The Earth has never been so warm in the last 2000 years. That is the conclusion of the most comprehensive study of climatic history ever undertaken and which was released last week, by two scientists already generally recognized as leading authorities on the subject.
"Black September Revisited"As far as I can ascertain, until Tuesday of this week when Walter Chronkite did a piece on NPR, this story remained essentially uncovered in the mainstream American media.
In the two years since the attacks of 9/11, I have searched through mountains of U.S. commentary and commemoration for mention of a 33-year-old terrorist strike that chillingly prefigured the 2001 attacks.
Without success.
On September 6, 1970, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) simultaneously hijacked four airliners bound for New York. Two—TWA Flight 741 of Frankfurt and Swissair Flight 100 of Zurich--were forced to land at Dawson's Field, a former RAF airstrip in the Jordanian desert. The third, Pan American Flight 93 of Amsterdam, was too large for Dawson's, so hijackers forced it down in Cairo, where passengers and crew were evacuated and the plane blown up.
In uncanny parallel to what happened 31 years later, the PFLP’s fourth hijacking attempt was foiled in flight. At the outset, the pilots of El Al Flight 219 from Amsterdam to New York plunged their jet into a steep dive, throwing the hijackers off their feet. One, Leila Khaled, 24, was overpowered by passengers. The other, Californian Patrick Arguello, 27, was fatally shot by an El Al onboard security guard.
Unlike United Flight 93, which on September 11th, 2001, plunged to the ground in Pennsylvania, killing everyone on board after passengers tried to regain control from hijackers, El Al 219 landed safely in London.
Yet the drama was far from over. On September 9th, PFLP operatives hijacked a fifth jet, adding it to the two planes in Jordan. Passengers were exchanged for Leila Khaled. Then, on September 12, 1970, the three empty airliners were blown up on the ground while television crews broadcast the spectacle to the world.
The diplomatic embarrassment spurred King Hussein of Jordan to declare military rule, provoking a bloody civil war between Palestinian refugees and the Jordanian army. Some 15,000 people died before the Palestinians, under Yassir Arafat, fled Jordan. The debacle spawned the infamous Black September Movement, responsible for killing 10 Israeli athletes and their coach at the Munich Olympics—two years later, again in early September.
The PFLP spelled out their motive for the 1970 hijackings as retribution for American arms-sales to Israel—sales which continue to this day. Since Israel’s founding in 1948, America has given the state a staggering $97 billion in foreign aid, a sizeable portion of which has gone towards weapons.
With such an investment, are we closer to peace in the Middle East? Is terrorism waning?
You judge: in 1970, one person was killed in five hijackings over six days. In 2001, some 3,044 people died in four hijackings in a matter of hours.
Those numbers expose a terrible trend. Noncombatant casualties are growing in lock-step with “get tough” policies of governments towards extremists. The policy of “No negotiation with terrorists” has escalated into all-out war, frequently pitting professional armies against civilians.
U.S. Predator drones track automobiles across Afghani deserts, obliterating alleged Taliban ringleaders and passengers alike. Israeli missiles target Hamas operatives, slaughtering bystanders in crowded Palestinian alleyways. “Coalition Forces” pulverize Iraqi cities, maiming tens of thousands who have nowhere to flee. In response, terrorists strap on explosives and board crowded busses. Civilians die regardless, “collateral damage” to one side or another.
History could have played out differently. What if Americans had paid heed to legitimate Palestinian concerns after the first hijackings and reassessed foreign policy in the region? Might 9/11 have been averted?
These questions are not even being posed. In contrast to al Qaeda, who one can assume studied the 1970 hijackings, U.S. leaders have “disappeared” them. President Bush publicly treated 9/11 as if it came out of nowhere—which is curious, given his neocon advisors are steeped in Middle Eastern history.
Take neocon godfather, Irving Podhoretz. On September 13, 1970, he signed a letter to The New York Times condemning the PFLP hijackings. More recently, he signed the statement of principles for the Project for the New American Century, with Dick Cheney, Jeb Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz. Podhoretz is also father-in-law to Elliott Abrams, director of Near Eastern & North American Affairs in the National Security Council.
Given the striking parallels, these men must discuss the earlier hijackings? Yet posing before news cameras, all Bush can ask is, “Why do they hate us?” Our rejoinder should be, “Why play dumb?” Why conceal the fact we were warned decades ago that our foreign policy, if unaltered, would result in devastating blowback?
Obscuring the fact that 9/11 was a by-product of corporate greed, arms sales and America’s unquenchable thirst for oil is fundamental to the pursuit of Bush’s foolhardy, expensive and ineffectual “War on Terrorism.” This never-ending conflict, with its lucrative war profiteering and curbs on civil liberties, advances both the fortunes and longstanding political aims of Bush’s closest supporters.
An even more dangerous obfuscation, however, is that we can deter future attacks through a “get tough” military strategy. If that were true, Israelis and Palestinians would not be dying at a rate of nearly 100 a month since the outbreak of the second Intifada in September—there’s that month again—2000.
We now have more than 33 years experience to demonstrate the futility of force as a deterrent to terrorism. Isn’t it time to try something new? Maybe refurbishing hospitals, schools, roads and power plants, instead of bombing them into rubble. How about offering Palestinians, ancient regional inhabitants, a standard of living comparable to that offered Jewish immigrants the minute they step foot on Israeli soil? Not only would these measures prove less expensive in money and lives in the long run, but Islamic fundamentalists have won over the Middle East’s poverty-stricken inhabitants by offering far less in the way of social services.
Or we can continue our present course of action: disregard the past, feign innocence and hope for the best. Just keep in mind, though, what the next escalation could involve. Can you imagine the death toll were a determined martyr to detonate a nuclear device in Manhattan?
Horrific as 9/11 was, it was also a second opportunity to change our ways. I, for one, am still hoping for a miracle, that we take the chance and avoid being condemned to relive history.
END
In his Sunday speech President Bush made a call for unity: "We cannot let past differences interfere with present duties." He also spoke, in a way he hasn't before, about "sacrifice." Yet, as always, what he means by unity is that he should receive a blank check, and it turns out that what he means by sacrifice is sacrifice by other people.Complete op-ed here.
…Here the criminal is king. Saddam emptied the prisons and the United States disbanded the police, while 60 percent of people are unemployed. As a result, carjacking, robbery, looting, and murder are rife. Marauding men in “misery gangs” kidnap and rape women and girls at will. Some of these victims are dumped back on the streets only to be executed by their “disgraced” male relatives in what are called “honor killings.”Read more here via Common Dreams.
Many women and girls stay locked inside their homes for weeks at a time. And increasingly those who do venture out wear veils, as the misogynist threats and ravings of the more fundamentalist Shia and Sunni clerics have warned that women who do not wear the hijab should not be protected.
According to the city morgue, there were 470 fatal shootings in July, up from 10 the year before. Not surprisingly, most people in Baghdad are armed and edgy.
[...]
As for the American troops—whom Iraqis call the kuwat al-ihtilal, or forces of occupation—they are stretched too thin to deal effectively with such crimes. And they have little understanding of Iraqi culture or politics. They are adrift in a sea of unintelligible Arabic, where even the street names are a mystery. At crime scenes they can just as easily arrest the victims as the perpetrators. Their small convoys are under constant assault.
Officially there are, on average, 13 attacks on Coalition Forces in Baghdad every day. Since May 1, when the war “ended,” more than 404 U.S. soldiers have been permanently removed from action due to wounds, while more that 60 have been killed in attacks.
[...]
Baghdad also suffers from the less dramatic structural violence of epidemic poverty. War, sanctions, and Saddam’s greed have left a large destitute class with no work, medicine, or schooling. Exploring the rubble of some government ministry, two colleagues and I meet Ibrahim Kadum, who lost his foot in the Iran-Iraq war, then he lost his home and now squats in these ruins with his wife, nine children, and a shaggy and bleating ewe.
[...]
A young woman, through a translator, explains the details of her work. She sells herself to American soldiers for $15 a session. She’s seventeen, wants to go to college and leave Iraq.
“Do you use protection with the soldiers?”
She blushes and pauses. “She says she takes the pills,” explains our translator Ahmed. Does she know about AIDS? “No condoms?” I ask. She blushes even more deeply and answers directly in English. “Sometimes.”
...“We have learned that terrorist attacks are not caused by the use of strength; they are invited by the perception of weakness.”Complete story here via Common Dreams
Again, there are no doubts among extremists in the Middle East regarding America’s military strength. The perceived weakness is in regard to America’s moral strength. Millions of people in the Middle East and beyond believe that it is morally wrong for the United States to support Arab dictatorships and Israeli occupation forces. They believe it is morally wrong that the amount of U.S. military aid to the Middle East is six times that of its economic aid. They believe it is morally wrong that the #1 U.S. export to the region is not consumer goods, high-tech equipment or agricultural products, but armaments. They believe it is morally wrong that a powerful country from the other side of the world would invade a sovereign Arab nation and justify it by falsely claiming that its government currently had weapons of mass destruction and was supporting Al-Qaeda. They believe it is morally wrong that U.S. bombing and sanctions against Muslim countries has killed far more civilians than have the terrorists themselves.
The unfortunate reality is that the more the United States has militarized the Middle East, the less secure we have become.
“And the surest way to avoid attacks on our own people is to engage the enemy where he lives and plans. We are fighting that enemy in Iraq and Afghanistan today so that we do not meet him again on our own streets, in our own cities.”
It is absurd to believe that those Iraqis and Afghanis currently fighting U.S. occupation forces in their own countries actually want to somehow sneak into the United States to fight Americans here. Indeed, no Afghans or Iraqis are known to have ever committed an act of terrorism against Americans on American soil.
The president’s statement is essentially a retread of the line used by supporters of the Vietnam War that “If we don’t fight them over there, we will have to fight them here.” However, more than 28 years after the Communist victory in Vietnam, we are yet to fight the Vietnamese in our streets and there is no indication that we ever will. The Iraqis and Afghans, as were the Vietnamese, are fighting Americans because U.S. troops are in their country and, like the Vietnamese, will stop fighting Americans once U.S. troops leave their country.
FRESNO — In a significant shift of campaign strategy, Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante on Sunday moved away from urging a "no" vote in the Oct. 7 recall election, abandoning Gov. Gray Davis to fight alone and focusing instead on the merits of his own candidacy.This really doesn't surprise me, I have such low expectations of all professional politicians.
WASHINGTON -- Members of Congress are preparing to swallow hard and approve the $87 billion President Bush has requested for U.S. operations in Iraq, but it will be a more bitter pill than earlier votes to authorize the war against Saddam Hussein and to begin funding the enterprise, legislators and political analysts said today.What irritates me about the tone of this article is the sense of surprise. Like no one could have seen these developments coming. When, in fact, the situation in Iraq is unfolding just as many anti-war activists predicted.
In the year since Congress authorized the war and the six months since it passed the first, $79 billion installment of funding, the political and fiscal picture has changed significantly in a way that will prompt greater scrutiny on Capitol Hill.
The federal budget deficit has soared. Few allies have offered to help with postwar troops or funding. U.S. casualties have mounted. No caches of unconventional weapons have been found. Even some members of Bush's own party have openly complained that the administration had inadequately planned for the rebuilding of Iraq after an unexpectedly rapid military victory over Saddam Hussein. [Emphasis mine.]
Mr. Bush's request for $87 billion was on the high end of what Congress expected. In recent days, administration officials have said they anticipated asking Congress for an additional $60 billion to $80 billion for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1. The financing, if approved by Congress, would significantly add to the federal government's deficit, which is approaching $500 billion. Mr. Bush said that $66 billion would be for the next fiscal year. White House officials said tonight they could not specify how the $87 billion would be spent.$87 billion...!
[...]
In his 15-minute speech, Mr. Bush did not specifically mention the searches for Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden, who have so far eluded American capture. He also did not mention the failure so far to find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the major stated reason that the United States went to war. Nor did Mr. Bush dwell on the conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians, which he once predicted would abate if Mr. Hussein was ousted from power.
…Thursday was the first day that Pennsylvania's more than 750,000 motorcyclists could ride bareheaded in 35 years. This summer, the Legislature voted to repeal the helmet requirement by comfortable margins, after more than two decades of unsuccessful attempts by motorcycle groups to repeal the helmet law.Statistics show that fatalities will rise. Even minor accidents can result in serious injuries when a motorcyclist isn't wearing a helmet.
Per mile traveled, motorcyclists are 16 times more likely than passenger car occupants to die in a traffic crash and about four times as likely to be injured. While only 20 percent of car crashes result in injury or death, that figure jumps to an astounding 80 percent for motorcycle crashes, according to the administration.Complete story here.
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.Complete story here.
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.
"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."So the activist was not really exaggerating.
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.
...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 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.
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.]
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."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.
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.
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.Among the highly disturbing details associated with this story is the following:
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.
...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?
Dan Holman, who said he drove here from Keokuk, Iowa, said Mr. Hill had "raised the standard" for anti-abortion protesters.Yep, nothing like murder to prove you're a man.
"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."
HOUSTON, Sept. 3 — And then there were 10.Complete story here.
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.
...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.Complete story here.
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...
-- 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.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.
-- 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.
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.]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.
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..."
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.
