The Rag Blog

I was onstage right next to Allen Ginsberg at the Human Be-In. I had an autoharp, which I was playing in those days. Luckily, they never allowed me to perform, because it would’ve been a disaster.

There was a sea of 10,000 faces. Don’t know how many they actually counted.

I remember, in the sunset, this lone parachutist descended on the crowd. That was great.

They call that particular locale in Golden Gate park Hippie Hill. They’d had big crowds there before, but nothing like that.

At one point, Allen turned to me and said, ‘What if we’re all wrong?’ I don’t think I had answer.

I didn’t realize a big part of audience was quote “kids,” they were just turned on hippies of all ages. There was a lot of smoke in the air.

A lot of acid being dropped. Yeah, I did drop that day. It was terrible. It’s not a good idea to do it in a crowded place. The only other time I did it was in Big Sur. That was the kind of setting you should have. Actually it wasn’t so bad, I was just kind of confused.

During the Summer of Love, I got the impression kids from all over the country were descending on the Haight Ashbury. Word had gotten around the country, and they all came to San Francisco, just out of high school, still in high school, college kids.

It was about that time that things began to fall apart. Really heavy drugs came in. Before things went bad, everything was light, in both senses of the word, light physically in the sky, and also in the sense of light versus heavy. After that year, everything got heavy. Things just degenerated more and more. I think it was that summer. It’s so long ago. I’m looking through the wrong end of telescope. It’s hard to differentiate one year from another.

Before, up through the Human Be-In, the Haight was really sort of innocent, clean.

I remember the early Jefferson Airplane, which was very lyrical. I was going to the Fillmore quite a bit. (Poet) Andre Voznesensky and I performed in between sets of the Jefferson Airplane at the old Fillmore. Bill Graham generously offered us the stage. I was reading translations of Andre’s poems. He was doing them in Russian.

Yeah, there was a light show going on at the time. That movement changed the whole country. All the main aspects of the hippie counterculture were ingested into the middle class: The music, the clothes, the colors, the psychedelic colors, the anti-war movement.

Herbert Marcuse spoke of the enormous capacity of the dominant society to ingest its own most dissonant elements. That’s just what happened.

Personally, I guess I was changed by that period.

I suddenly got 20 years younger.

The scientific community now finally seems to agree on the fact that global warming is happening and that it’s urgent to find remedies against the imminent hazards that threaten the planet. The big question that confronts the world community now is how do we go about countering this imminent global disaster.

During a short tour to a few cooperative countries in Latin America in March 2007 by our opportunist president, an ethanol alliance was proclaimed in Brazil (Sao Paolo March 8) between George W. Bush and Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva. “[It was] hailed by apologists for both governments as an advance in the development of alternative sources of energy and a gain for both countries’ economies.” (WSWS – ‘Brazil: Bush-Lula biofuel plans based on conditions worse than slavery’)

The relative costs and benefits of ethanol biofuels, however, are very much subject to doubt and even to open criticism by much of the community that is fighting for alternative sources for fuel.

An article in Le Monde Diplomatique of June 2007 (‘Les cinq mythes de la transition vers les agrocarburants’ – ‘The five myths of the transition towards biofuels'[1]) makes an impressive case against the cultivating of corn, sugar cane, wheat and soy beans for the development of ethanol to replace dwindling currently existing energy sources.

There is an insufficient supply of natural gas and oil-based energy which simply has to be replaced until the masses of energy-consuming people are forced to decrease their dependence on gas and oil and all the various forms of petrochemicals that we are addicted to.

However, what is the case for or against the imagined ethanol panacea? How thoroughly were the research and the arithmetic done before this huge enterprise was launched?

The case against ethanol biofuel is written in huge and clear script, so clear it is surprising that even the corporate industry that pushes for ethanol, for obvious reasons, is unable to read the writing on the wall. The cultivation of ethanol-producing crops is clearly just another way of making more profit. Instant profit is the god of the day and the mega cultures of corn, sugar cane, wheat and soy beans will add huge profits to transnational corporations. If one day the supply of oil and gas is going to give diminishing returns, which still seems to be a somewhat distant way off in the future, the way the price of gasoline and natural gas are skyrocketing, the big corporations will certainly make sure that they are protected against any possible future economic downturn.

The United States, Brazil, India and China are already busy cultivating these crops. The industry is already under way and has been for five years as far as the U.S. is concerned.

There are two major arguments to be made in this context.

Second: Besides this obvious drawback, there is the even more frightening fact that the culture of these fuel producing crops would take away such huge amounts of land from food-producing agro business that it would lead to increasing mass starvation on the planet. Already over half a billion people on the planet are starving.[2] Is it really the moment to convert huge arable lands from food production to ethanol-producing corn, sugar cane, soy beans and wheat?

What will follow if the world ignores the need for equitable distribution of the food that is presently available (more than enough to feed the world population) and sets out on a course of depriving the people of what is their due?[3] There is already an urgent need for improved policies for feeding the world’s population, and it seems insane instead to take away the food from the people who are already exposed to the risk of starving.

American cable news has been fixated on the jailing of socialite Paris Hilton for the past week, on grounds that she twice violated the probation sentence she earlier received for drunk driving. They interrupted coverage of world leaders at the G8. They briefly spliced in Gates’s decision not to reappoint Peter Pace as chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. A new frenzy broke out with every tiny twist . She was brave, she was weeping, she was mentally fragile. She was released, she was rejailed, she shouted it was unfair and cried, she was undergoing psychiatric evaluation.

Just for a little perspective, we could consider the news from Iraq on Saturday. Incoming mortar fire from guerrillas hit Bucca prison, killing 6 inmates and wounding 50.

The US military is holding 19000 Iraqis, 16000 of them at Bucca. Although most are guerrillas or their helpers, a lot of them were picked up because they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Once arrested, an inmate often cannot clear himself for months or years. I don’t think they have access to attorneys. No one cares if they are depressed. At Abu Ghraib earlier on, some inmates were systematically tortured. It is unclear if all such practices have ceased.

Some Iraqi women have been held in this way. Some were essentially hostages, taken to make them reveal where their husbands or fathers were or to guarantee their good behavior. Their reputations were shot, since Iraqis think Americans are sex fiends and wouldn’t trust the virtue of a woman who had been in their custody. The unmarried among them are likely doomed to be spinsters.

American television never mentions that the US has 19000 Iraqis in jail, or that some have been women, or that some are innocent, or how they feel about being in prison.

So is Paris Hilton being given special treatment by our media? We all are, folks.

posted by Juan @ 6/10/2007 06:29:00 AM

1 Comments:

At 6:52 AM, Peter Attwood said…

Why might Iraqis, Filipinos, and Okinawans, and Thais – for starters – think that Americans are sex fiends? Aren’t these the people who gang-raped a 14-year-old girl, like those who gang-raped the 12-year-old in Okinawa, in both cases protected by their chain of command? And what kind of barbarians take wives and daughters hostage anyway? Didn’t they used to think the Nazis were such awful people because they did such things?

Why does Paris Hilton have more traction with American audiences than Iraqi prisoners? That’s easy, and it has nothing to do with the nefarious media.

Paris Hilton is foxy, and slutty, and rich. Men can fantasize about having her, and women can fantasize about being her, or maybe not being her.

It’s not nearly as entertaining to think about Iraqi prisoners, because that means to think about just what you’re supporting when you “support our troops,” nearly half of whom actually say that they approve of torture, and who shamelessly sing songs like “Haji Girl” – and all with the hearty approval of their chain of command, who for the most part are even perfectly OK with their own women soldiers being raped and abused. To paraphrase Roger Taney in the Dred Scott decision, how much more then do Iraqis have no rights that any American is bound to respect?

“American Special Operations forces conducted raids in the area on Friday and Sunday, and on both occasions they called in airstrikes when they encountered armed resistance, the military said. It said in a statement that it had killed 136 Taliban fighters, including some who were trying to flee across the river.”

“Aerial bombing of a valley in western Afghanistan several days ago by the American military killed at least 42 civilians, including women and children, and wounded 50 more, an Afghan government investigation found Wednesday. A provincial council member who visited the site independently put the figure at 50 civilians killed “. . . some women and children were drowned in the river, and it was maybe in the heat of the moment that the children and people wanted to escape and jumped into the water”.”

New York Times, June 3, 2007

Who do you believe about the killing of Afghan civilians? Do you believe official US military statements, brought to us by the people who fabricated the story about Jessica Lynch and lied contemptibly at the highest levels about the killing of Pat Tillman? Or do you believe the Afghans who investigated the bombing?

The military gave a precise number for the number of supposed ‘Taliban’ killed by air strikes, so there are two points to be considered. First, in such circumstances how could they know the number and that all those killed were ‘Taliban’? That is impossible. Second, the military tell us smugly that they don’t do body counts. Then they feed the media with supposed exact figures of dead “enemy”. How can we trust people who produce such garbage? But this atrocity, like so many others, will vanish into the dust of history, speeded into oblivion by the lies of the Pentagon.

In another example of deception the military mind-benders went a bit too far. They made up identical quotes from an “Iraqi man who preferred not to be identified” concerning two entirely separate incidents. Here are the official announcements:

July 13, 2005: “The terrorists are attacking the infrastructure, the children and all of Iraq,” said one Iraqi man who preferred not to be identified. “They are enemies of humanity without religion or any sort of ethics. They have attacked my community today and I will now take the fight to the terrorists”.”

and

July 24, 2005: ” “The terrorists are attacking the infrastructure, the ISF [Iraqi Security Forces] and all of Iraq. They are enemies of humanity without religion or any sort of ethics. They have attacked my community today and I will now take the fight to the terrorists,” said one Iraqi man who preferred not to be identified.”

According to CNN “Lt. Col. Clifford Kent, spokesman for the U.S. Army’s 3rd Infantry Division, said use of the quote was an “administrative error.” He said the military was looking into the matter.” Yeah, right, Colonel.

It so happened that on July 11, 2005 Bush had declared “In the face of such adversaries there is only one course of action: We will continue to take the fight to the enemy . . .”, and it looks as if the phrase lodged in what might possibly be called the minds of the Pentagon’s robots. The Department of Defense PR machine was working hard, and the lying moron who concocted the press releases and disgraced his uniform and the Constitution of the United States has probably been promoted. But he had good examples to follow.

During the barbarous obliteration of the town of Fallujah by US forces in 2004 it was stated by witnesses that in the course of their malevolent savagery US troops fired White Phosphorus (WP; what we old soldiers used to know as ‘Willy Pete’) shells which are terror explosives that kill people in the most hideous way. This was denied vehemently by Washington. One self-righteous official rebuttal was that:

” . . . some news accounts have claimed that U.S. forces have used “outlawed” phosphorus shells in Fallujah. Phosphorus shells are not outlawed. U.S. forces have used them very sparingly in Fallujah, for illumination purposes. They were fired into the air to illuminate enemy positions at night, not at enemy fighters. There is a great deal of misinformation feeding on itself about U.S. forces allegedly using “outlawed” weapons in Fallujah. The facts are that U.S. forces are not using any illegal weapons in Fallujah or anywhere else in Iraq.”

Well . . . , perhaps not quite all the facts, because the US Army’s Field Artillery Magazine then recounted, embarrassingly, that :

“The munitions we brought to this fight [in Fallujah] [included] illumination and white phosphorous (WP, M110 and M825) . . . . White Phosphorus proved to be an effective and versatile munition. We used it for screening missions . . . and, later in the fight, as a potent psychological weapon against the insurgents in trench lines and spider holes when we could not get effects on them with HE. We fired “shake and bake” missions at the insurgents, using WP to flush them out and HE to take them out. . . We used improved WP for screening missions when HC smoke would have been more effective and saved our WP for lethal missions.”

The official Pentagon lie was “they were fired into the air to illuminate enemy positions” but the army inadvertently revealed that they were fired to “shake and bake”. In ordinary language that means to terrify and incinerate. A tiny morsel of WP burns instantly into flesh and cannot be stopped in its fiery chemical plunge deep into the body. There is no remedy. Victims die in shrieking agony from the effects of ammunition that the Pentagon boobies tell the world was fired “into the air to illuminate enemy positions at night, not at enemy fighters.” They lied. They are beneath contempt.

These people have forfeited all trust and credibility, especially as it seems they tell their lies for political reasons.

The military are supposed to be non-political. They owe allegiance to the Constitution. Their duty as citizens in uniform is to be representative of all Americans, no matter what politician is in the White House; no matter what political parties indulge in puerile antics in the House and Senate. But it appears that the generals have become politicized. Facts are acceptable only if they help the White House, and if convenient facts can’t be produced it’s easy enough to conjure up some cockamamie claptrap that will be believed by an amazing number of Americans, if by nobody else. Take, for example, the latest news about the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay.

We are supposed to believe that a boy who was thrown into jail in Afghanistan at the age of fifteen is a major and potent enemy of the United States. It is claimed that he is guilty of “conspiracy, murder, attempted murder, spying, and proving material support for terrorism.” At fifteen years of age he was in a compound that was bombed by US aircraft. He was the only survivor and, appallingly wounded (he lost an eye), he threw a grenade at US soldiers who came in to finish things off. They beat him up and he was then subjected to the most vicious torture before being sent to the Gulag cells of Guantanamo Bay.

Don’t these people understand that by conjuring up such twaddle they are making their nation an object of ridicule and hatred?

A courageous Iraqi journalist, who covered sectarian violence in the north of the country, has been murdered in Mosul, the latest victim of attacks against Muslim women reporters.

Sahar Hussein al-Haideri, 45, a top Iraqi reporter working in the perilous Mosul region, who fearlessly wrote about efforts by extremist forces to take control of the city and foment sectarian conflict, was murdered outside her home on June 7.

Haideri reported for a Mosul newspaper, the Voices of Iraq news agency, and the Institute for War & Peace Reporting, IWPR, where she had participated in numerous training and exchange programmes over the past three years.

Her most recent story was a moving feature on the stoning to death of a young Yezidi girl who had converted to Islam after falling in love with a Muslim boy. See “Honour Killing” Sparks Fears of New Iraqi Conflict.

Haideri had long been concerned about her security, and for the past year had contributed reports to IWPR under a pseudonym. Six months ago, her husband and four children moved to Damascus, and she had recently relocated to Syria herself.

The Yezidi minority has so far stayed well out of Iraq’s internecine battles, but violence with their Muslim neighbours has escalated following the murder of a girl who apparently converted to Islam.

Bashiqa, a small town sitting in lush green hills east of the city of Mosul, used to be regarded as an island of peace and stability while vast areas of post-Saddam Iraq were plunged into civil war.

Home to a population that is 70 per cent Yezidi – members of an old sect that is neither Muslim nor Christian – Bashiqa was spared the sectarian and ethnic strife between Arabs and Kurds, radical Sunnis and Shia that plagued surrounding areas. People from Mosul would drive the 25 kilometres to Bashiqa to have picnics and to enjoy the tranquility of a little town where Yezidi temples, Muslim mosques and Christian churches stand in close proximity, presenting a rare image of tolerant coexistence.

Until April 7, that is. On that day, a furious mob stoned a 17-year-old girl to death while bystanders applauded and filmed the killing on their cell phones.

Her crime? Duaa Khalil Aswad, a Yezidi, had run away from home because she had fallen in love with a Muslim boy. It was not the first love story of its kind, nor was it the first “honour killing” in a region where women are subject to strong social restrictions and face severe punishment for disregarding family, tribal or religious traditions.

Such cases can no longer be covered up as easily these days, because of pressure from local women’s activists – but they rarely cause a stir.

Duaa’s case was different. This killing has had much wider impact – unleashing widespread inter-communal strife in a formerly peaceful area, which has resulted in at least 20 deaths and the threat of more violence.

You might have missed it–a story buried in that slush pile of celebrity news, happy talk, and un-vetted press releases that now constitute so much of American journalism–but a report released by the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta has recently added a new threat to the nation’s growing stack of worries.

An intensive study of 1,000 randomly-selected Americans has yielded conclusive evidence of a heretofore unnoted contagion, an offshoot of Tourette’s Syndrome doctors have labeled BES, or Bush Exasperation Syndrome. As first reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), symptoms of Bush Exasperation Syndrome include involuntary outbursts of projectile cursing whenever the name or image of President George W. Bush is flashed before sufferers of this malady. This catalytic image (or trigger) has produced bouts of explosive and uncontrollable profanity in well over half of those tested for the disease.

But reflexive and propulsive swearing is only the most benign symptom of BES. As the disease progresses, more advanced symptoms include the loss of a sense of humor, coupled with feelings of hopelessness and despair. And the number of traffic accidents is thought to have increased due to drivers losing control of their vehicles while suffering BES-related episodes.

Most startling and worrisome is the fact that early indications suggest that as much as 60% of the nation’s population may be infected with BES, creating a degree of suffering seldom revealed by medical research. BES now qualifies as a true epidemic throughout the American population.

Preliminary studies reveal, however, that people with measurably low intelligence have an inexplicable immunity to this ailment thought to be linked to their DNA. Scientists have found an almost exact correlation between IQ and the degree of susceptibility to BES. The lower your IQ, the less likely it is that you will be infected.

Ironically, it was President Bush’s own father who alerted the scientific and medical communities to this looming threat. In an interview with Larry King back in April, the elder Bush allowed as how the nation was, perhaps, suffering from “Bush fatigue.” The phrase resonated with scientists at the CDC who had long suspected a correlation between a notable uptick in uncontrolled cursing virtually from the moment Bush took office, an outbreak that has skyrocketed in both severity and frequency in the last couple of years. George Herbert Walker Bush’s diagnosis of Bush Fatigue was, however, imprecise and unscientific. Early studies did, in fact, disclose a condition physicians called Bush Fatigue Syndrome (BFS), but that condition is a wholly separate disorder, differing from Bush Exasperation Syndrome (BES) in etiologically distinct ways. While sufferers of Bush Fatigue Syndrome present symptoms of ennui, numbness, loss of appetite, and purposelessness, those stricken with Bush Exasperation Syndrome are more likely to be volatile, unable to control their bodily movements when seized by a fit of cursing, with arms flailing, and digits involuntarily making obscene hand gestures at television screens or other triggering stimuli.

One of the many corollary symptoms of BES is a tendency to seek comfort in food. Thus it is that we are fast becoming a diseased nation made up of legions of obese people who are thrown into paroxysms of cursing and gesticulating each time the afflicted are confronted by an image of their nation’s leader. Even more insidious, words and phrases widely known to be associated with George W. Bush can increase the severity of these seizures. For instance, the phrase “the decider” has been shown to be nearly fatal to people with advanced cases of the disease, and there have been a handful of documented fatalities attributed to BES patients exposed to the phrase “Is our children learning?”

So far, the only known antidote is to sequester patients away from any possible Bush-related stimuli, a kind of quarantine that is nearly impossible to secure.

“The man who risked everything…
To speak for those who could not…
To make the blind see…
And to lead a movement that would change the world.”

Anyone who has seen the film Amazing Grace will appreciate the parallels between the career of William Wilberforce, as romanticised by Hollywood, and that of Tony Blair, as romanticised by Tony Blair.

Like Mr Blair, Wilberforce had his roots in the north of England. Like Mr Blair, he did not distinguish himself at Oxbridge. Like Mr Blair, he lost no time in entering politics, where his affability ensured rapid advancement. And, like Mr Blair, Wilberforce was strongly influenced by the Evangelical movement.

The revelation of “the infinite love, that Christ should die to save such a sinner” came to Wilberforce like a thunderbolt after he had entered Parliament.

But he was persuaded by (among others) the repentant slave trader and composer of Amazing Grace John Newton, that he could “do both”: politics and God’s work. It took a few false starts before, alerted to the atrocious conditions aboard slave ships making the transatlantic “Middle Passage”, he found his cause célèbre.

The moral transformation of England achieved by the Evangelical movement, without which the law abolishing the slave trade would never have been passed, has its echoes in our own time.

Today, of course, most English people are faintly embarrassed by religion and regard Americans as rather absurd for reading the Bible. Nevertheless, the English retain an authentically 19th-century enthusiasm for moral crusades. Part of Mr Blair’s original appeal as a politician was precisely the impression he gave of being able to lead one.

In our time, as in the 1800s, Africa has an especially strong appeal to the Evangelical sensibility. There is something irresistible about being able to feel simultaneously guilty about the continent’s problems (“I once was blind…”) and capable of solving them (“… but now I see”).

The problem is, of course, that generation after generation thinks it has found the solution, and generation after generation is disappointed. Wilberforce and his friends were convinced that abolishing the slave trade, and then slavery itself, would do the trick.

To give them their due, they knew that actions always speak louder than mere legislation. It should never be forgotten that, after the passage of the abolition legislation in 1807, the Royal Navy waged a sustained campaign against those who defied the British ban. Indeed, the campaign against slavery was a classic example of unilateral humanitarian intervention, in which the rights of other nations were repeatedly violated.

Yet doing away with the slave trade had less impressive consequences than the reformers had hoped. The same was true of abolishing slavery itself. Most of Africa remained not much better off in 1907 than it had been in 1807.

So something else had to be tried, and that something was state-led economic development. Throughout the Fifties, well-meaning administrators in the Colonial Office toiled to enrich Africa with groundnut schemes and the like. With minimal success.

So we tried again. This time the solution was political independence. British self-doubt was a much more important cause than indigenous nationalism of the “winds of change” that began to blow through Africa in the Fifties and Sixties. With astonishing speed, all British colonies in Africa were granted their freedom. Again, disappointment. Economically, the majority of the countries in question did even worse under self-government than they had under British rule.

We tried lending them money. That didn’t work. Then we gave them aid. That, too, had relatively meagre results. Many well-meaning people – led by that most Evangelical of economists, Jeffrey Sachs – continue to have faith in aid as a policy, arguing that it simply needs to be better targeted, for example on the provision of free malaria nets. But economists who know Africa better than Sachs are sceptical.

Oxford’s Paul Collier, author of The Bottom Billion, persuasively argues that Africa’s biggest problems (apart from incurable ones such as its location) are political. Corrupt tyrannies and civil wars between them account for a huge proportion of Africa’s economic under-performance since the end of colonial rule.

British and American collusion in the pillaging of Iraq’s heritage is a scandal that will outlive any passing conflict

Fly into the American air base of Tallil outside Nasiriya in central Iraq and the flight path is over the great ziggurat of Ur, reputedly the earliest city on earth. Seen from the base in the desert haze or the sand-filled gloom of dusk, the structure is indistinguishable from the mounds of fuel dumps, stores and hangars. Ur is safe within the base compound. But its walls are pockmarked with wartime shrapnel and a blockhouse is being built over an adjacent archaeological site. When the head of Iraq’s supposedly sovereign board of antiquities and heritage, Abbas al-Hussaini, tried to inspect the site recently, the Americans refused him access to his own most important monument.

Yesterday Hussaini reported to the British Museum on his struggles to protect his work in a state of anarchy. It was a heart breaking presentation. Under Saddam you were likely to be tortured and shot if you let someone steal an antiquity; in today’s Iraq you are likely to be tortured and shot if you don’t. The tragic fate of the national museum in Baghdad in April 2003 was as if federal troops had invaded New York city, sacked the police and told the criminal community that the Metropolitan was at their disposal. The local tank commander was told specifically not to protect the museum for a full two weeks after the invasion. Even the Nazis protected the Louvre.

When I visited the museum six months later, its then director, Donny George, proudly showed me the best he was making of a bad job. He was about to reopen, albeit with half his most important objects stolen. The pro-war lobby had stopped pretending that the looting was nothing to do with the Americans, who were shamefacedly helping retrieve stolen objects under the dynamic US colonel, Michael Bogdanos (author of a book on the subject). The vigorous Italian cultural envoy to the coalition, Mario Bondioli-Osio, was giving generously for restoration.

The beautiful Warka vase, carved in 3000BC, was recovered though smashed into 14 pieces. The exquisite Lyre of Ur, the world’s most ancient musical instrument, was found badly damaged. Clerics in Sadr City were ingeniously asked to tell wives to refuse to sleep with their husbands if looted objects were not returned, with some success. Nothing could be done about the fire-gutted national library and the loss of five centuries of Ottoman records (and works by Piccasso and Miro). But the message of winning hearts and minds seemed to have got through.

Today the picture is transformed. Donny George fled for his life last August after death threats. The national museum is not open but shut. Nor is it just shut. Its doors are bricked up, it is surrounded by concrete walls and its exhibits are sandbagged. Even the staff cannot get inside. There is no prospect of reopening.

Hussaini confirmed a report two years ago by John Curtis, of the British Museum, on America’s conversion of Nebuchadnezzar’s great city of Babylon into the hanging gardens of Halliburton. This meant a 150-hectare camp for 2,000 troops. In the process the 2,500-year-old brick pavement to the Ishtar Gate was smashed by tanks and the gate itself damaged. The archaeology-rich subsoil was bulldozed to fill sandbags, and large areas covered in compacted gravel for helipads and car parks. Babylon is being rendered archaeologically barren.

Meanwhile the courtyard of the 10th-century caravanserai of Khan al-Raba was used by the Americans for exploding captured insurgent weapons. One blast demolished the ancient roofs and felled many of the walls. The place is now a ruin.

The testimony is the first evidence suggesting that any officer may have engaged in a coverup in the 2005 deaths of 24 Iraqi civilians.

CAMP PENDLETON — A staff sergeant testified Thursday that he was ordered to destroy grisly pictures of women and children killed by Marines so that the images would not be part of a statement being prepared for an investigative officer and a magazine reporter.

The testimony by Staff Sgt. Justin Laughner, taken under a grant of immunity, is the first evidence suggesting that any Marine officer may have engaged in a coverup in the deaths of 24 Iraqi civilians in 2005.

Other testimony has suggested that officers made only a superficial review before deciding that the deaths were combat-related and thus no war crimes investigation was required.

At the Article 32 inquiry, similar to a preliminary hearing, for a former battalion commander, Laughner testified hat he felt the order to destroy the pictures, which he said was given by Lt. Andrew Grayson, amounted to obstruction of justice but that he complied and later lied when asked whether any pictures had been taken.

“It was wrong,” Laughner said. “Somebody was asking for them [the pictures], and we’re not going to give them to them? It’s not right, but I didn’t say anything.”

Although Laughner deleted the pictures from his computer, the images remained on his digital camera and are now part of the criminal case against four officers and three enlisted Marines.

Grayson is charged with dereliction of duty and obstruction of justice in the aftermath of the killings, which occurred in the Iraqi town of Haditha on Nov. 19, 2005. The three other officers — including the former commander of the Marine battalion involved, Lt. Col. Jeffrey Chessani — are charged with dereliction of duty for not calling for a war-crimes investigation.

At the inquiry on Chessani’s conduct, Laughner said that he had no evidence the lieutenant colonel ever saw the photographs or knew of their existence.

Laughner had taken the pictures in the hours after the killings.

Three months later, when he and Grayson were preparing a statement for high-ranking officers and a Time magazine reporter, Grayson told him to delete the pictures, Laughner testified Thursday.

The statement they prepared reiterated the Marines’ official position that the deaths were the result of crossfire after Marines were attacked by insurgents. Laughner and Grayson were part of an intelligence team assigned to work with the 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, in Haditha.

Team members interview civilians and, among other things, review the scene of civilian deaths to gather information that can be helpful to Marines.

Laughner arrived several hours after a roadside bomb had killed a Marine from the battalion’s Kilo Company. After that blast, Marines killed five young men outside their car and, after being ordered to search for insurgents in nearby houses, killed 19 civilians.

Laughner testified that Staff Sgt. Frank D. Wuterich, who led the troops involved in the shootings, told him that the men in the car had “engaged” the Marines with weapons, that Marines encountered an insurgent firing at them in one house, and that AK-47s were found in the houses. Prosecutors say all three assertions are lies.

Laughner said Wuterich did not tell him that the Marines had killed women and children in the houses. But when Laughner went to the houses to look for evidence of insurgents, he found instead a young girl who was in hysterics.

It was Israel which attacked Egypt after Nasser closed the straits of Tiran

06/09/07 “The Independent” — — – When I was a schoolboy, I loved a column which regularly appeared in British papers called “Ripley’s Believe It or Not!”. In a single rectangular box filled with naively drawn illustrations, Ripley – Bob Ripley – would try to astonish his readers with amazing facts:

“Believe It or Not, in California, an entire museum is dedicated to candy dispensers … Believe It or Not, a County Kerry man possesses an orange that is 25 years old … Believe It or Not, a weather researcher had his ashes scattered on the eve of Hurricane Danielle 400 miles off the coast of Miama, Florida.” Etc, etc, etc.

Incredibly, Ripley’s column lives on, and there is even a collection of “Ripley Believe It or Not” museums in the United States.

The problem, of course, is that these are all extraordinary facts which will not offend anyone. There are no suicide bombers in Ripley, no Israeli air strikes (“Believe It or Not, 17,000 Lebanese and Palestinians, most of them civilians, were killed in Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon”), no major casualty tolls (“Believe It or Not, up to 650,000 Iraqis died in the four years following the 2003 Anglo-American invasion of Iraq”). See what I mean? Just a bit too close to the bone (or bones).

But I was reminded of dear old Ripley when I was prowling through the articles marking the anniversary of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. Memoirs there have been aplenty, but I think only the French press – in the shape of Le Monde Diplomatique – was prepared to confront a bit of “Believe It or Not”.

It recalled vividly – and shamefully – how the world’s newspapers covered the story of Egypt’s “aggression” against Israel. In reality – Believe It or Not – it was Israel which attacked Egypt after Nasser closed the straits of Tiran and ordered UN troops out of Sinai and Gaza following his vituperative threats to destroy Israel. “The Egyptians attack Israel,” France-Soir told its readers on 5 June 1967, a whopper so big that it later amended its headline to “It’s Middle East War!”.

Quite so. Next day, the socialist Le Populaire headlined its story “Attacked on all sides, Israel resists victoriously”. On the same day, Le Figaro carried an article announcing that “the victory of the army of David is one of the greatest of all time”. Believe It or Not, the Second World War – which might be counted one of the greatest of all time, had ended only 22 years earlier.

Johnny Hallyday, France’s undie-able pop star, sang for 50,000 French supporters of Israel – for whom solidarity was expressed in the French press by Serge Gainsbourg, Juliette Gréco, Yves Montand, Simone Signoret, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and François Mitterand. Believe It or Not – and you can believe it – Mitterand once received the coveted Francisque medal from Pétain’s Vichy collaborationists.

Only the president of France, General de Gaulle, moved into political isolation by telling a press conference several months later that Israel “is organising, on the territories which it has taken, an occupation which cannot work without oppression, repression and expulsions – and if there appears resistance to this, it will in turn be called ‘terrorism'”. This accurate prophecy earned reproof from the Nouvel Observateur – to the effect that “Gaullist France has no friends; it has only interests”. And Believe It or Not, with the exception of one small Christian paper, there was in the entire French press one missing word: Palestinians.

I owe it to the academic Anicet Mobé Fansiama to remind me this week that – Believe It or Not – Congolese troops from Belgium’s immensely wealthy African colony scored enormous victories over Italian troops in Africa during the Second World War, capturing 15,000 prisoners, including nine generals. Called “the Public Force” – a name which happily excluded the fact that these heroes were black Congolese – the army mobilised 13,000 soldiers and civilians to fight Vichy French colonies in Africa and deployed in the Middle East – where they were positioned to defend Palestine – as well as in Somalia, Madagascar, India and Burma.

Vast numbers of British and American troops passed through the Congo as its wealth was transferred to the war chests of the United States and Britain.

A US base was built at Kinshasa to move oil to Allied troops fighting in the Middle East.

But – Believe It or Not – when Congolese trade unions, whose members were requisitioned to perform hard labour inside Belgium’s colony by carrying agricultural and industrial goods and military equipment, often on their backs, demanded higher salaries, the Belgian authorities confronted their demonstrations with rifle fire, shooting down 50 of their men.

At least 3,000 political prisoners were deported for hard labour to a remote district of Congo. Thus were those who gave their blood for Allied victory repaid. Or rather not repaid. The four billion Belgian francs which was owed back to the Congo – about £500m in today’s money – was never handed over. Believe It or Not.

So let’s relax and return to Ripley reality. “Believe It or Not, Russell Parsons of Hurricane, West Virginia, has his funeral and cremation instructions tattooed on his arm! … Believe It or Not, in April 2007 (yes, these are new Ripleys) a group of animal lovers paid nearly $3,400 to buy 300 lobsters from a Maine fish market – then set them free back into the ocean! … Believe It or Not, in a hospital waiting room, 70 per cent of people suffer from broken bones, 75 per cent are fatigued, 80 per cent have fevers. What percentage of people must have all four ailments?” Believe It or Not, I don’t know. And oh yes, “Geta, Emperor of Rome AD189-212, insisted upon alternative meals. A typical menu: partridge (perdix), peacock (pavo), leek (porrum), beans (phaseoli), peach (persica), plum (pruna) and melon (pepone).”

In 2002, Donald Rumsfeld famously called the detainees at Guantánamo “the worst of the worst.” General Richard B. Myers, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned they were “very dangerous people who would gnaw hydraulic lines in the back of a C-17 to bring it down.” These claims were designed to justify locking up hundreds of men and boys for years in small cages like animals.

George W. Bush lost no time establishing military commissions to try the very “worst of the worst” for war crimes. But four and a half years later, the Supreme Court decided in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld that those commissions violated the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the Geneva Conventions. So Bush dusted them off, made a few changes, and rammed his new improved military commissions through the Republican Congress last fall.

Only three detainees have been brought before the new commissions. One would expect the people Bush & Co. singled out for war crimes prosecutions would be high-level al-Qaeda leaders. But they weren’t. The first was David Hicks, who was evidently not so dangerous. The U.S. military made a deal that garnered Hicks a misdemeanor sentence and sent him back to Australia.

Salem Ahmed Hamdan, a Yemeni who used to be Osama bin Laden’s chauffeur, was the second. Hamdan, whose case had been overturned by the Supreme Court, was finally brought before a military commission Monday for arraignment on charges of conspiracy and material support for terrorism.

The third defendant was Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen, who appeared for arraignment the same day as Hamdan. Khadr was 15 years old when he arrived at Guantánamo. He faced charges of conspiracy, murder, attempted murder, spying, and supporting terrorism.

On Monday, much to Bush’s dismay, two different military judges dismissed both Hamdan’s and Khadr’s cases on procedural grounds.

The Military Commissions Act that Congress passed last year says the military commissions have jurisdiction to try offenses committed by alien unlawful enemy combatants. Unlawful enemy combatants are defined as (1) people who have engaged in hostilities or purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States or its allies; or (2) people who have been determined to be unlawful enemy combatants by a Combatant Status Review Tribunal (CSRT) or another competent tribunal. The Act says that a determination of unlawful enemy combatant status by a CSRT or another competent tribunal is dispositive.

But there are no “unlawful” enemy combatants at Guantánamo. There are only men who have been determined to be “enemy combatants” by the CSRTs. The Act declares that military commissions “shall not have jurisdiction over lawful enemy combatants.” In its haste to launch post-Hamdan military commissions, Bush’s legal eagles didn’t notice this discrepancy. That is why the charges were dismissed.

The Bush administration may try to fix the procedural problem and retry Khadr and Hamdan. But regardless of whether Guantánamo detainees are lawful or unlawful enemy combatants, the Bush administration’s treatment of them violates the Geneva Conventions. Lawful enemy combatants are protected against inhumane treatment by the Third Geneva Convention on prisoners of war. Unlawful enemy combatants are protected against inhumane treatment by Common Article Three.

Omar Khadr was captured in Afghanistan and brought to Guantánamo when he was 15 years old. In both places, he has been repeatedly tortured and subjected to inhumane treatment. At Bagram Air Base, Khadr was denied pain medication for his serious head and eye shrapnel wounds. At Guantánamo, his hands and feet were shackled together, he was bolted to the floor and left there for hours at a time. After he urinated on himself and on the floor, U.S. military guards mopped the floor with his skinny little body. Khadr was beaten in the head, dogs lunged at him, and he was threatened with rape and the removal of his body parts.

Khadr cried frequently. He has nightmares, sweats and hyperventilates, and is hypervigilant, hearing sounds that he can’t identify. When Khadr’s lawyer saw him for the first time in 2004, he thought, “He’s just a little kid.”

Why was Khadr treated this way? He comes from a family allegedly active in al-Qaeda. His charges stem from an incident where the U.S. sent Afghans into a compound where Khadr and others were located. The people inside the compound killed the Afghans and began firing at the U.S. soldiers. The Americans dropped two 500-pound bombs on the compound, killing everyone inside except Khadr. After Khadr threw a hand grenade which killed an American, the soldiers shot Khadr, blinding and seriously wounding him. Khadr begged them in English to finish him off. He was then taken to Baghram and later to Guantánamo.

According to Donald Rehkopf, Jr., co-chair of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers Military Law Committee, “The government has steadfastly refused to allow hearings on this alleged [unlawful enemy combatant] status because there are so many prisoners at GTMO that were not even combatants, much less ‘unlawful’ ones. Khadr is in an unusual situation because he has a viable ‘self-defense’ claim – we attacked the compound that he and his family were living in, and the fact that he was only 15 at the time.”

If Khadr were a U.S. citizen, he would not even be subject to trial by court-martial because of his age. When the Supreme Court ruled in 2005 that children under 18 at the time of their crimes could not be executed, it said that youths display a “lack of maturity and an underdeveloped sense of responsibility” that “often results in impetuous and ill-considered actions and decisions.” A juvenile, the Court found, is more vulnerable or susceptible to negative influences and his character is not as well-formed as that of an adult. “From a moral standpoint,” Justice Kennedy wrote for the majority, “it would be misguided to equate the failings of a minor with those of an adult, for a greater possibility exists that a minor’s character deficiencies will be reformed.” The Bush administration’s treatment of Omar Khadr flies in the face of the Court’s reasoning.

The United States may be able to retry Khadr and Hamdan. They have a few days to file an appeal. But the Court of Military Commissions Review hasn’t even been established yet, so it’s unclear where the appeals would be brought.

The Military Commissions Act, which denies basic due process protections, including the right to habeas corpus, is a disgrace. But an even bigger disgrace is the concentration camp the United States maintains at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The Act should be repealed and the Guantánamo prison should be shut down immediately.