February 14, 2003
Jessica Tuchman Matthews provided a detailed alternative to war in Iraq, following Secretary of State Colin Powell's speech to the United Nations Security Council last Wednesday. In her eyes, war is not the only answer. Iraq must be disarmed, and that can be done by "truly muscular inspections backed by a multinational military force."
Her steps to do this include (1) "put the right people in the field ... technical expertise be put ahead of the usual U.N. need for geographic balance in hiring. That has not been done. They also mean that every possible former inspector, the only individuals with experience, should be rehired;" (2) "Get the U-2s flying. U-2s are ... 'uniquely effective tools of inspection.' They possess the ability to stay in place (unlike satellites), detect activities aboveground and underground, and use sweep cameras to photograph large areas or zero in with high resolution;" (3) "Enforce 'no-fly' and 'no-drive' zones. The cat-and-mouse game can be largely ended and the odds of success tipped decisively in the inspectors' favor by giving them several additional powers;" (4) "Destroy any site being sanitized;" (5) "Don't let lethal items slip away. If inspectors on the ground find lethal items being moved -- warheads, for example, or a mobile biolab -- and cannot stop it, they should be able to direct airstrikes to destroy it;" and (6) "Put troops on the ground."
I am concerned by this vague statement: "[P]articipating countries will have to be prepared for a few awful mistakes. This operation cannot be carried out so cautiously that some errors won't happen. " What, exactly, does she mean by "a few awful mistakes" ? She doesn't elaborate. Do a few Iraqi citizens blown to bits by a misdirected air strike constitute an "error"?
She believes that twelve more months of coercive inspections seems a reasonable price when weighed against the "unknowable human, political and economic costs of war." Some people, she says, are not that patient. They want to punch the beeyootiful SHINY button; the jolly CANDY-LIKE button of war right now.
Check out the Washington Post article for more details of her proposal.
posted at 3:28 PM by Trish Wilson | Link
HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY!!! I bought my s. o. some chocolate truffles and foil-covered chocolate hearts that are already more than half gone, and it's barely past noon. I crossed out the "Happy Anniversary!" in the card I chose, penned "Happy Valentine's Day" in red ink, and scrawled that I didn't like any of the available V. D. cards because I thought they were too sappy. Take my word for it. I'm talking diabetic coma sappy. I found a sympathy card that had an even prettier picture and a sweeter saying, but I knew better than to pick that one and scratch out the "my condolences on your loss." My s. o. has a healthy appreciation of the surreal (hell, he lives with me), but that would have been pushing it.
In honor of Valentine's Day, here's hoping this article makes you see red.
I was very pleased to see more attention paid to U. S. involvement in providing Iraq with the supplies to make weapons of mass destruction. Body and Soul pointed to the same New York Times article that I had posted here my first week in the blogosphere. My blog birthday is New Year's Day, 2003.
It's helpful to remember that this list of U. S. companies is part of the missing 8,000 pages of the 12,000 page Iraqi report to the U. N. Security Council that had been reported by the media. That's the same 8,000 pages that had been removed by the U. S. for "security" reasons. The content of those pages had been leaked by Berlin's left-wing Die Tageszeitung newspaper. It's clear why those pages disappeared: the Bush administration wants to keep quiet prior U. S. involvement in the armament of Iraq while Reagan and Poppy Bush were at the helm. U. S. complicity would interfere with the Bushie Project for the New American Century cabal's dumb bomb propaganda campaign against "terra" and "evildoers."
Being a German newspaper, the Tageszeitung article is, of course, in German. I plugged it into Babelfish. Here are some informative (albeit choppy) excerpts:Among the five permanent members of the security council the USA - according to the Iraqi arms report - with distance were involved in the strongest in the armament of the regime by Saddam Hussein with means of mass destruction. The report supplies for the first time a complete overview of it, which the 24 US companies in particular mentioned supplied when to whom with on in the Iraq. And it makes clear, how strongly the administrations of presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush senior supported the armament of Iraq in the time of 1980 up to the gulf conflict of 1990/91. Substantial construction units for the Iraqi nuclear weapon and the rocket program were supplied with permission of the government to Washington. The poison Anthrax for the armament of Iraq with biological weapons originates from US laboratories. Iraqi military and armament experts were trained in the USA and received know-how for their domestic arms programs.Yes indeedy, it certainly would ... if the U. S. media would report it. So far, the most thorough reports about this "dark chapter" have appeared in newspapers overseas and here in the blogosphere.
According to estimate of the US armament control expert Susan Wright of the University of Michigan a publication of these information would be extremely embarrassing "for the USA". It would remind "U. S. citizens of a very dark chapter, which the Bush administration wants to gladly forget."
I've known about U. S. compliance in supplying chemicals and equipment since the late 1980s because a former friend of mine had worked at one of the two now-defunct U. S. companies mentioned in the Times article: Alcolac International. I had lived not from from Alcolac. He had called me in a panic while officials ransacked his office. I don't remember what kind of officials they were, only that they were the scary, feel-your-butt-pucker breed of official. Nothing came of the search. I vaguely recall that a low-level shipping clerk was blamed for the illegal rerouting of thiodiglycol to Singapore before the chemical landed in Iraq. thiodiglycol is an ingredient in mustard gas. The irony is that my former friend had moved on to Rhone Poulenc in New Jersey, which is another company cited by the Iraqi report as having provided chemical supplies to Iraq.
Kerim Friedman also addresses U. S. compliance on his Stand Down (No War Blog) entry. He points to the Independent (U. K.) article that mentioned the Tageszeitung article, thereby bringing more attention to the content of those yanked pages from the Iraqi report.
I made this post about U. S. involvement in Irai weapons armament on January 5, 2003. I've reproduced it below for convenience's sake.
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The New York Times reported on "the 12,000-page weapons declaration that Iraq delivered to the United Nations on Dec. 7 that details the history of its chemical weapons program before the 1991 gulf war" -- that period of time when the United States "carefully handled" Saddam Hussein.
Here are two partial lists of U. S. companies. I had lived not far from one of those companies, Alcolac International, which has since closed shop. Alcolac was a chemical company that produced thiodiglycol, an ingredient in dyes and water-based inks. Thiodiglycol was also used in the production of mustard gas. Alcolac was under investigation for illegally rerouting chemicals through Singapore before shipping them to Iraq.
The list of corporations includes the following, according to United for Peace:
USABelow is an excerpt from the April, 1998 issue of The Progressive on the same subject:
A - nuclear K - chemical B - biological R - rockets (missiles)
1)Honeywell (R,K)
2)Spektra Physics (K)
3)Semetex (R)
4)TI Coating (A,K)
5)UNISYS (A,K)
6)Sperry Corp. (R,K)
7)Tektronix (R,A)
8)Rockwell )(K)
9)Leybold Vacuum Systems (A)
10)Finnigan-MAT-US (A)
11)Hewlett Packard (A.R,K)
12)Dupont (A)
13)Eastman Kodak (R)
14)American Type Culture Collection (B)
15)Alcolac International (C)
16) Consarc (A)
17) Carl Zeis -U.Ss (K)
18)Cerberus (LTD) (A)
19)Electronic Assiciates (R)
20)International Computer Systems
21)Bechtel (K)
22)EZ Logic Data Systems,Inc. (R)
23)Canberra Industries Inc. (A)
24)Axel Electronics Inc. (A)
"The American company that provided the most biological materials to Iraq in the 1980s was American Type Culture Collection of Maryland and Virginia, which made seventy shipments of the anthrax-causing germ and other pathogenic agents, according to a 1996 Newsday story.
Other American companies also provided Iraq with the chemical or biological compounds, or the facilities and equipment used to create the compounds for chemical and biological warfare. Among these suppliers were the following:
* Alcolac International, a Baltimore chemical manufacturer already linked to the illegal shipment of chemicals to Iran, shipped large quantities of thiodiglycol (used to make mustard gas) as well as other chemical and biological ingredients, according to a 1989 story in The New York Times.
* Nu Kraft Mercantile Corp. of Brooklyn (affiliated with the United Steel and Strip Corporation) also supplied Iraq with huge amounts of thiodiglycol, the Times reported.
* Celery Corp., Charlotte, NC
* Matrix-Churchill Corp., Cleveland, OH (regarded as a front for the Iraqi government, according to Representative Henry Gonzalez, Democrat of Texas, who quoted U.S. intelligence documents to this effect in a 1992 speech on the House floor).
The following companies were also named as chemical and biological materials suppliers in the 1992 Senate hearings on "United States export policy toward Iraq prior to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait":
* Mouse Master, Lilburn, GA
* Sullaire Corp., Charlotte, NC
* Pure Aire, Charlotte, NC
* Posi Seal, Inc., N. Stonington, CT
* Union Carbide, Danbury, CT
* Evapco, Taneytown, MD
* Gorman-Rupp, Mansfield, OH
Additionally, several other companies were sued in connection with their activities providing Iraq with chemical or biological supplies: subsidiaries or branches of Fisher Controls International, Inc., St. Louis; Rhone-Poulenc, Inc., Princeton, NJ; Bechtel Group, Inc., San Francisco; and Lummus Crest, Inc., Bloomfield, NJ, which built one chemical plant in Iraq and, before the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, was building an ethylene facility. Ethylene is a necessary ingredient for thiodiglycol."
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As I said, I have been familiar with Alcolac for over ten years. Bechtel, another company on that list, has now crossed my radar screen. Common Dreams said that "Bechtel, the San Francisco engineering- construction giant, helped Iraq develop conventional weapons." Here's more detail about Bechtel's role:
Bechtel spokesman Jonathan Marshall said the engineering firm had entered into legitimate commercial and industrial contracts with Iraq, but he denied that it had anything to do with beefing up Iraq's military.Bechtel heads Boston's monumental cluster fuck, the Big Dig. I've lived in Massachusetts for about four years, having moved out of Maryland. I had not seen boneheaded construction operations until I got my first glimpse of the Big Dig. One reason the Big Dig has become a massive migraine for Massachusetts is due to Bechtel's failure "to perform basic work stipulated by the contract, including surveying the existing elevated Central Artery, leading to $350 million in cost overruns." CNN expanded on this report, saying that Bechtel had received $264 million more than its contract said it would be paid -- in many cases in order to fix its own mistakes."
The company signed a contract with Iraq in 1988 to manage the engineering and construction of a petrochemical plant near Baghdad, he said.
Some critics said Iraq may be planning to use the plant to develop chemical weapons.
Marshall said the company abandoned the project after Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990. He said Hussein's forces interned some Bechtel employees who were later released.
The project, he said, was "legal and sanctioned by the U.S. Department of Commerce."
The Commerce Department usually requires U.S. companies that plan to sell such products as high-performance computers or materials that could be used for developing weapons to secure a license, a spokesman said.
I visited Bechtel's web site. As I had expected, there is nary a peep about these cost overruns, nor is there mention of the petrochemical plant. Bechtel.com is one throbbing, self-congratulatory monkey spank.
Out of curiosity, I plugged "Iraq" on Bechtel's search engine. Lookie at what I found! Bechtel assisted in cleaning up Kuwait after the Gulf War.
Lemme get this straight. Bechtel oversaw the construction of a petrochemical plant in Iraq in 1988. This is the same Iraq whose own megolomaniac had been gassing his own people. This is the same Iraq that would soon attack Kuwait with supplies partially provided by the U. S., leading to Bechtel's clean-up mission in that oil-rich country. Bechtel spokesman Marshall glossed over the details regarding why the company left Iraq. On February 21, 1991, the Financial Times of London reported that Bechtel had been warned to leave Iraq by none other George Shultz, former Secretary of State under the Reagan Administration. He told Bechtel that "I really hit it very hard and I said something is going to go very wrong in Iraq and blow up and if Bechtel were there it would get blown up too. So I told them to get out."
Schultz was President of Bechtel before joining the Reagan administration. After he stepped down as Secretary of State, he returned to his former employer.
Bechtel had also revealed at the time that it was told by the Iraqi government to obtain payment for the work it had done on the petrochemicals project from the Atlanta, Georgia branch of Banca Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL).
BNL is the "Italian bank caught up in the scandal over $3bn (u1.5bn) of Iraqi loans made in 1988-89 by its Atlanta branch. Indictments of US bank employees and Iraqi officials implicated in the scandal were due to have been announced" in mid-February, 1991.
Bechtel has claimed no knowledge that Iraq had planned to use that plant's products for military purposes. Bechtel's statements marked "the first time a U.S. company has provided details of the direct involvement of Iraqi officials in the BNL Atlanta affair. Western intelligence officials say that a substantial portion of the $3bn of BNL money was used by Iraq to finance its development of unconventional weapons systems, including the Condor-II ballistic missile project and nuclear and chemical weapons projects."
Tom Flynn, a senior VP at Bechtel, has said "We were hired by the government of Iraq to be the project manager for an ethylene plant. Our client, the government of Iraq, told us we would be paid through letters of credit from the BNL Atlanta branch."
Didn't he know that ethylene oxide is easily converted into thyodiglycol, which is used to make mustard gas?
I guess not.
What goes around, comes around.
Bob Alvarez , an investigator at the U.S. Senate in the 1980s and later a senior policy adviser at the U.S. Department of Energy said (per the Common Dreams article): "The United States was looking to weaken Iran in any way they could, and this is why they entered into this relationship with Iraq and Saddam Hussein."
Yeah. Look where that got us -- into the same mess created when the Reagan administration had assisted the Afghan "freedom fighters" that twenty years became the "evildoers" that used our own planes against us.
Robert Sheer kept the whole mess in proper perspective.
Afghanistan... Iraq... The chickenhawks have once again come home to roost. And they're making out like bandits. Take note of this excerpt from Bechtel's Kuwait rescue mission:
The Bechtel-led team redrilled wells; rebuilt offshore export piers; laid more than 2,000 kilometers of pipe; and reconstructed storage tanks, administration buildings, warehouses, and tank farms. It also rebuilt 22 gathering centers, one of which was designed in Kuwait, fabricated in Texas, shipped to Kuwait as modules, and installed--all in just eight months.Hmmm. I wonder if Bechtel will be awarded a contract to build oil pipelines should the U. S. succeed in "liberating" Iraq from Saddam Hussein? And some prefer to think that this war is not about oil.
posted at 1:06 PM by Trish Wilson | Link
February 13, 2003
I had the pleasure of discovering Mo Paul at Bartcop. Those political cartoons have one of hell of a bite, plus they're so damned funny. Mo's rendition of Ann Coulter, which is included with my Mothman/Ann Coulter post, was a beaut. I hope everyone enjoys the cartoons as much as I have.
posted at 2:15 PM by Trish Wilson | Link
A cost of killing female fetuses in India.
[excerpt]Women and girls have not "simply disappeared." That's too inactive. That makes it sound like it "just happened." This attitude has lead to the abortions of female fetuses: "People say, you have two girl children, you have done some sins in your past life," said office manager Surinder Saini. "With a boy child, people say your generation will propagate, your older age will be safer. This is the concept of our society."
"All those years of prejudice against girls are finally coming back to haunt this society.
There is such an acute gender imbalance here that it is causing real social problems.
Young men are coming of marriageable age, only to discover there is no-one left for them to marry.
The young girls who would have been their brides never had the chance to be born.
The villages are full of frustrated bachelors. In Haryana, a quarter of the female population has simply disappeared."
The problem is, without girl children to grow up into fertile women, there won't be boy babies. This is the kind of short-sighted thinking that comes with misogyny.
posted at 1:20 PM by Trish Wilson | Link
Guernica's historic and artistic background has been described in an informative article on Slate.posted at 1:20 PM by Trish Wilson | Link
You've gotta be kidding.
Who did former New York state chief judge Sol Wachtler pay to write this puff piece in anticipation of his drive to be reinstated as judge? The Long Island Newsday link won't work, so if you want to find this piece of dreck, it's entitled "Trial By Fire: Sol Wachtler seeks to redeem his name and regain his place in the society he once served," by Stephanie McCrummen. Sunday, Jan. 26, 2003. I had to muck through several paragraphs of hand-wringing and pity-partying before the reported bothered to state what Wachtler had done.
This man had stalked his lover after she broke up with him. Wachtler pled guilty to a felony (he had threatened to kidnap his ex-lover's 14 year old daughter), paid more than $30,000 in restitution, and served time in federal prison.
After glossing over his crime, the reporter reverted to hand-wringing and pity-partying. Wachtler was described as "erudite, charming and, ... perfectly tailored." He spoke in a "regal baritone."
Enough, already. Wachtler, like many abusers, has chosen to blame his victim. He has never accepted responsibility for his actions.
The judge who convicted him had it right. She called his behavior "an expression of anger, intimidation and grotesque control." That's right, and he knows it. When he was chief judge, he had accepted the findings of the New York State Task Force on Women and the Courts (a. k. a. the New York State Gender Bias Report) and then appointed the New York State Judicial Committee on Women in the Courts to implement the recommendations.
Wachtler is the last person I'd want to appear in front of if I ever again needed a restraining order. He should not be reinstated.
posted at 1:20 PM by Trish Wilson | Link
Fighting Child Pornography
by Jennifer Lee for the New York Times
The national database [of all known child pornography photographs], which began processing photos on Jan. 24, has two main goals: to help trace the children in the photos, and to aid in prosecution by establishing that the photos are of identified victims who were under 18 when the pictures were taken.
The identification is in response to a Supreme Court ruling in April that overturned the Child Pornography Prevention Act. The court ruled that child pornography had to contain photos of actual children, not simply those that "appear to be children."
"The kid is out there and was victimized at one time," said Michael Netherland, the director of the child exploitation unit at the United States Customs Service, who oversaw Operation Hamlet, a yearlong investigation that has spread across four continents and resulted in the arrests of 30 people, most of them fathers who sexually abused their daughters. Eighteen of the arrests were in the United States.posted at 1:20 PM by Trish Wilson | Link
Here's one possible motive for instigating that orange alert. Bully anti-war protesters into silence.
posted at 1:20 PM by Trish Wilson | Link
Yo, Dubya! Your Orange Alert is wrong time, wrong bad guys.
[excerpt]It isn't Al-Qaida we have to worry about at the moment. Dubya, are you paying attention to this??? The moment the U. S. attacks Iraq, there will be retaliation -- from Hamas.
Q: Why was the threat level increased on Friday?
A: Law enforcement officials cited intelligence reports that al-Qaeda might be planning to attack "lightly secured targets" such as apartment buildings or hotels. Officials also warned of an attack with a "dirty bomb," which spreads radioactive material, or with a chemical or biological agent. They said an attack could be timed to coincide with the hajj, the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca. The climax of the three-to seven-day hajj was Monday.
posted at 1:20 PM by Trish Wilson | Link
This is a portion of a message that was sent to me via e-mail.
Below are phone and fax numbers to contact members of the United Nations in order to promote peace and disapprove of a U. S. war with Iraq. Preferably, send your message to the Ambassador himself, addressing him as "Your Excellency." In my opinion, it's best to fax because the U. N. will have a paper copy of your statements. Letters are very effective.
The most important people to contact on the Security Council are the five permanent members -- don't forget to tell your own country's Ambassador what you think (and send a copy to the Secretary of State) -- because they have the power of veto. Urge them to use it! Germany is also important, because they have made their disapproval clear, so although they don't have the veto, they need to be supported in their position.
Permanent Mission of the People's Republic of China to the United Nations: Ambassador Wang Yingfan, Permanent Representative
tel: 212-655-6191
fax: 212-634-7626
Permanent Mission of France to the United Nations: Ambassador Jean-David Levitte, Permanent Representative
tel: 212-702-4949
fax: 212-421-6889
Permanent Mission of the Russian Federation to the United Nations: Ambassador Sergey V. Lavrov
tel: 212-861-4900
fax: 212-628-0252
Permanent Mission of Germany to the United Nations : Ambassador Dr. Gunter Pleuger, Permanent Representative
tel: 212-940-0412
fax: 212-940-0402
Permanent Mission of the United States to the United Nations: Ambassador John D. Negroponte, Permanent Representative
tel: 212-415-4404
fax: 212-415-4443
Secretary of State Colin Powell
tel: 202-647-5291
fax: 202-647-2283
Spread the word. Thanks for your good work. It's so important.
posted at 1:20 PM by Trish Wilson | Link
Gee, guys, get your facts straight. Ann Coulter is neither the chupacabra nor is she a whack job that Florida would permit conceal a gun.
She's the Mothman.
Mothman (which bears no resemblance to events in the Richard Gere movie) is a 6 to 9-foot-tall, grey, winged creature with no real head. It has glowing red eyes. It's makes eardrum-piercing shrieks. Jeff Stoll described one case when "...it chased after a car full of people who stumbled upon it walking around in a field and in another case it hung around a familie's home, peering through the windows and scaring their dog."
Yup, that sounds like Ann Coulter.
Mothman was seen recently in Bristol, Connecticut. Coulter is from Connecticut. Hmmm....
See for yourself. Compare this witness's drawing of Mothman to Ann Coulter.
The resemblance is unmistakable.
Update: I found a photo of Coulter with a man who recently watched that Ring videotape. At the time this photo was taken, that man had less than a week to live.
All he had to do to save his life was copy the tape and show it to Coulter... Har har.
Update II: Here is a photo of what a lunar halo would look like to Yamamura Sadako if she could see outside. (she's the scary dead woman in the Japanese version of Ring.)
posted at 1:20 PM by Trish Wilson | Link
Hah hah!! I took the "How Republican Are You?" quiz that I read about at Body and Soul.
I am PURE EVIL!, but my friends already knew that.. 76 - 100% Republican. That's a laugh.
Quizilla doesn't know the difference between a Republican and an opportunistic, selfish little angel like me. I think what elevated me to Pure Evil status was that (1) I would have built an estate on my terrific tract of land with the beautiful view rather than turn it into a wildlife preserve, and (2) If I were a criminal attorney I'd take my white-collar criminal friend for all he was worth while defending his guilty ass. My job as defense attorney would be to provide the best defense I could, and I expect to be paid accordingly. The choice never said whether or not my friend was actually found guilty. The final outcome remains unknown.
Me, Republican? How's that joke about bipartisanship go? "I'll hug your elephant if you kiss my ass."
posted at 1:20 PM by Trish Wilson | Link
I'm still talking (through my teeth) to my service provider to find out why I cannot upload to my blog. I can access my ISP from anywhere but here. It isn't just me -- my s. o. can't connect, either. That little kangaroo is getting tired...
The problems began the day my service provider "troubleshot" its network, supposedly to improve performance. It's only sent a load of buckshot my way. Hopefully I will get this squared away by the end of the day. In the meantime, my s. o. is uploading content for me from his "secret, undisclosed location."posted at 1:20 PM by Trish Wilson | Link
