“The Bush administration and lawmakers have not followed through on their own concerns that terrorists could turn the nation’s chemical plants into weapons of mass destruction, congressional auditors said Tuesday.
Congress and the administration concluded after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that the plants were vulnerable, and the CIA warned a year ago of the potential for an al-Qaida attack on U.S. chemical facilities.” Nando Times
“International aid groups urged the United States and Britain on Tuesday to put the well-being of Iraqi civilians at the center of war plans, calling on them to avoid attacks on key civilian facilities like power plants.
Amnesty International and Oxfam also said the United Nations should enter Iraq as quickly as possible after a war to administer humanitarian aid and run a post-Saddam Hussein government.” Nando Times
The Iraq Body Count Project – “This is a Human Security project to establish an independent and comprehensive public database of civilian deaths in Iraq resulting directly from military actions by the USA and its allies in 2003. Results and totals are continually updated and made immediately available on this page and on various IBC counters which may be freely displayed on any website, where they will be automatically updated without further intervention. Casualty figures are derived from a comprehensive survey of online media reports. Where these sources report differing figures, the range (a minimum and a maximum) are given. All results are independently reviewed and error-checked by at least three members of the Iraq Body Count project team before publication.” [more]
“We don’t do body counts”
— Gen. Tommy Franks, US Central Command
Act Now As If The Future Depended On It: “In response to Bush’s ultimatum, Not in Our Name calls on everyone to begin massive opposition now to this war. We cannot go about our daily business as usual while bombs designed to flatten Baghdad and “shock and awe” the world into submission to U.S. might are loaded into planes. This war will be an outrageous crime against the people of Iraq and a blow to the very humanity of people the world over. We can’t wait for the bombs to fall.”
No Business As Usual When They Start Their War: “When we hear of massive bombing of Iraq, we must respond to this with massive resistance. There can be no business as usual that day. Don’t go to work, or to school. Don’t stay at home in your living room, watching this massacre unfold on TV. Plan convergence points in every city and community for that day now and spread the word. Gather in the day and manifest your resistance into the night. Hook up now with others in your city and make plans. Keep checking www.notinourname.net for updates.”
From Dave Farber’s IP mailing list:
If you have RealPlayer [and a broadband connection, I might add — FmH], this is worth a listen. It’s Robin Cook’s 11 1/2
minute speech today resigning from the government over the Iraq War. It is
measured, and eloquent, and reminds us again of why England’s is “the Mother
of Parliaments.”In all the hours we have watched C-Span over the last two years it would be
comforting if one person, either for or against this war, had spoken so
eloquently. Regardless of how you feel about the coming conflict, this is
A-1 political theater.
“
A host of recent actions by government agencies, school boards and other
institutions attempts to limit what we read, see and hear — sometimes
with
debilitating effects.” — Kari Lydersen, AlterNet
My rant about Camille Paglia’s take on the Sixties (below) reminded a reader of the following, buried in a New Yorker review of To the Finland Station:
“When you undertake historical research, two truths that sounded banal come to seem profound. The first is that your knowledge of the past—apart from, occasionally, a limited visual record and the odd unreliable survivor—comes entirely from written documents. You are almost completely cut off, by a wall of print, from the life you have set out to represent. You can’t observe historical events; you can’t question historical actors; you can’t even know most of what has not been written about. What has been written about therefore takes on an importance that may be spurious. A few lines in a memoir, a snatch of recorded conversation, a letter fortuitously preserved, an event noted in a diary: all become luminous with significance—even though they are merely the bits that have floated to the surface. The historian clings to them, while, somewhere below, the huge submerged wreck of the past sinks silently out of sight.
The second realization that strikes you is, in a way, the opposite of the first: the more material you dredge up, the more elusive the subject becomes.” [thanks, walker]
A passel of interesting and/or important items in recent days:
Camille Paglia: Religious Vision in the American 1960s —
“Commentary on the 1960s has been massive. Law and politics in that turbulent decade are well documented but remain controversial, and the same thing can be said of contemporary innovations in mass media and the arts. One major area remains ambiguous or poorly assimilated, however—the new religious vision, which for a tantalizing moment in the American sixties brought East and West together in a progressive cultural synthesis. Its promise was never completely fulfilled, for reasons I will try to sketch here. But the depth and authenticity of that spiritual shift need to be more widely acknowledged.
(…)Not since early nineteenth-century Romanticism had there been such a strange mix of revolutionary politics with ecstatic nature-worship and sex-charged self-transformation. It is precisely this phantasmagoric religious vision that distinguishes the New Left of the American 1960s from the Old Left of the American 1930s and from France’s failed leftist insurgency of 1968, both of which were conventionally Marxist in their indifference or antagonism to religion.” Arion
Paglia has a noble intent here which quickly turns misguided in some shockingly conventional, and insufficiently examined, assumptions in her next paragraphs —
What she misses in these jabs is that the ideal (even if it fell short in the reality in many instances) of the spiritual authority to which ’60’s seekers submitted themselves is different in essential fashions from the conventional moral and political authority being rejected; part of the difference being, of course, the discipline of voluntary submission and part the spiritual and moral accomplishment of the spiritual leader. Reams have been written by elegant thinkers — in the ’60’s, before, and since — reconciling social activism and spiritual striving, even —especially — in the Eastern traditions supposedly fatalistic about the inevitability of suffering. Someone blithely dismissing revelation and delusion as indistinguishable knows nothing about either, and someone blithely positing the inevitability of neurological damage from “long-term drug use” knows nothing about the distinctions among approaches to mind-altering drugs. There’s an old saying that anyone who remembers the ’60’s couldn’t have been there. Paglia clearly wasn’t there, and clearly misremembers, smugly and badly.
Typically, her vision deteriorates further into a smear campaign with the obligatory references to Charlie Manson, the fact that Leary and Alpert were dismissed from the Harvard faculty, the People’s Temple, the SLA’s kidnapping of Patty Hearst, Altamont, and Weatherman bombings, as if these were the only legacies of the era. And, of course, because ‘cults’ were a feature of the ’60’s, the ‘cult’-based tragedies of the ’90’s, like that of the Branch Davidians, are attributable to ’60’s values as well. Oh, and the “free love” ethos is responsible for the AIDS epidemic.
Paglia also makes the amazing assertion that “(t)he major Asian cult of the sixties was Transcendental Meditation, founded in India as the Spiritual Regeneration Movement by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi,” again proving she wasn’t there. TM was the Starbucks of meditation organizations, then and now.
I could go on. Paglia’s interests are erudite namedropping — she certainly mentions most of the pertinent trends and phenomena — and pseudo-profound analysis placing them in historical context — more namedropping. Making sense of it? That’s another matter. From her pitifully limited academic perch, she criticizes Sixties thinkers for not making contributions to academic cultural criticism, never considering the legitimacy of their position that that endeavor might be morally and spiritually bankrupt. Thinking of all Sixties seekers as cut from whole cloth, she is able to pontificate that “(t)he gap in the sixties’ artistic and intellectual legacy partly occurred because too many young people followed their elementary understanding of Asian religion by making sensory experience primary.” Every historical movement has produced a popularized, intellectually lightweight version for the masses emphasizing the superficial and appealing to the hedonistic urges, but that does not characterize the entire movement. Paglia, who should know better than to enact the fallacy of taking the part for the whole, just doesn’t know where to find the serious seekers and their legacy.
“Health experts believe a deadly flu-like illness that has killed nine people is likely a virus. They’re also encouraged that some victims seem to be recovering.” Wired News
SARS does not respond to antibiotics, and white blood cell counts drop in infected individuals, rather than rising as is typically seen in a bacterial infection.
A New York Times overview of where we stand on the threshold of the war, and how we got here.
“Victory in Iraq won’t end the world’s distrust of the United States, because the Bush administration has made it clear that it doesn’t play by the rules.” — Paul Krugman, NY Times op-ed
Related: War in the Ruins of Diplomacy: “This war crowns a period of terrible diplomatic failure, Washington’s worst in at least a generation.” NY Times editorial
