ARE YOU READY TO RUMBLE?

IRAQ: A MASSACRE NOT A WAR

THE LIGHT THAT BRINGS IN DARKNESS

Are you ready? Are you sure? I have been watching VH-1’s hip hop history and toast to the B Boys. Now it’s time to anticipate the latest round of the D Boys. Click here to catch the wave and feel the vibe: www.letsrumble.com

This VP encounter feels like one of those smackdowns on the way, doesn’t it? In one corner, the challenger, the smooth talking anti-corporate lawyer. In the other, Mr. Corporate Connection, the Heavy from Haliburton. To the GOP, it’s pictured as steak versus the sizzle where the Veep’s “Gravitas” is expected to prevail. Honest, I heard that claim on CNN last night.

If war is politics by other means, than politics may be war by other means. And a war it is.

It’s Cheney time.

Who wouldn’t want it to be a no holds barred fight to the finish? But of course, it won’t be as smiley takes on scourey and both men try to be last one standing. I think we all know what will be said . . . but the thought that something out of the ordinary might happen will turn the usually staid Vice presidential debate into a big ticket item as we lurch from event to event and spectacle to spectacle in a political contest that has as many sideshows as there are celebrities. Michael Moore is making appearances for his new DVD. Republicans are hoping and Democrats are fearing for that October surprise to put W over the top.

ASK DICK

John Nichols of the Nation poses a number of questions he’d like to see posed to the man many think is really in charge. One of those queries caught my interest:

“Nelson Mandela says he worries about you serving in the vice presidency because, “He opposed the decision to release me from prison.” As a member of Congress you did vote against a resolution expressing the sense of the House that then President Ronald Reagan should demand that South Africa’s apartheid government grant the immediate and unconditional release of Mandela and other political prisoners. You have said you voted the way you did in the late 1980s because “the ANC was then viewed as a terrorist organization.” Do you still believe that Mandela and others who fought for an end to apartheid were terrorists? If so, are you proud to have cast votes that helped to prolong Mandela’s imprisonment and the apartheid system of racial segregation and discrimination?”

THE NUMBERS GAME

How close is it? New polls say Kerry won the debate but still put Bush ahead. Others say its neck to neck. The Progressive Review summarizes: “Kerry is now only three points behind Bush. Our average is split between polls before and after the first debate. If you take just the three post-debate polls, the race is a dead heat. What can be said is that the first debate helped Kerry but not as much as some commentators have suggested. He still has a difficult fight ahead.

“ON THE OTHER HAND: Kerry’s October average is 46%, back to is level before the September slump. Not enough to win, but progress.

ELECTORAL VOTES: State polls lag well behind the national ones, hence in this case reflect pre-debate reality with Bush at 262 votes, Kerry 168, and 108 undecided.”

KERRY DENOUNCES “PATHETIC SCAREMONGERING”

After the first debate I predicted that John Kerry’s phrase “global test” would be the one the far right would go after. And sure enough, they did, taking his words out of context in the process. CNN reports he blasted back in a speech in New Hampshire:

“Sen. John Kerry on Monday lambasted as “pathetic” scaremongering, Republican criticism of his comments during last Thursday’s debate in which he said the president’s decision to go to war should pass a “global test” of legitimacy.

“Asked during a town hall meeting in Hampton to explain what he meant, the Massachusetts senator said, “It’s almost sad; it’s certainly pathetic, because all they can do is grab a little phrase and try to play a game and scare Americans.”

He added, “They’re misleading Americans about what I said. What I said in the sentence preceding that was, ‘I will never cede America’s security to any institution or any other country.’ No one gets a veto over our security. No one” . . .

RELIVE THE FIRST DEBATE

www.pleasurecaptains.com/favor/howsmall.html

WAR FOR IRAQI FREEDOM

26 dead in Baghdad in new car bombs. US responds by bombing Sadr City. . . . The Washington Post reports on a private little speech by L Paul Bremer. Guess what the former US “administrator/pro-consul had to say when he thought he was off the record? The Washington Post reports:

“Bremer Criticizes Lack of Troops in Iraq : The U.S. official said Monday that the United States made two major mistakes: not deploying enough troops and then not containing the violence immediately after the ouster of Saddam Hussein.” . . . .BBC reports Donald Rumsfeld saying he has seen no evidence of a Saddam-Osama/Al Quaeda Link. Rummy told the Council on Foreign Relations: “To my knowledge, I have not seen any strong, hard evidence that links the two,” he said.

Now he tells us.

“A NIGHTMARE WITHIN A NIGHTMARE”

Riverbend, the Iraqi blogger updates us on the fighting now under way:

“It’s like a nightmare within a nightmare, seeing the corpses pile up and watching people drag their loved ones from under the bricks and steel of what was once a home.

“To top it off, we have to watch American military spokespersons and our new Iraqi politicians justify the attacks and talk about ‘insurgents’ and ‘terrorists’ like they actually believe what they are saying… like hundreds of civilians aren’t being massacred on a daily basis by the worlds most advanced military technology.

“As if Allawi’s gloating and Bush’s inane debates aren’t enough, we have to listen to people like Powell and Rumsfeld talk about “precision attacks.” What exactly are precision attacks?! How can you be precise in a city like Samarra or in the slums of Sadir City on the outskirts of Baghdad? Many of the areas under attack are small, heavily populated, with shabby homes several decades old. In Sadir City, many of the houses are close together and the streets are narrow. Just how precise can you be with missiles and tanks? We got a first-hand view of America’s “smart weapons”. They were smart enough to kill over 10,000 Iraqis in the first few months of the occupation . . .

Dan Cassidy has been picking through the language of the reporting in the NY Times and commenting on it :

“US Training is Paying Off

“Angry and anxious Iraqi policemen kept pumping shots into the air with their AK-47’s, spurring onlookers to flee the scene in a frenzy and leading many to believe that an intense firefight had broken out right in the heart of the capital.” (The New York Times, October 4, 2004)

Sam Hamod writes that the war has become a massacre:

“This is a massacre, not a war in Iraq. The U.S. bombing Samarra, Fallujah, Baghdad and other cities, killing hundreds of civilians and calling them terrorists is like the massacres of the Native Americans during America’s push westward.

“In this case, it has to do with America’s push eastward.

“What is also troubling is that no major media outlet, no major politician — none are callig this what it is, an immoral, unmitigated killing of hundreds of Iraqi civilians every week.

“Those who are experts in Arabic have claimed for months that the man alleged to be Zarqawi is not really Zarqawi because he does not have the real Zarqawi’s Jordanian accent. But, the American military, we are positive by now, has created this mythical Zarqawi to allow it to mercilessly attack Fallujah and punish its inhabitants because they withstood the American ground attack and chased the Americans out. Even today, the Fallujhans have said aloud to Al Jazeera and other outlets, that they will come out into the streets and fight the Americans–but our country, America, is immoral and cowardly, every day attacking Fallujah by F16, Apache and long range cannon fire. In the process, killing hundreds of civilians, but as in the Viet Nam war, saying, “It’s just collateral damage and we are not responsible for that.”

http://tinyurl.com/6kaxo

TIME TO COVER THE WOUNDED

Alternet reports: “The painful stories and pictures of some of the 16,000 American soldiers — like Cpl. Tyson Johnson — wounded in Iraq might move Americans to action. Maybe that’s why we don’t see them in the mainstream media.

www.alternet.org/waroniraq/20080/

GITMO FAILURES

Yesterday I told you about a play in New York, Guantanamo Honor Bound to Defend Freedom” that dramatizes the stories of the detainees. It exposes the abuses there–but Guantanamo is more than a human rights disaster. It is also an intelligence failure, reports the Observer’s Martin Bright:

“Prisoner interrogations at Guantanamo Bay, the controversial US military detention centre where guards have been accused of brutality and torture, have not prevented a single terrorist attack, according to a senior Pentagon intelligence officer who worked at the heart of the US war on terror. Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Christino, who retired last June after 20 years in military intelligence, says that President George W Bush and US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld have ‘wildly exaggerated’ their intelligence value.

“Christino’s revelations, to be published this week in Guant·namo: America’s War on Human Rights, by British journalist David Rose, are supported by three further intelligence officials. Christino also disclosed that the ’screening’ process in Afghanistan which determined whether detainees were sent to Guant·namo was ‘hopelessly flawed from the get-go’ . . .

According to Christino, most of the approximately 600 detainees at Guant·namo - including four Britons - at worst had supported the Taliban in the civil war it had been fighting against the Northern Alliance before the 11 September attacks, but had had no contact with Osama bin Laden or al-Qaeda.”

HAITI: ARISTIDE IS OUT, HIT SQUADS ARE BACK

Port au Prince, Haiti (HIP) —

“Reports are surfacing from many neighborhoods in the capital of paramilitary forces aligned with the US-backed regime of Latortue patrolling at night and shooting suspected supporters of ousted president Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Witnesses in the neighborhoods of Delmas 19, 30, 32 and 33 report heavily armed men in civilian clothes pulling up in cars and commandeering intersections at approximately 6:30 PM for two nights in a row. “They stop you and ask you political questions about Aristide and Lavalas. They ask you what you think about Latortue. If they think you like Aristide they will shoot you where you stand. I saw two young men I know that were killed that way Friday night. We are terrified and many people have left Delmas 30 out of fear” said 52 year-old Gladys who declined to give her last name.”

TRASHING TV AND BLAMING THE AMERICAN MIND

Bill O’Relly once asked me about TV News. “Whats the problem Danny?” What indeed. What and who do you blame for the condition our country and culture finds itself in. To author Manuel Valenzuelas, the answer is simple: TV itself. He calls it “The Light that brings forth Darkness ”

“The darkness that has encircled the Empire and its people has over the last fifty years grown thanks to the continued evolution of the television monitor and the ever-expanding media tentacles of the corporate world. The TV has become the single biggest tool for the corporate beast, having morphed in the last few decades into the apparatus by which consumerism, materialism, belief in fantasy, mental manipulation, love of the almighty dollar and the virus of greed are extracted and exploited from the masses, thus enriching the corporate beast with both the treasure and the controlled, easily manipulated mind of the American populace.

As the popularity of the television media has grown over the years and with Americans watching more and more hours of the instruments of fantasy, propaganda and brainwashing fostered by the corporate Leviathan, the collective American mind has dissipated in power and intellect, over the last few decades degenerating and becoming instead a sponge readily accepting and believing anything and everything implanted into it by the monitor — the axis by which everything in our home revolves around — that now serves as its brain.

The television, that glowing light now reigning as the center of our homes, robbing us of analytical minds and healthy bodies, that invention celebrated and adored, has become the single biggest weapon the corporate capitalists have to dominate, control and program us. It lies as the great culprit in the continued regression of the American mind and erosion of intellect, the further dominance by corporations of our daily lives, the decay and festering ignorance of our youth, the indifference to world affairs and apathy to the plight of the peoples of the globe, the unconcern towards government politics, accountability and transparency, the growth of our world renowned amnesia and short-attention spans, and the increased conditioning of and appetite for violence, death and destruction. ”

http://207.44.245.159/article6997.htm

YOUR LETTERS KEEP COMING

Lee Ferrel:

” In homage and honored memory of Gloria Emerson’s deep integrity and courage let us spare a few moments in our memories of her to send some prayers along for the innocent women and kids killed in Samarra, and all over that beseiged land for too long. As in Viet Nam, it takes no courage at all to fire missles into buildings where innocent one’s must be; indeed, it is one of the higher forms of cowardice, as we noted when B-52’s unloaded ton upon ton of destruction on too many innocent ones in that other “war” that had no useful purpose at all except to keep military contractors and their hirelings happy and rich.”

Ken Daniels comments: “Enjoy your blog. Listen.. if George Bush is wired, can someone get the frequencies for the next debate or do they sweep the rooms for bugs before

Wendi Meremark:

“More remarkable than the debate content was the debate internet coverage. Blogapaloosa. Many mass media mentioned it, mostly with a passive-aggressive diffidence working at undoing the ‘net’ effect in order to maintain their own conventional power to shape popular perception of events such as a debate. The net dissed the media first. I even imagine I see a crack of disunity in the mainline media, between blogs and blogsnots, trending to tomorrow’s knows and knowsnots — aboard and behind. Thomas Friedman at the NY Times, for example, ignoring three years of an internet criticism chorus, returns from hiatus and his first piece sounds like ‘where’d everybody go? what’s going on?’ It’s the voice of many editors and news directors.

“So the blogs were made media by the debate — a vague claim, maybe premature conjecture; hindsight might clearer tell.”

Larry Houghteling takes me to task and offers a interesting observation:

“I’m surprised that you’re spending any time at all badmouthing John Kerry or quoting anyone else badmouthing him. God knows I too have my differences with the guy. I was appalled by his Oct. 2002 vote to allow GWB to go ahead with preparations for war in Iraq. It should have been obvious to him then, as it was to me and you and millions of others, that Bush had no intention of using any finesse or even sense when it came to dealing with Saddam Hussein.

“But that was then, and this is now. Kerry is it, the candidate, the one and only guy who stands a chance of calling up the movers on Bush’s behalf. So hold your fire, guys. He’s not a bad guy, really. He came back from Vietnam and had the balls to jeopardize the political future he’d worked so hard to make a reality (by going to Vietnam in the first place) with his testimony about the reality in Vietnam. He hasn’t been the greatest senator, but he’s definitely in the top 20 percent. And remember that when FDR ran in ‘32, all the really smart lefty guys like us considered him a pathetic lightweight who would accomplish nothing. Even really smart lefties have been known to misunderestimate an occasional bloke.

Here’s something else that caught my eye, and your several correspondents Monday who think Bush was prompted by a voice in his ear make me bring up my query. Did anyone else notice than whenever the camera showed Bush from the rear his back looked funny. On Friday, the Times’ Alessandra Stanley (”On Television”) even referred to “the president’s tensely knotted back.”

“But I don’t think his back was tensely knotted, I think he was wearing a bullet-proof vest. Those bulges looked for all the world like cops I have known who wear the vests. Is it possible that before a friendly audience at Miami the president was protected in that particular manner? Have you heard anything of that nature?”

BLAME CONGRESS

Anita Nowell, from Ramsey, NJ tells us:

“This weekend I was talking w/a couple who has a child you works for Haliburton and recently was home. They said their young adult can’t believe have uninformed Americans are on the conditions in Iraq.

“The truth of the matter is, we have the Congress to blame for not representing their constituents by knowingly and willingly permitting this administration to continue on the path of corruption for greed; and the media to blame for withholding the facts.

“On Sunday mornings I listen to The Riverside Cathedral in NY on the radio and recently there was a Rev. Dr. Synagman speaking. During his speech he asked the congregation to call their Senators about a bill before the House, #HR4011. He claims this bill will hinder progress in Korea between the North & South. Currently, there is movement on both sides to come together. He went on to say, however, there are Americans (esp. Sen. Sam Brownback-R-Kansas) who wish to have this cold war continue. He urged everyone to call — perhaps Danny, your readers would do this. Toll free #s: 1-877-331-1223 or 1-800-839-5276.

“Thanks Danny, you a blessing to many us and I don’t like it when you take time off and I can’t read you-only kidding!”

Rebecca Wiillis passes this along:

“Now that Operation Iraqi Freedom has become Operation American Quagmire, it’s remarkable how accurately a spattering of journalists, citizens and whistleblowers saw what was really going on beforehand — a sizable feat considering the media’s perpetual airing of WMD and other propaganda.

www.buzzflash.com/farrell/04/10/far04033.html

WORTH WATCHING;

Congrats to Perry Films and Bill Adler for their hip hop history docs on VH-1. They are on all week. This is cultural history as it should be done, I took a special kick out of it because some of the shots I used in my 20/20 story on hip hop from l981 were back on the air.

It may be too late to catch it but a Junoon rockumentary airs on Australian Broadcasting (ABC). It is about the band Junoon and the state of the Pakistani rock music and screens the 5th of October.

Fast connections:
www.abc.net.au/foreign/content/2004/pakrock_200k.ram

For slower connections:
www.abc.net.au/foreign/content/2004/pakrock_34k.ram

Move On announces that Next Monday evening, “the Vote for Change tour will culminate in one of the great moments of this election — a grand finale, televised live on the Sundance Channel, featuring Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, R.E.M., Pearl Jam, Dave Matthews Band, the Dixie Chicks, Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne, John Mellencamp, and many other special guests. We’re holding watch parties nationwide to celebrate and mobilize.”

Jeff Cohen passes along this GOP reaction to Bruuuce and the tour: “The concerts sound like a bunch of old hippies getting together,” said Matt Davis, a spokesman for the Michigan Republican Party. “It sounds like they’re going to Jerry Garcia’s grave and plan on resurrecting him with some Wiccan ritual.” Quoted in Jackson (MI) Citizen-Patriot, Sunday, Oct. 3:
http://tinyurl.com/44fen

It’s time for this old hippie to say thanks for checking in, Time for moi to check out. Let me know what you thought of the debate. Write: dissector@mediachannel.org