connecting*the*dots

(shot by Lisa Scheer)

What a naive lot those New Yorkers are…

In five days, it’ll be the four-year anniversary of “Mission accomplished.”

Unbelievable.

btw, Steven Connell is amazing.

Artists: Mos Def - Immortal Technique - Eminem

=============

[Mos Def - talking]
Man, you hear this bullshit they be talkin’
Every day, man
It’s like these motherfuckers is just like professional liars
YouknowwhatI’msayin? It’s wild
Listen

[Hook - Mos Def]
Bin Laden didn’t blow up the projects
It was you, nigga
Tell the truth, nigga
(Bush knocked down the towers)–[Jadakiss]
Tell the truth, nigga
(Bush knocked down the towers)–[Jadakiss]
Tell the truth, nigga

Bin Laden didn’t blow up the projects
It was you, nigga
Tell the truth, nigga
(Bush knocked down the towers)–[Jadakiss]
Tell the truth, nigga
(Bush knocked down the towers)–[Jadakiss]

[Verse 1 - Immortal Technique]
I pledge no allegiance, nigga fuck the president’s speeches
I’m baptized by America and covered in leeches
The dirty water that bleaches your soul and your facial features
Drownin’ you in propaganda that they spit through the speakers
And if you speak about the evil that the government does
The Patriot Act’ll track you to the type of your blood
They try to frame you, and say you was tryna sell drugs
And throw a federal indictment on niggaz to show you love
This shit is run by fake Christians, fake politicians
Look at they mansions, then look at the conditions you live in
All they talk about is terrorism on television
They tell you to listen, but they don’t really tell you they mission
They funded Al-Qaeda, and now they blame the Muslim religion
Even though Bin Laden, was a CIA tactician
They gave him billions of dollars, and they funded his purpose
Fahrenheit 9/11, that’s just scratchin’ the surface

[Hook - Mos Def]
Bin Laden didn’t blow up the projects
It was you, nigga
Tell the truth, nigga
(Bush knocked down the towers)–[Jadakiss]
Tell the truth, nigga
(Bush knocked down the towers)–[Jadakiss]
Tell the truth, nigga

Bin Laden didn’t blow up the projects
It was you, nigga
Tell the truth, nigga
(Bush knocked down the towers)–[Jadakiss]
Tell the truth, nigga
(Bush knocked down the towers)–[Jadakiss]

[Verse 2 - Immortal Technique]
They say the rebels in Iraq still fight for Saddam
But that’s bullshit, I’ll show you why it’s totally wrong
Cuz if another country invaded the hood tonight
It’d be warfare through Harlem, and Washington Heights
I wouldn’t be fightin’ for Bush or White America’s dream
I’d be fightin’ for my people’s survival and self-esteem
I wouldn’t fight for racist churches from the south, my nigga
I’d be fightin’ to keep the occupation out, my nigga
You ever clock someone who talk shit, or look at you wrong?
Imagine if they shot at you, and was rapin’ your moms
And of course Saddam Hussein had chemical weapons
We sold him that shit, after Ronald Reagan’s election
Mercenary contractors fightin’ a new era
Corporate military bankin’ off the war on terror
They controllin’ the ghetto, with the failed attack
Tryna distract the fact that they engineerin’ the crack
So I’m strapped like Lee Malvo holdin’ a sniper rifle
These bullets’ll touch your kids, and I don’t mean like Michael
Your body be sent to the morgue, stripped down and recycled
I fire on house niggaz that support you and like you
Cuz innocent people get murdered in the struggle daily
And poor people never get shit and struggle daily
This ain’t no alien conspiracy theory, this shit is real
Written on the dollar underneath the Masonic seal

(I don’t rap for dead presidents
I’d rather see the president dead
It’s never been said but I set precedents)–[Eminem]

[Hook - Mos Def]
Bin Laden didn’t blow up the projects
It was you, nigga
Tell the truth, nigga
(Bush knocked down the towers)–[Jadakiss]
Tell the truth, nigga
(Bush knocked down the towers)–[Jadakiss]
Tell the truth, nigga

Bin Laden didn’t blow up the projects
It was you, nigga
Tell the truth, nigga
(Bush knocked down the towers)–[Jadakiss]
Tell the truth, nigga
(Bush knocked down the towers)–[Jadakiss]

(Shady Records was 80 seconds away from the towers
Some cowards fucked with the wrong building, they meant to hit ours)– [Eminem]

(originally uploaded by UsokChoe)

Newsweek
Mao & Stalin, Osama & Saddam
By Fareed Zakaria

[…]

I’m not sure the president actually believes in the transnational threat of a “Shiite crescent.” If he does, why would he have invaded Iraq and handed it over to another group of Shiite extremists? (The parties that rule Iraq — and whose militias are killing people — are conservative, religious Shiites, often with ties to Iran.) In fact, Iraqi Shiites are different from Iranian Shiites. They have separate national agendas and interests. To conflate them into one group, and then to toss in Sunni Arab extremists as comrades in arms, is bad policy. The world of Islam is extremely diverse. We should recognize and act on this diversity — between Shiites and Sunnis, Persians and Arabs, Asians and Middle Easterners — and most especially between moderates and radicals. But instead the White House is lumping Chechen separatists in Russia, Pakistani-backed militants in India, Shiite politicians in Iraq and Sunni jihadists in Egypt all together as one worldwide movement. This is, of course, exactly what Osama bin Laden has argued all along. But why is Bush making bin Laden’s case?

Why? Well, it’s not because Bush is the fucking village idiot. Baudelaire was probably a lot closer to the truth of the matter with this timeless quote:

The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.

Bush is making bin Laden’s case because he’s fulfilling the neo-conservative agenda: a destabilized middle-east to fuel our military industrial complex and position the US as a long-term player in the struggle for natural resources.

In order for all of that to happen and continue on into the unforeseen future, the PNAC cronies needed a larger than life enemy to scare the living shit out of we, the people.

And 9/11 fell into their laps.

Bush isn’t a failed president; he’s a successful neo-con lapdog.

(photo by Jesus’ General)

Reuters
ABC Scrambling to Change 9/11 Drama

[…]

Officials at the Walt Disney Co.-owned network said they were still tinkering with the five-hour production, titled “The Path to 9/11,” which is scheduled to air without commercial interruption in two parts on Sunday and Monday.

But ABC declined to say how the movie was being reshaped or whether any changes would address specific complaints lodged by Clinton, his former aides and congressional Democrats that the film contained numerous inaccuracies and distortions.

The Hollywood trade paper Daily Variety, citing sources close to the project, reported the network was considering canceling the miniseries altogether.

The docu-drama, which ABC says is based largely on the official 9/11 Commission Report, opens with the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York and traces subsequent events leading up to the coordinated suicide hijackings five years ago that killed nearly 3,000 people.

Much of the controversy focuses on a scene depicting CIA agents and Afghan fighters coming close to capturing al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in the 1990s, only to have then-White House national security adviser Samuel Berger refuse to authorize completion of their mission.

An unfinished version of the film circulated by ABC to TV critics for review portrays Berger as abruptly hanging up the phone while the CIA is pressing him to approve the raid.

In letters of protest to Disney President Robert Iger, Berger and former White House aide Bruce Lindsey said no such episode ever occurred.

The executive producer of the film, Marc Platt, acknowledged to Reuters on Thursday the Berger scene was a “conflation of events.”

The film also drew denunciations from Clinton supporters for strongly suggesting his administration was too distracted by the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal to deal effectively with the gathering threat of Islamic militancy. Lindsey said the 9/11 Commission Report disputed that notion.

[…]

This is what you get when you try to cash in too early on a national tragedy.

Remember the films JFK and Pearl Harbor? Both films took tremendous license in their portrayals of actual events, but the difference is that they did so 28 and 60 years after the fact, respectively. And while each took accuracy jabs from critics, neither had to deal with this degree of criticism because the emotional scars of the American public had already healed and the people who were on watch during these tragedies were either retired or dead.

With the airing of The Path to 9/11 on the eve of the five year anniversary of the events of that day, we also happen to be stuck, knee-deep, in a war that has been proven to have no relationship to the events of that day. No matter what inaccuracies are found — from either side of the aisle — this production was bound to catch major flack for trying to feed a narrative to a still healing nation, ever so hungry for the truth, not some docu-drama version of the events leading to 9/11.

Who Made The Call To Produce This Film?

In my estimation, there are only two possible reasons why Disney/ABC would give the green light on this production at this time:

1. Karl Rove instructed his minions to write the narrative and convince Disney/ABC to produce the film
2. Disney/ABC is simply gambling on the old adage, “There is no such thing as bad PR”

As a firm believer in the power that human greed wields in shaping our world over back door conspiracies, I’m sitting pretty squarely in the second camp (though I couldn’t help using the above image of Mickey Rove; Gen. JC Christian, Patriot is a genius).

I’m betting that Disney/ABC figured that this would be business as usual, though blown up a bit due to the subject matter; you know the formula — create a controversy, sell the advertising, line the pockets and move on unscathed within a few weeks.

What they didn’t take into consideration is the age that we live in now — where blog reach is both gaining traction in the very same homes that their sugar-coated narrative is being presented, as well as influencing the presentation of popular shows on TV (The Daily Show and The Colbert Report to name a few).

When a passive audience starts to become more active in their digestion of information, these old axioms of capitalism begin to start biting mainstream marketing strategies in the ass.

To make my point, let me perform a few minutes worth of Google research… Okay, I’m back (and my own thesis has shifted somewhat after only 20 minutes). Take this bit of information from HuffPost as an example of how nutritional facts for digesting reality can change a perspective in a matter of minutes:

[…]

In fact, “The Path to 9/11″ is produced and promoted by a well-honed propaganda operation consisting of a network of little-known right-wingers working from within Hollywood to counter its supposedly liberal bias. This is the network within the ABC network. Its godfather is far right activist David Horowitz, who has worked for more than a decade to establish a right-wing presence in Hollywood and to discredit mainstream film and TV production. On this project, he is working with a secretive evangelical religious right group founded by The Path to 9/11’s director David Cunningham that proclaims its goal to “transform Hollywood” in line with its messianic vision.

Before The Path to 9/11 entered the production stage, Disney/ABC contracted David Cunningham as the film’s director. Cunningham is no ordinary Hollywood journeyman. He is in fact the son of Loren Cunningham, founder of the right-wing evangelical group Youth With A Mission (YWAM). The young Cunningham helped found an auxiliary of his father’s group called The Film Institute (TFI), which, according to its mission statement, is “dedicated to a Godly transformation and revolution TO and THROUGH the Film and Television industry.” As part of TFI’s long-term strategy, Cunningham helped place interns from Youth With A Mission’s in film industry jobs “so that they can begin to impact and transform Hollywood from the inside out,” according to a YWAM report.

Last June, Cunningham’s TFI announced it was producing its first film, mysteriously titled “Untitled History Project.” “TFI’s first project is a doozy,” a newsletter to YWAM members read. “Simply being referred to as: The Untitled History Project, it is already being called the television event of the decade and not one second has been put to film yet. Talk about great expectations!” (A web edition of the newsletter was mysteriously deleted yesterday but has been cached on Google at the link above).

The following month, on July 28, the New York Post reported that ABC was filming a mini-series “under a shroud of secrecy” about the 9/11 attacks. “At the moment, ABC officials are calling the miniseries ‘Untitled Commission Report’ and producers refer to it as the ‘Untitled History Project,’” the Post noted.

[…]

Hm… Maybe I was too quick to espouse my faith in greed over conspiracies? I highly doubt I’ll be going to Disneyland again. In any event, the chances of Disney/ABC walking away clean from this beaut of a mis-timed and shady production is slim to none.

The Future Of Market Accountability

As the ecosystem for delivering entertaining, informative and personalized information gains a new foothold of innovation each and every year, we’re becoming deeper and deeper immersed within the information age.

The people formally known as the audience are becoming more politically aware through osmosis these days. And the harder the mainstream, one-way channels are leveraged to message us with constructed narratives, the easier it becomes for us to unbundle the programming and filter fact from fiction — no matter our brand of politics.

An analogy: The addition of nutritional labels to food products years ago didn’t end up preventing obesity, but the presentation of nutritional meta-data sure as hell increased the potential for new forms of viable economic levers within the food industry.

As high-fat foods in the mid-nineties and high-carb foods over the past few years have taken a hit due to greater consumer awareness, low-fat and low-carb products have gained a place in the market at a higher selling point due to simple demand.

My point?

While a conglomerate like Disney/ABC can get away with producing a film with this level of empty calories here and there, as we move deeper into the online revolution, such blatant disregard for nutritious content could easily lead to the collapse of advertising arteries via brand corrosion, as an informed public is now armed with digital printing presses.

And man, is the web chock full of beating hearts willing to pump out blood or what?

(originally uploaded by Comandante Agi)

Duluth News Tribune
Army general says Rumsfeld refused to plan for post-war Iraq
By Stephanie Heinatz

[…]

In 2001, Scheid was a colonel with the Central Command, the unit that oversees U.S. military operations in the Mideast.

On Sept. 10, 2001, he was selected to be the chief of logistics war plans.

On Sept. 11, he said, “life just went to hell.”

That day, Gen. Tommy Franks, the commander of Central Command, told his planners, including Scheid, to “get ready to go to war.”

A day or two later, Rumsfeld was “telling us we were going to war in Afghanistan and to start building the war plan. We were going to go fast.

“Then, just as we were barely into Afghanistan Rumsfeld came and told us to get ready for Iraq.”

Scheid said he remembers everyone thinking, “My gosh, we’re in the middle of Afghanistan, how can we possibly be doing two at one time? How can we pull this off? It’s just going to be too much.”

Planning was kept very hush-hush in those early days.

“There was only a handful of people, maybe five or six, that were involved with that plan because it had to be kept very, very quiet.”

There was already an offensive plan in place for Iraq, Scheid said. And in the beginning, the planners were just expanding on it.

“Whether we were going to execute it, we had no idea,” Scheid said.

Eventually other military agencies like the transportation and Army material commands had to get involved.

They couldn’t just “keep planning this in the dark,” Scheid said.

Planning continued to be a challenge.

“The secretary of defense continued to push on us that everything we write in our plan has to be the idea that we are going to go in, we’re going to take out the regime, and then we’re going to leave,” Scheid said. “We won’t stay.”

Scheid said the planners continued to try “to write what was called Phase 4,” or the piece of the plan that included post-invasion operations like security, stability and reconstruction.

Even if the troops didn’t stay, “at least we have to plan for it,” Scheid said.

“I remember the secretary of defense saying that he would fire the next person that said that,” Scheid said. “We would not do planning for Phase 4 operations, which would require all those additional troops that people talk about today.

“He said we will not do that because the American public will not back us if they think we are going over there for a long war.”

[…]

Anyone who cared more about finding Osama bin Laden than wasting lives and money on trying to reshape the face of the middle east via a neo-con wet dream, immediately saw where our “war on terror” went wrong. No sooner did we commit to hunting down the mass murderer responsible for 9/11, the administration shifted focus and began to implement war planning in Iraq.

That’s like beginning the manhunt for the Son of Sam and then a month into it, sending the entire NYPD after the mob because, well shit, they’re both bad for the city.

But the temerity of Donald Rumsfeld to forgo the advice of his war planners — even threatening to fire them if they continued to present their opinion on post-regime change rebuilding — well, it speaks volumes to how this administration rolls.

Rumsfeld tells his staff that the American public wouldn’t back a long war. Fast forward three years into this debacle and the administration decides to present the terminology of The Long War to the American public in a “suck it up and deal with it” kind of way.

If that doesn’t make you pause for a moment and think about how planned chaos can occur, I don’t know what will. A military industrial complex doesn’t thrive in times of peace, you know.

Not properly planning for the war in Iraq was beyond foolish — it was inhumane — but that’s practically a moot point, because we never should have been there in the first place.

Here’s my deal: I’m tired of my government using 9/11 as their business card; their credentials for running amok in the middle east. It’s not what I wanted as I watched F-16’s buzz over my old pad in Brooklyn for a week in the fall of 2001. My former neighbors are tired of this administration hijacking our personal memory of that day as well.

Anyone with a conscience is tired of it.

(originally uploaded by tgbusill)

The Mercury News
Senate reports say Saddam rejected cooperating with terrorists
by Warren P. Strobel and Margaret Talev

WASHINGTON - Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein rejected pleas for assistance from Osama bin Laden and tried to capture terrorist Abu Musab al Zarqawi when he was in Iraq, a Senate Intelligence Committee report released Friday found, casting further doubt on the Bush administration’s rationale for invading Iraq.

President Bush and other administration officials repeatedly cited Saddam’s alleged ties to radical Islamic terrorists before the March 2003 invasion as one reason to take military action against Iraq.

The 150-page report said the administration’s claims were untrue. “Postwar findings indicate that Saddam Hussein was distrustful of al-Qaida and viewed Islamic extremists as a threat to his regime, refusing all requests from al-Qaida to provide material or operational support,” the report said.

The report was released along with a second one that said false information from the exile group Iraqi National Congress, led by Ahmad Chalabi, was widely distributed in prewar intelligence reports and used to support intelligence assessments about Iraq’s weapons and links to terrorism. Intelligence officials repeatedly warned that the INC was unreliable, but White House and Pentagon officials ignored the warnings.

The reports are part of a five-report study that the Senate Intelligence Committee has undertaken into the Bush administration’s use of intelligence before the invasion of Iraq.

The study has left the committee badly divided. Three reports remain classified, including one comparing prewar statements by Bush administration officials to intelligence available at the time. Democrats have accused Republicans of delaying the reports until after the November congressional elections.

[…]

Ain’t it grand that it took the Senate Intelligence Committee only 3.5 years, close to 3,000 dead US soldiers, more than 50,000 dead Iraqi civilians and upwards of $500 billion dollars floating in the wind to confirm what mid-east experts have been saying since 2003? Everyone and their mother knew that Saddam wanted nothing to do with al Qaeda; I mean, even Hardball scooped these jokers a year ago.

Alright, so it’s official. Now, which Senator is going to put country ahead of political aspirations and make a eloquent, yet vociferous call for the arrest of both George W. Bush and Dick Cheney?

People get locked up in America every day for the dumbest of reasons, all the while this administration knowingly schemed to wage war under false pretenses, which directly caused the deaths of upwards of a hundred thousand people… and there’s no chance of accountability.

I’m dead serious; which of these elected representatives is going to step up and make a passionate call for accountability? I mean, after the mid-term elections of course…

And people ask me why I’m so cynical. Now excuse me while I go throw up my dinner.

Donald Rumsfeld spoke at The American Legion National Convention in Salt Lake City, Utah the other day (full transcript), attempting to solidify the position of this administration’s war on terror; that we are fighting an enemy similar to Adolf Hitler — an Islamofascist.

Analogies to the attitudes years prior to WWII ebbed and flowed with the greatest of ease from Rumsfeld, all pointing to the absolute righteousness of this administration in their self-assigned task to rid the world of the threat of terrorism.

As a resident of New York City on 9/11, I’d be extremely satisfied with Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda lying in ruins before treading any deeper in potentially self-polluting waters, but apparently this administration doesn’t care what me and my former neighbors think about the matter at hand:

[…]

Over the next decades, a sentiment took root that contended that if only the growing threats that had begun to emerge in Europe and Asia could be accommodated, then the carnage and the destruction of then recent memory of WWI, could be avoided.

It was a time when a certain amount of cynicism and moral confusion set in among western democracies. When those who warned about a coming crisis — the rise of fascism and Nazism — they were ridiculed, or ignored.

Indeed, in the decades before World War II, a great many argued that the fascist threat was exaggerated.

[…]

I recount that history because, once again we face similar challenges in efforts to confront the rising threat of a new type of fascism.

Today, another enemy, a different kind of enemy, has made clear its intentions with attacks in places like New York and Washington D.C., Bali, London, Moscow and so many other places. But some seem not to have learned history’s lessons.

We need to consider the following questions, I would submit:

With the growing lethality, and the increasing availability of weapons, can we truly afford to believe that somehow, someway, vicious extremists can be appeased?

[…]

I have many thoughts on this line of reasoning, but first, take a listen to Keith Olberman’s perspective on the matter:

[…]

That about what Mr. Rumsfeld is confused is simply this:

This is a democracy, still. Sometimes, just barely. And as such, all voices count. Not just his. Had he or his president, perhaps proven any of their prior claims of omniscience — about Osama bin Laden’s plans 5 years ago; about Saddam Hussein’s weapon’s 4 years ago; about Hurricane Katrina’s impact 1 year ago — we all might be able to swallow hard and accept their omniscience as a bearable, even useful recipe, of fact plus ego.

But, to date, this government has proved little besides its own arrogance, and its own hubris. Mr. Rumsfeld is also personally confused, morally or intellectually, about his own standing in this matter. From Iraq to Katrina to flu vaccine shortages to the entire fog of fear that continues to envelop our nation, he, Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney and their cronies have, inadvertently or intentionally, profited or benefited, either personally or politically,

And yet he can stand up in public and question the morality and the intellect of those of us who dare ask for the receipt for the Emperor’s New Clothes.

In what country was Mr. Rumsfeld raised? As a child, of whose heroism did he read? On what side of the battle for freedom did he dream one day to fight? With what country has he confused the United States of America?

[…]

Rumsfeld, in his eagerness to equate this administration’s strategy in Iraq with Winston Churchill’s call to watch Hitler and a Germany on the rise to destructive power once again, misses the mark entirely. But let’s not waste energy with generalizations; instead, let’s speak to historical fact regarding the nation of Iraq and Saddam Hussein.

The facts are that the United States of America financially backed Iraq in the early 1980’s. President Reagan sent this very same Donald Rumsfeld to speak with Saddam Hussein in December of 1983, during the peak of the Iraq-Iran war, to ensure that all was well in the struggle against that decade’s flavor of tyranny.

Only one month prior to the visit, Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against both Iranian soldiers and his own people. Even though our intelligence confirmed such actions, nothing was said by Rumsfeld at the time.

Donald Rumsfeld doesn’t have a leg to stand on in a comparison with Winston Churchill. If anything, he is complicit in the build-up of aggression that “islamofascists” have against our nation.

Similarly, America, circa 1980 to 2006, is in no way analogous to a European continent that fell into conflict with a powerful, internal rogue state and their techniques of propaganda, fear mongering, terrorism, territorial occupation and mass executions.

If anything, this speech by Rumsfeld — one that holds both loaded arguments and misconstrued analogies of the highest order — is closer itself to propaganda than “the beacon of light in times of darkness” message that both he and this administration so very wishes to convince us of believing.

Olbermann, who might not speak for political analysts, but does for millions of Americans with quelled voices in this nation, put it best when he directly challenged this administration’s self-righteous claim to ownership of truth, by saying:

“And about Mr. Rumsfeld’s other main assertion, that this country faces a new type of fascism. As he was correct to remind us as how a government that knew everything could get everything wrong, so too was he right when he said that, though probably not in the way he thought he meant it. This country faces a new type of fascism, indeed.”

The only problem is that if you’re a student of history, it really isn’t that new.

These two guys hate each other, right? Then why is it that everyone else is doing all the dying?

James Westhead - BBC
Planning the US ‘Long War’ on terror

It sounds eerily like the Cold War - and that is no mistake.

The “Long War” is the name Washington is using to rebrand the new world conflict, this time against terrorism.

Now the US military is revealing details of how it is planning to fight this very different type of war.

It is also preparing the public for a global conflict which it believes will dominate the next 20 years.

The nerve centre of this war against terror is the huge MacDill airbase in Tampa, Florida.

Surrounded by white sand beaches, palm trees and two golf courses it looks more like a holiday camp than a military camp.

But inside US Central Command (Centcom) generals are planning what they call “fourth-generational warfare”.

Centcom is already responsible for operations in the Middle East, South Asia and Africa - as well as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - and now it is planning a campaign that will eventually span the globe.

Aiming at al-Qaeda

The man behind what the US military calls its “principles of the Long War” is Brig Gen Mark Kimmitt.

Gen Kimmitt, Centcom’s deputy director of plans and strategy, told BBC News: “Even if Iraq stabilised tomorrow the Long War would continue.”

So as Centcom tries to control events in Iraq, he is also planning a strategy for “nothing less than the defeat of al-Qaeda across the world and its associated movements strung together by extremist ideology”.

To achieve victory the US military will have to change dramatically, he says.

Like the terrorists it will have to build international networks, Gen Kimmitt says, making better use of “soft power” - diplomacy, finance, trade and technology.

“I’m an artillery officer, and I can’t fire cannons at the internet,” he says, referring to what he sees as one of the key weapons of the modern age.

Instead, he argues that the US military must try to break down “old mind-sets and bureaucracies” and build new relationships with other agencies - like the FBI, the police and the state department - through what in military jargon are called “joint inter-agency task forces”.

Improved posture

The theory is that the military cannot fight alone against such a nimble and deadly foe as al-Qaeda, and must build a new kind of worldwide network as flexible and smart as its enemy.

As a result Gen Kimmitt predicts a much lower profile for traditional US forces.

He believes that will help win hearts and minds, by ending the impression that the US is occupying the Middle East.

“Our future posture is still being worked out,” he says.

“But I would like to see to the number of troops in the Middle East cut to a fraction of the current 300,000, by at least a half.”

The US military is planning a big increase in the role of special forces, the smaller, specially-trained teams able to speak local languages - including Arabic - deploy rapidly and work with the armies of other nations.

Trailer park diplomacy

Outside Centcom sits a symbol of the new approach and its complexity - a large trailer park with fluttering flags atop each trailer representing each of the 63 nations represented at Centcom, from Denmark to El Salvador.

Inside each trailer, a small team of military liaison officers shares information with their American colleagues and co-ordinates action in Iraq, Afghanistan and throughout the region.

According to an American general working with the coalition, the aim is to maintain this loose-knit arrangement to fight the global war on terror.

“We want to make it a lasting organisation,” he said.

“We don’t want it to dissolve like it did after Desert Shield and Desert Storm.”

However, America’s difficult relationship with some allies after 11 September 2001 suggests that this will be a challenge.

France and Germany, for example, opposed the war in Iraq. Rear Adm Jacques Mazars, the French representative at Centcom, says French and American forces co-operate more successfully on the ground than their politicians.

But, he said, running a coalition for a sustained period would be hard.

“On the conceptual level we can agree,” he said. “There will be a long war to be won. But on the practical level it will be harder.”

One regular cause of tension among the allies is the sharing of sensitive intelligence.

“There are some things you wouldn’t share with a neighbour and even an ally,” one senior US officer said.

There are signs that despite the difficulties, the new coalition against terror is here to stay.

The Pentagon admits its vision is not yet fully realised, but it has already started work on a new building in the MacDill complex, providing a bricks-and-mortar home for the international occupants of the trailer park.

“I can’t see there ever being a completely homogenous coalition dealing with worldwide terror,” said Col Mark Bibbey, the chief of staff of the British mission at Centcom. “The 63 nations are not signed up to the same view on everything.”

But he added: “You’ve got to start somewhere. You have to plan ahead. You have to be driving in a particular direction. If we don’t start driving now or soon, we’ll be behind the curve.”

Don’t believe this shit for a minute. We’ve been consistently at war ever since WWII. All this formal labeling does is give our administration a streamlined name for hanging their illegal wiretaps, warrentless searches and covert operations, while providing the media, publishing and entertainment industries a new topical issue to craft a narrative around.

Are the US Armed Forces currently optimized to combat a Cold War enemy? Sure. But the decentralized, agile, inconspicuous warfare that our current foes engage in has been around forever and we’ve been playing that game as well over the years. The only reason we don’t hang our hat on covert operations and the funding of rebellions that support our interests in other countries, is because that type of involvement isn’t viewed as honorable in the eyes of the civilized world.

State-sponsored or individually driven, terrorism is terrorism.

So we’re now formalizing on a name, while removing the “civil” formalities of warfare. We’ll continue to position our red coats around the world in formal lines of advancement, while sneaking in for the kill with our scrappy blue coats when the sun goes down and the townsfolk are asleep. Nothing has changed.

Associated Press
Theater Pulls Trailer for ‘United 93′

NEW YORK - A New York City movie theater has pulled the trailer for “United 93,” which chronicles in real time the hijacked United Airlines flight that crashed into a Western Pennsylvania field on Sept. 11.

The AMC Loews Lincoln Square 12 theater in Manhattan said it made the decision after viewers complained they found it too upsetting.

“I don’t think people are ready for this,” theater manager Kevin Adjodha said.

“One lady was crying,” Adjodha told Newsweek. “She was saying that we shouldn’t have played the trailer. That this was wrong.”

Universal Studios in Los Angeles, meanwhile, said it would go ahead with plans to show the trailer for the thriller, which is scheduled to open in theaters on April 28.

Adam Fogelson, Universal’s president of marketing, said the trailer would be shown only before R-rated movies or “grown-up” PG-13 ones.

“The film is not sanitized or softened, it’s an honest and real look” at the events of Flight 93, Fogelson told The New York Times in Tuesday editions. “If I sanitized the trailer beyond what’s there, am I suggesting that the experience will be less real than what the movie itself is? We as a company feel comfortable that it is a responsible and fair way to show what’s coming.”

“United 93″ is scheduled to make its world premiere on opening night at the Tribeca Film Festival in Manhattan.

The festival, which was created to help lower Manhattan recover economically from the attacks, begins April 25 and runs through May 7.

The trailer begins with images of passengers boarding the plane on a sunny morning, and builds to a disturbing scene that includes actual news video of a plane about to hit one of the World Trade Center towers. It then returns inside Flight 93 as terrorists begin hijacking it and a passenger calls his family to tell them of the impending disaster.

The Families of Flight 93 have said that Universal Pictures will donate 10 percent of the first three days’ grosses to the memorial.

Where to begin? I guess I could start with my absolute disdain for the philathropic smokescreen Universal is attempting with their pathetic 10% donation of the first three days gross (that makes my last 401k plan of a 25% match up to 6% look charitable), but that’s not my major issue.

What fucking asshole decided to make this film? If you’re someone that considers 9/11 to be historically synonymous to Pearl Harbor, how ready do you think America circa 1946 would’ve been for a similar flick? America had already wrapped up WWII (while bombing Japan to hell in the process) yet I’d bet that the raw nerve of December 7, 1941 would’ve been wide open.

Almost five years beyond 9/11 we still (supposedly) can’t even find bin Laden, yet we’ve succeeded in destablizing an entire region — murdering tens of thousands of innocent people in the process while mobilizing the recruitment efforts of the very fundamentalist fervor we’re attempting to “battle.”

We’ve done everything except make a complex global situation less complex, and now the first 9/11 movie is on the horizon for release. We all know what happened on that horrific day, but know absolutely nothing about the seeds that led up to that day. I guess in this world of reality tv and goverment positioning, that doesn’t mean anything.

Personally speaking, I don’t appreciate the attempt to capitalize on my raw nerves and emotions surrounding the event. Then again, it took me more than a year to simply sit through the news footage of the planes crashing into the WTC due to being forced to walk though the rubble of Ground Zero for over a year on my daily commute from Brooklyn to Jersey City…

I might not have the average American’s perspective on this one.

What do you think?

Preface (pg. xvi)

[…]
However, just as the Christian Reformation opened the door to multiple, often conflicting, and sometimes baffling interpretations of Christianity, so has the reformation of Islam created a number of wildly divergent and competing ideologies. Perhaps it is inevitable that, as religious authority passes from institutions to individuals, there will be men and women whose radical reinterpretations of religion will be fueled by their extreme social and political agendas. In this sense, jihadists like Osama bin Laden must be understood as products of, not counters to, the Islamic Reformation. Indeed, bin Laden joins a long and unsavory list of militant puritans — whether Muslim, Christian, Jewish or Hindu — who consider themselves and their individual followers to be the only true believers, and all others to be hypocrites, imposters, and apostates who must be convinced of their folly or abandoned to their horrible fates.

Like puritans of other faiths — militaristic or not — the jihadists’ principal goals is the “purifying” of their religious communities. In other words, their first target is not the West, or Jews, or Christians, or Zionists, or Crusaders, or any other outsiders (what the jihadists term “the far enemy”), but those hundreds of millions of Muslims who do not share their puritanical worldview (”the near enemy”). Their agenda can most clearly be observed in the civil war they have launched in Iraq. For whatever else may be fueling the violence in that country, there can be little doubt that the primary aim of the jihadists who have infiltrated Iraq and who represent the most ruthless segment of the insurgency is the massacre of all those Muslims (particularly the Shi’ah majority) whom they regard as rawafida or apostates.

Of course, that is not to say that the far enemy is not a target of jihadism, as New York, Madrid, and London can testify. But it is mainly as a means to galvanize other Muslims to the jihadist cause that most of these attacks against the West should be understood. The attacks of September 11, 2001, for example, were by bin Laden’s own admission specifically designed to goad the United States into an exaggerated retaliation against the Islamic world so as to mobalize Muslims to, in the words of George W. Bush, “choose sides.”

Now, four years removed from that tragic day, perhaps the most hopeful development in this internal battle to define the faith and practice of over a billion people is that Muslims themselves are becoming increasingly aware that they are as much endangered by the extremist agenda as are the so called infidels. Thus, the day before the London bombings, one hundred seventy of the world’s leading clerics and scholars, representing every major sect and school of law in Islam, gathered in Amman, Jordan, where, in an unprecendented display of intersectarian collaboration, they issues a joint fatwa, or legal ruling, denouncing all acts of terrorism committed in the name of Islam. The Amman declaration was not only a tacit (if belated) acknowledgement of the civil war raging within Islam, it was an attempt by the clerical institutions to re-exert some measure of authority over those who have hijacked Islam for their own murderous causes.

It didn’t work. The next day, and almost as if in response to the Amman fatwa, London was attacked. Two weeks later, a bomb demolished aa hotel in the resort town of Sharm El-Sheik, Egypt, killing nearly a hundred people — many of them poor, many of them Muslim. Two weeks after that, three hundred fifty bombs tore through Bangladesh, one after the other, in a violent attempt to dislodge the country’s fledgling democratic government. After each of these attacks, a new wave of fatwas was issued, again denouncing the use of violence and terrorism in the name of Islam. And after each fatwa, the jihadists struck again. And the war goes on. Reformations, as we know from Christian history, are bloody events. And though the end is near, the Islamic Reformation has some way to go before it is resolved.

Steve Gilliard on the cartoon controversy:

What I don’t find surprising is the wave of liberal anti-Muslim commentary. After all, it took a major effort by the President to prevent lynchings after 9/11, and then 8,000 Muslims were expelled for reasons having nothing to do with national security.

And let’s face it, we have a lot in common with the Danes, or so we think.

But reality is very different.

Most major US newspapers will not run these cartoons any more than they run racially or sexually offensive cartoons. They wouldn’t run a cartoon mocking church buildings being burned either. To the most vigorous defenders of free speech on the planet, in a country which allows all manner of hate speech, these cartoons will not be shown, because they are needlessly offensive.

But what is lost in all the rioting is how badly the Danes handled this.

The government admits they wanted to force a culture war. The problem for them is that Danish Muslims, feeling outnumbered and under siege, went for help. They toured the middle east, showed the cartoons to leading Islamic scholars and then, the ambassadors asked to speak to the foreign minister, and despite the advice of 22 Danish ambassadors, refused.

Now, I can’t speak to being a Muslim, but I can speak to being an outsider.

There is always the tension of never truly being accepted. You see things, cartoons, TV shows, and you wonder is there a hidden insult there, are you being depicted fairly.

Hell, people routinely tell me they had no idea I was black online.

I know what it’s like to walk into a classroom of 200 people and be the ONLY black person in the room. In that situation, you either deal with it or retreat.

For a lot of minorities in Europe, not just Muslims, but Africans and Asians as well, there is the sense of being an outsider even when you try to fit in. You teach your kids the language, they root for the local sides, they go to the schools, but at the end of the day, you get a nice slap in the face by people who wish you would disappear.

But you’ve played by the rules and there is no reward.

Now, some folks play on this to push their version of Islamic revivalism, and the right talks about how they’re coming to take over, and why they don’t just fit in.

Well, if you’ve ever been accused of not fitting in, despite your best efforts, it can make you angry or even worse, doubt yourself. You wonder if it’s you or because people dislike the way you look.

No one wants to be excluded from the society they live in, but at some point, you’re faced with a challenge to your dignity. In this case, an insult to your religion. And the Danes stubborn refusal to deal with this as it became a crisis, says much about their racial attitudes.

A lot of Europeans believe, like a lot of people, that if the Muslims go away, all their discomfort will end. But it won’t. As Pat Robertson noted in his usually subtle way, Europeans are having less children. Well someone has to pay taxes to support the growing numbers of elderly and if there aren’t enough Europeans, they will have to import workers.

And while people say “well, they should just accept that they live in Europe”.

Ok, and I say, what is the reward? A scut work job, racial contempt from cab drivers to government officials, a continuing message that you don’t belong and if you object to being insulted, you can leave?

You can’t have it both ways: you cannot say you want an inclusive society, yet when people demand basic respect, and muslim leaders went to the government and the courts, insult them for doing so.

It is hard enough to be different in the US, it must be that much harder in a monocultural society like Denmark.

My attitude here is simple: I respect Muslims and their concerns because I want them to respect mine, enough so that they reject terrorism and inform on those that do embrace it. We cannot say reject terrorism and then mock what they see as holy. It’s as if we’re doing Osama’s work for him, and I don’t want any part of that.

Exactly.

This “Boycott MSNBC” meme being promoted by the “Open Letter To Chris Matthews” blog and pushed by big-time, left bloggers is disingenuous at best, and a horrible strategy… period. Forget for a moment that Chris Matthews compared Osama bin Laden’s recent choice of language to Michael Moore’s, the facts regarding Moore are just not being represented correctly. The “Open Letter…” blog states:

What’s this all about? Chris Matthews has repeatedly compared Osama bin Laden to Democrats…

Wrong.

1. Michael Moore is not a registered Democrat
2. Michael Moore does not hold office
3. Michael Moore is an independent documentary filmmaker, one who goes after both corrupt corporations and government administrations

1992 was the last time Moore was registered as a Democrat. In the past, I’ve had my own problems wrestling with how he has been positioned by both the media and the RNM as a “Liberal Democrat” due to his hardcore stance against the Bush administration. And then I experienced F9/11 on opening night and my eyes opened even wider regarding the actions of this administration, realizing that Moore wasn’t being partisan, he was being as direct and honest as humanly possible.

I’m sure Democrats feel a rush when an independent, creative voice rips apart the opposition party — especially one as corrupt as the Bush administration — but these actions don’t exclusively subscribe a voice such as Moore to the Democratic Party’s brand of progress or politics, nor should the Democrats want such to be the case.

As an independent (or non-affiliated here in North Carolina), I respect Moore’s perspective because he doesn’t belong to a political party. Michael Moore will reach more people to act and/or vote against corruption as an independent filmmaker, than a labeled “Liberal Democratic” filmmaker. The sheer amount of bloggers that are blindly supporting this meme is poor strategy.

Stop feeding the machine their propaganda. This is a short-term tactical reaction, one that will negatively affect Moore’s long-term output of truth if he’s pigeon holed as a Democrat.

UPDATE: The blog has changed its intro to now read:

What’s this all about? Chris Matthews has repeatedly compared Americans who are concerned about the war in Iraq to Osama bin Liden…

Well, at least they got the Democratic issue corrected, but Matthews only compared Moore’s language. This boycott is retarded. Shit, I’m watching Keith Olberman no matter what Chris Matthews says.

I’ve had the Koran sitting on my bookshelve for the past ten years; I have no idea how The Message has alluded me until this past weekend.

While the historical accuracy of the film and its brilliant acting took center stage, there were explicit elements of both the production and storyline I found especially intriguing.

For instance, Islamic law forbids portraying either the voice or likeness of the Prophet Mohammed (that concept would put Christianity straight out of business), so when certain scenes called for interaction with The Prophet, director Moustapha Akkad made the call to turn the camera into Mohammed’s silent point of view.

The cast of followers spoke directly to Mohammed, yet they were simultaneously engaged in conversation with the audience, providing us with the positioning of The Prophet. In 1976, this may not have been viewed as a compelling technique, but in the age of first person shooter video games — where we directly engage and interact with the narrative, driving the storyline as we gaze into the eyes of AI avatars — the technique shifts meaning over the years. Very retro-cool.

In terms of the story, both the politics and marketplace of Mecca circa 600 AD were fascinating and generated numerous offshoots of thought.

The film reveals that the ruling class of Mecca kept the populous in-line, and themselves profitable, through establishing a marketplace of ~360 idolic “Gods” — wooden or clay figures, sold to individuals and families alike to provide good luck. The families blindly worshiped them as their personal saviors (talk about instant, add-water religion) and left the ruling class alone to continue their manipulation of the market and society.

When Muhammed returned from the mountains and began sharing his first poetic drops of the Koran, amongst the numerous stanzas (of eventual Islamic law), the message that forbode the worship of other gods was explicit. “There is only one God” quickly became the righteous chant of all classes of men who followed Muhammed’s revelations. Upon experiencing this shifting of inclusion (of social classes) and exclusion (of idolic gods), the local merchants/governors took this challenge of authority as a direct threat to the well-greased mechanism of Mecca’s economy, class and power structure and responded with force.

The mere concept of “There can only be one God” was more revolutionary than any number of armed men storming the city because their God could not generate a profit.

After digesting the film, my mind’s eye kept returning to the current global struggles between Islam and the West, asking the question as to whether or not we’re going through a historical recurrance on a global scale. I mean, the World Trade Center was considered to be the most prolific iconic representation of the American (and Western) financial system. Could Ramzi Yousef and Osama bin Laden possibly have targeted the WTC in ‘93 and 9/11, respectively, in an attempt to make a deep seeded philosophical connection with fellow fundamentalists, tying the traits of modern day global capitalism to Mecca circa 600 AD?

Yeah, the film was that deep. Now I’ve got to check out Reza Aslan’s recently published book entitled “No God But God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam.” Based on Jon Stewart’s interview with him last night and the reviews of Islamic bloggers, it’s bound to be enlightening on numerous fronts.

Check out this video segment of a former Navy Seal turned independent journalist, Kaj Larsen, out in Afghanistan, tracing the footsteps of Osama bin Laden’s last know location: the caves of Tora Bora.

If MTV hit big due to the early adoption of cable TV, Al Gore’s Current TV is on the verge of hitting big because of the aligned stars of political backing, the philosophical and tangible aspects of open source, broadband access and the passionate content contributions of everyday citizens. The result is unbundled media, monetized to empower both the individual contributor and entrepreneurial business minds, while capturing the hearts and minds of home viewers currently pacified in their modernist couch potato, veal pens.

Apparently, the revolution will be televised…

Michael Moore is the man.

Well, not "The Man" (that would be the racist, greedy, loathsome punk he’s tirelessly chasing down), but he is one righteous cat. Damn, it’s refreshing to hear a man speak from his heart and not from the corner of his mouth. If you hadn’t guessed by the title of this entry, I saw ‘Bowling for Columbine’ last night. I’m (almost) at a loss for words, but I’m now provoked and really upset.

Top 10 things that struck me after watching "Bowling…"

10) Work for Welfare is a joke
9) Right wing Christians (or anything else right wing) live a scared life
8) Dick Clark has as much compassion as real skin left on his face
7) If James Nichols had Osama bin Laden’s bankroll… he’d be more dangerous
6) You probably won’t get shot in Canada
5) Marilyn Manson is more intelligent than most of our leaders
4) You can get a rifle when opening a bank account in the US… really
3) I’d probably consume raw sewage before ever working for Lockheed Martin
2) This country was built on fear, violence and oppression. Sounds like a modern day TVlineup, eh?
1) Charlton Heston needs to be put out of his misery… with a rifle

I realized most of these points before going to the movie (except for the part about Dick Clark…what a… dick), but the presentation was worth it’s weight in gold.

I don’t consider myself to be left or right, like the masses that will debate the credibility of this film for the near future. I try to formulate my opinions based on the situation at hand. But to a righty, that’s a lefty. To a lefty, it’s a non-committed vote. To me, it’s the only way to remain sane in this twisted society we live in.

Michael Moore has the courage of a warrior and the conviction to follow up. Thank God. Hopefully, my brother’s documentary gets picked up and he can follow in Moore’s enormous footsteps.

Righteous cats.

the world has changed.
no shit, glad you’ve woken up.
we don’t all drink from the same fountain
or even from the same cup
but if the music’s right
and the air is clear
why confuse the good times
with political matters
we fear
nothing.
at all…
because "no fear" is a fucking brand
manufactured for morons
living in a testosterone dreamland
yeah, we’re all now awake
we now have an enemy to curse and blame
but do we really understand why
"they" burn our flag and name?
no.
but who cares?
we’ll bomb ‘em till they quit.
yeah that’s a solid tactic
a top five rotation hit
now all the brands are buzzing
pulling at our patriotic strings
the marketing is subtle
yet sick and deafening
"united" is just that
ready to serve you across the land
and since they’re so "united"
they want us to go lend a helping hand
because, you see, they’re "with us"
and not just a part of our verbal psyche
but what if their name was continental?
or fuddruckers?
or nike?
brand opportunity
awareness at an all time high
higher than they used to go
when consumers weren’t afraid to fly
so come on out and support ‘em
get the business back on track
while you’re at it buy a rolex
shit, get a new cadillac
because money is all that matters
to a society built on exploitation
i wonder what "those people" would say
if we opened up actual lines of communication?
yeah right…
too late…
it’s all about annihilation.