Month: September 2003

Citizen Clark?
Or, Why Electing a Mass Murderer Is a Really Bad Idea. By now it is obvious that a vote for Bush/Cheney will be a vote for Empire. It should be equally obvious that a vote for Clark would have the same effect. The very fact that Clark walks free, that he is proud of what he has done, that he is running for President, is proof of the ethical abyss which seems to have engulfed the world.

Clark’s methods of “waging war” — approved by his superiors at the time, be it noted — hardly differ from those espoused by Osama Bin Laden: cowardly attack civilians with missiles and bombs, hoping their spirit breaks and they capitulate to your demands. Yet this man would be President. [Antiwar.com]

Guerrillas Ambush U.S. Convoy in Iraq [AP World News]

Also mentioned in the article is this incident:

bq. About 20 miles to the east, a nervous American patrol shot at a wedding party in Fallujah late Wednesday, killing a 14-year-old boy and wounding six other people after mistaking celebratory gunfire for an attack, witnesses said.

Mark Baard at Wired –

Radio Tag Debut Set for This Week – RFID is here. Pretty soon,
everything you buy will have a unique serial number with which it can
be tracked. Almost time to accustom yourself to zapping your clothing
in the microwave when you bring it home from the store. On the plus
side, it makes the supply chain much easier to manage. All that’s
really necessary is a policy of disabling the RFID chips as soon as
the product is sold. [smith2004] [End the War on Freedom]

I would never trust a store to disable the Big Brother chip. They’d just turn it off, but leave it functional–and then it could be re-activated at any time.

Right Cause, Wrong Reason. At The Dissdent, Will Wilkinson writes (say that three times fast) about the real reason to oppose the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund:

The next time you get the chance, please protest against the IMF and the World Bank. But do it for the right reason. Do it not because they promote globalization and capitalism, but because they impede it.

Wilkinson notes:

The increases in prosperity in the Third World are largely due to the remarkable growth in the economies of Asia, where markets and global trade have been embraced with varying degrees of enthusiasm. However, in Africa, where markets and global trade have generally been repudiated, the people remain, by and large, in the throes of the most desperate poverty. The Bank and the Fund are trying to impose economic globalization through political globalization, and they are failing — indeed, making things worse.

Read the whole thing here.

[Link via Free-Market.net] [Hit & Run]

Immigrants arrested as part of Homeland Security pilot program. Federal agents have begun arresting illegal immigrants in Connecticut as soon as they are ordered deported, rather than allowing them to remain free while they appeal.

Marcus and others complain that immigrants seeking political asylum or protection from torture will be detained alongside criminal aliens. (link)

The immigrants do not have to have committed any criminal offense to be arrested under this new program. [Al-Muhajabah’s Islamic Blogs]

I believe the point is that “illegally immigrating” is a criminal offense, although the notion of immigration being illegal strikes me as rather un-American.

I suppose our government will expect us to be happy that they are protecting the people of Connecticut from having their hotel rooms cleaned and gardens tended cheaply. I suspect they will be disappointed. Well, at least any terrorists trying to sneak into the country will be grateful that the KGB has found yet another way to make their job easier.

Girl Power and Post-War Iraq [Baghdad Burning]

Riverbend writes about the situation in Iraq for women before and after the US conquest.

Egyptian jihad?. Hossam El Hamalawy is an Egyptian journalist who covers militant Islamic groups for the Cairo Times. On the second anniversary of 9/11, he looks at Gama’a Islamiya (Islamic Group), one of the major terrorist groups in Egypt, in Forgive Me, Government, For I Have Sinned.

Gama’a Islamiya is closely affiliated with the group Al Jihad (also known as Islamic Jihad and Egyptian Jihad), which was responsible for the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat in 1981. Gama’a Islamiya is linked to the original plot to bomb the WTC in 1993 as well as the horrific massacre of 70 tourists at Luxor in 1997.

As Hamalawy reports, Gama’a Islamiya declared a truce with the Egyptian government in 1997 (before the Luxor attacks, in fact) and in the last several years its leadership have publically renounced violence. It was around this same time that Al Jihad seems to have merged with al-Qa’ida. The long-time leader of Al Jihad is Ayman Zawahiri, now better known for being Bin Laden’s “right hand man”.

Some analysts think that Zawahiri is the real brains behind al-Qa’ida while Bin Laden is merely its public face. For instance, Jane’s Intelligence Review wrote “Indeed, the genesis of what the USA thinks it is coming to grips with may well lie more in Egypt than in Saudi Arabia.”. Similarly, the Middle East Institute believes that the May bombings in Riyadh are similar in nature to the 1997 Luxor attacks and that both show Zawahiri’s hand. An organization called DefenseWatch goes even further, arguing that Egyptian Al Jihad has more or less taken over al-Qa’ida.

Gama’a Islamiya and Al Jihad have roots in Egypt going back to the late 1960s and early 1970s and are a radical offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is probably Egypt’s most senior Islamist group, dating all the way back to 1928. Gama’a Islamiya and Al Jihad take much of their ideology from Syed Qutb (see my previous discussion of Qutb’s followers here). The history and development of this movement from the Muslim Brotherhood to Al Jihad is traced in Karen Armstrong’s book, The Battle for God. Whether or not al-Qa’ida is actually a Saudi façade on what is now a primarily Egyptian organization, as the sources cited above claim, the Egyptian components of it are clearly quite important and deserve to be studied in their own right. [Al-Muhajabah’s Islamic Blogs]

Recall rulings in California and Venezuela: Very similar yet so different.

I am sure that some people will try to draw parallels between the three judge panel  canceling the California recall and the decisions taken in Venezuela to block the recall referendum. To me it simply shows that the same biased, partial and corrupt judges and politicians exist all over the world. In fact, the California decision is as absurd as the ones here. Among other reasons:

-If the voting machines are not good enough for the vote on the recall, they should not be good enough to vote on anything, whether candidates or issues until the problems are solved. Thus no election should take place until it is fixed. But this does not make sense either.

-Should Democracy be in suspended animation until the problems are solved? For how long? When is form more important than substance? When should the will of the people be more important?

-The three Judge panel is composed of three Democrats and is supposed to be the most liberal (read pro-Democratic party) in the US. And we thought we had it bad here in Venezuela with the Electoral Board being three to two against us.

-I would like to ask: Are these the same voting machines with  which Davies was chosen as a candidate for the Democrats and was later elected as Governor? Did anybody complain then? Should his elections be erased too in the interest of Justice or Democracy?

-I hate to be innovative or futuristic, but couldn’t they use something like pencil and paper to vote with? Too complicated? People don’t know how to write anymore? People can cheat with paper ballots?

I think in the end the difference is very clear, in every country there are biased, politically corrupt people or individuals with a limited understanding of what democracy truly is. Form can never replace substance and the people’s participation is indeed at the conceptual foundation of Democracy. The difference is that while Democracy has been suspended in Venezuela since January 23d. of this year, I will bet that a quick solution is found to the California problem short term by a system that still functions. People are the same all over, the difference is that in California the system still has checks and balances. Here we don’t, in Venezuela all we have is the citizens fighting for their freedom versus a system that only responds to the whims of one power hungry person. By this time next year, Californians may not even remember this episode, we Venezuelans may not be able vote for years to come……As simple as that. [Miguel Octavio: Venezuela]

I’m not so optimistic about a quick solution being found in California, but he does have a point–it’s not as bad when it’s only a Governor, and not the President.

French block. The Telegraph reports that the French government has told an airline that it is not to ferry British troops to Basra. The ban is seen as reflecting Paris’s opposition to the occupation of Iraq. Corsair, which has been chartered numerous times to transport UK forces around the world, pulled out of a contract to fly reinforcements to Basra at the weekend. Transport ministry officials said yesterday that the move had nothing to do with safety… [Samizdata.net]

Good for the French!

Beer and a Haircut. The aptly named Michael Puffer, an intrepid investigative reporter for the Danvers, Massachusetts, Herald, asks for a cup of beer at a local hair salon, receives the complementary beverage he requested, and returns the favor by ratting out the owner for serving liquor without a license. Then he brags about the feat in print. It makes you proud to be a journalist.

[Thanks to Doug Geiger for the link.] [Hit & Run]

I think the owner of the business has the best quote in the article:

bq. Asked whether he had thought to ensure his staff could practice identification checks to ensure they didn’t serve anybody under age 21, Petipas said he had not.

“I will put in an identification check for snot-nosed reporters looking to make a mark,” Petipas said.