micah holmquist's irregular thoughts and links

Welcome to the musings and notes of a Cadillac, Michigan based writer named Micah Holmquist, who is bothered by his own sarcasm.

Please send him email at micahth@chartermi.net.

Holmquist's full archives are listed here.

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Sites Holmquist trys, and often fails, to go no more than a couple of days without visiting (some of which Holmquist regularly swipes links from without attribution)

Aljazeera.Net English
AlterNet (War on Iraq)
Alternative Press Review
Always Low Prices -- Always
Another Irani online
antiwar.com (blog)
Asia Times Online
Axis of Logic
Baghdad Burning (riverbend)
BBC News
blogdex.net ("track this weblog")
bobanddavid.com
BuzzFlash
The Christian Science Monitor (Daily Update)
Common Dreams
Cryptome
Cursor
Daily Rotten
DefenseLINK
Democracy Now
The Drudge Report
Eat the Press (Harry Shearer, The Huffington Post)
Empire Notes (Rahul Mahajan)
frontpagemag.com (HorowitzWatch)
globalsecurity.org
greenandwhite.com
Guardian Unlimited
Haaretz
The Independent
Information Clearing House
Informed Comment (Juan Cole)
Iranians for Peace

Iraq Dispatches (Dahr Jamail)
Iraqi Democrats Against Occupation
Iraq Occupation and Resistance Report (Psychoanalysts for Peace and Justice)
MetaFilter
MLive
Mr. Show and Other Comedy
The Narco News Bulletin (blog)
NEWSMAKINGNEWS
The New York Times
Occupation Watch
Political Theory Daily Review
Press Action
Project Syndicate
Raed in the Middle (Raed Jarrar)
random-abstract.com
Reuters
Salon
The Simpsons Archive
Simpsons Collector Sector
Slate
Sploid
Technorati ("search for mth.blogspot.com")
thi3rdeye
United States Central Command
U.S. Embassy Baghdad, Iraq
venezuelanalysis.com
War Report (Project on Defense Alternatives)
The Washington Post
Wildfire (Jo Wilding)
wood s lot
www.mnftiu.cc (David Rees)

Blogs that for one reason or another Holmquist would like to read on at least something of a regular basis (always in development)

Thivai Abhor
As'ad AbuKhalil
Ken Adrian
Christopher Allbritton
Alli
Douglas Anders
Mark W. Anderson
Aziz Ansari
Atomic Archive
Bagatellen
James Benjamin
Elton Beard
Charlie Bertsch
alister black
Blame India Watch
Blixa
Blog Left: Critical Interventions Warblog / war blog
Igor Boog
Martin Butler
Chris Campbell
James M. Capozzola
Avedon Carol
Elaine Cassel
cats blog
Jeff Chang
Margaret Cho
Citizens Of Upright Moral Character
Louis CK
Les Dabney
Dack
Natalie Davis
Scoobie Davis
The Day Job
Jodi Dean
Dominic Duval
Steve Earle
Eli
Daniel Ellsberg
Tom Engelhardt
Lisa English
Faramin
Barbara Flaska
Brian Flemming
Joe Foster
Yoshie Furuhashi
Al Giordano
Glovefox
Rob Goodspeed
Grand Puba
Guardian Unlimited Weblog
Pete Guither
The Hairy Eyeball
Ray Hanania
Mark Hand
harveypekar.com
Hector Rottweiller Jr's Web Log Jim Henley Arvin Hill Hit & Run (Reason) Hugo Clark Humphrey Indri The Iraqi Agora Dru Oja Jay Jeff Lynne d Johnson Dallas Jones Julia Kane Blues Benjamin Kepple Ken Layne Phil Leggiere Brian Linse Adam Magazine Majority Report Radio Marc Maron Josh Marshall Jeralyn Merritt J.R. Mooneyham Michael Scott Moore Bob Morris Bob Mould Mr. Show and Tell Muslims For Nader/Camejo David Neiwert NewPages Weblog Aimee Nezhukumatathil Sean O'Brien Patton Oswalt The Panda's Thumb Randy Paul Rodger A. Payne Ian Penman politx Neal Pollack Greg Proops Pro-War.com Pure Polemics Seyed Razavi Rayne Simon Reynolds richardpryor.com Clay Richards Mike Rogers Yuval Rubinstein
Steven Rubio
Saragon Noah Shachtman Court Schuett The Simpsons Archive Amardeep Singh Sam Smith Soundbitten Jack Sparks Ian Spiers Morgan Spurlock Stand Down: The Left-Right Blog Opposing an Invasion of Iraq Aaron Stark Morgaine Swann Tapped (The American Prospect) tex Matthew Tobey Annie Tomlin Tom Tomorrow The University Without Condition Jesse Walker Warblogger Watch Diane Warth The Watchful Babbler The Weblog we have brains Matt Welch
Alex Whalen
Jon Wiener
Lizz Winstead
James Wolcott
Wooster Collective
Mickey Z

Sunday, November 16, 2003
 
micah holmquist's November 16 notes

To follow up on Friday's "November 14 vision," here is the lead editorial in yesterday's Deer Digest:

We here are Deer Digest are constantly under the threat of human repression but you can count on us to remain an independent advocate for our fellow deer. Just yesterday the humans tried to take over but we defeated them, 103-2.

Our reporting is never more than in a time like now -firearm deer season- when all good deer are enjoying the nice feed piles that human betters have graciously provided for us.

Today's lead editorial is simply:
Not bad but more can be and must done.
Strange.

***

"Bush is the president so why shouldn't it be allowed to do whatever he wants?" is my latest contribution to HorowitzWatch.

In it I mention Stephen F. Hayes' Weekly Standard story on connection between Saddam and al Qaeda:

OSAMA BIN LADEN and Saddam Hussein had an operational relationship from the early 1990s to 2003 that involved training in explosives and weapons of mass destruction, logistical support for terrorist attacks, al Qaeda training camps and safe haven in Iraq, and Iraqi financial support for al Qaeda--perhaps even for Mohamed Atta--according to a top secret U.S. government memorandum obtained by THE WEEKLY STANDARD.

The memo, dated October 27, 2003, was sent from Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith to Senators Pat Roberts and Jay Rockefeller, the chairman and vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. It was written in response to a request from the committee as part of its investigation into prewar intelligence claims made by the administration. Intelligence reporting included in the 16-page memo comes from a variety of domestic and foreign agencies, including the FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency. Much of the evidence is detailed, conclusive, and corroborated by multiple sources. Some of it is new information obtained in custodial interviews with high-level al Qaeda terrorists and Iraqi officials, and some of it is more than a decade old. The picture that emerges is one of a history of collaboration between two of America's most determined and dangerous enemies.

Hayes goes into far more detail about the memo's contents, although he is regularly unclear about when certain interviews took place. I also find it a bit suspect that no qualifications are made as to whether or not any of these individuals that are considered to be reliable sources in this report gave information of weapons of mass destruction that turned out to be inaccurate.

Eric Garris has raised another doubt in an antiwar.com piece while the Department of Defense says:

A letter was sent to the Senate Intelligence Committee on October 27, 2003 from Douglas J. Feith, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, in response to follow-up questions from his July 10 testimony. One of the questions posed by the committee asked the Department to provide the reports from the Intelligence Community to which he referred in his testimony before the Committee. These reports dealt with the relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida.

The letter to the committee included a classified annex containing a list and description of the requested reports, so that the Committee could obtain the reports from the relevant members of the Intelligence Community.

The items listed in the classified annex were either raw reports or products of the CIA, the NSA, or, in one case, the DIA. The provision of the classified annex to the Intelligence Committee was cleared by other agencies and done with the permission of the Intelligence Community. The selection of the documents was made by DOD to respond to the Committee’s question. The classified annex was not an analysis of the substantive issue of the relationship between Iraq and al Qaida, and it drew no conclusions.

If the Bush Administration does in fact believe their is a definite link, a question I raised last year -why isn't Team Bush making a bigger deal of this?- seems as pertinent as ever.

***

The Coalition Provisional Authority and Iraqi Governing Council's "Agreement on Political Process."

***

"The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is ending its emergency food programme in the West Bank, saying the economic collapse there is the direct result of Israeli military closures and that Israel must live up to its responsibility as the occupying power for the economic needs of the Palestinians," Justin Huggler writes in today's Independent. "The move comes as the Israeli media reported that François Bellon, the Red Cross representative, told senior Israeli generals that the Palestinian Authority was on the verge of an 'explosion' that could lead to 'the worst ever humanitarian crisis' in the occupied territories."

Also:

The Palestinian economy has collapsed under the weight of military closures of Palestinian cities, making it impossible for Palestinians to move their produce or travel to jobs in other cities or in Israel. Last year and early this year, curfews imposed for all but a few hours a week by the Israeli army made it impossible for Palestinians to work at all...

As a result of economic collapse, a fifth of Palestinian children are malnourished, according to a report last year by an American government aid agency. International aid organisations have stepped in to provide assistance. In the wake of the invasion and reoccupation of West Bank cities last April, the Red Cross launched an emergency food and essentials programme for Palestinians.

The organisation has spent $46m over the past year and a half providing food and such necessities as cooking oil and matches to around 300,000 of the most needy Palestinians in the West Bank. But now the ICRC says that must stop, and that Israel must live up to its responsibility as an occupying power under the Fourth Geneva Convention to meet the economic needs of the civilian population in the West Bank and Gaza Strip...

For the time being, the UN's World Food Organisation has stepped into the breach, setting up an alternative food programme until next summer.

"The ICRC in Israel, the Occupied Territories and the Autonomous Territories"

***

Apparently the advantages of getting your propaganda distributed by supposedly independent sources aren't all they are crack up to be.

***

"President George Bush and Tony Blair have agreed an exit strategy for pulling out of Iraq, officially ending the occupation next year while committing troops to the region until 2006," Kamal Ahmed and Peter Beaumont write in today's Observer. "...the two leaders will make the blueprint the centrepiece of their discussions during Bush's state visit to Britain this week."

***

"THE WHITE HOUSE always said it would never count how many Iraqi parents we killed to liberate their children. We would never count how many toddlers we blew to pieces to free their elders. We would never count how many nuclear families we vaporized. We would never know if we razed a village to save a child," Derrick Z. Jackson writes in Thursday's Boston Globe. "This is the most disgusting and least discussed aspect of President Bush's invasion and occupation of Iraq."

***

"Seven farmers told Reuters that U.S. soldiers, who are mounting a new crackdown against insurgents, have been pressuring them to help hunt down fighters," Michael Georgy writes in a November 14 Reuters story about Iraq. '''They came here and they told us to help them catch resistance fighters or their planes would destroy our homes and we would be arrested,' said Ahmed Mohammad, 30."

***

The Central Eurasia Project's analysis of the new Afghan draft constitution.