IRAQ WAR ENDS!

Ready to come home. In case you haven't read the wonderful news, please follow this link to the New York Times.

DICK CHENEY IS A LOATHSOME LIAR

Dick Cheney says torture investigation "offends the hell out of me."

With all due respect, Dick Cheney is a vile loathsome liar with the ethics of a Gila monster. His lies helped us get into the Iraq War. "There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction." Cheney consistently ridiculed dissent, strong-armed opponents, lined the pockets of his Halliburton cronies, and encouraged Gestapo tactics in our military.

It's not surprising that this vicious blowhard opposes the torture investigation. He has been howling against Obama for looking into the matter, though not as loudly as if an army field telephone to his genitals. That's an "enhanced interview technique," after all. Watch this interview.



Should we investigate torture and possible war crimes? Some people don't want to know--and they certainly don't want to be tried for war crimes. We will undoubtedly have more reports of torture if investigations are allowed to proceed. Back in the Vietnam days, the Cheneys of the time also stonewalled attempts for investigations. Sadly, Cheney isn't unique.

Just a few days ago, Lt. William Calley, who was held responsible for the deaths of hundreds of men, women and children at My Lai, made a public apology. At the time, the Cheneys of the day claimed the dead were combatants and stonewalled an investigation.

My Lai, Vietnam

“There is not a day that goes by that I do not feel remorse for what happened that day in My Lai,” William Calley told members of the Kiwanis Club of Greater Columbus today. His voice started to break when he added, “I feel remorse for the Vietnamese who were killed, for their families, for the American soldiers involved and their families. I am very sorry.” From the New York Times, Aug. 24, 2009

My Lai, Vietnam---"Q: And Babies? A: And Babies." From a CBS interview of one of the soldiers who participated in the My Lai massacre.

I remind you all that maybe we aren't aware of something on the level of My Lai in Iraq, but we wouldn't have been aware of My Lai either if the coverup had been successful back then. The Dick Cheneys of that era were also "offended as hell" that anyone would question the US military ops in Vietnam. Thank God some soldiers weren't only brave in battle but brave enough to speak up.

Abu Ghraib, Iraq

Could it be THAT bad? Maybe a little waterboarding, or sleep deprivation, but how bad could that be? According to Glenn Greenwald, writing in Salon, it's much worse then we know. Many deaths by US torture have been kept hidden.

"The interrogation and detention regime implemented by the U.S. resulted in the deaths of over 100 detainees in U.S. custody -- at least," says Greenwald. "While some of those deaths were the result of "rogue" interrogators and agents, many were caused by the methods authorized at the highest levels of the Bush White House, including extreme stress positions, hypothermia, sleep deprivation and others. Aside from the fact that they cause immense pain, that's one reason we've always considered those tactics to be 'torture' when used by others -- because they inflict serious harm, and can even kill people. Those arguing against investigations and prosecutions -- that we Look to the Future, not the Past -- are thus literally advocating that numerous people get away with murder."

Abu Ghraib, Iraq

Read the Salon story on the suppressed deaths by US torture here.
Read the NYT story on Calley here:

TORTURE MEMO AUTHOR PUNKED

John Yoo, formerly of the Department of Justice, played a key role in the Bush administration's justification of torture. He authored the infamous "torture memo," and for his trouble he got "punked."



A man dressed as an Abu Ghraib prisoner disrupted John Yoo's class (he currently lectures at Berkeley and Chapman University). The actor climbed on a desk while Yoo was discussing constitutionality and said, "I've got one question: How long can I be required to stand here 'til it counts as torture?"

Yoo was flustered, but not as much as if he had his balls wired to an army field telephone. When Yoo ended the class, a student yelled at the actor to leave. The actor replied, "I'd love to move but every time I do my balls get buzzed."


Yoo's interview with human rights scholar Doug Cassel is a horrifying moment of candor:

Cassel: If the president deems that he's got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person's child, there is no law that can stop him?

Yoo: No treaty

Cassel: Also no law by Congress -- that is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo...

Yoo: I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that.

- John Yoo, interviewed December 1, 2005

IRAQ WAR ENDS!

That's the headline of the New York Times, anyway. It turns out thousands of remarkable facsimiles of the newspaper were delivered this morning--nationwide--stunning readers with the news that the war was over. The paper also reported that Bush had been indicted for treason, and that columnist Thomas Friedman had confessed: "I have no business holding a pen, at least with intent to write."

The Yes Men: high concept anti-corporate pranksters

As far as we can tell, the parody is the work of brilliant satirists and pro-consumer pranksters, The Yes Men. You may have seen the 2003 film of the same name documenting their exploits (if not, I highly recommend it). These guys frequently pose as corporate or government spokesmen and lobby for shocking anti-consumer projects--and get the full support of the unwitting profit-seekers of the private sector. It's best to see for yourself. These guys have elevated guerrilla theater to an art form.

Jonathan Swift: don't believe him either

Original Yes Man Jonathan Swift punked the entire English-speaking world with his book--pamphlet, really--A Modest Proposal. In the essay, Swift eloquently, reasonably, suggested that Ireland's poor escape their poverty by selling their children as food to the rich:

"I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food...”


The Yes Men documentary trailer

Watch these clips of their exploits. It's amazing how far they get! Like the secret agents in Mission Impossible (the television series) a suit and an official-looking letterhead seems to grant them complete access.


BBC: You've been punked!


The Yes Men proposing slavery...well, sort of


YES MEN links:

-Read their answers to "frequently asked questions" here.
-Follow their latest hijinks here.
-Get the fake New York Times at the fake Times website here.

WAR STORIES

It's Veterans Day, so we're telling war stories. Everyone loves war stories. Life, death, courage, you know the drill. We grew up playing war games. Some went off to actual wars to kill or be killed. Here are some war stories interwoven with the words of Tim O'Brien, a Vietnam veteran and author of The Things They Carried, and Going After Cacciato, which won the National Book Award in 1979. I was fortunate to study with O'Brien at the Sewanee Writers Conference in Tennessee, where he meticulously line-edited 75 pages of my novel-in-progress. I can assure you, the man is obsessed with "getting it right," and his work reflects a precision of emotion and truth one rarely encounters in writing of any kind. O'Brien has written extensively about his experiences in Vietnam, the moral dimension as well as the combat, and he often speaks about the difference between "story-truth" and "truth-truth."


"A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things they have always done." -Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried



"You can tell a true war story by the questions you ask. Somebody tells a story, let's say, and afterward you ask, 'Is it true?' and if the answer matters, you've got your answer.

For example, we've all heard this one. Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast and saves his three buddies.

Is it true?

The answer matters."

"You'd feel cheated if it never happened. Without the grounding reality, it's just a trite bit of puffery, pure Hollywood, untrue in the way all such stories are untrue. Yet even if it did happen - and maybe it did, anything's possible even then you know it can't be true, because a true war story does not depend upon that kind of truth. Absolute occurrence is irrelevant. A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth. For example: Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast, but it's a killer grenade and everybody dies anyway. Before they die, though, one of the dead guys says, 'The fuck you do that for?' and the jumper says, 'Story of my life, man,' and the other guy starts to smile but he's dead. That's a true story that never happened."



"Often in a true war story there is not even a point, or else the point doesn’t hit you until, say, twenty years later, in your sleep, and you wake up and shake your wife and start telling the story to her, except when you get to the end you’ve forgotten the point again. And then for a long time you lie there watching the story happen in your head. You listen to your wife’s breathing. The war’s over. You close your eyes. You smile and think, Christ, what’s the point?"

Read Tim O'Brien's books. Buy them here and here.

PRISONERS OF WAR

John McCain was a POW, but you probably knew that since it seems to be the centerpiece of his presidential campaign. Some would even say he exploits that experience. While he may be a war hero, the question remains whether his wartime experiences qualify him to run the country. This interview with a former POW caught my attention.

Dr. Phillip Butler is a 1961 graduate of the United States Naval Academy and a former light-attack carrier pilot. In 1965 he was shot down over North Vietnam where he spent eight years as a prisoner of war.

Butler says John McCain is "not cut out to be President."

HOW WE GOT INTO THIS MESS IN IRAQ

This is an excerpt from "Bush's War," an excellent documentary that aired earlier this year on Frontline. This segment concerns itself with the pretext to war, and how it was pitched to the American public. This should be required viewing for all voters--especially the undecided.

As we watch the Republicans rewrite history in their pro-McCain convention speeches, and give their candidate credit for supporting Bush's war from the start, and continuously, it's good to remind ourselves what really happened back then.

The rest of the documentary is available here.

SUPPORT THE TROOPS, LET THEM TALK

Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan was the title of a conference held recently in Washington, DC, that allowed vets from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars to tell their stories. The conference hearkened back to the "Winter Soldier" testimonies held thirty years ago during the Vietnam War. Iraq War combat veteran Jon Michael Turner told his story.

"If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie."

-Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried



In related news, here is a list of the most vicious war profiteers. Click HERE for the story.

If you're still in denial, you're hopeless. Have a nice day.

HAPPY 4TH OF JULY!

Like Obama, I'm trying to reach out to the "red states."

NEW REPORT ON WAR BUILD-UP

A long-delayed Senate committee report has concluded that President Bush and his aides built the public case for the Iraq War by exaggerating available intelligence and ignoring disagreements among spy agencies about Iraq’s weapons programs and Saddam's links to Al Qaeda.

Bush and his cronies are liars -- but this is old news, right? Everyone -- including former insider Scott McClellan, who actually spoonfed the Bush line to the obedient media -- have said as much. Bush lied.

The rest of us knew way back when, when Democrats and Republicans alike were afraid to look unpatriotic. We marched in the streets and wrote letters to deaf ears, while the generals were the go-to interviews and military analysts made a second career as TV regulars. The game was rigged. Media was a conduit for policy, though some outlets later apologized for not questioning enough at the time. It wasn't convenient to tell the truth at that point, with the numbers skewed that way, so most people kept their mouths shut. Not our finest hour.

Finally, after the war has destroyed so many thousands of Americans and Iraqis lives and the shithouse is completely in flames, the cowards emerge from the crapper. What do they expect, a medal? It's a damn shame it took so long to tell the truth.

Throw the bums out!

RATS LEAVING THE SINKING SHIP

Keith Olbermann covers the Scott McClellan revelations on MSNBC.

Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan writes in a new memoir that the Iraq war was sold to the American people with a sophisticated "political propaganda campaign" led by President Bush and aimed at "manipulating sources of public opinion" and "downplaying the major reason for going to war." - Washington Post, May 28, '08

"Over that summer of 2002," he writes, "top Bush aides had outlined a strategy for carefully orchestrating the coming campaign to aggressively sell the war. . . . In the permanent campaign era, it was all about manipulating sources of public opinion to the president's advantage." - Ibid.

MEMORIAL DAY

No marching music today, no rattling sabers, no war drums, no flatulent military brass. This is Marvin Gaye, in a long out-of-print film, "Save the Children" (1973). This is our Memorial Day Music.

Mother, mother
There's too many of you crying
Brother, brother, brother
There's far too many of you dying
You know we've got to find a way
To bring some lovin' here today

Father, father
We don't need to escalate
You see, war is not the answer
For only love can conquer hate


"We honor our war dead this Memorial Day weekend. The greatest respect we could pay them would be to pledge no more wars for erroneous and misleading reasons; no more killing and wounding except for the defense of our country and our freedoms."

--Bill Moyers

UNCLE SAM NEEDS YOUR HELP AGAIN

Show some guts! This is war!!! Country Joe McDonald takes on the politicians, generals, war profiteers, and "patriotic" parents in this anti-war classic. Yes, it was written for another war. Then again, so were most of the pro-war "talking points" being recycled these days.

Back then people weren't so civil. Nowadays, we're much more sophisticated. Most of us are fighting to claim the ideological middle, on the assumption that there are two sides to every question, and a cool rational middle-of-the-road position is the sensible thing. We've been well trained. But are there really two sides to every question? What's the sensible middle position on cannibalism, say, or the Earth being flat? How about slavery, or child abuse? Highly rational people can be extremely agile intellectually. They can tell you straight-faced that there are good reasons to incinerate people, or to "stay the course" and continue incinerating people once the incineration has begun.

They have plenty of good reasons, and they always have.

9 POUND SHOWCASE: THE FUGS

Keeping our promise to offer offbeat, beat, non-conformist, non-commercial, visionary and downright strange acts of creativity to our readers, we bring you this 9 Pound Hammer Showcase highlighting the uncle beat poets from the East Village, The Fugs. Brilliant avant-folk provocateurs, these guys sang truth to power with a wicked sense of humor, satire, irony, high level stuff that could get you arrested (and did) in the Land of the Free.



The Fugs formed back in 1964, when Ed Sanders rented the former Kosher meat store on East 10th, and transformed it into the Peace Eye Bookstore. He met poet Tuli Kupferberg. They named themselves after a Norman Mailer-coined euphemism from "The Naked and the Dead," a wartime novel written when soldiers were free to kill but not say the word "fuck," at least in print. They played in cafes and theaters in the Village, and headlined a cross-country tour opposing the Vietnam war in its early days, playing folk and rock and basically blowing minds in the Heartland.



We drew inspiration for the Fugs from a long and varied tradition, going all the way back to the dances of Dionysus in the ancient Greek plays and the "Theory of the Spectacle" in Aristotle's Poetics, and moving forward to the famous premier performance of Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi in 1896, to the poèmes simultanés of the Dadaists in Zurich's Cabaret Voltaire in 1916, to the jazz-poetry of the Beats, to Charlie Parker's seething sax, to the silence of John Cage, to the calm pushiness of the Happening movement, the songs of the Civil Rights movement, and to our concept that there was oddles of freedom guaranteed by the United States Constitution that was not being used.
- Ed Sanders


They first recorded in 1965, and put their show on vinyl to the delight of far flung fans and connoisseurs of beatnik irreverence. This wasn't the frail, anemic poetry of your timid schoolbooks, but some rough beast vexed to nightmare, it's hour come at last, playing electric guitars and invoking the gods. They freaked the squares out. The grey flannel Chamber of Commerce types didn't dig this crazy pagan humor, and the crewcut cops were notified, but the children -- at least, some of them -- thought it was great to spit in Goliath's eye.

The Fugs became a cult favorite, secretly traded among fans like contraband, passed like a joint between outstretched fingers, popping up all over this great land. Yes, soon the Feds would be pounding at the door, and the FBI would try to crush this communist conspiracy of "free thought," but the damage had been done. Songs like "Kill for Peace" had already gotten out to undermine the war effort and corrupt the youth of Athens, er, I mean America.

You will enjoy this, I'm sure. For those who think the 1960s were all Austin Powers and the Monkees, this is a good antidote. Just don't take it and operate heavy machinery, okay kids?


For more information, check out the official History of the Fugs here. An interview with Ed Sanders is here. For more tales of beatnik glory, check out Ed Sanders' Woodstock Journal here.

FIVE YEARS OF FIGHTING

Here's a segment from "Late Night with David Letterman" featuring Bill O'Reilly.

It's been five years since the start of the war in Iraq. At this moment, 4,297 US troops have died (not counting soldiers-for-hire, a sizable group) and more than a million Iraqis. More than $500 Billion has been spent so far, with estimates as high as three trillion for the region before this is over. There is nothing clever to say about it. Still, I thought it shouldn't pass unremarked in these posts.



THE FUNERAL OF A SOLDIER


The funeral of Cpl. Maria Lauterbach, killed in Iraq, disrupted by fundamentalists from the Westboro Baptist Church. The "church" is a hate group run by Fred Phelps, of Topeka, Kansas, who believes "God Hates Fags" as well as Catholics, Jews, Irish, Swedes, and Mexicans. Their gripe with the army is the "don't ask, don't tell" policy. This proves you don't have to go half way around the world to find crazy religious extremists. Meet the American Taliban.


To make the numbers more real, check out the "Faces of the Fallen" in the Washington Post by clicking HERE.

A casualty counter is located HERE.

MAYBE HE KNOWS WHAT HE'S DOING

Remember this guy? The Democrats seem to have forgotten him, and the Republicans don't want anything to do with him, and are desperately scrambling to distance themselves. Even the dullards realize Bush screwed them over. Most of them, anyway.
Bush has done so many vicious, stupid things it's hard to remember them all, not to mention list them. We could start with lying about the WMDs, and cooking the intelligence to start a war that has turned into an unwinnable quagmire with no end in sight.


Bush used the tragedy of 9-11 to push his political agenda, and wrapped himself in the flag with a big self-satisfied grin. He blasted those who disagreed for being unpatriotic and un-American, and punished whistleblowers -- or their families, in the case of Valerie Plame. As for "freedom," he tossed out habeas corpus, the Geneva Convention, and countless safeguards protecting our civil liberties. He approved warrant-free wiretapping on citizens, and condoned torture and secret "black" prisons where people could be interrogated and simply "disappear." Let's not forget Abu Ghraib, Osama bin Laden, Medicare, Afghanistan, Haliburton, all the special deals with powerful lobbyists, and all the outright lying to the American public.

Katrina? Blackwater? Global warming? Bush cut billions of dollars from health, education, and housing, while lowering taxes for the rich, and securing no-competition contracts for his cronies in Iraq and New Orleans. He created a privatized war, with an army of mercenaries accountable to no one. I almost forgot the environment, and how he junked regulations on carbon monoxide and other poisons in our air, water, and food, and virtually ignored recommendations from the scientific community. All in all, Bush created a climate of fear, secrecy, spin, and hubris.


Jim Holt, in a provocative piece in the London Review of Books, makes a convincing counter-argument. From the Bush-Cheney perspective, the war might not be a failure at all, if the goal was to take control of Iraq’s oil resources and its infrastructure. As quoted in an article in Vanity Fair, Holt states “The draft law that the US has written for the Iraqi congress would cede nearly all the oil to Western companies. The Iraq National Oil Company would retain control of 17 of Iraq’s 80 existing oilfields, leaving the rest—including all yet to be discovered oil—under foreign corporate control for 30 years.”

A great deal for the multi-national corporations -- if not for the thousands of Americans and countless Iraqis who died since "Liberation."


Holt writes, "The occupation may seem horribly botched on the face of it, but the Bush administration’s cavalier attitude towards ‘nation-building’ has all but ensured that Iraq will end up as an American protectorate for the next few decades—a necessary condition for the extraction of its oil wealth. If the US had managed to create a strong, democratic government in an Iraq effectively secured by its own army and police force, and had then departed, what would have stopped that government from taking control of its own oil, like every other regime in the Middle East? On the assumption that the Bush-Cheney strategy is oil-centred, the tactics—dissolving the army, de-Baathification, a final ‘surge’ that has hastened internal migration—could scarcely have been more effective. The costs—a few billion dollars a month plus a few dozen American fatalities (a figure which will probably diminish, and which is in any case comparable to the number of US motorcyclists killed because of repealed helmet laws)—are negligible compared to $30 trillion in oil wealth, assured American geopolitical supremacy and cheap gas for voters. In terms of realpolitik, the invasion of Iraq is not a fiasco; it is a resounding success."

MARTIN LUTHER KING, TROUBLEMAKER (1929-1968)

It's Martin Luther King Day, and an election year, so there will be plenty of false recollections and phony platitudes by vote-seeking politicians, and they, too, will have a dream. Once again, they will de-claw King, and ignore the radical implications of what he believed. I'm sure even President Bush, who stands diametrically opposed to everything King stood for, will have a staged photo-op and make a speech. The real King -- the rabble-rouser, the troublemaker who provoked acts of civil disobedience and was jailed and beaten, and finally killed -- is safely dead and buried. The revisionist re-write is complete.


They must see us as strange liberators...What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform? What do they think as we test out our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building? Is it among these voiceless ones? -- MLK, at the Riverside Church, 1967

Another excerpt from the Riverside Church speech, 1967:


This is the other speech, the speech they won't be quoting all day long. It was April 4th, 1967, when King spoke at the Riverside Church in New York City and delivered a fiery sermon about America and Vietnam. It is a powerful call to conscience during a time of war.
The full text can be found here.


"Fight the Power," by Public Enemy

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!

In a desperate attempt to raise his low poll numbers, President Bush landed on an aircraft carrier today dressed as Santa Claus and handed out candy beneath a giant "Mission Accomplished" banner.

BUSH, NO ROCKET SCIENTIST

According to a report just released from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that corroborates an earlier report from the UN, Iran halted its nuclear weapons program back in 2003.

"The IAEA says a new U.S. intelligence report saying Iran stopped a secret nuclear weapons program four years ago confirms what the U.N. agency has been saying for years." (VOA News)

"A senior IAEA official said Tuesday in Vienna that the report validates agency statements that inspectors have found no secret nuclear program, and that there is no imminent danger, leaving time for negotiations."

The finding is "a bombshell." It means the Iran-war scare is over for the time being, and the World War III camp has been slapped on the nose. Right?

You would think so, but President Bush stuck to his talking points in an early morning press conference.

"I view this report as a warning signal that they had the program, they halted the program," Bush said. "The reason why it's a warning signal is they could restart it." (from ABC News )

“I still feel strongly that Iran’s a danger,” Bush said. “I think it is very important for the international community to recognize the fact that if Iran were to develop the knowledge that they could transfer to a clandestine program, it would create a danger for the world.”

YOUR TIME IS UP

What's wrong with me? I'm sick of these idiots. I should just chill and enjoy being an apathetic, slacker hipster -- make art, listen to music, watch suitably ironic shows on my flat screen, stop and smell the artificial roses. In the greater scheme of things, after all, we're just a speck in the cosmos.

What does it matter if these monkeys in suits drop bombs, trash the woods, shred the constitution, destroy the planet? Look at them. They drive me insane with their arrogance and greed, their stupidity, their sense of superiority, their imaginary inside track with God. I guess enlightenment will have to wait. I can't seem to transcend the bullshit.

I've always rooted for the underdog. It started on the playground, back in first grade. I can't help it (lowly evolved creature that I am) when some little David gives a hulking Goliath a good crack in the mouth. I'm a monkey, too, I guess. I may never get that placid, glazed third eye look of those smug seventh level vegans smoking cigarettes out on the Ave. The know-it-alls, world weary at twenty two. Maybe someday a good mortician will fix me up with a smile like that. In the meantime, all the joy and rage will be real -- including my rage against this ugly war machine. To help get through it, here are some soulful troubadours on the dark edge of the empire.

A Veterans' Day Jukebox:
First, a cry of love from a psychedelic ex-paratrooper from Seattle named Hendrix called "Machine Gun."


Next up, old man Dylan plays a song about a soldier named "John Brown."


Finally, the Roots perform "Masters of War," setting the lyrics to a familar tune. Check it out: