This is Bush's war....

Farah Fadhil was only 18 when she was killed. An American soldier threw a grenade through the window of her apartment. Her death, early last Monday, was slow and agonising. Her legs had been shredded, her hands burnt and punctured by splinters of metal, suggesting that the bright high-school student had covered her face to shield it from the explosion.

She had been walking to the window to try to calm an escalating situation; to use her smattering of English to plead with the soldiers who were spraying her apartment building with bullets.

But then a grenade was thrown and Farah died. So did Marwan Hassan who, according to neighbours, was caught in the crossfire as he went looking for his brother when the shooting began.

What is perhaps most shocking about their deaths is that the coalition troops who killed them did not even bother to record details of the raid with the coalition military press office.

[...]

I stood inside and looked to where the [American soldiers] must have been standing, towards the apartment houses the other way. I could not find impacts on the concrete paths or on the facing walls that would suggest that there was a two-way firefight here. Whatever happened here was one-sided, a wall of fire unleashed at a building packed with sleeping families. Further examination shows powder burns where door locks had been shot off and splintered wood where the doors had been kicked in. All the evidence was that this was a raid that - like so many before it - went horribly wrong.

[...]

What happened at Mahmudiya would be disturbing enough if it was unique, but it is not. It is part of a pattern that points not to a deliberate policy but perhaps to something equally worrying, an institutional lack of care among many in the US military for whether civilians are killed in their operations. It is not enough to say, as some defenders of the US military in Iraq do, that its soldiers are tired, frightened and under pressure from the simmering guerrilla attacks directed against them. For it is the impression that the US military gives of not caring about those innocent Iraqis that they kill that is stoking resentment.

Complete story here.

No-fly lists....

I may be one of the last to know about this. My sweetie and I were talking on the phone last night about an anti-war activist we know who was hassled at an airport recently when trying to board his flight. The guy was still fuming days later, talking about lists of names of activists who can be kept from leaving the country at the whim of “Homeland Security.”

I decided to follow up and I found this story from The Oregonian. (The url links to a non-Oregonian page: the original article seems inaccessible on the newspaper’s site. I did confirm the authenticity of the piece on Lexus-Nexus.)

"There is a 'no-fly' list," [Nico Melendez, federal Transportation Security Administration spokesperson] says. "That's people who cannot fly, period," because they've been determined to be or are suspected of being "a threat to civil aviation or to national security."

Details about the list are "considered sensitive security information and cannot be released to the public," Nico says, but the Wall Street Journal suggests there are about 300 names on the "no-fly" list.

There's another list that Nico calls the "selectees list." Might as well call them "suspectees." This is a much larger list of names, accumulated, Nico says, from information obtained from intelligence agencies and the airlines. These folks may be allowed to fly but only after they're intensely scrutinized by airline, law enforcement and security personnel.

So the activist was not really exaggerating.

This feeds into my greatest paranoia. Which is that when the next terrorist strike occurs on U.S. soil (I say when because most “anti-terrorist” measures are ineffectual and Bush’s “war on terrorism” is akin to throwing petrol on a raging fire), Bush will declare martial law and suspend civil liberties and the freedom to travel. Then Ashcroft will begin rounding up leftists, anti-war activists, non-born-again Christians, and others.

We’ve already done those things to non-U.S. citizens. I don't know about you, but my citizenship seems a rather thin shield to stand between me and this out-of-control fascist government.

Watch the ticker to the left....

...The White House has informed congressional leaders that it is preparing a new budget request for between $60 billion and $70 billion to help cover the mounting costs of the reconstruction and military occupation of Iraq, sources on Capitol Hill said last night.

The planned request -- which congressional budget analysts said will be nearly double what Congress expected -- reflects the deepening cost of the five-month-old U.S. occupation and serves as an acknowledgement by the administration that it vastly underestimated the cost of restoring order in Iraq and rebuilding the country's infrastructure.[Emphasis mine.]

The article goes on to talk of Bush’s appeal to the U.N. for help in rebuilding and administering Iraq and to say that the president is trying to resolve "festering disputes" over his Iraq policies before they turn into political liabilities.

Before?! I don't understand why Bush is not mired to his pointy little head in political shit already! He has been given the freest ticket to ride of any president I’ve ever known.

To the U.N. I say, tell Bush to take a flying folkdance, especially as long as he insists on all authority residing with the U.S.

Complete story here.

Religion trumps art in Russia....

I almost missed this story. Seems Russia has its own homegrown variety of religious fanatic.

MOSCOW, Sept. 1 — It was provocative, as modern art often is. But few of those involved could have foreseen just how provocative it would become when the Sakharov Museum here opened an exhibition of paintings and sculptures in January under the title "Caution! Religion."

Four days after the Jan. 14 opening, six men from a Russian Orthodox church came to the museum's exhibition hall and sacked it, defacing many of the 45 works with spray paint and destroying others. "Sacrilege," one of them scrawled on the wall.

The police came and quickly arrested the men, but their actions — described either as heroism or hooliganism — began a highly charged debate not only over the state of freedom of expression in Russia today but also over the ever-growing influence of the Orthodox Church.

Priests have denounced the museum, the lower house of Parliament has passed a resolution condemning it, criminal charges against four of the six men were dropped for lack of evidence — even though they were arrested inside the museum—and a court threw out charges against the others, saying they had been unlawfully prosecuted. Meanwhile, the exhibition's curator has gone into hiding.

One question: if religious believers have faith in God’s omnipotence, why don’t they just leave it to Her to punish immoral artists, abortionists and assorted evil-doers?

To me, their actions speak of a deep insecurity.

Complete story here.

Elevated to martyr status....

STARKE, Fla., Sept. 3 — Nine years after he calmly shot and killed an abortion doctor and his volunteer escort outside a Pensacola clinic, Paul Jennings Hill died by lethal injection here today as his supporters declared him a martyr and warned that his actions might be replicated.

Mr. Hill, a former Presbyterian minister, is the first killer of an abortion provider to be executed in the United States. He had not tried to prevent his death, which took place at Florida State Prison, just after 6 p.m. as lightning jagged across a nearly black sky. But abortion rights advocates fear what Mr. Hill's followers have hinted for months: that his death will cause a new wave of violence against abortion clinics, many of which have operated in relative peace over the last few years.

Among the highly disturbing details associated with this story is the following:

...Most of the roughly 50 supporters of Mr. Hill were white men, some kneeling and praying, others singing "How Great Thou Art..."

What's with that? The most extreme opponents of abortion are men! Is it a control issue? Womb-envy? Issues with their mothers? Small dicks?

Jeeze....

Here are some quotes:

Dan Holman, who said he drove here from Keokuk, Iowa, said Mr. Hill had "raised the standard" for anti-abortion protesters.

"Some day, I hope I will have the courage to be as much as a man as he was," said Mr. Holman, who carried a sign that said: "Dead Doctors Can't Kill."

Other signs read, "Killing Baby Killers Is Justifiable Homicide," and "Extremism in Defense of Life Is Not Extreme."

Yep, nothing like murder to prove you're a man.

Be warned, Hill's cold-blooded account of his actions that day are chilling to read. Complete story here.

Why'd he do it...?

HOUSTON, Sept. 3 — And then there were 10.

With the crucial defection of a leading Texas lawmaker, the defiant band of Democratic state senators holed up in New Mexico since July 28 has lost its ability to deny Gov. Rick Perry the quorum he needs to push through a hotly disputed Republican redistricting plan.

The surprising reappearance in Houston Tuesday night of a prize holdout, Senator John Whitmire, who, with 30 years in the State House and Senate is the dean of the Legislature, threw Texas politics into a new tizzy.

If Mr. Perry calls a highly unusual third special legislative session, as is widely expected, Mr. Whitmire, 54, known as Boogie from his avid partying in younger years, could be required to attend or be arrested and dragooned into the chamber.

"I don't perceive what I'm doing as caving," Mr. Whitmire said in an interview in his Houston district office as the phones rang incessantly. "I'm pursuing a different strategy."

But his colleagues in Albuquerque were incensed, members of the delegation said. One staff member sobbed.

Complete story here.

Bush on the couch....


I started to read this psychoanalysis of Bush in the Guardian for a laugh, but it actually makes some interesting points.

...His deepest beliefs amount to superstition. "Life takes its own turns," [Bush] says, "writes its own story and along the way we start to realise that we are not the author." God's will, not his own, explains his life.

Most fundamentalist Christians have authoritarian personalities. Two core beliefs separate fundamentalists from mere evangelists ("happy-clappy" Christians) or the mainstream Presbyterians among whom Bush first learned religion every Sunday with his parents: fundamentalists take the Bible absolutely literally as the word of God and believe that human history will come to an end in the near future, preceded by a terrible, apocaplytic [sic] battle on Earth between the forces of good and evil, which only the righteous shall survive. According to Frum when Bush talks of an "axis of evil" he is identifying his enemies as literally satanic, possessed by the devil. Whether he specifically sees the battle with Iraq and other "evil" nations as being part of the end-time, the apocalypse preceding the day of judgment, is not known. Nor is it known whether Tony Blair shares these particular religious ideas.

However, it is certain that however much Bush may sometimes seem like a buffoon, he is also powered by massive, suppressed anger towards anyone who challenges the extreme, fanatical beliefs shared by him and a significant slice of his citizens - in surveys, half of them also agree with the statement "the Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally, word for word".

Bush's deep hatred, as well as love, for both his parents explains how he became a reckless rebel with a death wish. He hated his father for putting his whole life in the shade and for emotionally blackmailing him. He hated his mother for physically and mentally badgering him to fulfil her wishes. But the hatred also explains his radical transformation into an authoritarian fundamentalist. By totally identifying with an extreme version of their strict, religion-fuelled beliefs, he jailed his rebellious self. From now on, his unconscious hatred for them was channelled into a fanatical moral crusade to rid the world of evil...

Complete story here.

Shame on them...!

Researchers at the Center for Public and Nonprofit Leadership at the Georgetown Public Policy Institute have found that charitable foundations are paying outrageous fees to their wealthy trustees.

-- Fourteen of the large foundations paid their trustees more than $100,000 each. The largest amounts went to two trustees of the Kimbell Art Foundation ($750,000 and $747,000) and to Walter Annenberg of the Annenberg Foundation ($500,000). Three large foundations paid between $90,000 and $100,000 to each of their board members, 27 paid $50,000 or more, and 56 paid $25,000 or more.

-- Five of the smaller foundations paid their trustees more than $100,000 each in fees. The highest fee, $232,619, was paid by the Ira and Doris Kukin Foundation. Four smaller institutions paid between $90,000 and $100,000 each to their board members, 16 paid $50,000 or more, and 31, or 50 percent, paid $25,000 or more.

-- Based on the 990-PF's and our follow-up phone calls, we found that, with a number of notable exceptions, trustees in general spent little time on foundation business.

I am the only person in my immediate family to graduate from college. I have worked since age 13 at an hourly job, attending school, or raising my daughter. Now, with a master's degree from a pestigious public university, I still have never taken home more than $30,000 a year, if that.

And these rich folks are making $25,000, $50,00, or sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars for doing practically nothing!

Complete story here, via Common Dreams.

No kidding...!

JERUSALEM, Sept. 1 — Finding a pattern of government "prejudice and neglect" toward Israel's Arab minority, a landmark Israeli commission of inquiry today accused the police of using excessive force three years ago to combat riots that it said had resulted from simmering, overlooked anger. [Which has only gotten only worse in the past three years.]

The commission said insensitivity by the Israeli "establishment" permitted widespread discrimination against Israeli Arabs and the buildup of a "combustible atmosphere," as, it said, a politicized Islam began to radicalize the population.

The three-member commission was charged with investigating the deaths of 13 people from police fire in October 2000, when thousands of Israeli Arabs choked streets and threw stones in solidarity with Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, who just had just begun their uprising against Israel. A Jewish motorist was also killed, by a stone-thrower.

Criticizing police tactics that included the use of sniper fire to disperse crowds, the report concluded that Israel "must educate its police that the Arab public is not the enemy, and should not be treated as such..."

I remind readers that this report is referring to the more than 1 million of Israel's 6.6 million citizens who are Arabs, and not to the roughly 4 million Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories.

While Israel is to be commended for investigating police violence toward Arabs, many Arabs feel the investigation did not go nearly far enough.

Walid Ghanaym, 37, whose brother Emad, 25, was killed, said: "If the police killed 13 Jews, what would they do? That's why we're third class."

Complete story here.