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arundhati roy

http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0402-01.htm

In most parts of the world, the invasion of Iraq is being seen as a racist war. The real danger of a racist war unleashed by racist regimes is that it engenders racism in everybody - perpetrators, victims, spectators. It sets the parameters for the debate, it lays out a grid for a particular way of thinking.

There is a tidal wave of hatred for the US rising from the ancient heart of the world. In Africa, Latin America, Asia, Europe, Australia. I encounter it every day. Sometimes it comes from the most unlikely sources. Bankers, businessmen, yuppie students, and they bring to it all the crassness of their conservative, illiberal politics. That absurd inability to separate governments from people: America is a nation of morons, a nation of murderers.

...Those who descend so easily into the pit of racist abuse would do well to remember the hundreds of thousands of American and British citizens who protested against their country's stockpile of nuclear weapons. And the thousands of American war resisters who forced their government to withdraw from Vietnam. They should know that the most scholarly, scathing, hilarious critiques of the US government and the "American way of life" comes from American citizens... More than one third of America's citizens have survived the relentless propaganda they've been subjected to.

...Despite the pall of gloom that hangs over us today, I'd like to file a cautious plea for hope: in times of war, one wants one's weakest enemy at the helm of his forces. And President George W Bush is certainly that... Bush's tactless imprudence and his brazen belief that he can run the world with his riot squad... has achieved what writers, activists and scholars have striven to achieve for decades... He has placed on full public view the working parts, the nuts and bolts of the apocalyptic apparatus of the American empire.

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http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/apmideast_story.asp?category=1107&slug=War%20Civilian%20Clothes

The Pentagon on Friday defended the use of some civilian clothes by U.S. special operations forces... Alleging war crimes, Bush administration officials complained bitterly last week that Iraqi paramilitary forces dressed as civilians... Asked at a Pentagon press conference why it is OK for American commando troops to take off their uniforms, but a crime when the Iraqis did it, Defense Department spokeswoman Victoria Clarke said she thought American forces wear something that distinguishes them from civilians.

...The discussion came as an Army legal official told a House panel that Fedayeen militia members captured in Iraq... could face criminal charges for attacking American soldiers... [because] to get POW protections, fighters must meet certain criteria, such as having a formal association with a government, carrying arms openly and wearing distinctive clothing.

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'stars and stripes' is a military magazine

http://www.stripes.osd.mil/article.asp?section=104&article=14382

“When we move in, you kill anything that moves,” Lt. Col. John Charlton, commander of the 1st Battalion, 15th Infantry Regiment, told his troops just hours before they assaulted a key position south of Baghdad. It is a change in tactics that soldiers have cheered but may lead to controversy as incidents are investigated.

...“Nobody on the streets in the middle of the night, in the middle of a battle, is an innocent civilian,” said Capt. Scott Brannon, commander of the 1-15th scout platoon.

...Senior military officials in Kuwait decline to discuss rules of engagement. The Pentagon similarly declined. “We do not talk about rules of engagement, due to the risks to operational security,” a Pentagon spokesman said.

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http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&cid=514&e=7&u=/ap/20030405/ap_on_re_mi_ea/israel_american_shot_5

JERUSALEM - An American peace activist working as a human shield in the West Bank was seriously wounded on Saturday when Israeli troops allegedly opened fire on him. Brian Avery, 24, from Albuquerque, N.M., heard shots fired and came out of his apartment building in Jenin to investigate just as an armored personnel carrier rounded a corner, said Tobias Karlsson, a fellow activist from Sweden... "We had our hands up and we were wearing vests that clearly identified us as international workers when they began firing," Tobias said. "Brian was shot in the face."

...Tobias said he, Avery and a Palestinian medical worker not with the group were approached slowly by the troops and stood with their hands up for about 10 minutes. There was no communication with the soldiers, who Tobias says fired unprovoked...There were few Palestinians on the streets Saturday because of a curfew Israeli troops were enforcing.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A38570-2003Apr6.html

JERUSALEM - Israel will reject a U.S.-backed "road map" to Palestinian statehood if it is asked to compromise on security issues, such as the elimination and disarmament of what it calls Palestinian terrorist groups, a senior Israeli official said Saturday... Dov Weisglass, the head of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's office, said Israel will present to the United States 15 reservations it has with the plan for Palestinian statehood by the end of 2005.

...On Sunday, Israeli troops raided the Gaza Strip village of Massader, rounding up all men between the ages of 25-50.

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http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0407/p07s02-wome.html

Last week saw the first mass expulsion of Palestinian civilians since fighting with Israel broke out more than two years ago... Israeli peace activists are calling this expulsion of between 1,000 and 2,000 males from the Tulkarem Refugee Camp an "extremely dangerous" precedent. The army says the expulsion was largely for the good of the Palestinians.

...The three-day action ended with an announcement that troops had arrested Anwar Alian, an Islamic Jihad leader... "If I have to choose between a car bomb and 2,000 people being uncomfortable, I definitely prefer that they be uncomfortable," the commander of the operation, Col. David Menachem, told Israel's Y-net news service.

...The Israeli government includes far-right ministers who espouse "transfer," a euphemism for expulsions of Palestinians... Uri Avnery, a left-wing former Knesset member, termed the Tulkarem operation "an army exercise and test to see how the world, the media, and the Israeli public would react. And there was no reaction, which proves that it can be done. The people on the trucks could easily have been taken to the Jordan River bridges or to Nablus."

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http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20030404/hl_afp/iraq_war_health_030404135815

Troops returning from the 2003 Iraqi war may well suffer ill health but it is likely to be different from the 1991 "Gulf War Syndrome" said to affect thousands of US, British and French veterans, a medical expert has confirmed... He theorised that this time around, the symptoms were likely to be of "more traditional post-traumatic stress disorder"... "The result is a real increase in physical and psychological symptoms, which in some people are persistent and disabling and cannot be dismissed. We should treat fear as a pathogen."

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http://www2.dailycamera.com/bdc/county_news/article/0,1713,BDC_2423_1866804,00.html

The daily White House press briefings and fuzzy real-time TV reports fall far short of conveying the brutality of war, says Boulder neurosurgeon Gene Bolles... "It really is disgustingly sanitized on television," said Bolles, who has spent the last 16 months as chief of neurosurgery at Landstuhl [in Germany], the destination for the war's most wounded [non-Iraqi] soldiers... "We have had a number of really horrific injuries now from the war. They have lost arms, legs, hands, they have been burned, they have had significant brain injuries and peripheral nerve damage. These are young kids that are going to be, in some regards, changed for life. I don't feel that people realize that."

...Still affected by the carnage he saw as a division flight surgeon during the Vietnam War, Bolles said he is particularly troubled by the injuries he has seen coming from Operation Iraqi Freedom, a war he doesn't necessarily support. "I am opposed to any war," he said. "I am doing what I am doing because I am a doctor, not because I have a political agenda... These are young children; 18, 19, 20 with arms and legs blown off. That is the reality," said Bolles.

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http://www.abcnews.go.com/wire/World/ap20030406_446.html

The number of casualties in Baghdad is so high that hospitals have stopped counting the number of people treated, the International Committee of the Red Cross said Sunday.

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http://english.aljazeera.net/topics/article.asp?cu_no=1&item_no=1858&version=1&template_id=263&parent_id=258

A senior British official admitted on Saturday that no chemical, biological or nuclear weapons of mass destruction may after all be found. Making the startling confession in a radio interview, British Home Secretary, David Blunkett, added in the same breath that he would in any case rejoice the “fall” of Saddam Hussein and his regime — regardless of whether any weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq or not.

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http://www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/holnus/01062208.htm

As Sayliya Camp (Qatar), Apr. 6: The US military said today it had not yet found any weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and it believed there was a diminishing threat that Iraq might use them.

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http://www.news24.com/News24/World/Iraq/0,6119,2-10-1460_1343771,00.html

Allied warplanes on Saturday began flying missions over the Iraqi capital... the US Air Force general in charge of the air war said... Lieutenant General Michael Moseley, speaking from his command post in Saudi Arabia... said a wide variety of aircraft began performing the mission of "airborne forward air controllers" over Baghdad to direct airstrikes... in a 90-minute interview with reporters at the Pentagon. He said the notion that allied air power has been used to soften up the Iraqi Republican Guard ground troops, the backbone of Saddam Hussein's army, falls short of reality. "We're not softening them up. We're killing them," he said.

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,930119,00.html

Tony Blair is to deploy his persuasive powers in southern Iraq with hundreds of thousands of leaflets containing a personal promise in Arabic that the country will be given self government as soon as possible. British troops will distribute 60,000 copies daily of Mr Blair's pledge, which includes a commitment that the UN will be involved.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A32303-2003Apr4.html

To the consternation of Congress and European allies, the White House has not defined a role for the United Nations or opened a clear channel for other countries to participate in political and economic reconstruction. U.S. military forces intend to rule Iraq with a measure of Iraqi help after Hussein falls, but tasks for Iraqis are still being determined. Yesterday, after a meeting on postwar issues between President Bush and his top advisers, [National security adviser Condoleeza] Rice emphasized that a broad-based internal authority would be created, and she reiterated that the U.N. would have a valuable, if undetermined, role.

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http://www.dailytelegraph.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5936,6241542%5E401,00.html

THE United States wrote off $1,000,000,000.00 in Pakistani debt in a ceremony in the capital today, one of the rewards for President General Pervez Musharraf's decision to support Washington's war on terrorism.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/06/international/worldspecial/06TERR.html?ex=1050669720&ei=1&en=2023437436f2bd97

The Justice Department, buoyed by a series of court victories, appears to be gaining traction in prosecuting Americans linked to terrorism by using a once-obscure law... The 1996 law... makes it a crime to offer "material support" to any group designated by the United States as a terrorist organization. The statute has become so useful that the Justice Department is exploring ways to cast an even wider legal net... The law has become the Justice Department's main weapon... The appeal for prosecutors is that they do not have to prove that the defendants actually supported terrorist attacks, only that they helped a group tied to terrorism.

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http://www.newsday.com/news/opinion/columnists/ny-nybresvr3183831mar21,0,701559.column?coll=ny%2Dopinion%2Dcolumnists

The following is from an immensely interesting transcript of Barbara Bush on an ABC-TV morning show. She was asked if she and her husband, the former president, watch television. "He sits and listens and I read books because I know perfectly well that - don't take offense - that 90 percent of what I hear on television is supposition, when we're talking about the news. And he's not, not as understanding of my pettiness about that. But why should we hear about body bags and deaths and how many, what day it's going to happen, and how many this or what do you suppose? Oh, I mean, it's, not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that? And watch him suffer."

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http://mahabarbara.tripod.com/themahablog/id48.html

IN HIS MOST vivid passage, Bush listed practices of Saddam Hussein such as destroying whole villages with chemical weapons... One still cannot tune into a discussion of Iraq without a neo-con bringing up The Gassing of His Own People as a reason to go to war... What actually happened, and how did the U.S. respond at the time?

...Halabja is a town in the southern part of Iraqi Kurdistan with about 60,000 inhabitants. In 1988, during the Iran-Iraq war, Kurdistan resistance fighters supported by Iranian troops took possession of the town... Iraq used chemical weapons to try to kill Iranians who had seized the town, which is in northern Iraq not far from the Iranian border. The Kurdish civilians who died had the misfortune to be caught up in that exchange. But they were not Iraq's main target.

...Immediately after the battle the United States Defense Intelligence Agency investigated and produced a classified report, which it circulated within the intelligence community on a need-to-know basis. That study asserted that it was Iranian gas that killed the Kurds, not Iraqi gas.

...Shortly after the massacre at Halabja, Senators Claiborne Pell, Al Gore, and Jesse Helms introduced legislation to impose sanctions on Iraq for its use of chemical weapons. The Prevention of Genocide Act of 1988 unanimously passed the US Senate just one day after being introduced. So what did the Reagan Administration do? Reagan vetoed this Act, of course... Classified records show U.S. support for [Iraq] continued unabated after the official cease-fire in the Iran-Iraq War was signed in August, 1988, and after Iraq's chemical weapons attack on the Kurdish villages on July 19, 1988. In fact, in August, 1988, Deputy Secretary of State Whitehead recommended in a secret policy memo that "there should be no radical policy changes now regarding Iraq." The pro-Iraq strategy was embraced by Bush when he became President.

...[So,] either 1. Saddam Hussein did not Gas His Own People; rather, the massacre at Halabja was an act of war and the gas most likely came from the Iranians. Or 2. Saddam Hussein did Gas His Own People, and he was enabled by the Reagan Administration.

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http://www.barbadosadvocate.com/NewViewNewsleft.cfm?Record=12703

A top US official visiting the island has urged Caricom [the Caribbean community] to “study very carefully” the consequences of what it says about the war against Iraq. That was the advice given by Otto Reich, Special Envoy of the President for Western Hemisphere Initiatives, during the Caribbean Broadcasting Corporation’s televised Chat Room programme yesterday afternoon... “It is not the kind of support that we expect from friends,” he said. “We listen very carefully to what our friends say and we’re very disappointed by some of the statements. We’re not violating international law, neither is Great Britain or any of the other countries and I would urge Caricom to study very carefully not only what it says, but the consequences of what it says.”

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http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&ncid=&e=6&u=/ap/20030404/ap_on_bi_go_ec_fi/economy

U.S. companies slashed 108,000 jobs in March [2003]... The unemployment rate held at 5.8 percent after thousands of job seekers gave up and dropped out of the work pool.

Job cuts were widespread with few hiring gains, the Labor Department reported Friday... In February [2003], businesses shed 357,000 jobs, more than previously reported.

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http://www.accessatlanta.com/ajc/metro/politics/0403/04flag.html

Georgia's state flag would be changed immediately, with a public vote to follow, under a plan endorsed by a key House committee today. The new flag would resemble the first national flag of the Confederacy -- three red and white bars, with a blue field in the top left corner. The state seal would be in the blue corner, and the words "In God We Trust" would be written to the right.

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http://www.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,6248472%255E25778,00.html

...Diplomats fleeing neighbouring Iraq after a convoy evacuating Moscow's ambassador from Baghdad came under fire... Several people were injured when the car convoy evacuating the ambassador was atacked. There are conflicting reports on whether US or Iraqi forces were responsible... A Rossiya correspondent who was with the convoy, Alexander Minakov, said: "As we left the city (Baghdad) we passed through Iraqi forces who suddenly came under fierce fire. Shells exploded 50 to 70 metres from us followed by automatic arms fire. I am 100 per cent sure the Americans were the first to open fire. The Iraqis obviously started shooting back and we were caught in a crossfire."

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http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0407/p06s02-woiq.html

DIBAGAH, IRAQ – US airplanes Sunday mistakenly bombed a convoy of Kurdish forces working with US Special Forces. The attack killed 18 Kurds and wounded 45 others, including the brother of Massoud Barzani, the president of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, which controls this autonomous area of northern Iraq. Mr. Barzani's son was also injured in the attack. It was not clear at press time whether there were casualties among US Special Forces, who assisted in the operation.

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