I made a bad mistake. I went to see The Last King of Scotland. I mean I really should have known: a Hollywood movie about Idi Amin. I don’t know what I expected. I guess I was taken in by all the media-hype about Forest Whitaker’s performance. Two nights before the Oscars, I was swept into the frenzy, myself and a packed theater in a white white white Vermont town.

We were treated to what the movie said was a story “based on actual events.” As the horror unfolded, as the young and stupid and careless Scottish doctor becomes part of Amin’s inner circle and slowly realizes Amin’s insanity and his own terrible complicity, I kept thinking, “Could this guy have really existed? He must have, because who would have the cojones to concoct him? I mean, wasn’t what Amin did all on his own bad enough without inventing a sidekick who spurred the madman on to fictional atrocities?”

Alas, this is Hollywood, folks, and the white West. You can’t present Africa without some white dude on-board to interpret. But he didn’t just interpret, this fictional Scottish doctor. No. He fictionally slept with Amin’s wife, and thus inadvertently caused her hideous fictional murder, but inadvertently, innocently, the Innocents Abroad, you know. By the time we get to Entebbe airport, we are really in la la land. An ad hoc torture/ crucifixion/Lakota Sundance in the duty-free shop? Twenty feet away from the Israeli hostages? Where were the news crews? At the ending credits I incredulously muttered “I think I hated that movie,” meeting with hostile looks from nearby movie-goers. I was too stunned to know how I felt in the moment. The lobby was all abuzz about the “intensity” of the film, and Whittaker’s “amazing” performance.

My partner said in misery, “This is the picture of Africa they always have in their minds.” Noble white missionary/doctors, suffering natives, beautiful landscape though, such a waste, such a shame…

We went home and asked Jeeves, and sure enough, there was no such Scot.

Apart from a couple of sinister Brits and Amin’s mention of belonging to the King’s Rifles in Uganda, viewers are given little indication that in the actual person of Idi Amin it is possible for the West to see itself refracted, to see the Heart of Darkness that goes far to create such horrors and then after the fact clucks regretfully at Africa’s hopeless misery. For Amin was a creature of the no-man’s land between Europe and Africa, plucked as a starving feral child off the streets of colonial Kampala, raised in violence, and groomed for his terrible brand of statesmanship, beholden to the West and enamored of its decadence. In trying to constitute some feeling of safety and home for himself, his paranoia and narcissism led him to crush any real or imagined opposition. Britain and Israel were happy to feed him weapons until Entebbe, in order to slaughter his own people, as long as he remained “our man”, like Mobutu in Congo/Zaire, like the Shah of Iran, like Duvalier in Haiti, like Saddam Hussein…

And Whitaker’s performance? The interminable close-ups where you can see every sweating pore? The sustained hysteria? “African savage” indeed. The movie has the beaten-up Scot in the duty-free shop whisper to Amin in smiling revelation: “You’re a child! That’s what makes you so fucking scary.” I have no right to ask, but I do: what self-respecting black man would read such a script and consent to take such a role? When I say I think this film should never have been made, I imagine how preposterous it would be to make a film that concocted a sidekick for Hitler, his “top advisor”, an innocent who happened into the snake-pit and found himself collaborating in the murder of a nation. But we can take those liberties when we make films about African despots, and that’s the point. Africa continues to be for us what we decide she is, and we do not find it outrageous in the least to view such twisted takes on all-too-real events.

Films have been made about Idi Amin. He was a truly outrageous character, and many of his antics on the world-stage were actually quite comic and even brilliant in their own awful way, if anybody remembers. The Last King of Scotland shows none of this, aside from the tossed-off comment during a press-conference that Queen Elizabeth should really consider sleeping with him. Amin actually gathered a bunch of whites for an ornate ceremony in which they were made to bow down to him: but such a scene would have been unacceptable for viewers in our “post-racial”, Obama atmosphere. If a film considered all the elements that went into making Amin, that would be a film worth seeing. Of course in such a film, whites would have to view their own complicity.

US Vice-President Dick Cheney has raised the possibility of military action to stop Iran acquiring nuclear weapons.

He has endorsed Republican senator John McCain’s proposition that the only thing worse than a military confrontation with Iran would be a nuclear-armed Iran.

In an exclusive interview with The Weekend Australian, Mr Cheney said: “I would guess that John McCain and I are pretty close to agreement.”

The visiting Vice-President said that he had no doubt Iran was striving to enrich uranium to the point where they could make nuclear weapons.

He accused Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of espousing an “apocalyptic philosophy” and making “threatening noises about Israel and the US and others”.
au herald sun

Well Dick, if there’s one thing you know all about, it’s ‘apocalyptic philosophy.’

Israel’s ‘right to exist’…what a ridiculous non-issue: like Hamas or Syria have anything to say about it…as if Israel has not rebuffed numerous overtures from the Arabs since 1948…as if Israel is interested in peace. I finally figured it out: virtually everyone who lived in Israel and suffered any moral pangs about its aggression has LEFT. Duh. All that remains is religious wing-nuts and Zionists so rabid they even have Ben-Gurion rolling in his grave…

The coup that ousted Haitian President Jean Bertrand Aristide on February 29, 2004 led very predictably to the worst human rights disaster in the Western Hemisphere over the following two years.[1] It is worth reviewing how the world’s most famous human rights group, Amnesty International, responded.

Aristide was twice elected President (in 1990 and in 2000). His first government was overthrown in a coup in 1991. The outcome of the 1991 coup was horrific and well documented. Thousands were murdered; tens of thousands were raped and tortured; hundreds of thousands were driven into hiding. The victims were overwhelmingly supporters of Aristide and his Lavalas movement. The 1991 and 2004 coups were both the work of the US government, Haiti’s elite and their armed servants. Canada and France collaborated extensively with the planning and execution of the second coup.[2]

By mid April of 2004, three organizations had sent delegations to Haiti to investigate the aftermath of the coup: the Quixote Center based in Maryland, the National Lawyers Guild (NLG) and the Ecumenical Program on Central America and the Caribbean (EPICA). All drew very similar conclusions.[3]

They uncovered a massive terror campaign waged by the de facto government in collaboration with the UN forces in Haiti (later to be known as MINUSTAH) against Lavalas partisans. They reported that some Haitian human rights groups in particular the National Coalition for Haitian Rights (NCHR) were unreliable due to their hostility towards Lavalas. The NLG and Quixote Center delegations observed “wanted” posters in NCHR offices which identified Aristide and other Lavalas officials as criminals. Both delegations reported that NCHR refused to carry out investigations in Lavalas strongholds such as Cite Soleil. Even at this early stage the NLG uncovered evidence in the state morgue of the huge death toll that was being exacted on Lavalas supporters. The state morgue reported that 1000 bodies had been disposed of a month after the coup – most obvious victims of violence. The morgue typically disposed of only 100 bodies a month.

The EPICA delegation suggested that people contact Amnesty to alert them of the unreliability of NCHR. It was a good suggestion because Pierre Esperance, NCHR’s director, had boasted in 2002 that

“I am a primary source of information for international human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Most recently, I was invited to address the US State Department in a roundtable forum to discuss the human rights situation in Haiti.”[4]

His statement does not seem to have been much of an exaggeration. During the first four months after the coup Amnesty failed to call attention to the evidence that a massive assault on Lavalas was well underway. Amnesty’s statements suggested equivalence between armed Lavalas partisans and their opponents.
upsidedownworld.org

A group with “links to al Qaeda” means our friends the Pakistanis, who created both al Qaeda and the Taliban for us back in the day. This multi-pronged ‘approach’ to the ‘Iran Problem’ is heading straight to war. Some day soon now we’ll awaken to the news from Bush that he had ‘no choice’: some kind of Gulf of Tonkin crap, I’ll bet. Maybe even in the Persian Gulf.

Police, insurgents clash after Iran bomb

Police and insurgents clashed after a bombing in southeastern Iran late Friday near the site where an explosion killed 11 members of the elite Revolutionary Guards this week, Iranian news agencies reported. “Minutes ago, the sound of a bomb explosion was heard in one of Zahedan’s streets,” the state-run news agency IRNA said, without giving more details. The semiofficial Fars news agency said clashes broke out between Iranian police and armed insurgents after the explosion.

Fars quoted the governor of Zahedan, Hasan Ali Nouri, as saying the blast was a “sound bomb explosion”_ a device that creates a loud boom but that usually does not cause casualties.

Nouri said there was gunfire heard but that it was late at night and that police had cordoned off the area.

On Wednesday, a car bomb blew up a bus carrying Revolutionary Guards, killing 11, in Zahedan, capital of Sistan-Baluchestan province, which sits on the border with Pakistan.

A Sunni Muslim militant group called Jundallah, or God’s Brigade, which has been blamed for past attacks on Iranian troops, has claimed responsibility for the Wednesday bombing.

Iran has accused the United States of backing militants to destabilize the country. Tensions between Tehran and Washington are growing over allegations of Iranian involvement in attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq, and over Iran’s nuclear activities.

Fars said the Friday explosion was at a school in Zahedan.

“The insurgents began shooting at people after the explosion. Clashes are continuing between police and the armed insurgents. Police have cordoned off the area,” the Fars agency said.

IRNA quoted an unnamed “responsible official” late Friday as saying that one of those arrested on charges of involvement in Wednesday’s bombing, identified as Nasrollah Shanbe Zehi, has confessed that the attacks were part of alleged U.S. plans to provoke ethnic and religious violence in Iran.

The confessions by Zehi helped police detain an unspecified number of Jundallah members and confiscate weapons and documents from the group in a raid Thursday in Zahedan, IRNA also said.

A majority of Iran’s population are Shiite Muslims but minority Sunnis live in southeastern Iran.

Friday’s blast came just hours after the funeral of the 11 Revolutionary Guardsmen in the capital.

Iran’s state-run television showed footage of Zahedan residents marching in the streets with the coffins of the killed Guardsmen. The crowd chanted, “death to hypocrites,” in a reference to the insurgents.

The blasts are a sharp flare-up of violence, but the remote southeast corner of Iran, near Pakistan and Afghanistan, has long been plagued by lawlessness. The area is a key crossing point for opium from Afghanistan and often sees clashes between police and drug gangs.

Jundallah, which is believed by some to have links to al-Qaida, has waged a low-level insurgency in the area and is led by Abdulmalak Rigi, a member of Iran’s ethnic Baluchi minority, a community that is Sunni Muslim and also can be found in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Rigi has said his group is fighting for the rights of impoverished Sunnis under Iran’s Shiite government.

Fars said that Rigi appeared on a station run by an opposition group known as the People’s Mujahedeen, which is based in Iraq, minutes before Friday’s explosion. The People’s Mujahedeen has long sought to overthrow the Iranian government by force.

Iranian officials have often raised concerns that Washington could incite members of Iran’s many ethnic and religious minorities against the Shiite-led government in Tehran.

Iran has faced several ethnic and religious insurgencies that have carried out occasionally deadly attacks in recent years Ñ though none have amounted to a serious threat to the government.

In December, Jundallah claimed responsibility for kidnapping seven Iranian soldiers in the Zahedan region, threatening to kill them unless group members were freed from Iranian prisons. The seven were released a month later, apparently after negotiations through tribal mediators.

In March 2006, gunmen dressed as security forces killed 21 people on a highway outside Zahedan in an attack authorities blamed on “rebels,” though Jundallah was never specifically named.
news.yahoo.com

It’s appropriate that Barak Obama announced his presidential candidacy in the shadow of Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln and Obama, 150 years apart, typify the delusional myths of which the U.S. is so fond.

What do schooldchildren learn about Lincoln? Why, he freed the slaves! What are they taught was the purpose of the American Civil War? Why, to end slavery, of course.

They are not taught that slavery was already done as a viable economic strategy. The Brits had already figured that out, and banned the trade in 1838. They are not taught that, despite or perhaps because of this fact, Lincoln was not much concerned with slavery at all, and that he, like most of his peers, considered blacks a hopelessly inferior and genetically servile species of human.

Schoolchildren are taught that Lincoln was a simple self-taught frontier lawyer. Well, kids, Abraham Lincoln was a prototype of the corporate shark, a lawyer for the railroads, in whose interests (among others) that catastrophic, ghastly, and yes, illegal war was conceived and fought. The issue was state sovereignty, and the Union victory made the country safe for eminent domain and other such, and created a top-heavy federal government wedded till death do us part to corporate interests.

Obama is actually being termed the ‘post-racial’ candidate. Post-racial. Yup folks, we have risen above all that race business; it’s a nasty thing of the past we don’t need to think about anymore. A black presidentƒwell, not really black: that’s the beauty of him. He’s not one of those scary black men: clean, not like Jesse or Al–his father is African, and thus did not transmit that pesky African-American anger to his kid, that particularly peculiarly American-engendered rage. Liberals are so so pleased to be able to support him without…well, fear. They are pleased as preening pussy-cats with a mouse’s tail hanging out of their mouths. ‘We’ are ‘ready’ for a black president, the pundits declare. He’s an ‘outsider’, a refreshing change from the status quo. He’s going to change how things are done.

Yeah right. Obama is Joe Lieberman’s protege, for heaven’s sake! Think AIPAC. Wake up, people. There is nothing refreshing or new about Obama. And even if there actually were, there’s mischief afoot. As ‘post-racial’ or ‘non-racial’ or ‘beyond racial’ as Obama might be, this great nation is absolutely not ‘past all that’, and the ones who ought to know know this very well. He’s unelectable. So is Hilary Clinton. So what’s the scam? Why has no high-profile Republican declared yet? Will our next prez be Jeb Bush? That’s my guess.

Lincoln, ‘the great uniter’ sent 600,000 men to their grisly deaths. If the issue were slaves, why did he wait three years before declaring them free? Americans’ capacity for self-delusion on the issue of race is boundless. Obama’s candidacy is just the latest permutation.

Obama Ties ’08 Bid to Lincoln’s Legacy

“The life of a tall, gangly, self-made Springfield lawyer tells us that a different future is possible,” Obama said. “He tells us that there is power in words. He tells us that there is power in conviction. That beneath all the differences of race and region, faith and station, we are one people. He tells us that there is power in hope.”

Blah blah blah. I guess it’s fitting, the newest corporate shill standing in the shadow of an old one.

Miami – The top US general on Thursday defended the leadership of defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, saying it is inspired by God.

“He leads in a way that the good Lord tells him is best for our country,” said marine General Peter Pace, chair of the joint chiefs of staff.

Rumsfeld is “a man whose patriotism focus, energy, drive, is exceeded by no one else I know … quite simply, he works harder than anybody else in our building”, Pace said at a ceremony in Miami.

Rumsfeld has faced a storm of criticism and calls for his resignation, largely over his handling of the Iraq war.

But he got a strong show of support from the military establishment at Thursday’s ceremony, where navy Admiral James Stavridis took over Southcom’s command from General Bantz Craddock.

“He comes to work every day with a single-minded focus to make this country safe,” said Stavridis, who was a senior aide to Rumsfeld before taking on the Southcom job.

news24.com

Poet Robert Bly and Michael Ventura on Iraq, fathers who eat their children, and other areas of vital interest.

A recent study published in the Lancet claims that over 650,000 “excess” deaths have occurred in Iraq since the invasion in March, 2003. STATS look at how scientists figure these numbers out, how their methods compare to other counts, and whether criticism of the numbers is justified. A companion article examines the media coverage.

…In a careful study published in the Lancet, a prestigious British journal for medicine, professors from Johns Hopkins University and the School of Medicine at Al Mustansirlya Univesity in Baghdad found through a random sampling of Iraqi households that over 650,000 deaths have occurred in Iraq since the invasion in 2003, that would not have occurred had there not been war.

While the Lancet numbers are shocking, the study’s methodology is not. The scientific community is in agreement over the statistical methods used to collect the data and the validity of the conclusions drawn by the researchers conducting the study.  When the prequel to this study appeared two years ago by the same authors (at that time, 100,000 excess deaths were reported), the Chronicle of Higher Education published a long article explaining the support within the scientific community for the methods used.
President Bush, however, says he does “not consider it a credible report” and the media refer to the study as “controversial.” And even as the Associated Press reported mixed reviews, all the scientists quoted in its piece on the “controversy” were solidly behind the methods used. Indeed, the Washington Post points out that this and the earlier study are the “only ones to estimate mortality in Iraq using scientific methods.”

stats.org

cnionline.org 

BBC poll: World against torture, Israel in favor

Who’s zoomin’ who? Like the good ole USA avec or sans ‘the Jews’ condemns torture and stands blameless in Iraq. Jewish people should look at ominous ’polls’ like this and see how they have been used since time immemorial by the European elites as the fall guys and stop their reflexive support for Israeli/US murderous stupidity in Palestine.

A day after George Bush conceded for the first time that America may have reached the equivalent of a Tet offensive in Iraq, the Pentagon yesterday admitted defeat in its strategy of securing Baghdad. The admission from President Bush that the US may have arrived at a turning point in this war – the Tet offensive led to a massive loss of confidence in the American presence in Vietnam – comes during one of the deadliest months for US forces since the invasion.

Yesterday the number of US troops killed since October 1 rose to 73, deepening the sense that America is trapped in an unwinnable situation and further damaging Republican chances in midterm elections that are less than three weeks away.

In Baghdad a surge in sectarian killings has forced the Pentagon to review its entire security plan for the capital, Major General William Caldwell, a US military spokesman, said yesterday.

“The violence is, indeed, disheartening,” he told reporters. The US has poured 12,000 additional US and Iraqi troops into Baghdad since August only to see a 22% increase in attacks since the beginning of Ramadan.

guardian.co.uk

 The Shiite militia run by the anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr seized control of a southern Iraqi city on Friday in one of the boldest acts of defiance yet by the country’s powerful, unofficial armies, witnesses and police said.Mahdi Army fighters stormed three main police stations Friday morning, residents said, planting explosives that flattened the buildings in Amarah, a city just 30 miles from the Iranian border that was under British command until August, when it was returned to Iraqi government control.

washingtonpost.com