Media

Watch for it!

ALSO: IVAW's Jason Lemieux might be on Lehrer News on PBS tomorrow - Watch for that too!

By Robert C. Koehler, Tribune Media Services

Well, why shouldn’t the Pentagon put its four-stars on the tube to ladle out patriotic talking points to the American public like mess hall stew?

There’s a straightforward quasi-honesty to government-managed news, which only has a weird feel because the Penta-pundits had to pose as impartial analysts and play along with the image the networks wanted to project: seriousness, independence, etc. How demeaning that their meetings with the Secretary of Defense had to be secret — an embarrassment awaiting ultimate exposure by the New York Times.

From Sue Udry:

Have you ever been arrested while protesting at the White House or in Congress? The next time you're arrested,* the Justice Department wants federal police to harvest your DNA, and add it to their massive DNA database.* This outrageous proposal would add the genetic information of thousands of peaceful activists to the government database, which already contains over 6 million DNA profiles. Every profile added increases the chances of a false match, misuse of data and the power of big brother. That adds an unacceptable risk to our right to protest using civil disobedience.

Speak out now against the latest Bush Administration assault on our privacy. The deadline for comments is May 19 at 4 p.m. eastern.

The Justice Department is making this proposal as part of a rule for implementing the DNA Fingerprint Act of 2005. The new rule would require federal agencies to:

By David Swanson

That's the title of a new book by Christopher Cerf and Victor Navasky. It's actually just a collection of the familiar quotes by Bush, Cheney, and gang, plus Democrats, plus pundits, all lying about Iraq before and during the occupation. It's mostly not a funny collection, but it's sort-of packaged as one and it's probably funnier than that truly dumb "The Young Dick Cheney" book that Alternet has promoted in a few hundred Emails. But it's not a serious collection either. It's not comprehensive or organized in a way to make any particular case. It also promotes the notion that prior to the invasion of Iraq nobody warned against it or debunked the lies, which is itself a major lie. Still, if you want a handy, huge-font collection of colorful lies in book form, picking up a copy of this would be easier than, say, printing out Waxman's database.

Sexual Terrorism
By DAVID ROSEN, CounterPunch

The “New York Times’” recently revealed the existence of a little-known executive order issued by President Bush in the summer of ’07 that permitted U.S. intelligence operatives to circumvent restrictions on the use of humiliating and degrading interrogation techniques.

Bush’s order permitted U.S. intelligence operatives to effectively side-step the legal and moral restrictions imposed by the Supreme Court and Congress (and formally approved by Bush) as well as Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions.

Brian Benczkowski, a deputy assistant attorney general, laid-out the rationale for the continued subversion of these restrictions:

The fact that an [humiliating interrogation] act is undertaken to prevent a threatened terrorist attack, rather than for the purpose of humiliating or abuse, would be relevant to a reasonable observer in measuring the outrageousness of the act.

By David Swanson

Former Republican Rhode Island Senator Lincoln Chafee on Tuesday evening called George W. Bush the worst president in U.S. history and the occupation of Iraq the worst foreign tragedy in U.S. history. Chafee said Bush deserved to be impeached.

Chafee served in the U.S. Senate from 1999 to 2006 and credits his defeat in 2006 - as do most analysts - to his membership in the party of Bush and Cheney. In 2003 Chafee was the only Republican senator to vote against authorization to attack Iraq. Chafee and John McCain had been the only two Republican senators to vote against the first round of Bush tax cuts.

While Chafee is supporting Barack Obama for president, he said on Tuesday that the Democrats as well as the Republicans have moved too far to the right. Without any apparent bitterness, Chafee remarked that while voters got a new Senate and House in 2006, they didn't get any changes in policies out of it.

By Associated Press

COLUMBIA, S.C. -- More than 200 students and faculty members at Furman University have signed a statement protesting President Bush's visit to speak at the South Carolina school's commencement later this month.

Bush is scheduled to speak at Furman's graduation ceremonies May 31.

The 222 co-signers say in a statement on the school's Web site that they object to the president's visit for several reasons, including the war in Iraq. They also cite the administration's "obstructing progress on reducing greenhouse gases while favoring billions in tax breaks and subsidies to oil companies that are earning record profits."

English professor Robin Visel says a lecture series about various Bush administration policies is planned before Bush comes to the Greenville school.

By James Carroll, The Boston Globe

AS WORLD WAR I broke out, Henry James identified an inexorable current
that had been running below international events, leading to the
"monstrous scene" of August "as its grand Niagara." Below the glassy
upriver surface, the swift tide had been driven by habits of mind, arms
merchant greed, imperial hubris, and a politics that was wholly
inadequate. At the deadly cascade, nations tumbled into the most violent
century in history. Writer Jonathan Schell cites the Niagara metaphor to
define the still running momentum of war.

But as James wrote, humans stood on another threshold. Wars had always
been fought on land and sea, but then new technologies of flight carried
combat into the realm above. Airborne weapons transformed killing.
Indeed, air force was the invention that made 20th century warfare
catastrophic. In looking back on that development, is it only naïve to

By Ali al-Fadhily and Dahr Jamail, Inter Press Service

FALLUJAH, May 12 (IPS) - Sharp increases in food prices have generated a new wave of anti-occupation and anti-U.S. sentiment in Fallujah.

"This is a country that was damned by the Americans the moment they stepped on our soil," Burhan Jassim, a farmer from Sichir village just outside Fallujah told IPS. "This is Iraqi land that has always been blessed by Allah with the best production in quality and quantity, but now see how it has been turned into a wasteland."

Fallujah faces this new crisis after much of the city was destroyed by U.S. military operations in 2004.

By Thomas Powers, New York Review of Books, Volume 55, Number 9 · May 29, 2008

The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict
by Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes

Norton, 311 pp., $22.95
Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy
by Andrew Cockburn

Scribner, 247 pp., $25.00
Still Broken: A Recruit's Inside Account of Intelligence Failures, from Baghdad to the Pentagon
by A.J. Rossmiller

Ballantine, 236 pp., $25.00
The Soviet-Afghan War: How a Superpower Fought and Lost
by the Russian General Staff, translated from the Russian and edited by Lester W. Grau and Michael A. Gress

University Press of Kansas,364 pp., $17.95 (paper)
The Bear Went Over the Mountain: Soviet Combat Tactics in Afghanistan
translated from the Russian and edited by Lester W. Grau

National Defense University Press, 223 pp., $35.00 (paper)

By Bruce K. Gagnon, http://www.space4peace.org
Remarks in Sao Paulo, Brazil, to the Global Greens Congress

My name is Bruce Gagnon and I live in the state of Maine in the United States.

I work for the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space.

A recent U.S. military report called "Transforming the way the Pentagon looks at energy," says that in order to ensure a "reliable" source of oil for the long term the military will increase its efforts to maintain control over foreign sources.

Soaring global demand for dimishing resources means strong international competition in the coming years.

Global power, the Pentagon says, will reside in the hands of those who control the distribution of declining natural resources.

One way to keep control of the global economic system is by holding the keys to the world's economic engine - oil.

By WILLIAM GLABERSON, New York Times

In a new blow to the Bush administration’s troubled military commission system, a military judge has disqualified a Pentagon general who has been centrally involved in overseeing Guantánamo war crimes tribunals from any role in the first case headed for trial.

The judge said the general was too closely aligned with the prosecution, raising questions about whether he could carry out his role with the required neutrality and objectivity.

Military defense lawyers said that although the ruling was limited to one case, they expected the issue to be raised in other cases, potentially delaying prosecutions, including the death-penalty prosecution of six detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, for the Sept. 11 attacks.

Critics of the military commission system said Friday that the judge’s decision would provide new grounds to attack the system that they say was set up to win convictions.

By Robin Acton, TRIBUNE-REVIEW

Three years and three months before Ryan Maseth stepped into a shower Jan. 2 in Baghdad, an Army safety specialist identified electrocution as a "killer of soldiers."

Still, when the 24-year-old Shaler Green Beret turned on the faucet, water flowed from a pump powered by an improperly grounded electrical system manufactured in China. Borne on water, an electrical current surged through the pipes, out of the shower head and into his body.

His heart stopped.

Maseth's electrocution, the latest of 14 among service personnel in Iraq since 2003, set into motion a series of events to determine how and why these deaths occurred.

OPEN FOR MORE!

By Ahmed Ali and Dahr Jamail, Inter Press Service

BAQUBA, May 9 (IPS) - Water supply is drying out in what was once the agriculturally rich Diyala province north of Baghdad. Baquba, the capital city of Diyala, is now running out of water both for drinking and for irrigation.

Water supply has been hit by power failures. The central pumping station has been running short of electricity supply over the last two years.

The pumping station is located between two districts in conflict -- Hwaider, which is predominantly Shia, and Jupenat, mostly Sunni. For two years now, fighting between Sunnis and Shias here has led to reduced water supply.

"The Diyala river passes by the two villages before the pumping station," resident Zuhair Mahmood told IPS. "They try to change its stream to deprive the other of water for irrigating their farms. The diversions mean relatively little water can reach the station."

By Ross Tuttle, The Nation

Guantánamo Bay

When Salim Hamdan, Osama bin Laden's alleged driver, returned to court recently for yet another hearing in his long odyssey through the ad hoc US legal system for suspected terrorists, he had an unlikely ally--Col. Morris Davis, the former chief prosecutor who charged him with war crimes in May 2007. Davis was there to testify as a defense witness in a motion to dismiss those charges because of unlawful interference by Bush Administration appointees, including Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann, legal adviser to the office that oversees the military commissions process.