British peace activist shot by IDF troops in Gaza Strip: “Israel Defense Forces troops firing from a tank critically wounded a British man Friday as he and other activists in a pro-Palestinian group approached an army position on the edge of a Gaza refugee camp, witnesses said.

The Briton, Thomas Hurndall, 21, from Manchester, suffered a head injury that left him comatose and hooked up to a respirator, said doctors.” Ha’Aretz

A spate of misquotes and misattributions: “In all these examples, the mistakes may appear to be minor, but accurately quoting public figures and attributing statements to the correct organization or individual are requirements of responsible journalism. It’s crucial to take the time to get the facts right because small assertions can often become the evidence for big arguments.”

“There is only one country in the world that has not yet fully grasped the implications of the American invasion of Iraq, and that country is Israel. The invasion of Iraq dramatically lowers Israel’s stock as a strategic asset.” Ha’Aretz [via GVNews.Net Daily World]

Killing outmatched foes: “Coalition forces wonder why more Iraqis didn’t surrender to survive. Trauma may linger as soldiers return.” Christian Science Monitor Breeding ground for new McVeighs? Rational Enquirer [via Cursor]

Why weapons of mass destruction will be found —

The only thing that will “justify” these deaths is the discovery of vast amounts of dangerous weapons of mass destruction. It is necessary, vitally necessary, to those who orchestrated the current happenings, that these weapons be found and shown to the world as evidence of Bush/Blair rightness. It is essential in allowing the U.S. to save any face left to be saved.

So they will be found.

And millions of people, those with yard signs that say, “Iraq today, France tomorrow,” those who still confuse Iran and Iraq, those who don’t know the difference between Osama and Saddam, those who believe Bush has a serious connect with God, those who think the 19 alleged hijackers on 9–11 were Iraqis…, all these people will trust their leaders that these weapons were there all along. Online Journal

Rumsfeld Condemns Reports of Mass Looting in Iraq: “Calling rampant looting and lawlessness in Iraq an “untidy” period between war and freedom, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Friday condemned media reports that anarchy ruled in Iraqi cities.” If Rumsfeld doesn’t like it, it isn’t news. Yahoo!

as Chaos Reigns

The Iraqi capital sank into anarchy on Friday as residents went on a looting spree in full view of U.S. forces.

As troops still battled to contain pockets of Iraqi fighters scattered around the city, thousands of ordinary citizens helped themselves to anything they could lay their hands on in shops, factories, schools, hospitals and government buildings.

Young and old, men and women rifled through bomb-damaged buildings as well as areas unaffected by fighting.

“Is this your liberation?” one frustrated shopkeeper screamed at the crew of a U.S. tank as a gang of youths helped themselves to everything in his small hardware store and carted booty off in the wheelbarrows that had also been on sale.

“Hell, it ain’t my job to stop them,” drawled one young marine, lighting a cigarette as he looked on. “Goddamn Iraqis will steal anything if you let them. Look at them.”

But for those not helping themselves to their new-found freedom, mounting anger was being directed at the U.S. forces for doing nothing to stop the frenzy. Reuters

The problem with Bush’s “preemptive” war doctrine: “If preemption may sometimes be legitimate, is the Bush administration right to extend the case of justified preemption to preventive offensive wars? If all threats are considered imminent and unavoidable without the use of force, then yes. But although war has been transformed along many of the lines the administration suggests, not all threats are immediate and unavoidable.” — Neta C. Crawford, Boston Review

Fear and Social Discipline in the Harry Potter Novels: “Although many in the Christian right argue that Harry Potter novels oppose Christianity, this third novel actively promotes many fundamentals of Christian morality. What these novels do oppose, however, is a fire-and-brimstone image of an all-seeing deity who is always watching and waiting to punish. Through her descriptions of the wizard prison and the Dementors who guard it, Rowling suggests that there is nothing moral about a morality based on fear.” nasty

Saddam’s Body and the Neo-Materialism of the Iraqi War:

As bodies burn, as lives cease, as families are torn, as corporate catechism preaches liberation while annihilating the principles of moral justice under the aegis of an emptied democracy signifier, I cannot but obsess over corporeality, of all things: the corporeality of Coalition soldiers powering through the desert with the speed of light; the corporeality of nose-painted fighter jets bearing half-human, half-beast effigies of aggression and vengeance; the corporeality of ‘smart’ bombs into whose technological soul-less bodies the tragic art of dance-like war movement has been breathed; the corporeality of insatiable and disenchanted viewers turned embedded cheerleaders catching war highlights over a TV-dinner; the corporeality of Iraqis being robbed of their lives by furtive Coalition thieves in the middle of the night; the corporeality of the millions of non-human species burning silently in the many ecological fires not hot enough to be news. — Phillip Vannini, ctheory

An Interview with Chuck Palahniuk: “It’s doubtful that Chuck Palahniuk – literary genius, torchbearer for the nihilistic generation and Portland’s answer to Irvine Welsh, with his haemorrhaging ribbons of toxic chiffon prose that sits somewhere in the vicinity of “Naked Lunch, A Clockwork Orange and Last House On The Left” – had any idea of the storm of controversy that was brewing as he dotted the i and crossed the final t on his anthemic Fight Club manuscript. But, then again, he probably had little inkling when one afternoon he was cruising down the Portland Freeway and a driver – “a freeway sniper”- slowly pulled up alongside him and pointed a gun directly at his head, that he would become the avatar against a violent world and society.” Between The Lines

“Yemeni authorities were hunting for 10 of the main suspects in the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole after they escaped from prison Friday, officials said. The fugitives, including chief suspect Jamal al-Badawi, had been jailed in the port city of Aden since shortly after the destroyer was bombed, killing 17 American sailors. Officials at Aden’s governor’s office would not say how the men escaped early Friday. But they quoted intelligence sources as saying security forces were out in force in a major search operation.” Yahoo! News

The Quiz.

9. Who commented on Bush’s “almost giddy readiness to kill”?

(a) Senator Chuck Hagel (R Nebraska).

(b) MSNBC’s Chris Matthews.

(c) CBS’s Dan Rather.

(d) General Tommy Franks. The New Yorker

“It’s time to phase out housing projects. Whether

old-fashioned or newfangled, they blight surrounding neighborhoods and prevent them from reviving.” — Howard Husock, City Journal

Yo La Tengo interviewed: “They remain the proverbial elephant examined by blind men, different things to different people. Which is okay, as far as Ira Kaplan is concerned. I asked him what he’d say if the dictionary people came knocking, wanting a definition. ‘That’s their job, isn’t it? Finding definitions. We’re happy just playing the music.'” 3am Summer Sun is their new recording, and I can’t wait to hear it…

According to Franz Hinkelammert, the West has repeatedly been under the illusion that it should try to save humanity by destroying part of it. This is a salvific and sacrificial destruction, committed in the name of the need to radically materialize all the possibilities opened up by a given social and political reality over which it is supposed to have total power. This is how it was in colonialism, with the genocide of indigenous peoples, and the African slaves. This is how it was in the period of imperialist struggles, which caused millions of deaths in two world wars and many other colonial wars. This is how it was under Stalinism, with the Gulag, and under Nazism, with the Holocaust. And now today, this is how it is in neoliberalism, with the collective sacrifice of the periphery and even the semiperiphery of the world system. With the war against Iraq, it is fitting to ask whether what is in progress is a new genocidal and sacrificial illusion, and what its scope might be. It is above all appropriate to ask if the new illusion will not herald the radicalization and the ultimate perversion of the Western illusion: destroying all of humanity in the illusion of saving it. — Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Bad Subjects

An interview with Samantha Power, author of A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, Executive Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy and Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. identitytheory

…(T)here is a pattern to the Bush administration’s way of doing business that does not bode well for the future — a pattern of conquest followed by malign neglect…. One has to admit that the Bush people are very good at conquest, military and political. They focus all their attention on an issue; they pull out all the stops; they don’t worry about breaking the rules. This technique brought them victory in the Florida recount battle, the passage of the 2001 tax cut, the fall of Kabul, victory in the midterm elections, and the fall of Baghdad.

But after the triumph, when it comes time to take care of what they’ve won, their attention wanders, and things go to pot. — Paul Krugman, NY Times

The baseball Hall of Fame has canceled a 15th anniversary celebration of the film “Bull Durham,” and the shrine’s president said it was because of anti-war criticism by co-stars Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon.

Reached Wednesday night, Robbins said he was “dismayed” by the decision. He responded with a letter he planned to send to Petroskey, telling him: “You belong with the cowards and ideologues in a hall of infamy and shame.” SF Chronicle

Are psychopaths running our government? The heart of this essay counterposes, paragraph by paragraph, a recent media portrait of Bush’s personality style and daily behavior with a detailed description of the psychopath in the workplace. Clinically, one would never make a diagnosis from a distance, sight unseen, and the concept of the psychopath is rather diffuse, but it draws a thought-provoking picture. digby [via the null device]

The Godwin’s Law FAQ: One of the most famous pieces of Usenet trivia out there is “if you mention Hitler or Nazis in a post, you’ve automatically ended whatever discussion you were taking part in”. Known as Godwin’s Law, this rule of Usenet has a long and sordid history on the network – and is absolutely wrong. This FAQ is an attempt to set straight as much of the history and meaning of Godwin’s Law as possible, and hopefully encourage users to invoke it a bit more sparingly. Of course, knowing Usenet, it won’t do an ounce of good… Rebecca Blood brought my attention to Godwin’s Law and discusses some of its implications here.

Nicholas de Genova, a 35-year old assistant professor of anthropology and Latino studies at Columbia, who is upsetting alot of people, is interviewed for the first time since his controversial remarks. Chronicle of Higher Education

says Rafe Coburn, “reserved for those people who use feigned concern for the injustices heaped upon the Iraqi people to bludgeon those who made arguments against the war in Iraq. To those people, I would ask what makes the Iraqi people special when you make it obvious that you don’t give a crap about the billions of other impoverished, oppressed, and miserable people around the world.”

The accompanying mugshot captures the essence of someone you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley. The Smoking Gun

says Independent/UK columnist Natasha Walter.

But: Net Trounced By Cable for War News: “Two separate surveys show the same thing: Americans rely on cable TV for war news vs. the Net. That aside, online news is making gains, and might provide a clearer picture in the fog of war.” Online Journalism Review

In a previous column, Walter cautions us, “Don’t idealise the soldiers fighting this unjust war.”

Do you think that Tony Blair would feel it necessary to state and restate that civilian casualties will be kept to a minimum if he were not conscious of the outrage that would otherwise result? Do you think that officers would keep briefing their soldiers on the need to treat prisoners according to the laws of war, if it were not for the scrutiny of the dissenters back home?

It is all very well to hear about how vulnerable and heroic our troops are, but we should not forget that the truly vulnerable people are not the healthy young men who chose to join one of the best-equipped armies in the world, but ordinary Iraqi people who did not choose to be caught, utterly defenceless, between a tyrant and a destructive army. Independent/UK

With victory in Iraq assured, hawks outside and inside the Bush administration have begun taking a notably aggressive stance toward its neighbor to the west, Syria.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, and their main ideological ally at the State Department, undersecretary John Bolton, have all made menacing public remarks about Syria in recent days. Newsday

Is there some element in the US military that wants to take out journalists? Independent/UK Found via an important, if you appreciate his contentious writing, compilation page of Reports by Mr. Robert Fisk.

A group of German university professors, angered by the US-British war against Iraq, have launched a campaign to replace many popular English-language words used in Germany with French terms.

Saying they are appalled by the way the United States and Britain defied the will of the United Nations and attacked Iraq, the four professors declared war on borrowed English terms in German such as “okay”, “T-shirt” and “party”. Sydney Morning Herald

And, while we’re on the topic of words (how’s that for a segue?), this is from Waxy [via Looka!]: Armed with a list of spelling errors and my old friend Google, I decided to see if I could find the most commonly misspelled word on the Web. If you can do better, leave a comment.

a gallery of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize-winning Works.

This LA Times piece points out that the uranium stocks, which it says could be enriched to weapons material, lay unguarded after their Iraqi custodians fled. US forces were not even aware of their existence for several days. Garret Vreeland pointed to this, noting how much background on the search for clandestine weapons it contains. As readers know, I’ve remained skeptical about the WMD rationale for the attack on Iraq. The article notes that Saddam may have had any chemical weapons the regime had moved to the Tikrit area, which has not yet fallen to advancing US forces. There’s also speculation on why, if he did indeed have CBW and was backed against the wall as he has been, he did not use them against massing American troops. It has been my point that the restraint he exercised in this regard in the face of US military intimidation, the potential harsh judgment of world opinion and/or the threat of war crimes prosecution, gives the lie to Bush’s “imminent danger” argument.

A House debate over gun rights legislation erupted into a racially charged dispute yesterday when a Republican lawmaker from Wyoming seemed to equate African Americans with drug addicts or people undergoing drug treatment. Washington Post

says Noam Chomsky in this April 2nd interview with Frontline India.

“Trusted Blog Search Tool, a search box that lets readers search the web, your site, or blogs you read.”

An extraordinary communication from the United States to UN representatives around the world has been leaked to Greenpeace. In it, the United States warns that the simple act of support for a General Assembly meeting to discuss the war will be considered “unhelpful and directed against the United States.” They further threaten that invoking the Uniting for Peace resolution will be “harmful to the UN.”

Greenpeace has been actively lobbying at the United Nations against the war, and many delegates have expressed both publicly and privately their distaste for what they see as US attempts to “strongarm” the world community to do as it is told. One delegate was so incensed with the memo circulated by the US that he leaked the full document. [via Liberal Arts Mafia]

Japanese electronics giant Sony has taken an extraordinary step to cash in on the war in Iraq by patenting the term “Shock and Awe” for a computer game.

It is among a swarm of companies scrambling to commercially exploit the war in Iraq, which has killed more than 5,000 soldiers and civilians in the space of three weeks. Guardian/UK

Mitsu said: The problem with this war (the “war on terror”) is that the connection between actions and consequences are far separated — the outrage expressed by many Arabs over this war in Iraq will likely bear fruit in asymmetrical warfare far down the line — but it will be years, not months, before we truly see the fruit of our actions. This disconnect in time creates a tremendous problem, since one of the chief mistakes people make when evaluating the success of their actions is to assume that there is no time delay. Although military victory in Iraq is likely, the mistakes our leaders made when ascertaining the reaction of the Iraqi people leads to the conclusion that they will similarly misjudge their political reaction in many other ways. Iraqis have not been fleeing the country to refugee camps — they’ve been trying to get back in to fight us. There will certainly be some who cheer our troops as they roll in — but, as one Arab history professor put it the other day, there are always people who cheer troops as they roll in: there were Lebanese who cheered the Israelis when they came in. They stopped cheering pretty quickly. synthetic zero