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Hudson lands giant GM facility

Well among all the economic ups and downs there is finally some good news for Hudson, Wisconsin. General Motors has decided to build a 400,000 sq. ft. auto parts distribution facility in the business park near Highway 35. This is the biggest building yet in the business park, and it will bring in about 140 jobs. It signifies that Hudson is a good place to look at for companies coming to the Twin Cities but seeking, of course, incentives and lower taxes. Yum! (St. Croix County is Wisconsin's fastest growing and more than half the residents commute.)

The case finally cracks: 'Dark actors playing games'

It has been awhile since my last posting. It's been a very interesting couple weeks. For one, I finally got a job! Today I start at Computer Zone Consulting, a tech startup in Minneapolis. My job is marketing computer systems to small businesses. It should be interesting!

Also lately I felt the need to back off following the news for a few days and launch into SimCity 4 (Mac) (PC), which is just so excellent. You can run multiple cities at once, which allows commuters, suburbs and regional economies. Also you can follow Sims around as they live in the city. The graphics are great, the music is OK and the addictive potential is high.

Also as you can see I signed one of those associate things with Amazon so I get a kickback if you buy something I link to. Will it net me a single cent? I don't know, but maybe someday...

Meanwhile in the real world it's as if everyone has suddenly woken from some terrible dream and now there's falsified evidence in a State of the Union speech, British arms experts are killing themselves and further questions are emerging on the corruption of intelligence and developments inside the Pentagon. You need to read "The Spies who pushed for war" from the July 17 Guardian:

According to former Bush officials, all defence and intelligence sources, senior administration figures created a shadow agency of Pentagon analysts staffed mainly by ideological amateurs to compete with the CIA and its military counterpart, the Defence Intelligence Agency.

The agency, called the Office of Special Plans (OSP), was set up by the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, to second-guess CIA information and operated under the patronage of hardline conservatives in the top rungs of the administration, the Pentagon and at the White House, including Vice-President Dick Cheney.

The ideologically driven network functioned like a shadow government, much of it off the official payroll and beyond congressional oversight. But it proved powerful enough to prevail in a struggle with the State Department and the CIA by establishing a justification for war....

The OSP was an open and largely unfiltered conduit to the White House not only for the Iraqi opposition. It also forged close ties to a parallel, ad hoc intelligence operation inside Ariel Sharon's office in Israel specifically to bypass Mossad and provide the Bush administration with more alarmist reports on Saddam's Iraq than Mossad was prepared to authorise.

"None of the Israelis who came were cleared into the Pentagon through normal channels," said one source familiar with the visits. Instead, they were waved in on Mr Feith's authority without having to fill in the usual forms.

The exchange of information continued a long-standing relationship Mr Feith and other Washington neo-conservatives had with Israel's Likud party.

In 1996, he and Richard Perle - now an influential Pentagon figure - served as advisers to the then Likud leader, Binyamin Netanyahu. In a policy paper they wrote, entitled A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, the two advisers said that Saddam would have to be destroyed, and Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Iran would have to be overthrown or destabilised, for Israel to be truly safe.

The Israeli influence was revealed most clearly by a story floated by unnamed senior US officials in the American press, suggesting the reason that no banned weapons had been found in Iraq was that they had been smuggled into Syria. Intelligence sources say that the story came from the office of the Israeli prime minister.

The OSP absorbed this heady brew of raw intelligence, rumour and plain disinformation and made it a "product", a prodigious stream of reports with a guaranteed readership in the White House. The primary customers were Mr Cheney, Mr Libby and their closest ideological ally on the national security council, Stephen Hadley, Condoleezza Rice's deputy.

Hello? What? Moral clarity a-knocking... The dead weapons expert sent out an email about 'Dark actors playing games' with respect to intelligence data. If you're looking for more on this with links to respectable news sources, I suggest checking out 'Coalition of Deceit' by Justin Raimondo. So was this whole Iraq game run by Douglas Feith, Ariel Sharon's office and Richard Perle? Is that closer to reality than anything we've yet had seared into our consciousness?

A pattern of chaos

The situation in mid-summer Iraq continues to take a great toll on Iraqis and American soldiers. American patrols seem to be attacked dozens of times a day, and hundreds of American soldiers have been wounded since "combat ended." Iraq's infrastructure hasn't been coming together very well. And now we have this story in TIME that US forces trashed the Baghdad International Airport:

In the case of the international airport outside Baghdad, the theft and vandalism were conducted largely by victorious American troops, according to U.S. officials, Iraqi Airways staff members and other airport workers. The troops, they say, stole duty-free items, needlessly shot up the airport and trashed five serviceable Boeing airplanes. "I don't want to detract from all the great work that's going into getting the airport running again," says Lieut. John Welsh, the Army civil-affairs officer charged with bringing the airport back into operation. "But you've got to ask, If this could have been avoided, did we shoot ourselves in the foot here?"

An American diplomat who was sent to Nigeria refutes the idea that Nigeria sold yellow-cake uranium to Iraq, and was shocked to find that BushCo held up this supposed incident as real evidence.

Based on my experience with the administration in the months leading up to the war, I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.

...If my information was deemed inaccurate, I understand (though I would be very interested to know why). If, however, the information was ignored because it did not fit certain preconceptions about Iraq, then a legitimate argument can be made that we went to war under false pretenses.

...Were these dangers the same ones the administration told us about? We have to find out. America's foreign policy depends on the sanctity of its information. For this reason, questioning the selective use of intelligence to justify the war in Iraq is neither idle sniping nor "revisionist history," as Mr. Bush has suggested. The act of war is the last option of a democracy, taken when there is a grave threat to our national security. More than 200 American soldiers have lost their lives in Iraq already. We have a duty to ensure that their sacrifice came for the right reasons.

You have to like This Modern World, the classic alternative pop-art style comic. Today it's asking, "What if [Bush] deliberately deceived Americans because he knew they'd never support sending their sons and daughters to die in pursuit of some neo-con wet dream of global hegemony? Would that truly be considered a lie?" Not to put too fine a point on it. :)

BBC reports that American soldiers perhaps don't recall how the tactics of our own revolution unfolded.

The recent spate of attacks on American troops in Iraq has had a profound effect on the morale of the US troops stationed here. Even though they are an army of occupation, many soldiers I have spoken to are surprised at the upsurge in violence against them. They were told that the people of this country would greet them as liberators.

"We're here to help them!" said a soldier on duty at a checkpoint near my hotel. "I don't want say anything bad about these people, but the way they're attacking us is just so...sneaky," he says. "Shooting at us from rooftops as we drive by ... and I wish they'd just like, stand up and fight us."

Feeling victimized lately? A fascinating piece "Bush Dominates a Nation of Victims" details how President Bush uses negative language, generalizations and personalizations to dominate the psyche of the American public. (Schwartz on the link :)

An article on OpenDemocracy.net details the dimensions of Iraqi resistance, and how perhaps "Saddam loyalist remnants" is too easy a label to apply.

Are these not just irrelevant if troublesome "remnants" as we are repeatedly told? The answer is probably no, and the reason relates to the closing stages of the original three-week war. For whatever reason, whether by the Americans "buying of" the leadership, or by design, the elite Special Republican Guard and the tens of thousands of people attached to the various security and intelligence organisations all failed to offer serious resistance to the US entry into Baghdad, Fallujah and Tikrit.

Almost all of these forces, numbering at least 40,000, melted away with their arms and ammunition largely preserved. Furthermore, in the aftermath of the original war, there was widespread looting of ordinary army munitions stores and the disbanding of that army of nearly 400,000 troops, most of them released to join the ranks of the unemployed.

Looked at this way, a picture emerges of "remnants" that could number in the many thousands, mostly trained in irregular warfare, well-armed and supported by a public mood that, in many parts of Iraq, has become increasingly anti-American.

An Arab attorney argues that the American effort to pump oil in Iraq is illegal under international law.

With this whole disgusting mess unfolding, can you say there was some merit, any merit, to the original anti-war position? That it could have been more than just liberal reactionism?

Road map unfolds unevenly

There are two big issues on the table right now between Israel and the Palestinians. Firstly, Israel has agreed to release some Palestinian prisoners, many of whom have been detained without trial indefinitely, received 'moderate physical pressure' from Israeli security, and generally locked up, as a way to remove agitators and other 'hazardous' people, along with armed fighters, from Palestinian society. The question is how many will be released, and Israel doesn't want to let those go who have harmed Israelis, including soldiers. The Palestinian militant groups are demanding a pretty broad collection of people be released, and it seems unlikely that Sharon will let many of those go. The second big issue is the settlements, where construction continues in defiance of the 'road map.' Even while road closures may hypothetically be eased, such steps can't ease the trauma of the settlement project:

Does anyone in Israel expect the Palestinians to be so grateful for having been permitted to leave their confined quarters that they won't see what is happening before their very eyes?

What is happening before their very eyes is the non-stop expansion of the settlements. Settlements are the unlawful transfer of an occupying population to occupied territory; they are the cynical theft of land reserves vital for the Palestinian cities and villages; they are the denial of territorial contiguity and the potential to develop; they are the wresting of control of irreplaceable water resources; they are control of roads. They are all that, and more.

The settlements embody all of the perceptions of Israeli lordliness that have developed over the years on both sides of the Green Line. It is an axiom now that "state lands" are only for Jews; that Palestinians need less land and water per head than Jews; that they do not deserve or require the same infrastructure or conveniences as Jews (see East Jerusalem and Galilee villages); that Palestinians live here because we allow them, not because it is their right.

Nothing as dangerous as an Israeli like Amira Hass who sympathizes with Palestinians. The venerable Edward Said reflected on the road map, and saw a document floating far from reality:

The roadmap, in other words, is not about a plan for peace so much as a plan for pacification: it is about putting an end to Palestine as a problem. Hence the repetition of the term "performance" in the document's wooden prose, -- in other words, how the Palestinians are expected to behave, almost in the social sense of the word. No violence, no protest, more democracy, better leaders and institutions, all based on the notion that the underlying problem has been the ferocity of Palestinian resistance, rather than the occupation that has given rise to it. Nothing comparable is expected of Israel except that the small settlements I spoke of earlier, known as "illegal outposts" (an entirely new classification which suggests that some Israeli implantations on Palestinian land are legal) must be given up and, yes, the major settlements "frozen" but certainly not removed or dismantled. Not a word is said about what since 1948, and then again since 1967, Palestinians have endured at the hands of Israel and the US. Nothing about the de-development of the Palestinian economy as described by the American researcher Sara Roy in a forthcoming book. House demolitions, the uprooting of trees, the 5000 prisoners or more, the policy of targeted assassinations, the closures since 1993, the wholesale ruin of the infrastructure, the incredible number of deaths and maimings -- all that and more, passes without a word.

There is also some very interesting stuff in this piece about an initiative called the National Political Initiative, which would help mobilize Palestinian society for elections seek peace, and take control of the adrift Intifada. There's an extremely interesting piece in Haaretz about how Marwan Barghouti, the arrested West Bank director of Fatah, helped orchestrate the cease-fire from within an Israeli prison. Barghouti has been linked to dozens of fatal Palestinian attacks and is on trial now. However, It's extremely likely that Barghouti will become the president or PM of Palestine someday.

"The hudna came about on three planes: There were negotiations between Abu Mazen [Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas] and the Palestinian organizations; there were negotiations between Barghouti and these organizations; and there were talks between groups of prisoners in the jails," says Haaretz Arab Affairs Editor Danny Rubinstein. "The prisoners are considered the avant-garde of the various Palestinian movements, and without their imprimatur, nothing can go forward. Thus it is that one of the central conditions of the hudna is the release of prisoners."

...Certainly Barghouti is no pacifist, nor a Ghandian proponent of passive resistance and non-violent struggle. Writing in the Washington Post in January last year, Barghouti declared that "Israel will have security only after the end of occupation, not before." He was widely seen as the West Bank leader of the Tanzim, the Fatah young guard that has functioned as the primary militia during the uprising. But Barghouti has consistently pressed for a two-state solution, in which Israel and an independent Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza Strip co-exist with fully normalized relations.

"For six years I languished as a political prisoner in an Israeli jail, where I was tortured, where I hung blindfolded as an Israeli beat my genitals with a stick," Barghouti wrote of his imprisonment, which ended only with his deportation to Jordan. "But since 1994, when I believed Israel was serious about ending its occupation, I have been a tireless advocate of a peace based on fairness and equality."

Bremer: I need more troops. Saddam: Planned chaos?

We're looking at a bad situation as Paul Bremer calls home to ask for more troops. Some bits from Knight Ridder:

Senior American officials said Bremer had asked for dozens of civilian officials to make up for a shortage of skilled Iraqi administrators who weren't closely affiliated with Saddam's regime. In addition, more U.S. troops were needed as a "stopgap measure" until international peacekeepers start to arrive, one American official said. None of the officials said how many troops Bremer had requested. "It is inconceivable that Rumsfeld and (Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul) Wolfowitz are fighting this because it would mean admitting they were wrong," said a senior administration official.

He was referring to a rejection by Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz of an estimate by former Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki that several hundred thousand U.S. troops would be required to ensure stability in post-Saddam Iraq.

A senior administration official said Bremer was asking for U.S. officials to be sent from across the government to accelerate the rebuilding of Iraq's central governmental ministries. The State Department has sent a list of roughly 50 Arabic-speaking diplomats to the Pentagon for approval.

Wait, are they suggesting that the destruction of central ministries shortly after the fall of Baghdad might have increased our current problems? We didn't exactly try to catch the Irrigation Ministry as it fell, if I recall. And now a document shows that all the infrastructure sabotage was probably planned by Saddam's intelligence agencies?

Allied officials now believe that a document recently found in Iraq detailing an 'emergency plan' for looting and sabotage in the wake of an invasion is probably authentic. It was prepared by the Iraqi intelligence service in January and marked 'top secret'. It outlined 11 kinds of sabotage, including burning government offices, cutting power and communication lines and attacking water purification plants.

What gives the document particular credence is that it appears to match exactly the growing chaos and large number of guerrilla attacks on coalition soldiers, oil facilities and power plants.

Here's a really marvellous story of how badly the Pentagon tripped over its own feet when Garner couldn't really get ahold of Iraq's problems. Another ongoing struggle in Iraq, besides a chronic and destabilizing shortage of electricity, is the power struggle within the Shia clergy.

The plight of Palestinian refugees in Iraq is very little-known here, but worth looking at. This story also has the tale of a Palestinian who volunteered to fight the Americans, then narrowly avoided death at the Baghdad airport.

A very unusual report in the Egyptian Al-Ahram alleges that Kuwaitis were among the most destructive looters shortly after the war.

At the entrance to Basra stand the charred remains of the Iraqi Oil Company, once the tallest building in town. A friend told me that score- settling between Iraqis and Kuwaitis was responsible for the destruction of that particular building. Other city residents gave a similar account. Shortly following the arrival of British forces in Basra, some of the locals stole furniture from the building. Later, a large number of Kuwaitis allegedly descended on to the city, having crossed the borders between the two countries and burnt the building, thereby destroying all the documents it housed. That act, suggested the people I spoke to in Basra, was in retaliation for Iraqi destruction during the invasion of Kuwait. The Kuwaitis are said to have repeated this pattern in several government buildings, making a point of targeting strategic buildings and documents.

The story of Kuwaiti participation in acts of arson and looting is one that I heard in more than one city near the border with Kuwait. Iraqis in Baghdad expressed their conviction that some of their compatriots had been paid by Kuwait to plunder Iraqi buildings, documents and antiquities.