Saturday, 12 April, 2003Arrest of Naser OrićIt kind of slipped by unnoticed, but on 10-Apr-2003, Naser Orić was arrested in Tuzla, Bosnia-Herzegovina, following his indictment by the ICTY (see the ICTY press release; the oddly-placed punctuation marks are supposed to show up as diacritics, but you need the "Times PP" font for that). Orić was the commander of the Bosnian forces bottled up in the Srebrenica enclave, later formally designated the 8th Operational Group of the Armija Bosne i Herzegovine (ABiH). He and the rest of the 8. OG command group were airlifted out of the enclave (by one of the ABiH's grand total of two helicopters) before it was overrun in July 1995. posted 1636 Z-8 [more..] Friday, 11 April, 2003Fisk reduxColby Cosh rejects a suggestion he fisk a Fisk article, pointing out that Fisk's notoriety may only be helped this way. Nobody ever considers the possibility that if the silly twat is ignored, he will eventually go away.A tempting theory, but it cannot stand up to scrutiny. Robert Fisk has had a career for some thirty years, so evidently that career is not dependent on the existence of CounterPunch or the Web editions of the Independent, etc. In short, even if the entire Web were to ignore him, he would still get paid for his peculiar brand of "journalism." And let's face it, he's never going to be ignored enough to go away; it's beyond our control. On discussion fora everywhere, those who subscribe to the notion that America is the sole source of all evil in the world keep citing his articles as if they were truth. Whether the fact that "fisking" has become a common term on the Internet hurts or helps Fisk's career is less relevant than the fact that those of us engaged in discussions online are increasingly able to counter the citing of a Fisk column with a simple "You do know how the term 'fisking' originated, don't you?" rather than actually having to go to the trouble of fisking the article in question. So I say "keep on fisking!"; at least, when one can muster the energy. posted 0008 Z-8 [link] Thursday, 10 April, 2003The Agonist affairOkay, I'm sure you must have heard by now that Sean-Paul Kelley, alias the Agonist, was discovered to be filling his blog with material plagiarised from some commercial intelligence firm called StratFor. I'm not going to go into it, but just in case you weren't already aware, here are some links summing it up: Article: "Noted War Blogger Cops to Copying" from Wired Article: "Ethics of War Blogging" from the Washington Post's tech section, Filter Article: "The Great Blogging Ethics Debate", also from Filter Commentary: Ken Layne on 07-Apr-2003 and 08-Apr-2003 Commentary: Meryl Yourish on 08-Apr-2003 and 10-Apr-2003 Commentary: Letter from Gotham on 08-Apr-2003 Commentary: Colby Cosh on 07-Apr-2003 and later that same day Well, I bet I could achieve that kind of output as well if I just copied stuff from The Economist. Boy, what some people will do for more traffic. In the spirit of disclosure, by the way, average traffic on this page has been between 100 and 150 unique visits a day for the past week or so. Hey, I write for a select audience! posted 2116 Z-8 [link] Abuse of MLK's legacy Russel Wardlow, aka "Mean Mr. Mustard," makes some excellent points regarding the state of cognitive dissonance any number of anti-war characters are going through at the present time; specifically, he refers to a column titled "What would Martin do?" by someone called Ruth Rosen, with whom I am mercifully unfamiliar. Rosen asserts in her conclusion: If he were alive today, [Martin Luther] King probably would be reviled by many as an unpatriotic traitor. Why? Because he would oppose a pre-emptive war on Iraq. Because he would organize nonviolent civil disobedience against American military aggression.Wardlow's assessment that "King is just a prop that Rosen sought to pull out of her bag of unassailable progressive icons to make an irrelevant plea to authority" is, in my opinion, right on the money. Rosen bases her assertion on the fact that Dr. King opposed the US involvement in Vietnam, but does not feel the need to illustrate what parallels there might be between that conflict and the present one. posted 2008 Z-8 [more..] Al-Tuwaitha uncovered From Blogs of War, I found this article from the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review: a US Marine Engineer unit is holding and inspecting the al-Tuwaitha complex. For those of you not in the know, al-Tuwaitha is Iraq's primary nuclear research facility. It's where the French-supplied "Osirak" nuclear reactor* was built (which the Israeli Air Force destroyed in 1981 - nice one, lads, mazel tov) and where the bulk of the Iraqi nuclear weapons development programme took place. It seems a distinct possibility that the IAEA hardly scratched the surface regarding the place, in more ways than one. * - The French are refreshingly honest in at least one way, which is that any government nuclear power or weapons project is assigned a name connected with death; the French nuclear missiles were called Pluton and Hades, and the reactor built at al-Tuwaitha was of a model named Osiris. The name "Osirak" came from the commingling of "Osiris" and "Irak"; the Iraqis called it "Tammuz-1", after the month the Ba'ath party seized power. This model, incidentally, was not capable of producing weapons-grade radiological material—that was going too far for even the French—but is a light-water "research" reactor. But as the name "Tammuz-1" indicates, the Iraqis were looking to build more reactors... (source: FAS) posted 0231 Z-8 [link] Wednesday, 9 April, 2003Baghdad Images Not In Your Name  Not In Your Name Oh, I just love this picture...  APDid he find that rod, or did he bring it? Class. posted 1909 Z-8 [link] Where, for that matter, is Salam? Jeff Jarvis is spot on; with Baghdad more or less fallen, somebody needs to find "Salam Pax" and make sure he's all right. Whoever he really is, he deserves his place in the annals of history (next to, among others, PFC Jessica Lynch and CPT Chris Carter) and personally, I'm hoping he made it through for the enshrining ceremony. Blogger history in the making. Speaking of CPT Carter, CO A/3-78th Infantry, I'd rather he was remembered less for this "I do believe this city is freakin' ours" statement and more for pulling that Iraqi woman off that bridge at Hindiyah. posted 1843 Z-8 [link] Fall of Baghdad "Cautious jubilation," I think, best sums up my current mood. Ideally, I'd hope for everyone who dropped the term "Stalingrad" into the soi-disant "expert opinion" over the past couple of weeks to have the decency to keep their ignorance to themselves. But I'm not holding my breath; overly dramatic predictions of doom about "Fortress Tikrit" are next, I expect. In the meantime, I read that US troops emptied several jails in their drive to the city centre. "Emptied several jails"? How can this be? After all, the Iraqi government emptied the jails last October, didn't they? The Revolutionary Command Council decreed a "general, comprehensive, and final pardon", didn't they? Interestingly, this blanket amnesty does not seem to have applied to the inmates of that children's prison liberated by the 5th Marine Regt. yesterday. Of course, the pardon was announced by Iraqi Information Minister, Mohammed Said "It's All Part of Our Plan" al-Sahhaf, which tells you how reliable that info is. posted 1648 Z-8 [link] Press corps, meet stepladder - part II It must be contagious; CNN reports the following: "We are appalled at what happened because it was known that both places contained journalists," said Robert Ménard, secretary-general of Reporters Without Borders.Translation: anybody else, we don't give a toss about, unless we're coming up to filing time and we still don't have a story. "We are concerned at the U.S. Army's increasingly hostile attitude towards journalists, especially those non-embedded in its military units."Yeah, I was wondering about that... posted 0155 Z-8 [more..] Tuesday, 8 April, 2003So you think you know what a war crime is...The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has been quick to condemn US forces for the deaths of journalists during fighting around the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad (AFP on Yahoo! and BBC): IFJ Says Attacks on Journalists in Iraq Are "Crimes of War" That Must be Punished There's no way to put this diplomatically, so I'll put it like this: Aidan White, the General Secretary of the IFJ needs to get a stepladder and get over himself, because he evidently has no fucking clue what he's talking about. posted 1737 Z-8 [more..] Better late than never Jackie D links to this opinion piece in the London Times; it notes that a few myths ("memes" might be the better word) from the anti-war camp are due for deconstruction, one of which is the notion that "America and Britain armed Iraq" in the 1980s. To support this point, the author, Michael Gove, cites this report from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. It should be noted that the "Dissident Frogman" made his own graphic of the very same data and posted it in this entry eight days ago. Isn't it great when bloggers are over a week ahead of the established media? Mind you, that SIPRI data has been around since 29-Oct-2001 so I don't suppose there's that much cause for celebration, but then again, bloggers don't get paid. Another one of the memes Gove addresses is the one that it is somehow hypocritical to condemn Iraq for violating UNSC resolutions when Israel is supposedly "in violation of UNSC resolutions as well." This is nothing new, of course; I've adressed that point myself a few times (most recently here and here). But frankly, the distinction between Chapter VI and Chapter VII resolutions should have long been a matter of common knowledge for (or to slap in the face of) anyone invoking this "argument"; it rathers saddens me that it is not. posted 1334 Z-8 [link] Monday, 7 April, 2003Quote of the YearUS Secretary of State Colin Powell, in an interview on German ZDF (Zweite Deutsche Fernsehen - Second German Television): No, there is no list. There is this common perception in Europe that there is this list of enemies and we are going to go down one-by-one and invade them all in some predetermined order. This is not the case. The President is not looking for places to go invade. The President has made it clear that he has many ways of dealing with regimes that, we believe, are not following international standards. So, sometimes political actions are appropriate, economic actions, use of our intelligence assets. Sometimes military force is appropriate. But we are not looking for wars to get into.Emphasis in bold mine. A transcript of the interview is available from the State Department. (State Dept. link via Jackie D.) posted 1702 Z-8 [link] Recommended: Spinsanity Today, I came across a site called Spinsanity (tagline: "Countering rhetoric with reason"). From what I've read so far, it has a good, even-handed approach to who's putting forth biased and/or unsupported assertions, particularly in the American media. No deserving pundit—be they left- or right-wing—is left unfisked (though not Fisk himself, as he is not American). Check it out. (I thoroughly recommend their "Myths and misconceptions about Iraq" at the present time.) posted 0520 Z-8 [link] Sunday, 6 April, 2003Another ISM casualty, and an observation on civil disobedienceI'm trying to build up a coherent picture of the shooting incident in Jenin in which an ISM activist (Brian Avery, 24, of Albuquerque, NM) was wounded in the face, allegedly by an IDF bullet. It's not proving very easy. The basics of the incident seem to be that on Saturday evening around 1830 or 1900 local time, during curfew, Avery and fellow ISM activist Tobias Karlsson (30, of Stockholm, Sweden) left the appartment they were occupying (which doubles as ISM's Jenin office) in response to small arms fire (SAF) heard in the city; at some point not long after leaving the apartment, they encountered an IDF armoured personnel carrier, as well as a second AFV (variously described as a tank or an APC). A warning burst was fired from the APC with a mounted machinegun (probably an FN MAG) at the ground some three metres from the pair. Avery was apparently struck in the face by a ricocheting bullet—or one or more bullet fragments—from the burst. posted 2017 Z-8 [more..] |
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