Antiwar.com Blog

From an ACLU press release: Members From Both Sides of the Aisle Promise to Investigate Problems at FBI After Hearing Wednesday

“WASHINGTON – Two Members of Congress promised to investigate whistleblower Sibel Edmonds’ allegations against the FBI and raised concerns over the government’s response to her case after she testified Wednesday for the first time before Congress.

Edmonds, who was fired after exposing national security concerns at the FBI, received support from Representatives Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) and Christopher Shays, (R-Conn.) after testifying at a subcommittee hearing of the House Committee on Government Reform.”…

This is a step in the right direction, maybe. If we have any power at all, it’s in the House of Representatives. Does your congressman support Mrs. Edmonds?
Click here for her March 2nd testimony to the House Committee on Government Reform (and more).
Click here for video of her press conference
Sibel Edmonds’ website: justacitizen.com
Sign her petition here
My interview of her here(mp3)
For the rest of the press release click Continue reading “Congress Members Vow Support for Sibel Edmonds”

In Backtalk:

Steve Vinson: the real Bush plan for the Mideast can be found in “Securing the Realm” — which doesn’t mention democracy.

Tom Harper: no one spit on Vietnam vets.

Leon Hadar: Britain would fail Rice’s “town-square test.”

Cheryl Hutchinson: (Ex-communist) David Horowitz has included Justin Raimondo — & Ayatollah Khomeni — in his Guide to the Political Left. Wrong. (The left/right polarity should be fine-tuned or ignored, not abused.)

Former US ambassador to Gabon, Joe Wilson, uses the f word.

And more…

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I was in Britain last year and couldn’t believe how unpopular the Iraq invasion/ occupation is there — and unpopular with the old, rural and conservative, not just the usual suspects. No wonder, as Tom Engelhardt describes in “The Emperor’s Potemkin Visits,” when the president goes abroad he brings a courtier bubble. Robert L. Pollock, senior editorial page writer at the WSJ, couldn’t avoid public opinion when he recently visited Turkey, though (“The Sick Man of Europe — Again“):

… Never in an ostensibly friendly country have I had the impression of embassy staff so besieged.

…Turkish parliamentarians themselves have accused the U.S. of “genocide” in Iraq, while Mr. Erdogan (who we once hoped would set for the Muslim world an example of democracy) was among the few world leaders to question the legitimacy of the Iraqi elections. When confronted, Turkish pols claim they can’t risk going against “public opinion.” …

But the only opposition now is a moribund People’s Republican Party, or CHP, once the party of Ataturk. At a recent party congress, its leader accused his main challenger of having been part of a CIA plot against him. That’s not to say there aren’t a few comparatively pro-U.S. officials left in the current government and the state bureaucracies. But they’re afraid to say anything in public. In private, they whine endlessly about trivial things the U.S. “could have done differently.”

Entirely forgotten is that President Bush was among the first world leaders to recognize Prime Minister Erdogan, while Turkey’s own legal system was still weighing whether he was secular enough for the job. Forgotten have been decades of U.S. military assistance. Forgotten have been years of American efforts to secure a pipeline route for Caspian oil that terminates at the Turkish port of Ceyhan. Forgotten has been the fact that U.S. administrations continue to fight annual attempts in Congress to pass a resolution condemning modern Turkey for the long-ago Armenian genocide. Forgotten has been America’s persistent lobbying for Turkish membership in the European Union.

Forgotten, above all, has been America’s help against the PKK. Its now-imprisoned leader, Abdullah Ocalan, was expelled from Syria in 1998 after the Turks threatened military action. He was then passed like a hot potato between European governments, who refused to extradite him to Turkey because — gasp! — he might face the death penalty. He was eventually caught — with the help of U.S. intelligence — sheltered in the Greek Embassy in Nairobi. "They gave us Ocalan. What could be bigger than that?" says one of a handful of unapologetically pro-U.S. Turks I still know.

And why has the US’s reputation recently plummeted in Turkey (and just about everywhere else)?:

…[A] 50-year special relationship, between longtime NATO allies who fought Soviet expansionism together starting in Korea, has long had to weather the ideological hostility and intellectual decadence of much of Istanbul’s elite. And at the 2002 election, the increasingly corrupt mainstream parties that had championed Turkish-American ties self-destructed, leaving a vacuum that was filled by the subtle yet insidious Islamism of the Justice and Development (AK) Party. It’s this combination of old leftism and new Islamism — much more than any mutual pique over Turkey’s refusal to side with us in the Iraq war — that explains the collapse in relations.

“Mutual pique over Turkey’s refusal to side with us in the Iraq”? Meaning that the Turks feel pique over their government’s refusal to help the US military invade Iraq?

Even for WSJ‘s editorial page, this analysis is an embarrassment. For the real story see William S. Lind’s “Turkey Imagines the Unimaginable.”

Amy Goodman interviews the great journalist and author of Pity the Nation Robert Fisk, who lives in Lebanon, about the gruesome assassination of Rafik Hariri, in which 18 people were dashed to pieces;

… at one point, I saw a woman’s hand …

Fisk has many interesting observations about the region, and while he believes that Syria knew about the assassination, he doesn’t think Syria ‘ordered’ it, which he characterizes as a ‘Hollywood’ view of world events. Hariri simply had a lot of enemies. Mp3 link Note: for best results, copy the link and paste it into Windows Media Player’s “open URL” function. WMP will download the entire file into a temp directory, so there won’t be any streaming screw-ups.

Last night, Brian Williams released a breaking story on NBC: that the presiding judge on the Saddam tribunal had been assassinated.

It turned out it was an error: one of the lower judges and a lawyer were killed. Not a major error in the news report, except….

NBC ran a photo of the actual presiding judge in the case, whose identity is supposed to be secret. They had previously run the photo in an earlier report, but had blurred out his face. This time, however, thinking he was dead, they unblurred his face and showed a nice clear shot of him (they might as well have drawn a target on it).

Thanks to Jon Stewart of The Daily Show.

Columns, that is. Tomorrow’s edition will be the 200th appearance of my exclusive column for Antiwar.com. It began in the fall of 2000, in the aftermath of Serbia’s “October revolution,” and has chronicled events in the former Yugoslavia ever since: the Presevo insurgency, the Djindjic assassination, the uncivil war in Macedonia, the pogrom in Kosovo, the Hague show trials, many elections, anniversaries and transitions. On several occasions it revisited history, both recent and distant, and even addressed language issues.
This isn’t the end – far from it! I intend to keep writing for as long as the situation in Yugoslavia’s successor states merits attention. Unfortunately for the people living there, that looks to be a long-term prospect.
It turned out – not surprisingly – that Slobodan Milosevic wasn’t the sole source of trouble in the region (well, there goes that conspiracy theory!), and his fall from power in 2000 didn’t do a damn thing to resolve the ongoing conflicts. Ultimately, the present crisis has roots in the demise of Yugoslavia, and until the circumstances of that murder – for that’s what it was – are addressed, the various parties involved will continue fighting over what they believe is rightfully theirs. So it looks like there will be a job chronicling that conflict for a good long time. Continue reading “Balkan Express turns 200”

The China Post perceives a new cold war with the United States:

“A new Cold War is taking shape after last week’s U.S.-Japan joint statement that China is their biggest security threat and that Taiwan is key to keep Beijing’s growing military might in check… It was the first time that the U.S. and Japan openly placed Taiwan under their defense umbrella. The joint statement represented the most significant change since 1996 to the 1960 U.S.-Japan Security Alliance. Just two days before that, U.S. Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, Douglas Feith, told the Council on Foreign Relations that China was one of the ‘four key concerns’ of the U.S., the others being weapons of mass destruction, terrorism and failing states. While the U.S. would respect China’s aspiration to achieve national greatness, Feith said, this in turn would require Beijing to ‘forgo the threat or use of force to pursue unification.’
In other words, China’s rise has to be in line with America’s ‘rules of the road.’ If not, he warned, ‘respect for sovereignty’ does not require the U.S. ‘to ignore the depredations of tyrannical regimes.'”

We (especially Feith) are in a position to say so because our government has respect for the rule of law.