Author: Jonathan Schwarz

The award goes to:

• Dennis Perrin on Michael Richards and the reactions thereto.

• No More Mr. Nice Blog for If I Helped Turn Iraq into an Open-Air Abbatoir for Human Beings, Here’s How It Happened by Douglas Feith, and more!

• Max Sawicky on being moved to profanity by the Washington Post’s execrable coverage of Social Security.

• Arianna Huffington on the sad-but-real fear that runs Hollywood.

I just hope this will bring some much needed attention to the awardees, particularly Ms. Huffington, who’s a wonderful writer but all her career has suffered from a crippling shyness.

I’m pleased to see Alberto Gonzales is still trotting out the same old crap about the NSA surveillance program. Here he is at an event yesterday:

The TSP [“Terrorist Surveillance Program”] is lawful. The president established the Program under both the authority given to him by Congress when it passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, and by his authority under the Constitution.

Dick Cheney made the same case on Friday:

We’re confident because the Terrorist Surveillance Program rests on firm legal ground. The Joint Authorization to Use Military Force, passed by Congress after 9/11, provides more than enough latitude for these activities. Therefore the warrant requirements of the FISA law do not apply to this wartime measure.

What I like about this is that new lies on their part would require us to figure out exactly how they’re lying. Whereas if you want to understand this old lie, you can just read this old Mother Jones article of mine.

Imad Khadduri, the Iraqi physicist who escaped to Canada in 1998 and did everything he could to expose the Bush administration’s lies before the invasion, writes from Amman:

Yesterday, I received an Email from a friend citing a very touching obituary for a young Iraqi boy by the name of Ali who died of leukemia in his family’s self imposed exile in Jordan. It was written by one of his teachers and published in Al Rai newspaper.

I wrote back to my friend to express my sympathy and told him that I wonder how many Iraqi Alis are dying without a word said about them. I did not know then that only few hours later I would have my Ali to mourn.

Ali is the nephew of my wife…But he was much more than that to me. He was like my own son who kept my company for eight years in Baghdad when my own sons were away. He was indeed a son, a friend, assistant and a delight to be with…He was great in dealing with children and loved so much my granddaughter Mariam who in return loved him and wanted him to be around as much as she wanted her parents…

Ali was killed in Baghdad on Thursday, November 7 by the Americans or their protégés, the national guards who were manning a close check point…

Does anybody doubt that there isn’t a home in Iraq now which is not suffering the loss or injury of a loved one? When will this nightmare end? When will we regain our country and see the back of this occupation?

The rest is here.

For a few of Khadduri’s pre-war writings, see “Iraq’s Nuclear Non-Capability” (November 21, 2002) and “The Nuclear Bomb Hoax” (February 7, 2003).

Before the 9/11 attacks came along, I used to work with groups trying to get the U.S. to stop funding Colombia’s right-wing paramilitaries. The pretense, of course, was we were funding the Colombian military in their heroic struggle in the War on Drugs. The reality, that the paramilitaries were run by the Colombian government to murder anyone to the left of Elliot Abrams, is finally being acknowledged:

The government of President Álvaro Uribe is being shaken by its most serious political crisis yet, as details emerge about members of Congress who collaborated with right-wing death squads to spread terror and exert political control across Colombia’s Caribbean coast…All are from the state of Sucre, where the attorney general’s office has been exhuming bodies from mass graves…

It’s difficult to overstate the level of human depravity exhibited by the paramilitaries. One of their favorite techniques is to kill people with chainsaws:

“The Chainsaw Massacre is not a film in Colombia,” said government ombudsman Eduardo Cifuentes, referring to the April 12 [2001] paramilitary massacre in Alto Naya, 650 kilometers (404 miles) southeast of [Bogota]…

It left some 128 people dead, including 40 in Alto Naya, according to official reports quoted by Cifuentes in an interview with AFP…

Around 400 paramilitaries took part in this “caravan of death” against civilians accused of supporting leftist guerrillas, Cifuentes said in his Bogota office.

“The remains of a woman were exhumed. Her abdomen was cut open with a chainsaw. A 17-year-old girl had her throat cut and both hands also amputated,” said the ombudsman…

“A neighbor pounced upon a paramilitary that was ready to shoot him and took his weapon, but unfortunately he didn’t know how to fire a rifle. They dragged him away, cut him open with a chainsaw and chopped him up,” a witness of the massacre told El Espectador daily.

I once attended a lunch with a Colombian union official. He said the paramilitaries would generally warn people like him of their intentions, by visiting them and cutting their sleeves or pants where they would later cut off their arms and legs if they didn’t flee the area. Less important people didn’t get warnings.

This year we’re giving Colombia approximately 600 million dollars for these appealing activities. The biggest upswing in aid came during the last years of the Clinton administration. What’s really neat is the paramilitaries are actually the ones controlling most of the cocaine trade in Colombia. In other words, as part of the War on Drugs, we’re giving massive aid to some of the world’s biggest drug dealers.

If past experience is any guide, the people mentioned in the above article as investigating this (e.g., Colombian Senator Gustavo Petro) have maybe four weeks to live.

SPECIAL BONUS DEPRAVITY: I once worked for a right-wing corporate lawyer who had (1) a massive cocaine addiction and (2) a Colombian maid who’d been a kindergarten teacher until she fled. I often felt he should have made the connection explicit by telling her, “Look at me! I can destroy your country and your life using only MY NOSE!!!”

Of course, in the long human tradition of utter indifference to those less powerful than you, he knew neither that she’d been a kindergarten teacher nor even that she was Colombian.

Tony Blair is a funny man:

[Blair] was challenged by Sir David that the Western intervention in Iraq had “so far been pretty much of a disaster”.

He replied: “It has, but you see what I say to people is why is it difficult in Iraq?

“It’s not difficult because of some accident in planning, it’s difficult because there’s a deliberate strategy – al-Qaeda with Sunni insurgents on one hand, Iranian-backed elements with Shia militias on the other – to create a situation in which the will of the majority for peace is displaced by the will of the minority for war.”

Yes…there are many things you can plan for in war, but one thing for which it is impossible to plan is someone fighting you.