Month: September 2007

Picture this: you’re an Iraqi civilian, perhaps one of the ever growing number of internally displaced persons, roaming the streets of Baghdad. You come upon a piece of seemingly abandoned US military equipment. Desperate for money, you approach the item, intending to sell it to one of the many vendors dealing in lost, abandoned, and stolen military surplus.

Bang

You just fell victim to the newly uncovered US military practice of “baiting”, and are now officially part of the “insurgents killed” count that is being touted as proof of how swimmingly the surge is going.

This practice has apparently been going on for quite some time, and while we may never know for sure how many innocent lives were taken in the name of inflating the military’s kill count to sell the war to the American public, we do know that the practice was so widespread and acceptable that, according to court documents, soldiers were planting “baits” on the bodies of people they’d killed illegally and, like magic, the problem would just go away.

This gruesome new trend of padding body counts with actual bodies almost makes one long for the days when they were just flat out lying to us about their numbers.

Georgie Anne Geyer writes today about Jon Basil Utley‘s journey to find the fate of his father who disappeared into the Soviet gulag.

Jon’s mother, Freda Utley, was a prominent American Communist in the 1920s. She fell in love with a brilliant Russian Jewish economist, the handsome, dark-haired Arcadi Berdichevsky, and moved to Russia with him. In 1936, their lives together came to an end with the Soviets’ infamous “knock on the door” at 2 a.m.

Freda, unable to help him, soon used her and Jon’s British passports to return to England, where she mobilized important leftist friends, people like George Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell and Harold Lasky, to try to find out where Arcadi was and even sent a letter directly to Stalin. What camp in the Gulag, that web of labor camps that eventually killed untold millions?

So Freda Utley stayed in the West, moving eventually to the United States, and turned totally against communism, becoming a prominent conservative writer, thinker and activist with her respected books The Dream We Lost in 1940 and Odyssey of a Liberal and many others. With Jon and his family, she settled in Washington, where she died at 80, having learned of her husband’s death, but never knowing the circumstances.

In 1991, Jon began contacting the Russians, and eventually made multiple trips to Russia where he eventually found the fate of his father. “Copies of files detailing his arrest, indictment and execution order were sent to me by the FSB, successor to Russia’s notorious KGB,” he told me. “Incredibly, it still has detailed records of political prisoners and willingly provides information and help to searchers like me. They also gave me three photos of my father from the file, taken at the time of his arrest in 1936. They are in better condition than any that my mother had preserved. In Moscow’s FSB library, I held the files of his interrogation in my hand.”

Read this great article.

I met Jon in the early days of Antiwar.com, and his commitment to the cause of peace and his assistance to this Website has been invaluable. Jon is still a welcome member of the conservative inner circles in Washington, DC, in spite of constantly handing out Antiwar.com’s latest articles to the often-uncomfortable insiders.

Check out Jon Basil Utley on the Web:
Antiwar.com archives
Americans Against Empire
Frida Utley’s Writings

Last week, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) announced an upcoming Q&A session with Iraqi PM Nouri al-Maliki.

IraqSlogger reports that today the CFR announced that, at Maliki’s request, his comments cannot be reported by any media or repeated by any participant in the meeting to anyone who might relay his comments to the media.

Maliki has asked to speak on this “not-for-attribution” basis, which is rare for a world leader speaking to an audience of hundreds of members of the CFR.

I have a question for Rudy Giuliani: Do you or do you not support your senior foreign policy advisor’s demand that we immediately bomb Iran?

Yes or no?

Via Jonathan Schwarz:

Sen. Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn., said he thought Columbia’s invitation to Ahmadinejad was a mistake “because he comes literally with blood on his hands.”

Click here to read Orwell’s thoughts on the debasement of language in the service of politics. I’ll just note that when you’re as full of sh*t as Joe Lieberman is, such phrases come easily, as when he told an audience of 400 at the Arab American Institute, “We are quite literally brothers and sisters.” Or when he told a DLC conference that a WTO meeting in Seattle “will literally bring the world to our Pacific doorstep.” You mean the literal world, or our literal doorstep?

Feel free to add your favorite Liebermanisms in comments.

After reading the first chapter of Mearsheimer and Walt’s The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, I can say one thing with absolute certainty: These guys are major-league anti-Semites. What I can’t understand is how such ardent neo-Nazis were able to hold their tongues for decades as they infiltrated America’s elite universities and became respected members of the establishment. Seems they would have let slip some of their bigotry long ago at faculty gatherings – in vino veritas and all that. How could they suppress the sort of volcanic hatred that has finally come out in this hatey hate-athon of hate?

I feel compelled to offer some samples to quiet the skeptics, but avert your eyes if you wish to remain pure of heart:

“There is a strong moral case for Israel’s existence and there are good reasons for the United States to be committed to helping Israel if its survival is in jeopardy.”

“The lobby is a loose coalition of individuals and organizations that actively works to move U.S. foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction. As we will describe in detail, it is not a single, unified movement with a central leadership, and it is certainly not a cabal or conspiracy that ‘controls’ U.S. foreign policy.”

“Like the efforts of other ethnic lobbies and interest groups, the activities of the Israel lobby’s various elements are legitimate forms of democratic political participation, and they are for the most part consistent with America’s long tradition of interest group activity.”

“By making it difficult to impossible for the U.S. government to criticize Israel’s conduct and press it to change some of its counterproductive policies, the lobby may even be jeopardizing the long-term prospects of the Jewish state.”

Ugh. I hope you didn’t actually read any of that garbage.

UPDATE: I see that Clark Stooksbury is similarly chagrined.