tristero got to it before I did, but I did want to comment on the petulant, immature president we are forced to put up with for two more years. Not only did he send out the snotty statement about Bolton’s resignation that tristero quotes below, he held a photo-op and talked to the press slumped down in his chair, lip curled, obviously pissed off. He said this:
“I’m not happy about it. I think he deserved to be confirmed. And the reason why I think he deserved to be confirmed is because I know he did a fabulous job for the country.”
You’d think he’d be used to failure after experiencing it his entire life but he doesn’t seem to he handling it well. His arrogance has always been there, throwing his weight around, peppering his speech with phrases like “I told the American people they were gonna have tah be patient and I meant it.” But now there’s a darker edge to it. I see no signs that he’s ready to see reason on a judgment call like Iraq.
Meanwhile, here’s a fun trip down memory lane with John Bolton from The Nation. Very informative.
But for sheer Bolton surreality, nothing beats Atlas Shrugs’“interview” with him:
What I most admire about John Bolton is his steely demeanor and moral clarity. His spectacular fortitude in the face of scoundrels, liars, and internationally sanctioned criminals never fails to surprise and delight me. What was completely unexpected was the other side of Bolton. He was funny, thoughtful, deliberate. I really enjoyed the chat.
Atlas: If I could I’d like to talk about you. [he is looking at me askance, laughing here] What formed you……….what is your favorite book?
JB: That’s a good question actually. I’d say one of the things that made a big impression on me was Edmund Burke’s book Reflections on the Revolution in France and I’ve read a lot of John Locke and that had a big impact on me and Ayn Rand.
Atlas: You’re just saying that to make me feel better……..
JB: No it’s true.
Atlas: Growing up, were you one of many?
JB: No, I had one sister, nine years younger.
Atlas: So you were the oldest. Your parents were tough? Encouraging? Non approving?. Trying to figure out where you developed that spine of yours……..I find that quality rare. There’s a lot of it in that administration.
JB: My father was a firefighter in the city of Baltimore, my mother was a housewife.
Atlas: YAY, the great American story.
[…]
Atlas: Do you find it is less difficult, more difficult getting things done in this political climate?
JB: When I was in earlier administrations I was in assistant secretary level positions working hard on my issues and I didn’t pay as much attention to the broader…….
Atlas: the big picture? [Atlas interrupting? WTF?]
JB: So when I see it now, it’s probably more discouraging how much there is to do.
Atlas: Discouraging how? Discouraging how much there is to do? Or discouraging as in –is it do-able?
JB: Oh its do-able, under the right circumstances. I’m not so naive that I would be doing it if I didn’t think there was a chance which makes it in some senses more frustrating. You can see sometimes how close you can get and yet you can’t finish a particular thing. Like Iran, I’ve been working on this for three and a half years
Atlas: And you’ll be working on it for three and half more.
JOB: I hope not, I hope not because now that it’s in the Security Council, now is the time to say this is their chance that either they give up their pursuit of nuclear weapons or we go to what the President said, we do something else.
Atlas: We do something else? That’s a little vague, don’t you think? Deliberately vague?
JB: Yeah, sure absolutely. The President said I never take options off the table. And you’ve got to be that way. Look this has happened to me enough times before …. if I said, well — I’ll give you an example……after the invasion of Iraq, after Saddam was overthrown I said something in a BBC interview like I hope the governments of Syria and Iran take notice of what’s just happened and I got into enormous trouble for that because it sounded like I was threatening the invasion of Iran and Syria.
Atlas: yeah but you get in enormous trouble for waking up in the morning
JB: Well that’s true too.
to be continued
More to come guys, but right now I am going to take a break, head downstairs, meet up with some AIPAC folks, and have me a glass of pinot noir…………I’ve had it. Long day. But great.
You can’t make this stuff up. Read on to find out how Pammy and John propose to nuke Lebanon.
Today is the worst day of her life:
Anybody happy about this is an America hater. The tyranny of the minority strikes again.
Read this from Al Gore, and then I have a question for you:
“[I]t’s almost too easy to say, ‘I would have heeded the warnings [about an al Qaeda attack in the summer of ’01].’ In fact, I think I would have, I know I would have. We had several instances when the CIA’s alarm bells went off, and what we did when that happened was, we had emergency meetings and called everybody together and made sure that all systems were go and every agency was hitting on all cylinders, and we made them bring more information, and go into the second and third and fourth level of detail. And made suggestions on how we could respond in a more coordinated, more effective way. It is inconceivable to me that Bush would read a warning as stark and as clear [voice angry now] as the one he received on August 6th of 2001, and, according to some of the new histories, he turned to the briefer and said, ‘Well, you’ve covered your ass.’ And never called a follow up meeting. Never made an inquiry. Never asked a single question. To this day, I don’t understand it. And, I think it’s fair to say that he personally does in fact bear a measure of blame for not doing his job at a time when we really needed him to do his job.
“And now the Woodward book has this episode that has been confirmed by the record that George Tenet, who was much abused by this administration, went over to the White House for the purpose of calling an emergency meeting and warning as clearly as possible about the extremely dangerous situation with Osama bin Laden, and was brushed off! And I don’t know why — honestly — I mean, I understand how horrible this Congressman Foley situation with the instant messaging is, okay? I understand that. But, why didn’t these kinds of things produce a similar outrage? And you know, I’m even reluctant to talk about it in these terms because it’s so easy for people to hear this or read this as sort of cheap political game-playing. I understand how it could sound that way. [Practically screaming now] But dammit, whatever happened to the concept of accountability for catastrophic failure? This administration has been by far the most incompetent, inept, and with more moral cowardice, and obsequiousness to their wealthy contributors, and obliviousness to the public interest of any administration in modern history, and probably in the entire history of the country!”
Here’s the question.
Who should be his running mate?
Oh. And to those who claim Al Gore is humorless, read this:
Do you know if President Bush has seen the movie [An Inconvenient Truth] yet?
Well, he claimed that [he] would not see it. That’s why I wrote the book. He’s a reader.
ps. Gotta take a break, get some stuff done. Back in 2 weeks or so.
“I am deeply disappointed that a handful of United States Senators prevented Ambassador Bolton from receiving the up or down vote he deserved in the Senate.”
You see? We’re not that far apart anymore, are we? Both Bush and I essentially agree it is deeply disappointing that a handful of senators would object to John Bolton representing the United States at the UN.
They should have unanimously opposed that neo-Bircher nutjob.
It’s true that terrible things will happen when U.S. forces withdraw. Mr. Bush was attacking a straw man when he mocked those who think we can make a “graceful exit” from Iraq. Everyone I know realizes that the civil war will get even worse after we’re gone, and that there will probably be a bloody bout of ethnic cleansing that effectively partitions the country into hostile segments.
But nobody – not even Donald Rumsfeld, it turns out – thinks we’re making progress in Iraq. So the same terrible things that would happen if we withdrew soon will still happen if we delay that withdrawal for two, three or more years. The only difference is that we’ll sacrifice many more American lives along the way.
If you are looking for a clearcut exposition of blatant moral imperatives, you wont’ find it in what’s to follow as I discuss what Krugman said. Nor is this a finished, coherent argument. It’s a first attempt to sort out a way to grasp the enormous problems Krugman’s column discusses. I’m posting it in the hopes that you can help clarify some of this for me.
While for the most part I think Krugman has it right, I think he errs is in one specific way. To use the dessicated language that so many pompous foreign policy types like to employ to keep themselves from contemplating the carnage behind their words, Krugman commits what I think is something close to a scaling error.
Where I part with Krugman is at the level of the individual where I think Krugman simply is wrong to claim that the results will be the same regardless of what Bush does or doesn’t do. The horrors to come – and I agree there will be a lot no matter what- will take substantially different paths on individual people and their families depending upon whether and when the US withdraws. Different brothers will die, different mothers will live lives of abject misery. And, while, yes, the same Bush-connected scumbags will reap the most profits regardless of what happens – the Bechtel and Halliburton criminals – different lower-level parasites will become fantastically rich exploiting Iraq.
Krugman doesn’t mention it, but the familes of the dead to come will blame the US – including you and me – if Bush leaves. Or the families of the dead to come will blame the US – including you and me – if Bush stays. But those families willl surely be different ones. And they will hate us more vehemently than we can possibly imagine. In that sense, the intensity of the trauma and hate will be the same. But the situation, and its consequences, will be different depending upon what Bush does. Both will be tragic, but different.
Now, if – if – the US government were run by even halfway decent women and men, the question of the extent of the inevitable tragedies to come would make it very important to argue which alternative would lead to more carnage, leaving or staying in some capacity. Even then, the only sensible alternative would become quite clear, I think, after only the briefest discussion: get out of Iraq. But given the Bush administration, its lust for war, its corruption, its dishonesty, and its sheer incompetence, there is nothing to argue about. The troops should leave. Starting today. Their presence is worse than pointless. American kids are killing and getting killed solely because the most powerful individual on the planet is too much of a coward to admit error and won’t order their withdrawal. There is no other reason they are there. They can do no genuine good – but will increasingly foment tremendous, compounding catastrophes – while they remain in Iraq, They should leave. Now.
That’s what should happen. What will happen is this. Bush will stay and things will get so chaotic and awful that Iraqis (and Americans) will remember this as a time when the decisions about what to do were both crystal clear and pretty hopeful. Or Bush will leave in such a fashion as to put the rest of the world – not to mention the Middle East – into more of a panic than it’s already in. Or Bush will try to have it both ways, combining – as he did, for instance, with stem cells – the stupidest moral reasoning with the most worthless policy.
In short, the terrible history of the rest of the first ten years of the new millenium will be terrible but, contra Krugman, it unfold very differently at the personal level, depending on what the ignorant rhinestone cowboy with his hand on the nuclear button decides to do. Facing those different realities, understanding them, planning for them, is critical.
Krugman is very right, and courageous, to make it clear that things will get much worse if the US pulls out. But that is absolutely no reason to delay withdrawal another millisecond. It will also get much worse if the US stays. The time to start planning for the aftermath is now, but lets be clearheade in realizing that that aftermath will be radically different in its horrors depending upon Bush’s actions.
As I promised, this is not a satisfyingly coherent post. But perhaps, somewhere, there’s an idea or two that could spark some interesting thoughts for you.
So I see that Joe Klein is going on television and regurgitating halfway digested cocktail party chatter again. He doesn’t seem to have a basic understanding of what kinds of things you can “say outloud” and what kinds of things you can’t. It’s a continuing problem for him.
On the Chris Matthews Show yesterday, Time magazine senior writer Joe Klein said of Sen. Barack Obama’s (D-IL) support for setting a timetable for the withdrawal of troops from Iraq: “That may well be true, but it’s wrong to say it.”
Apparently Klein overlearned his lesson from earlier this year when he blurted out that a nuclear first strike should be on the table.
A few weeks ago, I made a mistake while bloviating on the Sunday morning television program This Week With George Stephanopoulos. I said that all military options, including the use of tactical nuclear weapons, should remain on the table in our future dealings with Iran. I was wrong on three counts.
First, my words were a technical violation of a long-standing protocol: A diplomat friend tells me that while it is appropriate to say, “All options should remain on the table,” the direct mention of nukes — especially any hint of the first use of nukes — is, as Stephanopoulos correctly said, “crossing a line.” If George had asked, “What about nukes?” the diplomatic protocol would have been to tapdance: “I can’t imagine ever having to use nuclear weapons,” or some such, leaving the nuclear door open, but never saying so specifically. In truth, I was trying to make the same point, undiplomatically — which comes easy for me: If the Iranians persist in crazy talk about wiping Israel, or New York, off the face of the earth, it isn’t a bad idea if we hint that we can get crazy, too. One can easily imagine the unthinkable: a suitcase nuclear weapon, acquired from the former Soviet Union by Iranian agents, detonated in New York, London or Tel Aviv. A nuclear response certainly would have to be on the table then — and the military would be negligent if it weren’t studying all possible nuclear scenarios.
Klein seems to have difficulty understanding why people should say certain things publicly and why they shouldn’t. Speaking casually about pre-emptive nuclear strikes and how we need to make other countries think we are crazy is not a bad idea because it is impolitic — it’s a bad idea because it is immoral and unthinkable and invites the world to loathe, shun and band together to oppose us as a rogue superpower. The Bush administration and all the perpetually wrong pundits like Klein seem to truly believe this playground logic that says unless the world thinks we are insane they will not respect us. (I can only speculate about the psychological factors that lead to such an absurd conclusion.)
Withdrawing from Iraq, on the other hand, is a serious policy discussion which must be imposed on the administration and discussed publicly because they have given the nation no reason to believe they will do anything reasonable unless they are forced to do so. In fact, they seem intent upon going “full steam ahead” no matter what the people think, so in this case it is in our best interests to let the Iraqis and the world know — outside the official White House policy — that Americans favor withdrawal. Bush’s resolute idiocy has put the country in this unfortunate position.
Klein had to be schooled about why it’s a bad idea to advocate for a first strike and now he’s saying that everyone should keep mum about timed withdrawal in the face of a president who insists that he will stay the course till doomsday. Clearly, hanging around with fellow social conservatives Hugh Hewitt and Bill Bennet has taken its toll on his ability to reason. That’ll happen.
Looks Like I’m Flyin’ Nowhere But To Gitmo Next Year
by tristero
Your ‘Do You Want the Terrorists to Win’ Score: 100%
You are a terrorist-loving, Bush-bashing, “blame America first”-crowd traitor. You are in league with evil-doers who hate our freedoms. By all counts you are a liberal, and as such cleary desire the terrorists to succeed and impose their harsh theocratic restrictions on us all. You are fit to be hung for treason! Luckily George Bush is tapping your internet connection and is now aware of your thought-crime. Have a nice day…. in Guantanamo!
From Marshall’s posts, you’d think that all Democrats were Iraq hawks–comfortable with the idea of the Iraq war itself, so long as the war involved more troops, or only against the war because of prudent calculations about troop requirements. In fact, a huge chunk of the Democratic Party was against the Iraq war from the start, and would have opposed it even if–no, especially if–they thought that war could be won.
How wrong I was.
This morning, courtesy of Atrios, I’m reading this very nice article by Walter Pincus about Democrats who were right about the war from the beginning getting some good positions in the new Congress. As many of you know, the virtual lockout of Those Who Got It Right is a bete noir of mine so I’m feeling real good, sipping my coffee, thinking maybe there’s hope for the poor benighted planet God hastily stuck us on ’cause S/He was too lazy to work Walmart hours, ie 24/7.
But then I read this:
Rep. John M. Spratt Jr. (S.C.), a senior member of the Armed Services Committee, was one of several Democrats who predicted during the House floor debate that “the outcome after the conflict is actually going to be the hardest part, and it is far less certain.” He credited his views in part to what he heard over breakfasts with retired generals Anthony C. Zinni and Joseph P. Hoar, both of whom had led the U.S. Army’s Central Command — a part of which is in Spratt’s district.
“They made the point: We do not want to win this war…”
Oh. My. God. Go ahead, my fellow droogs, click on the link. There it is. There’s no point trying to deny it or explain it away. A Democrat approvingly paraphrases what two generals opposed to Bush/Iraq told him, “We do not want to win this war.”
It’s undeniable. The words seared themselves into my brain. The coffee tasted bitter on my tongue. Stanley Kurtz was 100% right. Democrats opposed to Bush/Iraq did not want to win the war. The clear implication is that they opposed Bush/Iraq because they thought it could be won.
When you’re wrong, you’re wrong, my father used to say, and a good man says so. (I was reminded of dear old Dad when I first heard the opening scene of Wozzeck, “Ein guter Mensch, ein guter Mensch!” but I digress.) And so, Stanley Kurtz, I’m sorry. There it is, in the black and white of one of the finest American newspapers, proof positive you were right about Democrats and their intentions.
One spring day during his three and a half years as an enemy combatant, Jose Padilla experienced a break from the monotony of his solitary confinement in a bare cell in the brig at the Naval Weapons Station in Charleston,South Carolina.
That day, Mr. Padilla, a Brooklyn-born Muslim convert whom the Bush administration had accused of plotting a dirty bomb attack and had detained without charges, got to go to the dentist.
“Today is May 21,” a naval official declared to a camera videotaping the event. “Right now we’re ready to do a root canal treatment on Jose Padilla, our enemy combatant.”
Several guards in camouflage and riot gear approached cell No. 103. They unlocked a rectangular panel at the bottom of the door and Mr. Padilla’s bare feet slid through, eerily disembodied. As one guard held down a foot with his black boot, the others shackled Mr. Padilla’s legs. Next, his hands emerged through another hole to be manacled.
Wordlessly, the guards, pushing into the cell, chained Mr. Padilla’s cuffed hands to a metal belt. Briefly, his expressionless eyes met the camera before he lowered his head submissively in expectation of what came next: noise-blocking headphones over his ears and blacked-out goggles over his eyes. Then the guards, whose faces were hidden behind plastic visors, marched their masked, clanking prisoner down the hall to his root canal.
[…]
Now lawyers for Mr. Padilla, 36, suggest that he is unfit to stand trial. They argue that he has been so damaged by his interrogations and prolonged isolation that he suffers post-traumatic stress disorder and is unable to assist in his own defense. His interrogations, they say, included hooding, stress positions, assaults, threats of imminent execution and the administration of “truth serums.”
A Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Col. Todd Vician, said Sunday that the military disputes Mr. Padilla’s accusations of mistreatment. And, in court papers, prosecutors deny “in the strongest terms” the accusations of torture and say that “Padilla’s conditions of confinement were humane and designed to ensure his safety and security.”
“His basic needs were met in a conscientious manner, including Halal (Muslim acceptable) food, clothing, sleep and daily medical assessment and treatment when necessary,” the government stated. “While in the brig, Padilla never reported any abusive treatment to the staff or medical personnel.”
In the brig, Mr. Padilla was denied access to counsel for 21 months. Andrew Patel, one of his lawyers, said his isolation was not only severe but compounded by material and sensory deprivations. In an affidavit filed Friday, he alleged that Mr. Padilla was held alone in a 10-cell wing of the brig; that he had little human contact other than with his interrogators; that his cell was electronically monitored and his meals were passed to him through a slot in the door; that windows were blackened, and there was no clock or calendar; and that he slept on a steel platform after a foam mattress was taken from him, along with his copy of the Koran, “as part of an interrogation plan.”
Mr. Padilla’s situation, as an American declared an enemy combatant and held without charges by his own government, was extraordinary and the conditions of his detention appear to have been unprecedented in the military justice system.
Philip D. Cave, a former judge advocate general for the Navy and now a lawyer specializing in military law, said, “There’s nothing comparable in terms of severity of confinement, in terms of how Padilla was held, especially considering that this was pretrial confinement.”
Ali al-Marri, a Qatari and Saudi dual citizen and the only enemy combatant currently detained in the United States, has made similar claims of isolation and deprivation at the brig in South Carolina. The Pentagon spokesman, Lieutenant Vician, said Sunday that he could not comment on the methods used to escort Mr. Padilla to the dentist. Blackened goggles and earphones are rarely employed in internal prison transports in the United States, but riot gear is sometimes used for violent prisoners.
One of Mr. Padilla’s lawyers, Orlando do Campo, said, however, that Mr. Padilla was a “completely docile” prisoner. “There was not one disciplinary problem with Jose ever, not one citation, not one act of disobedience,” said Mr. do Campo, who is a lawyer at the Miami federal public defender’s office.
I know that all the tough guys on the right will say that Padilla is just being a typical whining malcontent but I have a feeling that most of them would crumble into blubbering babies after five minutes in his position. This treatment is extremely inhumane. They basically blinded, deafened and then isolated him, essentially destroying his mind. There is no reason on earth to put those goggles and earphones on him to go to the dentist in the prison in South Carolina except to keep him from ever feeling like a normal human being, part of the natural world. It’s sick.
A psychiatrist for the defense says:
“It is my opinion that as the result of his experiences during his detention and interrogation, Mr. Padilla does not appreciate the nature and consequences of the proceedings against him, is unable to render assistance to counsel, and has impairments in reasoning as the result of a mental illness, i.e., post-traumatic stress disorder, complicated by the neuropsychiatric effects of prolonged isolation,” Dr. Hegarty said in an affidavit for the defense.
Of course this could just be a defense tactic. But there’s something really sinister about his behavior that leads her to these conclusions. It’s not your typical insanity type assessment:
Mr. Padilla’s lawyers say they have had a difficult time persuading him that they are on his side.
From the time Mr. Padilla was allowed access to counsel, Mr. Patel visited him repeatedly in the brig and in the Miami detention center, and Mr. Padilla has observed Mr. Patel arguing on his behalf in Miami federal court.
But, Mr. Patel said in his affidavit, his client is nonetheless mistrustful. “Mr. Padilla remains unsure if I and the other attorneys working on his case are actually his attorneys or another component of the government’s interrogation scheme,” Mr. Patel said.
Mr. do Campo said that Mr. Padilla was not incommunicative, and that he expressed curiosity about what was going on in the world, liked to talk about sports and demonstrated particularly keen interest in the Chicago Bears.
But the defense lawyers’ questions often echo the questions interrogators have asked Mr. Padilla, and when that happens, he gets jumpy and shuts down, the lawyers said.
Dr. Hegarty said Mr. Padilla refuses to review the video recordings of his interrogations, which have been released to his lawyers but remain classified.
He is especially reluctant to discuss what happened in the brig, fearful that he will be returned there some day, Mr. Patel said in his affidavit.
“During questioning, he often exhibits facial tics, unusual eye movements and contortions of his body,” Mr. Patel said. “The contortions are particularly poignant since he is usually manacled and bound by a belly chain when he has meetings with counsel.”
When I was a kid I read “The Count Of Monte Cristo” and it had a profound affect on me. It is a book about horrible injustice, terrible solitary confinement and the natural human response to suffering it. Every time I read about these prisoners being thrown into these high tech dungeons, isolated and dehumanized I think of that book and the descriptions of madness to which Edmund Dantes nearly succumbs until his mind is saved by the presence of another person to talk to. I think isolation and lack of a sense of time and strange repetitive interrogations may be even more cruel than physical punishment. The belief that it will never end, that you’ve lost all normal sense of personhood and control — that your mind is being stripped away and there’s nothing you can do about it — must be terrifying.
I get the sense that a lot of this stuff was rank experimentation. We have known for years that Guantanamo became a guinea pig farm very early on in which they trained green interrogators in “new” techniques. This was probably part of a similar program.
Reporters are not allowed to speak with interrogators or anyone else who deals with intelligence at Gitmo. The only testimony I hear is from General Geoffrey Miller, the task-force commander. “We are developing information of enormous value to the nation,” says Miller, a slight, pugnacious man said to be a strict disciplinarian. “We have an enormously thorough process that has very high resolution and clarity. We think we’re fighting not only to save and protect our families, but your families also. I think of Gitmo as the counterterrorism-interrogation battle lab.”
But Miller’s background is in artillery, not intelligence, and senior intelligence officials with long experience in counterterrorism, who spoke to Vanity Fair on condition of anonymity, question his assessment
[…]
General Miller, however, sees no cause for concern. “I believe we understand what the truth is. We are very, very good at interrogation… As many of our detainees have realized that what they did was wrong, they have begun to give us information that helps us win the global war on terror.”
Spies and psychiatrists may have their doubts, but Donald Rumsfeld is convinced that even the mere foot soldiers imprisoned at Gitmo are “among the most dangerous, best-trained, vicious killers on the face of the earth.” All, he has said, “were involved in an effort to kill thousands of Americans.”
You read some of this stuff now and it’s like these guys were all running lines from some cheap 1950’s era B-Movie script. Yet the press corps called this nutcase Rummy a “rock star.” It was some sort of mass delusion.
Somewhere they came up with the idea that every single person detained by the military as an enemy combatant was not just guilty, he was not even a human being. And so they did this stuff almost as if to make sure the person was not treated as a human being in any way. Perhaps it tested their own assumptions too much if they were seen as people instead of pure personifications of evil.
And it worked:
In his affidavit, Mr. Patel said, “I was told by members of the brig staff that Mr. Padilla’s temperament was so docile and inactive that his behavior was like that of ‘a piece of furniture.’ ”
This “piece of furniture” had to have blackout goggles and earphones, manacles and a force of men in riot gear in order to go to the prison dentist. I do not know if they made him wear the goggles and earphones when he had his root canal. But I’d be willing to bet they did. It would be so much more punishing not to be able to see and hear, but be able to feel. Why waste an opportunity to further dehumanize the furniture?
Oh, and be sure to read the whole article to remind yourself of just what a pathetic, absurd case the government is bringing against this guy.
What do you call a “large canister … as long as 13 feet and weighing up to 2,000 pounds … packed with … hundreds of … bomblets or submunitions packed with shrapnel and an explosive charge … launched from the air by fighter planes, bombers, or helicopters, or shot out of artillery, rockets or missile systems?”
It would be tempting to call it a cluster bomb.
Suppose that between 20 and 40 percent of the bomblets do not detonate upon impact and thus “their effects stretch beyond the duration of the hostilities” and when they do explode they “cannot distinguish between civilian and combatant.” What do you call it then?
How about a big canister full of land mines?
Probably not. Cluster bombs are legal and land mines are not. So we’d better go with cluster bomb.
The State Department is investigating Israel’s use of American made cluster bombs during the war in Lebanon–in particular whether Israel broke a secret agreement made in 1967 not to use cluster bombs against civilians. … During the last three days of the war–as the final touches on the peace agreement were being made–Israel dropped an estimated 1.2 million bomblets throughout Lebanon, a country smaller than the state of Connecticut. Jan Egeland, the U.N. Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, was decidedly undiplomatic in his assessment: “What is shocking and, I would say, to me, completely immoral is that 90 percent of the cluster bomb strikes occurred in the last 72 hours of the conflict, when we knew there would be a resolution.”
With their failure rate of up to 40%, more than one of every three bombs may not detonate immediately–lying in wait for children, trucks, and livestock. … An unnamed Israeli commander of a rocket unit in Lebanon told Haaretz on September 12 that the saturation bombing with cluster weapons was “insane and monstrous; we covered entire towns in cluster bombs.” … The saturation bombing has effectively crippled agriculture. Farmers’ fields and orchards are now minefields and their crops are rotting on the stalk. The summer tobacco, wheat, and fruit, as well as late-yielding crops like olives, cannot be harvested, and winter crops, like lentils and chickpeas, have not been planted because farmers cannot plow their fields.
Many of the two to three daily casualties are poor farmers desperate to feed their families from fields that are now de facto minefields.
Rida Noureddine, an olive and wheat farmer whose land is littered with cluster bombs, feels the frustration of many southern Lebanese who are dependent on the land. He told the New York Times, “I feel as though someone has tied my arms, or is holding me by the neck, suffocating me because this land is my soul.” … An Israeli Defense Force spokesman insists that “all of the weapons and munitions used by the IDF are legal according to international law and their use conforms to international standards.” That is cold comfort for the family of 11-year-old Ramy Shibleh, one of the post-war victims. He was gathering pinecones outside Halta, a small southern town where the Lebanese army had already cleared mines twice. But more bombs remained, including the one that Ramy and his brother hit with their cart of pinecones. Reuters reported that Ramy tried to toss the rock-like object out of the way, but it exploded, tearing off his right arm and the back of his head and killing him instantly. His mother keeps the shreds of the yellow shirt Ramy was wearing when he died. “He was only picking up the pine nuts to buy the toys he loved,” she told reporters.
From “What We Leave Behind: From Kosovo to Lebanon, cluster bomb casualties continue to mount” in the December print edition of In These Times. The article will be available on-line soon.
So what is the vital issue that the evangelicals of Kenya plan to focus on next year? You guessed it:
Leaders of Kenya’s Pentecostal congregation, with six million adherents, want the human fossils [in Kenya’s National Museum, some of the most important fossils in tracing the evolution of hominids to modern Homo Sapiens] de-emphasized.
“The Christian community here is very uncomfortable that Leakey and his group want their theories presented as fact,” said Bishop Bonifes Adoyo, head of the largest Pentecostal church in Kenya, the Christ is the Answer Ministries.
“Our doctrine is not that we evolved from apes, and we have grave concerns that the museum wants to enhance the prominence of something presented as fact which is just one theory,” the bishop said.
Bishop Adoyo said all the country’s churches would unite to force the museum to change its focus when it reopens after eighteen months of renovations in June 2007. “We will write to them, we will call them, we will make sure our people know about this, and we will see what we can do to make our voice known,” he said.
Dear Bishop Adoyo, If you ever get tired fighting the good fight in Kenya, Move here! I’m sure you’ll find a really great job that pays a lot more than the price of a single iPod, give or take.
