Antiwar.com Blog

Is this a trend, or what? First, the Polish embassy in New York cancels a scheduled talk by Tony Judt in response to pressure from Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith. Judt’s sin? He defended scholars John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, whose thesis that the Israel Lobby has a virtual lock on U.S. foreign policy has the Amen Corner up in arms.

Now we learn that author Carmen Callil has suffered the same fate — this time at the hands of the French.

Callil’s new book, Bad Faith, is about the career of an official of Vichy France who masterminded the deportation of Jews: the book has received rave reviews. However, the Amen Corner is peeved at the author’s postscript, which refers to the oppression of Palestinians at the hands of the Israeli state. The French embassy in New York scheduled a reception to honor Ms. Callil’s arrival in the U.S., and celebrate her book — but an email campaign underscoring the offending passage and indulging in the usual smears put the kibosh on the party. Why am I not surprised that, according to Media Bistro, the French surrendered after only a few emails?

Israel Lobby? What “Israel Lobby“?

This one:

“The Lobby pursues two broad strategies. First, it wields its significant influence in Washington, pressuring both Congress and the executive branch. Whatever an individual lawmaker or policymaker’s own views may be, the Lobby tries to make supporting Israel the ‘smart’ choice. Second, it strives to ensure that public discourse portrays Israel in a positive light, by repeating myths about its founding and by promoting its point of view in policy debates. The goal is to prevent critical comments from getting a fair hearing in the political arena. Controlling the debate is essential to guaranteeing US support, because a candid discussion of US-Israeli relations might lead Americans to favour a different policy.”

Having made a clean sweep of Embassy Row, the intellectual shock troops of the IDF (American branch) are now no doubt preparing an assault on Publishers’ Row: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux is reportedly bringing out a book-length work by Mearsheimer and Walt, elaborating on their thesis. You don’t have to be Nostradamus to see, with a fair degree of certainty, an organized effort to spike their book.

If FS&G, the Mercedes Benz of the publishing world — which has brought out works by T.S. Eliot, William Golding, Hermann Hesse, Czeslaw Milosz, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, Philip Roth, Susan Sontag, and Tom Wolfe — can be intimidated into silencing the Lobby’s critics, then what institution in American society is immune?

The War Party did more to enlist journalists in the cause of invading Iraq than deploying Judith Miller. Bob Woodward’s new book, State of Denial, reveals a top secret meeting chaired by Paul Wolfowitz, on November 29, 2001, attended by thinktank wonks, government officials, and two “journalists”: Fareed Zakaria, editor of the international edition of Newsweek and columnist for that magazine, and Robert D. Kaplan, currently on the staff of The Atlantic Monthly. The purpose of the group was to produce a paper dealing with the aftermath of the invasion of Afghanistan and which countries to invade in the Middle East. President Bush reportedly found the paper illuminated the “malignancy” of all those damn Ay-rabs in the Middle East, especially Iraq, who had yet to be “liberated.”

Both Zakaria and Kaplan signed confidentiality agreements, and the former, at least, appears to be living up to his as best he can: Zakaria denies that he knew a document would come out of the meeting, although Kaplan says most of the meeting was spent drafting the document. The New York Times asked Senor Kaplan: “Could any of the participants have been unaware there was a document in the making?” “No,” averred Kaplan, “that’s not possible.” Who’s lying, here?

These guys are “journalists” in the same sense that the old staff of Pravda, the mouthpiece of the Soviet Kremlin, are “journalists” — that is, they aren’t real journalists in any meaningful sense of the term. They are propagandists, pure and simple: shills for the government. When the State is pushing a course of action — an invasion, either of a foreign country or the rights of its own citizens — these people respond like Pavlovian parrots, rationalizing and “explaining” from their perches in the “mainstream” media, outdoing one another in their obeisance to Power, in the hope that they’ll be invited to the next secret meeting of shills and ass-kissers.

 

Get ready for a furor:

A team of American and Iraqi epidemiologists estimates that 655,000 more people have died in Iraq since coalition forces arrived in March 2003 than would have died if the invasion had not occurred.

The estimate, produced by interviewing residents during a random sampling of households throughout the country, is far higher than ones produced by other groups, including Iraq’s government.

It is more than 20 times the estimate of 30,000 civilian deaths that President Bush gave in a speech in December. It is more than 10 times the estimate of roughly 50,000 civilian deaths made by the British-based Iraq Body Count research group.

The surveyors said they found a steady increase in mortality since the invasion, with a steeper rise in the last year that appears to reflect a worsening of violence as reported by the U.S. military, the news media and civilian groups. In the year ending in June, the team calculated Iraq’s mortality rate to be roughly four times what it was the year before the war.

Of the total 655,000 estimated “excess deaths,” 601,000 resulted from violence and the rest from disease and other causes, according to the study. This is about 500 unexpected violent deaths per day throughout the country. …

The study was conducted under the supervision of Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health and will be published in the British medical journal the Lancet.

According to polls, tens of millions of Americans believe that the government was behind the 9/11 attacks. But 2 more conspiracy theories were pretty well debunked recently.

(1) That the government shot down United Flight 93.

(2) That the air force was ordered to “stand down” on 9/11.

Michael Bronner, a producer of the movie United 93, asked for the NORAD 9/11/01 transcripts, & published excerpts in Vanity Fair. He actually provides sound clips — here.

It seems that NORAD was unable to track or intercept any of the planes before they crashed. At one point they believed that the White House was targeted, and, incredibly, the air force planes were unable to find the White House:

Nasypany: “Goddammit! I can’t even protect my N.C.A. [National Capital Area].”

[A] dramatic chase towards the White House continues. Two more problems emerge: the controllers can’t find the White House on their dated equipment, and they have trouble communicating with the Langley fighters.

CITINO: 15 miles. One-five … noise level please … It’s got to be low. Quit 2-6, when able say altitude of the aircraft.… Did we get a Z-track [coordinates] up for the White House?
HUCKABONE: They’re workin’ on it.
CITINO: Okay. Hey, what’s this Bravo 0-0-5 [unidentified target]?
FOX: We’re trying to get the Z-point. We’re trying to find it.
HUCKABONE: I don’t even know where the White House is.

Conspiracy theorists still have some material to work with, though. On 9/11/01 there was a NORAD hijacking exercise, which seems to have caused some confusion when the real hijackings occurred:

BOSTON CENTER: Hi. Boston Center T.M.U. [Traffic Management Unit], we have a problem here. We have a hijacked aircraft headed towards New York, and we need you guys to, we need someone to scramble some F-16s or something up there, help us out.
POWELL: Is this real-world or exercise?
BOSTON CENTER: No, this is not an exercise, not a test.

WATSON: What?
DOOLEY: Whoa!
WATSON: What was that?
ROUNTREE: Is that real-world?
DOOLEY: Real-world hijack.
WATSON: Cool!

FOX: I’ve never seen so much real-world stuff happen during an exercise.
NASYPANY: This is what I got. Possible news that a 737 just hit the World Trade Center. This is a real-world.

—Is this explosion part of that that we’re lookin’ at now on TV?
—Yes.
—Jesus …
—And there’s a possible second hijack also—a United Airlines …
—Two planes?…
—Get the f*ck out …
—I think this is a damn input, to be honest.

The last line — “I think this is a damn input” — is a reference to the exercise, meaning a simulations input.

Also surprising is (1) that the terrorists knew to turn off the planes’ transponders, and (2) that this succeeded in making the planes invisible to NORAD. The Vanity Fair article suggests that civilian air traffic controllers had a better understanding of what was going on than did NORAD; even talking to each-other on the phone might have cleared up the confusion, but this didn’t happen.

No conspiracy theory is necessary to make the anti-imperial argument: ethics aside, a government that can’t find the president’s house during an attack shouldn’t be abroad shaking up hornets’ nests.

(Readers might be interested in checking out the Peace section of my science blog.)

On Sept. 12, the Smith Family Foundation held a discussion on “Responding to Anti-Americanism in the Arab World: Have We Been Effective Since 9/11?” Our own Leon Hadar was there, along with David “Axis of Evil” Frum and pollster Craig Charney. To watch a video or listen to audio of the vent, click here.

Not since “Dewey Defeats Truman” adorned the front page of the Chicago Tribune has a headline-writer gotten it more wrong:

“N. Korea appears to back down on threat“ 

That Associated Press story, posted hours before the North Koreans announced a successful nuclear test, detailed newly-elevated Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s trip to China, and noted his success in getting Beijing to issue a strong joint statement condemning North Korea’s stated intention of testing a nuke.

This unusual Sino-Japanese rapprochement might have been a primary cause of the North Koreans’ decision to go ahead with the test, rather than evidence Kim Jong-il was about to back down. By way of further explanation, here’s a snippet from an article in Dong-a Ilbo detailing recent developments in the DPRK:

“North Korea’s stance is clearly revealed in Kim’s message to a meeting of heads of North Korea’s overseas diplomatic missions held in Pyongyang from July 18 to 22 that said, ‘We should solve difficult problems on our own as the whole world is our enemy.’“Kim didn’t attend the meeting but is said to have criticized China and Russia for supporting the adoption of resolution and Korea for freezing additional aid of fertilizer and food as ‘not reliable.'”

The Bush administration has long campaigned to totally isolate North Korea, and now it can be fairly said to have succeeded. The question now is: how many more such “successes” can we afford?