Deep Blade Journal

CBC outlet for aviation mongering

This morning we find ourselves somewhere in the middle of Ontario. At the motel last night, on the CBC National program the normally stayed Peter Mansbridge was electric with news of the UK “liquid explosives against airplanes” terror plot roll-up.

Red Alert! Red Alert! Women, dump your pocketbooks of your “$80 worth of make-up” before you can board. I wish I had the tape to do some screen grabs. The reporting was all terror, and no political analysis.

For such analysis, I will point to Kurt Nimmo, who I think has it just about right: Fake Terror Obfuscates Lebanon and Iraq Failures:

Finally, as attention has now shifted to Muslim bad guys (either imagined or a parade of patsies), Israel will likely increase the severity of its criminal behavior against the civilians of Lebanon and those of Gaza as well, as the American public will be navel gazing video footage of inconvenienced air travel passengers.

And don’t we have Congressional elections or something happening in the fall? I noted yesterday that NY Times quoted Vice President Cheney on the recent victory of Iraq withdrawl proponent Ned Lamont in the Connecticut Senate primary, “Vice President Dick Cheney, who went so far as to suggest that the ouster of Mr. Lieberman might encourage ‘al Qaeda types.”’

Today, Lieberman himself had this to say,

If we just pick up like Ned Lamont wants us to do, get out by a date certain, it will be taken as a tremendous victory by the same people who wanted to blow up these planes in this plot hatched in England.

The War Party sees the panic button as the path to squashing political interference from the American people.

On CNN Larry King Live…

ALAN DERSHOWITZ: “We can forgive you for killing our children but we can never forgive you for making us kill your children”

He attributes that to Golda Meir, but clearly he thinks that is the proper logic of Israel’s destruction of Lebanon with the inherited hyperpower of the United States and boat loads of the explosives the US rushes to supply.

Last fall, I heard Dershowitz say, “I just love targeted assassinations.”

And look here. This is the result when Israel tries “not to kill civilians”.

Zogby had it just about right in this little sideshow:

JAMES ZOGBY: …the point you were making was not dissimilar to the point that terrorists always make and that is that in a war there are no civilians. Everyone on the enemy side is culpable.

Dershowitz is a toxic man.

Just in time for our cross-country vacation

This local station is one of the cheapest around here. From this starting point, what happens if we have a hurricane?

Good time for BPs Alaska pipeline operation to be shut. We’re only going as far as Minnesota. The west coast could have the biggest problem, according to the story cited. Small comfort.

We’ll travel round-trip 3750 miles and put 150 gallons into the old Subaru, so our budget will push $500 for fuel this time. Oh for the days when we could do it on $200. But you see, that extra $300 is not stopping us from going. What would it take to cancel? Maybe a near doubling to $5 or $6/gal would stop us, maybe.

Greg Palast says today,

Why shut the pipe now? The timing of a sudden inspection and fix of a decade-long problem has a suspicious smell. A precipitous shutdown in mid-summer, in the middle of Middle East war(s), is guaranteed to raise prices and reap monster profits for BP. The price of crude jumped $2.22 a barrel on the shutdown news to over $76. How lucky for BP which sells four million barrels of oil a day. Had BP completed its inspection and repairs a couple years back — say, after Dan Lawn’s tenth warning — the oil market would have hardly noticed.

But $2 a barrel is just the beginning of BP’s shut-down bonus. The Alaskan oil was destined for the California market which now faces a supply crisis at the very height of the summer travel season. The big winner is ARCO petroleum, the largest retailer in the Golden State. ARCO is a 100%-owned subsidiary of … British Petroleum.

BP could have fixed the pipeline problem this past winter, after their latest corrosion-caused oil spill. But then ARCO would have lost the summertime supply-squeeze windfall.

Doubtless BP and friends are up to no good on this one. But I’m of two minds on Greg Palast’s reporting on oil and the multinational oil companies–especially with respect to Iraq. On one hand, he does some excellent muckraking, as shown above. On the other, he is dismissive of peak oil, and this is discrediting of his entire analysis, to my mind. He sees big oil in an epic struggle to maintain high prices by preventing the huge natural oil glut from crashing the market. But, as Richard Heinberg pointed out in a long letter concerning Palast’s “potshot” at peak oil in Armed Madhouse, Palast has a lot of his facts wrong.

Sure, monopoly practice is strongly extant. However, if natural, geological limiting conditions were not beginning to be felt, it would be much more difficult for oil interests to engage in the manipulations we are seeing.

Patrick Cockburn: Baghdad is dying

…Into this maelstrom, President George Bush is ordering 4,000 extra American troops in a bid to control the civil war in Baghdad (absurdly, Bush and Tony Blair reject the phrase “civil war” despite the all-too-visible sectarian carnage). Many embattled Sunni districts will welcome the Americans, but the majority in Baghdad are Shia and they already see the US as playing sectarian politics in order to shore up imperial control.

“The Americans are not honest brokers,” one former minister told me. “They switch their support between the Shia, Sunni and Kurds in order to serve their own interests.” Already, US forces are attacking offices and arresting officials of the main Shia militia the Mehdi Army, followers of the radical nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. The US may be joining, not ending, the civil war….

Recording available at peacecast.us.

Democrats just as committed to war as Republicans

And that goes for Connecticut Democratic US Senate primary challenger Ned Lamont every bit as much as it does for the fifth-column, pro-Bush Democratic incumbent Joe Lieberman.

I wrote about the letter signed by Democratic senators opposing Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s statements condemning the Israeli attack on Lebanon here.

After that post, it came out that DNC Chair Howard Dean in Palm Beach had called Malaki an “anti-Semite”. This Monday article by Stanley Rogouski on Counterpunch is a particularly good read on the pro-war nature of the Democratic Party:

Let’s look at what Maliki actually said.

“The Israeli attacks and air strikes are completely destroying Lebanon’s infrastructure. I condemn these aggressions and call on the Arab League foreign ministers’ meeting in Cairo to take quick action to stop these aggressions. We call on the world to take quick stands to stop the Israeli aggression.”

What’s striking about this statement is not that it’s anti-Semitic but that it’s decidedly not anti-Semitic. If this is the most anti-Semitic thing that the Democratic Party could dig up from the Arab world than the problem of “anti-Semitism” we here about so much in the Middle East is a lie. Indeed, for an Islamic theocrat and Shiite politician, Maliki sounds an awful lot like a secular leftist politician in Western Europe, and that was what so angered Howard Dean, Hillary Clinton, Harry Reid and Dick Durbin. Any of them could have easily gone to the Memri (an organization set up by Israeli intelligence to publish the most inflammatory anti-Semitic and anti-American statements coming out of the Arab world) website and picked out something from the platform of the Dawa party about the status of women or gays, or about the Sunni minority in Iraq that would make your hair stand on end. So why pick out a rare statement by an Arab politician which denounces the Israeli government but says nothing about Jews or Zionism or anything else we’d find offensive?

Rouguski writes this about Ned Lamont and the Israeli war on Lebanon:

Ned Lamont is safely pro-Israel. The statement on his website leaves no room for doubt. “At this critical time in the Middle East,” Lamont says. “I believe that when Israel’s security is threatened, the United States must unambiguously stand with our ally to be sure that it is safe and secure. On this principle, Americans are united.” But the Democratic party rank and file that’s behind Lamont’s campaign, the grassroots, or “netroots” as they are popularly known, is not. In fact, they’re exploding with anti-Israel sentiment. For the first time in recent memory, the American people are not united and don’t stand unambiguously with Israel.

Curious. On the netroots point, I’m not sure who Rouguski is talking about. As far as I can tell, Atrios, the biggest major-blogger Lamont supporter, has had very little to say about Lamont’s strong pro-war stance with respect to Israel.

Update: I’d actually found this before I posted, but I forgot to mention… Billmon had a great piece on the “War Party” a couple of days ago. This is an excellent critique of the true lack of any meaningful anti-war positions to be found amongst Democrats:

But there’s one big problem with all this hyperventilating: It wildly exaggerates the anti-war fevor that Ned Lamont supposedly represents. Oh I know Ned says he’s anti-war, but he only means the war in Iraq. The war in Lebanon, on the other hand, is just fine by him. And he’s already pledged he’ll be just as staunch a friend of Israel and the Israel lobby in this war as Holy Joe ever was or ever could be. So bombs away.

Thanks, Billmon.

Thanks, Danny.

Imagine a month of 9/11s

CNN: “’This is Lebanon’s umbilical cord’”

Then imagine that the terrorist force “smashes bridges, roads into New York Beirut”. All the routes that rescue and aid workers need to help the sick and wounded and re-supply the population are cut off.

The Angry Arab says: “Israel loves to kill poor people.”

Looks like they’re going to do a lot of that before this is over.

Lunkers

Yellow crookneck summer squash (Cucurbita spp.)

We’ve been pulling up these things for a couple of weeks now. They’ve pretty much taken over the whole place (spread out much, much bigger now than here).

They’re great for the grill–slice & wrap in foil with some cut onions.

Intentional accidents

Following its ususal practice (adopted by the US in Iraq), Israel ignores the Geneva Conventions and targets ambulances. See Dahr Jamail for details about this photo.

According to Human Rights Watch (via Angry Arab), a new report, Fatal Strikes, Israel’s Indiscriminate Attacks Against Civilians in Lebanon,

documents serious violations of international humanitarian law (the laws of war) by Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in Lebanon between July 12 and July 27, 2006, as well as the July 30 attack in Qana. During this period, the IDF killed an estimated 400 people, the vast majority of them civilians, and that number climbed to over 500 by the time this report went to print. The Israeli government claims it is taking all possible measures to minimize civilian harm, but the cases documented here reveal a systematic failure by the IDF to distinguish between combatants and civilians.

Since the start of the conflict, Israeli forces have consistently launched artillery and air attacks with limited or dubious military gain but excessive civilian cost. In dozens of attacks, Israeli forces struck an area with no apparent military target. In some cases, the timing and intensity of the attack, the absence of a military target, as well as return strikes on rescuers, suggest that Israeli forces deliberately targeted civilians.

Perhap Gwynne Dyer should peruse this information, when pondering that awful-looking “40:1 kill ratio”.