Antiwar.com Blog

So a lot of readers are upset that we don’t talk up the Kucinich campaign more often. Well, the Massachusetts branch of Kucinich for Prez is running my essay on Howard Dean from a few weeks ago, so I’ll give them a little shout-out. Happy?

Faith Fippinger, a 62-year-old retired teacher, faces jail for travelling to Iraq before the war. On what grounds?

For three months she travelled around Iraq, guarding oil refineries, teaching in schools and working in hospitals.

But when she returned home there was a letter waiting for her from the US Treasury Department.

The Treasury Department?

“It was a requirement to send information as to why I was in Iraq,” she says.

“It also said the penalties for being there could be as high as a million dollars and up to 12 years in jail.”

By going to Iraq Faith Fippinger had broken the US economic embargo on Iraq, which had been in place for many years.

The letter explained that by travelling to the country and spending money there, Miss Fippinger was now liable for prosecution.

The same government that uses the Treasury Dept. for such blatantly political prosecutions tells us not to worry about the as-yet unused provisions of the PATRIOT Act?

During an April 22nd American Enterprise Institute briefing on the war in Iraq, Charles Krauthammer said: “Hans Blix had five months to find weapons. He found nothing. We’ve had five weeks. Come back to me in five months. If we haven’t found any, we will have a credibility problem.”

It’s been 5 months, Charley, care to comment?

Noticed on cursor.org

Gutsy essay in Ha’aretz about Israel’s brutal youth. Batya Gur confronts a group of female soldiers harassing an elderly Palestinian:

This was not one of the greater and more visible
evils that take place around us daily, nor was
it a disaster, only an insidious and consuming
evil, one that is hard to pinpoint and define
in words. I do not see the horrors that take
place at the checkpoints every day. I know very
well that such an act by a woman like me,
someone who avoids any political activity or
any consistent struggle for human rights, is
actually a sentimental act. Such a trivial act
of protest is a bit like sweeping the path to
my own private garden, but what the words and
eyes of this soldier with a blond ponytail and
a pierced tongue reflected was not easy to
sweep away; it was the glittering, sharp tip of
a force of nature: the destructive power that
has been penned up in the all-powerful
authority of 18- and 19-year-old men and women.
This power which we, the Jewish citizens of the
state of Israel, have put in the hands of our
children, the second and third generation of a
very long occupation.

Read the whole thing.

From a reader:

“The Clintonoids at FAIR”? Cute phrasing, which always seems to be the priority with you, but in this case at the expense of the truth. If you wanted to reveal your ignorance of FAIR’s stance you could scarcely have chosen a better phrase. Just a few examples:

http://www.fair.org/whats-new/publicdeception.html
http://www.fair.org/extra/9303/clintoncabinet.html
http://www.fair.org/media-beat/980820.html

Unlike you, I actually read Extra! and get FAIR’s alerts–and have for years–so I know their position on Clinton. You should take the time to familiarize yourself as well if you plan to comment on them. And if you do, I only hope you’re not one of those people for whom criticism of the impeachment and “pro-Clinton” were synonomous. Clinton *did* deserve to be impeached, but not for anything he did with cigars. I despised Clinton, and yet I also realized that the impeachment was a joke, a travesty, and a threat to democracy.

As for FAIR’s love for General Clark and his war, you could also have disabused yourself of your ignorance on that point if you’d taken the time to look around a bit and find out what they were actually saying DURING THAT WAR (which is, of course, not the point when they’re discussing his position on Gulf War Part II):

http://www.fair.org/press-releases/kosovo-ceasefire.html
http://www.fair.org/press-releases/kosovo-talks.html
http://www.fair.org/activism/embassy-bombing.html
http://www.fair.org/press-releases/kosovo-solution.html
http://www.fair.org/press-releases/victory.html

You can check the full list for yourself here (particularly those under “Action Alerts and Media Advisories”):

http://www.fair.org/international/yugoslavia.html

Thank goodness for FAIR, eh?

Sure. Hey, I said they had a decent review of his statements on Iraq. Of course, Clark only commented on that war; he didn’t lead it. I just thought it funny that in a piece on whether or not Clark is antiwar, they focused on things he had said, instead of things he had done.

A whole entry with no cute phrasing!

I mailed my article on sanctions-debunker Matt Welch to Welch, Reason, and Beirut Daily Star editor Michael Young. Only Young responded. You can find his response and my retort here on Young’s blog.

More updates later.