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 24 Sep 2004 @ 13:49
WSWS : News & Analysis : North America
CBS admits being duped over Bush National Guard memos
By Patrick Martin
24 September 2004
The so-called “memo-gate” affair—the use of apparently fabricated documents as part of a CBS News report on President Bush’s National Guard service during the Vietnam War—has been the occasion for much media hand-wringing, as well as harangues from the right wing about alleged liberal bias on the part of CBS and anchorman Dan Rather.
The moralizing of media pundits about a decline in journalistic standards is perhaps the most repulsive aspect of the affair. What standards? The American media is among the most corrupt and subservient institutions in the world.
Night after night, the network news programs pump out lies, most of them supplied verbatim by spokesmen for the US government. The slaughter of the Iraqi people is “liberation.” The torture of prisoners is the result of a “few bad apples.” Rising poverty and insecurity at home are “economic recovery.” An election in which the choice is restricted to two right-wing multimillionaires is “democracy.”
To hang CBS for credulously accepting fabricated memos is like indicting Enron for failing to pay parking tickets. It is the least of the network’s sins. Rather and company may have been fed phony documents, but the basic story is obviously true and hardly disputed. Bush, who today postures as an intransigent wartime leader, sought to escape military service in Vietnam and received privileged access to the National Guard due to the political connections of his wealthy family.
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WSWS : News & Analysis : Middle East : Iraq
US Congress hails Washington’s Iraqi stooge
By Bill Van Auken
24 September 2004
The degradation of the US political process found grotesque expression Thursday in the joint session of Congress convened to pay homage to Ayad Allawi.
Congressmen and senators as well as members of the Bush cabinet and the Joint Chiefs of Staff repeatedly leapt to their feet in standing ovations as the “interim prime minister” of Iraq proclaimed his commitment to “freedom and democracy,” and praised the US occupation as the country’s liberation and a decisive blow in the “worldwide war against terrorists.”
The news media, with very few exceptions, treated Allawi deferentially, accepting his status as a visiting head of state and quoting him at length on the policies of his government.
Allawi’s visit was marred by one minor detail: his right arm was in a cast, providing for awkward moments as Democrats and Republicans reached out to shake his hand following the speech. More >
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 15 Sep 2004 @ 14:33
From wsws.org
US media covers up American war crimes in Iraq
By Barry Grey
15 September 2004
Every day, US military forces in Iraq are attacking civilian populations in a calculated effort to drown a growing popular insurgency in blood. But one would hardly know the dimensions or brutality of the atrocities being carried out in the name of the American people from the sparse and sanitized coverage provided by the major press and broadcast outlets that purport to disseminate “the news.”
The US media—owned and controlled by a handful of huge corporate conglomerates—play an indispensable role in the mass murder of Iraqi men, women and children. Together with the Bush administration and the two major parties of US imperialism—the Democratic Party and its presidential candidate John Kerry, no less than their Republican rivals—the media are complicit in a crime against humanity of immense proportions, one that dwarfs any crimes committed by the various political leaders who have been targeted for destruction by the American ruling elite in recent years: from Panama’s Noriega, to Serbia’s Milosevic, to Saddam Hussein himself.
One can stare at the 24-hour cable news networks from sunup to sundown and get no sense of the carnage in towns and cities from Baghdad, to Fallujah, to Ramadi, to Hilla in the south and Tal Afar in the north that is left in the wake of US rockets, bombs, tank shells and sniper rounds. The evening news reports of the major networks provide at most a fleeting image of the death and destruction, inevitably hedged with absurd avowals from the US military that “precision” attacks were carried out against “terrorist” and “anti-Iraqi” targets.
As for the press, one day’s front-page report of US helicopter attacks on unarmed civilians or air strikes against urban centers is eclipsed the next day by the latest hurricane threat or new poll numbers on the upcoming election—an election in which no discussion of the legitimacy of the US subjugation of Iraq or the real war aims behind the bogus ones used to promote the war is permitted.
No country’s media is more cowardly, or more artful in churning out the official line and excluding any serious criticism or analysis, than that of the USA. It would be absurd to hold up the British media as a model of conscientious and objective reporting, but even there, articles occasionally appear that provide some insight into the reality of the situation in Iraq.
The Guardian newspaper, for example, on Tuesday carried an eyewitness account on its front page of the American helicopter attack on unarmed Iraqis that occurred Sunday in central Baghdad. Thirteen Iraqis were killed and dozens were wounded when US copters repeatedly fired rockets into a crowd that had gathered around a disabled American armored vehicle on Haifa Street, near the Green Zone that houses the US and British embassies and the offices of Washington’s puppet government.
For the benefit of our readers around the world, and especially in the US, we give here some excerpts from the chilling and tragic account provided by Guardian columnist Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, who was himself wounded while covering the US assault.
Abdul-Ahad describes at least four separate rocket strikes by American helicopters against the unarmed Iraqis—documenting that the helicopters returned several times to fire on those seeking to remove the dead and wounded from the first missile strike.
“When I was 50 m away I heard a couple of explosions and another cloud of dust rose across the street from where the first column of smoke was still climbing,” he writes. “People started running towards me in waves. A man wearing an orange overall was sweeping the street while others were running. A couple of helicopters in the sky overhead turned away.”
He runs for cover, and then: “A few seconds later, I heard people screaming and shouting—something must have happened—and I headed towards the sounds, still crouching behind a wall. Two newswire photographers were running in the opposite direction and we exchanged eye contact.
“About 20 m ahead of me, I could see the American Bradley armoured vehicle, a huge monster with fire rising from within. It stood alone, its doors open, burning. I stopped, took a couple of photos and crossed the street towards a bunch of people. Some were lying in the street, others stood around them. The helicopters were still buzzing, but further off now.”
The reporter continues: “I felt uneasy and exposed in the middle of the street, but lots of civilians were around me. A dozen men formed a circle around five injured people, all of whom were screaming and wailing.”
Abdul-Ahad’s belief that the presence of so many unarmed civilians afforded protection from a further US strike was shattered in short order. “I had been standing there taking pictures for two or three minutes when we heard the helicopters coming back. Everyone started running, and I didn’t look back to see what was happening to the injured men. We were all rushing towards the same place: a fence, a block of buildings and a prefab concrete cube used as a cigarette stall.
“I had just reached the corner of the cube when I heard two explosions. I felt hot air blast my face and something burning on my head. I crawled to the cube and hid behind it. Six of us were squeezed into a space less than two metres wide. Blood started dripping on my camera but all that I could think about was how to keep the lens clean. A man in his 40s next to me was crying. He wasn’t injured, he was just crying.
“I was so scared I just wanted to squeeze myself against the wall. The helicopters wheeled overhead, and I realised that they were firing directly at us.”
The helicopters moved away, and the reporter went back onto the street to record the carnage and help the wounded and dying. Then: “More kids ventured into the street, looking with curiosity at the dead and injured. Then someone shouted ‘Helicopters!’ and we ran. I turned and saw two small helicopters, black and evil. Frightened, I ran back to my shelter where I heard two more big explosions.... I reached a building entrance when someone grabbed my arm and took me inside. ‘There’s an injured man. Take pictures—show the world the American democracy,’ he said.”
It is hardly necessary to point out that no major US media outlet has taken note of the Guardian’s damning account of Sunday’s bloodletting in the center of Baghdad. Most US newspapers on Tuesday relegated to their inside pages news reports of yet another round of US air and artillery attacks on Fallujah, carried out Monday.
The Iraqi Health Ministry said 20 were killed and 39 wounded in the strikes. Aljazeera reported that those killed included the driver of an ambulance and six passengers, whose vehicle was struck by a jet-fired missile near the northern gate of the city. “Every time we send out an ambulance, it gets targeted,” the director of the Fallujah hospital told the Arab newspaper.
Aljazeera also reported that US missiles destroyed three homes in the city’s al-Shurta neighborhood, American shells hit a market place, and US tanks fired on homes in the al-Jughaivi neighborhood near the city’s northern gate.
The Washington Post, in a page-19 article, noted the attacks on Fallujah neighborhoods and the ambulance fatalities, but reported without comment the official US line that the attacks were directed against a “suspected hideout” of associates of Abu Musab Zarqawi. It printed the Goebells-like handout from the US military: “Based on the analysis of these [intelligence] reports, Iraqi Security Forces and multi-national forces effectively and accurately targeted these terrorists while protecting the lives of innocent civilians.”
The New York Times ran a front-page commentary focused not on the death and suffering being inflicted on the Iraqi people, but rather on the danger that the US military’s bloodletting against insurgent towns could backfire. It warned of the “classic dilemma faced by governments battling guerrilla movements: ease up, and the insurgency may grow; crack down, and risk losing the support of the population.”
This description is itself a cynical deception, as the Times well knows. The very fact that the US feels obliged to step up the slaughter and target civilian populations testifies to the fact that Washington and its stooge government are hated and despised by the Iraqi masses. Talk of a risk of “losing the support of the population” is an attempt to maintain the myth that the anti-US resistance is the work of a small minority of Baathist “hard-liners” and foreign terrorists, and the equally absurd claim that the US is in Iraq to establish “democracy.”
In reality, the US media’s disinformation operation is among the most striking and significant expressions of the collapse of American democracy.
See Also:
A daily toll of US atrocities in Iraq
[14 September 2004]
US military launches bloody attacks on rebel strongholds in Iraq
[11 September 2004]
The US sinks deeper into the Iraqi quagmire
[7 September 2004]
New York Times and Washington Post remain silent on murder allegations against Iraqi Prime Minister Allawi
[19 August 2004] More >
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 14 Sep 2004 @ 14:34
WSWS : News & Analysis : Middle East : Iraq
A daily toll of US atrocities in Iraq
By the Editorial Board
14 September 2004
The cold-blooded slaughter of civilians in Haifa Street in central Baghdad on Sunday underscores the completely criminal character of the US occupation of Iraq. Day after day, scores of Iraqi civilians are being massacred in concerted offensive aimed at terrorising the population and stamping American control over the country in the leadup to next year’s elections.
At least 13 people were killed and 55 injured when a US attack helicopter fired on unarmed demonstrators who were dancing around the remains of a burnt-out Bradley Armoured Vehicle on Haifa Street. Among the dead were a 12-year-old girl and a 28-year-old Palestinian journalist Mazen al-Tameizi, who was reporting on fighting in the area for the Al Arabiya television channel.
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Vote tampering feared in US presidential race
By Peter Daniels
14 September 2004
Only seven weeks remain until Election Day in the United States, and the charged atmosphere surrounding the reelection campaign of the Bush administration has focused increasing attention on voting and vote-counting procedures that have led millions to lose confidence that their ballots will be fairly cast and tabulated.
The vote-counting suspicions are centered on the continued use of antiquated equipment in some localities, the introduction in others of electronic voting systems that provide no paper trail for checking vote totals, and the fact that, according to one advocacy organization, the central tabulators used in 30 states to count up to 2 million votes at once are susceptible to hacking and vote-tampering (See: “Consumer organisation highlights security hole in US vote-counting system”).
Following the vote-counting debacle in Florida in 2000 that led to the installation of George Bush by a 5-4 majority of the US Supreme Count, Congress passed the misleadingly named “Help America Vote Act.” More >
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 11 Sep 2004 @ 15:33
Just a few headlines on wsws.org website today, 9-11-04…
US military launches bloody attacks on rebel strongholds in Iraq
[link]
The political issues behind the Jakarta bomb blast
[link]
Death toll rises on US-Mexico border
Stop the persecution of immigrant workers!
[link]
Israel targets Palestinians, threatens Syria
[link]
Although I agree we must have peace and love in our hearts and spread this consciousness out to the planet, via vibration, words, articles, radio stations, tv etc, very little to nothing will change if we don’t get to the bottom line or cause of these issues.
As long as we don’t see everyone (and I do mean everyone) as consciousness/souls in bodies and that we are all connected via this energy/intent, then there will not be peace and respect on or for the earth.
If we have a “them” and “us” attitude, therefore believing/feeling we have the “right” to land, and feel/believe we are “justified” to shove people out, take over their country or bomb them, then how can there ever be peace?
If we allow lies to rule our government,(and other governments) in any way shape or form, then how can there ever be peace?
If our very lifestyles demand more of the earth then it can handle, and we constantly need/desire it’s resources/life blood just to support our lifestyles, how can there be peace?
Yes this is a beautiful planet, and the high vibration of love is a potential that exists for all of us, but words won’t do it folks, we HAVE to reflect this in every way.
Allow lies, ego/power struggles etc to run the day, then it matters not how much you “speak” of love and peace, you won’t get it, maintain it, and spread it out to the planet. If your actions don’t reflect it, then your intentions are NOT what you think they are. Action follows intention, in everything.
If you really have the intention for a better planet, peace, love and highest benefit to be the norm, then this has to be reflected in your actions also.
You can’t say you want peace, then support a government that demands war. You can’t say you want peace, and live a wasteful lifestyle.
You can’t say you want peace and see people as separate and/or evil.
This is pure and simple. No matter how many sweet, acceptable, loving, pseudo-positive you “sound”, nothing will change if one’s actions and intentions don’t change.
This is not negative, it just is. One gets so accustomed to the low vibe, the lies, the downward spiral that one doesn’t even notice it anymore and actually believes that by keeping their “attitude” positive, things will change. The Universe doesn’t work in such a way, how can the human species progress and evolve in this way?
Can you imagine if the law of gravity only said in words that it will be a force that keeps your feet on the ground, but in truth some people float and some people don’t? It is through the action of gravity that makes it true and real, not just the belief in it. This is how Natural Laws work, and this is how Spiritual Laws work and this is the Truth.
It is believed that we all have the right to our “opinions” and lifestyles. Free will is the name of the “game”. Yes, we have the right, but then we also have to take responsibility for the consequences of this free will. You want to vote, pay taxes, believe lies, support one side/country in war, etc then do it, but accept the responsibility that you are also part of the cause for it. You are just as complicit as any government official.
So go ahead spread love and peace via words, “positive attitude”, not seeing the truth of the world situation etc, but also take responsibility for your actions. Your soul knows this, but your mind/ego fights it to the core. Again, this is pure and simple. The way things are going, NOTHING or very little will change. More >
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 10 Sep 2004 @ 14:58
WSWS : News & Analysis : North America
As the 1,000th US soldier dies in Iraq
The fight to end the war means opposing both Bush and Kerry
By Bill Van Auken, SEP presidential candidate
9 September 2004
The passing of the grim milestone of 1,000 American soldiers killed in Iraq must be the occasion for redoubling the fight for an immediate end to the US occupation of that war-ravaged country.
This means a struggle not only against the Bush administration, but also against the Democratic Party and its presidential candidate John Kerry, who voted to authorize the war and has vowed to continue it.
After the Iraqi people themselves, who have seen tens of thousands of their countrymen killed, wounded and tortured by the US occupation army, the American troops are the principal victims of this war.
Every reason given for sending them to fight and die has proven a lie. There were neither any weapons of mass destruction nor any Al Qaeda-Baghdad connection. The Bush administration’s promise to turn Iraq into a beacon of democracy has produced a puppet regime headed by a homicidal thug and long-time CIA agent who is despised by the majority of the population.
Stripped bare of all these false pretexts, the war stands as a criminal colonialist enterprise aimed at militarily subjugating Iraq in order to control its vast oil reserves.
More than half of the soldiers killed in Iraq were under 30, drawn overwhelmingly from the working class. Many of those whose lives have been needlessly sacrificed in what Washington insiders describe as a “war of choice” joined the military straight out of high school to get a job or money for college. These young men and women are now dying at the rate of three a day.
While the identity of the 1,000th soldier killed in Iraq is not yet known, names released by the Pentagon Wednesday included those of Tomas Garces, a 19-year-old army specialist from Weslaco, Texas, a Rio Grande Valley town where the unemployment rate is close to 15 percent, and Devin Grella, 21, a private first class in the reserves from Medina, Ohio, who was the 35th soldier from that state to die.
In addition to the dead, there are some 7,000 wounded, among them many who are permanently disabled. Some 1,100 soldiers and Marines were wounded in the month of August alone, as US forces faced determined resistance in heavily populated Iraqi cities.
There is every reason to believe that casualty rates will rise substantially after the November election. The Bush administration has deliberately postponed launching far more intense counterinsurgency operations to suppress the Iraqi resistance and retake cities that it now controls for fear of the impact the carnage would have on the November vote.
The preparations for a brutal offensive are already under way. General Richard Myers, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, told a Pentagon press briefing Tuesday that the US military in Iraq is now working “to set the conditions for the successful use of force later” against cities and areas where the Iraqi resistance has gained control. Military commanders in Iraq have indicated that any such action will be delayed for two to four months.
The administration dismissed any significance to the 1,000th US military fatality in Iraq. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld described the number of casualties as “relatively small” and obscenely lumped them together with the lives lost in the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, as all part of the global “war on terrorism.”
Kerry took note of the figure, calling it “tragic” and incorporating it into a new tack that the Democratic campaign has taken on the Iraq war.
It should be recalled that during the Democratic primaries Kerry cast himself as an antiwar candidate, opposed to Bush’s policies in Iraq. Once he had the votes needed for the nomination, Iraq became a non-issue. Kerry deliberately disassociated himself from the broad popular opposition to the war. He adopted the slogan that “failure is not an option,” and vowed to continue the occupation and even increase the number of US troops there.
Then, last month, Kerry announced that—even if he had then known that Iraq had neither the weapons nor terrorist ties alleged by the administration—he still would have cast his vote of two years ago giving Bush the authority to launch a “preemptive” invasion. With this statement the Democratic campaign essentially ceded the issue of Iraq to Bush.
Now, following relentless attacks against him by the Republicans, and a drop in the polls—particularly among those describing themselves as strongly committed to the Democratic candidate—Kerry has resurrected Iraq as a campaign theme.
Beginning on Labor Day, Kerry described Iraq as “the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time.” The candidate traveled Wednesday to Cincinnati, Ohio, to deliver a speech in the same hall where Bush made his fraudulent case for war nearly two years earlier. Kerry censured the Bush administration for a series of “miscalculations.”
“His miscalculation was going to war without planning carefully and without the allies we should have had,” said Kerry. “As a result, America has paid nearly 90 percent of the bill in Iraq. Contrast that with the Gulf War, where our allies paid 95 percent of the costs.”
What precisely is it that Kerry finds “wrong”—aside from Washington footing the bill—about the war in Iraq, a war that he and his running mate John Edwards both voted to authorize?
That the war was based upon lies and waged in blatant violation of international law merits no mention by Kerry. Nor did the Democratic candidate say a word about the continuing bombardment of crowded urban neighborhoods in Baghdad, Fallujah, Najaf and elsewhere in Iraq, which constitutes a war crime. The sadistic torture of Iraqi civilians at Abu Ghraib and other US detention camps in Iraq also failed to feature among the things Kerry found wrong about the war.
What has been done to the Iraqi population is, to put it bluntly, not an issue for Kerry. As we mark the 1,000th US fatality, it should be noted that no one in the Washington establishment has even bothered to estimate the casualties inflicted upon Iraqi civilians in the year and a half since the US invasion.
Estimates range as high as 37,000 killed and many more wounded. In a country where 60 percent of the population is under the age of 18, a large proportion of those who have been slain or maimed by US bombs, missiles, shells and bullets are children. Their deaths and agony go unrecorded, continuously censored from the major media’s coverage of the war.
So what’s wrong about the war for Kerry? His differences are a matter of tactics and style. He is committed to a successful consummation of the criminal and reckless aggression launched by the Bush administration, but insists that his election could win Washington greater international backing, while lulling the growing antiwar sentiment within the US itself.
Kerry has suggested that US troops could be withdrawn from Iraq after his first term, meaning four more years of war and thousands more US soldiers and tens of thousands more Iraqis killed. Kerry qualified even this halfhearted promise with a warning that withdrawing from Iraq too soon could leave a political “vacuum.” In other words, he is determined to continue the occupation until a pro-US regime is consolidated, a goal that means unending colonial war.
While the Republicans have undoubtedly smeared Kerry and grossly distorted his political record, their derisive singsong chant of “flip-flop, flip-flop” has some political basis.
Bush and his handlers portray Kerry’s twists and turns on the Iraq war as merely a matter of political opportunism, driven by the polls or some personal indecisiveness that disqualifies him from assuming the exalted title of “commander-in-chief.”
In reality, Kerry’s problem is that from the outset of his campaign he has been compelled to speak to two audiences. The first is the majority of the population which is opposed to the occupation of Iraq and wants US troops withdrawn.
The second—and for him the most important—are the predominant sections of the US corporate and financial oligarchy, which in no way want the election turned into a referendum on the Iraq war and global US militarism.
To the extent that Kerry is forced to criticize Bush on Iraq once again in order to boost his flagging campaign, it amounts to empty demagogy. When it comes to the fundamental aims of US imperialism in Iraq, there are no differences between the two candidates.
Kerry’s statement that he would still have voted for the war, like the vote itself, was no accident. The war on Iraq—whatever tactical differences existed over timing and diplomatic preparation—was a consensus policy of the ruling elite. It is the culmination of a strategy developed by both Republicans and Democrats since the dissolution of the Soviet Union 13 years ago—the use of overwhelming US military superiority to achieve global hegemony by securing a stranglehold over markets and sources of strategic raw materials, foremost among them oil.
Kerry’s election would not spell an end to either the US occupation of Iraq or the continuing campaign of global militarism under the pretext of a war on terrorism. Whatever sympathy he feigns for the working class youth in uniform who are being killed and maimed in this war, he is committed to continuing the slaughter for years to come.
Bringing a halt to the war and to the entire bipartisan program of world domination is possible only by means of a break with the two-party system and the emergence of a new mass political movement of working people, based on a socialist program. Only this kind of a movement, representing the needs and desires of the vast majority of the population, can end the domination of US foreign policy and every other vital social question by the predatory interests of a tiny financial elite.
(clip)
See Also:
Complaint filed with Pentagon over Kerry medals
The anatomy of a right-wing provocation in US election campaign
[8 September 2004]
The US sinks deeper into the Iraqi quagmire
[7 September 2004]
The Republican convention and the specter of dictatorship
[4 September 2004] More >
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