THE FLASHLIGHT, April 20-27, 2007

THE FLASHLIGHT, April 20-27, 2007

US Violence

[News media this week focused their attention on the murder of 32 students and Virginia Technical College on 4-21 by a student of South Korean origin. The coverage may have been exaggerated because there was little news of importance elsewhere. The event was unusual because of the high number of casualties and the college context. This college plays an important role in preparing students for the military.]

PBS 4-21. There is a federal law against selling guns to the mentally ill, but it is up to the states to enforce it, and the states provide little oversight. Moreover, the killer in this case, Seung-Hui Cho, was able to buy one of his guns on the Internet. He had been diagnosed as mentally ill two years before, but he ignored the call for outpatient treatment and was not committed to an institution.
A child from a poor immigrant family, Cho had a sister who graduated from Princeton. He was apparently a disappointment to his parents. His case had the following characteristics typical of school shooter: 1) he spoke little, behaved strangely as a child and was bullied in school 2) he had no adult whom he trusted and could talk to 3) he talked of suicide and what he planned to do before acquiring a weapon. 4) He was paranoid: he thought the world was against him. The college said that it did not have enough psychological counselors to deal with the need,

US Economy
CNN 4-23. Gasoline prices are expected to rise to $4.00 a gallon next month.
PBS 4-26. The Dow Jones Industrial Average reached an all-tune high of 13,050. But housing was weak: existing home sales fell sharply in March.

Iraq : Mercenaries

4-20. The Daily Show, Comedy Central. Jon Steward interviewed Jeremy Cahill, author of Blackwater, a major military contractor in Iraq. It has a $750 million contract with the State Department to provide private soldiers for service there. Some are paid $30,000 a month. They are better trained and equipped than the regular US military. They may also have a higher casualty rate: their casualties are not counted in the official US toll. They are exempt from the usual military codes of behavior.
The number of private contractors in Iraq according to the author is 126,000 (Rep, Murtha: 125,000). The percentage of military contractors in this total is not known.
[When the US withdraws its official military forces from Iraq, it may not have to withdraw these mercenaries. The oil companies who win contracts with the Iraqi government can hire the mercenaries as security guards.]
Iraq: Oil
4-20. Times Herald in Google News. New estimates of Iraq’s oil reserves have increased from 116 million barrels to 200 million: the new reserves are thought to be in the Western desert.
4-25. Az-Zaman. The Iraq Kurds opposed the new oil law.
Turkish and Canadian firms have signed agreements to develop oil in northern Iraq; Ireland, to develop it in the southern part.

Iraqi Suffering

NY Times 4-22 and FCNL 4-27. An estimated 100 Iraqis are dying per day. Two-thirds have no clean water. With half the doctors gone, the health care system is near collapse.
. About two million Iraqis are displaced within Iraq. Another two million are refugees in Syria and Jordan. Kuwait is closed to refugees and Saudi Arabia is closing. The US, on account of tight security requirements, has accepted only 500 Iraqi refugees.

The Sunni neighbors of Iraq

Several Arab countries are planning a conference next May 3-4 at Sharm ash-Sheikh (Egypt) to replace withdrawing American troops. Two Sunni countries – Egypt and Saudi Arabia – plan to occupy the Sunni areas of northern Iraq. [This would balance the heavy involvement of Iranian Shias in the Shia areas of the south.] The conference affirmed emphatically that all American troops had to be withdrawn from Iraq.

Science: Salt and Health

A reduction of salt intake by 25 – 35% has been found to reduce the risk of a heart attack or stroke by 25% - 30% in the following fifteen years.

THE FLASHLIGHT, April 14-20, 2007

THE FLASHLIGHT, April 14-20, 2007

The World
Climate Change

PBS 4-13, In a book called Deep Economy, Bill McKibben said that we must cut down drastically on carbon emissions during the next ten years. This will require Americans to scale down the size of their economy and to change their life style. He recommended increased use of farmer’s markets (now booming) to cut down on the cost of gasoline for transporting food over long distances to market. He recommended that solar panels be routinely placed on the roofs of houses. By these and other measures we should aim at cutting carbon emissions by 80% in 2050.

NYT 4-15. Americans used 100 billion plastic bags a year. They are made from petroleum and are it takes a thousand years, more or less, for them to biologically degrade. San Francisco is the first major city to ban plastic bags from large grocery stores and drugstores. It’s aim is to cut plastic bag use by 80%.

PBS 4-14. Terrorism: Suicide Bombing
The global war on terrorism is failing: suicide bombing is on the rise. Some Muslim clerics are trying to legitimize by portraying it as a heroic attack on an enemy target. They depict he occupation of Iraq, a Muslim country, as evil.
Suicide bombers are seen by many as “martyrs without borders.” Suicide bombing is globalized: Al-Qaeda is on the march, not on the run.

Iraq

` PBS 4-14. Al-Qaeda claimed responsibility for bombing the Iraqi Parliament Building.
PBS 4-17. Four car bombings in Baghdad, 183 dead, mostly Shia. Moqtada as-Sadr demands that Maliki set a deadline for US withdrawal.
NYTimes 4-20. Harry Reid, Democratic Majority Leader of the Senate, says that the “surge” is useless and the Iraq War is lost.

CNBC 4-15. George Tenet has written a book which is about to be published. In it he defends himself and the CIA against charges that they distorted or manipulated intelligence on the prospects for the invasion and occupation of Iraq. He denies the famous “slam-dunk” quotation, saying that the CIA warmed that even if the invasion was easy, the aftermath would be very difficult to manage. Tenet says that Vice President Cheney was responsible for the manipulation of intelligence.
One CNBC commentator, David Ignatius, said that blaming the CIA was incorrect because both American political leaders and the American public were very ignorant about the Middle East.
The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

In an article in the New York Review of Books, “Israel, America, and AIPAC,” (April 12, 2007” billionaire George Soros, a non-practicing Jew, accused the Bush Administration of making a major blunder by refusing to recognize the Palestinian Unity Government so long as it includes Hamas. Soros says that Hamas is not monolithic, and its political arm is more interested in compromise with the Israelis than its military arm. Moreover, he said that no peace settlement is possible without the support of Hamas. He said it was also a blunder to support Israel for withholding millions in taxes owed to the Palestinians.
Soros said that the Israel Lobby, AIPAC, is close to the neocons, and was an “enthusiastic supporter of the Iraq War.”
[The text of this article may be found on the Internet.]

US Politics: Justice Department Scandal

NYTimes 4-19. On Thursday Attorney General Alberto Gonzales put on a miserable performance testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, and all but one Republican Senator express strong dissatisfaction with him. Senator Spector said that the testimony of Gonzales was “significantly if not totally at variance with the facts.”
CNN 4-13. It was also reported that five million emails messages sent from Karl Rove to the Republican Naitonal Committee have been deleted. Senator Leahy (D) said that deletion was nearly impossible. Deleting or damaging White House documents was made illegal after the Watergate scandal.
Washington Post 4-4. In an article, “Delete does not mean disappear,”
It takes years for a computer, especially one with a big hard drive, to chew up deleted messages. Even encrypted mail cannot conceal the subject, addresses, date, and time of the message.

Science: Sexual Abstinence Program Fails Completely

Associated Press 4-14. This study, by Mathematica Policy Research of Princeton, N. J. had a control group: students outside of the government’s multimillion dollar program promoting sexual abstinence among young teenagers. Those studied were 16 years and six months at time of study. Those who had been in the program were given no information about condoms and other forms of birth control.
The students in the program and those in the control group had the same average time of first sexual intercourse: 14 years and 9 months. They had the same number of sexual partners. In both groups half of the students had sex before the age of sixteen years six months, and half did not.
In the current year $100 million dollars of federal money were spent on the program. The report recommended that the program be discontinued.

The Flashlight, April 6-13, 2007

THE FLASHLIGHT, April 6 – 13, 2007

World Bank Scandal

NY Times 4-13. There is a lively scandal about the President of the World Bank, Paul Wolfowitz, and his “companion” of two years, Shaha Ali Riza, a graduate of the London School of Economics and Oxford and “companion” of Dr. Wolfowitz. Wolfowitz is charged with directly arranging a large salary increase for his companion at the time of her transfer to the State Department. She is currently working there under the direction of Elizabeth Cheney, daughter of the Vice-President. Shaha’s salary was increased from $132,660 to $193,500, tax free because she has diplomatic status. This might have been overlooked if Wolfowitz were not very unpopular among World Bank employees for his role in planning the Iraq War. They regard him as unqualified to run the Bank and booed him when he gave a speech to them recently.

Paul Wolfowitz is legally separated from his wife, Clare. Shaha Ali Riza is divorced from her Cypriot Turkish husband, Bulent Ali Riza. She is a Muslim, born in Tripoli, Libya. Her father is a Libyan and her mother a Saudi-Syrian. She is an ardent feminist and a specialist in Middle Eastern affairs. Wolfowitz was the leader of the hawk clique in the Bush Administration.

Iraq

NYTimes 4-11. During the demonstration in Najaf several hundred people shredded and burned American flags and said, “Death to America” “Leave, leave occupier!” The story was underplayed by the US press.

PBS 4-11. More than half of Iraqi doctors have fled the country and hospitals have a severe shortage of them.

NYTimes editorial 4-12. “There is no possible triumph in Iraq and very little hope left.”

NYTimes 4-12—4-13. A suicide bomber was able to penetrate the Green Zone in Baghdad and to set off an explosion just outside the doors of the chamber of the Iraqi Parliament building. The number of dead is uncertain. It is thought that the bomber sneaked in as a member of the entourage of a member of Parliament. Such individuals do not have to be searched. The staff of the US Embassy in the Green Zone was untouched. They never leave the Embassy, which has additional very strict security even though it is within the Green Zone.

About the same time a truck bomb blew up the Sarafia Bridge across the Tigris River. It was built 60 years ago and many Baghdadis grieved for its loss. About 70% of its steel structure was destroyed. The bomber drove his truck to the middle of the bridge and abandoned it. An Iraqi looked inside the cab and saw detonators. He fled. Ten minutes later the truck blew up.

US News

2008 Presidential campaign. Move-On.org poll.
Among democrats, Obama (1) and Edwards (2) lead in the polls. [The worse the situation in Iraq, the more it hurts Hilary Clinton’s ratings.]
4-8. NBC. Hilary accepts money from PACs – lobby money; Obama does not. Edwards is showing himself to be better informed and tougher than in 2000..

Infiltration of the federal government by people with a fundamentalist religious agenda:

NYTimes 4-13, Paul Krugman. In the last six years large numbers of people with a fundamentalist religious agenda have been appointed to federal jobs.. Many are graduates of Regent University, founded and headed by televangelist Pat Robertson. Monica Goodling, a graduate of the law school of this University, was recently forced to resign from the Justice Department, where she served as counsel to Alberto Gonzales. The Reverends Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell agree that the 9/11 attack was the responsibility of “the pagans, the abortionists, feminists, gays and lesbians and the ACLU.”

The Flashlight, Mar. 31 - Apr. 5

THE FLASHLIGHT, March 31 – April 5, 2007

Editorial note. The editor will henceforth be consulting regularly the Arabic newspaper Az-Zaman, (The Times), an independent journal published in Baghdad but based in London. Translations from the Arabic are this editor’s. M. Matossian.

The Iraq War

While the White House and Congress joust, an authoritative voice came from Maj. Gen. (ret.), Robert H. Scales, who, writing in The Washington Times 3-30, said: “We’re running out of soldiers faster than we’re running out of war fighting missions. The troops will be coming home soon. There simply are too few to sustain the surge for very much longer.”

Az.Zaman 4-5. The al-Maliki government is emptying the bodies from the morgue refrigerators in Baghdad and burying them in mass graves outside Karbala and Najaf. The government tries to keep the number secret, but a local source in Karbala says that since last June 2,252 bodies have been buried outside Karbala alone. Most bodies show evidence of torture with electric drills and acid fluids. The government forbids funerals at the mass graves. It also forbids journalists from covering the burials.

Supreme Court ruling on Global Warming

4-3. NY Times editorial, says “it is hard to overstate the importance” of the Supreme Court’s environmental rulings. The Court criticized the Environmental Protection Agency for failing to regulate emissions from cars, trucks and coal-fired plants, which it had the authority to do under the present Clean Air Act. However, some commentators said Congress too must take action to improve the situation.

Presidential Campaign 2008

For the first time on record, the Democratic candidates for President raised more money ($80 million) than the Republican candidates ($50 million) in the first three months of this year. Hilary Clinton raised $26 million, Barack Obama, $25 million, and the Mormon Republican, Mitt Romney, $23 million, although he is only third in the Republican polls.

Mexican abortion law

NY Times 3-31. A bill to permit legal abortion on demand in the national legislature is causing an uproar. Leftists and feminists complain about the total lack of contraceptives and the danger of illegal abortions, which are common among the poor. Mexico exports many illegal emigrants because it is overpopulated and cannot provide nearly enough jobs. The population of Mexico City is now eight million and air pollution is severe there.

Israel/Palestine

NYTimes 4-1. No rockets have been fired at Israel since last November, but Israel warns that Hamas is building tunnels and concrete bunkers in Gaza and smuggling in missiles and explosives. This was the tactic used by Hizbollah in southern Lebanon.

God and Sex

CNN 4-5. Special program on “Sex and Salvation.” With Anderson Cooper, one hour. Matt Keller, an evangelical preacher of the Next Level Church in Ft. Myers, Florida is shown proclaiming: “God created sex. God is for sex.” But this is a bait-and-switch tactic: he means sex within marriage. He thinks sex is not ok outside of marriage.
The Bush Administration’s abstinence program to persuade adolescents to take a purity vow has been found to be unsuccessful. Having made a promise to have no sex before marriage, nine out of ten break it.
The American Psychological Association’s position is that homosexuality is not a mental disorder and does not need treatment. However, many churches try hard to treat, and many gay people try hard to change, with scant demonstrable success.