the human province

In an unexpected (by me) trip, New Mexico governor, Bill Richards, went to Khartoum to try to get Khartoum to allow UN peacekeepers in Darfur. He met separately with President Omar al-Bashir, former rebel leader Minni Minnowi and foreign minister Lam Akol:

Richardson told an Associated Press reporter traveling with him that he and al-Bashir discussed the U.N. peacekeeping force, a cease-fire, protection for humanitarian groups working in the region, increasing sexual violence against refugees and a potential conference with rebel leaders.

...He discussed the [Abuja accord] later with Minni Minnawi, the leader of the rebel Sudan Liberation Movement that signed the agreement and subsequently became a presidential assistant. Minnawi expressed disappointment that the government has not yet disarmed the militias and told Richardson if the al-Bashir's government does not honor its commitments, there will be regime change.

...In Khartoum, Richardson also met with Sudanese foreign minister Lam Akol, bringing along humanitarian workers that included one representative of the Save Darfur Coalition. The coalition organized the trip and has been instrumental in bringing attention to the crisis and criticism on al-Bashir's government.

According to the AP, this trip was meant to draw attention to Richardson's "extensive foreign policy background, including his tenure as U.S. envoy to the United Nations" in preparation for his "likely White House bid."

Given how apathetic Americans are about the genocide in Darfur, I can't imagine that this sort of a trip could do much besides show voters that he's got enough clout to meet with a head of state (although it's a lot less controversial than a similar trip to Iraq, Iran or North Korea). In any case, if it's an attempt to garner future votes, it's certainly made me sympathetic to his platform.

Let's hope he has some success in Sudan.

Here's a great piece of Op-Art to be published in the San Francisco Chronicle. It was done by a"Kossack" over at the Daily Kos:

This segment on Al Jazeera (translated and edited by MEMRI), is more than a little disconcerting. The segment pits Sadeq al-Musawi, a Shia journalist, against Mishan al-Jabouri, the Sunni owner of the Iraqi satellite network, Al Zawraa. I'm not really exaggerating when I use the word "pit," because it's almost as though two cocks had been set in a hole to kill each other.

Jabouri tells Musawi that he "should choose your words carefully, or else I will do things to you that you will not imagine, you Persian liar ... you are an Iranian shoe!"

Musawi responds with, "Your father killed Kurds!"

Finally, Jabouri advises Musawi against speaking ill of Saddam Hussein, to which Musawi tells him not to advise anything, but rather, "kill me in Iraq, send your militia to kill me."

I've been reading Vali Nasr's The Shia Revival, and he writes a lot about how the Sunni regard the Shia as not being proper Arabs, because Shiism has had much influence from Iran and since some Shia in Lebanon and Iraq are the descendants of Persians who migrated centuries ago. Jabouri literally calls Musawi and Iranian (he says both Ajami and Irani), and brings some paperwork (which he proceeds to throw at his interlocutor) out to support his claims. And in the end, who knows whether Musawi is Iranian or not. Maybe he is, or maybe his family fled Iraq and he was born in Iran to Iraqi parents.

But that's not really important. The important point is the internecine venom. Jabouri tells the Jazeera moderator, "The people who executed Saddam Hussein are the same people who killed Umar, the same people who killed Abu Bakr." Are these Iraqi militants? western viewers might ask. No, Umar and Abu Bakr are the first and second Caliphs, those who succeeded Mohammad in the 7th century. Umar ibn al-Khattab was poisoned by a Persian slave, and Abu Bakr either died of a cold or from being poisoned a year earlier, depending on your source. (The partisans of Ali, the Shi'at 'Ali, believed that Ali should have been Caliph instead of Abu Bakr and Umar.)

I find it disconcerting that the Iraqi political discourse still hinges on the desert politics of Medina and Mecca nearly 1400 years ago. And seeing the historical complexities of the situation in Iraq, I find it even more disconcerting that most of the people who are paid to understand these historico-religious contexts don't even know the difference between the Sunni and the Shia.

I've added links next to the comment section for DiggIt and Del.icio.us and Reddit in case anyone wants to add any of my posts to either of those sites...

I was reading a back and forth in the London Review debating the source of anti-Semitic remarks that had been attributed (falsely it seems) to Hassan Nasrallah, all of which came in response to Charles Glass's recent piece about Hezbollah learning from its mistakes. This led me to go check out some of his previous writings, since he seems to be an interesting character who studied at the American University in Beirut and was kidnapped by Hezbollah in the 1987.

While reading his piece in The Nation, From Beirut to Damascus, I came across this: "Kamal Salibi, Lebanon's historian laureate at the American University of Beirut, used to tell me the Palestinians had made the mistake of becoming another Lebanese tribe."

And this started me to thinking, has the US become just another Iraqi tribe?

There's a very good op-ed piece on Somalia in today's Times, A fleeting victory in Somalia. Jonathan Stevenson, at the United States Naval War College, argues, rightly in my opinion, that a robust round of diplomacy is needed to work out Somalia's problems, namely, a power-sharing plan with the Islamic Courts and the transitional government, an engagement of clan leaders and an agreement on the place of Islamic law in Somalia. He adds that the US should join efforts by the EU and Kenya to help broker an agreement, similar to the one that finally ended the war between Southern Sudan and Khartoum:

The temptation in Washington will be to keep its distance and rely on Ethiopia, the European Union and Kenya for as long as possible. This attitude is myopic. Neither the American public nor the world believe that the Bush administration?s predominantly military approach to counterterrorism is working. Relying primarily on Ethiopian troops to tamp down Somali Islamism would represent a continuation of that flawed model, and of the corresponding risk of fueling the jihad.

The United States' full participation in a diplomatic process in the Horn of Africa, on the other hand, would constitute a relatively low-cost way of signaling a new American approach to Islam and a re-engagement in sub-Saharan Africa, which has largely been left out of Washington's post-9/11 calculus. A result could be a small political victory in the Muslim world that would deprive Osama bin Laden and his followers of a new grievance rather than supplying them with one.

He points out that any prolonged presence of Ethiopian troops could be very dangerous. Many Somalis are afraid of Ethiopian designs on the country and disconcerted by the recent comments of the transitional Interior Minister Hussein Mohammad Aideed (whose father was made famous by the "Black Hawk Down" incident) that Somalia and Ethiopia "should unite, just like the Europeans. One money. One passport. One security."

The problem, then, lies in a tendency to rely on military force instead of negotiation. I tend to believe that it was a bad idea for the Ethiopians to invade; a better idea would have been negotiations in Yemen or Kenya to agree on a power-sharing deal, because even if the thought of another Islamic regime bothers me, the Courts did manage to bring some sort of stability and decrease the violence in the areas they controlled. Now, there is a risk that continued Ethiopian presence will rub Somalis the wrong way and that the spotty order of the Islamists will revert back to the reign of warlords and inter-clan violence.

A local radio journalist summed up the problems of an Ethiopian presence in the country, as reported by the Times:

With Somalia's longtime fears that Ethiopia might swallow it, the sooner [the Ethiopians' withdrawal] happens, the better. On Saturday, Nasteh Dahir Farah, a reporter for a Kismayo radio station, visited the town's airport with three foreign journalists. The foreigners were allowed in. Mr. Farah was not. He was shooed away by Ethiopian soldiers at the gate and told never to come back.

"This is my country, not theirs," he said. "If I didn't have a job," Mr. Farah muttered, straightening himself up and smoothing the shirt where he had been poked in the chest, "I'd join the resistance."

A little humiliation, it seems, goes a long, long way.

And indeed it does, as we have seen throughout the Muslim world, but especially in Iraq.

So while it seems imperative for negotiations to begin in good faith between the transitional government, the clan leaders and the Islamic Courts, I've got a sneaking suspicion that the transitional government has let their Ethiopian-backed success go to their head. And remarks by the transitional defense minister do little to reassure me:

The big man in Kismayo is Barre Aadan Shire, the transitional government's defense minister and a former warlord, whose strong jaw, natty goatee and bald head lend him an uncanny resemblance to Lenin. He says many people in Kismayo have asked him to reach out to the Islamists, but he does not want to. The last of the Islamist fighters have retreated to the Kenya border, about 150 miles away.

"If we were going to compromise," Mr. Shire said, "why go to war?"

Via Juan Cole, Daily Kos has the story of a blogger who contacted a talk radio station's advertisers to tell them that their products were being associated with and read by the same voices that call for torturing people and murdering Muslims. He sent advertisers polite informative letters and was subsequently slapped with a cease and desist letter by Disney's lawyers because he was providing audio recordings of the broadcasts to allow advertisers to hear the comments for themselves. It seems that this hit a nerve with Disney, particularly as Visa seems to have pulled their ads from the shows in question.

Here's a copy of the letter he sent AT&T:

To: Wendy Clark, VP-advertising, AT&T

Dear Ms. Clark:

Thanks to radio hosts from KSFO your brand is being associated with torturing and killing people. Would your marketing people be happy to hear your commercial ran after Lee Rogers said this about a black man in Lincoln, Nebraska?

"Now you start with the Sear's Diehard the battery cables connected to his testi*les and you entertain him with that for awhile and then you blow his bleeping head off. " (Audio link)

You should know the person calling for the execution and torture of the black man in that clip READS THE AT&T commercials on the air. Right now on KSFO Lee Rogers is THE VOICE of AT&T to the SF Bay area. (Audio Link)

Sadly, calling for the death and torture of individuals and groups of people is a regular occurrence on KSFO 560 AM, owned by ABC Radio Disney.

Another example: immediately after the 6 am ABC Radio news on October 27th:

Lee Rogers: I say they catch the person, tie 'em to a post and burn 'em. Set 'em on fire.

Officer Vic: Yeah.

Lee Rogers: Let 'em know what it feels like.

Melanie Morgan: Hog tie 'em first. That would be good.

Next, Lee Rogers talks about a protester at a Cindy Sheehan event:

"Whoever did that should have been stomped to death right there. Just stomp their bleeping guts out." (Audio link).

Within three minutes they called for someone to be burned alive and a protester to be stomped to death. If you dismissed the first clip as a "joke", note that in this clip they were clearly not joking:

Melanie Morgan famously called for Bill Keller of the New York Times (and nine editors from other papers) to be hanged.  (Audio link)

On Nov. 14th  Melanie Morgan said this about Nancy Pelosi:

"We've got a bulls-eye painted on her big laughing eyes." (Audio link)

Also note that Morgan reads the Cingular Wireless commercials on KSFO.

Of course political speech is protected, but I believe the FBI and the FCC frown on targeting elected officials for death or inciting violence toward leaders of any political party.

Because of how ads are purchased, your ad placement agency probably didn't know that Tom Brenner (the "comic relief" called Officer Vic) regularly mocks advertiser's products.  Listen as he:

calls Chevrolet's product "shi**y" (audio link)

suggests an anti-virus product is part of a protection racket (audio link)

pretends a cold pill is really a suppository (audio link)

The odds are your product will be mocked. If they don't respect a big client like Chevrolet, will they respect your brand?

And it's not simply calls for killing specific people or mocking products, the radio hosts at KSFO proudly talk about their anti-Muslim views. Based on my research, your business has rules about discrimination against people of other religions, so what message are you sending when your employees or customers hear your advertisements right after Brian Sussman demands of a caller:

"Say Allah is a Wh*re!" (audio link)

Or when Lee Rogers says,

"Indonesia is really just another enemy Muslim nation. ... You keep screwing around with stuff like this we are going to kill a bunch of you. Millions of you. "   (audio link)

Maybe you haven't heard any complaints. Would KSFO management let you know about complaints?  Doubtful. Morgan's husband, Jack Swanson, is KSFO's operations manager. The president of KSFO, Mickey Luckoff, started the station format and has a history of defending hosts like Michael Savage until he was forced to fire him.

I understand you can't listen to all the shows you advertise on - no one can. You rely on the accurate representation of the sales reps and the show description. But you don't need to take my word, listen to the programs. You probably won't have to listen long to hear something that offends or disgusts you.  If you wish to hear the complete context on any clip or the audio during a date your ad ran contact me I have an educational archive of audio clips, I've listed a few below.

I want to emphasize that if you withdrawal your ads you aren't limiting their free speech, just removing your paid support of it. Some other company without the values you describe on the AT&T website can support them. You can choose to advertise elsewhere. This is really about YOU. Do YOU want to be associated with these comments? Do you want your company and brand to be associated with these comments?

I urge you to discontinue advertising on KSFO during the shows hosted by Melanie Morgan, Lee Rogers, Tom Brenner and Brian Sussman.

If you want to contact KSFO here is a link to their website. If you wish to express your displeasure to their parent company contact Zenia Mucha, Senior Vice President, Corporate Communications, The Walt Disney Company PHONE: (818) 560-5300 CA, (212) 456-7255 NY or email Heather Rim, Vice President, Communications, ABC, Inc.  heather.rim@abc.com.

Sincerely,

P.S.  I would appreciate hearing your final determination in this matter.

Read the Daily Kos write up for the full story.

The New York Review has articles about torture and extraordinary rendition (subscription only) and ordinary Iraqis. The latter reviews Anthony Shadid's book Night Draws Near, which was recommended to me by an Iraqi diplomat friend of mine. I recently met Shadid in Beirut, and he's an extremely nice guy, and judging from his recent coverage of Lebanon, I can understand why his book would be really good. (Unfortunately, I haven't picked it up yet.)

The piece on extraordinary rendition helpfully brings together the stories of some of the more publicized victims of the Bush Administration's policy as well as some of the reporting done by CIA plane watchers who helped uncover the story of the "black sites" in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. Under review are the Canadian Government's report on the rendition to Syria and subsequent torture of Canadian citizen Maher Arar and Steven Grey's Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program:

Edward Walker Jr., a career diplomat, was the US ambassador in Egypt between 1994 and 1997 when some of the first renditions took place. According to Walker, there were only a few occasions when the procedure was used, and they concerned men who were wanted by the Egyptians for terrorist acts allegedly committed there. Walker thought it was a good policy. "They were bad guys, and they were set on causing harm. And you know it's not a perfect world," he told Grey. But he was under no illusions about how they would be treated. "I cannot believe that anybody that was involved in this," he said, "didn't in his heart of hearts, if he was halfway intelligent, think that they were getting abusive interrogation techniques that were tantamount to torture."

Grey asked Walker: "When Condoleezza Rice and the President now stand in front of people and say we don't send people to countries where they torture, are they telling the truth?"

Walker replied: "No, they're not telling the truth."

A former CIA officer was more colorful. "Coming out and saying 'we don't do torture' is as bad as President Clinton saying, 'I didn't have sex with that woman.'" he told Grey. "It's a bare-faced lie. Of course we do torture. Imagine putting President Bush's head under water and telling him to raise his hand when he thinks he's being tortured. Give him the water-board treatment, and he'd be raising his hand straightaway."

Al Jazeera has an interesting article about the Western media coverage of Iraq, and Iraq's sectarian makeup in particular.

Among the complaints about Western coverage is the claim by Tariq al-Hashimi, Iraq's Sunni Arab vice-president, that the media overestimates the number of Shia in the country:

Western media often refer to Iraq as being "overwhelmingly Shia", or use other phrases to imply a large Shia majority. This, [al-Hashimi] says, is wrong -- and it has resulted in over-representation of Shia parties in the Iraqi government at the expense of Sunni Arabs.

Al-Hashimi said: "The false allegations promoted by Western media have resulted in an [inappropriate] political process, and everyone is paying the price for its wrong foundations."

Where the figures came from to back up assertions of a large Shia majority are unclear: no Iraqi census in modern history has ever included sect.

Sources such as Encyclopaedia Britannica put the Shia population in Iraq at 52 per cent of the total in 2001. However, figures circulated by the US military, which invaded Iraq in 2003, put the figure at 60 per cent.

The CIA's World Factbook puts the Shia at 60 to 65 percent of the Iraqi population.

Other complaints include the characterization of the insurgency as essentially Sunni and the assertion that the Baath party was a Sunni-run apparatus that persecuted the Shia. According to the current Baath spokesperson,

"Actually, sect was never an issue in Iraq. I am a Shia and I have been a senior Baath official ... No Baath party official -- no Iraqi official -- ever asked me about my sect.

"When the US army occupied Iraq they issued a list of 55 wanted top Iraqi officials, starting with President Saddam Hussein; half of those senior officials were Shia.

"The Committee of Debaathification issued a list of 100,000 senior Iraqi Baathists who would not be allowed to enjoy governmental posts, 66,000 of them were Shia - so how is the Baath party a Sunni party?

...Abu Muhammad voiced resentment at the the term "Sunni insurgency", saying that Iraqis from different backgrounds are fighting the foreign presence in Iraq.

"This term plays down Iraqi nationalism," he said. "I repeat, I am a Shia and I am resisting the US forces in Iraq, and we know for sure that resistance fighters from all background are fighting. Why do the Western agencies insist that only Sunni are fighting? Big question mark, I think."

On the other hand, there are those who disagree:

However, Karim Bader, an independent Iraqi politician, said that Western media had done a decent job on reporting what had occurred under Saddam's rule.

He said one had to look only at the senior army commanders and intelligence officers in Saddam's day, all of whom he said were Sunni. Or to look at the sizes of houses in Shia suburbs - small and overcrowded - or in Sunni areas, where houses were far larger but with fewer occupants.

Bader said: "I think there was sectarianism under Saddam and the Western media reflected that, but the question is, should we hold the Sunni sect responsible for that? I think Iraqis must be careful in answering this question."

A lot has happened while I was away. I woke up the other morning to hear that Saddam Hussein had been executed; and on the same day while on my way back to Spain, I heard that the airport had been bombed by ETA, the militant Basque separatist group; then I saw that Bangkok had been rocked by bomb blasts on new year's eve. Besides that, Addis Ababa sent troops to Somalia to rout the Islamic Courts.

First things first: I'm generally against the death penalty, but I might be convinced to accept it for those guilty of genocide or other crimes against humanity. However, if Iraq was trying to show the world that it has a modern functioning government, this execution was a poor showing for al-Malaki's goverment: it was decidedly neither solemn nor professional and was carried out on the first day of Eid.

As for the ETA bombing, I saw the results first hand, because I left Madrid from the terminal that was bombed the next day. The bomb did some pretty serious damage and has probably left two people dead. It looks like this is going to cripple if not kill the peace talks between ETA and the Spanish Government. They haven't seemed to explain why they broke a cease-fire. Although I hadn't been following the talks closely at all, I remember that there was an Irish priest that had been called in to mediate, and I had the impression that progress was being made.

In Thailand, my first fear was that it was Muslims from the south, but it seems that the bombings are being blamed on supporters of ousted PM Shinawatra.

In Somalia, I've been afraid of an Ethiopian campaign for a while, since such explicit attacks might lead to an Eritrean invasion on behalf of its Islamist allies, rekindling the war between those two countries and making Somalia a battleground for a regional war. However, the Eritreans seem to have stayed out of it, and the Islamic Courts were routed surprisingly fast. However, as soon as the Courts moved out of Mogadishu, looting was rampant and order was on short supply in Somalia's capital. Furthermore, I wouldn't be surprised to see a guerrilla resurgence of Islamist forces in Somalia, which brings me to the point that a negotiated settlement that brought the Islamic Courts into the government would be the best solution. The last thing Somalia needs is for Eritrea and Ethiopia to have a little war on Somali territory. In some good news, Kenya has called for a ceasefire and a brokered peace in Somalia, which may or may not be fueled by their fear of more Somali refugees.

In an unexpected (by me) trip, New Mexico governor, Bill Richards, went to Khartoum to try to get Khartoum to allow UN peacekeepers in Darfur. He met separately with President Omar al-Bashir, former rebel leader Minni Minnowi and foreign minister Lam Akol:

Richardson told an Associated Press reporter traveling with him that he and al-Bashir discussed the U.N. peacekeeping force, a cease-fire, protection for humanitarian groups working in the region, increasing sexual violence against refugees and a potential conference with rebel leaders.

...He discussed the [Abuja accord] later with Minni Minnawi, the leader of the rebel Sudan Liberation Movement that signed the agreement and subsequently became a presidential assistant. Minnawi expressed disappointment that the government has not yet disarmed the militias and told Richardson if the al-Bashir's government does not honor its commitments, there will be regime change.

...In Khartoum, Richardson also met with Sudanese foreign minister Lam Akol, bringing along humanitarian workers that included one representative of the Save Darfur Coalition. The coalition organized the trip and has been instrumental in bringing attention to the crisis and criticism on al-Bashir's government.

According to the AP, this trip was meant to draw attention to Richardson's "extensive foreign policy background, including his tenure as U.S. envoy to the United Nations" in preparation for his "likely White House bid."

Given how apathetic Americans are about the genocide in Darfur, I can't imagine that this sort of a trip could do much besides show voters that he's got enough clout to meet with a head of state (although it's a lot less controversial than a similar trip to Iraq, Iran or North Korea). In any case, if it's an attempt to garner future votes, it's certainly made me sympathetic to his platform.

Let's hope he has some success in Sudan.

Here's a great piece of Op-Art to be published in the San Francisco Chronicle. It was done by a"Kossack" over at the Daily Kos:

This segment on Al Jazeera (translated and edited by MEMRI), is more than a little disconcerting. The segment pits Sadeq al-Musawi, a Shia journalist, against Mishan al-Jabouri, the Sunni owner of the Iraqi satellite network, Al Zawraa. I'm not really exaggerating when I use the word "pit," because it's almost as though two cocks had been set in a hole to kill each other.

Jabouri tells Musawi that he "should choose your words carefully, or else I will do things to you that you will not imagine, you Persian liar ... you are an Iranian shoe!"

Musawi responds with, "Your father killed Kurds!"

Finally, Jabouri advises Musawi against speaking ill of Saddam Hussein, to which Musawi tells him not to advise anything, but rather, "kill me in Iraq, send your militia to kill me."

I've been reading Vali Nasr's The Shia Revival, and he writes a lot about how the Sunni regard the Shia as not being proper Arabs, because Shiism has had much influence from Iran and since some Shia in Lebanon and Iraq are the descendants of Persians who migrated centuries ago. Jabouri literally calls Musawi and Iranian (he says both Ajami and Irani), and brings some paperwork (which he proceeds to throw at his interlocutor) out to support his claims. And in the end, who knows whether Musawi is Iranian or not. Maybe he is, or maybe his family fled Iraq and he was born in Iran to Iraqi parents.

But that's not really important. The important point is the internecine venom. Jabouri tells the Jazeera moderator, "The people who executed Saddam Hussein are the same people who killed Umar, the same people who killed Abu Bakr." Are these Iraqi militants? western viewers might ask. No, Umar and Abu Bakr are the first and second Caliphs, those who succeeded Mohammad in the 7th century. Umar ibn al-Khattab was poisoned by a Persian slave, and Abu Bakr either died of a cold or from being poisoned a year earlier, depending on your source. (The partisans of Ali, the Shi'at 'Ali, believed that Ali should have been Caliph instead of Abu Bakr and Umar.)

I find it disconcerting that the Iraqi political discourse still hinges on the desert politics of Medina and Mecca nearly 1400 years ago. And seeing the historical complexities of the situation in Iraq, I find it even more disconcerting that most of the people who are paid to understand these historico-religious contexts don't even know the difference between the Sunni and the Shia.

I've added links next to the comment section for DiggIt and Del.icio.us and Reddit in case anyone wants to add any of my posts to either of those sites...

I was reading a back and forth in the London Review debating the source of anti-Semitic remarks that had been attributed (falsely it seems) to Hassan Nasrallah, all of which came in response to Charles Glass's recent piece about Hezbollah learning from its mistakes. This led me to go check out some of his previous writings, since he seems to be an interesting character who studied at the American University in Beirut and was kidnapped by Hezbollah in the 1987.

While reading his piece in The Nation, From Beirut to Damascus, I came across this: "Kamal Salibi, Lebanon's historian laureate at the American University of Beirut, used to tell me the Palestinians had made the mistake of becoming another Lebanese tribe."

And this started me to thinking, has the US become just another Iraqi tribe?

There's a very good op-ed piece on Somalia in today's Times, A fleeting victory in Somalia. Jonathan Stevenson, at the United States Naval War College, argues, rightly in my opinion, that a robust round of diplomacy is needed to work out Somalia's problems, namely, a power-sharing plan with the Islamic Courts and the transitional government, an engagement of clan leaders and an agreement on the place of Islamic law in Somalia. He adds that the US should join efforts by the EU and Kenya to help broker an agreement, similar to the one that finally ended the war between Southern Sudan and Khartoum:

The temptation in Washington will be to keep its distance and rely on Ethiopia, the European Union and Kenya for as long as possible. This attitude is myopic. Neither the American public nor the world believe that the Bush administration?s predominantly military approach to counterterrorism is working. Relying primarily on Ethiopian troops to tamp down Somali Islamism would represent a continuation of that flawed model, and of the corresponding risk of fueling the jihad.

The United States' full participation in a diplomatic process in the Horn of Africa, on the other hand, would constitute a relatively low-cost way of signaling a new American approach to Islam and a re-engagement in sub-Saharan Africa, which has largely been left out of Washington's post-9/11 calculus. A result could be a small political victory in the Muslim world that would deprive Osama bin Laden and his followers of a new grievance rather than supplying them with one.

He points out that any prolonged presence of Ethiopian troops could be very dangerous. Many Somalis are afraid of Ethiopian designs on the country and disconcerted by the recent comments of the transitional Interior Minister Hussein Mohammad Aideed (whose father was made famous by the "Black Hawk Down" incident) that Somalia and Ethiopia "should unite, just like the Europeans. One money. One passport. One security."

The problem, then, lies in a tendency to rely on military force instead of negotiation. I tend to believe that it was a bad idea for the Ethiopians to invade; a better idea would have been negotiations in Yemen or Kenya to agree on a power-sharing deal, because even if the thought of another Islamic regime bothers me, the Courts did manage to bring some sort of stability and decrease the violence in the areas they controlled. Now, there is a risk that continued Ethiopian presence will rub Somalis the wrong way and that the spotty order of the Islamists will revert back to the reign of warlords and inter-clan violence.

A local radio journalist summed up the problems of an Ethiopian presence in the country, as reported by the Times:

With Somalia's longtime fears that Ethiopia might swallow it, the sooner [the Ethiopians' withdrawal] happens, the better. On Saturday, Nasteh Dahir Farah, a reporter for a Kismayo radio station, visited the town's airport with three foreign journalists. The foreigners were allowed in. Mr. Farah was not. He was shooed away by Ethiopian soldiers at the gate and told never to come back.

"This is my country, not theirs," he said. "If I didn't have a job," Mr. Farah muttered, straightening himself up and smoothing the shirt where he had been poked in the chest, "I'd join the resistance."

A little humiliation, it seems, goes a long, long way.

And indeed it does, as we have seen throughout the Muslim world, but especially in Iraq.

So while it seems imperative for negotiations to begin in good faith between the transitional government, the clan leaders and the Islamic Courts, I've got a sneaking suspicion that the transitional government has let their Ethiopian-backed success go to their head. And remarks by the transitional defense minister do little to reassure me:

The big man in Kismayo is Barre Aadan Shire, the transitional government's defense minister and a former warlord, whose strong jaw, natty goatee and bald head lend him an uncanny resemblance to Lenin. He says many people in Kismayo have asked him to reach out to the Islamists, but he does not want to. The last of the Islamist fighters have retreated to the Kenya border, about 150 miles away.

"If we were going to compromise," Mr. Shire said, "why go to war?"

Via Juan Cole, Daily Kos has the story of a blogger who contacted a talk radio station's advertisers to tell them that their products were being associated with and read by the same voices that call for torturing people and murdering Muslims. He sent advertisers polite informative letters and was subsequently slapped with a cease and desist letter by Disney's lawyers because he was providing audio recordings of the broadcasts to allow advertisers to hear the comments for themselves. It seems that this hit a nerve with Disney, particularly as Visa seems to have pulled their ads from the shows in question.

Here's a copy of the letter he sent AT&T:

To: Wendy Clark, VP-advertising, AT&T

Dear Ms. Clark:

Thanks to radio hosts from KSFO your brand is being associated with torturing and killing people. Would your marketing people be happy to hear your commercial ran after Lee Rogers said this about a black man in Lincoln, Nebraska?

"Now you start with the Sear's Diehard the battery cables connected to his testi*les and you entertain him with that for awhile and then you blow his bleeping head off. " (Audio link)

You should know the person calling for the execution and torture of the black man in that clip READS THE AT&T commercials on the air. Right now on KSFO Lee Rogers is THE VOICE of AT&T to the SF Bay area. (Audio Link)

Sadly, calling for the death and torture of individuals and groups of people is a regular occurrence on KSFO 560 AM, owned by ABC Radio Disney.

Another example: immediately after the 6 am ABC Radio news on October 27th:

Lee Rogers: I say they catch the person, tie 'em to a post and burn 'em. Set 'em on fire.

Officer Vic: Yeah.

Lee Rogers: Let 'em know what it feels like.

Melanie Morgan: Hog tie 'em first. That would be good.

Next, Lee Rogers talks about a protester at a Cindy Sheehan event:

"Whoever did that should have been stomped to death right there. Just stomp their bleeping guts out." (Audio link).

Within three minutes they called for someone to be burned alive and a protester to be stomped to death. If you dismissed the first clip as a "joke", note that in this clip they were clearly not joking:

Melanie Morgan famously called for Bill Keller of the New York Times (and nine editors from other papers) to be hanged.  (Audio link)

On Nov. 14th  Melanie Morgan said this about Nancy Pelosi:

"We've got a bulls-eye painted on her big laughing eyes." (Audio link)

Also note that Morgan reads the Cingular Wireless commercials on KSFO.

Of course political speech is protected, but I believe the FBI and the FCC frown on targeting elected officials for death or inciting violence toward leaders of any political party.

Because of how ads are purchased, your ad placement agency probably didn't know that Tom Brenner (the "comic relief" called Officer Vic) regularly mocks advertiser's products.  Listen as he:

calls Chevrolet's product "shi**y" (audio link)

suggests an anti-virus product is part of a protection racket (audio link)

pretends a cold pill is really a suppository (audio link)

The odds are your product will be mocked. If they don't respect a big client like Chevrolet, will they respect your brand?

And it's not simply calls for killing specific people or mocking products, the radio hosts at KSFO proudly talk about their anti-Muslim views. Based on my research, your business has rules about discrimination against people of other religions, so what message are you sending when your employees or customers hear your advertisements right after Brian Sussman demands of a caller:

"Say Allah is a Wh*re!" (audio link)

Or when Lee Rogers says,

"Indonesia is really just another enemy Muslim nation. ... You keep screwing around with stuff like this we are going to kill a bunch of you. Millions of you. "   (audio link)

Maybe you haven't heard any complaints. Would KSFO management let you know about complaints?  Doubtful. Morgan's husband, Jack Swanson, is KSFO's operations manager. The president of KSFO, Mickey Luckoff, started the station format and has a history of defending hosts like Michael Savage until he was forced to fire him.

I understand you can't listen to all the shows you advertise on - no one can. You rely on the accurate representation of the sales reps and the show description. But you don't need to take my word, listen to the programs. You probably won't have to listen long to hear something that offends or disgusts you.  If you wish to hear the complete context on any clip or the audio during a date your ad ran contact me I have an educational archive of audio clips, I've listed a few below.

I want to emphasize that if you withdrawal your ads you aren't limiting their free speech, just removing your paid support of it. Some other company without the values you describe on the AT&T website can support them. You can choose to advertise elsewhere. This is really about YOU. Do YOU want to be associated with these comments? Do you want your company and brand to be associated with these comments?

I urge you to discontinue advertising on KSFO during the shows hosted by Melanie Morgan, Lee Rogers, Tom Brenner and Brian Sussman.

If you want to contact KSFO here is a link to their website. If you wish to express your displeasure to their parent company contact Zenia Mucha, Senior Vice President, Corporate Communications, The Walt Disney Company PHONE: (818) 560-5300 CA, (212) 456-7255 NY or email Heather Rim, Vice President, Communications, ABC, Inc.  heather.rim@abc.com.

Sincerely,

P.S.  I would appreciate hearing your final determination in this matter.

Read the Daily Kos write up for the full story.

The New York Review has articles about torture and extraordinary rendition (subscription only) and ordinary Iraqis. The latter reviews Anthony Shadid's book Night Draws Near, which was recommended to me by an Iraqi diplomat friend of mine. I recently met Shadid in Beirut, and he's an extremely nice guy, and judging from his recent coverage of Lebanon, I can understand why his book would be really good. (Unfortunately, I haven't picked it up yet.)

The piece on extraordinary rendition helpfully brings together the stories of some of the more publicized victims of the Bush Administration's policy as well as some of the reporting done by CIA plane watchers who helped uncover the story of the "black sites" in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. Under review are the Canadian Government's report on the rendition to Syria and subsequent torture of Canadian citizen Maher Arar and Steven Grey's Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program:

Edward Walker Jr., a career diplomat, was the US ambassador in Egypt between 1994 and 1997 when some of the first renditions took place. According to Walker, there were only a few occasions when the procedure was used, and they concerned men who were wanted by the Egyptians for terrorist acts allegedly committed there. Walker thought it was a good policy. "They were bad guys, and they were set on causing harm. And you know it's not a perfect world," he told Grey. But he was under no illusions about how they would be treated. "I cannot believe that anybody that was involved in this," he said, "didn't in his heart of hearts, if he was halfway intelligent, think that they were getting abusive interrogation techniques that were tantamount to torture."

Grey asked Walker: "When Condoleezza Rice and the President now stand in front of people and say we don't send people to countries where they torture, are they telling the truth?"

Walker replied: "No, they're not telling the truth."

A former CIA officer was more colorful. "Coming out and saying 'we don't do torture' is as bad as President Clinton saying, 'I didn't have sex with that woman.'" he told Grey. "It's a bare-faced lie. Of course we do torture. Imagine putting President Bush's head under water and telling him to raise his hand when he thinks he's being tortured. Give him the water-board treatment, and he'd be raising his hand straightaway."

Al Jazeera has an interesting article about the Western media coverage of Iraq, and Iraq's sectarian makeup in particular.

Among the complaints about Western coverage is the claim by Tariq al-Hashimi, Iraq's Sunni Arab vice-president, that the media overestimates the number of Shia in the country:

Western media often refer to Iraq as being "overwhelmingly Shia", or use other phrases to imply a large Shia majority. This, [al-Hashimi] says, is wrong -- and it has resulted in over-representation of Shia parties in the Iraqi government at the expense of Sunni Arabs.

Al-Hashimi said: "The false allegations promoted by Western media have resulted in an [inappropriate] political process, and everyone is paying the price for its wrong foundations."

Where the figures came from to back up assertions of a large Shia majority are unclear: no Iraqi census in modern history has ever included sect.

Sources such as Encyclopaedia Britannica put the Shia population in Iraq at 52 per cent of the total in 2001. However, figures circulated by the US military, which invaded Iraq in 2003, put the figure at 60 per cent.

The CIA's World Factbook puts the Shia at 60 to 65 percent of the Iraqi population.

Other complaints include the characterization of the insurgency as essentially Sunni and the assertion that the Baath party was a Sunni-run apparatus that persecuted the Shia. According to the current Baath spokesperson,

"Actually, sect was never an issue in Iraq. I am a Shia and I have been a senior Baath official ... No Baath party official -- no Iraqi official -- ever asked me about my sect.

"When the US army occupied Iraq they issued a list of 55 wanted top Iraqi officials, starting with President Saddam Hussein; half of those senior officials were Shia.

"The Committee of Debaathification issued a list of 100,000 senior Iraqi Baathists who would not be allowed to enjoy governmental posts, 66,000 of them were Shia - so how is the Baath party a Sunni party?

...Abu Muhammad voiced resentment at the the term "Sunni insurgency", saying that Iraqis from different backgrounds are fighting the foreign presence in Iraq.

"This term plays down Iraqi nationalism," he said. "I repeat, I am a Shia and I am resisting the US forces in Iraq, and we know for sure that resistance fighters from all background are fighting. Why do the Western agencies insist that only Sunni are fighting? Big question mark, I think."

On the other hand, there are those who disagree:

However, Karim Bader, an independent Iraqi politician, said that Western media had done a decent job on reporting what had occurred under Saddam's rule.

He said one had to look only at the senior army commanders and intelligence officers in Saddam's day, all of whom he said were Sunni. Or to look at the sizes of houses in Shia suburbs - small and overcrowded - or in Sunni areas, where houses were far larger but with fewer occupants.

Bader said: "I think there was sectarianism under Saddam and the Western media reflected that, but the question is, should we hold the Sunni sect responsible for that? I think Iraqis must be careful in answering this question."

A lot has happened while I was away. I woke up the other morning to hear that Saddam Hussein had been executed; and on the same day while on my way back to Spain, I heard that the airport had been bombed by ETA, the militant Basque separatist group; then I saw that Bangkok had been rocked by bomb blasts on new year's eve. Besides that, Addis Ababa sent troops to Somalia to rout the Islamic Courts.

First things first: I'm generally against the death penalty, but I might be convinced to accept it for those guilty of genocide or other crimes against humanity. However, if Iraq was trying to show the world that it has a modern functioning government, this execution was a poor showing for al-Malaki's goverment: it was decidedly neither solemn nor professional and was carried out on the first day of Eid.

As for the ETA bombing, I saw the results first hand, because I left Madrid from the terminal that was bombed the next day. The bomb did some pretty serious damage and has probably left two people dead. It looks like this is going to cripple if not kill the peace talks between ETA and the Spanish Government. They haven't seemed to explain why they broke a cease-fire. Although I hadn't been following the talks closely at all, I remember that there was an Irish priest that had been called in to mediate, and I had the impression that progress was being made.

In Thailand, my first fear was that it was Muslims from the south, but it seems that the bombings are being blamed on supporters of ousted PM Shinawatra.

In Somalia, I've been afraid of an Ethiopian campaign for a while, since such explicit attacks might lead to an Eritrean invasion on behalf of its Islamist allies, rekindling the war between those two countries and making Somalia a battleground for a regional war. However, the Eritreans seem to have stayed out of it, and the Islamic Courts were routed surprisingly fast. However, as soon as the Courts moved out of Mogadishu, looting was rampant and order was on short supply in Somalia's capital. Furthermore, I wouldn't be surprised to see a guerrilla resurgence of Islamist forces in Somalia, which brings me to the point that a negotiated settlement that brought the Islamic Courts into the government would be the best solution. The last thing Somalia needs is for Eritrea and Ethiopia to have a little war on Somali territory. In some good news, Kenya has called for a ceasefire and a brokered peace in Somalia, which may or may not be fueled by their fear of more Somali refugees.

In an unexpected (by me) trip, New Mexico governor, Bill Richards, went to Khartoum to try to get Khartoum to allow UN peacekeepers in Darfur. He met separately with President Omar al-Bashir, former rebel leader Minni Minnowi and foreign minister Lam Akol:

Richardson told an Associated Press reporter traveling with him that he and al-Bashir discussed the U.N. peacekeeping force, a cease-fire, protection for humanitarian groups working in the region, increasing sexual violence against refugees and a potential conference with rebel leaders.

...He discussed the [Abuja accord] later with Minni Minnawi, the leader of the rebel Sudan Liberation Movement that signed the agreement and subsequently became a presidential assistant. Minnawi expressed disappointment that the government has not yet disarmed the militias and told Richardson if the al-Bashir's government does not honor its commitments, there will be regime change.

...In Khartoum, Richardson also met with Sudanese foreign minister Lam Akol, bringing along humanitarian workers that included one representative of the Save Darfur Coalition. The coalition organized the trip and has been instrumental in bringing attention to the crisis and criticism on al-Bashir's government.

According to the AP, this trip was meant to draw attention to Richardson's "extensive foreign policy background, including his tenure as U.S. envoy to the United Nations" in preparation for his "likely White House bid."

Given how apathetic Americans are about the genocide in Darfur, I can't imagine that this sort of a trip could do much besides show voters that he's got enough clout to meet with a head of state (although it's a lot less controversial than a similar trip to Iraq, Iran or North Korea). In any case, if it's an attempt to garner future votes, it's certainly made me sympathetic to his platform.

Let's hope he has some success in Sudan.

Here's a great piece of Op-Art to be published in the San Francisco Chronicle. It was done by a"Kossack" over at the Daily Kos:

This segment on Al Jazeera (translated and edited by MEMRI), is more than a little disconcerting. The segment pits Sadeq al-Musawi, a Shia journalist, against Mishan al-Jabouri, the Sunni owner of the Iraqi satellite network, Al Zawraa. I'm not really exaggerating when I use the word "pit," because it's almost as though two cocks had been set in a hole to kill each other.

Jabouri tells Musawi that he "should choose your words carefully, or else I will do things to you that you will not imagine, you Persian liar ... you are an Iranian shoe!"

Musawi responds with, "Your father killed Kurds!"

Finally, Jabouri advises Musawi against speaking ill of Saddam Hussein, to which Musawi tells him not to advise anything, but rather, "kill me in Iraq, send your militia to kill me."

I've been reading Vali Nasr's The Shia Revival, and he writes a lot about how the Sunni regard the Shia as not being proper Arabs, because Shiism has had much influence from Iran and since some Shia in Lebanon and Iraq are the descendants of Persians who migrated centuries ago. Jabouri literally calls Musawi and Iranian (he says both Ajami and Irani), and brings some paperwork (which he proceeds to throw at his interlocutor) out to support his claims. And in the end, who knows whether Musawi is Iranian or not. Maybe he is, or maybe his family fled Iraq and he was born in Iran to Iraqi parents.

But that's not really important. The important point is the internecine venom. Jabouri tells the Jazeera moderator, "The people who executed Saddam Hussein are the same people who killed Umar, the same people who killed Abu Bakr." Are these Iraqi militants? western viewers might ask. No, Umar and Abu Bakr are the first and second Caliphs, those who succeeded Mohammad in the 7th century. Umar ibn al-Khattab was poisoned by a Persian slave, and Abu Bakr either died of a cold or from being poisoned a year earlier, depending on your source. (The partisans of Ali, the Shi'at 'Ali, believed that Ali should have been Caliph instead of Abu Bakr and Umar.)

I find it disconcerting that the Iraqi political discourse still hinges on the desert politics of Medina and Mecca nearly 1400 years ago. And seeing the historical complexities of the situation in Iraq, I find it even more disconcerting that most of the people who are paid to understand these historico-religious contexts don't even know the difference between the Sunni and the Shia.

I've added links next to the comment section for DiggIt and Del.icio.us and Reddit in case anyone wants to add any of my posts to either of those sites...

I was reading a back and forth in the London Review debating the source of anti-Semitic remarks that had been attributed (falsely it seems) to Hassan Nasrallah, all of which came in response to Charles Glass's recent piece about Hezbollah learning from its mistakes. This led me to go check out some of his previous writings, since he seems to be an interesting character who studied at the American University in Beirut and was kidnapped by Hezbollah in the 1987.

While reading his piece in The Nation, From Beirut to Damascus, I came across this: "Kamal Salibi, Lebanon's historian laureate at the American University of Beirut, used to tell me the Palestinians had made the mistake of becoming another Lebanese tribe."

And this started me to thinking, has the US become just another Iraqi tribe?

There's a very good op-ed piece on Somalia in today's Times, A fleeting victory in Somalia. Jonathan Stevenson, at the United States Naval War College, argues, rightly in my opinion, that a robust round of diplomacy is needed to work out Somalia's problems, namely, a power-sharing plan with the Islamic Courts and the transitional government, an engagement of clan leaders and an agreement on the place of Islamic law in Somalia. He adds that the US should join efforts by the EU and Kenya to help broker an agreement, similar to the one that finally ended the war between Southern Sudan and Khartoum:

The temptation in Washington will be to keep its distance and rely on Ethiopia, the European Union and Kenya for as long as possible. This attitude is myopic. Neither the American public nor the world believe that the Bush administration?s predominantly military approach to counterterrorism is working. Relying primarily on Ethiopian troops to tamp down Somali Islamism would represent a continuation of that flawed model, and of the corresponding risk of fueling the jihad.

The United States' full participation in a diplomatic process in the Horn of Africa, on the other hand, would constitute a relatively low-cost way of signaling a new American approach to Islam and a re-engagement in sub-Saharan Africa, which has largely been left out of Washington's post-9/11 calculus. A result could be a small political victory in the Muslim world that would deprive Osama bin Laden and his followers of a new grievance rather than supplying them with one.

He points out that any prolonged presence of Ethiopian troops could be very dangerous. Many Somalis are afraid of Ethiopian designs on the country and disconcerted by the recent comments of the transitional Interior Minister Hussein Mohammad Aideed (whose father was made famous by the "Black Hawk Down" incident) that Somalia and Ethiopia "should unite, just like the Europeans. One money. One passport. One security."

The problem, then, lies in a tendency to rely on military force instead of negotiation. I tend to believe that it was a bad idea for the Ethiopians to invade; a better idea would have been negotiations in Yemen or Kenya to agree on a power-sharing deal, because even if the thought of another Islamic regime bothers me, the Courts did manage to bring some sort of stability and decrease the violence in the areas they controlled. Now, there is a risk that continued Ethiopian presence will rub Somalis the wrong way and that the spotty order of the Islamists will revert back to the reign of warlords and inter-clan violence.

A local radio journalist summed up the problems of an Ethiopian presence in the country, as reported by the Times:

With Somalia's longtime fears that Ethiopia might swallow it, the sooner [the Ethiopians' withdrawal] happens, the better. On Saturday, Nasteh Dahir Farah, a reporter for a Kismayo radio station, visited the town's airport with three foreign journalists. The foreigners were allowed in. Mr. Farah was not. He was shooed away by Ethiopian soldiers at the gate and told never to come back.

"This is my country, not theirs," he said. "If I didn't have a job," Mr. Farah muttered, straightening himself up and smoothing the shirt where he had been poked in the chest, "I'd join the resistance."

A little humiliation, it seems, goes a long, long way.

And indeed it does, as we have seen throughout the Muslim world, but especially in Iraq.

So while it seems imperative for negotiations to begin in good faith between the transitional government, the clan leaders and the Islamic Courts, I've got a sneaking suspicion that the transitional government has let their Ethiopian-backed success go to their head. And remarks by the transitional defense minister do little to reassure me:

The big man in Kismayo is Barre Aadan Shire, the transitional government's defense minister and a former warlord, whose strong jaw, natty goatee and bald head lend him an uncanny resemblance to Lenin. He says many people in Kismayo have asked him to reach out to the Islamists, but he does not want to. The last of the Islamist fighters have retreated to the Kenya border, about 150 miles away.

"If we were going to compromise," Mr. Shire said, "why go to war?"

Via Juan Cole, Daily Kos has the story of a blogger who contacted a talk radio station's advertisers to tell them that their products were being associated with and read by the same voices that call for torturing people and murdering Muslims. He sent advertisers polite informative letters and was subsequently slapped with a cease and desist letter by Disney's lawyers because he was providing audio recordings of the broadcasts to allow advertisers to hear the comments for themselves. It seems that this hit a nerve with Disney, particularly as Visa seems to have pulled their ads from the shows in question.

Here's a copy of the letter he sent AT&T:

To: Wendy Clark, VP-advertising, AT&T

Dear Ms. Clark:

Thanks to radio hosts from KSFO your brand is being associated with torturing and killing people. Would your marketing people be happy to hear your commercial ran after Lee Rogers said this about a black man in Lincoln, Nebraska?

"Now you start with the Sear's Diehard the battery cables connected to his testi*les and you entertain him with that for awhile and then you blow his bleeping head off. " (Audio link)

You should know the person calling for the execution and torture of the black man in that clip READS THE AT&T commercials on the air. Right now on KSFO Lee Rogers is THE VOICE of AT&T to the SF Bay area. (Audio Link)

Sadly, calling for the death and torture of individuals and groups of people is a regular occurrence on KSFO 560 AM, owned by ABC Radio Disney.

Another example: immediately after the 6 am ABC Radio news on October 27th:

Lee Rogers: I say they catch the person, tie 'em to a post and burn 'em. Set 'em on fire.

Officer Vic: Yeah.

Lee Rogers: Let 'em know what it feels like.

Melanie Morgan: Hog tie 'em first. That would be good.

Next, Lee Rogers talks about a protester at a Cindy Sheehan event:

"Whoever did that should have been stomped to death right there. Just stomp their bleeping guts out." (Audio link).

Within three minutes they called for someone to be burned alive and a protester to be stomped to death. If you dismissed the first clip as a "joke", note that in this clip they were clearly not joking:

Melanie Morgan famously called for Bill Keller of the New York Times (and nine editors from other papers) to be hanged.  (Audio link)

On Nov. 14th  Melanie Morgan said this about Nancy Pelosi:

"We've got a bulls-eye painted on her big laughing eyes." (Audio link)

Also note that Morgan reads the Cingular Wireless commercials on KSFO.

Of course political speech is protected, but I believe the FBI and the FCC frown on targeting elected officials for death or inciting violence toward leaders of any political party.

Because of how ads are purchased, your ad placement agency probably didn't know that Tom Brenner (the "comic relief" called Officer Vic) regularly mocks advertiser's products.  Listen as he:

calls Chevrolet's product "shi**y" (audio link)

suggests an anti-virus product is part of a protection racket (audio link)

pretends a cold pill is really a suppository (audio link)

The odds are your product will be mocked. If they don't respect a big client like Chevrolet, will they respect your brand?

And it's not simply calls for killing specific people or mocking products, the radio hosts at KSFO proudly talk about their anti-Muslim views. Based on my research, your business has rules about discrimination against people of other religions, so what message are you sending when your employees or customers hear your advertisements right after Brian Sussman demands of a caller:

"Say Allah is a Wh*re!" (audio link)

Or when Lee Rogers says,

"Indonesia is really just another enemy Muslim nation. ... You keep screwing around with stuff like this we are going to kill a bunch of you. Millions of you. "   (audio link)

Maybe you haven't heard any complaints. Would KSFO management let you know about complaints?  Doubtful. Morgan's husband, Jack Swanson, is KSFO's operations manager. The president of KSFO, Mickey Luckoff, started the station format and has a history of defending hosts like Michael Savage until he was forced to fire him.

I understand you can't listen to all the shows you advertise on - no one can. You rely on the accurate representation of the sales reps and the show description. But you don't need to take my word, listen to the programs. You probably won't have to listen long to hear something that offends or disgusts you.  If you wish to hear the complete context on any clip or the audio during a date your ad ran contact me I have an educational archive of audio clips, I've listed a few below.

I want to emphasize that if you withdrawal your ads you aren't limiting their free speech, just removing your paid support of it. Some other company without the values you describe on the AT&T website can support them. You can choose to advertise elsewhere. This is really about YOU. Do YOU want to be associated with these comments? Do you want your company and brand to be associated with these comments?

I urge you to discontinue advertising on KSFO during the shows hosted by Melanie Morgan, Lee Rogers, Tom Brenner and Brian Sussman.

If you want to contact KSFO here is a link to their website. If you wish to express your displeasure to their parent company contact Zenia Mucha, Senior Vice President, Corporate Communications, The Walt Disney Company PHONE: (818) 560-5300 CA, (212) 456-7255 NY or email Heather Rim, Vice President, Communications, ABC, Inc.  heather.rim@abc.com.

Sincerely,

P.S.  I would appreciate hearing your final determination in this matter.

Read the Daily Kos write up for the full story.

The New York Review has articles about torture and extraordinary rendition (subscription only) and ordinary Iraqis. The latter reviews Anthony Shadid's book Night Draws Near, which was recommended to me by an Iraqi diplomat friend of mine. I recently met Shadid in Beirut, and he's an extremely nice guy, and judging from his recent coverage of Lebanon, I can understand why his book would be really good. (Unfortunately, I haven't picked it up yet.)

The piece on extraordinary rendition helpfully brings together the stories of some of the more publicized victims of the Bush Administration's policy as well as some of the reporting done by CIA plane watchers who helped uncover the story of the "black sites" in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. Under review are the Canadian Government's report on the rendition to Syria and subsequent torture of Canadian citizen Maher Arar and Steven Grey's Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program:

Edward Walker Jr., a career diplomat, was the US ambassador in Egypt between 1994 and 1997 when some of the first renditions took place. According to Walker, there were only a few occasions when the procedure was used, and they concerned men who were wanted by the Egyptians for terrorist acts allegedly committed there. Walker thought it was a good policy. "They were bad guys, and they were set on causing harm. And you know it's not a perfect world," he told Grey. But he was under no illusions about how they would be treated. "I cannot believe that anybody that was involved in this," he said, "didn't in his heart of hearts, if he was halfway intelligent, think that they were getting abusive interrogation techniques that were tantamount to torture."

Grey asked Walker: "When Condoleezza Rice and the President now stand in front of people and say we don't send people to countries where they torture, are they telling the truth?"

Walker replied: "No, they're not telling the truth."

A former CIA officer was more colorful. "Coming out and saying 'we don't do torture' is as bad as President Clinton saying, 'I didn't have sex with that woman.'" he told Grey. "It's a bare-faced lie. Of course we do torture. Imagine putting President Bush's head under water and telling him to raise his hand when he thinks he's being tortured. Give him the water-board treatment, and he'd be raising his hand straightaway."

Al Jazeera has an interesting article about the Western media coverage of Iraq, and Iraq's sectarian makeup in particular.

Among the complaints about Western coverage is the claim by Tariq al-Hashimi, Iraq's Sunni Arab vice-president, that the media overestimates the number of Shia in the country:

Western media often refer to Iraq as being "overwhelmingly Shia", or use other phrases to imply a large Shia majority. This, [al-Hashimi] says, is wrong -- and it has resulted in over-representation of Shia parties in the Iraqi government at the expense of Sunni Arabs.

Al-Hashimi said: "The false allegations promoted by Western media have resulted in an [inappropriate] political process, and everyone is paying the price for its wrong foundations."

Where the figures came from to back up assertions of a large Shia majority are unclear: no Iraqi census in modern history has ever included sect.

Sources such as Encyclopaedia Britannica put the Shia population in Iraq at 52 per cent of the total in 2001. However, figures circulated by the US military, which invaded Iraq in 2003, put the figure at 60 per cent.

The CIA's World Factbook puts the Shia at 60 to 65 percent of the Iraqi population.

Other complaints include the characterization of the insurgency as essentially Sunni and the assertion that the Baath party was a Sunni-run apparatus that persecuted the Shia. According to the current Baath spokesperson,

"Actually, sect was never an issue in Iraq. I am a Shia and I have been a senior Baath official ... No Baath party official -- no Iraqi official -- ever asked me about my sect.

"When the US army occupied Iraq they issued a list of 55 wanted top Iraqi officials, starting with President Saddam Hussein; half of those senior officials were Shia.

"The Committee of Debaathification issued a list of 100,000 senior Iraqi Baathists who would not be allowed to enjoy governmental posts, 66,000 of them were Shia - so how is the Baath party a Sunni party?

...Abu Muhammad voiced resentment at the the term "Sunni insurgency", saying that Iraqis from different backgrounds are fighting the foreign presence in Iraq.

"This term plays down Iraqi nationalism," he said. "I repeat, I am a Shia and I am resisting the US forces in Iraq, and we know for sure that resistance fighters from all background are fighting. Why do the Western agencies insist that only Sunni are fighting? Big question mark, I think."

On the other hand, there are those who disagree:

However, Karim Bader, an independent Iraqi politician, said that Western media had done a decent job on reporting what had occurred under Saddam's rule.

He said one had to look only at the senior army commanders and intelligence officers in Saddam's day, all of whom he said were Sunni. Or to look at the sizes of houses in Shia suburbs - small and overcrowded - or in Sunni areas, where houses were far larger but with fewer occupants.

Bader said: "I think there was sectarianism under Saddam and the Western media reflected that, but the question is, should we hold the Sunni sect responsible for that? I think Iraqis must be careful in answering this question."

A lot has happened while I was away. I woke up the other morning to hear that Saddam Hussein had been executed; and on the same day while on my way back to Spain, I heard that the airport had been bombed by ETA, the militant Basque separatist group; then I saw that Bangkok had been rocked by bomb blasts on new year's eve. Besides that, Addis Ababa sent troops to Somalia to rout the Islamic Courts.

First things first: I'm generally against the death penalty, but I might be convinced to accept it for those guilty of genocide or other crimes against humanity. However, if Iraq was trying to show the world that it has a modern functioning government, this execution was a poor showing for al-Malaki's goverment: it was decidedly neither solemn nor professional and was carried out on the first day of Eid.

As for the ETA bombing, I saw the results first hand, because I left Madrid from the terminal that was bombed the next day. The bomb did some pretty serious damage and has probably left two people dead. It looks like this is going to cripple if not kill the peace talks between ETA and the Spanish Government. They haven't seemed to explain why they broke a cease-fire. Although I hadn't been following the talks closely at all, I remember that there was an Irish priest that had been called in to mediate, and I had the impression that progress was being made.

In Thailand, my first fear was that it was Muslims from the south, but it seems that the bombings are being blamed on supporters of ousted PM Shinawatra.

In Somalia, I've been afraid of an Ethiopian campaign for a while, since such explicit attacks might lead to an Eritrean invasion on behalf of its Islamist allies, rekindling the war between those two countries and making Somalia a battleground for a regional war. However, the Eritreans seem to have stayed out of it, and the Islamic Courts were routed surprisingly fast. However, as soon as the Courts moved out of Mogadishu, looting was rampant and order was on short supply in Somalia's capital. Furthermore, I wouldn't be surprised to see a guerrilla resurgence of Islamist forces in Somalia, which brings me to the point that a negotiated settlement that brought the Islamic Courts into the government would be the best solution. The last thing Somalia needs is for Eritrea and Ethiopia to have a little war on Somali territory. In some good news, Kenya has called for a ceasefire and a brokered peace in Somalia, which may or may not be fueled by their fear of more Somali refugees.

In an unexpected (by me) trip, New Mexico governor, Bill Richards, went to Khartoum to try to get Khartoum to allow UN peacekeepers in Darfur. He met separately with President Omar al-Bashir, former rebel leader Minni Minnowi and foreign minister Lam Akol:

Richardson told an Associated Press reporter traveling with him that he and al-Bashir discussed the U.N. peacekeeping force, a cease-fire, protection for humanitarian groups working in the region, increasing sexual violence against refugees and a potential conference with rebel leaders.

...He discussed the [Abuja accord] later with Minni Minnawi, the leader of the rebel Sudan Liberation Movement that signed the agreement and subsequently became a presidential assistant. Minnawi expressed disappointment that the government has not yet disarmed the militias and told Richardson if the al-Bashir's government does not honor its commitments, there will be regime change.

...In Khartoum, Richardson also met with Sudanese foreign minister Lam Akol, bringing along humanitarian workers that included one representative of the Save Darfur Coalition. The coalition organized the trip and has been instrumental in bringing attention to the crisis and criticism on al-Bashir's government.

According to the AP, this trip was meant to draw attention to Richardson's "extensive foreign policy background, including his tenure as U.S. envoy to the United Nations" in preparation for his "likely White House bid."

Given how apathetic Americans are about the genocide in Darfur, I can't imagine that this sort of a trip could do much besides show voters that he's got enough clout to meet with a head of state (although it's a lot less controversial than a similar trip to Iraq, Iran or North Korea). In any case, if it's an attempt to garner future votes, it's certainly made me sympathetic to his platform.

Let's hope he has some success in Sudan.

Here's a great piece of Op-Art to be published in the San Francisco Chronicle. It was done by a"Kossack" over at the Daily Kos:

This segment on Al Jazeera (translated and edited by MEMRI), is more than a little disconcerting. The segment pits Sadeq al-Musawi, a Shia journalist, against Mishan al-Jabouri, the Sunni owner of the Iraqi satellite network, Al Zawraa. I'm not really exaggerating when I use the word "pit," because it's almost as though two cocks had been set in a hole to kill each other.

Jabouri tells Musawi that he "should choose your words carefully, or else I will do things to you that you will not imagine, you Persian liar ... you are an Iranian shoe!"

Musawi responds with, "Your father killed Kurds!"

Finally, Jabouri advises Musawi against speaking ill of Saddam Hussein, to which Musawi tells him not to advise anything, but rather, "kill me in Iraq, send your militia to kill me."

I've been reading Vali Nasr's The Shia Revival, and he writes a lot about how the Sunni regard the Shia as not being proper Arabs, because Shiism has had much influence from Iran and since some Shia in Lebanon and Iraq are the descendants of Persians who migrated centuries ago. Jabouri literally calls Musawi and Iranian (he says both Ajami and Irani), and brings some paperwork (which he proceeds to throw at his interlocutor) out to support his claims. And in the end, who knows whether Musawi is Iranian or not. Maybe he is, or maybe his family fled Iraq and he was born in Iran to Iraqi parents.

But that's not really important. The important point is the internecine venom. Jabouri tells the Jazeera moderator, "The people who executed Saddam Hussein are the same people who killed Umar, the same people who killed Abu Bakr." Are these Iraqi militants? western viewers might ask. No, Umar and Abu Bakr are the first and second Caliphs, those who succeeded Mohammad in the 7th century. Umar ibn al-Khattab was poisoned by a Persian slave, and Abu Bakr either died of a cold or from being poisoned a year earlier, depending on your source. (The partisans of Ali, the Shi'at 'Ali, believed that Ali should have been Caliph instead of Abu Bakr and Umar.)

I find it disconcerting that the Iraqi political discourse still hinges on the desert politics of Medina and Mecca nearly 1400 years ago. And seeing the historical complexities of the situation in Iraq, I find it even more disconcerting that most of the people who are paid to understand these historico-religious contexts don't even know the difference between the Sunni and the Shia.

I've added links next to the comment section for DiggIt and Del.icio.us and Reddit in case anyone wants to add any of my posts to either of those sites...

I was reading a back and forth in the London Review debating the source of anti-Semitic remarks that had been attributed (falsely it seems) to Hassan Nasrallah, all of which came in response to Charles Glass's recent piece about Hezbollah learning from its mistakes. This led me to go check out some of his previous writings, since he seems to be an interesting character who studied at the American University in Beirut and was kidnapped by Hezbollah in the 1987.

While reading his piece in The Nation, From Beirut to Damascus, I came across this: "Kamal Salibi, Lebanon's historian laureate at the American University of Beirut, used to tell me the Palestinians had made the mistake of becoming another Lebanese tribe."

And this started me to thinking, has the US become just another Iraqi tribe?

There's a very good op-ed piece on Somalia in today's Times, A fleeting victory in Somalia. Jonathan Stevenson, at the United States Naval War College, argues, rightly in my opinion, that a robust round of diplomacy is needed to work out Somalia's problems, namely, a power-sharing plan with the Islamic Courts and the transitional government, an engagement of clan leaders and an agreement on the place of Islamic law in Somalia. He adds that the US should join efforts by the EU and Kenya to help broker an agreement, similar to the one that finally ended the war between Southern Sudan and Khartoum:

The temptation in Washington will be to keep its distance and rely on Ethiopia, the European Union and Kenya for as long as possible. This attitude is myopic. Neither the American public nor the world believe that the Bush administration?s predominantly military approach to counterterrorism is working. Relying primarily on Ethiopian troops to tamp down Somali Islamism would represent a continuation of that flawed model, and of the corresponding risk of fueling the jihad.

The United States' full participation in a diplomatic process in the Horn of Africa, on the other hand, would constitute a relatively low-cost way of signaling a new American approach to Islam and a re-engagement in sub-Saharan Africa, which has largely been left out of Washington's post-9/11 calculus. A result could be a small political victory in the Muslim world that would deprive Osama bin Laden and his followers of a new grievance rather than supplying them with one.

He points out that any prolonged presence of Ethiopian troops could be very dangerous. Many Somalis are afraid of Ethiopian designs on the country and disconcerted by the recent comments of the transitional Interior Minister Hussein Mohammad Aideed (whose father was made famous by the "Black Hawk Down" incident) that Somalia and Ethiopia "should unite, just like the Europeans. One money. One passport. One security."

The problem, then, lies in a tendency to rely on military force instead of negotiation. I tend to believe that it was a bad idea for the Ethiopians to invade; a better idea would have been negotiations in Yemen or Kenya to agree on a power-sharing deal, because even if the thought of another Islamic regime bothers me, the Courts did manage to bring some sort of stability and decrease the violence in the areas they controlled. Now, there is a risk that continued Ethiopian presence will rub Somalis the wrong way and that the spotty order of the Islamists will revert back to the reign of warlords and inter-clan violence.

A local radio journalist summed up the problems of an Ethiopian presence in the country, as reported by the Times:

With Somalia's longtime fears that Ethiopia might swallow it, the sooner [the Ethiopians' withdrawal] happens, the better. On Saturday, Nasteh Dahir Farah, a reporter for a Kismayo radio station, visited the town's airport with three foreign journalists. The foreigners were allowed in. Mr. Farah was not. He was shooed away by Ethiopian soldiers at the gate and told never to come back.

"This is my country, not theirs," he said. "If I didn't have a job," Mr. Farah muttered, straightening himself up and smoothing the shirt where he had been poked in the chest, "I'd join the resistance."

A little humiliation, it seems, goes a long, long way.

And indeed it does, as we have seen throughout the Muslim world, but especially in Iraq.

So while it seems imperative for negotiations to begin in good faith between the transitional government, the clan leaders and the Islamic Courts, I've got a sneaking suspicion that the transitional government has let their Ethiopian-backed success go to their head. And remarks by the transitional defense minister do little to reassure me:

The big man in Kismayo is Barre Aadan Shire, the transitional government's defense minister and a former warlord, whose strong jaw, natty goatee and bald head lend him an uncanny resemblance to Lenin. He says many people in Kismayo have asked him to reach out to the Islamists, but he does not want to. The last of the Islamist fighters have retreated to the Kenya border, about 150 miles away.

"If we were going to compromise," Mr. Shire said, "why go to war?"

Via Juan Cole, Daily Kos has the story of a blogger who contacted a talk radio station's advertisers to tell them that their products were being associated with and read by the same voices that call for torturing people and murdering Muslims. He sent advertisers polite informative letters and was subsequently slapped with a cease and desist letter by Disney's lawyers because he was providing audio recordings of the broadcasts to allow advertisers to hear the comments for themselves. It seems that this hit a nerve with Disney, particularly as Visa seems to have pulled their ads from the shows in question.

Here's a copy of the letter he sent AT&T:

To: Wendy Clark, VP-advertising, AT&T

Dear Ms. Clark:

Thanks to radio hosts from KSFO your brand is being associated with torturing and killing people. Would your marketing people be happy to hear your commercial ran after Lee Rogers said this about a black man in Lincoln, Nebraska?

"Now you start with the Sear's Diehard the battery cables connected to his testi*les and you entertain him with that for awhile and then you blow his bleeping head off. " (Audio link)

You should know the person calling for the execution and torture of the black man in that clip READS THE AT&T commercials on the air. Right now on KSFO Lee Rogers is THE VOICE of AT&T to the SF Bay area. (Audio Link)

Sadly, calling for the death and torture of individuals and groups of people is a regular occurrence on KSFO 560 AM, owned by ABC Radio Disney.

Another example: immediately after the 6 am ABC Radio news on October 27th:

Lee Rogers: I say they catch the person, tie 'em to a post and burn 'em. Set 'em on fire.

Officer Vic: Yeah.

Lee Rogers: Let 'em know what it feels like.

Melanie Morgan: Hog tie 'em first. That would be good.

Next, Lee Rogers talks about a protester at a Cindy Sheehan event:

"Whoever did that should have been stomped to death right there. Just stomp their bleeping guts out." (Audio link).

Within three minutes they called for someone to be burned alive and a protester to be stomped to death. If you dismissed the first clip as a "joke", note that in this clip they were clearly not joking:

Melanie Morgan famously called for Bill Keller of the New York Times (and nine editors from other papers) to be hanged.  (Audio link)

On Nov. 14th  Melanie Morgan said this about Nancy Pelosi:

"We've got a bulls-eye painted on her big laughing eyes." (Audio link)

Also note that Morgan reads the Cingular Wireless commercials on KSFO.

Of course political speech is protected, but I believe the FBI and the FCC frown on targeting elected officials for death or inciting violence toward leaders of any political party.

Because of how ads are purchased, your ad placement agency probably didn't know that Tom Brenner (the "comic relief" called Officer Vic) regularly mocks advertiser's products.  Listen as he:

calls Chevrolet's product "shi**y" (audio link)

suggests an anti-virus product is part of a protection racket (audio link)

pretends a cold pill is really a suppository (audio link)

The odds are your product will be mocked. If they don't respect a big client like Chevrolet, will they respect your brand?

And it's not simply calls for killing specific people or mocking products, the radio hosts at KSFO proudly talk about their anti-Muslim views. Based on my research, your business has rules about discrimination against people of other religions, so what message are you sending when your employees or customers hear your advertisements right after Brian Sussman demands of a caller:

"Say Allah is a Wh*re!" (audio link)

Or when Lee Rogers says,

"Indonesia is really just another enemy Muslim nation. ... You keep screwing around with stuff like this we are going to kill a bunch of you. Millions of you. "   (audio link)

Maybe you haven't heard any complaints. Would KSFO management let you know about complaints?  Doubtful. Morgan's husband, Jack Swanson, is KSFO's operations manager. The president of KSFO, Mickey Luckoff, started the station format and has a history of defending hosts like Michael Savage until he was forced to fire him.

I understand you can't listen to all the shows you advertise on - no one can. You rely on the accurate representation of the sales reps and the show description. But you don't need to take my word, listen to the programs. You probably won't have to listen long to hear something that offends or disgusts you.  If you wish to hear the complete context on any clip or the audio during a date your ad ran contact me I have an educational archive of audio clips, I've listed a few below.

I want to emphasize that if you withdrawal your ads you aren't limiting their free speech, just removing your paid support of it. Some other company without the values you describe on the AT&T website can support them. You can choose to advertise elsewhere. This is really about YOU. Do YOU want to be associated with these comments? Do you want your company and brand to be associated with these comments?

I urge you to discontinue advertising on KSFO during the shows hosted by Melanie Morgan, Lee Rogers, Tom Brenner and Brian Sussman.

If you want to contact KSFO here is a link to their website. If you wish to express your displeasure to their parent company contact Zenia Mucha, Senior Vice President, Corporate Communications, The Walt Disney Company PHONE: (818) 560-5300 CA, (212) 456-7255 NY or email Heather Rim, Vice President, Communications, ABC, Inc.  heather.rim@abc.com.

Sincerely,

P.S.  I would appreciate hearing your final determination in this matter.

Read the Daily Kos write up for the full story.

The New York Review has articles about torture and extraordinary rendition (subscription only) and ordinary Iraqis. The latter reviews Anthony Shadid's book Night Draws Near, which was recommended to me by an Iraqi diplomat friend of mine. I recently met Shadid in Beirut, and he's an extremely nice guy, and judging from his recent coverage of Lebanon, I can understand why his book would be really good. (Unfortunately, I haven't picked it up yet.)

The piece on extraordinary rendition helpfully brings together the stories of some of the more publicized victims of the Bush Administration's policy as well as some of the reporting done by CIA plane watchers who helped uncover the story of the "black sites" in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. Under review are the Canadian Government's report on the rendition to Syria and subsequent torture of Canadian citizen Maher Arar and Steven Grey's Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program:

Edward Walker Jr., a career diplomat, was the US ambassador in Egypt between 1994 and 1997 when some of the first renditions took place. According to Walker, there were only a few occasions when the procedure was used, and they concerned men who were wanted by the Egyptians for terrorist acts allegedly committed there. Walker thought it was a good policy. "They were bad guys, and they were set on causing harm. And you know it's not a perfect world," he told Grey. But he was under no illusions about how they would be treated. "I cannot believe that anybody that was involved in this," he said, "didn't in his heart of hearts, if he was halfway intelligent, think that they were getting abusive interrogation techniques that were tantamount to torture."

Grey asked Walker: "When Condoleezza Rice and the President now stand in front of people and say we don't send people to countries where they torture, are they telling the truth?"

Walker replied: "No, they're not telling the truth."

A former CIA officer was more colorful. "Coming out and saying 'we don't do torture' is as bad as President Clinton saying, 'I didn't have sex with that woman.'" he told Grey. "It's a bare-faced lie. Of course we do torture. Imagine putting President Bush's head under water and telling him to raise his hand when he thinks he's being tortured. Give him the water-board treatment, and he'd be raising his hand straightaway."

Al Jazeera has an interesting article about the Western media coverage of Iraq, and Iraq's sectarian makeup in particular.

Among the complaints about Western coverage is the claim by Tariq al-Hashimi, Iraq's Sunni Arab vice-president, that the media overestimates the number of Shia in the country:

Western media often refer to Iraq as being "overwhelmingly Shia", or use other phrases to imply a large Shia majority. This, [al-Hashimi] says, is wrong -- and it has resulted in over-representation of Shia parties in the Iraqi government at the expense of Sunni Arabs.

Al-Hashimi said: "The false allegations promoted by Western media have resulted in an [inappropriate] political process, and everyone is paying the price for its wrong foundations."

Where the figures came from to back up assertions of a large Shia majority are unclear: no Iraqi census in modern history has ever included sect.

Sources such as Encyclopaedia Britannica put the Shia population in Iraq at 52 per cent of the total in 2001. However, figures circulated by the US military, which invaded Iraq in 2003, put the figure at 60 per cent.

The CIA's World Factbook puts the Shia at 60 to 65 percent of the Iraqi population.

Other complaints include the characterization of the insurgency as essentially Sunni and the assertion that the Baath party was a Sunni-run apparatus that persecuted the Shia. According to the current Baath spokesperson,

"Actually, sect was never an issue in Iraq. I am a Shia and I have been a senior Baath official ... No Baath party official -- no Iraqi official -- ever asked me about my sect.

"When the US army occupied Iraq they issued a list of 55 wanted top Iraqi officials, starting with President Saddam Hussein; half of those senior officials were Shia.

"The Committee of Debaathification issued a list of 100,000 senior Iraqi Baathists who would not be allowed to enjoy governmental posts, 66,000 of them were Shia - so how is the Baath party a Sunni party?

...Abu Muhammad voiced resentment at the the term "Sunni insurgency", saying that Iraqis from different backgrounds are fighting the foreign presence in Iraq.

"This term plays down Iraqi nationalism," he said. "I repeat, I am a Shia and I am resisting the US forces in Iraq, and we know for sure that resistance fighters from all background are fighting. Why do the Western agencies insist that only Sunni are fighting? Big question mark, I think."

On the other hand, there are those who disagree:

However, Karim Bader, an independent Iraqi politician, said that Western media had done a decent job on reporting what had occurred under Saddam's rule.

He said one had to look only at the senior army commanders and intelligence officers in Saddam's day, all of whom he said were Sunni. Or to look at the sizes of houses in Shia suburbs - small and overcrowded - or in Sunni areas, where houses were far larger but with fewer occupants.

Bader said: "I think there was sectarianism under Saddam and the Western media reflected that, but the question is, should we hold the Sunni sect responsible for that? I think Iraqis must be careful in answering this question."

A lot has happened while I was away. I woke up the other morning to hear that Saddam Hussein had been executed; and on the same day while on my way back to Spain, I heard that the airport had been bombed by ETA, the militant Basque separatist group; then I saw that Bangkok had been rocked by bomb blasts on new year's eve. Besides that, Addis Ababa sent troops to Somalia to rout the Islamic Courts.

First things first: I'm generally against the death penalty, but I might be convinced to accept it for those guilty of genocide or other crimes against humanity. However, if Iraq was trying to show the world that it has a modern functioning government, this execution was a poor showing for al-Malaki's goverment: it was decidedly neither solemn nor professional and was carried out on the first day of Eid.

As for the ETA bombing, I saw the results first hand, because I left Madrid from the terminal that was bombed the next day. The bomb did some pretty serious damage and has probably left two people dead. It looks like this is going to cripple if not kill the peace talks between ETA and the Spanish Government. They haven't seemed to explain why they broke a cease-fire. Although I hadn't been following the talks closely at all, I remember that there was an Irish priest that had been called in to mediate, and I had the impression that progress was being made.

In Thailand, my first fear was that it was Muslims from the south, but it seems that the bombings are being blamed on supporters of ousted PM Shinawatra.

In Somalia, I've been afraid of an Ethiopian campaign for a while, since such explicit attacks might lead to an Eritrean invasion on behalf of its Islamist allies, rekindling the war between those two countries and making Somalia a battleground for a regional war. However, the Eritreans seem to have stayed out of it, and the Islamic Courts were routed surprisingly fast. However, as soon as the Courts moved out of Mogadishu, looting was rampant and order was on short supply in Somalia's capital. Furthermore, I wouldn't be surprised to see a guerrilla resurgence of Islamist forces in Somalia, which brings me to the point that a negotiated settlement that brought the Islamic Courts into the government would be the best solution. The last thing Somalia needs is for Eritrea and Ethiopia to have a little war on Somali territory. In some good news, Kenya has called for a ceasefire and a brokered peace in Somalia, which may or may not be fueled by their fear of more Somali refugees.

In an unexpected (by me) trip, New Mexico governor, Bill Richards, went to Khartoum to try to get Khartoum to allow UN peacekeepers in Darfur. He met separately with President Omar al-Bashir, former rebel leader Minni Minnowi and foreign minister Lam Akol:

Richardson told an Associated Press reporter traveling with him that he and al-Bashir discussed the U.N. peacekeeping force, a cease-fire, protection for humanitarian groups working in the region, increasing sexual violence against refugees and a potential conference with rebel leaders.

...He discussed the [Abuja accord] later with Minni Minnawi, the leader of the rebel Sudan Liberation Movement that signed the agreement and subsequently became a presidential assistant. Minnawi expressed disappointment that the government has not yet disarmed the militias and told Richardson if the al-Bashir's government does not honor its commitments, there will be regime change.

...In Khartoum, Richardson also met with Sudanese foreign minister Lam Akol, bringing along humanitarian workers that included one representative of the Save Darfur Coalition. The coalition organized the trip and has been instrumental in bringing attention to the crisis and criticism on al-Bashir's government.

According to the AP, this trip was meant to draw attention to Richardson's "extensive foreign policy background, including his tenure as U.S. envoy to the United Nations" in preparation for his "likely White House bid."

Given how apathetic Americans are about the genocide in Darfur, I can't imagine that this sort of a trip could do much besides show voters that he's got enough clout to meet with a head of state (although it's a lot less controversial than a similar trip to Iraq, Iran or North Korea). In any case, if it's an attempt to garner future votes, it's certainly made me sympathetic to his platform.

Let's hope he has some success in Sudan.

Here's a great piece of Op-Art to be published in the San Francisco Chronicle. It was done by a"Kossack" over at the Daily Kos:

This segment on Al Jazeera (translated and edited by MEMRI), is more than a little disconcerting. The segment pits Sadeq al-Musawi, a Shia journalist, against Mishan al-Jabouri, the Sunni owner of the Iraqi satellite network, Al Zawraa. I'm not really exaggerating when I use the word "pit," because it's almost as though two cocks had been set in a hole to kill each other.

Jabouri tells Musawi that he "should choose your words carefully, or else I will do things to you that you will not imagine, you Persian liar ... you are an Iranian shoe!"

Musawi responds with, "Your father killed Kurds!"

Finally, Jabouri advises Musawi against speaking ill of Saddam Hussein, to which Musawi tells him not to advise anything, but rather, "kill me in Iraq, send your militia to kill me."

I've been reading Vali Nasr's The Shia Revival, and he writes a lot about how the Sunni regard the Shia as not being proper Arabs, because Shiism has had much influence from Iran and since some Shia in Lebanon and Iraq are the descendants of Persians who migrated centuries ago. Jabouri literally calls Musawi and Iranian (he says both Ajami and Irani), and brings some paperwork (which he proceeds to throw at his interlocutor) out to support his claims. And in the end, who knows whether Musawi is Iranian or not. Maybe he is, or maybe his family fled Iraq and he was born in Iran to Iraqi parents.

But that's not really important. The important point is the internecine venom. Jabouri tells the Jazeera moderator, "The people who executed Saddam Hussein are the same people who killed Umar, the same people who killed Abu Bakr." Are these Iraqi militants? western viewers might ask. No, Umar and Abu Bakr are the first and second Caliphs, those who succeeded Mohammad in the 7th century. Umar ibn al-Khattab was poisoned by a Persian slave, and Abu Bakr either died of a cold or from being poisoned a year earlier, depending on your source. (The partisans of Ali, the Shi'at 'Ali, believed that Ali should have been Caliph instead of Abu Bakr and Umar.)

I find it disconcerting that the Iraqi political discourse still hinges on the desert politics of Medina and Mecca nearly 1400 years ago. And seeing the historical complexities of the situation in Iraq, I find it even more disconcerting that most of the people who are paid to understand these historico-religious contexts don't even know the difference between the Sunni and the Shia.

I've added links next to the comment section for DiggIt and Del.icio.us and Reddit in case anyone wants to add any of my posts to either of those sites...

I was reading a back and forth in the London Review debating the source of anti-Semitic remarks that had been attributed (falsely it seems) to Hassan Nasrallah, all of which came in response to Charles Glass's recent piece about Hezbollah learning from its mistakes. This led me to go check out some of his previous writings, since he seems to be an interesting character who studied at the American University in Beirut and was kidnapped by Hezbollah in the 1987.

While reading his piece in The Nation, From Beirut to Damascus, I came across this: "Kamal Salibi, Lebanon's historian laureate at the American University of Beirut, used to tell me the Palestinians had made the mistake of becoming another Lebanese tribe."

And this started me to thinking, has the US become just another Iraqi tribe?

There's a very good op-ed piece on Somalia in today's Times, A fleeting victory in Somalia. Jonathan Stevenson, at the United States Naval War College, argues, rightly in my opinion, that a robust round of diplomacy is needed to work out Somalia's problems, namely, a power-sharing plan with the Islamic Courts and the transitional government, an engagement of clan leaders and an agreement on the place of Islamic law in Somalia. He adds that the US should join efforts by the EU and Kenya to help broker an agreement, similar to the one that finally ended the war between Southern Sudan and Khartoum:

The temptation in Washington will be to keep its distance and rely on Ethiopia, the European Union and Kenya for as long as possible. This attitude is myopic. Neither the American public nor the world believe that the Bush administration?s predominantly military approach to counterterrorism is working. Relying primarily on Ethiopian troops to tamp down Somali Islamism would represent a continuation of that flawed model, and of the corresponding risk of fueling the jihad.

The United States' full participation in a diplomatic process in the Horn of Africa, on the other hand, would constitute a relatively low-cost way of signaling a new American approach to Islam and a re-engagement in sub-Saharan Africa, which has largely been left out of Washington's post-9/11 calculus. A result could be a small political victory in the Muslim world that would deprive Osama bin Laden and his followers of a new grievance rather than supplying them with one.

He points out that any prolonged presence of Ethiopian troops could be very dangerous. Many Somalis are afraid of Ethiopian designs on the country and disconcerted by the recent comments of the transitional Interior Minister Hussein Mohammad Aideed (whose father was made famous by the "Black Hawk Down" incident) that Somalia and Ethiopia "should unite, just like the Europeans. One money. One passport. One security."

The problem, then, lies in a tendency to rely on military force instead of negotiation. I tend to believe that it was a bad idea for the Ethiopians to invade; a better idea would have been negotiations in Yemen or Kenya to agree on a power-sharing deal, because even if the thought of another Islamic regime bothers me, the Courts did manage to bring some sort of stability and decrease the violence in the areas they controlled. Now, there is a risk that continued Ethiopian presence will rub Somalis the wrong way and that the spotty order of the Islamists will revert back to the reign of warlords and inter-clan violence.

A local radio journalist summed up the problems of an Ethiopian presence in the country, as reported by the Times:

With Somalia's longtime fears that Ethiopia might swallow it, the sooner [the Ethiopians' withdrawal] happens, the better. On Saturday, Nasteh Dahir Farah, a reporter for a Kismayo radio station, visited the town's airport with three foreign journalists. The foreigners were allowed in. Mr. Farah was not. He was shooed away by Ethiopian soldiers at the gate and told never to come back.

"This is my country, not theirs," he said. "If I didn't have a job," Mr. Farah muttered, straightening himself up and smoothing the shirt where he had been poked in the chest, "I'd join the resistance."

A little humiliation, it seems, goes a long, long way.

And indeed it does, as we have seen throughout the Muslim world, but especially in Iraq.

So while it seems imperative for negotiations to begin in good faith between the transitional government, the clan leaders and the Islamic Courts, I've got a sneaking suspicion that the transitional government has let their Ethiopian-backed success go to their head. And remarks by the transitional defense minister do little to reassure me:

The big man in Kismayo is Barre Aadan Shire, the transitional government's defense minister and a former warlord, whose strong jaw, natty goatee and bald head lend him an uncanny resemblance to Lenin. He says many people in Kismayo have asked him to reach out to the Islamists, but he does not want to. The last of the Islamist fighters have retreated to the Kenya border, about 150 miles away.

"If we were going to compromise," Mr. Shire said, "why go to war?"

Via Juan Cole, Daily Kos has the story of a blogger who contacted a talk radio station's advertisers to tell them that their products were being associated with and read by the same voices that call for torturing people and murdering Muslims. He sent advertisers polite informative letters and was subsequently slapped with a cease and desist letter by Disney's lawyers because he was providing audio recordings of the broadcasts to allow advertisers to hear the comments for themselves. It seems that this hit a nerve with Disney, particularly as Visa seems to have pulled their ads from the shows in question.

Here's a copy of the letter he sent AT&T:

To: Wendy Clark, VP-advertising, AT&T

Dear Ms. Clark:

Thanks to radio hosts from KSFO your brand is being associated with torturing and killing people. Would your marketing people be happy to hear your commercial ran after Lee Rogers said this about a black man in Lincoln, Nebraska?

"Now you start with the Sear's Diehard the battery cables connected to his testi*les and you entertain him with that for awhile and then you blow his bleeping head off. " (Audio link)

You should know the person calling for the execution and torture of the black man in that clip READS THE AT&T commercials on the air. Right now on KSFO Lee Rogers is THE VOICE of AT&T to the SF Bay area. (Audio Link)

Sadly, calling for the death and torture of individuals and groups of people is a regular occurrence on KSFO 560 AM, owned by ABC Radio Disney.

Another example: immediately after the 6 am ABC Radio news on October 27th:

Lee Rogers: I say they catch the person, tie 'em to a post and burn 'em. Set 'em on fire.

Officer Vic: Yeah.

Lee Rogers: Let 'em know what it feels like.

Melanie Morgan: Hog tie 'em first. That would be good.

Next, Lee Rogers talks about a protester at a Cindy Sheehan event:

"Whoever did that should have been stomped to death right there. Just stomp their bleeping guts out." (Audio link).

Within three minutes they called for someone to be burned alive and a protester to be stomped to death. If you dismissed the first clip as a "joke", note that in this clip they were clearly not joking:

Melanie Morgan famously called for Bill Keller of the New York Times (and nine editors from other papers) to be hanged.  (Audio link)

On Nov. 14th  Melanie Morgan said this about Nancy Pelosi:

"We've got a bulls-eye painted on her big laughing eyes." (Audio link)

Also note that Morgan reads the Cingular Wireless commercials on KSFO.

Of course political speech is protected, but I believe the FBI and the FCC frown on targeting elected officials for death or inciting violence toward leaders of any political party.

Because of how ads are purchased, your ad placement agency probably didn't know that Tom Brenner (the "comic relief" called Officer Vic) regularly mocks advertiser's products.  Listen as he:

calls Chevrolet's product "shi**y" (audio link)

suggests an anti-virus product is part of a protection racket (audio link)

pretends a cold pill is really a suppository (audio link)

The odds are your product will be mocked. If they don't respect a big client like Chevrolet, will they respect your brand?

And it's not simply calls for killing specific people or mocking products, the radio hosts at KSFO proudly talk about their anti-Muslim views. Based on my research, your business has rules about discrimination against people of other religions, so what message are you sending when your employees or customers hear your advertisements right after Brian Sussman demands of a caller:

"Say Allah is a Wh*re!" (audio link)

Or when Lee Rogers says,

"Indonesia is really just another enemy Muslim nation. ... You keep screwing around with stuff like this we are going to kill a bunch of you. Millions of you. "   (audio link)

Maybe you haven't heard any complaints. Would KSFO management let you know about complaints?  Doubtful. Morgan's husband, Jack Swanson, is KSFO's operations manager. The president of KSFO, Mickey Luckoff, started the station format and has a history of defending hosts like Michael Savage until he was forced to fire him.

I understand you can't listen to all the shows you advertise on - no one can. You rely on the accurate representation of the sales reps and the show description. But you don't need to take my word, listen to the programs. You probably won't have to listen long to hear something that offends or disgusts you.  If you wish to hear the complete context on any clip or the audio during a date your ad ran contact me I have an educational archive of audio clips, I've listed a few below.

I want to emphasize that if you withdrawal your ads you aren't limiting their free speech, just removing your paid support of it. Some other company without the values you describe on the AT&T website can support them. You can choose to advertise elsewhere. This is really about YOU. Do YOU want to be associated with these comments? Do you want your company and brand to be associated with these comments?

I urge you to discontinue advertising on KSFO during the shows hosted by Melanie Morgan, Lee Rogers, Tom Brenner and Brian Sussman.

If you want to contact KSFO here is a link to their website. If you wish to express your displeasure to their parent company contact Zenia Mucha, Senior Vice President, Corporate Communications, The Walt Disney Company PHONE: (818) 560-5300 CA, (212) 456-7255 NY or email Heather Rim, Vice President, Communications, ABC, Inc.  heather.rim@abc.com.

Sincerely,

P.S.  I would appreciate hearing your final determination in this matter.

Read the Daily Kos write up for the full story.

The New York Review has articles about torture and extraordinary rendition (subscription only) and ordinary Iraqis. The latter reviews Anthony Shadid's book Night Draws Near, which was recommended to me by an Iraqi diplomat friend of mine. I recently met Shadid in Beirut, and he's an extremely nice guy, and judging from his recent coverage of Lebanon, I can understand why his book would be really good. (Unfortunately, I haven't picked it up yet.)

The piece on extraordinary rendition helpfully brings together the stories of some of the more publicized victims of the Bush Administration's policy as well as some of the reporting done by CIA plane watchers who helped uncover the story of the "black sites" in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. Under review are the Canadian Government's report on the rendition to Syria and subsequent torture of Canadian citizen Maher Arar and Steven Grey's Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program:

Edward Walker Jr., a career diplomat, was the US ambassador in Egypt between 1994 and 1997 when some of the first renditions took place. According to Walker, there were only a few occasions when the procedure was used, and they concerned men who were wanted by the Egyptians for terrorist acts allegedly committed there. Walker thought it was a good policy. "They were bad guys, and they were set on causing harm. And you know it's not a perfect world," he told Grey. But he was under no illusions about how they would be treated. "I cannot believe that anybody that was involved in this," he said, "didn't in his heart of hearts, if he was halfway intelligent, think that they were getting abusive interrogation techniques that were tantamount to torture."

Grey asked Walker: "When Condoleezza Rice and the President now stand in front of people and say we don't send people to countries where they torture, are they telling the truth?"

Walker replied: "No, they're not telling the truth."

A former CIA officer was more colorful. "Coming out and saying 'we don't do torture' is as bad as President Clinton saying, 'I didn't have sex with that woman.'" he told Grey. "It's a bare-faced lie. Of course we do torture. Imagine putting President Bush's head under water and telling him to raise his hand when he thinks he's being tortured. Give him the water-board treatment, and he'd be raising his hand straightaway."

Al Jazeera has an interesting article about the Western media coverage of Iraq, and Iraq's sectarian makeup in particular.

Among the complaints about Western coverage is the claim by Tariq al-Hashimi, Iraq's Sunni Arab vice-president, that the media overestimates the number of Shia in the country:

Western media often refer to Iraq as being "overwhelmingly Shia", or use other phrases to imply a large Shia majority. This, [al-Hashimi] says, is wrong -- and it has resulted in over-representation of Shia parties in the Iraqi government at the expense of Sunni Arabs.

Al-Hashimi said: "The false allegations promoted by Western media have resulted in an [inappropriate] political process, and everyone is paying the price for its wrong foundations."

Where the figures came from to back up assertions of a large Shia majority are unclear: no Iraqi census in modern history has ever included sect.

Sources such as Encyclopaedia Britannica put the Shia population in Iraq at 52 per cent of the total in 2001. However, figures circulated by the US military, which invaded Iraq in 2003, put the figure at 60 per cent.

The CIA's World Factbook puts the Shia at 60 to 65 percent of the Iraqi population.

Other complaints include the characterization of the insurgency as essentially Sunni and the assertion that the Baath party was a Sunni-run apparatus that persecuted the Shia. According to the current Baath spokesperson,

"Actually, sect was never an issue in Iraq. I am a Shia and I have been a senior Baath official ... No Baath party official -- no Iraqi official -- ever asked me about my sect.

"When the US army occupied Iraq they issued a list of 55 wanted top Iraqi officials, starting with President Saddam Hussein; half of those senior officials were Shia.

"The Committee of Debaathification issued a list of 100,000 senior Iraqi Baathists who would not be allowed to enjoy governmental posts, 66,000 of them were Shia - so how is the Baath party a Sunni party?

...Abu Muhammad voiced resentment at the the term "Sunni insurgency", saying that Iraqis from different backgrounds are fighting the foreign presence in Iraq.

"This term plays down Iraqi nationalism," he said. "I repeat, I am a Shia and I am resisting the US forces in Iraq, and we know for sure that resistance fighters from all background are fighting. Why do the Western agencies insist that only Sunni are fighting? Big question mark, I think."

On the other hand, there are those who disagree:

However, Karim Bader, an independent Iraqi politician, said that Western media had done a decent job on reporting what had occurred under Saddam's rule.

He said one had to look only at the senior army commanders and intelligence officers in Saddam's day, all of whom he said were Sunni. Or to look at the sizes of houses in Shia suburbs - small and overcrowded - or in Sunni areas, where houses were far larger but with fewer occupants.

Bader said: "I think there was sectarianism under Saddam and the Western media reflected that, but the question is, should we hold the Sunni sect responsible for that? I think Iraqis must be careful in answering this question."

A lot has happened while I was away. I woke up the other morning to hear that Saddam Hussein had been executed; and on the same day while on my way back to Spain, I heard that the airport had been bombed by ETA, the militant Basque separatist group; then I saw that Bangkok had been rocked by bomb blasts on new year's eve. Besides that, Addis Ababa sent troops to Somalia to rout the Islamic Courts.

First things first: I'm generally against the death penalty, but I might be convinced to accept it for those guilty of genocide or other crimes against humanity. However, if Iraq was trying to show the world that it has a modern functioning government, this execution was a poor showing for al-Malaki's goverment: it was decidedly neither solemn nor professional and was carried out on the first day of Eid.

As for the ETA bombing, I saw the results first hand, because I left Madrid from the terminal that was bombed the next day. The bomb did some pretty serious damage and has probably left two people dead. It looks like this is going to cripple if not kill the peace talks between ETA and the Spanish Government. They haven't seemed to explain why they broke a cease-fire. Although I hadn't been following the talks closely at all, I remember that there was an Irish priest that had been called in to mediate, and I had the impression that progress was being made.

In Thailand, my first fear was that it was Muslims from the south, but it seems that the bombings are being blamed on supporters of ousted PM Shinawatra.

In Somalia, I've been afraid of an Ethiopian campaign for a while, since such explicit attacks might lead to an Eritrean invasion on behalf of its Islamist allies, rekindling the war between those two countries and making Somalia a battleground for a regional war. However, the Eritreans seem to have stayed out of it, and the Islamic Courts were routed surprisingly fast. However, as soon as the Courts moved out of Mogadishu, looting was rampant and order was on short supply in Somalia's capital. Furthermore, I wouldn't be surprised to see a guerrilla resurgence of Islamist forces in Somalia, which brings me to the point that a negotiated settlement that brought the Islamic Courts into the government would be the best solution. The last thing Somalia needs is for Eritrea and Ethiopia to have a little war on Somali territory. In some good news, Kenya has called for a ceasefire and a brokered peace in Somalia, which may or may not be fueled by their fear of more Somali refugees.

In an unexpected (by me) trip, New Mexico governor, Bill Richards, went to Khartoum to try to get Khartoum to allow UN peacekeepers in Darfur. He met separately with President Omar al-Bashir, former rebel leader Minni Minnowi and foreign minister Lam Akol:

Richardson told an Associated Press reporter traveling with him that he and al-Bashir discussed the U.N. peacekeeping force, a cease-fire, protection for humanitarian groups working in the region, increasing sexual violence against refugees and a potential conference with rebel leaders.

...He discussed the [Abuja accord] later with Minni Minnawi, the leader of the rebel Sudan Liberation Movement that signed the agreement and subsequently became a presidential assistant. Minnawi expressed disappointment that the government has not yet disarmed the militias and told Richardson if the al-Bashir's government does not honor its commitments, there will be regime change.

...In Khartoum, Richardson also met with Sudanese foreign minister Lam Akol, bringing along humanitarian workers that included one representative of the Save Darfur Coalition. The coalition organized the trip and has been instrumental in bringing attention to the crisis and criticism on al-Bashir's government.

According to the AP, this trip was meant to draw attention to Richardson's "extensive foreign policy background, including his tenure as U.S. envoy to the United Nations" in preparation for his "likely White House bid."

Given how apathetic Americans are about the genocide in Darfur, I can't imagine that this sort of a trip could do much besides show voters that he's got enough clout to meet with a head of state (although it's a lot less controversial than a similar trip to Iraq, Iran or North Korea). In any case, if it's an attempt to garner future votes, it's certainly made me sympathetic to his platform.

Let's hope he has some success in Sudan.

Here's a great piece of Op-Art to be published in the San Francisco Chronicle. It was done by a"Kossack" over at the Daily Kos:

This segment on Al Jazeera (translated and edited by MEMRI), is more than a little disconcerting. The segment pits Sadeq al-Musawi, a Shia journalist, against Mishan al-Jabouri, the Sunni owner of the Iraqi satellite network, Al Zawraa. I'm not really exaggerating when I use the word "pit," because it's almost as though two cocks had been set in a hole to kill each other.

Jabouri tells Musawi that he "should choose your words carefully, or else I will do things to you that you will not imagine, you Persian liar ... you are an Iranian shoe!"

Musawi responds with, "Your father killed Kurds!"

Finally, Jabouri advises Musawi against speaking ill of Saddam Hussein, to which Musawi tells him not to advise anything, but rather, "kill me in Iraq, send your militia to kill me."

I've been reading Vali Nasr's The Shia Revival, and he writes a lot about how the Sunni regard the Shia as not being proper Arabs, because Shiism has had much influence from Iran and since some Shia in Lebanon and Iraq are the descendants of Persians who migrated centuries ago. Jabouri literally calls Musawi and Iranian (he says both Ajami and Irani), and brings some paperwork (which he proceeds to throw at his interlocutor) out to support his claims. And in the end, who knows whether Musawi is Iranian or not. Maybe he is, or maybe his family fled Iraq and he was born in Iran to Iraqi parents.

But that's not really important. The important point is the internecine venom. Jabouri tells the Jazeera moderator, "The people who executed Saddam Hussein are the same people who killed Umar, the same people who killed Abu Bakr." Are these Iraqi militants? western viewers might ask. No, Umar and Abu Bakr are the first and second Caliphs, those who succeeded Mohammad in the 7th century. Umar ibn al-Khattab was poisoned by a Persian slave, and Abu Bakr either died of a cold or from being poisoned a year earlier, depending on your source. (The partisans of Ali, the Shi'at 'Ali, believed that Ali should have been Caliph instead of Abu Bakr and Umar.)

I find it disconcerting that the Iraqi political discourse still hinges on the desert politics of Medina and Mecca nearly 1400 years ago. And seeing the historical complexities of the situation in Iraq, I find it even more disconcerting that most of the people who are paid to understand these historico-religious contexts don't even know the difference between the Sunni and the Shia.

I've added links next to the comment section for DiggIt and Del.icio.us and Reddit in case anyone wants to add any of my posts to either of those sites...

I was reading a back and forth in the London Review debating the source of anti-Semitic remarks that had been attributed (falsely it seems) to Hassan Nasrallah, all of which came in response to Charles Glass's recent piece about Hezbollah learning from its mistakes. This led me to go check out some of his previous writings, since he seems to be an interesting character who studied at the American University in Beirut and was kidnapped by Hezbollah in the 1987.

While reading his piece in The Nation, From Beirut to Damascus, I came across this: "Kamal Salibi, Lebanon's historian laureate at the American University of Beirut, used to tell me the Palestinians had made the mistake of becoming another Lebanese tribe."

And this started me to thinking, has the US become just another Iraqi tribe?

There's a very good op-ed piece on Somalia in today's Times, A fleeting victory in Somalia. Jonathan Stevenson, at the United States Naval War College, argues, rightly in my opinion, that a robust round of diplomacy is needed to work out Somalia's problems, namely, a power-sharing plan with the Islamic Courts and the transitional government, an engagement of clan leaders and an agreement on the place of Islamic law in Somalia. He adds that the US should join efforts by the EU and Kenya to help broker an agreement, similar to the one that finally ended the war between Southern Sudan and Khartoum:

The temptation in Washington will be to keep its distance and rely on Ethiopia, the European Union and Kenya for as long as possible. This attitude is myopic. Neither the American public nor the world believe that the Bush administration?s predominantly military approach to counterterrorism is working. Relying primarily on Ethiopian troops to tamp down Somali Islamism would represent a continuation of that flawed model, and of the corresponding risk of fueling the jihad.

The United States' full participation in a diplomatic process in the Horn of Africa, on the other hand, would constitute a relatively low-cost way of signaling a new American approach to Islam and a re-engagement in sub-Saharan Africa, which has largely been left out of Washington's post-9/11 calculus. A result could be a small political victory in the Muslim world that would deprive Osama bin Laden and his followers of a new grievance rather than supplying them with one.

He points out that any prolonged presence of Ethiopian troops could be very dangerous. Many Somalis are afraid of Ethiopian designs on the country and disconcerted by the recent comments of the transitional Interior Minister Hussein Mohammad Aideed (whose father was made famous by the "Black Hawk Down" incident) that Somalia and Ethiopia "should unite, just like the Europeans. One money. One passport. One security."

The problem, then, lies in a tendency to rely on military force instead of negotiation. I tend to believe that it was a bad idea for the Ethiopians to invade; a better idea would have been negotiations in Yemen or Kenya to agree on a power-sharing deal, because even if the thought of another Islamic regime bothers me, the Courts did manage to bring some sort of stability and decrease the violence in the areas they controlled. Now, there is a risk that continued Ethiopian presence will rub Somalis the wrong way and that the spotty order of the Islamists will revert back to the reign of warlords and inter-clan violence.

A local radio journalist summed up the problems of an Ethiopian presence in the country, as reported by the Times:

With Somalia's longtime fears that Ethiopia might swallow it, the sooner [the Ethiopians' withdrawal] happens, the better. On Saturday, Nasteh Dahir Farah, a reporter for a Kismayo radio station, visited the town's airport with three foreign journalists. The foreigners were allowed in. Mr. Farah was not. He was shooed away by Ethiopian soldiers at the gate and told never to come back.

"This is my country, not theirs," he said. "If I didn't have a job," Mr. Farah muttered, straightening himself up and smoothing the shirt where he had been poked in the chest, "I'd join the resistance."

A little humiliation, it seems, goes a long, long way.

And indeed it does, as we have seen throughout the Muslim world, but especially in Iraq.

So while it seems imperative for negotiations to begin in good faith between the transitional government, the clan leaders and the Islamic Courts, I've got a sneaking suspicion that the transitional government has let their Ethiopian-backed success go to their head. And remarks by the transitional defense minister do little to reassure me:

The big man in Kismayo is Barre Aadan Shire, the transitional government's defense minister and a former warlord, whose strong jaw, natty goatee and bald head lend him an uncanny resemblance to Lenin. He says many people in Kismayo have asked him to reach out to the Islamists, but he does not want to. The last of the Islamist fighters have retreated to the Kenya border, about 150 miles away.

"If we were going to compromise," Mr. Shire said, "why go to war?"

Via Juan Cole, Daily Kos has the story of a blogger who contacted a talk radio station's advertisers to tell them that their products were being associated with and read by the same voices that call for torturing people and murdering Muslims. He sent advertisers polite informative letters and was subsequently slapped with a cease and desist letter by Disney's lawyers because he was providing audio recordings of the broadcasts to allow advertisers to hear the comments for themselves. It seems that this hit a nerve with Disney, particularly as Visa seems to have pulled their ads from the shows in question.

Here's a copy of the letter he sent AT&T:

To: Wendy Clark, VP-advertising, AT&T

Dear Ms. Clark:

Thanks to radio hosts from KSFO your brand is being associated with torturing and killing people. Would your marketing people be happy to hear your commercial ran after Lee Rogers said this about a black man in Lincoln, Nebraska?

"Now you start with the Sear's Diehard the battery cables connected to his testi*les and you entertain him with that for awhile and then you blow his bleeping head off. " (Audio link)

You should know the person calling for the execution and torture of the black man in that clip READS THE AT&T commercials on the air. Right now on KSFO Lee Rogers is THE VOICE of AT&T to the SF Bay area. (Audio Link)

Sadly, calling for the death and torture of individuals and groups of people is a regular occurrence on KSFO 560 AM, owned by ABC Radio Disney.

Another example: immediately after the 6 am ABC Radio news on October 27th:

Lee Rogers: I say they catch the person, tie 'em to a post and burn 'em. Set 'em on fire.

Officer Vic: Yeah.

Lee Rogers: Let 'em know what it feels like.

Melanie Morgan: Hog tie 'em first. That would be good.

Next, Lee Rogers talks about a protester at a Cindy Sheehan event:

"Whoever did that should have been stomped to death right there. Just stomp their bleeping guts out." (Audio link).

Within three minutes they called for someone to be burned alive and a protester to be stomped to death. If you dismissed the first clip as a "joke", note that in this clip they were clearly not joking:

Melanie Morgan famously called for Bill Keller of the New York Times (and nine editors from other papers) to be hanged.  (Audio link)

On Nov. 14th  Melanie Morgan said this about Nancy Pelosi:

"We've got a bulls-eye painted on her big laughing eyes." (Audio link)

Also note that Morgan reads the Cingular Wireless commercials on KSFO.

Of course political speech is protected, but I believe the FBI and the FCC frown on targeting elected officials for death or inciting violence toward leaders of any political party.

Because of how ads are purchased, your ad placement agency probably didn't know that Tom Brenner (the "comic relief" called Officer Vic) regularly mocks advertiser's products.  Listen as he:

calls Chevrolet's product "shi**y" (audio link)

suggests an anti-virus product is part of a protection racket (audio link)

pretends a cold pill is really a suppository (audio link)

The odds are your product will be mocked. If they don't respect a big client like Chevrolet, will they respect your brand?

And it's not simply calls for killing specific people or mocking products, the radio hosts at KSFO proudly talk about their anti-Muslim views. Based on my research, your business has rules about discrimination against people of other religions, so what message are you sending when your employees or customers hear your advertisements right after Brian Sussman demands of a caller:

"Say Allah is a Wh*re!" (audio link)

Or when Lee Rogers says,

"Indonesia is really just another enemy Muslim nation. ... You keep screwing around with stuff like this we are going to kill a bunch of you. Millions of you. "   (audio link)

Maybe you haven't heard any complaints. Would KSFO management let you know about complaints?  Doubtful. Morgan's husband, Jack Swanson, is KSFO's operations manager. The president of KSFO, Mickey Luckoff, started the station format and has a history of defending hosts like Michael Savage until he was forced to fire him.

I understand you can't listen to all the shows you advertise on - no one can. You rely on the accurate representation of the sales reps and the show description. But you don't need to take my word, listen to the programs. You probably won't have to listen long to hear something that offends or disgusts you.  If you wish to hear the complete context on any clip or the audio during a date your ad ran contact me I have an educational archive of audio clips, I've listed a few below.

I want to emphasize that if you withdrawal your ads you aren't limiting their free speech, just removing your paid support of it. Some other company without the values you describe on the AT&T website can support them. You can choose to advertise elsewhere. This is really about YOU. Do YOU want to be associated with these comments? Do you want your company and brand to be associated with these comments?

I urge you to discontinue advertising on KSFO during the shows hosted by Melanie Morgan, Lee Rogers, Tom Brenner and Brian Sussman.

If you want to contact KSFO here is a link to their website. If you wish to express your displeasure to their parent company contact Zenia Mucha, Senior Vice President, Corporate Communications, The Walt Disney Company PHONE: (818) 560-5300 CA, (212) 456-7255 NY or email Heather Rim, Vice President, Communications, ABC, Inc.  heather.rim@abc.com.

Sincerely,

P.S.  I would appreciate hearing your final determination in this matter.

Read the Daily Kos write up for the full story.

The New York Review has articles about torture and extraordinary rendition (subscription only) and ordinary Iraqis. The latter reviews Anthony Shadid's book Night Draws Near, which was recommended to me by an Iraqi diplomat friend of mine. I recently met Shadid in Beirut, and he's an extremely nice guy, and judging from his recent coverage of Lebanon, I can understand why his book would be really good. (Unfortunately, I haven't picked it up yet.)

The piece on extraordinary rendition helpfully brings together the stories of some of the more publicized victims of the Bush Administration's policy as well as some of the reporting done by CIA plane watchers who helped uncover the story of the "black sites" in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. Under review are the Canadian Government's report on the rendition to Syria and subsequent torture of Canadian citizen Maher Arar and Steven Grey's Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program:

Edward Walker Jr., a career diplomat, was the US ambassador in Egypt between 1994 and 1997 when some of the first renditions took place. According to Walker, there were only a few occasions when the procedure was used, and they concerned men who were wanted by the Egyptians for terrorist acts allegedly committed there. Walker thought it was a good policy. "They were bad guys, and they were set on causing harm. And you know it's not a perfect world," he told Grey. But he was under no illusions about how they would be treated. "I cannot believe that anybody that was involved in this," he said, "didn't in his heart of hearts, if he was halfway intelligent, think that they were getting abusive interrogation techniques that were tantamount to torture."

Grey asked Walker: "When Condoleezza Rice and the President now stand in front of people and say we don't send people to countries where they torture, are they telling the truth?"

Walker replied: "No, they're not telling the truth."

A former CIA officer was more colorful. "Coming out and saying 'we don't do torture' is as bad as President Clinton saying, 'I didn't have sex with that woman.'" he told Grey. "It's a bare-faced lie. Of course we do torture. Imagine putting President Bush's head under water and telling him to raise his hand when he thinks he's being tortured. Give him the water-board treatment, and he'd be raising his hand straightaway."

Al Jazeera has an interesting article about the Western media coverage of Iraq, and Iraq's sectarian makeup in particular.

Among the complaints about Western coverage is the claim by Tariq al-Hashimi, Iraq's Sunni Arab vice-president, that the media overestimates the number of Shia in the country:

Western media often refer to Iraq as being "overwhelmingly Shia", or use other phrases to imply a large Shia majority. This, [al-Hashimi] says, is wrong -- and it has resulted in over-representation of Shia parties in the Iraqi government at the expense of Sunni Arabs.

Al-Hashimi said: "The false allegations promoted by Western media have resulted in an [inappropriate] political process, and everyone is paying the price for its wrong foundations."

Where the figures came from to back up assertions of a large Shia majority are unclear: no Iraqi census in modern history has ever included sect.

Sources such as Encyclopaedia Britannica put the Shia population in Iraq at 52 per cent of the total in 2001. However, figures circulated by the US military, which invaded Iraq in 2003, put the figure at 60 per cent.

The CIA's World Factbook puts the Shia at 60 to 65 percent of the Iraqi population.

Other complaints include the characterization of the insurgency as essentially Sunni and the assertion that the Baath party was a Sunni-run apparatus that persecuted the Shia. According to the current Baath spokesperson,

"Actually, sect was never an issue in Iraq. I am a Shia and I have been a senior Baath official ... No Baath party official -- no Iraqi official -- ever asked me about my sect.

"When the US army occupied Iraq they issued a list of 55 wanted top Iraqi officials, starting with President Saddam Hussein; half of those senior officials were Shia.

"The Committee of Debaathification issued a list of 100,000 senior Iraqi Baathists who would not be allowed to enjoy governmental posts, 66,000 of them were Shia - so how is the Baath party a Sunni party?

...Abu Muhammad voiced resentment at the the term "Sunni insurgency", saying that Iraqis from different backgrounds are fighting the foreign presence in Iraq.

"This term plays down Iraqi nationalism," he said. "I repeat, I am a Shia and I am resisting the US forces in Iraq, and we know for sure that resistance fighters from all background are fighting. Why do the Western agencies insist that only Sunni are fighting? Big question mark, I think."

On the other hand, there are those who disagree:

However, Karim Bader, an independent Iraqi politician, said that Western media had done a decent job on reporting what had occurred under Saddam's rule.

He said one had to look only at the senior army commanders and intelligence officers in Saddam's day, all of whom he said were Sunni. Or to look at the sizes of houses in Shia suburbs - small and overcrowded - or in Sunni areas, where houses were far larger but with fewer occupants.

Bader said: "I think there was sectarianism under Saddam and the Western media reflected that, but the question is, should we hold the Sunni sect responsible for that? I think Iraqis must be careful in answering this question."

A lot has happened while I was away. I woke up the other morning to hear that Saddam Hussein had been executed; and on the same day while on my way back to Spain, I heard that the airport had been bombed by ETA, the militant Basque separatist group; then I saw that Bangkok had been rocked by bomb blasts on new year's eve. Besides that, Addis Ababa sent troops to Somalia to rout the Islamic Courts.

First things first: I'm generally against the death penalty, but I might be convinced to accept it for those guilty of genocide or other crimes against humanity. However, if Iraq was trying to show the world that it has a modern functioning government, this execution was a poor showing for al-Malaki's goverment: it was decidedly neither solemn nor professional and was carried out on the first day of Eid.

As for the ETA bombing, I saw the results first hand, because I left Madrid from the terminal that was bombed the next day. The bomb did some pretty serious damage and has probably left two people dead. It looks like this is going to cripple if not kill the peace talks between ETA and the Spanish Government. They haven't seemed to explain why they broke a cease-fire. Although I hadn't been following the talks closely at all, I remember that there was an Irish priest that had been called in to mediate, and I had the impression that progress was being made.

In Thailand, my first fear was that it was Muslims from the south, but it seems that the bombings are being blamed on supporters of ousted PM Shinawatra.

In Somalia, I've been afraid of an Ethiopian campaign for a while, since such explicit attacks might lead to an Eritrean invasion on behalf of its Islamist allies, rekindling the war between those two countries and making Somalia a battleground for a regional war. However, the Eritreans seem to have stayed out of it, and the Islamic Courts were routed surprisingly fast. However, as soon as the Courts moved out of Mogadishu, looting was rampant and order was on short supply in Somalia's capital. Furthermore, I wouldn't be surprised to see a guerrilla resurgence of Islamist forces in Somalia, which brings me to the point that a negotiated settlement that brought the Islamic Courts into the government would be the best solution. The last thing Somalia needs is for Eritrea and Ethiopia to have a little war on Somali territory. In some good news, Kenya has called for a ceasefire and a brokered peace in Somalia, which may or may not be fueled by their fear of more Somali refugees.