Does Tony Blair have any idea what the flies are like that feed off the dead?
By Robert Fisk, The Independent, January 26, 2003
On the road to Basra, ITV was filming wild dogs as they tore at the corpses of the Iraqi dead. Every few seconds a ravenous beast would rip off a decaying arm and make off with it over the desert in front of us, dead fingers trailing through the sand, the remains of the burned military sleeve flapping in the wind. "Just for the record,'' the cameraman said to me. Of course. Because ITV would never show such footage. The things we see – the filth and obscenity of corpses – cannot be shown. First because it is not "appropriate" to depict such reality on breakfast-time TV. Second because, if what we saw was shown on television, no one would ever again agree to support a war. That of course was in 1991. The "highway of death", they called it – there was actually a parallel and much worse "highway of death" 10 miles to the east, courtesy of the US Air Force and the RAF, but no one turned up to film it – and the only true picture of the horrors we saw was the photograph of the shrivelled, carbonised Iraqi soldier in his truck. This was an iconic illustration of a kind because it did represent what we had seen, when it was eventually published. For Iraqi casualties to appear on television during that Gulf War – there was another one between 1980 and 1988, and a third is in the offing – it was necessary for them to have died with care, to have fallen romantically on their backs, one hand over a ruined face. Like those First World War paintings of the British dead on the Somme, Iraqis had to die benignly and without obvious wounds, without any kind of squalor, without a trace of shit or mucus or congealed blood, if they wanted to make it on to the morning news programmes.

The President rides out
By  Ed Vulliamy, The Observer, January 26, 2003
George Bush's foes see him as an inarticulate bully. Friends say that evangelical faith underpins his every action. Back to Bush's dusty Texan roots to find out what really drives the man who now stands on the brink of war -- Last Sunday morning, like every Sunday, the gentry of the oil business met at the all-white Belle View Baptist Church on Big Spring Avenue. Rev Andrew Stewart prayed that 'the foes of our nation be forever vanquished', and asked God to bless 'our President, friend and fellow Texan, George Walker Bush'. Afterwards at a lunch with a family in the congregation he prayed again that God might 'guide our President against the enemy'. 'You want to understand about President George Bush?' inquired David Campbell, a real estate broker, over jelly and cream. 'Well, you ain't never going to understand President Bush unless you understand the faith of west Texas around here.' At 4.40pm on Friday 14 September 2001, George Walker Bush finally became President of the United States. He was amid the ruins of the World Trade Centre, greeting a crowd of rescue workers. On the way, New York governor George Pataki had jibed: 'See those people? None of them voted for you.' Then Bush overheard one of the multitude saying: 'Don't let me down.' ('Don't let me down,' Bush would later recall, 'It was so personal .') 'They want to hear him,' panted a presidential aide. A 69-year-old fireman called Bob Beckwith was standing on a charred truck, and was asked if he could test it for stability as a podium. He did. Bush clambered up, put his arm round the old man's shoulder and kept it there. Someone thrust a megaphone into Bush's hand, and he embarked on a version of the pedestrian speech he had been making all week: 'America today is on bended knee in prayer... ' 'Can't hear you!' someone shouted. 'Well, I can hear you!' retorted Bush. 'The rest of the world hears you, and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!' The hard hats drowned him out with a lusty chant of 'USA! USA!' The world heard loud and clear. Among the taut faces, one was beaming: that of Karen Hughes, Bush's spin-mistress, watching a moment that she and the entire Bush power machine had previously failed to achieve. No wonder Bush later described himself as 'comfortable' that night.

Portrait of a Laddie
By Maureen Dowd, New York Times, January 26, 2003
WASHINGTON — On this, our annual Sunday saturnalia of manliness, we will see a lot of body-slamming, nacho-gorging and beer-hawking. There will be chesty warriors on the field and chestier babes on the tube, selling suds by enacting male fantasies — erotic mud wrestling in bikinis, Polish blond twins in tank tops, the usual subtle appeals to the male cortex. Behind all these tableaus of testosterone, a disturbing question lurks: Are men losing interest in sex? Women's libidos may be surpassing men's, USA Today says. Now it is the men who plead headaches and the women who feel grumpy, deprived and inclined to cheat. "Sex therapists, researchers and marital counselors — as well as some divorce lawyers — are concerned about increasing numbers of men of all ages who rarely desire their wives sexually or rarely have sexual fantasies because of a variety of physical and emotional factors," the paper reported on Wednesday. What will happen if men, the mindlessly lusting sex, turn into the reflectively listless sex? With relief, I suddenly remembered that America will never have to worry about spiraling into impotence as long as we have . . . Rummy!

Veto - HTML (Web) version
Veto Acrobat version (recommended)
By Phyllis Bennis,  The Link, Americans for Middle East Understanding, January - March   2003
UNITED NATIONS, Dec. 20, 2002 — The United States today vetoed a Security Council resolution that condemned Israel for its recent killings of several United Nations employees and the destruction of a United Nations food warehouse. The count was 12 in favor, two — Bulgaria and Cameroon — abstained, the U.S. opposed. At various points in its history the United Nations has been a major player in the Middle East. For good or bad, it was responsible for the partitioning of Palestine through General Assembly resolution 181, creating the state of Israel, while endorsing a Palestinian state and international status for Jerusalem, neither of which was ever allowed to come into existence. It passed resolution 194 guaranteeing the right of return for Palestinian refugees. After the 1967 war, the Security Council passed resolution 242, which first called for the exchange of (Israeli-occupied Palestinian) land for (presumably Palestinian-disrupting Israeli) peace. Then in the early 1970s the U.N. played a key role in establishing the legitimacy and recognition of the Palestine Liberation Organization, highlighted by Chairman Yasir Arafat's speech to the General Assembly in 1974. But since that time, the U.N. has been largely excluded, not allowed to function as a significant player in Middle East diplomacy as a whole, and especially not on the question of Palestine. It is not a coincidence that the end of U.N. activism around the Middle East after 1974 matched, more or less, the beginning of the period in which the U.S. wielded its veto much more often. Washington’s vetoes exploded exponentially by the mid-1970s, and a very large percentage of them were used to block the Council from responding to Israel’s occupation.

Anti-War Protesters Risk Lives to Block Bombing of Baghdad
By Ken Nichols O’Keefe, American Free Press, January 6, 2003
A protest organizer and former U.S. veteran explains why he believes peace activists acting as human shields in Iraq constitute the most effective way to oppose an impending aggressive war. -- Day by day, the latest headlines tell us that we are moving ever closer to war with Iraq. So many people around the world are ashamed and outraged by this prospect and yet feel powerless to make their voices heard. Large rallies for peace have been held in cities around the globe. But the bulletins quickly return to the war drums beating ever faster for what must be one of the most choreographed and longest-planned wars in history. Those who suffer most will be the innocent men, women and children in Iraq. Their crime? Simply being the powerless citizens of an oil-rich nation with a leader who no longer fulfills the needs of the Western powers that supported and armed him in the past. We need not be powerless. What would happen if several thousand Western citizens migrated to Iraq to stand side by side with the Iraqi people? Along with a few hundred people, I will be going to Iraq to act as a human shield in the interests of protecting human life. We will join our fellow citizens of the world in Iraq to bear witness for peace and justice. We will run the risk of being maimed or killed—but it is simply the same risk that innocent Iraqis will themselves face. I would rather die in defense of justice and peace than “prosper” in complicity with mass murder and war. This is not about supporting Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, as our governments did in the past. It is about saving the lives of those in our human family. We will be expressing to the Iraqi people the reality that most people in the West do not support this criminal war.

Hypocrisy about biological weapons
By Jonathan Power, Arab News, January 26, 2003
LONDON, 26 January 2003 — On Nov. 25, 1969, in the midst of the war in Vietnam, President Richard Nixon, besieged by protests that he was a warmonger, threw out a sop to public opinion. The US, he announced, had decided to renounce the possession and use of lethal and incapacitating biological weapons. He declared that the government would destroy its stockpile of biological weapons. “These important decisions”, said Nixon, “have been taken as an initiative toward peace. Mankind already carries in its own hands too many of the seeds of its own destruction.” Privately Nixon was convinced that they had little military utility for the US while at the same time he feared that, if the big powers continued to depend on biological weapons, a “rogue” state might one day get its hands on the knowledge of how to make them and use them against American cities. Sending the message that the US military considered them an ineffective tool might discourage other nations from trying to develop them.

Destroying the Village to Save Weapons Manufacturers 
By Heather Wokusch, Common Dreams, January 25, 2003
One of the legacies of the Vietnam War is the now infamous quote from an American military press officer, "we had to destroy the village in order to save it." Rings some bells these days. In the name of "fighting terror," countries with secret weapons programs are poised to pulverize Iraq because of its secret weapons programs. And Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) are being used against civilians in order to prevent WMD from being used against civilians. Case in point: the American military's ongoing use of depleted uranium (DU), despite numerous independent studies warning of DU's toxic-radioactive effects. Research conducted six months before the Gulf War found that short-term high doses of DU could result in death, and long-term low doses could lead to cancer. Regardless, American forces used DU weapons in the 1991 Gulf war, the 1999 Balkan conflict, and the recent hostilities in Afghanistan. It can be assumed that DU weaponry will be used in any upcoming attack on Iraq as well. The implications are staggering. The Geneva Conventions clearly ban weapons that continue to kill or cause genetic effects after the fighting ends, not to mention weapons that unduly damage the natural environment. DU fails miserably on each count. And DU makes no distinction between friend and foe - its victims include local civilians as well as service members sent abroad to fight. Hundreds of thousands of US and allied troops entered areas heavily contaminated by DU dust and debris in the Gulf War, and at least 11 tons of DU was used by NATO forces in the Balkans. In Afghan cities subjected to allied bombing, uranium concentrations were recorded at 400% to 200% above normal, with birth defects sharply on the rise.

The role of democracy in preventing the neo-con artists' dangerous sleight-of-hand
By Laurie King-Irani, The Electronic Intifada, January 26, 2003
I know you've heard it's over now / And war must surely come. / The cities, they are broke in half / And the middlemen are gone. / But let me ask you one more time / O children of the dust: / These hunters who are shrieking now, / Do they speak for us? - Leonard Cohen "Stories of the Street"  -- The neo-conservatives and Likudniks of George W. Bush's unelected regime, those stern men and women who want to bring "democracy" to the Arab-Islamic world -- by force if necessary -- can, ironically, only realize their perilous plans by first dismantling democracy in the United States of America. They can only pull off their neo-con artist sleight-of-hand if they first succeed in shutting down public debate and decisively strangling participatory grassroots politics in the US. Reports and revelations from inside-the-beltway indicate that the neo-cons and their lackeys in the mainstream media are working overtime to disable critical thought, derail historical consciousness, fragment opposition, sever solidarity, and deflect any questions that might expose what they are really up to, and what they have been planning for over two decades in the brightly lit and elegantly appointed offices of some of Washington DC's wealthiest think-tanks. With demagoguery, knee jerk patriotism, and pusillanimous punditry reaching levels unseen in the US capital since the McCarthy era, few journalists, policy makers or elected representatives are willing to speak publicly about the dangerous repercussions -- or the troubling antecedents -- of current unilateralist American designs in the Middle East. (1)

Israel pounds Gaza into dust
By Kristen Ess, The Electronic Intifada, January 25, 2003
At 9 o'clock yesterday morning the Israeli military destroyed all of the bridges the lead in and out of Beit Hanoun in the north of the Gaza Strip. Israeli tanks and helicopters then shelled the town for 18 hours. Night before last Israeli occupation forces invaded Gaza City. One of the houses they destroyed is near where I used to live, next door to where many Palestinians still live. It is unusual for the Israeli military to invade Gaza City by land the way they do in the rest of the Gaza Strip. In the south, in Rafah for instance, every house I've lived in is now destroyed. I left one house for an hour in Rafah's Block O and the Israeli military destoyed it. But usually the IOF attacks Gaza City by air, by firing missiles from US donated Apache helicopters, as they also did last night. My friends from the Al-Mezan Center for Human Rights in Gaza City wrote this: "In the early morning hours of Friday, January 24, 2003, the IOF entered az-Zaytun area, west of Gaza City, and destroyed a house with explosives. The house is owned by the family of Mas,ud Ayad, who was assassinated by the Israeli military in 2000. Also, the IOF arrested four Palestinians; three of them are from the Ayad family. About twenty homes were damaged in the area due to the explosion. The same night Israeli helicopters shelled a metal shop in Gaza with five missiles. One of the missiles struck Saint Philips Church, which is located inside the Al Ahly Hospital, while a second missile hit a house directly, destroying it. One elderly woman died from a heart attack and three other people were injured."