The Bush Empire, an article by Charles Shaw on four generations of Bush manipulations.

From Newtopia Magazine, via :::wood s lot :::.

{ 1:48 PM }

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Harry Santorum and the Goblet of Hellfire. Still more insane right-wing publishing adventures are in the works:

"After years of publishing titles that catered to an academic readership, ISI Books is capitalizing on the invigorated market for right–wing books and its own recent successes by launching two new series," notes Christopher Dreher in a Publishers Weekly report. Dreher says "the small conservative house located in Wilmington, Del.," will introduce "a line of original translations of contemporary and classic works," starting with the publication of an Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn title, his first new work to appear in English in eight years. Dreher says "ISI will also branch out into children's books," starting with "an anthology edited by Karen Santorum, wife of Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum, and The National Review Treasury of Classic Children's Literature, edited by William F. Buckley Jr."

Link via Moby Lives, Thursday, 24 July 2003.

Previous misadventures in right-wing publishing include the Book-of-the-Month Club and Penguin and Random House, the two largest publishing houses.

{ 12:20 PM }

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One weekend a month, or eternity. People are responding to the lack of information about American deaths in the press (Editor & Publisher):

Last week, my daughter called me because a co-worker's daughter shot herself in Iraq. So I looked at the news and saw in a British newspaper a short line about a woman in the military in Iraq was shot. I was furious and wrote to papers like The New York Times demanding they ask about her suicide. Not a word from the military and not one question from the press. The mother is too bereaved and upset to talk to anyone and is now in seclusion.

The lack of curiousity in our press is very annoying. When terrorists killed 17 sailors, each got a long and loving memorial. We don't even get the names of the dead now. Always, it is "one was killed and four injured today." Not only that, there is seldom any description of how they died. I learned in the British and Muslim press that one soldier was on fire and ran through the streets, his face in flames, screaming before collapsing. He died but not one newspaper in America said he burned to death.

Another had his arm blown off and as he cried, clutching at it, dying, the Iraqis cheered because they want us to leave. This was hidden from us too. Finally, just this week, our press showed a photo of a dead soldier -- only he was completely covered.

America should be shown the burned soldier, the one with his arm blown off. We should see the 10,000 "injured", some of whom are missing arms and legs and eyes. Not one wounded soldier aside from Jessica Lynch, the propaganda victim of a faked-up story, has been shown.

Elaine Meinel Supkis
Petersburgh, N.Y.

[...]

Thanks for the article on the media's underreporting of Iraq-war casualties. I live in Elkhart, Ind., home of another U.S. soldier who died about a week ago -- whose death was not reported as a combat casualty. He was Craig Boling, a reservist, age 38, who is reported to have suffered a heart attack, though the autopsy report is not in yet. As you state in your article, had he not been in Iraq, in 120-degree heat and extreme stress, he would likely be alive to see his four children grow up. The whole community is grieving his loss.

Jenny Bartlett
Elkhart, Ind.

Every death and injury is tragic, but the number of middle-aged mothers and fathers who have suffered or died to bolster W's poll numbers and to enrich Halliburton shareholders is unconscionable.

It will take at least a full generation for the Reserves to recover from the abuse they've endured at the hands of the Rove-Cheney administration. Leaving aside the theft of the US Treasury and all that Iraqi oil for the moment, it is clear that the White House is literally destroying our military capability in pursuit, at best, of a half-baked geopolitical strategy that will certainly not protect us from further security threats.

Link via Cursor.

{ 11:22 AM }

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Felons and assassins. It's Special Prosecutor time, says Mark A. R. Kleiman, on the felonious outing of a CIA undercover operative for the White House's politically convenience.

Meanwhile, Lambert in Atriosland questions the wisdom and effectiveness of killing Saddam's evil boys:

Turning them over to the Hague would have been better for the Iraqi people, too, who probably are not going to be persuaded that Saddam's sons are really dead by any dental records or DNA analysis CENTCOM can produce. Prosecuting them live on TV for weeks on end—that would have been persuasive. Such a strategy worked for the Peruvians when they captured Shining Path leader Guzman and put him in a cage. Why not go with what works?

Bush and his gang seem to think that "hard power"—killing lots of people using very expensive high-tech weaponry—is the essence of what it means to be a great power. The Bush gang likes it, their backers (e.g., Halliburton) like it, and it brings them a bump in news coverage and the polls. So they do it.

Once again, the White House's political expedience remains the only policy criterion there is.

{ 11:04 AM }

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Is the US pumping Iraqi oil to Kuwait? Try to get your head around this story by Billy Cox, via The Balochistan Post:

On May 25, while scanning the Air Force Defense Meteorological Satellite Program images pipelined into his desktop from 450 miles in orbit, Hank Brandli skidded at a nighttime photo of Iraq. It looked familiar. But not exactly.

Brandli retrieved another DMSP image he'd archived from May 3. He compared the two. The most recent photo showed a blazing corridor of light running the length of Kuwait, south to north, all the way to the Iraqi border. The image wasn't there on May 3.

"It's going right up to Iraq's oil fields," says the retired Air Force colonel from his home in Palm Bay. "Maybe I'm full of s---. Maybe all they're doing is building a highway to put in McDonald's and sell hamburgers. But why go that way? I think we're in bed with Kuwait. I think we're pumping oil out of Iraq to pay for this war."

[...]

"If you're building pipelines, you've got to have power, you've got to have light -- trucks and personnel and food and all sorts of support. If I had to bet, I'd say it looks like we're running Iraqi oil through Kuwait. It would make sense, because Kuwait's got its infrastructure intact."

The story originally ran in Florida Today in June. A followup was published on July 15:

The State Department seemed to be the go-to choice for answers about this river of light, but a spokesperson was in the dark and said to call the Coalition of Provisional Authority, the office in charge of rebuilding Iraq. But the CPA never called back.

The U.S. Agency for International Development doesn't have any answers, either, and advises you to call the Defense Department. But the Pentagon media desk doesn't know anything about it, and urges you to call the CPA or U.S. Central Command in Tampa. CPA doesn't call back again. At CentCom, Lt. Col. Martin Compton is stumped.

"There are a number of possible explanations. All kinds of things are moving into Iraq right now, and it could be something as simple as water," he says. "But if it's something going on in Kuwait, I wouldn't know where to tell you to go for that. We might not even be in a position to tell you even if we knew."

You call the U.S. Commerce Department's Iraq Reconstruction Task Force in Washington. They refer you to CPA. CPA doesn't call back again.

Surely the American Petroleum Institute in Washington would know something about new Iraqi pipelines running through Kuwait. But after reviewing the e-mailed images, API spokesman Bill Bush says a key colleague is skeptical that they're oil-related.

"Presumably, if you're drawing oil out of Iraq, it would make more sense to go east toward the Gulf, where it could be unloaded," Bush says.

But in Monterey, Calif., Bob Fett says "Hank got it right."

Fett and Brandli worked together in Vietnam. Fett was the head of the Tactical Applications Department for the National Reconnaissance Organization, the spy-satellite program whose very existence was a state secret for 30 years. Fett, now a consultant for Naval Research Lab, provided a map showing how the lights line up into the region of Iraq's Rumaila oilfields.

"It's been an impressive operation," Fett says. "(Construction giants) Halliburton, or Bechtel, or Brown & Root, were contracted to get the oil flowing out of Iraq as quickly as possible, and hundreds of workers have been going at it 24 hours a day, around the clock. They needed lights to work at night." Fett adds that the project, which runs south into the metropolitan glow around Kuwait City, doesn't have to reach the Gulf for it to be oil-related. "Why not bring it south where the infrastructure is already in place?"

Bechtel and Halliburton didn't respond to messages. What's important is, Halliburton stocks are over $22 a share now. That's up from $12.62 last October.

So sometime between May 3 and May 25, private contractors probably installed a new pipeline running from Iraq to Kuwait at taxpayer expense — diverting resources from the citizens of not one but two countries, the US and Iraq.

This is so much worse that Iran-Contra or Watergate. It's the heist of a lifetime.

Found at the invaluable Seeing the Forest.

{ 3:20 PM }

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When was this written?

What's at stake here is far greater than a bureaucratic turf battle. The CIA exists to provide pure and unbiased intelligence to its chief customer, the president. George W. Bush, whose knowledge of world affairs is limited at best, probably depends more heavily than most presidents on what his aides tell him about the outside world. And there is mounting evidence that the decision to go to war is based on intelligence of doubtful veracity, which has been cooked by Pentagon hawks.

Not this week. Not last week. Robert Dreyfuss wrote it in December 2002, over a month before the State of the Union address and over four months before the Iraq invasion started, in The American Prospect.

{ 10:39 AM }

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Pizza beats cancer. This is not a joke, as far as I can tell (Guardian):

Eating pizza could help reduce the risk of certain forms of cancer, according to researchers at a Milan pharmacology centre.

A study of 8,000 Italians found that regular eaters were 59% less likely to contract cancer of the oesophagus, and 26% less likely to get cancer of the colon.

I'm sold. Out to lunch.

A possibly related story: "US children fatter but less violent"."

{ 12:29 PM }

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Don't ask, don't tell. Forget your sexuality, the Pentagon means "Don't talk about your morale or your career is over" (San Francisco Chronicle):

On Wednesday morning, when the ABC news show ["Good Morning America"] reported from Fallujah, where the [Third Infantry] division [whose stay was extended] is based, the troops gave the reporters an earful. One soldier said he felt like he'd been "kicked in the guts, slapped in the face." Another demanded that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld quit.

The retaliation from Washington was swift.

"It was the end of the world," said one officer Thursday. "It went all the way up to President Bush and back down again on top of us. At least six of us here will lose our careers."

First lesson for the troops, it seemed: Don't ever talk to the media "on the record" -- that is, with your name attached -- unless you're giving the sort of chin-forward, everything's-great message the Pentagon loves to hear.

The quality of the US civilian leadership is looking shabbier, more expensive and less effective by the day.

{ 10:50 AM }

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