From jafujii@uci.edu Tue Apr 1 01:52:44 2003 From: jafujii@uci.edu (Jim Fujii) Date: Mon, 31 Mar 2003 17:52:44 -0800 Subject: [Ethnicstudies] anti-war meeting april 3rd (fwd) Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20030331175211.00bdd268@benfranklin.hnet.uci.edu> --=====================_7937874==_.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed Date: Mon, 31 Mar 2003 16:54:25 -0800 Sorry if folks are getting this twice. Can everyone forward this on to any relevent listservs you belong to? Subject: Anti war meeting on Thursday April 3rd Let's coordinate our activities and consolidate our energies against the war. For all campus activists and groups please come or send representative to a campus wide meeting on Thursday April 3rd at 4:30 pm. Now more than ever we need to work together - students, faculty, staff and community welcomed. Please come prepared to discuss and suggest specific actions to fight the war and address other issues that threaten democratic and civil rights in U.S. Anti War Meeting Thursday April 3rd 2003 4:30 pm Center for Women and Men library (across from main library) Meeting called by members of Action for Global Justice and other concerned campus community members. Contact: Karen Kendrick at (949) 856-9845 or kkendric29@yahoo.com ***************************** Please take a visible stand for peace. ***************************** Karen Kendrick Department of Social Relations University of California, Irvine Irvine, CA 92697 kdk@uci.edu _______________________________________________ List-Info: https://maillists.uci.edu/mailman/listinfo/uci-peace-justice --=====================_7937874==_.ALT Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii"
Date:    Mon, 31 Mar 2003 16:54:25 -0800

Sorry if folks are getting this twice.  Can everyone forward this on to any
relevent listservs you belong to?


Subject: Anti war meeting on Thursday April 3rd

Let's coordinate our activities and consolidate our energies against the
war.  For all campus activists and groups please come or send representative
to a campus wide meeting on Thursday April 3rd at 4:30 pm.

Now more than ever we need to work together - students, faculty, staff and
community welcomed.

Please come prepared to discuss and suggest specific actions to fight the
war and address other issues that threaten democratic and civil rights in
U.S.

Anti War Meeting
Thursday April 3rd 2003
4:30 pm
Center for Women and Men library
(across from main library)

Meeting called by members of Action for Global Justice and other concerned
campus community members.

Contact:
Karen Kendrick at (949) 856-9845 or kkendric29@yahoo.com


*****************************
Please take a visible stand for peace.
*****************************


Karen Kendrick
Department of Social Relations
University of California, Irvine
Irvine, CA 92697
kdk@uci.edu



_______________________________________________
List-Info: https://maillists.uci.edu/mailman/listinfo/uci-peace-justice --=====================_7937874==_.ALT-- From jafujii@uci.edu Tue Apr 1 01:54:23 2003 From: jafujii@uci.edu (Jim Fujii) Date: Mon, 31 Mar 2003 17:54:23 -0800 Subject: [Ethnicstudies] The battle between Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20030331175413.00bbada0@benfranklin.hnet.uci.edu> --=====================_8036856==_.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable New Yorker Issue of 2003-04-07 Posted 2003-03-31 http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?030407fa_fact1 OFFENSE AND DEFENSE by Seymour Hersh The battle between Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon As the ground campaign against Saddam Hussein faltered last week, with attenuated supply lines and a lack of immediate reinforcements, there was anger in the Pentagon. Several senior war planners complained to me in interviews that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his inner circle of civilian advisers, who had been chiefly responsible for persuading President Bush to lead the country into war, had insisted on micromanaging the war=92s operational details. Rumsfeld=92s team took over crucial aspects of the day-to-day logistical planning=97traditionally, an area in which the= uniformed military excels=97and Rumsfeld repeatedly overruled the senior Pentagon planners on the Joint Staff, the operating arm of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. =93He thought he knew better,=94 one senior planner said. =93He was the decision-maker at every turn.=94 On at least six occasions, the planner told me, when Rumsfeld and his deputies were presented with operational plans=97the Iraqi assault was designated Plan 1003=97he insisted that the number of ground troops be= sharply reduced. Rumsfeld=92s faith in precision bombing and his insistence on streamlined military operations has had profound consequences for the ability of the armed forces to fight effectively overseas. =93They=92ve got= no resources,=94 a former high-level intelligence official said. =93He was so focussed on proving his point=97that the Iraqis were going to fall apart.=94 The critical moment, one planner said, came last fall, during the buildup for the war, when Rumsfeld decided that he would no longer be guided by the Pentagon=92s most sophisticated war- planning document, the= TPFDL=97time-phased forces-deployment list=97which is known to planning officers as the= tip-fiddle (tip-fid, for short). A TPFDL is a voluminous document describing the inventory of forces that are to be sent into battle, the sequence of their deployment, and the deployment of logistical support. =93It=92s the complete applecart, with many pieces,=94 Roger J. Spiller, the George C. Marshall Professor of military history at the U.S. Command and General Staff College, said. =93Everybody trains and plans on it. It=92s constantly in motion and always adjusted at the last minute. It=92s an embedded piece of the bureaucratic and operational culture.=94 A retired Air Force strategic= planner remarked, =93This is what we do best=97go from A to B=97and the tip- fiddle= is where you start. It=92s how you put together a plan for moving into the theatre.=94 Another former planner said, =93Once you turn on the tip-fid, everything moves in an orderly fashion.=94 A former intelligence officer added, =93When you kill the tip-fiddle, you kill centralized military planning. The military is not like a corporation that can be streamlined. It is the most inefficient machine known to man. It=92s the redundancy that= saves lives.=94 The TPFDL for the war in Iraq ran to forty or more computer- generated spreadsheets, dealing with everything from weapons to toilet paper. When it was initially presented to Rumsfeld last year for his approval, it called for the involvement of a wide range of forces from the different armed services, including four or more Army divisions. Rumsfeld rejected the package, because it was =93too big,=94 the Pentagon planner said. He= insisted that a smaller, faster-moving attack force, combined with overwhelming air power, would suffice. Rumsfeld further stunned the Joint Staff by insisting that he would control the timing and flow of Army and Marine troops to the combat zone. Such decisions are known in the military as R.F.F.s=97requests for forces. He, and not the generals, would decide which unit would go when and where. The TPFDL called for the shipment in advance, by sea, of hundreds of tanks and other heavy vehicles=97enough for three or four divisions. Rumsfeld ignored this advice. Instead, he relied on the heavy equipment that was already in Kuwait=97enough for just one full combat division. The 3rd= Infantry Division, from Fort Stewart, Georgia, the only mechanized Army division that was active inside Iraq last week, thus arrived in the Gulf without its own equipment. =93Those guys are driving around in tanks that were pre- positioned. Their tanks are sitting in Fort Stewart,=94 the planner said.= =93To get more forces there we have to float them. We can=92t fly our forces in, because there=92s nothing for them to drive. Over the past six months, you could have floated everything in ninety days=97enough for four or more divisions.=94 The planner added, =93This is the mess Rumsfeld put himself= in, because he didn=92t want a heavy footprint on the ground.=94 Plan 1003 was repeatedly updated and presented to Rumsfeld, and each time, according to the planner, Rumsfeld said, =93=91You=92ve got too much ground force=97go back and do it again.=92=94 In the planner=92s view, Rumsfeld had= two goals: to demonstrate the efficacy of precision bombing and to =93do the war on the cheap.=94 Rumsfeld and his two main deputies for war planning, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, =93were so enamored of =91shock and awe=92 that victory seemed assured,=94 the planner said. =93They believed that the= weather would always be clear, that the enemy would expose itself, and so precision bombings would always work.=94 (Rumsfeld did not respond to a request for comment.) Rumsfeld=92s personal contempt for many of the senior generals and admirals who were promoted to top jobs during the Clinton Administration is widely known. He was especially critical of the Army, with its insistence on maintaining costly mechanized divisions. In his off-the-cuff memoranda, or =93snowflakes,=94 as they=92re called in the Pentagon, he chafed about= generals having =93the slows=94=97a reference to Lincoln=92s characterization of= General George McClellan. =93In those conditions=97an atmosphere of derision and challenge=97the senior officers do not offer their best advice,=94 a high-ranking general who served for more than a year under Rumsfeld said. One witness to a meeting recalled Rumsfeld confronting General Eric Shinseki, the Army Chief of Staff, in front of many junior officers. =93He= was looking at the Chief and waving his hand,=94 the witness said, =93saying,= =91Are you getting this yet? Are you getting this yet?=92=94 Gradually, Rumsfeld succeeded in replacing those officers in senior Joint Staff positions who challenged his view. =93All the Joint Staff people now= are handpicked, and churn out products to make the Secretary of Defense happy,= =94 the planner said. =93They don=92t make military judgments=97they just= respond to his snowflakes.=94 In the months leading up to the war, a split developed inside the military, with the planners and their immediate superiors warning that the war plan was dangerously thin on troops and mat=E9riel, and the top= generals=97including General Tommy Franks, the head of the U.S. Central Command, and Air Force General Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff=97supportin= g Rumsfeld. After Turkey=92s parliament astonished the war planners in early March by denying the United States permission to land the 4th Infantry Division in Turkey, Franks initially argued that the war ought to be delayed until the troops could be brought in by another route, a former intelligence official said. =93Rummy overruled him.=94 Many of the present and former officials I spoke to were critical of Franks for his perceived failure to stand up to his civilian superiors. A former senator told me that Franks was widely seen as a commander who =93will do= what he=92s told.=94 A former intelligence official asked, =93Why didn=92t he go= to the President?=94 A Pentagon official recalled that one senior general used to prepare his deputies for meetings with Rumsfeld by saying, =93When you go in to talk to him, you=92ve got to be prepared to lay your stars on the table= and walk out. Otherwise, he=92ll walk over you.=94 In early February, according to a senior Pentagon official, Rumsfeld appeared at the Army Commanders=92 Conference, a biannual business and= social gathering of all the four-star generals. Rumsfeld was invited to join the generals for dinner and make a speech. All went well, the official told me, until Rumsfeld, during a question-and-answer session, was asked about his personal involvement in the deployment of combat units, in some cases with only five or six days=92 notice. To the astonishment and anger of the generals, Rumsfeld denied responsibility. =93He said, =91I wasn=92t= involved,=92=94 the official said. =93=91It was the Joint Staff.=92=94 =93We thought it would be fence-mending, but it was a disaster,=94 the= official said of the dinner. =93Everybody knew he was looking at these deployment orders. And for him to blame it on the Joint Staff=97=94 The official= hesitated a moment, and then said, =93It=92s all about Rummy and the truth.=94 According to a dozen or so military men I spoke to, Rumsfeld simply failed to anticipate the consequences of protracted warfare. He put Army and Marine units in the field with few reserves and an insufficient number of tanks and other armored vehicles. (The military men say that the vehicles that they do have have been pushed too far and are malfunctioning.) Supply lines=97inevitably, they say=97have become overextended and vulnerable to attack, creating shortages of fuel, water, and ammunition. Pentagon officers spoke contemptuously of the Administration=92s optimistic press briefings. =93It=92s a stalemate now,=94 the former intelligence official told me.= =93It=92s going to remain one only if we can maintain our supply lines. The carriers are going to run out of jdams=94=97the satellite-guided bombs that have been striking targets in Baghdad and elsewhere with extraordinary accuracy. Much of the supply of Tomahawk guided missiles has been expended. =93The Marines are worried as hell,=94 the former intelligence official went on. =93They=92= re all committed, with no reserves, and they=92ve never run the lavs=94=97light= armored vehicles=97=93as long and as hard=94 as they have in Iraq. There are serious maintenance problems as well. =93The only hope is that they can hold out= until reinforcements come.=94 The 4th Infantry Division=97the Army=92s most modern mechanized= division=97whose equipment spent weeks waiting in the Mediterranean before being diverted to the overtaxed American port in Kuwait, is not expected to be operational until the end of April. The 1st Cavalry Division, in Texas, is ready to ship out, the planner said, but by sea it will take twenty-three days to reach Kuwait. =93All we have now is front-line positions,=94 the former= intelligence official told me. =93Everything else is missing.=94 Last week, plans for an assault on Baghdad had stalled, and the six Republican Guard divisions expected to provide the main Iraqi defense had yet to have a significant engagement with American or British soldiers. The shortages forced Central Command to =93run around looking for supplies,=94= the former intelligence official said. The immediate goal, he added, was for the Army and Marine forces =93to hold tight and hope that the Republican Guard divisions get chewed up=94 by bombing. The planner agreed, saying, =93The= only way out now is back, and to hope for some kind of a miracle=97that the Republican Guards commit themselves,=94 and thus become vulnerable to= American air strikes. =93Hope,=94 a retired four-star general subsequently told me, =93is not a= course of action.=94 Last Thursday, the Army=92s senior ground commander,= Lieutenant General William S. Wallace, said to reporters, =93The enemy we=92re fighting= is different from the one we war-gamed against.=94 (One senior Administration official commented to me, speaking of the Iraqis, =93They=92re not scared.= Ain=92t it something? They=92re not scared.=94) At a press conference the next day, Rumsfeld and Myers were asked about Wallace=92s comments, and defended the= war plan=97Myers called it =93brilliant=94 and =93on track.=94 They pointed out= that the war was only a little more than a week old. Scott Ritter, the former marine and United Nations weapons inspector, who has warned for months that the American =93shock and awe=94 strategy would= not work, noted that much of the bombing has had little effect or has been counterproductive. For example, the bombing of Saddam=92s palaces has freed= up a brigade of special guards who had been assigned to protect them, and who have now been sent home to await further deployment. =93Every one of their homes=97and they are scattered throughout Baghdad=97is stacked with= ammunition and supplies,=94 Ritter told me. =93This is tragic,=94 one senior planner said bitterly. =93American lives= are being lost.=94 The former intelligence official told me, =93They all said,= =91We can do it with air power.=92 They believed their own propaganda.=94 The high-ranking former general described Rumsfeld=92s approach to the Joint= Staff war planning as =93McNamara-like intimidation by intervention of a small cell=94=97a reference to Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara and his= aides, who were known for their challenges to the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Vietnam War. The former high-ranking general compared the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the Stepford wives. =93They=92ve abrogated their responsibility.=94 Perhaps the biggest disappointment of last week was the failure of the Shiite factions in southern Iraq to support the American and British invasion. Various branches of the Al Dawa faction, which operate underground, have been carrying out acts of terrorism against the Iraqi regime since the nineteen-eighties. But Al Dawa has also been hostile to American interests. Some in American intelligence have implicated the group in the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, which cost the lives of two hundred and forty-one marines. Nevertheless, in the months before the war the Bush Administration courted Al Dawa by including it among the opposition groups that would control postwar Iraq. =93Dawa is one group that could kill Saddam,=94 a former American intelligence official told me. =93Th= ey hate Saddam because he suppressed the Shiites. They exist to kill Saddam.=94 He said that their apparent decision to stand with the Iraqi regime now was a =93disaster=94 for us. =93They=92re like hard-core Vietcong.=94 There were reports last week that Iraqi exiles, including fervent Shiites, were crossing into Iraq by car and bus from Jordan and Syria to get into the fight on the side of the Iraqi government. Robert Baer, a former C.I.A. Middle East operative, told me in a telephone call from Jordan, =93Everybody wants to fight. The whole nation of Iraq is fighting to defend Iraq. Not Saddam. They=92ve been given the high sign, and we are courting disaster. If we take fifty or sixty casualties a day and they die by the thousands, they=92re still winning. It=92s a jihad, and it=92s a good thing to die.= This is no longer a secular war.=94 There were press reports of mujahideen arriving from Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Algeria for =93martyrdom operations.=94 There had been an expectation before the war that Iran, Iraq=92s old enemy, would side with the United States in this fight. One Iraqi opposition group, the Iraqi National Congress, led by Ahmed Chalabi, has been in regular contact with the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, or sciri, an umbrella organization for Shiite groups who oppose Saddam. The organization is based in Iran and has close ties to Iranian intelligence. The Chalabi group set up an office last year in Tehran, with the approval of Chalabi=92s supporters in the Pentagon, who include Rumsfeld, his deputies Wolfowitz and Feith, and Richard Perle, the former chairman of the Defense Policy Board. Chalabi has repeatedly predicted that the Tehran government would provide support, including men and arms, if an American invasion of Iraq took place. Last week, however, this seemed unlikely. In a press conference on Friday, Rumsfeld warned Iranian militants against interfering with American forces and accused Syria of sending military equipment to the Iraqis. A Middle East businessman who has long- standing ties in Jordan and Syria=97and whose information I have always found reliable=97told me that the religious government in Tehran =93is now backing Iraq in the war. There isn=92t any= Arab fighting group on the ground in Iraq who is with the United States,=94 he said. There is also evidence that Turkey has been playing both sides. Turkey and Syria, who traditionally have not had close relations, recently agreed to strengthen their ties, the businessman told me, and early this year Syria sent Major General Ghazi Kanaan, its longtime strongman and power broker in Lebanon, to Turkey. The two nations have begun to share intelligence and to meet, along with Iranian officials, to discuss border issues, in case an independent Kurdistan emerges from the Iraq war. A former U.S. intelligence officer put it this way: =93The Syrians are co=F6rdinating with the Turks to screw us in the north=97to cause us problems.=94 He added, =93Syria and the Iranians agreed that they could not let an American occupation of Iraq stand.=94 -------------------------------------------------- http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?030331fa_fact1 WHO LIED TO WHOM? by SEYMOUR M. HERSH Why did the Administration endorse a forgery about Iraq=92s nuclear program? Issue of 2003-03-31 Posted 2003-03-24 Last September 24th, as Congress prepared to vote on the resolution authorizing President George W. Bush to wage war in Iraq, a group of senior intelligence officials, including George Tenet, the Director of Central Intelligence, briefed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Iraq=92s weapons capability. It was an important presentation for the Bush Administration. Some Democrats were publicly questioning the President=92s claim that Iraq still possessed weapons of mass destruction which posed an immediate threat to the United States. Just the day before, former Vice-President Al Gore had sharply criticized the Administration=92s= advocacy of pre=EBmptive war, calling it a doctrine that would replace =93a world in which states consider themselves subject to law=94 with =93the notion that= there is no law but the discretion of the President of the United States.=94 A few Democrats were also considering putting an alternative resolution before Congress. According to two of those present at the briefing, which was highly classified and took place in the committee=92s secure hearing room, Tenet declared, as he had done before, that a shipment of high- strength aluminum tubes that was intercepted on its way to Iraq had been meant for the construction of centrifuges that could be used to produce enriched uranium. The suitability of the tubes for that purpose had been disputed, but this time the argument that Iraq had a nuclear program under way was buttressed by a new and striking fact: the C.I.A. had recently received intelligence showing that, between 1999 and 2001, Iraq had attempted to buy five hundred tons of uranium oxide from Niger, one of the world=92s largest producers.= The uranium, known as =93yellow cake,=94 can be used to make fuel for nuclear reactors; if processed differently, it can also be enriched to make weapons. Five tons can produce enough weapon-grade uranium for a bomb. (When the C.I.A. spokesman William Harlow was asked for comment, he denied that Tenet had briefed the senators on Niger.) On the same day, in London, Tony Blair=92s government made public a dossier containing much of the information that the Senate committee was being given in secret=97that Iraq had sought to buy =93significant quantities of= uranium=94 from an unnamed African country, =93despite having no active civil nuclear power programme that could require it.=94 The allegation attracted immediate attention; a headline in the London Guardian declared, =93african gangs= offer route to uranium.=94 Two days later, Secretary of State Colin Powell, appearing before a closed hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, also cited Iraq=92s= attempt to obtain uranium from Niger as evidence of its persistent nuclear ambitions. The testimony from Tenet and Powell helped to mollify the Democrats, and two weeks later the resolution passed overwhelmingly, giving the President a congressional mandate for a military assault on Iraq. On December 19th, Washington, for the first time, publicly identified Niger as the alleged seller of the nuclear materials, in a State Department position paper that rhetorically asked, =93Why is the Iraqi regime hiding their uranium procurement?=94 (The charge was denied by both Iraq and= Niger.) A former high-level intelligence official told me that the information on Niger was judged serious enough to include in the President=92s Daily Brief, known as the P.D.B., one of the most sensitive intelligence documents in the American system. Its information is supposed to be carefully analyzed, or =93scrubbed.=94 Distribution of the two- or three-page early-morning report, which is prepared by the C.I.A., is limited to the President and a few other senior officials. The P.D.B. is not made available, for example, to any members of the Senate or House Intelligence Committees. =93I don=92t think anybody here sees that thing,=94 a State Department analyst told me. =93You= only know what=92s in the P.D.B. because it echoes=97people talk about it.=94 President Bush cited the uranium deal, along with the aluminum tubes, in his State of the Union Message, on January 28th, while crediting Britain as the source of the information: =93The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.=94 He commented, =93Saddam Hussein has not credibly explained these activities. He clearly has much to hide.=94 Then the story fell apart. On March 7th, Mohamed ElBaradei, the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, in Vienna, told the U.N. Security Council that the documents involving the Niger-Iraq uranium sale were fakes. =93The I.A.E.A. has concluded, with the concurrence of outside experts, that these documents . . . are in fact not authentic,=94 ElBaradei said. One senior I.A.E.A. official went further. He told me, =93These documents= are so bad that I cannot imagine that they came from a serious intelligence agency. It depresses me, given the low quality of the documents, that it was not stopped. At the level it reached, I would have expected more checking.= =94 The I.A.E.A. had first sought the documents last fall, shortly after the British government released its dossier. After months of pleading by the I.A.E.A., the United States turned them over to Jacques Baute, who is the director of the agency=92s Iraq Nuclear Verification Office. It took Baute=92s team only a few hours to determine that the documents were fake. The agency had been given about a half- dozen letters and other communications between officials in Niger and Iraq, many of them written on letterheads of the Niger government. The problems were glaring. One letter, dated October 10, 2000, was signed with the name of Allele Habibou, a Niger Minister of Foreign Affairs and Co=F6peration, who had been out of office since 1989. Another letter, allegedly from Tandja Mamadou, the President of Niger, had a signature that had obviously been faked and a text with inaccuracies so egregious, the senior I.A.E.A. official said, that =93they could be spotted by someone using Google on the Internet.=94 The large quantity of uranium involved should have been another warning sign. Niger=92s =93yellow cake=94 comes from two uranium mines controlled by= a French company, with its entire output presold to nuclear power companies in France, Japan, and Spain. =93Five hundred tons can=92t be siphoned off= without anyone noticing,=94 another I.A.E.A. official told me. This official told me that the I.A.E.A. has not been able to determine who actually prepared the documents. =93It could be someone who intercepted= faxes in Israel, or someone at the headquarters of the Niger Foreign Ministry, in Niamey. We just don=92t know,=94 the official said. =93Somebody got old letterheads and signatures, and cut and pasted.=94 Some I.A.E.A.= investigators suspected that the inspiration for the documents was a trip that the Iraqi Ambassador to Italy took to several African countries, including Niger, in February, 1999. They also speculated that MI6=97the branch of British intelligence responsible for foreign operations=97had become involved,= perhaps through contacts in Italy, after the Ambassador=92s return to Rome. Baute, according to the I.A.E.A. official, =93confronted the United States with the forgery: =91What do you have to say?=92 They had nothing to say.=94 ElBaradei=92s disclosure has not been disputed by any government or intelligence official in Washington or London. Colin Powell, asked about the forgery during a television interview two days after ElBaradei=92s report, dismissed the subject by saying, =93If that issue is resolved, that issue is resolved.=94 A few days later, at a House hearing, he denied that anyone in the United States government had anything to do with the forgery. =93It came from other sources,=94 Powell testified. =93It was provided in good faith to= the inspectors.=94 The forgery became the object of widespread, and bitter, questions in Europe about the credibility of the United States. But it initially provoked only a few news stories in America, and little sustained questioning about how the White House could endorse such an obvious fake. On March 8th, an American official who had reviewed the documents was quoted in the Washington Post as explaining, simply, =93We fell for it.=94 The Bush Administration=92s reliance on the Niger documents may, however,= have stemmed from more than bureaucratic carelessness or political overreaching. Forged documents and false accusations have been an element in U.S. and British policy toward Iraq at least since the fall of 1997, after an impasse over U.N. inspections. Then as now, the Security Council was divided, with the French, the Russians, and the Chinese telling the United States and the United Kingdom that they were being too tough on the Iraqis. President Bill Clinton, weakened by the impeachment proceedings, hinted of renewed bombing, but, then as now, the British and the Americans were losing the battle for international public opinion. A former Clinton Administration official told me that London had resorted to, among other things, spreading false information about Iraq. The British propaganda program=97part of its Information Operations, or I/Ops=97was known to a few senior officials in Washington. =93I knew that was going on,=94 the former Clinton= Administration official said of the British efforts. =93We were getting ready for action in Iraq, and we wanted the Brits to prepare.=94 Over the next year, a former American intelligence officer told me, at least one member of the U.N. inspection team who supported the American and British position arranged for dozens of unverified and unverifiable intelligence reports and tips=97data known as inactionable intelligence=97to= be funnelled to MI6 operatives and quietly passed along to newspapers in London and elsewhere. =93It was intelligence that was crap, and that we couldn=92t= move on, but the Brits wanted to plant stories in England and around the world,= =94 the former officer said. There was a series of clandestine meetings with MI6, at which documents were provided, as well as quiet meetings, usually at safe houses in the Washington area. The British propaganda scheme eventually became known to some members of the U.N. inspection team. =93I knew a bit,= =94 one official still on duty at U.N. headquarters acknowledged last week, =93b= ut I was never officially told about it.=94 None of the past and present officials I spoke with were able to categorically state that the fake Niger documents were created or instigated by the same propaganda office in MI6 that had been part of the anti-Iraq propaganda wars in the late nineteen-nineties. (An MI6 intelligence source declined to comment.) Press reports in the United States and elsewhere have suggested other possible sources: the Iraqi exile community, the Italians, the French. What is generally agreed upon, a congressional intelligence-committee staff member told me, is that the Niger documents were initially circulated by the British=97President Bush said as much in= his State of the Union speech=97and that =93the Brits placed more stock in them= than we did.=94 It is also clear, as the former high-level intelligence official told me, that =93something as bizarre as Niger raises suspicions= everywhere.=94 What went wrong? Did a poorly conceived propaganda effort by British intelligence, whose practices had been known for years to senior American officials, manage to move, without significant challenge, through the top layers of the American intelligence community and into the most sacrosanct of Presidential briefings? Who permitted it to go into the President=92s= State of the Union speech? Was the message=97the threat posed by Iraq=97more= important than the integrity of the intelligence-vetting process? Was the Administration lying to itself? Or did it deliberately give Congress and the public what it knew to be bad information? Asked to respond, Harlow, the C.I.A. spokesman, said that the agency had not obtained the actual documents until early this year, after the President=92s State of the Union speech and after the congressional briefings, and therefore had been unable to evaluate them in a timely manner. Harlow refused to respond to questions about the role of Britain=92s MI6. Harlow=92= s statement does not, of course, explain why the agency left the job of exposing the embarrassing forgery to the I.A.E.A. It puts the C.I.A. in an unfortunate position: it is, essentially, copping a plea of incompetence. The chance for American intelligence to challenge the documents came as the Administration debated whether to pass them on to ElBaradei. The former high-level intelligence official told me that some senior C.I.A. officials were aware that the documents weren=92t trustworthy. =93It=92s not a= question as to whether they were marginal. They can=92t be =91sort of=92 bad, or =91sort= of=92 ambiguous. They knew it was a fraud=97it was useless. Everybody bit their tongue and said, =91Wouldn=92t it be great if the Secretary of State said= this?=92 The Secretary of State never saw the documents.=94 He added, =93He=92s= absolutely apoplectic about it.=94 (A State Department spokesman was unable to= comment.) A former intelligence officer told me that some questions about the authenticity of the Niger documents were raised inside the government by analysts at the Department of Energy and the State Department=92s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. However, these warnings were not heeded. =93Somebody deliberately let something false get in there,=94 the former high-level intelligence official added. =93It could not have gotten into the system without the agency being involved. Therefore it was an internal intention. Someone set someone up.=94 (The White House declined to comment.) Washington=92s case that the Iraqi regime had failed to meet its obligation= to give up weapons of mass destruction was, of course, based on much more than a few documents of questionable provenance from a small African nation. But George W. Bush=92s war against Iraq has created enormous anxiety throughout the world=97in part because one side is a superpower and the other is not.= It can=92t help the President=92s case, or his international standing, when his advisers brief him with falsehoods, whether by design or by mistake. On March 14th, Senator Jay Rockefeller, of West Virginia, the senior Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, formally asked Robert Mueller, the F.B.I. director, to investigate the forged documents. Rockefeller had voted for the resolution authorizing force last fall. Now he wrote to Mueller, =93There is a possibility that the fabrication of these documents may be part of a larger deception campaign aimed at manipulating public opinion and foreign policy regarding Iraq.=94 He urged the F.B.I. to ascertain the source of the documents, the skill-level of the forgery, the motives of those responsible, and =93why the intelligence community did not recognize the documents were fabricated.=94 A Rockefeller aide told me that the F.B.I. had promised to look into it. --=====================_8036856==_.ALT Content-Type: text/html; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable New Yorker Issue of 2003-04-07 Posted 2003-03-31
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?030407fa_fact1

OFFENSE AND DEFENSE

by Seymour Hersh

The battle between Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon

As the ground campaign against Saddam Hussein faltered last week, with
attenuated supply lines and a lack of immediate reinforcements, there was
anger in the Pentagon. Several senior war planners complained to me in
interviews that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his inner circle of
civilian advisers, who had been chiefly responsible for persuading President
Bush to lead the country into war, had insisted on micromanaging the war=92s
operational details. Rumsfeld=92s team took over crucial aspects of the
day-to-day logistical planning=97traditionally, an area in which the uniformed
military excels=97and Rumsfeld repeatedly overruled the senior Pentagon
planners on the Joint Staff, the operating arm of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
=93He thought he knew better,=94 one senior planner said. =93He was the
decision-maker at every turn.=94

On at least six occasions, the planner told me, when Rumsfeld and his
deputies were presented with operational plans=97the Iraqi assault=20 was
designated Plan 1003=97he insisted that the number of ground troops be sharply
reduced. Rumsfeld=92s faith in precision bombing and his insistence=20 on
streamlined military operations has had profound consequences for the
ability of the armed forces to fight effectively overseas. =93They=92ve got no
resources,=94 a former high-level intelligence official said. =93He was so
focussed on proving his point=97that the Iraqis were going to fall apart.=94

The critical moment, one planner said, came last fall, during the buildup
for the war, when Rumsfeld decided that he would no longer be guided by the
Pentagon=92s most sophisticated war- planning document, the TPFDL=97time-phased
forces-deployment list=97which is known to planning officers as the tip-fiddle
(tip-fid, for short). A TPFDL is a voluminous document describing the
inventory of forces that are to be sent into battle, the sequence of their
deployment, and the deployment of logistical support. =93It=92s the complete
applecart, with many pieces,=94 Roger J. Spiller, the George C. Marshall
Professor of military history at the U.S. Command and General Staff College,
said. =93Everybody trains and plans on it. It=92s constantly in motion and
always adjusted at the last minute. It=92s an embedded piece of the
bureaucratic and operational culture.=94 A retired Air Force strategic planner
remarked, =93This is what we do best=97go from A to B=97and the tip- fiddle is
where you start. It=92s how you put together a plan for moving into the
theatre.=94 Another former planner said, =93Once you turn on the tip-fid,
everything moves in an orderly fashion.=94 A former intelligence officer
added, =93When you kill the tip-fiddle, you kill centralized military
planning. The military is not like a corporation that can be streamlined. It
is the most inefficient machine known to man. It=92s the redundancy that saves
lives.=94

The TPFDL for the war in Iraq ran to forty or more computer- generated
spreadsheets, dealing with everything from weapons to toilet paper. When it
was initially presented to Rumsfeld last year for his approval, it called
for the involvement of a wide range of forces from the different armed
services, including four or more Army divisions. Rumsfeld rejected the
package, because it was =93too big,=94 the Pentagon planner said. He insisted
that a smaller, faster-moving attack force, combined with overwhelming air
power, would suffice. Rumsfeld further stunned the Joint Staff by insisting
that he would control the timing and flow of Army and Marine troops to the
combat zone. Such decisions are known in the military as R.F.F.s=97requests
for forces. He, and not the generals, would decide which unit would go when
and where.

The TPFDL called for the shipment in advance, by sea, of hundreds of tanks
and other heavy vehicles=97enough for three or four divisions. Rumsfeld
ignored this advice. Instead, he relied on the heavy equipment that was
already in Kuwait=97enough for just one full combat division. The 3rd Infantry
Division, from Fort Stewart, Georgia, the only mechanized Army division that
was active inside Iraq last week, thus arrived in the Gulf without its own
equipment. =93Those guys are driving around in tanks that were pre-
positioned. Their tanks are sitting in Fort Stewart,=94 the planner said. =93To
get more forces there we have to float them. We can=92t fly our forces in,
because there=92s nothing for them to drive. Over the past six months, you
could have floated everything in ninety days=97enough for four or=20 more
divisions.=94 The planner added, =93This is the mess Rumsfeld put himself in,
because he didn=92t want a heavy footprint on the ground.=94

Plan 1003 was repeatedly updated and presented to Rumsfeld, and each time,
according to the planner, Rumsfeld said, =93=91You=92ve got too much ground
force=97go back and do it again.=92=94 In the planner=92s view, Rumsfeld had two
goals: to demonstrate the efficacy of precision bombing and to =93do the war
on the cheap.=94 Rumsfeld and his two main deputies for war planning, Paul
Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, =93were so enamored of =91shock and awe=92 that
victory seemed assured,=94 the planner said. =93They believed that the weather
would always be clear, that the enemy would expose itself, and so precision
bombings would always work.=94 (Rumsfeld did not respond to a request for
comment.)

Rumsfeld=92s personal contempt for many of the senior generals and admirals
who were promoted to top jobs during the Clinton Administration is widely
known. He was especially critical of the Army, with its insistence on
maintaining costly mechanized divisions. In his off-the-cuff memoranda, or
=93snowflakes,=94 as they=92re called in the Pentagon, he chafed about generals
having =93the slows=94=97a reference to Lincoln=92s characterization of General
George McClellan. =93In those conditions=97an atmosphere of derision=20 and
challenge=97the senior officers do not offer their best advice,=94 a
high-ranking general who served for more than a year under Rumsfeld said.
One witness to a meeting recalled Rumsfeld confronting General Eric
Shinseki, the Army Chief of Staff, in front of many junior officers. =93He was
looking at the Chief and waving his hand,=94 the witness said, =93saying, =91Are
you getting this yet? Are you getting this yet?=92=94

Gradually, Rumsfeld succeeded in replacing those officers in senior Joint
Staff positions who challenged his view. =93All the Joint Staff people now are
handpicked, and churn out products to make the Secretary of Defense happy,=94
the planner said. =93They don=92t make military judgments=97they just respon= d to
his snowflakes.=94

In the months leading up to the war, a split developed inside the military,
with the planners and their immediate superiors warning that the war plan
was dangerously thin on troops and mat=E9riel, and the top generals=97including
General Tommy Franks, the head of the U.S. Central Command, and Air Force
General Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff=97supporting
Rumsfeld. After Turkey=92s parliament astonished the war planners in early
March by denying the United States permission to land the 4th Infantry
Division in Turkey, Franks initially argued that the war ought to be delayed
until the troops could be brought in by another route, a former intelligence
official said. =93Rummy overruled him.=94

Many of the present and former officials I spoke to were critical of Franks
for his perceived failure to stand up to his civilian superiors. A former
senator told me that Franks was widely seen as a commander who =93will do what
he=92s told.=94 A former intelligence official asked, =93Why didn=92t he go = to the
President?=94 A Pentagon official recalled that one senior general used to
prepare his deputies for meetings with Rumsfeld by saying, =93When you go in
to talk to him, you=92ve got to be prepared to lay your stars on the table and
walk out. Otherwise, he=92ll walk over you.=94

In early February, according to a senior Pentagon official,=20 Rumsfeld
appeared at the Army Commanders=92 Conference, a biannual business and social
gathering of all the four-star generals. Rumsfeld was invited to join the
generals for dinner and make a speech. All went well, the official told me,
until Rumsfeld, during a question-and-answer session, was asked about his
personal involvement in the deployment of combat units, in some cases with
only five or six days=92 notice. To the astonishment and anger of the
generals, Rumsfeld denied responsibility. =93He said, =91I wasn=92t involved,=92=94
the official said. =93=91It was the Joint Staff.=92=94

=93We thought it would be fence-mending, but it was a disaster,=94 the official
said of the dinner. =93Everybody knew he was looking at these deployment
orders. And for him to blame it on the Joint Staff=97=94 The official hesitated
a moment, and then said, =93It=92s all about Rummy and the truth.=94=

According to a dozen or so military men I spoke to, Rumsfeld simply failed
to anticipate the consequences of protracted warfare. He put Army and Marine
units in the field with few reserves and an insufficient number of tanks and
other armored vehicles. (The military men say that the vehicles that they do
have have been pushed too far and are malfunctioning.) Supply
lines=97inevitably, they say=97have become overextended and vulnerable to
attack, creating shortages of fuel, water, and ammunition. Pentagon officers
spoke contemptuously of the Administration=92s optimistic press briefings.
=93It=92s a stalemate now,=94 the former intelligence official told me. =93It=92s
going to remain one only if we can maintain our supply lines. The carriers
are going to run out of jdams=94=97the satellite-guided bombs that have been
striking targets in Baghdad and elsewhere with extraordinary accuracy. Much
of the supply of Tomahawk guided missiles has been expended. =93The Marines
are worried as hell,=94 the former intelligence official went on. =93They=92= re all
committed, with no reserves, and they=92ve never run the lavs=94=97light armored
vehicles=97=93as long and as hard=94 as they have in Iraq. There are serious
maintenance problems as well. =93The only hope is that they can hold out until
reinforcements come.=94

The 4th Infantry Division=97the Army=92s most modern mechanized division=97whose
equipment spent weeks waiting in the Mediterranean before being diverted to
the overtaxed American port in Kuwait, is not expected to be operational
until the end of April. The 1st Cavalry Division, in Texas, is ready to ship
out, the planner said, but by sea it will take twenty-three days to reach
Kuwait. =93All we have now is front-line positions,=94 the former intelligence
official told me. =93Everything else is missing.=94

Last week, plans for an assault on Baghdad had stalled, and the six
Republican Guard divisions expected to provide the main Iraqi defense had
yet to have a significant engagement with American or British soldiers. The
shortages forced Central Command to =93run around looking for supplies,=94 the
former intelligence official said. The immediate goal, he added, was for the
Army and Marine forces =93to hold tight and hope that the Republican Guard
divisions get chewed up=94 by bombing. The planner agreed, saying, =93The only
way out now is back, and to hope for some kind of a miracle=97that=20 the
Republican Guards commit themselves,=94 and thus become vulnerable to American
air strikes.

=93Hope,=94 a retired four-star general subsequently told me, =93is not a course
of action.=94 Last Thursday, the Army=92s senior ground commander, Lieutenant
General William S. Wallace, said to reporters, =93The enemy we=92re fighting is
different from the one we war-gamed against.=94 (One senior Administration
official commented to me, speaking of the Iraqis, =93They=92re not scared. Ain=92t
it something? They=92re not scared.=94) At a press conference the next day,
Rumsfeld and Myers were asked about Wallace=92s comments, and defended the war
plan=97Myers called it =93brilliant=94 and =93on track.=94 They pointed out = that the
war was only a little more than a week old.

Scott Ritter, the former marine and United Nations weapons inspector, who
has warned for months that the American =93shock and awe=94 strategy would not
work, noted that much of the bombing has had little effect or has been
counterproductive. For example, the bombing of Saddam=92s palaces has freed up
a brigade of special guards who had been assigned to protect them, and who
have now been sent home to await further deployment. =93Every one of their
homes=97and they are scattered throughout Baghdad=97is stacked with ammunition
and supplies,=94 Ritter told me.

=93This is tragic,=94 one senior planner said bitterly. =93American lives are
being lost.=94 The former intelligence official told me, =93They all said, =91We
can do it with air power.=92 They believed their own propaganda.=94 The
high-ranking former general described Rumsfeld=92s approach to the Joint Staff
war planning as =93McNamara-like intimidation by intervention of a small
cell=94=97a reference to Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara and his aides,
who were known for their challenges to the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the
Vietnam War. The former high-ranking general compared the Joint Chiefs of
Staff to the Stepford wives. =93They=92ve abrogated their responsibility.=94

Perhaps the biggest disappointment of last week was the failure of the
Shiite factions in southern Iraq to support the American and=20 British
invasion. Various branches of the Al Dawa faction, which operate
underground, have been carrying out acts of terrorism against the Iraqi
regime since the nineteen-eighties. But Al Dawa has also been hostile to
American interests. Some in American intelligence have implicated the group
in the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, which cost the lives
of two hundred and forty-one marines. Nevertheless, in the months before the
war the Bush Administration courted Al Dawa by including it among the
opposition groups that would control postwar Iraq. =93Dawa is one group that
could kill Saddam,=94 a former American intelligence official told me. =93They
hate Saddam because he suppressed the Shiites. They exist to kill Saddam.=94
He said that their apparent decision to stand with the Iraqi regime now was
a =93disaster=94 for us. =93They=92re like hard-core Vietcong.=94

There were reports last week that Iraqi exiles, including fervent Shiites,
were crossing into Iraq by car and bus from Jordan and Syria to get into the
fight on the side of the Iraqi government. Robert Baer, a former C.I.A.
Middle East operative, told me in a telephone call from Jordan, =93Everybody
wants to fight. The whole nation of Iraq is fighting to defend Iraq. Not
Saddam. They=92ve been given the high sign, and we are courting disaster. If
we take fifty or sixty casualties a day and they die by the thousands,
they=92re still winning. It=92s a jihad, and it=92s a good thing to die. Thi= s is
no longer a secular war.=94 There were press reports of mujahideen arriving
from Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Algeria for =93martyrdom operations.=94

There had been an expectation before the war that Iran, Iraq=92s old enemy,
would side with the United States in this fight. One Iraqi opposition group,
the Iraqi National Congress, led by Ahmed Chalabi, has been in regular
contact with the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, or
sciri, an umbrella organization for Shiite groups who oppose Saddam. The
organization is based in Iran and has close ties to Iranian intelligence.
The Chalabi group set up an office last year in Tehran, with the approval of
Chalabi=92s supporters in the Pentagon, who include Rumsfeld, his deputies
Wolfowitz and Feith, and Richard Perle, the former chairman of the Defense
Policy Board. Chalabi has repeatedly predicted that the Tehran government
would provide support, including men and arms, if an American invasion of
Iraq took place.

Last week, however, this seemed unlikely. In a press conference on Friday,
Rumsfeld warned Iranian militants against interfering with American forces
and accused Syria of sending military equipment to the Iraqis. A Middle East
businessman who has long- standing ties in Jordan and Syria=97and whose
information I have always found reliable=97told me that the religious
government in Tehran =93is now backing Iraq in the war. There isn=92t any Arab
fighting group on the ground in Iraq who is with the United States,=94 he
said.

There is also evidence that Turkey has been playing both sides. Turkey and
Syria, who traditionally have not had close relations, recently agreed to
strengthen their ties, the businessman told me, and early this year Syria
sent Major General Ghazi Kanaan, its longtime strongman and power broker in
Lebanon, to Turkey. The two nations have begun to share intelligence and to
meet, along with Iranian officials, to discuss border issues, in case an
independent Kurdistan emerges from the Iraq war. A former U.S. intelligence
officer put it this way: =93The Syrians are co=F6rdinating with the Turks to
screw us in the north=97to cause us problems.=94 He added, =93Syria and the
Iranians agreed that they could not let an American occupation of Iraq
stand.=94

--------------------------------------------------

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?030331fa_fact1

WHO LIED TO WHOM?

by SEYMOUR M. HERSH

Why did the Administration endorse a forgery about Iraq=92s nuclear program?=

Issue of 2003-03-31 Posted 2003-03-24

Last September 24th, as Congress prepared to vote on the resolution
authorizing President George W. Bush to wage war in Iraq, a group of= senior
intelligence officials, including George Tenet, the Director of Central
Intelligence, briefed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Iraq=92s
weapons capability. It was an important presentation for the Bush
Administration. Some Democrats were publicly questioning the President=92s claim that Iraq still possessed weapons of mass destruction which posed= an
immediate threat to the United States. Just the day before, former
Vice-President Al Gore had sharply criticized the Administration=92s= advocacy
of pre=EBmptive war, calling it a doctrine that would replace =93a world= in
which states consider themselves subject to law=94 with =93the notion that= there
is no law but the discretion of the President of the United States.=94 A= few
Democrats were also considering putting an alternative resolution before
Congress.

According to two of those present at the briefing, which was highly
classified and took place in the committee=92s secure hearing room,= Tenet
declared, as he had done before, that a shipment of high- strength= aluminum
tubes that was intercepted on its way to Iraq had been meant for the
construction of centrifuges that could be used to produce enriched= uranium.
The suitability of the tubes for that purpose had been disputed, but= this
time the argument that Iraq had a nuclear program under way was= buttressed
by a new and striking fact: the C.I.A. had recently received= intelligence
showing that, between 1999 and 2001, Iraq had attempted to buy five= hundred
tons of uranium oxide from Niger, one of the world=92s largest producers.= The
uranium, known as =93yellow cake,=94 can be used to make fuel for= nuclear
reactors; if processed differently, it can also be enriched to make= weapons.
Five tons can produce enough weapon-grade uranium for a bomb. (When the
C.I.A. spokesman William Harlow was asked for comment, he denied that= Tenet
had briefed the senators on Niger.)

On the same day, in London, Tony Blair=92s government made public a= dossier
containing much of the information that the Senate committee was being= given
in secret=97that Iraq had sought to buy =93significant quantities of= uranium=94
from an unnamed African country, =93despite having no active civil= nuclear
power programme that could require it.=94 The allegation attracted= immediate
attention; a headline in the London Guardian declared, =93african gangs= offer
route to uranium.=94

Two days later, Secretary of State Colin Powell, appearing before a= closed
hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, also cited Iraq=92s= attempt
to obtain uranium from Niger as evidence of its persistent nuclear
ambitions. The testimony from Tenet and Powell helped to mollify the
Democrats, and two weeks later the resolution passed overwhelmingly,= giving
the President a congressional mandate for a military assault on Iraq.=

On December 19th, Washington, for the first time, publicly identified= Niger
as the alleged seller of the nuclear materials, in a State Department
position paper that rhetorically asked, =93Why is the Iraqi regime= hiding
their uranium procurement?=94 (The charge was denied by both Iraq and= Niger.)
A former high-level intelligence official told me that the information= on
Niger was judged serious enough to include in the President=92s Daily= Brief,
known as the P.D.B., one of the most sensitive intelligence documents in= the
American system. Its information is supposed to be carefully analyzed,= or
=93scrubbed.=94 Distribution of the two- or three-page early-morning= report,
which is prepared by the C.I.A., is limited to the President and a few= other
senior officials. The P.D.B. is not made available, for example, to any
members of the Senate or House Intelligence Committees. =93I don=92t= think
anybody here sees that thing,=94 a State Department analyst told me. =93You= only
know what=92s in the P.D.B. because it echoes=97people talk about it.=94=

President Bush cited the uranium deal, along with the aluminum tubes, in= his
State of the Union Message, on January 28th, while crediting Britain as= the
source of the information: =93The British government has learned that= Saddam
Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.=94= He
commented, =93Saddam Hussein has not credibly explained these activities.= He
clearly has much to hide.=94

Then the story fell apart. On March 7th, Mohamed ElBaradei, the
director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, in Vienna,= told
the U.N. Security Council that the documents involving the Niger-Iraq
uranium sale were fakes. =93The I.A.E.A. has concluded, with the= concurrence
of outside experts, that these documents . . . are in fact not= authentic,=94
ElBaradei said.

One senior I.A.E.A. official went further. He told me, =93These documents= are
so bad that I cannot imagine that they came from a serious intelligence
agency. It depresses me, given the low quality of the documents, that it= was
not stopped. At the level it reached, I would have expected more checking.= =94


The I.A.E.A. had first sought the documents last fall, shortly after the
British government released its dossier. After months of pleading by the
I.A.E.A., the United States turned them over to Jacques Baute, who is= the
director of the agency=92s Iraq Nuclear Verification Office.

It took Baute=92s team only a few hours to determine that the documents= were
fake. The agency had been given about a half- dozen letters and other
communications between officials in Niger and Iraq, many of them written= on
letterheads of the Niger government. The problems were glaring. One= letter,
dated October 10, 2000, was signed with the name of Allele Habibou, a= Niger
Minister of Foreign Affairs and Co=F6peration, who had been out of= office
since 1989. Another letter, allegedly from Tandja Mamadou, the President= of
Niger, had a signature that had obviously been faked and a text with
inaccuracies so egregious, the senior I.A.E.A. official said, that =93they could be spotted by someone using Google on the Internet.=94

The large quantity of uranium involved should have been another warning
sign. Niger=92s =93yellow cake=94 comes from two uranium mines controlled by= a
French company, with its entire output presold to nuclear power companies= in
France, Japan, and Spain. =93Five hundred tons can=92t be siphoned off= without
anyone noticing,=94 another I.A.E.A. official told me.

This official told me that the I.A.E.A. has not been able to determine= who
actually prepared the documents. =93It could be someone who intercepted= faxes
in Israel, or someone at the headquarters of the Niger Foreign Ministry,= in
Niamey. We just don=92t know,=94 the official said. =93Somebody got old
letterheads and signatures, and cut and pasted.=94 Some I.A.E.A.= investigators
suspected that the inspiration for the documents was a trip that the= Iraqi
Ambassador to Italy took to several African countries, including Niger,= in
February, 1999. They also speculated that MI6=97the branch of British
intelligence responsible for foreign operations=97had become involved,= perhaps
through contacts in Italy, after the Ambassador=92s return to Rome.

Baute, according to the I.A.E.A. official, =93confronted the United= States
with the forgery: =91What do you have to say?=92 They had nothing to say.=94=

ElBaradei=92s disclosure has not been disputed by any government or
intelligence official in Washington or London. Colin Powell, asked about= the
forgery during a television interview two days after ElBaradei=92s= report,
dismissed the subject by saying, =93If that issue is resolved, that issue= is
resolved.=94 A few days later, at a House hearing, he denied that anyone= in
the United States government had anything to do with the forgery. =93It= came
from other sources,=94 Powell testified. =93It was provided in good faith to= the
inspectors.=94

The forgery became the object of widespread, and bitter, questions in= Europe
about the credibility of the United States. But it initially provoked only= a
few news stories in America, and little sustained questioning about how= the
White House could endorse such an obvious fake. On March 8th, an= American
official who had reviewed the documents was quoted in the Washington Post= as
explaining, simply, =93We fell for it.=94

The Bush Administration=92s reliance on the Niger documents may, however,= have
stemmed from more than bureaucratic carelessness or political= overreaching.
Forged documents and false accusations have been an element in U.S. and
British policy toward Iraq at least since the fall of 1997, after an= impasse
over U.N. inspections. Then as now, the Security Council was divided,= with
the French, the Russians, and the Chinese telling the United States and= the
United Kingdom that they were being too tough on the Iraqis. President= Bill
Clinton, weakened by the impeachment proceedings, hinted of renewed= bombing,
but, then as now, the British and the Americans were losing the battle= for
international public opinion. A former Clinton Administration official= told
me that London had resorted to, among other things, spreading false
information about Iraq. The British propaganda program=97part of its
Information Operations, or I/Ops=97was known to a few senior officials= in
Washington. =93I knew that was going on,=94 the former Clinton= Administration
official said of the British efforts. =93We were getting ready for action= in
Iraq, and we wanted the Brits to prepare.=94

Over the next year, a former American intelligence officer told me, at= least
one member of the U.N. inspection team who supported the American and
British position arranged for dozens of unverified and unverifiable
intelligence reports and tips=97data known as inactionable intelligence=97to= be
funnelled to MI6 operatives and quietly passed along to newspapers in= London
and elsewhere. =93It was intelligence that was crap, and that we couldn=92t= move
on, but the Brits wanted to plant stories in England and around the= world,=94
the former officer said. There was a series of clandestine meetings with
MI6, at which documents were provided, as well as quiet meetings, usually= at
safe houses in the Washington area. The British propaganda scheme= eventually
became known to some members of the U.N. inspection team. =93I knew a= bit,=94
one official still on duty at U.N. headquarters acknowledged last week,= =93but
I was never officially told about it.=94

None of the past and present officials I spoke with were able to
categorically state that the fake Niger documents were created or= instigated
by the same propaganda office in MI6 that had been part of the anti-Iraq
propaganda wars in the late nineteen-nineties. (An MI6 intelligence= source
declined to comment.) Press reports in the United States and elsewhere= have
suggested other possible sources: the Iraqi exile community, the= Italians,
the French. What is generally agreed upon, a congressional
intelligence-committee staff member told me, is that the Niger documents
were initially circulated by the British=97President Bush said as much in= his
State of the Union speech=97and that =93the Brits placed more stock in them= than
we did.=94 It is also clear, as the former high-level intelligence= official
told me, that =93something as bizarre as Niger raises suspicions= everywhere.=94


What went wrong? Did a poorly conceived propaganda effort by British
intelligence, whose practices had been known for years to senior= American
officials, manage to move, without significant challenge, through the= top
layers of the American intelligence community and into the most= sacrosanct
of Presidential briefings? Who permitted it to go into the President=92s= State
of the Union speech? Was the message=97the threat posed by Iraq=97more= important
than the integrity of the intelligence-vetting process? Was the
Administration lying to itself? Or did it deliberately give Congress and= the
public what it knew to be bad information?

Asked to respond, Harlow, the C.I.A. spokesman, said that the agency had= not
obtained the actual documents until early this year, after the= President=92s
State of the Union speech and after the congressional briefings, and
therefore had been unable to evaluate them in a timely manner. Harlow
refused to respond to questions about the role of Britain=92s MI6.= Harlow=92s
statement does not, of course, explain why the agency left the job of
exposing the embarrassing forgery to the I.A.E.A. It puts the C.I.A. in= an
unfortunate position: it is, essentially, copping a plea of incompetence.=

The chance for American intelligence to challenge the documents came as= the
Administration debated whether to pass them on to ElBaradei. The former
high-level intelligence official told me that some senior C.I.A.= officials
were aware that the documents weren=92t trustworthy. =93It=92s not a= question as
to whether they were marginal. They can=92t be =91sort of=92 bad, or =91sort= of=92
ambiguous. They knew it was a fraud=97it was useless. Everybody bit= their
tongue and said, =91Wouldn=92t it be great if the Secretary of State said= this?=92
The Secretary of State never saw the documents.=94 He added, =93He=92s= absolutely
apoplectic about it.=94 (A State Department spokesman was unable to= comment.)
A former intelligence officer told me that some questions about the
authenticity of the Niger documents were raised inside the government by
analysts at the Department of Energy and the State Department=92s Bureau= of
Intelligence and Research. However, these warnings were not heeded.

=93Somebody deliberately let something false get in there,=94 the former
high-level intelligence official added. =93It could not have gotten into= the
system without the agency being involved. Therefore it was an internal
intention. Someone set someone up.=94 (The White House declined to comment.)=

Washington=92s case that the Iraqi regime had failed to meet its obligation= to
give up weapons of mass destruction was, of course, based on much more= than
a few documents of questionable provenance from a small African nation.= But
George W. Bush=92s war against Iraq has created enormous anxiety= throughout
the world=97in part because one side is a superpower and the other is not.= It
can=92t help the President=92s case, or his international standing, when= his
advisers brief him with falsehoods, whether by design or by mistake.=

On March 14th, Senator Jay Rockefeller, of West Virginia, the senior
Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, formally asked Robert
Mueller, the F.B.I. director, to investigate the forged documents.
Rockefeller had voted for the resolution authorizing force last fall. Now= he
wrote to Mueller, =93There is a possibility that the fabrication of= these
documents may be part of a larger deception campaign aimed at= manipulating
public opinion and foreign policy regarding Iraq.=94 He urged the F.B.I.= to
ascertain the source of the documents, the skill-level of the forgery,= the
motives of those responsible, and =93why the intelligence community did= not
recognize the documents were fabricated.=94 A Rockefeller aide told me= that
the F.B.I. had promised to look into it.
--=====================_8036856==_.ALT-- From jafujii@uci.edu Tue Apr 1 04:37:41 2003 From: jafujii@uci.edu (Jim Fujii) Date: Mon, 31 Mar 2003 20:37:41 -0800 Subject: [Ethnicstudies] Rumsfeld 'wanted cheap war' Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20030331203734.0260bab8@benfranklin.hnet.uci.edu> --=====================_17834745==_.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/2899823.stm BBC NEWS 2003/03/30 Rumsfeld 'wanted cheap war' US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld forced his military chiefs to accept his idea that a relatively small, lightly armed force should go to war with Iraq, it is being alleged. The New Yorker magazine quotes unnamed Pentagon sources as saying that Mr Rumsfeld insisted at least six times before the conflict on the proposed number of troops being reduced. In an article to be published on Monday, the magazine says Mr Rumsfeld overruled advice from the war commander, General Tommy Franks, to delay the invasion of Iraq. The defence secretary has flatly denied overriding military commanders. "You will find, if you ask anyone who has been involved in the process in the central command, that every single thing that they have requested has, in fact, happened," he said on the US television network, Fox News. 'Abrasive character' The BBC's correspondent in Washington, Justin Webb, says Mr Rumsfeld is a famously abrasive character who has been accused in the past of bullying his generals. Our correspondent says these fresh allegations are likely to cause a political storm and lead to further difficulties for the defence secretary and his team. The article quotes a former intelligence official as saying the war was now a stalemate. But Mr Rumsfeld says the US has "no plans for pauses or cease-fires". The article says the army is running out of cruise missiles and precision-guided bombs, and that there are maintenance problems with tanks. "The only hope is that they can hold out until reinforcements arrive," the official told the magazine. A senior Pentagon planner said Mr Rumsfeld wanted to "do war on the cheap" and thought precision bombing would bring victory. "He thought he knew better [than military officials]. He was the decision-maker at every turn," the unnamed planner said. Franks 'overruled' The article says General Franks wanted to delay the invasion until the American troops denied access to Turkey had been brought to Kuwait, but Mr Rumsfeld overruled him. It says the defence secretary also rejected recommendations to deploy four or more army divisions and to ship hundreds of tanks and other heavy vehicles in advance. Instead, Mr Rumsfeld preferred to rely on equipment which was already in Kuwait, but was insufficient, the magazine says. Our correspondent says Mr Rumsfeld and his team desperately need some decisive victories in battle if the American people are to continue to believe what the White House is telling them - that this war is going roughly according to plan. --=====================_17834745==_.ALT Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii" http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/2899823.stm

BBC NEWS     2003/03/30

Rumsfeld 'wanted cheap war'

US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld forced his military chiefs to accept
his idea that a relatively small, lightly armed force should go to war with
Iraq, it is being alleged.

The New Yorker magazine quotes unnamed Pentagon sources as saying that Mr
Rumsfeld insisted at least six times before the conflict on the proposed
number of troops being reduced.

In an article to be published on Monday, the magazine says Mr Rumsfeld
overruled advice from the war commander, General Tommy Franks, to delay the
invasion of Iraq.

The defence secretary has flatly denied overriding military commanders.

"You will find, if you ask anyone who has been involved in the process in
the central command, that every single thing that they have requested has,
in fact, happened," he said on the US television network, Fox News.

'Abrasive character'

The BBC's correspondent in Washington, Justin Webb, says Mr Rumsfeld is a
famously abrasive character who has been accused in the past of bullying his
generals.

Our correspondent says these fresh allegations are likely to cause a
political storm and lead to further difficulties for the defence secretary
and his team.

The article quotes a former intelligence official as saying the war was now
a stalemate.

But Mr Rumsfeld says the US has "no plans for pauses or cease-fires".

The article says the army is running out of cruise missiles and
precision-guided bombs, and that there are maintenance problems with tanks.


"The only hope is that they can hold out until reinforcements arrive," the
official told the magazine.

A senior Pentagon planner said Mr Rumsfeld wanted to "do war on the cheap"
and thought precision bombing would bring victory.

"He thought he knew better [than military officials]. He was the
decision-maker at every turn," the unnamed planner said.

Franks 'overruled'

The article says General Franks wanted to delay the invasion until the
American troops denied access to Turkey had been brought to Kuwait, but Mr
Rumsfeld overruled him.

It says the defence secretary also rejected recommendations to deploy four
or more army divisions and to ship hundreds of tanks and other heavy
vehicles in advance.

Instead, Mr Rumsfeld preferred to rely on equipment which was already in
Kuwait, but was insufficient, the magazine says.

Our correspondent says Mr Rumsfeld and his team desperately need some
decisive victories in battle if the American people are to continue to
believe what the White House is telling them - that this war is going
roughly according to plan.
--=====================_17834745==_.ALT-- From dtsang@lib.uci.edu Tue Apr 1 07:06:26 2003 From: dtsang@lib.uci.edu (Dan Tsang) Date: Mon, 31 Mar 2003 23:06:26 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Ethnicstudies] First American conscientious deserter from Iraq War--Santa Clara, California (fwd) Message-ID: fyi...a part-Pilipino brother. ......... If anyone knows how we can contact and support this guy, please let us all know. http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,926965,00.html Marine who said no to killing on his conscience Duncan Campbell in Los Angeles Tuesday April 1, 2003 The Guardian The first American conscientious deserter from the Iraq war will give himself up at a marine base in California this morning. He said he believed the war was "immoral because of the deception involved by our leaders". Stephen Eagle Funk, 20, a marine reserve who was due to be sent for combat duty, is currently on "unauthorised absence" from his unit. He faces a possible court martial and time in military prison for his action. "I know I have to be punished for going UA," Mr Funk told the Guardian in an interview before surrendering to authorities, "but I would rather take my punishment now than live with what I would have to do [in Iraq] for the rest of my life. I would be going in knowing that it was wrong and that would be hypocritical." Mr Funk, who is originally from Seattle and is half Filipino, was approached by a recruiting officer last year. At the time, he said, he was depressed after dropping out of a biology course at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. He was working part-time for a vet and in a pet shop. His family and friends were surprised by his decision, he said, because they had known him to have liberal political views and not to have been interested in the military. "I wanted to belong and I wanted another direction in my life, and this seemed to offer it," said Mr Funk, who is being counselled by conscientious objectors from the 1991 Gulf war. "They told me I would be able to go back to school [university]." Recruits have their college fees paid once they complete their service. "The ads make the armed forces look so cool - 'Call this number and we'll send you a free pair of boxer shorts' - and a lot of kids don't realise what's involved," he said. Although he graduated from the famously tough marine boot camp in San Diego and excelled as a rifleman during the 12-week induction period, Mr Funk said he had started to have doubts about military service during his training. "Every day in combat training you had to yell out 'Kill! Kill!' and we would get into trouble if you didn't shout it out, so often I would just mouth it so I didn't get into trouble." The recruits were also encouraged to hurt each other during hand-to-hand combat training. "I couldn't do that so they would pair me up with someone who was very violent or aggressive." He said many recruits were envious of those who were being sent to the Gulf. "They would say things like, 'Kill a raghead for me - I'm so jealous.'" As a Catholic who attended mass most Sundays during training, he eventually decided to take his concerns to the chaplain. "He said, 'It's a lot easier if you just give in and don't question authority.' He quoted the Bible at me and said, 'Jesus says to carry a sword.' "But I don't think Jesus was a violent man - in fact, the opposite - and I don't think God takes sides in war ... Everyone told me it was futile to try to get out." At shooting practice, although he scored well, the instructor told him he had an attitude problem: "I was a little pissed off and I said, 'I think killing people is wrong.' That was the crystallising moment because I had never said it out loud before. It was such a relief." He became concerned about the rea sons for the conflict in Iraq. "This war is very immoral because of the deception involved by our leaders. It is very hypocritical." He is opposed to the use of war as a way of solving problems. "War is about destruction and violence and death. It is young men fighting old men's wars. It is not the answer, it just ravages the land of the battleground. I know it's wrong but other people in the military have been programmed to think it is OK." Mr Funk said he had gone public to try to dissuade other young people who had not thought through their reasons for joining the forces. "All they [the military] want is numbers. What I'm doing is really trying to educate people to weigh their options - there are so many more ways to get money for school." He added: "My mum had a gut feeling it wouldn't work out." Although he does not know what punishment awaits, "it's a risk I'm willing to take". This morning, accompanied by his lawyer and former conscientious objectors from previous wars, he will arrive at his home base in San Jose, change into his uniform and give himself up. From dtsang@lib.uci.edu Tue Apr 1 08:09:25 2003 From: dtsang@lib.uci.edu (Dan Tsang) Date: Tue, 1 Apr 2003 00:09:25 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Ethnicstudies] [imc-la]FW: Statement on FBI Surveillance of Korean-American Citizen (fwd) Message-ID: This message is in MIME format. The first part should be readable text, while the remaining parts are likely unreadable without MIME-aware tools. Send mail to mime@docserver.cac.washington.edu for more info. ------=_NextPart_000_0037_01C2F456.2DF2B200 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; CHARSET=US-ASCII Content-ID: fyi... ------=_NextPart_000_0037_01C2F456.2DF2B200 Content-Type: MULTIPART/ALTERNATIVE; BOUNDARY="----=_NextPart_001_0038_01C2F456.2DF5BF40" Content-ID: Content-Description: This message is in MIME format. The first part should be readable text, while the remaining parts are likely unreadable without MIME-aware tools. Send mail to mime@docserver.cac.washington.edu for more info. ------=_NextPart_001_0038_01C2F456.2DF5BF40 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; CHARSET=US-ASCII Content-ID: please distribute wide & far... First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out-- because I was not a communist; Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out-- because I was not a socialist; Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out-- because I was not a trade unionist; Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out-- because I was not a Jew; Then they came for me-- and there was no one left to speak out for me. - Rev. Martin Niemoeller (under Nazi Germany, 1945) ============================= STATEMENT ON THE FBI COUNTERINTELLIGENCE INVESTIGATION AGAINST YAI JUNGWOONG On February 4, 2003, the FBI arrested and searched the home of a Santa Monica, CA resident under the pretext of a "national security issue." The following day, the FBI issued a press release & publicized a 76-page affidavit charging Mr. Jungwoong Yai, a U.S. citizen, for "failing to register as an agent" of the D.P.R.K. (North Korea) and "making fraudulent and false statements to a representative of the U.S. Customs Service." The information revealed in the affidavit and the timing of Mr. Yai's arrest raise serious concerns regarding the FBI's surveillance of U.S. citizens and the Bush Administration's handling of the situation with north Korea. 1. 7 Years to Investigate a "Snack Shop Owner" and His Newspaper Clippings. The FBI conducted electronic eavesdropping and covert physical searches against Mr. Yai for 7 years. Considering the extent of this investigation under the pretext of national security, do the alleged charges of "failing to register as an agent" and under-reporting cash to the customs department constitute a national security issue? Can the FBI justify the cost of such a lengthy investigation considering that the FBI determined that Mr. Yai sent reports to North Korea of "information he obtained from publicly available sources"? Based on government wiretaps, the FBI also accused Mr. Yai of attempting to recruit a "subagent" in order to obtain top secret information via employment at a government agency. Would an alleged agent pose a threat to national security by working at the Library of Congress or the Department of Health & Human Services? 2. Motivation and Timing of the Arrest The alleged crimes occurred between 1996 to 2000. If Mr. Yai committed serious crimes, why wasn't he immediately arrested 2 years ago? What compelled the FBI to arrest Mr. Yai now after no substantial events occurred over the past 2 years? The FBI made the arrest at a time when the Bush administration is escalating tensions on the Korean peninsula. Meanwhile, massive global opposition is mounting against an unpopular drive for war against Iraq. There is no relief in sight for the economy, and people are growing disconcerted with the elimination of social services. Rather than divert attention away from the problems, the government should engage the people and sincerely address the domestic and international problems facing the country. 3. From Arab Americans to Asian Americans to All American Citizens? Congressman Coble, the head of a Homeland Security subcommittee, recently stated that the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II was appropriate. But after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, white men were not categorically imprisoned for petty charges in order to prevent further terrorist bombings. Therefore, no group of people should be harassed or persecuted based on their ethnicity or national origin. We denounce the federal government's racially-motivated detention of Muslims and Arab American immigrants, and we oppose the extension of such detainment to Asian Americans or any other ethnic group. We call for an end to the McCarthy-era persecution that threaten the rights of US residents and citizens under the so-called USA Patriot Act and the newly proposed USA Patriot Act II. Today, the South Korean government has progressed and no longer fabricates spy scandals in order to distract the public and suppress its citizens. Harsh military dictatorships who once utilized such methods were ultimately overthrown by the conscience and will of the people. It is ironic that in America, the symbol of democracy and freedom, we find a degenerate US government walking backwards, repeating the mistakes of history, and fueling fear and division by targeting racial groups. Rather than exploit this nation's grief and despair following 9-11, the government must act with moral conscience in the interest of healing and bringing unity and peace to the nation and throughout the world. Interim Committee of the Defense Committee for Mr. Yai Contacts: Ken Roh < minjok@minjok.com> (213) 458-2245 or Danny Park dannypark@kiwa.org Attached Document: Statement on the FBI Counterintelligence Investigation Against Yai Jungwoong ------=_NextPart_001_0038_01C2F456.2DF5BF40 Content-Type: TEXT/HTML; CHARSET=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: QUOTED-PRINTABLE Content-ID: Message
please distribute wide &=20 far...

  First = they came for=20 the communists, and I did not speak out--
    because = I was=20 not a communist;
Then they came for the socialists, and I did not = speak=20 out--
    because I was not a socialist;
Then they = came for=20 the trade unionists, and I did not speak out--
    = because I=20 was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not = speak=20 out--
    because I was not a Jew;
Then they came = for=20 me--
    and there was no one left to speak out for=20 me. 

       =         =20 - Rev. Martin Niemoeller (under Nazi Germany, 1945)  

=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D= =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D
 

STATEMENT ON=20 THE FBI COUNTERINTELLIGENCE INVESTIGATION AGAINST YAI=20 JUNGWOONG

 

On = February 4, 2003,=20 the FBI arrested and searched the home of a Santa Monica, CA resident = under the=20 pretext of a “national security issue.” =20 The following day, the FBI issued a press release & = publicized a=20 76-page affidavit charging Mr. Jungwoong Yai, a U.S. citizen, for = “failing to=20 register as an agent” of the D.P.R.K. (North Korea) and = “making fraudulent and=20 false statements to a representative of the U.S. Customs = Service.”

 

The information = revealed in=20 the affidavit and the timing of Mr. Yai’s arrest raise serious = concerns=20 regarding the FBI’s surveillance of U.S. citizens and the Bush = Administration’s=20 handling of the situation with north Korea.

 

  1. 7 Years to = Investigate a “Snack=20 Shop Owner” and His Newspaper Clippings. =20
    The FBI conducted electronic eavesdropping and covert = physical=20 searches against Mr. Yai for 7 years. =20 Considering the extent of this investigation under the pretext = of=20 national security, do the alleged charges of “failing to = register as an agent”=20 and under-reporting cash to the customs department constitute a = national=20 security issue?  Can the = FBI=20 justify the cost of such a lengthy investigation considering that the = FBI=20 determined that Mr. Yai sent reports to North Korea of = “information he=20 obtained from publicly = available=20 sources”?  = Based on government=20 wiretaps, the FBI also accused Mr. Yai of attempting to recruit a = “subagent”=20 in order to obtain top secret information via employment at a = government=20 agency.  Would an = alleged agent=20 pose a threat to national security by working at the Library of = Congress or=20 the Department of Health & Human Services?
  2. Motivation and = Timing of the=20 Arrest
    The alleged crimes occurred between 1996 to 2000.  If Mr. Yai committed serious = crimes,=20 why wasn’t he immediately arrested 2 years ago?  What compelled the FBI to = arrest Mr.=20 Yai now after no substantial events occurred over the past 2 = years?  The FBI made the arrest at a = time when=20 the Bush administration is escalating tensions on the Korean = peninsula.  Meanwhile, massive global = opposition=20 is mounting against an unpopular drive for war against Iraq.  There is no relief in sight = for the=20 economy, and people are growing disconcerted with the elimination of = social=20 services.  Rather than = divert=20 attention away from the problems, the government should engage the = people and=20 sincerely address the domestic and international problems facing the=20 country.

 

  1. From Arab Americans = to Asian=20 Americans to All American Citizens?
    Congressman Coble, the = head of a=20 Homeland Security subcommittee, recently stated that the internment of = Japanese Americans during World War II was appropriate.  But after the Oklahoma City = bombing in=20 1995, white men were not categorically imprisoned for petty charges in = order=20 to prevent further terrorist bombings. =20 Therefore, no group of people should be harassed or persecuted = based on=20 their ethnicity or national origin. =20 We denounce the federal government’s racially-motivated = detention of=20 Muslims and Arab American immigrants, and we oppose the extension of = such=20 detainment to Asian Americans or any other ethnic group.  We call for an end to the = McCarthy-era=20 persecution that threaten the rights of US residents and citizens = under the=20 so-called USA Patriot Act and the newly proposed USA Patriot Act=20 II.

 

Today, = the South=20 Korean government has progressed and no longer fabricates spy scandals = in order=20 to distract the public and suppress its citizens.  Harsh military dictatorships = who once=20 utilized such methods were ultimately overthrown by the conscience and = will of=20 the people.  It is ironic = that in=20 America, the symbol of democracy and freedom, we find a degenerate US = government=20 walking backwards, repeating the mistakes of history, and fueling fear = and=20 division by targeting racial groups. =20 Rather than exploit this nation’s grief and despair = following 9-11, the=20 government must act with moral conscience in the interest of healing and = bringing unity and peace to the nation and throughout the world.  

 

 

Interim Committee of the Defense = Committee for=20 Mr. Yai

 

 

Contacts:

Ken Roh = <minjok@minjok.com> (213) = 458-2245

or Danny Park = dannypark@kiwa.org  =

 

Attached=20 Document: Statement on the FBI Counterintelligence = Investigation =20 Against Yai = Jungwoong 
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/v8DCgAA/////wYJAgAAAAAAwAAAAAAAAEYYAAAATWljcm9zb2Z0IFdvcmQgRG9jdW1lbnQACgAA AE1TV29yZERvYwAQAAAAV29yZC5Eb2N1bWVudC44APQ5snEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA ------=_NextPart_000_0037_01C2F456.2DF2B200-- From jafujii@uci.edu Tue Apr 1 16:19:47 2003 From: jafujii@uci.edu (Jim Fujii) Date: Tue, 01 Apr 2003 08:19:47 -0800 Subject: [Ethnicstudies] Peter Arnett fired for war reporting Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20030401081935.00b9de08@benfranklin.hnet.uci.edu> --=====================_597559==_.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed MIRROR.CO.UK Monday, March 31, 2003 http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/allnews/page.cfm?objectid=12795678&method=f ull&siteid=50143 THIS WAR IS NOT WORKING By Peter Arnett I am still in shock and awe at being fired. 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. I have made those comments to television stations around the world and now I'm making them again in the Daily Mirror. I'm not angry. I'm not crying. But I'm also awed by this media phenomenon. 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. I gave an impromptu interview to Iraqi television feeling that after four months of interviewing hundreds of them it was only professional courtesy to give them a few comments. That was my Waterloo - bang! I have not yet decided what to do, whether to pack my bags and leave Baghdad or stay on. I'll decide what to do today, right now I'm chewing on what has happened to me. 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. I was here in 1991 and the bombing is very similar to that conflict but the reality is very different. The US and British want to come here, take over the city, upturn the government and take us through to a new era. The troops are in the country and fighting there way up here. It creates a very different atmosphere. The Ba'ath party, currently led by Saddam Hussein, has been in power for 34 years. Tariq Aziz told me the US will have to brainwash 25 million Iraqis because these people think exactly the same as Saddam does. Maybe he is wrong, maybe not. For months, Iraqis have said officially and privately: "We will fight the Americans, we will use guerrilla tactics, we will surprise them." But the Iraqi opposition has said: "This will be a pushover, everyone wants to rebel against Saddam." Now the reality is being played out on the battlefield. We have to watch the reality now and some Iraqis are fighting and the government does seem very determined. For me to see that and to be criticised for saying the obvious is unfair. But it has made me a target for my critics in the States who accuse me of giving aid and comfort to the enemy. I don't want to give aid and comfort to the enemy - I just want to be able to tell the truth. I came to Baghdad with my crew because the Iraqi side needs to be heard too. It is clear the original timetable that America would be in Baghdad by the end of March has fallen by the wayside. There is clearly debate in the US about this, reinforcements are being sent in and there are delays. This doesn't mean it is going badly. Every casualty is a loss but they have been in limited numbers so far. Every night and every day I hear the B-52s and the missiles hammering the defences Baghdad. Just like in Afghanistan and Vietnam, the US is bringing enormous firepower to bear which it believes will grind the Iraqis down. I have seen it before and it has been enormously effective. The US optimism is justified. On the other hand, at what cost to civilians ? During the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, I entered a US-held town which had been totally destroyed. The Viet Cong had taken over and were threatening the commander's building so he called down an artillery strike which killed many of his own men. The Major with us asked: "How could this happen?" A soldier replied: "Sir, we had to destroy the town to save it." The Bush and Blair administration does not want that label stuck on this war, it is a liberation for them. But the problem is US Marines at checkpoints are suspicious of every man, woman and child because of the suicide bomb. Already there is suspicion growing. And in the south, there have not been popular rebellions and uprisings. As the battle for Baghdad grows, the potential for civilian casualties grows. This is the spectre rising as this war continues. The US and Britain have to figure this out. I don't think you can tell how it will end, there are many scenarios. A siege of Baghdad... a special operations strike on Saddam. Optimists in the Pentagon talk about an internal coup. Who would have had believed Umm Qasr would hold out for six days or US Marines directing traffic would be killed by a suicide bomber? This is more like the West Bank and Gaza and it could become like that in some areas. The US and Britain must avoid that scenario. Forces come in, communities resist, then suicide bombing and resistance from guerrillas. Except the Iraqis will be putting up a stiffer fight than the Palestinians because they are better armed. We know the world, including many Americans, is ambivalent about this war and I think it is essential to be here. I'm not here to be a superstar. I have been there in 1991 and could never be bigger than that. Some reporters make judgements but that is not my style. I present both sides and report what I see with my own eyes. I don't blame NBC for their decision because they came under great commercial pressure from the outside. And I certainly don't believe the White House was responsible for my sacking. But I want to tell the story as best as I can, which makes it so disappointing to be fired. -- Susan C. Jarratt Campus Writing Coordinator Professor, Department of English and Comparative Literature University of California Irvine, CA 92697 949.824.9533 sjarratt@uci.edu office: 500D Krieger Hall mailing address: 435 Humanities Instructional Building FAX: 949-824-9761 _______________________________________________ List-Info: https://maillists.uci.edu/mailman/listinfo/uci-peace-justice --=====================_597559==_.ALT Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii" MIRROR.CO.UK

Monday, March 31, 2003
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/allnews/page.cfm?objectid=12795678&method=f
ull&siteid=50143

THIS WAR IS NOT WORKING


By Peter Arnett


I am still in shock and awe at being fired. 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.

I have made those comments to television stations
around the world and now I'm making them again in the
Daily Mirror.

I'm not angry. I'm not crying. But I'm also awed by
this media phenomenon.

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.

I gave an impromptu interview to Iraqi television
feeling that after four months of interviewing
hundreds of them it was only professional courtesy to
give them a few comments.

That was my Waterloo - bang!

I have not yet decided what to do, whether to pack my
bags and leave Baghdad or stay on.

I'll decide what to do today, right now I'm chewing on
what has happened to me.

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.

I was here in 1991 and the bombing is very similar to
that conflict but the reality is very different.

The US and British want to come here, take over the
city, upturn the government and take us through to a
new era. The troops are in the country and fighting
there way up here. It creates a very different
atmosphere.

The Ba'ath party, currently led by Saddam Hussein, has
been in power for 34 years. Tariq Aziz told me the US
will have to brainwash 25 million Iraqis because these
people think exactly the same as Saddam does.

Maybe he is wrong, maybe not.

For months, Iraqis have said officially and privately:
"We will fight the Americans, we will use guerrilla
tactics, we will surprise them."

But the Iraqi opposition has said: "This will be a
pushover, everyone wants to rebel against Saddam."

Now the reality is being played out on the
battlefield.

We have to watch the reality now and some Iraqis are
fighting and the government does seem very determined.
For me to see that and to be criticised for saying the
obvious is unfair.

But it has made me a target for my critics in the
States who accuse me of giving aid and comfort to the
enemy.

I don't want to give aid and comfort to the enemy - I
just want to be able to tell the truth.

I came to Baghdad with my crew because the Iraqi side
needs to be heard too.

It is clear the original timetable that America would
be in Baghdad by the end of March has fallen by the
wayside.

There is clearly debate in the US about this,
reinforcements are being sent in and there are delays.

This doesn't mean it is going badly. Every casualty is
a loss but they have been in limited numbers so far.

Every night and every day I hear the B-52s and the
missiles hammering the defences Baghdad.

Just like in Afghanistan and Vietnam, the US is
bringing enormous firepower to bear which it believes
will grind the Iraqis down. I have seen it before and
it has been enormously effective. The US optimism is
justified.

On the other hand, at what cost to civilians ?

During the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, I entered a
US-held town which had been totally destroyed.

The Viet Cong had taken over and were threatening the commander's
building so he called down an artillery strike which killed many of his
own men.

The Major with us asked: "How could this happen?" A
soldier replied: "Sir, we had to destroy the town to
save it."

The Bush and Blair administration does not want that
label stuck on this war, it is a liberation for them.
But the problem is US Marines at checkpoints are
suspicious of every man, woman and child because of
the suicide bomb.

Already there is suspicion growing.

And in the south, there have not been popular
rebellions and uprisings. As the battle for Baghdad
grows, the potential for civilian casualties grows.

This is the spectre rising as this war continues. The
US and Britain have to figure this out.

I don't think you can tell how it will end, there are
many scenarios. A siege of Baghdad... a special
operations strike on Saddam. Optimists in the Pentagon
talk about an internal coup.

Who would have had believed Umm Qasr would hold out
for six days or US Marines directing traffic would be
killed by a suicide bomber? This is more like the West
Bank and Gaza and it could become like that in some
areas.

The US and Britain must avoid that scenario.

Forces come in, communities resist, then suicide
bombing and resistance from guerrillas.

Except the Iraqis will be putting up a stiffer fight
than the Palestinians because they are better armed.

We know the world, including many Americans, is
ambivalent about this war and I think it is essential
to be here.

I'm not here to be a superstar. I have been there in
1991 and could never be bigger than that.

Some reporters make judgements but that is not my
style. I present both sides and report what I see with
my own eyes.

I don't blame NBC for their decision because they came
under great commercial pressure from the outside.

And I certainly don't believe the White House was
responsible for my sacking.

But I want to tell the story as best as I can, which
makes it so disappointing to be fired.
--
Susan C. Jarratt
Campus Writing Coordinator
Professor, Department of English and Comparative Literature
University of California
Irvine, CA  92697
949.824.9533
sjarratt@uci.edu

office:  500D Krieger Hall
mailing address:  435 Humanities Instructional Building
FAX:  949-824-9761

_______________________________________________
List-Info: https://maillists.uci.edu/mailman/listinfo/uci-peace-justice
 --=====================_597559==_.ALT-- From jafujii@uci.edu Tue Apr 1 17:41:57 2003 From: jafujii@uci.edu (Jim Fujii) Date: Tue, 01 Apr 2003 09:41:57 -0800 Subject: [Ethnicstudies] The New BIA Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20030401094140.00b430a8@benfranklin.hnet.uci.edu> --=====================_5521659==_.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed BUREAU OF IRAQI AFFAIRS Formed March 20, 2003 Dear People of Iraq, Now that you have been liberated from your tyrannical oppressors, we at the BIA look forward to our relationship with you. Below you will find a list of what to expect from the services of our good offices. 1. Henceforth, English will be the spoken language of all government and associated offices. If you do not speak English, a translator fluent in German will be provided. 2. All Iraqi people will apply for a spot on a citizen roll. Citizenship will be open to those people who can prove that they are Iraqi back four generations with documents issued by the United States. Christian church records may also be given in support. 3. All hospitals will be issued with a standard emergency aid kit. The kit contains gauze, bandaids, burn cream, iodine, tweezers, and duct tape. 4. Your oil is to be held in trust for you. We will apoint your new American approved government a lawyer with a background in the oil industry. Never mind that he works for the company that he will eventually cut a deal with. This close relationship will guarentee you more money for your oil. 5. Each Citizen will be allotted one hundred acres of prime Iraqi desert. They will be issued plows, hoes, seed corn and the King James Bible. All leftover land will be open to settlement by Israelis. 6. Each Citizen is entitled to draw a ration of milk, sugar, flour and lard. If you can not use the rations for health or religious reasons you may file a complaint with your BIA appointed liaisons, Crisco. Those Iraqis showing signs of diabetes, heart disease, or glaucoma will be issued with double rations in place of adequate health care. 7. We will mismanage your trust monies, allowing any five year old with minimal computer skills to hack into the system and set up their own account. Records of your accounts will be kept, but you must receive express written permission from the head of the BIA to examine them. 8. In keeping with the separation of Church and State supported by the US constitution, Christian missionaries will be sponsored through government funding. Only Iraqis who convert to Christianity will be allowed to hold jobs within the government. 9. For the purposes of treaty making, any single Iraqi will be found competent to sign on behalf of all other Iraqis. 10. Welcome to the Free World and have a nice day! ________________________________________________________________ Sign Up for Juno Platinum Internet Access Today Only $9.95 per month! Visit www.juno.com ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~--> Make Money Online Auctions! Make $500.00 or We Will Give You Thirty Dollars for Trying! http://us.click.yahoo.com/yMx78A/fNtFAA/i5gGAA/sitolB/TM ---------------------------------------------------------------------~-> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ --=====================_5521659==_.ALT Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii" BUREAU OF IRAQI AFFAIRS
Formed March 20, 2003


Dear People of Iraq,
Now that you have been liberated from your tyrannical
oppressors, we at the BIA look forward to our relationship
with you. Below you will find a list of what to expect from
the services of our good offices.


1. Henceforth, English will be the spoken language of all
government and associated offices. If you do not speak
English, a translator fluent in German will be provided.

2. All Iraqi people will apply for a spot on a citizen roll.
Citizenship will be open to those people who can prove
that they are Iraqi back four generations with documents
issued by the United States. Christian church records
may also be given in support.

3. All hospitals will be issued with a standard emergency
aid kit. The kit contains gauze, bandaids, burn cream,
iodine, tweezers, and duct tape.

4. Your oil is to be held in trust for you. We will apoint your
new American approved government a lawyer with a
background in the oil industry. Never mind that he works
for the company that he will eventually cut a deal with.
This close relationship will guarentee you more money
for your oil.

5. Each Citizen will be allotted one hundred acres of
prime Iraqi desert.  They will be issued plows, hoes,
seed corn and the King James Bible. All leftover land
will be open to settlement by Israelis.

6. Each Citizen is entitled to draw a ration of milk,
sugar, flour and lard. If you can not use the rations for
health or religious reasons you may file a complaint
with your BIA appointed liaisons, Crisco. Those Iraqis
showing signs of diabetes, heart disease, or glaucoma
will be issued with double rations in place of adequate
health care.

7. We will mismanage your trust monies, allowing
any five year old with minimal computer skills to hack
into the system and set up their own account. Records
of your accounts will be kept, but you must receive
express written permission from the head of the BIA
to examine them.

8. In keeping with the separation of Church and State
supported by the US constitution, Christian missionaries
will be sponsored through government funding. Only Iraqis
who convert to Christianity will be allowed to hold jobs
within the government.

9. For the purposes of treaty making, any single Iraqi
will be found competent to sign on behalf of all other
Iraqis.

10. Welcome to the Free World and have a nice day!

________________________________________________________________
Sign Up for Juno Platinum Internet Access Today
Only $9.95 per month!
Visit www.juno.com

------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~-->
Make Money Online Auctions! Make $500.00 or We Will Give You Thirty Dollars for Trying!
http://us.click.yahoo.com/yMx78A/fNtFAA/i5gGAA/sitolB/TM
---------------------------------------------------------------------~->

 

Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
--=====================_5521659==_.ALT-- From gggonzal@uci.edu Tue Apr 1 17:42:54 2003 From: gggonzal@uci.edu (Gilbert G. Gonzalez) Date: Tue, 01 Apr 2003 09:42:54 -0800 Subject: [Ethnicstudies] Fwd: Once more into the swamp (fwd) Message-ID: <5.0.0.25.2.20030401094222.01eae440@pop.uci.edu> > >Subject: Once more into the swamp > >Toronto Sun March 30, 2003 > >Once more into the swamp > >Saddam learned a lesson in 1991, the U.S. and Britain did not ... now their >forces are tied down fighting a guerrilla war in Iraq > >by Eric Margolis > >The opening weeks of the Second Oil War against Iraq - a.k.a. Operation Iraq >Freedom - produced the advertised "shock and awe" all right, but it came in >Washington rather than bombarded Baghdad. > >The immediate uprisings against Great Satan Saddam, the quick, almost >effortless "liberation" of Iraq, and the joyous reception by grateful Iraqis >promised by the neo-conservatives who misled America into this increasingly >ugly war have been exposed as a farrago of lies or distortions. > >Iraqis, quite clearly, do not want to be "liberated" - even many who have >long opposed Saddam's brutal regime. To the contrary, the American-British >invasion appears to have ignited genuine national resistance among 17 >million Arab Iraqis, just as the 1941 German invasion of the USSR rallied >Russians and Ukrainians behind Stalin's hated regime. > >So far, regular Iraqi army units, militia groups and guerrillas have been >delaying and harassing the northward advance of U.S. forces by assaulting >their overextended supply lines, then retreating into cities and towns. Any >18th century general worth his snuff would tell you never leave enemy >garrisons athwart your communications (supply lines). Napoleon said lines of >communications were the most important factor in war, a lesson U.S. forces >are painfully relearning in Iraq. > >So 100,000 more American troops are being rushed to Iraq, meaning almost >half of the U.S. Army will be stuck in Mesopotamia at a time when North >Korea is threatening war. And this before U.S. forces have even clashed with >Iraq's Republican Guards. > >Last week, British Prime Minister Tony Blair admitted British forces have >been forced to lay siege to Basra, Iraq's second city - a "humanitarian" >operation he laughably claimed. Some reports claimed that British shelling >had destroyed Basra's water and electricity systems. The nasty, bloody urban >warfare the Americans and Brits sought to avoid at all costs is now >confronting them. > >Warnings > >The CIA and many American generals warned for months that: a) there might be >no mass uprisings against Saddam's regime; b) over-extended U.S. >communications would be vulnerable; c) the invasion force lacked sufficient >ground troops to conquer Iraq; d) Turkey's refusal to admit the U.S. 4th >Mechanized Division would wrong-foot the campaign. > >In his eagerness for war, President George Bush ignored these warnings. So >did the civilian neo-con war hawks running his administration, few of whom, >save Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, had ever served in their nation's >armed forces. > >The president's military background - a few appearances in the Texas >National Guard during the Vietnam conflict - were unlikely to have taught >him much about the art of war. > >Expect the Bush administration, the Pentagon, and their tame media to >shortly begin calling Iraqi guerrillas "terrorists" and, inevitably, "linked >to al-Qaida." > >The White House has issued orders to avoid at all costs any mention of >guerrilla warfare, as this term suggests both popular resistance and >conjures memories of Vietnam. > >The administration will continue efforts to convince the public that >invading Iraq is part of the so-called war on terrorism. Saddam is already >being downgraded as a menace in the event he, like Osama bin Laden, escapes >death or capture. > >The U.S. media, with some notable exceptions, too often simply parrots >Pentagon PR handouts, and shields Americans from the indelicate realities of >war. Ironically, Russia's media is delivering far more accurate reporting on >the conflict than America's self-censoring media. > >U.S. and British casualties may be under-reported, a practice the U.S. is >following in its guerrilla war in Afghanistan, where six American soldiers >were recently killed. > >Some reports suggested their helicopter was shot down. The Pentagon >described it as a "hard landing." The Pentagon stoutly denies >under-reporting losses, though some foreign intelligence sources contradict >its claim. > >Aggressive resistance > >Iraqis, quite clearly, have rained on President Bush's victory parade. No >matter how the Pentagon spins Iraqi resistance - "Saddam's thugs force >Iraqis to fight at gunpoint" ... "Iraqis use human shields" ... "civilians >fire on U.S. soldiers" ... etc., it seems clear that non-Kurdish Iraqis of >all sorts are resisting the invasion. Their growing and surprisingly >aggressive fight against vastly superior forces suggests a long guerrilla >war may be in the offing, even after U.S. and British forces occupy Baghdad. > > >And U.S. attacks on the holy cities of Najaf and Kerbala could also spark >even more fierce resistance by Shia Muslims, or even Iran. > >In a further irony, the U.S. believed it could refight the 1991 war against >Iraq, assuming the Iraqi Army would disintegrate under fire and run like >rabbits. By contrast, the Iraqis learned from their 1991 disaster and gained >much knowledge from friendly Serbia, which had been extremely successful in >the tactical deception and spoofing of U.S. technology. Most important, Iraq >learned to hide under urban shelter and avoid exposing its troops and armour >to lethal U.S. air power. > >The White House and Pentagon have forgotten the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War, when >Saddam was a close American ally. Iraq fought ferocious battles against >numerically superior Iranian forces, suffering 500,000 casualties. In open >desert, Iraq's forces, bereft of air cover, are sitting ducks; in urban >areas, they have fought, at least in the past, with skill and courage. > >And many of Iraq's soldiers are veterans of the war with Iran. > >This does not bode well for the upcoming U.S. attack on Baghdad. From dtsang@lib.uci.edu Tue Apr 1 23:01:08 2003 From: dtsang@lib.uci.edu (Dan Tsang) Date: Tue, 1 Apr 2003 15:01:08 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Ethnicstudies] [Subv] Remembering actor Leslie Cheung; Vietnamese Director Do Minh Tuan (fwd) Message-ID: Irvine -- As the U.S./U.K. invasion of Iraq continues unabated, we mourn the deaths of those killed in the unnecessary war. We also mourn those killed in the spreading SARS epidemic, which has struck Hong Kong particularly strongly. And today, some more sad news from Hong Kong: Actor Leslie Cheung committed suicide today in Hong Kong. On Subversity today, we plan to talk with Vancouver-based Hong Kong film scholar Helen Leung about Cheung's life and his bringing onto the screen depictions of a queer sensibility, in such films as Happy Together, and Farewell My Concubine. Subversity, a KUCI public affairs program, airs from 4-5 p.m. on KUCI, 88.9 fm in Orange County, California, and is Web-cast at the same time via http://kuci.org. You can call 949 824-5824 to chat with our guest during the show, or e-mail subversity@kuci.org with comments/questions. We will also air an interview with Hanoi director Do Minh Tuan, whose Foul King, a drama about romance in a rubbish dump, is screening at the Newport Beach Film Festival. Foul King (Vua Bai Rac) screens Thursday, April 10 at 5:00 PM at the Lido Theater in Newport Beach. Do Min Tuan is a Rockeffer Fellow at the William Joiner Center For The Study of War and Social Consequences at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. The center is the target of a federal lawsuit by rightwing forces in Little Saigon over its offer of fellowships to scholars from Vietnam. We dedicate this show to two American heroes, journalist Peter Arnett, who dared speak the truth about the invasion of Iraq, and U.S. Marine Lance Cpl Stephen Funk (half Pilipino), whose conscience prevents him from participating in killing. He turned himself in today to military authorities in San Jose. Resources: Hong Kong film site: http://www.hkflix.com/xq/asp/person.leslie+cheung/qx/titles.htm Leslie Cheung fan site: http://www.lesliecheung.com Review of another film about Vietnam screeening at NBFF, A Dream in Hanoi: http://www.ocweekly.com/ink/03/30/newport-tsang.php Newport Beach Film Festival http://www.newportbeachfilmfest.com Arnett is hired by Daily Mirror http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/allnews/page.cfm?objectid=12795796&method=full&siteid=50143 Article on conscientious objector Funk: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uslatest/story/0,1282,-2526375,00.html Thanx for listening. dan Daniel C. Tsang Host, Subversity, now Tuesdays, 4-5 p.m. KUCI, 88.9 FM and Web-cast live via http://kuci.org Subversity: http://kuci.org/~dtsang; E-mail: subversity@kuci.org Daniel Tsang, KUCI, PO Box 4362, Irvine CA 92616 UCI Tel: (949) 824-4978; UCI Fax: (949) 824-2700 UCI Office: 380 Main Library Member, National Writers Union (http://www.nwu.org) WWW News Resource Page: http://sun3.lib.uci.edu/~dtsang/netnews1.htm AWARE: http://sun3.lib.uci.edu/~dtsang/aware2.htm Personal Homepage: http://sun3.lib.uci.edu/~dtsang/ From jafujii@uci.edu Wed Apr 2 02:14:01 2003 From: jafujii@uci.edu (Jim Fujii) Date: Tue, 01 Apr 2003 18:14:01 -0800 Subject: [Ethnicstudies] Professors at IVC Protest Administrator's Warning Against Discussing War Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20030401181355.00b94518@benfranklin.hnet.uci.edu> --=====================_3462438==_.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed Tuesday, April 1, 2003 Professors at California College Protest Administrator's Warning Against Discussing War By SCOTT SMALLWOOD A vice president at Irvine Valley College has warned professors not to discuss the war in Iraq in their classrooms unless the course is directly related to the issue, a suggestion that several professors say infringes on academic freedom. Dennis W. White, the vice president for academic instruction at the Southern California community college, said he was responding to complaints from students when he sent the e-mail message to deans and department chairs last week. In it, he wrote: "It has come to my attention that several faculty members have been discussing the current war within the context of their classrooms. We need to be sure that faculty do not explore this activity within the context of their classroom unless it can be demonstrated, to the satisfaction of this office, that such discussions are directly related to the approved instructional requirements and materials associated with those classes." Gregory Bishopp, an art history professor and president of the Academic Senate, said that Mr. White's message was a violation of professors' academic freedom and that the war was certainly a suitable topic for classroom debate. Glenn R. Roquemore, president of the college, said the message was just an exchange among the vice president and the deans and was not a new official policy. "This college certainly approves of discussion about war by faculty and their students," he said. "It's not the policy of the college to stifle freedom of speech in any way." But in an interview on Monday, Mr. White said that while he would "rewrite it more sensitively," he stood by his memo. He argued that the war could be an appropriate topic for discussion in certain courses, including those on cultural anthropology or political science, but not on mathematics. And even in those courses where the war is a reasonable topic for discussion, he said, professors should refrain from stating their personal views. "Outside the classroom, they're free to say whatever, but for a faculty member who has a captive audience to say they are for or against the war is not appropriate," he said. "Inside the classroom, the professor is supposed to be sharing a scholarly, balanced review of the material." Mr. White said his concerns weren't limited to the war. When asked whether he would frown on a professor in a criminal-justice course expressing an opinion on the death penalty, he said, "Yes, for me, it would be problematic." Mr. Bishopp balked at the idea that professors shouldn't express their opinions and joked about whether a "balanced" review meant that courses about the Second World War should be taught from Hitler's perspective. "We're not the League of Women Voters," he said of faculty members. "We're not here to represent anything with any degree of neutrality." Wendy Gabriella, an anthropology instructor at the college and a lawyer, has sued the college seven times in the last five years over such issues as student demonstrations and open-meeting laws. She said she was dismayed by the latest flap. "The problem is Dennis White is in charge of the First Amendment on this campus," she said. "So faculty members are wondering what we're supposed to say. How do we make sure that Dennis White deems our conversations appropriate?" _________________________________________________________________ You may visit The Chronicle as follows: http://chronicle.com _________________________________________________________________ Copyright 2003 by The Chronicle of Higher Education --=====================_3462438==_.ALT Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii"
  Tuesday, April 1, 2003

 
  Professors at California College Protest Administrator's

  Warning Against Discussing War

 

  By SCOTT SMALLWOOD   

 

  A vice president at Irvine Valley College has warned

  professors not to discuss the war in Iraq in their classrooms

  unless the course is directly related to the issue, a

  suggestion that several professors say infringes on academic

  freedom.

 

  Dennis W. White, the vice president for academic instruction

  at the Southern California community college, said he was

  responding  to complaints from students when he sent the

  e-mail message to deans and department chairs last week. In

  it, he wrote: "It has come to my attention that several

  faculty members have been discussing the current war within

  the context of their classrooms. We need to be sure that

  faculty do not explore this activity within the context of

  their classroom unless it can be demonstrated, to the

  satisfaction of this office, that such discussions are

  directly related to the approved instructional requirements

  and materials associated with those classes."

 

  Gregory Bishopp, an art history professor and president of the

  Academic Senate, said that Mr. White's message was a violation

  of professors' academic freedom and that the war was certainly

  a suitable topic for classroom debate.

 

  Glenn R. Roquemore, president of the college, said the message

  was just an exchange among the vice president and the deans

  and was not a new official policy. "This college certainly

  approves of discussion about war by faculty and their

  students," he said. "It's not the policy of the college to

  stifle freedom of speech in any way."

 

  But in an interview on Monday, Mr. White said that while he

  would "rewrite it more sensitively," he stood by his memo. He

  argued that the war could be an appropriate topic for

  discussion in certain courses, including those on cultural

  anthropology or political science, but not on mathematics.

 

  And even in those courses where the war is a reasonable topic

  for discussion, he said, professors should refrain from

  stating their personal views. "Outside the classroom, they're

  free to say whatever, but for a faculty member who has a

  captive audience to say they are for or against the war is not

  appropriate," he said. "Inside the classroom, the professor is

  supposed to be sharing a scholarly, balanced review of the

  material."

 

  Mr. White said his concerns weren't limited to the war. When

  asked whether he would frown on a professor in a

  criminal-justice course expressing an opinion on the death

  penalty, he said, "Yes, for me, it would be problematic."

 

  Mr. Bishopp balked at the idea that professors shouldn't

  express their opinions and joked about whether a "balanced"

  review meant that courses about the Second World War should be

  taught from Hitler's perspective. "We're not the League of

  Women Voters," he said of faculty members. "We're not here to

  represent anything with any degree of neutrality."

 

  Wendy Gabriella, an anthropology instructor at the college and

  a lawyer, has sued the college seven times in the last five

  years over such issues as student demonstrations and

  open-meeting laws. She said she was dismayed by the latest

  flap.

 

  "The problem is Dennis White is in charge of the First

  Amendment on this campus," she said. "So faculty members are

  wondering what we're supposed to say. How do we make sure that

  Dennis White deems our conversations appropriate?"

 

 

 

_________________________________________________________________

 

You may visit The Chronicle as follows:

 

   http://chronicle.com

 

_________________________________________________________________

Copyright 2003 by The Chronicle of Higher Education

 
 --=====================_3462438==_.ALT-- From jafujii@uci.edu Wed Apr 2 05:56:03 2003 From: jafujii@uci.edu (Jim Fujii) Date: Tue, 01 Apr 2003 21:56:03 -0800 Subject: [Ethnicstudies] Bombing Basra Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20030401215555.00bcc438@benfranklin.hnet.uci.edu> --=====================_16784324==_.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed According to Robert Fisk, coalition forces are bombing neighborhoods during the Basra siege. "Far more terrible than the pictures of dead British soldiers, however, is the tape from Basra's largest hospital that shows victims of the Anglo-American bombardment being brought to the operating rooms shrieking in pain." The second link contains the pictures to go with the story. http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=391460 http://www.mabonline.net/media/news/articles/iraqwar200321.03.03.htm --=====================_16784324==_.ALT Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii"
According to Robert Fisk, coalition forces are bombing neighborhoods during the Basra siege. "Far more terrible than the pictures of dead British soldiers, however, is the tape from Basra's largest hospital that shows victims of the Anglo-American bombardment being brought to the operating rooms shrieking in pain." The second link contains the pictures to go with the story.



http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=391460

http://www.mabonline.net/media/news/articles/iraqwar200321.03.03.htm

--=====================_16784324==_.ALT-- From jafujii@uci.edu Wed Apr 2 06:01:48 2003 From: jafujii@uci.edu (Jim Fujii) Date: Tue, 01 Apr 2003 22:01:48 -0800 Subject: [Ethnicstudies] The Arab world's two major catastrophes Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20030401220139.00bce6d0@benfranklin.hnet.uci.edu> --=====================_17128709==_.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed >Resources of hope > >The two major catastrophes currently facing the Arab world, the US-led war >against Iraq and the Israeli war against the Palestinians, dominate >political debate. At a roundtable organised by Al-Ahram Weekly this week, >Edward Said and a number of political analysts debated the challenges the >Arabs face today. Amina Elbendary attended > >http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/631/focus.htm > >-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- > >The roundtable hosting Edward Said and a number of Egyptian political >analysts and Al-Ahram Weekly staff took place as the American bombing of >Iraq was casting heavy shadows over discussions on the future of the Arab >world. > >"It's a very fateful moment in a way because of this deeply unpopular and >reckless war that a small group within the American administration has >decided to wage against Iraq, and, in a way, against the whole Arab world. >My strong opinion, though I don't have any proof in the classical sense of >the word, is that they want to change the entire Middle East and the Arab >world, perhaps terminate some countries, destroy the so-called terrorist >groups they dislike and install regimes friendly to the United States. I >think this is a dream that has very little basis in reality. The knowledge >they have of the Middle East, to judge from the people who advise them, is >to say the least out of date and widely speculative," argued Said. > >The question of who advises the current American administration on its >Middle East policy was one recurring throughout the discussion. "The two >greatest outside influences on the administration's Middle East policy," >Said pointed out, "are Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami. Bernard Lewis hasn't >set foot in the Middle East, in the Arab world, for at least 40 years. He >knows something about Turkey, I'm told, but he knows nothing about the >Arab world." > >Lewis has developed a theory of "concentric circles" which seems to be >influential in Washington, but which Said and other critics take issue with. > >"This is the notion that the Middle East is divided into three circles: an >outer circle of deeply antipathetic regimes and anti-American people, a >second circle of pro-American people and anti- American regimes, and a >third inner circle of pro- American regimes and pro-American people -- >that would be the Gulf. The others are Egypt, Jordan and Morocco for the >second, and Syria and Libya probably for the outer circle. In other words, >there's a non-homogenous Arab world, and it's the role of American policy >to change that so that it all becomes pro-American regimes and >pro-American people." > >"Ajami has said many times that there will be flower-throwing on the >streets of Basra and Baghdad when the Americans are welcomed as >liberators. That's the world we're in. There's a deep contempt for other >ideas, certainly tremendous hostility to Europe, and to the large number >of American people and institutions, about which I wrote in the last issue >of Al-Ahram Weekly, which oppose the war and oppose such policies. And, as >far as I can tell, they're impervious because there's a fortress mentality >which is historically characteristic of cabals and putschist regimes." > >Scenarios for a post-war, most probably a post- Saddam, Iraq were also >part of the debate, as was the effect the war would have on the Arab region. > >Said: "I don't think the planning for the post- Saddam, post-war period in >Iraq is very sophisticated, and there's very little of it. [US >Undersecretary of State Marc] Grossman and [US Undersecretary of Defense >Douglas] Feith testified in Congress about a month ago and seemed to have >no figures and no ideas what structures they were going to deploy; they >had no idea about the use of institutions that exist, although they want >to de-Ba'thise the higher echelons and keep the rest." > >"The same is true about their views of the army. They certainly have no >use for the Iraqi opposition that they've been spending many millions of >dollars on. And to the best of my ability to judge, they are going to >improvise. Of course the model is Afghanistan. I think they hope that the >UN will come in and do something, but given the recent French and Russian >positions I doubt that that will happen with such simplicity." > >Iraqi scholar, Sinan Antoon, then pointed to reports that the cost of the >current war in Iraq, including humanitarian assistance, was estimated to >be 150 billion dollars, which would be paid from Iraqi oil revenues and >from frozen Iraqi assets. The opposition figures that the Americans have >lined up to take power have all agreed to that, meeting with oil >executives and agreeing to the privatisation of Iraqi oil. > >Said doubted that things would be so simple, saying that it would take >years before Iraqi oil revenues begin coming in. "We're not talking about >three or four years, we're talking about now," he said. "There's a major >economic crisis. We went in a matter of a year and a half from a budget >surplus to a major budget deficit in the US, which is going to increase >exponentially over the next two years. There is no money. I think the war >is a desperate attempt to try to recover some confidence in the economy >and in the country. We're not talking about 150 billion dollars from Iraqi >oil, we're talking about a trillion dollars . The calculations of the >ten-year cost of the war go up to trillions." > >Mursi Saad El-Din then asked Said whether the participation of the British >in the invasion, given their role in establishing the Hashemite dynasty in >1917 and the original role played by Gertrude Bell in drawing up the map >of the region, would allow them to play a role in the rehabilitation of Iraq. > >"I have no information," Said responded, "but my opinion is that the >Americans want to do the whole thing. I don't think they want the British >or the UN. I think the idea is to do everything themselves and maybe make >use of British experts, but the serious work is going to be done by the >Americans -- the appointments to the ministries, running the post-war >government, etc. And the British [would] have a very small role." > >Senior Al-Ahram political analyst Salama Ahmed Salama asked Said for his >views regarding the conservatism of the current American administration, >and how he judged it. Was it just a passing phase? > >"It's the worst administration I've seen since I went there in 1951. The >whole [conservative] trend is a very artificial one made up essentially of >three main currents. One is the Christian current, which is isolated from >the rest of the country. [But] it's a lot of people, 70-80 million. This >is George Bush's main constituency. Second, the neo-conservative movement, >which has been developing over the period since the end of the 1960s, as a >reaction to the 1960s. But it is now narrower and narrower and more >focused. That's why you have people like [Richard] Perle and [Paul] >Wolfowitz in positions of power, because they've made an alliance with the >isolationist right wing within America. And these people are toughened, >especially after 9/11. They are right-wing, anti-immigration, anti- >diversity on the campuses and elsewhere, and they have a very narrow >constituency of fear and contempt." > >"And the third group that feeds into this is the Washington establishment, >these think tanks in Washington which have taken the intellectual class >and turned them into policy salesmen who have no peer review. I can now >name maybe ten magazines that publish stuff which nobody referees. They >have become an entirely local group that feeds off the government. And I >think this is an extremely dangerous but in the end dead-ended [group]." > >"The opposition to the war is, I think, an opposition to all of that. It's >an opposition to the fundamentalists, who stand, for example, against the >theory of evolution. And these are the people pushing for the war. And >that's why I think the movement against the war, despite the fact that it >is flagging a bit because of loyalty to the boys and girls abroad, as some >of the Democrats are saying now, will grow. I think that Bush will not >have a second presidency. In fact, I and many others are convinced that >Bush will try to negate the 2004 elections: we're dealing with a >putschist, conspiratorial, paranoid deviation that's very anti- democratic." > >"This is why finally I think candidates in the Democratic primaries next >year will include people like Howard Dean, Dennis Kucinich, [maybe even] >Ralph Nader. I think those are very important things for us, especially >now given the war and what I'm sure will be its complications. I think >that's the role of the intellectual, to provide resources for hope. They >cannot be found in the conventional alleys of power." > >"And don't forget, we have a very dramatic economic recession. With lots >of people out of jobs there's a wide perception that the social security >system is about to be privatised, and this war then becomes a kind of >folly. Bush is already spending something like two billion dollars a day. >Who's going to pay for this? I think that's why the French and the Germans >and the others' reactions are so important. [They] don't want to be part >of [the] so- called reconstruction effort. And look what they did in >Afghanistan. They didn't do anything. They bombed the place and they >haven't helped at all. So I think it's a very important moment for this." > >Aziza Sami pointed to a growing perception that the Arab regimes have >reached the "end of their history" in some sense, no one knowing what will >happen next in the Arab world. For many, the only option seems to be a >kind of people's movement, a reaction coming from the non-state sector. In >this sense she asked Said whether the formal Arab political systems have >really reached the end of their lives and whether there is a way the Arab >masses can begin to find new directions. > >"I don't think anybody really knows the answer to that," responded Said. >"Regimes have a way of staying on, particularly in imperial moments such >as this." > >However, Said drew attention to what he called a "very lamentable emerging >current in America and England" of neo-imperialism, the thought that there >is an acceptable and benign form of imperialism, as carried out by the US. >This, he explained, has even lead to revisions in the history of the >former British empire by historians such as Nial Ferguson and David >Armitage, who argue that the empire wasn't that bad, since it brought >order and certain countries benefited from it. > >Said: "The advent of this new imperialism, with the cabalist or putschist >mentality that I believe exists in Washington, and with the highly dubious >results of the elections of 2000 in which Bush lost the popular vote but >got the presidency, has suggested to many people the complete failure of >American democracy. More and more people are thinking in terms of direct >democracy, such as on the streets, and in terms of various alternative >ways of looking at governance in this new world with a single global power >that has the ability to project military power all over the world and >carry on two, three wars at the same time. For that's what the Rumsfeld >vision is: not only preemptive but also simultaneous war. In such a >position, we're all in the same boat, those of us who don't believe in >that, whether American or not American." > >"And I would think the same thing applies here to the best of my knowledge >and ability to judge. That is to say, there's a failure of rule. The >powers that be in the Arab countries seem to be at best able to keep down >demonstrations, and so on and so forth." > >"But I think there are enough movements from below, whether human-rights >movements, ecological movements, women's movements, ethnic movements, that >favour, in America, the disuniting of America, which is very important. >And maybe the same is true here. In other words, I think the Westphalian >system, which ordered the state system of the world, has failed. And I >think it's failed internally. There's been a desire on the part of the >right wing in the United States, since the Clinton administration, to >attack very heavily independent thought and anything that appears to >challenge the prevailing order, and of course this increased after 9/11." > >Political analyst Mohamed Sid-Ahmed pointed out that after 9/11, it first >appeared that the main confrontation was between imperial America and >terrorism. But something new has developed since then, reversing the game. >Mass movements that began with Seattle, the anti-globalisation movement >that has acquired global dimensions ever since, and Porto Allegre, and the >more recent demonstrations worldwide against the war in Iraq, are changing >the balance, putting the Bush administration on the defensive. This is a >phenomenon, he argued, that has widespread implications, including the >extent to which the image of Islam as "terrorist" and "extremist" is being >replaced by regimes claiming to follow a moderate Islam. > >Said concurred but added that the problem for outsiders was that what >meets the eye are the official regimes. "The rest of the world identifies >the Arabs with their regimes. There doesn't seem to be anything else. And >we haven't in the Arab world, I don't think, developed a way of addressing >these counter-currents in an organised or at least in a significant way. >After 9/11 there were the attempts of groups, let's say of Egyptian >intellectuals, who wanted to respond and write letters and show that we're >not all Osama Bin Laden. But that's not quite the same thing. The problem >is the regimes themselves, which after all claim to represent their >people. There's a crisis of representation, which I think is difficult to >overcome." > >"What's very interesting also is the perception, and this is a footnote to >what Mohamed Sid-Ahmed said, that the opposition to the US in the Arab >world and Europe and elsewhere is not an Islamic opposition. It's on a >much wider basis, which is very important. I myself believe very strongly >that it's important for those of us who are not part of this state system >to be able to address what I call the 'other America', because there are >vast possibilities of mutual benefit, and Porto Allegre is a terrific >model for that." > >The Palestinian predicament and events in occupied Palestine naturally >found their way into the discussion, eventually dominating the roundtable. >Mohamed El-Sayed Said raised several issues relating to Palestinian >nationalism, referring to the chaos that has characterised the Palestinian >Intifada since its inception, which "reflects the increasing gulf between >both the intelligentsia and the political elite on the one hand and the >new generations on the other, particularly in the refugee camps in Gaza >but also in the West Bank. I believe this is an issue of grave concern >given the immense sacrifice paid without, at least until this moment, any >real political gains." > >He was also alarmed by how the Palestinian middle-ranking leadership had >lost its direction in the course of the Intifada: "You're having an >Intifada without a real head, and there is a question of how to restore >minds and reason in such a great act of resistance. Even the general >slogan of 'Intifada for Liberation', was exaggerated to the point of >suicide...Since you're actually asking Palestinians on their own to >complete the cycle and push forward to the end destination, you're >actually asking them to do something that they couldn't possibly do, even >in terms of numbers. Such chaos is disastrous when it comes to a >struggle," he insisted. > >Finally El-Sayed Said raised the problem of finance. "Arab funding and >Arab money was a part of [Palestinian] corruption since the very >beginning. Now we know that the Palestinians need economic assistance and >help, so how can we possibly track or streamline economic and financial >assistance for the strengthening of the body politic of the Palestinian >community, the Palestinian national movement?" > >Said was similarly uneasy about the militarisation of the Intifada, but >"one of the main elements in the creation of the mubadara [the democratic >initiative] of Mustafa Barghouti and Haydar Abdel-Shafi and others, is >precisely the issue of leadership of the Intifada and [its] militarisation." > >He conceded, however, that it was a sensitive issue for the Palestinians >since no one wanted to be seen to be capitulating to the Israeli >occupation, especially as Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon kept making >statements like "we want to break them." No one wants to just give up, he >explained. "The funny part of it is that there is no instrument for giving >way, for surrendering; we don't have even that capacity. I mean Arafat has >in effect surrendered, and nobody seems to be interested. Which is why >everybody is now looking for other ways." > >"I think the question of money and new contacts has emerged from this >mubadara as well. There has been a great deal of European interest in the >mubadara precisely because it's led and represented by several hundred >people all of whom have reputations for transparency and who are dedicated >to their organisations, whether they're medical organisations or relief >organisations. That's very impressive." > >"As for the gaps [referred to] between the camps and intelligentsia, there >are two other groups which are [also] extremely important: the >Palestinians who are Israeli, a million of them, and the shatat, the >diaspora Palestinians. Now, wherever you go there are people who say we >really have to organise ourselves and are beginning to do that. In places >like Britain there is a very strong solidarity movement. I think, being >basically anarchistic, it's working through other groups, like divestment >campaigns, anti-war campaigns, human-rights groups. Because we can't deal >with Israel and the US head on, they're just too powerful, we don't have >the means to deal with them. To me the answer is in the emergence of an >unconventional mentality that is willing to break with all the old slogans." > >Finally, the participants reverted to scenarios for post-war Iraq, >conceding that the picture was blurred. "I don't think anybody has any >idea," concluded Said. "All the available scenarios for the Middle East >that I've seen are full of suppositions. One writer whom I recommend to >your attention is Thomas Powers. He's the best writer on the situation >now. He's written an article entitled "The Man who would be President of >Iraq" for the New York Times and he thinks there's no doubt that once [the >American administration is] through with Iraq they're going into Iran. If >that's the case, if there's an attempt on Iran, who's going to stop them >from thinking the same thing about Syria? There are all kinds of scenarios >going around involving Israel. [The American administration] wants a new >friendly axis: Turkey, Israel and India. That's the new strategic >thinking. What is this going to do to the Arab world with that kind of >regime in Iraq? Those are the things that are being discussed -- non-Arab >dominance [in the Middle East]. A lot of Iraqis, like Kanan Makiya, have >been speaking about the 'de-Arabisation' of the Arab world, not just of >Iraq. I don't really know what to say because everything could go wrong. I >don't know what the war is going to be like." > >But will the Iraqi people remain submissive, Aziza Sami questioned. "I >don't know. I think they [the American administration] think so. Take my >words very literally: the [American] government has very few advisers on >the Middle East. The old Middle East people at the State Department, [the >Arabists] of whom maybe the last person is [Robert] Burns, have been >emasculated. They don't exist anymore, and they have no influence at all. >And the new people, like Thomas Friedman, don't know Arabic, travel around >the Arab world and are received in rooms like this and give [the >administration] advice about what the Arabs are saying and the Arab >street, and so on and so forth." > >"As against that our voices are never heard. Al- Ahram Weekly is one of >the few things that people read, and it is having an effect, slowly. So >cowed and so frightened has the US press become that even when Robert >Burns gave his great Senate speech a month ago it wasn't reported. You >couldn't find it in the NYT. It's unbelievable, there's such an atmosphere >of fear, so the only thing left are the alternative radio stations, >alternative publications, and if you follow them, and establish some kind >of relationship, I think that's where the action is. And that's why the >Weekly is a fantastic resource. Many Americans read it. They read your >columnists as alternatives to what they get in America." > >C a p t i o n : "I don't think the planning for the post-Saddam, post-war >period in Iraq is very sophisticated, and there's very little of it. >Grossman and Feith testified in Congress about a month ago and seemed to >have no figures and no ideas what structures they were going to deploy" _______________________________________________ List-Info: https://maillists.uci.edu/mailman/listinfo/uci-peace-justice --=====================_17128709==_.ALT Content-Type: text/html; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Resources of hope

The two major catastrophes currently facing the Arab world, the US-led war against Iraq and the Israeli war against the Palestinians, dominate political debate. At a roundtable organised by Al-Ahram Weekly this week, Edward Said and a number of political analysts debated the challenges the Arabs face today. Amina Elbendary attended

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The roundtable hosting Edward Said and a number of Egyptian political analysts and Al-Ahram Weekly staff took place as the American bombing of Iraq was casting heavy shadows over discussions on the future of the Arab world.

"It's a very fateful moment in a way because of this deeply unpopular and reckless war that a small group within the American administration has decided to wage against Iraq, and, in a way, against the whole Arab world. My strong opinion, though I don't have any proof in the classical sense of the word, is that they want to change the entire Middle East and the Arab world, perhaps terminate some countries, destroy the so-called terrorist groups they dislike and install regimes friendly to the United States. I think this is a dream that has very little basis in reality. The knowledge they have of the Middle East, to judge from the people who advise them, is to say the least out of date and widely speculative," argued Said.

The question of who advises the current American administration on its Middle East policy was one recurring throughout the discussion. "The two greatest outside influences on the administration's Middle East policy," Said pointed out, "are Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami. Bernard Lewis hasn't set foot in the Middle East, in the Arab world, for at least 40 years. He knows something about Turkey, I'm told, but he knows nothing about the Arab world."

Lewis has developed a theory of "concentric circles" which seems to be influential in Washington, but which Said and other critics take issue with.

"This is the notion that the Middle East is divided into three circles: an outer circle of deeply antipathetic regimes and anti-American people, a second circle of pro-American people and anti- American regimes, and a third inner circle of pro- American regimes and pro-American people -- that would be the Gulf. The others are Egypt, Jordan and Morocco for the second, and Syria and Libya probably for the outer circle. In other words, there's a non-homogenous Arab world, and it's the role of American policy to change that so that it all becomes pro-American regimes and pro-American people."

"Ajami has said many times that there will be flower-throwing on the streets of Basra and Baghdad when the Americans are welcomed as liberators. That's the world we're in. There's a deep contempt for other ideas, certainly tremendous hostility to Europe, and to the large number of American people and institutions, about which I wrote in the last issue of Al-Ahram Weekly, which oppose the war and oppose such policies. And, as far as I can tell, they're impervious because there's a fortress mentality which is historically characteristic of cabals and putschist regimes."

Scenarios for a post-war, most probably a post- Saddam, Iraq were also part of the debate, as was the effect the war would have on the Arab region.

Said: "I don't think the planning for the post- Saddam, post-war period in Iraq is very sophisticated, and there's very little of it. [US Undersecretary of State Marc] Grossman and [US Undersecretary of Defense Douglas] Feith testified in Congress about a month ago and seemed to have no figures and no ideas what structures they were going to deploy; they had no idea about the use of institutions that exist, although they want to de-Ba'thise the higher echelons and keep the rest."

"The same is true about their views of the army. They certainly have no use for the Iraqi opposition that they've been spending many millions of dollars on. And to the best of my ability to judge, they are going to improvise. Of course the model is Afghanistan. I think they hope that the UN will come in and do something, but given the recent French and Russian positions I doubt that that will happen with such simplicity."

Iraqi scholar, Sinan Antoon, then pointed to reports that the cost of the current war in Iraq, including humanitarian assistance, was estimated to be 150 billion dollars, which would be paid from Iraqi oil revenues and from frozen Iraqi assets. The opposition figures that the Americans have lined up to take power have all agreed to that, meeting with oil executives and agreeing to the privatisation of Iraqi oil.

Said doubted that things would be so simple, saying that it would take years before Iraqi oil revenues begin coming in. "We're not talking about three or four years, we're talking about now," he said. "There's a major economic crisis. We went in a matter of a year and a half from a budget surplus to a major budget deficit in the US, which is going to increase exponentially over the next two years. There is no money. I think the war is a desperate attempt to try to recover some confidence in the economy and in the country. We're not talking about 150 billion dollars from Iraqi oil, we're talking about a trillion dollars . The calculations of the ten-year cost of the war go up to trillions."

Mursi Saad El-Din then asked Said whether the participation of the British in the invasion, given their role in establishing the Hashemite dynasty in 1917 and the original role played by Gertrude Bell in drawing up the map of the region, would allow them to play a role in the rehabilitation of Iraq.

"I have no information," Said responded, "but my opinion is that the Americans want to do the whole thing. I don't think they want the British or the UN. I think the idea is to do everything themselves and maybe make use of British experts, but the serious work is going to be done by the Americans -- the appointments to the ministries, running the post-war government, etc. And the British [would] have a very small role."

Senior Al-Ahram political analyst Salama Ahmed Salama asked Said for his views regarding the conservatism of the current American administration, and how he judged it. Was it just a passing phase?

"It's the worst administration I've seen since I went there in 1951. The whole [conservative] trend is a very artificial one made up essentially of three main currents. One is the Christian current, which is isolated from the rest of the country. [But] it's a lot of people, 70-80 million. This is George Bush's main constituency. Second, the neo-conservative movement, which has been developing over the period since the end of the 1960s, as a reaction to the 1960s. But it is now narrower and narrower and more focused. That's why you have people like [Richard] Perle and [Paul] Wolfowitz in positions of power, because they've made an alliance with the isolationist right wing within America. And these people are toughened, especially after 9/11. They are right-wing, anti-immigration, anti- diversity on the campuses and elsewhere, and they have a very narrow constituency of fear and contempt."

"And the third group that feeds into this is the Washington establishment, these think tanks in Washington which have taken the intellectual class and turned them into policy salesmen who have no peer review. I can now name maybe ten magazines that publish stuff which nobody referees. They have become an entirely local group that feeds off the government. And I think this is an extremely dangerous but in the end dead-ended [group]."

"The opposition to the war is, I think, an opposition to all of that. It's an opposition to the fundamentalists, who stand, for example, against the theory of evolution. And these are the people pushing for the war. And that's why I think the movement against the war, despite the fact that it is flagging a bit because of loyalty to the boys and girls abroad, as some of the Democrats are saying now, will grow. I think that Bush will not have a second presidency. In fact, I and many others are convinced that Bush will try to negate the 2004 elections: we're dealing with a putschist, conspiratorial, paranoid deviation that's very anti- democratic."

"This is why finally I think candidates in the Democratic primaries next year will include people like Howard Dean, Dennis Kucinich, [maybe even] Ralph Nader. I think those are very important things for us, especially now given the war and what I'm sure will be its complications. I think that's the role of the intellectual, to provide resources for hope. They cannot be found in the conventional alleys of power."

"And don't forget, we have a very dramatic economic recession. With lots of people out of jobs there's a wide perception that the social security system is about to be privatised, and this war then becomes a kind of folly. Bush is already spending something like two billion dollars a day. Who's going to pay for this? I think that's why the French and the Germans and the others' reactions are so important. [They] don't want to be part of [the] so- called reconstruction effort. And look what they did in Afghanistan. They didn't do anything. They bombed the place and they haven't helped at all. So I think it's a very important moment for this."

Aziza Sami pointed to a growing perception that the Arab regimes have reached the "end of their history" in some sense, no one knowing what will happen next in the Arab world. For many, the only option seems to be a kind of people's movement, a reaction coming from the non-state sector. In this sense she asked Said whether the formal Arab political systems have really reached the end of their lives and whether there is a way the Arab masses can begin to find new directions.

"I don't think anybody really knows the answer to that," responded Said. "Regimes have a way of staying on, particularly in imperial moments such as this."

However, Said drew attention to what he called a "very lamentable emerging current in America and England" of neo-imperialism, the thought that there is an acceptable and benign form of imperialism, as carried out by the US. This, he explained, has even lead to revisions in the history of the former British empire by historians such as Nial Ferguson and David Armitage, who argue that the empire wasn't that bad, since it brought order and certain countries benefited from it.

Said: "The advent of this new imperialism, with the cabalist or putschist mentality that I believe exists in Washington, and with the highly dubious results of the elections of 2000 in which Bush lost the popular vote but got the presidency, has suggested to many people the complete failure of American democracy. More and more people are thinking in terms of direct democracy, such as on the streets, and in terms of various alternative ways of looking at governance in this new world with a single global power that has the ability to project military power all over the world and carry on two, three wars at the same time. For that's what the Rumsfeld vision is: not only preemptive but also simultaneous war. In such a position, we're all in the same boat, those of us who don't believe in that, whether American or not American."

"And I would think the same thing applies here to the best of my knowledge and ability to judge. That is to say, there's a failure of rule. The powers that be in the Arab countries seem to be at best able to keep down demonstrations, and so on and so forth."

"But I think there are enough movements from below, whether human-rights movements, ecological movements, women's movements, ethnic movements, that favour, in America, the disuniting of America, which is very important. And maybe the same is true here. In other words, I think the Westphalian system, which ordered the state system of the world, has failed. And I think it's failed internally. There's been a desire on the part of the right wing in the United States, since the Clinton administration, to attack very heavily independent thought and anything that appears to challenge the prevailing order, and of course this increased after 9/11."

Political analyst Mohamed Sid-Ahmed pointed out that after 9/11, it first appeared that the main confrontation was between imperial America and terrorism. But something new has developed since then, reversing the game. Mass movements that began with Seattle, the anti-globalisation movement that has acquired global dimensions ever since, and Porto Allegre, and the more recent demonstrations worldwide against the war in Iraq, are changing the balance, putting the Bush administration on the defensive. This is a phenomenon, he argued, that has widespread implications, including the extent to which the image of Islam as "terrorist" and "extremist" is being replaced by regimes claiming to follow a moderate Islam.

Said concurred but added that the problem for outsiders was that what meets the eye are the official regimes. "The rest of the world identifies the Arabs with their regimes. There doesn't seem to be anything else. And we haven't in the Arab world, I don't think, developed a way of addressing these counter-currents in an organised or at least in a significant way. After 9/11 there were the attempts of groups, let's say of Egyptian intellectuals, who wanted to respond and write letters and show that we're not all Osama Bin Laden. But that's not quite the same thing. The problem is the regimes themselves, which after all claim to represent their people. There's a crisis of representation, which I think is difficult to overcome."

"What's very interesting also is the perception, and this is a footnote to what Mohamed Sid-Ahmed said, that the opposition to the US in the Arab world and Europe and elsewhere is not an Islamic opposition. It's on a much wider basis, which is very important. I myself believe very strongly that it's important for those of us who are not part of this state system to be able to address what I call the 'other America', because there are vast possibilities of mutual benefit, and Porto Allegre is a terrific model for that."

The Palestinian predicament and events in occupied Palestine naturally found their way into the discussion, eventually dominating the roundtable. Mohamed El-Sayed Said raised several issues relating to Palestinian nationalism, referring to the chaos that has characterised the Palestinian Intifada since its inception, which "reflects the increasing gulf between both the intelligentsia and the political elite on the one hand and the new generations on the other, particularly in the refugee camps in Gaza but also in the West Bank. I believe this is an issue of grave concern given the immense sacrifice paid without, at least until this moment, any real political gains."

He was also alarmed by how the Palestinian middle-ranking leadership had lost its direction in the course of the Intifada: "You're having an Intifada without a real head, and there is a question of how to restore minds and reason in such a great act of resistance. Even the general slogan of 'Intifada for Liberation', was exaggerated to the point of suicide...Since you're actually asking Palestinians on their own to complete the cycle and push forward to the end destination, you're actually asking them to do something that they couldn't possibly do, even in terms of numbers. Such chaos is disastrous when it comes to a struggle," he insisted.

Finally El-Sayed Said raised the problem of finance. "Arab funding and Arab money was a part of [Palestinian] corruption since the very beginning. Now we know that the Palestinians need economic assistance and help, so how can we possibly track or streamline economic and financial assistance for the strengthening of the body politic of the Palestinian community, the Palestinian national movement?"

Said was similarly uneasy about the militarisation of the Intifada, but "one of the main elements in the creation of the mubadara [the democratic initiative] of Mustafa Barghouti and Haydar Abdel-Shafi and others, is precisely the issue of leadership of the Intifada and [its] militarisation."

He conceded, however, that it was a sensitive issue for the Palestinians since no one wanted to be seen to be capitulating to the Israeli occupation, especially as Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon kept making statements like "we want to break them." No one wants to just give up, he explained. "The funny part of it is that there is no instrument for giving way, for surrendering; we don't have even that capacity. I mean Arafat has in effect surrendered, and nobody seems to be interested. Which is why everybody is now looking for other ways."

"I think the question of money and new contacts has emerged from this mubadara as well. There has been a great deal of European interest in the mubadara precisely because it's led and represented by several hundred people all of whom have reputations for transparency and who are dedicated to their organisations, whether they're medical organisations or relief organisations. That's very impressive."

"As for the gaps [referred to] between the camps and intelligentsia, there are two other groups which are [also] extremely important: the Palestinians who are Israeli, a million of them, and the shatat, the diaspora Palestinians. Now, wherever you go there are people who say we really have to organise ourselves and are beginning to do that. In places like Britain there is a very strong solidarity movement. I think, being basically anarchistic, it's working through other groups, like divestment campaigns, anti-war campaigns, human-rights groups. Because we can't deal with Israel and the US head on, they're just too powerful, we don't have the means to deal with them. To me the answer is in the emergence of an unconventional mentality that is willing to break with all the old slogans."

Finally, the participants reverted to scenarios for post-war Iraq, conceding that the picture was blurred. "I don't think anybody has any idea," concluded Said. "All the available scenarios for the Middle East that I've seen are full of suppositions. One writer whom I recommend to your attention is Thomas Powers. He's the best writer on the situation now. He's written an article entitled "The Man who would be President of Iraq" for the New York Times and he thinks there's no doubt that once [the American administration is] through with Iraq they're going into Iran. If that's the case, if there's an attempt on Iran, who's going to stop them from thinking the same thing about Syria? There are all kinds of scenarios going around involving Israel. [The American administration] wants a new friendly axis: Turkey, Israel and India. That's the new strategic thinking. What is this going to do to the Arab world with that kind of regime in Iraq? Those are the things that are being discussed -- non-Arab dominance [in the Middle East]. A lot of Iraqis, like Kanan Makiya, have been speaking about the 'de-Arabisation' of the Arab world, not just of Iraq. I don't really know what to say because everything could go wrong. I don't know what the war is going to be like."

But will the Iraqi people remain submissive, Aziza Sami questioned. "I don't know. I think they [the American administration] think so. Take my words very literally: the [American] government has very few advisers on the Middle East. The old Middle East people at the State Department, [the Arabists] of whom maybe the last person is [Robert] Burns, have been emasculated. They don't exist anymore, and they have no influence at all. And the new people, like Thomas Friedman, don't know Arabic, travel around the Arab world and are received in rooms like this and give [the administration] advice about what the Arabs are saying and the Arab street, and so on and so forth."

"As against that our voices are never heard. Al- Ahram Weekly is one of the few things that people read, and it is having an effect, slowly. So cowed and so frightened has the US press become that even when Robert Burns gave his great Senate speech a month ago it wasn't reported. You couldn't find it in the NYT. It's unbelievable, there's such an atmosphere of fear, so the only thing left are the alternative radio stations, alternative publications, and if you follow them, and establish some kind of relationship, I think that's where the action is. And that's why the Weekly is a fantastic resource. Many Americans read it. They read your columnists as alternatives to what they get in America."

C a p t i o n : "I don't think the planning for the post-Saddam, post-war period in Iraq is very sophisticated, and there's very little of it. Grossman and Feith testified in Congress about a month ago and seemed to have no figures and no ideas what structures they were going to deploy"

_______________________________________________
List-Info: https://maillists.uci.edu/mailman/listinfo/uci-peace-jus= tice
 --=====================_17128709==_.ALT-- From jafujii@uci.edu Wed Apr 2 15:49:45 2003 From: jafujii@uci.edu (Jim Fujii) Date: Wed, 02 Apr 2003 07:49:45 -0800 Subject: [Ethnicstudies] Dozens of Iraqi civilians victims of "ferocious American air and land assault" Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20030402074938.00bc3ad0@benfranklin.hnet.uci.edu> --=====================_672577==_.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=393127 From The Independent (UK) Children killed and maimed in bomb attack on town By Robert Fisk in Baghdad and Justin Huggler 02 April 2003 At least 11 civilians, nine of them children, were killed in Hilla in central Iraq yesterday, according to reporters in the town who said they appeared to be the victims of bombing. Reporters from the Reuters news agency said they counted the bodies of 11 civilians and two Iraqi fighters in the Babylon suburb, 50 miles south of Baghdad. Nine of the dead were children, one a baby. Hospital workers said as many as 33 civilians were killed. Terrifying film of women and children later emerged after Reuters and the Associated Press were permitted by the Iraqi authorities to take their cameras into the town. Their pictures -- the first by Western news agencies from the Iraqi side of the battlefront -- showed babies cut in half and children with amputation wounds, apparently caused by American shellfire and cluster bombs. Much of the videotape was too terrible to show on television and the agencies' Baghdad editors felt able to send only a few minutes of a 21-minute tape that included a father holding out pieces of his baby and screaming "cowards, cowards'' into the camera. Two lorryloads of bodies, including women in flowered dresses, could be seen outside the Hilla hospital. Dr Nazem el-Adali, who was trained in Edinburgh, said almost all the patients were victims of cluster bombs dropped around Hella and in the neighbouring village of Mazarak. One woman, Alia Mukhtaff, is seen lying wounded on a bed; she lost six of her children and her husband in the attacks. Another man is seen with an arm missing, and a second man, Majeed Djelil, whose wife and two of his children were killed, can be seen sitting next to his third and surviving child, whose foot is missing. The mortuary of the hospital, a butcher's shop of chopped up corpses, is seen briefly in the tape. Iraqi officials have been insisting for 48 hours that the Americans have used cluster bombs on civilians in the region but this is the first time that evidence supporting these claims has come from Western news agencies. Most of the wounded said they were hit by American munitions and one man described how an American vehicle fired a shell into his family home. "I could see an American flag,'' he says. One of the editors in Baghdad, a European, when asked why he would not send the full videotape to London, wound the pictures on to two mutilated corpses of babies. "How could we ever send this?'' he said. Further south, there was heavy fire around the town of Diwaniyah, about 80 miles south-east of Baghdad. It was the second day of close combat between American forces and Iraqi troops, after fighting in the town of Hindiyah on Monday. It appeared that US troops were looking to take on some Iraqi forces after initially advancing largely unopposed through vast tracts of empty desert but deliberately avoiding population centres. According to reports from Diwaniyah, US Marines deliberately provoked a firefight by moving into an area where they had come under fire before. The marines came under heavy fire from rocket-propelled grenades and machine-guns. Iraqi Republican Guard troops and other fighters fired on the advancing marines from fortified bunkers and positions in buildings and behind vehicles. Corporal Patrick Irish of the US Marines said: "They were shooting from buildings, from dug-out positions, from holes, from everything. They would jump out to shoot. They were behind buses. You name it, they were there." Although the Iraqis were outgunned by the heavily armed marines, the firefight went on for about 10 hours, according to Lieutenant-Colonel B P McCoy of the US Marines. They used 155mm artillery to destroy Iraqi tanks and mortar positions. "We hammered them pretty hard," said Lt-Col McCoy. At least 75 Iraqis were killed in fighting on Diwaniyah's outskirts and at least 44 soldiers, including some Republican Guard officers, were taken prisoner, Lt-Col McCoy said. There was no report of American casualties. North-east of Diwaniyah there was heavy bombing yesterday near Kut to clear the way for ground forces, according to the US military. American marines also claim to have "secured" an air base at Qalat Sukkar, south-east of Kut, which US forces want to use as a staging ground. Overnight, planes bombed the area around Hindiyah. Ominously, there were also reports of missiles streaking towards the Shia holy city of Kerbala, where any damage to the shrines could set the Shia Muslim world alight. The Iraqi military said its troops were fighting US forces inside Nasiriyah and on the outskirts of the city, and had inflicted heavy casualties. "The blood of the enemy is flowing profusely," a military spokesman said at a press briefing, who claimed that fighting was still going on as he spoke. He claimed the forces fighting in and around Nasiriyah included Republican Guards, regular Iraqi army soldiers, volunteers from across the Arab world, and ordinary Iraqi citizens. US Marines fought their way across the city's bridges last Tuesday but did not take control of the city. Since then, Iraqi forces have made several ambushes in the area. The Iraqi spokesman also said US forces launched an attack on the Shia holy city of Najaf yesterday, and claimed fighters inside the city had forced them to retreat after suffering heavy losses. http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,927890,00.html >From The Guardian (UK) Children killed in US assault Ewen Mackaskill in Washington and Suzanne Goldenberg in Baghdad Wednesday April 2, 2003 The Guardian Dozens of Iraqi villagers were killed and injured in a ferocious American air and land assault near the Iraqi city of Babylon, hospital officials in the town said yesterday. Reuters reporters on the scene confirmed the deaths of at least nine children, two other civilians and two Iraqi fighters at Hilla in a bombardment on Monday night and early yesterday morning. An Iraqi hospital official said the death toll stood at 33 civilians, with more than 300 wounded. Unedited TV footage from Babylon hospital, which was seen by the Guardian, showed the tiny corpse of a baby wrapped up like a doll in a funeral shroud and carried out of the morgue on a pink pallet. It was laid face-to-face on the pavement against the body of a boy, who looked about 10. Horrifically injured bodies were heaped into pick-up trucks, and were swarmed by relatives of the dead, who accompanied them for burial. Bed after bed of injured women and children were pictured along with large pools of blood on the floor of the hospital. "All of these are due to the American bombing to the civilian homes. Hundreds of civilians have been injured, and many have been killed," said Nazim al-Adali, an Edinburgh-trained doctor at the hospital, who appealed to his "colleagues" in England to protest against the bombings. Among the injured in the women's ward was Aliya Mukhtaf, who said her husband and her six children were killed in the attack. The TV pictures also showed a teenage boy with bandages over the stump where his right hand was sheared off by shrapnel. "There are not any army cars or tanks in the area," said Dr al-Adali, who claimed cluster bombs had been used. Several of those interviewed on TV described large tank movements as the US tried to advance the final 50 miles to Baghdad. "God take our revenge on America," a stunned man said repeatedly at the hospital. Hospital staff said the man's whole family was wiped out. "What has he done wrong, what has he done wrong?" the driver of a pick-up truck ferrying the dead said as he held the body of an infant. Residents said US forces had attacked the town on Monday but were pushed back by regular and irregular Iraqi forces. As the Americans retreated, they shelled the town, the residents said. One US soldier was reported killed in the action on Monday. The US marines are fighting for control of Kerbala, Hilla and Najaf. Najaf, the third holiest city of Shia Muslims, is regarded as strategically important by the US in its attempts to try to win over Shia Muslims against the Iraqi president, Saddam Hussein, a Sunni Muslim. Any damage by a stray bomb to the Tomb of Ali in Najaf risks incurring the wrath of the Shia Muslims not only in Iraq but in Iran. US intelligence claims Iraqi fighters have holed up in the tomb . The task of dislodging the Iraqi forces from Najaf is proving daunting. For the first time in the conflict, US forces have been forced to engage in street fighting, which could become more difficult the closer they get to the centre: there is a warren of alleyways round the tomb. The American servicemen, their technological advantage neutralised by the narrow streets and lanes, face having to resort to more crude weapons: US infantrymen have already been seen in Najaf with fixed bayonets. The US and British governments have expressed disap pointment that, contrary to expectations, the Shia Muslims have failed to embrace them. US Brigadier General Benjamin Freakley, of the 101st Airborne division fighting in Najaf, told the New York Times that by taking Najaf "we want the oppressed to feel hopeful and the oppressors to feel hopelessness. Hope can put bravery in the hearts of men." US army intelligence, according to a Washington Post reporter with forces in Najaf, estimates that there are about 2,000 Iraqi fighters in the city, made up of Saddam's Fedayeen and Jerusalem Army militia. The 101st Airborne division exchanged rounds with Iraqi artillery yesterday. Lieutenant Colonel Bill Bennett, commander of the division's artillery, told reporters: "I've got 30 cannons and I'm shooting them all. I never shot so much in my life. I need some more bullets." __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Tax Center - File online, calculators, forms, and more http://tax.yahoo.com ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~--> Save Smiley. Help put Messenger back in the office. http://us.click.yahoo.com/4PqtEC/anyFAA/i5gGAA/sitolB/TM ---------------------------------------------------------------------~-> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ --=====================_672577==_.ALT Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii" http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=393127

From The Independent (UK)

Children killed and maimed in bomb attack on town

By Robert Fisk in Baghdad and Justin Huggler
02 April 2003

At least 11 civilians, nine of them children, were
killed in Hilla in central Iraq yesterday, according
to reporters in the town who said they appeared to be
the victims of bombing.

Reporters from the Reuters news agency said they
counted the bodies of 11 civilians and two Iraqi
fighters in the Babylon suburb, 50 miles south of
Baghdad. Nine of the dead were children, one a baby.
Hospital workers said as many as 33 civilians were
killed.

Terrifying film of women and children later emerged
after Reuters and the Associated Press were permitted
by the Iraqi authorities to take their cameras into
the town. Their pictures -- the first by Western news
agencies from the Iraqi side of the battlefront --
showed babies cut in half and children with amputation
wounds, apparently caused by American shellfire and
cluster bombs.

Much of the videotape was too terrible to show on
television and the agencies' Baghdad editors felt able
to send only a few minutes of a 21-minute tape that
included a father holding out pieces of his baby and
screaming "cowards, cowards'' into the camera. Two
lorryloads of bodies, including women in flowered
dresses, could be seen outside the Hilla hospital.

Dr Nazem el-Adali, who was trained in Edinburgh, said
almost all the patients were victims of cluster bombs
dropped around Hella and in the neighbouring village
of Mazarak. One woman, Alia Mukhtaff, is seen lying
wounded on a bed; she lost six of her children and her
husband in the attacks. Another man is seen with an
arm missing, and a second man, Majeed Djelil, whose
wife and two of his children were killed, can be seen
sitting next to his third and surviving child, whose
foot is missing. The mortuary of the hospital, a
butcher's shop of chopped up corpses, is seen briefly
in the tape.

Iraqi officials have been insisting for 48 hours that
the Americans have used cluster bombs on civilians in
the region but this is the first time that evidence
supporting these claims has come from Western news
agencies. Most of the wounded said they were hit by
American munitions and one man described how an
American vehicle fired a shell into his family home.
"I could see an American flag,'' he says.

One of the editors in Baghdad, a European, when asked
why he would not send the full videotape to London,
wound the pictures on to two mutilated corpses of
babies. "How could we ever send this?'' he said.

Further south, there was heavy fire around the town of
Diwaniyah, about 80 miles south-east of Baghdad. It
was the second day of close combat between American
forces and Iraqi troops, after fighting in the town of
Hindiyah on Monday. It appeared that US troops were
looking to take on some Iraqi forces after initially
advancing largely unopposed through vast tracts of
empty desert but deliberately avoiding population
centres.

According to reports from Diwaniyah, US Marines
deliberately provoked a firefight by moving into an
area where they had come under fire before. The
marines came under heavy fire from rocket-propelled
grenades and machine-guns.

Iraqi Republican Guard troops and other fighters fired
on the advancing marines from fortified bunkers and
positions in buildings and behind vehicles. Corporal
Patrick Irish of the US Marines said: "They were
shooting from buildings, from dug-out positions, from
holes, from everything. They would jump out to shoot.
They were behind buses. You name it, they were there."

Although the Iraqis were outgunned by the heavily
armed marines, the firefight went on for about 10
hours, according to Lieutenant-Colonel B P McCoy of
the US Marines. They used 155mm artillery to destroy
Iraqi tanks and mortar positions. "We hammered them
pretty hard," said Lt-Col McCoy. At least 75 Iraqis
were killed in fighting on Diwaniyah's outskirts and
at least 44 soldiers, including some Republican Guard
officers, were taken prisoner, Lt-Col McCoy said.
There was no report of American casualties.

North-east of Diwaniyah there was heavy bombing
yesterday near Kut to clear the way for ground forces,
according to the US military. American marines also
claim to have "secured" an air base at Qalat Sukkar,
south-east of Kut, which US forces want to use as a
staging ground.

Overnight, planes bombed the area around Hindiyah.
Ominously, there were also reports of missiles
streaking towards the Shia holy city of Kerbala, where
any damage to the shrines could set the Shia Muslim
world alight.

The Iraqi military said its troops were fighting US
forces inside Nasiriyah and on the outskirts of the
city, and had inflicted heavy casualties. "The blood
of the enemy is flowing profusely," a military
spokesman said at a press briefing, who claimed that
fighting was still going on as he spoke. He claimed
the forces fighting in and around Nasiriyah included
Republican Guards, regular Iraqi army soldiers,
volunteers from across the Arab world, and ordinary
Iraqi citizens.

US Marines fought their way across the city's bridges
last Tuesday but did not take control of the city.
Since then, Iraqi forces have made several ambushes in
the area.

The Iraqi spokesman also said US forces launched an
attack on the Shia holy city of Najaf yesterday, and
claimed fighters inside the city had forced them to
retreat after suffering heavy losses.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,927890,00.html

>From The Guardian (UK)

Children killed in US assault

Ewen Mackaskill in Washington and Suzanne Goldenberg
in Baghdad

Wednesday April 2, 2003
The Guardian

Dozens of Iraqi villagers were killed and injured in a
ferocious American air and land assault near the Iraqi
city of Babylon, hospital officials in the town said
yesterday.

Reuters reporters on the scene confirmed the deaths of
at least nine children, two other civilians and two
Iraqi fighters at Hilla in a bombardment on Monday
night and early yesterday morning.

An Iraqi hospital official said the death toll stood
at 33 civilians, with more than 300 wounded.

Unedited TV footage from Babylon hospital, which was
seen by the Guardian, showed the tiny corpse of a baby
wrapped up like a doll in a funeral shroud and carried
out of the morgue on a pink pallet.

It was laid face-to-face on the pavement against the
body of a boy, who looked about 10.

Horrifically injured bodies were heaped into pick-up
trucks, and were swarmed by relatives of the dead, who
accompanied them for burial.

Bed after bed of injured women and children were
pictured along with large pools of blood on the floor
of the hospital.

"All of these are due to the American bombing to the
civilian homes. Hundreds of civilians have been
injured, and many have been killed," said Nazim
al-Adali, an Edinburgh-trained doctor at the hospital,
who appealed to his "colleagues" in England to protest
against the bombings.

Among the injured in the women's ward was Aliya
Mukhtaf, who said her husband and her six children
were killed in the attack. The TV pictures also showed
a teenage boy with bandages over the stump where his
right hand was sheared off by shrapnel.

"There are not any army cars or tanks in the area,"
said Dr al-Adali, who claimed cluster bombs had been
used.

Several of those interviewed on TV described large
tank movements as the US tried to advance the final 50
miles to Baghdad.

"God take our revenge on America," a stunned man said
repeatedly at the hospital. Hospital staff said the
man's whole family was wiped out.

"What has he done wrong, what has he done wrong?" the
driver of a pick-up truck ferrying the dead said as he
held the body of an infant.

Residents said US forces had attacked the town on
Monday but were pushed back by regular and irregular
Iraqi forces. As the Americans retreated, they shelled
the town, the residents said. One US soldier was
reported killed in the action on Monday.

The US marines are fighting for control of Kerbala,
Hilla and Najaf. Najaf, the third holiest city of Shia
Muslims, is regarded as strategically important by the
US in its attempts to try to win over Shia Muslims
against the Iraqi president, Saddam Hussein, a Sunni
Muslim.

Any damage by a stray bomb to the Tomb of Ali in Najaf
risks incurring the wrath of the Shia Muslims not only
in Iraq but in Iran. US intelligence claims Iraqi
fighters have holed up in the tomb .

The task of dislodging the Iraqi forces from Najaf is
proving daunting. For the first time in the conflict,
US forces have been forced to engage in street
fighting, which could become more difficult the closer
they get to the centre: there is a warren of alleyways
round the tomb. The American servicemen, their
technological advantage neutralised by the narrow
streets and lanes, face having to resort to more crude
weapons: US infantrymen have already been seen in
Najaf with fixed bayonets.

The US and British governments have expressed disap
pointment that, contrary to expectations, the Shia
Muslims have failed to embrace them.

US Brigadier General Benjamin Freakley, of the 101st
Airborne division fighting in Najaf, told the New York
Times that by taking Najaf "we want the oppressed to
feel hopeful and the oppressors to feel hopelessness.
Hope can put bravery in the hearts of men."

US army intelligence, according to a Washington Post
reporter with forces in Najaf, estimates that there
are about 2,000 Iraqi fighters in the city, made up of
Saddam's Fedayeen and Jerusalem Army militia.

The 101st Airborne division exchanged rounds with
Iraqi artillery yesterday. Lieutenant Colonel Bill
Bennett, commander of the division's artillery, told
reporters: "I've got 30 cannons and I'm shooting them
all. I never shot so much in my life. I need some more
bullets."


__________________________________________________
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--=====================_672577==_.ALT-- From jafujii@uci.edu Thu Apr 3 02:16:11 2003 From: jafujii@uci.edu (Jim Fujii) Date: Wed, 02 Apr 2003 18:16:11 -0800 Subject: [Ethnicstudies] Mesopotamia. Babylon. The Tigris and Euphrates - Arundhati Roy Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20030402181603.00bb8370@benfranklin.hnet.uci.edu> --=====================_6412580==_.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,927712,00.html The Guardian Wednesday April 2, 2003 Mesopotamia. Babylon. The Tigris and Euphrates Arundhati Roy On the steel torsos of their missiles, adolescent American soldiers scrawl colourful messages in childish handwriting: For Saddam, from the Fat Boy Posse. A building goes down. A marketplace. A home. A girl who loves a boy. A child who only ever wanted to play with his older brother's marbles. On March 21, the day after American and British troops began their illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq, an "embedded" CNN correspondent interviewed an American soldier. "I wanna get in there and get my nose dirty," Private AJ said. "I wanna take revenge for 9/11." To be fair to the correspondent, even though he was "embedded" he did sort of weakly suggest that so far there was no real evidence that linked the Iraqi government to the September 11 attacks. Private AJ stuck his teenage tongue out all the way down to the end of his chin. "Yeah, well that stuff's way over my head," he said. According to a New York Times/CBS News survey, 42 per cent of the American public believes that Saddam Hussein is directly responsible for the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. And an ABC news poll says that 55 per cent of Americans believe that Saddam Hussein directly supports al-Qaida. What percentage of America's armed forces believe these fabrications is anybody's guess. It is unlikely that British and American troops fighting in Iraq are aware that their governments supported Saddam Hussein both politically and financially through his worst excesses. But why should poor AJ and his fellow soldiers be burdened with these details? It does not matter any more, does it? Hundreds of thousands of men, tanks, ships, choppers, bombs, ammunition, gas masks, high-protein food, whole aircrafts ferrying toilet paper, insect repellent, vitamins and bottled mineral water, are on the move. The phenomenal logistics of Operation Iraqi Freedom make it a universe unto itself. It doesn't need to justify its existence any more. It exists. It is. President George W Bush, commander in chief of the US army, navy, airforce and marines has issued clear instructions: "Iraq. Will. Be. Liberated." (Perhaps he means that even if Iraqi people's bodies are killed, their souls will be liberated.) American and British citizens owe it to the supreme commander to forsake thought and rally behind their troops. Their countries are at war. And what a war it is. After using the "good offices" of UN diplomacy (economic sanctions and weapons inspections) to ensure that Iraq was brought to its knees, its people starved, half a million of its children killed, its infrastructure severely damaged, after making sure that most of its weapons have been destroyed, in an act of cowardice that must surely be unrivalled in history, the "Allies"/"Coalition of the Willing" (better known as the Coalition of the Bullied and Bought) - sent in an invading army! Operation Iraqi Freedom? I don't think so. It's more like Operation Let's Run a Race, but First Let Me Break Your Knees. So far the Iraqi army, with its hungry, ill-equipped soldiers, its old guns and ageing tanks, has somehow managed to temporarily confound and occasionally even outmanoeuvre the "Allies". Faced with the richest, best-equipped, most powerful armed forces the world has ever seen, Iraq has shown spectacular courage and has even managed to put up what actually amounts to a defence. A defence which the Bush/Blair Pair have immediately denounced as deceitful and cowardly. (But then deceit is an old tradition with us natives. When we are invaded/ colonised/occupied and stripped of all dignity, we turn to guile and opportunism.) Even allowing for the fact that Iraq and the "Allies" are at war, the extent to which the "Allies" and their media cohorts are prepared to go is astounding to the point of being counterproductive to their own objectives. When Saddam Hussein appeared on national TV to address the Iraqi people after the failure of the most elaborate assassination attempt in history - "Operation Decapitation" - we had Geoff Hoon, the British defence secretary, deriding him for not having the courage to stand up and be killed, calling him a coward who hides in trenches. We then had a flurry of Coalition speculation - Was it really Saddam, was it his double? Or was it Osama with a shave? Was it pre-recorded? Was it a speech? Was it black magic? Will it turn into a pumpkin if we really, really want it to? After dropping not hundreds, but thousands of bombs on Baghdad, when a marketplace was mistakenly blown up and civilians killed - a US army spokesman implied that the Iraqis were blowing themselves up! "They're using very old stock. Their missiles go up and come down." If so, may we ask how this squares with the accusation that the Iraqi regime is a paid-up member of the Axis of Evil and a threat to world peace? When the Arab TV station al-Jazeera shows civilian casualties it's denounced as "emotive" Arab propaganda aimed at orchestrating hostility towards the "Allies", as though Iraqis are dying only in order to make the "Allies" look bad. Even French television has come in for some stick for similar reasons. But the awed, breathless footage of aircraft carriers, stealth bombers and cruise missiles arcing across the desert sky on American and British TV is described as the "terrible beauty" of war. When invading American soldiers (from the army "that's only here to help") are taken prisoner and shown on Iraqi TV, George Bush says it violates the Geneva convention and "exposes the evil at the heart of the regime". But it is entirely acceptable for US television stations to show the hundreds of prisoners being held by the US government in Guantanamo Bay, kneeling on the ground with their hands tied behind their backs, blinded with opaque goggles and with earphones clamped on their ears, to ensure complete visual and aural deprivation. When questioned about the treatment of these prisoners, US Government officials don't deny that they're being being ill-treated. They deny that they're "prisoners of war"! They call them "unlawful combatants", implying that their ill-treatment is legitimate! (So what's the party line on the massacre of prisoners in Mazar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan? Forgive and forget? And what of the prisoner tortured to death by the special forces at the Bagram airforce base? Doctors have formally called it homicide.) When the "Allies" bombed the Iraqi television station (also, incidentally, a contravention of the Geneva convention), there was vulgar jubilation in the American media. In fact Fox TV had been lobbying for the attack for a while. It was seen as a righteous blow against Arab propaganda. But mainstream American and British TV continue to advertise themselves as "balanced" when their propaganda has achieved hallucinatory levels. Why should propaganda be the exclusive preserve of the western media? Just because they do it better? Western journalists "embedded" with troops are given the status of heroes reporting from the frontlines of war. Non-"embedded" journalists (such as the BBC's Rageh Omaar, reporting from besieged and bombed Baghdad, witnessing, and clearly affected by the sight of bodies of burned children and wounded people) are undermined even before they begin their reportage: "We have to tell you that he is being monitored by the Iraqi authorities." Increasingly, on British and American TV, Iraqi soldiers are being referred to as "militia" (ie: rabble). One BBC correspondent portentously referred to them as "quasi-terrorists". Iraqi defence is "resistance" or worse still, "pockets of resistance", Iraqi military strategy is deceit. (The US government bugging the phone lines of UN security council delegates, reported by the Observer, is hard-headed pragmatism.) Clearly for the "Allies", the only morally acceptable strategy the Iraqi army can pursue is to march out into the desert and be bombed by B-52s or be mowed down by machine-gun fire. Anything short of that is cheating. And now we have the siege of Basra. About a million and a half people, 40 per cent of them children. Without clean water, and with very little food. We're still waiting for the legendary Shia "uprising", for the happy hordes to stream out of the city and rain roses and hosannahs on the "liberating" army. Where are the hordes? Don't they know that television productions work to tight schedules? (It may well be that if Saddam's regime falls there will be dancing on the streets of Basra. But then, if the Bush regime were to fall, there would be dancing on the streets the world over.) After days of enforcing hunger and thirst on the citizens of Basra, the "Allies" have brought in a few trucks of food and water and positioned them tantalisingly on the outskirts of the city. Desperate people flock to the trucks and fight each other for food. (The water we hear, is being sold. To revitalise the dying economy, you understand.) On top of the trucks, desperate photographers fought each other to get pictures of desperate people fighting each other for food. Those pictures will go out through photo agencies to newspapers and glossy magazines that pay extremely well. Their message: The messiahs are at hand, distributing fishes and loaves. As of July last year the delivery of $5.4bn worth of supplies to Iraq was blocked by the Bush/Blair Pair. It didn't really make the news. But now under the loving caress of live TV, 450 tonnes of humanitarian aid - a minuscule fraction of what's actually needed (call it a script prop) - arrived on a British ship, the "Sir Galahad". Its arrival in the port of Umm Qasr merited a whole day of live TV broadcasts. Barf bag, anyone? Nick Guttmann, head of emergencies for Christian Aid, writing for the Independent on Sunday said that it would take 32 Sir Galahad's a day to match the amount of food Iraq was receiving before the bombing began. We oughtn't to be surprised though. It's old tactics. They've been at it for years. Consider this moderate proposal by John McNaughton from the Pentagon Papers, published during the Vietnam war: "Strikes at population targets (per se) are likely not only to create a counterproductive wave of revulsion abroad and at home, but greatly to increase the risk of enlarging the war with China or the Soviet Union. Destruction of locks and dams, however - if handled right - might ... offer promise. It should be studied. Such destruction does not kill or drown people. By shallow-flooding the rice, it leads after time to widespread starvation (more than a million?) unless food is provided - which we could offer to do 'at the conference table'." Times haven't changed very much. The technique has evolved into a doctrine. It's called "Winning Hearts and Minds". So, here's the moral maths as it stands: 200,000 Iraqis estimated to have been killed in the first Gulf war. Hundreds of thousands dead because of the economic sanctions. (At least that lot has been saved from Saddam Hussein.) More being killed every day. Tens of thousands of US soldiers who fought the 1991 war officially declared "disabled" by a disease called the Gulf war syndrome, believed in part to be caused by exposure to depleted uranium. It hasn't stopped the "Allies" from continuing to use depleted uranium. And now this talk of bringing the UN back into the picture. But that old UN girl - it turns out that she just ain't what she was cracked up to be. She's been demoted (although she retains her high salary). Now she's the world's janitor. She's the Philippino cleaning lady, the Indian jamadarni, the postal bride from Thailand, the Mexican household help, the Jamaican au pair. She's employed to clean other peoples' shit. She's used and abused at will. Despite Blair's earnest submissions, and all his fawning, Bush has made it clear that the UN will play no independent part in the administration of postwar Iraq. The US will decide who gets those juicy "reconstruction" contracts. But Bush has appealed to the international community not to "politicise" the issue of humanitarian aid. On the March 28, after Bush called for the immediate resumption of the UN's oil for food programme, the UN security council voted unanimously for the resolution. This means that everybody agrees that Iraqi money (from the sale of Iraqi oil) should be used to feed Iraqi people who are starving because of US led sanctions and the illegal US-led war. Contracts for the "reconstruction" of Iraq we're told, in discussions on the business news, could jump-start the world economy. It's funny how the interests of American corporations are so often, so successfully and so deliberately confused with the interests of the world economy. While the American people will end up paying for the war, oil companies, weapons manufacturers, arms dealers, and corporations involved in "reconstruction" work will make direct gains from the war. Many of them are old friends and former employers of the Bush/ Cheney/Rumsfeld/Rice cabal. Bush has already asked Congress for $75bn. Contracts for "re-construction" are already being negotiated. The news doesn't hit the stands because much of the US corporate media is owned and managed by the same interests. Operation Iraqi Freedom, Tony Blair assures us is about returning Iraqi oil to the Iraqi people. That is, returning Iraqi oil to the Iraqi people via corporate multinationals. Like Shell, like Chevron, like Halliburton. Or are we missing the plot here? Perhaps Halliburton is actually an Iraqi company? Perhaps US vice-president Dick Cheney (who is a former director of Halliburton) is a closet Iraqi? As the rift between Europe and America deepens, there are signs that the world could be entering a new era of economic boycotts. CNN reported that Americans are emptying French wine into gutters, chanting, "We don't want your stinking wine." We've heard about the re-baptism of French fries. Freedom fries they're called now. There's news trickling in about Americans boycotting German goods. The thing is that if the fallout of the war takes this turn, it is the US who will suffer the most. Its homeland may be defended by border patrols and nuclear weapons, but its economy is strung out across the globe. Its economic outposts are exposed and vulnerable to attack in every direction. Already the internet is buzzing with elaborate lists of American and British government products and companies that should be boycotted. Apart from the usual targets, Coke, Pepsi and McDonald's - government agencies such as USAID, the British department for international development, British and American banks, Arthur Anderson, Merrill Lynch, American Express, corporations such as Bechtel, General Electric, and companies such as Reebok, Nike and Gap - could find themselves under siege. These lists are being honed and re fined by activists across the world. They could become a practical guide that directs and channels the amorphous, but growing fury in the world. Suddenly, the "inevitability" of the project of corporate globalisation is beginning to seem more than a little evitable. It's become clear that the war against terror is not really about terror, and the war on Iraq not only about oil. It's about a superpower's self-destructive impulse towards supremacy, stranglehold, global hegemony. The argument is being made that the people of Argentina and Iraq have both been decimated by the same process. Only the weapons used against them differ: In one case it's an IMF chequebook. In the other, cruise missiles. Finally, there's the matter of Saddam's arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. (Oops, nearly forgot about those!) In the fog of war - one thing's for sure - if Saddam 's regime indeed has weapons of mass destruction, it is showing an astonishing degree of responsibility and restraint in the teeth of extreme provocation. Under similar circumstances, (say if Iraqi troops were bombing New York and laying siege to Washington DC) could we expect the same of the Bush regime? Would it keep its thousands of nuclear warheads in their wrapping paper? What about its chemical and biological weapons? Its stocks of anthrax, smallpox and nerve gas? Would it? Excuse me while I laugh. In the fog of war we're forced to speculate: Either Saddam is an extremely responsible tyrant. Or - he simply does not possess weapons of mass destruction. Either way, regardless of what happens next, Iraq comes out of the argument smelling sweeter than the US government. So here's Iraq - rogue state, grave threat to world peace, paid-up member of the Axis of Evil. Here's Iraq, invaded, bombed, besieged, bullied, its sovereignty shat upon, its children killed by cancers, its people blown up on the streets. And here's all of us watching. CNN-BBC, BBC-CNN late into the night. Here's all of us, enduring the horror of the war, enduring the horror of the propaganda and enduring the slaughter of language as we know and understand it. Freedom now means mass murder (or, in the US, fried potatoes). When someone says "humanitarian aid" we automatically go looking for induced starvation. "Embedded" I have to admit, is a great find. It's what it sounds like. And what about "arsenal of tactics?" Nice! In most parts of the world, the invasion of Iraq is being seen as a racist war. The real danger of a racist war unleashed by racist regimes is that it engenders racism in everybody - perpetrators, victims, spectators. It sets the parameters for the debate, it lays out a grid for a particular way of thinking. There is a tidal wave of hatred for the US rising from the ancient heart of the world. In Africa, Latin America, Asia, Europe, Australia. I encounter it every day. Sometimes it comes from the most unlikely sources. Bankers, businessmen, yuppie students, and they bring to it all the crassness of their conservative, illiberal politics. That absurd inability to separate governments from people: America is a nation of morons, a nation of murderers, they say, (with the same carelessness with which they say, "All Muslims are terrorists"). Even in the grotesque universe of racist insult, the British make their entry as add-ons. Arse-lickers, they're called. Suddenly, I, who have been vilified for being "anti-American" and "anti-west", find myself in the extraordinary position of defending the people of America. And Britain. Those who descend so easily into the pit of racist abuse would do well to remember the hundreds of thousands of American and British citizens who protested against their country's stockpile of nuclear weapons . And the thousands of American war resisters who forced their government to withdraw from Vietnam. They should know that the most scholarly, scathing, hilarious critiques of the US government and the "American way of life" comes from American citizens. And that the funniest, most bitter condemnation of their prime minister comes from the British media. Finally they should remember that right now, hundreds of thousands of British and American citizens are on the streets protesting the war. The Coalition of the Bullied and Bought consists of governments, not people. More than one third of America's citizens have survived the relentless propaganda they've been subjected to, and many thousands are actively fighting their own government. In the ultra-patriotic climate that prevails in the US, that's as brave as any Iraqi fighting for his or her homeland. While the "Allies" wait in the desert for an uprising of Shia Muslims on the streets of Basra, the real uprising is taking place in hundreds of cities across the world. It has been the most spectacular display of public morality ever seen. Most courageous of all, are the hundreds of thousands of American people on the streets of America's great cities - Washington, New York, Chicago, San Francisco. The fact is that the only institution in the world today that is more powerful than the American government, is American civil society. American citizens have a huge responsibility riding on their shoulders. How can we not salute and support those who not only acknowledge but act upon that responsibility? They are our allies, our friends. At the end of it all, it remains to be said that dictators like Saddam Hussein, and all the other despots in the Middle East, in the central Asian republics, in Africa and Latin America, many of them installed, supported and financed by the US government, are a menace to their own people. Other than strengthening the hand of civil society (instead of weakening it as has been done in the case of Iraq), there is no easy, pristine way of dealing with them. (It's odd how those who dismiss the peace movement as utopian, don't hesitate to proffer the most absurdly dreamy reasons for going to war: to stamp out terrorism, install democracy, eliminate fascism, and most entertainingly, to "rid the world of evil-doers".) Regardless of what the propaganda machine tells us, these tin-pot dictators are not the greatest threat to the world. The real and pressing danger, the greatest threat of all is the locomotive force that drives the political and economic engine of the US government, currently piloted by George Bush. Bush-bashing is fun, because he makes such an easy, sumptuous target. It's true that he is a dangerous, almost suicidal pilot, but the machine he handles is far more dangerous than the man himself. Despite the pall of gloom that hangs over us today, I'd like to file a cautious plea for hope: in times of war, one wants one's weakest enemy at the helm of his forces. And President George W Bush is certainly that. Any other even averagely intelligent US president would have probably done the very same things, but would have managed to smoke-up the glass and confuse the opposition. Perhaps even carry the UN with him. Bush's tactless imprudence and his brazen belief that he can run the world with his riot squad, has done the opposite. He has achieved what writers, activists and scholars have striven to achieve for decades. He has exposed the ducts. He has placed on full public view the working parts, the nuts and bolts of the apocalyptic apparatus of the American empire. Now that the blueprint (The Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire) has been put into mass circulation, it could be disabled quicker than the pundits predicted. Bring on the spanners. --=====================_6412580==_.ALT Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii" http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,927712,00.html

The Guardian    Wednesday April 2, 2003

Mesopotamia. Babylon. The Tigris and Euphrates

Arundhati Roy

On the steel torsos of their missiles, adolescent American soldiers scrawl
colourful messages in childish handwriting: For Saddam, from the Fat Boy
Posse. A building goes down. A marketplace. A home. A girl who loves a boy.
A child who only ever wanted to play with his older brother's marbles.

On March 21, the day after American and British troops began their illegal
invasion and occupation of Iraq, an "embedded" CNN correspondent interviewed
an American soldier. "I wanna get in there and get my nose dirty," Private
AJ said. "I wanna take revenge for 9/11."

To be fair to the correspondent, even though he was "embedded" he did sort
of weakly suggest that so far there was no real evidence that linked the
Iraqi government to the September 11 attacks. Private AJ stuck his teenage
tongue out all the way down to the end of his chin. "Yeah, well that stuff's
way over my head," he said.

According to a New York Times/CBS News survey, 42 per cent of the American
public believes that Saddam Hussein is directly responsible for the
September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. And an ABC
news poll says that 55 per cent of Americans believe that Saddam Hussein
directly supports al-Qaida. What percentage of America's armed forces
believe these fabrications is anybody's guess.

It is unlikely that British and American troops fighting in Iraq are aware
that their governments supported Saddam Hussein both politically and
financially through his worst excesses.

But why should poor AJ and his fellow soldiers be burdened with these
details? It does not matter any more, does it? Hundreds of thousands of men,
tanks, ships, choppers, bombs, ammunition, gas masks, high-protein food,
whole aircrafts ferrying toilet paper, insect repellent, vitamins and
bottled mineral water, are on the move. The phenomenal logistics of
Operation Iraqi Freedom make it a universe unto itself. It doesn't need to
justify its existence any more. It exists. It is.

President George W Bush, commander in chief of the US army, navy, airforce
and marines has issued clear instructions: "Iraq. Will. Be. Liberated."
(Perhaps he means that even if Iraqi people's bodies are killed, their souls
will be liberated.) American and British citizens owe it to the supreme
commander to forsake thought and rally behind their troops. Their countries
are at war. And what a war it is.

After using the "good offices" of UN diplomacy (economic sanctions and
weapons inspections) to ensure that Iraq was brought to its knees, its
people starved, half a million of its children killed, its infrastructure
severely damaged, after making sure that most of its weapons have been
destroyed, in an act of cowardice that must surely be unrivalled in history,
the "Allies"/"Coalition of the Willing" (better known as the Coalition of
the Bullied and Bought) - sent in an invading army!

Operation Iraqi Freedom? I don't think so. It's more like Operation Let's
Run a Race, but First Let Me Break Your Knees.

So far the Iraqi army, with its hungry, ill-equipped soldiers, its old guns
and ageing tanks, has somehow managed to temporarily confound and
occasionally even outmanoeuvre the "Allies". Faced with the richest,
best-equipped, most powerful armed forces the world has ever seen, Iraq has
shown spectacular courage and has even managed to put up what actually
amounts to a defence. A defence which the Bush/Blair Pair have immediately
denounced as deceitful and cowardly. (But then deceit is an old tradition
with us natives. When we are invaded/ colonised/occupied and stripped of all
dignity, we turn to guile and opportunism.)

Even allowing for the fact that Iraq and the "Allies" are at war, the extent
to which the "Allies" and their media cohorts are prepared to go is
astounding to the point of being counterproductive to their own objectives.

When Saddam Hussein appeared on national TV to address the Iraqi people
after the failure of the most elaborate assassination attempt in history -
"Operation Decapitation" - we had Geoff Hoon, the British defence secretary,
deriding him for not having the courage to stand up and be killed, calling
him a coward who hides in trenches. We then had a flurry of Coalition
speculation - Was it really Saddam, was it his double? Or was it Osama with
a shave? Was it pre-recorded? Was it a speech? Was it black magic? Will it
turn into a pumpkin if we really, really want it to?

After dropping not hundreds, but thousands of bombs on Baghdad, when a
marketplace was mistakenly blown up and civilians killed - a US army
spokesman implied that the Iraqis were blowing themselves up! "They're using
very old stock. Their missiles go up and come down."

If so, may we ask how this squares with the accusation that the Iraqi regime
is a paid-up member of the Axis of Evil and a threat to world peace?

When the Arab TV station al-Jazeera shows civilian casualties it's denounced
as "emotive" Arab propaganda aimed at orchestrating hostility towards the
"Allies", as though Iraqis are dying only in order to make the "Allies" look
bad. Even French television has come in for some stick for similar reasons.
But the awed, breathless footage of aircraft carriers, stealth bombers and
cruise missiles arcing across the desert sky on American and British TV is
described as the "terrible beauty" of war.

When invading American soldiers (from the army "that's only here to help")
are taken prisoner and shown on Iraqi TV, George Bush says it violates the
Geneva convention and "exposes the evil at the heart of the regime". But it
is entirely acceptable for US television stations to show the hundreds of
prisoners being held by the US government in Guantanamo Bay, kneeling on the
ground with their hands tied behind their backs, blinded with opaque goggles
and with earphones clamped on their ears, to ensure complete visual and
aural deprivation. When questioned about the treatment of these prisoners,
US Government officials don't deny that they're being being ill-treated.
They deny that they're "prisoners of war"! They call them "unlawful
combatants", implying that their ill-treatment is legitimate! (So what's the
party line on the massacre of prisoners in Mazar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan?
Forgive and forget? And what of the prisoner tortured to death by the
special forces at the Bagram airforce base? Doctors have formally called it
homicide.)

When the "Allies" bombed the Iraqi television station (also, incidentally, a
contravention of the Geneva convention), there was vulgar jubilation in the
American media. In fact Fox TV had been lobbying for the attack for a while.
It was seen as a righteous blow against Arab propaganda. But mainstream
American and British TV continue to advertise themselves as "balanced" when
their propaganda has achieved hallucinatory levels.

Why should propaganda be the exclusive preserve of the western media? Just
because they do it better? Western journalists "embedded" with troops are
given the status of heroes reporting from the frontlines of war.
Non-"embedded" journalists (such as the BBC's Rageh Omaar, reporting from
besieged and bombed Baghdad, witnessing, and clearly affected by the sight
of bodies of burned children and wounded people) are undermined even before
they begin their reportage: "We have to tell you that he is being monitored
by the Iraqi authorities."

Increasingly, on British and American TV, Iraqi soldiers are being referred
to as "militia" (ie: rabble). One BBC correspondent portentously referred to
them as "quasi-terrorists". Iraqi defence is "resistance" or worse still,
"pockets of resistance", Iraqi military strategy is deceit. (The US
government bugging the phone lines of UN security council delegates,
reported by the Observer, is hard-headed pragmatism.) Clearly for the
"Allies", the only morally acceptable strategy the Iraqi army can pursue is
to march out into the desert and be bombed by B-52s or be mowed down by
machine-gun fire. Anything short of that is cheating.

And now we have the siege of Basra. About a million and a half people, 40
per cent of them children. Without clean water, and with very little food.
We're still waiting for the legendary Shia "uprising", for the happy hordes
to stream out of the city and rain roses and hosannahs on the "liberating"
army. Where are the hordes? Don't they know that television productions work
to tight schedules? (It may well be that if Saddam's regime falls there will
be dancing on the streets of Basra. But then, if the Bush regime were to
fall, there would be dancing on the streets the world over.)

After days of enforcing hunger and thirst on the citizens of Basra, the
"Allies" have brought in a few trucks of food and water and positioned them
tantalisingly on the outskirts of the city. Desperate people flock to the
trucks and fight each other for food. (The water we hear, is being sold. To
revitalise the dying economy, you understand.) On top of the trucks,
desperate photographers fought each other to get pictures of desperate
people fighting each other for food. Those pictures will go out through
photo agencies to newspapers and glossy magazines that pay extremely well.
Their message: The messiahs are at hand, distributing fishes and loaves.

As of July last year the delivery of $5.4bn worth of supplies to Iraq was
blocked by the Bush/Blair Pair. It didn't really make the news. But now
under the loving caress of live TV, 450 tonnes of humanitarian aid - a
minuscule fraction of what's actually needed (call it a script prop) -
arrived on a British ship, the "Sir Galahad". Its arrival in the port of Umm
Qasr merited a whole day of live TV broadcasts. Barf bag, anyone?

Nick Guttmann, head of emergencies for Christian Aid, writing for the
Independent on Sunday said that it would take 32 Sir Galahad's a day to
match the amount of food Iraq was receiving before the bombing began.

We oughtn't to be surprised though. It's old tactics. They've been at it for
years. Consider this moderate proposal by John McNaughton from the Pentagon
Papers, published during the Vietnam war: "Strikes at population targets
(per se) are likely not only to create a counterproductive wave of revulsion
abroad and at home, but greatly to increase the risk of enlarging the war
with China or the Soviet Union. Destruction of locks and dams, however - if
handled right - might ... offer promise. It should be studied. Such
destruction does not kill or drown people. By shallow-flooding the rice, it
leads after time to widespread starvation (more than a million?) unless food
is provided - which we could offer to do 'at the conference table'."

Times haven't changed very much. The technique has evolved into a doctrine.
It's called "Winning Hearts and Minds".

So, here's the moral maths as it stands: 200,000 Iraqis estimated to have
been killed in the first Gulf war. Hundreds of thousands dead because of the
economic sanctions. (At least that lot has been saved from Saddam Hussein.)
More being killed every day. Tens of thousands of US soldiers who fought the
1991 war officially declared "disabled" by a disease called the Gulf war
syndrome, believed in part to be caused by exposure to depleted uranium. It
hasn't stopped the "Allies" from continuing to use depleted uranium.

And now this talk of bringing the UN back into the picture. But that old UN
girl - it turns out that she just ain't what she was cracked up to be. She's
been demoted (although she retains her high salary). Now she's the world's
janitor. She's the Philippino cleaning lady, the Indian jamadarni, the
postal bride from Thailand, the Mexican household help, the Jamaican au
pair. She's employed to clean other peoples' shit. She's used and abused at
will.

Despite Blair's earnest submissions, and all his fawning, Bush has made it
clear that the UN will play no independent part in the administration of
postwar Iraq. The US will decide who gets those juicy "reconstruction"
contracts. But Bush has appealed to the international community not to
"politicise" the issue of humanitarian aid. On the March 28, after Bush
called for the immediate resumption of the UN's oil for food programme, the
UN security council voted unanimously for the resolution. This means that
everybody agrees that Iraqi money (from the sale of Iraqi oil) should be
used to feed Iraqi people who are starving because of US led sanctions and
the illegal US-led war.

Contracts for the "reconstruction" of Iraq we're told, in discussions on the
business news, could jump-start the world economy. It's funny how the
interests of American corporations are so often, so successfully and so
deliberately confused with the interests of the world economy. While the
American people will end up paying for the war, oil companies, weapons
manufacturers, arms dealers, and corporations involved in "reconstruction"
work will make direct gains from the war. Many of them are old friends and
former employers of the Bush/ Cheney/Rumsfeld/Rice cabal. Bush has already
asked Congress for $75bn. Contracts for "re-construction" are already being
negotiated. The news doesn't hit the stands because much of the US corporate
media is owned and managed by the same interests.

Operation Iraqi Freedom, Tony Blair assures us is about returning Iraqi oil
to the Iraqi people. That is, returning Iraqi oil to the Iraqi people via
corporate multinationals. Like Shell, like Chevron, like Halliburton. Or are
we missing the plot here? Perhaps Halliburton is actually an Iraqi company?
Perhaps US vice-president Dick Cheney (who is a former director of
Halliburton) is a closet Iraqi?

As the rift between Europe and America deepens, there are signs that the
world could be entering a new era of economic boycotts. CNN reported that
Americans are emptying French wine into gutters, chanting, "We don't want
your stinking wine." We've heard about the re-baptism of French fries.
Freedom fries they're called now. There's news trickling in about Americans
boycotting German goods. The thing is that if the fallout of the war takes
this turn, it is the US who will suffer the most. Its homeland may be
defended by border patrols and nuclear weapons, but its economy is strung
out across the globe. Its economic outposts are exposed and vulnerable to
attack in every direction. Already the internet is buzzing with elaborate
lists of American and British government products and companies that should
be boycotted. Apart from the usual targets, Coke, Pepsi and McDonald's -
government agencies such as USAID, the British department for international
development, British and American banks, Arthur Anderson, Merrill Lynch,
American Express, corporations such as Bechtel, General Electric, and
companies such as Reebok, Nike and Gap - could find themselves under siege.
These lists are being honed and re fined by activists across the world. They
could become a practical guide that directs and channels the amorphous, but
growing fury in the world. Suddenly, the "inevitability" of the project of
corporate globalisation is beginning to seem more than a little evitable.

It's become clear that the war against terror is not really about terror,
and the war on Iraq not only about oil. It's about a superpower's
self-destructive impulse towards supremacy, stranglehold, global hegemony.
The argument is being made that the people of Argentina and Iraq have both
been decimated by the same process. Only the weapons used against them
differ: In one case it's an IMF chequebook. In the other, cruise missiles.

Finally, there's the matter of Saddam's arsenal of weapons of mass
destruction. (Oops, nearly forgot about those!)

In the fog of war - one thing's for sure - if Saddam 's regime indeed has
weapons of mass destruction, it is showing an astonishing degree of
responsibility and restraint in the teeth of extreme provocation. Under
similar circumstances, (say if Iraqi troops were bombing New York and laying
siege to Washington DC) could we expect the same of the Bush regime? Would
it keep its thousands of nuclear warheads in their wrapping paper? What
about its chemical and biological weapons? Its stocks of anthrax, smallpox
and nerve gas? Would it?

Excuse me while I laugh.

In the fog of war we're forced to speculate: Either Saddam is an extremely
responsible tyrant. Or - he simply does not possess weapons of mass
destruction. Either way, regardless of what happens next, Iraq comes out of
the argument smelling sweeter than the US government.

So here's Iraq - rogue state, grave threat to world peace, paid-up member of
the Axis of Evil. Here's Iraq, invaded, bombed, besieged, bullied, its
sovereignty shat upon, its children killed by cancers, its people blown up
on the streets. And here's all of us watching. CNN-BBC, BBC-CNN late into
the night. Here's all of us, enduring the horror of the war, enduring the
horror of the propaganda and enduring the slaughter of language as we know
and understand it. Freedom now means mass murder (or, in the US, fried
potatoes). When someone says "humanitarian aid" we automatically go looking
for induced starvation. "Embedded" I have to admit, is a great find. It's
what it sounds like. And what about "arsenal of tactics?" Nice!

In most parts of the world, the invasion of Iraq is being seen as a racist
war. The real danger of a racist war unleashed by racist regimes is that it
engenders racism in everybody - perpetrators, victims, spectators. It sets
the parameters for the debate, it lays out a grid for a particular way of
thinking. There is a tidal wave of hatred for the US rising from the ancient
heart of the world. In Africa, Latin America, Asia, Europe, Australia. I
encounter it every day. Sometimes it comes from the most unlikely sources.
Bankers, businessmen, yuppie students, and they bring to it all the
crassness of their conservative, illiberal politics. That absurd inability
to separate governments from people: America is a nation of morons, a nation
of murderers, they say, (with the same carelessness with which they say,
"All Muslims are terrorists"). Even in the grotesque universe of racist
insult, the British make their entry as add-ons. Arse-lickers, they're
called.

Suddenly, I, who have been vilified for being "anti-American" and
"anti-west", find myself in the extraordinary position of defending the
people of America. And Britain.

Those who descend so easily into the pit of racist abuse would do well to
remember the hundreds of thousands of American and British citizens who
protested against their country's stockpile of nuclear weapons . And the
thousands of American war resisters who forced their government to withdraw
from Vietnam. They should know that the most scholarly, scathing, hilarious
critiques of the US government and the "American way of life" comes from
American citizens. And that the funniest, most bitter condemnation of their
prime minister comes from the British media. Finally they should remember
that right now, hundreds of thousands of British and American citizens are
on the streets protesting the war. The Coalition of the Bullied and Bought
consists of governments, not people. More than one third of America's
citizens have survived the relentless propaganda they've been subjected to,
and many thousands are actively fighting their own government. In the
ultra-patriotic climate that prevails in the US, that's as brave as any
Iraqi fighting for his or her homeland.

While the "Allies" wait in the desert for an uprising of Shia Muslims on the
streets of Basra, the real uprising is taking place in hundreds of cities
across the world. It has been the most spectacular display of public
morality ever seen.

Most courageous of all, are the hundreds of thousands of American people on
the streets of America's great cities - Washington, New York, Chicago, San
Francisco. The fact is that the only institution in the world today that is
more powerful than the American government, is American civil society.
American citizens have a huge responsibility riding on their shoulders. How
can we not salute and support those who not only acknowledge but act upon
that responsibility? They are our allies, our friends.

At the end of it all, it remains to be said that dictators like Saddam
Hussein, and all the other despots in the Middle East, in the central Asian
republics, in Africa and Latin America, many of them installed, supported
and financed by the US government, are a menace to their own people. Other
than strengthening the hand of civil society (instead of weakening it as has
been done in the case of Iraq), there is no easy, pristine way of dealing
with them. (It's odd how those who dismiss the peace movement as utopian,
don't hesitate to proffer the most absurdly dreamy reasons for going to war:
to stamp out terrorism, install democracy, eliminate fascism, and most
entertainingly, to "rid the world of evil-doers".)

Regardless of what the propaganda machine tells us, these tin-pot dictators
are not the greatest threat to the world. The real and pressing danger, the
greatest threat of all is the locomotive force that drives the political and
economic engine of the US government, currently piloted by George Bush.
Bush-bashing is fun, because he makes such an easy, sumptuous target. It's
true that he is a dangerous, almost suicidal pilot, but the machine he
handles is far more dangerous than the man himself.

Despite the pall of gloom that hangs over us today, I'd like to file a
cautious plea for hope: in times of war, one wants one's weakest enemy at
the helm of his forces. And President George W Bush is certainly that. Any
other even averagely intelligent US president would have probably done the
very same things, but would have managed to smoke-up the glass and confuse
the opposition. Perhaps even carry the UN with him. Bush's tactless
imprudence and his brazen belief that he can run the world with his riot
squad, has done the opposite. He has achieved what writers, activists and
scholars have striven to achieve for decades. He has exposed the ducts. He
has placed on full public view the working parts, the nuts and bolts of the
apocalyptic apparatus of the American empire.

Now that the blueprint (The Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire) has been put
into mass circulation, it could be disabled quicker than the pundits
predicted.

Bring on the spanners.
--=====================_6412580==_.ALT-- From jafujii@uci.edu Thu Apr 3 02:19:36 2003 From: jafujii@uci.edu (Jim Fujii) Date: Wed, 02 Apr 2003 18:19:36 -0800 Subject: [Ethnicstudies] Indigenous Peoples Declaration Against US Invasion of Iraq Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20030402181917.028d6eb8@benfranklin.hnet.uci.edu> --=====================_6617235==_.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable http://www.quechuanetwork.org/news_template.cfm?news_id=3D672&lang=3Ds Indigenous Peoples Declaration Against United States Invasion of Iraq Ottawa - Canada - (Posted on Apr-01-2003) The representatives of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas gathered during the second Annual Forum of Connectivity in Ottawa, Canada on March 24-26, 2003 and expressed the following: To join our voices to the millions of peoples around the world, including the voices of the peoples in United States, the voice of our sister Rigoberta Mench=F9 Tum, 1992 Nobel Peace Prize winner and other indigenous organizations to condemn the genocidal American invasion against the Iraqi people. This genocide is a crime against humanity and violates international law as well as human and legal rights. This is a criminal invasion and it is killing innocent children, women and the elderly. It lacks any kind of legitimacy and cannot be justified as it violates all declarations to live in peace. It violates the self determination and sovereignty of peoples and the consensus reached by most states represented in the United Nations. The representatives of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas strongly request that all those responsible for these criminal acts be brought to the International War Crimes Court and be condemned internationally. We urge the United Nations to call for an emergency meeting of the Security Council to condemn the United States government, and its allies decision to go to war and we call for an immediate cease fire, while re-establishing diplomacy to end this conflict. Furthermore, we reject any new government imposed by the United States as it will only justify its presence in Iraq to protect its own geo- political and geo-economic interests. We encourage all the peoples of the world to maintain their unity and to strengthen their mobilization against this injustice, to show their love for peace, fraternity and intercultural dialogue. We all shall reject the unilateral use of weapons to impose colonialist agendas and try to eliminate the cultural diversity of the world. As indigenous peoples, we do not condone war, violence, or any other conflict that destroys our Mother Earth. On the contrary, we promote dialogue as our principle and we do not reject peace. As indigenous peoples, we have suffered genocide throughout our history and for that reason we want to congratulate all those states that chose the option of peace and respect for human life. Therefore, we request all those states to make their best efforts to re-establish the multilateral order as a legal instrument against this neo-imperialist disorder. Ottawa, March 25th 2003 Signatures: Asociaci=F3n de Radios Comunitarias. ARCG. Guatemala Abya Yala Nexus USA Bachillerato Integral Comunitario Ayujk Polivalente. BICAP. Bolivia Consejo Ind=EDgena de Centro Am=E9rica . CICA. Guatemala Central Independiente de Obreros Agr=EDcolas y Campesinos.CIOAC. M=E9xico Coalici=F3n Obrero= Campesina y Estudiantil del Istmo, COCEI. Comisi=F3n de Juristas Ind=EDgenas de= Argentina. Argentina Coordinadora Mapuche de Neuquen. Argentina Conferencia Permanente de Pueblos Ind=EDgenas COPPIP. Peru Comision Juridica para el Autodesarrollo de los Pueblos Originarios Andinos. CAPAJ.Peru CONAIE, Departamento de Comunicacion. Enlace Continental de Mujeres Indigenas . Panam=E1 Brazil Fundaci=F3n Rigoberta Menchu. Guatemala Foro Permanente sobre Pueblos Ind=EDgenas. ONU Instituto Indigena de Propiedad Intelectual, INBRAPI.= Brazil InforCauca . Colombia Information Network of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas. INIPA. Canada Liga Maya Internacional . Guatemala Universidade Federal de Mato Groso. Brasil Coordinadora Nacional de Mujeres Ind=EDgenas= de M=E9xico, CNMI. M=E9xico Movimiento Chirapaq. Peru Mujeres Mayas de Jovel. M=E9xico Maya-Ixil, Proyecto Enlace Quich=E9 . Guatemala Oficina para el Desarrollo de los Pueblos Ind=EDgenas. Guatemala Promama de Derechos Ind=EDgenas, Instituto de Estudios Ind=EDgenas. Chile Prensa Ind=EDgena Internacional. Canada Resurgimiento Ancestral Ind=EDgena Salvadore=F1o. El Salvador Red Nacional de Trabajadoras de la Informaci=F3n y Comunicaci=F3n-REDADA.Bolivia RED Kechwa. USA SAPINCHIKMANTA Radio Programa= en Quecha y Castellano. Ayacucho Servicios para el Desarrollo, Pueblo Nah=F1u - Mexico Uni=F3n Nacional de Mujeres Kunas. Panama --=====================_6617235==_.ALT Content-Type: text/html; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable http://www.quechuanetwork.org/news_template.cfm?news_id= =3D672&lang=3Ds

Indigenous Peoples Declaration Against United States Invasion of Iraq

Ottawa - Canada - (Posted on Apr-01-2003) The representatives of=20 the
Indigenous Peoples of the Americas gathered during the second Annual Forum
of Connectivity in Ottawa, Canada on March 24-26, 2003 and expressed the
following:

To join our voices to the millions of peoples around the world, including
the voices of the peoples in United States, the voice of our sister
Rigoberta Mench=F9 Tum, 1992 Nobel Peace Prize winner and other indigenous
organizations to condemn the genocidal American invasion against the Iraqi
people.

This genocide is a crime against humanity and violates international law as
well as human and legal rights. This is a criminal invasion and it is
killing innocent children, women and the elderly.

It lacks any kind of legitimacy and cannot be justified as it violates all
declarations to live in peace. It violates the self determination and
sovereignty of peoples and the consensus reached by most states represented
in the United Nations.

The representatives of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas strongly
request that all those responsible for these criminal acts be brought to the
International War Crimes Court and be condemned internationally.

We urge the United Nations to call for an emergency meeting of the Security
Council to condemn the United States government, and its allies decision to
go to war and we call for an immediate cease fire, while re-establishing
diplomacy to end this conflict. Furthermore, we reject any new government
imposed by the United States as it will only justify its presence in Iraq to
protect its own geo- political and geo-economic interests.

We encourage all the peoples of the world to maintain their unity and to
strengthen their mobilization against this injustice, to show their love for
peace, fraternity and intercultural dialogue.

We all shall reject the unilateral use of weapons to impose colonialist
agendas and try to eliminate the cultural diversity of the world.

As indigenous peoples, we do not condone war, violence, or any=20 other
conflict that destroys our Mother Earth. On the contrary, we=20 promote
dialogue as our principle and we do not reject peace.

As indigenous peoples, we have suffered genocide throughout our history and
for that reason we want to congratulate all those states that chose the
option of peace and respect for human life. Therefore, we request all those
states to make their best efforts to re-establish the multilateral order as
a legal instrument against this neo-imperialist disorder.

Ottawa, March 25th 2003

Signatures:

Asociaci=F3n de Radios Comunitarias. ARCG. Guatemala Abya Yala Nexus USA
Bachillerato Integral Comunitario Ayujk Polivalente. BICAP. Bolivia Consejo
Ind=EDgena de Centro Am=E9rica . CICA. Guatemala Central Independiente de
Obreros Agr=EDcolas y Campesinos.CIOAC. M=E9xico Coalici=F3n Obrero Campesin= a y
Estudiantil del Istmo, COCEI. Comisi=F3n de Juristas Ind=EDgenas de Argentina.
Argentina Coordinadora Mapuche de Neuquen. Argentina Conferencia Permanente
de Pueblos Ind=EDgenas COPPIP. Peru Comision Juridica para el Autodesarrollo
de los Pueblos Originarios Andinos. CAPAJ.Peru CONAIE, Departamento de
Comunicacion. Enlace Continental de Mujeres Indigenas . Panam=E1 Brazil
Fundaci=F3n Rigoberta Menchu. Guatemala Foro Permanente sobre Pueblos
Ind=EDgenas. ONU Instituto Indigena de Propiedad Intelectual, INBRAPI. Brazil
InforCauca . Colombia Information Network of the Indigenous Peoples of the
Americas. INIPA. Canada Liga Maya Internacional . Guatemala Universidade
Federal de Mato Groso. Brasil Coordinadora Nacional de Mujeres Ind=EDgenas de
M=E9xico, CNMI. M=E9xico Movimiento Chirapaq. Peru Mujeres Mayas de Jovel.
M=E9xico Maya-Ixil, Proyecto Enlace Quich=E9 . Guatemala Oficina para=20 el
Desarrollo de los Pueblos Ind=EDgenas. Guatemala Promama de Derechos
Ind=EDgenas, Instituto de Estudios Ind=EDgenas. Chile Prensa Ind=EDgena
Internacional. Canada Resurgimiento Ancestral Ind=EDgena Salvadore=F1o. El
Salvador Red Nacional de Trabajadoras de la Informaci=F3n y
Comunicaci=F3n-REDADA.Bolivia RED Kechwa. USA SAPINCHIKMANTA Radio Programa en
Quecha y Castellano. Ayacucho Servicios para el Desarrollo, Pueblo Nah=F1u -
Mexico Uni=F3n Nacional de Mujeres Kunas. Panama
--=====================_6617235==_.ALT-- From jafujii@uci.edu Thu Apr 3 04:40:04 2003 From: jafujii@uci.edu (Jim Fujii) Date: Wed, 02 Apr 2003 20:40:04 -0800 Subject: [Ethnicstudies] The "Shock and Awe" Photo Gallery Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20030402203957.02228008@benfranklin.hnet.uci.edu> --=====================_15045624==_.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed What Fox, CNN, NBC, . . . will not show Click here: The "Shock and Awe" Photo Gallery --=====================_15045624==_.ALT Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii" What Fox, CNN, NBC, . . . will not show


Click here: The "Shock and Awe" Photo Gallery --=====================_15045624==_.ALT-- From dtsang@lib.uci.edu Thu Apr 3 04:28:49 2003 From: dtsang@lib.uci.edu (Dan Tsang) Date: Wed, 2 Apr 2003 20:28:49 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Ethnicstudies] more on Leslie Cheung; Vietnamese film director (fwd) Message-ID: A Chinese Daily News reporter (based in Monterey Park) called me yesterday about Hong Kong Canto pop star/actor Leslie Cheung's suicide and wrote a piece about yesterday's show with film scholar Helen Leung on Leslie Cheung's queer sensibility. The article, in Chinese, is on the Web at: http://www.chineseworld.com/publish/today/13_1400.4a/lx/4alv(030403)13_tb.htm I've backed it up at: http://falco.kuci.uci.edu/~dtsang/subversity/cdnsubv.txt The article is in Chinese. The show (which also includes an interview with Vietnamese director Do Minh Tuan of "Foul King") is archived online at: http://falco.kuci.uci.edu/~dtsang/subversity/Sv030401.ram A Real One Player or Media Player should be able to play it. dan Daniel C. Tsang Host, Subversity, now Tuesdays, 4-5 p.m. KUCI, 88.9 FM and Web-cast live via http://kuci.org Subversity: http://kuci.org/~dtsang; E-mail: subversity@kuci.org Daniel Tsang, KUCI, PO Box 4362, Irvine CA 92616 UCI Tel: (949) 824-4978; UCI Fax: (949) 824-2700 UCI Office: 380 Main Library Member, National Writers Union (http://www.nwu.org) WWW News Resource Page: http://sun3.lib.uci.edu/~dtsang/netnews1.htm AWARE: http://sun3.lib.uci.edu/~dtsang/aware2.htm Personal Homepage: http://sun3.lib.uci.edu/~dtsang/ _______________________________________________ KUCI.org 88.9FM - "eclectic music, engaging talk" _______________________________________________ From jafujii@uci.edu Thu Apr 3 21:18:11 2003 From: jafujii@uci.edu (Jim Fujii) Date: Thu, 03 Apr 2003 13:18:11 -0800 Subject: [Ethnicstudies] Shock & Awe - Revised! Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20030403131804.00b34918@benfranklin.hnet.uci.edu> --=====================_335983==_.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed Shock & Awe - Revised! The Barrage Continues... http://villagevoice.com/alertrd.php3?article=43165 --=====================_335983==_.ALT Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii" Shock & Awe - Revised! The Barrage Continues...

http://villagevoice.com/alertrd.php3?article=43165 --=====================_335983==_.ALT-- From dtsang@lib.uci.edu Thu Apr 3 23:46:38 2003 From: dtsang@lib.uci.edu (Dan Tsang) Date: Thu, 3 Apr 2003 15:46:38 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Ethnicstudies] Interview with Vietnamese director Do Minh Tuan etc. (fwd) Message-ID: In OC Weekly out today...(films from Newport Beach Film Festival starting today) http://www.ocweekly.com/ink/03/31/2003-tsang.php Down in the Dump Do Minh Tuan exposes life at the bottom in Vietnam Audio of part of interview (after section on Leslie Cheung): http://falco.kuci.uci.edu/~dtsang/subversity/Sv030401.ram Thanx to Andrew Le for interpreting. Also in OC Weekly: http://www.ocweekly.com/ink/03/31/2003-hoberman.php Emotional Car Wreck Sadness haunts Daughter From Danang and a food piece! http://www.ocweekly.com/ink/03/31/food-arellano.php Temple of Tofu Luck for everyone at Van Hanh Vietnamese Restaurant dan Daniel C. Tsang Bibliographer for Asian American Studies, Economics, Management (acting), & Politics Social Science Data Librarian Lecturer, School of Social Sciences 380 Main Library, University of California PO Box 19557, Irvine CA 92623-9557, USA E-mail: dtsang@uci.edu; Tel: (949) 824-4978; fax: (949) 824-2700 UCI Social Science Data Archives: http://data.lib.uci.edu From jafujii@uci.edu Fri Apr 4 04:06:34 2003 From: jafujii@uci.edu (Jim Fujii) Date: Thu, 03 Apr 2003 20:06:34 -0800 Subject: [Ethnicstudies] Scramble to carve up Iraqi oil reserves lies behind US diplomacy Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20030403200628.00b8b128@benfranklin.hnet.uci.edu> --=====================_1067555==_.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable http://www.observer.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,805530,00.html The Observer October 6, 2002 Scramble to carve up Iraqi oil reserves lies behind US diplomacy Manoeuvres shaped by horsetrading between America, Russia and France over control of untapped oilfields Ed Vulliamy in New York, Paul Webster in Paris, and Nick Paton Walsh in Moscow Oil is emerging as the key factor in US attempts to secure the support of Russia and France for military action against Iraq, according to an Observer investigation. The Bush administration, intimately entwined with the global oil industry, is keen to pounce on Iraq's massive untapped reserves, the second biggest in the world after Saudi Arabia's. But France and Russia, who hold a power of veto on the UN Security Council, have billion-dollar contracts with Baghdad, which they fear will disappear in 'an oil grab by Washington', if America installs a successor to Saddam. A Russian official at the United Nations in New York told the Observer last week that the $7 billion in Soviet-era debt was not the main 'economic interest' in Iraq about which the Kremlin is voicing its concerns. The main fear was a post-Saddam government would not honour extraction contracts Moscow has signed with Iraq. Russian business has long-standing interests in Iraq. Lukoil, the biggest oil company in Russia, signed a $20bn contract in 1997 to drill the West Qurna oilfield. Such a deal could evaporate along with the Saddam regime, together with a more recent contract with Russian giant Zarubezhneft, which was granted a potential $90bn concession to develop the bin Umar oilfield. The total value of Saddam's foreign contract awards could reach $1.1 trillion, according to the International Energy Agency's World Energy Outlook 2001. The Russian official said his government believed the US had brokered a deal with the coalition of Iraqi opposition forces it backs whereby support against Saddam is conditional on their declaring - on taking power - all oil contracts conceded under his rule to be null and void. 'The concern of my government,' said the official, 'is that the concessions agreed between Baghdad and numerous enterprises will be reneged upon, and that US companies will enter to take the greatest share of those existing contracts... Yes, if you could say it that way - an oil grab by Washington'. A government insider in Paris told The Observer that France also feared suffering economically from US oil ambitions at the end of a war. But the dilemma for Paris is more complex. Despite President Jacques Chirac and Chancellor Gerhard Schr=F6der of Germany agreeing last week to oppose= changing the rules governing weapons inspectors, France may back military action. Government sources say they fear - existing concessions aside - France could be cut out of the spoils if it did not support the war and show a significant military presence. If it comes to war, France is determined to be allotted a more prestigious role in the fighting than in the 1991 Gulf war, when its main role was to occupy lightly defended ground. Negotiations have been going on between the state-owned TotalFinaElf company and the US about redistribution of oil regions between the world's major companies. Washington's predatory interest in Iraqi oil is clear, whatever its political protestations about its motives for war. The US National Energy Policy Report of 2001 - known as the 'Cheney Report' after its author Vice President Dick Cheney, formerly one of America's richest and most powerful oil industry magnates - demanded a priority on easing US access to Persian Gulf supplies. Doubts about Saudi Arabia - even before 11 September, and even more so in its wake - led US strategists to seek a backup supply in the region. America needs 20 million barrels of crude a day, and analysts have singled out the country that could meet up to half that requirement: Iraq. The current high price of oil is dragging the US economy further into recession. US control of the Iraqi reserves, perhaps the biggest unmapped reservoir in the world, would break Saudi Arabia's hold on the oil-pricing cartel Opec, and dictate prices for the next century. This could spell disaster for Russian oil giants, keen to expand their sales to the West. Russia has sought to prolong negotiations, official statements going between opposition to any new UN resolution and possible support for military action against an Iraqi regime proven to be developing weapons of mass destruction. While France is thought likely to support US military action, and China will probably fall in line because of its admission to the World Trade Organisation, Putin is left holding the wild cards. Russia recognises potential benefits of reaching a deal with the US: Saddam's regime is difficult to work with. Lukoil's billion-dollar concessions are frozen and profitless to Moscow and Baghdad under UN sanctions, leading to fears that Saddam might have declared the agreement null and void out of spite. Iraqi diplomats say Zarubezhneft won its $90bn contract only after Baghdad took it away from TotalFinaElf because of French support for sanctions. Russia stands to profit if intervention in the Gulf triggers a hike in Middle East oil prices, as its firms are lobbying to sell millions of barrels a day to the US, at two-thirds of the current market price. Moscow's trust of Washington may be slipping after what a Russian UN official calls 'broken promises' that followed negotiations over Moscow's support for the Afghan campaign. Russia turned a blind eye to US troops in central Asia, on the tacit condition that US-Russian trade restrictions would be lifted. But they are still there, and other benefits expected after 11 September have also not materialised. 'They've been making this point very strongly,' a senior Bush administration official conceded to the Washington Post , 'that this can't be an all-give-and-no-get relationship... They do have a point that the growing relationship has got to be reciprocal.' --=====================_1067555==_.ALT Content-Type: text/html; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable http://www.observer.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,805= 530,00.html

The Observer  October 6, 2002

Scramble to carve up Iraqi oil reserves lies behind US diplomacy

Manoeuvres shaped by horsetrading between America, Russia and France over
control of untapped oilfields

Ed Vulliamy in New York, Paul Webster in Paris, and Nick Paton Walsh in
Moscow

Oil is emerging as the key factor in US attempts to secure the support of
Russia and France for military action against Iraq, according to an Observer
investigation.

The Bush administration, intimately entwined with the global oil industry,
is keen to pounce on Iraq's massive untapped reserves, the second biggest in
the world after Saudi Arabia's. But France and Russia, who hold a power of
veto on the UN Security Council, have billion-dollar contracts with Baghdad,
which they fear will disappear in 'an oil grab by Washington', if America
installs a successor to Saddam.

A Russian official at the United Nations in New York told the Observer last
week that the $7 billion in Soviet-era debt was not the main 'economic
interest' in Iraq about which the Kremlin is voicing its concerns. The main
fear was a post-Saddam government would not honour extraction contracts
Moscow has signed with Iraq.

Russian business has long-standing interests in Iraq. Lukoil, the biggest
oil company in Russia, signed a $20bn contract in 1997 to drill the West
Qurna oilfield. Such a deal could evaporate along with the Saddam regime,
together with a more recent contract with Russian giant Zarubezhneft, which
was granted a potential $90bn concession to develop the bin Umar oilfield.
The total value of Saddam's foreign contract awards could reach=20 $1.1
trillion, according to the International Energy Agency's World Energy
Outlook 2001.

The Russian official said his government believed the US had brokered a deal
with the coalition of Iraqi opposition forces it backs whereby support
against Saddam is conditional on their declaring - on taking power - all oil
contracts conceded under his rule to be null and void.

'The concern of my government,' said the official, 'is that the concessions
agreed between Baghdad and numerous enterprises will be reneged upon, and
that US companies will enter to take the greatest share of those existing
contracts... Yes, if you could say it that way - an oil grab by Washington'.


A government insider in Paris told The Observer that France also feared
suffering economically from US oil ambitions at the end of a war. But the
dilemma for Paris is more complex. Despite President Jacques Chirac and
Chancellor Gerhard Schr=F6der of Germany agreeing last week to oppose changing
the rules governing weapons inspectors, France may back military action.

Government sources say they fear - existing concessions aside - France could
be cut out of the spoils if it did not support the war and show a
significant military presence. If it comes to war, France is determined to
be allotted a more prestigious role in the fighting than in the 1991 Gulf
war, when its main role was to occupy lightly defended ground. Negotiations
have been going on between the state-owned TotalFinaElf company and the US
about redistribution of oil regions between the world's major companies.

Washington's predatory interest in Iraqi oil is clear, whatever its
political protestations about its motives for war. The US National Energy
Policy Report of 2001 - known as the 'Cheney Report' after its author Vice
President Dick Cheney, formerly one of America's richest and most powerful
oil industry magnates - demanded a priority on easing US access to Persian
Gulf supplies.

Doubts about Saudi Arabia - even before 11 September, and even more so in
its wake - led US strategists to seek a backup supply in the region. America
needs 20 million barrels of crude a day, and analysts have singled out the
country that could meet up to half that requirement: Iraq.

The current high price of oil is dragging the US economy further into
recession. US control of the Iraqi reserves, perhaps the biggest unmapped
reservoir in the world, would break Saudi Arabia's hold on the oil-pricing
cartel Opec, and dictate prices for the next century.

This could spell disaster for Russian oil giants, keen to expand their sales
to the West. Russia has sought to prolong negotiations, official statements
going between opposition to any new UN resolution and possible support for
military action against an Iraqi regime proven to be developing weapons of
mass destruction.

While France is thought likely to support US military action, and China will
probably fall in line because of its admission to the World Trade
Organisation, Putin is left holding the wild cards.

Russia recognises potential benefits of reaching a deal with the=20 US:
Saddam's regime is difficult to work with. Lukoil's billion-dollar
concessions are frozen and profitless to Moscow and Baghdad under=20 UN
sanctions, leading to fears that Saddam might have declared the agreement
null and void out of spite. Iraqi diplomats say Zarubezhneft won its $90bn
contract only after Baghdad took it away from TotalFinaElf because of French
support for sanctions.

Russia stands to profit if intervention in the Gulf triggers a hike in
Middle East oil prices, as its firms are lobbying to sell millions of
barrels a day to the US, at two-thirds of the current market price.

Moscow's trust of Washington may be slipping after what a Russian=20 UN
official calls 'broken promises' that followed negotiations over Moscow's
support for the Afghan campaign.

Russia turned a blind eye to US troops in central Asia, on the=20 tacit
condition that US-Russian trade restrictions would be lifted. But they are
still there, and other benefits expected after 11 September have also not
materialised.

'They've been making this point very strongly,' a senior Bush administration
official conceded to the Washington Post , 'that this can't be an
all-give-and-no-get relationship... They do have a point that the growing
relationship has got to be reciprocal.'
 --=====================_1067555==_.ALT-- From jafujii@uci.edu Fri Apr 4 04:09:18 2003 From: jafujii@uci.edu (Jim Fujii) Date: Thu, 03 Apr 2003 20:09:18 -0800 Subject: [Ethnicstudies] Pentagon plans for worst nightmare Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20030403200911.00bbae20@benfranklin.hnet.uci.edu> --=====================_1230759==_.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,928456,00.html Guardian April 3, 2003 Urban warfare Pentagon plans for worst nightmare Disastrous casualties, both civilian and military, feared in street-by-street fight for Baghdad Oliver Burkeman in Washington, Stuart Millar, and Nick Paton Walsh in Moscow American and British military tacticians rarely tire of invoking the name of Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese philosopher of war credited with laying the groundwork for everything from "decapitation strikes" to the policy of "shock and awe". But as coalition troops push north for an assault on Baghdad, through stubborn opposition from the most highly trained of Saddam Hussein's fighters, it is another aphorism of Sun Tzu's that may be ringing in the ears of their commanders. "The worst policy," he wrote, brooking no argument, "is to attack cities." There is nothing encouraging about the list of bloody, high-casualty urban entanglements that strategists on both sides of the Atlantic have been scrutinising for lessons they might apply if drawn into a street-by-street fight for the Iraqi capital. From Stalingrad, Manila and Seoul to Beirut, Grozny and Mogadishu, the history of what the US marines call Mout - military operations on urbanised terrain, known to the British as Fibua, for fighting in built-up areas - is one of massive civilian and military casualties with incendiary effects on public opinion back home. The Pentagon's gravest nightmare in Baghdad would be what is coming to be known as a "mega-Mogadishu", hundreds of times worse than in 1993, when rebel fighters triumphantly dragged the corpses of American servicemen through the Somali capital, prompting a humiliating US withdrawal. Its own bible on the topic, the 150-page doctrine for joint urban operations, published in September, reminds readers of the bloody, drawn-out battle for the central Vietnamese city of Hue in 1968 which resulted, after four weeks, in the US seizing control of just seven city blocks. And there are troubling reminders of conflicts in Beirut and Lebanon, where battling forces sometimes fought room-by-room for control of individual hotels and apartment blocks. "Nearly all operations in urban areas take significantly longer than expected," the doctrine warns. In training exercises in the swamps of Louisiana, where the marines have built a mock city to practise urban combat, soldiers playing the enemy routinely "kill" or "injure" 60% of the invading force. "The Iraqis have chosen to try to fight in an urban area because they can - it's the one area where our advantages are somewhat negated," said Colonel Gary Anderson, a retired US marine who fought in Somalia and has trained soldiers for urban combat. The narrow streets of Baghdad would render useless much of the advanced technology championed by Donald Rumsfeld, while bringing into sharp focus the coalition's political need to avoid major civilian casualties. It would be, as one US colonel put it, like a knife fight in a phone booth. The biggest advantage the Iraqi forces will have is a relatively intimate knowledge of the "unseen battlefield" inside homes and buildings, on rooftops and beneath the streets. "It's no secret that our intelligence-gathering capabilities are very limited [in Baghdad]," said Colonel Randy Gangle, who, as director of the Centre for Emerging Threats and Opportunities, a marines thinktank, has devised much of the forces' urban training. To attempt to counter this, marines in Baghdad are expected to deploy the Dragon Eye, a hand-launched miniature airplane with a 45in wingspan that can peer around corners. American strategists freely acknowledge that they are borrowing much of their thinking this time round from the British, with the experience of three decades in Northern Ireland and 10 years of peacekeeping from the Balkans to Africa. The British model views the city not as a single military objective, but as a series of bite-sized chunks, perhaps as small as a single building or a street. After the first chunk is taken, forces move in to consolidate their control, setting up strongholds used as launchpads for the attack on the next chunk. At the same time, it is essential to build relationships with the local population in the chunks already taken. "It's very much like viewing the city as a chessboard," said Garth Whitty, a retired lieutenant-colonel and now a defence analyst at the Royal United Services Institute in London. "You move into one square, you hold it and you use it as a base to move on to the next square. You have to be patient." Col Gangle said gathering intelligence to counter the Iraqi regime's tactic of basing military command points among civilians was already happening in Iraq. "The key is starting to develop intelligence from the population - patrols can go in, and clandestinely talk with people and say, 'We don't want you to expose yourselves, but we do want you to tell us who the bad guys are, and we'll go deal with them.' As people begin to realise that they can provide information without repercussion, the effect will grow exponentially. It's not this room-by-room, building-clearing thing that we used to do." The benefits of firepower are limited: blasting buildings with artillery or air strikes may take out any enemy positions, but it also creates debris which has to be negotiated and which offers cover for enemy forces. This means urban warfare is infantry-intensive. "It's rifles and bayonets stuff," one senior British trainer said. Troops "get tired fighting at this sort of intensity. It's not just physically exhausting, it's mentally exhausting." In Iraq, there will be one major difference from previous urban warfare situations: the stated objective of minimising civilian casualties. "You have immediately changed the rules to your disadvantage because you have to be more selective about targets but also you subject your people to greater danger," Mr Whitty said. The controversial alteration to US rules of engagement seen outside the cities of Iraq - where troops are cleared to fire on approaching civilians if they cannot make them halt and fear a suicide attack - would be much more fraught inside Baghdad. "It's one thing to have a defensive position and say, 'You may not come any closer,'" said Col Gangle, "but it's a different scenario when you're patrolling a city and people are coming into close contact all the time." In this chaos, it will be virtually impossible for commanders to keep track of everything happening on the ground, so the British approach is to devolve command to the lowest possible level. Tactical decisions on the ground will be taken by the patrol commanders, usually corporals or lance corporals. "The principle is intent," Col Gangle said. "You expect, even if you lose contact, your subordinates to continue to operate within your intent." But some British military experts argue that the Americans may be less prepared for this kind of structure, since their training focuses on implementing a gameplan decided by senior officers. "The British troops will have got their heads around what is expected of them before they hit the ground," said John MacKinlay, a former senior British officer and now a research fellow at Kings College's centre for war studies. "The American GI, by contrast, will have been brought up in a total war machine." The disastrous consequences of getting it wrong were illustrated in the Russian military's attempts to take the city of Grozny in 1994 and 2000. General Alexander Vladimirov, vice-president of the Association of Military Experts and an infantry specialist, said Russian experiences during Grozny's first assault in December 1994 showed how vital it was to properly reconnoitre the city before an assault, using scale models based on satellite photographs. "Our reconnaissance was absolutely ineffective in Grozny in 1994," he said. "We did not work out where the enemy had placed the snipers, machine guns and RPGs. I think the same thing will apply to Baghdad." The failed first operation against Grozny led to its carpet bombing in January 1995. For the second siege, five years later, a humanitarian corridor was left open so the population could flee. "We warned them to get out," said Gen Vladimirov, and "honestly told them we would flatten the city. We waited for a long time." And yet despite extensive planning by the Russian army, based on their past mistakes, Russian assault groups were still cut to pieces as they entered Grozny in 2000 by rebels targeting their tank columns, picking off vehicles one by one. --=====================_1230759==_.ALT Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii" http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,928456,00.html

Guardian    April 3, 2003

Urban warfare

Pentagon plans for worst nightmare

Disastrous casualties, both civilian and military, feared in
street-by-street fight for Baghdad

Oliver Burkeman in Washington, Stuart Millar, and Nick Paton Walsh in Moscow


American and British military tacticians rarely tire of invoking the name of
Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese philosopher of war credited with laying the
groundwork for everything from "decapitation strikes" to the policy of
"shock and awe". But as coalition troops push north for an assault on
Baghdad, through stubborn opposition from the most highly trained of Saddam
Hussein's fighters, it is another aphorism of Sun Tzu's that may be ringing
in the ears of their commanders. "The worst policy," he wrote, brooking no
argument, "is to attack cities."

There is nothing encouraging about the list of bloody, high-casualty urban
entanglements that strategists on both sides of the Atlantic have been
scrutinising for lessons they might apply if drawn into a street-by-street
fight for the Iraqi capital. From Stalingrad, Manila and Seoul to Beirut,
Grozny and Mogadishu, the history of what the US marines call Mout -
military operations on urbanised terrain, known to the British as Fibua, for
fighting in built-up areas - is one of massive civilian and military
casualties with incendiary effects on public opinion back home.

The Pentagon's gravest nightmare in Baghdad would be what is coming to be
known as a "mega-Mogadishu", hundreds of times worse than in 1993, when
rebel fighters triumphantly dragged the corpses of American servicemen
through the Somali capital, prompting a humiliating US withdrawal. Its own
bible on the topic, the 150-page doctrine for joint urban operations,
published in September, reminds readers of the bloody, drawn-out battle for
the central Vietnamese city of Hue in 1968 which resulted, after four weeks,
in the US seizing control of just seven city blocks. And there are troubling
reminders of conflicts in Beirut and Lebanon, where battling forces
sometimes fought room-by-room for control of individual hotels and apartment
blocks.

"Nearly all operations in urban areas take significantly longer than
expected," the doctrine warns. In training exercises in the swamps of
Louisiana, where the marines have built a mock city to practise urban
combat, soldiers playing the enemy routinely "kill" or "injure" 60% of the
invading force.

"The Iraqis have chosen to try to fight in an urban area because they can -
it's the one area where our advantages are somewhat negated," said Colonel
Gary Anderson, a retired US marine who fought in Somalia and has trained
soldiers for urban combat.

The narrow streets of Baghdad would render useless much of the advanced
technology championed by Donald Rumsfeld, while bringing into sharp focus
the coalition's political need to avoid major civilian casualties. It would
be, as one US colonel put it, like a knife fight in a phone booth.

The biggest advantage the Iraqi forces will have is a relatively intimate
knowledge of the "unseen battlefield" inside homes and buildings, on
rooftops and beneath the streets. "It's no secret that our
intelligence-gathering capabilities are very limited [in Baghdad]," said
Colonel Randy Gangle, who, as director of the Centre for Emerging Threats
and Opportunities, a marines thinktank, has devised much of the forces'
urban training. To attempt to counter this, marines in Baghdad are expected
to deploy the Dragon Eye, a hand-launched miniature airplane with a 45in
wingspan that can peer around corners.

American strategists freely acknowledge that they are borrowing much of
their thinking this time round from the British, with the experience of
three decades in Northern Ireland and 10 years of peacekeeping from the
Balkans to Africa.

The British model views the city not as a single military objective, but as
a series of bite-sized chunks, perhaps as small as a single building or a
street. After the first chunk is taken, forces move in to consolidate their
control, setting up strongholds used as launchpads for the attack on the
next chunk. At the same time, it is essential to build relationships with
the local population in the chunks already taken.

"It's very much like viewing the city as a chessboard," said Garth Whitty, a
retired lieutenant-colonel and now a defence analyst at the Royal United
Services Institute in London. "You move into one square, you hold it and you
use it as a base to move on to the next square. You have to be patient."

Col Gangle said gathering intelligence to counter the Iraqi regime's tactic
of basing military command points among civilians was already happening in
Iraq. "The key is starting to develop intelligence from the population -
patrols can go in, and clandestinely talk with people and say, 'We don't
want you to expose yourselves, but we do want you to tell us who the bad
guys are, and we'll go deal with them.' As people begin to realise that they
can provide information without repercussion, the effect will grow
exponentially. It's not this room-by-room, building-clearing thing that we
used to do."

The benefits of firepower are limited: blasting buildings with artillery or
air strikes may take out any enemy positions, but it also creates debris
which has to be negotiated and which offers cover for enemy forces. This
means urban warfare is infantry-intensive. "It's rifles and bayonets stuff,"
one senior British trainer said. Troops "get tired fighting at this sort of
intensity. It's not just physically exhausting, it's mentally exhausting."

In Iraq, there will be one major difference from previous urban warfare
situations: the stated objective of minimising civilian casualties. "You
have immediately changed the rules to your disadvantage because you have to
be more selective about targets but also you subject your people to greater
danger," Mr Whitty said.

The controversial alteration to US rules of engagement seen outside the
cities of Iraq - where troops are cleared to fire on approaching civilians
if they cannot make them halt and fear a suicide attack - would be much more
fraught inside Baghdad. "It's one thing to have a defensive position and
say, 'You may not come any closer,'" said Col Gangle, "but it's a different
scenario when you're patrolling a city and people are coming into close
contact all the time."

In this chaos, it will be virtually impossible for commanders to keep track
of everything happening on the ground, so the British approach is to devolve
command to the lowest possible level. Tactical decisions on the ground will
be taken by the patrol commanders, usually corporals or lance corporals.
"The principle is intent," Col Gangle said. "You expect, even if you lose
contact, your subordinates to continue to operate within your intent."

But some British military experts argue that the Americans may be less
prepared for this kind of structure, since their training focuses on
implementing a gameplan decided by senior officers.

"The British troops will have got their heads around what is expected of
them before they hit the ground," said John MacKinlay, a former senior
British officer and now a research fellow at Kings College's centre for war
studies. "The American GI, by contrast, will have been brought up in a total
war machine."

The disastrous consequences of getting it wrong were illustrated in the
Russian military's attempts to take the city of Grozny in 1994 and 2000.

General Alexander Vladimirov, vice-president of the Association of Military
Experts and an infantry specialist, said Russian experiences during Grozny's
first assault in December 1994 showed how vital it was to properly
reconnoitre the city before an assault, using scale models based on
satellite photographs. "Our reconnaissance was absolutely ineffective in
Grozny in 1994," he said. "We did not work out where the enemy had placed
the snipers, machine guns and RPGs. I think the same thing will apply to
Baghdad." The failed first operation against Grozny led to its carpet
bombing in January 1995.

For the second siege, five years later, a humanitarian corridor was left
open so the population could flee. "We warned them to get out," said Gen
Vladimirov, and "honestly told them we would flatten the city. We waited for
a long time."

And yet despite extensive planning by the Russian army, based on their past
mistakes, Russian assault groups were still cut to pieces as they entered
Grozny in 2000 by rebels targeting their tank columns, picking off vehicles
one by one.
--=====================_1230759==_.ALT-- From jafujii@uci.edu Fri Apr 4 04:11:26 2003 From: jafujii@uci.edu (Jim Fujii) Date: Thu, 03 Apr 2003 20:11:26 -0800 Subject: [Ethnicstudies] Send in the bulldozers Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20030403201117.00ba2cf0@benfranklin.hnet.uci.edu> --=====================_1358833==_.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed Guardian April 2, 2003 Send in the bulldozers: what Israel told marines about urban battles As troops close on Baghdad, Pentagon takes notes on house-to-house fighting in Jenin Chris McGreal in Jerusalem Martin van Creveld's advice to the US marines on what lessons to draw from Israel's bloody urban battle in Jenin was precise: Forget the helicopters, invest in armoured bulldozers. For months now, the Pentagon has been taking notes from the Israelis in preparation for what looks increasingly likely to be an arduous house by house, street by street, fight for Baghdad. Pentagon strategists have pored over videos of the Israeli military's assault on Jenin a year ago, when 150 lightly armed but determined Palestinians kept the army at bay for 11 days and killed 23 soldiers. US officers watched Israeli tank raids into West Bank cities in February, and American soldiers have learned in the Israeli desert how to blow their way from house to house to avoid booby traps and street fighting. The Israeli insights build on years of exchanges of military technology and intelligence between the deeply intertwined armies. Among other things, the US is using Israeli-manufactured drones to scout across Iraqi lines. But with the US army faced with fighting through Baghdad's sprawling maze of streets and alleyways, known intimately by its enemy, American technological superiority is probably worth less than the Israelis' bitter experience. And now there is the added factor of suicide bombers. As the war with Iraq loomed, the US marines called in Mr Van Creveld, a military strategist at Jerusalem's Hebrew University with close ties to the Israeli army. At a briefing in North Carolina in September, he offered some lessons. "There were three key things," he said. "How to clear streets house by house, particularly using bulldozers. They're very useful in this kind of war to break houses. "How and when to use helicopters to take out snipers. And when not to, and I'd say Baghdad is one of those situations. And how to avoid civilian casualties." Condemned The Israeli army used giant armoured Caterpillar bulldozers and helicopter gunships to crush and rocket a square kilometre of Jenin, killing dozens of Palestinian fighters and civilians and destroying hundreds of homes. The American-made bulldozers - originally used in Vietnam - are in themselves weapons, bringing buildings crashing down on an enemy without having to engage him room by room. It was a widely condemned tactic in Jenin, which the Israelis claim saved civilian lives even though, like bombs, the killing is not selective. But US forces have also been receiving insights into how to fight room by room if it becomes necessary. Close to 1,000 American soldiers were sent to Israel for joint manoeuvres at the beginning of the year. Some were sent to a mock Arab town in the Negev desert to draw on Israeli experience. Among other things, they were shown how Israeli soldiers avoid having to show themselves on the street by moving from inside one house to another by blowing a hole in the wall without bringing the building down. In February, residents of Nablus reported seeing English-speaking troops in unfamiliar uniforms accompanying Israeli soldiers during a two-week incursion into the old city, where just such tactics were used. US army officers have observed Israeli units at first hand in Jenin and Bethlehem. The traffic has been two way. Israeli officers have visited the US marines' thinktank at Quantico, Virginia. Its commander, Colonel Randy Gangle, confirms the visit took place but declines to discuss it other than to say he "appreciated the insights offered by the Israeli experience of the intifada". Mr Van Creveld told the Americans that for all the lessons learned from the West Bank, the fight for Baghdad was likely to be a lot tougher. "The Americans and Brits are taking measures very similar to the ones we've being using for years in the [occupied] territories," he said. "But whatever resistance we faced in Jenin and Gaza is nothing compared to what the Americans can expect. "The Palestinians are empty handed compared to the weaponry the Iraqis have. The Americans can expect heavier casualties. Baghdad will be really brutal." Because the Iraqis are better armed, Mr Van Creveld warned the Americans that the Israeli experience of using helicopters to kill snipers was probably of little use to the US. That is almost certainly a lesson the Pentagon has already taken on board from its disastrous foray into Somalia. The Israelis say they had another advantage the Americans will not. "We have built a very robust intelligence structure which Americans don't have in Iraq," said retired Brigadier-General Shlomo Brom of the Jaffee Centre for Strategic Studies in Tel Aviv. "On the other hand, I think the Palestinians are more motivated than the Iraqis." Israeli officials believe that Saddam Hussein has also learned some of the lessons of Jenin, particularly the use of booby traps and suicide bombers. After just one such bombing the Americans have swiftly adopted Israeli tactics at roadblocks - with tragic consequences for one vehicle full of women and children. Gen Brom said possibly the best advice the Israelis had offered was to take it slowly until victory, and then get out fast. "An urban environment is the great equaliser," he said. "You can't utilise your superiority in training and equipment. It's very easy for your adversary to hide and he usually knows the terrain much better than you. There is the need to be cautious and understanding that it takes time. "But once it's over, the most important lesson is not to stay there any longer than is absolutely necessary. I see the similarity between the situation in Iraq and when we invaded Lebanon. Our mistake was to stay there much too long." --=====================_1358833==_.ALT Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii" Guardian    April 2, 2003

Send in the bulldozers: what Israel told marines about urban battles

As troops close on Baghdad, Pentagon takes notes on house-to-house fighting
in Jenin

Chris McGreal in Jerusalem

Martin van Creveld's advice to the US marines on what lessons to draw from
Israel's bloody urban battle in Jenin was precise: Forget the helicopters,
invest in armoured bulldozers.

For months now, the Pentagon has been taking notes from the Israelis in
preparation for what looks increasingly likely to be an arduous house by
house, street by street, fight for Baghdad. Pentagon strategists have pored
over videos of the Israeli military's assault on Jenin a year ago, when 150
lightly armed but determined Palestinians kept the army at bay for 11 days
and killed 23 soldiers.

US officers watched Israeli tank raids into West Bank cities in February,
and American soldiers have learned in the Israeli desert how to blow their
way from house to house to avoid booby traps and street fighting. The
Israeli insights build on years of exchanges of military technology and
intelligence between the deeply intertwined armies. Among other things, the
US is using Israeli-manufactured drones to scout across Iraqi lines.

But with the US army faced with fighting through Baghdad's sprawling maze of
streets and alleyways, known intimately by its enemy, American technological
superiority is probably worth less than the Israelis' bitter experience. And
now there is the added factor of suicide bombers.

As the war with Iraq loomed, the US marines called in Mr Van Creveld, a
military strategist at Jerusalem's Hebrew University with close ties to the
Israeli army. At a briefing in North Carolina in September, he offered some
lessons.

"There were three key things," he said. "How to clear streets house by
house, particularly using bulldozers. They're very useful in this kind of
war to break houses.

"How and when to use helicopters to take out snipers. And when not to, and
I'd say Baghdad is one of those situations. And how to avoid civilian
casualties."

Condemned

The Israeli army used giant armoured Caterpillar bulldozers and helicopter
gunships to crush and rocket a square kilometre of Jenin, killing dozens of
Palestinian fighters and civilians and destroying hundreds of homes. The
American-made bulldozers - originally used in Vietnam - are in themselves
weapons, bringing buildings crashing down on an enemy without having to
engage him room by room. It was a widely condemned tactic in Jenin, which
the Israelis claim saved civilian lives even though, like bombs, the killing
is not selective.

But US forces have also been receiving insights into how to fight room by
room if it becomes necessary. Close to 1,000 American soldiers were sent to
Israel for joint manoeuvres at the beginning of the year. Some were sent to
a mock Arab town in the Negev desert to draw on Israeli experience. Among
other things, they were shown how Israeli soldiers avoid having to show
themselves on the street by moving from inside one house to another by
blowing a hole in the wall without bringing the building down.

In February, residents of Nablus reported seeing English-speaking troops in
unfamiliar uniforms accompanying Israeli soldiers during a two-week
incursion into the old city, where just such tactics were used. US army
officers have observed Israeli units at first hand in Jenin and Bethlehem.

The traffic has been two way. Israeli officers have visited the US marines'
thinktank at Quantico, Virginia. Its commander, Colonel Randy Gangle,
confirms the visit took place but declines to discuss it other than to say
he "appreciated the insights offered by the Israeli experience of the
intifada".

Mr Van Creveld told the Americans that for all the lessons learned from the
West Bank, the fight for Baghdad was likely to be a lot tougher. "The
Americans and Brits are taking measures very similar to the ones we've being
using for years in the [occupied] territories," he said. "But whatever
resistance we faced in Jenin and Gaza is nothing compared to what the
Americans can expect.

"The Palestinians are empty handed compared to the weaponry the Iraqis have.
The Americans can expect heavier casualties. Baghdad will be really brutal."


Because the Iraqis are better armed, Mr Van Creveld warned the Americans
that the Israeli experience of using helicopters to kill snipers was
probably of little use to the US. That is almost certainly a lesson the
Pentagon has already taken on board from its disastrous foray into Somalia.


The Israelis say they had another advantage the Americans will not.

"We have built a very robust intelligence structure which Americans don't
have in Iraq," said retired Brigadier-General Shlomo Brom of the Jaffee
Centre for Strategic Studies in Tel Aviv.

"On the other hand, I think the Palestinians are more motivated than the
Iraqis."

Israeli officials believe that Saddam Hussein has also learned some of the
lessons of Jenin, particularly the use of booby traps and suicide bombers.
After just one such bombing the Americans have swiftly adopted Israeli
tactics at roadblocks - with tragic consequences for one vehicle full of
women and children.

Gen Brom said possibly the best advice the Israelis had offered was to take
it slowly until victory, and then get out fast.

"An urban environment is the great equaliser," he said. "You can't utilise
your superiority in training and equipment. It's very easy for your
adversary to hide and he usually knows the terrain much better than you.
There is the need to be cautious and understanding that it takes time.

"But once it's over, the most important lesson is not to stay there any
longer than is absolutely necessary. I see the similarity between the
situation in Iraq and when we invaded Lebanon. Our mistake was to stay there
much too long.”
 --=====================_1358833==_.ALT-- From jafujii@uci.edu Fri Apr 4 06:13:21 2003 From: jafujii@uci.edu (Jim Fujii) Date: Thu, 03 Apr 2003 22:13:21 -0800 Subject: [Ethnicstudies] Academic Says Iraqi Shiites Hostile to USA Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20030403221313.00b98b50@benfranklin.hnet.uci.edu> --=====================_8674122==_.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed Georgia Straight April 3-10, 2003 Academic Says Iraqi Shiites Hostile to USA By Charlie Smith A UBC expert on the Middle East has claimed that western media have overlooked the significance of top Shiite religious leaders' opposition to the U.S.-led attack on Iraq. Hani Faris, a research associate at UBC's Institute of Asian Research, told the Straight that the highest religious authority among Shiite scholars is Ayatollah al-Husainy al-Sistani, who lives in the holy city of Najaf, Iraq. Faris said that on March 27, Ayatollah al-Sistani issued a proclamation declaring that all Shiites had a "religious duty" to resist the invasion. The ayatollah also prohibited collaboration with the U.S.-led forces. "When a religious authority like al-Sistani issues a statement like this, a great number of disciples and scholars follow in his path," Faris said, comparing al-Sistani's authority among Shia Muslims with that of the Pope among Roman Catholics. Faris, who previously taught Middle Eastern studies at Harvard University and Kuwait University, said that two days after al-Sistani's proclamation, all the Shiite religious scholars and ayatollahs in the Iranian holy city of Qom issued a joint proclamation prohibiting Shiites from collaborating with the U.S.-led forces in Iraq. "The media in the U.S. are basically glossing over these matters," Faris said. "They're not being given serious discussion." Although just 20 percent of the world's 1.3 billion Muslims are Shiites, Faris said, they comprise almost the entire population of Iran and 60 percent of Iraq's population. "The Shiites have a hierarchical religious system, which is much more structured and authoritative than the Sunnis," he said. "As such, their religious leadership plays a major role. Plus, the religious laity among the Shiites is much more in touch with the heartbeat of the Shiite society, unlike the Sunnis, who are more [like] government functionaries." The split between Shia and Sunni Islam arose in the seventh century in a dispute between rival camps over who should succeed the Prophet Muhammed as the leader of Muslims. The split was cemented at the Battle of Kerbala in what is now Iraq. Last February, Ken Adelman, arms-control director during the Reagan administration, wrote an opinion piece in the Washington Post claiming that demolishing Saddam Hussein's military power "would be a cakewalk". Adelman, an assistant to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld from 1975 to 1977, and other Bush administration sympathizers have predicted that the Shiites in southern Iraq would welcome the U.S. army as liberators against Saddam Hussein's Sunni-dominated regime. Faris said that the U.S. government's claim that it is bringing "liberty and democracy" to Iraq belies the reality of what the Arab world is seeing on television screens every night. As a result, he said, the U.S.-led forces have already lost the political battle for people's minds and hearts. "Destruction of Baghdad and the burning of a city of five million people becomes bringing liberty to Iraqis?" Faris said. "You can imagine what it means to Iraqis and to other Arabs, Muslims, and all fair-minded people around the world watching these scenes." Faris said there is no doubt that a sector of Iraqi society welcomes the U.S.-led invasion, and some will benefit from the U.S. presence. He said that many others have been hurt by Hussein's regime and will stand and wave the American flag. However, Faris predicted that a large number of Iraqis will "take a hostile position" to the American and British forces after the war ends. "The occupation forces will find themselves in quicksand, exactly like what happened to the Americans and the Israelis before them in Lebanon," he said. --=====================_8674122==_.ALT Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii" Georgia Straight      April 3-10, 2003

Academic Says Iraqi Shiites Hostile to USA

By Charlie Smith

A UBC expert on the Middle East has claimed that western media have
overlooked the significance of top Shiite religious leaders' opposition to
the U.S.-led attack on Iraq.

Hani Faris, a research associate at UBC's Institute of Asian Research, told
the Straight that the highest religious authority among Shiite scholars is
Ayatollah al-Husainy al-Sistani, who lives in the holy city of Najaf, Iraq.


Faris said that on March 27, Ayatollah al-Sistani issued a proclamation
declaring that all Shiites had a "religious duty" to resist the invasion.
The ayatollah also prohibited collaboration with the U.S.-led forces.

"When a religious authority like al-Sistani issues a statement like this, a
great number of disciples and scholars follow in his path," Faris said,
comparing al-Sistani's authority among Shia Muslims with that of the Pope
among Roman Catholics.

Faris, who previously taught Middle Eastern studies at Harvard University
and Kuwait University, said that two days after al-Sistani's proclamation,
all the Shiite religious scholars and ayatollahs in the Iranian holy city of
Qom issued a joint proclamation prohibiting Shiites from collaborating with
the U.S.-led forces in Iraq.

"The media in the U.S. are basically glossing over these matters," Faris
said. "They're not being given serious discussion."

Although just 20 percent of the world's 1.3 billion Muslims are Shiites,
Faris said, they comprise almost the entire population of Iran and 60
percent of Iraq's population. "The Shiites have a hierarchical religious
system, which is much more structured and authoritative than the Sunnis," he
said. "As such, their religious leadership plays a major role. Plus, the
religious laity among the Shiites is much more in touch with the heartbeat
of the Shiite society, unlike the Sunnis, who are more [like] government
functionaries."

The split between Shia and Sunni Islam arose in the seventh century in a
dispute between rival camps over who should succeed the Prophet Muhammed as
the leader of Muslims. The split was cemented at the Battle of Kerbala in
what is now Iraq.

Last February, Ken Adelman, arms-control director during the Reagan
administration, wrote an opinion piece in the Washington Post claiming that
demolishing Saddam Hussein's military power "would be a cakewalk". Adelman,
an assistant to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld from 1975 to 1977, and
other Bush administration sympathizers have predicted that the Shiites in
southern Iraq would welcome the U.S. army as liberators against Saddam
Hussein's Sunni-dominated regime.

Faris said that the U.S. government's claim that it is bringing "liberty and
democracy" to Iraq belies the reality of what the Arab world is seeing on
television screens every night. As a result, he said, the U.S.-led forces
have already lost the political battle for people's minds and hearts.

"Destruction of Baghdad and the burning of a city of five million people
becomes bringing liberty to Iraqis?" Faris said. "You can imagine what it
means to Iraqis and to other Arabs, Muslims, and all fair-minded people
around the world watching these scenes."

Faris said there is no doubt that a sector of Iraqi society welcomes the
U.S.-led invasion, and some will benefit from the U.S. presence. He said
that many others have been hurt by Hussein's regime and will stand and wave
the American flag.

However, Faris predicted that a large number of Iraqis will "take a hostile
position" to the American and British forces after the war ends. "The
occupation forces will find themselves in quicksand, exactly like what
happened to the Americans and the Israelis before them in Lebanon," he said.
 --=====================_8674122==_.ALT-- From jafujii@uci.edu Fri Apr 4 06:21:33 2003 From: jafujii@uci.edu (Jim Fujii) Date: Thu, 03 Apr 2003 22:21:33 -0800 Subject: [Ethnicstudies] Alexander Coburn, Apr 9, 7 p.m., Chapman U Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20030403222117.00ba25c8@benfranklin.hnet.uci.edu> --=====================_9166390==_.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed Real Wars & Press Wars Alexander Cockburn 7pm Beckman Hall 404 April 9, 2003 Free and Open to the Public Alexander Cockburn will discuss press coverage of the war with Iraq and related issues. He coedits the website and newsletter CounterPunch, is a regular columnist for The Nation and writes a syndicated newspaper column. Regarded by many as America's foremost radical journalist and press critic, he has coauthored such books as Whiteout: Drugs, the CIA and the Press and his own Corruptions of Empire and The Golden Age is in Us have been steady sellers for years. He lives in Humboldt County, northern California. The lecture is sponsored by the Delp-Wilkinson Peace Endowment and the Jill Sinclair Fund. For further information please call 714-997-6556. ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~--> Make Money Online Auctions! Make $500.00 or We Will Give You Thirty Dollars for Trying! http://us.click.yahoo.com/yMx78A/fNtFAA/i5gGAA/sitolB/TM ---------------------------------------------------------------------~-> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ --=====================_9166390==_.ALT Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii" Real Wars & Press Wars
Alexander Cockburn

7pm Beckman Hall 404
April 9, 2003

Free and Open to the Public

Alexander Cockburn will discuss press coverage of the war with Iraq and related
issues.  He coedits the website and newsletter CounterPunch, is a regular
columnist for The Nation and writes a syndicated newspaper column.  Regarded by
many as America's foremost radical journalist and press critic, he has
coauthored such books as Whiteout: Drugs, the CIA and the Press and his own
Corruptions of Empire and The Golden Age is in Us have been steady sellers for
years.  He lives in Humboldt County, northern California.

The lecture is sponsored by the Delp-Wilkinson Peace Endowment and the Jill
Sinclair Fund.  For further information please call 714-997-6556.


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--=====================_9166390==_.ALT-- From jafujii@uci.edu Fri Apr 4 15:04:56 2003 From: jafujii@uci.edu (Jim Fujii) Date: Fri, 04 Apr 2003 07:04:56 -0800 Subject: [Ethnicstudies] Western Journalists Beaten, Starved by Americans Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20030404070446.00b9e008@benfranklin.hnet.uci.edu> --=====================_441845==_.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable http://www.arabnews.com/Article.asp?ID=3D24644 >From Arab News (Saudi Arabia) SAUDI ARABIA'S FIRST ENGLISH DAILY Friday, April 04, 2003 / 2 Safar 1424 Exclusive: Western Journalists Beaten, Starved by Americans Essam Al-Ghalib, Arab News War Correspondent KUWAIT CITY, 3 April 2003 =97 Two Western journalists have arrived safely back in Kuwait City after being arrested, beaten up and deprived of food and water in Iraq =97 by members of the US Army=92s military police. Arab News has learned that Luis Castro and Victor Silva, both reporters working for RTP Portuguese television, were held for four days, had their equipment, vehicle and video tapes confiscated, and were then escorted out of Iraq by the 101st Airborne Division. Despite possessing the proper =93Unilateral Journalist=94 accreditation issued by the Coalition Forces Central Command, both journalists were detained. Their ordeal at the hands of the Americans is in stark contrast to that received by Newsday journalists in Baghdad, who yesterday in Jordan described as =93humane=94 their treatment at the hands of their Iraqi interrogators despite suffering various indignities. =93I have covered 10 wars in the past six years =97 in Angola, Afghanistan, Zaire, and East Timor. I have been arrested three times in Africa, but have never been subjected to such treatment or been physically beaten before,=94 Castro said in an exclusive interview with Arab News. =93The Americans call themselves liberators and freedom fighters, but look what they have done to us,=94 he added. Castro and Silva entered Iraq 10 days ago. They had been to Umm Qasr and Basra and were traveling to Najaf when they were stopped by the military police. According to Castro, their accredited identification was checked and they were given the all clear to proceed. =93Suddenly, for no reason, the situation changed,=94 Castro told Arab News. =93We were ordered down on the ground by the soldiers. They stepped on our hands and backs and handcuffed us. =93We were put in our own car. The soldiers used our satellite phones to call their families at home. I begged them to allow me to use my own phone to call my family, but they refused. When I protested, they pushed me to the ground and kicked me in the ribs and legs.=94 =93I believe the reason we were detained was because we are not embedded with the US forces,=94 he continued. =93Embedded journalists are always escorted by military minders. What they write is controlled and, through them, the military feeds its own version of the facts to the world. When independent journalists such as us come around, we pose a threat because they cannot control what we write.=94 After being held for four days, they were transported to the 101st Airborne Division to be escorted out of Iraq. Castro told Arab News: =93A lieutenant in charge of the military police told me, =91My men are like dogs, they are trained only to attack, please try to understand=92.=94 The journalists were then transported by truck to Camp Udairi to await a helicopter transfer out of Iraq. At Camp Udairi, they told their stories to members of the US Marines. One soldier, who Castro asked not be identified, wrote out a note, which was shown to Arab News. The note said: =93I am so sorry that you had to endure such bad conditions, but remember that I care and pray you can forgive.=94 =93The Americans in Iraq are totally crazy and are afraid of everything that moves. I would have expected this to happen to us at the hands of the Iraqis, but not at the hands of the Americans. This is typical of the American attitude, as related to us by British forces. The attitude is =91shoot first and ask questions later=92=94, Castro added. Castro, a veteran journalist, has had all his tapes and equipment returned to him, but not his jeep. When asked by Arab News what he intends to do next, he replied: =93Return to Iraq as soon as possible to tell the truth to the world about what is happening there.=94 __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Tax Center - File online, calculators, forms, and more http://tax.yahoo.com ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~--> Make Money Online Auctions! Make $500.00 or We Will Give You Thirty Dollars= =20 for Trying! http://us.click.yahoo.com/yMx78A/fNtFAA/i5gGAA/sitolB/TM ---------------------------------------------------------------------~-> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ --=====================_441845==_.ALT Content-Type: text/html; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable http://www.arabnews.com/Article.asp?ID=3D24644
>From Arab News (Saudi Arabia)

SAUDI ARABIA'S FIRST ENGLISH DAILY

Friday, April 04, 2003 / 2 Safar 1424

Exclusive: Western Journalists Beaten, Starved by
Americans

Essam Al-Ghalib, Arab News War Correspondent

KUWAIT CITY, 3 April 2003 =97 Two Western journalists
have arrived safely back in Kuwait City after being
arrested, beaten up and deprived of food and water in
Iraq =97 by members of the US Army=92s military police.

Arab News has learned that Luis Castro and Victor
Silva, both reporters working for RTP Portuguese
television, were held for four days, had their
equipment, vehicle and video tapes confiscated, and
were then escorted out of Iraq by the 101st Airborne
Division.

Despite possessing the proper =93Unilateral Journalist=94
accreditation issued by the Coalition Forces Central
Command, both journalists were detained.

Their ordeal at the hands of the Americans is in stark
contrast to that received by Newsday journalists in
Baghdad, who yesterday in Jordan described as =93humane=94
their treatment at the hands of their Iraqi
interrogators despite suffering various indignities.
=93I have covered 10 wars in the past six years =97 in
Angola, Afghanistan, Zaire, and East Timor. I have
been arrested three times in Africa, but have never
been subjected to such treatment or been physically
beaten before,=94 Castro said in an exclusive interview
with Arab News.

=93The Americans call themselves liberators and freedom
fighters, but look what they have done to us,=94 he
added.

Castro and Silva entered Iraq 10 days ago. They had
been to Umm Qasr and Basra and were traveling to Najaf
when they were stopped by the military police.

According to Castro, their accredited identification
was checked and they were given the all clear to
proceed.

=93Suddenly, for no reason, the situation changed,=94
Castro told Arab News. =93We were ordered down on the
ground by the soldiers. They stepped on our hands and
backs and handcuffed us.

=93We were put in our own car. The soldiers used our
satellite phones to call their families at home. I
begged them to allow me to use my own phone to call my
family, but they refused. When I protested, they
pushed me to the ground and kicked me in the ribs and
legs.=94

=93I believe the reason we were detained was because we
are not embedded with the US forces,=94 he continued.
=93Embedded journalists are always escorted by military
minders. What they write is controlled and, through
them, the military feeds its own version of the facts
to the world. When independent journalists such as us
come around, we pose a threat because they cannot
control what we write.=94

After being held for four days, they were transported
to the 101st Airborne Division to be escorted out of
Iraq.

Castro told Arab News: =93A lieutenant in charge of the
military police told me, =91My men are like dogs, they
are trained only to attack, please try to
understand=92.=94

The journalists were then transported by truck to Camp
Udairi to await a helicopter transfer out of Iraq. At
Camp Udairi, they told their stories to members of the
US Marines.

One soldier, who Castro asked not be identified, wrote
out a note, which was shown to Arab News. The note
said: =93I am so sorry that you had to endure such bad
conditions, but remember that I care and pray you can
forgive.=94

=93The Americans in Iraq are totally crazy and are
afraid of everything that moves. I would have expected
this to happen to us at the hands of the Iraqis, but
not at the hands of the Americans. This is typical of
the American attitude, as related to us by British
forces. The attitude is =91shoot first and ask questions
later=92=94, Castro added.

Castro, a veteran journalist, has had all his tapes
and equipment returned to him, but not his jeep.

When asked by Arab News what he intends to do next, he
replied: =93Return to Iraq as soon as possible to tell
the truth to the world about what is happening there.=94



__________________________________________________
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--=====================_441845==_.ALT-- From jafujii@UCI.EDU Fri Apr 4 15:01:44 2003 From: jafujii@UCI.EDU (Jim Fujii) Date: Fri, 04 Apr 2003 07:01:44 -0800 Subject: [Ethnicstudies] [OCCP] http://english.aljazeera.net/ Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20030404070101.00b37700@benfranklin.hnet.uci.edu> --=====================_250590==_.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed Al Jazeera is now back in service: http://english.aljazeera.net/ Sincerely, Duane J. Roberts duaneroberts92804@yahoo.com __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Tax Center - File online, calculators, forms, and more http://tax.yahoo.com ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~--> Save Smiley. Help put Messenger back in the office. http://us.click.yahoo.com/4PqtEC/anyFAA/i5gGAA/sitolB/TM ---------------------------------------------------------------------~-> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ --=====================_250590==_.ALT Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii" Al Jazeera is now back in service:

http://english.aljazeera.net/

Sincerely,

Duane J. Roberts
duaneroberts92804@yahoo.com

__________________________________________________
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--=====================_250590==_.ALT-- From jafujii@uci.edu Fri Apr 4 18:08:17 2003 From: jafujii@uci.edu (Jim Fujii) Date: Fri, 04 Apr 2003 10:08:17 -0800 Subject: [Ethnicstudies] Fwd: Update 4/4: Anti-war Calendar for Orange County Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20030404100755.01b49350@benfranklin.hnet.uci.edu> --=====================_11442723==_.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable CONTENTS #1 Newport Beach Film Festival April 4th-13th #2 Big Business Day Saturday April 5th, Huntington Beach #3 Conference about Iraq at Soka U. Sunday, April 6th #4 Sonali Kolhatkar & Tahmeen Faryal at Saddleback Wednesday, April 9 #5 Alexander Cockburn at Chapman U. April 9th #6 Alexander Cockburn at UCI April 10th #7 Taxation & War April 12th in Huntington Beach #8 ACLU Speaker at Church in Costa Mesa April 13th #9 ACLU-OC Meeting in Costa Mesa 7:00pm April 15 EIGHT REGULAR WEEKLY VIGILS: #1 Laguna Woods Wednesday 4:30 to 5:30 pm #2 Orange Wednesday Evenings #3 Fullerton Wednesday Evenings #4 Costa Mesa Friday evenings (Expanded hours: 5:00 -9:30 PM) #5 Laguna Beach Saturdays at 11 AM #6 Huntington Beach Sunday afternoons #7 Brea Saturday & Sunday afternoons #8 Huntington Beach Sunday evenings ******************************************************* #1 Newport Beach Film Festival April 4th-13th The Newport Beach Film Festival opens today and continues through April 13 at four locations in Newport. In addition to many features and short films, the festival includes several documentaries on political themes. Some of these are: The Last Zapatistas Veterans of the 1917 Mexican revolution tell their stories, Apr. 8, 6:30 pm at Orange County Museum of Art Unprecedented: The 2000 Presidential Election Apr. 8, 2:00 pm at Orange County Museum of Art Untouchables vs. Aryans: The Battle for the Soul of India Apr. 10, 11:00 am at Edwards Island Cinemas (Fashion Island) Tibet: Cry of the Snow Lion Apr. 6, 4:30 pm, Lido Cinema The Road to Reconciliation A look at three decades of violence in Northern Ireland Apr. 9, 11:00 am at Edwards Island (Fashion Island) Strange Fruit The history of the haunting song about lynching. Apr. 7, 2:00 pm, OC Museum of Art Lolita: Slave to Entertainment A story of whales in Puget Sound Apr. 6, 3:30 pm OC Museum of Art Life After War Post-Taliban Afghanistan Apr. 9, 7:00 pm, at Edwards Island (Fashion Island) Hip Hop Hope Alternative, underground view of the Trade Center attack Apr. 5, 6:30 pm OC Museum of Art Children of the Crocodile The struggle for freedom in East Timor as viewed by two exiled women. Apr. 9, 12:30 pm at at Edwards Island (Fashion Island) For a complete schedule, visit newportbeachfilmfest.com ******************************************************* #2 Saturday April 5th, 2003 12:00-2:00pm Big Business Day 2003 Boeing Defense Park 5301 Bolsa Ave Huntington Beach, CA 92647 (Meet at the corner of Graham and Bolsa) Stop the Corporate War on Democracy Corporations have too much power. We see everyday how our society, economy, government's foreign policy, its legal and electoral systems, culture, and environment are shaped by the profit-based whims of giant multinational corporations. America's corporate driven political economy is on a collision course with democracy. Problems including corruption of U.S. elections, sweatshops in Malaysia, oil exploitation in Africa, militarization of space, the commercialization of childhood, loss of critical ecosystems and the ongoing drive to war are all to some degree rooted in corporate abuse of power. Giant corporations are structured to place greed over the needs of people, the interests of the natural world, and the requirements of democracy. We must reverse this trend. Why target Boeing? Because they make, profit from and aggressively promote the weapons of war. They should be held responsible for the effects of their product. The purpose of many of these products is mass destruction. Boeing profits from this. Boeing produces the F18 Super Hornet strike fighter the F15 Eagle multirole fighter, the F22 Raptor stealth fighter, the RAH66 Comanche reconnaissance helicopter, the AV-8B Harrier II vertical/short-takeoff-and-landing multimission fighter, and the Apache combat helicopter among other weapons and weapons systems. Boeing is also the prime contractor for the U.S. Air Force Airborne Laser program. For more information on Big Business Day visit the Citizens Works website at www.citizenworks.org. They have an extensive Big Business Day Manual. For more information on the Boeing corporation visit their site at http://www.boeing.com/ids/ids-back/index.html Show Bush and the other warmongers we are not being distracted by the rush to war with Iraq. We not only protest the war on Iraq but the insane desire to keep our country in a permanent war econony with the only product being more death and misery while a small sliver profit. See you on April 5th Thomas Lash Coastal Convergence Society Huntington Beach, CA Phone: 714-964-2162 Email: ccshbca@aol.com Website: www.tokyoprogressive.org/~ccshbca ****************************************************** #3 Conference about Iraq at Soka U. Sunday, April 6th WHAT ABOUT THE WAR? How is the war affecting you? Are you getting the information you need from the News? Join a community discussion group to share your concerns, ask questions, or just listen. Sunday, April 6, 2003 2:00 p.m. Soka University 4th Floor Reading Room of the Ikeda Library 1 University Drive Aliso Viejo, CA Mark Gery, an Iraq scholar from EPIC, Washington, D.C. will offer information and respond to questions. The discussion groups will be moderated. All discussions will be free from criticism and arguments; all questions and viewpoints will be honored We invite you to email your questions in advance to questions@NewVisionsForAmerica.net so that we may address them during the discussions. Please bring a curious friend or acquaintance who also would like to know more. Brought to you by A.W.A.R.E. (A World Awakening Requires Education) ****************************************************** #4 SONALI KOLHATKAR (KPFK 90.7) & TAHMEEN FARYAL (RAWA) TEACH-IN WED. APRIL 9 "AFGHANISTAN AS A MODEL FOR IRAQ: THE RETHORIC OF LIBERATION" Wednesday April 9, 2003, 12:00-1:30 PM SADDLEBACK COLLEGE GYM (P.E 200) 28000 Marguerite Pkwy. Mission Viejo, CA 92692 FREE PARKING FOR EVENT IN LOTS # 13 & 5 A Teach =AD In by SONAL KOLHATKAR Vice President of the AFGHAN WOMEN=92S MISSION & Host of the MORNING SHOW on KPFK 90.7 FM & TAHMEENA FARYAL of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) For more information Contact: 949-436-1188 OR scavalonclub@yahoo.com Sonali Kolhatkar is the Vice President of The Afghan Women's Mission, Host of The Morning Show on 90.7 KPFK, and a writer who has has written numerous published articles. The 1 1/2 hour teach-in will look at the "War on Terrorism" that has been waged since 9/11 in Afghanistan, and the current target Iraq. It will look at how the goal of rooting out terrorism quickly turned into one of liberating the Afghan people from the Taliban. Once the hunt for Osama Bin Laden proved more difficult that the Bush Administration imagined, the target quickly became Iraq. The U.S is now on the verge of launching a brutal war against the Iraqi people, once more to liberate them through bombs. Donald Rumsfeld, US Defense Secretary has hailed Afghanistan as a model for Iraq. What are the implications of this for the people of Iraq? How will this war affect the women of Iraq? and what does it mean to be liberate a people through war? Sonali will will attempt to answer these and more questions at the teach-in. OPEN TO THE PUBLIC & ALL CAMPUS CLUBS Tahmeena Faryal is one of the leading spokeswomen of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA). The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) is the oldest political women's organization in Afghanistan. RAWA was founded in 1977 and after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, they joined the anti-Soviet resistance and rejected the fundamentalist ideologies of the US-backed Mujahadeen. To find out more about RAWA, visit there website at www.rawa.org. DIRECTIONS: Driving Directions: North or Southbound on the Interstate 5 Freeway: 1. Exit Avery 2. Tur n East on Avery 3. Cross Marguerite Parkway and go left into Saddleback College Avery Entrance FREE PARKING FOR EVENT IN LOT # 1, 13 & 5 on Saddleback Campus For more information, please contact scavalonclub@yahoo.com OR 949-436-1188 BROUGHT TO YOU BY: Saddleback College Avalon Club, Sign Language Club, Poetry Club, and The Gay & Straight Alliance Club & Saddleback College Students Against War ******************************************************* #5 Alexander Cockburn at Chapman U. April 9th Press Wars Alexander Cockburn 7pm Beckman Hall 404 April 9, 2003 Free and Open to the Public Alexander Cockburn will discuss press coverage of the war with Iraq and related issues. He coedits the website and newsletter CounterPunch, is a regular columnist for The Nation and writes a syndicated newspaper column. Regarded by many as America=92s foremost radical journalist and press critic, he has coauthored such books as Whiteout: Drugs, the CIA and the Press and his own Corruptions of Empire and The Golden Age is in Us have been steady sellers for years. He lives in Humboldt County, northern California. The lecture is sponsored by the Delp-Wilkinson Peace Endowment and the Jill Sinclair Fund. For further information please call 714-997-6556. ******************************************************* #6 Alexander Cockburn at UCI April 10th From: Paula Garb Alexander Cockburn Coeditor of CounterPunch, columnist for The Nation "Wars without End: How Many Iraqs?" Thursday, April 10, 2003 3:30-5:00 PM Social Science Plaza A, Room 1100 See the International Studies Program web site http://hypatia.ss.uci.edu/istudies The lecture series is free and open to the public. For more information, contact Paula Garb in the International Studies office at (949) 824-8687 People with disabilities may call this number for accommodations. ************************************************* #7 Taxation & War April 12th in Huntington Beach No Taxation without Representation Do you know where your tax money is going on April 15th? Do you realize that almost 50% of your hard-earned tax dollars are being spent on the U.S. military-industrial complex? What about the 40 million+ Americans without healthcare? What about California schools ranking 46th in the nation? What about the threat to our environment - clean oceans? Logging old-growth trees? Do you feel safer now with the Homeland Security Dept. in place and Patriot Act in full force (Patriot II coming)? Join us for an afternoon of music, speakers, open mic, nonviolent training info. and food provided by Food not Bombs. WHEN: Sat., April 12th from 11 am to 2 pm WHERE: Lake Park, Huntington Beach (cross streets Main St./11thSt/Crest St.) WHO: Sponsored by Green Party of Orange County and O.C. Peace Coalition (made up of 23 local peace grps.) WHY: Because the war machine is taking over our planet and a more just world is possible Let's take the first step in creating a new reality. Meet like-minded peace activists to discuss alternatives - get phone numbers to call you representatives - bring your family, friends, neighbors, coworkers and peace signs NO TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION! MINIMUM OF 75 BILLION BUDGETED FOR INVASION OF IRAQ... HOW COULD THIS MONEY BE SPENT? SAT., APRIL 12TH - MARCH DOWN MAIN ST. TO HUNTINGTON BEACH PIER PAST CONGRESSMAN DANA ROHRABACHER'S OFFICE SPEAK OUT - YOU CAN'T AFFORD TO BE SILENT www.ocpeace.org 949/559-7336 ************************************************* #8 ACLU Speaker at Church in Costa Mesa April 13th Speaker: Steve Rohde, past president of the Southern California Affiliate Board of the ACLU Topic: Civil Liberties and the Patriot Act. Time: April 13 at 9:15 AM and again at 11:00 AM services Location: Orange Coast Unitarian Universalist Church, 1259 Victoria Street, Costa Mesa Contact: 949-646-4652, www.ocuuc.org. ************************************************* #9 American Civil Liberties Union ACLU-OC Chapter Monthly Meeting Time: 7:00pm April 15, 2003 Location: Unitarian Church, 1259 Victoria, Costa Mesa Featured speaker: Liz Schroeder, Associate Director of ACLU-Southern California Topic: What's keeping ACLU-SC busy lately--an update on the Affiliate since September 2002. ************************************************ EIGHT REGULAR WEEKLY VIGILS AGAINST THE WAR IN ORANGE COUNTY ARE STILL GOING ON. SEE BELOW. ************************************************* #1 Every Wednesday 4:30 to 5:30 pm in Laguna Woods: From: nookno@webtv.net WOMEN IN BLACK; LAGUNA WOODS HISTORY: Since 1976, Argentenian women, dressed in black, have walked silently in a central plaza every week to commemorate and mourn the thousands of their loved ones who "disappeared" during the military coup. These women were the inspiration for the international movement of Women in Black that originated in Jerusalem in 1988 -- and within a few years has spread to many other countries of the world. CURRENT STATUS; Women in Black is now an international peace network of women of all denominations and nationalities who hold weekly vigils to protest war, violence and human -right abuses. The New York City group mourns 9/11, and at the same time opposes the US attack on Iraq. STRUCTURE; Each group is an independent local organization, setting its own policy and guidelines for a weekly vigil. THE VIGILS ARE SILENT BECAUSE WORDS ARE INADEQUATE TO EXPRESS THE TRAGEDY CAUSED BY WARS AND HATRED. BLACK IS WORN AS A SYMBOL OF SORROW FORALL VICTIMS OF WAR, AND FOR THE DESTRUCTION OF PEOPLE, NATURE AND THE FABRIC OF LIFE. WORLDWIDE RECOGNITION; The global Women in Black network was awarded the Millennium Peace Prize sponsred by UNIFEM in 2001 and has been nominated for the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize by the American Friends Service Committee. LOCAL GROUP; Women are invited to dress in black and join in a silent vigil for all victims of war - every Wednesday from 4:30 to 5:30 pm in front of the Laguna Woods City Hall, located near the corner of El Toro and Moulton in Laguna Woods. ************************************************* #2 EVERY WEDNESDAY EVENING IN ORANGE: From: D F A weekly peaceful demonstration against war, promoting world peace has begun in the city of Orange. We meet on Wednesdays, from 5-7 p.m., at the corner of Tustin and Chapman Aves. in the city of Orange. Park in the RiteAid shopping center. The volume of work traffic feeding from the 55, 57, and 22 freeways is large at this site. Bring signs w/large lettering. Encourage ALL to attend: friends, family, neighbors, coworkers. In unity we CAN make a difference! ************************************************ #3 EVERY WEDNESDAY EVENING IN FULLERTON 4-6 PM From: "dorian hunter" Fullerton Neighbors Against War will demonstrate against the war every Wednesday afternoon from 4:00 p.m. until 6:00 p. m. at the corner of Chapman Avenue and Harbor Blvd. Bring signs and wear pink. ************************************************ #4 EVERY FRIDAY EVENING IN COSTA MESA: At the corner of Bristol & Anton (in front of major entrance to South Coast Plaza) >From 5:00 -9:30 PM A long-standing peace vigil to say "NO" to the invasion of Iraq. Chuck asks us to bring noise makers and new signs. (The old ones have been disappearing.) This has generally been the biggest of the weekly vigils. South Coast Plaza has been keeping us away from their parking lot, so don't be afraid to walk a little. Police have been watching, so obey the traffic laws. More information: Chuck Anderson: QUETZALCOATL38@aol.com ************************************************** #5 EVERY SATURDAY: PEACE DEMO AT LAGUNA BEACH Please try to join us in this time of crisis. Thanks, Jeanie Bernstein Ongoing weekly - Saturday from 11:00 AM to 1:00 PM, Laguna Beach Vigil for Peace in the Middle East and through out the World. Main Beach, Pacific Coast Highway and Ocean Avenue. There are signs at the vigil, or bring your own message opposing the "War against Terrorism", the pending threat of a US invasion of Iraq, and demanding nonviolent solutions to conflict. For more information call 949-499-3190 ************************************************** #6 EVERY SUNDAY IN HUNTINGTON BEACH: Protest the impending attack on Iraq: Corner of Edinger & Springdale (across from Marina High School) 12:30-2:00 Contact: cecilpowers@yahoo.com *************************************************** #7 EVERY SATURDAY & SUNDAY AFTERNOON IN BREA: From: SleepnRvr51@aol.com ANTI-WAR DEMONSTRATION / PEACE RALLY EVERY SATURDAY AND SUNDAY 12:00 noon to 6:00pm Corner of Imperial Hwy. and Brea Blvd. in Brea Any questions please reach me via email: SleepnRvr51@aol.com or my cell: (714) 931-4264 ************************************************* #8 EVERY SUNDAY EVENING IN HUNTINGTON BEACH: From: CCSHBCA@aol.com There will be a Sunday evening candlelight vigil from 7-8pm until the war stops. Meet at Main and PCH at the Huntington Beach pier. We support our troops: we want them home alive. ************************************************* ________________________________________________________________ Sign Up for Juno Platinum Internet Access Today Only $9.95 per month! Visit www.juno.com ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~--> Save Smiley. Help put Messenger back in the office. http://us.click.yahoo.com/4PqtEC/anyFAA/i5gGAA/sitolB/TM ---------------------------------------------------------------------~-> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ --=====================_11442723==_.ALT Content-Type: text/html; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable CONTENTS

#1  Newport Beach Film Festival April 4th-13th
#2  Big Business Day Saturday April 5th,
         Huntington Beach
#3  Conference about Iraq at Soka U. Sunday, April 6th
#4  Sonali Kolhatkar & Tahmeen Faryal at Saddleback
       Wednesday, April 9
#5  Alexander Cockburn at Chapman U. April 9th
#6  Alexander Cockburn at UCI April 10th
#7  Taxation & War April 12th in Huntington Beach
#8   ACLU Speaker at Church in Costa Mesa April 13th
#9   ACLU-OC Meeting  in Costa Mesa 7:00pm April 15


     EIGHT REGULAR WEEKLY VIGILS:
        #1  Laguna Woods Wednesday 4:30 to 5:30 pm
        #2  Orange Wednesday Evenings
        #3  Fullerton Wednesday Evenings
        #4  Costa Mesa Friday evenings (Expanded
            &nbs= p; hours: 5:00 -9:30 PM)
        #5  Laguna Beach Saturdays at 11 AM
        #6  Huntington Beach Sunday afternoons
        #7  Brea Saturday & Sunday afternoons
        #8  Huntington Beach Sunday evenings
*******************************************************
#1  Newport Beach Film Festival April 4th-13th

The Newport Beach Film Festival opens today and continues
through April 13 at four locations in Newport.  In addition to
many features and short films, the festival includes several
documentaries on political themes.  Some of these are:

The Last Zapatistas
Veterans of the 1917 Mexican revolution tell their stories,
Apr. 8, 6:30 pm at Orange County Museum of Art

Unprecedented:  The 2000 Presidential Election
Apr. 8, 2:00 pm at Orange County Museum of Art

Untouchables vs. Aryans:  The Battle for the Soul of India
Apr. 10, 11:00 am at Edwards Island Cinemas (Fashion Island)

Tibet:  Cry of the Snow Lion
Apr. 6, 4:30 pm, Lido Cinema

The Road to Reconciliation
A look at three decades of violence in Northern Ireland
Apr. 9, 11:00 am at Edwards Island (Fashion Island)

Strange Fruit
The history of the haunting song about lynching.
Apr. 7, 2:00 pm, OC Museum of Art

Lolita:  Slave to Entertainment
A story of whales in Puget Sound
Apr. 6, 3:30 pm OC Museum of Art

Life After War
Post-Taliban Afghanistan
Apr. 9, 7:00 pm, at Edwards Island (Fashion Island)

Hip Hop Hope
Alternative, underground view of the Trade Center attack
Apr. 5, 6:30 pm OC Museum of Art

Children of the Crocodile
The struggle for freedom in East Timor as viewed by
two exiled women.
Apr. 9, 12:30 pm at at Edwards Island (Fashion Island)


For a complete schedule, visit newportbeachfilmfest.com

*******************************************************
#2  Saturday April 5th, 2003 12:00-2:00pm
      Big Business Day 2003
      Boeing Defense Park 5301 Bolsa Ave
      Huntington Beach, CA 92647
      (Meet at the corner of Graham and Bolsa)

Stop the Corporate War on Democracy
Corporations have too much power. We see everyday how
our society, economy, government's foreign policy, its legal
and electoral systems, culture, and environment are shaped
by the profit-based whims of giant multinational corporations.
America's corporate driven political economy is on a collision
course with democracy.

Problems including corruption of U.S. elections, sweatshops
in Malaysia, oil exploitation in Africa, militarization of space,
the commercialization of childhood, loss of critical ecosystems
and the ongoing drive to war are all to some degree rooted
in corporate abuse of power. Giant corporations are structured
to place greed over the needs of people, the interests of the
natural world, and the requirements of democracy. We must
reverse this trend.

Why target Boeing?  Because they make, profit from and
aggressively promote the weapons of war.  They should
be held responsible for the effects of their product. The
purpose of many of these products is mass destruction.
Boeing profits from this. Boeing produces the F18 Super
Hornet strike fighter the F15 Eagle multirole fighter, the
F22 Raptor stealth fighter, the RAH66 Comanche
reconnaissance helicopter, the AV-8B Harrier II
vertical/short-takeoff-and-landing multimission fighter,
and the Apache combat helicopter among other weapons
and weapons systems.  Boeing is also the prime contractor
for the U.S. Air Force Airborne Laser program.

For more information on Big Business Day visit the
Citizens Works website at www.citizenworks.org.
They have an extensive Big Business Day Manual.

For more information on the Boeing corporation
visit their site at http://www.boeing.com/ids/ids-back/index.html
Show Bush and the other warmongers we are not
being distracted by the rush to war with Iraq.  We
not only protest the war on Iraq but the insane
desire to keep our country in a permanent war
econony with the only product being more death
and misery while a small sliver profit. 

See you on April 5th

Thomas Lash
Coastal Convergence Society
Huntington Beach, CA
Phone: 714-964-2162
Email: ccshbca@aol.com
Website: www.tokyoprogressive.org/~ccshbca
******************************************************
#3  Conference about Iraq at Soka U. Sunday, April 6th

WHAT ABOUT THE WAR?

How is the war affecting you?
Are you getting the information you need from the News?

Join a community discussion group to share your concerns,
ask questions, or just listen.

Sunday, April 6, 2003
2:00 p.m.
Soka University
4th Floor Reading Room of the Ikeda Library
1 University Drive
Aliso Viejo, CA

Mark Gery, an Iraq scholar from EPIC, Washington, D.C.
will offer information and respond to questions.

The discussion groups will be moderated.
All discussions will be free from criticism and arguments;
all questions and viewpoints will be honored

We invite you to email your questions in advance to
questions@NewVisionsForAmerica.net
so that we may address them during the discussions.

Please bring a curious friend or acquaintance who
also would like to know more.

Brought to you by A.W.A.R.E.
(A World Awakening Requires Education)

******************************************************
#4  SONALI KOLHATKAR (KPFK 90.7) &
       TAHMEEN FARYAL (RAWA) TEACH-IN WED. APRIL 9

"AFGHANISTAN  AS  A  MODEL  FOR =20 IRAQ:
  THE  RETHORIC OF  LIBERATION"

Wednesday April 9, 2003, 12:00-1:30 PM
SADDLEBACK COLLEGE GYM (P.E 200)
28000 Marguerite Pkwy. Mission Viejo, CA 92692

FREE PARKING FOR EVENT IN LOTS # 13 & 5

A Teach =AD In  by  SONAL KOLHATKAR Vice President of =20
the AFGHAN   WOMEN=92S MISSION  & Host of the MORNING
SHOW on KPFK 90.7 FM
&
TAHMEENA FARYAL of the Revolutionary Association of
the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA)

For more information  Contact:
949-436-1188
OR
scavalonclub@yahoo.com

Sonali Kolhatkar is the Vice President of The Afghan
Women's Mission, Host of The Morning Show on 90.7
KPFK, and a writer who has has written numerous
published articles.

The 1 1/2 hour teach-in will look at the "War on
Terrorism" that has been waged since 9/11 in
Afghanistan, and the current target Iraq. It will look
at how the goal of rooting out terrorism quickly
turned into one of liberating the Afghan people from
the Taliban. Once the hunt for Osama Bin Laden proved
more difficult that the Bush Administration imagined,
the target quickly became Iraq. The U.S is now on the
verge of launching a brutal war against the Iraqi
people, once more to liberate them through bombs.
Donald Rumsfeld, US Defense Secretary has hailed
Afghanistan as a model for Iraq. What are the
implications of this for the people of Iraq? How will
this war affect the women of Iraq? and what does it
mean to be liberate a people through war? Sonali will
will attempt to answer these and more questions at the
teach-in.

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC & ALL CAMPUS CLUBS

Tahmeena Faryal is one of the leading spokeswomen of
the Revolutionary Association of the Women of
Afghanistan (RAWA).

The Revolutionary Association of the Women of
Afghanistan (RAWA) is the oldest political women's
organization in Afghanistan. RAWA was founded in
1977 and after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, they
joined the anti-Soviet resistance and rejected the
fundamentalist ideologies of the US-backed Mujahadeen.

To find out more about RAWA, visit there website
at www.rawa.org.

DIRECTIONS:

Driving Directions:

North or Southbound on the Interstate 5 Freeway:
1. Exit Avery
2. Tur n East on Avery
3. Cross Marguerite Parkway and
go left into Saddleback College Avery Entrance

FREE PARKING FOR EVENT IN LOT # 1, 13 & 5 on
Saddleback Campus

For more information, please contact
scavalonclub@yahoo.com
OR 949-436-1188

BROUGHT TO YOU BY: Saddleback College Avalon Club,

Sign Language Club, Poetry Club, and The Gay &
Straight Alliance Club & Saddleback College Students
Against War
*******************************************************
#5  Alexander Cockburn at Chapman U. April 9th

Press Wars

Alexander Cockburn

7pm Beckman Hall 404
April 9, 2003

Free and Open to the Public

Alexander Cockburn will discuss press coverage
of the war with Iraq and related issues.  He coedits
the website and newsletter CounterPunch, is a
regular columnist for The Nation and writes a
syndicated newspaper column.  Regarded by
many as America=92s foremost radical journalist and
press critic, he has coauthored such books as
Whiteout: Drugs, the CIA and the Press and his
own Corruptions of Empire and The Golden Age
is in Us have been steady sellers for years.  He
lives in Humboldt County, northern California.

The lecture is sponsored by the Delp-Wilkinson
Peace Endowment and the Jill Sinclair Fund. 
For further information please call 714-997-6556.
*******************************************************
#6  Alexander Cockburn at UCI April 10th

From: Paula Garb <pgarb@uci.edu>

Alexander Cockburn
Coeditor of CounterPunch, columnist for The Nation

"Wars without End: How Many Iraqs?"

Thursday, April 10, 2003
3:30-5:00 PM
Social Science Plaza A, Room 1100

See the International Studies Program web site
http://hyp= atia.ss.uci.edu/istudies The lecture
series is free and open to the public.

For more information, contact Paula Garb in the
International Studies office at (949) 824-8687
People with disabilities may call this number for
accommodations.
*************************************************
#7  Taxation & War April 12th in Huntington Beach

No Taxation without Representation

Do you know where your tax money is going on April 15th?
Do you realize that almost 50% of your hard-earned tax
dollars are being spent on the U.S. military-industrial
complex?

What about the 40 million+ Americans without healthcare?
What about California schools ranking 46th in the nation?
What about the threat to our environment - clean oceans?
  Logging old-growth trees?
Do you feel safer now with the Homeland Security Dept.
in place and Patriot Act in full force (Patriot II coming)?

Join us for an afternoon of music, speakers, open mic,
nonviolent training info. and food provided by Food not Bombs.

WHEN:        Sat., April 12th from 11 am= to 2 pm
WHERE:      Lake Park, Huntington Beach
            &nbs= p;        (cross streets Main= St./11thSt/Crest St.)
WHO:          Sponsored by= Green Party of Orange County
            &nbs= p;       and O.C. Peace Coalition
            &nbs= p;       (made up of 23 local peace grps.)
WHY:          Because the war= machine is taking over
            &nbs= p;      our planet and a more just world is= possible

Let's take the first step in creating a new reality.  Meet
like-minded peace activists to discuss alternatives - get
phone numbers to call you representatives - bring your
family, friends, neighbors, coworkers and peace signs

NO TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION!

MINIMUM OF 75 BILLION BUDGETED FOR INVASION OF IRAQ...
HOW COULD THIS MONEY BE SPENT?
SAT., APRIL 12TH - MARCH DOWN MAIN ST.
TO HUNTINGTON BEACH PIER
PAST CONGRESSMAN DANA ROHRABACHER'S OFFICE
SPEAK OUT - YOU CAN'T AFFORD TO BE SILENT
www.ocpeace.org  949/559-7336
*************************************************
#8  ACLU Speaker at Church in Costa Mesa April 13th

Speaker: Steve Rohde, past president of the Southern
California Affiliate Board of the ACLU

Topic: Civil Liberties and the Patriot Act.
Time: April 13 at 9:15 AM and again at 11:00 AM services
Location: Orange Coast Unitarian Universalist Church,
1259 Victoria Street, Costa Mesa
Contact: 949-646-4652, www.ocuuc.org.

*************************************************
#9 American Civil Liberties Union
ACLU-OC Chapter Monthly Meeting
Time: 7:00pm April 15, 2003
Location: Unitarian Church, 1259 Victoria, Costa Mesa
Featured speaker: Liz Schroeder, Associate Director
            &nbs= p;            &n= bsp;        of ACLU-Southern California=
Topic: What's keeping ACLU-SC busy lately--an update
            on the= Affiliate since September 2002.

************************************************
EIGHT REGULAR WEEKLY VIGILS AGAINST
THE WAR IN ORANGE COUNTY ARE STILL
GOING ON.  SEE BELOW.
*************************************************
#1  Every Wednesday 4:30 to 5:30 pm in Laguna Woods:

From: nookno@webtv.net

WOMEN IN BLACK;  LAGUNA WOODS

HISTORY:  Since 1976, Argentenian women, dressed in
black, have walked silently in a central plaza every week
to commemorate and mourn the thousands of their loved
ones who "disappeared" during the military coup.  These
women were the inspiration for the international movement
of Women in Black that originated in Jerusalem in 1988 --
and within a few years has spread to many other countries
of the world.
CURRENT STATUS; Women in Black is now an
international peace network of women of all denominations
and nationalities who hold weekly vigils to protest war,
violence and human -right abuses.  The New York City
group mourns 9/11, and at the same time opposes the
US attack on Iraq.
STRUCTURE; Each group is an independent local
organization, setting its own policy and guidelines for
a weekly vigil. 
THE VIGILS ARE SILENT BECAUSE WORDS ARE
INADEQUATE TO EXPRESS THE TRAGEDY CAUSED BY
WARS AND HATRED.  BLACK IS WORN AS A SYMBOL OF
SORROW FORALL VICTIMS OF WAR, AND FOR THE
DESTRUCTION OF PEOPLE, NATURE AND THE FABRIC
OF LIFE.
WORLDWIDE RECOGNITION; The global Women in Black
network was awarded the Millennium Peace Prize sponsred
by UNIFEM in 2001 and has been nominated for the 2003
Nobel Peace Prize by the American Friends Service
Committee.

LOCAL GROUP; Women are invited to dress in black and
join in a silent vigil for all victims of war - every Wednesday
from 4:30 to 5:30 pm in front of the Laguna Woods City Hall,
located near the corner of El Toro and Moulton in Laguna
Woods.
*************************************************

#2  EVERY WEDNESDAY EVENING IN ORANGE:

From: D F <ps4erth@yahoo.com>

A weekly peaceful demonstration against war, promoting
world peace has begun in the city of Orange.  We meet
on Wednesdays, from 5-7 p.m., at the corner of Tustin
and Chapman Aves. in the city of Orange.  Park in the
RiteAid shopping center.  The volume of work traffic
feeding from the 55, 57, and 22 freeways is large at this
site.  Bring signs w/large lettering.  Encourage ALL to
attend:  friends, family, neighbors, coworkers.  In unity
we CAN make a difference!
************************************************
#3  EVERY WEDNESDAY EVENING IN FULLERTON 4-6 PM

From: "dorian hunter" <dorianhunter@hotmail.com>

Fullerton Neighbors Against War will demonstrate
against the war every Wednesday afternoon from
4:00 p.m. until 6:00 p. m. at the corner of Chapman
Avenue and Harbor Blvd. Bring signs and wear pink.

************************************************
#4  EVERY FRIDAY EVENING IN COSTA MESA:

At the corner of Bristol & Anton (in front of
major entrance to South Coast Plaza)
>From 5:00 -9:30 PM

A long-standing peace vigil to say "NO"
to the invasion of Iraq.

Chuck asks us to bring noise makers and new
signs.  (The old ones have been disappearing.)
This has generally been the biggest of the weekly
vigils.

South Coast Plaza has been keeping us away
from their parking lot, so don't be afraid to walk
a little.  Police have been watching, so obey the
traffic laws.

More information:  Chuck Anderson:
 QUETZALCOATL38@aol.com
**************************************************
#5  EVERY SATURDAY:

PEACE DEMO AT LAGUNA BEACH
Please try to join us in this time of crisis.
Thanks, Jeanie Bernstein

Ongoing weekly - Saturday from 11:00 AM to
1:00 PM, Laguna Beach Vigil for Peace in the Middle
East and through out the World. Main Beach, Pacific
Coast Highway and Ocean Avenue. There are signs
at the vigil, or bring your own message opposing the
"War against Terrorism", the pending threat of a US
invasion of Iraq, and demanding nonviolent solutions
to conflict. For more information
call 949-499-3190

**************************************************
#6  EVERY SUNDAY IN HUNTINGTON BEACH:

Protest the impending attack on Iraq:

Corner  of Edinger & Springdale (across from
Marina High School) 12:30-2:00     

Contact: cecilpowers@yahoo.com

***************************************************
#7

EVERY SATURDAY & SUNDAY AFTERNOON IN BREA:

From: SleepnRvr51@aol.com

ANTI-WAR DEMONSTRATION / PEACE RALLY
EVERY SATURDAY AND SUNDAY
12:00 noon to 6:00pm
Corner of Imperial Hwy. and Brea Blvd. in Brea

Any questions please reach me via email:
SleepnRvr51@aol.com or my cell: (714) 931-4264
*************************************************
#8 EVERY SUNDAY EVENING IN HUNTINGTON BEACH:

From: CCSHBCA@aol.com

There will be a Sunday evening candlelight vigil from
7-8pm until the war stops. Meet at Main and PCH at the
Huntington Beach pier. We support our  troops:  we want
them home alive.
*************************************************

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--=====================_11442723==_.ALT-- From jafujii@uci.edu Sat Apr 5 00:12:08 2003 From: jafujii@uci.edu (Jim Fujii) Date: Fri, 04 Apr 2003 16:12:08 -0800 Subject: [Ethnicstudies] Outreach Weekend for next week's anti-war protest Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20030404161202.00bb2e38@benfranklin.hnet.uci.edu> --=====================_195521==_.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed Outreach weekend This saturday and sunday we are asking people to come into the office at 422 Western (bet 4th and 5th) at 12 noon and throughout the day to put up posters and hand out leaflets. The next protest in LA on Sunday April 13th at Hollywood and Vine at 12 noon will be part of a weekend of protests worldwide and we want the action in LA to be as big as possible. If you want to download the flyer please go to www.answerla.org and click on downloads. Paul ANSWER 213-487-2368 ------------------ This is the Los Angeles activist announcement list. Anyone can subscribe by sending any message to To unsubscribe --=====================_195521==_.ALT Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii" Outreach weekend

This saturday and sunday we are asking people to come into the office at 422 Western (bet 4th and 5th) at 12 noon and throughout the day to put up posters and hand out leaflets.
The next protest in LA on Sunday April 13th at Hollywood and Vine at 12 noon will be part of a weekend of protests worldwide and we want the action in LA to be as big as possible.

If you want to download the flyer please go to www.answerla.org and click on downloads.

Paul
ANSWER
213-487-2368

------------------
This is the Los Angeles activist announcement
list. Anyone can subscribe by sending any message to <laactivists-subscribe@action-mail.org>

To unsubscribe <laactivists-off@action-mail.org>
 --=====================_195521==_.ALT-- From jafujii@uci.edu Sat Apr 5 00:44:21 2003 From: jafujii@uci.edu (Jim Fujii) Date: Fri, 04 Apr 2003 16:44:21 -0800 Subject: [Ethnicstudies] Resistance is never futile - Arundhati Roy Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20030404164415.024919d8@benfranklin.hnet.uci.edu> --=====================_2127709==_.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed Le Monde diplomatique March 2003 Global crisis over Iraq Resistance is never futile By Arundhati Roy * What do we mean by the idea of confronting "empire"? Does "empire" mean the government of the United States (and its European satellites), the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organisation, the multinational corporations? Or is it something more than that? "Empire" has sprouted subsidiary identities in many countries, and produced dangerous byproducts: nationalism, religious bigotry, fascism, terrorism. All are in alliance with the project of corporate globalisation. India, the world's biggest democracy, is now at the forefront of the corporate globalisation project. The WTO is prising open its market of a billion people. The Indian government and elite are welcoming corporatisation and privatisation. It is no coincidence that India's prime minister, home minister, and "disinvestment" minister - men who signed the deal with Enron in India, men who are selling the country's infrastructure to corporate multinationals, men who want to privatise water, electricity, oil, coal, steel, health, education and telecommunication - are all members or admirers of the RSS, a rightwing, ultra-nationalist Hindu guild that openly admires Hitler (1). In India democracy is being dismantled with the speed and efficiency of a structural adjustment programme. The project of corporate globalisation destroys lives in India, and massive privatisation and labour "reforms" push people off their land and out of jobs. Hundreds of impoverished farmers have committed suicide by drinking pesticide. There are reports of starvation deaths from all over the country. While the elite ascend to an imaginary destination somewhere near the top of the world, the dispossessed fall into crime and chaos. History tells us this climate of frustration and national disillusionment is the perfect breeding ground for fascism. The two arms of the Indian government have achieved perfect pincer action. One sells India off in chunks, and the other, to divert attention, orchestrates a howling chorus of Hindu nationalism and religious fascism. Nuclear tests are being conducted, history rewritten, churches burnt and mosques demolished. Censorship, surveillance, the suspension of civil liberties and human rights, the redefinition of Indian citizenship (particularly with regard to religious minorities): these are all becoming common practice. In March 2002, 2,000 Muslims were butchered in a state-sponsored pogrom in the state of Gujarat. Muslim women, specially targeted, were stripped and gang-raped, then burned alive. Shops, homes, textile mills, and mosques were looted and burned. More than 150,000 Muslims were driven from their homes. The economic base of their community was devastated. While Gujarat burned, the Indian prime minister was on MTV promoting his new poems. This January the government that organised the killings was voted back into office with a comfortable majority. Nobody has been punished for genocide. Narendra Modi, architect of the pogrom, and proud member of the RSS, has begun his second term as the chief minister of Gujarat. Were he Saddam Hussein the atrocities would have been seen on CNN. But since he is not - and since the Indian market is open to global investors - the pogrom is not even an embarrassing inconvenience. There are more than 100 million Muslims in India. A time bomb is ticking in our ancient land. So it is a myth that the free market breaks down national barriers. The free market does not threaten national sovereignty, it undermines democracy. As the disparity between the rich and the poor grows, the fight to corner resources intensifies. Corporate globalisation, to push through its sweetheart deals, to corporatise the crops we grow, the water we drink, the air we breathe, and the dreams we dream, needs an international confederation of loyal, corrupt, authoritarian governments in poorer countries to pass unpopular reforms and quell mutinies. Corporate globalisation (let's call it by its name, imperialism) needs a press that pretends to be free and courts that pretend to dispense justice. All the while the countries of the North harden their borders and stockpile weapons of mass destruction. They have to ensure that only money, goods, patents and services are globalised. Not the free movement of people. Not respect for human rights. Not treaties on racial discrimination or chemical and nuclear weapons or greenhouse gas emissions or climate change - or justice. This is all "empire": this loyal confederation, this accumulation of power, this increased distance between those who make the decisions and those who suffer from them. Our fight, our vision of another world, must be to eliminate that distance. So how do we resist "empire"? The good news is that we are not doing too badly in resisting. There have been major victories, especially in Latin America. In Bolivia there was Cochabamba (2) and in Peru the uprising in Arequipa (3). In Venezuela President Hugo Chavez is holding on, despite the US government's best efforts. Lula da Silva has become president of Brazil. The world is looking to the people of Argentina, trying to refashion a country after the havoc done by the IMF. In India the movement against globalisation is gathering momentum and is poised to become the only real political force against religious fascism. But we also know that behind the slogans of the war against terrorism, men in suits are at work. While bombs rain down, and cruise missiles skid across the skies, we know that contracts are being signed, patents registered, oil pipelines laid, natural resources plundered, water privatised. However the "empire" is now out in the open and too ugly to face its own reflection. Before 11 September 2001 the US had a secret history, secret especially from Americans. But now those secrets are history, and that history public knowledge. We know that every argument used to escalate the war against Iraq is a lie, the most ludicrous being the US government's commitment to bring democracy to Iraq. Killing people to save them from dictatorship or ideological corruption is an old US governmental habit. Nobody doubts that Saddam Hussein is a dictator, a murderer whose worst excesses were supported by the governments of the US and United Kingdom. Iraq would be better off without him. But, then, the whole world would be better off without President George Bush. What can we do? We can improve our memory, learn from our history. We can build public opinion until it becomes overwhelming. We can expose George Bush and Tony Blair, and their allies, as baby killers, water poisoners, and cowardly long-distance bombers. We can re-invent civil disobedience in a million ways. When Bush says "you're either with us or you are with the terrorists," we can refuse his choices. We can let him know that the people of the world do not need to choose between a malevolent Mickey Mouse and mad mullahs. * Arundhati Roy is a writer, author of The God of Small Things, HarperCollins, 1997, for which she won the Booker prize. This is an extract from her speech to the World Social Forum at Porto Alegre in January 2003. (1) The RSS was founded in 1925; at present it has 3 million members who are sent to paramilitary training camps - see Le Monde, 15 March 2002. (2) In Cochabamba the water wars waged by Bolivians in 1990 and 2000 forced the government to deprivatise water management. (3) In June 2002 six days of popular uprising in the town and department of Arequipa, in the south of Peru, forced President Alejandro Toledo to stop privatisation of electricity companies. --=====================_2127709==_.ALT Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii" Le Monde diplomatique   March 2003

Global crisis over Iraq

Resistance is never futile

By Arundhati Roy *

What do we mean by the idea of confronting "empire"? Does "empire" mean the
government of the United States (and its European satellites), the World
Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organisation, the
multinational corporations? Or is it something more than that? "Empire" has
sprouted subsidiary identities in many countries, and produced dangerous
byproducts: nationalism, religious bigotry, fascism, terrorism. All are in
alliance with the project of corporate globalisation.

India, the world's biggest democracy, is now at the forefront of the
corporate globalisation project. The WTO is prising open its market of a
billion people. The Indian government and elite are welcoming
corporatisation and privatisation. It is no coincidence that India's prime
minister, home minister, and "disinvestment" minister - men who signed the
deal with Enron in India, men who are selling the country's infrastructure
to corporate multinationals, men who want to privatise water, electricity,
oil, coal, steel, health, education and telecommunication - are all members
or admirers of the RSS, a rightwing, ultra-nationalist Hindu guild that
openly admires Hitler (1).

In India democracy is being dismantled with the speed and efficiency of a
structural adjustment programme. The project of corporate globalisation
destroys lives in India, and massive privatisation and labour "reforms" push
people off their land and out of jobs. Hundreds of impoverished farmers have
committed suicide by drinking pesticide. There are reports of starvation
deaths from all over the country. While the elite ascend to an imaginary
destination somewhere near the top of the world, the dispossessed fall into
crime and chaos. History tells us this climate of frustration and national
disillusionment is the perfect breeding ground for fascism.

The two arms of the Indian government have achieved perfect pincer action.
One sells India off in chunks, and the other, to divert attention,
orchestrates a howling chorus of Hindu nationalism and religious fascism.
Nuclear tests are being conducted, history rewritten, churches burnt and
mosques demolished. Censorship, surveillance, the suspension of civil
liberties and human rights, the redefinition of Indian citizenship
(particularly with regard to religious minorities): these are all becoming
common practice.

In March 2002, 2,000 Muslims were butchered in a state-sponsored pogrom in
the state of Gujarat. Muslim women, specially targeted, were stripped and
gang-raped, then burned alive. Shops, homes, textile mills, and mosques were
looted and burned. More than 150,000 Muslims were driven from their homes.
The economic base of their community was devastated.

While Gujarat burned, the Indian prime minister was on MTV promoting his new
poems. This January the government that organised the killings was voted
back into office with a comfortable majority. Nobody has been punished for
genocide. Narendra Modi, architect of the pogrom, and proud member of the
RSS, has begun his second term as the chief minister of Gujarat. Were he
Saddam Hussein the atrocities would have been seen on CNN. But since he is
not - and since the Indian market is open to global investors - the pogrom
is not even an embarrassing inconvenience.

There are more than 100 million Muslims in India. A time bomb is ticking in
our ancient land. So it is a myth that the free market breaks down national
barriers. The free market does not threaten national sovereignty, it
undermines democracy. As the disparity between the rich and the poor grows,
the fight to corner resources intensifies. Corporate globalisation, to push
through its sweetheart deals, to corporatise the crops we grow, the water we
drink, the air we breathe, and the dreams we dream, needs an international
confederation of loyal, corrupt, authoritarian governments in poorer
countries to pass unpopular reforms and quell mutinies.

Corporate globalisation (let's call it by its name, imperialism) needs a
press that pretends to be free and courts that pretend to dispense justice.


All the while the countries of the North harden their borders and stockpile
weapons of mass destruction. They have to ensure that only money, goods,
patents and services are globalised. Not the free movement of people. Not
respect for human rights. Not treaties on racial discrimination or chemical
and nuclear weapons or greenhouse gas emissions or climate change - or
justice.

This is all "empire": this loyal confederation, this accumulation of power,
this increased distance between those who make the decisions and those who
suffer from them. Our fight, our vision of another world, must be to
eliminate that distance. So how do we resist "empire"?

The good news is that we are not doing too badly in resisting. There have
been major victories, especially in Latin America. In Bolivia there was
Cochabamba (2) and in Peru the uprising in Arequipa (3). In Venezuela
President Hugo Chavez is holding on, despite the US government's best
efforts. Lula da Silva has become president of Brazil. The world is looking
to the people of Argentina, trying to refashion a country after the havoc
done by the IMF. In India the movement against globalisation is gathering
momentum and is poised to become the only real political force against
religious fascism.

But we also know that behind the slogans of the war against terrorism, men
in suits are at work. While bombs rain down, and cruise missiles skid across
the skies, we know that contracts are being signed, patents registered, oil
pipelines laid, natural resources plundered, water privatised.

However the "empire" is now out in the open and too ugly to face its own
reflection. Before 11 September 2001 the US had a secret history, secret
especially from Americans. But now those secrets are history, and that
history public knowledge. We know that every argument used to escalate the
war against Iraq is a lie, the most ludicrous being the US government's
commitment to bring democracy to Iraq. Killing people to save them from
dictatorship or ideological corruption is an old US governmental habit.

Nobody doubts that Saddam Hussein is a dictator, a murderer whose worst
excesses were supported by the governments of the US and United Kingdom.
Iraq would be better off without him. But, then, the whole world would be
better off without President George Bush.

What can we do? We can improve our memory, learn from our history. We can
build public opinion until it becomes overwhelming. We can expose George
Bush and Tony Blair, and their allies, as baby killers, water poisoners, and
cowardly long-distance bombers. We can re-invent civil disobedience in a
million ways. When Bush says "you're either with us or you are with the
terrorists," we can refuse his choices. We can let him know that the people
of the world do not need to choose between a malevolent Mickey Mouse and mad
mullahs.


* Arundhati Roy is a writer, author of The God of Small Things,
HarperCollins, 1997, for which she won the Booker prize. This is an extract
from her speech to the World Social Forum at Porto Alegre in January 2003.

(1) The RSS was founded in 1925; at present it has 3 million members who are
sent to paramilitary training camps - see Le Monde, 15 March 2002.

(2) In Cochabamba the water wars waged by Bolivians in 1990 and 2000 forced
the government to deprivatise water management.

(3) In June 2002 six days of popular uprising in the town and department of
Arequipa, in the south of Peru, forced President Alejandro Toledo to stop
privatisation of electricity companies.
--=====================_2127709==_.ALT-- From jafujii@uci.edu Sat Apr 5 04:25:17 2003 From: jafujii@uci.edu (Jim Fujii) Date: Fri, 04 Apr 2003 20:25:17 -0800 Subject: [Ethnicstudies] A busy day for Israeli bulldozers Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20030404202511.02390e60@benfranklin.hnet.uci.edu> --=====================_15383920==_.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed April 3, 2003 A busy day for Israeli bulldozers It's been a busy day today for Israeli bulldozers. They had to do 16 houses by sundown, and they couldn't start until the men who live in them had gone off to work in the morning. But those machines are tireless, and by the end of the day, you could find 16 families sitting on heaps of rubble, weeping and cursing. Children, too. It was also a busy night for the boys in Tulkarm. That's the Palestinian town where our soldiers forced 1,500 men out of their homes in the middle of the night, put them on trucks, and then drove several miles out of town to dump them out, with orders not to return home 'for a few days'. And then the soldiers had to put the town under curfew, just in case the women wanted to go out looking for them. So now we have several man-made tragedies of the last 24 hours, but it couldn't have been very interesting. Not a photo or even a word about it appeared on the 45-minute TV news tonight on channel 2. Though we did get a very extended item about why the national Israeli soccer team again lost to France. Now that's sad. Three of us women - Na'ama from the Israel Committee Against House Demolitions, Sylvia from Peace Now, and me from the Coalition of Women for Peace - had a big argument with one of the bulldozers at Sur Baher (just outside Jerusalem) this morning. The bulldozer wanted to knock down the house, and we wanted to knock down the bulldozer. Well, actually we just wanted to stop its progress. Our presence standing between it and the house worked beautifully until the soldiers dragged us away along the rocky, thorny hillside. Thanks to three other activists for their support and photos. Here are some remarks I heard today: Soldier #1: They have to knock it down - there are terrorists inside. Soldier #2: No, it's because they're building the security fence right here. Soldier #3: No, it's because they were built illegally. None of the above. The homes demolished today were all in one neighborhood, and our best guess is that this is on the planned route of new bypass road #80. More remarks, these directed to the peace activists: Officer #1: See that? [Palestinians trying to protect their homes.] You're inciting them to violence. Officer #2: Your presence here is illegal. Soldier: Let go of each other or I'll cut your arms off. And now some Palestinian remarks made to the soldiers: Villager #1: You better kill us, because if you don't, we'll kill you. Villager #2: See that kid over there? You just turned him into a suicide bomber. And a Palestinian woman who alternately cried and shouted in broken English, "You are animals, where is your humanity, don't you have a mother?" It's been that kind of day for the Israeli soldiers. In addition to having to work from dawn to dusk, and sometimes in the middle of the night, they have to put up with insults and violence. Oh, and did I mention that one of those houses destroyed - for the world-record fourth time - was the home of Salim and Arabiyyeh Shawamreh? That's also the home of Lena, their daughter, who I wrote about 5 years ago in 'Lena doesn't live here anymore'. Oh, and did I mention that March was a particularly busy month? 99 Palestinians were killed, 28 of them children. It's a good thing it's April now! Ooops, I spoke too soon. Seven more were killed today, and still an hour before midnight... The Israeli army keeps turning the screws, but, hey, what's going on in Baghdad? Gila Svirsky Jerusalem --=====================_15383920==_.ALT Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii" April 3, 2003

A busy day for Israeli bulldozers

It's been a busy day today for Israeli bulldozers. They had to do 16 houses
by sundown, and they couldn't start until the men who live in them had gone
off to work in the morning. But those machines are tireless, and by the end
of the day, you could find 16 families sitting on heaps of rubble, weeping
and cursing. Children, too.

It was also a busy night for the boys in Tulkarm. That's the Palestinian
town where our soldiers forced 1,500 men out of their homes in the middle of
the night, put them on trucks, and then drove several miles out of town to
dump them out, with orders not to return home 'for a few days'. And then the
soldiers had to put the town under curfew, just in case the women wanted to
go out looking for them.

So now we have several man-made tragedies of the last 24 hours, but it
couldn't have been very interesting. Not a photo or even a word about it
appeared on the 45-minute TV news tonight on channel 2. Though we did get a
very extended item about why the national Israeli soccer team again lost to
France. Now that's sad.

Three of us women - Na'ama from the Israel Committee Against House
Demolitions, Sylvia from Peace Now, and me from the Coalition of Women for
Peace - had a big argument with one of the bulldozers at Sur Baher (just
outside Jerusalem) this morning. The bulldozer wanted to knock down the
house, and we wanted to knock down the bulldozer. Well, actually we just
wanted to stop its progress. Our presence standing between it and the house
worked beautifully until the soldiers dragged us away along the rocky,
thorny hillside. Thanks to three other activists for their support and
photos.

Here are some remarks I heard today:

Soldier #1: They have to knock it down - there are terrorists inside.
Soldier #2: No, it's because they're building the security fence right here.
Soldier #3: No, it's because they were built illegally.

None of the above. The homes demolished today were all in one neighborhood,
and our best guess is that this is on the planned route of new bypass road
#80.

More remarks, these directed to the peace activists:

Officer #1: See that? [Palestinians trying to protect their homes.] You're
inciting them to violence. Officer #2: Your presence here is illegal.
Soldier: Let go of each other or I'll cut your arms off.

And now some Palestinian remarks made to the soldiers:

Villager #1: You better kill us, because if you don't, we'll kill you.
Villager #2: See that kid over there? You just turned him into a suicide
bomber.

And a Palestinian woman who alternately cried and shouted in broken English,
"You are animals, where is your humanity, don't you have a mother?"

It's been that kind of day for the Israeli soldiers. In addition to having
to work from dawn to dusk, and sometimes in the middle of the night, they
have to put up with insults and violence.

Oh, and did I mention that one of those houses destroyed - for the
world-record fourth time - was the home of Salim and Arabiyyeh Shawamreh?
That's also the home of Lena, their daughter, who I wrote about 5 years ago
in 'Lena doesn't live here anymore'.

Oh, and did I mention that March was a particularly busy month? 99
Palestinians were killed, 28 of them children. It's a good thing it's April
now! Ooops, I spoke too soon. Seven more were killed today, and still an
hour before midnight...

The Israeli army keeps turning the screws, but, hey, what's going on in
Baghdad?

Gila Svirsky
Jerusalem
--=====================_15383920==_.ALT-- From jafujii@uci.edu Sat Apr 5 15:40:09 2003 From: jafujii@uci.edu (Jim Fujii) Date: Sat, 05 Apr 2003 07:40:09 -0800 Subject: [Ethnicstudies] Alexander Cockburn at Chapman, then UCI Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20030405073958.00bb0b58@benfranklin.hnet.uci.edu> --=====================_2343359==_ Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="=====================_2343359==_.ALT" --=====================_2343359==_.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed Just in case some of you are confused (as I was), it appears that Alexander Cockburn--a highly respected and hard-hitting critic of this war and a long time columnist for The Nation, whose recent right-turn editorial policies (David Corn and company) probably explain his move to Counterpunch--will be speaking on consecutive days, first at Chapman University, and then at UCI. I have pasted in both announcements here in the order that he is scheduled to speak at these two locations. Note that the titles of the two presentations are different. Jim (1) CHAPMAN UNIVERSITY APPEARANCE "Real Wars & Press Wars" by Alexander Cockburn 7pm Beckman Hall 404 April 9, 2003 Free and Open to the Public Alexander Cockburn will discuss press coverage of the war with Iraq and related issues. He co-edits the website and newsletter CounterPunch, is a regular columnist for The Nation and writes a syndicated newspaper column. Regarded by many as America's foremost radical journalist and press critic, he has coauthored such books as Whiteout: Drugs, the CIA and the Press and his own Corruptions of Empire and The Golden Age is in Us have been steady sellers for years. He lives in Humboldt County, northern California. The lecture is sponsored by the Delp-Wilkinson Peace Endowment and the Jill Sinclair Fund. For further information please call 714-997-6556. (2) UCI APPEARANCE "How Many Iraqs? War Without End" by Alexander Coburn Alexander Cockburn is scheduled to come to UCI on April 10th at 3:30 pm at the Social Science Plaza A - Room 1100 . See the International Studies Program web site:http://hypatia.ss.uci.edu/istudies This forum series was previously sponsored by the Center for Global Peace and Conflict Studies. The International Studies Program is an interdisciplinary teaching unit at UC Irvine devoted to the study of international affairs. The lecture series is free and open to the public. For more information, contact Paula Garb in the International Studies office at (949) 824-8687. People with disabilities may call this number for accommodations. --=====================_2343359==_.ALT Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii" Just in case some of you are confused (as I was), it appears that Alexander Cockburn--a highly respected and hard-hitting critic of this war and a long time columnist for The Nation, whose recent right-turn editorial policies (David Corn and company) probably explain his move to Counterpunch--will be speaking on consecutive days, first at Chapman University, and then at UCI.  I have pasted in both announcements here in the order that he is scheduled to speak at these two locations.  Note that the titles of the two presentations are different.
Jim

(1) CHAPMAN UNIVERSITY APPEARANCE

"Real Wars & Press Wars" by Alexander Cockburn

7pm Beckman Hall 404
April 9, 2003
Free and Open to the Public

Alexander Cockburn will discuss press coverage of the war with Iraq and related
issues. He co-edits the website and newsletter CounterPunch, is a regular
columnist for The Nation and writes a syndicated newspaper column. Regarded by
many as America's foremost radical journalist and press critic, he has
coauthored such books as Whiteout: Drugs, the CIA and the Press and his own
Corruptions of Empire and The Golden Age is in Us have been steady sellers for
years. He lives in Humboldt County, northern California.

The lecture is sponsored by the Delp-Wilkinson Peace Endowment and the Jill
Sinclair Fund. For further information please call 714-997-6556.


(2) UCI APPEARANCE

"How Many Iraqs?  War Without End" by Alexander Coburn

Alexander Cockburn is scheduled to come to UCI on April 10th at 3:30 pm at
the Social Science Plaza A  - Room 1100 . 

See the International Studies Program web site:http://hypatia.ss.uci.edu/istudies
This forum series was previously sponsored by the Center for Global Peace and Conflict Studies.  The International Studies Program is an interdisciplinary teaching unit at UC Irvine devoted to the study of international affairs.  The lecture series is free and open to the public.  For more information, contact Paula Garb in the International Studies office at (949) 824-8687. People with disabilities may call this number for accommodations.






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//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// //////////////////////////8BAP7/AwoAAP////8GCQIAAAAAAMAAAAAAAABGGAAAAE1pY3Jv c29mdCBXb3JkIERvY3VtZW50AAoAAABNU1dvcmREb2MAEAAAAFdvcmQuRG9jdW1lbnQuOAD0ObJx AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA== --=====================_2343359==_-- From dtsang@lib.uci.edu Sat Apr 5 21:51:41 2003 From: dtsang@lib.uci.edu (Dan Tsang) Date: Sat, 5 Apr 2003 13:51:41 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Ethnicstudies] iraqi casualty fotos etc. (fwd) Message-ID: iraq body count site: www.iraqbodycount.net al jazeera english site: http://english.aljazeera.net/ iraq war fotos: http://thunderbay.indymedia.org/news/2003/04/5367.php esp: http://www.robert-fisk.com/iraqwarvictims_mar2003.htm too shocking... d Daniel C. Tsang Bibliographer for Asian American Studies, Economics, Management (acting), & Politics Social Science Data Librarian Lecturer, School of Social Sciences 380 Main Library, University of California PO Box 19557, Irvine CA 92623-9557, USA E-mail: dtsang@uci.edu; Tel: (949) 824-4978; fax: (949) 824-2700 UCI Social Science Data Archives: http://data.lib.uci.edu From jafujii@uci.edu Sun Apr 6 05:16:23 2003 From: jafujii@uci.edu (Jim Fujii) Date: Sat, 05 Apr 2003 20:16:23 -0800 Subject: [Ethnicstudies] There's No Business Like War Business Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20030405201615.00b91600@benfranklin.hnet.uci.edu> --=====================_18153693==_.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed Inter Press Service April 3, 2003 There's No Business Like War Business by Thalif Deen United Nations - When the dust finally settles on post-war Iraq, the United States may have unleashed virtually all of its state-of-the-art weaponry on a country already devastated by 13 years of rigid U.N. sanctions. After 14 days of heavy pounding, U.S. military forces so far have dropped over 8,700 bombs, including more than 3,000 missiles, and also fired millions of rounds of ammunition on military and civilian targets inside the country. When U.S. fighter pilots in B-2 stealth bombers launched the initial attack on a residential compound in Baghdad - believed to be a meeting place for Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and senior Baath Party officials - the opening salvo included a pair of 2,000 pound bombs and 36 deadly long-range Tomahawk missiles. The U.S. military will have to replace all of these weapons - worth billions of dollars - giving a tremendous boost to the U.S. military industry, which has been on the skids since the last Gulf War in 1991. In the latest 'Congressional Budget Justification for Foreign Operations', the U.S. State Department predicts that U.S. arms sales are expected to reach over 14 billion dollars this year, the largest total in almost two decades, compared to 12.5 billion dollars in 2002. ''A tragic indicator of the values of our civilization is that there's no business like war business,'' says Douglas Mattern of the New York-based War and Peace Foundation. ''I believe arms sales will increase even beyond the staggering amount we have today, due to a continuing destabilization of the area and the lobbying for sales by the armament industry,'' Mattern told IPS. One writer describes a ''charmed circle of American capitalism'', where Tomahawk and cruise missiles will destroy Iraq, Bechtel Corporation (which once employed U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney) will rebuild the country. And stolen Iraqi oil will pay for it.'' ''U.S. weapons contractors are likely to gain significant profits because of this war,'' says Natalie Goldring, executive director of the Program on Global Security and Disarmament at the University of Maryland. ''They'll be paid to replace the weapons that are used or destroyed in the war. The companies will also trumpet their successes at next summer's Paris Air Show, searching for foreign buyers,'' Goldring told IPS. Global annual military spending was 780 billion dollars in 1999, 840 billion dollars in 2001 and is on target for one trillion dollars, according to U.N. estimates. Besides the human casualties, the 14-day-old Iraqi war has seen the destruction of millions of dollars worth of military equipment on both sides of the battlefield. A U.S. Apache Longbow helicopter, brought down by Iraqi farmers, costs about 22 million dollars. The U.S. Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle, which is also on the casualty list, is priced at over 1.2 million dollars. The war has also seen the destruction for the first time on a battlefield of a monstrous U.S.-built Abrams battle tank. Goldring pointed out that Washington has armed Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Jordan for decades. ''The strategy was to give and sell these countries weapons so that they could defend themselves, and we wouldn't have to deploy U.S. forces to the region. This strategy has clearly failed,'' she added. Of the world's 10 major buyers of U.S. weapons systems last year, five were from the Middle East: Egypt (1.1 billion dollars in U.S. arms), Kuwait (1.0 billion dollars), Saudi Arabia (885 million dollars), Oman (826 million dollars) and Israel (710 million dollars). The other five nations in the top 10 were South Korea, Japan, Canada, Greece and Britain. ''We have armed unstable regimes with our most sophisticated weapons, and have then used the widespread proliferation of the weapons as the argument for producing the next generation of more expensive weapons. The vicious cycle continues,'' Goldring said. The really big money for U.S. defense contractors, says Mattern, is in the annual Pentagon budget, which has risen from 294 billion dollars in 2000 to about 400 billion dollars in 2003. At the current rate of growth, the budget is expected to hit 500 billion dollars by 2010. He said the Pentagon will spend about 60 billion dollars to buy new arms this year and over 30 billion dollars in research and development of new weapons. ''The U.S. armament industry is the second most subsidized industry, after agriculture,'' he added. The Iraqi war will also affect the global fight against poverty, because of the huge cost of the war and its aftermath. ''It will also degrade health care and other needs in the United States,'' according to Mattern. One-half of the world's governments spend more on the military than on health care, he added. ''The war business is the world's ultimate criminal activity.'' U.S. President George W. Bush last week sought Congressional approval for a hefty 75 billion dollars to fund the first six months of the Iraqi war and related anti-terrorism and foreign aid expenses. ''With the intensity of the war so far,'' says Goldring, ''the 75 billion dollars is probably just the down payment on the war''. The bottom line, says 'New York Times' columnist Paul Krugman, is that the United States will win on the battlefield, probably with ease. ''I am not a military expert,'' he wrote, ''but I can do the numbers: the most recent U.S. military budget was 400 billion dollars, while Iraq spent only 1.4 billion dollars.'' --=====================_18153693==_.ALT Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii" Inter Press Service     April 3, 2003

There's No Business Like War Business

by Thalif Deen

United Nations - When the dust finally settles on post-war Iraq, the United
States may have unleashed virtually all of its state-of-the-art weaponry on
a country already devastated by 13 years of rigid U.N. sanctions.

After 14 days of heavy pounding, U.S. military forces so far have dropped
over 8,700 bombs, including more than 3,000 missiles, and also fired
millions of rounds of ammunition on military and civilian targets inside the
country.

When U.S. fighter pilots in B-2 stealth bombers launched the initial attack
on a residential compound in Baghdad - believed to be a meeting place for
Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and senior Baath Party officials - the
opening salvo included a pair of 2,000 pound bombs and 36 deadly long-range
Tomahawk missiles.

The U.S. military will have to replace all of these weapons - worth billions
of dollars - giving a tremendous boost to the U.S. military industry, which
has been on the skids since the last Gulf War in 1991.

In the latest 'Congressional Budget Justification for Foreign Operations',
the U.S. State Department predicts that U.S. arms sales are expected to
reach over 14 billion dollars this year, the largest total in almost two
decades, compared to 12.5 billion dollars in 2002.

''A tragic indicator of the values of our civilization is that there's no
business like war business,'' says Douglas Mattern of the New York-based War
and Peace Foundation.

''I believe arms sales will increase even beyond the staggering amount we
have today, due to a continuing destabilization of the area and the lobbying
for sales by the armament industry,'' Mattern told IPS.

One writer describes a ''charmed circle of American capitalism'', where
Tomahawk and cruise missiles will destroy Iraq, Bechtel Corporation (which
once employed U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney) will rebuild the country. And
stolen Iraqi oil will pay for it.''

''U.S. weapons contractors are likely to gain significant profits because of
this war,'' says Natalie Goldring, executive director of the Program on
Global Security and Disarmament at the University of Maryland.

''They'll be paid to replace the weapons that are used or destroyed in the
war. The companies will also trumpet their successes at next summer's Paris
Air Show, searching for foreign buyers,'' Goldring told IPS.

Global annual military spending was 780 billion dollars in 1999, 840 billion
dollars in 2001 and is on target for one trillion dollars, according to U.N.
estimates.

Besides the human casualties, the 14-day-old Iraqi war has seen the
destruction of millions of dollars worth of military equipment on both sides
of the battlefield.

A U.S. Apache Longbow helicopter, brought down by Iraqi farmers, costs about
22 million dollars. The U.S. Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle, which is
also on the casualty list, is priced at over 1.2 million dollars. The war
has also seen the destruction for the first time on a battlefield of a
monstrous U.S.-built Abrams battle tank.

Goldring pointed out that Washington has armed Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Turkey
and Jordan for decades. ''The strategy was to give and sell these countries
weapons so that they could defend themselves, and we wouldn't have to deploy
U.S. forces to the region. This strategy has clearly failed,'' she added.

Of the world's 10 major buyers of U.S. weapons systems last year, five were
from the Middle East: Egypt (1.1 billion dollars in U.S. arms), Kuwait (1.0
billion dollars), Saudi Arabia (885 million dollars), Oman (826 million
dollars) and Israel (710 million dollars). The other five nations in the top
10 were South Korea, Japan, Canada, Greece and Britain.

''We have armed unstable regimes with our most sophisticated weapons, and
have then used the widespread proliferation of the weapons as the argument
for producing the next generation of more expensive weapons. The vicious
cycle continues,'' Goldring said.

The really big money for U.S. defense contractors, says Mattern, is in the
annual Pentagon budget, which has risen from 294 billion dollars in 2000 to
about 400 billion dollars in 2003. At the current rate of growth, the budget
is expected to hit 500 billion dollars by 2010.

He said the Pentagon will spend about 60 billion dollars to buy new arms
this year and over 30 billion dollars in research and development of new
weapons. ''The U.S. armament industry is the second most subsidized
industry, after agriculture,'' he added.

The Iraqi war will also affect the global fight against poverty, because of
the huge cost of the war and its aftermath. ''It will also degrade health
care and other needs in the United States,'' according to Mattern.

One-half of the world's governments spend more on the military than on
health care, he added. ''The war business is the world's ultimate criminal
activity.''

U.S. President George W. Bush last week sought Congressional approval for a
hefty 75 billion dollars to fund the first six months of the Iraqi war and
related anti-terrorism and foreign aid expenses.

''With the intensity of the war so far,'' says Goldring, ''the 75 billion
dollars is probably just the down payment on the war''.

The bottom line, says 'New York Times' columnist Paul Krugman, is that the
United States will win on the battlefield, probably with ease.

''I am not a military expert,'' he wrote, ''but I can do the numbers: the
most recent U.S. military budget was 400 billion dollars, while Iraq spent
only 1.4 billion dollars.''
--=====================_18153693==_.ALT-- From jafujii@uci.edu Sun Apr 6 05:30:46 2003 From: jafujii@uci.edu (Jim Fujii) Date: Sat, 05 Apr 2003 20:30:46 -0800 Subject: [Ethnicstudies] White man's burden - (from Haaretz) Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20030405203035.00bbebf0@benfranklin.hnet.uci.edu> --=====================_19016834==_.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed From the Israeli Newspaper, Haaretz White man's burden By Ari Shavit The war in Iraq was conceived by 25 neoconservative intellectuals, most of them Jewish, who are pushing President Bush to change the course of history. Two of them, journalists William Kristol and Charles Krauthammer, say it's possible. But another journalist, Thomas Friedman (not part of the group), is skeptical 1. The doctrine Washington - At the conclusion of its second week, the war to liberate Iraq wasn't looking good. Not even in Washington. The assumption of a swift collapse of the Saddam Hussein regime had itself collapsed. The presupposition that the Iraqi dictatorship would crumble as soon as mighty America entered the country proved unfounded. The Shi'ites didn't rise up, the Sunnis fought fiercely. Iraqi guerrilla warfare found the American generals unprepared and endangered their overextended supply lines. Nevertheless, 70 percent of the American people continued to support the war; 60 percent thought victory was certain; 74 percent expressed confidence in President George W. Bush. Washington is a small city. It's a place of human dimensions. A kind of small town that happens to run an empire. A small town of government officials and members of Congress and personnel of research institutes and journalists who pretty well all know one another. Everyone is busy intriguing against everyone else; and everyone gossips about everyone else. In the course of the past year, a new belief has emerged in the town: the belief in war against Iraq. That ardent faith was disseminated by a small group of 25 or 30 neoconservatives, almost all of them Jewish, almost all of them intellectuals (a partial list: Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, William Kristol, Eliot Abrams, Charles Krauthammer), people who are mutual friends and cultivate one another and are convinced that political ideas are a major driving force of history. They believe that the right political idea entails a fusion of morality and force, human rights and grit. The philosophical underpinnings of the Washington neoconservatives are the writings of Machiavelli, Hobbes and Edmund Burke. They also admire Winston Churchill and the policy pursued by Ronald Reagan. They tend to read reality in terms of the failure of the 1930s (Munich) versus the success of the 1980s (the fall of the Berlin Wall). Are they wrong? Have they committed an act of folly in leading Washington to Baghdad? They don't think so. They continue to cling to their belief. They are still pretending that everything is more or less fine. That things will work out. Occasionally, though, they seem to break out in a cold sweat. This is no longer an academic exercise, one of them says, we are responsible for what is happening. The ideas we put forward are now affecting the lives of millions of people. So there are moments when you're scared. You say, Hell, we came to help, but maybe we made a mistake. 2. William Kristol Has America bitten off more than it can chew? Bill Kristol says no. True, the press is very negative, but when you examine the facts in the field you see that there is no terrorism, no mass destruction, no attacks on Israel. The oil fields in the south have been saved, air control has been achieved, American forces are deployed 50 miles from Baghdad. So, even if mistakes were made here and there, they are not serious. America is big enough to handle that. Kristol hasn't the slightest doubt that in the end, General Tommy Franks will achieve his goals. The 4th Cavalry Division will soon enter the fray, and another division is on its way from Texas. So it's possible that instead of an elegant war with 60 killed in two weeks it will be a less elegant affair with a thousand killed in two months, but nevertheless Bill Kristol has no doubt at all that the Iraq Liberation War is a just war, an obligatory war. Kristol is pleasant-looking, of average height, in his late forties. In the past 18 months he has used his position as editor of the right-wing Weekly Standard and his status as one of the leaders of the neoconservative circle in Washington to induce the White House to do battle against Saddam Hussein. Because Kristol is believed to exercise considerable influence on the president, Vice President Richard Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, he is also perceived as having been instrumental in getting Washington to launch this all-out campaign against Baghdad. Sitting behind the stacks of books that cover his desk at the offices of the Weekly Standard in Northwest Washington, he tries to convince me that he is not worried. It is simply inconceivable to him that America will not win. In that event, the consequences would be catastrophic. No one wants to think seriously about that possibility. What is the war about? I ask. Kristol replies that at one level it is the war that George Bush is talking about: a war against a brutal regime that has in its possession weapons of mass destruction. But at a deeper level it is a greater war, for the shaping of a new Middle East. It is a war that is intended to change the political culture of the entire region. Because what happened on September 11, 2001, Kristol says, is that the Americans looked around and saw that the world is not what they thought it was. The world is a dangerous place. Therefore the Americans looked for a doctrine that would enable them to cope with this dangerous world. And the only doctrine they found was the neoconservative one. That doctrine maintains that the problem with the Middle East is the absence of democracy and of freedom. It follows that the only way to block people like Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden is to disseminate democracy and freedom. To change radically the cultural and political dynamics that creates such people. And the way to fight the chaos is to create a new world order that will be based on freedom and human rights - and to be ready to use force in order to consolidate this new world. So that, really, is what the war is about. It is being fought to consolidate a new world order, to create a new Middle East. Does that mean that the war in Iraq is effectively a neoconservative war? That's what people are saying, Kristol replies, laughing. But the truth is that it's an American war. The neoconservatives succeeded because they touched the bedrock of America. The thing is that America has a profound sense of mission. America has a need to offer something that transcends a life of comfort, that goes beyond material success. Therefore, because of their ideals, the Americans accepted what the neoconservatives proposed. They didn't want to fight a war over interests, but over values. They wanted a war driven by a moral vision. They wanted to hitch their wagon to something bigger than themselves. Does this moral vision mean that after Iraq will come the turns of Saudi Arabia and Egypt? Kristol says that he is at odds with the administration on the question of Saudi Arabia. But his opinion is that it is impossible to let Saudi Arabia just continue what it is doing. It is impossible to accept the anti-Americanism it is disseminating. The fanatic Wahhabism that Saudi Arabia engenders is undermining the stability of the entire region. It's the same with Egypt, he says: we mustn't accept the status quo there. For Egypt, too, the horizon has to be liberal democracy. It has to be understood that in the final analysis, the stability that the corrupt Arab despots are offering is illusory. Just as the stability that Yitzhak Rabin received from Yasser Arafat was illusory. In the end, none of these decadent dictatorships will endure. The choice is between extremist Islam, secular fascism or democracy. And because of September 11, American understands that. America is in a position where it has no choice. It is obliged to be far more aggressive in promoting democracy. Hence this war. It's based on the new American understanding that if the United States does not shape the world in its image, the world will shape the United States in its own image. 3. Charles Krauthammer Is this going to turn into a second Vietnam? Charles Krauthammer says no. There is no similarity to Vietnam. Unlike in the 1960s, there is no anti-establishment subculture in the United States now. Unlike in the 1960s, there is now an abiding love of the army in the United States. Unlike in the 1960s, there is a determined president, one with character, in the White House. And unlike in the 1960s, Americans are not deterred from making sacrifices. That is the sea-change that took place here on September 11, 2001. Since that morning, Americans have understood that if they don't act now and if weapons of mass destruction reach extremist terrorist organizations, millions of Americans will die. Therefore, because they understand that those others want to kill them by the millions, the Americans prefer to take to the field of battle and fight, rather than sit idly by and die at home. Charles Krauthammer is handsome, swarthy and articulate. In his spacious office on 19th Street in Northwest Washington, he sits upright in a black wheelchair. Although his writing tends to be gloomy, his mood now is elevated. The well-known columnist (Washington Post, Time, Weekly Standard) has no real doubts about the outcome of the war that he promoted for 18 months. No, he does not accept the view that he helped lead America into the new killing fields between the Tigris and the Euphrates. But it is true that he is part of a conceptual stream that had something to offer in the aftermath of September 11. Within a few weeks after the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, he had singled out Baghdad in his columns as an essential target. And now, too, he is convinced that America has the strength to pull it off. The thought that America will not win has never even crossed his mind. What is the war about? It's about three different issues. First of all, this is a war for disarming Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction. That's the basis, the self-evident cause, and it is also sufficient cause in itself. But beyond that, the war in Iraq is being fought to replace the demonic deal America cut with the Arab world decades ago. That deal said: you will send us oil and we will not intervene in your internal affairs. Send us oil and we will not demand from you what we are demanding of Chile, the Philippines, Korea and South Africa. That deal effectively expired on September 11, 2001, Krauthammer says. Since that day, the Americans have understood that if they allow the Arab world to proceed in its evil ways - suppression, economic ruin, sowing despair - it will continue to produce more and more bin Ladens. America thus reached the conclusion that it has no choice: it has to take on itself the project of rebuilding the Arab world. Therefore, the Iraq war is really the beginning of a gigantic historical experiment whose purpose is to do in the Arab world what was done in Germany and Japan after World War II. It's an ambitious experiment, Krauthammer admits, maybe even utopian, but not unrealistic. After all, it is inconceivable to accept the racist assumption that the Arabs are different from all other human beings, that the Arabs are incapable of conducting a democratic way of life. However, according to the Jewish-American columnist, the present war has a further importance. If Iraq does become pro-Western and if it becomes the focus of American influence, that will be of immense geopolitical importance. An American presence in Iraq will project power across the region. It will suffuse the rebels in Iran with courage and strength, and it will deter and restrain Syria. It will accelerate the processes of change that the Middle East must undergo. Isn't the idea of preemptive war a dangerous one that rattles the world order? There is no choice, Krauthammer replies. In the 21st century we face a new and singular challenge: the democratization of mass destruction. There are three possible strategies in the face of that challenge: appeasement, deterrence and preemption. Because appeasement and deterrence will not work, preemption is the only strategy left. The United States must implement an aggressive policy of preemption. Which is exactly what it is now doing in Iraq. That is what Tommy Franks' soldiers are doing as we speak. And what if the experiment fails? What if America is defeated? This war will enhance the place of America in the world for the coming generation, Krauthammer says. Its outcome will shape the world for the next 25 years. There are three possibilities. If the United States wins quickly and without a bloodbath, it will be a colossus that will dictate the world order. If the victory is slow and contaminated, it will be impossible to go on to other Arab states after Iraq. It will stop there. But if America is beaten, the consequences will be catastrophic. Its deterrent capability will be weakened, its friends will abandon it and it will become insular. Extreme instability will be engendered in the Middle East. You don't really want to think about what will happen, Krauthammer says looking me straight in the eye. But just because that's so, I am positive we will not lose. Because the administration understands the implications. The president understands that everything is riding on this. So he will throw everything we've got into this. He will do everything that has to be done. George W. Bush will not let America lose. 4. Thomas Friedman Is this an American Lebanon War? Tom Friedman says he is afraid it is. He was there, in the Commodore Hotel in Beirut, in the summer of 1982, and he remembers it well. So he sees the lines of resemblance clearly. General Ahmed Chalabi (the Shi'ite leader that the neoconservatives want to install as the leader of a free Iraq) in the role of Bashir Jemayel. The Iraqi opposition in the role of the Phalange. Richard Perle and the conservative circle around him as Ariel Sharon. And a war that is at bottom a war of choice. A war that wants to utilize massive force in order to establish a new order. Tom Friedman, The New York Times columnist, did not oppose the war. On the contrary. He too was severely shaken by September 11, he too wants to understand where these desperate fanatics are coming from who hate America more than they love their own lives. And he too reached the conclusion that the status quo in the Middle East is no longer acceptable. The status quo is terminal. And therefore it is urgent to foment a reform in the Arab world. Some things are true even if George Bush believes them, Friedman says with a smile. And after September 11, it's impossible to tell Bush to drop it, ignore it. There was a certain basic justice in the overall American feeling that told the Arab world: we left you alone for a long time, you played with matches and in the end we were burned. So we're not going to leave you alone any longer. He is sitting in a large rectangular room in the offices of The New York Times in northwest Washington, on the corner of 17th Street. One wall of the room is a huge map of the world. Hunched over his computer, he reads me witty lines from the article that will be going to press in two hours. He polishes, sharpens, plays word games. He ponders what's right to say now, what should be left for a later date. Turning to me, he says that democracies look soft until they're threatened. When threatened, they become very hard. Actually, the Iraq war is a kind of Jenin on a huge scale. Because in Jenin, too, what happened was that the Israelis told the Palestinians, We left you here alone and you played with matches until suddenly you blew up a Passover seder in Netanya. And therefore we are not going to leave you along any longer. We will go from house to house in the Casbah. And from America's point of view, Saddam's Iraq is Jenin. This war is a defensive shield. It follows that the danger is the same: that like Israel, America will make the mistake of using only force. This is not an illegitimate war, Friedman says. But it is a very presumptuous war. You need a great deal of presumption to believe that you can rebuild a country half a world from home. But if such a presumptuous war is to have a chance, it needs international support. That international legitimacy is essential so you will have enough time and space to execute your presumptuous project. But George Bush didn't have the patience to glean international support. He gambled that the war would justify itself, that we would go in fast and conquer fast and that the Iraqis would greet us with rice and the war would thus be self-justifying. That did not happen. Maybe it will happen next week, but in the meantime it did not happen. When I think about what is going to happen, I break into a sweat, Friedman says. I see us being forced to impose a siege on Baghdad. And I know what kind of insanity a siege on Baghdad can unleash. The thought of house-to-house combat in Baghdad without international legitimacy makes me lose my appetite. I see American embassies burning. I see windows of American businesses shattered. I see how the Iraqi resistance to America connects to the general Arab resistance to America and the worldwide resistance to America. The thought of what could happen is eating me up. What George Bush did, Friedman says, is to show us a splendid mahogany table: the new democratic Iraq. But when you turn the table over, you see that it has only one leg. This war is resting on one leg. But on the other hand, anyone who thinks he can defeat George Bush had better think again. Bush will never give in. That's not what he's made of. Believe me, you don't want to be next to this guy when he thinks he's being backed into a corner. I don't suggest that anyone who holds his life dear mess with Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and President Bush. Is the Iraq war the great neoconservative war? It's the war the neoconservatives wanted, Friedman says. It's the war the neoconservatives marketed. Those people had an idea to sell when September 11 came, and they sold it. Oh boy, did they sell it. So this is not a war that the masses demanded. This is a war of an elite. Friedman laughs: I could give you the names of 25 people (all of whom are at this moment within a five-block radius of this office) who, if you had exiled them to a desert island a year and a half ago, the Iraq war would not have happened. Still, it's not all that simple, Friedman retracts. It's not some fantasy the neoconservatives invented. It's not that 25 people hijacked America. You don't take such a great nation into such a great adventure with Bill Kristol and the Weekly Standard and another five or six influential columnists. In the final analysis, what fomented the war is America's over-reaction to September 11. The genuine sense of anxiety that spread in America after September 11. It is not only the neoconservatives who led us to the outskirts of Baghdad. What led us to the outskirts of Baghdad is a very American combination of anxiety and hubris. http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=280279&%20contrassID=2 &subContrassID=14&sbSubContrassID=0&listSrc=Y --=====================_19016834==_.ALT Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii" From the Israeli Newspaper, Haaretz

White man's burden

By Ari Shavit   

The war in Iraq was conceived by 25 neoconservative intellectuals, most of
them Jewish, who are pushing President Bush to change the course of history.
Two of them, journalists William Kristol and Charles Krauthammer, say it's
possible. But another journalist, Thomas Friedman (not part of the group),
is skeptical     

1. The doctrine

Washington - At the conclusion of its second week, the war to liberate Iraq
wasn't looking good. Not even in Washington. The assumption of a swift
collapse of the Saddam Hussein regime had itself collapsed. The
presupposition that the Iraqi dictatorship would crumble as soon as mighty
America entered the country proved unfounded. The Shi'ites didn't rise up,
the Sunnis fought fiercely. Iraqi guerrilla warfare found the American
generals unprepared and endangered their overextended supply lines.
Nevertheless, 70 percent of the American people continued to support the
war; 60 percent thought victory was certain; 74 percent expressed confidence
in President George W. Bush.

Washington is a small city. It's a place of human dimensions. A kind of
small town that happens to run an empire. A small town of government
officials and members of Congress and personnel of research institutes and
journalists who pretty well all know one another. Everyone is busy
intriguing against everyone else; and everyone gossips about everyone else.


In the course of the past year, a new belief has emerged in the town: the
belief in war against Iraq. That ardent faith was disseminated by a small
group of 25 or 30 neoconservatives, almost all of them Jewish, almost all of
them intellectuals (a partial list: Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas
Feith, William Kristol, Eliot Abrams, Charles Krauthammer), people who are
mutual friends and cultivate one another and are convinced that political
ideas are a major driving force of history. They believe that the right
political idea entails a fusion of morality and force, human rights and
grit. The philosophical underpinnings of the Washington neoconservatives are
the writings of Machiavelli, Hobbes and Edmund Burke. They also admire
Winston Churchill and the policy pursued by Ronald Reagan. They tend to read
reality in terms of the failure of the 1930s (Munich) versus the success of
the 1980s (the fall of the Berlin Wall).

Are they wrong? Have they committed an act of folly in leading Washington to
Baghdad? They don't think so. They continue to cling to their belief. They
are still pretending that everything is more or less fine. That things will
work out. Occasionally, though, they seem to break out in a cold sweat. This
is no longer an academic exercise, one of them says, we are responsible for
what is happening. The ideas we put forward are now affecting the lives of
millions of people. So there are moments when you're scared. You say, Hell,
we came to help, but maybe we made a mistake.

2. William Kristol

Has America bitten off more than it can chew? Bill Kristol says no. True,
the press is very negative, but when you examine the facts in the field you
see that there is no terrorism, no mass destruction, no attacks on Israel.
The oil fields in the south have been saved, air control has been achieved,
American forces are deployed 50 miles from Baghdad. So, even if mistakes
were made here and there, they are not serious. America is big enough to
handle that. Kristol hasn't the slightest doubt that in the end, General
Tommy Franks will achieve his goals. The 4th Cavalry Division will soon
enter the fray, and another division is on its way from Texas. So it's
possible that instead of an elegant war with 60 killed in two weeks it will
be a less elegant affair with a thousand killed in two months, but
nevertheless Bill Kristol has no doubt at all that the Iraq Liberation War
is a just war, an obligatory war.

Kristol is pleasant-looking, of average height, in his late forties. In the
past 18 months he has used his position as editor of the right-wing Weekly
Standard and his status as one of the leaders of the neoconservative circle
in Washington to induce the White House to do battle against Saddam Hussein.
Because Kristol is believed to exercise considerable influence on the
president, Vice President Richard Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld, he is also perceived as having been instrumental in getting
Washington to launch this all-out campaign against Baghdad. Sitting behind
the stacks of books that cover his desk at the offices of the Weekly
Standard in Northwest Washington, he tries to convince me that he is not
worried. It is simply inconceivable to him that America will not win. In
that event, the consequences would be catastrophic. No one wants to think
seriously about that possibility.

What is the war about? I ask. Kristol replies that at one level it is the
war that George Bush is talking about: a war against a brutal regime that
has in its possession weapons of mass destruction. But at a deeper level it
is a greater war, for the shaping of a new Middle East. It is a war that is
intended to change the political culture of the entire region. Because what
happened on September 11, 2001, Kristol says, is that the Americans looked
around and saw that the world is not what they thought it was. The world is
a dangerous place. Therefore the Americans looked for a doctrine that would
enable them to cope with this dangerous world. And the only doctrine they
found was the neoconservative one.

That doctrine maintains that the problem with the Middle East is the absence
of democracy and of freedom. It follows that the only way to block people
like Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden is to disseminate democracy and
freedom. To change radically the cultural and political dynamics that
creates such people. And the way to fight the chaos is to create a new world
order that will be based on freedom and human rights - and to be ready to
use force in order to consolidate this new world. So that, really, is what
the war is about. It is being fought to consolidate a new world order, to
create a new Middle East.

Does that mean that the war in Iraq is effectively a neoconservative war?
That's what people are saying, Kristol replies, laughing. But the truth is
that it's an American war. The neoconservatives succeeded because they
touched the bedrock of America. The thing is that America has a profound
sense of mission. America has a need to offer something that transcends a
life of comfort, that goes beyond material success. Therefore, because of
their ideals, the Americans accepted what the neoconservatives proposed.
They didn't want to fight a war over interests, but over values. They wanted
a war driven by a moral vision. They wanted to hitch their wagon to
something bigger than themselves.

Does this moral vision mean that after Iraq will come the turns of Saudi
Arabia and Egypt?

Kristol says that he is at odds with the administration on the question of
Saudi Arabia. But his opinion is that it is impossible to let Saudi Arabia
just continue what it is doing. It is impossible to accept the
anti-Americanism it is disseminating. The fanatic Wahhabism that Saudi
Arabia engenders is undermining the stability of the entire region. It's the
same with Egypt, he says: we mustn't accept the status quo there. For Egypt,
too, the horizon has to be liberal democracy.

It has to be understood that in the final analysis, the stability that the
corrupt Arab despots are offering is illusory. Just as the stability that
Yitzhak Rabin received from Yasser Arafat was illusory. In the end, none of
these decadent dictatorships will endure. The choice is between extremist
Islam, secular fascism or democracy. And because of September 11, American
understands that. America is in a position where it has no choice. It is
obliged to be far more aggressive in promoting democracy. Hence this war.
It's based on the new American understanding that if the United States does
not shape the world in its image, the world will shape the United States in
its own image.

3. Charles Krauthammer

Is this going to turn into a second Vietnam? Charles Krauthammer says no.
There is no similarity to Vietnam. Unlike in the 1960s, there is no
anti-establishment subculture in the United States now. Unlike in the 1960s,
there is now an abiding love of the army in the United States. Unlike in the
1960s, there is a determined president, one with character, in the White
House. And unlike in the 1960s, Americans are not deterred from making
sacrifices. That is the sea-change that took place here on September 11,
2001. Since that morning, Americans have understood that if they don't act
now and if weapons of mass destruction reach extremist terrorist
organizations, millions of Americans will die. Therefore, because they
understand that those others want to kill them by the millions, the
Americans prefer to take to the field of battle and fight, rather than sit
idly by and die at home.

Charles Krauthammer is handsome, swarthy and articulate. In his spacious
office on 19th Street in Northwest Washington, he sits upright in a black
wheelchair. Although his writing tends to be gloomy, his mood now is
elevated. The well-known columnist (Washington Post, Time, Weekly Standard)
has no real doubts about the outcome of the war that he promoted for 18
months. No, he does not accept the view that he helped lead America into the
new killing fields between the Tigris and the Euphrates. But it is true that
he is part of a conceptual stream that had something to offer in the
aftermath of September 11. Within a few weeks after the attacks on the Twin
Towers and the Pentagon, he had singled out Baghdad in his columns as an
essential target. And now, too, he is convinced that America has the
strength to pull it off. The thought that America will not win has never
even crossed his mind.

What is the war about? It's about three different issues. First of all, this
is a war for disarming Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction. That's the
basis, the self-evident cause, and it is also sufficient cause in itself.
But beyond that, the war in Iraq is being fought to replace the demonic deal
America cut with the Arab world decades ago. That deal said: you will send
us oil and we will not intervene in your internal affairs. Send us oil and
we will not demand from you what we are demanding of Chile, the Philippines,
Korea and South Africa.

That deal effectively expired on September 11, 2001, Krauthammer says. Since
that day, the Americans have understood that if they allow the Arab world to
proceed in its evil ways - suppression, economic ruin, sowing despair - it
will continue to produce more and more bin Ladens. America thus reached the
conclusion that it has no choice: it has to take on itself the project of
rebuilding the Arab world. Therefore, the Iraq war is really the beginning
of a gigantic historical experiment whose purpose is to do in the Arab world
what was done in Germany and Japan after World War II.

It's an ambitious experiment, Krauthammer admits, maybe even utopian, but
not unrealistic. After all, it is inconceivable to accept the racist
assumption that the Arabs are different from all other human beings, that
the Arabs are incapable of conducting a democratic way of life.

However, according to the Jewish-American columnist, the present war has a
further importance. If Iraq does become pro-Western and if it becomes the
focus of American influence, that will be of immense geopolitical
importance. An American presence in Iraq will project power across the
region. It will suffuse the rebels in Iran with courage and strength, and it
will deter and restrain Syria. It will accelerate the processes of change
that the Middle East must undergo.

Isn't the idea of preemptive war a dangerous one that rattles the world
order?

There is no choice, Krauthammer replies. In the 21st century we face a new
and singular challenge: the democratization of mass destruction. There are
three possible strategies in the face of that challenge: appeasement,
deterrence and preemption. Because appeasement and deterrence will not work,
preemption is the only strategy left. The United States must implement an
aggressive policy of preemption. Which is exactly what it is now doing in
Iraq. That is what Tommy Franks' soldiers are doing as we speak.

And what if the experiment fails? What if America is defeated?

This war will enhance the place of America in the world for the coming
generation, Krauthammer says. Its outcome will shape the world for the next
25 years. There are three possibilities. If the United States wins quickly
and without a bloodbath, it will be a colossus that will dictate the world
order. If the victory is slow and contaminated, it will be impossible to go
on to other Arab states after Iraq. It will stop there. But if America is
beaten, the consequences will be catastrophic. Its deterrent capability will
be weakened, its friends will abandon it and it will become insular. Extreme
instability will be engendered in the Middle East.

You don't really want to think about what will happen, Krauthammer says
looking me straight in the eye. But just because that's so, I am positive we
will not lose. Because the administration understands the implications. The
president understands that everything is riding on this. So he will throw
everything we've got into this. He will do everything that has to be done.
George W. Bush will not let America lose.

4. Thomas Friedman

Is this an American Lebanon War? Tom Friedman says he is afraid it is. He
was there, in the Commodore Hotel in Beirut, in the summer of 1982, and he
remembers it well. So he sees the lines of resemblance clearly. General
Ahmed Chalabi (the Shi'ite leader that the neoconservatives want to install
as the leader of a free Iraq) in the role of Bashir Jemayel. The Iraqi
opposition in the role of the Phalange. Richard Perle and the conservative
circle around him as Ariel Sharon. And a war that is at bottom a war of
choice. A war that wants to utilize massive force in order to establish a
new order.

Tom Friedman, The New York Times columnist, did not oppose the war. On the
contrary. He too was severely shaken by September 11, he too wants to
understand where these desperate fanatics are coming from who hate America
more than they love their own lives. And he too reached the conclusion that
the status quo in the Middle East is no longer acceptable. The status quo is
terminal. And therefore it is urgent to foment a reform in the Arab world.

Some things are true even if George Bush believes them, Friedman says with a
smile. And after September 11, it's impossible to tell Bush to drop it,
ignore it. There was a certain basic justice in the overall American feeling
that told the Arab world: we left you alone for a long time, you played with
matches and in the end we were burned. So we're not going to leave you alone
any longer.

He is sitting in a large rectangular room in the offices of The New York
Times in northwest Washington, on the corner of 17th Street. One wall of the
room is a huge map of the world. Hunched over his computer, he reads me
witty lines from the article that will be going to press in two hours. He
polishes, sharpens, plays word games. He ponders what's right to say now,
what should be left for a later date. Turning to me, he says that
democracies look soft until they're threatened. When threatened, they become
very hard. Actually, the Iraq war is a kind of Jenin on a huge scale.
Because in Jenin, too, what happened was that the Israelis told the
Palestinians, We left you here alone and you played with matches until
suddenly you blew up a Passover seder in Netanya. And therefore we are not
going to leave you along any longer. We will go from house to house in the
Casbah. And from America's point of view, Saddam's Iraq is Jenin. This war
is a defensive shield. It follows that the danger is the same: that like
Israel, America will make the mistake of using only force.

This is not an illegitimate war, Friedman says. But it is a very
presumptuous war. You need a great deal of presumption to believe that you
can rebuild a country half a world from home. But if such a presumptuous war
is to have a chance, it needs international support. That international
legitimacy is essential so you will have enough time and space to execute
your presumptuous project. But George Bush didn't have the patience to glean
international support. He gambled that the war would justify itself, that we
would go in fast and conquer fast and that the Iraqis would greet us with
rice and the war would thus be self-justifying. That did not happen. Maybe
it will happen next week, but in the meantime it did not happen.

When I think about what is going to happen, I break into a sweat, Friedman
says. I see us being forced to impose a siege on Baghdad. And I know what
kind of insanity a siege on Baghdad can unleash. The thought of
house-to-house combat in Baghdad without international legitimacy makes me
lose my appetite. I see American embassies burning. I see windows of
American businesses shattered. I see how the Iraqi resistance to America
connects to the general Arab resistance to America and the worldwide
resistance to America. The thought of what could happen is eating me up.

What George Bush did, Friedman says, is to show us a splendid mahogany
table: the new democratic Iraq. But when you turn the table over, you see
that it has only one leg. This war is resting on one leg. But on the other
hand, anyone who thinks he can defeat George Bush had better think again.
Bush will never give in. That's not what he's made of. Believe me, you don't
want to be next to this guy when he thinks he's being backed into a corner.
I don't suggest that anyone who holds his life dear mess with Dick Cheney,
Donald Rumsfeld and President Bush.

Is the Iraq war the great neoconservative war? It's the war the
neoconservatives wanted, Friedman says. It's the war the neoconservatives
marketed. Those people had an idea to sell when September 11 came, and they
sold it. Oh boy, did they sell it. So this is not a war that the masses
demanded. This is a war of an elite. Friedman laughs: I could give you the
names of 25 people (all of whom are at this moment within a five-block
radius of this office) who, if you had exiled them to a desert island a year
and a half ago, the Iraq war would not have happened.

Still, it's not all that simple, Friedman retracts. It's not some fantasy
the neoconservatives invented. It's not that 25 people hijacked America. You
don't take such a great nation into such a great adventure with Bill Kristol
and the Weekly Standard and another five or six influential columnists. In
the final analysis, what fomented the war is America's over-reaction to
September 11. The genuine sense of anxiety that spread in America after
September 11. It is not only the neoconservatives who led us to the
outskirts of Baghdad. What led us to the outskirts of Baghdad is a very
American combination of anxiety and hubris. 


http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=280279&%20contrassID=2
&subContrassID=14&sbSubContrassID=0&listSrc=Y --=====================_19016834==_.ALT-- From jafujii@uci.edu Sun Apr 6 17:54:32 2003 From: jafujii@uci.edu (Jim Fujii) Date: Sun, 06 Apr 2003 09:54:32 -0700 Subject: [Ethnicstudies] Fwd: American Peace Activist Shot by Israeli Tank Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20030406095404.00b92af8@benfranklin.hnet.uci.edu> --=====================_536491==_.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed Today at about 6.30 pm Brian Avery, 24, of New Mexico was shot in the face by a burst of machine gun fire from an Israeli Armoured Personnel Carrier. The circumstances surrounding his injury are as follows. Today the Israeli army of occupation operating in the Jenin area imposed its second day of curfew on the people of the city. Groups of young men and boys continued their resistance to the curfew by venturing out onto the streets to throw stones at tanks and other military vehicles. At about 6.30 pm Brian and another ISM activist were at the ISM's Jenin headquarters when they heard the sound of gunfire coming from the centre of the city, about two blocks away. They left the apartment to investigate and had traveled about a hundred metres when they arrived at a major crossroad and saw two armoured personnel carriers advancing towards them at low speed. There were no Palestinians on the streets in the area, armed or otherwise. At the sight of the armoured vehicles both activists stood still and raised their hands above their heads. When the first armoured personnel carrier was 50 metres from them it fired a burst of machine gun fire (an estimated 15 rounds) at the ground in front of them so that they were sprayed by a shower of broken bullets and stones. Tobias, Brian's companion, leapt aside. He had fled about three steps when he looked back to see Brian lying face down on the road in a pool of blood. Tobias and Brian were then joined by four other ISM activists who had arrived at the scene of the shooting by a different route. All six of them rushed to help him as the two armoured vehicles rolled past without stopping. He was conscious but when he raised himself from the ground they saw that his left cheek has been almost totally shot off. The activists then performed first aid on him and phoned for an ambulance which took him to the Martyr Doctor Khalil Suleiman Hospital in Jenin where he was treated for shrapnel wounds to his face including bone fractures below the eyes, lacerations of the tongue and lacerations of his left cheek. A specialist was called in to examine his injuries and recommended that he be transferred immediately to a hospital in Afula in Israel but his departure was delayed because the Israeli military refused to grant his ambulance safe passage for more than an hour From Afula Brian was transported to a hospital in Haifa by helicopter. Under the Israeli Army's own rules of engagement soldiers are not permitted to fire warning shots with mounted weapons. They may fire warning shots with light hand held weapons and must aim away from the people they are warning. When he was shot Brian was wearing a fluorescent red vest with a reflective white cross on its back and front. ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~--> Make Money Online Auctions! Make $500.00 or We Will Give You Thirty Dollars for Trying! http://us.click.yahoo.com/yMx78A/fNtFAA/i5gGAA/sitolB/TM ---------------------------------------------------------------------~-> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ --=====================_536491==_.ALT Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii"

 Today at about 6.30 pm Brian Avery, 24, of New Mexico was shot in the
 face by a burst of machine gun fire from an Israeli Armoured Personnel
Carrier.  The circumstances surrounding his injury are as follows.

Today the Israeli army of occupation operating in the Jenin area imposed
its second day of curfew on the people of the city.  Groups of young men
and boys continued their resistance to the curfew by venturing out onto the
streets to throw stones at tanks and other military vehicles.

At about 6.30 pm Brian and another ISM activist were at the ISM's Jenin
headquarters when they heard the sound of gunfire coming from the centre
 of the city, about two blocks away.  They left the apartment to investigate
and had traveled about a hundred metres when they arrived at a major
crossroad and saw two armoured personnel carriers advancing towards them at
low speed.  There were no Palestinians on the streets in the area, armed or
otherwise.

At the sight of the armoured vehicles both activists stood still and  raised
their hands above their heads.

When the first armoured personnel carrier was 50 metres from them it  fired
a burst of machine gun fire (an estimated 15 rounds) at the ground  in front
of them so that they were sprayed by a shower of broken bullets
and stones.  Tobias, Brian's companion, leapt aside.  He had fled about
three steps when he looked back to see Brian lying face down on the road  in
a pool of blood.

 Tobias and Brian were then joined by four other ISM activists who had
arrived at the scene of the shooting by a different route.  All six of  them
rushed to help him as the two armoured vehicles rolled past without
stopping.  He was conscious but when he raised himself from the ground  they
saw that his left cheek has been almost totally shot off.

The activists then performed first aid on him and phoned for an  ambulance
which took him to the Martyr Doctor Khalil Suleiman Hospital  in Jenin where
he was treated for shrapnel wounds to his face including  bone fractures
below the eyes, lacerations of the tongue and lacerations
of his left cheek.  A specialist was called in to examine his injuries  and
recommended that he be transferred immediately to a hospital in  Afula in
Israel but his departure was delayed because the Israeli  military refused
to grant his ambulance safe passage for more than an hour

 From Afula Brian was transported to a hospital in Haifa by helicopter.
 Under the Israeli Army's own rules of engagement soldiers are not
permitted to fire warning shots with mounted weapons.  They may fire
warning shots with light hand held weapons and must aim away from the
people they are warning.
 When he was shot Brian was wearing a fluorescent red vest with a
reflective white cross on its back and front.



------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~-->
Make Money Online Auctions! Make $500.00 or We Will Give You Thirty Dollars for Trying!
http://us.click.yahoo.com/yMx78A/fNtFAA/i5gGAA/sitolB/TM
---------------------------------------------------------------------~->

 

Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
--=====================_536491==_.ALT-- From jafujii@uci.edu Sun Apr 6 19:25:37 2003 From: jafujii@uci.edu (Jim Fujii) Date: Sun, 06 Apr 2003 11:25:37 -0700 Subject: [Ethnicstudies] The Battle of Baghdad Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20030406112519.00b3d4a8@benfranklin.hnet.uci.edu> --=====================_6001129==_.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable The Battle of Baghdad 'Ever so slowly, the suburbs were turned into battlefields' By Robert Fisk 06 April 2003 The Iraqi bodies were piled high in the pick-up truck in front of me, army boots hanging over the tailboard, a soldier with a rifle sitting beside them. Beside the highway, a squad of troops was stacking grenades as the ground beneath us vibrated with the impact of US air strikes. The area was called Qadisiya. It was Iraq's last front line. Thus did the Battle for Baghdad enter its first hours, a conflict that promises to be both dirty and cruel Beside the highway, the Iraqi armoured vehicle was still smouldering, a cloud of blue-grey smoke rising above the plane trees under which its crew had been sheltering. Two trucks were burnt out on the other side of the road. The American Apache helicopters had left just a few minutes before I arrived. A squad of soldiers, flat on their stomachs, were setting up an anti-armour weapon on the weed-strewn pavement, aiming at the empty airport motorway for the first American tanks to come thrashing down the highway. Then there were the Iraqi bodies, piled high in the back of a pick-up truck in front of me, army boots hanging over the tailboard, a soldier with an automatic rifle sitting beside them. Beside the highway, a squad of troops was stacking rocket-propelled grenades beside a row of empty shops as the ground beneath us vibrated with the impact of American air strikes and shellfire. The area was called Qadisiya. It was Iraq's last front line. Thus did the Battle for Baghdad enter its first hours yesterday, a conflict that promises to be both dirty and cruel. Even the city's police force was sent to the front, its officers parading in a fleet of squad cars through the central streets, waving their newly issued Kalashnikov rifles from the windows. What is one to say of such frantic, impersonal =AD and, yes, courageous =AD chaos? A truck crammed with more than a hundred Iraqi troops, many in blue uniforms, all of them carrying rifles which gleamed in the morning sunlight, sped past me towards the airport. A few made victory signs in the direction of my car =AD I confess to touching 145km an hour on the speedometer =AD but of course one had to ask what their hearts were telling them. "Up the line to death" was the phrase that came to mind. Two miles away, at the Yarmouk hospital, the surgeons stood in the car park in blood-stained overalls; they had already handled their first intake of military casualties. A few hours later, an Iraqi minister was to tell the world that the Republican Guard had just retaken the airport from the Americans, that they were under fire but had won "a great victory". Around Qadisiya, however, it didn't look that way. Tank crews were gunning their T-72s down the highway past the main Baghdad railway yards in a convoy of armoured personnel carriers and Jeeps and clouds of thick blue exhaust fumes. The more modern T-82s, the last of the Soviet-made fleet of battle tanks, sat hull down around Jordan Square with a clutch of BMP armoured vehicles. The Americans were coming. The Americans were claiming to be in the inner suburbs of Baghdad =AD which was untrue; indeed, the story was designed, I'm sure, to provoke panic and vulnerability among the Iraqis. True or false, the stories failed. Across vast fields of sand and dirt and palm groves, I saw batteries of Sam-6 anti-aircraft missiles and multiple Katyusha rocket launchers awaiting the American advance. The soldiers around them looked relaxed, some smoking cigarettes in the shade of the palm trees or sipping fruit juice brought to them by the residents of Qadisiya whose homes =AD heaven help them =AD were now in the firing line. But then there was the white-painted Japanese pick-up truck that pulled out in front of my car. At first, I thought the soldiers on the back were sleeping, covered in blankets to keep them warm. Yet I had opened my car window to keep cool this early summer morning and I realised that all the soldiers =AD there must have been 15 of them in the little truck =AD were lying on top of each other, all with their heavy black military boots dangling over the tailboard. The two soldiers on the vehicles sat with their feet wedged between the corpses. So did America's first victims of the day go to their eternal rest. "Today, we attack," the Minister of Information, Mohammed Saeed al- Sahaf, was to announced an hour later, and he reeled off a list of Iraqi "victories" to sustain his country's morale. Seven British and American tanks destroyed around Basra, four American personnel carriers and an American aircraft destroyed near Baghdad. At the airport, the Iraqis "confronted the enemy and slaughtered them". Or so we were told. Well, an Iraqi friend of mine who lives near the airport told me that he had seen a tank on fire, a tank with a black "V" sign painted on its armour. The "V" is the American symbol of "friendly force", intended to warn their pilots from bombing their own soldiers by mistake. So this must have been an American tank. But Mr Sahaf's optimism got the better of him. Yes, he told journalists in Baghdad, Doura was safe, Qadisiya was safe. Yarmouk was safe. "Go and look for yourselves," he challenged. Ministry of Information officials were ashen-faced. And when foreign correspondents were bussed off on this over-confident adventure, they were turned back at the Yarmouk hospital and the ministry buses firmly ordered to carry reporters back to their hotel. But an earlier 35-minute journey around the shell-embraced suburbs proved one thing yesterday: that the Iraqis =AD up till dusk at least =AD= were preparing to fight the invaders. I found their 155mm artillery around the centre of the city, close to the rail lines. One artillery piece was even hauled up Abu Nawas Street beside the Tigris by a truck whose soldiers held up their rifles and shouted their support for Saddam Hussein. And all day, the air raids continued. It gets confusing, amid the dust and smoke, all these new targets and new pockets of ruination. Was the grey-powdered rubble in Karada a building yesterday, or was it struck last week? The central telephone exchange had taken another hit. So had the communications centre in Yarmouk. And then I noticed, along the front line where the Iraqi soldiers were preparing to become heroes or "martyrs" or survivors =AD the last an infinitely preferable outcome to the sanest of soldiers =AD how small craters had been punched into the flowerbeds on the central reservations. Ever so slowly, the suburbs of Baghdad were being turned into battlefields. 6 April 2003 11:06 Search this site: Printable Story Stefano Sensi M.D., Ph.D University of California, Irvine 2149 Gillespie NRSF bldg Irvine, CA, 92697-4292 phone: 949 824 3838 fax: 949 824 1668 ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~--> FREE Cell Phones with up to $400 Cash Back! http://us.click.yahoo.com/_bBUKB/vYxFAA/i5gGAA/sitolB/TM ---------------------------------------------------------------------~-> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ --=====================_6001129==_.ALT Content-Type: text/html; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

The Battle of Baghdad
'Ever so slowly, the suburbs were turned into battlefields'
By Robert Fisk
06 April 2003


The Iraqi bodies were piled high in the pick-up truck in front of me,
army boots hanging over the tailboard, a soldier with a rifle sitting
beside them. Beside the highway, a squad of troops was stacking
grenades as the ground beneath us vibrated with the impact of US air
strikes. The area was called Qadisiya. It was Iraq's last front line. Thus
did the Battle for Baghdad enter its first hours, a conflict that promises
to be both dirty and cruel

Beside the highway, the Iraqi armoured vehicle was still smouldering, a
cloud of blue-grey smoke rising above the plane trees under which its
crew had been sheltering. Two trucks were burnt out on the other side
of the road. The American Apache helicopters had left just a few
minutes before I arrived. A squad of soldiers, flat on their stomachs,
were setting up an anti-armour weapon on the weed-strewn pavement,
aiming at the empty airport motorway for the first American tanks to
come thrashing down the highway.

Then there were the Iraqi bodies, piled high in the back of a pick-up
truck in front of me, army boots hanging over the tailboard, a soldier
with an automatic rifle sitting beside them. Beside the highway, a
squad of troops was stacking rocket-propelled grenades beside a row=20
of empty shops as the ground beneath us vibrated with the impact of=20
American air strikes and shellfire. The area was called Qadisiya. It was
Iraq's last front line.

Thus did the Battle for Baghdad enter its first hours yesterday, a
conflict that promises to be both dirty and cruel. Even the city's police
force was sent to the front, its officers parading in a fleet of squad cars
through the central streets, waving their newly issued Kalashnikov
rifles from the windows.

What is one to say of such frantic, impersonal =AD and, yes, courageous
=AD chaos? A truck crammed with more than a hundred Iraqi troops,
many in blue uniforms, all of them carrying rifles which gleamed in the
morning sunlight, sped past me towards the airport. A few made
victory signs in the direction of my car =AD I confess to touching 145km
an hour on the speedometer =AD but of course one had to ask what their
hearts were telling them. "Up the line to death" was the phrase that
came to mind. Two miles away, at the Yarmouk hospital, the surgeons=20
stood in the car park in blood-stained overalls; they had already
handled their first intake of military casualties.

A few hours later, an Iraqi minister was to tell the world that the=20
Republican Guard had just retaken the airport from the Americans,
that they were under fire but had won "a great victory". Around
Qadisiya, however, it didn't look that way. Tank crews were gunning=20
their T-72s down the highway past the main Baghdad railway yards in=20
a convoy of armoured personnel carriers and Jeeps and clouds of
thick blue exhaust fumes. The more modern T-82s, the last of the
Soviet-made fleet of battle tanks, sat hull down around Jordan Square
with a clutch of BMP armoured vehicles.

The Americans were coming. The Americans were claiming to be in
the inner suburbs of Baghdad =AD which was untrue; indeed, the story
was designed, I'm sure, to provoke panic and vulnerability among the
Iraqis.

True or false, the stories failed. Across vast fields of sand and dirt and
palm groves, I saw batteries of Sam-6 anti-aircraft missiles and
multiple Katyusha rocket launchers awaiting the American advance.
The soldiers around them looked relaxed, some smoking cigarettes in=20
the shade of the palm trees or sipping fruit juice brought to them by the
residents of Qadisiya whose homes =AD heaven help them =AD were now in
the firing line.

But then there was the white-painted Japanese pick-up truck that
pulled out in front of my car. At first, I thought the soldiers on the back
were sleeping, covered in blankets to keep them warm. Yet I had
opened my car window to keep cool this early summer morning and I
realised that all the soldiers =AD there must have been 15 of them in the
little truck =AD were lying on top of each other, all with their heavy black
military boots dangling over the tailboard. The two soldiers on the=20
vehicles sat with their feet wedged between the corpses. So did
America's first victims of the day go to their eternal rest.

"Today, we attack," the Minister of Information, Mohammed Saeed al-
Sahaf, was to announced an hour later, and he reeled off a list of Iraqi
"victories" to sustain his country's morale. Seven British and American
tanks destroyed around Basra, four American personnel carriers and
an American aircraft destroyed near Baghdad. At the airport, the Iraqis
"confronted the enemy and slaughtered them". Or so we were told.

Well, an Iraqi friend of mine who lives near the airport told me that he
had seen a tank on fire, a tank with a black "V" sign painted on its
armour. The "V" is the American symbol of "friendly force", intended to
warn their pilots from bombing their own soldiers by mistake. So this
must have been an American tank.

But Mr Sahaf's optimism got the better of him. Yes, he told journalists
in Baghdad, Doura was safe, Qadisiya was safe. Yarmouk was safe.
"Go and look for yourselves," he challenged. Ministry of Information
officials were ashen-faced. And when foreign correspondents were
bussed off on this over-confident adventure, they were turned back at
the Yarmouk hospital and the ministry buses firmly ordered to carry=20
reporters back to their hotel.

But an earlier 35-minute journey around the shell-embraced suburbs
proved one thing yesterday: that the Iraqis =AD up till dusk at least =AD were
preparing to fight the invaders. I found their 155mm artillery around the
centre of the city, close to the rail lines. One artillery piece was even
hauled up Abu Nawas Street beside the Tigris by a truck whose
soldiers held up their rifles and shouted their support for Saddam
Hussein.

And all day, the air raids continued. It gets confusing, amid the dust
and smoke, all these new targets and new pockets of ruination. Was
the grey-powdered rubble in Karada a building yesterday, or was it
struck last week? The central telephone exchange had taken another
hit. So had the communications centre in Yarmouk. And then I noticed,
along the front line where the Iraqi soldiers were preparing to become
heroes or "martyrs" or survivors =AD the last an infinitely preferable
outcome to the sanest of soldiers =AD how small craters had been
punched into the flowerbeds on the central reservations.

Ever so slowly, the suburbs of Baghdad were being turned into
battlefields.
   6 April 2003 11:06

Search this site:
 

 Printable Story
 
 
 
 
 
 
 



Stefano Sensi M.D., Ph.D
University of California, Irvine
2149 Gillespie NRSF bldg
Irvine, CA, 92697-4292
phone: 949 824 3838
fax: 949 824 1668 


------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~-->
FREE Cell Phones with up to $400 Cash Back!
http://us.click.yahoo.com/_bBUKB/vYxFAA/i5gGAA/sitolB/TM=
---------------------------------------------------------------------~-><= br>
 

Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs= .yahoo.com/info/terms/
--=====================_6001129==_.ALT-- From dtsang@lib.uci.edu Mon Apr 7 19:53:00 2003 From: dtsang@lib.uci.edu (Dan Tsang) Date: Mon, 7 Apr 2003 11:53:00 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Ethnicstudies] [Subv] Better Luck Tomorrow's Justin Lin (fwd) Message-ID: Irvine -- Justin Lin's Better Luck Tomorrow opens this Friday at selected theaters nation-wide, including at the Block in Orange, California. We talk with the Orange County-rased indie director about his new film, picked up by MTV Films, loosely based on an OC murder case. Lin talks about why he wanted to present a story of over-achieving, real bad Asian Americans, and what this film suggests about the representation of Asians in American cinema. The film serves as a wake-up call to parents. The film is co-written by UCI film studies graduate, Fabian Marquez, and includes scenes shot in Orange County. Two actors in the film, John Cho and Jason Tobin, were previous guests on Subversity. The show airs Tuesday, April 8, 2003 from 4-5 p.m. on KUCI, 88.9 fm in Orange County, Calif., and is Web-cast at the same time via kuci.org. Our show last week with film scholar Helen Leung discussing the late Hong Kong popstar turned actor Leslie Cheung's queer sensibility and with Vietnamese Director Do Minh Tuan, who will be present at the showing of his "Foul King" at the Newport Beach Film Festival this Thursday, is posted on the Web at: http://falco.kuci.uci.edu/~dtsang/subversity/Sv030401.ram. Foul King screens at the Lido Theater, 3459 Via Lido, Newport Beach, (949) 253-2880, Thurs., April 10, 5 p.m. Resources: Better Luck Tomorrow http://www.betterlucktomorrow.com film web site http://www.calendarlive.com/movies/cl-ca-yi6apr06.story They're the Bad Seeds? [free registration needed] http://www2.ocregister.com/ocrweb/ocr/article.do?id=33272§ion=SHOW&subsection=SHOW&year=2003&month=4&day=6 Testing limits http://www2.ocregister.com/ocrweb/ocr/article.do?id=33271§ion=SHOW&subsection=SHOW&year=2003&month=4&day=6 Justin Lin's 'Luck' http://www.ocweekly.com Check later this week (late Thursday), Film section .......... Foul King http://www.newportbeachfilmfest.com Newport Beach Film Festival http://www.ocweekly.com/ink/03/31/2003-tsang.php Down in the Dump: Do Minh Tuan exposes life at the bottom in Vietnam. http://falco.kuci.uci.edu/~dtsang/subversity/leslietitle.gif http://falco.kuci.uci.edu/~dtsang/subversity/leslietext.gif Article in Chinese Daily News about Leslie Cheung dan Daniel C. Tsang Host, Subversity, now Tuesdays, 4-5 p.m. KUCI, 88.9 FM and Web-cast live via http://kuci.org Subversity: http://kuci.org/~dtsang; E-mail: subversity@kuci.org Daniel Tsang, KUCI, PO Box 4362, Irvine CA 92616 UCI Tel: (949) 824-4978; UCI Fax: (949) 824-2700 UCI Office: 380 Main Library Member, National Writers Union (http://www.nwu.org) WWW News Resource Page: http://sun3.lib.uci.edu/~dtsang/netnews1.htm AWARE: http://sun3.lib.uci.edu/~dtsang/aware2.htm Personal Homepage: http://sun3.lib.uci.edu/~dtsang/ _______________________________________________ KUCI.org 88.9FM - "eclectic music, engaging talk" _______________________________________________ From jafujii@uci.edu Tue Apr 8 02:06:18 2003 From: jafujii@uci.edu (Jim Fujii) Date: Mon, 07 Apr 2003 18:06:18 -0700 Subject: [Ethnicstudies] The shape of World War IV, by number Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20030407180612.00bbdd10@benfranklin.hnet.uci.edu> --=====================_558983==_.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable The shape of World War IV, by number "Overcoming evil is the noblest cause and the hardest work," declares U.S. President George W. Bush. "And the liberation of millions is the fulfillment of America's founding promise." Meanwhile, in Iraq, 91 million kilograms of explosives =97 more than were= used in the entire first Gulf War =97 have already thundered from the heavens, erupting into a blur of fireballs and smouldering craters from Basra to Baghdad to Mosul. It's tough to judge this "preventive" war, since no historical comparison exists. James Woolsey, the former CIA director, says World War IV is upon us =97 "World War III" was the Cold War. What the rest of the world can't= figure out is who started it. And why. There are many reasons to be skeptical about what is happening right now. But, sometimes, numbers say more than words. Here are a few that have caught my attention. Iraq War Index 77: Percentage of Americans who support military action against any country believed to be linked to 9/11 terrorist attacks, even if innocent civilians are killed in those countries. 69: In a 2002 poll, percentage of Americans who said they believe Iraq has nuclear weapons. O: Number of nuclear warheads in Iraq. 53.9: Estimated number of U.S. troops over the age of 20 deemed to be overweight by federal obesity standards. $850 billion: Estimated military spending in the world in 2002. 50: Percentage spent by U.S. 0.0015: Percentage spent by Iraq. 50 per cent: Spending increase on U.S. national defence projected between 2000 and 2007. 320 metric tonnes: Amount of depleted uranium left in region after 1991 Gulf War. 200,000: Estimated number of U.S. soldiers said to be suffering from Gulf War Syndrome. 700: Between 1991 and 94, percentage increase in cancer rates in Iraq. 1 in 6: Chance the U.S. bombed Iraq on any given day last year. 9: Percentage of U.S. munitions dropped during the first Gulf War that were classified as precision-guided. 75: Percentage used during current war. 98: During the first Gulf War, the reported "success rate" (or percentage of accurate strikes) by Tomahawk cruise missiles. 10: Pentagon's estimated "success rate" after the war ended. $750,000: Unit cost of one Tomahawk cruise missile. 725: By Thursday morning, number of Tomahawks used in Iraq. 6: Of the 10-member commission created to investigate the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the number who have direct links to the airline industry. $3 million: Budget given to commission. $9 billion: Estimated monthly cost for U.S. to sustain war in Iraq. $100 billion: Estimated cost of Iraq "reconstruction." $7.4 billion: Amount U.S. will spend on missile defence research and development this year. 70: The percentage increase in wealth gap between the top 10 per cent of American families with highest incomes and the 20 per cent of families with lowest incomes between 1998 and 2001. 400: Number of French products and companies suggested for boycott on several Web sites. 18: Number of times France has invoked its veto in United Nations history. 76: Number of times the U.S. has used its veto. 1,200: Number of American historians who signed a petition last year demanding the Bush administration respect the U.S. Constitution with respect to declaration of war. 54 to 67: By 2020, estimated percentage of crude oil that will come from Persian Gulf. 2: As a measure of proven oil reserves, ranking of Iraq among all countries. 6: Percentage of the world's population living in the U.S. 30: Percentage of the world's energy resources used in the U.S. 89: Percentage of Americans who rely on television as their first source of news during war in Iraq. 92: Between Sept. 14, 2002 and Feb. 7, 2003, percentage of news stories airing on NBC, ABC and CBS that originated directly from White House, Pentagon or State Department. 67: Between March 25 and 27, percentage of U.S. television viewers who said they felt "sad watching the war coverage." 83: Percentage of U.S. television viewers who say they now want a return to entertainment programming. 236,202: The number of times Osama bin Laden was mentioned in international media reports between Sept. 11, 2001 and Sept. 11, 2002. 57, 667: The number of times Osama bin Laden was mentioned between Sept. 11, 2002 and today. 66,648: The number of times Saddam Hussein was mentioned between Sept. 11, 2001 and Sept. 11, 2002. 225,147: The number of times Saddam Hussein was mentioned between Sept. 11, 2002 and today. Oct. 2, 2002: Date the American Gulf War Veterans Association called for the resignation of U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld after he denied the U.S. sent biological weapons to Iraq during the 1980s. 38: In a 2002 poll, percentage of Americans who said Canada should be annexed. 13: Percentage of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 who could find Iraq on a map prior to the war. 16,000: Number of inactive military ranges in the U.S. that have unexploded munitions that pose serious environmental hazards. 1.5 million: Number of Internet "hits" the Iraq Body Count Web site has had since the war began. 52: Percentage of these visitors who are from the United States. 50: Percentage of weapons entering the global market that come from American firms. 10: Percentage of U.S. military spending that would provide global population with basic necessities. 1: Number of countries that have used nuclear weapons against another country. Sources: U.S. Department of Defence, New York Times, Opinion Dynamics Corporation, Factiva Database, Leger Marketing, Center for Media and Public Affairs, Medact, Pentagon, Znet, U.S. Surgeon General, National Geographic, Environmental Protection Agency, United Nations, World Health Organization, National Energy Policy, Colorado Campaign for Middle East Peace, Iraqi Body Count, Advertising Age, The Pew Research Center, Congressional Budget Office, BBC News, Washington Post, Amnesty International. --=====================_558983==_.ALT Content-Type: text/html; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable The shape of World War IV, by number

"Overcoming evil is the noblest cause and the hardest work," declares U.S.
President George W. Bush. "And the liberation of millions is the fulfillment
of America's founding promise."

Meanwhile, in Iraq, 91 million kilograms of explosives =97 more than were used
in the entire first Gulf War =97 have already thundered from the heavens,
erupting into a blur of fireballs and smouldering craters from Basra to
Baghdad to Mosul.

It's tough to judge this "preventive" war, since no historical comparison
exists. James Woolsey, the former CIA director, says World War IV is upon us
=97 "World War III" was the Cold War. What the rest of the world can't figure
out is who started it. And why.

There are many reasons to be skeptical about what is happening right now.
But, sometimes, numbers say more than words. Here are a few that have caught
my attention.

Iraq War Index

 

77: Percentage of Americans who support military action against any country
believed to be linked to 9/11 terrorist attacks, even if innocent civilians
are killed in those countries.

 

69: In a 2002 poll, percentage of Americans who said they believe Iraq has
nuclear weapons.

 

O: Number of nuclear warheads in Iraq.

 

53.9: Estimated number of U.S. troops over the age of 20 deemed to be
overweight by federal obesity standards.

 

$850 billion: Estimated military spending in the world in 2002.=20

 

50: Percentage spent by U.S.

 

0.0015: Percentage spent by Iraq.

 

50 per cent: Spending increase on U.S. national defence projected between
2000 and 2007.

 

320 metric tonnes: Amount of depleted uranium left in region after 1991 Gulf
War.

 

200,000: Estimated number of U.S. soldiers said to be suffering from Gulf
War Syndrome.

 

700: Between 1991 and 94, percentage increase in cancer rates in Iraq.

 

1 in 6: Chance the U.S. bombed Iraq on any given day last year.=20

 

9: Percentage of U.S. munitions dropped during the first Gulf War that were
classified as precision-guided.

 

75: Percentage used during current war.

 

98: During the first Gulf War, the reported "success rate" (or percentage of
accurate strikes) by Tomahawk cruise missiles.

 

10: Pentagon's estimated "success rate" after the war ended.

 

$750,000: Unit cost of one Tomahawk cruise missile.

 

725: By Thursday morning, number of Tomahawks used in Iraq.

 

6: Of the 10-member commission created to investigate the 9/11 terrorist
attacks, the number who have direct links to the airline industry.

 

$3 million: Budget given to commission.

 

$9 billion: Estimated monthly cost for U.S. to sustain war in Iraq.

 

$100 billion: Estimated cost of Iraq "reconstruction."

 

$7.4 billion: Amount U.S. will spend on missile defence research=20 and
development this year.

 

70: The percentage increase in wealth gap between the top 10 per cent of
American families with highest incomes and the 20 per cent of families with
lowest incomes between 1998 and 2001.

 

400: Number of French products and companies suggested for boycott on
several Web sites.

 

18: Number of times France has invoked its veto in United Nations history.

 

76: Number of times the U.S. has used its veto.

 

1,200: Number of American historians who signed a petition last=20 year
demanding the Bush administration respect the U.S. Constitution with respect
to declaration of war.

 

54 to 67: By 2020, estimated percentage of crude oil that will come from
Persian Gulf.

 

2: As a measure of proven oil reserves, ranking of Iraq among all countries.


 

6: Percentage of the world's population living in the U.S.

 

30: Percentage of the world's energy resources used in the U.S.=20

 

89: Percentage of Americans who rely on television as their first source of
news during war in Iraq.

 

92: Between Sept. 14, 2002 and Feb. 7, 2003, percentage of news stories
airing on NBC, ABC and CBS that originated directly from White House,
Pentagon or State Department.

 

67: Between March 25 and 27, percentage of U.S. television viewers who said
they felt "sad watching the war coverage."

 

83: Percentage of U.S. television viewers who say they now want a return to
entertainment programming.

 

236,202: The number of times Osama bin Laden was mentioned in international
media reports between Sept. 11, 2001 and Sept. 11, 2002.

 

57, 667: The number of times Osama bin Laden was mentioned between Sept. 11,
2002 and today.

 

66,648: The number of times Saddam Hussein was mentioned between Sept. 11,
2001 and Sept. 11, 2002.

 

225,147: The number of times Saddam Hussein was mentioned between Sept. 11,
2002 and today.

 

Oct. 2, 2002: Date the American Gulf War Veterans Association called for the
resignation of U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld after he denied the
U.S. sent biological weapons to Iraq during the 1980s.

 

38: In a 2002 poll, percentage of Americans who said Canada should be
annexed.

 

13: Percentage of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 who could find
Iraq on a map prior to the war.

 

16,000: Number of inactive military ranges in the U.S. that have unexploded
munitions that pose serious environmental hazards.

 

1.5 million: Number of Internet "hits" the Iraq Body Count Web site has had
since the war began.

 

52: Percentage of these visitors who are from the United States.

 

50: Percentage of weapons entering the global market that come from American
firms.

 

10: Percentage of U.S. military spending that would provide global
population with basic necessities.

 

1: Number of countries that have used nuclear weapons against another
country.

Sources: U.S. Department of Defence, New York Times, Opinion Dynamics
Corporation, Factiva Database, Leger Marketing, Center for Media and Public
Affairs, Medact, Pentagon, Znet, U.S. Surgeon General, National Geographic,
Environmental Protection Agency, United Nations, World Health Organization,
National Energy Policy, Colorado Campaign for Middle East Peace, Iraqi Body
Count, Advertising Age, The Pew Research Center, Congressional Budget
Office, BBC News, Washington Post, Amnesty International.
 --=====================_558983==_.ALT-- From jafujii@uci.edu Tue Apr 8 02:08:56 2003 From: jafujii@uci.edu (Jim Fujii) Date: Mon, 07 Apr 2003 18:08:56 -0700 Subject: [Ethnicstudies] Oil War Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20030407180850.00b9f530@benfranklin.hnet.uci.edu> --=====================_716850==_.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable http://www.bbc.co.uk/business/programmes/moneyprogramme/archive/oil.shtml BBC 5th April 2003 Oil War The advocates of war insist it's not about oil. But global oil production is on the brink of terminal decline and when the West begins to run short of supplies - could be a lifeline. After World War I, the oil companies carved up Iraq. Shell, BP, Exxon and Total all had stakes in the Iraq Petroleum Company. They paid pennies for each barrel of oil and built a pipeline to take it away. In 1972 the Iraqis nationalised the industry and threw the foreigners out. >From then on Western oil companies could only dream of Iraq=92s oil= reserves - the second largest in the world. With Saddam Hussein came decades of war followed by sanctions and Iraq's massive reserves lay largely untouched. But with Hussein's regime under threat, at last there was a chance to get back in. Dwindling discoveries It's not greed that=92s driving big oil companies - it's survival. The rate= of oil discovery has been falling ever since the 1960's when 47 billion barrels a year were discovered, mostly in the Middle East. In the 70's the rate dropped to about 35 billion barrels while the industry concentrated on the North Sea. In the 80's it was Russia=92s turn, and the discovery rate dropped to 24 billion. It dropped even further in the 90's as the industry concentrated on West Africa but only found some 14 billion barrels. Shrinking production In America, always the greediest consumer of oil, production has been falling for 30 years. Americans guzzle 20 million barrels of oil a day, but now they have to import over 60% of it. That pattern is being repeated elsewhere. Geologist Dr Colin Campbell predicted a decline in the North Sea several years ago and claims by 2015 Britain may have to import over half its oil needs. "In 1999 Britain went over the top and is declining quite rapidly," he says. "It's now 17% down in just three years, and this pattern is set to continue. That means that Britain will soon be a net importer, imports have to rise, the costs of the imports have to rise, and even the security of supply is becoming a little uncertain," Campbell adds. In Norway the government forecasts that in the next ten years its North Sea production will halve. In Argentina oil production has been down for several years and in Columbia, which was a big producer in the 90's, production is now past its peak. US energy security When George Bush took power two years ago, his administration was already worried about the vulnerability of America=92s oil supplies - the buzzword= was =91energy security=92. "I think it=92s quite possible that the United States realises the key importance of the Middle East generally to world supply in fact, and especially its own, and that it sees Saddam Hussein as a ready-made villain," points out Campbell. "It finds this a convenient way in which to establish a military presence in the Middle East - aimed partially at Iraq by all means but with a wider significance to control the production elsewhere there." The US pushed its allies hard to support military action against Iraq. With resolution 1441 last November they seemed to be making progress. But in December America=92s energy security took yet another turn for the worse. Venezuelan oil workers went on strike and oil prices soared - hitting $35 a barrel. Iraqi oil for Iraqi people As preparations for war gathered pace there were massive demonstrations around the world. The widespread view that it was all about oil worried the US and British governments so much that they came up with a plan - they would safeguard Iraq=92s oil for the Iraqi people. "We will make sure that Iraq=92s natural resources are used for the benefit= of their owners, the Iraqi people," President Bush told the world. But even if the post-Saddam regime retains control of oil exports, at least the boost in Iraqi output will provide a growing supply to the West. For a war supposedly not about oil, military planners made a high priority of securing the oilfields. Apart from a handful of wells torched by Iraqi troops, the huge southern oilfields were taken largely intact. But other major oil-producing regions are still in Iraqi hands and there is still a danger that, as in Kuwait 12 years ago, massive sabotage may hit oil production for years to come. Terminal decline Whatever happens, rebuilding Iraq will be a huge job and only US companies have been invited to bid for contracts. Opposition leader Dr Salah Al-Shaikhly, of the Iraqi National Accord, admits Britain and America will benefit from helping remove Saddam. "Well definitely those who have helped us, all along, with regime change. Obviously they should have a little edge over the rest. I think even in economics, this is quite acceptable=85 as well as the politics." But even if Iraq does boost its oil production ironically the effect could be short lived. Its vast reserves represent just four years of world consumption and by the time Iraqi oil is flowing freely, global oil production may already be in terminal decline. Campbell thinks the decline will start by 2010. "It starts with a price shock due to control of the market by a few countries, and it is followed by the onset of physical shortage, which just gets worse and worse and worse," he says. So if alternatives to oil are not found soon the changes could be radical. Unlimited use of cars and cheap flights around the world may well be a thing of the past. While international trade - the very basis of the global economy - will suffer. --=====================_716850==_.ALT Content-Type: text/html; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable http://www.bbc.co.uk/business/programmes/moneyprogramme/= archive/oil.shtml

BBC  5th April 2003

Oil War

The advocates of war insist it's not about oil. But global oil production is
on the brink of terminal decline and when the West begins to run short of
supplies - could be a lifeline.

After World War I, the oil companies carved up Iraq. Shell, BP, Exxon and
Total all had stakes in the Iraq Petroleum Company. They paid pennies for
each barrel of oil and built a pipeline to take it away.

In 1972 the Iraqis nationalised the industry and threw the foreigners out.
>From then on Western oil companies could only dream of Iraq=92s oil reserves -
the second largest in the world.

With Saddam Hussein came decades of war followed by sanctions and Iraq's
massive reserves lay largely untouched. But with Hussein's regime under
threat, at last there was a chance to get back in.

Dwindling discoveries

It's not greed that=92s driving big oil companies - it's survival. The rate of
oil discovery has been falling ever since the 1960's when 47 billion barrels
a year were discovered, mostly in the Middle East.

In the 70's the rate dropped to about 35 billion barrels while the industry
concentrated on the North Sea. In the 80's it was Russia=92s turn, and the
discovery rate dropped to 24 billion. It dropped even further in the 90's as
the industry concentrated on West Africa but only found some 14 billion
barrels.

Shrinking production

In America, always the greediest consumer of oil, production has been
falling for 30 years. Americans guzzle 20 million barrels of oil a day, but
now they have to import over 60% of it.

That pattern is being repeated elsewhere. Geologist Dr Colin Campbell
predicted a decline in the North Sea several years ago and claims by 2015
Britain may have to import over half its oil needs. "In 1999 Britain went
over the top and is declining quite rapidly," he says.

"It's now 17% down in just three years, and this pattern is set to continue.
That means that Britain will soon be a net importer, imports have to rise,
the costs of the imports have to rise, and even the security of supply is
becoming a little uncertain," Campbell adds.

In Norway the government forecasts that in the next ten years its North Sea
production will halve. In Argentina oil production has been down for several
years and in Columbia, which was a big producer in the 90's, production is
now past its peak.

US energy security

When George Bush took power two years ago, his administration was already
worried about the vulnerability of America=92s oil supplies - the buzzword was
=91energy security=92.

"I think it=92s quite possible that the United States realises the key
importance of the Middle East generally to world supply in fact,=20 and
especially its own, and that it sees Saddam Hussein as a ready-made
villain," points out Campbell.

"It finds this a convenient way in which to establish a military presence in
the Middle East - aimed partially at Iraq by all means but with a wider
significance to control the production elsewhere there."

The US pushed its allies hard to support military action against Iraq. With
resolution 1441 last November they seemed to be making progress. But in
December America=92s energy security took yet another turn for the worse.
Venezuelan oil workers went on strike and oil prices soared - hitting $35 a
barrel.

Iraqi oil for Iraqi people

As preparations for war gathered pace there were massive demonstrations
around the world. The widespread view that it was all about oil worried the
US and British governments so much that they came up with a plan - they
would safeguard Iraq=92s oil for the Iraqi people.

"We will make sure that Iraq=92s natural resources are used for the benefit of
their owners, the Iraqi people," President Bush told the world.

But even if the post-Saddam regime retains control of oil exports, at least
the boost in Iraqi output will provide a growing supply to the West.

For a war supposedly not about oil, military planners made a high priority
of securing the oilfields. Apart from a handful of wells torched by Iraqi
troops, the huge southern oilfields were taken largely intact. But other
major oil-producing regions are still in Iraqi hands and there is still a
danger that, as in Kuwait 12 years ago, massive sabotage may hit=20 oil
production for years to come.

Terminal decline

Whatever happens, rebuilding Iraq will be a huge job and only US companies
have been invited to bid for contracts.

Opposition leader Dr Salah Al-Shaikhly, of the Iraqi National Accord, admits
Britain and America will benefit from helping remove Saddam. "Well
definitely those who have helped us, all along, with regime change.
Obviously they should have a little edge over the rest. I think even in
economics, this is quite acceptable=85 as well as the politics."

But even if Iraq does boost its oil production ironically the effect could
be short lived. Its vast reserves represent just four years of=20 world
consumption and by the time Iraqi oil is flowing freely, global oil
production may already be in terminal decline.

Campbell thinks the decline will start by 2010. "It starts with a price
shock due to control of the market by a few countries, and it is followed by
the onset of physical shortage, which just gets worse and worse and worse,"
he says.

So if alternatives to oil are not found soon the changes could be radical.
Unlimited use of cars and cheap flights around the world may well be a thing
of the past. While international trade - the very basis of the global
economy - will suffer.
--=====================_716850==_.ALT-- From jafujii@uci.edu Tue Apr 8 02:05:05 2003 From: jafujii@uci.edu (Jim Fujii) Date: Mon, 07 Apr 2003 18:05:05 -0700 Subject: [Ethnicstudies] Blair's peace efforts too extreme, says Israel Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20030407180459.00bcde38@benfranklin.hnet.uci.edu> --=====================_486309==_.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,5944-637522,00.html The Times April 7, 2003 Blair's peace efforts too extreme, says Israel >From Robert Tait in Jerusalem Israel has dismissed Tony Blair as =93irrelevant=94 to the Middle East peace process after he said that progress towards a Palestinian state was as important as toppling President Saddam Hussein. In a sign of increasing tensions between the two sides, Ariel Sharon=92s Government described Mr Blair=92s comments, made in a BBC interview, as =93inappropriate and unbalanced=94. Interviewed by the BBC=92s Arabic service last Friday, Mr Blair said: =93We= have got a situation now where the President of the United States of America . . . has laid out a two-state vision =97 Israel, recognised by everyone, confident about its security; and a viable Palestinian state. =93I believe it is every bit as important that we make progress on that as= we get rid of Saddam.=94 Dov Weissglass, Mr Sharon=92s chief adviser, responded angrily, telling= Israel radio: =93We regret that Great Britain is pushing itself out of involvement= in the peace process as a result of extreme positions it has adopted. A country that adopts such unbalanced positions cannot expect to have its voice attended to seriously. We will not be able to bear Blair=92s statements and= we will draw our conclusions.=94 The row erupted after it emerged that Mr Sharon had cancelled a meeting scheduled between Ephraim Halevy, his National Security Adviser, and Mr Blair, in the belief that Israel=92s concerns would not get a fair hearing. The Israeli Government has taken an increasingly hostile attitude towards Downing Street in recent months, accusing it of pressing the White House on the Middle East peace process to assuage British domestic concerns over Iraq. Two weeks ago, the Israeli Foreign Ministry called in Sherard Cowper-Coles, the British Ambassador in Tel Aviv, to protest about remarks by Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, in another BBC interview. Mr Straw said that the West had been guilty of double standards in insisting that Iraq implement United Nations resolutions while not making the same demands of Israel. The latest offensive came as the Prime Minister prepared to meet President Bush today in Northern Ireland to discuss the war in Iraq. The leaders will also discuss the international road map that has been drawn up to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. Mr Blair has been urging Mr Bush to publish the plan, which calls for a Palestinian state to be established by 2005, as a counterweight to Arab concerns over the Iraqi campaign. Mr Sharon met his senior advisers yesterday to discuss the plans. Mr Weissglass will travel to Washington this week to present a list of 15 reservations Israel has, including a demand that Israel should not have to halt settlement activity until there is an end to Palestinian violence. A Downing Street spokesman said last night: =93It=92s our strong belief,= shared by President Bush, that the road map represents a fair and balanced way forward. As President Bush said at Camp David, we want to see the road map not only published, but implemented, and that will feature in the talks the Prime Minister is having with Mr Bush in Northern Ireland.=94 --=====================_486309==_.ALT Content-Type: text/html; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,5944-637522,00.h= tml

The Times    April 7, 2003

Blair's peace efforts too extreme, says Israel

>From Robert Tait in Jerusalem
 
Israel has dismissed Tony Blair as =93irrelevant=94 to the Middle East peace
process after he said that progress towards a Palestinian state was as
important as toppling President Saddam Hussein.

In a sign of increasing tensions between the two sides, Ariel Sharon=92s
Government described Mr Blair=92s comments, made in a BBC interview, as
=93inappropriate and unbalanced=94.

Interviewed by the BBC=92s Arabic service last Friday, Mr Blair said: =93We have
got a situation now where the President of the United States of America . .
. has laid out a two-state vision =97 Israel, recognised by everyone,
confident about its security; and a viable Palestinian state.

=93I believe it is every bit as important that we make progress on that as we
get rid of Saddam.=94

Dov Weissglass, Mr Sharon=92s chief adviser, responded angrily, telling Israel
radio: =93We regret that Great Britain is pushing itself out of involvement in
the peace process as a result of extreme positions it has adopted. A country
that adopts such unbalanced positions cannot expect to have its voice
attended to seriously. We will not be able to bear Blair=92s statements and we
will draw our conclusions.=94

The row erupted after it emerged that Mr Sharon had cancelled a meeting
scheduled between Ephraim Halevy, his National Security Adviser, and Mr
Blair, in the belief that Israel=92s concerns would not get a fair hearing.

The Israeli Government has taken an increasingly hostile attitude towards
Downing Street in recent months, accusing it of pressing the White House on
the Middle East peace process to assuage British domestic concerns over
Iraq.

Two weeks ago, the Israeli Foreign Ministry called in Sherard Cowper-Coles,
the British Ambassador in Tel Aviv, to protest about remarks by Jack Straw,
the Foreign Secretary, in another BBC interview. Mr Straw said that the West
had been guilty of double standards in insisting that Iraq implement United
Nations resolutions while not making the same demands of Israel.

The latest offensive came as the Prime Minister prepared to meet President
Bush today in Northern Ireland to discuss the war in Iraq. The leaders will
also discuss the international road map that has been drawn up to resolve
the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. Mr Blair has been urging Mr Bush to publish
the plan, which calls for a Palestinian state to be established by 2005, as
a counterweight to Arab concerns over the Iraqi campaign.

Mr Sharon met his senior advisers yesterday to discuss the plans.=20 Mr
Weissglass will travel to Washington this week to present a list of 15
reservations Israel has, including a demand that Israel should not have to
halt settlement activity until there is an end to Palestinian violence.

A Downing Street spokesman said last night: =93It=92s our strong belief, shared
by President Bush, that the road map represents a fair and balanced way
forward. As President Bush said at Camp David, we want to see the road map
not only published, but implemented, and that will feature in the talks the
Prime Minister is having with Mr Bush in Northern Ireland.=94
 --=====================_486309==_.ALT-- From jafujii@uci.edu Tue Apr 8 02:04:00 2003 From: jafujii@uci.edu (Jim Fujii) Date: Mon, 07 Apr 2003 18:04:00 -0700 Subject: [Ethnicstudies] Police Attack Calif. Anti - War Protesters Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20030407180352.00b84418@benfranklin.hnet.uci.edu> --=====================_421516==_.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-War-Protests-Shootings.html Associated Press April 7, 2003 Police Attack Calif. Anti - War Protesters Oakland, Calif. (AP) -- Police open fired Monday morning with non-lethal bullets at an anti-war protest at the Port of Oakland, injuring several longshoremen standing nearby. Police were trying to clear protesters from an entrance to the docks when they opened fire and the longshoremen apparently were caught in the line of fire. Six longshoremen were treated by paramedics and at least one was expected to be taken to a hospital. It was unclear if any of the protesters was injured. ``I was standing as far back as I could,'' said longshoreman Kevin Wilson. ``It was very scary. All of that force wasn't necessary.'' Last week, a San Francisco-based peace group, Direct Action to Stop the War, had announced that it would stage a series of protests Monday involving new acts of civil disobedience. The Port of Oakland was among the targets, organizers had said, because at least one shipping company is handling war supplies. Trent Willis, a business agent for the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, said angrily that dockworkers were leaving the docks after the incident. ``They shot my guys. We're not going to work today,'' Willis said. ``The cops had no reason to open up on them.'' Police used non-lethal bullets, sandbags and concussion grenades to try to break up about 500 protesters, who split into groups in front of different terminals. Oakland Police officer James Carroll said police set up a ``skirmish line'' and ordered the protesters to disperse. ``It escalated pretty quick,'' he said. ``Usually you go to these protests and you wait around for three to four hours. Today, all of a sudden, people were being taken into custody.'' He could not confirm that anyone was hit by the bullets. Protests also took place at the federal building in San Francisco and at the Concord Naval Weapons Station. Seven people were arrested when they temporarily blocked an exit ramp off Interstate 280. --=====================_421516==_.ALT Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii" http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-War-Protests-Shootings.html

Associated Press     April 7, 2003

Police Attack Calif. Anti - War Protesters

Oakland, Calif. (AP) -- Police open fired Monday morning with non-lethal
bullets at an anti-war protest at the Port of Oakland, injuring several
longshoremen standing nearby.

Police were trying to clear protesters from an entrance to the docks when
they opened fire and the longshoremen apparently were caught in the line of
fire.

Six longshoremen were treated by paramedics and at least one was expected to
be taken to a hospital. It was unclear if any of the protesters was injured.


``I was standing as far back as I could,'' said longshoreman Kevin Wilson.
``It was very scary. All of that force wasn't necessary.''

Last week, a San Francisco-based peace group, Direct Action to Stop the War,
had announced that it would stage a series of protests Monday involving new
acts of civil disobedience.

The Port of Oakland was among the targets, organizers had said, because at
least one shipping company is handling war supplies.

Trent Willis, a business agent for the International Longshore and Warehouse
Union, said angrily that dockworkers were leaving the docks after the
incident.

``They shot my guys. We're not going to work today,'' Willis said. ``The
cops had no reason to open up on them.''

Police used non-lethal bullets, sandbags and concussion grenades to try to
break up about 500 protesters, who split into groups in front of different
terminals.

Oakland Police officer James Carroll said police set up a ``skirmish line''
and ordered the protesters to disperse.

``It escalated pretty quick,'' he said. ``Usually you go to these protests
and you wait around for three to four hours. Today, all of a sudden, people
were being taken into custody.'' He could not confirm that anyone was hit by
the bullets.

Protests also took place at the federal building in San Francisco and at the
Concord Naval Weapons Station. Seven people were arrested when they
temporarily blocked an exit ramp off Interstate 280.
--=====================_421516==_.ALT-- From jafujii@uci.edu Tue Apr 8 02:07:39 2003 From: jafujii@uci.edu (Jim Fujii) Date: Mon, 07 Apr 2003 18:07:39 -0700 Subject: [Ethnicstudies] Red Cross horrified by number of dead civilians Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20030407180733.00bd0dc0@benfranklin.hnet.uci.edu> --=====================_640330==_.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Canadian Press April 3, 2003 Red Cross horrified by number of dead civilians Ottawa =97 Red Cross doctors who visited southern Iraq this week saw "incredible" levels of civilian casualties including a truckload of dismembered women and children, a spokesman said Thursday from Baghdad. Roland Huguenin, one of six International Red Cross workers in the Iraqi capital, said doctors were horrified by the casualties they found in the hospital in Hilla, about 160 kilometres south of Baghdad. "There has been an incredible number of casualties with very, very serious wounds in the region of Hilla," Huguenin said in a interview by satellite telephone. "We saw that a truck was delivering dozens of totally dismembered dead bodies of women and children. It was an awful sight. It was really very difficult to believe this was happening." Huguenin said the dead and injured in Hilla came from the village of Nasiriyah, where there has been heavy fighting between American troops and Iraqi soldiers, and appeared to be the result of "bombs, projectiles." "At this stage we cannot comment on the nature of what happened exactly at that place . . . but it was definitely a different pattern from what we had seen in Basra or Baghdad. "There will be investigations I am sure." Baghdad and Basra are coping relatively well with the flow of wounded, said Huguenin, estimating that Baghdad hospitals have been getting about 100 wounded a day. Most of the wounded in the two large cities have suffered superficial shrapnel wounds, with only about 15 per cent requiring internal surgery, he said. But the pattern in Hilla was completely different. "In the case of Hilla, everybody had very serious wounds and many, many of them small kids and women. We had small toddlers of two or three years of age who had lost their legs, their arms. We have called this a horror." At least 400 people were taken to the Hilla hospital over a period of two days, he said -- far beyond its capacity. "Doctors worked around the clock to do as much as they could. They just had to manage, that was all." The city is no longer accessible, he added. Red Cross staff are also concerned about what may be happening in other smaller centres south of Baghdad. "We do not know what is going on in Najaf and Kabala. It has become physically impossible for us to reach out to those cities because the major road has become a zone of combat." The Red Cross was able to claim one significant success this week: it played a key role in re-establishing water supplies at Basra. Power for a water-pumping station had been accidentally knocked out in the attack on the city, leaving about a million people without water. Iraqi technicians couldn't reach the station to repair it because it was under coalition control. The Red Cross was able to negotiate safe passage for a group of Iraqi engineers who crossed the fire line and made repairs. Basra now has 90 per cent of its normal water supply, said Huguenin. Huguenin, a Swiss, is one of six international Red Cross workers still in Baghdad. The team includes two Canadians, Vatche Arslanian of Oromocto, N.B., and Kassandra Vartell of Calgary. The Red Cross expects the humanitarian crisis in Iraq to grow and is calling for donations to help cope. The Red Cross Web site is: www.redcross.ca http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/1049413227648_10/?hub=3D= Sp ecialEvent3=20 --=====================_640330==_.ALT Content-Type: text/html; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
Canadian Press       April 3, 2003

Red Cross horrified by number of dead civilians
 
Ottawa =97 Red Cross doctors who visited southern Iraq this week saw
"incredible" levels of civilian casualties including a truckload of
dismembered women and children, a spokesman said Thursday from Baghdad.

Roland Huguenin, one of six International Red Cross workers in the Iraqi
capital, said doctors were horrified by the casualties they found in the
hospital in Hilla, about 160 kilometres south of Baghdad.

"There has been an incredible number of casualties with very, very serious
wounds in the region of Hilla," Huguenin said in a interview by satellite
telephone.

"We saw that a truck was delivering dozens of totally dismembered dead
bodies of women and children. It was an awful sight. It was really very
difficult to believe this was happening."

Huguenin said the dead and injured in Hilla came from the village=20 of
Nasiriyah, where there has been heavy fighting between American troops and
Iraqi soldiers, and appeared to be the result of "bombs, projectiles."

"At this stage we cannot comment on the nature of what happened exactly at
that place . . . but it was definitely a different pattern from what we had
seen in Basra or Baghdad.

"There will be investigations I am sure."

Baghdad and Basra are coping relatively well with the flow of wounded, said
Huguenin, estimating that Baghdad hospitals have been getting about 100
wounded a day.

Most of the wounded in the two large cities have suffered superficial
shrapnel wounds, with only about 15 per cent requiring internal surgery, he
said.

But the pattern in Hilla was completely different.

"In the case of Hilla, everybody had very serious wounds and many, many of
them small kids and women. We had small toddlers of two or three years of
age who had lost their legs, their arms. We have called this a horror."

At least 400 people were taken to the Hilla hospital over a period of two
days, he said -- far beyond its capacity.

"Doctors worked around the clock to do as much as they could. They just had
to manage, that was all."

The city is no longer accessible, he added.

Red Cross staff are also concerned about what may be happening in other
smaller centres south of Baghdad.

"We do not know what is going on in Najaf and Kabala. It has become
physically impossible for us to reach out to those cities because the major
road has become a zone of combat."

The Red Cross was able to claim one significant success this week: it played
a key role in re-establishing water supplies at Basra.

Power for a water-pumping station had been accidentally knocked out in the
attack on the city, leaving about a million people without water. Iraqi
technicians couldn't reach the station to repair it because it was under
coalition control.

The Red Cross was able to negotiate safe passage for a group of Iraqi
engineers who crossed the fire line and made repairs. Basra now has 90 per
cent of its normal water supply, said Huguenin.

Huguenin, a Swiss, is one of six international Red Cross workers still in
Baghdad. The team includes two Canadians, Vatche Arslanian of Oromocto,
N.B., and Kassandra Vartell of Calgary.

The Red Cross expects the humanitarian crisis in Iraq to grow and is calling
for donations to help cope. The Red Cross Web site is: www.redcross.ca


http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/1049= 413227648_10/?hub=3DSp
ecialEvent3 --=====================_640330==_.ALT-- From jafujii@uci.edu Tue Apr 8 06:52:19 2003 From: jafujii@uci.edu (Jim Fujii) Date: Mon, 07 Apr 2003 22:52:19 -0700 Subject: [Ethnicstudies] Cops Attack Peaceful Protesters, Union Members at Oakland Docks Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20030407225210.00bb02a0@benfranklin.hnet.uci.edu> --=====================_17720590==_.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed International A.N.S.W.E.R. (Act Now to Stop War & End Racism) 2489 Mission St., Rm. 24, San Francisco, CA 94110 ? Phone: 415-821-6545 answer@actionsf.org ? www.internationalanswer.org ? www.votenowar.org For immediate release: April 7, 2003 Contacts: Tahnee Nye, Bill Hackwell Phone: 415-821-6545, 415-269-7917 Over 500 Peaceful Protesters Picket APL and SSA War Merchants at Oakland Docks Police Attack With Wooden Bullets, Stun Concussion Grenades At 5:30 a.m. this morning anti-war protesters set up picket lines at APL Shippers on the Oakland Docks to protest US war on Iraq. APL receives millions of taxpayer dollars every year for shipping military cargo through the Department of Defense Maritime Security Program (MSP). APL makes nine of its vessels available to the Department of Defense in order to move "ammunition and sustainment cargo." Several of these vessels have already been called up to service the military this year. "We are here to protest the war profiteers that are gaining from this illegal war and occupation," said Natividad Carrera, a youth organizer with A.N.S.W.E.R. (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism). Demonstrators chanted, "War is for profit, the workers can stop it," and "APL gets rich, US soldiers die, Iraqi people die." Workers from the International Longshoremen and Warehouse Union did not cross the anti-war protesters' picket line at the APL or SSA gates. Without the labor of the dockworkers cargo for the APL and SSA could not be loaded or unloaded. At 6 a.m. hundreds of protesters moved down the dock to block the gates to SSA shipping as well. SSA also has contracts with the US military to supply the occupation effort. Picketers blocked six gates in total. At approximately 7:20 a.m. police started using concussion grenades to break up the picket line at APL. Demonstrators moved down to the SSA gates where, later, police used rubber bullets, beanbags, and more concussion grenades to force demonstrators from the docks. "The community is legally picketing these corporations who transport military goods to the war and the police are responding with excessive force. We're trying to stop the killing of innocent civilians and this occupation. The police are shooting wooden bullets and beanbags. Even dockworkers, union members, waiting across the street have gotten shot by the police. They're using shock concussion grenades. Just look at the bloody bruises the police are inflicting. The police brutality is outrageous," said Natalie Alsop a student from City College of San Francisco who joined the protest. Protesters proceeded from the ports to march to the Federal Building in Oakland where some demonstrators blocked an intersection. Many demonstrators were carry signs reading "Stop the war, protest April 12 SF Civic Center." A.N.S.W.E.R. and the U.K. Coalition to Stop the War have initiated an international day of protest against the war on Iraq next Saturday in San Francisco, Washington, D.C., London and other cities. -30- --=====================_17720590==_.ALT Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii" International A.N.S.W.E.R. (Act Now to Stop War & End Racism)
2489 Mission St., Rm. 24, San Francisco, CA 94110 ? Phone: 415-821-6545
answer@actionsf.org ? www.internationalanswer.org ? www.votenowar.org

For immediate release: April 7, 2003            Contacts: Tahnee Nye, Bill Hackwell                                                                Phone: 415-821-6545, 415-269-7917
        
Over 500 Peaceful Protesters Picket
APL and SSA War Merchants at Oakland Docks
Police Attack With Wooden Bullets, Stun Concussion Grenades

At 5:30 a.m. this morning anti-war protesters set up picket lines at APL Shippers on the Oakland Docks to protest US war on Iraq. APL receives millions of taxpayer dollars every year for shipping military cargo through the Department of Defense Maritime Security Program (MSP). APL makes nine of its vessels available to the Department of Defense in order to move "ammunition and sustainment cargo." Several of these vessels have already been called up to service the military this year.

“We are here to protest the war profiteers that are gaining from this illegal war and occupation,” said Natividad Carrera, a youth organizer with A.N.S.W.E.R. (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism). Demonstrators chanted, “War is for profit, the workers can stop it,” and “APL gets rich, US soldiers die, Iraqi people die.”

Workers from the International Longshoremen and Warehouse Union did not cross the anti-war protesters’ picket line at the APL or SSA gates. Without the labor of the dockworkers cargo for the APL and SSA could not be loaded or unloaded. At 6 a.m. hundreds of protesters moved down the dock to block the gates to SSA shipping as well. SSA also has contracts with the US military to supply the occupation effort. Picketers blocked six gates in total. At approximately 7:20 a.m. police started using concussion grenades to break up the picket line at APL. Demonstrators moved down to the SSA gates where, later, police used rubber bullets, beanbags, and more concussion grenades to force demonstrators from the docks.

“The community is legally picketing these corporations who transport military goods to the war and the police are responding with excessive force. We’re trying to stop the killing of innocent civilians and this occupation. The police are shooting wooden bullets and beanbags. Even dockworkers, union members, waiting across the street have gotten shot by the police. They’re using shock concussion grenades. Just look at the bloody bruises the police are inflicting. The police brutality is outrageous,” said Natalie Alsop a student from City College of San Francisco who joined the protest.

Protesters proceeded from the ports to march to the Federal Building in Oakland where some demonstrators blocked an intersection. Many demonstrators were carry signs reading “Stop the war, protest April 12 SF Civic Center.” A.N.S.W.E.R. and the U.K. Coalition to Stop the War have initiated an international day of protest against the war on Iraq next Saturday in San Francisco, Washington, D.C., London and other cities.

-30-
 --=====================_17720590==_.ALT-- From jafujii@uci.edu Tue Apr 8 18:07:06 2003 From: jafujii@uci.edu (Jim Fujii) Date: Tue, 08 Apr 2003 10:07:06 -0700 Subject: [Ethnicstudies] My Oscar "Backlash": "Stupid White Men" Back At #1, "Bowling" Breaks New Records Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20030408100632.00b72798@benfranklin.hnet.uci.edu> --=====================_8216184==_.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed MICHAEL MOORE'S MESSAGE April 7, 2003 My Oscar "Backlash": "Stupid White Men" Back At #1, "Bowling" Breaks New Records Dear friends, It appears that the Bush administration will have succeeded in colonizing Iraq sometime in the next few days. This is a blunder of such magnitude -- and we will pay for it for years to come. It was not worth the life of one single American kid in uniform, let alone the thousands of Iraqis who have died, and my condolences and prayers go out to all of them. So, where are all those weapons of mass destruction that were the pretense for this war? Ha! There is so much to say about all this, but I will save it for later. What I am most concerned about right now is that all of you -- the majority of Americans who did not support this war in the first place -- not go silent or be intimidated by what will be touted as some great military victory. Now, more than ever, the voices of peace and truth must be heard. I have received a lot of mail from people who are feeling a profound sense of despair and believe that their voices have been drowned out by the drums and bombs of false patriotism. Some are afraid of retaliation at work or at school or in their neighborhoods because they have been vocal proponents of peace. They have been told over and over that it is not "appropriate" to protest once the country is at war, and that your only duty now is to "support the troops." Can I share with you what it's been like for me since I used my time on the Oscar stage two weeks ago to speak out against Bush and this war? I hope that, in reading what I'm about to tell you, you'll feel a bit more emboldened to make your voice heard in whatever way or forum that is open to you. When "Bowling for Columbine" was announced as the Oscar winner for Best Documentary at the Academy Awards, the audience rose to its feet. It was a great moment, one that I will always cherish. They were standing and cheering for a film that says we Americans are a uniquely violent people, using our massive stash of guns to kill each other and to use them against many countries around the world. They were applauding a film that shows George W. Bush using fictitious fears to frighten the public into giving him whatever he wants. And they were honoring a film that states the following: The first Gulf War was an attempt to reinstall the dictator of Kuwait; Saddam Hussein was armed with weapons from the United States; and the American government is responsible for the deaths of a half-million children in Iraq over the past decade through its sanctions and bombing. That was the movie they were cheering, that was the movie they voted for, and so I decided that is what I should acknowledge in my speech. And, thus, I said the following from the Oscar stage: "On behalf of our producers Kathleen Glynn and Michael Donovan (from Canada), I would like to thank the Academy for this award. I have invited the other Documentary nominees on stage with me. They are here in solidarity because we like non-fiction. We like non-fiction because we live in fictitious times. We live in a time where fictitious election results give us a fictitious president. We are now fighting a war for fictitious reasons. Whether it's the fiction of duct tape or the fictitious 'Orange Alerts,' we are against this war, Mr. Bush. Shame on you, Mr. Bush, shame on you. And, whenever you've got the Pope and the Dixie Chicks against you, you're time is up." Halfway through my remarks, some in the audience started to cheer. That immediately set off a group of people in the balcony who started to boo. Then those supporting my remarks started to shout down the booers. The L. A. Times reported that the director of the show started screaming at the orchestra "Music! Music!" in order to cut me off, so the band dutifully struck up a tune and my time was up. (For more on why I said what I said, you can read the op-ed I wrote for the L.A. Times, plus other reaction from around the country at my website http://www.michaelmoore.com/http://www.michaelmoore.com?) The next day -- and in the two weeks since -- the right-wing pundits and radio shock jocks have been calling for my head. So, has all this ruckus hurt me? Have they succeeded in "silencing" me? Well, take a look at my Oscar "backlash": -- On the day after I criticized Bush and the war at the Academy Awards, attendance at "Bowling for Columbine" in theaters around the country went up 110% (source: Daily Variety/BoxOfficeMojo.com). The following weekend, the box office gross was up a whopping 73% (Variety). It is now the longest-running consecutive commercial release in America, 26 weeks in a row and still thriving. The number of theaters showing the film since the Oscars has INCREASED, and it has now bested the previous box office record for a documentary by nearly 300%. -- Yesterday (April 6), "Stupid White Men" shot back to #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. This is my book's 50th week on the list, 8 of them at number one, and this marks its fourth return to the top position, something that virtually never happens. -- In the week after the Oscars, my website was getting 10-20 million hits A DAY (one day we even got more hits than the White House!). The mail has been overwhelmingly positive and supportive (and the hate mail has been hilarious!). -- In the two days following the Oscars, more people pre-ordered the video for "Bowling for Columbine" on Amazon.com than the video for the Oscar winner for Best Picture, "Chicago." -- In the past week, I have obtained funding for my next documentary, and I have been offered a slot back on television to do an updated version of "TV Nation"/ "The Awful Truth." I tell you all of this because I want to counteract a message that is told to us all the time -- that, if you take a chance to speak out politically, you will live to regret it. It will hurt you in some way, usually financially. You could lose your job. Others may not hire you. You will lose friends. And on and on and on. Take the Dixie Chicks. I'm sure you've all heard by now that, because their lead singer mentioned how she was ashamed that Bush was from her home state of Texas, their record sales have "plummeted" and country stations are boycotting their music. The truth is that their sales are NOT down. This week, after all the attacks, their album is still at #1 on the Billboard country charts and, according to Entertainment Weekly, on the pop charts during all the brouhaha, they ROSE from #6 to #4. In the New York Times, Frank Rich reports that he tried to find a ticket to ANY of the Dixie Chicks' upcoming concerts but he couldn't because they were all sold out. (To read Rich's column from yesterday's Times, "Bowling for Kennebunkport," go here http://www.michaelmoore.com/http://www.michaelmoore.com/articles/index.php?article=20030406-nytimes?. He does a pretty good job of laying it all out and talks about my next film and the impact it could potentially have.) Their song, "Travelin' Soldier" (a beautiful anti-war ballad) was the most requested song on the internet last week. They have not been hurt at all -- but that is not what the media would have you believe. Why is that? Because there is nothing more important now than to keep the voices of dissent -- and those who would dare to ask a question -- SILENT. And what better way than to try and take a few well-known entertainers down with a pack of lies so that the average Joe or Jane gets the message loud and clear: "Wow, if they would do that to the Dixie Chicks or Michael Moore, what would they do to little ol' me?" In other words, shut the f--- up. And that, my friends, is the real point of this film that I just got an Oscar for -- how those in charge use FEAR to manipulate the public into doing whatever they are told. Well, the good news -- if there can be any good news this week -- is that not only have neither I nor others been silenced, we have been joined by millions of Americans who think the same way we do. Don't let the false patriots intimidate you by setting the agenda or the terms of the debate. Don't be defeated by polls that show 70% of the public in favor of the war. Remember that these Americans being polled are the same Americans whose kids (or neighbor's kids) have been sent over to Iraq. They are scared for the troops and they are being cowed into supporting a war they did not want -- and they want even less to see their friends, family, and neighbors come home dead. Everyone supports the troops returning home alive and all of us need to reach out and let their families know that. Unfortunately, Bush and Co. are not through yet. This invasion and conquest will encourage them to do it again elsewhere. The real purpose of this war was to say to the rest of the world, "Don't Mess with Texas - If You Got What We Want, We're Coming to Get It!" This is not the time for the majority of us who believe in a peaceful America to be quiet. Make your voices heard. Despite what they have pulled off, it is still our country. Yours, Michael Moore HTTP://WWW.MichaelMoore.com _________________________________________________________________ Add photos to your messages with MSN 8. Get 2 months FREE*. http://join.msn.com/?page=features/featuredemail ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~--> Get a FREE REFINANCE QUOTE - click here! http://us.click.yahoo.com/2CXtTB/ca0FAA/i5gGAA/sitolB/TM ---------------------------------------------------------------------~-> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ --=====================_8216184==_.ALT Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii" MICHAEL MOORE'S MESSAGE

April 7, 2003

My Oscar "Backlash": "Stupid White Men" Back At #1, "Bowling" Breaks New
Records

Dear friends,

It appears that the Bush administration will have succeeded in colonizing
Iraq sometime in the next few days. This is a blunder of such magnitude --
and we will pay for it for years to come. It was not worth the life of one
single American kid in uniform, let alone the thousands of Iraqis who have
died, and my condolences and prayers go out to all of them.

So, where are all those weapons of mass destruction that were the pretense
for this war? Ha! There is so much to say about all this, but I will save it
for later.

What I am most concerned about right now is that all of you -- the majority
of Americans who did not support this war in the first place -- not go
silent or be intimidated by what will be touted as some great military
victory. Now, more than ever, the voices of peace and truth must be heard. I
have received a lot of mail from people who are feeling a profound sense of
despair and believe that their voices have been drowned out by the drums and
bombs of false patriotism. Some are afraid of retaliation at work or at
school or in their neighborhoods because they have been vocal proponents of
peace. They have been told over and over that it is not "appropriate" to
protest once the country is at war, and that your only duty now is to
"support the troops."

Can I share with you what it's been like for me since I used my time on the
Oscar stage two weeks ago to speak out against Bush and this war? I hope
that, in reading what I'm about to tell you, you'll feel a bit more
emboldened to make your voice heard in whatever way or forum that is open to
you.

When "Bowling for Columbine" was announced as the Oscar winner for Best
Documentary at the Academy Awards, the audience rose to its feet. It was a
great moment, one that I will always cherish. They were standing and
cheering for a film that says we Americans are a uniquely violent people,
using our massive stash of guns to kill each other and to use them against
many countries around the world. They were applauding a film that shows
George W. Bush using fictitious fears to frighten the public into giving him
whatever he wants. And they were honoring a film that states the following:
The first Gulf War was an attempt to reinstall the dictator of Kuwait;
Saddam Hussein was armed with weapons from the United States; and the
American government is responsible for the deaths of a half-million children
in Iraq over the past decade through its sanctions and bombing. That was the
movie they were cheering, that was the movie they voted for, and so I
decided that is what I should acknowledge in my speech.

And, thus, I said the following from the Oscar stage:

"On behalf of our producers Kathleen Glynn and Michael Donovan (from
Canada), I would like to thank the Academy for this award. I have invited
the other Documentary nominees on stage with me. They are here in solidarity
because we like non-fiction. We like non-fiction because we live in
fictitious times. We live in a time where fictitious election results give
us a fictitious president. We are now fighting a war for fictitious reasons.
Whether it's the fiction of duct tape or the fictitious 'Orange Alerts,' we
are against this war, Mr. Bush. Shame on you, Mr. Bush, shame on you. And,
whenever you've got the Pope and the Dixie Chicks against you, you're time
is up."

Halfway through my remarks, some in the audience started to cheer. That
immediately set off a group of people in the balcony who started to boo.
Then those supporting my remarks started to shout down the booers. The L. A.
Times reported that the director of the show started screaming at the
orchestra "Music! Music!" in order to cut me off, so the band dutifully
struck up a tune and my time was up. (For more on why I said what I said,
you can read the op-ed I wrote for the L.A. Times, plus other reaction from
around the country at my website
http://www.michaelmoore.com/http://www.michaelmoore.com?)

The next day -- and in the two weeks since -- the right-wing pundits and
radio shock jocks have been calling for my head. So, has all this ruckus
hurt me? Have they succeeded in "silencing" me?

Well, take a look at my Oscar "backlash":

-- On the day after I criticized Bush and the war at the Academy Awards,
attendance at "Bowling for Columbine" in theaters around the country went up
110% (source: Daily Variety/BoxOfficeMojo.com). The following weekend, the
box office gross was up a whopping 73% (Variety). It is now the
longest-running consecutive commercial release in America, 26 weeks in a row
and still thriving. The number of theaters showing the film since the Oscars
has INCREASED, and it has now bested the previous box office record for a
documentary by nearly 300%.

-- Yesterday (April 6), "Stupid White Men" shot back to #1 on the New York
Times bestseller list. This is my book's 50th week on the list, 8 of them at
number one, and this marks its fourth return to the top position, something
that virtually never happens.

-- In the week after the Oscars, my website was getting 10-20 million hits A
DAY (one day we even got more hits than the White House!). The mail has been
overwhelmingly positive and supportive (and the hate mail has been
hilarious!).

-- In the two days following the Oscars, more people pre-ordered the video
for "Bowling for Columbine" on Amazon.com than the video for the Oscar
winner for Best Picture, "Chicago."

-- In the past week, I have obtained funding for my next documentary, and I
have been offered a slot back on television to do an updated version of "TV
Nation"/ "The Awful Truth."

I tell you all of this because I want to counteract a message that is told
to us all the time -- that, if you take a chance to speak out politically,
you will live to regret it. It will hurt you in some way, usually
financially. You could lose your job. Others may not hire you. You will lose
friends. And on and on and on.

Take the Dixie Chicks. I'm sure you've all heard by now that, because their
lead singer mentioned how she was ashamed that Bush was from her home state
of Texas, their record sales have "plummeted" and country stations are
boycotting their music. The truth is that their sales are NOT down. This
week, after all the attacks, their album is still at #1 on the Billboard
country charts and, according to Entertainment Weekly, on the pop charts
during all the brouhaha, they ROSE from #6 to #4. In the New York Times,
Frank Rich reports that he tried to find a ticket to ANY of the Dixie
Chicks' upcoming concerts but he couldn't because they were all sold out.
(To read Rich's column from yesterday's Times, "Bowling for Kennebunkport,"
go here
http://www.michaelmoore.com/http://www.michaelmoore.com/articles/index.php?article=20030406-nytimes?.
He does a pretty good job of laying it all out and talks about my next film
and the impact it could potentially have.) Their song, "Travelin' Soldier"
(a beautiful anti-war ballad) was the most requested song on the internet
last week. They have not been hurt at all -- but that is not what the media
would have you believe. Why is that? Because there is nothing more important
now than to keep the voices of dissent -- and those who would dare to ask a
question -- SILENT. And what better way than to try and take a few
well-known entertainers down with a pack of lies so that the average Joe or
Jane gets the message loud and clear: "Wow, if they would do that to the
Dixie Chicks or Michael Moore, what would they do to little ol' me?" In
other words, shut the f--- up.

And that, my friends, is the real point of this film that I just got an
Oscar for -- how those in charge use FEAR to manipulate the public into
doing whatever they are told.

Well, the good news -- if there can be any good news this week -- is that
not only have neither I nor others been silenced, we have been joined by
millions of Americans who think the same way we do. Don't let the false
patriots intimidate you by setting the agenda or the terms of the debate.
Don't be defeated by polls that show 70% of the public in favor of the war.
Remember that these Americans being polled are the same Americans whose kids
(or neighbor's kids) have been sent over to Iraq. They are scared for the
troops and they are being cowed into supporting a war they did not want --
and they want even less to see their friends, family, and neighbors come
home dead. Everyone supports the troops returning home alive and all of us
need to reach out and let their families know that.

Unfortunately, Bush and Co. are not through yet. This invasion and conquest
will encourage them to do it again elsewhere. The real purpose of this war
was to say to the rest of the world, "Don't Mess with Texas - If You Got
What We Want, We're Coming to Get It!" This is not the time for the majority
of us who believe in a peaceful America to be quiet. Make your voices heard.
Despite what they have pulled off, it is still our country.

Yours,

Michael Moore

HTTP://WWW.MichaelMoore.com

_________________________________________________________________
Add photos to your messages with MSN 8. Get 2 months FREE*. 
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--=====================_8216184==_.ALT-- From dtsang@lib.uci.edu Tue Apr 8 20:05:12 2003 From: dtsang@lib.uci.edu (Dan Tsang) Date: Tue, 8 Apr 2003 12:05:12 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Ethnicstudies] Free film showing: Genesis: The Making of 'Better Luck Tomorrow' (fwd) Message-ID: On Wednesday April 9, 2003, at 7pm, there's a free showing of a documentary about the journey of Better Luck Tomorrow to Sundance Film Festival, at Crystal Cove Auditorium, UCI Student Center, at 7pm April 9. KUCI's Subversity will interview BLT director Justin Lin and co-writer Fabian Marquez (UCI film studies graduate) today, April 8, 2003 at 3-4 p.m. on KUCI, 88.9 fm in Orange County; simulcast on the Web via kuci.org. BLT opens at selected screens including at the Block in Orange this friday. See earlier press release: http://kuci.org/~dtsang/suversity/pr030408.htm. dan Daniel C. Tsang Host, Subversity, now Tuesdays, 4-5 p.m. KUCI, 88.9 FM and Web-cast live via http://kuci.org Subversity: http://kuci.org/~dtsang; E-mail: subversity@kuci.org Daniel Tsang, KUCI, PO Box 4362, Irvine CA 92616 UCI Tel: (949) 824-4978; UCI Fax: (949) 824-2700 UCI Office: 380 Main Library Member, National Writers Union (http://www.nwu.org) WWW News Resource Page: http://sun3.lib.uci.edu/~dtsang/netnews1.htm AWARE: http://sun3.lib.uci.edu/~dtsang/aware2.htm Personal Homepage: http://sun3.lib.uci.edu/~dtsang/ _______________________________________________ KUCI.org 88.9FM - "eclectic music, engaging talk" _______________________________________________ From jafujii@uci.edu Wed Apr 9 01:23:38 2003 From: jafujii@uci.edu (Jim Fujii) Date: Tue, 08 Apr 2003 17:23:38 -0700 Subject: [Ethnicstudies] We will handle trials, say Americans Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20030408172330.00b9b588@benfranklin.hnet.uci.edu> --=====================_34408106==_.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/04/08/wicc08.xml/ Daily Telegraph April 4, 2003 We will handle trials, say Americans By David Rennie in Washington The United States has the "sovereign right" to prosecute Iraqi leaders for war crimes in its own courts, and will not hand Saddam Hussein or his henchmen to any international tribunal, senior American officials said yesterday. In a move likely to alarm Downing Street, senior Pentagon and State Department officials summoned reporters to hear a pre-emptive rejection of any role for the International Criminal Court (ICC) - the permanent war crimes tribunal established in The Hague. Instead, Iraqi leaders accused of war crimes could be tried in federal courts in the United States, or by special military tribunals, they said. The United States had the right to imprison those found guilty, or sentence them to death. Britain, as its ally in the war, would have the same rights. The Bush administration has aggressively resisted the authority of the ICC, saying it fears that its military personnel and other citizens might be singled out for politically motivated prosecutions. To Britain's dismay, Washington last year "unsigned" the treaty establishing the court, and has leaned on allies worldwide to sign agreements shielding American citizens from any potential ICC probe. Pierre-Richard Prosper, the United States ambassador for war crimes issues, said the ICC had no jurisdiction over this war, because neither America nor Iraq had signed up to the treaty establishing the court. W Hay Parks, a senior Pentagon lawyer, accused Baghdad of three specific violations of the Geneva Convention and the rules of warfare, and said others were being investigated and catalogued. The first two alleged war crimes centred on Iraqi television footage of American soldiers captured and killed when their supply convoy was ambushed near the southern city of Nasiriyah, Mr Parks said. A third crime involved alleged acts of "perfidy", when Iraqi forces attacked coalition troops while carrying the white flags of surrender, or while disguised in civilian clothes. Mr Parks said that further charges might be levelled, amid signs that prisoners of war might have been killed, tortured, or treated inhumanely. The mention of humane treatment raised the prospect that a teenage soldier rescued last week might become a key witness against the Iraqi regime. Pte Jessica Lynch, 19, is the only American prisoner of war to have returned to American custody. There were initial reports that some members of the 507th Maintenance Company - Pte Lynch's unit whose supply convoy was ambushed at Nasiriyah - had been executed in cold blood. --=====================_34408106==_.ALT Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii" http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/04/08/wicc08.xml/

Daily Telegraph  April 4, 2003

We will handle trials, say Americans

By David Rennie in Washington
 
The United States has the "sovereign right" to prosecute Iraqi leaders for
war crimes in its own courts, and will not hand Saddam Hussein or his
henchmen to any international tribunal, senior American officials said
yesterday.

In a move likely to alarm Downing Street, senior Pentagon and State
Department officials summoned reporters to hear a pre-emptive rejection of
any role for the International Criminal Court (ICC) - the permanent war
crimes tribunal established in The Hague.

Instead, Iraqi leaders accused of war crimes could be tried in federal
courts in the United States, or by special military tribunals, they said.
The United States had the right to imprison those found guilty, or sentence
them to death. Britain, as its ally in the war, would have the same rights.

The Bush administration has aggressively resisted the authority of the ICC,
saying it fears that its military personnel and other citizens might be
singled out for politically motivated prosecutions. To Britain's dismay,
Washington last year "unsigned" the treaty establishing the court, and has
leaned on allies worldwide to sign agreements shielding American citizens
from any potential ICC probe.

Pierre-Richard Prosper, the United States ambassador for war crimes issues,
said the ICC had no jurisdiction over this war, because neither America nor
Iraq had signed up to the treaty establishing the court.

W Hay Parks, a senior Pentagon lawyer, accused Baghdad of three specific
violations of the Geneva Convention and the rules of warfare, and said
others were being investigated and catalogued.

The first two alleged war crimes centred on Iraqi television footage of
American soldiers captured and killed when their supply convoy was ambushed
near the southern city of Nasiriyah, Mr Parks said.

A third crime involved alleged acts of "perfidy", when Iraqi forces attacked
coalition troops while carrying the white flags of surrender, or while
disguised in civilian clothes.

Mr Parks said that further charges might be levelled, amid signs that
prisoners of war might have been killed, tortured, or treated inhumanely.

The mention of humane treatment raised the prospect that a teenage soldier
rescued last week might become a key witness against the Iraqi regime. Pte
Jessica Lynch, 19, is the only American prisoner of war to have returned to
American custody.

There were initial reports that some members of the 507th Maintenance
Company - Pte Lynch's unit whose supply convoy was ambushed at Nasiriyah -
had been executed in cold blood.
 --=====================_34408106==_.ALT-- From jafujii@uci.edu Wed Apr 9 06:33:14 2003 From: jafujii@uci.edu (Jim Fujii) Date: Tue, 08 Apr 2003 22:33:14 -0700 Subject: [Ethnicstudies] Reporters Without Borders Accuses Us Military of Deliberately Firing at Journali Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20030408223307.02589928@benfranklin.hnet.uci.edu> --=====================_52984016==_.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed Reporters Without Borders Accuses Us Military of Deliberately Firing at Journalists IRAQ - 8 avril 2003 Reporters Without Borders called today on US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld to provide evidence that the offices of the pan- Arab TV station Al-Jaze era and the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad were not deliberately fired at by US forces earlier in the day in attacks that killed three journalists. "We are appalled at what happened because it was known that both places contained journalists," said the organisation's secretary- general Robert Menard. "Film shot by the French TV station France 3 and descriptions by journalists show the neighbourhood was very quiet at that hour and that the US tank crew took their time, waiting for a couple of minutes and adjusting it s gun before opening fire." "This evidence does not match the US version of an attack in self- de fence and we can only conclude that the US Army deliberately and without warning targeted journalists. US forces must prove that the incident was not a deliberate attack to dissuade or prevent journalists from continuing to report on what is happening in Baghdad," he said. "We are concerned at the US army's increasingly hostile attitude towards journalists, especially those 'embedded' in its military units. Army officials have also remained deplorably silent and refused to give any details about what happened when a British ITN TV crew was fired on near Basra on 22 M arch, killing one journalist and leaving two others missing. "Very many non-embedded journalists have complained about being refused entry to Iraq from Kuwait, threatened with withdrawal of accreditation and being held and interrogated for several hours. One group of non-embedded journalists was held in secret for two days and roughed up by US military police," Menard said. Ukrainian cameraman Taras Protsyuk (35), normally attached to Reuters office in Warsaw, and Jose Couso, a Spanish cameraman for the Spanish TV station Telecinco, were killed in today's attack on the Palestine Hotel. Three other journalists were wounded when their rooms were hit by a shell fired by the US tank. Gen. Buford Blount, commander of the US Third Infantry Division, admitted that the tank had fired a shell at the hotel. He claimed it was in response to rocket fire and other shooting from the hotel. Al-Jazeera cameraman Tarek Ayoub was also killed today in US bombing of the pan-Arab TV station's offices elsewhere in the city. Reporters Without Borders is keeping count on its website, www.rsf.org, of the number of journalists killed, wounded and missing while doing their job in a war that is very hard for the media to cover. Reporters Without Borders 5 rue Geoffroy-Marie20 France - 75009 Paris 33 1 44 83 84 84 33 1 45 23 11 51 (fax) middle-east@rsf.org www.rsf.org __________________________________________________________________ Try AOL and get 1045 hours FREE for 45 days! http://free.aol.com/tryaolfree/index.adp?375380 Get AOL Instant Messenger 5.1 for FREE! Download Now! http://aim.aol.com/aimnew/Aim/register.adp?promo=380455 portside (the left side in nautical parlance) is a news, discussion and debate service of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. It aims to provide varied material of interest to people on the left. --=====================_52984016==_.ALT Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii" Reporters Without Borders Accuses Us Military of Deliberately Firing
at Journalists

IRAQ - 8 avril 2003


Reporters Without Borders called today on US defense secretary
Donald Rumsfeld to provide evidence that the offices of the pan-
Arab TV station Al-Jaze era and the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad were
not deliberately fired at by US forces earlier in the day in attacks
that killed three journalists.

"We are appalled at what happened because it was known that both
places contained journalists," said the organisation's secretary-
general Robert Menard.  "Film shot by the French TV station France
3 and descriptions by journalists show the neighbourhood was very
quiet at that hour and that the US tank crew took their time,
waiting for a couple of minutes and adjusting it s gun before
opening fire."

"This evidence does not match the US version of an attack in self-
de fence and we can only conclude that the US Army deliberately and
without warning targeted journalists.  US forces must prove that
the incident was not a deliberate attack to dissuade or prevent
journalists from continuing to report on what is happening in
Baghdad," he said.

"We are concerned at the US army's increasingly hostile attitude
towards journalists, especially those 'embedded' in its military
units.  Army officials have also remained deplorably silent and
refused to give any details about what happened when a British ITN
TV crew was fired on near Basra on 22 M arch, killing one journalist
and leaving two others missing.

"Very many non-embedded journalists have complained about being
refused entry to Iraq from Kuwait, threatened with withdrawal of
accreditation and being held and interrogated for several hours.
One group of non-embedded journalists was held in secret for two
days and roughed up by US military police," Menard said.

Ukrainian cameraman Taras Protsyuk (35), normally attached to
Reuters office in Warsaw, and Jose Couso, a Spanish cameraman for
the Spanish TV station Telecinco, were killed in today's attack on
the Palestine Hotel.  Three other journalists were wounded when
their rooms were hit by a shell fired by the US tank.

Gen. Buford Blount, commander of the US Third Infantry Division,
admitted that the tank had fired a shell at the hotel.  He claimed
it was in response to rocket fire and other shooting from the hotel.

Al-Jazeera cameraman Tarek Ayoub was also killed today in US bombing
of the pan-Arab TV station's offices elsewhere in the city.

Reporters Without Borders is keeping count on its website,
www.rsf.org, of the number of journalists killed, wounded and
missing while doing their job in a war that is very hard for the
media to cover.

Reporters Without Borders
5 rue Geoffroy-Marie20
France - 75009 Paris
33 1 44 83 84 84
33 1 45 23 11 51 (fax)
middle-east@rsf.org
www.rsf.org


__________________________________________________________________
Try AOL and get 1045 hours FREE for 45 days!
http://free.aol.com/tryaolfree/index.adp?375380

Get AOL Instant Messenger 5.1 for FREE! Download Now!
http://aim.aol.com/aimnew/Aim/register.adp?promo=380455


portside (the left side in nautical parlance) is a
news, discussion and debate service of the Committees
of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. It
aims to provide varied material of interest to people
on the left.
 --=====================_52984016==_.ALT-- From jafujii@uci.edu Thu Apr 10 00:48:03 2003 From: jafujii@uci.edu (Jim Fujii) Date: Wed, 09 Apr 2003 16:48:03 -0700 Subject: [Ethnicstudies] Amid Allied Jubilation, a Child Lies in Agony, Clothes Soaked in Blood Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20030409164757.02672488@benfranklin.hnet.uci.edu> --=====================_6965535==_.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable (This includes a link to the photo of grievously wounded 12-year-old Ali Ismail Abbas that ran in the Globe and Mail.) http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=3D395117 lndependent April 8, 2003 Amid Allied Jubilation, a Child Lies in Agony, Clothes Soaked in Blood by Robert Fisk in Baghdad They lay in lines, the car salesman who'd just lost his eye but whose feet were still dribbling blood, the motorcyclist who was shot by American troops near the Rashid Hotel, the 50-year-old female civil servant, her long dark hair spread over the towel she was lying on, her face, breasts, thighs, arms and feet pock-marked with shrapnel from an American cluster bomb. For the civilians of Baghdad, this is the real, immoral face of war, the direct result of America's clever little "probing missions" into Baghdad. It looks very neat on television, the American marines on the banks of the Tigris, the oh-so-funny visit to the presidential palace, the videotape of Saddam Hussein's golden loo. But the innocent are bleeding and screaming with pain to bring us our exciting television pictures and to provide Messrs Bush and Blair with their boastful talk of victory. I watched two-and-a-half-year-old Ali Najour lying in agony on the bed, his clothes soaked with blood, a tube through his nose, until a relative walked up to me. "I want to talk to you," he shouted, his voice rising in fury. "Why do you British want to kill this little boy? Why do you even want to look at him? You did this =AD you did it!" ------ A child with head and chest injuries is comforted at a hospital in Baghdad, Iraq Monday April,7. 2003. The child was injured in coalition airstrike on the al-Mansour district in Baghdad. (AP Photo/ALI Haider). http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/images/0408-01.jpg ------ The young man seized my arm, shaking it violently. "Are you going to make his mother and father come back? Can you bring them back to life for him? Get out! Get out!" In the yard outside, where the ambulance drivers deposit the dead, a middle-aged Shia woman in black was thumping her fists against her breasts and shrieking at me. "Help me," she cried. "Help me. My son is a martyr and all I want is a banner to cover him. I want a flag, an Iraqi flag, to put over his body. Dear God, help me!" It's becoming harder to visit these places of pain, grief and anger. The International Committee of the Red Cross yesterday reported civilian victims of America's three-day offensive against Baghdad arriving at the hospitals now by the hundred. Yesterday, the Kindi alone had taken 50 civilian wounded and three dead in the previous 24 hours. Most of the dead =AD the little= boy's family, the family of six torn to pieces by an aerial bomb in front of Ali Abdulrazek, the car salesman, the next-door neighbors of Safa Karim =AD were simply buried within hours of their being torn to bits. On television, it looks so clean. On Sunday evening, the BBC showed burning civilian cars, its reporter =AD "embedded" with US forces =AD saying that he= saw some of their passengers lying dead beside them. That was all. No pictures of the charred corpses, no close-ups of the shriveled children. So perhaps I should warn those of what the BBC once called a nervous disposition to go no further. But if they want to know what America and Britain are doing to the innocent of Baghdad, they should read on. I'll leave out the description of the flies that have been clustering round the wounds in the Kindi emergency rooms, of the blood caked on the sheets, the blood still dripping from the wounds of those I talked to yesterday. All were civilians. All wanted to know why they had to suffer. All =AD save for the incandescent youth who ordered me to leave the little boy's bed =AD= talked gently and quietly about their pain. No Iraqi government bus took me to the Kindi hospital. No doctor knew I was coming. ------ Ali Ismail Abbas, 12, wounded during an airstrike according to hospital sources, lies in a hospital bed in Baghdad, April 6, 2003. Abbas was fast asleep when war shattered his life. A missile obliterated his home and most of his family, leaving him orphaned, badly burned and blowing off both his arms. 'It was midnight when the missile fell on us. My father, my mother and my brother died. My mother was five months pregnant,' the traumatized boy told Reuters at Baghdad's Kindi hospital. 'Our neighbors pulled me out and brought me here. I was unconscious,' he said on Sunday. REUTERS/Faleh Kheiber http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/images/0408-03.jpg ------ Let's start with Mr Abdulrazek. He's the 40-year-old car salesman who was walking yesterday morning through a narrow street in the Shaab district of Baghdad =AD that's where the two American missiles killed at least 20 civilians more than a week ago =AD when he heard the jet engines of an aircraft. "I was going to see my family because the phone exchanges have been bombed and I wanted to make sure they were OK," he said. "There was a family, a husband and wife and kids, in front of me. "Then I heard this terrible noise and there was a light and I knew something had happened to me. I went to try to help the family in front of me but they were all gone, in pieces. Then I realized I couldn't see properly." Over Mr Abdulrazek's left eye is a wad of thick bandages, tied to his face. His doctor, Osama al-Rahimi, tells me that "we did not operate on the eye, we have taken care of his other wounds". Then he leant towards my ear and said softy: "He has lost his eye. There was nothing we could do. It was taken out of his head by the shrapnel." Mr Abdulrazek smiles =AD of course, he does= not know that he will be forever half-blind =AD and suddenly breaks into near-perfect English, a language he had learnt at high school in Baghdad. "Why did this happen to me?" he asks. Yes, I know the lines. President Saddam would have killed more Iraqis than us if we hadn't invaded =AD not a very smart argument in the Kindi hospital= =AD and that we're doing all this for them. Didn't Paul Wolfowitz, the US Deputy Defense Secretary, tell us all a few days ago that he was praying for the American troops and for the Iraqi people? Aren't we coming here to save them =AD let's not mention their oil =AD and isn't President Saddam a cruel and brutal man? But amid these people, such words are an obscenity. Then there was Safa Karim. She is 11 and she is dying. An American bomb fragment struck her in the stomach and she is bleeding internally, writhing on the bed with a massive bandage on her stomach and a tube down her nose and =AD somehow most terrible of all =AD a series of four dirty scarves that= tie each of her wrists and ankles to the bed. She moans and thrashes on the bed, fighting pain and imprisonment at the same time. A relative said she is too ill to understand her fate. "She has been given 10 bottles of drugs and she has vomited them all up," he said. The man opens the palms of his hands, the way Arabs do when they want to express impotence. "What can we do?" they always say, but the man was silent. But I'm glad. How, after all, could I ever tell him that Safa Karim must die for 11 September, for George Bush's fantasies and Tony Blair's moral certainty and for Mr Wolfowitz's dreams of "liberation" and for the "democracy", which we are blasting our way through these people's lives to create? --=====================_6965535==_.ALT Content-Type: text/html; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable (This includes a link to the photo of grievously wounded 12-year-old Ali
Ismail Abbas that ran in the Globe and Mail.)

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.js= p?story=3D395117

lndependent   April 8, 2003

Amid Allied Jubilation, a Child Lies in Agony, Clothes Soaked in Blood

by Robert Fisk in Baghdad
 
They lay in lines, the car salesman who'd just lost his eye but whose feet
were still dribbling blood, the motorcyclist who was shot by American troops
near the Rashid Hotel, the 50-year-old female civil servant, her long dark
hair spread over the towel she was lying on, her face, breasts, thighs, arms
and feet pock-marked with shrapnel from an American cluster bomb. For the
civilians of Baghdad, this is the real, immoral face of war, the direct
result of America's clever little "probing missions" into Baghdad.

It looks very neat on television, the American marines on the banks of the
Tigris, the oh-so-funny visit to the presidential palace, the videotape of
Saddam Hussein's golden loo. But the innocent are bleeding and screaming
with pain to bring us our exciting television pictures and to provide Messrs
Bush and Blair with their boastful talk of victory. I watched
two-and-a-half-year-old Ali Najour lying in agony on the bed, his clothes
soaked with blood, a tube through his nose, until a relative walked up to
me.

"I want to talk to you," he shouted, his voice rising in fury. "Why do you
British want to kill this little boy? Why do you even want to look at him?
You did this =AD you did it!"

------
A child with head and chest injuries is comforted at a hospital in Baghdad,
Iraq Monday April,7. 2003. The child was injured in coalition airstrike on
the al-Mansour district in Baghdad. (AP Photo/ALI Haider).
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/images/0408-01.j= pg
------

The young man seized my arm, shaking it violently. "Are you going to make
his mother and father come back? Can you bring them back to life for him?
Get out! Get out!" In the yard outside, where the ambulance drivers deposit
the dead, a middle-aged Shia woman in black was thumping her fists against
her breasts and shrieking at me. "Help me," she cried. "Help me. My son is a
martyr and all I want is a banner to cover him. I want a flag, an Iraqi
flag, to put over his body. Dear God, help me!"

It's becoming harder to visit these places of pain, grief and anger. The
International Committee of the Red Cross yesterday reported civilian victims
of America's three-day offensive against Baghdad arriving at the hospitals
now by the hundred. Yesterday, the Kindi alone had taken 50 civilian wounded
and three dead in the previous 24 hours. Most of the dead =AD the little boy's
family, the family of six torn to pieces by an aerial bomb in front of Ali
Abdulrazek, the car salesman, the next-door neighbors of Safa Karim =AD were
simply buried within hours of their being torn to bits.

On television, it looks so clean. On Sunday evening, the BBC showed burning
civilian cars, its reporter =AD "embedded" with US forces =AD saying that he saw
some of their passengers lying dead beside them.

That was all. No pictures of the charred corpses, no close-ups of the
shriveled children. So perhaps I should warn those of what the BBC once
called a nervous disposition to go no further. But if they want to know what
America and Britain are doing to the innocent of Baghdad, they should read
on.

I'll leave out the description of the flies that have been clustering round
the wounds in the Kindi emergency rooms, of the blood caked on the sheets,
the blood still dripping from the wounds of those I talked to yesterday. All
were civilians. All wanted to know why they had to suffer. All =AD save for
the incandescent youth who ordered me to leave the little boy's bed =AD talked
gently and quietly about their pain. No Iraqi government bus took me to the
Kindi hospital. No doctor knew I was coming.

------
Ali Ismail Abbas, 12, wounded during an airstrike according to hospital
sources, lies in a hospital bed in Baghdad, April 6, 2003. Abbas was fast
asleep when war shattered his life. A missile obliterated his home and most
of his family, leaving him orphaned, badly burned and blowing off both his
arms. 'It was midnight when the missile fell on us. My father, my mother and
my brother died. My mother was five months pregnant,' the traumatized boy
told Reuters at Baghdad's Kindi hospital. 'Our neighbors pulled me out and
brought me here. I was unconscious,' he said on Sunday. REUTERS/Faleh
Kheiber http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/images/0408-03.j= pg
------

Let's start with Mr Abdulrazek. He's the 40-year-old car salesman who was
walking yesterday morning through a narrow street in the Shaab district of
Baghdad =AD that's where the two American missiles killed at least 20
civilians more than a week ago =AD when he heard the jet engines of=20 an
aircraft. "I was going to see my family because the phone exchanges have
been bombed and I wanted to make sure they were OK," he said. "There was a
family, a husband and wife and kids, in front of me.

"Then I heard this terrible noise and there was a light and I knew something
had happened to me. I went to try to help the family in front of me but they
were all gone, in pieces. Then I realized I couldn't see properly." Over Mr
Abdulrazek's left eye is a wad of thick bandages, tied to his face. His
doctor, Osama al-Rahimi, tells me that "we did not operate on the eye, we
have taken care of his other wounds". Then he leant towards my ear and said
softy: "He has lost his eye. There was nothing we could do. It was taken out
of his head by the shrapnel." Mr Abdulrazek smiles =AD of course, he does not
know that he will be forever half-blind =AD and suddenly breaks into
near-perfect English, a language he had learnt at high school in Baghdad.
"Why did this happen to me?" he asks.

Yes, I know the lines. President Saddam would have killed more Iraqis than
us if we hadn't invaded =AD not a very smart argument in the Kindi hospital =AD
and that we're doing all this for them. Didn't Paul Wolfowitz, the US Deputy
Defense Secretary, tell us all a few days ago that he was praying for the
American troops and for the Iraqi people? Aren't we coming here to save them
=AD let's not mention their oil =AD and isn't President Saddam a cruel and
brutal man? But amid these people, such words are an obscenity.=20

Then there was Safa Karim. She is 11 and she is dying. An American bomb
fragment struck her in the stomach and she is bleeding internally, writhing
on the bed with a massive bandage on her stomach and a tube down her nose
and =AD somehow most terrible of all =AD a series of four dirty scarves that tie
each of her wrists and ankles to the bed. She moans and thrashes on the bed,
fighting pain and imprisonment at the same time. A relative said she is too
ill to understand her fate. "She has been given 10 bottles of drugs and she
has vomited them all up," he said.

The man opens the palms of his hands, the way Arabs do when they want to
express impotence. "What can we do?" they always say, but the man was
silent. But I'm glad. How, after all, could I ever tell him that Safa Karim
must die for 11 September, for George Bush's fantasies and Tony Blair's
moral certainty and for Mr Wolfowitz's dreams of "liberation" and for the
"democracy", which we are blasting our way through these people's lives to
create?
--=====================_6965535==_.ALT-- From jafujii@uci.edu Thu Apr 10 00:44:19 2003 From: jafujii@uci.edu (Jim Fujii) Date: Wed, 09 Apr 2003 16:44:19 -0700 Subject: [Ethnicstudies] Bringing aid and the Bible, the man who called Islam wicked Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20030409164413.00b77f48@benfranklin.hnet.uci.edu> --=====================_6741463==_.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,929399,00.html The Guardian 4 April 2003 Bringing aid and the Bible, the man who called Islam wicked Fears that US Christians will inflame situation By Matthew Engel in Washington It could only happen with an American invasion. Poised behind the troops, waiting for a signal that Iraq is safe enough for them to operate in, are the evangelical Christians - carrying food in one hand and the Bible in the other. All the groups, generously funded by American churchgoers, are likely to do a magnificent job in offering water, food, medical help and comfort to a traumatised population. But they are causing alarm among Muslims, who fear vulnerable Iraqis will be cajoled into conversion, and Christians, some of whom warn that the missionaries will be prime targets in an unpacified Iraq. Muslim worries have been heightened because the man leading the charge into Iraq is the Rev Franklin Graham, who delivered the invocation at President Bush's inauguration, the son of Billy Graham and a fierce critic of Islam. He is on record as calling it a "wicked, violent" religion, with a God different from that of Christianity. "The two are different as lightness and darkness," he wrote. He runs an organisation called Samaritan's Purse, whose workers are in Jordan, waiting to move into Iraq. It has a strong record of charitable help built up over more than 30 years, but its official aim is clear: "The organisation serves the church worldwide to promote the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ." Of late, Mr Graham has avoided inflammatory statements and declined to speak to the Guardian. He did, however, write an article for the Los Angeles Times yesterday designed to mollify his critics, insisting that Samaritan's Purse will offer help to Iraqis without religious strings attached. "Sometimes the best preaching we can do is simply being there with a cup of cold water, exhibiting Christ's spirit of serving others," he said. Ibrahim Hooper, of the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations was unimpressed, saying the groups involved were "despicable and deceitful". Of Mr Graham, he said: "This guy has repeatedly stated that Islam is intentionally cruel. I fail to see how such a person can be a positive influence in a Muslim country. Humanitarian relief is just a cover. Their basic motivation is conversion. These groups train workers to go in under the guise of relief to convert people away from their faith." "I know this because I've been on their training courses. There's a technique known as contextualisation. You never say directly you're Christian. You take chairs out of the church to make it look like a mosque. You grow a beard. You dress your wife in Islamic attire. They know they're not welcome." Also moving into Iraq are the Southern Baptists, the second largest religious group in the US after the Catholics and the most powerful component of the Christian conservative movement. They are perhaps the strongest pro-Bush, pro-Iraq war and pro-Israel political force in the US. Their coordinator in Oklahoma, Sam Porter, insists that humanitarian aid is the prime objective of the Iraqi relief operation; the church has 25,000 trained volunteers who help in disaster relief in the US and elsewhere. But he added: "If someone says 'Why would you to come to Iraq to serve in an impoverished, war-stricken country?' we would say it was because of the love that the Lord Jesus Christ put in our hearts. If a country opens up for evangelical missions to go there, we go. We believe strongly that Jesus Christ is the son of God and we intend to proclaim that." Some Christian commentators are alarmed that missionaries blundering into an unstable country of which they know little would be in danger. Three Baptist missionaries were shot and killed in Yemen last December by a Muslim extremist, who said he did it because "they were preaching Christianity in a Muslim country". One evangelical writer, Richard Mouw, of beliefnet.org, warned the groups: "We must do this with a genuine desire to serve human needs. If this is viewed as a pretence for evangelism it will only hurt the Christian cause, and perhaps further endanger the lives of the 600,000 Christians in Iraq." Jonathan Bonk, editor of the International Bulletin of Missionary Research, says that many strong evangelicals cannot separate their charitable work from spreading their faith. "It's not a crafty attempt to proselytise. It's an earnest attempt to share what they hold most dear. That's true of all the proselytising religions, including Islam. "The difficulty in Iraq won't be because the evangelists are Christian, but because they're western. If they aggressively evangelise, that's a problem. But they're going to be in danger whether they say anything or not. As symbols of the west, and what the west represents, they are targets." --=====================_6741463==_.ALT Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii" http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,929399,00.html

The Guardian    4 April 2003

Bringing aid and the Bible, the man who called Islam wicked

Fears that US Christians will inflame situation

By Matthew Engel in Washington

It could only happen with an American invasion. Poised behind the troops,
waiting for a signal that Iraq is safe enough for them to operate in, are
the evangelical Christians - carrying food in one hand and the Bible in the
other.

All the groups, generously funded by American churchgoers, are likely to do
a magnificent job in offering water, food, medical help and comfort to a
traumatised population. But they are causing alarm among Muslims, who fear
vulnerable Iraqis will be cajoled into conversion, and Christians, some of
whom warn that the missionaries will be prime targets in an unpacified Iraq.


Muslim worries have been heightened because the man leading the charge into
Iraq is the Rev Franklin Graham, who delivered the invocation at President
Bush's inauguration, the son of Billy Graham and a fierce critic of Islam.
He is on record as calling it a "wicked, violent" religion, with a God
different from that of Christianity. "The two are different as lightness and
darkness," he wrote.

He runs an organisation called Samaritan's Purse, whose workers are in
Jordan, waiting to move into Iraq. It has a strong record of charitable help
built up over more than 30 years, but its official aim is clear: "The
organisation serves the church worldwide to promote the gospel of the Lord
Jesus Christ."

Of late, Mr Graham has avoided inflammatory statements and declined to speak
to the Guardian. He did, however, write an article for the Los Angeles Times
yesterday designed to mollify his critics, insisting that Samaritan's Purse
will offer help to Iraqis without religious strings attached. "Sometimes the
best preaching we can do is simply being there with a cup of cold water,
exhibiting Christ's spirit of serving others," he said.

Ibrahim Hooper, of the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic
Relations was unimpressed, saying the groups involved were "despicable and
deceitful". Of Mr Graham, he said: "This guy has repeatedly stated that
Islam is intentionally cruel. I fail to see how such a person can be a
positive influence in a Muslim country. Humanitarian relief is just a cover.
Their basic motivation is conversion. These groups train workers to go in
under the guise of relief to convert people away from their faith."

"I know this because I've been on their training courses. There's a
technique known as contextualisation. You never say directly you're
Christian. You take chairs out of the church to make it look like a mosque.
You grow a beard. You dress your wife in Islamic attire. They know they're
not welcome."

Also moving into Iraq are the Southern Baptists, the second largest
religious group in the US after the Catholics and the most powerful
component of the Christian conservative movement. They are perhaps the
strongest pro-Bush, pro-Iraq war and pro-Israel political force in the US.

Their coordinator in Oklahoma, Sam Porter, insists that humanitarian aid is
the prime objective of the Iraqi relief operation; the church has 25,000
trained volunteers who help in disaster relief in the US and elsewhere.

But he added: "If someone says 'Why would you to come to Iraq to serve in an
impoverished, war-stricken country?' we would say it was because of the love
that the Lord Jesus Christ put in our hearts. If a country opens up for
evangelical missions to go there, we go. We believe strongly that Jesus
Christ is the son of God and we intend to proclaim that."

Some Christian commentators are alarmed that missionaries blundering into an
unstable country of which they know little would be in danger. Three Baptist
missionaries were shot and killed in Yemen last December by a Muslim
extremist, who said he did it because "they were preaching Christianity in a
Muslim country".

One evangelical writer, Richard Mouw, of beliefnet.org, warned the groups:
"We must do this with a genuine desire to serve human needs. If this is
viewed as a pretence for evangelism it will only hurt the Christian cause,
and perhaps further endanger the lives of the 600,000 Christians in Iraq."

Jonathan Bonk, editor of the International Bulletin of Missionary Research,
says that many strong evangelicals cannot separate their charitable work
from spreading their faith. "It's not a crafty attempt to proselytise. It's
an earnest attempt to share what they hold most dear. That's true of all the
proselytising religions, including Islam.

"The difficulty in Iraq won't be because the evangelists are Christian, but
because they're western. If they aggressively evangelise, that's a problem.
But they're going to be in danger whether they say anything or not. As
symbols of the west, and what the west represents, they are targets."
 --=====================_6741463==_.ALT-- From jafujii@uci.edu Thu Apr 10 06:48:53 2003 From: jafujii@uci.edu (Jim Fujii) Date: Wed, 09 Apr 2003 22:48:53 -0700 Subject: [Ethnicstudies] Statue Toppling Yet Another Deception Courtesy of our Pentagon and Corporate Media Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20030409224848.02ac69e8@benfranklin.hnet.uci.edu> --=====================_28615386==_.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed Please click on the Indymedia site below to see the reality behind all the hype over that statue of Saddam Hussein recently toppled by a small crowd of people in downtown Baghdad yesterday. No doubt many in Iraq dislike(d) Saddam Hussein, a B-grade dictator that the U.S. helped install and supported in the 1980s, but the "historic event" of the statue-toppling was carefully orchestrated to suggest massive Iraqi jubilation which is far from the truth. Click on below: http://nyc.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=55268&group=webcast Now you understand why Al Jazeera and other independent news agencies have been attacked by the U.S. and British military yesterday. --=====================_28615386==_.ALT Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii" Please click on the Indymedia site below to see the reality behind all the hype over that statue of Saddam Hussein recently toppled by a small crowd of people in downtown Baghdad yesterday.

No doubt many in Iraq dislike(d) Saddam Hussein, a B-grade dictator that the U.S. helped install and supported in the 1980s, but the "historic event" of the statue-toppling was carefully orchestrated to suggest massive Iraqi jubilation which is far from the truth.
Click on below:

http://nyc.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=55268&group=webcast

Now you understand why Al Jazeera and other
independent news agencies have been attacked by the
U.S. and British military yesterday.

--=====================_28615386==_.ALT-- From jafujii@uci.edu Thu Apr 10 16:26:52 2003 From: jafujii@uci.edu (Jim Fujii) Date: Thu, 10 Apr 2003 08:26:52 -0700 Subject: [Ethnicstudies] FW: Rupert Murdoch's 175 newspapers, and then some Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20030410082644.00bc6e58@benfranklin.hnet.uci.edu> --=====================_289726==_.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed To: Subject: Rupert Murdoch's 175 newspapers, and then some The headlines in a typical Murdoch owned newspaper read: KILLING ROOM Coalition forces reveal Saddam's torture terror - hundreds of victims in coffins - children were buried alive - critics branded with hot irons - vital UN food, aid confiscated This torture 'evidence' turned out to be bodies of Iranians killed in the Iran-Iraq war, which Iraq was preparing to repatriate to Iran before the preparations were interrupted by the invasion. The Sydney Morning Herald has a scathing piece on this episode, with a picture of the offending front page, well worth a look. http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/04/07/1049567619708.html The Guardian investigated all 175 of Murdoch's newspapers, and surprise, surprise all 175 were pro-war. http://media.guardian.co.uk/mediaguardian/story/0,7558,896864,00.html And now Murdoch finally has the foothold he's long sought in the US Satellite TV market http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/2934817.stm as if our media were not already well consolidated enough between ten conglomerates http://www.thenation.com/special/bigten.html John -++**==--++**==--++**==--++**==--++**==--++**==--++**==--++**== This message to peace-discuss@lists.stanford.edu was posted through Majordomo @ Stanford; if you wish to unsubscribe from this mailing list, please send "unsubscribe peace-discuss" in the message body to majordomo@lists.stanford.edu. Please check our website for more information and updates: http://www.stanford.edu/group/peace/ --=====================_289726==_.ALT Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii"
To: <peace-discuss@lists.Stanford.EDU>
Subject: Rupert Murdoch's 175 newspapers, and then some

The headlines in a typical Murdoch owned newspaper read:

KILLING ROOM
Coalition forces reveal Saddam's torture terror
- hundreds of victims in coffins
- children were buried alive
- critics branded with hot irons
- vital UN food, aid confiscated

This torture 'evidence' turned out to be bodies of Iranians killed in the
Iran-Iraq war, which Iraq was
preparing to repatriate to Iran before the preparations were
interrupted by the invasion. The Sydney Morning Herald has a scathing
piece on this episode, with a picture of the offending front page,
well worth a look.
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/04/07/1049567619708.html

The Guardian investigated all 175 of Murdoch's newspapers, and
surprise, surprise all 175 were pro-war.

http://media.guardian.co.uk/mediaguardian/story/0,7558,896864,00.html

And now Murdoch finally has the foothold he's long sought in the US
Satellite TV market
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/2934817.stm

as if our media were not already well consolidated enough between ten
conglomerates
http://www.thenation.com/special/bigten.html


John



-++**==--++**==--++**==--++**==--++**==--++**==--++**==--++**==
This message to peace-discuss@lists.stanford.edu was posted through
Majordomo @
Stanford; if you wish to unsubscribe from this mailing list, please send
"unsubscribe peace-discuss" in the message body to
majordomo@lists.stanford.edu.
Please check our website for more information and updates:
http://www.stanford.edu/group/peace/ --=====================_289726==_.ALT-- From jafujii@uci.edu Thu Apr 10 16:54:59 2003 From: jafujii@uci.edu (Jim Fujii) Date: Thu, 10 Apr 2003 08:54:59 -0700 Subject: [Ethnicstudies] Iraq invasion 'will be with us for decades' - Tariq Ali Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20030410085453.02868b58@benfranklin.hnet.uci.edu> --=====================_1977213==_.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed Vancouver Sun April 9, 2003 Iraq invasion 'will be with us for decades' In Vancouver on a speaking tour, Tariq Ali says Arab nation will react, but he hopes the resistance is national and not religious Dan Rowe The American-led war on Iraq will inevitably lead to a resistance movement in that country and the rest of the Arab world similar to the French resistance movement during the Second World War, says author and commentator Tariq Ali. "I do not believe the Arab nation will take this insult lying down. It's a total slap in the face," said Ali, the editor of the New Left Review whose latest book, The Clash of Fundamentalisms, was released last year. "Sooner or later, the resistance will begin. My only hope is that it's a nationalist resistance, not a religious one," he said. Ali, who lives in England, was in Vancouver Tuesday to address students at the University of B.C. and deliver a speech downtown at St. Andrew's-Wesley Church. The visit concluded a tour across the country that included appearances at a Toronto book festival, a speech at an anti-war rally in Toronto last weekend and appearances on CBC television. When The Clash of Fundamentalisms was released last year, Ali said, many people thought he may have gone too far when he wrote of "American imperial fundamentalism." But, Ali said, the U.S. "has shown its colours very clearly now." "It's an event -- the invasion and occupation of Iraq -- that will mark the 21st century. And its consequences will be with us for many, many decades." Ali said it is not a question of if there will be a resistance, but how that opposition will define itself. "It should not be done by religious fundamentalism, in my opinion. I am equally hostile to them. I think the way to oppose them is in the name of a secular democratic national resistance which calls for an elected constituent assembly to determine the country's future," he said. The resistance that Ali foresees will spill over into other countries in the region. "The other thing that will happen is that I think the Egyptian and Saudi and Jordanian regimes, which went along with the invasion and actually supplied help, will be punished," he said in an interview Tuesday. "How will al-Qaida use this? Just ask yourself that and the answer is obvious. They will go and say the Arab regimes let you down, they allowed the Americans to take Iraq. Whether or not Osama bin Laden is alive or not, terrorist groups will flourish. Others will emerge. People will say let's go and hit them. That's the tragedy." On Tuesday afternoon, news came out that an audiotape with a message said to come from Osama bin Laden was released. The message repeatedly referred to the Koran and called for suicide bombers to attack the American and British troops and the governments in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Kuwait and others. Ali believes that when American troops eventually seize full control of Iraq, the Americans and their coalition should be left alone to deal with post-war Iraq. "This is an American operation backed by the Brits," he said. "They've taken this country, let them run it. They're the ones who took it. Why should the rest of the world go and give them a cover?" Ali also denounced France, Germany and Russia for their "weakness" in opposing the war. "If you are going to oppose the war, you oppose it the whole way. You don't allow your bases to be used, you don't allow your hospitals to be used, you don't allow your airspace to be used. And you then try and stop it. You go to the United Nations to seek a Security Council resolution to condemn [the war]. In other words, you build the pressure." Instead, Ali said that, one-by-one, they began expressing a small amount of support for the war after it had already begun. He said he would be highly skeptical of any efforts by leaders of countries who did not initially support the war, particularly French President Jacques Chirac, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and Russian President Vladimir Putin. "These are very opportunist politicians who will now jump on the bandwagon and try to get a share of the loot. But the Americans are so angry that I don't think they will give them a share of the loot," Ali said. When he arrived in Vancouver on Monday, Ali visited the peace camp that has been set up across the road from the U.S. consulate. He said it is indicative of a new generation of protesters, different from those involved in the protests he helped lead in Europe during the 1960s. drowe@png.canwest.com http://www.canada.com/search/story.aspx?id=076ccc8b-e578-4b82-a8c7-a83fd144b 3ef --=====================_1977213==_.ALT Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii"
Vancouver Sun  April 9, 2003

Iraq invasion 'will be with us for decades'

In Vancouver on a speaking tour, Tariq Ali says Arab nation will react, but
he hopes the resistance is national and not religious
 
Dan Rowe        

The American-led war on Iraq will inevitably lead to a resistance movement
in that country and the rest of the Arab world similar to the French
resistance movement during the Second World War, says author and commentator
Tariq Ali.

"I do not believe the Arab nation will take this insult lying down. It's a
total slap in the face," said Ali, the editor of the New Left Review whose
latest book, The Clash of Fundamentalisms, was released last year.

"Sooner or later, the resistance will begin. My only hope is that it's a
nationalist resistance, not a religious one," he said.

Ali, who lives in England, was in Vancouver Tuesday to address students at
the University of B.C. and deliver a speech downtown at St. Andrew's-Wesley
Church.

The visit concluded a tour across the country that included appearances at a
Toronto book festival, a speech at an anti-war rally in Toronto last weekend
and appearances on CBC television.

When The Clash of Fundamentalisms was released last year, Ali said, many
people thought he may have gone too far when he wrote of "American imperial
fundamentalism."

But, Ali said, the U.S. "has shown its colours very clearly now."

"It's an event -- the invasion and occupation of Iraq -- that will mark the
21st century. And its consequences will be with us for many, many decades."

Ali said it is not a question of if there will be a resistance, but how that
opposition will define itself.

"It should not be done by religious fundamentalism, in my opinion. I am
equally hostile to them. I think the way to oppose them is in the name of a
secular democratic national resistance which calls for an elected
constituent assembly to determine the country's future," he said.

The resistance that Ali foresees will spill over into other countries in the
region.

"The other thing that will happen is that I think the Egyptian and Saudi and
Jordanian regimes, which went along with the invasion and actually supplied
help, will be punished," he said in an interview Tuesday.

"How will al-Qaida use this? Just ask yourself that and the answer is
obvious. They will go and say the Arab regimes let you down, they allowed
the Americans to take Iraq. Whether or not Osama bin Laden is alive or not,
terrorist groups will flourish. Others will emerge. People will say let's go
and hit them. That's the tragedy."

On Tuesday afternoon, news came out that an audiotape with a message said to
come from Osama bin Laden was released. The message repeatedly referred to
the Koran and called for suicide bombers to attack the American and British
troops and the governments in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Kuwait and others.

Ali believes that when American troops eventually seize full control of
Iraq, the Americans and their coalition should be left alone to deal with
post-war Iraq.

"This is an American operation backed by the Brits," he said.

"They've taken this country, let them run it. They're the ones who took it.
Why should the rest of the world go and give them a cover?"

Ali also denounced France, Germany and Russia for their "weakness" in
opposing the war.

"If you are going to oppose the war, you oppose it the whole way. You don't
allow your bases to be used, you don't allow your hospitals to be used, you
don't allow your airspace to be used. And you then try and stop it. You go
to the United Nations to seek a Security Council resolution to condemn [the
war]. In other words, you build the pressure."

Instead, Ali said that, one-by-one, they began expressing a small amount of
support for the war after it had already begun.

He said he would be highly skeptical of any efforts by leaders of countries
who did not initially support the war, particularly French President Jacques
Chirac, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and Russian President Vladimir
Putin.

"These are very opportunist politicians who will now jump on the bandwagon
and try to get a share of the loot. But the Americans are so angry that I
don't think they will give them a share of the loot," Ali said.

When he arrived in Vancouver on Monday, Ali visited the peace camp that has
been set up across the road from the U.S. consulate.

He said it is indicative of a new generation of protesters, different from
those involved in the protests he helped lead in Europe during the 1960s.

drowe@png.canwest.com


http://www.canada.com/search/story.aspx?id=076ccc8b-e578-4b82-a8c7-a83fd144b
3ef --=====================_1977213==_.ALT-- From jafujii@uci.edu Thu Apr 10 20:39:04 2003 From: jafujii@uci.edu (Jim Fujii) Date: Thu, 10 Apr 2003 12:39:04 -0700 Subject: [Ethnicstudies] FWD: A welcome to american troops Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20030410123851.00bd7a10@benfranklin.hnet.uci.edu> --=====================_15422626==_ Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="=====================_15422626==_.ALT" --=====================_15422626==_.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed --=====================_15422626==_.ALT Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii"

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lJW3vnahUEBeuefw6kVbWKQxf6rLFQDyM9wD1+lOEcyIrOqksSuGfIwSM+n0piuZtsTt4X+I7zjD Ng+uD+tOu5Afkbd5ZJ+RME4zk8fnVs2yB/O8rayls7iSdvUEfgKlkNrEPnBO6PIAcqwOOR25+lK1 x3MhpPljeRZFAG3HQjv1wapi5R50RZmjYbSQuMdecHjt/St+B7GaZftUHyL94yncucdQMdaoSCwk R2EOFQttCAr8vA9ffuKdhXIPtRNyRDC25iFCshOeSPbvV+2a/tXk+WEBDlyww3Q5x19PWlt3Rg0U a43DBZny3A4IPtnrUmZZ7x7WNtibctLjcAx7EfzpWHcqlDPGqefG6tuxkFW9yeT0B61XisbtnMEC rgkq0pOBu4Pr6cVNbxyK6PcuyLyTiLG7IwBnHtzWzaRJNpkTwkShScbG2nqc85Hf1NFh3M+Sxubd YIvOVgmFAi4OMEsxHtgU9LDy0QI21c7yckEcHgDI7VpsFUqzso2bdy4yByTxj6elPfy97PglDg5Y 8fh0osJsof2eoRBv3KTtAHBzkbePbHUVeS3ndDFNKrblYFSOQCar29wThX2yLuC5bgfTPtir8TKx J8tdw749/WmkIqR6eJEWORGVRyrI3PXpg/hz9KK1ojjOAMe5op2QXZ//2Q== --=====================_15422626==_-- From jafujii@uci.edu Thu Apr 10 20:43:10 2003 From: jafujii@uci.edu (Jim Fujii) Date: Thu, 10 Apr 2003 12:43:10 -0700 Subject: [Ethnicstudies] Occupation is Not Liberation: Why we are marching Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20030410124304.02aa1b80@benfranklin.hnet.uci.edu> --=====================_15668399==_.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable OCCUPATION IS NOT LIBERATION: Why We Are Marching on April 12 & 13th. Los Angeles March and Rally: Sunday, April 13, 12 Noon, Assemble Hollywood= =20 and Vine Having slaughtered and maimed thousands of Iraqi people, the U.S./British=20 invasion forces are celebrating the use of their massive, overwhelming and= =20 brutal military power to crush resistance to their invasion of Iraq. The=20 images portrayed in the U.S. media conceal the reality. While hospitals are= =20 overflowing with civilians and soldiers, the streets of the country are=20 littered with incinerated bodies, destroyed homes and families buried=20 alive. (See "Amid Allied Jubilation, a Child Lies in Agony, Clothes Soaked= =20 in Blood," Robert Fisk, The Independent (UK): http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=3D395117 ) The Bush administration is moving rapidly to impose a colonial-style=20 occupation government on Iraq. This is not liberation. It is the use of=20 overwhelming firepower to seize the land and resources of Iraq, and=20 eliminate Iraq's sovereignty, while violating the most basic principles of= =20 self-determination. This is a war for Empire. The Bush administration,=20 having carried out a war of conquest in Afghanistan and now in Iraq, will=20 now step up its plans for future wars of aggression in the Middle East and= =20 elsewhere. The people of the United States and the world must stand together with all= =20 of those who resist in the Middle East to say no to imperialism and to=20 Empire. The occupation of Iraq will be used to set the stage for=20 intensified war planning against Syria, Iran, southern Lebanon, North=20 Korea, the Philippines, and against the Palestinian people who continue to= =20 resist occupation in their homeland. On Saturday, April 12, people in=20 Washington DC and around the world will continue the mobilization against=20 the invasion and the occupation in an international day of action with=20 demonstrations in major capitals around the world. The global movement that suddenly emerged in the past six months in=20 opposition to Bush and the U.S. war drive is a singularly important=20 development. People all over the world, in the Middle East, Asia, Africa,=20 Latin America, in the United States and in Europe marched in coordinated=20 action. These movements have now defied borders and built an international= =20 voice of solidarity. Even the New York Times on February 17 referred to=20 this movement as the second "superpower" in the world. This movement represents the hopefulness of the planet that war,=20 imperialism, oppression, racism and any form of colonialism can be overcome= =20 through the globalization of human solidarity. It would be the most tragic and wasteful outcome if this movement =AD- less= =20 than a year old =AD- decided that its efforts had failed because Bush and= the=20 Pentagon proceeded with their slaughter in Iraq. The war on Iraq does not=20 prove the failure of the anti-war movement. If anything, the war on Iraq=20 proves only that the economic, political and military authority in the=20 United States is morally bankrupt. It is nurtured by a system that has=20 become addicted to militarism and war. Dick Cheney, speaking on behalf of the administration, promised after=20 September 11 that there would be "endless war" and a war lasting a=20 lifetime. These were neither idle comments nor rhetorical flourish. Since=20 then, the administration has been absolutely brazen about its planned=20 military adventures abroad and its systematic war against Arab Americans,=20 Muslims and civil rights and civil liberties at home. While they will never admit it, this planned "endless war" is a class war=20 waged by the U.S. government on behalf of corporate and banking elites=20 against all those governments in the formerly colonized world that have=20 dared to maintain nominal independence and control over their natural=20 resources. Bush put it succinctly when he said to the world "you are either= =20 with us or with them." Working people in the United States have nothing to= =20 gain from this war for Empire. It is for the enrichment and power of the=20 same corporate and banking circles that have engaged in mass layoffs, union= =20 busting, wage cutting, elimination of healthcare and other benefits. In=20 fact, Bush's war for Empire requires a massive transfer of wealth from=20 social service programs to fund the Pentagon's rapidly expanding budget. The Bush administration's plans for world domination are based on a fantasy= =20 entertained by the right wing and neo-conservative movement and corporate=20 thieves that military power alone is the ultimate arbiter in world=20 politics. The New World Order that they aspire to is similar to the Old=20 World Order of 19th Century colonialism. The people of the world aspire for= =20 freedom, justice, equality and self-determination. Brute force alone will=20 not reverse the long historical process whose necessary outcome is=20 liberation. The essential element in this struggle is to maintain and build= =20 the global movement -- the force that has always and can win against=20 military and economic might. ------------------ This is the Los Angeles activist announcement list. Anyone can subscribe by sending any message to=20 To unsubscribe --=====================_15668399==_.ALT Content-Type: text/html; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable OCCUPATION IS NOT LIBERATION:
Why We Are Marching on April 12 & 13th.

Los Angeles March and Rally: Sunday, April 13, 12 Noon, Assemble Hollywood and Vine

Having slaughtered and maimed thousands of Iraqi people, the U.S./British invasion forces are celebrating the use of their massive, overwhelming and brutal military power to crush resistance to their invasion of Iraq. The images portrayed in the U.S. media conceal the reality. While hospitals are overflowing with civilians and soldiers, the streets of the country are littered with incinerated bodies, destroyed homes and families buried alive. (See "Amid Allied Jubilation, a Child Lies in Agony, Clothes Soaked in Blood,"

Robert Fisk, The Independent (UK):
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/st= ory.jsp?story=3D395117 )

The Bush administration is moving rapidly to impose a colonial-style= occupation government on Iraq. This is not liberation. It is the use of= overwhelming firepower to seize the land and resources of Iraq, and= eliminate Iraq's sovereignty, while violating the most basic principles of= self-determination. This is a war for Empire. The Bush administration,= having carried out a war of conquest in Afghanistan and now in Iraq, will= now step up its plans for future wars of aggression in the Middle East and= elsewhere.

The people of the United States and the world must stand together with all= of those who resist in the Middle East to say no to imperialism and to= Empire. The occupation of Iraq will be used to set the stage for= intensified war planning against Syria, Iran, southern Lebanon, North= Korea, the Philippines, and against the Palestinian people who continue to= resist occupation in their homeland. On Saturday, April 12, people in= Washington DC and around the world will continue the mobilization against= the invasion and the occupation in an international day of action with= demonstrations in major capitals around the world.

The global movement that suddenly emerged in the past six months in= opposition to Bush and the U.S. war drive is a singularly important= development. People all over the world, in the Middle East, Asia, Africa,= Latin America, in the United States and in Europe marched in coordinated= action. These movements have now defied borders and built an international= voice of solidarity. Even the New York Times on February 17 referred to= this movement as the second "superpower" in the world.

This movement represents the hopefulness of the planet that war,= imperialism, oppression, racism and any form of colonialism can be overcome= through the globalization of human solidarity.

It would be the most tragic and wasteful outcome if this movement =AD- less= than a year old =AD- decided that its efforts had failed because Bush and= the Pentagon proceeded with their slaughter in Iraq. The war on Iraq does= not prove the failure of the anti-war movement. If anything, the war on= Iraq proves only that the economic, political and military authority in the= United States is morally bankrupt. It is nurtured by a system that has= become addicted to militarism and war.

Dick Cheney, speaking on behalf of the administration, promised after= September 11 that there would be "endless war" and a war lasting= a lifetime. These were neither idle comments nor rhetorical flourish. Since= then, the administration has been absolutely brazen about its planned= military adventures abroad and its systematic war against Arab Americans,= Muslims and civil rights and civil liberties at home.

While they will never admit it, this planned "endless war" is a= class war waged by the U.S. government on behalf of corporate and banking= elites against all those governments in the formerly colonized world that= have dared to maintain nominal independence and control over their natural= resources. Bush put it succinctly when he said to the world "you are= either with us or with them." Working people in the United States have= nothing to gain from this war for Empire. It is for the enrichment and= power of the same corporate and banking circles that have engaged in mass= layoffs, union busting, wage cutting, elimination of healthcare and other= benefits. In fact, Bush's war for Empire requires a massive transfer of= wealth from social service programs to fund the Pentagon's rapidly= expanding budget.

The Bush administration's plans for world domination are based on a fantasy= entertained by the right wing and neo-conservative movement and corporate= thieves that military power alone is the ultimate arbiter in world= politics. The New World Order that they aspire to is similar to the Old= World Order of 19th Century colonialism. The people of the world aspire for= freedom, justice, equality and self-determination. Brute force alone will= not reverse the long historical process whose necessary outcome is= liberation. The essential element in this struggle is to maintain and build= the global movement -- the force that has always and can win against= military and economic might.


------------------
This is the Los Angeles activist announcement
list. Anyone can subscribe by sending any message to= <laactivists-subscribe@action-mail.org>

To unsubscribe <laactivists-off@action-mail.org>
 --=====================_15668399==_.ALT-- From jafujii@uci.edu Thu Apr 10 20:38:40 2003 From: jafujii@uci.edu (Jim Fujii) Date: Thu, 10 Apr 2003 12:38:40 -0700 Subject: [Ethnicstudies] Another Iraqi view on "dancing in the street" Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20030410123832.00bd3838@benfranklin.hnet.uci.edu> --=====================_15397690==_.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed ---------- Forwarded Message ----------- From Yassmin Dear Friends, Peace upon you all. Today is a sad day for all the people of Iraq. Baghdad has been raped. The singing and dancing in the streets .... is a terrible movie. I cannot put it in a better way than my husband, as he has said, "the American Army and the Bush administration have used lots of horrible weapons ... but the most lethal weapon of all ...is the savage people, that they have unleashed in the streets of Baghdad, calling them...the people of Iraq!" Those people that you see on the streets, are the people of "Althowra city" or as they call it sometimes "Saddam's city." Those people do not in any way resemble the people of Iraq. They resemble the community of criminals in Iraq. As you can see, they are not only dancing , but they are also looting, robbing stores, stealing cars, burning places, and trashing the streets! Those people whom you see dancing were the very same people who used to appear on TV, clapping for Saddam like crazy, when everyone else was against him. They are opportunists who have no principles at all. Always with the winner, ... and they sell very cheap. I don't think that it was a coincidence that the American army has decided to enter Baghdad from this city. Please...you can believe whatever you want, just don't call a bunch of looters and murderers the people of Iraq." The people of Iraq are not on the streets because they are afraid of those maniacs, who were unleashed into the streets, due to the absence of the authority. Since I was in Iraq, last February, the real people of Iraq were very afraid of what these savages were planning to do, when there was no government control, because the same thing has happened after war in 1991. We don't see people on the streets ... we only see a group of men who are trashing the place and act like idiots. The movie of "Baghdad Dancing" apparently was successful, because everyone believes it. And no one is asking about what is happening in the rest of Baghdad. A lethal weapon indeed. Now that there is no government, Baghdad is full of chaos. The reporters are afraid to move, but they've visited Al-Sinek area ... and there it was a different story. The streets looked dark and deserted...No one was dancing. There are places that have been bombed, and traces of bloodstains covered the road. There were families who are mourning the loss of loved ones ... the death of a father and three daughters. The reporters drove in different places in Baghdad ... the streets were empty. And there was a demonstration by the foreigners in Iraq, and a lady was saying, "this is all propaganda, many people I know are against any presence of American army in Iraq." Today, the American soldiers shot at an ambulance that was carrying some casualties, killing two and injuring three. In Basra, armed people robbed a bank. Others burned a grain storage ... when the soldiers were just observing and never attempted to stop it. They were the reason that there is no government in the first place. So it is their responsibility to keep the community safe ... they did come to "free us and take care of us," after all. The war has not ended in Baghdad, just because Saddam has disappeared ... because it was never about Saddam. It is about Iraq. Iraq is not State No. 51 ... and it never will be. For more than 200 years, and up until this day, People of America have been celebrating their independence from the British ... on the 4th of July. I would say it is the biggest day for Americans. Why does anyone expect us to celebrate our invasion? I leave you all in peace. Yasmin -- ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~--> FREE Cell Phones with up to $400 Cash Back! http://us.click.yahoo.com/_bBUKB/vYxFAA/i5gGAA/sitolB/TM ---------------------------------------------------------------------~-> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ --=====================_15397690==_.ALT Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii"

---------- Forwarded Message ----------- From Yassmin

Dear Friends,

Peace upon you all.  Today is a sad day for all the people of Iraq.
Baghdad has been raped.  The singing and dancing in the streets .... is a
terrible movie.

I cannot put it in a better way than my husband, as he has said, "the
American Army and the Bush administration have used lots of horrible
weapons ... but the most lethal weapon of all ...is the savage people,
that they have unleashed in the streets of Baghdad, calling them...the
people of Iraq!"

Those people that you see on the streets, are the people of "Althowra
city" or as they call it sometimes "Saddam's city."  Those people do not
in any way resemble the people of Iraq.  They resemble the community of
criminals in Iraq.  As you can see, they are not only dancing , but they
are also looting, robbing stores, stealing cars, burning places, and
trashing the streets!

Those people whom you see dancing were the very same people who used to
appear on TV, clapping for Saddam like crazy, when everyone else was
against him.  They are opportunists who have no principles at all.
Always with the winner, ... and they sell very cheap.

I don't think that it was a coincidence that the American army has
decided to enter Baghdad from this city.

Please...you can believe whatever you want, just don't call a bunch of
looters and murderers the people of Iraq."

The people of Iraq are not on the streets because they are afraid of
those maniacs, who were unleashed into the streets, due to the absence of
the authority.

Since I was in Iraq, last February, the real people of Iraq were
very afraid of what these savages were planning to do, when there
was no government control, because the same thing has happened after
war in 1991.

We don't see people on the streets ... we only see a group of men who are
trashing the place and act like idiots.

The movie of "Baghdad Dancing" apparently was successful, because
everyone believes it.  And no one is asking about what is happening in
the rest of Baghdad.  A lethal weapon indeed.

Now that there is no government, Baghdad is full of chaos.  The
reporters are afraid to move, but they've visited Al-Sinek area ... and
there it was a different story.  The streets looked dark and
deserted...No one was dancing.

There are places that have been bombed, and traces of bloodstains covered
the road.  There were families who are mourning the loss of loved ones
... the death of a father and three daughters.

The reporters drove in different places in Baghdad ... the streets
were empty.

And there was a demonstration by the foreigners in Iraq, and a lady was
saying, "this is all propaganda, many people I know are against any
presence of American army in Iraq."

Today, the American soldiers shot at an ambulance that was carrying some
casualties, killing two and injuring three.

In Basra, armed people robbed a bank.  Others burned a grain storage ...
when the soldiers were just observing and never attempted to stop it.
They were the reason that there is no government in the first place.  So
it is their responsibility to keep the community safe ... they did come
to "free us and take care of us," after all.

The war has not ended in Baghdad, just because Saddam has disappeared ...
because it was never about Saddam.

It is about Iraq.

Iraq is not State No. 51 ... and it never will be.

For more than 200 years, and up until this day, People of America have
been celebrating their independence from the British ... on the 4th of
July.  I would say it is the biggest day for Americans.  Why does anyone
expect us to celebrate our invasion?

I leave you all in peace.

Yasmin
--
 

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FREE Cell Phones with up to $400 Cash Back!
http://us.click.yahoo.com/_bBUKB/vYxFAA/i5gGAA/sitolB/TM
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Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
--=====================_15397690==_.ALT-- From dtsang@lib.uci.edu Thu Apr 10 22:21:02 2003 From: dtsang@lib.uci.edu (Dan Tsang) Date: Thu, 10 Apr 2003 14:21:02 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Ethnicstudies] Better Luck Tomorrow film: interview; review (fwd) Message-ID: There is an interview AND a review in OC Weekly just out. Also, The OC Weekly decided NOT to hyphenate Asian Amercan! OC Weekly April 11-17, 2003 Interview: Behold the Brainy Bad Asses Justin Lin dares to depict young Asian Americans in a whole new way by Daniel C. Tsang http://www.ocweekly.com/ink/03/32/film-tsang.php Review: The Dorky, the Docile and the Dead Tomorrows rampaging A students by John Powers http://www.ocweekly.com/ink/03/32/film-powers.php Original Subversity interview with Justin Lin and Fabian Marquez Aired April 8, 2003 on KUCI Realaudio version [59 minutes] at: http://falco.kuci.uci.edu/~dtsang/subversity/Sv030408.ram Thanx! dan Daniel C. Tsang Host, Subversity, now Tuesdays, 4-5 p.m. KUCI, 88.9 FM and Web-cast live via http://kuci.org Subversity: http://kuci.org/~dtsang; E-mail: subversity@kuci.org Daniel Tsang, KUCI, PO Box 4362, Irvine CA 92616 UCI Tel: (949) 824-4978; UCI Fax: (949) 824-2700 UCI Office: 380 Main Library Member, National Writers Union (http://www.nwu.org) WWW News Resource Page: http://sun3.lib.uci.edu/~dtsang/netnews1.htm AWARE: http://sun3.lib.uci.edu/~dtsang/aware2.htm Personal Homepage: http://sun3.lib.uci.edu/~dtsang/ _______________________________________________ KUCI.org 88.9FM - "eclectic music, engaging talk" _______________________________________________ From jafujii@uci.edu Fri Apr 11 01:59:06 2003 From: jafujii@uci.edu (Jim Fujii) Date: Thu, 10 Apr 2003 17:59:06 -0700 Subject: [Ethnicstudies] Anger at 'governor' Garner's pro-Israel stance Message-ID: <5.2.0.9.2.20030410175857.01fa4e30@benfranklin.hnet.uci.edu> The Scotsman 10 April 2003 Anger at 'governor' Garner's pro-Israel stance Alex Massie He is the man tasked with rebuilding Iraq and uniting the ethnic and religious factions that divide the country. But before he has even started, General Jay Garner has come in for a storm of criticism from Arab and Muslim groups who claim his pro-Israeli views make him the wrong man for the job. Gen Garner has been involved with the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), has visited Israel, and once signed a statement defending Israel and accusing Palestinians of filling their children with hate. "I honestly think when Iraqis find out [about the statement] they are going to be genuinely appalled," said Hussein Ibish, a spokesman for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. Gen Garner, who will run an interim Iraqi authority, was one of more than 40 retired US military leaders to sign his name to a letter two years ago when the Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, declared a new intifada against Israel. The letter strongly supported Israel, praising Tel Aviv for exercising "remarkable restraint" and placed the primary blame for the crisis on Palestinian leaders. A Palestinian tactic to "use civilians as soldiers in a war is a perversion of military ethics", the statement said. Palestinian leaders taught children the mechanics of war while "filling their heads with hate", and Palestinian police and military commanders were "betting their children's lives on the capabilities and restraint" of the Israeli defence forces, the statement added. The Palestinians are "callously using the inevitable casualties as grist for their propaganda mill", it said. Gen Garner, who 12 years ago oversaw US efforts to aid Kurds in northern Iraq after the first Gulf war, is among more than 250 retired US military officers who have travelled to Israel with JINSA over the years. Some Arab critics suggest that Gen Garner's selection for the reconstruction job will be met with strong objections in the Middle East. "There have been well over 2,000 Palestinians killed in the past two years and the Iraqis know who killed them," said Professor Rashid Khalidi, who specialises in Middle Eastern history at the University of Chicago. Sarah Eltantawi, the spokeswoman for the Muslim Public Affairs Council, in Washington, called the choice of Gen Garner "very unwise - it will not reinforce among the Iraqis the sentiment that their leadership is representative". JINSA, whose aims include educating the public about US defence policy and officials about Israel's importance to it, said the statement and Gen Garner's travel to Israel should have no bearing on his new job. "A distinguished general spends 31 years of his life in the military and because he spent 10 days of his life in Israel, they question his ability to serve the president in Iraq," Jim Colbert, the JINSA spokesman, said yesterday. Pentagon officials insisted that Gen Garner's support for Israel had no bearing on his current responsibilities. Richard Murphy, the assistant secretary of state for Near East and South Asian relations, during Ronald Reagan's presidency, said: "The assumption, unfortunately in Iraq and in the region, is that we're in Iraq to seize oil and push it to sign a peace treaty with Israel." That assumption is "a challenge to all of the people sent out there", including Gen Garner, said Mr Murphy. Gen Garner is still in Kuwait where he has been preparing his 200-strong team in the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA) to move into Iraq and begin the process of constructing an interim Iraqi authority to administer the country. He is expected to move to Baghdad within the next week. Just how big a task Gen Garner faces became evident yesterday when the United Nations warned that restarting Iraq's oil-for-food programme will not be the simple task that many have assumed, and could take longer and cost far more than first thought. According to a study for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, repairing existing oil export installations will require $5 billion and rebuilding the electric power infrastructure could cost a further $20 billion. From jafujii@uci.edu Fri Apr 11 02:01:36 2003 From: jafujii@uci.edu (Jim Fujii) Date: Thu, 10 Apr 2003 18:01:36 -0700 Subject: [Ethnicstudies] Descent Into a Charnel-House Hospital Hell Message-ID: <5.2.0.9.2.20030410180129.01faafe8@benfranklin.hnet.uci.edu> http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/04/09/1049567748685.html Sidney Morning Herald 10 April 2003 Descent Into a Charnel-House Hospital Hell A searing visit to a trauma ward has Paul McGeough questioning the very essence of humanity. Paul McGeough There's a man who goes up to his roof terrace every time the fighting starts. Often in his underwear, he watches with his hands spread nonchalantly on the parapet wall. In a vegetable patch down by the Tigris River, a family of gardeners always crane their necks to see what is happening as the F/A-18s, usually in pairs, wheel in from the south. And now, a Vespa motor scooter is careering erratically down Abu Nuwas Street - its rider with his face turned to the sky as an Iraqi surface-to-air missile whistles off in pursuit of a United States fighter jet. The plane is so low I can count the missiles clipped to its wings - five. The SAM seems to be catching up; the jet does an evasive belly roll, clears the area, takes a new bead on the high-rise that the pilot and his colleagues are trying to demolish, and fires. It's a direct hit. Baghdad is gripped by a fatalism about life and death. People can't run, so sometimes they don't even bother to hide as the world's most ferocious firepower is turned on a sprawling city with a defenceless civilian population of five million. The instinctive reaction of parents is to get their children out of the city. Some are even making them walk to the country. But Wael Sabah was stuck in Baladiyat, on the city's far eastern flank where, neighbours say, she thought her children were out of harm's way. But their descent deep into hell starts the second the pilot in a low-flying F/A-18 pulled the trigger, unleashing a missile that rips apart their home and their lives. Tiny 12-year-old Noor, her long black plait a tangle of blood and dust, is dead; in the next cubicle in the Kindi Hospital trauma ward, her younger brother, Abdel Khader, is dead; and across the way, their mother is dying in a sea of her own blood. If it is possible to have a nightmare within a nightmare, Kindi Hospital is it. The horror of war in Baghdad is distressing, but it is not possible to walk into this hospital without questioning the very essence of humanity as we think we know it. Kindi has too much death and too much pain. It doesn't have enough medical staff, drugs and equipment; it's running out of body bags and clean water is dependent on electricity in a city of day-long blackouts. Patients facing emergency surgery can have only 800 milligrams of ibuprofen, the same amount an Australian doctor might prescribe for muscle pain, and there is a critical shortage of anaesthetics. They have resorted to making their own fracture-fixing frames with lengths of steel and moulding clay. Hygiene is poor - the wards and emergency rooms are filthy and because its laundry has been forced to close by the blackouts, doctors are making do with torn gowns instead of towels and wipes. Patients keep arriving in a procession of racing ambulances, muddied utilities and battered taxis. An army of exhausted, weepy support staff help them on to trolleys, scattering the flies that feed on the blood of the last patient. And dozens of relatives stand in the shadows of the forecourt, consoling each other about the dead and waiting for news on the half-dead. Men cry openly, uncontrollably; women wail, clutching each other for support. Anger at the West occasionally becomes violent. Guns have been cocked and punches thrown at foreign reporters seen to be intruding on Iraqi grief. A woman drops to the floor in the waiting area, screaming her 12-year-old son's name: "Feran! Feran! Tell me where he is!" Another son tries to console her, assuring her that he is merely wounded after an air strike on their neighbourhood, and that he's going to be fine. But Feran had just been declared dead on arrival at Kindi. A utility races in - lights on, horn blaring. On the back, an old man sobs broken-heartedly. He cradles a small boy who seems lifeless, his eyes peering blankly from pools of his own blood; the rose-coloured stain on his white shirt is getting bigger and his tongue hangs from his mouth in a foamy mess. His head is split open but there is no time to learn his story. He is wheeled into the hospital. A medical team takes one look at him, decides he needs services they can't provide and he is wheeled back out; into an ambulance that screeches off through the hospital gates, to another medical centre. The utility gives chase, with the man on the back still in tears. And nobody has time for the two corpses next to him which have been locked in an intimate embrace by the movement of the vehicle. Kindi's 12 operating theatres are in use around the clock. A haggard and tearful Dr Tarib Al Saddi stands outside the hospital, trying to have a break, hoping to compose himself as the wind whips at his soiled white coat. "I have done 12 operations today - crushings, fractures and amputations. You see that these Americans are hitting civilians - their homes, their streets, their cars and even those who walk about. They hit anyone. One of the ambulance drivers says they have struck Al Yarmuk Hospital, so now we worry about a strike here." Lips quivering and cheeks stained by his own tears, Dr Al Saddi goes on: "Everyone is anxious and angry, maybe I'm the only calm one here." He locks onto a disconsolate woman in black, slumped against a wall. He makes me look at her beautiful face, into her tragic eyes, and says: "She was driving in the car with her 23-year-old son. They put a bullet in the head because he failed to stop at an American check-point." The woman cuts in: "He was innocent. We were on our way home. Why do the Americans do this? God forgive them!" Dr Al Saadi asks: "How can anyone who comes to liberate a country do this - lacerate and destroy our people? Do they really think that somehow after a few days this woman will love them?" There is little talk of Saddam Hussein here. Hazem Mohammed Jabeel, 37, feels the need to prompt his wounded seven-year-old son, Ayman, to give reporters a V-for-victory sign. And despite the fact that his wounded foot will be keeping him here for some time, Haroot Manouk, a 32-year-old fighter, wants to soldier on: "We'll show them, you'll see, all of you will see." Surgeon Mohamed Kamil says there has been a marked change in the nature of Kindi's workload since the arrival of US troops in Baghdad at the weekend. "We're now getting not just shrapnel wounds, but pieces of people," he says. "These are wounds from missiles and rockets. They are amputations. They require more urgent surgery." The numbers have been rising steadily at the hospital - today it received more than 200 injuries and 35 corpses. Six other hospitals serving the city report similar figures and now they are having the overflow from Iraq's hard-pressed military hospitals foisted on them. Nothing prepares a visitor for the scene at the hospital morgue. I've been into several in Iraq now and I think I know what to expect - the bodies are always mangled, frequently burnt beyond recognition, but usually treated with as much dignity as each having its own cold metal tray allows. But when the double refrigeration doors are opened on one of several buildings out the back at Kindi, there is just a pile on the floor - maybe 20 or 25 corpses; it is impossible to tell. Some of the faces are scorched black. Some have their clothes ripped off, their intestine hanging out. Limbs protrude from the pile, lying across other corpses and it is impossible to tell who is who in this Dalian drama. The traffic to and from the morgue is pitiable. Hospital orderlies wheel the dead in and families bring makeshift coffins to take the dead out. And when a group of foreign cameraman moves in to film the scene, the four men charged with moving the bodies in and out of the morgue react badly, angrily chasing them away. "Why are you taking photos? For Bush?" one of them yells, waving his arms. "Tell him to go to hell." From jafujii@uci.edu Fri Apr 11 02:10:01 2003 From: jafujii@uci.edu (Jim Fujii) Date: Thu, 10 Apr 2003 18:10:01 -0700 Subject: [Ethnicstudies] RummyCo: the Full Service Pentagon Message-ID: <5.2.0.9.2.20030410180955.01fe0e58@benfranklin.hnet.uci.edu> RummyCo: the Full Service Pentagon Let Us Handle All Your War and Post-War Needs http://villagevoice.com/alertrd.php3?article=43324 From jafujii@uci.edu Fri Apr 11 02:12:33 2003 From: jafujii@uci.edu (Jim Fujii) Date: Thu, 10 Apr 2003 18:12:33 -0700 Subject: [Ethnicstudies] For Arabs, a sense of humiliation is added to decades of frustration Message-ID: <5.2.0.9.2.20030410181227.01fcfda0@benfranklin.hnet.uci.edu> The Guardian April 9, 2003 “It feels like 1967 all over again' For Arabs, a sense of humiliation is added to decades of frustration Jonathan Steele in Amman As Arab TV stations finally show pictures of American tanks in Baghdad as well as Arab journalists dead or wounded from US attacks, gloom and anger are spreading across this city in clouds as thick as the smoke of burning oil. Few places in the Middle East have such a high proportion of progressive English-speaking intellectuals as Jordan's capital, Amman. Yet it is precisely among this lively elite that despondency and fury are at their heaviest. Watching CNN and the BBC, they have known that the US and British invasion was advancing. They fear the impact on ordinary Jordanians and Palestinians as the truth sinks in. There was a week of euphoria when allied forces were caught out in false claims of victory at Umm Qasr and Iraqis were seen to be mounting an unexpected degree of resistance. Now defeat is imminent, they feel. "It's like 1967 when I was a kid at boarding school and for three days we were told that Nasser was shooting Israeli planes down like flies. Then we cried and cried," says Mustafa Hamarneh of Jordan's Centre for Strategic Studies. "Iraq will be the first country to be recolonised for a second time. Eighty-five years after the British came, they and the Americans are back", sighs Adnan Odeh, a former Jordanian ambassador to the UN. At the weekend Arab-language newspapers were still covering the claims of victory issued by Iraq's information minister, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf. Iraqi forces had re-taken the airport. Hundreds of US troops had been killed. "He's a source of therapy. They don't examine his credibility. If he doesn't appear for a few hours, they're miserable", said Odeh. "When it is over, frustration will be all the deeper". Without "embedded" reporters Arab stations have not been as heavy on battle footage as their British and US counterparts. This has meant they have focused on civilians' suffering, unarmed families detained at roadblocks, hooded prisoners, people cut off from supplies being reduced to beggars and looters, and thousands fleeing Baghdad. Everyone here has images of humiliation that stick in the mind. Many cite a photo, shown on several front pages, which they found a shocking symbol of the looming occupation. It showed three Iraqi women in long black robes and veils being body searched by an American soldier. While every Arab government - apart from Syria -has been too timid to call the war illegal, brave reporting by independent Arab journalists has shown the war's human reality, even if they sometimes pretend things are better on the battlefield than they really are. These reporters have served as the bridge across the widening gap between the Arab "street" with its strong pan-Arab emotions and the narrow nationalism of feeble rulers protecting their chairs. No wonder US forces first tried to close these TV stations, then did not hesitate to strike their offices. For civilians, an end to fighting is always a relief and the pictures of a few waving civilians in Basra that Tony Blair touted in Belfast yesterday are not the whole story. Freedom from the fear of bombs and bullets may be a more immediate cause for joy than freedom from the fear of Saddam Hussein. Beyond Basra, anger with Britain and America has grown. Blair's promises of action to solve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict are not taken seriously. Some Jordanians see him as a liar; a few think he sympathises with Palestinian grievances. Both sides feel his influence with the US is nil. George Bush is despised even by those who used to admire the US. "You can no longer talk about American good intentions. People won't believe you. Governments that want good relations with the United States will have a hard time", says Taher al Masri, a former prime minister of Jordan. "There is bitterness across the board, among the rich, the poor, the young, the old, the US-educated. There will be more extremism, more introversion and more suspicion of the west". The effects may not be seen quickly. They will add a new layer to the frustrations of decades. A generation that was unborn or too young to understand the defeats of 1967 and 1973 now has its own bitter experience. Arabs who fear a rise in Islamic fundamentalism take comfort from the peace marches in Europe and America, the anti-war stand of Schröder and Chirac, and the position of the Vatican. The protests showed this was not a clash of civilisations but an unpopular war run by a small coalition of the chilling. Like the British in 1918, the US did not come to Iraq to bring democracy, Jordanians believe. They have already set it back across the Middle East. The advocates of modernisation and secular values are on the defensive. Many who have good degrees will seek to emigrate to the very world that has dealt them another humiliation. The rest will retreat into a shell of suppressed rage, from which few doubt that yet more violence will emerge. From jafujii@UCI.EDU Fri Apr 11 18:07:51 2003 From: jafujii@UCI.EDU (Jim Fujii) Date: Fri, 11 Apr 2003 10:07:51 -0700 Subject: [Ethnicstudies] Fwd: "Hitler" producer fired for comparison to US Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20030411100733.023b8b98@benfranklin.hnet.uci.edu> --=====================_4464679==_.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed > 'Hitler' Exec Producer Fired Over Remarks > Thu, Apr 10, 2003 10:36 AM PDT > > LOS ANGELES (Zap2it.com) - The executive producer of a CBS miniseries > about Adolf Hitler's rise to power has been fired after giving an > interview in which he compared the current mood of Americans to that of > the Germans who helped Hitler rise to power. > > According to The Hollywood Reporter, Gernon was fired Sunday (April 6) > from Alliance Atlantis, the production company making "Hitler: The Rise of > Evil" for CBS. He had worked there 11 years and was head of the firm's > long-form programming division. > > Neither Gernon nor Alliance Atlantis is commenting on the matter. > > "Hitler" has caused controversy ever since CBS announced its intentions > last summer. In an interview with TV Guide about the four-hour film, > scheduled for May, Gernon compares many Americans' acceptance of a war in > Iraq to the fearful climate in post-World War I Germany, of which Hitler > took advantage to become its ruler. > > "It basically boils down to an entire nation gripped by fear, who > ultimately chose to give up their civil rights and plunged the whole > nation into war," Gernon said in the interview. "I can't think of a better > time to examine this history than now." > > Gernon's remarks reportedly didn't go over well at CBS, which has tried > very hard to frame "Hitler" as a historical piece that in no way > sensationalizes or offers excuses for Hitler's actions. > > ________________________________________________________________ Sign Up for Juno Platinum Internet Access Today Only $9.95 per month! Visit www.juno.com ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~--> Get a FREE REFINANCE QUOTE - click here! http://us.click.yahoo.com/2CXtTB/ca0FAA/i5gGAA/sitolB/TM ---------------------------------------------------------------------~-> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ --=====================_4464679==_.ALT Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii"  > 'Hitler' Exec Producer Fired Over Remarks >
Thu, Apr 10, 2003 10:36 AM PDT > >
LOS ANGELES
(Zap2it.com) - The executive producer of a CBS miniseries >
about Adolf Hitler's rise to power has been fired after giving an >
interview in which he compared the current mood of Americans to that of >
the Germans who helped Hitler rise to power. > >
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Gernon was fired Sunday (April 6) >
from Alliance Atlantis, the production company making "Hitler: The Rise
of >
Evil" for CBS. He had worked there 11 years and was head of the firm's >
long-form programming division. > >

Neither Gernon nor Alliance Atlantis is commenting on the matter. > >
"Hitler" has caused controversy ever since CBS announced its intentions >
last summer. In an interview with TV Guide about the four-hour film, >
scheduled for May, Gernon compares many Americans' acceptance of a war in
>
Iraq to the fearful climate in post-World War I Germany, of which Hitler
>
took advantage to become its ruler. > >

  "It basically boils down to an entire nation gripped by fear, who >
ultimately chose to give up their civil rights and plunged the whole >
nation into war," Gernon said in the interview. "I can't think of a
better >
time to examine this history than now." > >

Gernon's remarks reportedly didn't go over well at CBS, which has tried >
very hard to frame "Hitler" as a historical piece that in no way >
sensationalizes or offers excuses for Hitler's actions. > >

________________________________________________________________
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------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~-->
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--=====================_4464679==_.ALT-- From jafujii@uci.edu Sat Apr 12 01:22:11 2003 From: jafujii@uci.edu (Jim Fujii) Date: Fri, 11 Apr 2003 17:22:11 -0700 Subject: [Ethnicstudies] Crime Against Humanity - John Pilger Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20030411172204.00b9c700@benfranklin.hnet.uci.edu> --=====================_655252==_.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed ZNet April 10, 2003 Crime Against Humanity by John Pilger A BBC television producer, moments before he was wounded by an American fighter aircraft that killed 18 people with "friendly fire", spoke to his mother on a satellite phone. Holding the phone over his head so that she could hear the sound of the American planes overhead, he said: "Listen, that's the sound of freedom." Did I read this scene in Catch-22? Surely, the BBC man was being ferociously ironic. I doubt it, just as I doubt that whoever designed the Observer's page three last Sunday had Joseph Heller in mind when he wrote the weasel headline: "The moment young Omar discovered the price of war". These cowardly words accompanied a photograph of an American marine reaching out to comfort 15-year-old Omar, having just participated in the mass murder of his father, mother, two sisters and brother during the unprovoked invasion of their homeland, in breach of the most basic law of civilised peoples. No true epitaph for them in Britain's famous liberal newspaper; no honest headline, such as: "This American marine murdered this boy's family". No photograph of Omar's father, mother, sisters and brother dismembered and blood-soaked by automatic fire. Versions of the Observer's propaganda picture have been appearing in the Anglo-American press since the invasion began: tender cameos of American troops reaching out, kneeling, ministering to their "liberated" victims. And where were the pictures from the village of Furat, where 80 men, women and children were rocketed to death? Apart from the Mirror, where were the pictures, and footage, of small children holding up their hands in terror while Bush's thugs forced their families to kneel in the street? Imagine that in a British high street. It is a glimpse of fascism, and we have a right to see it. "To initiate a war of aggression," said the judges in the Nuremberg trial of the Nazi leadership, "is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole." In stating this guiding principle of international law, the judges specifically rejected German arguments of the "necessity" for pre-emptive attacks against other countries. Nothing Bush and Blair, their cluster-bombing boys and their media court do now will change the truth of their great crime in Iraq. It is a matter of record, understood by the majority of humanity, if not by those who claim to speak for "us". As Denis Halliday said of the Anglo-American embargo against Iraq, it will "slaughter them in the history books". It was Halliday who, as assistant secretary general of the United Nations, set up the "oil for food" programme in Iraq in 1996 and quickly realised that the UN had become an instrument of "a genocidal attack on a whole society". He resigned in protest, as did his successor, Hans von Sponeck, who described "the wanton and shaming punishment of a nation". I have mentioned these two men often in these pages, partly because their names and their witness have been airbrushed from most of the media. I well remember Jeremy Paxman bellowing at Halliday on Newsnight shortly after his resignation: "So are you an apologist for Saddam Hussein?" That helped set the tone for the travesty of journalism that now daily, almost gleefully, treats criminal war as sport. In a leaked e-mail Roger Mosey, the head of BBC Television News, described the BBC's war coverage as "extraordinary - it almost feels like World Cup football when you go from Um Qasr to another theatre of war somewhere else and you're switching between battles". He is talking about murder. That is what the Americans do, and no one will say so, even when they are murdering journalists. They bring to this one-sided attack on a weak and mostly defenceless people the same racist, homicidal intent I witnessed in Vietnam, where they had a whole programme of murder called Operation Phoenix. This runs through all their foreign wars, as it does through their own divided society. Take your pick of the current onslaught. Last weekend, a column of their tanks swept heroically into Baghdad and out again. They murdered people along the way. They blew off the limbs of women and the scalps of children. Hear their voices on the unedited and unbroadcast videotape: "We shot the shit out of it." Their victims overwhelm the morgues and hospitals - hospitals already denuded of drugs and painkillers by America's deliberate withholding of $5.4bn in humanitarian goods, approved by the Security Council and paid for by Iraq. The screams of children undergoing amputation with minimal anaesthetic qualify as the BBC man's "sound of freedom". Heller would appreciate the sideshows. Take the British helicopter pilot who came to blows with an American who had almost shot him down. "Don't you know the Iraqis don't have a fucking air force?" he shouted. Did this pilot reflect on the truth he had uttered, on the whole craven enterprise against a stricken third world country and his own part in this crime? I doubt it. The British have been the most skilled at delusion and lying. By any standard, the Iraqi resistance to the high-tech Anglo-American machine was heroic. With ancient tanks and mortars, small arms and desperate ambushes, they panicked the Americans and reduced the British military class to one of its specialities - mendacious condescension. The Iraqis who fight are "terrorists", "hoodlums", "pockets of Ba'ath Party loyalists", "kamikaze" and "feds" (fedayeen). They are not real people: cultured and cultivated people. They are Arabs. This vocabulary of dishonour has been faithfully parroted by those enjoying it all from the broadcasting box. "What do you make of Basra?" asked the Today programme's presenter of a former general embedded in the studio. "It's hugely encouraging, isn't it?" he replied. Their mutual excitement, like their plummy voices, are their bond. On the same day, in a Guardian letter, Tim Llewellyn, a former BBC Middle East correspondent, pointed us to evidence of this "hugely encouraging" truth - fleeting pictures on Sky News of British soldiers smashing their way into a family home in Basra, pointing their guns at a woman and manhandling, hooding and manacling young men, one of whom was shown quivering with terror. "Is Britain 'liberating' Basra by taking political prisoners and, if so, based on what sort of intelligence, given Britain's long unfamiliarity with this territory and its inhabitants ... The least this ugly display will do is remind Arabs and Muslims everywhere of our Anglo-Saxon double standards - we can show your prisoners in ... degrading positions, but don't you dare show ours." Roger Mosey says the suffering of Um Qasr is "like World Cup football". There are 40,000 people in Um Qasr; desperate refugees are streaming in and the hospitals are overflowing. All this misery is due entirely to the "coalition" invasion and the British siege, which forced the United Nations to withdraw its humanitarian aid staff. Cafod, the Catholic relief agency, which has sent a team to Um Qasr, says the standard humanitarian quota for water in emergency situations is 20 litres per person per day. Cafod reports hospitals entirely without water and people drinking from contaminated wells. According to the World Health Organisation, 1.5 million people across southern Iraq are without water, and epidemics are inevitable. And what are "our boys" doing to alleviate this, apart from staging childish, theatrical occupations of presidential palaces, having fired shoulder-held missiles into a civilian city and dropped cluster bombs? A British colonel laments to his "embedded" flock that "it is difficult to deliver aid in an area that is still an active battle zone". The logic of his own words mocks him. If Iraq was not a battle zone, if the British and the Americans were not defying international law, there would be no difficulty in delivering aid. There is something especially disgusting about the lurid propaganda coming from these PR-trained British officers, who have not a clue about Iraq and its people. They describe the liberation they are bringing from "the world's worst tyranny", as if anything, including death by cluster bomb or dysentery, is better than "life under Saddam". The inconvenient truth is that, according to Unicef, the Ba'athists built the most modern health service in the Middle East. No one disputes the grim, totalitarian nature of the regime; but Saddam Hussein was careful to use the oil wealth to create a modern secular society and a large and prosperous middle class. Iraq was the only Arab country with a 90 per cent clean water supply and with free education. All this was smashed by the Anglo-American embargo. When the embargo was imposed in 1990, the Iraqi civil service organised a food distribution system that the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation described as "a model of efficiency . . . undoubtedly saving Iraq from famine". That, too, was smashed when the invasion was launched. Why are the British yet to explain why their troops have to put on protective suits to recover dead and wounded in vehicles hit by American "friendly fire"? The reason is that the Americans are using solid uranium coated on missiles and tank shells. When I was in southern Iraq, doctors estimated a sevenfold increase in cancers in areas where depleted uranium was used by the Americans and British in the 1991 war. Under the subsequent embargo, Iraq, unlike Kuwait, has been denied equipment with which to clean up its contaminated battlefields. The hospitals in Basra have wards overflowing with children with cancers of a variety not seen before 1991. They have no painkillers; they are fortunate if they have aspirin. With honourable exceptions (Robert Fisk; al-Jazeera), little of this has been reported. Instead, the media have performed their preordained role as imperial America's "soft power": rarely identifying "our" crime, or misrepresenting it as a struggle between good intentions and evil incarnate. This abject professional and moral failure now beckons the unseen dangers of such an epic, false victory, inviting its repetition in Iran, Korea, Syria, Cuba, China. George Bush has said: "It will be no defence to say: 'I was just following orders.'" He is correct. The Nuremberg judges left in no doubt the right of ordinary soldiers to follow their conscience in an illegal war of aggression. Two British soldiers have had the courage to seek status as conscientious objectors. They face court martial and imprisonment; yet virtually no questions have been asked about them in the media. George Galloway has been pilloried for asking the same question as Bush, and he and Tam Dalyell, Father of the House of Commons, are being threatened with withdrawal of the Labour whip. Dalyell, 41 years a member of the Commons, has said the Prime Minister is a war criminal who should be sent to The Hague. This is not gratuitous; on the prima facie evidence, Blair is a war criminal, and all those who have been, in one form or another, accessories should be reported to the International Criminal Court. Not only did they promote a charade of pretexts few now take seriously, they brought terrorism and death to Iraq. A growing body of legal opinion around the world agrees that the new court has a duty, as Eric Herring of Bristol University wrote, to investigate "not only the regime, but also the UN bombing and sanctions which violated the human rights of Iraqis on a vast scale". Add the present piratical war, whose spectre is the uniting of Arab nationalism with militant Islam. The whirlwind sown by Blair and Bush is just beginning. Such is the magnitude of their crime. --=====================_655252==_.ALT Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii" ZNet      April 10, 2003

Crime Against Humanity

by John Pilger

A BBC television producer, moments before he was wounded by an American
fighter aircraft that killed 18 people with "friendly fire", spoke to his
mother on a satellite phone. Holding the phone over his head so that she
could hear the sound of the American planes overhead, he said: "Listen,
that's the sound of freedom."

Did I read this scene in Catch-22? Surely, the BBC man was being ferociously
ironic. I doubt it, just as I doubt that whoever designed the Observer's
page three last Sunday had Joseph Heller in mind when he wrote the weasel
headline: "The moment young Omar discovered the price of war". These
cowardly words accompanied a photograph of an American marine reaching out
to comfort 15-year-old Omar, having just participated in the mass murder of
his father, mother, two sisters and brother during the unprovoked invasion
of their homeland, in breach of the most basic law of civilised peoples.

No true epitaph for them in Britain's famous liberal newspaper; no honest
headline, such as: "This American marine murdered this boy's family". No
photograph of Omar's father, mother, sisters and brother dismembered and
blood-soaked by automatic fire. Versions of the Observer's propaganda
picture have been appearing in the Anglo-American press since the invasion
began: tender cameos of American troops reaching out, kneeling, ministering
to their "liberated" victims.

And where were the pictures from the village of Furat, where 80 men, women
and children were rocketed to death? Apart from the Mirror, where were the
pictures, and footage, of small children holding up their hands in terror
while Bush's thugs forced their families to kneel in the street? Imagine
that in a British high street. It is a glimpse of fascism, and we have a
right to see it.

"To initiate a war of aggression," said the judges in the Nuremberg trial of
the Nazi leadership, "is not only an international crime; it is the supreme
international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains
within itself the accumulated evil of the whole." In stating this guiding
principle of international law, the judges specifically rejected German
arguments of the "necessity" for pre-emptive attacks against other
countries.

Nothing Bush and Blair, their cluster-bombing boys and their media court do
now will change the truth of their great crime in Iraq. It is a matter of
record, understood by the majority of humanity, if not by those who claim to
speak for "us". As Denis Halliday said of the Anglo-American embargo against
Iraq, it will "slaughter them in the history books". It was Halliday who, as
assistant secretary general of the United Nations, set up the "oil for food"
programme in Iraq in 1996 and quickly realised that the UN had become an
instrument of "a genocidal attack on a whole society". He resigned in
protest, as did his successor, Hans von Sponeck, who described "the wanton
and shaming punishment of a nation".

I have mentioned these two men often in these pages, partly because their
names and their witness have been airbrushed from most of the media. I well
remember Jeremy Paxman bellowing at Halliday on Newsnight shortly after his
resignation: "So are you an apologist for Saddam Hussein?" That helped set
the tone for the travesty of journalism that now daily, almost gleefully,
treats criminal war as sport. In a leaked e-mail Roger Mosey, the head of
BBC Television News, described the BBC's war coverage as "extraordinary - it
almost feels like World Cup football when you go from Um Qasr to another
theatre of war somewhere else and you're switching between battles".

He is talking about murder. That is what the Americans do, and no one will
say so, even when they are murdering journalists. They bring to this
one-sided attack on a weak and mostly defenceless people the same racist,
homicidal intent I witnessed in Vietnam, where they had a whole programme of
murder called Operation Phoenix. This runs through all their foreign wars,
as it does through their own divided society. Take your pick of the current
onslaught. Last weekend, a column of their tanks swept heroically into
Baghdad and out again. They murdered people along the way.

They blew off the limbs of women and the scalps of children. Hear their
voices on the unedited and unbroadcast videotape: "We shot the shit out of
it." Their victims overwhelm the morgues and hospitals - hospitals already
denuded of drugs and painkillers by America's deliberate withholding of
$5.4bn in humanitarian goods, approved by the Security Council and paid for
by Iraq. The screams of children undergoing amputation with minimal
anaesthetic qualify as the BBC man's "sound of freedom".

Heller would appreciate the sideshows. Take the British helicopter pilot who
came to blows with an American who had almost shot him down. "Don't you know
the Iraqis don't have a fucking air force?" he shouted. Did this pilot
reflect on the truth he had uttered, on the whole craven enterprise against
a stricken third world country and his own part in this crime? I doubt it.
The British have been the most skilled at delusion and lying. By any
standard, the Iraqi resistance to the high-tech Anglo-American machine was
heroic. With ancient tanks and mortars, small arms and desperate ambushes,
they panicked the Americans and reduced the British military class to one of
its specialities - mendacious condescension.

The Iraqis who fight are "terrorists", "hoodlums", "pockets of Ba'ath Party
loyalists", "kamikaze" and "feds" (fedayeen). They are not real people:
cultured and cultivated people. They are Arabs. This vocabulary of dishonour
has been faithfully parroted by those enjoying it all from the broadcasting
box. "What do you make of Basra?" asked the Today programme's presenter of a
former general embedded in the studio. "It's hugely encouraging, isn't it?"
he replied. Their mutual excitement, like their plummy voices, are their
bond.

On the same day, in a Guardian letter, Tim Llewellyn, a former BBC Middle
East correspondent, pointed us to evidence of this "hugely encouraging"
truth - fleeting pictures on Sky News of British soldiers smashing their way
into a family home in Basra, pointing their guns at a woman and manhandling,
hooding and manacling young men, one of whom was shown quivering with
terror. "Is Britain 'liberating' Basra by taking political prisoners and, if
so, based on what sort of intelligence, given Britain's long unfamiliarity
with this territory and its inhabitants ... The least this ugly display will
do is remind Arabs and Muslims everywhere of our Anglo-Saxon double
standards - we can show your prisoners in ... degrading positions, but don't
you dare show ours."

Roger Mosey says the suffering of Um Qasr is "like World Cup football".
There are 40,000 people in Um Qasr; desperate refugees are streaming in and
the hospitals are overflowing. All this misery is due entirely to the
"coalition" invasion and the British siege, which forced the United Nations
to withdraw its humanitarian aid staff. Cafod, the Catholic relief agency,
which has sent a team to Um Qasr, says the standard humanitarian quota for
water in emergency situations is 20 litres per person per day.

Cafod reports hospitals entirely without water and people drinking from
contaminated wells. According to the World Health Organisation, 1.5 million
people across southern Iraq are without water, and epidemics are inevitable.
And what are "our boys" doing to alleviate this, apart from staging
childish, theatrical occupations of presidential palaces, having fired
shoulder-held missiles into a civilian city and dropped cluster bombs?

A British colonel laments to his "embedded" flock that "it is difficult to
deliver aid in an area that is still an active battle zone". The logic of
his own words mocks him. If Iraq was not a battle zone, if the British and
the Americans were not defying international law, there would be no
difficulty in delivering aid.

There is something especially disgusting about the lurid propaganda coming
from these PR-trained British officers, who have not a clue about Iraq and
its people. They describe the liberation they are bringing from "the world's
worst tyranny", as if anything, including death by cluster bomb or
dysentery, is better than "life under Saddam". The inconvenient truth is
that, according to Unicef, the Ba'athists built the most modern health
service in the Middle East.

No one disputes the grim, totalitarian nature of the regime; but Saddam
Hussein was careful to use the oil wealth to create a modern secular society
and a large and prosperous middle class. Iraq was the only Arab country with
a 90 per cent clean water supply and with free education. All this was
smashed by the Anglo-American embargo. When the embargo was imposed in 1990,
the Iraqi civil service organised a food distribution system that the UN's
Food and Agriculture Organisation described as "a model of efficiency . . .
undoubtedly saving Iraq from famine". That, too, was smashed when the
invasion was launched.

Why are the British yet to explain why their troops have to put on
protective suits to recover dead and wounded in vehicles hit by American
"friendly fire"? The reason is that the Americans are using solid uranium
coated on missiles and tank shells. When I was in southern Iraq, doctors
estimated a sevenfold increase in cancers in areas where depleted uranium
was used by the Americans and British in the 1991 war. Under the subsequent
embargo, Iraq, unlike Kuwait, has been denied equipment with which to clean
up its contaminated battlefields. The hospitals in Basra have wards
overflowing with children with cancers of a variety not seen before 1991.
They have no painkillers; they are fortunate if they have aspirin.

With honourable exceptions (Robert Fisk; al-Jazeera), little of this has
been reported. Instead, the media have performed their preordained role as
imperial America's "soft power": rarely identifying "our" crime, or
misrepresenting it as a struggle between good intentions and evil incarnate.
This abject professional and moral failure now beckons the unseen dangers of
such an epic, false victory, inviting its repetition in Iran, Korea, Syria,
Cuba, China.

George Bush has said: "It will be no defence to say: 'I was just following
orders.'" He is correct. The Nuremberg judges left in no doubt the right of
ordinary soldiers to follow their conscience in an illegal war of
aggression. Two British soldiers have had the courage to seek status as
conscientious objectors. They face court martial and imprisonment; yet
virtually no questions have been asked about them in the media. George
Galloway has been pilloried for asking the same question as Bush, and he and
Tam Dalyell, Father of the House of Commons, are being threatened with
withdrawal of the Labour whip.

Dalyell, 41 years a member of the Commons, has said the Prime Minister is a
war criminal who should be sent to The Hague. This is not gratuitous; on the
prima facie evidence, Blair is a war criminal, and all those who have been,
in one form or another, accessories should be reported to the International
Criminal Court. Not only did they promote a charade of pretexts few now take
seriously, they brought terrorism and death to Iraq.

A growing body of legal opinion around the world agrees that the new court
has a duty, as Eric Herring of Bristol University wrote, to investigate "not
only the regime, but also the UN bombing and sanctions which violated the
human rights of Iraqis on a vast scale". Add the present piratical war,
whose spectre is the uniting of Arab nationalism with militant Islam. The
whirlwind sown by Blair and Bush is just beginning. Such is the magnitude of
their crime.
--=====================_655252==_.ALT-- From jafujii@uci.edu Sat Apr 12 01:23:30 2003 From: jafujii@uci.edu (Jim Fujii) Date: Fri, 11 Apr 2003 17:23:30 -0700 Subject: [Ethnicstudies] British peace activist shot by IDF troops in Gaza Strip Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20030411172324.00bc1ea8@benfranklin.hnet.uci.edu> --=====================_733995==_.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed Ha'aretz April 11, 2003 British peace activist shot by IDF troops in Gaza Strip Israel Defense Forces troops shot a British peace activist working with the International Solidarity Movement on Friday, witnesses said. Doctors said the Briton was brain dead. The activist was standing in between IDF troops and a group of Palestinian children when soldiers opened fire, said Khalil Abdullah who works with the Palestinian-backed peace group. "A group of ISM people were trying to set up a small protest tent alongside a road used by the army. The soldiers opened fire," said Abdullah, who witnessed the shooting. The 24-year-old Briton was shot in the head and declared brain dead shortly after arriving at the United Nations Work and Reliefs Agency hospital in Rafah, where the shooting occurred, according to Dr. Ali Musa. An IDF spokeswoman said she was checking the report. On March 16, American activist Rachel Corrie, 23, was killed while trying to stop an Israeli military bulldozer in the Gaza Strip. Corrie, a student in Olympia, Washington, was the first member of the group to be killed in 30 months of fighting between Israelis and Palestinians. The group claimed the bulldozer ran over her and then backed up. The army denied the claim and said the operator of the armored bulldozer did not see her. Last week, Israeli troops in an armored personnel carrier allegedly shot Bryan Avery, 24, from Albuquerque, New Mexico, in the face. He had been working in the West Bank city of Jenin. The army said it was firing at gunmen in the area and was not aware it hit Avery. Activists in the group work in the West Bank and Gaza as human shields, often placing themselves between the Palestinians and the Israelis. News Agencies http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=283221&contrassID =1&subContrassID=5&sbSubContrassID=0&listSrc=Y --=====================_733995==_.ALT Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii"
Ha’aretz   April 11, 2003

British peace activist shot by IDF troops in Gaza Strip         
        
Israel Defense Forces troops shot a British peace activist working with the
International Solidarity Movement on Friday, witnesses said.

Doctors said the Briton was brain dead.

The activist was standing in between IDF troops and a group of Palestinian
children when soldiers opened fire, said Khalil Abdullah who works with the
Palestinian-backed peace group.

"A group of ISM people were trying to set up a small protest tent alongside
a road used by the army. The soldiers opened fire," said Abdullah, who
witnessed the shooting.

The 24-year-old Briton was shot in the head and declared brain dead shortly
after arriving at the United Nations Work and Reliefs Agency hospital in
Rafah, where the shooting occurred, according to Dr. Ali Musa.

An IDF spokeswoman said she was checking the report.

On March 16, American activist Rachel Corrie, 23, was killed while trying to
stop an Israeli military bulldozer in the Gaza Strip. Corrie, a student in
Olympia, Washington, was the first member of the group to be killed in 30
months of fighting between Israelis and Palestinians.

The group claimed the bulldozer ran over her and then backed up. The army
denied the claim and said the operator of the armored bulldozer did not see
her.

Last week, Israeli troops in an armored personnel carrier allegedly shot
Bryan Avery, 24, from Albuquerque, New Mexico, in the face. He had been
working in the West Bank city of Jenin. The army said it was firing at
gunmen in the area and was not aware it hit Avery.

Activists in the group work in the West Bank and Gaza as human shields,
often placing themselves between the Palestinians and the Israelis.     

News Agencies

http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=283221&contrassID
=1&subContrassID=5&sbSubContrassID=0&listSrc=Y --=====================_733995==_.ALT-- From jafujii@uci.edu Sat Apr 12 01:25:49 2003 From: jafujii@uci.edu (Jim Fujii) Date: Fri, 11 Apr 2003 17:25:49 -0700 Subject: [Ethnicstudies] The war's implications for Israel Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20030411172538.02421d08@benfranklin.hnet.uci.edu> --=====================_873616==_.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed Ha'aretz April 11, 2003 The war's implications for Israel By Aviad Kleinberg The war in Iraq was more than the first expression of the United States' readiness to go to war as an empire. It was also a conceptual experiment that bears profound implications. What the United States learned from this test - as had already been hinted in the smaller war fought in Afghanistan - is that it is the master of the world and can make use of its force almost without interference and without it exacting a true price, neither in casualties nor in economic or strategic assets. The choice of Iraq was no accident. Iraq was not selected because it posed a strategic threat. Even if it had stocks of chemical weapons, it is hard to view these as a global danger. There are countries that are far more dangerous. The reason Iraq was chosen is that it was relatively weak, because the possibility of getting mired there was small. Hence, it was ideal for a demonstration of the new Clausewitzian concept of war as the continuation of diplomacy. The Americans went into this war without having concrete support. England is an ally of largely-symbolic significance. The Americans could have got by without the British. The Russians, the European Union and the United Nations were all against the war. It turned out that they were not needed, that their protests were irrelevant, and that their tails were already wagging, instinctively, to greet the victors. The threats about the awakening strength of the Muslim world also turned out to be empty. The Americans had already discovered this in Afghanistan: You can fight with impunity during the holy month of Ramadan and without a Muslim coalition. There is no "Muslim world." The war of civilizations was decided long ago by Coca-Cola and McDonald's - the John the Baptists of capitalism - and by the savior himself - Microsoft and the Internet. The American hesitancy was less of a realistic perception than it was a late manifestation of the trauma of Vietnam. Not only the Arab regimes refrained from reacting to the conquest of Baghdad and Karbala, but the supposedly-fanatic Arab masses also stayed home. The world has a new sheriff who does not hesitate to use his pistol, with or without partners, with or without sanction, with or without justification. The rules have changed. What are the new rules? Well, this question reminds me of the first time I rented a car. I started to look over the leasing contract. "Let me save you the time," the clerk said. "We're always right and you're always wrong." There is only one country in the world that has not yet fully grasped the implications of the American invasion of Iraq, and that country is Israel. >From certain points of view, the invasion worked in Israel's favor. The work of the just is always done by others. Iraq, despite all the bombastic pronouncements by President Bush, is not a strategic threat to the United States or to the free world, but it is definitely a threat to Israel. That threat has been removed, more or less. However, the invasion of Iraq dramatically lowers Israel's stock as a strategic asset. And not because Israel is not loyal to Uncle Sam; on the contrary, it is a most obedient and faithful vassal. It's just that Israel is not really needed. Israel's great strategic weight stemmed from its ability to act - or to constitute a potential threat - in a region in which the United States did not want to intervene directly. Israel was a regional mini-power through which it was possible to threaten the Soviet bloc and its satellites, or the Arab world. Israel preserved American interests. If American involvement becomes direct, there is no further need for mediators. The United States does the dirty work itself. Moreover, as I have argued, American intervention in the Middle East was chosen less for any salient interest (that is, an economic-strategic interest) and more because it is easy to carry out. In the new world, Arab oil is not insignificant, but its significance is far less than it used to be. From other aspects, the Middle East has mainly nuisance value. What will be the significance of the structural reduction in Israel's status? It will mean that American readiness to go on paying so as to extricate us from the morass in which we are mired will be diminished. It is unlikely that the United States will exert increasing pressure on Israel in order to achieve durable political solutions. The United States will make do with bad solutions, based on the long-standing American principle of forging poor settlements the consequences of which will be paid by others in the future. Donald Rumsfeld has no inclination to give prizes to Arafat and his successors. He even likes Ariel Sharon. But the whole thing is starting to cost too much money. American support will be reduced. The economic crisis will deepen. Israeli democracy will continue to be eroded. It won't take much for Israel to become just another Third World country that solicits help from those willing to be generous. What conclusion should Israel draw from the war? That it should hurry on its own to achieve a good settlement that will make it possible to rehabilitate the economy and start rehabilitating the society and the state of democracy in the country. In the new world, Israel's major asset is not military might but genuine membership in the club of the advanced countries. --=====================_873616==_.ALT Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii" Ha'aretz        April 11, 2003

The war's implications for Israel

By Aviad Kleinberg

The war in Iraq was more than the first expression of the United States'
readiness to go to war as an empire. It was also a conceptual experiment
that bears profound implications. What the United States learned from this
test - as had already been hinted in the smaller war fought in Afghanistan -
is that it is the master of the world and can make use of its force almost
without interference and without it exacting a true price, neither in
casualties nor in economic or strategic assets.

The choice of Iraq was no accident. Iraq was not selected because it posed a
strategic threat. Even if it had stocks of chemical weapons, it is hard to
view these as a global danger. There are countries that are far more
dangerous. The reason Iraq was chosen is that it was relatively weak,
because the possibility of getting mired there was small. Hence, it was
ideal for a demonstration of the new Clausewitzian concept of war as the
continuation of diplomacy.

The Americans went into this war without having concrete support. England is
an ally of largely-symbolic significance. The Americans could have got by
without the British. The Russians, the European Union and the United Nations
were all against the war. It turned out that they were not needed, that
their protests were irrelevant, and that their tails were already wagging,
instinctively, to greet the victors.

The threats about the awakening strength of the Muslim world also turned out
to be empty. The Americans had already discovered this in Afghanistan: You
can fight with impunity during the holy month of Ramadan and without a
Muslim coalition. There is no "Muslim world." The war of civilizations was
decided long ago by Coca-Cola and McDonald's - the John the Baptists of
capitalism - and by the savior himself - Microsoft and the Internet.

The American hesitancy was less of a realistic perception than it was a late
manifestation of the trauma of Vietnam. Not only the Arab regimes refrained
from reacting to the conquest of Baghdad and Karbala, but the
supposedly-fanatic Arab masses also stayed home.

The world has a new sheriff who does not hesitate to use his pistol, with or
without partners, with or without sanction, with or without justification.
The rules have changed. What are the new rules? Well, this question reminds
me of the first time I rented a car. I started to look over the leasing
contract. "Let me save you the time," the clerk said. "We're always right
and you're always wrong."

There is only one country in the world that has not yet fully grasped the
implications of the American invasion of Iraq, and that country is Israel.
>From certain points of view, the invasion worked in Israel's favor. The work

of the just is always done by others. Iraq, despite all the bombastic
pronouncements by President Bush, is not a strategic threat to the United
States or to the free world, but it is definitely a threat to Israel. That
threat has been removed, more or less.

However, the invasion of Iraq dramatically lowers Israel's stock as a
strategic asset. And not because Israel is not loyal to Uncle Sam; on the
contrary, it is a most obedient and faithful vassal.

It's just that Israel is not really needed. Israel's great strategic weight
stemmed from its ability to act - or to constitute a potential threat - in a
region in which the United States did not want to intervene directly. Israel
was a regional mini-power through which it was possible to threaten the
Soviet bloc and its satellites, or the Arab world. Israel preserved American
interests.

If American involvement becomes direct, there is no further need for
mediators. The United States does the dirty work itself. Moreover, as I have
argued, American intervention in the Middle East was chosen less for any
salient interest (that is, an economic-strategic interest) and more because
it is easy to carry out.

In the new world, Arab oil is not insignificant, but its significance is far
less than it used to be. From other aspects, the Middle East has mainly
nuisance value.

What will be the significance of the structural reduction in Israel's
status? It will mean that American readiness to go on paying so as to
extricate us from the morass in which we are mired will be diminished. It is
unlikely that the United States will exert increasing pressure on Israel in
order to achieve durable political solutions. The United States will make do
with bad solutions, based on the long-standing American principle of forging
poor settlements the consequences of which will be paid by others in the
future.

Donald Rumsfeld has no inclination to give prizes to Arafat and his
successors. He even likes Ariel Sharon. But the whole thing is starting to
cost too much money. American support will be reduced. The economic crisis
will deepen. Israeli democracy will continue to be eroded. It won't take
much for Israel to become just another Third World country that solicits
help from those willing to be generous.

What conclusion should Israel draw from the war? That it should hurry on its
own to achieve a good settlement that will make it possible to rehabilitate
the economy and start rehabilitating the society and the state of democracy
in the country. In the new world, Israel's major asset is not military might
but genuine membership in the club of the advanced countries.
--=====================_873616==_.ALT-- From jafujii@uci.edu Sat Apr 12 01:28:37 2003 From: jafujii@uci.edu (Jim Fujii) Date: Fri, 11 Apr 2003 17:28:37 -0700 Subject: [Ethnicstudies] Hans Blix: War Planned 'Long in Advance' Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20030411172832.00ba3cf0@benfranklin.hnet.uci.edu> --=====================_1041397==_.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed http://www.news24.com/News24/World/Iraq/0,,2-10-1460_1345303,00.html News24.com 9 April 2003 Hans Blix: War Planned 'Long in Advance' Madrid - The invasion of Iraq was planned a long time in advance, and the United States and Britain are not primarily concerned with finding any banned weapons of mass destruction, the chief UN weapons inspector, Hans Blix, said in an interview on Wednesday. "There is evidence that this war was planned well in advance. Sometimes this raises doubts about their attitude to the (weapons) inspections," Blix told Spanish daily El Pais. "I now believe that finding weapons of mass destruction has been relegated, I would say, to fourth place, which is why the United States and Britain are now waging war on Iraq. Today the main aim is to change the dictatorial regime of Saddam Hussein," he said, according to the Spanish text of the interview. Blix said US President George W Bush had told him in October 2002 that he backed the UN's work to verify US and British claims that Baghdad was developing biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. Washington 'less convinced now' But he said he knew at the time "there were people within the Bush administration who were sceptical and who were working on engineering regime change". By the start of March the hawks in both Washington and London were getting impatient, he added. Blix said that he thought the US might initially have believed Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction - although its "fabrication" of evidence raised doubts about even that - but that Washington was now less convinced by its own claims. "I think the Americans started the war thinking there were some. I think they now believe less in that possibility. But I don't know - you ask yourself a lot of questions when you see the things they did to try and demonstrate that the Iraqis had nuclear weapons, like the fake contract with Niger," he explained. That was a reference to US allegations - later denied - that Iraq had sought to purchase uranium from the west African state of Niger. "I'm very curious to see if they do find any (weapons)," he said. Blix said the war, which on Wednesday entered its 21st day, was "a very high price to pay in terms of human lives and the destruction of a country" when the threat of weapons proliferation could have been contained by UN inspections. By attacking Iraq, Washington had sent the wrong message - that if a country did not possess biological, chemical or nuclear weapons, it risked being attacked. US sending out the wrong signal "The United States maintains that the war on Iraq is designed to send a signal to other countries to keep away from weapons of mass destruction. But people are getting a different message. Take the announcement North Korea has just made. It's tantamount to saying 'if you let in the inspectors, like Iraq did, you get attacked'. North Korea accused the United States on Sunday of using a UN Security Council discussion of its nuclear programme as a "prelude to war" and warned that it would fully mobilise and strengthen its forces. "It's an important problem," Blix continued. "If a country perceives that its security is guaranteed, it won't need to consider weapons of mass destruction. This security guarantee is the first line of defence against the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction." The 74-year-old Swede announced in March that he would step down from his post when his contract runs out in June. Blix's reputation for independence and resisting political pressure was sorely tested as the Iraq crisis unfolded and US officials became exasperated with his measured reports on Iraqi cooperation with his inspection teams. --=====================_1041397==_.ALT Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii" http://www.news24.com/News24/World/Iraq/0,,2-10-1460_1345303,00.html

News24.com    9 April 2003

Hans Blix: War Planned 'Long in Advance'

Madrid - The invasion of Iraq was planned a long time in advance, and the
United States and Britain are not primarily concerned with finding any
banned weapons of mass destruction, the chief UN weapons inspector, Hans
Blix, said in an interview on Wednesday.

"There is evidence that this war was planned well in advance. Sometimes this
raises doubts about their attitude to the (weapons) inspections," Blix told
Spanish daily El Pais.

"I now believe that finding weapons of mass destruction has been relegated,
I would say, to fourth place, which is why the United States and Britain are
now waging war on Iraq.

Today the main aim is to change the dictatorial regime of Saddam Hussein,"
he said, according to the Spanish text of the interview.

Blix said US President George W Bush had told him in October 2002 that he
backed the UN's work to verify US and British claims that Baghdad was
developing biological, chemical and nuclear weapons.

Washington 'less convinced now'

But he said he knew at the time "there were people within the Bush
administration who were sceptical and who were working on engineering regime
change". By the start of March the hawks in both Washington and London were
getting impatient, he added.

Blix said that he thought the US might initially have believed Iraq
possessed weapons of mass destruction - although its "fabrication" of
evidence raised doubts about even that - but that Washington was now less
convinced by its own claims.

"I think the Americans started the war thinking there were some. I think
they now believe less in that possibility.

But I don't know - you ask yourself a lot of questions when you see the
things they did to try and demonstrate that the Iraqis had nuclear weapons,
like the fake contract with Niger," he explained.

That was a reference to US allegations - later denied - that Iraq had sought
to purchase uranium from the west African state of Niger.

"I'm very curious to see if they do find any (weapons)," he said.

Blix said the war, which on Wednesday entered its 21st day, was "a very high
price to pay in terms of human lives and the destruction of a country" when
the threat of weapons proliferation could have been contained by UN
inspections.

By attacking Iraq, Washington had sent the wrong message - that if a country
did not possess biological, chemical or nuclear weapons, it risked being
attacked.

US sending out the wrong signal

"The United States maintains that the war on Iraq is designed to send a
signal to other countries to keep away from weapons of mass destruction.

But people are getting a different message.

Take the announcement North Korea has just made. It's tantamount to saying
'if you let in the inspectors, like Iraq did, you get attacked'.

North Korea accused the United States on Sunday of using a UN Security
Council discussion of its nuclear programme as a "prelude to war" and warned
that it would fully mobilise and strengthen its forces.

"It's an important problem," Blix continued.

"If a country perceives that its security is guaranteed, it won't need to
consider weapons of mass destruction. This security guarantee is the first
line of defence against the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction."

The 74-year-old Swede announced in March that he would step down from his
post when his contract runs out in June.

Blix's reputation for independence and resisting political pressure was
sorely tested as the Iraq crisis unfolded and US officials became
exasperated with his measured reports on Iraqi cooperation with his
inspection teams.
--=====================_1041397==_.ALT-- From jafujii@UCI.EDU Sat Apr 12 01:30:10 2003 From: jafujii@UCI.EDU (Jim Fujii) Date: Fri, 11 Apr 2003 17:30:10 -0700 Subject: [Ethnicstudies] We have a winner in Iraq Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20030411173004.00b82488@benfranklin.hnet.uci.edu> --=====================_1134291==_.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable AlterNet March 19, 2003 We have a winner in Iraq: Corporate America Divvies Up The Post-Saddam Spoils By Arianna Huffington Ladies and Gentlemen, we have a winner in Iraq. Yes, I know that the first smart bomb has yet to be dropped on Baghdad. But that's just a formality. The war has already been won. The conquering heroes are not generals in fatigues but CEOs in suits, and the shock troops are not an advance guard of commandos but legions of lobbyists. The Bush administration is currently in the process of doling out over $1.5 billion in government contracts to American companies lining up to cash in on the rebuilding of postwar Iraq. So bombs away! The more destruction the better =AD at least for the lucky few in the rebuilding business. The United Nations has traditionally overseen the reconstruction of war zones like Afghanistan or Kosovo. But in keeping with its unilateral, the-world-is-our-sandbox approach to this invasion, the White House has decided to nail a "Made in the USA" sign on this Iraqi fixer-upper. Postwar Iraq will be rebuilt using red, white, and blueprints. Talk about advance planning: Even as the people of Iraq are girding themselves for the thousands of bombs expected to rain down on them during the first 24 hours of the attack, the administration is already picking and choosing who will be given the lucrative job of cleaning up the rubble. Postwar rebuilding is a solitary bright spot in our own carpet-bombed economy. To further expedite matters, the war-powers-that-be invoked "urgent circumstances" clauses that allowed them to subvert the requisite competitive bidding process =AD the free market be damned =AD and invite a select group of companies to bid on the rebuilding projects. No British companies were included, which has left many of them seething and meeting with government officials in London to find out where they stand. So just which companies were given first crack at the post-Saddam spoils? Well, given Team Bush's track record, it will probably not fill you with "shock and awe" to learn that the common denominator among the chosen few is a proven willingness to make large campaign donations to the Grand Old Party. Between them, the bidders =AD a quartet of well-connected corporate consortiums that includes Bechtel Group, Fluor Corp., and, of course, Vice President Cheney's old cronies at Halliburton =AD have donated a combined= $2.8 million over the past two election cycles, 68 percent of which went to Republicans. The insider track given these fat cat donors proves afresh that splurging on a politician is one of the soundest and safest investments you can make. Where else will a $2.8 million ante offer you a one-in-four shot at raking in a $1.5 billion payoff? And that $1.5 billion is just for starters. The president is planning to give post-Saddam Iraq an extreme makeover =AD a wide-ranging overhaul that will include the transformation of the country's educational, health-care, and banking systems =AD all funded by taxpayer dollars and administered by private U.S. contractors. Think of it as a for Marshall Plan for profit. "The administration's goal," reads one of the reconstruction contracts that are up for bids, "is to provide tangible evidence to the people of Iraq that the U.S. will support efforts to bring the country to political security and economic prosperity." As a first step toward Iraqi prosperity, the president's ambitious postwar plan earmarks $100 million to ensure that Iraq's 25,000 schools have all the supplies and support necessary to "function at a standard level of quality" =AD including books and supplies for 4.1 million Iraqi schoolchildren. I'm sure those schools in Oregon that are being forced to shut down a month early due to inadequate funding, or the low-income students in California who are suing the state in a desperate effort to obtain adequate textbooks and qualified teachers of their own, would love to see the same kind of "tangible evidence" of President Bush's support. The same goes for our flatlining public health-care system. While more than a million poor Americans are about to lose their access to publicly funded medical care, the president is in the market for a corporate contractor to oversee a $100 million upgrade of Iraq's hospitals and clinics. And the White House has announced its intention to redesign Iraq's financial rules and banking system after it bombs the country halfway to oblivion. Too bad the administration keeps watering down reforms for the financial rules and banking system here at home. That's another way corporate America is profiting from the looming war. With all eyes on Iraq, few are paying attention to how little is being done to reform and redesign our own financial rules. The new chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, for instance, is getting away with an enforcement regime every bit as limp as that of his predecessor, the supremely spineless Harvey Pitt. Last week, in his first congressional testimony since assuming control of the watchdog agency, William Donaldson made it clear that, despite a massive increase in the SEC's budget, we shouldn't expect too much in the way of fundamental reform =AD stressing that one of his top priorities would be boosting the morale of the agency. I don't know about you, but I would feel a whole lot better if he'd made boosting the morale of a badly burned public Job No. 1. Tossing a slew of corporate crooks in the slammer would be a good start. Maybe America's beleaguered investors should band together with this country's "left behind" schoolchildren and start stockpiling a couple of plywood drones with overly long wingspans, some high-strength aluminum tubes, and a few discarded canisters of chemical gas. Apparently, that's the only way to get this administration's attention. Arianna Huffington is the author of "Pigs at the Trough: How Corporate Greed and Political Corruption are Undermining America." For information on the book, visit www.PigsAtTheTrough.com. If you have questions or comments, contact Arianna at arianna@ariannaonline.com --=====================_1134291==_.ALT Content-Type: text/html; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable AlterNet    March 19, 2003

We have a winner in Iraq:

Corporate America Divvies Up The Post-Saddam Spoils

By Arianna Huffington

Ladies and Gentlemen, we have a winner in Iraq. Yes, I know that the first
smart bomb has yet to be dropped on Baghdad. But that's just a formality.
The war has already been won. The conquering heroes are not generals in
fatigues but CEOs in suits, and the shock troops are not an advance guard of
commandos but legions of lobbyists.

The Bush administration is currently in the process of doling out over $1.5
billion in government contracts to American companies lining up to cash in
on the rebuilding of postwar Iraq. So bombs away! The more destruction the
better =AD at least for the lucky few in the rebuilding business.=20

The United Nations has traditionally overseen the reconstruction of war
zones like Afghanistan or Kosovo. But in keeping with its unilateral,
the-world-is-our-sandbox approach to this invasion, the White House has
decided to nail a "Made in the USA" sign on this Iraqi fixer-upper. Postwar
Iraq will be rebuilt using red, white, and blueprints.

Talk about advance planning: Even as the people of Iraq are girding
themselves for the thousands of bombs expected to rain down on them during
the first 24 hours of the attack, the administration is already picking and
choosing who will be given the lucrative job of cleaning up the rubble.
Postwar rebuilding is a solitary bright spot in our own carpet-bombed
economy.

To further expedite matters, the war-powers-that-be invoked "urgent
circumstances" clauses that allowed them to subvert the requisite
competitive bidding process =AD the free market be damned =AD and invite a
select group of companies to bid on the rebuilding projects. No British
companies were included, which has left many of them seething and meeting
with government officials in London to find out where they stand.

So just which companies were given first crack at the post-Saddam spoils?

Well, given Team Bush's track record, it will probably not fill you with
"shock and awe" to learn that the common denominator among the chosen few is
a proven willingness to make large campaign donations to the Grand Old
Party. Between them, the bidders =AD a quartet of well-connected corporate
consortiums that includes Bechtel Group, Fluor Corp., and, of course, Vice
President Cheney's old cronies at Halliburton =AD have donated a combined $2.8
million over the past two election cycles, 68 percent of which went to
Republicans.

The insider track given these fat cat donors proves afresh that splurging on
a politician is one of the soundest and safest investments you can make.
Where else will a $2.8 million ante offer you a one-in-four shot at raking
in a $1.5 billion payoff?

And that $1.5 billion is just for starters. The president is planning to
give post-Saddam Iraq an extreme makeover =AD a wide-ranging overhaul that
will include the transformation of the country's educational, health-care,
and banking systems =AD all funded by taxpayer dollars and administered by
private U.S. contractors. Think of it as a for Marshall Plan for profit.

"The administration's goal," reads one of the reconstruction contracts that
are up for bids, "is to provide tangible evidence to the people of Iraq that
the U.S. will support efforts to bring the country to political security and
economic prosperity."

As a first step toward Iraqi prosperity, the president's ambitious postwar
plan earmarks $100 million to ensure that Iraq's 25,000 schools have all the
supplies and support necessary to "function at a standard level of quality"
=AD including books and supplies for 4.1 million Iraqi schoolchildren.

I'm sure those schools in Oregon that are being forced to shut down a month
early due to inadequate funding, or the low-income students in California
who are suing the state in a desperate effort to obtain adequate textbooks
and qualified teachers of their own, would love to see the same kind of
"tangible evidence" of President Bush's support.

The same goes for our flatlining public health-care system. While more than
a million poor Americans are about to lose their access to publicly funded
medical care, the president is in the market for a corporate contractor to
oversee a $100 million upgrade of Iraq's hospitals and clinics.=20

And the White House has announced its intention to redesign Iraq's financial
rules and banking system after it bombs the country halfway to oblivion. Too
bad the administration keeps watering down reforms for the financial rules
and banking system here at home.

That's another way corporate America is profiting from the looming war. With
all eyes on Iraq, few are paying attention to how little is being done to
reform and redesign our own financial rules.

The new chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, for instance, is
getting away with an enforcement regime every bit as limp as that of his
predecessor, the supremely spineless Harvey Pitt.

Last week, in his first congressional testimony since assuming control of
the watchdog agency, William Donaldson made it clear that, despite a massive
increase in the SEC's budget, we shouldn't expect too much in the way of
fundamental reform =AD stressing that one of his top priorities would be
boosting the morale of the agency.

I don't know about you, but I would feel a whole lot better if he'd made
boosting the morale of a badly burned public Job No. 1. Tossing a slew of
corporate crooks in the slammer would be a good start.

Maybe America's beleaguered investors should band together with=20 this
country's "left behind" schoolchildren and start stockpiling a couple of
plywood drones with overly long wingspans, some high-strength aluminum
tubes, and a few discarded canisters of chemical gas.

Apparently, that's the only way to get this administration's attention.


Arianna Huffington is the author of "Pigs at the Trough: How Corporate Greed
and Political Corruption are Undermining America." For information on the
book, visit www.PigsAtThe= Trough.com.

If you have questions or comments, contact Arianna at
arianna@ariannaonline.com
 --=====================_1134291==_.ALT-- From jafujii@uci.edu Sat Apr 12 01:33:10 2003 From: jafujii@uci.edu (Jim Fujii) Date: Fri, 11 Apr 2003 17:33:10 -0700 Subject: [Ethnicstudies] CHAVEZ - INSIDE THE COUP Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20030411173303.00bd7de8@benfranklin.hnet.uci.edu> --=====================_1314219==_.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed http://www.cbc.ca/passionateeyesunday/feature_130403.html The Passionate Eye CHAVEZ - INSIDE THE COUP on Sunday, April 13 On the 11th April 2002, the world awoke to the news that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez had been removed from office and had been replaced by a new self-appointed "interim" government. News report after news report carried stories of the mayhem in Caracas, where 11 people had been killed in what were alleged to have been bloody street battles between Chavez supporters and an opposition march. Viewers all over the world were led to believe that Chavez had ordered the killings, and had therefore been forced to resign. What in fact took place was the first coup of the twenty first century, and probably the world's first media coup. Venezuela is the world's 4th largest exporter of oil, and the third highest supplier to the United States. In 1999 Hugo Chavez had been democratically elected president by a landslide majority, promising to end corruption and re-distribute the oil revenue to the 80% of the population who lived in poverty. But from his first day in office Chavez faced powerful enemies both inside and outside Venezuela. Just over 12 months ago two Irish documentary-makers, Kim Bartley and Donnacha O Briain travelled to Venezuela to make a film about this charismatic and unorthodox world leader. They met with Chavez and secured his permission to have full access to film, what was to be, an up close and personal profile. It turned out to be something completely different. "Chavez - Inside the Coup" is a thrilling insight into Chavez, charting the last seven months in the run up to the coup and his dramatic return to power some 48 hours later. Never has such a range of footage of Chavez, the new icon of the left and the thorn in the side of the US Administration, been assembled in one documentary. "Chavez - Inside the Coup" is a Power Pictures 2002 production and has received funding from a number of sources, including The Irish Film Board, RTE, BBC, ZDF/ARTE, NPS and YLE. The documentary, which was filmed and directed by Kim Bartley and Donnacha O Briain, was produced by David Power. --=====================_1314219==_.ALT Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii" http://www.cbc.ca/passionateeyesunday/feature_130403.html

The Passionate Eye

CHAVEZ - INSIDE THE COUP
on Sunday, April 13

On the 11th April 2002, the world awoke to the news that Venezuelan
President Hugo Chavez had been removed from office and had been replaced by
a new self-appointed "interim" government. News report after news report
carried stories of the mayhem in Caracas, where 11 people had been killed in
what were alleged to have been bloody street battles between Chavez
supporters and an opposition march. Viewers all over the world were led to
believe that Chavez had ordered the killings, and had therefore been forced
to resign. What in fact took place was the first coup of the twenty first
century, and probably the world's first media coup.

Venezuela is the world's 4th largest exporter of oil, and the third highest
supplier to the United States. In 1999 Hugo Chavez had been democratically
elected president by a landslide majority, promising to end corruption and
re-distribute the oil revenue to the 80% of the population who lived in
poverty. But from his first day in office Chavez faced powerful enemies both
inside and outside Venezuela.

Just over 12 months ago two Irish documentary-makers, Kim Bartley and
Donnacha O Briain travelled to Venezuela to make a film about this
charismatic and unorthodox world leader. They met with Chavez and secured
his permission to have full access to film, what was to be, an up close and
personal profile.  It turned out to be something completely different.

"Chavez - Inside the Coup" is a thrilling insight into Chavez, charting the
last seven months in the run up to the coup and his dramatic return to power
some 48 hours later. Never has such a range of footage of Chavez, the new
icon of the left and the thorn in the side of the US Administration, been
assembled in one documentary.

"Chavez - Inside the Coup" is a Power Pictures 2002 production and has
received funding from a number of sources, including The Irish Film Board,
RTE, BBC, ZDF/ARTE, NPS and YLE.  The documentary, which was filmed and
directed by Kim Bartley and Donnacha O Briain, was produced by David Power.
 --=====================_1314219==_.ALT-- From jafujii@UCI.EDU Sat Apr 12 05:19:55 2003 From: jafujii@UCI.EDU (Jim Fujii) Date: Fri, 11 Apr 2003 21:19:55 -0700 Subject: [Ethnicstudies] FISK: WHY ARE AMERICANS KILLING JOURNALISTS? Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20030411211937.00b8a0e0@benfranklin.hnet.uci.edu> --=====================_14919112==_.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Subject: FISK: WHY ARE AMERICANS KILLING JOURNALISTS? http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0409-06.htm Published on Wednesday, April 9, 2003 by the lndependent/UK Is There Some Element in the US Military That Wants to Take Out Journalists? by Robert Fisk First the Americans killed the correspondent of al-Jazeera yesterday and wounded his cameraman. Then, within four hours, they attacked the Reuters television bureau in Baghdad, killing one of its cameramen and a cameraman for Spain's Tele 5 channel and wounding four other members of the Reuters staff. Was it possible to believe this was an accident? Or was it possible that the right word for these killings - the first with a jet aircraft, the second with an M1A1 Abrams tank - was murder? These were not, of course, the first journalists to die in the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. Terry Lloyd of ITV was shot dead by American troops in southern Iraq, who apparently mistook his car for an Iraqi vehicle. His crew are still missing. Michael Kelly of The Washington Post tragically drowned in a canal. Two journalists have died in Kurdistan. Two journalists - a German and a Spaniard - were killed on Monday night at a US base in Baghdad, with two Americans, when an Iraqi missile exploded amid them. And we should not forget the Iraqi civilians who are being killed and maimed by the hundred and who - unlike their journalist guests - cannot leave the war and fly home. So the facts of yesterday should speak for themselves. Unfortunately for the Americans, they make it look very like murder. The US jet turned to rocket al-Jazeera's office on the banks of the Tigris at 7.45am local time yesterday. The television station's chief correspondent in Baghdad, Tariq Ayoub, a Jordanian-Palestinian, was on the roof with his second cameraman, an Iraqi called Zuheir, reporting a pitched battle near the bureau between American and Iraqi troops. Mr Ayoub's colleague Maher Abdullah recalled afterwards that both men saw the plane fire the rocket as it swooped toward their building, which is close to the Jumhuriya Bridge upon which two American tanks had just appeared. "On the screen, there was this battle and we could see bullets flying and then we heard the aircraft," Mr Abdullah said. "The plane was flying so low that those of us downstairs thought it would land on the roof - that's how close it was. We actually heard the rocket being launched. It was a direct hit - the missile actually exploded against our electrical generator. Tariq died almost at once. Zuheir was injured." Now for America's problems in explaining this little saga. Back in 2001, the United States fired a cruise missile at al-Jazeera's office in Kabul - from which tapes of Osama bin Laden had been broadcast around the world. No explanation was ever given for this extraordinary attack on the night before the city's "liberation"; the Kabul correspondent, Taiseer Alouni, was unhurt. By the strange coincidence of journalism, Mr Alouni was in the Baghdad office yesterday to endure the USAF's second attack on al-Jazeera. Far more disturbing, however, is the fact that the al-Jazeera network - the freest Arab television station, which has incurred the fury of both the Americans and the Iraqi authorities for its live coverage of the war - gave the Pentagon the co-ordinates of its Baghdad office two months ago and received assurances that the bureau would not be attacked. Then on Monday, the US State Department's spokesman in Doha, an Arab-American called Nabil Khouri, visited al-Jazeera's offices in the city and, according to a source within the Qatari satellite channel, repeated the Pentagon's assurances. Within 24 hours, the Americans had fired their missile into the Baghdad office. The next assault, on Reuters, came just before midday when an Abrams tank on the Jamhuriya Bridge suddenly pointed its gun barrel towards the Palestine Hotel where more than 200 foreign journalists are staying to cover the war from the Iraqi side. Sky Television's David Chater noticed the barrel moving. The French television channel France 3 had a crew in a neighboring room and videotaped the tank on the bridge. The tape shows a bubble of fire emerging from the barrel, the sound of a detonation and then pieces of paintwork falling past the camera as it vibrates with the impact. In the Reuters bureau on the 15th floor, the shell exploded amid the staff. It mortally wounded a Ukrainian cameraman, Taras Protsyuk, who was also filming the tanks, and seriously wounded another member of the staff, Paul Pasquale from Britain, and two other journalists, including Reuters' Lebanese-Palestinian reporter Samia Nakhoul. On the next floor, Tele 5's cameraman Jose Couso was badly hurt. Mr Protsyuk died shortly afterwards. His camera and its tripod were left in the office, which was swamped with the crew's blood. Mr Couso had a leg amputated but he died half an hour after the operation. The Americans responded with what all the evidence proves to be a straightforward lie. General Buford Blount of the US 3rd Infantry Division - whose tanks were on the bridge - announced that his vehicles had come under rocket and rifle fire from snipers in the Palestine Hotel, that his tank had fired a single round at the hotel and that the gunfire had then ceased. The general's statement, however, was untrue. I was driving on a road between the tanks and the hotel at the moment the shell was fired - and heard no shooting. The French videotape of the attack runs for more than four minutes and records absolute silence before the tank's armament is fired. And there were no snipers in the building. Indeed, the dozens of journalists and crews living there - myself included - have watched like hawks to make sure that no armed men should ever use the hotel as an assault point. This is, one should add, the same General Blount who boasted just over a month ago that his crews would be using depleted uranium munitions - the kind many believe to be responsible for an explosion of cancers after the 1991 Gulf War - in their tanks. For General Blount to suggest, as he clearly does, that the Reuters camera crew was in some way involved in shooting at Americans merely turns a meretricious statement into a libelous one. Again, we should remember that three dead and five wounded journalists do not constitute a massacre - let alone the equivalence of the hundreds of civilians being maimed by the invasion force. And it is a truth that needs to be remembered that the Iraqi regime has killed a few journalists of its own over the years, with tens of thousands of its own people. But something very dangerous appeared to be getting loose yesterday. General Blount's explanation was the kind employed by the Israelis after they have killed the innocent. Is there therefore some message that we reporters are supposed to learn from all this? Is there some element in the American military that has come to hate the press and wants to take out journalists based in Baghdad, to hurt those whom our Home Secretary, David Blunkett, has maliciously claimed to be working "behind enemy lines". Could it be that this claim - that international correspondents are in effect collaborating with Mr Blunkett's enemy (most Britons having never supported this war in the first place) - is turning into some kind of a death sentence? I knew Mr Ayoub. I have broadcast during the war from the rooftop on which he died. I told him then how easy a target his Baghdad office would make if the Americans wanted to destroy its coverage - seen across the Arab world - of civilian victims of the bombing. Mr Protsyuk of Reuters often shared the Palestine Hotel's elevator with me. Samia Nakhoul, who is 42, has been a friend and colleague since the 1975-90 Lebanese civil war. She is married to the Financial Times correspondent David Gardner. Yesterday afternoon, she lay covered in blood in a Baghdad hospital. And General Blount dared to imply that this innocent woman and her brave colleagues were snipers. What, I wonder, does this tell us about the war in Iraq? 'The American forces knew exactly what this hotel is' The Sky News correspondent David Chater was in the Palestine Hotel when the hotel was hit by American tank fire. This is his account of what happened. "I was about to go out on to the balcony when there was a huge explosion, then shouts and screams from people along our corridor. They were shouting, 'Somebody's been hit. Can somebody find a doctor?' They were saying they could see blood and bone. "There were a lot of French journalists screaming, 'Get a doctor, get a doctor'. There was a great sense of panic because these walls are very thin. "We saw the tanks up on the bridge. They started firing across the bank. The shells were landing either side of us at what we thought were military targets. Then we were hit. We are in the middle of a tank battle. "I don't understand why they were doing that. There was no fire coming out of this hotel - everyone knows it's full of journalists. "Everybody is putting on flak jackets. Everybody is running for cover. We now feel extremely vulnerable and we are now going to say goodbye to you." The line was cut but minutes later Chater resumed his report, saying journalists had been watching American forces from their balconies and the troops had surely been aware of their presence. "They knew exactly what this hotel is. They know the press corps is here. I don't know why they are trying to target journalists. There are awful scenes around me. There's a Reuters tent just a few yards away from me where people are in tears. It makes you realize how vulnerable you are. What are we supposed to do? How are we supposed to carry on if American shells are targeting Western journalists?" =A9 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd ### http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0410-06.htm Published on Thursday, April 10, 2003 by the lndependent/UK Final Proof that War is About the Failure of the Human Spirit by Robert Fisk It was a scene from the Crimean War; a hospital of screaming wounded and floors running with blood. I stepped in the stuff; it stuck to my shoes, to the clothes of all the doctors in the packed emergency room, it swamped the passageways and the blankets and sheets. The Iraqi civilians and soldiers brought to the Adnan Khairallah Martyr Hospital in the last hours of Saddam Hussein's regime yesterday - sometimes still clinging to severed limbs - are the dark side of victory and defeat; final proof, like the dead who are buried within hours, that war is about the total failure of the human spirit. As I wandered amid the beds and the groaning men and women lying on them - Dante's visit to the circles of hell should have included these visions - the same old questions recurred. Was this for 11 September? For human rights? For weapons of mass destruction? In a jammed corridor, I came across a middle-aged man on a soaked hospital trolley. He had a head wound which was almost indescribable. >From his right eye socket hung a handkerchief that was streaming blood on to the floor. A little girl lay on a filthy bed, one leg broken, the other so badly gouged out by shrapnel during an American air attack that the only way doctors could prevent her moving it was to tie her foot to a rope weighed down with concrete blocks. Her name was Rawa Sabri. And as I walked through this place of horror, the American shelling began to bracket the Tigris river outside, bringing back to the wounded the terror of death which they had suffered only hours before. The road bridge I had just crossed to reach the hospital came under fire and clouds of cordite smoke drifted over the medical center. Tremendous explosions shook the wards and corridors as doctors pushed shrieking children away from the windows. Florence Nightingale never reached this part of the old Ottoman Empire. But her equivalent is Dr Khaldoun al-Baeri, the director and chief surgeon, a gently-spoken man who has slept an hour a day for six days and who is trying to save the lives of more than a hundred souls a day with one generator and half his operating theatres out of use - you cannot carry patients in your arms to the 16th floor when they are coughing blood. Dr Baeri speaks like a sleepwalker, trying to describe how difficult it is to stop a wounded man or woman from suffocating when they have been wounded in the thorax, explaining that after four operations to extract metal from the brains of his patients, he is almost too tired to think, let alone in English. As I leave him, he tells me that he does not know where his family is. "Our house was hit and my neighbors sent a message to tell me they sent them away somewhere. I do not know where. I have two little girls, they are twins, and I told them they must be brave because their father had to work night and day at the hospital and they mustn't cry because I have to work for humanity. And now I have no idea where they are." Then Dr Baeri choked on his words and began to cry and could not say goodbye. There was a man on the second floor with a fearful wound to the neck. It seemed the doctors could not staunch his blood and he was dribbling his life away all over the floor. Something wicked and sharp had cut into his stomach and six inches of bandages could not stop the blood from pumping out of him. His brother stood beside him and raised his hand to me and asked: "Why? Why?" A small child with a drip-feed in its nose lay on a blanket. It had had to wait four days for an operation. Its eyes looked dead. I didn't have the heart to ask its mother if this was a boy or a girl. There was an air strike perhaps half a mile away and the hospital corridors echoed with the blast, long and low and powerful, and it was followed by a rising chorus of moans and cries from the children outside the wards. Below them, in that worst of all emergency rooms, they had brought in three men who had been burned across their faces and arms and chests and legs; naked men with a skin of blood and tissues whom the doctors pasted with white cream, who sat on their beds with their skinless arms held upwards, each beseeching a non-existing savior to rescue him from his pain. "No! No! No!" another young man screamed as doctors tried to cut open his pants. He shrieked and cried and whinnied like a horse. I thought he was a soldier. He looked tough and strong and well fed but now he was a child again and he cried: "Umma, Umma [Mummy, mummy]". I left this awful hospital to find the American shells falling in the river outside. I noticed, too, some military tents on a small patch of grass near the hospital's administration building and - "God damn it," I said under my breath - an armored vehicle with a gun mounted on it, hidden under branches and foliage. It was only a few meters inside the hospital grounds. But the hospital was being used to conceal it. And I couldn't help noticing the name of the hospital. Adnan Khairallah had been President Saddam's minister of defense, a man who allegedly fell out with his leader and died in a helicopter crash whose cause was never explained. Even in the last hours of the Battle of Baghdad, its victims had to lie in a building named in honor of a murdered man. =A9 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space PO Box 90083 Gainesville, FL. 32607 (352) 337-9274 (352) 871-7554 (Cell Phone) http://www.space4peace.org globalnet@mindspringcom --=====================_14919112==_.ALT Content-Type: text/html; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
Subject: FISK: WHY ARE AMERICANS KILLING JOURNALISTS?

http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0409-06.htm
<= br> Published on Wednesday, April 9, 2003 by the lndependent/UK

Is There Some Element in the US Military That Wants to Take Out Journalists?

by Robert Fisk


First the Americans killed the correspondent of al-Jazeera yesterday
and wounded his cameraman. Then, within four hours, they attacked the
Reuters television bureau in Baghdad, killing one of its cameramen
and a cameraman for Spain's Tele 5 channel and wounding four other
members of the Reuters staff.

Was it possible to believe this was an accident? Or was it possible=20
that the right word for these killings - the first with a jet
aircraft, the second with an M1A1 Abrams tank - was murder? These
were not, of course, the first journalists to die in the
Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. Terry Lloyd of ITV was shot dead by
American troops in southern Iraq, who apparently mistook his car for
an Iraqi vehicle. His crew are still missing. Michael Kelly of The
Washington Post tragically drowned in a canal. Two journalists have=20
died in Kurdistan. Two journalists - a German and a Spaniard - were=20
killed on Monday night at a US base in Baghdad, with two Americans,=20
when an Iraqi missile exploded amid them.

And we should not forget the Iraqi civilians who are being killed and
maimed by the hundred and who - unlike their journalist guests -
cannot leave the war and fly home. So the facts of yesterday should=20
speak for themselves. Unfortunately for the Americans, they make it=20
look very like murder.

The US jet turned to rocket al-Jazeera's office on the banks of the=20
Tigris at 7.45am local time yesterday. The television station's chief
correspondent in Baghdad, Tariq Ayoub, a Jordanian-Palestinian, was=20
on the roof with his second cameraman, an Iraqi called Zuheir,
reporting a pitched battle near the bureau between American and Iraqi
troops. Mr Ayoub's colleague Maher Abdullah recalled afterwards that
both men saw the plane fire the rocket as it swooped toward their
building, which is close to the Jumhuriya Bridge upon which two
American tanks had just appeared.

"On the screen, there was this battle and we could see bullets flying
and then we heard the aircraft," Mr Abdullah said.

"The plane was flying so low that those of us downstairs thought it
would land on the roof - that's how close it was. We actually heard=20
the rocket being launched. It was a direct hit - the missile actually
exploded against our electrical generator. Tariq died almost at once.
Zuheir was injured."

Now for America's problems in explaining this little saga. Back in
2001, the United States fired a cruise missile at al-Jazeera's office
in Kabul - from which tapes of Osama bin Laden had been broadcast
around the world. No explanation was ever given for this
extraordinary attack on the night before the city's "liberation"; the
Kabul correspondent, Taiseer Alouni, was unhurt. By the strange
coincidence of journalism, Mr Alouni was in the Baghdad office
yesterday to endure the USAF's second attack on al-Jazeera.

Far more disturbing, however, is the fact that the al-Jazeera network
- the freest Arab television station, which has incurred the fury of
both the Americans and the Iraqi authorities for its live coverage of
the war - gave the Pentagon the co-ordinates of its Baghdad office
two months ago and received assurances that the bureau would not be=20
attacked.

Then on Monday, the US State Department's spokesman in Doha, an
Arab-American called Nabil Khouri, visited al-Jazeera's offices in
the city and, according to a source within the Qatari satellite
channel, repeated the Pentagon's assurances. Within 24 hours, the
Americans had fired their missile into the Baghdad office.

The next assault, on Reuters, came just before midday when an Abrams
tank on the Jamhuriya Bridge suddenly pointed its gun barrel towards
the Palestine Hotel where more than 200 foreign journalists are
staying to cover the war from the Iraqi side. Sky Television's David
Chater noticed the barrel moving. The French television channel
France 3 had a crew in a neighboring room and videotaped the tank on
the bridge. The tape shows a bubble of fire emerging from the barrel,
the sound of a detonation and then pieces of paintwork falling past=20
the camera as it vibrates with the impact.

In the Reuters bureau on the 15th floor, the shell exploded amid the
staff. It mortally wounded a Ukrainian cameraman, Taras Protsyuk, who
was also filming the tanks, and seriously wounded another member of=20
the staff, Paul Pasquale from Britain, and two other journalists,
including Reuters' Lebanese-Palestinian reporter Samia Nakhoul. On
the next floor, Tele 5's cameraman Jose Couso was badly hurt. Mr
Protsyuk died shortly afterwards. His camera and its tripod were left
in the office, which was swamped with the crew's blood. Mr Couso had
a leg amputated but he died half an hour after the operation.

The Americans responded with what all the evidence proves to be a
straightforward lie. General Buford Blount of the US 3rd Infantry
Division - whose tanks were on the bridge - announced that his
vehicles had come under rocket and rifle fire from snipers in the
Palestine Hotel, that his tank had fired a single round at the hotel
and that the gunfire had then ceased. The general's statement,
however, was untrue.

I was driving on a road between the tanks and the hotel at the moment
the shell was fired - and heard no shooting. The French videotape of
the attack runs for more than four minutes and records absolute
silence before the tank's armament is fired. And there were no
snipers in the building. Indeed, the dozens of journalists and crews
living there - myself included - have watched like hawks to make sure
that no armed men should ever use the hotel as an assault=20 point.

This is, one should add, the same General Blount who boasted just
over a month ago that his crews would be using depleted uranium
munitions - the kind many believe to be responsible for an explosion
of cancers after the 1991 Gulf War - in their tanks. For General
Blount to suggest, as he clearly does, that the Reuters camera crew=20
was in some way involved in shooting at Americans merely turns a
meretricious statement into a libelous one.

Again, we should remember that three dead and five wounded
journalists do not constitute a massacre - let alone the equivalence
of the hundreds of civilians being maimed by the invasion force. And
it is a truth that needs to be remembered that the Iraqi regime has=20
killed a few journalists of its own over the years, with tens of
thousands of its own people. But something very dangerous appeared to
be getting loose yesterday. General Blount's explanation was the kind
employed by the Israelis after they have killed the innocent. Is
there therefore some message that we reporters are supposed to learn
from all this? Is there some element in the American military that
has come to hate the press and wants to take out journalists based in
Baghdad, to hurt those whom our Home Secretary, David Blunkett, has=20
maliciously claimed to be working "behind enemy lines". Could it be
that this claim - that international correspondents are in effect
collaborating with Mr Blunkett's enemy (most Britons having never
supported this war in the first place) - is turning into some kind of
a death sentence?

I knew Mr Ayoub. I have broadcast during the war from the rooftop on
which he died. I told him then how easy a target his Baghdad office=20
would make if the Americans wanted to destroy its coverage - seen
across the Arab world - of civilian victims of the bombing. Mr
Protsyuk of Reuters often shared the Palestine Hotel's elevator with
me. Samia Nakhoul, who is 42, has been a friend and colleague since=20
the 1975-90 Lebanese civil war. She is married to the Financial Times
correspondent David Gardner.

Yesterday afternoon, she lay covered in blood in a Baghdad hospital.
And General Blount dared to imply that this innocent woman and her
brave colleagues were snipers. What, I wonder, does this tell us
about the war in Iraq?

'The American forces knew exactly what this hotel is'

The Sky News correspondent David Chater was in the Palestine Hotel
when the hotel was hit by American tank fire. This is his account of
what happened.

"I was about to go out on to the balcony when there was a huge=20
explosion, then shouts and screams from people along our corridor.
They were shouting, 'Somebody's been hit. Can somebody find a
doctor?' They were saying they could see blood and bone.

"There were a lot of French journalists screaming, 'Get a doctor, get
a doctor'. There was a great sense of panic because these walls are=20
very thin. "We saw the tanks up on the bridge. They started firing
across the bank. The shells were landing either side of us at what we
thought were military targets. Then we were hit. We are in the middle
of a tank battle.

"I don't understand why they were doing that. There was no fire
coming out of this hotel - everyone knows it's full of journalists.

"Everybody is putting on flak jackets. Everybody is running for
cover. We now feel extremely vulnerable and we are now going to say=20
goodbye to you." The line was cut but minutes later Chater resumed
his report, saying journalists had been watching American forces from
their balconies and the troops had surely been aware of their
presence.

"They knew exactly what this hotel is. They know the press corps is
here. I don't know why they are trying to target journalists. There=20
are awful scenes around me. There's a Reuters tent just a few yards=20
away from me where people are in tears. It makes you realize how
vulnerable you are. What are we supposed to do? How are we supposed=20
to carry on if American shells are targeting Western journalists?"

=A9 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

###



http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0410-06.htm
<= br> Published on Thursday, April 10, 2003 by the lndependent/UK

Final Proof that War is About the Failure of the Human Spirit

by Robert Fisk

It was a scene from the Crimean War; a hospital of screaming wounded
and floors running with blood. I stepped in the stuff; it stuck to my
shoes, to the clothes of all the doctors in the packed emergency
room, it swamped the passageways and the blankets and sheets.

The Iraqi civilians and soldiers brought to the Adnan Khairallah
Martyr Hospital in the last hours of Saddam Hussein's regime
yesterday - sometimes still clinging to severed limbs - are the dark
side of victory and defeat; final proof, like the dead who are buried
within hours, that war is about the total failure of the human
spirit. As I wandered amid the beds and the groaning men and women
lying on them - Dante's visit to the circles of hell should have
included these visions - the same old questions recurred. Was this
for 11 September? For human rights? For weapons of mass destruction?

In a jammed corridor, I came across a middle-aged man on a soaked
hospital trolley. He had a head wound which was almost indescribable.
>From his right eye socket hung a handkerchief that was streaming
blood on to the floor. A little girl lay on a filthy bed, one leg
broken, the other so badly gouged out by shrapnel during an American
air attack that the only way doctors could prevent her moving it was
to tie her foot to a rope weighed down with concrete blocks.

Her name was Rawa Sabri. And as I walked through this place of
horror, the American shelling began to bracket the Tigris river
outside, bringing back to the wounded the terror of death which they
had suffered only hours before. The road bridge I had just crossed to
reach the hospital came under fire and clouds of cordite smoke
drifted over the medical center. Tremendous explosions shook the
wards and corridors as doctors pushed shrieking children away from
the windows.

Florence Nightingale never reached this part of the old Ottoman
Empire. But her equivalent is Dr Khaldoun al-Baeri, the director and
chief surgeon, a gently-spoken man who has slept an hour a day for
six days and who is trying to save the lives of more than a hundred=20
souls a day with one generator and half his operating theatres out of
use - you cannot carry patients in your arms to the 16th floor when=20
they are coughing blood.

Dr Baeri speaks like a sleepwalker, trying to describe how difficult
it is to stop a wounded man or woman from suffocating when they have
been wounded in the thorax, explaining that after four operations to
extract metal from the brains of his patients, he is almost too tired
to think, let alone in English. As I leave him, he tells me that he=20
does not know where his family is.

"Our house was hit and my neighbors sent a message to tell me they
sent them away somewhere. I do not know where. I have two little
girls, they are twins, and I told them they must be brave because
their father had to work night and day at the hospital and they
mustn't cry because I have to work for humanity. And now I have no
idea where they are." Then Dr Baeri choked on his words and began to
cry and could not say goodbye.

There was a man on the second floor with a fearful wound to the neck.
It seemed the doctors could not staunch his blood and he was
dribbling his life away all over the floor. Something wicked and
sharp had cut into his stomach and six inches of bandages could not=20
stop the blood from pumping out of him. His brother stood beside him
and raised his hand to me and asked: "Why? Why?"

A small child with a drip-feed in its nose lay on a blanket. It had=20
had to wait four days for an operation. Its eyes looked dead. I
didn't have the heart to ask its mother if this was a boy or a girl.

There was an air strike perhaps half a mile away and the hospital
corridors echoed with the blast, long and low and powerful, and it
was followed by a rising chorus of moans and cries from the children
outside the wards. Below them, in that worst of all emergency rooms,
they had brought in three men who had been burned across their faces
and arms and chests and legs; naked men with a skin of blood and
tissues whom the doctors pasted with white cream, who sat on their
beds with their skinless arms held upwards, each beseeching a
non-existing savior to rescue him from his pain.

"No! No! No!" another young man screamed as doctors tried to cut open
his pants. He shrieked and cried and whinnied like a horse. I thought
he was a soldier. He looked tough and strong and well fed but now he
was a child again and he cried: "Umma, Umma [Mummy, mummy]".

I left this awful hospital to find the American shells falling in the
river outside. I noticed, too, some military tents on a small patch=20
of grass near the hospital's administration building and - "God damn
it," I said under my breath - an armored vehicle with a gun mounted
on it, hidden under branches and foliage. It was only a few meters
inside the hospital grounds. But the hospital was being used to
conceal it. And I couldn't help noticing the name of the hospital.
Adnan Khairallah had been President Saddam's minister of defense, a=20
man who allegedly fell out with his leader and died in a helicopter=20
crash whose cause was never explained.

Even in the last hours of the Battle of Baghdad, its victims had to=20
lie in a building named in honor of a murdered man.

=A9 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd


Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space
PO Box 90083
Gainesville, FL. 32607
(352) 337-9274
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http://www.space4peace.org
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--=====================_14919112==_.ALT-- From jafujii@uci.edu Sat Apr 12 06:32:10 2003 From: jafujii@uci.edu (Jim Fujii) Date: Fri, 11 Apr 2003 22:32:10 -0700 Subject: [Ethnicstudies] The Day After the Statues Fall--Some Perspective Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20030411223128.00b7ac80@benfranklin.hnet.uci.edu> --=====================_19253735==_.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed The Day After the Statues Fall 10 April 2003 by Phyllis Bennis, Institute for Policy Studies It is not surprising, and like everyone else we anticipated that some Iraqis would welcome U.S. troops and cheer their arrival. Many have already tempered their welcome with urging the U.S. not to stay in Iraq for long. Most Iraqis are almost certainly relieved and thrilled at the imminent end of a terribly repressive regime and an end to crippling sanctions. But if yesterday was the party -- today the hangover begins. There are already reports of Iraqis saying the Ba'athist regime was bad, but that the current lack of authority and its resulting looting and chaos are worse -- "at least before we had security," one said. The fact that many Iraqis are pleased with the destruction of the regime does not mean the U.S. war was legal, justified or appropriate. All of the violations of the UN Charter inherent in this war are still violations. All of the human costs paid by Iraqi civilians and unwilling conscripts alike -- death, grievous injury, loss of family members, destruction of property -- are still being paid. We don't have any idea yet -- and may never -- of the human toll from this war. U.S. officials have again shifted the political justification they are asserting for the war; now we are supposed to believe the war's main objective was always the "liberation of the Iraqi people" -- no one is mentioning Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction, which was the official basis of the war. So far, of course, no such weapons have been found. Rumsfeld's unsubstantiated accusations of phantom WMDs moving across Iraq's border into Syria could provide both explanation for the embarrassing lack of WMDs found so far in Iraq, and potentially new justification for attacking Syria. The most urgent needs are for water and electricity, especially in cities in the south, as well as medical supplies. Hospitals in Baghdad over the last several days were treating as many as 100 new casualties each hour, until they were overwhelmed and stopped trying to count. Surgical supplies, anesthetics and electricity were all in short supply even in Baghdad, presumably worse in smaller cities. The U.S. and UK, as the occupying powers, are obligated under the Geneva Conventions to immediately provide for those needs. UN agencies have said that the looting -- even of hospitals -- may prevent the resumption of humanitarian assistance. The long-term legitimacy of any new government in Iraq will be measured by its authority and support at home, and by international recognition as determined by the UN General Assembly and individual governments. The key to any legitimacy will be determined by the process of how a new government, and even any interim authority are chosen. Any such process orchestrated by the Pentagon (such as the preemptive move to insert Ahmad Chalabi and dozens of his Iraqi National Congress cohorts into the fighting to jump-start his bid for a U.S.-sponsored 'presidency' of Iraq) stands in complete violation of international law or any democratic legitimacy. Chalabi-backer and vice-president Cheney announced a conference of Iraqi exiles and some from inside Iraq to discuss an interim authority; within hours his description of the meeting was challenged by the White House and State Department, indicating a heightened conflict within the administration over how to orchestrate governance in Iraq. The United Nations is still the only legitimate authority to orchestrate a process to select an interim authority. If the U.S. were serious about democratization in Iraq it would move quickly to turn even preliminary authority over to the UN to identify an interim authority and move towards a more permanent indigenous process. The divisions within the administration between supporters of Chalabi and the INC (largely the neo-cons in the Pentagon and Cheney's office) and those advocating broader participation are so far largely tactical. For example, the new proposal for sharing authority in post-war Iraq that came from former officials including Eagleburger, Haig, Perry, Woolsey, Gingrich, Kerrey and Thompson, does not recognize UN authority, but calls for "helping Iraqis build a new Iraq" only so the U.S. "will have moral authority to promote its other objectives in the region." The UN should have the central role -- but only if it has real decision-making power from the beginning of the process. That means re-opening to the whole world the already closed bidding process that allowed only a few U.S. corporations to bid on construction contracts; insuring that the UN is at the center of all moves to create an interim administration, recruit Iraqis to participate, set the dates for conferences and elections, etc. If UN authority is compromised, or the UN is brought into the process only to provide legitimacy to continuing U.S.control, the UN should not take it on at all. Oil remains a key consideration. The Israeli press reports negotiations are underway to reopen the British colonial-era oil pipeline from Mosul to Haifa. The pipeline was closed in 1948 with the creation of Israel; its reopening would dramatically increase Israel's oil independence and lower its energy costs (oil now imported largely from Russia). This is particularly significant given Ahmad Chalabi's longstanding support for Israel and interest, like that of his Pentagon backers, in normalizing Israeli ties with the Arab world and maintaining its military power. Further, U.S. special forces moved within one mile of the rich Kirkuk oil fields; some reporters in the region indicate it appears that may be their main objective in the area. The U.S. has also just agreed to allow Turkish military observers into Kirkuk "to verify that Iraqi forces have withdrawn"-- something Washington promised the Kurds it would never allow. SO, WHAT DO WE CALL FOR? * We call for an end to U.S. occupation of Iraq. * We call for the United Nations, not the U.S., to help Iraq create a new, representative and indigenous government. The UN's central role must involve real decision-making power; it must not be a fig-leaf designed to provide political cover to unilateral U.S. action. General Jay Garner's authority should be turned over to a United Nations special representative. * We call for the U.S. to immediately provide for the urgent needs of the Iraqi population, including water, electricity, medical supplies.* We will hold the U.S. accountable for its claims that this war is about democratization and not about empire, oil, and the expansion of U.S. power. ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~--> Get a FREE REFINANCE QUOTE - click here! http://us.click.yahoo.com/2CXtTB/ca0FAA/i5gGAA/sitolB/TM ---------------------------------------------------------------------~-> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ --=====================_19253735==_.ALT Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii" The Day After the Statues Fall

10 April 2003

by Phyllis Bennis, Institute for Policy Studies

It is not surprising, and like everyone else we anticipated that some Iraqis
would welcome U.S. troops and cheer their arrival. Many have already tempered
their welcome with urging the U.S. not to stay in Iraq for long. Most Iraqis
are almost certainly relieved and thrilled at the imminent end of a terribly
repressive regime and an end to crippling sanctions. But if yesterday was the
party -- today the hangover begins. There are already reports of Iraqis saying
the Ba'athist regime was bad, but that the current lack of authority and its
resulting looting and chaos are worse -- "at least before we had security," one
said.

The fact that many Iraqis are pleased with the destruction of the regime does
not mean the U.S. war was legal, justified or appropriate. All of the
violations of the UN Charter inherent in this war are still violations. All of
the human costs paid by Iraqi civilians and unwilling conscripts alike --
death, grievous injury, loss of family members, destruction of property -- are
still being paid. We don't have any idea yet -- and may never -- of the human
toll from this war.

U.S. officials have again shifted the political justification they are
asserting for the war; now we are supposed to believe the war's main objective
was always the "liberation of the Iraqi people" -- no one is mentioning Iraq's
alleged weapons of mass destruction, which was the official basis of the war.
So far, of course, no such weapons have been found. Rumsfeld's unsubstantiated
accusations of phantom WMDs moving across Iraq's border into Syria could
provide both explanation for the embarrassing lack of WMDs found so far in
Iraq, and potentially new justification for attacking Syria.

The most urgent needs are for water and electricity, especially in cities in
the south, as well as medical supplies. Hospitals in Baghdad over the last
several days were treating as many as 100 new casualties each hour, until they
were overwhelmed and stopped trying to count. Surgical supplies, anesthetics
and electricity were all in short supply even in Baghdad, presumably worse in
smaller cities. The U.S. and UK, as the occupying powers, are obligated under
the Geneva Conventions to immediately provide for those needs. UN agencies have
said that the looting -- even of hospitals -- may prevent the resumption of
humanitarian assistance.

The long-term legitimacy of any new government in Iraq will be measured by its
authority and support at home, and by international recognition as determined
by the UN General Assembly and individual governments. The key to any
legitimacy will be determined by the process of how a new government, and even
any interim authority are chosen. Any such process orchestrated by the Pentagon
(such as the preemptive move to insert Ahmad Chalabi and dozens of his Iraqi
National Congress cohorts into the fighting to jump-start his bid for a
U.S.-sponsored 'presidency' of Iraq) stands in complete violation of
international law or any democratic legitimacy. Chalabi-backer and
vice-president Cheney announced a conference of Iraqi exiles and some from
inside Iraq to discuss an interim authority; within hours his description of
the meeting was challenged by the White House and State Department, indicating
a heightened conflict within the administration over how to orchestrate
governance in Iraq.

The United Nations is still the only legitimate authority to orchestrate a
process to select an interim authority. If the U.S. were serious about
democratization in Iraq it would move quickly to turn even preliminary
authority over to the UN to identify an interim authority and move towards a
more permanent indigenous process. The divisions within the administration
between supporters of Chalabi and the INC (largely the neo-cons in the Pentagon
and Cheney's office) and those advocating broader participation are so far
largely tactical. For example, the new proposal for sharing authority in
post-war Iraq that came from former officials including Eagleburger, Haig,
Perry, Woolsey, Gingrich, Kerrey and Thompson, does not recognize UN authority,
but calls for "helping Iraqis build a new Iraq" only so the U.S. "will have
moral authority to promote its other objectives in the region."

The UN should have the central role -- but only if it has real decision-making
power from the beginning of the process. That means re-opening to the whole
world the already closed bidding process that allowed only a few U.S.
corporations to bid on construction contracts; insuring that the UN is at the
center of all moves to create an interim administration, recruit Iraqis to
participate, set the dates for conferences and elections, etc. If UN authority
is compromised, or the UN is brought into the process only to provide
legitimacy to continuing U.S.control, the UN should not take it on at all.

Oil remains a key consideration. The Israeli press reports negotiations are
underway to reopen the British colonial-era oil pipeline from Mosul to Haifa.
The pipeline was closed in 1948 with the creation of Israel; its reopening
would dramatically increase Israel's oil independence and lower its energy
costs (oil now imported largely from Russia). This is particularly significant
given Ahmad Chalabi's longstanding support for Israel and interest, like that
of his Pentagon backers, in normalizing Israeli ties with the Arab world and
maintaining its military power. Further, U.S. special forces moved within one
mile of the rich Kirkuk oil fields; some reporters in the region indicate it
appears that may be their main objective in the area. The U.S. has also just
agreed to allow Turkish military observers into Kirkuk "to verify that Iraqi
forces have withdrawn"-- something Washington promised the Kurds it would never
allow.

SO, WHAT DO WE CALL FOR?

* We call for an end to U.S. occupation of Iraq.

* We call for the United Nations, not the U.S., to help Iraq create a new,
representative and indigenous government. The UN's central role must involve
real decision-making power; it must not be a fig-leaf designed to provide
political cover to unilateral U.S. action. General Jay Garner's authority
should be turned over to a United Nations special representative.

* We call for the U.S. to immediately provide for the urgent needs of the Iraqi
population, including water, electricity, medical supplies.* We will hold the
U.S. accountable for its claims that this war is about democratization and not
about empire, oil, and the expansion of U.S. power.



------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~-->
Get a FREE REFINANCE QUOTE - click here!
http://us.click.yahoo.com/2CXtTB/ca0FAA/i5gGAA/sitolB/TM
---------------------------------------------------------------------~->

 

Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
--=====================_19253735==_.ALT-- From gggonzal@uci.edu Sat Apr 12 21:33:47 2003 From: gggonzal@uci.edu (Gilbert G. Gonzalez) Date: Sat, 12 Apr 2003 13:33:47 -0700 Subject: [Ethnicstudies] Fwd: Liberation Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20030412133333.026a16f0@pop.uci.edu> > > >Robert Fisk: Baghdad: the day after >Arson, anarchy, fear, hatred, hysteria, looting, revenge, savagery, >suspicion and a suicide bombing > >11 April 2003 The Independent > >It was the day of the looter. They trashed the German embassy and hurled >the ambassador's desk into the yard. I rescued the European Union flag ­ >flung into a puddle of water outside the visa section ­ as a mob of >middle-aged men, women in chadors and screaming children rifled through >the consul's office and hurled Mozart records and German history books >from an upper window. The Slovakian embassy was broken into a few hours >later. > >At the headquarters of Unicef, which has been trying to save and improve >the lives of millions of Iraqi children since the 1980s, an army of >thieves stormed the building, throwing brand new photocopiers on top of >each other and sending cascades of UN files on child diseases, pregnancy >death rates and nutrition across the floors. > >The Americans may think they have "liberated" Baghdad but the tens of >thousands of thieves ­ they came in families and cruised the city in >trucks and cars searching for booty ­ seem to have a different idea of >what liberation means. > >American control of the city is, at best, tenuous ­ a fact underlined >after several marines were killed last night by a suicide bomber close >to the square where a statue of Saddam Hussein was pulled down on >Wednesday, in the most staged photo-opportunity since Iwo Jima. > >Throughout the day, American forces had fought gun battles with Saddam >loyalists, said to be fighters from other Arab countries. And, for more >than four hours, marines were in firefights at the Imam al-Adham mosque >in the Aadhamiya district of central Baghdad after rumours, later proved >untrue, that Saddam Hussein and senior members of his regime had taken >flight there. > >As the occupying power, America is responsible for protecting embassies >and UN offices in their area of control but, yesterday, its troops were >driving past the German embassy even as looters carted desks and chairs >out of the front gate. > >It is a scandal, a kind of disease, a mass form of kleptomania that >American troops are blithely ignoring. At one intersection of the city, >I saw US Marine snipers on the rooftops of high-rise building, scanning >the streets for possible suicide bombers while a traffic jam of looters >­ two of them driving stolen double-decker buses crammed with >refrigerators ­ blocked the highway beneath. > >Outside the UN offices, a car slowed down beside me and one of the >unshaven, sweating men inside told me in Arabic that it wasn't worth >visiting because "we've already taken everything". Understandably, the >poor and the oppressed took their revenge on the homes of the men of >Saddam's regime who have impoverished and destroyed their lives, >sometimes quite literally, for more than two decades. > >I watched whole families search through the Tigris-bank home of Ibrahim >al-Hassan, Saddam's half-brother and a former minister of interior, of a >former defence minister, of Saadun Shakr, one of Saddam's closest >security advisers, of Ali Hussein Majid ­ "Chemical" Ali who gassed the >Kurds and was killed last week in Basra ­ and of Abed Moud, Saddam's >private secretary. They came with lorries, container trucks, buses and >carts pulled by ill-fed donkeys to make off with the contents of these >massive villas. > >It also provided a glimpse of the shocking taste in furnishings that >senior Baath party members obviously aspired to; cheap pink sofas and >richly embroidered chairs, plastic drinks trolleys and priceless Iranian >carpets so heavy it took three muscular thieves to carry them. Outside >the gutted home of one former minister of interior, a fat man was >parading in a stolen top hat, a Dickensian figure who tried to direct >the traffic jam of looters outside. > >On the Saddam bridge over the Tigris, a thief had driven his lorry of >stolen goods at such speed he had crashed into the central concrete >reservation and still lay dead at the wheel. > >But there seemed to be a kind of looter's law. Once a thief had placed >his hand on a chair or a chandelier or a door-frame, it belonged to him. >I saw no arguments, no fist-fights. The dozens of thieves in the German >embassy worked in silence, assisted by an army of small children. Wives >pointed out the furnishings they wanted, husbands carried them down the >stairs while children were used to unscrew door hinges and ­ in the UN >offices ­ to remove light fittings. One even stood on the ambassador's >desk to take a light bulb from its socket in the ceiling. > >On the other side of the Saddam bridge, an even more surreal sight could >be observed. A truck loaded down with chairs also had the two white >hunting dogs that belonged to Saddam's son Qusay tethered by two white >ropes, galloping along beside the vehicle. Across the city, I caught a >glimpse of four of Saddam's horses ­ including the white stallion he had >used in some presidential portraits ­ being loaded on to a trailer. >Tariq Aziz's villa was also looted, right down to the books in his >library. > >Every government ministry in the city has now been denuded of its files, >computers, reference books, furnishings and cars. To all this, the >Americans have turned a blind eye, indeed stated specifically that they >had no intention of preventing the "liberation" of this property. One >can hardly be moralistic about the spoils of Saddam's henchmen but how >is the government of America's so-called "New Iraq" supposed to operate >now that the state's property has been so comprehensively looted? And >what is one to make of the scene on the Hillah road yesterday where I >found the owner of a grain silo and factory ordering his armed guards to >fire on the looters who were trying to steal his lorries. This desperate >and armed attempt to preserve the very basis of Baghdad's bread supply >was being observed from just 100 metres away by eight soldiers of the US >3rd Infantry Division, who were sitting on their tanks ­ doing nothing. >The UN offices that were looted downtown are 200 metres from a US Marine >checkpoint. > >And already America's army of "liberation" is beginning to seem an army >of occupation. I watched hundreds of Iraqi civilians queuing to cross a >motorway bridge at Daura yesterday morning, each man ordered by US >soldiers to raise his shirt and lower his trousers ­ in front of other >civilians, including women ­ to prove they were not suicide bombers. > >After a gun battle in the Adamiya area during the morning, an American >Marine sniper sitting atop the palace gate wounded three civilians, >including a little girl, in a car that failed to halt ­ then shot and >killed a man who had walked on to his balcony to discover the source of >the firing. Within minutes, the sniper also shot dead the driver of >another car and wounded two more passengers in that vehicle, including a >young woman. A crew from Channel 4 Television was present when the >killings took place. > >Meanwhile, in the suburb of Daura, bodies of Iraqi civilians ­ many of >them killed by US troops in battle earlier in the week ­ lay rotting in >their still-smouldering cars. And yesterday was just Day Two of the >"liberation" of Baghdad. From jafujii@uci.edu Sun Apr 13 17:41:40 2003 From: jafujii@uci.edu (Jim Fujii) Date: Sun, 13 Apr 2003 09:41:40 -0700 Subject: [Ethnicstudies] Noam Chomsky Interviewed By Michael Albert Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20030413094128.00b87618@benfranklin.hnet.uci.edu> --=====================_74486075==_.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed Noam Chomsky Interviewed By Michael Albert Albert: (1) Why did the U.S. invade Iraq, in your view? Chomsky: These are naturally speculations, and policy makers may have varying motives. But we can have a high degree of confidence about the answers given by Bush-Powell and the rest; these cannot possibly be taken seriously. They have gone out of their way to make sure we understand that, by a steady dose of self-contradiction ever since last September when the war drums began to beat. One day the "single question" is whether Iraq will disarm; in today's version (April 12): "We have high confidence that they have weapons of mass destruction -- that is what this war was about and is about." That was the pretext throughout the whole UN-disarmament farce, though it was never easy to take seriously; UNMOVIC was doing a good job in virtually disarming Iraq, and could have continued, if that were the goal. But there is no need to discuss it, because after stating solemnly that this is the "single question," they went on the next day to announce that it wasn't the goal at all: even if there isn't a pocket knife anywhere in Iraq, the US will invade anyway, because it is committed to "regime change." The next day we hear that there's nothing to that either; thus at the Azores summit, where Bush-Blair issued their ultimatum to the UN, they made it clear that they would invade even if Saddam and his gang left the country. So "regime change" is not enough. The next day we hear that the goal is "democracy" in the world. Pretexts range over the lot, depending on audience and circumstances, which means that no sane person can take the charade seriously. The one constant is that the US must end up in control of Iraq. Saddam Hussein was authorized to suppress, brutally, a 1991 uprising that might have overthrown him because "the best of all worlds" for Washington would be "an iron-fisted Iraqi junta without Saddam Hussein" (by then an embarrassment), which would rule the country with an "iron fist" as Saddam had done with US support and approval (NYT chief diplomatic correspondent Thomas Friedman). The uprising would have left the country in the hands of Iraqis who might not have subordinated themselves sufficiently to Washington. The murderous sanctions regime of the following years devastated the society, strengthened the tyrant, and compelled the population to rely for survival on his (highly efficient) system for distributing basic goods. The sanctions thus undercut the possibility of the kind of popular revolt that had overthrown an impressive series of other monsters who had been strongly supported by the current incumbents in Washington up to the very end of their bloody rule: Marcos, Duvalier, Ceausescu, Mobutu, Suharto, and a long list of others, some of them easily as tyrannical and barbaric as Saddam. Had it not been for the sanctions, Saddam probably would have gone the same way, as has been pointed out for years by the Westerners who know Iraq best, Denis Halliday and Hans van Sponeck (though one has to go to Canada, England, or elsewhere to find their writings). But overthrow of the regime from within would not be acceptable either, because it would leave Iraqis in charge. The Azores summit merely reiterated that stand. The question of who rules Iraq remains the prime issue of contention. The US-backed opposition demands that the UN play a vital role in post-war Iraq and rejects US control of reconstruction or government (Leith Kubba, one of the most respected secular voices in the West, connected with the National Endowment of Democracy). One of the leading Shi'ite opposition figures, Sayed Muhamed Baqer al-Hakim, who heads the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), just informed the press that "we understand this war to be about imposing US hegemony over Iraq," and perceive the US as "an occupying rather than a liberating force." He stressed that the UN must supervise elections, and called on "foreign troops to withdraw from Iraq" and leave Iraqis in charge. US policy-makers have a radically different conception. They must impose a client regime in Iraq, following the practice elsewhere in the region, and most significantly, in the regions that have been under US domination for a century, Central America and the Caribbean. That too is well-understood. Brent Scowcroft, National Security Adviser to Bush I, just repeated the obvious: "What's going to happen the first time we hold an election in Iraq and it turns out the radicals win? What do you do? We're surely not going to let them take over." The same holds throughout the region. Recent studies reveal that from Morocco to Lebanon to the Gulf, about 95% of the population want a greater role in government for Islamic religious figures, and the same percentage believe that the sole US interest in the region is to control its oil and strengthen Israel. Antagonism to Washington has reached unprecedented heights, and the idea that Washington would institute a radical change in policy and tolerate truly democratic elections, respecting the outcome, seems rather fanciful, to say the least. Turning to the question, one reason for the invasion, surely, is to gain control over the world's second largest oil reserves, which will place the US in an even more powerful position of global domination, maintaining "a stranglehold on the global economy," as Michael Klare describes the long-term objective, which he regards as the primary motive for war. However, this cannot explain the timing. Why now? The drumbeat for war began in September 2002, and the government-media propaganda campaign achieved a spectacular success. Very quickly, the majority of the population came to believe that Iraq posed an imminent threat to US security, even that Iraq was involved in 9-11 (up from 3% after 9-11) and was planning new attacks. Not surprisingly, these beliefs correlated closely with support for the planned war. The beliefs are unique to the US. Even in Kuwait and Iran, which were invaded by Saddam Hussein, he was not feared, though he was despised. They know perfectly well that Iraq was the weakest state in the region, and for years they had joined others in trying to reintegrate Iraq into the regional system, over strong US objections. But a highly effective propaganda assault drove the American population far off the spectrum of world opinion, a remarkable achievement. The September propaganda assault coincided with two important events. One was the opening of the mid-term election campaign. Karl Rove, the administration's campaign manager, had already pointed out that Republicans have to "go to the country" on the issue of national security, because voters "trust the Republican Party to do a better job of...protecting America." One didn't have to be a political genius to realize that if social and economic issues dominated the election, the Bush administration did not have a chance. Accordingly, it was necessary to concoct a huge threat to our survival, which the powerful leader will manage to overcome, miraculously. For the elections, the strategy barely worked. Polls reveal that voters maintained their preferences, but suppressed concerns over jobs, pensions, benefits, etc., in favor of security. Something similar will be needed for the presidential campaign. All of this is second nature for the current incumbents. They are mostly recycled from the more reactionary sectors of the Reagan-Bush administrations, and know that they were able to run the country for 12 years, carrying out domestic programs that the public largely opposed, by pushing the panic button regularly: Libyan attempting to "expel us from the world" (Reagan), an air base in Grenada from which the Russians would bomb us, Nicaragua only "two-days driving time from Harlingen Texas," waving their copies of Mein Kampf as they planned to take over the hemisphere, black criminals about to rape your sister (Willie Horton, the 1988 presidential campaign), Hispanic narcotraffickers about to destroy us, and on and on. To maintain political power is an extremely important matter if the narrow sectors of power represented by the Bush administration hope to carry out their reactionary domestic program over strong popular opposition, if possible even to institutionalize them, so it will be hard to reconstruct what is being dismantled. Something else happened in September 2002: the administration released its National Security Strategy, sending many shudders around the world, including the US foreign policy elite. The Strategy has many precedents, but does break new ground: for the first time in the post-war world, a powerful state announced, loud and clear, that it intends to rule the world by force, forever, crushing any potential challenge it might perceive. This is often called in the press a doctrine of "pre-emptive war." That is crucially wrong; it goes vastly beyond pre-emption. Sometimes it is called more accurately a doctrine of "preventive war." That too understates the doctrine. No military threat, however remote, need be "prevented"; challenges can be concocted at will, and may not involve any threat other than "defiance"; those who pay attention to history know that "successful defiance" has often been taken to be justification for resort to force in the past. When a doctrine is announced, some action must be taken to demonstrate that it is seriously intended, so that it can become a new "norm in international relations," as commentators will soberly explain. What is needed is a war with an "exemplary quality," Harvard Middle East historian Roger Owen pointed out, discussing the reasons for the attack on Iraq. The exemplary action teaches a lesson that others must heed, or else. Why Iraq? The experimental subject must have several important qualities. It must be defenseless, and it must be important; there's no point illustrating the doctrine by invading Burundi. Iraq qualified perfectly in both respects. The importance is obvious, and so is the required weakness. Iraq was not much of a military force to begin with, and had been largely disarmed through the 1990s while much of the society was driven to the edge of survival. Its military expenditures and economy were about one-third those of Kuwait, with 10% of its population, far below others in the region, and of course the regional superpower, Israel, by now virtually an offshore military base of the US. The invading force not only had utterly overwhelming military power, but also extensive information to guide its actions from satellite observation and overflights for many years, and more recently U-2 flights on the pretext of disarmament, surely sending data directly back to Washington. Iraq was therefore a perfect choice for an "exemplary action" to establish the new doctrine of global rule by force as a "norm of international relations." A high official involved in drafting the National Security Strategy informed the press that its publication "was the signal that Iraq would be the first test, but not the last." "Iraq became the petri dish in which this experiment in pre-emptive policy grew," the New York Times reported -- misstating the policy in the usual way, but otherwise accurate. All of these factors gave good reasons for war. And they also help explain why the planned war was so overwhelmingly opposed by the public worldwide (including the US, particularly when we extract the factor of fear, unique to the US). And also strongly opposed by a substantial part of economic and foreign policy elites, a very unusual development. They rightly fear that the adventurist posture may prove very costly to their own interests, even to survival. It is well-understood that these policies are driving others to develop a deterrent, which could be weapons of mass destruction, or credible threats of serious terror, or even conventional weapons, as in the case of North Korea, with artillery massed to destroy Seoul. With any remnants of some functioning system of world order torn to shreds, the Bush administration is instructing the world that nothing matters but force -- and they hold the mailed fist, though others are not likely to tolerate that for long. Including, one hopes, the American people, who are in by far the best position to counter and reverse these extremely ominous trends. (2) There is some cheering in the streets of Iraqi cities. Does this retrospectively undercut the logic of antiwar opposition? I'm surprised that it was so limited and so long delayed. Every sensible person should welcome the overthrow of the tyrant, and the ending of the devastating sanctions, most certainly Iraqis. But the antiwar opposition, at least the part of it I know anything about, was always in favor of these ends. That's why it opposed the sanctions that were destroying the country and undermining the possibility of an internal revolt that would send Saddam the way of the other brutal killers supported by the present incumbents in Washington. The antiwar movement insisted that Iraqis, not the US government, must run the country. And it still does -- or should; it can have a substantial impact in this regard. Opponents of the war were also rightly appalled by the utter lack of concern for the possible humanitarian consequences of the attack, and by the ominous strategy for which it was the "test case." The basic issues remain: (1) Who will run Iraq, Iraqis or a clique in Crawford Texas? (2) Will the American people permit the narrow reactionary sectors that barely hold on to political power to implement their domestic and international agendas? (3) There have been no wmd found. Does this retrospectively undercut Bush's rationales for war? Only if one takes the rationale seriously. The leadership still pretends to, as Fleischer's current remarks illustrate. If they can find something, which is not unlikely, that will be trumpeted as justification for the war. If they can't, the whole issue will be "disappeared" in the usual fashion. (4) If wmd are now found, and verified, would that retrospecitvely undercut antiwar opposition? That's a logical impossibility. Policies and opinions about them are determined by what is known or plausibly believed, not by what is discovered afterwards. That should be elementary. (5) Will there be democracy in Iraq, as a result of this invasion? Depends on what one means by "democracy." I presume the Bush PR team will want to put into place some kind of formal democracy, as long as it has no substance. But it's hard to imagine that they would allow a real voice to the Shi'ite majority, which is likely to join the rest of the region in trying to establish closer relations with Iran, the last thing the Bushites want. Or that they would allow a real voice to the next largest component of the population, the Kurds, who are likely to seek some kind of autonomy within a federal structure that would be anathema to Turkey, a major base for US power in the region. One should not be misled by the recent hysterical reaction to the crime of the Turkish government in adopting the position of 95% of its population, another indication of the passionate hatred of democracy in elite circles here, and another reason why no sensible person can take the rhetoric seriously. Same throughout the region. Functioning democracy would have outcomes that are inconsistent with the goal of US hegemony, just as in our own "backyard" over a century. (6) What message has been received by governments around the world, with what likely broad implications? The message is that the Bush administration intends its National Security Strategy to be taken seriously, as the "test case" illustrates. It intends to dominate the world by force, the one dimension in which it rules supreme, and to do so permanently. A more specific message, illustrated dramatically by the Iraq-North Korea case, is that if you want to fend off a US attack, you had better have a credible deterrent. It's widely assumed in elite circles that the likely consequence is proliferation of WMD and terror, in various forms, based on fear and loathing for the US administration, which was regarded as the greatest threat to world peace even before the invasion. That's no small matter these days. Questions of peace shade quickly into questions of survival for the species, given the case of means of violence. (7) What was the role of the American media establishment in paving the way for this war, and then rationalizing it, narrowing the terms of discussion, etc.? The media uncritically relayed government propaganda about the threat to US security posed by Iraq, its involvement in 9-11 and other terror, etc. Some amplified the message on their own. Others simply relayed it. The effects in the polls were striking, as often before. Discussion was, as usual, restricted to "pragmatic grounds": will the US government get away with its plans at a cost acceptable at home. Once the war began it became a shameful exercise of cheering for the home team, appalling much of the world. (8) What is next on the agenda, broadly, for Bush and Co., if they are able to pursue their preferred agendas? They have publicly announced that the next targets could be Syria and Iran -- which would require a strong military base in Iraq, presumably; another reason why any meaningful democracy is unlikely. It has been reliably reported for some time that the US and its allies (Turkey, Israel, and some others) have been taking steps towards dismemberment of Iran. But there are other possible targets too. The Andean region qualifies. It has very substantial resources, including oil. It is in turmoil, with dangerous independent popular movements that are not under control. It is by now surrounded by US military bases with US forces already on the ground. And one can think of others. (9) What obstacles now stand in the way of Bush and Co.'s doing as they prefer, and what obstacles might arise? The prime obstacle is domestic. But that's up to us. (10) What has been your impression of antiwar opposition and what ought to be its agenda now? Antiwar opposition here has been completely without precedent in scale and commitment, something we've discussed before, and that is certainly obvious to anyone who has had any experience in these matters here for the past 40 years. Its agenda right now, I think, should be to work to ensure that Iraq is run by Iraqis, that the US provide massive reparations for what it has done to Iraq for 20 years (by supporting Saddam Hussein, by wars, by brutal sanctions which probably caused a great deal more damage and deaths than the wars); and if that is too much honesty to expect, then at last massive aid, to be used by Iraqis, as they decide, which well be something other than US taxpayer subsidies to Halliburton and Bechtel. Also high on the agenda should be putting a brake on the extremely dangerous policies announced in the Security Strategy, and carried out in the "petri dish." And related to that, there should be serious efforts to block the bonanza of arms sales that is happily anticipated as a consequence of the war, which will also contribute to making the world a more awful and dangerous place. But that's only the beginning. The antiwar movement is indissolubly linked to the global justice movements, which have much more far-reaching goals, properly. (11) What do you think is the relationship between the invasion of Iraq and corporate glboalization, and what should be the relation between the anticorproate globalization movement, and the peace movement? The invasion of Iraq was strongly opposed by the main centers of corporate globalization. At the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, opposition was so strong that Powell was practically shouted down when he tried to present a case for the war -- announcing, pretty clearly, that the US would "lead" even if no one followed, except for the pathetic Blair. The global justice and peace movements are so closely linked in their objectives that there is nothing much to say. We should, however, recall that the planners do draw these links, as we should too, in our own different way. They predict that their version of "globalization" will proceed on course, leading to "chronic financial volatility" (meaning still slower growth, harming mostly the poor) "and a widening economic divide" (meaning less globalization in the technical sense of convergence). They predict further that "deepening economic stagnation, political instability, and cultural alienation will foster ethnic, ideological and religious extremism, along with violence," much of it directed against the US -- that is, more terror. Military planners make the same assumptions. That is a good part of the rationale for rapidly increasing military spending, including the plans for militarization of space that the entire world is trying to block, without much hope as long as the matter is kept from the sight of Americans, who have the prime responsibility to stop it. I presume that is why some of the major events of last October were not even reported, among them the US vote at the UN, alone (with Israel), against a resolution calling for reaffirmation of a 1925 Geneva convention banning biological weapons and another resolution strengthening the 1967 Outer Space Treaty to ban use of space for military purposes, including offensive weapons that may well do us all in. The agenda, as always, begins with trying to find out what is happening in the world, and then doing something about it, as we can, better than anyone else. Few share our privilege, power, and freedom -- hence responsibility. That should be another truism. Forwarded email sent by: Thomas Lash Coastal Convergence Society Huntington Beach, CA Phone: 714-964-2162 Email: ccshbca@aol.com Website: www.tokyoprogressive.org/~ccshbca Anytime you wish to be removed from this list simply respond with the word unsubscribe. I will remove you as soon as possible. --=====================_74486075==_.ALT Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii" Noam Chomsky Interviewed
By Michael Albert



Albert: (1) Why did the U.S. invade Iraq, in your view?

Chomsky: These are naturally speculations, and policy makers may have
varying motives. But we can have a high degree of confidence about the
answers given by Bush-Powell and the rest; these cannot possibly be
taken seriously. They have gone out of their way to make sure we
understand that, by a steady dose of self-contradiction ever since last
September when the war drums began to beat. One day the "single
question" is whether Iraq will disarm; in today's version (April 12):
"We have high confidence that they have weapons of mass destruction --
that is what this war was about and is about." That was the pretext
throughout the whole UN-disarmament farce, though it was never easy to
take seriously; UNMOVIC was doing a good job in virtually disarming
Iraq, and could have continued, if that were the goal. But there is no
need to discuss it, because after stating solemnly that this is the
"single question," they went on the next day to announce that it wasn't
the goal at all: even if there isn't a pocket knife anywhere in Iraq,
the US will invade anyway, because it is committed to "regime change."
The next day we hear that there's nothing to that either; thus at the
Azores summit, where Bush-Blair issued their ultimatum to the UN, they
made it clear that they would invade even if Saddam and his gang left
the country. So "regime change" is not enough. The next day we hear that
the goal is "democracy" in the world. Pretexts range over the lot,
depending on audience and circumstances, which means that no sane person
can take the charade seriously.

The one constant is that the US must end up in control of Iraq. Saddam
Hussein was authorized to suppress, brutally, a 1991 uprising that might
have overthrown him because "the best of all worlds" for Washington
would be "an iron-fisted Iraqi junta without Saddam Hussein" (by then an
embarrassment), which would rule the country with an "iron fist" as
Saddam had done with US support and approval (NYT chief diplomatic
correspondent Thomas Friedman). The uprising would have left the country
in the hands of Iraqis who might not have subordinated themselves
sufficiently to Washington. The murderous sanctions regime of the
following years devastated the society, strengthened the tyrant, and
compelled the population to rely for survival on his (highly efficient)
system for distributing basic goods. The sanctions thus undercut the
possibility of the kind of popular revolt that had overthrown an
impressive series of other monsters who had been strongly supported by
the current incumbents in Washington up to the very end of their bloody
rule: Marcos, Duvalier, Ceausescu, Mobutu, Suharto, and a long list of
others, some of them easily as tyrannical and barbaric as Saddam. Had it
not been for the sanctions, Saddam probably would have gone the same
way, as has been pointed out for years by the Westerners who know Iraq
best, Denis Halliday and Hans van Sponeck (though one has to go to
Canada, England, or elsewhere to find their writings). But overthrow of
the regime from within would not be acceptable either, because it would
leave Iraqis in charge. The Azores summit merely reiterated that stand.

The question of who rules Iraq remains the prime issue of contention.
The US-backed opposition demands that the UN play a vital role in
post-war Iraq and rejects US control of reconstruction or government
(Leith Kubba, one of the most respected secular voices in the West,
connected with the National Endowment of Democracy). One of the leading
Shi'ite opposition figures, Sayed Muhamed Baqer al-Hakim, who heads the
Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), just informed
the press that "we understand this war to be about imposing US hegemony
over Iraq," and perceive the US as "an occupying rather than a
liberating force." He stressed that the UN must supervise elections, and
called on "foreign troops to withdraw from Iraq" and leave Iraqis in
charge.

US policy-makers have a radically different conception. They must impose
a client regime in Iraq, following the practice elsewhere in the region,
and most significantly, in the regions that have been under US
domination for a century, Central America and the Caribbean. That too is
well-understood. Brent Scowcroft, National Security Adviser to Bush I,
just repeated the obvious: "What's going to happen the first time we
hold an election in Iraq and it turns out the radicals win? What do you
do? We're surely not going to let them take over."

The same holds throughout the region. Recent studies reveal that from
Morocco to Lebanon to the Gulf, about 95% of the population want a
greater role in government for Islamic religious figures, and the same
percentage believe that the sole US interest in the region is to control
its oil and strengthen Israel. Antagonism to Washington has reached
unprecedented heights, and the idea that Washington would institute a
radical change in policy and tolerate truly democratic elections,
respecting the outcome, seems rather fanciful, to say the least.

Turning to the question, one reason for the invasion, surely, is to gain
control over the world's second largest oil reserves, which will place
the US in an even more powerful position of global domination,
maintaining "a stranglehold on the global economy," as Michael Klare
describes the long-term objective, which he regards as the primary
motive for war. However, this cannot explain the timing. Why now?

The drumbeat for war began in September 2002, and the government-media
propaganda campaign achieved a spectacular success. Very quickly, the
majority of the population came to believe that Iraq posed an imminent
threat to US security, even that Iraq was involved in 9-11 (up from 3%
after 9-11) and was planning new attacks. Not surprisingly, these
beliefs correlated closely with support for the planned war. The beliefs
are unique to the US. Even in Kuwait and Iran, which were invaded by
Saddam Hussein, he was not feared, though he was despised. They know
perfectly well that Iraq was the weakest state in the region, and for
years they had joined others in trying to reintegrate Iraq into the
regional system, over strong US objections. But a highly effective
propaganda assault drove the American population far off the spectrum of
world opinion, a remarkable achievement.

The September propaganda assault coincided with two important events.
One was the opening of the mid-term election campaign. Karl Rove, the
administration's campaign manager, had already pointed out that
Republicans have to "go to the country" on the issue of national
security, because voters "trust the Republican Party to do a better job
of...protecting America." One didn't have to be a political genius to
realize that if social and economic issues dominated the election, the
Bush administration did not have a chance. Accordingly, it was necessary
to concoct a huge threat to our survival, which the powerful leader will
manage to overcome, miraculously. For the elections, the strategy barely
worked. Polls reveal that voters maintained their preferences, but
suppressed concerns over jobs, pensions, benefits, etc., in favor of
security. Something similar will be needed for the presidential
campaign. All of this is second nature for the current incumbents. They
are mostly recycled from the more reactionary sectors of the Reagan-Bush
administrations, and know that they were able to run the country for 12
years, carrying out domestic programs that the public largely opposed,
by pushing the panic button regularly: Libyan attempting to "expel us
from the world" (Reagan), an air base in Grenada from which the Russians
would bomb us, Nicaragua only "two-days driving time from Harlingen
Texas," waving their copies of Mein Kampf as they planned to take over
the hemisphere, black criminals about to rape your sister (Willie
Horton, the 1988 presidential campaign), Hispanic narcotraffickers about
to destroy us, and on and on.

To maintain political power is an extremely important matter if the
narrow sectors of power represented by the Bush administration hope to
carry out their reactionary domestic program over strong popular
opposition, if possible even to institutionalize them, so it will be
hard to reconstruct what is being dismantled.

Something else happened in September 2002: the administration released
its National Security Strategy, sending many shudders around the world,
including the US foreign policy elite. The Strategy has many precedents,
but does break new ground: for the first time in the post-war world, a
powerful state announced, loud and clear, that it intends to rule the
world by force, forever, crushing any potential challenge it might
perceive. This is often called in the press a doctrine of "pre-emptive
war." That is crucially wrong; it goes vastly beyond pre-emption.
Sometimes it is called more accurately a doctrine of "preventive war."
That too understates the doctrine. No military threat, however remote,
need be "prevented"; challenges can be concocted at will, and may not
involve any threat other than "defiance"; those who pay attention to
history know that "successful defiance" has often been taken to be
justification for resort to force in the past.

When a doctrine is announced, some action must be taken to demonstrate
that it is seriously intended, so that it can become a new "norm in
international relations," as commentators will soberly explain. What is
needed is a war with an "exemplary quality," Harvard Middle East
historian Roger Owen pointed out, discussing the reasons for the attack
on Iraq. The exemplary action teaches a lesson that others must heed, or
else.

Why Iraq? The experimental subject must have several important
qualities. It must be defenseless, and it must be important; there's no
point illustrating the doctrine by invading Burundi. Iraq qualified
perfectly in both respects. The importance is obvious, and so is the
required weakness. Iraq was not much of a military force to begin with,
and had been largely disarmed through the 1990s while much of the
society was driven to the edge of survival. Its military expenditures
and economy were about one-third those of Kuwait, with 10% of its
population, far below others in the region, and of course the regional
superpower, Israel, by now virtually an offshore military base of the
US. The invading force not only had utterly overwhelming military power,
but also extensive information to guide its actions from satellite
observation and overflights for many years, and more recently U-2
flights on the pretext of disarmament, surely sending data directly back
to Washington.

Iraq was therefore a perfect choice for an "exemplary action" to
establish the new doctrine of global rule by force as a "norm of
international relations." A high official involved in drafting the
National Security Strategy informed the press that its publication "was
the signal that Iraq would be the first test, but not the last." "Iraq
became the petri dish in which this experiment in pre-emptive policy
grew," the New York Times reported -- misstating the policy in the usual
way, but otherwise accurate.

All of these factors gave good reasons for war. And they also help
explain why the planned war was so overwhelmingly opposed by the public
worldwide (including the US, particularly when we extract the factor of
fear, unique to the US). And also strongly opposed by a substantial part
of economic and foreign policy elites, a very unusual development. They
rightly fear that the adventurist posture may prove very costly to their
own interests, even to survival. It is well-understood that these
policies are driving others to develop a deterrent, which could be
weapons of mass destruction, or credible threats of serious terror, or
even conventional weapons, as in the case of North Korea, with artillery
massed to destroy Seoul. With any remnants of some functioning system of
world order torn to shreds, the Bush administration is instructing the
world that nothing matters but force -- and they hold the mailed fist,
though others are not likely to tolerate that for long. Including, one
hopes, the American people, who are in by far the best position to
counter and reverse these extremely ominous trends.



(2) There is some cheering in the streets of Iraqi cities. Does this
retrospectively undercut the logic of antiwar opposition?

I'm surprised that it was so limited and so long delayed. Every sensible
person should welcome the overthrow of the tyrant, and the ending of the
devastating sanctions, most certainly Iraqis. But the antiwar
opposition, at least the part of it I know anything about, was always in
favor of these ends. That's why it opposed the sanctions that were
destroying the country and undermining the possibility of an internal
revolt that would send Saddam the way of the other brutal killers
supported by the present incumbents in Washington. The antiwar movement
insisted that Iraqis, not the US government, must run the country. And
it still does -- or should; it can have a substantial impact in this
regard. Opponents of the war were also rightly appalled by the utter
lack of concern for the possible humanitarian consequences of the
attack, and by the ominous strategy for which it was the "test case."
The basic issues remain: (1) Who will run Iraq, Iraqis or a clique in
Crawford Texas? (2) Will the American people permit the narrow
reactionary sectors that barely hold on to political power to implement
their domestic and international agendas?


(3) There have been no wmd found. Does this retrospectively undercut
Bush's rationales for war?
Only if one takes the rationale seriously. The leadership still pretends
to, as Fleischer's current remarks illustrate. If they can find
something, which is not unlikely, that will be trumpeted as
justification for the war. If they can't, the whole issue will be
"disappeared" in the usual fashion.


(4) If wmd are now found, and verified, would that retrospecitvely
undercut antiwar opposition?

That's a logical impossibility. Policies and opinions about them are
determined by what is known or plausibly believed, not by what is
discovered afterwards. That should be elementary.


(5) Will there be democracy in Iraq, as a result of this invasion?

Depends on what one means by "democracy." I presume the Bush PR team
will want to put into place some kind of formal democracy, as long as it
has no substance. But it's hard to imagine that they would allow a real
voice to the Shi'ite majority, which is likely to join the rest of the
region in trying to establish closer relations with Iran, the last thing
the Bushites want. Or that they would allow a real voice to the next
largest component of the population, the Kurds, who are likely to seek
some kind of autonomy within a federal structure that would be anathema
to Turkey, a major base for US power in the region. One should not be
misled by the recent hysterical reaction to the crime of the Turkish
government in adopting the position of 95% of its population, another
indication of the passionate hatred of democracy in elite circles here,
and another reason why no sensible person can take the rhetoric
seriously. Same throughout the region. Functioning democracy would have
outcomes that are inconsistent with the goal of US hegemony, just as in
our own "backyard" over a century.



(6) What message has been received by governments around the world, with
what likely broad implications?

The message is that the Bush administration intends its National
Security Strategy to be taken seriously, as the "test case" illustrates.
It intends to dominate the world by force, the one dimension in which it
rules supreme, and to do so permanently. A more specific message,
illustrated dramatically by the Iraq-North Korea case, is that if you
want to fend off a US attack, you had better have a credible deterrent.
It's widely assumed in elite circles that the likely consequence is
proliferation of WMD and terror, in various forms, based on fear and
loathing for the US administration, which was regarded as the greatest
threat to world peace even before the invasion. That's no small matter
these days. Questions of peace shade quickly into questions of survival
for the species, given the case of means of violence.


(7) What was the role of the American media establishment in paving the
way for this war, and then rationalizing it, narrowing the terms of
discussion, etc.?

The media uncritically relayed government propaganda about the threat to
US security posed by Iraq, its involvement in 9-11 and other terror,
etc. Some amplified the message on their own. Others simply relayed it.
The effects in the polls were striking, as often before. Discussion was,
as usual, restricted to "pragmatic grounds": will the US government get
away with its plans at a cost acceptable at home. Once the war began it
became a shameful exercise of cheering for the home team, appalling much
of the world.


(8) What is next on the agenda, broadly, for Bush and Co., if they are
able to pursue their preferred agendas?

They have publicly announced that the next targets could be Syria and
Iran -- which would require a strong military base in Iraq, presumably;
another reason why any meaningful democracy is unlikely. It has been
reliably reported for some time that the US and its allies (Turkey,
Israel, and some others) have been taking steps towards dismemberment of
Iran. But there are other possible targets too. The Andean region
qualifies. It has very substantial resources, including oil. It is in
turmoil, with dangerous independent popular movements that are not under
control. It is by now surrounded by US military bases with US forces
already on the ground. And one can think of others.


(9) What obstacles now stand in the way of Bush and Co.'s doing as they
prefer, and what obstacles might arise?

The prime obstacle is domestic. But that's up to us.


(10) What has been your impression of antiwar opposition and what ought
to be its agenda now?

Antiwar opposition here has been completely without precedent in scale
and commitment, something we've discussed before, and that is certainly
obvious to anyone who has had any experience in these matters here for
the past 40 years. Its agenda right now, I think, should be to work to
ensure that Iraq is run by Iraqis, that the US provide massive
reparations for what it has done to Iraq for 20 years (by supporting
Saddam Hussein, by wars, by brutal sanctions which probably caused a
great deal more damage and deaths than the wars); and if that is too
much honesty to expect, then at last massive aid, to be used by Iraqis,
as they decide, which well be something other than US taxpayer subsidies
to Halliburton and Bechtel. Also high on the agenda should be putting a
brake on the extremely dangerous policies announced in the Security
Strategy, and carried out in the "petri dish." And related to that,
there should be serious efforts to block the bonanza of arms sales that
is happily anticipated as a consequence of the war, which will also
contribute to making the world a more awful and dangerous place. But
that's only the beginning. The antiwar movement is indissolubly linked
to the global justice movements, which have much more far-reaching
goals, properly.


(11) What do you think is the relationship between the invasion of Iraq
and corporate glboalization, and what should be the relation between the
anticorproate globalization movement, and the peace movement?

The invasion of Iraq was strongly opposed by the main centers of
corporate globalization. At the World Economic Forum in Davos in
January, opposition was so strong that Powell was practically shouted
down when he tried to present a case for the war -- announcing, pretty
clearly, that the US would "lead" even if no one followed, except for
the pathetic Blair. The global justice and peace movements are so
closely linked in their objectives that there is nothing much to say. We
should, however, recall that the planners do draw these links, as we
should too, in our own different way. They predict that their version of
"globalization" will proceed on course, leading to "chronic financial
volatility" (meaning still slower growth, harming mostly the poor) "and
a widening economic divide" (meaning less globalization in the technical
sense of convergence). They predict further that "deepening economic
stagnation, political instability, and cultural alienation will foster
ethnic, ideological and religious extremism, along with violence," much
of it directed against the US -- that is, more terror. Military planners
make the same assumptions. That is a good part of the rationale for
rapidly increasing military spending, including the plans for
militarization of space that the entire world is trying to block,
without much hope as long as the matter is kept from the sight of
Americans, who have the prime responsibility to stop it. I presume that
is why some of the major events of last October were not even reported,
among them the US vote at the UN, alone (with Israel), against a
resolution calling for reaffirmation of a 1925 Geneva convention banning
biological weapons and another resolution strengthening the 1967 Outer
Space Treaty to ban use of space for military purposes, including
offensive weapons that may well do us all in.

The agenda, as always, begins with trying to find out what is happening
in the world, and then doing something about it, as we can, better than
anyone else. Few share our privilege, power, and freedom -- hence
responsibility. That should be another truism.



Forwarded email sent by:

Thomas Lash
Coastal Convergence Society
Huntington Beach, CA
Phone: 714-964-2162
Email: ccshbca@aol.com
Website: www.tokyoprogressive.org/~ccshbca

Anytime you wish to be removed from this list simply respond with the word unsubscribe.  I will remove you as soon as possible. --=====================_74486075==_.ALT-- From jafujii@uci.edu Mon Apr 14 00:09:57 2003 From: jafujii@uci.edu (Jim Fujii) Date: Sun, 13 Apr 2003 16:09:57 -0700 Subject: [Ethnicstudies] The War Has Only Begun. Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20030413160939.02b84ff0@benfranklin.hnet.uci.edu> --=====================_19095047==_.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed Just to demonstrate the level of ignorance that we're up against, a passer-by in Huntington Beach yesterday, seeing our "No War" banner shouted "The war's over!" --GJ ------------------------------------------------------------- http://www.observer.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,935943,00.html Syria could be next, warns Washington Ed Vulliamy in Washington Sunday April 13, 2003 The Observer The United States has pledged to tackle the Syrian-backed Hizbollah group in the next phase of its 'war on terror' in a move which could threaten military action against President Bashar Assad's regime in Damascus. The move is part of Washington's efforts to persuade Israel to support a new peace settlement with the Palestinians. Washington has promised Israel that it will take 'all effective action' to cut off Syria's support for Hizbollah - implying a military strike if necessary, sources in the Bush administration have told The Observer . Hizbollah is a Shia Muslim organisation based in Lebanon, whose fighters have attacked northern Israeli settlements and harassed occupying Israeli troops to the point of forcing an Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon three years ago. The new US undertaking to Israel to deal with Hizbollah via its Syrian sponsors has been made over recent days during meetings between administration officials and Israeli diplomats in Washington, and Americans talking to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in Jerusalem. It would be part of a deal designed to entice Israel into the so-called road map to peace package that would involve the Jewish state pulling out of the Palestinian West Bank, occupied since 1967. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has so far rejected the road map initiative - charted by the US with its ally, Britain - which also calls for mutual recognition between Israel and a new Palestinian state, structured according to US-backed reforms. The American guarantee would be to take armed action if necessary to cut off Syrian support for Hizbollah, and stop further sponsorship for the group by Iran. 'If you control Iraq, you can affect the Syrian and Iranian sponsorship of Hizbollah, both geographically and politically,' says Ivo Daalder of the Brookings Institution think-tank in Washington. 'The United States will make it very clear, quietly and publicly, that Baathist Syria may come to an end if it does not stop its support of Hizbollah.' The undertaking dovetails conveniently into 'phase three' of what President George Bush calls the 'war on terror' and his pledge to go after all countries accused of harbouring terrorists. It also fits into calls by hawks inside and aligned to the administration who believe that war in Iraq was first stage in a wider war for American control of the region. Threats against Syria come daily out of Washington. Hawks in and close to the Bush White House have prepared the ground for an attack on Syria, raising the spectre of Hizbollah, of alleged Syrian plans to wel come refugees from Saddam Hussein's fallen regime, and of what the administration insists is Syrian support for Iraq during the war. Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz - regarded as the real architect of the Iraqi war and its aftermath - said on Thursday that 'the Syrians have been shipping killers into Iraq to try and kill Americans', adding: 'We need to think about what our policy is towards a country that harbours terrorists or harbours war criminals. 'There will have to be change in Syria, plainly,' said Wolfowitz. Washingtom intelligence sources claim that weapons of mass destruction that Saddam was alleged to have possessed were shipped to Syria after inspectors were sent by the United Nations to find them. One of the chief ideologists behind the war, Richard Perle, yesterday warned that the US would be compelled to act against Syria if it emerged that weapons of mass destruction had been moved there by Saddam's fallen Iraqi regime. ________________________________________________________________ Sign Up for Juno Platinum Internet Access Today Only $9.95 per month! Visit www.juno.com ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~--> Make Money Online Auctions! Make $500.00 or We Will Give You Thirty Dollars for Trying! http://us.click.yahoo.com/yMx78A/fNtFAA/i5gGAA/sitolB/TM ---------------------------------------------------------------------~-> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ --=====================_19095047==_.ALT Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii" Just to demonstrate the level of ignorance that
we're up against, a passer-by in Huntington
Beach yesterday, seeing our "No War" banner
shouted "The war's over!"

--GJ
-------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.observer.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,935943,00.html

Syria could be next, warns Washington


Ed Vulliamy in Washington
Sunday April 13, 2003
The Observer

 The United States has pledged to tackle the
Syrian-backed Hizbollah group in the next phase
of its 'war on terror' in a move which could threaten
military action against President Bashar Assad's
regime in Damascus.

 The move is part of Washington's efforts to persuade
Israel to support a new peace settlement with the
Palestinians. Washington has promised Israel that
it will take 'all effective action' to cut off Syria's support
for Hizbollah - implying a military strike if necessary,
sources in the Bush administration have told The
Observer .

 Hizbollah is a Shia Muslim organisation based in
Lebanon, whose fighters have attacked northern Israeli
settlements and harassed occupying Israeli troops to
the point of forcing an Israeli withdrawal from southern
Lebanon three years ago.

 The new US undertaking to Israel to deal with Hizbollah
via its Syrian sponsors has been made over recent days
during meetings between administration officials and
Israeli diplomats in Washington, and Americans talking
to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in Jerusalem. It
would be part of a deal designed to entice Israel into the
so-called road map to peace package that would involve
the Jewish state pulling out of the Palestinian West Bank,
occupied since 1967.
 Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has so far rejected the road
map initiative - charted by the US with its ally, Britain - which
also calls for mutual recognition between Israel and a new
Palestinian state, structured according to US-backed
reforms. The American guarantee would be to take armed
action if necessary to cut off Syrian support for Hizbollah,
and stop further sponsorship for the group by Iran.

 'If you control Iraq, you can affect the Syrian and Iranian
sponsorship of Hizbollah, both geographically and politically,'
says Ivo Daalder of the Brookings Institution think-tank in
Washington.

 'The United States will make it very clear, quietly and
publicly, that Baathist Syria may come to an end if it does
not stop its support of Hizbollah.'

 The undertaking dovetails conveniently into 'phase three'
of what President George Bush calls the 'war on terror'
and his pledge to go after all countries accused of
harbouring terrorists.

 It also fits into calls by hawks inside and aligned to the
administration who believe that war in Iraq was first stage
in a wider war for American control of the region. Threats
against Syria come daily out of Washington.

 Hawks in and close to the Bush White House have
prepared the ground for an attack on Syria, raising the
spectre of Hizbollah, of alleged Syrian plans to wel
come refugees from Saddam Hussein's fallen regime,
and of what the administration insists is Syrian support
for Iraq during the war.

 Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz - regarded
as the real architect of the Iraqi war and its aftermath -
said on Thursday that 'the Syrians have been shipping
killers into Iraq to try and kill Americans', adding: 'We
need to think about what our policy is towards a country
that harbours terrorists or harbours war criminals.

 'There will have to be change in Syria, plainly,' said
Wolfowitz.  Washingtom intelligence sources claim
that weapons of mass destruction that Saddam was
alleged to have possessed were shipped to Syria after
inspectors were sent by the United Nations to find
them.

 One of the chief ideologists behind the war, Richard
Perle, yesterday warned that the US would be compelled
to act against Syria if it emerged that weapons of mass
destruction had been moved there by Saddam's fallen
Iraqi regime.


________________________________________________________________
Sign Up for Juno Platinum Internet Access Today
Only $9.95 per month!
Visit www.juno.com

------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~-->
Make Money Online Auctions! Make $500.00 or We Will Give You Thirty Dollars for Trying!
http://us.click.yahoo.com/yMx78A/fNtFAA/i5gGAA/sitolB/TM
---------------------------------------------------------------------~->

 

Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
--=====================_19095047==_.ALT-- From jafujii@uci.edu Mon Apr 14 02:09:57 2003 From: jafujii@uci.edu (Jim Fujii) Date: Sun, 13 Apr 2003 18:09:57 -0700 Subject: [Ethnicstudies] Welcome aboard the Iraqi gravy train Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20030413180948.00b799c0@benfranklin.hnet.uci.edu> --=====================_26294759==_.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed http://www.observer.co.uk/worldview/story/0,11581,935649,00.html --=====================_26294759==_.ALT Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii" http://www.observer.co.uk/worldview/story/0,11581,935649,00.html
 --=====================_26294759==_.ALT-- From jafujii@uci.edu Mon Apr 14 06:13:27 2003 From: jafujii@uci.edu (Jim Fujii) Date: Sun, 13 Apr 2003 22:13:27 -0700 Subject: [Ethnicstudies] Fwd: who is running our foreign policy? Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20030413221310.00b9cc98@benfranklin.hnet.uci.edu> --=====================_40905619==_.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed The Weird Men Behind George W. Bush's War By Michael Lind New Statesman - London 4-12-3 America's allies and enemies alike are baffled. What is going on in the United States? Who is making foreign policy? And what are they trying to achieve? Quasi-Marxist explanations involving big oil or American capitalism are mistaken. Yes, American oil companies and contractors will accept the spoils of the kill in Iraq. But the oil business, with its Arabist bias, did not push for this war any more than it supports the Bush administration's close alliance with Ariel Sharon. Further, President Bush and Vice-President Cheney are not genuine "Texas oil men" but career politicians who, in between stints in public life, would have used their connections to enrich themselves as figureheads in the wheat business, if they had been residents of Kansas, or in tech companies, had they been Californians. Equally wrong is the theory that American and European civilisation are evolving in opposite directions. The thesis of Robert Kagan, the neoconservative propagandist, that Americans are martial and Europeans pacifist, is complete nonsense. A majority of Americans voted for either Al Gore or Ralph Nader in 2000. Were it not for the over-representation of sparsely populated, right-wing states in both the presidential electoral college and the Senate, the White House and the Senate today would be controlled by Democrats, whose views and values, on everything from war to the welfare state, are very close to those of western Europeans. Both the economic-determinist theory and the clash-of-cultures theory are reassuring: they assume that the recent revolution in US foreign policy is the result of obscure but understandable forces in an orderly world. The truth is more alarming. As a result of several bizarre and unforeseeable contingencies - such as the selection rather than election of George W Bush, and 11 September - the foreign policy of the world's only global power is being made by a small clique that is unrepresentative of either the US population or the mainstream foreign policy establishment. The core group now in charge consists of neoconservative defence intellectuals (they are called "neoconservatives" because many of them started off as anti-Stalinist leftists or liberals before moving to the far right). Inside the government, the chief defence intellectuals include Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defence. He is the defence mastermind of the Bush administration; Donald Rumsfeld is an elderly figurehead who holds the position of defence secretary only because Wolfowitz himself is too controversial. Others include Douglas Feith, the number three at the Pentagon; Lewis "Scooter" Libby, a Wolfowitz protege who is Cheney's chief of staff; John R Bolton, a right-winger assigned to the State Department to keep Colin Powell in check; and Elliott Abrams, recently appointed to head Middle East policy at the National Security Council. On the outside are James Woolsey, the former CIA director, who has tried repeatedly to link both 9/11 and the anthrax letters in the US to Saddam Hussein, and Richard Perle, who has just resigned from his unpaid defence department advisory post after a lobbying scandal. Most of these "experts" never served in the military. But their headquarters is now the civilian defence secretary's office, where these Republican political appointees are despised and distrusted by the largely Republican career soldiers. Most neoconservative defence intellectuals have their roots on the left, not the right. They are products of the largely Jewish-American Trotskyist movement of the 1930s and 1940s, which morphed into anti- communist liberalism between the 1950s and 1970s and finally into a kind of militaristic and imperial right with no precedents in American culture or political history. Their admiration for the Israeli Likud party's tactics, including preventive warfare such Israel's 1981 raid on Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor, is mixed with odd bursts of ideological enthusiasm for "democracy". They call their revolutionary ideology "Wilsonianism" (after President Woodrow Wilson), but it is really Trotsky's theory of the permanent revolution mingled with the far-right Likud strain of Zionism. Genuine American Wilsonians believe in self-determination for people such as the Palestinians. The neo-con defence intellectuals, as well as being in or around the actual Pentagon, are at the centre of a metaphorical "pentagon" of the Israel lobby and the religious right, plus conservative think- tanks, foundations and media empires. Think-tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) provide homes for neo-con "in-and- outers" when they are out of government (Perle is a fellow at AEI). The money comes not so much from corporations as from decades-old conservative foundations, such as the Bradley and Olin foundations, which spend down the estates of long-dead tycoons. Neoconservative foreign policy does not reflect business interests in any direct way. The neo-cons are ideologues, not opportunists. The major link between the conservative think-tanks and the Israel lobby is the Washington-based and Likud-supporting Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (Jinsa), which co-opts many non-Jewish defence experts by sending them on trips to Israel. It flew out the retired General Jay Garner, now slated by Bush to be proconsul of occupied Iraq. In October 2000, he co-signed a Jinsa letter that began: "We . . . believe that during the current upheavals in Israel, the Israel Defence Forces have exercised remarkable restraint in the face of lethal violence orchestrated by the leadership of [the] Palestinian Authority." The Israel lobby itself is divided into Jewish and Christian wings. Wolfowitz and Feith have close ties to the Jewish-American Israel lobby. Wolfowitz, who has relatives in Israel, has served as the Bush administration's liaison to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Feith was given an award by the Zionist Organisation of America, citing him as a "pro-Israel activist". While out of power in the Clinton years, Feith collaborating with Perle, co-authored for Likud a policy paper that advised the Israeli government to end the Oslo peace process, reoccupy the territories and crush Yasser Arafat's government. Such experts are not typical of Jewish-Americans, who mostly voted for Gore in 2000. The most fervent supporters of Likud in the Republican electorate are southern Protestant fundamentalists. The religious right believes that God gave all of Palestine to the Jews, and fundamentalist congregations spend millions to subsidise Jewish settlements in the occupied territories. The final corner of the neoconservative pentagon is occupied by several right-wing media empires, with roots - odd as it seems - in the Commonwealth and South Korea. Rupert Murdoch disseminates propaganda through his Fox Television network. His magazine the Weekly Standard, edited by William Kristol, the former chief of staff of Dan Quayle (vice-president, 1989-93), acts as a mouthpiece for defence intellectuals such as Perle, Wolfowitz, Feith and Woolsey as well as for Sharon's government. The National Interest (of which I was executive editor, 1991-94) is now funded by Conrad Black, who owns the Jerusalem Post and the Hollinger empire in Britain and Canada. Strangest of all is the media network centred on the Washington Times - owned by the South Korean messiah (and ex-convict) the Reverend Sun Myung Moon - which owns the newswire UPI. UPI is now run by John O'Sullivan, the ghost-writer for Margaret Thatcher who once worked as an editor for Conrad Black in Canada. Through such channels, the "Gotcha!" style of right-wing British journalism, as well as its Europhobic substance, have contaminated the US conservative movement. The corners of the neoconservative pentagon were linked together in the 1990s by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), run by Kristol out of the Weekly Standard offices. Using a PR technique pioneered by their Trotskyist predecessors, the neo-cons published a series of public letters, whose signatories often included Wolfowitz and other future members of the Bush foreign policy team. They called for the US to invade and occupy Iraq and to support Israel's campaigns against the Palestinians (dire warnings about China were another favourite). During Clinton's two terms, these fulminations were ignored by the foreign policy establishment and the mainstream media. Now they are frantically being studied. How did the neo-con defence intellectuals - a small group at odds with most of the US foreign policy elite, Republican as well as Democratic - manage to capture the Bush administration? Few supported Bush during the presidential primaries. They feared that the second Bush would be like the first - a wimp who had failed to occupy Baghdad in the first Gulf war and who had pressured Israel into the Oslo peace process - and that his administration, again like his father's, would be dominated by moderate Republican realists such as Powell, James Baker and Brent Scowcroft. They supported the maverick senator John McCain until it became clear that Bush would get the nomination. Then they had a stroke of luck - Cheney was put in charge of the presidential transition (the period between the election in November and the accession to office in January). Cheney used this opportunity to stack the administration with his hardline allies. Instead of becoming the de facto president in foreign policy, as many had expected, Secretary of State Powell found himself boxed in by Cheney's right-wing network, including Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith, Bolton and Libby. The neo-cons took advantage of Bush's ignorance and inexperience. Unlike his father, a Second World War veteran who had been ambassador to China, director of the CIA and vice-president, George W was a thinly educated playboy who had failed repeatedly in business before becoming the governor of Texas, a largely ceremonial position (the state's lieutenant governor has more power). His father is essentially a north-eastern, moderate Republican; George W, raised in west Texas, absorbed the Texan cultural combination of machismo, anti- intellectualism and overt religiosity. The son of upper-class Episcopalian parents, he converted to southern fundamentalism in a midlife crisis. Fervent Christian Zionism, along with an admiration for macho Israeli soldiers that sometimes coexists with hostility to liberal Jewish-American intellectuals, is a feature of the southern culture. The younger Bush was tilting away from Powell and toward Wolfowitz ("Wolfie", as he calls him) even before 9/11 gave him something he had lacked: a mission in life other than following in his dad's footsteps. There are signs of estrangement between the cautious father and the crusading son: last year, veterans of the first Bush administration, including Baker, Scowcroft and Lawrence Eagleburger, warned publicly against an invasion of Iraq without authorisation from Congress and the UN. It is not clear that George W fully understands the grand strategy that Wolfowitz and other aides are unfolding. He seems genuinely to believe that there was an imminent threat to the US from Saddam Hussein's "weapons of mass destruction", something the leading neo- cons say in public but are far too intelligent to believe themselves. The Project for the New American Century urged an invasion of Iraq throughout the Clinton years, for reasons that had nothing to do with possible links between Saddam and Osama Bin Laden. Public letters signed by Wolfowitz and others called on the US to invade and occupy Iraq, to bomb Hezbollah bases in Lebanon and to threaten states such as Syria and Iran with US attacks if they continued to sponsor terrorism. Claims that the purpose is not to protect the American people but to make the Middle East safe for Israel are dismissed by the neo-cons as vicious anti-Semitism. Yet Syria, Iran and Iraq are bitter enemies, with their weapons pointed at each other, and the terrorists they sponsor target Israel rather than the US. The neo- cons urge war with Iran next, though by any rational measurement North Korea's new nuclear arsenal is, for the US, a far greater problem. So that is the bizarre story of how neoconservatives took over Washington and steered the US into a Middle Eastern war unrelated to any plausible threat to the US and opposed by the public of every country in the world except Israel. The frightening thing is the role of happenstance and personality. After the al-Qaeda attacks, any US president would likely have gone to war to topple Bin Laden's Taliban protectors in Afghanistan. But everything that the US has done since then would have been different had America's 18th-century electoral rules not given Bush the presidency and had Cheney not used the transition period to turn the foreign policy executive into a PNAC reunion. For a British equivalent, one would have to imagine a Tory government, with Downing Street and Whitehall controlled by followers of Reverend Ian Paisley, extreme Eurosceptics, empire loyalists and Blimpish military types - all determined, for a variety of strategic or religious reasons, to invade Egypt. Their aim would be to regain the Suez Canal as the first step in a campaign to restore the British empire. Yes, it really is that weird. Michael Lind, the Whitehead Fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington, DC, is the author of Made in Texas: George W Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics. "The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power." -- Daniel Webster (1782-1852) http://www.newstatesman.com ==^==^============================================================= This email was sent to: alisonweir@yahoo.com EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84GeV.bbBdAf.YWxpc29u Or send an email to: mpjc-unsubscribe@topica.com TOPICA - Start your own email discussion group. FREE! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/create/index2.html ==^==^============================================================= --=====================_40905619==_.ALT Content-Type: text/html; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

The Weird Men Behind
George W. Bush's War
By Michael Lind
New Statesman - London
4-12-3

America's allies and enemies alike are baffled. What is going on in the United States? Who is making foreign policy? And what are they trying to achieve? Quasi-Marxist explanations involving big oil or American capitalism are mistaken. Yes, American oil companies and contractors will accept the spoils of the kill in Iraq. But the oil business, with its Arabist bias, did not push for this war any more than it supports the Bush administration's close alliance with Ariel Sharon. Further, President Bush and Vice-President Cheney are not genuine "Texas oil men" but career politicians who, in between stints in public life, would have used their connections to enrich themselves as figureheads in the wheat business, if they had been residents of Kansas, or in tech companies, had they been Californians.
 
Equally wrong is the theory that American and European civilisation are evolving in opposite directions. The thesis of Robert Kagan, the neoconservative propagandist, that Americans are martial and Europeans pacifist, is complete nonsense. A majority of Americans voted for either Al Gore or Ralph Nader in 2000. Were it not for the over-representation of sparsely populated, right-wing states in both the presidential electoral college and the Senate, the White House and the Senate today would be controlled by Democrats, whose views and values, on everything from war to the welfare state, are very close to those of western Europeans.
 
Both the economic-determinist theory and the clash-of-cultures theory are reassuring: they assume that the recent revolution in US foreign policy is the result of obscure but understandable forces in an orderly world. The truth is more alarming. As a result of several bizarre and unforeseeable contingencies - such as the selection rather than election of George W Bush, and 11 September - the foreign policy of the world's only global power is being made by a small clique that is unrepresentative of either the US population or the mainstream foreign policy establishment.
 
The core group now in charge consists of neoconservative defence intellectuals (they are called "neoconservatives" because many of them started off as anti-Stalinist leftists or liberals before moving to the far right). Inside the government, the chief defence intellectuals include Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defence. He is the defence mastermind of the Bush administration; Donald Rumsfeld is an elderly figurehead who holds the position of defence secretary only because Wolfowitz himself is too controversial. Others include Douglas Feith, the number three at the Pentagon; Lewis "Scooter" Libby, a Wolfowitz protege who is Cheney's chief of staff; John R Bolton, a right-winger assigned to the State Department to keep Colin Powell in check; and Elliott Abrams, recently appointed to head Middle East policy at the National Security Council. On the outside are James Woolsey, the former CIA director, who has tried repeatedly to link both 9/11 and the anthrax letters in the US to Saddam Hussein, and Richard Perle, who has just resigned from his unpaid defence department advisory post after a lobbying scandal. Most of these "experts" never served in the military. But their headquarters is now the civilian defence secretary's office, where these Republican political appointees are despised and distrusted by the largely Republican career soldiers.
 
Most neoconservative defence intellectuals have their roots on the left, not the right. They are products of the largely Jewish-American Trotskyist movement of the 1930s and 1940s, which morphed into anti- communist liberalism between the 1950s and 1970s and finally into a kind of militaristic and imperial right with no precedents in American culture or political history. Their admiration for the Israeli Likud party's tactics, including preventive warfare such Israel's 1981 raid on Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor, is mixed with odd bursts of ideological enthusiasm for "democracy". They call their revolutionary ideology "Wilsonianism" (after President Woodrow Wilson), but it is really Trotsky's theory of the permanent revolution mingled with the far-right Likud strain of Zionism. Genuine American Wilsonians believe in self-determination for people such as the Palestinians.
 
The neo-con defence intellectuals, as well as being in or around the actual Pentagon, are at the centre of a metaphorical "pentagon" of the Israel lobby and the religious right, plus conservative think- tanks, foundations and media empires. Think-tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) provide homes for neo-con "in-and- outers" when they are out of government (Perle is a fellow at AEI). The money comes not so much from corporations as from decades-old conservative foundations, such as the Bradley and Olin foundations, which spend down the estates of long-dead tycoons. Neoconservative foreign policy does not reflect business interests in any direct way. The neo-cons are ideologues, not opportunists.
 
The major link between the conservative think-tanks and the Israel lobby is the Washington-based and Likud-supporting Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (Jinsa), which co-opts many non-Jewish defence experts by sending them on trips to Israel. It flew out the retired General Jay Garner, now slated by Bush to be proconsul of occupied Iraq. In October 2000, he co-signed a Jinsa letter that began: "We . . . believe that during the current upheavals in Israel, the Israel Defence Forces have exercised remarkable restraint in the face of lethal violence orchestrated by the leadership of [the] Palestinian Authority."
 
The Israel lobby itself is divided into Jewish and Christian wings. Wolfowitz and Feith have close ties to the Jewish-American Israel lobby. Wolfowitz, who has relatives in Israel, has served as the Bush administration's liaison to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Feith was given an award by the Zionist Organisation of America, citing him as a "pro-Israel activist". While out of power in the Clinton years, Feith collaborating with Perle, co-authored for Likud a policy paper that advised the Israeli government to end the Oslo peace process, reoccupy the territories and crush Yasser Arafat's government.
 
Such experts are not typical of Jewish-Americans, who mostly voted for Gore in 2000. The most fervent supporters of Likud in the Republican electorate are southern Protestant fundamentalists. The religious right believes that God gave all of Palestine to the Jews, and fundamentalist congregations spend millions to subsidise Jewish settlements in the occupied territories.
 
The final corner of the neoconservative pentagon is occupied by several right-wing media empires, with roots - odd as it seems - in the Commonwealth and South Korea. Rupert Murdoch disseminates propaganda through his Fox Television network. His magazine the Weekly Standard, edited by William Kristol, the former chief of staff of Dan Quayle (vice-president, 1989-93), acts as a mouthpiece for defence intellectuals such as Perle, Wolfowitz, Feith and Woolsey as well as for Sharon's government. The National Interest (of which I was executive editor, 1991-94) is now funded by Conrad Black, who owns the Jerusalem Post and the Hollinger empire in Britain and Canada.
 
Strangest of all is the media network centred on the Washington Times - owned by the South Korean messiah (and ex-convict) the Reverend Sun Myung Moon - which owns the newswire UPI. UPI is now run by John O'Sullivan, the ghost-writer for Margaret Thatcher who once worked as an editor for Conrad Black in Canada. Through such channels, the "Gotcha!" style of right-wing British journalism, as well as its Europhobic substance, have contaminated the US conservative movement.
 
The corners of the neoconservative pentagon were linked together in the 1990s by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), run by Kristol out of the Weekly Standard offices. Using a PR technique pioneered by their Trotskyist predecessors, the neo-cons published a series of public letters, whose signatories often included Wolfowitz and other future members of the Bush foreign policy team. They called for the US to invade and occupy Iraq and to support Israel's campaigns against the Palestinians (dire warnings about China were another favourite). During Clinton's two terms, these fulminations were ignored by the foreign policy establishment and the mainstream media. Now they are frantically being studied.
 
How did the neo-con defence intellectuals - a small group at odds with most of the US foreign policy elite, Republican as well as Democratic - manage to capture the Bush administration? Few supported Bush during the presidential primaries. They feared that the second Bush would be like the first - a wimp who had failed to occupy Baghdad in the first Gulf war and who had pressured Israel into the Oslo peace process - and that his administration, again like his father's, would be dominated by moderate Republican realists such as Powell, James Baker and Brent Scowcroft. They supported the maverick senator John McCain until it became clear that Bush would get the nomination.
 
Then they had a stroke of luck - Cheney was put in charge of the presidential transition (the period between the election in November and the accession to office in January). Cheney used this opportunity to stack the administration with his hardline allies. Instead of becoming the de facto president in foreign policy, as many had expected, Secretary of State Powell found himself boxed in by Cheney's right-wing network, including Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith, Bolton and Libby.
 
The neo-cons took advantage of Bush's ignorance and inexperience. Unlike his father, a Second World War veteran who had been ambassador to China, director of the CIA and vice-president, George W was a thinly educated playboy who had failed repeatedly in business before becoming the governor of Texas, a largely ceremonial position (the state's lieutenant governor has more power). His father is essentially a north-eastern, moderate Republican; George W, raised in west Texas, absorbed the Texan cultural combination of machismo, anti- intellectualism and overt religiosity. The son of upper-class Episcopalian parents, he converted to southern fundamentalism in a midlife crisis. Fervent Christian Zionism, along with an admiration for macho Israeli soldiers that sometimes coexists with hostility to liberal Jewish-American intellectuals, is a feature of the southern culture.
 
The younger Bush was tilting away from Powell and toward Wolfowitz ("Wolfie", as he calls him) even before 9/11 gave him something he had lacked: a mission in life other than following in his dad's footsteps. There are signs of estrangement between the cautious father and the crusading son: last year, veterans of the first Bush administration, including Baker, Scowcroft and Lawrence Eagleburger, warned publicly against an invasion of Iraq without authorisation from Congress and the UN.
 
It is not clear that George W fully understands the grand strategy that Wolfowitz and other aides are unfolding. He seems genuinely to believe that there was an imminent threat to the US from Saddam Hussein's "weapons of mass destruction", something the leading neo- cons say in public but are far too intelligent to believe themselves. The Project for the New American Century urged an invasion of Iraq throughout the Clinton years, for reasons that had nothing to do with possible links between Saddam and Osama Bin Laden. Public letters signed by Wolfowitz and others called on the US to invade and occupy Iraq, to bomb Hezbollah bases in Lebanon and to threaten states such as Syria and Iran with US attacks if they continued to sponsor terrorism. Claims that the purpose is not to protect the American people but to make the Middle East safe for Israel are dismissed by the neo-cons as vicious anti-Semitism. Yet Syria, Iran and Iraq are bitter enemies, with their weapons pointed at each other, and the terrorists they sponsor target Israel rather than the US. The neo- cons urge war with Iran next, though by any rational measurement North Korea's new nuclear arsenal is, for the US, a far greater problem.
 
So that is the bizarre story of how neoconservatives took over Washington and steered the US into a Middle Eastern war unrelated to any plausible threat to the US and opposed by the public of every country in the world except Israel. The frightening thing is the role of happenstance and personality. After the al-Qaeda attacks, any US president would likely have gone to war to topple Bin Laden's Taliban protectors in Afghanistan. But everything that the US has done since then would have been different had America's 18th-century electoral rules not given Bush the presidency and had Cheney not used the transition period to turn the foreign policy executive into a PNAC reunion.
 
For a British equivalent, one would have to imagine a Tory government, with Downing Street and Whitehall controlled by followers of Reverend Ian Paisley, extreme Eurosceptics, empire loyalists and Blimpish military types - all determined, for a variety of strategic or religious reasons, to invade Egypt. Their aim would be to regain the Suez Canal as the first step in a campaign to restore the British empire. Yes, it really is that weird.
 
Michael Lind, the Whitehead Fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington, DC, is the author of Made in Texas: George W Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics.
 
"The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power."
-- Daniel Webster (1782-1852)
 
http://www.newstatesman.com


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--=====================_40905619==_.ALT--



From dtsang@lib.uci.edu  Mon Apr 14 10:05:38 2003
From: dtsang@lib.uci.edu (Dan Tsang)
Date: Mon, 14 Apr 2003 02:05:38 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [Ethnicstudies] u.s. govt. gets personal data on latin americans (fwd)
Message-ID: 

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/news/archive/2003/04/13/financial1444EDT0012.DTL
Questions on Latin American citizen data sold to U.S. government

JIM KRANE, AP Technology Writer

...

d.
Daniel C. Tsang
Bibliographer for Asian American Studies,
 Economics, Management (acting), & Politics
Social Science Data Librarian
Lecturer, School of Social Sciences
380 Main Library, University of California
PO Box 19557, Irvine CA 92623-9557, USA
E-mail: dtsang@uci.edu; Tel: (949) 824-4978; fax: (949) 824-2700
UCI Social Science Data Archives: http://data.lib.uci.edu



From dtsang@lib.uci.edu  Mon Apr 14 20:01:04 2003
From: dtsang@lib.uci.edu (Dan Tsang)
Date: Mon, 14 Apr 2003 12:01:04 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [Ethnicstudies] The looting and burning of Iraq's National Library (fwd)
Message-ID: 

fyi...IFLA is the International Federation of Library Associations and
Institutions...
............................

text of the IFLA Web:

http://www.ifla.org/III/announce/iraq1404.html


Information on the looting and burning of Iraq's National Library and
National Archives

Information on the looting and burning of Iraq's National Library
and National Archives, following the destruction of most of the
contents of the National Museum is available on the (Australian)
ABC website at http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/s831324.htm.

I am attending an emergency meeting, called by the Director General
of UNESCO, to be held in paris on Thursday 17th April 2003 to discuss
the best ways of responding to the desperate situation arising from
the looting and destruction of cultural property.

>From the New York Times:
[...] Among other buildings afire or still smoldering in eastern
Baghdad today were the city hall, the Agriculture Ministry and so
thoroughly burned that heat still radiated 50 paces from its front
doors the National Library. Not far from the National Museum of Iraq,
which was looted on Thursday and Friday with the loss of almost all
of its store of 170,000 artifacts, the library was considered another
of the repositories of an Iraqi civilization dating back at least
7,000 years.

By tonight, virtually nothing was left of the library and its tens
of thousands of old manuscripts and books, and of archives like
Iraqi newspapers tracing the country's turbulent history from the
era of Ottoman rule through to Mr. Hussein. Reading rooms and the
stacks where the collections were stored were reduced to smoking
vistas of blackened rubble.

Across the street, a lone American tank roared out of the monumental
gates of the Defense Ministry, untouched by the looters presumably
because they knew that the ministry, at least, would be under close
guard by American troops. Almost as much as the civilian casualties
from American bombs and tanks, the destruction of the museum and the
library has ignited passions against American troops, for their failure
to intervene. How far these passions offset the widespread jubilation
at the toppling of Mr. Hussein is impossible to tell, in part because
of the differing views within the population. [...]

New York Times on the web:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/14/international/worldspecial/14BAGH.html?
pagewanted=2

We will post more information as it becomes avaialable.

Ross Shimmon
Secretary General





From dtsang@lib.uci.edu  Tue Apr 15 20:40:57 2003
From: dtsang@lib.uci.edu (Dan Tsang)
Date: Tue, 15 Apr 2003 12:40:57 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [Ethnicstudies] [Subv] Alexander Cockburn on Iraq after the U.S. conquest (fwd)
Message-ID: 

On Subversity, a KUCI public affairs program, we air part of the UCI
International Studies program last Thursday at which journalist Alexander
Cockburn talked about the conquest of Iraq and its aftermath.

Cockburn was associated with the New Statesman and currently writes
for the Nation. He also edits the muckraking magazine, Counter Punch
(http://www.counterpunch.org/).

The show airs today from 4-5 p.m. on KUCI, 88.9 fm in Orange County,
California, and is Web-cast via http://kuci.org.

An interview with Cockburn appears in a recent OC Weekly:

http://www.ocweekly.com/ink/03/31/news-schou.php
As the World Burns:
Alexander Cockburn eviscerates Operation Iraqi Fiefdom -- and Christopher
Hitchens, the barstool bombardier
by Nick Schou

Thanx for listening.

At the program, to the sound of hisses, it was announced that former UN
Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick will be giving the Peltason Lecture on
Democracy, on "Human Rights and Democracy: The Essential Connection."
That will be on May 8, 2003 at UCI's Social Science Plaza 1100 from
3:30-5:00 p.m. For more information, see;
http://www.democ.uci.edu/democ/kirkpatrick.htm

No doubt there will be a huge turnout!

dan
Daniel C. Tsang
Host, Subversity, now Tuesdays, 4-5 p.m.
KUCI, 88.9 FM and Web-cast live via http://kuci.org
Subversity: http://kuci.org/~dtsang; E-mail: subversity@kuci.org
Daniel Tsang, KUCI, PO Box 4362, Irvine CA 92616
UCI Tel: (949) 824-4978; UCI Fax: (949) 824-2700
UCI Office: 380 Main Library
Member, National Writers Union (http://www.nwu.org)
WWW News Resource Page: http://sun3.lib.uci.edu/~dtsang/netnews1.htm
AWARE: http://sun3.lib.uci.edu/~dtsang/aware2.htm
Personal Homepage: http://sun3.lib.uci.edu/~dtsang/

_______________________________________________

KUCI.org 88.9FM - "eclectic music, engaging talk"
_______________________________________________


From jafujii@uci.edu  Wed Apr 16 17:02:30 2003
From: jafujii@uci.edu (Jim Fujii)
Date: Wed, 16 Apr 2003 09:02:30 -0700
Subject: [Ethnicstudies] UN resolution
Message-ID: <005e01c30431$9644b660$9dbac380@ucigyqexhlhmwv>

This is a multi-part message in MIME format.

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	charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Sent: Thursday, March 27, 2003 9:22 AM
To: Actforglobaljustice@yahoogroups.com; uci-peace-justice@uci.edu
Subject: [UCI-Peace-Justice] Urgent Peace Opportunity



Greenpeace: Urgent Peace Opportunity



Thanks to an initiative from the Arab League, the UN is not hiding its
head in
the sand over the war in Iraq. We now have a crucial opportunity for the
world
to condemn the war in Iraq.


On Wednesday, 26 March, there was an 'open session' of the UN
SecurityCouncil,
and members are expected to put forward a resolution condemning the war
and
calling for a ceasefire. The debate is expected to carry on until
Thursday, but
it is clear that any such resolution will be vetoed by the US and UK.
Arab League Foreign Ministers, as well as their colleagues in the
non-Aligned Movement, have said that if there is no Security Council
resolution, they will invoke Resolution 377 ('Uniting for Peace'), and
call for an Emergency Session of the UN General Assembly, where a
resolution calling for an end to the war would get overwhelming support.

We have chosen several countries whose support for this move is key to
its
success. Any country that puts this forward, will have to be able to
withstand
diplomatic and economic blackmail from the US and the UK in order to
exercise
their democratic right to speak on behalf of their people.

 Please use this link:

 http://act.greenpeace.org/ams/e?a=3D733&s=3Dwr

 to write to the Foreign Ministers of Cuba, South Africa, Malaysia,
Indonesia,
Nigeria, New Zealand, Switzerland, Fiji, Mexico, Chile, Germany, Russia,
and
France, and ask them to support 'Uniting for Peace'.

 You can discuss the campaign for a 'Uniting for Peace' resolution here:

 http://act.greenpeace.org/1048719593


VISIT THE CYBERCENTRE

 Please don't forget to visit the Greenpeace Cyberactivist Community at:

http://act.greenpeace.org



This email/fax message, including any attachments, is for the sole use
of the intended recipient(s) and may contain
confidential and privileged information. Any unauthorized review, use,
disclosure or distribution is prohibited. If you are not the
intended recipient, please contact the sender by reply e-mail/fax and
destroy all copies of the original message.





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Sent: Thursday, March 27, 2003 9:22 AM
To: Actforglobaljustice@y=
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uci-peace-justice@uci.eduSubject:=20
[UCI-Peace-Justice] Urgent Peace Opportunity



Greenpeace: =
Urgent=20
Peace Opportunity



Thanks to an initiative from the Arab =
League,=20
the UN is not hiding its
head in
the sand over the war in Iraq. We =
now=20
have a crucial opportunity for the
world
to condemn the war in=20
Iraq.


On Wednesday, 26 March, there was an 'open session' of =
the=20
UN
SecurityCouncil,
and members are expected to put forward a =
resolution=20
condemning the war
and
calling for a ceasefire. The debate is =
expected to=20
carry on until
Thursday, but
it is clear that any such resolution =
will be=20
vetoed by the US and UK.
Arab League Foreign Ministers, as well as =
their=20
colleagues in the
non-Aligned Movement, have said that if there is no =

Security Council
resolution, they will invoke Resolution 377 =
('Uniting for=20
Peace'), and
call for an Emergency Session of the UN General =
Assembly, where=20
a
resolution calling for an end to the war would get overwhelming=20
support.

We have chosen several countries whose support for this =
move is=20
key to
its
success. Any country that puts this forward, will have =
to be=20
able to
withstand
diplomatic and economic blackmail from the US =
and the UK=20
in order to
exercise
their democratic right to speak on behalf of =
their=20
people.

 Please use this link:

 http://act.gr=
eenpeace.org/ams/e?a=3D733&s=3Dwr

 to=20
write to the Foreign Ministers of Cuba, South Africa,=20
Malaysia,
Indonesia,
Nigeria, New Zealand, Switzerland, Fiji, =
Mexico,=20
Chile, Germany, Russia,
and
France, and ask them to support =
'Uniting for=20
Peace'.

 You can discuss the campaign for a 'Uniting for =
Peace'=20
resolution here:

 http://act.greenpeace.org/1=
048719593


VISIT=20
THE CYBERCENTRE

 Please don't forget to visit the Greenpeace =

Cyberactivist Community at:

http://act.greenpeace.org

<=
BR>
This=20
email/fax message, including any attachments, is for the sole use
of =
the=20
intended recipient(s) and may contain
confidential and privileged=20
information. Any unauthorized review, use,
disclosure or distribution =
is=20
prohibited. If you are not the
intended recipient, please contact the =
sender=20
by reply e-mail/fax and
destroy all copies of the original=20
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or We=20
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From jafujii@uci.edu  Wed Apr 16 17:34:54 2003
From: jafujii@uci.edu (Jim Fujii)
Date: Wed, 16 Apr 2003 09:34:54 -0700
Subject: [Ethnicstudies] Fw: National Council for Research on Women
Message-ID: <002401c30436$1c95f2c0$9dbac380@ucigyqexhlhmwv>

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Sent: Wednesday, April 16, 2003 9:33 AM
Subject: Fw: National Council for Research on Women


This is not exactly "local" news, but I thought it worth sending.

Jim

Sent: Wednesday, April 16, 2003 7:57 AM
Subject: National Council for Research on Women


please forward widely...=20

The National Council for Research on Women
Annual Conference 2003
In collaboration with
The Women's Leadership Institute, Mills College

BORDERS, BABIES, AND BOMBS: A GENDERED REFRAMING OF SECURITY
MAY 29-31, 2003
MILLS COLLEGE, OAKLAND, CA

In the name of ensuring security, civil liberties have been curtailed, =
national borders tightened, and militarization is on the rise.  The =
National Council for Research on Women's 2003 Annual Conference takes =
place at a critical moment of escalating military conflict and deepening =
economic disparities, as well as shortly before the US presidential =
primary campaign.  At this moment when there is an urgent need for =
voices of concern and dissent, for alternate visions and strategies, we =
will address the extraordinary challenges that women and girls - and all =
people -  face in the US and around the world.  The Conference will =
provide a forum for these voices and shift the focus of security from =
the safety of territory and states to human security - the safety of =
individuals, their social, economic, and physical well-being - and =
reframe security to incorporate the experiences and concerns of women =
and girls, their families and communities.

Issues to be addressed during the Conference include: militarization, =
its effects on people's economic, political, and social well-being, as =
well as on popular culture; the economics of war and economic security; =
civil and human rights; cultures of violence; HIV/AIDS; the erosion of =
Title IX; the attack on reproductive rights upon the 30th anniversary of =
Roe v. Wade; local applications of international law and treaties; and =
immigration and citizenship. =20

Speakers Include:
Rabab Abdulhadi (New York University)
Susan McGee Bailey (Wellesley College)
Linda Burnham (Women of Color Resource Center)
Charlotte Bunch (Rutgers University)
Cynthia Enloe (Clark University)
Krishanti Dharmaraj (Women's Institute for Leadership Development for =
Human Rights)
Sandra Harding (UCLA)
Sandra Morgen (University of Oregon)
Barbara Nelson (UCLA)
Deborah Rhode (Stanford Law School)
Saskia Sassen (University of Chicago)
Eleanor Smeal (Feminist Majority Foundation)
Viviene Taylor (Commission on Human Security)
Ann Tickner (University of Southern California)

Conference Host Committee:
Women of Color Resource Center; The Women's Foundation; Women's =
Institute for Leadership Development for Human Rights (WILD); Beatrice =
M. Bain Research Group, UC Berkeley; Institute for Research on Women and =
Gender, Stanford University; Global Fund for Women; Center for the Study =
of Women, UCLA; Women's Studies Programs, UCLA; School of Public Policy =
and Social Research, UCLA; Consortium for Women and Research, UC Davis; =
Moses and Associates; Center for Feminist Research, USC

Conference Planning Committee:
Rabab Abdulhadi (Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, NYU); =
Electa Arenal ( Luso-Brazilian and Women's Studies, CUNY); Janet L. =
Holmgren (President, Mills College); Sandra Morgen (Center for the Study =
of Women in Society, University of Oregon); Margo Okazawa-Rey (Women's =
Leadership Institute, Mills College); Kathy Rodgers (NOW Legal Defense =
and Education Fund); Eleanor Smeal (Feminist Majority Foundation)
=20



__________________

Margo Okazawa-Rey

Director, Women's Leadership Institute

Visiting Professor, Women's Studies

Mills College

5000 MacArthur Blvd.

Oakland, CA 94613 USA

1 510 430 2239

1 510 430 3233 (fax)

















-------------------------------------------------------------------------=
-------Regina F. Lark, Ph.D.
Manager/Graduate Advisor
UCLA Center for the Study of Women
UCLA Women's Studies Programs
288 Kinsey Hall
405 Hilgard Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1504
(310) 206-5898
http://www.women.ucla.edu


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Sent: Wednesday, April 16, 2003 9:33 AM




Subject: Fw: National Council for Research on =
Women





This is not exactly "local" news, but I =
thought it=20
worth sending.


 


Jim


 




Sent: Wednesday, April 16, 2003 7:57 AM


Subject: National Council for Research on Women



please forward =
widely...=20


The National Council for Research on =
Women
Annual=20
Conference 2003
In collaboration with
The Women's Leadership =
Institute,=20
Mills College

BORDERS, BABIES, AND BOMBS: A GENDERED REFRAMING =
OF=20
SECURITY
MAY 29-31, 2003
MILLS COLLEGE, OAKLAND,=20
CA

In the name of ensuring security, civil =
liberties have=20
been curtailed, national borders tightened, and militarization is on the =

rise.  The National Council for Research on Women's 2003 Annual =
Conference=20
takes place at a critical moment of escalating military conflict and =
deepening=20
economic disparities, as well as shortly before the US presidential =
primary=20
campaign.  At this moment when there is an urgent need for voices =
of=20
concern and dissent, for alternate visions and strategies, we will =
address the=20
extraordinary challenges that women and girls - and all people -  =
face in=20
the US and around the world.  The Conference will provide a forum =
for these=20
voices and shift the focus of security from the safety of territory and =
states=20
to human security - the safety of individuals, their social, =
economic,=20
and physical well-being - and reframe security to incorporate the =
experiences=20
and concerns of women and girls, their families and =
communities.

Issues=20
to be addressed during the Conference include: militarization, its =
effects on=20
people's economic, political, and social well-being, as well as on =
popular=20
culture; the economics of war and economic security; civil and human =
rights;=20
cultures of violence; HIV/AIDS; the erosion of Title IX; the attack on=20
reproductive rights upon the 30th anniversary of Roe v. Wade; local =
applications=20
of international law and treaties; and immigration and =
citizenship. =20


Speakers Include:
Rabab Abdulhadi (New York=20
University)
Susan McGee Bailey (Wellesley College)
Linda Burnham =
(Women of=20
Color Resource Center)
Charlotte Bunch (Rutgers =
University)
Cynthia Enloe=20
(Clark University)
Krishanti Dharmaraj (Women's Institute for =
Leadership=20
Development for Human Rights)
Sandra Harding (UCLA)
Sandra Morgen=20
(University of Oregon)
Barbara Nelson (UCLA)
Deborah Rhode =
(Stanford Law=20
School)
Saskia Sassen (University of Chicago)
Eleanor Smeal =
(Feminist=20
Majority Foundation)
Viviene Taylor (Commission on Human =
Security)
Ann=20
Tickner (University of Southern California)

Conference Host=20
Committee:
Women of Color Resource Center; The Women's =
Foundation;=20
Women's Institute for Leadership Development for Human Rights (WILD); =
Beatrice=20
M. Bain Research Group, UC Berkeley; Institute for Research on Women and =
Gender,=20
Stanford University; Global Fund for Women; Center for the Study of =
Women, UCLA;=20
Women's Studies Programs, UCLA; School of Public Policy and Social =
Research,=20
UCLA; Consortium for Women and Research, UC Davis; Moses and Associates; =
Center=20
for Feminist Research, USC

Conference Planning=20
Committee:
Rabab Abdulhadi (Center for the Study of Gender =
and=20
Sexuality, NYU); Electa Arenal ( Luso-Brazilian and Women's Studies, =
CUNY);=20
Janet L. Holmgren (President, Mills College); Sandra Morgen (Center for =
the=20
Study of Women in Society, University of Oregon); Margo Okazawa-Rey =
(Women's=20
Leadership Institute, Mills College); Kathy Rodgers (NOW Legal Defense =
and=20
Education Fund); Eleanor Smeal (Feminist Majority=20
Foundation)
 



__________________

Margo Okazawa-Rey

Director, Women's Leadership Institute

Visiting Professor, Women's Studies

Mills College

5000 MacArthur Blvd.

Oakland, CA 94613 USA

1 510 430 2239

1 510 430 3233 (fax)


















Regina F. Lark, Ph.D.

Manager/Graduate Advisor

UCLA Center for the Study of Women

UCLA Women's Studies Programs

288 Kinsey Hall

405 Hilgard Avenue

Los Angeles, CA 90095-1504

(310) 206-5898

http://www.women.ucla.edu


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From dtsang@lib.uci.edu  Wed Apr 16 23:21:50 2003
From: dtsang@lib.uci.edu (Dan Tsang)
Date: Wed, 16 Apr 2003 15:21:50 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [Ethnicstudies] articles on Iraq National Library & cultural destruction (fwd)
Message-ID: 

More horrors...

>From the Independent 15 April 2003:

http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=397350
Robert Fisk: Library books, letters and priceless documents are set ablaze
in final chapter of the sacking of Baghdad

...

>From the Guardian 15 April 2003:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,936943,00.html
Ancient archive lost in Baghdad library blaze
Oliver Burkeman in Washington

....

also from Guardian same day:

http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/worldwide/story/0,9959,936707,00.html
Art falls prey to war
The British Museum is to help Iraq protect its treasures says Donald
MacLeod and David Walker


dan

Daniel C. Tsang
Bibliographer for Asian American Studies,
 Economics, Management (acting), & Politics
Social Science Data Librarian
Lecturer, School of Social Sciences
380 Main Library, University of California
PO Box 19557, Irvine CA 92623-9557, USA
E-mail: dtsang@uci.edu; Tel: (949) 824-4978; fax: (949) 824-2700
UCI Social Science Data Archives: http://data.lib.uci.edu



From jafujii@uci.edu  Thu Apr 17 01:02:09 2003
From: jafujii@uci.edu (Jim Fujii)
Date: Wed, 16 Apr 2003 17:02:09 -0700
Subject: [Ethnicstudies] Fw: Lost in the Rubble
Message-ID: <00af01c30474$97ecc5a0$35bbc380@ucigyqexhlhmwv>

This is a multi-part message in MIME format.

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	charset="iso-8859-1"
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Sent: Wednesday, April 16, 2003 4:41 PM
Subject: Lost in the Rubble


http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0316/mondo4.php

Village Voice  April 16 - 22, 2003=20

Mondo Washington

Lost in the Rubble

by James Ridgeway

Anthrax, Biological Weapons, and Other Smoking Guns We Never Found in =
Iraq

. "25,000 liters of anthrax"=20

. "38,000 liters of botulinum toxin"=20

. "500 tons of sarin, mustard [gas] and=20

. "VX nerve agent"=20

. "Several mobile biological weapons labs"=20

. "An advanced nuclear weapons development program"=20

-George W. Bush, State of the Union speech, January 28, 2003=20






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Sent: Wednesday, April 16, 2003 4:41 PM




Subject: Lost in the Rubble



http://www.vi=
llagevoice.com/issues/0316/mondo4.php

Village=20
Voice  April 16 - 22, 2003 

Mondo Washington

Lost in =
the=20
Rubble

by James Ridgeway

Anthrax, Biological Weapons, and =
Other=20
Smoking Guns We Never Found in Iraq

. "25,000 liters of anthrax"=20


. "38,000 liters of botulinum toxin" 

. "500 tons of =
sarin,=20
mustard [gas] and 

. "VX nerve agent" 

. "Several mobile=20
biological weapons labs" 

. "An advanced nuclear weapons =
development=20
program" 

-George W. Bush, State of the Union speech, January 28, =
2003=20







------=_NextPart_000_00AC_01C30439.EADB1860--



From jafujii@uci.edu  Thu Apr 17 01:00:59 2003
From: jafujii@uci.edu (Jim Fujii)
Date: Wed, 16 Apr 2003 17:00:59 -0700
Subject: [Ethnicstudies] Fw: Final Thoughts from Palestine
Message-ID: <00a701c30474$6e274290$35bbc380@ucigyqexhlhmwv>

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Sent: Wednesday, April 16, 2003 4:59 PM
Subject: Fw: Final Thoughts from Palestine


Sent: Wednesday, April 16, 2003 4:41 PM
Subject: Final Thoughts from Palestine


http://www.counterpunch.org/christison04122003.html

CounterPunch   April 12, 2003=20

It Need Not Be This Way=20

Final Thoughts from Palestine=20

by Kathleen and Bill Christison former CIA political analysts=20

As we left East Jerusalem for Amman last week, on our way back home, we =
were
struck by the cynicism of what appeared to be a concerted effort by the
Israeli press and others in the media to justify, retrospectively, =
Israel's
siege and destruction of Jenin a year ago because it is now clear that =
U.S.
and British forces are doing the same thing in Iraq. Israeli papers and
military columnists say, with evident satisfaction, that the coalition
missile attacks on civilian marketplaces in Iraq should now make it =
easier
for the U.S. to understand why Israel did what it did in Jenin. Fighting
"terrorism," these papers suggest, is a messy business, and U.S. and =
British
forces must now understand that this fight involves engaging with a =
civilian
population and "getting your hands dirty," as one paper put it. Even a =
BBC
television anchor, interviewing an Israeli military historian, made the
comparison with Jenin, noting that when coalition forces enter Baghdad =
they
may face the same kind of fighting that Israel did in Jenin. The Israeli =
had
the decency to point out that what Israel did in Jenin was immoral, but =
the
BBC interviewer persisted, discussing the difficulties of urban warfare =
and
comparing the Jenin and the Baghdad situations as if the killing of
civilians who get in the way of urban fighting is simply one of those
unfortunate obstacles that military forces must cope with. In the effort =
to
justify the military operations in each case, no one seems to focus on =
the
dead civilians, the destroyed homes and buildings, the ruined lives, or =
the
right of any population to defend itself from invading armies. It's
unsettling, not to say enraging, to see the actions of one murderous =
army
justified by invoking the murderous tactics of another. How can this be
happening? These commentators must not have seen Jenin. Maybe you have =
to
have seen the destruction in Jenin to care about civilians.=20

***=20

Some people do understand. The courageous Israeli commentator Gideon =
Levy
has been writing about former Israeli "warmongers," now appearing as TV =
news
experts, who glory in the destructive capabilities of cluster bombs and
smart missiles that they unabashedly describe as "wreaking havoc,"
"pulverizing," and "raining steel." None of these experts, Levy notes, =
has
bothered to mention the killing and destruction that weapons like these =
can
cause among innocent civilians. Nor, he says pointedly, has any of them
thought to wonder "what happens to a society whose spokesmen get so
pathologically excited by weapons and killing." We need a Gideon Levy in =
the
United States.=20

***=20

The similarities between the Iraq war and the war that's been raging for
years in Palestine are growing by the day. A few days ago, American =
troops
in Iraq shot up a car carrying seven women and children, killing them =
all.
Or maybe it was ten or eleven women and children; we're still hearing
varying numbers. This occurred in the area where several U.S. Marines =
had
been killed a few days earlier by a car bomb, so of course, by some =
people's
lights, it's understandable that the Americans would be frightened, on
alert, on the defensive, and over-eager to start shooting--just like the
Israeli soldiers who man checkpoints throughout the West Bank and Gaza =
and
who shoot up Palestinian civilians with insane regularity. What no one =
among
the media swarming around these areas, no one at the Pentagon, no one in =
the
White House seems to notice is that, if the Americans weren't in Iraq in =
the
first place, and if the Israelis weren't in the West Bank and Gaza in =
the
first place, Iraqi civilians and Palestinian civilians could go about =
their
daily business without always being regarded as terrorists, without =
being
murdered.=20

***=20

Israel is probably the only country in the world where both the =
government
and popular opinion support the war in Iraq. One East Jerusalem man whom =
we
came to know who exercises regularly at a club frequented by both =
Israelis
and Palestinians told us of overhearing a conversation between two =
Israelis
in the locker room. One said, "The Americans and Brits are really doing =
a
good job for us." The other responded, "We're all children of God." This
would seem to confirm the fears of some of us cynics that the war is, =
and
has all along been intended to be, the beginning of a Judeo-Christian =
war
against Islam. Muslims, of course, are not the children of God.=20

***=20

The only souvenir we're bringing home is an empty Israeli bullet shell =
found
on the street in the old city of Nablus. Imagine having a foreign army's
shell casings lying in your streets. Imagine your streets torn up by a
foreign army's tank treads. Imagine your houses demolished by a foreign
army's bulldozers and F-16s.=20

***=20

A Ramallah man who has a three-year-old daughter tells us that, in her
three-year-old world, Israeli tanks are the monsters that children =
elsewhere
only imagine. Tanks destroy and terrorize. When she is angry with her =
older
sister, she calls her sister "a tank." This is the worst pejorative she =
can
think of.=20

***=20

On our first encounter at an Israeli checkpoint, driving into Ramallah =
from
Jerusalem, we had a minor argument with a brash young Israeli soldier. =
"What
do you think of the IDF?" he asked as he looked over our passports. =
Thinking
fast--not wanting either to endorse the IDF or so antagonize him that he
wouldn't let us through, we said something feeble like, "It's all right =
for
an army, but we wish you wouldn't be so hard on the Palestinians." This
ticked him off, and he started raging about Palestinian suicide bombers:
there has been a bus bombing in early March in Haifa, on a bus route =
that he
traveled frequently, and didn't we know that he or one of his friends =
could
have been killed? All Palestinians are dirt, he said, looking directly =
at
our Palestinian taxi driver, and they're all alike. Now acutely =
conscious of
his insults to our driver, we became a little bolder, agreeing that =
deaths
in suicide bombings were tragic but noting that Israel has been killing
Palestinians too. This really set him off, and he ranted on for a while =
with
further insults to Palestinians and, when we didn't respond, handed us =
back
our passports and waved us on. We resisted the temptation to point out =
to
him that, as American taxpayers, we help pay his salary and he should =
stop
acting like an arrogant bastard. We also resisted the temptation to tell =
him
that, just as suicide bombings lead him to think that all Palestinians =
are
alike and to treat them all shabbily as a result, his atrocious behavior
might lead us to think that all Israelis are as arrogant and unpleasant =
as
he is and to treat them accordingly. Palestinians endure this kind of =
abuse
every day of their lives, and most of those whom we told of our =
encounter
laughed at our anger because this kind of disrespect and humiliation is =
the
least serious aspect by far of what they face under occupation.=20

There are, incidentally, some very polite Israeli soldiers at some
checkpoints, and we do not regard all Israelis as arrogant bastards. =
But,
like Gideon Levy, we do wonder about "a society whose spokesmen get so
pathologically excited by weapons and killing" and whose young soldiers =
are
allowed to get off on humiliating an entire population.=20

***=20

The destruction throughout the West Bank and Gaza is unspeakable. There =
are
really no words to describe it adequately. Frequent piles of rubble =
along
city streets testify to homes demolished because some hapless =
Palestinian
could not obtain a permit to build or because Israel decided a terrorist
lived there; piles of dirt block through-traffic on city streets and =
rural
roads because Israel has decided that Palestinians have no right to =
travel
here or there; some village roads simply end abruptly where Israel has =
built
a limited access highway where Palestinians are forbidden to drive; =
concrete
and steel and ugly cuts in the land have replaced the spectacularly
beautiful terraced, olive-studded hillsides around Jerusalem where =
Israel is
building vast highways to accommodate a few hundred thousand Israelis =
who
don't want to have to associate with the few million Palestinians in =
whose
midst they live; as a further measure to impede movement around the West
Bank, Israel has dug trenches across some roads and occasionally around
villages, where ugly mounds of earth now mar the landscape; in some =
areas
the digging has cut sewer lines, encircling some villages around Nablus =
with
raw sewage that people must somehow cross in order to leave the village;
once beautiful olive groves are filled with trees totally or partially =
cut
down or burned because angry Israeli settlers have decided they don't =
like
Palestinians; hilltops are covered by new Israeli outposts with ugly
temporary trailers on cleared land where olive groves once stood; roads =
are
torn up by Israeli tank treads, potholed or with deep cuts along their
length because Israel thinks (1) that it's a legitimate tactic of =
civilian
control to rampage in tanks through city streets and (2) that exercising
military control over another people's civilian population is legitimate =
in
the first place; in the spring rains, mud is pervasive because Israel =
has
fully or partially torn up the paved roads, piled dirt in the roads, dug
trenches, ruined sidewalks, torn up the landsc ape.=20

Israel is making a trash heap of the West Bank and Gaza. During a trip =
to
Jerusalem in 1985, we went with a group to visit the Israeli settlement =
of
Ofra and met with one of the early settler leaders, Schifra Blass. =
Blass,
who had come from the United States to help build a settlement on
Palestinian land, justified the settlement on the basis that this had =
been
Jewish land millennia before and because, as she said, Palestinians in =
the
neighboring town of Ramallah had made the town a trash heap. Ramallah in
1985 may not have been a pretty town--we don't know, never having seen =
it in
those days--but what we have just seen in 2003 throughout the West Bank
makes Blass's assignment of blame to the Palestinians a serious =
misplacement
of responsibility.=20

***=20

We have received an immense amount of support throughout this =
trip--support
that is extremely gratifying and that in fact sustained us through both
difficult and happy times. On a much smaller scale, we have also been
criticized--not only for meeting with Yasir Arafat, as we reported =
earlier,
but for not meeting with Hamas, for not going to Bethlehem, for not =
seeing
Hebron, for agreeing with Jeff Halper's criticisms of Israeli policies, =
even
by an autistic man for having shown ignorance of the true nature of =
autism
by conveying Halper's labeling of Israel as autistic. The most =
disturbing
criticism came in an email message from a woman in our home town who
suggested, even before we left Amman for Jerusalem, that our only =
interest
in going to Jerusalem and Palestine was to "stick it to the Israelis." =
We
didn't have a good understanding, she wrote, of the ambiguities in =
Israeli
society or the extent of opposition to Sharon's policies and didn't know =
the
extent of Israeli-Palestinian cooperation to bring peace.=20

Not only is it not true that we are unaware of the existence of "good"
Israelis who oppose Sharon: we are well aware of and have made a point =
over
the years, in talks and articles, of praising those courageous Israeli
journalists, scholars, and activists who have defied their government's
oppressive policies by working with Palestinians to end the occupation =
and
ease restrictions on Palestinians; until going to Palestine, in fact, =
most
of our information on the degree of Israeli oppression came from =
precisely
these Israelis. But this woman's effort to exonerate Israeli society =
because
there are some ambiguities in it, or because a minuscule proportion of =
that
society actively opposes the government's policies, is a bit of a =
whitewash.
It is not "sticking it to the Israelis" to report on what the Israeli
government is doing in the occupied territories, and even to do so =
without
constant reference to those few Israelis who oppose the government and =
its
policies. Israelis as a society elected the Sharon government to do =
their
business for them, and Israelis as a society must therefore share the
responsibility whenever the government's actions arouse criticism. All =
of
Israeli society lives within no more than a few miles of Jenin and =
Nablus,
of the Palestinian lands confiscated for Israeli roads and settlements, =
of
the Palestinian homes demolished, of the Palestinian installations =
bombed to
rubble, of the checkpoints. Not to know, not to care, that this is =
happening
is far more than a mere ambiguity. It is a gross dereliction of
responsibility, and all of Israeli society must be called to =
account--most
particularly because Israel is a democracy and has a choice. The fact =
that
some Israelis do know and do criticize does not exonerate "the Israelis" =
as
a whole. As Gideon Levy has said, one must wonder about "a society whose
spokesmen get so pathologically excited by weapons and killing."=20

***=20

There is ambiguity in Palestinian society as well, and Palestinians =
react
very differently to Israel's policies and Israel's domination over them.
Some become suicide bombers; the vast majority do not. The vast majority =
are
willing to live in peace with Israel, and have been willing for the last
couple of decades, if Israel will give them a decent small state that's
truly independent and sovereign. The vast majority do not care about
vengeance, as long as Israel will leave them alone. We met Palestinians =
who
are angry, Palestinians who are resigned, but not many who hate. One =
woman
spoke with anger of what she and her neighbors endure and after a long
disquisition said simply, "We are down now. But when we have our breath, =
we
will know our target. We will make them eat what we eat." One man, on =
the
other hand, more despairing, less angry, said that "God is very angry =
with
the people here." When asked if he meant that God was only angry with =
the
Israelis for what they do in the occupied territories, he said, "No. God
must not like the Palestinians either, or he'd help them."=20

***=20

Actually seeing the West Bank and Gaza was truly eye-opening, despite =
our
having worked on the issue and the conflict for 30 years. Flying over =
the
West Bank and seeing the pervasiveness of Israeli settlements, driving =
its
highways past huge concrete blocs of Israeli apartments that dot the =
once
pastoral hillsides around Jerusalem, gives one a different perspective =
that
cannot be gained even from extensive reading or from seeing films and
photographs. We had always wondered why Israeli settlers wanted to live
isolated in what seemed to be ghettos throughout the West Bank--heavily
fortified, to be sure, but ghettos nonetheless--surrounded by =
Palestinians:
200,000 Israelis (not counting the equal number who live in Jerusalem)
living among 2,000,000 Palestinians. But when you are there, it comes =
home
to you with graphic immediacy that it's the Palestinians who, despite =
their
far greater numbers, live in the ghettos. Israeli settlements occupy the
hilltops and the upper hillsides, a commanding presence looming over
Palestinian cities and villages in the valleys or on lower hills. =
Israeli
highways bisect Palestinian areas, cutting one Palestinian town from
another, enclosing them, trapping them. The land allotted to Israeli
settlements and military bases constitutes 42% of the land area of the =
West
Bank; Israeli highways take up another 17% of the land area. Tanks and
checkpoints enclose Palestinian towns. Walls and barbed wire fences =
enclose
the entire Gaza Strip; a wall, now being built well inside present West =
Bank
boundaries, will soon enclose a considerably smaller, Israeli-defined, =
new
West Bank. When before in history has an entire nation been caged, =
fenced in
behind walls that function like a prison or a concentration camp?=20

***=20

Palestinians in both Palestine and Amman made a point of telling us that
Arabs like and respect the American people, have always loved what =
America
stands for, but now hate the U.S. government and its policies. We heard =
this
so often that the message almost became a ritual. It's a sincere message
nonetheless; Arabs throughout the Middle East have always been careful =
to
distinguish between the American people and their government, have =
always
welcomed and admired Americans despite always knowing about and deeply
resenting U.S. support for Israel. Things are changing, however. The war =
in
Iraq, the abandon with which the U.S. military is killing Iraqis, and =
the
unquestioning support the U.S. gives to everything Israel does in =
Palestine
are together beginning to blur the distinction between the American =
people
and the government and to turn all sentiment into hatred, for people as =
well
as government. It needn't be this way.=20


Bill Christison joined the CIA in 1950, and served on the analysis side =
of
the Agency for 28 years. From the early 1970s he served as National
Intelligence Officer (principal adviser to the Director of Central
Intelligence on certain areas) for, at various times, Southeast Asia, =
South
Asia and Africa. Before he retired in 1979 he was Director of the CIA's
Office of Regional and Political Analysis, a 250-person unit.=20

Kathleen Christison also worked in the CIA, retiring in 1979. Since then =
she
has been mainly preoccupied by the issue of Palestine. She is the author =
of
Perceptions of Palestine and The Wound of Dispossession.=20

The Christison's can be reached at: christison@counterpunch.org



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Sent: Wednesday, April 16, 2003 4:59 PM




Subject: Fw: Final Thoughts from Palestine





Sent: Wednesday, April 16, 2003 4:41 PM




Subject: Final Thoughts from Palestine



http://www.c=
ounterpunch.org/christison04122003.html

CounterPunch &nbs=
p;=20
April 12, 2003 

It Need Not Be This Way 

Final Thoughts =
from=20
Palestine 

by Kathleen and Bill Christison former CIA political =
analysts=20


As we left East Jerusalem for Amman last week, on our way back =
home, we=20
were
struck by the cynicism of what appeared to be a concerted effort =
by=20
the
Israeli press and others in the media to justify, =
retrospectively,=20
Israel's
siege and destruction of Jenin a year ago because it is now =
clear=20
that U.S.
and British forces are doing the same thing in Iraq. =
Israeli papers=20
and
military columnists say, with evident satisfaction, that the=20
coalition
missile attacks on civilian marketplaces in Iraq should now =
make it=20
easier
for the U.S. to understand why Israel did what it did in =
Jenin.=20
Fighting
"terrorism," these papers suggest, is a messy business, and =
U.S. and=20
British
forces must now understand that this fight involves engaging =
with a=20
civilian
population and "getting your hands dirty," as one paper put =
it. Even=20
a BBC
television anchor, interviewing an Israeli military historian, =
made=20
the
comparison with Jenin, noting that when coalition forces enter =
Baghdad=20
they
may face the same kind of fighting that Israel did in Jenin. The =
Israeli=20
had
the decency to point out that what Israel did in Jenin was =
immoral, but=20
the
BBC interviewer persisted, discussing the difficulties of urban =
warfare=20
and
comparing the Jenin and the Baghdad situations as if the killing=20
of
civilians who get in the way of urban fighting is simply one of=20
those
unfortunate obstacles that military forces must cope with. In =
the=20
effort to
justify the military operations in each case, no one seems =
to focus=20
on the
dead civilians, the destroyed homes and buildings, the ruined =
lives,=20
or the
right of any population to defend itself from invading armies. =

It's
unsettling, not to say enraging, to see the actions of one =
murderous=20
army
justified by invoking the murderous tactics of another. How can =
this=20
be
happening? These commentators must not have seen Jenin. Maybe you =
have=20
to
have seen the destruction in Jenin to care about civilians. =


***=20


Some people do understand. The courageous Israeli commentator =
Gideon=20
Levy
has been writing about former Israeli "warmongers," now =
appearing as TV=20
news
experts, who glory in the destructive capabilities of cluster =
bombs=20
and
smart missiles that they unabashedly describe as "wreaking=20
havoc,"
"pulverizing," and "raining steel." None of these experts, =
Levy=20
notes, has
bothered to mention the killing and destruction that =
weapons like=20
these can
cause among innocent civilians. Nor, he says pointedly, has =
any of=20
them
thought to wonder "what happens to a society whose spokesmen get =

so
pathologically excited by weapons and killing." We need a Gideon =
Levy in=20
the
United States. 

*** 

The similarities between the =
Iraq war=20
and the war that's been raging for
years in Palestine are growing by =
the day.=20
A few days ago, American troops
in Iraq shot up a car carrying seven =
women=20
and children, killing them all.
Or maybe it was ten or eleven women =
and=20
children; we're still hearing
varying numbers. This occurred in the =
area=20
where several U.S. Marines had
been killed a few days earlier by a =
car bomb,=20
so of course, by some people's
lights, it's understandable that the =
Americans=20
would be frightened, on
alert, on the defensive, and over-eager to =
start=20
shooting--just like the
Israeli soldiers who man checkpoints =
throughout the=20
West Bank and Gaza and
who shoot up Palestinian civilians with insane =

regularity. What no one among
the media swarming around these areas, =
no one=20
at the Pentagon, no one in the
White House seems to notice is that, =
if the=20
Americans weren't in Iraq in the
first place, and if the Israelis =
weren't in=20
the West Bank and Gaza in the
first place, Iraqi civilians and =
Palestinian=20
civilians could go about their
daily business without always being =
regarded=20
as terrorists, without being
murdered. 

*** 

Israel is =
probably=20
the only country in the world where both the government
and popular =
opinion=20
support the war in Iraq. One East Jerusalem man whom we
came to know =
who=20
exercises regularly at a club frequented by both Israelis
and =
Palestinians=20
told us of overhearing a conversation between two Israelis
in the =
locker=20
room. One said, "The Americans and Brits are really doing a
good job =
for us."=20
The other responded, "We're all children of God." This
would seem to =
confirm=20
the fears of some of us cynics that the war is, and
has all along =
been=20
intended to be, the beginning of a Judeo-Christian war
against Islam. =

Muslims, of course, are not the children of God. 

*** 

The =
only=20
souvenir we're bringing home is an empty Israeli bullet shell =
found
on the=20
street in the old city of Nablus. Imagine having a foreign =
army's
shell=20
casings lying in your streets. Imagine your streets torn up by =
a
foreign=20
army's tank treads. Imagine your houses demolished by a =
foreign
army's=20
bulldozers and F-16s. 

*** 

A Ramallah man who has a=20
three-year-old daughter tells us that, in her
three-year-old world, =
Israeli=20
tanks are the monsters that children elsewhere
only imagine. Tanks =
destroy=20
and terrorize. When she is angry with her older
sister, she calls her =
sister=20
"a tank." This is the worst pejorative she can
think of. 

***=20


On our first encounter at an Israeli checkpoint, driving into =
Ramallah=20
from
Jerusalem, we had a minor argument with a brash young Israeli =
soldier.=20
"What
do you think of the IDF?" he asked as he looked over our =
passports.=20
Thinking
fast--not wanting either to endorse the IDF or so antagonize =
him=20
that he
wouldn't let us through, we said something feeble like, "It's =
all=20
right for
an army, but we wish you wouldn't be so hard on the =
Palestinians."=20
This
ticked him off, and he started raging about Palestinian suicide=20
bombers:
there has been a bus bombing in early March in Haifa, on a =
bus route=20
that he
traveled frequently, and didn't we know that he or one of his =
friends=20
could
have been killed? All Palestinians are dirt, he said, looking =
directly=20
at
our Palestinian taxi driver, and they're all alike. Now acutely =
conscious=20
of
his insults to our driver, we became a little bolder, agreeing =
that=20
deaths
in suicide bombings were tragic but noting that Israel has =
been=20
killing
Palestinians too. This really set him off, and he ranted on =
for a=20
while with
further insults to Palestinians and, when we didn't =
respond,=20
handed us back
our passports and waved us on. We resisted the =
temptation to=20
point out to
him that, as American taxpayers, we help pay his salary =
and he=20
should stop
acting like an arrogant bastard. We also resisted the =
temptation=20
to tell him
that, just as suicide bombings lead him to think that all =

Palestinians are
alike and to treat them all shabbily as a result, =
his=20
atrocious behavior
might lead us to think that all Israelis are as =
arrogant=20
and unpleasant as
he is and to treat them accordingly. Palestinians =
endure=20
this kind of abuse
every day of their lives, and most of those whom =
we told=20
of our encounter
laughed at our anger because this kind of disrespect =
and=20
humiliation is the
least serious aspect by far of what they face =
under=20
occupation. 

There are, incidentally, some very polite Israeli =
soldiers=20
at some
checkpoints, and we do not regard all Israelis as arrogant =
bastards.=20
But,
like Gideon Levy, we do wonder about "a society whose spokesmen =
get=20
so
pathologically excited by weapons and killing" and whose young =
soldiers=20
are
allowed to get off on humiliating an entire population. =


***=20


The destruction throughout the West Bank and Gaza is =
unspeakable. There=20
are
really no words to describe it adequately. Frequent piles of =
rubble=20
along
city streets testify to homes demolished because some hapless=20
Palestinian
could not obtain a permit to build or because Israel =
decided a=20
terrorist
lived there; piles of dirt block through-traffic on city =
streets=20
and rural
roads because Israel has decided that Palestinians have no =
right to=20
travel
here or there; some village roads simply end abruptly where =
Israel has=20
built
a limited access highway where Palestinians are forbidden to =
drive;=20
concrete
and steel and ugly cuts in the land have replaced the=20
spectacularly
beautiful terraced, olive-studded hillsides around =
Jerusalem=20
where Israel is
building vast highways to accommodate a few hundred =
thousand=20
Israelis who
don't want to have to associate with the few million=20
Palestinians in whose
midst they live; as a further measure to impede =

movement around the West
Bank, Israel has dug trenches across some =
roads and=20
occasionally around
villages, where ugly mounds of earth now mar the=20
landscape; in some areas
the digging has cut sewer lines, encircling =
some=20
villages around Nablus with
raw sewage that people must somehow cross =
in=20
order to leave the village;
once beautiful olive groves are filled =
with trees=20
totally or partially cut
down or burned because angry Israeli =
settlers have=20
decided they don't like
Palestinians; hilltops are covered by new =
Israeli=20
outposts with ugly
temporary trailers on cleared land where olive =
groves once=20
stood; roads are
torn up by Israeli tank treads, potholed or with =
deep cuts=20
along their
length because Israel thinks (1) that it's a legitimate =
tactic of=20
civilian
control to rampage in tanks through city streets and (2) =
that=20
exercising
military control over another people's civilian population =
is=20
legitimate in
the first place; in the spring rains, mud is pervasive =
because=20
Israel has
fully or partially torn up the paved roads, piled dirt in =
the=20
roads, dug
trenches, ruined sidewalks, torn up the landsc ape. =


Israel=20
is making a trash heap of the West Bank and Gaza. During a trip =
to
Jerusalem=20
in 1985, we went with a group to visit the Israeli settlement of
Ofra =
and met=20
with one of the early settler leaders, Schifra Blass. Blass,
who had =
come=20
from the United States to help build a settlement on
Palestinian =
land,=20
justified the settlement on the basis that this had been
Jewish land=20
millennia before and because, as she said, Palestinians in =
the
neighboring=20
town of Ramallah had made the town a trash heap. Ramallah in
1985 may =
not=20
have been a pretty town--we don't know, never having seen it in
those =

days--but what we have just seen in 2003 throughout the West =
Bank
makes=20
Blass's assignment of blame to the Palestinians a serious =
misplacement
of=20
responsibility. 

*** 

We have received an immense amount =
of=20
support throughout this trip--support
that is extremely gratifying =
and that=20
in fact sustained us through both
difficult and happy times. On a =
much=20
smaller scale, we have also been
criticized--not only for meeting =
with Yasir=20
Arafat, as we reported earlier,
but for not meeting with Hamas, for =
not going=20
to Bethlehem, for not seeing
Hebron, for agreeing with Jeff Halper's=20
criticisms of Israeli policies, even
by an autistic man for having =
shown=20
ignorance of the true nature of autism
by conveying Halper's labeling =
of=20
Israel as autistic. The most disturbing
criticism came in an email =
message=20
from a woman in our home town who
suggested, even before we left =
Amman for=20
Jerusalem, that our only interest
in going to Jerusalem and Palestine =
was to=20
"stick it to the Israelis." We
didn't have a good understanding, she =
wrote,=20
of the ambiguities in Israeli
society or the extent of opposition to =
Sharon's=20
policies and didn't know the
extent of Israeli-Palestinian =
cooperation to=20
bring peace. 

Not only is it not true that we are unaware of the=20
existence of "good"
Israelis who oppose Sharon: we are well aware of =
and have=20
made a point over
the years, in talks and articles, of praising those =

courageous Israeli
journalists, scholars, and activists who have =
defied their=20
government's
oppressive policies by working with Palestinians to end =
the=20
occupation and
ease restrictions on Palestinians; until going to =
Palestine,=20
in fact, most
of our information on the degree of Israeli oppression =
came=20
from precisely
these Israelis. But this woman's effort to exonerate =
Israeli=20
society because
there are some ambiguities in it, or because a =
minuscule=20
proportion of that
society actively opposes the government's =
policies, is a=20
bit of a whitewash.
It is not "sticking it to the Israelis" to report =
on what=20
the Israeli
government is doing in the occupied territories, and even =
to do=20
so without
constant reference to those few Israelis who oppose the =
government=20
and its
policies. Israelis as a society elected the Sharon government =
to do=20
their
business for them, and Israelis as a society must therefore =
share=20
the
responsibility whenever the government's actions arouse =
criticism. All=20
of
Israeli society lives within no more than a few miles of Jenin and =

Nablus,
of the Palestinian lands confiscated for Israeli roads and=20
settlements, of
the Palestinian homes demolished, of the Palestinian=20
installations bombed to
rubble, of the checkpoints. Not to know, not =
to care,=20
that this is happening
is far more than a mere ambiguity. It is a =
gross=20
dereliction of
responsibility, and all of Israeli society must be =
called to=20
account--most
particularly because Israel is a democracy and has a =
choice.=20
The fact that
some Israelis do know and do criticize does not =
exonerate "the=20
Israelis" as
a whole. As Gideon Levy has said, one must wonder about =
"a=20
society whose
spokesmen get so pathologically excited by weapons and=20
killing." 

*** 

There is ambiguity in Palestinian society =
as well,=20
and Palestinians react
very differently to Israel's policies and =
Israel's=20
domination over them.
Some become suicide bombers; the vast majority =
do not.=20
The vast majority are
willing to live in peace with Israel, and have =
been=20
willing for the last
couple of decades, if Israel will give them a =
decent=20
small state that's
truly independent and sovereign. The vast majority =
do not=20
care about
vengeance, as long as Israel will leave them alone. We met =

Palestinians who
are angry, Palestinians who are resigned, but not =
many who=20
hate. One woman
spoke with anger of what she and her neighbors endure =
and=20
after a long
disquisition said simply, "We are down now. But when we =
have our=20
breath, we
will know our target. We will make them eat what we eat." =
One man,=20
on the
other hand, more despairing, less angry, said that "God is =
very angry=20
with
the people here." When asked if he meant that God was only angry =
with=20
the
Israelis for what they do in the occupied territories, he said, =
"No.=20
God
must not like the Palestinians either, or he'd help them." =


***=20


Actually seeing the West Bank and Gaza was truly eye-opening, =
despite=20
our
having worked on the issue and the conflict for 30 years. Flying =
over=20
the
West Bank and seeing the pervasiveness of Israeli settlements, =
driving=20
its
highways past huge concrete blocs of Israeli apartments that dot =
the=20
once
pastoral hillsides around Jerusalem, gives one a different =
perspective=20
that
cannot be gained even from extensive reading or from seeing =
films=20
and
photographs. We had always wondered why Israeli settlers wanted =
to=20
live
isolated in what seemed to be ghettos throughout the West=20
Bank--heavily
fortified, to be sure, but ghettos =
nonetheless--surrounded by=20
Palestinians:
200,000 Israelis (not counting the equal number who =
live in=20
Jerusalem)
living among 2,000,000 Palestinians. But when you are =
there, it=20
comes home
to you with graphic immediacy that it's the Palestinians =
who,=20
despite their
far greater numbers, live in the ghettos. Israeli =
settlements=20
occupy the
hilltops and the upper hillsides, a commanding presence =
looming=20
over
Palestinian cities and villages in the valleys or on lower =
hills.=20
Israeli
highways bisect Palestinian areas, cutting one Palestinian =
town=20
from
another, enclosing them, trapping them. The land allotted to=20
Israeli
settlements and military bases constitutes 42% of the land =
area of=20
the West
Bank; Israeli highways take up another 17% of the land area. =
Tanks=20
and
checkpoints enclose Palestinian towns. Walls and barbed wire =
fences=20
enclose
the entire Gaza Strip; a wall, now being built well inside =
present=20
West Bank
boundaries, will soon enclose a considerably smaller,=20
Israeli-defined, new
West Bank. When before in history has an entire =
nation=20
been caged, fenced in
behind walls that function like a prison or a=20
concentration camp? 

*** 

Palestinians in both Palestine =
and Amman=20
made a point of telling us that
Arabs like and respect the American =
people,=20
have always loved what America
stands for, but now hate the U.S. =
government=20
and its policies. We heard this
so often that the message almost =
became a=20
ritual. It's a sincere message
nonetheless; Arabs throughout the =
Middle East=20
have always been careful to
distinguish between the American people =
and their=20
government, have always
welcomed and admired Americans despite always =
knowing=20
about and deeply
resenting U.S. support for Israel. Things are =
changing,=20
however. The war in
Iraq, the abandon with which the U.S. military is =
killing=20
Iraqis, and the
unquestioning support the U.S. gives to everything =
Israel=20
does in Palestine
are together beginning to blur the distinction =
between the=20
American people
and the government and to turn all sentiment into =
hatred, for=20
people as well
as government. It needn't be this way. =



Bill=20
Christison joined the CIA in 1950, and served on the analysis side =
of
the=20
Agency for 28 years. From the early 1970s he served as =
National
Intelligence=20
Officer (principal adviser to the Director of Central
Intelligence on =
certain=20
areas) for, at various times, Southeast Asia, South
Asia and Africa. =
Before=20
he retired in 1979 he was Director of the CIA's
Office of Regional =
and=20
Political Analysis, a 250-person unit. 

Kathleen Christison also =
worked=20
in the CIA, retiring in 1979. Since then she
has been mainly =
preoccupied by=20
the issue of Palestine. She is the author of
Perceptions of Palestine =
and The=20
Wound of Dispossession. 

The Christison's can be reached at: christison@counterpunch.org



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From jafujii@uci.edu  Thu Apr 17 20:56:32 2003
From: jafujii@uci.edu (Jim Fujii)
Date: Thu, 17 Apr 2003 12:56:32 -0700
Subject: [Ethnicstudies] A bully can be stopped. So can a mob
Message-ID: <001501c3051b$723c34b0$30bac380@ucigyqexhlhmwv>

This is a multi-part message in MIME format.

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"A bully can be stopped. So can a mob"

Tim Robbins lashes back at the lynch mob
calling for his head and those of other peace
activists.

Editor's note: Actor Tim Robbins delivered the
following speech to the National Press Corps in
Washington on Tuesday.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

April 16, 2003  |  I had originally been asked here
to talk about the war and our current political
situation but I have instead chosen to hijack this
opportunity and talk about baseball and show business.
Just kidding. Sort of.

I can't tell you how moved I have been at the
overwhelming support I have received from newspapers
throughout the country these past few days. I hold
no illusions that all of these journalists agree with
me on my views against the war. While the journalists'
outrage at the cancellation of our appearance in
Cooperstown is not about my views; it is about my right
to express these views. I am extremely grateful that
there are those of you out there still with a fierce
belief in constitutionally guaranteed rights. We need
you the press, now more than ever. This is a crucial
moment for all of us.

For all the ugliness and tragedy of 9/11 there was
a brief period afterwards where I held a great hope. In
the midst of the tears and shocked faces of New
Yorkers, in the midst of the lethal air we breathed as
we worked at ground zero, in the midst of my children's
terror at being so close to this crime against
humanity, in the midst of all of this I held onto a
glimmer of hope in the naive assumption that something
good could come out of all this. I imagined our leaders
seizing upon this moment of unity in America, this
moment when no one wanted to talk about Democrat vs.
Republican, white vs. black or any of the other
ridiculous divisions that dominate our public
discourse. I imagined our leaders going on television,
telling the citizens that although we all want to be at
Ground Zero we can't. But there is work that is needed
to be done all over America. Our help is needed at
community centers, to tutor children, to teach them to
read, our work is needed at old age homes to visit the
lonely and infirm, in gutted neighborhoods to rebuild
housing and clean up parks, and convert abandoned lots
into baseball fields. I imagined leadership that would
take this incredible energy, this generosity of spirit,
and create a new unity in America born out of the chaos
and tragedy of 9/11. A new unity that would send a
message to terrorists everywhere: If you attack us we
will become stronger, cleaner, better educated, more
unified. You will strengthen our commitment to justice
and democracy by your inhumane attacks on us. Like a
phoenix, out of the fire we will be reborn.

And then came the speech. "You are either with us
or against us." And the bombing began. And the old
paradigm was restored as our leader encouraged us to
show our patriotism by shopping and by volunteering to
join groups that would turn in their neighbor for any
suspicious behavior.

In the 19 months since 9/11 we have seen our democracy
compromised by fear and hatred. Basic inalienable
rights, due process, the sanctity of the home have been
quickly compromised in a climate of fear. A unified
American public has grown bitterly divided and a world
population that had profound sympathy and support for
us has grown contemptuous and distrustful, viewing us
as we once viewed the Soviet Union, as a rogue state.

This past weekend Susan and I and the three kids went
to Florida for a family reunion of sorts. Amidst the
alcohol and the dancing, sugar-rushing children there
was, of course, talk of the war. The most frightening
thing about the weekend was the amount of times we were
thanked for speaking out against the war because that
individual speaking thought it unsafe to do so in their
own community in their own life. "Keep talking. I
haven't been able to open my mouth."

A relative tells me that a history teacher tells his
11-year-old son, my nephew, that Susan Sarandon is
endangering the troops by her opposition to the war.
Another teacher in a different school asks our niece if
we were coming to the school play. "They're not welcome
here," said the molder of young minds. Another relative
tells me of a school board decision to cancel a civics
event that was proposing to have a moment of silence
for those who have died in the war because the students
were including dead Iraqi civilians in their silent
prayer. A teacher in another nephew's school is fired
for wearing a T-shirt with a peace sign on it. And a
friend of the family tells of listening to the radio
down South as the talk radio host calls for the murder
of a prominent antiwar activist.

Death threats have appeared on other prominent
peaceniks' doorsteps for their views against the war.
Relatives of ours have received threatening e-mails and
phone calls. My 13-year-old boy, who has done nothing
to anybody, has been embarrassed and humiliated by a
sadistic creep who writes, or rather, scratches, his
column with his fingers in the dirt. Susan and I have
been listed as traitors, as supporters of Saddam, and
various other epithets by the Aussie gossip rags
masquerading as newspapers and by their "fair and
balanced" electronic media cousins 19th Century Fox.
Apologies to Gore Vidal. Two weeks ago, the United Way
cancelled Susan's appearance at a conference on women's
leadership and both of us last week were told that both
we and the First Amendment were not welcome at the
Baseball Hall of Fame. A famous rock and roller called
me last week to thank me for speaking out against the
war only to go on to tell me that he could not speak
himself because he fears repercussions from Clear
Channel. "They promote our concert appearances," he
said. "They own most of the stations that play our
music. I can't come out against this war."

And here in Washington Helen Thomas finds herself
banished to the back of the room and uncalled on after
asking Ari Fleisher whether our showing prisoners of
war at Guant=E1namo Bay on television violated the Geneva
Convention.

A chill wind is blowing in this nation. A message
is being sent through the White House and its allies in
talk radio and Clear Channel and Cooperstown. "If you
oppose this administration there can and will be
ramifications." Every day the airwaves are filled with
warnings, veiled and unveiled threats, spewed invective
and hatred directed at any voice of dissent. And the
public, like so many relatives and friends I saw this
weekend, sit in mute opposition and in fear.

I'm sick of hearing about Hollywood being against
the war. Hollywood's heavy hitters, the real power
brokers and cover of the magazine stars have been
largely silent on this issue. But Hollywood, the
concept, has always been a popular target.

I remember when the Columbine High School shootings
happened, President Clinton criticized Hollywood for
contributing to this terrible tragedy. This as we were
dropping bombs over Kosovo. Could the violent actions
of our leaders contribute somewhat to the violent
fantasies our teenagers are having? Or is it all just
Hollywood and rock and roll? I remember reading at the
time that one of the shooters had tried to enlist to
fight the real war a week before he acted out his war
in real life at Columbine. I talked about this in the
press at the time and curiously no one accused me of
being unpatriotic for criticizing Clinton. In fact, the
same talk radio patriots that call us traitors today
engaged in daily personal attacks on their president
during the war in Kosovo.

Today, prominent politicians who have decried
violence in movies, (the "blame Hollywooders" if you
will), recently voted to give our current president the
power to unleash real violence in our current war. They
want us to stop the fictional violence but are OK with
the real kind. And these same people that tolerate the
real violence of war don't want to see the result of it
on the nightly news. Unlike the rest of the world our
news coverage of this war remains sanitized, without a
glimpse of the blood and gore inflicted upon our
soldiers or the women and children in Iraq.

Violence as a concept, an abstraction. It's very
strange. As we applaud the hard-edged realism of the
opening battle scene of Saving Private Ryan, we cringe
at the thought of seeing the same on the nightly news.
We are told it would be pornographic. We want no part
of reality in real life. We demand that war be
painstakingly realized on the screen but that war
remain imagined and conceptualized in real life.

And in the midst of all this madness, where is the
political opposition? Where have all the Democrats
gone? Long time passing, long time ago? With apologies
to Robert Byrd, I have to say it is pretty embarrassing
to live in a country where a five-foot-one comedian has
more guts than most politicians. We need leaders, not
pragmatists that cower before the spin zones of former
entertainment journalists. We need leaders who
understand the Constitution, Congressmen who don't, in
a moment of fear, abdicate their most important power,
the right to declare war, to the executive branch. And
please, can we stop the congressional sing-a-longs?

In this time when a citizenry applauds the liberation
of a country as it lives in fear of its own freedom,
when an administration official releases an attack ad
questioning the patriotism of a legless Vietnam veteran
running for Congress, when people all over the country
fear reprisal if they use their right to free speech,
it is time to get angry.

It is time to get fierce. It doesn't take much to
shift the tide. My 11-year-old nephew mentioned
earlier, a shy kid who never talks in class, stood
up to his history teacher who was questioning Susan's
patriotism. "That's my aunt you're talking about.
Stop it!" And the stunned teacher backtracked and
began stammering compliments in embarrassment.

Sports writers across the country reacted with such
overwhelming fury at the Hall of Fame that the
president of the Hall admitted he made a mistake
and Major League Baseball disavowed any connection
to the actions of the Hall's president. A bully can
be stopped. So can a mob. It takes one person with
the courage and a resolute voice. The journalists in
this country can battle back at those who would
re-write our Constitution in the Patriot Act II (or
Patriot, the sequel, as we would call it in Hollywood).
We are counting on you to star in that movie.
Journalists can insist that they not be used as
publicists by this administration. The next White House
correspondent to be called on by Ari Fleischer should
defer their question to the back of the room to the
banished journalist-du-jour. Any instance of
intimidation to free speech should be battled against.
Any acquiescence to intimidation at this point will
only lead to more intimidation. You have, whether you
like it or not, an awesome responsibility and an
awesome power.

The fate of discourse, the health of this republic
is in your hands, whether you write on the left or
the right. This is your time and the destiny you have
chosen. We lay the continuance of our democracy on
your desks and count on your pens to be mightier.
Millions are watching and waiting in mute frustration
and hope. Hoping for someone to defend the spirit and
letter of our Constitution and to defy the intimidation
that is visited upon us daily in the name of national
security and warped notions of patriotism. Our ability
to disagree, and our inherent right to question our
leaders and criticize their actions, define who we are.
To allow those rights to be taken away out of fear, to
punish people for their beliefs, to limit access in the
news media to differing opinions is to acknowledge our
democracy's defeat. These are challenging times. There
is a wave of hate that seeks to divide us, right and
left, pro-war and antiwar.

In the name of my 11-year-old nephew and all the
other unreported victims of this hostile and
unproductive environment of fear, let us try to find
our common ground. Let us celebrate this grand and
glorious experiment


________________________________________________________________
The best thing to hit the internet in years - Juno SpeedBand!
Surf the web up to FIVE TIMES FASTER!
Only $14.95/ month - visit www.juno.com to sign up today!

------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~-->
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=20

Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to =
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/=20



------=_NextPart_000_0012_01C304E0.C53E84A0
Content-Type: text/html;
	charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable









 
"A bully can be =
stopped. So can=20
a mob"

Tim Robbins lashes back at the lynch mob
calling for =
his head=20
and those of other peace
activists.

Editor's note: Actor Tim =
Robbins=20
delivered the
following speech to the National Press Corps =
in
Washington=20
on Tuesday.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

April 16, 2003  =
|  I=20
had originally been asked here
to talk about the war and our current=20
political
situation but I have instead chosen to hijack =
this
opportunity=20
and talk about baseball and show business.
Just kidding. Sort =
of.

I=20
can't tell you how moved I have been at the
overwhelming support I =
have=20
received from newspapers
throughout the country these past few days. =
I=20
hold
no illusions that all of these journalists agree with
me on =
my views=20
against the war. While the journalists'
outrage at the cancellation =
of our=20
appearance in
Cooperstown is not about my views; it is about my =
right
to=20
express these views. I am extremely grateful that
there are those of =
you out=20
there still with a fierce
belief in constitutionally guaranteed =
rights. We=20
need
you the press, now more than ever. This is a crucial
moment =
for all=20
of us.

For all the ugliness and tragedy of 9/11 there was
a =
brief=20
period afterwards where I held a great hope. In
the midst of the =
tears and=20
shocked faces of New
Yorkers, in the midst of the lethal air we =
breathed=20
as
we worked at ground zero, in the midst of my children's
terror =
at being=20
so close to this crime against
humanity, in the midst of all of this =
I held=20
onto a
glimmer of hope in the naive assumption that something
good =
could=20
come out of all this. I imagined our leaders
seizing upon this moment =
of=20
unity in America, this
moment when no one wanted to talk about =
Democrat=20
vs.
Republican, white vs. black or any of the other
ridiculous =
divisions=20
that dominate our public
discourse. I imagined our leaders going on=20
television,
telling the citizens that although we all want to be =
at
Ground=20
Zero we can't. But there is work that is needed
to be done all over =
America.=20
Our help is needed at
community centers, to tutor children, to teach =
them=20
to
read, our work is needed at old age homes to visit the
lonely =
and=20
infirm, in gutted neighborhoods to rebuild
housing and clean up =
parks, and=20
convert abandoned lots
into baseball fields. I imagined leadership =
that=20
would
take this incredible energy, this generosity of spirit,
and =
create a=20
new unity in America born out of the chaos
and tragedy of 9/11. A new =
unity=20
that would send a
message to terrorists everywhere: If you attack us=20
we
will become stronger, cleaner, better educated, more
unified. =
You will=20
strengthen our commitment to justice
and democracy by your inhumane =
attacks=20
on us. Like a
phoenix, out of the fire we will be reborn.

And =
then=20
came the speech. "You are either with us
or against us." And the =
bombing=20
began. And the old
paradigm was restored as our leader encouraged us=20
to
show our patriotism by shopping and by volunteering to
join =
groups that=20
would turn in their neighbor for any
suspicious behavior.

In =
the 19=20
months since 9/11 we have seen our democracy
compromised by fear and =
hatred.=20
Basic inalienable
rights, due process, the sanctity of the home have=20
been
quickly compromised in a climate of fear. A unified
American =
public=20
has grown bitterly divided and a world
population that had profound =
sympathy=20
and support for
us has grown contemptuous and distrustful, viewing =
us
as=20
we once viewed the Soviet Union, as a rogue state.

This past =
weekend=20
Susan and I and the three kids went
to Florida for a family reunion =
of sorts.=20
Amidst the
alcohol and the dancing, sugar-rushing children =
there
was, of=20
course, talk of the war. The most frightening
thing about the weekend =
was the=20
amount of times we were
thanked for speaking out against the war =
because=20
that
individual speaking thought it unsafe to do so in their
own =
community=20
in their own life. "Keep talking. I
haven't been able to open my=20
mouth."

A relative tells me that a history teacher tells=20
his
11-year-old son, my nephew, that Susan Sarandon is
endangering =
the=20
troops by her opposition to the war.
Another teacher in a different =
school=20
asks our niece if
we were coming to the school play. "They're not=20
welcome
here," said the molder of young minds. Another =
relative
tells me=20
of a school board decision to cancel a civics
event that was =
proposing to=20
have a moment of silence
for those who have died in the war because =
the=20
students
were including dead Iraqi civilians in their =
silent
prayer. A=20
teacher in another nephew's school is fired
for wearing a T-shirt =
with a=20
peace sign on it. And a
friend of the family tells of listening to =
the=20
radio
down South as the talk radio host calls for the murder
of a=20
prominent antiwar activist.

Death threats have appeared on other=20
prominent
peaceniks' doorsteps for their views against the =
war.
Relatives=20
of ours have received threatening e-mails and
phone calls. My =
13-year-old=20
boy, who has done nothing
to anybody, has been embarrassed and =
humiliated by=20
a
sadistic creep who writes, or rather, scratches, his
column with =
his=20
fingers in the dirt. Susan and I have
been listed as traitors, as =
supporters=20
of Saddam, and
various other epithets by the Aussie gossip=20
rags
masquerading as newspapers and by their "fair and
balanced"=20
electronic media cousins 19th Century Fox.
Apologies to Gore Vidal. =
Two weeks=20
ago, the United Way
cancelled Susan's appearance at a conference on=20
women's
leadership and both of us last week were told that both
we =
and the=20
First Amendment were not welcome at the
Baseball Hall of Fame. A =
famous rock=20
and roller called
me last week to thank me for speaking out against=20
the
war only to go on to tell me that he could not speak
himself =
because=20
he fears repercussions from Clear
Channel. "They promote our concert=20
appearances," he
said. "They own most of the stations that play =
our
music.=20
I can't come out against this war."

And here in Washington Helen =
Thomas=20
finds herself
banished to the back of the room and uncalled on=20
after
asking Ari Fleisher whether our showing prisoners of
war at=20
Guant=E1namo Bay on television violated the =
Geneva
Convention.

A chill=20
wind is blowing in this nation. A message
is being sent through the =
White=20
House and its allies in
talk radio and Clear Channel and Cooperstown. =
"If=20
you
oppose this administration there can and will =
be
ramifications." Every=20
day the airwaves are filled with
warnings, veiled and unveiled =
threats,=20
spewed invective
and hatred directed at any voice of dissent. And=20
the
public, like so many relatives and friends I saw this
weekend, =
sit in=20
mute opposition and in fear.

I'm sick of hearing about Hollywood =
being=20
against
the war. Hollywood's heavy hitters, the real power
brokers =
and=20
cover of the magazine stars have been
largely silent on this issue. =
But=20
Hollywood, the
concept, has always been a popular target.

I =
remember=20
when the Columbine High School shootings
happened, President Clinton=20
criticized Hollywood for
contributing to this terrible tragedy. This =
as we=20
were
dropping bombs over Kosovo. Could the violent actions
of our =
leaders=20
contribute somewhat to the violent
fantasies our teenagers are =
having? Or is=20
it all just
Hollywood and rock and roll? I remember reading at =
the
time=20
that one of the shooters had tried to enlist to
fight the real war a =
week=20
before he acted out his war
in real life at Columbine. I talked about =
this in=20
the
press at the time and curiously no one accused me of
being =
unpatriotic=20
for criticizing Clinton. In fact, the
same talk radio patriots that =
call us=20
traitors today
engaged in daily personal attacks on their =
president
during=20
the war in Kosovo.

Today, prominent politicians who have=20
decried
violence in movies, (the "blame Hollywooders" if =
you
will),=20
recently voted to give our current president the
power to unleash =
real=20
violence in our current war. They
want us to stop the fictional =
violence but=20
are OK with
the real kind. And these same people that tolerate =
the
real=20
violence of war don't want to see the result of it
on the nightly =
news.=20
Unlike the rest of the world our
news coverage of this war remains =
sanitized,=20
without a
glimpse of the blood and gore inflicted upon =
our
soldiers or the=20
women and children in Iraq.

Violence as a concept, an =
abstraction. It's=20
very
strange. As we applaud the hard-edged realism of the
opening =
battle=20
scene of Saving Private Ryan, we cringe
at the thought of seeing the =
same on=20
the nightly news.
We are told it would be pornographic. We want no =
part
of=20
reality in real life. We demand that war be
painstakingly realized on =
the=20
screen but that war
remain imagined and conceptualized in real=20
life.

And in the midst of all this madness, where is =
the
political=20
opposition? Where have all the Democrats
gone? Long time passing, =
long time=20
ago? With apologies
to Robert Byrd, I have to say it is pretty=20
embarrassing
to live in a country where a five-foot-one comedian =
has
more=20
guts than most politicians. We need leaders, not
pragmatists that =
cower=20
before the spin zones of former
entertainment journalists. We need =
leaders=20
who
understand the Constitution, Congressmen who don't, in
a =
moment of=20
fear, abdicate their most important power,
the right to declare war, =
to the=20
executive branch. And
please, can we stop the congressional=20
sing-a-longs?

In this time when a citizenry applauds the =
liberation
of=20
a country as it lives in fear of its own freedom,
when an =
administration=20
official releases an attack ad
questioning the patriotism of a =
legless=20
Vietnam veteran
running for Congress, when people all over the=20
country
fear reprisal if they use their right to free speech,
it =
is time=20
to get angry.

It is time to get fierce. It doesn't take much =
to
shift=20
the tide. My 11-year-old nephew mentioned
earlier, a shy kid who =
never talks=20
in class, stood
up to his history teacher who was questioning=20
Susan's
patriotism. "That's my aunt you're talking about.
Stop =
it!" And=20
the stunned teacher backtracked and
began stammering compliments in=20
embarrassment.

Sports writers across the country reacted with=20
such
overwhelming fury at the Hall of Fame that the
president of =
the Hall=20
admitted he made a mistake
and Major League Baseball disavowed any=20
connection
to the actions of the Hall's president. A bully can
be =
stopped.=20
So can a mob. It takes one person with
the courage and a resolute =
voice. The=20
journalists in
this country can battle back at those who =
would
re-write=20
our Constitution in the Patriot Act II (or
Patriot, the sequel, as we =
would=20
call it in Hollywood).
We are counting on you to star in that=20
movie.
Journalists can insist that they not be used as
publicists =
by this=20
administration. The next White House
correspondent to be called on by =
Ari=20
Fleischer should
defer their question to the back of the room to=20
the
banished journalist-du-jour. Any instance of
intimidation to =
free=20
speech should be battled against.
Any acquiescence to intimidation at =
this=20
point will
only lead to more intimidation. You have, whether =
you
like it=20
or not, an awesome responsibility and an
awesome power.

The =
fate of=20
discourse, the health of this republic
is in your hands, whether you =
write on=20
the left or
the right. This is your time and the destiny you =
have
chosen.=20
We lay the continuance of our democracy on
your desks and count on =
your pens=20
to be mightier.
Millions are watching and waiting in mute =
frustration
and=20
hope. Hoping for someone to defend the spirit and
letter of our =
Constitution=20
and to defy the intimidation
that is visited upon us daily in the =
name of=20
national
security and warped notions of patriotism. Our ability
to =

disagree, and our inherent right to question our
leaders and =
criticize their=20
actions, define who we are.
To allow those rights to be taken away =
out of=20
fear, to
punish people for their beliefs, to limit access in =
the
news=20
media to differing opinions is to acknowledge our
democracy's defeat. =
These=20
are challenging times. There
is a wave of hate that seeks to divide =
us, right=20
and
left, pro-war and antiwar.

In the name of my 11-year-old =
nephew=20
and all the
other unreported victims of this hostile =
and
unproductive=20
environment of fear, let us try to find
our common ground. Let us =
celebrate=20
this grand and
glorious=20
experiment


___________________________________________________=
_____________
The=20
best thing to hit the internet in years - Juno SpeedBand!
Surf the =
web up to=20
FIVE TIMES FASTER!
Only $14.95/ month - visit www.juno.com to sign up=20
today!

------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor=20
---------------------~-->
Rent DVDs Online-No late fees! Try =
Netflix for=20
FREE!
http://=
us.click.yahoo.com/YKLNcC/oEZFAA/i5gGAA/sitolB/TM
----------------=
-----------------------------------------------------~->

 =


Your=20
use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/ter=
ms/=20




------=_NextPart_000_0012_01C304E0.C53E84A0--



From jafujii@uci.edu  Fri Apr 18 01:38:53 2003
From: jafujii@uci.edu (Jim Fujii)
Date: Thu, 17 Apr 2003 17:38:53 -0700
Subject: [Ethnicstudies] Fw: Iraq's war of liberation from the Americans is just about to begin
Message-ID: <00c701c30542$e40a0c30$cdbac380@ucigyqexhlhmwv>

This is a multi-part message in MIME format.

------=_NextPart_000_00C4_01C30508.3719F0B0
Content-Type: text/plain;
	charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable


Sent: Thursday, April 17, 2003 5:22 PM
Subject: Iraq's war of liberation from the Americans is just about to =
begin


http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=3D397925

The Independent   17 April 2003=20

For the people on the streets, this is not liberation but a new colonial
oppression

America's war of 'liberation' may be over. But Iraq's war of liberation =
from
the Americans is just about to begin

Robert Fisk

It's going wrong, faster than anyone could have imagined. The army of
"liberation" has already turned into the army of occupation. The Shias =
are
threatening to fight the Americans, to create their own war of =
"liberation".


At night on every one of the Shia Muslim barricades in Sadr City, there =
are
14 men with automatic rifles. Even the US Marines in Baghdad are talking =
of
the insults being flung at them. "Go away! Get out of my face!" an =
American
soldier screamed at an Iraqi trying to push towards the wire surrounding =
an
infantry unit in the capital yesterday. I watched the man's face suffuse
with rage. "God is Great! God is Great!" the Iraqi retorted.

"Fuck you!"

The Americans have now issued a "Message to the Citizens of Baghdad", a
document as colonial in spirit as it is insensitive in tone. "Please =
avoid
leaving your homes during the night hours after evening prayers and =
before
the call to morning prayers," it tells the people of the city. "During =
this
time, terrorist forces associated with the former regime of Saddam =
Hussein,
as well as various criminal elements, are known to move through the area =
...
please do not leave your homes during this time. During all hours, =
please
approach Coalition military positions with extreme caution ..."

So now - with neither electricity nor running water - the millions of =
Iraqis
here are ordered to stay in their homes from dusk to dawn. Lockdown. =
It's a
form of imprisonment. In their own country. Written by the command of =
the
1st US Marine Division, it's a curfew in all but name.

"If I was an Iraqi and I read that," an Arab woman shouted at me, "I =
would
become a suicide bomber." And all across Baghdad you hear the same =
thing,
from Shia Muslim clerics to Sunni businessmen, that the Americans have =
come
only for oil, and that soon - very soon - a guerrilla resistance must =
start.
No doubt the Americans will claim that these attacks are "remnants" of
Saddam's regime or "criminal elements". But that will not be the case.

Marine officers in Baghdad were holding talks yesterday with a Shia =
militant
cleric from Najaf to avert an outbreak of fighting around the holy city. =
I
met the prelate before the negotiations began and he told me that =
"history
is being repeated". He was talking of the British invasion of Iraq in =
1917,
which ended in disaster for the British.

Everywhere are the signs of collapse. And everywhere the signs that
America's promises of "freedom" and "democracy" are not to be honoured.

Why, Iraqis are asking, did the United States allow the entire Iraqi =
cabinet
to escape? And they're right. Not just the Beast of Baghdad and his two
sons, Qusay and Uday, but the Vice-President, Taha Yassin Ramadan, the
Deputy Prime Minister, Tariq Aziz, Saddam's personal adviser, Dr A K
Hashimi, the ministers of defence, health, the economy, trade, even =
Mohammed
Saeed al-Sahaf, the Minister of Information who, long ago, in the days
before journalists cosied up to him, was the official who read out the =
list
of executed "brothers" in the purge that followed Saddam's revolution -
relatives of prisoners would dose themselves on valium before each Sahaf
appearance.

Here's what Baghdadis are noticing - and what Iraqis are noticing in all =
the
main cities of the country. Take the vast security apparatus with which
Saddam surrounded himself, the torture chambers and the huge bureaucracy
that was its foundation. President Bush promised that America was
campaigning for human rights in Iraq, that the guilty, the war =
criminals,
would be brought to trial. The 60 secret police headquarters in Baghdad =
are
empty, even the three-square-mile compound headquarters of the Iraqi
Intelligence Service.

I have been to many of them. But there is no evidence even that a single
British or US forensic officer has visited the sites to sift the wealth =
of
documents lying there or talk to the ex-prisoners returning to their =
former
places of torment. Is this idleness. Or is this wilful?

Take the Qasimiyeh security station beside the river Tigris. It's a =
pleasant
villa - once owned by an Iranian-born Iraqi who was deported to Iran in =
the
1980s. There's a little lawn and a shrubbery and at first you don't =
notice
the three big hooks in the ceiling of each room or the fact that big =
sheets
of red paper, decorated with footballers, have been pasted over the =
windows
to conceal the rooms from outsiders. But across the floors, in the =
garden,
on the roof, are the files of this place of suffering. They show, for
example, that the head of the torture centre was Hashem al-Tikrit, that =
his
deputy was called Rashid al-Nababy.

Mohammed Aish Jassem, an ex-prisoner, showed me how he was suspended =
from
the ceiling by Captain Amar al-Isawi, who believed Jassem was a member =
of
the religious Dawa party. "They put my hands behind my back like this =
and
tied them and then pulled me into the air by my tied wrists," he told =
me.
"They used a little generator to lift me up, right up to the ceiling, =
then
they'd release the rope in the hope of breaking my shoulder when I =
fell."

The hooks in the ceiling are just in front of Captain Isawi's desk. I
understood what this meant. There wasn't a separate torture chamber and
office for documentation. The torture chamber was the office. While the =
man
or woman shrieked in agony above him, Captain Isawi would sign papers, =
take
telephone calls and - given the contents of his bin - smoke many =
cigarettes
while he waited for the information he sought from his prisoners.

Were they monsters, these men? Yes. Are they sought by the Americans? =
No.
Are they now working for the Americans? Yes, quite possibly - indeed =
some of
them may well be in the long line of ex-security thugs who queue every
morning outside the Palestine Hotel in the hope of being re-hired by the =
US
Marines' Civil Affairs Unit.

The names of the guards at the Qasimiyeh torture centre in Baghdad are =
in
papers lying on the floor. They were Ahmed Hassan Alawi, Akil Shaheed,
Noaman Abbas and Moham-med Fayad. But the Americans haven't bothered to =
find
this out. So Messrs Alawi, Shaheed, Abbas and Fayad are welcome to apply =
to
work for them.

There are prisoner identification papers on the desks and in the =
cupboards.
What happened to Wahid Mohamed, Majid Taha, Saddam Ali or Lazim Hmoud?A =
lady
in a black chador approached the old torture centre. Four of her =
brothers
had been taken there and, later, when she went to ask what happened, she =
was
told all four had been executed. She was ordered to leave. She never saw =
or
buried their bodies. Ex-prisoners told me that there is a mass grave in =
the
Khedeer desert, but no one - least of all Baghdad's new occupiers - are
interested in finding it.

And the men who suffered under Saddam? What did they have to say? "We
committed no sin," one of them said to me, a 40-year-old whose prison =
duties
had included the cleaning of the hangman's trap of blood and faeces =
after
each execution. "We are not guilty of anything. Why did they do this to =
us?

"America, yes, it got rid of Saddam. But Iraq belongs to us. Our oil =
belongs
to us. We will keep our nationality. It will stay Iraq. The Americans =
must
go."

If the Americans and the British want to understand the nature of the
religious opposition here, they have only to consult the files of =
Saddam's
secret service archives. I found one, Report No 7481, dated 24 February =
this
year on the conflict between Sheikh Mohammed al-Yacoubi and Mukhtada =
Sadr,
the 22-year-old grandson of Mohammed Sadr, who was executed on Saddam's
orders more than two decades ago.

The dispute showed the passion and the determination with which the Shia
religious leaders fight even each other. But of course, no one has =
bothered
to read this material or even look for it.

At the end of the Second World War, German-speaking British and US
intelligence officers hoovered up every document in the thousands of =
Gestapo
and Abwehr bureaux across western Germany. The Russians did the same in
their zone. In Iraq, however, the British and Americans have simply =
ignored
the evidence.

There's an even more terrible place for the Americans to visit in =
Baghdad -
the headquarters of the whole intelligence apparatus, a massive =
grey-painted
block that was bombed by the US and a series of villas and office =
buildings
that are stashed with files, papers and card indexes. It was here that
Saddam's special political prisoners were brought for vicious =
interrogation
- electricity being an essential part of this - and it was here that =
Farzad
Bazoft, the Observer correspondent, was brought for questioning before =
his
dispatch to the hangman.

It's also graced with delicately shaded laneways, a creche - for the
families of the torturers - and a school in which one pupil had written =
an
essay in English on (suitably perhaps) Beckett's Waiting for Godot. =
There's
also a miniature hospital and a road named "Freedom Street" and =
flowerbeds
and bougainvillea. It's the creepiest place in all of Iraq.

I met - extraordinarily - an Iraqi nuclear scientist walking around the
compound, a colleague of the former head of Iraqi nuclear physics, Dr
Sharistani. "This is the last place I ever wanted to see and I will =
never
return to it," he said to me. "This was the place of greatest evil in =
all
the world."

The top security men in Saddam's regime were busy in the last hours,
shredding millions of documents. I found a great pile of black plastic
rubbish bags at the back of one villa, each stuffed with the shreds of
thousands of papers. Shouldn't they be taken to Washington or London and
reconstituted to learn their secrets?

Even the unshredded files contain a wealth of information. But again, =
the
Americans have not bothered - or do not want - to search through these
papers. If they did, they would find the names of dozens of senior
intelligence men, many of them identified in congratulatory letters they
insisted on sending each other every time they were promoted. Where now, =
for
example, is Colonel Abdulaziz Saadi, Captain Abdulsalam Salawi, Captain =
Saad
Ahmed al-Ayash, Colonel Saad Mohammed, Captain Majid Ahmed and scores of
others? We may never know. Or perhaps we are not supposed to know.

Iraqis are right to ask why the Americans don't search for this =
information,
just as they are right to demand to know why the entire Saddam cabinet -
every man jack of them - got away. The capture by the Americans of =
Saddam's
half-brother and the ageing Palestinian gunman Abu Abbas, whose last =
violent
act was 18 years ago, is pathetic compensation for this.

Now here's another question the Iraqis are asking - and to which I =
cannot
provide an answer. On 8 April, three weeks into the invasion, the =
Americans
dropped four 2,000lb bombs on the Baghdad residential area of Mansur. =
They
claimed they thought Saddam was hiding there. They knew they would kill
civilians because it was not, as one Centcom mandarin said, a "risk free
venture" (sic). So they dropped their bombs and killed 14 civilians in
Mansur, most of them members of a Christian family.

The Americans said they couldn't be sure they had killed Saddam until =
they
could carry out forensic tests at the site. But this turns out to have =
been
a lie. I went there two days ago. Not a single US or British official =
had
bothered to visit the bomb craters. Indeed, when I arrived, there was a
putrefying smell and families pulled the remains of a baby from the =
rubble.

No American officers have apologised for this appalling killing. And I =
can
promise them that the baby I saw being placed under a sheet of black =
plastic
was very definitely not Saddam Hussein. Had they bothered to look at =
this
place - as they claimed they would - they would at least have found the
baby. Now the craters are a place of pilgrimage for the people of =
Baghdad.

Then there's the fires that have consumed every one of the city's =
ministries
- save, of course, for the Ministry of Interior and the Ministry of Oil =
- as
well as UN offices, embassies and shopping malls. I have counted a total =
of
35 ministries now gutted by fire and the number goes on rising.

Yesterday I found myself at the Ministry of Oil, assiduously guarded by =
US
troops, some of whom were holding clothes over their mouths because of =
the
clouds of smoke swirling down on them from the neighbouring Ministry of
Agricultural Irrigation. Hard to believe, isn't it, that they were =
unaware
that someone was setting fire to the next building?

Then I spotted another fire, three kilometres away. I drove to the scene =
to
find flames curling out of all the windows of the Ministry of Higher
Education's Department of Computer Science. And right next to it, =
perched on
a wall, was a US Marine, who said he was guarding a neighbouring =
hospital
and didn't know who had lit the next door fire because "you can't look
everywhere at once".

Now I'm sure the marine was not being facetious or dishonest - should =
the
Americans not believe this story, he was Corporal Ted Nyholm of the 3rd
Regiment, 4th Marines and, yes, I called his fianc=E9e, Jessica, in the =
States
for him to pass on his love - but something is terribly wrong when US
soldiers are ordered simply to watch vast ministries being burnt by mobs =
and
do nothing about it.

Because there is also something dangerous - and deeply disturbing - =
about
the crowds setting light to the buildings of Baghdad, including the =
great
libraries and state archives. For they are not looters. The looters come
first. The arsonists turn up later, often in blue-and-white buses. I
followed one after its passengers had set the Ministry of Trade on fire =
and
it sped out of town.

The official US line on all this is that the looting is revenge - an
explanation that is growing very thin - and that the fires are started =
by
"remnants of Saddam's regime", the same "criminal elements", no doubt, =
who
feature in the marines' curfew orders. But people in Baghdad don't =
believe
Saddam's former supporters are starting these fires. And neither do I.

The looters make money from their rampages but the arsonists have to be
paid. The passengers in those buses are clearly being directed to their
targets. If Saddam had pre-paid them, they wouldn't start the fires. The
moment he disappeared, they would have pocketed the money and forgotten =
the
whole project.

So who are they, this army of arsonists? I recognised one the other day, =
a
middle-aged, unshaven man in a red T-shirt, and the second time he saw =
me he
pointed a Kalashnikov at me. What was he frightened of? Who was he =
working
for? In whose interest is it to destroy the entire physical =
infrastructure
of the state, with its cultural heritage? Why didn't the Americans stop
this?

As I said, something is going terribly wrong in Baghdad and something is
going on which demands that serious questions be asked of the United =
States
government. Why, for example, did Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defence,
claim last week that there was no widespread looting or destruction in
Baghdad? His statement was a lie. But why did he make it?

The Americans say they don't have enough troops to control the fires. =
This
is also untrue. If they don't, what are the hundreds of soldiers =
deployed in
the gardens of the old Iran-Iraq war memorial doing all day? Or the =
hundreds
camped in the rose gardens of the President Palace?

So the people of Baghdad are asking who is behind the destruction of =
their
cultural heritage: the looting of the archaeological treasures from the
national museum; the burning of the entire Ottoman, Royal and State
archives; the Koranic library; and the vast infrastructure of the nation =
we
claim we are going to create for them.

Why, they ask, do they still have no electricity and no water? In whose
interest is it for Iraq to be deconstructed, divided, burnt, =
de-historied,
destroyed? Why are they issued with orders for a curfew by their =
so-called
liberators?

And it's not just the people of Baghdad, but the Shias of the city of =
Najaf
and of Nasiriyah - where 20,000 protested at America's first attempt to =
put
together a puppet government on Wednesday - who are asking these =
questions.
Now there is looting in Mosul where thousands reportedly set fire to the
pro-American governor's car after he promised US help in restoring
electricity.

It's easy for a reporter to predict doom, especially after a brutal war =
that
lacked all international legitimacy. But catastrophe usually waits for
optimists in the Middle East, especially for false optimists who invade
oil-rich nations with ideological excuses and high-flown moral claims =
and
accusations, such as weapons of mass destruction, which are still =
unproved.
So I'll make an awful prediction. That America's war of "liberation" is
over. Iraq's war of liberation from the Americans is about to begin. In
other words, the real and frightening story starts now.



------=_NextPart_000_00C4_01C30508.3719F0B0
Content-Type: text/html;
	charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable









 




Sent: Thursday, April 17, 2003 5:22 PM


Subject: Iraq's war of liberation from the Americans is just =
about=20
to begin



http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=3D=
397925

The=20
Independent   17 April 2003 

For the people on the =
streets,=20
this is not liberation but a new colonial
oppression

America's =
war of=20
'liberation' may be over. But Iraq's war of liberation from
the =
Americans is=20
just about to begin

Robert Fisk

It's going wrong, faster =
than=20
anyone could have imagined. The army of
"liberation" has already =
turned into=20
the army of occupation. The Shias are
threatening to fight the =
Americans, to=20
create their own war of "liberation".


At night on every one =
of the=20
Shia Muslim barricades in Sadr City, there are
14 men with automatic =
rifles.=20
Even the US Marines in Baghdad are talking of
the insults being flung =
at=20
them. "Go away! Get out of my face!" an American
soldier screamed at =
an Iraqi=20
trying to push towards the wire surrounding an
infantry unit in the =
capital=20
yesterday. I watched the man's face suffuse
with rage. "God is Great! =
God is=20
Great!" the Iraqi retorted.

"Fuck you!"

The Americans have =
now=20
issued a "Message to the Citizens of Baghdad", a
document as colonial =
in=20
spirit as it is insensitive in tone. "Please avoid
leaving your homes =
during=20
the night hours after evening prayers and before
the call to morning=20
prayers," it tells the people of the city. "During this
time, =
terrorist=20
forces associated with the former regime of Saddam Hussein,
as well =
as=20
various criminal elements, are known to move through the area =
...
please do=20
not leave your homes during this time. During all hours, =
please
approach=20
Coalition military positions with extreme caution ..."

So now - =
with=20
neither electricity nor running water - the millions of Iraqis
here =
are=20
ordered to stay in their homes from dusk to dawn. Lockdown. It's =
a
form of=20
imprisonment. In their own country. Written by the command of the
1st =
US=20
Marine Division, it's a curfew in all but name.

"If I was an =
Iraqi and I=20
read that," an Arab woman shouted at me, "I would
become a suicide =
bomber."=20
And all across Baghdad you hear the same thing,
from Shia Muslim =
clerics to=20
Sunni businessmen, that the Americans have come
only for oil, and =
that soon -=20
very soon - a guerrilla resistance must start.
No doubt the Americans =
will=20
claim that these attacks are "remnants" of
Saddam's regime or =
"criminal=20
elements". But that will not be the case.

Marine officers in =
Baghdad were=20
holding talks yesterday with a Shia militant
cleric from Najaf to =
avert an=20
outbreak of fighting around the holy city. I
met the prelate before =
the=20
negotiations began and he told me that "history
is being repeated". =
He was=20
talking of the British invasion of Iraq in 1917,
which ended in =
disaster for=20
the British.

Everywhere are the signs of collapse. And everywhere =
the=20
signs that
America's promises of "freedom" and "democracy" are not to =
be=20
honoured.

Why, Iraqis are asking, did the United States allow the =
entire=20
Iraqi cabinet
to escape? And they're right. Not just the Beast of =
Baghdad and=20
his two
sons, Qusay and Uday, but the Vice-President, Taha Yassin =
Ramadan,=20
the
Deputy Prime Minister, Tariq Aziz, Saddam's personal adviser, Dr =
A=20
K
Hashimi, the ministers of defence, health, the economy, trade, even =

Mohammed
Saeed al-Sahaf, the Minister of Information who, long ago, =
in the=20
days
before journalists cosied up to him, was the official who read =
out the=20
list
of executed "brothers" in the purge that followed Saddam's =
revolution=20
-
relatives of prisoners would dose themselves on valium before each=20
Sahaf
appearance.

Here's what Baghdadis are noticing - and =
what Iraqis=20
are noticing in all the
main cities of the country. Take the vast =
security=20
apparatus with which
Saddam surrounded himself, the torture chambers =
and the=20
huge bureaucracy
that was its foundation. President Bush promised =
that=20
America was
campaigning for human rights in Iraq, that the guilty, =
the war=20
criminals,
would be brought to trial. The 60 secret police =
headquarters in=20
Baghdad are
empty, even the three-square-mile compound headquarters =
of the=20
Iraqi
Intelligence Service.

I have been to many of them. But =
there is=20
no evidence even that a single
British or US forensic officer has =
visited the=20
sites to sift the wealth of
documents lying there or talk to the =
ex-prisoners=20
returning to their former
places of torment. Is this idleness. Or is =
this=20
wilful?

Take the Qasimiyeh security station beside the river =
Tigris. It's=20
a pleasant
villa - once owned by an Iranian-born Iraqi who was =
deported to=20
Iran in the
1980s. There's a little lawn and a shrubbery and at first =
you=20
don't notice
the three big hooks in the ceiling of each room or the =
fact that=20
big sheets
of red paper, decorated with footballers, have been pasted =
over=20
the windows
to conceal the rooms from outsiders. But across the =
floors, in=20
the garden,
on the roof, are the files of this place of suffering. =
They show,=20
for
example, that the head of the torture centre was Hashem =
al-Tikrit, that=20
his
deputy was called Rashid al-Nababy.

Mohammed Aish Jassem, =
an=20
ex-prisoner, showed me how he was suspended from
the ceiling by =
Captain Amar=20
al-Isawi, who believed Jassem was a member of
the religious Dawa =
party. "They=20
put my hands behind my back like this and
tied them and then pulled =
me into=20
the air by my tied wrists," he told me.
"They used a little generator =
to lift=20
me up, right up to the ceiling, then
they'd release the rope in the =
hope of=20
breaking my shoulder when I fell."

The hooks in the ceiling are =
just in=20
front of Captain Isawi's desk. I
understood what this meant. There =
wasn't a=20
separate torture chamber and
office for documentation. The torture =
chamber=20
was the office. While the man
or woman shrieked in agony above him, =
Captain=20
Isawi would sign papers, take
telephone calls and - given the =
contents of his=20
bin - smoke many cigarettes
while he waited for the information he =
sought=20
from his prisoners.

Were they monsters, these men? Yes. Are they =
sought=20
by the Americans? No.
Are they now working for the Americans? Yes, =
quite=20
possibly - indeed some of
them may well be in the long line of =
ex-security=20
thugs who queue every
morning outside the Palestine Hotel in the hope =
of=20
being re-hired by the US
Marines' Civil Affairs Unit.

The =
names of the=20
guards at the Qasimiyeh torture centre in Baghdad are in
papers lying =
on the=20
floor. They were Ahmed Hassan Alawi, Akil Shaheed,
Noaman Abbas and =
Moham-med=20
Fayad. But the Americans haven't bothered to find
this out. So Messrs =
Alawi,=20
Shaheed, Abbas and Fayad are welcome to apply to
work for =
them.

There=20
are prisoner identification papers on the desks and in the =
cupboards.
What=20
happened to Wahid Mohamed, Majid Taha, Saddam Ali or Lazim Hmoud?A =
lady
in a=20
black chador approached the old torture centre. Four of her =
brothers
had been=20
taken there and, later, when she went to ask what happened, she =
was
told all=20
four had been executed. She was ordered to leave. She never saw =
or
buried=20
their bodies. Ex-prisoners told me that there is a mass grave in =
the
Khedeer=20
desert, but no one - least of all Baghdad's new occupiers - =
are
interested in=20
finding it.

And the men who suffered under Saddam? What did they =
have to=20
say? "We
committed no sin," one of them said to me, a 40-year-old =
whose=20
prison duties
had included the cleaning of the hangman's trap of =
blood and=20
faeces after
each execution. "We are not guilty of anything. Why did =
they do=20
this to us?

"America, yes, it got rid of Saddam. But Iraq belongs =
to us.=20
Our oil belongs
to us. We will keep our nationality. It will stay =
Iraq. The=20
Americans must
go."

If the Americans and the British want to=20
understand the nature of the
religious opposition here, they have =
only to=20
consult the files of Saddam's
secret service archives. I found one, =
Report No=20
7481, dated 24 February this
year on the conflict between Sheikh =
Mohammed=20
al-Yacoubi and Mukhtada Sadr,
the 22-year-old grandson of Mohammed =
Sadr, who=20
was executed on Saddam's
orders more than two decades ago.

The =
dispute=20
showed the passion and the determination with which the =
Shia
religious=20
leaders fight even each other. But of course, no one has bothered
to =
read=20
this material or even look for it.

At the end of the Second World =
War,=20
German-speaking British and US
intelligence officers hoovered up =
every=20
document in the thousands of Gestapo
and Abwehr bureaux across =
western=20
Germany. The Russians did the same in
their zone. In Iraq, however, =
the=20
British and Americans have simply ignored
the =
evidence.

There's an=20
even more terrible place for the Americans to visit in Baghdad -
the=20
headquarters of the whole intelligence apparatus, a massive=20
grey-painted
block that was bombed by the US and a series of villas =
and=20
office buildings
that are stashed with files, papers and card =
indexes. It was=20
here that
Saddam's special political prisoners were brought for =
vicious=20
interrogation
- electricity being an essential part of this - and it =
was here=20
that Farzad
Bazoft, the Observer correspondent, was brought for =
questioning=20
before his
dispatch to the hangman.

It's also graced with =
delicately=20
shaded laneways, a creche - for the
families of the torturers - and a =
school=20
in which one pupil had written an
essay in English on (suitably =
perhaps)=20
Beckett's Waiting for Godot. There's
also a miniature hospital and a =
road=20
named "Freedom Street" and flowerbeds
and bougainvillea. It's the =
creepiest=20
place in all of Iraq.

I met - extraordinarily - an Iraqi nuclear=20
scientist walking around the
compound, a colleague of the former head =
of=20
Iraqi nuclear physics, Dr
Sharistani. "This is the last place I ever =
wanted=20
to see and I will never
return to it," he said to me. "This was the =
place of=20
greatest evil in all
the world."

The top security men in =
Saddam's=20
regime were busy in the last hours,
shredding millions of documents. =
I found=20
a great pile of black plastic
rubbish bags at the back of one villa, =
each=20
stuffed with the shreds of
thousands of papers. Shouldn't they be =
taken to=20
Washington or London and
reconstituted to learn their =
secrets?

Even=20
the unshredded files contain a wealth of information. But again,=20
the
Americans have not bothered - or do not want - to search through=20
these
papers. If they did, they would find the names of dozens of=20
senior
intelligence men, many of them identified in congratulatory =
letters=20
they
insisted on sending each other every time they were promoted. =
Where now,=20
for
example, is Colonel Abdulaziz Saadi, Captain Abdulsalam Salawi, =
Captain=20
Saad
Ahmed al-Ayash, Colonel Saad Mohammed, Captain Majid Ahmed and =
scores=20
of
others? We may never know. Or perhaps we are not supposed to=20
know.

Iraqis are right to ask why the Americans don't search for =
this=20
information,
just as they are right to demand to know why the entire =
Saddam=20
cabinet -
every man jack of them - got away. The capture by the =
Americans of=20
Saddam's
half-brother and the ageing Palestinian gunman Abu Abbas, =
whose last=20
violent
act was 18 years ago, is pathetic compensation for =
this.

Now=20
here's another question the Iraqis are asking - and to which I =
cannot
provide=20
an answer. On 8 April, three weeks into the invasion, the =
Americans
dropped=20
four 2,000lb bombs on the Baghdad residential area of Mansur. =
They
claimed=20
they thought Saddam was hiding there. They knew they would =
kill
civilians=20
because it was not, as one Centcom mandarin said, a "risk =
free
venture"=20
(sic). So they dropped their bombs and killed 14 civilians in
Mansur, =
most of=20
them members of a Christian family.

The Americans said they =
couldn't be=20
sure they had killed Saddam until they
could carry out forensic tests =
at the=20
site. But this turns out to have been
a lie. I went there two days =
ago. Not a=20
single US or British official had
bothered to visit the bomb craters. =
Indeed,=20
when I arrived, there was a
putrefying smell and families pulled the =
remains=20
of a baby from the rubble.

No American officers have apologised =
for this=20
appalling killing. And I can
promise them that the baby I saw being =
placed=20
under a sheet of black plastic
was very definitely not Saddam =
Hussein. Had=20
they bothered to look at this
place - as they claimed they would - =
they would=20
at least have found the
baby. Now the craters are a place of =
pilgrimage for=20
the people of Baghdad.

Then there's the fires that have consumed =
every=20
one of the city's ministries
- save, of course, for the Ministry of =
Interior=20
and the Ministry of Oil - as
well as UN offices, embassies and =
shopping=20
malls. I have counted a total of
35 ministries now gutted by fire and =
the=20
number goes on rising.

Yesterday I found myself at the Ministry =
of Oil,=20
assiduously guarded by US
troops, some of whom were holding clothes =
over=20
their mouths because of the
clouds of smoke swirling down on them =
from the=20
neighbouring Ministry of
Agricultural Irrigation. Hard to believe, =
isn't it,=20
that they were unaware
that someone was setting fire to the next=20
building?

Then I spotted another fire, three kilometres away. I =
drove to=20
the scene to
find flames curling out of all the windows of the =
Ministry of=20
Higher
Education's Department of Computer Science. And right next to =
it,=20
perched on
a wall, was a US Marine, who said he was guarding a =
neighbouring=20
hospital
and didn't know who had lit the next door fire because "you =
can't=20
look
everywhere at once".

Now I'm sure the marine was not =
being=20
facetious or dishonest - should the
Americans not believe this story, =
he was=20
Corporal Ted Nyholm of the 3rd
Regiment, 4th Marines and, yes, I =
called his=20
fianc=E9e, Jessica, in the States
for him to pass on his love - but =
something=20
is terribly wrong when US
soldiers are ordered simply to watch vast=20
ministries being burnt by mobs and
do nothing about =
it.

Because there=20
is also something dangerous - and deeply disturbing - about
the =
crowds=20
setting light to the buildings of Baghdad, including the =
great
libraries and=20
state archives. For they are not looters. The looters come
first. The =

arsonists turn up later, often in blue-and-white buses. I
followed =
one after=20
its passengers had set the Ministry of Trade on fire and
it sped out =
of=20
town.

The official US line on all this is that the looting is =
revenge -=20
an
explanation that is growing very thin - and that the fires are =
started=20
by
"remnants of Saddam's regime", the same "criminal elements", no =
doubt,=20
who
feature in the marines' curfew orders. But people in Baghdad =
don't=20
believe
Saddam's former supporters are starting these fires. And =
neither do=20
I.

The looters make money from their rampages but the arsonists =
have to=20
be
paid. The passengers in those buses are clearly being directed to=20
their
targets. If Saddam had pre-paid them, they wouldn't start the =
fires.=20
The
moment he disappeared, they would have pocketed the money and =
forgotten=20
the
whole project.

So who are they, this army of arsonists? I=20
recognised one the other day, a
middle-aged, unshaven man in a red =
T-shirt,=20
and the second time he saw me he
pointed a Kalashnikov at me. What =
was he=20
frightened of? Who was he working
for? In whose interest is it to =
destroy the=20
entire physical infrastructure
of the state, with its cultural =
heritage? Why=20
didn't the Americans stop
this?

As I said, something is going =
terribly=20
wrong in Baghdad and something is
going on which demands that serious =

questions be asked of the United States
government. Why, for example, =
did=20
Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defence,
claim last week that there was =
no=20
widespread looting or destruction in
Baghdad? His statement was a =
lie. But=20
why did he make it?

The Americans say they don't have enough =
troops to=20
control the fires. This
is also untrue. If they don't, what are the =
hundreds=20
of soldiers deployed in
the gardens of the old Iran-Iraq war memorial =
doing=20
all day? Or the hundreds
camped in the rose gardens of the President=20
Palace?

So the people of Baghdad are asking who is behind the =
destruction=20
of their
cultural heritage: the looting of the archaeological =
treasures from=20
the
national museum; the burning of the entire Ottoman, Royal and=20
State
archives; the Koranic library; and the vast infrastructure of =
the=20
nation we
claim we are going to create for them.

Why, they =
ask, do=20
they still have no electricity and no water? In whose
interest is it =
for Iraq=20
to be deconstructed, divided, burnt, de-historied,
destroyed? Why are =
they=20
issued with orders for a curfew by their =
so-called
liberators?

And=20
it's not just the people of Baghdad, but the Shias of the city of =
Najaf
and=20
of Nasiriyah - where 20,000 protested at America's first attempt to=20
put
together a puppet government on Wednesday - who are asking these=20
questions.
Now there is looting in Mosul where thousands reportedly =
set fire=20
to the
pro-American governor's car after he promised US help in=20
restoring
electricity.

It's easy for a reporter to predict =
doom,=20
especially after a brutal war that
lacked all international =
legitimacy. But=20
catastrophe usually waits for
optimists in the Middle East, =
especially for=20
false optimists who invade
oil-rich nations with ideological excuses =
and=20
high-flown moral claims and
accusations, such as weapons of mass =
destruction,=20
which are still unproved.
So I'll make an awful prediction. That =
America's=20
war of "liberation" is
over. Iraq's war of liberation from the =
Americans is=20
about to begin. In
other words, the real and frightening story starts =

now.



------=_NextPart_000_00C4_01C30508.3719F0B0--



From jafujii@uci.edu  Fri Apr 18 01:42:28 2003
From: jafujii@uci.edu (Jim Fujii)
Date: Thu, 17 Apr 2003 17:42:28 -0700
Subject: [Ethnicstudies] Fw: Why The Anti-War Movement Was Right
Message-ID: <00f701c30543$643c7fa0$cdbac380@ucigyqexhlhmwv>

This is a multi-part message in MIME format.

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Content-Type: text/plain;
	charset="iso-8859-1"
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Sent: Thursday, April 17, 2003 5:23 PM
Subject: Why The Anti-War Movement Was Right


http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemID=3D14853

Why The Anti-War Movement Was Right=20

By Arianna Huffington=20

The Bible tells us that pride goeth before the fall. In Iraq, it cameth
right after it.=20

>From the moment that statue of Saddam hit the ground, the mood around =
the
Rumsfeld campfire has been all high-fives, I-told-you-sos, and endless =
smug
prattling about how the speedy fall of Baghdad is proof positive that =
those
who opposed the invasion of Iraq were dead wrong.=20

What utter nonsense. In fact, the speedy fall of Baghdad proves the =
anti-war
movement was dead right.=20

The whole pretext for our unilateral charge into Iraq was that the =
American
people were in imminent danger from Saddam and his mighty war machine. =
The
threat was so clear and present that we couldn't even give inspectors
searching for weapons of mass destruction -- hey, remember those? -- =
another
30 days, as France had wanted.=20

Well, it turns out that, far from being on the verge of destroying =
Western
civilization, Saddam and his 21st century Gestapo couldn't even muster a
half-hearted defense of their own capital. The hawks' cakewalk disproves
their own dire warnings. They can't have it both ways. The invasion has
proved wildly successful in one other regard: It has unified most of the
world -- especially the Arab world -- against us.=20

Back in 1991, more than half-a-dozen Arab nations were part of our =
Desert
Storm coalition. Operation Iraqi Freedom's "coalition of the willing" =
had
zero. Not even the polygamous potentates of Kuwait -- whose butts we =
saved
last time out and who were most threatened by whatever threat Iraq still
presented -- would join us. And, I'm sorry, but substituting Bulgaria =
and
the island of Tonga for Egypt and Oman is just not going to cut it when =
it
comes to winning hearts and minds on the Arab street.=20

In fact, almost everything about the invasion -- from the go-it-alone
build-up to the mayhem the fall of Saddam has unleashed -- has played =
right
into the hands of those intent on demonizing our country. Islamic =
extremists
must be having a field day signing up recruits for the holy war they're
preparing to wage against us. Instead of Uncle Sam wants you, their
recruiting posters feature a different kind of patriotic image: an =
American
soldier ill-advisedly draping the American flag over Saddam's face.=20

The anti-war movement did not oppose the war out of fear that America =
was
going to lose. It was the Bush administration's pathological and frantic
obsession with an immediate, damn-the-consequences invasion that fueled =
the
protests.=20

And please don't point to jubilant Iraqis dancing in the streets to =
validate
the case for "pre-emptive liberation." You'd be doing the Baghdad =
Bugaloo
too if the murderous tyrant who'd been eating off golden plates while =
your
family starved finally got what was coming to him. It in no way proves =
that
running roughshod over international law and pouring Iraqi oil -- now
brought to you by the good folks at Halliburton -- onto the flames of
anti-American hatred was a good idea. It wasn't before the war, and it =
still
isn't now. The unintended consequences have barely begun to unfold.=20

And the idea that our slamdunk of Saddam actually proves the White House =
was
right is particularly dangerous because it encourages the Wolfowitzes =
and
the Perles and the Cheneys to argue that we should be invading Syria or =
Iran
or North Korea or Cuba as soon as we catch our breath. They've tasted =
blood.


It's important to remember that the Arab world has seen a very different =
war
than we have. They are seeing babies with limbs blown off, children =
wailing
beside their dead mothers, Arab journalists killed by American tanks and
bombers, holy men hacked to death and dragged through the streets. They =
are
seeing American forces leaving behind a wake of destruction, looting,
hunger, humiliation, and chaos.=20

Who's been handling our war PR, Osama bin Laden? The language and =
imagery
are all wrong. Having Tom DeLay gush about our "army of virtue" at the =
same
time we're blowing up mosques is definitely not sending the right =
message to
a Muslim world already suspicious that we're waging a war on Islam.=20

Neither is Ari Fleischer's claim that the administration can't do =
anything
to keep Christian missionaries -- including those who have described the
Islamic prophet Muhammad as a "demon-possessed pedophile" and a =
"terrorist"
-- from going on a holy crusade to Baghdad. You think the Arab world =
might
take that the wrong way? If there is one thing that could bring Sunnis =
and
Shiites together, it's the common hatred of evangelical zealots who
denigrate their prophet.=20

And it doesn't help to have the American media referring to Jay Garner, =
the
retired general Don Rumsfeld picked to oversee the rebuilding of Iraq, =
as
"viceroy." It reeks of colonial imperialism. Why not just call him "Head
Bwana?" Or "Garner of Arabia?" I didn't realize the Supreme Court had =
handed
Bush a scepter to go along with the Florida recount.=20

The powerful role that shame and humiliation have played in shaping =
world
history is considerable, but something the Bush team seems utterly =
clueless
about. Which is why the anti-war movement must be stalwart in its =
refusal to
be silenced or browbeaten by the gloating "I told you so" chorus on the
right. On the contrary, it needs to make sure that the doctrine of
preemptive invasion is forever buried in the sands of Iraq.=20

Especially as the administration, high on the heady fumes of Saddam's
ouster, turns its covetous eyes on Syria. I give it less than a week =
before
someone starts making the case that President Assad is the next, next
Hitler.=20

------=20

Arianna Huffington is the author of "Pigs at the Trough: How Corporate =
Greed
and Political Corruption are Undermining America." For information on =
the
book, visit www.PigsAtTheTrough.com=20

If you have questions or comments, contact Arianna at
arianna@ariannaonline.com





------=_NextPart_000_00F4_01C30508.B74670B0
Content-Type: text/html;
	charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable









Sent: Thursday, April 17, 2003 5:23 PM




Subject: Why The Anti-War Movement Was Right



http:=
//www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemID=3D14853

Why=20
The Anti-War Movement Was Right 

By Arianna Huffington =


The Bible=20
tells us that pride goeth before the fall. In Iraq, it cameth
right =
after it.=20


>From the moment that statue of Saddam hit the ground, the =
mood=20
around the
Rumsfeld campfire has been all high-fives, I-told-you-sos, =
and=20
endless smug
prattling about how the speedy fall of Baghdad is proof =
positive=20
that those
who opposed the invasion of Iraq were dead wrong. =


What=20
utter nonsense. In fact, the speedy fall of Baghdad proves the=20
anti-war
movement was dead right. 

The whole pretext for our=20
unilateral charge into Iraq was that the American
people were in =
imminent=20
danger from Saddam and his mighty war machine. The
threat was so =
clear and=20
present that we couldn't even give inspectors
searching for weapons =
of mass=20
destruction -- hey, remember those? -- another
30 days, as France had =
wanted.=20


Well, it turns out that, far from being on the verge of =
destroying=20
Western
civilization, Saddam and his 21st century Gestapo couldn't =
even=20
muster a
half-hearted defense of their own capital. The hawks' =
cakewalk=20
disproves
their own dire warnings. They can't have it both ways. The =
invasion=20
has
proved wildly successful in one other regard: It has unified most =
of=20
the
world -- especially the Arab world -- against us. 

Back in =
1991,=20
more than half-a-dozen Arab nations were part of our Desert
Storm =
coalition.=20
Operation Iraqi Freedom's "coalition of the willing" had
zero. Not =
even the=20
polygamous potentates of Kuwait -- whose butts we saved
last time out =
and who=20
were most threatened by whatever threat Iraq still
presented -- would =
join=20
us. And, I'm sorry, but substituting Bulgaria and
the island of Tonga =
for=20
Egypt and Oman is just not going to cut it when it
comes to winning =
hearts=20
and minds on the Arab street. 

In fact, almost everything about =
the=20
invasion -- from the go-it-alone
build-up to the mayhem the fall of =
Saddam=20
has unleashed -- has played right
into the hands of those intent on=20
demonizing our country. Islamic extremists
must be having a field day =
signing=20
up recruits for the holy war they're
preparing to wage against us. =
Instead of=20
Uncle Sam wants you, their
recruiting posters feature a different =
kind of=20
patriotic image: an American
soldier ill-advisedly draping the =
American flag=20
over Saddam's face. 

The anti-war movement did not oppose the war =
out of=20
fear that America was
going to lose. It was the Bush administration's =

pathological and frantic
obsession with an immediate, =
damn-the-consequences=20
invasion that fueled the
protests. 

And please don't point to =
jubilant=20
Iraqis dancing in the streets to validate
the case for "pre-emptive=20
liberation." You'd be doing the Baghdad Bugaloo
too if the murderous =
tyrant=20
who'd been eating off golden plates while your
family starved finally =
got=20
what was coming to him. It in no way proves that
running roughshod =
over=20
international law and pouring Iraqi oil -- now
brought to you by the =
good=20
folks at Halliburton -- onto the flames of
anti-American hatred was a =
good=20
idea. It wasn't before the war, and it still
isn't now. The =
unintended=20
consequences have barely begun to unfold. 

And the idea that our =
slamdunk=20
of Saddam actually proves the White House was
right is particularly =
dangerous=20
because it encourages the Wolfowitzes and
the Perles and the Cheneys =
to argue=20
that we should be invading Syria or Iran
or North Korea or Cuba as =
soon as we=20
catch our breath. They've tasted blood.


It's important to =
remember=20
that the Arab world has seen a very different war
than we have. They =
are=20
seeing babies with limbs blown off, children wailing
beside their =
dead=20
mothers, Arab journalists killed by American tanks and
bombers, holy =
men=20
hacked to death and dragged through the streets. They are
seeing =
American=20
forces leaving behind a wake of destruction, looting,
hunger, =
humiliation,=20
and chaos. 

Who's been handling our war PR, Osama bin Laden? The =
language=20
and imagery
are all wrong. Having Tom DeLay gush about our "army of =
virtue"=20
at the same
time we're blowing up mosques is definitely not sending =
the right=20
message to
a Muslim world already suspicious that we're waging a war =
on=20
Islam. 

Neither is Ari Fleischer's claim that the administration =
can't do=20
anything
to keep Christian missionaries -- including those who have =
described=20
the
Islamic prophet Muhammad as a "demon-possessed pedophile" and a=20
"terrorist"
-- from going on a holy crusade to Baghdad. You think the =
Arab=20
world might
take that the wrong way? If there is one thing that could =
bring=20
Sunnis and
Shiites together, it's the common hatred of evangelical =
zealots=20
who
denigrate their prophet. 

And it doesn't help to have the =
American=20
media referring to Jay Garner, the
retired general Don Rumsfeld =
picked to=20
oversee the rebuilding of Iraq, as
"viceroy." It reeks of colonial=20
imperialism. Why not just call him "Head
Bwana?" Or "Garner of =
Arabia?" I=20
didn't realize the Supreme Court had handed
Bush a scepter to go =
along with=20
the Florida recount. 

The powerful role that shame and =
humiliation have=20
played in shaping world
history is considerable, but something the =
Bush team=20
seems utterly clueless
about. Which is why the anti-war movement must =
be=20
stalwart in its refusal to
be silenced or browbeaten by the gloating =
"I told=20
you so" chorus on the
right. On the contrary, it needs to make sure =
that the=20
doctrine of
preemptive invasion is forever buried in the sands of =
Iraq.=20


Especially as the administration, high on the heady fumes of=20
Saddam's
ouster, turns its covetous eyes on Syria. I give it less =
than a week=20
before
someone starts making the case that President Assad is the =
next,=20
next
Hitler. 

------ 

Arianna Huffington is the author =
of "Pigs=20
at the Trough: How Corporate Greed
and Political Corruption are =
Undermining=20
America." For information on the
book, visit www.PigsAtTheTrough.com =


If you=20
have questions or comments, contact Arianna at
arianna@ariannaonline.com




------=_NextPart_000_00F4_01C30508.B74670B0--



From jafujii@uci.edu  Fri Apr 18 06:48:12 2003
From: jafujii@uci.edu (Jim Fujii)
Date: Thu, 17 Apr 2003 22:48:12 -0700
Subject: [Ethnicstudies] Fw: Tariq Ali calls for Anti-Imperialist League
Message-ID: <01eb01c3056e$1a2f6140$cdbac380@ucigyqexhlhmwv>

This is a multi-part message in MIME format.

------=_NextPart_000_01E8_01C30533.6D286260
Content-Type: text/plain;
	charset="UTF-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable


Sent: Thursday, April 17, 2003 7:55 PM
Subject: Tariq Ali calls for Anti-Imperialist League


Tariq Ali calls for Anti-Imperialist League

Below is the last section of Tariq Ali's editorial in
an upcoming New Left Review. The parts not reproduced
(but available at=20
http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR25501.shtml) are a
thorough, incisive analysis of the run-up to the war,
its motives and history, and the shallowness of
interimperialist arguments about whether to go to war
-- as well as skewering of calls for the UN to take
over.

I'm forwarding his last section because he makes an
explicit suggestion for the next step of the millions-
strong global antiwar movement: the need "for a global
Anti-Imperialist League." As part of that, he calls on
the World Social Forum to take the logical step of
expanding its opposition to global capital in the
economic and political spheres to the military sphere
which props up the first two.  And for those of us in
the US, he points out that:

"... it is the US component of such a front that would
be crucial. The most effective resistance of all starts
at home. The history of the rise and fall of Empires
teaches us that it is when their own citizens finally
lose faith in the virtue of infinite war and permanent
occupations that the system enters into retreat."

One task of such a League, and a WSF with an expanded
agenda would be to "campaign for the shutting down of
all American military bases and facilities abroad--that
is, in the hundred plus countries where the US now
stations troops, aircraft or supplies."

I would only add that aside from the moral and
political virtues of such a global withdrawal, bringing
home ALL these troops and materiel are the surest way
to end the threat of terrorism on US soil. -- Andy P.
-----------------------------

New Left Review 21 May-June 2003

TARIQ ALI

RE-COLONIZING IRAQ=20

Editorial=20

What is to be done?

If it is futile to look to the United Nations or
Euroland, let alone Russia or China, for any serious
obstacle to American designs in the Middle East, where
should resistance start? First of all, naturally, in
the region itself. There, it is to be hoped that the
invaders of Iraq will eventually be harried out of the
country by a growing national reaction to the
occupation regime they install, and that their
collaborators may meet the fate of Nuri Said before
them. Sooner or later, the ring of corrupt and brutal
tyran=C2=ADnies around Iraq will be broken. If there is one
area where the clich=C3=A9 that classical revolutions are a
thing of the past is likely to be proved wrong, it is
the Arab world. The day the Mubarak, Hashemite, Assad,
Saudi and other dynasties are swept away by popular
wrath, American--and Israeli--arrogance in the region
will be over.

In the imperial homeland itself, meanwhile, opposition
to the ruling system should take heart from the example
of America=E2=80=99s own past. In the closing years of the 19th
century, Mark Twain, shocked by chauvinist reactions to
the Boxer Rebellion in China and the US seizure of the
Philippines, sounded the alarm. Imperialism, he
declared, had to be opposed. In 1899 a mammoth assembly
in Chicago established the American Anti-Imperialist
League. Within two years its membership had grown to
over half a million and included William James, W. E.
B. DuBois, William Dean Howells and John Dewey. Today,
when the United States is the only imperial power, the
need is for a global Anti-Imperialist League. But it is
the US component of such a front that would be crucial.
The most effective resistance of all starts at home.
The history of the rise and fall of Empires teaches us
that it is when their own citizens finally lose faith
in the virtue of infinite war and permanent occupations
that the system enters into retreat.

The World Social Forum has, till now, concentrated on
the power of multi=C2=ADnational corporations and neoliberal
institutions. But these have always rested on
foundations of imperial force. Quite consistently,
Friedrich von Hayek, the inspirer of the =E2=80=98Washington
Consensus=E2=80=99, was a firm believer in wars to buttress the
new system, advocating the bombing of Iran in 1979 and
of Argentina in 1982. The World Social Forum should
take up that challenge. Why should it not campaign for
the shutting down of all American military bases and
facilities abroad--that is, in the hundred plus
countries where the US now stations troops, aircraft or
supplies? What possible justification does this vast
octopoid expanse have, other than the exercise of
American power? The economic concerns of the Forum are
in no contradiction with such an extension of its
agenda. Economics, after all, is only a concentrated
form of politics, and war a continuation of both by
other means.

For the moment, we are surrounded with politicians and
pundits, prelates and intellectuals, parading their
consciences in print or the air-waves to explain how
strongly they were opposed to the war, but now that it
has been launched believe that the best way to
demonstrate their love for humanity is to call for a
speedy victory by the United States, so that the Iraqis
might be spared unnecessary suffering. Typically, such
figures had no objection to the criminal sanctions
regime, and its accompanying dose of weekly Anglo-
American bombing raids, that heaped miseries on the
Iraqi population for the preceding twelve years. The
only merit of this sickening chorus is to make clear,
by contrast, what real opposition to the conquest of
Iraq involves.

The immediate tasks that face an anti-imperialist
movement are support for Iraqi resistance to the Anglo-
American occupation, and opposition to any and every
scheme to get the UN into Iraq as retrospective cover
for the invasion and after-sales service for Washington
and London. Let the aggressors pay the costs of their
own imperial ambitions. All attempts to dress up the
re-colonization of Iraq as a new League of Nations
Mandate, in the style of the 1920s, should be stripped
away. Blair will be the leading mover in these, but he
will have no shortage of European extras behind him.
Underlying this obscene campaign, the beginnings of
which are already visible on Murdoch=E2=80=99s TV channels, the
BBC and CNN, is the urgent desire to reunite the West.
The vast bulk of official opinion in Europe, and a
substantial chunk in the US, is desperate to begin the
post-war =E2=80=98healing process=E2=80=99. The only possible reply to
what lies ahead is the motto heard in the streets of
San Francisco this spring: =E2=80=98Neither their war nor their
peace=E2=80=99.

8 April 2003




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=EF=BB=BF







 




Sent: Thursday, April 17, 2003 7:55 PM


Subject: Tariq Ali calls for Anti-Imperialist =
League



Tariq Ali =
calls for=20
Anti-Imperialist League

Below is the last section of Tariq Ali's=20
editorial in
an upcoming New Left Review. The parts not =
reproduced
(but=20
available at 
http://www.newleftre=
view.net/NLR25501.shtml)=20
are a
thorough, incisive analysis of the run-up to the war,
its =
motives=20
and history, and the shallowness of
interimperialist arguments about =
whether=20
to go to war
-- as well as skewering of calls for the UN to=20
take
over.

I'm forwarding his last section because he makes=20
an
explicit suggestion for the next step of the millions-
strong =
global=20
antiwar movement: the need "for a global
Anti-Imperialist League." As =
part of=20
that, he calls on
the World Social Forum to take the logical step=20
of
expanding its opposition to global capital in the
economic and=20
political spheres to the military sphere
which props up the first =
two. =20
And for those of us in
the US, he points out that:

"... it is =
the US=20
component of such a front that would
be crucial. The most effective=20
resistance of all starts
at home. The history of the rise and fall of =

Empires
teaches us that it is when their own citizens finally
lose =
faith=20
in the virtue of infinite war and permanent
occupations that the =
system=20
enters into retreat."

One task of such a League, and a WSF with =
an=20
expanded
agenda would be to "campaign for the shutting down of
all =

American military bases and facilities abroad--that
is, in the =
hundred plus=20
countries where the US now
stations troops, aircraft or =
supplies."

I=20
would only add that aside from the moral and
political virtues of =
such a=20
global withdrawal, bringing
home ALL these troops and materiel are =
the surest=20
way
to end the threat of terrorism on US soil. -- Andy=20
P.
-----------------------------

New Left Review 21 May-June=20
2003

TARIQ ALI

RE-COLONIZING IRAQ 

Editorial =


What=20
is to be done?

If it is futile to look to the United Nations=20
or
Euroland, let alone Russia or China, for any serious
obstacle =
to=20
American designs in the Middle East, where
should resistance start? =
First of=20
all, naturally, in
the region itself. There, it is to be hoped that=20
the
invaders of Iraq will eventually be harried out of the
country =
by a=20
growing national reaction to the
occupation regime they install, and =
that=20
their
collaborators may meet the fate of Nuri Said before
them. =
Sooner or=20
later, the ring of corrupt and brutal
tyran­nies around Iraq will =
be=20
broken. If there is one
area where the clich=C3=A9 that classical =
revolutions are=20
a
thing of the past is likely to be proved wrong, it is
the Arab =
world.=20
The day the Mubarak, Hashemite, Assad,
Saudi and other dynasties are =
swept=20
away by popular
wrath, American--and Israeli--arrogance in the =
region
will=20
be over.

In the imperial homeland itself, meanwhile, =
opposition
to the=20
ruling system should take heart from the example
of America=E2=80=99s =
own past. In=20
the closing years of the 19th
century, Mark Twain, shocked by =
chauvinist=20
reactions to
the Boxer Rebellion in China and the US seizure of=20
the
Philippines, sounded the alarm. Imperialism, he
declared, had =
to be=20
opposed. In 1899 a mammoth assembly
in Chicago established the =
American=20
Anti-Imperialist
League. Within two years its membership had grown =
to
over=20
half a million and included William James, W. E.
B. DuBois, William =
Dean=20
Howells and John Dewey. Today,
when the United States is the only =
imperial=20
power, the
need is for a global Anti-Imperialist League. But it =
is
the US=20
component of such a front that would be crucial.
The most effective=20
resistance of all starts at home.
The history of the rise and fall of =
Empires=20
teaches us
that it is when their own citizens finally lose =
faith
in the=20
virtue of infinite war and permanent occupations
that the system =
enters into=20
retreat.

The World Social Forum has, till now, concentrated =
on
the=20
power of multi­national corporations and neoliberal
institutions. =
But=20
these have always rested on
foundations of imperial force. Quite=20
consistently,
Friedrich von Hayek, the inspirer of the=20
=E2=80=98Washington
Consensus=E2=80=99, was a firm believer in wars =
to buttress the
new=20
system, advocating the bombing of Iran in 1979 and
of Argentina in =
1982. The=20
World Social Forum should
take up that challenge. Why should it not =
campaign=20
for
the shutting down of all American military bases =
and
facilities=20
abroad--that is, in the hundred plus
countries where the US now =
stations=20
troops, aircraft or
supplies? What possible justification does this=20
vast
octopoid expanse have, other than the exercise of
American =
power? The=20
economic concerns of the Forum are
in no contradiction with such an =
extension=20
of its
agenda. Economics, after all, is only a concentrated
form =
of=20
politics, and war a continuation of both by
other means.

For =
the=20
moment, we are surrounded with politicians and
pundits, prelates and=20
intellectuals, parading their
consciences in print or the air-waves =
to=20
explain how
strongly they were opposed to the war, but now that =
it
has=20
been launched believe that the best way to
demonstrate their love for =

humanity is to call for a
speedy victory by the United States, so =
that the=20
Iraqis
might be spared unnecessary suffering. Typically, =
such
figures had=20
no objection to the criminal sanctions
regime, and its accompanying =
dose of=20
weekly Anglo-
American bombing raids, that heaped miseries on =
the
Iraqi=20
population for the preceding twelve years. The
only merit of this =
sickening=20
chorus is to make clear,
by contrast, what real opposition to the =
conquest=20
of
Iraq involves.

The immediate tasks that face an=20
anti-imperialist
movement are support for Iraqi resistance to the=20
Anglo-
American occupation, and opposition to any and every
scheme =
to get=20
the UN into Iraq as retrospective cover
for the invasion and =
after-sales=20
service for Washington
and London. Let the aggressors pay the costs =
of=20
their
own imperial ambitions. All attempts to dress up =
the
re-colonization=20
of Iraq as a new League of Nations
Mandate, in the style of the =
1920s, should=20
be stripped
away. Blair will be the leading mover in these, but =
he
will=20
have no shortage of European extras behind him.
Underlying this =
obscene=20
campaign, the beginnings of
which are already visible on =
Murdoch=E2=80=99s TV=20
channels, the
BBC and CNN, is the urgent desire to reunite the =
West.
The=20
vast bulk of official opinion in Europe, and a
substantial chunk in =
the US,=20
is desperate to begin the
post-war =E2=80=98healing process=E2=80=99. =
The only possible reply=20
to
what lies ahead is the motto heard in the streets of
San =
Francisco this=20
spring: =E2=80=98Neither their war nor their
peace=E2=80=99.

8 =
April=20
2003




------=_NextPart_000_01E8_01C30533.6D286260--



From dtsang@lib.uci.edu  Fri Apr 18 07:11:16 2003
From: dtsang@lib.uci.edu (Dan Tsang)
Date: Thu, 17 Apr 2003 23:11:16 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [Ethnicstudies] UCI freshman applications a record; rises
Message-ID: 

For next fall, expect more students on campus, and a record number of
freshmen.

"A record 34,359 high school seniors applied to the university for fall
2003 and slightly more than half (17,926) have been accepted. Admitted
students averaged a higher SAT score (1246) and grade point average (3.87)
than previous years. Diversity among admitted students also increased."

Also: "Fall freshman admission numbers show an increase
across most ethnic categories. Of those offered admission for fall 2003:
African Americans increased by 1 percent from fall 2002 to fall 2003 (399
to 403); American Indians decreased by 5 percent (78 to 74); Asian
Americans increased slightly (7,890 to 7,896); Chicanos increased by 13
percent (1,620 to 1,844), Latinos increased by 9 percent (504 to 553);
whites increased by 6 percent (5,111 to 5,441); and the number who
declined to state increased by 22 percent (1,148 to 1,410)."

More in UCI press release:

http://today.uci.edu/news/release_detail.asp?key=990
UCI attracts record number of top-tier freshman applicants

2003 fall freshman class will be largest, highest caliber in campus
history

...

dan
Daniel C. Tsang
Bibliographer for Asian American Studies,
 Economics, Management (acting), & Politics
Social Science Data Librarian
Lecturer, School of Social Sciences
380 Main Library, University of California
PO Box 19557, Irvine CA 92623-9557, USA
E-mail: dtsang@uci.edu; Tel: (949) 824-4978; fax: (949) 824-2700
UCI Social Science Data Archives: http://data.lib.uci.edu
OFFICE HOURS: Tuesday: 2-3:30 p.m.; Thursday: 1-2 p.m.



From jafujii@uci.edu  Fri Apr 18 07:58:18 2003
From: jafujii@uci.edu (Jim Fujii)
Date: Thu, 17 Apr 2003 23:58:18 -0700
Subject: [Ethnicstudies] Fw: UCSB to Host Major Globalization Conference: Free and Open to the Public (May 1-4, Cowin Pavilion and UCEN, UCSB) (fwd)
Message-ID: <022901c30577$e4c68b50$cdbac380@ucigyqexhlhmwv>

This is a multi-part message in MIME format.

------=_NextPart_000_0226_01C3053D.37B81260
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	charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Sent: Thursday, April 17, 2003 11:02 PM
Subject: UCSB to Host Major Globalization Conference: Free and Open to =
the Public (May 1-4, Cowin Pavilion and UCEN, UCSB) (fwd)


PLEASE CIRCULATE:

SOME ONE HUNDRED SCHOLARS, public intellectuals, and global justice =
activists from around the world will converge at UCSB's Corwin Pavilion =
and UCEN meeting rooms from May 1-4 to debate the future of =
globalization. Participants will come from Armenia, Canada, Ecuador, =
France, Holland, Mexico, Pakistan, Philippines, Russia, Turkey, United =
Kingdom, United States, and Uruguay, among other countries.  The =
conference, "Towards a Critical Globalization Studies: Continued =
Debates, New Directions, and Neglected Topics," has the dual purpose of =
examining the development of global studies in the academy and exploring =
the bridges between global studies and the global justice movement.  The =
conference program is available at



http://www.global.ucsb.edu/projects/globalization/GlobalComputer2.pdf.

The conference's kick-off event is a keynote speach Thursday evening, =
May 1, at 7:00pm, by the celebrated Pakistan-British novelist, =
playwright, social critic, and Verso Press founder-publisher Tariq Ali. =
Ali, the author of Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihad, and =
Modernity, will address recent developments in a talk entitled "War and =
Peace in the 21st Century: Will the American Consensus Hold?"  The =
conference continues all day Friday, Saturday, and Sunday morning, with =
a series of plenary events featuring world-renown scholars and =
activists, followed by breakout panel discussions on 16 different =
themes.



Noted participants include Luis Macas, leader of the Ecuadoran =
indigenous movement and currently Ecuador's Minister of  Agriculture; =
Saskia Sassen, University of Chicago professor and member of the Council =
on Foreign Relations; Walden Bello, leader of the global justice =
movement and former member of the Philippine Parliament; Susan George, =
Paris-based author-activist, leader of the Transnational Institute and =
Vice-President of ATTAC; Njoki Njehu, Director of the Washington-based =
"50 Years is Enough!" campaign; Boris Kagarlitsky, Russian journalist, =
author, social critic, and former Moscow City Council member; Tom =
Hayden, a founder of the U.S. "new left"in the 1960s and recent =
California State Senator; and David Harvey, one of the world's most =
celebrated geographers and author of The Condition of Postmodernity.

Conference organizers are also planning several cultural events, =
including a special screening on Saturday evening, May 3, of the =
powerful Oscar-nominated documentary, "Se=F1orita Extraviada: the Fate =
of 200 Women" (about the young women factory workers who have been raped =
and murdered in Juarez in recent years), including an audience =
discussion with Mexican filmmaker and producer, Lourdes Portillo.



The conference is being organized by Global Studies/Sociology professors =
Richard P. Appelbaum and William I. Robinson. Both  It is co-sponsored =
by UCSB, the Institute for Research on World Systems at UC Riverside, =
and the UK-based Global Studies Association.


For further information, contact conference assistant organizer Jessica =
Taft, at jtaft@umail.ucsb.edu
-------------------------------------------------
Richard P. Appelbaum, Ph.D.
Professor, Sociology and Global & International Studies
Director, Institute for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Research =
(ISBER)
Co-Director, Center for Global Studies
University of California at Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, CA 93106
phone: (805) 893-7230
fax: (805) 893-7995
email: rich@isber.ucsb.edu
http://www.isber.ucsb.edu
---------------------------------------------------

_______________________________________________
List-Info: https://maillists.uci.edu/mailman/listinfo/uci-peace-justice


------=_NextPart_000_0226_01C3053D.37B81260
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	charset="iso-8859-1"
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Sent: Thursday, April 17, 2003 11:02 PM




Subject: UCSB to Host Major Globalization Conference: Free =
and Open=20
to the Public (May 1-4, Cowin Pavilion and UCEN, UCSB) (fwd)



PLEASE CIRCULATE:

SOME ONE HUNDRED SCHOLARS, =
public=20
intellectuals, and global justice activists from around the world will =
converge=20
at UCSB's Corwin Pavilion and UCEN meeting rooms from May 1-4 to debate =
the=20
future of globalization. Participants will come from Armenia, Canada, =
Ecuador,=20
France, Holland, Mexico, Pakistan, Philippines, Russia, Turkey, United =
Kingdom,=20
United States, and Uruguay, among other countries.  The conference, =

"Towards a Critical Globalization Studies: Continued Debates, New =
Directions,=20
and Neglected Topics," has the dual purpose of examining the development =
of=20
global studies in the academy and exploring the bridges between global =
studies=20
and the global justice movement.  The conference program is =
available=20
at



http://www.global.ucsb.edu/projects/globalization/GlobalComputer2.p=
df.

The=20
conference's kick-off event is a keynote speach Thursday evening, May 1, =
at=20
7:00pm, by the celebrated Pakistan-British novelist, playwright, social =
critic,=20
and Verso Press founder-publisher Tariq Ali. Ali, the author of Clash of =

Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihad, and Modernity, will address recent=20
developments in a talk entitled "War and Peace in the 21st Century: Will =
the=20
American Consensus Hold?"  The conference continues all day Friday, =

Saturday, and Sunday morning, with a series of plenary events featuring=20
world-renown scholars and activists, followed by breakout panel =
discussions on=20
16 different themes.



Noted participants include Luis =
Macas,=20
leader of the Ecuadoran indigenous movement and currently Ecuador's =
Minister=20
of  Agriculture; Saskia Sassen, University of Chicago professor and =
member=20
of the Council on Foreign Relations; Walden Bello, leader of the global =
justice=20
movement and former member of the Philippine Parliament; Susan George,=20
Paris-based author-activist, leader of the Transnational Institute and=20
Vice-President of ATTAC; Njoki Njehu, Director of the Washington-based =
"50 Years=20
is Enough!" campaign; Boris Kagarlitsky, Russian journalist, author, =
social=20
critic, and former Moscow City Council member; Tom Hayden, a founder of =
the U.S.=20
"new left"in the 1960s and recent California State Senator; and David =
Harvey,=20
one of the world's most celebrated geographers and author of The =
Condition of=20
Postmodernity.

Conference organizers are also planning several =
cultural=20
events, including a special screening on Saturday evening, May 3, of the =

powerful Oscar-nominated documentary, "Se=F1orita Extraviada: the Fate =
of 200=20
Women" (about the young women factory workers who have been raped and =
murdered=20
in Juarez in recent years), including an audience discussion with =
Mexican=20
filmmaker and producer, Lourdes Portillo.



The conference =
is being=20
organized by Global Studies/Sociology professors Richard P. Appelbaum =
and=20
William I. Robinson. Both  It is co-sponsored by UCSB, the =
Institute for=20
Research on World Systems at UC Riverside, and the UK-based Global =
Studies=20
Association.


For further information, contact conference =
assistant=20
organizer Jessica Taft, at jtaft@umail.ucsb.edu
--------=
-----------------------------------------
Richard=20
P. Appelbaum, Ph.D.
Professor, Sociology and Global & =
International=20
Studies
Director, Institute for Social, Behavioral, and Economic =
Research=20
(ISBER)
Co-Director, Center for Global Studies
University of =
California at=20
Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, CA 93106
phone: (805) =
893-7230
fax: (805)=20
893-7995
email: rich@isber.ucsb.edu
http://www.isber.ucsb.edu
-----=
----------------------------------------------

___________________=
____________________________
List-Info:=20
htt=
ps://maillists.uci.edu/mailman/listinfo/uci-peace-justice
<=
/HTML>

------=_NextPart_000_0226_01C3053D.37B81260--



From dtsang@lib.uci.edu  Sat Apr 19 01:26:16 2003
From: dtsang@lib.uci.edu (Dan Tsang)
Date: Fri, 18 Apr 2003 17:26:16 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [Ethnicstudies] OPEN LETTER FROM JUSTIN LIN BLT DIRECTOR - APRIL 17 THANK YOU FOR
 YOUR SUPPORT - (fwd)
Message-ID: 

fyi...
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 18 Apr 2003 18:57:15 EDT
From: APAFirstWeekend@aol.com
To: APAFirstWeekend@aol.com
Subject: Re: OPEN LETTER FROM JUSTIN LIN BLT DIRECTOR - APRIL 17 THANK YOU FOR YOUR SUPPORT -

OPEN LETTER FROM JUSTIN LIN - APRIL 17, 2003  -
Please share this with all of your volunteers and supporters...

APRIL 17, 2003

Dear Friends:

Thank you for your incredible support this past weekend. I got the wake up
call of a lifetime Sunday morning from the heads of MTV Films and Paramount.
Not only was BETTER LUCK TOMORROW the highest grossing film per screen in
the country, but we also set records for both the PARAMOUNT CLASSICS and MTV
Films.

And my phone did not stop ringing there. Executives from other studios also
called, and one thing's for certain, everyone is baffled. They can't figure
out how a small independent film with barely any advertising muscle could
out-perform the big movies. Of course, we already know the answer: word of
mouth - by all of YOU!

This history-making success is a testament to all of you that came out,
bought a ticket, and told your friends to go see it. Now, the audience is
telling the studios what kind of film they want to see - something
completely unheard of in Hollywood. We are setting a new precedent. Fans
showed up in such big numbers that theaters actually cancelled screenings of
"Anger Management" in order to add additional showings of BLT. And in
cities where BLT isn't showing, fans have been calling their local theatre
managers and demanding that the theatres bring it to their towns.

But we still have a long road ahead. If there's any downside to our
triumphant opening weekend, it's that we might be seen as a fluke. BLT is
opening in ten additional cities on Friday, April 18th. If we can sustain
the same momentum of last weekend, I've been assured that BETTER LUCK
TOMORROW
will go to a nationwide release on April 25th on approximately 400 screens!

Not only would this be historic for Asian American cinema, but it would
finally put us on a
level playing field with the average Hollywood film. I found out that
approximately 70% of the audiences last weekend were Asian Americans. If
this trend continues, we will at last be able to carve out a piece of the
pie on the studio marketing chart, thereby signaling the way for more films
with real, human portrayals of Asian Americans. We're on the verge of
something truly groundbreaking, so let's not turn back now. If you haven't
seen the film yet, now is the time. If you saw it last weekend (thank
you!), bring a friend and watch it again. Remember, your movie ticket is
your vote.

Please look at the new cities on our website at www.betterlucktomrrow.com
and if you have friends or family there, let them know about the film and
tell them to visit the website or read the reviews.

Once again, thank you for all your support.

Very truly yours,



Justin Lin
Director
Better Luck Tomorrow


From jafujii@uci.edu  Sat Apr 19 04:42:46 2003
From: jafujii@uci.edu (Jim Fujii)
Date: Fri, 18 Apr 2003 20:42:46 -0700
Subject: [Ethnicstudies] Fw: Build the May 10 LA Anti-War Conference
Message-ID: <00b601c30625$beb119e0$33bbc380@ucigyqexhlhmwv>

This is a multi-part message in MIME format.

------=_NextPart_000_00B3_01C305EB.11B98450
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	charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable


----- Original Message -----=20
From: ANSWER Los Angeles=20
To: LA Activists=20
Sent: Friday, April 18, 2003 12:49 PM
Subject: Build the May 10 LA Anti-War Conference


A.N.S.W.E.R Los Angeles
Act Now to Stop War and End Racism

This weekend:
Major work session to build the

Emergency Anti-War Conference In Los Angeles to be held on
Saturday, May 10 at the 1st Baptist Church, 7th St and=20
Westmoreland.

COME HELP MAIL TO THOUSANDS ABOUT THE UPCOMING ANTI-WAR=20
CONFERENCE IN LOS ANGELES—
This Saturday, April 19
from 12 Noon to 6 PM, and Sunday 10 AM to 4 PM
422 S. Western Avenue (4 blocks North of Wilshire).

Also: Special Outreach Workshop at 11 AM this Saturday=20
before the mailing. Improve your talking points on the new=20
period: role playing, developing verbal skills, resources,=20
etc.

Where is Bush going? What’s next for our movement?

Occupation is Not Liberation
No War for Empire
U.S. Out of Iraq

Saturday, May 10
11 AM to 6 PM
(Registration at 10 AM0
First Baptist Church of Los Angeles
760 Westmoreland Ave (at 7th St.)

Suggested donation $5-$10.

Speakers, Literature, Break-Out Groups

Strategy
Analysis
Evaluation/Assessment
Break-Out Groups

Historical Perspective of the U.S. and the Middle East
Strategies and Tactics for the Anti-War Movement in the=20
Coming Period
U.S., Israel, and the Palestine National Liberation=20
Movement
No War on the World: Stop US war move against the=20
Philippines, North Korea, Cuba, Syria, etc.
War, Profit, and the Corporate Media
Stop U.S. Intervention from Colombia to Zimbabwe.
The War at Home: Money for jobs, healthcare, education,=20
housing, not for war.
Fight Racism: Build the movement to stop police repression=20
and demand economic justice.
Defend immigrant rights: Stop round-ups and deportations.
Defend Civil Rights: Not to the Patriot Act 1 and 2
U.S. Hands Off Cuba: Free the Cuban Patriots Held in U.S.=20
Jails.
International Solidarity: Defend the right of Self=20
–Determination for all oppressed nations.
Up against the Brass: organizing rank-and-file resistance=20
in the U.S. military: justice for veterans.

Sponsor: International ANSWER Los Angeles. (213) 487-2368
www.answerla.org
Email: answer-la@acion-mail.org








------------------
This is the Los Angeles activist announcement
list. Anyone can subscribe by sending=20
any message to 

To unsubscribe 


------=_NextPart_000_00B3_01C305EB.11B98450
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	charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable









 


----- Original Message -----=20

From: ANSWER Los Angeles =




Sent: Friday, April 18, 2003 12:49 PM


Subject: Build the May 10 LA Anti-War Conference



A.N.S.W.E.R Los Angeles
Act Now to Stop War and End=20
Racism

This weekend:
Major work session to build =
the

Emergency=20
Anti-War Conference In Los Angeles to be held on
Saturday, May 10 at =
the 1st=20
Baptist Church, 7th St and 
Westmoreland.

COME HELP MAIL TO =
THOUSANDS=20
ABOUT THE UPCOMING ANTI-WAR 
CONFERENCE IN LOS =
ANGELES&#8212;
This=20
Saturday, April 19
from 12 Noon to 6 PM, and Sunday 10 AM to 4 =
PM
422 S.=20
Western Avenue (4 blocks North of Wilshire).

Also: Special =
Outreach=20
Workshop at 11 AM this Saturday 
before the mailing. Improve your =
talking=20
points on the new 
period: role playing, developing verbal skills, =
resources,=20

etc.

Where is Bush going? What&#8217;s next for our=20
movement?

Occupation is Not Liberation
No War for =
Empire
U.S. Out=20
of Iraq

Saturday, May 10
11 AM to 6 PM
(Registration at 10=20
AM0
First Baptist Church of Los Angeles
760 Westmoreland Ave (at =
7th=20
St.)

Suggested donation $5-$10.

Speakers, Literature, =
Break-Out=20
Groups

Strategy
Analysis
Evaluation/Assessment
Break-Out =

Groups

Historical Perspective of the U.S. and the Middle=20
East
Strategies and Tactics for the Anti-War Movement in the =

Coming=20
Period
U.S., Israel, and the Palestine National Liberation =

Movement
No=20
War on the World: Stop US war move against the 
Philippines, North =
Korea,=20
Cuba, Syria, etc.
War, Profit, and the Corporate Media
Stop U.S.=20
Intervention from Colombia to Zimbabwe.
The War at Home: Money for =
jobs,=20
healthcare, education, 
housing, not for war.
Fight Racism: Build =
the=20
movement to stop police repression 
and demand economic =
justice.
Defend=20
immigrant rights: Stop round-ups and deportations.
Defend Civil =
Rights: Not=20
to the Patriot Act 1 and 2
U.S. Hands Off Cuba: Free the Cuban =
Patriots Held=20
in U.S. 
Jails.
International Solidarity: Defend the right of Self =


&#8211;Determination for all oppressed nations.
Up against =
the Brass:=20
organizing rank-and-file resistance 
in the U.S. military: justice =
for=20
veterans.

Sponsor: International ANSWER Los Angeles. (213) =
487-2368
www.answerla.org
Email: answer-la@acion-mail.org
=








------------------
This=20
is the Los Angeles activist announcement
list. Anyone can subscribe =
by=20
sending 
any message to <laactivists-subscri=
be@action-mail.org>

To=20
unsubscribe <laactivists-off@action-ma=
il.org>


------=_NextPart_000_00B3_01C305EB.11B98450--



From jafujii@uci.edu  Sat Apr 19 07:04:22 2003
From: jafujii@uci.edu (Jim Fujii)
Date: Fri, 18 Apr 2003 23:04:22 -0700
Subject: [Ethnicstudies] Fw: Oxfam International
Message-ID: <010201c30639$86985aa0$33bbc380@ucigyqexhlhmwv>

This is a multi-part message in MIME format.

------=_NextPart_000_00FF_01C305FE.D9AB7370
Content-Type: text/plain;
	charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable


Sent: Friday, April 18, 2003 10:17 PM
Subject: Oxfam International



      This organization is refusing to take any aid money from the US or =
British Government. Their plane (provided by the UN) left London =
yesterday with 17 tons of equipment and parts to repair the water and =
sanitation systems in Iraq. Oxfam is an amazing organization, very well =
known & respected. I urge you to look at their website at =
www.oxfamamerica.org if you aren't familiar with them.=20

      Iraq's Humanitarian Crisis Continues=20
      April 18, 2003=20

    =20
Fighting and looting have left hospitals struggling with poor supplies =
of electricity, water, equipment, and sanitation. And without =
functioning civil services, medical waste is now piling up outside =
hospitals; our team has seen children in Basra picking through the =
piles, searching for items to sell. There has been a huge increase in =
reported cases of diarrhea, a predictable result of lack of access to =
clean water.=20

Make a secure donation now!=20

Oxfam in Iraq=20

Oxfam engineers have been traveling in and out of southern Iraq under =
tight security to assess the damage to water and sewage systems and, =
where possible, carry out emergency repairs. As soon as Oxfam receives =
security clearance from the United Nations, we will begin full =
operations, including:=20

     restoring power supplies to water/sewage treatment plants and =
pumping stations;=20
    =20
     replacing transformers, pumps, and control panels where necessary;=20
    =20
     repairing pumping stations, installing temporary generators if =
available;=20
    =20
     providing treatment chemicals and paying operators;=20
    =20
     repairing obvious pipe leakages and breakages, and building hydrant =
connections and tap stands;=20
    =20
     erecting emergency water tanks, and providing chlorine tablets.=20
    =20




[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]


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Sent: Friday, April 18, 2003 10:17 PM


Subject: Oxfam International




      This organization is =
refusing=20
to take any aid money from the US or British Government. Their plane =
(provided=20
by the UN) left London yesterday with 17 tons of equipment and parts to =
repair=20
the water and sanitation systems in Iraq. Oxfam is an amazing =
organization, very=20
well known & respected. I urge you to look at their website at www.oxfamamerica.org if you =
aren't=20
familiar with them. 

      Iraq's =
Humanitarian=20
Crisis Continues 
      April 18, 2003=20


     
Fighting and looting have left =
hospitals=20
struggling with poor supplies of electricity, water, equipment, and =
sanitation.=20
And without functioning civil services, medical waste is now piling up =
outside=20
hospitals; our team has seen children in Basra picking through the =
piles,=20
searching for items to sell. There has been a huge increase in reported =
cases of=20
diarrhea, a predictable result of lack of access to clean water. =


Make a=20
secure donation now! 

Oxfam in Iraq 

Oxfam engineers have =
been=20
traveling in and out of southern Iraq under tight security to assess the =
damage=20
to water and sewage systems and, where possible, carry out emergency =
repairs. As=20
soon as Oxfam receives security clearance from the United Nations, we =
will begin=20
full operations, including: 

     restoring =
power=20
supplies to water/sewage treatment plants and pumping stations;=20

     
     replacing=20
transformers, pumps, and control panels where necessary;=20

     
     repairing =
pumping=20
stations, installing temporary generators if available;=20

     
     providing =
treatment=20
chemicals and paying operators; 
    =20

     repairing obvious pipe leakages and =
breakages, and=20
building hydrant connections and tap stands; =

    =20

     erecting emergency water tanks, and =
providing=20
chlorine tablets. 
     =





[Non-text=20
portions of this message have been =
removed]


------------------------=20
Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~-->
Make Money Online=20
Auctions! Make $500.00 or We Will Give You Thirty Dollars for =
Trying!
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From jafujii@uci.edu  Mon Apr 21 05:57:17 2003
From: jafujii@uci.edu (Jim Fujii)
Date: Sun, 20 Apr 2003 21:57:17 -0700
Subject: [Ethnicstudies] FW: Cohn: US firms cash in on war
Message-ID: <002601c307c2$7c144960$aebac380@ucigyqexhlhmwv>

This is a multi-part message in MIME format.

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Sent: Sunday, April 20, 2003 9:45 PM
Subject: [OCCP] FW: [NLG] Cohn: US firms cash in on war


U.S. firms cash in on war
By Marjorie Cohn
Sacramento Bee
April 20, 2003

Basking in his high ratings from the Iraq war, George W. Bush turned his
attention on Monday -- April 15 -- to selling his tax-cut plan. Bush's
proposal to cut taxes by $550 billion over the next decade has been =
roundly
criticized as corporate welfare at its best.

Bush's timing could scarcely be labeled serendipitous. His tax-cut =
campaign
coincides with USAID and Army Corps of Engineers awards of massive
reconstruction contracts to corporations that have filled Republican =
Party
coffers with hefty campaign donations. The most egregious aspect of =
these
contracts is that they will result in windfall profits for the =
corporations
that have landed them.

The list of companies that will profit handsomely from the contracts =
reads
like a Who's Who of Republican loyalists. Topping the list is Kellogg =
Brown
& Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton Co., headed by Dick Cheney before he =
was
tapped for vice president, which was initially awarded the most =
lucrative
Iraq reconstruction contract. The pact for emergency oil-field services =
may
be worth $7 billion over the next two years. It could earn as much as 7
percent profit, or $490 million.

Strikingly, this contract was bestowed upon Kellogg Brown & Root without
sending it out for bids, to the consternation of many in Congress. After =
the
General Accounting Office, Congress's investigative arm, launched a
wide-ranging inquiry into the award, the Army Corps of Engineers =
announced
it would send the Halliburton contract out for competitive bids. It =
remains
to be seen whether the Corps' about-face is simply a perfunctory move to
forestall criticism, in which Halliburton will walk away with the =
contract
in the end. Months before the Iraq war, Kellogg Brown & Root had been
granted a separate Army logistics contract, which has the unprecedented
distinction of carrying no price tag.

Another fat Iraq reconstruction contract for $680 million was awarded to
Bechtel Group, which donated most of its $1.3 million worth of political
campaign contributions since 1999 to the Republican Party. Bechtel has =
close
ties to the Bush administration.

Donald Rumsfeld once served as a liaison between Bechtel and the Iraqi
government to finesse the building of an oil pipeline. And former =
Secretary
of State George Shultz, a member of the board of directors of Bechtel, =
is
also chairman of the advisory board of the Committee for the Liberation =
of
Iraq, a strongly pro-war organization with influence in the White House.

An accused human rights violator, DynCorp, a firm which provides =
security
services and which has donated nearly $70,000 to the Republican Party, =
won a
multi-million dollar contract to police post-war Iraq. DynCorp has been
accused of engaging in the prostitution business in Bosnia, and it is =
being
sued in a class action by a group of Ecuadorean peasants for spraying
herbicides in Colombia that drifted across the border, killing children =
and
crops.=20

Many in Congress are miffed because the bidding process for these
reconstruction contracts has taken place in secret. Sens. Susan Collins
(R-Maine), Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) have
cosponsored the Sunshine in the Iraq Reconstruction Contracting Act of =
2003,
to bring transparency to the awarding of these contracts.

Tony Blair must also be seething. Notwithstanding Blair's unwavering =
loyalty
to Bush, Iraq reconstruction contracts will go exclusively to U.S. =
firms.
Foreign corporations can only subcontract for these lucrative jobs.

Moreover, after the Bush administration succeeds in privatizing Iraq's =
oil,
U.S. corporations will likely be first in line to do business. The =
hundreds
of protestors chanting "No blood for oil" at ChevronTexaco's world
headquarters in San Ramon the day before Bush launched his tax-cut =
campaign
understood this well.
Defense contractors are also profiting handily from the war. SY Coleman, =
a
key company connected to the U.S. Patriot missile system, is headed by =
Lt.
Gen. Jay Garner, the new "sheriff of Baghdad." And Northrop Grumman, =
which
won $8.5 billion in contracts last year, has ties with the =
neoconservatives
who provided the blueprint for Bush's doctrine of preemptive war, =
beginning
with Iraq.=20

It is wrong for huge corporations to profit from war. During the Civil =
War,
there was a public outcry in Georgia against profiteering from that =
national
tragedy. Georgia's General Assembly responded by enacting a special =
profits
tax.=20

Congress itself enacted "excess-profits taxes" during World Wars I and =
II
and the Korean War, to prevent firms from making windfall profits from =
these
conflicts. Democratic Rep. Clement C. Dickinson of Missouri eloquently
stated the rationale for an excess-profits tax on the floor of Congress =
in
1917. He said that "those who reap large war profits in times of =
distress
should help to bear the burdens of government, increased by reason of =
the
very conditions that add to the wealth of those who flourish and fatten =
on
the misfortunes of the country."

President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in his first radio address following =
the
outbreak of World War II, declared that "no American has the moral right =
to
profiteer at the expense either of his fellow-citizens or of the men, =
women
and children who are living and dying in the midst of war in Europe." =
The
U.S. had not yet entered the war at that point.

In a message to Congress in 1940, Roosevelt sought "a steeply graduated
excess-profits tax" to ensure "that a few do not gain from the =
sacrifices of
the many." The members of the U.S. armed forces who have served in the =
war
on Iraq are not making excess wages for their sacrifices. Many will =
suffer
for the rest of their lives with injuries and, likely, with Gulf War II
Syndrome.=20

On Feb. 13, 2003, former Sen. George McGovern suggested on MSNBC's =
"Buchanan
& Press" that Congress impose an excess-profits tax. "I don't think =
people
ought to be making money out of young American blood in Iraq," McGovern
said.=20

Excess-profits taxes are generally calculated in one of two ways. Any =
return
on capital over a fixed percent may be considered excess profits. Or =
they
might be defined as net income in excess of prewar levels.

In his farewell speech to America in 1961, President Dwight D. =
Eisenhower
warned: "In the councils of government, we must guard against the
acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the
military-industrial complex."

George W. Bush has cited the lofty ideal of bringing freedom to the =
Iraqi
people as justification for this war. He should not then oppose the
imposition of an excess-profits tax on corporations that have secured
contracts to rebuild Iraq.
=20
Marjorie Cohn, a professor of law at Thomas Jefferson School of Law in =
San
Diego, is executive vice president of the National Lawyers Guild.=20


------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~-->
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=20

Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to =
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/=20



------=_NextPart_000_0023_01C30787.CF2BF610
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	charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable









Sent: Sunday, April 20, 2003 9:45 PM




Subject: [OCCP] FW: [NLG] Cohn: US firms cash in on =
war



U.S. firms cash in on war
By Marjorie =
Cohn
Sacramento=20
Bee
April 20, 2003

Basking in his high ratings from the Iraq =
war,=20
George W. Bush turned his
attention on Monday -- April 15 -- to =
selling his=20
tax-cut plan. Bush's
proposal to cut taxes by $550 billion over the =
next=20
decade has been roundly
criticized as corporate welfare at its=20
best.

Bush's timing could scarcely be labeled serendipitous. His =
tax-cut=20
campaign
coincides with USAID and Army Corps of Engineers awards of=20
massive
reconstruction contracts to corporations that have filled =
Republican=20
Party
coffers with hefty campaign donations. The most egregious =
aspect of=20
these
contracts is that they will result in windfall profits for the=20
corporations
that have landed them.

The list of companies that =
will=20
profit handsomely from the contracts reads
like a Who's Who of =
Republican=20
loyalists. Topping the list is Kellogg Brown
& Root, a subsidiary =
of=20
Halliburton Co., headed by Dick Cheney before he was
tapped for vice=20
president, which was initially awarded the most lucrative
Iraq =
reconstruction=20
contract. The pact for emergency oil-field services may
be worth $7 =
billion=20
over the next two years. It could earn as much as 7
percent profit, =
or $490=20
million.

Strikingly, this contract was bestowed upon Kellogg =
Brown &=20
Root without
sending it out for bids, to the consternation of many in =

Congress. After the
General Accounting Office, Congress's =
investigative arm,=20
launched a
wide-ranging inquiry into the award, the Army Corps of =
Engineers=20
announced
it would send the Halliburton contract out for competitive =
bids. It=20
remains
to be seen whether the Corps' about-face is simply a =
perfunctory move=20
to
forestall criticism, in which Halliburton will walk away with the=20
contract
in the end. Months before the Iraq war, Kellogg Brown & =
Root had=20
been
granted a separate Army logistics contract, which has the=20
unprecedented
distinction of carrying no price tag.

Another =
fat Iraq=20
reconstruction contract for $680 million was awarded to
Bechtel =
Group, which=20
donated most of its $1.3 million worth of political
campaign =
contributions=20
since 1999 to the Republican Party. Bechtel has close
ties to the =
Bush=20
administration.

Donald Rumsfeld once served as a liaison between =
Bechtel=20
and the Iraqi
government to finesse the building of an oil pipeline. =
And=20
former Secretary
of State George Shultz, a member of the board of =
directors=20
of Bechtel, is
also chairman of the advisory board of the Committee =
for the=20
Liberation of
Iraq, a strongly pro-war organization with influence in =
the=20
White House.

An accused human rights violator, DynCorp, a firm =
which=20
provides security
services and which has donated nearly $70,000 to =
the=20
Republican Party, won a
multi-million dollar contract to police =
post-war=20
Iraq. DynCorp has been
accused of engaging in the prostitution =
business in=20
Bosnia, and it is being
sued in a class action by a group of =
Ecuadorean=20
peasants for spraying
herbicides in Colombia that drifted across the =
border,=20
killing children and
crops. 

Many in Congress are miffed =
because the=20
bidding process for these
reconstruction contracts has taken place in =
secret.=20
Sens. Susan Collins
(R-Maine), Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) and =
Ron Wyden=20
(D-Ore.) have
cosponsored the Sunshine in the Iraq Reconstruction =
Contracting=20
Act of 2003,
to bring transparency to the awarding of these=20
contracts.

Tony Blair must also be seething. Notwithstanding =
Blair's=20
unwavering loyalty
to Bush, Iraq reconstruction contracts will go =
exclusively=20
to U.S. firms.
Foreign corporations can only subcontract for these =
lucrative=20
jobs.

Moreover, after the Bush administration succeeds in =
privatizing=20
Iraq's oil,
U.S. corporations will likely be first in line to do =
business.=20
The hundreds
of protestors chanting "No blood for oil" at =
ChevronTexaco's=20
world
headquarters in San Ramon the day before Bush launched his =
tax-cut=20
campaign
understood this well.
Defense contractors are also =
profiting=20
handily from the war. SY Coleman, a
key company connected to the U.S. =
Patriot=20
missile system, is headed by Lt.
Gen. Jay Garner, the new "sheriff of =

Baghdad." And Northrop Grumman, which
won $8.5 billion in contracts =
last=20
year, has ties with the neoconservatives
who provided the blueprint =
for=20
Bush's doctrine of preemptive war, beginning
with Iraq. 

It is =
wrong=20
for huge corporations to profit from war. During the Civil War,
there =
was a=20
public outcry in Georgia against profiteering from that =
national
tragedy.=20
Georgia's General Assembly responded by enacting a special =
profits
tax.=20


Congress itself enacted "excess-profits taxes" during World Wars =
I and=20
II
and the Korean War, to prevent firms from making windfall profits =
from=20
these
conflicts. Democratic Rep. Clement C. Dickinson of Missouri=20
eloquently
stated the rationale for an excess-profits tax on the =
floor of=20
Congress in
1917. He said that "those who reap large war profits in =
times of=20
distress
should help to bear the burdens of government, increased by =
reason=20
of the
very conditions that add to the wealth of those who flourish =
and=20
fatten on
the misfortunes of the country."

President Franklin =
D.=20
Roosevelt, in his first radio address following the
outbreak of World =
War II,=20
declared that "no American has the moral right to
profiteer at the =
expense=20
either of his fellow-citizens or of the men, women
and children who =
are=20
living and dying in the midst of war in Europe." The
U.S. had not yet =
entered=20
the war at that point.

In a message to Congress in 1940, =
Roosevelt sought=20
"a steeply graduated
excess-profits tax" to ensure "that a few do not =
gain=20
from the sacrifices of
the many." The members of the U.S. armed =
forces who=20
have served in the war
on Iraq are not making excess wages for their=20
sacrifices. Many will suffer
for the rest of their lives with =
injuries and,=20
likely, with Gulf War II
Syndrome. 

On Feb. 13, 2003, former =
Sen.=20
George McGovern suggested on MSNBC's "Buchanan
& Press" that =
Congress=20
impose an excess-profits tax. "I don't think people
ought to be =
making money=20
out of young American blood in Iraq," McGovern
said. =


Excess-profits=20
taxes are generally calculated in one of two ways. Any return
on =
capital over=20
a fixed percent may be considered excess profits. Or they
might be =
defined as=20
net income in excess of prewar levels.

In his farewell speech to =
America=20
in 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower
warned: "In the councils of=20
government, we must guard against the
acquisition of unwarranted =
influence,=20
whether sought or unsought, by the
military-industrial=20
complex."

George W. Bush has cited the lofty ideal of bringing =
freedom to=20
the Iraqi
people as justification for this war. He should not then =
oppose=20
the
imposition of an excess-profits tax on corporations that have=20
secured
contracts to rebuild Iraq.
 
Marjorie Cohn, a =
professor of=20
law at Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San
Diego, is executive vice =

president of the National Lawyers Guild. =



------------------------=20
Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~-->
Make Money Online=20
Auctions! Make $500.00 or We Will Give You Thirty Dollars for =
Trying!
http://=
us.click.yahoo.com/yMx78A/fNtFAA/i5gGAA/sitolB/TM
----------------=
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 =


Your=20
use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/ter=
ms/=20




------=_NextPart_000_0023_01C30787.CF2BF610--



From dtsang@lib.uci.edu  Mon Apr 21 23:21:59 2003
From: dtsang@lib.uci.edu (Dan Tsang)
Date: Mon, 21 Apr 2003 15:21:59 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [Ethnicstudies] Chang-Lin Tien Student Internship (fwd)
Message-ID: 

fyi...Dr. Tien of course was at UCI also as EVC for academic affairs...

Paid internship to recruit (online apparently) members (about one a day)
for 80-20 organization.

dan

.............

see:

> Chancellor Chang-Lin Tien Student Internship
> for Summer, 2003

> In memory of  Chancellor Chang-Lin Tien, a key
> founder of 80-20 and the first Asian Am. to become
> the president of a major university (The Univ. of
> Calif., Berkeley), 80-20 will sponsor up to 3
> student interns in 2003.  The stipend is $1000 per
> month from June 1 to August 31,2003.  Only the best
> and the brightest who are prepared to work long and
> hard for public service need apply.
>
> The Memorial Fund was started by classmates of
> Chang-Lin Tien, the Mechanical Engineering Class of
> 1955, National Taiwan University.  80- 20 is proud
> to sponsor this Memorial Fund, not so much because
> of Tien's high academic achievement but rather his
> legacy in fighting for justice and equal opportunity
> for all Americans.  When he was a young
> college student in Kentucky, he protested
> discrimination against blacks on city buses by
> walking to school for a year.  Unlike some
> successful Asian Americans who shy away from our
> community, Tien was a pillar of strength for our
> community.  He was not concerned about protecting
> his own feathers.  He cared about doing the right
> thing for the Asian American community and the
> nation.
>
> ORGANIZE, ORGANIZE & ORGANIZE!  That is the key to
> political success.  Today, tens of young staff are
> working 14 hours/day and 7 days per week in Iowa and
> New Hampshire organizing for presidential
> candidates.  If the Asian Am. community is to have
> its share of political clout, we need youths who
> know how to organize politically -- cutting their
> teeth in the real world.
>
> The Interns will be trained intensively for 2 weeks
> and then let go to recruit dues-paying members for
> 80-20 under semi-weekly supervision.
> The expectation is for each Intern to recruit
> sufficient members whose dues will equal to an
> intern's stipend.  In this manner, the Memorial fund
> will be self perpetuating, thereby providing a last
> memory of Chancellor Tien.  At the same time, the
> program will provide our youths with the real world
> experience of the joy and frustration of organizing
> the Asian American community.
>
> To apply visit
> http://www.80-20initiative.net/intern.html .
>


From jafujii@uci.edu  Tue Apr 22 04:41:08 2003
From: jafujii@uci.edu (Jim Fujii)
Date: Mon, 21 Apr 2003 20:41:08 -0700
Subject: [Ethnicstudies] Fw: Don't scrap those "No War" signs yet.
Message-ID: <003d01c30881$03290850$51bbc380@ucigyqexhlhmwv>

This is a multi-part message in MIME format.

------=_NextPart_000_003A_01C30846.563C2120
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Rumsfeld calls for regime change in North Korea
By David Rennie in Washington
(Filed: 22/04/2003)

A secret Donald Rumsfeld memorandum calling
for regime change in North Korea was leaked
yesterday, opening a fresh foreign policy split
in the Bush administration.

The classified discussion paper, circulated by
the defence secretary, appears to cut directly
across State Department plans to disarm Kim
Jong-il, the North's dictator, through threats
leavened by promises that his regime is not a
target for overthrow.

The paper does not call for military action against
North Korea, but wants the United States to team
up with China in pushing for the collapse of Kim
Jong-il's bankrupt but belligerent regime, the New
York Times reported.

In a sign that Washington is girding itself for a
repetition of the bitter rows that preceded the
Iraq conflict, the memorandum was leaked on
the same day that a senior State Department
negotiator flew to Beijing for three-way talks with
China and North Korea.

Officials working for Mr Rumsfeld are implacably
opposed to the talks, pointing to North Korea's long
history of extorting aid and concessions in return for
promises - never kept - to behave in a more reasonable
way.

Instead, they seek to use the salutary effect of the
rapid victory in Iraq to push North Korea to scrap its
nuclear weapons programme immediately.

They also want to demand weapons inspections
across the country. That would be an unthinkable
concession for a Stalinist police state that bars
even aid agencies from a third of its territory.

This raises the prospect that Washington would
be urging inspections for form's sake and with
little hope of success, much as happened in Iraq.

Even before the American envoy, James Kelly,
arrived in Beijing for the talks, there were signs
of new North Korean brinksmanship.

Pyongyang released conflicting statements last
Friday, saying in an English language text that it
had started reprocessing spent fuel rods into
plutonium, a dramatic step that would place it
only months from producing several nuclear
warheads. However, a Korean version of the
statement said that Pyongyang was merely
poised to begin reprocessing.

Supporters of the diplomatic approach attacked
the Pentagon proposal as ludicrous. They said
that Beijing, while appalled by North Korea's recent
behaviour, would never join an American-led
campaign to topple its communist neighbour.

An unnamed senior administration official told
the New York Times: "The last thing the Chinese
want is a collapse of North Korea that will create
a flood of refugees into China and put Western
allies on the Chinese border."

The White House says that regime change in
North Korea is not official policy, despite the
country's inclusion with Iraq and Iran in President
George W Bush's "axis of evil".

Mr Bush has said that he "loathes" Kim Jong-il,
who is believed to have killed a tenth of his
population through starvation and imprisonment
in vast labour camps.

Colin Powell, the secretary of state, is said to
have secured the president's approval for a
carrot and stick approach in a meeting last week.
Mr Powell called for threats to withhold aid and
investment from North Korea, while assuring
the regime that it faces no threat from the United
States.

Mr Rumsfeld, who was "distracted" by the war
against Saddam Hussein, did not attend the
meeting and may now be trying to regain some
traction in the Korea debate, officials speculated.

Mr Bush, who appears willing to let his senior
aides scrap over policy before taking a final decision,
endorsed Mr Kelly's diplomatic mission at the
weekend and thanked Beijing for hosting the talks.

He said that China's involvement meant there was
"a good chance of convincing North Korea to abandon
her ambitions to develop nuclear arsenals".

The Clinton administration drew up plans to bomb
the main North Korean nuclear site at Yongbyon.
But the generally far more hawkish Bush government
has long contended that talk of military action against
North Korea is unrealistic, given the country's huge
conventional arsenals aimed at South Korea.

Instead, conservatives have advocated letting North
Korea "stew in its own juice", cutting off the overseas
aid which sustains the crumbling regime until it
collapses under its own weight.

Information appearing on telegraph.co.uk is the
copyright of Telegraph Group Limited and must
not be reproduced in any medium without licence.
For the full copyright statement see Copyright



________________________________________________________________
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Surf the web up to FIVE TIMES FASTER!
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=20

Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to =
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/=20



------=_NextPart_000_003A_01C30846.563C2120
Content-Type: text/html;
	charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable









 


 
Rumsfeld calls for regime =
change in=20
North Korea
By David Rennie in Washington
(Filed: =
22/04/2003)

A=20
secret Donald Rumsfeld memorandum calling
for regime change in North =
Korea=20
was leaked
yesterday, opening a fresh foreign policy split
in the =
Bush=20
administration.

The classified discussion paper, circulated =
by
the=20
defence secretary, appears to cut directly
across State Department =
plans to=20
disarm Kim
Jong-il, the North's dictator, through threats
leavened =
by=20
promises that his regime is not a
target for overthrow.

The =
paper does=20
not call for military action against
North Korea, but wants the =
United States=20
to team
up with China in pushing for the collapse of Kim
Jong-il's =

bankrupt but belligerent regime, the New
York Times =
reported.

In a=20
sign that Washington is girding itself for a
repetition of the bitter =
rows=20
that preceded the
Iraq conflict, the memorandum was leaked on
the =
same day=20
that a senior State Department
negotiator flew to Beijing for =
three-way talks=20
with
China and North Korea.

Officials working for Mr Rumsfeld =
are=20
implacably
opposed to the talks, pointing to North Korea's =
long
history of=20
extorting aid and concessions in return for
promises - never kept - =
to behave=20
in a more reasonable
way.

Instead, they seek to use the =
salutary=20
effect of the
rapid victory in Iraq to push North Korea to scrap=20
its
nuclear weapons programme immediately.

They also want to =
demand=20
weapons inspections
across the country. That would be an=20
unthinkable
concession for a Stalinist police state that bars
even =
aid=20
agencies from a third of its territory.

This raises the prospect =
that=20
Washington would
be urging inspections for form's sake and =
with
little=20
hope of success, much as happened in Iraq.

Even before the =
American=20
envoy, James Kelly,
arrived in Beijing for the talks, there were =
signs
of=20
new North Korean brinksmanship.

Pyongyang released conflicting =
statements=20
last
Friday, saying in an English language text that it
had =
started=20
reprocessing spent fuel rods into
plutonium, a dramatic step that =
would place=20
it
only months from producing several nuclear
warheads. However, a =
Korean=20
version of the
statement said that Pyongyang was merely
poised to =
begin=20
reprocessing.

Supporters of the diplomatic approach =
attacked
the=20
Pentagon proposal as ludicrous. They said
that Beijing, while =
appalled by=20
North Korea's recent
behaviour, would never join an =
American-led
campaign=20
to topple its communist neighbour.

An unnamed senior =
administration=20
official told
the New York Times: "The last thing the Chinese
want =
is a=20
collapse of North Korea that will create
a flood of refugees into =
China and=20
put Western
allies on the Chinese border."

The White House =
says that=20
regime change in
North Korea is not official policy, despite =
the
country's=20
inclusion with Iraq and Iran in President
George W Bush's "axis of=20
evil".

Mr Bush has said that he "loathes" Kim Jong-il,
who is =
believed=20
to have killed a tenth of his
population through starvation and=20
imprisonment
in vast labour camps.

Colin Powell, the secretary =
of=20
state, is said to
have secured the president's approval for =
a
carrot and=20
stick approach in a meeting last week.
Mr Powell called for threats =
to=20
withhold aid and
investment from North Korea, while assuring
the =
regime=20
that it faces no threat from the United
States.

Mr Rumsfeld, =
who was=20
"distracted" by the war
against Saddam Hussein, did not attend =
the
meeting=20
and may now be trying to regain some
traction in the Korea debate, =
officials=20
speculated.

Mr Bush, who appears willing to let his =
senior
aides scrap=20
over policy before taking a final decision,
endorsed Mr Kelly's =
diplomatic=20
mission at the
weekend and thanked Beijing for hosting the =
talks.

He=20
said that China's involvement meant there was
"a good chance of =
convincing=20
North Korea to abandon
her ambitions to develop nuclear =
arsenals".

The=20
Clinton administration drew up plans to bomb
the main North Korean =
nuclear=20
site at Yongbyon.
But the generally far more hawkish Bush =
government
has=20
long contended that talk of military action against
North Korea is=20
unrealistic, given the country's huge
conventional arsenals aimed at =
South=20
Korea.

Instead, conservatives have advocated letting =
North
Korea "stew=20
in its own juice", cutting off the overseas
aid which sustains the =
crumbling=20
regime until it
collapses under its own weight.

Information =
appearing=20
on telegraph.co.uk is the
copyright of Telegraph Group Limited and=20
must
not be reproduced in any medium without licence.
For the full =

copyright statement see=20
Copyright



________________________________________________=
________________
The=20
best thing to hit the internet in years - Juno SpeedBand!
Surf the =
web up to=20
FIVE TIMES FASTER!
Only $14.95/ month - visit www.juno.com to sign up=20
today!

------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor=20
---------------------~-->
Make Money Online Auctions! Make $500.00 =
or We=20
Will Give You Thirty Dollars for Trying!
http://=
us.click.yahoo.com/yMx78A/fNtFAA/i5gGAA/sitolB/TM
----------------=
-----------------------------------------------------~->

 =


Your=20
use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/ter=
ms/=20




------=_NextPart_000_003A_01C30846.563C2120--



From jafujii@uci.edu  Tue Apr 22 04:44:16 2003
From: jafujii@uci.edu (Jim Fujii)
Date: Mon, 21 Apr 2003 20:44:16 -0700
Subject: [Ethnicstudies] Fw: TODAY SHOW GOES DARK ON TIM ROBBINS
Message-ID: <004f01c30881$73889480$51bbc380@ucigyqexhlhmwv>

This is a multi-part message in MIME format.

------=_NextPart_000_004C_01C30846.C69D33F0
Content-Type: text/plain;
	charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Sent: Monday, April 21, 2003 8:13 PM
Subject: TODAY SHOW GOES DARK ON TIM ROBBINS=20


Today Show goes black on Tim Robbins

At 8:15 Monday Morning Today Show host Mat Lauer
introduced the controversy that has been kicked up by
the cancellation of the 15th anniversary of Bull Durham
at the Baseball Hall of Fame.

In a letter made public on Wednesday - Dale Petroskey,
the President of the Hall suggested that his venue was
not the appropriate venue for a highly charged political
expression.

Lauer then introduced Tim Robbins, who along with his
wife Susan Sarandon, had had their initiations revoked.
Lauer quizzed Robbins on free speech, and pointedly
asked Robbins if he had planned to use the Hall of Fame
event as a platform for a political statement. Robbins
said 'of course not.'

The discussion went back in forth for a few minutes,
with Lauer being neither accommodating nor
confrontational. And Robbins' responses were equally
measured. But Robbins did end up saying things that have
hardly been heard before since the war began. "The
message is if you speak out against this administration
you can and will be punished" Robbins explained.

"We're sending out messages on an almost daily basis
that they have no right to protest against this
President" said Robbins. To which Lauer responded with a
question about the Dixie Chicks and their controversial
comments against the President. Robbins responded -
pointing to the fact that the protest and banning of the
Dixie Chicks was by Clear Channel Radio and it's
connection with the Bush Administration. This
conversation was unheard of in the current environment.

Robins was talking serious politics on a morning chat
show - and clearly hackles went up. By 8:24 Robins was
explaining "We're fighting for freedom for the Iraqi
people right now so that they can have freedom of
speech, yet we're telling our own citizens they have to
be quiet"

Lauer could have called it quits there -but he went on
"When you see pictures of Iraqi's dancing and
celebrating -does it change your mind?" "No" Said
Robbins - "I'm ecstatic that they feel this freedom, I
hope we have the resolve to get in there and make it
work."

It was at this point that something happened that has
perhaps never happened before in the history of morning
television.

The music swelled under Robbins... Mid-sentence
answering a question that had been asked just 10 seconds
earlier... "We have a terrible track record" said
Robbins, clearly not able to hear that music was coming
up to literally 'play him off the stage'.

The camera cut to a wide shot. Lauer was leaning in and
very much in conversation. Either Lauer was ignoring
what must have been the deluge of invectives in his
earpiece, or he just determined that he wasn't finished
with this line of questioning.

But the music ended. The bumper music ended and the
studio was in the two shot as Robbins said..."It's for
some reason not in our best interest to keep it going
and pursue it to the next level." Lauer nodded, and the
camera faded to black as Robbins - mid sentence - had
his microphone turned down.

A conversation about free speech. An anchor asking
reasonable questions. A guest responding in equally
reasonable tones. No attempt to close out the discussion
- to say "Well thank you Tim". This was not a
filibuster. Robbins was not hogging the spotlight.

Someone in the control room simply decided that it was
time to pull the plug. And without grace or ceremony, or
even the face saving of letting Lauer say "We're out of
time" as morning shows do on so many occasions.

A conversation about free speech and free expression was
cut off mid sentence as the network went to black.

Television history was made, as million of Americans got
to watch in real time just how powerful and inescapable
censorship can be. Robbins wasn't revealing troop
locations, or giving aid and comfort to the enemy.
Remember the war has been won - by all accounts. He was
discussing freedom, free speech, and why his appearance
has been canceled at the Baseball Hall of Fame. NBC
should invite him back and let him finish his thought -
or admit at least who was on the phone to master control
demanding that they pull the plug.





------=_NextPart_000_004C_01C30846.C69D33F0
Content-Type: text/html;
	charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable









Sent: Monday, April 21, 2003 8:13 PM




Subject: TODAY SHOW GOES DARK ON TIM ROBBINS 



Today Show =
goes black on=20
Tim Robbins

At 8:15 Monday Morning Today Show host Mat=20
Lauer
introduced the controversy that has been kicked up by
the=20
cancellation of the 15th anniversary of Bull Durham
at the Baseball =
Hall of=20
Fame.

In a letter made public on Wednesday - Dale =
Petroskey,
the=20
President of the Hall suggested that his venue was
not the =
appropriate venue=20
for a highly charged political
expression.

Lauer then =
introduced Tim=20
Robbins, who along with his
wife Susan Sarandon, had had their =
initiations=20
revoked.
Lauer quizzed Robbins on free speech, and pointedly
asked =
Robbins=20
if he had planned to use the Hall of Fame
event as a platform for a =
political=20
statement. Robbins
said 'of course not.'

The discussion went =
back in=20
forth for a few minutes,
with Lauer being neither accommodating=20
nor
confrontational. And Robbins' responses were equally
measured. =
But=20
Robbins did end up saying things that have
hardly been heard before =
since the=20
war began. "The
message is if you speak out against this=20
administration
you can and will be punished" Robbins =
explained.

"We're=20
sending out messages on an almost daily basis
that they have no right =
to=20
protest against this
President" said Robbins. To which Lauer =
responded with=20
a
question about the Dixie Chicks and their controversial
comments =
against=20
the President. Robbins responded -
pointing to the fact that the =
protest and=20
banning of the
Dixie Chicks was by Clear Channel Radio and =
it's
connection=20
with the Bush Administration. This
conversation was unheard of in the =
current=20
environment.

Robins was talking serious politics on a morning=20
chat
show - and clearly hackles went up. By 8:24 Robins =
was
explaining=20
"We're fighting for freedom for the Iraqi
people right now so that =
they can=20
have freedom of
speech, yet we're telling our own citizens they have =
to
be=20
quiet"

Lauer could have called it quits there -but he went =
on
"When=20
you see pictures of Iraqi's dancing and
celebrating -does it change =
your=20
mind?" "No" Said
Robbins - "I'm ecstatic that they feel this freedom, =

I
hope we have the resolve to get in there and make =
it
work."

It=20
was at this point that something happened that has
perhaps never =
happened=20
before in the history of morning
television.

The music swelled =
under=20
Robbins... Mid-sentence
answering a question that had been asked just =
10=20
seconds
earlier... "We have a terrible track record" said
Robbins, =
clearly=20
not able to hear that music was coming
up to literally 'play him off =
the=20
stage'.

The camera cut to a wide shot. Lauer was leaning in =
and
very=20
much in conversation. Either Lauer was ignoring
what must have been =
the=20
deluge of invectives in his
earpiece, or he just determined that he =
wasn't=20
finished
with this line of questioning.

But the music ended. =
The=20
bumper music ended and the
studio was in the two shot as Robbins =
said..."It's=20
for
some reason not in our best interest to keep it going
and =
pursue it to=20
the next level." Lauer nodded, and the
camera faded to black as =
Robbins - mid=20
sentence - had
his microphone turned down.

A conversation =
about free=20
speech. An anchor asking
reasonable questions. A guest responding in=20
equally
reasonable tones. No attempt to close out the discussion
- =
to say=20
"Well thank you Tim". This was not a
filibuster. Robbins was not =
hogging the=20
spotlight.

Someone in the control room simply decided that it =
was
time=20
to pull the plug. And without grace or ceremony, or
even the face =
saving of=20
letting Lauer say "We're out of
time" as morning shows do on so many=20
occasions.

A conversation about free speech and free expression=20
was
cut off mid sentence as the network went to =
black.

Television=20
history was made, as million of Americans got
to watch in real time =
just how=20
powerful and inescapable
censorship can be. Robbins wasn't revealing=20
troop
locations, or giving aid and comfort to the enemy.
Remember =
the war=20
has been won - by all accounts. He was
discussing freedom, free =
speech, and=20
why his appearance
has been canceled at the Baseball Hall of Fame.=20
NBC
should invite him back and let him finish his thought -
or =
admit at=20
least who was on the phone to master control
demanding that they pull =
the=20
plug.





------=_NextPart_000_004C_01C30846.C69D33F0--



From dtsang@lib.uci.edu  Tue Apr 22 23:32:15 2003
From: dtsang@lib.uci.edu (Dan Tsang)
Date: Tue, 22 Apr 2003 15:32:15 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [Ethnicstudies] [Subversity] A Century of Male Bonding in Photographs (fwd)
Message-ID: 

Irvine -- Have male friendships become more intimate or less over the
years?

That's the question we'll ask American Studies Prof. John Ibson of Cal
State Fullerton, author of Picturing Men: A Century of Male Relationships
in Everyday American Photography (Smithsonian Press, 2002).

We'll also ask him how he managed to collect so many thousands of
snapshots of guys, and why.

Ibson is the featured guest on Subversity, a KUCI public affairs program,
airing today from 4-5 p.m. on KUCI, 88.9 fm in Irvine (Orange County,
Calif.) and via the Web on http://kuci.org.

To chat with our guest, call 949 824-5824 during the show, or send e-mail
to subversity@kuci.org.

Thanx for listening.  Next week is our KUCI fund drive, where you get a
chance to show your support for public radio.  Stay tuned!

dan
Daniel C. Tsang
Host, Subversity, now Tuesdays, 4-5 p.m.
KUCI, 88.9 FM and Web-cast live via http://kuci.org
Subversity: http://kuci.org/~dtsang; E-mail: subversity@kuci.org
Daniel Tsang, KUCI, PO Box 4362, Irvine CA 92616
UCI Tel: (949) 824-4978; UCI Fax: (949) 824-2700
UCI Office: 380 Main Library
Member, National Writers Union (http://www.nwu.org)
WWW News Resource Page: http://sun3.lib.uci.edu/~dtsang/netnews1.htm
AWARE: http://sun3.lib.uci.edu/~dtsang/aware2.htm
Personal Homepage: http://sun3.lib.uci.edu/~dtsang/

_______________________________________________

KUCI.org 88.9FM - "eclectic music, engaging talk"
_______________________________________________



From dtsang@lib.uci.edu  Fri Apr 25 15:36:05 2003
From: dtsang@lib.uci.edu (Dan Tsang)
Date: Fri, 25 Apr 2003 07:36:05 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [Ethnicstudies] Chinese in California 1850-1925 site (fwd)
Message-ID: 

The Library of Congress has put up a Chinese in California web site
drawing from digital resources from the Bancroft Library, Ethnic Studies
Library (UCB) and from the California Historical Society.

See: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/award99/cubhtml/cichome.html

dan
Daniel C. Tsang
Bibliographer for Asian American Studies,
 Economics, Management (acting), & Politics
Social Science Data Librarian
Lecturer, School of Social Sciences
380 Main Library, University of California
PO Box 19557, Irvine CA 92623-9557, USA
E-mail: dtsang@uci.edu; Tel: (949) 824-4978; fax: (949) 824-2700
UCI Social Science Data Archives: http://data.lib.uci.edu
OFFICE HOURS: Tuesday: 2-3:30 p.m.; Thursday: 1-2 p.m.




From dtsang@lib.uci.edu  Sat Apr 26 16:56:20 2003
From: dtsang@lib.uci.edu (Dan Tsang)
Date: Sat, 26 Apr 2003 08:56:20 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [Ethnicstudies] Web site on Asian American Movement
Message-ID: 

This site is still up:

http://www.kqed.org/w/snapshots/index.html

I have two entries in it.

http://www.kqed.org/w/snapshots/01transforming/09tsang_daniel.html
(I'm fifth from left, with mustache, next to filmmaker Richard Fung)

and

http://www.kqed.org/w/snapshots/05bigpicture/06tsang_daniel2.html

Based in part on Asian Americans: The Movement and The Moment (UCLA Asian
American Studies Press, 2001).

dan
Daniel C. Tsang
Bibliographer for Asian American Studies,
 Economics, Management (acting), & Politics
Social Science Data Librarian
Lecturer, School of Social Sciences
380 Main Library, University of California
PO Box 19557, Irvine CA 92623-9557, USA
E-mail: dtsang@uci.edu; Tel: (949) 824-4978; fax: (949) 824-2700
UCI Social Science Data Archives: http://data.lib.uci.edu
OFFICE HOURS: Tuesday: 2-3:30 p.m.; Thursday: 1-2 p.m.



From gggonzal@uci.edu  Tue Apr 29 22:50:08 2003
From: gggonzal@uci.edu (Gilbert G. Gonzalez)
Date: Tue, 29 Apr 2003 14:50:08 -0700
Subject: [Ethnicstudies] Fwd: Letter to the G & M from the Cuban Ambassador to Canada
 (fwd)
Message-ID: <5.0.0.25.2.20030429144951.02264d00@pop.uci.edu>

>
>
>
>Subject: Letter to the G & M from the Cuban Ambassador to Canada
>
>From: Carlos Fernandez de Cossio
>Date: Thu, 10 Apr 2003 18:25:48 -0400
>Subject: letter to the G & M
>
>To the Editor of the Globe and Mail:
>
>The individuals arrested, prosecuted and sentenced in Cuba in recent days
>were not accused, nor were they detained, tried and sentenced for being
>economists, journalist, human rights activists or for expressing their
>opinion and dissent.  They have violated laws clearly known by them that are
>
>aimed to legitimately protect Cuba from the attempt by the US Government to
>destabilize the country, undermine and destroy Cuba's Constitutional order,
>its Government, its independence and its Socialist society.
>
>Unfortunately Cuba is still forced to defend its independence form US
>aggression and to face a hostility that has escalated to dangerous levels in
>
>recent months.  It is illegal in Cuba to act in detriment of the
>independence of the Cuban state or the integrity of its territory in the
>interest of a foreign state.  It is illegal to render to the US government
>information that facilitates the implementation of the Helms-Burton law and
>other provisions of US hostility toward Cuba.  It is illegal to seek
>classified information to help the implementation of Helms-Burton.  It is
>illegal to reproduce and distribute information materials of the US
>government conceived to support the economic war against Cuba and disturb
>the internal order of the country.  It is illegal to take actions in support
>
>of Helms-Burton that damage or obstruct the economic, industrial, commercial
>
>and financial relations of Cuban entities with the international community.
>
>The US does not have the right in Cuba and should not have the right
>anywhere to instruct their diplomats to interfere in the domestic affairs of
>
>a foreign country.  It is not acceptable to Cuba for the chief US diplomat
>in Havana to act as an organizer or agitator against the Government and to
>have Cuban citizens acting not only in complicity but also as instruments of
>
>the policy of hostility of the US against Cuba.  The US Government has
>dedicated hundreds of millions of dollars and still dedicates millions of
>dollars today to destabilize the Cuban nation.  It is a publicly documented
>fact.  The actions for which these individuals have faced the law are
>organized, financed, and conceived by the US government.  Cuba has the right
>
>to defend itself against such powerful foe and protect the stability,
>security and the lives of its citizens.  US hostility against Cuba has cost
>already hundreds of lives, pain to many families, immense economic damage
>and instability to the region.  No country that respects itself would allow
>its nation to face such dangers without protection.
>
>It is not true that the accused did not enjoy proper defense, in most cases
>designated by them and in the absence of such designation, assigned by the
>Government.  It is not true that they were uninformed about the charges
>before the trials.  It is not true that the trials were held in secret or
>closed doors.  Relatives and other Cuban citizens were present in all of the
>
>trials.  These were indeed summary trials, conducted in accordance with the
>law, with full guarantees and based on provisions for summary procedure
>similar to those existing in over one hundred countries, including the
>United States.
>
>Some Governments and international figures have expressed public concern
>about these trials, apparently driven by lack of information, misguided
>advice or a double standard when looking at justice.    In contrast, they
>express public silence in regard to the most powerful nation on Earth. No
>action similar to the abuses of Afghans, Arabs and citizens from different
>countries detained in Guantanamo base has taken place in Cuba.  No secret
>military trial like the ones established in the United States has been nor
>can be carried out in Cuba.  There do not exist thousands of detainees still
>
>unaware of the charges against them and whose names have not been released
>in totality, as is happening in the United States since September 11, 2001.
>None of the individuals tried in Cuba has been submitted to solitary
>confinement, to psychological torture or cruel separation from their
>families like the five Cuban unjustly suffering prison in the United States.
>
>The 75 Cuban individuals and their attorneys have had full access to the
>information used against them by the prosecution, in contrast with the five
>Cubans condemned to abusive sentences in the US who are still waiting to
>read over 50 per cent of the documentation used to incriminate them because
>it was declared secret.
>
>This is not an issue of human rights, liberty or freedom of expression; it
>is about the right of a nation to build a just society protected from
>foreign aggression.  International Law is on Cuba's side.  The government
>that has supported some of the most brutal regimes of the 20th century, that
>
>disregards international law, that steps over the UN, that carries out a
>criminal war for economic and geopolitical ambitions, that possesses the
>greatest arsenals of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons cannot and
>should not be allowed to assume that Cuba's integrity and sovereignty are
>for sale.
>
>
>Carlos Fernandez de Cossio
>Ambassador of Cuba