laura.fo

NSA spying on soldiers' phone sex calls

A couple of articles about the media:

One on the presentation of the Iraq situation prior to the war, from the founder of FAIR:

In the fall of 2002, week after week, I argued vigorously against invading Iraq in debates televised on MSNBC. I used every possible argument that might sway mainstream viewers — no real threat, cost, instability. But as the war neared, my debates were terminated.

In my 2006 book Cable News Confidential, I explained why I lost my airtime:

There was no room for me after MSNBC launched Countdown: Iraq — a daily one-hour show that seemed more keen on glamorizing a potential war than scrutinizing or debating it. Countdown: Iraq featured retired colonels and generals, sometimes resembling boys with war toys as they used props, maps and glitzy graphics to spin invasion scenarios. They reminded me of pumped-up ex-football players doing pre-game analysis and diagramming plays. It was excruciating to be sidelined at MSNBC, watching so many non-debates in which myth and misinformation were served up unchallenged.

It was bad enough to be silenced. Much worse to see that these ex-generals — many working for military corporations — were never in debates, nor asked a tough question by an anchor. (I wasn’t allowed on MSNBC unless balanced by at least one truculent right-winger.)

Except for the brazenness and scope of the Pentagon spin program, I wasn’t shocked by the recent New York Times report exposing how the Pentagon junketed and coached the retired military brass into being “message-force multipliers” and “surrogates” for Donald Rumsfeld’s lethal propaganda.

The biggest villain here is not Rumsfeld or the Pentagon. It’s the TV networks. In the land of the First Amendment, it was their choice to shut down debate and journalism….

What makes me really angry? Is that this article is followed by comment after comment saying versions of "I don't watch TV," "who watches cable news?" "who believes this stuff in the first place?" "we all know Corporate Media lies," on and on.

Hurray, you don't watch television. HOW FANTASTIC FOR YOU. I appreciate non-participation as one strategy — will even call it the best strategy — against the way the Big Media^TM machine is currently constructed, but that yawn-and-dismiss tactic is INSUFFICIENT. Not when millions of other people DO watch television, DO get the majority of their international news from cable television, and DO use that information to vote and otherwise influence political events. I don't have any great answers here myself; it's not like I run something larger than the Pentagon and can combat this kind of thing in my spare time. But this guy is making some excellent points, if not strictly new ones, and I would appreciate having many more discussions about the issue without seeing them consistently bogged down in "you watch Hardball? what's wrong with you?" discussion-closers.

Sheesh.

Another one, this one about Debbie Almontaser, the Yemeni-American woman who was forced to resign as the principal of NYC's first Arabic bilingual high school. It's long-ish, but worth reading, especially pages 4 and 5, for another example of the oh-so-helpful role media (this time local media) play in defining political issues. Even I — who had been following this case, and wrote about it elsewhere last summer — was under the impression that she was fired because she was wearing an "intifada" t-shirt. While I personally don't have any problems with that, this article says she wasn't even doing that much: she was on the board of an organization that had an office that was sometimes used by a group of young women who were selling an "intifada" t-shirt:

Critics of the Madrassa Coalition say its tactics are typical of campaigns singling out Muslims: They lean heavily on guilt by association. The nuances of the claims against Ms. Almontaser were lost as the controversy lit up the blogosphere, said Chip Berlet, a senior analyst at Political Research Associates, a liberal organization outside Boston that studies the political right. One Web site, MilitantIslamMonitor.org, displayed photographs of Ms. Almontaser wearing her hijab in different styles, suggesting that she had undergone a public relations makeover to “disguise” her “Islamist agenda.”

But no worries. "She's certainly not a terrorist" –Mayor Bloomberg.

I watched Ghosts of Abu Ghraib. It was good. It included interviews with former prisoners, former guards, and the soldier who blew the whistle, as well as old footage from the original Milgram experiment.

Most interesting, to me, were the interviews with Sabrina Harman, the other female (besides Lynndie England) who did jail time over this, and the background she provides for the specific pictures that include her. She said she's always taken photos, of everything, her whole life. She said she always smiles for pictures, knee-jerk reaction, it's how she is. She said they got the thumbs-up sign from Iraqi kids, that it was habit to do that for each other, especially for the camera. And she said the picture of her next to a corpse was a man she'd been told had had a heart attack in the shower, and fallen. She had no idea he'd been murdered — "it was just a body." She's not excusing herself so much as explaining herself, and listening to her you can see how, from her perspective — not being on the other side of the camera, not seeing what we see — she probably really didn't understand the full gravity of what adding those four factors together would produce, namely:

Not that she was completely ignorant of it, not that she risked life and limb to stop what she was aware of and what she did understand — but the Milgram footage is relevant.

Overall they did a good job showing how impossible it is to view Abu Ghraib as "Animal House on the night shift". They traced the origins of specific torture acts and stress positions to Guantanamo and the Brazilian military ("and Israel!" I yelled at the TV — but it's not just those three; torture's been considered a science for hundreds of years, and the photos of Abu Ghraib prove _somebody_, somewhere, knew what they were doing).

My only complaint was that they stopped with Rumsfeld and the Geneva Conventions, making this into a conversation about torture, full stop, rather than a conversation about occupation in general. Assumption being that if we'd just had more controls in place, a better chain of command, better translators, better intelligence, better facilities, more security around the prison, more training for the soldiers, more soldiers period, or whatever… THEN this could have been a well-oiled machine, cue flowers-and-candy scenario.

But support for war was support for THIS, straight A to B; this is what occupation looks like in practice. If it hadn't been Abu Ghraib, it would have been something else. The folks in charge seem to be okay with that, which I find appalling, but almost as egregious are the members of the mainstream media who accept the "few bad apples" explanation and then turn to Iran and ask all the same questions they did about Iraq — does he have the bomb? would he ever use it? — without turning around and asking if the U.S. is actually capable of "installing democracy" (sic) in that county, not just when we're also tied up in Iraq, but ever.

Deliberately timing the execution to coincide with Eid is just creepy.

"Killing Saddam during the Hajj means they're willing to provoke Sunnis to the highest degree," one pilgrim said.

There are no words.

(I have mixed feelings about Bill Maher, and I'm willing to argue about where "being wrong" might more accurately be described as "lying" or "spin that works on the gullible," but the first 45 seconds of this are priceless anyway.)

Very interesting article about Lynndie England in marie claire of all places.

I just finished watching NICE BOMBS, Usama Alshaibi's documentary about returning to Iraq in 2004 after fleeing it in 1980. Two thumbs up. This film is so much more interesting and informative than mainstream news, obviously, but also better than other documentaries that attempt to take the viewer "inside Iraq" by interrogating Iraqis with an endless and exclusive focus over what they think of America. That question comes up here, too, but without the obsessional it's-all-about-us character of most American reporting. The people he talks to are neighbors and family members, all with their own histories, which he portrays and discusses (I can't stress enough how important this is to making them seem like humans instead of soundbites). There's a wide diversity of opinion, so much so that I think even a supporter of the occupation could watch it and see their views reflected, but regardless of your politics, by the time you get to the end, where he interviews two American soldiers — quote: "Freedom's new to them. They don't know how to deal with it" — it's clear how offensively simplistic, xenophobic, and frankly racist even the most optimistic justifications for this war are. Even the word "them" leaves a bad taste in your mouth. "Them"? You mean Usama's aunt, his uncle, his cousin? The ones who spend hours in coffeeshops and at the kitchen table talking politics and dodging rockets? "They" don't get democracy, "don't know how to deal with freedom"? That's it? That's their problem?

It's really powerful. Hopefully coming to a theater near you.

Yet another insipid news program, this time on NPR, in which grown men and women get together and forgive themselves for supporting the invasion of Iraq. But how could they have known? Given the intelligence at the time¹, the absence of an anti-war movement², and the purity of motives in the Bush administration ("we'd just been attacked!"), what choice did they have? Who could possibly have predicted something like Haditha, or Abu Ghraib, or the strength of the insurgency, or the possibility we might lose the war, or the idea that a lengthy occupation might create more terrorists than it eliminated? How could anyone have known that? Were we supposed to have a crystal ball??

I can't listen anymore. I'm done. There is absolutely nothing that has come out of this war that wasn't predicted before it began. I'm open to hearing people say "I weighed the evidence and at the time I believed X, but now I think Y." I'm even open to hearing hawkish ends-justify-the-means -style arguments. But I'm totally OVER hearing people Americans tell themselves there was just no way, oh *twists hands*, anyone could have seen what was coming round the corner.

¹ Published 08/14/02. Just one example.
² Favorite line: "The extent of the global spread of protest is highlighted by the fact that even the Polar region saw protests with a group of scientists at the US McMurdo Station in Antarctica holding a rally."

Usama posted this a couple months ago. It still haunts me.

Girl, Iraq.

She looks exactly like my daughter.

Bush promises probe into Saddam underwear pictures

Hey, I don't write the headlines.

A Just Deserter
By Matt Mernagh, NOW. Posted December 21, 2004

After three days of listening to graphic testimony at the refugee hearing of South Dakota war resister Jeremy Hinzman, one observer sitting near me shakily remarks, "If you're not a pacifist after sitting through this then nothing will make you into one." In this harshly lit hearing room on Victoria, a refugee board adjudicator is going to have to rule on a most shocking proposition: whether this former soldier of the U.S. 82nd Airborne ought to be granted asylum because he fears participating in war crimes in Iraq.

Those packing the room – mostly Quakers and other peace types – are busy trying to send subliminal messages to presiding member Brian Goodman through their anti-war buttons and peace quilts.

Round one has already been lost. A technical legal ruling forbids Hinzman's counsel, Jeffry House, from arguing the illegality of the war in Iraq and a soldier's duty not to participate in such a war. House considers the ruling a huge ground for appeal should Hinzman be denied refugee status.

But House has another card up his sleeve – an Ontario Court of Appeal precedent in the case of Fereidoon Zolfagharkhani, who deserted from the Iranian military upon learning that Iran intended to gas Kurds. Zolfagharkani was a paramedic, and it would have been his job to treat Kurdish people who didn't die from the attacks so they could withstand interrogation. He won the right to asylum in Canada, and House hopes a similar logic will work in Hinzman's case.

The point at issue is whether Hinzman, as a member of the 82nd, would have been forced to kill civilians or participate in violations of the Geneva Convention during his tour of duty. So House has entered exhibits of media reports from the Washington Post, Democracy NOW and Human Rights Watch with such titles as U.S. Military Attacks On Population Centers, U.S. Military Attacks On Health Clinics and U.S. Military Attacks On Civilians.

Info relating specifically to the exploits of the 82nd Airborne are easy enough to Google. I did the search myself and found a Human Rights Watch report documenting actions of the 82nd Airborne that resulted in the deaths of seven unarmed civilians.

As that report details, "soldiers from the 82nd Airborne's 3rd Battalion, 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment raided the apartment of Fadhil Hamza Hussain al-Janabi in al-Mahmudiyya on the outskirts of Baghdad after receiving a tip from a local pool hall about 'bad guys' in the neighborhood… Al-Janabi's 19-year-old daughter Farah was killed, as was a neighbor."

Outside reports of the 82nd, Hinzman's case turns on how well he can articulate the growing worries he harbours about becoming a killing machine. During his wife's pregnancy back in South Dakota, Hinzman began to disdain his training, which included chanting, "Trained to kill! Kill we will!" Fatherhood, he says, cemented his belief that, unlike the other soldiers, he couldn't make the grass grow with bright red blood.

Two months after his baby's birth and several months before shipping out to Afghanistan, he filed a very complicated conscientious objector (CO) application. "I didn't feel I could kill. I could have done other jobs in the Army," Hinzman says.

What happened then isn't entirely clear. Somehow, the papers were lost and Hinzman resubmitted his CO application. At this point he was in Afghanistan doing kitchen duty. Then one day while scrubbing pots, he says, superiors pulled him from his duties, brought him in front of a tribunal and quickly denied him CO status.

Upon returning to the U.S., he came to realize his only option was to flee to Canada. He led a hard double life, he says – by day training to deploy to Iraq and by night planning an escape route north.

"We were going to Iraq to jack up terrorists. We were told this was a new kind of war, that these people weren't human and that they were not to be treated in a humane way. We were told by commanders in pep talks that these people are evil."

Needing more specifics on who the army considered evil, presiding member Goodman asks, "Who were they referring to as terrorists?"

Hinzman chillingly replies, "They associate everyone in the area as a terrorist."

"The entire population of Iraq was considered a terrorist?" Goodman asks.

"We referred to Iraqis, Saudis, Kuwaitis, Yemenis, Iranians as terrorist, as they came from the Middle East," comes Hinzman's reply.

Somewhat disbelieving, Goodman asks again, "All Arabs from that region were terrorists?"

"Correct, sir."

Though the war in Iraq isn't on trial, House manages to highlight U.S. soldiers' propensity to kill Iraqi civilians. When he introduces his star witness, Marine Staff Sgt. Jimmy J. Massey, immigration rep Janet Chisholm weakly objects. "He doesn't have a similar position in the Army," she says of Massey, and suggests he couldn't possibly be an expert on the Geneva Convention.

The soft-spoken, bespectacled Massey, who is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder from his tour in Iraq, was not only trained in the Geneva Convention since boot camp but was also assigned to ensure firefights were clean – i.e., carried out according to the army's Standing Operating Procedures and the Geneva Convention.

Within Massey's first 48 hours in Iraq, his platoon of 45 had slaughtered 30 unarmed men, women and children at checkpoints. Marines are trained to set up checkpoints according to a set procedure, but Massey testifies that military fearmongering "was giving us the mindset that every Iraqi was a terrorist."

Now the former Marine even questions whether their procedure for trying to stop a vehicle entering a checkpoint could have been sending the wrong message to approaching Iraqis. As cars moved towards them, a Marine would flash what they believed was the international "Halt" hand symbol, a closed fist in the air. Of course, it is easily mistaken for the internationally recognized brotherhood or solidarity gesture, which is exactly the same.

All this happened in a matter of seconds as the fear of suicide bombers created itchy trigger fingers. "We fired at a cyclic rate. We pulled the trigger and didn't stop," Massey says.

"I witnessed Marines putting rounds into enemy combatants who were expiring. It is not uncommon for a Marine to put rounds in the head of someone playing possum," he says.

Besides trying to establish the realities of soldiering in Iraq, the hearing also puts Hinzman's religious beliefs under the microscope. The war resister and his family attend twice-weekly Quaker gatherings. They are tenders, not members, but Hinzman says that after years of quiet contemplation, he would apply to become a member.

The other question before the refugee board is whether Hinzman is a refugee by reason of a well-founded fear of persecution. To establish this, he would have to show that the U.S. government and its military would persecute him for reasons of political opinion, religion or membership in a social group – namely conscientious objectors to military service in the U.S. Army in Iraq.

All this Goodman will have to weigh to determine if the horrors that he repeatedly heard in gross, exacting detail meet the requirements set out by the Court of Appeal. With written submissions from House and Chisholm not due until the end of January, a ruling probably won't drop until March. Then the world will learn whether Canada considers the actions of the U.S. Army in Iraq to be so dire that conscientious objectors are in need of our protection.

Bush: I would accept Islamic Iraq

Mr Bush told the Associated Press in an interview that he would accept such a result if elections were open and fair.

"I will be disappointed. But democracy is democracy," he said during an interview given on Air Force One.

"If that's what the people choose, that's what the people choose," he said. Free elections are expected in the country next January.

Speaking as he travelled between campaign stops, Mr Bush said the US would leave Iraq "once we've helped them to get on the path of stability and democracy".

He added: "It's very difficult for me to predict what forces will exist although I will tell you that Iraq's leadership has made it quite clear that they can manage their own affairs at the appropriate time."

Correspondents say Mr Bush's comments appear to clash with earlier remarks from his administration which rejected calls soon after the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime for the creation of an Islamic state similar to that of its neighbour, Iran.

This already happened, more than ten years ago: in Algeria. In 1992 the Islamists won the first round of democratic elections and looked ready to win the run-off when the ruling party, the FLN, declared the elections void, launching the country into a civil war. France supported the FLN but the U.S. under George H.W. Bush stayed neutral, refusing to endorse either the prospect of an Islamic government or the anti-democratic alternative. Of course they had the freedom to shy away from that question because Algeria was and remains a French problem. In Iraq they won't have that privilege.

But be very clear. The point of "regime change" in Iraq is to install a cooperative puppet, one responsive to U.S. business interests in the region. A theocracy poses no inherent contradiction to that objective: witness our friends on the Arabian peninsula. If anything a theocracy is more likely to squash dissent, thereby ensuring that the country is "secure" for the free flow of capital. America's main worry in the case of Algeria was that it would not repay its debt, but this is not an issue in Iraq; whatever regime gets set up there will be beholden to American interests one way or another, and in case they have doubts over such a situation we'll have troops on the ground to remind them.

An Islamic win in Iraq would be a PR disaster for Bush, but only in the short term, and anyway, if there's anything we've learned in the last four years, it's that Bush doesn't care much about public relations. He has other priorities.

Utah Phillips will be registering to vote this year for the first time in his life

I've always been fond of saying "I'm not a pacifist," because it undermines so many of the strawman arguments the pro-war set try to make with me. Oh yeah?!? Well if you don't believe in WAR, how would you —" "I'm not against war. I'm against THIS war."

Of course there are an awful lot of wars that have fallen under the "THIS war" umbrella lately, and I'm beginning to notice a trend. Right now I am dealing with a lot of anger because there is not one shocking expose about the situation in Iraq that wasn't made by the anti-war movement back in 2002 and the beginning of 2003. Iraq doesn't have WMD? That's what we were telling you! Removing Saddam will create a safe haven for Islamist extremism? Had a crystal ball on that one! No exit strategy = bad idea? You're joking!

I had a very close friend who attempted suicide at the beginning of the first Gulf War after hearing that George I was asked for his opinion on the war protesters and responded, "They don't exist." Nobody tells me I don't exist, he wrote to me a few years later. At the time I couldn't really put myself in his place — hey, you win some you lose some, man — but since then I've met so many other activists who are almost thrilled with seeing the world go to shit because it means they won their argument, never mind the devastation and human suffering inflicted in the process or the shame they should be feeling because their protest was ineffectual, again. In that context the depth of my friend's pain, and his response, impresses me.

Another friend, around the same time, was asked to speak at a Q&A session and when the topic of violence was raised he mentioned, in passing, that this was among other things a gendered conversation "because women experience violence differently than men do." Which I take to mean we're usually on the receiving end of it.

Utah Phillips, on pacifism: "I didn't know what exhausted me emotionally until that moment, and I realized that the experience of being a soldier, with unlimited license for excess, excessive violence, excessive sex, was a blueprint for self-destruction. Because then I began to wake up to the idea that manhood, as passed onto me by my father, my scoutmaster, my gym instructor, my army sergeant, that vision of manhood was a blueprint for self-destruction and a lie, and that was a burden that I was no longer able to carry. It was too difficult for me to be that hard. I said, 'OK, Ammon, I will try that.' He said, 'You came into the world armed to the teeth. With an arsenal of weapons, weapons of privilege, economic privilege, sexual privilege, racial privilege. You want to be a pacifist, you're not just going to have to give up guns, knives, clubs, hard, angry words, you are going to have lay down the weapons of privilege and go into the world completely disarmed.' He died in 1970 and is still a headache. If there is one struggle that animates my life and why I do what I do, it's that."

I love this quote, and on the other hand I can't get around the fact that the labor movement he so passionately defends is one that people fought and died for, and I have difficulty seeing the wisdom of pacifism-as-strategy. He says himself, later in the same interview, "These kids don't have a little brother working in the coal mine, they don't have a little sister coughing her lungs out in the looms of the big mill towns of the Northeast. Why? Because we organized; we broke the back of the sweatshops in this country; we have child labor laws. Those were not benevolent gifts from enlightened management. They were fought for, they were bled for, they were died for by working people, by people like us. Kids ought to know that."

Maybe he's defending violence only in the case of self-defense (where "self" also refers to the defense of one's community) — which is the view I subscribe to as well, in the abstract and hypothetical — but the question then becomes defining aggression vs. self-defense and I don't think that's as easy as it seems. I'm struggling with this because it's easy to say "well what did you expect?" to the Americans who are shocked, just shocked! at the level of violence in Iraq, but it's harder to say "the Iraqis have the right to defend themselves" and mean it when you know that involves shooting off the leg of some 19-year-old from Missouri.

"Islam stands for peace,"" said the imam immediately after September 11. It does? I'd wondered. All the time? Even if it means rolling over and taking it?

"Islam stands for justice," a professor said to me back when I was seventeen. I'd been immediately intrigued.

Reality TV in the Arab World

Iraq has also recently entered the reality-TV sweepstakes, with shows evincing Iraq's own rather bleak reality. Carried on the independent satellite channel Al Sharqiya, reports the Washington Post, are sunny pick-me-ups with titles like Ration Card and Iraq's Most Melancholy Home Videos. Then there's Labor Plus Materials, a knockoff of Ty Pennington's Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, except instead of selecting families with ugly couch patterns or Formica countertops, hard-hatted saviors rebuild war-damaged homes.

And a review of the Egyptian movie B'heb al Sima

In one scene, the unhappy wife mounts her fasting husband, hoping—in vain—to arouse him. In the meantime, the family's radio is blaring away in the background. What's on? It's not Umm Kulthum singing one of her sad, 45-minute epics. It's no less than President Nasser, delivering a famous speech in which he takes responsibility for Egypt's ignominious defeat in the 1967 war with Israel, and offers to resign. I will leave you to contemplate this remarkable contrapuntal presentation of various Egyptian frustrations.

No wonder, you may be thinking, that such a film is controversial; it's a wonder that it was released at all. Actually, no. The real problem faced by the film is that the family portrayed in it is Coptic Christian…

The Cairo Times used to have a lot of good information about censorship in Egypt. And lo, their web site is down — I wonder why. I did find this, though.