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Oh the Irony of Unfortunate Timing
Far From Civilisation
I just noticed the chociest quote in all the wedding party massacre coverage:
Major General James Mattis, commander of the 1st Marine Division, was scathing of those who suggested a wedding party had been hit. “How many people go to the middle of the desert … to hold a wedding 80 miles (130km) from the nearest civilisation? There were more than two dozen military-age males. Let’s not be naive.” When reporters asked him about footage on Arabic television of a child’s body being lowered into a grave, he replied: “I have not seen the pictures but bad things happen in wars. I don’t have to apologise for the conduct of my men.”
I take two things from this that pretty much sum up the unsurprising and historically mundane colonial arrogance of Major General James Mattis. The first is that people who live in tiny hamlets such as Mukaradeeb (with all of 25 houses) are indeed far from civilised, and probably up to no good and should not expect to indulge their uncivilised traditions. And the second is that any gathering of 20+ “military-age males” in Iraq is now fair game for artillery barrage and aerial attack, not to mention ground troops liquidation after the fact. For a country where half the population is under 25, this means pretty much every city, town, or even tiny village is a “legitimate” target.
“I saw something that nobody ever saw in this world,” said Mr Nawaf. “There were children’s bodies cut into pieces, women cut into pieces, men cut into pieces.” Among the dead was his daughter Fatima Ma’athi, 25, and her two young boys, Raad, four, and Raed, six. “I found Raad dead in her arms. The other boy was lying beside her. I found only his head,” he said. His sister Simoya, the wife of Haji Rakat, was also killed with her two daughters.
Coup A Go Go
Earlier here.
Four More Years!
Because of his complicity with the Bush Gang’s irresponsible wartime stimulus to the US economy — largely consisting of enticing people to speculate on their homes by creating an artificially low interest rate coupled with drastic inflationary spending and a massive nontaxable transfer of wealth from the middle classes to the upper classes — it comes as no great surprise that Bush nominated the almost-octagenarian Chief Money Guy Greenspan for yet another term at the funds spigot. But larger forces than political favouritism are gathering that will contrain Greenspan’s ability to sustain this false recovery beyond the short-term…
The Fed is lending at sharply negative real interest rates. The fed funds rate of 1% minus the latest inflation rate of 2.3% gives a negative real interest rate of 1.3%. The 20-year average is a positive rate of 2.4%. To get to 2.4% now would mean hiking the fed funds rate to 4.75% … Keeping the economy afloat by inflating a credit bubble is the most stupid thing any central bank could do, but they do it again and again. The Fed under Greenspan took that stupidity to a new high.
Bush’s War Crime Memos – Planning Ahead!
Newsweek has uncovered some amazing memos that demonstrate how even several years ago Colin Powell was warning that abandoning the Geneva Conventions was probably a mistake, and could lead to war crimes prosecutions against not only US soldiers but high-ranking US officials implicated in condoning any torture or other contraventions of the Protocols. Here’s White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales, saying “hell yeah do what you want”. And here’s Colin Powell and his legal advisor warning that doing this would not only ruin US credibility and make it more difficult to fight the “War on Terror” because countries that still respected the Geneva Protocols (basically, everyone but the US, Myanmar, North Korea, and Syria) could legitimately refuse to extradite suspects to a country like the US where human rights were being explicitly curtailed.
In the memo, the White House lawyer focused on a little known 1996 law passed by Congress, known as the War Crimes Act, that banned any Americans from committing war crimesdefined in part as “grave breaches” of the Geneva Conventions … One key advantage of declaring that Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters did not have Geneva Convention protections is that it “substantially reduces the threat of domestic criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act”.
So it seems even a couple of years ago the Bush Gang were giving serious thought as to how to avoid future criminal prosecution for malfeasance, no matter how that might cripple the “War on Terror”. I guess they learned how important it was to cover their arses after so many of them were prosecuted in the 1980s.
Watching them now desperately (and badly) lying to save their arses is a lesson in political desperation. Rumsfeld (and, by implication, Bush) have been caught now several times lying about how and when they first “knew” that torture was being used in interrogations in Iraq, and before that. Rumsfeld has said he was briefed first in January/February 2004, and Bush’s sock puppet Scott McClellan said those early months of 2004 was when Bush was first informed. However, now even Colin Powell has come out and verified the Red Cross’s statements that they had been warning “the highest levels” of the Bush Gang of ongoing torture since the middle of 2003.
We kept the president informed of the concerns that were raised by the ICRC and other international organizations as part of my regular briefings of the president, and advised him that we had to follow these issues” … A Powell aide said he couldn’t pinpoint when the secretary first spoke with Bush about detainees in Iraq but said Powell told the president of receiving complaints about detainees generally – in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, “at various times throughout this period – the last year or more.”
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