The Largest Minority

July 16th, 2008 by Manila Ryce

Judging from the Bush administration’s change in policy, it would appear as though Iran’s missile tests were successful in more ways than one.

The United States does not invade countries which can defend themselves. We invade countries like Iraq and Grenada because they pose a potential economic opportunity and NO potential military threat. If Iran were really the most dangerous nation in the world, as the administration has irresponsibly stated over and over again, then any military option would be completely off the table. Only after the Iranians have shown that they do in fact have the ability to put up a fight have we decided to attend talks to avoid one.

An envoy from the US will attend weekend talks with Iran and other major powers over Tehran’s nuclear programme.

The announcement on Tuesday that William Burns, the US under-secretary of state, is to attend a meeting in Geneva with Saeed Jalili, Iranian nuclear negotiator, is a switch in position for the US.

Burns will join Javier Solana, the EU foreign policy chief, and envoys from China, Russia, France, Britain and Germany, at the meeting, due on Saturday.

They will discuss Iran’s response to an offer made by world powers last month to give up nuclear work that the West believes is aimed at building an atomic bomb and Tehran says is for peaceful power-generation purposes.

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July 13th, 2008 by Manila Ryce

I’ve been meaning to post this video for a long time.

Emmanuel Jal was a child soldier in south Sudan before he was smuggled out of the country by a British aid worker. He is now based in London and is a respected activist. See part one and part two of AlJazeera’s interview with Jal to learn more about his story.

July 9th, 2008 by Sam

Hysteria over China’s supposed looming threat to US national interests (read: hegemony) continue to underlie the foreign policy consensus among both political parties, the mainstream media, and “responsible” intellectual opinion.  In an interview with the The Real News Network, Aijaz Ahmad dispels some of the myths surrounding China’s alleged aggressiveness.  When asked about arguments suggesting that the possibility of China’s economy outgrowing the US’s may potentially pose a future threat, Ahmad responds:

“Well first of all that’s a very very irrational argument: if you lose out in peaceful economic competition you should just go and invade some country.  That’s an extremely irrational argument.  And a frightening one . . . As of now, Chinese posture is completely defensive . . . first of all, China has not fought a war outside its territory since the Korean war.  For the last 60 years, China has had no troops beyond its territory.  Its military expenditure, when you look at it . . . even its nuclear program, is essentially defensive in character.  It is frightened that it will be attacked by the United States . . .”

And unlike the land of the free and the home of the brave:

“[China] does not set out to tell any country what its internal social system should be, because it has not arrogated to itself the power to police the world either military or politically.”

Internally, China is rightly condemned for its gross human rights violations and repressive police state policies.   But serious consideration of China’s foreign policy can hardly merit the frenzy that is regularly  expressed by both “doves,” like Sen. Jim Webb (see above video), and “hawks,” like Sen. Joe Lieberman, who justifies increases in defense spending due to the “serious danger of falling behind China,” a country which possesses a defense budget a tenth the size of our own.  As Robert Scheer notes, “The only adversary that interested China,” according to a Pentagon report citing intellegence community estimates, “was Taiwan, and as recent events have indicated, that game is over.”  Scheer describes the recent warming of relations across the Taiwan Straits as a “nightmare scenario for America’s military hawks in desperate need of an excuse for soaking up more than half of the U.S. government’s discretionary budget.”  But we shouldn’t “shed tears just yet for the denizens of the military-industrial complex. Why should they doubt our continued willingness to throw money at weapons that have no targets, when few in Congress or the media ever bother to notice,” let alone honestly challenge the paranoid and imperialistic assumptions that lead us to assume that those targets exist in the first place?

July 9th, 2008 by Manila Ryce

The motivation behind the resistance in Iraq is the same now as it was when the war started, and the only way to end it is to end the military and corporate occupation. It really is that simple. We have no right as aggressors to determine our future role in a foreign country when the government of Iraq has clearly stated that we’re not welcome. Haven’t we killed enough innocent people? Haven’t we destroyed enough nations? Haven’t we been robbed enough ourselves by Washington?

Barack has failed to deliver. Those of us who actually listened to the debates from the beginning knew he was a Clintonian clone. Fuck him. He never was and never will be an agent for change. If you actually do desire change, and you’re pissed enough to finally do something about it, then show a little backbone and hold your vote as leverage above the Democrats.

July 2nd, 2008 by evmonk

I was reading this profile of Rush Limbaugh from the upcoming NYTimes mag and came across something odd. Not only does Limbaugh follow Olbermann’s lead in referring to his counterpart Bill O’Reilly as a real-life Ted Baxter, he also has good things to say about the rhetorical powers of Christopher Hitchens. This struck me as somewhat odd, considering Hitchens is a Marxist/Atheist who is famous for, among countless other controversial remarks, his convincing assessment of Henry Kissinger as a war criminal.

Anyway, this led me to an article and video Hitchens produced for the August ‘08 issue of Vanity Fair where he gets waterboarded. It’s an interesting enough video, which I threw on YouTube when I realized VF doesn’t allowed embedding.

Kudos to Hitchens for putting his aging, booze-saturated body under such duress. Although he taps out kind of quickly, don’t you think? (Not that I’d last any longer.) And what’s up with that music? Is that Enya?

Kaj Larson of Current TV, a former Navy Seal, submitted himself to a far more extensive and violent waterboarding session 2 summers ago. Plus Kaj’s video has more diverse, interesting commentary. Check it out by clicking below.

June 29th, 2008 by Sam

Here is Seymour Hersh on CNN’s Late Edition discussing covert US operations conducted inside Iranian territory.

It’s worth noting the utter illegality and brashness of such actions on the US’s part.  Scott Ritter, who has also written extensively on these issues, reminds us that the “violation of a sovereign nation’s airspace is an act of war in and of itself.” One can only imagine the response our government would unleash were Iran to even contemplate conducting similar operations in our sovereign territory, much less actually carry them out.

June 21st, 2008 by Sam

Working for the VA, as with any job I suppose, has its benefits as well as its drawbacks. On the one hand, helping combat veterans recover from the mental wounds of war, as we do at the facility I work at, is genuinely gratifying. It certainly beats the alienated labor of your run-of-the-mill corporate service sector job. On the other hand, I’m often reminded and confronted with the full barrage of myths surrounding the US’s violent and aggressive involvement with the rest of the world, both contemporary and historical.

Just the other week I was treated to a loud waiting room conversation between two Vietnam vets, both of whom have been receiving counseling for PTSD from my facility for several years. Their scars are lifelong, and so too it seems, are the myths they learned and were told to fight for four decades ago. The conversation, as it often does, veered from a discussion of the value the gook places on life (none, in case you were wondering), to the victory stolen from the Army and its corresponding State by the treasonous media and those damned anti-war activists, to the need to teach those red bastards a lesson by “taking no prisoners of war,” just razing villages and exterminating defenseless peasants, because after all, “that’s how they treated us,” as a walk through Topeka, KS or Billings, MT in 1968 would amply demonstrate. The conversation, as it usually does among the more reactionary sectors of our population, naturally shifted to a quaint conversation on the “invasion from the south” of illegal brown people. It seems where ever we turn, whether it be Vietnam, Iraq, or Mexico, brown people are ruining it for everyone. I was reminded of Noam Chomsky’s quote of whether “what is needed in the United States is dissent–or denazification.”

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June 16th, 2008 by D.C.

Fadel Shana, a photographic journalist for Reuters, was killed by an Israeli tank shell on April 16th, 2008. He died while reporting in the Gaza Strip, and Israeli forces have stated that they could not discern whether he was a journalist or not. In a recent Reuters article, Shana was said to be:

filming from a tripod in full view of two tanks for several minutes when one of the tanks fired a shell that exploded above them, showering them with metal darts known as flechettes.

Both wore body armor that carried “Press” markings, as did the car which they had been driving in the area for about half an hour. They were about 1.5 km (a mile) from the tanks. Shana’s camera captured the fatal shell being fired.

Not only was Shana killed, but eight adolescents aged 12 to 20 were killed. It is a blaring attrocity, but doesn’t seem to be the only case where Israel has fired first and asked questions later. In a botched airstirke, Israeli forces killed 6 people. It just seems to be a recurring theme in Palestinian territory: Israel forces respond to Palestinian activity with a quick military response, and sometimes that response is fatal.

What is peculiar about this incident is the fact that the tank fired into a group of people, where two men were journalists (and might I add, clearly journalists and not hostiles). The Israeli military forces have been known to discourage press coverage inside the Gaza Strip, so could this be their way of sending a warning to other journalists who want to cover the conflict? Or is this just a simple case of a trigger-finger-happy officer? Either way, it is an attrocity and should be investigated to the fullest extent. Will the investigation (if one actually takes place) actually give us an answer into the brutal death of Shana and eight others? Probably not, but I am hoping for the best result.

A spokesperson for Ehud Olmert, Mark Regev, commented on the deadly firing of the shell by stating:

“We have expressed regret and the army is conducting an investigation. It’s a tragedy,”
“There was no identification that he was a journalist. Had it been clear he was a journalist, the shell would not have been fired.”

This is a rather interesting comment. Apparently, by the statement he makes above, if a person is not recognized as a journalist in the Gaza Strip the military is free to fire on them. Does that make any sense to you? It sure doesn’t strike me as very humane. Regev’s statement leads me to believe that Israel does not regard the lives of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip as being worth very much. If they are willing to fire tank shells into a group of people that, according to the Reuter’s article, weren’t doing anything suspicious, I wonder what else they are ‘willing’ to do?

I am very sorry for the loss of the Shana family, and condolences to the families of those Palestinian adolescents killed that day as well. What I hope comes from these tragic deaths is a change in the way Israel treats people in the Gaza Strip, and hopefully they will actually stop and think before they act. When it comes to people’s lives, I think that is at least due.

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