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In a bizarre twist ripped straight out of a Peter Sellers film, Israeli citizens are coming forward in relation to the recent murder of a Hamas arms supplier in Dubai. Get the lowdown in my original post from Thursday. Why? Because their passports put them at the scene of the crime after the assassins cloned them and stole their identities. Leaving people like poor Melvyn Mildiner, 31, to now be fearing for his life, despite having never left the house. Though interestingly there’s this reported quote from ynet.com that he ‘awoke to a world of fun’. Whatever gets you going Melvyn.
For those of you still scraping your jaws off the floor from the now infamous Supreme court ruling that uncapped corporate electoral spending, the democrats have awoken from their shock to suggest some counter-measures. Read about them here.
And whilst my Honduran coup comic is now almost finished and primed for the printers (for more info on it click here), the violent repression of resistance members in Honduras continues unchecked by the media. For a brutal wake-up call, a list of the reported incidents has been published and updated here.
News today that the US has decided to rename the Iraq war ‘Operation New Dawn’ to vaunt the US’s evolving relationship with the Government of Iraq. So it’s goodbye “Operation Iraqi Freedom”, hello new dawn. Despite the predictable media fanfare (drowning out the rising death toll, you say?), it seems no one actually did a google search before coining the moniker. Had they done, they’d have seen that amongst the top billings for ‘New Dawn’ is a rehab center for getting people back on the right track. The company’s slogan says it all: “Confidence. Security. Hope. Always” – sounds like a military press release to me. Speaking of which, here’s the original memo from the Dept of Defense suggesting the name change. Lest you commit the social faux pas of mismatching the wrong war to the wrong sobriquet, here are some personal favourites of mine:
“Operation Earnest Will” – no, it’s not the abortive first draft title of Good Will Hunting, it was the 1987-1988 Inter-State War in Iran
“Operation Deliberate Force” – best not to think about the need for the word ‘deliberate’ here – NATO Intervention in Bosnia 1994-1995
Both still sound better than “Operation WTF WMDs”, mind you.
This week’s book review corner features New Orleans: After the Deluge, an amazing piece of comics journalism that recreates the chaos and panic when Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005. It was originally serialised online, so you can actually read it here. The story focuses on half a dozen characters around the city and their contrasting reactions to the impending disaster. Based on actual testimonies, it’s a towering work that earns Josh Neufeld a place in the comics journalist hall of fame, next to Joe Sacco. Ok, so it’s still a small hall, but you get the idea.
Lastly, the more observant among you will have noticed the chipin widget on the right sidebar has been replaced by a new button, which will take you directly to the paypal checkout for a copy of the Honduran coup comic. Yours for $5 plus $2 shipping to the US, or $4 to the rest of the world. Not only that, but for those of you who are new to the site (welcome) or who haven’t ordered your hard copy of the Honduran Coup: A Graphic History (for shame), I’ve created this new page with all the information, links, quotes and background you could ever want, plus a radio interview thrown in for good measure.
Some amazing, bizarre and inspiring stories in the news this week. I came across the amazing one this afternoon, though it’s the form of the news that’s amazing as opposed to the content: the Winter Olympics’ use of a live twitter feed embedded in its online coverage so you can monitor trends in real-time as events unfold. See for yourself. Needless to say, the potential for this carried over into other news stories is massive.
The bizarre portion relates to the assassination guide mentioned in the title and is something straight out of the Bourne Identity franchise. If you hadn’t heard, Mossad, the Israel intelligence agency, is alleged to have carried out a covert operation to take out Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, a leading Hamas official, in his hotel room in Dubai on Jan 20. Aside from the furore surrounding the identities of the team involved (who are also alleged to have cloned British and Irish passports) and the undeniable fact that al-Mabhouh wound up dead, what is most unbelievable is the security camera footage that chronicles the entire operation, broadcast recently on the US’s ABC network. Click here for the play-by-play guide, should you ever need to brush up your black ops skills. A surefire contender for the least covert operation ever carried out.
Lastly, on the inspiration front, is news from Iran that dissidents are publishing a comic that chronicles life in Iran. I know what you’re thinking – you’ve already read Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis. But whereas Satrapi’s incredible memoir relied on her childhood memories, this new project is being published in real time (there’s that buzzword again), and will be serialized three times a week. Click here for the full story or here for the start of the comic.
Join the ongoing debate about the future of journalism in these technology-obsessed times, courtesy of authors Robert McChesney and John Nichols and their new book, The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution that Will Begin the World Again. The authors argue for increased government subsidies (like in the Old World) to support the US media and encourage a free press to combat the growing spectre of coporate dominance of content providers, best exemplified by Comcast’s takeover bid for NBC. It’s currently being reviewed to see if it complies with anti-trust laws, though seeing as Comcast currently provides 24m homes with cable, 16m with internet and will suddenly be granted cable networks such as Telemundo, MSNBC and Bravo, TV shows such as Jay Leno’s, regional stations such as Washington’s WRC (Channel 4), and Universal movie studios, it’s clearly a step towards massive media consolidation. Not to mention posing a big threat to net neutrality. How do you feel about it? Leave a comment below.
In other news, the first ever Tea Party convention is currently taking place in Nashville, proving that the right can actually mobilise and protest with just as much (perhaps even more) vitriol than the left. For those outside the US bubble unfamiliar with the trend, it’s essentially a grass roots organization against what they perceive as Obama’s socialist agenda (forcing healthcare, tax hikes and increased state control on an unsuspecting populace). Personally, I think it’s great to see more people engaged in the political process, standing up for what they believe in. Unless, of course, they aren’t so sure why they have those beliefs in the first place – see this video of their march to the White House last year.
One reason, Dr David Runciman argues, that people can feel so passionately against measures that are designed to help them is that they have fallen for the narrative of a specific agenda, despite its lack of substantiating evidence. For more, read this article from the BBC on how interesting stories can speak to voters more than facts and figures, courtesy of Steve Bissette.
Yet further proof that we need to rethink the way news content and information is presented – comics journalism, anyone? Speaking of which, if you haven’t already, you need to check out legendary comics journalist Joe Sacco‘s latest graphic opus, Footnotes in Gaza – a devastating piece of comics journalism form on Israeli policy towards Palestinians in the occupied territories, as well as an investigation of historical truth.
And last but not least comes the news of a corruption scandal at the heart of the world’s second largest arm manufacturer (the UK’s own BAE), and the £300m it has been forced to pay out in compensation. Check out the Guardian and the Serious Fraud Office’s combined efforts to bring the company to justice over the past 30 years here. Remember my Jan 28th post about Attorney General Goldsmith from the Chilcot Inquiry? Turns out he was once again silenced by Tony Blair, this time when it came to investigating BAE’s £43bn al-Yamamah fighter plane sales to Saudi Arabia. Which was on a par with the sale of a hi-tech military radar system to poverty-stricken Tanzania. Naturally, both cases were of the utmost concern to the respective parties’ national security.
I don’t think I was alone in finding Barack Obama’s nuclear change of heart a little odd, and more than a little hypocritical. Let’s skip back to December, and his Nobel Peace Prize address. Which, incidentally, made him one of the few prize winners to argue for war in his acceptance speech: “To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism – it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason”. When it comes to waging war, reason will apparently only take you so far. Presumably after that it’s intuition, or maybe divine inspiration – we need only look back to the former President for that, courtesy of the Independent UK.
But I digress. The important thing here is Obama’s policy towards nuclear weapons, which incidentally was the reason he was awarded the Nobel in the first place. Here he is again: “One urgent example is the effort to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, and to seek a world without them. I am committed to upholding this treaty. And I am working with President Medvedev to reduce America and Russia’s nuclear stockpiles.” That was December 2009. Hence the double-take when he announced in the latest budget that the agency responsible for the US’ nuclear weapons stockpile would receive a 13.4% increase from the previous fiscal year, totalling $11.2 billion. Granted, some of that would go towards controlling and securing existing nuclear warheads, but then there’s also “plans to go to full production of the refurbished Navy W-76 Trident submarine warhead, to refurbish the B-61 bomb, and to study options for maintaining the W-78, the warhead in the Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile.”
Coincidentally, in the same month that this nuclear leap was taken, one of the lone survivors of both of the 1945 atomic bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Tsutomo Yamaguchi, died aged 93. Amazingly, he was within the designated ground zero area (3km from the blast) for both. The students of the Stanford Graphic Novel Project have chosen his incredible testimony as the basis for their graphic novel, and the first few pages were excitedly written on Monday. To get a sense of the unbelievably apocalyptic level of destruction in Hiroshima and Nagasaki when the bombs dropped, check out this recent NPR podcast with the author of Last Train from Hiroshima, a collection of survivor testimonies.
In other news, the Independent World Report is running my Diego Garcia comic in their latest issue, but you can check it out here. And there’s only a week to get your pre-orders for the Honduran coup comic in! See the widget to the right and spread the word.
Belated good news from the Obama camp that they will be challenging the acquittal of the Blackwater mercenaries responsible for the Nisour Square massacre of 16 September 2007. For those of you unfamiliar with Blackwater, essentially they’re a private mercenary army for hire, employed as go-to guys by the US government but apparently not bound by its legal or ethical codes. Means less litigation down the line for human rights violations incurred in the field, right? (In the interests of national security, of course). Well it did until now.
Jeremy Scahill has been covering their nefarious involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, summed up in his excellent book, Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army. His latest piece for the Nation on the verdict tells the story of the brave man who brought the case against the company after his young son was killed in the massacre. All he wants is an apology, but Blackwater would rather he took the hush money.
Today’s quote comes courtesy of teflon Tony Blair, all the way over in London. No, he’s not talking about forgetting to pay for his TV licence. He’s at the Chilcot Inquiry and he’s talking about forgetting to fact-check the intelligence dossier that convinced him we needed to invade Iraq. Despite gems like these (taken from the Daily Torygraph, I confess) surfacing online today in all the main papers, the headlines make out that he’s a man of decisive action, “not Bush’s poodle” – as if the internecine power dynamic between the two stooges was more important than whether the pair of them should be tried as war criminals. Other heinous admissions dressed up in diplomatic-speak include: “A second resolution was obviously going to make life a lot easier, politically and in every respect” – good to see his reverence for the UN as little more than a rubber-stamp for making life easier.
For more of the same, then why not check out this secret Downing Street Memo from July 2002 (later republished in the Sunday Times), in which Mssrs Blair, Campbell, the Attorney General and John Scarlett (then head of “Intelligence”) all talk more candidly about how they and the US can get the Iraq show on the road, evidence on not:
Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.
Then there’s the small matter of Attorney General Lord Goldsmith, who wrote Blair a full letter in 2002 outlining the illegality of an Iraq invasion, stating that: there were only three justifications: self-defence, which he did not accept because he did not accept the new US doctrine of expanded pre-emption; averting a humanitarian crisis, which justified the no-fly zones but would not justify war; and UN authorisation, which would require a new resolution.
Blair’s reaction was not only to ignore him (obviously), but to gag and bar him from the Cabinet. Then deny everything. The Daily Mail (hey, at least the sources have some standing) had the full scoop here. Read a blow-by-blow account of Goldsmith’s turn on the stand at Chilcot here.
Before I kick things off, become a fan of the newborn Archcomix Facebook Fan page here and get more updates than you can shake a digitized stick at. Now, onwards. Heroes of the week – In West Virginia, Protestors associated with Climate Ground Zero and Mountain Justice have managed to halt blasting on Coal River Mountain for the last week by staging a three-person tree-sit. David Aaron Smith, 23, Amber Nitchman, 19 and Eric Blevins, 28 are on platforms approximately 60 feet up two tulip poplar trees and one oak tree. They are located next to where Massey Energy is blasting to build an access road to the Brushy Fork Impoundment on its Bee Tree Strip Mine. One of them came down two days ago suffering from the cold, although the incessant horn blaring and siren wailing of vindictive Massey energy workers to prevent them from sleeping might have also had something to do with it.Today is National Coal Ash day of action so inform yerselves by watching this video, or reading my comic about Mountain Top Removal (pasted below). Please share this post with others via the buttons at the bottom too.
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Legendary leftist historian activist Howard Zinn also gets a special mention after suffering a fatal heart attack yesterday. Here’s a good interview with him by way of an introduction. Of course, there’s always his seminal A People’s History of the US (later adapted into a graphic novel) too.
I had my interview for KALW’s Crosscurrent’s show yesterday on the Honduran Coup graphic history, the role of comics in the news and how new media can help foster grass-roots activism. It’ll be broadcast next Weds (the 18th) at 5pm Pacific, giving listeners enough time to get indignant about the Honduran election that’s slated to go ahead on the 29th. Whilst there, Holly Kernan, the News Director, told me about a new online project to encourage community-sponsored journalism, spot.us. It’s a fantastic site, only a year old, that allows journalists to pitch a story to the public in order to secure funding through micro-payments. Sadly it’s limited to local news coverage at the moment, so no ties to Honduras, but I have a number of other pitches on the back burner.
I’ve also had emails about difficulties with sharing specific comics via email – as opposed to sending the link to the gallery page, so here’s an experiment: I’ll post the Diego Garcia comic as a gallery post below and you should be able to share it around by clicking the twitter/fbook/digg etc tabs below. Let me know if it works. Honduran follow-up is 2/3 done! Keep coming back for updates and I’ll let you know when the ink’s dry on the last page.
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Now that we’ve reached the end of the Diego Garcia comic, it’ll be a few days before I post more finished comics up as I return to the drawing board and my thumbnails for some other projects – one involving Harvey Pekar. If you’re hungry for more comics, then head to the COMIX page, where you’ll a selection to choose from, including one on the Prop 8 protests in California last year – timely, given what’s just happened in Maine. If that’s still not enough, then stop by the store, order some hard copies, and I’ll ship them to wherever you are in the world.
A date in your diaires: I’ll be on KALW local public radio next Weds, Nov 11, talking about comics journalism and developments in Honduras. I’ll post a link to the show when it’s up.
Speaking of which, after cautious celebrations of an agreement in Honduras, people are beginning to smell a rat at the small print hidden in the US-brokered deal, which sees the US recognizing the upcoming elections regardless of whether Manuel Zelaya is reinstated. The staunchly republican Senator Jim DeMint (R-South Carolina) states: ” I take our administration at their word that they will now side with the Honduran people and end their focus on the disgraced Zelaya”. So much for Zelaya’s proposed non-binding consultation that got him into all this trouble in the first place then. Read the full statement here. This from the man who today also campaigned to keep Guantanamo in use for another year, where the prisoners are “by all accounts …being treated better than any prisoner in American jails”.
