HURRICANES OF PAIN

911 WIDOWS BACK KERRY

WHAT REALLY HAPPENED IN RUSSIA?

The Big Easy is more than uneasy this morning as Hurricane Ivan menaces New Orleans. The killer storm has slowed down and has lost its category five status for now. The Washington Post reports that if the storm hits the city with full force “New Orleans could cease to exist.”

AP explained why: “The worst-case scenario for New Orleans. a direct strike by a full-strength Hurricane Ivan could submerge much of this historic city treetop-deep in a stew of sewage, industrial chemicals and fire ants, and the inundation could last for weeks, experts say.

“If the storm were strong enough, Ivan could drive water over the tops of the levees that protect the city from the Mississippi River and vast Lake Pontchartrain. And with the city sitting in a saucer-shaped depression that dips as much as 9 feet below sea level, there would be nowhere for all that water to drain. ”

SAFE FOR NOW

As I write at 6:15 AM, it appears as if the city was spared with Mobile Bay the place Ivan is likely to come to shore. Is this extreme weather related to global warming? So far no one is making the connection but I wouldn’t be surprised if these weather patterns and intense storms don’t have more to them.

Of course, it is the poor who tend to pay the highest price as the peoples of several; Caribbean islands discovered when the shacks and shanty town neighborhoods of the poor in Grenada and Jamaica were devastated.

Western Cuba was hit and hit hard according to the Miami Herald, with the lovely Isle Of Youth, home of the prison that once held Fidel Castro (that I once visited) getting the brunt of it.” ‘’The situation is bad, very, very, bad,'’ a woman huddled in her home in Pinar del Rio province told The Herald by telephone Monday night. Wind howled in the background. “We’ve been told it’s going to get a lot worse. We are in a difficult situation.'’

The hurricane was “mushroom in size,” the paper reported. “It was so vast that its clouds simultaneously covered Cuba, the Florida Keys, the entire Florida peninsula and portions of the Bahamas, Mexico, Belize and Honduras.” An old friend in Havana responded to my inquiry about his safety that that city was mostly spared but the parts of the Island are suffering terribly.

“We were very close to Ivan, but finally it decides to cross over Cuba on one of the extremes, by Pinar del Rio province. That was very convenient, because it was a huge hurricane with winds of more that 250 kilometer per hour and a lot of rain. It destroys a lot of houses, crops, roads, but there were no dead people.

“Now we are working to solve the problems created by Charlie and Ivan, in addition of the ones created by George, that has been crossing over Cuba for more than three years.” Note that Cuba’s level of organization and popular mobilization has saved lives.

THE GHOST OF MARK TWAIN

There are other storms of pain in this world with Iraq remaining an epicenter. I was reminded this morning of the great American writer Mark Twain’s use of the word Hurricane in his famous War Prayer to call an end to the Spanish American War, that largely forgotten Vietnam before Vietnam in the Philippine Islands. (Forgotten perhaps because it was before John Kerry’s time and the GOP has no interest in resurrecting its tragic memory) . Twain headed the anti-imperialist league then. His words remain timely in the terror era:

“O Lord our God, help us tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a HURRICANE of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended in the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames in summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it.

“For our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, strain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen. . . . .

NEWS FROM THE FRONT

Turkey has threatened to stop cooperating with the US if its military attacks on areas housing the Turkeman people do not cease . . . .BBC reports the “insurgency is spreading and deepening throughout Iraq . . . ” Dan Cassidy writes:

“The real story is this lead Iraq story semi-buried on the internet version of nyt under “international.” The US state is spinning out of control so fast the editors at nyt — like the entire beltway-media elite - perceive the chaos as almost-normal - or standing still.”

“BAGHDAD, Iraq, Sept. 14 - An increasingly bold and organized insurgency seized the offensive again on Tuesday as a suicide car bomb packed with artillery shells exploded outside police headquarters here, ripping into a crowd of hundreds of young men seeking to join the Iraqi police force and killing at least 47 people and wounding 114 others, police and health officials said.”

Three men were found beheaded this morning, probably a warning to others who cooperate with the US occupation . . . Colin Powell said he now does not believe that stocks of WMDs will be found. The Secretary of State once assured the UN that they would . . .

Reuters characterized this admission this way: “Powell’s latest comments appeared to be his most explicit to date suggesting that the central argument for President Bush’s decision to invade Iraq - the belief it possessed weapons of mass destruction - was flawed.”

Flawed?

Editorials against the war are becoming more strident even as President Bush continues to support it in familiar language in campaign appearances. Maureen Dowd of the New York Times says the Administration calculates that their message is still working:

“These guys figure, hey, these scare tactics worked in building support for the Iraq war, maybe they can work in tearing down support for John Kerry. They linked Saddam with terrorism and cowed the Democrats (including Mr. Kerry, who has never been able to make the case against the Bush administration’s trompe l’oeil casus belli) and fooled the country into going along with their trumped-up war. So why not link Mr. Kerry with terrorism and cow the voters into sticking with the White House they’ve got?”

911 WIDOWS BACK KERRY

The Republican convention milked 911 politically. Now the 911 widows who did the most and worked the hardest to press for the 911 Commission (largely not mentioned in the convention) are backing Kerry. These women told me when we first met a year ago they were not political and felt that 911 should not be politicized. In light of what’s happened in recent months, they seem to have changed their minds: The Associated Press reported: “WASHINGTON - Five outspoken Sept. 11 widows on Tuesday will publicly endorse John Kerry for president, The Associated Press has learned, throwing their weight behind the Democratic challenger in a heated campaign debate over who is best suited to defend the nation from another terrorist attack.

“Some, including Kristen Breitweiser, of Middletown, N.J., and Monica Gabrielle, of West Haven, Conn., also have agreed to make campaign appearances for the Democratic senator, campaign sources told the AP.

“”We will be speaking from the heart, and speaking from our conscience,” Breitweiser said Monday. She would not elaborate. Breitweiser is by far the most visible and outspoken of the Sept. 11 family advocates, and has been highly critical of the government’s reform efforts to date. The move highlights the widening political divide among the nearly 3,000 Sept. 11 families.”

SMALL TOWN NEWSPAPERS OPPOSE WAR AND USE OF WAR

The Bushevik approach is not working in many small towns across America. Here’s part of an editorial in the Niagara Falls Reporter in upstate New York:

” There are a lot of Americans getting shot to pieces in Iraq, fighting on behalf of a cabal of cowards who lied our country into the war. The same guys who dodged the draft in Vietnam now capriciously send our sons and daughters into harm’s way. . . . There’s a word for guys like that, and it’s not a word that’s fit to be printed in a family newspaper.

www.niagarafallsreporter.com/editorial169.html

Free Press carries this item: Mike Jenner, “The Executive editor of the Bakersfield Californian writes that the media’s preoccupation with the military service of Bush and Kerry has overshadowed the serious reporting of campaign issues that should be taking place.

www.freepress.net/news/4535

KITTY KELLY IN THE EYE OF THE MEDIA HURRICANE

Meanwhile, that new book by Kitty Kelly exposing George Bush is continuing to stir it up on the campaign trail. Sam Smith of the Progressive Review puts her work in the context of journalistic irresponsibility:

“Few things get the conventional media more riled up than one of its own who doesn’t play by the rules, such as the requirement demanding sycophancy towards whatever sociopaths currently lead the country and, coincidentally, provide the propaganda that the media passes on as news.

“Thus it is that Kitty Kelly is under full fire these days: unreliable, sensational, lack of facts and so forth. So just for fun, we’ve been reading these attacks to learn some facts about Kitty Kelly and all we’ve found is the unreliable, sensational and a lack of facts. Kelly, who has never been successfully sued, apparently does her mischief so cleverly that the uptight media toadies power can only allude to it without actual citation. A typical example from the NY Times’ Michiko Kakutani:

“Though Doubleday is promoting Ms. Kelley as ‘a master investigative biographer,’ she lavishes all too much of her admirable energy on trying to ferret out personal peccadilloes, ranging from drug and alcohol binges to temper tantrums, from weight problems to bad taste in gift-giving. Certainly family members (particularly George W. Bush, running in the aftermath of the Bill Clinton scandals) have to some degree invited this sort of scrutiny by selling themselves as a close, wholesome, all-American clan, but Ms. Kelley’s relentless concentration on these matters, often to the exclusion of far more serious issues, makes for a tacky, voyeuristic and petty-seeming narrative.”

“This from a paper that consistently misled its readers on the far more serious issue of what was going on in Iraq.”

Smith also roasts the Washington Post’s contempt for her work: “As Isaiah Berlin noted way back in 1943: “No town has ever taken itself so seriously with so little reason.” And when you take yourself that seriously, intimations that those up to whom one sucks might be sleazeballs, coke addicts, or just plain crooks is just too much to bear..”

Matt Taibbi comments on her work in New York Press. “Kitty Kelley’s take on the Bush dynasty: consistently cold, calculating, predatory and unscrupulous generation after generation. In other words, her book is a rollicking good read.”

www.alternet.org/mediaculture/19888/

RACIAL PROFILING GETS WORSE

AP reports:

“Authorities’ targeting of people because of their racial background or religious affiliation is a deep-rooted problem in the United States, with nearly 32 million people reporting they’ve been racially profiled, a human rights group said Monday.

“The report by Amnesty International USA also said at least 87 million people - one in three - in the United States are at high risk of being victimized because they belong to a racial, ethnic or religious group whose members are commonly targeted by police for unlawful stops and searches.

“Racial profiling is a growing problem as the government has expanded its war on terror, the report said. Police, immigration and airport security procedures are the areas where the problem has gotten worse since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, it said.”

SHARON STILL OBSESSED WITH ARAFAT

“USA Today reports: “Prime Minister Ariel Sharon vowed in an interview published Tuesday to expel Yasser Arafat from the West Bank “at a convenient time,” saying he saw no difference between the Palestinian leader and top Hamas militants killed by Israel.. (South Africa’s Mail and Guardian reports that Sharon hinted that Arafat may be killed.)

www.usatoday.com/news/world/2004-09-14-sharon-arafat_x.htm

WHAT REALLY HAPPENED IN OSSETIA?

We may all think we know but as the school reopens in Beslan, unasked and unanswered questions that I have not seen in the US press are being raised. One disclosure: There were no “Arabs” among the terrorists. This is from RFE sent to us from Istanbul:

UNANSWERED QUESTIONS IN AFTERMATH OF BESLAN.

Three days after the gun battle that precipitated the end of the Beslan hostage taking, any number of crucial questions remain unanswered.

“The exact number and provenance of the hostage takers is still not known with any certainty. Initially there were said to be between 17 and 40 of them. One of the female hostages released on 2 September was quoted by “Kommersant-Daily” the following day as saying that there were “about 30″ hostage takers, of whom two were women; that they were all masked; and that they claimed to be Chechens. Reuters on 2 September quoted North Ossetian Interior Minister Kazbek Dzantiev as saying that the Beslan hostage takers include both Ingush and Chechens, and that “they speak good Russian.” The kavkazcenter.com website for its part quoted Dzantiev as saying that there were also Ossetians and Russians among the militants. Valerii Andreev, head of the North Ossetian branch of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), dismissed the hostage takers’ ethnicity on 2 September as irrelevant.

“Late on 3 September, Andreev alleged that at least 10 of the hostage takers were Arabs. But on 6 September, the “Financial Times” quoted Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov’s representative Akhmed Zakaev as rejecting that allegation as “propaganda. If that were the case, the Russians would have shown their faces immediately.” “The Washington Post” on 5 September quoted a Beslan resident as expressing disbelief: “Everyone is deceiving us. They’re telling us there were Arabs. There were no Arabs.” The independent Ingushetian website ingushetiya.ru reported on 5 September that one dead hostage taker initially said to have been a Negro had his face burned and blackened with ash during the assault on the school building.

“Russian Deputy Prosecutor-General Sergei Fridinskii told journalists in Beslan on 4 September that the bodies of 26 hostage takers have been recovered, and their identity is still being clarified. But the following day, Fridinskii gave the total number of terrorists as 32, of whom he said two are still alive.”

www.rferl.org/reports/caucasus-report/2004/09/34-060904.asp

YOUR LETTTERS HIT HARD

Chuck O Brien takes on NGOs:

“NGO’s too often are a vortex, and that is the shame of it. Like black holes they suck the good intentions of well meaning persons down an endless hole of meetings, position papers, lunches, phone conventions, smoozy cocktail events, and talk, talk, talk. They provide counter point to the seemingly infinite army of do nothing governmental representatives, department heads, and lobbyists. Without the salaried professionals and experts of NGOs it would be all too obvious that Washington is singing only to itself. Instead they have these eager, wide-eyed, non-governmental bridesmaids to waltz around the ballroom of eternal discussions and inaction. Then all go home believing that they have each played out their expected roles, and knowing that they can pay their rents. There are rare exceptions without whose accomplishments all others NGOs would be easily discredited. But fore-stalling the public interest is an objective of commercial lobbyists, and amongst those who need only speak of the public interests, government employees and NGOs alike, inactivity is endemic.

“Counting on NGOs is like despairing for inequity amongst people, but feeling okay about yourself because you have contributed money to charity. Let’s look elsewhere for the emergence of a civil society.”

ON PRO-NADER INTELLECTUALS BACKING KERRY

Jean Braun writes:

“While I have enormous respect for people like Noam Chomsky, Ben Cohen, and Susan Sarandon, it is mind-bogglingly incomprehensible to me that they should support John Kerry in this presidential election.

“If Kerry is elected, what resources do we have to change his policies on support for the Iraqi war, for sending 40,000 more troops into the 120 countries where our troops are now (and where is he to get these troops?), on support for the war on terrorism, on support for the Patriot Act, on support for a Star Wars nuclear missile space defense system? All of these are Kerry policies.

“If the Bush/Cheney team is elected, they have committed such egregious violations of national, Constitutional and international law and have committed such a bloody blunder in Iraq, that it is very possible to force Congress to impeach or remove them, especially if progressive people — including Democrats — are elected in an election that is audited by candidates themselves, in calling for voters to transmit the ballot IDs of the votes they have cast for them.

“If it comes down to a push vs. shove legal battle, - and there was a small army of young persons who went into law after the close of the Vietnam war - it is important to realize that because they publicly violated the Voting Rights Act in Florida, 2000, in preventing the counting of the votes that had been discarded by chad-gorged machines, the conservative Supreme Court Five (Justices Rehnquist, O‚Connor, Scalia, Thomas and Kennedy) would need to recuse themselves for conflict of interest on any matter concerning Bush or elections. Their statute of limitations has not yet expired.

COVER PALESTINIANS BETTER

Nadia writes from Washington:

“I do enjoy reading your newsletter from time to time. But may I ask why you don’t cover Israel and the Palestinians as you do other news stories on a more regular basis? That region is burning up daily if not hourly and I have to resort to Al-Jazeera in English and BBC to find out what is happening. There are other Internet sites, but the two I mentioned are more popular with me at least.

“I have noticed you mention Palestinians in passing and every so often you have a brief paragraph on Israel, but that’s it. Palestinians and Israelis are dying weekly as a result of hostilities from both sides, yet this gets very little mention in your newsletter. I really find this surprising. And if you have covered how Palestinians are being oppressed by Israeli policies and how other Israelis are suffering as a result of Palestinian backlash, then I may have missed the stories. I am not partial to the Palestinians or the Israelis, but one cannot avoid thinking how the media is biased towards the Palestinians when they are gunned down by Israeli soldiers. But when Israelis are killed by Palestinians, then we hear a completely different version. What do you make of this? Do you find this to be true? I am curious.”

ON THE TERM 9/11

Christopher Bailey hates the way the media cheapens the events of September 11th.

“A former NYC detective once said to me he thought calling September 11th “9/11″ was an insult, that it was yet another easy capsulation of something of greater importance by American society. I’ve tried to be respectful, take what he said to heart and remember to call it September 11th.

“That said, I believe calling it September 11th, or 9/11, 911 three times is an editing slip that really needs to be addressed.

“Walter Kirn wrote a piece in the New York Times on Sunday suggesting what want is “the right to revive 9/11 on command, whenever it served their own ambitious purposes.” Further, he acknowledges that “(g)etting over the attacks is (his) way of refusing (the opportunity for politicians to do that).”

www.nytimes.com/2004/09/12/magazine/12WWLN.html

“As a New Yorker, I recognize that it’s considered blasphemous to hold that opinion, but I’m slowly coming around to it. It’s not that I will ever forget September 11th, rather I hope to learn from it and carry the lessons learned forward. It is my wish that we all do the same and that in so doing we treat the events and the victims with the appropriate respect.”

That’s all I have time for now. Happy New Year who all who mark Rosh Hashanah… Check out our lead story on MediaChannel — an impressive report from the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

www.mediachannel.org/views/dissector/affalert255.shtml

….Thanks to all for tuning in. Your comments and items are the bane of the blog. Keep them coming. Write: Dissector@mediachannel.org