:: Diary of an Aging Protester ::

:: 4.25.2003 ::

More Thoughts on Soft Colonialism
A report in the BBC todaydescribes the reaction by US admin to Kofi Annan's description of US military presence in Iraq as an 'occupying power' at his annual address to the Human Rights Commission. Supposedly the US ambassador to the UN in Geneva took umbrage at this description. As if we didn't invade the country, as if we haven't stationed our military in varous parts of the country, as if we didn't secure the thousand oil wells, as if we didn't bomb the major cities....
I'm disturbed by the lack of accountability this admin continues to illustrate. Rumsfeld's 'stuff happens. people do bad things' about the looting that went on for a week after 'liberation' and continues, Gen. Blount's remarks that an Iraqi grenade was responsible for the killing of 2 journalists at the Palestine Hotel, and when confronted with footage from a French TV station (ha!) that it was an American tank, still refused to apologize to the families or news organizations. Bush saying everything is going well during his Saturday morning address while every ministry office building was burned to the ground except for the Minister of Oil and the Foreign Office. Now Rumsfeld has declared that a cleric-ruled Iraq will not be acceptable as Powell attempts a mop up on the side by saying a theocracy doesn't mean a gov't that is undemocratice. I'd like them to articulate what they mean by democracy; its meaning fluctuates based on who's talking to the press and when. Yet we aren't occupying Iraq; we just sent 170,000 troops to rebuild a nation that we destroyed through sanctions.
:: posted by Doreen on 9:57 AM [+] ::
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Thoughts from a Gulf War (the first one) Vet
:: posted by Doreen on 9:42 AM [+] ::
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Amy Goodman Interview with Robert Fisk
:: posted by Doreen on 9:29 AM [+] ::
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Friends in High Places
It's nice to know that I'm a friend of Carl Levin! This is his response to an email I sent out recently to 30 senators about the Patriot Act Sequel designed to prevent the sunsetting of harsh surveillance laws set out in the first one, among other things. Intterestingly enough, his email back to me was the only one which did not ask me to resubmit my email to his senate homepage through an on-line form.

Dear Friend:

Thank you for contacting me about the USA PATRIOT Act (P.L.107-56). I appreciate hearing your views.

The USA PATRIOT was approved by Congress on October 25, 2001 and subsequently signed into law on Friday, October 26, 2001. This law gives law enforcement agencies important new tools to use in combating terrorism without denigrating the principles of due process and fairness embedded in our Constitution. The law strengthens federal criminal laws against terrorism in several ways, including extending the statute of limitations for terrorist offenses and modernizing surveillance laws to permit investigators to keep pace with new technologies like cell phones and the Internet. I believe this law responds to the sentiments of the American people since the events of September 11th that we must act
swiftly and strongly to defend our country without sacrificing our most cherished values.

However, the law is not perfect. In fact, during the Senate's consideration of the bill, I supported three amendments offered by Senator Russell Feingold (D-WI). Each amendment would have strengthened privacy protections for American citizens without undermining law enforcement efforts to investigate terrorists. One amendment would have maintained limits in federal and state law on law enforcement access to personal records, particularly with regards to sensitive medical and financial information. A second amendment would have required law enforcement to ascertain that a surveillance target under this law's expanded wiretap authority was actually in the house that was bugged or using the phone that was tapped before surveillance could be initiated. The third amendment would have placed sensible limits on the government's ability to intercept computer communications. Among these limits were the type of investigation and the length of surveillance in which the government could utilize new surveillance authority provided in this law.

While these amendments were not adopted, I voted in favor of this bill because I believe this is a necessary piece of legislation. Though terrorism is a threat unlike any other our nation has faced, that cannot diminish our determination to fight it or our commitment to civil liberties.

Best wishes.
Sincerely,
Carl Levin



:: posted by Doreen on 5:09 PM [+] ::
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Surge in Heretical Works on NYT Bestseller List
So not all Americans have been duped by the Bush posse as the many mainstream polls suggest. An article by Ed Vuillamy in the Sunday Observer claims that many books critical of the war and post-9/11 Bush and Co. have made their way into the top ten lists. Some that he mentions are:

9/11--Noam Chomsky

The Best Democracy Money Could Buy--Greg Palast -- he was at Emory last week but my lack of a car prevented me from going, yes I could've done Marta but it's hell to get there via public transport

Stupid White Men--Michael Moore Interestingly enough, his book came back on the top ten list after his speech at the Oscars

Targeting Iraq: Sanctions, Bombing and US Policy--Geoff Simons

Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Bush-Cheney Junta--Gore Vidal

Another book I'd recommend is a History of Arab Nationalism recently reviewed in the Guardian

Read on, folks, and fight the powers that be.
:: posted by Doreen on 9:00 AM [+] ::
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Where is Salaam Pax
I've been thinking lately about Salaam Pax from Where is Raed, a blog that gathered a lot of momentum right before the war started. Located in Baghdad, he hopefully weathered the bombing campaign. I'm sure once electricity and phone lines are restored, he'll back up and running with a lot of interesting insights to provide on the liberation of Iraq. Come back to blog world, Salaam Pax, come back!
:: posted by Doreen on 8:55 AM [+] ::
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Cocooning
As I watch the Sunday morning news shows, I see a protective shell that surrounds the media pundits' discourse--an inability to go one step further, to really discuss what is going on in Iraq now, not in the democratic future, but now. When discussions about WMDs come up, there is no mention of how the US and Britain have sent in their own inspectors rather than rely on UN expertise and knowledge of the area. Why? Why such reluctance? And then there is the current horror of 'post-war iraq". As John Pilger notes in his passionate column
When the invasion began, the British public was called upon to "support'' troops sent illegally and undemocratically to kill people with whom we had no quarrel. "The ultimate test of our professionalism'' is how Commander McKendrick describes an unprovoked attack on a nation with no submarines, no navy and no air force, and now with no clean water and no electricity and, in many hospitals, no anaesthetic with which to amputate small limbs shredded by shrapnel. I have seen elsewhere how this is done, with a gag in the patient's mouth.

As has been noted by many media pundits, we are so protected here in the US from the ugliness, the stench of war that tears bodies apart, leaves families devastated. Yet at the same time we cart out various retired military personnel to crow about how humane this war really was, the precision with which bombs were dropped has made this a whole new war.

We are so cocooned in this country, luxuriating in our literal and symbolic fatness, unaware of our complicity in so much of the world's other terrors--lack of water and food in Iraq, few hospital supplies because of UN sanctions and US efforts to stop any drugs from entering the country for years, not to mention the 500,000 N. Koreans in gulags living penned up like animals, like the chickens we stuff into pens in poultry factories.

:: posted by Doreen on 11:34 AM [+] ::
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The Western eye has fundamentally been a wandering eye, a travelling lens. --Donna Haraway, "Situated Knowledges"

Rereading Haraway's essay for my third chapter, I found this sentence striking in relation to geo-politics today and the US's dominating role in the MidEast. It also provided me with a deeper theoretical connection to my earlier entry The Military Eye and the relation between violence, both epistemic and material, visual language, and Western domination of third world countries, especially as seen from the POV of the embeds joyriding across the desert--the new Lawrences of Arabia--in tanks and not on camels. I read some acc't today of how disgusted one political columnist was, perhaps Jonathan Raban in yesterday's Guardian, as he listened to a CNN embed who was a soldier in the Gulf War rhapsodize about his adventures crusing with the troops. There appeared to be little critical understanding of the violence used against local villagers, the whipped Iraqi soldiers, the scorched uranium earth....

It's rather frightening listening to Arab journalists from Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan talk on NPR about how the Arab street views this occupation with increasing apprehension that they are next. This is racism at its most vile and violent, anaesthetized, viewed through the lens of a camera, a video game, a tv screen.
:: posted by Doreen on 10:35 AM [+] ::
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