Antiwar.com Blog

Most commentary on North Korea, by hawks and doves alike, posits a false dilemma: either “get tough” with Kim Jong-Il (thus far, this has meant talk tough, because there’s no military solution that doesn’t end with Seoul in ashes), or send him money. This naturally plays into the hawks’ hands, as no one wants to coddle an elfin Jerry Bruckheimer wannabe. Sheldon Richman gets it right:

Some want to see the Bush administration engage Kim in one-on-one negotiations. But negotiations mean that each side offers something. What would the United States offer? In the past it has provided aid, but this is objectionable on two counts. First, previous aid didn’t keep Kim from pursuing his nuclear program. More important, American taxpayers should not be forced to assist Kim’s evil, decrepit regime. For one thing, while assistance would help him, it would do little for the long-suffering North Korean people. Moreover, the North Korean government is almost universally condemned because it flouts the rights of “its” people. Where is the logic in the Bush administration’s flouting the rights of Americans in dealing with Kim’s government?

There is something the administration could offer, but it’s not likely to want to do so. It could agree to remove the 37,500 American troops from South Korea, to end the alliance with Seoul, and to pledge never to start a war, including an economic war, with North Korea. That’s something an American president should have done a long time ago. The North Korean government has had grounds for distrusting the United States since the war in the early 1950s, which began when North Korea invaded South Korea. U.S. participation in that war — President Harry Truman’s undeclared “police action” — was unjustified from the standpoint of limited government and the safety of the American people. But it told the world that the United States was assuming the role of world policeman. That couldn’t help but create fear of — and enemies for — America. It also gave North Korea’s communist dictator a powerful propaganda tool with which to keep the North Koreans scared and loyal.

It should come as no surprise that successive American administrations have taken the least sensible approach (short of war), alternating bribery with bullying. Unfortunately, as we’ve seen in Iraq, the Bushies won’t let mere failure stand in the way of total ruin, so expect U.S. Korean policy to get much worse.

Last week, a mortar attack on a U.S. ammo-storage site in Baghdad “set off a series of explosions … that shook buildings miles away.” If you’re wondering what such a thing looks like, watch the video below. Note in particular the explosion at 3:57.

[youtube]LlM3BDojdLo[/youtube]

(If you’ve forgotten the title reference, click.)

From The History of Torture by George Riley Scott (London, 1940), we read:

Often in combination with the rack was applied the “torture of water.” This was generally adopted when racking, in itself, proved ineffectual. The victim, while pinioned on the rack, was compelled to swallow water, which was dropped slowly on a piece of silk or fine linen placed in his mouth. This material, under pressure of the water, gradually glided down the throat, producing the sensation experienced by a person who is drowning. A variation of the water torture was to cover the face with a piece of thin linen, upon which the water was poured slowly, running into the mouth and nostrils and hindering or preventing breathing almost to the point of suffocation. In another variation, the nose was stopped up, either by means of plugs placed in the nostrils, or by pressure of the fingers, and water was dropped slowly and continuously into the open mouth. The victim, in his desperate efforts to breathe, often burst a blood-vessel. Generally speaking, the larger the quantity of water forced into the victim the more severe was the torture.

Will the next edition of The History of Torture contain additional water tortures used by the American military and CIA? Impossible you say? Nothing is impossible with this administration. Is there any doubt that the full story of U.S. “interrogation” techniques is yet to be revealed?

In Japan, that is – one of our closest allies, whose discussion of developing nukes was only a response to Kim Jong-Il’s growing arsenal – but, hey, let’s go ahead and chalk this up to Dubya’s refusal to tolerate Saddam’s WMD.

According to former CIA officer Philip Giraldi, writing in the October 9th edition of the American Conservative magazine, the Bush administration is withholding a new CIA National Intelligence Estimate on Iran.

“The United States government’s intelligence community has prepared a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran, but the White House has decided that it is not “finished” yet and has decided to postpone any decision on issuing it until after the November elections. NIEs are the government’s document of record on international issues that confront the United States and they are supposed to be both impartial and definitive. Vice President Cheney’s office has reportedly objected to many of the conclusions in the draft Iran NIE, or, more to the point, to the lack of any conclusions that he would welcome.

“The draft document indicates that there is no solid intelligence confirming that Iran has a nuclear weapons program, contradicting many recent statements made by the Administration. It also states that Iran exercised virtually no control over Hezbollah in the recent fighting in Lebanon and that there is little to no confirmed information supporting the often cited contention that Iran is arming the militias and insurgents in neighboring Iraq. The report ruefully observes that there are plenty of weapons floating around inside Iraq without any assistance from Iran, though it does note, without hard evidence, that Iran could have provided some bomb making expertise and possibly sophisticated timers and detonators to the insurgency’s arsenal. For what it’s worth, most US intelligence officers working on Iran believe that Tehran is concealing a weapons program even if the hard evidence is lacking.”

The people of the Unitary Executive State of America[.pdf] have a right to know what that NIE says now, before the mid-term elections. Before the next war.

The rest of the piece is regarding Pete “Hoaxter” Hoekstra and Capital Hill staffer Vaughn S. Forrest’s visit with Manucher Ghorbanifar’s sock-puppet, Fereidoun Mahdavi, in Paris, which Larisa Alexandrovna also covered for RawStory earlier this week. Giraldi writes:

“The House Intelligence Committee Chairman Peter Hoekstra has been receiving information reports from an Iranian exile source in Paris who is believed to be Fereidoun Mahdavi, a close associate of discredited Iran/Contra fabricator Manucher Ghorbanifar. Hoekstra, who has stated his contempt for the US intelligence community, has been using Vaughn Forest, a well-known Hill staffer who has a reputation for right-wing activism, as a channel to the Ghorbanifar circle. Hoekstra recently made a trip to Paris with Forest to meet the source who has been providing information on Iranian intentions in the nuclear field that CIA and DIA analysts consider to be largely fabricated. Unfortunately, some of these reports have been stove-piped to Vice President Cheney’s office through the Pentagon’s Abe Shulsky, who heads up an “Iranian Directorate”, an office that replicates the disbanded Office of Special Plans that was previously used as a clearinghouse for fabricated and speculative exile reports on Iraq. The Ghorbanifar information is also disseminated to the intelligence community from Hoekstra’s House Intelligence Committee. Ghorbanifar and his associates have no access to genuine information about Iran, often just repackaging media reports and propaganda handouts from the Paris-based Mujahedin e-Khalq (MEK), a Pentagon protected Iranian exile group that is on the US State Department’s list of terrorist groups. Ghorbanifar and Mahdavi are also reported to be the sources of Pennsylvania Congressman Curt Weldon, who advocates pre-emptive war against Iran. Weldon has written a sensational and factually challenged book on Iran that describes Tehran as the number one threat to world peace, a line that is curiously similar to that being promoted by the Israeli lobby AIPAC.”

At the risk of offending Russians, I feel I really must chime in on the subject of the quite notable suckiness of their country. I’ll just recount current events which have irked me — if I have to mention everything that has bugged me about the behavior of Russia’s government and the brutality of its culture, we’ll be here all day.

Sure, maybe nobody can pin the murder of Anna Politkovskaya on Vladimir Putin — but then he is the president and he was in the KGB in commie days. If anyone could cover up his involvement in a crime it would be Putin. This is all really irrelevant, because this isn’t any kind of isolated incident in Russia — journalists and businessmen are offed routinely in this mafia playpen.

But truly the proof that Russia is at best a thin mockery of a Western culture is the outrageous way Georgian citizens living in Russia have been treated ever since Georgian authorities arrested four Russian spies. Georgian businesses have been shut down, merchants at markets have been swept from their stalls, and even school children who dare to have “Georgian-sounding” surnames are spied on like ethnic criminals — it’s enough to ask if the gulags will really be reconditioned as theme parks after all.

The plain fact is, anyone who didn’t at least try to run screaming from Russia 90 years ago (like many of my relatives did) had to have been some kind of mental defective. Anyone who stays now, well… I think I have risked too much offense as it is.