Looks like the war on terror will need some modifications to the U.S. court system to remove inconveniences that might result in a not-guilty verdict. Enter military tribunals.

<q>The tribunals Mr. Bush envisions are a breathtaking departure from due process. He alone will decide who should come before these courts. The military prosecutors and judges who determine the fate of defendants will all report to him as commander in chief. Cases can be heard in secret. Hearsay, and evidence that... [More]

Lynne Cheney, the Vice President Dick Cheney’s wife is doing her part for the war effort. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni, which she founded, has come out with a report (PDF Format) called Defending Civilization: How Our Universities Are Failing America and What Can Be Done About It, which contains over 100 quotes from university professors which are deemed unpatriotic. There’s an article called Conservatives Denounce Dissent at Common Dreams and a discussion at Plastic (once... [More]

Basically, if this ‘War on Terror’ is so simple, why the need for spin? AlterNet published Why Bush Needs to Spin the War. The basic issues of current events are being dictated to us in a fashion suitable for kindergartners. How many people are sick of the word ‘evildoers’? In the same vein, The Newsday has an opinion piece discussing the increasing involvement of ad execs and Hollywood in the PR campaign for this war.

From the Online Journal comes a piece called The Greatest Sedition is... [More]

SFGate reports that a federal appeals court has determined that the $5 Billion punitive damages levied against Exxon for the Valdez disaster are “excessive”.

<q>Exxon, which later merged with Mobil, argued that it shouldn’t have to pay any punitive damages. The oil giant said it learned its lesson and spent more than $3 billion cleaning up the Prince William Sound area and to settle federal and state lawsuits. … R.J. Kopchak, 52, a fisherman in Cordova near the oil spill, said there are no... [More]

Mark Morford, of SF Gate has published Evil Evildoers of Evil: How to feel calmly patriotic and yet not be slightly reassured by Bush & Co..

<q>There is more than one way to respond to the horror of Sept. 11. And there is more than one kind of patriotism. We forget this. … Pro-America does not mean pro-war. Or pro-Bush. Or anti-Afghanistan. Or pro-little-flags-on-SUV-antennas. … It means thinking independently and getting better informed and filtering your news very carefully and realizing... [More]

<q>In the year of the new century and nine months, From the sky will come a great King of Terror… The sky will burn at forty-five degrees. Fire approaches the great new city…</q>

<q>In the city of york there will be a great collapse, two twin brothers torn apart by chaos while the fortress falls the great leader will succumb.</q>

<q>Third big war will begin when the big city is burning</q>

I’ve found a page debunking this Nostradamus quatrain being sent around. Apparently, it originated... [More]

Salman Rushdie (yes, that one) writes Yes, This is About Islam, also in the New York Times. It talks about the need for reform in the Muslim world, particularly because those speaking most stridently for Islam are ignorant proponents of a “cluster of customs, opinions and prejudices…” rather than true religious leaders.

<q>An Iraqi writer quotes an earlier Iraqi satirist: “The disease that is in us, is from us.” A British Muslim writes, “Islam has become its own enemy.” A Lebanese friend,... [More]

Here’s a scary article from Thomas Friedman on the New York Times. He discusses how the U.S. needs to spin the war better because there’s too much dissent.

<q>[A] month into the war in Afghanistan, the hand-wringing has already begun over how long this might last. Let’s all take a deep breath and repeat after me: Give war a chance. This is Afghanistan we’re talking about. Check the map. It’s far away.</q>

So, the government isn’t doing enough to convince of the righteousness of the cause. In... [More]

Common Dreams published The One-Eyed Man, discussing the recent enormous “economic stimulus” bill passed this week. The article is so named because:

<q>to really understand legislation you have to look for the clause giving special consideration to one-eyed bearded men with a limp &#8212; that is, you have to look for the provision that turns a bill ostensibly serving a public purpose into a giveaway for some special interest.</q>

For more information on the bill, see Operation Enduring... [More]

Former U.S. secretary of labor, Robert Reich, published How to Be Tough on Terrorism on AlterNet. He recommends a more reasoned approach, avoiding the far-right or far-left fanaticism that has polarized political discussion recently.

<q>The right dismisses this [U.S.] sordid history as irrelevant to the current crisis and accuses anyone on the left who dwells on it as “blaming America” for terrorism. Both sides are wrong: the left for suggesting that this history should make us any less... [More]

Common Dreams reports that the CIA has been approved to use targeted kills (assasinations for those of you not versed in doublespeak) again for the first time (ahem) since 1975, when they last made a horrendous mess of trying to kill Castro (who is still alive for those playing catch-up).

<q>The US defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, confirmed reports of such a move yesterday by telling CNN that the US would be acting in self-defence in carrying out such missions. … Mr Rumsfeld said: “It is... [More]

A lot of media attention is given to the connection between the Anthrax letters and the 9/11 attack. Why the silence on right-wing terrorism? on the World Socialist Web Site discusses the very real possibility that the Anthrax attacks are from domestic sources.

<q>If the anthrax attacks had taken place before September 11, the prime suspects would have been anti-abortion zealots or right-wing militia fanatics seeking to avenge the execution of Timothy McVeigh.</q>

Since the U.S. has no... [More]

The NY Times writes No News Is Good News, another article about media management in the U.S. It discusses the efforts to keep Bin Laden off of network television, with the transparent excuse that he might be sending coded messages to his ‘troops’, as well as the bending of public sentiment to keep up support for the war by encouraging a ‘with us or against us’ mentality:

<q>Even so, America’s New War, as CNN has branded it, is already whipping up one of the cold war’s most self-destructive... [More]

I’ve read a lot of longer articles and papers recently, filling in history that somehow got left out of the standard U.S. curriculum (pretty much the whole 20th century). It’s a bit of an information overload. There’s a (semi-)interesting read on First Monday about separating fact from dogma and propaganda and the success of newspaper, television and community news services in that regard.

On to the information overload.

On September 18, Noam Chomsky gave another talk at MIT, recapping many... [More]

Browsing the archives at CounterPunch turned up more interesting material. For a bit of levity, here’s The New Newspeak with some terms and definitions for today’s world. An article called Sex not Bombs is view of the situation I haven’t seen yet.

A John Pilger article from the 15th of October seriously derides the war in Afghanistan from a British point of view and takes to task our leaders for not reflecting the people’s views (also available at Pilger’s site):

<q>“Moreover, with every bomb... [More]

ZMag has 47 questions about the War in Afghanistan. The questions progress naturally, starting with “What is Islamic Fundamentalism?” (1) and proceeding from there. Of particular interest are “What is Terrorism?” (5), which leads to defining which nations are terrorist based on that criteria. “Is what the U.S. is doing consistent with a legal approach” (14) addresses the current vigilante approach the U.S. is taking:

<q>the answer is that the U.S. wishes to send a message and to establish a... [More]

In the Newsday today, I see that the CIA is being rewarded for their great counter-intelligence work so far:

<q>President George W. Bush last month signed an intelligence order directing the CIA to undertake its most sweeping and lethal covert action since the founding of the agency in 1947, explicitly calling for the destruction of Osama bin Laden and his worldwide al-Qaida network, according to senior government officials. … The president also added more than $1 billion to the agency’s war... [More]

In the same creepy vein as the previous post, here’s an article on the Wall Street Journal talking about how easy it is being white and being able to freely profile people while sympathizing with their plight, but demanding their patience and that they “suck it up”.

<q>But you know what? I think we’re in the fight of our lives, and I think we’re going to need their patience. And I think those who have not yet developed patience are going to have to grow up and get some. …
No one likes... [More]

You better make sure your reading material is government-approved. From CityPaper, an account of one man trying to fly to Arizona in a highly vigilant America.

Enjoy.

WiredNews reports that the USA (Uniting and Strengthening America) or “Terror” Bill has passed the Senate. Presumably it will not have more trouble passing Congress. Included measures granted to policing organizations are:

<q>…allow[s] police to perform “roving wiretaps” and listen in on any telephone that a subject of an investigation might use. … expands police’s ability to access any type of stored or “tangible” information…such as medical or educational data … [provides] that... [More]

If you caught President Bush’s press conference last night, you might have been amazed to discover that not only is the notion of a Missile Defense Shield still alive, apparently his faith in its abilities are strengthened. An article from Discover Magazine called Shield of Dreams (only available in print for now, should be on the website in a month or so), provides a “A critical look at the science and technology required to build an antiballistic system that would make the United States... [More]

Alternet has an article on Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan has two huge problems. One is crippling poverty and brutal winters in the mid-nineties that killed much of the population through malnutrition. The other is that:

<q>Geologists estimate that sitting beneath the wind-blown steppes of Kazakhstan are 50 billion barrels of oil — by far the biggest untapped reserves in the world. (Saudi Arabia, currently the world’s largest oil producer, is believed to have about 30 billion barrels remaining.)</q>... [More]

Noam Chomsky was interviewed (again) on MSNBC on October 2, 2001. ZMag has the transcript. He touches on the failure of the U.S. propaganda system abroad (despite its resounding success on Americans):

<q>…the reason is that they can see with their own eyes what the facts are. When you produce false propaganda to people who can see that it’s false, it does not succeed. Just the way that we never believed Soviet propaganda. It was so obviously ridiculous that you just laughed at it.</q>

Also... [More]

The U.S. started bombing Afghanistan yesterday. Seems we’re bombing someone new every couple of years or so. How surgical are the attacks? This is the same military that had to cheat on other ‘surgical strike’ tests…and still failed them. The same military that claimed surgical attacks in the Gulf War…and admitted later they lied and had killed about 200,000 people, many of them civilians. What kind of military installations are being targeted? I thought most places in Afghanistan didn’t... [More]

There’s an excellent article on the NY Times Magazine site called A Cautionary Tale for a New Age of Surveillance. Note that it requires a NY Times account to view now. Sorry.

One company that seemed to be doing well in the wake of the attack on the WTC is Visionics. The CEO of Visionics voiced an understandable concern:

<q>How can we be alerted when someone is entering the subway? How can we be sure when someone is entering Madison Square Garden? How can we protect monuments? We need to... [More]

ZMag has another radio interview with Noam Chomsky by John Campbell. It discusses the 1992 Pentagon draft of the Defense Planning Guide (excerpts of which were published in the NY Times of March 8, 1992 and which I am hard-pressed to find any trace of myself):

<q>The US must hold global power and a monopoly of force. It will then protect the new order while allowing others to pursue their legitimate interests as Washington defines them. The US must account sufficiently for the interests of the... [More]

John Negroponte got a September 14th approval from the Senate to be the new U.S ambassador to the United Nations. Unfortunately, he may not last long if the call to “root out all terrorists” is to be carried out in full. This article in the Newsday discusses his history, particularly his involvement in Honduras in the early ‘80s.

<q>There, he was paymaster for an unsavory covert army known as the Contras, who, under the tutelage of the United States, waged a dirty little war against the... [More]

In the Newsday today, another pair of authors try to point out that all of this “tough talk” from the U.S. is not helping our actual national security.

<q>…what we really mean by “national security.” Do we choose the meaning it has had for 56 years − essentially domination and protection of the U.S. right to have its finger in every pie? Or do we mean the physical safety of the American people in their own country?</q>

What if we tried to change the basic feeling towards America in those... [More]

The Economist argues in an opinion piece that regardless of the many ways in which the U.S. may have angered other countries, factions, religions and peoples, nothing it did could possibly explain an attack of such viciousness.

<q>America defends its interests, sometimes skilfully, sometimes clumsily, just as other countries do. Since power, like nature, abhors a vacuum, it steps into places where disorder reigns. On the whole, it should do so more, not less, often. Of all the great powers in... [More]

CNN reports that the U.S. has shared its evidence of links to Al Qaeda and Bin Laden to the September 11 attack.

<q>A senior Bush administration source said the United States provided phone records and bank records involving al Qaeda members. This source said the records also spelled out a bin Laden link between the September 11 attacks and last year’s attack on the USS Cole at the port of Aden, Yemen, as well as the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya.</q>

Upon reviewing... [More]