The Downward Spiral of the War on(of) Terror

I guess you will have heard the news of the murder of Benazir Bhutto. It is a sad day but, unfortunately, just one more unravelling part of the war of terror. The U$/UK administrations, flush with military power and dreaming of a neo-liberal compliant Middle East have set about doing everthing they could to make a bad situation worse. The War of Terror is a monumental cock-up of conspiratorial levels:

Pakistan: "The Pakistani authorities are blaming Muslim militants for the assassination. That is possible, but everyone in Pakistan remembers that it was the military intelligence, or Inter-Services Intelligence, that promoted Muslim militancy in the two decades before September 11 as a wedge against India in Afghanistan and Kashmir."

Afghanistan: "The Americans have a way of painting this black and white," said one European official. "For them it's like a cowboy film - you're either a good guy or a bad guy. But anyone with any experience in this country knows it's not that simple."

Somalia: The Islamic Courts Union driven from power a year ago by Western-backed troops is regrouping and planning a large-scale attack and the government can do little to stop it...

Palestine: "Are you wondering about the Annapolis meeting that will open this week? Will the meeting exceed the low expectations that now embrace it? The confab has already been downgraded from a 'conference' to just a 'meeting.'"

Iraq I: "The rate of attacks in Iraq (for all types) has stabilized at the levels of 2004/2005, which were prior to the bombing of Askariya. During this earlier period, Iraq's open source insurgency was highly decentralized. A good way to quantify this is through the analysis of Oxford's Neil Johnson, who plotted the number of attacks against casualties per attack. He found that the equilibrium point for Iraq's conflict (as well as the long running war in Colombia) was a power law with a coefficient of 2.5 . A conflict with a coefficient of 2.5 looks more like intensive terrorism than conventional warfare. It is also likely, given Colombia's experience, a level sustainable over decades of conflict."

Iraq II: Myth: The Sunni Arab "Awakening Councils," who are on the US payroll, are reconciling with the Shiite government of PM Nuri al-Maliki even as they take on al-Qaeda remnants. Fact: In interviews with the Western press, Awakening Council tribesmen often speak of attacking the Shiites after they have polished off al-Qaeda.

Still, one bright spot, one the Native American nations is planning to go independent of the US; reminds me of what Ward Churchill said, that for the whole planet to survive we need to first end the US occupation of America.

PS. Bristol Indymedia has a review of 2007 online....
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The Iraqi Resistance on YouTube

There is a good report from Aljazeera on the Iraqi resistance groups who are not al-Qaeda. The report contains lots of very staged footage, but makes some good points about the nature of these groups. Firstly the staged video shows a pretty good degree of media sophistication and secondly the report highlights how these groups recruit people - via the US abuse of detainees; a vicious circle.

Split in the BNP?

Looks like the skull-duggery that defines the far-right is being turned in upon themselves...

Open rebellion is being threatened against the leader of the British National Party, Nick Griffin, from dozens of senior activists. The party has retaliated by expelling two senior members, who it accuses of plotting a coup. BNP officials Sadie Graham and Kenny Smith were kicked out after they were critical of Mr Griffin's style. They have now set up a rival faction, supported by up to 60 senior members. The BNP leadership denies it is split. The row centres on the activities of Ms Graham, the BNP's former group development officer, and Mr Smith, former head of administration. They were accused of "gross misconduct" after it came to light the party said that they were masterminding a blog site critical of Mr Griffin and demanding the sacking of senior officials Mark Collett and Dave Hannam.

also see:

http://www.channel4.com/player/v2/player.jsp?showId=10569#

Bunch of bone-heads.

Bali's Hot Air & Cold Hope

Now its all over, time for reflection. Yes the spin-fest that was the Bali United Nations Climate Change Conference has ended with very little to show. Waste of time and carbon. A guess what Neo-Labour did? Yes the war-mongering, big-brother, big-business, hypocritical, shit-pant Labour Party sold us down the river...again;

EU sources told The Independent on Sunday that Britain had unilaterally helped the US to get the figure relegated to a footnote after a telephone call from the White House to Downing Street, but Hilary Benn, the Environment Secretary, denied that the Government had strayed from the united European position.

On the subject, this well reasoned video (unless your climate-crank or in serious denial, that is) is doing the rounds (I've seen it on Bristol Indymedia & Charlie Bolton's Southville blog)



But Paul Kingsnorth puts it better than I ever could...

You might be expecting me to be furious about the outcome of the latest climate change shindig in Bali. Furious about the whole thing, perhaps: 15,000 people fly to this sunny little island from all corners of the world, emitting as much carbon dioxide to do so as Mali emits in a year. They spend a week yakking about the biggest threat to the world since humanity walked on all fours; they get right down to the wire; then they announce ... a 'breakthrough!'..And the plan is ... well, the plan is to agree that at some stage in the future we will set some targets to slightly reduce our emissions at some stage after that, if at all possible...Still, I am not depressed. Why? Because I have given up expecting better. I am cultivating an almost Buddhist detachment....What will save us? Who knows if we even need 'saving'? I know it's Christmas, but we don't have to think like fundamentalist Christians all the time - don't have to keep worrying that apocalypse is around the corner. Even if it is, there's nothing Gordon Brown and Greenpeace can do about it. What will save us? Digging our garden, being in love, writing poems, standing up for our inevitable place, belonging, fighting off the encroachment of corporate culture, walking in the woods, knowing who we are, grounding ourselves - and not believing the talk of those who expect the suits and the bankers and the big-picture thinkers to get us out of what they so long ago dragged us into. This system has its own momentum now. This tide will not turn until it is ready. And us? We have to ride it. And you know what - I am beginning to believe that we can.

This is akin to Derrick Jensen's POV too:

Frankly, I don’t have much hope. But I think that’s a good thing. Hope is what keeps us chained to the system, the conglomerate of people and ideas and ideals that is causing the destruction of the Earth...To start, there is the false hope that suddenly somehow the system may inexplicably change. Or technology will save us. Or the Great Mother. Or beings from Alpha Centauri. Or Jesus Christ. Or Santa Claus. All of these false hopes lead to inaction, or at least to ineffectiveness. One reason my mother stayed with my abusive father was that there were no battered women’s shelters in the ‘50s and ‘60s, but another was her false hope that he would change. False hopes bind us to unlivable situations, and blind us to real possibilities.

A WONDERFUL THING happens when you give up on hope, which is that you realize you never needed it in the first place. You realize that giving up on hope didn’t kill you. It didn’t even make you less effective. In fact it made you more effective, because you ceased relying on someone or something else to solve your problems—you ceased hoping your problems would somehow get solved through the magical assistance of God, the Great Mother, the Sierra Club, valiant tree-sitters, brave salmon, or even the Earth itself—and you just began doing whatever it takes to solve those problems yourself.

Time to have a re-think, I think...
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Caught in the Crossfire

Finally got round to listening to the Arnolfini Journalism 2007, by Andrew Gilligan, and it is a good listen and well worth the effort. Sample quote;

Over the question of Iraq, the most serious question you could possible imagine, the coming of our troops to war against a country that had offered no provocation to us; nearly all the democratic institutions that were supposed to protect us, failed. The civil service in the person of John Scarlet of the joint intelligence committee became Alistair Campbell's co-conspirator. Parliament, in the form of the Foreign Affairs Committee became more concerned with humiliating David Kelly than getting to the bottom of the dossier business and the Judiciary, in the form of Lord Hutton, well I just don't know what happened to Lord Hutton. Not only did the institutions fail; they have failed to acknowledge that their failures and they continue to present that all is well.

Another point he raises is what he calls 'anti-jounralists' or PR people, whos job is to obfuscate and manipulate the news agenda. Link to the MP3 is here.

(PS, on the subject of Iraq & David Kelly - also check out the lecture on the death of David Kelly by the Lib Dem MP Norman Baker)