US Attorney scandal...of NH phone-jamming

Hey--what about the US Attorneys who didn't get fired? Paul Krugman is asking (free link here)--and it's a good question. Check out the US Attorney in charge of the NH phone-jamming, Thomas J Colantuono. Does Gonzales give prizes for slow response to Republican dirty tricks? It took Colantuono's people more than a year before the FBI questioned their top/only suspect in the NH phone-jamming, a crime by Republicans.

But in other matters, Colantuono could move fast. Just before the 2004 elections, he moved fast to block Democrats from questioning phone-jamming suspects--and fast again to file corruption charges against a NH Democrat.

In 2006, right after the Democrats' landmark electoral victory, Colantuono also moved fast to shut down his phone-jamming enquiries, making a guilty plea deal with the last defendant that gave the Feds nothing and the Republicans everything.

When Republicans commit crimes, Colantuono moves sloowwwwwly:

Nov. 5, 2002: During a tight race for a US Senate seat, phone lines to 5 get-out-the-vote operations run by NH Democrats around the state, and one GOTV operation run by the Manchester Firefighters' Association, are swamped by repeated hang-up phone calls from Idaho. Republican John Sununu wins the Senate seat.

Feb. 7, 2003: Union Leader headline "Dirty tricks: Federal officials alerted by police to alleged GOP phone jamming". Article names Chuck McGee, Allen Raymond, GOP Marketplace, and Mylo Enterprises, the company owned by Shaun Hansen.

Feb 20, 2003: Union Leader reports that GOP Marketplace has shut down its website in anticipation of investigation; their lawyer says no federal investigators have contacted them.

December, 2003. More than a year after the phone jamming, FBI first interviews Chuck McGee.

More timeline here

When Democrats have problems, Colantuono moves fast:

On June 10, 2004, NH State Senator Burt Cohen dropped out of the US Senate race against incumbent Judd Gregg (R, NH) after controversy surfaced about Cohen's campaign manager Jesse D Burchfeld. Cohen's withdrawal so close to election left Democrats without a credible candidate. In November of 2004, Gregg defeated his opponent "Granny D" Haddock (aged 94) by a 66 to 34% margin--and Burchfield pled guilty to making false statements to the FCC.

The problem surfaced in June, 2004, but by August, 2004 (well in time for the 2004 election) Colantuono had sent out a press release describing the charges against Jesse Burchfeld, with liberal mention of Democrat Burt Cohen.

Yes, within two months after a Democrat's problem surfaced, Colantuono could not just investigate but file charges.

2004 was a Presidential election year, as you may recall (and Mrs. Colantuono's innovative pro-GOP tactics made local news). And, in 2004, US Attorney Colantuono could move fast not just to start enquiries but also to block them.

August 11, 2004: US Department of Justice Attorney Todd Hinnen, who obtained guilty pleas from McGee and Raymond that mention an unnamed "official in a national political organization", will be pulled off the phone-jamming case.

October 11, 2004: Josh Marshall identifies James Tobin as the (still unindicted) Republican official mentioned by Hinnen.

October 15, 2004: James Tobin resigns as Bush-Cheney New England campaign chair.

October 21, 2004: Twenty minutes before Democrats are set to depose to interview phone-jamming witnesses for their civil suit, the DOJ intervenes to shut down their investigation for six months.

But--slow again--James Tobin was not indicted until December 2004, safely after the Presidential election. And his trial was scheduled, once again post-election, in December of 2005.

And--fast again--US Federal Attorneys for NH and Idaho moved fast in 2006, to accept a deeply-flawed guilty plea from their very last phone-jamming defendant.

So, if you're wondering how the Bush Justice Department would like all its US Attorneys to act...

Will somebody notice that it's almost a year that Colantuono's many ties to the GOP prompted a request to Gonzales for a special prosecutor on the NH phone jamming?

URL

Four years later: Iraqis look back on pre-invasion era with longing

Perspective

Sun Mar 11 2007

By Leila Fadel

BAGHDAD -- Four years ago, Iraqi poet Abbas Chaychan, a Shiite Muslim who'd been forced into exile during the predominantly Sunni Muslim regime of Saddam Hussein, hailed the American presence here in a poem that praised the top U.S. diplomat in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer.

We have breakfasts of kabab and qaymar, he wrote, describing the new Iraq with a reference to a rich cream that's considered a sign of wealth.

We put, in your stead, Mr. Bremer / Better than a tyrant of our own flesh and blood, and his torture.

Last January, shortly after Saddam was hanged, Chaychan again put words to paper. But his outlook had changed.

History is proud to write about him, he said of Saddam. It wasn't a rope that wrapped around the neck / It was the neck that wrapped around the rope....

From his childhood he was a leader, stubborn and against the occupation.

As the anniversary of the March 20, 2003, U.S.-led invasion of Iraq nears, many Iraqis, like Chaychan, are expressing nostalgia for the time more than 1,000 days ago when Saddam's statue stood proudly in Baghdad's Fardos Square.

Chaychan's reading of his most recent work, in which he calls Saddam the Arab world's "knight" and compares his death to the eclipsing of the sun, has become a popular Iraqi destination on video-sharing services such as YouTube, where his pained voice rings out over a montage of shots of the Iraqi dictator: clenching his fist in the air, sporting his signature beret, at trial holding a Qur'an, with a noose around his neck.

In a January interview with CBS News' 60 Minutes, U.S. President George W. Bush told correspondent Scott Paley that the American invasion had taken "care of a source of instability in Iraq."

"Envision a world in which Saddam Hussein was rushing for a nuclear weapon to compete against Iran," Bush said.

"My decision to remove Saddam Hussein was the correct decision, in my judgment. We didn't find the weapons we thought we would find or the weapons everybody thought he had. But he was a significant source of instability."

In interviews across Baghdad recently, few Iraqis agreed.

Instead, they displayed a collective fatigue, even as another plan to bring about security got underway.

They're tired of waiting for better days when each morning brings new terrorism.

Trapped in their homes, afraid that death will knock, they're worn down, they said.

Law and order -- even under a bloody dictator who killed thousands and tortured many others -- was better than this, many said. Even those who are glad to see Saddam dead expressed a longing for more orderly times.

Layla Mohammed, a Sunni Muslim mother of three, remembered that heady day four years ago when a noose tightened around the neck of Saddam's statue.

"I felt that I was at the highest point of a roller-coaster, just about to plunge into what I hoped would be an exhilarating experience," Mohammed said. "I thought, 'Oh, my God, it's happening. I live to see my sons set free.' "

A pharmacist, she said she'd voted in all three elections that Iraq has had since Saddam was toppled: first for an interim government, then for a new constitution, then for a permanent government. She remembers dipping her finger in purple ink -- to indicate that she'd voted -- with her two sons and her daughter. Together they held up their fingers and took a family photo to commemorate their future democracy.

"At that moment I felt that I was, at last, a sated human being. I had an opinion and it carried weight! I shall treasure that moment all my life," she said. "If only I could have that moment back; its joy was untainted.

"Now I know better."

The life of freedom and liberty she was promised never came. Her sons are trying to flee the country. She can't afford to keep her house warm, and no longer goes to her pharmacy in the neighbourhood of Hurriyah, a once mixed-sect community that was emptied of most Sunnis in December.

"I have been conned," Mohammed said.

When Saddam was executed she told herself, "There goes the one man who could stop this bloodbath. I thought we would have to pay oil for freedom and democracy, but not our life's blood. It's too much."

She put her hand to her head. "It's too much."

* * *

Ahmed al Yasseri, a Shiite, also remembers his excitement at the fall of Saddam. He excitedly set up a once-forbidden satellite dish. For the first time he watched Arabic news channels and foreign stations. He bought a cellphone and subscribed to an Internet service.

Then his brother, a former officer in Saddam's army, was shot as he returned from his electronics shop in 2004. Yasseri's two nephews ran outside to see their father's body riddled with bullets. Yasseri fled his neighbourhood looking for somewhere safer.

Three months later his uncle was killed, caught in a crossfire as he waited in a long line to buy gasoline. Yasseri moved again.

"In a short time you lose your dear ones, and for what?" he asked with despair. "Believe me, for nothing."

Now his current neighbourhood, Mansour, once an upscale shopping district in central Baghdad, has grown dangerous as well. The crowded Shorja market, where he works, is a tempting target for bombs: A triple car bomb there killed at least 67 people a few weeks ago. He travels nowhere but the path between home and work. Every moment he worries that he'll die in the kind of bombing that fills the morgue with body parts.

"We envy the people who die in one piece now," he said.

* * *

Saddam was caught nearly nine months after the invasion, hidden in an underground hole with a pistol. Bilal Ali, 40, a Shiite, remembers that night. He pulled out an AK-47 rifle that he'd received as a gift and fired into the air in celebration -- a burst of pop-pop-pops -- then handed the weapon to his mother, then to his seven-year-old son.

"I shot five full magazines," he said. Each held 30 bullets. "Thank God, who blessed even the hearts of the martyrs in their grave, for this gift."

But it didn't bring the peace that Bilal Ali, a shopkeeper in the Shiite area of Karada, had imagined. Car bombs became prevalent in Shiite areas. Shiites were afraid to pray in their mosques, and Iraqis were afraid to shop in outdoor markets, targets of the Sunni insurgency.

Shiite militias struck back. Men, mostly Sunnis, turned up in the morgue, shot in the head, hands tied behind their back, drill holes in their bodies. The perpetrators eventually were linked to the Ministry of Interior, which oversees the police.

Electricity grew scarcer, at first available for eight hours, then six, then as few as three hours a day. Salaries went up, but so did the cost of living. A tank of cooking gas soared to $60 on the black market. A lower price cost a day's wait in line. The use of a generator cost $100 a month. At $300 a month, wages hardly kept pace.

Still, Bilal Ali is happy that Saddam was hanged.

"I had hope at that time that life would be much better after his regime's collapse," he said. "But I'm very happy with his end even if the security situation is bad."

* * *

EVERY morning as Mona Ali, a single Shiite mother, prepares sandwiches and breakfast for her three children she wonders whether they won't return to her. She leaves her four-year-old son at home and tightly grips the hands of her two young daughters. On the daily walk to school, bullets sometimes have whizzed above their heads in the Shiite Amil neighbourhood in west Baghdad.

"There is fear in my heart every day that my kids will go and not come back to me," she said.

Daily she walks to the neighbourhood marketplace. On one trip, a car bomb ripped through the vegetable stands as she approached. The blood, the dead, the injured lay in front of her and she thought, it could have been me. She had a nightmare about her children as orphans.

"I remembered the fear I had for my children and I realized I might not return safely to them," she said.

"Baghdad is dirty. When it gets dark everybody hides in their houses just like rats," she said.

Over and over again she repeated, "Baghdad is dirty."

She remembers the bombing of the gold-domed Shiite shrine in Samarra more than a year ago. She knew the attack was different from all the others.

"I felt bitterness in my heart that day," she said. "I knew that things would not rest; I knew that we shall have torment for a long time, and it was true."

Shiite revenge killings soared. Neighbours soon couldn't live with one another. Sunnis feared Shiite militias and their dreaded checkpoints; Shiites feared the Sunni insurgency and its bloody bombings. People fled, and families were torn apart.

Many, like Ali, feel numb to the pain, cheated out of the lives they expected.

On the morning Saddam was hanged, Ali said, she wept. Not for the dictator, but for the death of her hope and the loss of confidence in a government that she thinks is worse than the one that came before it.

"I want safety," she said. "Saddam's time was a safe time for us."

* * *

Abbas Chaychan never returned to Iraq after the war. He remains an exile, part of an Iraqi diaspora that grows daily. As many as two million Iraqis have fled their homeland since the war began, according to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. Up to 1.7 million Iraqis have been displaced internally.

It's the largest refugee movement in the Middle East since the displacement of the Palestinians in 1948, the UN reports. About eight per cent of Iraq's population before the war has left; up to 50,000 more Iraqis are displaced each month.

Bodies are stacked at the morgue, mothers weep and children are maimed.

For four years Iraqis have waited for better days, and they weep for the time lost: no liberty, no freedom, just death.

Chaychan's most recent poem doesn't lament Saddam's death as much as it pines for the era when he lived.

"I cried & I didn't cry for you," he wrote. "I cried for the time that put you in a tomb."

-- McClatchy Newspapers

Special correspondents Laith Hammoudi, Zaineb Obeid and Sahar Issa contributed to this report.

Bloodshed by the numbers

How many have died since the March 20, 2003

invasion?

COALITION MILITARY DEATHS

* U.S.: 3,188

* U.K.: 134

* Other coalition countries: 124

* Total: 3,446

(Through March 7, 2007. Source: Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, which monitors news releases from coalition departments of defence)

IRAQI CIVILIAN DEATHS

58,022 to 63,800

(Through March 7, 2007. Source: Iraqi Body Count, British-based anti-war group which monitors news reports.)

'EXCESS DEATHS'

655,000

(As of Oct. 11, 2006. Source is polling done by Iraqi doctors, supervised by a team of epidemiologists from Johns Hopkins University. The study compared death rates under the pre-invasion Saddam regime with current rates, and concludes that 655,000 people may have died who would still be living had the coalition not invaded.)

---

© 2007 Winnipeg Free Press. All Rights Reserved.

Gonzales starts to lose it

After Tough Week, Gonzales Says He Remains Focused

By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 11, 2007; A09

Excerpt

Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales met privately with top members of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday to offer an olive branch, but he did not seem too happy about it.

Gonzales had agreed to let Congress limit his powers and interview Justice Department officials as part of an escalating battle over the firings of eight U.S. attorneys. He knew that another scandal on FBI abuses was about to break and that some GOP lawmakers were hinting that he was in over his head.

"What else do you want us to do?" the normally taciturn Gonzales asked in exasperation, according to several officials with knowledge of the meeting.

A response to Time magazine's "Why they hate each other"

Iraq

Sunday, March 11, 2007

"Sunnis vs. Shi'ites, Why they Hate each other. What's really driving the civil war that's tearing the Middle East apart."

So proclaims the cover of the March 5th, 2007, issue of Time magazine, U.S and Pacific editions. Presumably, they know better than to put it on the cover of the European edition.

It reminds me of the "Iraq at war with itself" cover of The Economist, May 2006, which featured the face of a bawling Iraqi man. I commented on it here.

Then it was the face of grief. Now it's the face of hate.

In both cases, Iraqis are portrayed as unfortunately emotional before the typical reader of Time, whose "person of 2006", let us recall, was You, the face of which is rationality itself, a computer.

Note the shades of "Why do they hate us?" which followed the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.

Beyond this (staged and unconvincing) image of these two hate-ful Iraqis, we find the now familiar American explanation of these 'hateful warring sects', in Behind the Sunni-Shi'ite Divide.

The lead-in from the contents page gives the gist:

The war between the two Islamic sects has left the U.S.'s hopes of building a stable Iraq in ruins. A look at the roots of the struggle —and whether anything can stop it.

This must be such a comfort to American readers. The guerrilla war against their soldiers, which is intensifying even during the present security crackdown, is not mentioned in this Time article.

Thus, in the space of a year the "narrative" has been transformed from the Iraq which America has ruined to the ruins of the "U.S.'s hopes". So it's Americans we should empathize with. If it wasn't for these over-emotional Iraqis, they'd have rebuilt the country, packed up and gone home by now.

No wonder they didn't run this cover in the European edition. They think little enough of America as it is.

Rather slap a declaration on its cover, and then presuming to clear up any lingering misunderstanding in the actual news story, Time would do better to form the words into a question: Why do they hate each other?

It's a good question, because until recently, whether Iraqis were Sunni or Shi'ite was not the defining feature of their identity.

To be sure, the common view that Sunnis, though a minority, controlled Iraq and discriminated against Shi'ites, who deeply resented their treatment, is amply supported by the historical record.

But it wasn't the doing of Saddam Hussein. It goes back to the days of the Ottoman empire (1534-1918), when Sunni Arabs from around Baghdad were placed in positions of power to ward off the threat of Iran connected Shia clerics.

The British continued this practice during the first half of the last century when they took control of the region. Integration of Sunnis and Shi'ias began as soon as the British left (although their monarch remained) and it continued under the Baathists.

More recently:

The real tension in Iraq in the latter 1980s was between the majority of the population, Sunnis as well as Shias, for whom religious belief and practice were significant values, and the secular Baathists, rather than between Sunnis and Shias. Although the Shias had been underrepresented in government posts in the period of the monarchy, they made substantial progress in the educational, business, and legal fields. Their advancement in other areas, such as the opposition parties, was such that in the years from 1952 to 1963, before the Baath Party came to power, Shias held the majority of party leadership posts. Observers believed that in the late 1980s Shias were represented at all levels of the party roughly in proportion to government estimates of their numbers in the population. For example, of the eight top Iraqi leaders who in early 1988 sat with Husayn on the Revolutionary Command Council--Iraq's highest governing body-- three were Arab Shias (of whom one had served as Minister of Interior), three were Arab Sunnis, one was an Arab Christian, and one a Kurd. On the Regional Command Council--the ruling body of the party--Shias actually predominated. During the war, a number of highly competent Shia officers have been promoted to corps commanders. The general who turned back the initial Iranian invasions of Iraq in 1982 was a Shia. [Helen Chapin Metz. ed. Iraq: A Country Study, 1988]

During the Presidency of Saddam Hussein, integration of Sunnis and Shi'ites continued. Most of his government were Shi'ia. As I recall, the majority of those "most wanted" depicted on playing cards by the U.S. Department of Defense, are Shi-ites, not Sunnis.

They married each other and lived together as Muslims and Iraqis. A little over a year ago they were fighting together side-by-side in the resistance to the occupation.[Link]

So well might we ask, Why all the sectarian killing now?

Most basically, if someone tries to kill you and yours, the emotions of anger and hate are a normal response. When there is no State justice system and given Iraqis tribal sense of honour, that those who are attacked will retaliate should surprise no one—least of all those inciting this civil war.

There is now a rat's nest of attacks and retaliation, causes and effects. But let's start with the event which seems to have transformed a united Iraqi resistance to the occupation into a civil war, the bombing of the al-Askari mosque, a little over a year ago.

My own thoughts on this at the time are in The al-Askari mosque: who were those masked gunmen?

Is it true that the mood on the street following the destruction of the dome was anti-Sunni? Not according to Sami Ramadani, writing in The Guardian: The word on the street was (and is) that this was the work of the U.S. and its allies—U.S. and Israeli flags were burned in protest—not Sunni extremists. The mood was anti-occupation, not sectarian.

So who were those masked gunmen who took around 12 hours to plant the explosives under that dome, in the then U.S. controlled Samarra?

It's a question many Iraqis are asking even now. It underlies Akram Abdulrazzaq's Iraq's Car Bombers—Who are They? Why is it that of the thousands of car bombs, not a single owner of these cars has been identified?

He goes on:

Before Baghdad fell to U.S. troops, the country had a sophisticated car registration system, and the authorities were able to identify the owner of any wrecked vehicle in a matter of minutes.

So why not now?

Don't these cars have registrations and serial numbers? We have yet to hear of the authorities identifying the owner of a single vehicle used in a car bombing or even where it came from.

Iraqis, he argues, are not persuaded by the authorities' "naive excuses".

They need the Americans and the Iraqi authorities they support to tell them where in the world all these car bombs are coming from. How is it that they manage to sneak through so many American and Iraqi checkpoints and road blocks, especially in Baghdad?

With more than 80,000 American troops now in Baghdad, and every modern means of technology available to them, how indeed.

Amin al-Hashmee, in Hiding Iraq’s Death Squads is No Game, asks:

How can one ignore the fact that with all of their capabilities, the occupiers and the government failed to prevent a vehicle carrying hundreds of kilos of explosives from freely crossing the border, traveling the streets and passing through check point after check point? On top of that, the authorities have been unable to identify even a single car bomb or person who prepares them; and they have failed to inhibit their passage through government checkpoints on their way to park amid shops and innocent people.

Wouldn't you think that the "security services" would make a special effort at the February 12 ceremony at the Shorja market to mark the one year anniversary of the bombing of the al-Askari mosque? Two car bombs. At least 80 people killed. [Link]

Where did these cars come from? Who owned them? How is it that the perpetrators of these car bombings are always "unknown"?

A lot of the cars used as car bombs, you may be surprised to learn, come from the United States. So argues Debbie Hamilton of Right Truth. She believes that they are supplied by "Muslim/Arab used car dealers", in support of the "terrorists", but a rather more obvious conclusion is possible.

Consider also Are the 70,000 Pentagon Mercs in Iraq killing Shias, Sunnis? published in Aljazeera, a review of Robert Pelton's book Licensed to Kill: Hired Guns in the War on Terror:

Could some of the Pentagon’s hired Mercenaries be the real perpetrators of the daily bombings and assassinations of Sunnis and Shias in Iraq?

Is the current disaster taking place in the war-torn country part of a wider plot to provoke a U.S./Israeli planned civil war that will dismember Iraq?

Just who is accountable for this privatized war machine?

And while we're on this topic, whatever became of those two British SAS soldiers, disguised as Arabs, caught about to plant a bomb near a religious festival in Basra? John Pilger's account is here. My own is here. See also Steve Watson's Who are the Real Terrorists in Iraq?

Why isn't Time magazine asking questions such as these? Americans (and the British, come to that) have such an exaggerated opinion of themselves that they don't believe "they" could have a hand in inciting this civil war.

If the recent BBC World Service poll, which evaluates the USA alongside Iran, Israel and North Korea, is any guide, the rest of the world appears not to have this problem.

Links
Ali Al-Hamdani, An "Open Letter" to the Iraqi Resistance; Call for "Joint Action"

Fred Halliday, Sunni, Shi'a and the "Trotskyists of Islam" Open Democracy, 9-2-2007

Jessica Long Analyzing the pandemic of global American hatred.

Jan Morris Once the most beloved country in the world, the US is now the most hated.

01:18 PM in Iraq | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's Israel that incites hate

March 11, 2007 12:36 am


BETHLEHEM, Palestine--I am surprised that you find so terrible some of the quotes you record ["A steady diet of hate for kids in Palestine," Feb. 11] from Palestinian textbooks, such as "Palestine will be liberated by its men, its women, its young ones and its elderly." Surely something of this sort was said by Americans fighting for their independence during the Revolutionary War. Their desire to sacrifice for freedom echoes some of our first generals: "[A]ppealing to Heaven for the justice of our cause, we determine to die or be free" (Joseph Warren, American account of the Battle of Lexington, 1775).

I spent three months in Palestine and Israel. I have been a witness to injustice that rarely makes it to mainstream news in the U.S.

I have spent time with families whose houses have been demolished; families who are left with no means of income after their fields have been destroyed; men who have been tortured in prison and who are nevertheless seeking a nonviolent way to resist; children who have been shot while playing; children who have been beaten by soldiers; and children whose siblings are in jail simply for being members of a political party.

The lives of Palestinians are devalued at the expense of Israelis. Palestinian children have little or no access to play areas, because of Israeli building restrictions and continued confiscation of land. While settlements atop hills in Palestine use water for swimming pools, gardens, and open spaces, Palestinians must pay four times as much to Israel for water.

Sewage from these settlements often runs directly onto Palestinian farmland.

Palestinian children in refugee camps face raids, where soldiers come in the middle of the night, break into their houses, and sometimes make an arrest or simply break things and leave.

You state that Palestinians do not learn about the Holocaust. Well, Israelis are not taught in school about the history of their country beyond the Jewish perspective. It is not taught, for example, that in the 1948 war more than 400 Palestinian towns were destroyed, and thousands of Palestinians were expelled or killed.

I have found that Israeli soldiers know little about why they receive orders, and Israeli civilians are ignorant of what happens in the West Bank. Please consider the following typical examples:

The first week I was here, I met a Palestinian family whose 11-year-old son was shot from a watchtower while playing on his porch.

I told an Israeli girl in her 20s about it. Her reply: "That couldn't have happened. It would have been on the news."

Two weeks ago we received a phone call from a family whose sons, 17 and 18 years old, had been beaten and arrested by the Israeli Defense Force in the village of Budrus.

I called the spokesperson for the IDF. I did not get in direct contact with the general. Instead I talked to an office worker. His response: "This doesn't have to do with us. We just talk to the media. But soldiers do not hurt innocent people. I am really sorry."

Last week I asked an Israeli soldier if he knew where the Green Line (the internationally recognized border that gives Palestine 22 percent of its original territory) is--since bulldozers, 12 kilometers away from this border, removed 700-year-old olive trees, the livelihood of 200 people.

His answer: "I don't know where the border is. I am just following orders."

There are actually many schools in Palestine that teach about Israelis and Palestinians living peacefully together. The Hope Flowers School near Bethlehem works to bring Palestinian and Jewish Israelis together to teach about reconciliation.

This school faces a court order--from Israel--that its cafeteria be demolished to make room for a security road. In addition, the school's water well will be taken. This school is even denied the right to repair the road that leads to the school.

Palestinians do not need to learn hate from textbooks. They can learn it when they see what happens to their friends and families, their schools, and their land. They learn it by having dignity and rights taken away.

The Web site Palestinian Media Watch teaches Americans to hate. It turns the parents and teachers of Palestine into caricatures of terrorists whom we can easily blame.

Every parent and teacher I have met here is struggling to meet basic needs--and at the same time is teaching children that education is the key to freedom. But you cannot tie a cat down and ask it to make peace.

It would be much more useful if the Web site were devoted to America's role in unilaterally supporting Israel and how we can reach a solution that is just.

It would also be helpful if Americans came to visit Palestine, to see for themselves.
Caroline Borden, from Catlett, works in Bethlehem, Palestine.

Copyright 2007 The Free Lance-Star Publishing Company.

Editor's note: see new articles at the other blog

And more coming up here.

The other blog.

The Baghdad Talks

Sunday, March 11, 2007

On to Istanbul

Al-Sabah, a newspaper controlled by the Green Zone government, pointed out that the main three-hour session of the Baghdad get-together yesterday was held in the strictest secrecy. Which means that the accounts in AFP, Reuters and AP (and Aswat al-Iraq, for that matter) are thus made up mostly of what the generally talkative Iraqi and American spokesmen had to say afterwards and in their public speeches. In a nutshell, Maliki said the violence that is killing Iraqis is the same violence that killed others in Madrid, London and the World Trade Center, adding this is something that requires a unified international response, sounding like Bush vintage 2003-4. David Satterfield even got to try out his Colin Powell imitation (according to AP), when he "pointed to his briefcase" and said we have proof of Iranian involvement, to which the Iranian representative replied that the US is only trying to cover for its own failures. But the media message was very tightly controlled, and it was the same in Arabic as in English, namely: Everyone has to help restore stability, including helping the Maliki government in its reconciliation program. (Saudi Arabia and the Iraqi groups of the Sunni persuasion appear not to have made public statements at all). And the Americans on the one side, and the Iranians and the Syrians on the other, "interacted", which is seen as a very positive thing.

The group agreed on the idea of creating three working groups, one to deal with security, the other to deal with the refugee problem, and a third to deal with natural resources. The Iraqi foreign minister Zebari, who vouchsafed this information, was unable or unwilling to say who would be on the committees, when they would meet, what their agendas would be, and so on.

There will be a followup meeting of the neibhbors, this time with the G-8 apparently, and the consensus seems to be that Istanbul was the lucky applicant for this, beating out Baghdad, Cairo, and Berlin. Khalilzad noted in his press-remarks that if it is held in Istanbul, then Rice will attend, and apparently this was taken as the decisive thumbs-up. The Istanbul meeting will be in April, apparently.

Interestingly, among the Iraqi-party statements in connection with yesterday's meeting, it was left to the Fadhila party to point out the meaninglessness of the mantra about "only talking about Iraq". There is also the little matter of the role of the United States of America and Britain, Fadhila said in its statement, considering that they have played quite an important role in changing the political equilibrium of Iraq since 2003 (Al -Mada, Sunday, p3).

But on the whole, the distilled reporting ended up creating a picture of teenage dating behaviour. They (US on one side and Iran and Syria on the other) succeeded in "breaking the ice", although Khalilzad noted he and the Iranians were never alone out of earshot of the others. And they agreed to meet again. Al-Hayat noted that it was only the sound of mortar fire outside that reminded the participants that there are other groups that need to be consulted in this.