http://informationclearinghouse.info/article12083.htm
Defeat is victory. Death is life
By Robert Fisk
02/26/06 "The Independent" -- -- Everyone in the Middle East rewrites
history, but never before have we had a US administration so wilfully,
dishonestly and ruthlessly reinterpreting tragedy as success, defeat as
victory, death as life - helped, I have to add, by the compliant American
press. I'm reminded not so much of Vietnam as of the British and French
commanders of the First World War who repeatedly lied about military victory
over the Kaiser as they pushed hundreds of thousands of their men through
the butchers' shops of the Somme, Verdun and Gallipoli. The only difference
now is that we are pushing hundreds of thousands of Arabs though the
butchers' shops - and don't even care.
Last week's visit to Beirut by one of the blindest of George Bush's bats -
his Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice - was indicative of the cruelty
that now pervades Washington. She brazenly talked about the burgeoning
"democracies" of the Middle East while utterly ignoring the bloodbaths in
Iraq and the growing sectarian tensions of Lebanon, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
Perhaps the key to her indifference can be found in her evidence to the
Senate Committee on International Affairs where she denounced Iran as "the
greatest strategic challenge" facing the US in the region, because Iran uses
policies that "contradict the nature of the kind of Middle East sought by
the United States".
As Bouthaina Shaaban, one of the brightest of Syria's not always very bright
team of government ministers, noted: "What is the nature of the kind of
Middle East sought by the United States? Should Middle East states adapt
themselves to that nature, designed oceans away?" As Maureen Dowd, the best
and only really worthwhile columnist on the boring New York Times, observed
this month, Bush "believes in self-determination only if he's doing the
determining ... The Bushies are more obsessed with snooping on Americans
than fathoming how other cultures think and react." And conniving with rogue
regimes, too, Dowd might have added.
Take Donald Rumsfeld, the reprehensible man who helped to kick off the
"shock and awe" mess that has now trapped more than 100,000 Americans in the
wastes of Iraq. He's been taking a leisurely trip around North Africa to
consult some of America's nastiest dictators, among them President Zine
el-Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia, the man with the largest secret service in
the Arab world and whose policemen have perfected the best method of
gleaning information from suspected "terrorists": to hold them down and
stuff bleach-soaked rags into their mouths until they have almost drowned.
The Tunisians learned this from the somewhat cruder methods of the Algerians
next door whose government death squads slaughtered quite a few of the
150,000 victims of the recent war against the Islamists. The Algerian lads -
and I've interviewed a few of them after their nightmares persuaded them to
seek asylum in London - would strap their naked victims to a ladder and, if
the "chiffon" torture didn't work, they'd push a tube down the victim's
throat and turn on a water tap until the prisoner swelled up like a balloon.
There was a special department (at the Chateauneuf police station, in case
Donald Rumsfeld wants to know) for torturing women, who were inevitably
raped before being dispatched by an execution squad.
All this I mention because Rumsfeld's also been cosying up to the Algerians.
On a visit to Algiers this month, he announced that "the United States and
Algeria have a multifaceted relationship. It involves political and economic
as well as military-to-military co-operation. And we very much value the
co-operation we are receiving in counter-terrorism..." Yes, I imagine the
"chiffon" technique is easy to learn, the abuse of prisoners, too - just
like Abu Ghraib, for example, which now seems to have been the fault of
journalists rather than America's thugs.
Rumsfeld's latest pronouncements have included a defence of the Pentagon's
system of buying favourable news stories in Iraq with bribes -
"non-traditional means to provide accurate information" was his fantasy
description of this latest attempt to obscure the collapse of the American
regime in Baghdad - and an attack on our reporting of the Abu Ghraib
tortures. "Consider for a moment the vast quantity of column inches and
hours of television devoted to the detainee abuse [sic] at Abu Ghraib.
Compare that to the volume of coverage and condemnation associated with,
say, the discovery of Saddam Hussein's mass graves, which were filled with
hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis."
Let's expose this whopping lie. We were exposing Saddam's vile regime,
especially his use of gas, as long ago as 1983. I was refused a visa to Iraq
by Saddam's satraps for exposing their vile tortures at - Abu Ghraib. And
what was Donald Rumsfeld doing? Visiting Baghdad, grovelling before Saddam,
to whom he did not mention the murders and mass graves, which he knew about,
and pleading with the Beast of Baghdad to reopen the US embassy in Iraq.
With the usual press courtiers in tow, Rumsfeld has no problems, witness
George Melloan's recent interview with the Beast of Washington in his Boeing
737: "He generously spares me time for a chat about defence strategy. Bright
sunlight streams in and lights his face ... Sitting across from him at a
desk high above the clouds, one wonders if the ability of this modern Jove
to call down lightning on transgressors will be equal to the tasks ahead."
And so myth-making and tragedy go hand in hand. Iraq's monumental
catastrophe has become routine, shapeless, an incipient "civil war". Note
how the American framework of disaster is now being portrayed as an Iraqi vs
Iraqi war, as if the huge and brutal US occupation has nothing to do with
the appalling violence in Iraq. They blow up each other's mosques? They just
don't want to get on. We told them to have a non-sectarian government and
they refused. That, I suspect, will be the get-out line when the next deluge
overwhelms the Americans in Iraq.
Winston Churchill, when the Iraqis staged their insurgency against British
rule in 1920, called Iraq "an ungrateful volcano". But let's just sit back
and enjoy the view. Democracy is coming to the Middle East. People are
enjoying more liberties. History doesn't matter, only the future. And the
future for the people of the Middle East is becoming darker and bloodier by
the day. I guess it just depends whether "Jove" is up to his job when all
that bright sunlight streams in and lights his face.
© 2006 Independent News and Media Limited
***
From: Anthony Saidy
Sent: Monday, February 27, 2006 8:58 AM
Subject: Gore Vidal and Scott Ritter Dialogue
March 4 in L.A.on ME Emergency
(This will be the decade's top nexus of truth & wit, coupled with a
passionate commitment to the American democracy promised.
Seats about two thousand, and it will be full. Car-pooling advised.
-AFS)
Gore Vidal and Scott Ritter
Saturday, March 4, 4:00 PM to 5:30 PM
Immanuel Presbyterian Church
3300 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles
Former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter will join legendary writer-
radical reformer Gore Vidal in LA on March 4.
U.S. Tour of Duty's Real Intelligence Project, Los Angeles City Beat,
and Progressive Talk AM 1150 present: an emergency public discussion
about Iraq, Iran and America's constitutional crisis.
A citizen response to lying, spying and dying for the "war on terror"
Doors open 3:00 PM. Seating is first-come, first-served.
A book sale and signing ("Iraq Confidential") will follow the event.
SCOTT RITTER was the UN's top weapons inspector in Iraq between 1991
and 1998. Before working for the UN he served as an officer in the US
Marines and as a ballistic missile adviser to General Schwarzkopf in
the first Gulf war. He is the author of Iraq Confidential, published
by Nation Books.
"The important thing to know about Scott Ritter is that he was
right." - Seymour Hersh
National Book Award winner GORE VIDAL was born in 1925 at the United
States Military Academy at West Point. His first novel, Williwaw,
written when he was nineteen years old and serving in the Army,
appeared in the spring of 1946. Since then he has written twenty-
three novels, five plays, many screenplays, short stories, well over
two hundred essays, and a memoir.
Suggested donation: $10 (nobody turned away)
For more information call 310.842.8794 or visit
http://www.ustourofduty.org
***
FATHER-DAUGHTER POETRY SPECTACULAR
Mel Weisburd, co-founder and editor-in-chief of Coastlines, the historic
literary magazine of 1950s Los Angeles, and
Stefi Weisburd, winner of the 2002 The Nation/Discovery Prize and the 2005
St. Lawrence Book Award
Sunday, March 19, 2:00 PM, in the courtyard at Dutton's Brentwood Bookstore
Poems on Art, Science, Politics, History, Travel, Love, Life...
Introduction by Suzanne Lummis
Mel Weisburd will read from his new book A Life of Windows & Mirrors, which
selects from 60 years of work and includes a cycle of poems on his role in
the early struggle to control smog in LA., as well as a prose tribute to the
poet Tom McGrath. "Weisburd mixes the outer world of technology and politics
with a deeply felt inner landscape, and all of it expressed in the
intellectually and emotionally complex language of a true poet," notes
Estelle Gershgoren-Novak, editor of Poets of the Non-Existent City: L.A.
During the McCarthy Years (UNM press, 2002). Mel has published in The
California Quarterly, The Transatlantic Review, Poetry-Los Angeles, Poet
Lore, Blue Mesa Review and in Walter Lowenfel's New Poets of Today. His
article, "Lysergic Acid and the Creative Experience" was included in Best
Articles and Stories in 1956. Leonard Wolf, in Voices from the Love
Generation, later credited him for giving an account of that kind of
experience well before Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg.
Stefi Weisburd grew up in the literary community, surrounding Coastlines in
the 50's. She was the Louis Untermeyer Scholar in Poetry at the Bread Loaf
Writers Conference in 2003. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Paris
Review, Poetry Daily, Tin House among others. Her first book The Wind-Up
Gods will be published by Black Lawrence Press by early 2007. Barefoot, a
collection of poems for children is forthcoming from Wordsong.
Suzanne Lummis is the author of In Danger from Heyday Books and editor of
Speechlessthemagazine.org, "the warmest, coolest and oddest literary
magazine on the web". The Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Poets and
Poetry describes her as one of the most influential Los Angeles area poets
of the past 20 years.
Dutton's is at 11975 San Vicente Blvd.
(A block and half east of Bundy)
Los Angeles, CA. 90049
Featured Book on sale.
Refreshments and book signing.
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