Wednesday, March 03, 2004
Admit WMD mistake, survey chief tells Bush
David Kay, the man who led the CIA's postwar effort to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, has called on the Bush administration to "come clean with the American people" and admit it was wrong about the existence of the weapons.
In an interview with the Guardian, Mr Kay said the administration's reluctance to make that admission was delaying essential reforms of US intelligence agencies, and further undermining its credibility at home and abroad. ...
Tuesday, March 02, 2004
U.N.: Iraq had no WMD after 1994
UNITED NATIONS — A report from U.N. weapons inspectors to be released today says they now believe there were no weapons of mass destruction of any significance in Iraq after 1994, according to two U.N. diplomats who have seen the document....
Monday, March 01, 2004
Bush’s War Story Is All Wrong
President Bush likes to say that if his war critics had their way, Saddam Hussein would still be in power. But if we are to believe the president, the same thing can be said about him: if he had had his way, Saddam Hussein would still be in power.
A dominant theme of Bush’s case for war against Iraq has been that it was forced on the United States. It was a war of necessity because Saddam refused to comply with UN resolutions calling for him to dismantle weapons of mass destruction. As Bush summarized his pre-war position on Meet the Press February 8, “We expect you, Mr. Saddam Hussein, to disarm, your choice to disarm, but if you don’t, there will be serious consequences.”
What if Saddam had complied with the resolutions? Bush’s position implies that Saddam would have remained in power and no war would have occurred. After all, the resolutions did not demand “regime-change.” But if Bush was prepared to leave him in power, why does he now list Saddam’s brutality against the Iraqi people as grounds for war?
There’s only one way to resolve this paradox: Bush is not telling the truth....
Schlock, Yes; Awe, No; Fascism, Probably
...This may seem like an oblique way in which to approach Mel Gibson's ghastly movie The Passion. But it came back to me this week that an associate of his had once told me, in lacerating detail, that an evening with Mel was one long fiesta of boring but graphic jokes about anal sex. I've since had that confirmed by other sources. And, long before he emerged as the spear-carrier for the sort of Catholicism once preached by Gen. Franco and the persecutors of Dreyfus, Mel Gibson attained a brief notoriety for his loud and crude attacks on gays. Now he's become the proud producer of a movie that relies for its effect almost entirely on sadomasochistic male narcissism. The culture of blackshirt and brownshirt pseudomasculinity, as has often been pointed out, depended on some keen shared interests. Among them were massively repressed homoerotic fantasies, a camp interest in military uniforms, an obsession with flogging and a hatred of silky and effeminate Jews. Well, I mean to say, have you seen Mel's movie?...
How Britain and the US keep watch on the world
...Its junior partner is Britain's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) at Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, the eavesdropping organisation for which Katharine Gun worked. Like NSA, GCHQ is a highly secret operation. Until 1983, when one of its officers, Geoffrey Prime, was charged with spying for the Russians, the Government had refused to reveal what GCHQ's real role was, no doubt because its operations in peacetime were without a legal basis. Its security is maintained by massive and deliberately intimidating security.
Newspapers have been discouraged from mentioning it; a book by a former GCHQ officer, Jock Kane, was seized by Special Branch police officers and a still photograph of its headquarters was banned by the Independent Broadcasting Authority, leaving a blank screen during a World in Action programme. As with NSA, the size of GCHQ's staff at Cheltenham, about 6,500, gives no real indication of its strength. It has monitoring stations in Cyprus, West Germany, and Australia and smaller ones elsewhere. Much of its overseas work is done by service personnel.
Its budget is thought to be more than £300m a year. A large part of this is funded by the United States in return for the right to run NSA listening stations in Britain - Chicksands, Bedfordshire; Edzell, Scotland; Mentworth Hill, Harrogate; Brawdy, Wales - and on British territory around the world.
The collaboration between the two agencies offers many advantages to both. Not only does it make monitoring the globe easier, it solves tricky legal problems and is the basis of the Prime Minister's statement yesterday that all Britain's bugging is lawful. The two agencies simply swap each other's dirty work.
GCHQ eavesdrops on calls made by American citizens and the NSA monitors calls made by British citizens, thus allowing each government plausibly to deny it has tapped its own citizens' calls, as they do. The NSA station at Menwith Hill intercepts all international telephone calls made from Britain and GCHQ has a list of American citizens whose phone conversations interest the NSA.
The NSA request to GCHQ for help in bugging the diplomats from those nations who were holding out for a second Security Council resolution to authorise an attack on Iraq is unsurprising. Nor is it surprising that both organisations wanted to provide their political masters with recordings of private conversations of high-ranking international diplomats....
A Legacy of Lies
It was a devastating blow to the White House. David Kay, the man hand-picked by the Bush administration to lead the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, confirmed to a Senate committee in late January that the intelligence supporting Washington's case for war against Saddam Hussein was baseless.
"It turns out we were all wrong… and that is most disturbing," Kay declared.
But who exactly got it wrong? Intelligence agencies obviously exaggerated Iraq's WMD potential, and it's well known that they were egged on by their political masters in the Bush administration. But that's not the whole story. In fact, Bush's manipulation of Iraq intelligence was built on a foundation established during the late 1990's, when Bill Clinton was in the White House. ...
...In other words, the defector who had been cited time after time, over eight years, by two presidents and their cabinets, as the source that proved Saddam was still hiding a deadly arsenal of chemical and biological weapons -- that defector had actually said the opposite: Not only did the weapons not exist, they had been destroyed before Clinton was even elected.
Take, for example, the "5,000 gallons of botulinum. 2,000 gallons of anthrax, 25 biological-filled Scud warheads and 157 aerial bombs" -- the weapons Bill Clinton had listed in 1998. Or consider the "26,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulin, one and a half tons of nerve agent VX, 6,500 aerial chemical bombs" -- the weapons rattled off by Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer as the U.N. was inspecting Iraq in 2003.
"We don't know where those [weapons] are," Fleischer claimed. "We have yet to see any accounting for all of these." In fact, it was these very stockpiles that Kamel attested had been destroyed in 1991.
There is now little doubt that Kamel was telling the truth. The strongest evidence -- evidence so unimpeachable it invites the word "proof" -- came in the form of a captured Iraqi document obtained in January by Barton Gellman of The Washington Post. The memo was composed five days after Kamel's defection, on August 13, 1995, and its author was Hossam Amin, Iraq's chief liaison to the U.N. inspectors. It was addressed to Qusay Hussein, Saddam's son.
The letter was a piece of damage assessment. Kamel was expected to blow all Iraq's cover stories to the inspectors, and the regime needed to prepare itself for the fallout. So Amin proceeded to lay out for his boss, in minute detail, two separate storylines: The version Iraq had told the inspectors about each weapons program, and what the truth was. (Or, as the memo itself put it: "the matters that are known to the traitor and not declared" to the U.N.)
Among the memo's statements of fact was that "destruction of the biological weapons agents took place in the summer of 1991" In a comprehensive evaluation of the evidence, Gellman stood Kamel's 1995 briefing to the U.N. against the real story laid out in Amin's memo. The comparison, he concluded, "suggests that Kamel left little or nothing out."
Iraq had eliminated all its weapons of mass destruction by the summer of 1991, and the U.S. had been told of it in 1995. ...
Can religion be blamed for war?
George Bush was in little doubt about how the US-led coalition would bring down Saddam Hussein.
At a prayer meeting, shortly before the invasion of Iraq, he said: "Behind all of life and all of history, there's a dedication and purpose, set by the hand of a just and faithful God."
But God's help was being invoked in Baghdad, too. Saddam Hussein told Iraqis: "Fight as God ordered you to do."
So does that makes last year's Iraq conflict a religious war?
The authors of the War Audit suggest that it was arguably a war driven by religion.
But, as they point out, the Pope and the US Catholic bishops, the Archbishop of Canterbury and many theologians around the world argued that it fell well short of the rigorous criteria for a "just" war.
President Bush and Saddam Hussein were only the most recent of a long line of political leaders who have drawn on religion to help them in battle or to justify a military campaign....
...The War Audit says that although armed conflicts may take on religious overtones, their genesis invariably lies in factors such as ethnicity, identity, power struggles, resources, inequality and oppression - and one factor is often exacerbated by another.
It is often suggested that there has been a sharp rise in religiously motivated conflict.
But the authors of the War Audit say there have been very few genuinely religious wars in the past century.
A Knight Templar from the time of the Crusades
The Israel-Arab wars from 1948 to the present day are often seen as wars over religion.
In fact, they say, they have been about nationalism, self-defence or the liberation of territory.
So why is religion a factor in war at all when all the main faiths have little time for violence and advocate peace?
Because, it is suggested, leaders use differences over faith as a way of sowing hatred and mobilising support for political wars.
As the American civil war leader Abraham Lincoln put it almost 150 years ago: "The will of God prevails. ...
Sunday, February 29, 2004
Christianity's Silent Majority must be heard in the political arena
...During South Carolina's recent Democratic primary debate, the Rev. Al Sharpton nailed the issue. In describing President Bush's conservative Christian supporters, he said, "I don't think they represent Christianity any more than some of these murderers, and mass murderers, represent Islam. So let's not blame the religion."
Christianity's extreme right cannot reasonably be compared to Muslim extremists or to acts of terrorism. It can, however, be held responsible for minimizing the potential benefits of a religion far greater in scope than the vocal minority that currently represents it.
Indeed, the public perception of contemporary Christianity is most effectively and unfortunately incarnated in the person of George W. Bush. The president attends church regularly. He describes his life as being "rededicated to Christ." He is hailed as the answer to the prayers of the religious right. ...
...Many Christians worship with quiet dignity, unwilling to join battle with strident evangelists who preach a single path to salvation. These silent faithful recognize that there are innumerable paths to God and that God might be called by many names. By definition, this gentle army goes largely unnoticed. Thomas Jefferson, when asked if he was a Christian, responded, "It is in our lives, and not from our words, that our religion must be read." St. Francis of Assisi told his brothers, "Preach the Gospel at all times and if necessary use words."
But the time has come to break silence and give Jesus back his good name, to free the master-philosopher from the strictures of literal and limiting Bible readings and apply his life-altering view to the unique challenges of the 21st century. ...
Army chiefs feared Iraq war illegal just days before start
Britain's Army chiefs refused to go to war in Iraq amid fears over its legality just days before the British and American bombing campaign was launched, The Observer can today reveal.
The explosive new details about military doubts over the legality of the invasion are detailed in unpublished legal documents in the case of Katharine Gun, the intelligence officer dramatically freed last week after Lord Goldsmith, the Attorney-General, dropped charges against her of breaking the Official Secrets Act.
The disclosure came as it also emerged that Goldsmith was forced hastily to redraft his legal advice to Tony Blair to give an 'unequivocal' assurance to the armed forces that the conflict would not be illegal. ...
US told UK Attorney General to alter legal advice on Iraq war
The attorney general initially told Tony Blair that an invasion of Iraq would be illegal without a new resolution from the United Nations and only overturned his advice when Washington ordered Downing Street to find legal advice which would justify the war....
Saturday, February 28, 2004
This evangelist has a 'Purpose'
LAKE FOREST, Calif. — The Rev. Rick Warren — the most influential evangelist you've never heard of — has the answer to the meaning of life.
He has built an overflowing mega-church here in the mountain foothills southeast of Los Angeles....
...Warren is part of the ultra-conservative Southern Baptist Convention, and all his senior staff sign on to the SBC's doctrines, such as the literal and infallible Bible and exclusion of women as senior pastors. Yet Warren's pastor-training programs welcome Catholics, Methodists, Mormons, Jews and ordained women....
Friday, February 27, 2004
I DETEST THIS FILM ..WITH A PASSION
Christopher Hitchens
A FEW years ago, Mel Gibson got himself into an argument after uttering a series of crude remarks that were hostile to homosexuals.
Now he has made a film that principally appeals to the gay Christian sado-masochistic community: a niche market that hasn't been sufficiently exploited.
If you like seeing handsome young men stripped and tied up and flayed with whips, The Passion Of The Christ is the movie for you....
...Yesterday, as the movie opened, a Pentecostal church in Denver, Colorado, put up a big sign on its marquee saying: "Jews Killed The Lord Jesus." Nice going....
...Having secured a huge amount of free publicity in this way, and some very lucrative advance block bookings from Christian fundamentalist groups, Gibson now talks self-pityingly about how he has risked his fortune and his career, but doesn't care if he "never works again" because he's done it all for Jesus.
The clear message I get from that is that he'll be boycotted by sinister Hollywood Jews. So it's a win-win for him: big box office or celebrity martyrdom. With any luck, a bit of both. How perfectly nauseating.
In a widely publicised concession, Gibson said that he'd removed the scene where the Jewish mob cries out that it wants the blood of Jesus to descend on the heads of its children's children.
This very questionable episode - it is mentioned in only one of the four gospels - has in fact not been cut. Only the English subtitle has gone. (The film is spoken in Aramaic and Latin, though Roman soldiers actually spoke a dialect of Greek.)
So when the film is later shown, in Russia and Poland, say, or Egypt and Syria, there will be a ready-made propaganda vehicle for those who fancy a bit of torture and murder, with a heavy dose of Jew-baiting thrown in.
Gibson knows very well that this will happen, and he'll be raking it in from exactly those foreign rights to the film. ...
The Worship of Blood
...The only cinematic achievement of The Passion of the Christ is that it breaks new ground in the verisimilitude of filmed violence. The notion that there is something spiritually exalting about the viewing of it is quite horrifying. The viewing of The Passion of the Christ is a profoundly brutalizing experience. Children must be protected from it. (If I were a Christian, I would not raise a Christian child on this.) Torture has been depicted in film many times before, but almost always in a spirit of protest. This film makes no quarrel with the pain that it excitedly inflicts. It is a repulsive masochistic fantasy, a sacred snuff film, and it leaves you with the feeling that the man who made it hates life....
...So the kindest thing that may be said of Gibson is that he is an extremely late medieval. He contemplates the details of pain ecstatically. But this is still too kind, because the morbidity of the Man of Sorrows, even in its most popular versions, was rarely as crude as what Gibson presents. Does Christian dolorousness, a serious reflection upon the fate of Jesus, really require these special effects, this moral and aesthetic barbarity? The Passion of the Christ is the work of a religious sensibility of remarkable coarseness. It is by turns grossly physical and grossly magical, childishly literalist, gladly credulous, comically masculine. Gibson's faith is finally pre-theological, the kind of conviction that abhors thought, superstitiously fascinated by Satan and "the other realm," a manic variety of Christian folk religion....
...It will be objected that I see only pious pornography in The Passion of the Christ because I am not a believer in the Christ. This is certainly so. I do not agree that Jesus is my savior or anybody else's. I confess that I smiled when the credits to The Passion of the Christ listed "stunts." So I am not at all the person for whom Gibson made this movie. But I do not see how a belief in Jesus strengthens the case for such a film. Quite the contrary. Belief, a theory of meaning, a philosophical convenience, is rarely far away from cruelty. Torture has always been attended by explanations that vindicate it, and justify it, and even hallow it. These explanations, which are really extenuations, have been articulated in religious and in secular terms. Their purpose is to redescribe an act of inhumanity so that it no longer offends, so that it comes to seem necessary, so that it edifies. My victim of torture is your martyr.
There is a small chapter in The City of God in which Augustine denounces torture--"a thing, indeed, to be bewailed, and, if that were possible, watered with fountains of tears"--and then complacently accepts the necessity of it. (He asks only that we "condemn human life as miserable.") Augustine is speaking not of the duties of the martyr, but of the duties of the wise judge. Introduce God into the grim situation, and you will find fountains of tears shed not only over the success of some individuals in making the ultimate sacrifice, but also over the failure of other individuals to do the same. This is true of all the religious traditions. There is an ideal of holy suicide in all of them. It is important that we know how such extreme deeds were understood by the men and the women who performed them, but we have no obligation to concur in their understanding of what they did. Religious belief may actually interfere with a lucid analysis of religious life. Anyway, is the sanctification of murder really what this country needs now? ...
Blood Libel
I haven't seen Gibson's Passion, and I don't plan to, but the coverage sure makes it sound like a movie Sam Peckinpah would have loved...
...It's funny how, despite everything Jesus taught about peace and love and forgiveness, the fundamentalists (Catholic and Protestant alike) tend to focus so heavily on the bloody and violent circumstances of his death. They end up treating the crucifixation as the main event, and the resurrection -- the most powerful part of the story, in my opinion -- almost as a coda.
...Come to think of it, Blood Libel wouldn't be a bad alternate title for Gibson's film. Although "Jesus Chainsaw Massacre" -- the one that's currently making the rounds on the blogs -- is also pretty good.
...My friend, who knows the Middle East far better than I do, thinks Passion probably will do very big box office in the region. This isn't likely to reduce antisemitic sentiments there, either. (I'm not sure anything could at this point, but a bad situation can always be made worse.) Islam regards Jesus as a prophet -- not the Prophet, but a prophet nonetheless -- and some of its benighted offshoots also buy into the Jews-killed-Chri...um, Jesus myth. And now Gibson has given them a whole new Hollywood version to sell....
Thursday, February 26, 2004
Two distinct styles of faith characterize the mainline Protestant churches in the U.S. One is the faith of the academy, theologically informed but arid and intellectual. The other is popular Christianity, an energetic mixture of tradition and superstition that provides fellowship and comfort but cannot answer the challenges posed by historical and scientific knowledge. Mainline pastors tend to hold an academic faith, but, lest they scandalize the laity, they preach a popular one. Meanwhile, those who seek a faith adequate to the modern world are silently disappearing from the pews.
-- The Dishonest Church, Jack Good
Senators' Stocks Beat the Market by 12 Percent
US senators' personal stock portfolios outperformed the market by an average of 12 per cent a year in the five years to 1998, according to a new study.
"The results clearly support the notion that members of the Senate trade with a substantial informational advantage over ordinary investors," says the author of the report, Professor Alan Ziobrowski of the Robinson College of Business at Georgia State University.
He admits to being "very surprised" by his findings, which were based on 6,000 financial disclosure filings and are due to be published in the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis.
"The results suggest that senators knew when to buy their common stocks and when to sell."
First-time Senators did especially well, with their stocks outperforming by 20 per cent a year on average - a result that very few professional fund managers would be able to achieve.
"It could be argued that the junior senators most recently came out of private industry, so may have better connections. Seniority was definitely a factor in returns," says Prof Ziobrowski.
There was no difference in performance between Democrats and Republicans.
A separate study in 2000, covering 66,465 US households from 1991 to 1996 showed that the average household's portfolio underperformed the market by 1.44 per cent a year, on average. Corporate insiders (defined as senior executives) usually outperform by about 5 per cent.
The Ziobrowski study notes that the politicians' timing of transactions is uncanny. Most stocks bought by senators had shown little movement before the purchase. But after the stock was bought, it outperformed the market by 28.6 per cent on average in the following calender year.
Returns on sell transactions are equally intriguing. Stocks sold by senators performed in line with the market the year following the sale.
When adjusted by the size of stocks, the total portfolio returns outperformed by 12 per cent a year on average. The study used a total market index as the benchmark for comparison.
The study took eight years to complete because there was no database of information and the documents had to be gathered and examined manually. Stocks held in blind trusts are not included in the disclosure documents.
See The Movie, Buy The Nail
Jesus died for your sins -- and also to sell you a really bitchin' "Passion" coffee mug
You, yes you, can right now purchase a truly stylin' sepia-toned "Passion of the Christ" cross-adorned coffee mug, an exact replica of the one Jesus Himself used every morning at the Jerusalem Starbucks.
You can buy "witnessing tools," including lapel pins labeled in indecipherable Aramaic (yay Aramaic! What a comeback! Who knew?) and lapel pins with crucifixes, and packs of "witnessing cards" to swap with your Jesus-happy friends, just like the Disciples did when they sat around the holy campfire, swapping tales of sad lost goddesses and making s'mores with communion wafers and pink Easter marshmallow peeps.
But nothing says "slightly masochistic Jesus fanatic" like adorning your fine self with a two-inch silver pewter crucifixion-nail pendant, hanging 'round your neck from a nice 24-inch leather cord. Oh my yes. ...
...And, as for the nail pendants, well, the late, great comedian Bill Hicks probably said it best when he commented, "A lot of Christians wear crosses around their necks. Do you think when Jesus comes back he ever wants to see a f--in' cross? It's kind of like going up to Jackie Onassis with a rifle pendant on." ...
Tuesday, February 24, 2004
Bands reaping miracle
No music is more reliant on its message than Christian music. And in a time when Christian music is selling better than its secular brothers and sisters, that message - whether it serves God or mammon - is clear.
Solid Christian acts such as the Newsboys and Rebecca St. James, who are touring together and playing Denver and Colorado Springs this weekend, are masters of marketing - and the church community lends itself to it.
Many Christian artists use their music, their charismatic sway and their worldwide exposure to influence others and spread their word. Just as religious artists making films and writing books have learned (think "Omega Code"), the church is a powerful promotional tool that operates on the cost-effective vehicle known as word-of-mouth. And sales are thriving, posting numbers that, in an otherwise moribund industry, are downright miraculous.
But it's getting a bit weird.
Open up the latest Newsboys disc, "Adoration: The Worship Album," and out pops an ad pitching "The Official Bible of the Newsboys." The book is the "NIV Student Bible," and the leaflet includes a bold quote from Newsboys frontman Peter Furler: "The NIV Student Bible has been and continues to be my daily read."
You might think the ad random, unless you also come across Rebecca St. James' 2003 greatest-hits CD. Inside her "Wait for Me: The Best From Rebecca St. James" is an insert hyping Eugene H. Peterson's "The Message." The pitch: "There is so much that is fake about our society," St. James writes. "My generation is craving something that is real, honest and true. 'The Message' is straight up! It's modern, relevant and direct."...
Violent 'Passion' is too graphic for kids
After seeing an advance screening of Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" two weeks ago, I felt like Pilate pondering a host of questions: Was it anti-Semitic or fair to Jews? Was it true to the Bible or adapted, a la Hollywood, to accommodate dramatic flourishes?
On one score I had little doubt: "The Passion," which opens Tuesday, is easily the most violent, blood-drenched film I have seen in years — perhaps ever. And therein lies a serious issue I see not only through the eyes of an entertainment writer, but also a church-going Christian.
Churches busing youth to this movie like it's some sort of Chuck E. Cheese field trip need to think — and pray — long and hard about the aftershock. "The Passion" is not kids' stuff. It is gory in the extreme, with prolonged flogging and torture scenes. One lasts 45 minutes....
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