Author: sybil

President George W. Bush claims that God did so.

Having given the order, the president walked alone around the circle behind the White House. Months later, he told Woodward: “As I walked around the circle, I prayed that our troops be safe, be protected by the Almighty. Going into this period, I was praying for strength to do the Lord’s will. I’m surely not going to justify war based upon God. Understand that. Nevertheless, in my case, I pray that I be as good a messenger of his will as possible. And then, of course, I pray for forgiveness.”

more…

Did Mr. Bush ask his father for any advice? “I asked the president about this. And President Bush said, `Well, no,’ and then he got defensive about it,” says Woodward. “Then he said something that really struck me. He said of his father, `He is the wrong father to appeal to for advice. The wrong father to go to, to appeal to in terms of strength.’ And then he said, `There’s a higher Father that I appeal to.'”

Beyond not asking his father about going to war, Woodward was startled to learn that the president did not ask key cabinet members either. CBS News, Woodward Shares War Secrets

“I’m driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, ‘George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan.’ And I did, and then God would tell me, ‘George go and end the tyranny in Iraq,’ and I did.” Independent, 7Oct2005

After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the former official said, he was told that Bush felt that “God put me here” to deal with the war on terror. The President’s belief was fortified by the Republican sweep in the 2002 congressional elections; Bush saw the victory as a purposeful message from God that “he’s the man,” the former official said. Publicly, Bush depicted his reëlection as a referendum on the war; privately, he spoke of it as another manifestation of divine purpose. The New Yorker: Fact

I bolded the *megalomaniacal God statements.

*megalomania
1 : a mania for great or grandiose performance
2 : a delusional mental disorder that is marked by infantile feelings of personal omnipotence and grandeur

[This was originally a long DKos comment searching for backup on the Bush “God told me to go to war” quote.]

as usual.

Bolton has a tin ear when it comes to listening to other countries.(The Nation)

There is a bio on Right Web. I emphasize what will go down in history as Bolton’s most disgusting act:

In July 2002, the Wall Street Journal reported that Bolton’s “most memorable moment came after the U.S. Supreme Court ordered a halt to the recount, when Mr. Bolton strode into a Tallahassee library, where the count was still going on, and declared: `I’m with the Bush-Cheney team, and I’m here to stop the vote’.”

The bio forgot the part about Bolton taking a plane across the Atlantic in order to be on the ground in Florida to make that arrogant announcement.

After thanking Bolton for his services, Vice President-elect Cheney was asked what job Bolton would get in the new administration. “People ask what [job] John should get,” Cheney said, “My answer is, anything he wants.”

Yes Bush/Cheney owed him big-time. His tenure in the UN by Presidential appointment will only be for one year but since he is hyper-active and hell-bent he could achieve a great deal of destruction in that short time. Let’s hope cooler heads prevail and prevent his course.

Seeing him on Nightline, last night, I noticed that he is even uglier in video than in still photos, very fidgety and shifty-eyed. He evaded what I thought were sharp questions from Terry Moran and got in a plug for the invasion of Iran.
[I was unable to find a transcript/video of the interview on ABC’s website or search engine].

March 15, 2006, UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) – The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, on Wednesday compared the threat from Iran’s nuclear programs to the September 11 terror attacks on the United States.

“Just like September 11, only with nuclear weapons this time, that’s the threat. I think that is the threat,” Bolton told ABC News’ Nightline program.

Terry Moran in a comment after the interview was over told us about Bolton’s latest vote against the UN Human Rights Council:

Bolton = 4
Rest of the World = 170

Heck of a job, Johnny!

More on Bolton from The Nation:
The Bolton Archipelago

The three states that the United States led into the “nay” camp were Israel, Palau and the Marshall Islands, which are among the highest per capita recipients of US cash in the world, along with the Federated States of Micronesia, which even Bolton couldn’t bully enough.

Nor could one be sure that Venezuela, Belarus and Iran, the states that abstained, were necessarily part of the Administration’s dream team. [LOL]
[…]
Along with the “Responsibility to Protect” resolution adopted last year, the Human Rights Council is a step forward for the United Nations. But far from being rewarded by Congress, watch out for attacks on the world’s temerity for disagreeing with Ambassador Bolton.

UPDATE:
Warnings from Steve Clemons on Bolton Watch, February 28, 2006.

[From the diaries by susanhu with minor edits.]

Why We Can No Longer Afford George W. Bush
by Lewis H. Lapham

I would like to draw your attention to this essay in March 2006 issue of HARPER’S. Lapham bases much of his material on Congressman John Conyers Jr.’s December 18, 2005 Resolution. This Resolution invited the House of Representatives to investigate the Administration’s intent to go to war before congressional authorization, its manipulation of pre-war intelligence, its encouraging and countenancing torture, and its retaliating against critics. He also makes recommendations regarding grounds for possible impeachment.

Of course, the request attracted little attention in the press, “scattered applause from left-wing blogs, heavy sarcasm on websites flying the flags of the militant right.”

Lapham wonders why Conyers did it. In January, in a telephone conversation, Conyers explains:

Continued below:

“To take away the excuse,” he said “that we didn’t know.” So that two or four or ten years from now, if somebody should ask, “Where were you, Conyers, and where was the United States Congress?” when the Bush Administraion declared the Constitution inoperative and revoked the license of parliamentary government, none of the company now present can plead ignorance or temporary insantiy, can say that “somehow it escaped our notice” that the President was setting himself up as a supreme leader exempt from the rule of law.

There’s a portrait of Bush that is halfway erased.

We have before us in the White House a thief who steals the country’s good name and reputation for his private interest and personal use; a liar who seeks to instill in the American people a state of fear; a televangelist who engages the United States in a never-ending crusade against all the world’s evil, a wastrel who squanders a vast sum of the nation’s wealth on what turns out to be a recruiting drive to multiply the host of our enemies. In a word, a criminal – known to be armed  and shown to be dangerous.

Who could add anything to that. I hope you can read the entire article, in Harper’s -better still Conyer’s Resolution. You see, Democrats are at work.

[note: It seems the Resolution was presented before the information of NSA domestic spying.]

There is a connection in that the jihadis who perpetrated 9/11 could not have expected a better outcome. They knew the US reaction would be a swift and brutal vengeance against a Muslim country. Those who attacked the USA on 9/11 were all “Muslims, of whom 15 belonged to Saudi Arabia, two were from the UAE and one from Egypt” one from Pakistan.

Iraq is the perfect strategic background for Islamic revolutionaries to continue (indefinitely it seems) the global jihad against the infidel Muslims and the infidel Westerners. (This is different from Iraqi nationals who are fighting the Military occupation. who really knows? since the information we are getting is suspect.)  How astute would the jihadis have to be to guess that Bush would attack Iraq? The world knew that the Bush administration had Saddam Hussein in their sights. PNAC
Count how many times the name Saddam Hussein is mentioned and check the signatories of this document.

[more…]
Looking backwards at the history of Islamic extremism to its foundation from WWII until today, we can start with Sayyid Qutb (COO-tub).

Qutb was the most influential advocate in modern times of jihad, or Islamic holy war, and the chief developer of doctrines that legitimise violent Muslim resistance to regimes that claim to be Muslim,[…]

In the context of that global programme, the destruction of the twin towers, spectacular atrocity though it was, is merely a by-blow in al-Qaida’s current campaign. Neither the US nor Israel is Bin Laden’s primary target – rather it is Bin Laden’s homeland, Saudi Arabia. Link

Osama was actually taught by Qutb’s brother Mohammed in Saudi Arabia.

Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Mohammed Atta were all influenced by the lessons in hate taught by Sayyid Qutb. Qutb actually lived in the USA for two years in the mid 1950’s. His “gripes about America require serious attention because they cast light on a question that has been nagging since the fall of the World Trade Center [as well as the attack on the Pentagon and the destruction of AA 93]: Why do they hate us?”

David Von Drehle claims that Qutb “read nearly every American encounter – a clash of New World versus Old.”

Qutb:
“This great America: What is its worth in the scale of human values? He wondered.
“And what does it add to the moral account of humanity?”
His answer: nothing.

See, “The Smithsonian” A LESSON IN HATE by David Von Drehle of the Washington Post.

So the hatred springs from a deeper source than disgust at corrupt Western political involvement in the Middle East. Violence against Muslim countries should outrage all Muslims, but for the jihadis it is opportunity. GWB far from protecting America has played right into their hands.

Partial synopsis of the movie:

From writer/director Stephen Gaghan, winner of the Best Screenplay Academy Award for Traffic, comes Syriana, a political thriller that unfolds against the intrigues and corruption of the global oil industry. From the players brokering back-room deals in Washington to the men toiling in the oil fields of the Persian Gulf, the film’s multiple storylines weave together to illuminate the human consequences of the fierce pursuit of wealth and power.

At the other end of the wage scale in Nasir’s country are the migrant laborers toiling in its energy fields, […]

The movie demonstrates how unfairly these laborers are treated, summarily dismissed from their jobs after a comppany merger. They live in squalid conditions near the oil fields, spending years away from their homes and families.

And when they do go home for vacation they likely board old ‘roll-on, roll-off’ ferry boats, a high percentage of which are involved in disasters.

Egyptian Ferry Sinks in Red Sea; 1,000 May Be Lost

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates, Saturday, Feb. 4 — A ferry carrying more than 1,400 passengers and crew, most of them Egyptian laborers returning from Saudi Arabia, sank Friday about 40 miles off the coast of Egypt, and by late evening, only 324 people had been rescued. […]

Ferry disaster.

Some shouted to waiting journalists, angry that their rescue had taken so long.

“They left us in the water for 24 hours. A helicopter came above us and circled, we would signal and they ignored us,” one man shouted. “Our lives are the cheapest in the world,” another said. Lines of police kept journalists away from the survivors to prevent them asking questions.

[Promoted by susanhu — As rough as we’ve got it in our own country’s political struggle, seemingly crawling up Denali without support equipment or oxygen, there is a country so near us whose people are falling into a horrible abyss.
Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! never forgets Haiti’s horrific conditions, and it was good to finally see the NYT do a major story on the crisis in this country that no one in D.C. — except a few like Rep. Maxine Waters, who Amy interviews regularly on Haiti — pays any attention to. Here are the search results for Amy’s shows about Haiti, including her interview yesterday for the hour of Harry Belafonte, in which he said the U.S. has undermined “a legitimate democracy.” We worry about the fate of many countries, but Haiti is rarely on our radar. Sybil has written an excellent diary on Haiti. Per usual, the Canadians — ironically, further away geographically and and not as implicated politically — are much more aware than we:]

The Bush/Cheney administration is causing untold harm in the world “spreading democracy” while keeping its people so busy with a multitude of domestic scandals, heads are spinning. Here’s a summary from an excellent CBC documentary (that US audiences are unlikely to see) on how the US changed regimes in Haiti. It’s eerily similar to US regime change in Iraq where the leadership of a small country is destroyed with no plan in place for the resulting chaos and human suffering.

Bush/Cheney did not like this man:

Jean-Bertrand Aristide

Why?

President Aristide promised not only to give voice to the poor in the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, but also to raise the minimum wage and force businesses to pay taxes. NYT

Why Haiti is in the news recently.
From the CBC Documentary, Haiti: Democracy Undone:

After four postponements, voters in Haiti are once again scheduled to go to the polls. The February 7 vote follows a coup almost two years ago.

In early 2004, when the government of Haiti faced a serious threat from armed rebels who had crossed the border from the Dominican Republic, the US government made it clear they supported the elected president of Haiti, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. “The policy of this Administration is not regime change,” Colin Powell, then US Secretary of State, said in testimony before a Congressional committee. A fews weeks later Aristide was overthrown.

Haiti: Democracy Undone presents new evidence that in fact the US played a role in the coup that overthrew Aristide; that it had one foreign policy on Haiti but secretly carried out a very different policy.

From the New York Times, January 29, 2006.

Mixed U.S. messages helped send Haiti over the edge

[…] Curran accused the democracy-building group, the International Republican Institute, of trying to undermine the reconciliation process after disputed 2000 Senate elections threw Haiti into a violent political crisis. The group’s leader in Haiti, Stanley Lucas, an avowed Aristide opponent from the Haitian elite, counseled the opposition to stand firm, and not work with Aristide, as a way to cripple his government and drive him from power, said Curran, whose account is supported in crucial parts by other diplomats and opposition figures. Many of these people spoke publicly about the events for the first time.

[Former Ambassador Brian Dean] Curran, a 30-year Foreign Service veteran and a Clinton appointee retained by President Bush, also accused Lucas of telling the opposition that he, not the ambassador, represented the Bush administration’s true intentions.

In the documentary, Curran explains his farewell statement to the Haitians where he blamed the chaos in Haiti on a “Chimere from Washington.” A chimere “is a shadow — illusive, impossible to pin down” who comes in the night and commits crimes and atrocities against the people. It is quite a condemnation, especially from a diplomat. The Ambassador asked Washington for tighter controls on the IRI because it was working against him.

The International Republican Institute is one of several prominent nonprofit groups that receive federal funds to help countries develop the mechanisms of democracy, like campaigning and election monitoring. Of all the groups, though, the I.R.I. is closest to the administration. President Bush picked its president, Lorne W. Craner, to run his administration’s democracy-building efforts. The institute, which works in more than 60 countries, has seen its federal financing nearly triple in three years, from $26 million in 2003 to $75 million in 2005. Last spring, at an I.R.I. fund-raiser, Bush called democracy-building “a growth industry.”

These groups walk a fine line. Under federal guidelines, they are supposed to nurture democracy in a nonpartisan way, lest they be accused of meddling in the affairs of sovereign nations. But in Haiti, according to diplomats, Lucas actively worked against President Aristide.

Several months later, the rebels marched on Port-au-Prince and Aristide left Haiti on a plane provided by the American government. Since then, Haiti has become even more chaotic, said Marc L. Bazin, an elder statesman of Haitian politics.
[…]
As the rebels took more towns and cities in February 2004, Aristide turned to the international community for help. The US sent in the Marines — to protect the US embassy. By the end of the month Aristide had fled Haiti on an airplane chartered by the US government. An interim government backed by Canada, the US and France took over in Haiti. In the months since, life has been marked by widespread violence, chaos and economic collapse.

Bush/Cheney like this man:

Louis Jodel Chamblain, [former death squad leader]

For your entertainment, IRI has posted a response to the New York Times article on their website in a PDF file.

[From the diaries by susanhu. Fascinating, sybil!]

From Raw Story

Judith Miller wanted to write an OpEd defending herself against charges of “entanglement” with sources among other things but the NY Times refused.

Instead she was allowed to write a letter to the editor, a long letter to the editor. She scooped her own letter to the editor in the New York Times using her own website.

She also had an interview with RAW STORY and with the Washington Post, below…

The Reporter’s Last Take
[choice bits]
[…]a parade of Judys appears. Outraged Judy. Saddened Judy. Charming Judy. Wise Judy. Conspiratorial Judy. Judy, the star New York Times reporter turned beleaguered victim of the gossipmongers and some journalists who have made her “sick to death of the regurgitation of lies and easily checkable falsehoods.” That’s why she’s agreed to talk.
[…]
It goes on like this for three hours. She answers questions — or refuses. She turns the tables, asking about her interviewer’s life. She takes calls. She grabs the tape recorder. She waxes eloquent, even in anger. At times, tears well up. There’s something frantic about her — not vulnerable, mind you, for that’s the last thing she is.
[…]
She was demanding that a story about Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis be pulled from the paper.

The story was too soft, she complained — and said Lee Atwater, the political strategist for Vice President George H.W. Bush, believed it was soft as well. Clymer said he was stunned to realize that Atwater apparently had either seen the story or been told about it before publication. He and Miller argued, he recalls, and he ultimately hung up on her, twice.
[…]
“But I will make no apologies for my continuous commitment, my desire to pursue stories about threats to our country,” she says emphatically, almost frantically, her crusading eyes brimming with tears. [end, sob, sob]

As for her promotion of the invasion of Iraq, she is using the White House talking point of “faulty intelligence.”

Even before I went to jail, I had become a lightning rod for public fury over the intelligence failures that helped lead our country to war. Several articles I wrote or co-wrote were based on this faulty intelligence. [from her NYTimes Letter to the Editor and the world]

Come on Judy, people are getting killed in a war that you encouraged. Have you got any solutions for “the Iraq problem?” Don’t go away mad, don’t go away protecting your self, make some atonement by working to end the slaughter over there that you helped to start based on your reporting. Yeah, yeah, we know, it wasn’t your fault, it was “faulty intelligence.”

[From the diaries by susanhu w edits.] The Interdictor (home page) blogger is a former soldier who he says he put himself in military mode to secure the building where he is holed up with his girlfriend, Crystal. The blog begins Sunday, 28 August and continues today.

He keeps his generator going with fuel in the basement. Each morning he does a recon of the building. Included in the blog are a live feed and many photos taken from his apartment window. It’s very real. FROM TODAY’s ENTRY:

5:52a    
Good morning, world.
Team Alpha is back online. Glad to see Outpost Crystal is still connected to world.
(196 Comments | Comment on this)
6:36a    
Cannot Confirm
One of the first things I do in the morning after my intitial security sweep of the building is check my messenger programs, email, and the comments section of this blog for the latest situation reports.

I cannot confirm the Superdome “chemical plant” explosion you guys are reporting. When Bravo Team becomes functional this morning, we’re going to do a Medium Range Recon Patrol around our section of the CBD. We need to access the area for potential human threats, situational threats (burning buildings, etc.), flooding, potential evac routes, military and civilian authority presence, etc.

We bring the camera with us everywhere we go, whether it’s to empty fuel into the tank or perform personal hygiene.

Everyone has secondary responsibilities. Crystal, for instance, has the secondary responsibility of organizing physical assets. Sigmund’s secondary responsibility is photography. Donny’s secondary responsibility is inter-team communication. My secondary responsibility is first aid. And so on.

MORE BELOW:

MORE of today’s entry:

Just because we’re doing a security sweep, for instance, doesn’t mean we can’t also be doing something else.

Sig’s got a ton more pictures to post today.

This just in: Team Bravo reports no fire visibility from the Dome, but there is smoke — and where there’s smoke…

We’re headed to the roof to investigate.

BRB
(645 Comments | Comment on this)
10:01a    
The City is ON FIRE
Teams Alpha and Bravo finished the medium range recon and there are 3 separate locations on fire. We have pictures coming shortly.

During the recon, I spoke to some Federal Marshalls and NOPD. Morale is LOW. Very low. They’re not seeing the military presence they say they were promised. I told those guys they can’t possibly imagine how much we (the world) appreciate their dedication. I asked what civil rights the citizens have and the US Marshalls looked at me like I just fell off the turnip truck and chuckled. I asked if citizens can have guns for protection and he said if someone thinks he needs a gun, he should have already evacuated. He also said they are setting the city on fire.

The NOPD wants to know where “the two active duty brigades” were that he says they were told were supposed to arrive today. When I asked him what he would want to tell the world, he said Everyone keeps talking about the military presence in the city, and then asked me,” Do you see any military around here” in dusgust.

We reconned our roof also, to get a better view of the city and took… I hesitate to call them “amazing” pictures. My city… it has been punched in the face and is on the canvas being counted out.

And yes, that’s smoke you see out of the windows. The city is under a haze from the fires. Smoke and ash are floating miles away from the fires.
(552 Comments | Comment on this)
10:41a    
Cam Feed
Reset the feed. Here are the addresses:

http://old.mises.org:88/NO
http://old.mises.org:88/NO2
http://194.97.144.25/NewOrleans

The first two are being hosted by the great people at The Ludwig Von Mises Institute.

The third one is being hosted by the generous people at space.net
(145 Comments | Comment on this)
11:10a    
Wow
If you’re watching the feed, it’s incredible. Hard to believe the fire department is still viable. God bless them. I’m no expert on conflagrations, but I don’t think they’re gonna win this one. Hopefully they can contain it.

It takes a spectacular kind of asshole to set a fire in this environment.

A lot of people are asking about our fuel situation. We have some, but we need more. We have a few days worth. We desperately need more. We’re coordinating now.

By the way, here comes some military on cam.

I tweaked the feed to try to help the people restreaming it.

The building you’re watching appeared to be some small hotel right behind Mother’s.
(234 Comments | Comment on this)
11:45a    
Cam Feed Mirrors
We are getting thousands of request to mirror the feed. Right now mises alone has 4000 or so viewers. My IMs are blown up out of control, no way I can filter them at this point. I sincerely apologize. If you want to mirror the feed, please go to the IRC chat on irc.freenode.net in #interdictor and announce your intentions to the admins and they will get you set up. Huge thanks to all of you stepping up to help bring my city’s deterioration to the world.

I think it finally hit me when I was on our roof 27 floors up looking down at my city. This place will never be the same — and I don’t mean in that “can’t step into the same river twice” philosophical sense. I mean in the “We won’t even recognize the place” sense.

This place is completely coming apart. The hopelessness on the street breaks the heart. The old, the tired, the sick seem resigned to their presumed fate. Death.

I’m pretty much running out of words for my commentary. I’ll try to stick to just the facts.

Thanks so much for the moral support, guys. I only wish we could pass it on to the people who need it more than we do.
(138 Comments | Comment on this)
12:00p    
Here Come the Troops
Just saw 2 CH-53E Super Stallion Helicopters pass by overhead, and now on cam you can see what looks like a whole batallion of troops roll toward the Convention Center.
(231 Comments | Comment on this)
12:19p    
Finally!
This convoy coming down the street is loaded with supplies. I see MREs and water and I assume ice.

Ok, so the troops used to restore order went in first and now the supplies are coming for orderly distribution (I hope).

Hope is on the way for the people at the Convention Center. Finally.

Check the cam
[more…]

READ MORE and VIEW THE PHOTOS at The Interdictor

City of Nature – New Orleans’ blessing; New Orleans’ curse.

By Ari Kelman
Posted Wednesday, Aug. 31, 2005, at 3:59 PM PT

[I found this article through Talking Points Memo. Ari Kelman, a friend and colleague of Josh Marshall wrote a book about New Orleans. His article is concise and so relevant right now.]

http://www.slate.com/id/2125346/nav/tap2/

[For those tired of reading, there is a link to an audio version in an MP3 download on Slate.com.]

New Orleans’ dysfunctional relationship with its environment may make it the nation’s most improbable metropolis. It is flood prone. It is cursed with a fertile disease environment. It is located along a well-worn pathway that tropical storms travel from the Atlantic to the nation’s interior. From this perspective, New Orleans has earned all the scorn being heaped upon it–the city is a misguided urban project, a fool’s errand, a disaster waiting to happen.

more

But such insults miss why most American cities are built in the first place: to do business. In 1718, when the French first settled New Orleans, the city’s earliest European inhabitants saw riches inscribed by the hand of God into the landscape of the vast Mississippi valley. The Mississippi river system takes the shape of a huge funnel, covering nearly two-thirds of the United States from the Alleghenies to the Rockies. The funnel’s spout lies at the river’s outlet at the Gulf of Mexico, less than 100 miles downstream from New Orleans. In an era before railways, good highways, and long before air travel, much of the interior of the nation’s commerce flowed along the Mississippi, fronting New Orleans. The river system’s inexorable downstream current swept cotton, grain, sugar, and an array of other commodities to New Orleans’ door. Because of the region’s geography and topography, many 19th-century observers believed that God–working through nature, His favorite medium–would see to it that anyone shrewd enough to build and live in New Orleans would be made rich.

So, people built. Some lived. A lucky few even got rich. Many others, usually poor residents, died. They were carried away in floods. They were battered by catastrophic storms. They were snuffed out by yellow fever epidemics, like the great scourge of 1853 that killed nearly 10,000 people in the city. Over time, New Orleans developed a divided relationship with the environment: Nature, as embodied by the Mississippi, promised a bright future. But it also brought water, wind, and pathogens, elements of a fickle environment that in the past as now turned cruelly chaotic.

Ari Kelman ends with:
Most of the city’s residents will be saved, but its site cannot be airlifted to Texas. That was yesterday, each day that goes by the number of ‘saved’ is decimated.

His book is A River and Its City: The Nature of Landscape in New Orleans
Since I have not read the book and can’t recommend it, here is an Amazon review of the book:

Interesting But Uneven, August 4, 2003
Reviewer: A reader
This is a book by an academic for academics. That being said, this topic ached to be addressed. Kelman has done his homework concerning the first two centuries of New Orleans’ relationship with the Mississippi. The third (1918-present) seems to stop with the defeat of the notorious riverfront expressway. The river is likely (according to some scientists) to shift away from New Orleans, leaving the riverfront a muddy trickle. Kelman is silent on this. The degree of pollution and the efforts to clean up the lower part of the river go unsung as well. The last parts of the book have a rushed feeling, as if the expansive early history sapped the author’s resources and there was little left worth saying. Lively it’s not, but the book is important and a good reference work for further research.

Another media person, Reuters TV soundman Waleed Khaled was killed in Iraq. I heard it described on Air America this morning. The man was wearing a press pass and two of the five sniper’s bullets hit him right through his pass, killing him.

“His U.S. military and Reuters press cards, clipped to his shirt, were caked in blood. In one, there were two bullet holes,” it said.

Outrage over fatal shooting of Reuters TV soundman by US sniper fire
[…]the Reuters TV crew had gone to cover an incident in [which] two Iraqi policemen were killed in the Hay al-Adil district of Baghdad. As they arrived, Khaled was hit by a shot in the face and four other shots in the chest, while Kadhem was slightly hurt.

“I heard shooting, looked up and saw an American sniper on the roof of the shopping centre,” Kadhem told other journalists who arrived seconds later. He was subsequently arrested by US soldiers. Reuters said he had still not been released six hours later. Other Iraqi journalists who arrived at the scene were also briefly detained, but were then released. […]

The military explanation was :
“Task Force Baghdad units responded to a terrorist attack on an Iraqi police convoy [. . .] one civilian was killed and another was wounded by small-arms fire during the attack.”

“Small arms fire” is military speak for sniper fire by sharp shooters, apparently.

The US ambassador to Iraq at a news conference on the Iraq Constitution said it was unfortunate but he did not apologize.
more below…
Insisting on more than a dismissive ‘unfortunate’ from the US, the incident has been taken to the United Nations by a world media body:

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) called on the United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan Monday to establish an independent inquiry into the killings of media staff at the hands of US and coalition occupation forces in Iraq. […]
[Using very strong language against the United States military in Iraq, they demand a response.] “The time has come for the UN itself to step in and demand that there is justice and respect for basic humanitarian rights.” The IFJ accuses the US army of incompetence, reckless soldiering, and cynical disregard for the lives of journalists – particularly Iraqi – who are covering events in Iraq. […]  The Brussels-based IFJ represents over 500,000 journalists in more than 110 countries.

Of course we know that US Ambassador to the UN, John Bolton will give this case his undivided attention and committment. <sarcasm>

Since the shooting, the cameraman, Abrahem Al-Mashadani has been imprisoned. Reporters Without Borders has written a letter to the US military commander CENTCOM, Gen. John Abizaid, demanding his release. No comment, no reason for his arrest has been given by the military.

Uncle of slain soundman Waleed Khaled mourns for his nephew.

Two of Waleed’s colleagues who arrived at the scene minutes after he was killed, were briefly detained and released, Reuters said.

“They treated us like dogs. They made us … including Haider who was wounded and asking for water, sit in the sun on the road,” one said.
They said that Khaled was still alive when they reached him, and that US troops refused to give him water despite the blazing sun. (aljazeera.com)

66 journalists and media personnel have been killed in Iraq since the invasion. Two are still missing.

______

Too early to be an update, I have just read this moving article entitled “An Appointment in Samarra.” (John O’Hara wrote a book called “Appointment in Samarra” a title which evoked a beautiful exotic city in those days.)

Reuters correspondent Luke Baker covered the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 as an embedded journalist and has reported on the country from our Baghdad bureau for the last two years. The following is his personal account of how the atmosphere of death and destruction has become ever more insistent as acquaintances and friends are struck down. It has been updated following the killing on Sunday of Reuters soundman. Waleed Khaled.

An Appointment in Samarra by Luke Baker

BAGHDAD, Aug 29 (Reuters) – Death creeps up on you in Iraq. The longer you remain amid the country’s violence, the more insistent, the more bullying it becomes.

Over time, more people you know die, or are maimed, or have scrapes with death that leave them psychologically scarred.

All along there have been stories about it — those killed by aerial bombardments, children blown apart by suicide bombs, families caught in crossfire, slain at the hands of insurgents or murdered by criminals.

In March last year, I stood in the street in Kerbala as suicide bombers exploded among crowds of Shi’ite Muslim pilgrims, killing more than 100 people, including dozens standing around me — strangers who became new victims of Iraq’s conflict.

But in recent months, the deaths have grown more personalised — it’s not just random people who die anymore, but people you’ve met, people you’ve interviewed, some you know quite well, colleagues you work with every day, friends even.

Almost every week, someone on the staff at Reuters, just one of a dozen or so news organisations still operating in the country, has a new tale to tell of a relative — a brother, a mother, a cousin, or a son — killed in terrible circumstances.

On Sunday, howls of grief echoed through the office for Waleed, the burly television soundman and driver, a jovial and busy presence these past two years. He was shot dead as he drove to a story — by U.S. troops, it seemed. We’re a close team and it hurt; his brother, our receptionist, was inconsolable.

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