Monday, March 31, 2003
Allied forces’ terrorism a new threat to the world
— Syed Hamid.
KOTA TINGGI (Johor) March 30 — The terrorism perpetrated by the allied forces on the people of Iraq poses a new threat to the world, Foreign Minister Datuk Seri Syed Hamid Albar said Sunday.He said the suicide attacks now taking place would be continued not only in Iraq but also in other places once people become angry and developed a hatred over the cruelty inflicted by the big powers.
| “This action (suicide attack) is taking place because people are fed up with the terrorism and injustice of the allied forces. The world has to face up to terrorism of this nature,” he told reporters when asked to comment on the suicide attack on allied forces in Iraq on Saturday in which four United States soldiers were killed.
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Syed Hamid, who was met at a meet-the-people session at Kampung Teluk Ramunia near here, said it would become even more dangerous when anger against the arrogance of the allied forces led by the United States touched the hearts of ordinary people.
| “We see the protests and hatred being displayed not only by people saddened by the human tragedy but also by those who in the first place never had any sympathy for Saddam Hussein,” he said.
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Speaking at the meet-the-people session, Syed Hamid reminded Malaysians to learn from the US-led invasion of Iraq and strengthen their own unity.“Only with a strong bond of unity among them can Malaysians prevent themselves from being colonised by the big powers,”he said.kewe note: Calling the coalition forces, “the allied forces" highlights the three western nations former achievements. The allied nations were then many more. Then, they were ‘truely allied’ in their fight for democracy, and the rights of a society that respected each individual. Why the nations of Australia, The United Kingdom, and The United States, ignoring all others who tried to council more sanely, have descended into such terrorism as they are presently committing is beyond me. Perhaps you have an answer?
posted by kewe 4:19 PM
ARNETT JOINS MIRROR
April 1, 2003THE reporter sacked by American TV for telling the truth about the war is joining the Daily Mirror. Veteran newsman Peter Arnett was axed by NBC yesterday accused of being a Saddam stooge. He told state-run Iraqi TV the conflict was not going to plan because of fierce resistance and said his Baghdad reports “help those who oppose war”. He joins the Mirror on the day it was revealed that 8,700 bombs have rained down on Iraq in 12 days, including 3,000 missiles over the weekend.
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OUTSPOKEN: Live from Baghdad |
After his sacking, Pulitzer Prize winner Arnett said: “I report the truth of what is happening here in Baghdad and will not apologise for it. I have always admired your newspaper and am proud to be working for it.”The New Zealand-born journalist was vilified across the US for an interview in which he said: “The first war plan has failed because of Iraqi resistance. Now they are trying to write another war plan. Clearly, thewar planners misjudged the determination of the Iraqi forces. In my TV commentaries I’d tell the Americans about the Iraqi forces and their willingness to fight.“President Bush says he is concerned about the Iraqi people. But if Iraqi people are dying in numbers, then American policy will be challenged very strongly.”Arnett, 68, added that there was growing opposition about the conduct of the war.’He said: “Our reports about civilian casualties here, about the resistance of the Iraqi forces, are going back to the US. It helps those who oppose the war when you challenge the policy.”On Sunday, NBC praised the reporter for risking his life to deliver news from Baghdad.The station said of the Iraqi TV interview: “He answered their questions out of professional courtesy. He saw it as purely analysis.”But the furious White House said Arnett spoke from “a point of complete ignorance”.They day after backing him, NBC cut him loose.Yesterday Arnett said on NBC: “I want to apologise to the American people. It was clearly a misjudgment talking to Iraqi TV.“I’m not anti-war. I said what we all know about this war. But I’ve created a firestorm and for that I’m sorry.”Asked about his future, he joked: “There’s a small island in the South Pacific I’ll try to swim to. I’ll leave.”Arnett was one of the few TV journalists in Baghdad. He said: “The Iraqis let me stay because they see me as a fellow warrior. They know I might not agree with them. But I’ve got their respect.”The reporter, the first Western journalist to interview Osama bin Laden and the last to interview Saddam Hussein, was accused of peddling pro-Iraqi propaganda while covering the 1991 Gulf War.But he gained much of his prominence for reporting the last conflict with Iraq for CNN.His Pulitzer Prize came for reporting in Vietnam in 1966 for the Associated Press.
HOME OF THE FREE: ARNETT JOINS MIRROR .
Reporter Arnett: U.S. War Plan Has Failed
By DAVID BAUDER
The Associated Press Sunday, March 30, 2003; 9:11 PM
Veteran journalist Peter Arnett, covering the war from Baghdad, told state-run Iraqi TV in an interview aired Sunday that the American-led coalition’s first war plan had failed because of Iraq’s resistance and said strategists are “trying to write another war plan.”
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Peter Arnett broadcasting from Iraq on MSNBC |
New Zealand-born journalist Peter Arnett, covering the war from Baghdad, told state-run Iraqi TV the American-led coalition’s first war plan had failed because of Iraq’s resistance.Arnett, who won a Pulitzer Prize reporting in Vietnam for The Associated Press, gained much of his prominence covering the Gulf War for CNN in 1991. Arnett, reporting from the Iraqi capital for NBC and its cable stations, said in an interview with Iraqi TV that strategists were “trying to write another war plan.”The interview could make Arnett a target of the war’s supporters. The first Bush administration was unhappy with Arnett’s reporting in 1991 for CNN, suggesting he had become a conveyor of propaganda.He was denounced for his reporting about the bombing of a baby milk factory in Baghdad. The American military said it was a biological weapons plant, but Arnett stood by his reporting that the plant’s sole purpose was to make baby formula.NBC, in a statement Sunday, praised Arnett’s “outstanding” reporting from Iraq and said he was trying nothing more than to give an analytical response to an interviewer’s questions.In the interview, Arnett said his Iraqi friends tell him there is a growing sense of nationalism and resistance to what the coalition forces are doing.He said the United States is reappraising the battlefield and delaying the war, maybe for a week, “and rewriting the war plan. The first war plan has failed because of Iraqi resistance. Now they are trying to write another war plan.”“Clearly, the American war plans misjudged the determination of the Iraqi forces,” Arnett said during the interview broadcast by Iraq’s satellite television station and monitored by The Associated Press in Egypt.Arnett said it is clear that within the United States there is growing opposition to the war and a growing challenge to US President Bush about the war’s conduct.“Our reports about civilian casualties here, about the resistance of the Iraqi forces, are going back to the United States,” he said. “It helps those who oppose the war when you challenge the policy to develop their arguments.”The interview was broadcast in English and translated by a green military uniform-wearing Iraqi anchor. NBC said Arnett gave the interview when asked shortly after he attended an Iraqi government briefing.“His impromptu interview with Iraqi TV was done as a professional courtesy and was similar to other interviews he has done with media outlets from around the world,” NBC News spokeswoman Allison Gollust said. “His remarks were analytical in nature and were not intended to be anything more. His outstanding reporting on the war speaks for itself.”Arnett was the on-air reporter of the 1998 CNN report that accused American forces of using sarin gas on a Laotian village in 1970 to kill U.S. defectors. Two CNN employees were sacked and Arnett was reprimanded over the report, which the station later retracted. Arnett ultimately left the network.He went to Iraq this year not as an NBC News reporter but as an employee of the MSNBC show, “National Geographic Explorer.” When other NBC reporters left Baghdad for safety reasons, the network began airing his reports.
Veteran journalist Arnett says war plan has failed
The first war plan has failed because of Iraqi resistance.
Arnett rattles hornets' nest with Iraqi TV comments.
NBC Fires Peter Arnett Over Iraqi TV Interview.
A US Republican politician has branded an interview by the reporter on Iraqi television as “nauseating”..
Arnett, On Iraq TV, Praises Treatment Of Reporters.
Mubarak says Iraq war to produce:
“100 new bin Ladens”
31-03-2003
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said on Monday the U.S.-led war on Iraq would produce “one hundred new bin Ladens,” driving more Muslims to anti-Western militancy.“When it is over, if it is over, this war will have horrible consequences,” Mubarak told Egyptian soldiers in the city of Suez. “Instead of having one (Osama) bin Laden, we will have 100 bin Ladens,” he added.
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak
Egypt, a key regional U.S. ally which has cracked down hard on Islamic militants, publicly opposes the war launched by Washington to overthrow President Saddam Hussein.Mubarak said Iraqi forces fighting U.S. and British troops were “guarding Iraq’s lands and defending its national honour and nobility” in the conflict.Reflecting widespread public anger at what many Arabs see as Western aggression against an Arab country, he said the war would cause a “great tragedy (and) destroy a deep-rooted culture and people”.“Egypt’s position has been and still is clear in rejecting...the military option and rejecting participation in military action of the coalition forces against brotherly Iraq,” he said.Mubarak said the war had raised many questions, especially among the Arab and Muslim peoples of the Middle East, about the “credibility of the international system of collective security represented in the United Nations”.Many Arabs think Washington has employed double standards in enforcing U.N. resolutions on Iraq while not making Israel comply with resolutions demanding withdrawal from Palestinian territories and an end to Jewish settlements.Mubarak read out the highlights of an international plan for Israeli-Palestinian peace called the “roadmap”, saying that while the Palestinian Authority had accepted it, the government of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had asked for 100 changes.“This means the roadmap has been rendered meaningless. Unless the big powers agree and put forward a mechanism to implement it without any alterations...I believe the roadmap will not move on the right road and it might lead to complications,” he said.The Egyptian leader added that international commitments obliged his country to keep the Suez Canal open to all vessels. “Crossing of ships of the Suez Canal is a right for all countries and is an international commitment that cannot be trampled with,” he aired.
“When it is over, if it is over, this war will have horrible consequences,"
Mubarak says Iraq war to produce: “100 new bin Ladens”
posted by kewe 10:41 AM
I’m going to do something horrible to them for this.
Among civilians the casualty list was heavier. None of the schools had been hit, but there was a fair list of damaged dwelling houses. One bomb had fallen in the almshouses, and some of the old people had been killed. And they had killed one rabbit!Blast had burst down the doors of the net defence store yard, and had thrown down the hutch. Within it the little furry body was stretched, hardly cold; it had been very sudden, for a part-eaten frond of cow parsley was clenched between the teeth. The body was unmarked, the fur unruffled. A rabbit does not stand blast very well.The naval officer took out the body gently, but it sagged limp in his hands; there was nothing they could do. The girl said unevenly: ‘He couldn’t have known anything about it Michael. He wasn’t even frightened. Look, he was still eating.Rhodes turned to her, and she was shocked at his expression. He was dead-white, and tears were streaming down his face.‘They had to pick this street, of all streets,’ he said.There was a pause; the girl did not know what to say to help him. Very carefully he laid the body down upon the grass and stood erect, thoughtfull. Mechanically he got out his handkerchief and blew his nose.The problem of burial occured to her. She looked up at him. ‘What had we better do, Michael?’‘I’ll have to go to Honiton,’ he said. ‘I’d better go tomorrow. I’m going to do something horrible to them for this.’
| Nevile Shute — Most Secret First Published 1945. |
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posted by kewe 6:09 PM
Escondido family mourns its Marine, a ‘man of honor’ .
Mar 29 2003 By Daniel J. Chacón and Blanca Gonzalez. San Diego Union-Tribune staff writers ESCONDIDO — Fernando Suárez de Solar moved his family from Tijuana less than a decade ago in the hope of securing a better life on the U.S. side of the border.Yesterday, he struggled with that decision after learning that his only son, Jesús, who joined the Marines after he graduated from Escondido’s Valley High School in 2001, died on a battlefield in Iraq.“I feel terrible because if I wouldn’t have brought them here, this wouldn’t have happened,” he said, hugging a large framed photograph of his son in his Marine dress blues.A stream of family and friends, many of whom traveled from Tijuana, spilled into the family’s apartment in tears, unable to talk. The family closed the door, saying the Marine’s mother felt overwhelmed.“How is this fair?” asked Suárez’s grandfather, Raúl Navarro Alcazar, 75. “I can’t explain it. He was such a good boy.”
 Fernando Suárez de Solar embraced one of Jesús’ boyhood friends, Joshua Josue, outside the Suárezes’ home in Escondido yesterday. Josue had just heard Jesús had been killed in Iraq. Behind them was Jesús’ grandfather, Raúl Navarro Alcazar.
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Fernando Suárez said his son’s death should serve as an example to those who belittle Mexican immigrants. “We didn’t come as immigrants to take anything from anyone,” he said. “It’s the opposite. We give our blood for their freedom.” The Suárez family learned of their son’s death yesterday morning, when two Marines showed up at their door. “Your son is a hero,” one Marine said in Spanish. “He died on the battlefield in Iraq.” “They told me, ‘It happened at night,’ ” Suárez said. He won’t get any more details for two to nine days. A lance corporal, Suárez was assigned to the 1st Marine Division based at Camp Pendleton. “He always wanted to help people,” his father said. “He always wanted to help everyone.” Suárez, 20, married his longtime girlfriend, Sayne, also 20, in December. They also had a baby, Erik. Suárez was born and raised in Tijuana. He immigrated to the United States in the late 1990s with his father, mother and two sisters. The family settled in Escondido, where Suárez attended San Pasqual High School. He then transferred to Valley High School, where staff yesterday remembered him as a good kid with a winning smile who focused on having a military career. “He was so bright and so mature,” said Principal Janice Boedeker, who had the flag outside the school lowered to half-staff yesterday. Boedeker said one of Suárez’s former teachers told her she had bumped into Suárez, his wife and their baby at a mall recently. She said he told her he had been in Afghanistan and that he loved being in the military. “He was so excited about being a part of the infantry and the Marine Corps,” Boedeker said. “I always ask kids about their goals what they want to do. There was never a question with him. I remember he wrote in big, capital letters: MARINES.” Suárez returned to the campus several times after he graduated. Counselor Rhonda Winegarner said he would visit the school with Marine recruiters and spoke at the school’s 9/11 ceremony last year, commemorating those who died in the terrorist attacks. “He was quite eloquent and spoke about what an honor it was to serve our country,” she said, her voice breaking. “He had a smile that could steal your heart.” Tom Gabriella, one of Suárez’s teachers, remembers Suárez’s senior project. “It was a power point presentation on the military — what it takes to be successful, what it teaches you,” Gabriella said. A couple of weeks ago, Suárez visited the campus in uniform and told Gabriella he was heading to Kuwait. “I kind of grimaced and told him to be careful.” Suárez’s family told him to fight hard and to help the wounded, even the enemy. Longtime family friend Gloria González of Tijuana said that as Mexicans, many of the people mourning Suárez’s death were against war. Yet they respected Suárez’s beliefs. “He died for what he thought was just,” she said. “Not many people would die for what they believe. He was very brave. My only hope is that his death won’t be in vain.” Suárez’s father said his son understood the risk of being a Marine. “He said, ‘Dad, if something happens to me, take care of my son. Teach him like you taught me,’” his father said. “He was always proud to be Mexican. That’s how I want my grandson to remember him. He was a man of honor.” A few days ago, Fernando Suárez e-mailed a letter to his son, asking him to be careful and to remember his values. “Wear your American soldier’s uniform with pride, but wear with even greater pride your heritage of an Aztec warrior,” he wrote. Fernando Suárez said his son died defending the values of his newfound country. “He died like a hero. I have no doubts about that.”
Jesús died on a battlefield in Iraq.
posted by kewe 2:58 PM
“The Madness of Tony Blair - Paranoia, Apocalyptic, Delusional
— his false belief strongly held in spite of invalidating evidence.”
kewe note: I was extremely surprised to find this article in ‘The Times,’ certainly not one of the United Kingdom’s frivolous newspapers. Over the past year, while spending much of my time in the United Kingom, I have become increasingly more interested, and more concerned, with watching Mr Blair on television. This interest has increased over the past month, not in the sense that I was watching for a turnaround in Mr Blair’s policy, but rather in noticing how he behaved. The following agrees with my own opinion. It is a long article. I urge you to read it in full. And to watch. However, so many people today are ‘embedded’ in this war with Mr Blair: Generals, Cabinet Ministers, and voting politicians, that the very idea is not likely to be allowed to become credible; and if it does take hold to any sizable number of people, I can only imagine the howls of rhetoric, (not the least from the skill of Mr Blair himself) and the denunciations that will issue forth. But, as Mr Drudge is so fond of typing, when ending a report where events are likely at some stage to take a strange twist, developing....
The Madness of Tony Blair - Paranoia, Apocalyptic, Delusional
— his false belief strongly held in spite of invalidating evidence.
By Matthew Parris, www.timesonline.co.uk The Times March 29, 2003
Most of us have experienced the discomfort of watching a friend go off the rails. At first his oddities are dismissed as eccentricities. An absurd assertion, a lunatic conviction, a sudden enthusiasm or unreasonable fear, are explained as perhaps due to tiredness, or stress, or natural volatility. We do not want to face the truth that our friend has cracked up. Finally we can deny it no longer — and then it seems so obvious: the explanation, in retrospect, of so much we struggled to reconcile.
Sometimes the realisation comes fast and suddenly. It did for me at university when my Arab fellow student Ahmed, who for months had been warning me of the conspiracies of which he suspected we might be victims, pulled me into his room to show me the death-ray he could see shining through his window. It was somebody’s porch-light. Likewise, the madness of King George III, which came in spells, was undeniable when it came. At other times the realisation is a slow, sad dawning of the obvious. Sometimes it is a friend about whom we worry. Sometimes it is a prime minister.
I will accept the charge of discourtesy, but not of flippancy, when I ask whether Tony Blair may now have become, in a serious sense of that word, unhinged.
Genius and madness are often allied, and nowhere is this truer than in political leadership. Great leaders need self-belief in unnatural measure. Simple fraudsters are rumbled early, but great leaders share with great confidence tricksters a capacity to be more than persuaded, but inhabited, by their cause. Almost inevitably, an inspirational leader spends important parts of his life certain of the uncertain, convinced of the undemonstrable.
So do the mentally ill. It can be extremely difficult to distinguish between a person who is sticking bravely to a difficult cause whose truth is far from obvious, and a person who is going crazy. It took us quite a while to explain David Icke’s beliefs in the only useful way in which they could be explained — and he was on the political fringe. A national leader commands vastly more respect and will be given the benefit of many more doubts than Mr Icke ever was. Colleagues, commentators and the wider public are usually late to face up to evidence that the boss has gone berserk, even though the evidence may have been around for quite some time.
There are good reasons for this. To call somebody mad is bad manners even when fair comment. To tackle your opponent’s argument by questioning his sanity can look like a childish copping-out from sensible discussion. How can the victim answer back?
But the charge is sometimes germane. It may become the only thing worth considering. Winston Churchill had lost the plot long before the proper public discussion this deserved got under way. And I myself believe that one of my political heroes, Margaret Thatcher, began to lose her mental balance well before the end, and before those close to her allowed themselves to consider this explanation of her behaviour. For me the suspicion first dawned when the then Prime Minister devised for the Lord Mayor’s banquet a dress with such an extravagant train that she needed someone to help her with it into the Mansion House. This was when she was beginning to refer to herself as “we”, and treating friends who warned her of her fate as treacherous. A telltale of incipient insanity is when the victim begins to take a Manichaean view of the universe.
There are good reasons why those at the top can go quietly bonkers before their inferiors wake up to the warning signs. The first is obviously deference. “The Madness of King Tony” might — I accept — seem an impertinent way of discussing our leader during a war when, whatever application it may have in Tony Blair’s case, it applies to Saddam Hussein in spades.
Beyond deference, however, those at the top of the pyramid who are anxious to impress us with truths which are not obvious have another powerful weapon at their disposal. They can credibly claim to know more than we can be told. To the man in the street, the most potent of Mr Blair’s arguments for invading Iraq is that he and George W. Bush are in possession of special intelligence which supports their stand but which cannot be divulged. And no doubt that is true. The question is about the amount of support such intelligence lends, not its existence.
Note from your own experience, as well as from the history books, how those with a claim which sounds incredible tend to support it by claiming a private source of information they are unable to share. Joan of Arc heard voices. Ahmed said he could feel the lethal qualities of the apparent porch-light and reminded me that his enemies would obviously decoy the ignorant by disguising death-rays in this way. One or another version of God has been a time-honoured way for madcap leaders to give their actions an authority not apparent to the five senses of their audiences. Cornered by reality, “private sources” are the last refuge of the deluded. Is Mr Blair among them? Let me outline some of my grounds for worry. Any one of these grounds might be dismissed as negligible, or indicative of nothing more sinister than conviction; but cumulatively I find them worrying.
Mr Blair has stopped sounding like a career politician. He has lost the professional polish of a man doing a job, and developed that fierce, quiet intensity which, from long experience of dealing with mad constituents, I know that the slightly cracked share with the genuinely convinced. He has lost his feel for whom to confront, or when and where, and puts himself into situations (like the slow handclapping by anti-war women) which do not assist his case. Historians may point to Mr Blair’s private — but publicised — audience with the Pope as an early sign of a dawning unrealism about the perceptions of others. Did he this week stop for a moment to think what impression would be made on grieving parents by his wild-eyed suggestion (based on misinformation) that two British soldiers had been executed by the Iraqis in cold blood?
Blair’s long-standing tendency to compartmentalise logic (a habit all politicians share to some degree) is now being pushed to extremes. The speeches the “old” Europeans are making — about giving Iraq more time, accepting gradual progress and not sticking to a literal interpretation of earlier demands — are exactly the speeches Mr Blair himself gives (persuasively) in defence of letting the IRA off the decommissioning hook.
This logic-chopping alarms. The Prime Minister has lost his sense of how his indignation at Iraqi brutality jars, coming from someone attacking a country whose puny forces are grotesquely outgunned by ours. His anger at the French (whose position has been consistent and identical to that which Blair held until a year ago) is inexplicable to those of us who are not doctors. He displays a demented capacity to convince himself that it is the other guy who is cheating.
He has started saying things which are not only unsustainable, but palpably absurd. The throwaway remark to Parliament that he would ignore Security Council vetoes which were “capricious” or “unreasonable” was more than ill-considered: coming from a trained lawyer it was stark, staring bonkers. It was breathtaking. For risibility I would bracket it with Ahmed’s death-ray. The whole country should have been crying with laughter. That the British media should have been mesmerised into reporting him in any other way still leaves me dumbfounded. No sane lawyer could have said what Blair said.
He keeps retreating into a hopeless, desperate optimism: another sign of lunacy. He seems to have promised the Americans he could deliver Europe, and told the Europeans he could tame America. There was scant ground for hope on the first score and none on the second. The belief that irreconcilables can be reconciled by one’s personal contacts and powers of persuasion is a familiar delusion among people who are not quite right in the head. While each futile promise is in the process of being demonstrated to be undeliverable, he goes into a sort of nose-tapping, “watch this space” denial. When finally the promise is abandoned he turns insouciantly away — and makes a new promise.
This week he has been promising to sort out the Americans, and persuade them to let the United Nations supervise the post-conflict administration of Iraq. He is probably telling the Americans he can sort out the Security Council. He can do neither. Meanwhile, he has forgotten that his previous position was that the coalition partners invaded as agents of the UN anyway, so it isn’t up to Washington to give permission. Any bank manager used to dealing with bankrupts with a pathological shopping habit who have severed contact with arithmetic will recognise the optimism.
Have the rest of the Cabinet tumbled yet to the understanding that this may not be about Iraq at all, but about the Prime Minister? My guess is that those closest to Mr Blair must be beginning to wonder privately. It is time people pooled their doubts. |
The Madness of Tony Blair - Paranoia, Apocalyptic, Delusional
— his false belief strongly held in spite of invalidating evidence.
posted by kewe 3:05 AM |
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