Posts by Danyl Mclauchlan
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Has anyone had a play with the conspiracy theoryJava map function yet:
That is SO cool. Now I see how John Kerry is linked to Pearl Jam, who are linked to R.E.M, who are controlled by Greenpeace and Fidel Castro.
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You could also ask where were those from the left when 2 1/2 million North Koreans were starved to death in the 1990s?
Where has the left been as North Korea has run a horrendously brutal police state as bad as anything Stalin did for something like 60 years. . ?
James - I'll answer your 'where has the left' been question with another question: what could 'the left' have done about the famine in North Korea, or Stalinist Russia. The ACLU has a mandate to defend civil liberties in the US, which they mostly do through providing free legal representation in key cases - how exactly could they have prevented Saddam Hussein from gassing Halabja? ANSWER is a bunch of trust-fund kids with spray-cans - I'm curious to know how they could address the problem of Chinas policy towards Sudan trade sanctions?
The reason that groups protest in the US is because it's a democracy that enjoys free speech and government policy, and the government itself can (in theory) be changed through protest and activism. Demanding that the ACLU stop challenging the Bush Administrations war on civil liberties and 'do something about Castro', or fix the treatment of women in Islamic Society is patently absurd.
Your argument - that people aren't allowed to complain about an issue because they haven't spoken out or intervened in some other, unrelated matter is a reductio ad absurdum. It's just as easy for me to insist that you have no right to complain about the complaints of the left - after all, you've been tellingly silent on the issue of Mobutus Zaire, or the war crimes committed by the British during their surpression of the Boxer Rebellion. And where were you during the Algerian civil war? Did you fight against Francos facist regime in Spain? And where were you when Peron seized Argentina? Nowhere - that's where.
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Today in Iraq . . .
* 30 dead in central Baghdad clash between Iraqi Army and gunmen following reports that Sunnis had set up fake checkpoint where they were detaining Shiites, shooting them, and hanging their bodies from lampposts;
* 27 bodies were dumped behind a hospital in Baghdad;
* 72 bodies were recovered around Baghdad on Saturday, most showing signs of torture.
I guess pretty much the same stuff is happening in New Orleans . . .
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In the week since Saddam Hussein was hanged in an execution steeped in sectarian overtones, his public image in the Arab world, formerly that of a convicted dictator, has undergone a resurgence of admiration and awe.
On the streets, in newspapers and over the Internet, Mr. Hussein has emerged as a Sunni Arab hero who stood calm and composed as his Shiite executioners tormented and abused him.
“No one will ever forget the way in which Saddam was executed,” President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt remarked in an interview with the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot published Friday and distributed by the official Egyptian news agency. “They turned him into a martyr.”
Yesterdays NYT.
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James - the numbers in the links you cite appear to be very different from the ones you provided in your previous post. The murder rate in NO is given as being between 60-80/100000, not 105/100000 as you claimed. It also points out that New Orleans is ten times more violent than other cities of similar size in the US.
In the past few days in Iraq:
Police found 47 bodies in the streets of Baghdad on Thursday.
Guerrillas set off two car bombs in the al-Mansur district, killing 13 persons and injuring 22
Sunni Arab guerrillas launched a mortar attack on the Shiite Shu'la district of Baghdad, injuring 9 civilians
Police found four bodies in Hilla, in the mixed Sunni and Shiite province of Babel
Gunmen set up a phony checkpoint in the Shiite holy city of Karbala and stopped and killed Shaikh Akram al-Zubaydi, an important cleric and aide of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani.
A bombing wounded 3 Iraqi policemen in Kirkuk.
Political violence left about 10 persons dead on Tuesday.
Googling around I can find no stories about New Orleans suffering from car bombings, assasinations, or police discovering dozens of bodies showing signs of torture.
As far as Iraq being worse now than it was before March 2003, as the UN's former Thief in Chief Kofi Annan said in his departing address, I saw the Iraqi UN Ambassador asked that exact question on CNN the day after Saddam's rope dance. The Ambassador didn't have too much time for that view!!
So the ambassador didn't feel his own government was worse than Saddam Husseins! Sounds like they picked the right guy for that job . . .
Iraq is not pretty, but I think the Pottery Barn rule applies. The US and the UK and the other forces broke it, so now they have to fix it. I think that the UK, the US have an obligation to stay and support in whatever way necessary the Iraqi government as long as is necessary.
The problem is, the government is probably responsible for the lions share of the murders currently occuring in Iraq. Do the US and UK REALLY have an obligation to stay and help the Shia ethnically cleanse their country of Sunnis?
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Hi James - can you provide a link to where you sourced the Iraqi government murder rate figures? And, incidentally, Time reports that the NO murder rate is less than half the number cited in your post, so you might want to check that number too.
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1175489,00.html
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Since we are discussing Saddam, here is a random factoid related to Iraq, just read that New Orleans' murder rate is twice that of Iraqs'. Based on the last 6 month in New Orleans, our murder rate is 105 per 100,000 and based on the last year in Iraq, Iraqs' is 53 per 100,000. I don’t feel the least bit unsafe here. Mind you, I am not going into the ‘hood to buy crack, and we don’t have suicide bombers and IEDs here.
The US military doesn't count people killed in Iraq by bombs, rockets or morters as 'murders'. They also don't count people killed by US troops as murders, and typically the US is responsible for about 30% of fatalities in Iraq on any given month.
I'm sure that if you checked with the Rwandan Department of Statistics they'd be happy to inform you that their 'murder rate' in 1994 - ie, the number of murders reported to police - was very low and that many US cities had much higher rates . . .
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*By urban sanctuary I mean, of course, urban dictionary. Duh.
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So is that the extent of it?
Nobody has anything to say about Saddam then?I think it was probably prudent to execute Saddam Hussein, given the current anarchy in Iraq it was always on the cards that his supporters would free him and that's no longer an option.
But that's not the point. Russell was referring to the images of his final moments. It's not easy to make yourself look like the bad guy when you're executing one of the most evil and hated men alive, but yet again the Bush Administration came through for us. The images of Husseins final moments - a dignified elderly man surrounded by masked captors jeering as they fasten a noose around his neck - give him a one-way ticket to martyrdom.
It's not about Saddam - it's about how allowing his death to be filmed and broadcast will deepen and antagonise the civil war currently underway.
I agree with the previous commentators that the Listener is currently rubbish. We've canceled our subscription.
The urban sanctuary link is one of the most depressing things I've read in a while. (Thanks Russell). It's quite an acheivement to be born into one of the most privileged demographics in human history and still make such a mess of your life that you need someone else to blame for your failures, and even more impressive to conclude that the people at fault are the poorest most underprivileged members of your society. White pride.
The right-wing blogosphere seems to have concluded that the REAL story behind the Hollow Men is that Hager has 'violated National Security' by publishing his book. Whatever. Reading the book again over the holidays made me rethink my original position on how Hager obtained his information. I still think most of the documents were stolen by someone working in the National leaders office - some PA or receptionist or IT person who had access to everyone's laptop and simply copied all their pst files onto a USB key.
But there's too much anecdotal information in the book for this to be the only source. In the epilogue Hager tells us about a conversation between Ruth Richardson and Brash at Richardsons holiday home shortly after the election. The footnote attributes the information to a confidential source, not an email. You have to wonder how many people Brash and Richardson would have told about that conversation? Not many, is my guess. How many would have been inclined to pass that information on to Nicky Hager? Even fewer.Hager has made it known that he had a great deal of information that he couldn't publish because it would have identified his sources. I suspect National already knows whom at least one of their leakers were. They're smart people and Hager has given them hundreds of pages of clues.
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Readers of Alan Moore's 'From Hell' will not be surprised to see that the police investigator in charge of the case is a DCS Gull . . .