Bush or Kerry or ???



limerickman said:
Seems your account of what allegedly happened mirrors exactly what the
Pentagon said at the time - and then was found to be lies about the Jessica
Lynch scenario.
I believe she herself said that nothing happened to her.

You're the one who's telling lies.

Oh really?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3251731.stm

Earlier this week, it emerged that medical evidence suggested that Miss Lynch had been raped during her capture.

The assault was revealed in extracts from Miss Lynch's authorised biography - I am a Soldier, Too: The Jessica Lynch Story - to be released by publisher Alfred A Knopf on Tuesday.

Who is telling the lies? Again, you are lower than a snake's belly.
 
limerickman said:
No I'm not bored.
I ask the question about Jessica Lynch because her name came up in conversation today.

Of course, this doesn't take away the fact that lies were told about her capture, valiant struggle, her being held in oppressive captivity.
So that's why I ask the question of you statesiders - 'cause after the lies were exposed about her, we have heard nothing about her in this part of the world.
Did the Hollywood moveie ever materialise ?
How did we get from Bush or Kerry, to the retarded saying “blood for Oil”, to some Private Lynch conspiracy theory?

Back to the Bush or Kerry theme, I wouldn’t mind it if Kerry won the election, just as long as the House/Senate maintain a Republican majority, it will be nice to play the blame card for once, besides, I’ve never lived in a third world country before (that would be the result of a prolonged exposure to the policies of the far left).
 
Weisse Luft said:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3251731.stm
Who is telling the lies? Again, you are lower than a snake's belly.

You're the Perfidious one, Luft.

The erm evidence, of her being attacked is contained in her biography no less.
Even though the same link says that she cannot recall or remember being attacked.
The book and her evidence is provided by FIRED JOURNALIST RICK BRAGG OF
THE NEW YOUR TIMES.
Bragg was fired for plagiarising other peoples work :

Here is the The Guardian Newspaper : re Jessica Lynch

Once the attack was over, the Iraqi troops took Lynch and Pietsewa to the Nasiriyah military hospital. Had they not, she would have bled to death. Pietsewa died of her injuries.

Dr. Jamal Kadhim Shwail and Dr Harith al-Houssona examined her. She was in shock with precariously low blood pressure. Not knowing the extent of the musculoskeletal injuries or whether there was spinal damage, they could not afford to jostle her to remove the layers of combat gear, uniform, body armor, and web gear. They had to use bandage scissors to cut away the equipment and clothing, which was still fully secured on her body. She was infused with fluids, including three units of whole blood--two donated on the spot by Iraqi hospital staff--catheterized, splinted, her head sutured, and transported to Saddam hospital, also in Nasiriyah, for surgery on her dangerously fractured femur.

Dr. Mahdi Khafazi performed the surgery.

Al Jazeera published photos from Nasiriyah, including pictures of the dead and captured Americans. The U.S. military would eventually attack the al Jazeera offices (as they had also done in Afghanistan) for daring to publish the true face of war. In those pictures were prisoners from the ambush of the 507th: Specialist 4 Edgar Adan Hernandez, 21, of Mission, Texas; Specialist 4 Joseph Neal Hudson, 23, of Alamogordo, New Mexico; Specialist 4 Shoshana Nyree Johnson, 30, of El Paso, Texas; Private First Class Patrick Wayne Miller, 23, of Walter, Kansas and Sergeant James Joseph Riley, 31, of Pennsauken, New Jersey.

The fear and pain of Specialist Johnson, a young African American woman who had been shot in both legs before capture, was almost palpable in her picture. Shoshana Johnson's story would cross Jessica Lynch's again.

During Lynch's convalescence, Dr. Harith Houssona, a young 24-year-old physician, and several of the nurses befriended Lynch. Iraqi military commanders considered her a prisoner of war but, given the severity of her injuries, gave the hospital staff wide latitude and little oversight. Seven days into the ordeal, most of the Iraqi military left and Houssona ordered Jessica Lynch to be returned to the American military. One Iraqi officer and an ambulance driver named Sabah Khazaal tried to transport Lynch back to the Americans.

The reasoning was that an ambulance is protected under the Geneva Conventions and wouldn't be fired upon. It didn't work. When the ambulance was within 300 meters of the American army checkpoint, U.S. soldiers opened fire on it, nearly killing Lynch after she was well on her way to a successful convalescence and repatriation to the United States.

It was well known to American military intelligence, by the time that the so-called rescue of Jessica Lynch was planned, that the Iraqi military was abandoning Nasiriyah as tactically untenable. Civilians were moving freely between Nasiriyah and American positions on the outskirts of the city. Wily opportunists were among them, one in particular a lawyer named Mohammed al-Rehaief. The official story is that al-Rehaief reported Lynch's "captivity" to the Americans, and CENTCOM then organized a special ops rescue mission.

Given what we know now, including that al-Rehaief has become rich and lives in the United States, it seems likely that al-Rehaief, whose wife worked in the hospital, told him about Lynch. He went to the Americans, who then began debriefing him.

The war was going very badly for American forces at that point with Rumsfeld's feeble new doctrine and his incessant and counter-productive micromanagement. Doubt was emerging in the anesthetized consciousness of America, and to keep that patient asleep, the War Department needed a publicity boost.

Al-Rehaief was offered a free trip to America for him and his family and a life of fame and adulation in exchange for a modicum of cooperation.

He was sent back to the hospital to gather specific information on floor plans and door locations, while the "special" unit began planning the "rescue" of PFC Lynch. The Public Affairs Officer of CENTCOM was put on high alert, and the whole Department of Defense Wag-the-Dog Bureau went into action, including the Rendon Group.

The Rendon Group has been around through both the Clinton and Bush II administrations. It is not the only public relations outfit feeding at the public trough for the purpose of shoveling ******** at the very public who signs its checks. But Rendon is emblematic.

Rendon stage managed much of the run-up to the current quagmire in Iraq, to include being largely responsible for the organization of the new Iraqi quisling regime--dubbed by Rendon the "Iraqi National Congress," complete with the changed regime head and convicted embezzler, Ahmad Chalabi. (Said one unnamed State Department official in a moment of anonymous candor, "Were it not for Rendon, the Chalabi group wouldn't even be on the map.")

Neither would Jessica Lynch's "rescue," because it never would have happened. It was a staged military operation... staged for the entertainment media with the purpose of injecting some war optimism into the American mass consciousness. There never was a rescue. There was a made-for-television mini-movie.

Rendon has picked up where Hill & Knowlton, the Gulf War I perception managers, left off. I people recall, Hill & Knowlton, on contract with the US government, hatched the Kuwaiti-babies-thrown-from-their-incubators-by-Iraqi-soldier s story that mobilized massive press and public support for the Bush I invasion. Of course, the story turned out to be complete horseshit, but it proved so persistent that an HBO movie about Gulf War I last year actually echoed it again as fact. It should not surprise anyone that Torie Clarke, Pentagon spokesperson during the stop-and-start blitz at the beginning of the latest invasion, is a former Hill & Knowlton staffer

The Rape of Kuwait is an interesting choice of words. Rape comes up again and again in warfare, on the one hand as an unspeakable reality, and on the other as part of a patriarchal morality tale, as we shall see further down.

The shifting fictional account that happened to Jessica Lynch was likely a fabrication that originated in the White House's Office of Global Communications--an office almost run by Rendon people. (Rendon's Chief Financial Officer is Sandy Libby, wife of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President **** Cheney's chief of staff.) They generated "news stories" to be released through CENTCOM and elsewhere faster than the press could keep up in order to push deadlines and competition and inhibit fact-checking. Then the stories come apart, sometimes in mere days or hours, but the fabrications are allowed to "linger" without comment.

"Linger" is a wag-the-dog industry word and a concept employed by military psychological operations (Psyops).

This tactic is combined with language/message control--explaining why masculine bluster like "Americans are not the running kind" can show up in two separate speeches in the same day by different members of the administration--redefining all opposition to US actions as terrorists, and building false associations through repetition: "echoing," another industry word. (How many times did we hear "September 11," "terrorists," and "Saddam Hussein" in the same breath.) This is a Psyops technique, a method to "construct memory," and the "target audience" is not the enemy, and not the "indigenous population." It is us.

When they get caught, they reconfigure the story with elliptical, some would say obtuse, language, then let it linger some more. Weapons of mass destruction become a "weapons program," a "seeking" of WMD. George Tenet's CIA "had questions" about the British forgery... er, dossier. By the time this is published, who will remember the Jessica Lynch fable, or care?

Some of these constructed tales are so lurid they would defy imagination if people had any.

But the American press, always a bastion of healthy skepticism and critical thought, lapped up the Jessica Lynch fable like Basset hounds. The prefabricated story was ready at had for the press pool at CENTCOM headquarters in Qatar, and they dutifully echoed a dramatic morality play of chauvinism--national then male--around the world.

Concept.

The pretty, plucky, white American female soldier fights off the degenerate, blood-drinking, cowardly (that is, feminized), sub-human Iraqis, emptying her magazine into several of the evil-doers until, multiply shot and stabbed, she is overwhelmed and taken prisoner. CENTCOM solemnly left the question of sexual assault open to let the public imagination run with it. Wicked Fedayeen interrogators reportedly cuffed her around in the hospital.

Then, the epitome of moral American manhood, Special Operations, enters the set to rescue our heroine, fallen beneath the assaults of the unmanly Arabs, reaffirming the roles of male and female fully-human Americans, and the great chain of being is reconstituted in all its proper hierarchies.

To paraphrase Susan Jeffords in her essay, "Telling the War Story", at a time when American military invincibility is being called into question by Iraqi resistance, a display of heroic, militarized male power can provide a "compensatory national identity."

Fade in.

Roll subtext: "Never overestimate the intelligence of the general public."--P. T. Barnum

Susan Schmidt and Vernon Leob of the Washington Post were positively fawning on April 10 when they regurgitated the "leaked" story of Jessica Lynch's fight to the death with deviant Iraqis and her subsequent rescue, complete with subtitles like, "Fighting to the Death," "Talk About *****," and "Classic Special Ops."

On May 15th, the Guardian said, "Her rescue will go down as one of the most stunning pieces of news management yet conceived. It provides a remarkable insight into the real influence of Hollywood producers on the Pentagon's media managers, and has produced a template from which America hopes to present its future wars." Americans don't read the Guardian. They still believe the rescue fiction.

In point of fact, the Special Operations raid was conducted with zero resistance, exactly as they expected, given that they were perfectly aware the Iraqi combatants had already withdrawn. But to give it the feel of authenticity, they cut the power to the hospital (putting every patient there in danger), explosively breached doors that hospital staff would have willingly opened for them, and even flex-cuffed two hospital employees, taking one prisoner for several days, and two patients, one with an intravenous infusion.

That was edited out of the film version.

Then the doubt as the Lynch fight-to-the-death story collapsed, and the ellipsis came. Lynch's actual experiences were "still being sorted out," said CENTCOM. They were obscured by "the fog of war," a fog generated from the White House Office of Global Communications.

The Rendonesque spinmeisters, taking their cue from Hollywood, manned by men who clumsily tail social trends like commodified-media ersatz feminism, constructed their tale of the spunky woman soldier, kind of a GI Jane meets Courage Under Fire, and ran headlong into an unexpected red-meat reactionary backlash. Any woman who donned a uniform was a manifestation of something called "radical feminism," which meant anything remotely resembling feminism at all. Lynch the late imperialist token woman hero ran headlong into Lynch the violator of primitive partriarchy's weapons taboo. America the diverse!

The perception managers of the fight-to-the-death story, in trying to mobilize "feminist" sympathy as support for the war, now spotlighted (if we were looking) how patriarchal society has to reduce women in order to retain male hegemonic claims on this key institution, the military.

The father of a male soldier--who had reportedly fought fiercely before being killed--excoriated Lynch when her book deal was signed. So did a host of others. Now she would become a gold digger, a woman ruthlessly exploiting the deaths of brave male soldiers to make money

Rick Bragg--a white man--was fired from the New York Times for almost plagiarizing a freeleancer's material and pretending he was reporting from on the scene, when he was clearly not.

Bragg cut a million dollar deal with Knopf publishers to write Lynch's "authorized" biography, which raises the suspicion that he swindled Lynch into signing a contract in which she relinquished her control over the final product. Or not. I'm not here to idealize Lynch or anyone else. I don't know. A million dollars is a lot of money to turn down for a poor family from Palestine, West Virginia. A million dollars is just a lot of money.

The book, I Am a Soldier, Too: The Jessica Lynch Story, patched together as many details as Bragg could string together, then added a twist to pump up the sales. Jessica Lynch, it claimed, was raped by her captors.

Raped.

This claim, it turns out, has no evidence to support it, and the Jessica Lynch doll (that is, whatever collection of interests now acting as her public surrogate) is reported to have another bout of amnesia about this ostensible rape. The doctors at Nasiriyah hospital who examined her in great detail, to include catheterizing her, said that (1) there was no sign of sexual assault, (2) her clothing was still buttoned, zipped, and intact when she arrived at the hospital, and (3) her condition was so grave from her injuries that a sexual assault would have killed her.

Aside from selling books, why rape? The answer will take us across the terrain where gender and race tread together in the landscape of the American psyche.

Rape happens, and rape happens in war as well as peace. Men rape women. Male sexuality is socially constructed, understood, and accepted as aggression. "Getting ****ed" is still metaphorical slang for being attacked. Men still boast about their sexual exploits as "tearing that ***** up." These are not aberrations. This is the norm. And this is not news.

The frequency of rape is amplified by war, but it can be amplified so readily because patriarchal culture is rape culture. Masculinity that is associated with violence that defines the sexual subject (male) as aggressive, and describes sex as aggression, necessarily defines the sexual object (female) as an object of (sexual) aggression.

Women, nature, and brown people's societies are "naturalized" in the imperial Cartesian cosmology, the objects of male subjectivity, the objects of conquest (often referred to as penetration) and control. When an imperium requires war to continue its exploitation, the (masculinized) military as an institution assumes greater centrality, taking the rest of society along with it by further militarizing masculinity. When sectoral wars occur, this dialectic of militarism and masculinity happens too, and the frequency of rape is amplified.

The merger of violence and sexuality that is already there in countless forms is suddenly released from the legitimizing constraints of civil association, and men take their opportunity to rape, to actualize sex as aggression and aggression as sex and therein actualize their own masculinity.

But rape also has propaganda value, and here is where we have to take great care. Just as we deal with the intricacies of separating anti-Semitism from anti-Zionism, we have to separate the denial of rape culture, about which women and their male allies are rightly outraged and in motion, from identifying actual falsifications about rape. This is an extremely important critical challenge as imperialist patriarchy becomes ever more deft and sophisticated in retaining its ideological hegemony.

In Cynthia Enloe's Maneuvers, remarking on the breakup of Yugoslavia, she said, "Rape has been used as one method to terrorize civilian populations in villages and forcing ethnic groups to leave [according to the U.N. "Investigation into Rapes in Bosnia," which published its report in 1993]. ... Serb paramilitary units would enter a village. Several women would be raped in the presence of others so that word would spread throughout the village and a climate of fear was created. ... Those male villagers who had wanted to stay then decided to leave with their women and children in order to protect them from being raped. ... Often, men were deported or fled. Women were then often raped in their own homes or taken from their hopes to another location to be raped ... (p. 140)"

This is an example of unwitting collaboration with one form of patriarchy, and with imperialism, that happens when seeking "evidence" to support one's case in a singularized issue, in this case the characterization of the military as a dehistoricized thing-in-itself with no reference to which military, under what circumstances. The fact is that in some militaries rape was not tolerated. And every story of rape cannot be accepted uncritically.

A thorough review of the breakup of Yugoslavia reveals in short order that many of the lurid tales of mass rape and "rape camps" were in fact not true, that these stories targeted almost exclusively those crimes alleged against Serbian combatants, and that they were used to mobilize not only Western feminist outrage, but--and this is even more significant, I think--also the paternalistic outrage of men as women's father-protectors.

There were rapes in Yugoslavia, and they were committed on all sides. But that does not constitute a "rape camp."

Yoshie Furuhashie, a feminist scholar with whom I have corresponded off and on for about four years, had the temerity to point out on a feminist listserv (that was quickly taken over by men) that these stories were questionable. A male on the list replied with reflexive outrage, "What proof do you have that the Serbs did not use mass rape as a conscious policy of genocide and terror in Bosnia and Kosovo?"

Note the detailed specificity of his construction.

There is an argument from intimidation in this challenge where he not only demands that Yoshie prove a negative (Prove that there is no God.), but he issues the challenge with a kind of sanctimonious outrage that implies any question of the veracity of the rape camp claim is tantamount to holocaust denial.

Yoshie cited numerous sources that demonstrated these were demonizing fictions, targeting Western feminists as an audience, to mobilize support for an imperial war to further break up Yugoslavia disguised as a war against demonic Serbs.

The demonization of the Serbs with this strategy is little different than the similar demonization of African Americans and German Jews, also systematically and effectively portrayed as sub-human sexual predators. Now it was the Serbs' turn.

Diane Johnstone, former European editor of In These Times ("Seeing Yugoslavia Through a Dark Glass: Politics, Media, and the Ideology of Globalization", 1999) and Karen Talbot, of Covert Action Quarterly ("Backing Up Globalization with Military Might", 1999), both journalists with a high index of suspicion when imperialist adventures dovetail so nicely with shocking stories of women-as-victims issued by the male-dominated imperial press, looked into the stories of "rape camps" and found that for the hundreds of stories about them, there appeared to be a singular original source: Ruder Finn, Inc., yet another public relations outfit, al la Rendon Group and Hill & Knowlton, working for the US government through proxies in Bosnia and Croatia.

Ruder Finn convinced the world of the existence of Serbian rape camps, which was disproved by Martin Lettmayer, a German journalist who spent months trying to find any actual evidence of these rape camps, and came up empty handed. Nick Mamatas ("The Public Relations Firms of Dictators", 2001), describes one public relations coup manufactured by Ruder Finn: "Pictures can fool the world, and recently, one of them did. In 1992, an Independent Television News team led by journalist Penny Marshall shot footage of men staring out from behind barbed wire. They were Bosnian prisoners inside a Serbian concentration camp, ITN explained. The picture was very misleading: the ITN photographers were actually inside the compound, and their subjects were outside the fence, looking in. LM, a libertarian magazine that had been founded by some disaffected former Marxists, pointed this out, and was promptly sued out of existence thanks to Britain's stringent libel laws."

Ruder Finn's president, Jim Harff, unapologetically proud of his accomplishments, boasted in public interviews that his firm had targeted liberals, feminists, and Jews, wagering on a generalized ignorance of Balkan history, in their efforts to gain support for Euro-American interventions in the Balkans.

Catherine Sameh, in Against the Current, "The Rebel Girl: The War, The Women, The West," responded to similar attempts of the Bush administration to appeal to feminists for support of the war against Afghanistan:

"Let me be clear that I DO NOT in any way support the Taliban regime as defenders of Afghanistan against neocolonial domination, nor do I endorse a silence from the left on this issue. I strongly condemn the Taliban's oppression of women and all Afghan citizens, as I believe any thoughtful antiwar, global justice movement must.

"But I do oppose a decontextualized, exclusively Western discussion of women under the Taliban or the position of women in the Middle East (as if there were one position). From Oprah to "Frontline" to the Feminist Majority, the discussion spins on a highly out-of-context, sensationalist view of Islamic societies and Muslim people_which simultaneously reinforces the Islamic-fundamentalist framing of their political regimes as the one true Islam, and the Orientalist framing of Arab and Muslim societies that further silences women's voices and agency."

This tactic is proving effective in many venues, and the paradox of it is that while it is directed at feminists, it also serves as an appeal to an anachronistic patriarchal protectionism that often defines women as sentimentalized property.

Jessica Lynch is now being yet again redefined by Bragg's totally unsubstantiated allegations of rape. Rape by an enemy is the usurpation of male privilege by a subhuman, and it must be avenged to restore the status of the victim in the eyes of the father-husband. Rape becomes symbolic of the enemy.

Men have to "protect" women, and oftentimes, "our" women. This is the basis of the Black rapist stereotype that was used to overthrow Reconstruction and enforce Jim Crow.

Andrea Dworkin writes of lynching, "The black male, in the South hunted at night to be castrated and/or lynched, becomes in the racist United States the carrier of danger, the carrier of rape. The use of a racially despised type of male as a scapegoat, a symbolic figure embodying the sexuality of all men, is a common male-supremacist strategy. .... And so, among the women, night is the time of sex and also of race: racial exploitation and sexual exploitation are fused, indivisible. Night and black: sex and race: the black men are blamed for what all men do..."

In Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 and its Legacy, edited by David Cecelski (UNC Press, 1998), describing the North Carolina coup d'etat against the fusion governments of Black Republicans and white Populists that signaled the last nail driven in the coffin of Reconstruction, there is account after account of how the specter of the Black Rapist was the absolute centerpiece of white Democrat propaganda to marshal and mobilize ad hoc white militias against "Black rule." As Dworkin points out, this is a "common male supremacist strategy."

The Origin Myth--based fundamentally on white supremacy--asserted itself in the minds of the white Populists and when given the choice between their class peers among Blacks and the white ruling class, they chose the latter. (This is a lesson we cannot afford to forget about any form of American populism.)

This provision of outrage is essential to deploying troops into battle on imperial adventures. While wars in defense of one's home, or wars defending oneself against extermination are clear and unambiguous to combatants, wars of offense generally require the emotional fuel of a morality tale. It needn't have much of a half life either.

When I was in Haiti, my team allowed themselves to feel the outrage at the FAdH baton beatings of civilians when the mission was still defined as one that might involve combat. Once the likelihood of combat passed, however, within a month, several of my subordinates were longing for the baton-wielding FAdH and would themselves have gleefully laid into the raucous crowds of turbulent black bodies.

Which brings us to Shoshana Johnson, Black, daughter of a Panamanian immigrant, and one of the captives from the ambush of the 507th. There was never any reference, however elliptical, to the possibility of Shoshana Johnson being raped, as there was for Jessica Lynch even before CENTCOM learned her fate. Indeed the issue of Black women being raped is extremely dangerous in the United States because it hits too close to the centuries-long American tradition of white masters raping their slaves. This is not part of the U.S. Origin Myth. Quite the contrary.

There is much being made, and rightly so, of the disparate treatment of Jessica Lynch and Shoshana Johnson, but little remarked upon is what binds the two together in mass consciousness.

They are both women. White supremacy has been sniffed out by both sides of the race question regarding Johnson and Lynch (who reportedly liked each other), judging by the outrage of one side and the defensiveness of the other.

The issue of racial disparity is red hot and will fought out in other venues, and I stand with Shoshana Johnson in her demand to be treated equally, holding the military and white supremacy as systems responsible, and not Jessica Lynch.

It is more important here, perhaps, to point out what they had in common, and to include Lori Pitsewa: an Appalachian woman, an African American woman, and a Hopi woman; all in the Army, and all doubly colonized and plurally defined by capitalist patriarchy.

Lynch and Johnson are now scheduled to appear together on the cover of December's Glamour magazine as the "Women of the Year." Get your head around that if you want to see how deftly any seed of subversion is commodified! This is the latest transformation, the latest account--two smiling women warriors, salt 'n' peppa like the biracial buddy movies Americans find so comforting, backgrounded by American flags and yellow ribbons, our (militarized) social progress on display in every supermarket.

How do these many accounts of them reflect not on them as individuals, but on capitalist patriarchy in the United States?
 
limerickman said:
You're the Perfidious one, Luft.

The erm evidence, of her....zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
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reflect not on them as individuals, but on capitalist patriarchy in the United States?
That has got to be longest post I've ever seen. Can we get a condensed version of that?

Lim, why is a Irishman reading about the Wilmington race riots?
 
Having a President like George Bush makes America the laughing stock of anyone remotely intelligent. He can't string a coherent sentence together (Oh, I forgot,he;s Texan so he must be OK) Vote for him if you want to see the absolute destruction of the American way of life you so cherish. BTW, it ain't **** all compared to a lot of other countries. ****ed up Medical system, Education if you're rich, unbelievable poverty in a first world country, an overriding belief that AMERICA is the world, an unbelievable gullability (WMDs?, Osama a bigger threat than Republican Imperialism/Christian Zionism? Voting a ******** like Schwarzeneger into office ha!), staggering crime rates, soldiers in Iraq kidding themselves (or at least brainwashed into believing) that they are defending outdated notions called "Liberty" and "Freedom" (Iraq is the "Jewel" of the middle east...plunder it and keep those SUVs running cheap...), Britney Spears, Cultural Imperialism...rampant materialism. At least you get cheap sneakers from all of this...well ****ing yahoo! Read some books about the CIA, the ruthless plundering/abuse of geo--political alliances around the world, grand-daddy Bush's money laundering for the Nazis, the Bush families ties with the Bin laden family, right--wing Protestants who believe white man (Christians) are the true inheritors of salvation and ruthlessly support the state of Israel (and the disgusting incursion into Palestine)...my God. America...the land of self--deception and excess. No wonder your values are decried the world over. Have I ever been there. Yes. Your Pizza is good.
 
Bikerman2004 said:
That has got to be longest post I've ever seen. Can we get a condensed version of that?

Lim, why is a Irishman reading about the Wilmington race riots?

The Guardian article happens to include some lines about the Wilmington Riots.
I didn't copy the article to highlight this.
I copied to article to show how the lie of the raping of Jessica Lynch - repeated by our friend Luft - is bogus.
 
Borg said:
Having a President like George Bush makes America the laughing stock of anyone remotely intelligent. He can't string a coherent sentence together (Oh, I forgot,he;s Texan so he must be OK) Vote for him if you want to see the absolute destruction of the American way of life you so cherish. BTW, it ain't **** all compared to a lot of other countries. ****ed up Medical system, Education if you're rich, unbelievable poverty in a first world country, an overriding belief that AMERICA is the world, an unbelievable gullability (WMDs?, Osama a bigger threat than Republican Imperialism/Christian Zionism? Voting a ******** like Schwarzeneger into office ha!), staggering crime rates, soldiers in Iraq kidding themselves (or at least brainwashed into believing) that they are defending outdated notions called "Liberty" and "Freedom" (Iraq is the "Jewel" of the middle east...plunder it and keep those SUVs running cheap...), Britney Spears, Cultural Imperialism...rampant materialism. At least you get cheap sneakers from all of this...well ****ing yahoo! Read some books about the CIA, the ruthless plundering/abuse of geo--political alliances around the world, grand-daddy Bush's money laundering for the Nazis, the Bush families ties with the Bin laden family, right--wing Protestants who believe white man (Christians) are the true inheritors of salvation and ruthlessly support the state of Israel (and the disgusting incursion into Palestine)...my God. America...the land of self--deception and excess. No wonder your values are decried the world over. Have I ever been there. Yes. Your Pizza is good.
Guess who's been on the conspiracy pages.
If I was a betting man, I'd wager he doesn't like America.
 
Borg said:
Having a President like George Bush makes America the laughing stock of anyone remotely intelligent. He can't string a coherent sentence together (Oh, I forgot,he;s Texan so he must be OK) Vote for him if you want to see the absolute destruction of the American way of life you so cherish. BTW, it ain't **** all compared to a lot of other countries. ****ed up Medical system, Education if you're rich, unbelievable poverty in a first world country, an overriding belief that AMERICA is the world, an unbelievable gullability (WMDs?, Osama a bigger threat than Republican Imperialism/Christian Zionism? Voting a ******** like Schwarzeneger into office ha!), staggering crime rates, soldiers in Iraq kidding themselves (or at least brainwashed into believing) that they are defending outdated notions called "Liberty" and "Freedom" (Iraq is the "Jewel" of the middle east...plunder it and keep those SUVs running cheap...), Britney Spears, Cultural Imperialism...rampant materialism. At least you get cheap sneakers from all of this...well ****ing yahoo! Read some books about the CIA, the ruthless plundering/abuse of geo--political alliances around the world, grand-daddy Bush's money laundering for the Nazis, the Bush families ties with the Bin laden family, right--wing Protestants who believe white man (Christians) are the true inheritors of salvation and ruthlessly support the state of Israel (and the disgusting incursion into Palestine)...my God. America...the land of self--deception and excess. No wonder your values are decried the world over. Have I ever been there. Yes. Your Pizza is good.

I agree with the thrust of your argument - although I'd express it slightly differently - welcome aboard !

The Frat pack are typing away as we speak !
 
limerickman said:
The Guardian article happens to include some lines about the Wilmington Riots.
I didn't copy the article to highlight this.
I copied to article to show how the lie of the raping of Jessica Lynch - repeated by our friend Luft - is bogus.
Didn't mean anything by my question. Just odd that an a Irishman mentions an obscure US historical event.
 
Bikerman2004 said:
Didn't mean anything by my question. Just odd that an a Irishman mentions an obscure US historical event.

The Guardian mention the race riots.

The article was copied to show the Jessica Lynch coverup.
The fact that it contained some statements about race riots - was not the point that I was attempting to convey.
 
Lim, you "precious" Guardian account is highly slanted and conflicts with PFC(Ret.) Lynch's authorized biography AND official DA reports.

You "cherry-pick" in order to reinforce your warped view of reality. Might I suggest you stay to your own business?

Oh yes, that other darling from West Virginia who is in trial for her actions at Abu Ghraib is sinking deeper into the mess she and the other made. But the blame stopped well short of the brigade commander as evidence is now showing...

Lower than a snake's belly. How ironic for someone residing on the Emerald Isle. Almost makes me want to join the Orange Party ;)
 
limerickman said:
The Guardian article happens to include some lines about the Wilmington Riots.
I didn't copy the article to highlight this.
I copied to article to show how the lie of the raping of Jessica Lynch - repeated by our friend Luft - is bogus.

You really need to learn to read for comprehension. The Guardian 'article' (more like an editorial, since facts make up so little of it) offers nothing to refute the charges of rape other than circumstantial evidence.

The 'proof' your precious Guardian cites:

- They say she was still clothed, as if she couldn't/wouldn't have been re-dressed by any potential rapist. Hardly definitive.

- They say she has no recollection - this is a psychological response completely consistent with trauma victims the world over.

- They say that her injuries were so severe that a rape would have killed her. This presupposes that any such rape would have had to happen after she was injured. But no such timetable for her injuries has been established. She herself admits she never fired her gun, so it would be reasonable to believe she was taken intact, and was injured after the fact. Note that I'm not necessarily saying that's what happened, but I am pointing out that reasonable doubt exists.

- The article notes that the Iraqi doctors did *not* do an internal examination, which is what would be necessary to definitively determine whether any sexual violation occurred. Such an examination (if any occurred), could only have come upon her repatriation to American forces.

Your article also cites no sources for its stories of an attempted repatriation that was turned back by American fire. In fact the whole article makes no attempt at unbiased reporting - it's clearly a piece of propaganda just as skewed and distorted as anything that's ever come out of the Fox News Network or other News Corporation outlets.

Was Lynch's rescue (and more precisely, the media spin on it) a PR stunt? Of course. But there's no proof that the substance of the claims about her are false, and no basis for calling her a liar.
 
Weisse Luft said:
Lim, you "precious" Guardian account is highly slanted and conflicts with PFC(Ret.) Lynch's authorized biography AND official DA reports.

You "cherry-pick" in order to reinforce your warped view of reality. Might I suggest you stay to your own business?

Oh yes, that other darling from West Virginia who is in trial for her actions at Abu Ghraib is sinking deeper into the mess she and the other made. But the blame stopped well short of the brigade commander as evidence is now showing...

Lower than a snake's belly. How ironic for someone residing on the Emerald Isle. Almost makes me want to join the Orange Party ;)

The authorised biography you refer to, was written by a journalist who was fired for stealing free lance writers work (that is what the Guardian article states).
So are you saying that the Guardian Newspaper is wrong ?
If the Guardian is wrong - why isn't Lynch and Co suing them for defamation and libel ?
In a country full of lawyers, they'd be only too happy to sue a paper who is lying - wouldn't they ?

Do you see the point that I am making.
If a report appears that doesn't align itself to your political view - you say it's
"speculation" or "untrue".
Yet you willingly believe the words of an author who - was fired by a national newspaper.

That's the problem with you and your kind.
Perfidious.
 
skwanch said:
You really need to learn to read for comprehension. The Guardian 'article' (more like an editorial, since facts make up so little of it) offers nothing to refute the charges of rape other than circumstantial evidence.

The 'proof' your precious Guardian cites:

- They say she was still clothed, as if she couldn't/wouldn't have been re-dressed by any potential rapist. Hardly definitive.

- They say she has no recollection - this is a psychological response completely consistent with trauma victims the world over.

- They say that her injuries were so severe that a rape would have killed her. This presupposes that any such rape would have had to happen after she was injured. But no such timetable for her injuries has been established. She herself admits she never fired her gun, so it would be reasonable to believe she was taken intact, and was injured after the fact. Note that I'm not necessarily saying that's what happened, but I am pointing out that reasonable doubt exists.

- The article notes that the Iraqi doctors did *not* do an internal examination, which is what would be necessary to definitively determine whether any sexual violation occurred. Such an examination (if any occurred), could only have come upon her repatriation to American forces.

Your article also cites no sources for its stories of an attempted repatriation that was turned back by American fire. In fact the whole article makes no attempt at unbiased reporting - it's clearly a piece of propaganda just as skewed and distorted as anything that's ever come out of the Fox News Network or other News Corporation outlets.

Was Lynch's rescue (and more precisely, the media spin on it) a PR stunt? Of course. But there's no proof that the substance of the claims about her are false, and no basis for calling her a liar.

The Guardian newspaper's article is clear and definitive.
The Jessica Lynch stunt - was just that, a stunt.

You need to gain an understanding of the Law.
Circumstantial evidence - is evidence.
Whether it is hearsay, circumstantial or physical or corroborative evidence - the fact remains, that evidence is evidence be it circumstantial or not.

None of the issues raised in the article have been denied by Jessica Lynch.
Furthermore, none of the issues raised in the article have been contested by Jessica Lynch.
If there was an inaccurate issues raised - the Guardian would have to place a retraction.

It was your collegue, Luft, who raised the issue of rape and I was happy to post the article rebutting Luft's rehashing of the same old lies.
 
limerickman said:
You're the Perfidious one, Luft.

The erm evidence, of her being attacked is contained in her biography no less.
Even though the same link says that she cannot recall or remember being attacked.
The book and her evidence is provided by FIRED JOURNALIST RICK BRAGG OF
THE NEW YOUR TIMES.
Bragg was fired for plagiarising other peoples work :

Here is the The Guardian Newspaper : re Jessica Lynch

Once the attack was over, the Iraqi troops took Lynch and Pietsewa to the Nasiriyah military hospital. Had they not, she would have bled to death. Pietsewa died of her injuries.

Dr. Jamal Kadhim Shwail and Dr Harith al-Houssona examined her. She was in shock with precariously low blood pressure. Not knowing the extent of the musculoskeletal injuries or whether there was spinal damage, they could not afford to jostle her to remove the layers of combat gear, uniform, body armor, and web gear. They had to use bandage scissors to cut away the equipment and clothing, which was still fully secured on her body. She was infused with fluids, including three units of whole blood--two donated on the spot by Iraqi hospital staff--catheterized, splinted, her head sutured, and transported to Saddam hospital, also in Nasiriyah, for surgery on her dangerously fractured femur.

Dr. Mahdi Khafazi performed the surgery.

Al Jazeera published photos from Nasiriyah, including pictures of the dead and captured Americans. The U.S. military would eventually attack the al Jazeera offices (as they had also done in Afghanistan) for daring to publish the true face of war. In those pictures were prisoners from the ambush of the 507th: Specialist 4 Edgar Adan Hernandez, 21, of Mission, Texas; Specialist 4 Joseph Neal Hudson, 23, of Alamogordo, New Mexico; Specialist 4 Shoshana Nyree Johnson, 30, of El Paso, Texas; Private First Class Patrick Wayne Miller, 23, of Walter, Kansas and Sergeant James Joseph Riley, 31, of Pennsauken, New Jersey.

The fear and pain of Specialist Johnson, a young African American woman who had been shot in both legs before capture, was almost palpable in her picture. Shoshana Johnson's story would cross Jessica Lynch's again.

During Lynch's convalescence, Dr. Harith Houssona, a young 24-year-old physician, and several of the nurses befriended Lynch. Iraqi military commanders considered her a prisoner of war but, given the severity of her injuries, gave the hospital staff wide latitude and little oversight. Seven days into the ordeal, most of the Iraqi military left and Houssona ordered Jessica Lynch to be returned to the American military. One Iraqi officer and an ambulance driver named Sabah Khazaal tried to transport Lynch back to the Americans.

The reasoning was that an ambulance is protected under the Geneva Conventions and wouldn't be fired upon. It didn't work. When the ambulance was within 300 meters of the American army checkpoint, U.S. soldiers opened fire on it, nearly killing Lynch after she was well on her way to a successful convalescence and repatriation to the United States.

It was well known to American military intelligence, by the time that the so-called rescue of Jessica Lynch was planned, that the Iraqi military was abandoning Nasiriyah as tactically untenable. Civilians were moving freely between Nasiriyah and American positions on the outskirts of the city. Wily opportunists were among them, one in particular a lawyer named Mohammed al-Rehaief. The official story is that al-Rehaief reported Lynch's "captivity" to the Americans, and CENTCOM then organized a special ops rescue mission.

Given what we know now, including that al-Rehaief has become rich and lives in the United States, it seems likely that al-Rehaief, whose wife worked in the hospital, told him about Lynch. He went to the Americans, who then began debriefing him.

The war was going very badly for American forces at that point with Rumsfeld's feeble new doctrine and his incessant and counter-productive micromanagement. Doubt was emerging in the anesthetized consciousness of America, and to keep that patient asleep, the War Department needed a publicity boost.

Al-Rehaief was offered a free trip to America for him and his family and a life of fame and adulation in exchange for a modicum of cooperation.

He was sent back to the hospital to gather specific information on floor plans and door locations, while the "special" unit began planning the "rescue" of PFC Lynch. The Public Affairs Officer of CENTCOM was put on high alert, and the whole Department of Defense Wag-the-Dog Bureau went into action, including the Rendon Group.

The Rendon Group has been around through both the Clinton and Bush II administrations. It is not the only public relations outfit feeding at the public trough for the purpose of shoveling ******** at the very public who signs its checks. But Rendon is emblematic.

Rendon stage managed much of the run-up to the current quagmire in Iraq, to include being largely responsible for the organization of the new Iraqi quisling regime--dubbed by Rendon the "Iraqi National Congress," complete with the changed regime head and convicted embezzler, Ahmad Chalabi. (Said one unnamed State Department official in a moment of anonymous candor, "Were it not for Rendon, the Chalabi group wouldn't even be on the map.")

Neither would Jessica Lynch's "rescue," because it never would have happened. It was a staged military operation... staged for the entertainment media with the purpose of injecting some war optimism into the American mass consciousness. There never was a rescue. There was a made-for-television mini-movie.

Rendon has picked up where Hill & Knowlton, the Gulf War I perception managers, left off. I people recall, Hill & Knowlton, on contract with the US government, hatched the Kuwaiti-babies-thrown-from-their-incubators-by-Iraqi-soldier s story that mobilized massive press and public support for the Bush I invasion. Of course, the story turned out to be complete horseshit, but it proved so persistent that an HBO movie about Gulf War I last year actually echoed it again as fact. It should not surprise anyone that Torie Clarke, Pentagon spokesperson during the stop-and-start blitz at the beginning of the latest invasion, is a former Hill & Knowlton staffer

The Rape of Kuwait is an interesting choice of words. Rape comes up again and again in warfare, on the one hand as an unspeakable reality, and on the other as part of a patriarchal morality tale, as we shall see further down.

The shifting fictional account that happened to Jessica Lynch was likely a fabrication that originated in the White House's Office of Global Communications--an office almost run by Rendon people. (Rendon's Chief Financial Officer is Sandy Libby, wife of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President **** Cheney's chief of staff.) They generated "news stories" to be released through CENTCOM and elsewhere faster than the press could keep up in order to push deadlines and competition and inhibit fact-checking. Then the stories come apart, sometimes in mere days or hours, but the fabrications are allowed to "linger" without comment.

"Linger" is a wag-the-dog industry word and a concept employed by military psychological operations (Psyops).

This tactic is combined with language/message control--explaining why masculine bluster like "Americans are not the running kind" can show up in two separate speeches in the same day by different members of the administration--redefining all opposition to US actions as terrorists, and building false associations through repetition: "echoing," another industry word. (How many times did we hear "September 11," "terrorists," and "Saddam Hussein" in the same breath.) This is a Psyops technique, a method to "construct memory," and the "target audience" is not the enemy, and not the "indigenous population." It is us.

When they get caught, they reconfigure the story with elliptical, some would say obtuse, language, then let it linger some more. Weapons of mass destruction become a "weapons program," a "seeking" of WMD. George Tenet's CIA "had questions" about the British forgery... er, dossier. By the time this is published, who will remember the Jessica Lynch fable, or care?

Some of these constructed tales are so lurid they would defy imagination if people had any.

But the American press, always a bastion of healthy skepticism and critical thought, lapped up the Jessica Lynch fable like Basset hounds. The prefabricated story was ready at had for the press pool at CENTCOM headquarters in Qatar, and they dutifully echoed a dramatic morality play of chauvinism--national then male--around the world.

Concept.

The pretty, plucky, white American female soldier fights off the degenerate, blood-drinking, cowardly (that is, feminized), sub-human Iraqis, emptying her magazine into several of the evil-doers until, multiply shot and stabbed, she is overwhelmed and taken prisoner. CENTCOM solemnly left the question of sexual assault open to let the public imagination run with it. Wicked Fedayeen interrogators reportedly cuffed her around in the hospital.

Then, the epitome of moral American manhood, Special Operations, enters the set to rescue our heroine, fallen beneath the assaults of the unmanly Arabs, reaffirming the roles of male and female fully-human Americans, and the great chain of being is reconstituted in all its proper hierarchies.

To paraphrase Susan Jeffords in her essay, "Telling the War Story", at a time when American military invincibility is being called into question by Iraqi resistance, a display of heroic, militarized male power can provide a "compensatory national identity."

Fade in.

Roll subtext: "Never overestimate the intelligence of the general public."--P. T. Barnum

Susan Schmidt and Vernon Leob of the Washington Post were positively fawning on April 10 when they regurgitated the "leaked" story of Jessica Lynch's fight to the death with deviant Iraqis and her subsequent rescue, complete with subtitles like, "Fighting to the Death," "Talk About *****," and "Classic Special Ops."

On May 15th, the Guardian said, "Her rescue will go down as one of the most stunning pieces of news management yet conceived. It provides a remarkable insight into the real influence of Hollywood producers on the Pentagon's media managers, and has produced a template from which America hopes to present its future wars." Americans don't read the Guardian. They still believe the rescue fiction.

In point of fact, the Special Operations raid was conducted with zero resistance, exactly as they expected, given that they were perfectly aware the Iraqi combatants had already withdrawn. But to give it the feel of authenticity, they cut the power to the hospital (putting every patient there in danger), explosively breached doors that hospital staff would have willingly opened for them, and even flex-cuffed two hospital employees, taking one prisoner for several days, and two patients, one with an intravenous infusion.

That was edited out of the film version.

Then the doubt as the Lynch fight-to-the-death story collapsed, and the ellipsis came. Lynch's actual experiences were "still being sorted out," said CENTCOM. They were obscured by "the fog of war," a fog generated from the White House Office of Global Communications.

The Rendonesque spinmeisters, taking their cue from Hollywood, manned by men who clumsily tail social trends like commodified-media ersatz feminism, constructed their tale of the spunky woman soldier, kind of a GI Jane meets Courage Under Fire, and ran headlong into an unexpected red-meat reactionary backlash. Any woman who donned a uniform was a manifestation of something called "radical feminism," which meant anything remotely resembling feminism at all. Lynch the late imperialist token woman hero ran headlong into Lynch the violator of primitive partriarchy's weapons taboo. America the diverse!

The perception managers of the fight-to-the-death story, in trying to mobilize "feminist" sympathy as support for the war, now spotlighted (if we were looking) how patriarchal society has to reduce women in order to retain male hegemonic claims on this key institution, the military.

The father of a male soldier--who had reportedly fought fiercely before being killed--excoriated Lynch when her book deal was signed. So did a host of others. Now she would become a gold digger, a woman ruthlessly exploiting the deaths of brave male soldiers to make money

Rick Bragg--a white man--was fired from the New York Times for almost plagiarizing a freeleancer's material and pretending he was reporting from on the scene, when he was clearly not.

Bragg cut a million dollar deal with Knopf publishers to write Lynch's "authorized" biography, which raises the suspicion that he swindled Lynch into signing a contract in which she relinquished her control over the final product. Or not. I'm not here to idealize Lynch or anyone else. I don't know. A million dollars is a lot of money to turn down for a poor family from Palestine, West Virginia. A million dollars is just a lot of money.

The book, I Am a Soldier, Too: The Jessica Lynch Story, patched together as many details as Bragg could string together, then added a twist to pump up the sales. Jessica Lynch, it claimed, was raped by her captors.

Raped.

This claim, it turns out, has no evidence to support it, and the Jessica Lynch doll (that is, whatever collection of interests now acting as her public surrogate) is reported to have another bout of amnesia about this ostensible rape. The doctors at Nasiriyah hospital who examined her in great detail, to include catheterizing her, said that (1) there was no sign of sexual assault, (2) her clothing was still buttoned, zipped, and intact when she arrived at the hospital, and (3) her condition was so grave from her injuries that a sexual assault would have killed her.

Aside from selling books, why rape? The answer will take us across the terrain where gender and race tread together in the landscape of the American psyche.

Rape happens, and rape happens in war as well as peace. Men rape women. Male sexuality is socially constructed, understood, and accepted as aggression. "Getting ****ed" is still metaphorical slang for being attacked. Men still boast about their sexual exploits as "tearing that ***** up." These are not aberrations. This is the norm. And this is not news.

The frequency of rape is amplified by war, but it can be amplified so readily because patriarchal culture is rape culture. Masculinity that is associated with violence that defines the sexual subject (male) as aggressive, and describes sex as aggression, necessarily defines the sexual object (female) as an object of (sexual) aggression.

Women, nature, and brown people's societies are "naturalized" in the imperial Cartesian cosmology, the objects of male subjectivity, the objects of conquest (often referred to as penetration) and control. When an imperium requires war to continue its exploitation, the (masculinized) military as an institution assumes greater centrality, taking the rest of society along with it by further militarizing masculinity. When sectoral wars occur, this dialectic of militarism and masculinity happens too, and the frequency of rape is amplified.

The merger of violence and sexuality that is already there in countless forms is suddenly released from the legitimizing constraints of civil association, and men take their opportunity to rape, to actualize sex as aggression and aggression as sex and therein actualize their own masculinity.

But rape also has propaganda value, and here is where we have to take great care. Just as we deal with the intricacies of separating anti-Semitism from anti-Zionism, we have to separate the denial of rape culture, about which women and their male allies are rightly outraged and in motion, from identifying actual falsifications about rape. This is an extremely important critical challenge as imperialist patriarchy becomes ever more deft and sophisticated in retaining its ideological hegemony.

In Cynthia Enloe's Maneuvers, remarking on the breakup of Yugoslavia, she said, "Rape has been used as one method to terrorize civilian populations in villages and forcing ethnic groups to leave [according to the U.N. "Investigation into Rapes in Bosnia," which published its report in 1993]. ... Serb paramilitary units would enter a village. Several women would be raped in the presence of others so that word would spread throughout the village and a climate of fear was created. ... Those male villagers who had wanted to stay then decided to leave with their women and children in order to protect them from being raped. ... Often, men were deported or fled. Women were then often raped in their own homes or taken from their hopes to another location to be raped ... (p. 140)"

This is an example of unwitting collaboration with one form of patriarchy, and with imperialism, that happens when seeking "evidence" to support one's case in a singularized issue, in this case the characterization of the military as a dehistoricized thing-in-itself with no reference to which military, under what circumstances. The fact is that in some militaries rape was not tolerated. And every story of rape cannot be accepted uncritically.

A thorough review of the breakup of Yugoslavia reveals in short order that many of the lurid tales of mass rape and "rape camps" were in fact not true, that these stories targeted almost exclusively those crimes alleged against Serbian combatants, and that they were used to mobilize not only Western feminist outrage, but--and this is even more significant, I think--also the paternalistic outrage of men as women's father-protectors.

There were rapes in Yugoslavia, and they were committed on all sides. But that does not constitute a "rape camp."

Yoshie Furuhashie, a feminist scholar with whom I have corresponded off and on for about four years, had the temerity to point out on a feminist listserv (that was quickly taken over by men) that these stories were questionable. A male on the list replied with reflexive outrage, "What proof do you have that the Serbs did not use mass rape as a conscious policy of genocide and terror in Bosnia and Kosovo?"

Note the detailed specificity of his construction.

There is an argument from intimidation in this challenge where he not only demands that Yoshie prove a negative (Prove that there is no God.), but he issues the challenge with a kind of sanctimonious outrage that implies any question of the veracity of the rape camp claim is tantamount to holocaust denial.

Yoshie cited numerous sources that demonstrated these were demonizing fictions, targeting Western feminists as an audience, to mobilize support for an imperial war to further break up Yugoslavia disguised as a war against demonic Serbs.

The demonization of the Serbs with this strategy is little different than the similar demonization of African Americans and German Jews, also systematically and effectively portrayed as sub-human sexual predators. Now it was the Serbs' turn.

Diane Johnstone, former European editor of In These Times ("Seeing Yugoslavia Through a Dark Glass: Politics, Media, and the Ideology of Globalization", 1999) and Karen Talbot, of Covert Action Quarterly ("Backing Up Globalization with Military Might", 1999), both journalists with a high index of suspicion when imperialist adventures dovetail so nicely with shocking stories of women-as-victims issued by the male-dominated imperial press, looked into the stories of "rape camps" and found that for the hundreds of stories about them, there appeared to be a singular original source: Ruder Finn, Inc., yet another public relations outfit, al la Rendon Group and Hill & Knowlton, working for the US government through proxies in Bosnia and Croatia.

Ruder Finn convinced the world of the existence of Serbian rape camps, which was disproved by Martin Lettmayer, a German journalist who spent months trying to find any actual evidence of these rape camps, and came up empty handed. Nick Mamatas ("The Public Relations Firms of Dictators", 2001), describes one public relations coup manufactured by Ruder Finn: "Pictures can fool the world, and recently, one of them did. In 1992, an Independent Television News team led by journalist Penny Marshall shot footage of men staring out from behind barbed wire. They were Bosnian prisoners inside a Serbian concentration camp, ITN explained. The picture was very misleading: the ITN photographers were actually inside the compound, and their subjects were outside the fence, looking in. LM, a libertarian magazine that had been founded by some disaffected former Marxists, pointed this out, and was promptly sued out of existence thanks to Britain's stringent libel laws."

Ruder Finn's president, Jim Harff, unapologetically proud of his accomplishments, boasted in public interviews that his firm had targeted liberals, feminists, and Jews, wagering on a generalized ignorance of Balkan history, in their efforts to gain support for Euro-American interventions in the Balkans.

Catherine Sameh, in Against the Current, "The Rebel Girl: The War, The Women, The West," responded to similar attempts of the Bush administration to appeal to feminists for support of the war against Afghanistan:

"Let me be clear that I DO NOT in any way support the Taliban regime as defenders of Afghanistan against neocolonial domination, nor do I endorse a silence from the left on this issue. I strongly condemn the Taliban's oppression of women and all Afghan citizens, as I believe any thoughtful antiwar, global justice movement must.

"But I do oppose a decontextualized, exclusively Western discussion of women under the Taliban or the position of women in the Middle East (as if there were one position). From Oprah to "Frontline" to the Feminist Majority, the discussion spins on a highly out-of-context, sensationalist view of Islamic societies and Muslim people_which simultaneously reinforces the Islamic-fundamentalist framing of their political regimes as the one true Islam, and the Orientalist framing of Arab and Muslim societies that further silences women's voices and agency."

This tactic is proving effective in many venues, and the paradox of it is that while it is directed at feminists, it also serves as an appeal to an anachronistic patriarchal protectionism that often defines women as sentimentalized property.

Jessica Lynch is now being yet again redefined by Bragg's totally unsubstantiated allegations of rape. Rape by an enemy is the usurpation of male privilege by a subhuman, and it must be avenged to restore the status of the victim in the eyes of the father-husband. Rape becomes symbolic of the enemy.

Men have to "protect" women, and oftentimes, "our" women. This is the basis of the Black rapist stereotype that was used to overthrow Reconstruction and enforce Jim Crow.

Andrea Dworkin writes of lynching, "The black male, in the South hunted at night to be castrated and/or lynched, becomes in the racist United States the carrier of danger, the carrier of rape. The use of a racially despised type of male as a scapegoat, a symbolic figure embodying the sexuality of all men, is a common male-supremacist strategy. .... And so, among the women, night is the time of sex and also of race: racial exploitation and sexual exploitation are fused, indivisible. Night and black: sex and race: the black men are blamed for what all men do..."

In Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 and its Legacy, edited by David Cecelski (UNC Press, 1998), describing the North Carolina coup d'etat against the fusion governments of Black Republicans and white Populists that signaled the last nail driven in the coffin of Reconstruction, there is account after account of how the specter of the Black Rapist was the absolute centerpiece of white Democrat propaganda to marshal and mobilize ad hoc white militias against "Black rule." As Dworkin points out, this is a "common male supremacist strategy."

The Origin Myth--based fundamentally on white supremacy--asserted itself in the minds of the white Populists and when given the choice between their class peers among Blacks and the white ruling class, they chose the latter. (This is a lesson we cannot afford to forget about any form of American populism.)

This provision of outrage is essential to deploying troops into battle on imperial adventures. While wars in defense of one's home, or wars defending oneself against extermination are clear and unambiguous to combatants, wars of offense generally require the emotional fuel of a morality tale. It needn't have much of a half life either.

When I was in Haiti, my team allowed themselves to feel the outrage at the FAdH baton beatings of civilians when the mission was still defined as one that might involve combat. Once the likelihood of combat passed, however, within a month, several of my subordinates were longing for the baton-wielding FAdH and would themselves have gleefully laid into the raucous crowds of turbulent black bodies.

Which brings us to Shoshana Johnson, Black, daughter of a Panamanian immigrant, and one of the captives from the ambush of the 507th. There was never any reference, however elliptical, to the possibility of Shoshana Johnson being raped, as there was for Jessica Lynch even before CENTCOM learned her fate. Indeed the issue of Black women being raped is extremely dangerous in the United States because it hits too close to the centuries-long American tradition of white masters raping their slaves. This is not part of the U.S. Origin Myth. Quite the contrary.

There is much being made, and rightly so, of the disparate treatment of Jessica Lynch and Shoshana Johnson, but little remarked upon is what binds the two together in mass consciousness.

They are both women. White supremacy has been sniffed out by both sides of the race question regarding Johnson and Lynch (who reportedly liked each other), judging by the outrage of one side and the defensiveness of the other.

The issue of racial disparity is red hot and will fought out in other venues, and I stand with Shoshana Johnson in her demand to be treated equally, holding the military and white supremacy as systems responsible, and not Jessica Lynch.

It is more important here, perhaps, to point out what they had in common, and to include Lori Pitsewa: an Appalachian woman, an African American woman, and a Hopi woman; all in the Army, and all doubly colonized and plurally defined by capitalist patriarchy.

Lynch and Johnson are now scheduled to appear together on the cover of December's Glamour magazine as the "Women of the Year." Get your head around that if you want to see how deftly any seed of subversion is commodified! This is the latest transformation, the latest account--two smiling women warriors, salt 'n' peppa like the biracial buddy movies Americans find so comforting, backgrounded by American flags and yellow ribbons, our (militarized) social progress on display in every supermarket.

How do these many accounts of them reflect not on them as individuals, but on capitalist patriarchy in the United States?

Anyone who has this much time on his hands must not have a job, no wonder you’re such a miserable weakling liberal.

Prosperity envy seems to be synonymous with the “blame America” crowd.

I’m surprised you’re not in NYC right now painted green, puffing on a blunt, chillin with the “homies” , rich self loathing white college kids, AIDS infected gay rights activists, fetus killers, and those scum-bags who don’t have the self-discipline, or self-respect to ever experience responsible employment.
 
Espada9 said:
Anyone who has this much time on his hands must not have a job, no wonder you’re such a miserable weakling liberal.

Prosperity envy seems to be synonymous with the “blame America” crowd.

I’m surprised you’re not in NYC right now painted green, puffing on a blunt, chillin with the “homies” , rich self loathing white college kids, AIDS infected gay rights activists, fetus killers, and those scum-bags who don’t have the self-discipline, or self-respect to ever experience responsible employment.

Is your comment addressed to me or the author of the article ?

I've got a very busy and wellpaid job, thank you very much.

The author, well, I can't speak for him though I expect the Guardian pay their
journalists very well.

As for your view of the people in NYC - it's only your opinion, amigo.
 
limerickman said:
The authorised biography you refer to, was written by a journalist who was fired for stealing free lance writers work (that is what the Guardian article states).
So are you saying that the Guardian Newspaper is wrong ?
If the Guardian is wrong - why isn't Lynch and Co suing them for defamation and libel ?
In a country full of lawyers, they'd be only too happy to sue a paper who is lying - wouldn't they ?

Do you see the point that I am making.
If a report appears that doesn't align itself to your political view - you say it's
"speculation" or "untrue".
Yet you willingly believe the words of an author who - was fired by a national newspaper.

That's the problem with you and your kind.
Perfidious.

Wrong AGAIN! The biography was written by Rick Bragg, not Jayson Blair. He was NOT fired but resigned. Jayson Blair was fired for fabrication of story lines. Bragg was suspended for not giving credit. But the details miss you.

Anyway, the canard you foisted is a red herring and totaly non-sequitar. This is an AUTHORIZED biography. So put that in your bong and smoke it.

:eek:
 
Weisse Luft said:
Wrong AGAIN! The biography was written by Rick Bragg, not Jayson Blair. He was NOT fired but resigned. Jayson Blair was fired for fabrication of story lines. Bragg was suspended for not giving credit. But the details miss you.

Anyway, the canard you foisted is a red herring and totaly non-sequitar. This is an AUTHORIZED biography. So put that in your bong and smoke it.

The Guardian :

"Rick Bragg--a white man--was fired from the New York Times for almost plagiarizing a freeleancer's material and pretending he was reporting from on the scene, when he was clearly not.
The book, I Am a Soldier, Too: The Jessica Lynch Story, patched together as many details as Bragg could string together, then added a twist to pump up the sales. Jessica Lynch, it claimed, was raped by her captors."
endquote :

Rick Bragg, according to the article, wrote the book about Jessica Lynch.
If he resigned for the NYT (as you suggest) - he can sue the Guardian for defamation.