Author: Brandon

The Israeli attack on Lebanese civilians (55 dead so far today) continues. Chomsky goes into a brief history of Israeli aggression against Lebanon in this article. Chomsky writes:

From the early 1970s, Lebanon was drawn into the conflict as a result of cross-border PLO terror and far more destructive Israeli attacks on Lebanon, sometimes retaliatory, often not. Thus in February 1973, Israeli forces attacked north of Beirut, killing many civilians, in a raid justified as preemptive. In December 1975, Israeli bombing killed over 50 Lebanese in an attack Israel described as “preventive, not punitive”; it appears to have been a reaction to the UN Security Council meeting debating the diplomatic settlement that Israel opposed and Washington vetoed. There are many other examples.

The indiscriminate murdering of Lebanese civilians is also recognized as being futile, even by the Israeli government, despite their public statements placing blame for Hezbollah on Beirut, as documented in this Stratfor piece:

Hezbollah has demonstrated time and again that it has retained the ability to paralyze the Lebanese government and thwart any attempt to disarm the militant movement. Though Olmert has blamed the Lebanese government for Hezbollah’s actions, it is well known in Israeli political circles, and throughout the region, that Hezbollah acts unilaterally and that Beirut lacks the ability to rein the group in

Israel’s actions include not only bombing the international airport’s runways so that no planes can land, but also blockading Lebanese ports. The blockades and bombing have cut off not just contraband, such as arms and ammunition, but also cut off any non-contraband trade such as food and medicine, as this story reports:

Israeli naval vessels enforcing the siege turned away three ships carrying fuel to Beirut, a shipping source said. A local shipping agent said seaborne trade was at a standstill at the port, which handles 95 percent of Lebanon’s commerce.

As usual in the case of Middle-East strife, the US and Israel stand virtually alone against world opinion, as in the title of this report, "World Slams, US Defends Israel Lebanon "War"".
While the international community condemns Israel’s actions as being (the word of the day) “disproportionate”, and calls on Hezbollah to release the two IDF soldiers they’re holding, the US government deflects the criticism of its favourite client state in remarks like this one, from Bush:

“Syria needs to be held to account”

It is therefore Syria that is blamed, when Israeli aggression results in murder and destruction of property. Yet another shameful but unsurprising example of the moral cowardice of US officials regarding the actions of their client in the region.

Hollywood actor Bruce Willis, expressing far more displeasure with the Bush administration’s prosecution of the “War on Terror” than he cares to admit, has stepped up to the plate and offered a million dollars for information leading to the capture of al Qaeda leaders such as bin Laden. That’s damned generous of him. Perhaps, if this works, John McClane himself will offer to lead the occupation forces in Iraq in their heroic attempt to crush all resistance to Washington DC.
Wishful thinking. I seriously doubt that the type of fanatic who would fly an airplane into a building is looking for material rewards. Besides, pampered rich-boys like Willis and public war-hawk intellectuals seem perfectly willing to allow someone else to do the killin’ and the dyin’.
Willis, a neocon-ish Republican and Bush supporter, also offered criticism of the press for not reporting “really good things happening in Iraq.” What a shock. Does anyone, anywhere in the world, think the press is doing a good job? Here’s something you never read: “My, my, my, my, my, is the press ever doing a spiffy job reporting on [insert issue here]. And they’re certainly not demonstrating any bias against my point of view, are they?”
Perhaps Willis could elicit the kind of reporting he approves of if he offered a million bucks for it.

Time asks the question;

Some observers wondered last week why a bright lawyer like Libby bothered with a cover story at all. The indictment offers scant evidence that Libby knew Plame was a covert officer, a key test in the 1982 law barring such disclosures. By that logic, Libby could have told the truth about everything he did and still avoided criminal exposure.

Time notes that Fitzgerald has not revealed everything he knows, and therefore there could be more to this than we can see. Nevertheless, as St. Clair/Cockburn note, Libby could simply have trotted out the reliable ol’ “I have no clear recollection of that, sir”, so beloved of crafty politicos under investigation. St. Clair/Cockburn conclude;

The people in charge of the nation’s destinies these last five years are very, very stupid. Only really stupid people could have thought that outing Valerie Plame as an undercover CIA employee was a good way of undercutting her husband, Joe Wilson. Cheney is stupid. Rove is stupid. Bush is stupid. Libby, about whom we now have a heap of useful material, is very, very stupid.

Don’t sugarcoat it like that guys. Give it to us straight. The LRC bloggers, particularly William L. Anderson, take a mostly negative view, comparing the investigation and indictment to the Salem-like Martha Stewart investigation. I’m with them. Gary North agrees, claiming Scooter is “ruined”, but on that point, I diverge. Assuming Scooter is convicted and goes to the land of slamming doors for a couple of years, when he gets out, he’ll get his own talk show. Perhaps a guest spot on Crossfire, or a seat on the McLaughlin Group. The real criminals, the ones in charge of the “justice” system, are never prosecuted, and as St. Clair/Cockburn say, Scooter will probably get a big, fat pardon anyway.

The Washington Post is running the text of an email sent by New York Times executive editor Bill Keller to the Paper’s staff. Put in simple terms, Keller is saying “the pain in our collective backside is from Judy Miller screwing us over”.

I wish that when I learned Judy Miller had been subpoenaed as a witness in the leak investigation, I had sat her down for a thorough debriefing, and followed up with some reporting of my own.

Keller continues:

Until Fitzgerald came after her, I didn’t know that Judy had been one of the reporters on the receiving end of the anti-Wilson whisper campaign. I should have wondered why I was learning this from the special counsel, a year after the fact. (In November of 2003 Phil Taubman tried to ascertain whether any of our correspondents had been offered similar leaks. As we reported last Sunday, Judy seems to have misled Phil Taubman about the extent of her involvement.)

Taubman is the NYT’s Washington Bureau Chief. Keller goes on to say:

if I had known the details of Judy’s entanglement with Libby, I’d have been more careful in how the paper articulated its defense, and perhaps more willing than I had been to support efforts aimed at exploring compromises.

Entanglement. That is one word for it. After this thrashing, Keller goes even further, suggesting that a newspaper has, or should have, a contract with its reporters–and that Miller had broken it. In so doing, Miller had released the paper from any obligation to defend her source (Scooter Libby):

The contract holds that the paper will go to the mat to back them up institutionally _ but only to the degree that the reporter has lived up to his or her end of the bargain, specifically to have conducted him or herself in a way consistent with our legal, ethical and journalistic standards, to have been open and candid with the paper about sources, mistakes, conflicts and the like, and generally to deserve having the reputations of all of us put behind him or her.

Seems that Miller is about as popular over at the Gray Lady right now as skin cancer.

This morning on the Imus radio show, John McCain made some comments regarding the progress of the Iraq war. McCain emphatically believes that the occupation should continue, because the US has made such a mess of Iraq, that it is now the America’s responsibility to clean that mess up. The one way McCain suggested that this goal could be accomplished was to train brigades of Iraqi police officers. McCain didn’t mention anything else specifically, but did use the words “win” and “winning” when describing the goal of the war. Thus, McCain has now become the 7489th consecutive US politician/commentator to call for victory without;
A) Being asked to define victory, or;
B) Offering an unsolicited definition of victory, thus insuring that;
C) The war can continue for as long as the US government wants, for any reasons it chooses to specify. A + B = C.
On the other hand, while suggesting that the training of the Iraqi police force was ‘making progress’, McCain admitted that the military now says that only one brigade is trained, where it previously had claimed three. Progress, in the wrong direction.
McCain’s original premise, unhindered by his shaky qualifications, is seductive. Why shouldn’t the one who caused the mess clean it up? That’s a good definition of justice, isn’t it? In fact, I agree with McCain on that point. McCain seems to think, however, that the situation would somehow be worse if the US military were to evacuate while there are still some people alive over there. The insurgency that McCain’s police force needs to be in place to neutralize is being caused by the US invasion and subsequent occupation. All that needs to be done to correct that problem is to remove the occupying forces. The training of a ‘police force’ is impossible. It will inevitably fail, and fail miserably. The Iraqis being trained have no loyalty to the US, and no desire to face a seething civilian population on the side of the occupation. Thus, infiltration by ‘the enemy’ is unavoidable. If McCain knows this, then he’s simply making excuses for the continuation of a war he knows is wrong. If not, then he’s too big an idiot to take seriously anymore. I think the former is true. McCain mentioned the recruiting problem, and Imus suggested that the way to meet recruiting goals was to “stop involving troops in these stupid wars”, while McCain giggled nonchalantly.

Following Pat Robertson’s call for the assassination of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, the station ‘ABC Family’ has apparently decided to run a new disclaimer at the end of the 700 Club’s broadcasts. The previous message read “The preceding program was brought to you by CBN.”; the new message goes like this; “The preceding CBN telecast does not reflect the views of ABC Family.” There are screenshots here.
I think it should read “The preceding program did not contain any serious demands for political assassination. No really it didn’t. DON’T LAUGH.”, or perhaps “The preceding program was not intended for an audience over the age of 6”.