In the Name of Improving People's Lives

Editor's note: I m posting at the other blog(also see Sunday articles below).
---
March 17 / 18, 2007

Mounting Civilian Deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq

By BRIAN CLOUGHLEY

"On a trip to the market, Haji Lawania says he drove into a hail of US gunfire that shattered his windshield and killed his father, nephew and a village elder. In three separate incidents Sunday and Monday, Afghan witnesses and officials said US military action may have killed up to 20 civilians."

- AP Afghanistan, March 7, 2007

"US forces opened fire on an unarmed Iraqi family's car and killed a father and his two young daughters, the man's wife told AFP on Saturday . . . 'They just opened fire randomly on us,' said Akhlas Abduljabbar, a Sunni housewife . . . 'They killed my husband and two daughters and my three-year-old boy was wounded in the head'."

- AFP Iraq, March 10, 2007

"I don't think America gets enough credit for trying to help improve people's lives."

- George W Bush, March 9, 2007

Bush has lost his wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The world condemns the gulags operated by his secret agencies that are accountable to the laws of neither man nor God. The peoples of Iraq and Afghanistan dread and detest the foreign troops who occupy their country. The lives of few on earth have been improved by America, and those are mainly the already obscenely rich (the "haves and the have-mores", in the words of the vulgar Bush). And the United States, that wonderful country, is now regarded round the world as an aggressive barbaric empire whose soldiers and pilots kill at will.

Give credit where it's due.

Not so many years ago infantry soldiers lived by the principle that their duty was to "close with and kill the enemy in any weather, in any terrain, by day or by night" (or words to that effect). Nowadays it seems that soldiers live by the principle that they can kill anyone who might get in their way, either by random blazing away at civilian cars carrying kids or by calling in airmen daremen who just love slamming 2000 pound bombs onto the planet.

These pilots, these video-game warriors, are experiencing what Tom Wolfe called "fighter jock heaven". They love this ultra-modern warfare against ragheads (just like the old days of gooks, dinks, slopes and so forth), because they have war joy without the danger. These bombing and rocketing pilots face no enemy threat. There is not a chance of them facing an enemy aircraft that could meet them on equal terms. They never see blood unless they cut themselves shaving. They take off, like in the simulator, and zoom along to blast and shatter whatever the army wants to target and it doesn't matter a damn if there are kids down there.

There has not been a US strike aircraft shot down or had its paint job scratched in this century, except by friendly fire. And after the Air Force or Navy jet jocks kill kids with 2000 pound bombs they can go back and relax over a beer, because they never see (so cannot think about), the deaths so far below them. They mean nothing to them, because they are the Lords of the skies. Their job is to kill and question not. They are the nearest thing, so far, to living robots. These poor, soulless, happy savages are androids, and in a way we should pity them.

The spokesman for North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces in Afghanistan, the Alice-in-Wonderland Colonel Tom Collins, told the world why two thousand pound bombs thunder down on Afghan houses. He explained that "It would seem to me that the enemy benefits when forces take what we consider appropriate action against threatening behavior . . . Nonetheless, the enemy is able to gain from that because there is this perception that we're shooting people, civilians."

Of course your troops are "shooting people, civilians" you booby. And your pilots and their bombs and rockets are killing civilians like there's no tomorrow, thereby creating ever more hatred of Americans.

In the bombing Collins referred to it was said that two men ran into a house after an incident in which it was alleged that they had fired at US soldiers. Well, let's accept that this is fact. So what should the US soldiers have done? It was what Colonel Collins describes as "threatening behavior". So why were the men not pursued by the soldiers they shot at?

Nobody knew, nobody could have known, who else was in the house into which the men fled. But the immediate action was to obliterate it with a two thousand pound bomb which killed lots of people. This was "appropriate action" according to Collins who said that "We didn't know who was in that building, but we saw fighters move into that area who were legitimate targets. The building was struck and, as we all know, unfortunately civilians were killed."

The officer ultimately responsible for calling in the airstrike, LtCol Brian Mennes, commanding officer of the paratroop battalion that was shot at, went to the graves of three of the children killed by the bomb and gave some cash to the families, which isn't as crass as it might appear because this is what is expected in Afghanistan in such circumstances. What was insensitive was the statement by Mennes that "I doubt many countries in the world, particularly that have been fighting here, go to these lengths to show the people we're sorry when bad things happen, even in very complex situations when you have the enemy fighting among the people". This is an inane set of observations, not least because he was denigrating US allies in Afghanistan such as the UK and Canada. (He meant the former Soviet Union, apparently.) And of course he wasn't going to any extraordinary "lengths" : he was doing the least that should be done in Afghanistan by people who kill kids with 2000 pound bombs or any other weapon.

Do people like Collins, Menes and the jet jockey bombers manage to sleep at night? Probably they do, with smiles on their lips. Because they are not normal human beings. To them it is "unfortunate" that civilians are killed. Three little boys in their graves are an example of "bad things happening". Do they have children, these bright-eyed and bushy-tailed kid-killers and apologists for kid-killing? Perhaps they do. No doubt if one of their kids was killed they would consider it an unfortunate bad thing. Or something. And probably they imagine, like their commander-in-chief, that they are "improving people's lives".

In shattering people's lives around the world, the Bush Administration is hurtling downwards to even murkier depths. Week by week there are more revelations of hideous incidents in which blameless citizens of Iraq or Afghanistan have been killed during military operations, drive-by shootings, or in acts of willful murder. No-one knows how many rapes, killings and beatings have taken place because it is only when the most horrible of them bobs, scum-like, to the surface that the media can take notice. The fetid bubbles that burst explosively on the public are disgusting. But they are only part of the evidence of deep-lying putrefaction.

Last month President Putin summed up America's position by saying that "Today we are witnessing an almost uncontained hyper-use of military force in international relations ; force that is plunging the world into an abyss of permanent conflicts . . . We are seeing a greater and greater disdain for the basic principles of international law. One country, the United States, has overstepped its national borders in every way."

Washington's actions, said President Putin, "have caused new human tragedies and created new centers of tension. Judge for yourselves : wars as well as local and regional conflicts have not diminished. And even more are dying than before. Many more."

But it's all in the cause of helping to improve people's lives.

Brian Cloughley is a former army officer who writes on political and military affairs. His website is www.briancloughley.com

Poll: Confidence in Iraq war down sharply

Story Highlights• Percentage who say they're confident, proud of Iraq war drops by more than half
• In 2003, 83 percent of Americans said they were confident, 65 percent proud
• 61 percent of those polled now say it was not worth invading Iraq, poll says
• Support for Afghanistan war drops from 88 percent in 2001 to 53 percent today

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Americans are starkly less confident and proud of their country's involvement in Iraq, according to poll results released Sunday.

However, the poll -- results of which were released on the eve of the Iraq war's 4-year anniversary -- also indicated that Americans are no more worried about the conflict than they were when it began in March 2003.

The CNN poll of 1,027 adults was conducted March 9-11 by Opinion Research Corp. The sampling error for the poll is plus or minus 3 percentage points.

According to the results, 35 percent of Americans are confident about the war, the poll said. When the war began, 83 percent of Americans expressed confidence in the campaign.

Similarly, 30 percent of those polled this month said they were proud of the war, as opposed to 65 percent who expressed that sentiment in 2003.

The poll also showed that 33 percent of Americans are afraid of the war and 55 percent are worried by it. Those percentages are roughly the same as they were four years ago.

Sunday's results came on the heels of a Saturday release indicating that years of war had whittled away at Americans' support for the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

When the Iraq war began, 68 percent of Americans said they felt the situation in the country was worth fighting over. Now, 61 percent of those surveyed say it was not worth invading Iraq, according to the poll.

That survey of 1,027 adults by Opinion Research Corp. was conducted by telephone March 9-11 as well. It has a sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

The poll showed that support for the Iraq war had dwindled to 35 percent. In 2004, support for the war was about 56 percent. Last year, the number dipped to 37 percent, and today about 35 percent of Americans say they support the war, according to the poll.

Support for the war in Afghanistan also has seen a considerable decline as 88 percent of those polled in 2001 said they were behind the conflict. This month's poll indicates that support lingers around 53 percent.

Also, according to the poll, about 55 percent of Americans feel the war in Afghanistan is "going badly," according to the poll.

CNN's Keating Holland contributed to this report.

Base Politics

To understand why the United States turns a blind eye to growing state repression in Central Asia, look no further than its air force base.

Web Exclusive: 03.15.07

On an unseasonably warm January day in Bishkek, the capital city of Kyrgyzstan, Edil Baisalov, a young activist, found himself in yet another standoff with the government. Baisalov has had a dramatic run over the past year, speaking out against corruption in the government and leading a successful series of protests in the fall to amend Kyrgyzstan's constitution and decrease the powers of the president. His work has been dangerous; he has survived an assassination attempt and several attacks. Today, however, Baisalov was at the tax authority's office facing charges that he hadn't paid taxes on property nine years ago. “You have to remember Henry David Thoreau -- ‘To remain independent you have to own nothing,’” he said. "Many activists have had this problem, so I interpret this as intimidation.”

Worried about the development, Baisalov retreated to his home on the outskirts of Bishkek, where he lives with his wife, daughter, mother, and father. Baisalov is on what he calls "paternity leave" after the birth of his daughter, but his decision has more to do with wanting to take some time off from politics and fade from the public eye.

In many ways, Baisalov, who has a reputation as one of the brightest young reformists in Kyrgyzstan, is cooling his heels. This year, he has been cut off from his funding from the American organization the National Democracy Institute (NDI), which once supported his civic activities to the tune of $100,000 a year.

NDI says that Baisalov had become too political, crossing the line from activist to politician for his work supporting Kyrgyzstan's fledging opposition. "When you're providing support, one has to be careful of what the lines are to be sure not to look like we're funding political activities," said a representative of NDI in Washington. "[Baisalov] had adopted a much more political profile, with participation in the demonstrations in November. Our support was for election monitoring."

But the line separating politics from activist is a thin one in Kyrgyzstan. After the successful Tulip Revolution in 2005 succeeded in ousting authoritarian president Askar Akayev, many hoped that new president Kurmanbek Bakiyev would usher in real reforms. But soon enough, Bakiyev refused to move on his promised agenda. The media remains largely state-controlled, and corruption is rampant.

Baisalov, with his stylish black glasses and perfect English, could pass for a young media executive in New York. His media savvy and Western training allowed him to quickly rise to national and even international prominence for speaking out against corruption and mobilizing Kyrgyz citizens to criticize the government. Using a blog, he detailed insider politics in Kyrgyzstan. He organized government protests and helped opposition leaders craft their public message. In the protests last November that forced the government to rewrite the constitution, limiting the power of the president, Baisalov could be seen on television every day standing right next to opposition leaders.

Kyrgyzstan, a mountainous nation bordered by Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, China, and Tajikistan, has been seen as an islet of democracy by the West. The 2005 Tulip Revolution, which followed in the wake of democratic revolutions in Ukraine, Georgia and Serbia, appeared to signify a turning point for Central Asia, with Kyrgyzstan the leader of the emerging democracies. But in short order, U.S. pro-democracy funders have been losing their footing across the region. The International Republican Institute has had its offices closed in several countries, and now is primarily active only in Kyrgyzstan. NDI, while fairing better, has also seen a dramatic cooling off in Central Asia.

Meanwhile, democracy in Kyrgyzstan is losing ground fast. After the successful November protests, the Kyrgyz government reversed several amendments to the constitution during December holidays. Why then, would NDI cut off Baisalov from his funding right at a time when it seemed democracy reformists needed support the most?

Baisalov thinks it's because he didn't want to play ball. "It was an unhappy situation because they didn't want to be seen as representing my activism and criticism of the government," he said. A representative of a democracy organization working in Kyrgyzstan, meanwhile, explained to the Prospect that popular suspicion and misunderstanding of the work of democracy organizations has grown since the color revolutions.

But others credit NDI's shift to something else: recent tensions over a U.S. air force base in Kyrgyzstan. That base was established -- giving the country a new strategic importance to the United States -- in 2001. After the government of neighboring Uzbekistan expelled a U.S. base from its territory, the Kyrgyz base took on even greater importance as the sole forward operating base into Afghanistan. Conflict has simmered ever since. In December, a Kyrgyz civilian was killed while trying to illegally enter the base, and that was merely the latest in a string of mishaps that has soured public opinion over the past year.

During base negotiations this summer, two U.S. diplomats were expelled from Kyrgyzstan for meddling in local affairs. Then, at the end of the summer, a U.S. air force major disappeared from a Bishkek mall. She surfaced some days later with her head shaved and dyed brown, saying she had been kidnapped. So far, there’s been no public disclosure of what happened. (Meanwhile, also during the summer, the U.S. and Kyrgyz governments reached an agreement on a new lease for the base, to the tune of $150 million dollars.) In the fall, a U.S. air tanker clipped a Kyrgyz passenger jet, almost causing a major crash. The local press has jumped on every episode, both trumpeting and fuelling public dissatisfaction with the base's existence. The discontent has spread to the highest levels of government. Most recently, the Kyrgyz speaker of parliament told State Department officials in Washington that the base agreement needed to be renegotiated. He warned of a perilous downturn in Kyrgyz-U.S. relations.

Some local analysts say that the United States is scaling back its support for activists like Baisalov Kyrgyzstan in order to maintain its air base. Alisher Mamasaliev is an analyst who runs the Public Association Civil Platform. "In the last year, the position of the U.S. has changed drastically," he said during a meeting at his offices in a dilapidated Soviet-era building. "It has to do with the diplomatic scandal and with the fact that it's unclear where the financial payments from the military base are going. There are a few American politicians whose comments intervene in internal politics and that instigate the anti-American sentiment."

One result of this souring of relations with the United States, says Mamasaliev, is that Kyrgyz officials are now increasingly taking marching orders from Russia. Mamasaliev, who was recently dispatched to a meeting of young political leaders across the region in Moscow, says the Kyrgyz government is looking to cement closer ties with Russia and that the Kremlin is having dramatic input into local politics. "The closest economic and political relationship is with Russia," he said. "Our government relies on the support of Moscow, and with the Kremlin, the support is very visible."

One example is a policy that closely mirrors a new nonprofit law in Russia which forces all nongovernmental organizations to register with a new government agency, reporting all their activities and foreign funding. In January 2006, the Kyrgyz Ministry of Justice ordered an investigation of all foreign-funded NGOs in the country. The prime minister at the time, Feliks Kulov, went a step further and suggested a ban on all foreign NGOs. Both measures were eventually reversed.

But for activists like Baisalov, the message has been clear. Not only has Baisalov lost his U.S. support, he still suffers locally for being tied to American funders. Discredited by the government, he’s often labeled an American lackey or agent. Even educated young people question his motives. A young Kyrgyz businessman, who regularly bribes government officials to import alcohol for sale in the country and who went to college in the United States, told me that he hates Baisalov above all because he makes it harder for him to operate. The same man asked me for any interview tape I had of Baisalov so he could tamper with it and damage Baisalov’s public image.

Baisalov once dreamed of going to graduate school in the United States. He finished his senior year of high school in South Carolina -- one of the most formative years of his life, he says. But in the wake of his “divorce” from NDI, Baisalov is considering totally cutting his ties to the United States. “You know, I'm already called a Western agent, an American lackey,” he said. “Imagine if I go to an American school. So I choose to stay here.”

Baisalov says he is firmly committed to working in the civil sector to reform Kyrgyz democracy. But he has a new destination in mind for his travels. “Why not China?” he said. “That seems to be the future.”

By Alexandra Poolos

Alexandra Poolos worked as a correspondent for Radio Free Europe, primarily covering the Balkans and the former Soviet Union. She has also worked for the Wall Street Journal, Newsday, and the Christian Science Monitor. In reporting this story, Poolos traveled to Kyrgyzstan on a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, a Washington-based organization that supports reporting on global issues. Additional photographs and related resources can be found here.

Keep Off The Hippies

Friday, March 16, 2007

by digby

Ron Brownstein and Matt Cooper were on Hardball today (a refreshingly excellent show when it's hosted by David Gregory instead of you-know-who) discussing the Plame hearing. Brownstein is a good reporter who usually gets it right, but today he betrayed a little bit of that beltway reflexive dismissiveness of anything "the left" finds important. He said that Waxman needed to pick his battles better because playing to the liberal blogosphere with hearings like this will create the same problems for Democrats that Republicans found themselves in when they went after Clinton. Setting aside the fact that the Republicans' "problems" resulted in them holding all three branches of government for six years, this sounds to me like one of those tired GOP talking points that reporters love to parrot because it distances them from the hippies.

It's especially ironic since we've just seen the mainstream press sporting dripping oozing egg yolk all over their faces over the US Attorney scandal, which they also dismissed as a figment of hippy conspiracy mongerer's imaginations. This knee jerk loathing of the left tends to lead them astray and they should check themselves before they do it.

Matt Cooper and David Gregory ably argued that the Democrats can hardly be called overly zealous since this is only the second hearing the congress ever held on the issue and Cooper pointed out that this is hardly a settled issue what with the possible pardon and all. Furthermore, the underlying "crime" that Waxman is getting at isn't the covert agent act which the lying Gorgon Toensing insists on arguing every five minutes. The crime was lying and misleading the United States of America into war, something that the congress damned well should be investigating. Valerie Plame's outing is a window into that crime and the Democrats are wise to explore her story to show just how far the administration was willing to go to cover their tracks. What a prosecutor cannot do --- prosecute a political crime --- the congress surely can.

There is a huge need for the Democrats to develop the record on this administration's many crimes. It's important for our future and it's important for history. What they have done should never, ever be repeated. You had the highest reaches of the white house casually revealing what was clearly "need to know" classified information (which they had no "need to know" in the first place) to reporters, for purely political purposes. The same people who did this later turned around and said that reporters for the Washington Post and NY Times should be investigated by the Justice Department for revealing classified information that was not released purely to punish a political enemy, but rather in true whistleblower fashion, to tell the nation what its government was illegally doing.

We now know that in the case of the NSA spying stories, the Attorney General personally intervened to stop an internal investigation of the program when it came too close to him, but allowed those who were investigating that alleged treason of the NY Times to carry on.

This is all part of a very large mosaic of government secrecy, political backstabbing and abuse of power. Those of us who were screaming about this until we are hoarse were dismissed out of hand when we argued that no administration should be allowed to seize such unchecked power and the assumption among the establishment was that it was just more of our "unhinged" hysteria.

It wasn't. This stuff happened and it's likely only the tip of the iceberg. If the press can get past their loathing of the dirty hippies for five minutes they will see that not only have we been right, we have been flogging some amazingly good stories for the past six years that had they bothered to report them would have been journalistic coups. We really aren't that nuts --- and the Bush administration really is that bad.

.
digby 3/16/2007 06:20:00 PM Comments (101) | Trackback (0)

Video of Encampment to Stop the War Arrests

Related
Anti-War Protests
Photos
---
Video of Encampment to Stop the War Arrests Yesterday
By Troops Out Now Staff
Mar 16, 2007, 16:5

WASHINGTON - Yesterday, 9 participants in the Encampment to Stop the War were arrested at the House Appropriations Committee Meeting in the Rayburn Building. The Democrat-led committee met to execute their first step toward increasing funding for the U.S. war on the people of Iraq. The following video was taken by Troops Out Now during the arrests. Our attorneys worked throughout the day yesterday to gain their release late last night. Watch for more direct action against the Democrat-backed war on Iraq as people are pouring into Washington this evening for the March on the Pentagon tomorrow. You can find more action updates on the Encampment to Stop the War Blog.

VIDEO

URL

Major New Problems At Walter Reed

EXCLUSIVE
Written by Bruce Leshan
9NEWS NOW
Created:3/16/2007 3:40:22 PM
Last Updated:3/16/2007 6:30:26 PM

Washington, DC (WUSA) -- A major 9NEWS NOW EXCLUSIVE -- allegations from a former inspector at Walter Reed of widespread and dangerous problems in nearly all the buildings at the Army's premier hospital.

Burst steam pipes near electrical cables, rats, mold, and holes in floors and walls -- all of that extends far beyond the well-publicized problems at the notorious Building 18.

And 9NEWS NOW has learned managers may have been slow to respond.

A worried quality control inspector, Mark Cordell, finally quit last week in frustration, and brought his fears to 9NEWS NOW.

"I won't sit back and watch someone get killed," he says while running through 81 pictures of the problems on a laptop computer.

Cordell says the worst of it may be Building 40. The old research institute has been condemned, but last week, the private contractor now responsible for maintaining Walter Reed sent workers in to fix a leak.

Cordell points to a picture showing the terrible decay inside the building and says, "The water is actually on the ground floor here. There is water halfway across the ground floor. And there's electricity too. There's high voltage that goes to this building. Two thirteen thousand volt transformers. Through the basement filled with water."

Cordell took more pictures in Building 1, the old hospital, that's now the main administration building. Water damage in the walls; holes in the ceilings next to electric cables and computer servers; hazardous waste stored between occupied floors; and leaking pipes that are rotting floor joists.

"The steam pipes below these buildings have burst, and it's making the rafters on the basement floor wet. People work on those floors," says Cordell.

When the Washington Post exposed the black mold in Building 18, where wounded soldiers recover, the contractor sent Cordell in to coordinate repairs. He says he did 250 to 300 work orders in two weeks.

The Army moved many of the injured soldiers to Building 14 -- and Cordell says as soon as they arrived the troops found more problems.

"So the building the soldiers moved to is just as messed up as Building 18?" asked 9NEWS NOW Reporter Bruce Leshan.

"Yes. Every one of the buildings at Walter Reed is the same way, or worse."

Cordell has a stack of e-mails -- nearly a week of trying to get managers to hire a qualified high voltage electrician to shut off the power to the flooded Building 40.

He finally went to the Garrison Commander who thanked him. But he's still unsure if it's been fixed.

He says, "They more or less told me, just be quiet and let it go. Well you know what, I can't let that go. Look at this, this is corrosion, stuff just wasted away. When they fix one steam leak, it just bursts somewhere else."

A spokesman for Walter Reed declined to offer any comment on the situation. But a Pentagon public affairs officer called and promised a response soon.

IAP, the private contractor that took over maintaining the hospital last month, released a written statement, saying it acted "without delay" to deal with the situation at Building 40, but that it took a little while to find "electrical schematics" and bring in a "high voltage subcontractor."

It also says Cordell's photographs were part of a survey it's using to develop a comprehensive building maintenance and assessment plan.

Related Video

Bruce Leshan Reports

PHOTOS

Al-Jazeera released video clip from Iraqi resistance operation

This video released by Al-Jazeera few minuets ago, showing one member of Iraqi resistance putting explosives under a US tank in Ramadi.

Video

U.S. troops in Iraq often abuse prisoners: report

The United States has a flagrant record of violating the Geneva Convention in systematically abusing prisoners during the Iraqi War and the War in Afghanistan, says the Human Rights Record of the United States in 2006 issued on Thursday.

A report released in News Night of British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), originally provided by the U.S.-based Human Rights First, showed that since August 2002, 98 prisoners had died in American-run prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Among the dead, 34 died of premeditated murder, 11 deaths were suspicious, and 8 to 12 were tortured to death, according to an AFP report on Feb. 21, 2006.

A Human Rights Watch report in July 2006 said torture and other abuses against detainees in U.S. custody in Iraq were authorized and routine.

Detainees were routinely subject to severe beating, painful stress positions, severe sleep deprivation, and exposure to extreme cold and hot temperatures.

Soldiers were told that many abusive techniques were authorized by the military chain of command and Geneva Conventions did not apply to the detainees at their facility.

Detainees at Camp Nama, a U.S. detention center at the Baghdad airport- in violation of international law- not registered with the International Committee of the Red Cross, were regularly stripped naked and subject to beatings.

Some detainees were used for target practice. In May 2006 human rights group Amnesty International condemned the detention of some 14,000 prisoners in Iraq without charge or trial.

On February 15, 2006, Australia's SBS TV aired more than 10 pictures and video clips taken at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison; the images included: a man's throat was cut off, left forearm of a man was left with burns and shrapnel wounds, a blood-stained interrogation room, and a seemingly insane ma's body covered with his own feces.

U.S. army's criminal investigation division gathered materials including 1, 325 photographs and 93 video clips of suspected abuse of detainees, 546 photographs of suspected dead Iraqi detainees, all recorded between Oct. 18 and Dec. 30, 2003, reported the Guardian on Feb. 17, 2006.

Another report carried by the New York Times in December 2006 says a man named Donald Vance, a 29-year-old Navy veteran from Chicago who went to Iraq as a security contractor, was detained by American soldiers and put into detention center Camp Cropper for 97 days.

The man said American guards arrived at his cell periodically, shackled his hands and feet, blindfolded him and took him to a padded room for interrogation.

When he was returned to his cell, he was fatigued but unable to sleep, for the fluorescent lights were never turned off and at most hours, heavy metal or country music blared in the corridor.

He was not allowed to use telephone and denied the right to a lawyer at detention hearings.

The New York Times reported on March 18, 2006 that an elite Special Operations forces unit Task Force 6-26 converted one of Saddam Hussein's former military bases near Baghdad into a top-secret detention center.

There, American soldiers made one of the former Iraqi government's torture chambers into their own interrogation cell. They named it the Black Room. In the windowless, jet-black garage-size room, some soldiers beat prisoners with rifle butts.

According to another report by British newspaper The Independent, 460 people were confined in the Guantanamo prison camp, including dozens of adolescent prisoners, with more than 60 under 18 and the youngest only 14.

A young man named Mohammed el-Gharani was allegedly accused of member of al-Qaeda and conspiracy in the 1998 al-Qaeda London terrorist conspiracy when he was only 12. In 2001, he was arrested at the age of 14.

According to a report by the Washington Post, on May 30, 2006, 75 prisoners in Guantanamo went on a hunger strike against U.S. soldiers' maltreatment.

On June 10, 2006, three prisoners hung themselves with bed sheets and clothing, reported the Associated Press on June 11, 2006.

Mani Shaman Turki al-Habardi Al-Utaybi's family said his organs including the brain, liver, kidney and heart were all taken away when the corpse arrived.

Mani Shaman Turki al-Habardi Al-Utaybi's cousin said that might be done to conceal the truth behind his brother's death.

Another Saudi Arabian prisoner's father thought his son's death was not suicide but intentional hanging as he found bruises on his son's body.

The Amnesty International described it as another "indictment" of the worsening U.S. human rights record.

Human rights experts with the United Nations have condemned the United States for long-term arbitrary detention of suspects and abuses of detainees as serious violations of international law and relevant international conventions.

The U.S. Military Commissions Act signed into law on October 17, 2006 allows more severe means be used to interrogate terrorist suspects.

The War on Terror Ended

16 Mar 2007

. . . And the Winner Was Not the United States
by Leon Hadar

Baghdad, 2027 (Year of the Goat). Special for the Shanghai Post (proud member of the Global Murdoch Group).

Unlike some of my readers, I’m old enough to remember the time, during the American occupation of Baghdad, when this part of the city was known as the Green Zone. It was renamed the Yellow Peace Zone ten years ago, after Iraq joined the China-led Association of South-West Asian Nations (ASWAN). In fact, I’m digital-delivering this report on my Chinese-made RedPeony from Ali Baba’s Pagoda Hotel, which is located near the embassy of Greater China and which was built in 2015 in exactly the same location where, two years earlier, a devastating explosion triggered by fighters allied with the al-Sadr brigades destroyed the gigantic U.S. embassy, forcing thousands of American citizens to flee Baghdad and make their way to the Turkish-controlled northern part of Iraq.

---

Indeed, I was there in Baghdad on that historic day, October 12, 2013, and I watched as Lauren Bush, the last U.S. ambassador to Baghdad (and daughter of Neil Bush, a brother of former President George W. Bush), as well as other U.S. officials and Iraqi public figures, including Ahmed Chalabi, were evacuated. That last U.S. helicopter left the city on its way to the aircraft carrier USS Richard Cheney, which was positioned somewhere in the Persian Gulf. It was a sad and traumatic moment for many older Americans, recalling memories of another humiliating evacuation of U.S. diplomats and citizens from Ho Chi Minh City, following its liberation by the People’s Army of Vietnam on April 30, 1975 (an event the Americans refer to as the “Fall of Saigon”).

Long before the Americans decided to end their diplomatic presence in Baghdad in May 2013 (Mexico, a member of the North American Union, represents U.S. diplomatic interests in Iraq now), American pundits had already started debating the question of “Who lost Iraq?” After the Americans decided to close their last naval base near Haifa in Israel-Palestine, on September 17, 2016, the most popular topic at major conferences in think tanks in Washington, D.C., became “Who lost the Middle East?”

As an old Middle East hand, I was invited to address one such conference, at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) in Washington, D.C., on June 11, 2017. The event, held in the Richard Perle Auditorium at the Leo Strauss Building and sponsored by the Weekly Standard, was bursting with symbolism. After all, it was in the offices of this think tank that the so-called neoconservatives, in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington of September 11, 2001, had drawn up the plans for the ousting of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and for “remaking” the Middle East under U.S. leadership. The neoconservative agenda of trying to establish U.S. hegemony in the Middle East—or an American Empire, as some had referred to it—as a way of advancing American interests and values was embraced by the administration of President George W. Bush. That, in turn, created the conditions for the collapse of U.S. power in the Middle East. In the aftermath of the Five-Year War (2008-13) between Iran and the Arab-Sunni Coalition headed by Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Syria, the Quartet (China, India, Russia, and the European Union) helped bring some stability to the region, with Turkey playing a leading role in ending the civil wars in Iraq and Lebanon.

The conference at AEI brought together some of the surviving neocons, including former Weekly Standard editor (and advisor to failed Republican presidential candidate John McCain) Bill Kristol; Michael Ledeen, who, with aging Italian politician Alessandra Mussolini, is now running the Gabriele D’Annunzio Institute in Rome; and Paul Wolfowitz, the president of AEI, then writing The First Neocon, his biography of Leon Trotsky. Unfortunately, Perle, after whom the auditorium was named, passed away three years ago after choking on a bone in a fish restaurant in Paris—although some conspiracy theorists allege that he was poisoned by an agent of a “foreign power” who was worried that Perle was planning to reveal in his memoirs new details about the events that led to the U.S. decision to oust Saddam.

The title of my address was “The Gulf Wars: Was U.S. Strategic Loss Inevitable?” Discussing the dramatic events that unfolded in the first decade of the 21st century, starting with the September 11 terrorist attacks, I tried to draw the outlines of the counterfactual “what if” scenario and contrast it with what really happened. I started by suggesting that September 11 had highlighted the costs of the strategy of maintaining U.S. hegemony in the Middle East after the end of the Cold War and, particularly, in the aftermath of the Gulf War of 1991. That strategy had been embraced by both Republican President George H.W. Bush and the Democratic administration of President Bill Clinton, and it was based on the notion that an “over the horizon” presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia and other Arab Gulf states would be sufficient to contain the anti-status-quo powers of Iraq and Iran (a policy known as “off-shore balancing”) and that continuing American diplomacy aimed at fostering peace between Israel and the Palestinians would help win the support of the moderate Arab regimes in the region. In short, it was a low-cost strategy aimed at deterring potential challenges from regional players, such as Baghdad and Tehran, as well as global powers such as the European Union.

But the collapse of the Camp David talks between the Israelis and the Palestinians in 2000 and the start of the Second Intifada, followed by September 11, illustrated the need for replacing the Pax Americana approach in the Middle East and also provided Americans with a glimpse of Hell-on-Earth, of what could happen if the tensions between the West and the Islamic world degenerated into a bloody global confrontation. “In retrospect, it seems to me that a mix of the right policies, including effective security measures and creative diplomatic efforts following September 11, could have ensured that the primary goal of Osama bin Laden—forcing the United States and the West out of the Middle East and creating the conditions for a War of Civilizations—would not have been achieved,” I argued in my address.

“But as we know now, after September 11, U.S. foreign policy was hijacked by a bunch of American ideologues who exploited the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in order to advance a U.S.-led messianic crusade to remake the Middle East—in the most devastating way, as far as U.S. national interests and the Western presence in the Middle East was concerned,” I continued. And I speculated that, “in retrospect, the United States and the European Union, backed by Russia, China, and the rest of the international community as an effective Concert of Great Powers—a U.S.-led global oligopoly as opposed to the model American monopoly envisioned by the neocons—could have attempted to ensure that the goals of the invasion of Afghanistan were accomplished through the capture of Osama and the rest of the Al Qaeda leadership. That could have been followed by pursuing a common strategy aimed at the radical Muslim terrorist networks in Europe, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere, while working together with the pro-Western governments in the Middle East, including Hussein’s in Iraq.” The United States and her allies, in a 21st-century version of the Congress of Vienna, could also, with a little political imagination, have tried to manage some of the explosive policy issues that helped to ignite anti-American sentiment in the Muslim world, including the tensions with Iraq and Iran, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and the rise of political Islamic movements.

In raising this “what if” scenario, I stressed that I was not arguing that there would have been easy and quick solutions to these issues. When you are trying to treat a headache, however, there is a difference between banging your head against the wall and taking a rest and an aspirin. The Bush administration, led by a powerful group of neoconservative policymakers and their allies in the think tanks, media, and even the blogosphere, ended up placing the hunt for Osama on Washington’s back burner and, instead, launching a unilateral invasion of Iraq. The stated aims became “liberating” Iraq from the rule of Saddam Hussein and his secular regime and turning it into a shining model of freedom and democracy for the greater Middle East. The decision produced a fissure in the transatlantic relationship, ignited anti-American hostility in the Middle East and other parts of the world, and weakened the antiterrorism alliance. The Bush administration exacerbated the situation by giving a green light to Israel to destroy the infrastructure of the Palestinian Authority and refusing to move toward some form of rapprochement with Iran, with which Washington shared common interests in post-Taliban Afghanistan and in post-Saddam Iraq. At the same time, the neocon Democracy Project helped bring to power in Baghdad a coalition of Shiite clerics with ties to Iran, led to the election of the radical Islamic group Hamas in Palestine, and strengthened the power of the Shiite radical Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Putting all of these historic developments into context, I told the audience at AEI, one could have concluded that the post-September 11 U.S. policies were nothing short of a revolutionary attempt to weaken the very fragile foundations of the political status quo in the Middle East—without coming up with a viable and sustainable strategy aimed at replacing them in a way that would help protect long-term American and Western interests. The United States destroyed Iraq’s military power, the only counterbalance to Iran, without making an effort to co-opt Iran into the system. She got rid of an Arab-Sunni dictator who had kept the lid on the ethnic and religious powder keg of Iraq, and she helped create the conditions for a bloody civil war there without deploying the necessary military troops to deal with such an outcome. In the process, the United States strengthened the power of the Shiites in the Middle East who threatened the Arab-Sunni regimes, while empowering Kurdish nationalism, which alarmed Turkey and Iran. At the same time, U.S. policies that helped radicalize the Palestinians also enabled the election of the Palestinian offshoot of the radical Muslim Brotherhood, ensuring that the Palestinian-Israeli peace process would not be revived and providing a sense of political momentum to Muslim Brotherhood groups in Egypt and other parts of the Middle East.

Add to all of that the growing anti-Western emotions among Muslims worldwide, as demonstrated in the “cartoons war”; Iran’s drive to achieve nuclear-weapons capability; and the continuing domestic challenges faced by the pro-American regimes in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan, and it became quite obvious that no one, not even the group of Wise Men (and one Wise Woman) who constituted the Iraq Study Group, could have pushed the rewind button, restored the status quo ante, and saved President Bush and the U.S. foreign-policy establishment. The powerful forces unleashed by the United States could not be stopped and ended up intertwining with other global developments, including Sino-American competition over energy and rising economic nationalism in the West, not to mention the expanding U.S. budget and trade deficits and the domestic political discontent that led to the election of an anti-Bush Democratic Congress in 2006. Not unlike the aftermath of World War I, which brought about the collapse of great empires (including that of the Ottomans in the Middle East), the dramatic changes that had taken place in the Middle East helped produce much instability in the coming years and ignited forces that challenged U.S. supremacy in the region and around the world.

What happened in the Middle East could be described as dialectical thinking run amok. President Bush and his neoconservative advisors had pledged that, after ousting Saddam Hussein, they would succeed in transforming “liberated” Iraq into a prosperous democracy that would serve as a model of political and economic freedom for the Middle East. Westernized and secular Mesopotamia was supposed to have a “domino effect” on the rest of the authoritarian governments in the region. Hence, the withdrawal of Syria’s troops from Lebanon in the aftermath of the so-called Cedar Revolution, which was celebrated as an important chapter of the U.S.-led “democratization” of the Middle East, was supposed to help eradicate the sectarian splits in that country and make it possible to disarm and co-opt the Shiite-led Hezbollah into the political system. The expectation in Washington was that this would be followed by the collapse of the Ba’ath regime in Damascus, leading even to the downfall of the ayatollahs in Tehran. And finally, as the Bushies envisioned it, “the road from Baghdad would lead to Jerusalem.” That is, the dramatic explosion of freedom in the Arab world would make it more likely that the Palestinians would move to establish their own independent state and conclude a peace accord with Israel. In the first stage of that process, the Palestinians would hold a free election that would bring to power a moderate and peace-oriented leadership.

President Bush’s project to remake the Middle East collapsed within a year of its launch in 2003. Iraq did indeed become a model for the entire Middle East—a model of sectarian violence, religious extremism, and growing anti-American and anti-Western sentiments. If anything, Bush’s policies had made the Middle East safer for ethnic and religious strife, not for democracy. His policies helped to shift the balance of power in the region in the direction of Iran and Shiite and Sunni radicals. Iraq started exporting war and instability to the rest of the Middle East. Arab-Shiites and Arab-Sunnis were massacring each other throughout the country; the fighting gradually degenerated into a civil war and the splitting of Iraq into Shiite, Sunni, and Kurdish ministates. In Baghdad, Saddam’s secular regime was replaced through an open election by a coalition of Shiite religious parties with links to the ruling Shiite clerics in Iran.

The main beneficiaries of these developments were Iran’s religious Shiite rulers, who strengthened their influence in Iraq and encouraged radical Shiite groups—including Hezbollah in Lebanon—in the so-called Shiite Triangle stretching from the Persian Gulf to the Levant to reassert their power and challenge the ruling (pro-American) Arab-Sunni governments there. In Iran herself, instead of the Democratic Spring that the neocons had predicted, the ayatollahs actually strengthened their hold on power, and a virulent anti-American (and anti-Israeli) figure was elected president through a mostly democratic process. In Lebanon, U.S. pressure forced the withdrawal of Syrian troops that had been invited by the Arab League to bring stability into that country in the aftermath of the civil war and the Israeli occupation in early 1982 (which had also helped give birth to Hezbollah). Then, the Americans celebrated the sectarian parliamentary election that helped increase the political power of Hezbollah and brought it into the government. Hence, Hezbollah gained more power and representation, while a weak central government lacked the power to disarm its militias, which continued to dominate southern Lebanon and the border with Israel. And the road from Baghdad did not lead to Jerusalem. The Bush administration failed to revive the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and increased U.S. backing for Israel. At the same time, the Americans, resisting advice from Israelis and moderate Palestinians, insisted on holding free elections in the West Bank, which led to the victory of Hamas, an anti-Israeli, anti-American, radical Sunni group that is opposed to holding peace negotiations with Israel.

On one level, on the “democratic” side of the democratic empire in the Middle East, the Bush administration launched a revolutionary process that brought to power, and played into the hands of, the more radical, anti-American players in the region: Iran and her alliance of Shiite groups in Iraq and Lebanon, as well as Hamas in Palestine and, by extension, the Muslim Brotherhood in the rest of the Arab-Sunni world. On another level, on the “imperial” side of the democratic empire in the Middle East, the Americans moved aggressively to strengthen their hegemony in the region directly (Iraq), indirectly (Lebanon), and through proxies (Israel). They attempted to build up an international coalition to contain and isolate Iran and force her to give up her ambition to develop nuclear-weapons capability, and adopted a similarly punitive approach to Damascus while trying to oust Hamas from power.

“Was it surprising,” I asked, “that this mishmash of idealistic democracy-promotion crusades and a unipolar approach aimed at establishing U.S. hegemony in the Middle East ended up producing an ad hoc, informal coalition of anti-American players, who were emboldened thanks to Washington’s policies and who are now trying to challenge U.S. power?” Iran, whose leaders sensed that she was gradually becoming a regional power, and an isolated and angry Syrian regime decided in 2006 to utilize their proxies, Hezbollah and Hamas, to deliver an indirect blow to American power by making aggressive moves against an American proxy, Israel. Indeed, it was in that geopolitical and regional context that one must place the killing and kidnapping of the Israeli soldiers on Israel’s borders with Gaza and Lebanon that led to the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah. The goal of this action was to demonstrate that, against the backdrop of the U.S. quagmire in Iraq and the increasing influence of Iran, Washington would find it difficult to maintain the status quo in the region. And that is exactly what happened. The Bush administration had given Israel a green light to attack Hezbollah, hoping that Israeli military power would succeed in defeating Hezbollah and Hamas and leave the Americans in a position to counterbalance Iran’s growing power. Instead, by launching missile attacks against targets in Israel, including Haifa, and resisting an Israeli ground invasion of southern Lebanon, Hezbollah demonstrated its growing military and political power, while the Israeli air bombardment of Lebanon only produced more anti-American sentiments in the Middle East. “Ironically, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice explained to me and other reporters, who had traveled with her to Lebanon as she was trying to defuse the crisis, that the scenes of death, destruction, and human misery from Beirut, Haifa, and Gaza are—get this!—‘birth pangs of a new Middle East,’” I recalled.

If anything, the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war was probably the turning point in the American imperial project in the Middle East. The war exposed the weakness of Israel and her American patron while shifting the balance of power in the direction of Iran and Syria. Demonstrating the rising U.S. problems in the region, Washington, with its military overstretched in Iraq and Afghanistan, had to plead with the French and the Germans (and the Chinese) to deploy peacekeeping troops to Lebanon. And, in another attempt to counterbalance the Iranians, the Americans, with the support of the Saudis, gave a green light to the Israelis at the end of 2007 to strike alleged nuclear military sites in Iran. As in Lebanon, the Israeli aerial bombardment resulted in thousands of civilian casualties while failing to destroy the main and secret nuclear military site. Iran retaliated by attacking oil platforms and tankers, closing the Strait of Hormuz, and hitting oil infrastructure in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf emirates. Iraq’s Shiite government announced its support for Tehran and called on the United States to withdraw her troops from Iraq. And Hezbollah’s forces in Lebanon launched another set of devastating missile attacks on Israel, hitting Tel Aviv and oil refineries in Haifa, while its militias succeeded in overrunning the forces that backed the pro-Western government in Beirut. Israel reacted by invading southern Lebanon and taking control of the roads leading to Damascus, while U.S. Marines and French forces landed in Beirut. At the same time, American air and missile attacks destroyed Iran’s oil installations and crippled her economy.

While the United States and Israel emerged as victorious from the military campaign, not unlike the British, French, and Israelis after the 1956 Suez Campaign against Egypt, they found themselves totally isolated in the international community and facing enormous diplomatic and economic pressure to reverse their policies. As oil prices soared to more than $125 per barrel, Venezuela imposed an oil embargo on the United States, and China threatened to create the conditions for the collapse of the dollar by selling her U.S. Treasury bonds if Washington did not agree to convene an international conference on the Middle East that would determine the political future of Iraq and Lebanon, as well as take steps toward imposing a peace accord on Israel and Palestine. This international pressure, combined with a deteriorating economy at home and growing political opposition, including threats by Congress to impeach Bush, forced the White House to agree to take part in such a conference, which produced an interim and loose confederal arrangement backed by fragile cease-fires in Iraq, Lebanon, and Israel-Palestine in June 2008. Unfortunately, growing tensions between Damascus and Baghdad along the border, following the deployment of Syrian troops into the Arab-Sunni enclave of Iraq, resulted in the collapse of the cease-fire agreements in the region and marked the start of the bloody Five-Year War. The only good news for Washington was the decision by the government of the Israel-Palestine Federation to refrain from taking sides in the Sunni-Shiite conflict and to ask the Americans and the Europeans to provide it with security guarantees. However, after President George P. Bush (the nephew of George W.), a.k.a the First Hispanic-American President, announced his decision to close down the U.S. naval base in Israel-Palestine, the government in Jerusalem decided to follow in the footsteps of most of its neighbors and join the China-led ASWAN. In fact, Beijing announced that the headquarters of its alliance in Western Asia—Americans still refer to the region as the “Middle East”—would be located in Tel Aviv.

Leon Hadar is a research fellow in foreign-policy studies at the Cato Institute, where he analyzes global politics and economics.

This article first appeared in the March 2007 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Velkomin to the United States of Foreclosure

Related
Subprime Defaults to Soar, Hurt Lenders, Funds Say
---
Mar 18, 2007

By Mike Whitney

The stock market is about to crash. The only question is whether it will quickly drop down the elevator shaft or follow the jerky flight-path of a man pushed down a stairwell. Either way, the outcome will be the same; stocks will nose-dive, the dollar will plummet, and the bruised US economy will be splattered on the canvas like George Foreman in Rumble in the Jungle.

Troubles in the sub-prime market have just begun to materialize and already 38 main sub prime lenders have gone kaput. Foreclosures have reached a 37 year high, and an estimated 2 million homeowners will be put out on the street in the next few years.

And that’s just for starters.

The contagion has spread beyond the sub prime sector to other ARMs (Adjustable Rate Mortgages) where late payments and defaults are cropping up faster than their sub-prime counterparts. According to Goldman Sachs chief economist Jan Hatzius, “Prime ARM delinquencies are above their worst levels of the 2001 recession…. By contrast, sub-prime fixed-rate delinquencies are well below their recession levels.” (Barrons)

Sub prime loans and other “Prime ARMs” (alta-A loans) make up roughly 35% of current mortgages. That means that millions of homeowners are struggling to meet their “upwardly-adjusted” payments. If Congress does not come up with a bailout strategy, then we will face a “downturn worse than that resulting from the NASDAQ collapse”. (Barrons)

Sub prime loans are loans that are made to people with poor credit. The lender requires a higher rate of interest to cover his risk. For the last 5 years, the sub prime market has skyrocketed due to the loosening of lending practices. The traditional criterion for determining whether a loan applicant is credit-worthy has been abandoned. Now, it is not uncommon to have mortgage lenders provide 100% financing to shaky borrowers who are unable to provide documentation of their real earnings (“no doc” loans) and cannot even scrimp together 4 or $5 thousand for a down payment.(“piggyback” loans)

Why on earth would the banks and mortgage lenders take such a risk?

In a word; greed.

The mortgage industry is driven by fees. Lenders (and agents) are able to fatten their bottom line through loan origination fees and then they tack on additional fees for shipping the loans off to Wall Street where they are bundled into Mortgage Backed Security (MBS). Collateralized debt has become a Wall Street favorite and these otherwise shaky loans have become staples in the hedge funds industry. In fact, last year Wall Street purchased nearly 60% of all mortgages--ignoring the risks associated with sub prime “debt instruments”. Also, through the magic of derivatives, many of these Mortgage Backed Securities have been leveraged to the extreme; sometimes at a ratio of 35 to 1.

In other words, a home loan of $300,000--that may have been secured by a young man with bad credit who makes $12.50 per hour picking up mill-ends and bits of insulation on a construction job site--has been leveraged into a $10,500,000 securities investment. This may explain why Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson is trying to sooth jittery investors with words of encouragement while he dispatches the Plunge Protection Team (PPT) to shore up the trembling stock market behind the scenes. Every effort is being made to keep this monstrous equity bubble from pirouetting to earth.

Currently, derivatives and mortgage-backed bonds total more than all US Treasuries, Notes and US Bonds combined!?! The stock market is one gigantic pyramid of debt and it’s ready to blow.

Kitco.com’s Doug Casey puts it like this:

“The rocket-shot rise of hedge funds and the advances in financial modeling techniques have spawned something of a competition among the so-called best and brightest to find ever-more-complex ways of skimming pennies from very large piles of money. The collective result is that our financial system has been wired up to $370 trillion dollars of privately negotiated investment contracts. They’re usually written to shift risk from one bank, pension fund, insurance company or brokerage firm to another. And many are linked together in long chains, with each contract providing collateral for the next.

It’s all very clever, but layering the enormous size– $370 trillion dollars, far more than the net worth of all the financial institutions in the world – on top of all that complexity is downright scary. In simpler times, a home loan going bad would affect only the particular lender. Enough defaults would put the lender out of business. And that would be the end of it. But today a wave of defaults can send a shock through the portfolios of financial institutions around the globe, including hedge funds, banks and pension funds far removed from the troubled borrowers.

Imagine an electrical circuit with thousands of connections. No one designed it. No one tested it. No one has a diagram for it. It just grew. Now, because of its size and power and pervasiveness, everything depends upon it. So what happens when one of those thousands of connections burns out? No one really knows.” (Kitco.com commentaries)

That’s right; no one really knows what will happen, but there is growing concern about what MIGHT happen. And, what might happen is disaster!

(Derivatives numbers are staggering. The Bank for International Settlements estimates that the notional amount of derivatives traded on regulated exchanges topped a quadrillion dollars last year) Ann Berg “War Drags the Dollar Down” antiwar.com

Casey gives an apt summary of our present predicament. There is currently $370 trillion in derivatives, hedge funds and over-leveraged marginal investments. There is no coherent relationship between this mass of cyber-wealth and actual deposits or investments. It is merely a fractional banking scam on steroids; computer-generated capital with no basis in reality. As the sub prime market comes under greater strain; hedge funds will teeter, derivatives will tremble, liquidity will dry up and the whole debt-plagued system will crash in a heap. The frantic efforts of the PPT with their flimsy bits of scaffolding will amount to nothing. Wall Street is quick-stepping towards the gallows and there’s little hope of a reprieve.

As we watch the sub-prime market unwind; we should keep in mind that this massive expansion of credit took place on Alan Greenspan’s watch and with his implicit approval. The former Fed-chief was a big fan of sub-prime mortgages and he wasn’t hesitant to extol their merits. In April 2005, Greenspan said:

“Innovation has brought about a multitude of new products, such as sub-prime loans and niche credit programs for immigrants… With these advances in technology, lenders have taken advantage of credit scoring models and other techniques for efficiently extending credit to a broader spectrum of consumers… Where once more marginal applicants would simply have been denied credit, lenders are now able to quite efficiently judge the risk posed by individual applicants and to price that risk appropriately. These improvements have led to rapid growth in sub-prime mortgage lending… fostering constructive innovation that is both responsive to market demand and beneficial to consumers.” (Thanks Jim Willie Goldenjackass.com)

“Innovation”? Is that what Maestro Greenspan calls this fiendish, economy-busting Ponzi-swindle?

Greenspan is like a jungle-monkey swinging from one massive equity bubble to the next. The housing bubble turned out to be his “piece de resistance”, a bottomless black hole sucking up the nations’ wealth into its dark vortex. His “low interest” doctrine may have kept the moribund economy on life support after the dot.com bust, but it has ruined the country’s prospects for the future. We’ll be digging out of this mess for decades.

Greenspan nodded approvingly as trillions of dollars were funneled into shaky sub primes, but he chose to cheerlead rather than slow-down the process. He scorned the idea of government regulation preferring his own type of Darwinian “natural selection” or, rather, survival of the shrewdest. Now the pundits and the talking heads are trying to shift the blame to struggling low-income wage-slaves who thought they could live the American dream by buying a home on credit. They were seduced by the promise of cheap money and then led by the nose to the slaughter. The whole charade was orchestrated by Greenspan and his buddies in the banking cabal. They alone are responsible.

Here’s another tidbit which sheds light on Greenspan’s culpability in the sub prime fiasco:

"The Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency took little action in public to police the $2.8-trillion boom in the U.S. mortgage market -- whose bust now risks worsening the housing recession. The Fed, which is responsible for the stability of the banking system, didn't publicly rebuke any firm for failing to follow up warnings on home-lending practices between 2004 and 2006. The OCC, which supervises 1,793 national banks, took only three public mortgage-related consumer-protection enforcement actions over the same period.

Consumer advocates and former government officials say the regulators, by acting behind the scenes rather than openly advertising the shortcomings of some firms, failed to discipline an industry that loaned too much money to borrowers who couldn't repay it. Now, more lenders are being forced to shut and foreclosures are rising, threatening to scuttle any chance of an early recovery in housing. (Chuck Butler; “The Daily Pfennig”)

The Federal Reserve knows where every dime winds up in the economy. They even provide a detailed account of the relevant data. Ignorance is not an excuse. The Fed looked on while trillions of dollars flowed to “unqualified” applicants who had no chance of repaying their loans. The lax standards and easy money kept Wall Street and the mortgage industry happy, but the “predatory lending” hurt millions of hard working Americans who are now in danger of losing their homes.

The End of the Liquidity Party?

All of the major investment firms are heavily invested in the $6.5 trillion mortgage securities market. The sudden decline in the sub prime market is shutting down the funding sources for low income people while increasing home inventories. It is also boosting unemployment, putting pressure on the banks, and thrusting the country towards recession.

As the housing market continues to languish, home equity loans (which amounted to $600 billion in 2006) will shrivel reducing consumer spending and GDP accordingly. That means that the Federal Reserve will be forced to lower interest rates and remove the last crumbling cinder block propping up the greenback.

When Bernanke lowers interest rates, foreign investment in US Treasuries and dollar-based securities will drop off, the dollar will fall and we will undergo a painful cycle of hyperinflation. These are the inescapable consequences of Greenspan’s policies.

Equity bubbles are an expression of class interest. They are a way of shifting wealth from working class people--whose hourly wages or fixed-incomes can’t keep pace with a hyperinflationary monetary policy—to the wealthy and powerful, who benefit from overheated markets and rampant speculation. The investor class and their plutocratic peers are the only ones who profit from interest rate manipulation and increases in the money supply. For everyone else, inflation is just a hidden tax. Greenspan used the money supply and interest rates as weapon against working class people. It became his preferred method of “social engineering”; creating greater division between rich and poor while ensuring the upward redistribution of wealth consistent with his plans for a new world order. (NWO)

Greenspan is the plutocrat’s champion; America’s all-time serial bubble maker.

The rest of the world is eying America’s housing slump with growing apprehension. The downturn in the sub prime market is just the first crack in the façade. Other disruptions are bound to follow. Another jolt from the Yen “carry trade” or a sudden blip in the Chinese stock market could send Wall Street sprawling and put the economy on a fiscal-respirator. A substantial dip in securities could trigger a liquidity crisis which would traumatize our credit-dependent society. If consumer spending slows down, the economy will grind to a halt and living standards will sharply decline. The sub primes are just the first domino.

These are some of the things that Fed chief Bernanke will have to consider before resetting interest rates: Does he keep rates where they are and turn away foreign investment or lower rates and try to salvage the faltering housing market? Either choice will result in a certain amount of pain.

A cloud of uncertainty has descended on the over-leveraged United States of Foreclosure. The storm is just ahead. The stewards of the system--Paulson, Bush, Bernanke--could care less about the public welfare. All their energy is devoted to building a lifeboat for themselves and their fat-cat buddies. Once, they’ve robbed the last farthing from the public till they’ll be gone, and we’ll still be marching along the path to national calamity.

High-flying US fund manager Jim Rogers summed up the impending crisis like this:

“You can’t believe how bad it’s going to get. It’s going to be a disaster for many people who don’t have a clue about what happens when a real estate bubble pops. Real estate prices will go down 40-50% in bubble areas. There will be massive defaults. And it’ll be worse this time because we haven’t had this kind of speculative buying in U.S. history.”

Then he added ominously, “When markets turn from bubble to reality, a lot of people get burned.”

Inshallah

March 18, 2007

By Uri Avnery

NOT ONLY the Palestinians must be breathing a deep sigh of relief after the swearing in of the Palestinian National Unity Government. We Israelis have good reason to do the same.

This event is a great blessing, not only for them, but also for us - if indeed we are interested in a peace that will put an end to the historic conflict.

FOR THE Palestinians, the immediate blessing is the elimination of the threat of civil war.

That was a nightmare. It was also absurd. Palestinian fighters were shooting at each other in the streets of Gaza, gladdening the hearts of the occupation authorities. As in the arena of ancient Rome, gladiators killed each other for the amusement of the spectators. People who had spent years together in Israeli prisons suddenly acted like mortal enemies.

That was not yet a civil war. But the bloody incidents could have led there. Many Palestinians were worried that if the clashes were not stopped immediately, a fully-fledged fratricidal war would indeed break out. That was, of course, also the great hope of the Israeli government - that Hamas and Fatah would annihilate each other without Israel having to lift a finger. The Israeli intelligence services did indeed predict this.

I was not worried on that account. In my view, a Palestinian civil war was never in the cards.

First of all, because the basic conditions for a civil war are absent. The Palestinian people are unified in their ethnic, cultural and historical composition. Palestine does not resemble Iraq, with its three peoples who are distinct ethnically (Arabs and Kurds), religiously (Shiites and Sunnites) and geographically (North, Center and South). It does not resemble Ireland, where the Protestants, the descendents of settlers, were fighting the Catholic descendents of the indigenous population. It does not resemble African countries, whose borders were fixed by colonial masters without any consideration of tribal boundaries. It certainly had no revolutionary upheaval like those that brought on the civil wars in England, France and Russia, nor an issue that split the population like slavery in the USA.

The bloody incidents that broke out in the Gaza Strip were struggles between party militias, aggravated by feuds between Hamulahs (extended families). History has seen such struggles in almost all liberation movements. For example: after World War I, when the British were compelled to grant Home Rule to the Irish, a bloody struggle among the freedom fighters broke out at once. Irish Catholics killed Irish Catholics.

In the days of the struggle of the Jewish community in Palestine against the British colonial regime ("the Mandate"), a civil war was averted only thanks to one person: Menachem Begin, the commander of the Irgun. He was determined to prevent a fratricidal war at all costs. David Ben-Gurion wanted to eliminate the Irgun, which rejected his leadership and undermined his policies. In the so-called "season", he ordered his loyal Haganah organization to kidnap Irgun members and turn them over to the British police, which tortured them and put them in prison abroad. But Begin prohibited his men from using their weapons to defend themselves against Jews.

Such a struggle among the Palestinians will not turn into a civil war, because the entire Palestinian people oppose this strenuously. Everybody remembers that during the Arab Rebellion of 1936, the Palestinian leader at that time, the Grand Mufti Hadj Amin al-Husseini, butchered his Palestinian rivals. During the three years of the rebellion (called "the Events" in Zionist terminology) Palestinians killed more of each other than they killed of their British and Jewish opponents.

The result: when the Palestinian people came face to face with their supreme existential test, in the war of 1948, they were split and splintered, lacking unified leadership and dependent on the mercies of the bickering Arab governments, who were intriguing against each other. They were unable to stand up to the much smaller organized Jewish community, which rapidly set up a unified and efficient army. The result was the "Naqba", the terrible historic tragedy of the Palestinian people. What happened in 1936 still touches the life of every single Palestinian to this very day.

It is difficult to start a civil war if the people are against it. Even provocations from outside - and I assume that there has been no lack of these - cannot ignite it.

Therefore I did not doubt for a moment that in the end a Unity Government would indeed come about, and I am glad that this has now happened.

WHY IS this good for Israel? I am going to say something that will shock many Israelis and their friends in the world:

If Hamas did not exist, it would have to be invented.

If a Palestinian government had been set up without Hamas, we should have to boycott it until Hamas was included.

And if negotiations do lead to a historical settlement with the Palestinian leadership, we should make it a condition that Hamas, too, must sign it.

Sounds crazy? Of course. But that is the lesson history teaches us from the experience of other wars of liberation.

The Palestinian population in the occupied territories is almost evenly divided between Fatah and Hamas. It makes no sense at all to sign an agreement with half a people and continue the war against the other half. After all, we shall make serious concessions for peace - such as withdrawing to much narrower borders and giving East Jerusalem back to its owners. Shall we do so in return for an agreement that half the Palestinian people will not accept and will not be committed to? To me this sounds like the height of folly.

I shall go further: Hamas and Fatah together represent only the part of the Palestinian people that lives in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem. But millions of Palestinian refugees (no one knows for sure how many) live outside of the territory of Palestine and Israel.

If we strive indeed for a complete end to the historic conflict, we must reach out for a solution that includes them, too. Therefore I strongly question the wisdom of TzipI Livni and her colleagues, who demand that the Saudis drop from their peace plan any mention of the refugee problem. Simply put: that is stupid.

Common sense would advise the exact opposite: to demand that the Saudi peace initiative, which has become an official pan-Arab peace plan, include the matter of the refugees, so that the final agreement will also constitute a solution of the refugee problem.

That will not be easy, for sure. The refugee problem has psychological roots that touch the very heart of the Palestinian-Zionist conflict, and it concerns the fate of millions of living human beings. But when the Arab peace plan says that there must be an "agreed upon" solution - meaning agreed upon with Israel - it transfers it from the realm of irreconcilable ideologies to the real world, the world of negotiations and compromise. I have discussed this many times with Arab personalities, and I am convinced that an agreement is possible.

THE NEW Palestinian government is based on the "Mecca agreement". It seems that it would not have been possible without the energetic intervention of King Abdallah of Saudi Arabia.

The international background has to be considered. The President of the United States is now busy with desperate efforts to bring his Iraqi adventure to a conclusion that will not go down in history as a total disaster. For this purpose he is trying to bring together a Sunni Front that would block Iran and help to put an end to the Sunni violence in Iraq.

That is, of course, a simplistic idea. It disregards the enormous complexity of the realities of our region. Bush has presided over the setting up in Iraq of a government dominated by the Shiites. He has tried to isolate Sunni Syria. And Hamas is, of course, a pious Sunni organization.

But the American ship of state is beginning to turn around. Being a giant ship, it can do this only very slowly. Under American pressure, the Saudi king has agreed (perhaps unwillingly) to take upon himself the leadership of the Arab world, after Egypt has failed in this task. The king has persuaded Bush that he has to speak with Syria. Now he is trying to persuade him to accept Hamas.

In this picture, Israel is a hindrance. A few days ago Ehud Olmert flew to America and told the conference of the Jewish lobby, AIPAC, that a withdrawal from Iraq would be a disaster (contrary, by the way, to the opinion of more than 80% of American Jews - who support early withdrawal.) This week, the US ambassador in Tel-Aviv hinted that from now on the Government of Israel is allowed to conduct negotiations with Syria - and it may be assumed that this hint will turn into an order before long. In the meantime, no change in the position of the Israeli government is noticeable.

UNFORTUNATELY, JUST at this moment, with a newly formed Palestinian government that has a good chance of being strong and stable, the government of Israel is becoming more and more destabilized.

Olmert's support rating in the polls is approaching zero. The percentage points can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Practically everybody speaks about his political demise within weeks, perhaps after the publication of the interim report of the Vinograd commission on the Second Lebanon War. But even if Olmert manages to survive, his will be a lame duck government, unable to start anything new, and certainly no bold initiative vis-à-vis the new Palestinian government.

But if Bush supports us on one side, and the Saudi king on the other, perhaps we shall after all take a few steps forward. As people in this region say: in sha Allah, if God wills.


An Israeli author and activist. He is the head of the Israeli peace movement, Gush Shalom.

Israeli MP refuses to sing national anthem

He's Arab, one among millions in Israel. Here's the national anthem:

"As long as the Jewish spirit is yearning deep in the heart,

With eyes turned toward the East, looking toward Zion,

Then our hope - the two-thousand-year-old hope - will not be lost:

To be a free people in our land,

The land of Zion and Jerusalem."

Imagine the US national anthem, "... home of the brave, land of the free white people..."

---
Majadele refuses to sing national anthem

Rightist MKs slam Israel's first Arab minister, who said in newspaper interview he would not sing anthem, because song was written 'only for Jews'

Amnon Meranda Published: 03.17.07, 23:37 / Israel News

Rightist Knesset members strongly criticized Minister Raleb Majadele Saturday, after he said in an interview to Yedioth Ahronoth this weekend that he refuses to sing Israel's national anthem, Hatikva.

In the interview, Majadele said, "Of course I would not sing the anthem in its current form. But before we talk about symbols, I wantמודעto talk about equal education for my children. It's more important that my son would be able to buy a house, live with dignity… the Arabs are not in a mood to sing right now."

Majadele told Ynet following interview that, "As a government minister, I swore allegiance to the laws of the State of Israel, and I intend to honor them." Majadele noted that he expresses his respect to the national anthem by standing up whenever the song is being sung.

"To the best of my knowledge, the law does not require me to sing the anthem, but to honor it. I fail to understand how an enlightened, sane Jew allows himself to ask a Muslim person with a different language and culture, to sing an anthem that was written for Jews only," he added.

'Majadele must apologize'

Majadele's statements prompted harsh responses among right-wing MKs. MK Arieh Eldad (National Union-National Religious Party) said that a man who refuses to sing the national anthem should not be a minister.

"I don't want to force Minister Majadele to sing the anthem, but I don't want to see as a minister a man who does not identify with Israel's character, and who declares he does not identify with the national anthem," he stated.

MK Zevulun Orlev (National Union-NRP) was also furious with Majadele's words and said that the prime minister should order the minister to apologize.

"Majadele's statements should raise deep concern. They represent a clear violation of his ministerial oath to be loyal to the State of Israel and its laws. I call on the prime minister to demand that he make it clear he is loyal to the State of Israel as a Jewish state," he declared.

Tibi: Attacks are hypocritical

Meanwhile, MK Ahmed Tibi voiced his support for Majadele, and said that he too never sings the anthem.

"The attacks on him from the Right are hypocritical, self-righteous and ridiculous. Hatikva's words cannot be sung by any Arab citizen," Tibi said, adding that any reasonable Jew should sympathize with this sentiment, "Including honest rightists who have already accepted the fact that the words are aimed at the Jewish, not the Arab, soul."

"Lately we have witnessed a torrent of anti-Arab statements, and this should be understood in this context," he concluded.

Human rights advocate and defender of Palestinian Rights Professor Tanya Reinhart passed away

(of a stroke).

On Academic Boycotts and Divestment
http://www.harvardmitdivest.org/tanya.html

A tribute to Tanya is posted here in French with photos
http://www.europalestine.com/article.php3?id_article=2562

English text (translated by Robert Thompson)

We are going to miss Tanya Reinhart terribly badly.

We were staggered to learn of the sudden death of our friend Tanya Reinhart, yesterday in New York (she had a stroke). Words fail us because we are so stricken by the loss of our friend, of this great lady, of this indefatigable militant against the policy of the Israeli government towards the Palestinians, of this warm woman who never stopped denouncing injustice and lies, through her articles, her books, and her actions.

Ii is particularly difficult for us to speak of Tanya in the past tense. Tanya, who gave us so much pleasure when she came to the opening of the Résistances book-shop in Paris on 7th December last, when she gave an extraordinary address with her companion, the great poet Aharon Shabtai. Tanya, who took part in all the battles against the colonisation and the occupation of Palestine, and who was one of the most lucid analysts of the criminal policy of her government.

Tanya Reinhart could have been content to be a brilliant linguist and to perfect her university career in Israel. But she made the choice of denouncing and resisting pressures. In her weekly column in the Israeli daily Yediot Ahoronot, as in her books, "Destroy Palestine" and "Sharon's heritage", she systematically painted a picture which made no concession to the terrible situation created by the rulers of her country, with a rare faculty for anticipating the future.

"Destroy Palestine" (in French "Détruire la Palestine" published by the Editions La Fabrique) is a masterly description of all the stratagems always used by the Israeli rulers to avoid engagement in a genuine peace process, and to make believe that this was the sole fault of the Palestinians. Tanya Reinhart especially examined in detail the 7 years during which the "Olso agreement" lasted and showed the contrast between what was presented as being the "generous offer" of Ehud Barak, and its reality. This was to show how the vice was being closed around the Palestinians during the same period (between 1993 and 2000), and the totally inacceptable "proposals" put forward by the Israelis, since they allowed for no viable Palestinian state which would instead find itself in pockets, without territorial continuity, and deprived of East Jerusalem.

More recently, Tanya Reinhart was the first to denounce the "red herring" of the announcement by Sharon of the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, in which she never believed. "Behind the smokescreen of the 'withdrawal' from Gaza can be seen the transfer of the Palestinians", she wrote, while our rulers praised the "great man of peace".

Tanya was also one of the rare Israeli opposition personalities to support the boycott of her country's institutions, especially the Universities. "We shall stop having to worry about the boycott when we respect international law", she replied not only to the Israeli establishment, but also to that timid, supposedly pacifist, Israeli "left-wing" which accepted the impunity from which the state of Israel and all its institutions benefitted. Tanya Reinhart did not hesitate to give her support to the Paris 6 University, when its Administrative Council, in 2003, voted to surpend its special relations with Israeli Universities.

During her last lecture in France, on 7th December last at the Résistances book-shop, she strongly denounced the embargo imposed on the Palestinian people, explaining that the European countries, including France in which we live, had no right to cut off food supplies from the Palestinians. "It was not an act of generosity which Europe could either carry on or not", she explained. "It was a choice which had been made to take on the obligations imposed by international law on the Israeli occupier to see to the well-being of the occupied populations. Europe chose not to oblige Israel to respect its obligations, and preferred to pay money to the Palestinians. When it put an end to this, it breached international law".

Tired out, Tanya "apologised" for not having the strength to remain in Israel where, she let it be known, physical repression against genuine opponents had become more and more brutal. She had therefore decided to go to teach in the United States and had just settled in New York.

This marvellous woman, whom we had the joy of welcoming to several of our meetings and concerts, is going to be terribly badly missed by us. We express all our sadness and our sympathy to her companion, Aharon Shabaï, a man with a great heart and talent.

We'll organize an evening in her honour in Paris, at the Bookshop "Librairie Résistances" on the 27th of March, from 7 pm.

---

Tanya on CCNWON
Tanya Reinhart - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Palestinian American Congress statement and action alert on the formation of the Unity Government

Virginia, 3/18/07.--The Palestinian American Congress congratulates all Palestinians at home and in the Shatat on the formation of a unitary Palestinian authority in the West Bank and Gaza. The Zionist lobby in America is mobilizing to continue the siege on the people of Palestine who live in the illegally occupied areas. We salute countries like Norway who took the courageous step of recognizing the new unity government and extending aid. We call on all Palestinian Americans and all people of conscience to mobilize and disseminate information to media and all elected officials and candidates for office to:

a) Support the Palestinian struggle for freedom and self-determination including the right of refugees and displaced Palestinians to return to their homes and lands, the right to live in equality and justice without discrimination based on religion, and the right to be free from occupation and oppression.

b) Support an immediate lifting of all remaining sanctions, embargoes, and financial restrictions on the Palestinian society under occupation. This includes releasing the Palestinian tax money illegally held by Israel. For those who insist on putting conditions on Palestinians under occupation, they should be called upon to demand at least the same conditions from the occupiers (renouncing violence, accepting previous agreements, recognizing Palestine).

c) Support the Palestinian Civil Society call to action which includes boycotts, divestment and sanctions on Israel until it complies with human righst and international law (see full call to action at http://www.pacbi.org/boycott_news_more.php?id=66_0_1_0_M and http://stopthewall.org/worldwideactivism/968.shtml )

We also call on all activists to join in these critical initiatives:

1) Mobilize and attend the PAC national convention to be held in Connecticut June 2-3 (email media@pac-national.org if interested to attend and we will send you details)

2) Mobilize and attend the national march and rally in Washington organized by the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation (see http://www.endtheoccupation.org for details)

3) Mobilize for the 60 year anniversary of the Nakba (literally the Catastrophe as it commemorates the ethnic cleansing of 70% of the native inhabitants of what became Israel). PAC and other organizations and individuals are planning a Palestinian national conference and a number of other events.

Media contacts http://www.pmwatch.org/pmw/contact/media.asp
http://capwiz.com/adc/dbq/media

Congressional contacts http://www.house.gov

media@pac-national.org

URL

Karl Rove and others will face Senate subpoenas this week if they do not agree to testify in a dispute over fired prosecutors

Senate may subpoena White House aide Karl Rove

Sun Mar 18, 2007 1:03PM EDT

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - White House political strategist Karl Rove and others will face Senate subpoenas this week if they do not agree to testify in a dispute over fired prosecutors that has put pressure on Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to quit, a Senate committee head said on Sunday.

Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee called for Gonzales to come to Congress to explain the dismissals of eight U.S. attorneys and clear up the varying reasons given for their firings. But they stopped short of seeking to compel members of President George W. Bush's staff to testify under oath.

The White House is in talks with Congress over whether to allow testimony by officials including Rove -- whose former aide had been selected to replace one of the fired prosecutors. The replacement helped fuel charges the firings were politically motivated.

But one way or another, Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the Democratic judiciary chairman, made it clear he wanted the officials to testify at the Senate under oath.

"The final decision on putting on the agenda subpoenas is mine," Leahy said on ABC's "This Week." "And it will be on Thursday this week, among the subpoenas that will be voted on, will be one for Karl Rove and one for (former White House counsel) Harriet Miers, another one for her deputy."

Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, one of Bush's strongest Republican supporters in Congress, agreed on the same show that the committee needed to hear Justice Department officials.

But he said he feared Democrats "want to cut to the chase and let's get Karl Rove there and have a political circus."

As far as subpoenas for the White House, Cornyn said he was worried about violating the constitutional separation of powers between Congress and the White House.

"This is what I'm talking about when I say a legitimate investigation can be overreached," Cornyn said, saying he did not want the probe to become "a political witch hunt."

Critics say the Bush administration fired the prosecutors to make room for Republican allies. Democrats say the attorneys angered powerful Republicans, partly by pursuing corruption probes against Republican lawmakers, and Gonzales fired them in retaliation.

RESIGNATION CALLS

Gonzales is trying to fend off resignation calls from Democrats and some Republicans. He has previously drawn fire for policies that critics say eroded U.S. civil liberties and contributed to abuse of foreign detainees.

A Newsweek poll on Saturday said 58 percent of the U.S. public believed the prosecutors' firings were driven by political concerns.

Gonzales apologized for the handling of the firings in a conference call Friday with all 93 U.S. attorneys, McClatchy newspapers and the Washington Post reported. Among the actions he apologized for were suggestions that the fired prosecutors performed poorly, the reports said.

The White House first said the idea of firing all the federal prosecutors at the beginning of Bush's second term came from Miers.

But e-mails last week brought up the involvement of Rove.

"Mr. Rove is speaking publicly about it," Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, another Democrat on the Judiciary committed, said on CBS' "Face the Nation." "I think he should come up to the committee and speak under oath about it and we should have the opportunity to ask questions."

But she added Bush's top political adviser "is probably not willing" to do so automatically.

Here's how US political scientists are talking about Iraqi civilians

Sunday, March 18, 2007

Colin Kahl is the political scientist who wrote in the November/December issue of Foreign Affairs that "US compliance with noncombatant immunity in Iraq has been relatively high by historical standards, and it has been improving since the beginning of the war". By "historical standards" he was alluding to the fact counterinsurgencies in Philippines at the turn of the 19th century, and in South Vietnam more recently killed somewhere around 3% of the entire civilian populations in those countries, while the civilian death-toll in Iraq has been much lower on a dead-persons-per-capita basis. To understand what he means by "improvement since the beginning of the war", you would have to steel yourself, put on your white lab-coat and the read the whole article.

Today, thanks to the public-spiritedness of one of Kahl's scientific colleagues, we are offered some hints about the latest thinking about this. First of all, it seems the military-academic community has actually borrowed from the medical community the concept of "best practices", only in this case they are called "COIN [which means counterinsurgency] best practices", and this "COIN best practices" is something that is being implemented under the new leadership of Petraeus. So not only have efforts to "spare the civilian population" been improving, they are actually now part of an ideal approach: They represent "COIN best practices". There appear to be two main components of this: First of all, naturally you try not to do too much shelling of civilian neighborhoods; you try to minimize atrocities, and so on. Secondly, this appears to involve "spreading American troops out into smaller bases from which they can work with Iraqi forces to provide local security".

The next thing we learn is that there has recently been a "briefing", but the details of the briefing are kept out of sight, behind the three dots. All we can glean is that it appears US military authorities were doing the talking, and academics including Kahl were doing the listening and the nodding of the heads. Here's what Kahl says about the briefing:

. . .This shift [in COIN strategy] makes sense from the perspective of COIN best practices and the new COIN field manual. There are other successful approaches to COIN, including what the briefing calls "the Roman Strategy" ("make a desert and call it peace"), which was basically the approach Saddam used to prevent sustained insurgency in Iraq. But, as the briefing properly notes, adopting this approach (or even somewhat softer, but still highly coercive COIN practices, such as those used by the Americans effectively in the Philippines between 1899-1902), is incompatible with norms against targeting civilians embraced by the U.S. military and political leadership. So, with the Roman strategy off the table, that leaves the "clear, hold, and build" option. However, as the briefing makes clear, this strategic shift may simply be too little, too late. What the briefing doesn't say is that it is also unclear whether employing COIN best practices will work in the context of not only a raging insurgency (in Baghdad, Anbar, Diyala), but also a sectarian civil war (in Baghdad, Diyala, and increasingly Kirkuk), diffuse criminal anarchy and militia rivalry (in the South), and endemic separatist tendencies (in Kurdistan).

In other words, among the other successful approaches to counterintelligence is the "Roman strategy", or scorched-earth approach, where the occupying forces annihilate target civilian populations. Kahl doesn't say this (along with its "somewhat softer, but still highly coercive" variants) is recognized as a shameful crime by every decent human being, he merely says it is "incompatible with norms against targeting of civilians embraced by the US military and political leadership." That is the first point. We have his word for it that the "Roman strategy" was "taken off the table," but only because they are "incompatible with the norms..." of the Bush administration. Am I the only person who hears an echo of the verbiage that has been used in the discussions about torture?

The second point is Kahl's own contribution to this.

What the briefing doesn't say [he writes] is that it is also unclear whether employing COIN best practices will work in the context of not only a raging insurgency (in Baghdad, Anbar, Diyala), but also a sectarian civil war (in Baghdad, Diyala, and increasingly Kirkuk), diffuse criminal anarchy and militia rivalry (in the South), and endemic separatist tendencies (in Kurdistan).

If "COIN best practices" don't work, what then? Could the "norms" be relaxed and some of the "other successful approaches" be tried? Think of the language this administration has used in support of torture.

Kahl's little essay is something he sent to other experts who participate in a listserve, and he gave Juan Cole permission to publish it. Cole's own point in publishing it is no doubt that Iraq is on the brink, and this is no time to be thinking of toppling the SCIRI-led administration. But I think this tells us more than that.

The US Weakens - The Danger of Adventurism and the Chance for Peace on the Incre

Sunday, March 18, 2007

Many of us were pleased to see Mustafa Bargouti among the ministers in the new Palestinian government. Mustafa Bargouti is well known to the peace camp in Israel and to the friends of peace in the international community. He appears regularly in the international media as an effective and articulate spokesperson for the Palestinian cause. As a rule, Bargouti supports serious dialog between Palestinians and Israeli groups fighting for a just peace. His frequent appearances in important meetings of the protest movement bear witness to his humanist principles. He was absolutely right when he declared on television this week that if Israel really wants peace, all the issues can be solved peacefully within the framework of the two-state solution. If the people of Israel will find a way to overcome the obstacles raised by the Olmert government, peace can be achieved ushering in a period of prosperity and security.

It has been long clear that the Palestinians and the Arab countries are ready for a far-reaching compromise for peace. If there is a chance at this point for serious negotiations, it stems from the crisis of Bush's policies. The area is in turmoil, and US control of the Middle East is on the downgrade. The entire world keeps telling the US government that the tension surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the US blanket support for Israel is destroying the last vestiges of US prestige in the region. As a result of the US ensnarement in Iraq, the so-called "moderate" Arab countries are demanding some sort of revision in US policy. Rice is trying to pass off a new round of blather and chatter as the restart of the ‘peace process', but more and more nations and countries are losing their patience. Everybody has had enough of the bluff.

Voice out of Zion

The newspaper photo of Tsipi Livni speaking at the recent AIPAC conference was terrible. In the photo you see Livni, as if she were in some sort of virtual cockpit hovering above the audience. Sadly enough, Livni's message was even worse. She personally informed the AIPAC delegates of the call of the Israeli government to the Jews of the US to do everything in their power in order to strengthen the hand of George W. Bush and his dwindling band of followers so they can remain firm and resolute and fight on in Iraq until victory.

It seems, for a change, that in this matter, there is no difference of opinion between the Minister of Foreign Affairs and the Prime Minister. Olmert explained (by video) to the same conference that the US must not show any weakness because this would impair stability in the region. Olmert really outdid himself when he attempted to convince a delegation from the Reform movement to support Bush and the continuation of the war. Olmert doesn't know or he just does not care that the Reform movement was the first major religious denomination in the US to come out (by an overwhelming majority at its democratically elected conference) against the war. It is hard to decide if Olmert is that much of a fool, or if he is simply fulfilling a request (more like an order) from the leader of the free world who is competing with him in a tight race to the lowest rungs of unpopularity.

By: Reuven Kaminer [ ::: The Region ::: ]

::: About us :::

Hagada Hasmalit (The Left Bank) turns to English language readers in order to provide them with authentic, first-hand voices of peace and social progress in Israel.

We ask for your active participation in the site by submitting articles, letters to the editor and short responses to articles appearing here. We prefer articles to be between 800 to 1,500 words and responses to not exceed 300 words. We cannot, of course, undertake to print every submission.

In addition, we would be pleased if we could find volunteers to translate articles from Hebrew to English or from English to Hebrew - as well from Arabic to Hebrew and English. And if you value our efforts, please disseminate Hagada Hasmalit among other activists and organisations.

And ''last but not least'', Hagada, like most progressive publications, is based on the voluntary efforts of its editors. But we do have considerable expenses. Therefore, each and every contribution to further this important project will be sincerely appreciated.

Donations can be sent to our bank account:

Account No. 67055747, Bank Discount, Branch 118, 34 Yehuda Hanasi St. 69200 Tel Aviv, Israel

Or simply write a cheque made out to Hagada Hasmalit and send it to R. Kaminer, PO Box 9013, Jerusalem 91090 – Israel

And finally, please send us your comments and suggestions to help us improve the site!

The Editorial Staff

Raja Zaatry; Ruchama Marton; Reuven Kaminer; Shmuel Amir; Efraim Davidi; Danny Peter; Noam Kaminer; Brurya Silberstein; Amir Hallel

Contact us

info@hagada.org.il.

Twilight Zone / After her!

Sick monsters
---
Sat., March 17, 2007 Adar 27, 5767 | Haaretz

By Gideon Levy

When it was all over, the soldiers gave her a cookie and some halva. And just to be on the safe side, they added a threat: "Don't you dare tell your parents; otherwise we'll kill you," they told her before letting her go, knowing they had done a terrible thing. But little Jihan did tell, and so did her parents: The IDF is using children as human shields.

Regarding this practice, known as "early warning" or the "neighbor procedure," then Supreme Court president Aharon Barak wrote in October 2005: "These considerations lead me to the conclusion that the 'Early Warning' procedure is at odds with international law. It comes too close to the normative 'nucleus' of the forbidden, and is found in the relatively grey area of the improper. The result is that we turn the order nisi into an order absolute, in the following way: we declare that the 'Early Warning' procedure contradicts international law." Thus the practice was declared illegal, banned by the Supreme Court. But so what? Instead of using men, how about a little girl? The "neighbor procedure" is prohibited? So we'll use the "neighbor's daughter procedure."

Jihan Dadush, 11, who lived in the Nablus casbah, was rewarded with halva and a cookie after soldiers had her leave her house early one evening and lead them to the hiding place of wanted suspects, enter a dark and abandoned apartment to check if anyone was hiding there or if there were any explosive devices inside. They did the same thing with Amid Amira, a 15-year-old boy from another part of Nablus. He, too, was sent into a dark apartment, at dawn, to scout out the place himself. Arfa Amira, 12, was sent in to investigate who was in his own apartment. Instead of the famous "After me!" ethos of the IDF heritage, now we have "After her!" - a young girl led off by armed soldiers who hide behind her.

We walk through the alley-ways of the Old City of Nablus - thousand-year-old buildings whose beauty rivals those in Jerusalem's Old City - with two excellent investigators from the B'Tselem organization, Salma Dab'i and Abdel Karim Sa'adi. Two weeks after the operation, the casbah is full of people. Now is the time of the 'aqub, a plant that grows in the mountains and has a very short season. Its price is already on the rise: This week it was selling in the casbah for NIS 25 per kilo - the truffles of Nablus.

Passing stands that sell grape leaves and lamb ribs, we enter a dim stone building. In its inner courtyard, where woolen blankets are now being aired out, 14 people were killed during Operation Defensive Shield. Five years later, in Operation Warm Winter, four times soldiers have raided this winding, mysterious compound, with its narrow staircases leading off in every direction. Only the locals really know these alleyways and the passages between them. The soldiers were searching for tunnels here, but in the Old City of Nablus, one can pass from building to building via the rooftops.

Steep stone steps lead us to the apartment of the Dadush family - Tahni, Nimr and their four children, who live in three small, neat rooms, with arched, damp ceilings. While we wait for Jihan to return from school, her mother, Tahni, recounts her own nightmares from Operation Warm Winter. On Sunday, February 25, when the operation began, soldiers took over two of the neighboring apartments. The Hawah and Jadallah families had to crowd into one small room. And here's the punch line: When one group of soldiers burst into the Hawah family's apartment, they found another group of soldiers already there. "They were in shock when they saw other soldiers in the apartment," laughs Tahni.

A few hours later, they arrived at her home. Nine people, including in-laws and a sister, were forced to gather in this tiny living room where we are now sitting. The father, Nimr, was arrested and sent to Hawara for interrogation. He returned 14 hours later. Soon, he, too, will join our conversation, when he finishes his shift at the restaurant in the casbah where he works. Around midday, the soldiers asked to go up to the roof. In the afternoon, they left. During the night, the family was too frightened to sleep. With the IDF around the whole casbah was tense.

The next evening, around 8 P.M., they returned to the apartment, the same soldiers from the day before, and were surprised to see that Nimr had been released. This time the soldiers were carrying a lot of equipment, which frightened Tahni very much. She asked to go into the kitchen to prepare for what might be a prolonged occupation of her home, and the soldiers consented. How did they treat her? "Some were nice and some weren't." The soldiers ordered the two daughters, 15-year-old Hanan and 11-year-old Jihan, to leave the apartment. Outside, they separated the girls and asked them if they knew where the wanted men were hiding.

A pale neon light illuminates the tiny living room during the day, too. A neighbor's rooster crows. The two girls returned from the brief interrogation, straight into the arms of their frightened mother. But a little while later, a soldier came in again, looking for Jihan. He instructed the child to go outside. Tahni cried out to the soldier, "She's little, she's a little girl and she's scared," but he ignored her. Her mother was also worried because Jihan has a congenital heart defect. The soldier prevented Tahni from leaving the apartment to see what was happening to her daughter. She says she was close to fainting. She tried to phone one of the assistance organizations, like Medical Relief, for help, but was told that they couldn't come into the casbah because of the curfew.

Nimr, 36, told the soldiers: "Take me to jail or to hell, but don't touch the girl." But they pushed him away, told him to be quiet and made him stay in the room. A little while later, Tahni decided to open the door, and saw that the soldiers and Jihan were no longer near the doorway. The family's nightmare had begun.

Jihan could not tell her parents what had happened until a few days later. The soldiers, apparently along with someone from the Shin Bet who was not in uniform, had taken her outside and said that her father had told them that she knew where the wanted men were hiding. They also told the girl that her father said she knew the location of the wanted men's tunnel. She told them she had no idea about any tunnel or any apartment. They said she was lying. Jihan said the soldiers tried to bind her hands, but that she resisted and they relented. "At that moment, out of fear," says her mother, "she pointed to one of the neighbors' apartments, an apartment that has stood empty for years, and told them that that's where the people were hiding."

Three soldiers took her to the abandoned apartment she had pointed out. They ordered her to enter the dark apartment and followed, their rifles aimed at her. One of the soldiers lighted the way. Jihan pleaded with them to let her go home.

Now Hanan arrives, wearing her striped school uniform. Then Nimr comes home from work. He speaks Hebrew. Finally, Jihan arrives, too, also in her school uniform. A sixth-grader, she looks mature for her age, a cheerful, energetic girl with a long ponytail. She surprises us with her readiness to tell her story:

"The soldiers told me to come with them. One of them asked me about the tunnels and the shabab. I told them that I didn't know anything. One of them said that I was a liar. He threatened that they'd arrest me. I was scared, so I told him that there was an empty apartment, maybe the wanted men used it to sleep in. The soldiers took me to the apartment, I pointed it out to them and then they brought me back. About a half hour later, two soldiers came back and asked me to come outside. They put me in the lead and walked behind me. The soldiers pointed their rifles at me from behind. When I got to the apartment, they asked me to go inside. They used a laser beam from their rifle to light the way for me. They told me to go into the kitchen and all the rooms and then they asked me how to get up to the roof."

Jihan knew her way around the apartment. Until a few years ago, it had been the home of the Sirasi family, whose mother was a friend of her mother's. Jihan says that the soldiers spoke Hebrew to each other inside the apartment, and she didn't understand. They left her in one of the rooms and went up to the roof. The whole thing lasted about an hour and a half.

After being led out by the soldiers, she returned home at about 10 P.M. and got straight into bed, pulled the covers up over her head and didn't say a word. Her mother says that she looked very frightened. Every so often, she called out to her mother from her bed: "Have the soldiers come back for me?" In her hand were the halva and cookie the soldiers had given her. Her mother says that Jihan has recently started wetting the bed at night.

The Al-Balat quarter of Nablus, a few minutes' drive from the casbah and Jihan's house. Amid Amira, 15, woke up along with the rest of his family to the sound of a loud boom. This was at about five in the morning on February 25, the day that Operation Warm Winter started. There were seven people at home; his father was in America. A stun grenade exploded right next to the front door; the soot marks are still visible. The holes in the door, in the walls and the ceiling attest to gunfire by soldiers inside the house.

Na'ima, the mother, opened the door and was startled to see soldiers standing there. They instructed her to get everyone in the house to come outside. The whole family, which includes two babies and an 80-year-old grandmother, had to move into the neighbors' apartment, with the Quseini family. Three families were crowded in there, one family to a room. The soldiers instructed Manal, Na'ima's 17-year-old daughter, to go into their apartment, turn on all the lights, open all the windows, closets and doors. Manal didn't understand the soldiers' broken Arabic and so they took Arfa, 12, and ordered him to open all the doors and turn on all the lights for them.

In his still childlike voice, Arfa relates that one of the soldiers butted his forehead with his helmet. "My head hurt a little," the boy says. The soldiers were searching for Amer, one of the sons, and Ala, the fiance of Manal, whose brother, Omar Aqub, is on the list of wanted men. They questioned a son, Ahmed, 28, and when he told them that he had no idea where those two were, they took Amid with them.

Amid: "They said: Tell us where your brother Amer is, or we'll shoot you. I told the soldier that I didn't know, and then he hit me from behind. Then they asked me who the apartment next door belonged to and I told them that it was my uncle's. They told me to go with them to the apartment. There, they told me to go into the house, open all the doors and all the closets and turn on all the lights. They threw a smoke grenade into the house and then they told me to go in and they followed me. They spread out in all the rooms and they put me in the last room. When they didn't find anything, they led me outside." He didn't get any halva or cookies.

The IDF spokesperson responded that the incidents are under investigation.

A Few things about Iraq You Probably Have never Been Told: Former State Dept Advisor to Iraq Govt

Mar 18, 2007
Generally speaking

By Marshall Adame

1.In the United States Embassy in Iraq there are a couple of hundred Iraqi workers. They are badged and vetted. No hostile incident has ever occurred in the US Embassy executed by an Iraqi employee of the U.S. Embassy. In fact, the Iraqis working for and in the US Embassy have turned out to be great assets to the operation as a whole and have contributed more than expected and have gone the extra mile to help achieve stability in Iraq. Most are risking there very lives every day by working for the US Embassy, but through various forms of cloak and dagger secrecy they are able to make their way to the Green Zone to work on behalf of the Coalition and their country. (Most Iraqis are not the enemy).

2.In contrast to the above paragraph, the US military are prohibited from employing any Iraqi citizen (with a few exceptions). Any Iraqi who is employed by the US military in Iraq is accompanied by a US soldier every minute they are at work.

3.The US Military and Halliburton have brought in thousands of third world employees from Europe and Asia to fill thousands of jobs that could have went to Iraqi citizens. Basically, all Iraqi citizens have been considered, or are treated as a potential enemy. Planned and formulated widespread efforts to create relationships and alliances with the Iraqi population at large have never been carried out in Iraq.

4.I am told Halliburton employs and pays most of its American and foreign employees in Iraq through a company in Saudi Arabia. By doing so, they do not pay any US taxes related to Medicare, social security, income tax (federal or State) etc.

What many of the American employees discover, usually after they return form Iraq, is that they are still liable for paying their share of Social Security, Medicare and State taxes and obligations. They are also responsible for income taxes for all income in excess of the first 82K dollars per year which is exempt under US law.

5.The Iraq Reconstruction Management Office (IRMO) which oversees all contracts in Iraq and the US Army have funded and built or re-built dozens of Muslim Mosques throughout Iraq, but has not re-built, or built a single Christian Church that I am aware of, although a couple of dozen have been battle damaged or destroyed.

6.When the Commander of the Multi-National Corp-Iraq suggested that we begin to utilize some funds to restart State owned Enterprises, which were many, to re-employ the Iraqis, open micro-finance offices in the critical cities to allow Iraqis to begin restructuring their own existence, and build a few highways as a way of re-employing thousands of Iraqi men, he was denied. Formally or informally, I do not know, but I do know the subject was dropped at the subsequent meetings.

7.Coalition? Somebody needs to ask who paid for the salaries, transportation, housing, food, offices, and other amenities for most of the "Coalition" members in Iraq. With the exception of the British, Italians, Japanese and very few others, we (YOU) pretty much paid for everybody else.

For example; What was the cost of supporting the Polish, Check Slovakian, Romanian and other contingents? KBR Halliburton has provided much of the support for these contingents. Isn’t that sort of like "paying" them to be with us? If we did not offer to pay, would they have been there at all?

8.Many of the "elected" Iraqi Government officials, although still being paid, have left Iraq and are living in neighboring Arab countries, France and England. Most are connected to rivaling militias.

9.From 2003 until late 2006 there existed no joint "Iraqi-American" working groups to determine structure, design, civil planning, priorities, requirements or civil "Rule of Law" plans. If they did exist, no-one I knew was aware of their existence. We (IRMO) decided what would be built and then we would inform the Iraqis. Iraqi civil servants and elected officials had no input. (The single exception is the PRTs which allow the Provincial councils to submit preferences for reconstruction). On many occasions we built things the Iraqis did not even want and told us so prior to construction. One example would be the "Highway Patrol" Station we built. The Iraqis do not have a Highway Patrol.
US Logistics units MNST-I/CPATT insisted on its construction.

10.The State Department Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs), which exist all over Iraq to bring Rule of Law, City Planning, reconstruction planning, etc to the Provincial governments do not have a single professional Iraqi citizen on the teams. No Iraqi city planners, no Iraqi engineers, no Iraqi Lawyers. There are thousands of unemployed, qualified Iraqi Engineers, Attorneys, City planners, etc., etc. etc..

11.About eight-thousand brand new SUVs and Pickup trucks were delivered to the Iraqi Police under a program called "Project Daytona". In the beginning the State Department had oversight of the project.
The pace was methodical and sure, but not fast enough for the US Military Commander, Maj. Gen. D.P. (Yes, the same D.P. who runs our Military in Iraq today). The DOS personnel were relieved of their primary responsibility of oversight and the Army began the hasty issue of the 8,600 SUVs and Pick-up trucks. With almost no accountability, no spare parts and no maintenance plan,the vehicles were issued.

Last time I check in late 2006, almost none could be accounted for and the Iraqi Police were telling us that the vehicles were destroyed. What a coincidence that SUVs and Pickups, just like the ones the America Taxpayers bought, are all over Baghdad and the Iraqi finance Minister, who used to control the Iraqi police, has dozens at his disposal now. We also delivered dozens of Brand New Factory armored Mercedes Benz sedans which cannot be account for now.

The governments of Japan and Korea had sent the Iraqi Minister of Interior over three thousand SUVs and Pickups. Those delivery numbers were never shared with IRMO although the Iraqis had agreed to share that information. We never formally asked them to explain their behavior.

12. A bridge construction project in Ramadi, approved by the IRMO/PCO and thoroughly briefed and signed off on by the Military Commanders in Baghdad was stopped by a single Colonel who had no authority to cancel the project. The thirteen million dollars was stilled paid out to the contractors, who were prevented from entering the construction area. (The Ramadi Governor and his Provincial council insisted that the bridge was critical to Ramadi and its future). The original bridge had been blown up by order of a Marine commander AFTER the Marines had already secured the immediate area.

13. Iraqi citizens are, more or less, prone to trust the average American soldier who walks their streets. They genuinely see the American soldier and Marine as a protector and shield against the violence. In contrast, the average Iraqi citizens, I have known, have a profound mistrust of many of the American commanders and civilian authorities they encounter. They know the Iraqi Police, for the most part, make up a large part of the Shia Militias. In Basrah, Iraq’s second largest city, the situation is different. In Basrah, where the British reign, there is a pronounced contempt and suspicion about even the average soldier. On many occasions the Provincial Governor of Basrah has simply refused to talk with the British authorities. The Shia Militias there have, to a great degree, dissuaded the British Army from being too active in the city of Basrah. British patrols in the actual city of Basrah are few.

14. With few exceptions, all the construction and assistance to the Iraqis in Southern Iraq, where the British have complete control and oversight, has been funded by the United States.

15. The costs for US Army Corps of Engineer controlled projects through the PCO in Iraq are more than double that of other US Government sanctioned contracting units such as the Air Force Contracting group in Iraq known as AFCEE.

The average advertised cost of performing a contract with through AFCEE is about 5% of the whole contract and usually ends up under that figure.
With the Corp of Engineers, the average advertised cost of the total contract dollar is about 8%. In many cases those contracts end up exceeding 22% to 30% of the total contract dollar. Lots of overhead, lots of "other" expenditures.

AFCEE is managing over three Billion dollars of contracts in Iraq with an
American staff of between nine and twelve people physically in Iraq. The US Corps of Engineers has roughly hundreds of American staff in Iraq.
Somebody needs to be shown the number of project "starts" by the Corps of
Engineers and the numbers of "fully completed" projects by them. I think that number would be of interest to the American population.

Somebody needs to ask how many projects have been "de-scoped" in order to
recover contract funds to pay "other" costs.

16. Many of the Military Base facilities the United States built for the Iraqi Military, were looted and stripped of anything of value, i.e., air conditioning, copper wire, bathroom fixtures, furniture, etc., very shortly after being formally turned over to the Iraqi Military.

The average American Soldier, Airman, Sailor and Marine in Iraq is dedicated and faithful to his/her service and leadership. They see some of the good and most of the bad to be seen in Iraq. They want to believe that they are there for a great purpose, a purpose that transcends tangible accomplishment.

Our Soldiers and Marines want the Iraqi people to know what we know in America, freedom, liberty and peace. They want the Iraqi to understand that we do not want to change their religion, or their culture and that we do not need to control the precious oil which lays in abundance under the Iraqi soil. The soldier in Iraq believes he/she came to help, to do a good work. Their Military and Civilian leadership has failed them.

Although there is great turmoil happening throughout Iraq everyday, our military soldiers, occasionally, are given the moment in time when an Iraqi man puts out his hand in friendship, or an Iraqi kid kicks the ball over to a soldier or Marine who happily joins into the game. An Iraqi mother glances with a grateful "thank you" in her expression to a passing soldier.

There is the snapshot in time, where a Marine holds the limb body of a dead child in his arms and cries from the senselessness of it all. At that moment, there is no politics, or good reason for what is happening, only a dead child, a life gone before it’s time. How do we compensate that Marine for that moment in his life? We don’t. We can’t. God help us.

There is no questioning the bravery, courage and compassion of the US Airmen, Sailors, Soldiers and Marines. That has never been the issue. America loves them and they know it. Right Wing, Left Wing, Conservative, Liberal, Cut "n" run, Stay the Course, or the Bomb the hell out of Iran group. We all love our men and women in uniform. They and the first responders of 9/11 have given America the real life heroes we have needed for so long.

Many Corporations and business people, American, Iraqi, British, Iranian, Kuwaiti, Jordanian and others have financially profited greatly from this war. Many of the Iraqi government officials, having arrived after Saddams fall, back in Iraq paupers, are now millionaires thanks to the American taxpayer, the President of the United States and the failed leadership of Donald Rumsfield and Paul Bremer. Those very same Iraqi government officials who now are associated with the very militant elements responsible for the senseless murder of thousands of Iraqi and US Soldiers and Marines. My own son was wounded battling these terrorist, criminal and murderous elements who are the friends of many of the Iraqi officials we support.

We owe the American Soldier, Sailor, Airman and Marine, who without question, has carried out his/her mission, and rightly performed his/her duty to their God, Service and Country without reservation. It was so discouraging to me when I heard about the Walter reed Medical scandal wherein our wounded soldiers were being subjected to terrible treatment. What was our President and Republican Congress thinking over the past four years?

This disgrace upon our Military wounded was totally avoidable. How did we have the money to pour Billions into the pockets of the Corporations and the Iraqi government officials, but could not find the funding to care for our wounded? The President surely understood business for the Corporations, but failed in the business of leading our Military and serving the people of America.

Iraq can only be stabilized by the Iraqis themselves. Yes we can and should support, train, advise and provide technical assistance to their economic and commercial development, but our combat role in Iraq must be ended immediately. Our combat forces need to be redeployed to areas where there is availability without exposure.

We have paid the price, we have gone the extra mile while the entire Middle East has sat out the turmoil. The Arab league needs to help Iraq, financially, commercially, and militarily.

America needs to allow the countries of the Middle East to begin the healing process in Iraq. The war against terrorism is not in Iraq. Enough is enough.

God bless the suffering people of Iraq. God bless America.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Marshall is a retired US Marine Vietnam veteran who became an Aviation Management/Logistics consultant in 1992.
Marshall worked in the Kuwait recovery of 1992-93.
He the Senior Aviation Logistics Manager for Kaman Aerospace in Egypt US Government programs for four years.
Marshall was in Iraq from mid-2003 until late-2006 where:
In 2003 he was the US Coalition Airport Director for Basrah Int'l Airport in Iraq.
In 2004 he was VP for Aviation Development with The Sandi Group Int’l, Iraq.
In 2005 Marshall was a Department of State US Advisor to the Iraqi Ministry of Interior and with the Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRT) where he was on the staff of the National Coordination Team (NCT) in Baghdad.

Marshall returned to the USA from hi diplomatic assignment in Iraq in September 2006 and is currently on staff as a Senior Analyst for a DOD project.
Marshall and his wife Becky (3rd grade teacher) have been married for 37 years and have four children, Paul, Veronica, William and Benjamin, and eleven grandchildren.
Their sons William and Benjamin, served in Iraq in the US Army. William was wounded in action on July 2nd 2006.
Marshall and Becky reside in Jacksonville North Carolina. marshall_adame@yahoo.com
Note: Marshall Adame will be a 2008 Democratic candidate for Congress in NC and is a supporter of John Edwards for President

Human Shields

Click on image to enlarge

Borrowers, Beware

By James Grant

Sunday, March 18, 2007; B01

The top man at the Treasury Department urged calm last week in the face of losses on Wall Street brought on by fears of defaults on the riskier kinds of mortgages. Really, he said, the damage is easily containable.

But of all people, Henry M. Paulson Jr., former head of the New York investment banking house of Goldman Sachs, should know just how reasonable this near-panic was. Easy credit has long been the American financial lifeblood. Anything resembling stringency on the part of our formerly carefree lenders would tend to set the economy on its ear.

Easy credit financed the bull market in houses and the flood of home refinancings. Americans felt richer and spent as though they were. It stands to reason that the withdrawal of this manna will lead them to spend less -- with substantial collateral damage to the housing-centered U.S. consumer economy, and, perhaps, well beyond. Our captains of industry owe as much to their lenders' leniency as does any subprime, or high-risk, home buyer. They, too, have been able to raise money on terms unimaginable only four years ago.

All this sounds scary enough, and it is. But financial history offers some solace. The U.S. economy excels in the art of facing up to error -- of identifying it, reappraising it and then repricing it. Loans, especially the risky kind, have been mispriced. They were, and are, too cheap. They will be repriced -- as they were, for example, in the aftermath of the junk-bond and real-estate troubles of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Borrowing costs will go up, and the value of the things that debt financed will tend to go down. In an attempt to ease the pain, the Federal Reserve will print more money.

A sign of the times was the announcement the other day by the top U.S. mortgage lender, Countrywide Financial, that it will no longer help the average Joe or Jane buy a house with not one dollar down. The era of lending home buyers 100 percent of the purchase price is over, it said. The other surviving mortgage originators have been forced to adopt similar policies -- not as stringent as in Grandfather's day, but a radical departure from the free-and-easy ways of the recent past.

It wouldn't matter so much if the new sobriety affected only a narrow segment of the home-buying population. But no less than 40 percent of the residential real estate market faces a much higher borrowing bar, according to a new report from Credit Suisse. About one in five of last year's mortgage originations could not have been booked if 2007 standards had applied, the banking firm estimates.

But the ripples from this cold bath go even further than the $8 trillion mortgage market. The truth is that the no-down-payment, no-documentation, interest-only mortgage loan has its counterparts in most branches of American finance.

The date of the last ceremonial burning of an American mortgage is lost in the mists of time. Outright, unencumbered ownership of a house, a building or a corporation is no longer an ideal that most Americans embrace. The new goal is to borrow as much as possible, as soon as possible, against any asset that could be financed. And these days -- thanks to Wall Street's ingenuity --all manner of assets pass as good collateral for a loan.

Up until just the other day, nearly every home buyer could qualify for a little more house than he or she could decently afford. The same holds true, with no interruption to date, for the billionaire buyers of businesses. On Wall Street, as on Main Street, borrowers have had to beat the lenders away with a stick. The question before the house is whether Wall Street's lenders will catch Main Street's jitters.

Many are the wellsprings of credit in this age of financial invention. The Federal Reserve, for example, pushed down the interest rate it alone controls to just 1 percent in 2003 (and held it there for 12 months). But the Fed is only one central bank. Interest rates are low the world over. You can borrow in Japan for about 1 percent today -- and many hedge funds do.

Lenders are herding creatures. They tend to think the same thoughts at the same time. In consequence, credit ebbs and flows in cycles. Imagine a bankers' migration between point A, which we may call "No way," and point B, which we will designate "Come and get it." Just such a movement got underway in 2002-03. At the start of this journey, risky credit instruments -- junk bonds, for example -- were virtually unmarketable. Lenders feared the fallout from the burst stock-market bubble. Before long, however, lenders and borrowers regained their courage. But now, having long tarried at "Come and get it," they are reversing course for "No way." The migration has only just begun.

Free-and-easy lending not only financed the run-up in house prices (and the attendant massive drawdown of homeowners' equity). It also spawned the upsurge in corporate-acquisition activity. Business borrowing costs in relation to the Treasury's borrowing costs are at near-record lows. Exotic borrowing terms designed to enable investors to pay higher and higher prices for businesses are still freely available. The standard fine print once demanded by lenders in loan documents to protect against wayward borrowers is increasingly being waived. Last week, Stephen A. Schwarzman, chairman and chief executive of the Blackstone Group, a leader in the private-equity field, informed a New York audience that he could raise $20 billion with only a few phone calls -- and without the inhibiting fine print, of course.

Lenders read the newspapers, too. All but the greenest understand the risks of overdoing it. What, then, could they possibly be thinking about? For many, it is the serenity of the recent past. It seemed that nothing could go wrong in American finance. Stocks went up (or, at least, not down). Inflation was contained. Defaults were few and far between. Until the tiny Metropolitan Savings Bank of Pittsburgh bit the dust last month, no federally insured bank had failed for 2 1/2 years, the longest such streak since the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. opened its doors in 1934. And when a company did file for bankruptcy protection, more lenders rushed to its aid.

Last Tuesday brought word that delinquencies among subprime mortgage borrowers had hit a four-year high. Few had expected it. Housing will be fine as long as the economy is upright, standard Wall Street thinking had it. But the optimists failed to reckon with the lenders. The sheer recklessness of recent mortgage underwriting practices has done the kind of damage to the creditworthiness of the American homeowner that only recessions used to inflict.

Always, the knee bone is connected to the thigh bone. Especially in this age of global markets, the two are tightly joined. Nowadays, loans rarely rest on the balance sheets of the lenders who make them. Rather, they are scooped up and fashioned into securities -- "asset-backed securities." And these are gathered up and refashioned into still other securities -- "collateralized debt obligations." And the CDOs, many of them dizzyingly complex, are sold to investors the world over. No bank regulator watches over these financial sausage-making operations. As the Federal Reserve has receded in importance in this worldwide financial system of ours, so has the U.S. banking system. A parallel kind of banking system has come into existence. Wall Street calls it the "CDO machine."

The CDO machine is a component of the infernal engine of international finance. This nation is privileged to be able to consume much more than it produces. We buy foreign goods, paying with dollars. The foreigners most generously consent to invest these dollars in U.S. stocks, bonds, CDOs and the like. Many of these CDOs are packed with mortgages, including the subprime, or low-grade, variety.

In a speech two years ago, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke pointed to a curious coincidence: Growth in U.S. mortgage debt tracks closely with the growth in the trade deficit -- that is, the difference between what we consume and what we produce. "Over the past two decades," he said, "major innovations in the United States have improved the availability and lowered the costs of home mortgages. These developments likely spurred homeowners to tap increasing home equity to finance consumer expenditures beyond home purchase. In contrast, mortgage debt is not so readily available among our trading partners as a vehicle to finance consumption expenditures."

If I were the head of state of one of our trading partners, I would be asking myself if these "major innovations" were as wholesome as they used to seem. Deciding not, I would command my minister of investments to unload U.S. mortgage holdings. And I would imagine that I would not be the only head of state to whom this thought had occurred.

Naturally, Congress will want to know whom to blame for this reckless lending and borrowing. The usual suspects come to mind: the Fed for pushing interest rates down to half-century lows, the bond-rating agencies for sugarcoating the risk on mortgage-backed securities and the lenders who competed with one another to see who could operate in defiance of the greatest number of canons of prudent credit practice. It was Congress itself that eliminated tax deductions on interest for nearly all consumer debt -- but let them stand for residential mortgages.

But our lawmakers should not forget to call human nature to account. In 1886, 40 years before the birth of former Fed chief Alan Greenspan, the Great Plains was the scene of a terrific real-estate boom, financed by the most reckless kind of lending. There was no Fed, and there were no rating agencies, just lenders and borrowers taking leave of their senses. They returned to them, eventually. They always do.

editor@grantspub.com

James Grant is the editor of Grant's Interest Rate Observer.

Valerie Plame case The Valerie Plame case: My wife, the CIA agent, by Joe Wilson

Valerie Plame broke cover this week to give her side of a story that has engulfed the White House in scandal and led to the conviction of the Vice President's chief of staff for perjury. Here her husband, Joe Wilson, whose opposition to the Iraq war is thought to have provoked her 'outing', talks to Andrew Buncombe about their ordeal

Published: 18 March 2007

The removal men have been and gone, and the elegant house in Georgetown's Charleston Terrace, with its huge door knocker in the shape of a lion's head, stands empty. Its new occupants, a woman from Oman and her husband who works for the World Bank, are getting ready to move in.

For the best part of 10 years the house, with its expansive views of the Washington Monument, was home to former ambassador Joseph Wilson and his wife Valerie Plame. They signed their names to its deeds in May 1998 and moved in shortly afterwards. But two weeks ago the couple, who for almost four intense years have been at the centre of one of Washington's most closely followed stories, closed that heavy-set door one final time and headed west. Their destination was New Mexico and what they hope will be a new chapter in their lives.

"Santa Fe. We thought it would it would be a nice place to raise our kids," Mr Wilson, 57, tells The Independent on Sunday, referring to the couple's seven-year-old twins, Trevor and Samantha. "We are from the west. We have been going back and forth for a number of years. Santa Fe appeals to us. It's an international city, there's an opera. And Valerie has been going to [the US nuclear laboratory at] Los Alamos for years as part of her activities."

Put most simply, the reason they no longer have a reason to be in Washington is that Mr Wilson's wife no longer has a job here. In the summer of 2003, a conservative newspaper columnist revealed that, according to White House sources, Mr Wilson's wife was a covert CIA operative, working on weapons of mass destruction. Her outing set off a series of events that this month resulted in the conviction for perjury of Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

But her outing - widely believed to have been carried out by the highest levels of the Bush administration in an act of revenge against Mr Wilson after he showed President Bush's claims about Iraq's nuclear ambitions to be false - had more straightforward ramifications. As Ms Plame herself told a congressional committee last week during a rare public appearance, with her cover blown she was out of a job. "My name and identity were carelessly and recklessly abused by senior officials in the White House and State Department," she said. "I could no longer perform the work for which I had been highly trained."

Her appearance before a House committee was noteworthy less for what she said but because she was saying anything at all. For the past four years in which she and Mr Wilson have watched as federal investigators examined who was involved in the leaking of her identity, Ms Plame has kept largely quiet. While Mr Wilson has railed against the actions of the Bush administration, she has borne in mind her training as a covert operative and allowed her husband to take the spotlight.

That is not to say she has kept out of sight. Indeed, since 2003 Ms Plame, 43, and Mr Wilson have become something of a fixture on Washington's liberal cocktail circuit. They have attended parties, gone to openings and accepted invitations to all manner of events, especially those organised by Democrats. Recently they had dinner with leading Democratic presidential hopeful Senator Hillary Clinton. Last year, they even took up an invitation from ABC News to attend the White House Correspondents Association (WHCA) dinner, also attended by George and Laura Bush.

It is just that, at these events, the striking Ms Plame was careful not to stir controversy and said very little. Her behaviour at a small, invitation-only party held in the spring of 2004 to launch her husband's book The Politics of Truth was typical of the way Ms Plame behaved. The event was held in the Washington home of a former US ambassador to Portugal. Throughout the evening, at which the IoS was among the guests, Ms Plame remained in the background, content to talk quietly with friends. When her husband made a short speech in which he thanked her, she remained standing with her circle, unwilling to become the focus of people's attention.

Likewise, a report in The Washington Post about an October 2003 party at the home of former NBC White House correspondent Campbell Brown noted that Mr Wilson openly voiced his criticisms of the administration. "The buzz, though," said the Post, "focused on a shy and attractive blonde who sat nibbling finger sandwiches and discreetly introduced herself only as 'Valerie'."

The Wilsons' strategy has not been without its slips. For the January 2004 edition of Vanity Fair, for example, the couple posed for a now notorious photograph in Mr Wilson's open-top Jaguar, he with one arm hanging casually over the door and she wearing a head-scarf and dark-glasses. "The pictures should not be able to identify her, or are not supposed to," Mr Wilson later said. "She's still not going to answer any questions and there will not be any pictures that compromise her."

But given that Mr Wilson had until that point insisted his wife would rather "break her arm" than be photographed, even some of the couple's supporters began to wonder whether he had grown a little too fond of the attention he was getting.

Certainly, Mr Wilson has never shied away from publicity. He has appeared on television, given speeches and lectures, and is now co-operating with producers at Warner Bros on a film about the couple's lives. He has given his support to various Democratic candidates, including Senator John Kerry in his 2004 presidential campaign.

But the former Californian "surf dude", who as a US diplomat in Iraq once faced down Saddam Hussein, insists he is driven by principle rather than ego. "There are lots of good old sayings," he says, speaking by phone from Utah at the weekend. "Americans stand up and fight for our liberties against those that try to usurp our [rights]."

Ms Plame's preference for keeping a lower profile is apparently genuine. Friends of the couple say that she has always been a pleasant, easy-going woman whose prime concern has been the welfare of her children. They insist that when she told them she was an energy consultant for Brewster, Jennings and Associates (a fictitious front company invented by the CIA), they had no reason not to believe her. No one thought for a moment she was a spy.

"They are our dearest friends ... She is a nice, nice woman. As normal and as natural as possible," says David Tillotson, a neighbour of the Wilsons in Charleston Terrace. "We had no idea [of her real profession]. They have two seven-year-old twins. I have a lap pool ... with a wooden door to the outside, and very often during the summer they would come over and go swimming. Very often [it would be just] Valerie and the children. They would come and swim and we would sit and talk."

And when the news of Ms Plame's identity became public, the Tillotsons' relationship with the Wilsons changed very little. At the same time, Ms Plame talked very little about her "other" life. "Valerie is a very private person. She does not go in for that," says Mr Tillotson, a lawyer. "We know her at a different level."

Mr Wilson first met Ms Plame in 1997 at a party at the home of Turkey's ambassador to the US. In his memoir, he says when he saw her he was immediately smitten. "I looked up and saw across the room this willowy blonde, resembling a young Grace Kelly," he writes. It was on their third or fourth date during a "heavy make-out" session that she revealed to Mr Wilson, who as a former diplomat had classified clearance, the truth about herself.

That truth involved joining the CIA when she was just 22 and fresh out of college in Pennsylvania, a tough initiation at "the Farm", the agency's training facility at Camp Peary, Virginia, and then assignments in Athens and London, where she had posed as a student at the London School of Economics (LSE). Like Mr Wilson she had also been previously married, he twice. When they met, she was based in Brussels but that same year she moved back to Washington, reportedly because the CIA believed her name had been on a list handed to the Russians by the double agency Aldrich Ames in 1994 and that she may have been compromised.

The future for the Wilsons is somewhat unclear. The former diplomat has previously worked as a consultant to US businesses looking to invest in challenging overseas environments, and he says he has a number of projects that he intends to follow. For her part, Ms Plame is still awaiting clearance from the CIA for the publication of her own memoir, entitled Fair Game, a title based on President Bush's special adviser Karl Rove's description of her to a television journalist. The book reportedly earned her an advance of $2.5m. Then there is the little matter of who will play her in the movie.

In the meantime, the couple are busy setting up home in a three-bedroom adobe-style home complete with guest quarters. According to a report in the Albuquerque Journal, the property is set among piñon and aspen trees and has a patio that looks out over the nearby Jerez Mountains. Intriguingly, the property comes with 11 fireplaces. But, best of all given Ms Plame's previous life, the front door of their new home is fitted with a postigo, a small wooden shutter that allows the occupant to look and see just who is knocking.

Marilyn Monroe was fooled by RFK into killing herself, says a newly released FBI file

Marilyn: The case for 'assisted suicide'

The star was fooled into killing herself, says a newly released FBI file. Did her friends deliberately let her die? Kathy Marks reports

Published: 18 March 2007

Marilyn Monroe may have been tricked into killing herself as part of a plot hatched with the knowledge of the former US attorney general, Robert Kennedy, according to a secret FBI file.

The document, uncovered by an Australian film director, Philippe Mora, suggests Monroe was "induced" to make a suicide attempt, in the belief she would be found in time, and her stomach pumped. Instead, it suggests, she was left to die by staff and friends, including the actor Peter Lawford, who was married to Kennedy's sister, Patricia.

The 36-year-old actress was found naked and face down on her bed on 5 August 1962, with a large quantity of barbiturates in her system. For 45 years conspiracy theorists have claimed that her death was not a simple suicide, with some linking it to alleged affairs with Kennedy and his brother, the then President, John F Kennedy.

According to the FBI report, Robert Kennedy called Lawford from a San Francisco hotel that night "to find out if Marilyn was dead yet". Writing in the Sydney Morning Herald yesterday, Mr Mora, who is based in Los Angeles, says he found the file among thousands of classified documents recently released under freedom of information laws. Compiled by a "former Special Agent" whose name is deleted, it is headed "Robert F Kennedy".

The FBI received the file on 19 October 1964. It contains a report that claims Monroe was deliberately given the means to fake a suicide attempt. Those in on the conspiracy, as well as Lawford, were her psychiatrist, Ralph Greenson, her housekeeper, Eunice Murray, and her secretary and press agent, Pat Newcomb.

The former agent warns he cannot evaluate the authenticity of the information. Even so, saysMora, his file was circulated to five top FBI officers, including Clyde Tolson, right-hand man of bureau chief J Edgar Hoover.

The report that it cites suggests the motive was to silence Monroe, who had threatened to make public a "romance and sex affair" with Robert Kennedy. Monroe had, it says, realised Kennedy was never going to divorce his wife and marry her, as promised. Kennedy had also reneged on a pledge to "take care of everything" after the actress's contract with 20th Century Fox was cancelled. The pair had "unpleasant words" on the phone.

The file - parts of which were deleted before its release - states that Lawford "knew from Marilyn's friends that she often made suicide attempts and that she was inclined to fake a suicide attempt in order to arouse sympathy". He reportedly made "special arrangements" with Greenson, who was treating her for "emotional problems and getting her off the use of barbiturates". On her last visit, Greenson gave Monroe a prescription for 60 tablets of Seconal, used to relieve insomnia and anxiety. The prescription was "unusual in quantity", the report says. Murray left the pills on Monroe's night table.

That day Kennedy left the Beverly Hills Hotel and flew to San Francisco. The report says: "Robert Kennedy made a telephone call to Peter Lawford to find out if Marilyn was dead yet."

Lawford called and spoke to Monroe, "then checked again later to make sure she did not answer". According to the file, Murray then called Greenson to tell him Monroe had taken the pills. "Marilyn expected to have her stomach pumped and get sympathy for her suicide attempt. The psychiatrist left word for Marilyn to take a drive in the fresh air but did not come to see her until after she was known to be dead."

Officially, Monroe was found dead in the early hours by Murray. Within 48 hours, the report says, Newcomb and Lawford had flown to the Kennedy compound at Hyannisport, Massachusetts.

French-born Mora admits he is not sure what to make of the file. He asks: "Is all this the elaborate dirty tricks of Kennedy haters from decades ago, or are we getting closer to the historical truth?"

Jimmy Carter and Apartheid

Volume 54, Number 5 · March 29, 2007

Jimmy Carter and Apartheid
By Joseph Lelyveld
Perhaps an intrepid researcher will one day go through the many Internet pages that make assertions pro and con on the question of whether Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories can properly be assessed as "apartheid." Then we may be in a position to tell whether the first polemicist to sling the term in the context of the West Bank was a foreigner, a Palestinian, or, just possibly, an Israeli. Suffice it to say, it wasn't Jimmy Carter, whose recent book, with its unpunctuated title Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, has been high on the best-seller lists for nearly three months despite—maybe, in part, because of—the wrath his use of the term has provoked among Israel's supporters.

The road to 'freedom' is paved with blood

Patrick Cockburn: The road to freedom is paved with blood

In Arbil, the streets have been cleared of burned-out tanks and Saddam's troops. But they are more dangerous than ever

Published: 18 March 2007

Four years ago, in the middle of the US invasion, I drove safely from Arbil in northern Iraq to Baghdad. There were heaps of discarded weapons beside the road, and long lines of former Iraqi soldiers walking home. Signs of battle were few, aside from the hulks of burned-out tanks, but they all seemed to have been hit by US aircraft after their crews had fled.

If I tried to make the same journey today, I would be killed or kidnapped long before I reached Baghdad. Kurdish ministers in the Iraqi government dare not travel by road between the capital and their homeland. Three bodyguards of the Foreign Minister, Hoshyar Zebari, were ambushed and killed when they tried to do so a month ago.

Tony Blair and George Bush still occasionally imply that the picture of Iraq as a war-torn hell is an exaggeration by the media. They suggest, though not as forcibly as they did a couple of years ago, that parts of the country are relatively peaceful. Nothing could be more untrue.

In reality, the violence is grossly understated. The Baker-Hamilton report by senior Republicans and Democrats, led by James Baker, took a single day last summer, when the US army reported 93 acts of violence in Iraq, and asked American intelligence to re-examine the evidence. They found the real figure was 1,100 - the US military had deliberately understated the violence by factor of over 10.

Getting rid of Saddam Hussein was not going to be the main problem when the US and Britain invaded four years ago. His army would fall apart, as it had done in 1991 when he was expelled from Kuwait, because Iraqis simply would not fight for him. But the outcome of the invasion of 2003 was predictably different from the war in 1991, and not just because there is now a large American army in the heart of the Middle East, destabilising the whole region. US forces had not pressed on to Baghdad 16 years ago, partly because Washington did not want to see Saddam replaced by Shia religious parties with possible links to Iran. That is exactly what has happened now, because 60 per cent of the Iraqi population is Shia.

Less predictable was the disaster facing ordinary Iraqis. Most wanted rid of Saddam Hussein because they expected a better life after his fall. Since they had oil reserves comparable to Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, Iraqis felt, why could they not have an equivalent standard of living to Saudis and Kuwaitis?

In fact almost every aspect of Iraqi day-to-day life has got worse over the last four years. In May 2003, people in Baghdad were getting 16 to 24 hours of electricity a day. Today the official figure is just six hours a day - and even that is on the optimistic side. In a city with one of the hottest climates in the world, it is catastrophic when fridges, freezers or air conditioners cannot be used.

There are 4.8 million Iraqi children under the age of five, who have lived most of their lives since the fall of Saddam Hussein. Unicef figures show that 20 per cent of them are so severely malnourished that their growth is stunted.

Under Saddam Hussein most Iraqis worked for the state. This worked well while he had oil revenues to pay them, but after 1990, UN sanctions meant that millions of people who had enjoyed a middle-class standard of living became totally impoverished, and four years ago more than half of Iraqis were unemployed. One of the worst scandals of the occupation is that they still are - although billions of dollars have been spent, billions were stolen.

For all the money supposedly being spent on developing the economy, there were no cranes to be seen in Baghdad except a cluster in the Green Zone, at work on a vast new American embassy.

But whatever the material failings of life, over the last four years it is the lack of security that has dominated everything else for Iraqis. By the end of 2003 I could already see mothers becoming hysterical at a school near my Baghdad hotel, because if they could not find their children they immediately feared that they had been kidnapped.

Since 2003, Iraqi life has become drenched by violence. Many Iraqis now carry two sets of papers, to pass through Sunni and Shia areas, but often it is not enough. The UN, using figures from Baghdad morgue and the Health Ministry, says 3,462 civilians were killed in Iraq in November and 2,914 in December. Many died at the hands of death squads, picked up on the street or caught at checkpoints.

The US troop reinforcements in Baghdad, the famous "surge", should make some difference to the casualty figures. But it is essentially a change in tactics masquerading as a change in strategy. Baghdad has fewer and fewer mixed Sunni and Shia districts. The Shia militias and Sunni insurgents have not disappeared, but are awaiting their moment to return.

People in Baghdad used to say that under Saddam Hussein, life was fairly safe if you kept out of politics. This was true of crime: during the war of 1991 I was once stranded in the semi-desert between Baghdad and Mosul when my car broke down, because the petrol in the tank had been watered down. I travelled on to Mosul, hitching lifts from farmers without any threat to my safety.

If I did that today, I would be stopped and probably murdered at one of the official or unofficial checkpoints on the road.

From Shock & Awe to the 'surge' without end

Four years ago this Tuesday, George Bush began his ill-fated Iraq campaign. Today's news that the US is sending an extra battalion to Baghdad will push troop levels to 160,000 - 10,000 more than at the time of the invasion

By Raymond Whitaker

Published: 18 March 2007

US troop levels in Iraq are set to rise higher than at any time since the war began four years ago, The Independent on Sunday can reveal.

This summer, troop levels will top 160,000 - compared with the 150,000 there were at the time of the invasion.

As Britain prepares to pull 1,600 troops out of southern Iraq, the Pentagon has just obtained the agreement of the US Defence Secretary, Robert Gates, to deploy an additional combat aviation brigade of 2,600, consisting of ground forces and a full complement of helicopters.

The brigade was due to go to Iraq in the summer as part of a regular rotation of troops, but is being sent in early to support the "surge" of American forces approved by President George Bush in January.

At that point the plan, aimed at bringing the insurgency in Baghdad and neighbouring Anbar province under control, called for an additional 21,500 combat troops to be sent to Iraq. But the figure has since crept up to nearly 30,000, with 2,200 military police being added to handle the higher number of people being detained in security sweeps, plus a further 2,400 combat and service-support personnel. Pentagon figures released on Friday show a total of 7,200 troops have been added to the "surge", taking the overall increase to 28,700.

According to the US military thinktank GlobalSecurity.org, there were 132,000 American ground troops in Iraq at the beginning of this year. When the reinforcements finish arriving by the end of June, the total will rise above 160,000, more than at any point in the past four years. Tuesday is the fourth anniversary of the start of the conflict with the "shock and awe" bombing of Baghdad.

In 2003, when the American-led coalition smashed its way to Baghdad in three weeks, there were never more than 150,000 US troops in the country. By March 2004, when Saddam Hussein was in custody and Mr Gates's over-confident predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, was anticipating an early exit, the total slipped as low as 117,500. The only months the US deployment approached 160,000 were November and December 2005, when extra forces were in place during the national elections. Their numbers were reduced immediately afterwards, but the formation of a government has done nothing to quell the violence.

Last week the Pentagon admitted for the first time that there was civil war in parts of Iraq. Its assessment of the final quarter of 2006 was its bleakest ever, with record levels of violence. Attacks increased to more than 1,000 a week and average daily casualties rose above 140 - and those figures, the report admitted, are based purely on "violence observed by or reported to the US-led military coalition". The real extent of violence is likely to be much greater.

Describing worsening sectarian divisions, the report said: "Illegally armed groups are engaged in a self-sustaining cycle of politically motivated violence, using tactics that include indiscriminate bombing, murder, and indirect fire to intimidate people and stoke sectarian conflict."

Up to 9,000 civilians are fleeing the country each month as a result, according to the Pentagon. The UNHCR says that if internally displaced people are included, the figure rises to something like 50,000 a month.

This is the background to the "surge" operation, which began a month ago. American and Iraqi forces are attempting to "clear and hold" Baghdad, neighbourhood by neighbourhood.

"Once security forces have locked down an area," an official told the IoS, "we are applying a tailored combination of social, governance, economic and political measures. The aim is to take advantage of the temporary absence of insurgents, and render that absence permanent by 'hard-wiring them out' of the environment that they used to dominate.

"Then they may not be able to return, or if they do they will find greatly increased resistance and will stand out better against the background of the population, and it will be harder [for them] to operate."

Commanders claim there have been positive early results, with a decline in sectarian killings in Baghdad, although February saw a record number of bombings. They also admit that to some extent violence has simply been displaced outside the capital - on Friday, in Anbar province, two suicide truck bombers driving tankers filled with chlorine killed at least eight people south of Fallujah. About 350 civilians and six US troops were treated for chlorine gas exposure.

"Moving security forces into an insurgent area to 'shut it down' is like stamping on a puddle - the large pool of water disappears, but little splashes and spots radiate out from it," said the official.

"So if security operations are all you are doing, they will have local and temporary effects. Violence will decrease, but only where you are operating, and when you leave it will come back."

Major General William Caldwell, the most senior US military spokesman in Baghdad, said it would make "an incredible difference ... if the high-profile car bombs can be stopped or brought down to a much lower level". But the official warned that the bombers would remain difficult to stop until the mood of the population changed, and that would come, if at all, at the end of the operation.

While those conducting the operation stress the need for patience, the risk is that US troop losses will rise, strengthening the campaign in Washington for a pullout date to be set. So far this month 44 American soldiers have been killed, on course to match the 80 deaths in February and 83 in January. The belief in Baghdad, said the official, was that the US public would tolerate the losses, as long as there was a perception of progress being made: "What they hate are not lives lost, but lives wasted."

But the political side of the "surge" plan is going badly, according to the Pentagon and others. The Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, is showing little enthusiasm for American attempts to reverse one of their own worst mistakes: the "de-Baathification" of the old regime, which removed thousands of Sunni military commanders and pushed them into the insurgency.

"In one sentence," the official concluded, "my take on the current situation is: 'Right strategy, great team, possibly too late.'"

A nation in ruins

2,000,000 Iraqis now live outside Iraq, according to UNHCR

12,000 doctors have fled Iraq since the war began. Another 2,000 are said to have been killed, and at least 250 kidnapped

50% Average inflation in 2006, according to the World Bank

6.3 hours of electricity daily in Baghdad in December 2006. In May 2003 there were 16-24 hours

32 percentage of people in Iraq with drinkable water

3,700,000 Iraqis now receive food aid from the UN World Food Programme

16% Proportion of Iraqis who said in January that their income meets their basic needs

Rove's "Dirty Tricks" Email Servers

Mar 18, 2007

Imagine an administration that designed a special way to communicate to keep their secrets secret from investigations and history. Ok, stop imagining, because it's already here!!

On the talking points website, we find an email with J. Scott Jennings Signature --a signature is the electronic equivalent to his business card. And it says ---

J. Scott Jennings
Special Assistant to the President and
Deputy Political Director [note - this = Karl Rove]
The White House
Washington D.C. 20502
SJennings@gwb43.com [emphasis added]

Ok, so Karl's assistant doesn't use the WH email system but rather gwb43.com. So, let's query the WhoIs database to see who owns gwb43.com:

Registrant:
Republican National Committee
310 First Street SE
Washington, DC 20003
US

Domain Name: GWB43.COM

Administrative Contact, Technical Contact:
Republican National Committee dns@RNCHQ.ORG
310 First Street SE
Washington, DC 20003
US
999 999 9999 fax: 999 999 9999

Record expires on 16-Jan-2008.
Record created on 16-Jan-2004.
Database last updated on 17-Mar-2007 13:19:34 EDT.

Domain servers in listed order:

NS1.CHA.SMARTECHCORP.NET
A.NS.TRESPASSERS-W.NE

Oh, I see. The Republican National Committee maintains this server. The Washington Post mentioned this in its Wednesday's story on Gonzales---

Jennings used an e-mail account registered to the Republican National Committee, where Griffin had worked as an opposition researcher.

Democratic congressional aides said they will investigate whether using the private address for government business violated laws against using taxpayer resources for political work or signaled that White House officials considered the firing of U.S. attorneys to be primarily a political issue. Jennings did not return a call to his office seeking a comment.

"As a matter of course, the RNC provides server space and equipment to certain White House personnel in order to assist them with their political efforts," RNC spokeswoman Tracey Schmitt said.

DeepSouthdoug blogged yesterday, in Send "kr" Your Love on Karl Rove's outside email account, kr@georgebush.com. His blog was based on this WaPo article by Dan Fromklin.

Fromkin asked the WH a these questions, all of which weren't answered:

1. Does White House policy allow White House staffers to use non-White House e-mail addresses for official White House business? Does it prohibit it? What is the policy?

2. Would these e-mails be treated any differently from official White House e-mails when it comes to archiving or subpoena purposes?

3. Does it create either impropriety or the appearance of impropriety that gwb43.com is a domain owned by the Republican National Committee?

4. Do other White House staffers regularly use non-White House e-mail accounts for White House business, and if so, why?

Since then, several readers have e-mailed me with their own questions and comments. So I've added four more, passed those along as well, and still no response:

5. Does non-White House e-mail fulfill security requirements for White House communications?

6. If other non-White House e-mail accounts are used, who are the providers for all of the other accounts? (Any others besides the RNC?)

7. Does White House policy allow White House staffers to use non-White House e-mail addresses from their computers, even for non-official business? I'm told that during the Clinton administration, access to external e-mail, including Web mail, was shut off from White House (eop.gov) computers. Was there a conscious change of policy by the Bush administration?

8. Have there been any recent changes in policy relating to e-mail practices, or are changes in policy contemplated?

He also wonders who maintains the domain that Karl used, georgebush.com. Well, we can query the WhoIs database to find that answer--

Registrant:
Bush-Cheney '04, Inc.
P.O. Box 10648
Arlington, VA 22210
US

Domain Name: GEORGEBUSH.COM

Administrative Contact, Technical Contact:
Bush-Cheney '04, Inc. Chuck@georgewbush.com
P.O. Box 10648
Arlington, VA 22210
US
703-647-2700

Record expires on 01-Apr-2012.
Record created on 01-Apr-1998.
Database last updated on 17-Mar-2007 13:35:28 EDT.

Domain servers in listed order:

NS1.CHA.SMARTECHCORP.NET
A.NS.TRESPASSERS-W.NET

Karl's works in the White house, but "Chuck@georgewbush.com" and Bush-Cheney '04 is responsible for maintaining Karl's uptime.

Technical note: for both email servers the "finger function" is disabled. So, you can't find whether "kr" is the only user of that email server.

However, we can conclude that certain White House communications have been outsourced.

Does anyone remember when a convenient Windows update was made to Flordia state computers after the 2000 election and many emails were--oops!--lost!

And whatdoyaknow? Windows Vista has just been released!!

Also, I suspect that Fitzgerald did not supeona communications from these systems when he investigated the Plame affair. If this was Rove's main email server, then Fitzy--well, it's a sad St. Patrick's day for this snookered Irishman.

And perhaps most important, if matters of National Security were discussed on these servers--and we know that "National Security" is also political--then the very existance of these servers probably violates National Security laws and endangers our county.

Potentially, hackers could break in and find--well, a lot of stuff on National Security.

But--and here it gets amusing or Orwellian, depending upon your sense of humor--someone should subpoena everything on these servers bec. National Security might have been discussed on this alternative channel. But who--the NSC or the DOJ?

-----------------------
UPDATE 3/18/07; 11:45 EST

There are many great threads below, briefly some intereting threads to "find on Page" for are

Network or trespassers-w – for mailserver and host information – who to subpoena and where the actual hard drives should be located
tech (Info on Smarttech – the company hosting the mail servers),
CREW citizensforethics.org – CREW is working on this issue
litigatormom (subpoenas scope),
Britain (a similar sit. with Blair's mailservers)
George (GWB & administration’s email habbits)
Ralston (Abramoff scandal link)
KStreetProjector gives the physical address where the servers are located -

I bet the parking lot is packed and 50 people are there right now.

302 N. Cleveland-Massillon Rd.
Akron, OH 44333
v/ 330.665.3483

if anyone lives there, this would make a great Sunday drive with a video camera or a conventional camera. Pack a lunch and post your findings! Oh, and bring a phone. NOTE: YOU MIGHT BE ABLE TO SELL YOUR VIDEO EVEN AFTER POSTING PART OF IT, IF ANYONE IS THERE. An hour out of your day, maybe you sell it to cnn.

JEB posts on the applicable law

-- and then there's lots of other great threads! (most more insightful than this post)

by BloggerJohn

March on Pentagon Photo Gallery

March on Pentagon Photo Gallery

7 U.S. troops die in Iraq violence

By LAUREN FRAYER, Associated Press Writer 1 hour, 12 minutes ago

The U.S. military on Sunday announced the deaths of seven more troops in Iraq, including four killed by a roadside bomb while patrolling western Baghdad — the latest American casualties in a monthlong security crackdown in the capital.

Though violence has receded slightly in the capital, a car bomb killed seven Iraqis in a predominantly Shiite district on Sunday, police said. The attack targeted people cooking food at open-air grills in the street, to offer as charity on a Shiite Muslim holiday. Police said 26 people were wounded.

A U.S. official, meanwhile, blamed al-Qaida in Iraq for chlorine bomb attacks that struck villagers in Anbar province earlier this week but said tight Iraqi security measures prevented a higher number of casualties.

Three suicide bombers driving trucks rigged with tanks of toxic chlorine gas struck targets in the insurgent stronghold including the office of a Sunni tribal leader opposed to al-Qaida. The attacks killed at least two people and sickened 350 Iraqi civilians and six U.S. troops, the U.S. military said Saturday.

U.S. military spokesman Adm. Mark Fox said at least one of the attackers detonated his explosives after he was unable to get past an Iraqi police checkpoint in Amiriyah, just south of Fallujah, killing only himself. Fox conceded that many Iraqis were exposed to the chemical fumes but insisted that steps Iraqi security forces were increasingly effective

"Insurgent attempts to create high-profile carnage are being stopped at checkpoints across the country," he said at a news conference in Baghdad.

Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh appealed to Iraqis to help stop the violence.

"Opportunity is still available to all honest Iraqis to rescue this country from the criminals," he said at a joint news conference with Fox. "The chlorine attack was a kind of punishment against the people who stood against terrorist organizations."

There is a growing power struggle between insurgents and the growing number of Sunnis who oppose them in Anbar, the center of the Sunni insurgency, which stretches from Baghdad to the borders with Syria, Saudi Arabia and Jordan. The Anbar assaults came three days after Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite, traveled there, hoping to reach out to Sunni clan chiefs and to undermine tribal support for the insurgency.

After the explosion that killed four U.S. soldiers on Saturday, the unit came under fire and another soldier was wounded. During this month's crackdown in the capital, the battalion had found eight weapons caches and two roadside bombs and helped rescue a kidnap victim, the military said.

An explosion in Diyala province northeast of Baghdad killed another soldier Saturday and injured five. A sixth soldier died Saturday in a non-combat related incident, the military said. A U.S. Marine also was killed Saturday in fighting in Anbar, according to a separate statement.

Saturday's deaths brought to at least 3,217 members of the U.S. military who have died since the Iraq war started in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.

A Web video surfaced Sunday showing an alleged insurgent crawling under a U.S. military vehicle in Iraq and purportedly planting explosives in full daylight. Seconds later, the video cuts to an explosion ripping the vehicle apart.

The footage was stamped with the emblem of the Islamic State of Iraq, an al-Qaida-linked militant group that disavows Iraq's elected government and seeks to establish Muslim law.

The video was posted on an Islamic Web site that frequently airs insurgent messages, but its contents and authenticity could not be independently verified.

The footage shows a man in beige pants and a dark sweatshirt, crawling through mud puddles underneath a Bradley fighting vehicle and hauling an object about two feet long. Then the video switches to a wider view of the vehicle exploding in a ball of flames and smoke.

A caption says the incident happened in western Anbar province, an insurgent stronghold west of Baghdad.

In violence Sunday, gunmen opened fire on a minibus carrying civilians northeast of Baghdad, killing seven men and wounding four others, police said. The attack occurred in Hibhib, just east of Baqouba, in the area where al-Qaida in Iraqi leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed in a U.S. airstrike on June 7.

A roadside bomb also hit an Iraqi police convoy in eastern Baghdad, killing two policemen and wounding five, authorities said. Later, police said a mortar round landed near a house in central Baghdad, killing a civilian and wounding another.

In Shorja market, Baghdad's most popular central shopping district, a man tossed a grenade into a group of workers, police said. One worker was killed and another was wounded. The suspect escaped through an alley, they said.

The Shorja market, which has been attacked several times, was turned into a pedestrian zone after a U.S.-Iraqi security crackdown began in Baghdad on Feb. 14.

An abandoned hotel exploded Sunday in an industrial area of Fallujah, 40 miles west of Baghdad. Police said insurgents had planted bombs in the three-story building and then detonated it at dawn. Half of the building was destroyed.

Iraqi troops had taken over part of the building's roof as a base, police said. There were no reports of casualties.

In Diwaniyah, 80 miles south of Baghdad, fierce fighting erupted between U.S. troops and elements of the Shiite Mahdi Army, police said. There were no reports of casualties, and the U.S. military had no immediate comment.

Eleven bodies were found — six in Baqouba, in Diwaniyah and four in Mosul — many with signs of torture and all apparently victims of sectarian killings.

Meanwhile, the U.S. military said American troops captured 12 suspected militants Sunday in raids across Iraq, all accused of plotting attacks on U.S. troops.

Fox, the U.S. military spokesman, also said Iraqi forces acting on a tip found a huge weapons cache Friday on the outskirts of the northern city of Mosul, including 1,800 pounds of bulk explosives.

He said the military was seeing "glimmers of good signs" in the security sweep that began in mid-February to quell sectarian violence in Baghdad.

Third of Iraqi children now malnourished four years after US invasion

16 Mar 2007 15:10:23 GMT
Source: Caritas Internationalis

Vatican City – Caritas Internationalis and Caritas Iraq say that malnutrition rates have risen in Iraq from 19 percent before the US-led invasion to a national average of 28 percent four years later.

Caritas says that rising hunger has been caused by high levels of insecurity, collapsed healthcare and other infrastructure, increased polarisation between different sects and tribes, and rising poverty.

Over 11 percent of newborn babies are born underweight in Iraq today, compared with a figure of 4 percent in 2003. Before March 2003, Iraq already had significant infant mortality due to malnutrition because of the international sanctions regime.

Caritas Iraq has been running a series of Well Baby Clinics throughout the country. Currently it provides supplementary food for 8000 children up to 8 years and new mothers.

The Caritas clinics help the most vulnerable, and the health crisis they face is much worse than the national average.

Caritas works in an environment of high risk insecurity. Claudette Habesch, President of Caritas Middle East North Africa works closely with Caritas Iraq: "Sectarian and tribal conflict infects daily life in Iraq. Primary and secondary schools, hospitals, police, government are all divided along these lines. You cannot even go to the supermarket without fear that you will not return.

"Caritas Iraq is working against this difficult background providing vital food to the most vulnerable children and newborn mothers. Staff face great risks but still managing to provide medical care in a country where the national healthcare system has collapsed in some areas.

"Iraq has the second largest oil supplies in the world, but it has levels of poverty, hunger and underdevelopment comparable to sub-Saharan Africa.

"The last four years, but in particular 2006, we have seen life get worse rather than better for the ordinary Iraqi. And people are voting with their feet. Everyday 5000 people leave Iraq. In 2007, one in ten Iraqis is expected to leave the country.

"We are seeing minority groups such as Christians completely disappear from the country or leave their homes for safer areas. I have hope for Iraq that things will improve but that is because things can surely get no worse."

Caritas Internationalis is a confederation of 162 Catholic relief, development, and social service organisations present in over 200 countries and territories.

For more information, contact: Nancy McNally, CI Media Officer
Tel: +39 06 69879752, Email: mcnally@caritas.va

[ Any views expressed in this article are those of the writer and not of Reuters. ]

The world should welcome the Palestine unity government

Sunday, March 18, 2007

Israel’s priority, however, is the very opposite. It wants the Palestinians to fight each other....

"Israel’s priority, however, is the very opposite. It wants the Palestinians to fight each other and it will do everything possible, including resorting to its familiar black arts and to provocation by its army of informers, to set them against each other. It wants Fatah to destroy Hamas and drive it from power. It repeats its mantra that there can be "no compromise with terrorists," while seeking to persuade the world that its own violence -- far more lethal than that of the Palestinians -- is that of legitimate self-defence."

The world should welcome the Palestine unity government by Patrick Seale, Mar 18, 2007

posted by annie at 7:31 AM

The State of Iraq, an Update

Related













In this photo taken with a video camera, protesters of the Iraq war march near the Pentagon on Saturday, March 17, 2007, in Arlington, Va. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
---

March 18, 2007
Op-Ed Contributors
Op-Chart
By JASON CAMPBELL, MICHAEL O’HANLON and AMY UNIKEWICZ

Excerpt [Double click on image to enlarge]


There is a real glimmer of hope, but no proof of progress, from the surge so far.

Jason Campbell is a senior research assistant at the Brookings Institution in Washington. Michael O’Hanlon is a senior fellow at Brookings and the co-author of “Hard Power.” Amy Unikewicz is a graphic designer in South Norwalk, Conn.

Iraq experts say draft oil industry law fraught with problems

by Kamal Taha Sun Mar 18, 12:15 AM ET

Some Iraqi oil experts and politicians are aghast over their government's approval of a bill that many fear will deliver the country's oil wealth to international firms on a platter.

In February, capping months of bitter wrangling, the Baghdad government approved a draft law that aims to distribute revenue from crude oil exports equitably across Iraq's 18 provinces and open the sector to foreign investors.

The multi-party government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki sees the legislation as a key plank in moves to reunite a country torn apart by sectarian violence, and hopes that parliament will ratify the bill in May.

But former Iraqi oil industry officials, experts and lawmakers gathered in Jordan to debate the bill have warned that the timing is wrong, and expressed strong concerns that Iraq would lose control of its own "black gold."

"There are many question marks hanging over this draft law," said Dhia al-Bakaa, former president of the Iraqi State Oil Marketing Organisation (SOMO).

"Why the timing? Why the hurry when we still lack political, economic and security stability," Bakaa asked a recent conference organised by the non-governmental Iraqi Centre for Strategic Studies.

"The Iraqi National Oil Company should have been restructured before the government endorsed the draft law, to allow INOC to develop the giant oil fields so that they would not face pressure and extortion in the future."

Issam Chalabi, an oil minister under executed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, said the bill did not take "into account our greater national interests."

It was adopted "to satisfy US President George W. Bush," who called on the newly installed Maliki government last June to restore electricity in Iraq, adopt a new investment law and restructure the oil industry, he said.

Chalabi also charged that Iraqi oil exports over the past four years have gone "unchecked and unaccounted for."

Iraq's proven oil reserves, estimated at 115 billion barrels, are thought to be the third largest in the world, behind Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Since the US-led invasion in 2003, Iraqi production has tumbled from 3.5 million barrels per day to around two million. Chalabi said Iraq has been exporting around 1.5 million bpd.

Faleh al-Khayat, a former head of planning at the oil ministry, warned that "major foreign oil firms are greedy and will covet Iraq's oil wealth" if the bill is adopted.

"If Iraq's giant oilfields are developed they would yield 80 percent of Iraq's proven reserves estimated at 115 billion barrels," he said.

MP Saleh Mutlak of Iraq's National Dialogue Front echoed him: "We have no need for foreign companies. We are experienced enough to reap the fruit of our wealth."

Mutlak also said he feared the bill may not live up to government hopes that it will unify Iraq.

"We don't want a new law that will further divide us. We need a law that will unite the Iraqi people," he said.

Most oil production is in the Shiite south, with the best prospects for new finds centred on the Kurdish north. The northern oil hub of Kirkuk is disputed between Kurdish and Arab leaders.

Motlak said parliament in Baghdad should not ratify the bill "until we reach the appropriate climate for investments in Iraq."

MP Ali Mashhadani agreed.

"Our oil wealth is black gold that must be kept underground until security conditions are appropriate to take advantage of it. It has been entrusted to our safekeeping by the people we represent," he said.

According to Mashhadani "Iraq has sold 125 billion dollars worth of oil since the start of the US-led occupation."

The Iraqi people have not benefited from this revenue and "are eating garbage," Mashhadani said, suggesting that income from oil sales be given to the people in the form of state-subsidised "monthly rations cards."

Articulating a Just Peace: Whose Responsibility?

Speech for Stockholm Conference 16-19 March 2007

By Ramzy Baroud

In my speech today, I will refrain from stating the obvious: those who are yet to recognize the injustices committed daily against the Palestinian people, have either succumbed completely to Israel’s propaganda or are simply uninterested in the whole matter.

Although confronting both groups - one plagued by misinformation or misplaced sympathy, and the other plagued by indifference and apathy - is vital, to say the least, I am addressing neither of these groups today.

There are various reasons behind what I am about to say: but most importantly, one particular episode, where I was invited to speak at some European country by a group that introduced itself as Marxist. I, of course, readily obliged, when I was faced with the following question: where do you stand on the one state solution?

I was not sure why I was urged by the head of the group to delineate my position regarding an issue that is of no particular consequence, at the time being, considering what Israel has done and is doing to ethnically cleanse large swathes of the West Bank, and is actively, with American, and less energetic, but real European support, starving Palestinians mostly in the Gaza Strip, but elsewhere in the Occupied Territories.

According to the World Food Program (WFP) forty-six percent of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories are food insecure, I was quick to cite. Though I thought that a one state solution, if ever possible, is an honorable and dignified solution to the conflict, I thought this was neither the time nor the place for such discussion.

Our focus, should hardly be diverted to intellectual and technical scuffles over a subject whose relevance to the current happenings in Palestine is most uncertain, to say the least. Moreover, this is something that should be decided through a national Palestinian consensus. If I must address the one state solution topic, this is how I would approach it, I told my potential host.

After some hesitation, and a clear loss of enthusiasm, I was told that the group, who had decided amongst itself that this is the most suitable solution for Palestinians and Israelis was not able to afford my ticket, and the invitation was revoked.

A day later, I met with a long time American activist for Palestine. Sharing with her the story, with a bit of disillusionment, that I, a Palestinian whose family still dwells a refugee camp in Gaza should be censored by a group of activists for questioning the timing and the method of making sweeping solutions to the conflict, she confronted me with something even more disheartening: in New Jersey among other areas, she says, some Palestine groups determine their relationship with one another, whether to participate in joint rallies or organize joint conferences, based on their self proclaimed solution to the Palestine Israel conflict: whether a secular democratic state, bi-national state, two states, etc.

This is the backdrop of what I am about to declare: I would neither rail against anyone, nor go on a personal crusade promoting one solution vs. the other. But I would rather to use this as an opportunity for self reflection, introspection and self critique.

It is never easy to admit that the Palestinian front, both at home and abroad, remains more fragmented and self-consumed, thus ineffective than ever before.

Such a realization wouldn’t mean much if the inference concerned any other polity; but when it’s made in regards to a nation that is facing an active campaign of ethnic cleansing at home and an international campaign of sanctions and boycott, the problem becomes both real and urgent.

Palestinians in the West Bank, especially in areas penetrated by the formidable Israeli imprisonment wall, are losing their land, their rights, their freedom and their livelihood at an alarming speed, unprecedented in their tumultuous history of military occupation. The 700-kilometre wall, once completed, will further fragment the already splintered West Bank; Israel’s settlement project since 1967 has disfigured the West Bank using Jews-only bypass roads, military zones and so forth, to ensure the viability of the country’s colonization scheme, but split or isolate Palestinian areas, making the two-state solution, or any other solution that is predicated on a viable exchange of land for peace simply inconceivable.

Gaza, which Yitzhak Rabin had once wished would sink into the sea and which Israel has labored to dump on anyone foolish enough to take responsibility for it as long as it is not part of any comprehensive agreement that would include Jerusalem and the West Bank, maintains its “open air prison” status.

Palestinians there are being reduced to malnourished refugees, manipulated into violence and discord, a spectacle that Israel is promoting around the world as an example of Palestinian lack of civility and their incapacity to govern themselves.

The Israeli government insistently refuses to consider Jerusalem an issue that warrants negotiations; nothing to talk about, according to Israeli officials who see Jerusalem as their state’s undivided and eternal capital.

Vital movement from and into Jerusalem is increasingly impossible for West Bank Palestinians. Muslim and Christian properties in the city are continuously threatened, targeted or desecrated.

The most recent targeting of Al Aqsa Mosque was intended to further exacerbate Muslim fury and emphasize the point that Israel retains the upper hand in its relations with the Palestinians.

Other major issues such as settlements, water, refugees, borders, continue to be subjected to unilateral Israeli actions, while the Palestinian role is relegated to that of a hapless, submissive and often angry victim.

If such decisive matters go largely unchallenged by a solid, popular Palestinian strategy, one mustn’t be surprised if other issues, such as the need to restructure the progressively more fragmented Palestinian national identity, the need for a powerful, sustained and articulate Palestinian voice in the media and an influential body that unites and channels all Palestinian efforts around the world to serve a clear set of objectives, are receiving little or no attention whatsoever.

It must also be acknowledged, as uncomfortable as this may be to some, that the Palestinian democratic experience is rapidly succumbing to Israeli pressures, American meddling — tacitly or otherwise, coordinated with other governments — and the fractious Palestinian front that has been for decades permeated with ideological exclusivism, cronyism and corruption.

The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), since its formation by the Arab League in 1964, but most significantly since its reformation in the early 1970s under Palestinian leadership, was for long regarded as the main body that eventually brought to the fore the Palestinian struggle as — more than a mere question of a humanitarian issue that needed redress — a national fight for freedom and rights.

There was, more or less, a national movement that spoke and represented Palestinians everywhere. It gave the Palestinian struggle greater urgency, one that was lost, or willingly conceded, by Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn in September 1993, and again in Cairo in May 2004, and yet again in Paris, Sharm al-Sheikh and so forth.

Aside from snuffing out the Palestinian national project, reducing the territory to self-autonomous areas, rendering irrelevant millions of Palestinians, mostly refugees scattered around the world and thus demoting the international status of the PLO to a mere symbolic organization, Oslo gave rise to a new type of thinking among Palestinians who see themselves as pragmatic and whose language is that of real politic and diplomacy.

This is the most woeful case of self-defeatism, and it continues to infuse most Palestinian circles whose new “strategy” is limited to acquiring funds from European countries which eventually dotted the West Bank with NGOs, mostly without a clear purpose, agenda and coordination.

Involving oneself in such useless projects is ineffectual, while rejecting them without a clear alternative can be frustrating or demoralizing.

An official in President Mahmoud Abbas’ circle chastised me during a long airplane ride once for subscribing to Edward Said’s school, whose followers, I was told, wish to parrot criticism from the outside and refrain from “getting their hands dirty”, i.e., getting involved in the Palestinian Authority’s institution building, and so forth. Such a claim is utterly baseless; and no viable institution can possibly come out of the current setting, an amalgam of a most violent occupation, and internal corruption sanctioned, if not fed, by both Israel and the US government.

It is true that there have been no serious collective Palestinian efforts to redress the Oslo mistakes and to breathe life into the PLO. The Intifada was a popular expression of Palestinians disaffection with Oslo and the occupation, but, alone, it can hardly be considered a sustainable strategy.

Neither a religious movement like Hamas nor a self-exalted one like Fateh is capable of approaching this subject alone, nor are they individually qualified to alter the Palestinian course, which seems to be moving in random order.

The problem is indeed bigger than mere ideological or even personal quarrels between two rival political parties; rather, it is the expression of a prevailing Palestinian factionalism that seems to consume members of various Palestinian communities regardless of where they are based.

In the absence of centrality everywhere, individuals hoping to fill the vacuum are offering their own solutions to the conflict, once more without any serious or coordinated efforts and without a grassroots constituency either in the occupied territories or among major Palestinian population concentrations in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, etc.

Others, like the Geneva Initiative enthusiasts, find it acceptable to negotiate a solution on Palestinians’ behalf — without any mandate whatsoever — and obtain sums of money to promote their ideas, though the whole enterprise is run by a few individuals who have no support from the Palestinians.

Oslo has lost its relevance as a peace treaty, but the individualism it espoused among Palestinians still prevails; its legacy was self-preservation at the expense of the collective good, and I believe no Palestinian party, including Hamas, is immune from subscribing to its luring values.

To avoid further debacles, Palestinians must ditch their factionalism and quit thinking of their relationship with their struggle in terms of funds, ideology (at times so flexible as to fit political interests) or religious interpretations.

They are in urgent need of a new collective strategy that pushes for specific principles which can only be achieved through national consensus. Waving flags in the face of passersby and the proverbial preaching to the choir alone will lead nowhere.

Individual initiatives will further confuse the Palestinian ranks. Only a consistent, cohesive and reasonable strategy that emanates from the Palestinians themselves can engage international public opinion — with the hope of breaking the patronage system that unites the West, especially the United States to Israel — and possibly slow down the Israeli army bulldozers currently carving up the West Bank into a system of cantons and high-walled prisons.

While for Palestinians, I believe that reforming and revitalizing the PLO is not an option, but a must, I call on groups that work for a just peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis to continue to emphasize and expose the injustices committed against the Palestinian people, to highlight that self determination for Palestinians, everywhere, is an imperative for that just peace and to continue to push for serious governmental shifts in their respective polities, to entertain whatever needed pressure, through boycotts, media campaigns, and so forth, but to kindly refrain from imposing specifities on the Palestinian people: who, to avoid the mistakes of the past, must be the ultimate definer of its own destiny and whose articulation for a just peace has been the most overlooked, yet vital imperative. Without it, there will neither be peace, nor justice.

Did a Rightwing PR firm bribe NYT, WSJ, MIT and other?

Ed Leefeldt at the Washingtonpost and Clay Risen of TNR both separately wrote very interesting investigative reports that many or you may have missed. First Mr. Risen writes:

On March 7, 2007, a "media and research" company called eSapience filed a breach-of-contract lawsuit against C.V. Starr & Co., the California investment firm helmed by Maurice "Hank" Greenberg.

What makes this suit so interesting is not C.V. Starr's alleged actions, but the services eSapience was hired to perform. That's because, far from being a typical p.r. firm, eSapience, run by a clique of conservative, free-market academics, is in the business of buying and manipulating influence at the very highest levels of academic and intellectual circles--a cynical strategy laid out in deep detail by the lawsuit. The suit, in fact, is a Rosetta Stone into the extremes to which a group of right-wingers have taken the phrase "marketplace of ideas"--and it has exposed the lengths to which some people will go to buy intellectual influence.

As many have noted the Right-wing has a much stronger and more extensive network. They use this network to sell their ideas and push their public narratives. They do this it at several different levels, government, media, and academic.

Very little information exists about eSapience outside the suit. Its website, eSapience.org, goes directly to something called the "eSapience Center for Competition Policy" (eCCP), a sort of virtual think tank that organizes conferences, promotes papers, and even publishes a journal, all of which have a decidedly conservative, free-market bent (the journal's editorial board, for example, features a bevy of University of Chicago legal scholars and economists, including Richard Posner and Frank Easterbrook). All of this seems dryly academic and above board--in fact, there is hardly any explanation of what eSapience itself actual is

This is typical of Right-wing think tanks. For all the glamor of the CATO and Hoover institutes, most of the real damage is done, by these faceless nameless institutes. There conservatives toil away in obscurity, underminig everything we love about this country.

The lawsuit, though, shows otherwise. According to the suit, the firm, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is a coterie of high-end academics--the chair is David Evans, a visiting professor at the University College London; a managing director is Richard Schmalensee, dean of the MIT Sloan School of Management; Richard Epstein, the highly regarded Chicago legal scholar, is an affiliate--who use their connections in academia, the media, and the business world to improve their clients' public image. (eSapience declined, through its lawyer, to comment for this article.) According to an accompanying confidential memo to C.V. Starr, obtained by THE NEW REPUBLIC, eSapience promises to "blunt and/or change the conversations that influential people, including public intellectuals, have about the set of issues we are asked.

I hope you read that correctly. They exist in order to misdirect and/or change the very CONVERSATIONS that our leaders are having! WOW!

ESapience planned and executed three such events, on September 12, 14, and 15, 2006. One of them, co-sponsored with the Federalist Society, took place in (where else?) Greenberg Lounge at New York University. Titled "Does Procedure Dominate Substance? Of Class Actions and Pretrial Motions," it appeared no different from the sort of stultifying but edifying conferences that happen several times a week on university campuses. The keynote speech was by the eminent lawyer David Boies; the participants were drawn from top-25 law schools. Two of the participants I contacted knew little beyond the fact that eSapience was a co-sponsor; they were certainly unaware that it had planned the event as part of a scheme to improve Greenberg's image. For them, it was just another academic klatch ("If Hank Greenberg thought this resuscitated his reputation, that is beyond my knowledge or understanding," says NYU Law Professor Samuel Issacharoff). Did the Federalist Society know of the eSapience-Greenberg connection?

OK, so influencing the Federalist Society is one thing. They already are a well know Right-wing outfit. But the next part of this tale should give all of us pause.

Beyond the September events, eSapience also promised to use its existing "channels"--presumably the eCCP and its journal--to further sway opinion, and to "secur[e] a New York Times journalist who might be inclined to write an article related to the lawsuit filed by the new York State Attorney General's Office against Greenberg." It also hired Dan Senor, famous as the Bush administration's spokesman in the early days of the Iraq war, and Mark Corallo, John Ashcroft's former public affairs director, to help in the effort, though the suit doesn't explain their roles further. All this, while billing C.V. Starr at rates between $400 and $1,000 an hour, per person. In about six months, it had run up some $2 million in charges. No wonder C.V. Starr balked at paying.

Did you get that? to further sway opinion, and to "secur[e] a New York Times journalist who might be inclined to write an article related to the lawsuit filed by the new York State Attorney General's Office against Greenberg." They billed someone for "paying off" a NYT reporter! For those who don't know, Hank Greenberg was the former CEO of AIG (one of the nations 10 largest insurance companies), who was ousted after Elliot Spitzer charged him with fraud. AIG and the State of NY settled out of court. Greenberg and the State of NY are still going to trial.

I don't want to falsely accuse people, or commit libel. But I did my own search of NYT archives. I noticed there was a bunch of articles with titles like:
Two Views of a Rising Star: Populist Warrior or Reckless Foe of Big Business? and also like: Spitzer Fights Criticism That He Is a Hothead. Was this just regular campaign reporting? Or was it something more? The problem with an issue like this is it's very hard to ever know. It's also why it's so evily effective.

But It didn't stop there as the Washington Post reports

Greenberg had been rumored last November to be interested in buying New York Times Co. (NYT.N).

Why just "secure" a reporter, when you can "secure" the whole outfit!

Furthermore, Ed Leefeldt reports that:

Additionally eSapience tried to engage a "best-selling author" to ghostwrite Greenberg's autobiography, the suit claims.

ESapience said in the suit that its work for Greenberg from May through September was successful in getting Greenberg an article in the front section of The Wall Street Journal.

ESapience said it was told to bill the costs of the campaign to C.V. Starr, a private company where Greenberg is the chairman and chief executive, according to the suit. C.V. Starr runs insurance brokerage operations.

The Wall Street Journal SOLD (or was influenced into?) placing an article in its front section! To add credence to this tale, a real company was billed for this service! Why has the MSM ignored mostly ignored this? Are their more Judith Miller's out there at the NYT and WSJ?

One more disturbing fact

Under the heading "Independent Channels" eSapience promises to "leverage our relationships with important and highly credible channels including AEI, AEI-Brookings, Hoover Institution, MIT, University of Chicago Law School and the Federalist Society, among others. These organizations will work with us to host conferences, Capitol Hill briefings (if appropriate), co-author papers, link to our Center web sites, and distribute our materials on their web sites, among other things." These organizations may or may not have known of eSapience's plans to abuse their intellectual standing. They clearly didn't get a cut of the profits.

What exactly do Universities need to support a position? Are Professors being "paid off"? Is there a quid pro qou were large donations are being made to the schools? (at the University of Chicago for example, eSapience was a sponsor of the UCL Antitrust & Regulation Forum)I am only speculating, I really don't know???

If I may suggest a few action items.

1. If you are an alumn of MIT or the University of Chicago Law School, ask them what their relationship with eSapience is/was? Have they done research for them? Request items written for them, or events co-hosted by them. I hope a few readers are big donors, I think they will have a bigger influence.

2. Start emailing the New York Times and Wall Street Journal asking the comptroller about this story. Have they done an internal investigation?

3. Keep an eye out for any trial procedings from this. Post them on Daily Kos. Sunshine is always the best disinfectant. The more we see of the Right-wings shady dealings, the less effective they become!

.
.
.
My letter to the NYT

Dear Mr. Byron Calame,
I have read a recent article in The New Republic and Washington Post with some alarm and concern. It seems a PR firm named eSapience is billing a Mr. Hank Greenberg (former CEO of AIG Insurance) for among other things, "securing" a reporter from the NYT. On the face of it I would find such a claim outrageous, but in light of the Judith Miller story, it has given me some pause. My question is, has the NYT completed an internal investigation into this claim? I and many concerned readers would like to know the answer to this. I have been posting a diary on Daily Kos, under the screen name dopper0189, concerning this story, and would like to post any response to this letter you feel inclined to write.

My letter to the WSJ

Dear Mr. Bill Grueskin,
I have read a recent article in The New Republic and Washington Post with some alarm and concern. It seems a PR firm named eSapience is billing a Mr. Hank Greenberg (former CEO of AIG Insurance) for among other things, "securing" an article in the front section of The Wall Street Journal.. On the face of it I would find such a claim outrageous, but the fact that there are ongoing court proceedings for this billing has given me some pause. My question is, has the WSJ completed an internal investigation into this claim? I and many concerned readers would like to know the answer to this. I have been posting a diary on Daily Kos, under the screen name dopper0189, concerning this story, and would like to post any response to this letter you feel inclined to write.

--by dopper0189

From Guilt to Responsibility

Speech given in Stockholm 18 March 2007

By Gilad Atzmon

The impossible condition of being an ex-Israeli as well as an ethically orientated human being necessary leads towards a serious guilt complex. I am referring here to the obvious case of one feeling guilty for the crimes committed on one’s behalf by one’s brethren. Yet, I have to confess that while guilt can be charming, at least for a while, it is far from being a productive state of mind in the long term. Guilt is a self-centred endeavour, it doesn’t aim towards a change. In guilt alone, there is not much hope for better future. In fact, the only way to translate guilt into productivity is to transform remorse into responsibility.

At least in my case, responsibility is primarily grounded on the deep acknowledgment that, though totally against my will, as things are set by the Jewish State, every atrocity committed by Israel is actually committed in my name and on my behalf. In other words, my commitment to the Palestinian issue is evoked by my acceptance of my responsibility. Though shouting ‘not in my name’ would have helped to vindicate me as an individual person, it won’t change the grave sinister fact that every Israeli war crime is actually done in the name of the Jewish people. Thus, I have never been an advocate of the ‘not in my name’ call. Clearly, I am not searching for my own self-redemption but rather for a metaphysical shift of awareness. Consequently, responsibility is for me a form of intervention that bridges the necessary gap between silent acceptance and ethical commitment. My responsibility is my pledge to do whatever I can to bring the suffering of the Palestinians to an immediate halt.

I obviously set myself a very serious challenge here. Bearing in mind that my weapons are my saxophone and my pen, it may even sound slightly pathetic. One may wonder whether it is possible to knock down a nuclear regional superpower with a soprano saxophone or even with a pencil. Though I don’t have a definite answer yet, I am willing to admit that in the last seven years I have given it a go.

For me, being responsible means looking into the Israeli atrocities while regarding myself at the crux of the issue. While in the past I somehow tended to remove myself from the conflict, positioning myself as a detached scout, I now happen to search for the answers inside myself, in my own soul, in my esoteric experience. Following Otto Weininger, I’m inclined to believe that artists’ revelations about the world are the direct outcome of some sincere self-searching. However, while looking into myself I clearly found out that whereas I may be able to say some things about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I probably cannot really say much about its political aspects.

Generally speaking, discussing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is far from being an easy job. Furthermore, lately, the task is becoming more and more difficult. Due to some intensive pressure imposed on the Palestinians by Israel (with the full support of the willing and obedient West), the Palestinians are pushed into a state of civil war. As a result, the emerging animosity within Palestinian society (both in Palestine and in the Diaspora) makes it very difficult to suggest any intellectual or ideological contribution that may refer to a conflict resolution. Palestinian society is now officially divided about almost everything. Moreover, Palestinians may even find it difficult to agree upon the notion of the Palestinian cause. As it seems, many of us in the West happen to claim to support the Palestinian cause without really being able to suggest what this cause is anymore. Rather often we happen to classify activists based on their vision of the conflict resolution. We would say, “he is OK, he is for ‘one State’, but leave her alone, she is a Zionist ‘two States’ supporter”. In other words, we identify political affiliations with what seems to us as the ‘true’ Palestinian cause. But in fact, our image of the Palestinian cause is in itself dependent upon our own political culture, personal political struggles, personal affiliations and lifestyle. It has very little to do with Palestine, the Palestinians and their current or future needs.

Such a realisation may challenge the notion of solidarity and it implies some possible criticism over the entire issue of responsibility. Consequently, I have been recently coming to terms with the idea that I must be very careful with any rhetoric having to do with Palestine. Consequently, I avoid talking in the name of the Palestinians. Moreover, being an ex-Israeli, I do not allow myself to interfere with the Palestinian discourse of resolution. I am totally convinced that the future of Palestine is an internal Palestinian affair. The future of Palestine should be determined by the Palestinian people and by themselves alone. Yet I feel more than entitled to talk about the atrocities that are committed in my name. This is where my responsibility is coming into play.

My task is far from being hard to define. I would argue that if indeed the crimes against the Palestinians are committed by the ‘Jewish State’ in the name of the ‘Jewish’ people, before any progress can be made, we first must grasp what the word ‘Jewish’ stands for. In other words, it is Jewishness which I am trying to contemplate. I try to learn its metaphysics, its historical and cultural background. I try to understand how Jewish lobbies are operating within different organisations, institutes and systems of hegemony. I argue that if it is the Jewish State that is engaged in terrorising the Palestinians, we better understand once and for all what hides behind the notion of Jewishness. Yet, I find it necessary to elaborate on the differences between the different categories having to do with the ‘J’ word.

Resolutely, I differentiate between Judaism (the religion), Jews (the people) and Jewishness (the ideology). I refrain categorically from referring to Jews and avoid criticism of Judaism. The reasons are obvious. First, though Israel regards itself as the ‘Jewish State’, it is far from being the State of the Jews. Many Jews are living outside of Israel and have nothing to do with Israel or the Israeli crimes. Second, it isn’t Judaism that inflicts so much pain on the Palestinians but rather people who follow some peculiar modern secular vision named by some as Zionism. Thus, it is the Jewishness that I am interested in, the ideological mindset and the cultural framework. I am interested in the collective bond that provides Zionism with a substantial body shield. I am interested in that which transforms Global Zionism into a leading and winning contemporary worldview.

But this is exactly where the real problem starts. Although I firmly refrain from referring to racial or ethnic categories, enormous energy is invested in stopping me and others from saying that which we feel entitled to say. Jewish political pressure groups both in the left and in the right, both Zionists and anti-Zionists, both sectarian Marxists and Fascist settlers fight to keep the differentiation between Judaism, Jewishness and the Jews as blurred as possible. May I suggest that they know what they are doing. It is this tactic that allows them to dismiss any possible criticism of Israel and its lobbies as being a racist assault. As long as the demarcation between Judaism, Jews and Jewishness is obscure, Israel is safe from criticism.

By maintaining such a tactic, Jewish groups in the left and in the right have managed to block any meaningful debate having to do with Israel, the Jewish State, Palestine, world Jewry, the Israeli Lobby in America, etc.. Every essential discussion is dismissed immediately as a form of racism or as plain anti-Semitism. My responsibility therefore is to stand up and resist. My duty is to insist that Jewishness is an Ideology, or at least a mindset. It is an idea that made the Nakba possible, it is an ideology that has maintained ethnic cleansing policies for six decades, it is an a unique intuition that lives in peace with 80% starvation in Gaza.

It is not the Jews and it is not Judaism that are to be blamed here, but it is not Zionism either. Jewishness is actually a deeper concept than mere Zionism. How do I know that it is deeper than Zionism? I know because I look into myself and into my past. I know because I grew up in Israel and I can tell that as a young lad, the word Zionism was foreign to my ears. My peers and myself were Israelis, we were the Jewish people, we were not Zionists. Zionism was a foreign abstract expression, it smelled of Galut (Diaspora). We were Jews and our enemies were the ‘others’ whoever they were at the time: the Germans, The Goyim, the anti-Semites, the Arabs in general the Palestinians in particular and so forth.

My responsibility thus is to expose the real meaning of the Jewish idea in its full extent. My mission is to get to the essence of this almighty fear that settles comfortably at the core of the Jewish collective psyche. My responsibility is to expose the carriers and protagonists of this ideology. As an artist, my duty is to look into myself and to trace its origin in my own soul.

If I am indeed correct and Jewishness is an ideology, then it cannot just position itself beyond criticism. If I am indeed on the right track, it is my duty as an intellectual and as an artist who believes in free spirit, to point out that the Palestinian discourse is viciously shaped by an absurd form of political correctness that blocks any meaningful and fruitful discourse.

I will use this unique opportunity and mention as well that I am tired of hearing people telling me “Gilad, you can say it all, you are a Jew.” I just do not accept it. There is nothing in my ethnic belonging or biological origin that should grant me with any special entitlement. I must admit as well that I have never found myself telling a Muslim or an Arab friend “you can say it, you are an Arab.” I do not remember myself ever hearing anyone suggesting to anyone else: “you can say it, you are Protestant, Irish, Black, etc.”. Noticeably, the Jewish State and its supporters have managed to position their beloved country in a very privileged precious position, far beyond criticism. My responsibility is to expose this tactic as a complete fallacy.

I believe that we cannot bring hope to Palestine unless we teach ourselves to speak freely, unless we allow ourselves to open up the discourse. I may as well suggest that I truly believe that the Zionists and the Israelis will benefit from such an initiative.

The Israelis and their supporters set themselves in an artificial detached heaven. They have surrounded themselves with security walls and have managed to block all channels of criticism. While in a complete state of blindness, the Israelis have failed to notice that they have become the embodiment of modern evil. More than anyone else, it is the Jewish State and the Israelis who need an immediate wake up call.

Several large US military projects under fire

by David Dieudonne Sat Mar 17, 1:36 PM ET

The Pentagon is facing mounting criticism over the awarding of several large contracts because of deficiencies and irregularities in the procurement of new age military machines.

Thursday, the US Government Accountability Office, a congressional agency responsible for keeping tabs on federal spending, revealed delays in developing an advanced combat Joint Strike Fighter and costs had swollen 12 percent.

"Total JSF program acquisition costs (through 2027) have increased by 31.6 billion dollars," the GAO said.

Wednesday, the US Coast Guard withdrew a contract from Lockheed Martin and Northrop Gumman to steer the procurement of 12 patrol boats, saying it could better "ensure full and open competition, and control costs" by doing the work in-house.

The 24-billion dollar "Deepwater" project launched after the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States was to provide for progressive modernization and recapitalization of the aging Coast Guard fleet over 25 years.

In December, the New York Times exposed several deficiencies in the program, launched in June 2002 to better protect America's coasts against possible terrorist attacks. They included hull cracks, engine breakdowns, design flaws and electronic equipment that was not sufficiently waterproofed.

The construction of the high-speed vessel was already scrapped once because they were deemed too heavy, guzzled too much fuel and problems with their propulsion systems arose, the newspaper said.

"You will see changes shortly in the Coast Guard in our acquisition organization," fleet commander Admiral Thad Allen had predicted then. "It will be significantly different than we have done in the past."

Late February, doubt was coast over another major military purchase worth 10 billion dollars -- Boeing's construction of 141 combat search and rescue helicopters (CSAR) for the US Air Force.

The GAO recognized that Boeing competitors Sikorsky (United Technologies) and Lockheed Martin had valid concerns about the current bidding process.

"We recommend that the Air Force amend the solicitation to clarify its intent with respect to evaluation of Operations and Support costs, reopen discussions with offerors consistent with our conclusions above, and then request revised proposals," the GAO said.

But Boeing chief executive Jim McNerney told the Financial Times in March: "I do not think there will be a full-blown re-compete on the helicopter competition."

These complications come at the worst time for the Air Force.

Already facing a poor rating over contracts granted to Boeing for the renewal of its supply aircrafts, then canceled, the Air Force is under intense scrutiny by Congress.

The House Armed Services Committee held hearings on March 7 on the Air Force's procurement plans, some accusing the Pentagon of rigging the bidding process for supply planes to favor Boeing over consortium EADS/Northrop.

Selected remarks by Bush on the Iraq war

FACTBOX
17 Mar 2007 12:42:29 GMT

March 17 (Reuters) - Following are a selection of remarks by U.S. President George W. Bush about the Iraq war since it began in March 2003:

"Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed."

- May 1, 2003, aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln under a banner declaring "Mission Accomplished."

"I hope there's not an expectation from people that all of a sudden there's going to be zero violence ... It's just not going to be the case."

- June 14, 2006, White House Rose Garden.

"We will stay the course, we will help this young Iraqi democracy succeed, and victory in Iraq will be a major ideological triumph in the struggle of the 21st century."

- Aug. 30, 2006, Salt Lake City.

"Stay the course means keep doing what you're doing. My attitude is, don't do what you're doing if it's not working -- change. Stay the course also means don't leave before the job is done. We're going to get the job done in Iraq."

- Oct. 11, 2006, White House Rose Garden.

"It's my responsibility to provide the American people with a candid assessment on the way forward ... Absolutely, we're winning."

- Oct. 25, 2006, White House East Room.

"We're not winning, we're not losing."

- Dec. 19, 2006, interview with The Washington Post (published on Dec. 20).

"The situation in Iraq is unacceptable to the American people -- and it is unacceptable to me ... Where mistakes have been made, the responsibility rests with me.

- Jan. 10, 2007, White House library.

"Our country is pursuing a new strategy in Iraq -- and I ask you to give it a chance to work."

- Jan. 23, 2007, State of the Union address to Congress.

"The struggle in Iraq may be hard, but this should not be a time for despair."

- March 6, 2007, speech to American Legion in Washington.

We Have Met The Enemy, And He Is Republican Administrations!

The New York Times is reporting that Sunni militants have emerged as the main obstacle to peace in Baghdad:

In January, when President Bush announced his plans to reinforce American troops in Baghdad, Shiite militias were seen as the main worry. Some analysts predicted that bloody clashes with Shiite militants in the Sadr City district in northeastern Baghdad were all but inevitable.

Instead, during the early weeks of the operation, deadly bombings by Sunni Arab militants have emerged as a greater danger. In particular, the threat posed by the Sunni group Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia was underscored when American troops seized a laptop computer from a senior operative in the group who was killed in late December.

Information from captured materials indicates that the group’s leadership sees “the sectarian war for Baghdad as the necessary main focus of its operations,” according to an intelligence report that was described by American officials.

Okay.

Let's think about this.

Bush went to war with Saddam, whose Baathist Sunni minority oppressed the Shia Iraqi majority.

BBC:

Shia Muslims were oppressed by Iraq's Baathist regime for more than 30 years and excluded from the highest ranks of power.

Except that created worries that the Iraqi Shia majority will create an alliance with neighboring Shia Iran.

The Financial Times, almost a year ago:

Arab rulers are increasingly frustrated by a changing political order in the Middle East, where the Shia are for the first time in power in Iraq and Shia militia are now engaged in the sectarian conflict with the Sunni minority.

But their fears have been compounded by the muscle-flexing of Shia Iran, a traditional rival now determined to pursue a nuclear programme and consolidate its alliance with Syria, the Shia in Lebanon and some radical Palestinian factions, forming a radical anti-western axis in the face of the more moderate pro-western and Sunni-dominated Arab states.

And that fear was exacerbated by the disastrously bungled execution of Saddam.

Time:

Saddam's execution became another flash point. Even Sunnis who had little sympathy for Saddam were incensed that the government chose to hang him at the hour of morning prayers on one of the most sacred Muslim holidays (Iraqi Sunnis celebrated the holiday one day before the Shi'ites). The choice seemed to confirm suspicions that Shi'ite political dominance would be a constant humiliation. "It was their way of telling us, 'We're in charge now, and you are so weak that even your holy days have no meaning anymore,'" says media analyst Kadhim al-Mukhdadi. "That morning I gave up hoping that things would get better."

And Bush is so worried about Iran that he might go to war with them.

Newsweek:

The Iranians have reason to feel paranoid. In recent weeks senior American officers have condemned Tehran for providing training and deadly explosives to insurgents. In a predawn raid on Dec. 21, U.S. troops barged into the compound of the most powerful political party in the country, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, and grabbed two men they claimed were officers in Iran's Revolutionary Guards. Three weeks later U.S. troops stormed an Iranian diplomatic office in Irbil, arresting five more Iranians. The Americans have hinted that as part of an escalating tit-for-tat, Iranians may have had a hand in a spectacular raid in Karbala on Jan. 20, in which four American soldiers were kidnapped and later found shot, execution style, in the head. U.S. forces promised to defend themselves.

Some view the spiraling attacks as a strand in a worrisome pattern. At least one former White House official contends that some Bush advisers secretly want an excuse to attack Iran. "They intend to be as provocative as possible and make the Iranians do something [America] would be forced to retaliate for," says Hillary Mann, the administration's former National Security Council director for Iran and Persian Gulf Affairs. U.S. officials insist they have no intention of provoking or otherwise starting a war with Iran, and they were also quick to deny any link to Sharafi's kidnapping. But the fact remains that the longstanding war of words between Washington and Tehran is edging toward something more dangerous. A second Navy carrier is steaming toward the Persian Gulf. Iran shot off a few missiles in those same tense waters last week, in a highly publicized test. With Americans and Iranians jousting on the chaotic battleground of Iraq, the chances of a small incident's spiraling into a crisis are higher than they've been in years.

And he's even been funding Sunni allies of al Qaeda, because they're also opposed to potential Shia hegemony.

Think Progress:

New Yorker columnist Sy Hersh says the “single most explosive” element of his latest article involves an effort by the Bush administration to stem the growth of Shiite influence in the Middle East (specifically the Iranian government and Hezbollah in Lebanon) by funding violent Sunni groups.

Hersh says the U.S. has been “pumping money, a great deal of money, without congressional authority, without any congressional oversight” for covert operations in the Middle East where it wants to “stop the Shiite spread or the Shiite influence.” Hersh says these funds have ended up in the hands of “three Sunni jihadist groups” who are “connected to al Qaeda” but “want to take on Hezbollah.”

And since at least last summer, there have been reports that the Sunni al Qaeda allies known as the the Taliban are resurgent in Afghanistan.

Washington Post:

Since early May, a resurgent Taliban militia has launched attack after attack in which more than 300 insurgents, soldiers and civilians have died.

In fact, NATO is preparing to fight an imminently expected Taliban offensive.

AFP:

NATO has pledged a robust response to an expected offensive early this year from Taliban-led insurgents in Afghanistan, as the United States offered to boost aid and possibly provide extra troops.

And, of course, during the Cold War, Reagan helped create the Taliban, in the first place, because their predecessors were fighting the Soviet Union.

From the Dkosopoedia:

The Reagan administration and the Saudi governmen gasve weapons, training and vast sums to the Islamists who hated the attempt by the Soviet client Afghan regime because it had attempted to end debt slavery through land reform, end child marriage and educate women. The Taliban and al-Qaeda grew out of the seeds planted by the Reagan administraion in the 1980s.

Of course, back then, Reagan was also allied with Saddam, because Saddam was fighting Iran. Reagan sent some guy named Donald Rumsfeld to meet with Saddam, and finesse that support's little hitch over Saddam's use of chemical weapons.

The National Security Archive, at George Washington University:

Soon thereafter, Donald Rumsfeld (who had served in various positions in the Nixon and Ford administrations, including as President Ford's defense secretary, and at this time headed the multinational pharmaceutical company G.D. Searle & Co.) was dispatched to the Middle East as a presidential envoy. His December 1983 tour of regional capitals included Baghdad, where he was to establish "direct contact between an envoy of President Reagan and President Saddam Hussein," while emphasizing "his close relationship" with the president. Rumsfeld met with Saddam, and the two discussed regional issues of mutual interest, shared enmity toward Iran and Syria, and the U.S.'s efforts to find alternative routes to transport Iraq's oil; its facilities in the Persian Gulf had been shut down by Iran, and Iran's ally, Syria, had cut off a pipeline that transported Iraqi oil through its territory. Rumsfeld made no reference to chemical weapons, according to detailed notes on the meeting.

Rumsfeld also met with Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz, and the two agreed, "the U.S. and Iraq shared many common interests." Rumsfeld affirmed the Reagan administration's "willingness to do more" regarding the Iran-Iraq war, but "made clear that our efforts to assist were inhibited by certain things that made it difficult for us, citing the use of chemical weapons, possible escalation in the Gulf, and human rights." He then moved on to other U.S. concerns. Later, Rumsfeld was assured by the U.S. interests section that Iraq's leadership had been "extremely pleased" with the visit, and that "Tariq Aziz had gone out of his way to praise Rumsfeld as a person."

Of course, as
James Ridgeway writes in the Village Voice:

When Ronald Reagan dispatched Donald Rumsfeld as his special envoy to meet Saddam Hussein in Baghdad in 1984, the Republican administration was anxious to stop any westward expansion of the Ayatollah Khomeini and his force of Shia madmen, who had taken power in Tehran.

To that end, the U.S. sent war supplies and offered intelligence to Saddam to keep the Iranians from beating Iraq in the war then raging between the two countries.

Need I go on?

Do they do anything but fuel the fire, first on one side, then the other?

Is there any greater threat to American national security than a Rebublican American administration? Posted

by Turkana at 3:19 AM Comments | Trackback

4 Years After Start of War, Anger Reigns

Related
Ridiculous coverage: Goodbye WaPo
The article, entitled "4 Years After Start of War, Anger Reigns", makes some ridiculous assertions, passes more rumor and opinion as fact, and was the last straw in my ever-shortening patience for the shitrag that used to pass for the nation's preeminent political paper.
---
Is WaPo good enough to be a shitrag?
I think not
---
Photo #8 - shown above
---
Demonstrators Brave Cold to Carry Message to Pentagon, as Counter-Protesters Battle Back

By Steve Vogel and Michael Alison Chandler

Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, March 18, 2007; A01

Thousands of demonstrators protesting the fourth anniversary of the war in Iraq marched on the Pentagon yesterday, jeered along the way by large numbers of angry counter-protesters.

Organizers billed the antiwar rally as marking the 40th anniversary of the 1967 march on the Pentagon. At times, verbal clashes during the cold and blustery day demonstrated that the bitter divisions of four decades ago sparked by Vietnam are very much alive in the debate over Iraq.

The march, part of a weekend of protests that included smaller demonstrations in other U.S. cities and abroad, comes as the Bush administration sends more troops to Iraq in an attempt to regain control of Baghdad and Congress considers measures to bring U.S. troops home.

Paul Miller, 72, a Korean War-era Marine Corps veteran who flew from California for the march with his brother, was making his first appearance at an antiwar rally. "I was like everybody else. I trusted the people who ran the country, and I'm tired of being lied to," Miller said, standing on a hill overlooking the Pentagon, a beret with a Marine Corps pin on his head. "I feel so bad for the young Marines who are getting their legs blown off and losing their lives."

Organizers said yesterday's march on the Pentagon reflected the public's sense of betrayal over the escalation of the war. As some speakers called for the impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Cheney, others denounced Congress in equally bitter terms for not cutting off funding for the war. Yet attendance at yesterday's march was noticeably smaller than one held in Washington in January, police said.

Much of the passion yesterday was supplied by thousands of counter-demonstrators, many of them veterans who mobilized from across the country to gather around the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Some said they came in response to appeals on the Internet to protect the Wall against what they feared would be acts of vandalism; no such acts were reported.

Others said they were tired of war protesters claiming to speak for the country. "I'm here because I think we need to commit to our troops in the field," said Guy Rocca, 63, a veteran who drove nine hours from Detroit.

Some counter-protesters yelled obscenities and mocked the marchers as traitors. War protesters responded with angry words of their own, and police intervened at times to prevent shouting matches from escalating.

The counter-demonstrators ringed the Lincoln Memorial and continued along portions of Arlington Memorial Bridge. "You've got no pride and no honor," yelled Kenneth Murphy, a Vietnam veteran from North Carolina.

When marchers reached the Virginia side of the bridge, they were greeted by more protesters at the traffic circle in front of Arlington National Cemetery, along with a banner that read in part: "You dishonor our dead on Hallowed ground." The war protesters might have found the warmest reception of the day at the Pentagon, where police had the building blocked off, but no counter-demonstrators were waiting.

"It's strange to say, but welcome to the Pentagon," said protest leader Mara Veheyden-Hilliard, speaking on a stage in the north parking lot as the first streams of marchers began arriving.

A group of protesters who tried to reach the Pentagon by charging toward the south parking lot ended up in a tense standoff with police. Five arrests were made in the incident. But beyond shoving matches, no violence was reported.

After a night of rain, sleet and snow, the day began with bright sunshine but low temperatures. Marchers assembled at first in relatively sparse numbers on a muddy playing field at 23rd Street and Constitution Avenue NW.

Organizers, who had predicted tens of thousands of marchers would demonstrate, gave estimates ranging from 15,000 to 30,000. Police no longer provide official estimates of crowd size but informally put it at 10,000 to 20,000, with a smaller but sizable contingent of counter-protesters.

War protest leaders said a large winter storm that hit the Northeast hurt turnout. More than 60 bus loads of protesters who had been scheduled to come from the region canceled their trips Friday night, according to Brian Becker, national coordinator for the Answer Coalition, the event's main sponsor.

It was quickly apparent that the weather had not prevented counter-demonstrators, many in black leather motorcycle jackets, from showing up in force and surrounding all sides of the Wall.

At one point before the march started, counter-demonstrators formed a gantlet along an asphalt walkway on Constitution Avenue and heaped verbal abuse at protesters who walked through on their way to the assembly area. One Vietnam veteran in a wheelchair yelled obscenities at demonstrators, including some with children.

Some demonstrators supporting the war effort engaged in good-natured banter with war protesters. But others blocked paths and prevented marchers from getting near the Wall, particularly anyone carrying a sign. District resident Eric Anderson, 47, had his sign ripped from his hands and thrown in the mud.

Bob Anders, 60, an Iowa banker who said he served with the 25th Infantry Division in Vietnam and rode a bus from Iowa to protest the war, had his heart set on seeing the memorial but turned around after seeing the situation. "I've never seen the memorial, and I wanted to see it in a spirit of protest," he said.

After speeches from antiwar activists including Cindy Sheehan, the first marchers took off across the bridge shortly before 1 p.m. The marchers began arriving at the Pentagon about 1:45, some gathering in front of the stage in the north parking lot and others perched on a hill by a Route 27 overpass.

About 2:10, a group of several hundred young people continued past the rally point and marched down Route 27 toward the south parking lot until they confronted a police barricade. Some youths who carried traffic barrels cut in half and painted red and black as shields and wore scarves over their faces pressed forward as Pentagon police, backed by Virginia state troopers in riot gear, stood two layers deep, trying to push them back. When that failed, the police donned gas masks. One of the protesters threw a firecracker, and many people ran off.

About 70 to 80 people sat down and were threatened with arrest. Protesters chanted, "The whole world is watching." Then protesters took a vote and opted to back off.

Yet, many demonstrators showed respect toward police and the military.

Among those marching on a day of cold, whipping wind was Maureen Dooley of Melfa, Va., who first marched on the Pentagon when she was 18; now she is 58. "I came, as I did today, to be quietly counted among the people opposed to this war," she said.

Dooley said she wished she could "apologize for my generation" for the way the antiwar movement treated Vietnam veterans on their return home. "This time, we're with our young men and women," she said.

The Pentagon's windswept north parking lot was cold, and many protesters did not linger long. By 3:30 p.m., only a few hundred marchers remained huddled around the stage. Most had left, with many of the out-of-towners seeking refuge on the floor of the nearby Arlington Cemetery Metro station.

One group that had come by overnight bus from Iowa City huddled on the floor near the station elevators. They had survived the 22-hour bus ride as well as the insults of the counter-protesters, only to be defeated by the bitter cold.

"We just couldn't take it anymore," said Christine Gaunt, 50, a hog farmer from Grinnell, Iowa. Now, with a voice fatigued from chanting litanies against the president and feet tired from marching on the military industrial complex, Gaunt just counted the hours to the group's scheduled bus pickup at 7 p.m.

If she was lucky, she said in a tired voice, she would get home this afternoon, just in time to haul her pigs to the Sunday market.

Staff writers Nelson Hernandez, William Wan and Theola Labb? and the Associated Press contributed this report.

RNC phone-jamming lawyer spills disturbing beans

Sat 17 Mar 2007

by Betsy Devine

How do our new Democratic Senate and Congress look to the many who have so much to hide?

Scarily revealing is the oh-so-subtle promo for DC white-shoe lawfirm Covington and Burling written by one of the many high-priced DC lawyers who worked for the RNC on the NH phone-jamming, one Robert Kelner.

Phone-jamming fans may recall that Kelner let slip some embarassing info to a TV station in NH–making it clear that the RNC’s defense lawyers were fully informed about DOJ investigations into the phone-jamming’s White House connection, although said investigations were kept a deep secret from Democrats.

Kelner's remark inspired a Freedom of Information Request to the DOJ (pdf here), filed on April 18, 2006 but not yet answered by the DOJ.

Kelner predicts woe to all wrongdoers who do not quickly hire his law firm now that the Democrats of the 110th Congress can do some investigating. He also makes some interesting predictions:

In the House, the large majority – approximately the same number of seats the Republicans possessed after 1994 – and other factors will likely lead to a very active investigative agenda on a wide range of issues. In contrast, the narrow Democratic majority in the Senate will tend to limit investigations to areas of bipartisan support.

The 2008 presidential election also will influence the investigative agenda. Because national press attention will shift to the presidential primaries in early 2008, the most sensational and high profile congressional hearings will likely occur in the first year of the new Congress. In 2008, investigations will garner less public attention, but they will nonetheless continue to be a reality for corporate America.

Kelner also warns that "[The new Democratic] Congressional investigators can be expected to look tirelessly for sweetheart contracts, administrative cost overruns, waste and fraud, and narrow appropriations earmarks." (Unlike the Republican majority before them, which had a clear and patriotic understanding that big campaign donors were entitled to guzzle freely from public tax dollars.)

Well, IANAL, and Kelner is, so I should probably quote no more from his four-page analysis (pdf), which you can easily read online for yourself.

This remarkable document seems open to the interpretation that Covington and Burling would like to hear from anyone who fears investigation for no-bid contracts, various waste and fraud (including Katrina relief funds as well as Iraq), drug company profits under the Medicare prescription program, and even "warrantless wiretapping." (Really, could the FBI and Department of Justice spend my tax dollars to pay for defense lawyers from Covington and Burling?)

It's hard to understand why a document at once so cynical and so revealing--spilling beans that would embarass the heck out of most of us--would be exposed on the open web except in the hope of motivating potential investigatees to call Covington and Burling.

I sincerely hope that the clients of Covington and Burling will receive no magic juju to help them postpone or derail the Congressional oversight voters were hoping for when they overwhelmingly voted Democratic in 2006.

under New Hampshire! , Editorial
No Comments

Al-Sadr advocates Baghdad uprising

FIERCE RESISTANCE: Shiite cleric reverses cooperative stance, calls for new protest

Karin Brulliard, Sudarsan Raghavan, Washington Post

Saturday, March 17, 2007

(03-17) 04:00 PDT Baghdad -- Firebrand Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr on Friday called upon followers inside his stronghold of Sadr City to resist U.S. forces trying to stabilize the capital. Officials in his organization said the cleric was advocating a peaceful uprising.

"Raise your voices, all of you loving your brothers and united against your enemy saying as your leader taught you: 'No America, no Israel, no, no Satan,' by standing and demonstrating that way," al-Sadr said in a message distributed at the Kufa mosque in southern Iraq, according to a translation by the Washington-based SITE Institute, which tracks militant groups.

In recent weeks, al-Sadr has appeared to be cooperating with U.S. and Iraqi troops as they implement an enhanced security plan in Baghdad and other parts of the country, even as he has continued to criticize the American presence in Iraq.

On Friday, thousands of al-Sadr's followers demonstrated in several parts of Iraq, including Sadr City, to protest the U.S. role. They denounced the neighborhood security outposts and garrisons being set up under the plan and demanded a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. troops.

Al-Sadr's statement came a day after gunmen attacked a convoy carrying the mayor of Sadr City, Rahim al-Darraji, leaving him seriously wounded and killing at least two of his bodyguards. Al-Darraji, an al-Sadr appointee, took part in negotiations with U.S. officials to allow American troops to conduct security sweeps and build a garrison in Sadr City.

It was unclear whether al-Sadr, whose Mahdi Army militia has often attacked U.S. and Iraqi forces, was issuing a call to arms.

"The statement calls for calming down and self-control and to be careful and cautious of the occupation forces and their agents, because we have become surrounded by them from all sides," said Haider al-Tarfy, a senior al-Sadr representative.

As U.S. troops have carried out raids across Sadr City as part of the security plan, the Mahdi Army has lain low. Friday's statement appeared to address recent public comments by U.S. military officials that the militia's low profile represented tacit cooperation with the security plan.

"And here you are standing up for the support of your beloved city; this city which the occupier wanted to harm, and tarnish its reputation by spreading false propaganda and rumors and claiming that there are negotiation and collaboration between you and them," the statement continued. "But I am sure that you consider them as your enemies."

Al-Sadr's whereabouts are known. U.S. military officials believe he has fled to Iran; his supporters say he remains in Iraq.

One high-level Sadr City official said Friday that he believes the Sadr City mayor was targeted for working with the Americans and backing the security plan, and that al-Sadr's militia is probably to blame. He declined to be identified further out of fear for his life.

"The investigation is still in the beginning," the official said. "But all the accusations are against the Mahdi Army."

Two Mahdi Army leaders reached Friday denied the militia was behind the shooting.

In other developments:

-- The U.S. military said a soldier was killed by an explosion during fighting in Salahuddin, while a Marine died in a noncombat incident in Anbar province. Both died Thursday.

-- Britain reported that 10 inmates at the Shaibah detention facility in Basra escaped this week after swapping clothes -- and then places -- with visitors who came to see them. Nine of the 10 impostors who switched places with the detainees remained in custody in Basra, but no further details were released.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Worldwide protests against Iraq war

(dpa) With the war in Iraq poised to enter its fifth year, tens of thousands of demonstrators Saturday flooded the streets of

Washington, Hungary, Spain, Australia, Greece, Turkey, Cyprus, South Korea, Chile, Sweden, Iraq and elsewhere in protest.

The protests were timed to coincide with the fourth anniversary on Tuesday of the Iraq war, which has claimed the lives of at least 70,000 civilians and nearly 10,000 soldiers and police officers from Iraq, the US and eight coalition countries.

In Hungary, thousands of people holding torches formed the peace sign on Heroes' Square in Budapest.

In Istanbul, Turkish activists held up peace flags and signs saying "We're all Iraqis" and "Go back home Bush!" The Coalition against the War in Iraq gathered supporters in Nicosia, Cyprus, to protest.

Some 2,000 South Korean anti-war protestors were met by a massive block of riot-gear clad police in Seoul.

In Athens, an estimated 6,000 people, including critics of globalization, left-wing parties and unions, demonstrated at the US embassy.

A handful of Australian activists, about 300 or one-third the number organizers had anticipated, marched through Sydney, while more marched in other cities. Greens member of parliament Kerry Nettle said she had campaigned against Australian participation when it was first mooted.

"Four years on, how things have changed," Nettle told the gathering. "The issue of Iraq is the disaster we all said it would be. The predictions have not only come true, it's worse."

Thousands of Spanish demonstrators walked through the streets of Madrid, Barcelona, Seville, Valencia and Pamplona, accusing the US, Britain and the government of former Spanish prime minister Jose Maria Aznar of crimes against humanity.

In Washington, DC, an estimated 8,000 to 10,000 people braved winter weather to gather at the Lincoln Memorial and cross the Memorial Bridge to assemble in the north parking lot of the Pentagon. A number of Iraq war veteran groups and American Muslim organizations participated.

The turnout was less than a third of the massive showing organizers called for. They had hoped for an outpouring similar to the 1967 march on the Pentagon that signalled the beginning of the end of the Vietnam war.

On Friday, about 3,000 members of US Christian groups held a separate protest to pray for peace at the National Cathedral and march to the White House. About 200 were detained for refusing to stay on the sidewalk.

And also on Friday, in Sadr City, Iraq, where the US military has boosted its presence as part of a new plan to secure Baghdad, 10,000 Shiites staged a protest against the influx of American soldiers and the opening of a joint US-Iraqi force base.

Saturday's demonstrations came as suicide attacks in Iraq killed at least 10 people and wounded dozens others in the cities of Fallujah, Ramadi and Baghdad. At least eight people were killed and scores wounded when two tankers filled with chlorine exploded in separate incidents in and around the restive Iraqi city of Fallujah, Voices of Iraq news agency reported Saturday.

In the four years since the US-led coalition ousted the Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, who was executed in December, an estimated 2 million Iraqis have fled their country and another 2 million are believed to be internally displaced.

Why Pakistan is crucial to the world's stability

Denis Macshane
Sunday March 18, 2007
The Observer

Anyone who wants political power in Pakistan, so say the street pundits, must hold three aces - America, the army and Allah. As Pakistan plans its 60th birthday celebrations this year, it may hope for a future less in thrall to its military, to its mullahs and to Washington. President Pervez Musharraf, who took power in a bloody 1999 coup, is facing a crisis.

Far from being Nato's calm eastern ally, a new front in the fight against terrorism, Islamabad's streets feel shaky, divided and waiting for the worst. Pakistan is neither dictatorship nor democracy. Its newspapers are louder in criticism of their President than the anti-Blair or anti-Bush press in the West. Its intellectuals roam the world, trashing their country. Opposition politician, Cambridge-educated billionaire, Benazir Bhutto, is free to return home when she wants. But General Musharraf and his army are in charge. The house arrest of Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, after he refused Musharraf's demand to resign, has caused outrage. In a nation that reveres high office, the manhandling of the judge shocked even the most cynical of Pakistani politicians.

---

---

Pakistan urgently needs a return to democratic civilian rule even if its elected leaders in the Nineties became bywords for corruption, encouraging the Taliban and the madrassas, as well as the long-bearded, turban-wearing politicians who insist the law should be subordinate to theocracy. Democracy requires compromise between the military and the politicians. Instead there may be a slow drift towards increased authoritarianism under Musharraf, further alienating Pakistan.

In fact, the most poignant story in Pakistan last week was not about the Chief Justice but the stoning to death of a woman and two men accused of adultery. The rise of religious intolerance is now a political danger from the Christian West to the Muslim East. Yet it is all too easy to patronise Pakistan. Britain is currently gushing over India with its clever graduates and Midas-touch businessmen. But India's record on human rights and the illiteracy of half its population is little better than Pakistan's. India is rightly seen as a strategic partner for the West, especially the US, which is playing a balance-of-power game using India against China. But Pakistan, not India, is key to stability in the new world order.

The chain reaction that began when the West and Saudi Arabia called into being the jihadi movement to oust the Russians from Afghanistan is coming back to haunt Pakistan. In the Eighties it allowed itself to be the base for military attacks on Russia, even as the USSR tottered on the edge of history's dustbin. Now the jihadis are heading steadily eastwards as fanatical Islamism preaches hate and justifies suicide bombings. But Afghanistan could be saved if a political-economic-social campaign can gain ground from a purely military definition of the challenges. Earlier this month US soldiers ran amok after a bomb attack. They fired indiscriminately, killing 30 people. A few more Bloody Sundays like this and Pakistan's neighbour will be Iraqified before reconstruction pays off.

Britain is sending one of its toughest trouble-shooting diplomats to take over a beefed-up presence in Kabul. The UN agencies, the European Commission plus the European Council, plus dozens of NGOs constitute the huge effort being made in Afghanistan, yet without better co-ordination it may end up chasing its tail.

The news is good in terms of schools, roads and hospitals built. Kabul looks richer than when it was a hippy-trail stopover three decades ago. But relentlessly the Taliban and the jihadis from among the three million Afghan refugees in Pakistan are back in business. Pakistan is endlessly reproached about not doing enough. It is told to close its frontier, as if the US can close the Mexican border or 30,000 British soldiers could seal the border across which IRA killers roamed. Pakistan is pressured to hunt bin Laden, but Nato can't find Radovan Karadzic or persuade the Serbian army to stop protecting Ratko Mladic.

The time is overdue to acknowledge the sacrifices Pakistan has made. It has 80,000 soldiers along the 2,300km frontier with Afghanistan; 500 have been killed, far in excess of Nato casualties in Afghanistan or Britain's in Iraq. India could join the war against terror by removing its 700,000 soldiers from Kashmir and opening the border. Musharraf has been braver than his predecessors in acknowledging that Indian-controlled Kashmir is not going to return to Pakistan.

If Pakistan felt its eastern flank was secure, it could transfer its military to the west - Afghanistan. Britain in recent years has given £1bn in aid to India, while India spends £200m on aid to Afghanistan. UK aid is, in effect, subsidising India's efforts to pull Afghanistan into its orbit. India is opening consulates in parts of Afghanistan where no Indian has been seen in years. From Pakistan's perspective, this looks like India seeking influence in order to keep up pressure on its old foe.

This summer heroin will be cheaper on the streets of Pakistan than sweets. India and China have a bigger drugs problem than the UK. Both countries should cut Islamabad some slack. If Afghanistan goes wrong, the next target for the ideologues who unleash suicide bombers will be Pakistan with its nuclear arsenal. Pakistan is the key to defeating the new threats to the world. Time and again, the West has turned its back on Pakistan. That mistake should not be made again. Britain, with its close links to Pakistan, its able, articulate Muslim MPs, and its duty to tell America to change tactics, should help before it is too late.

· Denis MacShane is Labour MP for Rotherham and was a minister at the Foreign Office until 2005.

New Palestinian government marks collapse of Israel's Middle East positions

From Debka, the unofficial voice of Mossad.
---
New Palestinian government marks collapse of Israel's Middle East positions

DEBKAfile Exclusive Analysis

March 18, 2007, 10:10 AM (GMT+02:00)

The Hamas-Fatah government taking office Sunday, March 18, is more than a policy failure by prime minister Ehud Olmert and foreign minister Tzipi Livni; it is another milestone on the road to the collapse of Israel’s Middle East positions at large, on a scale comparable to the setback to its deterrence from the mismanaged war against Hizballah last summer.

This fiasco is reflected in the horrified outcry across the board, from members of the Olmert government coalition and the opposition alike, as Israelis woke up Sunday, March 18, to face a hostile Palestinian government led by a terrorist organization, godfathered by Saudi Arabia, armed by Iran, and blessed by Western powers.

Exactly a week ago, on March 11, the Israeli prime minister said he was positively reviewing sections of the Saudi Arabian 2002 “peace plan.” He did not waver when Riyadh declared the hard-line text would not be modified when it is re-launched at the Arab summit in ten days’ time.

That afternoon, Olmert had his second interview with Mahmoud Abbas, chairman of the Palestinian Authority and leader of Fatah. He stressed the importance of “staying in touch with positive Palestinian elements.” This was also Livni’s mantra during her recent travels to the US and European capitals.

They both fell into the Palestinian trap, effectively sanctioning the seal of moderation with which Abbas and Fatah stamped a Palestinian government dominated by the Hamas terrorists.

Even more dangerously, the two Israeli leaders failed to question the covert Yalta-type understanding reached by Riyadh and Tehran. They ought to have grasped that when the Saudis and Iranians stuck their deal to preserve the Siniora government in Lebanon, as DEBKAfile revealed in late February, they must also have come to terms on the Palestinian issue.

And so they did. It was a package: Tehran called off the campaign led by its patsy Hizballah against the anti-Syrian Lebanese government, gaining stronger representation – at Syria’s expense, while the rival Palestinian factions were told in Mecca to share power – at Israel’s expense.

Olmert and Livni forgot a permanent Middle East axiom: Israel’s neighbors can always set aside their differences for common action against the Jewish state. Therefore, Sunni princes and Shiite clerics easily agreed on a Palestinian formula that would imperil Israel’s most vital interests.

They figured that, just as Syrian president Bashar Assad is too isolated to challenge his dependence on Tehran, so too Israel is too dependent on Washington to complain about Saudi under-the-table transactions with Iran for the sake of a deal on Iraq.

In the past year, Olmert-Livni policies have been so closely synchronized with Washington’s, that many of Israel’s vital interests have gone by the board.

It was their vain hope that Arab governments in fear of Iran’s ambitions would come to terms with Israel and move the Middle East closer to peace. This misreading was shared by opposition leader Binyamin Netanyahu. What happened instead was that the so-called moderate Arab camp stood aside when Tehran focused its attention on building up the menace to Israel on the backs of the now-kosher Palestinian radicals.

Iran not only gave them arms, ordnance, cash and training, but also strategic depth. Its Revolutionary Guards have spread their wings into Gaza through Sinai up to the Suez and Mediterranean, and built up a war menace to Israel from the south, as well as the north. The realistic prospect is therefore closer to war rather than peace, the culmination of a process which the prime minister, his foreign minister and their advisers consistently missed or misread.

Addressing the Washington pro-Israel lobby AIPAC’s annual conference last week, Olmert and Livni both came out in support of the Bush administration’s military strategy in Iraq. Since that strategy hinges largely on covert Saudi-Iranian diplomacy in Washington’s name, Israeli government spokesmen implicitly gave America a blank check to pay for an Iraq accommodation at Israel’s expense.

Former French PM accuses “Jewish Lobby”: "The Jewish lobby is capable of mounting disgraceful operations”

Updated: 06/Mar/2007 23:12

By Joseph Byron

PARIS (EJP)--- Former French Prime Minister Raymon Barre has sparked an uproar within the Jewish community after accusing “the Jewish lobby” of making “a scapegoat” of Maurice Papon, a French senior official who signed deportation orders for hundreds of Jews in the Bordeaux region during WWII. In an interview last week with France Culture, a state-run radio station, Barre also said that “opposing the deportation of Jews had not been a matter of “major national interest.” CRIF, the umbrella of French Jewish secular organizations, said it was “scandalized” by the comments, adding that Barre "had joined the extreme-right". Historian and film director Claude Lanzmann accused Barre of being "an anti-Semite". Such statements from a person who was Prime Minister are among the things which may anguish the Jewish community. Joël Mergui, president of the Paris Consistoire. A senior official under the wartime Vichy government, Papon was sentenced to 10 years in jail in 1998 for his role in organising the deportation of hundreds to Nazi extermination camps. During his six-month trial, the longest in French history, Papon came to symbolize France’s collaboration with the Nazis. He was convicted of complicity in crimes against humanity, after the court rejected his plea that he was a civil servant following instructions from above. He was released in 2002 on medical grounds and died last month aged 96. Moral judgement The radio interview initially focused on Papon’s guilt. Asked if he understands that it is possible for someone to be guilty of not disobeying, Barre said: “When you have essential responsibilities in a department, a region or even more at the national level, you don’t resign. You only resign when it is truly a question of major national interest.” “Mr Papon became a scapegoat. I am not passing moral judgment on the attitude that one should have had with regard to the deportation of the Jews or not. But I consider that this country is fundamentally hypocritical in seeking out a few scapegoats.” “Don’t forget that all the French personnel who went to manage the part of Germany occupied by France [after the end of WWII] consisted in large part of highly professional civil servants who needed maybe to be eliminated on a national level but were able to continue to serve the country at the international level”. Barre added: “I want to say that on this issue I consider that the Jewish lobby – and not only with regard to me – is capable of mounting disgraceful operations and I want to say this publicly.” Not the first time Raymon Barre, who was Prime Minister under former President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, already shocked the Jewish community at the time when reacting to a Palestinian terrorist bomb attack against a Paris synagogue in October 1980, he declared on the television: “This appalling attack was intended to hit Jews on their way to the synagogue, it has hit innocent French people who happened to be in the Rue Copernic”. He implicitely stated that Jews are not French. During the interview with France Culture, Barre said he doesn’t not regret his words. “Don’t forget that in the same statement I said that the Jewish community cannot be separated from the French community. When you quote, you must quote in full. And the campaign undertaken by the Jewish lobby with the strongest links on the left came from the fact that we were in an electoral climate and this didn’t impress me and they can continue to repeat it.” “Those who wanted to get their own back on Jews could have blown up the synagogue and Jews. But not at all, they launched a blind bomb attack and there were three French people, not Jews, that’s a fact, not Jews. And that doesn’t mean that Jews are not French,” Barre said.

Amid Concerns, FBI Lapses Went On

Records Collection Brought Internal Questions But Little Scrutiny

By R. Jeffrey Smith and John Solomon
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, March 18, 2007; A01

FBI counterterrorism officials continued to use flawed procedures to obtain thousands of U.S. telephone records during a two-year period when bureau lawyers and managers were expressing escalating concerns about the practice, according to senior FBI and Justice Department officials and documents.

FBI lawyers raised the concerns beginning in late October 2004 but did not closely scrutinize the practice until last year, FBI officials acknowledged. They also did not understand the scope of the problem until the Justice Department launched an investigation, FBI officials said.

Under pressure to provide a stronger legal footing, counterterrorism agents last year wrote new letters to phone companies demanding the information the bureau already possessed. At least one senior FBI headquarters official -- whom the bureau declined to name -- signed these "national security letters" without including the required proof that the letters were linked to FBI counterterrorism or espionage investigations, an FBI official said.

The flawed procedures involved the use of emergency demands for records, called "exigent circumstance" letters, which contained false or undocumented claims. They also included national security letters that were issued without FBI rules being followed. Both types of request were served on three phone companies.

Referring to the exigent circumstance letters, Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) wrote in a letter Friday to Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine: "It is . . . difficult to imagine why there should not have been swift and severe consequences for anyone who knowingly signed . . . a letter containing false statements. Anyone at the FBI who knew about that kind of wrongdoing had an obligation to put a stop to it and report it immediately."

A March 9 report by Fine bluntly stated that the FBI's use of the exigency letters "circumvented" the law that governs the FBI's access to personal information about U.S. residents.

The exigency letters, created by the FBI's New York office after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, told telephone providers that the FBI needed information immediately and would follow up with subpoenas later. There is no basis in the law to compel phone companies to turn over information using such letters, Fine found, and in many cases, agents never followed up with the promised subpoenas, he said.

But Fine's report made no mention of the FBI's subsequent efforts to legitimize those actions with improperly prepared national security letters last year.

Fine's report brought a deluge of criticism on the FBI, prompting a news conference at which Director Robert S. Mueller III took responsibility for the lapses. Some lawmakers immediately proposed curtailing the government's expansive anti-terrorism powers under the USA Patriot Act.

In a letter to Fine that was released along with the March 9 report, Mueller acknowledged that the bureau's agents had used unacceptable shortcuts, violated internal policies and made mistakes in their use of exigent circumstance letters.

Mueller also said he had banned the future use of such letters this month, although he defended their value and denied that the agency had intentionally violated the law.

Other FBI officials acknowledged widespread problems but said they involved procedural and documentation failures, not intentional misgathering of Americans' phone records. Mueller ordered a nationwide audit, which began Friday, to determine if the inappropriate use of exigency letters went beyond one headquarters unit.

"We wish, in retrospect, that we had learned about this sooner, corrections had been made and the process was more transparent," FBI Assistant Director John Miller said yesterday.

Fine's report said the bureau's counterterrorism office used the exigency letters at least 739 times between 2003 and 2005 to obtain records related to 3,000 separate phone numbers. FBI officials acknowledged that the process was so flawed that they may have to destroy some phone records to keep them from being used in the future, if the bureau does not find proof they were gathered in connection with an authorized investigation.

Disciplinary action may be taken when the bureau completes an internal audit, a senior FBI official said in an interview at headquarters Friday.

Ann Beeson, an attorney for the ACLU who has sued the FBI in an effort to block some of its data requests, said that if the bureau cannot prove a link between the letters and an ongoing investigation, its requests were "a total fishing expedition."

The FBI agreed that one senior official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of forthcoming House and Senate hearings on the matter, would speak for the agency.

Lawmakers have begun to probe who knew about the use of the letters and why the department did not act more swiftly to halt the practice. Grassley asked that Fine turn over to the Senate Judiciary Committee copies of all FBI e-mails related to the letters of demand, as well as transcripts of the interviews Fine conducted on the issue.

The committee has scheduled a hearing for Wednesday, with Mueller as the chief witness. On Tuesday, the House Judiciary Committee intends to question Fine and FBI general counsel Valerie Caproni.

FBI and Justice Department officials said most of the letters at issue were drafted by the Communications Analysis Unit (CAU), which comprises about a dozen people assigned to analyze telephone records and other communications for counterterrorism investigators. They sent the secret requests to three companies -- AT&T, Verizon and a third firm whose identity could not be learned. Since the 2001 terrorist attacks, the FBI has been paying the companies' cost of supplying such records almost instantaneously in a form that its agents can readily examine, according to the report and the senior FBI official.

In each letter, the FBI asserted that "due to exigent circumstances, it is requested that records for the attached list of telephone numbers be provided." The bureau promised in most of the letters that subpoenas for the same information "have been submitted to the U.S. Attorney's office who will process and serve them formally."

But the inspector general's probe concluded that many of the letters were "not sent in exigent circumstances" and that "there sometimes were no open or pending national security investigations tied to the request," contrary to what U.S. law requires. No subpoenas had actually been requested before the letters were sent. The phone companies nonetheless promptly turned over the information, in anticipation of getting a more legally viable document later, FBI officials said.

The use of such letters was virtually "uncontrolled," said an FBI official who was briefed on the issue in early 2005. By that fall, CAU agents had begun creating spreadsheets to track phone records they had collected for a year or more that were not covered by the appropriate documents, according to FBI e-mails and interviews with officials.

A spokesman for AT&T declined to discuss the topic, referring questions to the FBI. Verizon spokesman Peter Thonis , who would not confirm nor deny the existence of an FBI contract with his firm, said that "every day Verizon subpoena units respond to emergency requests from federal, state and local law enforcement for particular calling records. After 9/11, of course, Verizon responded to FBI emergency requests in terrorist matters, and we had every reason to believe they were legitimate emergency situations."

The inspector general's report said that the wording of the exigency letters was copied from a standard letter that the FBI's New York office used to obtain urgently needed records after the 2001 terrorist bombings. When officials from that office were later reassigned to create the CAU in Washington, the senior FBI official said, "they brought their business practices with them" and continued to use the same letter "for reasons that I cannot explain."

But the unit was not authorized under FBI rules to make such requests, and from the outset in 2003 it asked FBI field offices to submit the promised legal follow-up documents. The offices rarely did so speedily, and in many cases ignored the request altogether.

"In practice, if you have already got the records, the incentive to do the paperwork is reduced," the senior FBI official said.

When a lawyer in the FBI's national security law branch, Patrice Kopistansky, noted in late 2004 that the proper legal justifications were frequently missing or extremely late, she did not advise agents to "change their process," the senior official said. "Our advice was instead to . . . use these letters only in true emergencies" and institute "covering practices."

These included ensuring that the bureau's agents had opened a related investigation and promptly sent a formal national security letter to provide legal backing for the demand.

Bassem Youssef, who currently heads the CAU, raised concerns about the tardy legal justifications shortly after he was assigned to the job in early 2005, according to his lawyer, Steve Kohn.

"He discovered they were not in compliance, and then he reported that to his chain of command. They defended the procedures and took no action," Kohn said, adding that "their initial response was to deny the scope of the problem."

Youssef has battled the FBI in court over whether he was denied a promotion because of discrimination based on his ethnicity.

Eventually, the general counsel's office organized a meeting at headquarters on Sept. 26, 2005, where the bureau considered a work-around: Its lawyers proposed creating special, catch-all investigative files that could be used to authorize quick phone-records seizures that did not involve open field investigations.

But one official at the meeting, Youssef, argued that genuine emergency requests for the records "were few and far between," according to an e-mail summarizing the meeting that was reviewed by The Washington Post, and the idea was never implemented. The account referred to efforts by one of the bureau's top lawyers to brief "higher ups" in the agency about the problem.

"At some point, they told us there were not that many such letters" still in use, the senior official said. "We believed the problem had resolved itself . . . in retrospect, it never got resolved."

One reason that FBI officials did not act more quickly is that Kopistansky and others in the general counsel's office did not review until May 2006 copies of any of the exigent circumstances letters sent to the phone companies from 2003 to 2005. As a result, they were unaware that some of the letters contained false statements about forthcoming subpoenas and urgent deadlines, the senior official said.

Bureau officials ultimately decided to "clean up" the problem by writing seven national security letters designed to provide legal backing for all the telephone records requests that still needed it, the senior FBI official said. In every case, these requests in 2006 covered records already in the FBI's possession and lacked the required cover memos spelling out the investigative requirements for the requests.

At no time did senior FBI officials outside the communications unit attempt to tally how often the exigent circumstances letters had been used, with the result that Mueller and others in senior management did not learn about the scope of the problem until two months ago, when Fine informed them, the senior official said.

Talking About Israel: NICHOLAS KRISTOF

THE COMPLETE ARTICLE
THE NEW YOR TIMES
OP-ED COLUMNIST

Talking About Israel

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Published: March 18, 2007

The lack of serious political debate about our policy toward Israelis and Palestinians harms America, Middle East peace prospects and Israel itself.

Democrats are railing at just about everything President Bush does, with one prominent exception: Mr. Bush’s crushing embrace of Israel.

There is no serious political debate among either Democrats or Republicans about our policy toward Israelis and Palestinians. And that silence harms America, Middle East peace prospects and Israel itself.

Within Israel, you hear vitriolic debates in politics and the news media about the use of force and the occupation of Palestinian territories. Yet no major American candidate is willing today to be half as critical of hard-line Israeli government policies as, say, Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper.

Three years ago, Israel’s minister of justice spoke publicly of photos of an elderly Palestinian woman beside the ruins of her home, after it had been destroyed by the Israeli army. He said that they reminded him of his own grandmother, who had been dispossessed by the Nazis. Can you imagine an American cabinet secretary ever saying such a thing?

--MORE--

The Ides of March 2003: FRANK RICH - The March to War

THE COMPLETE ARTICLE WITH ALL HYPERLINKS
THE NEW YORK TIMES
OP-ED COLUMNIST

The Ides of March 2003

By FRANK RICH

Published: March 18, 2007

A chronology of some of the high and low points in the days leading up to the national train wreck whose anniversary we mourn this week.

TOMORROW night is the fourth anniversary of President Bush’s prime-time address declaring the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom. In the broad sweep of history, four years is a nanosecond, but in America, where memories are congenitally short, it’s an eternity. That’s why a revisionist history of the White House’s rush to war, much of it written by its initial cheerleaders, has already taken hold. In this exonerating fictionalization of the story, nearly every politician and pundit in Washington was duped by the same “bad intelligence” before the war, and few imagined that the administration would so botch the invasion’s aftermath or that the occupation would go on so long. “If only I had known then what I know now ...” has been the persistent refrain of the war supporters who subsequently disowned the fiasco. But the embarrassing reality is that much of the damning truth about the administration’s case for war and its hubristic expectations for a cakewalk were publicly available before the war, hiding in plain sight, to be seen by anyone who wanted to look.

By the time the ides of March arrived in March 2003, these warning signs were visible on a nearly daily basis. So were the signs that Americans were completely ill prepared for the costs ahead. Iraq was largely anticipated as a distant, mildly disruptive geopolitical video game that would be over in a flash.

Now many of the same leaders who sold the war argue that escalation should be given a chance. This time they’re peddling the new doomsday scenario that any withdrawal timetable will lead to the next 9/11. The question we must ask is: Has history taught us anything in four years?

--MORE--