Saturday, September 8, 2007

Arianna Huffington: Bin Laden Slams Dems, Praises Chomsky, and Promises Lower Taxes. George Bush vowed to capture Osama bin Laden - dead or alive. But then he turned his attention to the real object of his desire, Iraq, leaving the perpetrator of 9/11 on the loose, free to offer kudos to Noam Chomsky and Michael Scheuer's Imperial Hubris, and to fret over global warming and U.S. mortgage rates. And, by the look of things, free to stock up on Grecian Formula. Wherever bin Laden is, they apparently have CSPAN. In his latest tape, he seems very up on U.S. politics, castigating Democrats for failing to fight hard enough to end the war. "You elected the Democratic Party for this purpose," he says to U.S. voters, "but the Democrats haven't made a move worth mentioning. On the contrary, they continue to agree to the spending of tens of billions to continue the killing and war there." America's Most Wanted Terrorist also appears to have studied the GOP playbook on attracting converts. "I invite you to embrace Islam," he says at the end of his new diatribe. "There are no taxes in Islam, but rather there is a limited Zakaat [alms] totaling 2.5 percent." Read his lips: very low taxes! Pandering for support just the way George Bush would have drawn it up. [The Full Feed from HuffingtonPost.com] 3:34:13 PM    comment []

Edwards Proposing Anti-Terrorism Agency. Beth Fouhy of The Associated Press reports: "Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards said he would create an international organization to fight terrorism through shared intelligence, cooperation he says would combat the dangers facing the United States where President Bush has failed." [t r u t h o u t] 11:29:34 AM    comment []

Naomi Klein | The Shock Doctrine. In The Guardian UK, Naomi Klein says, "What [is] happening in Iraq and New Orleans was not a post-September 11 invention. Rather, these bold experiments in crisis exploitation were the culmination of three decades of strict adherence to the shock doctrine." [t r u t h o u t] 11:28:31 AM    comment []

FBI Data Mining Tracked 'Associates' Of Suspected Americans. The F.B.I. cast a much wider net in its terrorism investigations than it has previously acknowledged by relying on telecommunications companies to analyze phone-call and e-mail patterns of the associates of Americans who had come under suspicion, according to newly obtained bureau records. The documents indicate that the F.B.I. used secret demands for records to obtain data not only on the person it was targeting but also details on his or her "community of interest" -- the network of people that the target in turn was in contact with. The F.B.I. recently stopped the practice in part because of broader questions raised about its aggressive use of the records demands, which are known as national security letters, officials said Friday after being asked about it. [The Full Feed from HuffingtonPost.com] 11:27:59 AM    comment []

Stan Goff: OBL and Sex. When I was working as a technical adviser on a film, we'd end each day by sitting around with food (and alcohol) and watching the day's film takes. It was always kind of flat somehow, even when others were raving about how well this or that take had gone. Then I realized... there was no music, no background sound patched in. Now when I watch films, I pay attention to the background music, because I realize that it is the vehicle for my appropriate emotional response. We are being told how to feel about what is happening in the film, quite explicitly, and we don't even realize it. That's how the social system of gender -- males on top, so to speak -- works in all those situations that are not explicitly articulated as gendered. But like that background music, it is there always, and it is explaining to us in a powerful non-verbal medium exactly how we are to feel about every situation we encounter. We learned this background music and its meanings -- without the slightest separation between what we call cognitive and emotional in our (male, dualistic) dissection of experience -- as early as we learned to recognize our first caretakers... usually a mother. We take it for granted; and so gender appears to us -- until the contradictions of later life expose it with power, pain, and confusion -- to be absolutely "natural," an irreducible and inescapable aspect of our very existence, like the need for oxygen or food... ... ... ... ...In the next part of this series, I was going to explore the relationship between actual politics, security-as-our preoccupation since 9-11, and gender. As it happens, the news today is full of the most recent video release from Osama bin Laden. The commentary on this event will be predictably obtuse; and bin Laden will again emerge as a complete caricature of evil. Democrats will predictably point out that the Bush administration hasn't "got him" yet. Republicans will rejoice, because (1) this takes some of the heat off of them from the Larry Craig's sex solicitation scandal (no gender there... duh), and (2) every time the bogeyman shows up, it triggers a paranoid section of the public to seek the protection of "real man" saber-rattlers... a carefully crafted Republican archetype. This only supports the thesis -- once one studies the actual bin Laden, a well-educated, calculating Saudi political actor who aims to topple the House of Saud -- that bin Laden himself is delighted with the war in Iraq and the concurrent debacle in Afghanistan, not to mention the US belligerence against his other arch-enemy, the Iranian government. Bin Laden reasonably assumes that his own intervention as the bogeyman, will reinforce support for the ill-defined Global War on Terror that has been such a godsend in support of his own political objectives: to isolate and break the power of the House of Saud in his home country, by exacerbating the dilemmas of the House of Saud's guarantor of power, the USA.... FULL ESSAY [The Full Feed from HuffingtonPost.com] 8:30:14 AM    comment []