Antiwar.com Blog

Sorry to distract from all the Dictatorship Day celebrations this weekend, but nuclear physicist and Antiwar.com regular contributor, Gordon Prather, reminds us that none of the Middle Eastern countries being targeted (Iraq, Iran, Syria) in this Phony “Global War on Terror” – so that they won’t “give nukes to terrorists” – have nukes or the capability to make them. The only Muslim nation with nuclear weapons is Pakistan – our ally – and if terrorists ever get a nuke, that country is its most likely origin. (Not that either of us are arguing for aggression against that country.)

“Pervez Musharraf, currently Pakistan’s President and ‘Chief of Staff’ of Pakistan’s army, has been on a world-wide book tour, flogging his just published autobiography, In the Line of Fire. It must be good, President Bush urged us to buy it.

“Steve Croft, of CBS News, began his interview of Musharraf this way:

‘Pakistan, with its nuclear weapons and Islamic militants, has been called the most dangerous country in the world, and one of the most dangerous places in it is riding in the motorcade of President Musharraf. Twice suicide bombers have tried to blow it up, killing 14 people in the process. Both times, Musharraf barely escaped.

‘There have been half a dozen plots on his life. Why are so many people trying to kill Pakistan’s president?’

“Basically, it’s because of Musharraf’s decision shortly after 9/11 to turn his back on the Taliban government in Afghanistan and the Islamic militants in his own country and to “cooperate” with President Bush in his ‘War on Terra.’

“But with the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan, and Osama bin Laden’s continued protected presence in Pakistan/Afghanistan, and the recently released National Intelligence Estimate [.pdf] that Bush’s war of aggression against Iraq has increased the chances that you and yours will get nuked in your jammies, probably by a Pakistani nuke, it may be worth recalling ‘It’s Pakistan, Stupid,’ a column originally posted four years ago, on August 31, 2002, before it was general knowledge that Boy Bush had already commenced bombing the gee-whiz out of Iraq.”

My favorite quote from the article:

“You see, the Islamic terrorists and their nukes are in Pakistan – not Iraq. Any attempt to prosecute the loose-nuke problem in Iraq may be counterproductive.”

Continue reading “Islamic Bomb”

The prize for the headline of the year goes to today’s Washington Post for the following gem:

“Many Rights in U.S. Legal System Absent in New Bill”

The Post article on the military tribunal bill the Senates passed yesterday  details some of the legal and procedural rights that people seized as “enemy combatants” will not possess.  (Amnesty International has a good summary of the bill here).

The Post article gives the impression that only aliens have to fear being treated  slightly better than East Bloc dissidents. But as a superb piece in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times by law professor Bruce Ackerman noted, the legislation “authorizes the president to seize American citizens as enemy combatants, even if they have never left the United States. And once thrown into military prison, they cannot expect a trial by their peers or any other of the normal protections of the Bill of Rights.”

When I clicked on the “print” version of the “absent rights” article, the page on the Washington Post website included a hefty ad:  “Helping to Deliver Air Dominance for the U.S. – the Lockheed Martin – Boeing – Pratt Whitney – F-22 Raptor.” 

Who the hell needs civil liberties when we have “air dominance”?

Comments/ caterwauling etc. welcome at my blog here

The following Republican members of the House of Representatives voted against the Torture-“Terrorist” Tribunal bill (HR 6166) today.

Ron Paul, Roscoe Bartlett, Wayne Gilchrest, Walter Jones, Steven LaTourette, James Leach, Jerry Moran.

These folks deserve hearty applause for their courage in rebuffing the surge of authoritarian sentiments now sweeping the Grand Old Party.

The final vote was 253-168, with 12 members not bothering to vote.

A vote for the bill was a vote for torture, plain and simple.  Congressmen can hem and haw and pretend that they are only authorizing Bush to make decisions on what methods of interrogation will be used.  But everyone who has been paying half-attention knows that the US govt. has been torturing people since 9/11.  And now the House of Representatives has sprinkled its holy water over American barbarity.

This Torture/Tribunal bill looks to me to be far more dangerous for both Americans and for the world than is the Patriot Act. [Comments / grousing/ etc. welcome here at my blog]

When plans to produce My Name Is Rachel Corrie, a play based on the journal entries of an American girl murdered by the IDF for her pro-Palestinian activism, were canceled in New York City this year, in the U.S. we only read about it in The Nation. When plans to put on Idomeneo, a Mozart opera, in Germany were recently canceled to placate Muslim sensibilities — the original has nothing to do with Muslims, or Mohammed, but the “post-modern” version that was being planned featured a scene involving the Prophet’s severed head being brought out onto the stage — we read about it … everywhere.

Go figure…

In case you missed it, here’s Cato Institute scholar Arnold Kling writing at TCS Daily last month:

I believe that what we need going forward is a policy of disarming Muslims. I believe that we must keep devout Muslims away from weapons, and keep weapons away from devout Muslims. I can work with Muslims, send my children to school with Muslims, and be friends with Muslims. I do not have an issue with their religion, as long as they do not have weapons. However, the combination of weapons and Islam poses unacceptable danger to the rest of us.

I guess the right to bear arms is, er, faith-based. Who knew?

Philip Weiss, over at the New York Observer, is always a good source of information, and here is his take on the thinktank situation and how it relates to U.S. policy toward Israel:

“As we are frequently told, universities belong to the left. The academy is like an internment camp, the one place they can put ’em all; and it’s become more and more irrelevant to policy-making. But the Washington thinktanks are camped next to the corridors of power. ,,,

“Indeed, this is one of the most important points in the Walt-Mearsheimer paper that set off this debate: in the last generation, rich liberal ponds like Brookings and Carnegie were stocked with pro-Israeli carp; pro-Arab fish simply disappeared. It’s not a conspiracy, but acts of devotion: Conservative Jewish backers, recognizing the importance of thinktanks to the formulation of policy, have forcibly established an orthodoxy of opinion here.

” … Here are a few data points. Roger Hertog, chairman of the rightwing Manhattan Institute—’turning intellect into influence,’ is their brag—got choked up at the annual dinner last year describing his core commitment to Israel. His friend and co-New-York-Sun-backer Bruce Kovner chairs the American Enterprise Institute, which gave a home to Dick and Lynne Cheney in days gone by, gives Likudnik Jerusalemite Dore Gold $96,000 a year for what it’s not clear, and has stocked the White House with neocons like Richard Perle who opposed the Oslo peace process and the idea of land-for-peace and came up with Baghdad-for-peace instead. Or there is Dennis Ross’s sock, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, whose views are epitomized by the former chief of staff of the Israeli Defence Forces who served as a distinguished military fellow last year when he was sued for alleged war crimes at Qana in Lebanon (the last time, in ’96, not this time)(and sued by the Center for Constitutional Rights.) Or Martin Indyk’s spot, Brookings’ Saban Center, financed by ‘a fanatic Zionist billionaire’ Israeli (per Alexander Cockburn), from which Ken Pollack launched the Iraq war for liberals with a book that as I have pointed out before spoke many times about vague Arab/Israeli ‘troubles’ and their importance to the Arab street without once using the word occupation. (Israeli officials don’t like to say occupation; they prefer “administered territories.”) Move on to libertarian Cato, where I am told scholars were warned to pull in their horns on Israel last year lest they endanger funding. Or to the place all these guys get to ski, the Aspen Institute, to which the brilliant Anatol Lieven was never invited again after bringing up the occupation as a source of Arab rage at a 2002 conference discussing the sources of Arab rage. Or the Carnegie Institute for International Something or Other, where Lieven, then a fellow, became a ‘pariah’ after publishing a book that was sharply critical of Israel, and from which he soon debarked for the underfunded Center for American Progress.“

I’m not surprised at the pro-Israel bias of the thinktanks cited above, including the pressure put on the “libertarian” Cato Institute, which said practically nothing about the Israeli invasion of Lebanon except to object when the U.S. evacuated its citizens from Lebanon — after all, why should taxpayers pay for getting our people out of Lebanon? Wasn’t it enough that we paid for the Israeli bombs that were landing on their heads?