Keys Corner

If you have any plans to visit the spectacular Grand Canyon Skywalk, you will probably be interested to read this article first – here’s the salient point:

We walked in to get the tickets and met a very long line of people waiting to do the same. After 10 minutes of waiting, a “Question Answerer” came by and made it clear why it was taking so long: the sales people had to explain the “packages” and pricing to each and every person in the line. This was not because the package was that complex, but because each person in the line thought they were going to be paying $25 per person. In reality, the tribe was charging another $50 on top of the $25 for each person. You read that right, 75 bucks a pop. The “Question Answerer” explained it to us:

“The investor wants to get his, that’s the $25. But it’s our land, and we don’t get any of that $25, so we have to get ours too, you know?”

On top of the $75 you need to add tax, making $83 per person. For that price, by the way, you are not allowed to take your camera onto the Skywalk.

The Pentagon has announced that an alleged senior al-Qaida member who has been held in Guantanamo has “confessed” to planning the September 11 attacks on the USA:

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged number three in al-Qaida, confessed to planning the attacks on New York and Washington on September 11 2001, in front of the secret military tribunals being held for the top detainees in Guantánamo, the Pentagon said last night.

However:

He is understood to have gone through torture, including “waterboarding” when the suspect being interrogated is strapped to a board and placed underwater. According to the New York Times, the use of harsh techniques was approved in his case by the justice department and the CIA.

So that makes the confession as likely to be true as the White House’s statements on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, that were made before the invasion in 2003, doesn’t it?

Once upon a time, you could trace the spread of imperialism by counting up colonies. America’s version of the colony is the military base; and by following the changing politics of global basing, one can learn much about our ever more all-encompassing imperial “footprint” and the militarism that grows with it…

...Interestingly enough, the thirty-eight large and medium-sized American facilities spread around the globe in 2005—mostly air and naval bases for our bombers and fleets—almost exactly equals Britain’s thirty-six naval bases and army garrisons at its imperial zenith in 1898. The Roman Empire at its height in 117 AD required thirty-seven major bases to police its realm from Britannia to Egypt, from Hispania to Armenia. Perhaps the optimum number of major citadels and fortresses for an imperialist aspiring to dominate the world is somewhere between thirty-five and forty…

More >

The White House / Pentagon spin machine has shifted up a gear with their attempts to convince us that Iran is really, really evil. How long until they or Israel attacks them? The Guardian thinks we probably have about a year.

It’s not surprising that the US army let looters clear out museums and hospitals after the fall of Baghdad – just look at these quotes from those responsible for losing track of up to $20bn in $100 bills that was shipped to Iraq to finance the reconstruction of the country (my emphasis in the quote):

Paul Bremer, the head of the CPA, reminded the committee that “the subject of today’s hearing is the CPA’s use and accounting for funds belonging to the Iraqi people held in the so-called Development Fund for Iraq. These are not appropriated American funds. They are Iraqi funds. I believe the CPA discharged its responsibilities to manage these Iraqi funds on behalf of the Iraqi people.“

Bremer’s financial adviser, retired Admiral David Oliver, is even more direct. The memorandum quotes an interview with the BBC World Service. Asked what had happened to the $8.8bn he replied: “I have no idea. I can’t tell you whether or not the money went to the right things or didn’t – nor do I actually think it’s important.”

Q: “But the fact is billions of dollars have disappeared without trace.”

Oliver: “Of their money. Billions of dollars of their money, yeah I understand. I’m saying what difference does it make?“

In other words, it’s not our money, why should we worry? Apart that is, from the suspicion that some of that missing money has financed the people involved in both the civil war in Iraq and the on-going attacks on military personnel.

It’s mind-blowingly arrogant, not the mention short sighted.

William Pfaff comments in today’s Observer on a phemonenom that has worried most Europeans for the last 3 or 4 years:

... In America, it’s as though Bush, his inner cabinet, and the neocons have been playing a video game, with fictional characters and victims, virtual death and torture. Now the disc has suddenly finished, and it’s time to shut down the player.

This is not just a figure of speech. American policy has been running on images rather than evidence of real nations and people doing things for real human motives. It has been populated by abstractions: Global Terrorist Conspiracies, Rogue Nations, Fanatics Who Hate Our Freedoms, Generations of Terrorism and The Global Menace of Al-Qaeda.

The US, where actual people live, has been turned into an abstraction: the Sole Superpower, which everyone in the world knows is a Righteous Nation, the Mars (in the neocon Robert Kagan’s formulation) defending the fragile Venus which is Europe, the Straussian (Leo Strauss, the University of Chicago philosopher) Realist unflinchingly battling in a Hobbesian universe to protect Kantian Europeans, with their illusions of global parliaments and peace, from nameless horrors…

See which were the most common words in each US President’s speechs, and when they were first used on Chirag Mehta’s blog. Interesting – you can see clearly events such as McCarthyism, the Cuba Missile Crisis and 9/11 reflected in the words used in speechs at those times.

(via Boing Boing)

Looking at the headlines in the internet this morning makes depressing reading.

There has been joint survey by leading newspapers in the UK, Canada, Israel and Mexico, which shows that most of the people in these traditional allies of the USA think that George Bush is more of a threat to world peace than the leader of North Korea (Kim Jong-II) or the Iranian president (Mahmoud Ahmadinejad). North Korea and Iran are, of course, both members of Bush’s “Axis of Evil”.

Yes, the leader of the country which likes to think of itself as being the world’s leading example of democracy is seen by many, even in Israel, as being a very threatening person who has made the world more dangerous since he came to power. Here are the top three threats:

At the same time, the German magazine Spiegel is running it’s lead article on a poll by the state TV station, ARD, showing that only a minority (49%) here believes that democracy is working in Germany. The figure is down from 55% in a survey carried out in April this year by the EU and down 11% on the results of a survey in September 2005; it is the lowest value ever recorded in Germany. In the EU survey, the Germans were more satisfied with how democracy was working in their country than the Italians or French, although their satisfaction then was less that the average for all EU countries.

George Bush is quoted on the BBC web site today as referring to

“Islamic fascists… will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom”.

He’s supposed to be brighter than people give him credit for, but I do wonder if he knows the definition of fascist?

There’s a short summary of political scientist Dr. Lawrence Britt’s article on fascism (2003 in Free Inquiry) here, which is worth taking a look at. Looking at the fascist regimes of Hitler (Germany), Mussolini (Italy), Franco (Spain), Suharto (Indonesia), and Pinochet (Chile), Dr. Britt found they had 14 elements in common. To summarise the summary, the 14 characteristics that he identified were:

1. Powerful and Continuing Nationalism


2. Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights


3. Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause


4. Supremacy of the Military


5. Rampant Sexism


6. Controlled Mass Media


7. Obsession with National Security


8. Religion and Government are Intertwined


9. Corporate Power is Protected


10. Labor Power is Suppressed


11. Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts


12. Obsession with Crime and Punishment


13. Rampant Cronyism and Corruption


14. Fraudulent Elections

Do those seem to you to match more closely with al-Qaeda or the USA?

Update (2006-08-12):
I see that Daniel Benjamin of the Center for Strategic and International Studies also thinks using the term “islamic fascists” is nonsense:

There is no sense in which jihadists embrace fascist ideology as it was developed by Mussolini or anyone else who was associated with the term. This is an epithet, a way of arousing strong emotion and tarnishing one’s opponent, but it doesn’t tell us anything about the content of their beliefs…

Sounds similar to Bush’s redefinition of the word terrorist, which he uses to mean anyone whose political views divirge from Bush’s.

According to The Economist, the answer is that Israel funds a lobby group (AIPAC) in Washington with a budget of nearly $50m and a staff of 200 – allegedly more powerful than the National Rifle Association:

“Thank God we have AIPAC, the greatest supporter and friend we have in the whole world,” says Ehud Olmert, Israel’s prime minister. The lobby, which is the centrepiece of a co-ordinated body that includes pressure groups, think-tanks and fund-raising operations, produces voting statistics on congressmen that are carefully scrutinised by political donors. It also organises regular trips to Israel for congressmen and their staffs. (The Washington Post reports that Roy Blunt, the House majority whip, has been on four.)

The other factor is the evangelical Christians, representing 25% of the American electorate:

White evangelicals are significantly more pro-Israeli than Americans in general; more than half of them say they strongly sympathise with Israel. (A third of the Americans who claim sympathy with Israel say that this stems from their religious beliefs.) Two in five Americans believe that Israel was given to the Jewish people by God, and one in three say that the creation of the state of Israel was a step towards the Second Coming.

Finally, the Americans probably see themselves in the same boat as Israel – the 9/11 attacks and the rocket attacks of Hizbullah are both seen as “terrorist” attacks on “democracy”.