United for Peace of Pierce County, WA - We nonviolently oppose the reliance on unilateral military actions rather than cooperative diplomacy.

Among the nearly 200 readers who poured scorn on New York Times reporter John Burns's We-could-not-know-then remarks on the occasion of the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom was Professor Sid Olufs (Political Science) of Pacific Lutheran University.  --  Olufs cited more than a dozen sources refuting the premise of Burn's revisionist musings, adding:  "I personally heard from more than one field grade officer that the coming war was unwise, understaffed, and would take more than a decade to begin to achieve its alleged objectives.  Didn’t Burns hear any of that?"[1] ...

Seven and one half years after the U.S. invaded Iraq, President Barack Obama told the American people in a nationally broadcast address that Operation Iraqi Freedom was over and "the American combat mission in Iraq has ended."  --  But the National (Abu Dhabi) reported that the Iraqi resistance believes that "Nothing has changed at all" and said that George Washington would approve of their continued fight against a foreign invader.[1]  --  A Baath party official said:  "'[T]hey can say combat is over but there has been no ceasefire from the resistance and there will be no ceasefire while there is even a single American soldier in Iraq' . . . He said that U.S. claims to have ceased offensive military operations were a 'lie,' pointing to the continued role of U.S. Special Forces units and intelligence assets.  U.S. soldiers also continue to patrol the so called trigger-line territories -- areas disputed between Iraqi Kurds and Arabs."  --  "'I think 50,000 soldiers is a lot of men to have left behind if you are saying you have completed a withdrawal,' the official said.  'Fifty thousand is an occupation force, it might just be a new style of occupation.'"  --  "Abu al Moheeb, a spokesman for the breakaway Mohammad Yunis al Ahmed faction of the Baath party, which has split from the Izzat al Douri wing, also vowed that the insurgency would continue," Phil Sands reported.  --  "Abu al Moheeb compared the Baathists’ fight to that of George Washington, a figure revered in the U.S. for leading America’s uprising against the British in the Revolutionary War, before becoming the first president of the United States.  'We have the right to resist foreign occupation,' he said.  'If George Washington were alive today he would support us in our right to resist, he led a national liberation movement.'  --  COMMENT:  American mainstream media seemed disinclined to probe the president's definition of "combat."  --  The last time we looked it up, "combat" meant "armed fighting; battle" or "any struggle or conflict; strife."  --  With about 50,000 U.S. troops still in Iraq and the numbers of U.S.-paid mercenaries on the increase, the declaration that "combat" is over is merely a neo-Orwellian "information operation" of the U.S. national security state.  --  As Konrad Becker has written:  "The development in electronic communication and digital media allows for a global telepresence of values and behavioral norms and provides increasing possibilities of controlling public opinion by accelerating the flow of persuasive communication.  Information is increasingly indistinguishable from propaganda, defined as 'the manipulation of symbols as a means of influencing attitudes.'  Whoever controls the metaphors controls thought." ...

U.S. Army (ret.) Capt. Paul K. Chappell is an Iraq war veteran from a military family who is the Peace Leadership Director for the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.  --  In April C-SPAN2 broadcast a 1:45:00 video of his discussion with a recent class at American University on his belief that world peace is possible.[1]  --  A short clip of the talk can be sampled from his website.[2]  --  He is also the author of a short book, Will War Ever End?: A Soldier's Vision of Peace for the 21st Century (Rvive Books, 2009).  --  Chappell highly recommends Dave Grossman's On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (2008), and argues that the evidence is overwhelming that human beings are naturally peaceful, not naturally violent.  --  Interestingly, Chappell is a great admirer of the U.S. military in general and West Point in particular.  --  He calls himself "anti-war and pro-military," arguing that waging peace and waging war have many similarities.  --  But, he says, while deception is the key to waging war, truth is the essence of waging peace.  --  COMMENT:  Chappell is an able, disciplined, even captivating, speaker, and he is also good in Q&A....

A background article on President Barack Obama's experience as commander in chief appeared on the front page of Sunday's New York Times.  --  Peter Baker reported that Obama has "surrounded himself with uniformed officers" and "relied on [Secretary of Defense Robert] Gates as his ambassador to the military and deferred to him repeatedly."[1]  --  "Reliant on Mr. Gates, Mr. Obama has made limited efforts to know his service chiefs or top commanders, and has visited the Pentagon only once, not counting a Sept. 11 commemoration."  --  COMMENT:  It is worthwhile, in the context of this article, to review some basic notions about the difference between the state and the government, two concepts that are elided in mainstream political discourse in the U.S.  --  While related, they are quite different.  --  Michael Parenti wrote in an essay entitled "State vs. Government" that "'Government' is 'visible office holders,' while 'state' is 'the ultimate coercive instrument of class power'" (Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader [SF: City Lights, 2007], 194).  --  "Roughly speaking, the difference between government and state is the difference between the city council and the police, between Congress and the armed forces" (ibid.).  --  Taking government office does not guarantee control of the state, Parenti emphasizes.  --  In general, the executive is not allowed to stray from "its primary dedication -- which is to advance the interests of corporate investors and protect the overall global capital accumulation process" (ibid., 199-200).  --  "Ultimate power . . . [rests] with the class for which [the CIA] works," not with the president (ibid., 201).  --  This why "[a] president working closely with the national security state and unequivocally for corporate hegemony can operate outside the laws of democratic governance with impunity" (ibid.)....

It seems we live in Oceania after all... -- or should we say, already?  --  On Friday, USA Today played the role of Ministry of Truth, informing readers that the war has brought many benefits to Iraq, though it is probably "too soon to tell" for sure whether it was all "worth it."[1]  --  Accompanying the tendentious analysis was a four-paragraph summary of how the Iraq war came about that was stunning in its revisionism.  --  Fortunately, FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting) is around to set the record straight.[2]  --  Some of it, at any rate; there are quite a few other objectionable assertions that FAIR didn't mention.  --  DEEPER BACKGROUND:  USA Today is owned by the Gannett Company, whose chairman, Allen Neuharth, once told a group of Wall Street investors that "No Gannett newspaper has any direct competition." ...

Theirs not to make reply... -- and it's a good thing, too, since they haven't a clue what they're doing in Afghanistan almost nine years after 9/11.  --  Spencer Ackerman of the Danger Room blog (on the website of Wired magazine) reported Thursday on the consternation and befuddlement of American soldiers who haven't been able to figure our "how their day-to-day jobs actually contributed to a successful outcome.  One person," Ackerman said, "actually asked me if I could explain how it’s all supposed to knit together."[1]  --  The confusion goes all the way to the top.  --  When Ackerman asked Gen. David Petraeus "[w]hat end state is his campaign plan supposed to bring about?  Reducing the Taliban to irrelevance, getting the Taliban to negotiate, or bringing them down just to the point where the Afghan security forces can handle them?" the new commander in Afghanistan replied "I think it’s all of the above.”  --  COMMENT:  Sorry, general, you may have a Ph.D. from Princeton (in International Relations, no less), but you just failed the test....

The Washington Post reported Wednesday that unnamed U.S. officials say CIA analysts now regard Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (in Yemen) as "the most urgent threat to U.S. security."[1]  --  COMMENT:  What do "urgent" and "U.S. security" mean in this sentence?  --  That the U.S. national security state has decided to move more deeply into Yemen.  --  Though the Washington Post announces this as news ("For the first time since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks" . . . "The sober new assessment"), it isn't.  --  In December 2009, Max Fisher reported on the Atlantic Wire that "many analysts fear that Yemen is on the edge of becoming an international crisis point on the scale of Afghanistan."  --  A few days later, Lolita Baldor of the Associated Press reported on the U.S. move into Yemen as the result of "a strategy shift that occurred about a year ago, when the United States determined that the two key centers in the fight against al-Qaida are Yemen, located on the southern tip of the Saudi Arabian peninsula, and Pakistan."  --  This article, coming some 20 months after the "strategy shift" of December 2008 or thereabouts, prepares U.S public opinion for further escalatation of its involvement in Yemen.  --  FURTHER COMMENT:  The United States and its allies defeated the 18,200,000 soldiers of Nazi Germany and the 1,700,000 of Imperial Japan in less than four years.  --  Nearly nine years have not sufficed to capture Osama bin Laden.  --  U.S. officials, however, speaking anonymously, "insisted there would be no letup in their pursuit of Osama bin Laden and other senior figures thought to be hiding in Pakistan" because "al-Qaeda and its allies in the tribal areas of Pakistan [are] supremely dangerous adversaries."[1]  --  That, or supremely useful adversaries.  --  If Osama bin Laden did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.  --  So why bother to apprehend him?  --  As for "Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula" and "Al Qaeda" itself, the U.S. does not bother to estimate the size of their forces.  --  Like other major media, the Washington Post freely lends its columns to this sort of U.S. government propaganda in return for access to news sources.  --  It will be interesting to hear what, if anything, Barack Obama has to say about Yemen in his Aug. 30 speech on Iraq....

NDM 1 was just the tip of the iceberg with which the globalized world is now colliding, the London Guardian reported on Aug. 12.  --  "[T]he post-antibiotic apocalypse is within sight. . . . The highly serious journal Lancet Infectious Diseases yesterday posed the question itself over a paper revealing the rapid spread of multi-drug-resistant bacteria.  'Is this the end of antibiotics?' it asked."[1]  --  The end of the age of antibiotics means farewell to transplant surgery and hello to fatal cases of appendicitis, incurable tuberculosis, hard-to-treat gonorrhea, and pneumonia as a leading cause of death in the elderly, Sarah Boseley wrote....

SEPTEMBER 2010 READING SCHEDULE

DIGGING DEEPER meets every Monday from 7:00 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. at the Mandolin Café, 3923 S. 12^th St., Tacoma, WA.[1] ...

For several weeks the Sarkozy government has been embarrassing France by pursuing a repressive crack-down on Romani campsites in a move that is widely regarded as an effort to troll for far-right voters concerned about illegal immigration.  --  This week "Viviane Reding, the European commissioner for justice and fundamental rights, said her office would launch a legal analysis to determine whether France’s actions complied with E.U. law," the Financial Times of London reported Wednesday.[1]  --  "I expect that all member states respect the commonly agreed E.U. rules on free movement, non-discrimination, and the common values of the European Union,” she said.  --  "In its legal review, the commission is expected to focus on whether the French measures were proportional, and whether they have breached the prohibition in the Charter of Fundamental Rights on 'collective expulsion.'"  --  The new Sarkozy government policy has become the object of intense criticism from "international human rights organisations, the Catholic church and even members of the governing UMP party," Ben Hall and Joshua Chaffin reported.  --  On the website Rue 89 a few days ago, commentator Hugues Serraf offered some non-politically correct ruminations, translated below, on the issue that give a flavor of the debate in France.[2]  --Mark]

A recent judicial ruling of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit indicates that another link in the neo-Orwellian mesh being constructed to protect the U.S. national security state is being forged, perhaps in anticipation of major difficulties ahead.  --  Time reported Wednesday that now "Government agents can sneak onto your property in the middle of the night, put a GPS device on the bottom of your car and keep track of everywhere you go. This doesn't violate your Fourth Amendment rights, because you do not have any reasonable expectation of privacy in your own driveway -- and no reasonable expectation that the government isn't tracking your movements.  That is the bizarre -- and scary -- rule that now applies in California and eight other Western states.  The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which covers this vast jurisdiction, recently decided the government can monitor you in this way virtually anytime it wants -- with no need for a search warrant."[1]  --  What's more, Adam Cohen noted, "the judges added insult to injury with some shocking class bias:  the little personal privacy that still exists, the court suggested, should belong mainly to the rich." ...

Psychologists spend their time devising subtle experiments and analyzing the results their subjects produce, but maybe they should spend some time analyzing themselves, columnist John Kay suggested in the Financial Times of London on Tuesday.  --  "Very few people read 'a bird in the the hand' when you have written 'a bird in the hand,' but the converse misreading is very common.  --  But who is actually making the mistake?  Doesn’t the fault lie with the experimenter who asks his subjects to parrot a meaningless phrase, rather than the subject who valiantly finds sense in nonsense? . . . If you approached the staff and said:  'I see the sign for buses to Stanstead Airport, but where do I find the buses to Stansted Airport?' you would rightly be regarded as a pedantic fool rather than a careful observer." ...

The headline to Serena Chaudhry's Reuters article on Tuesday announced "combat ends" but the text said something different.[1]  --  "'The war is not over.  There is still danger. There's still lots of people who will attack our forces, we all know that. Until we get every last soldier out of here, our commitment to this is not over,' [General Raymond] Odierno [U.S. military commander in Iraq] said."  --  But the next sentence referred to "[t]he end of U.S. combat operations."  --  Chaudhry reported that there are "six remaining U.S. brigades in Iraq," but that they will "move into an advisory role on September 1, training and supporting Iraq's army and police as they fight a weakened al Qaeda-linked insurgency."  --  COMMENT:  Such a "link" exists mainly in the minds of U.S. Information Operations personnel, intent on inculcating in the hivemind a connection between the Iraq war and 9/11.  --  But the resistance in Iraq has always been and will continue to be a largely nationalist resistance to a foreign occupation.  --  The occupation is not ending, but moving into a more privatized mode, with the U.S. continuing to maintain a choke hold on Iraqi society as it relishes the possession of large bases for U.S. forces in the Middle East (according to many analysts, this was always one of the chief aims of the war).  --  It was to this resistance, apparently, that Gen. Odierno addressed these comments:  "He said it was time for Iraqis to stop seeing the United States as '100,000 guys running around in uniforms, providing security, occupying the country,' but in terms of the economic, educational, diplomatic and educational help it could give them."  --  (In that sentence, what on earth does "it" refer to?)  --  Reuters's reporter had not a word to say about the rising number of the tens of thousands of Dept. of Defense contractors in Iraq.  --  But she did sau that "Obama has said no U.S. service members will remain in Iraq by January 1, 2012, even though it will be impossible for Iraq to stand up its own multi-role air force and be fully ready to protect its territorial integrity by then.  --  But Odierno said if Iraq's leaders asked the United States to retain support personnel in the country, or help it with air defenses, the request would not be rejected out of hand."  --  How generous.  --  In this article, Reuters might as well be acting as a press agency for the U.S. government.  --  BACKGROUND:  Reuters was once an independent news agency, but those days are long past.  --  The news agency is now a subsidiary of the Canadian corporation Thomson Reuters, whose revenues come chiefly from supplying financial markets with information and trading products.  --  When Reuters first went public, a rule prevented more than 15% of its stock being controlled by a single individual.  --  This rule was waived when in 2007 The Thomson Corporation merged with Reuters, and Thomson holds some 53% of its stock....

Peter Dale Scott has argued for some time that since the end of World War II events in the United States have increasingly not been directed by politics in the ordinary sense of the term, but rather by "parapolitics" and "deep politics."  --  In Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina (Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), Scott explained his view that "parapolitics" is conscious deceit and collusion, while "deep politics" is practices that are repressed rather than acknowledged: "Parapolitics . . . tends to metastasize into deep politics . . . This is the heart of the analysis" (pp. xii-xiii, emphasis in original; also 29).  --  The notion of "deep politics" has been embraced by other writers and researchers, and some of them gathered in Santa Cruz, CA, in May 2010 at a conference called "Understanding Deep Politics."  --  Videos of much of the conference have now been posted on the web.[1] ...

In the era of the market state, Philip Bobbitt has argued, political legitimacy for corporations, NGOs, and states alike comes from the ability to generate a cash flow.  --  So the question of how WikiLeaks keeps itself afloat financially is an important one in its current David-and-Goliath struggle with the U.S. national security state.  --  Ironically, Wikileaks is trying to keep secret many details of its financial operations, the Wall Street Journal reported Monday.[1]  --  Meanwhile, right-wing websites are demanding an answer to the question:  "Who is bankrolling Julian Assange?"[2]  -- 

Time magazine reported that a poll (full results here) of 1,002 American adults conducted on Aug. 18, 2010, found that 24% of Americans believe that President Barack Obama is a Muslim.  --  The poll also indicated that more than 70% of Americans oppose proceeding with the plan to build an Islamic center, believing the building that formerly housed a Burlington Coat Factory outlet is "so close to 'hallowed ground,' as President Obama put it."[1]  --  The poll also revealed other fruits of the Islamophobia that the American right has assiduously inculcated in the public mind:  "Twenty-eight percent of voters do not believe Muslims should be eligible to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court.  Nearly one-third of the country thinks adherents of Islam should be barred from running for President."  --  "While the poll revealed that prejudice toward Muslims is widespread, respect for other religious traditions remains sturdy," Alex Altman noted.  --  "Respondents held the Jewish faith in the highest regard, with 75% professing to hold a favorable impression -- just slightly higher than attitudes toward Protestants and Catholics.  Fifty-seven percent say they have a favorable view of the Mormon faith, compared with 44% for Muslims.  Despite (or perhaps because of) this widespread antipathy, 62% of respondents say they don't personally know a Muslim American." ...

On Tues., Aug. 17, 2010, two sonic booms rocked Western Washington, shaking buildings and bringing thousands of people into the streets.  --  The Olympian (Olympia, WA) exaggerated somewhat when it said they "unleashed pandemonium in the South Sound on Tuesday," but it was true that they temporarily shut down Pierce County’s largest 911 dispatch center.[1]  --  The cause of it all:  a "wayward float plane on its way from Lake Chelan to Lake Washington" that "violated a no-fly zone put in place over the Seattle area to protect [President Barack Obama] during his visit there."  --  "Authorities scrambled two F-15s from the Oregon Air National Guard in Portland to intercept the plane.  The fighters reached speeds faster than the speed of sound -- 761 mph at sea level -- as they raced north, setting off at least two sonic booms as they whizzed over Pierce County."  --  Though a low-flying F-15 (top speed 900 mph) flies more than five times faster than a Cessna 180 (top speed 170 mph), the offending aircraft had already left the restricted area by the time the military craft arrived on the scene, and the two interceptors were back in Portland about an hour later.  --  Col. Mike Stencel said the Oregon Air National Guard in Portland "monitors the entire Northwest.  'We cover defense for Oregon, Washington, and Idaho, with the next air defense base being down in Fresno, Calif.'"[2]  --  CHRONOLOGY:  The two F-15s belonging to the 142nd Fighter Wing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/142d_Fighter_Wing) of the Oregon Air National Guard, which sit on 24-hour alert at Portland International Airport as part of the North American Air Defense (NORAD) system, were scrambled from Portland International Airport[2] at 1:38 p.m. on orders from the North American Aerospace Defense Command.  --  The two sonic booms (which can be heard on an Aviation News video here on YouTube) were heard about ten seconds apart from Vancouver to Renton at about 1:50 p.m., just about the time the Cessna 180 was leaving the restricted air space.  --  The two F-15s landed back in Portland at 2:45 p.m. and 2:58 p.m. respectively, according to the Oregonian (Portland, OR).[2]  --  President Barack Obama left the King County International Airport/Boeing Field on Air Force One at 3:47 p.m.  --  HISTORICAL NOTE:  McChord AFB used to host the 318th Fighter Interceptor Squadron of the U.S. Air Force that could have handled this job, but the unit was inactivated in 1989.  --  ADDENDUM:  On Friday, the News Tribune (Tacoma, WA) reported that the pilot, 63-year-old Charles “Lee” Daily of Redmond, said he was sorry for the commotion he caused, but that he and his passenger, Laura Joseph of Normandy Park, were unaware of the excitement until after they landed on Lake Washington.[3]  --  They never heard the sonic boom.  --  BACKGROUND:  The F-15 is a McDonnell Douglas (now Boeing) plane whose design dates to 1967 and that first flew in 1972.  --  The plane is expected to remain in service with the U.S. Air Force until 2025.  --  In November 2007 an F-15 came apart in flight, and all F-15 aircraft were grounded for more than two months, raising questions about the plane's long-term future.  --  As of 2008, Israel has some 82 F-15s, Japan 223, Saudi Arabia 161, and the U.S. Air Force 630, of which 499 were active duty.  --  An F-15 costs about $15,000,000 and costs about $30,000 an hour to fly; a Cessna 180 costs about $25,000 and costs about $130 an hour to fly.  --  As for sonic booms, Chuck Yeager was the first pilot to produce one in level flight on Oct. 14, 1947, with the Bell X-1 rocket plane.  --  But the first sonic boom was prehistoric (the crack of a whip is a tiny one)....

An American private from Idaho who disappeared in Afghanistan more than a year ago has converted to Islam, taken the name Abdullah, and begun training Taliban fighters, the London Daily Mail reported Sunday, citing Afghan intelligence officials....

Readers at the website Reader Supported News responded with skepticism to reports that allegations of rape were being raised against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.[1] ...

Swedish Chief Prosecutor Eva Finné said Saturday that Julian Assange is "no longer wanted" by police and "is not suspected of rape" after having an arrest warrant filed against him Friday night and being "arrested in absentia" by "an 'on-call prosecutor,'" CNN reported late Saturday.[1]  --  The New York Times reported that "on Saturday in Twitter feeds, [Assange] said the accusations were 'without basis,' and implied they were payback for his disclosures:  'We were warned to expect "dirty tricks."  Now we have the first one.'"[2]  --  Late Saturday Al Jazeera was reporting that "Al Jazeera's Paul Brennan, in London, said: 'The two alleged victims in this are in their twenties.  One [alleged incident] is supposed to have happened last weekend in Stockholm and another last Tuesday in Sweden but in a separate town.'"[3]  --  A Newsweek blog called the latest developments "a head-spinning drama" involving "a bizarre sequence of events that echoed the plot of a Stieg Larsson novel."[4]  --  "The latest turns in the case are eerily evocative of both the storylines and characters in the trilogy of thrillers by Stieg Larsson, the Swedish investigative reporter who died in 2004 and whose novels have lately become international publishing phenomena," said Mark Hosenball.  --  "Apart from sometimes violent sexual overtones, the Swedish political and social backdrop to Larsson's novels features feckless prosecutors and sinister secret policemen.  Among Larsson's main characters are world-class computer hackers (Assange's background allegedly includes hacking), private investigators, and left-wing journalists." ...