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Section 13 Entry 0001. Date: 2003 February 10 Monday.
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Want the latest on Iraq? There are various postings on the site of the Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq.

At first blush, the site looks as if it's been asleep since January - the "Latest Information" on the home page is January - but actually there's activity humming just a couple of clicks beneath the surface.

The activity includes the discussion list which is a bunch of related contributions about Iraq. These related contributions ("threads", in Internet jargon) are organized by both date and topic ("thread index" = "topic index) here.

To see the latest, hottest contributions (or, in Internet jargon, "postings") click here.

Over the last 48 hours or so, the news came out about the UK government. One of its reports on Iraqi activities (terrorism and so forth) was plagiarized from various magazines and academic reports, some of them fairly outdated.

Some of this stuff is apparently twelve years old! I mean, these guys are just desperate to have this war!

As is typical in cases of plagiarism, apparently the UK report reproduced spelling mistakes and grammatical errors which were in the original.

If you missed that story, it's on the Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq site here.

To quote from the thread:-

"And, to cap it all, the finished document appeared to have been cobbled together not by Middle East experts, but by the secretary of Alastair Campbell, the Government's chief spin doctor, and some gofers."

Now, in my opinion, the threads are by far and away the most interesting part of the site.

However, there is more stuff ... if you click on What's New you will find a bunch of updated links, including one to the US Government's PDF copy of the Colin Powell's PowerPoint presentation at the UN - U.S. Secretary of State Powell's Presentation to the UN Security Council, February 5, 2003.

(I just downloaded my own copy of Powell's presentation from the friendly US government, provider of freebies ... however, having downloaded it, I can't seem to get past the title page ... but my Windows 98 setup is misbehaving badly, and what doesn't work for me may still work for you ... the link, if you want to try it yourself, is here.)

Anyway, how come I'm suddenly writing about Iraq again, after having more or less forgotten about it while I obsessed about Iraq?

Well, back in January I asked, in this online diary, "What is the Cambridge peace group?" The BBC knew, but they weren't saying. Along with the rest of the world media, the BBC reported that "a Cambridge peace group" had released a draft of a secret United Nations report on the casualties that a war in Iraq would generate.

I know for a fact that the BBC was fully aware that the "Cambridge peace group" was the guys at the Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq, locatable at the URL www.casi.org.uk.

Why do I know? Because the BBC had a link to the United Nations report on the group's site. It's a PDF document - that is, a "portable documents format" document - and you can open it if your computer has Adobe Acrobat, which it probably does.

Back in January, the PDF document was available at www.casi.org.uk/info/undocs/war021210.pdf. As of 2003 February 09 Saturday, the document was still there at the same place.

A piece of supporting documentation which explains the context is available at http://www.casi.org.uk/info/undocs/war021210notes.html.

Back in January, I noticed how the world media seemed to conspire to deny the Cambridge peace group any publicity. Every journalistic outfit obviously knew the identity of the peace group, but it was as if everyone was following the party line - "Deny these peace dissidents the oxygen of publicity."

It was the first time that I really started to think that, subtly, perhaps without really realizing it, the news media are lining up with the war-making governments of the UK and the USA.

Anyway, I then pretty much forgot about the Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq. My imagination was seized, instead, by the growing possibility of a war on the Korean peninsular, which is much closer to home than the Middle East.

However, I was reminded about the whole Cambridge peace group business yesterday, Saturday.

I have a few counters on my site which give me some clues as to how people find the site - sometimes through improbable searches such as "rugby mud" or "kerosene use Japan". And on Saturday I found my site had taken a hit from someone using www.google.com to search for "Cambridge peace group."

This seemed a highly improbable occurrence, so I repeated the search, and found, to my astonishment, that my site had the number one listing for a search for "Cambridge peace group" with Google.

I guess my site got the hit someone remembered that back in January some "Cambridge peace group" had released a United Nations report about war casualties in Iraq, and went looking for it ... but now that it's February, it's not quite so easy to find the link that I found in just a few minutes just a few weeks ago.

The mysterious "Cambridge peace group" had its three and a half seconds of fame cut back to nothing, and now it's slipped back into the "not obviously easy to find" category.

Having been reminded of this whole business, I felt a bit guilty ... I never got round to reading my own copy of this draft United Nations report on predicted war casualties in Iraq. And, in fact, I found I'd gone and lost the PDF copy that I'd downloaded. (It's probably on my hard drive somewhere, but I haven't a clue where.)

So I downloaded another copy ... and opened it up with Adobe Acrobat ... and then I thought, "What happens if you highlight this then try to copy it and paste it into a plain text editor?" To my surprise, I found out that this is perfectly doable, although some of the formatting gets lost. Also, I found you have to go through the document and copy and paste it one page at a time.

Here's paragraph 23:-

"23. It is also likely that in the early stages there will be a large segment of the population requiring treatment for traumatic injuries,either directly conflict-induced or from the resulting devastation. Given the population outlined earlier,as many as 500,000 could require treatment to a greater or lesser degree as a result of direct or indirect injuries."

And here, in part, is paragraph 24, which may make you wonder what an IDP is. I didn't have a clue, so I had to nose around the Internet for the answer, which turns out to be "Internally Displaced Person":-

"24.The children under 5, pregnant and lactating women, and IDPs will be particularly vulnerable because of the likely absence of a functioning primary health care system in a post conflict situation. In the c entre and south it is estimated that these groups represent a total caseload of 5.2 million people, 4.2 million under 5, with one million pregnant and lactating women, plus a further two million IDPs."

I come from New Zealand, a country which has fewer than four million people. When George Bush starts his war, his exercise in making history is going to involve over four million kids under the age of five.

And many of these may die because, moving on to paragraph 25, we find that:-

"25. Furthermore,the outbreak of diseases in epidemic if not pandemic proportions is very likely. Diseases such as cholera and dysentery thrive in the environment, which will prevail and as a result of circumstances and the present low vaccination rates for measles, meningitis and the like will be ever present. When determining the requirement for pharmaceuticals and medical supplies these factors must be considered."

I read a newspaper article recently which compared the situation in Iraq with the situation in Libya. The boss man of Libya is Mu'ammer Al-Gaddhafi (the name has various spellings, at least in the West - this spelling I got from Al-Jazeerah, locatable here - wow, real Arab news! In English!

I just stole this from Al-Jazeerah:-

"The outcome of the UN-imposed embargo on Iraq can be seen clearly in the increasing number of rare diseases spreading across the country.

"Banned weapons used by the Western allies against the country, especially depleted uranium, have been a basic factor in the spread of many serious diseases."

If you want to know what they're saying in the "Arab street", as we've been taught to call it, this would seem to be the place to start.

(Of course it's sheer propaganda to talk of depleted uranium weapons as "banned weapons". From what I've read about the subject of depleted uranium in recent weeks, it's clear that rendering landscapes radioactive is a standard part of modern conventional warfare.)

Anyway, where was I? To be honest, I've forgotten. I think I'd planned some intelligent way to wrap up this whole entry, but my concentration slipped at the point at which I accidentally discovered the Al-Jazeerah website while looking for the spelling of Gaddhafi's name ....

Ah yes! That was it!

Let me get back on track ....

I read a newspaper article recently which compared the situation in Iraq with the situation in Libya. The boss man of Libya is Mu'ammer Al-Gaddhafi, and back in the days when Ronald Reagan was president, this guy Gaddhafi was Public Enemy Number One, Mr Terrorist State with a capital T and a capital S.

However, although Reagan sometimes gave the impression of being a bit of a cowboy, in practice he was reasonably stable, and although he dropped some bombs on Gaddhafi at one time (killing at least one kid in the process, but leaving Gaddhafi untouched) he didn't take the total war route.

And the result? Well, Gaddhafi's still alive, just like Fidel Castro, and he's still the boss, and he's still a dictator, and in the overall balance of things it doesn't really matter.

And if George Bush would just back off from the Iraq situation, which is still possible, then the probability is that Iraq's Saddam Hussein will prove every bit as containable as Libya's Gaddhafi.

Yeah, Saddam is a bad guy, and he kills people. But George Bush is going to kill people, too, a fair few of them under the age of five, and he's going to kill them with bombs, with bullets, with the radioactive contamination from depleted uranium ammunition, and with cholera, and dysentery, and meningitis, with maybe a little starvation on the side unless the aftermath's been a lot better organized than it appears to have been.

Kill them by the thousand and by the tens of thousands. By an act of free will. Totally unnecessarily. Thus writing himself into history. For no pressing reason, really, except that this is what he's decided he's going to do.

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Section 13 Entry 0002. Date: 2003 February 11 Tuesday.
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Monday morning, the steel shutters were shunted into their housings, and the outside world was revealed. Lying on the garden path just outside the bedroom was a small dead animal, black and oddly twisted. On investigation, this proved to be one of my socks.

This delinquent sock, motivated by some urge which is beyond my comprehension, had somehow gotten out through the front door, which is made of metal, and had gotten halfway down the path before expiring.

I was not particularly surprised. Escaping socks? Fresh threats of nuclear war? Was that an earthquake just now? Is the Problem of the Immediate Moment a side effect of that kara-age bento I ate yesterday? Well, I still seem to be functional, so let's move on and tackle the Next Problem ....

There's so much going on that each new event is something that I pretty much take in my stride. If it wasn't so, I simply wouldn't be able to function.

At the moment I'm enduring a pressure cooker existence which, right now, chiefly involves me using computers, finding out how to do new things with computers, teaching other people to do the new things I've just learnt, and saying to myself (when Desperate Measures are called for yet again) "Well, thank God I know how to use the DOS prompt!"

It's got to the stage where I'm just taking things one day at a time, most of my worry circuits having overloaded and burnt out quite some time back.

Since I've been really impossibly busy lately, work on my writing has been going nowhere fast, but today I managed to finish a new piece of work, and it's posted on the website.

The new piece of work is UFO Invasion - the Truth about Alien Abductions!!. Each year, millions of Americans are abducted by aliens. But why? This lightly fictionalized account of a TRUE STORY supplies the answer.

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Kara-age bento. A "bento" (terminating with a long "o") is a boxed lunch (or, in Japanese English, a "lunch box". You can buy one for about 450 yen minimum (right now, I think that's about US $3.75, though I confess that I haven't looked at the exchange rate for a couple of weeks.) A more typical price, though, is round about 600 yen. The dictionary describes "kara-age" as "food fried without coat" - I take this to mean "food fried without first being dipped in batter".

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Section 13 Entry 0003. Date: 2003 February 11 Tuesday.
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I've been reading what purports to be a blog by someone in Iraq. In Baghdad, in fact. Is this thing for real? I don't know, but it sure looks authentic to me. The link is:-

http://www.dear_raed.blogspot.com/.

Here's a quote from January 30:-

"Everybody got an email from the Iraqi ISP saying that email and internet services will be irregular and maybe cut off for long periods in the next 48 hours. "Maintenance and improvement of the service", may be that should be translated to "screwing the firewall bolts a bit tighter" or maybe they are just dealing with that weird SQL-Slammer-virus-thingy, Uday's news paper wrote about it today on the last page. Either way it makes posting a test of patience."

Uday is one of Saddam Hussein's sons, I think ... yeah, there are links to him all over the Internet, like one reading "ATHLETES TORTURED BY SADDAM'S SON".

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Section 13 Entry 0004. Date: 2003 February 12 Wednesday.
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In my reading about the upcoming war in Iraq, the subject of depleted uranium has repeatedly come up, to the point where I've gotten interested enough to dig into the subject and put together a page which tries to answer the question what is depleted uranium? ... if you choose your scientist carefully you can get whatever answer you want, but to my way of thinking it's very bad news indeed. I've put in plenty of links.

While I was doing the research, I noticed something on Google News about a woman on trial in Seattle because she apparently handed out material to recruits warning them on the dangers of depleted uranium ... apparently she's charged with trespassing ... the article apparently is on the Seattle Times but it won't load for me. (I guess it would if I waited long enough, but I have to get some sleep.)

If you're interested in the latest, go to Google News, punch "depleted uranium" into the search box and see what you get.

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Section 13 Entry 0005. Date: 2003 February 12 Wednesday.
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The Israeli whose blog has a link to that of the Iraqi guy Salam (living in Baghdad and so one of George Bush's targets), writes about the Iraqi guy. This is very interesting. This is war, okay? This is the emotional reality of war. Check it out at http://imshin.blogspot.com/ - the entry for 2003 February 11 Tuesday.

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Section 13 Entry 0006. Date: 2003 February 12 Wednesday.
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I thought today I'd write about my latest adventure as a tourist, a trip to Yokohama's Chinatown. Today, after all, I have the time. Today I'm scheduled to spend about four and a half hours on trains (plus half an hour on a bus and a certain amount of time in a taxi) and my schedule includes yet another trip to the remote wilderness of Gunma Prefecture, featuring yet another exciting stop at the touristic city of Takasaki (main attraction: McDonald's).

But I might end up spending most of my time on the trains sleeping rather than writing. Unfortunately, depleted uranium failed to prove a cure for insomnia, and I was asleep for barely ninety minutes before my alarm went off at 0500.

I booted the computer, made a cup of tea, microwaved yesterday's leftovers, fired up my Mozilla browser, and was clicking my way around some of my favorite sites when I found an "I must comment on this" comment on the Israeli site imshin.blogspot.com, which has been one of my favorites ever since I first discovered it, a long time ago now ... something like 24 hours ago, in fact, which was when I added it to my list of interesting individual blogs.

This Israeli site, by the way, goes by the name of Not a Fish.

When I looked at this at 0600 this morning, I found the Israeli was writing about the Iraqi guy Salam whose blog is www.dear_raed.blogspot.com/.

Both the Israeli site and the Iraqi site have clear and obvious links to each other, although I earlier missed Salam's clear and obvious link to "Not a Fish".

Salam was looking for guidance on household preparations for war, and, via "Not a Fish", he found his way to the Israeli Defense Force's Home Front Command webpage.

Having done this, Salam wrote on his website about how he had found his link via Imshin's website ....

(I'm stunningly ignorant about everything to do with the Middle East, but I take it that "Imshin" is a name and that the "Not a Fish" blogspot at imshin.blogspot.com is actually maintained by someone called "Imshin" ....)

And then Salam wrote "OK, so I am not sure how the proprietors of that site will react if they know an Iraqi is finding their information very useful".

Which prompted Imshin (I can't confess that I can't figure out if this name is for a male or a female, I just can't, it would be too embarrassing) to write, on Tuesday, February 11, 2003:-

Salam, whose blog I've been having difficulty accessing all day, found the IDF's Home Front Command webpage through me and has found it helpful. I'm very moved by this. I hope he manages to implement some of the suggestions. And I hope neither our families need to make use of them.

He wonders how the proprietors of that site will react if they know an Iraqi is finding their information very useful. Well, Salam, if they knew what use you were going to make of the information, I am absolutely convinced that they would be just as moved as I am.

And then Imshin goes on to write about how he feels about Baghdad and war and the problem of people who hate each other ... all of which is very well worth reading and, to my mind, intensely moving ....

The emotional reality of war being that ... well, nobody needs me to make the point ... and, anyway, I promised to write about Yokohama's Chinatown.

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