April 2003

"Of all occupying Powers, the Americans showed themselves the most inept at the business of governing a conquered country. They maintained little or no continuity of policy. They never succeeded in making up their minds whether they wanted to administer stern justice or indulge Christ-like charity. They did not, indeed, make up their minds about anything except the 'superiority' of their own intentions."

"In Albania, Egypt, Bangladesh, Azerbaijan, Indonesia, Morocco, and Turkey, 92 to 99 percent of the public endorsed democratic institutions -- a higher proportion than in the United States (89 percent)"

things aren't so rosy when it comes to gender equality and sexual freedom, but then the US leaders pushing "democracy" don't necessarily care for those things either...

"intelligence agencies on both sides of the Atlantic were furious that briefings they gave leaders were distorted"

"A field of corn growing in full sunlight in the middle of the day uses up all the carbon dioxide within a meter of the ground in about five minutes."

"The emergence of Mahmoud Abbas as the new Palestinian Prime Minister comes exactly at the wrong time. His ascent to power seems legitimate. ... He may even genuinely want peace."

"An anti-American governor is ensconced in the administration building, issuing decrees, delivering food aid, and taking money from the bank to pay local employees."

"Why was Microsoft caught in the humiliation of a four year hairball of legislative scrutiny, when Intel escaped without the public knicker-washing?"

how to write a grant proposal for a study of HIV testing among homosexual men without mentioning them in the abstract?

"a new confidence and political assertiveness in recent months with various leaders publicly enunciating their goal of expelling western forces"

"Small, die-hard cells of 'liberals' still admired the US, but as the war loomed these people mostly went underground."

"It is doubtful that the evangelical Christian Zionists in the US administration are aware of the complex and rich history of Arab Christians"

"there has been an affecting simplicity, verging on naivety, about much of what President Bush has had to say"

"A study of coverage in five countries shows that the BBC featured the lowest level of dissent of all."

a couple are arrested and their children taken away - for photographing the mother breastfeeding her 1-year-old

"With my own eyes I saw about fifteen civilians killed in two days. I've gone through enough wars to know that it's always dirty, that civilians are always the first victims. But the way it was happening here, it was insane."

Microsoft's "workaround" involves setting PC clocks back two years - I'm sure that will go down well with the banks!

it may seem wrong to care about this when tens of thousands of people have been killed or injured - but harms can be qualitatively different and are not additive (any more than they are subtractive)

"developments in Afghanistan suggest how quickly the U.S. government can lose interest in a nation-building project"

A [US] Federal Judge has dismissed an application to permit a Harvard researcher to obtain a list of blocked sites"

this war is "imperial arrogance unschooled in worldliness, unfettered either by competence or experience, undeterred by history or human complexity, unrepentant in its violence and the cruelty of its technology"

"'Let's say I had a problem with someone in the past. Now I come with a gun and kill him. Nobody's there to do anything about it. That's the situation we're in,' explained Aya, a housewife."

"They steal and steal. They threaten us, saying 'we are with the Americans, you can do nothing to us.'"

"The soldiers and police who were supposed to be the bedrock of a stable postwar Afghanistan have gone unpaid for months and are drifting away"

"Make no mistake about where the love of war takes us: straight to the demolition of civilization itself"

- and in the early 1980s, they tried to stop Fisk publicising Saddam Hussein's use of chemical weapons!

"the White House is trying to reassert control and end an unseemly, increasingly public battle between the Pentagon on the one hand and the State Department and CIA on the other"

"if Iraqi Shiites openly sided with the US, there could be a dangerous schism between Sunni and Shiite"

"A U.S. Marine was killed on Sunday after stepping on an unexploded cluster bomb. In 1991, six U.S. Army combat engineers were killed while disposing of cluster bombs."

"so we are to be given a diet of straight war propaganda, 24/7, a thin tasteless gruel of televised hectoring and verbatim reading of Pentagon press releases"

"the Pentagon vetoed a list of senior officials proposed by the State Department to help run the country"

"There are dead bodies lying in our streets and my children are scared to go to bed because of the shelling"

"He's been married to an American for 35 years. He loves America, but if America has lost my father..."

"Welcome to hell. Many of us lived it in another era. And don't expect it to get any better for a while."