Spidergrrl's Web

election fraud Ukraine/US

I've been fascinated by the amount of NPR news time that was spent on the Ukrainian elections, mainly because the absence of any reporting on the groups investigating U.S. election fraud was so deafening. I'm not objecting to the reporting on the Ukraine; our press is still too U.S./western-european-centric. I'm just noticing the disjuncture. Listening to NPR felt surreal -- because I kept expecting the reports of election fraud to slip from the Ukraine to the U.S. But that didn't happen. What's up with this void in the mainstream media? Not surprising. But certainly frustrating and illuminating.

Derrida & Arafat

These two deaths this fall (Derrida on 8 October of pancreatic cancer and Arafat on 11 November in a military hospital in Paris) change the world, change my sense of the world. No. That's not what I want to say. I want to pay hommage. Both figures have been powerful figures threading through my spheres of academia, writing, self- & world-reflection. Arafat because he is the icon of Palestine, or as Hanan Ashrawi put it, Arafat "is the one who personified the Palestinian people.... He will stay a part of our memory but also be an incentive for the future." Arafat passes on, ceding his iconic spot to a younger generation, who will not be drawn in his shadow's outline. Derrida because his writings rewritten by Spivak, the literary theory teacher I encountered in my first year of graduate school, shapes much of my ways of seeing and understanding. Until I first heard Spivak in that initial class, where she situated New Criticism in its cold war webbing, and I heard postcolonialism, feminism, race, gender, & class all discussed in one breath...I did not know there were such clear words and terms for the things I'd been tumbling in my mind. Two powerhouses of the African Arab world leave us this past fall.

Red Sox & Kerry, Bush & Creon

According to an NPR segment I heard this afternoon, John Kerry showed up at a gathering in Ohio wearing a Red Sox hat. He said that a year ago when the campaign wasn't doing so well, a snide listener called up a radio show host and said, "John Kerry will get elected president when the Red Sox win the World Series!" There ya have it. Complete with lunar eclipse? What could be more fortuitous.

Report today from health officials...I've got to find the source...that says over 100,000 civilian Iraqis killed in the last 18 months -- mostly due to U.S. air raids. We should be a nation in mourning.

During the first presidential debate, all I could think of was Bush as Creon. We were doing Antigone in my world lit. I course, and Creon lived in George W. The leader of the state who demands unquestioning loyalty, who refuses to change any decision even with new information, who believes certainty is strength...who belittles women, doesn't listen to the people, and imputes motives of greed on seers and sentinels.

Now we're finishing up Douglass's Narrative in my world lit. II class and I'm struck yet again by the Appendix, in which Douglass explains his perceptions of slave holding Christianity and Christianity proper. Again, slave holding Christianity is Bush's faith, the Christianity where the church bell and the slave auctioner's bell ring in unison. Where practitioners of a faith that says "Thou shalt not kill" decide that commandment surely must not apply to Iraqis.

Mark Danner's "Abu Ghraib: The Hidden Story"

In The New York Review of Books (volume LI, no. 15, 7 Oct. 2004), Mark Danner has a powerful piece reviewing the Abu Ghraib documents (Final Report of the Independent Panel to Review DoD Detention Operations (The Schlesinger Report) and AR 15-6 Investigation of Abu Ghraib Detention Facility and 205th Military Intelligence Brigade). Here's a line that hit me:

The fact that the legal trail at Abu Ghraib has been directed toward the abuses that appear in the photographs means that the question of policy -- of whether the United States should be torturing prisoners, of what the political and moral costs of this will finally be, and of what responsibility those who ultimately direct that policy really bear -- has hardly been seriously debated, whether in Congress or anywhere else. ... So far, officials of the Bush administration, who counted on the fact that the public, and much of the press, could be persuaded to focus on the photographs -- the garish signboards of the scandal and not the scandal itself -- have been proved right. This makes Abu Ghraib a peculiarly contemporary kind of scandal, with most of its plotlines exposed to view -- but with few willing to follow them and fewer still to do much about them. As with other controversies over the Iraq war, the revelations have been made, the behavior exposed, but the moral will to act, or even to debate what action might be warranted, seems mostly lacking. (50)

I still haven't seen the pictures, but Danner's article makes that unnecessary. He describes the visuals, but the main obscenity he outlines is the administration's responsibility for policy and its attempt to scapegoat those lower in rank.

death in two lands

My browser opens up to http://apple.netscape.com/apple.adp mainly because I'm too lazy to change it. This morning I was hit by a weird juxtaposition of headlines. First in red print came "CNN - U.S. Blamed as Mosque Mortar Barrage Slaughters 25." Below that headline was this article, flanked by an idyllic cemetery picture complete with sunset: "The Best Places in the U.S. to Die --
When it comes to estate taxes, states can vary greatly. Find out where the tax burden is lower." I dunno. I felt that strange broiling in my gut that means something's off. I guess I couldn't put the two things together in the same world. I couldn't move from the U.S. slaughtering to the U.S. dying peacefully and financially well off. I kept thinking of the unbridgeable schism between the two kinds of death. And that the second death, the daily mundane stuff of keeping our affairs in order, somehow obscures the first death, that as citizens of this country, we each bear responsibility in each individual slaughter. Not sure how to walk through the day with that kind of schism.

Iraqi Olympic soccer team

On RFP, someone posted a piece by Dave Zirin, who writes a column for The Prince George's Post. I can't yet point to a URL for the piece, but I'm assuming the column will be up either on the current article page or on the archives soon. If all sports writing were this insightful, I'd have a subscription to Sports Illustrated. My sports knowledge and reading only gets augmented by my 12 yr. old son, who corrects me when I think the Cubs are the Giants (ok, I'm not quite that bad). I tend to favor geekyness and tai chi. When I worked at the Center for Women and Information Technology (at University of Maryland Baltimore County - UMBC) and had the honor of meeting Anita Borg who came to the Center to speak, I also took her to visit UMBC's president. Freeman Hrabowski told Anita that we didn't have a football team, but our chess team was kicking butt. That's also my idea of a great university. But I'm realizing that my sports brouhaha antipathy is keeping me from reading some excellent political analysis. I like Zirin's piece a lot:

Iraqi Olympic Soccer Team Gives Bush the Boot
By Dave Zirin

Sometimes we are reminded that the Olympics can serve as an international platform not only for nationalism and truck commercials, but also resistance. In an incredible piece on Sports Illustrated.com, Grant Wahl reports that the Iraqi Olympic Soccer team has issued a stinging rebuke to George W. Bush's attempt to use them as election year symbols. Iraq's soccer squad is perhaps the surprise of the entire Olympics, advancing to this weekend's quarterfinals despite the war and occupation that has gripped their country for the last 17 months.

Yet amidst cheers and triumph, they were infuriated to learn that Bush's brain, Karl Rove, had launched campaign ads featuring their Olympic glory as a brilliant by-product of the war on terror. The commercial, subtle as a blowtorch, begins with an image of the Afghani and Iraqi flags with a voice over saying, "At this Olympics there will be two more free nations -- and two fewer terrorist regimes." Bush has also been exploiting their exploits in stump speeches. Much more comfortable talking sports than
foreign policy or stem-cell research, Bush brayed with bravado in Oregon, "The image of the Iraqi soccer team playing in this Olympics, it's fantastic, isn't it? It wouldn't have been free if the United States had not acted."

This has compelled the Iraqi soccer team, at great personal risk, to respond. Mid-fielder and team leader Salih Sadir told Sports Illustrated, "Iraq as a team does not want Mr. Bush to use us for the presidential campaign. He can find another way to advertise himself."

Sadir has reason to be upset. He was the star player for the professional soccer team in Najaf. Najaf has in recent weeks been swamped by US troops and the new Iraqi army in an attempt to uproot rebel cleric Moqtada Al-Sadr. Thousands have died, each death close to Sadir's heart.

"I want the violence and the war to go away from the city," said Sadir, "We don't wish for the presence of Americans in our country. We want them to go away."

Sadir's teammates were less diplomatic. Midfielder Ahmed Manajid, told Wahl angrily, "How will [Bush] meet his god having slaughtered so many men and women? He has committed so many crimes."

Manajid understands Sadir's pain because he is from another Iraqi city that has been in a state of siege, Fallujah. Manajid told Wahl that his cousin Omar Jabbar al-Aziz, who was a resistance fighter, was killed by the US, as were several of his friends. Manajid even said that if he were not playing soccer he would "for sure" be fighting as part of the resistance. "I want to defend my home. If a stranger invades America and the people resist, does that mean they are terrorists? Everyone [in Fallujah] has been labeled a terrorist. These are all lies. Fallujah people are some of the best people in Iraq."

Usually when there is political unrest on Olympic teams, the coach tries to be a mitigating force with the media. But not here and not now. Iraqi soccer coach Adnan Hamad also went public to Sports Illustrated saying, "My problems are not with the American people, They are with what America has done in Iraq: destroy everything. The American army has killed so many people in Iraq."

To be clear, Iraq's team is not pining for former Olympic head Uday Hussein, notorious for torturing athletes that under performed. Yet they don't feel their choice has to be between Uday's way and the bloodbath that has been visited upon their country. As Hamad said, "What is freedom when I go to the [national] stadium and there are shootings on the road?"

The ideas expressed by the Iraqi soccer team are by all counts commonplace in Iraq yet find little expression in the mainstream media here at home. It is critical that their words find ears. Without WMDs, Al-Qaeda connections, and with an Iraqi populace that overwhelmingly views the U.S. as occupiers and not liberators, what possible justification does Bush - and Kerry - have for supporting this invasion that has cost hundreds of billions of dollars and countless lives?

Take time this weekend to root for the Iraqi soccer team. Their ascent will accompany a platform for ideas that demand to be heard.

Dave Zirin can be reached at editor@pgpost.com. His book "What's My Name Fool": Sports and Resistance in the United States (Haymarket Books) comes out spring 2005. To get his column every week, e-mail edgeofsports-subscribe@zirin.com

que notre President soit un idiot...

This image was posted to RFP and I got a huge amount of solace and chuckles from it. The label is apparently from a small American company that sells its products in France. After all the cleaning instructions, the label reads: "We're sorry our President is an idiot. We didn't vote for him."

pressure CBS

draft board link

I found the email that discussed the draft board stuff and checked out the link at
http://www.defendamerica.mil/articles/sss092203.html, and it's all there. Defend America, the newsletter that is subtitled, "U.S. Department of Defense News About the War on Terrorism," offers this headline: "Serve Your Community and the Nation -- Become a Selective Service System Local Board Member." Here's the paragraph that contains the sentence that begins with, "If a military draft becomes necessary..."

Local Board Members are uncompensated volunteers who play an important community role closely connected with our Nation's defense. If a military draft becomes necessary, approximately 2,000 Local and Appeal Boards throughout America would decide which young men, who submit a claim, receive deferments, postponements or exemptions from military service, based on Federal guidelines.

Why do I have waking daydreams of Canada?

Seems like the best antidote is to list resources for conscientious objectors, which someone on the RFP list did in response to the draft article. I've included these resources here, also.

Today I also read Maher Arar's 4 Nov. statement to the media about his year-long ordeal of torture. Arar appeals to Canadians and wants to ensure that no Canadian ever suffers what he did, but it seems that the criminals who set the events rolling were actually U.S. immigration folks in NYC. A Syrian-born Canadian, as Arar self-identifies, he now wants to get to the bottom of his case, as he says. Here's a link from Amnesty International - Canada -- Why was Maher Arar Deported to Syria?.

12 November is the German release date for a documentary on Guatanamo Bay. OK, the email I saw said the director is Ashwin Raman and the documentary is supposed to show on ARD, Germany. But I've searched Google (which gives me a couple links to info on Raman) and have just gone through the ARD schedule for the 12th and done a search on ARD for "ashwin raman" and "guantanamo" and haven't yet found the documentary. Here's the link to Raman's paper on Guantanamo, presented 30 Sept. 2003 in Brussels: Guantanamo: a right to a fair trial. Raman is 56 years old, born in Bombay -- looks like he's lived in Germany for a while. Has done a lot of reporting from Afghanistan and also interviewed Osama bin Laden over 15 years ago.

disturbing item found

I remember the other thing... posting to a list on draft boards being set up. Very disturbing. I will find links for all this info. I'm feeling like a severely incompetent blogger these days. Blogged out all over the place.