Blogging on Meds

This kid looks stoked:

Maybe its because he’s 8 years old, works long hours in the Saharan heat, barely eats and he doesn’t even have to go to school…sounds like a kids dream! The Guardian has a good story today on child labor in Egypt; specifically the ones who work in cotton fields to keep production up for “high thread count Egyptian cotton.”

Nice:

Walking across the cotton farmers’ pathetic patch of land we find half a dozen children crawling on their knees through the undergrowth, like field mice. It is early in the growing season and their vital role is to remove tiny insects and worms that threaten the cotton plants. Standing waist-high in the cotton of an adjacent field, Ahmed Khaled casts nervous glances back towards his foreman. At 10 years old he is a ‘veteran’ of the fields. His day begins at 6am harvesting onions, a reliable year-round crop; the hardest part of the day comes when he enters the cotton fields, by 8am. ‘We work up to eight hours a day,’ he says. ‘This is the hardest time, keeping the cotton safe when the sun is at its hottest. The harvest is easier – the hours are hard but the weather is cooler.’ The youngster shows me his calloused hands, the dirt ingrained in his palm. ‘I cannot read or write,’ Ahmed says. ‘We go to school when we can, but we cannot afford to. School is for rich children.’

It’s been said time and time again that the majority of Americans care more about Britney’s nasty poon, steroids in baseball and Hillary’s “bitchiness” than they do about the Iraq War. Basically, it’s true. But the ones you would expect to care, the flag pin-wearing war’s cheerleaders, don’t care either and want to keep the public in the dark about US troop deaths overseas, even when they are decorated officers whose families want America to know about their loved ones.

It’s a shame that the “love it or leave it” types in Washington and elsewhere can’t even pay respect to the men and women they ship off to get killed and maimed. Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank tells of the Pentagon’s refusal to allow media to cover the funeral of one of the most senior officers to be killed in Iraq so far at Arlington National Cemetery, even though the family wanted the media there. Lt. Col. William G. Hall was killed by an IED near Fallujah.

Journalists were held 50 yards from the service, separated from the mourning party by six or seven rows of graves, and staring into the sun and penned in by a yellow rope. Photographers and reporters pleaded with Arlington officials.

“There will be a yellow rope in the face of the next of kin,” protested one photographer with a large telephoto lens.

“This is the best shot you’re going to get,” a man from the cemetery replied.

“We’re not going to be able to hear a thing,” a reporter argued.

“Mm-hmm,” an Arlington official answered.

Media whining? Perhaps. But the de facto ban on media at Arlington funerals fits neatly with an effort by the administration to sanitize the war in Iraq. That, in turn, has contributed to a public boredom with the war. A Pew Research Center poll earlier this month found that 14 percent of Americans considered Iraq the news story of most interest — less than half the 32 percent hooked on the presidential campaign and barely more than the 11 percent hooked on the raid of a polygamist compound in Texas.

It’s a disgrace that this can’t get more coverage than a column in the Post.

Randy Rhoads, guitar god.

Randi Rhodes, whatever.

When I saw the headline “Randi Rhodes calls Hillary a ‘Big fucking whore’” I thought, “Whoa! Did Randy Rhoads, he of Ozzy Osbourne guitar ripping fame, come back from the dead to hate on Hills?” Then I realized it was just some crappy bag of hot air on Air America Radio. Yawn.

ED: if I wasn’t such a burnout, I would have remembered Lissa’s way more in depth Randi post. Kids, don’t do drugs.

Yesterday there was a pretty nasty sandstorm in Cairo. It happened to fall on the same day as a (failed) nationwide strike protesting poor working conditions, low wages and outrageous inflation, on top of everything else people are pissed off about. News from about 100km north of Cairo says at least one person was killed in clashes with police and buildings, cars, etc were torched.

It’s no secret Egypt is poor. Nearly half of the 80 million people live on less than $2 a day, subsidized bread is no longer affordable and corruption is rife all across the board. Tomorrow are nationwide municipal elections. The police have been rounding up Muslim Brotherhood members (in the hundreds) to keep them from participating, and now the MB have called for an election boycott. People are pretty fed up and the strike kept Cairo relatively quiet yesterday, but the extreme police lockdown kept people from getting too rowdy in the city. Yesterday will probably be more of the same but the government has certainly been put on notice.

Urban Sahara

The Times’ resident man-eater, Maureen Dowd, has a good column today on Hillary giving BARACK OBAMA: THE SEXIEST MAN OF ALL TIME a little schooling in the art of presidential politics.

Whether or not she wins, Hillary has already given noble service as a sophisticated political tutor for Obama, providing her younger colleague with much-needed seasoning. Who else was going to toughen him up? Howard Dean? John Edwards? Dennis Kucinich?

Obama had not been hit hard until this campaign; he sailed through his Senate race. Without Hillary, he never would have learned to be a good debater. He never would have understood how to robustly answer distorted and personal attacks. He never would have been warned about how harmful an unplugged spouse can be. He never would have realized how a luminous speech can be effective damage control.

Yuck:

Hillary has clearly raised Obama’s consciousness about the importance of courting the ladies. Touring a manufacturing plant in Allentown, Pa., Tuesday, he was flirtatious, winking and grinning at the women working there, calling one “Sweetie,” telling another she was “beautiful,” and imitating his daughters’ dance moves by twirling around.

Later, at a Scranton town hall, he went up to Denise Mercuri, a pharmacist from Dunmore wearing a Hillary button. “What do I need to do? Do you want me on my knees?” he charmed, before promising: “I’ll give you a kiss.

Go Hillz!

One of the most valuable lessons the gritty Hillary can teach the languid Obama — and the timid Democrats — is that the whole point of a presidential race is to win.

“I’m the guy behiiiiind the guy (with the M4/Glock/mustache combo) and looking spiffy in my suit n’ bootz”

The NY Times op-edders asked nine experts, proponents and architects of the Iraq War to answer some questions on the fifth anniversary of the invasion. L. Paul Bremer (the 3rd), professional terrorist fighter, terror consultant, terrorist hater, terrorist hunter, Saddam Catcher and former Lord of Baghdad answers “Where Was The Plan?” Clearly, as Lord Bremer recounts, uh, whatever. His engaging five paragraph essay says nothing. Except to hint that we’re sort of winning (again).

Our soldiers were magnificent in liberating Iraq. But after arriving in the country, I saw that the American government was not adequately prepared to deal with the growing security threats.

…

The vicious spiral was finally reversed by the change in strategy the president put in place a year ago.

Yeah, like the security threat posed by your wild west lynch mob in the above picture? It sure was fun for everyone to play cowboys and indians for a while.

Al Jazeera and China’s Xinhua news are saying 10 people are dead so far in Tibet’s capital Lhasa during anti-China riots. Chinese tanks are rolling through the streets too.

“We will deal harshly with these criminals in accordance with the law,” Champa Phuntsok, chairman of the Tibetan government, said. “Calm will be restored very soon.”

Chinese officials also asked rioters to surrender by Monday midnight if they wanted leniency.

Yeah guys, we promise…if you turn yourselves in, it’ll be all good. Don’t sweat our human rights record or the fact that we sell executed prisoners’ organs on the black market, that’s imperialist propaganda. Mao is watching!

Tibetan Freedom Fest Redux??? Good Charlie, Fallout Boi, Hannah Montana…could be brilliant!

300 Miles From Anywhere, Mauritania

• As Liberia’s lights come back on, former warlord and the man responsible for ruining that country, Charles Taylor, sits in the dock at the International Criminal Justice court in The Hague getting his due. There is a very informative blog on his trial giving hourly updates and detailed descriptions of witness testimony from the Hague, etc. The posts are really long, but the transcripts are an interesting window into just how crazy the African wars of the 1990s were.

Following up on Marzah’s [Zigzag's] testimony from yesterday, Griffiths asked him whether he had eaten many people. Marzah stated that when someone wants to kill you and your family, you kill and eat them for revenge.

He went on to say that Taylor had ordered him and other NPFL/RUF fighters to eat captured ECOMOG and white UN people, using them “as pork to eat”. He confirmed yesterday’s account of eating Superman’s heart, and said he, Benjamin Yeaten and the others had done so on Taylor’s orders. He explained in detail how victims were prepared for cooking after being killed, and cooked with salt and pepper. He said Taylor knew this.

Wow. What the hell do you say to that?

(more…)

Bummer. Yusuf Islam, the artist formerly known as Cat Stevens, has allegedly been threatened by Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb* after announcing a performance at an Islamic music fest in Oran, Algeria, forcing him to cancel. “Wild World” is such a great song too, what assholes!

*the artists formerly known as the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, one of the funnier terrorist org names ever.

Didn’t we win that thing or something? I thought we like totally had those Sunni tribal whatevers hanging out with us or something?

US news coverage of Iraq sucks. Go figure. But J-Lo had twins.

The whole PEW RESEARCH pdf here:
401p.pdf

Monrovia Pool Party ‘06

The Washington Post’s Johannesburg correspondent, Craig Timberg, has been filing some really great stories out of Africa lately. His latest is from Liberia, the once war-torn West African coke hub that is actually showing some slow signs of progress. Imagine that, a flicker of hope in an African news dispatch.

Monrovia, Liberia’s wild and crime-ridden capital is coming back to life. A semi-steady flow of electricity is coming to areas of the city, lighting up the streets and driving the number of robberies down.

So brazen were the robbers in parts of Monrovia’s Paynesville district that they often sang a terrifying serenade, “I Hear My Blessing Coming,” in the moments before they lifted their victims into the air, rifled through their pockets and ran off into the night.

Then in September — more than four years after warlord Charles Taylor stepped down as president, ending the country’s disastrous civil war — a pair of diesel generators no larger than tool sheds rumbled to life in one of Paynesville’s most lawless neighborhoods. Operated by the national power company, they produced just enough electricity to operate streetlights. The robbers retreated. The singing stopped.

The newish president, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf came to power promising changes; no small task in Liberia.

Johnson Sirleaf has repeatedly urged patience from Liberians as she attempts to cultivate a culture in which the government is seen as something more than just a source of jobs and largess. She trimmed the civil service by thousands of jobs and has made a priority of tax collection, often a neglected art in countries such as Liberia where much of the national budget is paid by international donors.

Billboards across Monrovia feature an illustration of streetlights shining on a road at night. To the side, in a separate image, a girl is pictured drinking water from a communal tap, another slow-moving success story as some neighborhoods get what Liberians call “Ellen water” in affectionate homage to their president.

Though still far from prospering, it looks like the country might stand a chance at pulling itself back up.

Now Liberians worry about the routine frustrations of citizens of poor but peaceful nations anywhere. The price of rice has spiked. Jobs are far too few. Taxes are high. Road construction has caused traffic jams and kicked up a mess of dust that irritates eyes and chokes throats.

But there also is something to celebrate.

“Light has something to do with life,” said Sarah Barpolu, 42, a mother of seven who sells ice and water by the soft radiance of the streetlights. “If there wasn’t light, we couldn’t be sitting here. Everybody would be afraid.”

In early February, Timberg write a great piece on Zimbabwe about a man forced to walk 9 miles each way to work because roundtrip bus fare costs a week’s salary.

Looks like Liberia isn’t alone in being the new transit point for cocaine traveling from Latin America to Europe. Guinea-Bissau, yet another failed/narco state in West Africa, is beginning to look a lot more like Colombia. The Guardian has a good story today about drug trafficking there, a country with no prisons and a police force that seems to be in on the smuggling. Colombian cartels are moving in and buying up walled compounds as well as politicians and cops. The coke phenomenon also seems to have taken the locals by surprise.

Guinea Bissau’s cocaine Calvary began three years ago when fishermen on one island found packages of white powder washed up on the beach. They had no idea what the mysterious substance was. ‘At first, they took the drug and they put it on their bodies during traditional ceremonies,” recalls local journalist Alberto Dabo. ‘Then they put it on their crops. All their crops died because of that drug. They even used it to mark out a football pitch’.

As though the suffocation of society by the cartels were not enough, Guinea-Bissau inevitably suffers from a proliferation of addiction among its own people. ‘Foot soldiers are paid in kind,’ says Antonio Maria Costa, ‘and whatever is left behind is sold domestically.’ With addicts hidden away in villages, many still believe that their hallucinations are the result of evil spirits.

In a country where the average wage is $1 a day, people are understandably being caught up in the flurry (uh, pun) of cash and an extravagant lifestyle.

Down a street of elaborate colonial-style buildings is Ana’s restaurant. Beneath red-tiled roofs, giant candles flicker in the gentle, humid evening breeze - it could be mistaken for an exotic tourist destination. But ‘the only visitors we get are the Colombians’, sighs Ana, ‘this country is being destroyed by drugs. They’re everywhere. A few weeks ago, the man who used to be my gardener knocked at the door and offered to sell me 7kg of cocaine.’

Crack kills (and makes you crazy):

When United Nations workers went to the country’s only excuse for a rehabilitation unit in a mangrove swamp 30km from the capital, they found a man called Bubacar Gano, who calls himself ‘the first man to smoke pedra’ - as crack cocaine is known in the country. He recalls the fishing boat that lost its load in the sea in 2005, saying: ‘Most of the locals who found the packages had no idea what it was or what to do with it. But I knew. After a while I became crazy and aggressive. But it is a difficult thing to stop smoking pedra.’

is another man’s freedom fighter.

The Washington Post gets the best story out of Iraq so far this year, I’d have to say its my favorite in the last year altogether, with writer Joshua Partlow and photographer Andrea Bruce hanging with the PKK (Kurdish Worker’s Party) in northern Iraq during and after Turkey’s recent invasion. Check out Bruce’s slideshow, there are some amazing pictures in there.

Sounds like the Turks are trying to save face:

The conclusion of the eight-day battle last Friday along Iraq’s northern border was described by Turkey’s government as the scheduled end to a successful incursion that crippled its enemies, destroying hundreds of their caves and hideouts. But ultimately the battle ended where it had begun, with the intractable guerrillas in sole control of hundreds of miles of mountainous terrain.

Turkey, the US and EU have designated the PKK a terrorist organization.

What was clear was that years in these snowcapped mountains have forged the fighters into rugged ascetics. Although they have based themselves in northern Iraq, they are oriented elsewhere, choosing even to live on Turkish time, an hour behind Iraq’s. They are based in the heart of the Islamic Middle East but are largely uninterested in religion or the cultures they abandoned in Turkey, Syria, Iran and Iraq. They relate their struggle to those of the American revolutionaries who fought the British crown, and the Cuban guerrillas who followed Fidel Castro down from the Sierra Maestra mountains.

“We are fighting for democracy, for freedom,” said Osman Delbrine, a 32-year-old guerrilla with eight years in the mountains. “We are fighting for peace and for all Kurds in all nations.”

The firsthand accounts from northern Iraq differ greatly from what the Turkish government says about the group, who they say want to overtake Ankara and piss all over their “Turkishness”.

The PKK leaders say they are no longer fighting for an independent Kurdish state, or even to replicate or expand the semiautonomous Kurdish region in Iraq. Rather, they say, they want their people to speak Kurdish in schools, to receive national identification cards, to have equal rights for women, to avoid persecution by state security forces, and to gain respect and political influence wherever they live. To walk among the guerrillas, however, is to feel some are also fighting to prolong their communal, socialist experiment and to be left alone.

“In society, in the cities, I feel like someone is choking me,” said Berivan, a 27-year-old female guerrilla. “In the mountains I feel free.”

To say that Partlow and Bruce went after the story would be an understatement:

Although the PKK welcomes visitors, the Kurdistan Regional Government of northern Iraq has tried to bar outsiders, particularly journalists, from entering the area where the authorities effectively tolerate the guerrillas. After receiving an invitation to tour the area, The Post’s journalists hiked for eight hours, first up a rocky path for herders to the top of a mountain overlooking Kurdish towns to the south, then down a precipitous slope a local guide said was littered with land mines. Along the way, it was necessary to shimmy across a steel bridge mangled by Turkish bombs and crouch below boulders when warplanes flew overhead. The mountains rang with the spatter of gunfire and the discharge of distant bombs. At dusk, the first guerrilla — wearing camouflage and carrying a Kalashnikov rifle — appeared from behind a tree in a rock-strewn ravine. Others soon emerged, and one of them held out his hand.

“Welcome to our mountain,” he said in English.

All of the political fellatio/cunnilingus in the media has reminded me that politicians are still assholes at heart. Whether its artists trying to turn Obama into a Che Guevara commodity or washed up actors/lame sports fans (Jack Nicholson) making ads for Hillz, its all corny.

Ron Paul is a racist prick/faux populist, Dennis Kucinich seriously cares about UFOs, John McCain is just straight up fucking crazy, Hillary is a sleazy, money grubbing businesswoman and Obama is a sexyman with a nice smile who’s done nothing but pat himself on the back for not voting on things when he wasn’t even in Washington yet. The list could literally go on forever. Anyone who thinks these candidates will stick to all of the platforms they’re selling is fooling themselves.

That said, I love politics. I just don’t think the smoke and mirrors routine of making politicians out to be saviors is accurate. To successfully do business in Washington, Moscow, Islamabad or wherever, you have to be a lying scumbag. We elect these people to do our dirty work. Every time I vote*, I know I’m selling myself out a little bit, but that’s just how it goes. Spare me the politician as studly everyman/down to earth housemom schtick.

*my prez election voting record sucks…Clinton ‘96 (still back that one), Nader ‘00 (what the fuck was I thinking?), Kerry ‘04 (had to vote for someone besides GW).

I’m a huge fan of nicknames, especially those of warlords, dictators and war criminals. The Mosquito, General Butt Naked, Big Daddy (Idi Amin), the list goes on. But the owner of my favorite nom de guerre ever, Chemical Ali (aka Ali Hassan al-Majid), is about to get the noose. I’m not sad to see him go; he is the guy responsible for the deaths of some 200,000 Kurds, so his time is up.

Majid acquired his nickname Chemical Ali during the operation after poison gas was used.

Over the course of the Anfal trial, which opened in August last year, a defiant Majid showed no trace of remorse for ordering the attacks.

He said at one hearing: “I am the one who gave orders to the army to demolish villages and relocate the villagers. I am not apologising. I did not make a mistake.”

I guess you could say he doesn’t give a fuck.

You wouldn’t know it by reading the US press, but Turkey and the Kurdish Worker’s Party (PKK) are duking it out in the mountains of northern Iraq right now. A Turkish helicopter was shot down yesterday and while Turkey claims they’ve lost 15 soldiers so far, the PKK is saying they’ve killed at least 47 Turks. Turkey has also been destroying civilian infrastructure, something they promised not to do. I guess that’s what the PKK gets for insulting their “Turkishness”.

As Ray pointed out to me, imagine if 10,000 (or however many) Iranian troops crossed the border in southern Iraq to go after “terrorists”? I don’t think anyone would call that an “incursion”.

After all the shit I’ve talked on them, Al Jazeera English is at least covering this.

AFP/David Furst

10,000 Turkish troops invaded northern Iraq today in pursuit of Kurdish PKK guerillas. Not much to be said here, although when that many troops enter a country I’d say it’s quite a bit more than an “incursion”.

The ground operation started after Turkish warplanes and artillery bombed suspected rebel targets on Thursday, the military said on its website.

“After the successful bombing, a cross-border ground incursion backed by the air force started at 1900 (1700 GMT)” on Thursday, it said.

No surprise here, but Egypt is jailing people for being HIV Poz. A couple of guys were street beefing, one admits to the cops he has HIV, then shazam! They’re convicted of “the habitual practice of debauchery.” Human Rights Watch says:

The arrests began in October 2007, when police stopped two men having an altercation on a street in central Cairo. When one of them told the officers that he was HIV-positive, police immediately took them both to the Morality Police office and opened an investigation against them for homosexual conduct. The two men told human rights defenders that they were slapped and beaten for refusing to sign statements the police wrote for them. They spent four days in the Morality Police office handcuffed to an iron desk, sleeping on the floor. Police later subjected the two men to forensic anal examinations designed to “prove” that they had engaged in homosexual conduct.

Warning: another bum-out Africa post. But then again, very little good happens on the Dark Continent so here we go.

The Horn of Africa is one of the most volatile regions on earth, and no surprise since it consists of countries like Somalia, Ethiopia and Eritrea. Whenever I thought about Somalia or Ethiopia, images of famine, dead US Army Rangers (Josh Hartnett is wicked sexy!) and Stevie Wonder, The Boss, etc singing “We Are the World” came to mind. Eritrea was always hard to find on a map.

Now, Eritrea and Ethiopia are on the verge of yet another war over their disputed border after Eritrea cut off UN peacekeepers from fuel supplies, forcing them to leave. The two countries are now facing off without a buffer of blue helmets and they have already fought a war for the same territory that cost tens of thousands of lives. Lately they’ve been fighting each other in a proxy war in Somalia with US-backed Ethiopia invading Somalia and semi-defeating the Eritrean-backed Union of Islamic Courts. Pretty soon the “proxy” could be dropped and full on beef could break out.

Also, Ethiopia is already fighting a war with Somali separatists in their own Ogaden region and another in Mogadishu. Last week at least 20 people were killed in a grenade attack in northern Somalia, mostly Ethiopians looking for work.

Oh, and the US has threatened to designate Eritrea a haven for terrorists for allowing members of the Union of Islamic Courts to hang there. And the US military (part of Africom) has a mega base in Djibouti, which also happens to be wedged between Ethiopia, Somalia and Eritrea. Outlook…nyet good.

Egypt beat Cameroon 1-0 in the Africa Cup of Nations. After Ivory Coast got bounced I sort of had to pull for Egypt. I was hoping they’d burn down the McDonald’s at the end of my street but no such luck.