Antiwar.com Blog

The State-worshipping warmonger known as Ann Coulter has struck again. Defending the White House from allegations that it’s policy of issuing ‘press passes’ is partisan, Coulter suggests that “that old Arab” Helen Thomas is allowed in. That wasn’t really a response to the charge, which, as I have noted, was of partisanship, IE. left vs. right. What does Thomas’s Lebanese descendancy have to do with … but never mind. All Coulter was trying to do was generate publicity for herself, to sell more garbage-er I mean books to glazed-eyed Fundies.
Coulter is to political commentary what Madonna is to music. Their real talents are in stirring up hypocritical outrage to sell … dare I call it music and literature?
Thomas’s credentials are infinitely superior to Coulter’s, of course, and the 84 year-old Thomas has Coulter beat in another way; physical attractiveness. What sort of a creature is Coulter anyway? I’ve studied her image, on TV and in pictures, and I’ve decided that she’s not human, or female in any sense that I know the terms. She makes Karen Carpenter look fat. If I saw Coulter standing nearby, I’d have to start looking for the mothership.
Rather than a human being, I think Coulter is a physical manifestation of the fear and hatred inspired by neoconservatism, worldwide. Perhaps if we ignore her, like a failed marketing slogan, she’ll go away. I will try to do so, from now on, but I can’t guarantee results.

Oops! The US military almost killed the freed hostage:

An Italian journalist was injured when a U.S. armoured vehicle mistakenly fired on her car after her release from captivity in Iraq, news reports said Friday. One Italian secret service agent was killed in the shooting, and another was injured, the reports said.

The Apcom and ANSA news agencies said that Giuliana Sgrena, a reporter for the communist daily Il Manifesto, was in a hospital in Iraq with a shoulder injury. The shooting occurred Friday at a roadblock while the car was heading to the airport, the reports said.

The editor of Il Manifesto, Gabriele Polo, said the secret service agent was killed when he threw himself over the freed hostage to protect her from U.S. fire, according to Apcom. He also said Sgrena was in the hospital but was not seriously injured.

The U.S. military press desk in Baghdad had no immediate comment on reports of the shooting and said it was looking into the matter.

You gotta watch out for those liberators in Iraq.

I’d give all the cedars of Lebanon to know how the “opposition” and their American amen corner will spin the latest news from the investigation into the assassination of Rafik Hariri:

“Lebanon’s investigations show that ex-Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri was almost certainly killed by a suicide car bomb, a judicial source close to the probe said on Friday. The source said results of the probe would be released next week. He expected them to show that a Muslim militant who had appeared in a video tape claiming responsibility for the attack was in the car that ripped through Hariri’s motorcade in Beirut on Feb. 14. ‘The attack happened when a car slowed up to allow Hariri’s motorcade to pass it. As the motorcade passed it, the car blew up,’ the source said. He said evidence came from a security camera at a nearby bank which caught parts of the incident. “

A “security camera,” eh? So, who are you going to believe — the transparently biased view of a “security camera,” which is obviously just part of an ongoing Syrian plot against Democracy and Goodness, or Walid Jumblatt, who thinks the U.S. bombed itself on 9/11
and also believes (along with the U.S. government, Charles Krauthammer, Glenn Reynolds, and all the Usual Suspects) that he was knocked off by the evil Syrians?

The story goes on to say that “Lebanon’s opposition and the international community have made revealing the identity of Hariri’s killers a key priority. ”

Yeah, well not anymore! Ever since the bomb went off, the Syrian “opposition” has been pushing a conspiracy theory that posits the existence of an underground bomb, which was (naturally!) planted by Syrian intelligence. Now they’ll start howling that this is all part of a “cover-up” — but how will they explain the DNA tests that point to the identity of the killer?:

“A previously unknown Islamist group said in a video aired a few hours after the bombing it had carried out a suicide attack against Hariri because he supported the Saudi government.
Lebanese security sources identified the man who read the statement as on the video as Ahmed Tayseer Abu Adas and authorities did DNA tests on the remains of a body found at the scene to establish they belonged to Abu Adas.”

So maybe there was something to the videotaped claim of responsibility by a “previously unknown” Al Qaeda-affiliated anti-Saudi group. Oh, but never mind all that: these are mere facts, which get in the way of “the revolution”! Move along — nothing to see here!

Syria didn’t kill Hariri. The Syrians may be brutes, but they aren’t dumb brutes. So who did?

Stay tuned ….

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…

—

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.