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November 30, 2005
Exporting Democratic Journalism
Postings about resume... Among so much to comment about, this one stands out because it sums up so much:
U.S. Army officers have been secretly paying Iraqi journalists to produce upbeat newspaper, radio and television reports about American military operations and the conduct of the war in Iraq.U.S. officials in Washington said the payments were made through the Baghdad Press Club, an organization they said was created more than a year ago by U.S. Army officers. They are part of an extensive American military-run information campaign - including psychological warfare experts - intended to build popular support for U.S.-led stabilization efforts and erode support for Sunni Muslim insurgents.
Members of the Press Club are paid as much as $200 a month, depending on how many positive pieces they produce.
What would they do without us bringing them democracy.
Posted by zeynep at 10:35 PM | Comments (1)
November 21, 2005
Meanwhile, AIDS continues to kill...
Meanwhile, an enormous number of people continue to become newly infected with HIV/AIDS. The new report for Sub-Saharan Africa is here. (Things are also getting worse in parts of Asia. But here's the graph that struck me, that I have been thinking about all day:
Forty percent of the women in Botswana attending antenatal clinics were HIV positive. Forty percent.
Thirty percent in South Africa. Twenty percent in Mozambique and Zimbabwe (which actually registered a decline).
These numbers are so horrific that I just can't get my head wrapped around them.
Posted by zeynep at 07:43 PM | Comments (0)
November 17, 2005
So Who Is Going to Invade Iraq to Destroy These Weapons?
Hmm, yeah, it does sound bad when you put it that way:
Let's review:The United States went to war citing Saddam Hussein's chemical weapons appetite as one excuse. Remember Paul Wolfowitz's comment to Vanity Fair interviewer Sam Tanenhaus: "The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on, which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason . . ."
The advertised large chemical weapons stockpiles, the "renewed production of mustard, sarin, GF (cyclosarin), and VX" nerve gas and the active atomic bomb program weren't there.
Saddam never used chemical weapons against U.S. forces. But now U.S. forces admit using weapons with chemical properties against Iraqis.
On Tuesday night, Lt. Col. Barry Venable, a Pentagon spokesman, confirmed to BBC radio that white phosphorus munitions were used during attacks on enemy forces inside Fallujah.
"When you have enemy forces in covered positions that your high explosive artillery rounds are not having an impact on," Venable was quoted in the Daily Telegraph newspaper of London, "one technique is to fire a white phosphorus round into the position because the combined effects of the fire and smoke will drive them out so that you can kill them with high explosives."
Venable added that such use of incendiary weapons "against enemy combatants" is a permitted use.
Venable apparently failed to brief others that the official line had changed.
"U.S. forces do not use napalm or white phosphorus as weapons," Robert Tuttle, former car salesman turned U.S. ambassador to Britain, wrote in Tuesday's Independent newspaper.
Posted by zeynep at 09:18 PM | Comments (0)
November 16, 2005
Routine
This has become routine, almost. Wake up and learn what new atrocities are uncovered. Front page news, trickling in from many direction. The latest is white phosphorus use on urban areas:
It's part of our conventional-weapons inventory and we use it like we use any other conventional weapon," added Bryan Whitman, another Pentagon spokesman.Venable said white phosphorus is not outlawed or banned by any convention. However, a protocol to the 1980 Convention on Conventional Weapons forbids using incendiary weapons against civilians or against military targets amid concentrations of civilians.
The United States did not sign the protocol.
White phosphorus munitions are primarily used by the U.S. military to make smoke screens and mark targets, but also as an incendiary weapon, the Pentagon said. They are not considered chemical weapons. The substance ignites easily in air at temperatures of about 86 F (30 C), and its fire can be difficult to extinguish.
U.S. forces used the white phosphorus during a major offensive launched by Marines in Falluja, about 30 miles (50 km) west of Baghdad, to flush out insurgents. The battle in November of last year involved some of the toughest urban fighting of the 2-1/2-year war.
Venable said that in the Falluja battle, "U.S. forces used white phosphorous both in its classic screening mechanism and ... when they encountered insurgents who were in foxholes and other covered positions who they could not dislodge any other way."
He said the soldiers employed what they call a "shake-and-bake" technique of using white phosphorus shells to flush enemies out of hiding then using high explosives to kill them.
The Italian documentary showed images of bodies recovered after the Falluja offensive, which it said proved the use of white phosphorus against civilians.
But, you see, it makes perfect sense. There were no civilians in Fallujah. If they were there, they were insurgents. Therefore we did not use incendiary weapons against civilians.
Posted by zeynep at 05:54 PM | Comments (0)
November 13, 2005
Welcome to Planet Earth
So, will we now realize that we have no absolute right to houses with five and a half bathrooms per family? Not yet, it seems for this family quoted this week in Newsweek about the "energy agita" that is finally gripping some people:
Gina and Ron Martin's home in mentor, Ohio, is just plain big. It has six bedrooms, five and a half bathrooms, a cavernous basement, a spacious patio and a pool in the backyard. But the last thing the self-employed housing contractors suspected when they bought their dream house in 2004 was just how big the heating bills were going to be. Last winter their utility bills averaged $400 a month. Although the price of heating oil has inched down in the past two weeks, the Martins are anticipating bills of $700 a month this winter. They expect the price of energy to keep rising—and many experts agree with them. Once their three teenage kids leave for college, the couple plans to downsize. "We loved this house, now we hate this house," Gina says. "We are a hardworking middle-class family that is freaking out about a gas bill. Something is very wrong with that picture."
What struck me about this quote is the way they see having to worry about "a gas bill" as something that should not happen to a hardworking middle-class family. What can I say? Welcome to our limited, finite planet. Try not to finish it all at once.
Posted by zeynep at 05:06 PM | Comments (1)
November 10, 2005
Ten Years Gone
It's already been ten years since Ken Saro-Wiwa was murdered. A song about another murdered freedom fighter, Steve Biko, makes a claim:
You can blow out a candle But you can't blow out a fire Once the flames begin to catch The wind will blow it higher
I don't know. I think the ruling powers often operate on the assumption that this isn't true. They believe you can blow out candles and crush movements before the flames catch. I think the record is mixed. So many times, you blow out enough candles, the fire will die down.
Posted by zeynep at 05:59 PM | Comments (1)
November 08, 2005
“had never seen anyone’s arms positioned like that, and he was surprised they didn’t just pop out of their sockets.”
So, We Do Not Torture. Except when we do.
The house belongs to Mark Swanner, a forty-six-year-old C.I.A. officer who has performed interrogations and polygraph tests for the agency, which has employed him at least since the nineteen-nineties. (He is not a covert operative.) Two years ago, at Abu Ghraib prison, outside Baghdad, an Iraqi prisoner in Swanner’s custody, Manadel al-Jamadi, died during an interrogation. His head had been covered with a plastic bag, and he was shackled in a crucifixion-like pose that inhibited his ability to breathe; according to forensic pathologists who have examined the case, he asphyxiated. In a subsequent internal investigation, United States government authorities classified Jamadi’s death as a “homicide,” meaning that it resulted from unnatural causes. Swanner has not been charged with a crime and continues to work for the agency.
Posted by zeynep at 09:25 PM | Comments (0)
Ancient Hatreds, It's in their Blood, Etc.
You'd think there'd be wall-to-wall coverage of a story like this. It has all the elements, tragedy, tension, forgiveness, death, happy endings, children, dead and resurrected.
The parents of a Palestinian boy killed by Israeli soldiers have donated his organs to three Israeli children.Ahmad Khatib, 12, was carrying a toy rifle when he was gunned down on Thursday in the West Bank town of Jenin.The soldiers, who were conducting a raid, had mistaken him for a militant.The boy died on Sunday but three Israeli girls underwent surgery to receive his lungs, heart and liver.
Ahmad's father Ismail Khatib said the decision to donate the organs was influenced by the act his 24-year-old brother died while waiting for a liver transplant.
Mr Khatib hoped the gesture would send a message of peace to Israelis and Palestinians.
He said: "In our religion, God allows us to give organs to another person and it doesn't matter who the person is."
The father of 12-year-old Samah Gadban, who had been waiting five years for a heart, called the donation a "gesture of love."
Riad Gadban said: "I want to thank him (Mr Khatib) and his family. With their gift, I would like for them to think that my daughter is their daughter."
The Schneider Children's Medical Centre in Israel reported that a 14-year-old Jewish girl has received Ahmad's lungs and a seven-month-old girl was given his liver.
Israel has a chronic shortage of donor organs that many medical officials attribute to Jewish religious taboos against such donations.
It was on page 24 of the Washington Post and a few mentions buried here and there. To make front page, it would have had to have been the other way around, I suppose. Something about Muslim prejiduces and ancient hatreds, and how we must save them.
Posted by zeynep at 07:06 PM | Comments (0)
November 06, 2005
Iraqi Money
As regular readers of this blog know, I've been writing for a long time about this issue: billions of Iraq's money that has been squandered. For the first time, an auditing board has suggested a few hundred million of those billions be paid back.
An auditing board sponsored by the United Nations recommended yesterday that the United States repay as much as $208 million to the Iraqi government for contracting work in 2003 and 2004 assigned to Kellogg, Brown & Root, the Halliburton subsidiary.The work was paid for with Iraqi oil proceeds, but the board said it was either carried out at inflated prices or done poorly. The board did not, however, give examples of poor work.
Some of the work involved postwar fuel imports carried out by K.B.R. that previous audits had criticized as grossly overpriced. But this is the first time that an international auditing group has suggested that the United States repay some of that money to Iraq. The group, known as the International Advisory and Monitoring Board of the Development Fund for Iraq, compiled reports from an array of Pentagon, United States government and private auditors to carry out its analysis.
A good start, but tip of the iceberg.
Posted by zeynep at 05:23 PM | Comments (1)
November 05, 2005
Ethics Refresher Course at the White House
The White House is to provide "refresher" courses in ethics.
Bush Orders Staff to Attend Ethics Briefings White House Counsel to Give 'Refresher' CoursePresident Bush has ordered White House staff to attend mandatory briefings beginning next week on ethical behavior and the handling of classified material after the indictment last week of a senior administration official in the CIA leak probe.
According to a memo sent to aides yesterday, Bush expects all White House staff to adhere to the "spirit as well as the letter" of all ethics laws and rules. As a result, "the White House counsel's office will conduct a series of presentations next week that will provide refresher lectures on general ethics rules, including the rules of governing the protection of classified information," according to the memo, a copy of which was provided to The Washington Post by a senior White House aide.
Hmm, okay. How does it go?
1- Don't get caught
2- Torture doesn't count
3- Don't take digital pictures, unless it's pictures of torture since it doesn't count
4- Make sure to destroy your notes and memos, but don't worry if it's about torture (see point 2).
5- Don't get caught.
Posted by zeynep at 11:53 AM | Comments (0)
November 03, 2005
Our Gulags
The International Committee of the Red Cross expressed strong interest in the claims, first reported Wednesday in the Washington Post, that the CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al-Qaida captives at Soviet-era compounds.Red Cross chief spokeswoman Antonella Notari said the agency asked Washington about the allegations and requested access to the prisons if they exist. The Red Cross, which has exclusive rights to visit terror suspects detained at a U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, long has been concerned about reports U.S. officials were hiding detainees from ICRC delegates.
Europe's top human rights organization, the Council of Europe, said it, too, would investigate.
Notari said the Red Cross, which also monitors conditions at U.S. detention centers in Afghanistan and
Iraq, has been unable to find some people who reportedly were detained. She said the Red Cross was "concerned about the fate of an unknown number of persons detained as part of what is called the 'global war on terror' and held in undisclosed places of detention."In implicating Poland and Romania, Human Rights Watch examined flight logs of CIA aircraft from 2001 to 2004, said Mark Garlasco, a senior military analyst with the New York-based organization. He said the group matched the flight patterns with testimony from some of the hundreds of detainees in the war on terrorism who have been released by the United States.
"The indications are that prisoners in Afghanistan are being (taken) to facilities in Europe and other countries in the world," Garlasco, a former civilian intelligence officer with the Defense Intelligence Agency, told The Associated Press.
He would not say how the organization obtained the flight logs, but said two destinations of the flights stood out as likely sites of any secret CIA detention centers: Szymany Airport in Poland, which is near the headquarters of Poland's intelligence service; and Mihail Kogalniceanu military airfield in Romania.
Human Rights Watch also obtained the tail numbers of dozens of CIA aircraft to match them with the flight logs, Garlasco said.
He said that in September 2003, a Boeing 737 flew from Washington to Kabul, Afghanistan, making stops along the way in the Czech Republic and Uzbekistan. On Sept. 22, the plane flew on to Szymany Airport, then to Mihail Kogalniceanu, proceeded to Sale, Morocco, and finally landed at Guantanamo, Garlasco said.
As far as he knew, Human Rights Watch has not found and interviewed detainees who were held in any alleged facilities in Poland and Romania.
I've been staring at this story, wondering what to write. What is there to say?
Posted by zeynep at 08:59 PM | Comments (1)
November 01, 2005
Bird Flu
When the threat is directed at us, we can talk about overriding patents, spending money, creating vaccines. (Same thing happened back in 2001 with Anthrax. Suddenly, we got tough with Bayer over CIPRO patents.)
So it's not stupidity, it's plain old callousness that we fought Sub-Saharan African countries tooth and nail when they tried to do the same: override patents, spend money on health (instead of paying back odious debts).
We are perfectly capable of understanding the issue when it's us.
Posted by zeynep at 11:06 AM | Comments (0)