War

Woman Chops Off Finger in War Protest

/ Iraq, War

The wife of a Gulf War addict in China cut off her finger to stop him from watching TV news about the conflict all day long, a news report said today.

The 45-year-old woman from Nanjing in Jiangsu Province took the drastic step after quarrelling with her husband about his TV addiction since the war began last week, the Hong Kong edition of the official China Daily reported.

She cut off the middle finger of her left hand with a kitchen knife to get his attention because their 15-year-old daughter could not concentrate on studying for upcoming exams with the TV constantly on.

The shocked husband then turned off the TV and took her to hospital, said the newspaper report.

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Clear Channel Rallies and the Bush Administration

/ GW Bush Admin, Iraq, Media, Radio, War

Paul Krugman on Clear Channel's sponsorship of prowar rallies (New York Times, 3/25/03):

Who has been organizing those pro-war rallies? The answer, it turns out, is that they are being promoted by key players in the radio industry -- with close links to the Bush administration. . . .

Experienced Bushologists let out a collective "Aha!" when Clear Channel was revealed to be behind the pro-war rallies, because the company's top management has a history with George W. Bush. The vice chairman of Clear Channel is Tom Hicks, whose name may be familiar to readers of this column. When Mr. Bush was governor of Texas, Mr. Hicks was chairman of the University of Texas Investment Management Company, called Utimco, and Clear Channel's chairman, Lowry Mays, was on its board. Under Mr. Hicks, Utimco placed much of the university's endowment under the management of companies with strong Republican Party or Bush family ties. In 1998 Mr. Hicks purchased the Texas Rangers in a deal that made Mr. Bush a multimillionaire.

There's something happening here. What it is ain't exactly clear, but a good guess is that we're now seeing the next stage in the evolution of a new American oligarchy. As Jonathan Chait has written in The New Republic, in the Bush administration "government and business have melded into one big 'us.' " On almost every aspect of domestic policy, business interests rule: "Scores of midlevel appointees . . . now oversee industries for which they once worked." We should have realized that this is a two-way street: if politicians are busy doing favors for businesses that support them, why shouldn't we expect businesses to reciprocate by doing favors for those politicians -- by, for example, organizing "grass roots" rallies on their behalf?

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Weblogging Soldiers

/ Iraq, US Military, War, Weblogs

Weblogging US soldiers -- and their surprising freedom (for now) to do so -- as covered by the Wall Street Journal via Yahoo (3/25/03):

It's not hard to run this kind of Web site from the front. The armed services don't have centralized rules governing troops' Internet use, beyond restricting such obvious things as pornography and disclosure of military operational details. Each branch of the military has its own set of general guidelines, but typically delegates decisions about e-mail and Internet access to commanders in the field. There, soldiers can use the military's nonofficial network, the Nonsecure Internet Protocol Network, or Nippernet. Enlisted troops often have access to makeshift Internet cafes in the larger camps.

Maj. C.J. Wallington, team leader for the Army's secure intranet system, Army Knowledge Online, says because of the volume, the Army "can't spend a lot of time" checking soldiers' e-mail. "We put a lot of faith in soldiers to do the right thing," and apply the same discretion to their Internet communications that they'd use in personal conversations, he says.

The Army is considering incorporating blogging into its secure network where troops communicate with each other and their families. If such a system were put into place, the general public would no longer have access to such blogs.

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Who’s Responsible for the Forged Nuclear Documents?

/ GW Bush Admin, Iraq, War

CIA ducks culpability for forged nuke docs (Slate, 3/23/03)

With CIA analysts accusing the Bush administration of coercing them, the administration is likely to volley back in this internecine war fought on the battlefields of the nation's dailies. A glimmer of that coming clash appears in the last paragraph of the [Washington] Post story, where a State Department spokesman flings the dead cat back over Foggy Bottom's fence toward Langley. The Post reports:

The State Department's December fact sheet, issued to point out glaring omissions in a declaration Iraq said accounted for all of its prohibited weapons, said the declaration "ignores efforts to procure uranium from Niger." Asked this week to comment on the fact sheet, a CIA spokesman referred questions on the matter to the State Department, where a spokesman said "everything we wrote in the fact sheet was cleared with the agency."

Still unanswered are these urgent questions: Who forged the documents? Given the documents' transparent inauthenticity, why were they given such credence? Who in the administration pushed the CIA to validate them (if it did)? Why didn't the CIA push back?

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Clear Channel Rallies

/ Iraq, Media, Radio, War

"Media Giant's Rally Sponsorship Raises Questions" (Tim Jones, Chicago Tribune, 3/19/03):

Some of the biggest rallies this month have endorsed President Bush's strategy against Saddam Hussein, and the common thread linking most of them is Clear Channel Worldwide Inc., the nation's largest owner of radio stations. . . .

The sponsorship of large rallies by Clear Channel stations is unique among major media companies, which have confined their activities in the war debate to reporting and occasionally commenting on the news. The San Antonio-based broadcaster owns more than 1,200 stations in 50 states and the District of Columbia.

While labor unions and special interest groups have organized and hosted rallies for decades, the involvement of a big publicly regulated broadcasting company breaks new ground in public demonstrations.

"I think this is pretty extraordinary," said former Federal Communications Commissioner Glen Robinson, who teaches law at the University of Virginia. "I can't say that this violates any of a broadcaster's obligations, but it sounds like borderline manufacturing of the news."

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Don’t Let These Peace Protesters Confuse You

/ Iraq, Media, Radio, War

Conservative talk radio host organizes prowar rallies; Clear Channel Communications pays for them (Douglas Jehl in the New York Times, 3/24/03):

"Don't let these peace protesters confuse you," Glenn Beck, a conservative radio host from Philadelphia, told the crowd estimated at 10,000 . . . [in Glen Allen, VA on March 23]. "We know we're facing dark and terrible, terrifying times. But I tell you, we will look these times dead in the eye, and we will climb these stairs."

Over the last few weeks, Mr. Beck, whose three-hour program is heard five days a week on more than 100 stations, has helped promote many similar demonstrations under the banner of Rally for America. Some have been financed by radio stations owned by his employer, Clear Channel Communications, the nation's largest owner of radio stations, in an arrangement that has been criticized by those who contend that media companies should not engage in political advocacy.

The rally near Richmond was paid for by WRVA, a local radio station that broadcasts Mr. Beck's program. Executives at WRVA, which is owned by Clear Channel, said they had decided to stage the event in response to calls from listeners, who in turn had been exhorted by Mr. Beck to seek venues for such rallies.

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Dead People

/ Iraq, Media, War

On Al Jazeera's images of dead bodies and the western press: Tim Cavanaugh in Reasononline (3/24/03).

Since the beginning of the new Iraq war on Wednesday, the Qatari news network Al Jazeera has been showing images of corpses. . . . The station really hit paydirt late Friday and throughout Saturday. Al Jazeera provided some of the most shocking war images ever broadcast on television: A field of bodies after the American strike on the Ansar al-Islam terrorist group in northern Iraq, a blood-soaked emergency room at the same location, and most horrendously of all, a luxuriously-paced tour of civilian casualties in Basra. Among those, one will linger in this viewer's mind forever . . . It was the corpse of a boy with the top of his head blown off. The kid's face, while stiff and covered with dust, retains its human features, but beginning at the forehead the skull simply deflates like an old balloon, ending in an unsupported scalp that (with apologies for the mixed similes) resembles the loose hide of skinned animal. . . .

Al Jazeera photo of dead Iraqi child

The elements of Jazeera's total and terrible victory over its competitors are pretty basic: It treats news as an immediate and vital resource. Jazeera's reporters take great personal risks for exciting footage and stories. The station has rapidly attained core professionalism -- full coverage of press conferences, comments from all sides, and so on. It is welcome in areas where the western networks are not, and it is absolutely not squeamish about presenting any claim or image. . . .

To the extent that the Jazeera version of events presents a plausible case that America could lose the war, every extra day that the war takes to complete will make even victory look more and more like defeat. (In fact, given that current resistance appears to be coming as much from small bands of guerillas as from Iraq's regular army, and considering the near certainty that jihadists are now eagerly making their way into Iraq, it's no longer clear that the peace will look substantially different from what we're seeing right now.) The more CNN's coverage starts to look like Jazeera's, and the messier the war starts to look, the more it will embolden both opponents of the war and those who actually oppose America. Whether it will also reveal how thin domestic support for the war is remains to be seen: Americans may become more determined to fight as more dead soldiers pile up (though significantly, they will no longer claim to be fighting for democracy).

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Women in the US Military

/ Iraq, US Military, War

New York Times editorial: "The Pinking of the Armed Forces" (3/23/03):

The news that one of the American soldiers taken captive by the Iraqis over the weekend is a woman serves as a reminder of how the American military has evolved, slowly and sometimes reluctantly, into an organization where the dangerous jobs of war are performed by both sexes. While women are still barred from some sorts of duty, the case for equal footing is gaining ground.

Thanks to changes in the law in 1994, women, who make up 15 percent of the military, are eligible for about 90 percent of all service positions. Those gains were a recognition of the performance of the 41,000 women deployed as part of Desert Storm three years earlier. Despite legal limits on combat participation, 13 women died and many more were wounded in that conflict.

But while the law opened the door for women a little wider, glass ceilings have held firm and women have made gains in just a small fraction of the jobs supposedly open to them. Helping to hold them back are the remaining taboos and the misperceptions of physical and mental inadequacies that they perpetuate. . . .

The United States, with the most advanced military in history, is simply a laggard on the topic of women in combat. One million women served in the Soviet Army in World War II, and Israel, Canada and South Africa are among the countries that now give women combat roles. The American policies of excluding women threaten the readiness of the armed forces, particularly when there is no draft.

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Day 4: Iraqis Slow Invasion Forces

/ Iraq, War

"Iraqis Use Guerrilla Tactics to Slow Advance" (Douglas Hamilton for Reuters, 3/23/03):

Washington's hopes that U.S.-led forces would be welcomed into Iraq as liberators bled into the sand on Sunday, the fourth day of war, as Iraqi troops fought back with determination and guerrilla tactics.

There was no evidence of weapons of mass destruction being used by Iraq in battle. Instead, Iraqi troops were fighting with machinegun-mounted Japanese pickup trucks against squadrons of the world's most formidable battle tank, the U.S. Abrams.

There were reports of between 10 and 15 U.S. troops killed in fighting to secure bridgeheads across the River Euphrates at Nassiriyah, with perhaps up to 50 more wounded.

U.S. General John Abizaid acknowledged it was the "toughest day of resistance" so far. He said Iraqi forces near Nassiriya inflicted several casualties in "the sharpest engagement of the war." There were 12 American troops missing, he added.

"Everybody was predicting they'd be welcomed as liberators but it's working out differently," said one senior Arab official in the Gulf. "The Americans had a hard day today" . . . .

In Kuwait, former oil minister Ali al-Baghli said the time taken to capture Umm Qasr might undermine any faith ordinary Iraqis had that the Americans could topple Saddam Hussein.

"We are astonished that there is still resistance in Umm Qasr after all this time. It is a very small place.

"If it takes them this long to capture Umm Qasr, how long will it take to capture Tikrit or Baghdad?"

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Prisoners of War

/ Iraq, War

"Iraqi Forces Block Americans, Show POWs on TV" (Hassan Hafidh for Reuters, 3/23/03):

For the public on the other side, the media focus was on the treatment of the American prisoners shown on television.

US prisoners of war shown on Iraqi TV, 3/23/03

"I was just under orders," said one soldier, who gave his name only as Miller. "I don't want to kill anybody."

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called it a breach of the Geneva Convention, which bans subjecting prisoners of war to "public curiosity." Baghdad pledged to respect the law.

Iraqi prisoners taken by U.S. and British troops have also been filmed and interviewed by foreign television stations.

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