Olbermann: Bush's 8 in 8

While Bush is scrambling around trying to find his "legacy," some have accused him of being an incompetent idiot. The fact is that he succeeded rather well in his goal of shredding the Constitution and making Congress irrelevant.

For someone who didn't spend much time in the White House, preferring to whack innocent shrubbery at his Texas "ranch," he managed to get a lot done, even if every single bit of it was damaging to the nation.

MSNBC's Keith Olbermann sums up Bush's 8 years of accomplishment in 8 minutes. It's quite a list.





current-events

Why We Fight, Part III

In case you missed it:

Big Oil and the War in Iraq

"IT TOOK five years, the deaths of 4,100 US soldiers, and the wounding of 30,000 more to make Iraq safe for Exxon. It is the inescapable open question since the reasons given by President Bush for the invasion and occupation did not exist, neither the weapons of mass destruction nor Saddam Hussein's ties to Al Qaeda and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

"The New York Times reported last week that several Western oil companies, including ExxonMobil, Shell, Total, BP, and Chevron, are about to sign no-bid contracts with the Iraqi government. Western oil had a significant stake in Iraqi oil for much of the last century until the government nationalized the industry in 1972. The Associated Press quoted Oppenheimer & Co. analyst Fadel Gheit as saying he believed the contracts were a first step toward production-sharing agreements. "These companies are in it for the money, not to make friends," Gheit said.

"This of course blows a hole in another ancient Bush fallacy, the one in which former Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld said "the oil wells belong to the Iraqi people" and former secretary of State Colin Powell seconded him by saying Iraqi oil "will be held in trust for the Iraqi people." Former Deputy Defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz once claimed there was so much oil in Iraq that "When it comes to reconstruction, before we turn to the American taxpayer, we will turn first to the resources of the Iraqi government." - Boston Globe

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This time next year, you should be able to fill up your monster truck with Iraqi oil, if the bank hasn't repo'd it yet.



current-events

Cutting of Internet cables no accident?

Countries affected by cut cable shown in red. Kish Island is in the Persian Gulf, upper right.
Map courtesy DailyWireless (dot) org

Mostly ignored by big media here in the United States, the recent flurry of undersea cables being cut across the Middle East and the Mediterranean have all the earmarks of military action, possibly as a means to stall the opening of the Iranian oil bourse, originally scheduled for this week (Feb. 1 – 11), but now postponed due to the interruption of Internet service, suggests Market Watch, a respected online financial newsletter.

A number of cables, possibly as many as eight, have been cut, all within a matter of hours. Affected areas include parts of Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and India, and significantly, an island off the southern coast of Iran – Kish - where the Iranian oil bourse is headquartered.

The Iranians have been moving for some time to open the bourse, which has as one of its main purposes changing the denomination of oil trades from US dollars to the euro. This is, of course, threatening to Western powers, which have a vested interest in continuing to use the US dollar – and that’s putting it mildly - as the international trade in crude oil is the bedrock of international trade and hence, the stability of governments all over the world. Specifically, a shift from dollars to the euro (which is now trading better than par with the dollar) will further erode America’s already staggering trade deficit, and possibly trigger an abandonment of the dollar altogether, completely trashing the value of Treasury bills, which are only ultimately backed by the “full faith and credit” of the United States.

Recall President Bush’s assertion that “all options are on the table” in dealing with Iran; most people would assume that to mean armed intervention, but there are other “options” besides the use of guns and bombs.

For instance, Venezuela recently had a major bank account in the United States frozen (maybe) as the Venezuelan national petroleum operator Petroleos de Venezuela SA suffered a judgment brought against it by ExxonMobil in US, Dutch and British courts, to the tune of $12 billion. The judgment came down at roughly the same time the Internet cables were cut, by the way.

As for cutting the cables themselves, there are several possibilities and culprits. The US Navy has already demonstrated its ability to interfere with underseas cables with Operation Ivy Bells, back in 1971. There is also the existence of the USS Jimmy Carter, a fast attack submarine which has been retrofitted with an extra section in its hull, which some have claimed includes a room devoted to cable dredging equipment similar to that employed in Glomar Explorer, the joint CIA-Howard Hughes venture to retrieve a downed Soviet submarine back in the early 1970s. If in fact the Carter has these capabilities, it would be a major technological coup, as undersea cable operations are highly problematic.

That said, the present location of the Carter is unknown (the location of all US submarines while deployed is Top Secret as a matter of policy), but it has been estimated by those who know about these things – including myself – that Carter could not be responsible for more than one of the cable incidents, distance and travel times being a severely mitigating factor (the Carter would have to be traveling at near light speed to arrive at all the places in the given time frame– not even theoretically possible – and that’s leaving out the time required for the cutting operations themselves). Israelis? Maybe. They have submarines and the knowledge and motive. But then, so do the Chinese.

It’s a kettle of fish, frankly, but no doubt all a part of the Big Con.

current-events

State of the Union

Shaker Heights is already hit by the sub prime mortgage meltdown

The Shrub gave his State of the Union speech last night; I didn't watch it - what the fuck does he know? Instead, I re-read this article:

The streets are empty. Trash rustles down the road past rusted barbecues, abandoned furniture, sagging homes and gardens turned to weed.

This is Shaker Heights, a suburb of Cleveland and a town ravaged by the sub prime mortgage crisis roiling the United States.

Faded "for sale" signs sit in front of deserted houses. The residents are gone, either in search of new jobs after the factories shut down, or in shame after being evicted for missing their mortgage payments.

A red, white and blue American flag flies over windows and doors which have been boarded up to keep the drug dealers away.

Thieves have stripped many homes of the plumbing, the doors, the windows, the aluminum siding.

The police station parking lot is full. The officers, who have seen their numbers triple since 2006, are coming back from their rounds. They speak of installing alarms in some of the homes claimed by squatters.

The rest of the story here.

And, of course, this shit hasn't even slowed down:

BAGHDAD — A suicide car bomb exploded near an American patrol in the northern city of Mosul on Tuesday, a day after Sunni Arab guerrillas killed five American soldiers during an ambush on a convoy in Mosul.

There were no American casualties in the latest attack, but one Iraqi was killed and 15 others were wounded, the military said in a statement. The attack is the latest sign that the main front of the insurgency has shifted to northern Iraq.

On Monday, the Sunni Arab guerrillas ambushed the American convoy with a roadside bomb, then sprayed survivors with machine-gun fire from perches in a nearby mosque.

It was the second devastating attack on United States forces this month, bringing the number of fatalities to 36 this year. While American deaths have fallen sharply in Baghdad and Anbar Province, they have not slowed in the north. Three-fifths of the American service members killed this year were in three provinces dominated by Sunni Arabs north of Baghdad.

Three weeks ago, a house rigged with explosives killed six soldiers in Diyala Province.

And there's still this:

Photo by Clayton James Cubitt

current-events

American media bored with Iraq war?

Two weeks ago we ran a review of a book of Iraq war photography, Unembedded; in it, we noted the lack of coverage - both in print and on television - of this war. Leaving aside the problem of how physically dangerous it is for reporters, whether photographers or print, the question still remains: where is the coverage?

Rebecca Dana and Lizzy Ratner in a recent article for The New York Observer have posed the same question and have come up with one possible answer:

In 2003, after the invasion, media companies were warned not to feed the American news consumer too much material on the downside of war. The media-consulting firm Frank Magid Associates advised broadcast outlets that its survey results suggested that viewers had very little appetite for stories about casualties, prisoners of war and anti-war protests.

“There’s this kind of general, industry-wide view that Americans don’t like anything tough, don’t like anything complicated, don’t give a shit, don’t know how to spell the country much less care what’s going on there,” Ms. [Christiane] Amanpour said. “I find that a very patronizing attitude.”

Yes, it is patronizing, but probably realistic, as far as it goes. When the national news coverage goes on for days about some white chick who left her husband at the altar or JaLo’s recent pregnancy (did that happen? I really don’t know) for hours and hours of Jacko or that skinny Hilton broad, I personally can’t figure out if the media is generating the celebrity-watch demand or if the public really wants to see this crap more than they want to know how their Johnny might be doing in that foreign country where the towel heads are all trying to kill him.

Bear in mind that military policy presently forbids the photographing of coffins arriving from Iraq and military funerals taking place here in America on public grounds, i.e. Arlington National Cemetery, by anyone - and that includes the grieving parents of the deceased.

So if the American media couldn’t be bothered to report the news from Iraq and the American public couldn’t be bothered to watch it, why then is the US abducting or killing reporters and targeting media offices?

Don’t think so? Read this, from the UK Guardian:

22 November 2005
EXCLUSIVE: BUSH PLOT TO BOMB HIS ARAB ALLY
Madness of war memo
By Kevin Maguire And Andy Lines

PRESIDENT Bush planned to bomb Arab TV station al-Jazeera in friendly Qatar, a "Top Secret" No 10 memo reveals ... Bush disclosed his plan to target al-Jazeera, a civilian station with a huge Mid-East following, at a White House face-to-face with Mr Blair on
April 16 last year ... The No 10 memo now raises fresh doubts over US claims that previous attacks against al-Jazeera staff were military errors ... In 2001 the station's Kabul office was knocked out by two "smart" bombs. In 2003, al-Jazeera reporter Tareq Ayyoub was killed in a US missile strike on the station's Baghdad centre ... The memo, which also included details of troop deployments, turned up in May last year at the Northampton constituency office of then Labour MP Tony Clarke.

To bring us up to date, the number of journalists killed so far in Iraq (74) exceeds those killed during the Vietnam War (66), which lasted twenty years. But getting killed isn’t the only problem. It seems that if the insurgents don’t kidnap reporters, the Americans will:

The Iraqis who have taken up the most dangerous legwork are not safe either. Five Iraqi journalists are currently being held without charges by U.S. and Iraqi government troops. Since April 2003, between 10 and 13 have been killed by American gunfire.

“It really comes from all sides,” said Reuters global managing editor David Schlesinger, who has lost three Iraqi reporters to U.S. gunfire and three more to detention facilities. “Certainly there’s a huge risk from insurgents, either to be hurt or killed accidentally … but unfortunately, there’s also been an issue with U.S. troops.”

And don’t forget:

(1) Italian journalist Juliana Sgerno was shot at and her bodyguard killed at a US checkpoint,
(2) CNN’s former chief Eason Jordan called for the US to stop targeting journalists, and
(3) The Palestine Hotel, headquarters for the international press in Baghdad, was blasted by a US tank, with two journalists killed and several wounded, May 2004.

And of course, having embed-induced tunnel vision doesn’t help, either:

“If you’re a [Western] print reporter,” [former Washington Post bureau chief] Mr. Chandrasekaran said, “you’re pretty much confined to Baghdad. And if you want to go anywhere else, you basically have to be embedded.”

This also keeps the press working within an official, bureaucratic context. Jon Alpert, a filmmaker working on a documentary for HBO about military medicine, said that the MedEvac unit he embedded with for the project was surprisingly accommodating. But when injured troops reached the field hospital, officials invoked the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, the same privacy law that has come to thwart stateside reporters.

“When we were in the hospital,” Mr. Alpert said, “I had to have a public-affairs officer with me all the time. Because it was a hospital, they were applying the HIPAA laws.”

The combination of structured access to U.S. forces and open hostility from insurgents has left reporters with lopsided sources. “Who are the insurgents?” said freelance photojournalist Kael Alford, who covered the invasion and the first three months of the occupation. “Who are these people and why are they fighting? That’s a really valuable perspective …. It’s the story we have all been trying to do all along, and very few journalists have been able to get it.”

So maybe the American media isn’t bored with the Iraqi war; perhaps they’re just frustrated by the lack of exciting visuals, corporate policy that favors tits over national security, damn little access to the Iraqi populace, lack of personnel on the ground, active interference by the military, and governmental policy that restricts what can be reported, both from here and Iraq.

In other words, it’s not their fault.

In the meantime, keep your Internet provider bill paid up or subscribe to a foreign newspaper, because that’s the only way you’re going to find out anything worth knowing about this war.