The State

Frank Wallis writes:

"Freedom, God, and George W. Bush"

Frank Wallis

I keep hearing a familiar refrain from George W. Bush: freedom is from God, not from man.

"Liberty is both the plan of Heaven for humanity, and the best hope for progress here on Earth. The progress of liberty is a powerful trend. Yet, we also know that liberty, if not defended, can be lost. The success of freedom is not determined by some dialectic of history. By definition, the success of freedom rests upon the choices and the courage of free peoples, and upon their willingness to sacrifice. In the trenches of World War I, through a two-front war in the 1940s, the difficult battles of Korea and Vietnam, and in missions of rescue and liberation on nearly every continent, Americans have amply displayed our willingness to sacrifice for liberty." (Speech at the 20th Anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy, 6 Nov. 2003)

One can only witness in wonderment what Bush means by "our willingness to sacrifice for liberty". GIs were sacrificed, but who made the decision to send them to war? Rich people who partied at night while poor men were being blown to bits on the battlefield.

Jacques Derrida, "For A Justice To Come"

April 28, 2004 - 9:31pm -- jim

"For A Justice To Come:

An Interview with Jacques Derrida"

Lieven De Cauter

[The Brussells Tribunal is a commission of inquiry into the “New Imperial Order”, and more particularly into the “Project for A New American Century” (PNAC), the neo-conservative think tank that has inspired the Bush government’s war logic. The co-signatories of the PNAC “mission statement” include Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz. The programme of this think tank is to promote planetary hegemony on the basis of a supertechnological army, to prevent the emergence of a rival super-power and to take pre-emptive action against all those who threaten American interests. The Brussells Tribunal was held in Brussels from April 14 through 17, 2004. Jacques Derrida, who suffers from cancer and was unable to attend the tribunal, invited the project’s initiator, Lieven De Cauter, to his house for an interview.]

Lieven De Cauter: While thanking you for your generosity — why have you decided to grant us this interview on our initiative, the “Brussells Tribunal”?

Jacques Derrida: First of all I wanted to salute your initiative in its principle: to resuscitate the tradition of a Russell Tribunal is symbolically an important and necessary thing to do today. I believe that, in its principle, it is a good thing for the world, even if only in that it feeds the geopolitical reflection of all citizens of the world. I am even more convinced of this necessity in light of the fact that, for a number of years now, we have witnessed an increased interest in the working, in the constitution of international institutions, institutions of international law which, beyond the sovereignty of States, judge heads of State, generals. Not yet States as such, precisely, but persons responsible for, or suspected of being responsible for, war crimes, crimes against humanity — one could mention the case of Pinochet, despite its ambiguity, or of Milosevic. At any rate, heads of State have to appear as such before an International Criminal Court, for instance, which has a recognised status in international law, despite all the difficulties you know: the American, French, Israeli reservations. Nonetheless this tribunal exists, and even if it is still faltering, weak and problematic in the execution of its sanctions, it exists as a recognised phenomenon of international law.

David Martinez. "The Kill Zone: Moving Wounded in Fallujah"

April 16, 2004 - 8:36am -- nolympics

The Kill Zone: Moving Wounded in Fallujah

The first thing you notice is the silence. An unnerving, horrible quiet without the sound of voices, car engines, children playing, or televisions. Even the birds are wise enough to have gone elsewhere. And yet we are in a small city in the middle of the day.

We passed the last mujaheedin patrol two blocks ago, and they waved us through when our escort told them what we were there for. To evacuate wounded, and to collect the dead.

We drop out of the truck and start walking, our passports held high in our otherwise empty hands. We leave our Iraqi driver and guide and enter the crushing quiet of the Kill Zone, the no man’s land between the rebels and the American forces, somewhere inside the town of Fallujah.

Air Force Officer Disciplined for Saying Bush Allowed September 11 Attacks

April 14, 2004 - 5:59pm -- jim

Air Force Officer Disciplined for Saying
Bush Allowed September 11 Attacks

Hijacker Attended US Military School

Jerry Isaacs (originally published 21 June 2002)

A US Air Force officer in California recently accused President Bush of
deliberately allowing the September 11 terror attacks to take place. The
officer has been relieved of his command and faces further discipline. The
controversy surrounding Lt. Col. Steve Butler's letter to the editor, in
which he affirmed that Bush did nothing to warn the American people because
he "needed this war on terrorism," received scant coverage in the media.

Universally ignored by the press, however, was that the officer was not
merely expressing a personal opinion. He was in a position to have direct
knowledge of contacts between the US military and some of the hijackers in
the period before the terrorist attacks that destroyed the World Trade
Center and damaged the Pentagon.

Lieutenant Colonel Butler, who wrote in a letter to the editor of the
Monterey County Herald charging that "Bush knew about the impending
attacks," was vice chancellor for student affairs at the Defense Language
Institute in Monterey, California — a US military facility that one or more
of the hijackers reportedly attended during the 1990s.

Jo Wildings, Death and Terror in Falluja

April 13, 2004 - 1:59pm -- nolympics

"Death and Terror in Falluja"

Jo Wildings, April 11th

Trucks, oil tankers, tanks are burning on the highwayeast to Falluja. A stream of boys and men goes to and from a lorry that’s not burnt, stripping it bare. We turn onto the back roads through Abu Ghraib, Nuha and Ahrar singing in Arabic, past the vehicles full of people and a few possessions, heading the other way, past the improvised refreshment posts along the way where boys throw food through the windows into the bus for us and for the people inside still inside Falluja.

The bus is following a car with the nephew of a local sheikh and a guide who has contacts with the Mujahedin and has cleared this with them. The reason I’m on the bus is that a journalist I knew turned up at my door at about 11 at night telling me things were desperate in Falluja, he’d been bringing out children with their limbs blown off, the US soldiers were going around telling people to leave by dusk or be killed, but then when people fled with whatever they could carry, they were being stopped at the US military checkpoint on the edge of town and not let out, trapped, watching the sun go down.

Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, "Why We Need a Multilateral Magna Carta"

April 11, 2004 - 1:14pm -- jim

"Why We Need a Multilateral Magna Carta"

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri

It is becoming increasingly clear that a unilateral or “monarchical” arrangement of the global order — centred on the military, political and economic dictation of the United States — is undesirable and unsustainable.

The crisis of this arrangement presents the opportunity for the proposition of a new global order by the “global aristocracies” — that is to say, the multinational corporations, the supranational institutions and the other dominant nation states.

Tom Murphy, "Papers on 1964 Brazil Coup Declassified"

April 3, 2004 - 1:35pm -- jim

"Papers on 1964 Brazil Coup Declassified"

Tom Murphy, Associated Press, Sat Apr 3, 2004

SAO PAULO, Brazil — Newly declassified U.S. documents show the extent of American willingness to provide aid to Brazil's generals during the 1964 coup that ushered in 21 years of often bloody military rule.

The National Security Archive, a non-governmental Washington-based research group, posted the documents on its Web site this week to coincide with Wednesday's 40th anniversary of the coup.

Summary of Finucane report into state killings in North of Ireland

April 1, 2004 - 12:24pm -- nolympics

Summary of Finucane Report

The Belfast based Committee on the Administration of Justice (CAJ), a human rights NGO, has just published the following summary of the findings of Canadian Judge Peter Cory (appointed by the British and Irish governments) in his investigation into the circumstances surrounding the murders of Pat Finucane, Robert Hamill, Rosemary Nelson and Billy Wright. The full report into the murder of Pat Finucane is now available on the Pat Finucene Centre's website: www.serve.com/pfc

John Chuckman, "The Countessa of Empire"

March 31, 2004 - 8:27am -- jim