March 18, 2008
A couple of months ago, I was contacted by producers from Backlight, an investigative documentary TV series on the Dutch public broadcaster VPRO. They were trying to locate and interview Scott Sforza for a program set for the 5th anniversary...
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10:57 PM
October 25, 2007
Modular, prefab, minimalist, outdoor space, nice matte finish, shipping containers... Just slap a couple of solar panels on the roof and get a book stylist in there to add a Moholy-Nagy monograph to the coffee table, I think we...
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2:44 PM
June 7, 2006
Deborah Scranton got embedded reporter credentials, but her documentary, The War Tapes was largely shot by US soldiers in Iraq using camera equipment she provided. She did much of her directing remotely via IM and email reviews of Quicktime dailies....
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12:46 PM
May 4, 2006
How stoked are you that AirArabia, the JetBlue of Sharjah, UAE--best known to real estate brokers as "Dubai Adjacent"--used the South Park Character Generator for the little characters on their website? Each time you reload the site, you get...
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8:25 AM
November 8, 2005
First, I'm trying to imagine what kind of fundraiser one would find both David O. Russell and George W. Bush. But allowing for that possibility, I have to say I was surprised to hear this anecdote:[Three Kings] director Russell ran...
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9:05 AM
September 3, 2005
"Not an hour goes by that we do not spend a lot of time thinking about the people who are actively suffering." - Michael Chertoff, DHS Secretary, in the aptly names White House Rose Garden. [As NYT: White House Anxiety...
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6:26 AM
March 8, 2005
Ed Halter has a interesting take on how two Iraq documentaries may rehabilitate the image of the much-criticized embedding process as a means for creating accurate historical documents of the war. [Of course, that that's not at all how it...
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9:28 AM
November 4, 2004
For those keeping score at home, "a year later" is this year:The U.S. troops said there was little they could do to prevent looting of the ammunition site, 30 miles south of Baghdad. "We were running from one side of...
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2:01 AM
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October 1, 2004
Talking about his daughters last night, George W. Bush said he's "trying to put a leash on'em." U Miami Transcript of Bush/Kerry debate [PRNewswire]...
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9:05 AM
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September 28, 2004
Kwikpoint specializes in visual language guides, laminated pictograph cards to help bridge language barriers in hospitals, foreign countries, in daily deaf life--and for law enforcement and the military. An Army captain with his boots on the ground calls their fold-out...
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7:10 AM
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September 13, 2004
Tony Scott's first report from Toronto really gives you a feel for the festival's sprawl and cinematic frenzy, where you feel like you're missing movies more than watching them. Meanwhile, he only mentions one film, and he mentions the hell...
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6:18 AM
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August 17, 2004
Philadelphia Enquirer photographer David Swanson and reporter Joe Galloway have created a powerful report on the Marines of Echo Company, which has lost more soldiers in the Iraq War than any other unit so far. Swanson accompanied the Marines, part...
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12:06 PM
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June 27, 2004
If you are going to call yourself a Christian -- and I don't -- then you have to ask yourself a fundamental question, and that is: Whom would Jesus torture? Whom would Jesus drag around on a dog's leash? How...
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6:01 AM
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June 17, 2004
from an AP report, Coalition's sealed compound includes a brisk bar scene:The plushest tavern is the CIA's rattan furnished watering hole, known as the ''OGA bar." OGA stands for ''Other Government Agency," the CIA's low-key moniker. The OGA bar has...
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10:08 AM
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May 28, 2004
Apparently, Paul Wolfowitz and I have something in common: our neighborhood Thai restaurant. We're in DC for the weekend, eating at Sala Thai, and he walks in alone, with a newspaper under his arm. Makes a beeline for the...
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11:04 AM
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May 23, 2004
Reading this story in the Guardian " Iraqis lose right to sue troops over war crimes," reminded me of this New York Times story from 2002, "On World Court, U.S. Focus Shifts to Shielding Officials. The Bush administration's opposition to...
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1:29 AM
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May 7, 2004
Everyone gets a nickname, whether friend or evildoin' foe. But Bush has one word that signals his support of someone. Can you guess what it is? (Hint: "really good" is two words.) No, my torture-tortured friends, the word is FABULOUS....
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8:44 AM
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April 13, 2004
[via kottke] Soldiers in Iraq: fighting to protect our--and their--right to share music and buy bootlegged DVD's. Also noted: Troops greet each other with, "Who's your Baghdaddy?" No mention made of Hajji. Ancient "Stairway to Heaven" still inexplicably popular. Line...
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Posted by greg at
10:47 AM
March 15, 2004
Five British citizens were transferred from Guantanamo--where they were held for around two years without charge or judicial review for being "the hardest of the hard core," in Donald Rumsfeld's words--to the custody of the British government--who promptly released them...
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9:38 AM
December 15, 2003
What fortuitous timing. Last week's announcement of an Iraq-based, Iraqi-run tribunal to prosecute crimes against humanity, including "trying Saddam Hussein in absentia," if necessary, was a convenient pre-emptive strike against too much international meddling. Nice to have those death penalty-friendly...
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11:23 AM
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December 8, 2003
New at Bloghdad.com: Lucian K Truscott IV writes a sobering, scathing op-ed in the NY Times which points out the distance and gaps in experience and POV between troops actually deployed in Iraqi towns and the political appointee/apparatchiks at their...
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6:55 AM
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November 4, 2003
An update on Hajji, the Arabic term for "pilgrim" which has become the GWII term for "enemy": it looks like it's not just for GWII anymore. I found a Jan. 2002 usage in a short piece by Lisette Garcia, who...
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10:19 AM
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November 2, 2003
From Jay Price's article in the Raleigh NandO: US Coalition US troops in Iraq have come up with this war's equivalent of "kraut," "slope," or "gook." They call everyone--everyone else, that is-- "hajji." It's pronounced the way one soldier scrawled...
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8:47 AM
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October 11, 2003
I've been very quiet about my actual filmmaking activities of late, mostly because they've been pretty sparse. My efforts to re-edit Souvenir November 2001 have been stymied by Final Cut Pro for a while, and I'm coming to grips with...
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8:59 AM
October 5, 2003
Excellent NYT discussion with Steve Young, the screenwriter of NBC's Jessica Lynch TV movie, on how his script changed and took shape as the "definitive" version of Lynch's rescue shifted underneath him....
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11:46 AM
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August 18, 2003
[via the always-excellent Wooster Collective] A gang of 10-16 year-old Iraqi children painted up this disabled tank, a Russian-made T55. (Fortunately for the cause of world peace, that's a tank model, not a Terminator sequel title.) Neal Rubin's Detroit...
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7:59 AM
August 15, 2003
If karma were an Islamic teaching, the blackout map would've included Washington, DC and the Pentagon. And there'd be a teeny, gerrymandered congressional district-style finger reaching down to Crawford, Texas. As it is, though, the blackout hit New York and...
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Posted by greg at
6:05 AM
July 11, 2003
Matt Taibbi takes a look at the semantic evolution of the people attacking US troops in Iraq. They're variously called "loyalists," "remnants of ____," and, of course, "terrorists." But that's just the tip of the descriptive iceberg....
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10:46 AM
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Not the Heaps of BS they called apple pie when they wanted to go to war, and not the coverup for which Condoleeza Rice pushed George Tenet onto his sword. Go to Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo unimpeachable reporting on...
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10:15 AM
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June 10, 2003
First, the BBC uncovers the truth behind the too-good-to-be-factchecked Saving Private Lynch story, calling it "one of the most stunning pieces of news management ever conceived." Now, according to the Guardian, a BBC news program shows the Wholesale Looting...
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8:49 AM
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June 5, 2003
Billmon compiles and documents a list of US administration quotes on Iraqi WMD's. Additions continue in the comments (but I confess, I could only get through about 20% of them. It seems people ARE talking about something besides the Matrix...
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12:45 PM
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June 4, 2003
One man decides to up-and-go to Iraq and see it for himself. Check out his writings and photographs (via Kottke: i decided to go, probably, during the second week of the war, when my frustration with the western media had...
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7:49 AM
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Jeff "Many Irons in the Fire" Jarvis posts an interesting proposal: weblog up Iraq in the name of free expression and democracy. An earlier post of Salam Pax's about discovering free internet access got him started thinking, you see, now...
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3:20 AM
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June 2, 2003
Peter Maass redeems himself. It seems Salam brought some CD's to work, which, when combined with road songs from David O. Russell's Three Kings, makes one helluvan Amazon List: "the best music imaginable for driving around anarchic Baghdad"...
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11:22 AM
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Turns out the Times Magazine had Salam Pax on the payroll, translating pizza orders for their Man in Baghdad, Peter Maass, but they didn't know it. That copy of the New Yorker mentioned in Rory's Guardian piece? It's Maass's. Looks...
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9:28 AM
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May 30, 2003
Maybe it was the way Rory flaunted his expense account by overpaying for pizza. Maybe it was the promise of more back issues of the New Yorker, (Anthony Lane's X2 review gets a specific mention. Whose yer publicist, Tony? Day-amn!)...
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12:12 PM
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May 29, 2003
[via TMN] Tim Judah, the eyes and ears of The New York Review of Books in Baghdad.Amir, a man in his forties, seemed close to tears. "I have heard there is an underground prison here," he said. "Did you see...
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11:34 AM
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May 25, 2003
"Winning the war's easy, it's winning the peace that's hard." Even in this season of sequels, the media seems uninterested in the Iraq followup story, even when it was so heavily foreshadowed in the first script. Eh. Nothing to...
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7:01 AM
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May 21, 2003
It's Wednesday. I clearly wasn't set on posting this, but then I read James Norton's The X2 Guide to US Foreign Policy and figured, what the heck. All that purely Revelations-based analysis of the latest End of The World was...
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11:57 AM
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May 20, 2003
In a NY Times editorial, President Jimmy Carter warned that "the aftermath of a military invasion [of Iraq] will destabilize the region and prompt terrorists to further jeopardize our security at home." But that was way back in March,...
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2:33 AM
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May 12, 2003
On his ever-interesting Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall has some good book recommendations for people trying to figure out what just happened--and what's still to come--war-wise. Of note: The Iraq War Reader: History, Documents, Opinions, compiled and edited by...
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2:11 AM
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May 8, 2003
Skoal. For the third time, Norway merits an entry in Bloghdad.com. First, it was for an examination of non-violent resistance to the Nazi occupation. A few days later, it was for an underground WWII protest song. Now, keeping the Orwell...
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Posted by greg at
10:59 AM
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April 30, 2003
[Boston Globe, via Travelers Diagram, et al] ''The President looks in the mirror and speaks His shirts are clean but his country reeks Unpaid bills Afghanistan hills.'' These pointedly political lyrics to ''Bombs Away,'' a song on The Police's 1980...
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3:26 AM
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April 26, 2003
A new kid in town is competing with Club Iguana at The Westin Rio Mar Beach's Club, image:westinriomar.com "At Club Iguana kids get to have all the fun! Every day, we welcome Westin's young guests age 4 to 12...
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10:04 AM
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April 24, 2003
It depends on how you count. If you group desks+chairs together with vases+cuneiform+manuscripts, we are now seeing the second wave of looting in Iraq. Still to come: US-imposed mass privatization of the Iraqi infrastructure/patrimony opening the Iraqi economy to foreign...
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10:56 AM
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April 23, 2003
"Our armies," [British Lt General Stanley Maude] declared [on 9 March, 1916], "do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors, but as liberators." Within three years, 10,000 had died in a national Iraqi uprising against the British rulers,...
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11:36 AM
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April 22, 2003
Through "interviews with US intelligence officials and nuclear experts," MSNBC has created an info-packed, interactive map of Israel's WMD programs and locations, only according to Common Dreams, it's not actually reachable through the MSNBC site. [via robotwisdom]...
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Posted by greg at
4:53 AM
April 21, 2003
Danny O'Brien quotes Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle: "What happens to libraries? they burn," a pretty nihilistic-sounding comment if it's taken to be a comment on Iraqi libraries burning. And Cory Doctorow points to a librarian's-eye critique of blithe, "oh,...
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4:09 AM
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April 20, 2003
Sue Ellicott writes in the Washington Post about how the British Museum (known, before last week, for having "the greatest collection of Mesopotamian antiquities outside Iraq") mobilized during wartime. They quickly programmed lectures, gallery talks, and panels to meet the...
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10:55 AM
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April 18, 2003
The NYTimes' man in Baghdad, John F. Burns, talks to Newshour about the shakedowns and threats from his Iraqi Information Ministry handlers in the last days of the regime. Apparently, they were not all as funny as al-Sahhaf. [4/19 update:...
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9:47 AM
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Arts Journal has an extensive round-up of coverage of the Iraqi National Museum and libraries looting/burning (Including LAT's Christopher Knight's view of Bush admin. views of art/culture, which coincides with my own.It doesn't include Pfaffenblog's extensive discussion of possible pre-war...
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3:11 AM
This is probably a fence-sitter between greg.org and bloghdad.com: A Guardian interview with Jack Shaheen, who's spent 20+ years studying Hollywood's depiction of Arabs. His massive survey, Reel Bad Arabs, came out in the US in 2001, but is just...
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Posted by greg at
1:03 AM
April 14, 2003
The AP report on CNN details the contents of Saddam's "shagadelic" safehouse. On the day when I'm meeting a producer of Austin Powers for lunch, all my websites are converging. In a nod to Thomas Struth, AP's John Moore...
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10:20 AM
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April 12, 2003
Pillagers Strip Iraqi Museum of Its Treasure, John F. Burns in the NYT. Mosul descends into chaos as even museum is looted, Luke Harding in the Guardian. When I said yesterday that the US administration had no interest or care...
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1:58 AM
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April 11, 2003
In his Bloghdad column on Slate [love the name, Will!], William Saletan scores a direct hit on the "soft bigotry" of Bush's complimenting the Iraqi people as "gifted." "He doesn't mean exceptional. He means ethnic." For Bush, it turns out,...
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11:14 AM
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Talk about motivated seller. The Wash. Post's Jonathan Finer went to an open house at Tariq Aziz' place in Baghdad, and like any good open house visitor, he judges the owner's taste in books, movies, and bathroom reading. It's gotta...
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10:50 AM
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WNYC is my media default setting. I know several artists who live by WNYC; they have it playing in their studios all day. If they still do this, I don't know; but I find myself turning off wall-to-wall war discussion...
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9:34 AM
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April 10, 2003
When Rush Limbaugh told his radio audience the Iraqi Info Min (turns out he's a Democrat, who knew?) had just claimed to have invaded the US and taken over Shea, then Yankee Stadium ("because it was snowing, and they...
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Posted by greg at
10:56 AM
For those who aren't familiar with Phoenix (the US city I've most heard Baghdad compared to on NPR), the Webby-nominated Cockeyed.com has published the Baghdad City Size Comparison. With the ribbon-cutting for the American Express office still weeks away, and...
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9:20 AM
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April 9, 2003
For those who are put off by the Lord Bless This Defender of Freedom Figurine from The Bradford Group's Hamilton Collection, be of good cheer. When the Power that made and preserved us a (free, capitalist) nation, He surely...
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12:33 PM
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April 8, 2003
Paul Ford (you know, Ftrain?) snares An Interview With The Dolphin (the US Navy's mine-hunting, AWOL-going dolphin, that is). If I knew Flash, I'd make Moroccan Minesweeper. TMN: There are 2000 mine-sweeping monkeys that have been promised to the Iraqis...
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9:50 AM
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Or Shell-Shock and Awe, as the Voice's Joy Press calls it in an interesting article about the history of military psychiatry, and the evolution from WWI's "shell-shock" to Vietnam's PTSD. A lot of it is drawn from Ben Shephard's...
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4:17 AM
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From Bloggy, where Barry, too, wrestles with the ratio of art and war posts: "Ballad of Revolt" was composed in 1942 by Harald SÊverud, a Norwegian musician fed up with the Nazi occupation. The song became an anthem for the...
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Posted by greg at
3:29 AM
Slate's Timothy Noah rounds up some public relations experts to explain the increasingly reality-challenged statements of/give advice to Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf. Meanwhile, In the SF Chron, Ashraf Khalil comments on a live FoxNews interview with US troops...
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2:48 AM
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April 6, 2003
Don't quite know where to categorize this post...probably between "Hey, that was my idea," and "Maybe if you'd mentioned it or moved on it..." David Edelstein looks at David O. Russell's 1999 GW1 movie, Three Kings through 2003 GW2...
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12:47 PM
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Meg Laughlin's Sabbathy report from Camp Bushmaster, Iraq, in the Miami Herald [via IP]: "Army chaplain offers baptisms, baths" In this dry desert world near Najaf, where the Army V Corps combat support system sprawls across miles of scabrous dust,...
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1:22 AM
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April 5, 2003
Dean Falvy turns to Huig de Groot--aka Hugo Grotius, the Dutch inventor, essentially, of international law, who died in 1645--for a very useful, not-at-all-polemical discussion of legal and other implications of the US invasion of Iraq. The only point...
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Posted by greg at
10:32 AM
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The substitution of the term "incursion" for "invasion" has a controversial history, one that goes generally forgotten or ignored by most present-day users. In what became known as the Incursion Address, Richard Nixon infamously announced, "This is not an invasion...
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1:47 AM
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April 4, 2003
One of the most vividly written reports from anywhere in the war, John F. Burns' account of daily Baghdad life in the NYTimes:On the same street where the driver was pulled over this morning, a man who owns a boutique...
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4:50 AM
The Peace Pledge Union Project has a good overview of Norway's highly successful use of nonviolent tactics to resist and stymie the Nazi occupation. Resistance began almost immediately after the occupation; actions were rapidly disseminated via 300+ underground newspaper/chain letters...
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2:17 AM
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April 3, 2003
For the second month in a row, Artforum is looking back at the 80's. Douglas Crimp talks with surviving members of Gran Fury, the art collective which grew out of ACTUP and the early days of the AIDS crisis. Other...
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Posted by greg at
11:42 AM
April 2, 2003
Who else is embedded? Pentagon Public Affairs handlers. "Indeed, one of the CPIC's most vital roles is to discourage "rogue" journalists from venturing into dangerous areas by providing the information they might otherwise attempt to get on their own." (in...
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Posted by greg at
9:20 AM
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Once in a while, I'm standing here, doing something. And I think, "What in the world am I doing here?" It's a big surprise.-- A Confession (May 16, 2001, interview with the New York Times), from Hart Seely's piece on...
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Posted by greg at
8:16 AM
March 31, 2003
In Washington Monthly, Joshua Micah Marshall (his stellar weblog: Talking Points Memo) has a sobering look at the neocon view of Baghdad-as-beta for "rolling the table," i.e., regime changing the entire Middle East. Slate's Kaus realizes that this explains Rumsfeld's...
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11:05 AM
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March 30, 2003
Jeff "Buzz" Jarvis suggests I give bloghdad.com to the (eventually) liberated Salam Pax, who he notes is "the true Baghdad Blogger." I like it. To make it happen, I'll link up with an NGO and petition the ITU liaison at...
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4:22 AM
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When Bush's Ambassador to Canada, Paul Cellucci, blamed Canada for not supporting the Administration's war policy, it set of waves of self-criticism and anguish across the whole country (granted, they probably do that a lot up there...). Aaron has a...
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2:39 AM
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Gary Wills' NY Times Magazine article, "With God on His Side," a long look at presidents' pressing God into the service of politics. Keywords: "Missed you at bible study," (an unsubtle slam in the Bush White House) and "muscular Christianity."...
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2:13 AM
March 29, 2003
So rather than reinvent the war-related weblog wheel, develop an RSS/XML aggregator that categorizes all the war-blog posts by politico-ideological slant, or simply redirect it to Slate, I've decided that Bloghdad.com will be an unpredictable feature where I point to...
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11:30 AM
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March 20, 2003
Utterly remarkable. Tuesday on NPR, I heard an excerpt of British MP Malcolm Bruce's comments in the marathon Iraq debate in the House of Commons. What I heard That leaves us with the United Kingdom divided, Europe divided, NATO divided...
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9:06 AM
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Forget 1991, it feels like 1999 around here. That was the last time I made an impulse buy. of a URL. If anyone has a good idea for what to do with Bloghdad.com, let me know. The clock is ticking....
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Posted by greg at
8:15 AM
