Chalabi’s “intel” to be examined

Ah, it couldn’t happen to a “nicer” bunch of snake-oil salesmen! I read with delight a report I found via Yankeedoodle of Today in Iraq, that Ahmed Chalabi and his nefarious Iraqi National Congress will be having the information they supplied to the US prior to last year’s war specifically examined by W’s new Commission on the Intel (whatever it’s called.)
The good, well-reported Knight-Ridder story that Yankee sent me to says:

    Sens. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., and Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., the chair and vice chair of the Senate intelligence committee, announced Thursday that they are expanding a probe into prewar intelligence to include the use of information from the INC.

It’s a good story, in general. Read it. Thanks, Yankee!
By the way, Yankee also has two other great features on his blog. One is the listing that he works hard at, in which he tries to get something up on his blog about every US soldier killed in Iraq, presented to readers state-by-state. Since I’m a Virginia home-girl, I’m going to try to copy all the listings he makes for Virginia soldiers. Maybe I could start a special area of the blog to gather them all together on.
Here’s one from his latest post:
Local story: Virginia soldier killed in Iraq.
And here’s another little feature that he introduced onto his blog just three days ago:
86-43-04. Pass it on.

‘Concentration’ in Palestine

I’ve spent most of the past week in occupied Palestine, though with
the occasional trip over the Green Line into Israel. While here, I’ve
had ample opportunity, yet again, to see the devastating effects on the lives
of the Palestinians of the tight and capriciously applied “movement controls”
that the Israeli occupation forces have maintained on the Palestinians here continuously since September 2000 (41 months).

Like the building of the ghastly Apartheid Wall, these movement controls
have been pursued by the Israelis in the name of a still-elusive search for
their own people’s security. We could discuss for a long time whether it is only the search for security, and not–in addition–a desire to pursue and consolidate Israel’s colonial-style land-grab in the occupied territories, that has motivated these measures. However, regardless of the intentions of the men who decided on them and proceeded to plan their implementation, the effect of the movement controls (as of the Apartheid Wall which is just one part of this inhuman broader policy) has been to concentrate the three-million-plus Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza
into a series of scores of disconnected pens.

We could call these pens “strategic
hamlets”, except in some cases they are whole cities. We could call
them Bantustans, except that they are far smaller and have far less potential
for any kind of self-sufficiency even than those ill-starred exercizes in
apartheid-era control and social engineering. We could call them “concentration
areas”– a fine colonial example of domination of another population group,
also pioneered in South Africa: its aim was to cut the restive Boers off
from any connection with productive economic life. (It notably did
not turn most of them into warm, cuddly, peace-seeking people; see ‘Bantustans’
above.) Or, we could call them ghettoes– walled-in ghettoes like the ones in Warsaw,
Theresienstadt, or other places into which, in the first phase of a process that later ended in the horrendously successful project to physically destroy the Jewish and Roma peoples, the Nazis penned their future victims.

I came to Israel/Palestine with one main aim: to go to Gaza to do some consulting
on p.r. issues for a US-based NGO…

Continue reading “‘Concentration’ in Palestine”

Great experiences; limbo nonetheless

I’ve been hanging around here in Israel/Palestine for the past few days,
for reasons that will become clear to you if you read one third or so of
the way down in the present post.

This post is made up of some descriptive fragments that I have written over
the past couple of days as one way of dealing with this Kafka-esque limbo
situation I’ve been in. They are not well organized; but that’s for
later.

Nightfall in West Jerusalem

Monday night I decided to spend a little time in Israel. So I left the
charming little hotel I was staying in in occupied East Jerusalem, the Christmas
Hotel, and walked around 200 yards westward before dashing across the hectic
eight-lane highway built some years ago along this section of the Green Line
that divides the occupied and unoccupied halves of this ancient city. Immediately
I was plunged into the late-19th-century world of a quarter of extremely religious
Jewish Israelis called Mea Shearim.

For a long time, most of the people of Mea Shearim were so fundamental in
their religious beliefs that they did not believe any “slvation” of any value
could be brought by the establishment at human hands of a Jewish state, and
some of them were staunchly anti-Zionist. But that’s another story.
Today, as the shadows of dusk gathered in the narrow streets, I walked
through quickly, not wanting to attract attention to my “immodest” dress of
long pants and long-sleeved shirt. Large notices exhorted “Women and
girls” not to offend the quarter’s residents with any immodest garb. Pants
were expressly included in that. I wasn’t sure wherther the notice
applied to the street I was walking along, or only the smaller side-alleys.
But I walked fast, just in case.

Continue reading “Great experiences; limbo nonetheless”

Juan Cole’s reply to Bush

Okay, I know that because I’m traveling, I’m hopelessly behind the curve of the US news cycle. But I just read Juan Cole’s elegantly argued response to Bush’s really lame ‘Meet the Press’ appearance Sunday, and wanted to get the link up here.
I’m thinking that a smart Dem– and particularly one with a strong record of military service*– should be able to take on this sad little president we have right now, and WIN.
* Okay, I’m a Quaker and I oppose all wars and military ventures. But I respect that Kerry, despite being a member of the upper class who could easily–like W– have found a way to evade active service in Vietnam times, did not take the easy way out… Plus, the journals he wrote during and after that service, as revealed in Douglas Brinkley’s new book on him, show him to have been an unusually astute and esnsitive observer of the coarsening effects that the military life was having on everyone involved in it.
Today, by the way, is the Democratic primary back home in Virginia. I cast an absentee ballot for Dean before leaving home, and don’t regret doing so. Dean has played a magnificent role by pushing the whole party to confront Bush openly on the war issue.

Jerusalem’s Apartheid Wall

I’m now in Jerusalem. This morning, I had some time to spare so I thought
I should go and look at some local sections of the vast network of walls
and fences the Israelis are building throughout the West Bank.

Actually, before I went there I had a good visit with Tom Neu, the head of
the Jerusalem office of a humanitarian-aid organization called American Near
East Refugee Aid, with which I’m doing a little consulting work. Tom
gave me a copy of the latest edition of the map the local U.N. people put
out periodically that tries to indicate which roads are closed and open,
and where the Wall is being built. This info is vital for all the humanitarian-aid
workers attempting to deliver services to the hard-pressed Palestinians of
the West Bank

‘Wall’ is not quite an adequate term for this network of barriers that loops
back on itself many times, cutting the Palestinian population of the West
Bank into 12 or more separate pens. Like animals. (I see in today’s
paper that the Israeli military is now claiming they “did not realize” how
much hardship the Wall would cause to the Palestinians, so they’re asking
for more money to take ameliorative measures like bussing schoolkids from
one zone to another. But how about they just stop building the Wall
altogether– especially since they’re building it totally on somebody
else’s land, not their own?)

Anyway, I thought I should go check out the sections near Jerusalem…

Continue reading “Jerusalem’s Apartheid Wall”

JWN blogiversary, etc

So my first blogiversary here at JWN passed Feb 6 and I didn’t even blog that day. Oh well.
My first post, here, was about Colin Powell’s speech to the UN just the day before.
What a lot has happened in this past year!
Back in early January (2004) I wrote a CSM column urging that the administration should be held accountable for its many serious mis-statements over Iraqi WMDs– in Powell’s speech, and of course, elsewhere. I actually had no idea that that process of being-held-accountable would proceed as far and as fast as it has in the past month.
Not nearly enough, of course. I looked at the make-up of the Commission of Inquiry that the Prez himself appointed (to investigate himself… how does that work again??), and I noted along with most other commentators that of the seven folks named to date, only one has any depth of the relevant expertise.
Judge Wald, I know a little bit. She specialized in family law; then, about six or seven years ago she was named to the bench of the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY).

Continue reading “JWN blogiversary, etc”

Luxor fun

We had a totally awesome three days checking out various tombs and ancient temples in Luxor. I got back to Cairo yesterday, and started pulling together the raw materials for a very deep think-piece here about the fate of empires etc– with our clamber over the ruins of the statue of Ozymandias providing a great leaping-off point.
Unfortunately, however, I had a late buffet lunch at the Nile Hilton yesterday that totally pole-axed me and spent much of the evening clasping the toilet bowl as I heaved profusely into it.
Lucky, really, that at this stage in life my body has enough anti-bodies in it to various Egyptian tummy bugs that it knew exactly what to do and repelled all invading microbes in efficient (I guess) and thorough fashion.
So there went “Ozymandias, king of kings” (Shelley reference needed here.)

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Posting from Egypt

I’m traveling in Egypt this week. Not sure how much I’ll actually learn about What Egyptians Think, since we’re doing mainly touristy stuff (Luxor, etc.) And I am not the kind of journalist who has one conversation with a cab-driver and thinks s/he has touched something essential or even, necessarily worthwhile in the soul of a country.
I have too much respect and affection for my Egyptian frineds to do that.
Next week, I will be traveling somewhere more interesting, and shall certainly hope to blog about that. This week, let’s see what comes up, eh?
…. Of course, it has also happened that travel has in the past allowed me to think in a different, clearer way about things that obsess me at home (the US-Iraq war, Palestine/Israel, etc etc.) I recall that when I was in Africa last year I did some posts about Iraq that ended up having shelf-life. Who knows what the suns of Luxor will do for my gray cells?
I tell you one thing, though. They will make a totally fabulous change from the cold snap that settled on central Virginia about ten days before we left and held everything there in a tight, icy grasp.

Violence and escalation in Palestine/Israel

I had so many things I wanted to blog about today. Mainly, a big piece I’ve been kinda planning for a few days now, connecting some dots on matters Israeli-Palestinian.
Like, looking at what it does to the thinking of Palestinians when they see that Lebanon’s Hizbollah can get around 400 Palestinian detainee/hostages released from Israel’s lockups by playing hardball with their own Israeli hostage (and the mortal remains of three other Israelis)– while on the other hand, Yasser Arafat, who has continued to support a negotiated settlement for many years now gets what from the Israelis?
Precisely nothing except continued humiliation, derision, and the destruction of the last vestiges of his PA infrastructure.
(I was going to bring in all these excellent links on this last score… )
So what message does that send to the average, very hard suffering Palestinian??

Continue reading “Violence and escalation in Palestine/Israel”

Kay and Kelly, connecting the dots?

On Thursday, Juan Cole had a really interesting post that highlighted an aspect of the David Kelly affair in the U.K. that I had earlier been too dainty to write about in public.
Namely, what seems to have been the late Dr. Kelly’s long-time affair with Mai Pederson, an Egyptian-American, a Staff Sergeant in the US Air Force who was assigned to Kelly as his interpreter when he was the chief bio-weapons inspector for UNSCOM in Iraq.
I’ve been wondering two things:
(1) Are there dots that need to be connected between the David Kelly affair in London and some of the recent words of David Kay in the U.S.?
What Kay was saying was that, in his estimation, one of the reasons the CIA had become so flabby and ineffective–my words, not his– in its gathering of decent, fresh intel on Iraq by the late 1990s was that earlier in the decade it had become easily addicted to all the pickings it got from UNSCOM.
We all know from Scott Ritter’s work and other sources that UNSCOM had been deeply penetrated by the CIA. But was Mai Pederson perhaps part of that operation? Who knows?
(2) It seems that a lot of people in public life and the media world had known about Kelly’s relationship with Pederson, whom I have seen described in print somewhere as “a flirty divorcee”. (That’s a sort of code-word for a “loose woman”, and it is probably a terrible libel against her. But many journos use it to tell you, nudge-nudge, that the two people in question have “that” kind of a relationship…)
So here’s my second question…

Continue reading “Kay and Kelly, connecting the dots?”