VOTE EARLY AND OFTEN
CURFEWS IN PARIS
ANDERSON COOPER TO THE RESCUE

It is election day in most of the USA. Here in New York city, Republican Mayor Michael Bloomberg, (call me “Mike” in his volumuninous four color campaign literature) the former bond trading billionaire turned media owner has spent $66 million plus to hold on to his job as Mayor. At the polling place this morning, only trickle of voters…Another depressing moment for our manipulated democracy.

In New Jersy, Senator Jon Corzine, another multi-millionaire, is fighting for relection. In California, The Governator is holding a special election:

http://www.alternet.org/story/27186/

CURFEWS IMPOSED IN PARIS

The French Government is imposing curfews in certain neighborhoods outside Paris to quell the continuing insurrection there. This amounts to a state of emergency being proclaimed as the first death is reported. After riots rocked America’s cities in the 1960’s, The Kerner Commission revealed that racial insensitivity, police abuse and deep inequality—the existence of two nations separate and apart in the USA—were underlying factors. The same seems true in this situation. The New York Times reports using terms like “at worst, racist.” They have had a Commision studying the situation BEFORE the eruption:

”The local police assigned to France’s poor suburbs who are the objects of scorn of the rioting youths are often inexperienced and ill equipped, according to a recent report from the National Commission on Ethics in the Security Services.

The commission reported in April that a lack of training led to behavior that was at best clumsy and at worst racist in those neighborhoods with large immigrant populations. It criticized the fact that French police officers have rarely been punished for misdeeds and lamented the lack of ethnic diversity in all branches of the police…”

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/08/international/europe/08police.html

Its an old story: put people in ghettoes, deny them jobs and opportunities, abuse them and, sooner or later, boom you have a social explosion.

See Washington Post.com for more photos. The International Herald Tribune (IHT.com) in Paris offers a slide show of photos.

PENTAGON: TO TIGHTEN CONTROLS ON INTERROGATION

The problem that the Pentagon denied existed is now to be fixed by a new policy directive with field regulations….

WHAT TORTURE FEELS LIKE

In a New Yorker article –Jane Mayer — personalizes Senator John McCain’s crusade against making torture of detainees an official policy by describing details about the deaths of detainees at the hands of CIA personnel. Mayer also discusses the emergence to public scrutiny of some controversial internal “memos” on torture, authored by John Loo (see additional note on Loo below) and now Attorney-General, Alberto R. Gonzales. Mayer also gives more details about the Abu Ghraib abuse matter (see especially quotes by Jeffrey H. Smith and Dr Steven Miles).

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/051114fa_fact

More on Torture: Van Bergen: The New CIA Gulag of Secret Foreign Prisons

http://writ.news.findlaw.com/commentary/20051107_bergen.html

Police in Australia claim they foiled a terror attack and announced 17 arrests…

IN THE BUNKER

Sidney Sid Blumenthal says President Bush has a “Bunker strategy.”

”One year after his reelection President
Bush governs from a bunker. “We go forward with complete confidence,” he proclaimed in his second inaugural address. He urged “our youngest citizens” to see the future “in the determined faces of our soldiers” and to choose between “evil” and “courage.”

“But as he listened to Bush that day, Vice President Dick Cheney knew that the election had been secured by a coverup…”.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2005/11/03/vanguard/print.html

FROM THE HALLS OP MONTEZUMA TO THE SHORES OF….

A week ago I was surprised to be called by Lt Colonel Rick Long at the Quantico Marine Coprs base in Virginia. Rick actually ran the Marine embedding program in Iraq and was telling me about a media conference they are planning to have. I said maybe the military would do well to have some critics present to explain why the public is turning against the war.

He didn’t dismiss the idea and agreed it might be interesting He told me someone would call me. I wasn’t surpised when they didn’t. One visit to Google might persuade them that I would not be considered a “friendly” although I would be keen to go. Just as I resigned myself that I was not Marine material, Colonel Long sent me an article attacking a marine challenging the military. It was a guy I had met

It seems that one of his embeds, Ron Harris of the St Louis Post Dispatch is on a tear against Jimmy Massey, an ex marine who has been blowing the whistle on war crimes. More than a year ago, I met him when he first started speaking out. At that time, no media was interested his story. He and other soldiers speaking out against the war were mostly ignored. He had to to go overseas to be heard

But once a book came out in France with his charges, Jimmy started coming under attack as a liar and worse. I wasn’t able to get his side of this yesterday, but I assume I will soon. In the meantime, the aforementioned Harris is criticizing the media for carrying Massey’s claims that he witnessed—and in some cases participated in—the killing of innocent civilians. “During a single 48-hour period, he says, he saw as many as 30 civilians killed by US gunfire at highway checkpoints,” reports WSWS:
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/nov2004/vet-n11.shtml

Supporters of the war say he is slandering the troops:

http://dustinthelight.timshelarts.com/lint/000567.html

An early report appeared in his home town newspaper, The Smoky Mountain News:

http://www.smokymountainnews.com/issues/05_04/05_26_04/fr_massey.html

MEDIA DENOUNCED FOR CARRYING REPORTS

From Ron Harris in the St Louis Post Distatch:

”Media outlets throughout the world have reported Jimmy Massey’s claims of war crimes, frequently without ever seeking to verify them.

For instance, no one ever called any of the five journalists who were embedded with Massey’s battalion to ask him or her about his claims.

The Associated Press, which serves more than 8,500 newspaper, radio and television stations worldwide, wrote three stories about Massey, including an interview with him in October about his new book.

But none of the AP reporters ever called Ravi Nessman, an Associated Press reporter who was embedded with Massey’s unit. Nessman wrote more than 30 stories about the unit from the beginning of the war until April 15, after Baghdad had fallen.

Jack Stokes, a spokesman for the AP, said he didn’t know why the reporters didn’t talk to Nessman, nor could he explain why the AP ran stories without seeking a response from the Marine Corps. The organization also refused to allow Nessman to be interviewed for this story.

Some media did seek out comment from the Marine Corps and were told that an investigation of Massey’s accusations had found them baseless. Still, those news outlets printed Massey’s claims without any evidence other than the word of Massey, who had been released from service because of depression and post traumatic stress disorder.

I am told Massey is sticking by his story. More when I have it.

The silencing on a lone Marine will not silence all the stories about war crimes. In fact, just today, the Independent in London is picking up an Italian report about the use of chemical weapons by US soldiers in Iraq.

FALLUJAH AGAIN

Today is the first anniversary of the assault on Fallujah. This video was being shown in Italy.

Story about Sgrena / Fallujah video last evening on google news:
http://www.adnki.com/index_2Level.php?cat=Terrorism&loid=8.0.226404219&par=

COMMENT

“If this report is true, the US has lost all of their arguments for invading Iraq. This team just delivers one black eye for the US after another, including their inability to tell the truth. Powerful new evidence emerged yesterday that the United States dropped massive quantities of white phosphorus on the Iraqi city of Fallujah during the attack on the city in November 2004, killing insurgents and civilians with the appalling burns that are the signature of this weapon. But now new information has surfaced, including hideous photographs and videos and interviews with American soldiers who took part in the Fallujah attack, which provides graphic proof that phosphorus shells were widely deployed in the city as a weapon.

http://americablog.blogspot.com/2005/11/independent-uk-picks-up-us-chemical.html

Original Story: US Used Chemical Weapons In Iraq Veteran admits: Bodies melted …

http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m17559&date=07-nov-2005_20:32_ECT

See George Monbiot in the Guardian today for a tough piece on how the press has been minimizing civilian casualties in Iraq. He is one of the few columnists who writes with footnotes.

http://www.monbiot.com

ON PRO-WAR LIBERALS

John R MacArthur, Publisher of Harpers goes after pro war lliberals in the Providence Journal:

…”…as much as I’m infuriated by the Bush brigade’s steadfast support of the Iraq horror, I find myself angrier still when pro-war liberals — the so-called reluctant hawks — wring their hands over the bloody mess they’ve wrought with their neo-conservative allies.

“There are many such handwringers in politics, especially within the leadership of the Democratic Party. Sen. Joseph Biden, of Delaware, is forever asking “tough questions” about Iraq (the torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo upset him terribly), without drawing the obvious conclusion that we never should have attacked in the first place, and need to get out as fast as possible.
In journalism, the current handwringer-in-chief is the New Yorker writer George Packer, whose book The Assassins’ Gate has met with high praise from handwringers, hawks, and a subset of pundits I call trimmers. Handwringers “anguish” over their past or current support for the war; hawks don’t apologize for anything; and trimmers criticize Bush the foolish president, but avoid unequivocal denunciations of this foolish war.

“Christopher Hitchens, a ferocious hawk, has embraced The Assassins’ Gate, calling Packer “both tough-minded enough, and sufficiently sensitive, to register all [the] complexities [of the Iraq conflict].” The handwringer Samantha Power went even gushier in her blurb on the back cover: “Packer . . . cuts past the simplistic recriminations and takes us on an unforgettable journey that begins on a trail of good intentions and winds up on a devastating trail of tears.”

Trimmer Frank Rich, of The New York Times, settled for calling Packer’s book “essential,” and quoting it favorably in a column.

“I think a better description of George Packer is “useful idiot,” as invoked by some Western anti-communists when they ridiculed liberals sympathetic to the ruthless Soviet state. Too harsh, you say? After all, “humanists” such as Packer, Power, and Michael Ignatieff signed on with the neo-conservative crowd for a “democracy-building” project in Iraq, not a proletarian overthrow of capitalism.

WAR WITH SYRIA?

Military expert William Arkin writes in his blog in the Washington Post

Last year, U.S. intelligence agencies and military planners received instructions to prepare up-to-date target lists for Syria and to increase their preparations for potential military operations against Damascus.

“According to internal intelligence documents and discussions with military officers involved in the planning, U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) in Tampa was directed by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to prepare a “strategic concept” for Syria, the first step in creation of a full fledged war plan.

“The planning process, according to the internal documents, includes courses of action for cross border operations to seal the Syrian-Iraqi border and destroy safe havens supporting the Iraqi insurgency, attacks on Syrian weapons of mass destruction infrastructure supporting the development of biological and chemical weapons, and attacks on the regime of Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad….