WTC Snuff

Some other blog made me aware of the existence of this 8-minute film at Atomfilms.com, called "The Voice of the Prophet," in which a head of security at Morgan Stanley reminisces about war, and remarks that the coming wars will be fought on the streets, "of Los Angeles," for example, against terrorists, and that the WTC bombing (the first one) was an example of things to come. It's shot in his WTC office, in 1998. The Atomfilms Web site enthuses about how this "prophet" foresaw all, in 1998, "long before Osama bin Laden was public enemy number 1."

How long before? Days before? I remember hearing Osama jokes in the office, and I only worked in an office from 1996 to 1998. (and here's an MSNBC story from April 1998, called Bin Laden Comes Home to Roost.) In addition, this prophet in the film, the security chief, was speaking five years after the first bombing.

The sound is bad on this film, and my speakers are bad. But, he starts out talking about Viet Nam and Rhodesia. There's a long rambling anecdote about charred bodies in Viet Nam. I couldn't hear that much of the first part, but apparently he volunteered in Rhodesia, or he was a mercenary in Rhodesia. I -- again, just don't know what to say there. From mercenary in Rhodesia to lackey for Morgan Stanley. What was his prophetic gift but guilt: "I am not going to get away with this shit forever." I'd have called the film "Man Sells Soul, Brings Doom on Us All."

No Fair
I have nothing arch, scathing, or funny to write about the war, the war coverage, or the protests. But, I did read this heartening editorial by Jeffrey St. Clair at CounterPunch. In which he asks, apropos all the recent brandishing of the Geneva Convention, "What does the professor of torture Alan Dershowitz have to say now?" Now that it's the US soldiers who are POWs.

The heartening part, besides the pleasure of seeing Dershowitz scorned for his defense of torture, is the part about the real resistance to the war taking place on the streets of "Cairo, Paris, New York, Madrid, London, Nablus, San Francisco..."

Color Commentary: Beyond Comment

This was in the New York Times on Saturday:

"This is the biggest, ugliest desert I've seen in my life," Ted Koppel told Peter Jennings on a special extended ABC newscast on Friday night. He said his convoy had made no contact with the enemy, "only a few Bedouins and their sheep."

--I, I just can't think of what to say. No wonder all my friends with TVs are so depressed. It's not so much the "incorrectness" of the Bedouin & sheep comment, though that's bad enough. Just the unashamed Ugly-Americanism of it.

(I have to acknowledge again The Pinocchio Theory of March 21 for the spot-on sportscaster/warcaster analogy.)

Off to protest, again. Yes, I know, the whole world protested yesterday, as did the whole nation, but here in Rhode Island, we're picking pious, church-y Sunday on which to stand around looking sad and morally superior. What can I say? My taste in protest runs to chanting ("Osama, Saddam, Pinochet/ All creations of the CIA!"), absurdity ("chair not war" [see entry for March 21], "drop pants not bombs"]), music/noise (Infernal Noise Brigade, the Anti-Fascist Marching Band), and Foucault ("no more sad militants"). And, um, also mobile shifting groups of anarcho-vomiters who go around the city not getting arrested.

This last, not getting arrested, may become more and more important as fresh hells like the Domestic Security Enhancement Act (DSEA) get under way, I mean if they do. Everybody's all up in arms, so to speak, about Patriot II's assault on privacy; it's the extension of secrecy that worries me. According to warblogging "The legislation would allow the Justice Department to 'detain' anyone secretly indefinitely, at least until an indictment is secured against the person. It would make it a crime to reveal the identity — or even existance — of such a detainee."

As my friends and I wrote last fall in 23 Theses on the History of the Secret: "But nowdays the locus of secrecy has been radically reversed: it is no longer the individual that has a 'right to privacy' but the state that has the power of secrecy. It’s not only the kind of power you think it is: taking prisoners of war, locking them up at Guantanamo Bay and torturing them for six months, or imprisoning thousands of immigrants but keeping their identity secret. It is also waging publicly secret wars: wars whose bare factuality is common knowledge but whose events are invisible, even to the most vigilant 'public.' We live in the age of the public secret."

(though I admit there's some collusion in the secrecy of the publicly secret war: I could post links to the Al-Jazeera photos of Iraqi corpses, but... you can find them if you want to.)

Get Your War on TV

Steve Shaviro's blog of March 21 anatomizes the boredom factor of Gulf War II on TV: not that you know what's going to happen before it does, or that the actual war itself is unimportant, but that nothing happens, on camera, right in front of you, in real time, lots of nothing. Tanks rolling endlessly across the sand.

I don't have a TV now, so I've only seen Gulf War II TV silently, in restaurants. I haven't seen the tank footage. I have seen some four-screens-at-once footage. Like the latest in video porn: no narrative, no context, just four screens of simultaneous "action." Or, in this case, inaction: green-lit cities; carrier decks; computer graphics of military helicopters; some Al-Jazeera footage with Arabic uselessly (to me) scrolling by. My experience supports Shaviro's boredom observation; porn is the boredom genre. CNN.com, too, has free news, but entices you to buy the special footage you can only see "by subscription," again like porn, in this case, web porn.

As to Shaviro's question, whether they'll show the carnage on this reality show, he probably knows the answer is no. Wrecked and charred buildings will have to stand in for that, if what I saw today is any indication. The only Iraqis on this show will be live, cheering ones.

On the scrolling stories at the bottom of the screen, it said, just once: "Protestors in NM vow to take the protest to one of Rumsfeld's four residences." Right the f---* on. I hope it's true.

*can I use the seven dirty words on this blog? I mean "f---", not "Rumsfeld." I don't know, I just agreed to the terms of service without reading them.

MOAB of the Signifiers

This is from a few days before the war "started," so to speak (considering it never really ended). The New York Times ran this story: "Realizing Dreams of Flight, Inspired by Historic Crew".

If the New York Times has already archived the story by the time you read this, let me give you the highlights:

Photo: an African-American pilot gazes off into Destiny. It's straight out of Barthes' essay "Myth Today."

The story is a profile of a Lt Barnes, a young African-American, who serves on the USS Abraham Lincoln, and went to school at the Tuskegee Institute. Are they serious??? If this "Barnes" didn't exist, Operation _____'s office of public relations/ office of securing African-American consensus would have to invent him.

Another oddity to this story:

"Lieutenant Barnes... became animated..."
"Animated again, Lieutenant Barnes said ...."
" 'I'd like to go,' Lieutenant Barnes said, animated once again..."

Apparently, he either lapses into a stupor when he's not raring to go kill, or the reporter's slip betrays the fact that "Lt Barnes" is animated only in the space of nytimes.com.

It's eerily close to what Charles Mudede noticed about the use of African-American faces in coverage of 9/11:

"Then there were the images of weeping and praying blacks on the covers of USA Today, The New York Times, and The Seattle Times. These images of suffering were not false; many black people were deeply affected by the monstrous magnitude of the September 11 attacks. But these newspaper photos served another purpose. Beyond showing that the tragedy was an American tragedy, the photos also said, 'Look, even black people are upset about this attack. They have been humiliated and oppressed by America from day one, and yet here they are crying.'
"Now, dear reader, if blacks are crying, can you imagine what white America is feeling at this moment? Yes, that is how bad things are."

The NY Times promises we can follow its "Tours of Duty" profiles throughout the war.