ARTS & FARCES internet

What do you do with an information minister who tells lies so unbelievable that he becomes a cult figure? Give him a job as a television gasbag, of course.

The Guardian is reporting that Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, Iraq’s information minister under Saddam Hussein, has been hired by Abu Dhabi television as an “expert commentator.” al-Sahaf is known mostly for the outrageous lies he told to journalists during the early stages of the war on Iraq.

Nicknamed “Comical Ali,” al-Sahaf is best remembered for his on-air statement from the roof of the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad as U.S. tanks rolled into the capitol city in the background and Iraqi troops scrambled for safety. “Baghdad is safe. The battle is still going on,” al-Sahaf spun his yarn. “The infidels are committing suicide by the hundreds on the gates of Baghdad. Don’t believe those liars.”

The Guardian cheekily reports, “He later surrendered to American troops but was released after being deemed insignificant.”

Saddam Hussein kept the Iraqi populace in line through the use of a secret police force called the mukhabarat. The Bush administration apparently believes what’s good for the goose is good for the gander and has directed the CIA to create a secret police force to root out the remnants of Ba’athist insurgency. So says Julian Coman in a Telegraph article this morning.

Costing US$3 billion over the next three years, with the funds coming out of the CIA’s budget, the initiative is being compared to the Phoenix program in Vietnam, which “sought to destroy the civilian infrastructure supporting the Vietcong through assassinations and abductions secretly authorised by Washington,” according to Coman’s report who got a former chief of CIA counterterrorism to admit as much on the record.

Coman clarifies the purpose of the initiative as a clumsy sleight-of-hand maneuver (pay no attention to that assassin behind the curtain):

“The force is intended to take on a crucial role for Washington in post-Saddam Iraq. The Pentagon and CIA have told the White House that the organisation will allow America to maintain control over the direction of the country as sovereignty is handed over to the Iraqi people during the course of this year.”

Coman goes on to quote John Pike, an expert on classified military budgets at Washington-based Global Security:

“The creation of a well-functioning local secret police, that in effect is a branch of the CIA, is part of the general handover strategy. If you are in control of the secret police in a country then you don’t really have to worry too much about who the local council appoints to collect the garbage.”

President Bush II seems clearly incapable of deviating from the modern American foreign policy of setting up heinous dictatorships and then knocking them down.

During the Saturday that Saddam Hussein was being pulled out of his hole, Shrub was busy whittling your civil liberties even closer to the nub. Of course he didn’t do this on his own; he couldn’t have done it without the help of our elected Congress Critters (the Senate passed the legislation around Thanksgiving on a voice vote so as to spare the good Senators the embarrassment of their individual votes).

On 13 December 2003, President Bush II signed into law legislation granting the FBI even more power over the citizenry—including the power to sift through our financial records; even if we’re not suspected of committing a crime. By timing his signature with the capture of Hussein, Shrub assured that his enactment of part of USA PATRIOT II would see little, if any, media coverage. It was a safe bet; as it turns out, only David Martin’s San Antonio Current piece, “With a Whisper, Not a Bang,” offered coverage of the event.

Bush’s strategy is clearly to enact parts of USA PATRIOT II a little at a time in an attempt to avoid attracting the attention of civil libertarians and other activists.

The new law, entitled the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2004, provides funding for all of the intelligence activities of the federal government. One of the more curious aspects of the legislation is broadening the definition of “financial institution.” Airlines, car dealers, casinos, insurance agencies, pawnbrokers, and even the U.S. Post Office are all considered financial institutions under the expanded definition, as is any business “whose cash transactions have a high degree of usefulness in criminal, tax, or regulatory matters.” Under the provisions of the new law, the FBI can obtain the financial records of any citizen merely by submitting a “National Security Letter” to the financial institution. No probable cause and no court hearing before a judge; the FBI doesn’t even have to provide a Congressional accounting regarding its use of the Letters. And if your records are seized, the financial institution is prohibited from informing you; a gag order automatically attaches to each and every National Security Letter.

Additionally, the law creates a new intelligence office in the Treasury Department and creates test programs to determine whether agencies should share raw data with each other as well as state and local governments.

It’s time for the culture to have the argument about whether healthcare is a right or a privilege in this country. We’re going to have to have this argument—and make no mistake: this is going to be a gloves-off doozy—sooner or later and the sooner this is resolved, the better for everyone. This issue should have been resolved five years ago, but better late than never, I guess. Like it or not, the healthcare issue is going to be one of the core components of the 2004 election cycle.

The American healthcare system is irreparably broken. That much there’s no denying.

America’s corporate media is beginning to finally awaken to the issue. At the end of 2003, The New York Times published a Milt Freudenheim article, “Some Doctors Letting Patients Skip Co-Payments,” reporting that some medical providers interpret the bureaucracy of managed-care networks as damage and routing around them by refusing to join and accepting the insurer’s out-of-network payment for their services, forgiving patients’ co-payments and deductibles.

Demonstrating yet again that he has nothing even remotely resembling a clue, President Bush today signed the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. Ostensibly designed to regulate unsolicited bulk email, this legislation will do little to stem the spam tide. The legislation Bush signed is an opt-out law that supersedes opt-in laws several states have initiated, most recently and notably California.

C|net cites a report from email security provider MessageLabs finding that spam increased a whopping 77% in 2003 over the previous year, now accounting for more than 66% of all email traffic

In a civilized opt-in universe, like, oh I don’t know, the European Union, a marketeer would have to receive your explicit permission before he or she could inundate your inbox with pitches for penis enlargements, cheap refinancing, and prescription drugs. That, of course, would make too much sense and would intolerably violate the prime directive of American jurisprudence: “all law is based on maintaining or enhancing corporate profit” (with apologies to Sidney Jourard).