The Rag Blog

Dear Cindy Sheehan,

Hopefully Gavan Duffy, an old friend from Austin, Texas, can hand deliver the accompanying letter of appreciation. It is from a number of US Americans in Europe and originally written to be given to you upon your visit at the European Parliament recently. We were saddened that you could not make the trip, and shocked to heard about some difficulties in New York. Also unfortunately over here there was a bit of “frantic” organizing by a person in Germany which caused confusions and communications problems.

Hopefully you can get over this way at some point in the future. One anecdote from Berlin: at a peace demonstration we participated in here the police came over and thanked us for demonstrating.

Nice, yes?

And we in turn thank you for your insights, courage and visible work. Here our original letter to you.

Greetings, Cindy Sheehan!

We, Americans living abroad, want to thank you for coming here this week. We thank you for your great dedication.

We hope that all those here today, and all those who could not come personally but are here in spirit, will give you the strength to continue to deliver your message.

We also want you to know about the concerned and informed Europeans among whom we live who overwhelmingly view this war as wrong.

We stand at your side, millions of Americans, whether in the United States or living overseas, with millions of Europeans, laughing with you, crying with you, and, hopefully, working with you to end this war.

from Germany:
American Voices Abroad, Berlin
American Voices Abroad, Hamburg
American Voices Abroad, Heidelberg
American Voices Abroad, Stuttgart
American Voices Abroad, Tuebingen

from France:
Americans Against the War, France
American Voices Abroad, Southwestern France
Americans for Peace and Justice, Montpellier

from Italy:
American Voices Abroad (U.S. Citizens Against War), Florence
American Voices Abroad (U.S Citizens for Peace and Justice), Rome

as well as individual members of the American Voices Abroad Coalition
from the Czech Republic (Prague) and the United Kingdom (London).

Yours,
Ann Wertheimer, Chair AVA-Berlin
www.avaberlin.org
David MacBryde, secretary

Guess they’ll be dropping in to ask us questions soon, eh? When you see the picture of this kid, you’ll wonder what we’re coming to.

Teen Questioned Over Bush Threats on MySpace
Secret Service Agents Remove 14-Year-Old Girl From Class
By DON THOMPSON, AP

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (Oct. 14) – Upset by the war in Iraq, Julia Wilson vented her frustrations with President Bush last spring on her Web page on MySpace.com.

She posted a picture of the president, scrawled “Kill Bush” across the top and drew a dagger stabbing his outstretched hand. She later replaced her page on the social-networking site after learning in her eighth-grade history class that such threats are a federal offense.

It was too late.

Federal authorities had found the page and placed Wilson on their checklist. They finally reached her this week in her molecular biology class.

The 14-year-old freshman was taken out of class Wednesday and questioned for about 15 minutes by two Secret Service agents. The incident has upset her parents, who said the agents should have included them when they questioned their daughter.

Read it here.

Elections in the USA – Justice and Perversion and the Perversion of Justice
By James Petras
Oct 11, 2006, 11:05

In a month in which the US Congress voted to legalize torture, discard the US Constitution by abolishing habeas corpus and increase the military budget to prolong the daily slaughter of hundreds of Iraqis and Afghanis, the big controversy among the mass media and elected officials is the sexual overtures of a Republican Congressman to adolescent boys employed by Congress.

Millions of fundamentalist Christians, who blindly supported the Republican Congress’ deadly ‘War on Terror’ are in revolt against their Party because of its tolerance toward a single pervert – overlooking the torture at Abu Ghraib, Israel’s massive bombing of Lebanon and the Bush Administration’s criminal abandonment of the hundreds of thousands of poor (mostly black) citizens in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

Why do US Congress members and the mass media go into a political feeding frenzy over personal sexual transgressions like Congressman Foley’s nasty e-mail flirtations with teenage boys or former President Clinton’s office adventures in extramarital sex with a White House intern and not over issues of great consequence for peace or war, democracy or authoritarianism, torture or human rights?

Superficial commentators trot out our Anglo-American ‘Puritan heritage’: a pseudo-explanation, which overlooks the US democratic-constitutional heritage, our recent history of opposing the Vietnam War, and our signing of the United Nation Charter on Human Rights. Since there are numerous historical pasts, there is no single ‘heritage’ that dominates others, especially when the so-called ‘Puritan’ past is overlain with a highly sexualized mass culture over the last 50 years.

We should leave aside dubious psycho-cultural explanations because they fail to explain political behavior. Specifically, even if ‘Puritan morality’ were such a dominant aspect of US political life, it cannot explain why one should focus only on sexual misdeeds of individual politicians and not the immorality of the widespread, systematic use of sexual torture practiced by US interrogators in Iraq, Afghanistan and at the Guantanamo prison camp and specifically approved by the Bush Administration.

To understand the perversity of US politics, where great crimes are approved by Congress and the President and minor sexual misdemeanors become an obsession, one has to turn away from the amorphous notion of the ‘US public’ and examine what the mass media and opinion leaders find acceptable as the basis for electoral competition.

Read the rest here.

P.S. Here is the editorial comment that accompanies Petras’ article:

Editorial Comment: Among the strongest responses to positions taken by Axis of Logic over the years has been reader-reaction to our call for a boycott of U.S. national elections. While many respond with approbation, joining the boycott, many others – both left and right – have argued against our position. James Petras’ article … provides the most concise argument I have seen to date – for a citizen’s refusal to participate in (and thus to invalidate) the corrupt and deceptive U.S. electoral process. Particularly after the failed economic policies, assault on civil liberties, global terror and human misery executed by the Bush regime, it is tempting to believe that a Democrat Party victory in November will make things better. We say that the killing did not begin with George W. Bush and his Republican-led congress. It began and has been continued by both political parties throughout U.S. history. As we approach the November mid-term elections we again call upon qualified voters to –

Refuse to Vote – Refuse to participate

Your non-vote is the strongest vote available to you as a U.S. citizen – a vote against the system. Read James Petras’ article and please write to us with your thoughts. – Les Blough, Editor

Soulless New World: Bush’s Military Commissions Act and the Future of America
By JENNIFER VAN BERGEN

“The legacy of Nuremberg and the solemn undertaking that Justice Jackson gave for the United States at the opening session, are under assault by the Bush Administration, which has embraced a radical world view that rests on a cult of power and a disdain for law.” Scott Horton, When Lawyers Are War Criminals

Before Congress recessed, it passed, amid much criticism, the Military Commissions Act (MCA). The Act has consequences for citizens and non-citizens alike. Among it’s worst features, it authorizes the President to detain, without charges, anyone whom he deems an unlawful enemy combatant. This includes U.S. citizens. It eliminates habeas corpus review for aliens. It also makes providing “material support” to terrorists punishable by military commission. And, once again, the military commissions procedures allow for coerced testimony, the use of “sanitized classified information” (where the source is not disclosed), and trial for offenses not historically subject to trial by military commissions. (Terrorism is not historically a military offense; it’s a crime.) Finally, by amending the War Crimes Act, it allows the president to authorize interrogation techniques that may nonetheless violate the Geneva Conventions and provides future and retroactive immunity for those who engage in or authorize those acts.

Given the troubling new broad powers Congress has given the President, what will happen now?

While the President has consistently insisted these laws are necessary, it is becoming increasingly clear that, in addition to a huge up-swelling of anti-American sentiment in the Middle East, the administration’s approach to terrorism has led to a tremendous number of false arrests and imprisonments. It is hard to imagine that the MCA will not lead to more and greater mistakes of law and judgment. Although the Act provides for trial by military commission, it is unlikely very many will even be tried. As Michael Ratner points out: “As detainees can now be held forever without trial, why try them?”

Finish reading the article here.

A Last Wild Ride on the Titanic: Bush Leading the Ship to Destruction
By Mike Whitney
Al-Jazeerah, October 13, 2006

Yesterday’s report in the Washington Post that over 650,000 Iraqis have died as a result of the US-led invasion is just the latest bit of bad news to hit the Bush administration. In fact, the buzzards have been circling the White House for some time now and they won’t be leaving anytime soon.

The “peer-reviewed” report from the John Hopkins School of Public Health followed all the standard procedures for producing a thoroughly credible survey. After interviewing nearly 2,000 Iraqi residents, checking death certificates and records at the morgue, they compiled their data and made their calculations. “The same survey methods were used to measure mortality during conflicts in the Congo, Kosovo, Sudan and other regions.”

The Bush administration has never challenged the organization’s findings before. In fact, they used the group’s reckoning on Sudan to accuse the Sudanese government of “genocide”. If that’s true, then Iraq must be “triple-genocide”; an entirely new nomenclature for the premeditated obliteration of the world’s oldest civilization.

[snip]

Still, in the face of mounting pressure and widespread public unease, Bush has ordered a carrier group to the Gulf; steaming ahead for an apocalyptic confrontation with Iran. When the time is right, he’ll blow the whistle and the bombs will start pelting down like a Texas hailstorm.

It’s a death-wish.

Bush is chugging inexorably towards Tehran and we’re all being swept along in his wake. It’s like one last wild ride on the Titanic before we hit the ice in the open seas and slip slowly beneath the waves.

Glub, glub!

Read all of it here.

Kids these days – ya gotta love ’em ….

Halliburton CEO David Lesar has refused to come clean about his war profiteering, so we thought we’d help him out a bit. From the producers of ‘Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers.’

The Age of Terror
Robert Fisk
October 9, 2006

“And so on we go with the Middle East tragedy, telling the world that things are getting better when they are getting worse, that democracy is flourishing when it is swamped in blood, that freedom is not without “birth pangs” when the midwife is killing the baby.”

A few days after Lebanon’s latest war came to an end, I went through many of the reporter’s notebooks I have used in my last 30 years in the Middle East. Some contained the names of dead colleagues, others the individual stories of the suffering of Arabs and Kurds and Christians and Jews. One, dated 1991, is even splashed with a dark and viscous substance, the oil that came raining down on us from the skies over the Kuwaiti desert after Saddam blew up the wells of the Emirate. It was only after a few minutes that I realised what I was looking for: some hint, back in the days of dangerous innocence, of what was going to happen on 11 September 2001.

And sure enough, in one notebook, part of a transcript of an interview I gave in Toronto in the late 1990s, I see myself trying to discourage the Middle East optimism of my host. “There is an explosion coming in the Middle East,” I tell him. What was this explosion I was talking about? I find myself writing almost the same thing a couple of years later in The Independent – I refer to “the explosion to come” without locating it in the Middle East at all. What was I talking about? And then, most disturbingly, I re-run parts of a film series I made with the late Michael Dutfield for Channel 4 and Discovery in 1993. Called From Beirut to Bosnia, it was billed as an attempt to record “Muslims growing anger towards the West.”

In one sequence, I walk into a destroyed mosque in a Bosnian village called Cela. And I hear my voice on the soundtrack, saying: “When I see things like this, I think of the place I work, the Middle East… I wonder what the Muslim world has in store for us… Maybe I should end each of my reports with the words: ‘Watch out!’ ” And when I checked back to my post-production notes, I find the dates of all our film sequences listed. I had walked into that Bosnian mosque, watched by Serb policemen, on 11 September 1993. My warning was exactly eight years too early.

Read the rest of it here.

I loved watching the cartoons on Saturday morning when I was a kid. They were black and white when I was little, then colour as I turned into double digits. I can no longer recall what I liked, but I’m sure if this had come on one Saturday morning, it would’ve made an impression on me. R. Jehn

This comes from Fred on Everything. Every once in awhile, Fred has some interesting things to say.

Permit me a foray of a paragraph into psychojournalism. It fascinates me to know that George Bush was a male cheerleader at Andover. Yes, it could have been worse. He might have been a table-dancer. But most of us who were in high school when he was recognize that you either came to watch football, or you came to watch the girl cheerleaders. There was something odd about a boy who wanted to be one.

We are ruled by a male cheerleader who favors torture. I wonder what things twist in the inner fog.

Given a president who seems chiefly concerned to display his indomitable manhood, the question arises: What restraints keep him from absolute control of a formidably armed nation of three hundred million? The Constitution, noblest of fables, was designed to do just this. But absent the will to enforce them, checks and balances do not exist, and laws, principles, and constitutions mean nothing. If no one says “no,” the president simply behaves as he wants. The genius of the strange little man in the White House has been to recognize this, to divine the weakness of the American political order.

When he wanted to attack Iraq, he simply lied, and lied again, and shifted his ground and lied again. It worked. When he didn’t want to follow the Geneva Conventions in his treatment of captured Iraqis, he just declared his prisoners of war not to be prisoners of war. Torture? He just did it and faced down the country and the world. Disregard of civil rights? Spying? He just did as he chose.

Read the rest here.

Jim Otterstrom is running an interesting series about his personal history in peace and environmental activism. He had a post about his participation in the Artist’s Peace Tower in 1966 yesterday, and today he writes about the Ward Valley Nuclear Waste protest in 1998. Here’s a short clip:

In the Mojave Desert, some 180 miles east of here, is a place known as Ward Valley, sacred land (isn’t all land sacred?) to the five tribes of American Indians that formed the Colorado River Native Nations Alliance. Ward Valley was chosen by the Bureau Of Land Management as the site for a low-level nuclear waste dump to be operated by U.S. Ecology, a waste management company. Because of Ward Valley’s close proximity to the Colorado River, a source of drinking water and irrigation for millions of people, and U.S. Ecology’s already poor track record at another waste facility, in Beatty, Nevada, that was leaking tritium into the ground, this was obviously a very bad idea.

Determined to stop the project, members of the Colorado River Native Nations Alliance set up an encampment at the site in late 1995, and had a presence of 50 to 200 activists there for the next 3 years. In 1998 the BLM attempted to close the land to the public and remove the activists. Through the efforts of the ‘Save Ward Valley Committee’, based in Needles, hundreds of environmental activists from all over the country, including our family, showed up to give their support and form a human blockade to stop the BLM.