SpaceKitty Wanderings

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Another fun project I put together a 5-minute collage of the voices of "Making Contact." Essentially, it's a good community radio plug:

Media, Democracy, Peace & Justice

In general, check out Making Contact, we've been putting out some hard hitting shows lately.
4:24:01 PM  comment []    

The flight from Jordan feels all too normal[sigma]until we arrive over Baghdad International Airport. The nose of the plane dips, the left wing drops and the downward spiral begins-dropping us 4,000 feet per minute into the inferno that is occupied Iraq.

Rather than an in-flight magazine, a lonely card is available to read in the seat pocket. It begins with:

[base "]For those of you who have not traveled with us before, you need to be aware that, for your security and safety, and not for your comfort, we do a spiral decent into Baghdad.
This is carried out to avoid any risk from anti-aircraft missiles or small arms fire[sigma][per thou]

Doctors in Fallujah are reporting there are patients in the hospital there who were forced out by the Americans,[per thou] said Mehdi Abdulla, a 33 year-old ambulance driver at a hospital in Baghdad, [base "]Some doctors there told me they had a major operation going, but the soldiers took the doctors away and left the patient to die.[per thou] He looks at the ground, then away to the distance.

1:49:49 PM  comment []    

"It doesn't matter that Bush scares the hell out of me," Hersh answered. "What matters is that he scares the hell out of a lot of very important people in Washington who can't speak out, in the military, in the intelligence community. They know in ways that none of us know, the incredible gap between what is and what [Bush] thinks."

With that, he was off and running. One could safely say that for the next hour, Hersh proceeded to scare the hell out of most of the audience by detailing the gaps between what they knew and what he hears is actually going on in Iraq. ...

"I've been doing an alternate history of the war, from inside, because people, right after 9/11, because people inside - and there are a lot of good people inside - are scared, as scared as anybody watching this tonight I think should be, because [Bush], if he's re-elected, has only one thing to do, he's going to bomb the hell out of that place. He's been bombing the hell of that place - and here's what really irritates me again, about the press - since he set up this Potemkin Village government with Allawi on June 28 - the bombing, the daily bombing rates inside Iraq, have gone up exponentially. There's no public accounting of how many missions are flown, how much ordinance is dropped, we have no accounting and no demand to know. The only sense you get is we're basically in a full-scale air war against invisible people that we can't find, that we have no intelligence about, so we bomb what we can see."

And yet - despite the more than 1,000 deaths of U.S. soldiers and the horrific number of Iraqi casualties - Bush continues to believe we are doing the right thing, according to Hersh. "He thinks he's wearing the white hat," he said, adding that is what makes this administration different from previous ones whose hypocrisy Hersh has exposed. Bush and the neocons "are not hypocrites."

Enter the Utopians

"I think it's real simple to say [Bush] is a liar. But that would also suggest there was a reality that he understood," explained Hersh. "I'm serious. It is funny in sort of a sick, black humor sort of way, but the real serious problem is, he believes what he's doing." In effect, Bush, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz,and the other neocons are "idealists, you can call them utopians." As Hersh understands them, they really believe that the solution to global terrorism began with invading Baghdad and will end only with the transformation of the last unfriendly government in the Middle East into a democracy.

"No amount of body bags is going to dissuade [Bush]," said Hersh, despite the fact that Hersh's sources say the war in Iraq is "not winnable. It's over." As for Kerry's war plans, Hersh said he wished he could tell him to stop talking as if the senator's plan for Iraq could somehow still eke out a victory there. "This is a disaster that's been going on. It's a civil war, the insurgency. There is no 'win'anymore in this war," he argued. "As somebody said, 'We're playing chess, they're playing Go.'" ...

What is worse, he said impatiently, was that because U.S. forces had "privatized" so many of Iraq's institutions, it had decimated the job market in the country. "This is why Bush can talk about 100,000 people wanting to go work in the police or in the army. It's because there's nothing else for them to do. They're willing to stand in line to get bombed because they want to take care of their family," he said.

Hersh has been accused many times of sympathizing with "the enemy," and told that his
publicizing of incidents like the My Lai massacre and the Abu Ghraib torture only fan the flames of anti-American sentiment around the world. He related that he's been asked if he feels guilty about the beheadings of two Americans who were wearing uniforms like those worn at Abu Ghraib. "As if the Iraqis needed me to tell them what's going on in that prison!" he responded. He also repeated a question often posed to him: "Was it immoral to go in ... [T]he idea that Saddam was a torturer and a killer, doesn't that lend a patina of morality to going after him?" The answer to that one, he said unsmilingly, "is of course, Saddam tortured and killed his people. And now we're doing it."

1:14:43 PM  comment []