Oh no: this injured young girl in Iraq looks like one of my little nieces. I can't tell you how sad it is to see this man, crying over his niece, who looks like mine.

Iraq is full of people, just like us. Baghdad is full of people, just like us.

*

I just heard on Bill Moyer's show Now that some newspapers in Texas have been accused of being anti-war. The reason: they printed pictures of Iraqi casualties.

They showed what is happening.

They showed photos of war.

And it turns out that real photos of war could be interpreted as a condemnation of war.

Go figure.

*

Perception is everything. I remember hearing that the first photos of the earth from space caused political upheaval, because they show earth the way it really looks. The imaginary borders, and the odd colors and symbols we use on our maps and globes aren't really there. The planet really is one planet. The land really is just land, not their land or our land. The huge barriers inked across our minds aren't actually marked on the earth.

The fact that people in authority were alarmed by this revelation is fascinating to me. I try to actively remember that perceptions are carefully cultivated, so we see our own, customized edition of reality.

Civilian casualties mount in Hilla.

At least several dozen civilians are believed to have been killed in the area in the past few days, and the wards at Hilla's hospital are filled with hundreds of bleeding, moaning patients.

But the ones who may be remembered long after the war sweeps past this place are those who appeared to have been maimed by cluster bombs -- the tiny, unpredictable munitions notorious for the toll they took on civilians in the conflicts in Afghanistan, Kosovo and the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

[Just an aside here: how many of you remember reading reports of Kosovars being injured by our weapons? Or seeing photos of that in the papers? Me neither.]

The Pentagon admitted for the first time Wednesday that American forces are now using cluster bombs in the Iraq conflict...

Reporters who have visited Hilla's hospital since then have left with the strong impression that cluster munitions may have been responsible for many of the injuries there -- shrapnel driven into eyes, legs, breasts, brains and backs.

Residents of surrounding hamlets described a rain of the tiny explosives, which detonated either in the air, upon impact on buildings and -- most chillingly -- later on when they were bumped into on the ground by people or animals....

Pointing at six other beds occupied by youngsters with bloodstained bandages and bruises, she cried, "What did these little children do to the Americans? What did they do to Bush?"

This article continues to describe an attack against a civilian bus, which decapitated most of the occupants. The U.S. is trying to cast doubt on how these injuries took place. The reporter notes that the reports about houses being bombed are "vague," because the victims didn't get a good look at the bombs.

Seriously. The U.S. is dropping hundreds of thousands of bombs, shooting missiles, and firing from tanks, but whenever anyone is injured, the U.S. government suggests that it was SOMEONE ELSE's BOMB. This is completely implausible. The attempts of the U.S. regime to cast doubt that their massive bombing and shelling campaign is responsible for injuries defies all reason.

Intelligent life on this planet should be insulted.

*

Iraqometer has added two new categories. The 'cost per taxpayer' is on the lowest side of estimates I've read so far.

What does it mean when a large chorus of criticism from retired and current military officers angers the Bush Administration? General Myers (chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) calls the criticism of Rumsfeld's meddling, understaffing, and some poor scheduling decisions "bogus." Myers says the criticism was made by people who "either weren't there, don't know, or they're working another agenda."

Moreover, Myers added, "It is not helpful to have those kind of comments come out when we've got troops in combat because, first of all, they're false, they're absolutely wrong, they bear no resemblance to the truth, and it's just harmful to our troops that are out there fighting very bravely, very courageously."

(I think this is a nice addition to the earlier theme about the government not really having all that much respect for veterans.)

I find this interesting, because it sounds a bit paranoid to say that current and retired veterans/officers are both completely misguided AND may be "working another agenda," which is completely unspecified. What agenda might these conspiratorial veterans be working? Inquiring minds want to know!

Also, I like the continued myth that domestic criticisms are freely available to the soldiers in combat. Because the NY Times is being delivered to their tent doors, and they have enough time to read it all?

*

Reports expressed concern that a maternity hospital in Baghdad may have been 'bombed' by US forces.

In Baghdad, Red Crescent official Abdel-Hameed Salim told Reuters: "There were air raids. Some 25 people who work and live in the area were wounded. Three of our Red Crescent staff were also wounded." ...

Iraqi authorities said on Wednesday that at least 55 civilians had been killed by coalition forces in attacks on Baghdad and other cities in the past 24 hours.

At least 33 of the victims are reported to have died when US helicopter gunships strafed a residential neighbourhood in the city of Hilla on Tuesday....

[International Committee of the Red Cross] spokeswoman Nada Doumani said the team "witnessed a vehicle transporting bodies of men, women and children to the [Hilla] hospital and in the hospital they saw also some 300 injured people and it was very clear that this was the result of heavy fighting and bombings".

The Red Cross said the hospital was completely unable to cope....

The United States has admitted shooting dead seven women and children after their vehicle failed to stop at a checkpoint in Najaf on Monday, but said "the climate established by the Iraqi regime" had contributed to the incident.

Of course, that same bad climate wouldn't have caused these deaths in the absence of U.S. soldiers, but I think we're not supposed to know that.

*

Here are photos of more international protests for peace.

*

I should post more links to reporting by the Iraq Peace Team, a group of Canadian and American peace workers observing the impact of the war on the Iraqi people, and reporting it to all. They are featured in a Reuters story on the confusion of Baghdad residents over US intentions.

"People just ask why? They stress the point that they are not criminals and never wanted to attack the United States. It doesn't make logical sense to them," said Kathy Kelly, head of a group of activists who have been in Baghdad since October.

Speaking to Reuters by telephone, she said ordinary Iraqi's were struggling to understand Washington's talk of liberating Iraq, given the "viciousness" of the strikes, now in their seventh day...

"We met one woman last night who was so distraught, she had to be restrained," Breen said. "She had just lost one daughter and her three other children were in hospital. It is a fearful situation."

On Wednesday, a Reuters Television correspondent reported seeing 15 burned corpses in a poor residential part of Baghdad following a U.S. air raid....

"They have become like family to me and it is all the more inconceivable that we could be doing this to them," she said. "Especially now, it becomes increasingly hard to face these people who look so imploringly at me and just ask why this is happening.

"More than the bombs, I fear more for the soul of my own country and what we are doing as a nation. This is the time to turn around what is happening and change the course of history."

The Guardian Unlimited somehow was omitted from my weekly visit list. It is also the source of many great articles.

*

Wait a minute, I keep hearing that soldiers are fighting for my rights to free speech (which I admittedly don't believe anyway), but then how can this be possible? This Indymedia summary of a Reuters article is frightening: OREGON LAW WOULD JAIL WAR PROTESTERS AS TERRORISTS: "An Oregon anti-terrorism bill would jail street-blocking protesters for at least 25 years in a thinly veiled effort to discourage anti-war demonstrations, critics say.... lawmakers still expect a debate on the definition of terrorism and the value of free speech before a vote by the state senate judiciary committee, whose Chairman, Republican Senator John Minnis, wrote the proposed legislation. Dubbed Senate Bill 742, it identifies a terrorist as a person who "plans or participates in an act that is intended, by at least one of its participants, to disrupt" business, transportation, schools, government, or free assembly." There are links to the full article (which can be found at Findlaw and elsewhere).


*

How is Arundhati Roy so consistently great? This essay has so many good parts, I'm not sure which to quote to entice you to read the rest. But I'll choose this:

Finally [criticics of all that is American or British] should remember that right now, hundreds of thousands of British and American citizens are on the streets protesting the war. The Coalition of the Bullied and Bought consists of governments, not people. More than one third of America's citizens have survived the relentless propaganda they've been subjected to, and many thousands are actively fighting their own government. In the ultra-patriotic climate that prevails in the US, that's as brave as any Iraqi fighting for his or her homeland.

While the "Allies" wait in the desert for an uprising of Shia Muslims on the streets of Basra, the real uprising is taking place in hundreds of cities across the world. It has been the most spectacular display of public morality ever seen.

Most courageous of all, are the hundreds of thousands of American people on the streets of America's great cities - Washington, New York, Chicago, San Francisco. The fact is that the only institution in the world today that is more powerful than the American government, is American civil society. American citizens have a huge responsibility riding on their shoulders. How can we not salute and support those who not only acknowledge but act upon that responsibility? They are our allies, our friends.

Sites I now visit every day:
Text

• BBC News World Edition
  
• San Francisco's Independent Media Center, a collaborative news publishing project run by ordinary, yet very talented and dedicated, people
  
• Indymedia.org, the international Independent Media Center
  
• SFGate (San Francisco Chronicle Online), and its Day In Pictures Feature
  

Audio

BBC World News Live (audio, real player, other versions available)

Enemy Combatant Radio, a webcast of local news and a wild variety of music

Sites I visit every week or so:

• This Modern World, a web log by the author of the comic strip of the same name
  
• Truthout.org, because someone is always sending me a great article from this site about the war
  
• Der Spiegel (in German) with cover stories summarized in English
  
• German Indymedia (in German), along with Cleveland Indymedia, Mumbai Indymedia, and other locales from which I'm wildly unlikely to hear opinions reflected in the mainstream media
  
• Not quite weekly, but increasingly often: The New York Times Multimedia page
  
• Al Jazeera, the post-hacker link, to see what the rest of the world sees.
  

*

Last week there were huge demonstrations for peace around the world. Indymedia's figures:

Spain (many cities) - 1,000,000 - M26
Syria, Damascus - 500,000 to 1,000,000 - M25
Indonesia, Jakarta - 300,000 to 500,000 - M30
Morocco, Rabat - 200,000 - M30
Algeria, Algiers -200,000 - M27
India, Calcutta - 150,000 - M30
Iran, Tehran - 100,000s - M29
Pakistan, Peshawar - 100,000 - 200,000 - M29
Germany (across various cities) - 100,000 - 150,000 - M30
Yemen, Saana - 100,000 - M27
Spain, Rota - 60,000 - M30
Bangladesh, Bazar - 50,000 - M30
France, Paris - 50,000 - M29
Greece, Athens - 50,000 - 100,000 - M29
Lebanon, Tripoli - 40,000 - M28
Massachusetts, Boston - 30,000 - 50,000 - M29
South Korea - 30,000 - M29

How many of those did you see on TV?

*

Speaking of TV journalism, I wish I had attended the protest against Fox News' biased reporting. (I had to work that lunch hour.) It keeps getting worse:

Fox News had its own response to the demonstrators. The news ticker rimming Fox's headquarters on Sixth Avenue wasn't carrying war updates as the protest began. Instead, it poked fun at the demonstrators, chiding them.

"War protester auditions here today ... thanks for coming!" read one message. "Who won your right to show up here today?" another questioned. "Protesters or soldiers?"

Since we established our own darned right to free speech and assembly when we both protested againts and then fought against England for our independence, I would say both. Or, I would say, 'a lot of dead guys a really long time ago, who wouldn't watch Fox News.' But that might sound biased.

*

While visiting The Fatal Second Banana: Vice Presidents and How They Suck, I realized that the author has a rather entertaining web log. It includes a well expressed commentary on why every single person in the military is NOT, in fact, defending our freedom. This seems especially obvious in instances in which we are attacking countries which have never, in fact, attacked us, yet it still needs to be said.

I support our troops, in that I want them to come home alive, have good health care, and live in decent housing.

Other people support our troops by wanting to send them into harm's way in distant countries that have never attacked us, where they are unwelcome.

But we can use the same words, and the latter group has first dibs on the meaning of 'support' as reported in the media.

Politics corrupts language.

*

What timing: a colleague just forwarded this Iraq War Quiz by Stephen R. Shalom, which features a similar theme:

1. The anti-war movement supports our troops by urging that they be brought home immediately so they neither kill nor get killed in a unjust war. How has the Bush administration shown its support for our troops?

a. The Republican-controlled House Budget Committee voted to cut $25 billion in veterans benefits over the next 10 years.

b. The Bush administration proposed cutting $172 million from impact aid programs that provide school funding for children of military personnel.

c. The administration ordered the Dept. of Veterans Affairs to stop publicizing health benefits available to veterans.

d. All of the above.

Unfortunately, the correct answer is D. Visit Truthout to read its many, many excellent articles.

*

S mentioned to me yesterday that Peter Arnett has been fired AGAIN, this time for going on Iraqi television with his personal opinions that the war isn't going as smoothly as U.S. forces had planned. In the last Gulf War, he was fired for visiting a baby formula factory that had been bombed and reporting on it. That sounds benign, but the official U.S. line was that the factory was making chemical weapons, and the fact that he tasted the baby formula and brought packets of it from the ruins to hand out to locals was considered dangerous anti-propaganda. (See my earlier entry on this event).

While going on Iraqi TV was something he likely thought could get him some good interviews later, and which would benefit him under other circumstances, it was a gesture the U.S. propaganda war (which, apparently, we're also losing OUTSIDE of the U.S.) could not afford.

I suppose the U.S. government will eventually give up on having journalists stationed anywhere, and just have a military press office make announcements for the network news talking heads to read aloud. Much like last time.

*

Photos: unhappy civilians flee Basra; scenes from international protests on March 30th; and anti-war protesters without a permit are pepper-sprayed, just because.

There is a very sad article in the excellent Observer called This is the reality of war. We bomb. They suffer. I haven't read anything in a U.S. paper quite like this. Should I wonder why? Or are children U.S. bombs paralyze not news? (Or at least, not as worthy news as the latest playstation game, or who wore what at the Oscars?) No, don't answer that.

I took a nearly two-day vacation from reading war-related media, yet war still disturbs my dreams.

*

I was reading this May 2002 Time Magazine article on Bush's obsession with Iraq. It suggests that Bush has been planning this war since he was sworn in.

Rumsfeld has been so determined to find a rationale for an attack that on 10 separate occasions he asked the CIA to find evidence linking Iraq to the terror attacks of Sept. 11. The intelligence agency repeatedly came back empty-handed. The best hope for Iraqi ties to the attack - a report that lead hijacker Mohamed Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence official in the Czech Republic - was discredited last week....

But other Administration principals fear that Saddam is working his own U.N. angle for the return of weapons inspectors to Iraq, whose presence could make the U.S. look like a bully if it invades. "The White House's biggest fear is that U.N. weapons inspectors will be allowed to go in," says a top Senate foreign policy aide.

From the moment he took office, Bush has made noises about finishing the job his father started. Sept. 11 may have diverted his attention, but Iraq has never been far from his mind. By the end of 2001...the communications team was plotting how to sell an attack to the American public. The whole purpose of putting Iraq into Bush's State of the Union address, as part of the "axis of evil," was to begin the debate about a possible invasion.

Yes, that is from May 2002.

It's not so much the fact that Bush has been determined to start a war that bothers me about the tone of the article - my hopes for this Administration's intentions have always been low. It's the fact that the article never questions for a moment the idea of the United States unilaterally forcing a regime change. Perhaps it is an attempt at 'objectivity,' but there are serious ethical questions that should always be considered when OVERTHROWING the head of a sovereign nation, and none of those are raised at all.

*

From a colleague: Iraqometer.com, with its tallies of civilian casualties (currently at 580), WMDs found (gee, at zero, who would have thought), and with its cool graphics. Some of the best material is on the About page, including a scary quote from Bush Sr. as to why occupying Iraq is a terrible idea, and these stats:

Percentage of Americans who currently support this war: 72%

Percentage of Americans who believe Iraq attacked the World Trade Center: 51%

Percentage of Americans who cannot locate Iraq on a world map: 65%

How did all these stupid people wind up living in MY home country? What the heck went wrong?

*

Here's a good reason not to fly Delta: "the U.S. government is assembling dossiers on American citizens and then assigning them each their own Threat Assessment Color -- red, yellow or green. Under a pilot program, from March until June the dossiers are being collected as soon as anyone buys a ticket on Delta Airlines to fly via a handful of unspecified airports...

No citizen will be able to challenge a dossier, or even see it; or even to learn whether he or she has been labeled a yellow citizen or a green, much less why. Green citizens are to be waved through airline boarding with the usual scrutiny, red citizens to be detained as likely terrorists; the big question is yellow citizens, who will be searched more suspiciously but then allowed onto the plane -- with their "yellow" designation winging through cyberspace ahead of them, to who knows whom and with what effect.

More information at Boycottdelta.org.

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From the 'oh, and I thought I was having enough nightmares' file, this item from the English-language edition of Der Spiegel:

According to a classified document leaked from the Pentagon last month, the Bush administration is planning a secret meeting in August at the "Strategic Command" headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska, and the topic on the agenda will be further development of the US nuclear program. The objective is to develop smaller, tactical nuclear weapons and neutron bombs, weapons to be deployed in preventive attacks against "rogue nations." According to Pentagon chief Rumsfeld, potential targets include North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Libya.

I joked at work about selling T-shirts with the US flag and the words "rogue nation" underneath, but... but... the very thought...

The article also quotes former president Carter in words I had not previously read: "Now a group of conservatives, under the cover of war, is attempting to pursue the ambitions it has harbored for years."

*

Last Thursday I heard a radio item on the every so excellent BBC World Service. The speaker said that Rumsfeld referred to the chemical weapons treaty as a "straightjacket" in February, and wants to use chemical weapons in Iraq. The US considers the weapons legal, but most of the world doesn't. The BBC host wondered if the US could possibly anticipate the 'hypocrisy' other countries would view the use of such agents by the US as, since it's chemical weapons that we claim were our motivation for rushing into Iraq in the first place.

I was in shock and awe. Would the US really use chemical weapons?

Do you really want me to answer that question? This is from, of all places I never personnally look, Fox Marketwire:

The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons oversees countries' moves to stop developing, stockpiling, transferring and using chemical weapons. The treaty even bans using these harmful agents during military operations. It specifies: "Each state party undertakes not to use riot-control agents as a method of warfare."

That provision came under hot debate during the 15 years it took to craft the treaty. It arose as an objection to the United States' reliance on tear gas to flush out Viet Cong fighters and kill them during the Vietnam War.

[I had no idea the U.S. did that. The chemical agent used was non-lethal, but the end result was quite lethal...]

Army Major General David Grange ordered his troops to use tear gas on hostile crowds of Serbs in Bosnia six years ago but complained that red tape prevented him from using it more often.

"We didn't kill anyone," Grange, who is retired, told The Associated Press. "It saved lives."

And now, the part that I fear earned this a mention in the BUSINESS section, rather than, say, news or world affairs or ethics:

A Pennsylvania State University institute prepared a 50-page report with Pentagon funding in October 2000 that explored a range of drugs - including Prozac, Valium and Zoloft - for use as "calmatives" for crowds.

The researchers found "use of non-lethal calmative techniques is achievable and desirable." Despite the endorsement, Marine Capt. Shawn Turner of the non-lethal weapons directorate said the military stopped "calmative" research because such drug-weapons could violate international law.

I'm sure pharmaceutical stocks rose one and a quarter percent upon this news. @#$%^&*!!