Jeff Cohen’s piece published on The Huffington Post yesterday is of import…

“In the fall of 2002, week after week, I argued vigorously against invading Iraq in debates televised on MSNBC. I used every possible argument that might sway mainstream viewers — no real threat, cost, instability. But as the war neared, my debates were terminated.

In my 2006 book Cable News Confidential, I explained why I lost my airtime:

“There was no room for me after MSNBC launched Countdown: Iraq — a daily one-hour show that seemed more keen on glamorizing a potential war than scrutinizing or debating it. Countdown: Iraq featured retired colonels and generals, sometimes resembling boys with war toys as they used props, maps and glitzy graphics to spin invasion scenarios. They reminded me of pumped-up ex-football players doing pre-game analysis and diagramming plays. It was excruciating to be sidelined at MSNBC, watching so many non-debates in which myth and misinformation were served up unchallenged.”

It was bad enough to be silenced. Much worse to see that these ex-generals — many working for military corporations — were never in debates, nor asked a tough question by an anchor. (I wasn’t allowed on MSNBC unless balanced by at least one truculent right-winger.)

Except for the brazenness and scope of the Pentagon spin program, I wasn’t shocked by the recent New York Times report exposing how the Pentagon junketed and coached the retired military brass into being “message-force multipliers” and “surrogates” for Donald Rumsfeld’s lethal propaganda.

The biggest villain here is not Rumsfeld or the Pentagon. It’s the TV networks. In the land of the First Amendment, it was their choice to shut down debate and journalism.

No government agency forced MSNBC to repeatedly feature the hawkish generals unopposed. Or fire Phil Donahue. Or smear weapons expert Scott Ritter. Or blacklist former attorney general Ramsey Clark. It was top NBC/MSNBC execs, not the Feds, who imposed a quota system on the Donahue staff requiring two pro-war guests if we booked one anti-war advocate — affirmative action for hawks.

I’m all for a Congressional investigation into the Pentagon’s Iraq propaganda operation — which included an active-duty general exhorting ex-military-turned-paid-pundits that “the strategic target remains our population.”

But I’m also for keeping the focus and onus on CNN, FOX, NBC, ABC, CBS, even NPR - who were partners in the Pentagon’s mission of “information dominance.” And for us to see that American TV news remains so corrupt today that it has hardly mentioned the Times story on the Pentagon’s pundits, which was based on 8,000 pages of internal Pentagon documents acquired by a successful Times lawsuit.”

Recently it was discovered that the Pentagon worked to place various retired military commanders at the disposal of various news networks as ‘analysts’. Internal Pentagon documents repeatedly refer to such individuals as “message force multipliers” or “surrogates”, their role being to reinforce administration policy. It should also noted that the majority of them represent in excess of 150 military contractors as either lobbyists, consultants, board members, or senior executives.

In a free society, the willful usurpation of the integrity of the fourth estate by the military establishment is – what? What term would you use to describe the premeditated infiltration of the fourth estate by the military establishment for the purpose of promoting a military agenda? And, given that reality, how must we then seriously examine the redefinition of freedom itself?

The truth is that such practices are authoritarian. Ironically, while the spirit of the First Amendment is being tarnished, the practice can’t be condoned as illegal being that the media allows such individuals to appear, aiding in what David Barstow of the New York Times recently referred to as - “a kind of media Trojan horse — an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks”. In layman’s terms, it’s reverse embedding.

The issue is not whether it constitutes a crime, rather that the practice constitutes a concerted effort on the part of the current administration and the military establishment to control how information is presented. There is no questioning the fact that, since 9/11, the American media has largely entered into a very dangerous game in which it has been willing to sell itself out for access to whatever table scraps the administration is willing to offer them. Cast in an economic light, journalistic impartiality and objectivity has become a secondary notion compared to revenues, which makes it all the easier of a format to exploit. Thus, it becomes less about the quality of information and more about quantity. To achieve the latter, access is required to those in a position to provide information, no matter its basis. Add to that advertisers that are looking to be associated with media outlets that do not take chances, that sidestep the complexities of issues, and ensure that they are able to appeal to a wide demographic to ensure their survival, and you have the production of a pseudo-informational stream that is easily infiltrated and corrupted.

That, like it or not, is how the roots of authoritarianism can take hold in a society that believes its liberties sacrosanct.

Today’s New York Times includes a crucial piece about US media manipulation entitled Behind Military Analysis, the Pentagon’s Hidden Hand…

“In the summer of 2005, the Bush administration confronted a fresh wave of criticism over Guantánamo Bay. The detention center had just been branded “the gulag of our times” by Amnesty International, there were new allegations of abuse from United Nations human rights experts and calls were mounting for its closure.

The administration’s communications experts responded swiftly. Early one Friday morning, they put a group of retired military officers on one of the jets normally used by Vice President Dick Cheney and flew them to Cuba for a carefully orchestrated tour of Guantánamo.

To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.

Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.

The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.

Those business relationships are hardly ever disclosed to the viewers, and sometimes not even to the networks themselves. But collectively, the men on the plane and several dozen other military analysts represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants. The companies include defense heavyweights, but also scores of smaller companies, all part of a vast assemblage of contractors scrambling for hundreds of billions in military business generated by the administration’s war on terror. It is a furious competition, one in which inside information and easy access to senior officials are highly prized.

Records and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its control over access and information in an effort to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse — an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks.”

We live a new era of propaganda, one in which governments have unprecedented access to the media and exploit that access to not only further their agendas but to convolute information. That is, in and of itself, contradictory to the purpose of a free and unhindered fourth estate, and is, in truth, no different than those governments that overtly control media to ensure that dissent is curbed and the control of information remains tightly controlled. Interestingly, they represent the same governments and regimes that are routinely condemned by the likes of the United States for doing so.

The trick to getting away with it is not in the stealth of the practice itself, but the public’s belief that they live in a society in which such a thing is perceived impossible. That, in truth, is the reason why its success and influence is so profound – when people don’t believe that they are being lied to then what reason do they have to question anything?

This speaks to a much greater reality. That to confront the corruption of something considered unspotted is to bring into question its base purity, which would require the populace of any nation to seriously examine their own role in the allowance of the usurpation of those principles on which their governments were founded. In that regard, many Americans are simply not prepared to do it, preferring to labour under the comfortable misconception that theirs is a nation in which such a thing could never happen.

And that is precisely why it does.

Jeff Tweedy of Wilco wrote an interesting piece in the New York Times yesterday about his life-long battle with migraines, depression, and anxiety. Though I have never suffered headaches in my life, I completely understand what it’s like to vomit for 12 hours at a time. In my case it was due to anxiety, though for some years I laboured under the misconception that it was an ulcer.

One of the more impacting passages from his piece, for me anyway, was…

“I’m sure there were misperceptions about my condition. You know, seeing a rock musician vomit on the side of the stage, I’m sure people thought I was completely out of my mind on drugs or strung out.”

Prior to my diagnosis, and getting on the proper medication, many of you might recall images of me looking as if I was akin to a skeleton. I had been rail-thin my whole life, rarely ate, and never quite understood why. Drugs have never been a factor in my life, and for ten years, between the ages of 20 and 30, I didn’t drink. I was thin because of the affects of intense mania, though wouldn’t figure that out until I was properly diagnosed. My mood swings were also a result of my condition, but that didn’t stop a lot of people from thinking that I was a drug user.

At one point in my life I weighed a mere 134 pounds. Standing six feet tall, that’s extremely thin. I now weigh 180 lbs, but even my gaining weight didn’t stop some from claiming that I was ‘getting fat’. It was, and is, somewhat of a no win situation with regards to public perception.

I commend Tweedy for being so open about his problems. Besides being one of the best songwriters of my generation, in my opinion anyway, it’s good to know that he’s also courageous enough to speak publicly about his experiences.

Today, while the President was referencing freedom and justice as being “written in our hearts by All Mighty God”, The New York Times began a new series entitled War Torn: A series of articles and multimedia about veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who have committed killings, or been charged with them, after coming home, which I think is sadly telling.

When I wrote The Boy Come Home for Hospital Music it was based on stories of paranoia and disparity felt by a handful of Iraq veterans that I had been corresponding with. Of course, the story that I convey in the song is fictional, but it is steeped in a psychology that, having corresponded with those veterans, is not.

The words “In God We Trust” first appeared on American currency during the US Civil War. It’s telling, given that that conflict was the deadliest in US history, that then Secretary of the Treasury, Simon P. Chase, received countless appeals from American Christians to have the motto, which was adopted as the official motto of the United States in 1956, placed on US currency. Prior to the 1956 adoption, the de facto motto of the nation had been, since its appearance on the Great Seal in 1782, E Pluribus Unum, or – “for many, one”.

During those catastrophic four years, the people of the United States perhaps looked to a greater power to somehow define the nation given the insanity that had torn it apart. And yet, those men that died to preserve it, religious or not, were duty bound to enact the nation’s first creed – for many, one.

It is this motto that is looked to in times of justifying the defense of liberty. It is the second, when the reality of the price being paid becomes apparent, that is clung to.

Not long ago, the less than adequate conditions that injured US veterans returning from overseas were made to endure were exposed to the nation. It caused national outrage, as it should have, and forced the administration to deal with a problem that they had perpetuated the existence of prior to it being uncovered by the media and becoming politically damaging. Lost in the enveloping comfort of In God We Trust, the nation, and its government, had forgotten…

…for many, one.

War Torn: Part 1

Across America, Deadly Echoes of Foreign Battles…

“Late one night in the summer of 2005, Matthew Sepi, a 20-year-old Iraq combat veteran, headed out to a 7-Eleven in the seedy Las Vegas neighborhood where he had settled after leaving the Army.

This particular 7-Eleven sits in the shadow of the Stratosphere casino-hotel in a section of town called the Naked City. By day, the area, littered with malt liquor cans, looks depressed but not menacing. By night, it becomes, in the words of a local homicide detective, “like Falluja.”

Mr. Sepi did not like to venture outside too late. But, plagued by nightmares about an Iraqi civilian killed by his unit, he often needed alcohol to fall asleep. And so it was that night, when, seized by a gut feeling of lurking danger, he slid a trench coat over his slight frame — and tucked an assault rifle inside it.

“Matthew knew he shouldn’t be taking his AK-47 to the 7-Eleven,” Detective Laura Andersen said, “but he was scared to death in that neighborhood, he was military trained and, in his mind, he needed the weapon to protect himself.”

Head bowed, Mr. Sepi scurried down an alley, ignoring shouts about trespassing on gang turf. A battle-weary grenadier who was still legally under-age, he paid a stranger to buy him two tall cans of beer, his self-prescribed treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder.

As Mr. Sepi started home, two gang members, both large and both armed, stepped out of the darkness. Mr. Sepi said in an interview that he spied the butt of a gun, heard a boom, saw a flash and “just snapped.”

In the end, one gang member lay dead, bleeding onto the pavement. The other was wounded. And Mr. Sepi fled, “breaking contact” with the enemy, as he later described it. With his rifle raised, he crept home, loaded 180 rounds of ammunition into his car and drove until police lights flashed behind him.

“Who did I take fire from?” he asked urgently. Wearing his Army camouflage pants, the diminutive young man said he had been ambushed and then instinctively “engaged the targets.” He shook. He also cried.

“I felt very bad for him,” Detective Andersen said.

Nonetheless, Mr. Sepi was booked, and a local newspaper soon reported: “Iraq veteran arrested in killing.”

Town by town across the country, headlines have been telling similar stories. Lakewood, Wash.: “Family Blames Iraq After Son Kills Wife.” Pierre, S.D.: “Soldier Charged With Murder Testifies About Postwar Stress.” Colorado Springs: “Iraq War Vets Suspected in Two Slayings, Crime Ring.”

Individually, these are stories of local crimes, gut-wrenching postscripts to the war for the military men, their victims and their communities. Taken together, they paint the patchwork picture of a quiet phenomenon, tracing a cross-country trail of death and heartbreak.

The New York Times found 121 cases in which veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan committed a killing in this country, or were charged with one, after their return from war. In many of those cases, combat trauma and the stress of deployment — along with alcohol abuse, family discord and other attendant problems — appear to have set the stage for a tragedy that was part destruction, part self-destruction.

Three-quarters of these veterans were still in the military at the time of the killing. More than half the killings involved guns, and the rest were stabbings, beatings, strangulations and bathtub drownings. Twenty-five offenders faced murder, manslaughter or homicide charges for fatal car crashes resulting from drunken, reckless or suicidal driving.

About a third of the victims were spouses, girlfriends, children or other relatives, among them 2-year-old Krisiauna Calaira Lewis, whose 20-year-old father slammed her against a wall when he was recuperating in Texas from a bombing near Falluja that blew off his foot and shook up his brain.

A quarter of the victims were fellow service members, including Specialist Richard Davis of the Army, who was stabbed repeatedly and then set ablaze, his body hidden in the woods by fellow soldiers a day after they all returned from Iraq.

And the rest were acquaintances or strangers, among them Noah P. Gamez, 21, who was breaking into a car at a Tucson motel when an Iraq combat veteran, also 21, caught him, shot him dead and then killed himself outside San Diego with one of several guns found in his car.”

Continue reading ‘Across America, Deadly Echoes of Foreign Battles’ here.

Interventionism can be a nasty business. In the case of Benazir Bhutto, whose return to Pakistani politics was dramatic, polarizing, and suspiciously timed, it ultimately took her life. True, Bhutto played the role of democratic savior and stood to make a significant impact in the upcoming elections, but despite the tragedy of her death, the root of why she returned to Pakistan should not be overlooked.

Benazir Bhutto was an instrument of US interventionism that was playing just a risky a game as President Musharraf has been. The different, of course, is that Musharraf possesses the support of the Armed Forces and Inter Service Intelligence, which, with regards to the reality of the Pakistani political landscape, is immensely significant. There is no question that Bhutto’s distrust of Pakistan’s military establishment was palpable, and given the expedience of her reintroduction to political life, and the entrenchment of the military establishment, one has to seriously wonder what would have occurred had she been successful in unseating the current government given that fact. There is little doubt that the military establishment was well aware of the motives behind Bhutto’s return and, given that, were certainly faced with difficult decisions of their own – even including the possibility of terminating Bhutto to usurp the objectives of those behind her return.

Bhutto’s assassination has plunged Pakistan into a state of chaos, resulting in a decision today by the government to crack down on unrest throughout the country. According to the BBC, 38 people have died in the violence that has erupted since Bhutto’s assassination last Thursday. But beneath such scenes, the wheels of interventionism continue to turn on this side of the globe, with even the New York Times suggesting that the Bush administration should intervene in Pakistan to “fortify Pakistan’s badly battered democratic institutions.” Without Bhutto, US hopes for timely change have been temporarily dashed, but that does not mean that they are out of options. Having alienated Musharraf, they may very well now turn to Nawaz Sharif, who, like any politician in a volatile state, may very likely be open to forming strong ties with foreign interests that are in a position to significantly support his government should he succeed. Then again, given Ms. Bhutto’s fate, he might not.

Ultimately, there should be no confusion regarding the loose employment of the term ‘democracy’ and the reality of what is transpiring in Pakistan. Since 9/11, the use of that term has been bandied about by the United States with regards to those locations that if feels are of significance to its foreign policy objectives. Where the United States is able to enjoy the cooperation of autocratic regimes to facilitate their policy objectives in specific regions they do. In fact, Saudi Arabia is a prime example of that reality.

Pakistan’s significance is obviously multifaceted. Not only are wilder regions of it home to a variety of militant groups, but it has also been used as a staging ground for Taliban operations since their deposition in 2001, not to mention the fact that the Pashtun belt remains home to millions of refugees, many of which have been used to bolster the Taliban’s numbers.

Then there is the reality that within the military establishment itself there are elements that support those that the United States would see confronted. In fact, the assassination of Bhutto could very well have been undertaken by that very element using militants as proxies. The speed with which the ISI was able to produce evidence that Bhutto’s assassination was undertaken by an al-Qaeda affiliated group is both suspect and, in truth, genius. While it certainly appeared to be far too expediently convenient, it shouldn’t be lost on anyone that that convenience plays perfectly into the hands of the very powers that championed Bhutto. Offering up al-Qaeda, in any way, shape, or form, was sure to set off a media firestorm in the Western world, introducing confusion into an already confused situation. Compounding that confusion is also the growing scandal regarding the government’s assertion of how Bhutto died. While her supporters claim that she was shot, a government spokesman has said that she died as a result of her head being slammed against the vehicle she was in as a result of the bomb blast. Adding another layer to the confusion, the militant that the Interior Ministry has claimed was responsible for masterminding the attack has denied any involvement.

If all of that sounds like a contradictory mess then one has to ultimately ask if it’s the product of genuine confusion or manufactured confusion? In situations such as these, genuine confusion certainly does occur, but is usually tempered by the eventuality of informational course corrections. On the other hand, if, in situations such as this, confusion is being manufactured, you’re going to see a continuance in contradictory information being released. The reason for this is to so utterly submerge the event in confusion that answers seem almost impossible to obtain and the public, faced with such overwhelming confusion, will find themselves so mired in it that they will eventually find their focus and scorn diverted.

Diversion, of course, is key to the success of any killing undertaken by the military establishment of any country.

Upon her return to Pakistan, Ms. Bhutto exclaimed that she was not afraid of those that sought to stop her democratic vision from becoming a reality. On the day that she returned to Pakistan, her motorcade was attacked, an incident that took the lives of over 130 people. Since that time, her public appearances placed more lives in danger, including her own it should be rightly said, and numerous attempts on her life were also made. Of course, it takes courage to continue in the face of such dangers, but ultimately the reason for doing so has to be seen for what it is. While her death will most certainly make her a martyr of the country’s democratic movement, it should never be forgotten that hers was not a singular campaign aimed solely at delivering true democracy to the people of Pakistan. That, in the end, it came with conditions that were to the benefit of foreign interests, just as much as to the satisfaction of her own ego given the corruption that plagued her past. Ultimately, perhaps it was her ego that allowed her to overlook the inherit dangers of becoming the democratic proxy of foreign interests. And though it might seem a harsh thing to say, that decision may very well have been what killed her.

As for US interventionism, Pakistan’s nuclear capability requires that future attempts at political subversion be undertaken in a similar fashion. An outright confrontation with Pakistan is not something the United States is at all in the position to consider. There are also other factors to consider as well, such as - in 2006 the United States “signed arms transfer agreements with Pakistan in excess of $3.5 billion, ranking Pakistan first among all arms clients of the United States during that calendar year.” Obviously relations with Musharraf’s government have changed over the last year, but ultimately, customers are customers.

The White House hasn’t commented directly about the ongoing scandal regarding the destruction of CIA interrogation tapes, but it did comment on an article in today’s New York Times which asserts…

“At least four top White House lawyers took part in discussions with the Central Intelligence Agency between 2003 and 2005 about whether to destroy videotapes showing the secret interrogations of two operatives from Al Qaeda, according to current and former administration and intelligence officials.

The accounts indicate that the involvement of White House officials in the discussions before the destruction of the tapes in November 2005 was more extensive than Bush administration officials have acknowledged.

Those who took part, the officials said, included Alberto R. Gonzales, who served as White House counsel until early 2005; David S. Addington, who was the counsel to Vice President Dick Cheney and is now his chief of staff; John B. Bellinger III, who until January 2005 was the senior lawyer at the National Security Council; and Harriet E. Miers, who succeeded Mr. Gonzales as White House counsel.”

The White House has called the article “pernicious”, claiming that the Times should correct assertions that the administration hid facts. The administration has also been leaning on Congress and the courts to “back off”, claiming that the courts do not have the authority to get involved. In most cases it has succeeded, but one U.S. Federal Judge, Henry H. Kennedy, recently asserted that the government must answer questions about the destruction of the tapes. Kennedy was the same judge that ordered the administration in 2005 to ensure the safety of “all evidence and information regarding the torture, mistreatment, and abuse of detainees” at the US detention facility at Guantanamo.

The tapes, which showed the interrogations of two al-Qaeda suspects, were not made at the US detention facility at Guantanamo, a fact that government attorneys claim renders Kennedy’s 2005 order moot.

The CIA has claimed that it destroyed the tapes to protect the identities of the interrogators, even though one of them has since come forward and done a television interview about his role in the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, claiming that vital intelligence was gleaned from the interrogation that ultimately helped disrupt significant terror activities. But because the tapes were destroyed, only the CIA and, by extension, the administration, knows whether the intelligence acquired was significantly actionable.

The overthrow of the ICU in Somalia was AFRICOM’s first challenge. Using Ethiopia as a military proxy, and backing their initial invasion of Somalia with air strikes and the insertion of special forces teams, the United States helped plunge Somalia back into a state of chaos that has resulted in a crisis that is being compared to that of Darfur.

The justification for their direction of the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia was that several members of the ICU had ties to al-Qaeda. The ICU’s implementation of Sharia law concerned the United States (who, ironically, has no qualms about its existence in Saudia Arabia), even though in the case of Mogadishu it provided stability where none had existed for more than a decade, with many Somalis, for the first time in a very long time, openly confessing that despite its implementation they were content to have a governing body in place that could provide stability. The US reaction, of course, was one that lent on the possible evolution of a terror-state governed by such a body.

What has occurred in Somalia since has gone largely under reported, and the situation there has become catastrophic in scope. From today’s New York Times…

“The worst humanitarian crisis in Africa may not be unfolding in Darfur, but here, along a 20-mile strip of busted-up asphalt, several top United Nations officials said.

A year ago, the road between the market town of Afgooye and the capital of Mogadishu was just another typical Somali byway, lined with overgrown cactuses and the occasional bullet-riddled building. Now it is a corridor teeming with misery, with 200,000 recently displaced people crammed into swelling camps that are rapidly running out of food.

Natheefa Ali, who trudged up this road a week ago to escape the bloodbath that Mogadishu has turned into, said Monday that her 10-month-old baby was so malnourished she could not swallow.

“Look,” Ms. Natheefa said, pointing to her daughter’s splotchy legs, “her skin is falling off, too.”

Top United Nations officials who specialize in Somalia said the country had higher malnutrition rates, more current bloodshed and fewer aid workers than Darfur, which is often publicized as the world’s most pressing humanitarian crisis and has taken clear priority in terms of getting peacekeepers and aid money.

The relentless urban combat in Mogadishu, between an unpopular transitional government — installed partially with American help — and a determined Islamist insurgency, has driven waves of desperate people up the Afgooye road, where more than 70 camps of twigs and plastic have popped up seemingly overnight.

The people here are hungry, exposed, sick and dying. And the few aid organizations willing to brave a lawless, notoriously dangerous environment cannot keep up with their needs, like providing milk to the thousands of babies with fading heartbeats and bulging eyes. “Many of these kids are going to die,” said Eric Laroche, the head of United Nations humanitarian operations in Somalia. “We don’t have the capacity to reach them.”

He added: “If this were happening in Darfur, there would be a big fuss. But Somalia has been a forgotten emergency for years.”

The officials working on Somalia are trying to draw more attention to the country’s plight, which they feel has fallen into Darfur’s shadow. They have recently organized several trips, including one on Monday, for journalists to see for themselves.

“The situation in Somalia is the worst on the continent,” said Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the top United Nations official for Somalia.

That situation has included floods, droughts, locusts, suicide bombers, roadside bombs and near-daily assassinations.

United Nations officials said the recent round of plagues, natural and man-made, coupled with the residual chaos that has consumed Somalia for more than a decade, have put the country on the brink of famine. In the worst-hit areas, like Afgooye, recent surveys indicate the malnutrition rate is 19 percent, compared with about 13 percent in Darfur; 15 percent is considered the emergency threshold.

The officials, in making the comparison, were not trying to diminish the problems in Darfur, where more than 200,000 people have died from violence and disease since 2003. But they said they were concerned that the crisis here was increasingly urgent.

Unlike Darfur, where the suffering is being eased by a billion-dollar aid operation and more than 10,000 aid workers, Somalia is still considered mostly a no-go zone. Just last week, a Somali aid worker and a guard were shot to death at an aid distribution center in Afgooye. United Nations officials estimate that total emergency aid is under $200 million, partly because it is so difficult just getting food into the country.

Pirates lurking off the coast of Somalia have attacked more than 20 ships this year, including two carrying United Nations food. The militias that rule the streets — typically teenage gunmen in wraparound sunglasses and flip-flops — have jacked up roadblock taxes to $400 per truck. The transitional government last month jailed a senior official of the United Nations food program in Somalia, accusing him of helping terrorists, though he was eventually released.”

“Installed partially with American help”. Now there’s an understatement.

This passage, though, is rather telling…

“United Nations officials now concede that the country was in better shape during the brief reign of Somalia’s Islamist movement last year. “It was more peaceful, and much easier for us to work,” Mr. Laroche said. “The Islamists didn’t cause us any problems.”

Off The Books

Since the US backed Ethiopian invasion of Somalia, the United States has been gifted use of notorious Ethiopian jails to house and question detainees, despite the fact that they have been afforded the ability to conveniently claim that such individuals are not technically in US custody…

“Ethiopia, which denies holding secret prisoners, is a country with a long history of human rights abuses. In recent years, it has also been a key U.S. ally in the fight against al-Qaida, which has been trying to sink roots among Muslims in the Horn of Africa.

U.S. government officials contacted by AP acknowledged questioning prisoners in Ethiopia. But they said American agents were following the law and were fully justified in their actions because they are investigating past attacks and current threats of terrorism.

The prisoners were never in American custody, said an FBI spokesman, Richard Kolko, who denied the agency would support or be party to illegal arrests. He said U.S. agents were allowed limited access by governments in the Horn of Africa to question prisoners as part of the FBI’s counter-terrorism work.

Western security officials, who insisted on anonymity because the issue related to security matters, told AP that among those held were well-known suspects with strong links to al-Qaida.

But some U.S. allies have expressed consternation at the transfers to the prisons. One Western diplomat in Nairobi, who agreed to speak to AP only if not quoted to avoid angering U.S. officials, said he sees the United States as playing a guiding role in the operation.

John Sifton, a Human Rights Watch expert on counter-terrorism, went further. He said in an e-mail that the United States has acted as “ringleader” in what he labeled a “decentralized, outsourced Guantanamo.”

Details of the arrests, transfers and interrogations slowly emerged as AP and human rights groups investigated the disappearances, diplomats tracked their missing citizens and the first detainees to be released told their stories.

One investigator from an international human rights group, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to speak to the media, said Ethiopia had secret jails at three locations: Addis Ababa, the capital; an Ethiopian air base 37 miles east of the capital; and the far eastern desert close to the Somali border.”

As an added tidbit, it should also come as no surprise that Ethiopia is believed to be the country in which AFRICOM’s headquarters are located.

If pictures say a thousand words, the expression on President Bush’s face in the above photograph says only a handful – “what are you guys, stupid?”. It’s a face that he’s employed in the past on more occasions than I can count. Unfortunately, his track record when employing it is less than stellar. In fact, it’s utterly dismal. It’s the face that he uses when he seems to think he knows something that everyone else doesn’t. In the past I would have chalked that up to Presidential privilege and the fact that he has 16 different intelligence agencies feeding him information. But not anymore.

As I have exhaustively said in the past, I’m no fan of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; that much is certain. But I’ll not sit silently by and watch idiots drive their nations towards war when the outcome will see the deaths of innocent Iranians, American soldiers, and God knows who else.

The President of the United States claims that if and when Iran obtains nuclear capabilities it’s only a matter of time before they have the bomb and then only a matter of time before they use it. You know, I sometimes wonder how George Bush made it out of high school, let alone Yale and Harvard. Then again, I suppose that has to be uniformly applied to pretty much everyone in his administration as well.

The President’s current ‘public’ strategy is to isolate Iran in hopes that internal elements will emerge and force a change in Iranian leadership because they refuse to endure prolonged economic sanctions and international isolation. Of course, it should be pointed out that UN imposed sanctions against Iraq prior to the 2003 invasion, which began in 1990, killed an estimated 1.25 million people, of them over 500,000 children below the age of five. The infant mortality rate during that period was 108 for every 1,000 births. Of course, the United States claimed that Saddam Hussein was guilty of starving his own people, and I’ll not argue that entirely. But cause and effect when dealing with a regime such as that of Hussein’s also has to be taken into consideration. So too does the corrupted oil for food program.

When it comes right down to it, and I have written about this on so many different occasions that I’m blue in the face – would Iran unilaterally use a nuclear weapon against, for example, Israel if they had the opportunity? Would they be stupid enough to gift a weapon to the likes of Hezbollah? The fact remains, were the use of nuclear weapons to occur, Iran would instantly be blamed, targeted, and decimated. It’s as simple as that.

So where does that leave us? It leaves us with our perceptions of just how ‘crazy’ the Iranians actually are, doesn’t it? And make no mistake; we’ve been propagandized to the hilt with regards to just how diabolic they must be to willingly allow a man such as Ahmadinejad to govern them without openly opposing his government. Interestingly, not unlike the current US administration, the government of Mr. Ahmadinejad represents a small, hard-line element within the national political landscape, not to mention Iran’s national public psyche. One need only look at the robbery of the national elections in Iran in 2005 as proof positive that there are those within that country that are forward thinking, and it truly has to be said that were the elections truly transparent, Khatami would most likely have remained President. Unfortunately, his initiatives to do with limiting various governmental powers and opening up the representative process in Iran were met with massive opposition by those threaten by their possibility. Thus, it was assured that Ahmadinejad would win and therefore help maintain the status quo.

But is that enough to force the Iranians into a position in which they feel threatened? Even more, to actually bet on the possibility that the people of Iran will work to disenfranchise the government given everything that has occurred in the region since 2003 with regards to foreign occupation and influencing? The truth is, even while Khatami was President, Iran was already backed into a corner when they were listed as a member of Mr. Bush’s ‘Axis of Evil’ during the 2002 State of the Union address. And it also shouldn’t be overlooked that that inclusion also gave power to hardliners in Iran to see a more abrasive and anti-Western government come to power.

After 9/11, some 1 million Iranians held a vigil for the victims, something that was completely overlooked by the Western media. In fact, Khatami’s government was wholly sympathetic and denounced the attacks outright. This is the same government that Bush would later label as ‘evil’ not months later because of their ties to groups such as Hezbollah. It’s here that we often forget our own ties with paramilitary groups throughout the world, such as numerous ones in Latin America over the last half century that have been responsible for untold death and destruction. Of course, we are not evil, and were we labeled as such by anyone else, we would dismiss it as preposterous.

In the final analysis, would the Iranian government, either directly or through a proxy, employ the use of nuclear weapons unilaterally against another nation – Israel, for example? And if they did, what would the outcome entail? It would most certainly mean the destruction of Iran itself and deaths of tens of millions of people besides. Now, if you want to labour under the misconception that such reckless behaviour would be employed because of religious zealotry with absolutely no regard for cost or consequence, then by all means do so. But I, for one, do not believe for a second that the government of Iran is that stupid, let alone zealous. It may be led by a man that I consider no more enlightened that Mr. Bush, but I simply cannot believe that the consequences of any unilateral nuclear action is lost on anyone within the Iranian government or military infrastructure. They too have families and friends, and I’m sure seeing them liquefied is not something that is their top priority.

This leads us back to why Iran would want a nuclear weapon in the first place and why the United States and others are so vehemently opposed to it. It provides the Iranians a deterrent against invasion. It provides them the exact same ability that nations such as the United States, Israel, Russia, and China possess – that with any attempted military action against them comes the possibility that nuclear force can be employed to respond defensively. Were that not the case, and were that not the reality of nuclear deterrents, then the United States would not possess the nuclear arsenal that it does, not would India or Pakistan or anyone else for that matter.

Put into context, if Afghanistan was conventionally invaded following 9/11 as a reaction to the attacks, the Taliban becoming the enemy singled out because of their association with al-Qaeda, then it only stands to reason that were a rogue group to employ a nuclear device, a state would be held responsible for it, not merely the group itself. And if any connection existed between it an Iran, even in the most obscure fashion, the repercussions would be overwhelming.

If we are not able to take that logic into account regarding Iran, and come to the realization that they truly understand the possible repercussions, then we must assume that preemptive military action against it is therefore a foregone conclusion, no matter Mr. Bush’s current rhetoric.

From the New York Times…

“Fresh accounts of the Blackwater shooting last month, given by three rooftop witnesses and by American soldiers who arrived shortly after the gunfire ended, cast new doubt Friday on statements by Blackwater guards that they were responding to armed insurgents when Iraqi investigators say 17 Iraqis were killed at a Baghdad intersection.

The three witnesses, Kurds on a rooftop overlooking the scene, said they had observed no gunfire that could have provoked the shooting by Blackwater guards. American soldiers who arrived minutes later found shell casings from guns used normally by American contractors, as well as by the American military.

The Kurdish witnesses are important because they had the advantage of an unobstructed view and because, collectively, they observed the shooting at Nisour Square from start to finish, free from the terror and confusion that might have clouded accounts of witnesses at street level. Moreover, because they are pro-American, their accounts have a credibility not always extended to Iraqi Arabs, who have been more hostile to the American presence.

Their statements, made in interviews with The New York Times, appeared to challenge a State Department account that a Blackwater vehicle had been disabled in the shooting and had to be towed away. Since those initial accounts, Blackwater and the State Department have consistently refused to comment on the substance of the case.

The Kurdish witnesses said that they saw no one firing at the guards at any time during the event, an observation corroborated by the forensic evidence of the shell casings. Two of the witnesses also said all the Blackwater vehicles involved in the shooting drove away under their own power.

The Kurds, who work for a political party whose building looks directly down on the square, said they had looked for any evidence that the American security guards were responding to an attack, but found none.

“I call it a massacre,” said Omar H. Waso, one of the witnesses and a senior official at the party, which is called the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. “It is illegal. They used the law of the jungle.”

Many of the American soldiers were similarly appalled. While Blackwater has said its guards were attacked by automatic gunfire, the soldiers did not find any casings from the sort of guns typically used by insurgents or by Iraqi security forces, according to an American military official briefed on the findings of the unit that arrived at the scene about 20 minutes after the Blackwater convoy left. That analysis of forensic evidence at the scene was first reported Friday by The Washington Post.

The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak about the matter, added that soldiers had found clear evidence that the Blackwater guards were not been threatened and also opened fire on civilians who had tried to flee. “The cartridges and casings we found were all associated with coalition forces and contractors,” the official said. “The only brass we found where somebody fired weapons were ones from contractors.”

The case has angered many in the military who believe that the conduct of the security guards makes the troops’ jobs harder. “If our people had done this,” another American military official said, “they would be court-martialed.”

The shooting, on Sept. 16, and the deaths of two Iraqi women in a shooting by a different security company on Tuesday, have provoked anger at politically potent levels of Iraqi society. In the holy cities of Karbala and Najaf, officials affiliated with Iraq’s most revered Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, called for sanctions against the companies.

In Karbala, a spokesman for the ayatollah inveighed against “the cheapening of Iraqi blood” and called for Parliament to take action. In a legacy of orders handed down during post-invasion American rule here, Western contractors essentially have immunity to Iraqi law.

None of the roughly two dozen witnesses previously interviewed by Iraqi investigators said that they saw or heard anyone but the Blackwater guards fire during the shooting, which Iraq says killed 17 and wounded 27. Still, because nearly all of those witnesses were in the field of fire, their accounts could conceivably have been skewed by the terror and confusion of the moment.

The Kurdish witnesses on the rooftop said they had not been interviewed by Iraqi investigators. They said they had been visited by American investigators, but had not been fully interviewed.”