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Analysis & Polemic

May 22, 2004 - 3:58pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Mainstream Media

"Panic on the Hill"

Eleanor Clift, Newsweek


Like the movie, "No Way Out," Iraq can only get worse; it can't get
better. Gen. John Abizaid, head of U.S. Central Command, said as much when
he testified this week before the Senate Armed Services Committee that the
violence would increase after the June 30 handover and that the Iraqis won't
be ready to assume responsibility for security until April 2005.


Who is President Bush kidding when he talks of turning over sovereignty to
the Iraqis? No one yet has been identified to give power to, and the
Pentagon's love affair with Iraqi exile leader Ahmad Chalabi is over.
American troops stormed Chalabi's residence and offices in Baghdad, a
remarkable reversal of fortune for a man who was on the U.S. payroll until
this month, and who provided most of the phony intelligence that formed the
Bush administration's basis for war.

May 22, 2004 - 8:39am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Electoral Politics

"When Bonesmen Fight"

Tom Hayden,
Yale Politic

I hope some journalist has the guts to ask John Kerry
(Skull and Bones, 1965) and George Bush (Skull and
Bones, 1967) whether they have any qualms about
belonging to a secret, oath-bound network since their
college days. Did they discuss Skull and Bones in code
when President Bush called Senator Kerry to
congratulate him on his primary victories? Will they
agree not to leave the room if the reporter blurts out
"322", coded references to Demosthene's birthday and
Skull and Bones' founding.


Am I scratching the blackboard yet, dear reader? Or are
you smugly dismissing these questions as paranoid and
unsophisticated?

May 21, 2004 - 11:34am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Culture

"Apocalypse Please"

George Monbiot, London Guardian


US policy towards the Middle East is driven by a rarefied form of madness.
It's time we took it seriously.


To understand what is happening in the Middle East, you must first
understand what is happening in Texas. To understand what is happening
there, you should read the resolutions passed at the state's Republican
party conventions last month. Take a look, for example, at the decisions
made in Harris County, which covers much of Houston.1


The delegates began by nodding through a few uncontroversial matters:
homosexuality is contrary to the truths ordained by God; "any mechanism to
process, license, record, register or monitor the ownership of guns" should
be repealed; income tax, inheritance tax, capital gains tax and corporation
tax should be abolished; and immigrants should be deterred by electric
fences.2


Thus fortified, they turned to the real issue: the affairs of a
small state 7000 miles away. It was then, according to a participant, that
the "screaming and near fistfights" began.

May 20, 2004 - 8:14pm -- nolympics
Analysis & Polemic
Prisons & Prisoners

Rafah's Human Face
Starhawk

Just over a year ago, I held Nehad's six-year old, curly haired charmer of a daughter on my lap and scooped eggs from a plate shared by her five other children as bullets thudded into the walls of her home in the border zone of Rafah. With shy pride, Nehad told me the eggs were from her own chickens, the oranges from the few trees that remained undamaged in her garden. The kids watched cartoons on TV , inured to the rat-a-tat-tat of constant fire until the bullets grew so loud that even they dived to the floor.

May 20, 2004 - 9:34am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Race Politics

Yoshie Furuhashi writes:

"Particularly Humiliating in 'Arab Culture'?"

Yoshie Furuhashi


Throughout the US media coverage of Abu Ghraib torture scandal, I've kept seeing the same idea — be it journalists' own or expressed in others' remarks quoted or paraphrased in articles — that the torture in question is particularly humiliating in Arab or Muslim culture.

May 18, 2004 - 7:36pm -- nolympics
Analysis & Polemic
The State

"Afflicted Powers:
The State, the Spectacle and September 11"
Retort

He too fought under television for our place in the sun.
Robert Lowell on Lieutenant Calley, 1971.

We begin from the moment in February 2003 when the tapestry copy of Picasso’s Guernica hung in the anteroom to the un Security Council Chamber was curtained over, at American insistence—not ‘an appropriate backdrop’, it was explained, for official statements to the world media on the forthcoming invasion of Iraq. [1] The episode became an emblem. Many a placard on Piccadilly or Market Street rang sardonic changes on Bush and the snorting bull. An emblem, yes—but, with the benefit of hindsight, emblematic of what? Of the state’s relentless will to control the minutiae of appearance, as part of—essential to—its drive to war? Well, certainly. But in this case, did it get its way? Did not the boorishness of the effort at censorship prove counterproductive, eliciting the very haunting—by an imagery still capable of putting a face on the brutal abstraction of ‘shock and awe’—that the velcro covering was meant to put a stop to? And did not the whole incident speak above all to the state’s anxiety as it tried to micro-manage the means of symbolic production—as if it feared that every last detail of the derealized decor it had built for its citizens had the potential, at a time of crisis, to turn utterly against it?


Read the rest at

New Left Review

May 18, 2004 - 9:49am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Electoral Politics

"Fear for Sale"

Greg Palast

September 11, 2001, was Derek Smith's lucky day. There were all those pieces
of people to collect-tubes marked "DM" (for "Disaster Manhattan")-from which
his company would extract DNA for victim identification, work for which the
firm would receive $12 million from New York City's government.

I have no doubt that Smith, like the rest of us, grieved, horrified and
heartsick, at the murder of innocent friends and countrymen. As for the
12-million-dollar corpse identification fee, that's chump change to the $4
billion corporation Smith had founded only four years earlier, ChoicePoint
of Alpharetta, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta.

May 16, 2004 - 1:07pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
News

"Sex, Lies, and Videotapes"

John Chuckman

Among the hoard of pictures from Iraq viewed by members of America's Senate in a top-secret, eavesdrop-proof room — a rather grandiose version of one of those smelly little, stained booths for which patrons of Times Square shops used to pay to watch "hot stuff" — were pictures of a young female soldier, already recognized worldwide for her smiling-Nazi poses with abused prisoners, having sex with a gang of fellow soldiers.


One of the exalted Senator spectators, with all the dignity he could summon, was quoted, "She was having sex with numerous partners. It appeared to be consensual. Almost everyone was naked all the time."

May 16, 2004 - 12:48pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
News

"What Do We Do Now?"

Howard Zinn, The Progressive

It seems very hard for some people — especially those in high places, but also those striving for high places — to grasp a simple truth: The United States does not belong in Iraq. It is not our country. Our presence is causing death, suffering, destruction, and so large sections of the population are rising against us. Our military is then reacting with indiscriminate force, bombing and shooting and rounding up people simply on "suspicion."

May 14, 2004 - 2:26pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Electoral Politics

Let Us Hope the Darkness Has Passed

Arundhati Roy, The Guardian

India's real and virtual worlds have collided in a humiliation of power

For many of us who feel estranged from mainstream politics, there are rare, ephemeral moments of celebration. Today is one of them. When India went to the polls, we were negotiating the dangerous cross-currents of neo-liberalism and neo-fascism — an assault on the poor and minority communities.


None of the pundits and psephologists predicted the results. The rightwing BJP-led coalition has not just been voted out of power, it has been humiliated.

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