Month: February 2004

I am not linking to this horrific article to discuss the politics of the fire-bombing of Dresden, Germany, fifty-nine years years ago today. I am linking to it to illustrate that war is always the most terrible method nations can resort to in settling their differences. It doesn’t matter which side you are on; death and suffering don’t play favorites. As so many have repeated this past year: war is the ultimate failure of humanity.

Toward the end of World War II, as Allied planes rained death and destruction over Germany, the old Saxon city of Dresden lay like an island of tranquillity amid desolation. Famous as a cultural center and possessing no military value, Dresden had been spared the terror that descended from the skies over the rest of the country.

Dresden was a hospital city for wounded soldiers. Not one military unit, not one anti-aircraft battery was deployed in the city. Together with the 600,000 refugees from Breslau, Dresden was filled with nearly 1.2 million people…

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was in Dresden when it was bombed in 1945. Returning home to Indianapolis after the war, Vonnegut began writing short stories for magazines. Finally, in 1969, he tackled the subject of war, recounting his experiences as a POW in Dresden, forced to dig corpses from the rubble. The resulting novel was Slaughterhouse Five. “Yes, by your people, may I say,” he insists. “You guys burnt the place down, turned it into a single column of flame. More people died there in the firestorm, in that one big flame, than died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.

The WWII Dresden Holocaust – ‘A Single Column Of Flame’

Got a number of emails re “Why There’s No Left Left (Part II).”

Eugene Koontz pointed out that 2 of the links in the post were broken. Here they are again: “Why There’s No Left Left [Part I]” and “Cash or Charge?”

Thanks Mr. Koontz!

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Thant Tessman writes:

“Minor note: The article about government debt linked to in the blog entry [“Tuition warfare“] says: ‘The government can spend more money than it takes in because it has the power to borrow money on the open market.’ This is not the whole story. The government would not be able to borrow the kind of money it does to finance the wars we’ve seen throughout U.S. history without the banks (through the mechanisms of the Federal Reserve and fractional-reserve banking) effectively printing money to buy that government debt. I’m sure this is something most of the contributors to Antiwar.com already know. I only mention it because this point never seems to get the attention it deserves.”

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B. Sirius writes:

“Let’s see, if we were citizens of a foreign country, Brazil for example, they would just forgive the national debt. When you have a population as collectively dumb as we are, folks just bend over and grab their ankles.”

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And Cam Hardy writes:

“I’m a regular reader of Antiwar.com, and generally your Mad Max-style libertarianism doesn’t get in the way of quality reporting and commentary. However, the blog entry ‘Why There’s No Left Left Part II’ was ridiculous. If there truly was ‘no Left left,’ the antiwar movement would be an irrelevant bunch of pseudo-intellects blogging about the need for roads to be privatized.”

Good eye for exaggeration, M. Hardy! “Why There’s Little Left Left” would have been more accurate. Also, Nixon did win in a landslide a few decades ago so maybe “Why There’s So Little Left” would have been better yet.

The story of Geoge W. Bush’s rise to wealth and the people who helped him, well worth the time it takes to read this 26-page article from Harpers Magazine originally written back in Feb 2000 by Joe Concson and Kevin P. Phillips while Bush was a candidate for the presidency. As an aside, it is interesting to note that among the military records just released documenting that 1st Lt. George W. Bush was relieved of flying status for not taking a required physical examination, further down the same page, Maj. James R. Bath was also relieved of flying status for the same reason shortly afterward. Mr. Bath appears in Bush business dealings spoken of in this article, and also was involved in the financial affairs of the bin Laden family. More on Mr. Bath later.

NOTES ON A NATIVE SON

And why the wishy-washy Kerry isn’t likely to win.

Read an excerpt of Myths of Rich and Poor.”

Or buy the book (and help out Antiwar.com)!

Read “Why There’s No Left Left” Part I.

To which a reader replies suggesting that the rise in the US standard of living is due to personal debt: “Cash or Charge?.”

But more ominous than personal debt is the government’s debt, which some analysts claim is approaching $100,000 per American (not per taxpayer, per man, woman and child) if Social Security obligations are included. How is a nation of people living paycheck to paycheck gonna pay down $100K per person? Not to worry, the same birdbrains and thieves who brought us the expensive, dangerous and (some of us would say) unethical everything-but-neutrality, fund’em-then-bomb’em foreign policy are hard at work, uh…

What is the White House still hiding? And what are other government agencies hiding? Here are just a few bits of 9/11 information which may not have come before the commission.

The politically divided 9/11 commission was able to agree on a public airing of four and a half minutes from the Betty Ong tape, which the American public and most of the victims’ families heard for the first time on the evening news of Jan. 27. But commissioners were unaware of the crucial information given in an even more revealing phone call, made by another heroic flight attendant on the same plane, Madeline (Amy) Sweeney. They were unaware because their chief of staff, Philip Zelikow, chooses which evidence and witnesses to bring to their attention. Mr. Zelikow, as a former adviser to the pre-9/11 Bush administration, has a blatant conflict.

“My wife’s call was the first specific information the airline and the government got that day,” said Mike Sweeney, the widowed husband of Amy Sweeney, who went face to face with the hijackers on Flight 11. She gave seat locations and physical descriptions of the hijackers, which allowed officials to identify them as Middle Eastern men—by name—even before the first crash. She gave officials key clues to the fact that this was not a traditional hijacking. And she gave the first and only eyewitness account of a bomb on board.”

The captain of American’s Flight 11 stayed at the controls much of the diverted way from Boston to New York, sending surreptitious radio transmissions to authorities on the ground. He gave extraordinary access to the drama inside his cockpit by triggering a “push-to-talk button” on the aircraft’s yoke … the plane turned south toward New York, and more than one F.A.A. controller heard a transmission with an ominous statement by a terrorist in the background, saying, “We have more planes. We have other planes.” All of it was recorded by a F.A.A. traffic-control center in Nashua, N.H. According to the reporter, Mark Clayton, the federal law-enforcement officers arrived at the F.A.A. facility shortly after the World Trade Center attack and took the tape. To this writer’s knowledge, there has been no public mention of the pilot’s narrative since the news report on Sept. 12, 2001.

After 14 months of watching while commissioners politely negotiated with a White House that has used every known ruse and invented some new ones to evade, withhold and play peekaboo with the commissioners, the Four Moms and their Families Steering Committee feel frustrated almost to the boiling point. Congress has already given him [President Bush] a big-picture look—in a scathing 900-page report by the joint House and Senate inquiry into the intelligence failures pre-9/11. But the Bush administration doesn’t look at what it doesn’t want to see.

…read more

I had originally come across this news story back in November, 2003. I copied the link and put it aside, waiting to see what the final outcome would be. Well, I haven’t heard anything more about Kirk von Ackermann, 37, a Californian working in Iraq as a contractor who mysteriously disappeared in October leaving behind his vehicle and all his possessions, including $40,000 in cash. Who is he and what was he really doing driving around alone in Iraq; and most of all, does anyone know if he has been found?

The media reported von Ackermann has been missing for more than a month. His car was found abandoned between the cities of Tikrit and Kirkuk. Inside the vehicle authorities discovered his satellite phone, a laptop computer and a briefcase containing approximately $40,000, which suggested that he had not fallen prey to a robbery. Fears are mounting that he’s been abducted or possibly killed. “You heard rumors that he had some sort of connection … somehow to the war or to counterintelligence,” said Farbstein…

The Army is reportedly conducting an “aggressive” investigation in conjunction with Iraqi police, but so far little progress has been made in the case. Authorities initially thought von Ackermann had been kidnapped but no ransom demands have been made.

read more…