Some Iraqi bloggers losing hope

Photo: A door riddled with bullet holes from a joint raid conducted by the Iraqi and U.S. Forces is seen as a boy walks out from a house in Baghdad's Sadr City February 7, 2008. (Kareem Raheem/Reuters)

Sunshine talks about the hard times in her city of Mosul, but she is one of the few bloggers who still seems hopeful. But as you can see, her situation is very difficult:

On Wednesday the situation was really bad, in the morning there were shooting all the time, at 4:30 pm I was combing my hair, and about to continue studying, something like an earth-quake happened, without thinking I knew it’s an explosion, I didn’t have time to run or hide, BOOOOOOOM, I felt like the blaster pushed me, I ran, and tried to avoid something but it hit me, I wasn’t sure what was it, smoke filled the rooms, I was glad to see everyone ok, I went to my room to see what has happened to it, the thing that hit me was my mug, and thank god we didn’t have many losses, I saw an orange smoke, we thought it was CL gas, so we put wet towels on our noses, grandpa and dad closed all the windows, and replaced the broken ones with cartoons ..
In the next day, my mom went to work, she said there were so many people in the hospital, and from time to time a family would go out crying loud because their wounded member died, it was a painful view..
On Thursday morning I couldn’t study well, there was a fight in the street behind our house, and I had to stay in the corridor, I was angry, and told grandma when she asked me to stay in a safe place “THE TERRORISTS ARE CHALLENGING ME, BUT I WILL STUDY NO MATTER WHAT” so I brought my books, sat on the floor, and studied , at noon, I got a phone call from my headmistress , she said Z was very badly injured, I couldn’t take it anymore, I lost my ability to tolerate, I was devastated, and I had a killing headache..

Sunshine has some even more hopeful words to say about the recent massive bombing in Mosul:

There were many terrible stories, people lost their whole family members, mothers lost their kids, etc, you most saw that in TV. But I heard stories made me feel how great people the Iraqis are.

I heard a talk show in the radio, when A man said “ I was in the hospital in the day of explosion, and I saw the ambulances bringing people injured very badly, I wanted to help but didn’t know what to do, so I took my car, went to a neighborhood and started to shout “ an explosion happened in a neighborhood, many people were injured, is there any one willing to donate with blood?” and I came to the hospital with about 25 guys”

Many people called and adopted the orphans, many people donated with money, clothes, & medicines, my mom and her friend called every dentist they knew collected money to the wounded people.

A man called the radio and his words touched my heart he said “I don’t have money to give, but I’ll work for free and re-build the destroyed houses and shops“ and he gave the reporter his number, the world needs more people like him.

Amazing words from someone living in a war zone who is only 16 years old!

Baghdad Dentist also talked about the massive bombing in Mosul, where he is currently living. He called it a disaster.

even the word disaster doesnt describe the crime happened there. as if a nuclear bomb were thrown there.the trees were 100metre away. the bricks of the buildings were everywhere.the power cables were in pieces allover the place. i couldnt distinguish the houses from each other and from the shops. a cyclon is less less destructive. i stood astonished there. i havent seen like this only when the b52 aircraft bombed one of the buildings during war in baghdad. without any exaggeration 20 houses were severly ruined up and nearly 35 affected. who was that monster who did it? he is the evil himself. the people who live in this area are poor and lovely and they can't harm a creature. one is working and doing his best to build a house and to grow his children up in a life with dignity and in a second all this just vanished so easily. after all i have seen I went back home and pain was tearing my heart.

Treasure of Baghdad watched the video released of Iraqi children being trained as ‘al qaeda’ although some of the training seems to him to be regular military training. He identifies the children and their adult trainers as being Iraqi from the accent. He thinks the trainers are former members of Iraqi’s military which was disbanded in 2003.

God! What does Iraq have anymore? The entire new generation is going down. It is impossible Iraq would improve or return to its former shape at least after having this new generation destroyed. Of course, they are destroyed! They have nothing to see except death, bombs, warplanes, helicopters, dead and wounded bodies, shootings, beheadings etc… It has been five years since the war started. It has been five years of their eight or ten years, seeing all of these things in front of their eyes. It’s been five years of complete failure of the Iraqi politicians to sit down and see how grave the danger surrounding us has become. It has been five years of concentrating on who gets more, who changes the flag, and who prays for God. It’s been five damned years and all Iraqis could see is nothing but collapse, segregation, hatred, and blast walls surrounding their once opened neighborhoods.

He concludes by saying that “And you know what? It’s not only al-Qaeda whom we should blame for that. It’s a lot of people.”

A Star from Mosul is in college in Mosul, and she reports on what is happening in her city and her life. She talks about two university professors who were killed and the massive explosion in her town. She titled her piece Dead Zone.

It is a bad dream, but that's it, it doesn't end. You just have to live through it and put all your feelings in some jar because they won't do you any good. During the exams a car bomb exploded in our street and broke some of the windows.. And during the exams, and in the midst of the mess, they decided to change the flag. And they did. And we the people didn't have a say in this.. They're just way too wise to be true.

Now it's the break.. and I hate breaks.. I'm sitting here at home waiting for the decisive battle on Mosul.. I'm waiting for them to come search the house.. and I do not feel like writing, so excuse me.

She sums it up with this sentence: “In short very little is going right, and the situation in Mosul is going from really bad to much worse.”

In Last of Iraqis blog, Mohammad says good bye to Iraq. He is 25 years old and a dentist living in Baghdad, and is planning on immigrating to Jordan. The title of his blog “Last of Iraqis” came from his belief that he might be the last Iraqi in Iraq, and his fear that Iraqis are going to be extinct. Mohammad completely rejects the new Iraqi flag, and is very distressed about what has happened to his country, and distressed that he feels forced to leave.

Nothing is like it used to be in my country….or what used to be my country…poor Iraq, everything beautiful in it was destroyed, everything was stolen, they even messed with the most important thing that identifies it, they even messed with the great and beautiful Iraqi flag, I wonder when will they change it's name claiming that it's a Baathiests name or Saddamists name!!!!
I wonder when will they have enough of messing around and destroying our country, I wonder when will those idiots who calls them selves politicians working for a new Iraq stop messing up Iraq!
They changed the flag, the great Iraqi flag the rolled the dead bodies of the brave soldier whether Shiite, Sunni or Kurds….it's the flag the covered the coffins of millions of Iraqis it's the flag that fluttered for many years in the Iraqi sky.

Neurotic Iraqi wife reports on an encounter with an acquaintance in a post called The Silently Grieving Black Veils. At first she did not recognize her, then the women took off her sunglasses and veil. Neurotica was disturbed by the change she saw in this women, and started to question why and if this total change in dress was only in Basra. This is what her acquaintance had to say:

She stopped applying her makeup, turned towards me and said in the saddest voice ever “Oh Neurotica, this is happening everywhere in Iraq, not just in Basrah or here but everywhere. We have become easy targets for those animal extremists”. The sadness in her voice slowly turned into anger. “Yes we suffered under Saddam’s regime, but atleast then, we knew who to blame. Now Neurotica, now, we don’t even know who to point the finger at? The Sadr Militias? The Badr Brigades? The Al Qaeda Wahabi extremists? Who do we blame Neurotica? Even the US forces are guilty.”

“I don’t even know if my neighbour will tell on me, or my friend. Or that old man I buy the vegetables from. Or that small boy sitting in the corner begging. I don’t know who will shoot me first. The militia? The police? The Americans? Or maybe a drug addict, or a drunk man? Who is it gonna be? If it wasn’t for my elderly parents I would have left long long time ago."

But the saddest post that I have run across recently was written by HNK. She is a young college student living in Mosul, and the younger sister to A Star From Mosul blogger. This one really broke my heart.

Ended Life, Killed Laughter

Breathless, hopeless, and fatigue
That's what I am now..

I am between the devil and the deep blew see
and between them

I am wishing I am never be...

What can you say after that? Updated information on Iraq at Iraq Today blog. Updated pictures of Iraqis at Faces of Grief blog. If you would like to help bring an Iraqi child to the US for medical treatment, please go to No More Victims website.

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Petitions

Press Release: Act Against Iraq Poverty

The Baghdad section of the Iraq Solidarity Campaign is calling upon the international anti-occupation movements to mobilise in an act of unity and defiance, against the planned elimination of the Iraqi food rationing system. We are making this call, in response to the outcry by the Iraqi media, which has informed the international community, that the regime of Jalal Talabani, The Dawa Party and SCII, plan to eliminate the food rations by June of 2008, a system which was first put in place under the UN Sanctions and have since helped to save millions of Iraqi’s from starvation. Under the rule of Al Ba’ath Party, the United Nations praised the ration system as being “the world’s largest and most effective relief effort” but since the introduction of the US protected death squads in 2003, the Iraqi peoples welfare has been subjected to corruption, hatred, abuse and a deluded form of vengeance. The Iraq Solidarity Campaign has repeatedly warned both Iraqi and Western governments about the growth of poverty in Iraq (see some examples below!), along with the effects which have been brought with it, such as the increase in malnutrition, prostitution, substance abuse and people searching for food from rubbish dumps. We are asking that people consider the seriousness of these cuts and through dignified and peaceful methods mobilise human rights and political organisations, to force the regime and their allies in the fortified Green Zone to change its direction and maintain the ration service.

Sign our new International Petition!

ALSO:

We Support the Troops Who Oppose the War

On the weekend of 13-15 March, 2008, Iraq Veterans Against the War will assemble history's largest gathering of US veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as Iraqi and Afghan survivors. They will provide first hand accounts of their experiences and reveal the truth of occupation. We support Iraq Veterans Against the War and their Winter Soldier: Iraq & Afghanistan Investigation. Join us in supporting the effort to reveal truth in the way that only those who lived it can.

Please go to this website to sign the petition to support IVAW.

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Mehdi Army ready to rise up again in Iraq?

Moqtada al-Sadr is calling to extend a six-month cease fire, but many rank-and-file in the Shi’ite force are restive. On the flip side, the International Crisis Group said the Mehdi Army was “unassailable” in its strongholds and the U.S. military should not provoke it.

Too late on both sides, perhaps. The U.S. has arrested several so-called “rogue” members, which certainly has added to the restiveness directed toward Sadr.

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US Military Admits to Killing Nine Iraqi Civilians

We are told...

The U.S. military said Monday [2/4/08] that it had accidentally killed nine Iraqi civilians during an operation targeting al-Qaida in Iraq — the deadliest known case of mistaken identity in recent months.

The operative word there is "known"... via the establishment media that is. Those who are reading this probably seek alternative sources of information and know the only thing rare about this event is the military admission.

The other word to parse is "accidentally."

As I write, before reading the full AP article, I'm guessing, "hmmm... If this was an air attack by the US, and it probably is, then the military's standard operating procedure is to conduct a collateral damage assessment before bombing. So, is the military saying that it's "accident" was a flawed collateral damage assessment? Did they predict zero civilian deaths, or did they predict only a couple dead civilians rather than nine? An even better question is whether only nine civilians were actually killed."

Sure enough, it was an air attack, the use of which increased five fold from 2006 to 2007.

I grow weary writing about this supposedly rare event, which I've written about before. This is just another government propaganda piece, taking a bad situation and spinning it to give the impression that this is "known" to be a rare "accident." It's not.

Sources:

Associated Press, 9 Iraqi civilians accidentally killed, LAUREN FRAYER, February 4, 2008.

Originally posted on GDAEman blog.

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Untucked

(Cross-posted to Lotus - Surviving a Dark Time.)

I have said oh so many times that it's the little things, the little things that go seemingly unnoticed that get me. In this case, the thing itself is by no means little but the fact that it seems to have passed unnoticed is some degree of qualification. And by any measure it is a great example of a classic I. F. Stone "shirttail," the good stuff at the tail end of an article.

Omar Khadr is a Canadian citizen captured after a firefight in Afghanistan in 2002. He has been at Gitmo ever since and is now facing a military tribunal there on a boatload of charges relating to the accusation that he threw a hand grenade that killed a US solider in that fight. However, he was 15 at the time, so, Reuters reported, he

should not be tried as a war criminal because he was a child soldier for al Qaeda, too young to voluntarily join its forces, his military defense lawyer told a U.S. war court on Monday.

Navy Lt. William Kuebler asked a military judge to throw out the charges....

"He is a victim of al Qaeda, not a member of al Qaeda," Kuebler said.

It certainly is a story worth knowing if only because it's another case of people having been held for years without trial or even charges. The fact that he was a child soldier and the questions that surround it add to its worth. However, that's not actually the part I'm concerned with. This is the end of that same article:

The court released documents describing the battle in which Khadr was captured. U.S. forces entered the suspected al Qaeda compound after an aerial bombing and were fired upon with a rifle and with the grenade that killed [Sgt. Christopher] Speer, it said.

An unidentified witness, who is apparently a member of the U.S. armed forces, said he found two wounded people still alive inside - a man lying near an AK-47 assault rifle, whom he shot in the head and killed, and Khadr, who was seated on the ground facing away.

The witness said he shot Khadr twice in the back and that Khadr replied repeatedly in English, "Kill me."

Khadr was instead given medical treatment and sent to Guantanamo.

The Miami Herald says the revelation was unintentional and casts doubt on the prosecution's claims.

At issue is, with the revelation that another person was alive and fighting inside the compound, how the military can be certain that Khadr threw a grenade that killed

Sgt. Speer? Yes, that certainly is an issue for the trial. But it's not the issue that struck me hard, one that neither of these articles nor any of the (admittedly few) others I checked addressed:

By the military's own account, a US soldier summarily executed a wounded fighter and shot another wounded, unresisting fighter in the back - twice.

God fucking damn it, these are war crimes! Why isn't that soldier in the dock? Why isn't he in chains in some dark cell somewhere awaiting a trial that maybe will happen someday? More disturbingly, why didn't any account find what he did worthy of notice? And even more disturbingly, even frighteningly, is it because it simply didn't occur to them to question the actions of a US soldier?

And I don't want to hear one bleeping bit of a defense that "maybe they were faking" or "maybe one of them was hiding another grenade" or whatever. By that argument you are saying you are comfortable with a scorched Earth policy or with soldiers going down streets just shooting down everyone they see, because - and you can't deny it - any one of those people "might" have a hidden gun or a grenade. (By the way, if "anything goes" is not right for "them," it's not right for "us." So neither will I accept any defense along the lines of "if you'd even been in combat" unless you're an avowed pacifist arguing that war destroys all vestiges of humanity in its participants and so should not be engaged in by anyone.)

It's been said to death that "9/11 changed everything." But of course it didn't. And contrary to the development of nuclear weapons, which, Einstein said, "has changed everything except our way of thinking," 9/11 actually changed nothing - except our way of thinking, especially regarding the level of decency we expect from ourselves.

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Today I am The Decider

(Cross posted from Gold Star Mom Speaks Out)

Today is Super Tuesday. 15 primaries and 5 caucuses will take place in 24 states to determine how more than 2700 delegates will be designated in the presidential campaign.

Today I've earned the privilege to make my vote count, to decide who I want to be my president.

Today I am not voting for gender or race.

Today I am not voting because some celebrity told me how to vote.

Today I am the decider.

Today I am voting with hopes that my candidate will end the occupation in Iraq.

Today I am voting to honor those who can no longer vote.

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On Prestige and Power and War Crimes

I wrote about this only a few weeks ago, but I still can't get my head around how this story played out in the press. (I could cite many more examples of this national noblesse oblige, such as revelations from the Downing Street Memo, on Abu Ghraib, on illegal wiretapping, on secret prisons, etc.)

From the Center for Public Integrity:

President George W. Bush and seven of his administration's top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Nearly five years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, an exhaustive examination of the record shows that the statements were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses....

In short, the Bush administration led the nation to war on the basis of erroneous information that it methodically propagated and that culminated in military action against Iraq on March 19, 2003.

I simply can't understand why this story hasn't gotten more traction. As a matter of sound evidence of governmental deception and war crimes, it couldn't be clearer. Yet, at the mageristerial press conferences and speeches by governmental personnel, we witness continuing deference, and acceptance of lies and spins, with the promise of cocktail parties later for the "in" crowd who never make waves. Is it really all about access to power?

Who has more prestige than the powerful? Where can we find more deception than in the highest echelons of the societal apparatus?

Prestige

1546, "practicing illusion or magic, deceptive," from L. præstigious "full of tricks," from præstigiæ "juggler's tricks," probably altered by dissimilation from præstringere "to blind, blindfold, dazzle," from præ- "before" + stringere "to tie or bind" (see strain (v.)). Prestige is from 1656, from Fr. prestige "an illusion" (16c.). These words were derogatory until 19c.; prestige in the sense of "dazzling influence" was first applied 1815, to Napoleon. Prestigious with this sense is attested from 1913

Power

Privilege is prestige, and prestige, in its fundamental nature as in the etymology of the word, means deception and enchantment. Again the line of development is continuous from the magician-leader of the simpler societies to the priest-king or god-king of the first civilization, as indeed Frazer showed fifty years ago.

Power was originally sacred, and it remains so in the modern world. Again we must not be misled by the flat antimony of the sacred and the secular, and interpret as "secularization" what is only a metamorphosis of the sacred. If there is a class which has nothing to lose but its chains, the chains that bind it are self-imposed, sacred obligations which appear as objective realities with all the force of a neurotic delusion. (Life Against Death, Norman O. Brown, Vintage Books, 1959, p. 252)

What else but neurotic delusion or mass denial could account for the fact that U.S. citizens have failed to react to the fact that its government has in the past five years killed over one million people? As Reuters reports:

LONDON (Reuters) - More than one million Iraqis have died as a result of the conflict in their country since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, according to research conducted by one of Britain's leading polling groups.

The survey, conducted by Opinion Research Business (ORB) with 2,414 adults in face-to-face interviews, found that 20 percent of people had had at least one death in their household as a result of the conflict, rather than natural causes....

The margin of error in the survey, conducted in August and September 2007, was 1.7 percent, giving a range of deaths of 946,258 to 1.12 million.

The Reuters story notes the now long-simmering controversy over the Iraq death toll. The OMB poll results are themselves a reduction from a study OMB initially reported last September that found 1.2 million Iraqis had died as the result of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. A Lancet study in 2004 found 100,000 had died as a result of the initial U.S. invasion. A second study in 2006 reported "654,965 excess deaths related to the war, or 2.5% of the population."

The website Iraq Body Count reports between 80,000 and 90,000 civilian deaths due to the war to date. But then IBC uses a "media-centered" approach to body counting:

The project uses reports from English-language news media (including Arabic media translated into English) to compile a running total. In its "Quick-FAQ" the IBC states: "It is likely that many if not most civilian casualties will go unreported by the media. That is the sad nature of war."

The statistical approach of the ORB is said to have the backing of many statisticians and epidemiologists, who use many of the same techniques in other studies of populations. Indeed, the U.S. Census uses household sampling methodologies, although not without its own concurrent controversies. (See this excellent article at Science News for a relevant discussion of statistical sampling issues.)

To make matters worse, counting Iraqi bodies has become even more difficult since "the surge," i.e., the escalation of the war.

...as the United Nations Assistance Mission in Iraq discovered early last year, verifying the numbers independently is impossible because, since the U.S. escalation nicknamed the "surge" began one year ago, the Iraqi government has refused to share its raw mortality data with UNAMI [United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq] or other outside sources. Many human rights advocates, including UN Human Rights Officer Ivana Vucco, have said this step was taken under pressure from the United States to conceal the real level of violence.

No matter how you want to look at it, the U.S. government is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. And not the government only as a whole, but specific people in the government, individuals who are as directly responsible as the Nuremburg defendents were for the crimes of Hitler's regime. But you wouldn't know it if you watched the mass media spectacle that is modern America.

The famous playwright Arthur Miller is reported to have said that an era only comes to an end when its basic illusions are exhausted. The era of U.S. imperial policy and war hubris is not over. The illusions of much of the population in the goodness and right of the government, and the elite that staffs the top layers of government, remain alive, and seemingly oblivious to change. Yet underneath it all, the worm of change and transformation silently gnaws, and the presitigious apparatus that girds the temples and monuments of power awaits its Ozymandian moment.

Also posted at Invictus

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Bush's 2008 State Of the Union Speech

The Beginning of the End
By William Rivers Pitt, t r u t h o u t | Columnist, Tuesday 29 January 2008

And when he had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour.
- Revelations 8:1, King James Bible

George W. Bush's State of the Union (SOTU) speeches have been the basis for a new kind of drinking game for several years now, basically because the things have always needed some kind of actual substance from somewhere, and because it was a good way to dull the pain of it all. The rules: 1. When he says the word "terra" or "terra-ists," take a drink. 2. When he says "tax cuts," take a drink. 3. When he says "Iraq," take a drink. 4. When he says "nook-yuh-lerr," take a drink and a shot and a good swift kick to the head. Et cetera.

But that's just one night out of the year. Reality has proven to be far more alcoholic in nature. For seven years now, the whole phenomenon of this government has been one long drinking game played out each and every day. The rules of this game? 1. Say the words, "George W. Bush is in charge of the country." 2. Turn off the TV. 3. Just drink.

Sounds familiar, right? Just about everyone has played that game a time or two by now. We have endured seven Bush SOTU speeches as of last night. Seven years worth of lies, carnage, greed, disgrace, failure, ignominy, calamity heaped upon calamity heaped upon calamity for more than two thousand five hundred days now, with three hundred and fifty seven more days still to go.

Seven speeches. Seven years.

No more.

The final deal went down in DC last night, wreathed in all the pomp and circumstance of political theater and media spectacle. The first tangible evidence this long national and planetary nightmare is actually beginning to come to an end was served up live on network television, for the viewing pleasure of a thoroughly disgusted and entirely disinterested American public.

If Bush's lips are moving, it means he must be lying; so it has been for all those days, and so it was again on Monday evening. Some 75 percent of the citizenry believe this country to be "on the wrong track," and since the gomer giving the speech last night is seen as being largely responsible for putting us all on this "wrong track" to begin with, a vast American majority pretty much didn't give a fig about what he had to say.

All that most people cared about was the historic significance of the night itself. It was The Last Bush SOTU Speech Ever.

Seven speeches.

Seven years.

No more.

Remember Bush's SOTU speech from January 20 of 2003? That was the one when he told America Iraq was in possession of 6,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent - for those without calculators, 500 tons equals 1,000,000 pounds - plus around 30,000 munitions to deliver these agents, mobile biological weapons labs and uranium from Niger for use in a robust nook-yuh-lerr weapons program.

Take your drink. Take your shot. Don't forget your kick to the head: Each and every single one of those comprehensively-debunked claims can still be found on the White House web site.

Five American soldiers died in Iraq during the afternoon preceding Bush's SOTU speech on Monday. They were patrolling the city of Mosul and were struck by a roadside bomb that was followed up with lethal gunfire. There have now been 36 American soldiers killed in Iraq during the month of January, and 3,940 killed in total since Bush gave that January 2003 SOTU address and thus signed the death warrants for our fallen troops.

We don't do body counts, so there's no accurate way to assess how many tens or hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have been killed and maimed since that 2003 speech. Last Wednesday, 60 Iraqis were killed and 280 others were wounded when a huge bomb exploded in Mosul. The casualties, according to a New York Times report, were "mostly children, women and the elderly."

"Americans are still dying at the rate of one every day," wrote Chicago Tribune columnist Steve Chapman last week. "And violent civilian Iraqi deaths, according to the independent web site Iraq Body Count (iraqbodycount.org), have averaged about 1,000 a month since September. That's far lower than last January, but it's no better than in 2005, and it's well above the levels of 2004 - when Iraq was already in the grip of bloody chaos. To pronounce that reduction a success is like driving your car into a lake and then bragging when you pull it halfway out."

Bush managed all this with just the one 2003 SOTU speech. He's given seven of the things now, so adjust the body-count mathematics accordingly. Seven speeches. Seven years.

No more.

Monday night's speech was almost breathtaking in its lack of substance. He promised to bring the 9/11 perpetrators to justice, again. He promised to bring democracy to the Middle East, again. He talked up tax cuts for the financially solvent, again. He threatened Iran, again. He massaged the debacle known as "No Child Left Behind," again. He mispronounced "nuclear" at least three times, again. Basically, Bush could have just as easily been replaced by one of those high-school-chemistry-class projection screens showing some random video snippets from his other six SOTU addresses. Nobody would have noticed the difference.

There was no there, there. Again.

We have to put up with this man and his people for less than a year, or so most people believe. A story on today's Washington Post front page by Michael Abramowitz, however, reeled off a laundry list of pre-speech challenges for Bush that was capped by this line: "That is the problem Bush faces as he prepares to deliver his seventh and probably final State of the Union address tonight."

"Probably final"?

"Probably final"?!

Drink.

William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of two books: "War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know" and "The Greatest Sedition Is Silence." His newest book, "House of Ill Repute: Reflections on War, Lies, and America's Ravaged Reputation," is now available from PoliPointPress.

The 2008 SOTU was his last address.

Now he's a man with no address.

The GOP doesn't want him in their house. The Democrats don't want him in their house. The whole damn country doesn't want him in their house.

But give the man some respect. He has his biggest challenge still ahead of him.

Self-governance:
Or he can always go back to life in a bottle. Were he from a middle class family, he'd probably be staggering through an alley somewhere with nothing but a bottle of cheap wine to keep him warm and help him forget his string of failures, or in prison... where he belongs.

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First There Were 935 Lies... But What About The Scandals? Hugh Makes A List... 300 and Counting!

News of "The 935"

Tipped by discourse.net

Hugh Makes a List

"...because there are just too many scandals to remember"

INTRODUCTION: George Bush, the Connecticut cowboy, the good old boy from Yale is a man of mediocre intelligence, little imagination, and great stubbornness and vindictiveness. He may be the Decider but his handlers have long known how to manipulate him. The key is to hook him with short, simple sells. Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, and Condoleezza Rice know that once he has consulted his gut and perhaps his higher father his decision is forever. So whoever gets to him first is likely to carry the day because he doesn't like to be challenged and is, quite simply, too lazy to change his mind. The Bubble is a natural consequence of this decision making process where logic, reason, and facts have little or no role.

...Bush's Presidency began in the shadow of a contested and likely stolen election and promised to be unsuccessful in a largely forgettable and unremarkable way. 911 changed all that and transformed a plodding, and essentially AWOL one termer into an accidental hero. Enormous power flowed to his office but Bush had no idea how to use it. He liked to campaign, not govern. In those around him, he prized loyalty over competence and honesty. A believer in the notion of "to the victor go the spoils," he was the perfect mark for every conniver, bumbler, bungler, hack, hanger on, and would be crony that Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, and their friends could find. In the normal course of things, this would have spelled failure. Post-911, it was catastrophic.

....At this critical juncture in our history we needed an adult but got an adolescent. Instead of responsibility, we got a truant. In place of flexibility we got obduracy. In the face of great and complex challenges, we got strawmen, a black and white universe, my way or the highway, regurgitated stump speeches, and a steadfast refusal to compromise not just with opponents but with reality.

....What all this comes down to is that George Bush should never have become our President. He is not just a bad President but the worst one we could have had, the worst our country has ever seen. This is a judgment that many Americans have come to but which our political establishment and media, even after 6 years, have yet to acknowledge, accept, and act on. This is the tragedy and crime of our times.

1. Walter Reed [Details]
2. Firing of US attorneys. [Details]
.
.
30. Cooked intelligence and the Office of Strategic Plans/ Doug Feith
.
.
.
43. Porter Goss and the gutting of the CIA

[He goes on in GREAT detail about all 300 (and counting... feel free to contact him if he's missed one)]

Continued @ Hugh Makes a List

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Fallout from the Torture Issue: Why I'm Leaving APA

I’m sending a letter off to the American Psychological Association (APA) explaining my decision to resign membership from that organization. The text of the letter follows below (with hypertext links added here to assist the reader with context).

January 27, 2008

Alan E. Kazdin, Ph.D.
President, American Psychological Association
750 First Street, NE
Washington, DC 20002-4232

Dear Dr. Kazdin,

I hereby resign my membership in the American Psychological Association (APA). I have up until now been working with Psychologists for an Ethical APA for an overturn in APA policy on psychologist involvement in national security interrogations, and I greatly respect those who are fighting via a dues boycott to influence APA policy on this matter. I hope to still work with these principled and dedicated professionals, but I cannot do it anymore from a position within APA.

Unlike some others who have left APA, my resignation is not based solely on the stance APA has taken regarding the participation of psychologists in national security interrogations. Rather, I view APA’s shifting position on interrogations to spring from a decades-long commitment to serve uncritically the national security apparatus of the United States. Recent publications and both public and closed professional events sponsored by APA have made it clear that this organization is dedicated to serving the national security interests of the American government and military, to the extent of ignoring basic human rights practice and law. The influence of the Pentagon and the CIA in APA activities is overt and pervasive, if often hidden. The revelations over the constitution and behavior of the 2005 Psychological Ethics and National Security (PENS) panel are a case in point. While charged with investigating the dilemmas for psychologists involved in military interrogations in the light of the scandals surrounding Guanatamo’s Camp Delta and Abu Ghraib prison, it was stacked with military and governmental personnel, and closely monitored and pressured by APA staff.

I strongly disagree with APA’s current position on interrogations, and am unimpressed with recent clarifications to that position that allows for voluntary non-participation in specifically defined cases where torture and abuse of prisoners is proved to exist. I have discussed my reasoning for this elsewhere, both blogging on the Internet and in public. In 2007, I was a panelist in the “mini-convention,” which examined the dispute over interrogations held at the APA Convention in San Francisco, presenting my findings on secret and non-secret psychologist research into isolation, sensory deprivation and sensory overload.

I will briefly review my objections to APA policy and practices, then place them in the context of current APA institutional objectives and goals. I find the latter to be antithetical to the ideals of an ethical and beneficent organization promoting psychological knowledge and practice.

*** APA’s position on non-involvement in torture allows psychologists to work in settings that do not allow the basic right of habeas corpus, in addition to practices of humane confinement as delineated in the Conventions of the Geneva Protocols and various international documents and treaties.

*** APA maintains in private communications that relegating various modes of psychological torture (sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, isolation) and the use of drugs in interrogations to something less than outright prohibition in recent APA position papers does not mean APA had any intention of providing a “loophole” for interrogators in the practice of coercive interrogations. APA also promises to clarify its position on these matters in an “ethics casebook.” When it has found it exigent, as on the PENS resolution, to step outside normal procedure to clarify its position, it has done so. I find it noteworthy that recent APA clarifications of its position are treated as something requiring less than direct organizational expression.

*** APA continues to propagate a position that it knows is not true, specifically that psychologists operate in interrogation settings to prevent abusive interrogations. While sometimes citing the compelling conclusions about context and behavior outlined by Zimbardo, and stemming from his famous Prisoner Experiment, it twists the representation of this research by making psychologists into a quasi-police force monitoring abusive interrogations. On the contrary, the Zimbardo research leads to a more unsettling conclusion, i.e., that human beings in general are susceptible to participation in abusive behavior based upon contextual factors. In fact, the Zimbardo research argues, as Dr. Zimbardo himself has done, against participation in these kinds of interrogations.

*** APA has shown precious little interest in the many revelations regarding psychologist participation in torture, or in psychologist research into abusive or coercive interrogations. Excepting only a brief period in the late 1970s, when widespread and public exposure of CIA mind control programs raised considerable scandal, APA has shown little inclination to confront the history of psychologist participation in such research, nor of its own institutional role in this research.

*** Finally, recent APA activities, such as the joint CIA/Rand Corporation/APA July 2003 workshop in the “Science of Deception,” point to questionable current participation in unethical practices and illegal governmental activities. I queried relevant actors and APA leaders as to what actually occurred at this workshop, which the APA Science Directorate described as discussing how to use “pharmacological agents to affect apparent truth-telling behavior?” Also considered was the study of “sensory overloads on the maintenance of deceptive behaviors,” with workshop participants asked, “How might we overload the system or overwhelm the senses and see how it affects deceptive behaviors?” I never received any answer from relevant APA personnel, including the current director of ethics, about what was going on at this workshop.

The latter episode captures the terrible trap into which APA has fallen. When making agreements with state intelligence and military agencies, it is usual that secrecy agreements are signed. This makes it impossible to reasonably assess and monitor the activities of psychologists in national security settings. Furthermore, the subordination of military psychologists to the chain of command of the armed forces also allows for ineffective if not impossible oversight of psychologist activities. But the problem with secrecy does not end there. Major researchers, including even a former APA president, who contracted with the government, or had their work utilized by the military, as for the latter’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape or SERE program, have told me they are unable to discuss matters beyond a certain point, or tried to restrict discussion of these matters, no doubt due in part to secrecy restrictions. Summing up this point, governmental secrecy and scientific enterprise are in direct opposition to each other, and secrecy negates the promise of effective oversight, not to mention the distortions it renders upon the scientific process itself.

In the recently APA published book, Psychology in the Service of National Security (APA Press, 2006), the book’s editor, A. David Mangelsdorff, wrote, “As the military adjusts to its changing roles in the new national security environment, psychologists have much to offer” (p. 237). He notes the recent forward military deployment of psychologists, their use in so-called anti-terrorism research, and assistance in influencing public opinion about “national security problems facing the nation.” L. Morgan Banks, himself Chief of the Psychological Applications Directorate of the U.S. Army Special Operations Command, and a member of the controversial PENS panel, wrote elsewhere in the same book about the “bright future” (p. 95) for psychologists working with Special Operations Forces. Never mind that SOPs have been implicated in torture in Afghanistan, including receiving instructions in such coercive procedures from psychologists from some of the same psychologists, by the way, that attended the APA/CIA workshop noted above.) Nowhere could I find in the entire book a discussion of ethical problems surrounding these issues, nor certainly of political and social questions implicit in such outright support of governmental initiatives and military policy. Additionally, and curiously, there is no discussion of psychologist participation in military interrogations anywhere in the book.

In my opinion, and despite the otherwise notable and positive stances and activities of APA on other aspects of social note, such as work against prejudice against gays and lesbians, or against race prejudice, it is an unfortunate but urgent fact that APA as an institution has become subordinated to the state when it comes to military matters. In other words, when it comes to interrogations and psychologist military activities in general, APA acts as an arm of the Pentagon and a support agency for the CIA. The differences around interrogation policy APA has with the Bush Administration is itself a mirror of differences with the administration itself, and within different governmental departments. In such instances, APA acts as the instrument of one or another faction within government, but not as an independent actor and representative of the profession and its ideals and goals.

I would suggest the following remedies, if any are still possible, in turning around the degeneration of APA into a willing instrument for U.S. military and intelligence interests:

1) A full opening of all APA archives related to research and participation in activities with the military, including its intelligence arms; and a call for the government to declassify all documents related to the same;

2) The disestablishment of Division 19, the Society for Military Psychology, from the APA;

3) The immediate recission of APA’s Ethics Code 1.02, which was changed from earlier formulations in 2002 to permit adherence “to the requirements of the law, regulations, or other governing legal authority” when there is otherwise a conflict between the law and psychologists’ ethical practice. Opponents of 1.02 have rightly compared it to the Nazi defense of “following orders” at Nuremberg;

4) A call for the formation of a civilian, cross-disciplinary investigatory panel to examine the past history and current collaboration of scientific and medical professionals with the government, especially its military and intelligence agencies, to encompass fields as diverse as psychology, anthropology, linguistics, and sociology, with a goal of producing recommendations on interactions between government and the scientific and medical communities;

5) A moratorium on research into interrogations;

6) Sever the link that ties APA’s definition of “cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment or punishment” in its various resolutions from the Reagan-era Reservations to the UN Convention Against Torture, which seeks to weaken that definition by relying on suspect interpretations of U.S. law rather than international definitions;

7) The immediate cessation of all support for involvement of psychological personnel in participation in any activity that supports national security interrogations.

The sordid history of American psychology when it comes to collaboration with governmental agencies in the research and implementation of techniques of psychological torture is one that our field will have to confront sooner or later. In a larger sense, the problems I have presented here are inherent in a larger societal dilemma regarding the uses of knowledge. This problem was recognized by the first critics of untrammeled scientific advance, and represented powerfully by Goethe’s Faust, and Mary Shelley’s Doctor Frankenstein. Human knowledge is capable of producing both good and evil. The scientist, the scholar, and the doctor hold tremendous responsibility in their hands. That they have not shown themselves, in a tragic number of instances, to ethically wield or control this responsibility has meant that the 21st century opens under the awful prospect of worldwide nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare, while a sinister, behaviorally-designed torture apparatus operates as the servant of nation-states wielding these awful weapons of mass destruction.

It’s appropriate that I close with a statement about the problem of serving powerful national interests from a former president of the APA, a leading and important pioneer in our field, and also, for awhile, a member with top secret clearance in the CIA’s MKULTRA mind control program, Carl Rogers. One wonders, along with the authors of a recent study on Dr. Rogers’ CIA collaboration (see Demanchick & Kirschenbaum (2008), Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 48, pp. 6-30), if Rogers’ exposure to the world of secret government military projects didn’t inform his feelings about psychologists and government, as expressed in his famous debate with another seminal psychologist, B. F. Skinner:

To hope that the power which is being made available by the behavioral sciences will be exercised by the scientists, or by a benevolent group, seems to me a hope little supported by either recent or distant history. It seems far more likely that behavioral scientists, holding their present attitudes, will be in the position of the German rocket scientists specializing in guided missiles. First they worked devotedly for Hitler to destroy the U.S.S.R. and the United States. Now, depending on who captured them, they work devotedly for the U.S.S.R. in the interest of destroying the United States, or devotedly for the United States in the interest of destroying the U.S.S.R. If behavioral scientists are concerned solely with advancing their science, it seems most probably that they will serve the purposes of whatever individual or group has the power. (Rogers & Skinner (1956), “Some issues concerning the control of human behavior. A symposium.” Science, 124, p. 1061.)

Sincerely yours,

J------ K------, Ph.D.
San Francisco, CA

(Also posted at Invictus)

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