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Wednesday, August 27, 2008 |
Travels in the Scriptorium. A demented man, Mr. Blank, a war criminal on trial, tries to remember. Like us.
"The old man sits on the edge of the narrow bed, palms spread out on his knees, head down, staring at the floor. He has no idea that a camera is planted in the ceiling directly above him.
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The Confederation... The Con-fed-e-ra-tion... It's all very simple, isn't it? Just another name for America. Not the United States as we know it, but a country that has evolved in another way, that has another history. But all the trees, all the mountains, and all the prairies of that country stand exactly where they do in ours. The rivers and oceans are identical. Men walk on two legs, see with two eyes, and touch with two hands. They think double thoughts and speak out of both sides of their mouths at once.
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The Confederation is a fragile, newly formed state composed of previously independent colonies and principalities, and in order to hold this tenuous union together, what better way to unite the people than to invent a common enemy and start a war? In this case, they've chosen the Primitives. Land is a double agent who's been sent into the Territories to stir up rebellion among the tribes there. Not so different from what we did to the Indians after the Civil War. Get the natives riled up and then slaughter them.
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What if the rumor of an insurrection is no more than a blind to cover up a far more sinister undertaking: a quiet slaughter of the Primitives that would enable the government to open their territory to white settlement, to expand the reach of the Confederation all the way to the shores of the western ocean?
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Yes, Land was sent into the Territories as a double agent, with instructions to stir up the Djinn into invading the western provinces, which would unleash the war the government so desperately wants. But Land fails in his mission. A year goes by, and when nothing happens after all that time, the men in power conclude that Land has betrayed them, that for one reason or another his conscience has gotten the better of him and he's made peace with the Djinn. So they cook up a new plan and send a second army in the Territories. Not from Ultima, but from another garrison several hundred miles to the north, and this contingent is much larger than the first, at least ten times larger, and with a thousand troops against a hundred, Land and his ragtag bunch of idealists don't have a chance. Yes, you heard me correctly. The Confederation sends in a second army to wipe out the first army. All in secret, of course, and if a man such as Graf should be sent out to look for Land, he would naturally conclude that the Djinn are responsible for that pile of stinking, mutilated corpses. At this point, Graf becomes the key figure in the operation. Without knowing it, he's the person who's going to get the war started. How? By being allowed to write his story in that crummy little cell in Ultima.
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That's the crucial point: a vivid, eyewitness account of what happened, with all the blame put on the Djinn.
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When is this nonsense going to end?
It will never end. For Mr. Blank is one of us now, and struggle though he might to understand his predicament, he will always be lost. I believe I speak for all his charges when I say he is getting what he deserves - no more, no less. Not as a form of punishment, but as an act of supreme justice and compassion."
Telegraph: "The letter began, 'My fellow Americans, I have recently been told that I am one of the millions of Americans who will be afflicted with Alzheimer's Disease'. Ronald Reagan then went on to explain why he and his wife Nancy had chosen to go public.
The letter ended, in a style befitting the curtain call of a veteran of Hollywood B-movies, with the words, 'I now begin the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life'.
This week, we learned that Reagan's political soulmate, Margaret Thatcher, has embarked on her own journey into the sunset with confirmation of her battle with dementia."
2:10:02 PM 
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THE JUSTICE ROBERT H. JACKSON CONFERENCE:
PLANNING FOR THE PROSECUTION OF HIGH LEVEL AMERICAN WAR CRIMINALS
September 13 - 14, 2008
Andover, Massachusetts
Registration details available here.
"The common sense of mankind demands that law shall not stop with the
punishment of petty crimes by little people. It must also reach men who
possess themselves of great power and make deliberate and concerted use of
it to set in motion evils which leave no home in the world untouched."
EUObserver: "Poland has launched an internal probe into old allegations that it hosted a secret prison used by the CIA to move terrorist suspects around the world.
Revelations about the CIA's practice of snatching and torturing terrorist suspects illegally but with the consent of friendly governments round the world first broke in 2005.
A special European Parliament committee, in which Mr Pinior took part, found in February 2007 that 14 EU states including Poland allowed thousands of suspect US flights.
A report by the Council of Europe in Strasbourg in June 2007 said Poland and Romania housed CIA jails between 2003 and 2005, but failed to provide hard evidence.
Also in June, the New York Times quoted a CIA source saying the 'most important' of its 'black sites' in the years after 9/11 was in Szymany, some 160km north of Warsaw."
RawStory: "The CIA operated an interrogation and short-term detention facility for suspected terrorists within a Polish intelligence training school with the explicit approval of British and US authorities, according to British and Polish intelligence officials familiar with the arrangements.
Intelligence officials identify the site as a component of a Polish intelligence training school outside the northern Polish village of Stare Kiejkuty. While previously suspected, the facility has never been conclusively identified as being part of the CIA's secret rendition and detention program."
News: "Russian investigators say they have proof Georgian forces committed genocide in their attack on the rebel region of South Ossetia this month.
'It has been fully established that between August 7 and 12, Georgia's armed forces invaded the territory of the unrecognised republic with the aim of fully annihilating the Ossetian ethnic group living in South Ossetia,' Investigative Committee head Alexander Bastrykin told state newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta.
'They spared no one. We found a woman who had been killed with a shot to the head. She was eight months' pregnant. Her unborn child died too,' he said."
11:08:40 AM
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Iranmania: "A recent report suggests that the US and Israel had plans to use Georgia as a launchpad for aerial strikes on Iranian nuclear sites, PressTV reported.
Columnist Ian Brockwell says the US is interested in Georgia because it borders Russia, has a pipeline that is intended to transfer oil to Israel, and most importantly is a country that can be used in an attack against Iran.
According to his article in the American Chronicle, the Bush Administration has been looking for an excuse to attack the Islamic Republic so that it can take possession of the country's oil and give Israel a share in Iranian crude by transferring it through Georgia."
10:56:21 AM
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No, we can't.
Telegraph: "A flagship database intended to protect every child in the country will be used by police to hunt for evidence of crime in a shocking extension of its original purpose.
Phil Booth, national co-ordinator for the civil liberties campaign group No2ID, added: 'Parents should know that this is not for the protection of their children, it could be used to prosecute them. This is a serious step on from what little has been told to the public.'"
10:51:10 AM
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Guardian: "In his book Late Victorian Holocausts, Mike Davis tells the story of the famines that sucked the guts out of India in the 1870s. The hunger began when a drought, caused by El Niño, killed the crops on the Deccan plateau. As starvation bit, the viceroy, Lord Lytton, oversaw the export to England of a record 6.4m hundredweight of wheat. While Lytton lived in imperial splendour and commissioned, among other extravagances, 'the most colossal and expensive meal in world history', between 12 million and 29 million people died. Only Stalin manufactured a comparable hunger.
Now a new Lord Lytton is seeking to engineer another brutal food grab. As Tony Blair's favoured courtier, Peter Mandelson often created the impression that he would do anything to please his master. Today he is the European trade commissioner. From his sumptuous offices in Brussels and Strasbourg, he hopes to impose a treaty that will permit Europe to snatch food from the mouths of some of the world's poorest people.
Seventy per cent of the protein eaten by the people of Senegal comes from fish. Traditionally cheaper than other animal products, it sustains a population that ranks close to the bottom of the human development index. One in six of the working population is employed in the fishing industry; about two-thirds of these workers are women. Over the past three decades, their means of subsistence has started to collapse as other nations have plundered Senegal's stocks.
The EU has two big fish problems. One is that, partly as a result of its failure to manage them properly, its own fisheries can no longer meet European demand. The other is that its governments won't confront their fishing lobbies and decommission all the surplus boats. The EU has tried to solve both problems by sending its fishermen to west Africa. Since 1979 it has struck agreements with the government of Senegal, granting our fleets access to its waters. As a result, Senegal's marine ecosystem has started to go the same way as ours. Between 1994 and 2005, the weight of fish taken from the country's waters fell from 95,000 tonnes to 45,000 tonnes. Muscled out by European trawlers, the indigenous fishery is crumpling: the number of boats run by local people has fallen by 48% since 1997.
In a recent report on this pillage, ActionAid shows that fishing families that once ate three times a day are now eating only once or twice. As the price of fish rises, their customers also go hungry. The same thing has happened in all the west African countries with which the EU has maintained fisheries agreements. In return for wretched amounts of foreign exchange, their primary source of protein has been looted.
Mandelson's office is trying to negotiate economic partnership agreements with African countries. They were supposed to have been concluded by the end of last year, but many countries, including Senegal, have refused to sign. The agreements insist that European companies have the right both to establish themselves freely on African soil, and to receive national treatment. This means that the host country is not allowed to discriminate between its own businesses and European companies. Senegal would be forbidden to ensure that its fish are used to sustain its own industry and to feed its own people. The dodges used by European trawlers would be legalised."
Chapter 1 of Late Victorian Holocausts.
10:46:10 AM
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© Copyright 2008.
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