Gaza

The tanks are rolling in Gaza again, as the Israeli leadership indulges its penchant for collective punishment yet again. Gaza's only power station has been bombed, denying electricity to the entire strip, and water supplies appear to be hext on the Israeli hitlist. This, as pointed out by Terrorism News, is a war crime.
Israel's strategy is deliberate - they make Palistinian civilians suffer in the hope that they will turn over the terrorists who live among them, this is the reason that Israel has consistently used bombs, missiles and artillery to attack their targets in Palistinian territory. Civilian deaths can be dismissed as collateral damage, regretable but necessary. Terror being fought with terror on both sides. The people of Gaza are caught in between; if they act against the terrorist they face reprisals, if they don't then Israel considers them fair game.
A strategy like this doesn't work - there have been decades of collective punishment and assassination in Palestine and look at the result: the democratic election of a terrorist organisation. If you abuse a population it fights back. But still the heavy handed tactics continue. Look at the situation in Ireland. We know that in order to defeat terrorists whose beliefs, if not their methods, are supported by a large population is to deal with the underlying issues, to negotiate. Imagine if Britain had used Israeli tactics in Ireland.
It is so simple that it's hard to believe that the people in power do not know this. But the right-wing regime in Israel is propped up by the cycle of violence, just as Bush has been propped up by the war on terror, so on and on and on it will go.

I swear they're using it as a handbook

"It's intense it's fire. It drives people to insanity...All kinds of things happen in the heat of sexual passion, so my point is because it's fire it needs to be governed..."

- Karl Zinsmeister, White House chief domestic policy adviser, speaking last week.

I can't go five minutes without thinking about 1984 these days.

Reality Control

Interesting argument that the US government puts forward in its quest to lock up journalists for publishing leaks. They seem to expect us to believe that before the papers published these stories terrorists had no idea that the government might be tapping their phone or monitoring their bank transactions. This is despite the fact that the lawful methods of surveillance used by the security services are public knowledge and always have been.
These bone-headed justifications aside, what we have here is a government threatening to send journalists to jail for revealing that it broke its own laws.
But don't worry-congress has promptly responded to this crisis. They're now debating a bill that would make warrantless surveillance legal.
It is, apparently, every citizen's duty to report illegal activity. If the bill passes the criminals will magically become good citizens and the good citizens will become criminals. In fact, as the law would act retrospectively, they would always have been criminals. They just didn't realise it.
Remember Orwell's terrible future? This is how it starts.

Might as well get this over with now...

(Deep breath)

ONE HUNDRED POSTS AND STILL NO-ONE READS THIS FUCKING BLOG!!!!!!!

and rest

Orwell's genius

Just finished 1984 again. It's the finest book ever written. I don't need to read them all - nothing could surpass it. The most terrible future imaginable. Orwell created a perfect dictatorship - its lucky he was a good man and not a politician. He understood exactly how power works, how the class system works and the ways in which all governments would con their people well into the future. Witness the War on Terror, and all the doublethink it entails.
It's also the most tragic love story ever told. Romeo and Juliet never stopped loving each other - love wins in that play. In 1984 love is crushed and destroyed along with decency and humanity and thought.
It's intensely disturbing. More disturbing even than the Wasp Factory.
Which is pretty disturbing.
the end

Another distraction...

The NY times was asked by the US government not to reveal its secret monitoring program that left the bank transactions of ordinary Americans open to NSA scrutiny, but they went ahead and did it anyway. The press seem to be finally standing up to Bush, six years too late. Probably because all but a few slavering fascists in middle America have deserted the hapless language-mangler and they're worried about losing their audience. The Times is of course the paper that distiguished itself by running Greg Palast's investigation into vote rigging in florida FOUR YEARS after he broke it on Newsnight in Britain.(It was big news over here, in America it only ran on the internet.) Incidentally the US is currently looking for a way to jail reporters who publish leaked info. Freedom! Democracy!
So: more warrantless, illegal snooping.
This revelation was followed with convenient speed by the arrest of seven men in Florida for plotting to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago. Well, I say "plotting" but the US attorney general admitted shortly afterwards that the men possessed no bomb making equipment, no illegal weaponry and had "no clear plan". Apparently they were arrested on the basis of a tapped phone conversation. The administration also claimed the men were planning to link up with Al Quaida but offered no evidence for this. I'd like to hear the incriminating conversation, maybe they'll play it at the trial. If the men get a trial - they could be sent straight to Guantanamo I suppose or be tried behind closed doors with the excuse that the evidence is sensitive to national security.
Maybe they would have blown up the tower, I don't know. But you cannot trust a government that tortures, that imprisons without trial, that breaks its own laws, that lies its nation into a war to do this fairly. The timing of their arrest was clearly intended to distract, not to prevent a threat. If they were going to link up with Al Quaida, surely more surveillance would have lead the authorities to bigger fish. Either an investigation has been interrupted for political purposes or this whole thing is yet more bullshit.

1997

There was a show on the BBC the other night, "Summer of 1997", very strange looking back on that year for me. Tony Blair swept into power and a strange mass psychosis spread among the people of Britain, convincing them that New Labour would be a good and fair government, everyone rendered blind by the euphoric relief at the fact that the Tories had finally gone. Blair would be the anti-Tory, a decent and true politician. One person who emphatically didn't buy it was Greg Palast, who swiftly set up an elaborate undercover sting that blew open the "cash for access" scandal and ended Blair's honeymoon with a sleazy squelch the next year. Should have brought his government down.(The cash for access story is genuinely chilling - read Palast's "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy").
Then we had "Cool Brittania", where music, art and politics desperately attempted to collide for mutual benefit. Suddenly it was most embarrassing to be British. Noel Gallacher met the PM, the Spice Girls hilariously claimed that it was fantastic that "British music was finally being recognised"(the Beatles? Pink Floyd? Bowie? Led Zeppelin?). Radiohead refused to buy into this shite and instead released the album of the decade, the bleak and frightening OK Computer.
Oh, and Diana died. Mass hysteria followed, suddenly our fragmented and atomised population found a reason to cry in each other's arms...
A year of delusions and hallucinations on this oddball island.
I went nuts at the end of that summer, that's why '97 sticks in my mind...looking back on it kind of makes me wonder how many other people lost their minds that year. Everyone?

Four journalists expelled from Guantanamo

My favourite piece of spin this week comes from Defense Department spokesperson Cynthia Smith. This is from James Rainey's report in the LA Times:

A civilian spokeswoman at the Pentagon said the reporters had to leave because at least five other news outlets wanted to cover the suicides but did not get permission from Guantanamo commanders.
"The Defense Department wants to be fair and impartial," said spokeswoman Cynthia Smith. "We got them on the next flight out of Guantanamo Bay to be fair to the rest of the media outlets that did not get a chance to go down there."

A truly magnificent piece of bullshit there. 10/10

Zarqawi: Dead and Loving it.

Well, they got old Zarqawi. Good riddance. One murdering psychopath down....
How many more to go? Well Al Quaida have already appointed his successor and sadly the actions of America, Britain and Israel in the Middle East have assured that there is a long line of maniacs waiting behind "the Immigrant" when his cheque is eventually cashed. Sadly this assassination is really a side note in the Iraq tragedy - Zarqawi was never the leader that America made him out to be. He was just one of the individuals who said "Alrighty then" when Bush said "bring 'em on".
Two civilians were also killed in the airstrike, which is increasingly becoming the method of choice for anti-insurgent operations in Iraq, collateral damage an' all. Of course George Bush and Tony Blair continue to claim that civilian casualties in Iraq don't in fact have any relation to Islamic terrorism.
Sooner of later they'll claim that down is up and black is white.

Haditha

Its pretty much incontrovertible now. Statements from survivors, statements from soldiers who were present, video footage of children dead in their nightclothes from gunshot wounds. Even conservative commentators are starting to admit that it was murder.
Still being described as an isolated incident wherever possible, despite the fact that independent reporters in Iraq have been detailing similar cases pretty much since "mission accomplished". And despite the fact that the US military attempted to cover up the Haditha massacre. It was written in the military report just after the incident that 15 civilians had been killed by the roadside bomb and 8 "insurgents" killed by marines in a gunfight that followed. Its obvious now that this report was pure fiction, which begs the question: how many more so called "insurgents" have in fact been unarmed civilians? If the military tried to cover this up, what else has it been hiding?
The soldiers involved in this particular atrocity will be charged with either murder or manslaughter and the US military is currently investigating itself to see if it has been covering things up. So we can all rest easy. The idea of command responsibility, used to great effect at Nuremburg, has obviously gone right out the window. There is some optimistic talk that Bush and his men may be open to prosecution because of incidents like this, but seeing as he hasn't been held accountable by anyone for the supreme international crime of starting a war that was not in self-defence or sanctioned by the security council, I doubt anyone should get their hopes up. Just chalk up Iraq as yet another atrocity the UN failed to stand against.

Yeah and fuck Hillary Clinton too

Politics is a vacuous game where the only thing that matters is power. Political parties have no ideology, they pick their policies according to how likely it it that they'll get them elected and everything they claim to stand for is bullshit.
Here we saw New Labour coming to power with a set of promises that went out the window as soon as they got power. For this staggering deceit we re-elected them twice. Now the nation is beginning to realise that they are corrupt, lying hypocrites. So people are voting for the Tories. A party who were voted out nine years ago for being corrupt, lying hypocrites. We won't vote for anyone else because we think that no-one else will vote for them. Aren't we clever thinking things like that?
So! Who will win; Republicans or Democrats, Labour or Conservatives?
Personally I don't give a flying fuck anymore.

Bush's wiretaps and so on blah blah blah

Illegal and unconstitutional(yes I read the damn thing) and, unnecessary. Unless he wants to spy on political opponents. He could have legally got warrants through the FISA courts - they authorised all but four of the warrants the administration has asked for since 9/11, all in cases of national security. So if Bush wanted to spy on terrorists he already had a perfect system. Some would say that under the PATRIOT act he had too much legal freedom to spy on people. But still he broke the law. Because, quite obviously, he needed a spy program for people who aren't terrorist suspects.
The only explanation is that he broke the law for political reasons, the NSA spy program would give the Republicans quite an advantage in elections to come...and it really doesn't have any other discernable purpose. Same deal as Nixon. Not very democratic but then Bush himself did say that a dictatorship would be easier. He was joking of course.
But he meant it.
So, will he be impeached? If democrats win control of congress later this year its a real possiblility. In fact the Republicans' only election strategy at the moment is "don't vote for the Democrats because they'll impeach Bush". Sadly they fail to realise that the majority of Americans would dance on the fucker's political grave.