You know we’re in trouble when some of the best news coverage is coming from The Onion :

U.S. Continues Proud Tradition Of Diversity On Front Lines
CAMP COYOTE, KUWAIT?With blacks and Hispanics comprising more than 60 percent of the Army’s ground forces in Iraq, the U.S. military is continuing its long, proud tradition of multiculturalism on the front lines of war. “Though racism and discrimination remain problems in society at large, in the military?especially in the lower ranks where you find the cannon fodder?a spirit of inclusiveness has prevailed for decades,” Gen. Jim White said Monday. “When it comes to having your head blown off by enemy fire, America is truly colorblind.”

There seems to be a lot of talk about “rape rooms” lately in defense of the war in Iraq. The Administration would love us to believe that they sent troops because they care about the Iraqi people, but if they were so concerned, then why did they wait this long? Why haven’t they gone after Sierra Leone, Kosovo, the senate Republic of Congo, and Rwanda, where raping women during conflicts is common? Why haven’t they tried to “liberate” the estimated 135 million women who have undergone forced “female circumcision” (mutilation of the clitoris and parts of the labia) which is a common procedure in much of Africa as well as Egypt, Oman, Yemen and the United Arab Emirates? Why haven’t they sought “regime change” in Ukraine, Moldova, Nigeria, the Dominican Republic, Burma, and Thailand where women have been bought and sold as sex slaves? Why is the United States the only industrialized nation that hasn’t ratified the U.N.’s Women’s Rights Treaty?

We actually know the answer to that last one. The Treaty was on its way to ratification in the senate in 1994 when the “Republican Takeover” happened and the Republican Party took over the House and senate. There it sat the the shelf for eight years because the Republicans objected to the treaty’s perceived “pro-abortion” slant as well as the treaty’s failure to reinforce gender-based stereotypes that are “anti-family”. It wasn’t until 2002 when the Democrats controlled the senate that ratification of the treaty even made it out of a senate commitee (in a 12 – 7 vote). Unfortunately, the treaty never got a full vote and has reverted back to the senate Foreign Relations Committee. (You can contact them here.)

But then again, the US has it’s own rape problems to worry about :

The Air Force acknowledges that at least 56 cases of rape or other sexual assaults at the academy have been investigated in the last 10 years, though only one male cadet has faced a court-martial as a result of any accusation, in 1995. He was acquitted. Eight other male cadets have been expelled in sexual attacks since 1996. The academy concedes that it has no records of sexual assaults in the first 20 years of women’s admission, starting in 1976.

You can find more information about global women’s rights issues here and here.

There’s something disturbing about the fact that almost all the news that’s being reported on American networks is from reporters that are closely working with the Pentagon. Isn’t the whole point of journalism to be objective and not take sides? If they have to clear everything they report through the Pentagon, then there’s no way they’re being impartial. These “embeded” reporters are essentially an information laundering operation, filtering government propaganda through their facade of objectivity. Now I expect the American media is naturally going to be biased towards American interests, but there have been too many questions going unasked and too many big stories being shrugged off or mentioned in passing in favor of showing “exclusive” footage of tanks driving through the desert or yet another long-winded speech about how revolutionary the war coverage has been. Just the other day I saw a clip of a British raid on an Iraqi compound that clearly showed a guy running around on fire. The retired general (or whoever the hell he was) was going into great detail about the military strategies involved in the raid but the news anchor never even thought to throw in a “Who was the guy on fire? Was he a good guy or a bad guy?”

I’m not the only one noticing this stuff either. Check out the great articles here, here, and here.

You’re not gonna see this kinda stuff on CNN. I guess it wouldn’t be “respectful” (read : entertaining) to show that wars kill innocent people.

Al Jazeera’s website keeps going down, so I’ve changed the references to point to thememoryhole.org (which I highly recommend)

For those of you who couldn’t hear it over the boo-ing :

Whoa. On behalf of our producers Kathleen Glynn and Michael Donovan from Canada, I’d like to thank the Academy for this. I have invited my fellow documentary nominees on the stage with us, and we would like to ? they’re here in solidarity with me because we like nonfiction. We like nonfiction and we live in fictitious times. We live in the time where we have fictitious election results that elects a fictitious president. We live in a time where we have a man sending us to war for fictitious reasons. Whether it’s the fictition of duct tape or fictition of orange alerts we are against this war, Mr. Bush. Shame on you, Mr. Bush, shame on you. And any time you got the Pope and the Dixie Chicks against you, your time is up. Thank you very much.

It’s a shame that he had to speak quickly and yell over the hecklers because he made some good points. Despite the boo-ing, I think it’s the first time I’ve ever seen someone make an overtly political statement at the Oscars without admonished by one of the later presenters. It’s obvious to me that besides the hecklers, everyone involved in the ceremony seemed to agree with Moore’s message even if they didn’t agree with the way he presented it. Even more interesting than the acceptance speech were the comments he made backstage :

I saw the entire place stand up and applaud. Applaud a film that talks about how we are manipulated by the fear that’s put forth from the white house, that’s put forth by corporate america to create a culture of violence. Violence at home and violence abroad. We kill each other at an enormous rate. More so than virtually any other country on this planet. What was the lesson that we taught the children of Columbine this week? This was the lesson : that violence is an acceptable means to resolve a conflict.

The majority of Americans don’t want your your young men and women to be hurt in this war. They want the troops to come home safe. And the majority of Americans never voted for that guy who sits in the White House. He was never elected by a majority of the citizens of this country and I’ll keep saying that until he’s outta there. Our democracy was hijacked and there’s a sqatter on federal land at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Call me crazy, call me an American, I just happen to believe it’s “one person one vote” and “you count all the votes”. What a wild idea!

The majority of americans were not for us getting in the war, are not for Bush’s policies, they’re not for drilling in Alaska. Go down the whole damn list. The majority of Americans oppose what Bush stands for. The majority of your fellow Americans are pro-choice, they’re pro-environment, they’re pro-labor, and that’s the truth. And I’m sorry to have to speak it but I don’t know what else to do.

[The ficticious reason is] that Saddam Hussein is going to kill you or I tonight. That’s the fiction. The non-fiction is that we’re over there because they’re got the second largest supply of oil in the world.

…then how can we be so sure they’re hitting the right buildings? So far I’ve seen reports of a “stray” missle going into Iran and another one hitting a Syrian passenger bus. It’s disgusting to think about how many innocent people are going to die because Bush didn’t have enough patience to allow the weapons inspectors to finish their job.

That’s the message that the Republicans are sending :

By a vote along party lines, the majority members of the House Budget Committee passed and reported for a vote by the House a budget resolution that would cut $844 million from veterans? medical care next year and $9.7 billion over the next 10 years. In addition, the budget resolution would cut $15 billion from the disability compensation and other benefit programs over the next 10 years. The House leadership are pushing these cuts to offset the cost of the President?s $1.57 trillion tax reduction plan.

Jeez, that’s as bad as cutting funding to firefighters after 9/11. Oh wait, they did that too.

Just when I was starting to think “Shock and Awe” was just a bluff, the air assault on Iraq began. There’s a shocking article about the current attacks in the Sydney Morning Herald that includes this interesting tidbit (as well as the quote above) :

A legal expert at the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva said the use of napalm or fuel air bombs was not illegal “per se” because the US was not a signatory to the 1980 weapons convention which prohibits and restricts certain weapons.

But napalm isn’t the only “frowned upon” weapon being used by U.S. Forces. The Australian governement went as far as issuing this statement :

Australian troops in Iraq will operate under stricter rules of engagement than their U.S. comrades and will avoid use of land mines and cluster bombs, a defense spokesman said Friday.

For more information about the use of landmies, you can check out the full text of the U.N. Anti-Landmine Treaty (which the U.S. refuses to sign) here and get some more information about one of the campaigns to ban mines here.

The Washington Post has a good article about the various lies that the Bush Administration have been repeating to justify the current slaughter in Baghdad.

In his appearance Sunday, on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” the vice president argued that “we believe [Hussein] has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons.” But Cheney contradicted that assertion moments later, saying it was “only a matter of time before he acquires nuclear weapons.” Both assertions were contradicted earlier by Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, who reported that “there is no indication of resumed nuclear activities.”

Also, there’s an excellent post about the war here that sums up why this war is unjust a lot better than I could.

Bush seems pretty excited about this war for a guy who went AWOL.

Minutes before the speech, an internal television monitor showed the president pumping his fist. “Feels good,” he said.

Here’s a sobering blog from and Iraqi guy named Raed :

No one inside Iraq is for war (note I said war not a change of regime), no human being in his right mind will ask you to give him the beating of his life, unless you are a member of fight club that is, and if you do hear Iraqi (in Iraq, not expat) saying ?come on bomb us? it is the exasperation and 10 years of sanctions and hardship talking. There is no person inside Iraq (and this is a bold, blinking and underlined inside) who will be jumping up and down asking for the bombs to drop. We are not suicidal you know, not all of us in any case.

…
What is bringing on this rant is the question that has been bugging for days now: how could ?support democracy in Iraq? become to mean ?bomb the hell out of Iraq?? why did it end up that democracy won?t happen unless we go thru war? Nobody minded an un-senate Iraq for a very long time, now people have decided to bomb us to democracy? Well, thank you! how thoughtful.

Just in case the was any doubt about the illegality of the upcoming war, this is being reported by Reuters :

President Bush and his allies are unlikely to face trial for war crimes although many nations and legal experts say a strike on Iraq without an explicit U.N. mandate breaches international law.

Shouldn’t someone remind the Bush what he said 48 hours ago?

War crimes will be prosecuted, war criminals will be punished and it will be no defense to say, “I was just following orders.”

In the ongoing quest to get a UN Resolution to use force against Iraq, the Bush administration has been offering billions of dollars in bribes (they prefer the term “aid”) to the undecided members of the Security Council. Aren’t there more important things to be spending that money on?