Month: July 2004

Best blog comment from an anti-war lefty on the deplorable Kerry is at Lenin’s Tomb. “Kerry is the neocon dream. Pro-war, pro-Israel, pro-Plan Colombia. And also, not to miss the finer points, loaded.” Lenin points out that not only is Kerry a hawk on Iraq, but he may well be a worse Drug Warrior than Bush.

Tim Dunlop comments on Powell’s condescending nanny-lecture to the Hungarians (excerpt):

The nice thing about the Bush administration is that just because you’re an ally and helped them out on occasion that doesn’t mean that they’re going to play nice with you. Colin Powell is in Europe at the moment and is heavying one of the key members of the “new ” bit, his good friends in Hungary:

Secretary of State Colin Powell said Tuesday that countries assisting post-war Iraq must “not get weak in the knees” and yield to guerrillas waging a campaign of hostage-taking and bombing against the interim government installed by the American-led coalition.

“Democracy is hard,” Powell said at a gathering of Hungarian ambassadors in Budapest on the first stop on a six-nation tour of Europe and the Middle East. “Democracy is dangerous. This is the time for us to be steadfast, not get weak in the knees and say, ‘Oh, gosh, this may be too hard; let’s leave these poor people alone so the tyrants can return.’ We’re not going to do that.”

At another point, he said, “We must not allow insurgents, those who will use bombs and kidnapping and beheading, to triumph.”

You see, when you want international cooperation, it’s always a good idea to suggest that you’re allies are either directly or indirectly on the side of terrorists, that they are a bit soft and are scaredy pants. People love being lectured about their lack of moral fibre by moral giants like Colin Powell and other representatives of the Bush administration.

TalkLeft, blogging from the Dem convention, has pictures of the riot police sent out when protesters actually protested in the Protest Pen. Apparently a few escaped the Pen and actually protested in the street, where they could be seen! The horror!

RT at The Decadent West actually manages to eke some entertainment out of the Dem convention by sending Jim “Tron Dork” Maynard as DW’s correspondent.

The Poorman on Night Of 1,000 Hacks:

Wouldn’t it be funny if someone told a few thousand journalists and pundits and all-purpose blowhards that there was this really interesting event going on and that they just had to go and cover it because it was going to be just the most interesting thing ever? And then it was just this enormous, week-long Guthy-Renker seminar? Good one, DNC!

Swopa has a good post up on the death of Zaydun Hassoun at the hands of American soldiers. Zaydun was the Iraqi who was pushed off the Tharthar dam into the icy Tigris river last January and drowned. The defense lawyers at the court martial are now claiming that there is no evidence that Zaydun drowned even though the family is offering to exhume Zaydun’s body. From the AP story:

An uncle, Nizar Fadhel al-Samarrai, told the AP that Army investigators never showed up to confirm the death of his nephew, though the family was prepared to exhume the body to prove it.

Army investigator Sgt. Irene Cintron testified that it was too dangerous to exhume the body, and she relied on the word of family members and members of the Iraqi Civil Defense Force.

That should tell you all you need to know about how well the occupation is going in Samarra.

Antiwar Libertarianism: Principled or Pragmatic? Don’t miss Roderick Long’s reply to Volokh liberventionist Randy Barnett. Long concludes by saying he speaks only for himself, not other antiwar libertarians, but he’s welcome to speak for me on this subject. Interestingly, liberal blogger Mark Kleiman nails the flaw in Barnett’s post also, and issues a challenge, “But presumably Barnett has convinced himself that it’s possible to wage war without violating rights, and I’d really like to know how that miracle is supposed to be performed. I’d hate to imagine that Libertarians don’t mind violating rights as long as the people whose rights are violated don’t look like them.” which Barnett fails to answer.

Stephan Kinsella says Kerry is going to win.

Be sure to check out two great exclusives on Antiwar.com this weekend by first-time contributors Scott Sutton and Michael Uhl.

Over the weekend of August 12-13, 2000, as the delegates to the Democratic National Convention gathered in Los Angeles, the US and the UK conducted two airstrikes against the southern Iraq town of Samawa. Two people were killed and 19 injured in the first, in which several homes and a warehouse used to store supplies purchased under the U.N. oil-for-food program were hit, according to Iraq. In the second, a train station and several homes were damaged and several people were injured.

On Thursday, August 17, the day Gore accepted the nomination, US jets bombed air defense sites in northern Iraq, according to the US military.

Making convention week a perfect recapitulation of the Clinton administration’s eight-year aggression was the release on Tuesday, the 15th, of a U.N.-commissioned report titled The Adverse Consequences of Economic Sanctions on the Enjoyment of Human Rights (“The Bossuyt Report”). Regarding Iraq, it found that the 10 years of U.N. sanctions driven by the U.S. and U.K. “ have produced a humanitarian disaster comparable to the worst catastrophes of the past decades…

“The sanctions regime against Iraq is unequivocally illegal under existing international humanitarian law and human rights law. Some would go as far as making a charge of genocide,” as it has “as its clear purpose the deliberate infliction on the Iraqi people of conditions of life (lack of adequate food, medicines, etc.) calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”

A month earlier, Danny Muller of Voices in the Wilderness had provided some amusement for Gore when he asked him about the sanctions at a campaign stop.

John Nichols, assisstant editor of Madison’s Capital Times and Washington correspondent for The Nation, is such an antiwar, antiBush stalwart that almost half of the 200 columns he’s written for the CT since January 1, 2003 have contained the word “Iraq.” Nichols wrote three columns about the 2000 convention, each of them gushing over Senator Russ Feingold (aka “Diogenes”) for “taking a hard line on soft money.” No “Iraq” to be found during recapitulation week.

Like Nichols, the brunt of the antiwar movement loathes Bush for first “stealing” the election and then cynically manipulating the 9/11 attacks in order to invade Iraq. Never mind how laughable the idea that Gore deserved to be president, never mind that 9/11 might not have been there to exploit if Clinton/Gore Middle East policy had evinced a bit of decency.

Yes, what the Bush administration is doing is intolerable, but every once in a while the antiwar movement should take a break from its loathing and ask itself how, for the most part, it tolerated what the Clinton administration did.

The loudest applause during Wesley Clark’s speech last night came at the end of this:

Under John Kerry we will attack and destroy the terrorist threats to America. He’ll join the pantheon of great wartime Democrats.

Great Democrats like Woodrow Wilson, who led us to victory in World War 1. Great Democrats like Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, who turned back the tide of fascism to win World War II. Great Democrats like John Kennedy, who stood firm and steered us safely through the Cuban Missile Crisis. And great Democrats like Bill Clinton, who confronted ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia, and with diplomacy — backed by force — brought peace to a shattered land.

Read the whole putrid thing.

Titled "Responses to Al Qaeda’s Initial Assaults," the fourth chapter of the 9/11 report follows the government’s slow appreciation of Osama bin Ladin’s threat to America. Overall, the chapter demonstrates the internal conflicts within various government agencies on how to respond to the growing threat of terrorism. 1996 saw the first concerted effort to focus on Bin Ladin with the formation of the CIA’s "Bin Ladin Unit." It was set up "to analyze intelligence on and plan operations against Bin Ladin." (page 109). Once Bin Ladin moved back to Afghanistan the Bin Ladin unit was able to use CIA contacts [tribals] in the regions to get fairly reliable information on his location. However, action could not follow until the US charged him with a crime:

"The eventual charge, conspiring to attack U.S. defense installations, was finally issued from the grand jury in June 1998—as a sealed indictment.The indictment was publicly disclosed in November of that year." (page 110)

The first plan to capture or kill Bin Ladin was ready by early 1998:

"Tenet apparently walked National Security Advisor Sandy Berger through the basic plan on February 13. One group of tribals would subdue the guards, enter Tarnak Farms [a Bin ladin hideout] stealthily, grab Bin Ladin, take him to a desert site outside Kandahar, and turn him over to a second group.This second group of tribals would take him to a desert landing zone already tested in the 1997 Kansi capture. From there, a CIA plane would take him to New York, an Arab capital, or wherever he was to be arraigned." (page 112)

Due to a concern for civilian casualties and a belief that the capture plan was too flawed, the CIA did not go ahead with the operation. This plan was the last before the embassy bombings of 1998. In response, President Clinton ordered a Tomahawk missile strike on a suspected Bin Ladin camp. Although the missiles hit their targets, Bin Ladin escaped the attack reportedly because he was tipped off by Pakistani military intelligence. As readers may recall, these attacks occurred during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, leading some pundits to claim that the action was meant to distract the American public. The commission claims that such sentiments affected the way America approached Bin Ladin in the following years:

"The failure of the strikes, the ‘wag the dog’ slur, the intense partisanship of the period, and the nature of the al Shifa [supposed chemical plant in Sudan] evidence likely had a cumulative effect on future decisions about the use of force against Bin Ladin. Berger told us that he did not feel any sense of constraint." (page 118).

Continue reading “Notes on Chapter 4 of the 9/11 Report”

John Kerry: “I defended this country as a young man and I will defend it as president.”

You defended this country from what? Those Vietnamese peasants who were pillaging Boston?