Yet Another U.S. Cover-Up
from IPS and Dahr Jamail:
by Dahr Jamail and Arkan Hamed
In the wake of the Haditha massacre, reports of another atrocity have surfaced in which U.S. troops killed two women in Samarra, and then attempted to hide evidence of their responsibility.
Among the innumerable such cases people speak of, this one too has now come to light.
According to an earlier account, Nabiha Nisaif Jassim, a 35-year-old mother of two, was killed in firing along with her 57-year-old cousin Saliha Mohammed Hassan on May 30 when they were being transported to Samarra General Hospital for Nabiha to give birth.
What was not reported, according to an Iraqi human rights investigator who spoke with IPS on condition of anonymity, was that both women were shot in the back of the head by U.S. snipers.
“I investigated this incident myself, and both of these women were shot from behind,” said the investigator. “Nabiha’s brains were splattered on her brother who was driving the car, since she was in the back seat.”
The U.S. military said soldiers fired on the car after it entered a “clearly marked prohibited area near an observation post” after failing to stop despite “repeated visual and auditory warnings.” The U.S. military said in a statement that “shots were fired to disable the vehicle.”
The brother of the pregnant woman, Redam Nisaif Jassim, who was driving the car, told IPS that he neither saw nor heard any warnings by the U.S. military. Two men who witnessed the incident from a nearby home also said they saw no signs of any warning.
“These kinds of killings by the Americans happen daily in Iraq,” said Jassim, “They gave no warning to us before killing my cousin and sister. Of course we know they have no respect for the lives of Iraqis.”
The U.S. military claims the incident is being investigated.
The Haditha slaughter in which 24 Iraqis were killed is under investigation for the incident itself, and further for the cover-up, since the initial report given by the Marine Corps stated only that 15 civilian deaths were caused by a roadside bomb and fighting with insurgents.
In this case too, all signs point to a cover-up. “The area where they were killed by the Americans was completely unmarked,” the human rights investigator told IPS. A warning sign at the place was put up after the two women were killed, he said.
Like the Haditha massacre, this incident too should be investigated both for the killing and the cover-up, he said.
According to the investigator, the U.S. troops who killed the two women made no attempt to assist them after the shooting.
The next day Redam Jassim was summoned to a local police station. “The Americans offered me 5,000 dollars, and told me it wasn’t compensation but because of tradition,” Jassim told IPS. The U.S. military pays usually 2,500 dollars compensation for killing an Iraqi. Jassim says he refused the payment.
The U.S. military recently announced in a Defence Department report provided to Congress that it paid out 19 million dollars in compensation to Iraqis last year—half of which paid out by Marines in al-Anbar province west of Baghdad.
The military claimed the amount was paid in 600 separate incidents, but it is common knowledge in Iraq that the usual payout for a non-combat civilian death is 2,500 dollars.
A payment of 19 million dollars compensation at 2,500 dollars a person would suggest such killings in thousands.
Jassim told IPS and the human rights investigator that he was asked by the Americans’ translator to sign a paper written in English. The family and their relatives live in a village called al-Muta’assim, a 40-minute drive from the main hospital in Samarra.. Most people there, like the Jassims, neither speak nor read English.
After he signed the paper, Jassim was offered 2,500 dollars by U.S. soldiers, which he again refused.
“It is clear the Americans tried to cheat him as well as cover up their tracks at the same time,” the investigator told IPS. “Like in Haditha, this incident, along with so many others we cannot keep track of, requires a truly independent investigation, rather than one by the U.S. military.”
Phone calls and emails to the U.S.. military spokesperson in Baghdad have not been returned.
Stop the Beast
from truthout:
By Marjorie Cohn
To date, the Iraq War represents the fullest and most relentless application of the Bush Agenda. The “freer and safer world” envisioned by Bush and his administration is ultimately one of an ever-expanding American empire driven forward by the growing powers of the nation’s largest multinational corporations and unrivaled military.
-Antonia Juhasz, The Bu$h Agenda: Invading the World, One Economy at a Time
In an annual security conference on Saturday, Donald Rumsfeld assured the audience, “We don’t intend to occupy [Iraq] for any period of time. Our troops would like to go home and they will go home.”
Why, then, would the United States be building an enormous embassy in Baghdad and a base so large it eclipses Kosovo’s Camp Bondsteel, which had been the largest foreign US military base built since Vietnam?
The new embassy, which occupies a space two-thirds the area of the national mall in Washington DC, comprises 21 buildings that will house over 8,000 government officials. It has a huge pool, gym, theater, beauty salon, school, and six apartment buildings.
The gargantuan military base, Camp Anaconda, occupies 15 square miles of Iraqi soil near Balad. The base is home to 20,000 soldiers and thousands of “contractors,” or mercenaries. The aircraft runway at Anaconda is the second busiest in the world, behind only Chicago’s O’Hare airport. And, depending on which report you read, between six and fourteen more US military bases are under construction in Iraq. It doesn’t appear we’ll be leaving anytime soon - or anytime, really.
Bush’s trumped-up war on Iraq has claimed nearly 2,500 US military lives and tens of thousands of Iraqi lives. Thousands of US soldiers suffer in military hospitals, most with head injuries, many missing limbs. Thousands more have PTSD. Our economy is in shambles from the war and Bush’s tax-cuts-for-the-rich. And America’s moral standing in the world continues to plummet.
So, with all the construction activity in Iraq, and with an overextended military and an under funded budget, how could the Bush administration possibly consider expanding the fight and attacking Iran? Logic and reason say it couldn’t happen and shouldn’t happen. But this administration has rarely paid much heed to logic and reason.
The plan to attack Iran has long been in the works. Bush gave us a preview in January 2002 when he inaugurated it into his “axis of evil.” His 2006 National Military Strategy says, “We may face no greater challenge from a single country than from Iran.” On Saturday, Donald Rumsfeld called Iran the world’s leading terrorist nation. Does any of this have a familiar ring to it?
To understand why the US may attack Iran, one must consider the underlying motive of US militarism. The recent US strategy is calculated to maintain economic, political and military hegemony over oil-rich areas of the world. A 1992 draft of the Pentagon Defense Planning Guidance on post Cold War Strategy that was leaked to the New York Times said, “Our overall objective is to remain the predominant outside power in [the Middle East and Southwest Asia to] preserve US and Western access to the region’s oil.”
Truthout writer Dahr Jamail, an independent journalist who spent eight months in occupied Iraq, told a gathering at Thomas Jefferson School of Law on Friday that the US has been conducting ongoing special operations inside Iran. He cited unmanned surveillance drones flying over Iran. Jamail predicts Bush will invade Iran before the November election.
Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern agrees with Jamail’s prediction, but thinks it will happen in June or July. “There is already one carrier task force there in the Gulf, two are steaming toward it at the last report I have at least - they will be there in another week or so,” McGovern said on the Alex Jones Show.
Team Bush is following the same game plan used in the run-up to Iraq - hyping a threat that doesn’t exist and going through the motions of diplomacy.
Bush & Co. are not motivated by rationality. They act in the interests of the huge corporations, at the expense of humanity. During the Bush years, oil companies have earned record profits. Dick Cheney’s Halliburton has landed many of the juiciest contracts in Iraq. New Iraqi laws that US ambassador Paul Bremer put in place lock in significant advantages for US corporations in Iraq, including corporate control of Iraq’s oil.
Neoconservative Thomas Friedman, in a March 1999 New York Times article illustrated by an American flag on a fist, accurately summed up US foreign policy:
For globalism to work, America can’t be afraid to act like the almighty superpower that it is ... The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist - McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.
As long as we allow our government to pursue this strategy, Abu Ghraibs and Hadithas will continue to emerge, our soldiers and thousands of people in other countries will continue to die, and our economy will continue toward bankruptcy. It is up to us to stop the beast - now!
When AWOL Is the Only Way Out
from AlterNet:
By Peter Laufer
The following text is an excerpt from Peter Laufer’s new book, “Mission Rejected: U.S. Soldiers Who Say No to Iraq” (Chelsea Green, 2006).
“We was going along the Euphrates River,” says Joshua Key, a 27-year-old former U.S. soldier from Oklahoma, detailing a recurring nightmare—a scene he stumbled on shortly after the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003. “It’s a road right in the city of Ramadi. We turned a real sharp right and all I seen was decapitated bodies. The heads laying over here and the bodies over here and U.S. troops in between them. I’m thinking, ‘Oh my God, what in the hell happened here? What’s caused this? Why in the hell did this happen?’ We get out and somebody was screaming, ‘We fucking lost it here!’ I’m thinking, ‘Oh, yes, somebody definitely lost it here.’”
Joshua says he was ordered to look around for evidence of a firefight, for something to rationalize the beheaded Iraqis. “I look around just for a few seconds and I don’t see anything.” But then he noticed the sight that now triggers his nightmares. “I see two soldiers kicking the heads around like a soccer ball. I just shut my mouth, walked back, got inside the tank, shut the door, and it was like, I can’t be no part of this. This is crazy. I came here to fight and be prepared for war but this is outrageous. Why did it happen? That’s just my question: Why did that happen?”
He’s convinced there was no firefight that led to the beheading orgy—there were no spent shells to indicate a battle. “A lot of my friends stayed on the ground, looking to see if there was any shells. There was never no shells, except for what we shot. I’m thinking, Okay, so they just did that because they wanted to do it. They got trigger happy and they did it. That’s what made me mad in Iraq. You can take human lives at a fast rate and all you have to say is, say, ‘Oh, I thought they threw a grenade. I thought I seen this, I thought I seen that.’ You could mow down 20 people each time and nobody’s going to ask you, ‘Are you sure?’ They’re going to give you a high five and tell you that you was doing a good job.”
He still cannot get the scene out of his head. “You just see heads everywhere,” he says. “You wake up, you’ll just be sitting there, like you’re in a foxhole. I can still see Iraq just as clearly as it was the day I was there. You’ll just be on the side of a little river running through the city, trash piled up, filled with dead. Heads and stuff like that. I don’t sleep that much, you might say. I don’t sleep that much.”
His wife, Brandi, nods in agreement and says he cries in his sleep.
We’re sitting in the waning summer light on the back porch of the Toronto house where Joshua and his wife and their four little children have been living in exile since Joshua deserted to Canada. They’ve settled in a rent-free basement apartment, courtesy of a landlord sympathetic to their plight. Joshua smokes cigarettes and drinks coffee while we talk. He’s wearing a T-shirt promoting a 2002 peace rally in Raleigh, North Carolina. There’s a scraggly beard on his still-boyish face; his eyes look weary.
Sleep deprivation while on duty, first in Kuwait and then in Iraq, was routine, Joshua says, and he thinks exhaustion was generated intentionally by his commanders. “You’ll do whatever the hell they say just to get that sleep. That’s the way they controlled us. You ain’t had no sleep and you got shitty food all the time. I got to call my wife once every month, maybe once every two weeks if I was lucky. Mail, shitty, if it even came.” Food and water were inadequate, he says.
“When we first got to Kuwait we were rationed to two bottles of water a day and one MRE [meals ready to eat]. In the middle of the desert, you’re supposed to have six bottles of water a day and three MREs. They tell us they don’t have it. I’m thinking ‘How in the hell can the most powerfullest nation, the most powerfullest military in the world, be in the middle of a damn desert and they don’t even have no food to feed us?’”
Joshua rejects the U.S. government line that the Iraqis fighting the occupation are terrorists. “I’m thinking: What the hell? I mean, that’s not a terrorist. That’s the man’s home we killed. That’s his son, that’s the father, that’s the mother, that’s the sister. Houses are destroyed. Husbands are detained and wives don’t even know where they’re at. I mean, them are pissed-off people, and they have a reason to be pissed off. I would never wish this upon myself or my family, so why would I do it upon them?”
Pulling security duty in the Iraqi streets, Joshua found himself talking to the locals. He was surprised by how many spoke English, and he was frustrated by the military regulations that forbade his accepting dinner invitations to join Iraqis for social evenings in their homes. “I’m not your perfect killing machine,” he admits. “That’s where I broke the rules. I broke the rules by having a conscience.”
And the conscience developed further the more time he spent in Iraq. “I was trained to be a total killer. I was trained in booby-traps, explosives, landmines, and how to counterresolve everything.” He pauses. “Hell, if you want to get technical about it, I was made to be an American terrorist. I was trained in everything a terrorist is trained to do.” In case I might have missed his point, he says it again. “I mean terrorist.”
Deserting to Canada seemed the only viable alternative, Joshua says. He did it, he insists, because he was lied to “by my president.” Iraq—it was obvious to him—was no threat to the United States. He says he followed his orders while he was in Iraq, and so no one can call him a coward for deserting. “I was not a piece of shit. I always did everything I was told and I did it to the highest standards. They can never say, ‘Oh, he was a piece of shit soldier.’ No bullshit.”
Joshua doesn’t mind telling his war stories again and again. He readily agrees to talk about the horrors he experienced in Iraq, his life AWOL and underground in the States, and his new life as a deserter in Canada.
Telling the stories helps him deal with his post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), he says, and he apologizes in advance if his narrative is not linear or if he has trouble expressing himself. In fact, his scattered approach to his timeline and his machine gun-like delivery set the scene for his troubled memories—there is nothing smooth or simple or easy to understand here.
Teaching Remedial Decency
Maureen Dowd writes (via jurassicpork):
Before the war, America railed against the Iraqi leader for slaughtering innocent Iraqis. Now the Iraqi leader is railing against America for slaughtering innocent Iraqis.
Iraq is blustering about sending away American troops to make life better for Iraqis, after American troops were sent in to make life better for Iraqis.
With fury swirling over the Haditha massacre and the shooting on Wednesday of two women, one of whom might have been pregnant and on the way to a hospital, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki laced into the American military, accusing it of regular attacks on civilians that were “completely unacceptable” and pledging his own inquiry on Haditha.
“They crush them with their vehicles and kill them just on suspicion,” he said, adding that some in the military “do not respect the Iraqi people,” and that assaults on unarmed civilians will help determine how long American troops are welcome in Iraq.
Bold talk from a tenuous government dependent on U.S. forces to prop it up during a sectarian bloodfest.
It’s a bitter irony. And not even a terribly illuminating irony, since Saddam truly had a regime of butchery and the American military is not in the business of atrocity, even if an undeniable atrocity was committed and even if the war has become something of an atrocity.
“It’s one of those things where we have become the enemy,” John Murtha said ruefully on CNN.
American troops are under spectacular emotional pressure. They go out every day, not knowing Arabic, not understanding the culture, not knowing who the insurgents are, not knowing when they can go home or which of their buddies will be blown up before their eyes by an unseen enemy.
The troops were not trained for a counterinsurgency, because Bush hawks ignored the intelligence reports that predicted an insurgency and civil war. These kids were turned into sitting ducks because the neocon con to sell the war needed a gauzy prediction of Iraqi gratitude and a quick exit.
It is admirable that the Marine commanders want to morally sensitize the troops while they are in such a hostile environment, but it also seems a bit absurd, sending them to summer school in “core values.”
There’s no way to teach someone not to shoot an unarmed woman or child. If somebody doesn’t already know why they shouldn’t murder a baby, it’s not clear that a refresher course will help.
The problem with brushing up on core values is that if you don’t know them by a certain point you can’t learn them. You can’t teach remedial decency, any more than you can teach remedial ethics to White House officials who vindictively leak information about critics of the war after vowing not to leak.
As Norman Schwarzkopf said, in a quote that is part of the military’s slide show on core warrior values: “The truth of the matter is that you always know the right thing to do. The hard part is doing it.”
From Reverend Dimmesdale to Bill Bennett to President Bush, people who righteously preach values and aspire to be moral exemplars often get bitten in the end.
The world is now looking askance at American values, even though W. ran on a platform of restoring values to the Oval Office and was propelled to victory by “values voters.”
Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld engineered the invasion of Iraq in part to revive what they saw as lost American values. They wanted to stiffen the squishiness about using force left over from Vietnam and the moral ambivalence left over from the do-what-feels-good 60’s.
In their worry about a spineless America, they made America all spine — overly vertebrate. They started thinking with their spine.
They wanted everyone to be afraid of us, and now nobody’s afraid. Certainly not the nutty president of Iran, whom the administration is forced to kowtow to, now that the American military is not a fearsome force in potentia, but a depleted, demoralized and disparaged force trapped in Iraq trying to police a civil war.
The invasion that was supposed to help terrorism has made it worse. The invasion that was supposed to make America more feared and beloved has made us more hated. The invasion that was supposed to banish post-Vietnam syndrome has revived it.
The virtuecrats of the right thought they would demonstrate American virtue to the world as they imposed American democracy. But now, with murder charges expected against some marines, and a cover-up investigation under way, the values president is running a war that requires a refresher course on values. A bitter irony.
Uncovering the Rationales for the War on Iraq
Devon M. Largio
Senior Honors Thesis
Department of Political Science
University of Illinois
The Dividing Line of Torture
Jane Hamsher writes an excellent though disturbing (as befits the subject) post on firedoglake.
Yes He Would
from the NYT via truthout:
By Paul Krugman
“But he wouldn’t do that.” That sentiment is what made it possible for President Bush to stampede America into the Iraq war and to fend off hard questions about the reasons for that war until after the 2004 election. Many people just didn’t want to believe that an American president would deliberately mislead the nation on matters of war and peace.
Now people with contacts in the administration and the military warn that Mr. Bush may be planning another war. The most alarming of the warnings come from Seymour Hersh, the veteran investigative journalist who broke the Abu Ghraib scandal. Writing in The New Yorker, Mr. Hersh suggests that administration officials believe that a bombing campaign could lead to desirable regime change in Iran - and that they refuse to rule out the use of tactical nuclear weapons.
“But he wouldn’t do that,” say people who think they’re being sensible. Given what we now know about the origins of the Iraq war, however, discounting the possibility that Mr. Bush will start another ill-conceived and unnecessary war isn’t sensible. It’s wishful thinking.
As it happens, rumors of a new war coincide with the emergence of evidence that appears to confirm our worst suspicions about the war we’re already in.
First, it’s clearer than ever that Mr. Bush, who still claims that war with Iraq was a last resort, was actually spoiling for a fight. The New York Times has confirmed the authenticity of a British government memo reporting on a prewar discussion between Mr. Bush and Tony Blair. In that conversation, Mr. Bush told Mr. Blair that he was determined to invade Iraq even if U.N. inspectors came up empty-handed.
Second, it’s becoming increasingly clear that Mr. Bush knew that the case he was presenting for war - a case that depended crucially on visions of mushroom clouds - rested on suspect evidence. For example, in the 2003 State of the Union address Mr. Bush cited Iraq’s purchase of aluminum tubes as clear evidence that Saddam was trying to acquire a nuclear arsenal. Yet Murray Waas of the National Journal reports that Mr. Bush had been warned that many intelligence analysts disagreed with that assessment.
Was the difference between Mr. Bush’s public portrayal of the Iraqi threat and the actual intelligence he saw large enough to validate claims that he deliberately misled the nation into war? Karl Rove apparently thought so. According to Mr. Waas, Mr. Rove “cautioned other White House aides in the summer of 2003 that Bush’s 2004 re-election prospects would be severely damaged” if the contents of an October 2002 “President’s Summary” containing dissents about the significance of the aluminum tubes became public.
Now there are rumors of plans to attack Iran. Most strategic analysts think that a bombing campaign would be a disastrous mistake. But that doesn’t mean it won’t happen: Mr. Bush ignored similar warnings, including those of his own father, about the risks involved in invading Iraq.
As Joseph Cirincione of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace recently pointed out, the administration seems to be following exactly the same script on Iran that it used on Iraq: “The vice president of the United States gives a major speech focused on the threat from an oil-rich nation in the Middle East. The U.S. secretary of state tells Congress that the same nation is our most serious global challenge. The secretary of defense calls that nation the leading supporter of global terrorism. The president blames it for attacks on U.S. troops.”
Why might Mr. Bush want another war? For one thing, Mr. Bush, whose presidency is increasingly defined by the quagmire in Iraq, may believe that he can redeem himself with a new Mission Accomplished moment.
And it’s not just Mr. Bush’s legacy that’s at risk. Current polls suggest that the Democrats could take one or both houses of Congress this November, acquiring the ability to launch investigations backed by subpoena power. This could blow the lid off multiple Bush administration scandals. Political analysts openly suggest that an attack on Iran offers Mr. Bush a way to head off this danger, that an appropriately timed military strike could change the domestic political dynamics.
Does this sound far-fetched? It shouldn’t. Given the combination of recklessness and dishonesty Mr. Bush displayed in launching the Iraq war, why should we assume that he wouldn’t do it again?
Avoiding Defeat on Human Rights
from Mother Jones:
by Jeffrey Laurenti
After the Bush administration’s multiple failures to forge common policy with its allies and developing countries at the United Nations on Iraq, nuclear proliferation, human rights, and UN reform, it has at last made a strategically sound decision: the United States will not run for a seat on the UN’s newly constituted Human Rights Council.
The administration’s decision wisely acknowledges that the president’s personal representative to the UN, conservative firebrand John Bolton, cannot win an election for the United States in the General Assembly—not even in the Western group. Rather than face a humiliating defeat at the hands of Portugal or Greece, the administration will not seek a seat for the United States at all.
While politically realistic, the decision not to run constitutes a damning admission that the administration’s belligerent policies have squandered America ’s global leadership. The one-time leader of the Free World and the planet’s pioneering constitutional democracy cannot muster half the votes in an assembly where democracies now constitute the majority.
Administration policies have blighted America’s traditional reputation as a leader on human rights. A government forfeits that mantle when it countenances torture, on graphic display at Abu Ghraib; secretly renders Muslim-surnamed individuals to torturers among Arab secret police; refuses to permit UN rights monitors to see detainees at Guantanamo who have been imprisoned for years but not accounted for; and refuses to compel states to honor consular obligations to foreign nationals accused of capital crimes.
Terrorist or terrorized?
from the LA Times:
By George Rupp
IN HIS SECOND inaugural address, Bush made a stirring commitment to oppressed people yearning to be free: “When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you.”
For half a century, one of the best expressions of that bond has been the federal Refugee Resettlement Program. This State Department-administered program seeks to offer a safe harbor to those fearing persecution by tyrannical governments. But thousands of people whose lives are at risk for standing up for freedom will this year be denied help because of a Kafkaesque interpretation of who is deemed a terrorist.
The laws governing eligibility for refugee status have long denied it to anyone who commits a terrorist act or who provides “material support” to terrorists. These laws were strengthened after 9/11. The problem was created by recent legislation that expanded the definition of terrorists. There are real-life consequences from such myopic “reform.”
In Colombia, for example, the leftist guerrilla group FARC often kidnaps civilians and demands ransom from their relatives. FARC also requires the payment of a “war tax” from Colombians in the regions it controls, upon threat of serious harm. Nearly 2,000 Colombians who faced such circumstances as paying a ransom or “tax” — and who later fled the country and were determined by the United Nations to be refugees — have been denied U.S. resettlement on the basis of the “material support” provision.
In Liberia, a female head of a household was referred to the U.S. resettlement program by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees as a person particularly vulnerable to attack. Rebels had come to her home, killed her father and beat and gang-raped her. The rebels held her hostage in her own home and forced her to wash their clothes. The woman escaped after several weeks and made her way to a refugee camp. The Department of Homeland Security has decided that because the rebels lived in her house and she washed their clothes, she had provided “material support” to the rebels; the case has been placed on hold.
A Sierra Leonean woman’s house was attacked by rebels in 1992. A young family member was killed with machetes, another minor was subjected to burns and the woman and her daughter were raped. The rebels kept the family captive for days in their own home. Homeland Security has placed the case on hold for “material support” concerns because the family is deemed to have provided housing to the rebels. Under this interpretation, it does not matter whether the support provided was given willingly or under duress.
Unfortunately, the actions of Homeland Security go far beyond barring the affected refugees from entering the U.S. They become permanently tainted by suspicions of terrorism and find themselves shut out by other nations that resettle refugees. And the governments now providing these people with temporary asylum might even force them back to the nations they fled.
U.S. policy toward authoritarian governments has been turned on its head: The victims of terrorism are being denied protection and sanctuary. The secretary of Homeland Security has the authority to determine that the “material support” provision shall not apply to certain individuals or groups. Yet the department has failed to issue guidance, causing mass confusion and holding up decisions on refugee cases. Neither the administration nor Congress seems able to fix the problem for fear of being labeled weak on terrorism…
The Hyperpower Hype and Where It Took Us
from TomDispatch:By Tom Engelhardt
Just last week, a jury began to deliberate on the fate of Zacarias Moussaoui, who may or may not have been the missing 20th hijacker in the September 11th attacks. At the same time, newly released recordings of 911 operators responding to calls from those about to die that day in the two towers were splashed across front pages nationwide. ("All I can tell you to do is sit tight. All right? Because I got almost every fireman in the city coming…")
Over four and a half years later, September 11, 2001 won't go away. And little wonder. It remains the defining moment in our recent lives, the moment that turned us from a country into a "homeland." With Iraq in a state of ever-devolving deconstruction, the President's and Vice President's polling figures in tatters, Karl Rove (Bush's "brain") again threatened with indictment, the Republican Party in disarray, and New Orleans as well as the Mississippi coast still largely unreconstructed ruins, perhaps it's worth revisiting just what exactly was defined in that moment.
A DIY World of Terrorism
The brilliance of the al-Qaeda assault that day lay in its creation of a vision of destruction out of all proportion to the organization's modest strength. At best, al-Qaeda had adherents in the thousands as well as a "headquarters" and training camps located in the backlands of one of the poorest countries on the planet.
Its leaders made the bold decision to launch an attack on the political and the financial capitals of what was then regularly termed the globe's "sole hyperpower." Although this face-off might have seemed the ultimate definition of asymmetric warfare, in terms of theatrical value -- no small thing in our world of 24/7 news and entertainment -- the struggle turned out to be eerily symmetrical. By the look of it (but only the look), the Earth's lone superpower met its match that day. With box cutters, mace, two planes, and the use of Microsoft piloting software to speed their learning curve, a few determined fanatics, ready to kill and die, took aim at the two most iconic (if uninspired) buildings at the financial heart of the American system and managed to top the climax of any disaster film ever shot. What they created, in fact, was a Hollywood-style vision of the apocalypse, enough so that our media promptly dubbed the spot where those two towers crumbled in those vast clouds of dust and smoke, "Ground Zero," a term previously reserved for an atomic explosion.
This was -- let's be blunt -- an extraordinary accomplishment for a tiny band of men with one of the more extreme religious/political ideologies around; and, if the testimony under CIA interrogation of al-Qaeda's Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is to be believed -- summaries were released at the Moussaoui sentencing hearing -- what happened seems to have stunned even him. ("According to the CIA summary, he said he ‘had no idea that the damage of the first attack would be as catastrophic as it was.'")
And yet, so many years later, there have been no follow-up attacks here. This was obviously never the equivalent of breaking through military lines in war. There were no al-Qaeda troops poised to pour through that breach, ransack the rubble, and spread across New York; nor, like the Japanese at Pearl Harbor (to which the 9/11 assault was often compared), did al-Qaeda launch a simultaneous set of strikes elsewhere. Of this sort of activity the group was incapable. Such acts were far beyond its means.
By the look of it, there weren't even sleeper cells in the U.S. ready to launch devastating follow-up attacks. (Given the Bush administration's record from New Orleans to Iraq, we can take it for granted that its officials would have been incapable of stopping any such well-planned attacks.) As far as we can tell, most of the major terrorist assaults launched since then, from Bali to Baghdad, were essentially franchised operations, undertaken by groups who claimed a kinship of inspiration and ideology; and, in a number of devastating cases, including London and Madrid, by small, self-organized groups, brought to a boil by Bush's War in Iraq, who struck on their own as, in essence, al-Qaeda wannabes. What al-Qaeda has really been promoting, because it was never capable of promoting much else, is a DIY world of terrorism.
Dispatch from Iraq: Baghdad by Night
JJ Sutherland of NPR writes:
I get a call the other night. They’ve found four more bodies in western Baghdad. Three of them are in a car. They’re bound, hands and feet. They’re blindfolded. They’ve been shot in the head. Their bodies bear wounds from beatings, electrical burns, and someone has used a drill on their flesh. The fourth is the same, the only difference being that his body was tossed onto a sidewalk. That’s just one phone call. I get a few more. Every night, it seems, dozens of bodies turn up, often killed in the same fashion, both Shi’ite and Sunni.
We spoke with a journalist recently for a piece we’re doing. He works for an Iraqi television station. For the last nine days he’s been sleeping at the office. He’s been threatened with death because of his work, and he doesn’t want to bring the danger home to his parents and six sisters. He told the Ministry of the Interior about the threat, they told him to get a gun.
“Death is the simplest thing now in Iraq. A bullet in the head is nothing, especially against journalists. So crying and sadness are the norm,” he said to us. Later, he added, “I have been in love for the last 4 years but my conditions don’t allow me to marry, not because of money but because of how things are going on. There is no stability and you never know when a civil war will breakout.”
People here are more terrified than I have ever seen them.
Neighborhoods are self-segregating as one either Shi’ites or Sunnis flee out of fear for their lives. Neighbors are getting together and forming their own militias, vowing to fight the death squads that slaughter people here nightly.
A friend of mine tells me today he’s bought weapons for his family, and is teaching his wife, who hates to even hold a knife, to fire a gun.
He has a daughter around two. In his neighborhood he saw a few families pack up and leave. Why? They are poor Shi’ites, usually from the south, or Sadr city, who moved to his neighborhood to work as housekeepers. The day before yesterday Sunni insugents burst into one family’s home. They were a young couple, maybe 24 or 25. The husband was killed, and then they set his body on fire. They didn’t bother killing the wife and four children first. They burned them alive.
My friend tells me this story and says, “I can understand someone who gets killed. I can understand beheadings. I can’t understand burning someone alive.” I find myself stunned. Both by his story and by the fact that killings and beheadings are understandable. Burning people alive apparently goes violates some behavioral norm that says chopping people’s heads off is okay.
It is becoming very clear to me that war can shatter a society and what it becomes as it puts itself back together can become a warped malefic grotesquerie. A social organism that eagerly eats itself alive.
At a press conference the other day an American General said he thinks that Iraqis feel more secure. I think that most of the Iraqis I’ve spoken with since I’ve been here might have a slightly different perspective.
America’s war on the web
from the Sunday Herald via Think Progress:
IMAGINE a world where wars are fought over the internet; where TV broadcasts and newspaper reports are designed by the military to confuse the population; and where a foreign armed power can shut down your computer, phone, radio or TV at will.
In 2006, we are just about to enter such a world. This is the age of information warfare, and details of how this new military doctrine will affect everyone on the planet are contained in a report, entitled The Information Operations Roadmap, commissioned and approved by US secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld and seen by the Sunday Herald.
The Pentagon has already signed off $383 million to force through the document’s recommendations by 2009. Military and intelligence sources in the US talk of “a revolution in the concept of warfare”. The report orders three new developments in America’s approach to warfare:
- First, the Pentagon says it will wage war against the internet in order to dominate the realm of communications, prevent digital attacks on the US and its allies, and to have the upper hand when launching cyber-attacks against enemies.
- Second, psychological military operations, known as psyops, will be at the heart of future military action. Psyops involve using any media – from newspapers, books and posters to the internet, music, Blackberrys and personal digital assistants (PDAs) – to put out black propaganda to assist government and military strategy. Psyops involve the dissemination of lies and fake stories and releasing information to wrong-foot the enemy.
- Third, the US wants to take control of the Earth’s electromagnetic spectrum, allowing US war planners to dominate mobile phones, PDAs, the web, radio, TV and other forms of modern communication. That could see entire countries denied access to telecommunications at the flick of a switch by America.
Freedom of speech advocates are horrified at this new doctrine, but military planners and members of the intelligence community embrace the idea as a necessary development in modern combat.
How George W. Bush Unified Latin America
“Fascist Bush!” they chanted, “you are the terrorist!”
from TomDispatch via Mother Jones:
by Nick Miroff
Has Latin America ever had such a unifying figure?
At political rallies, his visage is held aloft as a beacon to regional independence and self-determination. He’s helped forge new trade partnerships to spur economic growth and alleviate poverty. And his leadership has fanned a gale-force electoral trend that’s sweeping the hemisphere to topple one pro-Washington government after the next.
Who is this grand inductor of Latin American leftism? Venezuelan fireball Hugo Chavez? Blue-collar Brazilian Lula Ignacio da Silva? Bolivia’s coca-farmer-cum-president, Evo Morales?
¡Epa! It’s George W. Bush, the accidental revolutionary.
In the past five years, the swaggering Texan has inspired a leftward surge that is uniting Latin America and threatening to knock Che Guevara right off all those natty t-shirts.
When Che’s ill-fated insurgency ended in the jungles of Bolivia with his death in 1967, his vision of a single, unified, socialist continent remained utterly unfulfilled. U.S.-backed right-wing military dictators would rule much of Latin America over the ensuing two decades, and many of Che’s followers would be tortured and killed in efforts to overthrow them.
As democracy returned to the region at the end of the Cold War, most Latin American governments rushed to embrace the “Washington consensus”—market-oriented liberalization policies that cut social spending and privatized national industries in order to pay down national debts. But the formula, pushed on the region by successive American presidents, largely failed to deliver the goods and left entire governments bankrupt and beholden to foreign lenders. For Latin America’s angry, marginalized, impoverished masses, already-threadbare social safety nets only unraveled further.
“The macroeconomic proposals of the Washington consensus have not been working,” says Guillermo Delgado, professor of Latin American Studies at UC Santa Cruz. “That model was supposed to create prosperity and, after so many years, such prosperity has not been seen and class polarization has grown deeper.”
Sensing an opportunity, new social and political movements in the region began marshalling their forces. Then George W. Bush came along, combining Yankee hubris with a Che-worthy radicalizing touch.
Bush has since presided over one of the most significant political re-alignments in the history of the Western Hemisphere. By this summer, every major Latin American nation but Colombia is likely to be run by elected leaders with stronger backgrounds in Marx than free markets. If Cold War-era “domino theory” has been a bust in the Middle East, it’s working with textbook precision in Latin America.
Soldier Quits Over Illegal Tactics in Iraq
from The Telegraph UK via truthout:
By Sean Rayment
An SAS soldier has refused to fight in Iraq and has left the Army over the “illegal” tactics of United States troops and the policies of coalition forces.
After three months in Baghdad, Ben Griffin told his commander that he was no longer prepared to fight alongside American forces.
He said he had witnessed “dozens of illegal acts” by US troops, claiming they viewed all Iraqis as “untermenschen” - the Nazi term for races regarded as sub-human.
The decision marks the first time an SAS soldier has refused to go into combat and quit the Army on moral grounds.
It immediately brought to an end Mr Griffin’s exemplary, eight-year career in which he also served with the Parachute Regiment, taking part in operations in Northern Ireland, Macedonia and Afghanistan.
But it will also embarrass the Government and have a potentially profound impact on cases of other soldiers who have refused to fight.
On Wednesday, the pre-trial hearing will begin into the court martial of Flt Lt Malcolm Kendall-Smith, a Royal Air Force doctor who has refused to return to Iraq for a third tour of duty on the grounds that the war is illegal. Mr Griffin’s allegations came as the Foreign Office minister Kim Howells, visiting Basra yesterday, admitted that Iraq was now “a mess”.
Mr Griffin, 28, who spent two years with the SAS, said the American military’s “gung-ho and trigger happy mentality” and tactics had completely undermined any chance of winning the hearts and minds of the Iraqi population. He added that many innocent civilians were arrested in night-time raids and interrogated by American soldiers, imprisoned in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, or handed over to the Iraqi authorities and “most probably” tortured.
Mr Griffin eventually told SAS commanders at Hereford that he could not take part in a war which he regarded as “illegal”.
He added that he now believed that the Prime Minister and the Government had repeatedly “lied” over the war’s conduct.
“I did not join the British Army to conduct American foreign policy,” he said. He expected to be labelled a coward and to face a court martial and imprisonment after making what “the most difficult decision of my life” last March.
Instead, he was discharged with a testimonial describing him as a “balanced, honest, loyal and determined individual who possesses the strength of character to have the courage of his convictions”.
Last night Patrick Mercer, the shadow minister for homeland security, said: “Trooper Griffin is a highly experienced soldier. This makes his decision particularly disturbing and his views and opinions must be listened to by the Government.”
The MoD declined to comment.
Bush in India: Just Not Welcome
from The Nation:
by ARUNDHATI ROY
On his triumphalist tour of India and Pakistan, where he hopes to wave imperiously at people he considers potential subjects, President Bush has an itinerary that’s getting curiouser and curiouser.
For Bush’s March 2 pit stop in New Delhi, the Indian government tried very hard to have him address our parliament. A not inconsequential number of MPs threatened to heckle him, so Plan One was hastily shelved. Plan Two was to have Bush address the masses from the ramparts of the magnificent Red Fort, where the Indian prime minister traditionally delivers his Independence Day address. But the Red Fort, surrounded as it is by the predominantly Muslim population of Old Delhi, was considered a security nightmare. So now we’re into Plan Three: President George Bush speaks from Purana Qila, the Old Fort.
Ironic, isn’t it, that the only safe public space for a man who has recently been so enthusiastic about India’s modernity should be a crumbling medieval fort?
Since the Purana Qila also houses the Delhi zoo, George Bush’s audience will be a few hundred caged animals and an approved list of caged human beings, who in India go under the category of “eminent persons.” They’re mostly rich folk who live in our poor country like captive animals, incarcerated by their own wealth, locked and barred in their gilded cages, protecting themselves from the threat of the vulgar and unruly multitudes whom they have systematically dispossessed over the centuries.
So what’s going to happen to George W. Bush? Will the gorillas cheer him on? Will the gibbons curl their lips? Will the brow-antlered deer sneer? Will the chimps make rude noises? Will the owls hoot? Will the lions yawn and the giraffes bat their beautiful eyelashes? Will the crocs recognize a kindred soul? Will the quails give thanks that Bush isn’t traveling with Dick Cheney, his hunting partner with the notoriously bad aim? Will the CEOs agree?
Oh, and on March 2, Bush will be taken to visit Gandhi’s memorial in Rajghat. He’s by no means the only war criminal who has been invited by the Indian government to lay flowers at Rajghat. (Only recently we had the Burmese dictator General Than Shwe, no shrinking violet himself.) But when Bush places flowers on that famous slab of highly polished stone, millions of Indians will wince. It will be as though he has poured a pint of blood on the memory of Gandhi.
We really would prefer that he didn’t.
It is not in our power to stop Bush’s visit. It is in our power to protest it, and we will. The government, the police and the corporate press will do everything they can to minimize the extent of our outrage. Nothing the happy newspapers say can change the fact that all over India, from the biggest cities to the smallest villages, in public places and private homes, George W. Bush, the President of the United States of America, world nightmare incarnate, is just not welcome.