SECTION NINE
sm
COLUMN
SEVENTY-EIGHT,
NOVEMBER
1, 2002
(Copyright © 2002 The Blacklisted Journalist)
1.
March on Washington October 26
STOP THE WAR ON
IRAQ BEFORE IT STARTS!
SATURDAY,
OCTOBER 26, 2002
NATIONAL MARCH
ON WASHINGTON DC with a joint action in San Francisco
The Bush
administration is rushing towards war. The time to act is now. The people of the
United States can stop this madness.
World public
opinion and almost every government opposes Bush's planned war of aggression.
But it will take a mass peoples' movement--in the streets, workplaces,
communities, campuses and high schools--to stop the coming war.
On Saturday,
October 26, 2002 -- the first anniversary of the signing of the so-called
Patriot Act -- anti-war, civil rights, labor, student and other forces are
joining together to launch a massive international mobilization in opposition to
a new war against the people of Iraq. Mass marches and rallies will be held in
Washington DC and San Francisco in the U.S., and in many other countries.
As the Bush
administration violates international law it has been systematically engaged in
a campaign of division and repression in the United States including a wholesale
assault on the Bill of Rights, institutionalization of racial profiling, and
aggregation of near dictatorial powers to the Executive branch.
In articulating
the so-called doctrine of preemptive war, the Bush administration is preparing
to violate all existing international law and the UN charter, which forbids
countries to carry out war except in the case of self-defense. Preemption is
merely a slogan to justify a foreign policy of armed aggression and military
adventure.
Bush, Cheney,
Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and company are planning to send tens of thousands of young
GIs to kill and be killed in another war for Big Oil. Simultaneously, the Bush
Administration is diverting billions of dollars to feed military conquest and
away from jobs, education, healthcare, childcare and housing.
The so-called
debate that is opening now to public view from within the political
establishment presents a necessity for all anti-war forces to become a major
factor in generating an authentic opposition to U.S. war plans in the Middle
East. The October 26 National March in Washington DC and joint action in San
Francisco come just one week before midterm Congressional elections.
There won't be
a real national debate on a planned invasion of Iraq until the people are in the
streets. We can't leave it to the military establishment to decide when and how
they will go to war and to define the debate. We must tell Bush and his
corporate and Big Oil patrons that we will not allow this to happen.
This war can be
stopped. Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz and company can be stopped. But the
essential element must be the mobilization of a massive new anti-war movement in
the streets. We call for civilians and soldiers alike to exercise their
political right to speak out against an illegal war. On October 26, there will
be a National March in Washington DC, a West Coast march in San Francisco, and
protests around the world. ##
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2.
Denounce the Pacifists
"Why, of
course the people don't want war ... But after all, it is the leaders of the
country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the
people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a
parliament, or a communist dictatorship...Voice or no voice, the people can
always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to
do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack
of patriotism and exposing the country to danger."
- Hermann Goering, Nazi leader, at the Nuremberg Trials after World
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3.
The Mother of all Weapons
Subject: The
Mother of all Weapons of Mass Destruction
How did Iraq
get its weapons? We sold them.
THE US and
Britain sold Saddam Hussein the technology and materials Iraq needed to develop
nuclear, chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction.
Reports by the
US Senate's committee on banking, housing and urban affairs---which oversees
American exports policy---reveal that the US, under the successive
administrations of Ronald Reagan and papa George Bush, sold materials including
anthrax, VX nerve gas, West Nile fever germs and botulism to Iraq right up until
March 1992, as well as germs similar to tuberculosis and pneumonia. Other
bacteria sold included brucella melitensis, which damages major organs, and
clostridium perfringens, which causes gas gangrene.
Classified US
Defence Department documents also seen by the Sunday Herald show that
Britain sold Iraq the drug pralidoxine, an antidote to nerve gas, in March
The Senate
committee's reports on US Chemical and Biological Warfare-Related Dual-Use
Exports to Iraq, undertaken in 1992 in the wake of the Gulf war, give the
date and destination of all US exports. The reports show, for example, that on
May 2, 1986, two batches of bacillus anthracis---the micro-organism that causes
anthrax---were shipped to the Iraqi Ministry of Higher Education, along with two
batches of the bacterium clostridium botulinum, the agent that causes deadly
botulism poisoning.
The shipments
to Iraq went on even after Saddam Hussein ordered the gassing of the Kurdish
town of Halabja, in which at least 5000 men, women and children died. The
atrocity, which shocked the world, took place in March 1988, but a month later
the components and materials of weapons of mass destruction were continuing to
arrive in Baghdad. . .
By Neil Mackay
and Felicity Arbuthnot
Sunday Herald
(Scotland)
##
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4.
Advance to the Rear
At the height
of the summer, as talk of invading Iraq built in Washington like a dark,
billowing storm, the US armed forces staged a rehearsal using over 13,000
troops, countless computers and $250m. Officially, America won and a rogue state
was liberated from an evil dictator.
What really
happened is quite another story, one that has set alarm bells ringing throughout
America's defence establishment and raised questions over the US military's
readiness for an Iraqi invasion. In fact, this war game was won by Saddam
Hussein, or at least by the retired marine playing the Iraqi dictator's part,
Lieutenant General Paul Van Riper.
In the first
few days of the exercise, using surprise and unorthodox tactics, the wily
64-year-old Vietnam veteran sank most of the US expeditionary fleet in the
Persian Gulf, bringing the US assault to a halt.
What happened
next will be familiar to anyone who ever played soldiers in the playground.
Faced with an abrupt and embarrassing end to the most expensive and
sophisticated military exercise in US history, the Pentagon top brass simply
pretended the whole thing had not happened. They ordered their dead troops back
to life and "refloated" the sunken fleet. Then they instructed the
enemy forces to look the other way as their marines performed amphibious
landings. Eventually, Van Riper got so fed up with all this cheating that he
refused to play any more. Instead, he sat on the sidelines making abrasive
remarks until the three-week war game---grandiosely entitled Millennium
Challenge---staggered to a star-spangled conclusion on August 15, with a US
"victory".
Friday
September 6, 2002
The Guardian
##
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5.
The Big Picture
The Agitprop of
Mike Alewitz.
By Edward
Ericson, Jr.
Published
09/19/02
Hartford
Advocate
Mike Alewitz is
an iconoclast, fiercely independent from both the commercial art world and the
sectarian leftist factions that have helped shape his thinking and his art
during three decades as an artist and activist.
Today, Alewitz
teaches mural painting at Central Connecticut State University, while spending
his summers, often abroad, creating politically charged murals that seem as much
designed to court controversy as to illuminate past and present social
struggles.
This summer,
for example, Alewitz painted in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He's also painted in
Chernobyl, Nicaragua and Iraq. In 2000 Alewitz lost a wall he had been given to
paint after he refused to remove a musket from the hands of abolitionist Harriet
Tubman. "I don't want to make Harriet Tubman a meaningless icon that hangs
in McDonald's to try to get you to buy hamburgers," Alewitz said at the
time. "She was a freedom fighter---and that is how she should be
painted."
He painted
Tubman on a huge canvas instead, and it has toured the country.
A detailed and
inspiring portrait of the artist, his art, and the social and political movement
from which it springs, Insurgent Images: The Agitprop
It's probably
destined to serve all these roles. But the book is for "artists, activists,
people interested in doing political art," Alewitz says.
After the
forward by actor Martin Sheen, Insurgent Images is organized into six
chapters, including a long introduction by author Paul Buhle, a
The
introduction reads like a graduate level primer on labor history, packed with
offhand references to events, themes and personalities that are familiar mainly
to those already grounded in labor and progressive politics. But the succeeding
chapters stew much of the history---at least that which inspired Alewitz to his
vocation---into spicy chunks. And the inspired reader with an Internet
connection can quickly fill in the blank spaces.
Most of
Alewitz's works are huge---20 feet tall and much wider than that. He has
developed a collaborative system in which workers---often those on strike---are
brought in to help design and paint the murals. The process builds solidarity
and gets the work done faster, and Alewitz always hopes the skills he imparts
carry on to new projects after he leaves. More is always needed as most of the
old murals are destroyed within a few years of their creation.
In a way
Alewitz's surviving murals have been rendered invisible---nearly so--- by the
prevailing media orthodoxy. News about workers has for decades been subsumed by
stock market listings, musings by economists, and lately, accounting debauchery
and bankruptcy scandal. Alewitz cuts against the grain, always lionizing the
everyday employees---the chemical and atomic workers, teamsters, striking
meat-packers and even the non-unionized, scorned immigrant legions who work
"temporary" jobs.
In Temporary
Sanity, Alewitz's tribute to those forgotten workers in New
As is often the
case, Alewitz had trouble finding a wall for this mural. The city refused, area
churches did likewise. The Labor Education Center at Rutgers University refused.
He's always
looking for a new wall.
"The
problem is it's just not part of labor culture in the U.S. the way it is in
other countries," he says. "In Latin America you don't have to explain
to people why you need a mural. Here you do. That's because in the 1950s in
America artists were driven away from the movement."
Alewitz's noble
life's work is to bring them back. ##
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6.
Chickenhawks
"A
chickenhawk [describes] public persons -- generally male " who (1) tend to
advocate, or are fervent supporters of those who advocate, military solutions to
political problems, and who have personally (2) declined to take advantage of a
significant opportunity to serve in uniform during wartime."
--The New
WASHINGTON --
We are being dragged toward war with Iraq by such chickenhawks. The loudest
voices demanding war are those of men who once upon a time quietly skipped out
on the fun in Vietnam.
Men like Dick
Cheney, who famously explained, "I had other priorities in the '60s than
military service."
Cheney received
draft deferments as a college student until he got married in 1964; marriage
removed him from the draft. But the next year, the government announced married
men would be drafted, unless they were also fathers. Nine months and two days
after that announcement, the Cheneys had their first child.
A list of
chickenhawks---including many who are eager for war with Iraq, yet who had
"other priorities" when Vietnam came a-calling---has been compiled by
Steven Fowle, a Vietnam veteran who edits The New Hampshire Gazette.
(It's at http://www.nhgazette.com/chickenhawks.html
).
It starts with
the president himself. George W. Bush waited out the war from a post with light
duties in the Texas Air National Guard. And, apparently, even that cushy deal
was too onerous: There's an unexplained one-year gap, from May 1972 to May 1973,
in Bush's service record. That year he was supposed to have reported for duty at
the Alabama Air National Guard, but apparently never showed. Bush's reply is
that he was honorably discharged and is proud of his service---but also that he
can't recall the specifics.
By Matt Bivens
Monday, Sep. 2,
2002. Page 8 ##
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7.
Dershowitz Sings Torture's Praises
By James
Bamford
Sunday,
September 8, 2002; Washington Post
Excerpt:
As the United
States fights its holy war against the Muslim hordes, new ways must be found to
deal with nonbelievers and criminal suspects back home. If celebrity lawyer Alan
M. Dershowitz could have his way, those methods would include such Draconian
tactics as "torture warrants," collective punishment and national ID
cards. "I am willing to think the unthinkable and move beyond any kind of
conventional wisdom," he admits in Why Terrorism Works: Understanding
the Threat, Responding to the Challenge (Yale Univ., $24.95).
Dershowitz, who
has long championed the cause of Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard, spends much of
this convoluted book arguing that Ariel Sharon's hard-line approach to the
Palestinians has not been hard enough. The sometime civil libertarian also
chastises those who seek to understand the "root causes" of the Middle
East violence, arguing that it merely plays into the hands of the terrorists. On
one of his many visits to Israel, Dershowitz analyzed the Israeli government's
program of collective punishment against the Palestinians--- demolishing the
homes of innocent relatives of those involved in suicide bombing. It is a
practice outlawed under international law. Nevertheless, Dershowitz decided to
recommend a more effective policy---leveling the buildings in entire villages.
"The next time the terrorists attack," he said, "the village's
residents would be given twenty-four hours to leave, and then Israeli troops
would bulldoze the houses."
Dershowitz also
came up with the idea of torture while on a visit to Israel. He discovered that
the Israeli government regularly used the technique, also long outlawed under
international statutes, against Palestinians in custody and thought it might be
useful in the United States. After all, he argues, law enforcement does it
anyway, so why not legalize it and allow judges to issue "torture
warrants"? "I think there would be less torture with a warrant
requirement than without one," he argues. Thus if a person still refuses to
talk, or tell where a bomb is hidden, after the "torture warrant" has
been issued, says Dershowitz, "he would be subjected to judicially
monitored physical measures designed to cause excruciating pain without leaving
any lasting damage." One form of torture recommended by Dershowitz---"the
sterilized needle being shoved under the fingernails"---is chillingly
Nazi-like. ##
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8.
Union Democracy
By Kirstin
Downey Grimsley
Washington Post
Staff Writer
Friday,
September 13, 2002
Top corporate
executives aren't the only officials living high.
More than two
dozen officials of the Washington-based International Brotherhood of Teamsters
earned more than $200,000 last year, and 225 earned more than $100,000,
according to a report by a union dissident group. Some officials received
multiple salaries from different locals, the group said.
Teamsters
President James P. Hoffa was paid $236,725 in salary and $272,096 in total
compensation, said Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU). Frank Wsol, head of
Local 710 in Chicago, received $298,005 in total compensation.
More than 100
Teamster bosses got multiple salaries by simultaneously holding posts in
different parts of the organization. Eleven received four separate salaries,
while 53 received three or more.
"This is a
union, not Enron or General Motors," said Ken Paff, national organizer for
TDU, which is based in Detroit. "It's a movement of working people. This
shouldn't be a road to the upper classes, or even to the country clubs. We
should pay our officers well, but not likeCEOs. This distorts our values and
resources."
Many of the
individual salaries reported by the TDU are lower than the group found in past
surveys. In the mid-1980s, for example, then-president Jackie Presser raked in
$500,000 annually by serving in multiple posts, the dissident group said.
##
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9.
They Feel Your Pain
The 60,000
delegates (from 182 countries) to the recent World Summit on Sustainable
Development in Johannesburg, South Africa, luxuriated not only in four-and
five-star accommodations but an elegant food and drink layout, including tons of
lobster, oysters, filet mignon, salmon, caviar, pate de
Daily Telegraph (London), 8-31-02 ##
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10.
Patriotism Run Amok
US media cowed
by patriotic fever, says CBS star
Network news
veteran admits national mood caused him to shrink from tough questions on war in
Afghanistan
Matthew Engel
in Washington
Friday May 17,
2002
The Guardian, UK
Dan Rather, the
star news anchor for the US television network CBS, said last night that
"patriotism run amok" was in danger of trampling the freedom of
American journalists to ask tough questions. And he admitted that he had shrunk
from taking on the Bush administration over the war on terrorism. In the weeks
after September 11 Rather wore a Stars and Stripes pin in his lapel during his
evening news show in an apparent display of total solidarity with the American
cause. However, in an interview with BBC's Newsnight, he graphically
described the pressures to conform that built up after the attacks on the World
Trade Centre and the Pentagon. ##
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MIKE ALEWITZ
alewitzm@ccsu.edu
Department of
Art
Central Connecticut State University
New Britain, CT 06050
Phone: (860)832-2359 ##
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