The following is an update from Suzanne Taylor and
TheConversation.org Making Sense of These Times [http://www.theconversation.org] Website. Thank you for
your interest. If you wish to be removed from this list at any time, just let us
know.
________________________________________
May 29,
2002
Crop Circle Diary
Entry:
For the most beautiful collection of crop circle photos I've seen,
visit Cosmic Reflections [http://www.cosmicreflections.com].
Hit "Steve Pattersons Crop Circles," and then keep hitting "next" for a real
treat.
________________________________________
Suzanne's
comments: Each time I've seen this
information in passing, as just part of everyday reality, I've done a double
take, thinking it sounded stinking. Arianna to the rescue -- it's not just one
of those little things. It's BIG and it's awful -- one of the almost
unbelievable ways that corporate culture is swindling America. "To the
ever-growing mountain of evidence that corporate kingpins live in an entirely
different world from the rest of us we can now add the latest revelations about
the gargantuan loans CEOs receive from their companies...Essentially, these are
simply large gifts, dressed-up with paperwork and disguised as
'loans.'"
Other quotes drawn from the
column:
How can corporate executives legally use
the balance sheet of a public company as their own personal piggy bank? Doesn't
the balance sheet belong to the shareholders? And don't CEOs have a fiduciary
obligation to them? How then can they legally write their own checks for
ridiculous amounts -- often from companies that are troubled and can't afford
it, and at the expense of shareholders who can't prevent it?
________________________________________
Column from Geov
Parrish: Running for Cover: On
Bush, the Press and Impending Doom -- May 24, 2002
Suzanne's comments: Here's another smart stab
from Geov at turning us to right thinking about the futility of our war making
mentality. It's old common sense ever
more urgent for us to realize as we face presumably inevitable attack.
"...prevention can only be successful if America stops making enemies — that is,
if America changes the way it conducts itself in the world. And that's a topic
nobody in Washington wants to discuss."
Other quotes drawn from the column:
Almost immediately after
September 11, Dubya declared "war," not against an enemy country, but against a
tactic — one brandished by adherents of a self-defined club open to anyone, from
any country, at any time, that, for whatever reason, wants to kill a lot of
Americans. Such a war is necessarily without limits and unwinnable, as is the
language gradually adopted later — that we were to fight not just war but evil
itself. That's a much bigger involvement than the 50 years Dick Cheney is giving
it. (Ask Jesus of Nazareth.)...
The warnings of "inevitable" terrorist retaliation will continue, as
surely as Ariel Sharon's government can confidently predict, after razing some
part of the West Bank, that another suicide bombing is "inevitable." In the
meantime, Bush's retaliatory strikes will do nothing to ensure your safety or
mine. Eventually, even domestic opinion will begin to realize that such U.S.
attacks do nothing to prevent future anti-American terrorism, but instead kill a
lot of innocent people and inspire a lot of future anti-American terrorists...
The hijackings and mass murders of September 11 were crimes —
international in scope and heinous beyond imagination, but crimes nonetheless.
...nobody seemed to be asking why we don't think we can prevent the next
one — or what we can do, when it happens, to prevent the one after that. In the
end, that sort of prevention can only be successful if America stops making
enemies — that is, if America changes the way it conducts itself in the world.
And that's a topic nobody in Washington wants to discuss.
________________________________________
...the internet seems to have turned those who do not
like to hear the truth about the Middle East into a community of haters, sending
venomous letters not only to myself but to any reporter who dares to criticise
Israel – or American policy in the Middle East...In 26 years in the Middle East,
I have never read so many vile and intimidating messages addressed to me. Many
now demand my death...
How, I ask myself, did it come to this? Slowly
but surely, the hate has turned to incitement, the incitement into death
threats, the walls of propriety and legality gradually pulled down so that a
reporter can be abused, his family defamed, his beating at the hands of an angry
crowd greeted with laughter and insults in the pages of an American newspaper...
The events of 11 September turned the hate mail white hot. That day, in
an airliner high over the Atlantic that had just turned back from its routing to
America, I wrote an article for The Independent, pointing out that there
would be an attempt in the coming days to prevent anyone asking why the crimes
against humanity in New York and Washington had occurred. Dictating my report
from the aircraft's satellite phone, I wrote about the history of deceit in the
Middle East, the growing Arab anger at the deaths of thousands of Iraqi children
under US-supported sanctions, and the continued occupation of Palestinian land
in the West Bank and Gaza by America's Israeli ally. I didn't blame Israel. I
suggested that Osama bin Laden was responsible.
Since Ariel Sharon's
offensive in the West Bank, provoked by the Palestinians' wicked suicide
bombing, a new theme has emerged. Reporters who criticise Israel are to blame
for inciting anti-Semites to burn synagogues. Thus it is not Israel's brutality
and occupation that provokes the sick and cruel people who attack Jewish
institutions, synagogues and cemeteries. We journalists are to
blame...
Why does John Malkovich want to
kill me?
Robert Fisk
http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=294787
________________________________________
Quotes that appear on the site in
the Quotes section, are in bold in this Five Star
Piece.
Five Star Piece: Don't Wag Your
Finger at Us, Mr. Bush, Henry Porter
-- May 26, 2002
Suzanne's
comment: Is the Bush tide turning? You can
see how he's headed to hit the wall in this intelligent observation about who
Bush is, and of his attempt to enroll Europe in his plans for Iraq. "The
President's lecture tour of Europe and Russia reminds us how little experience
he has of foreign affairs and how recent is his discovery of the history and
complexities of issues which have been unquestionably better covered and
probably better understood in Europe than in the US. As if to underline this
point, the US Joint Chiefs of Staff have used the Commander-in-Chief's absence
from Washington to reveal their deep concerns about any attack on
Iraq."
There's a lot about President Bush's manner, breezing
through Europe and telling us all to pull our socks up, that makes you want to
wipe the smile off his face. 'Iraq ought to be on the minds of the German
people,' he said to a TV station in Berlin, 'because the Iraq government is a
dangerous government.' Well, yes, but how exactly has Saddam's stance changed
since this time last year when America was enjoying the first month's of George
Bush's carefree unilateralism and Iraq was some way down the agenda? Not much,
is the answer. Saddam has probably acquired a little more weaponry but
essentially his regime is as barbarous to its own people and as menacing to the
outside world as it was last year. 'This is a government that has gassed its own
people,' Bush added, pressing home the point. Indeed, but that was back in
August 1988 when estimates of between 50,000 and 180,000 were killed in the
final solution of the Kurdish question. At the time it raised only modest
interest in the US media.
The President's lecture tour of Europe
and Russia reminds us how little experience he has of foreign affairs and how
recent is his discovery of the history and complexities of issues which have
been unquestionably better covered and probably better understood in Europe than
in the US. As if to underline this point, the US Joint Chiefs of Staff have used
the Commander-in-Chief's absence from Washington to reveal their deep concerns
about any attack on Iraq.
Europe may
have its faults, as Bush and Colin Powell reminded us last week, but whatever
our weaknesses of coordination, resolution and principle, it still seems
mightily rich of Bush to expect us to go along with a policy General Tommy
Franks, head of US Central Command, said would require at least 200,000 US
troops and result in large casualties.
Eight months on from the
11 September attacks George Bush's reflection on the grave new world appears to
be no more than a couple of slogans deep. The war on terrorism took America just
so far, but now Europeans want to see some evidence of thought and leadership
beneath the rhetoric, especially because that particular phrase has
been readily adapted to neutralise American diplomatic intervention by, for
example, Ariel Sharon, whose invasion of the Palestinian territories reduced the
US diplomatic response to a shake of the head and a murmured, 'but we didn't
quite mean that kind of war on terrorism'.
And what about Pakistan, so
recently rehabilitated from near pariah status? On one border the country has
undoubtedly aided the war on terrorism, but on another it has been sheltering
the Islamic insurgents that have murdered thousands of Indian Kashmiris and have
pushed the two countries close to war. In other words, Bush's fine phrase has
brought him to the point where he is doing a fair impression of backing a state
that sponsors terrorism. If Iraq was behaving so brazenly he would have all the
excuse he needed.
Mercifully for the White House, Bush's tour has
occurred just as the first serious doubts about the President's behaviour prior
to 11 September were raised by the US media and in Congress. While Bush was
warning the Bundestag that if we ignore the threat presented by the 'axis of
evil' we invite certain blackmail and place millions of our citizens in danger,
America was gripped by the story that on 6 August last year Bush ignored just
such a warning.
This wasn't by any means a lone briefing. From 22 June
2001 the Director of the CIA, George Tenet, was 'nearly frantic' with concern
and wrote to the national security adviser that 'a significant al-Qaeda attack'
was highly likely in the near future, 'within several weeks'. Through the year
the FBI and CIA had picked up hard evidence that bin Laden was training pilots
and planned a major airborne attack. The French intelligence service passed on
clear warnings about individuals and their plans. And Jordan and possibly
Morocco did likewise, supplying the CIA with important intercepts. But in the
fiercely competitive US intelligence community none of this was coordinated. The
President, meanwhile, was cheerily content to pursue his programme of country
boy disengagement. Whatever else emerges from
the Congressional inquiry into what went wrong on 11 September, we can certainly
conclude that there was a monumental lack of grip at the top. And it is from
this man that we are now all expected to take a dressing down about moral fibre,
cohesion and foresight.
What Americans - currently in a more
edgy and defensive mood than I can ever remember - do not recognise is that the
vast majority of Europeans are not at base anti-American. It's just that we
require more in the way of solid reasoning and debate if we are to support
serial campaigns against the members of the 'axis of evil' - an awkward phrase
which was, incidentally, chosen by the great wordsmith himself. The American
attitude to Iraq, for instance, seems to Europeans to be utterly baffling. While
Bush instructs his commanders to consider the options for attack, on the grounds
that Saddam has built a vast stockpile of biological, chemical and radiological
- if not nuclear - weapons, (an arsenal which is probably less dangerous than
Pakistan's, incidentally), his administration does everything to undermine the
freely elected opposition, the Iraqi National Congress.
The INC is the
one organisation which has seriously planned for an Iraq after Saddam. It also
has by far the best intelligence network in the country and is constantly
scooping the CIA, which pretty much gave up on Iraq after the failed uprising in
1995. And yet the State Department impedes the funding of the INC - so much so
that the organisation has recently been forced to close down its satellite
broadcasts to the country - and refuses to take any notice of what the free
Iraqis have to say about developments in Saddam's regime. Given that a Pentagon
official was quoted in yesterday's Washington Post as saying covert intelligence
operations were now the most likely method of effecting a change of regime, the
neglect of the INC is all the more remarkable.
Besides this, the
White House has offered no post-Saddam vision for a country which contains 9 per
cent of the world's known oil reserves and, let's not forget, some of the most
abused and terrorised people on earth. No one in Bush's administration thinks
beyond the slogan which means that in the event of Saddam being toppled another
despot will probably fill the void and the whole process will begin
again.
One can see why Americans get frustrated with European
opinion, but equally the US press, which is only just beginning to emerge from
the patriotic support of the Bush regime in the wake of 11 September, must
realise that we need an idea of White House thinking which goes beyond slogans
and the talk of smart bombs and invasion. And yes, dammit, if there is to be any
removal of Saddam, the exercise of the principle that an innocent Iraqi has as
much right as an American or an Israeli to live his life freely and without
being terrorised.
At the end of this week it is clear that
Bush's presidency is showing signs of being disorganised and intellectually
under-powered. He returns home to face a group of generals who are in
more-or-less open contempt of his plan to launch against Saddam and an
intelligence community which is riven with competition and cover-ups about who
knew what before the al-Qaeda attacks. Reason enough for Europeans to
be circumspect about his slogans in the future.
SOURCE: http://www.observer.co.uk/worldview/story/0,11581,722410,00.html
________________________________________
If you are
receiving this newsletter from a third party, you can sign up
by sending your
full name and how you heard of us to:
update@theconversation.org
________________________________________
Your feedback is subject to
posting here and on our Website. If you do not wish to have your comments
posted, please let us know.
You can always visit our What's New Since
Last Update [http://www.theconversation.org/new.html] page for links to everything new since we posted an
Update from Suzanne, May 11, on the
site.
We're sending these messages in HTML -- prettier than text. If you
prefer text, let us know.