By Jeremy Scahill
t r u t h o u t | Film Review

Friday 16 May 2008

    Back in 1989, in his smash hit, "Say Anything," John Cusack famously stood with a boom box above his head outside the home of the woman he loved blasting Peter Gabriel's "In Your Eyes." With his latest films on the Iraq war, Cusack is standing outside Hollywood with a TV above his head broadcasting his political movies calling on the public to wake up and "Do Something."

    John Cusack began working on his new film, "War, Inc.," which premieres in LA and New York May 23, about a year into the US occupation of Iraq. From the moment US tanks rolled into Baghdad, Cusack was a voracious consumer of news about the war. He took it deadly seriously, regularly calling independent journalists and asking them questions as he sought as much independent information as he could. Watching the insanity of the erection of the Green Zone and the advent of the era of McWar, complete with tens of thousands of "private contractors," Cusack set out to use the medium of film to unveil the madness. He wanted to do on the big screen what independent reporters like Naomi Klein, Nir Rosen and Dahr Jamail did in print. Over these years of war and occupation, Cusack has become one of the most insightful commentators on a far-too-seldom-discussed aspect of the occupation: the corporate dominance of the US war machine.

By Keith Olbermann
MSNBC Countdown

Wednesday 14 May 2008

    Transcript:

    Finally tonight, as promised, a Special Comment on two topics a lot of us had foolishly thought, had naively hoped, we would not again have to address… and a third topic nobody thought a president would ever seriously mention in public unless perhaps he'd just been hit in the head with something and was not in full possession of his faculties - how he expressed his "empathy" to the families of the dead in Iraq - by giving up golf.

5/13/08 Vietnam

When I was 14, my dad took me to Tahiti and Bora Bora.  Vietnam reminds me of Papeete (extended for many miles).  Lush, green, monster trees, banana trees, coconut trees, bougainvilla and hibiscus, tiny shops, swift rain squalls, people with big smiles who love to test their English on you, motor scooters (multiplied by several million). 

[I had my first ride on a motor scooter behind a polyn/asian girl in Papeete.  Come to think of it, it was my most recent, as well.]

We're guided by Mr. Loc (pronounced "Lo") of the YMCA, and driven everywhere through the honking streets in a big maroon van by Mr. Thong.  Those accompanying us are Sayuri and Eiko of the Dream Bridge Project, and Kozumi of Toyama YMCA.  Sayuri and I have a room three times the size of our hotel rooms in Tokyo (about which Jay remarked, "I found the closet, but where's the room?").

The scooters are an overwhelming force here.  I stepped out on the balcony at 6 am and rush hour had already started, four lanes plus two sidewalks of motor scooters weaving perilously between buses and cars. Other than a few lights on the main roads (fortunately all one-way) there are seemingly no traffic laws.  Traffic circles are bedlam, but Mr. Thong negotiates them with aplomb, a horn, and a shocking lack of alarm as others surge toward him.  Many people wear face masks.  The pollution is horrid! 

The food is marvelous, particularly the noodles.  Breakfast yesterday was truly french rolls with butter and pate, pineapple, papaya.  Lunch was on the Saigon River, one course after another, starting with the sweetest grapefruit juice imaginable.  Grapefruits are the size of bowling balls.  Green coconut milk for dinner through a straw, then the waiter lopped the top off the coconut and I scooped out the jelly for dessert.  Trees reach to the heavens.  There's a huge lumpy green fruit at stands along the roadside in the poorer section (where migrant workers and the YMCA reside), which I'm told smells like Camembert but tastes delicious.  I can't wait to try it.

I wish I could stay a month, walk the streets rather than zooming past, rent a scooter, talk to the people.  This is a tour, Japanese style, very directed.  Not much time for aimless gawking. 

Anyhow, having painted the scene, I want to get to the story.

Yesterday we visited four of the projects of the YMCA, which was resurrected in 1992 after a hiatus of 17 years.  Between 1968 and 1975, the YMCA was active in Vietnam helping young orphans of the war and providing refugees medical and emergency services, but it became outspokenly anti-war, and Hanoi shut it down after the Americans left.  Their purpose is to help poor children develop their gifts in safety, particularly focused on providing a loving environment for disabled children. 

We visited a vocational school which housed the students for free during one year courses in motorcycle and scooter repair (a mainstay of the economy, it seems from all the workshops that line the roads), computers, industrial electricity, refrigerator repair, industrial sewing.  We visited a club for physically disabled people who learn embroidery and beadwork and computers. 

The most inspiring part of the day was when we visited a school for 23 blind children, ranging from ages 9 to 27, who learn English, computers (which require English), produce books in braille, and study music together.  They also learn to give massage.  The idea is to make the children self-sufficient and happy.  The school is the inspiration of a marvelous man, Thien An, who lost his eyesight 17 years ago after an accident.  He had already learned French, English, computers, and music.  The children are marvelous musicians, and perform publicly.  Many of these children have been blind since birth (blindness occurs at a rate five times higher than other countries, and Agent Orange genetic defects are mostly to blame). 

The reason Jay and I were blessed with this opportunity is because of the Dream Bridge Concert we have agreed to facilitate this November 15th at UDC. 

The purpose of the concert is to raise money for a new project of the Vietnamese YMCA (Youth Movement for Cooperative Action) and the Japanese Dream Bridge Project.  We want to help them establish a community center and restaurant for the graduates of the school for the blind, who will help provide good food, music, and massage and live in dormitories at the center, which is near a national tourist site.   Whatever money comes in will be applied to construction and provisioning of the community center until it becomes self-supporting.
Let's make this concert a huge success. We need to make broad contacts in the DC community, and keep everyone updated through a web page.  We also need to find performers equal to those we've seen in Japan, and Vietnam. 

Off to the Mekong Delta.  More later.

There had already been warnings of the cyclone Nargis lurking around the coast since the end of April, but I had thought that it won't come our way because in my life time, a cyclone had never reached us in Yangon. Previously, most of the storms that occured in the Bay of Bengal mostly went into Bangladesh or India, or sometimes, into the coast of Rakhine. At that time, we were reading reports from several weather agencies online that the cyclone will pass between Rakhine state, and Ayewarddy Division. But almost only at the last minute that the storm changed directions.

By David Nakamura and Debbi Wilgoren
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, May 12, 2008; 10:42 AM

Mayor Adrian M. Fenty is announcing today that the city will not build a new downtown library on the site of the old convention center, and instead has reached an agreement with a developer to construct a four-star, 400-room hotel on the prime downtown parcel.

Fenty's predecessor, Anthony A. Williams, proposed a grand new library at the convention center site during his tenure, saying a state-of-the-art facility would draw crowds to the heart of downtown and boost civic and cultural pride.

Dear friends,
 
Many thanks to all of our supporters who are now holding events across the country to help raise funds for victims of the Cyclone.  The situation gets more dire everyday.  It appears that still only a trickle of humanitarian aid is reaching the people most in need, and yesterday even the United Nations World Food Program briefly suspended shipments of aid to Burma after the military regime impounded aid planes.  Reports indicate that supplies that should be reaching the Burmese people are literally sitting on the tarmac. 
 
We are going to send you a full update about the Cyclone, we are pulling it together right now.  For a quick moment though, we wanted to answer a question that hundreds of you (including many journalists) have been asking us:  what is the condition of Aung San Suu Kyi, the leader of Burma's struggle for human rights and democracy and the world's only imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize recipient? 

Link here: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2004404786_cremains10.html

How bad does it have to get before we finally say Enough.?

How much disrespect do they have to demonstrate?  How much will we tolerate?

Who can justify this Administration?

 

Article text:

By Ann Scott Tyson

The Washington Post