Thursday, June 29, 2006

Democracy Now: Norman Finkelstein, Dixon Osburne, Ben Wizner, Lawrence Norden

The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that . . . [Bully Boy] overstepped his authority in ordering military war crimes trials for Guantanamo Bay detainees, saying in a strong rebuke that the trials were illegal under U.S. and international law.
[. . .]
The court declared 5-3 that the trials for 10 foreign terror suspects violate U.S. military law and the Geneva conventions.
The ruling raises major questions about the legal status of the approximately 450 men still being held at the U.S. military prison in Cuba and exactly how, when and where the administration might pursue the charges against them.
The above, from Gina Holland's "Supreme Court blocks Bush, Gitmo war trials" (Associated Press) and it will count as one of two headline for today. The other, selected by Erika is from today's Democracy Now! Headlines:

10 Members of Granny Peace Brigade Released in Philly
In Philadelphia, 10 members of the Granny Peace Brigade were arrested Wednesday after refusing to leave a military recruiting center.

Democracy Now! ("always informing you," as Marcia says):

Headlines for June 29, 2006

- Israel Arrests 64 Palestinian Lawmakers
- Supreme Court Upholds GOP Redistricting of Texas
- Ex-Guantanamo Detainees Speak Out
- Bush: Dems Are Waving "White Flag of Surrender"
- Marine Featured in Fahrenheit 9/11 Killed in Iraq
- 200,000 Gather at Lopez Obrador Rally In Mexico City
- Senate Committee Rejects Net Neutrality
- Committee OKs Creating As Many as 2000 New LPFM Stations 200,000 Ordered to Evacuate in Pennsylvania
- Former Public Housing Residents In New Orleans File Suit
- Berkeley Ballot Will Include Referendum on Impeachment

Los Titulares de Hoy: Democracy Now!'s daily news summary translated into Spanish

Israel Arrests Dozens of Hamas Lawmakers and Ministers as Assault on Gaza Widens

Israel has arrested dozens of lawmakers and ministers from the ruling Palestinian party Hamas as it continues its military assault to recover a captured soldier. Nearly half of the Gaza Strip remains without power following Israeli air strikes that knocked out a main power station. We go to Gaza to get a report from Chris McGreal of the London Guardian. [includes rush transcript]


AIPAC v. Norman Finkelstein: A Debate on Israel's Assault on Gaza

We host a debate on the situation in Gaza with Norman Finkelstein, a professor of political science at DePaul University in Chicago and author of "Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History" and Josh Block, the Director of Media Affairs for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). [includes rush transcript - partial]

Pentagon Spying on Gay, Antiwar Groups More Widespread than Previously Acknowledged

Servicemembers Legal Defense Network released documents earlier this week showing that the Pentagon conducted surveillance on a more extensive level than first reported late last year. We speak with the executive director of SLDN and a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union who recently filed a federal lawsuit to force the agency to turn over additional records.
Excerpt:
JUAN GONZALEZ: And the responses to your request, have they been saying that they have no material that meets your request or that they're precluded, in one way or another, from releasing it?
BEN WIZNER: No, we have not yet gotten the substantive request from the military saying that they don't have responsive material. Essentially they ignore us until a federal judge requires them to respond to us. But if we were in a functioning democracy, we wouldn't need FOIA requests to get to the bottom of what's going on here. The minute that report was leaked to NBC News, the minute NBC News reported that grannies and Quakers and people protesting “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” at law schools were in a Pentagon secret database, there would have been hearings the next week, and Don Rumsfeld and Stephen Cambone would have been dragged up to Capitol Hill, and there would have been a full airing of what was going on. And that really is what's needed here. I mean, we will find out more information through this FOIA, but Congress's silence here is really remarkable.
AMY GOODMAN: When you say if we were really functioning in a democracy, what exactly do you mean?
BEN WIZNER: What I mean is that we have not had any meaningful congressional oversight of any of these surveillance activities over the last five or six years. You know, I do know, Amy, I’ve been here on the program talking about what we've uncovered through our FOIAs against the F.B.I., F.B.I. surveillance of peaceful protesters. What's going on with the N.S.A. really is a constitutional crisis, and Congress has yet to play a meaningful role. The reason why the FOIA, the Freedom of Information Act, has taken on such great importance over the last four or five years is that there is no meaningful oversight whatsoever going on on Capitol Hill. And so, our only choice is to get this information, bring it before the public and hope that there's some pressure on the administration to change its policies.

Study: All Electronic Voting Machines Vulnerable to Software Attacks

A major new report on electronic voting by the Brennan Center for Justice has concluded that the three most common types of electronic voting machines are all vulnerable to software attacks. We speak with the chair of the Brennan Center Task Force on Voting System Security.
Excerpt:
AMY GOODMAN: Your major findings are shocking. Go through them.
LAWRENCE NORDEN: Well, first of all, we did find that there are serious vulnerabilities in electronic voting machines. What we also found, importantly, was that there are relatively simple and straightforward ways to make those systems substantially more secure, to remedy the vulnerabilities that we found that we were most concerned about, but that unfortunately right now very few jurisdictions have those remedies in place.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Now, explain the vulnerabilities and also the different voting systems, different companies that produce them, in terms of what you found with each of them, if at possible.
LAWRENCE NORDEN: Sure. Something that was different about, I think, this report, as opposed to previous reports on electronic voting machines that have come out, is that we weren't looking at specific anecdotes or focusing on one particular vendor. What we were doing is looking at all of the major electronic voting systems. This is a new architecture. Something like 50% of Americans are voting on new machines over the past few years, and they require new security measures.
So one of the systems that many people will be using across the country are what are called optical scan machines. These are machines where you fill in a ballot, as you might fill in in an SAT exam, and you then scan that ballot electronically. It's read electronically, and the vote total is electronically recorded in the machine. And the other machine that many people are familiar with are the touch screens, the DREs. And these are like ATM machines or computer screens that a voter presses directly onto the machine to record her vote. Again, stored electronically. In some cases these have paper trails, where voters can check to see that their vote was recorded correctly. In other cases there are no paper records.
What we found is that in all cases, for all of these systems, there are enough points of vulnerability, there is enough access, that somebody could insert a software-type program and reach enough machines, so that they could potentially change the votes on the machines, shut down the machines, do other things like this. Now, again, I want to emphasize that there are things that can be done to prevent this to make this much more difficult.


Iraq snapshot.

Chaos and violence continue.

Stooges, fools and cheerleaders allow it to continue. Meanwhile the so-called coalition continues to shrink.

Romania becomes the next to tell the Bully Boy, "Catch you on the flip-side." Retuers reports Calin Tariceanu (prime minister of Romania) announced today that Romania would pull all troops by the end of the year -- before Romania's 890 troops can be pulled the Supreme Defence Council has to give its approval. Romania's president has slammed the proposal as had American ambassador to Romania and Advance Auto Parts merchant Nicholas F. Taubman. Bully Boy pioneer Taubman expressed his "impression that not all of the relevant parties, whether within Romania or beyond, were consulted before this proposal was announced." "Within Romania or beyond"? Spoken like a big donor, not like an ambassador, but Advance Auto Parts isn't known for turning out diplomats.

This as Rocky Mountain News reports that the Colorado Army National Guard's 169th unit will ship 100 soldiers to Iraq in July (with 300 of the "2/135th Aviation Company" currently training in Texas with orders to deploy in Septemeber).

Despite yesterday's 'coverage' of the "insurgent-poll" nothing really changed. It was another day of violence and chaos in Iraq.

Australia's ABC reports that Australian troops were "under attack" in southern Iraq. The Associated Press reports that "Iraqi and U.S. troops battled Shi'ite militiamen in a village northeast of Baghdad" -- still ongoing when the AP filed their report. Reuters notes, on this incident, that a police commander was shot dead by a sniper and two others were wounded.

Those were among many of the deaths in Iraq. As Sandra Lupien noted on KPFA's The Morning Show, there were multiple victims of violence today: trash collector, head of security for Baghdad University (Kadhim Challoub), merchants, baker, electrical worker and a woman who'd been waiting in her car with her two children (the children were wounded, not killed) among them. Reuters notes, in Kerbala, the death (by gunshot) of "a criminal intelligence policeman" as well as the death of two Iraqi soldiers (as well as one civilian, with one soldier and two other civilians wounded) in Faulluja, and one Iraqi soldier dead with seven more wounded from a roadside bomb in Riyadh. In Kirkuk, a car bomb exploded at a Shi'ite soldier's funeral initially claiming the lives of at least four. Reuters would later put the number of those dead at seven.

As Mark Mericle noted on yesterday's KPFA The KPFA Evening News, "People gathered in 34 cities around the country yesterday to show their support for Lt. Ehren Watada" introducing a news report by Julie Sabatier from Portland.

Two other items noted on yesterday's KPFA Evening News, the 'apologetic' Joshua Belile, who once apologized (or 'apologized') for his song while advising others to "let it go," has now announced that he will be releasing "a professionally recorded version of the song in a few weeks" and in Berkeley, the city council has put a "symbolic" referendum on the ballot calling on Congress to impeach the Bully Boy due to his lies that led us into an illegal war. (June 27th was also declared Cindy Sheehan day.)

Reuters notes that seven corpses were found (male) in the Tigris River ("gunshot wounds . . . signs of torture"), while two more corpses (male) were discovered in the Euphrates River ("gunshot wounds . . . signs of torture"). Reuters notes that: "Morgue officials say 30-50 bodies are found in Baghdad alone every day." In Kirkuk, the AP reports the corpse of a fifteen-year-old female was discovered -- "kidnapped five days ago." The AFP puts the count of corpses discovered throughout Iraq today at 18.

File it under "No one could have guessed," Condi No-One-Could-Have-Guessed Rice had a "testy exchange" with Russia's Sergei Lavrov (Russia's Foreign Minister) in a "closed-door meeting" from which the audio feed was accidentally left on. "What does that mean?" Rice asks at one point, to which Lavrov responds, "I think you understand." In what might have been her most honest reply, she declared, "No, I don't." On that, we believe you, Condi, we believe you. The issue was how to word a statement on the security situation in Iraq and the anger spilled over publicly after the meeting, in front of reporters when Rice responded to Lavrov's comments about changes in America that he'd seen since he first visited in 1979, "So when did you go and where did you go in the United States in 1979 that you saw so much change? I am really interested." Though Rice may have forgotten, her current title is Secretary of State.

What gets play and what doesn't? One might think that Nancy A. Youssef breaking the news Monday that the US government, despite claims otherwise, was indeed keeping body counts of Iraqis. You might think that would be news . . . but you'd be wrong. What gets runs with?

Not truth. July 4th's a-coming, can't have families getting together in the United States without some false hope or Bully Boy might get a trashing that wouldn't bode well for the November elections. So nonsense gets tossed out by the puppet government and the media amplifies it.

Yes, we're speaking of the nonsense that "insurgents" are on the two-year-withdrawal bus. Since the domestic, US media has never explored the terms "insurgent" or "resistance," who knows what they mean? The AFP notes: "At the same time, a foreign diplomat raised questions about the identity of armed groups reportedly in contact with the government and whether they carry any real weight in the nationwide insurgency." Al Jazeera notes that eleven groups have met with occupation puppet Nouri al-Maliki and that eight of them are the ones being referred to. Do they carry any weight? A good question to ask. (Instead, it's easier to report/"report": "Insurgents meeting with Maliki!") Al Jazeera, which may be the only news organization that's going by more than government sources (it's spoken to representatives for the groups) reports that "the 11 groups operate north and north-east of Baghdad in increasingly violent Salahuddin and Diyala provinces."

Increasingly violent. This isn't Anbar, this isn't even Baghdad. These, if Al Jazeera's reporting is correct, are groups from, for Iraq, relatively restful provinces that are growing "increasingly violent." It's a nice bit of happy talk to send us all into the holiday weekend. It's not, however, reality. Having never explored the issue (other than to guess fighting is fueled by Iran -- wait, no! it's Egypt), they now want to get behind eight groups or eleven groups and the news consumer is left uninformed. (Possibly that's the point of it all.)

Reality was Nancy A. Youssef's report. Have we seen that covered in the New York Times? Have we seen it covered elsewhere? Maybe the silence is due to the fact that the administration being caught in yet another lie seems more "redundant" than "newsworthy"?

Ethan notes this from Danny Schechter's News Dissector site:

REMINDER: EVENTS THIS WEEKEND --NY STATE
Panel on Threats to the press and democracy; Friday night, June 30th, 7:30 PM, SUNY Ulster, Stone Ridge, from Congressperson Maurice Hinchey, Amy Goodman, Danny Schechter and Jeff Cohen, Alan Chartock, emcee,
Sunday, July 2nd, 5:00 PM, Rosendale (NY) Theatre -- sneak preview of my new film In Debt We Trust. (For more on film, See InDebtWeTrust.com)
Hope to see those of you who can make it. Everyone welcome to read, join, and support Mediachannel. Check out our new home page with articles about the World Cup, The Bush strategy, and why citizens have to join the media as well as a new Mediachannel Europe page. Just click on the EU Flag.



The e-mail address for this site is common_ills@yahoo.com.
















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NYT: Dexy wants to process, everyone in a group circle!

Dexy's, no doubt, sure he's got another 'award winning' piece. Today's New York Times carries his "Iraq War Ends Silently for One American Soldier" which appears to be both an attempt to make it less obvious that he used a dead soldier as a pawn earlier this week and also to show that "Hey, I care." It fails on both levels and just about every other one as well.

For readers, the most obvious problem is that they'll remember we're past the three year mark and this is the first time the paper's elected to highlight a funeral from the battlefield. It's doubtful many will give points for sincerity. (It's equally true that the death of Iraqis, or a single Iraqi, have never prompted such coverage but as he gets in touch with his inner Wally Lamb, possibly Dexy plans that as his next installement?)

Is it prose? Is it poetry? Whatever it hopes to be, his "style" will cause many to spew their morning coffee as they burst out laughing.

It's not the subject matter (though readers will note it's never appeared as such in the paper before). It's the "style." As he goes on, apparently think he's about to become a poetic voice for war, it will leave you laughing. He's not exactly Wilfred Owen, but then he's a cheerleader, not someone serving.

It's superficial with him ticking off details that add up to little -- it reads like a writing excercise from Advanced Comp, a really bad excercise. Translation, Somini Sengupta, you don't need to look over your shoulder just because Dexy's there -- he's no in-house poet.

Dexy ends with: "No one said a word." It's a phrase he works in earlier. Too bad it's not one he absorbed.

Everything that Dexy fails to capture, Joao Silva's photo reveals proving that not only is a picture paints a thousand words, Dexy piling on that number with bad prose won't win the battle for the text. (Silva's photo appears on the front page , above Filkins story.)

While Dexy tries to attone (and fails) for using the death of a solider as a pawn/set up for his own version of the news, don't expect the paper to attone enough to cover the following, noted by Cindy, "Military Mom and Military Wife Visit Senators, Deliver Message: 'This is What Staying the Course Looks Like'" (Common Dreams):

WASHINGTON - June 28 - On Thursday, June 29 at 1:00 p.m. the wife and mother of two U.S. soldiers will visit the offices of Senators, including Hillary Rodham Clinton, Jack Reid, Dianne Feinstein, Carl Levin, Trent Lott, Maria Cantwell, Lindsay Graham, Jim Imhofe, Arlen Spector, Ted Stevens, and Jack Warner, to say "This is what staying the course looks like."
"While Senators engage in mock debates about the war, our troops continue to die," says Stacy Bannerman. Military Families Speak Out members will carry boots that represent U.S. troops who will die if Congress does not take action to bring them home now. Anne Roesler says, "I will ask the Senators 'if my son's name gets added to the growing list of casualties, are you going to be able to look me in the eye and tell me it was worth it?"
WHAT:
Military Families to visit Senators carrying combat boots representing U.S. troop deaths.
WHO:
Members of Military Families Speak Out, including: Stacy Bannerman of Kent, WA whose husband serves in the Washington Army National Guard, SFC Mortar Platoon, and served a year's tour of duty in Iraq. He may re-deploy in the future. Stacy is also the author of When the War Came Home: The Inside Story of Reservists And the Families They Leave Behind.
Anne Roesler of Saratoga, CA whose son, a Staff Sergeant in the 82nd Airborne Division, based at Ft. Bragg, is facing a fourth deployment to Iraq.
WHEN:
Thursday, June 29 at 1:00 p.m.
WHERE:
Intersection of New Jersey Avenue and Independence Avenue, SE in front of the Cannon House Office Building
Operation House Call is a Summer-long campaign that began on June 22 and will continue until August 7 when Congress recesses for the summer. Members of MFSO will be holding daily vigils, speaking events, visits with Congress and related activities at Congressional Office Buildings. An on-going display will feature pairs of combat boots representing U.S. troop deaths, and shoes representing the deaths of Iraqi children, women and men. The count begins from June 15, the day of the 2,500th troop death, when the Iraq War was debated in both the Senate and the House and the majority voted to "stay the course." New boots and shoes will be added to the display to correspond with continuing deaths in Iraq, highlighting lives lost due to Congressional inaction. For More Information, go to: www.mfso.org

Worth covering, just don't expect to read about it in the Times. On the attempts to silence the press (most of whom silenced themselves some time ago), Nick notes Katrina vanden Heuvel's "Right Pejoratives, Wrong Targets" (Editor's Cut, The Nation):

A free press is the cornerstone of a vibrant democracy – our system of checks and balances – holding accountable those who would abuse power at the expense of citizens and the public interest. If ever we've witnessed Executive Power run amok, now is that time. And since this Republican Congress has abdicated its oversight responsibilities it's up to the media to fill that void. As Matt Rothschild wrote in his blog for The Progressive, "What King, Cheney, Bush, Gonzales, and many rightwing pundits don't seem to appreciate is that we, the American people, need to have a free press to check the excesses of government."
Stories on money tracking also appeared in the Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times last week. But King's ire is focused on the New York Times. Why? When I debated him on MSNBC's Scarborough Country Monday night, he called the paper "a recidivist" because of its previous important (and Pulitzer-prize winning) report exposing domestic surveillance.


Laura Flanders has covered this topic in detail while filling in for Mike Malloy thisl week on The Mike Malloy Show (which airs live on Air America Radio from ten p.m. to one a.m. EST) -- Dave Zirin is her guest tonight, by the way. Elaine's also tackeld it her site with "When does the spying stop?." Scott Sherman takes a look at any legal grounds in Heath's highlight, "Chilling the Press" (The Nation):

Is the Times vulnerable to prosecution? On May 21 US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales declared that there is "a possibility" that journalists can be prosecuted for publishing classified information. Most experts doubt that the government would attempt such a maneuver. Says Geoffrey Stone, professor of law at the University of Chicago and author of Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime, "The fact is that the US government, in 215 years, has never once prosecuted the press for publishing government secrets." In Stone's view the 1950 law is "clearly unconstitutional. It includes no reference whatever to clear and present danger or any other level of harm to the national security."
Others agree. "While in theory the Times might be vulnerable," notes Boston defense attorney Harvey Silverglate, "there are arguable defenses. And besides, where is the Department of Justice going to get a twelve-citizen jury to unanimously buy the government's view that the Times is a criminal but the Bush Administration is not?" Schoenfeld says he cannot imagine a government prosecution: "Before my essay came out, I would say the chance was zero percent. After the article came out, the odds have risen to .05 percent." Then what did he achieve with the essay? "I hope," he says, "that I set in motion a 'chilling effect,' however slight, when it comes to the publication of sensitive and highly classified counterterrorism programs, the illegal disclosure of which may make it easier for radical Islamists to strike us again."
In recent months Schoenfeld's essay certainly appears to have provided intellectual ammunition for those who would censor and punish the press. His arguments have already been reproduced in the Wall Street Journal, National Review and The New Criterion; by Accuracy in Media; and by pundits like Michael Barone. Fortunately, some top newspaper editors seem to be waking up to the dangers. "I'm not sure journalists fully appreciate the threat confronting us," Times executive editor Bill Keller recently told National Journal, citing "the Times in the eavesdropping case, the Post for its CIA prison stories and everyone else who has tried to look behind the 'war on terror.'"

Remember to listen, watch or read Democracy Now! today and Amy Goodman has an event Friday (as does Danny Schechter and Jeff Cohen -- three people worth hearing):

* Amy Goodman in Stony Ridge, NY:
Fri, June 30
*TIME: 7:30 PM
Sounding the Alarm for Freedom: Media Responsibility in Time of War
Tickets are $5 (students free)
For more information: (845) 876 7535
andi@re-media.org
http://www.re-media.org/
Panel Discussion featuring:
Congressman Maurice Hinchey: leader in media reform legislation
Amy Goodman: award winning investigative journalist for "Democracy Now"
Jeff Cohen: founder of FAIR, panelist on "News Watch" (Fox) and"Crossfire" (CNN)
Danny Schechter: media critic and filmmaker ("Weapons of MassDeception")
Dr. Alan Chartock, President and CEO of WAMC, will host the panel,which will be broadcast by member stations of WAMC/NPR.


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NYT: Covering the spin and not much more

Mr. Rubaie said the Iraqi government learned the details of the shrine bombing after the capture a few days ago of Yusri Fakher Muhammad Ali, also known as Abu Qudama, a Tunisian militant who confessed to be a member of Mr. Badri's team. Mr. Ali, who entered Iraq in November 2003, also said the assault team consisted of four Saudis and two Iraqis in addition to himself and Mr. Badri, Mr. Rubaie said.
"The crime of Samarra was one of the biggest crimes meant to provoke sectarian division and civil war, but they failed to achieve that," Mr. Rubaie said at a news conference inside the fortified Green Zone.

The above is from Edward Wong's "Prisoner Links Iraqi to Attack on Shiite Shrine, Official Says" in this morning's New York Times. Martha notes Joshua Partlow's "Iraqi Official Says Insurgent Cell Bombed Shiite Shrine" (Washington Post) on the same subject and if Wong left you scratching your head, read Partlow which is more straight forward chronology wise. (Wong's jumping all over the place in his article. It's as though he thinks he has the skill to pull off writing Rashomon and he doesn't this morning.)

From Partlow's article:

Meanwhile, news services reported that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had been contacted by several Sunni Arab insurgent groups about his proposal to end violence by bringing them into the Iraqi political process. The Associated Press said nearly a dozen insurgent groups had agreed to immediately halt attacks on all foreign or Iraqi targets if the United States agreed to withdraw foreign forces within two years.
Maliki has said, however, that amnesty offers included in his recent reconciliation proposal did not extend to killers of Americans or Iraqis, and the Bush administration has rejected setting a timetable for troop withdrawals.

Why the AP continues to trumpet this based on an unnamed source, I have no idea. In exactly two weeks, they'll probably be forced to drop the story. Reality will once again bite them in the butt, but it's a talking point (usually presented as fact) for some. Another difference between the Wong and Partlow articles (there are many differences, I try to avoid commenting in any form on the Post but I've trashed four lengthy entries already this morning so we'll all just have to deal with the fact that I'm bending, if not breaking, my own rule) are details like this (present in Partlow's article, absent in Wong's):

In Samarra in February, some local officials said the bombers had been dressed in the uniforms of Iraqi security forces. A DVD later distributed in the area, said to be made by Ansar al-Sunna, contended that Interior Ministry commandos had organized the attack. Some Samarra residents said they put more credence in the video than in the national security adviser's account.
"The Iraqi government has made this announcement to look innocent of this crime," said Khaldoon Ahmed, 33, a high school teacher in Samarra. "If they are really prepared to reveal the truth, then we demand the formation of an international committee to investigate this incident, and we will not let anyone rebuild the shrine until that is done."

Mia notes Zoltan Grossman's "Military Resistance: A Brief History" (CounterPunch):

The public refusals here at Fort Lewis (Washington) of Army 1st Lt. Ehren Watada, Sgt. Kevin Benderman and Spc. Suzanne Swift to deploy to Iraq are the most recent chapter of a long and noble history of resistance within the U.S. armed forces. To understand this history, and where it might lead, it helps to see how resistance varies strongly according to rank, class and race, and how difficult it is for resisters to express their patriotic viewpoints alone, without support from the larger peace movement.
Dissent from soldiers during foreign interventions has been reported throughout U.S. history, such as in Mexico in the 1840s and the Philippines in the 1900s. Even during World War II, African American rebellions against internal racism shook the military, and eventually forced unit desegregation. After the war ended in 1945, soldiers and sailors demanded a postwar demobilization and tickets home. Starting in Manila, they formed a huge and successful movement that may have prevented a U.S. intervention against the Chinese Revolution later in the decade, though did not prevent the Korean War of the 1950s.
During the Vietnam War, the military ranks carried out mass resistance on bases and ships in Southeast Asia, the Pacific, U.S. and Europe. Military resistance was instrumental in ending the war by making the ranks politically unreliable. This history is well documented in Soldiers in Revolt by David Cortright and teh recent film "Sir! No Sir!." Servicemen and women were heavily influenced by the antiwar and African American liberation movements back home, as well as by personal contact with Vietnamese civilians. But this resistance took years to develop after the initial deployments in 1960, not catching fire until after the 1968 Tet Offensive showed that the war was unwinnable.

Getting back to the AP talking point, it defies logic to believe that those who've taken up arms against a government (in this case a puppet government as they fight the occupation) would offer the prospect of laying down (candles in the rain?) if they were given a promise (from someone they don't believe) that in two years the American forces would withdraw. It's also true that if history means anything to the people of Iraq (as opposed to reporters for the AP who will no doubt be yet again caught with their heads up their asses), there's about to be a new wave of violence. Beth agreed it was spin from anonymice but wondered why I said it was "American made." I think the puppet government is perfectly capable of creating their own spin (and have) but I think only Americans could be so ignornant of Iraq's history as to fail to see the date looming on the horizion (July 14th, AP reporters, get out your history books).

Were the United States occupied, July 4th would not be an easy day for the occupation as Americans were reminded of independence from the past. By the same notion, July 14th shouldn't go over easy in Iraq. That the talking point of resistance fighters willing to lay down arms if they can have a promise from the installed al-Maliki ("two years, America out!") can come so close to July 14th is why I see it as American grown spin. An Iraqi, my opinion, would be aware of the upcoming date and hesitant to put forward a talking point that could blow up in their face internationally and wouldn't go down easy, to begin with, in Iraq (where July 14th has meaning).

Remember to listen, watch or read (transcripts) Democracy Now! today.

The e-mail address for this site is common_ills@yahoo.com.





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