Liberal-oriented columns, commentary and archived articles on national and international news, politics, and the communication arts--with emphasis on China--by Joseph Bosco, author, journalist, director and actor; Professor of Drama and Communications at Beijing Foreign Studies University. 

Wednesday, December 31, 2003

A Progress Report

Being the staunch liberal--some would say radical--Democrat that I am, I am going to let the Center for American Progress be my missive to the New Year to dawn in less than four hours here in the Middle Kingdom ( If you haven't already blogrolled America's newest and perhaps best liberal think-tank, then this is my Holiday gift to you!):
2004: The Road Ahead

The Progress Report examines the challenges of upcoming year.

NATIONAL SECURITY

WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION: The WMD-inspecting Iraq Survey Group – minus David Kay – is set to release its final report on the search for WMD this coming February. Although the Bush Administration used the imminent threat of WMD as the premise for going to war in Iraq, the previous interim report released by the ISG last September "found no evidence that Iraq had taken significant steps to build nuclear weapons or produce fissile material after 1991. No evidence that aluminum tubes had been used to enrich uranium. No proof that two trucks carrying laboratory equipment had been designed to produce biowarfare agents, as the president had claimed. No smallpox, anthrax, or VX. No chemical or biological weapons ready to fire in 45 minutes--indeed, no poison gases or germ weapons at all." Progressives need to hold the Administration accountable for the intelligence failures leading up to its WMD claims – and refuse to allow conservatives to say there is “no difference” whether WMD are found in Iraq after all. An aggressive examination of the report and its findings is necessary to redirect resources toward existing threats in the future. Progressives must champion a powerful national security strategy that will best protect Americans and stop the spread of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, while demonstrating the concrete harm to the American people caused by pre-emption and unilateral action.

IRAQ: The Iraqi Governing Council and the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq (CPA) agreed to hand over power to a transitional government in Iraq no later than July 2004. Before that happens, Progressives need to define a strong and sustainable course for U.S. actions in Iraq that utilizes international experience in nation building and charts a realistic course for advancing democratic values and institutions in the region. At the same time, Progressives need to participate actively in the debate over transforming the military to help adapt its roles, size and scope on the battlefield and in post-conflict situations.

PUBLIC DIPLOMACY: This past year saw the advent of the preemptive war, but the Administration is dangerously ignoring pre-emptive peace. In a report titled "Changing Minds, Winning Peace," a State Department advisory group found "the United States today lacks the capabilities in public diplomacy to meet the national security threat emanating from political instability, economic deprivation and extremism, especially in the Arab and Muslim world" in large part because "public diplomacy is absurdly and dangerously underfunded." The NYT reports, "The government's public-relations drive to build a favorable impression abroad — particularly among Muslim nations — is a shambles, according to Republican and Democratic lawmakers, State Department officials and independent experts. They say the effort, known as public diplomacy, lacks direction and is starved of cash and personnel." Despite this, conservatives still give public diplomacy short shrift, just this year attempting to cancel programs such as Radio-Free Europe, "one of the cheapest, most effective and most popular tools of U.S. public diplomacy." Progressives must press for a renewed commitment to public diplomacy throughout the world to help stem a rising tide of anti-Americanism.

ACCOUNTABILITY: A number of troubling controversies continue to go unanswered and progressives must not let the collective memory dim. Halliburton must be held accountable for overcharging the government by as much as $61 million. The Justice Department must aggressively continue its investigation into who in the White House breached national security and leaked the name of a CIA operative. And the Administration must answer questions about why it allowed a drug company CEO and longtime business associate of the President to "craft" key portions of the Medicare bill.
The above is just the start of a great roundup of the important issues before us. Me? Right now I'm going out to have some fun in Beijing!

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!

(Note: There are many neat things about living in China, just one of them is getting to have 3 Happy New Years. One, in just about 3 hours. Two, 13 hours after the first one (I'm speaking about the one in Times Square, New York). Then the Chinese Lunar New Year and Spring Festival almost a month later!!!
 

9:03 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Better To Be Careful Now Than Sorry Later

So far so good on the SARS front; the central government is doing everything--perhaps even too much--in its preventive measures against a potential full-force return of the disease. Here's the view from the Beijing bureau of The New York Times in an article by Jim Yardley:
BEIJING, Dec. 30 — Perplexed medical experts from China's Ministry of Health and the World Health Organization have ordered new rounds of tests for a man suspected of having SARS because previous results have been so contradictory that they cannot reach a diagnosis.

"We can't confirm that the patient is a SARS patient or that he is not," said Dr. Julie Hall, the SARS team leader in the organization's office in Beijing. She said his test results have "really been a mixed bag of negatives and positives."

On Tuesday, Dr. Hall said the Ministry of Health agreed to allow W.H.O. laboratories outside China to conduct additional tests on blood and other samples from the patient. She said the samples could be shipped out as soon as Wednesday, though she did not yet know when the testing would occur or at which labs.

New tests are also planned at the provincial health department in the southern city of Guangzhou, where the sick man is hospitalized, and at two laboratories in Beijing affiliated with the Chinese Center for Disease Control. Dr. Hall said those tests could be delayed a few days as researchers await a shipment of control materials.

The decision to conduct more tests came after a long Tuesday meeting in Beijing between Chinese and W.H.O. experts, and also followed a confusing day in which a provincial health official in Guangzhou told a news agency that test results had caused the upgrading of the case from suspected to confirmed.

"The case has been confirmed," Feng Shaoming, the health official, told Agence France-Presse. "Our experts at the Center for Disease Control have made many tests and they are all positive."

But by early Tuesday evening, W.H.O. officials said that it was still too soon to give a diagnosis on the case and that it remained unconfirmed. The Ministry of Health said in a daily update on its Web site the status of the case was unchanged.

The handling of this case is being watched particularly closely given the harsh criticism directed at China for its early handling of the original SARS outbreak. The first person believed infected by SARS came from a suburb of Guangzhou in November 2002. Government officials initially covered up the existence of the disease as it spread through the population.
For the full story, with a good accounting of all details, read it in The New York Times
 

8:01 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




WilsonGate: An Update

It is being said that Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the United States attorney chosen to lead the investigation into the WilsonGate affair when Ashcroft recused himself, will be tenacious in pursuit of the truth. I have some serious doubts, but first let's go to the story. Here is some of what people who should know are saying, in an article in today's The New York Times:
CHICAGO, Dec. 30 — For some who had still wondered whether Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the United States attorney here, would really be as aggressive as had been rumored when he arrived a few years ago from New York, the answer came this month.

Mr. Fitzgerald announced that he was prosecuting former Gov. George Ryan, a Republican, in a scandal that had been swirling around long before Mr. Fitzgerald got here and that many people thought would never touch the most powerful politicians in Illinois. But there Mr. Fitzgerald was, a week before Christmas, ticking off the details of a 91-page indictment against Mr. Ryan, seemingly from memory.

That, even Mr. Fitzgerald's former opponents in the courtroom say, is classic Fitzgerald: dogged, dispassionate and endlessly prepared.

"He doesn't let anything go," said George Santangelo, who represented John Gambino, identified by the authorities as a crime family captain, in a case prosecuted by Mr. Fitzgerald. "We duked it out for about three years, and it was quite a duking session. Let me put it to you this way: If John Ashcroft wanted any favors on this one, he went to the wrong guy. This guy is tough."

After Attorney General Ashcroft chose to recuse himself from an investigation into who gave the name of a Central Intelligence Agency officer to a newspaper columnist, Mr. Fitzgerald was appointed on Tuesday to lead the investigation. Announcing the assignment in Washington, James B. Comey Jr., the United States deputy attorney general and a friend and former colleague of Mr. Fitzgerald, described him as "Eliot Ness with a Harvard law degree and a sense of humor."

Kenneth M. Karas, a co-chief of the terrorism unit in the United States attorney's office in Manhattan who worked with Mr. Fitzgerald for many years, put it this way: "His brain is like a mainframe computer." ...
All well and good, both his friends, colleagues and even former adversaries are trumpeting that Mr. Fitzgerald is indeed the man to dig until it hurts in search for the leaker from within the very administration for which he works. A sterling resume, however, seldom reveals the kind of courage necessary to bite the hand from which its subject feeds. I am not alone in that thought.
But Frederick H. Cohn, a lawyer who represented a defendant against Mr. Fitzgerald in the embassy bombings case, wondered whether anyone who worked within the Justice Department could truly divorce himself from the subtle pressures that might come along in a case like this.

"He is a bulldog," Mr. Cohn said. "If anybody from inside the Justice Department has to do it, he'll be as good as anybody. That said, it would be my feeling that it should have been someone from outside."
It is my feeling also; we shall see...

In The New York Times
  

7:26 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




The Terrorists Have Already Won

If this continues, the terrorists have already won. Shutting down our normal, modern life is what they want. Many thousands of people just died in Iran because of a catastrophic blow delivered by the hands of nature, yet we run because of the relatively low cost in lives from a blow delivered by the hands of a small group of world-class criminals? An example: When confronted with a snarling dog, or many other aggressive creatures, if you turn and run or try to hide, you are lunch. If you stand your ground and stare that same dog in the eyes without fear, it will almost always slink away with a whimper. These murdering human dogs are no different. They smell and see our fear and they are emboldened all the more. They want to eat your lunch, dinner, and breakfast too if you hide and let them.

We are Americans. When did we start running away from enemies? When did we start believing that we should change our way of life because some yapping, anachronistic beast from days long past comes out of its last hiding place to confront us out of desperation? We are America, the land that is inclusive of every ethnicity on this spinning rock: are we now going to close down the very river of diverse humanity that made us what we are just because some wild, rogue criminals might kill a few of us? Do we want to enter another year with hope, or fear? I know my choice. Do you know yours?
The Department of Homeland Security said yesterday that it will restrict private flights over Las Vegas and New York as a precaution for New Year's Eve.

Private aircraft will be banned from flying over the Las Vegas strip, Hoover Dam and Times Square. U.S. officials ordered tighter patrols of airspace over Washington and New York last week, when the Homeland Security Department elevated the nation's alert level to "high" out of concern that terrorists might try to hijack planes and crash them into high-profile targets or set off a "dirty" bomb. Flights also were restricted last week over downtown Chicago. ...

In New York, "anti-sniper teams" will be stationed on downtown rooftops and police wearing radiation detectors and carrying metal detectors plan to inspect partygoers carrying large packages or backpacks, a police spokesman said. City and military police will patrol the sky over Manhattan. Utility covers and mailboxes will be sealed in the 10-block Times Square area.

"Certainly it's going to be an intensive security detail," said New York City Police Department spokesman Kevin Czartoryski "Everyone entering the [Times Square] area is subject to a search. If they're carrying a backpack, they will be definitely be searched."

In Las Vegas, a city that U.S. officials have identified as a possible target by terrorists, sharpshooters will be stationed on rooftops and the military will assist with air patrols over the strip, where 350,000 people are expected to ring in the New Year, officials said.

"The only place in America where there will be more people celebrating will be Times Square," said Greg Bortolin, a spokesman for Nevada Gov. Kenny C. Guinn. "Security is going to be much tighter than it was last year."
In the Washington Post...
  

5:57 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Another Victory for a Free Press

No one will say this too loudly or too prominently, but this retreat is a direct result of people becoming informed about what their leaders are up to on the hush and hustle side of capitalism. It's in the Washington Post: Military Ends Halliburton Deal To Supply Gasoline to Iraq.
The Pentagon said yesterday that it will end an arrangement with Halliburton Corp. to import fuel to Iraq, a contract that had been criticized by government auditors and Democratic members of Congress.

A military unit that already supplies fuel to the armed forces in Iraq will assume control of the import and distribution of gasoline, kerosene and cooking gas into the country and will find new private contractors through competitive bidding, the Defense Energy Support Center announced.

Pentagon officials said that the change had been under discussion for months and that the timing was not related to allegations that KBR, the Halliburton subsidiary that held the contract, had overcharged the government at least $61 million by buying more expensive fuel from Kuwait instead of Turkey.

"They have the expertise," Glenn Flood, a Pentagon spokesman, said of the military's energy group. "At this point, we need that expertise."
Right. If you believe that, I have some ocean front property in Arizona I want to sell you. Instead, why not read the rest of the story in the Washington Post...
  

4:52 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




All Gawd's Children Got Religion These Days?

Before reading the rest of this post, you have to keep this in mind: Folks lie more about sex and religion than anything else other than income taxes or fishing. Okay, now, David Brooks is writing about some foolishness he calls: The National Creed. Read a bit of this mish-mash, then we'll skip down to the money graphs which just might scare you into joining me in China!
George W. Bush was born into an Episcopal family and raised as a Presbyterian, but he is now a Methodist. Howard Dean was baptized Catholic, and raised as an Episcopalian. He left the church after it opposed a bike trail he was championing, and now he is a Congregationalist, though his kids consider themselves Jewish.

Wesley Clark's father was Jewish. As a boy he was Methodist, then decided to become a Baptist. In adulthood he converted to Catholicism, but he recently told Beliefnet .com, "I'm a Catholic, but I go to a Presbyterian church."

What other country on earth would have three national political figures with such peripatetic religious backgrounds? In most of the world, faith-hopping of this sort is simply unheard of. Yet in the United States, we simply take it for granted that people will move through different phases in the course of their personal spiritual journeys, and we always have. ...
We'll skip the middle, silly part that is all willy-nilly foolishness about all Americans being under one big sunny tent when it comes to beliefs about god: Where was Mr. Brooks when Waco went burning down?
The small groups movement, from which President Bush emerges, emphasizes intimate companionship and encouragement. Members of these groups study the Bible in search of guidance and help with personal challenges. They do not preach at one another, but partner with each other.

The third effect of our dominant religious style is that we have trouble sustaining culture wars. For some European intellectuals, and even some of our own commentators, the Scopes trial never ended. For them, the forces of enlightened progress are always battling against the rigid, Bible-thumping forces of religion, whether represented by William Jennings Bryan or Jerry Falwell.

But that's a cartoon version of reality. In fact, real-life belief, especially these days, is mobile, elusive and flexible. Falwell doesn't represent evangelicals today. The old culture war organizations like the Moral Majority or the Christian Coalition are either dead or husks of their former selves.

As the sociologist Alan Wolfe demonstrates in his book, "The Transformation of American Religion," evangelical churches are part of mainstream American culture, not dissenters from it.

So we have this paradox. These days political parties grow more orthodox, while religions grow more fluid. In the political sphere, there is conflict and rigid partisanship. In the religious sphere, there is mobility, ecumenical understanding and blurry boundaries.

If George Bush and Howard Dean met each other on a political platform, they would fight and feud. If they met in a Bible study group and talked about their eternal souls, they'd probably embrace.
That's it! Well, almost. There is this one lady out there...? But, it sure is looking like it's going to be Clark for this agnostic/shamanist/humanist/sun-worshiper--he's lying less dangerously than the other two.

In The New York Times...
  

4:07 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




The unmistakable Sound Of The Other Shoe Dropping?

We said months ago that there would be another shoe dropping in the WilsonGate affair; plop, goes a Bass Weejun.
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Attorney General John Ashcroft will recuse himself from an investigation into who leaked the name of a CIA operative, Justice Department sources said Tuesday.

The investigation will be headed by the U.S. attorney in Chicago, Patrick Fitzgerald, who will report to Ashcroft's new deputy, James Comey, the officials said.

It was not immediately clear why Ashcroft made the decision.

Investigators want to know who leaked the name of Valerie Plame, an undercover CIA officer, to syndicated columnist Robert Novak in July. Plame is married to former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, who has said he believes his wife's identity was disclosed to discredit his assertions that the Bush administration exaggerated Iraq's nuclear capabilities to build the case for war.

The leaker could be charged with a felony if identified.

The FBI has interviewed more than three dozen Bush administration officials, including political adviser Karl Rove and press secretary Scott McClellan.

The interviews have extended beyond the White House to other government agencies. The Defense and State departments and the CIA itself also are part of the probe.

The focus, however, remains on the White House, two law enforcement officials said on condition of anonymity. While the initial, informal interviews have yielded no major breaks, the FBI is satisfied that the dozen agents assigned to the probe are making progress and have not encountered any stalling tactics, the officials said Thursday.

So far, no grand jury subpoenas have been issued, they said.

Boxloads of documents have been forwarded to the FBI team, including White House phone logs and e-mails. More documents are being produced, as the contents of individual items sometimes lead agents to request additional materials, one official said.

Wilson said he had no idea why Ashcroft chose to recuse himself now. He speculated that Ashcroft, who has long ties to members of the president's staff, simply wanted to make sure that any findings at the end of the investigation are not tainted by even the suspicion of conflict of interest.

"I would have no idea whether a report has emerged that led him to recuse himself," Wilson said in a telephone interview Tuesday. "I have always said, as some senators have argued, that the administration needed to take a good hard look at this."

He declined to express satisfaction over Ashcroft's recusal.

"It's not a question of whether I'm happy about it," he said. "The crime that was committed was not committed against me or my wife, but against my country. It's the country that's the victim in this."
Of course, it can certainly be deduced that this action is preparatory to an eventual white-wash that would not be sullied by having Ashcroft's name on it.

The New York Times
  

3:35 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




As Good A Day To Die As Any Other, But Say It With Love And Compassion

With so much death in the news, and on my mind, I thought an article in The New York Times by Jane E. Brody, Facing Up to the Inevitable, in Search of a Good Death, was worth noting and passing along. The writing is crystal clean but softly so, the knowledge is invaluable. Here's how it starts:
The year was 1958, I was 16 and my mother was lying in a hospital bed connected to all sorts of tubes and was dying of cancer. As her life slipped away, a nurse slapped an oxygen mask on her face and asked me to hold it. There was no chance for either of us to say goodbye or 'I love you.' I carry this medicalized memory of my mother's death with me to this day.

I am hardly alone. Cicely Saunders, the founder of the first modern hospice, said, "How people die remains in the memories of those who live on."

Experts on end-of-life care say that my mother's death was handled wrong, all wrong. Chalk it up to ignorance back then. But 45 years later, despite a greatly enhanced understanding of what happens to a person near the end of life, little has changed in the way most people die in hospitals or nursing homes.

All too often, life is prolonged in pain or discomfort, with medical interventions and instruments precluding an opportunity for loved ones to say goodbye.

Such was the case for 22-year-old Dave Fulkerson, who was hit by a car while he was jogging with his girlfriend. In the intensive care unit, his family was not allowed to see him for three hours. By then, he was no longer able to talk. Further, only one person was allowed in for five minutes every two hours. Eventually, his frustrated girlfriend went home, and his parents fell asleep in the waiting room, only to be awakened by a nurse and told their son had died.
The way that I heard the words informing me that my 57 year-old, perfectly healthy father was dead haunts me, torments me, turns the center of me into shivering, quivering black dread and panic still, and it has been 28 years ago this week. Those words came from a loved one who in her pain wanted to hurt someone who loved him as much as she did so that perhaps in a moment of great need I would love her the way I loved him. It did not work. Read the rest of this article in The New York Times...
  

2:58 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Take This Test and Find Out What You Are

folknik
You are a Folkie. Good for you.


What kind of Sixties Person are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

  

1:21 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




The Ad Campaign: Clark Brings a Big Gun Into the Race

Doctor Dean has Al Gore, a fine man, and a good politician; General Clark has Bill Clinton, an extraordinarily complex man, and a great politician. Well, at least he has him on TV. General Clark is the first of the Running Dems to use the image of Mr. Clinton, the only two-term elected Democratic President since FDR. As noted by The New York Times, that is the biggest gun in the arsenal. No, it is not an endorsement. But, if President Clinton doesn't publicly disavow his prominence in the TV spot, it just about the next best thing to an endorsement.
This 30-second advertisement from Gen. Wesley K. Clark began running yesterday in New Hampshire and will start soon in South Carolina, Oklahoma and Arizona. It is the first commercial of the Democratic presidential primary campaign to use the image of Bill Clinton.

ON THE SCREEN: The commercial opens with a black-and-white still photo of General Clark standing in an industrial kitchen with a cook, then goes to a photo from his Army days, in which he has clasped the shoulder of a black soldier. The commercial then switches to color and shows President Bill Clinton walking across a stage at the White House and hanging a medal around General Clark's neck. In the background applauding is Hillary Rodham Clinton. The commercial then goes back to black-and-white still images, showing General Clark with older people, with a war veteran and with children.

THE SCRIPT: Text on a black screen: "What if we could have a president?"

Male narrator: "What if we could have a president who in his lifetime has seen ordinary people do extraordinary things? Because he believed in them. Who was decorated for valor and service to our country. Who helped negotiate a peace."

Text on screen: "Helped negotiate the Bosnia peace accords."

Male narrator: "And has dedicated his life to protecting our country. Because like you, he believes America is ready to do great things. A new American leader."

Text on a black screen: "Wes Clark for President. Democrat. www.clark04.com."

General Clark: "I'm Wes Clark and I approve this message."

ACCURACY: General Clark, the former supreme allied commander in Europe, received multiple decorations in his 34-year military career. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Mr. Clinton in 2000. The commercial does not mention that just months before that ceremony, Mr. Clinton's administration relieved General Clark of his command.

SCORECARD; While the Democratic candidates are jousting for Mr. Clinton's blessing, General Clark receives it in living color. The addition of Mrs. Clinton is icing on the cake. The message is unmistakable: General Clark is ready to step in as commander in chief.
The New York Times
  

12:10 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Tuesday, December 30, 2003

Things Are Booming For The Rich

Mr. Krugman is back reminding us that America is still heading down two paths economically: one for the rich and another one for everybody else. Which, of course, is exactly how the haves would have it if they could keep having things their way: a class-based society. In fact, just to taunt those muscle-heads from the right, Mr. Krugman actually typed the phrase "Class Warfare!" into his CPU. Can you hear that thin, shrill wailing and gnashing of broken teeth? Yep, it's those right-nutters railing at the fates that rendered their worst enemy too smart for them to answer back with facts instead of more stale old ad hominem bluster.
It was a merry Christmas for Sharper Image and Neiman Marcus, which reported big sales increases over last year's holiday season. It was considerably less cheery at Wal-Mart and other low-priced chains. We don't know the final sales figures yet, but it's clear that high-end stores did very well, while stores catering to middle- and low-income families achieved only modest gains.

Based on these reports, you may be tempted to speculate that the economic recovery is an exclusive party, and most people weren't invited. You'd be right.

Commerce Department figures reveal a startling disconnect between overall economic growth, which has been impressive since last spring, and the incomes of a great majority of Americans. In the third quarter of 2003, as everyone knows, real G.D.P. rose at an annual rate of 8.2 percent. But wage and salary income, adjusted for inflation, rose at an annual rate of only 0.8 percent. More recent data don't change the picture: in the six months that ended in November, income from wages rose only 0.65 percent after inflation.

Why aren't workers sharing in the so-called boom?
It's a very sobering question, which Mr. Krugman answers in his inimitable style of wordsmithing in today's The New York Times...
  

9:14 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




People's Daily: China may participate in reconstruction of Iraq

This analysis and commentary piece, while it speaks of events earlier in the week and month, was published today in the People's Daily. Apparently China has reason to believe it will not be excluded from reconstruction contracts in Iraq.
On December 23, US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld indicated that the Pentagon didn't prohibit China from participating in Iraq's postwar reconstruction. But earlier, US attitude was not like this. On December 9, US Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz issued a memorandum, declaring that the United States would prohibit those countries which opposed the Iraq War from participating in the activities of bidding for Iraq's reconstruction, China was then in the 'black list'. On December 15, US President George W. Bush again announced the list of countries that could participate in the bidding for the contract worth US$18.6 billion for Iraq's reconstruction, again China was not in the name list. For a while, whether China could participate in Iraq's reconstruction became a topic of concern to the people.
This commentary goes on at some length to explain the background of already contracted obligations pre-war Iraq had with Chinese firms, and then continues explaining the situation of the moment and what China reasonably expects it to be in the near future. It is well worth reading in the People's Daily...
 

5:27 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




People's Daily: Saddam confesses to stealing billions before ouster

Some days I choose to blog the state-owned news media in China even on international stories; I do this for a couple of reasons. One is that they are almost always brief and directly to the point. The other is that it is in contrast to what I read in the western media, and contrast is the spice of intellect the same as it is in art. Without light and shade, everything would be grey and virtually invisible. The same is true with ideas and information; there must be something in contrast or very little would be discernible in your mind from anything else--just a mass of grey ideas. Think about it. Oh, I also love the hyperlinks sprinkled throughout, little nuggets of basic information that come in handy when reading a short news story.
Saddam Hussein has acknowledged depositing billions of dollars abroad before his ouster and has given interrogators the names of people who know where the money is, a member of the Iraqi Governing Council said in remarks published Monday.

The U.S.-appointed council estimates that the Iraqi dictator seized $40 billion while in power and is now searching for that amount deposited in Switzerland, Japan, Germany and other countries, Iyad Allawi told the London-based Arab newspapers Al-Hayat and Asharq al-Awsat.

"Saddam has started to give information on money that has been looted from Iraq and deposited abroad," Allawi told Asharq al-Awsat. "Investigation is now concentrated on his relationship with terrorist organizations and on the money paid to elements outside Iraq."

Allawi said Saddam, who has been questioned by American interrogators since his capture this month, gave names of people who know where the money is deposited and also know the location of arms and ammunition depots used by insurgents in attacks against the coalition forces and the Governing Council.

In similar remarks to Al-Hayat, Allawi said Saddam had confessed to "important matters," a reference to the smuggling of billions of dollars abroad.

"We have asked international legal and specialized companies to follow up the money he (Saddam) has deposited in Switzerland, Germany, Japan and other countries which is estimated at around $40 billion under fictitious companies' names," Allawi told Al-Hayat.

Allawi spoke to Lebanese journalists during a private visit to Beirut last week.
People's daily
  

4:50 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




28,000 bodies...!

The mind boggles; the heart aches; the belly quivers because it is not you or your loved ones but could be within the next moment, day, week, month or year.
Rescuers have pulled from rubbles about 28,000 corpses that were buried after the powerful earthquake hit the southeastern Iranian city of Bam on Friday, state radio reported Tuesday.

State radio quoted a local official as saying that the final toll will probably top 30,000.

Earlier, officials from Kerman province said 25,000 bodies have been recovered following the quake which measured 6.3 on the Richter scale.

Only 2,000 people have been pulled out alive from the ruins.

Meanwhile, state radio quoted President Mohammad Khatami as saying that the government has promised to reconstruct the historic city of Bam.

"The town of Bam must reappear on the map of Iran," Khatami said during a meeting at Bam airport.
People's Daily
  

4:20 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Death & Destruction & Gawd

Every day there is so much death and destruction in our news: be it war, suicide bombers, high school kids with automatic weapons, new diseases we know little about, airline crashes, careless safety management, nature. There are many who will say such things as, "It is god's will; we must not question his wisdom. He works in mysterious ways; God's will be done." What!? My question then is simple, or rather it is a demand: If all of this is god's will, let's fire his butt and get a new one! This one is having too much fun playing sadistic games. Criminy, if this is his will, then he is as psychopathic as any serial killer, or thrill murderer I ever interviewed, studied or read about.

I'm serious. If all of this is some god's will, then goddamn him to his own eternal hell because he's a stone-cold killer without motive or cause. Give me a god who is better than man. Not one like man, who murders and destroys out of anger, wrath, vengeance, jealousy ( "Thou shall have no other gods before me" ), deterrence...etc. Those are human traits! If I want to worship a human, I want it to look and act like Jane Fonda or Debra Winger or Elisabeth Shue or more directly to the point, any one of about a dozen young, beautiful Chinese ladies in my "Media & Foreign Policy" classes (now that's wishful thinking and self-delusion on a par with God-believers). But I can rant on till the albatross flies backwards and it will have no consequence, the mayhem and suffering will not abate one whit.
As of Monday morning, the death toll from Tuesday's gas blowout rose to 234 in Kaixian County in southwest China's Chongqing municipality as more bodies were found in nearby mountainous villages, according to the local government.

An investigation team was busy working while environmental protection staff, health and epidemic prevention workers, and over 1,000 soldiers, armed police and militia, continued their rescue work.

Kaixian County has received over 10,000 quilts sent by the Ministry of Civil Affairs and over 300 tons of food, medicine and other donations from neighboring areas.

On Sunday morning, some 600 officials with 125 vehicles had been organized by the local government to help local residents return home as the blowout had already been contained. Villagers living near the gas well are expected to go home Monday.

The accident took place at 10:00 p.m. on Dec. 23 at a natural gas field in Kaixian county, operated by China National Petroleum Corporation, when a well burst and released a high concentration of natural gas and sulfurated hydrogen.

In five villages near the gas well, the bodies of poisoned animals, including 2,275 rabbits, 866 pigs, 241 ducks, 476 chickens and 38 dogs were found and buried.
People's Daily
 

3:26 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




China: Up, Up & Away!

It seems that China is serious about spurring a space race--and why not? It beats to hell and back the rest of the world's current obsession: War. Yes, yes, I know that space exploration and its technology can and probably will have military by-products and applications for the PLA. Again, I ask: Why not? Defense capability is an obligation of government, all governments. On the other hand, unilateral offensive capabilities are choices or options of a government that warrants close scrutiny by all other nations. I believe there is only one nation on earth that is far and away preeminent in that category, and it is not China.
China launched a high-altitude orbiting satellite into the preset orbit successfully Tuesday morning, using a Long March 2C/SM carrier rocket, according to witnesses at the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in southwest China.

Witnesses said the "equatorial orbiting" satellite, named Probe No. 1, was launched at 03:06 a.m. Tuesday from Xichang in Sichuan Province.

Tracking reports from the Xi'an Satellite Monitor and Control Center showed the launch was successful. The satellite had entered an orbit with a perigee of 555 kilometers and an apogee of 78,051 kilometers, and at a gradient of 28.5 degrees.

Probe No.1, the first satellite of the Double Star Project, is the highest orbiting satellite China has ever launched. The apogee of its orbit is more than twice as high as the geosynchronous orbit.

Weighing 350 kilometers, the satellite is expected to work in space for 18 months.

Proposed by Chinese scientists in 1997, the Double Star Project is the first China-Europe joint satellite probe program.

This is also the first time that China cooperated with developed countries with its own space exploration programs.

The design and manufacture of the platform and the assembly of Probe No. 1 were carried out by the Space Technology Institute of the China Aerospace Technology Corporation. Its probe equipment were developed by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and eight European scientific research institutions.
Read the rest of the story in the People's Daily...
  

1:20 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




We grieve, But We Cannot Quit

Death does not take a holiday in Iraq. While much of America was watching the NFL Playoff schedule take final shape (not in China, though, damn!) coalition troops were fighting, dying and killing. That will put a damper on things NFL--even Brett Favre's banner day that spoiled the Vikings party (highlights, sometimes, on CNN Asian Edition). War is truly hell when it becomes so commonplace that we can speak or write about combat fatalities and football in almost the same breath.
Two American soldiers died in Iraq, the United States military announced today, one in an incident involving suspected rebels and another from an undetermined illness at a medical facility.

In Baghdad on Sunday, a soldier from a First Armored Division task force was killed and five other soldiers were wounded when an improvised explosive device detonated during a patrol east of the Karadah district of the capital at about 10:13 a.m.

The wounded soldiers were evacuated to military medical facilities, Central Command said in a statement today, but no other information was available.

The soldier who died from an unknown illness, from Task Force Ironhorse, was being treated at a medical center about six miles west of Bayji, between Tikrit and Mosul. Medical personnel immediately attended to the soldier, who was not identified, but were unable to revive him, Central Command said.

The incident is being investigated, the command said.

In an incident in the northern city of Mosul on Sunday, three Iraqis were killed and two American soldiers were wounded when a search for insurgents set off a firefight. Suspected members of the Ansar Al Islam militant group threw a grenade and fired on soldiers of the Second Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division, searching a home for insurgents, the command said.
In The New York Times...
  

1:54 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Monday, December 29, 2003

The World’s Smallest Political Quiz

Want to have a little fun in your surfing away from too much good eats and good scotch and good company (well, not all of it's good company--unless you're in China and your in-laws and family are in the states) during the holiday season? Then click on over to a website/weblog called Advocates for Self-Government, an unabashed, crusading organization for Libertarianism, an economic, political and sociological philosophy that many liberals and conservatives--from far left to far right--share parts of even though most don't know it or if they did wouldn't admit to it in polite company.

On the site you will find a link to: The World's Smallest Political quiz. Take the quiz--it won't take but a minute, there are only 10 questions--and find out what you really are on the question of political philosophy, although it's more sociologically metaphysical in my way of looking at such matters, but that is getting too academic. You might surprise yourself and you might not. Whichever, learning or confirming what you are, is not a bad thing to do.

My results did not surprise me at all, here take a look. In truth, while this is kind of fun, the underlying question asked and maybe answered cannot be overstated in its importance to the world in which you wish to live.

While you are at the site--which might be awhile, there are a number of fun, interesting, enlightening links to play clickity click with. One is: Polling firm gives Quiz to America. The page that brings you to is very instructional if you really are in the punditry business.

Anyway, give it a look if you have any interest in such things (my guess is that you can't help yourself from taking a peek). Enjoy.
  

10:05 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




News On The Valerie Plame Leak Investigation, Finally

The Valerie Plame WilsonGate affair and subsequent investigation has been out of the press for awhile. So, out of sight, out of mind? No, it appears that the story and investigation has been bubbling, boiling and roiling just under the radar. In fact, things look even more ominous for Shrub & Twigs with each quiet turning of the screw. Thanks to Calpundit for noticing something that was right under my nose--or mouse actually--even though I am on the other side of the globe from the scene of the crime. From the Washington Post:
The Justice Department has added a fourth prosecutor to the team investigating the leak of an undercover CIA officer's identity, while the FBI has said a grand jury may be called to take testimony from administration officials, sources close to the case said.

Administration and CIA officials said they have seen signs in the past few weeks that the investigation continues intensively behind closed doors, even though little about the investigation has been publicly said or seen for months.

According to administration officials and people familiar with some of the interviews, FBI agents apparently started their White House questioning with top figures -- including President Bush's senior adviser, Karl Rove -- and then worked down to more junior officials. The agents appear to have a great deal of information and have constructed detailed chronologies of various officials' possible tie to the leak, people familiar with the questioning said. ...

But sources said the CIA believes that people in the administration continue to release classified information to damage the figures at the center of the controversy, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV and his wife, Valerie Plame, who was exposed as a CIA officer by unidentified senior administration officials for a July 14 column by Robert D. Novak. ...

Sources said the CIA is angry about the circulation of a still-classified document to conservative news outlets suggesting Plame had a role in arranging her husband's trip to Africa for the CIA. The document, written by a State Department official who works for its Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), describes a meeting at the CIA where the Niger trip by Wilson was discussed, said a senior administration official who has seen it.

CIA officials have challenged the accuracy of the INR document, the official said, because the agency officer identified as talking about Plame's alleged role in arranging Wilson's trip could not have attended the meeting.

"It has been circulated around," one official said. CIA and State Department officials have refused to discuss the document.

On Oct. 28, Talon News, a news company tied to a group called GOP USA, posted on the Internet an interview with Wilson in which the Talon News questioner asks: "An internal government memo prepared by U.S. intelligence personnel details a meeting in early 2002 where your wife, a member of the agency for clandestine service working on Iraqi weapons issues, suggested that you could be sent to investigate the reports. Do you dispute that?" ...

White House officials profess to be unconcerned about the outcome of the investigation. Some administration officials said they believe charges will eventually result, although it could be as long from now as 2005. A Republican legal source who has had detailed conversations about the matter with White House officials said he "doesn't get any sense at all that they're worried or concerned, or that they're covering up."

Still, the White House is eager for the findings to emerge soon, or wait until after the November election. "The only fear I've heard expressed is that the investigation will be too slow or too fast and will kick into a visible mode in a way that is poorly timed for the election," the Republican said. "If they prosecuted someone tomorrow, I don't think the White House would care. And they can do it in December 2004. They just don't want it to become an issue in the election."
Give the whole article a read, in the Washington Post
 

2:45 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Give Me That Old Time Liberalism

He will speak like Democrats used to. She will speak the words we need to hear from a citizen leading the still greatest experiment in Freedom the world has ever known. He will remind us that we are a people who believe in freedom so much we will pay the price of an open society rather than accept the slavery of a closed one only for some dubious promise of safety. That is not America. She will tell us that the lesson of 9/11 wasn't how vulnerable we are. America has always been vulnerable to those who will use our freedom to strike us. But how often has it happened? Rarer than hen's teeth. He will say that the lesson of 9/11 was and is how a great and open nation of free people living free have the embedded durability of our cherished system to shake off everything from a great Civil War, to the two wars to end all wars, the assassination of presidents and great citizen leaders, even the stealing of elections, and still the ship of state will right itself every time and remain the envy of all people who dream of living free.

With a clear and ringing voice she will have us remember that there was honor in never striking first. He will say that there was greatness in climbing up from the bloodied ground and striking back with justice and the unquestioned might of a nation united.

Those days can not come again, but the principles can, we just need real leaders who truly believe in the American way. We need men and women of vision; we do not need men and women who vent in rage and revenge and bully talk! We are America. We beat Hitler and Tojo at the same time, and we did it with unquestioned right on our side. We did it with absolutely no brag, or arrogance from the White House or the houses of state.

We cannot let anyone change us because we are afraid of being hit first. When did we become the bloated silver-spoon on the school playground that cried for sympathy and railed in self-pity and self-righteousness when he was sucker-punched by some loudmouth bully? Give us back our honor and our freedom—give us back men and women who know that being an American means that we have to live and act above the fray of lesser nations with old, corrupted systems.

Give us leaders who have the superiority of the rule of law and rationality, not the rule of arrogance and born-again true-believers of intolerance who revel in their dependency only upon their own kind. Give us men and women who are not afraid to be wrong and say so. Give us leaders who talk and lead out front, not preach and hide in back. Give us leaders who lead with big ideas, not small ideology. Give us leaders who love words and books and art and all the things that lift up our eyes and minds to see and know what we can become, not what we have been. Give us leaders who have known war and peace and love peace more because they saw the blood and felt the fear.

But mostly give us leaders who know that above all America is a state of mind, not a state of mine or yours, or us or them...then no one but the most base and evil will feel the need to strike it down because it is not theirs. But when they do, give us leaders that will lead us openly as we strike back with deliberate pace, united, with right and might.

Where? Please tell us where such men and women are to be found today when we need them more than even breath itself? Because to breathe the air of fear and hatred, the air of isolation and incivility, is to not live and breathe as Americans at all.
 

2:14 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Blogging The Earthquake In Iran

That estimable Weblog Boing Boing has a roundup of earthquake blogging in country. I will post part of it here, and say "great work, folks." This particular post was produced by Xeni Jardin.
The recent earthquake in Bam, Iran may have claimed as many as 40,000 lives by some estimates. Sorting through the Persian blogosphere, you'll find a number of sites where residents and expatriates are posting about this tragedy, and its impact on their country's future.

Hossein Derakshan has yet to sound out on his English-language site, but there's a post on his Farsi blog for those who read Farsi. Among the English-language sites where posts are already out: Persianblogger.com, Pesmanesque, Days of My Life In California, Iranian Truth, Iranfilter, Eyeranian, HumanFirstThenaProudIranian. Many more are listed here, including blogs written in Farsi (there are probably more than 12,000 of them -- here is a good background piece on the Persian blogosphere, from Wired News). And finally, Doug Rushkoff (not Persian) has this to say.
Boing Boing
  

1:51 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Friedman Gets The Cure In Poland

Thomas Friedman has found that rarest of spots on this earth, a place where America, and Americans, are not dirty words. Believe it or not, it's Poland, the butt of too many bad jokes over the decades. This is not surprising to me, I have always had a fondness for all things Polish. My only son is half Polish; his mother is 100 percent a daughter of Poland. But this isn't about me and Poland, it's about Poland and America. Let Mr. Friedman tell you all about it.
WARSAW.

I found the cure.

I found the cure to anti-Americanism: Come to Poland.

After two years of traveling almost exclusively to Western Europe and the Middle East, Poland feels like a geopolitical spa. I visited here for just three days and got two years of anti-American bruises massaged out of me. Get this: people here actually tell you they like America — without whispering. What has gotten into these people? Have all their subscriptions to Le Monde Diplomatique expired? Haven't they gotten the word from Berlin and Paris? No, they haven't. In fact, Poland is the antidote to European anti-Americanism. Poland is to France what Advil is to a pain in the neck. Or as Michael Mandelbaum, the Johns Hopkins foreign affairs specialist, remarked after visiting Poland: "Poland is the most pro-American country in the world — including the United States."
You must read the rest of this column in The New York Times...
  

3:11 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




The Bastards Are Blowing Up Children: We Grieve and Shudder at the Loss of Innocents But We Cannot Quit

I would say we have the answer as to how much affect Saddam Hussein being captured in a hole in the ground without firing a shot in defense of himself would have on the war: Zilch, Nada. Zero. None. If anything, the sons of bitches appear to be invigorated, even more determined. So the killing will continue. But the numbers and time are on our side; we will kill many, many more of them than they will kill coalition forces.
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Guerrillas detonated a powerful bomb in a busy Baghdad shopping district on Sunday, killing a U.S. soldier and two Iraqi children, and another U.S. soldier died in an attack on a convoy west of the capital.

The ambushes came a day after coordinated suicide bomb, mortar and machinegun attacks in the holy city of Kerbala killed 19 people -- five Bulgarian and two Thai soldiers and 12 Iraqis -- the deadliest strike on foreign troops since the capture of Saddam Hussein.

The Baghdad attack, which targeted U.S. vehicles driving through the Karada shopping area, wounded five American soldiers, eight members of the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps and an Iraqi translator.

"A soldier from the 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment and two Iraqi children standing nearby were killed when the IED (improvised explosive device) detonated as a convoy was passing,'' military spokesman Captain Jason Beck said.

"At this stage we don't know how serious the injuries are.''

Beck said the explosion occurred at around 10:15 a.m. (2:15 a.m. EST) when the streets of Karada, a bustling area of shops and stalls, would have been crammed with people.

Northeast of the flashpoint town of Falluja, another bomb attack on a convoy killed one soldier from the 82nd Airborne Division and wounded three, the U.S. Army said.

MOUNTING DEATH TOLL

The attacks raised to 212 the number of U.S. soldiers killed in action since Washington declared major combat over on May 1. Attacks appear to be continuing at a consistent pace despite the capture of former dictator Saddam Hussein on December 13.

Bulgaria's Defense Ministry said a fifth Bulgarian soldier died from his wounds on Sunday after a suicide car bomb attack on Saturday that destroyed the Bulgarian military headquarters in Kerbala and wounded 27 soldiers.

But Sofia said it remained committed to its pledge to help Washington fight global terrorism. "We once again declare our firm will to fight all attempts to destroy the values of humanity and civilization all over the world,'' Deputy Defense Minister Ilko Dimitrov told a press conference.

Thailand also said it had no plans to withdraw medical and engineering troops from Iraq. "As of today, there is no change in our presence there as the morale of our troops remains high,'' Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra said in Bangkok.

IRAQI OFFICIALS TARGETED

In the Kurdish city of Arbil in northern Iraq, gunmen killed three bodyguards of Jawamer Atia, deputy director-general of security at the local interior ministry, during a bid to assassinate him on Sunday, the city's police chief said.

Five people, including Atia, were wounded in the attack.

Near Mahmudiya, south of Baghdad, gunmen opened fire on a car carrying foreign contractors working with the Ministry of Electricity, killing two Iraqi security guards, police said. A British official said a British contractor was shot in the leg in the attack and was recovering in hospital.
The New York Times
  

2:34 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




You Guess: Top ten domestic news stories in 2003

What were the top 10 domestic news stories in China? Under the maxim that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, the western media should say thank you for the compliment being paid it by its colleagues in the state-owned media in China. So, test your geopolitical IQ and see if you can guess the "winning" events in China. When you are stumped, go click and read all about it.
China's Xinhua News Agency has selected out the top 10 domestic news stories in 2003, including election of new leaders, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) epidemic, successful spaceflight of Shenzhou-5 and the latest gas field blowout in southwest China.

Election of new government leaders was a big event for China in 2003. In March of this year, China held the First Session of the 10th National People's Congress and elected new government leaders including President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao. New CPPCC leaders were also elected at the First Session of the 10th National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) held in March.
Okay, so they give away 4 out of the 10 upfront. Now you guess the rest... in the People's Daily
  

2:01 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




The People's Daily: China seals up gas well, investigation continues

In a country where mining accidents of every type are tragically far too frequent, the blowout of the natural gas well near Chongqing is horrific and it is being reported so. But, like every other nation in a time of disaster, for those who have to work in its immediate aftermath, there is that special sense of camaraderie and achievement at every small level of success in dealing with the tragedy. It is the same here, in the ancient, but so new Middle Kingdom.
After two hours of struggle to pump mud into a gas well which blew out Tuesday in southwest China's Chongqing Municipality, emergency teams and technicians finally sealed it off Saturday morning.

Preparations for the capping operation started Friday evening at the gas field. Reporters were ordered to stay at least four kilometers away.

The operation, originally set for 10:00 am Friday, was postponed by one day in order to complete the evacuation of non-essential personnel.

Over 100 medical workers and anti-chemical warfare corps soldiers started a large-scale disinfection of the gas blowout site and eight nearby villages soon after the capping operation was completed Saturday morning.

Samples of plants and water were taken away for examination by the local environmental protection department.

Local people might be allowed to return home within days, after the environment is cleaned and strict protection measures are taken, local officials said.

Meteorologists also expressed optimism.

"Breezes and moderate rain in the next three days will be helpful for preventing the spread of the gas fumes," said Qiao Lin,a senior engineer with the Central Meteorological Station.

"Such weather will also help pollutants sink into the earth in areas near the gas field," Qiao said, but warned that rain would also make soil pollution worse.

With seven more bodies found in nearby areas Saturday, the gas blowout, the worst of its kind in the country, has thus far killed 198 people and poisoned over 9,000 others in Kaixian County, some 337 km northeast of Chongqing.

Of the dead, 196 were local villagers who were overcome by toxic fumes, while two were workers at the gas field, according to the rescue headquarters.

But it is feared the toll may rise as further work to search for survivors and identify casualties will be carried out in a more thorough way now that the gas leak has been contained.

More than 42,000 local people were evacuated from their villages after a high concentration of natural gas and sulfureted hydrogen quickly spread to areas within 10 km after the burst on Tuesday night.
People's Daily
  

1:30 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




The People's Daily Critiques George Bush's Performance in 2003

What's good for the goose, must be so for the gander. The People's Daily, as part of the traditional wrap-up of a year of news-making that is so popular in the west, places its reflective spotlight on the American president. I find just the notion to be endearing, and also revealing of how far China has come in its "engaging" of the west, taking its rightful place as a player on the world's stage of nations. The essay is long, but quite revealing. I will give you a taste, and then you click into the rest of it.
For America, 2003 is a year full of domestic and foreign events. The Bush administration, like a ship on a sea, rocked at first due to ignorance of the depth of water, then pulled along hard in sweeping waves, but rode out storms finally. In a weekly broadcast speech on December 13, President Bush summed up his government work with a smile---the implementation of medical security law is a "milestone" event; the tax-cut plan is driving the economy to a positive direction; and victory has been achieved in the war to topple Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, so 2003 is doubtlessly a 'fruitful' year. While the tunes of out-of-power Democrats are less pleasant, and even the achievements in medicine, taxation and anti-terrorism boasted by Bush are "seriously flawed", not to mention other aspects. Republicans led by Bush are "leading the country toward a wrong direction".

The Bush administration came upon snags when the year just began. A war was looming large and "Iraqi factors" triggered turbulences in every side. Oil price soared and Wall Street stock remained slack, putting a recovering economy in danger. Determined to settle accounts with Saddam, Bush yet met troubles upon each step. The international community's criticism of American "unilateralism" poured in like waves, putting Bush in a mindset of "vexation".

But heart-hardened Bush was dead set on ousting Saddam. The coalition army, a dozen thousands in number, rushed for Iraq on March 19, and US tanks drove into Baghdad 20 days later. As expected, the war was a poorly matched one, but it went beyond people's expectation that Saddam's armed forces, boasting hundreds of thousands of regular troops and over 1 million mixed troops, collapsed and scattered at first blows. On May 1, Bush flew to the "Lincoln" aircraft carrier near the West Coast on his way home and announced the end of major military operations in Iraq. Polls showed his popularity leapt to 70 percent.
There are many good things about living away from one's country for a spell, one of the most important is to learn how your country is viewed from a totally foreign perspective. Whether you are a Bush supporter or not, a Democrat or a Republican, you should read this essay in full, you just might learn something--the very least you will learn is how someone on the other side of the globe from you perceived the same events you did.

People's Daily:
  

12:47 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




From the People's Daily: Anti-SARS Action Plan Unveiled in Guangzhou

Here is a brief story on the anti-SARS preparedness of the provincial government of Guangdong.
Anti-SARS Action Plan Unveiled in Guangzhou

South China's city of Guangzhou has unveiled its anti-SARS emergency plan for the upcoming Spring Festival, a time when travel sharply increases.

The plan stipulates that anyone whose temperature is above 37.5 centigrade with coughing and difficulty in breathing should not be allowed to ride the trains.

Such individuals are also required to be sent to the hospital immediately.

Guangzhou was the origin of the killer virus and the worst-hit region during the SARS outbreak in early Spring.
People's Daily
  

12:09 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Sunday, December 28, 2003

From The People's Daily: Suspected SARS case no cause for alarm

It is the responsibility of a free press to keep watch on the press itself in these days of "transparency," therefore it is incumbent upon professional journalists who honed their skills in the west to use those very same skills in the service of the China we have come to love. The very best way we can do that is to not only cover the SARS story--if it becomes one--but to cover how the story is covered by our colleagues in the state-owned press. Here is the current status of the story as reported today in the People's Daily:
Suspected SARS case no cause for alarm

A leading Chinese scientist said in Guanghzhou Saturday that it was unnecessary to be alarmed at the report of China's first suspected SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) case since July.

"It is not unexpected that a few cases of suspected SARS have been reported, since it is not likely that the SARS virus will die out so soon after its emergence," said Prof. Zhong Nanshan, director of the Guangzhou Institute of Respiratory Diseases, who has been fighting SARS since late last year.

"Nevertheless, this new suspected SARS case should arouse our attention," Zhong said.

A 32-year-old freelance TV station worker was confirmed Saturday by the Chinese Ministry of Health to be a suspected SARS patient in this capital of south China's Guangdong Province.

"The case does not seem to be infectious, and the patient is recovering very quickly," Zhong said. "But anyone who has long-lasting fever symptoms or lung inflammation should see a doctor immediately."

"His condition is stable," said a doctor at the No. 8 People's Hospital where the suspected SARS patient is receiving treatment in quarantine. His temperature has been normal over the last three days, the doctor said.

However, the health authorities and doctors have yet to know how the patient became infected in the first place.

Wang Zhiqiong, deputy head of the Guangdong provincial health department, said that the patient claimed that he had not left Guangzhou or eaten wild animal meat for one month before hospitalization.

The health authorities have strengthened protection of local medical workers. The patient's living environment and residence have been sterilized to counteract possible infection.

In another development, the health authorities in Shanghai, China's biggest city, have been on high alert after Guangdong reported the country's first suspected SARS case since July.

"We are fully prepared for any SARS epidemic," said Zhang Shengnian, director of the Shanghai Municipal Diseases Prevention and Control Center.

To date, those who have had close contact with the patient have shown no abnormal syndromes, such as fever. But they are still in quarantine, as a precaution.

The Ministry of Health has sent a team to Guangzhou to help deal with the suspected SARS case, after receiving a report from the province.

This is the first suspected SARS case discovered since May 23, when the World Health Organization lifted the SARS-related travel advisory against Guangdong Province.

The first SARS case emerged in Foshan City, also in Guangdong, in November 2002.

Chinese mainland's last two SARS patients were discharged from hospital on August 16 in Beijing, after more than 100 days of medical treatment.

During the outbreak, a total of 5,327 SARS cases were reported on the Chinese mainland, 4,959 of whom were cured and discharged from hospital. The death toll from the disease stood at 349. Of the total figure, 2,521 SARS cases and 193 deaths from the disease were reported in Beijing.
The People's Daily
  

11:58 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




A Whole Lot Alike, But Hopefully A Whole Lot Of difference

There is a rather instructive profile on Doctor Dean in today's The New York Times. There is a lot there upon the similarities and the differences between the Doctor and Dubya. One thing strikes me badly, however, and it is sure barking up the radically liberal side of me: Any man who will not admit to being a "head," a "freak," a "hippie," or at least a "part of the movement" during the days from 1963 to 1975, is a sellout coward who was part of the problem we beat in those days, not part of the solution for which we paid blood and jail time to give to an oppressed America and then let the folks we beat regain the ascendancy because we went soft. Goddammit, we WON! Why are so many members of the "counter-culture movement" afraid to stand up and say "Hell, yes, I smoked dope and worked to free black folks, and brown folks, and yellow folks, and women, and longhairs, and free-speechers, and free-thinkers, and free writers, and free lovers and everybody else that the Great Society left out of the great society!" Where is that man or woman? God knows there were millions of us. Why are they afraid to be what they were? Is it because they are ashamed of what they have become?
The Park Avenue building where Howard Dean grew up has a neurologist's office on the ground floor and a church just behind. His mother, Andree Maitland Dean, is eager to emphasize that the family's three-bedroom apartment there is not luxurious.

"Look around," Mrs. Dean said in a recent interview, gesturing at the quarters where her boys grew up. "Howard didn't have the least bit of a glamorous upbringing." ...

George Walker Bush and Howard Brush Dean III are from opposite sides of the nation's political fault line. Yet besides energizing the left wing of his party, Dr. Dean has some Republicans worried that the characteristics he shares with President Bush could appeal to swing voters, especially when Dr. Dean's current image as a Vermont liberal is leavened with details of the fiscally conservative way he governed Vermont for 11 years.

The two are sons of established blueblood families dominated by powerful fathers. They attended top prep schools and Yale. And they settled far from traditional power enclaves, reinventing themselves as archetypes of their chosen new homes, President Bush in swaggering Texas and Dr. Dean in outdoorsy Vermont.

They were known for hard-partying, hard-drinking in their youths, but those days ended when they simply gave up alcohol as adults. Each man's character was shaped by the loss of a sibling: for the president, a sister who died of leukemia at age 3; for Dr. Dean, a younger brother who disappeared in 1974 in Laos while on an around-the-world trip.

And although each has a distinct political style, as governors they developed reputations for carefully bridging the political divide between liberals and conservatives, a skill that has thus far eluded them on the national stage.

Other, deeper similarities are apparent only to those who have spent significant time with each man: temperaments prone to irritation; political skills that play better in small groups than on television; rock-solid confidence in their own decisions.

In addition, each man is seen as being his own worst enemy on the campaign trail, President Bush for mangling his English and fumbling answers, Dr. Dean for creating unnecessary crises by speaking his mind too swiftly.
Read the rest of this story, it is an in-depth look at the man who is the front-runner to face Dubya come November. There are things you need to know, for some of it you will have to read between the lines, but read it, please, in The New York Times...
  

11:25 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Take The Necessary Precautions; Do Not Panic; Do Not Spread Gossip, Please

Okay, folks, we have been expecting this for many months; corona viruses almost always come back the following winter. A small piece of history as a cautionary tale, if you do not mind taking a moment. When the great Flu epidemic that followed the end of World War I by only months broke out during the late winter and early spring months, several thousand people around the world died and there was a great deal of fear and panic. When it suddenly ended with the coming of summer, there was relief and people quickly forgot about it. The next winter it came back and killed some 250,000 people. The lesson here is not in that last big number, it is in the complacency and forgetting that followed the earlier, smaller outbreak. Sound familiar? Maybe, maybe not. It appears that the government and medical authorities are prepared for it, but is the public? There lies the rub--and by the way, never rub your unwashed fingers on your eyelids or lips during the SARS season. Be careful, but not scared; stay away from sick people, and wash your hands frequently after you have been away from your home.
GUANGZHOU, China, Dec. 27 — The Chinese government increased health screenings of travelers and hospital patients on Saturday after acknowledging that doctors in this coastal city were treating the first suspected SARS case in mainland China since the disease was declared contained by the World Health Organization in July.

The patient, identified by the government as a 32-year-old freelance journalist, was listed in stable condition. Chinese state media reported that he had had a normal temperature for three days and that he was being kept in a quarantine ward at the No. 8 People's Hospital here. ...

If SARS is confirmed as the cause of the illness in Guangzhou, it would raise the possibility of severe acute respiratory syndrome re-entering the general population.

It was not clear when health officials would be able to determine whether the patient had SARS or some type of pneumonia with similar symptoms. He has shown mixed results on tests, and Chinese health officials plan to continue testing him. The World Health Organization has offered its assistance. ...

In Beijing, where the disease all but shut down the city for several weeks in the spring, state-run news media reported that government officials were increasing temperature screenings for travelers at bus and air terminals and taking some people with high fevers for examinations at hospitals. ...

At Hong Kong's main train station, officials in surgical masks and white latex gloves used ear thermometers to double-check the temperatures of dozens of adults and children as an extra precaution. Dr. Henry Kong, a Hong Kong Health Department medical officer, said the scanners had detected many people with the flu and other respiratory infections in recent months. These people were referred to doctors, but no SARS cases were found.
In The New York Times...

 

10:18 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




The Worst News of The Young Century--Christian Missionaries Pouring Into Iraq!

"Ethel? Grab me the .303 Enfield, the Remington 1100 20-gauge, the .357 Ruger Black Hawk, two big knives and pack a lunch! On the double, dammit--there's goddamn Southern Baptist missionaries coming across the wadi by the dozens. Southern Baptists! They've done more good for hate than Hitler, Attilla and Dubya rolled together. Dead meat they'll be soon enough, though. The Baathists needed a good whupping, but this is cruel and unusual punishment, unconstitutional, it is! This is too cruel for Saddam himself! Missionaries, Ethel! Whole bus loads of the do-badders. We need to kill or maim ever last one of 'em if we're to claim any moral authority in this low-down mess! Shit fire and pass the ammo, Luvvy, it's dying time for Baptists!"
American Christian missionaries have declared a "war for souls" in Iraq, telling supporters that the formal end of the US-led occupation next June will close an historic "window of opportunity."

Organising in secrecy, and emphasising their humanitarian aid work, Christian groups are pouring into the country, which is 97 per cent Muslim, bearing Arabic Bibles, videos and religious tracts designed to "save" Muslims from their "false" religion.

The International Mission Board, the missionary arm of the Southern Baptists, is one of those leading the charge.

John Brady, the IMB's head for the Middle East and North Africa, this month appealed to the 16 million members of his church, the largest Protestant denomination in America.

"Southern Baptists have prayed for years that Iraq would somehow be opened to the gospel," his appeal began. That "open door" for Christians may soon close.

"Southern Baptists must understand that there is a war for souls under way in Iraq," his bulletin added, listing Islamic leaders and "pseudo-Christian" groups also flooding Iraq as his chief rivals.

The missionaries are mainly evangelicals who reject talk of Muslims and Christians worshipping the same God.

Jerry Vines, former head of the Southern Baptist Convention, has described the Prophet Mohammed as a "demon-obsessed paedophile". Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham and the head of Samaritan's Purse, a big donor to Iraq, has described Islam as a "very evil and wicked religion".

The missionaries pose a dilemma for President George W Bush. He has reached out to Muslims since September 11, shrugging off criticism from evangelicals to describe Islam as "peaceful". But Christian conservatives are also a key Bush constituency: Franklin Graham delivered the invocation prayer at his presidential inauguration.

The US Agency for International Development has said that the government cannot rein in private charities. "Imagine what the US Congress would say to us," said a spokesman in April.

Jon Hanna, an evangelical from Ohio who has recently returned from Iraq, applied for a new passport to travel there, describing himself as a humanitarian worker. "I was worried the US authorities might try to stop us, might be worried we were going to start a riot with our Bibles."

In Baghdad last month Mr Hanna met two other American missionary teams. One, from Indiana, had shipped in 1.3 million Christian tracts. "A US passport is all you need to get in, until the new Iraqi government takes over. What we thought was a two-year window, originally, has narrowed down to a six month window," said Mr Hanna, an evangelical minister and editor of Connection Magazine, a Christian newspaper in Ohio.

He describes Islam as "false". He cited St John's Gospel, saying: "Who is the liar? It is the man who denies that Jesus is the Christ. Such a man is the antichrist."

Mr Hanna concluded: "The Muslim religion is an antichrist religion." Later Mr Hanna asked to retract that choice of words. "Without the reader hearing my voice and looking into my eyes as I made that statement, it would be easy for certain readers to feel personally attacked and be offended," Mr Hanna wrote by email. "That would be unfruitful."

He rejected the suggestion that aid work was a "cover" for missionary work, preferring to call it a "conduit for sharing the gospel of Jesus. Christians are commanded to minister to the hungry, but also to the hunger of the spirit. It can't be separated," he said.

In public, the largest groups put the emphasis on their delivery of food parcels and their medical work. However, their internal fund-raising materials emphasise mission work. One IMB bulletin reported aid workers handing out copies of the New Testament and praying with Muslim recipients. Another bulletin said Iraqis understood "who was bringing the food . . . it was the Christians from America."

Southern Baptists from North Carolina visited Iraq in October to help hand out 45,000 boxes of donated food. One of the team, Jim Walker, told IMB's Urgent News bulletin that he met village children "starved of attention and I could tell some of them have not eaten well. But their biggest need is to know the love of Christ."

Mr Hanna said he encountered friendly curiosity, with noisy crowds gathering to take his group's tracts. "Maybe 10 per cent were hostile." He was one of 21 on his mission including Jackie Cone, 72, a Pentecostalist grandmother from Ohio who said God had told her to join a second mission planned for next year. "I sensed Him telling me to come back in January," she said.

Mrs Cone is confident she made converts in Baghdad. In her hotel she met a Muslim woman on crutches with a leg operation due that day. Mrs Cone knelt on the lobby floor and prayed that surgery would not be required.

"I saw her that evening and she said God had healed her, and she hadn't needed the surgery. She didn't say Allah, she pointed to Heaven and gave God the glory," she said.

Mrs Cone led the Kurdish woman and her brother in prayer, asking Jesus into their hearts. "I'd given them a Bible and a Jesus video in Arabic. I think they think of themselves as Christians now," she said. "They have the Bible and I hope they will grow in grace."

Muslims are hard converts, American missionaries admit. The large organisations have experts trained in refuting Muslim teachings that Jesus is just another prophet.

Before going to Iraq, Mr Hanna studied Christian training manuals and attended a seminar for missionaries to the Arab world.

Mr Hanna concedes his new Iraqi friends were possibly drawn by the novelty of meeting Americans. "But you don't discount that, you use it as an opportunity to tell them about Jesus. Last time we only took 8,000 Arabic Bibles to Iraq. In future missions the goal is one million."
Telegraph
  

4:25 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Nature Is Still The World's Most Lethal Terrorist

All the evil genius's of the masters of war can only occasionally approach the ferocity of nature in its lethal power, and even then it takes nature imploding nature under the direction of man to achieve an equality of destructive forces. One minute the world is looking to Iran in concern for alleged nuclear proliferation, then the earth trembles, shifts and below great plates grind one against another and above there is rubble, desolation and the wailing of the living for the dead. We can drive a monstrous tyrant into a hole in the ground after half-a-year of war, yet in minutes the earth can crack and swallow up thousands of innocents.

Why are we not humbled into understanding that in the end we are all brothers and sisters trying to survive against an environment that many times over countless eons has buckled and fumed and creatures twenty-fold larger than we are gone forever save for their fossilized bones? Is there not lesson enough in this? Sadly, no; tomorrow, the killing will continue along with the burial of the crushed and twisted product of an unfeeling force beyond the control even of presidents, princes of god or allah, generals or terrorists.
TEHRAN, Dec. 27-- A strong earthquake in southeastern Iran killed at least 20,000 people in and around the historic city of Bam early Friday, according to Iranian officials who appealed for international assistance in searching for survivors and recovering the dead.

The devastating 6.7-magnitude quake struck at 5:28 a.m. local time (8:58 p.m. Thursday EST), an hour at which almost all of the city's 80,000 residents were in bed on the Muslim day of rest. Officials who surveyed the ancient Silk Road oasis by air estimated that 60 percent of dwellings collapsed, killing thousands almost instantly and injuring as many as 30,000, according to Iranian state television. Four thousand of the injured were flown by helicopter to hospitals outside the affected area.

An Interior Ministry statement broadcast on state television Saturday said the initial estimate of the death toll was 20,000, and local officials said the number was likely to rise as search and recovery of victims continued.

Two senior officials involved in the relief operation said they feared the final toll could be 40,000 dead, the Associated Press reported.

"Many people have died," Kerman provincial governor Mohammad Ali Karimi told state media. ''Many people are buried under the rubble."

Video images from Bam, 630 miles southeast of the capital city of Tehran, showed a vista of desolation that appeared to extend for miles. On residential streets lined with the city's trademark eucalyptus trees, whole blocks of homes had collapsed onto their square lots, loose bricks spilling over sidewalks where bodies lay neatly tied in fuzzy blankets. The city was without water or power.

Loved ones squatted beside the corpses, weeping and brushing dust from the faces of the dead. A wailing man cradled the body of a child in one hand, and held his head with the other.

Bam, a starkly beautiful city founded 1,800 years ago, has been a favored tourist site, known for its massive mud ramparts and citadel with 38 towers, most of which were built starting in the 16th century. Long a center for commerce, Bam is located on the old Silk Road trade route through Asia and is considered a world cultural site of major importance. An aerial view of Bam on Friday showed much of the city's sprawling modern section all but indistinguishable from its historic quarter. Witnesses said the city's medieval fortress, renowned as the largest mud brick structure in the world, was reduced to rubble by the temblor. Experts say the energy released in a 6.7 earthquake is roughly equal to a one megaton hydrogen bomb.
Washington Post
  

3:23 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Is This War Or Insurgency? And What the Hell's the Difference?

A three-pronged, coordinated attack with a large amount of casualties on both sides comes very close I would think to any definition of the word war. Insurgency is a ripe, descriptive, literary, romanticized term that plays well in novels, movies and pseudo-military jargon in coffee house palaver, but this is WAR and it's still HELL. It is also increasingly similar to a World War story: Polish troops, Bulgarian troops, even Thai troops, along with American G.I.s. fighting, dying, bleeding...
KARBALA, Iraq - Armed with car bombs, mortars and machine guns, insurgents launched three coordinated attacks in the southern city of Karbala on Saturday, killing 11 people - including six Iraqi police officers and four coalition soldiers, military and hospital officials said. An Iraqi civilian also was killed.

The attacks also wounded at least 172 people, with U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt saying 37 of them were coalition soldiers, including five Americans. Some 135 Iraqi police officers and civilians also were wounded, said Ali al-Arzawi, deputy head of Karbala General Hospital.

"It was a coordinated, massive attack planned for a big scale and intended to do much harm," said Maj. Gen. Andrzej Tyszkiewicz, head of the Polish-led multinational force responsible for security around Karbala, from his headquarters at Camp Babylon in comments carried on Polish television. ...

"There were different types of attacks at different places," said U.S. Maj. Ralph Manos, a spokesman for the multinational force.

The attackers targeted two military coalition camps at the city's university and at a police station, as well as the mayor's office.

Col. Mariusz Michalski, another coalition spokesman, told the Polish news agency PAP that two soldiers died at the Bulgarian camp. He did not confirm their nationalities.

Bulgarian soldiers were being evacuated from their two bases in Karbala because it was destroyed. Deputy Defense Minister Ilko Dimitrov told Bulgarian state television that 15 soldiers were wounded slightly. ...

Thai soldiers also operate in the area, but Jakrapob Penkair, a government spokesman in Bangkok, said there were no reports of Thai casualties.
Washington Post
  

2:22 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Saturday, December 27, 2003

Chicken Little and SARS: Redux

Sometimes it's appropriate to recycle an article, even when it's one of your own. Below is a piece assigned by the state-owned media in China during the peak of the SARS "epidemic" last spring when I was teaching at Xiamen University, Xiamen, Fujian, P.R.C. I believe its central message is as meaningful today, before the panic, if not more so.

It is interesting to note that it was assigned only a week or two after the lid had been taken off the SARS story by the central government and state-employed journalists had just been given the go-ahead to report the story as they found it. To my knowledge, I was the only "foreigner" and free-lancer assigned to cover the story for a major daily newspaper (Xiamen Daily); it was subsequently picked up and published somewhat widely in China--without censorship of any kind.
Chicken Little and SARS


(Xiamen, P.R. China)— "Fear of SARS is outrunning SARS," Dr. David Ho, a noted virologist who heads the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center in New York, said recently in an interview with Reuters.

"People clearly have reacted to it with a level of fear that is incommensurate with the size of the problem and I think it is getting in the way of a reasonable response," is how David Baltimore, a leading AIDS researcher who won the 1975 Nobel Prize in medicine, explained his concerns with the public's response to the SARS phenomenon, also to Reuters.

According to my Merriam-Webster Dictionary (abridged edition), epidemic, as an adjective, means: "affecting many persons at one time; also: excessively prevalent." And in the Cambridge Advanced Dictionary (online edition), epidemic, as a noun, means; "the appearance of a particular disease in a large number of people at the same time: a flu/AIDS epidemic."

As of April 29, there were 5,462 confirmed cases of SARS, out of a world population of 6.1 billion. Statistically, that is less than one in a million. One may say such a large view in this instance is myopic, since SARS is not evenly distributed around the globe. Then let's look at just China. On April 29, there were 3303 confirmed cases of SARS, out of a population of 1.3 Billion—that's 2 ½ out of a million! Of those statistical few, 148 have died. As tragic as even one premature death is, the numbers are again comforting—a mortality rate of .000000113, or a little more than one-tenth of one one-millionth!

Not close enough? Beijing: As I write, there are 1347 cases out of a population of 13,000,000. If you were in Beijing about two weeks ago, you had one chance out of a thousand of getting sick with SARS. And with the death count at 59, we can say that if you were in Beijing two weeks ago, and you got sick with SARS, you had 4 chances out of 100 of dying.

Every day, 3,000 children in Africa die of Malaria, a preventable and curable disease. Last year, 250,000 people died of flu. We know that after 20 years AIDS still kills almost everyone who gets it. There is still no cure or vaccine. There is also no media frenzy about these diseases—at least not anymore.


* * *


Earlier this month two Chinese runners were yanked from a marathon in the Netherlands because of the SARS panic. In cities throughout the west people are staying away from Chinatown districts in droves—even in New York, where not a single case of SARS has been confirmed.

David Baltimore, who is also president of the California Institute of Technology, lays much of this at the feet of the media. "What we are seeing is a playing up of the things that make people worry," he said.

But isn't this just another confirmation of the media only supplying what its customers crave. Baltimore thinks so. "In some sense people like to be frightened," he said. "And so, to some extent what I am saying is a denial of what seems to be a basic human instinct—to get a sort of frisson (shiver) of excitement out of danger. And the press is playing into that."

As perverse as it seems, there is something thrilling about gossip and news of quarantines, school closings, mass exoduses—a sense of history. But thrills are short-lived. We tire of them quickly, and that is the most serious danger from SARS. We know that most coronaviruses usually fade away with summer, only to come back with a vengeance with the return of winter.

Therefore, the experts tell us we have perhaps a six-month window in which we can all but eradicate the SARS virus. We can do this if we stay cautious and diligent, using the remedies that have finally been put in place. We must do this methodically, systematically, even when the "thrill" is gone. Without the panic.

Perhaps the most important thing about this new bug that we do know is if you don't have contact with someone who has it, you won't catch it.

But if you do, you have almost a 95% chance of living long enough to come home and get run over by a taxi! Of course, here in Xiamen, since there are only three known cases of SARS in all of Fujian Province and no deaths, you're far more likely to die in a traffic accident than from SARS.


* * *


"What happened to Hong Kong, for example, with the hotel occupancy rate at 2 percent, is an overreaction," David Ho said.

"As much as overreaction, there has been a lack of balance, of putting it into perspective, because it is a real problem, no question," David Baltimore said. "Boycotts of Chinese-owned businesses (in America) and scenes of people walking the streets of Hong Kong wearing surgical masks show that the general public does not understand the real dangers," Baltimore concluded.

"The sky is falling! The sky is falling!" Chicken Little said. Very shortly people stopped listening to anything else he said. Panic has a way of doing that.
Chicken Little and SARS:
 

11:07 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Something To Think About

"The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind."

William Blake, (1757–1827)
  

10:17 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




SARS 1st Case In China: We Must Not Panic

All those who were here last year know that the worst thing about SARS is the fear of SARS. Take all of the basic sanitary precautions: Keep your hands clean; stay away from sick people--that's basically it. You can only catch SARS from direct contact with the virus in a saturated quantity. It is one of the easiest diseases to avoid. It does not travel more than a few feet when air-borne. It will stay active for perhaps 2 or 3 days on hard surfaces; if the hard surface has been in prolonged contact with a SARS carrier, there is a strong probability that the virus is there in enough quantity to make you sick. But, if you wash your hands with just basic soap, the virus will be destroyed. So, remember, wash your hands often every time you are out of your home; and stay away from sick people. It really is that simple. Please do not panic.
Suspected Case of SARS in China Alarms Officials

HONG KONG, Saturday, Dec. 27 — A free-lance television employee has fallen ill 80 miles from here in southern China with what doctors suspect is SARS, health officials here and in mainland China said on Saturday afternoon.

The unidentified man has the clinical symptoms of severe acute respiratory syndrome, including a full-blown respiratory tract infection and fever, said P.Y. Lam, Hong Kong's director of health.

But a laboratory test for antibodies against the virus was inconclusive, possibly because blood was drawn for the test early in the illness, while a genetic test for the virus has not yet been completed, Dr. Lam said.

"There is reason to believe it is SARS," based on the symptoms, but the evidence is not conclusive, he added.

The man is in a hospital in Guangzhou, 80 miles up the Pearl River from here and the capital of China's Guangdong Province. The first SARS cases occurred in November of last year in the suburbs of Guangzhou, and the disease infected more than 1,000 before spreading late last February to Hong Kong, from which air travelers then carried it to countries around the globe.

Dr. Lam said that Hong Kong officials had been told by their mainland counterparts that the man had not traveled recently outside Guangdong Province and that there was no epidemiological clue yet as to how the man could have contracted the disease. SARS disappeared around the world last June following stringent quarantines of victims and their close personal contacts.

There have been only two cases since then, a laboratory worker in Singapore who contracted the virus last summer and another lab worker in Taiwan who fell ill with SARS earlier this month. Neither worker is known to have infected anyone else, although Taiwan and Singapore have quarantined dozens of people who were in contact with the Taiwan medical worker, who fell ill at the end of a business trip to Singapore.

Public health experts have been warning for months that SARS could return this winter. A previously unknown type of corona virus, a group of viruses also responsible for many common colds, causes SARS, and corona viruses tend to spread more easily during cool, dry weather of the sort that southeastern China has been experiencing in recent weeks.

Dr. Lam said that Hong Kong would deploy extra staff to check the health of people entering this autonomous Chinese territory from the mainland and to check the health of people entering and leaving at the airport.

The territory has declared a "yellow alert" at all hospitals, requiring all hospital visitors to wear masks and taking other precautions, and the territory's infectious diseases committee will hold an emergency meeting on Saturday afternoon to review possible further measures, he said.
DO NOT PANIC

The New York Times
  

8:22 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




From Jesus to Christ - The First Christians

I have written often, usually disparagingly, about Christianity and Christians in these pages. I assure you I do not do so lightly and without experience and knowledge of the deeply personal, the empirical and the intellectual varieties.

My intense, lifelong interest in the matter is due to a peculiar but, unfortunately, not unique religious turmoil in my youth. This almost cyclonic turbulence was occasioned in part by the zealotry of an immediate family member and their inordinate obsession with evangelical fundamentalism. And in part by an ugly, contagious and ultimately dangerous outbreak of religious mass hysteria which spread like wild-fire first throughout the congregation of a particular church and then throughout almost the entirety of the populace of the small fishing village I grew up in on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. This quite scary, quite wrenching phenomenon was not at all unlike the Salem witchcraft trials in colonial New England during the 17th Century. I have written much about that unseemly episode in other literary forms; this is not the time nor the place to do so again. I mention it only as a brief predicate and explanation for my beliefs--or non beliefs, if you will--and my somewhat scholarly and anecdotal exploration of comparative religions during my life.

I bring all this up now to introduce you to one of the very best online, multimedia presentations of the "historical" Jesus Christ I have yet encountered on the web, a stunning piece of work by FRONTLINE. Enjoy and learn and think: while it will not change what you believe, it will greatly inform you about what you believe.
This FRONTLINE series is an intellectual and visual guide to the new and controversial historical evidence which challenges familiar assumptions about the life of Jesus and the epic rise of Christianity.

For an overview of the series read the Synopsis. It includes links to some of the stories and material on this web site which expand the narrative.

This site is anchored by the testimony of New Testament theologians, archaeologists and historians who serve as both critics and storytellers. They address dozens of key issues, disagreements and critical problems relating to Jesus' life and the evolution of Christianity. Throughout the site, maps, charts (for example, the fortress of Masada), ancient texts (including Perpetua's diary), pictures of the archaeological discoveries, ancient imagery, and audio excerpts from the television program complement and illuminate the scholars' commentary.

A new addition to this site is the edited transcript of a two-day symposium at Harvard University. This symposium was a follow-up to the FRONTLINE broadcast and featured scholars' presentations, workshops and audience discussion.
Give yourself an intellectual and spiritual after-Christmas present, go click on: Frontline: From Jesus to Christ - The First Christians.
  

4:44 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Man in southern China suspected of having SARS

This is NOT Confirmed. Do Not Panic.
HONG KONG — A man admitted to a hospital in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou is reportedly suspected to have been infected with SARS, and the government's public health officials have been requested to confirm whether it is a positive case, news reports said Saturday.

The man was admitted to hospital one week ago and underwent several tests, which convinced city officials that he is highly likely to be infected with the deadly virus, according to a Hong Kong radio station, quoting a Guangzhou newspaper report.
Japan Today
  

4:26 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Friday, December 26, 2003

A Little Late For The Cure, But At Least They're Making House Calls

Digging up bones, digging up bones: digging up Italian bones. This is my favorite story of the day: What did the Medici's eat and was it bad for them or just expensive?
ROME, Dec. 24 — A team of Italian and American scientists will exhume the remains of 49 members of the Medici clan, the powerful Renaissance merchant family that ruled Tuscany, to study what they ate and what illnesses they suffered.

The two-year project is unusual because it concerns an elite group of people for whom there is already a vast amount of documentation. That information can be compared with any new scientific findings, researchers say.

"Nobody has ever worked on a royal population," said Bob Brier of the C. W. Post Campus of Long Island University, a mummy expert who is one of the study's lead researchers.

"In a sense, we're looking at the lifestyle of the rich and famous."

In July, the scientists will exhume 49 bodies buried in the Medici Chapel in Florence, take DNA samples from hair and skeletons, perform CAT scans and X-rays of intact mummies, and sample whatever soft tissues remain.
The New York Times
  

11:32 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Mori & Chen, Sounds Like a Comedy Team, Or a New Cocktail In a Trendy Hollywood Club

Whatever it is, if it will put some sense into the Mouse-Mouth that roars' itty bitty brain, it's a welcome addition to anyboby's lexicon.
TAIPEI — Former Japanese Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori met Taiwan President Chen Shui-bian on Thursday and urged him to exercise caution on a proposed referendum on Chinese missiles so as not to aggravate tensions between Taiwan and China, Japanese delegation members said.

Mori met the president despite his previous statement that his visit to Taiwan is a private one. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao expressed displeasure Thursday about Mori's visit to the island.
Japan Today
  

11:23 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Tough Justice

I wonder how the Law-and-Order right-wingers would spin this story. I mean, would they call this an abuse of human rights in the People's Republic of China? Or would that be too hypocritical even for them--they who call out to hang those bad guys high and soon, to honor the victims and save public money to boot?
ZHENGZHOU, Dec. 26 (Xinhuanet) -- Serial killer Huang Yong, convicted of killing 17 children, was executed by gunshot in Pingyu County in central China's Henan Province Friday.

Henan Provincial Higher People's Court held a public meeting before the execution, attracting over 300 participants, mostly relatives of the victims.

Huang Yong, 29, was arrested on Nov. 22 and sentenced to death on Dec. 9 by Zhumadian City Intermediate People's Court. He did not appeal the sentence.

Huang lured teenagers from Internet cafes and video parlors to his rural house and strangled them before burying their bodies under his house and in his garden from September 2001 to November 2003.
They don't mess around with murderers over here in the Middle Kingdom; the Chinese are a Law-and-Order society, no doubt. So why all the guff from the American Law-and-Order conservatives over China? Must be the communism that scares the bejesus out of those hardy NRA stud yahoos.

Xinhuanet.com
  

11:21 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Better Late Than Never

Perhaps Japan is beginning to accept some responsibility for its atrocities during World War II, but it sure isn't much. Truly, what is their problem? Perhaps the Japanese collective psyche hasn't really changed in the last 60 years.
BEIJING (AFP) Dec 25, 2003 -- China said Thursday it was about to receive 300 million yen (2.8 million dollars) in compensation from Japan over a chemical weapons spill that killed one Chinese and injured 43 earlier this year.

The money, promised by Japan two months ago, would be paid to the victims of an accident in northeast China in August when workers dug up a cache of World War II-era weapons left by fleeting Japanese armies, Xinhua news agency said.

While noting that the money was on the way, Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao was quoted by Xinhua as saying China would continue to urge Japan to clean up the weaponry left in the mainland for nearly 60 years.

More than 700,000 chemical bombs and grenades are estimated by Japan to have been abandoned in China by its armies.

Chinese experts dispute this figure, saying as many as two million are still buried, giving China the world's largest stockpile of abandoned chemical weapons.

Since beginning work to search and destroy these old weapons about a decade ago, Japan has retrieved about 36,000 chemical bombs on the mainland, according to previous reports.

A Japanese team was recently in Qiqihar, the location of the August accident, to dispose of the newly-discovered weapons there.

Sino-Japanese tensions, never far below the surface of the tortured bilateral relationship, have flared up again in recent months.
SpaceWar.com
  

11:14 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Krugman Resolves

Paul Krugman suggests some 2004 resolutions for his punditry colleagues that, unfortunately, make far too much sense for lesser journalists to understand enough to put into practice because they either don't have Mr. Krugman's intellect or his integrity, or they are hoping to right-elbow themselves into becoming Murdochians.
During the 2000 election, many journalists deluded themselves and their audience into believing that there weren't many policy differences between the major candidates, and focused on personalities (or, rather, perceptions of personalities) instead. This time there can be no illusions: President Bush has turned this country sharply to the right, and this election will determine whether the right's takeover is complete.

But will the coverage of the election reflect its seriousness? Toward that end, I hereby propose some rules for 2004 political reporting.
Mr. Krugman offers a number of resolutions in his column, however, I will quote two of them for flavor and fun, and suggest you read the rest of the story.
• Beware of personal anecdotes. Anecdotes that supposedly reveal a candidate's character are a staple of political reporting, but they should carry warning labels.

For one thing, there are lots of anecdotes, and it's much too easy to report only those that reinforce the reporter's prejudices. The approved story line about Mr. Bush is that he's a bluff, honest, plain-spoken guy, and anecdotes that fit that story get reported. But if the conventional wisdom were instead that he's a phony, a silver-spoon baby who pretends to be a cowboy, journalists would have plenty of material to work with.

If a reporter must use anecdotes, they'd better be true. After the Dean endorsement, innumerable reporters cracked jokes about Al Gore's inventing the Internet. Guys, he never said that: it's a malicious distortion of a true statement, and no self-respecting journalist would repeat it. ...

• It's not about you. We learn from The Washington Post that reporters covering Mr. Dean are surprised — and, it's implied, miffed — that "he never asks a single question about them." The mind reels.
There is much more In The New York Times...
  

11:10 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




We Grieve, But We Cannot Quit

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- Iraqi insurgents shelled a base northeast of Baghdad, killing two U.S. soldiers and wounding four, the military said Friday.

The insurgents fired mortars that hit the base around 6:15 p.m. on Thursday, Maj. Josslyn Aberle of the 4th Infantry Division said. Two soldiers were evacuated for medical care but died of their wounds, she said. The four others did not have life-threatening injuries.

Baqouba is 30 miles northeast of Baghdad.

In Baghdad, Rebels unleashed a string of grenade, rocket and mortar attacks before dawn on Christmas Day, hitting a hotel housing foreigners for the second time in as many days and targeting two banks, several embassies and a U.S. Army base.

Thursday night, several explosions were heard in central Baghdad, and sirens sounded in the Green Zone, a barricaded area that houses the headquarters of the U.S.-led coalition governing Iraq. A U.S. military spokeswoman said there were ``two to three impacts in the vicinity of the Green Zone,'' but no casualties were reported.
In The New York Times...
 

6:51 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Well, I Can Scratch Dean Off My Maybe List

What is it with all this "God" in politics of late? Have we warped back a generation or two? It's down to Clark or Kerry for this Yellow Dog Democrat. However, I believe Dean is pulling a sneaky on us for the Southern vote; with a wife and kids who are Jewish, and no record in his home state of having a publicly religious life, it appears that this really is all about the Christian vote. I am no fan of Bible-thumpers, but I admire a true one over a hypocrite any day of the week. Flush, Doctor Two-Face Dean!
MANCHESTER, N.H. -- Presidential contender Howard B. Dean, who has said little about religion while campaigning except to emphasize the separation of church and state, described himself in an interview with the Globe as a committed believer in Jesus Christ and said he expects to increasingly include references to Jesus and God in his speeches as he stumps in the South.

Dean, 55, who practices Congregationalism but does not often attend church and whose wife and children are Jewish, explained the move as a desire to share his beliefs with audiences willing to listen. His comments came as a rival, Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, chastised other Democrats for forgetting ''that faith was central to our founding and remains central to our national purpose.''

The move is striking for a man who has steadfastly kept his personal life out of the campaign, rarely offering biographical information, much less his religious beliefs. But in the Globe interview, Dean said that Jesus was an important influence in his life and that he would probably share with some voters the model Jesus has served for him.

''Christ was someone who sought out people who were disenfranchised, people who were left behind,'' Dean said. ''He fought against self-righteousness of people who had everything . . . He was a person who set an extraordinary example that has lasted 2000 years, which is pretty inspiring when you think about it.''
Boston Globe...
  

2:26 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Thursday, December 25, 2003

Southwest China Gas Well Fire Kills 191

This is breaking news; it is horrible breaking news:
Southwest China Gas Well Fire Kills 191

BEIJING (AP) -- Fumes spewed from a gas well in China's southwest, killing at least 191 people and forcing the evacuation of people in the area, the official Xinhua News Agency said Thursday.

The blowout occurred Tuesday night at a natural gas field in Kaixian County, outside the city of Chongqing.

Residents were evacuated from two square miles around the site of the explosion, Xinhua said, without specifying the number of people affected.

Earlier, the agency reported that eight people were killed from the release of gas. It didn't say how or when the additional deaths occurred.

Workers were preparing to try to plug the well using cement and earth-moving equipment, Xinhua said.

Employees who answered the phones at police, fire and local government offices in Chongqing and Kaixian county wouldn't confirm the higher death toll. Some said they had heard about only eight deaths, while others refused to give any information.

Phone calls to the management office of the gas field weren't answered.

A team of officials led by the general secretary of China's Cabinet rushed to the scene from Beijing, Xinhua said.

The well blowout, which occurred about 10 p.m., spewed a 100-foot-high cloud of natural gas and hydrogen sulfide, Xinhua said, citing Qian Zhijia, the field's deputy director.

Qian said the blowout should be brought under control by late Friday, Xinhua said. It said the field is run by Sichuan Petroleum Administration, part of the China National Petroleum Corp.

Emergency crews ignited the gas coming from the well on Wednesday to burn off the hydrogen sulfide and keep it from spreading, Xinhua said.

Chinese state television reported the disaster as the second item on its national evening newscast but gave no death toll.
The New York Times
 

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The Real Story of Christmas?

As any regular reader of these pages knows, I am not a Christian. Neither am I a Jew or Muslim. Indeed, regular readers will know that I blame the historical confluence of those three major worldwide religions--all springing from the loins, bosom if you like, but I know not how that could be done, of Abraham--for most of the horrific inhumanity perpetrated by large segments of humanity upon humanity from prehistory until this moment: 8 rocket attacks in Baghdad in one hour, and another U.S. soldier killed by an improvised explosive device.

Regular readers will know that I believe Christianity, as we know it, did not spring from the words and deeds of the carpenter and teacher named Jesus, but rather from a dangerous, bitter, bigoted failure of a man named Paul. Pualinianism is the hybrid word to more accurately depict the beliefs of Christians today. Jesus was a Jew who wanted to reform Judaism; his mother, brothers and sister continued that cause after his death in a reform Jewish "movement" in Jerusalem that lasted less than a century. Mohammed? He was a latecomer to the party, but with burning Arab pride he made up for his late start and has been going like a house-afire with his nationalistic extension of the Abraham to Jesus to, well, him, link of monotheism ever since. So much for the greatly truncated and simplistic overview of a very complex history, necessary only to set the stage for what comes next: I have little use for Christianity, but I love Christmas--even with the sadness it brings because of the anniversary of my father's death.

So, I want to lead you to an exploration of the Christmas story. First, there is an article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer to try and reconcile the basics, such as the oddity of there being two different versions in the Bible of the circumstances of Jesus's birth.
When the gifts have all been unwrapped, and the "is that all there is?" feeling begins to creep in like a chilly fog, read the story. The actual story, not Dickens or Clement Moore or Peanuts, but the real one. The real Christmas story, of which there are two in the New Testament.
Please read the rest of the story here.

Now I want to send you to the mother-lode: Everything you ever wanted to know about Christmas, and some things you probably didn't want to know, but it is all here, and all of it will warm your heart and maybe help you get past your mother-in-law's inappropriate behavior at the big family dinner/football game soiree... Welcome Christmas. It's all there, folks, and it is well worth a clickity click. I will just get you started with an opening excerpt:
On December 25, Christians around the world celebrate the birth of Christ. The origins of the holiday are uncertain; by the year 336, however, the Christian church in Rome observed the Feast of the Nativity on December 25. At that time, Christmas coincided with the winter solstice and the Roman Festival of Saturnalia. Today, observations of Christmas incorporate the secular and religious traditions of many cultures, from the ancient Roman practice of decorating homes with evergreens and exchanging gifts at the New Year to the Celtic Yule log.

For Margaret Davis, born in Clarke County, Georgia in 1887, Christmas brought to mind memories of the food and family that filled her parents' home between Christmas Eve and New Year's Day. She recalled:

Mama killed turkeys, chickens, and cooked cakes for two weeks . . . That was the way we spent our Christmas then, eating and dancing, and parties all through the week . . . There was not so many things for children to get then, as they have now, but we got many nice things.

Mrs. Margaret Davis
Grace McCune, interviewer
December 9, 1938.
American Life Histories, 1936-1940
That is just the tip of the icing, go forth and learn the rest of the stories at Welcome Christmas.
  

9:52 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




My Christmas Greetings To All and A Memorial To My Father

28 Years Ago Tonight My Father Passed From This Life, I Miss Him As If It Were Yesterday. This Is What He Would Want Said In His Name At This Time Of Great Strife In the World:

PEACE ON EARTH, GOOD WILL TOWARD MEN.
The four short paragraphs below, written by William Saroyan, were the words my father, Frank A. Bosco, the greatest man I ever knew, chose as a humanistic creed by which to live his life. In time, he passed them along to me, as I later did to my son Joseph. While each of us at times fell short of its ideals, they none the less remained our private benchmark.
J.B.
In The Time of Your Life

In the time of your life, live—so that in that good time there shall be no ugliness or death for yourself or for any life your life touches. Seek goodness everywhere, and when it is found, bring it out of its hiding place and let it be free and unashamed.

Place in matter and in flesh the least of the values, for these are the things that hold death and must pass away. Discover in all things that which shines and is beyond corruption. Encourage virtue in whatever heart it may have been driven into secrecy and sorrow by the shame and terror of the world. Ignore the obvious, for it is unworthy of the clear eye and the kindly heart.

Be the inferior of no man, or of any men be superior. Remember that every man is a variation of yourself. No man's guilt is not yours, nor is any man's innocence a thing apart. Despise evil and ungodliness, but not men of ungodliness or evil. These, understand. Have no shame in being kindly and gentle but if the time comes in the time of your life to kill, kill and have no regret.

In the time of your life, live—so that in that wondrous time you shall not add to the misery and sorrow of the world, but shall smile to the infinite delight and mystery of it.

William Saroyan
[ In the Time of My Life ]
 

11:47 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Christmas Day Update From Iraq

We Grieve, But We Cannot Quit. Their cause is wrong, they cannot win.
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 24 — As Iraqis and occupation soldiers began their Christmas Eve celebrations on Wednesday, guerrilla fighters unleashed a string of bomb attacks across the country, killing at least four American soldiers and six Iraqi civilians and wounding dozens of people, military and government officials said.

The day ended in spectacular fashion, when a round of powerful ordinance — most likely a rocket-propelled grenade, the military said — exploded at 8:30 p.m. above the roof of the Sheraton Hotel in central Baghdad, a favorite of Western journalists and contractors. The blast could be heard for miles and damaged part of the upper wall and the huge white S on the hotel sign.

The Coalition Provisional Authority said in a message to employees on Wednesday that it had indications that guerrilla fighters were planning operations to "demonstrate that they are still a significant force." It urged employees to be especially vigilant over the next 10 days.
In The New York Times...
  

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Ho Hum, This Is News?

This hardly needs comment; the only interesting part is where Scowcroft lets Dubya off with a he-really-didn't-mean-to-lie-just-persuade-folks-his-way white wash. Criminy!
White House Faulted on Uranium Claim: The President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board has concluded that the White House made a questionable claim in January's State of the Union address about Saddam Hussein's efforts to obtain nuclear materials because of its desperation to show that Hussein had an active program to develop nuclear weapons, according to a well-placed source familiar with the board's findings.
Read the whole thing, wink-wink, in the Washington Post
  

4:33 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




3 U.S. Soldiers Killed Christmas Eve in Iraq

This is the worst time of the year to lose a loved one. 28 years ago tomorrow, my father was killed; even though I was a full grown man of 27, no Christmas since has been without great sadness. I miss him as much today as I did then. He was the greatest man I ever knew. I am sure that each of the soldiers killed on this Christmas Eve were loved that much by their families. Let us mourn their passing, and resolve that their deaths were not in vain.
3 U.S. Soldiers Killed Christmas Eve in Iraq The attacks, perhaps timed to undermine the primarily Christian holiday, underscored the tenuous security situation in Iraq and indicated that insurgents were still coordinating deadly strikes despite the capture of Saddam Hussein on Dec. 13.

The Coalition Provisional Authority sent a message to its workers today saying that it had indications that guerrilla fighters were planning attacks to 'demonstrate that they are still a significant force.' It urged employees to be especially vigilant over the next 10 days.

Security fears were also evident among Iraqi Christians, as churches throughout Baghdad held traditional Midnight Masses this afternoon instead of after dark. American soldiers attended some of those gatherings, putting down their rifles and helmets to pray while priests delivered sermons on the urgent need for world peace.

But the day began with bloodshed. A roadside bomb exploded this morning as an American military convoy was driving outside the city of Samarra, killing three soldiers from Task Force Ironhorse, said a military spokesman, Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt.

It was the deadliest single attack on American forces since Mr. Hussein's capture.
In The New York Times...
 

3:37 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Paul Krugman's "The Death of Horatio Alger"

This article may be one of the most important you will read this week, this month, perhaps this year. In fact, it is the kind of article that you will keep around in some fashion for many years, certainly in your thinking, if you're a thinking kind of human, with the emphasis on human. It's in the current edition of one the most important "little" magazines published in America, and certainly one of its very oldest, The Nation:
The other day I found myself reading a leftist rag that made outrageous claims about America. It said that we are becoming a society in which the poor tend to stay poor, no matter how hard they work; in which sons are much more likely to inherit the socioeconomic status of their father than they were a generation ago.

The name of the leftist rag? Business Week, which published an article titled "Waking Up From the American Dream." The article summarizes recent research showing that social mobility in the United States (which was never as high as legend had it) has declined considerably over the past few decades. If you put that research together with other research that shows a drastic increase in income and wealth inequality, you reach an uncomfortable conclusion: America looks more and more like a class-ridden society.

And guess what? Our political leaders are doing everything they can to fortify class inequality, while denouncing anyone who complains--or even points out what is happening--as a practitioner of "class warfare."

Let's talk first about the facts on income distribution. Thirty years ago we were a relatively middle-class nation. It had not always been thus: Gilded Age America was a highly unequal society, and it stayed that way through the 1920s. During the 1930s and '40s, however, America experienced what the economic historians Claudia Goldin and Robert Margo have dubbed the Great Compression: a drastic narrowing of income gaps, probably as a result of New Deal policies. And the new economic order persisted for more than a generation: Strong unions; taxes on inherited wealth, corporate profits and high incomes; close public scrutiny of corporate management--all helped to keep income gaps relatively small. The economy was hardly egalitarian, but a generation ago the gross inequalities of the 1920s seemed very distant.

Now they're back. According to estimates by the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez--confirmed by data from the Congressional Budget Office--between 1973 and 2000 the average real income of the bottom 90 percent of American taxpayers actually fell by 7 percent. Meanwhile, the income of the top 1 percent rose by 148 percent, the income of the top 0.1 percent rose by 343 percent and the income of the top 0.01 percent rose 599 percent. (Those numbers exclude capital gains, so they're not an artifact of the stock-market bubble.) The distribution of income in the United States has gone right back to Gilded Age levels of inequality.
Please do yourself and all of us a favor and read the rest of this powerful article in The Nation
  

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Carnival of the Vanities Is Up

This Week's Carnival of the Vanities is up at Winds of Change.NET. This is the big Christmas Edition, Joe Katzman is your host:
Here on Christmas Eve, we've decided to make the Christmas spirit the focus of this, our second time hosting Silflay Hraka's magnificent Carnival of the Vanities. Because you don't have to believe in Christmas to believe in the Christmas spirit. Let me tell you a story.
A number of years ago, we lived next door to a diplomat at the Pakistani Consulate. You might think this would be a recipe for friction, but he was nice enough. 9/11 was several years away and if anyone had a legitimate beef, it was our (formerly Pakistani) Isma'ili Muslim neighbours on the other side. But I digress. Anyway, Christmas comes around, and some bright acquaintance decides to give this Muslim diplomat a bottle of whiskey for the holidays. Since this is sort of like sending the Israeli Consulate a smoked ham, our neighbour came over with an embarassed expression. Would we like a bottle of fine whiskey?

To this day, I still think of it as the perfect North American holiday story: a Muslim giving his Jewish neighbours a bottle of whiskey… for Christmas.
Carnival entries are listed by blogname in reverse alphabetical order, and are arranged into several categories:
Go clickity click and read some great posts from all around the Blogoshpere at Winds of Change.NET.

 

2:14 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




China Gets Help In Its Battle With Terrorists

The West needs to know that China is also facing violence from Islamic fundamentalists who want to break away from western China and form Islamic theocracies.
A man recently identified by China as its most dangerous terrorist is reported to have been shot dead, in an anti-terrorism operation in Pakistan conducted by US and Pakistani forces.

The Beijing News says the dead man was Hasan Mahsum, a former resident of northwestern China's Xinjiang, and alleged to be a member of an ethnic Muslim separatist group there.

China last week placed Mahsum on the top of its first-ever list of 11 Muslim separatists, branded as "terrorists" by Beijing.

Mahsum was a leader of the East Turkistan Islamic movement, striving for an independent state in the Uighur region.

Mahsum allegedly planned a bombing in 1995, when he was living in Xinjiang, and fled to Afghanistan two years later.
ABC Radio Australia
 

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Wednesday, December 24, 2003

Mr. Kristof Will Break Your Heart On Christmas Eve, But Brilliantly

Leave it to a great journalist, a wonderful wordsmith, a compassionate liberal, a man with a heart and soul as big as the China he loves and is journeying through on a journalistic exploration of what we call the "New China," to break your heart on Christmas Eve. But Nicholas Kristof is that kind of man and writer. In his column of this Christmas Eve, he reports vividly on the plight of North Koreans who cross the border into China to escape hunger and repression in their home country. He tells the story so very well, focusing immediately upon one mother crying, and then expanding that lead into a panoramic view and analysis of the new rock and the very hard, cold place these refugees find themselves between. Again, I am going to produce the column in full below, it is that good and important, and I want a record of it in these pages. I do, however, want to add a few comments about an analogy that perhaps will shed a different light on this dark, sad, complex story.

Over the past few days, because of the Holiday Season, I have been visiting with people I wouldn't normally see except for holiday festivities . Some of these folks hold rather high places within the major Ministries of the Central Government. There was one fellow in particular I enjoyed speaking with; for reasons I do not fully know, he travels often to North Korea from Beijing. I had the presumtpuousness to ask if there was anyway I might accompany him sometime. He laughed and said that getting an American journalist into North Korea would be even more difficult than an Islamic extremist getting a visa to visit the United States. We then talked at some length about the very subject that is Mr. Kristof's today: North Korean refugees crossing illegally into China. However, he offered an insight that I wasn't expecting, although I should have; before coming to China I had been living in Los Angeles for about 10 years.

You see, he explained that many of the refugees are performing the menial tasks that even marginally better-off Chinese do not want to do. In other words, these illegal aliens are serving the same purpose as do Hispanic illegal aliens in the American southwest. In sum, the situation is just as in California, where the politicians--and a lot of other people, but mainly the well-to-do--give great lip-service to stopping the human flow across the border from Mexico, but hire those in the never-ending pipeline as live-in maids, nannies, gardeners, and for day-labor construction jobs. This phenomenon is so much a part of patrician culture in the finer neighborhoods of Southern California, many folks don't even try to hide it. This, I was told by that gentleman, and others, is exactly what is happening to the refugees that are not part of the occasional sweep by the authorities in a public show of "go home."

So, what is to be done? Considering the political and economic climate of the moment--short of some radically liberal move by one party or the other, which I wouldn't bet the mortgage on occurring any time soon--probably more of the same. Occasionally the Armed Police will make an authoritarian sweep and deportation. The better-off citizens will employ the rest who are willing to live and work at menial jobs in the coldest part of China--which is why the many unemployed Chinese workers and peasants from warmer climates aren't protesting overmuch about losing jobs to cheaper labor. The most populous part of China is the southeast, and its populace hate, I mean hate, being cold.

Odd, isn't it? So many of the world's problems are universal in their distribution. Basically, any problem you have, someone in another country and culture also has.

Please read and enjoy and think about Mr. Kristof's excellent column.
NEAR THE NORTH KOREAN BORDER,

China

In a safe house in a village here, a North Korean mother sits on the floor, hunched over and crying silently, wiping away tears ? not because she is hungry or cold, but because she is warm and well fed.

"Here we have enough food and clothes, in a way that is unimaginable in North Korea," she says. "Whenever I eat and dress in new clothes, I feel guilty because of my family members still in North Korea."

So she plans to sneak back across the frozen Tumen River into North Korea sometime soon to find her daughter and take her to China. But before crossing the river, the mother will swallow a plastic bag with money in it. That way, if she is caught, her money will not be stolen by border guards, and when the bag passes through her system she can try to bribe her way out of jail.

"That's what everybody does now," she says matter-of-factly.

One of the knottiest human rights problems in the world concerns the North Koreans hiding in China, probably 30,000 to 100,000 of them. China is catching them and forcing them back to North Korea at a rate of 100 a week, and they are some of the sorriest and most helpless people you can imagine.

Paradoxically, their plight has been made worse by some of the people who care most about them and try hardest to help them. The result is a cautionary tale about the importance of understanding local realities before barging in with good intentions.

Foreigners ran an "underground railroad" in this border area to spirit North Koreans to freedom. They helped the Koreans swarm into foreign embassies and consulates in China, embarrassing Chinese leaders ? who then began rounding up tens of thousands of North Korean migrants and sending them back across the border. So dozens of North Koreans were helped, and tens of thousands were harmed. Today, there are only about half as many North Koreans in China as there were a year ago.

Now there's some risk that we're going to do that again.

Conservatives, particularly evangelical Christians, have taken the lead in trying to help North Koreans. They are among the few people focusing on human rights in North Korea, and they have offered creative ideas, like dropping radios into North Korea (ordinary North Korean radios are locked into propaganda stations).

Yet some are also pushing for the U.N. high commissioner for refugees to interview the North Koreans in China and offer asylum. As one person helping North Koreans here put it, that's a Western solution to an Asian problem, and it would backfire. China would crack down further on the North Koreans, sending even more back to their homeland.

It is appalling that China violates international law by sending defectors back to North Korea, but China does quietly tolerate a still considerable North Korean presence. I visited an orphanage where sympathetic Chinese are raising North Korean children whose parents starved to death or were captured. The walls of the orphanage are covered with the children's drawings ? happy pictures of smiling children and sunny skies that are a tribute to the resilience of youth.

It's great that conservatives are paying attention to the North Koreans, and I wish liberals showed equal compassion for them. But well-meaning Americans often overdose on moral clarity and end up creating messes, like Iraq, or hurting those they aim to help: the liberals' anti-sweatshop campaign (which reduces opportunities for the poor) and the conservatives' support for Cuban sanctions (which seem to keep Castro in power) are both examples. Heaven preserve the world's desperate people from well-intended Americans.

If we want to help North Koreans, the best approach is not a flamboyant Western solution, but a practical Asian approach: we should quietly encourage China and Russia to accept North Koreans. This is achievable and could create a de facto refuge, and the cross-border migration might help to pry open North Korea itself.

Interviewing North Koreans hiding in China was a delicate task that put them in great danger, and once we got two safe houses mixed up. The mistake put the North Koreans at some risk of capture, and for a few moments they radiated a life-or-death terror that gave me a glimpse of what they must suffer daily.

If we push too hard, we'll make their fears come true. Foreign policy, alas, requires more than moral clarity and good intentions.
The New York Times
  

9:11 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Another Milestone Passed In the New China

China, historically the land of "firsts," from gunpowder, to paper, to movable type, deng deng (etc. in Pinyin, ed.) marks another one and it also is Good News for the New China on this Christmas Eve.
BEIJING, Dec. 23 (Xinhuanet) -- China's foreign minister Li Zhaoxing answered questions raised by Chinese people through the Internet Tuesday afternoon, saying ordinary people's questions about whether China should adopt more aggressive diplomatic policies often left them deep in thought.

It was the first time a foreign minister has communicated with ordinary Chinese via the Internet.

"Many of the Internet users' viewpoints are helpful for the government's diplomatic policy making," Li said. "We need help and support from our people."

The 105-minute-long online communication via the Foreign Ministry's website (www.fmprc.gov.cn) and Xinhua News Agency's website (www.xinhuanet.com) was arranged at the request of the public, ministry sources said.

People asked more than 2,000 questions of the minister, including "Will China participate in the reconstruction of Iraq?" "How are diplomatic policies made?" and "Are there any shortcomings in China's current diplomacy?"

Observers say the communication was a sign that ordinary Chinese are increasingly interested in discussing their viewpoints on China's diplomatic policies openly.

"The public will have a more significant influence on China's diplomacy as they are motivated by this fast-changing world," said Professor Shi Yinhong of the School of International Relations of Beijing's People's University.
Read more about another small, but significant, step in the march forward by the leadership of the New China at Xinhuanet.com
  

5:03 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




More Good News From China In Tech Sector

Another Good News Story From China On Christmas Eve; it also is in the tech sector, which makes it even better news for the future of the New China.
NANJING, Dec. 24 (Xinhuanet) -- A Chinese IT company has made a minor landmark success in breaking Microsoft's monopoly of the office software market by signing a contract with a Japanese IT product dealer, Internet Telephone, to sell its Yongzhong Office software in Japan.

Before signing the contract, Internet Telephone tracked and assessed the performance of the China-made office software for three months. It finally reached the deal to sell it on the Japanese market to partly replace Microsoft's Office series. Internet Telephone has started publicity work on the Chinese software. It is expected that sales could reach over five billion yen-worth in 2004.

Besides a Japanese-language version, the Yongzhong Technology Co. Ltd, based in Wuxi City, in east China's Jiangsu Province, has also provided versions in English and traditional Chinese characters.
There is more to this good news at Xinhuanet.com
  

4:23 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Taiwan Spies In China? Oops!

One would not like to be in these folks' shoes. Here is the story as reported in the state-owned press:
BEIJING, Dec. 24 (Xinhuanet) -- State security departments of the Chinese mainland have smashed a ring of intelligence agents, arresting 24 spies from Taiwan and 19 mainlanders involved, a spokesman for the state security authorities said here Wednesday.

The intelligence departments of Taiwan have never given up their attempts to spy on the mainland, the spokesman said, noting that these spies conducted activities in violation of the law.

The law never allows anyone to threaten the safety and interests of the mainland, and moreover, what these spies did may bring catastrophes and bitterness to the people of Taiwan, the spokesman said.

The state security departments, which captured and interrogated the spies, have behaved strictly in accordance with the law, are protecting their rights, and providing them with daily necessities and medical services. The spies are in good health.

All those arrested in this case have expressed their gratitude to the state security departments for the humanitarian treatment they have received.

Currently, the case is being further investigated, though the spies have confessed all their crimes, the spokesman said.
Xinhuanet.com

Here is the same story as reported by ABC Radio Australia:
China says it has arrested 24 spies from Taiwan and 19 of their mainland Chinese accomplices.

The official Xinhua news agency quotes a state security spokesman as saying what the spies did may bring bitterness to the people of Taiwan.

The report gives few details of the alleged activities of those arrested, but says they have confessed all their crimes.

Xinhua accuses Taiwan's intelligence departments of never giving up on attempts to spy on the mainland.

It says the spies have been interrogated in accordance with the law and the case is being further investigated.

Earlier, Taiwan dismissed a Hong Kong newspaper report that China had cracked a major ring of more than 30 spies working for the island, saying there had been no cases of any staff being arrested by China.

China considers Taiwan part of its territory waiting to be reunified, by force if necessary, since the two sides split in 1949 at the end of a civil war.
RADIO AUSTRALIA
 

2:24 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Good News From Slash Dot: China, Russia, U.S. To Build 100MBps Network

Here is some China good news from the Tech front:
Prostoalex writes "Gloriad (Global Ring Network for Advanced Applications Development), a scientific data network, will unite academic institutions in China, Russia and the United States with a 100 MBps link. National Center for Supercomputing Applications received a $2.8 mln grant from NSF, and both Russia and China will match this amount to contribute to network build-up. Later this year, as the Associated Press article notes, a new plan will be launched to move the international network to 10 GBps capacity."
Slash Dot
  

1:50 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Tuesday, December 23, 2003

It's Just a Job, huh Rummy?

So now Americans learn the truth about Donald Rumsfeld, the truth others have known for a long time. He is not the ideologue that zealous neocons thought. He is just another amoral bureaucrat who does whatever is expedient to the folks in power at the moment. So, where is the moral authority for this administration now? If Dubya meant what he said in his last big speech about putting an end forever to those bad old days of appeasing tyrants because they were the enemy of our enemy, does he ask for Rummy's resignation? Does he ask him to publicly repudiate his dirty work during those dirty days of Ronnie's reign, when everything and anything was allowed as long as it meant guns, bullets, missiles and worse for any right-wing dictator who was engaged in killing and torturing leftists, socialists, communists, and the Islamic revolutionaries who threw off the strangle-hold of tyranny that was the Shah of Iran, who we also created? But that would also call for an apology from pappy Bush, who had some of the dirtiest of dirty hands in American covert ops from the early 60's up to and including his presidency. Yeah. Right. I won't hold my breath.
WASHINGTON, Dec. 22 — As a special envoy for the Reagan administration in 1984, Donald H. Rumsfeld, now the defense secretary, traveled to Iraq to persuade officials there that the United States was eager to improve ties with President Saddam Hussein despite his use of chemical weapons, newly declassified documents show.

Mr. Rumsfeld, who ran a pharmaceutical company at the time, was tapped by Secretary of State George P. Shultz to reinforce a message that a recent move to condemn Iraq's use of chemical weapons was strictly in principle and that America's priority was to prevent an Iranian victory in the Iran-Iraq war and to improve bilateral ties.

During that war, the United States secretly provided Iraq with combat planning assistance, even after Mr. Hussein's use of chemical weapons was widely known. The highly classified program involved more than 60 officers of the Defense Intelligence Agency, who shared intelligence on Iranian deployments, bomb-damage assessments and other crucial information with Iraq.

The disclosures round out a picture of American outreach to the Iraqi government, even as the United States professed to be neutral in the eight-year war, and suggests a private nonchalance toward Mr. Hussein's use of chemicals in warfare. Mr. Rumsfeld and other Bush administration officials have cited Iraq's use of poisonous gas as a main reason for ousting Mr. Hussein.

The documents, which were released as part of a declassification project by the National Security Archive, and are available on the Web at www.nsarchive.org, provide details of the instructions given to Mr. Rumsfeld on his second trip to Iraq in four months. The notes of Mr. Rumsfeld's encounter with Tariq Aziz, the foreign minister, remain classified, but officials acknowledged that it would be unusual if Mr. Rumsfeld did not carry out the instructions.

Since the release of the documents, he has told members of his inner circle at the Pentagon that he does not recall whether he had read, or even had received, the State Department memo, Defense Department officials said. ...

Mr. Rumsfeld's trip was his second visit to Iraq. On his first visit, in late December 1983, he had a cordial meeting with Mr. Hussein, and photographs and a report of that encounter have been widely published.

In a follow-up memo, the chief of the American interests section reported that Mr. Aziz had conveyed Mr. Hussein's satisfaction with the meeting. "The Iraqi leadership was extremely pleased with Amb. Rumsfeld's visit," the memo said. "Tariq Aziz had gone out of his way to praise Rumsfeld as a person."
If you still have the stomach for it, there is much more in the article in The New York Times...
  

10:32 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




A Federal Case or Presidential Vengeance?

Here is another story from The New York Times that begs sober questioning; read the excerpt below, then the full article and come to your own conclusions to: A Federal Case for a Teenager: Family Sees Tie to Ex-President.
KENNEBUNK, Me. — It was supposed to be simple, breaking into a small boatyard near here and stealing a marine radio to monitor police frequencies.

But when the two intruders, Patrick V., 14, and his accomplice, Christopher Conley, 19, spotted what they thought were video surveillance cameras, they panicked and set fire to the building, burning it down along with several boats and engines. Unknown to them, one of the boat engines belonged to former President George Bush, whose summer house is seven miles away.

Within days of the July 2002 fire, Secret Service and other federal agents were at Patrick's house here. His mother, Denise Collier, said they told her that the young men had "blown up the president's boat" in what might have been "a terrorist act." One federal firearms agent told her, Ms. Collier recalled, that the incident had raised "national security concerns."

Patrick then found himself in a highly unusual predicament. Instead of being tried in local juvenile court, he was turned over to the United States attorney's office in Portland, tried in Federal District Court and found guilty. He was given the maximum sentence allowed: 30 months incarceration, followed by 27 months of probation. He was then sent to a maximum security juvenile facility in Pennsylvania on the order of the federal Bureau of Prisons.
There is a great deal more to this story, read it all in The New York Times...
  

2:21 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Private Property In The People's Republic of China?

This is a milestone, no doubt, but with a "Caveat." Perhaps the qualifier included in this unprecedented amendment to the Constitution of a Communist state is out of responsible governance caution. Read the excerpt below, and then Joseph Kahn's complete article in The New York Times--a fine piece of journalism by one of the best correspondents working in China--and you decide if it is prudence or unnecessary authoritarianism.
SHENZHEN, China, Dec. 22 — China's national legislature moved to amend the Constitution on Monday to protect private property rights, the first time the Communist Party has formally protected private wealth since taking power 55 years ago.

The change, expected to be enacted early next year, is a milestone in China's 25-year economic reform effort. It marks a victory for advocates of China's emerging class of entrepreneurs, who have argued for years that the Marxist Constitution discriminates against them and gives leeway to the police and the courts to seize their property according to party dictates.

The amendment, subjected to a prolonged debate behind closed doors during the past six months, says that "private property obtained legally shall not be violated," at least nominally putting it on the same footing as public property, which the Constitution now deems "sacred and inviolable."

But the wording of the amendment made public on Monday differs in crucial ways from a simpler version put forward by supporters of more fundamental changes to the Constitution. By including the phrase "obtained legally," the amendment still makes the legal system, controlled by the Communist Party, the arbiter of property rights.

Officials are determined to avoid the rush to privatization that occurred in Russia in the early 1990's, when entrepreneurs assumed ownership of valuable properties in sales that were later considered flawed.

Corruption is rampant in China and some intellectuals and government leaders have long warned against steps that would make it easier for well-connected people to take control of public property and treat it as their own.

The watered-down amendment also seems geared to give the state continued sway over wealthy businessmen who fall out of favor.
Please read the rest of the article in The New York Times...
  

1:33 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Just a thought...

...for the day:
"A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving."

Albert Einstein
Bartleby.com
 

12:50 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




This Is Very Bad News

Yikes! This we did not need: Inquiry Suggests Pakistanis Sold Nuclear Secrets. If it is true, what do we do? We can't invade Pakistan. We can't sanction it heavily. We do not want to discredit General Musharraf. The reason? 1) We need Pakistan stable. 2) He's got the bomb. He is an elephant in the living room; he is a member of the club. All we can do is scold him and hope he tells us the truth about where all the sales were made.
WASHINGTON, Dec. 21 — A lengthy investigation of the father of Pakistan's atomic bomb, Abdul Qadeer Khan, by American and European intelligence agencies and international nuclear inspectors has forced Pakistani officials to question his aides and openly confront evidence that the country was the source of crucial technology to enrich uranium for Iran, North Korea and possibly other nations.

Until the past few weeks, Pakistani officials had denied evidence that the A. Q. Khan Research Laboratories, named for the man considered a national hero, had ever been a source of weapons technology to countries aspiring to acquire fissile material. Now they are backing away from those denials, while insisting that there has been no transfer of nuclear technology since President Pervez Musharraf took power four years ago.

Dr. Khan, a metallurgist who was charged with stealing European designs for enriching uranium a quarter century ago, has not yet been questioned. American and European officials say he is the centerpiece of their investigation, but that General Musharraf's government has been reluctant to take him on because of his status and deep ties to the country's military and intelligence services. A senior Pakistani official said in an interview that "any individual who is found associated with anything suspicious would be under investigation," and promised a sweeping inquiry.
Read the rest of this in-depth report on a bad situation in The New York Times...
  

3:22 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




He's Mad---But He Didn't Say S--t

Doctor Dean Gives The Post a Tongue-lashing, but no expletives--aw, golly, shucks, not even a D--n?
The Post's Dec. 18 editorial discussing my recent foreign policy speech ['Beyond the Mainstream'] badly misrepresents both my position and the central argument in the coming election on how best to strengthen America's security.
Go click and read the rest, the Post could use the traffic: Washington Post

 

2:54 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Saddam was held by Kurdish forces, drugged and left for US troops--Yahoo Reports It

This has to be a joke, right? Did someone dummy up a Yahoo webpage? Read it and laugh, or read it and wonder...?

LONDON, (AFP) - Saddam Hussein was captured by US troops only after he had been taken prisoner by Kurdish forces, drugged and abandoned ready for American soldiers to recover him, a British Sunday newspaper said.
Saddam came into the hands of the Kurdish Patriotic Front after being betrayed to the group by a member of the al-Jabour tribe, whose daughter had been raped by Saddam's son Uday, leading to a blood feud, reported the Sunday Express, which quoted an unnamed senior British military intelligence officer.

The newspaper said the full story of events leading up to the ousted Iraqi president's capture on December 13 near his hometown of Tikrit in northern Iraq (news - web sites), "exposes the version peddled by American spin doctors as incomplete".

A former Iraqi intelligence officer, whom the Express did not name, told the paper that Saddam was held prisoner by a leader of the Kurdish Patriotic Front, which fought alongside US forces during the Iraq war, until he negotiated a deal.

The deal apparently involved the group gaining political advantage in the region.

An unnamed Western intelligence source in the Middle East told the Express: "Saddam was not captured as a result of any American or British intelligence. We knew that someone would eventually take their revenge, it was just a matter of time."
Yahoo.com
 

2:38 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Classic Example of the Effect Murdochian Syndrome Has On Human Intelligence

This is monumental stupidity and Hayes lays it out for the world to see--what is he smoking? It ain't marijuana, otherwise he would be centered and focused enough to see the illogic inherent in his own article. Just look at three paragraphs and see the slippery avalanche he trots out as "connecting dots."
Wouldn't the bombing of a plant with well-documented connections to Iraq's chemical weapons program, undertaken in an effort to strike back at Osama bin Laden's terrorist network, seem to suggest the Clinton administration national security officials believed Iraq was working with al Qaeda? Benjamin, who has been one of the leading skeptics of claims that Iraq was working with al Qaeda, doesn't want to connect those dots.

Instead, he describes al Qaeda and Iraq as unwitting collaborators. "The Iraqi connection with al Shifa, given what we know about it, does not yet meet the test as proof of a substantive relationship because it isn't clear that one side knew the other side's involvement. That is, it is not clear that the Iraqis knew about bin Laden's well-concealed investment in the Sudanese Military Industrial Corporation. The Sudanese very likely had their own interest in VX development, and they would also have had good reasons to keep al Qaeda's involvement from the Iraqis. After all, Saddam was exactly the kind of secularist autocrat that al Qaeda despised. In the most extreme case, if the Iraqis suspected al Qaeda involvement, they might have had assurances from the Sudanese that bin Laden's people would never get the weapons. That may sound less than satisfying, but the Sudanese did show a talent for fleecing bin Laden. It is all somewhat speculative, and it would be helpful to know more."

It does sound less than satisfying to one Bush administration official. "So, when the Clinton administration wants to justify its strike on al Shifa," this official tells me, "it's okay to use an Iraq-al Qaeda connection. But now that the Bush administration and George Tenet talk about links, it's suddenly not believable?"
Read the whole article in the Weekly No Standards for a really good laugh at a really stupid hack who actually wants to call himself a journalist but disproves that notion by working for Murdoch. Go figure.
  

2:24 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Monday, December 22, 2003

Clark Has B---s!

I saw his expletive delivered live, here in China. I also saw his townhall meeting and speech that preceded the s--- hitting the airwaves. I think I am almost ready to pull a Gore and declare early for...CLARK! I said almost, maybe tomorrow, or the next day...

DERRY, N.H. -- Moments after praising his opponents in the Democratic presidential race as worthy running mates, Wesley Clark said, in no uncertain terms, how he would respond if they or anyone else criticized his patriotism or military record.

"I'll beat the s--- out of them," Clark told a questioner as he walked through the crowd after a town hall meeting Saturday. "I hope that's not on television," he added.

It was, live, on C-SPAN.

The campaign's traveling press secretary, Jamal Simmons, was with Clark at the time.

"If anyone tries to question Wes Clark's character, integrity or his commitment to this country or its security, they're going to be in the biggest fight they've ever had," Simmons said.
Houston Chronicle
 

11:14 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




We Grieve, But We Cannot Quit

We are winning this fight, folks, in spite of the politicians...
BAGHDAD, Iraq -- A roadside bomb exploded near a U.S. military convoy Monday, killing two American soldiers and an Iraqi translator, the military said. U.S. troops overnight arrested a former Iraqi intelligence officer suspected of directing anti-American attacks and raided a Baghdad mosque.

L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator of Iraq, told NBC's ``Today'' show that ``there's been a suggestion of high terror threats'' in Iraq in the last weeks unrelated to Saddam Hussein's capture on Dec. 13.

Two other soldiers from the 1st Armored Division were wounded in the attack at about 11:45 a.m. in Baghdad. The soldiers' names were being withheld pending notification of next of kin.

Three American soldiers have now been killed in combat in the past week, raising the toll to 317 soldiers killed in combat since military operations began in March.
In The New York Times...

 

11:05 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




"Roll Over Vladimir, Tell Mao Zedong The News" The New York Times Has Gotten Into My Act

This story is a hoot, and a confirmation of what I've been writing for quite some time now. Read it and smile if you are a westerner living in China, Beijing or Shanghai, particularly.
BEIJING — Friday marks the 110th anniversary of Mao Zedong's birthday and the Chinese government has rolled out the obligatory blizzard of tributes.

There are compilations of Mao's poems, biographies, television documentaries, a photography exhibit and a compact disc with Maoist maxims pounding to a rap music beat.

Yet if the transformation of the Great Helmsman into the Great Rapper seems a stretch, it reflects the continued emergence, under the watch of Communist Party censors, of a middle-class pop culture increasingly like that in the West: loud, sensationalistic and often banal, driven largely by a marketplace where the purse strings are increasingly controlled by the young - even the very young.

The question is whether this noisy pop culture represents a meaningful increase in personal freedom for Chinese citizens or merely serves as a superficial distraction from a repressive political structure.

The shattering of taboos and upending of traditions is widespread. For decades, beauty pageants were banned, but earlier this month, China was host to its first Miss World pageant. Polls show that far more Chinese couples are having premarital sex or living together before marriage than ever before. Plastic surgery is thriving in a country where bodies were once hidden in drab Mao suits. And divorce rates, once almost nonexistent, are rising.

"China is going through a very chaotic time right now," said Jianying Zha, whose 1995 book, "China Pop," chronicled the rise of popular culture in the early 1990's. "All the old values are being turned upside down."
In The New York Times...
 

2:53 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




NeoCons Win One?

Surely Qaddafi's decision will lend credence to the NeoCon's first-strike doctrine, so is it really good news? Yes. To rid Libya of these weapons, to bring it into the community of peaceful nations, is worth even four more years of Dubya. I mean, how much worse can he do? The world is in such a mess by what Shrub & Twigs have already done, just the vagaries of good and bad fortune render us a better than even chance that things will improve. Am I whistling past a graveyard? Probably, but still it is good news; for anyone to think otherwise for purely political partisan reasons has no business in a leadership role of a nation that truly wishes for peace and good will among nations.
LONDON, Dec. 20 — Libya's surprise declaration giving up its nuclear, biological and chemical weapons was the culmination of a week of intense negotiations that followed months of secret diplomacy, officials in London and Washington said Saturday.

Since an opening gambit by Libya in March, they said, there were a series of clandestine meetings in Tripoli between the Libyan leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, and experts from the C.I.A., as well as visits to at least 10 sites in Libya by British and American weapons experts.

Colonel Qaddafi personally drove his own subordinates to cooperate with the C.I.A.'s review of Libya's illicit weapons programs, United States intelligence officials said.

"During meetings with Colonel Qaddafi, he was consistent throughout with his desire to proceed with the admissions and elimination of his weapons program," one intelligence official said. "He knew what he wanted to do, and he had a message to pass back to both Washington and London. Our meetings were usually late at night, but in each case he had done his homework, and was quite generous with his time." ...

A State Department official said Libya felt an urgency to act because of the American stances on Iran and North Korea and the war in Iraq. An intelligence official said Colonel Qaddafi was also concerned about the threat to his government from militant elements in the country.

British and American officials said Friday that the initial approach was made by Libya in March, just before the war. A spokesman for Mr. Blair said Saturday that Libya's chief of intelligence, Musa Kussa, contacted the British government. ...

"It wasn't the individual things we were shown that we were blown away by," said one official involved in the review, but "the extent to which we were given access." The C.I.A. teams visited dozens of sites, including the 10 involved in the nuclear program, and interviewed Libyan scientists.

"One of our most senior analysts said this was the most extraordinary disclosure in his 30 years of doing this," one official said.

Libya revealed chemical weapon stockpiles, the existence of precursor materials used to develop other nerve agents, and a fledgling nuclear weapons program, complete with centrifuges to enrich uranium for weapons fuel. The discoveries raised the question of what nations had supplied components like centrifuges, which intelligence officials said have not been assembled in the "cascade" necessary to begin weapons-grade fuel production. The officials said Libya has obtained long-range Scud C-type missiles, with a range of 500 miles, from North Korea.

The experts found tens of tons of mustard gas, a chemical weapon first used in World War I, that had been produced about a decade ago, American officials said. The gas was accompanied by hundreds of aerial bombs that could be used to deliver it.
The New York Times...
  

2:15 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Sunday, December 21, 2003

You Have To See This

Promptly go clickity click to a great China Blog, The Peking Duck, and take a look at Queer Eye for the Straight Tyrant. You will more than chuckle, I believe.

Great catch, Richard!
  

5:11 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




"Where Birds Don't Fly?" Have The Terrorists Already Won?

Have the terrorists already won? With great sadness I ask that question, prompted mostly by another wonderful column by Thomas L. Friedman in today's The New York Times, titled: "Where Birds Don't Fly." In my absolutely not humble opinion, Mr. Friedman has become perhaps the best columnist in America on all matters involving our Islamic wars, and the War on Terrorism. (I am tempted to say that the two phrases represent differences without distinctions, that they are one and the same; I do not, however, because I must resist the sometimes overwhelming conviction that Islam itself wants to destroy modernity, and that just cannot be true. Can it?)

Mr. Friedman's column on this Sunday is another example of why I believe he has become--or should become, if some are still resisting the notion--the rational liberal's liberal on these matters that are correctly a world obsession. His wisdom in these quite prickly affairs, affairs that are more than dicey to traverse without great skill and integrity of logic, human compassion and critical, pragmatic thinking, is nothing short of extraordinary. For those who will not be able to read it before it becomes archived into the pay-per-article vault within the Grey Lady, I am producing it in full. (I know that The New York Times has generously come up with a way for bloggers to permanently bypass that obstacle--I just can't seem to make it work due to my general technological ignorance in almost all things having to do with computers other than producing words. I will keep trying, however.)
ISTANBUL

If we ever run out of room to store our gold in Fort Knox, I know just the place to put it: the new U.S. Consulate in Istanbul. It looks just like Fort Knox — without the charm.

The U.S. Consulate used to be in the heart of the city, where it was easy for Turks to pop in for a visa or to use the library. For security reasons, though, it was recently moved 45 minutes away to the outskirts of Istanbul, on a bluff overlooking the Bosporus — surrounded by a tall wall. The new consulate looks like a maximum-security prison. All that's missing is a moat with alligators and a sign that says: "Attention! You are now approaching a U.S. Consulate. Any sudden movement and you will be shot. All visitors welcome."

But here's the stone cold truth: A lot of U.S. diplomats are probably alive today because they moved into this fortress. One of the captured terrorists involved in the Nov. 20 attack on the British Consulate in Istanbul — which was just a short walk from the old U.S. Consulate — reportedly told Turkish police that his group was interested in blowing up the new U.S. Consulate, but when they cased the place they found it was so secure "they don't let birds fly" there.

This is where we've come to after two decades of anti-U.S. terrorism and 9/11: The cops are now in charge — not the diplomats. As one U.S. diplomat in Europe put it to me, "The upside is that we are more secure, the downside is you lose the human contact and it makes it way harder to have interactions with people who are not part of the elite. It makes my job less fun. [Some days] you might as well be in Cleveland, looking at the world through a bulletproof plate glass window."

Some of our embassies have such a Crusader castle look, they're actually becoming tourist sites. Fuat Ozbekli, a Turkish industrialist, told me: "I was just on a tour to Amman and we stopped our tourist van in front of the U.S. Embassy there. We asked the guide why they need all these tanks around it, and the guy told us that within this American Embassy they have everything they need so they can survive without going outside . . . I felt really sorry for the Americans there."

It's not just the brick walls that our embassies are now putting up that are increasing American isolation. Beginning next year, in order to get a visa to the U.S., you will have to come to the nearest U.S. Embassy or Consulate and be fingerprinted first. Some European diplomats have already started warning their American counterparts not to expect them in the U.S. anytime soon — if they have to submit to fingerprinting.

U.S. diplomats understand the security reasons for this. But, they note, it is really awkward to call up a Turkish writer or a Chinese dissident, extend an invitation to come to America on a State Department exchange program, and then say: "But first you have to come into the embassy and get fingerprinted."
Give us your tired, your poor and your properly fingerprinted.

Serhat Guvenc, a lecturer at Bilgi University in Istanbul, was actually flying to the U.S. on Sept. 11, 2001, and was diverted to Canada. He's been avoiding the U.S. since because of all the already intrusive visa requirements. "All the new measures the U.S. introduced intimidated me," he said. "In Turkey, unless you are a criminal or a potential criminal, you would never be asked to leave your fingerprints. It is kind of humiliating. It's uncomfortable."

A Turkish columnist friend, Cengiz Candar, told me: "I was traveling to Iraq recently and my very old mother was very, very worried. I told her, 'Don't worry, Momma, I've been there before. It is very safe, as long as you know what to do.' She said to me, 'Stay away from the Americans.' "

Is that what mothers will tell their kids from now on? I don't know. Many people would still line up for America if we charged $1,000 per visa and demanded their dental X-rays. But others, especially young Europeans, are thinking twice because they don't want the hassle. Better to go to France or Germany. Add to this the shrinking capacity of U.S. diplomats to reach out and, in 20 more years, we could wake up and find that we've gone from America the accessible to America the isolated. The only Americans foreigners will meet will be those wearing U.S. Army uniforms and body armor.

We need to figure out a better system. Because where birds don't fly, ideas don't fly, friendships don't fly and mutual understanding never takes off.
It does make one think, does it not? Good, because someone has to "think" the world out of this global craziness. Guns, bomb and ever higher and thicker walls, both literal and metaphorical, are obviously not the solution, but really only more of the problem.

The New York Times
 

4:25 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




The Sumbitches Are At It Again

These dangerous fools are going to be with us for a very long time; there are too many reasons for their existence. We need to understand that you don't win a "war" against global terrorism. You stop them when you can; you kill them when you can; you arrest them when you can. But there will just be others to take their place. Actually, it is no different than normal crime prevention, or apprehension after the crime is committed. What we absolutely cannot do is let the criminals change how we live our lives and govern our society. If we do, they have won no matter how many we capture or kill.
CAIRO, Egypt - A voice purported to be Al-Qaida's second-in-command warns in an audiotape that the terror group will target Americans 'in their homeland' and will drive the U.S. military from bases in the Middle East.

Excerpts of the 10-minute tape were broadcast Friday by satellite television channel Al-Jazeera. It said the recording was made by Ayman al-Zawahri, Osama bin Laden's deputy.

The channel said it received the tape earlier Friday through the mail.

In Washington, the CIA said it will analyze the tape to determine its authenticity.

The speaker on the tape, whose voice resembled al-Zawahri's, mentioned a visit to Iraq by U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz — which took place in late October. The speaker did not mention last weekend's capture of ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

The speaker also denied that the resistance U.S. troops are facing in Iraq comes mainly from Saddam loyalists. He said the resistance fighters were "holy warriors."

"It is a real and authentic holy war of the Iraqi people," he said.

The speaker noted that two years have passed since the battle of Tora Bora, a major clash between U.S.-led forces and al-Qaida fighters in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan.

"Two years after Tora Bora, the American bloodshed started to increase in Iraq, and the Americans have become unable to defend themselves or even defend their big criminals such as Wolfowitz," he said.

He was referring to an Oct. 26 rocket attack that barraged the Baghdad hotel where Wolfowitz was staying. A U.S. colonel was killed in that attack, and Wolfowitz escaped unharmed.

"We are still chasing the Americans and their allies everywhere, even in their homeland," he said.

The weeks before and after the rocket attack on Wolfowitz saw an upsurge in attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq — making November the bloodiest month for U.S. forces since the fall of Saddam. Attacks lessened as the U.S. military launched an offensive in late November. Violence has continued after Saddam's capture on Dec. 13.

Al-Jazeera's newscaster quoted the tape as saying: "Those renegades who offered the Americans military bases and support to kill Muslims should prepare for the day of settling scores because the Americans are ready to flee."

Montasser el-Zayat, an Egyptian lawyer who knows al-Zawahri, heard the tape and said it was undoubtedly al-Zawahri's voice.

El-Zayat spent three years in an Egyptian prison with al-Zawahri in the early 1980s on charges related to President Anwar Sadat's 1981 assassination.
A.P.
  

2:40 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Saturday, December 20, 2003

Kristof's "The China Threat?": A Response

Nicholas Kristof asks: Is China a Threat to the Rest of the World? in his column in today's The New York Times. It is a continuation of a series of columns he is writing on his journey of exploration of the "New China," along with a reader's forum on the series in his semi-weblog "Kristof Responds." His major thrust today is concern over the "nationalism" he finds stirring in the belly of many if not most young Chinese people, university students in particular, which he finds directed most openly towards Japan and the Japanese people. In his argument, he mentions two very recent events as examples of this phenomenon: An ugly, and outrageous, incident over a skit performed by Japanese exchange students at a university in Xian in the early part of this semester; and the arrests and adjudication in a case involving several hundred Japanese businessmen and their mega tryst with several hundred Chinese prostitutes at a hotel in the southern port city of Zhuhai (for which two Chinese citizens received life sentences just this past week). Readers of these pages and other China-based web logs will be familiar with both of these aberrations. His third example is the ever-upward creeping revisionism of the death toll of the Japanese atrocity in 1937, commonly known as the "Rape of Nanjing."

Being a visiting professor at one of China's elite universities, without qualification, I can attest to the accuracy of Mr. Kristof's underlying findings. The loathing of Japan and, to a lesser extent, the Japanese people, is quite palpable. It manifests itself whenever Japan, and things Japanese, are the focus of class lectures or discussions, any time Japan is in the news, and most vehemently in private conversation.

I will offer but one graphic example—out of hundreds that come to mind from my past two years in China. During a student union-organized talent contest at another university in south east China where I taught last year, when a Japanese student, a boy, took to the stage to sing a favorite Chinese pop song, female Chinese students sitting with me in the audience immediately said things such as: "Ugh! Look at that Japanese nose!" There were other comments about his person, but that one is quite representative. Then, paradoxically, as soon as he started singing—extremely well, perhaps even at a professional level of talent—they listened with rapt attention, displaying all of the universal body language of an audience caught up in the enjoyment of a musical performance. They informed me in hushed tones that he was the best singer on campus—out of an enrollment of almost 20,000—and that they had enjoyed his singing on other occasions. They predicted he would win the contest, easily.

When he did win, there was significant, polite applause. However, as we further discussed his performance and the contest afterwards, while they were all objective about his unquestioned talent and how much they appreciated his performance, particularly that he had sung, in flawless Chinese they told me, one of their most favorite pop songs, there was that intonation again, that inflection of loathing behind their objective evaluation of his singing. As I have stated, this is but one of many, many such incidents demonstrating the anti-Japanese sentiment that is widespread among Chinese students.

Where I somewhat disagree with Mr. Kristof, is in what it actually means, and that it is fore-shadowing a potential military confrontation with Japan. I also disagree on how much of it is orchestrated by the central government as a way of using "nationalism" as a cohesive factor in holding China together as ideology increasingly diminishes with the rush into capitalism and, yes, the beginnings of a form of "Democracy with Chinese Characteristics" which is fact and not just dissident radicalism. If it is possible for most people in the west to understand, the Communist Party of China itself is a burgeoning democracy, with peacefully competing "wings" left, right and center, amongst the 60 million party members.

It is these two engines that are driving China, and also holding it together. While they often exercise their prejudice of Japan, what the young Chinese people spend most of their time doing is chasing what we used to call the "American dream": a good life that includes a home of their own, a car of their own, a good education for their one child, vacations that include travel, and of course the good, steady job that provides for all of these things. Going to war with anyone seriously gums up that future and they know it.

They talk about just that subject, often, in my "Media & Foreign Policy" classes. The only war that they can even abstractly agree is worth waging is over an actual declaration of independence by Taiwan. Upon that, there is almost 100 percent agreement. But only in the abstract. In practice, when I try to make them deal with the reality that bad politics all too often leads to wars out of inertia and unintended consequences, they shudder, and pull back emotionally and say, "It will not happen. The government will make a deal."

No, the loathing of Japan is of Japanese making—the humiliation of everything that transpired from the Sino-Japanese War of 1895 through 1945, is all too real and still in their face. The victims of the Nazi Holocaust received many apologies and eventually even reparations. The Chinese can't even get an apology out of Japan, much less reparations, or even much help in paying for finding and disposing of all the chemical weapons caches that the Japanese left scattered throughout China after their defeat in 1945. It has been all but impossible to get the Japanese to even admit to most of the atrocities they visited upon China.

Quite frankly, I find it difficult to forgive, much less forget, what Japan did during its "militarist" years—which would still be going on if they had not miscalculated and brought a world war upon themselves by attacking United States and British territories in early December, 1941. If Japan had stopped with its East Asian conquests, the history of the second half of the 20th Century in Asia would be vastly different. The anti-Japanese feeling is not dangerous, and it is not wholly unreasonable when recent history is still so damning. Of course, I would be remiss if I did not mention that part of this hatred lies in another very human emotion: envy. The Chinese have difficulty with the notion that the country which so ravaged Asia only a short time ago could so quickly become an economic, technologic and world affairs giant, and that they did this almost solely through a "gift" from the United States with whom they had just waged such a bitter and costly war, when China had fought bravely in alliance with the United States in that war but received only condemnation and isolation as its reward.

Another reason I do not believe that China is a military threat to Japan, or any of its other neighbors, is that while they may viscerally loathe Japan, they are not afraid of Japan, or even mistrustful of Japan. Who my students fear and mistrust is America. While they love Americans, and almost all things American, they truly believe that an administration such as George W. Bush's would in fact attack China in a heartbeat if it was in any way politically or geopolitically advantageous to what the neocons might one day believe to be American interests.

No amount of explaining how that is all but impossible, even for this administration, can dissuade them, and many of their Chinese professors, from their deep and basic mistrust of American unilateralism. And this is not just since that term became a buzz word after 9/11 and Bush's strike-first doctrine. They have feared American unilateralism all of their young lives. You see, Chinese students study a great deal more history than American students. The Korean war is not a "forgotten war" to them. And the war in Vietnam isn't something they culturally want to forget as do American students. They know that war well; they know that our air force came all too close to unloading B-52s on Hainan Island, China's southern most province and its "Hawaii," only about a 100 miles of South China Sea away from North Vietnam.

This is probably not the kind of thing Mr. Kristof and other Americans want to hear—I damn sure did not like it when I first became aware of it (which was about a day after arriving in China). But it is fact: America is the only country Chinese young adults fear and mistrust. Japan they can hate, and even haze and all but terrorize its visiting citizens when they are not extremely careful regarding China's over sensitivity towards Japan's behavior during the first half of the 20th Century. They can do this because they do not fear or mistrust them; they just don't like them.

On the other hand, we Americans are treated with almost embarrassingly special attention. As long as our students are testing well and getting into graduate schools in America and Great Britain, we can almost get away with murder. Being an American "Foreign Expert" in China is a ticket to a life of special favors in almost every sector of life. We are loved, feted, wined, dined and lavished with presents and invitations home.

But our government? Particularly this government? They don't trust it any farther than they can throw it. And they fear it greatly. It wasn't just one student who wondered aloud that if we could force the acknowledged leader of a country like Iraq into a rat-infested hole in the ground for weapons of mass destruction he did not have, or for supporting terrorists who were not in country much before he went into that hole, what might we Americans do to the leaders of a country that absolutely does have weapons of mass destruction, a country that has made serious military threats against a runaway province that America is sworn by law, not treaty, to defend? A country that actively engaged in combat (mostly as "advisors") against the American military in Vietnam, the only real war—casualties counted in the many thousands over almost a decade of full bore war—this administration's generation has experienced. A country that humiliated the American military in Korea only a handful of years after that same American military had defeated Germany and Japan in World War II. (In other words, the only country to have twice "defeated" the American military in a span of less than 25 years, when no other nation has defeated it once in over 200 years.) A country that will not revalue its currency upon demand, or back off from competitive, aggressive trading policies, also upon demand. A country that, according to many of the voices these students hear coming from American governmental organizations and its press, is a first class "abuser of human rights," and a denier of religious freedoms—this truly resonates because it comes from an administration that has placed Christianity as one of its principle doctrines to export forcefully throughout the "developing nations" of the world. A country that is the last great Communist state still standing and prospering against all odds placed against it by the hawks that are again in the ascendancy in the United States. The only country that could not only threaten the national security of the United States if it chose to, but perhaps even defeat it militarily—although in so doing they fortunately understand that it would probably end civilization as we know it.

This recitation could go on at an even more tedious length, but surely you get the idea. Yes, Chinese young people, and their government, perhaps too much relish rubbing Japan's nose into the shameful history it refuses to fully acknowledge. But they and their government are not now or in the future a military threat to Japan. I think upon reflection, Mr. Kristof might rethink his point and come to another conclusion other than his worries about China's perpetual feeling of victim hood leading it to make war upon Japan, even over some long disputed islands. The Chinese people do need to get over it, and in time they will, even though they have much victim hood to get over—say, from 1840 until only a few years ago. China wasn't flying a spy plane along our borders forcing an American pilot to crash into the sea and drown. It wasn't an American embassy that was accidentally bombed in 1999. (What do you suppose would be this administration's reaction to either of those reversed scenarios?)

My worry is that China just might indeed be a threat to the United States, not Japan. This worry is because I know that they do not hate America or Americans as much as most other non-European nations; this worry is because they fear and mistrust our government. And that is the stuff of wars. Atrocities are the stuff of hatred after a war starts, or ends. What we must write and talk more about are the reasons not to fear or mistrust America. America should be doing everything it can to make sure China believes that we are her friend—for the duration.
SHANGHAI

Is China a threat to the rest of the world?

Perhaps, for rising powers have always spelled trouble for their neighbors, even in the case of democracies like Athens (the Peloponnesian War) and the U.S. (we managed to invade Canada and Mexico in the 1800's.

Yet what worries me about China isn't its upgrade of its nuclear arsenal and its military acquisitions to project power beyond its borders. China's military doctrine is cautious, and President Hu Jintao is leading China toward an increasingly constructive role in international affairs.

No, what troubles me, as one who loves China and is rooting for it to succeed, is the growing nationalism that the government has cultivated among young people.

Americans saw a hint of that when enraged mobs attacked our embassy in Beijing after the U.S. bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in 1999, and when Chinese students reacted to the horror of 9/11 by filling Internet chat rooms with delighted cheers of shuang — roughly equivalent to "Wow, so cool!"

But it's in attitudes toward the Japanese that we see a leading indicator of the instability that blind nationalism can cause. This fall, three Japanese students in the central Chinese city of Xian performed a bawdy skit, wearing red bras over T-shirts and throwing the stuffing at their audience — and word spread that the Riben guizi, Japanese devils, were mocking China. So a mob of 1,000 people rampaged through town, looking for any Japanese to attack.

In the same vein, fury had erupted around the country a few weeks earlier because of reports that Japanese businessmen had engaged in an orgy with Chinese prostitutes in the southern city of Zhuhai. The Chinese rage was hypocritical in a country where hundreds of thousands of prostitutes blatantly ply their wares — in Zhengzhou last year, an army of prostitutes practically battered down my hotel room door as I cowered inside.

Even the Chinese recounting of history has become hysterical. Take the Rape of Nanjing in 1937, which was so brutal that there's no need to exaggerate it. One appalled witness in the thick of the killing, John Rabe, put the death toll at 50,000 to 60,000. Another, Miner Searle Bates, estimated that 12,000 civilians and 28,000 soldiers had been killed. The Chinese delegate to the League of Nations at the time put the civilian toll at 20,000. A Communist Chinese newspaper of the period put it at 42,000.

Yet China proclaims, based on accounts that stand little scrutiny, that 300,000 or more were killed. Such hyperbole abuses history as much as the denial by Japanese rightists that there was any Rape of Nanjing at all. It nurtures nationalism by defining China as a victim state, the world's punching bag, that must be more aggressive in defending its interests.

What does this add up to? The rising nationalism warps Chinese decision-making and risks conflicts with Japan over, for example, the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu islands. It also forces the government to be tough in international disputes — particularly in the case of Taiwan, where a miscalculation could conceivably lead to a war with the U.S.

"Some Chinese military leaders are saying that Japan is secretly behind Taiwan's moves toward a referendum and independence," warned a well-connected Chinese who knows that this is nonsense. "They say it is all a Japanese plot to steal Taiwan from China."

The reasons for rising Chinese nationalism are complex and include a justified anger at Japan's reluctance to apologize for war atrocities. But one factor is the way the Chinese government has been pushing nationalist buttons in an effort to create a new national glue to hold the country together as ideology dissolves. By constantly excoriating the Japanese nationalists of the 1930's, they are emulating them.

One of the lessons of 1930's Japan and Germany is that ferocious nationalism is a real global security risk, and it's a matter that the U.S. and other countries should respectfully raise with President Hu. To their credit, some farsighted Chinese intellectuals are calling for changing China's "victim mentality," recognizing that it is one of the greatest obstacles to China's maturing into the global leader that it should be.

Meanwhile, we in the West are bashing China, unfairly and demagogically, over its exports. But we're missing the risk in China's rise. The menace isn't in its trade policies, but in its nationalist psychology.
The New York Times
  

11:16 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Rummy and Saddam and the WMDs We Sold Him to Gas and Poison Thousands

What moral authority? Not this administration: My enemy's enemy is my friend, has been a Republican Party/Right-wing policy since Ike at least. And what a rogue's gallery of "friends" we have maintained over the years. Saddam, for instance, needed to be maintained with a supply of ingredients for chemical and biological weapons. We were only too happy to oblige since the folks getting zapped were Iranians, never mind that they were women and children, they were Iranians. Gas 'em, with our blessing, Rummy's trips were meant to convey.
Donald H. Rumsfeld went to Baghdad in March 1984 with instructions to deliver a private message about weapons of mass destruction: that the United States' public criticism of Iraq for using chemical weapons would not derail Washington's attempts to forge a better relationship, according to newly declassified documents.

Rumsfeld, then President Ronald Reagan's special Middle East envoy, was urged to tell Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz that the U.S. statement on chemical weapons, or CW, "was made strictly out of our strong opposition to the use of lethal and incapacitating CW, wherever it occurs," according to a cable to Rumsfeld from then-Secretary of State George P. Shultz.

The statement, the cable said, was not intended to imply a shift in policy, and the U.S. desire "to improve bilateral relations, at a pace of Iraq's choosing," remained "undiminished." "This message bears reinforcing during your discussions."

The documents, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the nonprofit National Security Archive, provide new, behind-the-scenes details of U.S. efforts to court Iraq as an ally even as it used chemical weapons in its war with Iran.

An earlier trip by Rumsfeld to Baghdad, in December 1983, has been widely reported as having helped persuade Iraq to resume diplomatic ties with the United States. An explicit purpose of Rumsfeld's return trip in March 1984, the once-secret documents reveal for the first time, was to ease the strain created by a U.S. condemnation of chemical weapons. ...

But throughout 1980s, while Iraq was fighting a prolonged war with Iran, the United States saw Hussein's government as an important ally and bulwark against the militant Shiite extremism seen in the 1979 revolution in Iran. Washington worried that the Iranian example threatened to destabilize friendly monarchies in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Jordan.

Publicly, the United States maintained neutrality during the eight-year Iran-Iraq war, which began in 1980.

Privately, however, the administrations of Reagan and George H.W. Bush sold military goods to Iraq, including poisonous chemicals and deadly biological agents, worked to stop the flow of weapons to Iran, and undertook discreet diplomatic initiatives, such as the two Rumsfeld trips to Baghdad, to improve relations with Hussein.

Tom Blanton, executive director of the National Security Archives, a Washington-based research center, said the secret support for Hussein offers a lesson for U.S. foreign relations in the post-Sept. 11 world.

"The dark corners of diplomacy deserve some scrutiny, and people working in places like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan and Uzbekistan deserve this kind of scrutiny, too, because the relations we're having with dictators today will produce Saddams tomorrow."

Shultz, in his instructions to Rumsfeld, underscored the confusion that the conflicting U.S. signals were creating for Iraq.

"Iraqi officials have professed to be at a loss to explain our actions as measured against our stated objectives," he wrote. "As with our CW statement, their temptation is to give up rational analysis and retreat to the line that U.S. policies are basically anti-Arab and hostage to the desires of Israel."
The New York Times
 

2:14 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Friday, December 19, 2003

Saddam - the can of worms

Many politicos, especially the over-60 of the species, in their hearts are not celebrating the capture of Saddam Hussein. Of the "Dead or Alive" choice of outcomes for the de-throned sadist, the "Dead" was the most appealing to that crowd--and it is a lot bigger than you might imagine. George Herbert Walker Bush (41), Rummy, Cheney the Great, Ronnie and Nancy, to name only a very few, are certainly in that number. Read why:
However, despite the carefully choreographed announcement by US civilian administrator Paul Bremer of the fallen dictator's discovery in a concealed cellar close to his home town of Tikrit, there are some leading figures within the Bush administration who would have preferred Saddam to have gone down fighting to the death in the same way as his sons Uday and Qusay did in late July. A dead dictator would have dispensed with the need for a public trial - the prospect of which is deeply troubling for some within the Bush administration.

Few are naïve enough to believe that international politics is anything but a dirty business that may require co-operation with repressive and sordid regimes. However, putting Saddam on trial for crimes committed throughout his long term of office is likely to invite the defence to raise a whole raft of awkward questions about the West's role - and particularly that of the USA - in bringing Saddam to power in the Iraqi coup d'etat of 1968 and in sustaining him, often covertly, during the Iran-Iraq war of 1981-1988.
Janes.com
  

11:36 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Who Screwed Up? Or Is It All Hindsight?

Okay, it's a real story, it's in The New York Times, and not just a Murdochian Post/Fox cabal of unprincipled Hacks & Rags. But still, unless names are named, and connections are made, a listing of what "might have been" is just that. And so far that is what we have. However, Governor Kean promises that it will get serious when the full report comes out. We shall see.
WASHINGTON, Dec. 18 — The chairman of a federal commission investigating the Sept. 11 terror attacks said on Thursday that information long available to the public showed that the attacks could have been prevented had a group of low- and mid-level government employees at the F.B.I., the immigration service and elsewhere done their jobs properly.

The chairman, Thomas H. Kean, former Republican governor of New Jersey, said in a telephone interview that his investigators were still studying whether senior Bush administration officials should also share the blame. He said it was too early to suggest that White House aides or other senior officials had been derelict.

"There were people at the borders who let these people in even though they didn't have proper papers to get into this country," Mr. Kean said of immigration inspectors who allowed the hijackers into the United States.

"There were visa people who let these people in," he said. "There were F.B.I. people who, when they got reports from Phoenix and Minnesota and elsewhere, didn't think they were important enough to buck up to the higher-ups. There were security officers at the airports who let these people onto airplanes even though they were carrying materials that weren't allowed on airplanes."

Mr. Kean said an interview that was broadcast Wednesday by CBS News was being misinterpreted as suggesting that he was calling for the departure of senior administration officials.

"We don't have the evidence to do that yet," he said. "We're doing the work. The report may in fact end up suggesting that people are the subject of some serious criticism."

Mr. Kean, whose bipartisan 10-member panel is to issue a final report in May, said he was surprised that some midlevel officials at the F.B.I. and in federal immigration agencies had not been removed from their jobs, given errors before the Sept. 11 attacks that may have allowed the hijacking plot to go undetected.

"It surprises me that if there were serious mistakes, there haven't been any consequences of those mistakes," he said.
The New York Times
  

11:17 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




The Courts Give Us Back Our Rights, Temporarily

Shrub & Twigs Are Dethroned, the Courts Gave Us Back Our Freedom--for the Moment. But it will all get the 5-4 boot from the Supremes. It is refreshing, nonetheless, that there are still real Americans sitting on Appellate courts; although both of these were splits--and fly in the face of opposite rulings from other Federal Appeals circuits.
WASHINGTON, Dec. 18 — A divided federal appeals court in New York ruled on Thursday that President Bush lacked the authority to detain indefinitely a United States citizen arrested on American soil on suspicion of terrorism simply by declaring him "an enemy combatant. "

Within hours, a second federal appeals court, based in San Francisco, also in a divided ruling, declared that the administration's policy of imprisoning some 660 noncitizens captured in the Afghan war on a naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, without access to United States legal protections was unconstitutional as well as a violation of international law.

The twin blows to the underpinnings of the administration's elaborate legal strategy erected after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks make it all the more likely that the Supreme Court will have the final say on matters that the administration had argued did not belong in the courts in the first place. Just last month, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case of the detainees at Guantánamo and are widely expected to rule as well on the issues raised in the case of Jose Padilla, the American declared "an enemy combatant."

The court is expected to announce next week whether it will hear a related case involving another person held alongside Mr. Padilla in the naval brig in Charleston, S.C., named Yaser Esam Hamdi. Mr. Hamdi, who is believed to be a United States citizen as well as a Saudi, was arrested in Afghanistan and is being held as an enemy combatant, an action that was upheld by an appeals court based in Richmond, Va. ...

"The president, acting alone, possesses no inherent constitutional authority to detain American citizens seized within the United States, away from the zone of combat, as enemy combatants," said the majority composed of Judges Rosemary S. Pooler and Barrington D. Parker Jr. ...

In a strong dissent, Judge Richard C. Wesley said he believed the president had the power to "thwart acts of belligerency on U.S. soil."

Judge Wesley called it startling that the majority would say the president lacked authority to detain a citizen terrorist who was "dangerously close" to putting Americans in peril. ...

While the Guantánamo situation has provoked anger both in the United States and abroad, the issues raised in the New York ruling were, if anything, more contentious. The action of detaining United States citizens arrested on American soil as enemy combatants and consequently keeping them from the usual legal protections Americans enjoy had been treated as especially alarming by civil liberties advocates.

"This is by far the biggest legal setback the administration has faced in conducting its war on terrorism," said David Cole, a law professor at Georgetown University and the author of a recent book on the subject. "That's because this is the furthest they've gone out on a limb. They had essentially asserted that the president had unchecked authority to label U.S. citizens as enemy combatants anywhere in the United States and lock them up."

Mr. Padilla has been held incommunicado for 18 months at a Navy brig in Charleston. The court majority said he should be entitled to full constitutional protections, including access to his lawyers. His lawyers have not been permitted to see him since President Bush declared him an enemy combatant in June 2002.

"As this court sits only a short distance from where the World Trade Center once stood, we are as keenly aware as anyone of the threat Al Qaeda poses to our country and of the responsibilities the president and law enforcement officials bear for protecting the nation," Judges Parker and Pooler wrote.

"But presidential authority does not exist in a vacuum and this case involves not whether those responsibilities should be aggressively pursued but whether the president is obligated" to share them with Congress.

The majority said that a law known as the Non-Detention Act provides that "No citizen shall be imprisoned or otherwise detained by the United States except pursuant to an Act of Congress." The court said that the joint Congressional resolution authorizing military action and operations against terrorism after Sept. 11 "contains no language authorizing detention."

In the ruling on the Guantánamo detainees by the appeals court in San Francisco, two judges on a three-judge panel similarly ruled against the Bush administration with the third dissenting.

The majority opinion, written by Judge Stephen Reinhardt and joined by Judge Milton I. Shadur, rested its conclusion on the notion that the naval base at Guantánamo is not part of Cuba as the government has contended and thus outside of United States jurisdiction. The opinion said that Guantánamo was clearly under the territorial jurisdiction of the United States and thus the plaintiff, Salim Gherebi, a Libyan, is entitled to the protections of United States law.
The New York Times
  

8:57 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




9/11 Attack Was Preventable?

Whoa. This will grab some attention. Preventable by whom? Are we talking hindsight here? Is this a Murdochian tease-lead and quotes out of context? Something tells me Gov. Kean isn't going to make these kind of comments to a Murdoch ragsheet. This is New York Times' material, or the Washington Post at least. But who knows--with some folks there is just no accounting for taste or a sense of history.
The chairman of the federal commission investigating Sept. 11 (search) said Wednesday the terrorist attacks could have been prevented.

Tom Kean said his 10-member commission was wrapping up its report.

"As you read the report, you're going to have a pretty clear idea of what wasn't done and what should have been done," he told one television station.

"I mean, this was not something that had to happen."

The comments were the first by Kean, former Republican governor of New Jersey, blaming public officials for not anticipating the attacks.

"There are people that, certainly, if I was doing the job, who would certainly not be in the position they were in at the time because they failed," he said.

"They simply failed."

Kean didn't name names but it has previously been reported that the Bush administration received intelligence warnings that provided hints about Usama bin Laden's intentions before Sept. 11.

Kean's report is not due until May, but he promises major revelations as early as next month in public testimony - possibly from President Bush and Bill Clinton. "This is a very, very important part of history and we've got to tell it right," he said.
The New York Post.com
  

12:40 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Thursday, December 18, 2003

We Grieve, But We Cannot Quit, Yet

U.S. Soldier Killed in Ambush in Iraq

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 18 — An American soldier was killed in an ambush in Baghdad on Wednesday, the United States military said today, in the first American combat-related casualty since the former Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein, was captured.

A United States Central Command statement said that the soldier from the First Armored Division was ambushed while on patrol in the Iraqi capital. Another soldier and an Iraqi interpreter were wounded, it said.

"The one this morning was the first since his capture," a military spokesman said by telephone, referring to Mr. Hussein and the death reported today.

The insurgency against the American occupation in Iraq has shown few signs of abating since Mr. Hussein was uncovered hiding in an underground hole dug into the courtyard of a farm in the northern city of Tikrit, Mr. Hussein's hometown.
In The New York Times...
  

11:50 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Friedman The Wise

Thomas L. Friedman has staked out perhaps the most unique position of all major pundits on the subject of the war in Iraq: The true liberal who sides with Bush and Blair on the "good" war. He has done it exceedingly well, with exceeding wisdom, insight, compassion and just enough zeal to move us with his words. Below are three paragraphs from his column in today's The New York Times:
We have entered a moment of truth in Iraq. With Saddam now gone, there are no more excuses for the political drift there. We are now going to get the answer to the big question I had before the war: Is Iraq the way it is because Saddam was the way he was? Or was Saddam the way he was because Iraq is the way it is — ungovernable except by an iron fist?

We have to give Iraqis every chance to prove it is the first, not the second. For starters, I hope we don't hear any more chants from Iraqis of "Death to Saddam." He's now as good as dead. It's time for Iraqis to stop telling us whom they want to die. Now we have to hear how they want to live and whom they want to live with. The Godfather is dead. But what will be his legacy? Is there a good Iraqi national family that can and wants to live together, or will there just be more little godfathers competing with one another? From my own visits, I think the good family scenario for Iraq is very possible, if we can provide security — but only Iraqis can tell us for sure by how they behave.

The way to determine whether Iraqis are willing to form the good family is how they use and understand their newfound freedom. The reason Iraqi politics has not jelled up to now is not only because of Saddam's lingering shadow. It is because each of the major blocs — the Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites — has been pushing maximalist demands for what it thinks is its rightful place in shaping and running a new Iraq. The Iraqi ship of state has broken up on these rocks many times before.
In The New York Times...
 

11:34 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




"My Father’s Name Was James Strom Thurmond"

For those of us who fought the civil rights wars in the Jim Crow south, particularly those of us who were native southerners, therefore "traitors" in the eyes of our friends and neighbors, this story resonates deeply and with great complexity. It also needs little commentary. Surely you know of it; I will just post the beginning of the article, and hope you click onto it in full.
COLUMBIA, S.C., Dec. 17 — Essie Mae Washington-Williams began simply, "My father's name was James Strom Thurmond. "

With that statement at a news conference in the capital of the state where her father made his political name, the 78-year-old retired teacher from Los Angeles spoke publicly for the first time about being the mixed-race daughter of a legendary white political figure who built his career on a segregationist platform.

"I was sensitive about his well-being, his career and his family," Ms. Williams said. "I never wanted to do anything to harm him."

Ever since she was a girl, Ms. Williams tried to bury the awkward truth that she was the daughter of a black maid and a young teacher who would become the longest serving senator in United States history. "My children deserved to know where they came from," she said. "I am not bitter. I am not angry."
For the rest of this moving, provocative, evocative, troubling, gentle, well-told story: The New York Times...
  

9:48 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




The "Taiwan Issue" In Perspective

For an in-depth look at the "Taiwan Issue" from the mainland perspective, give a click and learn something you might not have known before, or at least access a new way of looking at something you thought you knew thoroughly.
Let's talk economy instead of rhetoric
In China Daily
  

9:06 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




It's Tit for Tat

China is learning how to play the international game, Tit for Tat:
China blasts US trade probe, starts own

China on Wednesday criticized a U.S. anti-dumping probe of its furniture exports and said it was launching its own investigation of imports from the United States and elsewhere of a chemical used in water treatment.

The moves by Beijing come amid a series of U.S. actions to restrict Chinese imports.

The Commerce Ministry in a statement on its Web site that the U.S. probe of Chinese furniture trade would "definitely exert a negative impact" on trade relations.

Antidumping probes are generally aimed at determining if a country is selling a product outside its borders at prices below the cost of making them in hopes of capturing market share.

Ministry spokesman Chong Quan said the probe violates U.S. law and World Trade Organization rules. It is the biggest antidumping probe ever conducted by Washington into Chinese imports and could affect trade worth $1 billion a year.

"It is hoped that the United States could face up to the simple fact of China's development of a market economy," Chong said in a statement.
Read the rest of this story in China Daily...
  

8:46 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




China Is Fighting The Same Kind of Terrorism As The West

While not crying about the problem--which would be really un-Chinese--China has been suffering its problems with Islamic terrorist groups for years. Now, for the first time, a detailed report and analysis of the magnitude of the problem has been published. Read it; we are certainly not alone in this fight. The Chinese central government is serious about combating the same kind of terrorism the west is because Chinese citizens and soldiers are also dying from the plague of Islamic fundamentalism.
China's Ministry of Public Security Monday issued a list of the first batch of identified "Eastern Turkistan" terrorist organizations and 11 members of the groups.

The identified "Eastern Turkistan" terrorist organizations are: the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM), the Eastern Turkistan Liberation Organization (ETLO), the World Uygur Youth Congress (WUYC) and the Eastern Turkistan Information Center (ETIC).

The 11 identified "Eastern Turkistan" terrorists are: Hasan Mahsum, Muhanmetemin Hazret, Dolqun Isa, Abudujelili Kalakash, Abudukadir Yapuquan, Abudumijit Muhammatkelim, Abudula Kariaji, Abulimit Turxun, Huadaberdi Haxerbik, Yasen Muhammat, and Atahan Abuduhani.

This is the first time China issued a list of terrorist organizations and terrorists.

"East Turkistan" committed countless crimes

"East Turkistan" terrorist organizations pose a grave threat to people's lives and property, and are an important part of international terrorist forces.

Incomplete statistics show that from 1990 to 2001, the "East Turkistan" terrorist forces inside and outside Chinese territory were responsible for over 200 terrorist incidents in Xinjiang, resulting in the deaths of 162 people of all ethnic groups, including grass-roots officials and religious personnel, and injuries to more than 440 people. Among these alarming terrorist activities much is contribution from the four terrorist organizations identified this time-

From early 1998 to late 1999, the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM) set up many secret workshops in the Hotan Prefecture of Xinjiang. They made 5,000-odd bombs and recruited 1,000-strong members, and committed a series of major violent crimes, killing six innocent people. On June 18, 1999, they shot policemen in Hotan County.

In May 1998, the East Turkistan Liberation Organization (ETLO) committed the "5.23" arson case in Urumqi, and then carried out bombings in the Osh area of Kyrgyzstan; in May 2000, ETLO elements attacked Chinese officials who came to Bishkek to help investigate a fire case, killing one and injuring another; the killers fled to Hazakhstan, and killed in September the same year two Hazakhstan policemen who were performing duty; on June 29, 2002, they killed Chinese diplomat Wang Jianping in Bishkek.

The "East Turkistan Youth Alliance", a terrorist organization affiliated to the "World Uygur Youth Congress" (WUYC), since its founding in 1993, has engaged in plans of assassinating Party, government and military leaders of the autonomous region, damaging railroads and bridges, bombing, attacking Chinese agencies in foreign countries and disrupting China's borders with India, Tadzhikistan and Afghanistan. The organization also masterminded two bombings in Xinjiang's Kashi and Shache, killing two and injuring 22 altogether.

The "East Turkistan Information Center" has long been engaged, through various means of media, especially the Internet, in spreading, preaching and instigating terrorism, extremism and splittism, calling for "jihad" (holy war) by violent and terrorist means. They openly called on Muslins in China to stage terrorist events targeting kindergarten, school and government building of the Han nationality by means of bombing and poisoning. In March 2003, they schemed a bombing on the railway linking Gansu's Lanzhou and Xinjiang's Hami.

Among the 11 terrorists identified this time, three were already subjects of Interpol red notices and Chinese police had requested Interpol issue red notices on the other eight. Colluding with international terrorist organizations is another characteristic of these people.

ETIM has a coexistence relationship with bin Laden's al-Qaeda organization, and receives support from Taliban and al-Qaeda for training terrorist fighters. ETIM sent its men to bases in Afghanistan for military training, and then dispatched them to slip into Xinjiang to set up gangs for terrorist activities including bombing, assassinating and poisoning.
The report goes on at significant length with significant news for westerners who almost certainly have no idea that China has been fighting a terrorist insurgency of Islamic separatists financed, trained and directed by the same people and groups the west has for a long time now. Please read it, it's important to know whose side China is on in this fight for the survival of progress.

The People's Daily...
  

8:13 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




China Says It Did Not Assist Iraq Air Defense System

Not us, says the Chinese Foreign Ministry. No way. Nope, Uh huh!
China's Foreign Ministry Tuesday denounced a report which claimed some Chinese exports helped Saddam Hussein design an air defence plan against the allied forces of the United States and Britain between 2002 and early 2003.

"The report is groundless and irresponsible," said foreign ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao, during yesterday's regular news briefing.

He said the Chinese Government has implemented the resolutions of the United Nations on the Iraq issue all along.

"The Chinese side has never had contacts in any form with the Saddam (Hussein) government in the military field since 1990 when the Gulf crisis broke out."
The People's Daily
  

7:22 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Tough Justice; Life For Sex

This should make you think twice about breaking the law in China--particularly if you also embarrass the nation in the process. Yikes!
The notorious mass prostitution case relating to a group of Japanese tourists in September in Zhuhai was adjudicated Wednesday, with two Chinese defendants sentenced to life imprisonment and another 12 sentenced to 2 to 15 years in prison for organizing prostitution or assisting the organization of prostitution.

The Zhuhai Intermediate People's Court made the verdict after its trial of first instance.

Chinese police has also requested the Interpol to issue red notices targeting three Japanese citizens involved in the crime.

The three Japanese, namely Hirobe Isao, Takahashi Shunji and Fukunaga Koji, were accused of organizing prostitution for over 200 Japanese tourists during their stay at a hotel in Zhuhai during Sept. 16 to 18, police sources said.

Chinese Foreign Ministry has made representations with the Japanese side, requesting assistance to the Chinese police for the capture of the three suspects.

The three-day party, allegedly involving hundreds of Chinese prostitutes, ended on Sept. 18, and triggered wide anger among the Chinese public as it coincided with the sensitive anniversary date of a 1931 Japanese attack on Northeast China, an event marking the start of Japan's invasion and occupation of China.

According to the court hearing, Ye Xiang and Ming Zhu, employees of an unspecified Zhuhai hotel, two prime offenders, were sentenced to life imprisonment and all their property was confiscated.

Liu Xuejing and Zhang Junying, another two organizers from the hotel, were sentenced to 15 year's imprisonment and 12 years respectively and both were also fined. Another 10 defendants were sentenced to prison terms of two to 10 years in addition to fines.

According to the hearing, Hirobe Isao of an Osaka-based construction company first contacted the hotel in March to arrange a meeting for the company. But the plan was postponed due to the SARS crisis in China.

At the end of August, Isao came to Zhuhai with his colleagues Takahashi Shunji and Fukunaga Koji to sign an agreement with the hotel and clearly requested sexual services for the tourist group during talks with Liu Xuejing, a manager with the hotel, the court was told.

With this request, Ye Xiang, who worked for the hotel, contacted prostitutes Ming Zhu and Zhang Junying, who later gathered a group of prostitutes from a number of entertainment outlets.

The 200-member Japanese tourist group arrived in Zhuhai on the afternoon of Sept. 16. After the meeting, some of the tourists brought the prostitutes to their hotel rooms for sex, the court heard. All the members of the tourist group left China at 8:00 am, Sept. 18.
The People's Daily
  

7:06 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Beijing Is Getting Increasingly Tired of the Games Taiwanese Politicians Are Playing

The World Does Not Need This Dangerous Brinkmanship Being Played In Taiwan.
HONG KONG, Dec. 17 — China strongly warned Taiwan today not to continue the island's recent, election-season drift toward more independent and confrontational policies toward the mainland.

The warning came a day after Taiwan's national legislature approved two resolutions calling on China to remove nearly 500 missiles pointed at the island. Taiwan's vice president, Annette Lu, described the missiles as "state-sponsored terrorism."

Li Weiyi, the spokesman of the Taiwan Affairs Office in Beijing, described President Chen Shui-bian today as "immoral" and accused him of risking his country's future for the sake of winning a second four-year term when Taiwanese voters go to the polls on March 20.

"Chen Shui-bian's selfishness in seeking re-election spares no effort and gambles with the immediate interests of Taiwan compatriots," Mr. Li said.

Issuing what the official New China News Agency categorized as the strongest warning to the island in weeks, Mr. Li said that "in the face of outrageous Taiwan independence-splittist activities, we must make necessary preparations to resolutely crush Taiwan independence-splittist plots."

In an interview on Dec. 5, Mr. Chen revealed plans to hold a national referendum, also on election day, demanding that China withdraw the missiles and renounce the use of force against the island. He insisted then that he was not motivated by election politics, but that a referendum was "a universal value and a basic human right" and that "a referendum represents a concept and belief that I have pursued throughout my more-than-20-year political career."

In an interview published by the Financial Times today, Mr. Chen also warned that if China conducts missile tests close to Taiwan, as it did in 1996, then he would no longer consider himself bound by a pledge in his inaugural speech in 2000 not to seek changes on issues of Taiwanese sovereignty.
This escalating war of words must stop before inertia takes over and leads us into events beyond control--it can happen, folks, do not kid yourselves. Read the rest of this report and analysis in The New York Times...
  

2:28 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




It Ain't Over, The Fat Lady Isn't Even On The Stage

So it continues; but we cannot quit. Not Yet. In some ways the capture of Saddam Hussein could mean that we stay even longer. We can't bring him with us; we can't shoot him; and we can't just turn him over to the Iraqis--they would have a war over who gets to wreak vengeance on him first. And the Baathists would fight them. What a mess.
BAGHDAD, Dec. 17 — A truck laden with explosives that was apparently on its way to strike a police station blew up in the middle of a busy intersection in Baghdad today when it collided with a bus, killing 13 people and wounding 22, the Iraqi police said.

The explosion took place about half a mile from the Amil police station in the Bayaa area of southwest Baghdad. Among the dead were three children — two girls and a boy who was ripped apart from the blast.

"It was horrible," said Second Lt. Ahmed Suheil. "I have never seen a bomb this big."

The police said the vehicle, which was a tractor trailer cab, was packed with explosives and was apparently going to try to breach the concrete barriers and barbed wire around the station. But it hit a bus and exploded, the police said.
In The New York Times...
  

2:06 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Bush Gets Expected Bump In Polls With Capture Of Saddam Hussein

Nothing Surprising About This New York Times/CBS News Poll, Americans Really Are That Fickle, or in the lingo of sports, Front-Runners:
The capture of Saddam Hussein has lifted Americans' view of the state of the nation and their opinion of President Bush, while at least momentarily halting what had been a spiral of concern about the nation's economic and foreign policy, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News Poll.

But even in the glow of Mr. Hussein's capture, Americans worry that United States forces will be mired in Iraq for years, are concerned that the attacks on American troops will continue and say that President Bush has no plan to extricate the United States from Iraq, the poll found. And 60 percent of Americans said the United States was as vulnerable to a terrorist attack as it was before Mr. Hussein was pulled from a hole in Ad Dwar.

Times/CBS News polls spanned the days before and after Mr. Hussein's capture, offering a vivid demonstration of the extent to which public opinion can shift in reaction to a momentous event. From Saturday night to Sunday night, Americans' view of the success of the war soared, as did their opinion about whether the nation is on the right track and their approval of Mr. Bush. ...

In the most apparent demonstration of the shift, 47 percent of respondents said the war was going well for the United States in the poll that ended Saturday night. That number jumped to 64 percent in the second poll. Before the weekend, 47 percent of Americans disapproved of the way Mr. Bush was handling foreign policy, the worst rating of his presidency. After the weekend, that number had slid to 38 percent.

Mr. Bush's approval rating jumped to 58 percent after Mr. Hussein was captured, from 52 percent, and the number of Americans who disapproved of his performance fell to 33 percent, from 40 percent.
Read the all of the numbers and analysis in The New York Times...
  

1:48 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




The International Herald Tribune Asks: Does Taiwan's leader know when to stop?

There is an excellent analysis of the Taiwan issue in today's International Herald Tribune, written by Ralph A. Cossa, president of the Pacific Forum CSIS, a Honolulu-based research institute affiliated with the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
Pushing the U.S. too far:

SINGAPORE President George W. Bush got it just about right last week when he publicly criticized Taiwan's leader, President Chen Shui-bian, during the visit to Washington of Prime Minister Wen Jiabao of China. Bush was not kowtowing to China, he was merely expressing U.S. policy in clear and plain language. But his comments may have been too little, too late. ...

Let's be clear on this point. It was Chen's campaign tactics, not Chinese demands, that prompted Bush's remarks. Bush and Wen would have been perfectly content to make their ritual "one-China" comments and then move on, but Chen's actions, immediately before the Chinese prime minister's visit, forced Taiwan to the top of the political agenda.

Chen also reinforced the growing suspicion that Taiwan leaders see American relations with Beijing and Taipei strictly in zero-sum terms. Bush believes the United States can enjoy close relations with both and has little tolerance for attempts by either Beijing or Taipei to undermine the other relationship. Beijing seems to have grasped this; Taipei apparently has not.

While the primary responsibility for the current controversy rests with Chen, Beijing and Washington are not free of their share of the blame. China continues its diplomatic full press against Taipei, thus raising Chen's frustration level. Beijing's refusal to permit Taiwan's entry into the World Health Organization, even as a "health entity" - a status that would reinforce Beijing's "one China" claim - increases the "separatist" feelings China says it is combating.

More important, Beijing seems to have concluded that if 100 missiles opposite Taiwan is a good thing, 500 must be five times as good. The point of diminishing returns has long since been passed. At some point, Washington will feel compelled to respond by supplying Taiwan with more advanced missile defense systems, which will then prompt Beijing to accuse Washington of emboldening Taiwan. Neither Taipei nor Beijing seems to understand the principle of cause and effect.

Meanwhile, comments by hard-liners in the U.S. administration that Bush is Taiwan's "guardian angel" and that he did not "oppose" independence were enthusiastically interpreted in Taipei as a green light to test relations with China. While Washington remains officially neutral regarding the outcome of Taiwan's presidential elections in March 2004, supporters of Chen's governing Democratic Progressive Party have been citing such remarks as "proof" that Washington not only backs Taiwan democracy - which it does - but that it also supports Chen's re-election bid. Bush's recent comments should help correct this misperception.

It would be unrealistic, however, to expect Chen to abandon completely his drive to hold a referendum. In the referendum as it is currently described, voters will be asked if they oppose the presence of Chinese missiles aimed at Taiwan or the use of force in resolving the cross-Strait issue. The referendum is pure politics and nothing more - is anyone in favor of being threatened?

Chen now seems to be openly confronting and antagonizing Washington (as well as Beijing), apparently confident that a little bit of anti-Americanism might serve his near-term political interests. That it might harm Taiwan's long-term interests seems to matter little.
Read the full piece in the International Herald Tribune...
  

12:10 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Wednesday, December 17, 2003

Kristof Continues His Exploration of the New China: "China’s Velvet Glove"

For Americans living and working in China, what Nicholas Kristof is reporting is troubling, particularly to those of us who are also journalists and authors and are admirers of Mr. Kristof's writing and his journalistic integrity. I say this because every word he writes must be true; he is an unimpeachable source of observation and insight into what he observes. He is not a newcomer to China. Therefore, when he reports abuses of freedom that we "Foreign Experts"--that is what academics teaching in Chinese universities are officially categorized as on visas and resident permits--have not experienced, it causes us to seriously doubt our faculties of observation. It is true that we receive special privileges, and in our classrooms are allowed to discuss any topic we choose--even the most controversial ones. I can only conclude that I need to dig deeper and travel farther afield and talk to more Chinese citizens. It would also help if I expedite my learning of the language; that is surely a benefit to Mr. Kristof in his work here. It is a splendid column, told almost entirely in dialogue with telling narrative devices. I am going to post it in its entirety because I want it as a permanent record on these pages.
LIAOYANG, China — I've been searching for the limits of freedom on this visit to China, and I found them here on Saturday — when the authorities detained me.

"China is a country of laws," explained one of the three government officials who accosted me here outside the home of Yao Fuxin, an imprisoned labor leader. "We must go somewhere else to talk."

"But I don't want to talk to you," I protested. "I want to talk to Yao Fuxin's family."

"China is a country of laws," the man repeated, politely but sternly. "And we are the government. Come with us."

"I don't want to speak to the government," I replied. "I want to speak to Yao Fuxin's wife."

"China is a country of laws," said the man, who refused to show any identification. "Come with us."

I had come to this gritty industrial city, 375 miles northeast of Beijing, to investigate labor unrest, potentially one of China's biggest challenges. Last year, thousands of workers from 20 factories took to the streets in Liaoyang, protesting official corruption and demanding unemployment payments, pensions and back pay.

Last May, the authorities sentenced Mr. Yao to seven years, and another protest leader, Xiao Yunliang, to four years. Presumably because of beatings, Mr. Xiao appeared to be blind at the sentencing and was unable to recognize family members.

So I dropped in to visit the families of Mr. Yao and Mr. Xiao. But the wives are apparently kept under some kind of house arrest. When I arrived, I tried phoning Mr. Xiao's wife; she spoke one word before a man took the phone and hung up. A few minutes later, the three officials nabbed me outside Mr. Yao's home.

To their credit, they were very polite. I was traveling with a colleague from The New York Times on the Web, Naka Nathaniel, and my intrepid 9-year-old son, and we were all taken to a nearby hotel. They let us use the bathroom — under careful escort in case we tried to break out.

"China is a country of laws," the leader explained, after offering us cigarettes. "So your interviews must go through State Council rules and local officials. You must go through the procedures for this to be legal. So interviews now are impossible. But you are welcome to come back to Liaoyang any time as a tourist."

"Well, then," I suggested, "I'll go and talk to Yao Fuxin's family about the local tourist spots."

They didn't even crack a smile. Instead, they put one goon in my taxi and sent another carload to escort us to the Shenyang airport and wait there until we boarded a plane to Shanghai. My son was tailed in the airport as he went to get an ice cream. (For a Web accompaniment to my China trip, go here.)

The Chinese government is worried about labor problems. Americans are resentful about job losses that they blame on the Chinese export behemoth, but China is also full of millions of laid-off workers — and they are getting angrier and bolder.

Last month alone, according to China Labor Bulletin, 1,000 taxi drivers took to the streets in the city of Dazhou, protesting the cancellation of taxi permits; some 10,000 workers blocked roads and rail lines in Xiangfan to protest job losses arising from privatization; and 2,000 teachers in Suizhou rallied to demand salary increases.

The Chinese government is right to close inefficient factories and nudge workers into more productive employment. But Beijing is going to have to tackle labor issues with openness, rather than repression. It will have to learn that strikes and protests can be a sign of a country's strength and freedom, not weakness and chaos.

China is emerging as one of the world's great powers, a status that it has earned with shrewd management and increasingly mature diplomacy. But a great power cannot go around crushing peaceful protests and torturing labor leaders. It is disgraceful that "People's China" goes around locking up people like Mr. Xiao and beating his wife unconscious at his sentencing hearing — and holding family members of labor leaders incommunicado.

"This is not the China of the 1970's or the 1980's," I complained to the men who nabbed me. "China has reformed. It should be open enough now to allow foreigners to speak to family members of prisoners."

The curt answer: "China is a nation of laws."

Someday soon, I hope, it will be.
The New York Times
  

11:56 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




The Games Politician's Play

Democracy in east Asia is what you want? Okay. Here is an example of a baby model of democracy in Taiwan, the wannabe runaway province of the People's Republic of China. Which until very recently was basically a right-wing dictatorship of the Nationalist Party, ever since the old Generalissimo lost the Chinese Revolution in 1949 and escaped from the mainland with most of his army and 3 Billion U.S. dollars.
TAIPEI, Dec. 16. — Taiwan’s legislature passed two resolutions today calling on China to remove hundreds of missiles pointed at the island. The move was part of the Opposition’s efforts to counter plans by President Mr Chen Shui-bian to hold a 20 March referendum on the issue.

The Opposition has argued that the referendum is unnecessary because it’s already clear that most Taiwanese want China to remove the missiles. It has said that passing a resolution would be the best way to display Taiwan’s dissatisfaction.

Today, ruling Democratic Progressive Party and Opposition lawmakers couldn’t agree on the resolution’s wording, so they passed two versions. The DPP version asked for China to remove the missiles pointed at Taiwan and to respect the island’s sovereignty. The Opposition version said: "We hope the Chinese authorities will not install any new missiles, and gradually remove those that have already been installed."

Opp shift: Taiwan’s Opposition presidential candidate today declined to embrace his party’s long-held policy that Taiwan should eventually unify with China. Mr Lien Chan’s repeated refusal to endorse the unification policy marked a major shift in his Nationalist Party’s position.
Now, is everybody clear on what happened? Good. Because, if this keeps up, the war in Iraq will be but an afterthought compared to what would come from any Taiwanese attempt to declare independence from China.

The Statesman
  

9:02 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




A Headline From China Daily: Now Saddam is captured, where's bin Laden?

The subject and context of this story would be routine for an American daily newspaper: Below, is the story in China Daily, one of the two official state-owned national daily newspapers that publish an English language edition--the other is The People's Daily. Other than being a bit shorter in word-count, can you see any difference in the "angle" of perspective?
Now that Saddam Hussein has been caught, the pressure is on to find the other top target in the war on terror. Why is it proving so hard to find Osama bin Laden?

"We're on his trail, too," Bush told ABC television Tuesday in his first interview since Saddam's capture at the weekend. "He's probably in a hole somewhere hiding from justice."

"Bin Laden's on the run," Bush said. "The leader of the al- Qaeda terror network will face a similar fate as that of the deposed Iraqi president."

"All I can say, he's certainly not leading any parades these days," Bush also said, referring to bin Laden. "He's probably in a hole somewhere hiding from justice. We'll get him dead or alive."

Thousands of US troops and special intelligence agents have been searching for the al-Qaeda chief since he escaped the US bombing offensive in Tora Bora, southeastern Afghanistan, in November 2001. Their search is concentrated mainly along the 2,450-kilometre (1,520-mile) Afghan-Pakistan border.

The border is a remote region that winds through some of the world's most inhospitable terrain, criss-crossing the Hindu Kush mountain range.

The last time the U.S. military believed it knew exactly where bin Laden was hiding was two years ago, when it bombed the mountains of Tora Bora, Afghanistan.

The most recent American intelligence puts bin Laden somewhere in, or near, the mountains in the Pakistani province of Waziristan.

The region's rugged terrain, which ABC television visited earlier this year, is home to fiercely independent tribes hostile to the Pakistani government or any other outside force.

The tribes and the terrain make the search for Saddam Hussein seem easy in comparison, says Akbar Ahmed, a former official in Waziristan.

"(There are) formidable fighting tribesmen who resent any outsider coming into the area," said Ahmed, who is now a professor of International Relations at American University in Washington, D.C. "Osama, if he's there, would be there as a guest. And the code of the people there is that if a guest is living there they will protect him with their lives."

Pakistan does not allow U.S. forces to operate in Waziristan, so American troops or operatives are unable to go into the marketplaces where money handlers and merchants might provide the kind of clues that led to Saddam Hussein's hideout in Iraq.

"We have to work through the Pakistanis," said Richard Clarke, a national security adviser at the White House before retiring earlier this year, "and in Pakistan there are vast areas that are hostile to even the Pakistanis. So it's very, very difficult to do the kind of controlled search we did in Iraq."
Did you see any difference? Perhaps a Communist Party-inspired anti-American slant? No. Is there a lesson in that? You think about it.

China Daily
  

8:25 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Has Brooks Gone AA Evangelical Too?

Please say it ain't so, David. How can a man write as well as you do and quote such monumental ignorance as a virtue? It is just such beliefs that have people being blown into body parts all over the globe; it is just such beliefs that spurred 19 young men to murder almost 3,000 human beings, along with themselves. This world will only be a safe and peaceful place to live in when people believe in and love humanity instead of holy ghosts that no one but crazed fanatics believed in thousands of years ago when they lived and lied if they lived at all.

President George W. Bush said the following and you praise it?
"I believe, firmly believe — and you've heard me say this a lot, and I say it a lot because I truly believe it — that freedom is the almighty God's gift to every person — every man and woman who lives in this world. That's what I believe. And the arrest of Saddam Hussein changed the equation in Iraq. Justice was being delivered to a man who defied that gift from the Almighty to the people of Iraq."
For shame, David, for shame: Whose almighty God are you and Shrub invoking? The exclusive one of Christianity. The exclusive one of Islam? The one who chose only the Jews? The one who persecutes Jews? WHICH SIDE IS THIS GOD ON, DAVID?

In The New York Times...
  

1:55 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




The Video of the Year

Millions of folks around the world think that Mr. Hussein's human rights were violated and his position as head of state demeaned beyond necessity. There was an outpouring of sympathy and pity for the tyrant--and all because he was subjected to a doctor examining his mouth with a swab and tongue depressor. Get real, folks. This is the man who had people's tongue jerked out of their mouths with pliers and then severed with pruning shears--and the bastard enjoyed the nuances of this "medical" procedure so much he had the events video-taped for enjoyment at his leisure.
Saddam Hussein was not locked into leg irons. He didn't writhe in a police hold; he didn't appear with his hands cuffed.

Instead, he was handled, on camera, with latex gloves. His tangled hair was inspected, ostensibly for bugs. His mouth was examined, apparently for strep, or cyanide pills.

To all this Mr. Hussein yielded, obediently widening his jaws for the throat exam. Or the DNA sample. Or the cavity search? Whatever it was.

A frank-looking video of the intimate indignities and almost comically symbolic violations of the former Iraqi dictator and American bete noir was released by the Pentagon on Sunday, the day after it was shot.

Formally it's a deft piece of work, with striking moments: the underside of Mr. Hussein's tongue, radiantly orange in the doctor's light, is a shot for film students. And if hirsute Mr. Hussein is the villain of the piece, the hero is the faceless doctor, his head fastidiously shaved, who pesters and jabs.

In the major markets, the clip played well. Predicting on CNN that it would send the stock market soaring in Kuwait City, Mamoun Fandy, a Middle East scholar, called Mr. Hussein's lice-and-strep check "the picture of the year in the Arab world."

The American world, too, was overwhelmed by the strange images. ...

In the case of Mr. Hussein's close-up, American officials sought an image that would persuade speakers of every language that they had him. The video does indeed show Mr. Hussein off to exquisite disadvantage.

If the first Gulf war has come to be remembered in the iconic image of a laser-guided bomb going deep down into a hole, the video of a uniformed American doctor's tongue depressor bunker-busting Mr. Hussein's private places may prove equally memorable.
In The New York Times...
  

12:57 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Celebratory Party Is Over

With the fighting and dying back to its horrific routine, Paul Krugman is back doing what he does best: Keeping tabs on Shrub & Twigs' slopping at the public trough. His column in today's The New York Times should make more than a few good ol' boys toiling easy on Bush's largesse take notice that there might be need of a spider hole for them to hide in soon.
Last week there were major news stories about possible profiteering by Halliburton and other American contractors in Iraq. These stories have, inevitably and appropriately, been pushed temporarily into the background by the news of Saddam's capture. But the questions remain. In fact, the more you look into this issue, the more you worry that we have entered a new era of excess for the military-industrial complex.

The story about Halliburton's strangely expensive gasoline imports into Iraq gets curiouser and curiouser. High-priced gasoline was purchased from a supplier whose name is unfamiliar to industry experts, but that appears to be run by a prominent Kuwaiti family (no doubt still grateful for the 1991 liberation). U.S. Army Corps of Engineers documents seen by The Wall Street Journal refer to "political pressures" from Kuwait's government and the U.S. embassy in Kuwait to deal only with that firm. I wonder where that trail leads.

Meanwhile, NBC News has obtained Pentagon inspection reports of unsanitary conditions at mess halls run by Halliburton in Iraq: "Blood all over the floors of refrigerators, dirty pans, dirty grills, dirty salad bars, rotting meat and vegetables." An October report complains that Halliburton had promised to fix the problem but didn't.

And more detail has been emerging about Bechtel's much-touted school repairs. Again, a Pentagon report found "horrible" work: dangerous debris left in playground areas, sloppy paint jobs and broken toilets.

Are these isolated bad examples, or part of a pattern? It's impossible to be sure without a broad, scrupulously independent investigation. Yet such an inquiry is hard to imagine in the current political environment — which is precisely why one can't help suspecting the worst.
Do yourself a favor and read the rest of Mr. Krugman's column, please, in The New York Times...
  

12:19 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Tuesday, December 16, 2003

Did They Really Think He Was Going To Spill the FedaBeans and Phantom WMDs

What incentive does old "Lice Beard" have to tell us anything? The sumbitch still considers himself the "President of the Republic of Iraq," for chrissakes! Not a murder suspect picked up off the street. And is our government all that sure they want him talking candidly in the first place? He knows where not only all of the bodies he planted are, but also those of most of the world's major nations who have been his allies at different times through any number of nefarious deeds committed over the past 30 years. Iraq may look like a third-rate date-palm republic at the moment, but during his heyday, it was a must gathering spot for many of the world's anti-communists and anti-Iranians during Ronnie's and Poppie's 12 years at the reactionary switch. Working the field were younger operatives by the names of Rumsfeld, Cheney, North, McFarland, Adnan whats-his-name, et al., cooking up all kinds of skullduggery to get guns, bullets and missiles--spiced with cocaine and money laundering--dispersed between bin Laden's holy warriors in Afghanistan fighting the "Evil Empire" and the Contras heroes doing the same anti-commie holy work in Central America. What an interwoven mess all of this is and was when looked at through the continuum of history, recent history. What the hell, does anybody care about truth and consequences beyond any given moment of expediency? Nope.
WASHINGTON, Dec. 15 — Saddam Hussein has denied playing any direct role in commanding Iraqi insurgents or in planning attacks after he went into hiding, and he said his government possessed no prohibited weapons, United States government officials said Monday.

Interrogators began questioning Mr. Hussein just hours after American forces captured him, officials said. An early focus of the interrogation, they said, has been anything he knows about the guerrilla war, in hopes of quickly gleaning information that might help prevent attacks and disrupt or dismember cells responsible for the attacks.

Mr. Hussein has also been quizzed about programs to develop unconventional weapons, according to Bush administration, Pentagon and intelligence officials, but he has so far denied the existence of such weapons. Officials said his denials were in line with statements of other top Iraqi officials who have been captured in recent months, and who still maintain that Baghdad did not have unconventional weapons.

American interrogators took the somewhat unusual step of immediately asking Mr. Hussein about substantive issues, in part because he appeared mentally and physically fatigued, and thus his resistance to interrogation seemed low, officials said.

Yet intelligence and military officials still said they were discounting much of the little information that Mr. Hussein had offered so far. The officials based in Washington who spoke about his interrogation were all referring to reports in briefings transmitted from Iraq.

They said it might take weeks or months for him to face up to the reality of his situation and begin to answer questions more candidly.

"He's the king of denial and deception," said Senator Pat Roberts, Republican of Kansas and chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

One administration official said: "Obviously, there are a whole lot of answers we need on a whole lot of topics. He is compliant in the sense that he is responding, as opposed to being obstinate and not speaking at all. But he is not helpful."
Surprise, surprise! You don't stay in power as long as this sadistic bastard by being a gullible fool. Paranoid, yes, naive, not damn likely.
After his capture by troops of the Fourth Infantry and a Special Operations unit called Task Force 121, he was handed off to a team of interrogators drawn from the military's Central Command and the Central Intelligence Agency and Defense Intelligence Agency, officials said.

Allied forces, especially from Britain, are expected to play a role in the questioning. Iraqis will be brought in to question Mr. Hussein about accusations of mass killings and other war crimes, officials said.

Officials offered no conjecture as to why Mr. Hussein would deny involvement in the guerrilla-style insurgency, even though statements attributed to him since his ouster called on Iraqis to rise up against the Americans. It was also unknown whether he was making statements that took into account his status under international law.

A senior administration official said Mr. Hussein was being afforded protections granted prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions.

But that official said the protected status could change should it be conclusively determined that once major combat operations were over and he left power, Mr. Hussein chose to play a role in subsequent attacks against nonmilitary targets that killed or wounded large numbers of noncombatants in violation of the laws of war.
Are we really to believe that he sees it that way, that "he left power"? Right!

In The New York Times
  

11:17 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Words....

Below are words to ponder, words to remember, and most importantly there are words that we must make certain are never said about a United States government again. Just a partial listing of the monsters we created or propped up as enemies of our enemies only to suffer for later is long enough: The Shah of Iran; Pinochet; Ky and Thieu; Noriega; Battista; Trujillo; bin Laden; Saddam Hussein...
The bedraggled man pulled out of a hole near Tikrit certainly did not look like a military genius. When he comes to trial, perhaps the Iraqi people will finally learn whether they were governed for so many years by a cunning tyrant or by one who at some point turned into an out-of-touch thug, allowing his brutal underlings to do whatever they wanted to keep a terrorized populace subdued. Interrogators will certainly be trying to figure out whether weapons of mass destruction were being produced and stockpiled. They may discover that the first Bush administration was right in believing that having been thoroughly defeated in 1991 and kept under an international embargo, Mr. Hussein no longer posed a major military threat.

The one thing on which everyone now agrees is that this man caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of his own people and kept most of the rest in fear and misery. Ironically, that was a vision first painted nearly 15 years ago by international human rights groups, during a period in which American presidents, as well as most of the rest of the world, treated him as a valuable ally and a bulwark against Iranian extremism.
From an editorial in The New York Times
  

8:17 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




China coast as factory of the world

Interestingly enough, The Christian Science Monitor, is giving The New York Times and the Washington Post a good run for their money as to who is best covering the news of China. The article below is a good example of why.
GUANGZHOU, CHINA – This Christmas, as pajama-clad kids across the US wake early to race to the tree, they will probably be shaking boxes filled with toys made in China - especially from China's southeast coast.

Once a set of sleepy low-rise fishing towns, China's Pearl River Delta can now, and in the foreseeable future, be justifiably called "the factory of the world." It's the engine that places China as America's No. 1 provider of the toys beneath the typical tree, the ornaments on it, and - if artificial - the tree itself.

But China's clout goes well beyond the holiday season. Every day, year round, Guangdong province alone - which covers most of the delta - exports $300 million of goods to world markets. That's a third of China's total. Ten percent of all Delta exports are stocked on Wal-Mart's shelves. In Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and their environs, well-paved roads pass through a staggeringly crowded landscape of factories, offices, dormitories, apartments, and streams of migrant labor.

What those Chinese peasants from the poor interior find seems a different country - one of manicured coastal highways, wealthy peasants, nuclear power, and boom-time growth.
For a pretty accurate picture of the boom in China and its consequences, intended or not, read this report in full, in the The Christian Science Monitor...
  

3:55 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




For The First Time Terror Groups Listed By Chinese Central Government

Chinese News, Saudi Style: The Saudi Gazette

BEIJING

CHINA Monday issued its first ever list of terrorist groups, blaming them for a series of bombings and assassinations and calling for international assistance to wipe them out.

The groups are accused of trying to create an independent state called East Turkistan in northwest China s Xinjiang region, which is populated by the Turkish-speaking Uighur Muslims.

East Turkistan forces inside and outside China have long plotted and executed a series of bombings, assassinations, arsons, poisoning attacks and other activities in Xinjiang and elsewhere in China, said Ministry of Public Security official Zhao Yongshen.

The groups carried out their attacks to achieve their goal of undermining national unity, said Zhao, deputy director of the ministry s bureau of anti-terrorism.

With numerous crimes committed, they have seriously endangered the safety of the life and property of the Chinese people, and other ethnic groups and threatened the security and stability of relevant countries in the region, Zhao said at a briefing.

He called for help from countries where the groups operate. I strongly call on governments of all foreign countries ... to outlaw the four terrorist organizations that our country has designated ... stop providing safe havens for these organizations and freeze their assets, Zhao said.

The list comes with Beijing anxious to seize upon the global counter-terrorism campaign to gain international support for its fight against Uighur separatists, whom it considers terrorists.

The groups identified were the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM), the Eastern Turkistan Liberation Organization (ETLO), the World Uighur Youth Congress (WUYC) and the East Turkistan Information Center (ETIC).

China said the ETIM and ETLO have received funding from Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan, including several million US dollars to spread religious extremism and carry out terrorist activities.

Some of them have established bases outside China to train terrorists and plot sabotage activities, frequently sending agents into China to guide terrorist acts, according to a ministry statement released at the briefing.
The Saudi Gazette
  

3:26 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Everything's Turning Up China

Every where you look these days you see China in the news; today is no exception. This time it is for something very old, even by Chinese standards by which time is measured in milleniums. We are talking really, really old. Try 125 Million years old.
Oldest Marsupial Fossil Found in China

Amateur fossil hunters have helped to uncover the oldest known ancestor to kangaroos, koalas, possums, and wombats. A near complete skeletal fossil of the chipmunk-size, marsupial ancestor Sinodelphys szalayi has been dug up from 125-million-year-old shales in China's northeastern Liaoning province.

This mammal could be the … great grandparent of all marsupial mammals," said Zhe-Xi Luo, one of the paleontologists behind the find, based at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh. "This new fossil provides precious new information, and sheds light on the evolution of all marsupial mammals," he said.

Sinodelphys, which shares more wrist, ankle and dental features with living marsupials than other mammals, will help researchers understand what the ancestor to all marsupials may have been like. The fossil will also help scientists piece together the early history of all placental and marsupial mammals, according to the Chinese and American paleontologists who detail their analysis of the fossil in the current edition of the research journal Science.
National Geographic
 

2:56 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Cheney the Great, Shooting Pheasant Under False Pretence

Cheney the Great, to the manor born, in keeping with the tradition of oligarchs from time immemorial, went a'hunting the other day. Great sport he had, too; he's a gentleman's gentle shooter, no doubt. The eye of the hawk he has, and a dandy smooth trigger-pull. Ah, the simple pleasures of the rustic countryside that replenish and invigorate for the harder tasks that await anon the great men of state who labor so diligently, so thanklessly, for a future safe and sound and free for us all. To the hunt!

Learn more from Tom Engelhardt of the Daily MoJo.

The shooting party: "One of Washington's big guns came to Westmoreland County yesterday for a day's shooting at the Rolling Rock Club in Ligonier Township. For the second time in two years, Vice President Dick Cheney arrived at daybreak at Arnold Palmer Airport in Latrobe. Air traffic was halted briefly at about 7 a.m. as Air Force Two landed and Cheney's security detail loaded him and his favorite shotgun into a Humvee and drove up U.S. Route 30 to the exclusive country club...

"Cheney shot more than 70 ringneck pheasants and an unknown number of mallard ducks. The birds were plucked and vacuum-packed in time for Cheney's afternoon flight to Washington, D.C. ... Scott Wakefield, a dog handler at the club, said about 500 farm-raised pheasants were released from nets for the morning hunt. The 10-man hunting party that included Cheney shot 417 pheasants. The vice president was set to hunt ducks in the afternoon."

(Needless to say, the ducks were just not flying by at the time. Rebekah Scott, Cheney in region for a day of small-game hunting, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. "This wasn't a hunting ground. It was an open-air abattoir, and the vice president should be ashamed to have patronized this operation and then slaughtered so many animals," states Wayne Pacelle, a senior vice president of the Humane Society of the United States. "If the Vice President and his friends wanted to sharpen their shooting skills, they could have shot skeet or clay, not resorted to the slaughter of more than 400 creatures planted right in front of them as animated targets.")
Whoa, now just you wait a minute before you go lambasting me for being anti Second Amendment. I love to shoot; I've owned fine rifles and shotguns since my youth in Mississippi. I spent many a still, crisp autumn's dawn in the piney woods waiting for that one great shot at a white-tail buck with an eight-point rack. And with excitement still I remember the rush of a covey of quail taking wing when flushed, followed by that smooth, fluid motion of raising the scrolled mahogany-adorned model 1100 20 gauge; then, after the perfect swinging lead and smooth trigger-pull, came a fluttered fall and a bird for the bag and later the oven. Great old days, they were. I say "were" because long ago I stopped shooting animals: while my stomach was still in it for the eating, my heart was no longer there for the killing. But that's a personal choice and I have no problem with those who still love to hunt. But the sportsmen I know--and I back then--don't shoot at "sitting ducks" or in baited fields. We are and were shooters and hunters, not mass killers of wild-life caged for our arrival and sport. To think that the Vice President of the United States of America could find pleasure in such an event scares the bejesus out of me. As it should you.

BTW, when you are at the Daily MoJo, scroll down and see a number of important, interesting, revealing posts and links.
  

1:35 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Monster Betrayed By His Own

Betrayal is a fitting end to the reign of a sadistic tyrant. He ruled and tormented by the wholesale use of informants; he was delivered from his vermin hole into the hands of justice the same way. The man who exhorted his terrified, repressed citizens to resist to the death, when discovered, cried out, "Don't shoot. I am Saddam Hussein, the president of the Republic of Iraq." In the end, he was the coward I knew he must be: when you spend enough time writing about murder and murderers, which means spending far too much time getting to know them, you learn that, invariably, the worst of the lot, the ones who take pleasure in the killing, are almost always cowards. He had a side-arm on him; he could have taken his life. He probably would have if the people who were uncovering his pit of shame had been Iraqi Shiites or Kurds. But he knew he would be safe from physical harm in the hands of American soldiers who would treat him as a high-profile prisoner; this student of the German Nazi regime knew that Mr. Hess, the infamous founding partner of the Third Reich, lived out his long life in relative peace and comfort in Spandau Prison. That is unlikely to be Saddam's eventual fate because his countrymen will want it otherwise. Let it be done as they wish.
"He was just caught like a rat," Maj. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the commander of the Fourth Infantry Division, told reporters at his headquarters in Tikrit on Sunday. "He could have been hiding in a hundred different places, a thousand different places like this all around Iraq. It just takes finding the right person who will give you a good idea where he might be."

In recent weeks, American officials had started a new effort to draw up a list of people likely to be hiding Mr. Hussein, including bodyguards, former palace functionaries, tribal leaders and others not prominent on previous American wanted lists. After a half-dozen raids and arrests, one senior administration official said, the crucial breakthrough came Friday when a raid on a house in Baghdad led to the capture of an Iraqi who, under questioning in the hours that followed, identified the location where Mr. Hussein was ultimately found.

... Officials have described the Iraqi seized Friday as a member of Mr. Hussein's clan or tribe, but have not been more specific.
In The New York Times
 

12:58 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Not Everybody Sees Things the Same

Here is how the capture of the Beast of Baghdad was seen by the Palestinians:
Hamas: U.S. will pay for capturing Saddam

Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat and his government made no comment on the arrest of the deposed Iraqi leader, but Abdel-Aziz Rantisi, a senior Hamas leader, said the United States would "pay a very high price for the mistake" of capturing Saddam.

"What the United States did is ugly and despicable. It is an insult to all Arabs and an insult to Muslims," he told Reuters.

"It's a black day in history," said Sadiq Husam, 33, a taxi driver in Ramallah, West Bank seat of the Palestinian Authority.

"I am saying so not because Saddam is an Arab, but because he is the only man who said 'no' to American injustice in the Middle East," he said.

Islamic factions sworn to Israel's destruction have taken strength from Iraqi resistance and cautioned on Sunday that Saddam's capture would not end attacks on U.S. forces. ...

Saddam paid over $35 million to the kin of Palestinian suicide bombers, militants and bystanders who died in an uprising that began in 2000.

Although far from all Palestinians supported him, militants marched to back Saddam ahead of the U.S.-led invasion in March and Palestinian protesters were often heard chanting: "Oh, Saddam. Oh, Saddam. Bomb, bomb Tel Aviv".

During the 1991 Gulf War, Palestinians cheered as Iraqi Scud missiles crashed into Israeli cities.
Haaretz Daily
  

12:14 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Monday, December 15, 2003

A View From The Official Chinese Press: World leaders thrilled by capture of Hussein

Here is how the state-owned press in China reported world reaction to the capture of Saddam Hussein:
BEIJING, Dec. 15, (Xinhuanet) -- As celebratory gunfire erupted in Baghdad, world leaders welcomed Saddam Hussein's capture, saying it brought a long-awaited end to the career of a brutal dictator and could mark the beginning of peace in Iraq.

"This is very good news for the people of Iraq,'' British Prime Minister Tony Blair said. "It removes the shadow that has been hanging over them for too long of the nightmare of a return to the Saddam regime.''

Blair, who braved intense domestic opposition to support the U.S.-led war that ousted Saddam in April, indicated that Saddam could be "tried in Iraqi courts for his crimes against the Iraqi people.''

Iraq's interim government has established a special tribunal to try Saddam and other members of his regime for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Blair added that Saddam's capture could mark the beginning of better times in Iraq and give the coalition the chance to "take a step forward in Iraq.''

"We should try now to unite the whole of Iraq in rebuilding the country and offering it a new future,'' he said.

The Spanish government, another supporter of the war, also hailed the news.

"It is a great day for humankind,'' said Spanish Foreign Minister Ana Palacio. "The horrible shadow of this bloody dictator is going to vanish.''

France, which has had a rocky relationship with the United States since it led the opposition to the war, said the capture would help stabilize the country and lead to its sovereignty.

"It's a major event that should strongly contribute to democracy and stability in Iraq and allow the Iraqis to master their destiny in a sovereign Iraq,'' French President Jacques Chirac said in a statement.

German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, another foe of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, congratulated President Bush on Saddam's capture.

"With much happiness I learned about the arrest of Saddam Hussein,'' Schroeder wrote in a letter to Bush released by the German government. "I congratulate you on this successful action.''

Japan, Australia and other countries also were quick to applaud the news of Saddam's capture, as a video showing a bearded Saddam being examined by a doctor was broadcast on news channels.

"We're absolutely thrilled that Saddam Hussein has been captured,'' Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said in a statement. "And his capture has the potential to change the situation on the ground.''

News of Saddam's capture also reverberated among the 500 delegates and other dignitaries at the opening session of Afghanistan's historic constitutional council, being held in Kabul.

Afghan Interior Minister Ali Ahmad Jalali said the arrest would help improve security in Afghanistan by dampening the ability of militant groups to recruit fighters here.

"What happens in Iraq is also something to do with the situation in Afghanistan. Since the war in Iraq, the terrorist organizations have tried to open a new front in Afghanistan, so any failure of terrorism in Iraq is going to effect the situation in Afghanistan,'' Jalali told The Associated Press.

In San Diego, Alan Zangana, a 48-year-old Kurd who fled Iraq in 1981, said the phone at his Chula Vista home started ringing early Sunday with people sharing the reports that Saddam had been captured.

"I have been waiting for this for the last 35 years,'' said Zangana, director of Kurdish Human Rights Watch in the San Diego suburb of El Cajon.

Saddam instituted a policy of genocide against the Kurds and Zangana said oppression in his oil-rich hometown of Kirkuk was severe.

"Nobody is going to be happy today like the Kurds,'' Zangana said. "He killed a lot of us.''

The tribunal would cover crimes committed from July 17, 1968 -- the day Saddam's Baath Party came to power -- until May 1, 2003 -- the day President Bush declared major hostilities over, said Abdel-Aziz al-Hakim, the current president of the Iraqi Governing Council. Saddam became president in 1979 but wielded vast influence starting from the early 1970s.
Xinhuanet.com
 

11:50 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




The First Call For Halliburton Investigation Comes From GOP

How far do you think this will fly? Less than the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk.
GOP congressman calls for hearings into allegations Halliburton overcharged for fuel.

A Republican congressman Saturday joined Democratic calls for hearings on allegations that Halliburton Co. charged up to $61 million too much for delivering gasoline to Iraqi citizens under a no-bid contract.

Rep. Jim Gibbons, R-Nev., called the allegations "an absolute outrage" and said he wants the House Armed Services Committee to hold hearings early next year on Halliburton, Vice President Dick Cheney's former company.

"If these allegations which were found in a Pentagon audit of government contracts is true, then it's time for Halliburton to break out its checkbook and refund American taxpayers," Gibbons said.

Gibbons, a committee member, said he's the first Republican member of Congress to call for congressional hearings of the company.
San Francisco Gate
  

11:14 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Safire's Look Into the Spider Hole

Just a taste of William Safire's take on the capture of Saddam Hussein--as always, a masterful use of language and some deft prognostication from his vantage point on the right.
Democrats here are already saying ruefully "because we 'got' Saddam, we'll 'get' four more years of Bush." But that assumes that the Iraqi captive will now reveal weapons of mass destruction and his connections to Al Qaeda, thereby confirming the intelligence that the Bush neocons are charged with having cooked up to justify going to war.

I think Saddam is still Saddam — a meretricious, malevolent megalomaniac. He knows he is going to die, either by death sentence or in jail at the hands of a rape victim's family. Why did he not use his pistol to shoot it out with his captors or to kill himself? Because he is looking forward to the mother of all genocide trials, rivaling Nuremberg's and topping those of Eichmann and Milosevic. There, in the global spotlight, he can pose as the great Arab hero saving Islam from the Bushes and the Jews.

Under interrogation, he's not likely to rat on his fedayeen, lead us to his hidden billions abroad or tell the truth about dirty dealings with France and Russia. Instead, he intends to lie all the way to martyrdom.

Example: Dr. Ayad Allawi, an Iraqi leader long considered reliable by intelligence agencies, told Britain's Daily Telegraph last week that a memo has been found from Saddam's secret police chief to the dictator dated July 1, 2001, reporting that the veteran terrorist Abu Nidal had been training one Mohamed Atta in Baghdad. Nobody disputes that a few months after Atta's 9/11 suicide mission, Nidal was permanently silenced by Saddam's police, the only "suicide" to be found with four bullets in his head.

The prisoner will surely dispute all connections to Al Qaeda, along with charges that he ordered the deaths of what Tony Blair now estimates as 400,000 Shiite and Kurdish Muslims in Iraq.

We are not finished with this remorseless monster; Saddam will have his day in an Iraqi court. But so will the ghosts of poison-gassed Halabja and Iraqi children forced to clear minefields in Iran. The meticulous presentation of his offenses against humanity will demonstrate again that all that would have been necessary for the triumph of evil was for good people to do nothing.
In The New York Times...
  

11:05 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




We Will Now Learn Who Are/Were Spurring the Insurgency

With Saddam Hussein in custody, we should soon learn whether the insurgency in Iraq is a spasmodic reflex of the old Baathist regime, or a truly partisan movement of indigenous Iraqis and foreign Islamic Jihadists bent on the removal of Coalition forces from Iraq. This should become clear over the next several weeks. There will be attacks against the Coalition troops and Iraqis working for them no matter for a period of time following Saddam's capture: Last gasp revenge attacks by loyalists in response to their despotic leader's unmasking; or attack missions that perhaps were already in the 'pipeline' prior to Saddam's capture, although it is now obvious that he was directing nothing specifically from his primitive existence other than the projection of a rallying figurehead as long as he was free. If the attacks continue for a longer period of time, and remain in the same relative pattern, then it can be deduced that the guerrilla war is a newly homegrown phenomenon directed against an occupying army and will require a strong Coalition military presence longer than anyone would like, particularly Dubya's re-election operatives. We shall see.
DUBAI and WASHINGTON - Neither the US Commander in Chief, President George W Bush, nor the commander of the US forces in Iraq believe that the capture of Saddam Hussein will bring about a quick end to the insurgency. But what should become clearer in the coming weeks and months is whether the insurgency consists largely of Saddam and Ba'ath loyalists, as the US administration insists. ...

[S]ome specialists warned even before Sunday's announcement that Saddam's death or detention would prove largely irrelevant to the difficult problems faced by US and coalition forces in Iraq, both because loyalty to Hussein - or even to his Ba'ath Party - had ceased to be a catalyst for the insurgency, and, in any event, the complex internal political situation in Iraq had begun to fuel more tension and violence.

Some even suggested that Saddam's capture might actually create new problems for the occupation by empowering sectors in the Shi'ite community to test the occupation and back up their demands for direct elections to a new Iraqi government with more militant tactics.

"Now that it is perfectly clear that [Saddam] is finished," noted Iraq specialist Juan Cole, who teaches history at the University of Michigan, "the Shiites may be emboldened. Those [Shiites] who dislike US policies or who are opposed to the idea of occupation no longer need be apprehensive that the US will suddenly leave and allow Saddam to come back to power.

"They may therefore now gradually throw off their political timidity, and come out more forcefully into the streets when they disagree."

Although military commanders have long insisted that resistance to the occupation was being carried out primarily by "Saddam loyalists", they had never ascribed to him any actual leadership role, apart from his status as a symbol, particularly for Ba'athists.

That appeared to be borne out by the circumstances of his capture. Not only was Saddam bedraggled, he also lacked any apparent means of electronic or satellite communication, such as a telephone. For some observers, this proved the resistance was clearly operating independently of Saddam. "Given the location and circumstances of his capture, it makes clear that Saddam was not managing the insurgency, and that he had very little control or influence," said Senator Jay Rockefeller, the Democratic leader on the Senate Intelligence Committee.

"That is significant and disturbing because it means the insurgents are not fighting for Saddam; they're fighting against the United States," he added. ...

"The Sunni Arab resisters to US occupation in the country's heartland had long since jettisoned Saddam and the Ba'ath as symbols," [Cole] stressed.

"They are fighting for local reasons. Some are Sunni fundamentalists, who despised the Ba'ath. Others are Arab nationalists who weep at the idea of their country being occupied. Some had relatives killed or humiliated by US troops and are pursuing a clan vendetta. Some fear a Shi'ite and Kurdish-dominated Iraq will reduce them to second-class citizens."

Both this thesis, as well as the administration's continued insistence that the insurgency consists mainly of Saddam and Ba'ath loyalists, criminals, and foreign "jihadis", will be tested in the coming weeks and months.
Asia Times
  

10:01 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Facing His Real Enemy: The Iraqis He Tortured

The miserable coward had only disrespect for the men he tortured and tormented who now govern in his stead. It is said he paid respect and even deference to the American authorities, but had only contempt for members of the ruling council. It is understandable that he would identify with the Americans who captured him; it was Americans who helped put him in power and made sure that he stayed there as long as we needed him. We must deal with our complicity in his crimes: he is a monster much of our own making. As long as he fought against Iran in the 80's, and the Soviets always, he was our man in Baghdad. We make tyrants, we unmake them--and the "people" be damned. That is a much younger Rumsfeld you see in old newsreel footage with a younger Saddam, but it is still Rummy, paying Republican Party respect to the enemy of our enemy, no matter how many of them he gassed. It is history, folks, and we must live with it, and resolve never to do it again.
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 14 — The wild gray beard was gone, and he sat on a metal army cot, just awake from a nap, in socks and black slippers. He was not handcuffed. He did not recognize all his visitors, but they recognized him. That was the purpose of the visit: to help confirm that he was, in fact, Saddam Hussein.

What came next in the Sunday afternoon meeting, according to people in the room, was an extraordinary 30 minutes, in which four new leaders of Iraq pointedly questioned the nation's deposed and now captured leader about his tyrannical rule. Mr. Hussein, they said, was defiant and unrepentant but very much defeated.

"The world is crazy," said Mowaffak al-Rubaie, a Governing Council member in the room on Sunday after Mr. Hussein was captured near his hometown, Tikrit. "I was in his torture chamber in 1979, and now he was sitting there, powerless in front of me without anybody stopping me from doing anything to him. Just imagine. We were arguing, and he was using very foul language."

The carefully managed event gave the four men who had spent decades opposing the ruler they regard as an oppressor of their country a rare chance to confront him. Though he spoke forcefully, the haggard Mr. Hussein was now the prisoner, and his opponents seemed to gain some legitimacy as leaders through the meeting in which they said they had called him to task on behalf of their nation.
You will want to read the rest of the story of this most interesting, quite surreal encounter, in The New York Times...
  

9:55 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




New York Times Editorial: The Capture of a Dictator

Some things need little or no commentary; that is the case here:
The Capture of a Dictator

The United States achieved its most important military objective in Iraq since the fall of Baghdad when it captured Saddam Hussein. President Bush rightly claimed yesterday that it was a critical milestone toward the reconstruction of Iraq. The image of Mr. Hussein, bedraggled and bearded, being humbled before Iraqi leaders, some of whom had survived his torture chambers, was a tonic of relief. One indisputable fact in the bloody and divisive saga of Iraq is that this man ranked with the world's most vicious dictators. His crimes are monstrous. Hundreds of thousands of his people were murdered or tortured at his order and some may have been brutalized by his own hands.

We hope that his arrest will reduce organized violence against American troops, although Mr. Bush himself was careful to say yesterday that hostilities are not over. We do not know how involved Mr. Hussein was in these attacks against American and allied occupation forces, or against Iraqis who cooperated with them. But the dictator's capture should offer Iraqis some relief from the lingering fear that somehow he might return to power and exact revenge on those who cooperated with the United States.

Though the Hussein regime ended with the fall of Baghdad on April 9, many frustrating puzzles remain. These include the question of what happened to Iraq's unconventional weapons programs in recent years and what was going on in that shadowed regime in the last weeks before the war, when the Iraqi leader seemed reluctant to take steps that might have stayed the president's hand.

It would be good if some of those questions could now be resolved. And it is critical that the dictator be given a fair and open trial to exact justice for his crimes, to give some solace to the people he terrorized and to give pause to other despots. The trial must be above any suspicion that it is merely an exercise in retribution or propaganda. While every effort should be made to maximize Iraqi involvement, Iraq's judicial institutions are too weak to handle the case. Although last week's creation of an Iraqi war crimes tribunal was a promising step, we would suggest this trial be conducted in Iraq under United Nations auspices by international and Iraqi judges. A tribunal picked by Americans would lack legitimacy.

Mr. Hussein's capture leaves the United States facing the same profound questions about how best to create a stable and democratic government in Iraq. The capture does not diminish the need for Washington to find ways to broaden the international nature of the occupation, and to put the nation-building efforts under the United Nations. The ultimate measure of success will be an Iraq held together by consent, not force, with its resources dedicated to development, not weapons. Iraqis will then finally be free of the malign legacy of Saddam Hussein.
The New York Times