Update on a recent post #1

On July 28 I wrote about the attempt by the British Airports Authority to prevent a week-long protest camp outside Heathrow Airport that was to address the airport's contribution to global warming and oppose construction of a third runway. The method chosen by BAA was to seek an injunction that would allow police to arrest any member of a long list of groups that attempted to take part in the protest, an injunction that would cover as many as five million people.

When the ruling came down a week ago, BAA got little of what it wanted, certainly not near enough to head off the protest. The groups considered it a great victory. Still, the outcome makes me quite itchy. From the BBC:

BAA has won a High Court ruling banning certain protesters from Heathrow during a week-long climate change camp.

The injunction applies to Plane Stupid, which has a history of "direct action", and protesters from two other groups,

those being Hacan Clearskies and the No Third Runway Action Group. Now, I think it's bad enough that a government feels it can tell people they can't take part in a protest because of what it thinks they might do, but catch the reasoning:

Mrs Justice Swift ruled at the High Court that there was a risk that "a terrorist group may use the disruption caused by the protesters to perpetrate a terrorist act".

Get that? People can be banned from taking part in a protest because of what some government twit imagines in a scare quote some unnamed and unknown third-party "terrorist group" might do. You as a protestor are no longer responsible just for your own actions but for others' as well, even if you have no connection with them, don't know who they are, and have no control over them. The use of the "terrorist" boogeyman to shut down opposition has rarely been clearer.

Still, the protest will go on; in fact, it started a bit early, says RTTNews:

Climate change campaigners have set up camp outside UK's Heathrow on Sunday two days earlier than expected to protest against the airport's expansion plans and climate change.

About 150 protesters started building the Camp for Climate Action, just over half a mile outside the airport's perimeter, and the numbers are expected to swell to 3,000 by Tuesday for a weeklong protest aimed at highlighting the link between global warming and aviation.

Additionally, more than 150,000 activists from across Europe will join them Monday at the Imperial College sports ground, between the villages of Sipson and Harlington.

Undeterred by its loss at court, the government has switched to intimidation and abuse of authority, as the Guardian (UK) informs us:

Armed police will use anti-terrorism powers to "deal robustly" with climate change protesters at Heathrow next week, as confrontations threaten to bring major delays to the already overstretched airport. ...

Scotland Yard's plans for handling the protests are revealed in a document seen by the Guardian, which was produced by Met commander Peter Broadhurst during a legal hearing at the high court which imposed restrictions on a number of named campaigners. ...

The police report makes it clear that the government has encouraged police forces to make greater use of terrorism powers "especially the use of stop and search powers under s44 Terrorism Act 2000".

The law gives police powers to:

· Stop and search people and vehicles for anything that could be used in connection with terrorism

· Search people even if they do not have evidence to suspect them

· Hold people for up to a month without charge

· Search homes and remove protesters' outer clothes, such as hats, shoes and coats.

Last night the protesters said they would not be intimidated.

Good for them. Let's hope they follow through. The best defense against these kinds of tactics is just that: refuse to be intimidated; do what you were going to do anyway.

This is not the first time UK police have engaged in heavy-handed tactics against legal demonstrators: The Guardian article recalls a 2003 anti-war demonstration at RAF Fairford: Police detained, searched, and ultimately turned back two busloads of protestors on their way to the legal demo. Law lords ultimately ruled the stop illegal. Even so,

[p]olice used section 44 of the act 995 times at the Fairford peace camp, even though there was no suggestion of terrorist overtones.

But perhaps the most 1984-ish quote that came out of this was this one:

"With the current terrorism threat, keeping Heathrow safe and secure is a very serious business," said Mark Bullock, BAA Heathrow's managing director.

"Any action taken by the protestors that distracts us or the police from this task is irresponsible and unlawful."

So now for a demonstration to be illegal, it doesn't have to be destructive, disrupting, disabling, even disturbance-causing - it merely needs to be distracting. What's next, disrespectful to its elders?

Another anniversary

Not all memories of August 9 are bad ones.

It is also the anniversary, August 9, 1974, of the resignation of Richard Nixon.

Ah, good times, good times.

The other one

This is slightly garbled and more than slightly rambling. But after I sat down to write it this evening, I quickly found that the more I wrote the more I wanted to write, the more sources I wanted to cite - and I chose to cut myself off in order to get this up tonight. Take it as you find it.

The photo above was taken by Japanese photographer Yosuke Yamahata. The date was August 10, 1945. The place was Nagasaki. One day earlier it had become the second city, the "other" city, hit with - devastated by, leveled by, ruined by - a nuclear bomb, an event which was in a number of ways an even greater crime than Hiroshima.

A crime? A war crime? Yes.

The shock of that first blast was still reverberating through Japan's councils of war when Nagasaki was attacked. Three days was simply not time enough to take it all in, not time enough to decide to admit total defeat. Not time enough to truly understand, as our own difficulty in understanding, in comprehending the level of destruction, even at this distance, makes more than clear.

But if the military and political leaders in the US grasped that fact, they apparently didn't care: The second bombing was originally scheduled for August 20 but was moved up to August 11 when the fissionable material became available sooner than expected. It was then pushed forward to August 9 by a day-and-night effort in order to get the next attack in ahead of some days of bad weather predicted for Japan. General Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project, claimed that speed was the only consideration:

Admiral Purnell and I had often discussed the importance of having the second blow follow the first one quickly so that the Japanese would not have time to recover their balance.

The statement has an oddly forced quality about it: After all, if the intent was to drop the second bomb "quickly," why not wait a bit on the first one so you actually have two bombs ready to go instead of being prepared initially to wait two weeks? But take Groves at his word. It is then legitimate to ask if the purpose was to stun the Japanese into instant surrender - or to get the second bombing in before it had a chance to.

Bear in mind first that the minutes of the meeting of the Target Committee on May 10-11, 1945 specified the three factors the Committee determined for deciding on targets for atomic weapons. They were:

(1) they be important targets in a large urban area of more than three miles in diameter, (2) they be capable of being damaged effectively by a blast, and (3) they are unlikely to be attacked by next August. [Emphasis added.]

When the bombing order came down on July 25, 1945, it contained no references to civilians.

So while there certainly were military considerations involved, there was a good deal more of "Let's see what these babies can do." If Japan surrendered too quickly, well, that would mean fewer opportunities for what amounted to nuclear experiments. That didn't matter; after all, they were only Japanese - only "Nips." And indeed, one of the uses for atomic weapons was, in the words of Secretary of State James Byrnes, to allow the US "to dictate our own terms [with the USSR] at the end of the war" and "make Russia more manageable in Europe." How can you do that if you don't prove you have not only the technology but also the willingness to use it?

Bear in mind next this excerpt from Article VI of the Nuremberg Principles, which were declared, eerily enough, on August 8, 1945:

The following acts, or any of them, are crimes coming within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal for which there shall be individual responsibility:

(c) Crimes against humanity: namely, murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian populations, before or during the war....

Leaders, organizers, instigators and accomplices participating in the formulation or execution of a common plan or conspiracy to commit any of the foregoing crimes are responsible for all acts performed by any persons in execution of such plan.

So were the bombings war crimes? Is deliberately choosing to bomb "a large urban area" while making no mention of avoiding or reducing civilian casualties a war crime? Is doing so for the purpose of finding out just how destructive to an urban area the bomb can be a war crime? How can it not be? Yes, I'm fully aware that the prohibition on bombing civilians had already been broken, in Hamburg, in Dresden, in Tokyo. But one immorality does not excuse another, committing one crime does not free you to commit others, guilt there is not exoneration here. (And yes, I'm also fully aware of the Blitz. But the Blitz was spread over eight months, over which time total casualties did not match those inflicted on any one of those three cities in their one day of infamy. More importantly, it's irrelevant: Someone else's guilt in one case is not evidence of your innocence in a different one.)

And please, no, none of the "necessary to end the war, saved lives, blah blah." They were not necessary and even the much-mentioned land invasion of Japan - projected casualties supposedly associated with which grew like Topsy over the years - was not necessary, as growing numbers of historians agree. Many of them agree that the bombings may have shortened the war but, because the invasion was not necessary, reject the claim that lives were saved on either side. Now, however, Ward Wilson of Rethinking Nuclear Weapons has gone beyond that, declaring in the Spring 2007 issue of the Harvard University-based "International Security" that

[my] historical research shows that the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had apparently little or no impact on the Japanese decision to surrender,

relating it more to Japan's overall state of defeat and the Soviet Union's declaration of war on Japan on August 9, 1945. (Full article here in .pdf format.)

But still, that leaves on last thing: a greater crime than Hiroshima? Yes. Because even among those who will call the bombing of Hiroshima "a necessary evil," there are many who will call Nagasaki "a tragic mistake" and wholly unnecessary. Even the defenders of devastation cringe at Nagasaki. Yes, a greater crime.

Footnote: Not all of the painful memories of Nagasaki reside with the hibakusha. NPR for August 9 tells the story of South Dakota farmer Rudi Bohlmann.

Bohlmann's ship received orders to sail to Nagasaki, where the sailors could smell the stench of death before they arrived.

"We knew something was up - the stink," Bohlmann says. "You just about gagged, just by breathing it. I hadn't eaten breakfast yet that morning, 'cause I'd just come off watch. And I couldn't go eat. Nobody could eat."

The ship pulled into Nagasaki harbor on Sept. 23, 1945. It was the first U.S. ship there.

Bohlmann remembers how sailors tossed oranges and apples down to two Japanese boys who helped tie the ship to the dock. The starving boys - covered in festering sores and exhibiting other symptoms of radiation sickness = devoured every one.

The boys were the only living people anyone on the Tyrrell saw in Nagasaki - and the ship moored there for five days. ...

Massive cranes in the shipyard were crumpled like pretzels, Bohlmann recalls. He says when looked through binoculars, he couldn't even make out where streets had been - just a few concrete foundations here and there, the stone remains of a shrine. ...

When Bohlmann came home from the war to South Dakota, his father wanted to celebrate his safe return with smoked fish, then a real delicacy on the prairie. But for Bohlmann, it only reminded him of what he'd experienced at Nagasaki.

He took one bite, got up, walked outside, and threw up. His mother asked what was wrong, and he told her he could not eat the fish.

"And I says, 'Boy, I can't tell you, something in the back of my mouth, it just smells like it was over in Japan,'" Bohlmann says. "And to this day I don't eat … smoked fish. I don't even try it no more."

No, his pain is not the same as those who were actually targeted. That makes it no less real.

It's happened

The newest addition to the right hand column here, added a week or two ago, is the running total of "Iraqi Deaths Due to U.S. Invasion" provided by Just Foreign Policy. As a base, the counter total used last year's study published in The Lancet that said there had been about 650,000 "excess deaths" in Iraq as a result of the invasion, of which 601,000 were due to violence. It then uses the Iraq Body Count's tabulation of civilian deaths to estimate the rate at which those excess deaths by violence are increasing and updates the number displayed accordingly. The entire methodology is explained in more detail here.

Just a little while ago, sometime this afternoon, it ticked over to 1,000,985.

Over one million.

One million.

One million dead because of our hubris, our stupidity, our greed, our murderous violence. One million. One million.

Amid all our talk of "surges" and "schedules" and "drawdowns" and "deadlines," this is what it actually means: One. Million. Dead. One million people who would have been alive today had some among us not decided to act out their imperialist fantasies and the rest of us had not allowed ourselves to be stampeded with lies and fear-mongering. After this, I do not want to hear any shit from anyone about Saddam Hussein. Not one freaking word.

Yes, it's an estimate. Yes, it's a calculation. Yes, the number could be lower - which also means it could be higher. I don't care. It's the best guess we have now. And it's over one million.

Twilight Geek: The Eye of the Beholder

Two recent bits of news on the medical front, both via the BBC.

1) "Minimally Conscious State" is a neurological state where the person exhibits intermittent or greatly limited signs of awareness. It's differentiated both from a coma, where the person is deeply unconscious, and a persistent vegetative state, or PVS, which is characterized by wakefulness but no awareness. For some time, it was felt there was little that could be done for people in a minimally conscious state and institutional care with the hope of spontaneous recovery (which did happen) was the usual course.

Now, that may have changed. Consider this case of a man badly beaten six years ago, causing brain damage that left him in a minimally conscious state.

Deep brain stimulation with electrical pulses may offer hope for patients trapped in a minimally conscious state.

Treatment of a 38-year-old man with a severe brain injury enabled him to use words and gestures, chew and swallow and drink from a cup, say US doctors.

Before the stimulation, done through electrodes implanted in his brain, he could only make slight eye or finger movements, the team report in Nature. ...

The procedure involves electrodes implanted with millimetre accuracy to specific areas of the brain. ...

Over a period of six months the researchers alternated periods of electrical stimulation with fake stimulation to assess whether it was having an effect.

Within 48 hours of the first stimulation, the patient was able to keep his eyes open, turn his head, and utter words.

After several treatments he is now able to perform complex tasks such as brushing his hair, although with difficulty due to severe immobility caused by his condition.

And he can chew and swallow his food where before he needed a feeding tube.

One example, of course, is not conclusive: There have, again, been enough spontaneous recoveries to hold off judgment. But the FDA has now approved tests on 12 additional patients and if the results are replicated, it could dramatically change the standard of care and radically improve their chances of getting better.

2) A disease whose seriousness is often overlooked because its effects tend to be cumulative over a period of years, is diabetes. Those effects can indeed be devastating: blindness; ulceration, even gangrene, of the feet; nerve damage; kidney failure; heart disease. But something new has come up that may make the condition, while incurable, even more manageable than it is now.

A simple vitamin deficiency may be the cause of many of the side effects of diabetes, a study suggests.

Researchers found people with the disease expelled thiamine - vitamin B1 - from their bodies at 15 times the normal rate in a study of 94 people.

The study, done by a team at Warwick University, found thiamine levels in the blood plasma of diabetes patients at levels 75% lower than they should be. This hadn't been noticed before, the team said, because it turned out that the standard test to determine thiamine levels wasn't necessarily revealing. This is important because

[t]hiamine is key to warding off vascular problems such as kidney, retina and nerve damage as well as heart disease and stroke.

It works by helping protect cells against the effect of high glucose levels.

Trials are now being carried out to see if supplementing diet with thiamine could return levels to normal.

As usual, the caveat "more research is needed" applies, but as Matt Hunt of Diabetes UK, which helped to fund the study, said, this "could potentially have very exciting outcomes."

My wife is diabetic and suffered from diabetic retinopathy as a side effect of the disease. My mother was diabetic. She wound up with cataracts of both eyes, had trouble walking because of loss of circulation in her legs and feet, and died of kidney failure - all related to diabetes. I want that exciting outcome.

Twilight Geek: Where Is Everybody?

Not that long ago, astronomers were wondering if there could be life "out there." One argument, favored by Carl Sagan, was that there are so many stars that there must be a large number of them that have planets and thus so many planets that it was likely that some form of life arose on some of them. Put another way, no matter how small you wanted to make the chances of life developing, there are likely so many opportunities that life should have appeared in a goodly number of places.

That argument, of course, was logic drawn from probabilities. And life has still never been found anywhere other than Earth. But with what is being learned now, the question really is shifting from "Is there life out there?" to "How can there not be life out there?" For example, astronomers have actually mapped the climate of a planet called HD 189733b, which orbits a star some 63 light-years away in the constellation Vulpecula. Last month, World-Science.net reported that

[r]esearchers say they have found the best evidence to date that planets outside our solar system have water.

“Water is the quintessence of life as we know it,” said Yuk Yung, a professor of planetary science at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif. It’s “exciting to find that it is as abundant in another solar system as it is in ours.” Yung is co-author of a paper on the finding, appearing in this week’s issue of the research journal Nature. ...

Researchers had predicted that planets of its class, called “hot Jupiters,” would contain water vapor; recent observations had also suggested as much. The new research confirmed this, using the NASA Spitzer Space Telescope’s particularly keen ability to study near­by stars and their planets, scientists said. ...

“Finding water on this planet implies that other planets in the universe, possibly even rocky ones, could also have water,” said co-author Sean Carey of the Spitzer Science Center at Cal­tech.

We know that water ice and water vapor exist on Mars and it's possible that liquid water still flows occasionally on the surface in brief spurts. Icy water geysers may well be on Saturn's moon Enceladus. There might be water on Pluto's moon Charon. We know Jupiter's moon Europa has a surface covered with water ice - and it probably has a liquid ocean underneath the frozen surface. Even our own Moon might harbor water, at least in the form of frost. We're finding water all over our solar system - and now elsewhere in the galaxy as well.

On top of that, within the last year, astronomers have found three molecules in space carrying a negative electrical charge. Big whoop, you say? It is. You see, scientists had discovered about 130 neutral and about a dozen positively-charged molecules in space but thought negatively-charged ones wouldn't be found because radiation would knock off the excess electrons, which carry the negative electrical charge, leaving the molecule either neutral or positive.

Still big whoop? Try this:

“This discovery continues to add to the diversity and complexity that is already seen in the chemistry of interstellar space,” said Anthony J. Remijan of the Charlottesville, Va.-based National Radio Astronomy Observatory.

“It also adds to the number of paths available for making the complex organic molecules,” the ingredients of life, he added. Such substances are thought to have formed in the same giant clouds that give rise to stars and planets.

Get it now? The discovery adds to the number of ways that organic molecules on which life is based could arise, making the formation of such molecules - and thus life - that much more likely.

No, this doesn't mean that SETI will hit paydirt any day now. It doesn't even mean that there is another intelligent species anywhere out there (and please no cracks about if there's intelligence here). It does make it increasingly likely that whether it be brainiacs or bacteria, the universe in all its wonder is glowing with life.

Something you didn't know

Sure, you didn't.

It appears that people are finally starting to question the received corporate (And GOPper. And Democrat.) wisdom that unfettered free trade is an unquestionable, everybody-wear-a-smiley-face boon to all workers. McClatchy News brings it on:

“For decades we took for granted that everyone agreed with us economists that free trade is good, protectionism is bad. Somewhere along the way, that stopped being the conventional wisdom,” acknowledged U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab, in an interview with McClatchy Newspapers. “And whereas the default vote on a trade bill in Congress used to be a ‘yes’ vote, the default vote on a trade bill now in Congress is a ‘no’ vote.” Why? Because lots of people are no longer convinced that a rising tide of trade lifts all boats - and there's evidence to back them up.

For three decades, the richest 10 percent of Americans have been growing even richer much faster than everyone else. Over the past five years, real wages for all the rest of American workers have been almost flat. Many blame globalization.

During a mid-July congressional hearing, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke contended that education levels largely determine income inequality. But he was angrily interrupted by Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, who declared, “Mr. Bernanke, that’s simply not true.”

Frank said that the 29 percent of Americans who have bachelor’s and even master's degrees haven't seen real income growth, on average, over the past five years. ...

Frank quoted repeatedly from a new report published by the Financial Services Forum, a think tank run by President Bush’s close friend, former Commerce Secretary Donald Evans. The report was co-written by Matthew Slaughter, a former member of Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers.

The report concluded that “over time, the pressures of global engagement spread economy-wide to alter the earnings of even those not directly exposed to international competition.”

Since 2000, the report said, most American workers have seen meager income growth. Only “a small share of workers at the very high end has enjoyed strong growth in incomes.” This occurred despite strong productivity growth, which in the past raised wages and salaries.

In short, the rich have been getting richer, the poor have been getting poorer, and the folks in the middle have been going nowhere. Ain't we got fun.

This shift in opinion against a long-dominant presumption that free trade provides broad net benefits to the U.S. economy is rooted not only in the experience of stagnant incomes, but it's also gaining intellectual respectability as economic theory. Alan Blinder, a Princeton economist and a former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve, was a lifelong free-trader, like most economists, until he began looking hard at how globalization is evolving.

Recently he shocked free-trade orthodoxy by warning that modern technology and trade practices will put at risk as many as 40 million American jobs within a decade or two.

Still, the old bromides and the old fear-mongering refuse to die. The appropriately-named Blinder, for example, wants to maintain "free trade," just with some job retraining and some more tax breaks to "give incentives to firms to produce here," the article says - which, of course, really means tax breaks to major corporations, ones big enough where the "produce here or there" decision is a practical consideration.

And the sly fears still sneak through. There's this:

Small but already negotiated trade deals with Panama, Colombia and Peru are being held up. While those deals wouldn't affect the U.S. economy greatly, given how small those economies are, they're important to those countries and their blockage sends signals worldwide about changing U.S. attitudes.

Meanwhile, Asian nations continue integrating into the fast-growing Chinese economy's sphere of influence.

An economic variation on military foreign policy (not that the two are ever far apart), preaching The Chinese are coming! while throwing up the image of the faithless, doesn't-keep-its-word US. And then there was this:

The Financial Services Forum report [cited by Frank] backs similar solutions [as Blinder's] as necessary to head off a turn toward outright protectionism, which helped prolong the Great Depression in the 1930s.

See? The alternative will just make things worse! I mean, yeah, all this globalization crap hasn't worked out like we said it would and yeah, only the richest are actually benefitting, but that doesn't mean we should do anything about it. Except teach people how to do different jobs, usuaully for less money. And if those sorts of jobs are found nowhere around where you live, what then?

That's a question I think both important and too rarely asked. I raised it over 13 years ago, in November 1993, in a letter to a friend. Discussing NAFTA and GATT, I noted that while the number of jobs was much discussed in the debate over "free trade," the types of jobs was not. I then went on:

This is without even considering how the changes would impact on different industries and different regions. If, again for example, one sort of industry mostly in the southwest loses those theoretical million jobs and another sort in New England gains them, overall employment would again be the same - but the economic effects on both those regions, not to mention the social disruption, could be enormous. According to a report by the General Accounting Office, exactly that kind of regional “dislocation” is a real risk of NAFTA.

That, in turn, raises another issue which predates NAFTA (and GATT) but is closely connected to them: loss of community or, rather, the creation of what I call rootless workers. For a few decades now, capital has become more and more mobile, shifting from place to place more by electronic transfers than by the movement of actual bonds, bills, and coins. (You’ve heard of “virtual reality;” this is like virtual money.) Corporations have become freer than ever to chase around a country or the world, leaping from enterprise to enterprise, even industry to industry, in pursuit of profit. The result has been regional booms and busts as one area competes with others to see who could offer the most to Big Business in a downward spiral of self-flagellation that inevitably left the losers gasping for economic breath - and, often, the “winners” with a temporary if not downright pyrrhic “victory.” (Consider Texas, whose “boom towns” of the ‘70s became the empty husks of the ‘80s; consider Korea, whose “economic miracle” of the ‘80s, built on the infusion of transnational capital in search of low-wage labor, is turning sour as corporations move on to the Philippines in search of even lower-wage labor.)

The corporate response to this undeniable reality has been to trumpet “emerging opportunities,” “growth regions,” and “market expansion.” Implicit in all this staged euphoria is the notion that working stiffs, ordinary folks, everyday people, or whatever other folksy label we want to put on the 90% of us left out of the considerations of the powerful, are no different than the parts on a machine: replaceable, disposable, even interchangeable. And that the only way for us to survive in this bold new economic future is to be as mobile as capital - that is, to chase work around the country or the world as rapidly as money chases profit. We dare not attach ourselves to a place, a people, a community, or even a particular sort of work because we may have to abandon it on short notice for the sake of our own and our families’ survival, perpetually chasing behind - always, of course, behind - capital in what gives a new, more sinister meaning to “the rat race.”

We have to drink the shallow economic water that runs on the surface of a local economy because if we dare to set down roots and try to drink from a deeper source, we may find the watershed pumped away to feed another, distant, plain, leaving the earth cracked, dry, and barren and ourselves (and the stable communities we hoped to find) to wither. We must, that is, become nomads - no, not even nomads, which implies purposeful ranging over well-known territory, but mere wanderers, emotionally isolated in order to be emotionally insulated against the constant risk and frequent reality of loss. We must be homeless, placeless, rootless.

If that sounds melodramatic it’s because it describes not what’s fully formed today but the end of a process that has been going for some time and will only be accelerated by NAFTA and GATT, which make the macroeconomics of transnational corporations and not the microeconomics of actual human beings not merely the central (that’d be nothing new) but increasingly the only economic standard of measure. On the other hand, if it sounds melancholic, that’s because it is.

I've quoted that passage twice before in different contexts, but it does seem to bear repeating here. Because finally, finally, it may be sinking in that giving transnational corporations their head is not the route to prosperity for any but the already-prosperous, not the source of economic power for any but the already-powerful, not the basis of security for any but the already-secure. That's a small enough ray of hope, but these days we should take what we can find.

Okay, maybe I can't leave it yet

I just came across this via Raw Story, quoting Secrecy News, a blog of the Federation of American Scientists.

On Friday, Bush signed into law legislation implementing recommendations of the 8/11 Commission. He surely wasn't happy about all the provisions, but he signed it.

One such provision required making public the formerly-secret national intelligence budget. On Monday, GOPper Rep. Darrell Issa of California filed an amendment to the Defense Appropriations Act that would undo the requirement to reveal the intelligence budget. Democrat and antiwar hero Rep. John Murtha announced the amendment was accepted. No discussion. No debate. No chance for dissent.

The matter now goes to a House-Senate conference. Considering what just happened with FISA, I have no confidence any Democrat is going to go to the wall to maintain a bill to reveal what previously had been classified information. This is the Democratic Party on which we are supposed to bank our future.

A little more about this...

...before I, you'll pardon the expression, move on.

My post from last week about the weakness of the antiwar movement, which I argued arose from being "too god damned concerned with being seen as respectable [and] serious" and the associated practice of slicing off any supposedly "radical" elements, got a little bit of attention. Avedon Carol said of the part about respectability "I think that's a lot of it." Matt at ScaryShit followed her link, decided it was "an extremely important post," and quoted a couple of paragraphs. And Armando "Big Tent Democrat" Llorens at Talk Left also took note via Avadon and quoted a bit. However, he was of a different mind:

I think Larry is right about the anti-war Netroots failing miserably in 2007 but I think he is wrong on the why it is failing. ...

Larry's critique is based on worrying about imaging. That was not the problem. The problem was deciding to NOT pressure the Democratic Congress. To instead be, led by Tom Mattzie of Move On, coopted by the Democratic Congress. I do not think the protests against the war worried anyone.

In my reply in comments I said

My concern was not about "imaging," which makes it sound like I was talking about PR, but with the sense the "leaders" of the "movement" have of their own image, which is not the same thing. In fact, I see what you call the problem - "deciding to NOT pressure the Democratic Congress" - as the result of that concern with image, not something apart from it.

That is, too many of the leading lights - such as MoveOn - felt and feel pushing for stronger measures on the war, such as the one we agreed on (don't pass an appropriation), would brand them as "too radical" and therefore as not "serious," undermining the image they've cultivated. It would cost them access - and access is, as a lot of MSM reporters will confess (once they've retired), a powerful narcotic, both soporific and addictive.

Ultimately, they have sought "respectability" in the halls of power - and have, as have so many before them, wound up entangled in the web of limitations that status weaves and so have lost the ability to speak truth to that power. That is why they have failed.

We have failed by standing by and not acting on our own apart from that failed leadership.

Related to that is that yes, demonstrations did bother some of those same forces. For a post I was writing some time ago I started to compile a list of Big Name Bloggers and other "leaders" who either dismissed, advised against, sneered at, or even attacked various demonstrations. I threw it away because I decided what I wanted to go after was an attitude, not particular individuals. Clearly, I should have kept it. It would have proved useful.

(The link to my earlier post is added here and was not in the actual reply at Talk Left. I will say here that two names on that list were Ezra Klein and Todd Gitlin.)

While this was going on another example arose indirectly illuminating what I say is the problem. Matt Stoller, another Big Name Blogger, expressed his thoughts on "Why the Progressive Movement Couldn't Stop FISA." First, he said, we need to "consider the possibility that these 57 Democrats believe in a more expansive security state and do not support civil liberties. They ... just don't agree with us. " Okay, fair enough.

But he then addressed the opposition to the bill. Why did it fail? Where was the breakdown, he wondered? Certainly not in the Netroots, oh no.

[A]s a movement, we have only one crop of politicians in office, those elected in 2006. ...

Given the age of our movement, it shouldn't be a surprise that the progressive caucus is weaker than it could be....

Right. There was never any attempt to elect "liberal" Democrats before, say, 2004 and those that were supported in 2006 who voted to kill the Fourth Amendment - such as Jim Webb - well, you can't blame them, it's just because the "movement" is, uh, young. Really young. And, therefore apparently and of course understandably, feeble. Yes, indeed. Not our fault, no siree.

So it's not fault of the Netroots that were too busy preparing for and then celebrating their supposed influence at YearlyKos to notice. And it's not the fault of the Democrats who actually voted for the thing. Nor is it the fault of the Democratic leadership which could have killed the bill in either house of Congress. Nope, all of them entirely innocent. So whose fault was it?

According to Stoller, it was the fault of the "immense and unforgivable incompetence" of the American Civil Liberties Union!

Yes, that ACLU. The one that sent out repeated announcements and action alerts. The one that, as Llorens mentioned in his own case, was the source for "anything and everything" he learned about the bill, something which I strongly suspect that, beyond the vague, often confusing and generally unhelpful last-minute press coverage, was true for most of the rest of us as well. The one that, contrary to Stoller, did push both Reid and Pelosi, but

[t]hey did not listen to us. ... We met with them. They rebuffed our arguments. ...

We gave it the full court press: with action alerts, meetings with Members of Congress and Senators and their staff.

Pelosi and friends spent the entire week negotiating with the DNI and cut out ALL the civil liberties groups - not just the ACLU.

That ACLU, that's the one on whose shoulders lies the entire blame for the failure of effective opposition in Congress to this latest egregious exercise in power-hunger. Or so Stoller tells us.

In fairness to Stoller, he did post the ACLU's emailed answer to his post. But he didn't respond to it, neither apologizing for his outburst nor making any attempt to refute the group's defense. So we are left to ponder his original assertion. And in doing so we are left with, yet again, a movement (or, to be more precise, the "leaders" of a "movement") more concerned with being "respectabile" than effective. A "movement" too afraid of making a fuss, too afraid of not being "serious," of embarrassing the oh-so-important leaders at whose tables of power they eagerly dine on crumbs. The failure must have been - must have been - someone else's fault.

And so what we got was what Llorens called "a vicious cheap shot at the ACLU," adding that

[i]t takes some nerve for a failing Netroots to go potshotting like this. Let's look in our mirrors first.

To which I could only reply "Damn effing straight."

Footnote: The graphic appears to be making the rounds, but I first came across it at The Left End of the Dial.

Passing thought

Here's something that I think indicates the kind of farcical, all-hail-the-Democrats thinking that passes for a "movement" these days which I complained about the other day:

On Wednesday, Avedon Carol, who sometimes posts at Eschaton under the nom de screen "Not Atrios," had this to say:

Lambert wants to ask the Democratic candidates, "What is the Democrats' plan to restore Constitutional Government?"

Hm. Maybe we should ask our reps, too.

She provided links to the House and Senate webpages with contact information. Sometime later, she added this:

Update: Look, I'm not saying we should bash the Dems. I'm saying it's a real issue and no one else is going to ask them, so we have to. ...

It's a question about one of the important issues of the day, and they should be able to answer it.

That is, she felt she had to justify asking Democrats questions other than softball ones that they want to be asked! In comments, the original question was called "the anti-Dems thing," "anti-Democratic," and an "attack." Just really discouraging.

Aaaaaaahhhh!!!

Updated Tell me again, go on, try to tell me again why it was so fucking important to elect Democrats. Just try.

The Senate, in a high-stakes showdown over national security, voted late Friday to temporarily give President Bush expanded authority to eavesdrop on suspected foreign terrorists without court warrants[, Associated Press reports].

The House, meanwhile, rejected a Democratic version of the bill.

Democratic leaders there were working on a plan to bring up the Senate-passed measure and vote on it Saturday in response to Bush's demand that Congress give him expanded powers before leaving for vacation this weekend. ...

Senate Democrats reluctantly voted for a plan largely crafted by the White House after Bush promised to veto a stricter proposal that would have required a court review to begin within 10 days.

And why is it a "temporary" measure, supposedly just for six months? Because taking the time to work on a final, permanent bill would have screwed up their fucking summer vacation, that's why. And oh, yeah, I'm damn sure the version they'll come up with later will take back the "temporary" expanded powers to snoop poke prod and pry, just like those provisions of the Traitor Act with "sunset" clauses - and we all remember how well that worked out.

This whole pile of crap started when an FISA court ruled against part of the Bushites warrantless eavesdropping and by the way, the AP article linked here gets that part wrong. It says the ruling

barred the government from eavesdropping on foreign suspects whose messages were being routed through U.S. communications carriers, including Internet sites.

Bzzzt! It did no such thing. It said such surveillance could not be done without a warrant from the FISA court because it was in effect domestic surveillance and the busybodies couldn't promise that domestic conversations would not also be intercepted.

The fact is, as a means of oversight, the FISA court is a joke: According to data compiled from the court's annual reports by the Federation of American Scientists and presented by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, in the period 1979-2005 the FISA court was presented with nearly 21,000 requests for electronic surveillance warrants and rejected precisely four. Even so, that was too much of a restriction for the Shrub gang, who, as they usually do when they're caught screwing around with the law, demanded the law be changed to let them do what they damn well pleased.

Now, truth be told there was an aspect of this that was (relatively) uncontroversial: Most if not all nations of the world, even if they're not quite so direct about it, reserve the right to spy, including the right to listen in on foreign communications - that is, cases where both sides of the conversation are in foreign countries. (In fact, a lot of countries feel no compunction about doing the same to domestic communications as well. Be grateful for small favors.) The thing is, due to changes in communication technologies, the routes information travels can go rather far afield. It would not be surprising for someone in Peru talking on their cell phone to someone in Japan to have their call routed through Seattle. Email packets can be scattered far and wide on their way from sender to recipient.

Since intercepting of foreign communications was accepted practice, the question became how to do surveillance of communications passing through the US without in effect engaging in warrantless domestic wiretapping. And who was going to decide if the measures to keep the two separate were adequate to the task.

Democrats initially wanted the FISA court to decide; that's pretty feeble protection but it's better than none at all, albeit it not by much. For its part, the White House wanted that power to be in the hands of - get this - the attorney general. That's right, the very man who has twisted himself into so many rhetorical knots to evade his patent mendacity that his name should be Earblot Slagzone.

And yes! the dynamic, the powerful, the Voice of the People Democrats stood their ground and forced the White House to retreat - all the way back to requiring both Slagzone and Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell to approve! What a victory! High-fives and tickertape parades all around! Tickertape being a good approximation of the strength of the Democrats' collective backbone.

The bill also, the Washington Post points out,

would expand the government's authority to intercept without a court order the phone calls and e-mails of people in the United States who are communicating with people overseas. ...

Privacy advocates accused the Democrats of selling out and charged that this bill gives the government more authority than it had under a controversial warrantless wiretapping program begun in secret after the 2001 terrorist attacks. Under that program, the government could conduct surveillance without judicial oversight only if it had a reason to believe that one party to the call was a member of or affiliated with al-Qaeda or a related terrorist organization. This bill drops that condition, they noted.

Democrats "have a Pavlovian reaction: Whenever the president says the word 'terrorism,' they roll over and play dead," said Caroline Fredrickson, Washington legislative director of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Fredrickson said the group is "hugely disappointed" and that the Democrats "let themselves be manipulated into accepting the White House proposal ... it's mind-boggling." No it isn't, Ms. Fredrickson, it's Democrats.

But oh, it's true that the fear merchants out in force, each one trying to outdo the other, for example:

- "I hope that there are no attacks before we are able to effectively update this important act." - Rep. Lamar Smith
- "We are not going to put our national security at risk. Time is short." - The Shrubbery-in-Chief
- "Al-Qaeda is not going on vacation this month." - Sen. Mitch McConnell
- "We're at war. The enemy wants to attack us." - Sen. Joe "The Zipperman" Lieberman

But for sheer paranoid wackoness, this is a prize-winner:

"Every day we don't have [this wiretap authority], we don't know what's going on outside the country," a senior White House official said. "All you need is one communication from, say, Pakistan to Afghanistan that's routed through Seattle that tells you 'I'm about to do a truck bomb in New York City' or 'about to do a truck bomb in Iraq,' and it's too late."

Omigod omigod OMIGOD! We might miss that message! Hurry hurry hurry! Oh please protect us Mister Bush, please oh please protect us from the very bad men using email!

This is the kind of mindless, cliché-ridden crap which stampeded Senate Democrats into endorsing virtually everything Bush wanted and House Democrats into rejecting better oversight and perhaps later today assuming the position like they do every time Bush puts on his petulant "my way or the highway" routine. While I have absolutely no expectation they will, what the Democrats - what any decent human being - should do is reply that they feel the call of the open road and Bush can take his power-hungry, lying, fear-mongering bullshit and cram it.

Footnote: But I really am being unfair, aren't I? After all, we know - don't we? - from experience that they'll act fairly and properly, just like our intelligence agencies always have.

As for Democrats, well, I mean, let's be fair and all, at least they'll stand fast and protect our future from any more wacko rightwing fruitcake judges Bush wants on the federal bench. Won't they?

Updated to note that Marty Lederman at Balkinization has a preliminary analysis of the atrocity passed by the Senate.

Okay, to make you feel a little better

AP reported a few days ago on

[t]wo teens from opposite coasts [who] are marching across the country for peace, hoping to gain followers and attention with each step.

Ashley Casale, 19, of Clinton Corners, N.Y., and Michael Israel, 18, of Jackson, Calif., had hoped others who oppose the war in Iraq would join them on their 3,000-mile walk from San Francisco to Washington. ...

The two met 10 minutes before beginning their journey. Casale just finished her freshman year at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, and Israel recently graduated from high school. ...

On Wednesday, the two stopped for lunch in Montezuma[, Iowa]. Wearing T-shirts and displaying deep tans, the two described the blisters and achy knees they have endured as they crossed the western deserts, the Rocky Mountains and the Great Plains.

"We've never thought about quitting, but there are parts of the country that are so isolated and towns are so far between we feel like we're alone without any support, but then we come across a town and see the support we have and it helps," Casale said. ...

Israel said he felt good about what he and Casale have accomplished.

"I hope it inspires people to be more vocal and politically active and become more aware of what's going on around them," he said. ...

"Our message is about ending the war in Iraq, but it's more than that," Casale said. "It's about cultivating peace in our daily lives and responding to things in a peaceful, nonviolent way."

The pair - actually now the trio, as they picked up a third go-the-whole-way walker in Iowa - crossed the Mississippi River on Tuesday and hope to be in Washington DC on September 11. This is the kind of action that usually gets very little national press but can generate boatloads of local coverage. You can follow the progress and offer support at www.marchforpeace.info.

Let's move on...

Updated ...to tearing your hair out and screaming.

Barak Obama, anxious to show he's "muscular" - i.e., militaristic - enough to be in charge of US foreign policy after days of being called "naive," the Chicago Tribune reports,

declared Wednesday he would use military force against Al Qaeda operatives hiding in tribal areas of Pakistan if that nation did not move more aggressively against them first.

He would, he said, be prepared to act unilaterally if Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf is not aggressive enough at what we want him to do. This despite that fact that Musharraf is actually limited in what he can do and is in a "shaky position."

An attempt by the Pakistani president to dismiss the Supreme Court chief justice stirred violent riots and moved the court's full membership to over-rule the president in a politically damaging rebuff. Islamic fundamentalists took control of the capital city's Red Mosque and had to be ousted through a bloody military raid. That raid in turn prompted a series of suicide bombings against the Pakistani government.

Musharraf has also survived several assassination attempts over the years and faces challenges to his own government not only from Islamic fundamentalists but from a growing number of legal advocates and democracy proponents. None of this is to defend Musharraf, who is certainly no sweetheart, but to point out that he simply doesn't have the forces or, more importantly, the political maneuvering room to undertake the massive mission that would be required to root out al-Qaeda fighters in the mountains along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. Does Obama understand any of this?

"I understand that President Musharraf has his own challenges," Obama said. "But let me make this clear. There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans. They are plotting to strike again.... If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf will not act, we will."

In other words, "yes, I understand and I don't give a damn. I've got an election to posture for."

The Washington Post's version of the story, noting that Obama said in the same speech that he would send at least 7,000 more troops to Afghanistan, indicated that he was not just talking about things like air strikes but was proposing he would send US troops over the border to go after al-Qaeda strongholds in Pakistan.

Some folks have been defending Obama on the grounds that it has "always" been US policy that the military would strike unilaterally based on "actionable intelligence." Frankly, I don't see why I'm supposed to feel better from being told he's just like everyone who came before.

The whole notion of such a strike seemed nuts to

Teresita Schaffer, a former State Department official with responsibility for the region and now director of the South Asia program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, [who] said that an overt U.S. military strike inside Pakistani territory would be a particular blow to Musharraf, who is a military leader, and could well lead to his ouster. It also would bolster leaders hostile to the United States in both the struggle for national leadership and local control of the tribal areas, she said.

"Once you have made that kind of operation, everything connected to the United States, even more than before, is believed to be the enemy," Schaffer said. "You've probably created a safe haven that works even better than before."

Obviously she is just weak and naive.

Footnote: Later on Wednesday, Hillary Clinton said in a radio interview that she would not hesitate to attack al-Qaeda targets on Pakistani territory, apparently, like Obama, without requiring the assent of the government of Pakistan. Plus ça change?

Another footnote: Obama also said in regard to military aid to Pakistan,

"I would make our conditions clear: Pakistan must make substantial progress in closing down the training camps, evicting foreign fighters and preventing the Taliban from using Pakistan as a staging area for attacks in Afghanistan," Obama said.

I just wonder: If he did order the kind of attack he suggested he would and it didn't make "substantial progress" toward shutting down al-Qaeda, would he cut off military aid to the Pentagon?

Updated with the comment about people defending Obama.

Now that you're depressed...

...time for your jaw to drop. This is from the MoJo Blog at Mother Jones magazine, dated July 30.

In this morning's Washington Post, Robert Novak reports that select members of Congress were informed last week of a covert operation now underway to target leaders of the PKK, a Kurdish separatist movement in southeastern Turkey. [Emphasis added.]

Over the last two years, the blog reports, members of the PKK have been staging more frequent cross-border raids into Turkey while taking refuge in the mountainous areas of nothern Iraq where Kurds have established an essentially autonomous state. Turkey has been responding by shelling areas over its border with Iraq and making increasingly bellicose noises about undertaking harsher measures. But, as Novak correctly notes, if it did it would surely find itself engaging not just the PKK but the military forces of the Kurdistan Regional Government: a second real shooting war on a second front in Iraq, this one pitting two US allies against each other.

[I]t's unclear what the U.S. can do to calm things down. Bush apparently believes that deploying Special Forces troops to hunt down PKK leaders will help resolve the issue. This seems doubtful. But it could succeed in exhausting the patience and goodwill of Iraq's Kurds. What then?

Well, by then Bush will be out of office and he won't give a damn. As for the Kurds, our use and subsequent dismissal of them would hardly be unprecedented. If it came down to a choice, I don't think there's any question that the "tilt" would be toward Turkey - especially as pressure mounts for withdrawal from Iraq and the poster-child status of the "success" of the Kurdish region becomes less important in US political schemes.

Okay, if that didn't depress you...

...this will. Amid the noise and shrapnel of sectarian violence in Iraq, with Sunnis killing Shias and Shias killing Sunnis and both very likely supplied and supported by their regional allies, we can sometimes - frequently - forget that there are other communities in Iraq with their own stories and facing their own pain. From the BBC:

Caught in a triangle of religious, ethnic and criminal violence, communities which once made up as much as 14% of the country's population get little state protection, said Hunain Qaddo, chairman of the Iraqi Minorities Council, a Baghdad-based non-governmental organisation. ...

He says that his own community, the Shabaks of the Nineveh Plains, face oblivion as a people, targeted physically by al-Qaeda militants because they are mainly Shia, and politically by Kurdish separatists with claims on their land. ...

Iraq's minorities range from large communities like Turkmens and Christians to small groups of Armenians, many of them descended from refugees from the Ottoman Empire nearly a century ago, and Palestinians given sanctuary by Saddam Hussein. ...

[T]he number of minority group members among the 2m refugees from Iraq is believed to be disproportionately high.

Mandaeans who fled to Syria told the BBC earlier this year harrowing stories of forced conversion, rape and murder by Islamists.

A Minority Rights Group International report published in February notes that Mandaeans, who follow a religion which pre-dates both Islam and Christianity, are also targeted by criminals because they traditionally work as goldsmiths and jewellers. ...

Christians have found themselves in a similar dilemma: targeted by Sunni extremists because of their religion and by kidnappers - who are often Shia Arab militants or rogue members of the security forces - because of their wealth.

These communities, unlike the big three, have no militias for their protection and the Iraqi police are simply not up to the job even assuming they're interested in doing it. They are, essentially, on their own.

Depressed yet?

If not, this from CNN for Wednesday will undoubtedly help in that direction.

Upset over being "marginalized," Iraq's largest Sunni political bloc Wednesday made good on a threat to leave the Cabinet.

The move, which will likely further cripple the embattled Shiite-dominated government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, came on the same day as a wave of bombings shook Baghdad and left dozens of people dead.

The Iraqi Accord Front has been critical of legislative stalemates and the failure to achieve national reconciliation, a key U.S. benchmark for Iraq, and it warned last week that it would pull its six Cabinet ministers.

Another resignation could follow: Vice-President Tariq al-Hashimi is also from a member group of the Iraq Accord Front and he's expected to submit his resignation to the bloc, which will decide whether he should remain in office.

It occurs to me that there are undoubtedly some who will be cheered rather than depressed by the news, figuring that anything that leads to the downfall of the "US puppet government" in Baghdad is good news. I actually disagree that the Iraqi government is a true "puppet" of the US, although it clearly is heavily dependent on it and won't stray too far. But while all the main factions within the government (note that I am not talking about the public at large) want the US to stay, they want it for different and to some extent contradictory reasons: The Sunnis regard the US military as their bulwark against Shia attacks and oppression. The Shias are concerned that if the US withdraws, the government they dominate (and thus their institutional power) will collapse. And the Kurds figure those troops are a guarantee against Arab attacks undermining their autonomy.

More to the point, personally, I have a hard time thinking of even greater chaos in a country already measured as the second most unstable in the world (behind only Sudan) as a good thing. Maybe it looks good from a distant political perspective - but I doubt that perspective is shared by the Iraqis who would have to live with the result.

Here we go again

The opening discussion here is by way of introduction.

Richard at American Leftist quoted the blog Lenin's Tomb commenting on an exchange between Alexander "More Revolutionary Than Thou" Cockburn and Katha Pollitt.

Cockburn, who thinks that global warming is a hoax perpetrated either by environmentalists to fundraise without offending corporate sponsors (2001 version) or some combination of NASA, the UN, climate modelers, the IPCC, and Al Gore to support nuclear power (2007 version), wrote in Counterpunch in mid-July that "the antiwar movement is pretty much dead" and suggests as a main cause "the lack of solidarity with the Iraqi resistance," unlike the solidarity shown during the wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua. "In other words," he said, "support their troops."

Pollitt shot back in the pages of The Nation.

With whom, exactly, are we supposed to be showing solidarity? Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia? Shiites massacring their Sunni neighbors? Sunnis killing Shiites? Religious reactionaries who have murdered doctors, professors, working women, Christians, students, hand-holding couples?

She insisted, rightly in my view, that there is a fundamental difference between then and now: "The Sandinistas and the FMLN were far from perfect, but they were leftists." The variegated resistance in Iraq, even Cockburn conceded, is "murky and in some aspects unappetizing to secular progressive coalitions in the West."

Comments on the post at American Leftist were divided; beyond noting that my own contention is that it's not an either/or and that I feel no obligation to embrace the Iraqi resistance in order to condemn the invasion and occupation, I'll leave it to you to check out the whole exchange, including its extension to here, if you're so moved.

I do so because, as I said at the top, that was the introduction.

The subject is the weakness of the antiwar movement. And I say that the real reason that the antiwar movement seems unable to stop the war despite having the support of perhaps two-thirds of the public is that too much of that "movement" is too god damned concerned with its own image. Too god damned concerned with being "respectable," with being seen as "serious," as truly "pro-American." Too god damned concerned with politics over praxis, with positioning over protest. As a result, it has surrendered tactical decisions to the leadership of the Democratic Party and moral leadership to a crew of inside-the-Beltway wannabes both on- and offline who have mocked demonstrations and made Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi the arbiters of the acceptable limits of debate. And that has been a horrendous blunder, both tactically and ethically, with disastrous consequences for Americans and even more - far more - for Iraqis.

A clear example of that kind of "CYA first" attitude was seen just about two weeks ago: In its July 30 issue, The Nation published an article by Chris Hedges and Laila Al-Arian with damning evidence about the conduct of American soldiers in Iraq gathered in testimony from US veterans of that war.

From these collected snapshots a common theme emerged. Fighting in densely populated urban areas has led to the indiscriminate use of force and the deaths at the hands of occupation troops of thousands of innocents.

Many of these veterans returned home deeply disturbed by the disparity between the reality of the war and the way it is portrayed by the US government and American media. The war the vets described is a dark and even depraved enterprise, one that bears a powerful resemblance to other misguided and brutal colonial wars and occupations, from the French occupation of Algeria to the American war in Vietnam and the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory.

A man named Corey Mitchell posted a diary at DailyKos which referred to the article's description of

damning photos of a U.S. Soldier using a spoon to literally scoop out the brains of a dead Iraqi and pretending to eat the gray matter [which] were recently acquired.

Of course, everyone is appropriately appalled and make all claims of disgust and finger-wagging. Research shows, however, that such unacceptable behavior happens more often than the United States military wants you to know.

Mitchell then cited several notorious serial killers and mass murderers who were military veterans before noting that

[a] survey determined that only 25% of all soldiers during [World War II] actually fired their weapons. The main reason cited was that soldiers were more afraid to kill another human being than to be killed. ...

[But due to increasing use of conditioning techniques in military training, b]y the Korean War the percentage of troops that fired their weapons rose to 55%, while by Vietnam it had sky-rocketed to 90%. ...

According to the San Francisco Chronicle's Vicki Haddock in a 2006 article entitled The Science of Creating Killers, U.S. soldiers' killing efficiency and coping mechanisms have only "improved."

Mitchell condemned the fact that the military deliberately "undermined [the] moral autonomy" of soldiers, sought to make killing an automatic, emotionless, unthinking response, but did and does nothing to decondition those soldiers when they leave the military, offers them little or no help in making the psychological transition to civilian life. As a result,

[m]any soldiers suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, others commit suicide, and still others go on murderous rampages. ...

The newest crop of Charles Whitmans and Jeffrey Dahmers should be prowling our streets any day now - and for many years to come

as a result of the government's failure.

And of course he was immediately and harshly attacked for supposedly branding US soldiers, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, as serial killers. And not just by the right, but by the left as well: The diary collected, according to one commenter on another site, "151 comments, 95% of which criticized or excoriated the author," a fact noted happily as a defense against the claim that "the left hates the troops." Other comments at DKos suggested Mitchell was actually a rightwing troll who posted just so wacko sites like Little Green Footballs could get the screen shot. Mitchell, seeing he was unwanted, deleted the diary. (He changed his mind a few days later and posted it on his own site.)

Meanwhile, John Cole of Balloon Juice, called "a man of integrity" by Armando Llorens at Talk Left, labeled Mitchell "some anonymous wingnut [who] wrote a nasty anti-military screed on DKOS." Llorens, for his part, noted that contrary to Cole, it was Mitchell himself, not DKos, that took down the post, but found it necessary to call Mitchell a "first time diarist with no history at all at daily kos," that is, a stranger, an outsider.

What is the message of all this? What is the collective voice of the "responsible" left saying?

"Oh, no no no! He's not with us! Oh no, no way! Hey, you! Get outta here, you, you, wingnut! You, you, you troop-hater! Scram!"

So fearful are these responsible, these serious, these clear-headed, thinkers of being tainted with even the suggestion of a hint of a possibility of being "anti-troop" that they will cut off, ice out, denounce, anyone who doesn't toe the "support the troops" line. They will do it even if what that someone is saying is that a combination of military training, combat experiences, and lack of mental health services can leave veterans emotionally scarred - and neither the military nor the VA will acknowledge that fact: A recent lawsuit by veterans noted that only 27 of the VA's 1,400 hospitals around the country have in-patient PTSD programs. As I said in my own comment on this,

[y]ou may disagree with [Mitchell's] argument, but to call it hatred of the troops is absurd.

The line Mitchell crossed was a very different one, the line in our current political culture that says any criticism of "the troops," even by implication, is beyond the pale, marks you as an enemy, an outsider, a heretic to be attacked and shunned.

And so he was. Because he was, as another commenter said, "off the reservation."

That, folks, is why the antiwar movement is weak. Because, as I've been saying for years, we spend too much goddam time going "Oh no, they're not with us!" Too much time covering our own asses by collectively kissing the asses of the military and political establishment and staying "on the reservation."

That's why the GOPpers and the rest of the reactionary kill freaks know they can taunt the "antiwar" leaders in Congress about funding the war: If you oppose the war, they say, you can just cut off the money - so why don't you? They know that actually stopping the war, you'll pardon the expression, dead in its tracks is too "radical" for those "leaders" who - again, echoed by a goodly portion of what passes for an "antiwar" community online - equate cutting off funds with being or at least and perhaps worse being labeled as being "anti-troop." (That does not mean, I hasten to add, that no antiwar forces urged precisely that course, i.e., simply refusing pass any appropriation for the war, noting that such action could not be vetoed as there is no legislation to reject. That idea was advocated persistently and strongly by, among others, Armando Llorens. Credit where it's due.)

That's why, in the wake of the play-acted Senate filibuster on a withdrawal motion earlier this month which ended with another failed cloture motion, AP was able to report this without generating, so far as I'm aware, any response from the Big Blogs:

The 52-47 vote fell far short of the 60 needed to advance the legislation and marked the final act in an all-night session that Democrats engineered to dramatize their opposition to the war. ...

Democrats seemed content, having labored overtime to reassure MoveOn.org and other anti-war constituents of their commitment....

Democrats seemed content? There was no vote on the motion, no withdrawal of any sort, no date set, the whole staged thing was a complete failure legislatively but Democrats seemed content because they had reassured MoveOn and other anti-war constituents of their "commitment." Their commitment to what, precisely? To positioning for 2008? That seems a hell of a lot more likely than a commitment to ending the brutal carnage in Iraq.

And yes, it is brutal. And brutalizing. These are selections from two different emails received from Iraq by journalist Dahr Jamail, who wrote about his feeling of being back in the US on TomDispatch on July 17:

[1] I called my cousin in the al-Adhamiya neighborhood of Baghdad to check if they are still alive. She is in her sixties and her husband is about seventy. She burst into tears, begging me to pray to God to take their lives away soon so they don't have to go through all this agony. She told me that, with no electricity, it is impossible to go to sleep when it is 40 degrees Celsius [104 degrees Fahrenheit] unless they get really tired after midnight. Her husband leaves the doors open because they are afraid that the American and Iraqi troops will bomb the doors if they don't respond from first door knock during searching raids. Leaving the doors open is another terror story after the attack of the troops' vicious dogs on a ten-month old baby, tearing him apart and eating him in the same neighborhood just a few days ago. The troops let the dogs attack civilians. The dogs bite them and terrify the kids with their angry red eyes in the middle of the night. So, as you can see my dear Gerri, we don't have only one Abu Ghraib with torturing dogs, we have thousands of Abu Ghraibs all over Baghdad and other Iraqi cities.

[2] Today I went to the morgue. I saw horrible things there. I didn't see [H's] photo among them. Some figures cannot be easily recognized because of the blood or the face is terribly deformed. I saw also only heads; those who were slayed, it's unbelievable. Tomorrow, we will have another visit to make sure again. In your country, when somebody wants to go to the morgue, he may naturally see two or, say, three or four bodies. For us, I saw hundreds today. Every month, the municipality buries those who are not recognized by their families because of the capacity of the morgue. Imagine!

Imagination hardly reaches to what people live with in Iraq, conditions not only of violence and fear, but of deprivation. A new report by Oxfam International, released Monday, finds that four million Iraqis – 15% of the population - are in "dire need" of food; 70% of Iraqis are without adequate water supplies; 28% of Iraqi children are malnourished and a truly shocking 92% of them suffer learning problems, mostly due, Oxfam says, to the climate of fear; and more than four million Iraqis have been forced from their homes with more than two million people displaced inside Iraq and two million more refugeed, mostly in Syria and Jordan. (The full Oxfam report, in .pdf format, is at this link.)

Brutality. Deprivation. Fear. That's what we have worsened where we have not created it. And that's what most of our so-called "antiwar" movement seems content to continue, albeit at some lower level, for who knows how much longer as Harry Reid pushes "withdrawal" motions like the one in that overnight pose-fest which would withdraw troop by next spring

with the exception of a residual force to fight terrorists, train Iraqis and protect U.S. personnel and possessions. ...

Democrats have provided no estimates on how many thousands, or even tens of thousands, of troops would be required to fulfill those missions. [Emphasis added.]

The "withdrawal" bill in the House added Iraqi border security to that list of tasks to be undertaken by US troops after this supposed withdrawal. I don't know about you, but I don't feel the least bit "reassured." Or the least bit impressed with a "movement" that allows itself to be cast as satisfied with such half-measures, if "half" is not overstating the case, while twitching with trepidation over fears of what it might be called unless it casts out anyone who goes "off the reservation" defined, in effect, by Democrats more concerned with how it looks than with what it does.

This is just so flaming stupid it's hard for me to comprehend. They should not be setting our agenda on the war, we should be setting theirs and "reassuring" us should be regarded as another word for a failure to act and a failure of nerve. Screw "respectability." Screw "seriousness." Screw "a seat at the table." And screw right down through the floor the fear that drives us to attack and isolate our own real and potential comrades because some right wing flakes and their media hack ass-lickers call them names.

We have been down this path before, oh so frustratingly many times, and the result is always the same: a weakened movement for peace, for justice, for whatever, without ever accomplishing the supposed goal of political strength through "moderation." I say again, as I have said before,

acquiescence is not an answer. ... Most of all, slicing away your friends and supporters will not help you. Spending time and energy going "oh, no, no, no, I'm not one of them" only narrows your base, reduces your potential support, and will not satisfy your attackers.

So why why why WHY do we keep doing it? Why do we attack the Corey Mitchells? Why do we, despite all the evidence of crimes committed by US soldiers in Iraq, why do we jump into CYA mode and reflexively denounce those who dare to speak that unpleasant truth and face what militarism, what war, does do and has done to all involved? Why after all this time do we still fail to realize that, as I have declared God knows how many times,

the movement for peace and social justice in this country has been at its strongest and most influential when it has spoken the truth without giving a flying damn if anyone was "offended" or not.

A lesson that we have not, that we seemingly have refused to, learn. Instead, we tie ourselves to what is in fact the more conservative portion of the opposition to the Iraq war - even to the point of fawning over Ron Paul - in order to prove our "reasonable," our "centrist," our "serious" credentials. That is our weakness. That is the source of our ineffectiveness. That is our failure. Not refusing to "show solidarity" with the Iraqi resistance. Not refusing to "support their troops." Not refusing to endorse even by implication IEDs, sectarian murder, and purveyors of the most reactionary forms of sharia law. But rather our fearful failure to speak the truth as we know it and to embrace those who speak those truths, especially when they are unpopular ones.

Acquiescence is not an answer. Slicing away your friends and supporters will not help you. Until we learn those simple truths, we will continue to wonder at our frustration as the war drags on.

Footnote: As another poster on his blog noted, Mitchell was vindicated a few days later when a commission headed by Bob Dole and Donna Shalala - pretty establishment, there - reported that the VA had made inadequate efforts to address post-traumatic stress disorder and recommended the agency be required to give it more attention.

Meanwhile, that same poster informed us, the LA Times reported on July 24 that

[a] recent report by a special Pentagon task force found that 38% of soldiers and 50% of National Guard members coming home from Iraq or Afghanistan have mental health issues, ranging from stress disorder to brain injuries.

Yeah, I'd call that some serious measure of vindication.

Conflict heats up

The effects of global warming, some now say, can already be seen - in Darfur. But the reference in this case is not to the environmental effects, but to the social and cultural ones, to the potential for conflict. The Christian Science Monitor discussed it on Friday:

Competition for water - in refugee camps, between farmers and herders, and between countries - has long sparked conflict in the arid region and forms one of the main causes of the war in Sudan's Darfur region. But the trouble is only beginning, as it becomes clear that dramatic climate change will have its sharpest effects in Africa, leading to rising hardship, massive population displacement, and, in some cases, all-out war.

Decades of drought marked by rainfall that has dropped by 40% over the past 50 years and has left Lake Chad a mere one-tenth its original size have forced Arab nomads to range further south ahead of advancing desertification in search of water for their stocks. The inevitable result has been bloodshed amid increasing competition for decreasing resources. Some point directly to global warming as a cause.

British Home Secretary John Reid pointed to global warming as a key factor behind the conflict in Darfur. "The blunt truth is that the lack of water and agricultural land is a significant contributory factor to the tragic conflict we see unfolding in Darfur," he said. "We should see this as a warning sign."

UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon also joined the climate-change bandwagon, writing in a Washington Post opinion page column, "The Darfur conflict began as an ecological crisis, arising at least in part from climate change."

"Bandwagon" is a rather pejorative term, especially considering that he had good cause for his statement: An 18-month study of Sudan by the UN Environment Program (UNEP), released a month ago, confirmed that

[t]he conflict in Darfur has been driven by climate change and environmental degradation, which threaten to trigger a succession of new wars across Africa unless more is done to contain the damage,

The Guardian (UK) reported at the time.

Still, not all are convinced: CSM says that activists in the Save Darfur Coalition say that the climate-change argument is just an attempt to absolve Sudan's government of its role in supplying and directing janjaweed militias in their murderous attacks against black villages.

But frankly, as much as I support the work of the Coalition, I don't buy the accusation. I have to say that I see no contradiction whatsoever between noting that climate factors played a role in initiating the conflict and denouncing the viciousness and cruelty that have been shown by the janjaweed and their Sudanese backers. Ignoring issues of resource depletion and competition in starting wars only condemns us to even more of them than we would see otherwise.

Stargeek: Atlantis

AP reported on Thursday that

[r]esearchers in northern Greece have uncovered two massive tusks of a prehistoric mastodon that roamed Europe more than 2 million years ago — tusks that could be the largest of their kind ever found.

The remains of the mastodon, which was similar to the woolly mammoth but had straighter tusks as well as different teeth and eating habits, were found in an area about 250 miles north of Athens where excavations have uncovered several prehistoric animals over the past decade.

One of the tusks measured 16-feet-4-inches long and the other was more than 15 feet long, the research team said. They were found with the animal's upper and lower jaws - still bearing teeth - and leg bones.... ...

Mastodons, an ancestor of the elephant, roamed Europe, Asia and North America, but how they became extinct remains a mystery. They are thought to have disappeared in Europe and Asia some 2 million years ago, but survived in North America until 10,000 years ago.

One of the things about such finds - besides the inherent coolness - is that they carry more information than just about the animal itself. Plants in the same vicinity and strata can tell scientists more about the environment in which the animal lived and analyzing growth rings in the tusks can yield information about the climate at the time. That notion of "everything teaches" is one of the reasons I am drawn to science.