If You’re in the Bay Area This Weekend

Speaking of WMDs that do exist…

For some reason or other, a few dozen Nobel prize-winning scientists and other smarty-pantses are concerned that America and Russia still have enough nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert to destroy civilization (“Nobel Laureates say ‘Take Nuclear Warheads off Hair-Trigger Alert’“). One of these Big-Brains Who HATE AMERICA!!! (irony alert), Nobel Peace Showoff scientist Professor Sir Joseph Rotblat (aka “the man who walked away from the Manhattan Project”) came up with the idea of raising money from the private sector to dismantle nuclear weapons. To this end, a long fundraising walk has been organized by the Global Nuclear Disarmament Fund. The opening event — which includes a Japanese senator, Nobel prize winners, actor Steven Seagal, etc. — begins Saturday morning in San Francisco: click here for program. The walk starts at noon, heads down the peninsula, and over the next month hits NV, AZ, & NM, ending at the Trinity nuke test site: click here for walk schedule.

All apologies….

3 months ago (“No Peaking“) I said that I’d answer some of my Peak Oil mail “in the next day or two.” I made a file of many of these e-mails and my replies, and then decided to write an article instead — which I still haven’t done. It’s a shame, ’cause I rec’d a number of good e-mails, both pro and con. When I finish the article I’m working on I’ll post a link to it here. Sorry about that.

London Bombing: Still No Iraqi Terrorists

Zahid Hussain, the London Times‘ correspondent in Pakistan explains “how Pakistan became a hotbed for terrorists“:

For quite some time, there has been a network of contacts between British extremists and the Jihadi organisations based in Pakistan. Once contact has been made with … young people, they become influenced by them and are encouraged to visit the training camps.

For the last two decades, sections of Pakistan have been under the influence of guerillas who were involved in the war against the Soviet forces in Afghanistan – with, it’s important to say, American support.

They had offices in all of the neighbourhoods and were recruiting people to fight in that war. A culture of jihad developed which has continued to this day. Many are still involved in the fighting in Kashmir and through this they have become battle-hardened fighters while others have gone over to Iraq.

Suffocation chambers

Three years ago, under the psuedonym “Jim Rissman,” I wrote a piece for Antiwar that was then used by Freedomfiles.org to anchor its “Atrocities against the Afghan People” section. The Northern Alliance, a U.S. client, took prisoners “in a U.S.-orchestrated military operation,” as the Washington Post put it. Another source, Julian Strauss, picks up the story:

The prisoners were crammed at gunpoint into large, oblong freight containers. When no more could be squeezed in, the metal doors were shut tight. Slowly they began to suffocate.

By the time the containers were opened two days later – at the end of the journey from Kunduz to Sheberghan – many were dead.

“There was no oxygen,” said Maqsood Khan, a 26-year-old Pakistani from Rawalpindi. “We drank the sweat off our own bodies and off the dead men. Some drank their urine. Of 400, half were dead by the time we arrived.”…

Sajjid Mehmood, an 18-year-old from Karachi, said: “There were about 250 men in the container I was in. We were praying, shouting and begging for mercy. It was very difficult to breathe.

“Zubair, a man who was crushed up against me, died after two or three hours. We were praying to God. When the soldiers heard our cries for help they opened the rear doors and began shooting.

“Many of us died, maybe 20 or 30. When the container arrived after 18 hours, 150 out of 250 people were dead.” Today Sheberghan prison, originally built for 500 to 1,000 inmates, houses more than 3,000. The commandant said 807 of them are Pakistanis. The rest are Afghans.

My piece closes with Strauss’ warning that “stories such as these have only served to harden the resolve of Islamic militants.” And sure enough, from the Wall Street Journal we learn that the four London bombers, “of Pakistani descent,” according to friends “had been
influenced by claims of atrocities in Afghanistan and Iraq.” (“From Heart of U.K., Four Friends Emerge As Terror Suspects,” 7/14/05)

Unbelievably, in Iraq fours days after the London bombings, “Ten Sunni Muslim tribesmen died after American-trained Iraqi police commandos kept them in an airtight container for more than six hours in 115-degree heat.” Because they belonged to the same tribe as the leader of the Association of Muslim Scholars, “they were locked in what was described as a cargo-type container” and suffocated.

Strauss’ piece was titled Slow death on the jail convoy of misery. I called mine Slow death on the jail convoys of misery to emphasize that the sides in the Afghan civil war took turns suffocating each other. The Iraq occurrence is to say the least a horrific development, for Iraqis, for the Western orchestrators, for the world. One can only hope that freight containers don’t “line the roads” of Iraq as they do in Afghanistan.

Orange Revolution Comes Full Circle

As is common with such revolutions, the democratic free-market Orange revolution in Ukraine continues to show signs of having turned sour before it began. Anders Aslund writes, “Last year Ukraine enjoyed economic growth of 12 percent; in the first four months of this year, the growth rate plunged to 5 percent, while inflation has surged to 15 percent….”

Furthermore, “the property rights of thousands of enterprises are in limbo. In Kiev, rumors abound that oligarchs connected to the old regime are trying to sell their enterprises to Russian business executives and are preparing to escape the country. Naturally, executives are cutting off investment, and economic growth is screeching to a halt. To make matters worse, a new socialist minister of privatization has been appointed who opposes privatization in principle. She asked recently: ‘What is so bad about re-nationalization?’ Tymoshenko concurred in a recent newspaper interview: ‘The biggest enterprises, which can easily be efficiently managed, must not be privatized, and they can give the state as an owner wonderful profits.’ This sounds like state capitalism.”

State capitalism. Hmmm. Well what should we have expected? As Justin Raimondo said more than three months ago:

“The Ukrainians believe they can balance their budget by revisiting suspicious privatizations, seizing assets, and re-selling them to the highest bidder. Yushchenko was sold to Western journalists as well as his own electorate as a ‘free-market reformer,’ but this is hardly a ‘free market’ approach. Aside from destroying the sort of stability that business requires, it assumes the good will of government regulators – not a wise course, in any country – and encourages yet more corruption by making political pull, rather than entrepreneurial skill, the coin of the realm. Who will be ‘re-privatized,’ and who will be spared? It’s all up to the gang currently in power.” Continue reading “Orange Revolution Comes Full Circle”

Official Truth in a nutshell

I wrote “Smokescreen” in the early hours of July 13, so I could not have read, much less mentioned, an editorial that appeared later that morning in Newsday. Titled “Serbs finally look within,” the editorial manages to pull together just about every strand of Official Truth about Srebrenica, and can thus serve as an exemplar of mainstream opinion. It is somehow fitting that such an” honor” belongs to a paper that peddled the Pulitzer-winning atrocity propaganda of Roy Gutman, early in the Bosnian War. Continue reading “Official Truth in a nutshell”

Kosovo and Iraq

Many don’t see the parallels: each was (is) a failed foreign policy. Few politicians, liberals, “conservatives” or pundits supported or opposed both. Except of course, Antiwar.com. Here are some choice quotes from many who were critical of the US intervention in Kosovo. My favorite:

Victory means exit strategy, and it’s important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is.

~ George W. Bush, 1999 on the intervention in Kosovo

hatip Catallarchy.