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--- Begin Message ----Caveat Lector- http://atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/FE13Aa02.htmlThe war of the snuff videos HOUSTON - It will get worse. A secrecy-obsessed Pentagon is in total disarray. Republican Senator John McCain is in favor of releasing all of Abu Ghraib's S&M stash right now, photos and videos. Houston was under "tornado alert" this Tuesday. This was not merely a meteorological metaphor. Conservative Texas is getting sick and tired of it all. Some blame it on "the whole movement of our culture towards decadence". Others, like Randy Johnson, a gentleman from Houston, are more ... proactive: "Just take the camera away from the troops and replace them with 9mm pistols." Retired generals are in panic, convinced that Iraq may become, simultaneously, an ally of Iran and an al-Qaeda paradise. The upcoming snuff videos from Abu Ghraib found their counterpart in the snuff video on the Islamic website Muntada al-Ansar of five masked men beheading civilian contractor Nick Berg from Philadelphia after warning George W Bush he will regret the day he stepped into Iraq. This snuff video even comes with a title: Abu Musab al-Zarqawi Shown Slaughtering an American. Al-Qaeda-linked al-Zarqawi, with a US$10 million bounty on his head, may be the only real al-Qaeda commander active in Iraq. The Pentagon had at least three clear chances to nab him before the war. It did not - because he was one of the justifications for the war. The war of the snuff videos may have deadly repercussions. This hardcore jihad propaganda stunt - if it's real - may encourage different sectors of the Iraqi resistance to join, to the delight of Washington neo-cons who want an all-out clash of civilizations-cum-total war. The majority of Americans don't seem to have the stomach to go primal, but the impatience already expressed by many people in Texas may eventually signal the go-ahead for total war without mercy. One from the heart The hyperactive US corporate media salivate at the prospect of figuring out what Washington neo-cons are up to next. "Superb Job" Secretary on the Defensive Donald Rumsfeld insists "the military, not the media, discovered these abuses", trying to imply that the Pentagon was always on top of it. It was, but maybe not the way he intended. Rumsfeld hates the fact that it was a journalist, Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker, who broke the Abu Ghraib story. And Hersh is sure the buck stops at Rumsfeld. Serious questions have not been answered. Since his Pentagon "told the world" of an investigation on Abu Ghraib last January, Rumsfeld never bothered to tell Bush or the Armed Services Committee about the possibility of Americans practicing torture. Rumsfeld never ordered one of his countless aides to read the report by Major-General Antonio Taguba and come up with some solutions. Rumsfeld himself sanctioned the use of private contractors who were involved in the Abu Ghraib abuses, so he should know what they were up to. Last year in the Sunni triangle, a number of sheikhs told this correspondent they knew experts from Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's intelligence apparatus were passing prison interrogation techniques to the Americans. These consultants were used by the Pentagon exactly because they were not respecting the Geneva Conventions or even Iraqi justice - since the country was occupied anyway. So it was no-holds-barred territory, with US commanders and soldiers totally shielded from any intrusion. Sixty-four percent of Americans believe that Abu Ghraib was an isolated case - subscribing to the official Pentagon spin. It would have to be a Pentagon insider to provide the killer evidence capable of convincing Americans that Rumsfeld and the Pentagon civilian leadership have been acting as if they were one of the rogue regimes they despise - in total violation of international law. Rumsfeld's departure as a pugnacious sacrificial lamb could be prevented by the White House finding the ultimate tactic for the perfect public relations strategy, an equation between cost-benefit and the polls. According to the latest CNN-Gallup poll, 46 percent approve and 51 percent disapprove of Bush on Iraq. Election-wise, Bush has 48 percent and Democratic rival John Kerry 47 percent. But CNN does not stress that among registered voters Kerry has jumped 6 points ahead of Bush. Vice President Dick Cheney has all but ordered Congress to "get off his back" (Rumsfeld's), a call to arms dutifully followed by the oil-oiled neo-con propaganda machine. Rumsfeld also said everybody at the Pentagon is "heartsick". In a hilarious twist of fate, this happened the same day that Cheney's own heart was proclaimed by his doctor to be "functioning properly". One, two, three, fire The chattering classes are divided between the fire-Rumsfeld group and the "loyal" opposition - Democrats and moderate Republicans who want to see the neo-cons in the Bush administration back in the wilderness but who also want the United States to restore at least a measure of its badly damaged credibility. What we might call the Revolt of the Generals was expressed by the now-iconic editorial of the Army Times: "This was not just a failure of leadership at the local command level. This was a failure that ran straight to the top. Accountability here is essential - even if that means relieving top leaders from duty in a time of war." The war of the snuff videos will keep the Abu Ghraib S&M on media red alert, with the networks hysterically falling over themselves to come up with any damage-control euphemism, such as referring to the S&M as "inappropriate sexual behavior". The wall-to-wall cover is very bad news for Bush and potential good news for the still-in-deep-slumber Kerry campaign. No matter what happens next, 32 states have already decided how to vote next November. Eighteen are swing states. People like former Democratic pollster Pat Cadell are stressing that Kerry "has to take the high road", has to tell everyone in these 18 states what he's actually planning to do, considering that roughly 50 percent of Americans in most polls are now saying the country is on the wrong track. But compare it with another amazing statistic: no less than 49 percent of Democrats are still saying that Kerry straddles the issues. Cadell insists that Kerry must tell voters: Bush was indeed a good leader after September 11, 2001, but then he collapsed because of Iraq and his tax cuts for the rich. Bush keeping Rumsfeld in command, in terms of US credibility in Iraq, the Middle East and the world of Islam, would be the 21st-century equivalent of the medieval black plague. Two in three Americans may support Rumsfeld at the moment, according to a University of Pennsylvania poll, but the support is bound to drop dramatically after the war of the snuff videos. And now for the sacrificial lamb Republican Senator James Inhofe told the Senate Armed Services Committee, "These prisoners, they're murderers, they're terrorists, they're insurgents, and many of them probably have American blood on their hands, and here we're concerned about the treatment of those individuals." The Red Cross, in its February 2004 report, is adamant: Up to 90 percent of the prisoners in Iraq were arrested by mistake. General Taguba's comprehensive 53-page report on prison abuse in Abu Ghraib, "a very good job" in the words of Senator McCain, stops the buck at the brigade-commander level. Taguba in essence says this was an individual, not institutional, failure. He does not mention that Major-General Geoffrey Miller, former Guantanamo supremo, wanted to "Gitmoize" Abu Ghraib, employing hardcore methods widely condemned by the Red Cross and Amnesty International since early 2002. Pentagon critics insist it goes all the way up to Lieutenant-General Ricardo Sanchez, the top commander on the ground in Iraq, and the whole Pentagon leadership. Even Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, daggers pointed, wants (high) heads to roll. But how to make the Iraq S&M story go away? The Bush administration would have to ignore it. This is now absolutely impossible. Abu Ghraib is another round in the classic case study of the Bush administration vs world public opinion (the most famous previous round was certainly February 15, 2003, when more than 10 million people around the world demonstrated in the streets against the preemptive war on Iraq). It was world opinion uproar over Abu Ghraib that forced Bush to go public and in an extra-mild way denounce the Pentagon. Mainstream US media were not willing to go all the way with such an embarrassing story in time of war. Bush going public meant the official go-ahead for the porno deluge. One more historical irony: Bush couldn't care less for world opinion ("focus groups", in his own words) and America's image in the world, but it is world opinion that now has backed him into a very tight corner. The only strategy left - repeated ad nauseam by White House, Pentagon and neo-con think-tanks ("we should not abandon the oppressed throughout the Middle East", etc) is to proclaim one's shock - and disgusted awe. But it all comes back full circle: Who will be offered as the proverbial sacrificial lamb (or wolf) so corporate media may declare this scandal officially over? Until then, it's the war of the snuff videos. ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~--> <FONT COLOR="#000099">Yahoo! 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