Something about moral clarity

Why not start with some very interesting comments between Bush, Sharon and Abbas at the mideast summit, as reported in Haaretz?

Selected minutes acquired by Haaretz from one of last week's cease-fire negotiations between Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas and faction leaders from the Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Popular and Democratic Fronts, reveal some of the factors at play behind the scenes in the effort to achieve a hudna [truce]....

[Abbas] emphasized that at that stage he made clear to the participants at the Sharm summit that "we need time and capabilities to stand on our feet. And I explained that I had already spoken with Ariel Sharon about reaching a hudna between all the Palestinian factions." According to Abbas, "Bush exploded with anger and said `there can be no deals with terror groups.' We told him that they are part of our people and we cannot deal with them in any other way. We cannot begin with repression, under no circumstances, and I made clear to Bush that Sharon already agreed with that."...

[Abbas' peace speech]: "We did not speak of our rights but only of our commitments. Bush was impressed by that and mentioned the prisoners and settlements in his speech." On the matter of the right of return, Abbas said "that right appears in all the previous initiatives, and is not under discussion now. Bush asked, if that's the case, why mention the settlements now, and I told him the settlements are happening now. The Israelis use the excuse of natural growth and I told them that according to U.S. statistics, 33 percent of settlements are empty.

Abbas said that at Aqaba, Bush promised to speak with Sharon about the siege on Arafat. He said nobody can speak to or pressure Sharon except the Americans.

According to Abbas, immediately thereafter Bush said: "God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East. If you help me I will act, and if not, the elections will come and I will have to focus on them."

Substantiated? "God told me to strike at al Qaida"? Damn. I hope someone follows up on this. Here's a Canadian piece about why Blair is catching so much more flak than Bush. It all has to do with the structure of our governments.

It is here that one can see the greatest flaw in the American political system. Being president, for the most part, means never having to say you're sorry. That's because the U.S. president is almost completely insulated from his peers, the representatives of the people. Every week, the prime minister has to go down to the House of Commons and look the opposition directly in the eye. He must explain his conduct and his decisions to his peers, to men and women who are formally his equals.

The American president, on the other hand, is constantly surrounded by his inferiors. The only people to whom he is forced to explain himself, on a day-to-day basis, are journalists. Even then, he is able to do so at a time and a place of his own choosing. He can cut short any line of inquiry that displeases him. And if things get rough, he can simply choose, as Ronald Reagan did, not to hold press conferences for years at a time. He is then, in practice, accountable to no one.

Stay up on your war casualties. Since the illustrious Bush landed on the aircraft carrier it's been an average of 1.24 deaths a day.

A couple interesting piecess from the UK's Independent about the worthless American press (by the BBC's Washington correspondent Justin Webb) and torture in the war on terror:

Privately, the Americans admit that torture, or something very like it, is going on at Bagram air base in Afghanistan, where they are holding an unknown number of suspected terrorists.

Al-Qa'ida and Taliban prisoners inside this secret CIA interrogation centre - in a cluster of metal shipping-containers protected by a triple layer of concertinaed wire - are subjected to a variety of practices. They are kept standing or kneeling for hours, in black hoods or spray-painted goggles. They are bound in awkward, painful positions. They are deprived of sleep with a 24-hour bombardment of lights. They are sometimes beaten on capture, and painkillers are withheld.

The interrogators call these "stress and duress" techniques, which one former US intelligence officer has dubbed "torture-lite". Sometimes there is nothing "lite" about the end results. The US military has announced that a criminal investigation has begun into the case of two prisoners who died after beatings at Bagram. More covertly, other terrorist suspects have been "rendered" into the hands of various foreign intelligence services known to have less fastidious records on the use of torture.

Delicious moral clarity and takin out evildoers. Torture ain't evil if it happens to suspected terrorists, right? The Iraqi power network is a disaster. "Repair crews have reported 2000 incidents of damage to the power grid in six weeks. Some were strategic attacks." And all the water pumps are electrical. This does not make a happy occupied nation. The BBC is reporting that former US ambassador Timothy Carney "has told the BBC it is clear the White House did not think through its post-war plans and that there was a lack of resources and priority given to reconstruction efforts." Most of this news today comes off a news thread at DailyKos. Big ups to them, because they are switching to Scoop, which is what this site runs.

Super-duper leftie historian Howard Zinn comments that we are still looking at something with The Specter of Vietnam:

The elder President Bush in 1991, after the first war against Iraq, announced proudly: "The specter of Vietnam has been buried forever in the desert sands of the Arabian peninsula."

But is the "Vietnam syndrome" really gone from the national consciousness? Is there not a fundamental similarity -- that in both instances we see the most powerful country in the world sending its armies, ships and planes halfway around the world to invade and bomb a small country for reasons which become harder and harder to justify?

...What was not talked about publicly at the time of the Vietnam War was something said secretly in intra-governmental memoranda -- that the interest of the United States in Southeast Asia was not the establishment of democracy, but the protection of access to the oil, tin and rubber of that region. In the Iraqi case, the obvious crucial role of oil in U.S. policy has been whisked out of sight, lest it reveal less than noble motives in the drive to war.

In the Vietnam case, the truth gradually came through to the American public, and the government was forced to bring the war to a halt. Today, the question remains whether the American people will at some point see behind the deceptions, and join in a great citizens movement to stop what seems to be a relentless drive to war and empire, at the expense of human rights here and abroad.

There's not much more frightening than the story of the six dead British MPs.

After a seemingly prosaic dispute between the paratroops and townspeople escalated into an intense firefight, witnesses said, scores of Iraqis armed with assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers laid an Alamo-like siege to a police station where British military police were training local patrolmen. At least four soldiers were killed at close range when their ammunition ran out. "Almost the whole city was outside," said Ahmed Hassan, a police trainee who was inside the station but escaped through a side window. "It was not a small attack. It was like a war."

...The siege at the police station in this small southeastern town did not appear to have been connected to the former president's supporters. Instead, residents and officials said, it was motivated by a growing anger at the foreign occupation of Iraq.... In Majar al-Kabir and nearby towns, where local Shiite Muslim militias chased out Hussein's Baath Party government before invading troops arrived, British soldiers had adopted a low profile, refraining from shows of force and making relatively few trips into populated areas. But orders to confiscate banned weapons, such as rocket-propelled grenades, led them to intensify searches of private homes, which many residents contend have been conducted in ways that violate conservative local customs. The Iraqis' rage has been compounded by what they regard as insufficient progress by the United States and Britain in addressing the economic disruption and lack of basic services that followed the war.

The confrontation became so intense, witnesses said, that the paratroops retreated down the main street under a hail of gunfire, returning fire as they moved. Although reinforcements arrived and the paratroops were extracted, a dual-rotor Chinook helicopter was hit with a rocket-propelled grenade as an armed throng converged upon the British evacuation point from several directions, the witnesses said.

"The people were shooting at them from everywhere," said Ahmed Fartosi, 37, an administrator at a humanitarian aid center who observed the battle. "The street was like hell. There were bullets everywhere. It was just like a war."

Either during that clash or shortly after, residents said dozens of people armed with AK-47 assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers besieged the town's police station, about a quarter-mile from the market, where six members of the British Royal Military Police were inside training members of the town's new police force. The attackers shouted for the British police to drop their weapons and leave the building, which they refused to do, Hassan said. When the attackers began firing at the concrete-and-brick building, he said, the British fired back through windows and from the roof. [Hassan] and others who witnessed the gun battle said it lasted for about two hours, until the British soldiers ran out of ammunition. At that point, Hassan and others said, the mob rushed into the compound and killed the soldiers.

That about rounds it out for Thursday. This Iraq thing, not really working right.