Ohiocore

I don't usually do entertainment news, but a great opening line caught my eye on Google News. The film is Alexander (as in "the great"), and the Tribune reviewer is Craig Outhier, found here in an Arizona paper, the East Valley Tribune:
"Not content to direct a mediocre historical epic, filmmaker Oliver Stone marshals all of his talent as a provocateur to direct a colossally bad one in 'Alexander'...

It's a shame, too, because mediocrity is so tantalizingly within the director's reach. "

Now that's critique, baby.

NYTimes reports that the New C.I.A. Chief Tells Workers to Back Administration Policies. His doublespeak is already well crafted.

On the one hand, he says "We provide the intelligence as we see it - and let the facts alone speak to the policymaker,'' meaning effectively "we don't make policy... and we don't comment on it either." Then on the other hand, he says the CIA's job is to "support the administration and its policies in our work,'' and "we do not identify with, support or champion opposition to the administration or its policies."

So, the message is: provide facts that support W's policies, and the rest be damned.

FAGS V FOOD by Political Editor Oonagh Blackman. It might give it away to mention it runs in the Mirror (UK). Ah, Britishisms.

We're only halfway into it, but November is already the 2nd most fatal month for U.S. troops in Iraq, approaching 100 dead. While we're on pace to surpass it, for now the cruelest month is still April (with 135 dead).

Then you have the videotaped slaughter of an unarmed, wounded, motionless, allegedly "insurgent" prisoner recorded by NBC camerman Kevin Sites. From the Globe and Mail report:

On the video, as the camera moved into the mosque during the Saturday incident, a marine can be heard shouting obscenities in the background, yelling that one of the men was only pretending to be dead.

“He's fucking faking he's dead!”

“Yeah, he's breathing,” another marine is heard saying.

“He's faking he's fucking dead!” the first marine says.

The video then showed a marine raising his rifle toward a prisoner lying on the floor of the mosque. The video shown by NBC and provided to the network pool was stopped and did not show the bullet hitting the man, but the audio continued and a rifle shot could be heard.

“He's dead now,” a marine is heard saying.

The blacked out portion of the videotape, provided later to Associated Press Television News and other members of the network pool, showed the bullet striking the man in the upper body, possibly the head. His blood splatters on the wall behind him and his body goes limp.

Of course the circumstances of war are extraordinary. Just one day earlier, a Marine in the same unit had been killed by an explosive rigged corpse. Earlier Marines had occupied the same Mosque where the bodies were, seized weapons there and treated some enemy wounded, leaving them "captured" for this, the next group of Marines. The shooter himself had suffered minor facial injury in the previous day's fighting. But for all these reasons, military discipline and international law expressly prohibit such action.

The ABC News report includes an image, and a fair amount conveying the apparent violation of the Geneva Convention (not unlike the Abu Ghraib atrocities).

Resignations are rippling through the CIA, including the head of clandestine operations. So reports anyone with a newspaper, e.g. The New York Times. NYTimes goes further, saying:

At the heart of the tensions is resentment felt at the C.I.A. over criticisms of the agency's performance, particularly on Iraq and its illicit weapons. Many intelligence officials believe the C.I.A. has been unfairly blamed by the White House and Congress for what now appear to have been exaggerated prewar depictions of Iraq's arsenals.

Also take the time to innoculate yourself against the fabricated crap slinging, people like reliable chump David Brooks reducing the CIA to "contemptuous subversive incredibly stupid insubordinate enemy mutineers". He doesn't use that phrase in aggregate, he uses all those terms. So either the emperor looks very good in his new outfit, or you are a traitor: "Langley was engaged in slow-motion, brazen insubordination, which violated all standards of honorable public service. It was also incredibly stupid, since C.I.A. officials were betting their agency on a Kerry victory."

Of course the CIA must be the ones at fault. He complains about leaks undermining the President. You can be sure he never mentions Bob Novak, Valarie Plame, or the Office for Special Plans. The whole phenomenon of deliberately conjuring false intelligence based on convenient lies, circumventing the CIA via a novel pentagon pet office, using that information in publicly discredited reports and then blaming the Agency for it, holding prisoners in secret inside the military, so secret that for more than half a year the CIA itself is denied access for interrogation, and then to top if off, illegally revealing a clandestine operative for political cover... these things are below mention for Brooks. They just hate Bush. No real reason. They're just stupid partisans. Bad CIA, bad!

Almost 2 decades have passed since Mordechai Vanunu exposed Israel's nuclear arsenal. But today, St. George's Cathedral was stormed by about 30 heavily armored/armed tactical forces and he was removed via an unmarked car. Vanunu had been living there under house arrest, since his release from prison in April, having accepted sanctuary from The Right Reverend Riah Abu El-Assal, Epicscopal Bishop of Jerusalem.

If you are unfamiliar with Vanunu's case, take some time to acquaint yourself with the history. It is a perfect example of invoking government "secrecy" purely to quash political dissent and criticism. In 1985 Vanunu was was a nuclear technician at the Dimona nuclear plant in Israel. In 1986 he fractured Israel's deliberate facade of "nuclear ambiguity" by revealing that nation's underground plutonium separation plant and stockpile of several hundred nuclear warheads. He travelled to Asia (converted to Buddhism), Australia and then to England, where he delivered extensive first-hand accounts and photographs to Sunday Times that were verified by British experts.

But, before any publication was made, Israeli intelligence had already decided how to silence him:

On September 30, 1986, an American Mossad agent, Cheryl Bentov, operating under the name of "Cindy" and masquerading as an American tourist, began an affair with Vanunu, eventually persuading him to fly to Rome with her on a holiday. The Israeli government had promised Margaret Thatcher that they would not conduct operations on British soil. Therefore... Once in Rome, Mossad agents kidnapped and drugged him, and returned him to Israel on a freighter.
(source: Wikipedia)

BBC reports that the relatives of Iraqi Prime Minister Allawi have been kidnapped. On the one hand, an obvious security failure, as any kidnapping. On the other hand, a first cousin, the cousin's wife and step-daughter are quite remote from Allawi himself, suggesting security for himself and his immediate family is better, if not good.

The number of abductions in recent months numbers in the hundreds.

Thus queries Fred Kaplan's headline at Slate. Kaplan has some interesting restatements of fact regarding Fallujah. Obviously, the offensive was postponed until after the US Presidential election. Less obvious is the likely harmful effect of the extra 6 months spent fortifying, organizing and trap-setting.

On Iraqi Security forces: "National Public Radio's Anne Garrels, who is embedded with the Marines in Fallujah, reports that of the 500 Iraqi soldiers originally deployed to go in alongside U.S. forces only 170 were still on station when the operation began. The rest had deserted."

"The offensive is going to be a massive undertaking; the city is going to be pummeled by fire from the ground and the air; it will be hard to distinguish innocent civilians from insurgent fighters; and, given the warnings and the waiting and the declared urgency of the mission, there will be little incentive to try."

Print media had reported the Marines' seizure of the main hospital in Fallujah. Seems normal enough: what else is there to seize? Kaplan thinks it out a little further:
"it is intriguing that the U.S. forces' first move, upon crossing into Fallujah Monday, was to seize the main hospital. In part, the step was practical. The site will be needed to care for the wounded. In part, it was a political. During the offensive last spring, U.S. commanders have said, the hospital issued inflated reports of civilian casualties for propaganda purposes. Capturing the site will not only prevent a repetition, it will also allow the United States to control the message about casualties. There are almost certain to be many deaths and injuries; how many of them will be reported is another matter."

Coalition of the Waning
The article also summarizes a New York Times report on "Coalition" support evaporating, as evidenced by the ongoing reduction and removal of troops, despite our new offensive of the moment. Countries listed (with size of force reduction):

• Hungary: (300);
• Spain: (1,300);
• Poland: (2,400);
• Netherlands: (1,400);
• Thailand: (450);
• Dominican Republic: (302);
• Nicaragua: (115);
• Honduras: (370);
• Philippines: (51);
• Norway: (155);
• New Zealand: (60);
• Singapore: (159) from 191 to 32;
• Moldova: (30) from 42 to 12; and
• Bulgaria: (53) from 483 to 430.

Eerily enough, the Christian Science Monitor headlines a different article by staff writers Peter Grier and Faye Bowers almost identically: After the Fallujah fight, then what?

With all the ill-timed catastrophe of a Fallujah offensive, Judge James Robertson of U.S. District Court has invalidated the entire procedure (such as it was) of military tribunals for Guantanamo Bay detainees. In fact, he nearly disposes of the "detainee" terminology also. The Washington Post reports Judge Rules Guantanamo Trials Unlawful: "Military trials set up to determine the guilt or innocence of enemy combatants imprisoned at a U.S. military prison in Cuba are unlawful and cannot continue in their current form, a federal judge ruled this afternoon.
In a major setback to the Bush administration, found that detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, may legally be prisoners of war entitled to the protections of international law and should be allowed a hearing on whether they qualify for those protections."

"the military commissions... are not lawful or proper."

"The judge ruled that unless and until the military gives detainees a fair hearing before a 'competent tribunal" on whether they are prisoners of war, the government can only try them for enemy offenses in military courts martial, under long-established rules of military law."

In what appears to be a predetermined trajectory for US forces in Iraq, 10,000 Marines are proceeding to "retake" the city of Fallujah, vowing to eradicate opposition in the area. The Marines are clearly more committed to a "sending a stern message to militants that they will be dealt with unmercifully" (CSM) in a show of force than they are to the accuracy of their targetting. For this reason it is unlikely they will succeed: objectives and conditions for victory are wholly unspecified, except in terms that concede complete control to the opposition. I.E., "when we win, there will be no more roadside bombings".

The comparisions to Vietnam seems self-apparent. However, that doesn't mean every conceivable Vietnam comparision is worthwhile. For example: "In preparation for the assault, U.S. commanders warned their troops to expect the most brutal urban fighting since the Vietnam War. "(Boston Globe, as below)
How odd. Apparently nobody pointed out that none of these Marines were around to fight in Vietnam. Or that it was jungle warfare, with small villages and towns, not "urban".

Playing their part, the interim government of Iraq has declared a 60-day state of emergency. The Boston Globe does a good job of laying out what that means:
"U.S. and Iraqi forces opened their long-promised assault on the insurgent stronghold of Fallujah, hours after the government declared a 60-day period of emergency rule in most of the country.
Under the emergency decree, men between the ages of 15 and 55 were and all vehicle traffic were banned from the streets of Fallujah 24 hours a day. All members of the Fallujah police were suspended indefinitely. The law also closes indefinitely all roads into Fallujah and neighboring Ramadi."

A sampling of Ohio, from all over the news:

New York Times: "Voting Problems in Ohio Set Off an Alarm":

• "Officials in Ohio will be able to reject some of the approximately 155,000 provisional ballots cast there..."


• "Voting machines in Ohio failed to register votes for president in 92,000 cases over all this year,"


• Ken Blackwell's expected voter turnout: 72%. Reported turnout: 70%.


• "In Ohio, for instance, four-member county election boards, each with two Republicans and two Democrats, will decide [whether to count provisional ballots], with the approval of three members needed to count the votes."

That last one is among the most distressing, since purely partisan considerations can easily allow the invalidation of all provisional ballots. Legally, if your party doesn't want to count them, they can prevent it. And why should it be that the NYTimes is the first to bring it to my attention when I've been reading the Columbus Dispatch and Cleveland Plain Dealer regularly?

Also check the Washington Post, with the specificity:

"The vote counting was marred in several places by computer glitches. the most serious appears to be in Ohio, which provided Bush with his decisive margin. Election officials in Franklin County, in the Columbus area, said yesterday that a computer error gave Bush 3,893 extra votes in one precinct."

Word.

From the front page of The Mirror in the UK,
"DOH! 4 More Years of Dubya:
How can 59,054,087 people be so DUMB?"


The clever British headlines keep coming. See also "War More Years".

From Reuters: "F-16 fighter fires at New Jersey school."

I guess they're just practicing for Fallujah.

Election results read directly from the the voting-machine receipts in 3 precincts of North-Central Columbus, Ohio, each precinct having four voting machines: