Monday, October 31, 2005
· A plan to defend ships and ports from attack is six months overdue. · Rules to protect air cargo from infiltration by terrorists are two months late. · A study on the cost of giving anti-terrorism training to federal law enforcement officers who fly commercially was supposed to be done more than three years ago. · A report on how a grant program for shippers and ports would work is more than a year late. · A report on cargo container security is eight months overdue. · A national security plan for marine transportation is well past its April 1 due date.Pigs at the Trough: The report said Iraq's Bureau of Supreme Audit charged that up to $1.27 billion from some 90 contracts was lost from June 2004 to February 2005 because deals were given to "favored suppliers" and cash was given to third-party firms to work out contracts. Mafia: Italy's government on Sunday rallied to the defense of spy chief Nicolo Pollari, whose agency is accused of passing off bad intelligence to the United States, helping bolster claims about Iraq's pre-war nuclear ambitions. Mafia 2: Possibly seeking to distance himself from Bush, who is widely unpopular in Italy, Berlusconi also claimed that he pleaded with Bush not to invade Iraq. "I tried repeatedly to convince the American president not to go to war," he told the La7 television channel. "I maintained that military action should be avoided." Mosul: Angry Sunni Arabs protesting the removal of a top police official have threatened to topple the provincial government of Nineveh as sectarian tensions flare in the volatile northern Iraqi province. Several hundred armed protesters, chanting slogans against what they say is Kurdish domination of Nineveh's regional administration, besieged government offices in the provincial capital of Mosul late on Saturday and were kept from overrunning the building by U.S. troops, local officials said on Sunday. Arabs accuse Kurdish leaders, whose autonomous region of Kurdistan lies just outside the city, of packing Mosul with Kurds. The Kurds deny this. Dumbsfeld: "Osama bin Laden hasn't been seen in a video for a hellishly long time. That could be because he's become shy -- but wasn't before." Complete timeline of the 2003 Invasion of Iraq: Key Events related to issues raised in Downing Street Memo. Please visit this link. Opinion and Commentary Brain Drain:
"There are almost no more qualified people in Basra," said Tamimi, who returned to Iraq's second-biggest city recently without his family for a short business trip. "Any successful engineer, doctor or businessman is now abroad. All this will have a negative impact on Iraq." Successful Iraqis want to invest their money "where there is peace and stability," he said. Government officials say they have no figures on the number of Iraqis who have fled since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. But the former minister of migration, Pascale Warda, said she heard of people leaving almost daily. As many as 800,000 Iraqis are believed to be living in Jordan, many of them since the conflict began. Thousands more have left for Syria, the United Arab Emirates, and other Arab countries. For the superrich, London and the United States are options. "This just destroys the country. It has a very negative effect on the situation in Iraq and on the country's ability to improve," said Warda, who served in the interim government of Ayad Allawi, which left office in late April. Salah Ahmed Hamoudi, a businessman who moved to Syria with his family three months ago, said patriotic Iraqis would prefer to stay home. "Even if Syria is heaven on earth, I still love my country," he said by phone during a business trip to Mosul in northern Iraq. "But what are we supposed to do if there is no strong government? How can I come back and work if no one is capable of defending me?" Many Iraqi scientists and university professors who stay have become targets, either because they belonged to Saddam Hussein's Baath Party — once essential for career advancement — or as part of a campaign by the predominantly Sunni Arab insurgency to weaken Iraq's intellectual power. A Sunni Arab engineer, who insisted on not being quoted by name for security reasons, said he sent his wife and children abroad after insurgents threatened him because he works for a foreign company. He quoted from a letter that the militants left for him with his son: "The only good thing about you is that you're a Sunni. If you weren't, we would have chopped your head off without even a warning."Long Time Coming:
Liberals called it "Fitzmas". And it was a long time coming. But even though it took almost two years for special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald to make it down the chimney, it was worth the wait. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the chief of staff of vice-president Dick Cheney, faces up to 30 years in prison and a fine of $1.25m if found guilty of lying over his role in leaking the identity of a covert CIA agent. Meanwhile, the continuing investigation of George Bush's consiglieri, Karl Rove, holds out the possibility of further charges against a more senior White House staff member. In a week that saw Bush withdraw his supreme court nominee, Harriet Miers, and that followed a week in which Tom DeLay, the Republican house leader, was arrested for money laundering and conspiracy, liberals were gorging themselves on a festival of alleged corruption, criminality and incompetence prepared and served by conservatives. The extent to which these most recent developments have exposed the Bush administration's real agenda and modus operandi should be welcomed. But legal defeats for the right should not be mistaken as political victories for the liberal-left, which has yet to convince anyone that it represents a meaningful alternative. There is a thin line between what we know to be true and what we can show to be undeniable. Whether it's Rodney King or Abu Ghraib, only with incontrovertible evidence does an assertion shift from a debating point to a reference point. All that separates the misfortunes of Kate Moss from the fortunes of David Cameron is the money shot. We can tolerate the notion that a potential Conservative party leader has taken cocaine so long as we haven't seen it; we cannot tolerate the fact that a waifish model has taken cocaine because we have. Fitzgerald's investigation crossed that line, laying out in clear detail the proof for some of the central criticisms the liberal-left has asserted about the Bush administration over the past five years. First, that the case for the invasion of Iraq was built on a lie. This goes to the heart of the matter. Valerie Plame was a covert CIA agent whose husband, the former ambassador Joseph Wilson, was sent on a CIA-sponsored trip to investigate whether Iraq was seeking to buy uranium from Niger for nuclear weapons. Wilson concluded that this was unlikely but the claim ended up in Bush's state of the union address anyhow. When it came to Saddam's supposed weapon's cache, the White House was not the victim of flawed intelligence. It was the wilful perpetrator of known falsehood. Second, that lie could only be sustained by discrediting those who dared to expose it. On July 6 2003, Wilson accused the Bush administration of exaggerating the case for war in an article in the New York Times. Libby sought to trash Wilson's credibility by telling reporters that Plame helped arrange her husband's trip, thus revealing her identity and sparking the investigation. It is a crime knowingly to divulge the identity of an undercover CIA operative. For the team that stood a candidate whose wealthy connections ensured he never saw combat while rubbishing the actual war record of his opponent, John Kerry, this was business as usual. Two days after Wilson's piece appeared a Pew poll showed that over the previous four months the number of Americans who believed the military effort in Iraq was going very well had slumped form 61% to 23%; the number of those who thought it was not going well had rocketed from 4% to 21%. Three months after Bush landed on the USS Lincoln emblazoned with its Mission Accomplished banner, both the message and the mission was tanking; it was time to shoot the messengers along with the Iraqis. Third, the case has revealed the supine character of America's mainstream media in the run-up to the war. Primarily, it showcased the sharp practices of New York Times reporter Judith Miller. In Miller's own account of her grand jury testimony, she wrote: "When the subject turned to Mr Wilson, Mr Libby requested that he be identified only as a 'former Hill staffer' [rather than "senior administration official"]. I agreed to the new ground rules because I knew that Mr Libby had once worked on Capitol Hill." I once played centre forward for Cygnet Rovers of Stevenage. But to cite me as "a former footballer" would, in most instances, be as true as it is misleading. Miller's uncritical approach amounted to dictation that bolstered the administration's flimsy case for going to war. "WMD - I got it totally wrong," she told Times reporters recently. "If your sources are wrong, you are wrong. I did the best job that I could." Neither the Times in particular nor US journalism in general should be judged by the standards of one reporter. But while Miller's reporting style in the run-up to the war was appaling, its content was not aberrant. Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, the administration circled the wagons around the flag and the media found itself on the wrong side. Politically embedded at home before they were military embedded abroad, their fear of appearing unpatriotic trumped their fear of misinforming the public. So the investigation has given us one of the clearest indications to date of how we got to this point. Given the malevolent partisanship of the Republican party it is not surprising that many liberals gloat at the prospect of a full-scale Republican implosion. But such schadenfreude is premature. The wounds of recent weeks have all been self-inflicted - the result of a mixture of hubris, malice, greed and ineptitude. There is no doubt that they have damaged Bush politically. A Washington Post-ABC poll this weekend shows his approval rating at an all-time low, with the public believing Bill Clinton ran a more ethical administration after the Monica Lewinsky scandal than Bush does now. Meanwhile, An AP-Ipsos poll released on Saturday shows support for the war at an all-time low of 37%. But the Democrats are not faring much better, with only marginally more support than Republicans, according to a poll taken before the indictments and Miers withdrawal, but after hurricane Katrina and DeLay's arrest. Having supported the war and without coherent proposals for disengaging, they are ill-placed to take advantage of the Republican's current troubles. Either unable or unwilling to present a clear agenda of how they would do things differently, they have been effectively mute for several months. With no opposition, popular disenchantment with the Bush Administration's ethical failings is descending into cynicism. Indeed, the only group that has really flexed its muscles in recent weeks has been the Christian right, which derailed Mier's nomination to the supreme court. Bush is likely to nominate another candidate later this week who will be more to their liking, thereby tipping the balance of the court against abortion and affirmative action. Unless the Democrats develop the wherewithal to challenge them, conservatives will then shape both the law and the politics of the country for a generation. And Fitzmas will be little more than a lingering reminder of what the law can do when politics has failed.Reality and Myth:
But today we seem to live on two levels: reality and myth. Let's start with the reality of Iraq. It is, to quote Winston Churchill on Palestine in the late 1940s, a "hell-disaster," a nation of anarchy from Mosul and Irbil down to Basra, where armed insurgents control streets scarcely half a mile from the Baghdad "green zone" wherein American and British diplomats and their democratically elected Iraqi "government" dream up optimism for a country whose people are burning with ferocious resentment against Western occupation. No wonder I'm more sure each day that I want to be away from conflict. But for Bush, America is not anxious to withdraw from Iraq. Far from it. The United States is fighting enemies who want to establish a "totalitarian empire," he says, a "mortal danger to all humanity" which America will confront. Washington is fighting "as brutal an enemy as we have ever faced." Come again? What about Hitler's Nazi Germany? Mussolini's fascist Italy? The cruel, expansionist Japanese empire which bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941? It's one thing, surely, for Bush and Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara to play Roosevelt and Churchill or to claim that Saddam is Hitler but to exalt our grubby, torture-encrusted, illegal conflicts as being more important than the Second World War -- or our turbaned enemies as more malicious than the Auschwitz SS killers -- is surely a step on the road to the madhouse. "By any standard of history," my favourite American President declared this week, "Iraq has made incredible progress." Excuse me? By any standard of history, the Iraqi insurgents have made incredible inroads into the US military occupation of Iraq. "We've lost some of our nation's finest men and women in the war on terror," Bush tells us. .".. The best way to honour the sacrifice of our fallen troops is to complete the mission." In other words, we are going to prove the worth of the sacrifice by making more sacrifices. Truly, this is bin Laden-like in its naivety. We've suffered martyrs? Then let's have more martyrs! Then we have President Ahmadinejad of Iran. Israel, he tells one of those infinitely dull and boring Tehran conferences on "Zionism" this week, must be "wiped off the map." I'm old enough to remember this claptrap from Yasser Arafat's weary old cronies in Beirut in the late 1970s. Ahmadinejad's speech -- before the obligatory 4,000 "students" who used to be a regular feature of Iran's revolution -- was replete with all the antique claims. "The establishment of the Zionist regime was a move by the world oppressor against the Islamic world. The skirmishes (sic) in the occupied land are part of the war of destiny." Was this silly man, I ask myself, the scriptwriter for Ridley Scott's movie Kingdom of Heaven? Surely not, for the Hollywood epic is Homeric in its scope and literacy compared to Ahmadinejad's sterile prose. This, after all, is the sort of stuff I had to suffer during the original Iranian revolution when Ayatollah Khomeini set up his theocracy -- no, let us be frank and call it necrocracy -- in Iran. Government for and by the dead is becoming a vision for both Bush and Ahmadinejad. But hold on. We have not counted on the Churchillian vision of Lord Blair. "I have never come across a situation of (sic) the president of a country stating they want to wipe out another country," he told us on Thursday. Oh deary me. What can we do with this man? For Rome was rather keen, was it not, to wipe out Carthage (delenda est Carthago, Tony)? And then there is the little matter of Herr Hitler -- a regular bogeyman for Lord Blair when he stares across the desert wastes towards the Tigris -- who insisted that Poland should be wiped out, who turned Czechoslovakia into the Nazi protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, who allowed the Croatian Ustashe to try to destroy Serbia, who ended his days by admitting that his own German state should be wiped out because its people didn't deserve him. But now let's listen to Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara again. "If they (the Iranians) carry on like this, the question that people are going to be asking is: when are you going to do something about this? Can you imagine a state like that with an attitude like that having a nuclear weapon?" Well yes, of course we can. North Korea. Whoops! But they've already got nuclear weapons, haven't they? So we'll ask a different question. Exactly who are those "people," Lord Blair, who might expect you to "do something"? Could they have anything in common with the million people who told you not to invade Iraq? And if not, could we have some addresses, identities, some idea of their number? A million perhaps? I doubt it. Is there to be any end of this? Not yet, I fear. In Australia a couple of weeks ago, I found Muslims in Melbourne and Adelaide regaling me with stories of abuse and obscenities in the street. New laws are about to be introduced by Prime Minister John Howard to counter "terror" which will not only allow detention without trial, but also the extension of "sedition" laws which could be used against those (mainly Muslims, of course) who oppose Australia's preposterous military involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq. Well, count me in, John. I think you live in a great country with great people, but I'm planning to turn up in Adelaide again in the spring to argue against any Western involvement in those two countries, including yours. I look forward to a sedition charge. And to Lord Blair "doing something" against North Korea. I hope Mr Bush never does discover enemies worse than the Wehrmacht and the SS. And I sincerely trust that the little satraps of the religious necrocracy that is Iran will grow up in the years to come. Alas. Like Peter Pan, our leaders wish to be forever young, forever childish, and forever ready to play in their bloodless sandpits -- at our expense.
Sunday, October 30, 2005
Today, elite journalists can't pretend to be on the outside looking in at a scandal that doesn't involve them. This scandal is about them -- it's about White House-media cronyism, about journalists on the top rung of the phone trees of Karl Rove and Scooter Libby, two of the dirtiest smear artists in Washington history. It's no accident Rove and Libby didn't turn to Helen Thomas or Seymour Hersh about Joe Wilson. They turned to journalists they could count on -- at news outlets that had dutifully promoted so many pre-war lies In the past, elite journalists were up to their neck in scandals -- but they were deft about writing themselves out of the story. That can't happen in this scandal involving the origins of the Iraq War. It did happen in the scandal at the origins of the Vietnam War: the Tonkin Gulf hoax. In pursuit of his long-held strategy, President Johnson went on national TV in August 1964 to announce a momentous escalation of the war: air strikes against North Vietnam in response to an "unprovoked attack" on a U.S. destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin. But there'd been no such attack on the U.S. Johnson's ploy succeeded because major news media reported official lies as absolute truth. The next day's headline in the Washington Post spoke of North Vietnam's "New Aggression." The New York Times reported of U.S. "retaliatory action" and editorialized in support of Johnson and his "somber facts."Flypaper Strategy:
Islam expert Guido Steinberg, who just wrote a book on new terror networks, suspects that there are hardly more than 1,000 non-Iraqi, Arabic fighters in Iraq, although Paz's estimates are slightly higher. Most are able to sneak in though the Saudi and Syrian borders and this summer, a brochure appeared on the Internet that gave tips on how to best make it to the "battlefield." For example, it suggests a person disguised as a businessman or a patient, ideally wearing jeans and listening to western music on a Walkman, would likely not be suspected of being an Islamic radical by border guards. And even if they are responsible for the bulk of the most brutal attacks, foreign fighters are in the minority. On the other hand, it is estimated that there are several tens of thousands of Iraqis participating in the insurgency. Most of the mujahedeen volunteers are, if one can generalize from the data from the lists, between 18 and 28 years old. Many of them are fathers; several of the older ones have already fought in Afghanistan and spent time in prison in their home countries because of extremist activities.Australian Wanker:
Four images from the Muslim Middle East: Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, calls for Israel to be "wiped off the map"; in Jordan, network TV begins broadcasting a 29-part, Syrian-made series based on the protocols of the Elders of Zion -- a crude and notorious forged document of anti-Semitic propaganda depicting Jews as baby-killers and corruptors of the world. Meanwhile, in Iraq, about 10 million people, more than 60percent of the electorate, vote to introduce the most liberal and democratic constitution the Arab world has ever known. And Saddam Hussein, one of the two or three most murderous dictators of the second half of the 20th century, goes on trial in Iraq over the massacre of civilians. Which of these events occasioned criticism and contempt from left-wing commentators throughout the West? Naturally, the ones that herald a potentially liberal and democratic future in the Middle East. There is much tragedy and blood still to come in Iraq, but the referendum was a historic moment. It's amazing how a de facto alliance has developed between the Left in the West, as seen every day on our own ABC, and the Islamist murderers and terrorists of Iraq, because in the end they share the same enemy: Western power, and especially the US.No end in sight:
While the nation mourns the 2,000th U.S. combat death in Iraq, instead of looking for ways to plan an exit strategy, Congress is finalizing another payment of $50 billion to continue fighting the war. The dynamics of the fighting between the resistance and the U.S., and the horrific human costs that are being exacted, are unlikely to change in the near term as the Bush administration remains stubbornly committed to occupying Iraq. And both parts of the administration's purported plan, democratization and putting Iraqis in charge of their own security, are failing because of the continued resistance to U.S. occupation. It's clear that the situation is only getting worse. Instead of helping make Iraq safer and more stable, U.S. troops add to the violence. As long as U.S. troops remain in Iraq, the resistance -- and the violence -- will flourish. Suicide attack rates have doubled since 2004, the number of resistance attacks per month have doubled in 2005 and the U.S. Army National Guard has been losing more soldiers per months than at any other time during the war. The impact on the people of Iraq has also been staggering. Over 27,000 Iraqi civilians have died in the war and at least 3,000 Iraqi soldiers have been killed so far. And Iraqis still live today without adequate supplies of water or electricity, without sewage treatment plants or access to jobs. On top of these human costs, the financial costs are soaring as well. Before the war started, administration officials argued that the total cost would be $50 billion. But the latest spending will lift the tab to $250 billion, bringing the average yearly spending to $86 billion. This amounts to every man, woman and child in the U.S. sending the government a check for $840 to pay for the bill so far. Congress and the Pentagon have fallen down on the job of keeping tabs on the money being spent. In late September the Government Accountability Office issued a report concluding, "neither [the Department of Defense] nor Congress ... can reliably know how much the war is costing and details on how appropriated funds are being spent." At a time where our nation is running a deficit and money is urgently needed for emergency relief and reconstruction, we cannot afford to waste funds.Look!!! - Iraq is doing so well:
An embattled President George W. Bush sought yesterday to shift the focus away from a host of domestic political crises by calling for the American people to back the struggle for democracy in Iraq. At the end of a disastrous week for the White House, which culminated in the indictment and resignation of senior aide Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, Bush and senior Republicans launched a counter-offensive in a bid to regain the political initiative. Republican leaders and commentators hailed the fact that Bush's political guru, Karl Rove, had not been indicted in the Plamegate scandal - which concerns the leaking of the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame - as a sign that the worst is over. 'The wrongdoing leads in no way beyond this one individual [Libby] and what he allegedly said to FBI investigators and the grand jury,' said William Kristol, editor of the Conservative 'bible', The Weekly Standard At the same time Bush used his weekly radio address yesterday to hail the 'great sacrifice' of American soldiers who had died in Iraq. 'The best way to honour the sacrifice of our fallen troops is to complete the mission and win the war on terror,' he said. His comments came as three more American soldiers were killed in Iraq to add to a toll that has already passed 2,000 since the invasion in 2003.Do they want us?:
The real issue now is not whether the United States leaves Iraq today, tomorrow or in next decade. It is this: We Americans must realize that our Iraqi adventures fit a long-term pattern. We have believed far too long that people everywhere will like and accept what we, as a nation, do for and to them. They don't, they haven't and they won't. I am not opposed to all wars. I would have supported the Union in the Civil War. As a youngster, I supported my country against the Nazis. Later I served six years in the military and was honorably discharged. I learned then that no sergeant and no general is entirely wise and good. I have learned that no politician and no political party is entirely wise and good. I have learned that civilian and military leaders, rather than lying directly, more often mislead the public with half-truths and "deniability." I have learned that, concerning national and world affairs it is best to take the long view, rather than critiquing the next election or the most recent war. And I have learned that out in the real world, our American purposes do not guarantee results. This is because other people and nations have their own purposes. A century ago, with both Republican and Democratic support, the U.S. "freed" numerous Caribbean and Pacific islands, including the Philippines, from Spain. Our leaders promised the Filipinos would welcome our rule with open arms. They didn't. Filipinos, with "insurgent" leader Aguinaldo, had been fighting for freedom against Spain. They continued fighting against us. Some American soldiers, frustrated, and with official approval, tortured and abused prisoners. The United States did not free the Philippines, but was increasingly vulnerable there, because an expanding Japan viewed us as intruders in Asia. The Japanese took the Philippines, after first attacking Hawaii, which we had taken from the Hawaiians Obviously, America's leaders in 1898 did not anticipate a Pacific war 40 years later. Obviously, our 1898 purposes did not match the long-term consequences for ourselves, or for millions of others. Four presidents led the Vietnam War, two from each party, with support from members of Congress and voters, both Republican and Democratic. The Vietnamese, who had been fighting the French, now fought us. Thousands of Americans died, as did hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese. Vietnam was reunited. Our announced purposes had nothing to do with the real consequences. We wasted lives, money and international goodwill. In the last hundred years, we have promised that all those people would welcome our soldiers, our institutions and our trade. But "insurgents" have always appeared, and they always will. Sometimes frustrated American soldiers, trapped by the irresponsible promises of civilian and military leaders, have tortured and abused prisoners, burned villages and killed noncombatants. Sometimes they have had approval from military and civilian leaders with "deniability." Our armies have "pacified" towns and countries - until we left.
Saturday, October 29, 2005
Friday, October 28, 2005
On Oct. 16 at an Army airfield in Indiana, Suzette Boler wrapped her arms around her husband and through tears wished him the best. Army Spc. Jerry Boler, 45, was bound for Fort Dix, N.J., and duty in Iraq. He expects to put his life on the line guarding convoys from insurgent attacks. Suzette Boler, of Caledonia, returned home that Sunday night and prepared the next day to return to her receptionist job at a small Caledonia employee benefits firm. She had taken four unpaid days off to see her husband of 22 years off to war. Late Monday afternoon, Boler, 40, answered the phone. She was told to come in the next day and pick up her things. She was fired. "It was a shock," Boler said. "I was hurt. I felt abandoned by people I thought cared for me. I sat down on the floor and cried for probably two hours." Officials at Benefit Management Administrators Inc. confirmed Boler was fired for failing to show up for work the day after she bid goodbye to her husband. "We gave her sufficient time to get back to work," said Clark Galloway, vice president of operations for Benefit Management.Benefit Management Administrators, Inc. Email: Benefit Management Administrators, Inc N. Henry Bledsoe, President
Thursday, October 27, 2005
Wednesday, October 26, 2005
War News for Wednesday, October 26, 2005
Bring ‘em on: Three people abducted by gunmen on the road outside Tikrit. Two policemen killed when gunmen attacked a police station in Ramadi. Three policemen killed and two wounded when a roadside bomb exploded beside their patrol in central Falluja. Four bodies found in northeastern Haditha, three of them wearing army uniforms and the other a contractor working with U.S companies. The corpses were bound, gagged and had gunshot wounds to the head and chest. Gunmen killed an official at
Bring ‘em on: At least nine people killed when a car bomb exploded in Sulaimaniya. A member of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan escaped assassination when two car bombs targeted his motorcade near his home in western Sulaimaniya, one of his guards was killed and two were injured in the attack. Three corpses of Iraqi army soldiers wearing civilian clothes found in Ramadi. The bodies had gunshot wounds to the head. Two policemen killed and another seven wounded when gunmen ambushed a vehicle transferring prisoners in the western Ghazaliya district of Baghdad,. It was not clear if there were casualties among the prisoners. A suicide car bomber targeted a
Technology marches on: After 31 months of fighting in
The bombs range from massive explosives capable of destroying five-ton vehicles to precision "shaped charges" that bore softball-size holes through thick armor, the main defense of troops in the field, and they are becoming a key factor in the fast-rising
Iraqi Politics
Democracy in Iraq: After 10 days of audit, a draft Iraqi constitution was finally ratified with 78 percent of "yes" votes, surpassing the 21 percent "no" votes with a huge margin, as announced by the Iraqi Independent Electoral Commission on Tuesday.
The long-awaited but much anticipated result of the Oct. 15 referendum, which was to pave the way for a parliament election in mid December, was embraced by majority of the 9.8 million voters despite a narrow fate of being defeated by opposing Sunnis, who managed strong "no" votes in two provinces, falling short of only one in order to veto it.
Some disagree: When election officials proclaimed yesterday that Iraqi voters had approved a constitution in this month's referendum, the
But the vote result also deepens a dangerous divide that could inflame the insurgency by Sunni Arabs, who voted massively against the constitution. "This result ... is a big fraud operation by the government," declared Saleh Mutlaq, a leading Sunni politician who served on the commission that drafted the constitution.
Societal fracture lines: In final results for the October 15 referendum released yesterday, some 78.6 per cent of voters cast Yes ballots and 21.4 per cent voted against - but voting appears to have split along ethnic and sectarian lines.
In the overwhelmingly Sunni Arab governorates of Anbar and the predominantly Sunni Arab Salaheddin, 97 and 82 per cent of voters rejected the document, while in the swing governorate of Ninawah, about 55 per cent of ballots rejected it.
But the result in Ninawah, which was only announced yesterday, means opponents of the draft narrowly failed to reach the two-thirds majority in three provinces that would have been needed to block the charter.
The predominantly Shia south and Kurdish north meanwhile supported the document by margins of more than 95 per cent, while more divided results in the mixed governorates such as Baghdad, in which 78 per cent of voters approved it, Kirkuk, in which 63 per cent did, and Diala, in which only 51 per cent voted Yes, also appeared to reflect the demographic balances in those governorates.
May they find consensus: Three Sunni Arab parties on Wednesday set up a coalition to contest December's parliamentary elections after a big turnout of Sunni voters failed to block
The move comes after the
In forming their new coalition, the Iraqi People's Gathering, the Iraqi Islamic Party and the Iraqi National Dialogue hope to give Sunni Muslims, who had boycotted previous elections, a bigger voice in a permanent political structure expected to emerge from the December poll.
It also may provide Sunnis more leverage in discussions over constitutional amendments under a deal brokered by
The Number Of The Beast
Round number: The American military death toll in the Iraq war reached 2,000 Tuesday with the announcements of three more deaths, including an Army sergeant who died of wounds at a military hospital in Texas and a Marine and a sailor killed last week in fighting west of Baghdad.
The 2,000 mark was reached amid growing doubts among the American public about the
Rough numbers:
A report by Iraq Body Count in July said nearly 37 percent of the Iraqi deaths it had recorded were caused by U.S.-led forces, with the rest caused by insurgents and criminal gangs.
According to icasualties.org, a web site run by a non-governmental group that tallies U.S. and Iraqi casualties, more than 3,400 Iraqi police and soldiers have been killed in postwar Iraq, including more than 2,100 this year alone.
Numbers game: The US military has revived the discredited "bodycount" method of measuring success in
Unlucky number: Adel Abed Hammed was a skinny 31-year-old so withdrawn he sometimes went days without talking to anybody and would let only his mother touch him.
Mentally ill since childhood, he used to wander the streets of
"I wouldn't feel such misery if he wasn't so sick but that makes it double for me," said his mother. "He was like a child."
Comparing numbers: "The nearly 2,000 Americans killed in combat (1,998 on October 24, 2005) in
Statistics: The real human cost, of course, is far greater than 2,000. It includes the 198 members of the "coalition of the willing" who have died, almost 300 private contractors, 73 journalists, the 15,220 Americans who have been wounded, and the invisible dead from what the Guardian's Julian Borger called the "extraordinarily high number of accidents, suicides and other non-combat deaths in the ranks that have gone largely unreported in the media."
And then there's the sad fact that those deceased Americans and allies are a fraction of the number of Iraqi dead.
Another estimate: Michael O'Hanlon, a military analyst at the Brookings Institution who has closely followed the war's casualties, said an average of 1,500 to 2,000 Iraqis have been killed per month, about half of them insurgents.
While American troops are killed at the rate of about 60 to 70 per month, the new Iraqi military suffers that many deaths in a week, mainly from insurgent attacks that rose to about 90 per day in September, O'Hanlon said.
Exacerbating the carnage is the Iraqi crime rate, now the highest in the
The total of Iraqi deaths - including insurgents - from all manner of war-related violence could run as high as 70,000, said O'Hanlon, who teaches a course at
One in four: Since the March 2003 invasion, at least 487 National Guard or Reserve troops have died in
"The Guard is different in the respect that these folks are seen around town every day, driving a deputy sheriff's patrol car or working at the 7-11 or teaching high school," said U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga. "These are everyday folks who have been commanded to go to war."
Folks like James Kinlow, who survived just six weeks in that hostile land.
“An artificial mark”: AP said the 2,000th military fatality was an Army sergeant who was wounded by a roadside bomb north of
Specific agendas and ulterior motives. What, the Bush administration set the artificial mark? Shove it, Steve.
Invisible numbers: The human toll for the
Military doctors say
Military statistics showed that while 23 percent of
But military doctors said some troops who may have died in previous wars are surviving, but with grievous injuries such as multiple limb amputations. More than 300 troops have undergone at least one limb amputation. By far the single biggest cause of combat wounds are blasts from IEDs.
Not numbers at all: Air Force Master Sgt. Steven Auchman was the 1,294th service member killed in
On Tuesday, nearly a year after his death, the nation mourned the 2,000th
"To me, it's not so much the number, it's the person, because I couldn't tell you what the number was for my husband," said his widow, Jenny, sitting in her home off
"I really don't care what his number is. He's a person, not a number."
“Negligible”: Imagine a major mainstream media figure stating that the deaths of American soldiers in
How many service age children or grandchildren do you have, Brit? How many are actually serving?
Some other numbers: On top of these human costs, the financial costs are soaring as well. Before the war started, administration officials argued that the total cost would be $50 billion. But the latest spending will lift the tab to $250 billion, bringing the average yearly spending to $86 billion. This amounts to every man, woman and child in the
Congress and the Pentagon have fallen down on the job of keeping tabs on the money being spent. In late September the Government Accountability Office issued a report concluding, "neither [the Department of Defense] nor Congress ... can reliably know how much the war is costing and details on how appropriated funds are being spent."
Here are some of those spending details: When the Pentagon went shopping for seven armored cars for senior Iraqi policemen,
After spending nearly $1 million, here's what they got: Six vehicles with bad armor and run-down mechanics. They also were a little more than slightly used: The newest model was a 1996; the oldest a 1994.
According to the special inspector general for
In a report released Monday, the inspector general said the Pentagon couldn't get its money back because it did such a bad job negotiating the no-bid deal.
Only a down payment: In the weeks ahead, Congress will formally sign over to the Pentagon about $50 billion to run the war in
Same old stuff from numero uno: President Bush tried Tuesday to begin reviving
"I know this is a trying time for our military spouses," Bush said at a Joint Armed Forces Officer Wives' luncheon at Bolling Air Force Base. "We've lost some of our nation's finest men and women in the war on terror."
"And the best way to honor the sacrifice of our fallen troops is to complete the mission and lay the foundation of peace by spreading freedom," he said.
Number 2001: An American soldier was killed Tuesday in a vehicle accident near
Two thousand and one Americans. Tens of thousands of Iraqis. Five or ten times that many wounded, twenty times that many lives irreparably shattered. Billions of wasted dollars.
Complete the mission. Stay the course.
What are we buying with all this blood, all this wasted treasure?
Torture: The Bush administration has proposed exempting employees of the Central Intelligence Agency from a legislative measure endorsed earlier this month by 90 members of the Senate that would bar cruel and degrading treatment of any prisoners in
"This is the first time they've said explicitly that the intelligence community should be allowed to treat prisoners inhumanely," said Tom Malinowski, the
Murder: At least 21 detainees who died while in
The analysis by the American Civil Liberties Union, released today, looked at 44 deaths described in records obtained by the ACLU. Of those, the group characterised 21 as homicides, and said at least eight resulted from abusive techniques by military or intelligence officers, such as strangulation or "blunt force injuries", as noted in the autopsy reports.
The 44 deaths represent a partial group of the total number of prisoners who have died in US custody overseas; more than 100 have died of natural and violent causes.
Starvation: UNICEF recently conducted a rapid assessment survey to determine the current rate of malnutrition among children under the age of five, with the results being released 10 days ago.
The results showed that acute malnutrition among children had almost doubled since before the war, jumping from 4 per cent to 7.7 per cent. Children who are acutely malnourished are literally wasting away, and for severe cases their condition can be fatal. Acute malnutrition sets in very fast and is a strong indicator of the overall health of children.
And an America that should shame every one of its citizens: Congressional negotiators are feeling heat from the White House and constituents as they consider whether to back a Senate-approved ban on torturing detainees in U.S. custody or weaken the prohibition, as the White House prefers.
Led by Vice President Dick Cheney, the Bush administration is floating a proposal that would allow the president to exempt covert agents outside the Defense Department from the ban.
Complete The
What mission?: In November 2003, McKee quietly ordered up a new plan for
Fighting The Only War They Know
The PR war: President George W. Bush's nominee to be the Pentagon's chief public affairs official told Congress on Tuesday he hoped to encourage more positive stories about the Iraq war by encouraging the practice of embedding reporters with U.S. troops in Iraq.
Dorrance Smith, a former television producer who spent nine months in
In the article, Smith concluded that the United States was "losing badly" the battle for the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people, and said ethical questions were raised by the practice of U.S. networks airing videos of hostages obtained by Al-Jazeera, a popular Arab-language television channel.
He told the Senate Armed Services Committee one way to get out more positive stories about U.S. troops in Iraq would be to "reinvigorate" the Pentagon's practice of embedding reporters with military units, which was widely used during the invasion of Iraq 2-1/2 years ago but is done only sporadically now.
They better move fast though: A new Harris Interactive poll shows American sentiment about the situation in Iraq remains generally gloomy, with fewer than a quarter of Americans saying they are confident U.S. policies in Iraq will be successful.
For the first time, a majority of Americans (53%) feels that military action in
At the same time, 66% of
This one might already be lost: The Bush administration and the
With the death toll reaching 2,000, those two goals are colliding as escalating public impatience with the war is triggering demands for more progress in
Unless they open a second front: As the war in
But the news from
That would be a good diversionary tactic: Of course it’s deeply disturbing that
But Bush’s UN call is not without specific purpose. In fact, it’s likely part of a two-pronged argument that we’re about to hear:
It is highly doubtful that such an invasion will take place, especially given how stretched
That is, get everyone whipped up about the pros and cons of another invasion, including, especially, the costs, in dollars and lives. And, about the goals and appropriateness of the action. Almost by definition, news organizations must always place military issues and possible hostilities ahead of other matters. And the reality is that wars play better: it’s just too darned hard to explain to the public the intricacies of corruption cases – unless the corruption involves something we all get, like a blue dress that needs dry cleaning. Plus, resources, space and time are limited. So all of these creeping –gates, PlameGate, LobbyistGate, DonorGate, etc, can momentarily be shunted away to the inside pages where only the most hardy pay attention to them.
To be sure, an actual arrest and prosecution of someone of Rove’s ‘stature’ would lead the news. But don’t bet on it remaining the topic of conversation once a clarion call is sounded for
Good thing the media won't let them get away with it! Umm...: It’s finally dawning on the New York Times how thoroughly it was spun on the fictions about
“Some deeply troubling facts about the murder of
But the problem with the Times editorial is that the report by German prosecutor Detlev Mehlis is anything but “meticulous,” reading more like a compilation of circumstantial evidence and conspiracy theories than a dispassionate pursuit of the evidence.
Fight Back!
Cut their funding!: As the number of U.S. military deaths in Iraq reaches 2,000, U.S. Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA) this week will introduce legislation to prohibit the use of taxpayer funds to deploy United States Armed Forces to Iraq. The bill will allow funds to be used for the safe and orderly withdrawal of our troops; for transitional security provided by other countries – including international organizations like NATO and the United Nations; and for continued support for Iraqi security forces and international forces in
Take back the media!: With the Bush administration on the defensive, with rationalizations for the war fading, with public opinion shifting, with talk of troop withdrawals all the buzz even as the Pentagon hardens "permanent" bases in the mess it has made of ‘Messopotamia,’ it's time for those who oppose the war to think about where our pressure and protest might hasten the war's end.
The Administration is locked into its own imperial logic with Condoleezza Rice even now refusing to rule out new wars in
Protests to the ideologues and neocon warheads, in what a former Colin Powell aide now calls "The Cabal," are fruitless. That seems clear.
The Democrats as a party also seem too compromised and incapable of mounting the kind of opposition that is needed. We all know why. They drank the "Kool Aid" of war early on and uncritically backed the invasion. Some have now moved away from their earlier positions. Some politicians have admitted they were wrong, but as the war machine grinds on, most remain, uncomfortably perhaps, part of it.
We need to move beyond narrow partisanship. We need a new citizen-based campaign to make the war and its coverage an issue. We need to reach out to the existing anti-war movement, and beyond it.
Who should be targeted? Who can we turn to, and who can we turn on?
Why not the media!
Commentary
Here’s something encouraging – one of the following pieces was written by well-known liberals and the other two were written by people with impeccable conservative credentials. Can you tell which is which?
Opinion: As of today, the principal winner of the
In 2001, Iranians demonstrated in support of the
But with Bush declaring
With
A second winner of the
Among the other beneficiaries of
As George Bush's place in history is riding on the outcome of this war, he is right to be angry and alarmed. But this war is not the doing of any subordinate.
Opinion: We'll never know how many Iraqis have been killed at checkpoints, how many were caught in crossfires, how many were killed by roadside bombs. We'll never know how many Iraqi babies have died because of unclean drinking water from bombed out water systems, how many sick Iraqis died because hospitals were looted of critical equipment, how many Iraqis died because so many doctors have fled the country. Some say tens of thousands; others, like the survey in the medical journal, Lancet, say over 100,000. We don't know; we'll never know.
The Bush administration insists we must "stay the course" to help the Iraqi people. But a national survey conducted in August by an Iraqi university research team for the British Ministry of Defense found 82 percent of Iraqis "strongly opposed" to the presence of coalition troops; less than one per cent of the population believes coalition forces are responsible for any improvement in security, and 67 per cent of Iraqis feel less secure because of the occupation.
But why should we expect the Bush administration to listen to the Iraqis, when they don't even listen to their own constituents? Since the summer of 2005, polls consistently show that a majority of Americans oppose this war, think it's unwinnable, think it makes us less safe at home and want a timetable for troop withdrawal. How many of our soldiers need to die before our elected officials start listening to us?
Opinion: From managing the environment to securing sufficient energy resources, from dealing with trafficking in human beings to performing peacekeeping missions abroad, governing is vastly more complicated than ever before in human history.
Further, the crises the
Casualty Reports
Local story:
Local story:
Local story:
Local story: South Haven, MI, soldier killed in a roadside bombing in Ramadi.
Local story:
Local story: Catawba, NC, Marine killed by a roadside bomb southwest of
Local story:
Tuesday, October 25, 2005
- My webhosting service has been balky or completely down for the past 20 hours or so. If my friends there don't get it up and running pretty soon I'll be tempted to tell you what company they're with... This would be the morning I wanted to toss a couple of quick Iraq-related posts into the blogsphere, eh? So it's lucky I can at least get them up here... The first one is:
Cheney as Agnew?
NYT today:
- I. Lewis Libby Jr., Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, first learned about the C.I.A. officer at the heart of the leak investigation in a conversation with Mr. Cheney weeks before her identity became public in 2003, lawyers involved in the case said Monday.
The NYT reporters write that Fitz "is expected to decide whether to bring charges in the case by Friday." So I guess we'll know soon enough.
From what these reporters' sources have told them, there so far seems only a small possibility that a threat of imminent indictment might force Cheney to follow the example that Spiro Agnew set in 1973--also, in October-- and become only the third vice-president in the history of this republic to resign from office.
But who knows? Thus far, Fitzgerald's staff has done a good job of holding their cards remarkably close to their chests. (There is no indication that this latest leak to the NYT people came from them.) So we did not know about this new twist in the case until now. What more might we learn in three days' time?
Anyway, the newly disclosed information about the Cheney-Libby conversation, certainly seem to make matters harder for Libby. The reporters write:
- Notes of the previously undisclosed conversation between Mr. Libby and Mr. Cheney on June 12, 2003, appear to differ from Mr. Libby's testimony to a federal grand jury that he initially learned about the C.I.A. officer, Valerie Wilson, from journalists, the lawyers said.
The notes, taken by Mr. Libby during the conversation, for the first time place Mr. Cheney in the middle of an effort by the White House to learn about Ms. Wilson's husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV.
... The notes help explain the legal difficulties facing Mr. Libby. Lawyers in the case said Mr. Libby testified to the grand jury that he had first heard from journalists that Ms. Wilson may have had a role in dispatching her husband on a C.I.A.-sponsored mission to Africa in 2002 in search of evidence that Iraq had acquired nuclear material there for its weapons program.
But the notes, now in Mr. Fitzgerald's possession, also indicate that Mr. Libby first heard about Ms. Wilson - who is also known by her maiden name, Valerie Plame - from Mr. Cheney. That apparent discrepancy in his testimony suggests why prosecutors are weighing false statement charges against him in what they interpret as an effort by Mr. Libby to protect Mr. Cheney from scrutiny, the lawyers said.
It is not clear why Mr. Libby would have suggested to the grand jury that he might have learned about Ms. Wilson from journalists if he was aware that Mr. Fitzgerald had obtained the notes of the conversation with Mr. Cheney or might do so. At the beginning of the investigation, Mr. Bush pledged the White House's full cooperation and instructed aides to provide Mr. Fitzgerald with any information he sought.
- (1) The Democratic Party leaders are still nowhere in terms of being out there, advocating a compelling alternative to the cabalists' view of the world (or even, apparently, able to any significant political profit from the cabalists' escalating discomfiture, at all.)
(2) There are numerous "wag the dog" scenarios being feverishly discussed around Washington right now. Ludicrous those each of these scenarios might appear on its own merits-- Syria? Iran??-- the fact that there are no adults (from either party) on the scene in Washington DC means we need to be very concerned indeed that even the most childish and incendiary scenarios may get played out over the weeks ahead as a desperate attempt at a "wag the dog" diversion...
Human equality now!
The JWN permalink for this one will be this, but it might not work for a few more hours...
Monday, October 24, 2005
|Attacks against British soldiers in southern Iraq are likely to increase in the coming months. These attacks are primarily motivated by one factor alone: the British are no longer needed in southern Iraq. The south is largely peaceful and the security structures created by Shi'ite militias have proved highly effective. Much of the tension between the UK military and the militias is rooted in the almost universal wish in the Shi'ite south that the British begin withdrawing immediately. While the British government has hinted that it might start withdrawing substantially from May 2006 onwards, no firm guarantees to this effect have been given to Iraqi authorities in the south. But there is a deeper reason why Iraq is now such a dilemma for UK foreign policy. From a British perspective, the country has invested significant resources in the Iraq conflict, but has reaped very few benefits apart from consolidating the "special relationship" with the US. Indeed, British prestige in the region and the wider world has declined since the war and the Iraq conflict may have even been the decisive factor that propelled four young British Muslim suicide bombers to attack their own country in July. Instinctively, the Blair government wants to stay in Iraq as long as the Americans, if only to reap the final rewards of a "democratic" and "stable" Iraq. But evidence on the ground suggests that while a stable Iraq is, at best, 10 years away, a democratic Iraq may forever remain a neo-conservative fantasy. From a wider geostrategic perspective, if the British government is hoping to apply pressure on Iran in the nuclear stand-off, then it has completely misread events in Tehran over the past few months. While this kind of pressure might have had an impact on the previous Mohammed Khatami government, the new government of President Mahmud Ahmadinejad is stridently nationalist and has made it clear that Iran will not make any concessions over its right to master the nuclear fuel cycle. The message from the Ahmadinejad administration, and the Iranian nationalists who stand behind him, is clear: even if the British believe in their own propaganda there is not much that they can do about it. Given this state of affairs, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the British government has badly miscalculated. Indeed, if the British government wanted to portray itself as a key player in the nuclear stand-off, the uncompromising message from Tehran leaves little doubt that the UK is merely a pawn in an escalating geostrategic conflict between the Islamic Republic and the United States.Assrocket:
Excuse me. Are all rightwingers this stupid or is this guy just uniquely ignorant. You don't have to take my word for it, just read The Senate Intelligence Committee Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community's PreWar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq (July 2004), pages 43-47. However, you'll have to read carefully because the Republican staff who wrote this report tried their best to obfuscate and confuse the matter. These are the clear facts: 1. Prior to Joe Wilson's trip to Niger, most of the U.S. intelligence community (the CIA and State Department's INR) did not believe Iraq was trying to buy uraniusm from Niger. The intelligence community had received two intelligence reports from the same source (the Italian intelligence service)in the previous six months and did not find them credible. 2. Joe Wilson and the U.S. Ambassador to Niger both told the Senate investigators that they each concluded separately that there was nothing to the story that Iraq was trying to buy uranium, or could even do so, because of the local controls in place. (See p. 42 of the Senate report). 3. Joe Wilson returned from his Niger trip in March of 2002 and was debriefed by CIA officers on March 5. They in turn produced an intelligence report based on Ambassador Wilson's trip. He was not provided a chance to review or approve the report. The CIA's Directorate of Operations gave the report based on the Ambassador's debriefing a grade of good. 4. According to the Senate report, the results of Joe Wilson's trip to Niger were not shared with the Vice President because it did not provide any new information to clarify the issue. In other words, the intelligence community discounted the notion that Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Niger. They continued to hold this position even in the now discredited October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate. Moreover, even though the British Government provided a "white paper" that seemed to bolster the claim that Iraq was trying to buy uranium in Africa, the intelligence analysts also dismissed the British paper as not credible. Senior CIA officials repeatedly briefed U.S. policymakers and legislators that there was no substance to the reports claiming that Iraq was up to no good in Africa. Those are the facts. Unfortunately, guys like Hinderaker prefer neocon fantasies. The desperation of Hinderaker and his ilk should serve as a strong reminder that the group who got us into war in Iraq have learned nothing in the last four years.Fitzmas Week:
"It's not personal," Fitzgerald said, according to Sauber. "It's my job." Miller chose jail, setting the stage for the last piece of Fitzgerald stagecraft. Periodically calling lawyers, he eventually learned from Miller attorney Robert S. Bennett that she might relent if she received a clear and personal waiver from Libby. In three single-spaced pages, the special counsel wrote Libby attorney Joseph A. Tate that it would be seen as "cooperation with the investigation" if Libby reiterated the confidentiality release he had previously given Miller. But in a twist apparently designed to get Libby's attention, Fitzgerald said twice that he suspected Libby may have preferred Miller to keep quiet about their talks. Libby, after months of silence, quickly wrote Miller. He told her she was missed. He declared that he would be better off if she testified, and he made clear he was freeing her from her pledge. Miller testified, and Fitzgerald prepared to wrap up his inquiry, but not without a final surprise. A lawyer familiar with Miller's grand jury testimony said the special counsel asked her to discuss all relevant conversations she had with Libby before Novak published Plame's name. When Miller detailed two July 2003 discussions and said she could not remember any others, Fitzgerald begged to differ. He showed her a page from a White House logbook that recorded a June 23 visit by Miller to Libby at the Old Executive Office Building. Miller corrected herself and soon produced for the grand jury her notes from that meeting.Saddam Trial:
The real problem is that the United States was closely allied to Saddam Hussein during the 1980s when he was committing the worst atrocities against the Iranians and the Kurds. At that time, the Reagan administration saw the revolutionary regime of Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran as a far greater threat to U.S. interests, and when Saddam's war against Iran started going badly it stepped in to save him. It was U.S. intelligence photos from spy satellites and AWACS reconnaissance aircraft that provided the raw information about Iranian positions, and U.S. Air Force photo interpreters seconded to Baghdad who drew Saddam the detailed maps of Iranian trenches that let him drench them inpoison gas. It was the Reagan administration that stopped Congress from condemning Saddam's use of poison gas, and that encouraged American firms and NATO allies to sell him the appropriate chemical feedstocks, plus a wide variety of other weapons. It was the U.S. State Department that tried to protect Saddam when he gassed his own Kurdish citizens in Halabja in 1988, spreading stories (which it knew to be false) that Iranian planes had dropped the gas. It was the U.S. that finally saved Saddam's regime by providing escorts for tankers carrying oil from Arab Gulf states while Iraqi planes were left free to attack tankers coming from Iranian ports. Even when one of Saddam's planes mistakenly attacked an American destroyer in 1987, killing 37 crew members, Washington forgave him. So the U.S. doesn't want any of Saddam's crimes that are connected with the Iran war to come up in his trial.Why Dujail?
The proceedings raise more than one question mark. Iraqis wonder why the court insists on trying Saddam only for the Dujail killings at a time the list of his crimes is too numerous to be counted. Many Iraqis say the killings in Dujail were connected with the members of a party in power currently in Iraq. This is why, they add, the authorities have focused on Dujail. Saddam Hussein executed thousands of ordinary Iraqis who were members of no political party or faction. It was better for the court to start with these cases at least to do justice for the hapless relatives of these victims. In this case no one would have attempted even to allege that the proceedings were somewhat politically orchestrated. The killings in Dujail are a crime and any one involved in them must be tried and punished. But to only try Saddam for these killings sends the wrong message to the relatives of tens of thousands of other victims. And now the court itself goes to what it has described as the only witness on Dujail killings. Al-Sheik will testify from his death bed hospital in seclusion without the glare of media cameras and most probably in the absence of defense lawyers, raising even more questions about the whole trial.Changing Tact:
Failing to spread its control and restore order, the U.S. is changing tact. But halt. It is not for the interest of the Iraqi people. The U.S. now realizes the country is on the brink of a civil war and it is utilizing the status quo for its own benefit in the hope it will eventually lead it to a way out of its Iraqi quagmire. Iraqi casualties and losses are mounting, the country’s infrastructure, which the U.S. was supposed to modernize, is creaking as a result. But these issues are no longer a matter of concern for those who once called themselves “the liberators.” The past few months have seen a shift in U.S. Iraq strategy. It has abandoned the traditional military means it pursued against armed groups opposing it. The U.S. has become a principal player in the “match of terror” going on in the country. The U.S. is now in fact feeding violence in Iraq by using the country’s disparate sectarian, ethnic and religious factions in a way that will eventually help it realize some of its aims of coming to Iraq. The U.S. is now sowing seeds of strife and civil war. It wants Iraqi factions to do the fighting instead of its troops. The U.S. is fueling sectarian tensions in the hope that the groups, who previously directed their guns almost solely against its marines, would now shoot Iraqis instead. The U.S. now believes if it can set Iraqi factions against each other, it will then withdraw – not from Iraq – but to safe Iraqi havens and watch from there the disintegration of the country in a civil strife that will leave no faction strong enough to put up a fight against its troops.
Sunday, October 23, 2005
"We found he was shot from behind, right through the kidneys. The other bullet wound was near the hip," he said. The Americans had left a "claims card" with details of the incident and how the family could seek compensation. Adel's family has not decided whether to press a claim. Adel met his death as the eyes of the world were focused on a constitutional referendum and on the trial of Saddam Hussein. As these events unfolded, Adel's mother received condolence visits from friends and relatives in a mourning ritual that has been repeated day after day in countless homes around Iraq. Adel's cousin Abdullah Hussain, a doctor, said it should have been clear that Adel was mentally ill. "He was very innocent. Anyone could tell he was ill from the first moment." "The Americans are spreading terror in Iraq because they are terrified," he added. "These are not the qualities of liberators but criminals." Adel's older brother Ali said the Americans should leave Iraq. "These rivers of blood should be stopped," he said.2000: Cindy Sheehan, the military mother who made her son's death in Iraq a rallying point for the anti-war movement, plans to tie herself to the White House fence to protest the milestone of 2,000 U.S. military deaths in Iraq. "I'm going to go to Washington, D.C. and I'm going to give a speech at the White House, and after I do, I'm going to tie myself to the fence and refuse to leave until they agree to bring our troops home," Sheehan said in a telephone interview last week as the milestone approached. Bad trade-in deal: Meanwhile, soldiers and commanders grumble about a "one-for-one" exchange program in which lesser armored vehicles are traded for newer models with stronger shells. The catch: The old vehicles must have been severely damaged or destroyed in battle. No News is Good News: Skeptics say morale is propped up because of soldiers' limited access to news — newspapers on many bases throughout the country are sparse, and weary soldiers often head straight to their trailers after missions instead of plodding to check the latest nationwide news at Internet centers. "We really don't know what is going on in the rest of the country, just here," said Spc. Dainsworth Harris of New York, tapping his table. Harris said he sometimes would learn about major attacks in the country in e-mails from relatives. Opinion and Commentary Karen Hughes:
Exactly how big Hughes's weapon of mass deception is, nobody really knows, but the US Department of Defence alone employs 7,000 'professional communicators', and it's recorded that the State Department spent $685 million on public diplomacy in 2004, with critics complaining that it hasn't been increased enough since 11 September and that little of it has targeted the Muslim world. One thing we do know is that Hughes has at her disposal the most sophisticated intelligence-gathering capability ever assembled. With thousands employed in 'Information Operations' on the US government's behalf, using every conceivable ruse from satellite surveillance to leaflet dropping to finding out how much whisky President Putin gets through of a night, knowing what's really going on everywhere should be simple. The question is, what are she and Bush going to do with all the information in the world if they can't see how things like Guantanamo Bay and the indefinite detention of hundreds of suspects, or the abuse of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib jail, contradict every platitude they spout? And if they can't stop the rot? Worry not. 'IO' by now has the potential to step in with a much firmer, less 'Southern' grasp of precisely what to do and who to target when manipulating public opinion on a global scale. Now there's a thought.Basra:
The stunning transformation of Basra from a secure rear area for U.S. and British troops into a center of anti-occupation agitation reveals the utter weakness of the Shiite political base on which the United States must now rely to sustain its occupation of the country. After the election in January, according to senior police officials in Baghdad, the police force in the city was under the control of militant Shiite Badr Organization, which is aligned with the government of Prime Minister Jafari. But the loyalty of many militiamen in Basra to the Badr Organization proved in the end to be very weak. By the time of the protests, the Mahdi Army was clearly predominant within the police force. The strategic significance of events in Basra becomes clearer if it compared with a parallel event in the Vietnam War. In 1966 an anti-government and anti-U.S. Buddhist "Struggle Movement" loosely aligned with the Communist forces carried out an uprising and seized power in Hue, the ancient capital and center of Buddhist agitation. The U.S. command responded by airlifting South Vietnamese government battalions into Hue to reassert military control. In Iraq, however, there were no government units available to send into Basra to take back the city. And neither the British nor the Americans had enough troops to impose direct control on Basra by force. Comments to the press by British officers in Basra make it clear that the command understands that the city slipped out of control because the occupation forces could not trust the very people who they thought were their loyal allies. The U.S. command, meanwhile, refuses to acknowledge publicly that it faces a powerful anti-occupation movement in the South. Two weeks after the Basra uprising, Gen. George Casey, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, went so far as to claim that "lately" Moktadr al-Sadr had become "part of the solution" in Iraq. If the U.S. command really believes that, it may be in for a nasty surprise. Moqtadr al-Sadr has yet not played all of his cards. He still has loyal followers all across the South and as well as in his primary political base in Baghdad's Sadr City. What happened in Basra may be a preview of a strategy aimed at causing the collapse of the U.S. political position in one city after another.Historic Mistakes:
For them, there was Saddam and now there is America. The latter is trying the former. The blame for this moral equivalency does not rest with the Iraqis. To them, and many others in the world not sucked in by the Washington spin, Saddam in the dock and the constitution on a referendum ballot are not milestones on the road to nirvana but the latest reminders of the gap between reality and the delusions, or the outright lies, of George W. Bush. As Iraq becomes Vietnam, he blames the seemingly unstoppable insurgency on Al Qaeda and other Islamic militants, whom he has just compared to Stalin, Hitler and Pol Pot. But his own analysts peg their number at only a few hundred out of an estimated 10,000 insurgents. He blames Iran and Syria and won't rule out waging war on either or both. Yet suspected foreign militants caught in Iraq since April add up to a grand total of 312. Of them, the highest number, 78, hail from Egypt, about which he remains silent, as also about the other American ally, Saudi Arabia, whose apprehended citizens outnumber Iran's, 32 to 13. He crows about bringing democracy to Iraq but plans to veto a U.S. Senate vote ordering him to bring Guantanamo Bay and similar other holding pens under the rule of law. We are witnessing historic mistakes that cannot be masked even by master propagandists.
Saturday, October 22, 2005
- This post is cross-posted at Just World News,where you can also find a searing Wilfred Owen poem about war; and posts about Larry Wilkerson's trouncing of the war-making 'cabal', Judy Miller, the need for post-war war-crimes trials to be part of a broader politics of reconstruction (a contrast between the Saddam trial and the Nuremberg Tribunal)-- oh, and one about Condi Rice "calling" last weekend's Iraqi referendum well before all the votes were even gathered in and counted...
Friday, October 21, 2005
Thursday, October 20, 2005
Hillary Clinton once said that it takes a village to raise a child, metaphorically this is the basis on what society has evolved from. Everyone supporting each other even though we disagree upon the focal issue of the war being right or wrong. My own thoughts are that it took an Idiot to follow through with such an insane plan as to invade Mesopotamia from the start. It's equally blind to continue believing that freedom's on the march in Iraq and publicly stating time after time that we are winning and that the Iraqi people will embrace us as benevolent conquer as if he's Cesar leading his victorious legions through streets lined with rose petals. Personally I don't think that he's even qualified to be dog catcher. Support for the war is at an all time low with 55% saying that we should have stayed out and 64% saying that the war isn't worth the costs. 59% saying that we should leave as soon as possible according to this CBS poll taken on October 10th. And speaking of polls President George W. Bush's job approval rating has fallen to a new low of 39 percent in an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released on Wednesday. In addition, with 13 months until the 2006 congressional elections, 48 percent say they prefer a Democratic-controlled Congress, compared with 39 percent who want the Republicans to control Capitol Hill. In fact, that nine-point difference is the largest margin between the parties in the 11 years the NBC/Journal poll has been tracking this question. Is the Republican revolution losing momentum? That contrast encapsulates the uneven advance of Republican Party efforts to build a lasting conservative majority in U.S. politics. After a 2004 election that consolidated their hold on the White House and Congress, Republicans have suffered through a year of missteps and bad news -- such as this week's indictment of DeLay, the House majority leader from Texas -- that have stirred Democratic hopes of a revival. In some respects, the GOP appears close to establishing a lasting political edge -- not seen since the days of President McKinley more than a century ago -- with interlocking advantages that create formidable barriers to a Democratic resurgence. But approval ratings in polls for the GOP-controlled Congress and President Bush are similar to those for the Democratic-controlled Congress and President Clinton prior to the 1994 electoral landslide that put the GOP in charge of the House and Senate. "Clearly, the majority doesn't seem to be as stable as (Republicans) thought, but whether this is a blip and doesn't rearrange the fundamental structural foundations for a Republican edge is still to be answered," said Andrew Taylor, a political scientist at North Carolina State University and author of the new book "Elephant's Edge: The Republicans as a Ruling Party." Or do the long term trends favor the GOP? And regardless of which side of the isle who's going to win by these trends? and who's going to lose? Who's going to pay for it? And is it just going to effect the U.S.?Posted by Whisker and formated by me.
Wednesday, October 19, 2005
War News for Wednesday, October 19, 2005
Bring ‘em on: One US soldier killed, two wounded, in roadside bombing near Iskandariyah.
Bring ‘em on: One US soldier by small-arms fire in
Bring ‘em on: Deputy governor of Anbar province shot dead by gunmen in Ramadi. His bodyguard was also killed in the attack.
Bring ‘em on:
Bring ‘em on: Three Iraqi election officials assassinated by gunmen in
Bring ‘em on: Two Iraqi police commandos killed and three wounded in fighting in
Bring ‘em on: One British soldier killed in a roadside bombing in
Bring ‘em on: One US soldier killed by small arms fire in
Bring ‘em on: Six Shiite factory workers lined up and shot to death in front of their fellow workers by insurgents who then fled in stolen company vehicles.
Bring ‘em on:
Some statistics: As anticipated, insurgent attacks continued at a high level in
But the number of U.S. troops wounded in action continued at a grimly high level, and the percentage of U.S. troop fatalities inflicted by improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, was higher than ever for September and October so far -- an ominous indicator that the technical expertise of the insurgents is steadily advancing.
The number of
This was a very high rate of injuries suffered, and reflected the continuing widespread and formidable nature of the insurgency. The figure was far worse than the average of 16.3
It was open season once again on the poorly trained and even more poorly protected new Iraqi security forces. No less than 109 of them were killed in the 14 days from Oct. 2 to Oct. 16, the IIP said.
That was a rate of just under eight per day, far worse than the six per day kill rate the insurgents achieved in the first 13 days of September and even worse than the 7.5 per day kill rate they achieved during the four days from Sept. 29 to Oct. 2.
At that time, it appeared possible that that kill rate might have been a statistical aberration, with the insurgents getting "lucky" or mounting an intensive offensive that they could not sustain for more than a few days. But they have now sustained it for two-and-a-half weeks with no relief in sight. As long as the insurgents can continue to inflict such a sustained heavy level of casualties on the allied Iraqi police and troops, their effectiveness must be judged to almost negligible. They remain far more the hunted rather than the hunters.
These figures clearly document an insurgency that so far has been able to sustain its latest quantum leap in area, intensity and tactical sophistication in terms of the power of the IEDs and the number of car bombs per week it can set off.
Like naming Karl Rove head of the Plame leak inquiry: The U.S. military will look into whether American warplanes and helicopter gunships killed civilians during a raid on suspected militants near the western Iraqi city of
Asked for President George W. Bush's reaction to the deaths on Sunday of about 20 civilians, including children, spokesman Scott McClellan disputed the reports.
"The military has said otherwise at this point," he said. "The military has review mechanisms in place, and when there are questions raised they look into those matters and so that's something that, obviously, they will look into."
Mother of mercy – 570 a day?: Analysts do not see an end to Iraq's nonstop jockeying among competing ethnic and religious groups or to an insurgency that is averaging 570 attacks a day, despite voters' apparent approval of a new constitution on Saturday.
The constitution, opposed by many of the country's Sunni Muslim minority, leaves up in the air such vital questions as control of oil resources, regional autonomy, the role of Islam and women's rights.
The new government, to be established by the parliament elected Dec. 15, faces a huge challenge to solve those problems while fighting a counterinsurgency, rebuilding a shattered economy and dealing with a Bush administration eager to cut
"It's 50-50 this thing holds together through the spring of 2006. But that is purely a guess,'' Anthony Cordesman, a military analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in
Saddam
Some Iraqis miss him: Dozens of supporters of Saddam Hussein took to the streets of his hometown Tikrit on Wednesday, vowing loyalty to the former dictator as he went on trial in
He’s still dangerous: The main reason the trial of Saddam Hussein and seven others facing charges of crimes against humanity has been adjourned was because many witnesses were too afraid to turn up, the judge trying the case said on Wednesday.
Judge Rizgar Mohammed Amin told Reuters around 30 or 40 witnesses had not come to
"The main reason is the witnesses did not show up," Amin said. "They were too scared to be public witnesses. We're going to work on this issue for the next sessions."
No question the sumbitch deserves whatever he gets: For angry families in this small Iraqi village, the start of Saddam Hussein's trial on Wednesday marks the beginnings of justice for husbands, sons and brothers murdered three decades ago.
"This is the end of every tyrant," said Laith Abd Mahdi, a middle-aged man outside his small house in Dujail. "He hurt us, hurt my relatives and hurt my closest friends. Death is not enough for him."
The first charges Saddam faces stem from events in Dujail, a Shi'ite farming village about 60 km north of Baghdad, after local young men tried but failed to assassinate the Iraqi ruler in 1982 as his motorcade passed through town.
Prosecutors say Saddam sought brutal revenge, ordering his henchmen to hunt down, torture and kill more than 140 men from the town following the attack.
Women and children were also alleged to have been forcibly removed from Dujail, imprisoned and later sent to a desert internment camp where many ultimately "disappeared". The village's farmlands, rich date palm and fruit groves on the banks of the
But he wasn’t worth this war: The documents were released by the independent Washington-based National Security Archive yesterday as the dictator went on trial for the 1982 massacre of 143 Shi'ites in the town of
They also showed US intelligence had an early understanding that overthrowing the Iraqi dictator would lead to instability that could pull the country apart.
Saddam's removal "could usher in an extended period of instability in
The report said such infighting raised the chances of an Iran-backed fundamentalist Islamic regime coming to power – a widely anticipated possibility since the
Very Reassuring
Who says we don’t have a plan?: Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Wednesday outlined a strategy of helping Iraqis clear out insurgents and build durable, national institutions as she sought to reassure jittery members of Congress about the path to peace in Iraq. Rice said the
Under the heading of Ummm, yeah – how’s that working out?, please pop by our sister site, Today in
Following the successful model:
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''Islamic terrorism is a much bigger problem in Europe than in the
Donald Rumsfeld, National Embarrassment
The wise teacher: Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told students and faculty at a Communist Party school here today that openness, democracy and freedom are the keys to
Irony’s corpse is starting to reek: Republican members of Congress say there are signs that the Defense Department may be carrying out new intelligence activities through programs intended to escape oversight from Congress and the new director of national intelligence. The warnings are an unusually public signal of some Republican lawmakers' concern about overreaching by...
This is all of the article TimesSelect ripoff will give us. If any alert reader is actually paying money for this ‘service’ and wants to sort of copy the article to comments…hmm?
From 2004 and do you think it’s different today?: The official in charge of information security at the Pentagon told lawmakers yesterday that at least half of the information the U.S. government classifies every year should not be kept secret.
"How about if I say 50-50?" Carol Haave told the House Government Reform national security, emerging threats and international relations subcommittee, when asked to quantify the problem of overclassification.
Speaking Of National Embarrassments
Bush: President Bush's unprecedented inclusion in his weekend radio address of a direct reference to a letter he said was written by al-Qaida's number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri, highlights the fascinating insights it appears to offer into the inner workings of the group.
But there are nagging questions about the document -- which
And even the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich., has cautioned against "reading too much into a single source of intelligence."
Loaded cigar: A letter purportedly written by a senior al Qaeda leader -- and said to be authentic by
Some analysts have gone so far as to label the letter a likely
"If this is a forgery, then either it was designed to blow up in the face of the American government; or someone in the 'coalition of the willing' has been caught with their pants down," said one analyst, who spoke with Cybercast News Service on the condition of anonymity.
Ha ha! This is from the GOPUSA website. How pathetic is this letter if even those bozos don’t buy it?
Foreign Affairs
Turkish officials have repeatedly demanded
Judge Santiago Pedraz issued the warrant for Sgt. Shawn Gibson, Capt. Philip Wolford and Lt. Col. Philip de Camp, all from the U.S. 3rd Infantry.
Jose Couso, who worked for the Spanish television network Telecinco, died April 8, 2003, after a
Reuters cameraman Taras Portsyuk, a Ukrainian, also was killed.
The Spanish judge said he issued the arrest order because of a lack of judicial cooperation from the
Lord Steyn, a law lord, also launched a scathing attack on ministers over the
He said it was a “fairytale” to suggest that the
Lord Steyn echoed the views of Lord Alexander of
Lord Alexander’s view that the war was illegal “reflected the overwhelming view of international lawyers and was undoubtedly correct”.
US Military News
Another cost of war: A Pentagon assessment of troops returning home from
The newspaper obtained the report from the
About 28 percent, or 50,000 troops this year, reported problems ranging from lingering battle wounds to suicidal thoughts or strained marriages, the report said.
Screw the troops: The Pentagon has reneged on its offer to pay a $15,000 bonus to members of the National Guard and Army Reserve who agree to extend their enlistments by six years, according to Sen. Patty Murray (D-Seattle).
The bonuses were offered in January to Active Guard and Reserve and military technician soldiers who were serving overseas. In April, the Office of the Secretary of Defense for Reserve Affairs ordered the bonuses stopped,
“This is outrageous,” the senator said in a telephone interview. “It makes me angry that this administration has broken another promise to our troops.”
A Pentagon spokeswoman, Lt. Col. Ellen Krenke, confirmed the bonuses had been canceled, saying they violated Pentagon policies because they duplicated other programs. She said Guard and Reserve members would be eligible for other bonuses.
The “Dirt Navy”, heaven preserve us: With the squeeze of an index finger, the machine gun jerked to life – a metallic, menacing growl that chattered in the bone marrow: rat-a-tat … rat-a-tat-tat … rat-a-tat-tat-tat …
An acrid halo of steely smoke rose from the 84-pound gun. Spent shell casings bubbled from an opening in its side. Three football fields away, thumb-size bullets – as many as 550 per minute – sparked off a battered tank parked on the hillside of a gun range.
These are the sights, sounds and smells of the “Dirt Navy,” the buzz words for a new initiative that, if put into play, could thrust sailors into a domain long reserved for foot soldiers.
The Navy has been pondering the idea since at least July, when the service outlined plans aimed at making it more effective in the small-skirmish, close-quarter arenas of a drawn-out war on terrorism.
Among the proposals: creating an expeditionary combat force. The move would produce, according to one Navy official who spoke at the summer briefing: “A sailor with a bayonet in his teeth, ready to go ashore and mix it up.”
They can fight for free speech, they just can’t listen to it: A liberal talk show host scheduled to begin broadcasting on Armed Forces Radio on Monday is blaming political payback for a last-minute decision to shelve the show.
Ed Schultz, whose daily radio show is broadcast in about 100 markets in the
“They knew exactly what kind of program they were getting,” he said. “This looks like a get-back to me. They don’t want any other voices on the air.”
But Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said Schultz’s views and recent comments played no factor in the decision.
“What we have here is a staff member who got ahead of the decision-making process,” he said. “We’re in the process of looking at additional programming, but there have been no decisions yet.”
US Politics
Everything they touch they screw up: When Porter J. Goss took over a failure-stained CIA last year, he promised to reshape the agency beginning with the area he knew best: its famed spy division.
Goss, himself a former covert operative who had chaired the House intelligence committee, focused on the officers in the field. He pledged status and resources for case officers, sending hundreds more to far-off assignments, undercover and on the front line of the battle against al Qaeda.
A year later, Goss is at loggerheads with the clandestine service he sought to embrace. At least a dozen senior officials -- several of whom were promoted under Goss -- have resigned, retired early or requested reassignment. The directorate's second-in-command walked out of
Commentary
High risk constitution: Early reports from elections officials over the weekend indicated the referendum passed, clearing the way for Dec. 15 elections and a new government by Dec. 31. Constitutional approval and subsequent elections are key concerns for
Not a normal democracy: It won’t be until later in the week that we have even an unofficial tally of how the vote went in the Iraqi referendum on a constitution, though Condoleezza Rice has already jumped the gun by opining in
By that, she meant the rejectionist front of Sunnis had not won more than two-thirds of the votes in more than three provinces. The only figure available is that more than 60% of voters turned out overall.
But if the supporters of the referendum have to hold their breath for a province-by-province breakdown of the voting, they can draw comfort already from the unexpectedly peaceable nature of the referendum. Of course, the level of violence would be unacceptable in a normal democracy.
Rockets were fired yesterday into
But
The fact that Sunni terror groups largely abstained from such heavy-handed tactics at the weekend suggests they realised many Sunnis were going to vote, so that bombing polling stations would result in killing “their own”.
Bombing bridges: In his speech, casting the conclusions of both missions aside, President Bush observed that Muslim countries from "
President Bush did not shy away from using phrases like "Islamic fascism", "violent Jihad" and "Islamic terrorism", thus condemning everything associated with Islam. It is, however, inappropriate to associate Americans indiscriminately with
Meanwhile, back at home: Habeas corpus is the greatest protection Americans have against a police state. Habeas corpus ensures that Americans can only be detained by law. They must be charged with offenses, given access to attorneys, and brought to trial. Habeas corpus prevents the despotic practice of picking up a person and holding him indefinitely.
President Bush claims the power to set aside habeas corpus and to dispense with warrants for arrest and with procedures that guarantee court appearance and trial without undue delay. Today in the
These new "seize and hold" powers strip the accused of the protective aspects of law and give rein to selectivity and arbitrariness. No warrant is required for arrest, no charges have to be presented before a judge, and no case has to be put before a jury. As the police are unaccountable, whoever is selected for arrest is at the mercy of arbitrariness.
The judiciary has to some extent defended habeas corpus against Bush's attack, but the protection that the principle offers against arbitrary seizure and detention has been breeched. Whether courts can fully restore habeas corpus or whether it continues in weakened form or passes by the wayside remains to be determined.
Americans may be unaware of what it means to be stripped of the protection of habeas corpus, or they may think police authorities would never make a mistake or ever use their unbridled power against the innocent. Americans might think that the police state will only use its powers against terrorists or "enemy combatants".
But "terrorist" is an elastic and legally undefined category. When the President of the
Casualty Reports
Local story:
Local story:
Local story: Grottoes, VA, Marine killed in combat near the Jordanian border in
Local story:
Local story:
Local story: Springer, NM, Marine killed in al Rutba.
Tuesday, October 18, 2005
War News for Tuesday, October 18, 2005
Bring ‘em on: Two US Marines and four guerillas killed in fighting near Rutba.
Bring ‘em on: Two police officers killed in drive-by shooting in
Bring ‘em on: Three civilians killed and seven wounded when gunmen attacked the al-Rahman mosque in Mahaweel. An adviser to the Iraqi Industry Minister killed by gunmen outside his home in
Bring ‘em on: Two Iraqi soldiers killed and seven wounded when a roadside bomb struck a joint U.S and Iraqi army patrol in Baiji. Eleven insurgents killed and 57 suspects arrested in a joint U.S and Iraqi army operation in Mahmudiya. Three men shot dead by U.S. Marines, who claimed the men had planted a roadside bomb near Haqlaniya. Aircraft then destroyed caves where weapons were said to be stored and made. About 12 insurgents killed in attack on US Marine base near Qusayba. Three guerillas killed by Marine helicopters in Karabila.
Bring ‘em on: Senior member of the Anbar provincial government and his bodyguard shot dead by gunmen in Ramadi.
Bring ‘em on: One civilian killed and two others injured Tuesday when a mortar shell slammed into their house in
Bring ‘em on: At least five Iraqis were killed by militants on Tuesday. At least one of these deaths is documented in a post above, unclear on the others. In addition, the handcuffed and mutilated bodies of six Iraqis who had been kidnapped and killed in captivity were found in three locations of the capital.
Bring ‘em on: A U.S. fighter jet bombed a crowd gathered around a burned Humvee on the edge of a provincial capital in western Iraq, killing 25 people, including 18 children, hospital officials and family members said Monday. The military said the Sunday raid targeted insurgents planting a bomb for new attacks.
In all, residents and hospital workers said, 39 civilians and at least 13 armed insurgents were killed in a day of
The
At Ramadi hospital, distraught and grieving families fought over body parts severed by the airstrikes, staking rival claims to what they believed to be pieces of their loved ones.
Iraqi Politics
The “democratic process”: For Iraq's Shia Muslims, Saturday's referendum on a new constitution was reason for celebration - the consecration of their rise to power.
For the angry Sunnis, it was a motivation to participate for the first time in the "democratic process" devised by US occupation forces, albeit to say No.
In the Shia slums of
The scene was different in the Sunni cities of Anbar and Salaheddine provinces, which are believed to have delivered a massive No to the US-backed charter.
“Unusually high”:
"Statements coming from most provinces indicating such high numbers ... require us to recheck, compare and audit them, as they are unusually high according to the international standards," the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq said in a statement.
Possible irregularities:
In at least six provinces, the turnout to vote on the measure appears to have topped 95 percent, said Izzadin al Mohammadi, a senior commission official.
The audit announcement came amid allegations by the nation's Sunni minority, some 20 percent of
Much of the attention has focused on Ninevah province, home to
If there was ballot-box stuffing in Ninevah that affected the outcome of the swing province's vote for or against the constitution, it could create a politically explosive situation in a nation already teeming with sectarian strife.
Ninety-nine percent: A sandstorm that had closed
The investigation by
Meanwhile, insurgents resumed attacks that had fallen sharply during Saturday's vote at heavily protected polling stations across the country.
Fancy footwork required:
Tempting the Sunnis further toward politics and away from revolt will take skilful bargaining by other Iraqi leaders -- and
The likely "Yes" result in Saturday's constitutional referendum may prompt an upsurge in violence; but the vote has also forged a Sunni political movement that, for the first time, will fight its corner in a parliamentary election in December.
Quandary: For most of the 30 months since American-led forces ousted Saddam Hussein, the Bush administration has argued that as democracy took hold in
Over time, President Bush told troops at
But inside the administration, that belief provides less solace than it once did. Senior officials say the intelligence reports flowing over their desks in recent months argue that even if democratic institutions take hold, the insurgency may strengthen. And that possibility has created a quandary for an administration that desperately wants to equate democracy-building with winning the war, but so far has not been able to match the two.
National reconciliation conference: A much-anticipated Arab League-sponsored conference to promote national reconciliation in
Secretary General Moussa had been widely expected to open the two-day conference to spearhead the Arab League's first major initiative in
It is not known why the secretary general was absent from the session. But it is widely believed that security concerns may have prevented him from attending. Earlier this month, an Arab League delegation preparing for Mr. Moussa's visit came under attack in
Saddam Hussein Trial
Trial begins: Saddam Hussein and seven members of his Baath party, including his half-brother, will file into a marble-lined, chandelier-hung courtroom in
Two years after he was found hiding in a hole near where he was born, the former Iraqi president and his co-defendants go on trial for their lives on charges of crimes against humanity for the killing of more than 140 Shi'ite Muslim men two decades ago.
No better: Very few Iraqis want Saddam back in charge at the
Supporters: The Yihyas are not former Baath Party officials in the Sunni Arab clique which dominated
"I hope Saddam is freed," said family matriarch Rajha Saleh, whose Sunni Muslim sons all married Shi'ite Muslim women to make the clan a sectarian mix typical of
"During Saddam's time we could go out at night. We slept in the garden on hot nights," she said at the run-down family home. "Now I wouldn't dare. The sound of a cat would scare me."
For the Yihyas, seeing Saddam take the stand will be a stark reminder of the contrasts between his rule, marked by wars with neighbours and great powers, and a new life plagued by suicide bombings, shootings, kidnappings and rampant crime.
Random News
Corruption: The
When the final page is written on
The American-dominated Coalition Provisional Authority could well prove to be the most corrupt administration in history, almost certainly surpassing the widespread fraud of the much-maligned UN Oil for Food Program. At least $20 billion that belonged to the Iraqi people has been wasted, together with hundreds of millions of
From The American Conservative magazine! This savage attack on the occupation’s endemic corruption is well worth a read.
Support the troops!: Wounded US soldiers who have returned home are increasingly finding that they are being referred to credit agencies by the US military because of discrepancies in pay or "failure to pay" for lost equipment.
The Roanoke Times writes in an editorial that this is the latest in a string of problems that the Bush administration has had in dealing with soldiers, both full-time military and National Guard and Reserve troops. The Times pointed to a recent cut of a billion dollars in the Veterans Affairs budget, and the problems outfitting soldiers in war zones with proper equipment. The pay issue just compounds the situation.
The GAO found that more than 90 percent of the soldiers in some Reserve and Guard units have incurred payroll errors during deployment. Organizations such as the Wounded Warriors Project in
Crisis of morale: Recent comments by the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, that British forces might have to stay in an increasingly volatile conflict for up to 10 more years have exacerbated fears among British forces that the conflict in which they are engaged is open-ended and lacking a credible exit strategy. There are currently 8,500 British troops in
According to Combat Stress, the military charity dedicated to helping soldiers suffering psychological problems, the seemingly indefinite struggle has created the greatest crisis of morale among British troops for decades.
Allison Barber strikes again: Armed Forces Radio (AFR) is a station that is broadcast to American troops overseas through “over 1,000 outlets in more than 175 countries.” It currently features an hour of programming from right-wing host Rush Limbaugh. There is no comparable progressive program.
Today, that was supposed change. Ed Schultz – the most popular progressive radio show in the country — was supposed to start broadcasting on Armed Forces radio. Jones Radio, the company that syndicates the Ed Shultz show, received an email on September 29 from an Armed Forces Radio official confirming that one hour of the Ed Schultz show would begin airing today, October 17.
But morning this at 6AM, the producer of the Ed Schultz show, James Holm, received a call from Pentagon communications aide Allison Barber. She told Holm that she was calling so early to let Schultz know his show would not begin airing on AFR today. You’ll remember Barber as the aide caught coaching troops before a photo-op with President Bush last week.
The Rule of Law
Analysis: On 19 March 2003 President Bush Jr. commenced his criminal war against
….
The
…
This brings the analysis to the so-called Constitution of Iraq that was allegedly drafted by the puppet Interim Government of Iraq under the impetus of the
Francis A. Boyle, Professor of Law, University of
Sponsoring torture in the United States Senate: The Conference Committee that will consider and reconcile the Senate and House defense appropriations bills is scheduled to meet this coming week. The Senate bill contains the "McCain Amendment," which would prohibit all U.S. personnel from engaging in cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of detainees -- i.e., engaging in conduct that would "shock the conscience" under Due Process Clause doctrine -- anywhere in the world.
It's increasingly clear that the strategy of McCain's opponents -- the Vice President and his congressional supporters -- will be to amend the McCain Amendment in the Conference Committee so as to exempt the CIA from the prohibition on cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of detainees. The Senate delegation to the Conference Committee presumably will include three of the nine Republicans who voted against the McCain Amendment -- Ted Stevens, Thad Cochran and Kit Bond. A recent Congressional Quarterly article reports Stevens -- who would "lead the Senate's conferees" -- as saying that "he can support McCain's language if it's augmented with guidance that enables certain classified interrogations to proceed under different terms." "'I'm talking about people who aren't in uniform, may or may not be citizens of the United States, but are working for us in very difficult circumstances,' Stevens said. 'And sometimes interrogation and intimidation is part of the system.'"
What this barely veiled statement means is that Senator Stevens will support inclusion of the McCain Amendment in the final bill only once it has been "augmented" to exempt the CIA from the prohibition on cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. (Stevens's reference to persons who "may not be citizens of the
Practicing torture in
Starvation policy: A senior United Nations official has accused US-led coalition troops of depriving Iraqi civilians of food and water in breach of humanitarian law.
Human rights investigator Jean Ziegler said they had driven people out of insurgent strongholds that were about to be attacked by cutting supplies.
Mr. Ziegler, a Swiss-born sociologist, said such tactics were in breach of international law.
A
When will there be accountability?: It’s not yet clear whether senators will succeed in their effort to force the Bush administration to give up the use of "cruel, inhuman and degrading" treatment of foreign detainees, despite a 90-9 vote by the Senate. Resistance by House Republicans and the White House threat of a veto means this badly needed restoration of the American commitment to human rights faces an uphill battle in the coming weeks. Meanwhile, the outcome of another legislative initiative stemming from the hundreds of documented cases of prisoner abuse is even cloudier. Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Michigan) so far has won no Republican support for a proposal to create an independent commission to investigate the treatment of detainees since 2001. Given what is known -- and still unknown -- about this shocking and shameful record, the rejection of accountability by the administration and Congress is a scandal in its own right.
A number of senior Army officers, most notably former Iraq commander Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez and former Guantanamo commander Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, have been implicated in serious offenses, including ordering or approving prisoner mistreatment. Yet the only direct investigation of these still-active generals, by the Army inspector general, resulted in no sanctions or charges. The head of the U.S. Southern Command, Gen. Bantz J. Craddock, refused to follow a recommendation by the Army's own investigators that Gen. Miller be held accountable for the "degrading and abusive treatment" of one
We're willing to make a prediction: Some day there will be an exhaustive investigation of how and why prisoners were abused after 2001, and accountability will be assigned to the senior officers and officials who now hide behind their subordinates and inspector generals. Like the internment of ethnic Japanese during World War II or the CIA's involvement in Cold War-era coup plots and assassinations, government acts so at odds with fundamental American standards will eventually be exposed and disowned by our democracy. Yet it would be much better for the legacy of President Bush, and this Republican Congress, if that honest accounting were to begin now, rather than after they have left office. The opportunity exists: Mr. Levin and his amendment are waiting.
Commentary
Strategerizing: In refocusing the nation's attention on the war on terror in past weeks, both the president and his critics in Congress are increasingly turning to a fundamental yet frequently overlooked aspect of the
Time and again, the Bush administration has stated that the way to ultimately break the insurgency is to create a strong and democratic
This conflict is the sort that the armed forces have avoided since
Now, pressed by Congress and an impatient public, President Bush and Pentagon leaders have begun to articulate the vision behind their current course - casting
A good question: So, why isn't character on the table this time?
Character, we were all so piously told seven years ago, was what elevated Bill Clinton's lie about an extramarital dalliance to an issue of national gravity and justified his impeachment. It was a lie that, to those of us who were not hyperventilating with rage, seemed trivial compared to matters concerning the ship of state, even if it was a lie told under oath in a trumped-up civil trial.
No, no, no, we were scolded; it goes to the character of the man. If you can't rely on a leader to confess before the entire ogling world that he dropped his pants for the wrong woman, how could you trust anything he said? Our children would abandon all respect for honesty, integrity and propriety, using the excuse, "Well, the president did it. Why can't I?"
These dire predictions of social anarchy struck me as absurdly exaggerated, but the standard was set. Or so we thought.
In rode a new administration and party promising to raise the bar on character. As I see it, they've splintered that bar into toothpicks.
And yet, isn't it curious how in the public discourse today one rarely hears references to character as a material issue with respect to political leadership? If an extramarital affair was proof of a vacant character, wouldn't questionable actions that actually affect people - soldiers, covert agents, Congress, storm victims and the like - be exponentially more serious?
False premises: In a New York Times article published on Sunday, columnist Frank Rich buried the dart right in the center-black. "What matters most in this case," wrote Rich, "is not whether Mr. Rove and Lewis Libby engaged in a petty conspiracy to seek revenge on a whistle-blower, Joseph Wilson, by unmasking his wife, Valerie, a covert C.I.A. officer. What makes Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation compelling, whatever its outcome, is its illumination of a conspiracy that was not at all petty: the one that took us on false premises into a reckless and wasteful war in
That last sentence strikes sparks, for it takes us beyond the minutiae of a case surrounding two senior White House aides. However important Rove and Libby may be to this administration, neither represents the end of the story. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, with deliberation and intent, took this country to war in
Rich, in his article, details the existence of the White House Iraq Group, or WHIG. "Its inception in August 2002, seven months before the invasion of
WHIG, and its intention to sell an unnecessary war to a shell-shocked public, is only half the story. The other half of the manipulative sales team could be found in the neighborhood occupied by the Department of Defense. The Office of Special Plans, or OSP, was created by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld specifically to second-guess and reinterpret intelligence data to justify war in
Casualty Reports
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Monday, October 17, 2005
Ninevah province, home to the mixed city of Mosul and the besieged city of Tal ‘Afar, is seeing some very strange numbers. I’ve done back of the Excel envelope calculations and have found this: * In the January election, which was boycotted by Sunnis, there were 165,934 votes cast, according to the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq. * In October, according to AP’s preliminary results, there were 419,804 votes cast in Ninevah, an increase of 253,870 votes, or +152.99 percent. * The number of people voting for the constitution in Ninevah, according to the AP, was 326,774 (78 percent), with 90,065 voting against it (21 percent). Less than 1 percent, or 2,965 votes, was disqualified. By way of comparison, Tamim province, home to the disputed city of Kirkuk, saw 542,000 votes cast — an increase of 35.2 percent over January — with 341,611 voting “yes” (63 percent) and 195,725 voting “no” (36 percent). You mean we’re supposed to believe that in Tamim, which is also a mixed province but which has had a steady stream of Kurds moving in for the last two-and-a-half years, had more than twice as many no votes as Ninevah? And with the Kurds already pretty much owning Kirkuk? Color me skeptical. What’s truly eyebrow-raising is that the number of constitutional “yes” votes — 326,774 — is more than the total increase in votes over January’s turnout. That suggests that not only did all of the Sunnis in Ninevah province, who largely boycotted the January elections turn out, but that they all voted for the constitution. That’s a very strange idea to me, as I’ve not met a single Sunni who voted for it here in Baghdad. Ninevah is home to Mosul, a mixed city of about 2 million Arabs, Turkomans and Kurds, as well as Tal’Afar, the mostly Turkoman city of 500,000 that U.S. and Iraqi forces stormed last month. Anecdotal reports are that a) Sunni Arabs have come out in droves, mainly to vote down the constitution, and b) the constitution was very unpopular in Tal’Afar because of military actions there. Now, several possibilities spring to mind: Sunni Arabs in the north really love the idea of the new national charter, but I find this unlikely, to say the least. In fact, I only suggest it for the giggle factor. Another possibility is that the vote was blatantly fixed. A third possibility is that the Kurds moved thousands of people into Mosul to skew the vote. Oddly enough, I heard Sunnis making just this charge in the run-up to the Saturday’s referendum. A third possibility is a combination of the last two. The vote was rigged and the Kurds moved people in. Now, contrasting points that prove I don’t know what I’m talking about, suggested by colleagues: 1. Mosul is an Iraqi Islamic Party stronghold. The IIP called on its supporters to vote “yes” after a deal last week to open up the constitution to early amendments. This split the Sunni opposition to the charter. 2. The Sunnis simply don’t make up 20 percent of Iraq. There hasn’t been a reliable census in years and not only do the Sunnis not make up 42 percent of Iraq as Saleh Mutlaq, a member of the National Dialogue Council, claims, but they’re much fewer than the 20 percent most people assume. 3. Ninevah and Mosul aren’t Sunni strongholds. It’s conventional wisdom, but maybe that’s wrong. 4. Mosul was a lot more violent in January, keeping the vote there down. Perhaps now, with less violence, more Kurds — perhaps half of the total increase — were able to come out and vote. 5. The Turkomans aren’t a factor. Money quote from cynical colleague: “There are more Turkoman parties than there are Turkomans.” 6. The AP numbers are so preliminary, they’re flat-out wrong. The possibility exists that all of these possibilities have played into the dynamic in Ninevah, leading to wild numbers, and I’ve not been able to reach a stringer in Mosul yet to get more information. But if these numbers hold, there’s something very, very rotten in the north.
But the tight security was not enough to stop a roadside bomb from exploding on al-Madhif street in al-Amiriya area, targeting an Iraqi police patrol stationed near a polling centre. Two police officers were seriously injured and a police vehicle was damaged, Khalid told Aljazeera. The explosion occurred as the centre was opening at 7am, and no voters were there, said police Lieutenant Muhammad Kheyon. Fighters also attacked a polling centre in al-Dhu