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Anti-Warrers:
In this update:
- Grinnell Initiative make national web site
- Grinnell Armbands make Iowa news
- Jan 18th protests in DC
- New war toys @ JC Penny
- Next Meeting: After Break
- A whole lot of good news in the News Digest
******* Grinnell Initiatives make national web site **********
http://www.citiesforpeace.org (Resolution section)
Contact [student's name removed at their request, 12/15/04] with questions about the initiative
****** Grinnell Armbands make Iowa news *******
Ok, so it was only one site that I found, but is totally better than
nothing.
http://www.theiowachannel.com/news/1830688/detail.html
******** Jan 18th protests in DC ********
I'll be sending out an email later about this, but if you're looking for
transport or a place to crash contact Eli Zigas [zigaseli].
Also, if you have ideas for what a banner should say contact [student's name removed at their request, 12/15/04].
For more info on protest:
www.internationalanswer.org
********* New War Toys @ JC Penny ********
To go along with the "Forward Battle Station" in a civilian house that
was
posted a few months ago, also from JCPenney:
"World Peace Keepers Battle Station"
http://www3.jcpenney.com/jcp/Products.asp?GrpTyp=PRD&ItemID=05b5ba2&RefP
age=
Products&mscssid=3D809D27FEE824DA19A31C0587FB4F6E1xMnVNoV5a5WxMnVNoV5a5o
200B
2E27DAEB8DE442AA3ADF63F30732747F8KK
"Accessory set includes everything needed to stage a battle."
************** Next Meeting *********
Next Grinnell Anti-War Meeting: Tues January 21, 2003 9 PM ARH 120
****************************************
Two random Note for the day:
From the Nation:
"For those keeping track, this year's $396 billion is more than three
times the combined defense spending of Russia, China, Iraq, Iran, North
Korea, Libya, Cuba, Sudan and Syria. America outspends Russia, the
second-biggest defense spender, by a factor of six. "
http://www.thenation.com/failsafe/index.mhtml?bid=2&pid=163
@@@@@@
And for fun/serious viewing:
http://www.dubyadubyadubya.com/
**************** News Digest ***********************
- New US Strategy to Deal with Weapons of Mass Destruction
- DEC 10th - Days of Action nationwide... a sampling
- Frank Rich Op-ed from NY Times
- More articles from Iownas for Peace's : War and Peace News and Review
****************************************************
@@@@@@@ New US Strategy to Deal with Weapons of Mass Destruction @@@@@@@
A broad look at the "anti-war" movement
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A32758-2002Dec9.html
Washington Post: US's new strategy in responding to weapons of mass
destruction
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A36819-2002Dec10.html
The policy itself (attached in .pdf format)
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ Dec 10th - A sampling of actions @@@@@@@@@@@
AP crossed to the UK - Stories on actions across the country
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uslatest/story/0,1282,-2234798,00.html
Ben Cohen (of Ben and Jerry's) and others arrested
http://www.cnn.com/2002/US/12/10/sproject.irq.protest/
DC Protests
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35163-2002Dec10.html
http://www.msnbc.com/news/845637.asp
Chicago
http://abcnews.go.com/wire/US/ap20021210_935.html
NYC
http://www.newsday.com/news/local/newyork/ny-bc-ny--anti-warprotest1210d
ec10,0,7696685.story?coll=ny-nynews-headlines
University of Texas action
http://www.news8austin.com/content/headlines/?ArID=54490&SecID=2
Sacramento Veterans for Peace
http://www.sacbee.com/content/news/story/5536333p-6515205c.html
Seattle
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/1209-06.htm
Hartford CT
http://www.wfsb.com/Global/story.asp?S=1044189
Loyola University
http://greyhound.loyola.edu/issues/121002/news/news3.html
Celebrities protest with letter
http://www.wokr13.tv/entertainment/story.aspx?content_id=9B0B733D-6CA2-4
A70-89E3-93BF07F873E8
Indiana University
http://www.hoosiertimes.com/stories/thisday/news.021210_HT_C1_MCW25966.s
to?PREVURI=%2Fstories%2Fthisday%2Fterseindex%2Fnews
Member of Australian Parliament (non dec. 10)
http://news.ninemsn.com.au/National/story_43513.asp
@@@@@@@@@@@@ FRANK RICH OP-ED @@@@@@@@@@@@@
New York Times
"Pearl Harbor Day, 2002"
December 7, 2002
Op-Ed By FRANK RICH
History will eventually tell us whether Pearl Harbor Day
2002 is the gateway to a war as necessary as World War II
or to a tragedy of unintended consequences redolent of
World War I. But for this moment, farce has the edge: A
savage dictator is delivering a "full" accounting of his weapons arsenal
that only a fool would take for fact, and a president of the United
States is pretending (not very hard) to indulge this U.N. rigmarole
while he calls up more reserves for the confrontation he seeks. The rest
of us are but pawns in a great game that only Joseph Heller could have
devised.
The game comes with an ever-growing cast of peculiar
players. In Iraq, there's a team of inspectors out of
"H.M.S. Pinafore," charged with a mission that is probably impossible
and whose results will soon be disregarded by the relevant parties
anyway. In Washington, there's an unintentionally comic spokesman for
our ally Saudi Arabia who on Tuesday declared that his country was the
victim of unwarranted American intolerance bordering on "hate."
Whassup with that? It couldn't be that Americans have
noticed that his government's official religion, the
extremist Wahhabi sect of Islam, is the hate-filled creed
that nurtured Osama bin Laden in the first place, or that
Saudi Arabia has been Al Qaeda's "most important source of funds," as a
task force of the Council on Foreign Relations reported in October. Or
that the Saudi minister of the interior, Prince Nayef, maintained as
recently as last week that the 15 Saudi hijackers of 9/11 were dupes in
a Zionist plot.
The strangest player of all, predictably, is Henry
Kissinger, whose first act as chairman of the "independent" commission
to investigate 9/11 was to initiate a cover-up, fully backed by the
White House, of the identities of the clients of Kissinger Associates,
his consulting firm. Mr. Kissinger consistently sees the confidentiality
of this list as a higher priority than service to his country. When the
Senate's Committee on Foreign Relations a decade ago investigated the
B.C.C.I. affair - a scandal that itself figures in the tangled history
of Saudi/Al Qaeda money laundering - Kissinger Associates resisted the
subpoena by threatening litigation "through an extensive appellate
process to the Supreme Court." (The quote is from the committee's
December 1992 report on its investigation.) The Senate retreated. The
only list that may be as tightly guarded is that of the oil executives
who met with Dick Cheney's energy task force - a secret that Mr. Cheney
may yet defend all the way to the Supreme Court.
Might these lists overlap? Might some of the names be dear American
business cronies of the Saudis? Do any of them have a vested interest in
post-Saddam Iraq? It's stonewalled questions like these that make some
of us nervous about the expanded war to come. We know Saddam Hussein is
a thug and we want him gone. But the administration has never stuck to a
single story in arguing the case for urgent pre-emptive action now.
Saddam was in league with Al Qaeda - or maybe he wasn't. He has nuclear
weapons - or maybe he won't have them until some years from now. Our
goal is regime change - or disarmament - or both. Our post-Saddam
endgame is - what? Something is missing from this picture, and meanwhile
Al Qaeda is very much at war with us and, in a new development, the
Israelis. You wonder if the Bush administration thinks we're as gullible
as the Saudis do.
It's in this context that Bob Woodward's latest best
seller, "Bush at War," could not be more timely. If
journalism is the rough draft of history, the journalism in this book is
the rough draft of the 9/11 report that Mr. Kissinger's commission will
someday write. The administration cooperated with Mr. Woodward. The
president himself was "quite open" - about what he wanted to talk about,
at least.
Thus did the same White House that fiercely protects Mr. Cheney's
oil-baron dealings leak to Mr. Woodward documents that might seem even
more valuable - the notes from "more than 50 National Security Council
and other meetings." Newt Gingrich complained in The Wall Street
Journal, "It makes no sense for an administration that has jealously
guarded its executive privilege to allow a reporter the access it denies
to members of Congress." But it makes a lot of sense if a White House
wants to put out a certain version of its story on the eve of a new war.
Fifty meetings do not a complete history make. The chronicle in "Bush at
War" is highly selective, and not just because it limits its narrative
to the first 100 days after 9/11. The book often minimizes
administration failings that should worry us as we prepare to march on
to Iraq.
Mr. Woodward has said that his is "a neutral,
non-judgmental account," but that is not the same thing as objectivity.
When he quotes the president of the United States calling Seymour Hersh,
the Woodward rival who has reported on wartime military failures, "a
liar" and just lets the charge sit there unanswered, without comment
from Mr. Hersh or anyone else, is that "neutral"? When he quotes
Condoleezza Rice as saying post-9/11 that "as many packages or
containers as possible coming into American ports should be examined,"
is it "non-judgmental" to leave out the fact that to this day this
crucial domestic security directive remains largely ignored?
The big revelations generating the buzz for "Bush at War"
are not real revelations at all. The Powell vs.
Rumsfeld-Cheney battles over policy aren't news, and
neither is it a shock that Fox News's Roger Ailes might
have a back channel to a Republican administration. The
truly sensitive issues for the Bush administration are
those that are given short shrift in the book or are left
out entirely. We hear no inside accounts of its failure to track down
the anthrax terrorists. John Ashcroft's inability to arrest a single
terrorist during his post-9/11 mass roundups goes unnoted.
The Saudis are remarkably minor figures. "We need to know whoever is
giving [bin Laden] money and deal with them," says President Bush, who
vows to personally contact the leader of any nation reluctant to
cooperate with the crackdown. But the Saudis' continued resistance to
these entreaties goes unreported. Even odder is that Mr. Woodward's
book, for all its you-are-there theatrics in recounting the days after
9/11, makes no mention at all of what happened on 9/18: the
administration's collaboration with the Saudis in flying bin Laden
family members out of America. What old/oil boy network pulled those
strings in the White House? Why did the F.B.I. not verify whether the
fleeing bin Ladens were both personally and financially estranged from
Osama? Neither the Americans nor the Saudis have yet lifted the veil on
this dead-of-night exodus.
This omission is characteristic of a narrative that acknowledges the
American failure to nab Osama or vanquish Al Qaeda but plays down the
embarrassing details by racing through them perfunctorily. The pivotal
battle of Tora Bora gets only two paragraphs, yet it was the Waterloo
that allowed more than 1,000 Qaeda operatives (plus, in all likelihood,
bin Laden) to escape. Newsweek, which did nail down the fiasco last
summer, said the story was hard to get because "American officials, both
civilian and military, prefer to focus on what went right." Though "Bush
at War" does report setbacks in the war, they are usually the temporary
setbacks in the administration's triumphal toppling of the Taliban, not
those lasting defeats in routing Al Qaeda.
As American officials prefer, the book's focus is on what
went right - and while much did, it is our failed pursuit
of Al Qaeda that is relevant to our engagement in Iraq, especially as
its agents steadily escalate their post-9/11 pace of terrorist activity.
It is not reassuring that the same war planners who completely misjudged
the enemy in Tora Bora are now plotting our cakewalk through Iraq.
Mr. Woodward does offer some useful, if unexamined, nuggets
on Iraq, showing that Paul Wolfowitz wanted to target it
from the start. According to "Bush at War," though, Mr. Wolfowitz was
not driven by ideology or any certainty of a connection between Saddam
and Al Qaeda, but by the expectation that "war against Iraq might be
easier than against Afghanistan." In a subsequent interview, President
Bush explained why he didn't want to go to war simultaneously with Al
Qaeda and Saddam after 9/11: "If we tried to do too many things - two
things, for example, or three things - militarily, then . . . the lack
of focus would have been a huge risk."
The follow-up question that can't be found in "Bush at War"
is simple enough: If it was a huge risk to split our focus between
Saddam and Al Qaeda then, why isn't it now?
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/07/opinion/07RICH.html?ex=1040289135&ei=1
&en=99daa5e1ed203713
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ WAR AND PEACE NEWS AND REVIEW @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
Articles collected from: Dec. 1st to Dec. 6th
Iraq News:
URL: http://www.observer.co.uk/iraq/story/0,12239,856166,00.htm
The No Fly Zones: Jeremy Scahill reports on the history and present
state of
Iraq's "No-Fly Zones"
URL: http://www.observer.co.uk/iraq/story/0,12239,856166,00.htm
The Heckling Never Stops: As the US hunts for a single excuse to go to
war
with Iraq, the heckling from the US has intensified to the point where
Blix
had to respond to the US demanding that he abduct Iraqi scientists and
their
families for questioning by the US, "We're not going to abduct anyone."
Despite touring everything from old nuclear facilities to a surprise
visit on
a presidential palace in the middle of reestablishing a forward
headquarters,
the US has accused him of not pursuing the first 10 days with sufficient
vigor, while ignoring Blix's demand that if the US has evidence that
Iraq
retains weapons of mass destruction (which they keep publicly
insisting),
they should share it with the inspectors. (needless to say, this has not
happened). Inspectors are currently simply hoping that Washington will
actually give them time to complete their job.
URL:
http://www.nonviolence.org/vitw/pages/treasury_deadline_response.html
Buy The Poor Medicine, Pay 20,000 Fine: Voices In The Wilderness was
recently
levied a 20,000 fine by the Treasury Department for bringing medication
to
Iraq where people are often unable to receive the most basic treatments.
Voices In The Wilderness elects to pay the fine, with 6,750 Iraqi dinar
(ID)
- worth 20,000 before the sanctions, however now worth only about 3
dollars
and 33 cents.
URL: http://www.fair.org/extra/0209/iraq-gas.html
The Washington Post On Chemical Weapons: Fairness and
Accuracy
In Reporting, in their usual highly-referenced style, compares the
Washington
Post's apologetic reporting on Iraq's use of chemical weapons when it
occured
to its harsh condemning of the event 15 years later. The Washington
post at
the time actually even hinted that the attacks may be justified. Ends
with
the line, in reference to Saddam gassing "his own people", "A casual
reader
might assume that Saddam Hussein is himself a Kurd; actually, the Kurds
are
only Hussein's "own people" in the same sense that the Cherokees were
Andrew
Jackson's "own people". "
URL: http://www.fair.org/activism/hbo-gulf-hoax.html
HBO Recycling Gulf War Hoax: FAIR hits again, this time with an analysis
of
the new HBO documentary "Live From Baghdad". Live from Baghdad attempts
to
portray the "throwing babies from incubators" story as if it actually
happened. For those who don't remember, that story was made up by a
Kuwaiti-run PR firm; the "15-year-old Kuwaiti girl" who supposedly saw
it was
the US ambassador's daughter and had been coached by the firm Hill &
Knowlton. Amnesty International, who initially bought into the story,
eventually issued an embarassing retraction when the investigation found
it
to be false. Even to quote the new documentary's producer, "That story
turned out to be false..". You wouldn't know that from watching his
documentary, however, leaving viewers to believe the freshly restated
lie.
**********************************************************
The Anti-War Update and Digest is published by:
--Eli Zigas
antiwar@grinnell.edu
Norris 1st
X 4039
To subscribe or unsubscribe, contact me.
WMDStrategy_whitehouse.pdf
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