Monday, February 09, 2004
-Yasukuni: Seek a New Way to Remeber the War Dead
by Yoshibumi Wakamiya
Translated from the International Herald Tribune by the people at JAPAN FOCUS.
...The true culprit in suicide attacks is not the individual who sacrifices his or her life, but the organizations and leaders who praise, encourage or order such attacks. Likewise, unless we look squarely at the mistakes made by the imperial army and national leaders who forced Japan to fight a reckless war at the cost of the lives of young kamikaze pilots, there is no way we can truly mourn for the war dead, including kamikaze pilots, and in the same breath pray for peace.
At the time, as the central facility for state Shintoism, Yasukuni Shrine played a leading role in whipping up fighting spirit and encouraging kamikaze pilots. Even now that the shrine is officially no more than one of countless religious corporations, it continues to serve as the spiritual base for people who still believe Japan’s path was right and inevitable as it entered the “Greater East Asia War.”
Whole Article
-Kerry Wrapping Himself in the Flag--Road to Disaster
ZNet Commentary
(Support the Sustainers program, of which this is an example).
So the results are in. After shellacking Dean in Iowa, Kerry once again won a very convincing victory in New Hampshire. Democrats who made up their minds last year tended to favor Dean, while those who made up their minds in the last four weeks favored Kerry; those who voted based on the issues favored Dean, while those who voted based on “electability” favored Kerry.
Some cast this as a matter of Kerry’s greater experience in Washington, dealing with national and international issues. Much more important, however, is the elephant in the room that Democratic strategists alternately discuss feverishly and ignore: the significance of Iraq in the upcoming election.
Since before the war, I have maintained that Iraq will be the crucial issue in the election, and the one that it is most important for the Democrats to try to get right if they want to win. Counterposed against this was the argument that, even though there is widespread discontent over the war, those who oppose it are a minority, and that anyway Americans will vote on jobs and health-care, the issues that affect them most proximately. And, of course, in polls on the relative significance of issues, Iraq consistently comes in third behind jobs and health-care; a solid third that shows a persistence of interest in the issue, but notably behind the first two.
Until they were blindsided by the Dean phenomenon, the mainstream Democratic candidates were all running on the strategy of not allowing too much daylight between them and George W. Bush on Iraq while excoriating him on domestic issues; indeed, any other stance has been difficult given their votes on the Iraq resolution in October 2002. In the November 2003 issue of the American Prospect, Bill Clinton explicitly outlined this as the strategy necessary for the Democrats to win in 2004.
Superficially at least, the Kerry results seem to bear out all of this analysis. Dean, though he had plans on other issues, was defined as the antiwar candidate, and yet even voters who describe themselves as antiwar voted for Kerry over Dean.
I’m still unconvinced. There’s something I think the pundits are not paying attention to-- the main election campaign will be run against Bush, not against Kerry or Dean or Edwards. Karl Rove has already announced that foreign policy is what Bush will run on, and the attacks on the Democratic candidate will be merciless. Once the Bush campaign really starts and all that money kicks in, the political landscape will be transformed.
After that, the only thing I can predict is this: a Democratic candidate who has little intelligent to say about the war will be swallowed whole. If the candidate bases his objections, as many do now, on our not asking France to help pay for the war, he will be ridiculed. If he signs on completely, he will become irrelevant. Although Iraq is not the “biggest” issue in the campaign, measured in gross terms, Iraq will be the defining issue, the issue the Democratic candidate has to get right if he wants to have a chance of standing up to Bush’s overwhelming advantage in money, Bush’s shock troops in the Christian right, Bush’s profound influence over the broadcast money, and the fact that the economy will be kept roughly afloat by extremely low interest rates.
In fact, even looking at the New Hampshire results, you can notice that Dean arrested his scream-driven slide in the polls only by coming out newly combative and attacking Kerry on his vote for the Iraq resolution.
Kerry seems to have learned the wrong lesson from his two victories. After limbering up to the point where he actually denounced Reagan’s illegal war in Central America on a nationally televised debate, his New Hampshire victory speech took just the opposite tone: “In the hardest moments of the past month, I depended on the same band of brothers that I depended on more than 30 years ago. We’re a little older, and a little grayer, but I’ll tell you this: we still know how to fight for our country. “
This is the same John Kerry who in 1971 delivered perhaps the finest speech (http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1972VVAW.html) ever given to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where he said, among other things, “In our opinion and from our experience, there is nothing in South Vietnam which could happen that realistically threatens the United States of America..”
He understood then that he and his fellow soldiers were not fighting for their country but for an immoral imperial foreign policy. If he had really learned the lessons of the 2000 and 2002 elections, he would post that speech right at the top of his website.
Dean seems initially to have learned the right lesson and is attacking Bush administration deception on WMD more vigorously. If he can bring himself to say that three-letter word “lie” and back it up with some of the copious evidence unearthed by so many, he might just be able to transform the presidential race.
Of course, no one is talking about the real horrors of the continuing occupation of Iraq, except for mentions of the U.S. casualty count, and that is not likely to change anytime soon.
In response to Kerry’s call to Democratic voters not to “send them a message” but rather to “send them a president,” Howard Dean has said his campaign is not about “changing presidents” but about “changing America.” It’s hard to see how he or any of his frontrunning fellows would do anything to change America except to roll it back to the halcyon days of 1999 and 2000, but the fact that he is using this rhetoric is worth noting.
In that speech of 1971, where Kerry announced the formation of the Winter Soldiers, a group opposing the Vietnam War, he expressed the hope that his organization would help to make Vietnam the place “where America finally turned and where soldiers like us helped it in the turning.”
If Kerry went back and re-read his speech, perhaps he would realize that now is the time to go beyond wrapping himself in the flag of his participation in an immoral war and open a real debate on America’s role in the world. He has nothing to lose but a near-certain defeat; he has a presidency to gain.
Rahul Mahajan is the publisher of Empire Notes (http://www.empirenotes.org) and serves on the Administrative Committee of United for Peace and Justice, the nation’s largest antiwar coalition. His first book, “The New Crusade: America’s War on Terrorism,” has been called “mandatory reading for anyone who wants to get a handle on the war on terrorism,” and his most recent book, “Full Spectrum Dominance: U.S. Power in Iraq and Beyond,” has been described as “essential for those who wish to continue to fight against empire.” He can be reached at
-Lesser of Two Evils is Still Evil: Wesley Clark would use Depleted Uranium and Cluster Bombs
Jan 28 - In an on-the-spot interview with the Democracy Now! radio program, General Wesley Clark defended the actions of the NATO forces he commanded during the 78-day bombing of Kosovo. The former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO and current presidential candidate told Democracy Now! correspondent Jeremy Scahill that, “All of my actions were examined and they were all upheld by the highest law in the United States.”
Clark, who was campaigning in New Hampshire at the time of the interview, told Democracy Now! that, if elected President, he would “use whatever it takes that’s legal to protect the men and women against force” and would not rule out the use of depleted uranium or cluster bombs.
Depleted uranium munitions, which NATO forces used extensively in Kosovo, are able to pierce some armor plating. They are also radioactive heavy metals and, according to scientists, can contaminate water and soil for long periods of time, adversely affecting civilian populations. BBC News Online’s environmental correspondent says that the effects of high exposure may include increased risks of kidney failure, leukemia, cancer and birth defects.
Read the full story in the New Standard
Saturday, February 07, 2004
-Kucinich (A candidate never covered by the media): Bring Troops Home!
My campaign is about the end of fear and the beginning of hope. When the lives of men and women who bravely serve this nation are at risk in Iraq, our civil liberties are in peril and the entire U.S. domestic agenda is being sacrificed, we must have the courage to see through the lies that sent us into Iraq. We must reclaim our nation.
The Washington caucuses are a referendum on the Iraq war. Every other Democratic presidential candidate, except the Rev. Al Sharpton, would keep our troops in Iraq for years. I will bring our troops home quickly. I have a plan to work with the United Nations to replace U.S. troops with U.N. peacekeepers.
-Iraq Coverup: Hire Journalists to Get facts
by Chalmers Johnson
So the Bush administration—under considerable pressure from people outraged that we invaded Iraq not only without U.N. approval but on false intelligence that Saddam Hussein had “weapons of mass destruction”—has now decided to investigate itself. For this important task it is proposing a panel of former CIA officials (Robert Gates, Richard Kerr), former Congressional members with “intelligence expertise” (Warren Rudman, Gary Hart), and David Kay, the weapons inspector whose recent report and change of heart have so discomfited the administration. Unsurprisingly, if this administration has its way, the investigation will not make public its results until well after the November election.
The whole exercise smacks of “cover-up” and is about as trustworthy as asking Enron executives to investigate themselves. A group of men, deeply protective of their former colleagues, friends, and Washington connections, will doubtless tell us in due course that U.S. intelligence on Iraq was “thin” (at the time of the war it had been two years since there had been a National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq). The now-famous misinformation about “yellow cake” being purchased from Niger will be blamed on England’s MI6, the equivalent of our CIA. The real reasons why former ambassador Joseph Wilson’s first-hand report on Niger yellow cake was ignored and Wilson’s CIA wife subsequently outed will be conveniently forgotten. The real story of how and why the Bush administration went to war in Iraq will be lost in a miasma of words - and undoubtedly an endless commission report with endless appendices, some of which will surely be declared top secret and shielded from public view—and no one in particular will be blamed (much as Robert McNamara now blames “the fog of war” and not himself for the failures of American policy in Vietnam).
Published on Thursday, February 5, 2004 by TomDispatch.com
A Modest Proposal
by Chalmers Johnson
So the Bush administration—under considerable pressure from people outraged that we invaded Iraq not only without U.N. approval but on false intelligence that Saddam Hussein had “weapons of mass destruction”—has now decided to investigate itself. For this important task it is proposing a panel of former CIA officials (Robert Gates, Richard Kerr), former Congressional members with “intelligence expertise” (Warren Rudman, Gary Hart), and David Kay, the weapons inspector whose recent report and change of heart have so discomfited the administration. Unsurprisingly, if this administration has its way, the investigation will not make public its results until well after the November election.
The whole exercise smacks of “cover-up” and is about as trustworthy as asking Enron executives to investigate themselves. A group of men, deeply protective of their former colleagues, friends, and Washington connections, will doubtless tell us in due course that U.S. intelligence on Iraq was “thin” (at the time of the war it had been two years since there had been a National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq). The now-famous misinformation about “yellow cake” being purchased from Niger will be blamed on England’s MI6, the equivalent of our CIA. The real reasons why former ambassador Joseph Wilson’s first-hand report on Niger yellow cake was ignored and Wilson’s CIA wife subsequently outed will be conveniently forgotten. The real story of how and why the Bush administration went to war in Iraq will be lost in a miasma of words - and undoubtedly an endless commission report with endless appendices, some of which will surely be declared top secret and shielded from public view—and no one in particular will be blamed (much as Robert McNamara now blames “the fog of war” and not himself for the failures of American policy in Vietnam).
Let me propose that if the Bush administration really wants to find out what went wrong with our pre-war intelligence on Iraq, it should appoint a commission consisting of first-class investigative reporters, including first and foremost the New Yorker magazine’s Seymour Hersh and the Atlantic Monthly’s James Fallows. These two journalists have, in fact, already told us in damning detail what really went on inside the Bush administration....
-Fascism in America: Iowa Peace Activists Ordered to Testify in Court
Three Des Moines peace activists have been subpoenaed to appear before a federal grand jury next week as part of an investigation that the activists believe is being conducted by the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force.
Activists Brian Terrell, Patti McKee and Elton Davis say they have been ordered to testify in federal court Tuesday about something documents describe only as a “possible violation of federal law.”
.....Local peace activists say they worry that the subpoenas are part of an effort to discourage protests against America’s actions in Iraq.
Sally Frank, a Drake University law professor who several times has defended war protesters in court, said that “one can only assume that (the grand jury) is an attempt to put a chill on the peace movement in Iowa.”
-Hutton Fiasco: Government Overseeing Itself
by By Isa F. Atkins
The problem with America’s new war is that, for most Americans, it’s not really happening. The nation got moderately excited during the initial stage of the invasion. But now most US news providers don’t even highlight the daily combat fatalities of the men and women supposedly fighting to defend America’s freedom -let alone bothering to question the official pretexts for going to war. Much more excitement and controversy was caused by Janet Jackson’s bare breast, as featured recently in the Superbowl XXXVIII halftime show, than by any single incident of the Iraq war. Indeed, judging by the daily preoccupations of its citizens, America is not a nation in war -it is a nation asleep.
This, of course, is not the case everywhere else. Coalition member countries with a more sensitive political culture, such as Japan, South Korea, Italy, or Spain, are witnessing their public institutions torn apart and their leaders severely questioned for deciding to join the falsely justified assault on Iraq.
The recent events in Britain, following the release of the findings of the Hutton Committee, are indicative of such turmoil.......
-Israel Considered Murder, Still Trying to Silence Nuclear Whistleblower
Israel’s Mossad spy agency considered killing nuclear whistle blower Mordechai Vanunu in 1986, but decided instead to abduct him for trial on treason charges, a former Mossad director said on Thursday. Shabtai Shavit, who masterminded the “honey trap” that snaked Vanunu after he told a British newspaper about his work at Dimona atomic research center, said he feared the ex-technician intends to spill more secrets on his release from prison in April.
This and many other stories from the February 6 Issue of the New Insider.
