How Esso (Exxon) leads George Bush by the nose

The Attorney General wants the power to strip you of your citizenship. — Nat Hentoff, Village Voice

Also:

Bush is Out of Control. Bush is out of control. Come and get me. truthout Read William Rivers Pitt’s missive. Then, if you can find it in your heart, publish the statement “Bush is out of control” somewhere, in solidarity. They’re watching. They’ll notice. But can they come for all of us?

Bush’s War on Women: From the FDA’s prayer-against-PMS to the battle over Title IX, the Bush administration’s policies and postures seem designed to erode women’s rights. Village Voice

An early test version of the next major release of Microsoft Windows has been leaked onto the Net, offering a glimpse of the company’s plans for the new software. ZDNet

A boycott of Delta Airlines is being mounted in response to the airline’s decision to test a controversial program that requires airline passengers to undergo background checks. Wired

It’s folk wisdom that the Academy favors films about mental illness and disability, yet few legends are so statistically well-founded. — Andrea Clark, AlterNet

The widening rift within the Security Council and NATO is not about Iraq

but the U.S. plan for global dominance. AlterNet

Another Poster for Peace: download any poster for free by clicking on the image.

by Tara Calishain and Rael Dornfest: a collection of industrial-strength, real-world, tested solutions to practical problems. This concise book offers a variety of interesting ways for power users to mine the enormous amount of information that Google has access to, and helps you have fun while doing it. You’ll learn clever and powerful methods for using the advanced search interface and the new Google API, including how to build and modify scripts that can become custom business applications based on Google. Google Hacks contains 100 tips, tricks and scripts that you can use to become instantly more effective in your research. Each hack can be read in just a few minutes, but can save hours of searching for the right answers. O’Reilly

In this reprise of an April, 2000 post from FmH I just stumbled upon while looking back for something else, a prescient Mikhail Gorbachev Warns The US Of Its Dangerous “Superiority Complex” ‘and said that, if the 21st century became known as the second “American Century”, the rest of the world would have suffered. Speaking in New York, the former Soviet President criticised Madeleine Albright, the US Secretary of State, for saying that there were exceptional circumstances in which the US had the right to use military force unilaterally, even if other countries objected.’ Times of London [via Common Dreams]

‘It will be soon, it will be swift and it will be short’.

War will commence against Iraq in 10 days, reports The Sun.

Citing a top United States intelligence source, the newspaper said a crucial United Nations Security Council vote authorizing military force is expected a week from Wednesday, and U.S. airstrikes will be launched hours later.

“The moment we know we have the nine votes needed, we will go for it. The military won’t hang around after that,” The Sun quotes the source as saying. WorldNetDaily

But what do you make of this, from the same source? Jews Saved Saddam From Abortion:

An Iraqi Jewish family took in Saddam Hussein’s mother in 1937 and talked her out of an abortion, according to Israel’s leading expert on Iraq and the large traditional Jewish community that once prospered there.

“The story is true,” says Amatzia Baram. “I’ve pretty much confirmed all of the details, but the family doesn’t like to talk about it. There was this fear that people would blame the Jews for Saddam. WorldNetDaily

When Suffering Becomes an Abstraction:

Jeff Gates, at Life Outtacontext, meditates on the faith-based moral instigations that flow from Joe Klein’s troubling observation that

George W. Bush lives at the intersection of faith and
inexperience. This is not a reassuring address, especially
in a time of trouble.

To paraphrase the sense Gates makes of Klein, Bush is a concrete thinker whose faith, perhaps truly humble when faced with suffering and distress firsthand, becomes messianic and dogmatic “when suffering becomes an abstraction —a budget item or deposing a despot— Bush loses his sensitivity.” With such rigidity, Bush has no uncertainty about his assumed righteousness and is unswayed by dissent.

For reasons that don’t seem necessary, however, to the flow of his essay, Gates chooses to lump Andrew Sullivan in with Bush’s genre of moral certainty. Sullivan, though — yes — equally morally blind, seems not really to be of a piece with Dubya. I’m reminded of what I wrote below, on a seemingly different topic — that there are multiple species of self-deception, some more insidious, and some more conscious, than others. Since his emergence as the Republican candidate, I have felt that Bush’s intellectual limitations — the same ones Gates broods over in this essay — make him a puppet of handlers who are more adept, more manipulative, and have a variety of other agendas. It has always seemed laughable that pundits discuss the messages in Bush’s speeches as if they were his own ideas rather than those of a committee of speechwriters vetted by the likes of Karl Rove and Dick Cheney. Similarly, all the motives ascribed to the administration for the war —

• that it is for moral rectitude,
• for self-defense,
• to punish and chasten terrorists,
• to vanquish the infidels,
• to strike a blow against the Axis,
• for the greater glory of God,
• for American hegemony,
• to solve the Middle East problem,
• to end dependence on foreign oil,
• to line the pockets of the administration’s ruling class cronies,
• to prevent US humiliation,
• to liberate an oppressed people,
• to end history,
• as a proving ground for bigger and better things to come,
• to win reelection 
• for Daddy; or to prove that you’re as good or better than him,
• because you can

— are operative… somewhere inside the Beltway among those impelling us toward Baghdad. One aspect, Jeff, of the cognitively rigid Bush’s blinding by his certainties may be that all these motives run rampant with no policy helmsman arbitrating and cohering them. That may be why this war, and the world of hurt into which it will plunge us, the rest of the world, and our children, is inexorable.

Three decades ago, in the throes of the energy crisis, Washington’s hawks conceived of a strategy for US control of the Persian Gulf’s oil. Now, with the same strategists firmly in control of the White House, the Bush administration is playing out their script for global dominance. Mother Jones. No news, by now.

Weblogger Jeremy Zawodny’s much-blinked list seems to be putting the fear of God into many other webloggers in a frenzied rush to comply with what for some puzzling reason is being seen as the Received Wisdom. (It’s actually amazing he didn’t phrase these ten items as “thou shalt” ‘s and “shalt not” ‘s!) Zawodny is profoundly (I use the term advisedly) thrilled at his influence, declaring, “Blogs rock!” Unfortunately, he forgets the eleventh habit of annoying bloggers — pontificating on how it should be done, although his #3 is a complaint about bloggers who “spend more time blogging about blogging than anything else.”

(Not to mention his commission of the admittedly more minor twelfth annoying habit — overuse of “blog” and “blogger”. Lawdy, I’m surprised he doesn’t indulge in the even more annoying “blogosphere.” [Shoot me and put me out of my misery if I ever use that word without quotation marks around it, please. — FmH]

My overall reaction to his list is that he doesn’t seem to understand (especially in his #2 and #8, which he concedes are alike but, he asserts enigmatically and without further elaboration for readers as dense as myself, “not quite the same”) the self-referential, organic nature of hyperlinked reality if he thinks there’s an absolute difference between “original content” and “aggregating links to other blogs”, or between “acting” and “reacting”… and that he is the arbiter of such difference. Wake up, Jeremy, it’s a postmodern world. Authenticity and derivativeness are not, in a simple sense, dichotomous anymore, if they ever were. He also does not appear to appreciate that weblogging arose from the practice of cataloguing the author’s interesting websurfing discoveries (often with little or no commentary), which in a semiotic sense (upon which I will enigmatically not elaborate much) does build a sort of original content from the aggregation and juxtaposition. Hint: start with Claude Levi-Strauss’ use of the term ‘bricolage’. Indeed, it is a postmodern tenet that the “originality” will lie not in the writer so much as in the reader’s synthesis of meaning for herself from the work. Making it all too explicit is another annoying habit of webloggers. I hope the people who read FmH (all three of them) do it because they know I esteem their astuteness more than they should mine. Now, if they found me a highly annoying blogger…

“At last we know why girls fall for older men…” Observer/UK

Brain protein influences response to extreme stress:

A hungry soldier is left sitting alone for four hours. Hostile figures interrogate him for the next 50 minutes. The soldier is not hurt physically, but he doesn’t know when or how the ordeal will end.

Later, he’s permitted to sleep — for 19 minutes total during the course of three days.

In this mock captivity exercise that’s part of survival training, American soldiers respond in sharply different ways.

One man feels constantly that he’s watching himself from outside his body. Colors fade. His tormenters look motionless. Another man, just as sleepy and hungry, also loses focus at times, but mostly stays alert and calm.

Why the difference? Sac Bee

Why is there a philosophical problem about self-deception?

Self-deception is a common human enterprise. Our capacity for it seems no more exotic a part of our nature than our capacity to spell. We attribute the state freely to others (“you’re kidding yourself”), and come to realise we were in the state ourselves (“I was kidding myself when I said that”). However, when we step back from those confident judgements and try making sense of self-deception, it becomes extraordinarily difficult to do so. The Philosophers’ Magazine

Considerations of self-deception go right to the heart of what exactly is the self that is being deceived, and the nature of consciousness. As a psychiatrist, I’m equally, if not more, preoccupied with self-deception than the philosophers who are just coming to the conclusion that it drives one more nail into the coffin of the notion of the unitary self. Enlisting a patient in the study of his or her self-deception is the daily bread and butter of thoughtful psychotherapists. For example, the proposal in this essay that, perhaps, self-deception is “not one singular psychobehavioural phenomenon, reducing to issues of belief and knowledge” seems a truism to psychotherapists who generate taxonomies of self-deception with their clientele. “Self-deception is perhaps quite eclectic, and is not always easily distinguishable from germane phenomena such as compartmentalisation, repressed conflicts, submerged aggressions, false consciousness, and wishful thinking.” Indeed.

Related: A highly inflated version of reality: …(N)ew research suggests that people lie chronically for a wide variety of reasons, some serious, others relatively benign. In a recent article reviewing 100 years of literature on the subject, as well as several cases in the news, doctors at Yale University find that some chronic liars are capable, successful, even disciplined people who embellish their life stories needlessly. They don’t suffer from an established mental illness, as many habitual fabricators do. They’re just, well, liars. LA Times

Mickey Kaus wonders: [scroll down]: Why did we find out about the capture of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed almost immediately after the event? Wouldn’t it have been better to keep the arrest secret while the U.S. and its allies rolled up those al Qaeda operatives whose whereabouts could be traced through Mohammeds’ cell phone and computer, etc.? Why send out a worldwide alert, through CNN, to his co-conspirators, telling them it was time to scatter? Did the need for good publicity trump sound anti-terror techniques?… Slate

One way to make sense of this is suggested by Robert Fisk. Was Mohammed really arrested at all. Where’s the proof? Common Dreams [thanks, Miguel] The US has a knack for crowing about victories in the War-on-Terror® at the most politically convenient times. (As Fisk puts it, “In the theatre of the absurd into which America’s hunt for al Qa’ida so often descends, the ‘arrest’ — the quotation markes are all too necessary — of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed is nearer the Gilbert and Sullivan end of the repertory.”) If the significance of this announcement lies in its propaganda value rather than any operational benefits, nothing would be served by not splashing it all over the front pages as soon as it “happened.”

[scroll down]: Mickey Kaus edges toward the antiwar stance he calls the proceduralist position, after reading Michael Kinsley’s latest column (“…only if it’s multilateral…”), although he mischaracterizes France as the sole international obstacle to the Security Council’s blessings. “(I)f the war’s a good thing to do, they argue, are you really going to let France stop it?” Yes, he says, and agrees with Kinsley’s observation that “the general regime of international law depends on a willingness to sacrifice short-term goals that may even be admirable for the long-term goal of establishing some civilized norms of global behavior.” Kaus neatly dismisses the self-defense arguments of the dysadministration: “If self-defense justifies an attack on any nation that might pose a grave threat a few years down the road, the result could be just as destabilizing as if there were no general rule against trans-border attacks.”

He then goes on to share my consternation at a point made in antiwar polemics:

“The seemingly sophisticated focus, among antiwar types, on the difficulty of administering postwar Iraq actually undermines the anti-war case… because it suggests that without those difficulties a war outside the U.N. would be justifiable. In fact, those difficulties are largely irrelevant to the initial question of procedural legitimacy.”

It not only demeans the antiwar position to lump arguments of convenience and expense together with questions of inherent legitimacy and legality of the war; it also doesn’t keep company well with any of the other antiwar arguments with which it travels:

• the destabilizing precedent of preemptive strikes;
  
• the dismantling of the alliance of ‘civilized’ nations by US unilateralism;
  
• the humanitarian catastrophe awaiting Iraqi civilians;
  
• the abandonment of the principle that war is a last resort only with the failure of diplomatic engagement;
  
• the precipitation of anti-American terrorist blowback this will cause.
  

None of this, of course, is to mention at all the more absolutist antiwar position which rejects any complicity with the morally bankrupt killing machine perpetuating violent non-solutions. But Kaus is welcome nonetheless in the antiwar camp, even if he shows what a strange bedfellow he is in this contorted ‘P.S.’:

“Democracy, which we hope to bring to the Middle East, is basically a bunch of formal procedural rules too, no? We don’t ignore them when we don’t like the outcome. [Insert cheap shot about Bush actually losing the election?–ed. No! He won by the rules, with the Supreme Court playing the role of France.]” Slate

(Confidential to Mickey Kaus: As far as “not rushing” into your decision goes — if not now, when? You’re long past the point where taking the time to make up your mind is a virtue.)

Related: Time for a new antiwar message: ‘The peace movement’s call to “Let the Inspections Work” is becoming about

as effective as duct tape against biological weapons.’ — Karin Rosman, AlterNet

Hoax Photo Gallery

And, somewhat related: a neat idea! a weblog consisting of examples of fallacious reasoning from the world at large. I wonder if the author knows about General Semantics?

about context: “a new planetary culture emerges in the context of the digital information and connections. one culture that overcomes the old cultural dimensions clashes (science-art, universal-national, public-private, work-leissure, entertainment-education…).

context project is devoted to a net driven research and development on this new cultural context. the project’s initiatives aims to appropriate and disseminate the emerging culture as a new ‘art de vivre’…”

Visually appealing and (this is always my highest compliment on the net, it seems) thoughtful.

The Laws of War, US-Style:

After decades of massive defence spending, the US is today assured of victory in any war it chooses to fight. High-tech weaponry has reduced the dangers to US personnel, making it easier to sell war to domestic constituencies. As a result, some US politicians have begun to think of war, not as the high-risk recourse of last resort, but as an attractive foreign policy option in times of domestic scandal or economic decline. This change in thinking has already led to a more cavalier approach to the jus ad bellum, as exemplified by the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive self-defence. It is beginning to have a similar effect with regard to the jus in bello. When war is seen as an ordinary tool of foreign policy – ‘politics by other means’ – political and financial considerations impinge on the balance between military necessity and humanitarian concerns. Soldiers are buried alive because the folks back home don’t like body bags.

In Washington, it has become accepted wisdom that future opponents are themselves unlikely to abide by international humanitarian law. During the Gulf War, captured American pilots were brutalised in several ways – some, for example, were gang-raped. The September 2001 attacks on the Twin Towers were ‘crimes against humanity’ – in technical terms, they were acts of violence committed as part of a systematic attack on a civilian population. If your enemy is going to cheat, why bother playing by the rules? — Michael Byers (who teaches international law at Duke), London Review of Books

My purpose here will be to consider the current criticisms of the Bush Administration articulated within mainstream opinion, and the responses of the Administration to them: in effect, the structure of intellectual justification on each side of the argument, what divides them and what they have common. I will end with a few remarks on how this debate looks from a perspective with a different set of premises. — UCLA historian Perry Anderson, London Review of Books

Escalating the war against the war: “The Pentagon is busy trying to persuade Iraqis not to cooperate with their

own government. It’s time American citizens did the same.”

What will today’s conscientious objectors and military deserters look like? Well, all week in Italy, activists have been blocking dozens of trains carrying U.S. weapons and personnel on their way to a military base near Pisa, while Italian dockworkers are refusing to load arms shipments. Last weekend, two U.S. military bases were blockaded in Germany, as was the U.S. consulate in Montreal, and the air base at RAF Fairford in Gloucester, England. This coming Saturday, thousands of Irish activists are expected to show up at Shannon airport, which, despite Irish claims of neutrality, is being used by the U.S. military to refuel its planes en route to Iraq.

In Chicago last week, more than 100 high-school students demonstrated outside the headquarters of Leo Burnett, the advertising firm that designed the U.S. military’s hip, youth-targeted Army of One campaign. The students claim that in underfunded Latino and African-American high schools, the army recruiters far outnumber the college scouts.

The most ambitious plan has come from San Francisco, where a coalition of antiwar groups is calling for an emergency non-violent “counterstrike” the day after the war starts: “Don’t go to work or school. Call in sick, walk out: We will impose real economic, social and political costs and stop business as usual until the war stops.”

— Naomi Klein, AlterNet

the CIA’s self-image descends to the surrealistic cartoonish. [via Dave Farber]

Spam Haiku: “I was looking at my SPAM mailbox the other day. As I was reading the countless subject lines, I started hearing Haiku in my head (this could be a sign that I’m losing it). I thought it would be neat to put together a script that would write Haiku out of my SPAM subject lines. What you see below are the results of this experiment.

I generate a new SpamKu every 15 minutes. That is what you see below. If you would like to see them, I keep an archive of old SpamKu.” Letters From Exile

Fast Cash Advance

A Better Option Than Bankruptcy

Cash In A Flash 8

“a place for the veneration of images of our Dear Leader.” [thanks, Adam]

[scroll down]: Wolfowitz v. Perle? After an Iraq war, if Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz moves to try to force Israel to curtail its settlements in the occupied territories — as he’s suggested he’ll do — how long do you think it will take his fellow neocon Bush adviser Richard Perle to turn on him? Not very long, I’d guess. .. Slate

Should genetic factors be cited as mitigating factors in criminal proceedings just as social factors already are?

In 1995, lawyers in America acting on behalf of the convicted murderer Stephen Mobley attempted to have his death sentence reduced to life imprisonment by claiming that there was a pattern of aggression (and, bizarrely, business success) in Mobley’s ancestry which suggested a relevant genetic aetiology underlying his criminal behaviour.

Even by the standards of the TV series Ally McBeal such an approach may strike one as desperate (the jury were clearly unimpressed; they rejected Mobley’s case and he remains on death row to this day) but the publication in September of a report by the Nuffield Council on Bioethics suggests that in the future such an approach may become far more widespread. The Philosophers’ Magazine

Children who bite their fingernails may be damaging their IQ, a study suggests.

This is because lead can gather under their nails simply by playing in dusty conditions, both indoors and outdoors. BBC

Ariel Sharon yesterday virtually ruled out the creation of a Palestinian state under his hawkish new government just a day after President Bush pledged to broker a peace deal once he has dealt with Iraq.

Hours before his cabinet was sworn in, the prime minister revealed to the knesset that he has backed away from his commitment to the Palestinian state envisioned by Washington’s “road map” for a settlement, as part of the deal to put together his government. Guardian/UK

“These 130-decibel sirens, which, beginning Friday, will scream all day and night in the nation’s 50 largest metro areas, will serve as a helpful reminder to citizens to stay on the lookout for suspicious activity and be ready for emergency action,” [Secretary of Homeland Security Tom] Ridge said. “Please note, though, that this is merely a precautionary measure, so go about your lives as normal.” The Onion

Flatly contradicting his engineers, NASA head Sean O’Keefe said yesterday that he does not accept their premise that nothing could have been done to repair the heat tiles and save the crew of the space shuttle Columbia before it dived into its fiery re-entry from orbit.

Mr. O’Keefe’s comments came as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration released a video showing the last images of the crew, shot as their ship slashed through the upper atmosphere’s super-heated gas, which pulsed like red flashes outside Columbia’s windows.

The footage of the routine flight operations takes on an aura of poignancy because the crew, unlike those who view the tape now, was unaware that within minutes their orbiter would disintegrate more than 60 kilometres above the ground. Toronto Globe and Mail

Related: NASA’s Worst Fears Realized:

Newly disclosed e-mail inside NASA showed senior engineers worried a day before the Columbia disaster that the shuttle’s left wing might burn off and cause the deaths of the crew, a scenario remarkably similar to the one investigators believe actually occurred.

The dozens of pages of e-mail describe a broader, internal debate than previously acknowledged about the seriousness of potential damage to Columbia from a liftoff collision with foam debris from its central fuel tank. Engineers never sent their warnings to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s brass. Wired News

Fifty years to the day from the discovery of the structure of DNA, one of its co-discoverers has caused a storm by suggesting that stupidity is a genetic disease that should be cured.

…Watson says that low intelligence is an inherited disorder and that molecular biologists have a duty to devise gene therapies or screening tests to tackle stupidity.

“If you are really stupid, I would call that a disease,” says Watson, now president of the Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory, New York. “The lower 10 per cent who really have difficulty, even in elementary school, what’s the cause of it? A lot of people would like to say, ‘Well, poverty, things like that.’ It probably isn’t. So I’d like to get rid of that, to help the lower 10 per cent.”

Watson, no stranger to controversy, also suggests that genes influencing beauty could also be engineered. “People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would be great.” New Scientist

Some of the most secret and scariest work under way in the Pentagon these days is the planning for a possible military strike against nuclear sites in North Korea….Ironically, the gravity of the situation isn’t yet fully understood in either South Korea or Japan, partly because they do not think this administration would be crazy enough to consider a military strike against North Korea. They’re wrong. — Nicholas Kristof, NY Times

The “raptors clustered around …Cheney and …Rumsfeld and in the National Security Council” have apparently recently found Bush’s ear, just as their relentless and criminal hawking for war on Iraq eventually wore down saner positions within the administration. Bush, it seems, remains a malleable puppet in the hands of his father’s cronies. Now the administration has dropped the bilateral reference and is willing to talk to North Korea only in a multilateral framework that doesn’t exist. The old approach had a snowball’s chance in purgatory; now it’s less than that. One observer noted, “We haven’t exhausted diplomacy. We haven’t begun diplomacy…” Kristof thinks there’s nothing wrong with planning, but in an administration that’s diplomatically handicapped, going to war if diplomacy fails means going to war.

So, Kristof concludes, we’re likely headed for a surgical strike against North Korean nuclear capabilities — even without the consent of the South Koreans — banking on Kim Jong Il’s fear of US retaliation if he responds. If we’re on the wrong side of that gamble, we may be in for another Korean war. The North has 13,000 artillery pieces and could fire some 400,000 shells in the first hour of an attack, many with sarin and anthrax, on the 21 million people in the “kill box” — as some in the U.S. military describe the Seoul metropolitan area. The Pentagon has calculated that another Korean war could kill a million people. What’s the answer? Three things this dysadministration is incapable of — thinking before it acts, skillful negotiation, and thinking before it acts..

Is it cos I is British? Ali G has arrived on American TV screens and influential reviewers are not amused. Hardly surprising, says Mark Lawson – comedy rarely crosses the Atlantic ‘humour gulf’ successfully. Guardian/UK Uhhh, I’m sorry, it’s not because it’s British humor. For some inexplicable reason, I caught the HBO debut of this tripe, and I’m someone who thrives on British humor. But I’ll never watch it again. The essayist misses the point (is it cos he am British?) even though he grasps the central conceit of the show, in which an offensive, puerile and — let’s not shy away from it — stupid interviewer insinuates himself into various situations.

Entirely character-driven, the basic joke in the show – the unwillingness of officialdom to question the racial and intellectual credentials of their questioner – becomes even more pointed in a nation where the right to racial self-definition is widely accepted and terrible consequences can follow from questioning someone’s professional competence.

Even if Edwin Meese or Newt Gingrich or any of the others had felt that there was something a little odd about their interlocutor, they would have been well aware of the potential newspaper headlines or even lawsuits which might result from throwing him out. For this reason, the American editions of Da Ali G Show may be its creator’s most powerful commentary on a culture which is terrified of giving offence to anyone at all.

So American viewers are either going to be the ones who get the joke and find it too painful to be entertaining or funny, or they’re going to be the ones who are too myopic to get it at all. Sort of like the division right down the middle of the American public over George Bush’s credentials. Nobody on either side of the 49%/51% cultural divide finds him funny either.

The world’s first attempted Aids vaccine proved a failure yesterday when, after four years’ work, the Californian biotech company VaxGen announced that trial results showed that it did not protect those at risk of HIV infection.

VaxGen did its best to put an optimistic spin on the collapse of its hopes of selling the vaccine to the US and Europe by offering the surprising finding that its AidsVax had appeared to protect African Americans and, to a lesser extent, people from some other ethnic groups.

But the 78% efficacy in black volunteers, although statistically significant, proved to be based on just 13 cases of HIV infection.

The statistical problem in proving significant effectiveness against a low-incidence condition are far greater, and require much larger numbers of subjects, than against higher-frequency conditions. It is very likely that the finding that the vaccine worked in minority populations was a statistical fluke, although the company appears to be whoring with it.

Seth Berkley, president of the International Aids Vaccine Initiative (IAVI), said: “It is difficult to draw conclusions about what this means.”

John Moore, a professor of microbiology at Cornell University in New York, said: “The common sense is that this is a very small group of patients and I think they are data dredging.”

VaxGen said it intended to seek a licence to market the vaccine to those groups – African Americans and other (North American) ethnic minorities, excluding Hispanics – in whom efficacy had been shown.

“This is the first time we have specific numbers to suggest that a vaccine has prevented HIV infection in humans,” said Phillip Berman, its senior vice president for research and development and inventor of the vaccine. Guardian/UK

Tom Lehrer is still feisty and funny, but the king of sophisticated satire tells Tony Davis there’s no place for his style of humour now: the world just wouldn’t get it.

‘I’m not tempted to write a song about George W.Bush. I couldn’t figure out what sort of song I would write. That’s the problem: I don’t want to satirise George Bush and his puppeteers, I want to vaporise them.” Sydney Morning Herald

Security Council diplomats say countries that are undecided whether to wage war on Iraq — six crucial elected council members — are preparing for a withering show of pressure from the world’s sole superpower.

“There’s an old saying that in good times, your friends find out who you are; in bad times, you find out who your friends are,” U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Tony Garza said last week. Mexico is one of the key undecided votes.

Countries have learned to fear Washington’s wrath over key U.N. votes. USA Today

Related: Revealed: US dirty tricks to win vote on Iraq war:

Secret document details American plan to bug phones and emails of key Security Council members. Guardian/UK

Ariel Sharon yesterday virtually ruled out the creation of a Palestinian state under his hawkish new government just a day after President Bush pledged to broker a peace deal once he has dealt with Iraq.

Hours before his cabinet was sworn in, the prime minister revealed to the knesset that he has backed away from his commitment to the Palestinian state envisioned by Washington’s “road map” for a settlement, as part of the deal to put together his government. Guardian/UK

State sells penknives confiscated at airports at online auction SF Chronicle

The Homeland Security Threat Monitor program for Windows places an icon in the system tray to show the current terrorism threat level and polling the White House web server periodically to be sure there hasn’t been an increase. If there is, the icon flashes to alert you. Be the first on your block to roll out the duct tape! A similar Mac utility is here.

Scare Bear Index

from my neighborhood. MetroWest Daily

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the suspected mastermind of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, was arrested Saturday in Pakistan, a senior official told The Associated Press.

Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed said Mohammed was one of three men arrested in a 3 a.m. raid in Rawalpindi, a city near Islamabad.

A U.S. official said both U.S. and Pakistani agents were involved in the operation.

Mohammed, 37, is one of the FBI’s most-wanted terror suspects, and the U.S. government had offered up to $25 million for information leading to his capture.

U.S. officials have described him as a key al-Qaida lieutenant and the organizer of the terror mission… Nando Times

Pakistan might consider itself under some burden to deliver for the US just now considering that it is a (a) despotically-run (b) hotbed of Islamic foment (c) full of weapons of mass destruction (d) harboring al Qaeda terrorists in droves, and (e) at a strategic geopolitical crossroad, if that sounds familiar. But, on the other hand, they don’t have extensive oil resources, so they’re probably safe. Don’t expect too much followup news about where U.S. authorities have Mohammed in custody, by the way. They’ve whisked him out of Pakistan to an undisclosed location outside the U.S., likely a ship in international wates or a secret military base, where there can be no scrutiny over their ‘interrogation’ techniques. No interference from those pesky ACLU types will stop us from putting him in a world of hurt in payback for what he has allegedly done.

Turkey’s parliament dealt a stunning blow to U.S. war planning Saturday by failing to approve a bill allowing in American combat troops to open a northern front against Iraq.

The decision was likely to seriously strain ties with Washington and marked a setback to U.S. efforts to show Saddam Hussein that he is surrounded and his neighbors support a U.S.-led coalition.

(…) Turkish lawmakers had faced overwhelming public opposition to basing U.S. troops on Turkish soil. Yet Washington had been so sure of winning approval from close ally and NATO member Turkey, that ships carrying U.S. tanks are waiting off Turkey’s coast for deployment and the U.S. military has thousands of tons of military equipment ready to unload at the southern Turkish port of Iskenderun. Nando Times

What, do you suppose, will the vindictive and small-minded dysadministration honchos do to Turkey if this narcissistic blow stands? Add it to the Axis-of-Evil®?

The United Arab Emirates on Saturday called for Saddam Hussein to step down to spare the region war, the first Arab country to do so publicly. Nando Times

What ever happened to the predictions, to which I blinked months ago, that major Middle East players like the Saudis would surely engineer Saddam’s resigning or being deposed to prevent the U.S. intervention?

about the case for war with Iraq; and 26 ways to use the 13 myths. RightWATCH. RightWATCH “organizes responses to antidemocratic distortions of truth” using a unique online collaborative model for researching and editing pamphlets and factsheets. You can distribute their product or use it as a template to generate your own documents countering pernicious political myths.

And:

As a supplement to the facts presented in “13 Myths,” we suggest the following guides to detecting deceptive reasoning:

• Introduction to Propaganda Analysis by Chip Berlet (2-pages)
• Guide to logical fallacies, at Nizkor.org (extensive)
• Guide to logical fallacies, by Stephen Downes complete but succinct)
  

On this day in 1862, Emily Dickinson’s “Safe in Their Alabaster

Chambers” was published. This was the second of only a handful of

poems to appear in Dickinson’s lifetime, all of them anonymously

and, most think, without her knowledge. Six weeks later she sent

her famous letter to the critic Thomas Wentworth Higginson: “Are

you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?”

Safe in their alabaster chambers,

Untouched by morning and untouched by noon,

Sleep the meek members of the resurrection,

Rafter of satin, and roof of stone. . . .

Today in Literature

Two from wood s lot that bear repointing to:

Blueprint for a Prison Planet:

The purpose of this piece is to introduce the reader to the possibility that much of what we typically believe about our world, notably its history and its political structure, may be some distance from the truth. In writing it is not my intention to reveal some vast, secret government or destiny, but simply to allow interested readers to indulge themselves in the exercise of re-evaluating just what is going on around us. Whether or not anyone chooses to believe the scenario portrayed is entirely up to him or her. I make no categorical statements about “how the world is” because our interpretation of our world and the events of our lives is ultimately an entirely subjective experience.

In presenting this alternative interpretation of our world, I have simply gone straight into the “conspiracy theory” version of history with scant regard for quite viable alternative explanations for much of what has happened in recent years. Put simply, I have for the purpose of this exercise quite deliberately selected the most negative explanation or outcome for any series of events portrayed. If the reader finds following this piece stressful, then I advise him or her to always keep in mind that there are many other ways of looking at our world and, even if the “worst-case scenario” were true, then simply recognizing the problem would quickly bring about its reversal. — Nick Sandberg

How Apocalyptic and Millennialist Themes Influence Right Wing Scapegoating and Conspiracism. — Chip Berlet, Senior Analyst, Political Research Associates (originally in the Fall 1998 issue of The Public Eye magazine)

“an independent, nonprofit research center that studies antidemocratic, authoritarian, and other oppressive movements, institutions, and trends. PRA is based on progressive values, and is committed to advancing an open, democratic, and pluralistic society. PRA provides accurate, reliable research and analysis to activists, journalists, educators, policy makers, and the public at large.”

Paul McGeough, Herald Correspondent in Baghdad:

United Nations agencies in Iraq have embarked on a desperate drive to “beef up” hundreds of thousands of malnourished toddlers, hoping to enable them to survive a war.

An aid official yesterday said: “The worst-case scenario is that we have only 10 days to finish what is an enormous task.”

The mercy dash, before what many UN staff believe will be their imminent evacuation from the country, follows the leaking of UN assessments that warn of a “humanitarian emergency of exceptional scale and magnitude”.

The “strictly confidential” UN documents, posted on the website of the Campaign Against Sanctions in Iraq, warn that 30 per cent of Iraqi children under age five would be at risk of death from malnutrition because of likely war damage to the country’s electricity grid and transport systems. Sydney Morning Herald

[Many articles have been written on the illegality and the immorality of

Bush’s plans to attack the people of Iraq. While many of these

articles are excellent, they are not usually directed at the people who

need to read them the most — the members of the armed forces of the United

States. If you find this information useful, please forward this

article to anyone you know in the military or to websites that they

would frequent or link to it here. I couldn’t find this online anywhere else, so I posted it despite its length. Thanks, Dennis, for forwarding it to me. ]

A Duty to Disobey All Unlawful Orders

By Lawrence Mosqueda, Ph.D., Evergreen State College, Olympia, WA 98505

DOMESTIC AND INTERNATIONAL LAW

As the United States government under George Bush gets closer to

attacking the people of Iraq, there are several things that the men and

women of the U.S. armed forces need to know and bear in mind as they are

given orders from the Bush administration. This information is provided

for the use of the members of the armed forces, their families, friends

and supporters, and all who are concerned about the current direction of

U.S. policy toward Iraq.

The military oath taken at the time of induction reads:

“I,____________, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and

defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies,

foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the

same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United

States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to

the regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me

God”

The Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) 809.ART.90 (20), makes it

clear that military personnel need to obey the “lawful command of his

superior officer,” 891.ART.91 (2), the “lawful order of a warrant

officer”, 892.ART.92 (1) the “lawful general order”, 892.ART.92 (2)

“lawful order”. In each case, military personnel have an obligation and

a duty to only obey Lawful orders and indeed have an obligation to

disobey Unlawful orders, including orders by the president that do not

comply with the UCMJ. The moral and legal obligation is to the U.S.

Constitution and not to those who would issue unlawful orders,

especially if those orders are in direct violation of the Constitution

and the UCMJ.

During the Iran-Contra hearings of 1987, Senator Daniel Inouye of

Hawaii, a decorated World War II veteran and hero, told Lt. Col. Oliver

North that North was breaking his oath when he blindly followed the

commands of Ronald Reagan. As Inouye stated, “The uniform code makes it

abundantly clear that it must be the Lawful orders of a superior

officer. In fact it says, ‘Members of the military have an obligation

to disobey unlawful orders.’ This principle was considered so important

that we-we, the government of the United States, proposed that it be

internationally applied in the Nuremberg trials.” (Bill Moyers, The

Secret Government, Seven Locks Press; also in the PBS 1987 documentary,

The Secret Government: The Constitution in Crisis)

Senator Inouye was referring to the Nuremberg trials in the post WW II

era, when the U.S. tried Nazi war criminals and did not allow them to

use the reason or excuse that they were only “following orders” as a

defense for their war crimes which resulted in the deaths of millions of

innocent men, women, and children. “In 1953, the Department of Defense

adopted the principles of the Nuremberg Code as official policy” of the

United States. (Hasting Center Report, March-April 1991)

Over the past year there have been literally thousands of articles

written about the impact of the coming war with Iraq. Many are based on

politics and the wisdom of engaging in an international war against a

country that has not attacked the U.S. and the legality of engaging in

what Bush and Rumsfield call “preemptive war.” World opinion at the

highest levels, and among the general population, is that a U.S. first

strike on Iraq would be wrong, both politically and morally. There is

also considerable evidence that Bush’s plans are fundamentally illegal,

from both an international and domestic perspective. If the war is

indeed illegal, members of the armed forces have a legal and moral

obligation to resist illegal orders, according to their oath of

induction.

The evidence from an international perspective is overwhelming. The

United States Constitution makes treaties that are signed by the

government equivalent to the “law of the land” itself, Article VI, para.

2. Among the international laws and treaties that a U.S. pre-emptive

attack on Iraq may violate are:

• The Hague Convention on Land Warfare of 1899, which was reaffirmed by
  
  the U.S. at the 1946 Nuremberg International Military Tribunals;

• Resolution on the Non-Use of Nuclear Weapons and Prevention of Nuclear
  
  War, adopted UN General Assembly, Dec 12, 1980;

• Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide;
  
  December 9, 1948, Adopted by Resolution 260 (III) A of the UN General
  
  Assembly;

• Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in
  
  Time of War, Adopted on August 12, 1949 by the Diplomatic Conference for
  
  the Establishment of International Conventions for the Protection of
  
  Victims of War;

• Convention on the Prohibition of Military or any Other Hostile Use of
  
  Environmental Modification Techniques, 1108 U.N.T.S. 151, Oct. 5, 1978;

• The Charter of the United Nations;
• The Nuremberg Principles, which define as a crime against peace,
  
  “planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression, or
  
  a war in violation of international treaties, agreements, or assurances,
  
  or participation in a common plan or conspiracy for accomplishment of
  
  any of the forgoing.” (For many of these treaties and others, see the
  
  Yale Avalon project at www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/imt/imt.htm. Also see
  
  a letter to Canadian soldiers sent by Hamilton Action for Social Change
  
  at http://www.hwcn.org/link/hasc/letter_cf.html)
  

As Hamilton Action for Social Change has noted,

“Under the Nuremberg

Principles, you have an obligation not to follow the orders of leaders

who are preparing crimes against peace and crimes against humanity. We

are all bound by what U.S. Chief Prosecutor Robert K. Jackson declared

in 1948: [T]he very essence of the [Nuremberg] Charter is that

individuals have intentional duties which transcend the national

obligations of obedience imposed by the individual state.” At the Tokyo

War Crimes trial, it was further declared “[A]nyone with knowledge of

illegal activity and an opportunity to do something about it is a

potential criminal under international law unless the person takes

affirmative measures to prevent commission of the crimes.”

The outcry about the coming war with Iraq is also overwhelming from

legal experts who have studied this in great detail.

By November of 2002, 315 law professors had signed a statement entitled

“A US War Against Iraq Will Violate US and International Law and Set a

Dangerous Precedent for Violence That Will Endanger the American

People.” (See the full statement at

www.the-rule-of-law.com/IraqStatement/.)

Other legal organizations such as the Lawyers’ Committee on Nuclear

Policy and the Western States Legal Foundation have written more

extensive reports, such as that by Andrew Lichterman and John Burroughs

on “War is Not the Path to Peace; The United States, Iraq, and the Need

for Stronger International Legal Standards to Prevent War.” As the

report indicates “Aggressive war is one of the most serious

transgressions of international law.” In fact, at the Nuremberg trials,

the issue was not just individual or collective acts of atrocities or

brutal actions but the starting of an aggressive war itself. U.S.

Supreme Court Justice Robert L. Jackson stated,

“We must make clear to the Germans that the wrong for which their fallen

leaders are on trial is not that they lost the war, but that they

started it. And we must not allow ourselves to be drawn into a trial of

the causes of the war, for our position is that no grievances or

policies will justify resort to aggressive war. It is utterly renounced

and condemned as an instrument of policy.” (August 12, 1945, Department

of State Bulletin. For a copy of the Lichterman and Burroughs report

see www.lcnp.org/global/IraqLetter.htm)

In another report written by the same authors and also by Michael

Ratner, President of the Center for Constitutional Rights, New York, and

Jules Lobel, Professor of Law at the University of Pittsburgh entitled

The United Nations Charter and the Use of Force Against Iraq, the

authors note that:

“Under the UN Charter, there are only two circumstances in which the use

of force is permissible: in collective or individual self-defense

against an actual or imminent armed attack: and when the Security

Council has directed or authorized use of force to maintain or restore

international peace and security. Neither of those circumstances now

exists. Absent one of them, U.S. use of force against Iraq is

unlawful.”

The authors were specifically referring to Article 51 of the UN Charter

on the right to self-defense. Nothing that Iraq has done would call

that provision into effect. The report also states that:

“There is no basis in international law for dramatically expanding the

concept of self-defense, as advocated in the Bush Administration’s

September, 2002 “National Security Strategy” to authorize “preemptive” –

really preventive – strikes against states based on potential threats

arising from possession or development of chemical, biological, or

nuclear weapons and links to terrorism. Such an expansion would

destabilize the present system of UN Charter restraints on the use of

force. Further, there is no claim or publicly disclosed evidence that

Iraq is supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorist.

The Bush administration’s reliance on the need for “regime change” in

Iraq as a basis for use of force is barred by Article 2(4) of the UN

Charter, which prohibits “the threat or use of force against the

territorial integrity or political independence of any state.” Thus the

rationales being given to the world, the American public, and the armed

forces are illegal on their face. (For a copy of this report see

www.lcnp.org/global/iraqstatement3.htm)

It is important to note that none of the authors cited thus far or to be

cited have any support for Saddam Hussein or the Government of Iraq

whatsoever. They and others who do not support an illegal war in Iraq

believe that government of Saddam Hussein is corrupt, vile, and

contemptible. So is the leadership and governments of many of our

“allies,” such as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan-governments that the United

States may very well attack within the next decade. It is important to

remember that Saddam Hussein was an important “ally” during the 1980s

and that many of the weapons that may be faced by our armed forces will

bear a “Made in the USA” label. The issue here is not the “evil’ of

Saddam Hussein, nor the international community doing nothing, but an

illegal march to war by the Bush administration.

Even former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, a very conservative

Republican from Texas, has warned that an “unprovoked attack against

Iraq would violate international law and undermine world support for

President Bush’s goal of ousting Saddam Hussein.” Armey explicitly

states “If we try to act against Saddam Hussein, as obnoxious as he is,

without proper provocation, we will not have the support of other nation

states who might do so. I don’t believe that America will justifiably

make an unprovoked attack on another nation. It would not be consistent

with what we have been as a nation or what we should be as a nation.”

(Chicago Tribune, August 9, 2002, available at

http://commondreams.org/headlines02/0809-08.htm)

Other articles demonstrating the illegality of this war can be found at

http://deoxy.org/wc/wc-ilaw.htm and at

www.lcnp.org/global/SCIraqletter.htm.

In addition to the violations of international laws, which have been

incorporated into U.S. law, the impending attack on Iraq is a direct

violation of national law as Bush claims that he has the authority to

decide whether the U.S. will go to war or not. The U.S. Constitution is

very explicit on this point. Only the Congress has the authority to

declare war, Article 1, section 8, Par. 11. Congress does not have the

right to give that power away, or to delegate that power to the

president or anyone else. The President as the “Commander in Chief”

(Article 2, section 2, Par. 1) can command the armed forces in times of

peace and war, but he does not have the authority to declare the war or

determine if that war is to occur, especially if he is engaged in

illegal conduct in violation of the Constitution itself or his oath of

office. The Constitution spells out very clearly the responsibility of

the President and his oath, “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will

faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and

will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the

Constitution of the United States.” (Article 2, section 2, Par. 8). The

President also has the primary duty to make sure “that the laws be

faithfully executed,” (Article 2, section 3).

The vaguely worded resolution passed by the Congress in October was both

illegal and an act of cowardice, as noted by Senator Robert Byrd of West

Virginia. Byrd’s remarks were made on the floor of the Senate on

October 3, 2002. In part he said:

“The resolution before us today is not only a product of haste; it is

also a product of presidential hubris. This resolution is breathtaking

in its scope. It redefines the nature of defense, and reinterprets the

Constitution to suit the will of the Executive Branch. It would give the

President blanket authority to launch a unilateral preemptive attack on

a sovereign nation that is perceived to be a threat to the United

States. This is an unprecedented and unfounded interpretation of the

President’s authority under the Constitution, not to mention the fact

that it stands the charter of the United Nations on its head.”

The full texts of his remarks are well worth reading, not only on the

illegality of the war but also the illegality of Congress in abandoning

its duty under the Constitution. (See the text at

http://byrd.senate.gov/byrd_newsroom/byrd_news_oct2002/rls_oct2002/rls_oct2002_2.html)

MORAL CODES AND LAWS

The United States is a secular country with a great variety of

religions, which are adhered to by the majority of the people.

Political leaders who claim to speak in the name of God are rightfully

looked upon with suspicion, whether they are foreign leaders or the

president of the United States. This is especially true when the issues

are those of war and peace. Nevertheless, the U.S. often blends the

border on issues of Church and State, including in public oaths, such as

the oath which is taken at the time of induction. This author will not

claim to know the will of God, but it is valuable to examine what the

religious leaders of the country are saying about this war. Virtually

every major religion in the United States has come out against the Bush

plans for war. Again this is not because of any support for Saddam

Hussein, but rather the Bush plans do not meet any criteria for the

concept of “just war.” One would expect this from the religions that

are respected and pacifist, but it also true from those who have

supported past U.S. wars, and even have Chaplains in the service. Below

is a sample of the analysis of U.S. religious leaders:

Catholic

We respectfully urge you to step back from the brink of war and help

lead the world to act together to fashion an effective global response

to Iraq’s threats that conforms with traditional moral limits on the use

of military force. US Conference of Catholic Bishops, Letter to

President Bush, Sept. 13, 2002.

Episcopalian

The question for us now must be: what is our role in the community of

nations? I believe we have the capacity within us to help lead our world

into the way of justness and peace. The freedoms we enjoy as citizens of

the United States oblige us to attend not only to our own welfare, but

to the well-being of the world around us. A superpower, especially one

that declares itself to be “under God,” must exercise the role of super

servant. Our nation has an opportunity to reflect the values and ideals

that we espouse by focusing upon issues of poverty, disease and despair,

not only within our own nation but throughout the global community of

which we are a part. The Presiding Bishop’s statement on military

action against Iraq, September 6, 2002.

Jewish

International cooperation is far, far better than unilateral action, and

the U.S. must explore all reasonable means of attaining such support.

Non-military action is always preferable to military action, and the

U.S. must fully explore all options to resolve the situation through

such means. If the effort to obtain international cooperation and

support through the United Nations fails, the U.S. must work with other

nations to obtain cooperation in any military action. Union of American

Hebrew Congregations, Executive Committee Decision on Unilateral Action

by the U.S. Against Iraq.

Lutheran

While we are fully aware of the potential threat posed by the government

of Iraq and its leader, I believe it is wrong for the United States to

seek to over-throw the regime of Saddam Hussein with military action.

Morally, I oppose it because I know a war with Iraq will have great

consequences for the people of Iraq, who have already suffered through

years of war and economic sanctions. Further, I believe it is

detrimental to U.S. interests to take unilateral military action when

there is strong international support for weapons inspections, and when

most other governments oppose military action. I also believe that U.S.

military action at this time will further destabilize the region. I

call upon members of our congregations to be fervent in prayer, engaged

in conversation

with one another and with our leaders. In the final analysis, we must

stand unequivocally for peace. ELCA Presiding Bishop Mark S. Hanson’s

Statement on Iraq Situation, August 30, 2002.

Methodist

United Methodists have a particular duty to speak out against an

unprovoked attack. President Bush and Vice-President Cheney are members

of our denomination. Our silence now could be interpreted as tacit

approval of war. Christ came to break old cycles of revenge and

violence. Too often, we have said we worship and follow Jesus but have

failed to change our ways. Jesus proved on the cross the failure of

state-sponsored revenge. It is inconceivable that Jesus Christ, our Lord

and Savior and the Prince of Peace, would support this proposed attack.

Secretary Jim Winkler of The United Methodist Church General Board of

Church and Society, August 30, 2002.

Presbyterian

We urge Presbyterians to oppose a precipitate U.S. attack on Iraq and

the Bush administration’s new doctrine of pre-emptive military action.

We call upon President George W. Bush and other leaders to: Refrain

from language that seems to label certain individuals and nations as

“evil” and others as “good”; Oppose ethnic and religious

stereotyping, Guard against a unilateralism, rooted in our unique

position of political, economic and military power, that perpetuates the

perception that “might makes right”; Allow United Nations weapons

inspections in Iraq, without undue pressure or threats of pre-emptive,

unilateral action; and End the economic sanctions against Iraq, which

have been ineffectual but have done untold damage to the Iraqi people.

The General Assembly

Council and the staff leadership team of the Presbyterian Church (USA),

September 28, 2002.

United Church of Christ

With heavy hearts we hear once again the drumbeat of war against Iraq.

As leaders committed to God’s reign of justice and peace in the world

and to the just conduct of our nation, we firmly oppose this advance to

war. While Iraq’s weapons potential is uncertain, the death that would

be inflicted on all sides in a war is certain. Striking

against Iraq now will not serve to prevent terrorism or defend our

nation’s interests. We fear that war would only provoke greater regional

instability and lead to the mass destruction it is intended to prevent.

UCC leaders, September 13, 2002.

Ecumenical

As Christians, we are concerned by the likely human costs of war with

Iraq, particularly for civilians. We are unconvinced that the gain for

humanity would be proportionate to the loss. Neither are we convinced

that it has been publicly demonstrated that all reasonable alternative

means of containing Iraq’s development of weapons of mass destruction

have been exhausted. We call upon our governments to pursue these

diplomatic means in active cooperation with the United Nations and to

stop the apparent rush to war. World Council of Churches, August 30,

2002.

For a fuller elaboration of these and other comments from religious

leaders, such as by the Mennonites, Quakers (Society of Friends),

Unitarian Universalist, and other ecumenical groups see www.ecapc.org.

Other religious and moral objections to Bush’s plans have been

articulated. In September of 2002, 100 Christian Ethicists from major

seminaries, divinity schools, and traditionally conservative religious

schools challenged the claim that preemptive war on Iraq would be

morally justified in a simply worded statement, “As Christian ethicists,

we share a common moral presumption against a pre-emptive war on Iraq by

the United States.” (See the Chronicle of Higher Education, September

23, 2002, at http://chronicle.com/daily/2002/09/2002092302n.htm.)

Religious resistance to Bush’s war plans can also be found in the

overwhelming vote of 228-14 by the U.S. Catholic Bishops against the war

at http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/1114-03.htm and in the

unprecedented show of unity by Chicago’s top Christian, Jewish, and

Muslim leaders in the first public statement on any national issue of

the Council of Religious Leaders of Metropolitan Chicago in opposing

Bush’s war. (Seattle Post-Intelligencer, December 1, 2002)

It is noteworthy that the Pope John Paul II has come out very strongly

against this war in unambiguous terms, “No to war!” The Pope said during

his annual address to scores of diplomatic emissaries to the Vatican, an

exhortation that referred in part to Iraq, a country he mentioned

twice. “War is not always inevitable. It is always a defeat for

humanity.” (NY Times, January 14, 2003). The Pope, a seasoned

diplomat, was not just making a moral statement about peace; he referred

to the legal codes discussed earlier in this article, “War is never just

another means that one can choose to employ for settling differences

between nations. As the Charter of the United Nations organization and

international law itself reminds us, war cannot be decided upon, even

when it is a matter of ensuring the common good, except as the very last

option and in accordance with very strict conditions, without ignoring

the consequences for the civilian population both during and after the

military operations.” (See Irish Examiner, 1/13/2003)

It is also important to restate that the head of Bush’s own church has

come out against this war. Jim Winkler, the general secretary of the

Board of Church and Society for the United Methodist Church has come out

very strongly against this war. President Bush has refused to meet

with Winkler.

“The Methodist Church, he (Winkler) says, is not pacifist, but ‘rejects

war as a usual means of national policy’. Methodist scriptural doctrine,

he added, specifies ‘war as a last resort, primarily a defensive thing.

And so far as I know, Saddam Hussein has not mobilized military forces

along the borders of the United States, nor along his own border to

invade a neighboring country, nor have any of these countries pleaded

for our assistance, nor does he have weapons of mass destruction

targeted at the United States’.” (See Observer/UK, October 20, 2002 at

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/1020-02.htm.)

Individual will have to make their own decisions about the “morality” of

the war but the consensus decision that has been developing among

religious leaders is that this war does not constitute a “just war” by

virtually anyone’s standards. The concept of “sin” is also a personal

decision but again those who study these issues from the Pope to

theologians to pastors to other religious leaders do not and cannot give

their approval to the illegal actions that the Bush administration are

going to impose on the world in general, and people of Iraq and the men

and women of the U.S. armed forces in particular.

REASONS FOR THE WAR AND POSSIBLE ACTIONS

The reasons for war are not supposed to be the purview of soldiers in

the field. They are just supposed to follow orders. But when a war is

so blatantly illegal soldiers need to have some background to make an

informed decision about how to conduct themselves. In a short space it

is not possible to delineate the full reasons, but it is not about the

dangers of Saddam Hussein. As indicated above, there are no credible

anti-war or peace advocates that advocate any positive statements about

Saddam Hussein or the Government of Iraq. The world, however, in

general, does not believe that the Bush administration has any solution

to the situation. In fact many believe that Bush, himself, is a

significant part of the problem.

Many people have pointed out that this war is about the oil. It is, but

it is much more than that. The United States does not need the oil to

survive but the people in the Bush administration want to expand the

hegemony that the United States government has had since the collapse of

the Soviet Union. This is not a critique of U.S. foreign policy, per

se, but a recognition of reality. This is essentially what Bush has

been saying in his public speeches at West Point, etc., and is very

explicitly saying in his National Security Strategy (NSS), available

at: http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nssall.html, which he published in

September of 2002.

The NSS is the political articulation of what the main actors of the

Bush administration published in September 2000, before the elections,

before they took power, and before the fateful day of September 11,

2001. That project was called Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy,

Forces and Resources for a New Century, A Report of The Project For the

New American Century, available at:

http://www.newamericancentury.org/publicationsreports. These documents

are essentially the blueprints for hegemony and for a word that has come

back into vogue —

Empire. These documents are publicly available, but not often read.

All Americans and all members of the armed forces should read them.

Many of the people quoted in this article have no doubt read them and

understand the policies basic illegalities, and thus the conclusion that

the war itself is domestically, internationally and morally

indefensible.

There are many critiques of the impact of these policies-which

articulate the reasons not to go to war. Some of the better ones can be

found at Global Policy at www.globalpolicy.org; Foreign Policy in Focus at

http://www.foreignpolicy-infocus.org/index.html, or the Education for

Peace in Iraq Center at http://epic-usa.org. There are also several

other valuable research sites.

There are also many U.S. veteran groups that have seen the horrors of

war up close and do not want to have another generation of young

Americans suffer not only the war, but also the post traumatic stresses

that emerge after war, when they discover they have been lied to, have

participated in aggression, and then are abandoned by their government

after the wars. This war is particularly amenable to such, since there

is so much dissention, based on solid information that this war is not

only unnecessary but also illegal, and may be without a foreseeable

end.

Charles Sheehan Miles, is a Gulf War veteran and former President of the

National Gulf War Resource Center (http://www.ngwrc.org). He also helped

to found the extraordinarily useful “Veterans for Common Sense”

(http://www.veteransforcommonsense.org/) which has a great deal of

information about the current situation. On January 16, 2003, he

wrote:

“This war does nothing to protect American lives, but it will do

everything to destroy the lives of many thousands of Iraqis and

Americans. This war will not protect us from weapons of mass

destruction, but it will make it more likely Iraq will try to use them.

This war will not liberate the Iraqi people, but it will do everything

to ensure they receive a new master, one ruled by corporate profits and

oil to fuel more American consumption.

This war isn’t worth the life of one American soldier.”

(http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=14952)

The idea that those who oppose the Bush plans for war are against the

troops is a fundamental lie. Support for the troops is not done by

sending them off to a war which is fundamentally unnecessary-support is

keeping them home. Support for the troops is not done by lying to them

about the purpose and goals of the war and allowing those who will

benefit and profit a free ride on the backs of the troops. Support for

the troops is not done by making them complicit in an illegal and

immoral war-it is done by exposing the lies and giving the troops an

opportunity not to be complicit in war crimes.

A group of veterans of many different wars and eras has issued a

statement that has been distributed to active duty soldiers making some

of the points made in this article. Signers includes many well-known

veterans such as Vietnam veteran and author Ron Kovic (Born on the 4th

of July), author and film producer Michael Moore (Bowling for

Columbine), and American historian Howard Zinn (A People’s History of

the United States) and several hundred other veterans.

The statement Call to Conscience from Veterans to Active Duty Troops

and Reservists reads in part:

“…. Many of us believed serving in the military was our duty, and our

job was to defend this country. Our experiences in the military caused

us to question much of what we were taught. Now we see our REAL duty is

to encourage you as members of the U.S. armed forces to find out what

you are being sent to fight and die for and what the consequences of

your actions will be for humanity. We call upon you, the active duty and

reservists, to follow your conscience and do the right thing.

In the last Gulf War, as troops, we were ordered to murder from a safe

distance. We destroyed much of Iraq from the air, killing hundreds of

thousands, including civilians. We remember the road to Basra — the

Highway of Death — where we were ordered to kill fleeing Iraqis. We

bulldozed trenches, burying people alive. The use of depleted uranium

weapons left the battlefields radioactive. Massive use of pesticides,

experimental drugs, burning chemical weapons depots and oil fires

combined to create a toxic cocktail affecting both the Iraqi people and

Gulf War veterans today. One in four Gulf War veterans is disabled….

If you choose to participate in the invasion of Iraq you will be part of

an occupying army. Do you know what it is like to look into the eyes of

a people that hate you to your core? You should think about what your

“mission” really is. You are being sent to invade and occupy a people

who, like you and me, are only trying to live their lives and raise

their kids. They pose no threat to the United States even though they

have a brutal dictator as their leader. Who is the U.S. to tell the

Iraqi people how to run their country when many in the U.S. don’t even

believe their own President was legally elected?…

There is no honor in murder. This war is murder by another name. When,

in an unjust war, an errant bomb dropped kills a mother and her child it

is not “collateral damage,” it is murder. When, in an unjust war, a

child dies of dysentery because a bomb damaged a sewage treatment plant,

it is not “destroying enemy infrastructure,” it is murder. When, in an

unjust war, a father dies of a heart attack because a bomb disrupted the

phone lines so he could not call an ambulance, it is not “neutralizing

command and control facilities,” it is murder. When, in an unjust war, a

thousand poor farmer conscripts die in a trench defending a town they

have lived in their whole lives, it is not victory, it is murder….

If the people of the world are ever to be free, there must come a time

when being a citizen of the world takes precedence over being the

soldier of a nation. Now is that time. When orders come to ship out,

your response will profoundly impact the lives of millions of people in

the Middle East and here at home. Your response will help set the course

of our future. You will have choices all along the way. Your commanders

want you to obey. We urge you to think. We urge you to make your choices

based on your conscience. If you choose to resist, we will support you

and stand with you because we have come to understand that our REAL duty

is to the people of the world and to our common future.”

(To see the full statement and view all the signatures see

http://www.calltoconscience.net.)

The choices that those in the military and their supporters face are

hard ones. Let us begin with some undisputed options. Members of the

armed forces are sworn to protect the Constitution from all enemies,

foreign and domestic. They are also sworn to obey all LAWFUL orders and

have an affirmative duty to DISOBEY all UNLAWFUL orders.

The unelected president will not tell his troops or his commanders that

he is issuing unlawful orders. Few, if any, of the top commanders will

tell their troops that they are issuing unlawful orders. Those on the

front lines, those who fly the planes, those who target Cruise missiles

and other weapons of mass destruction need to make decisions. According

to International Law, Domestic Law, the Constitution, and various Moral

Codes it is not enough to say or believe that one is just “doing their

job” or just “following orders.” Decisions have to be made.

One should check out the sources of information presented in this

article, to see if International Law still applies to America, to see if

the Constitution still applies, to see if the Pope and other national

and international members of the clergy are right in their moral

objections to this war, to see if the legal arguments are valid against

the war or for the war. One should investigate if they are being lied

to by their unelected commander in chief. Members of the armed forces

have a sworn and sacred duty to uphold the law and the Constitution.

According to the laws, international, domestic, and moral, the

interpretation of whether orders are legal are not only the

responsibility of “superior officers,” but is needed each level of

command, and by those who execute those commands.

Please note that the information presented here is not meant to

encourage one to break the law, but rather to follow international,

domestic, and moral laws. The information here is not intended to

encourage one to break one’s oath but rather to be true to one’s duty

and conscience and make an informed decision.

If the decision is made that the orders to begin or continue the war are

illegal, then each bomb dropped will be a war crime, each bomb loaded

will be a war crime, each support effort will be aiding and abetting a

crime. Each death, especially that of a civilian, will be a war crime

(not collateral damage). If the war itself is a crime than all efforts

that aid in that effort are criminal. Given that over 50% of the people

of Iraq are children under the age of 16, this will be a war against

children and a crime against humanity.

The decision to obey one’s oath and not follow illegal orders is no

doubt a difficult one, and one that will probably result in punishment

from those who issue the illegal orders. One should not take this issue

lightly, just as one should not take the decision to follow an illegal

order lightly. There will no doubt be consequences for those who follow

their conscience. It is the duty of all who recognize the illegality of

the war to support all resisters. For examples on how hundreds of

thousands of GIs resisted the illegal war in Vietnam (by the U.S.

Governments own admission in the Pentagon Papers) read Howard Zinn’s A

People’s History of the United States, Chapter 18. For a personal

account of a brave officer’s resistance in Vietnam and later, see

Witness to War by Charles Clement.

I am aware that many active duty personnel and reservist already have

grave doubts and reservations about the conduct of this war, just as do

significant numbers of veterans and the general public and citizenry.

Those who have severe doubts about the legality of what they are

“ordered” to do should talk to their comrades in arms, their spiritual

advisor (if they have one), and should contact one of the groups listed

below and weigh their options.

There may well be some safety in numbers. Albert Einstein, the genius

physicist, once stated that if 2% of the military refused to fight or

participate, the wars could not continue. Time is short. Or if you are

reading this after the hostilities have commenced, it is time to stop

the madness and war crimes.

At the end of this article there is contact information for

organizations that have historically assisted active duty personnel,

reservist, or veterans of conscience who desire specific legal,

political, or moral guidance in time of war. If possible, these would

be good organizations to contact. As the veterans’ “Call to Conscience”

statement notes “if you have questions or doubts about your role in the

military (for any reason) or in this war, help is available. Contact

one of the organizations listed below. They can discuss your situation

and concerns, give you information on your legal rights, and help you

sort out your possible choices.” These organizations are listed for

your information and are not responsible for the contents of this

article.

Also listed below are sources of information that may be useful about

the current situation, in addition to the sources listed in the

article.

SUGGESTED RESOURCES:

BOOKS on foreign policy

• By Noam Chomsky, especially Deterring Democracy, 9/11, Rogue States
  
• Phyllis Bennis, Before and After: U.S. Foreign Policy and the September
  
  11 Crisis
  
• 
  Gilbert Achcar, The Clash of Barbarisms: September 11 and the Making of
  
  the New World Disorder
  
• 
  William Blum, Killing Hope
  
• 
  Dilip Hiro, Iraq, In the Eye of the Storm
  

WEB SITES

• Alternative News and analysis: www.commondreams.org;
  
  www.alternet.org; www.fair.org
  
  

• Alternative Analysis, www.globalexchange.org; www.znet.org
• Middle East Analysis, www.merip.org;
  
  http://www.foreignpolicy-infocus.org/index.html

• English Reports from Iraq, http://www.iraqjournal.org/jeremybio.html
  

ORGANIZATIONS THAT HAVE HELPED GIs IN THE PAST

(Some are religious, some political, some pacifist)

• Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors (CCCO)

  The GI Rights Hotline

  (800) 394-9544

  (215) 563-4620 Fax (510) 465-2459

  630 Twentieth Street #302

  Oakland, CA 94612

  girights@objector.org

  http://girights.objector.org/whoweare.html

• 
  American Friends Service Committee-National

  1501 Cherry Street

  Philadelphia, PA 19102

  Phone: (215) 241-7000

  Fax: (215) 241-7275

  afscinfo@afsc.org

  www.afsc.org

• 
  American Friends Service Committee – New England Region

  2161 Massachusetts Ave.

  Cambridge, MA 02140

  617-661-6130

  afscnero@afsc.org

• 
  Center on Conscience & War (NISBCO)

  1830 Connecticut Ave. NW, Washington, DC 20009

  Tel: (202) 483-2220

  Fax: (202) 483-1246

  Email: nisbco@nisbco.org

  http://www.nisbco.org/

• 
  Military Law Task Force of the National Lawyers Guild

  1168 Union Street, Suite 200

  San Diego, CA 92101

  619-233-1701

• 
  National Lawyers Guild, National Office

  143 Madison Ave 4th Fl., New York NY 10016

  212-679-5100

  FAX 212 679-2811

  nlgno@nlg.org

  http://www.nlg.org/
  

• 
  Northcoast WRL / Humboldt Committee for Conscientious Objectors

  (NCWRL-HCCO)

  1040 H Street

  Arcata, CA 95521

  707-826-0165

  HCCO-Help@sbcglobal.net

• 
  Quaker House of Fayetteville, NC

  223 Hillside Ave

  Fayetteville, NC 28301

  910-323-3912 or 919-663-7122

• 
  Seattle Draft and Military Counseling

  PO Box 20604

  Seattle, WA 98102

  206-789-2751

  sdmcc@scn.org

• 
  War Resisters League

  339 Lafayette Street

  New York, NY 10012

  212-228-0450 or 800-975-9688

  wrl@warresisters.org

  http://www.warresisters.org/

• 
  Veterans Call to Conscience

  4742 42nd Ave. SW #142

  Seattle, WA 98116-4553

  CallToConscience@yahoo.com

  http://www.oz.net/~vvawai/CtC/

• 
  Veterans for Common Sense

  www.veteransforcommonsense.org

  National Contacts

  http://www.veteransforcommonsense.org/contacts.asp

• 
  Citizen Soldier

  267 Fifth Ave., Suite 901

  New York, NY 10016

  Phone (212) 679-2250

  Fax (212) 679-2252

  www.citizen-soldier.org/

• 
  Fellowship of Reconciliation

  521 N. Broadway

  NY, NY 10960

  845-358-4601

• 
  Fellowship of Reconciliation

  P.O. Box 271,NY, NY 10960

  Fax:(845) 358-4924

  E-mail: for@forusa.org

  http://www.forusa.org

• 
  Catholic Peace Fellowship

  P.O. Box 41

  Notre Dame, Indiana 46556-004

  574-631-7666

  info@catholicpeacefellowship.org;

  http://www.catholicpeacefellowship.org/

• 
  Peace Education Office of Mennonite Central Committee

  MCC US

  21 S. 12th Street

  Akron, PA 17501-0500

  717-859-3889

  tmp@mccus.org

  http://www.mcc.org/ask-a-vet/index.html

“A complex of angular buildings and a 1,776-foot spire designed by architect Daniel Libeskind was chosen as the plan for the World Trade Center site on Wednesday, The Associated Press has learned.

(…) The new building is planned to be taller than the trade center towers, which briefly stood as the world’s tallest at 1,350 feet. Libeskind’s tower also would surpass Malaysia’s 1,483-foot Petronas Twin Towers, the tallest buildings in the world.” CNN

Is it too late to call off the war? “Conventional thinking (and the higher in a bureaucracy you go the more conventional the thinking gets) says that the United States is now committed to war with Iraq, even if tens of millions of people and most of the world’s governments are against it. You don’t send 200,000 troops to staging areas in the Mediterranean, Kuwait, and Jordan only to call them back without a fight.

I agree. It is a waste of time and money. The question is – What kind of fight?” — Rose Berger, Sojourners

Paul Rogers, Foreign Policy in Focus, suggests that, “contrary to expert predictions, war may still be five weeks

away. The U.N. and antiwar demonstrators still have time to

derail the Bush administrations plans for war.” AlterNet

“There may still be two superpowers on the planet:

the United States and world public opinion.”

“If only Laura Bush could be more like the eponymous heroine of Aristophanes’ antiwar comedy Lysistrata… ” AlterNet

“…Worst Novel Ever Published in the English Language… I am on the phone with Robert Burrows, author of the recently published political novel Great American Parade. This book has sold only 400 copies nationwide, and Burrows seems flabbergasted to be hearing from me. The most prestigious newspaper to have shown any interest so far is the Daily Student at Indiana University.

I tell Burrows that if he is willing to submit to an interview, I am willing to review his book at length in The Washington Post. The only catch, I said, is that I am going to say that it is, in my professional judgment, the worst novel ever published in the English language.”

(…)

Me: It is possible that some people might have found the plot a little improbable. They might find it hard to believe that, in order to garner political support for his tax cuts, George W. Bush would secretly arrange a giant parade in Washington honoring the richest people in America, who would march front to back in order of their net worth. Or that a cadre of earnest, teetotaling college students would get wind of this and, encouraged by Sen. Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, rise up to stage a heroic counter-parade honoring basic American values like morality and hard work. Was this perhaps deft satire, a nifty Swiftian touch?

Burrows: No. Washington Post

Researchers in the former Soviet Union spent years fine-tuning virulent bioterror agents, says one expert, and they won’t share samples so other countries can develop vaccines. It’s a problem not easily patched with duct tape. Wired News

creates, collects, and distributes net.art and poetry within the limitations and context of web advertisements.

Most view net advertising as a necessary evil. But creating an effective ad requires a strict adherence to voluntary standards that strictly control both the pixel and file size and limit the interactive behaviors of the ad. Designers must produce work that will be viewed in a variety of contexts on a variety of pages, and they must create an ad that uses its position within the marginalia of a webpage to its advantage. In addition, ad designers must be hyperaware of accessibility issues–an unviewable ad is a dead ad.

By creating and distributing art within the limitations of WWW advertising, net.artists are forced to work under stringent rules. In that regard, banner art follows in a historical tradition of working against and within the limitations of a strict, sometimes arbitrary, form. In exploring this form, they also explore the marginalization of net.art; in banner art, this marginalization is quite literal.

From the heart of the United States, we extend a profound apology to the rest of the world for the serious failure of our political system.

While not receiving a majority of the popular vote and selected by the Supreme Court rather than elected, we nevertheless have ended up with a sociopath as President surrounded by religious fanatics who actively seek war and others who seek to destroy our democracy and impose authoritarian values.

This group is taking the world down the path to an Armageddon that they believe is the necessary and appropriate end to the world as we know it. They hate life, believe themselves to be flawed by sin, and long for a divine intervention that will make them rulers of an Earth transformed by the absence of earthiness.

They care nothing for the environment because there won’t be an environment when they are done.

They do not care about international law and a preemptive U.S. strike as precedent because there will be no such law under the elevated “Christian” rule.

They do not worry that an invasion of Iraq may cause outrage in the Muslim world and spread the conflict because such an expansion is part of the necessary script.

They do not worry about later retaliation by those angered at an invasion of Iraq because all such lesser beings will be under their unbreakable domination after the final battle.

They do not worry about how to govern a post-war Iraq because they will be ruling the entire world and everyone will appear before them on bended knee.

They do not worry about Iraq or the U.S. initiating the use of nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction because use of such weapons is part of the Armageddon script.

The only thing they worry about is getting the war started before some force can prevent their usurpation of everyone’s future.

At home, civil liberties are quickly being erased in favor of absolute government to prevent democratic discussion of and opposition to the coming holocaust and to practice for their coming domination of the world.

We lack an appropriate political mechanism for removing these dangerous people from power. We do not have the opportunity to vote no confidence, as the Australian Senate did.

The once proud Democratic Party is coopted and corrupted by corporate contributions and eager to beat the drums of war in hopes of being popular.

The once independent media is now a corporate conglomerate that closes more doors to truth than it opens.

Our people are fed lies big and small and lack access to the information they need to understand what is happening in our country.

Flush with the wealth exploited from the planet they seek to kill, our government and corporations bribe, buy, or otherwise coerce smaller and more fragile governments into ignorantly supporting the coming destruction.

All we can do is appeal to those outside our country to save the world from our government.

Even though we will not hear about it from our media, march in your streets.

Even though we will not hear about it from our media, expose the lies being told by our government and others.

Even though we will not hear about it in our media, talk about Armageddon so people will know where the madness is leading.

Urge your government to vote no on any U.N. resolution furthering the Armageddon agenda.

We will continue to reach out to our fellow citizens within the limitations imposed on our society and do our part to bring sanity back to the human family and protect all life.

Our apology is an expression of our love for and unity with that family and the living Earth.

As it did for the reader who sent it to me, this captures many of my feelings. We may truly be living in the end of days if the madmen in Washington have their way.

is seen moving out from our Sun in this condensed half-hour time-lapse sequence. Ten Earths could easily fit in the “claw” of this seemingly solar monster. This large prominence, though, is significant not only for its size, but its shape. The twisted figure eight shape indicates that a complex magnetic field threads through the emerging solar particles. Recent evidence of differential rotation inside the Sun might help account for the surface explosion. The sequence was taken early in the year 2000 by the Sun-orbiting SOHO satellite. Although large prominences and energetic Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) are relatively rare, they are occurred more frequently near Solar Maximum, the time of peak sunspot and solar activity in the eleven-year solar cycle.” Astronomy Picture of the Day

Skeptical inquirer Michael Shermer: “If the brain mediates all experience, then paranormal phenomena are nothing more than neuronal events… These studies are only the latest to deliver blows against the belief that mind and spirit are separate from brain and body. In reality, all experience is mediated by the brain. Large brain areas such as the cortex coordinate inputs from smaller brain areas such as the temporal lobes, which themselves collate neural events from still smaller brain modules such as the angular gyrus. Of course, we are not aware of the workings of our own electrochemical systems.” Scientific American

On February 26th, every Senate office will receive a call every minute from a constituent, as they receive a simultaneous flood of faxes and e-mail. Hundreds of thousands of people from across the country will send the collective message: Don’t Attack Iraq. Every Senate switchboard will be lit up throughout the day with our message — a powerful reminder of the breadth and depth of opposition to a war in Iraq. And on that day, “antiwar rooms” in Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles will highlight the day’s progress for the national media, while local media can visit the “antiwar room” online to monitor this constituent march throughout the day.

We need your help NOW to make the Virtual March a reality. You can (1) prepare a free fax for transmission on the day of the march, and (2) register to make phone calls to Congress on the day of the march below. We’re lining people up for every minute of the day in every state. Faxes are very easy and phone calls are the most effective. Do both or do whatever you can.

This ‘Virtual March on Washington’ is sponsored by the Win Without War coalition, composed of many credible organizations with impeccable antiwar credentials (in case you worried that you would be used for a secondary agenda by some of the crazies the antiwar movement is starting to attract).

“If you had known about Hiroshima in advance, what would you have done to stop it?”

Cronenberg and ‘Spider’: portentious wedding! NY Times

“Nobody in America makes me feel more insecure than Tom Ridge.” — Maureen Dowd;

My Survival Kit: “While the government does its part in the fight against terrorism, we ought to do ours: learn to live with more and more anxiety.” — Thomas L. Friedman, NY Times op-ed

“The world must stand against the evil that took my son’s life,” writes Danny Pearl’s father on the first anniversary of his murder. WSJ OpinionJournal.

The Memory Hole [thanks, Walker]

says psychiatrist Lauren Slater:

You’ve been in therapy for years.You’ve time-traveled back to your childhood home, to your mother’s makeup mirror with its ring of pearl lights. You’ve uncovered, or recovered, the bad baby sitter, his hands on you, and yet still, you’re no better. You feel foggy and low; you flinch at intimate touch; you startle at even the slightest sounds, and you are impaired. Hundreds of sessions of talk have led you here, back to the place you started, even though you’ve followed all advice. You have self-soothed and dredged up; you have cried and curled up; you have aimed for integration in your fractured, broken brain.

This is common, the fractured, broken brain and the uselessness of talk therapy to make it better. A study done by H.J. Eysenck in 1952, a study that still causes some embarrassment to the field, found that psychotherapy in general helped no more, no less, than the slow passing of time. As for insight, no one has yet demonstrably proved that it is linked to recovery. What actually does help is anyone’s best guess — probably some sort of fire, directly under your behind — and what leads to relief? Maybe love and work, maybe medicine. Maybe repression. Repression? Isn’t that the thing that makes you sick, that splits you off, so demons come dancing back? Doesn’t that cause holes in the stomach and chancres in the colon and a general impoverishment of spirit? Maybe not. New research shows that some traumatized people may be better off repressing the experience than illuminating it in therapy. If you’re stuck and scared, perhaps you should not remember but forget. Avoid. That’s right. Tamp it down. Up you go. NY Times Magazine

The ‘trauma establishment’ in modern mental health care is an enormous edifice which largely arose as a legitimate feminist-driven backlash against at least a century of misogyny in psychiatric care — ever since Freud revised his theory of infantile trauma shortly after the turn of the century with the declaration that the memories of abuse he was seeing in his female patients with ‘hysteria’ were merely fantasies. Yet several crucial mistakes in the use of the trauma concept in modern mental health care have rendered it an overblown, ineffective approach that often does more harm than good (and leave it open to the embarrassing ‘Emperor’s-new-clothes’ findings about the ineffectiveness of post-trauma acute interventions such as those which have been emerging after 9-11).

First, the assumption that trauma underlies much psychiatric distress, at least in female patients, has been unleashed in the hands of inexperienced, unsubtle, polemical mental health practitioners with an irrational, religious zeal. In its most extreme fashion, the fervent and uncritical hunt for a history of abuse in their patients leads therapists to inject the infamous “false memories” of traumatic scenes which, although facile explanations, never happened. While dramatic, however, this is not the greatest harm induced by the uncritical application of the trauma hypothesis. Far more pervasive is the assumption, in cases where a patient did actually undergo some physical or sexual abuse, that it explains any and all mental health distress the patient currently suffers. This has led to the dilution of the concept of trauma and the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder to the point of meaninglessness.

To paraphrase Bateson, a distinction is a difference that makes a difference, and ‘PTSD’ no longer makes a difference in describing symptomatology, suggesting a treatment approach, or predicting outcome, if almost any event seen as a precipitant to distress is ‘traumatic’. What then gets lost is the crucial clinical and research question — why do some people who suffer a trauma go on to develop PTSD or other post-traumatic syndromes, while others are resilient, integrate it and continue to function well? Both from the point of view of salient characteristics of the trauma and salient characteristics of the sufferer, the possibility of answering this question is obscured. Surely Slater is right that some trauma victims under some circumstances should repress and go on, but it is not clear that she zeroes in on which ones. Undertrained mental health practitioners on a mission, convincing their patients that any and all remembering is better under any and all circumstances, and armed with little more than platitudes about “the courage to heal” and “taking back the night”, certainly do not zero in.

Another aspect of therapeutic nieveté which Slater touches upon is one reaction to the suggestion that we bolster, instead of break through, repression. Some therapists feel that encouraging repression of ‘legitimate’ memories sacrifices the chance to help the patient reach the holy grail of the therapeutic process — the authentic, accurate, total truth about their lives. This ignores the fact that the ‘truth’ one helps a client create for her life in the psychotherapeutic process is narrative truth, inherently different from historical truth.

The next shortcoming in thinking about trauma (about which next to nothing is written and about which Slater is spot on) is to ignore the fact that most trauma sufferers probably never present to mental health providers. The selection bias in generalizing from the subset who are seen works to underestimate the capacity for healthy coping strategies to get one past even horrendous trauma. In the emphasis on psychopathology, as elsewhere in the mental health field, resiliency is not given its due.

The third crucial error of the trauma establishment has been to confuse and conflate several different types of ‘trauma”. (Bonanzas in research funding come from having a larger constituency, especially one that can tap directly into federal dollars!). First is the attention to ‘shellshock’ or combat victims paid by the nascent postwar American psychiatric establishment and augmented by the profession’s advocacy for Vietnam veterans, especially within Veterans’ Administration psychiatric departments. Arguably, most combat veterans had undergone a normal course of development prior to their service. Second has been the research and early intervention edifices that have grown up around horrendous but momentary traumatization due to natural disasters (the 1972 Buffalo Creek flood), massive accidents (airplane crashes, fires and building collapses), and terrorizing crimes (the 1976 Chowchilla, CA schoolbus kidnapping; hostage incidents). Again, the majority of those exposed to such events were ‘normally functioning adults’ previously. Finally come the instances (which I am convinced are the vast minority of cases seen in trauma clinics) in which a person has been repeatedly or continuously traumatized, often for a significant portion of their childhood, within a family or pseudo-family situation, essentially kept captive and terrorized. This subjects the person not only to unbearability but inescapability, and betrayal of the beneficence of early caretakers which is essential to normal development, so early and so repetitively that they never have the chance to develop the resources for trusting relationships or coping strategies. In my impression, these people do not so much develop post-traumatic symptoms as a pervasive post-traumatic personality formation. I have been amazed by the lack of perspective by all but a few of the most thoughtful trauma theorists — such as Dr Judith Herman — about the crucial significance of these distinctions. Slater quotes, but largely dismisses, a psychiatrist acquaintance of mine, Dr. Amy Banks, who aptly puts it this way:

Trauma that happens at the hands of another human being has a much greater psychological impact than trauma that happens from a physical illness, accident or even natural disaster. There’s a bigger destruction in trust and relationships. And to further complicate things, sexual abuse usually happens over time, in a situation of secrecy, to what may be a preverbal child. A heart attack is a public event that involves fully verbal adults who have so much more control over their world.’

Without an appreciation for which trauma sufferers may have the capacity for repression or the ability to keep themselves safe and get to an alliance with a therapist, it is hard to strategize where to apply Slater’s suggestion that we should forsake reexperiencing and leave well enough alone. Certainly, my objections to the ‘trauma establishment’ and the harm it does to patients are largely built on an understanding similar to Slater’s that uncovering and talking-through are overrated and applied indiscriminately. But there is a reprehensible and ignorant attitude attitude toward most sufferers of mental illness abroad; my patients are often reporting to me that family, friends or work associates are telling them to “get over it”, “tough it out”, “try harder”, etc. The danger is that Slater’s argument will be used uncritically as ammunition for this misguided message. As Amy Banks, again, puts it:

…(R)epression is useful for repressors. Is repression useful for those of us with different styles? I doubt it. I think it’s probably harmful.

and good user interfaces: an oxymoron?

A much-blinked article says “Google will likely use Blogger to develop sophisticated searches that utilize the rich metadata inherent in the RSS feeds from weblogs: who wrote what and when, what it linked to, what linked to it and its level of popularity with Web surfers.” Wired Uhhh, it doesn’t strike me that they’d have to buy Blogger for that??

A technology consultant (read: not a journalist) writing on the BBC site takes the occasion of the news of the Google purchase of Blogger having been broken on a weblog to beat a dead horse again: Blogging is not journalism.

Ridiculous comments, such as Dan Gillmor’s claim that “with the advent of weblogging, the readers know more than the journalists” only stoke the fires of hyperbole and do not help us understand this new tool.

Blogging is not journalism.

Often it is as far from journalism as it is possible to get, with unsubstantiated rumour, prejudice and gossip masquerading as informed opinion.

Without editors to correct syntax, tidy up the story structure or check facts, it is generally impossible to rely on anything one finds in a blog without verifying it somewhere else – often the much-maligned mainstream media.

The much-praised reputation mechanism that is supposed to ensure that bloggers remain true, honest and factually-correct is, in fact, just the rule of the mob, where those who shout loudest and get the most links are taken more seriously.

He then goes on to some more cogent comments about the dangers Google’s expansion might represent in the privacy sphere, much as I suggested in my initial reaction to the news of the purchase. He concludes, “Perhaps the time has come to recognise this dominant search engine for what it is – a public utility that must be regulated in the public interest.”

“For many believers in biblical prophecy, the Bush administration’s go-it-alone foreign policy, hands-off attitude toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and proposed war on Iraq are not simply actions in the national self-interest or an extension of the war on terrorism, but part of an unfolding divine plan.” — Paul S. Boyer (professor emeritus of history at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and currently a visiting professor of history at the College of William and Mary, and author of When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture), AlterNet.

Nobody gives a shit what anti-war or pro-war writers think. Really. So shut up. That goes double for poets. Shut the hell up, poets. Everybody just shut up.” The inimitable Neal Pollack thinks what 9-11, the War-on-Terror ® and the impending Just-Because War have mostly subjected us to is bad writing. Lots of it. theStranger And I still think Pollack is the self-important Dave Eggars trying to be provocative. Shut the hell up if you don’t agree.

Perhaps the only reason to watch the Grammy Awards is to see if this happens. [via Drudge Report] Oh, and to see if they continue to heap adulation on the ignorant misogynist Eminem…

humiliated by US Immigration in Chicago. Is this because INS officers still don’t know the difference between Indians and Muslim Asians? Toronto Star “We have very high-tech technology out there to detect these kinds of tampered documents.” — INS spokesperson.

“The world must stand against the evil that took my son’s life,” writes Danny Pearl’s father on the first anniversary of his murder. WSJ OpinionJournal.

“A corrupt banking employee can guess your PIN in just 15 attempts, researchers say.” New Scientist.

Just as important as electricity and running water, says state’s housing corporation. A US state has decided that a broadband connection is as much a human right as electricity and running water.

The Kentucky Housing Corporation (KHC), which builds low-income housing in the state, has listed broadband internet access among the inalienable rights of its residents. vnunet.com

your rights and remedies when stopped or confronted for photography: “a downloadable guide that is loosely based

on the ACLU’s Bust Card and the Know Your Rights flyer. It may be downloaded

and printed out using Adobe Acrobat Reader. You may make copies and carry

them your wallet, pocket or camera bag to give you quick access to your

rights and obligations concerning confrontations over photography…”

This is big. Stanford researchers have characterized a central mechanism underlying addiction, regardless of which substance a subject is addicted to. It appears to involve dopamine-induced sensitization of neurons in a brain region called the ventral Tegmental area to another neurotransmitter, glutamate. Interestingly, the same process occurs in response to stress. Neuronal sensitization to glutamate is at the core of the biochemical mechanism of learning and memory as well. The investigators appear at a loss to explain the similarities between stress-induced and drug-induced VTA changes, but the link may be the theory, of Bessel van der Kolk in Boston and others, that traumatic stress induces a cascade of endogenous opiate release. van der Kolk has long maintained that, in effect, the trauma victim becomes addicted to stress (explaining the risk-taking behaviors and the so-called compulsion to repeat the trauma often seen in this population), and we may be seeing the neurophysiological evidence for it here. Traumatic memory is different from ordinary memory — walled off, experienced inchoately and nonverbally, perhaps repressed; the elucidation of stress-induced changes in a system that regulates learning and memory may help us to understand why. EurekAlert!

Joe Conason takes off from a Washington Post report this week that Saddam, believing that the anti-war demonstrations last week expressed support for his regime, has been emboldened to stall any cooperation with the inspection process.

That is precisely the opposite of what the peace movement should want.

The Post report is highly credible because this kind of lethal illusion is characteristic of Saddam. Wily but unwise, he mistakenly assumed that the West and the U.N. would do nothing if he invaded Kuwait in 1990, and like many dictators, he is reportedly isolated from the truth about negative world opinion of him. Apparently he also shares the Bush administration’s jaundiced view of the antiwar movement as “defenders of Saddam,” which could well be his fatal error. International ANSWER and other “radical” stooges for fascism may well support Saddam, but the millions who turned out to endorse inspections rather than war don’t share ANSWER’s politics.

Although time is terribly short, there is a real answer to this problem. The Iraqi tyrant must be made to understand that the enormous crowds that turned out to oppose war don’t support him — in fact, despise him — and demand his full, complete, immediate cooperation with U.N. Resolution 1441. Salon

Conason proposes that the next venue for anti-war demonstrations be the Iraqi embassies throughout the world, and that there be a flood of emails to the Iraqi U.N. mission (MissionOfIraq@nyc.rr.com) and the Iraq News Agency (ina@uruklink.net) demanding Iraqi compliance and disarmament. I’m not sure, however, on reading this, whether Conason is making a realistic, if desperate, strategy proposal, or if he is more interested in rehabilitating the credibility of the anti-war movements with its critics.

“The study of feelings, once the province of psychology, is now spreading to history, literature, and other fields.” The Chronicle of Higher Education

“The habits and needs of a little-understood group.” The Atlantic

Homeland Security Site Doesn’t Shoot Straight: “It’s better than a hysterical call for duct tape. But Ready.gov, the Homeland Security Department’s new website to help the public prepare– and deal with the aftereffects of – a biological, chemical or nuclear terrorist attack, still ignores an obvious truth: that such strikes are nearly impossible for al Qaeda-like groups to pull off.” — Noah Schachtman, Defense Tech

And:

The Smart Way to Be Scared:

“Flashing ‘threat level’ warning boxes on newscasts. Police officers with shotguns wandering Times Square, antiaircraft missiles near the Washington Mall. Federal instructions to stockpile water and batteries and obtain plastic and tape for a ‘safe room.’ Yet it’s far from clear that this security rush will help anyone.” — Greg Easterbrook, NY Times

Strange, violent and unwanted, even in hospital: “Man in wretched condition shows up at shelter in a cab.” Victoria Times Colonist [via Pam]

“As the United States readies for a possible conflict in Iraq, many of the star weapons from the Persian Gulf war of 1991 are back and deadlier than ever. The smart bombs are smarter. The stealth planes are sneakier. Even the ground troops are better equipped than they were a dozen years ago.

Yet according to military experts, the biggest technical revelation of another war in the region may not be improvements to old systems but rather a new category of firepower known as directed-energy weapons.” NY Times

The Day the Protest Music Died: “Independent radio stations that once would have played antiwar anthems have been gobbled up by corporations that have no wish to rock the boat.” NY Times

“Yes, HBO’s prison drama is fueled by shower-room shankings, an Aryan cult, and grotesqueries such as the excretion cocktail mixed by one Hole-bound inmate. Most viewers have turned away from the show’s in-your-face imagery in disgust, including the Emmy voters, who consistently ignore stunning acting by Eamonn Walker, Christopher Meloni, Rita Moreno, Dean Winters, Lee Tergesen, and J.K. Simmons. ”Oz,” so feral and explosive, is the black sheep of quality television.” Boston Globe

Signs of water hint at possibility of life on Mars: “A new theory and a revised interpretation of observations have bolstered the idea that Mars has more water than was thought and have encouraged speculation about the possibility of life on the planet.” IHT

‘With perhaps only hours left to live, the 17-year-old girl mistakenly given a heart and lungs with the wrong blood type was miraculously handed a second chance Thursday after doctors — against all odds — located another set of organs.

Surgeons rushed to transplant the new heart and lungs into Jesica Santillan, whose relatives had feared she would be dead by the weekend.

She was in critical condition after the four-hour operation, and doctors warned it was too early to say whether she would pull through.’ Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“Shares of U.S. local telephone companies fell Thursday after federal regulators kept in place rules that force carriers to provide rivals with low-priced access to their telephone networks, analysts said.

In a complicated decision, the Federal Communications Commission approved new guidelines that give state regulators the power to decide what parts of local telephone networks must be leased at discounts. That dealt a blow to the dominant local telephone companies–the Baby Bells, which wanted immediate relief from rules they contend cost them money and customers.

The FCC decision, however, did offer the Baby Bells a partial win. The agency ruled that local companies that install new fiber-optic cables for high-speed Internet access won’t have to share those lines with rivals.” CNET News

Happy Birthday to the Future

I mean, what good is a poem by some lowly person against a cruise missile, or an aircraft carrier, or Total Information Awareness?

And this feeling was borne out when I arrived and saw the crowd of mostly oldsters like myself, flying their freak flags the same as ever, only shinier.

I have written poems, especially when I was young, that use war, or have war in them. I typically exploited the horror, the feeling of helplessness, and the landscapes we leave when we give up on one another.

But I couldn’t imagine any of these bad dream poems having a salutary effect on the peace gathering. So I dug up some old World war I poems of Wilfred Owen, “Strange Meeting” and “Dulce et Decorum Est,” both harrowing poems written in his wartime “remission,” when he invalided in England after succumbing to the noise and horror of bombs.

Before they dragged Owen away, he had sat gibbering in a hole for four days with the parts of a comrade splattered all around him.

The thing about Owen’s poems is, they are bitter and sad, like every young man’s poems. Except, he had greater call. I thought, as I looked out at the gathering in the coffee shop, that we had all got so old. I’m twice Owens’ age, and Robert Bly, over there in the corner, is more than three Owens of time.

The war was so terrible, because it took a generation of men educated in genteel ways, and it ground them to puilp. They went off to war like gentlemen, and came back, if they were lucky, with a frankness of expression that was rooted in the greatest grief.

We today owe our freewheeling diction, our realism, to the horrors of the trenches. They gave us e.e. cummings and Hemingway, Robert Graves and Gertrude Stein (she worked as a nurse) … Appolinaire, Cocteau, Eluard and Breton … Isaac Rosenberg, Otto Dix and Eugenio Montale.

They gave us Robert Bridges, Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke, Joyce Kilmer, John Dos Passos, Edith Wharton (likewise a nurse), Archibald Macleish, Giuseppe Ungaretti, W. Somerset Maugham.

These people created a new language of straight talk from the rubble of the empires, which comes so easily to us today. worldgonewrong

“Don’t Be Afraid — Be Ready”. Duck’n’cover for the 21st century. This reads so much like a parody it would be surreally funny if I weren’t so enraged at the peril the dysadministration places the world, and my children, in.

“The leaked preparations for the meeting are the clearest sign yet that the administration is determined to overhaul its nuclear arsenal so that it could be used as part of the new ‘Bush doctrine’ of pre-emption, to strike the stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons of rogue states.” Guardian UK