Category Archives: World Press

World Press

What we are in the grips of: Joseph Wilson and Noam Chomsky

May 4, 2004 admin 61 Comments

As I react with incredulity at the conduct of this administration, there is so much to rail against that I, along with many others, have cut back on scrutinizing all the accounts. As someone who has taken to passing information along, my alternative has been to say more about crop circles, which are a source of potential breakthrough, than to keep wallowing in political breakdown. But sometimes I come across something so compelling that instead of speed reading it I slow down to take in every word. The latest thing I've ingested this way is an excerpt from Joseph Wilson's new book, The Politics of Truth, that was posted on the Truthout.com website a couple of days ago.

I'm not going to excerpt it here so that you don't get a few bites and think you've had enough. For a penetrating exposé, The Cult That's Running the Country: Joseph Wilson blasts the secretive neoconservative cabal that plunged America into a disastrous war, do read it all.

I did skim over parts of a long and “very enlightening interview with [Noam] Chomsky,” which listmember Ed Herman sent out. If you find more things for me to post in the whole piece, send them along, but here's the end, that I've found myself chewing over, of what Chomsky said on April 24th:

I mean sooner or later terror and weapons of mass destruction are going to get together, it’s just a matter of time. This reflects an extremely broad consensus among analysts. There’s also a consensus on how to deal with terror, a strong consensus and it has two elements: there are the terrorists themselves and there is the potential reservoir of support and sympathy which they’re trying to mobilize. They regard themselves as the vanguard trying to mobilize support. The reservoir of sympathy may be people who hate them and fear them and hate what they do but nevertheless recognize that there is some justice in their cause. So how do you deal with the two groups? Well the terrorists, you deal with them as with other criminal actions, through police actions, which turns out to be have been quite successful. There has been considerable success in finding leaders, in trying them and breaking up the financing networks.

What about the potential reservoir? Well on that again there is strong agreement. What you have to do is ask them what their grievances are. They have grievances, many of them are quite legitimate, so you address those legitimate grievances. I mean that should be done apart from the threat of terror, but just focusing on terror, if you address the legitimate grievances that will reduce the ability of the vanguard to mobilize support because it’s based on grievances.

On the other hand if you want to help the terrorist then just use violence because that will antagonize and infuriate the reservoir. It will increase recruitment to the terrorist groups, so we have a choice. Either can reduce the threat of terror or we can increase it. This administration and Blair are consciously acting to increase it.

Blair is particularly interesting because the British have just been through this in Northern Ireland. As long as they reacted to IRA terror by increasing violence they stimulated it. As soon as they began, for the first time, to pay some attention to the grievances they were able to reduce it. In fact Belfast is not paradise but it is a lot better than it was ten years ago

As far as I know, every former head of Israeli Military Intelligence and of the general security services has said the same thing: that is if you want to fight terror with violence then you’re asking for an unwinnable war. If you give the people some respect and pay attention to their grievances then you can reach an accommodation, that’s been very generally true.

There’s only one way in which violence works and that’s through extermination, then it works. So take, say, the United States, the United States does not have a lot of internal conflicts and it has a single language over a huge territory and why? It exterminated the native population. If you do that you don’t have any problems, but anything that falls short of extermination or mass expulsion then it’s going to escalate a cycle of violence. It’s always terrible but by now it has become lethal to survival because of our capacity for destruction.

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World Press

Destroying a Town in Order to Save It

April 12, 2004 admin 31 Comments

Rahul Mahajan is a reliable source. This is what keeps me going on my crop circle mission. Just think about this:

I spoke to a young man, Ali, who was among the wounded we transported to Baghdad. He said he was not a muj but, when asked his opinion of them, he smiled and stuck his thumb up. Any young man who is not one of the muj today may the next day wind his aqal around his face and pick up a Kalashnikov. After this, many will.

How can we hope to get out of the situation we are in by any ordinary means?

—–Original Message—–

From: Empire Notes
Sent: Monday, April 12, 2004 5:54 AM

Hello, all. Here's my latest report — from Fallujah this time. I witnessed and can confirm several things that are only being reported in the Arabic press. Please forward this to other people who may find it of interest.

In solidarity,
Rahul Mahajan,

Report from Fallujah — Destroying a Town in Order to Save It

Fallujah is a bit like southern California. on the edge of Iraq's western desert, it is extremely arid but has been rendered into an agricultural area by extensive irrigation. Surrounded by dirt-poor villages, Fallujah is perhaps marginally better off. Much of the population is farmers. The town itself has wide streets and squat, sand-colored buildings.

We were in Fallujah during the “ceasefire.” This is what we saw and heard.

When the assault on Fallujah started, the power plant was bombed. Electricity is provided by generators and usually reserved for places with important functions. There are four hospitals currently running in Fallujah. This includes the one where we were, which was actually just a minor emergency clinic; another one of them is a car repair garage. Things were very frantic at the hospital where we were, so we couldn't get too much translation. We depended for much of our information on Makki al-Nazzal, a lifelong Fallujah resident who works for the humanitarian NGO Intersos, and had been pressed into service as the manager of the clinic, since all doctors were busy, working around the clock with minimal sleep.

A gentle, urbane man who spoke fluent English, Al-Nazzal was beside himself with fury at the Americans' actions (when I asked him if it was all right to use his full name, he said, “It's ok. It's all ok now. Let the bastards do what they want.”) With the “ceasefire,” large-scale bombing was rare. With a halt in major bombing, the Americans were attacking with heavy artillery but primarily with snipers.

Al-Nazzal told us about ambulances being hit by snipers, women and children being shot. Describing the horror that the siege of Fallujah had become, he said, “I have been a fool for 47 years. I used to believe in European and American civilization.”

I had heard these claims at third-hand before coming into Fallujah, but was skeptical. It's very difficult to find the real story here. But this I saw for myself. An ambulance with two neat, precise bullet-holes in the windshield on the driver's side, pointing down at an angle that indicated they would have hit the driver's chest (the snipers were on rooftops, and are trained to aim for the chest). Another ambulance again with a single, neat bullet-hole in the windshield. There's no way this was due to panicked spraying of fire. These were deliberate shots designed to kill the drivers.

The ambulances go around with red, blue, or green lights flashing and sirens blaring; in the pitch-dark of blacked-out city streets there is no way they can be missed or mistaken for something else). An ambulance that some of our compatriots were going around in, trading on their whiteness to get the snipers to let them through to pick up the wounded was also shot at while we were there.

During the course of the roughly four hours we were at that small clinic, we saw perhaps a dozen wounded brought in. Among them was a young woman, 18 years old, shot in the head. She was seizing and foaming at the mouth when they brought her in; doctors did not expect her to survive the night. Another likely terminal case was a young boy with massive internal bleeding. I also saw a man with extensive burns on his upper body and shredded thighs, with wounds that could have been from a cluster bomb; there was no way to verify in the madhouse scene of wailing relatives, shouts of “Allahu Akbar” (God is great), and anger at the Americans.

Among the more laughable assertions of the Bush administration is that the mujaheddin are a small group of isolated “extremists” repudiated by the majority of Fallujah's population. Nothing could be further from the truth. Of course, the mujaheddin don't include women or very young children (we saw an 11-year-old boy with a Kalashnikov), old men, and are not necessarily even a majority of fighting-age men. But they are of the community and fully supported by it. Many of the wounded were brought in by the muj and they stood around openly conversing with doctors and others. They conferred together about logistical questions; not once did I see the muj threatening people with their ubiquitous Kalashnikovs.

One of the mujaheddin was wearing an Iraqi police flak jacket; on questioning others who knew him, we learned that he was in fact a member of the Iraqi police.

One of our translators, Rana al-Aiouby told me, “these are simple people.” Without wanting to go along with the patronizing air of the remark, there is a strong element of truth to it. These are agricultural tribesmen with very strong religious beliefs. They are insular and don't easily trust strangers. We were safe because of the friends we had with us and because we came to help them. They are not so far different from the Pashtun of Afghanistan — good friends and terrible enemies.

The mujaheddin are of the people in the same way that the stone-throwing shabab in the first Palestinian intifada were and the term, which means “youth,” is used for them as well. I spoke to a young man, Ali, who was among the wounded we transported to Baghdad. He said he was not a muj but, when asked his opinion of them, he smiled and stuck his thumb up. Any young man who is not one of the muj today may the next day wind his aqal around his face and pick up a Kalashnikov. After this, many will.

Al-Nazzal told me that the people of Fallujah refused to resist the Americans just because Saddam told them to; indeed, the fighting for Fallujah last year was not particularly fierce. He said, “If Saddam said work, we would want to take off three days. But the Americans had to cast us as Saddam supporters. When he was captured, they said the resistance would die down, but even as it has increased, they still call us that.”

Nothing could have been easier than gaining the good-will of the people of Fallujah had the Americans not been so brutal in their dealings. Tribal peoples like these have been the most easily duped by imperialists for centuries now. But now a tipping point has been reached. To Americans, “Fallujah” may still mean four mercenaries killed, with their corpses then mutilated and abused; to Iraqis, “Fallujah” means the savage collective punishment for that attack, in which over 600 Iraqis have been killed, with an estimated 200 women and over 100 children (women do not fight among the muj, so all of these are noncombatants, as are many of the men killed).

A Special Forces colonel in the Vietnam War said of the town, Ben Tre, “We had to destroy the town in order to save it,” encapsulating the entire war in a single statement. The same is true in Iraq today — Fallujah cannot be “saved” from its mujaheddin unless it is destroyed.

[Rahul Mahajan is publisher of the weblog Empire Notes. He was in Fallujah recently and is currently writing and blogging from Baghdad. His most recent book is “Full Spectrum Dominance: U.S. Power in Iraq and Beyond.” He can be reached at rahul@empirenotes.org]

World Press

“Earth could be hit in an hour.” — INITIATING A CONVERSATION

February 26, 2004 admin 57 Comments

“If you cross a street, you don't predict the probability of a car being there; you look to see if one's coming.”

If humanity had its wits about it, the asteroid inquiry, below, is an example of what it would do. There is so much danger on this living planet that we are a primitive species until we turn our collective attention to protecting ourselves from things beyond our control.

A shift of mind-set is what it will take to get us to seriously change our ways, and, most logically, this would come from an event that made the possibility of species annihilation real to everyone who was left. All good minds should be turned to how to bring about this shift in another way. My offering is crop circles — evidence that we're not alone would bring us all together in a vastly different juxtaposition to the universe, plus it would conceivably enroll a greater intelligence than ours in coming to our aid. The pattern so far has been that the incidence and complexity of the crop formations have increased in response to interest that has been shown, and anything that can put crop circles in our landscape conceivably could put an asteroid shield around the earth. (We've tweaked our booklet showing why crop circles can't be hoaxed, and it's done now. Please look: http://theconversation.org/booklet2.html. To view the booklet you must have at least Flash Player v.5. To get the latest version of the free Flash Player go to www.macromedia.com/flash.)

Does anyone have another idea for how to bring about a radical change in the way humanity thinks, or are there responses to this one?

Scientists Want to Be Ready to Block Asteroid

A group gathered in O.C. says Earth could be hit in an hour — or in a thousand years or more.

By David Haldane, February 24, 2004

A huge asteroid heading for Earth could kill 1.5 billion people and devastate the planet, scientists at an international gathering said Monday in Garden Grove.

The only question is when.

“It could happen this year or in a century or in a millennium” or far longer, said David Morrison, a space expert at NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, in Northern California. Whenever it does, he said, we need to be ready.

Making sure that we are is the mission of 120 scientists and engineers attending the four-day gathering called the Planetary Defense Conference: Protecting Earth From Asteroids, which began Monday at the Hyatt Regency hotel. Billed as the first major conference of its kind, the confab has attracted astronomers, aerospace engineers, astronauts and emergency preparedness specialists from throughout the United States as well as Italy, Great Britain, Canada, the Netherlands, Germany and Russia.

Among the strategies to be discussed are such extravagant-sounding scenarios as deflecting asteroids with nuclear warheads, lasers and mirrors — which would create gas jets that would disrupt the object's trajectory.

“We have reached a point in the evolution of life on this planet where we can actually do something about this, but not if we don't start planning,” said Bill Ailor, director of the Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies at the Aerospace Corp. in El Segundo, which organized the conference along with the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics in Reston, Va. “Our goal,” Ailor said, “is to raise the consciousness of the public and of people who work in the field.”

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach) who, among other things, chairs the House subcommittee on space and aeronautics and has introduced two bills encouraging research on threats from outer space, set the tone during a keynote address.

“Bin Laden was out there like a near-Earth object for a long time,” he said. “It took 9/11 — the slaughter of 3,000 innocents — for us to pay attention to that threat. I hope it won't take that long for us to recognize the threat of near-Earth objects; so far we've had a very tepid response.”

In fact, the U.S. government has been tracking and charting the paths of large asteroids since 1998. To date, Morrison said, about 60% of all those known have been charted; about 90% are expected to be done by 2008. “Among those charted,” he said, “there appears to be no danger.” As for the others, Morrison said, “I can't tell you anything about them — one could hit us in an hour, though it's not very likely.”

He bases that mixed assessment on the belief of most scientists that truly catastrophic asteroid collisions occur only about once every million years. The uncertainty, he said, stems from the fact that, because the last such collision occurred in prerecorded history, its date is unknown. (A more minor incident — the magnitude of which occurs about once every 100 years — happened in 1908, leveling more than 1,000 square miles of Siberian forest.)

“We want certainty,” Morrison said. “If you cross a street, you don't predict the probability of a car being there; you look to see if one's coming.”

Conference organizers say that, for starters, they intend to encourage the continuation of that process. The conference — held in Garden Grove because, Ailor said, “it seemed like a good place to start [and] the weather is good this time of year” — is expected to be the first of many held at least once every four years.

At Monday's opening session, participants heard presentations on the threat posed by asteroids and the methods by which it is assessed. Sessions through the rest of the week, Ailor said, will cover such topics as how to move a near-Earth object off course (including the early planning of a mission to do so), how to prepare for the disaster that will ensue if preventive efforts fail, and how to affect political and policy issues related to the impending threat.

“We want people to get excited about this topic,” Ailor said. “We want young people to consider it as a subject for future work.”

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