Month: December 2005

Jeremy Scahill sends along the following:

Four members of Christian Peacemaker Teams were taken this past
Saturday, November 26, in Baghdad, Iraq. They are not spies, nor do
they work in the service of any government. They are people who have
dedicated their lives to fighting against war and have clearly and
publicly opposed the invasion and occupation of Iraq. They are people
of faith, but they are not missionaries. They have deep respect for
the Islamic faith and for the right of Iraqis to self-determination.

Continue reading “An Urgent Appeal”

Saturday on the Weekend Interview Show, I’ll be talking with Sy Hersh about his new article “Up in the Air, and a few other things, and then in the second hour, James Bamford will return to discuss his article “The Man Who Sold the War” My previous interview of Mr. Bamford from August 14, 2004 here.

Update: Show’s over, Archives here.

Check out Don’t Bomb Us — a blog by the staff of Al Jazeera. If only Yugoslavia’s RTS had thought of that …

Boris Johnson, British MP and editor of the conservative Spectator — which has the good taste to run a column by Taki Theodoracopulos — has pledged to publish the “bomb Al Jazeera” memo if anyone will send it to him. Why is it that their conservatives are so much more spirited than ours?

Speaking of spirited conservatives, and Taki Theodoracopulos: this piece by Taki in the Pittsburg Tribune Review lauds my recent piece in The American Conservative and refers to me as “the greatest Greek writer since Aristophanes.” But, hey, I’m Italian — and if I were Andrew Sullivan (or a certain very sssssensitive Cato-amite), I’d be hysterically denouncing Taki as a hate criminal. Luckily, I’m not, and he’s not …. Instead, I’m happy to accept a compliment in the good-natured spirit in which it is given, but, hey, Gore Vidal runs rings around me in the Aristophanes department, although my, uh, Greek-ness (Warning: Racy link) is Taki-esque in its unrestrained pagan exuberance.

Speaking of Andy, a couple of years ago, in a fit of nastiness, I made a very un-nice remark about him, one that was entirely uncalled for and quite cruel, to boot. At any rate, I got some flack about it, which only served to harden me in my cruel indifference, but last night I had a friggin’ dream — perhaps prompted by this post on Sullivan’s blog — about it, believe it or not, in which I personally expressed my remorse to Sullivan and — get this — asked his forgiveness (!) Good lord, I suppose that was my better self asserting himself — and who knew I had one? At any rate, I’d like to take the opportunity to publicly apologize to him. Now if only he’ll apologize to the people of Iraq for calling on George W. Bush to nuke them in response to the anthrax attacks, which they had nothing to do with, we’ll be even-Steven. (And, no, I’m not holding my breath ….)

Yes, Great Britain’s conservatives are a lot tonier, and more interesting than our own, but perhaps not for long: here’s the news, via the Guardian, that the neocons are colonizing England.

Speaking of British neocons, the commie-interventionist website, “Harry’s Place,” is shocked — shocked! — that Alex Cockburn’s Counterpunch would praise this writer, not to mention run articles by Paul Craig Roberts and Rep. Ron Paul. This eminently reasonable piece by John Walsh, according to Commissar Harry, means “Justice isn’t all that important anyway,” and Walsh doesn’t care about such bothersome topics as “trade unionism and poverty.” The masthead of “Harry’s Place,” sporting a vaguely Middle Eastern-looking woman in a Bolshevik-style uniform (red, of course), holding up a red flag in a pose reminescent of “The Red Detachment of Women,” gives us some indication of its dogmatic 1930s lefty tone. The tiresome hectoring that makes up much of Comrade Harry’s discourse is the Old Left as its old maiden-ish worst, although his website is vivid testimony to a point I’ve been making for years: that socialism and war go hand in hand.

John Judis on the Pew poll chronicling the resurgence of “isolationism”:

“The growth of isolationist sentiment can cast a pall over the formulation of foreign policy. During Clinton’s first term, he suffered not only from inexperience in foreign relations, but also from a public and a Republican Congress that disdained foreign involvement. Voter support for America minding its own business reached its prior peak in June 1995 just as French President Jacques Chirac was complaining that the post of world leader was ‘vacant.’ Bush’s foreign-policy stumbling during his first nine months in office was also partly attributable to public attitudes. The next administration could face a similar trial–and in a world that over the last ten years has grown more dangerous and more interdependent.”

America “minding its own business”? — the mere prospect is enough to send chills of horror down the spine! Surely Doomsday is just around the corner ….

Speaking of Kosovo, what better place for a secret CIA prison where torture and other unspeakable acts are freely indulged in? And here Republicans used to think we’d never get anything useful out of our invasion of Yugoslavia ….

Recommended Reading:

Jane Hamsher’s firedoglake for the latest on Plame-gate.

Larry Johnson’s No Quarter for the inside scoop on intelligence matters.

Robert Dreyfuss has a scoop in The American Prospect:

“The Prospect has learned that part of a secret $3 billion in new funds—tucked away in the $87 billion Iraq appropriation that Congress approved in early November—will go toward the creation of a paramilitary unit manned by militiamen associated with former Iraqi exile groups. Experts say it could lead to a wave of extrajudicial killings, not only of armed rebels but of nationalists, other opponents of the U.S. occupation and thousands of civilian Baathists—up to 120,000 of the estimated 2.5 million former Baath Party members in Iraq.”

And the always-informative Laura Rozen has been blogging up a storm lately, and is plenty steamed, with good reason.

THIS JUST IN from Steve Clemons’ The Washington Note: Barbara Bush is out for Dick Cheney’s scalp — also Andy Card’s, and Karl Rove’s. Forget Pat Fitzgerald — if I were these guys, I’d run for the hills while I still could …

And this is good news, if true — although I wouldn’t bet the farm on it ….

Via the Left Coaster blog, this snippet from a piece in the UK’s Private Eye magazine illuminates the mystery of how the Niger uranium forgeries came to be incorporated in the U.S. intelligence stream:

“When the US State Department finally gave international weapons inspectors its ‘evidence’ that Saddam was trying to buy uranium from the African State of Niger in 2003, they held back the one document even their own analysts knew was ‘funky’ and ‘clearly a forgery’. Experts at the International Atomic Energy Agency quickly discovered that all the papers were fake, but they did this by spotting errors that had slipped passed the State Department and CIA: The fact that the US government handed over the whole bundle of what became known as the ‘Niger Forgeries’ except the one paper they recognised as a hoax suggests they were trying to pass off documents they knew were phoney as the real thing.”

The neocons are crying “McCarthyism” in response to demands that Congress investigate charges that we were lied into war. However, somebody in our government knew these documents were forgeries, and nonetheless utilized them to make the case for war. When the IAEA exposed them as fraudulent, the FBI initiated an investigation — which soon ran up against the brick wall of this administration’s unwillingness to pursue the matter. What I want to know is why is it left to Private Eye to do the job the FBI ought to be doing?

What did U.S. government officials know about the Niger forgeries, and when did they know it? When we get an answer to this question — or if we can even get Congress and our law enforcement agencies to ask it — we’ll be a lot closer to knowing who lied us into war.

Flashback: Anthony Gregory, April 20, 2004:

Just as the number of Americans who have died after Bush triumphantly stood in front of the now-famous “Mission Accomplished” banner exceeds by several times the U.S. death count of 140 before the war “ended,” the number of American fatalities after the Iraqi handover may make the current death toll seem like a drop in the bucket…

The fear is that pulling out may prove that the Iraq experiment was a failure, as the country descends into chaos and war. But even after Richard Nixon lost more than twenty thousand troops in his incremental attempts at “Vietnamization,” the United States eventually pulled out only to see South Vietnam fall to communism anyway…

As time goes on, and many more Americans continue to die in Iraq for reasons that increasingly seem unpersuasive to the public, the troops will come home. The only question that remains is how long this war, which now only survives by its own inertia, will continue to consume human lives. The United States can cut its losses now or we can maintain a war with no clear and just purpose, no victory in sight, and no realistic chance of reducing terrorism or bringing freedom to Iraq.

Diana Moon sez:

I leave it to the big boys to analyze this’n, meanwhile, please go to page 9, where Bush, or his speechwriter, essentially admits that the largest portion of “the enemy” is composed of “rejectionists”, that is, Sunni Arabs “who are against a new Iraq in which they are no longer a privileged elite.”

So, the next time someone says that the insurgency is manned mostly by foreigners, quote the President.

And if anyone sees the warbloggers returning to the foreigners-are-the-insurgency trough — and it won’t be long before their little snouts are right back in it — please drop me a line: matt@antiwar.com.