Cosmos Left

Miami's thug cops shoot Nikki Hartman in back with rubber bullet (www.tacitconsent.com)

November 24, 2003--These lyrics from Pink Floyd's "Run Like Hell" (The Wall, 1979) are taking on an ominous relevance with each passing day. As Operation Iron Hammer drops 2,000-pound bombs on Iraqi villages, last week Miami police viciously attacked a peaceful anti-globalization protest with rubber bullets, tear gas, pepper spray and Taser stunners. Eight legal observers from the National Lawyers Guild were arrested; four were beaten. More than 50 protesters, including Nikki Hartman in the above photo, were arrested for disobeying police orders to disperse and resisting arrest.

But photos like the one above prove that the protesters were dispersing when the cops opened fire and shot Nikki in the back. The armed capitalist state apparatus lies as much at the local level as it does nationally and internationally.

Justin Lipson, an Indymedia Video activist, was pepper sprayed while filming the protest and attacked when he refused to stop shooting. Lipson is being held in the Dade County jail on $10,000 bail and faces felony counts of resisting arrest and assaulting an officer.

On November 16, New York City cops violently attacked a Brooklyn fundraising event for Anarchist People of Color in the offices of Critical Resistance, a national grassroots organization that educates people about prisons and police brutality. About 100 people were assaulted by nightsticks and sprayed with chemical agents. Eight were arrested, and injuries included bruised ribs, blows to the head and a spinal injury. The gathering was peaceful; the assault unprovoked.

These latest manifestations of cop violence and police state tactics in Miami and Brooklyn are only a glimpse of what the US rulers have in store for the US working class. Increasingly, the violence being inflicted on the American people resembles the horrifying violence Washington is unleashing on Iraqis.  Nothing captures the synchronicity of this repression than the fact that the $8.5 million spent on the 2,500 Miami-area police came out of the $87 billion Congress just passed to fund the occupation of Iraq!

And if that isn't enough for you, just as the Pentagon had friendly "embedded" journalists accompany US forces in Iraq to ensure biased, pro-war coverage, Miami Police John Timoney arranged for reporters to be embedded with his posse of cops and paramilitary vigilantes. In other words, military style methods were used to manipulate press coverage of a legal demonstration on US soil. For more on this, check out Jeremy Scahill's Nov. 24 Counterpunch article, "The Miami Model--Paramilitaries, Embedded Journalists and Illegal Protests: Think This is Iraq? It's Miami"

In a recent interview with Cigar Aficionado magazine, General Tommy Franks, former commander of the US invasion of Iraq, predicted that the US Constitution will not survive another successful terrorist attack on this country. In the event of a devastating biological, nuclear or chemical attack, Franks declared, "the Western world, the free world, loses what it cherishes most, and that is freedom and liberty we've seen for a couple of hundred years in this grand experiment that we call democracy."

Franks elaborated, "It means the potential of a weapon of mass destruction and a terrorist, massive casualty-producing event somewhere in the Western world--it may be in the United States of America--that causes our population to question our own Constitution and to begin to militarize our country in order to avoid a repeat of another mass, casualty-producing event. Which in fact, then begins to unravel the fabric of our Constitution. Two steps, very, very important."

In other words, after the coming terrorist attack which the US government will either organize or allow to happen, kiss the Constitution, Bill of Rights, and bourgeois democracy good bye.

The image from Pink Floyd's "The Wall" that accompanies the above-quoted lyric, "And the hammers batter down the door," consists of red and black hammers marching in a threatening, goose step manner. The name that the warmaniacs in the Pentagon chose for the current military campaign of terror from the skies over Iraq--Operation Iron Hammer--was also the name used by the Nazis for an aborted plan to bomb Soviet power plants near Moscow and Gorky in 1943.

The US working class will organize a fightback against the ruling rich and the war criminals who serve them. We will discover our own proletarian values, our own self worth, and our own dignity. We will not run like hell, and we will not remain on our knees forever. The day of reckoning is coming for Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Powell, Rice, Kristol, O'Reilly, Hannity, Coulter, Friedman, and all the other ruling class scum determined to drag us into hell defending their empire.

MORE ON THE SYNCHRONICITY OF REPRESSION

Israel building apartheid wall in West Bank--Al Jazeera.net

November 2003--Sunday, November 9, 2003, was an international day of protest against the apartheid wall Israel is building on Palestinian land in the Occupied Territory of the West Bank. The illegal wall, consisting of cement, barbed wire, fences, and trenches, cuts so deep into Palestinian territory that it will leave half of the West Bank on Israel's side of the wall. The protests were held in 21 countries, including Argentina, Bangladesh, South Africa and the United States, on the 13th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall.

Al-Jazeera reports that the wall will cause the villages of Rumaneh, Tabeh and Yaneen to be put into a canton and separated from the West Bank and Israel by two separate walls. The village of Tulkarem will also be surrounded by walls with additional barriers on its western side near the Green Line while surrounded by trenches on the West Bank side.

Israel claims the wall's purpose is to protect Israeli settlers from Palestinian suicide bombers, but John Dugard, the UN's special reporter for human rights in the occupied territories, disputes this pretext by noting that Israeli troops themselves had concluded that most resistance fighters slip through checkpoints.

Substantiating a UN human rights report that said the wall was an illegal annexation of Palestinian territory, Dugard stated, "The evidence strongly suggests that Israel is determined to create facts on the ground amounting to de facto annexation. Annexation of this kind, known as conquest in international law, is prohibited by the Charter of the United Nations and the Fourth Geneva Convention."

The report says that the fence will have "severe humanitarian consequences" for nearly 700,000 Palestinians. Thousands will have to apply for military permits from Israel for the privilege of living in their own homes. Another 400,000 will be cut off from their farms, jobs and schools.

The report predicts that "[T]he damage caused by the destruction of land and property for the wall's construction is irreversible." Palestinians will be forced to go through checkpoints to reach their farms, schools and hospitals, while Zionist settlers will be able to freely cross in and out of Israel.

It is one of the tragic ironies of modern history that Israeli Zionists are hemming Palestinians into Warsaw-type ghettoes, much as the Nazis did to Polish Jews seven decades ago.

Bring the Troops Home Now! Washington, DC, Oct. 25, 2003

WE'RE BACK.

On October 25, about 100,000 antiwar demonstrators--many of them families of US soldiers in Iraq--marched in Washington, DC, and San Francisco demanding an end to Washington's occupation of Iraq and the impeachment of George Bush. Demonstrations also were held in Los Angeles, Seattle, London, Barcelona, and other cities throughout the world protesting US and Israeli military aggression.

The demented Caesar in the White House was already having a rough week--his stupid general Boykin made chauvinistic remarks against Muslims that Christ is better than Allah; that pesky Sept. 11 commission threatened to subpoena documents that would reveal what BUSH KNEW before the attacks occurred; that "leaked" Rumsfeld memo warned of a long hard slog in Iraq, contradicting Bush's recent put on a happy face campaign regarding Iraq, which continues to blow up in Bush's face; the FBI keeps asking questions about who outed a CIA agent; the mainstream media keeps talking about how Bush's grandfather bankrolled the Nazis, and now the antiwar movement is militantly marching past the White House calling for Bush's political hide. The demonstrations were smaller than last year's, but they were significant nevertheless, and they will grow as the horrors unleashed by Bush's war crimes in Iraq unfold every day.

In recent days, the Iraqi resistance has answered Bush's exhortation to "bring them on" with a vengeance. A US Black Hawk helicopter was shot down near a base in central Iraq, shortly after Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz visited there. The chief of police in the southern town of Amarah was assassinated. US bases in Samara, Baquba, and Balad were shelled by guerrilla fire. In Baghdad, three police stations and the headquarters of the International Red Cross were destroyed by suicide car bombs, and a multiple rocket attack on the Rasheed Hotel almost killed Wolfowitz, one of the principal architects of Bush's criminal invasion of Iraq.

The shaken look on Wolfowitz's face?

Priceless.

Those voices in the Arab media blaming Washington for the latest suicide bombings in Baghdad are absolutely correct. The truth is that Bush, Wolfowitz and the rest of their gang are responsible for ALL of the violence and destruction occurring in Iraq today.

And Bush has no intention of stopping his murderous course.

"The more successful we are on the ground, the more these killers will react."

In other words, the blood flowing in Iraq today is proof that Bush's policy is working. This shithead must take lessons in Orwellian doublespeak from Bill O'Reilly.

"We're constantly looking at the enemy and adjusting. Iraq is dangerous, and it's dangerous because terrorists want us to leave, and we're not leaving."

Iraq is dangerous because you invaded it with 150,000 troops and unleashed the savage firepower of the most powerful military machine in history AGAINST A DEFENSELESS PEOPLE.

Iraqis want Bush's army to leave because they object to a foreign occupying force on their soil.

"The more free the Iraqis become, the more electricity is available, the more jobs are available, the more kids are going to school, the more desperate these killers become, because they can't stand the thought of a free society," Bush said from the White House on October 27.

Iraqis are so free that Bush tells them when they can have an election and what they are not permitted to elect (a Shiite Islamic state). The country's electricity grids have been pulverized twice in 12 years by US bombs. Iraq's unemployment rate is almost 70%. Bush is dismantling Iraq's food distribution system that gave free rations of flour, rice and cooking oil to every citizen. Iraq's schools are a shambles.

The only killers who are desperate are the war criminals in the White House and Pentagon, who can't stand the thought of a free and sovereign people not under the thumb of US imperialism.

"The decision to send more troops to Iraq is a decision by John Abizaid. General Abizaid makes the decision as to whether or not he needs more troops."--George Bush, October 28, 2003

No, you're the commander in chief, moron. YOU decide if US troops are sent to Iraq. This is not the first time Bush has uttered this falsehood, and is indicative of the bankruptcy of the bourgeois media that this lie has never been challenged. Article 2, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution is quite clear: "The President shall be commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States."

Americans and Iraqis are dying every day because of conscious decisions made by the White House, yet the cowardly punk occupying it refuses to accept responsibility for these decisions. It's the CIA's fault that he got bad intelligence, it's Abizaid's decision to send more troops, it was the sailors of the USS Lincoln who wanted that "Mission Accomplished" banner in full view.

The song remains the same. The buck stops with George Bush. And the bell of history will toll for him.

It's pathetic listening to right-wing military hacks on cable television whining about the lack of "human intelligence" on the ground in Iraq. While it's hard to disagree with this formulation, it shows how deluded the war supporters truly are. When you invade a nation, its people will fight to kick you out. This is a law of history that all the intelligence in the world won't alter.

Bush is showing every indication that he intends to escalate his war of terror to beat the Iraqi people into submission. Unwittingly, on October 18 he gave a clue as to what he has in store for the Iraqi people when he invoked the Philippines as an example of what Washington has in mind when it liberates a nation with democracy.

The United States was "proud of its part in the great story of the Filipino people." Bush claimed, with a straight face, that Washington "had liberated the Philippines from colonial rule" when it invaded in 1898. "Some say the culture of the Middle East will not sustain the in stitutions of democracy. The same doubts were once expressed about the culture of Asia. These doubts were proven wrong nearly six decades ago, when the Republic of the Philippines became the first democratic nation in Asia."

You better duck when this idiot starts giving history lessons--particularly concerning Asia. Remember this is the same genius who said that the US and Japan had enjoyed harmonious relations for centuries--leaving out that little tidbit of history called World War II.

The United States was "proud of its part in the great story of the Filipino people." Bush claimed, with a straight face, that Washington "had liberated the Philippines from colonial rule" when it invaded in 1898. "Some say the culture of the Middle East will not sustain the in stitutions of democracy. The same doubts were once expressed about the culture of Asia. These doubts were proven wrong nearly six decades ago, when the Republic of the Philippines became the first democratic nation in Asia."

You better duck when Bush starts giving history lessons--particularly concerning Asia. Remember this is the same genius who said that the US and Japan had enjoyed harmonious relations for centuries--leaving out that little tidbit of history called World War II.

The US did not "liberate" Philippines from colonial rule. Washington declared war against Spain to steal this colonial prize from Madrid by force, along with Guam, Puerto Rico and Cuba. The 1898 Spanish-American war heralded the emergence of the US as a major imperialist nation on the world stage. Publishing magnates like William Randolph Hearst used their newspapers to whip up a war fever and jingoistic hysteria against Spain, just as Rupert Murdoch and Bill O'Reilly are doing today for George Bush.

Washington purchased Guam, Puerto  Rico and the Philippines for $20 million, despite the fact that a Filipino independence movement had announced the country's independence. Washington's reply was to fo rmally annex the Philippines as a colony.  When Filipino national liberation forces resisted, the US waged a brutal imperialist war that slaughtered 200,000 Filipino civilians.

Is this what you're so proud of, Bush?

Since then the Philippines has been a semi-colony of the US, with the exception of World War II, when Japan controlled the country. After the war, Washington imposed a series of puppet regimes and dictators like Ferdinand Marcos who ensured that the landowning elite and US capitalists enriched themselves at the expense of the Filipino masses languishing in poverty and backwardness.

When the Filipinos rose up in protest against Marcos, Washington urged the dictator to impose martial law, which he did with a brutal vengeance.

Such is US imperialism's respect for democracy.

Bush is listening to right-wing think tankers like Tom Donnelly and Gary Schmitt, who as reported by the Barry Grey of the  World Socialist Web Site, are advising Bush that to win in Iraq coalition forces "would have to swamp a given area in order to root out insurgents and their supporting infrastructure."

As Grey correctly states, this smacks of a "full-scale reversion to the mass terror tactics that were employed in Vietnam [and the Philippines!-CL] and became synonymous with American imperialist barbarism: the Phoenix Program's campaign of assassination, the herding of civilians into Strategic Hamlets (a euphemism for concentration camps), and similar methods. Such is the inevitable trajectory of US policy in Iraq and, if not prevented by an independent movement of the American and international working class, other countries yet to be 'liberated.' "

US Out of Iraq!

End All Aid to Israel!

US Out of Guantanamo Bay!

Indict Bush for War Crimes!

La Paz, Oct. 17, 2003

October 2003--Tin miners, historically in the vanguard of the Bolivian labor movement, converged on Bolivia's capital, La Paz, from all over the country. Jorge Martin of marxist.com reports that on October 13, miners from Huanuni, the world's largest tin mine, voted to occupy the mines belonging to president Sanchez de Lozada. On October 15, a column of 2,500 miners from Huanuni were met by the army in the town of Patacamaya. The soldiers started shooting at the miners' trucks and tear-gassed them. Then the soldiers jumped on the trucks and looted the miners belongings. As the miners fled, a journalist reporting all this was shot in the back. The miners fought back with sticks of dynamite, forcing the army to retreat a few meters. Then a plane showed up and started machine-gunning workers from the sky. Three miners were killed and many more were wounded.

When the miners arrived in La Paz for the huge October 17 mobilization, they were carrying sticks of dynamite. Tin workers and coca farmers are forming self defense committees and organizing roadblocks across the country. In El Alto, the center of the uprising, the Federation of Neighborhood Juntas and the Regional Workers Committee of El Alto are the true organs of power. All police stations have been destroyed and the workers  have announced that hose police officers who do not side with the people face expulsion from the city.

The Bolivian masses are confident in their organizing strength and celebrating their victory in deposing the puppet de Lozada. However, they are sober and realistic as to what they're up against--the brutal repression of the Bolivian army and the US imperialists behind it.

Miners in La Paz, Oct. 17, 2003

October 18, 2003--Under siege from an insurrectionary uprising by the Bolivian masses, Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada resigned as President of Bolivia yesterday in La Paz. Tens of thousands workers and peasants rejoiced at the news in the streets of the capital.

"Goni has got to go," said one housewife. "Too much blood has been shed, and too many hatreds awakened for him to continue in office."

Indeed, Lozada's army has massacred nearly 100 workers, peasants, students during the past month of nationwide protests against his pro-US, free market policies, particularly a plan to export natural gas to Mexico and the US through Chile.

London, Sept. 27, 2003

September 27, 2003--This weekend saw a renewal of large antiwar protests across the globe. Militant demonstrations occurred in Britain, Italy, Spain, South Korea, Japan, Turkey, Egypt, Lebanon, France, Germany, Ireland, Belgium, Sweden, Greece and Poland.

In London, 100,000 anti-imperialist demonstrators marched to tell Bush and Blair: NO TO US AND ISRAELI OCCUPATIONS OF IRAQ AND PALESTINE!

British Prime Minister Tony Blair is facing a far greater domestic political crisis than his imperialist counterpart in the White House over their criminal aggression against Iraq. The growing calls for Blair's resignation and the firestorm of dissent within the Labour Party have in part been fueled by the suspicious death of whistleblower Dr. David Kelly.

London has tried to divert attention away from its own responsibility for Kelly's death and the disaster in Iraq by positing that the key question is whether it was Kelly or BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan who first uttered the words "sexed up" in describing Britain's falsification of intelligence data. The bottom line is Gilligan accurately reported Kelly's reservations over the weakness of London's case for war--and that Kelly was either murdered by British intelligence or was driven to suicide by the pressure coming from the government.

MARCH 22, 2004 FLASH: US Military Drops All Charges Against Capt. Yee!

In a humiliating defeat for Rumsfeld and the Pentagon, on March 19, 2004, the US military dropped all remaining charges against Capt. James Yee, the former Muslim chaplain at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. After initially charging Yee with espionage for running a spy ring among Muslim prisoners at Guantanamo, the government's phony case against Yee quickly collapsed. When a government investigation cleared him of the espionage charge, Washington, in a sickening display of vindictiveness, tacked on pornography and infidelity charges to the lesser charge of mishandling classified information.

In the March 19 statement, the military said US Army Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the commanding officer at Guantanamo, dismissed the charge of mishandling classified information because of "national security concerns that would arise from the release of the evidence."

What national security concerns? Once again, the government is using the bogey phrase "national security" to cover up the fact that the biggest threat to the security of the American people is the clandestine machinations of the US government itself.

As in the case of Zacharias Moussaoui, another case that has brought great humiliation to the US government, Washington refuses to release its intelligence files BECAUSE TO DO SO would prove that the biggest source of terrorism in the world is the United States government, followed by Israel and Britain.

RELEASE ALL FILES!

THE PEOPLE HAVE A RIGHT TO KNOW!

WE NEED PROTECTION FROM THE CIA AND THE FBI!

September 26-29, 2003--The arrest and imprisonment of Army Captain Youseff Yee, the Muslim chaplain at the Camp Delta, the Guantanamo concentration camp in Cuba, represent an ominous escalation of Bush's tyrannical assault on democratic rights. Yee, facing espionage charges that could bring the death penalty, has been jailed in the same Charleston, South Carolina Naval brig that has housed the two other US citizen "enemy combatants"--Yaser Hamdi, a US-born Saudi who fought with the Taliban in Afghanistan, and Jose Padilla, the US citizen arrested at O'Hare Airport for conspiring to build a "dirty bomb."

The government accuses Lee of possessing "classified documents" such as sketches of Camp Delta and lists of prisoners and their interrogators when he arrived in the US on September 10. Washington claims these materials could threaten US security and the war on terror if they fell into Al-Qaeda's hands.

But the World Socialist Web Site reports that according to an unnamed military official, the case against Yee is weak. This official told Fox News "he was having a difficult time assessing the meaning of the articles said to be in the chaplain's possession when he was arrested."

The government says Yee possessed classified documents without having the required "courier card" in his possession. But this same military official says such mistakes are not uncommon. And as for the charge that Yee illegally possessed a laptop computer with a modem, the official told Fox that most laptops on the market come with dial-up modems.

The government now says another soldier from the camp was arrested two months ago on similar espionage charges: 24-year-old Airman Ahmad al-Halabi, a translator who has been secretly imprisoned at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Unlike Captain Yee, Al-Halabi was charged with spying for a specific country--his native Syria. The 30 charges include alleged attempts to pass on information to Damascus, conducting "unauthorized communications" with prisoners "by furnishing and delivering unauthorized food" such as baklava pastries.

Right on cue, the big business media pimps are already convicting Yee and Al-Halabi as traitorous spies working for Al Qaeda and Syria. The press passes along the script from Washington as if every word was the Absolute Truth.

One thing we should have learned since Sept. 11--believe NOTHING this government and corporate media say about terrorism. They are behind it. They sponsor it. Washington and Tel Aviv, the CIA and Mossad, have been framing Muslims and Arabs from the beginning. This whole thing is a fraud, a setup.
The reality is that in every one of these phony terrorist cases--Padilla, Hamdi, Lackawanna Six, Sami Al-Arian--all of them--the government has nothing on these individuals.

Syria and Al-Halabi deny that the latter was spying for the former. Al-Halabi's family says the government is misinterpreting his visits to the Syrian embassy that he made for the purpose of arranging visits to the country to marry his Syrian-born fiancee and bring her to the US.

What Yee and Halabi are guilty of in the eyes of the US government is being men of conscience who felt sympathy toward the Guantanamo prisoners who have been illegally detained and interrogated for 18 months. No doubt the US was worried that Yee and Halabi might publicly reveal the brutal treatment of the 660 plus prisoners.

The impression drummed into the heads of most Americans by the corporate media is that the Camp Delta detainees are all Al-Qaeda members who are either directly connected to 911 or know something about it or future terrorist operations.

The truth is that the vast majority of Guantanamo prisoners were foot soldiers for the Taliban in the civil war with the Northern Alliance, at a time when Bush was sending aid to the Taliban in an effort to negotiate the construction of a gas pipeline in Afghanistan. You want Al-Qaeda? Look in the files of the CIA and NSA, that is if they haven't been destroyed.

Many of the Camp Delta detainees are children. Yee and al-Halabi were in all likelihood disturbed over the the inhumane and draconian conditions these children were suffering at the hands of camp authorities: confined to small cells like animals, subjected to physical and psychological abuse and psychological stress methods defined as torture by international law, and isolated from the outside world. These prisoners have been charged with no crimes, denied access to lawyers, and have been presented with no evidence against them. Psychological stress techniques defined by international law as torture have been used daily against them.

There have also been credible reports recently that executions of Guantanamo prisoners are being planned; that Bush and Rumsfeld aim to turn Camp Delta into a death camp.

Yee and Al-Halabi were either trying to help the beleaguered prisoners or the government was worried they might say something publicly about the inhuman treatment Camp Delta prisoners are receiving.

Perhaps US authorities were concerned that Yee and Al-Halabi might corroborate an October 8 report out of Australia by the Associated Press that an Australian lawyer, Richard Bourke, who has been representing dozens of Guantanamo Bay prisoners for over two years, charged that "American military officials were using old-fashioned torture techniques to force confessions out of prisoners."

Bourke told ABC radio that his accusations were based on reports leaked by US military personnel and from several prisoner descriptions that have been released.

"One of the detainees had described being taken out and tied to a post and having rubber bullets fired at them. They were being made to kneel cruciform in the sun until they collapsed."

The US ruling class is so deluded they think they can commit this barbarism forever and no one will resist or protest. They are being proven wrong.

The detention and prosecution of Yee and Al-Halabi signal an acceleration of the witchhunt and hysteria that's been whipped up against Muslims since September 11, 2001.

The frameup may already be unraveling. CNN's Barbara Starr reported on September 26, 2003, that the US Air Force had been scrutinizing Al-Halabi while he was stationed in California, before he was sent to Camp Delta at Guantanamo, Cuba.

According to Starr, Special Agent Lance Wega of the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, in an affidavit that sought a search warrant, said the investigation of Al-Halabi was "initiated based on reports of suspicious activity while he was stationed at Travis AFB and also while deployed to Kuwait and Guantanamo Bay (GTMO) Naval Base, Cuba."

The affidavit shows that investigators searched Al-Halabi's belongings at Guantanamo and supposedly discovered "several originals and copies of mail belonging to suspected al Qaeda and Taliban detainees."

Al-Halabi is also accused of not reporting unauthorized communications between US soldiers and Camp Delta's "enemy combatants," a term concocted by Bush and not recognized by the Geneva Convention or any other manifestation of international law. The government also alleges that Al-Halabi sent emails to people in Syria giving details of the base's flight schedules, and was in possession of 186 "sensitive, classified Defense documents related to Camp Delta detainees."

Al-Halabi's military lawyer denies these charges. "Airman al-Halabi is not a spy and he is not a terrorist. We asked whom the enemy is, and we haven't been able to get an answer."

And they won't get an answer, because they're living in the Kafkaesque, Alice in Wonderland world of George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld.

The government's case is all rubbish. The biggest crime committed by Al-Halabi in Washington's eyes can be found in another portion of this affidavit: "al  Halabi made statements criticizing United States policy with regard to the detainees and U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. He has also expressed sympathy for and has had unauthorized contact with the detainees, including providing unauthorized items of comfort to the detainees."

Like those baklava pastries.

This proves that Washington's allegations against Captain Yee and Airman Al-Halabi are aimed at the First Amendment rights of soldiers and all US citizens revolted by the barbaric conditions at Camp Delta. The Bush gang are worried that the democratic sentiments of the US working class will be outraged as the truth about the illegality and criminality of Camp Delta are exposed.

There's something else that appears to be at work in these phony espionage charges against Yee and Al-Halabi. The fact that Syria is being targeted as "the enemy" in these allegations suggest that Rumsfeld and Bush's "neocons" are directly involved in this frameup. The Defense Secretary and others in the administration have accused Syria of harboring Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and providing many of the foreign fighters flocking to Iraq to fight the US occupation.

Further confirmation of this theory is the fact that New York Democratic Senator Charles Schummer has his filthy hands all over this sordid tale. Schummer, a rabid  Zionist, has taken credit for Yee's arrest and urged an expansion of the investigation to include the American Muslim Armed Forces and Veterans Affairs Council and the Graduate School for Islamic Studies, the two groups that train and certify Muslim military chaplains.

As WSWS writer Mike Read aptly put it in his Sept. 26 article entitled, "The US military detains another of its Guantanamo Bay soldiers":

"Schummer's role highlights the bipartisan character of what appears to be a witchhunt against those of Muslim backgrounds in the US armed forces as well as a determined effort to defend the Bush administration's flagrant abuse of fundamental democratic rights at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere."

The prisoners at Camp Delta had nothing to do with September 11. They have been illegally detained for almost two years in violation of the Geneva Convention and international law. No charges and no evidence have been brought against them, and they have been denied defense counsel. They've been kept in tiny cells, isolated from the outside world, and subjected to psychological stress methods defined as torture under international law. Bush is getting away with this travesty because the corporate media obediently parrots the government's lie that the prisoners are September 11 terrorists.

We should demand that these political prisoners are released and this death camp be shut down immediately. Further, the very existence of a US naval base on Cuban soil is an ongoing violation of Cuban sovereignty and international law. Most Americans don't know that Washington granted itself permanent custody of Guantanamo when Cuba became its colony after winning her from Spain in the 1898 Spanish-American War.

The imperialist victor told the captured colony that Guantanamo belonged to the US until the end of time. Washington even legalized this theft in the form of the 1903 Platt Amendment, whose Article VII reads:

"To enable the United States to maintain the independence of Cuba, and to protect the people thereof, as well as for its own defense, the Government of Cuba will sell or lease to the United States lands necessary for coaling or naval stations, at certain specified points, to be agreed upon with the President of the United States."

Just digest the imperialist arrogance contained in the above sentence. "To enable the United States to maintain the independence of Cuba . . . the Government of Cuba will sell or lease to the United States lands necessary for coaling or naval stations . . ."

Ever since 1903, Washington has gratuitously sent Cuba a rent check for this tidy arrangement. However, since the Cuban Revolution, Havana has refused to cash these checks and thereby acquiesce in imperialism's ongoing violation of Cuba's national sovereignty.

This attack on Cuba's national sovereignty is now directly linked to Washington's escalating assault on the democratic rights of working people everywhere. Bush justifies the indefinite detention of Camp Delta's 660 prisoners by saying that since they are outside of US jurisdiction and on Cuban soil, they have no constitutional rights. This is a transparently cynical argument that deserves the contempt of the international working class. If the Cuban government attempted to reclaim Guantanamo, the US would immediately respond with a military attack.

Abolish Camp Delta!

US Out of Guantanamo!

Iraqi women grieve for father and 3 sons murdered by Bush's troops in al-Khazraj near Balad

June 14-17, 2003--Contrary to another in a never-ending succession of lies from Bush and his kept media, the war in Iraq is not over. As predicted by COSMOS LEFT and others, a guerrilla war of resistance is unfolding by the day in occupied Iraq. For several weeks, US troops have been hit by a steady stream of hit and run attacks from the shadows; individuals and small groups firing rockets, grenades and small arms. Forty nine US soldiers have died since May 1, bringing the US death toll to 183 and counting.

Ambushes are occurring every day, in Baghdad, Tikrit, Falluja, Al Qaim, Mosul, and Rawah. A US Air Force F-16CG fighter crashed near Baghdad on the same day a US Army Apache helicopter was shot down by hostile fire. Some Iraqi attacks are being coordinated with color-coordinated signal flares. The resistance is so organized and sophisticated that Washington has been forced to counter with a major military offensive dubbed "Operation Peninsula Strike," which has so far killed hundreds of Iraqi and other resistance fighters.

The use of color-coded signal flares suggests a degree of popular support for the growing guerrilla campaign, which appears to be composed of a combination of Fedayeen, irregular soldiers, and Republican Guard forces. This should come as no surprise to any serious observer of the Iraq war.  Baghdad fell as easy as it did because Rumsfeld bribed the city's Republican Guard officers with American tax dollars. It's obvious that many Hussein loyalists realized there was no way they could take on the invaders through conventional fighting and made a conscious decision to melt into the shadows and regroup to fight another day.

It wasn't supposed to turn out this way. Bush and the corporate media announced the war was over, much like a Super Bowl is over. Game over, evil dictator gone, his statue toppled, a people liberated, Lynch rescued, the world saved from Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

But just as Bush and the media lied about weapons of mass destruction, Iraq's connections to Al Qaeda and September 11, and Private Lynch, they lied to the American people--and US soldiers--about the war being over. It's been a long time gone since American forces heard the myth from their military and political "leaders" that they would be greeted with open arms as "liberators" by the Iraqis. Now they are despised and shot at. US soldiers are so terrified they fear children and old women approaching. Morale is plummeting according to a recent NY Times article, "Anxious and weary U.S. soldiers face new mission in Iraq."

Private First Class Matthew O'Dell is quoted as saying, "You call Donald Rumsfeld and tell him our sorry asses are ready to go home...Tell him to come spend a night in our building."

The article reported that some soldiers "said they were haunted by the deaths they caused--and suffered--and have sought counseling. All seemed tired andh ot and increasingly bitter. Morale seems to have plummeted as sharply as the temperature has risen."

The brutal nature of the US occupation ensures that Iraqi resentment of Rumsfeld's troops will continue to escalate. As Washington senses the situation slipping out of control, its only response is harsh repression. US soldiers increasingly look like their thuggish compatriots from the Israeli Defense Forces: opening fire from tanks and helicopters at the homes of Iraqi civilians in Rawah, killing dozens of people while they fled their houses in terror; busting down doors and rampaging through homes, handcuffing and hooding terrified inhabitants.

Indeed, it is no accident that this week an IDF commander lectured US Marines on the finer points of occupying an oppressed people, based on what the Israelis have learned in their barbaric occupation of Palestine. According to Amos Harel's June 19 Haaretz article, the Marines were most interested in what Israelis could teach them about establishing control of crowded urban areas, especially the tactic of moving from house to house by tearing down the walls to avoid walking through exposed narrow alleyways.

Bush's liberation has brought the Iraqis humiliation, social degradation, unemployment, disease, water and electricity shortages, radioactive contamination, environmental destruction. Demonstrations protesting the US occupation are taking place all over Iraq.

Bush, Blair and their underlings stand convicted before the world of lying about Iraq's nonexistent weapons of mass destruction to justify the war. As the lies unravel, the fingerpointing and scapegoating is intensifying among the White House, CIA, Pentagon and 10 Downing Street. While the war criminals in Washington and London continue to feel the heat from the exposure of their lies and from the growing Iraqi resistance, it is a good time for Americans to get back into the streets and let Bush know he will be held accountable for his crimes.

On Monday, June 23rd, ANSWER is sponsoring an anti-war, anti-occupation mobilization at 5pm to protest Bush's appearance at the Sheraton Hotel in New York City. COSMOS LEFT urges everyone who can to be there.

Falluja to Bush: Get the hell out!

April 29-May 1, 2003--In the latest confirmation that Bush's "liberation" of the Iraqi people is a bloody lie, last night US soldiers fired on a crowd of unarmed Iraqis in Falluja, a conservative Sunnis town 30 miles west of Baghdad, killing at least 15, including several children, and wounding 75. The protesters had assembled after Monday evening's prayers in a mosque. Some were students demanding that US troops leave their schools so they could attend classes.

That's right, the government that accused Baghdad of using civilians as human shields has its soldiers using Iraqi schools for military purposes. US officials claim its soldiers were only returning hostile fire from demonstrators, a charge vehemently denied by Iraqis like Kamal Shaker Mahmoud, a local Sunni Muslim cleric. "It was a peaceful demonstration. They did not have any weapons. They (the US troops) opened fire on the protesters because they went out to demonstrate. We are asking the Americans to leave Iraq completely but first we want them to leave residential areas."

The US military sang the same tune after its tanks shelled the Palestine Hotel three weeks ago, claiming that they were defending themselves against hostile fire. It was a lie then and it's a lie in Falluja. According to the Associated Press, an 18 year old wounded in the massacre said the US soldiers "waited until we came very close, and then they started shooting. At least 3 fatalities were children young than 10.

Thus far, no evidence corroborates Washington's version, just as none existed backing up their version of the Palestine Hotel shelling. All of the eyewitness testimony suggests that the soldiers opened fire on an unarmed demonstration. According to Ahmed Karim, a 21 year old blacksmith who suffered a gunshot wound in his thigh, "All of us were trying to run away. They shot at us directly. The soldiers were very scared. There were no warning shots, and I heard no announcements on the loudspeakers. We arrived at the school building and were hoping to talk to the soldiers when they began shooting at us randomly. I think they knew we were unarmed but wanted a show of force to stop us from demonstrating."

US spokesperson Lt. Col. Eric Nantz claimed the troops were being shot at and stones had been thrown at them. Innocent, peace-keeping US soldiers under attack by stone-throwing schoolboys--a surefire sign that the so-called "liberation" is in truth a brutal occupation cut from the same cloth as Israel's ongoing atrocities against the Palestinian people.

Now American soldiers are shooting at boys with rocks, just like their compatriots in the Israeli army, who just killed 12 more Palestinians, including a two year old. Washington and Tel Aviv, the Axis of Evil--Mordor and Isengard; their leaders, Bush and Sharon, Sauron and Saruman, seated in the Dark Tower and Orthanc, the Two Towers of the Axis of Evil, plotting their conquest of the working class with armies of plundering Orcs.

An account by the British newspaper The Independent contradicts Nantz: "Yet there are no bullet holes visible at the front of the school building or tell-tale marks of a firefight. The place is unmarked. . . . Asked to explain the absence of bullet holes, Lt. Col. Nantz said that the Iraqi fire had gone over the soldiers' heads."

On Wednesday US forces added to their war crimes when they fired into a crowd of 1,000 Iraqis who were protesting Monday's shooting. At least three more died and 16 were wounded. Nothing could better illustrate the brutal character of this occupation than the murderous events in Falluja this week.

Falluja should bolster the case of the Belgian lawyer who had already filed war crimes charges against General Franks for the killing of civilians by US forces under his command. Don Bush has already threatened Belgium with retribution for this insult to the head of the capitalist family. France, Germany, Mexico and Canada have already been notified they will be punished for their insubordination to the Boss.

One of Don Bush's underbosses, Colin Powell, openly confirmed the relevance of the Mafia analogy at a recent Senate Foreign Relations appearance, according to Washington Post reporter Al Kamen. While claiming "It's not a matter of punishing anyone," Powell pointed out there will be consequences for France's efforts to stop other nations from joining the coalition. "I've had very candid converstaions with my French colleague [Dominique de Villepin]. . . . And I had a long meeting with the French ambassador on Friday afternoon. And because we are friends, we can speak candidly."

"This isn't -- this isn't personal. It's strictly business."

The gangster character of the Bush administration is openly acknowledged by its clueless supporters. Recently two reactionary co-workers were discussing the firestorm surrounding the Dixie Chicks and their criticism of Bush. After one co-worker pronounced the group's career was over, the other almost gleefully gushed, "Criticizing Bush these days is like criticizing the Mafia."

US troops shooting at unarmed boys who want their schools returned to them. This is George Bush's America. This is how morally bankrupt his capitalist class has become. US soldiers forcing Iraqi men to run naked through the streets of Baghdad. This is a disgrace. Those troops do not represent working class America when they act like trigger-happy brutes who revel in humiliating Iraqi workers. They represent capitalist America--parasites like Bush who never worked a day in their lives and who've spent their entire lives enriching themselves by looting the working class. US forces are even mindlessly parroting the empty rhetoric of their commander in chief. Listen to Lt. Col. Tobin Green of the 3rd Armored Calvary Regiment:

"The evil-doers are deliberately placing at risk the good civilians. These are deliberate actions by the enemy to use the population as cover."

You know, that line's getting old and tired and I'm sick of it. We've been hearing that rubbish since Vietnam and it's still a pathetic attempt to camoflage the fact that when the US invades and occupies a country with massive firepower IT IS WAGING WAR AGAINST AND TARGETING THE CIVILIAN POPULATION.

And where, oh where, are those elusive weapons of mass destruction--you know, the reason Bush gave for invading Iraq. Another false alarm about suspected chemical agents has come and gone and still Bush has found nothing because there is nothing. But the bourgeois press, masters of the Big Lie to a degree that would make Goebbels blush, has reported these false report so many times most Americans probably believe they've been found, as they erroneously think Hussein was linked to September 11.

US leaders are now openly conceding that weapons of mass destruction may not be found after all. Maybe they were smuggled into Syria; maybe they were destroyed just before US forces got there, as the scientist who was probably bribed allegedly stated.

Washington's latest lie to cover the collapse of all the others is the bogus intelligence report that documents found in the rubble of Iraq's intelligence headquarters prove Iraq invited bin Laden to visit Baghdad in 1998. This one's so transparently fraudulent it's laughable. The CIA sweeps the building and finds nothing. Then the CIA invites some of its favorite reports to search for themselves, and , low and behold, the journalists discovered the incriminating documents.

One such journalist, The Daily Telegraph's Inigo Gilmore, claims he noticed some information that had been whited out, but with a razor he determined that the erased words were "bin Laden."

Investigative journalist Wayne Madsen says, however, that if a razor blade were used to scrape away the markings, the indelible ink and toner ink would be obliterated. The standard procedure for redacting a classified document is to only use a black indelible marker to mask classified information."

Madsen noted that the US allowed its pet reporters to explore the intelligence building to find any piece of paper to use in its smear campaign against Iraq, but wouldn't let anyone near the oil ministry building.

"The reason for this is obvious. While the intelligence building can be salted with phony intelligence documents, the Oil Ministry is likely rife with documents showing the links between Saddam Hussein and Dick Cheney's old firm, Halliburton."

Which is in part why Cheney refused to tell the GAO what exactly was talked about in the energy policy meetings in 2001. Enron, Halliburton, Afghanistan pipeline, Dubol power plant in India, the devil's in the details, isn't he, Cheney?

The Falluja atrocities confirm that this is a war of colonial conquest, not liberation of weapons of mass destruction or Al Qaeda. Bush aims to install a protectorate puppet regime that will acquiesce in the plunder of Iraq's wealth by US corporations and a permanent US military occupation.

It is fitting that on the day Bush is expected to announce that the war is over, seven US soldiers were wounded from a grenade attack in Falluja. Napoleon once said that you cannot sit on bayonets. The US imperialists will not be able to subjugate a nation of 25 million forever. The Falluja events will strengthen resistance and support for an armed national liberation struggle in Iraq.

US soldier enforcing liberation in Baghdad

April 12-13, 2003--Yesterday a CNN news ticker flashed a warning from the Pentagon that despite its military success, Washington may still drop the 21,000-pound MOAB on Tikrit as a "psychological weapon" against any enemy holdouts in Hussein's hometown. Now, aside from the fact that a 21,000-pound bomb's destructive capacities go far beyond "psychological," the Pentagon just admitted it is waging state terrorism against the Iraqi people.

Webster's defines "terror" as: "violence (as bomb throwing) committed by groups in order to intimidate a population or government into granting their demands" and "terrorism" as: "the systematic use of terror as a means of coercion."

These bastards are so drunk with power and imperial arrogance they don't even realize how self damning they sound half the time. Rumsfeld jokes about henny penny hysteria and people doing bad things when they're free while Iraqis are dead and laying dying in the tens of thousands, their country raped and pulverized and humiliated before the world's eyes.

As of April 12, despite overwhelming supremacy, the US forces are still meeting strong resistance from the western Syrian border town of Qaim to the heart of Baghdad at the Palestine Hotel. At least 3 Americans died in Baghdad today, two after US tanks fired on a discovered arms cache in a residential area, despite the frantic pleas of Iraqis to remove the arms from the area first. Sniper fire forced US Special Forces to pull back in Mosul. Meanwhile, US forces advance toward Tikrit, Hussein's birthplace, the last major city not under US "control." Iraqis may fight intensely here, though US intelligence indicates widespread abandoning of Iraqi positions taking place.

Organized Iraqi resistance is essentially over. Much of the Republican Guard was pulverized by overwhelming US air power. Still, Iraqi forces fought fiercely from the moment the invaders entered southern Iraq and all the way up to Baghdad. Tens of thousands died heroically defending their nation from foreign invaders. Iraqi soldiers and civilians were defenseless against an aerial and weapons assault unparalleled in history. Lacking an air force and air defense, Iraqis were sitting ducks for the most lethal military technology ever assembled.

Lacking weapons to match their opponents, Iraqis literally threw themselves at imperialist forces. Their resistance in the first week of the war in southern Iraq DID cause some jitters in Washington. The Pentagon adjusted by taking off the gloves and ordering all-out, in discriminate slaughter of all in the way of their conquest. The opposition collapsed, the imperialists rolled into Baghdad and "liberated" the city, but as we're seeing things are not so simple, nor are they over.

On the surface and for the moment, Rumsfeld's strategy of relying on a smaller, agile army, Special Forces, and air power has won the day in the mini-tactical controversy that erupted after the early setbacks. Former generals and present field commanders publicly complained that Rumsfeld's strategy wasn't working, that a much larger force was needed to conquer Iraq.

This is all part of the broader debate within US military circles since their defeat at the hands of the Vietnamese in 1975. Generals shaped by their Vietnam experiences supported the so-called Powell doctrine, which says the US should go to war only when it's ready to use overwhelming military power in achieving specific objectives that has strong public backing.

Rumsfeld's doctrine, adjusting to the changed relationship of forces flowing from the Soviet Union's collapse, foresees the need to fight several wars simultaneously. During the 90s, ruling class ideologues lobbied for a more aggressive, unilateral defense of US capitalism's interests globally. The so-called "neoconservatives" like Perle, Wolfowitz, Cheney, Libby, and the rest of the scum populating imperialist think tanks looked around the world, saw no Soviet Union in the way, and decided to embark on an openly colonialist approach to shoring up the empire.

As the international capitalist system slides into a depression, inter-imperialist conflicts are deepening, and Washington's use of its military supremacy to compensate for its political and economic weakness accelerates by the day. Looking around the world, it's easy to see why Rumsfeld's strategy of multiple wars has convinced the US ruling class that he's their guy. With Afghanistan, Iraq, Philippines, and Colombia already under the gun, and Iran, North Korea, and Syria in the cross-hairs, multiple wars seem the way to go to the captains of Wall Street.

As of April 12 most of the Iraqi fighting is now coming from irregulars, Fedayeen, armed civilians, and remaining Republican Guard units. The US/UK imperialists face a guerrilla-style resistance to their brutal occupation of Iraq. Anger and resentment will only grow--in Iraq and internationally. At this point it is hard to see Bush stabilizing and pacifying the country.

Indeed, an explosive powderkeg looms in the north. Washington's push into the Kurdish region of Iraq threatens to spill over into Turkey. Bush's use of the Kurds for his war against Iraq may give the oppressed Turkish Kurds ideas to revive their own struggle for national liberation against Ankara. Washington has warned Turkey to stay out of it, but with armed Kurds massing at the border, the chance of clashes between two NATO armies cannot be ruled out.

Actually, with continued reports of not enough US forces in the north to keep the Kurds and Turks from tearing each other apart, and not enough troops in Baghdad to police the anarchy, the debate over the Rumsfeld strategy may not be over.

Already in Baghdad, the cheers and flowers are turning to shouts of "Yankee go home!" Here's a sampling of comments from Baghdad's streets today reported by AP:

"Saddam Hussein's greatest crime is that he brought the American army into Iraq."

"The United States breaks into the palaces and then threatens all the people who steal from them. The United States is a liar. They are not going to make anything better."

"I don't like the Americans. But this pistol is for the thieves."

"The army of America is like Genghis Khan. America is not good and Saddam is not good. My people refused Saddam Hussein, and they will refuse the Americans."

"If this continues in Baghdad, we'll kill any American or British soldier. All of us--even the women."

Guerrilla warfare, anyone?

Today, US troops killed a shopkeeper who was defending his store against looters after the latter told the soldiers he was a Saddam Fedayeen. Way to go, guys. What a fitting alliance: imperialist killers and the lumpenproletariat. The whole world is watching.

This affinity between the imperialists and looters is not surprising. Looting is what Bush and his class are all about--looting workers pensions with insider trader fraud like Bush did at Harken (where he got financial help from bin Laden's brother in law and major Al-Qaeda benefactor) and like his buddy Ken Lay did at Enron and his vice president Cheney did at Halliburton, and Global Crossing and Xerox and on and on. Not satisfied with looting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, Bush and the capitalists are in the process of looting Iraq of its oil wealth.

********************

It was nothing short of nauseating to see Bush get all teary-eyed as he praised wounded soldiers at Bethesda and Walter Reed hospitals for their capacity to sacrifice themselves for a greater cause. This from a spoiled blue blood who went AWOL from the Texas Air Guard in 1972 and used Daddy's influence to get away with it. While Bush thanks the soldiers for having the guts to do what he didn't, he is slashing veterans benefits by $25 billion.

Bush was truly grateful for the soldiers' sacrifice. He should be thankful he rules a country where working class kids can be brainwashed into sacrificing their lives so rich parasites like Bush who never worked a day in his life can line their pockets with the profits they make from looting a sovereign nation.

Similarly, Rumsfeld expressed confidence in the American people to keep supporting Bush. What he's really saying is that he feels confident that the public will continue to be hoodwinked by the propaganda bombardment emanating from the capitalist press "in bed with" the Pentagon.

Rumsfeld should have confidence in his press: Any journalist not in bed with the Pentagon risks being shot or fired. The Pentagon said this openly before the war. They made good on the threat.

The international capitalist order is like one big Mafia family. The US president is the don, the godfather. The CIA and military are the hit men. Hussein was a capo who got too big for his britches and tried to grab more than the don allowed. Both don Bushes ordered a contract on the capo who didn't follow the rules.

The capitalist crisis is so deep that its most reactionary elements increasingly have resorted to gangsterism and plunder to defend their profits and declining empire. Bush directly represents the most rapacious, predatory faction of the US capitalist class who accumulated enormous wealth in the last two decades from fraudulent stock market speculation and manipulation, plundering workers pensions through Enron and Halliburton-like swindling, and looting public treasuries from Texas to Washington.

Already the capitalist vultures are circling the carnage and devastation of Iraq and starting to move in. Oil companies, war contractors, construction firms--all of them huge Republican contributors and all of them well connected in Washington and Texas--are salivating for thehuge profits beckoning. Companies like DynCorp, the military contractor that just won a multimillion dollar contract to police Iraq, has been in trouble for firing whistleblowers exposing an illegal sex ring in Bosnia, and for spraying poisonous pesticides in Colombia to eradicate coca plants, part of the Clinton-initiated Plan Colombia.

While Bush and Rumsfeld blather about liberating Iraq, Bush appoints former general Jay Garner to be the civilian administrator in charge of Iraq during the "transition" period. Garner, a notorious right wing Zionist who thinks Israel's been too soft on the Palestinians, is also a former executive of a defense firm with close ties to Israel. This is who Bush appoints to openly oversee the installment of a puppet protectorate regime of a major Arab country.
Unfuckinbelievable.

There's actually been reports that former CIA director James Woolsley, who has as much blood on his filthy hands as Bush, Rumsfeld, Perle, Wolfowitz, Cheney, Rice, and the rest of the slimy oil gangsters and mass murderers in power, may be appointed minister of information of Iraq. This follows Bush's appointments of John Negroponte, Elliott Abrams, Otto Reich, John Poindexter, and Richard Pipes, a particularly odious cretin currently waging war on Muslims and the First Amendment on American campuses, to high level diplomatic and human rights organizations. Bush continues to unleash a nightmare of Orwellian proportions.

Speaking of Orwell, the bourgeois media continues to lie and pimp for the Pentagon. MSNBC reported yesterday that Baghdad hospitals were not overloaded at all, in fact hardly any one was in there. This was coming from Bob Arnot, one of the biggest Pentagon whores on the air, a raving reactionary who sounds like a Sharon lover and Palestinian hater. Arnot was trying to give credence to Washington's assertion that the war was relatively clean and that civilian casualties were minimal.

Meanwhile, the Red Cross was reporting a critical emergency in the city's hospitals, many of which were being looted with US soldiers standing by. This is the latest in a long series of Geneva Convention violations committed by America since Sept. 11. Occupying armies are required to provide basic security and services to the population being occupied. But then, the Geneva Convention requirements are toilet paper to be used for wiping when they apply to America, but are sacret texts to be thrown in the world's face when America decides it applies to anyone else.

Meanwhile, despite all the blathering from right wing idiots like Bill O'Reilly, the NY Times continues to whitewash Washington's foul deeds. In an April 13 article titled "The Means to Make the Poisons Came from the West," its reporters lay out the case, complete with a detailed chart, that Western nations like France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Netherlands, and others sold Hussein most of his chemical weapons.
The Times explains, "The data was given to United Nations inspectors in the late 1990s, and was reconfirmed in Iraq's 12,000-page declaration last fall."

At the end the article gratutiously informs readers that "The absence of American firms from this picture does not mean that none supplied Mr. Hussein's mass-destruction weapons programs. [In other words, the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.] American firms show up on lists of suppliers of anthrax strains to Iraq, and of advanced electronics for nuclear and missile sites."

What the Times--and the rest of the capitalist media--leave out is that Washington seized the sole copy of Iraq's 12,000-page report in New York, transported it to DC, made copies, and distributed them to the Security Council. The US brazenly stole the report and deleted the names of those US manufacturers that had sold chemical agents to Iraq. This act of piracy was no doubt a key reason why Bush could only muster four Security Council votes.

But it was not news fit to print in the New York Times.

Baghdad trying to be liberated, April 2003

Early April, 2003--After 17 days of this Anglo-American aggression against Iraq, one thing is clear through all the fog of war generated by the Pentagon's media cheerleaders--Bush and Blair and their generals are engineering a vicious slaughter of a defenseless population. They should be tried for war crimes before an international people's tribunal and summarily shot for egregious crimes against humanity.

This is not a war--it is a one sided slaughter by two major capitalist powers against an impoverished semi-colonial nation already ravaged from the 1991 war. It is an imperialist act of aggression against a sovereign nation for its strategic natural resource--oil. It is a brazen, criminal act of gangsterism and plunder to loot the resources of the Iraqi people. Every lie Bush told to justify the attack has been exposed. Where are the weapons of mass destruction? In Washington and London, slaughtering tens of thousands of Iraqis.

Still, there has been resistance. British troops are still fighting to take Basra after two weeks. Fighting continues in the north and around Baghdad. Washington's media continues to lie and propagandize about the battles taking place. They reported as fact the taking of Baghdag's airport while fighting continued to rage. It's still unclear what happened. Listening to the US media and the international press is like listening to two different wars.

The red line has been crossed, and still no evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq's hands. Washington's overwhelming military power is slaughtering tens of thousands of Iraqi workers and peasants in uniform. Civilians casualties are growing, alarming the International Red Cross. Iraqi children's arms and legs and heads are being blown off by cluster bombs.

There could still be fierce fighting in Baghdad. Hussein appears to be alive. Bush's moment of truth approaches. Either the Republican Guard and Iraqi people will fight to the death in Baghdad's streets, or all resistance melts away and Bush faces a Gaza occupation the size of California.

Antiwar protests continue everywhere. Look for a large protest in Dublin this week when Bush meets Blair for a war council. The working class worldwide seethes. Bush has turned the US into a bloody death trap. American sports teams and tourists are spat on and booed everywhere, courtesy of Bush's leadership of US capitalism. Workers of the world unite! Workers of Spain, Greece, Italy, Britain, France, Germany! Call an emergency meeting with Sweeney and other US labor leaders! Expose their collaboration with Bush before the US working class! Workers of America! This war is not about weapons of mass destruction or liberating the Iraqi people with bombs. It's about Bush and his capitalist cronies lining their pockets with oil and reconstruction contracts. This "victory" for Bush puts him in a stronger position to accelerate his war against workers in the US. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, pensions, health care, wages, are all on the chopping block while Bush and his capitalist class gorge themselves at our expense. US soldiers are cannon fodder for big business profits.

It is obscene watching the capitalist media gush over Bush's "victory," covering up for the war crimes he has just committed, for the thousands of dead and maimed Iraqis, many of them children. We must get the truth out about what has just happened and about the brutal occupation of Iraq that is unfolding before our eyes. American workers! Bush has made this nation a bloody death trap! US soldiers look just like Israeli occupiers in the West Bank, brutally treating shackled and hooded Iraqis. Is this the America you want? This war will not end in Iraq. Bush has Iran, north Korea, Philippines, Colombia in his cross hairs. War, depression and fascism are what capitalism have in store for humanity.

US out of Iraq! End all aid to Israel!

Iraqis killed trying to surrender; note white flag

March 24-27, 2003--"War is the most complicated of all equations."--Napoleon Bonaparte.

The war criminals in the White House and Pentagon are learning how right the French general was. The initial euphoria on Wall Street and in the corridors of the Empire is rapidly fading as the Iraqi people are showing the conquest of their country will not be a "cakewalk."

After lying for months during their failed attempt to sell this latest imperialist war on Iraq, it should surprise no one that deception and misinformation have accompanied every Pentagon briefing since the aggression began. This is no surprise. Lies--and naked terror--are all the imperialists have in their arsenal.

Whatever happens militarily in the coming days, the unexpected intensify of Iraqi resistance has already ensured that the US has lost this war politically. Every premise of Washington's rationales for this war is crumbling before the world's eyes. After every other pretext for the war was exposed as a lie--weapons of mass destruction, connection to 911 and Al-Qaeda--the American people and soldiers were told that the latter would be greeted as liberators by the Iraqi people and that the Hussein regime would crumble within days.

It is not turning out that way. The US/UK invaders are meeting "fierce resistance" and "a hornet's nest" from Iraqi regulars, irregulars, armed citizens, Republican Guards, and "fedayeen," from Shiite-populated cities in the south like Basra and Nasiriya to Najaf, a key city in central Iraq.

The first day of Bush's war saw a more restrained, "surgical" version of Shock and Awe than had been promised. Apparently, Bush got an "intelligence" tip that Hussein was in a presidential palace and tried to "take him out" on Wednesday, March 19. The next two days looked like a rerun of the first gulf war to most Americans--video game assaults from air and sea; hundreds of Tomahawk cruise missiles hitting Baghdad, setting the ancient capital ablaze. When Americans left work on Friday for the weekend, they were confident the commander in chief was right: Hussein would crumble and it would all be over in a few days.

Someone once said there are times when decades pass and nothing happens, and other times when decades transpire in a week. The imperialist warmakers in Washington and London had one of those weekends on March 22 and 23. The arrogance of the imperialists once again blinded them from a lesson they never learn--sometimes people fight back and defend their country from foreign aggressors.

The war propaganda machine--led by bourgeois journalists in bed with the Pentagon--has been furiously cranking out lies and misinformation since the aggression began. First the Americans claimed the Iraqis fired "illegal" Scuds. False, they were "legal" Silkworm missiles. Then the US falsely reported the Shiites in Basra were revolting against Hussein. No, but the Brits were no doubt trying to create an uprising in Basra, just the latest cynical attempt by US imperialism to exploit the Shiites for its own nefarious strategic objectives.

The Shiites in Basra are no friends of Hussein and his Sunni regime, but that doesn't translate into support for foreign invaders. The Shiites have been fighting so fiercely in Basra that the vaunted British Desert Rats had to RETREAT from the city. The Shiites aren't fighting for Hussein; they're fighting for the national sovereignty and honor of Iraq.

Unrestrained by the most elemental decency and honesty, the Pentagon and its media whores are falsely reporting that Iraq cut off water and supplies to Basra. The truth is it was the "coalition's" bombing that caused the humanitarian disaster taking place in that besieged city. The Brits and Americans are actually blackmailing Basra's residents: "You want the water and food that our bombing took away back? Then revolt against Baghdad."

The propaganda is sickening here. Just as they did in Bosnia and Kosovo, the imperialists are engineering a humanitarian crisis, then masking their aggression by posing as saviors to the rescue. That charade may be feeling brainwashed Americans, but it's not fooling Basra, or the rest of the world.

Pathetically thrashing about for any pretext to justify their criminal aggression, Washington and London are frantically trying to manufacture a smoking gun that proves Iraq harbors biological and chemical weapons. First it was the chemical facility outside Baghdad with vats supposedly filled with illegal chemicals. False--no chemicals.

In a repulsive exhibition of sensationalistic yellow journalism that would make William Randolph Hearst blush, the Pentagon's media whores continue to falsely claim that the discovery of chemical suits proves Iraq possesses biological or chemical weapons. And they faithfully parrot the Pentagon's assertion that Iraq has ordered its troops to attack Americans with chemical weapons.

The fact is the imperialist invaders have found no trace of biological or chemical weapons, and Iraq has not used any. But no rational person should be shocked if the US "finds" biological or chemical weapons in their travels. Indeed, the Russian Foreign Minister stated today that if any are found, it's likely they were put there by US/UK forces. US armed forces are every bit as likely to plant evidence to frame their "enemies" as their local counterparts in every police department in the US do every single day.

Of course, all the chemical suits prove is that the Iraqis want to protect themselves against WMD used by the Americans against them. This is entirely logical, given the fact that the only side to use chemical weapons in the gulf war was the US, whose forces used massive amounts of depleted uranium shells against Iraqis, including civilians, one reason Iraq's cancer rate skyrocketed after 1991.

The entire world sees that the US has fitted its troops with chemical weapons as well. When the Americans wear chemical protective suits, it's just self defense. But when the Iraqis have them, it's protection against them handling the weapons. It is this kind of hypocrisy and arrogance that has the whole world demonstrating against US imperialism.

The US is using uranium tipped shells in this war too. Iraq reports that cluster bombs are being dropped on Baghdad, and there's no reason to doubt this, since Washington deployed these hideous anti-personnel cluster bombs designed to maximize casualties in Serbia and Afghanistan.

Further, Washington has threatened to use the same opiate-based chemical weapon deployed by the Russians against Chechnyan rebels in a Moscow theater last year. Washington has even threatened to drop the ultimate weapons of mass destruction--nuclear bombs--on Iraq. Believe them, since the US is the only government that's actually used nuclear weapons.

The US/UK forces are committing massive war crimes against the Iraqi people. Launching Tomahawk cruise missiles from afar against a major city like Baghdad is an act of terror against a civilian population. The city is in flames from the massive bombardment. Two thousand pound bombs, bunker busters and other weapons of mass destruction are raining down on a defenseless civilian population. Thirty six civilians were slaughtered in a Baghdad market on March 26. Another 60 plus were slaughtered in a separate market attack a few days later.

Hundreds, perhaps thousands of Iraqi civilians are already dead from the aggression in Baghdad, Basra, Nasiriya and Najaf. Thousands more Iraqi soldiers have fallen. And the bloodbath is just beginning. Baghdad could potentially become an Arab Stalingrad.

The most striking aspect of this war so far is the heroic resistance of the Iraqi people. The level of fierce and intense fighting for six straight days in southern Iraq at Basra and Nasiriya and in central Iraq at Najaf has stunned the imperialist warmakers. Media propagandists like Bill O'Reilly are slandering the Iraqi people by characterizing the resistance as "thugs" and "terrorists" and consisting solely of Saddam's fedayeen.

But the world sees that what is holding up the imperialist advance into Baghdad is the heroic resistance embodied in that 72-year-old peasant who shot down an Apache helicopter with a Czech-made rifle. This is not a fair fight. It is a modern-day David versus Goliath. The casualty ratio is overwhelmingly one-sided, although it is very likely US/UK casualties are substantially higher than what's been acknowledged thus far. The Iraqis are firing machine guns and rocket propelled grenades from the backs of Japanese pickup trucks against Abrams tanks and Apache choppers. Peasants are firing old rifles at Apaches and downing them.

The intensity of the sustained fighting in Basra, Nasiriya and Najaf was not supposed to happen. The imperialists are stunned by the sheer audacity of the Iraqi resistance. In a real sense the invaders have lost this war already. Iraqi troops have counterattacked the aggressors; they've ambushed them from behind; they've attacked with an offensive thrust under cover of sandstorms; they're cutting the coalition's supply line. Hell, there was even a fragging incident that killed two Americans in their tent. That didn't happen until the end of the Vietnam war.

The Pentagon brass and media cheerleaders like O'Reilly can try to spin these problems away by repeating the mantra that their forces are "50 miles from Baghdad," but the unpleasant and unavoidable truth is the warmakers have been stuck at the 50 mile point for 5 days because they've been forced to fight the raging southern resistance that has Central Command reeling.

The absence of the US Fourth Division from the north, caused by the Turkish parliament's March 1 failure to allow its soil to be used by the Americans to invade Iraq, is severely impacting Washington's ability to conduct this war. This is a tribute to the proletarian internationalism shown by the Turkish toilers when they protested outside the parliament on March 1.

Adding to the growing sense of chaos and disaster are the usual blunders and "mistakes" that characterize US aggression: a Patriot missile downing a British RAF plane; US forces killing ITN correspondent Terry Lloyd; US marines firing on other marines; scores of Syrians are killed in a bus after crossing the Iraqi border into Syria; "errant" missiles landing in Turkey and Iran, the country very much next on Bush's list to "take out."

Clearly on the defensive, the US warmakers have already been reduced to pathetically whine and blame all their woes on the nasty Saddam-loyal "fedayeen" whom they never heard about, and the pesky civilians who keep getting in the way of the US invasion of their land.

They're tough and nasty and they don't play by the conventional rules of war, we're hearing from the whiners representing the most powerful and destructive military machine in history. They dress up as civilians, they use civilians as shields, they hide in mosques and hospitals, they pretend to surrender and then they fire at us. In fact, the US and media are now saying, these Iraqis defending their nation are terrorists. We should have known that was coming.

Let's be clear on one matter: when the world's most powerful military power illegally and without provocation invades a virtually defenseless, impoverished country still recovering from the last pulverizing inflicted on it by the same imperialist aggressor, when that invading force is dropping bombs on civilians from 30,000 feet, missiles from ships far away, laser and satellite-guided rockets who have no virtually no air defense, when heavily armed American troops are running amok, than the outmanned, outgunned Iraqis have a sovereign right to defend themselves BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY.

If the Americans can't cope with these street tactics, than they're out of their league and they should quit bitching and go home with their tails between their legs, as Scott Ritter has predicted they will end up doing. But I'm sick of hearing them moaning that the Iraqis are not identifying themselves as combatants, as if, as Linda Heard says, they should be "conveniently wearing a recognizable uniform, while fighting under the Queensbury Rules. 'Oh sorry, old chap. I really musn't thump you in the balls. Please feel free to drop your bombs on my wife and children while I dash off to get my uniform out of the dry cleaners.'"

The key point is that when a foreign colonialist power invades an oppressed country to conquer it, the entire civilian population becomes the enemy. We saw that in Vietnam. All the nonsense we're already h earing from this Iraq war about children, women, or civilians shooting GIs is the same drivel we heard 30 plus years ago regarding Vietnam. " You don't know who the enemy is." Their ultimate solution?: kill them all.

When an imperialist country like the US invades a weaker semi-colonial nation possessing an overwhelming advantage in firepower and technology, it is a brutal war of conquest in which the entire civilian population is the enemy to be subjugated. Consequently, the people being invaded have a sovereign right to defend their lives, families, honor and country by any means necessary, and if that means trickery, deception, street tactics, wearing civilian clothes or birthday suits, they have a right to kill as many foreign invaders as they can.

Before the Americans make too big fools of themselves, they should reread their own history of the Revolutionary War, where American colonists used similar tactics of guerrilla warfare to defeat the hated redcoats.

On a side note, 2 Israeli undercover agents slipped into the Gaza and killed several Palestinian gunmen in their car. It's alright for Zionist agents to hide in civilian clothes to execute suspected militants, in the but not for Iraqis exercising their soverign right to defend their national dignity.

Calling the Iraqis "terrorists" for defending their country shows how fraudulent the rulers' war on terror truly is. Now it's out in the open--from Iraq to the States, where Bill O'Reilly gave a boost to Oregon legislation that would prosecute "violent" antiwar protesters as "terrorists". Anyone who resists the dictates of imperialism and the New World Order is a terrorist in the rulers' eyes.

We're hearing lurid, unconfirmed stories that Iraqi paramilitaries and fedayeen are threatening to execute families of men who don't fight and have executed a woman for waving at imperialist troops. Given the rampant lying done so far by the US and its media, skepticism is prudent. However, all through history, army commanders fighting for the life and death of their nations have dealt harshly with deserters, including the Americans.

The hypocrisy and cynicism employed by Bush and Rumsfeld regarding the issue of POW treatment is staggering even by their standards. You can hear the whole world howling with derision upon hearing the US complain about Iraq violating Geneva Convention violations regarding prisoners of war.

After the way the US has tortured, slaughtered, and illegally jailed over 1,000 Afghan POWs, Bush and Rumsfeld should choke upon uttering the words "Geneva Convention." Washington has been spitting on the Geneva Convention in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay for two years. In Afghanistan, hundreds of Taliban POWs were stuffed into containers and suffocated to death while US soldiers watched. Other Afghan prisoners of war were tortured to death while in US custody. Thousands more have been shackled, hooded, and kept like animals in 8 X 10 cages while incarcerated at Camp Gitmo in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. These were foot soldiers fighting in a civil war who were swept off the Afghan battlefield by a foreign aggressor and occupier. They have nothing to do with 911. They are political prisoners who have been charged with no crimes, illegally and indefinitely detained in inhuman conditions with no evidence presented against them. They were purposely detained in Guantanamo because the US knew they'd be in legal limbo with no rights, Guantanamo being outside US jurisdiction and itself an illegal occupation of Cuban soil.

Washington has been warned all along that its brutal treatment of prisoners in violation of the Geneva Convention would condemn American POWs in the wars everyone knew Washington was preparing.

But all of history and the facts thus far in this aggression show that we should be extremely skeptical of every single statement uttered by the US, UK, CNN, Fox, BBC and the rest of the big business media concerning this war.

Two days after parading hundreds of Iraqi POWs in front of cameras--part of the propaganda campaign proclaiming the Iraqis would surrender without a fight--Bush and his media had the gall to whine about American prisoners being interviewed on Iraqi television. They did not look humiliated or mistreated. They were asked their names, ranks, and what they were doing there. It should be no surprise that Iraqis publicize the capture of invading forces. Of course it's a propaganda coup. But to accuse them of war crimes when the US has done far worse is sheer hypocrisy, and the world sees it. Bush and his loser war criminals are losing the political war fast.

The accusation reported as fact that British soldiers had been executed was false. The families were informed by London that they had died in combat. Those American soldiers may have been executed, but that still has not been confirmed. Lurid, sensationalist stories of Iraqi atrocities are being peddled by the bourgeois media every day, most, if not all of them untrue. They are designed to cover up the very real atrocities already committed by US forces against Iraqi civilians and to prepare for an even greater slaughter on the way.

Be skeptical of everything you hear in the ruling class media. That Iraqi missile fired into Kuwait may have been an errant US missile, it is now being reported. If there's a report that Iraqis are using chemical weapons, believe the Russians--they were used or planted by the Americans.

The big story continues to be the resistance of the Iraqi people, which is causing serious rifts within military circles, despite the Pentagon's attempt to downplay them. Lt. Gen. William Wallace complains that the "bizarre" behavior of the Iraqis was not "what we war-gamed for." Translation: we didn't think they'd give their lives for their country.

Reports keep surfacing about this big divide between what field commanders are saying ("Their determination is somewhat of a surprise to us all. What we were really hoping was to just go through and everyone would wave flags and stuff") and what the top brass ("All is going exactly as planned) is saying about the fighting.

General Barry McCaffery, war criminal from the gulf war and ex-drug czar, has criticized Rumsfeld for going in too quick and with insufficient numbers, relying excessively on air power and Special Forces, and in the process, leaving troops and supply lines vulnerable to ambushes and rear attacks. Indeed, Rumsfeld's rushing another 100,000 troops to Iraq as fast as he can.

The Pentagon's blaming the CIA for the unanticipated Iraqi resistance. The CIA is blaming the Pentagon. The US and its puppet media are blaming the Iraqis for being sneaky and their civilians for being there. Former marine colonel and UN arms inspector Scott Ritter says the US can't win militarily and will leave Iraq with its tail between its legs.

The Pentagon and its media stooges and propagandists like O'Reilly and Hannity repeat the mantra that they're 50 miles from Baghdad, that they've killed tens of thousands Iraqi troops while suffering minor losses, that they control Iraqi airspace. All this says is that this is not a war of equals but a complete mismatch, a bully armed to the teeth overrunning an essentially defenseless population; a superiority resulting solely from the overwhelming air advantage possessed by the US. Iraq has basically no air defense. Washington has the most advanced, lethal air force in the world. Real tough, those Americans.

But when it comes to duking it out mano y mano on the ground, the Americans aren't finding it so easy, and they're not sounding as macho as before. We are hearing incessant whining that the Iraqis aren't fighting fair. They're fighting hard, tenaciously, courageously, cunningly, and it's not just Saddam's "fedayeen," and Republican Guard, it's Iraqi workers and peasants fighting with rifles and machine guns and pickup trucks against cruise missiles, B-52s, Apache helicopters, Adams tanks, and all the deadly weaponry in the war maniacs' possession.

The air is so thick with bullshit and propaganda from the Pentagon's media whores that it is sickening. COSMOS LEFT encourages readers to visit all the alternative news outlets that exist to the corporate media. They are working overtime to cover up US/UK atrocities and prepare for the escalation of those atrocities against civilians that is looming.

What the pro-war apologists cannot explain away, however, is the stunning degree of resistance from the working people of Iraq. This is Korea or Vietnam, where socialist revolutions were taking place with communist leaderships giving land to the peasants, thus cementing a bond between the people and the governments against foreign aggression and colonialism. Iraq is also not like the Soviets in 1941 defending Stalingrad against the invading Nazi onslaught, where the Soviet working people were defending the workers state established by the October 1917 revolution. Hussein's government is a bourgeois nationalist regime based on a party-police state, born with the help of the CIA. Yet still the Iraqi people fight the foreign invaders tenaciously, despite Hussein not because of him.

Despite the growing divisions and dissent within military circles, Bush and Rumsfeld, pissed and frustrated over how bad things are going, are determined to unleash total devastation on Baghdad. Everyone expected there would be resistance there, but the war makers really had convinced themselves that the south would fall and throw flowers and the march to Baghdad would be easy.

The march to Baghdad is stalled. Rumsfeld faces increasing criticism that this initial force was inadequate. He thought it wasn't needed because they didn't expect resistance in the south. If they faced that much resistance in the south, Baghdad could be the graveyard for thousands of American soldiers.

Which brings us to the question of questions--the Vietnam syndrome, defined as American opposition to large scale casualties in a protracted military conflict. Despite premature assertions by Bush Sr. during the gulf war that the syndrome was dead, in truth it has never really been tested. Washington got away with relatively few casualties in Grenada, Panama, the gulf war, Kosovo and Serbia, and Afghanistan, though the last is far from over, and Americans are being killed there as this is written.

The siege of Baghdad promises to be the first true test of the Vietnam syndrome since Vietnam.

Vitoria, Spain, March 20, 2003

March 20, 2003--Today the workers of the world answered Washington's brutal and criminal attack on Iraq by taking to the streets in militant protests. 200,000 marched in Athens, Greece under signs saying, "Bush - Killer". Hundreds of thousands of Italian workers in Milan, Turin, Rome and elsewhere engaged in work stoppages, 24-hour general strikes, and joined tens of thousands of students in militant demonstrations and clashes with police.

80,000 children held candles in Berlin, another 20,000 students walked out of classes; tens of thousands more throughout Germany. Hundreds of thousands of workers and students rallied throughout France.

Tens of thousands protested in Sidney and Melbourne, Australia. Hundreds of thousands in Barcelona, Madrid, England, Scotland, Holland, Moscow, Belgium, Cairo, Bangladesh, Bangkok, Calcutta, Denmark, and Switzerland, where it was reported that cops fired on schoolchildren outside the US Embassy.

This does not bode well for Washington. Whatever short-term military success they may achieve against Iraq (and they've already lost 16 soldiers in a helicopter crash), they will bite their teeth on this Iraq war even harder than they did on the first gulf war "victory."

The proletarian character of the resistance to US aggression we are seeing worldwide is a bad sign for the US capitalists and a great sign for workers everywhere. We are witnessing the beginning of a new communist international being borne in struggle against US imperialism. This resistance by the international proletariat will have a huge impact on the consciousness of American workers in the period ahead.

US imperialism is driven to go to war because of the deepening economic and political crisis of US and world capitalism. The divisions and antagonisms among the imperialist powers over control of the world's booty--workers and natural resources--will accelerate. Imperialism's only answer to its internal contradictions and growing crisis is war. That will prove to be its undoing.

IDF about to murder Rachel in cold blood

On March 16, 2003, an Israeli army bulldozer crushed to death Rachel Corrie, a 23-year-old American student, in a Palestinian refugee camp in Gaza City. Rachel was there as a member of the International Solidarity Movement, acting as a human shield to protect Palestinian civilians from the murderous onslaught of the Israeli Defense Forces. Only two weeks before, an Israeli bulldozer destroyed the house next door to where Rachel was slain, killing a pregnant Palestinian woman, Nuha Sweidan, and her fetus. A few months ago, a brave Israeli soldier shot a 95-year-old Palestinian woman in the back.  Recently the IDF's orgy of violence extended to its own when it mistakenly killed two undercover agents.The Israeli army continues its homicidal violence every day against Palestinians, UN workers, and now American students. The US media and politicians shrug, look the other way, and blame Rachel for being there. The Israeli army and government are run by psychopathic killers. They continue their reign of terror unchecked and with impunity, backed by the biggest purveyor of violence and terror in history--the US imperialist government.

We are witnessing the true axis of evil in the world--Tel Aviv and Washington. The Pentagon just bought a dozen of the same Caterpillar bulldozers that murdered Rachel Corrie. It shipped them to Israel to be equipped with armor. Soon they will be in Baghdad, demolishing homes with Iraqis inside as they have been doing to Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. Further confirmation of the nexus between Israel and the US is the announcement by the US Air Force that it will use deadly force against antiwar protesters at the Vandenberg base in southern California.

The only way out to this madness is a political struggle by the working class against the capitalists and their government. We should demand that the US break all relations and end all aid to the murderous Zionist regime of Israel.

Hundreds of thousands outside Turkish Parliament, March 1, 2003

March 12, 2003--The growing revolt against Tony Blair in England, coupled with the comments by US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that the US can invade Iraq without Britain, should put to rest any doubts that the global antiwar protests are making a difference. The demonstrations are also behind the diplomatic crisis facing Bush in the UN, as Washington desperately scrambles for Security Council votes for the politically desirable fig-leaf of legitimacy.

In so doing, Washington has revealed for all the world to see that its "leadership" in the world has been reduced to bribery, arm-twisting, coercion, falsification, fabrication, and spying. The US government is a collection of gangsters; the president is like a don threatening to break the kneecaps of his capos if they don't follow orders.

The second US diplomat in less than a month has resigned in protest of Bush's war. John H. Brown wrote in his resignation letter to Colin Powell: "I cannot in good conscience support President Bush's war plans against Iraq. Throughout the globe the US is becoming associated with the unjustified use of force. The president's disregard for views in other nations, borne out by his neglict of public diplomacy, is giving birth to an anti-American century."

Not anti-American, Mr. Brown, but anti-American government and anti-American imperialism. Brown joins John Brady Kiesling, a senior US diplomat in Athens, who quit last month in disgust over Bush's militarism and aggression.

An Australian intelligence operative also resigned today, saying the US has not shared all the intelligence it possesses on Iraq.

The Orwellian rhetoric, the Alice in Wonderland inversion of reality, the lies and transparently false claims used by Bush to justify invading Iraq, is radicalizing the entire world. The masses' contempt for Bush surpasses his contempt for them. They're not buying his lies that he's invading Iraq to liberate its people, or to eliminate weapons of mass destruction. Even Britain's support is wavering.

Bush's response is even more shrill rhetoric and desperate, baseless accusations against Iraq. The bullshit is flying so thick and fast the whole world is ready to throw up. Hussein's going to suit up his soldiers with American uniforms and kill Iraqis; Al-Qaeda is going to commit terrorist acts against US troops; an Iraqi official called Abu Sayef in the Philippines; Hussein's going to set his oil fields ablaze, as he supposedly did in the first gulf war, except reports keep surfacing that it was US Special Forces which did the burning afterall; Hussein's sent agents to the US to infiltrate the antiwar movement and commit terrorism.

The imperialists have lost on the facts. They make no pretense that they have truth or facts on their side. All they offer are rhetoric, fearmongering, dogma, cliches and slogans that bear no relation to reality. Now they're reaching hysteria, if not hysterical.

Did you get a good look at the pilotless drone that the US charged COULD BE USED to spread biological and chemical weapons? It looked like a model plane made out of balsa wood and duct tape(!). This is why a horrible slaughter is about to take place?

The March 13 NY Times' headline read: "Iraq Shows One of Its Drones, Recalling Wright Brothers," and a call-out said "Up close, one drone, at least, has making tape as part of its Rube Goldberg look."

It turns out the RPV (remote pilotless vehicle) is used for reconnaisance purposes by the Iraqis. They have no idea how to equip it with biological weapons. The American press dutifully passed on the Pentagon's wild charges about biological weapons deliverance, but once again they failed to ask: What biological and chemical weapons? Where are they? If the US had the intelligence confirming this myth, they would have showed the world and told the inspectors where to look for them. They haven't. They're lying. And the entire world knows it.

What's obscene is that while Washington and its servile media spread fantasies about a model airplane, the US is about to use its latest weapon of mass destruction on Iraqi civilians: the MOAB (Massive Ordnance Air Blast), the largest conventional bomb ever made, possessing 18,000 pounds of high explosives and weighing in overall at 21,500 pounds. The perfect weapon for this latest Western Crusade against Arabs and Muslims--Moab, known in the Book of Genesis as the incestuous offspring of Lot and a daughter following Sodom's destruction. And, according to the Book of Numbers, the Israelites chose the Plains of Moab as their final stop before entering the Promised Land.

If the Iraqis are wearing protective suits, it could very well be in self defense, because the only side to use chemical weapons in the first gulf war was the US, and Washington is about to use them again, including reportedly the same opiate-based gas the Russians used against Chechnyan rebels in Moscow several months ago.

American soldiers are still dying from the depleted uranium shells used by the Pentagon during the first gulf war. And the war maniacs in Washington still haven't properly equipped US troops this time around. They don't give a damn about their own soldiers, let alone Iraqi troops and civilians.

And Washington's charge that Iraq is planning to disguise its soldiers as Americans and kill Iraqi civilians is a transparent attempt to frame Iraq for the atrocities the US is about to commit.

******************

March 13-14, 2003--In recent days there have been a spate of reports that confirm what this war is all about: the looting of Iraqi resources by US-based multinational corporations. Five US companies are competing for contracts worth $900 million to rebuild what Washington will destroy, according to the US Agency for International Development. The five firms are: Kellog Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton Co. (where VP Cheney was chief executive from 1995-2000, and from which he's still receiving about $1 million), Bechtel Corp. (once populated by Reaganites Caspar Weinberger and George Shultz, and still a heavy Republican benefactor), Louis Berger Group, Parsons Corporation and Fluor Corporation.

Oil companies are salivating over the 112 billion barrels of oil in Iraq's ground, second most in the world. Most of Iraq's oil fields are unexplored, moving one oil executive to gush, "For any oil company, being in Iraq is like a kid being in F.A.O. Schwarz" ("Iraq Is a Strategic Issue for Oil Giants, Too," NY Times, Feb. 22, 2003). So don't be fooled by the self-righteous denials coming from  Bushites like Richard Perle that oil is one of the coveted prizes sought by Washington and Wall Street. Bushites like James Baker and Richard Cheney had no qualms about admitting this truth when the first war against Iraq broke out in 1991. Bushites like Cheney, Perle, Wolfowitz, and Feith openly stated the strategic importance of controlling oil in their Project for a New American Century documents written in the 1990s.

Richard Perle and the rest of these Zionist, right wing ideologues, the so-called "neo-conservatives," are having a rough time of it lately, which is only good for working people. First Perle was embarrassed by Seymour Hersh's New Yorker article that suggested Perle was knee-deep in a serious conflict of interest: Perle is a managing partner for Trireme Partners, a venture capital firm specializing in homeland security and defense.

Further, Hersh reports that Perle used his position on the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board and his status with Bush as a leading war proponent to attempt to procure millions of dollars from Saudi investors, including Adnan Khashoggi, the notorious billionaire arms dealer who was centrally involved in the Iran-Contra scandal and the collapse of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, which brings us back to the Bush family--HW, Dubya, Neil, Jeb, the whole slimy lot of them.

Perle, one of the most repugnant ruling class ideologues to ever disgrace this planet, has never been able to hide his greed, viciousness, and slavish devotion to Zionist Israel. During the early 1970s, when he was Senator Henry Jackson's assistant, Perle was accused of slipping classified documents to the Israeli embassy. As Reagan's assistant secretary of defense in 1983, Perle got into trouble for recommending that the Army buy weapons from an Israeli company that had paid him $50,000 two years before.

Throughout the 90s, Perle has been the principal advocate for invading Iraq. With Bush in power, Perle's star has only risen in eyes of the capitalist class he so zealously serves. Perle and his cohorts in Zionist think tanks like the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs--Feith, Abrams, Wolfowitz, and Libby, are serving as Bush's central strategists and ideologues in the coming war.

Perle is a dangerous individual, and not merely because he's threatening to sue Hersh for libel. In addition to the fact he will be directly responsible for the slaughter of thousands of Iraqi civilians, maybe more, making him one of the leading candidates for a war crimes tribunal, Perle on national television called Hersh a terrorist for writing that New Yorker investigative piece.

This is not rhetoric, a slip of the tongue, or a statement made in the heat of passion. When one considers Perle is an influential player in an administration that is illegally detaining and jailing suspects and has passed legislation that defines "terrorist" as opponents of the government whose citizenship can be stripped and who can be thrown in a military brig, his statement only shows the fascistic leanings of the Bush clique.

Then Virginia Democratic Congressman Jim Moran shook the Bush Zionists up further when he lamented that American Jews were the driving force behind the Iraq war. Just the fact that Israel's role in the coming aggression against Iraq was injected into the public debate was a huge embarrassment for ruling class circles. The convergence of Israeli and US interests vis a vis crushing the most powerful Arab nation can no longer be hidden. This was only bolstered by Bush's March 14th Middle East "peace plan" on the eve war with Iraq.

****************

As the Bush "diplomatic" campaign to win support for the war crumbles, as the warmakers continue to lose on battlefield political ideas, the capitalist media is working overtime escalating the propaganda and misinformation. MSNBC, owned by General Electric, a leading military contractor, is leading the way. Every day, one of their more obnoxious anchors, Chris Jansen announces the "question of the day" such as "Have you had enough of celebrities giving their opinions on the war?"; "Have we given Saddam enough time or should we take him out now?"

Trying to shape public opinion for your boss these days, Chris? Then Jansen and others cheerfully announce the results of these phony polls: 70% support Bush on invading Iraq.

That's a lie, and another manifestation of the growing chasm between the bourgeois establishment and the working people.

We will see tomorrow, March 15th, and next Saturday, March 22nd, how much this country is behind Bush and the brutal war he's about to start.

POWELL'S FEB. 5 UN SPEECH

Feb. 11, 2003--Today, in an appearance before the Congress, Secretary of State Colin Powell outdid his embarrassing Feb. 5 performance at the UN when he relied on a British "dossier" that was plagiarized from a graduate student's paper containing 12-year-old data. Powell told Congress that the Arab station Al-Jazeera possessed an audio tape of bin Laden that he claimed showed a connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq--which is emerging as the lynchpin of Washington's argument for war since the inspectors have found zero evidence of weapons of mass destruction.

Except that Al-Jazeera did not have the tape and knew nothing about it. They didn't receive it until hours after Powell was already misrepresenting what the man purported to be bin Laden said.

Before dissecting this latest Powell distortion, an even bigger red flag needs mentioning: In MSNBC's original report, bin Laden was translated as calling for Iraqis to  OVERTHROW the infidel Hussein. Later, MSNBC said that was a mistake. Bin Laden only called Hussein an "infidel." No online articles after that first one reported the call to overthrow Hussein.

This is what Kurt Vonnegut was getting at when he recently said described the Bugh gang as "sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style". These scumbags can't even scam a fabrication smoothly. First Powell reveals the tape's existence before the station that he claimed had it knew anything about it. Then a passage that contradicts Bush's new reason for going to war--needed since no weapons of mass destruction have been found after 2 months of thorough inspection--first appears on the tape, then is removed because the translation was a mistake.

This is so transparently fraudulent  that it's almost absurd. First, trust nothing from this government. There is reasonable basis for suspicion that the tape is a fabrication. They've done it many times. The last bin Laden video was very likely a fake. The Israelis planted a false "Trojan Horse" communications device in Libya in  1986 to plant incriminating evidence against Tripoli, so that Reagan would bomb the city. The 1990 satellite photos of Iraqi soldiers massing at the Saudi  border were bogus.

How convenient for bin Laden to show up on the eve of a US blitzkreig against Iraq. COSMOS LEFT is highly suspicious, but even assuming it was bin Laden, a possibility given the above-described fiasco surrounding bin Laden calling for the overthrow of Hussein, Powell twisted what bin Laden said to advance the lie Hussein is connected to Al-Qaeda and 911.
 
"Once again he speaks to the people of Iraq and talks about their struggle and how he is in partnership with Iraq."

Whoever is speaking on the tape pledges solidarity with the Iraqi people in their struggle against the coming US invasion. Powell's use of  "how he is in partnership with Iraq" suggests an Al-Qaeda/Baghdad alliance regarding 911and terrorism. That's the PR campaign being sold to the American public to gain support for a war on Iraq: "This nexus between terrorists and states that are developing weapons of mass destruction can no longer be looked away from and ignored."

Now COSMOS LEFT hasn't seen the entire translation of the bin Laden tape, and given the controversy over the disputed passage where bin Laden calls for Hussein's overthrow, it's difficult to know what was said, assuming of course the tape's legitimacy. But it appears that bin Laden was pledging support for the Iraqi people as they face another slaughter, and there's a distinction between the people and the Iraqi government, which he blasts as being infidels and may have even called for its overthrow. Some nexus, Mr. Powell. Lie after lie from this man has been exposed. Yet he shamelessly continues to utter them with that legendary earnestness and credibility. The chemical weapons camp that turned out  to be a bakery. Another that was a video studio. The biological weapons facility that turned out to produce powdered milk. The British dossier fakery, and now the debacle surrounding the bin Laden tape.

Just the latest chapters in a long, sordid career as a war criminal for US imperialism. Powell tried to whitewash the My Lai massacre in 1968, concluding that relations  between US soldiers and the Vietnamese were "excellent." Later Powell was up to his neck in the Iran/contra scandal, then continued his service to Wall Street with  more war crimes during the first gulf war, when  he accurately summed up his contempt for working people by stating he really didn't think about how many Iraqi civilians were slaughtered by the soldiers he ordered into battle.

FEBRUARY 15TH ALERT!
Feb. 6, 2003--
Both the New York City and London governments are refusing permits for the huge antiwar protests scheduled in those cities on February 15th. Half a million people are expected in each city on that day. If the authorities are dumb enough not to back down, the people will have to respond  to the challenge by pouring into New York and London and defeating the government in the streets.

FEB. 10, 2003--
As COSMOS LEFT sensed in the above paragraph,
the US government was dumb enough to deny antiwar protesters a permit to march past the UN on Saturday, Feb. 15. Today, Federal District Court Judge Barbara Jones bought the city's argument that its need to "protect the public" outweighed demonstrators' right to assemble near the United Nations. We should not be surprised. We should not look to the capitalist courts to safeguard our right to organize and dissent from this capitalist government's militarism. This is a move out of desperation and from political weakness. The rulers are terrified; frightened witless by the sheer size of the January 18 protests and the depth of antiwar feelings they represented. Jones's ruling, a pathetic attempt to deflate the antiwar movement and intimidate people from marching this Saturday, is still another example of the government using 911 as a cover for attacking democratic rights. Cowardly hiding behind Sept. 11 to shred the Constitution--did you learn that in second or third year of law school, Judge Jones?

We should answer this outrageous attack on our democratic rights by going all out on Feb. 15th in New York City and showing Jones and the rest of the exploiting class she represents that we will not be intimidated, and will not back down from their repression.
Rally organizers are appealing Jones's tyrannical decision. During wartime federal courts almost always defer to executive branch authority. Since 911 most courts have upheld Bush's expansion of executive prerogatives and evisceration of the Constitution. A few district court judges ruled against Bush on illegal detentions and secret evidence, (reflecting the divisions within the capitalist class on how far Bush should go and how fast) but they've been reversed by the federal appeals courts. So the precedent isn't promising for a reversal of this district court decision that sided with the government. Unless the appellate court gets enlightened, sizes up the relationship of forces looming on this test of wills between the government and the people, and concludes that it would be counterproductive to the government to lose this battle in the streets in front of the watchful eyes of the entire world.

We should not be mesmerized by the machinations of the state. They are responding to us. If enough citizens show up on Saturday, we will defeat the rulers in the streets and inflict a humiliating political defeat on them. Judge Jones can go back to her lawbooks and look for what went wrong there. If enough of us mobilize, it won't matter what happens in the appeals courts.

There's another weapon of fear the rulers are throwing at us now--this elevated terror status alert. Ridge is practically guaranteeing a massive terrorist attack in the next few weeks--just when the war on Iraq will begin. The timing is exquisite.  The same government that either sponsored or allowed 911 to occur in order to facilitate its war drive is capable of sponsoring or allowing another terrorist attack to take that war drive to Iraq and possession of all that oil. These bastards are desperate. They're losing the political battle for this war. The diplomatic and political opposition to a US war on Iraq is hampering Washington's path to war. Powell's fraudulent speech has been an international disaster since the humiliating revelation that the British dossier he relied on was plagiarized from 12 years ago, though the American press has largely censored that from Americans.

Time is running out. They are desperate. All they have in answer to the crisis of capitalism is war. War without end. War with brand-new weapons, like bunker buster E-bombs weighing 15,000 tons that will knock out computers and phone lines as well as killing any humans in the way.

The devastating results of the coming US blitzkreig against Baghdad sound eerily similar to what the next terrorist attacks that Ridge guarantees will cause here. Ridge is warning Americans to stock up on plastic sheeting and duct tape and three days' supply of food and water.

WE ARE ALL PALESTINIANS NOW. Think  of the overwhelming repression the Palestinians are up against every single day, just to survive--the tanks and F-15s and F-16s and Apache choppers and thuggish  soldiers who shoot unarmed civilians in  the streets every day and bulldoze homes with old women in them and shoot 95-year-old women in the back and blow up entire blocks and shoot kids for violating illegal curfews.

Today Israel sealed off the West Bank and Gaza. Jones sealed off the United Nations. WE ARE ALL PALESTINIANS NOW.

ALL OUT FEBRUARY 15TH IN NEW YORK CITY!!

"Ev'rywhere I hear the sound of marching, charging feet, boy"--Rolling Stones, "Street Fighting Man"

"Be the first ones on your block
to have your boy come home in a box!"
"Fish Cheer"-- Country Joe and the Fish, 1969

Feb. 9, 2003--Country Joe's line may not even be applicable for this latest imperialist war. Rumsfeld reconfirmed his evil barbarism when it was reported he's order any US soldiers killed by biological or chemical weapons to be burned, bulldozed and buried in the tortured Iraqi soil.

Of course the US Army has experience with bulldozers in Iraq, having buried 1,000 Iraq soldiers alive with them in the first gulf war, among the many war crimes committed by Washington over the last century since becoming an imperialist power.

While most Americans are still too steeped in patriotic fog to realize the extent of Rumsfeld's barbarism, most of the rest of the world has this Dr. Strangelove pegged for  the war criminal he is. It was wonderful to see German Foreign Minister Fischer publicly berate Rumsfeld in Munich over the US lust for war with Iraq. Even more gratifying were the tens of thousands of demonstrators outside in a raging snowstorm, which is what lies behind  Fischer's resistance.

Rumsfeld appeared noticeably crestfallen and beaten during Fischer's outburst,  "Well, I'm sorry, you haven't convinced me!" It was gratifying to see Rumsfeld put in his place. He wasn't as confident and self-assured as he is in front of the pool of servile, adoring American sycophants posing as reporters.

My, how things are getting testy among the capitalist allies of the "free world." The French foreign minister telling Bush, "this is no game." It's not over. And Rumsfeld lumping Germany with Cuba among those nations opposing a war against Iraq! Among capitalist thieves, this is an insult of the highest degree.

Workers of the world, however, recognize that Cuba's principled opposition to an imperialist invasion of Iraq is the real deal, one we should emulate, because it's based on the fundamental principle of proletarian internationalism.

These displays of rudeness and throwing barbs by American, French and German leaders are manifestations of the growing antagonisms and divisions among the leading imperialist powers in the world. Working people should not rely on French or German imperialism to stop the US imperialists from going to war. Schroder and Chirac don't give a whit about Iraq's working people--they're looking out for the interests of their respective bourgeoisies. As during the two 20 century world wars, it's all about the imperialist powers fighting among themselves for the world's booty, for control of natural resources like oil, markets, cheap labor, and spheres of investment. Imperialists have been warring with each other over how to carve up the oil-rich  Middle East for almost a century. With no more Soviet Union to constrain it, Washington's using its status as the world's only imperialist superpower to subjugate the world, a la Rome, using its overwhelming military colossus to compensate for its relative economic weakness to best its imperialist rivals.

Rumsfeld is telling Germany and France, times have changed, we're the biggest and baddest honchos in  town, we set the rules, you get what we give you, you play ball with us or fuck you.

France and Germany are regrouping, realizing that the reckless gang around Bush is serious about reshaping the world in their image.

In the end, France and  Germany will reluctantly fall in line. They'll get fewer crumbs than they otherwise would have, however. Bribery and coercion--those are the ingredients of Washington's "coalition of the willing."

No, we should not rely on Chirac or Schroder to stop the US. But we should recognize that what also lies behind their public resistance to Washington is the overwhelming antiwar sentiments harbored by the French and German toilers, as well as workers throughout Europe.

It is this worker to worker solidarity--the kind exhibited by revolutionary Cuba--that should be the anchor of the growing movement to oppose imperialist wars.--February 10, 2003

Jan. 30, 2003--COSMOS LEFT is thrilled at the exploding antiwar movement around the world. While much of the leadership is flawed and many participants harbor illusions in capitalism, the UN, pacifism, etc., it is already a powerful force in world politics and the potential exists to transform it into a working class, anti-capitalist  movement.

Class conscious workers should point out that because a working class, internationalist leadership  of this  movement is not yet consummated, many organizations and celebrities who are in the forefront of the movement are off  base in their political perspective.  "Let the inspections  work" ; "Give inspections more time"; "Gain UN and international support first"; "Don't do it unilaterally"; "Disarm Iraq peacefully"; "Containment works".

These slogans and views have been heard repeatedly in  the "antiwar" movement. They're flawed because the accept the framework of imperialism, which means they fall within patriotic parameters, they accept the premise of imperialist domination and capitalist exploitation. This is what has historically been called "social patriotism." It is no basis to oppose imperialist war. The working class found that out back in 1914. We must learn from history's lessons, especially when they're paid in toilers' blood.

"Win without War"  Win what? The war against terror?
That means nothing else but the goals of the exploiting capitalists--their class war against working people worldwide.

COSMOS LEFT rejects this entire framework disarming Iraq, of gaining the fig-leaf of UN approval. The UN is  an instrument of US imperialism. The UN does nothing when Israel thumbs its nose at UN resolutions and continues to illegally occupy Palestinian land and brutually enforce that occupation.

Why should Iraq disarm? Given the recent track record of US aggression against it, Iraq has every right to defend itself and protect its sovereignty. Israel is the country with weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear, which should be inspected and disarmed. Tel Avivis a far greater threat than Baghdad.

It is Washington that should be inspected and disarmed. It is Washington, not Iraq, that has terrorized the world with weapons of mass destruction. It is Washington that is the only nation to actually drop nuclear bombs on civilians, incinerating hundreds of thousands of civilians instantly. And it Washington who is terrorizing the entire world with threats of pre-emptive nuclear warfare including against non-nuclear nations.

It is Washington that has repeatedly used biological and chemical weapons, far more than Iraq. The US has no business lecturing anyone about  "gassing its own people"--let alone using it as a reason to wage war--when the US gassed 84 of its own people in Waco, Texas, in 1993, burning men, women and children alive. Washington also used biological and chemical weapons in Vietnam, Korea and Cuba, Iraq. It also contaminated its  own soldiers and its  allies' soldiers with atomic radiation, from tests conducted on American, Canadian and British soil.

Further, the source of the anthrax attacks last fall looks more and more to be from the bioweapons lab at Ft. Detrick, Maryland, in other words, from the US government, contrary to Bush's assertion right after the attacks that they were linked to Iraq.

This news dovetails with other reports that Washington has been producing biological and chemical weapons in recent years in violation of a international protocol signed by Nixon 1969, including a more lethal strain of anthrax.

The US government and its press have been dishonest in its mantra that Iraq "gassed its own people." The truth is pro-Iranian Kurds were caught in the chemical weapons crossfire between Iraq and Iran. Iranians used cynanide gas, the Iraqis used mustard gas, and the incident most referred to by the press actually involves the Iranians using cynanide.

The fact is, after the first gulf war, Iraq was effectively disarmed by the UN inspectors, illegitimate as that was, established by the victors over the defeated. The inspectors, far more than US and British bombs,  disarmed most of the biological and chemical weapons provided to Iraq by the US, Germany, France and Britain.

This is and never was about weapons of mass destruction. The prize in Bush's eyes and the class he represents is Iraqi's oil. The cabal around Bush planned to invade Iraq long before Bush became president.

Bush thought Hussein would never let the inspectors return. When Hussein said let them in, Bush was in a quandary, and it showed, for he's been dissing the inspectors ever since. The fact is the inspectors have found nothing. Zilch. The International Atomic Energy Agency reported there's no evidence Iraq has or is building nuclear weapons. They've already disputed the lies Bush keeps recycling that Iraq is using aluminum tubes for centrifuges to enrich uranium.

Doesn't matter. Either way Bush was going to war. If they found weapons, he'd invade. If they didn't, and they haven't, Bush was going to war anyway. The whole thing was a setup. You  can't prove a double negative. If Bush and Blair had evidence,  they would have shown it by  now.

Today we're hearing that on February 5 Powell will present some of the secret intelligence Washington claims will prove that Iraq has been deceiving the inspectors and hiding its biological and chemical weapons.

At first we heard they had satellite photographs, which would mean little and should be greeted with suspicion since Washington claimed satellites showed in 1990 that Iraq was massing 250,000 on the Saudi border. No  one checked, but it was proven to be a lie when a Russian commercial satellite firm showed no such event.

Today we heard that the "smoking gun" Powell will allegedly produce Feb. 5 is NSA electronic intercepts of Iraqi government communications that supposedly "prove" Iraq is hiding weapons of mass destruction from the inspectors.

Right. We've seen how above board the NSA is. These are the clowns who just happened to intercept al-Qaeda  conversations about zero hour on Sept. 10, but poor them, they didn't have the people to translate it in time. Rumsfeld was none too happy with Orrin Hatch when  he revealed this following 911.

Yes, the NSA, who had all sorts of taps on intercepted conversations after 911 but had no clue before that date. Except for that Sept. 10 zero hour call they didn't have time to translate.

And didn't this same NSA destroy all records concerning 911?

The point is, trust nothing from Washington. Nothing. Since they have no evidence, they will fabricate it, they will provoke an incident, they will manufacture fraudulent videos of bin Laden, they will doctor or fabricate tapes.

Remember these are the people who brought you the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, the tale of Iraqi soldiers stealing babies from incubators, and the satellite photos of 250,000 Iraqi  troops at the Saudi border in 1990, which showed no such thing.

Already we're hearing that what the NSA does claim to
capture on tape proves nothing. Gee, big surprise. It'll be alleged intercepts of alleged Iraqi agents allegedly talking about deceiving the inspectors. Powell will prove nothing, except how desperate, dishonest and barbaric the imperialists and their political  stooges truly are.

But even if the UN inspectors found any proscribed weapons, the world should still oppose a US-led war against the people of Iraq. The issue is the self determination and sovereignty of the Iraqi people. We should stand shoulder to shoulder with the Iraqi working class and demand that Washington and its imperialist allies end the sanctions and aggression and the illegal no-fly zones and organize an emergency international aid effort to help Iraq rebuild its country and heal its sick. Iraq has a sovereign right not to disarm. The first government that should be disarmed, the "greatest purveyor of violence in the world," to quote Rev. King, is Washington.
The war criminals in the Pentagon, White House, CIA, should be tried before international people's tribunals for the atrocities they committed in Afghanistan and what's to come in Iraq. A group of 100 lawyers recently warned  the White House they could be guilty of war crimes in the coming war on Iraq. The only country to actually drop nuclear bombs on civilians has no moral authority to demand that any nation unilaterally disarm.

The  American ruling class is in the midst of a war fever and blood lust because capitalism is in a deepening crisis and that's their only answer to it. Working people will pay in blood for the capitalists' crisis and their rapacious drive for profits and world domination. This is all about the US capitalist class grabbing Iraqi oil to crush OPEC and clubbing the euro currency to prop up the dollar. War contractors and oil companies will profit; working people from America to Iraq will suffer.

The Pentagon has announced they're planning a blitzkreig in the opening days of the invasion, raining 400 cruise missiles a day on Baghdad. "Shock and awe" these war pigs are calling it. This is a preemptive act of naked military aggression that surpasses what the Nazis accomplished.

No wonder the Bush gang bribed and coerced the international community a while back into exempting the US from war crimes prosecutions.

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Ten thousand demonstrated in Pittsburgh last week.

Protest actions are breaking out all over America.

On January 30th cops attacked University of Colorado students with pepper spray for refusing to end their teach-in against the war.

The White House was forced to cancel a poetry reading with Laura Bush on Thursday, Jan. 30th, because all  signs pointed to it turning into an antiwar reading.

From London we hear that the city government has refused to allow demonstrators to rally in Hyde Park on Feb. 15th. The so-called democratic governments continue  to reveal how repressive and totalitarian they are when they wage their criminal and aggressive wars.

February 15th is building all across the US and the world.
New York, Chicago, London, will demonstrate again the international opposition  to imperialist war and the potential to build mass socialist parties based on anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism, and internationalist worker solidarity.
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On January 18th the world spoke with one voice: No War! In addition to the nearly half million in DC and another 300,000 in San Francisco, many tens of  thousands protested  against US aggression all over the world, from Bonn to Cologne to Moscow to Tokyo to Amsterdam to Paris to Greece to Beirut and beyond, sent a clear message to Bush, Blair and  Sharon and the rest of the war criminals in their Axis of Evil: you will pay a high political price for your crimes against humanity.

The protests are making a difference and complicating matters diplomatically for Bush--particularly in a country like Turkey, where polls show 80% opposed to an invasion of Iraq. The weak bourgeois Turkish regime is feeling the pressure from the masses, which is why it just told Bush he could only send 15,000  American soldiers through Turkey, not the 80,000 the US wanted.

And God bless the North Koreans for exposing the double standard and hypocrisy behind Washington's weapons of mass production pretext  to attack Iraq. North Korea has no oil, but it does have a tough army, and weapons that could level Seoul. The US remembers well how the North Koreans kicked the Americans' ass 50 years ago. Iraq is weak and virtually defenseless, with a helluva lot of oil. The Pentagon  are cowards and b ullies, not so tough with an enemy that is organized and can fight back. The US wasn't  so quick to pick a fight with  the Soviets, or even the Cubans. It would think twice about tangling with the Vietnamese again too.

Bush blunders from East Asia to Latin America. His CIA's attempt to subvert Venezuelan president Chavez's government is backfiring badly. The oil strike caused  by the CIA-backed unrest is cutting off an  oil  supply that would be crucial if an Iraq war disrupts Middle Eastern oil.

Besides Bush, Rumsfeld and their gang of war  criminals, the biggest losers from the January 18 triumph  are "expert" bourgeois pundits like Nation writer David Corn, who confidently predicted that the antiwar movement would never grow and attrack "mainstream" American with Workers World at the helm.

So much for Corn's political sagacity. ANSWER just mobilized 300,000-400,000 in San Francisco and DC, the latter in frigid temperatures. To be fair, ANSWER was not the sole source of organizing energy and talents responsible for the huge turnout. Yes, they provided the spark and an outlet for masses of people to vent their outrage against US militarism, but there were many other groups and individuals who contributed to Jan. 18th. There's been  an explosion of grassroots organizing throughout  the country, based on  the Internet but including a myriad of veterans groups, churches, high school and college groups, women's organizations, environmentalists, unions, community and seniors organizations. And reformist groups like Not  in our Name and Moveon played key roles too, and was reflected in the broad layers of the demonstrators who haven't fully figured out the imperialist dynamics of this war.

Corn's crudely redbaited ANSWER on the O'Reilly Factor (discussed further on "Oh Really O'Reilly" (2001-2003) was met with well-deserved contempt. While few listen to Corn, ANSWER, for all their flaws, articulated demands that resonated with broad layers of the population. They exposed Washington's lies about Iraq, they presented fact sheets proving that the US and Israel are the rogue states terrorizing peoples with weapons of mass destruction, that the US is the only government to ever use nuclear weapons and incinerate hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians instantly, that the US is the only  government who used biological weapons in the first gulf war, that the US slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Iraqis in that war, committing horrendous war crimes in the process, that the US-sponsored sanctions have killed a million  Iraqi children, and that this is a colonial war of conquest for control of oil, that Iraq had absolutely nothing to do with 911 and al-Qaeda, but Bush and the CIA sure did.

People responded to these facts. The opponents of the Jan. 18 protests can only redbait the organizers; they are losing the battle for the minds of the people; they are losing on the political battlefield of ideas. They've worked overtime ignoring the growing antiwar, anti-imperialist movement that's been mushrooming all across the country; they did their best to ignore the big success of October 26th, which laid  the foundation for January 18th.
They've propagated the myth that most Americans back Bush.

And then a half million citizens showed up in DC in subfreezing weather to say no to war on Iraq.

And that's freaking out the network talking heads. They're among the biggest losers from Jan. 18. They're pissed that their propaganda isn't working. CNN's Aaron Brown threw a fit on the air because he's getting deluged with emails that accuse CNN and the rest of the corporate media of warmongering and profiting  from it. When the soporific Brown gets that emotional, you know the ruling class is in trouble.

Brown was probably grumpy after receiving a penetrating
email from Truthout's William Rivers Pitt, who convincingly refuted Brown's weak response to the war profiteering charge by pointing out that CNN had made its bones from the first gulf war, that CNN propagandized for Washington's aggression against Iraq in its distorted coverage of the empty arms munition shells, erroneously called "chemical warheads" by  the network.

Rivers left out the constant visual drumbeat of militarism and jingoism always in CNN's background, banners reading Target Iraq, Countdown Iraq, Showdown with Iraq, etc. He also didn't mention the obvious connections, like the fact that GE owns MSNBC, and GE is a major military contractor and war profiteer.

CNN's Wolf Blitzer is another war propagandist who's been foaming at the mouth lately. Recently, after an articulate spokesperson for the antiwar perspective was too impressive in his master of the facts, Blitzer had to drop all pretense to objectivity and go out of his way to get the last word in, mindlessly repeating such sophisticated formulations as "You don't support Saddam Hussein, do you?" This is what they're reduced to; this is what passes for professional journalism in the capitalist media.

If Wolf keeps this up COSMOS LEFT will have to devote a page to excoriating him.

The Jan. 18 DC rally was still in progress and the TV stooges were already falsely characterizing the protest as a means of putting pressure on Bush to give the inspectors more time.

But the sentiment that clearly dominated the crowd was expressed in slogans like "US Hands Off Iraq! No War! Money for Jobs, Not War!"

Yes, there were a lot of participants who  possess illusions of all kinds--pacifist illusions, illusions in UN and the inspectors, illusions in the Democratic Party. And there were too many Democratic speakers--Jackson, Sharpton, Conyers, McKinney--who  offered platitutdes and rhetoric but couldn't explain how virtually their entire party backs Bush on the war. This speaks to the class collaborationist weakness of Workers World in orienting toward this wing of the Democrats.

Ramsey Clark cut from a different cloth than these Democratic representatives. The Lincolnesque former Attorney  General under LBJ has broken from the power structure and represents the most left wing of the capitalist class, but he's hanging by a thread to the capitalists politically, for his heart and mind are with the working class.  He's a man of great integrity and respect who's fought tirelessly against US war crimes and atrocities for many years, from Central America to the Balkans to Iraq. He just still has illusions that capitalism can be reformed.

Clark gave a rousing speech that called for Bush's impeachment for high crimes and treason, citing Bush's violations of the Constitution with his Patriot Act and illegal detentions, and his wars against Afghanistan and Iraq, and violations of the Geneva Convention and UN Charter for war crimes in  Afghanistan  and Iraq.  Clark announced that a Web site would be operational in a few days that would spearhead the impeachment drive.

Impeachment's not the answer, because impeaching Bush doesn't eliminate the causes and need for the capitalists to pursue these reckless, criminal policies, and there will be someone else in line to replace him. Remember too that the overwhelming majority of Democrats and Republicans supported Bush on the war and the Patriot Act, as well as the tax cuts.

While an impeachment campaign could take off and shake things up and serve as a useful organizing and radicalizing tool, and would certainly cause Bush fits, impeachment fosters illusions that the system can be reform, illusions Clark still clings to but which are part of the problem in front of us.

Still, the underlying politics of the crowd was anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist.  And what's troubling the rulers is that they can't dismiss this crowd as fringe radicals, hippies, anti-globalist anarchists left over from Seattle. This was a broad, diverse, working class crowd, and not a few middle class folks as well, full of families, white workers, Blacks, Latinos, Arabs, Asians, women, young people and unions was especially striking.

Also encouraging about Jan. 18 was the significant participation of labor unions. The San Francisco march was bolstered by the dozens of Bay  Area labor councils that oppose this war and mobilized its members to the rally. Similarly, the DC action was strengthened by sizable union involvement from New York City labor groups and a strong, weighty input from Chicago,  where local unions are actively organizing against a US war.

We are seeing a glimpse of the future. Working people are responding to and supporting anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist demands articulated by Marxists. This shows how David Corn was dead wrong when he said as long as Workers World was sponsoring antiwar protests, they would never grow, that WW would alienate "mainstream" America, that they weren't respectable like he is.

January 18 proved once again how politically bankrupt Corn really is. It's precisely BECAUSE communists are organizing the demonstrations that the movement is skyrocketing.

Because you can't build a movement against imperialist war if it isn't anti-capitalist, if it doesn't explain the roots of America's war drive lie in the profit drive and the crisis of capitalism. Imperialist militarism is erupting because the world capitalist system is in the throes of a deepening crisis. The US will invade Iraq to control its oil and dominate the Middle East in order to defeat its capitalist rivals in Europe and Japan. It also goes to war because of the deepening economic crisis inside the US, where the social and class contradictions are building with no solutions in sight coming from either capitalist party. The neocon hawks and Wall Street see the conquest of such a huge supply of Iraqi oil as a way of buttressing the US domestic economy.

That's where all the liberal redbaiters are so wrong. If you're not anticapitalist,  you can't explain the cause of these wars and you can't build an effective movement against  them.

That's the flaw of libertarian antiwar forces like Justin Raimondo from Antiwar.com. Mr. Raimondo does an excellent job of presenting the facts which expose the lies of the Bush and pro war forces, and he's obviously devoting much time and energy toward stopping this war.
But as a libertarian he's pro-capitalist, and because of that his articles disarm working people politically.

Of course liberal redbaiters like Corn are just jealous that  they're being  passed over for socialists. Right wing redbaiters like David Horowitz, Sean Hannity, and Bill O'Reilly attack Workers World out of fear. They see the handwriting on the wall. That explains the foam visible at the corners of their mouths.

COSMOS LEFT has profound political disagreements with Workers World on many key issues of world politics,  including the pro-Democrat, class collaborationist orientation of the Jan. 18 march.  These flaws originated when Sam Marcy capitulated to Stalinism over 40 years ago.

But COSMOS LEFT will defend Workers World against any and all attacks by pro-capitalists, redbaiting liberals and all class enemies. They  should be commended for their tremendous organizing energy and talents that have successfully mobilized almost a million people in 2 national demonstrations against another US war. ANSWER has accomplished this in the face of a relentless campaign of psychological warfare and  misinformation waged by the imperialist government and media.

COSMOS LEFT will elaborate on its differences with Workers World in future essays. It would be phenomenal  if we could figure out a way to combine the organizing talents of Workers World, the theoretical, intellectual and analytical skills of World Socialist Web Site, and the Socialist Workers Party's revolutionary  program, tradition, achievements, and historical ties to the Russian Revolution.

Perhaps the day when the US working class actually does sift through the various communist tendencies to cobble together a revolutionary Marxist party is sooner  than we think. January 18th illuminated the huge gulf that exists between official bourgeois society and the working class. The foundation is being laid for the building of a mass socialist party in the United States.

"We must patiently explain. The masses will come to us--they have no alternative."--Lenin

"We are going to export death and violence to every corner of the globe in defense of our great nation."--George W. Bush

Ten to fifteen thousand protesting in Los Angeles; 2400 in Chicago, another 2500 in Minnesota. Eighty percent
of Turkey's population oppose a US war on Iraq; 75 percent of the English say no; a Time.europe poll showed 71 percent believe Washington was the biggest threat to peace in the world, as opposed to 18% who think Iraq is and 11% who selected Iraq.

Huge demonstrations are coming in Washington, San Francisco and London. The world is speaking with one voice against this war; only the oil companies and military contractors and their stooges in the US government want this war, for oil and domination of the Middle East.

We won't be strong enough to stop them, but we are and will make them pay a high price, and out of the worldwide resistance to their aggression will emerge a revolutionary workers movement that will end this madness once and for all.--January 2003

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On October 26th, 150,000 Americans demonstrated in   Washington DC against the coming US invasion of Iraq. Another 100,000 mobilized in San Francisco to protest  the planned slaughter of Iraqi civilians so that US oil corporations can dominate the huge oil reserves in Iraq.
The New  York Times and NPR didn't see it that way. They initially  reported that only thousands showed up in DC, and that rally organizers were disappointed.

But after an avalanche of emails, letters, faxes and phone calls, first the NPR and then the Times were forced to run humiliating about-face articles that were far closer to reality.

COSMOS LEFT was one of those who put the pressure on the Times to repudiate its biased reporting and rewrite its account of the demonstration. Reprinted below is Nivek's initial letter to the Times, followed by a response by Bill Borders, NY Times senior editor, and a final answer from Nivek.

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Lynette Clemetson’s “Thousands March in Washington Against Going to War in Iraq” (10/27/02) grossly misrepresents the size and import of the October 26 protests that occurred throughout the US and around the world. First, there were not “thousands of protesters” in DC; there were close to 200,000. Second, “The rally was one of several held in American and foreign cities” does not capture the magnitude of dissent that was expressed on that historic  day.

Clemetson neglects to mention that 100,000 mobilized in San Francisco; 10,000 marched  in St. Paul; 5,000 showed up in Denver; 2,500 in Augusta,  Maine; and thousands more demonstrated in Spokane, Anchorage, Nashville, Houston, San Antonio, Palm Beach, Des Moine, Poughkeepsie, Port Huron, East Lansing, Charlotte, Oregon and Vermont.

Accurate and honest reporting would have deemed fit to print the following news: 30,000 demonstrated in Berlin; 1,500 in Frankfurt; 500 in Hamburg; 1,500 rain-soaked protesters marched in Copenhagen; and thousands more protested in Stockholm, Paris, Rome, Tokyo, Seoul, and Puerto Rico.

The entire tone of Clemetson’s piece was negative--organizers allegedly disappointed in the turnout; participants attributing this to the sniper shootings. While the turnout may very well have been bigger if there’d been no shootings, every rally organizer and participant I spoke to was thrilled with the huge numbers. The snipers were barely mentioned throughout the day. The topic of conversation from one end of the rally to the other was the daily exposure of the Bush administration’s lies regarding Iraq, despite the best efforts of a servile corporate media.

Of course, if the premise of Clemetson’s reporting was true--that only thousands turned out in DC, then the disproportionate amount of space devoted to the sniper shootings would make sense. But the true number was closer to a quarter of a million people, so here the sniper discussion was another attempt by the press to exploit the shootings for political purposes.

The pro-government bias of Clemetson and her editors prevented the Times from providing its readers a truthful account of the October 26 worldwide protests against US  aggression. Clemetson and the rest of the mainstream media are doing everything they can to minimize and understate the growing international revulsion for Washington’s war drive. The shoddiness of her reporting is nothing more than a reflection of the media’s frustration and desperation that their censorship and blackouts are not working.