Antiwar.com Blog

Here in Miami, it’s the third night of the Raúl Castro Ruz era. Although I wouldn’t say the euphoria (or the schadenfreude) has entirely evaporated, calm has returned just in time for everyone to rush to the supermarket to stock up on water and batteries should Tropical Storm Chris decide to spoil any weekend festivities. Only a man as evil as Fidel could pick the Monday before a weekend hurricane to drop dead. Thoughtless bastard.

All kidding aside, it’s been fairly surreal down here. Coverage of the crazy Cubans shaking their booties across several major thoroughfares in Miami has been on all the national networks. We saw hours of videos here. Yes, we’ve danced on Fidel’s grave before, but this time it’s different. It really is. The announcement that Fidel was ceding power — even if it is only temporary — was like watching a coma patient twitch his eyes after 47 years. You simply just don’t sit back and relax when something like that happens. We’re celebrating and waiting to see what twitches next.

We don’t really pretend to know what’s going on down there, but fueled on shots of high-octane Cuban coffee, everyone is speculating. Maybe for once they told the truth. Maybe he’s already embalmed. Maybe he’s just in a coma or stroked out in a hospital bed. Maybe — as my friend Robert suggested — he’s on Calle Ocho dressed as a little old lady, spying on his Miami Mafia funeral. And with Raúl missing in action too, the conspiracy theories multiply with each passing hour. Maybe it’s an honest-to-goodness, old-fashioned, backroom coup d’état. The possibilities are endless, and I suspect we’ll never really know.

I’ve rolodexed through a number of emotions these last three days — mostly disbelief, grief for family and friends who didn’t live to see this, and hope that the future starts now for Cuba instead of after another couple of years of close calls — but I never expected in my wildest dreams to actually be concerned for the Castro butchers. For all the trouble those two have caused I guess I want them to have a more fitting end than gastro-intestinal trouble and some quick “demise” in a dark hallway. Just what the hell has happened to Raúl? Until this mystery surfaced everything had been going according to my schedule of how the changeover was likely to happen.

It’s almost a traitorous feeling, I suppose. My Mom and most of her family fled their adopted island home within a couple years of the glorious revolution in ’59. Then again, if it weren’t for the Castros, she wouldn’t have moved to Miami, and I would never have been born, so I guess they do deserve a smidgen of concern from me…or maybe I was just hoping for the better entertainment value of a nice, public lynching.

(I posted a bit about this on Monday night over at Crash Landing, one of my regular blathering haunts.)

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George W. Bush has apparently given up any aspiration of receiving an honorary award from the American Civil Liberties Union.

His administration is responding to the Supreme Court ruling striking down his military tribunals with a legislative proposal that would place far more Americans in peril of having their rights nullified. 

The Washington Post reports today:

A draft Bush administration plan for special military courts seeks to expand the reach and authority of such “commissions” to include trials, for the first time, of people who are not members of al-Qaeda or the Taliban and are not directly involved in acts of international terrorism, according to officials familiar with the proposal.

The plan, which would replace a military trial system ruled illegal by the Supreme Court in June, would also allow the secretary of defense to add crimes at will to those under the military court’s jurisdiction. The two provisions would be likely to put more individuals than previously expected before military juries, officials and independent experts said.

That last sentence evoked from me the phrase I heard most often during my  summers working as a peach picker:  No s**t.

The system would permit hearsay evidence (which the defendant would not be permitted to see) to seal their fate, including death sentences.  A U.S. government official told the Washington Post that defendants would have to count on “the trustworthiness of the system.”   (The fact that the Bush administration has almost always been wrong when it accuses people of terrorist connections was not mentioned in this piece; I dealt with that subject a few weeks ago for the Boston Globe.).

The fact that the Bush proposal would seek to empower Rumsfeld to act as legislator, jury, and executor of anyone accused of future specified crimes – based on the shabbiest standards of evidence and kangaroo court procedures – vivifies the total contempt of the Bush team for American liberty.

Jonah Goldberg, the former editor of National Review Online who owes his status as a “conservative” pundit to his mom’s proximity to the stain on Monica Lewinsky’s dress, is now applying his journalistic talents to shilling for Israel’s war. But would somebody please call the re-write department? His latest screed denies the Qana massacre even took place:

“Aspects of the Qana story don’t jibe, starting with the timeline. The building collapsed seven hours after the bombing (which remains the likely explanation now). Some of the bodies don’t look like they were killed in a building collapse, and refrigerated trucks were reportedly brought in before the media could visit the site, perhaps delivering corpses. An elaborate 30-foot-long banner condemning a bloody lipped Rice for the attack was improbably at the ready for a protest that morning. Bloggers around the globe are steadily picking apart other details, to the dismay of many who like their anti-Israel storylines tidy (see confederateyankee.mu.nu for a summary).”

Jefferson Morley gives us the lowdown on the growing “revisionist” movement among Israel’s amen corner, which denies each and every atrocity committed by the Israelis even as they occur:

“The Qana conspiracy theory not only underscores how the Internet can misinform (an old story), it also reveals a popular demand for online content that attempts to explain away news reports that Israel (and by proxy, its closest ally and arms supplier, the United States) was responsible for the deaths of dozens of women and children in a Hezbollah stronghold. At a time when American and Israeli public opinion of the war diverge radically from the world opinion elsewhere, the emergence of a right-wing equivalent of the Sept. 11 conspiracy theories is worth noting.”

It turns out that the “report” about refrigerated trucks being brought in with fresh corpses for the Hezbollah “show” originated with the “Israel Insider,” a vehemently pro-Israel web site based in Israel that backs its claim up with — nothing:

“Citing news images of the event, [Israel Insider publisher Reuben] Korvet said the bodies of 57 civilians ‘looked like they had been dead for days’ and suggested that Hezbollah operatives planted them there.”

How did refrigerator trucks get to the scene without being seen by the Israelis, whose aerial photography noted other details of the scene? Korvet insists the dead bodies “must be something else,” and asks “who were these people.” Morley, with an audible sigh of astonished resignation, answers:

“That question has been definitively answered in the mainstream press. Almost all of the victims belonged to two extended families, the Hashems and the Shalhoubs, who lived in the area, according to the independent accounts of The Washington Post‘s Anthony Shadid and the Daily Star‘s Nicholas Blanford.”

And Morley has a few questions for the “revisionists”:

“Who killed the Hashems and Shalhoubs, if it wasn’t an Israel bomb? Korvet and the other bloggers don’t offer any theories.

“How did Hezbollah truck in bodies to the Qana site without the pervasive Israeli aerial surveillance catching it on film? Israel has released footage of what it says are Hezbollah fighters firing rockets from the area. Presumably, the Israeli Foreign Ministry is not covering up the story.”

Goldberg’s suspicions about the “timeline” of the Qana massacre are definitively answered in this story in Ha’aretz:

“The survivors spoke of two bombings, one at 1 A.M., and the second some 10 minutes later. However, what appeared to the survivors as a second bombing may have been the sound of the building coming down. None of the survivors said that the building only collapsed several hours later.” 

But, then again, what do they know?

Morley e-mailed one prominent denialist blogger, Richard North, asking for proof of his contentions, and received this telling reply: “All I have to go on is gut instinct.” That instinct which tells him Israel can do no wrong.

“I appreciate his candor,” writes Morley. “It confirms that he has no evidence to support the central claim of his blog posts. North says he is just trying to ‘raise questions,’ which is certainly a legitimate goal. My question is: What is it about the photos from Qana that made Israel’s supporters prefer fantasy to fact?”

Senor North, Goldberg, and their ilk have always preferred fantasy to reality: indeed, the neocons, in their more effusive moods, openly disdain what one administration official described to writer Ron Suskind as “the reality-based community,” which is based on the old-fashioned method of studying empirical facts, and is today being tossed in the dustbin of history by the War Party:

“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'”

It isn’t the historians, however, who will discover the roots of what I call the Goldberg Syndrome — the tendency to make up “facts” when reality doesn’t fit your pre-determined ideological convictions. Because this isn’t politics, it’s psychopathology we’re dealing with here — a form of mental derangement that is sure to become more widespread in certain quarters as evidence of Israel’s ruthless brutality begins to pile up. By the time the Israelis finish their blitzkrieg, it no doubt will have reached epidemic proportions.

So they’re sending more troops to Iraq, and of course the ostensible reason is to help quell the ever-spreading insurgency, with their purported destination said to be Baghdad. But there’s another possibility: are they positioning to move against Syria? Damascus is next, says Bashar al-Assad — and the he’s mobilized the Syrian army to back up his contention.

Every day the Israelis bomb closer to the Syrian-Lebanese border: it wouldn’t take much to push them over the edge. As I wrote on July 21:

“Bashar al-Assad is a pincer movement away from being deposed. A right hook from U.S.-occupied Iraq and a left from the Israelis would knock out the last remaining Ba’athists “ 

I see Antiwar.com blogger Margaret Griffis is on the case ….

UPDATE: An Israeli airborne commando unit has dropped into Baalbeck, about 12 miles from the Syrian border. CNN reports they have taken control of a Hezbollah hospital:  Israeli special ops are said to have checked the identification papers of all medical personnel and patients, supposedly looking for a “high value” target, perhaps a member of Hezbollah’s “shura” or high command.

This report, however, claims that the raid was prompted by a belief that the two captured Israeli soldiers — remember them? — were being held there:

“The Israeli army confirmed Wednesday that paratroopers landed in helicopters near the city Baalbeck in north-eastern Lebanon and that a number of ‘terrorists’ were taken prisoner. The prisoners were brought to Israel and “all soldiers returned to to their base in Israel” without any casualties, said an Israeli army spokeswoman without giving further details of the overnight raid. 

“… Lebanese security sources said that reports from the area suggested that Israeli troops were pursuing suspicions that two abducted Israeli soldiers were being held or treated inside the hospital.”

According to the Israeli Defense Forces, an Israeli patrol heard an explosion on the Syrian side of the border late Sunday evening. Upon further investigation, they discovered an exploded mine placed inside a tire that was subsequently set on fire. This incident could be an attempt by unknown parties to draw Syria into the conflict between Israel and Lebanon, or it could be merely an accident. Israel claims the explosion injured no soldiers.

IDF officials suggested that the mine could be an attempt by Hezbollah to encourage Syria to join the fighting, but the border crossing is far from Hezbollah territory and well within a UN buffer zone. On the other hand, Syrian Ambassador to the UN, Bashar Ja’afari, warned on Saturday that Washington and Tel Aviv were looking for a “pretext to extend the conflict.” For their part, Syrian troops readied for any potential conflict.

The border at Al Qunaytirah is at the edge of the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. The area has long been the source of disputes between Israel and Syria as to which country destroyed the now-abandoned city during the 1973 Arab-Israeli War; however, the UN eventually condemned Israel for its actions in the province. Syria has maintained mines in the area as a deterrent to further Israeli incursions, so it is possible that this was merely an older, deteriorating mine suffering a malfunction.

While repeating that they are definitely not trying to involve Syria, the Israelis also promised to target any Syrian vehicles that might be carrying weapons into Lebanon. Any accidental deaths of Syrians entering Lebanon could also be a source of increased tensions at this time.