[Mb-civic] 2 victories for sanity, and some major tragedy from U.S. to Iraq

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

Here are 4 items for you to read, the 1st 2 very short, the next 2 a 
bit longer.  The 1st 2 are good news, the next 2 are not but as a 
"citizen of the empire" you need to know and you won't get it on 
NPR (never mind CBS, CNN etc).....

1. A victory in congress against building new nuclear weapons
2. A victory in court allowing schools to keep military recruiters out
3.  "The Marlboro Man" vs the harsh reality (U.S. impunity in Iraq)
4.  Recent blog posting from an ordinary "middle class" resident of 
Baghdad (this could be you if you lived there...)

--Mha Atma

---------------------

(from 20/20 Vison)

Dear Supporter:

Thanksgiving is not over yet! Here is one more HUGE thing we can 
all be thankful for:

Last week Congress rejected President Bush's plans for new 
nuclear weapons! Bush wanted to spend almost $100 million of 
YOUR money on new nukes--at the same time he is trying to 
convince Iran and North Korea not to build their own! No wonder his 
efforts with those countries are not going well...

According to Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), this "is a 
consequential victory for those of us who believe the United States 
sends a wrong signal to the rest of the world by reopening the 
nuclear door and beginning testing and development of a new 
generation of nuclear weapons."

This is a great victory for 20/20 Vision members and the peace 
community. All of our hard work really paid off. Special thanks go to 
Senator Feinstein and Rep. David Hobson (R-Ohio), Chairman of 
the House Energy Appropriations Committee.

Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) called this "The biggest victory that 
arms-control advocates in Congress have had since 1992, when we 
were able to place limits on nuclear testing."

So cheer up everyone! Today we celebrate a victory. Enjoy! 
Together, we really can make a difference!

And stay tuned. The Pentagon will try again next year to get its 
nuclear wish list filled...

------


***
GREAT NEWS!!!!
Schools Win Battle Over Campus Recruiting
By DAVID B. CARUSO
Associated Press Writer
November 29, 2004, 4:57 PM EST
PHILADELPHIA -- A federal appeals court Monday barred 
the Defense Department from withholding funds from 
colleges and universities that deny access to military 
recruiters.
The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 that a 
federal law known as the Solomon Amendment infringes on 
the free speech rights of schools that have restricted on-
campus recruiting because of the military's ban on 
homosexuals.
Ruling in a lawsuit brought by students and professors at 
New Jersey law schools, the three-judge panel said that by 
threatening to withdraw federal funds from schools, the 
government is compelling them to take part in speech they 
do not agree with.
"The Solomon Amendment requires law schools to express 
a message that is incompatible with their educational 
objectives, and no compelling governmental interest has 
been shown to deny this freedom," the court wrote.
The panel overturned a decision by a lower court judge.
Similar lawsuits have been filed around the country, but 
Monday's ruling represented the first time a court blocked 
the government from enforcing the law
***

Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit

"In the name of electability, the Kerry team gave Bush five months 
on the campaign trail without ever facing serious questions about 
violations of international law."

The Guardian - Nov 26, 2004
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1359871,00.html

--------


-------------------------------------------------------
Smoking while Iraq burns 

Its idolisation of 'the face of Falluja' shows how numb the US is to 
everyone's pain but its own 

Naomi Klein
Friday November 26, 2004
The Guardian 

Iconic images inspire love and hate, and so it is with the photograph 
of James Blake Miller, the 20-year-old marine from Appalachia, who 
has been christened "the face of Falluja" by pro-war pundits, and 
the "the Marlboro man" by pretty much everyone else. Reprinted in 
more than a hundred newspapers, the Los Angeles Times 
photograph shows Miller "after more than 12 hours of nearly non-
stop, deadly combat" in Falluja, his face coated in war paint, a 
bloody scratch on his nose, and a freshly lit cigarette hanging from 
his lips. 
Gazing lovingly at Miller, the CBS News anchor Dan Rather 
informed his viewers: "For me, this one's personal. This is a warrior 
with his eyes on the far horizon, scanning for danger. See it. Study 
it. Absorb it. Think about it. Then take a deep breath of pride. And if 
your eyes don't dampen, you're a better man or woman than I." 

A few days later, the LA Times declared that its photo had "moved 
into the realm of the iconic". In truth, the image just feels iconic 
because it is so laughably derivative: it's a straight-up rip-off of the 
most powerful icon in American advertising (the Marlboro man), 
which in turn imitated the brightest star ever created by Hollywood - 
John Wayne - who was himself channelling America's most 
powerful founding myth, the cowboy on the rugged frontier. It's like a 
song you feel you've heard a thousand times before - because you 
have. 

But never mind that. For a country that just elected a wannabe 
Marlboro man as its president, Miller is an icon and, as if to prove it, 
he has ignited his very own controversy. "Lots of children, 
particularly boys, play army, and like to imitate this young man. The 
clear message of the photo is that the way to relax after a battle is 
with a cigarette," wrote Daniel Maloney in a scolding letter to the 
Houston Chronicle. Linda Ortman made the same point to the 
editors of the Dallas Morning News: "Are there no photos of non-
smoking soldiers?" A reader of the New York Post helpfully 
suggested more politically correct propaganda imagery: "Maybe 
showing a marine in a tank, helping another GI or drinking water 
would have a more positive impact on your readers." 

 Yes, that's right: letter writers from across the nation are united in 
their outrage - not that the steely-eyed, smoking soldier makes 
mass killing look cool, but that the laudable act of mass killing 
makes the grave crime of smoking look cool. Better to protect 
impressionable youngsters by showing soldiers taking a break from 
deadly combat by drinking water or, perhaps, since there is a severe 
potable water shortage in Iraq, Coke. (It reminds me of the joke 
about the Hassidic rabbi who says all sexual positions are 
acceptable except for one: standing up "because that could lead to 
dancing".) 

On second thoughts, perhaps Miller does deserve to be elevated to 
the status of icon - not of the war in Iraq, but of the new era of 
supercharged American impunity. Because outside US borders, it 
is, of course, a different marine who has been awarded the prize as 
"the face of Falluja": the soldier captured on tape executing a 
wounded, unarmed prisoner in a mosque. Runners-up are a 
photograph of a two-year-old Fallujan in a hospital bed with one of 
his tiny legs blown off; a dead child lying in the street, clutching the 
headless body of an adult; and an emergency health clinic blasted 
to rubble. 

Inside the US, these snapshots of a lawless occupation appeared 
only briefly, if they appeared at all. Yet Miller's icon status has 
endured, kept alive with human interest stories about fans sending 
cartons of Marlboros to Falluja, interviews with the marine's proud 
mother, and earnest discussions about whether smoking might 
reduce Miller's effectiveness as a fighting machine. 

Impunity - the perception of being outside the law - has long been 
the hallmark of the Bush regime. What is alarming is that it appears 
to have deepened since the election, ushering in what can only be 
described as an orgy of impunity. In Iraq, US forces and their Iraqi 
surrogates are no longer bothering to conceal attacks on civilian 
targets and are openly eliminating anyone - doctors, clerics, 
journalists - who dares to count the bodies. At home, impunity has 
been made official policy with Bush's appointment of Alberto 
Gonzales as attorney general, the man who personally advised the 
president in his infamous "torture memo" that the Geneva 
conventions are "obsolete". 

This kind of defiance cannot simply be explained by Bush's win. 
There has to be something in how he won, in how the election was 
fought, that gave this administration the distinct impression that it 
had been handed a get-out-of-the-Geneva-conventions free card. 
That's because the administration was handed precisely such a gift 
- by John Kerry. 

In the name of electability, the Kerry team gave Bush five months on 
the campaign trail without ever facing serious questions about 
violations of international law. Fearing that he would be seen as soft 
on terror and disloyal to US troops, Kerry stayed scandalously silent 
about Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay. When it became painfully 
clear that fury would rain down on Falluja as soon as the polls 
closed, Kerry never spoke out against the plan, or against the other 
illegal bombings of civilian areas that took place throughout the 
campaign. When the Lancet published its landmark study 
estimating that 100,000 Iraqis had died as result of the invasion and 
occupation, Kerry just repeated his outrageous (and frankly racist) 
claim that Americans "are 90% of the casualties in Iraq". 

There was a message sent by all of this silence, and the message 
was that these deaths don't count. By buying the highly questionable 
logic that Americans are incapable of caring about anyone's lives 
but their own, the Kerry campaign and its supporters became 
complicit in the dehumanisation of Iraqis, reinforcing the idea that 
some lives are expendable, insufficiently important to risk losing 
votes over. And it is this morally bankrupt logic, more than the 
election of any single candidate, that allows these crimes to 
continue unchecked. 

The real-world result of all the "strategic" thinking is the worst of 
both worlds: it didn't get Kerry elected and it sent a clear message to 
the people who were elected that they will pay no political price for 
committing war crimes. And this is Kerry's true gift to Bush: not just 
the presidency, but impunity. You can see it perhaps best of all in 
the Marlboro man in Falluja, and the surreal debates that swirl 
around him. Genuine impunity breeds a kind of delusional 
decadence, and this is its face: a nation bickering about smoking 
while Iraq burns. 

---


Baghdad Burning http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/


... I'll meet you 'round the bend my friend, where hearts can heal 
and souls can mend...
Monday, November 29, 2004

Tired in Baghdad...
The situation in Falloojeh is worse than anyone can possibly 
describe. It has turned into one of those cities you see in your 
darkest nightmares- broken streets strewn with corpses, crumbling 
houses and fallen mosques... The worst part is that for the last 
couple of weeks we've been hearing about the use of chemical 
weapons inside Falloojeh by the Americans. Today we heard that 
the delegation from the Iraqi Ministry of Health isn't being allowed 
into the city, for some reason.

I don't know about the chemical weapons. It's not that I think the 
American military is above the use of chemical weapons, it's just 
that I keep wondering if they'd be crazy enough to do it. I keep 
having flashbacks of that video they showed on tv, the mosque and 
all the corpses. There was one brief video that showed the same 
mosque a day before, strewn with many of the same bodies- but 
some of them were alive. In that video, there's this old man leaning 
against the wall and there was blood running out of his eyes- almost 
like he was crying tears of blood. What 'conventional' weaponry 
makes the eyes bleed? They say that a morgue in Baghdad has 
received the corpses of citizens in Falloojeh who have died under 
seemingly mysterious conditions. 

The wounded in Falloojeh aren't getting treatment and today we 
heard about a family with six children being bombed in the city. It's 
difficult to believe that in this day and age, when people are 
blogging, emailing and communicating at the speed of light, a whole 
city is being destroyed and genocide is being committed- and the 
whole world is aware and silent. Darfur, Americans? Take a look at 
what you've done in Falloojeh. 

The situation in Baghdad isn't a lot better. Electricity has been 
particularly bad. Our telephone has been cut off for the last week 
which has made communication (and blogging) particularly difficult. 
The phone difficulties are quite common all over Baghdad. It usually 
happens in an area after a fresh bombing. We joke amongst 
ourselves that it's all an agreement with the new mobile phone 
companies, but the truth is that the mobile phones aren't very much 
more reliable. For the last couple of weeks we've been able to 
receive sms from abroad (which was impossible before). It's nice to 
get a message every once in a while from some concerned relative 
or friend living far away, especially when the phone starts glowing 
eerily in the darkened living room. 

We spent the last week fixing up the house. Around 10 days ago, 
there were a series of very large explosions in our area and the third 
or fourth one took out three of the windows on one side of the 
house. Riverbend and family spent two days gathering shattered 
glass and sticking sheets of plastic over the gaping squares that 
were once windows. We sent E. for the window guy but he was 
booked for three days. Our window man has become a virtual 
millionaire with an average of about 20 windows to replace daily. 

The situation is really bad in Baghdad. Many areas have turned into 
mini-warzones. A'miriyah, A'adhamiyah, Ghazaliyah and Haifa to 
name a few. The rest of us just get our usual dose of daily 
explosions and gun fire. 

Elections are a mystery. No one knows if they'll actually take place 
and it feels like many people don't want to have anything to do with 
them. They aren't going to be legitimate any way. The only political 
parties participating in them are the same ones who made up the 
Governing Council several months ago- Allawi's group, Chalabi's 
group, SCIRI, Da'awa and some others. Allawi, in spite of all his 
posturing and posing, has turned himself into a hateful figure after 
what happened in Falloojeh. As long as he is in a position of power, 
America will be occupying Iraq. People realize that now. He's Bush's 
boy. He has proved that time and again and people are tired of 
waiting for something insightful or original to come from his 
government. 

The weather is cool now. You can't leave the house without a jacket. 
Baghdad is popular for a dry, windy cold. The kind that settles in 
late, but once it's here, it seems to creep into everything, including 
one's bones. The kerosene heater has become my cherished friend 
these last couple of weeks. The days are much shorter and it gets a 
bit depressing when the darkness sets in- especially when there's 
no electricity. We aren't using the generator as much as before 
because there's still a fuel shortage. 

There's a collective exhaustion that seems to have settled on 
Baghdad... it feels almost like an epidemic sometimes.

- posted by river @ 10:10 PM riverbend at velocall.com

---

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Action is the antidote to despair.  ----Joan Baez
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