October 24, 2010 archive

Unless you’ve already voted, you have a decision that must be made by no later than November 2, 2010.  Will you choose to exercise your right to vote?

Unless this writer has misjudged the mood of the Docudharma community, there seems to be a prevailing sentiment that the Democrats need to be taught a lesson. If enough of their supporters from 2006 and 2008 stay at home this time, perhaps they will learn a lesson.  But the question must be asked, “What will that lesson be?”

Will the Democrats, soon to become a severely chastened minority party, move to the left to recapture the hearts and minds of those who have voluntarily surrendered their right to vote?  Will they regard this portion of their electorate as fickle and unreliable, choosing to move further to the right, even further marginalizing the progressives, compensating for their losses by attempting to secure the support of those occupying that elusive “center” of the political continuum?  The clear shift to the right under the influence of the deceptively named Tea Party by the Republicans has created a gaping vaccuum in the so-called “center.”  

Will the Democrats perceive the stay-at-home progressives as an important constituency to be recaptured at all costs, or simply write them off as not worth the trouble?  Even though abortions are still performed in this country, gay marriage is now legal in several states, we haven’t yet adopted a state religion, and a few civil rights still remain, the Republicans can rest easy knowing that the Right to Life movement, the Christian Right, the NRA and the libertarians will show up without fail.  And they can still take this for granted even though much that was on these respective factions’ wish lists were not enacted, even with clear Republican majorities from January, 2003 through January, 2007.  

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Robert Fisk: The Shaming of America

The UK Independent, Sunday, October 24, 2010

As usual, the Arabs knew. They knew all about the mass torture, the promiscuous shooting of civilians, the outrageous use of air power against family homes, the vicious American and British mercenaries, the cemeteries of the innocent dead. All of Iraq knew. Because they were the victims.

Only we could pretend we did not know. Only we in the West could counter every claim, every allegation against the Americans or British with some worthy general – the ghastly US military spokesman Mark Kimmitt and the awful chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Peter Pace, come to mind – to ring-fence us with lies. Find a man who’d been tortured and you’d be told it was terrorist propaganda; discover a house full of children killed by an American air strike and that, too, would be terrorist propaganda, or “collateral damage”, or a simple phrase: “We have nothing on that.”

Of course, we all knew they always did have something. And yesterday’s ocean of military memos proves it yet again. Al-Jazeera has gone to extraordinary lengths to track down the actual Iraqi families whose men and women are recorded as being wasted at US checkpoints – I’ve identified one because I reported it in 2004, the bullet-smashed car, the two dead journalists, even the name of the local US captain – and it was The Independent on Sunday that first alerted the world to the hordes of indisciplined gunmen being flown to Baghdad to protect diplomats and generals. These mercenaries, who murdered their way around the cities of Iraq, abused me when I told them I was writing about them way back in 2003.

[snip]

We still haven’t got to the bottom of the WikiLeaks story, and I rather suspect that there are more than just a few US soldiers involved in this latest revelation. Who knows if it doesn’t go close to the top? In its investigations, for example, al-Jazeera found an extract from a run-of-the-mill Pentagon press conference in November 2005. Peter Pace, the uninspiring chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is briefing journalists on how soldiers should react to the cruel treatment of prisoners, pointing out proudly that an American soldier’s duty is to intervene if he sees evidence of torture. Then the camera moves to the far more sinister figure of Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who suddenly interrupts – almost in a mutter, and to Pace’s consternation – “I don’t think you mean they (American soldiers) have an obligation to physically stop it. It’s to report it.”

Robert Fisk: The shaming of America

Our writer delivers a searing dispatch after the WikiLeaks revelations that expose in detail the brutality of the war in Iraq – and the astonishing, disgraceful deceit of the US

Sunday, 24 October 2010

As usual, the Arabs knew. They knew all about the mass torture, the promiscuous shooting of civilians, the outrageous use of air power against family homes, the vicious American and British mercenaries, the cemeteries of the innocent dead. All of Iraq knew. Because they were the victims.

Only we could pretend we did not know. Only we in the West could counter every claim, every allegation against the Americans or British with some worthy general – the ghastly US military spokesman Mark Kimmitt and the awful chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Peter Pace, come to mind – to ring-fence us with lies.

Julian Assange of Wikileaks and Professsor John Sloboda of the Iraq Body Count project spoke Saturday morning in a news conference at the Frontline Club in London, England.

Sloboda gave his early assessment of what the Iraq War Logs released by WikiLeaks add to the known Iraqi death toll, while Assange defended his decision to publish the leaked documents, saying “this disclosure is about the truth” and that his hope is to correct some of the attacks on the “truth” about the Iraq invasion and occupation by the Pentagon and the American government and US mainstream media.

The BBC reported this morning, with their reporter Gordon Corera framing the initial spin UK mainstream media will put on the release of the logs: