The Day of Bahr Moussa
April 30, 2009 § Leave a Comment
UK’s retreat from Basra is ‘A historic day for Iraq – but not in the way the British want to believe,’ writes Robert Fisk.
One hundred and seventy-nine dead soldiers. For what? 179,000 dead Iraqis? Or is the real figure closer to a million? We don’t know. And we don’t care. We never cared about the Iraqis. That’s why we don’t know the figure. That’s why we left Basra yesterday.
I remember going to the famous Basra air base to ask how a poor Iraqi boy, a hotel receptionist called Bahr Moussa, had died. He was kicked to death in British military custody. His father was an Iraqi policeman. I talked to him in the company of a young Muslim woman. The British public relations man at the airport was laughing. “I don’t believe this,” my Muslim companion said. “He doesn’t care.” She did. So did I. I had reported from Northern Ireland. I had heard this laughter before. Which is why yesterday’s departure should have been called the Day of Bahr Moussa. Yesterday, his country was set free from his murderer. At last.
Eric Margolis on Pakistan and Afghanistan
April 29, 2009 § 1 Comment
Eric Margolis is one of the world’s leading experts on Afghanistan and Pakistan. He is particularly insightful in this interview with Scott Horton of Antiwar Radio.
Eric Margolis, author of American Raj: Liberation or Domination, discusses the causes of instability in Pakistan, the unrealistic expectations the U.S. places on its puppet governments, the Taliban’s inability to fill the Pakistan power vacuum and why the U.S. can’t resist the lure of imperialism.
MP3 here. (23:59)
Eric Margolis is a regular columnist with the Quebecor Media Company and a contributor to The Huffington Post. He is the author of War at the Top of the World: The Struggle for Afghanistan, Kashmir and Tibet.
Sheikhs, lives and videotape
April 29, 2009 § Leave a Comment
‘A member of the UAE royal family is accused of torture – but is there any chance of justice when the country’s rulers are the law?’ asks Brian Whitaker.
The atrocities of Abu Ghraib caused much rightful indignation – and nowhere more so than in Arab countries where the sadistic torture of prisoners at the hands of their American jailers was viewed as symbolising the rape of Iraq by a foreign power.
I remember discussing this at the time with Hisham Kassem, a newspaper editor in Cairo who – contrary to the prevailing Arab view – described the coverage of Abu Ghraib by the Egyptian press as “shameless”.
“They talk about American monstrosities as if their own governments have never practised anything similar,” he said. “It’s nothing in comparison to what’s happening in Arab prisons.”
Dr. Mads Gilbert: A Physician in Gaza
April 29, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Dr. Mads Gilbert has worked and practiced medicine in Gaza for more than thirty years. One of the few western observers on the ground during Israel’s January bombardment, Gilbert’s testimony during the offensive was a critical source of information. On January 3, after an Israeli strike on a Gaza vegetable market, Gilbert sent a text message to his Norwegian and International contacts:
‘From doctor Mads Gilbert in Gaza: Thanks for your support. They bombed the central vegetable market in Gaza city two hours ago. 80 injured, 20 killed. All came here to Shifa. Hades! We wade in death, blood and amputees. Many children. Pregnant woman. I have never experienced anything this horrible. Now we hear tanks. Tell it, pass it on, shout it. Anything. DO SOMETHING! DO MORE! We’re living in the history books now, all of us!’
Laura Flanders spoke with Gilbert recently as he embarked on a speaking tour in the United States.
Farewell, the American Century
April 28, 2009 § 1 Comment
Andrew J. Bacevich Rewriting the Past by Adding In What’s Been Left Out. (via TomDispatch)
In a recent column, the Washington Post’s Richard Cohen wrote, “What Henry Luce called ‘the American Century’ is over.” Cohen is right. All that remains is to drive a stake through the heart of Luce’s pernicious creation, lest it come back to life. This promises to take some doing.
When the Time-Life publisher coined his famous phrase, his intent was to prod his fellow citizens into action. Appearing in the February 7, 1941 issue of Life, his essay, “The American Century,” hit the newsstands at a moment when the world was in the throes of a vast crisis. A war in Europe had gone disastrously awry. A second almost equally dangerous conflict was unfolding in the Far East. Aggressors were on the march.
Financial Barbarians at the Gate
April 28, 2009 § Leave a Comment
The Financial Barbarians at the Gate is a Guns and Butter interview with economist / historian Michael Hudson. In it he discusses the historical takeover of the economy by the finance sector.
Financial Barbarians at the Gate (59:53): MP3
One point of note is that the illegal war of aggression in Iraq is not a war related to economics but to the strategic interests of Israel. Hudson, explaining American Imperialism, states that “unlike England the United States didn’t have to invade countries, at least before the oil grab in Iraq” and instead drained countries through the US monetary system. It’s revealing that he suggests Iraq as a change in economic policy, it was not about economics, the oil lobby in Washington didn’t want a war, they wanted an end to brutal sanctions to gain conventional access to the oil.
AIPAC, Espionage, and a Congressional Committee Appointment
April 28, 2009 § 1 Comment
Time magazine reported 2 1/2 years ago that the FBI was investigating Representative Jane Harman, a Democrat, for allegedly agreeing to lobby the Department of Justice to reduce espionage charges against two officials at the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). In exchange, Time reported, AIPAC would then lobby the House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi to appoint Harman as chair of the House Intelligence Committee if the Democrats captured the House after the 2006 elections. The story went nowhere. Nowhere, that is, until last week, when Congressional Quarterly broke a story (later confirmed by The New York Times) revealing that Harman had been heard in a several years old NSA wiretapped conversation talking with a suspected Israeli agent. Harman said she would “waddle” into lobbying the DOJ on the AIPAC case. The suspected agent pledged to help lobby Nancy Pelosi to get Harman her the coveted committee appointment. Harman ended the call, according to the news reports, saying “This conversation doesn’t exist.”
Why were the transcripts leaked now? And why is the story suddenly so hot?
What is Education?
April 27, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Thanks to Adrian Barnes of the Rossland Telegraph for sending me this transcription of David Foster Wallace’s address to US college graduates in 2005.
If anybody feels like perspiring, I’d advise you to go ahead, because I’m sure going to. Greetings and congratulations to Kenyon’s graduating class of 2005. There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”
This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. The story ["thing"] turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre, but if you’re worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don’t be. I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.
