Antiwar.com Blog

Yes, I know, you already knew that, but I have to complain about the President’s speech Monday night.

There was a bunch of Roosevelt-invoking garbage in there, obviously, but there’s one particular lie that Bush will not stop telling the people of this country, which, due to its total absurdity, is beginning to chap my Texas hide.

So let’s get this straight once and for all: If America leaves Iraq, the chances that al Qaeda will take over and use the oil money to build a giant al Qaeda Caliphate to take over the world are LESS THAN NOTHING.

The Sunni foreign fighter “al Qaeda types” in Iraq have NEVER made up more than a few percentage points worth of the insurgency. If the U.S. government leaves now, with the current government in place, the dominant force in that country will be Iran, not al Qaeda.

Even if the country splits into three, the new Sunni state will be dominated by people from there: Either the former Baathists or the local religious leaders will rise to the top. The idea that some Saudis and Egyptians – in exile on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border – could come and dominate the locals (who have held their own against the U.S. Army for over three years) is, in the words of incomparable investigative reporter, Robert Dreyfuss, “utterly stupid.” And there are no oil wells under the Sunni triangle anyway – it’s all near Kirkuk in the north and Basra in the south.

Besides, everyone knows that the invasion and occupation are radicalizing people who had nothing to do with al Qaeda before 9/11. Well, at least, that’s according to the former CIA director, the CIA’s National Intelligence Council, former CIA agents, the FBI, the RIIA, the Saudis and the Israelis. So any strengthening of the Terroristsâ„¢ since then is all Bush’s fault in the first place.

Should it bother anyone that the only excuse for continuing this bloody occupation is a ridiculous falsehood?

Here‘s where I wrote about it last year, and here‘s a great article by Tom Porteous on the same subject.

(praise/ridicule welcome over at Stress)

The Globalist website posted an article of mine on how the media and intellectuals subvert American democracy.  Here’s the lead of the piece –

Why is it that in the United States, the vast majority of government abuses and failures either never show up on the  intellectual radar screen, or are merely one or two blips — and then forever gone?

One reason is that many intellectuals have long disdained the specific details of government policies.

The more coercive government becomes, the more tactless it is to admit that government coerces. Looking at the actual details of government policy is left to the auditors and accountants, the congressional staffers — or perhaps the interns.

The politically correct attitude looks beyond the government’s past failings and current botches — and focuses instead on the idea of government……..

Full text of the article is at the Globalist website  and on my blog  – http://jimbovard.com/blog/2006/09/11/how-the-us-media-helps-subvert-us-democracy/ = where comments & condemnations are always welcome
 

I asked some family and friends who I knew witnessed the attacks on 9/11/2001 or who were severely affected by them if they could give me a brief write-up of their experiences that day; where they place blame, or what they think of blame placed; and what they think of the government’s response since. I expect the answers to come trickling in over the week, but here is one now.

Dr. Mario Rizzo, Professor of Economics at New York University, offers these comments:

I was in my apartment on the edge of Soho when I heard a very low-flying plane go over my building. And then I heard the sound of a large impact. So I went outside and looked at the Towers where I saw that the plane had apparently hit one of the buildings. I did not actually see the first plane hit, however. I kept looking. Before long I saw the second plane hit the other Tower. Obviously, at this point, I realized it was no accident. I then went to my nearby office to check the internet news sources. From my office on Mercer Street I saw each of the Towers collapse. I then took a xanax to calm myself. For some reason, I had no thought that anything more would happen.

I stayed out in the streets all day and saw large numbers of people walking up from the Wall Street and other lower Manhattan areas. The day was incredibly beautiful and since the winds were blowing the smoke in a direction away from downtown Manhattan it was hard to fathom that anything was wrong. But obviously it was. The juxtaposition of the beauty of the day and these events was so awfully strange. During the whole day, people seemed remarkably friendly and some sort of “collective spirit” was present. This lasted for quite a number of weeks, it seemed. There soon developed a memorial spot for the dead, wounded and missing in Union Square Park. There were pathetic signs all over the city for weeks with pictures of people who went “missing” on 9/11.

In the first instance the moral blame must go to the people who hijacked the planes – presumably, the associates of Osama bin Laden (after all, he did take credit). But in another, political sense, blame must be assigned to the ignorant and immoral US foreign policy that has alienated, with good cause, so many people in the Islamic world. The U.S. government’s “approval” of the recent Israeli bombing of Lebanon is one example that these policies are not simply in the past.

It is hard to know what counts as the government’s response: the attack on Afghanistan, the baseless invasion of Iraq, holding of prisoners without due process of law, previously-secret prisons in countries where the US can plausibly deny that it (or Bush) had any role in torturing prisoners, periodic threat-level rises with dubious justification, etc? Well, almost all of this has been counterproductive both politically and militarily. Unfortunately, the government’s policies have been managed by people who are quite ignorant and quite immoral. What worse combination of traits can there be?

———-

Stay tuned for the next installment.

One of the few conservative magazines worth reading, The New American, reports that Henry Kissinger told an Italian reporter in 1972 that the war in Vietnam had “been a useless war.” I think if I was one of the 58,000 soldiers killed or one of the 304,000 soldiers wounded or one of the 75,000 soldiers disabled (23,000 totally disabled) in that “useless war” that I would be quite upset at Kissinger and the government that was responsible for that crime.

When will we hear Bush or Rumsfeld admit that the war in Iraq is likewise a “useless war”? Probably not until after a few thousand more American soldiers die for a lie.

I could not believe he actually said it, and I am sure he wasn’t supposed to.

Earlier this week, in an exclusive interview, President Bush told Katie Couric:

“One of the hardest parts of my job is to connect Iraq to the war on terror.”

As reported by Antiwar.com’s Debbie Clark:

Saturday morning, after a march around the Capital building, 30-35 people from Camp Democracy – mostly Veterans for Peace and Iraq Veterans Against the War members – went to the Pentagon to see the new 9/11 memorial.

As they were nearing the end of the tour, Geoffrey Millard, a disabled Iraq war veteran, left a stack of pamphlets about the dangers of depleted uranium on a brochure stand as they were entering the chapel. At first, no one noticed and they continued the tour, but as the group was headed out, they say they were surrounded by about 20 or 25 pentagon police.

The cops indicated that someone had left a stack of “literature” inside and announced that this was a violation. They were told that if they didn’t admit who did it, they would all be arrested. The cops apparently then thought a bit better of it, and decided they would arrest the the ones who still had them. That’s funny. Arrest the people who still have them, even though they are the one’s who obviously hadn’t left their’s behind.

Four of them, three IVAW guys, Steve Mortillo, Joe Hatcher, and Toby Hartbarger, and Gregory Watson, a friend, still had the pamphlets and were arrested.

Geoffrey Millard had been doing an interview, and so was held up. When he caught up and saw that his friends were being arrested, he went up to the cops and told them he was the one who had done it.

All five were held in a police station on the Pentagon grounds and were charged with violating a lawful order and illegally posting materials – both federal misdemeanors. All 5 have now been released, but they missed Ray McGovern‘s and Karen Kwiatkowski‘s speeches at Camp Democracy.

For those in DC, the recently released Prisoner of Conscience, Kevin Benderman, will be giving a speech to the Congressional Black Caucus at 7pm Eastern, Saturday night at St. Aloysius Church, 900 N. Capital Street Northwest, near Union Station Metro, redline.

Update: See the video of their press conference here.