Covered in Bees dot Org - dubya

Some lives are more equal than others

dan — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 10:27:58 +0000

The US has bombed a village on the Somali / Kenyan border where, allegedly, a lot of al Qaida folk were. They used an AC130 gunship, so there's probably not much left of the village. Some civilians are dead, too, of course.

The Guardian (destroying morale and undermining the nation's will to win the war on towelheads, as always) reports the words of one father:

My four-year-old boy was killed in the strike. The plane was firing at other areas in Ras Kamboni. We could see smoke from the area. We also heard 14 massive explosions.

Aw, bleeding heart me. Can't make an omelette without, etc.

But what if that boy was a US citizen? Or from any European country? The bombing wouldn't have happened. Why not? Two possible explanations.

Next time, make it work

dan — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 13:34:11 +0000

Diane McWhorter in Slate:

We have become such "good Americans" that we no longer have the moral imagination to picture what it might be like to be in a bureaucratic category that voids our human rights, be it "enemy combatant" or "illegal immigrant." Thus, in the week before the election, hardly a ripple answered the latest decree from the Bush administration: Detainees held in CIA prisons were forbidden from telling their lawyers what methods of interrogation were used on them, presumably so they wouldn't give away any of the top-secret torture methods that we don't use. Cautiously, I look back on that as the crystallizing moment of Bushworld: tautological as a Gilbert and Sullivan libretto, absurd as a Marx Brothers movie, and scary as a Kafka novel.

So, is there a new, post-election normal? A recent Google search turned up some impressive, learned commentary comparing the Military Commissions Act of 2006 to the Enabling Act of 1933. A reader congratulated one of the legal scholars, human rights lawyer Scott Horton, for daring to defy Godwin's Law. Perhaps (to switch totalitarian metaphors) we are in the midst of a little intellectual Prague Spring.

Of course, that democratic interlude met a swift and terrible end. If the midterm election was a referendum on nothing more than Bush's competence, then the message the Republicans have gotten is: Next time, make it work.

A magic hour light moment for the world

dan — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 19:56:12 +0000

Not sure what to say about the US mid-term elections, but the past 24 hours couldn't go unblogged. This is Planet Earth's magic hour light moment. We get to feel the weight of Satan's cock lifted off our shoulder, step photogenically out into a perfectly timed sunset, and grin like loons. We get to know that many, many others around the world are doing the same.

Syria on Iraq: if that's democracy, we don't want it.

dan — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 11:32:02 +0100

Syrian human rights activists have effectively been silenced by the war on Iraq, the Washington Post reports today. (I've pasted the full article here since not everyone can immediately get to these articles.) The reasoning is horrendous, but entirely logical: if that's democracy, we don't want it. It parallels so many things about US / UK policy since 2001: how obviously, to everyone with two brain cells, their actions were going to do the opposite of what they claimed.

Full article:

Horror at the bloodshed accompanying the U.S. effort to bring democracy to Iraq has accomplished what human rights activists, analysts and others say Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had been unable to do by himself: silence public demands for democratic reforms here.

The idea of the government as a bulwark of stability and security has long been the watchword of Syrian bureaucrats and village elders. But since Iraq's descent into sectarian and ethnic war -- and after Israel's war with Hezbollah in Lebanon, on the other side of Syria -- even Syrian activists concede that the country's feeble rights movement is moribund.

Advocates of democracy are equated now with supporters of America, even "traitors," said Maan Abdul Salam, 36, a Damascus publisher who has coordinated conferences on women's rights and similar topics.

"Now, talking about democracy and freedom has become very difficult and sensitive," Salam said. "The people are not believing these thoughts anymore. When the U.S. came to Iraq, it came in the name of democracy and freedom. But all we see are bodies, bodies, bodies."

Somehow

dan — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 18:58:55 +0100

From TruthDig.com:

Kevin Tillman joined the Army with his brother Pat (the all-American hero who turned down a $2m dollar sports contract to sign up) in 2002, and they served together in Iraq and Afghanistan. Pat was killed in Afghanistan on April 22, 2004. The article above is written by Kevin, who was discharged in 2005.

(Note also a serving Marine has started this site too...)

Some quotes...

Somehow American leadership, whose only credit is lying to its people and illegally invading a nation, has been allowed to steal the courage, virtue and honor of its soldiers on the ground.

Somehow those afraid to fight an illegal invasion decades ago are allowed to send soldiers to die for an illegal invasion they started.

Clinton on the Bush Administration

dan — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 12:09:40 +0100

If all you care about is concentrating wealth and power, and you're an ideologue so you already have all the answers, and you can't be bothered with inquiry and evidence, you're going to get bad decisions.

(From the Guardian)

A nice little summary, I thought.

Trying not to get my hopes up about the mid-term elections... the Bush administration dead in the water... legislative ability castrated... oooo... One week six days to go...

Blair in a cell with people good at logic

dan — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 14:40:42 +0100

A couple of things recently make me think we need a new branch of state - or an addition to the judiciary.

First, Burnham et al's estimation of deaths in Iraq in the Lancet - Nature has an article (which I don't think I can link to) that says:

None of the experts contacted by Nature said that their doubts fatally undermined the study. Some, such as Daponte, would have liked the authors to have better assessed their method's shortcomings before releasing a result with such political impact. But most say the result is a welcome addition to conflict epidemiology, which is now seen as playing a central role in assessing the severity of wars, and in helping states recover from them.

Musharraf, me and the water-board

dan — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 23:40:01 +0100

Open Democracy has a piece by Moazzam Begg, an ex-Guantanamo victim, today. He reviews Musharraf's autobiography, finding similarities between their lives, before explaining in a matter-of-fact way about the moment the door-bell rang for the last time.

Like Christ knows how many others, he vanished for three years into the black hole of the 'war on terror'. Musharraf claims the US threatened Pakistan with being 'bombed back to the stone age'. The US say this is nonsense - but Begg offers corroboration:

Perhaps threats of being bombed "back to the stone age" did not persuade him to join the fight. But I will never forget what one of the Pakistani agents told me in Islamabad: 'I know you're not wanted in this country for anything, and I don't know what the Americans want for you either. But listen son; if we don't hand you over to them they'll strike us so hard that we'll never be able to recover.'

Absence of evidence of evidence of absence of brain

dan — Sat, 29 Jul 2006 04:51:57 +0100

Haven't quite managed to get anything written in the past few weeks. There's been obsessive reading of online news, watching Adam Curtis' the Power of Nightmares, just seen Syriana, spent yonks staring at the Middle East through the eye of Google Earth. Nothing structured; internet nail-biting I think. (Incidentally, the current maps of Israel, Gaza and the West Bank have changed. It used to show clearly what dreadful land the West Bank was. That's no longer clear. Hmm.)

Well at any rate, the Power of Nightmares is available to watch at Google - at least as I write this. Here's Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 - as well as a fine review in the Nation. It seems fine anyway - but that's because the writer knows more than me. Could be Bobbins.

There's just one little fact about the Lebanon. Much like other little facts that won't go away (like Albright's 'a price worth paying' quote), this one just keeps on poking me on the forehead - tink, tink. If the US has any interest in a ceasefire (as they claim they do), then why are they continuing to supply Israel with precision-guided missiles, and bunker busters? (And I wonder where Israel are getting the cluster bombs they're using?)

Dear Mr Bush

dan — Mon, 19 Jun 2006 15:25:20 +0100

Dear Mr Bush

I thought I'd write to you to let you know that a terrorist came to try and recruit me today but, because of your mission in my country, I turned him away.

Last year, my father and two of my brothers were killed at a checkpoint by an American missile. Men dressed as Arabs were driving towards the checkpoint. They did not stop, and warning shots were fired. Helicopters soon followed, and the checkpoint was destroyed, killing these three members of my family. An American woman came to visit me and my mother later and told us that they were transporting a terrorist to be interrogated. She apologised to us, and gave us 500 dollars. We used it to buy parts for our generator.