Antiwar.com Blog

I put this up as a comment on Gene Healy’s blog earlier, so I might as well post it here, too. Healy wrote about Bush’s recent interview with Brit Hume on Fox, and one of the funnier/scarier moments in the exchange when Bush said that he gets all of his info from Rice and Wolfowitz. Good, but my favorite part was this:

HUME: Now the Israelis have indicated that they might get rid of [Arafat] one way or another, exile, killing him. What would be our reaction to that? I mean, we keep hearing that he’s an enemy of peace, an obstacle to peace, and yet when the Israelis said, well, OK, let’s get rid of him, the answer up in the U.S. government is, whoa, not so fast. What about it?

BUSH: Well, the best way — in America, we believe in getting rid of people through a peaceful, orderly process, and the Palestinian people should make that decision by getting a government that represents their will. Because I believe most Palestinians believe in peace.

“Getting rid of people through a peaceful, orderly process”– this should be Ashcroft’s motto for the PATRIOT Act.

I’d rather see Congressman John J. Duncan (R-TN) in the White House. He has consistently opposed the war on Iraq, and for reasons I find more compelling. The speech linked to on Antiwar.com today is great, but it’s what he’s been saying all along. Check out this speech from early March. Eat your heart out, Wesley Clark.

So a lot of readers are upset that we don’t talk up the Kucinich campaign more often. Well, the Massachusetts branch of Kucinich for Prez is running my essay on Howard Dean from a few weeks ago, so I’ll give them a little shout-out. Happy?

Faith Fippinger, a 62-year-old retired teacher, faces jail for travelling to Iraq before the war. On what grounds?

For three months she travelled around Iraq, guarding oil refineries, teaching in schools and working in hospitals.

But when she returned home there was a letter waiting for her from the US Treasury Department.

The Treasury Department?

“It was a requirement to send information as to why I was in Iraq,” she says.

“It also said the penalties for being there could be as high as a million dollars and up to 12 years in jail.”

By going to Iraq Faith Fippinger had broken the US economic embargo on Iraq, which had been in place for many years.

The letter explained that by travelling to the country and spending money there, Miss Fippinger was now liable for prosecution.

The same government that uses the Treasury Dept. for such blatantly political prosecutions tells us not to worry about the as-yet unused provisions of the PATRIOT Act?

During an April 22nd American Enterprise Institute briefing on the war in Iraq, Charles Krauthammer said: “Hans Blix had five months to find weapons. He found nothing. We’ve had five weeks. Come back to me in five months. If we haven’t found any, we will have a credibility problem.”

It’s been 5 months, Charley, care to comment?

Noticed on cursor.org

Gutsy essay in Ha’aretz about Israel’s brutal youth. Batya Gur confronts a group of female soldiers harassing an elderly Palestinian:

This was not one of the greater and more visible
evils that take place around us daily, nor was
it a disaster, only an insidious and consuming
evil, one that is hard to pinpoint and define
in words. I do not see the horrors that take
place at the checkpoints every day. I know very
well that such an act by a woman like me,
someone who avoids any political activity or
any consistent struggle for human rights, is
actually a sentimental act. Such a trivial act
of protest is a bit like sweeping the path to
my own private garden, but what the words and
eyes of this soldier with a blond ponytail and
a pierced tongue reflected was not easy to
sweep away; it was the glittering, sharp tip of
a force of nature: the destructive power that
has been penned up in the all-powerful
authority of 18- and 19-year-old men and women.
This power which we, the Jewish citizens of the
state of Israel, have put in the hands of our
children, the second and third generation of a
very long occupation.

Read the whole thing.