The Thick Fog of War on American Television
By Norman Solomon, Common Dreams/FAIR, April 3, 2003
Minutes after the dawn spread daylight across the Iraqi desert, "embedded" CNN correspondent Walter Rodgers was on the air with a live report. Another employee at the network, former U.S. Gen. Wesley Clark -- on the job in a TV studio back home -- asked his colleague a question. When Rodgers responded, he addressed Clark as "general" and "sir." The only thing missing was a salute. That deferential tone pretty much sums up the overall relationship between American journalists and the U.S. military on major TV networks. Correspondents in the field have bonded with troops to the point that their language and enunciated outlooks are often indistinguishable. Meanwhile, no matter what tensions exist, reporters remain basically comfortable with Pentagon sources. And what passes for debate is rarely anything more than the second-guessing of military decisions. It's OK to question how -- but not why -- the war is being fought. Sure, some journalists have raised uncomfortable questions for top war makers in Washington. At this point, within the bounds of mass media, the loudest voices of pseudo-dissent have demanded to know whether the U.S. government miscalculated by failing to deploy enough troops from the outset. When the media debate centers on whether the United States has attacked Iraq with adequate troop strength and sufficient lethal violence, the fulcrum of supposed media balance is far into the realm of fervent militarism.

Of terror and defiance
By Shamel Darwish, Al-Ahram Weekly On-line, 3 - 9 April 2003
First-hand experience of the devastating effects of the war in Baghdad, visiting Al-Rashidiya camp on the Jordanian border -- "Iraqis are fleeing from Iraq to neighbouring countries." The statement is continually repeated in the media and is absolutely false. On the contrary, in fact, Iraqi expatriates are going back to their homeland via Jordanian, Syrian, and Iranian borders to stand with their brethren against the forces of the coalition. Al-Ahram Weekly visited the Al-Rashidiya camp on the Iraqi- Jordanian border to meet Iraqi families who managed to 'escape' the hell of the war. The camp is divided into two sections, one for Arabs and foreigners, and the other for Iraqis. When we arrived at the camp, we were met by a supervisory delegation of associations affiliated to the United Nations. They told us there were 20,000 tents in the Iraqi section waiting to receive up to 500,000 Iraqis. When we asked how many families were in the camps now, we were told "it is a military secret". Journalists were not permitted to enter the Iraqi section of the camp, but when we managed to sneak in we got a surprise. There was not a single Iraqi in the camp; nobody walking between the rows of tents, not a single child crying or playing, and the furnished tents were completely deserted. Silence prevailed, apart from the blowing of the wind and the pattering of rain. One official, who preferred to remain anonymous, later admitted there were no Iraqis in the camp at all. According to some Iraqi expatriates returning to Iraq, this situation is not confined to the Al-Rashidiya camp; similar camps along the Syrian and Iranian border are also deserted. It was quite clear that claims of Iraqis fleeing their country in search of refuge from the war were simply part of the psychological warfare waged on the Iraqis, in addition to the other type of warfare using artillery, aircraft and tank operations.

'The freedom to take our land'
By Jonathan Cook,  Al-Ahram Weekly On-line, 3 - 9 April 2003
Three decades on, Land Day continues to conjure up heightened bitterness. This year, Palestinians' anger was directed at Israel, US aggression on Iraq and the ineffectual Arab governments. -- As a tide of Palestinian protest -- from Nazareth to Bethlehem and Gaza -- was unleashed at the weekend against the war, a suicide bomber slipped into the coastal town of Netanya and detonated himself at the entrance to a café, hurting 58 diners and passers-by. According to Islamic Jihad, which claimed responsibility, the injuries inflicted by the explosives strapped to 19-year- old Rami Ranam were "a gift" to the Iraqi people. The bombing occurred on Land Day, an annual event observed across much of the Middle East to commemorate the fatal shootings of six Palestinian citizens of Israel by the security services in 1976, during demonstrations against government attempts to confiscate huge swaths of Arab- owned land in the Galilee. This year Land Day marches merged into rallies sweeping the globe against the American and British invasion of Iraq. The year before, Land Day became the main channel for venting anger at Israel's invasion of the West Bank and the trail of carnage left in its wake. For this year's 27th anniversary of Land Day the leadership of Israel's one million Palestinian citizens called a general strike to protest at the continuing attacks on the minority, including economic cuts designed to hit Arab citizens hardest, and the Israeli army's "bloody escalation of aggression" against the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza.

Bracing for Bush's War at Home
By Chisun Lee, The Village Voice, March 26 - April 1, 2003
Ground Laid for Historic Presidential Powers Push -- An ugly theory popped up in the nation's capital several weeks ago. The Bush administration would wait until war began, and worry gripped the homeland, to ram a staggering package of domestic security measures through a Congress silenced by fears of seeming unpatriotic. Such measures would radically expand the executive branch powers already inflated by the 2001 USA Patriot Act. On Friday—as the U.S. began suffering combat fatalities, and the terror alert on whitehouse.gov glared orange for "high"—Justice Department spokesperson Mark Corallo confirmed to the Voice that such measures were coming soon. Exact details are confined to "internal deliberations," he said, but the proposals "will be filling in the holes" of the Patriot Act, "refining things that will enable us to do our job." But a new, comprehensive review of Bush's growing presidential power hardly reveals any "holes." Rather—using court positions, internal policy changes, and secret decisions as bricks—the administration has built the executive branch into a fortress, nearly invulnerable to the checks of the judiciary and Congress. Most alarming, according to the watchdog authors of the 96-page report, "Imbalance of Powers," the complexity of this historic expansion continues to mask its true proportions. "You have to connect the dots," said Elisa Massimino, Washington, D.C., director of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights (LCHR), a 25-year nonprofit defender of civil liberties and humane policy. LCHR analyzed hundreds of pages of legislation, policy directives, and congressional records, plus a spate of major court cases such as the suit challenging the indefinite detention, without representation, of accused American "dirty bomber" Jose Padilla. The big picture shows an "executive branch amassing so much more power," said Massimino, even in the past six months alone. But since many developments have occurred "under the radar," she said, few members of Congress, let alone of the public, could easily map out such a blueprint on their own.

Hearts, minds and bodybags
By James Fox, The Guardian, April 5, 2003
Iraq can't be a Vietnam, pundits insist. Those who were there know better -- In Vietnam in 1972 there was a hearts and minds programme called chieu hoi to entice the population in the south to rally to the government. The late Gavin Young of the Observer quipped: "I think the Americans have bitten off more than they can chieu hoi ." Is this the case with Iraq if, whatever happens in Baghdad, liberation turns to occupation and resistance? To lose the hearts and minds, which the Americans have surely done so far in Iraq, would surely be to lose the war, whatever the strategic results. But don't whisper "Vietnam", and certainly "quagmire", the word with which the Iraqis daily taunt the Americans. To do so in print has invited the reflex denial that the topography - desert versus jungle - is different and not good for guerrilla war; that Vietnam took 10 years to lose and we've been here two weeks. One historian wrote last week that the Iraqis were not "politicised as the Vietnamese were by the Vietcong", a startling observation given the evidence of recent days. Nationalism, patriotism and fatwas from the Arab world are surely enough. Iraqi strategists, according to one Arab editor, study Vietnam constantly. And they talk of it too. Not only will 100 Bin Ladens be unleashed by this struggle, they say, but "100 Vietnams". "Let our cities be our swamps and our buildings our jungles," Tariq Aziz told the Institute of Strategic Studies before war began. Yesterday Iraq's information minister, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, talked of turning Iraq into "another Indochina". Has Baghdad become a mini Ho Chi Minh trail of hidden tunnels and arsenals?

The Jerusalem paradox
By Yossi Beilin, Haaretz, April 5, 2003
"The Palestinian Struggle for Jerusalem" by Moshe Amirav, The Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies, 80 pages, NIS 30 -- Dr. Moshe Amirav has come a long way from the days when he was a Likud activist in Jerusalem and held talks with Palestinians on the possibility of coming to a diplomatic agreement, to his tenure as deputy mayor of Jerusalem on behalf of Meretz. But all along his political path, he has invested effort in solving the question of Jerusalem, and has contributed quite a bit to the principles that have in recent years been leading toward an agreed-upon solution. In the booklet Amirav recently published, he does not offer a new proposal for this serious dispute, but rather deals with a scientific attempt to describe what he presents as a Palestinian achievement: stressing the issue of Jerusalem and even assuming control of it. He tries to explain this Palestinian attempt by a political science approach that relates to the ability of players to turn circumstances into problems and redefine them. He argues that the Palestine Liberation Organization succeeded in making Jerusalem, and especially the Temple Mount, into a key issue on the international agenda and having done this, also succeeded in becoming the exclusive Arab party making a claim on East Jerusalem, with Israel having to come to terms with this.

U.S. invasion has landed it in Israeli territory
By Tarif Abboushi, Houston Chronicle, April 1, 2003
We can win the war, but the peace will enervate us. Welcome, America, to a vicious cycle of violence like that Israel is mired in. In time our nation will yearn for freedom from Operation Iraqi Freedom. -- Two weeks and 8,000 missiles into the war on Iraq, things have not gone quite as planned. The much-ballyhooed "shock and awe" strategy has failed to precipitate the quick capitulation of stunned Iraqi forces or an internal overthrow of Saddam Hussein's brutal dictatorship. Far from throwing in the towel in the first round, Saddam's men have taken our laser-guided punches and satellite-homed hooks and put up a fight. Not only have we yet to reach Baghdad for the inevitable siege, we have struggled to take Basra, a city a mere hour's drive north of the Kuwaiti border, and one we were led to believe would welcome our troops with flurries of petals and rice. There is shock and awe aplenty, but not as was scripted. Set against the backdrop of our heralded ability to minimize "collateral damage" with the awesome precision of our technology-laden arsenal, the waywardness marking some of the missiles fired by our navy from ships in the Mediterranean and Red Seas is notably shocking. U.S. Central Command has reported that some not only failed to hit their targets in Iraq, but they completely missed the country! (They landed instead in Turkey and Saudi Arabia.) Needless to say, CentCom has cancelled missile launches from MedRed.

Was Einstein Right?
John Chuckman, Palestine Media Center, April 5, 2003
"My awareness of the essential nature of Judaism resists the idea of a Jewish state with borders, an army, and a measure of temporal power, no matter how modest. I am afraid of the inner damage Judaism will sustain - especially from the development of a narrow nationalism within our own ranks, against which we have already had to fight strongly, even without a Jewish state." Albert Einstein -- Einstein is one of my favorite twentieth-century characters. He was remarkable, and I don't mean only for his profound contributions to our understanding of the physical world. He was someone who drove authoritarians like J. Edgar Hoover mad. He was one of those rare souls, like George Orwell, who despite mistakes and flaws, consciously worked to direct his actions, and redirect them after missteps, by principles of decency, humanity, and rational thought. He never subscribed to menacing slogans like "My country, right or wrong" or "You're either with us or against us." Quite the opposite, he knew any country was capable of being wrong at times and did not deserve blind allegiance when it was. Einstein's was one of the most important names lent to the cause of Zionism. His name and visits and letters raised a great deal of money towards establishing universities and resettling European Jews suffering under violent anti-Semitism long before the founding of Israel. But even in a cause so dear to his heart, Einstein never stopped thinking for himself. He not only opposed the establishment of a formal Israeli state - he was after all a great internationalist - but he always advocated treating the Arabic people of Palestine with generosity and understanding.

Erosion of liberties occurs close to home
Editorial, Statesman Journal, April 5, 2003
A man held in a terrorism inquiry is denied due process of law. If government encroachments on civil liberties seem like something abstract and far-off, consider the case of Maher “Mike” Hawash. This Hillsboro man is an American citizen, a software engineer at Intel Corp., a husband and father of three. For more than two weeks, since his arrest in an Intel parking lot, he has been held without charges as a “material witness” in a terrorism investigation. There’s no public record of his arrest, and the search warrants on his home and office have been sealed. His lawyers aren’t allowed to talk about his situation. There’s no word about why he’s being held or how long he can expect to be in solitary confinement at the federal prison in Sheridan. The government has held several dozen “material witnesses” like this since Sept. 11, 2001. Many have disappeared into a hazy kind of legal limbo. Hawash is lucky enough to have friends and co-workers who are loudly insisting that his constitutional rights to a “speedy and public trial” be respected. His fellow Oregonians should pick up that cry. It’s unconscionable that a U.S. citizen who is highly unlikely to flee should be held indefinitely under these conditions. Even more troubling is the cloak of secrecy that has been drawn around Hawash’s case.