Been a long time. I've been busy helping out with the OccupationWatch website and prettifying the AxisOfEvildoers one.

Some comments on recent events:

Earlier this week we had the AI report on human rights to give us nightmares. Amnesty points out that the torture, killings and other atrocities committed by US forces are inconsistent with the lofty rhetoric about freedom and such like. According to the miserable failure in this latest press conference, we can just dismiss AI's report as yet more America (freedom/God/Apple Pie)-hating BS:

In terms of the detainees, we've had thousands of people detained. We've investigated every single complaint against the detainees. It seemed like to me they based some of their decisions on the word of -- and the allegations -- by people who were held in detention, people who hate America, people that had been trained in some instances to disassemble -- that means not tell the truth. And so it was an absurd report. It just is. And, you know -- yes, sir.

Yes, they "disassemble" this:

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A short aside. Does anyone else think it strange that there is a need to airbrush out TESTICLES when showing torture? Do most people find hairy sacks more shocking than torture? Is a penis more disturbing than people abusing other humans? Another case of Old Europe I suppose.

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I need to admit to my shame that I was unaware of the scale of the horror in Africa. Now that sounds truly like TERROR, but do we give a fuck? Thanks to AI for trying to bring all this to the attention of the world

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Nancy Pelosi delivered yet another anti Palestinian talk to AIPAC while two senior AIPAC employees are being indicted for espionage against the US. (Why is it that Anti Palestinian does not sound as bad as Anti Semitic - they are Semites too?) My favorite quote? Gotta be this one:

There are those who contend that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is all about Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. This is absolute nonsense. In truth, the history of the conflict is not over occupation, and never has been: it is over the fundamental right of Israel to exist.

It is all about a country's right (what other country makes claim to such a right?) to exist trumping the right of 4 million HUMANS to live free of occupation. Personally I believe people have rights, not countries, but I'm an old European, and therefore no doubt an anti Semite. Incidentally if, as the anti Palestinian crowd insist, criticism of Israeli crimes is anti Semitism, then I'm proud to be labeled as such by them. But they should stand still while I call them racist, colonialist religious supremacists.

Israel plans to build 3,500 new homes in the West Bank to cement its hold on Jerusalem, government sources said on Monday

Haaretz reports.

The blueprint for two new neighborhoods linking the settlement of Ma'aleh Adumim to East Jerusalem appeared to flout the U.S.-backed peace road map whose final vision is disputed by Israel and the Palestinians.

The road map requires a halt to settlement-building on land Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East war and which Palestinians want as part of a future state.

But U.S. President George W. Bush said in 2004 that Israel, which intends to quit the occupied Gaza Strip this year, could expect to keep some West Bank settlement blocs under an accord.

Strange religious news. In Greece the religion (the church?) is being exposed:

The revelations are mind-boggling. Almost daily, men once revered as paragons of virtue have been exposed as lascivious money-grabbers. Recorded conversations of eminent clerics engaging in 'love talk' have been broadcast on television, secret bank accounts revealed, and malfeasance unearthed, with priests emerging as central players in activities as disparate as trial-fixing, antiquities smuggling and election rigging. Highlighting a raft of lurid sexual claims, one newspaper splashed what was purported to be a 91-year-old priest in bed with a woman across its front page.

'In many ways, the Greek Orthodox Church has been revealed for what it is: a completely amoral and unethical multinational company'

Meanwhile in Jesusland (USA USA USA) we have slightly different developments:

In several US states, Imax cinemas - including some at science museums - are refusing to show movies that mention the subject or suggest that Earth's origins do not conform with biblical descriptions.

John Bolton named as US ambassador to the UN! From the BBC:

He has in past been quoted as saying there is no such thing as the United Nations.

He also reportedly said in 1994 that it would not make any difference if the UN headquarters in New York lost 10 of its storeys.

Here is a description by Pilger:

The "crazies" include John Bolton, Under Secretary of State, who has made a personal mission of tearing up missile treaties with the Russians and threatening North Korea, and Douglas Feith, an Under Secretary of Defence, who ran a secret propaganda unit "reworking" intelligence about Iraq's weapons. I interviewed them both in Washington.

BOLTON boasted to me that the killing of as many as 10,000 Iraqi civilians in the invasion was "quite low if you look at the size of the military operation."

For raising the question of civilian casualties and asking which country America might attack next, I was told: "You must be a member of the Communist Party."

Good article on fighting homophobia in "Kansas" and on the relations with the fight for civil rights. Gary Younge in the Guardian:

There are two main reasons why this comparison jars with many. The first is blatant homophobia. It is far easier to marginalise the lesbian and gay agenda if you can sever any association between it and other struggles for equality. The second is latent homophobia, which argues that such comparisons trivialise racism, as though the right to love who you want and still keep your job, your home and sometimes your life is a trifling matter.

Those who insist that one is worse than the other should remember that this is not a competition. Sadly, there is enough misery to go around. People like the Phelpses will make sure it stays that way. They don't need our help.

The subtle way in which Palestinians are vilified when compared to Israelis is demonstrated in this paragraph from the New York Times:

In February, 13 Palestinians were killed, according to the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group. Most were militants, though teenage civilians were among the dead, Palestinians said. All five Israeli deaths came in the Tel Aviv bombing.

We are informed that "most" of the Palestinians are militants. We are told nothing of the fact that most of the Israeli dead were soldiers. Not that it particularly matters, but neither does it matter what portion of the Palestinian dead are militants, whatever that means. In fact, outside Haaretz and the Jerusalem Post I have seen no mention that the Israeli dead were anything other than civilians.

Sometimes I wonder whether journalists have the same understanding of language as other people. From The Guardian

The family had not suffered any particular grievance at the hands of the Israelis, Ibrahim said, although he was detained in 1989 and held for 18 months without trial.

The town has lost a large part of its livelihood because the separation barrier has cut it off from its 825 acres (334 hectares) of farmland.

In theory they can reach it through a gate, but it is rarely open, and the Israelis have begun chopping down some of the trees.

I wonder what would constitute a particular grievance?

Who is the terrorist?

The "settlers" told by "man of peace" Sharon to "grab every hilltop" continue their good work. From Haaretz:

A number of times from the end of 2000 to the end of 2003, the villagers had no water to their homes after unknown perpetrators smashed the water pipes and threw building waste into the water holes.

Oxfam volunteered to finance the pipes' repair, but they were vandalized again. Oxfam then encased the pipes above the surface with concrete and built an iron cage around the water holes to protect them. However, once again the concrete and pipes were smashed and the drinking water fouled with dirty diapers and other waste.

In November 2003, Italian volunteers helped the villagers seal the water hole openings with concrete. But in a few months the villagers started suffering from liver infections and stomach diseases. The contaminated water was banned for use until January this year, when after heavy rainfalls the pollution was reduced. The villagers started using it again, until 10 days ago.

But remember. The Palestinians need to stop the violence before discussion of a state for them can begin.

A couple of days ago in an editorial in the NYT we were told:

The Europeans need to bend too. They should commit themselves to a much greater role in training Iraqi security forces. And they must join the United States in declaring Hezbollah a terrorist organization, because it is, and because the message to terrorists must be one and only one.

To the best of my knowledge Hezbollah has not engaged in terrorism (unless one accepts the new US/Israeli definition of terrorism as any attack on occupation forces) for many years. The occasional anti aircraft fire into the occupied Shabaa Farms is usually (always?) a response to Israeli military aircraft entering Lebanese air space.

In Europe vs. America Tony Judt discusses differences between these two.

America, it seems, is better than Europe at creating jobs. So more American adults are at work and they work much more than Europeans. What do they get for their efforts?

Not much, unless they are well-off. The US is an excellent place to be rich. Back in 1980 the average American chief executive earned forty times the average manufacturing employee. For the top tier of American CEOs, the ratio is now 475:1 and would be vastly greater if assets, not income, were taken into account. By way of comparison, the ratio in Britain is 24:1, in France 15:1, in Sweden 13:1.[2] A privileged minority has access to the best medical treatment in the world. But 45 million Americans have no health insurance at all (of the world's developed countries only the US and South Africa offer no universal medical coverage). According to the World Health Organization the United States is number one in health spending per capita—and thirty-seventh in the quality of its service.

As a consequence, Americans live shorter lives than West Europeans. Their children are more likely to die in infancy: the US ranks twenty-sixth among industrial nations in infant mortality, with a rate double that of Sweden, higher than Slovenia's, and only just ahead of Lithuania's—and this despite spending 15 percent of US gross domestic product on "health care" (much of it siphoned off in the administrative costs of for-profit private networks). Sweden, by contrast, devotes just 8 percent of its GDP to health. The picture in education is very similar. In the aggregate the United States spends much more on education than the nations of Western Europe; and it has by far the best research universities in the world. Yet a recent study suggests that for every dollar the US spends on education it gets worse results than any other industrial nation. American children consistently underperform their European peers in both literacy and numeracy.

Amira Hass on the Israeli occupation and the resistance to it:

That's the upside down method: occupy them, their land, their natural resources, take over their lives and judge them as criminals when they resist us - when they kill either civilians or soldiers. We admit we killed civilians, but the "war" apparently not only justifies our cruelty, it erases it. On the other hand, the war - in other words, the occupation, in other words, the war for the preservation of the loot from the 1967 war: the settlements - does not justify or even explain their cruelty in our eyes.

If the Palestinians had warplanes and tanks so their killing was sterile, they would prefer to use those. And then, even if they killed Jewish civilians, they would not be called murderers with blood on their hands but enemy soldiers. And when caught they would be considered prisoners of war. If the policy makers of the Olso Accords really were thinking about peace the way they are said to have been, they would have freed all those prisoners. But then, like now: those who speak about gestures and then only free Marwan Barghouti's son, even if it was at Abbas' request, continue to operate with the old diskette of the colonialist who throws candy to the natives.

In the process of spreading freedom liberty and apple pie round the world a boy must have some fun too. Here is how Lt. Gen. James N. Mattis has fun with the natives of the empire:

"Actually, it's a lot of fun to fight. . . . It's fun to shoot some people. I'll be right upfront with you, I like brawling," he said at the forum in San Diego.

"You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil," he added. "You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them."

We are told that he is "one of the country's bravest and most experienced military leaders"

I am reminded of General Boykin who also has an "outstanding record":

He told one gathering: "Why is this man in the White House? The majority of Americans did not vote for him. He's in the White House because God put him there for a time such as this."

In January, he told Baptists in Florida about a victory over a Muslim warlord in Somalia, who had boasted that Allah would protect him from American capture. "I knew my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real god and his was an idol," Gen Boykin said.

He also emerged from the conflict with a photograph of the Somalian capital Mogadishu bearing a strange dark mark. He has said this showed "the principalities of darkness. . . a demonic presence in that city that God revealed to me as the enemy".

One of these "Only in America" moments. The "American Family Association" publishes an article with the title:
Children's TV Unites to Launch Pro-Homosexual Campaign of 'Tolerance'
SpongeBob, Arthur, Pooh, Bob the Builder, Little Mermaid, Many Others Enlisted in Stealth Effort

This follows the education secratery Margaret Spellings' complaint about, cover your eyes, lesbians, in Buster the bunny.
DOE Director Calls PBS to Account for Pro-Homosexual Cartoon
Ex-Homosexual Evangelist Says 'Buster Bunny's Been Busted' ... and Rightly So

The US "takes down" another UN official, Peter Hansen, head of UNRWA. According to the Guardian:

The Israeli ambassador to the UN, Dan Gillerman, often attacked Mr Hansen, saying he was exceeding his remit and calling him an "Israel hater".

Yet another "only in JesusLand". It would appear that people have complained to the FCC claiming that the opening ceremony for the Athens Olympics were obscene. From the Washington Post:

my children saw an exposed breast during the opening eremonies

also

"How could NBC be allowed to show the male genitalia on national television" during the opening ceremonies.
"I am referring to when the giant white mask that broke apart into a statue of a nude man," the writer explained. (Actually, the writer is referring to the gigantic replica of a Cycladic head, so popular around 2700 B.C., that broke apart to reveal a replica of a Kouros sculpture, all the rage around the 6th century B.C

I enjoyed the LA Times piece on this:

Greece does not wish to be drawn into an American culture war.

An old Barbara Bush quote that I just saw today (March 18 2003) in Mark Crispin Miller's book Cruel and Unusual. It is referenced here. A fine example of compassionate conservatism:

But why should we hear about body bags, and deaths, and how many, what day it's gonna happen, and how many this or what do you suppose? Or, I mean, it's, it's not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?

The book also reminded me of that golden oldie by Bush the Lesser from 2001:

Now, the American people have got to go about their business. We cannot let the terrorists achieve the objective of frightening our nation to the point where we don't conduct business or people don't shop.

Seymour Hersh reports in the New Yorker on the Bush administration's plans to continue their crusades. Onward Christian soldiers, now to Iran.

“This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq is just one campaign. The Bush Administration is looking at this as a huge war zone,” the former high-level intelligence official told me. “Next, we’re going to have the Iranian campaign. We’ve declared war and the bad guys, wherever they are, are the enemy. This is the last hurrah—we’ve got four years, and want to come out of this saying we won the war on terrorism.”

Why is Israel leaving the Gaza strip? Well one reason may be because it is one of the poorest places on earth. The CIA tells us unemployment is 50% (ranked 185 in the world) and GDP per capita is $600 (ranked 229)

Incidentally, I must commend the CIA factbook in that when talking of the Israeli population they say:

Population:6,199,008
note: includes about 187,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank, about 20,000 in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, more than 5,000 in the Gaza Strip, and fewer than 177,000 in East Jerusalem (July 2004 est.)

Mnost commentators ignore the Jerusalem settlers.

According to the Washington Post:

The hunt for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons in Iraq has come to an end nearly two years after President Bush ordered U.S. troops to disarm Saddam Hussein.

No weapons found. So, no doubt the media will start firing journalists, editors, who unquestioningly parroted the US administration's line taking us up to war. Surely these reporting failures are as important as the errors in the Dan Rather/CBS reporting on the miserable failure's war record.
And what of al the Iraqi scientists and bearcats held in captivity while the search for non weapons went on? When will they be released, and will they be compensated?

From the BBC website:

Former head of UN weapons inspections Hans Blix also said there was no surprise in the announcement.

"We have believed that there weren't any weapons since around May or June 2003. First came David Kay in September 2003 [who said] that he hadn't found any weapons and that was a big sensation - but he thought that there were programmes still," he told the BBC.

"But then came Duelfer last November [who] said that he hadn't seen any programmes, but maybe Saddam would have intended to restart the programme, and there is no evidence of that.

Mr Blix said he assumed it would be natural for the United States to now report their finding to the UN Security Council "because the US took the inspections out of the hands of the UN to undertake it themselves".

Is life in the US so much better than that in "old europe" countries such as Greece, France? Depends on what you mean by life.



Infant Mortality Rate: deaths/1,000 live births

country	total population	male	female
US	6.63	7.31	5.91
Greece	5.63	6.19	5.04
France	4.31	4.83	3.78

Life Expectency

country	total population	male	female
US	77.43	74.63	80.36
Greece	78.94	76.44	81.59
France	79.44	75.8	83.27

Literacy: definition: age 15 and over can read and write

country	total population	male	female
US	97	97	97
Greece	97.5	98.6	96.5
France	99	99	99

GDP/Capita

country	GDP
US	$37,800
Greece	$20,000
France	$27,600

The BBC reports the donor levels for tsunami relief. If you ever hear US-supremassists crowing about their generosity compared to the "euro-weenies" tell them that US=$550m, Germany $1.1bn and the EU $628m.

In the Guardian today, a first hand account from 'liberated' Fallujah. The concluding paragraph:

The US military destroyed Falluja, but simply spread the fighters out around the country. They also increased the chance of civil war in Iraq by using their new national guard of Shias to suppress Sunnis. Once, when a foreign journalist, an Irish guy, asked me whether I was Shia or Sunni - the way the Irish do because they have that thing about the IRA - I said I was Sushi. My father is Sunni and my mother is Shia. I never cared about these things. Now, after Falluja, it matters.

Rahul Maharajan pointed me to this article in Newsweek:

" Following that model, one Pentagon proposal would send Special Forces teams to advise, support and possibly train Iraqi squads, most likely hand-picked Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Shiite militiamen, to target Sunni insurgents and their sympathizers, even across the border into Syria, according to military insiders familiar with the discussions. "

Some while ago there was a Sy Hersh article on the Israeli finger in such a plan...

"Israeli intelligence and military operatives are now quietly at work in Kurdistan, providing training for Kurdish commando units and, most important in Israel’s view, running covert operations inside Kurdish areas of Iran and Syria. Israel feels particularly threatened by Iran, whose position in the region has been strengthened by the war."

Now that Negroponte and Sharon are working together to assure the freedom of Iraqis we can all feel secure and happy.