seven point exit strategy for iraq
Howard Roberts
A Seven-point plan for an Exit Strategy in Iraq
1) A timetable for the complete withdrawal of American and British forces must be announced.
I envision the following procedure, but suitable fine-tuning can be applied by all the people involved.
A) A ceasefire should be offered by the Occupying side to representatives of both the Sunni insurgency and the Shiite community. These representatives would be guaranteed safe passage, to any meetings. The individual insurgency groups would designate who would attend.
At this meeting a written document declaring a one-month ceasefire, witnessed by a United Nations authority, will be fashioned and eventually signed. This document will be released in full, to all Iraqi newspapers, the foreign press, and the Internet.
B) US and British command will make public its withdrawal, within sixth-months of 80 % of their troops.
C) Every month, a team of United Nations observers will verify the effectiveness of the ceasefire.
All incidences on both sides will be reported.
D) Combined representative armed forces of both the Occupying nations and the insurgency organizations that agreed to the cease fire will protect the Iraqi people from actions by terrorist cells.
E) Combined representative armed forces from both the Occupying nations and the insurgency organizations will begin creating a new military and police force. Those who served, with out extenuating circumstances, in the previous Iraqi military or police, will be given the first option to serve.
F) After the second month of the ceasefire, and thereafter, in increments of 10-20% ,a total of 80% will be withdrawn, to enclaves in Qatar and Bahrain. The governments of these countries will work out a temporary land-lease housing arrangement for these troops. During the time the troops will be in these countries they will not stand down, and can be re-activated in the theater, if both the chain of the command still in Iraq, the newly formed Iraqi military, the leaders of the insurgency, and two international ombudsman (one from the Arab League, One from the United Nations), as a majority, deem it necessary.
G) One-half of those troops in enclaves will leave three-months after they arrive, for the United States or other locations, not including Iraq.
H) The other half of the troops in enclaves will leave after six-months.
I) The remaining 20 % of the Occupying troops will, during this six month interval, be used as peace-keepers, and will work with all the designated organizations, to aid in reconstruction and nation-building.
J) After four months they will be moved to enclaves in the above mentioned countries.
They will remain, still active, for two month, until their return to the States, Britain and the other involved nations.
2) At the beginning of this period the United States will file a letter with the Secretary General of the Security Council of the United Nations, making null and void all written and proscribed orders by the CPA, under R. Paul Bremer. This will be announced and duly noted.
3) At the beginning of this period all contracts signed by foreign countries will be considered in abeyance until a system of fair bidding, by both Iraqi and foreign countries, will be implemented ,by an interim Productivity and Investment Board, chosen from pertinent sectors of the Iraqi economy.
Local representatives of the 18 provinces of Iraq will put this board together, in local elections.
4) At the beginning of this period, the United Nations will declare that Iraq is a sovereign state again, and will be forming a Union of 18 autonomous regions. Each region will, with the help of international experts, and local bureaucrats, do a census as a first step toward the creation of a municipal government for all 18 provinces. After the census, a voting roll will be completed. Any group that gets a list of 15% of the names on this census will be able to nominate a slate of representatives. When all the parties have chosen their slates, a period of one-month will be allowed for campaigning.
Then in a popular election the group with the most votes will represent that province.
When the voters choose a slate, they will also be asked to choose five individual members of any of the slates.
The individuals who have the five highest vote counts will represent a National government.
This whole process, in every province, will be watched by international observers as well as the local bureaucrats.
During this process of local elections, a central governing board, made up of United Nations, election governing experts, insurgency organizations, US and British peacekeepers, and Arab league representatives, will assume the temporary duties of administering Baghdad, and the central duties of governing.
When the ninety representatives are elected they will assume the legislative duties of Iraq for two years.
Within three months the parties that have at least 15% of the representatives will nominate candidates for President and Prime Minister.
A national wide election for these offices will be held within three months from their nomination.
The President and the Vice President and the Prime Minister will choose their cabinet, after the election.
5) All debts accrued by Iraq will be rescheduled to begin payment, on the principal after one year, and on the interest after two years. If Iraq is able to handle another loan during this period she should be given a grace period of two years, from the taking of the loan, to comply with any structural adjustments.
6) The United States and the United Kingdom shall pay Iraq reparations for its invasion in the total of 120 billion dollars over a period of twenty years for damages to its infrastructure. This money can be defrayed as investment, if the return does not exceed 6.5 %.
7) During beginning period Saddam Hussein and any other prisoners who are deemed by a Council of Iraqi Judges, elected by the National representative body, as having committed crimes will be put up for trial.
The trial of Saddam Hussein will be before seven judges, chosen from this Council of Judges.
One judge, one jury, again chosen by this Council, will try all other prisoners.
All defendants will have the right to present any evidence they want, and to choose freely their own lawyers.
A Seven-point plan for an Exit Strategy in Iraq
1) A timetable for the complete withdrawal of American and British forces must be announced.
I envision the following procedure, but suitable fine-tuning can be applied by all the people involved.
A) A ceasefire should be offered by the Occupying side to representatives of both the Sunni insurgency and the Shiite community. These representatives would be guaranteed safe passage, to any meetings. The individual insurgency groups would designate who would attend.
At this meeting a written document declaring a one-month ceasefire, witnessed by a United Nations authority, will be fashioned and eventually signed. This document will be released in full, to all Iraqi newspapers, the foreign press, and the Internet.
B) US and British command will make public its withdrawal, within sixth-months of 80 % of their troops.
C) Every month, a team of United Nations observers will verify the effectiveness of the ceasefire.
All incidences on both sides will be reported.
D) Combined representative armed forces of both the Occupying nations and the insurgency organizations that agreed to the cease fire will protect the Iraqi people from actions by terrorist cells.
E) Combined representative armed forces from both the Occupying nations and the insurgency organizations will begin creating a new military and police force. Those who served, with out extenuating circumstances, in the previous Iraqi military or police, will be given the first option to serve.
F) After the second month of the ceasefire, and thereafter, in increments of 10-20% ,a total of 80% will be withdrawn, to enclaves in Qatar and Bahrain. The governments of these countries will work out a temporary land-lease housing arrangement for these troops. During the time the troops will be in these countries they will not stand down, and can be re-activated in the theater, if both the chain of the command still in Iraq, the newly formed Iraqi military, the leaders of the insurgency, and two international ombudsman (one from the Arab League, One from the United Nations), as a majority, deem it necessary.
G) One-half of those troops in enclaves will leave three-months after they arrive, for the United States or other locations, not including Iraq.
H) The other half of the troops in enclaves will leave after six-months.
I) The remaining 20 % of the Occupying troops will, during this six month interval, be used as peace-keepers, and will work with all the designated organizations, to aid in reconstruction and nation-building.
J) After four months they will be moved to enclaves in the above mentioned countries.
They will remain, still active, for two month, until their return to the States, Britain and the other involved nations.
2) At the beginning of this period the United States will file a letter with the Secretary General of the Security Council of the United Nations, making null and void all written and proscribed orders by the CPA, under R. Paul Bremer. This will be announced and duly noted.
3) At the beginning of this period all contracts signed by foreign countries will be considered in abeyance until a system of fair bidding, by both Iraqi and foreign countries, will be implemented ,by an interim Productivity and Investment Board, chosen from pertinent sectors of the Iraqi economy.
Local representatives of the 18 provinces of Iraq will put this board together, in local elections.
4) At the beginning of this period, the United Nations will declare that Iraq is a sovereign state again, and will be forming a Union of 18 autonomous regions. Each region will, with the help of international experts, and local bureaucrats, do a census as a first step toward the creation of a municipal government for all 18 provinces. After the census, a voting roll will be completed. Any group that gets a list of 15% of the names on this census will be able to nominate a slate of representatives. When all the parties have chosen their slates, a period of one-month will be allowed for campaigning.
Then in a popular election the group with the most votes will represent that province.
When the voters choose a slate, they will also be asked to choose five individual members of any of the slates.
The individuals who have the five highest vote counts will represent a National government.
This whole process, in every province, will be watched by international observers as well as the local bureaucrats.
During this process of local elections, a central governing board, made up of United Nations, election governing experts, insurgency organizations, US and British peacekeepers, and Arab league representatives, will assume the temporary duties of administering Baghdad, and the central duties of governing.
When the ninety representatives are elected they will assume the legislative duties of Iraq for two years.
Within three months the parties that have at least 15% of the representatives will nominate candidates for President and Prime Minister.
A national wide election for these offices will be held within three months from their nomination.
The President and the Vice President and the Prime Minister will choose their cabinet, after the election.
5) All debts accrued by Iraq will be rescheduled to begin payment, on the principal after one year, and on the interest after two years. If Iraq is able to handle another loan during this period she should be given a grace period of two years, from the taking of the loan, to comply with any structural adjustments.
6) The United States and the United Kingdom shall pay Iraq reparations for its invasion in the total of 120 billion dollars over a period of twenty years for damages to its infrastructure. This money can be defrayed as investment, if the return does not exceed 6.5 %.
7) During beginning period Saddam Hussein and any other prisoners who are deemed by a Council of Iraqi Judges, elected by the National representative body, as having committed crimes will be put up for trial.
The trial of Saddam Hussein will be before seven judges, chosen from this Council of Judges.
One judge, one jury, again chosen by this Council, will try all other prisoners.
All defendants will have the right to present any evidence they want, and to choose freely their own lawyers.
posted by sevenpointman at 2:23 PM
77 Comments:
Published on Saturday, December 3, 2005 by Agence France Presse
Iraqi Journalists Condemn US Military Media Tactics
Journalists in Iraq say they are shocked by revelations that the US military paid Iraqi newspapers and journalists to run positive articles about US activities in Iraq.
"It is a scandal that the US administration would use methods like these which contradict all principles of the profession and seek to defraud public opinion," well-known Iraqi journalist and political analyst Ahmed Sabri said.
"A newspaper should reflect the reality on the ground, not sponsored information aimed at improving the image of the The United States, which in reality has failed in Iraq," Sabri added.
The Los Angeles Times reported Wednesday that dozens of stories written by "information operations" soldiers were secretly placed with media outlets in Iraq through a defense contractor to mask the military's involvement.
The report relied largely on leaks from members of the military establishment who say they fear that US attempts to influence the Iraqi media may actually be subverting a free press.
As recently as Tuesday, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld pointed to the free press in Iraq as evidence of the progress made in Iraq.
Knight-Ridder newspapers on Thursday reported that the military also was paying Iraqi reporters up to 200 dollars a month to write sympathetic stories.
It said the payments were made to members of the Baghdad Press Club, an organization set up by US army officers more than a year ago.
An Iraqi female journalist, who preferred to remain anonymous, told AFP about working for the Baghdad Press Club, which is headquartered is at the airport, for three months before quitting.
"We were called to go out with them on various educational, reconstruction, health or aid projects and asked to write positive articles about them in exchange for 50 dollars," she recalled.
"After three months, I left. The whole thing was ridiculous and against the ethics of journalists," she said, recalling a US-sponsored trip to Sadr City where people called her a traitor and threw rocks at her.
Another Iraqi journalist in Baghdad who also preferred not to be named was more philosophical about the entire affair.
"It's true that it's fraud, but a professional journalist shouldn't fall into such a trap," he said.
Major General Rick Lynch, the US military spokesman in Iraq, cast the matter as an effort to counter lies spread by Al-Qaeda.
"We do empower our operational commanders with the ability to inform the Iraqi public, but everything we do is based on fact not based on fiction," he said.
Military officials would not comment on whether newspapers and journalists were paid to plant the articles.
Lieutenant Colonel Barry Johnson, head of the US military's press department in Baghdad, cited operational secrecy in withholding information about the program.
Johnson explained that the Iraqi press has traveled a long hard road from total control under ousted president Saddam Hussein to the current period characterized by a lethal insurgency.
"There's outright intimidation and many murders and other ways of manipulating the press, so it was felt operationally that it was necessary to make sure the facts were out," he said.
The White House announced on Wednesday that it was "very concerned" about the report.
©2005 AFP
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Society Against the State
Pierre Clastres
(an excerpt from Clastres' Society Against the State)
Primitive societies are societies without a State. This factual judgment, accurate in itself, actually hides an opinion, a value judgment that immediately throws doubt on the possibility of constituting political anthropology as a strict science. What the statement says, in fact, is that primitive societies are missing something - the State - that is essential to them, as it is to any other society: our own, for instance. Consequently, those societies are incomplete; they are not quite true societies--they are not civilized--their existence continues to suffer the painful experience of a lack--the lack of a State--which, try as they may, they will never make up. Whether clearly stated or not, that is what comes through in the explorers' chronicles and the work of researchers alike: society is inconceivable without the State; the State is the destiny of every society. One detects an ethnocentric bias in this approach; more often than not it is unconscious, and so the more firmly anchored. Its immediate, spontaneous reference, while perhaps not the best known, is in any case the most familiar. In effect, each one of us carries within himself, internalized like the believer's faith, the certitude that society exists for the State. How, then, can one conceive of the very existence of primitive societies if not as the rejects of universal history, anachronistic relics of a remote stage that everywhere else has been transcended? Here one recognizes ethnocentrism's other face, the complementary conviction that history is a one-way progression, that every society is condemned to enter into that history and pass through the stages which lead from savagery to civilization. "All civilized peoples were once savages," wrote Ravnal. But the assertion of an obvious evolution cannot justify a doctrine which, arbitrarily tying the state of civilization to the civilization of the State, designates the latter as the necessary end result assigned to all societies. One may ask what has kept the last of the primitive peoples as they are.
Karl Marx,
Capital, Chapter One
Likewise, foreign trade introduces a broader notion of universality: trading with people from all over the world sooner or later brings with it the acceptance of rights shared with those with whom you trade. What is characteristic about the notion of equality that comes about as a result of money is equality of wealth. No bourgeois radical has ever put forward the demand that the wealth of society should be divided equally: but the very existence of monetary wealth brings this quantitative notion of equality into being.
The U.S. bourgeois revolution in 1776, and in 1789 in France, both declared loudly that "All men are born equal". Still none of these gentlemen imagined for a moment that women and slaves were counted in this, neither that equality had meaning after birth, i.e., in the real world. Nevertheless, there is a huge step forward in the notion of equality here which denounces the inherited privileges of feudal society, and granted white males some equal rights in theory.
From the very beginning of the bourgeois epoch, the working class has sought to radicalise the idea of equality and subject the limited and abstract forms of equality supported by the bourgeoisie to critique. This movement first took the form of the Levellers in 17th Century England and Babeuf in France which advocated literally bringing everyone down to the same level, in something Marxists would later call "crude communism":
"[The first form] of communism — since it negates the personality of man in every sphere — is but the logical expression of private property, which is this negation.
"General envy constituting itself as a power is the disguise in which greed re-establishes itself and satisfies itself, only in another way. The thought of every piece of private property as such is at least turned against wealthier private property in the form of envy and the urge to reduce things to a common level, so that this envy and urge even constitute the essence of competition. Crude communism is only the culmination of this envy and of this levelling-down proceeding from the preconceived minimum. It has a definite, limited standard.
"How little this annulment of private property is really an appropriation is in fact proved by the abstract negation of the entire world of culture and civilisation, the regression to the unnatural simplicity of the poor and crude man who has few needs and who has not only failed to go beyond private property, but has not yet even reached it."
Sevenpointman,
Some thoughts on your plan.
A seize fire agreement with Sunnis and Shias is rediculous because its not a war between the occupation and them! Between themsleves I also do not see the need for such an agreement. The insurgents will never sit down and talk with the occupation forces or anyone else. Useless strategy in other words.
Would you really send in UN observers to roam around in a region that volitile? Look what happened to the Special representative of the Secretary General in 2003.
I would nevertheless agree that a UN led occupation would be preferable to the current US led occupation.
I believe the Iraqi government that will be elected by its own people should scrap the CPA decisions if they so wish. Why should the US do this through the UN? What does the UN have to do with it?
Iraqi sovereignty is important, but I do not share your optimism regarding the possibility to hold the country together. Iraq was created by British colonisation and will probably only function as a state with a blood thirsty dictator ruling by fear. Otherwise, split it up!
That the US and UK are econmically responsible for the reconstruction of Iraq I completely agree with.
The trial of Saddam Hussein is an Iraqi affair in which I do not wish to meddle. Generally I nevertheless like the South African model of truth commissions and pardons better than trials and punishment. Iraq must remember its horrible past, forgive and move on.
I am not convinced by your plan and would rather stick to what you call the 35 pages of lies. Thanks so much for your contribution though.
Best,
Robert Egnell
http://robertegnell.blogspot.com
Robert-
Thank you for your comments.
Let me address them:
The process of seize fire will be part of the overall strategy for withdrawal by the Ocuppying forces.
Lets make this very clear: these Occupying forces are the aggressors and must leave.
This war never had any justification: either on the level of international law or human logic.
The United Nations never authorized the use of force in Iraq-or was their any reason for this attack, based on threat level or on risk to American lives.
The United States has consistently, within the framework of the sanctions, been attacking Iraq from the moment Slamdunk George Tenet
convinced Bill Clinton to opt for a policy of regime change-other than the policy of death and attrition
of this 14 year embargo that killed one million Iraqis.
Given the obvious nature of aggression we must be the one to begin to rectify our deadly inhuman mistake, carried out to steal and privatize every last vestige of Iraqi freedom.
The United Nations will be implemented in several stages along the way-with the proper safeguards-as one of the international players that can help in developing a safer and better transistion to self-government.
As for your point on who we are fighting I would let the latest poll that indicates that 85% percent of all Iraqis want us out now.
Your comment that insurgents will never sit down and speak with anyone is historically inaccurate.
On many occassions in the last 30 years insurgent groups have negotiated with occupiers.
In this case their have been at least eight meetings between Iraqi interim Occupation-designated leaders and the insurgency, with U.S. military and Intelligence people present.
The iraq interim government is restricted to get rid of or even make adjustments on the CPA declarations, and given their complicity to U.S. interests they would never reach a two-thirds majority vote to augment these rules.
Iraq under my plan will be become a representative democracy-based on 18 federally autonomous states and one central government.
It will not be divided into ethnic mini-state fiefdoms-that will divide the national integrity of Iraq.
I appreciate your views.
Lets keep the dialogue going.
Howard
Much apologies to the spelling dictionary-and to the world of Freudian slips.
I obviously meant ceasefire-not to seize fire.
That could probably be very painful !
Some explanation of the inner workings and administration of my plan will follow shortly.
This time I'll double check in the preview mode.
Wow! I'm impressed. I just shoot off my mouth, but you really thought this out. Very nice.
Published on Friday, December 9, 2005 by The Nation
'Never Before!' Our Amnesiac Torture Debate
by Naomi Klein
It was the "Mission Accomplished" of George W. Bush's second term, and an announcement of that magnitude called for a suitably dramatic location. But what was the right backdrop for the infamous "We do not torture" declaration? With characteristic audacity, the Bush team settled on downtown Panama City.
It was certainly bold. An hour and a half's drive from where Bush stood, the US military ran the notorious School of the Americas from 1946 to 1984, a sinister educational institution that, if it had a motto, might have been "We do torture." It is here in Panama and, later, at the school's new location in Fort Benning, Georgia, where the roots of the current torture scandals can be found. According to declassified training manuals, SOA students--military and police officers from across the hemisphere--were instructed in many of the same "coercive interrogation" techniques that have since migrated to Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib: early morning capture to maximize shock, immediate hooding and blindfolding, forced nudity, sensory deprivation, sensory overload, sleep and food "manipulation," humiliation, extreme temperatures, isolation, stress positions--and worse. In 1996 President Clinton's Intelligence Oversight Board admitted that US-produced training materials condoned "execution of guerrillas, extortion, physical abuse, coercion and false imprisonment."
Some of the Panama school's graduates returned to their countries to commit the continent's greatest war crimes of the past half-century: the murders of Archbishop Oscar Romero and six Jesuit priests in El Salvador, the systematic theft of babies from Argentina's "disappeared" prisoners, the massacre of 900 civilians in El Mozote in El Salvador and military coups too numerous to list here. Suffice it to say that choosing Panama to declare "We do not torture" is a little like dropping by a slaughterhouse to pronounce the United States a nation of vegetarians.
And yet when covering the Bush announcement, not a single mainstream news outlet mentioned the sordid history of its location. How could they? To do so would require something totally absent from the current debate: an admission that the embrace of torture by US officials long predates the Bush Administration and has in fact been integral to US foreign policy since the Vietnam War.
It's a history that has been exhaustively documented in an avalanche of books, declassified documents, CIA training manuals, court records and truth commissions. In his upcoming book A Question of Torture, Alfred McCoy synthesizes this unwieldy cache of evidence, producing an indispensable and riveting account of how monstrous CIA-funded experiments on psychiatric patients and prisoners in the 1950s turned into a template for what he calls "no-touch torture," based on sensory deprivation and self-inflicted pain. McCoy traces how these methods were field-tested by CIA agents in Vietnam as part of the Phoenix program and then imported to Latin America and Asia under the guise of police training programs.
Part 1
It's not only apologists for torture who ignore this history when they blame abuses on "a few bad apples"--so too do many of torture's most prominent opponents. Apparently forgetting everything they once knew about US cold war misadventures, a startling number have begun to subscribe to an antihistorical narrative in which the idea of torturing prisoners first occurred to US officials on September 11, 2001, at which point the interrogation methods used in Guantánamo apparently emerged, fully formed, from the sadistic recesses of Dick Cheney's and Donald Rumsfeld's brains. Up until that moment, we are told, America fought its enemies while keeping its humanity intact.
The principal propagator of this narrative (what Garry Wills termed "original sinlessness") is Senator John McCain. Writing recently in Newsweek on the need for a ban on torture, McCain says that when he was a prisoner of war in Hanoi, he held fast to the knowledge "that we were different from our enemies...that we, if the roles were reversed, would not disgrace ourselves by committing or approving such mistreatment of them." It is a stunning historical distortion. By the time McCain was taken captive, the CIA had already launched the Phoenix program and, as McCoy writes, "its agents were operating forty interrogation centers in South Vietnam that killed more than twenty thousand suspects and tortured thousands more," a claim he backs up with pages of quotes from press reports as well as Congressional and Senate probes.
Does it somehow lessen the horrors of today to admit that this is not the first time the US government has used torture to wipe out its political opponents--that it has operated secret prisons before, that it has actively supported regimes that tried to erase the left by dropping students out of airplanes? That, at home, photographs of lynchings were traded and sold as trophies and warnings? Many seem to think so. On November 8 Democratic Congressman Jim McDermott made the astonishing claim to the House of Representatives that "America has never had a question about its moral integrity, until now." Molly Ivins, expressing her shock that the United States is running a prison gulag, wrote that "it's just this one administration...and even at that, it seems to be mostly Vice President Dick Cheney." And in the November issue of Harper's, William Pfaff argues that what truly sets the Bush Administration apart from its predecessors is "its installation of torture as integral to American military and clandestine operations." Pfaff acknowledges that long before Abu Ghraib, there were those who claimed that the School of the Americas was a "torture school," but he says that he was "inclined to doubt that it was really so." Perhaps it's time for Pfaff to have a look at the SOA textbooks coaching illegal torture techniques, all readily available in both Spanish and English, as well as the hair-raising list of SOA grads.
Other cultures deal with a legacy of torture by declaring "Never again!" Why do so many Americans insist on dealing with the current torture crisis by crying "Never Before"? I suspect it has to do with a sincere desire to convey the seriousness of this Administration's crimes. And the Bush Administration's open embrace of torture is indeed unprecedented--but let's be clear about what is unprecedented about it: not the torture but the openness. Past administrations tactfully kept their "black ops" secret; the crimes were sanctioned but they were practiced in the shadows, officially denied and condemned. The Bush Administration has broken this deal: Post-9/11, it demanded the right to torture without shame, legitimized by new definitions and new laws.
Despite all the talk of outsourced torture, the Bush Administration's real innovation has been its in-sourcing, with prisoners being abused by US citizens in US-run prisons and transported to third countries in US planes. It is this departure from clandestine etiquette, more than the actual crimes, that has so much of the military and intelligence community up in arms: By daring to torture unapologetically and out in the open, Bush has robbed everyone of plausible deniability.
For those nervously wondering if it is time to start using alarmist words like totalitarianism, this shift is of huge significance. When torture is covertly practiced but officially and legally repudiated, there is still the hope that if atrocities are exposed, justice could prevail. When torture is pseudo-legal and when those responsible merely deny that it is torture, what dies is what Hannah Arendt called "the juridical person in man"; soon enough, victims no longer bother to search for justice, so sure are they of the futility (and danger) of that quest. This impunity is a mass version of what happens inside the torture chamber, when prisoners are told they can scream all they want because no one can hear them and no one is going to save them.
In Latin America the revelations of US torture in Iraq have not been met with shock and disbelief but with powerful déjà vu and reawakened fears. Hector Mondragon, a Colombian activist who was tortured in the 1970s by an officer trained at the School of the Americas, wrote: "It was hard to see the photos of the torture in Iraq because I too was tortured. I saw myself naked with my feet fastened together and my hands tied behind my back. I saw my own head covered with a cloth bag. I remembered my feelings--the humiliation, pain." Dianna Ortiz, an American nun who was brutally tortured in a Guatemalan jail, said, "I could not even stand to look at those photographs...so many of the things in the photographs had also been done to me. I was tortured with a frightening dog and also rats. And they were always filming."
Ortiz has testified that the men who raped her and burned her with cigarettes more than 100 times deferred to a man who spoke Spanish with an American accent whom they called "Boss." It is one of many stories told by prisoners in Latin America of mysterious English-speaking men walking in and out of their torture cells, proposing questions, offering tips. Several of these cases are documented in Jennifer Harbury's powerful new book, Truth, Torture, and the American Way.
Part 2
Some of the countries that were mauled by US-sponsored torture regimes have tried to repair their social fabric through truth commissions and war crimes trials. In most cases, justice has been elusive, but past abuses have been entered into the official record and entire societies have asked themselves questions not only about individual responsibility but collective complicity. The United States, though an active participant in these "dirty wars," has gone through no parallel process of national soul-searching.
The result is that the memory of US complicity in far-away crimes remains fragile, living on in old newspaper articles, out-of-print books and tenacious grassroots initiatives like the annual protests outside the School of the Americas (which has been renamed but remains largely unchanged). The terrible irony of the anti-historicism of the current torture debate is that in the name of eradicating future abuses, these past crimes are being erased from the record. Every time Americans repeat the fairy tale about their pre-Cheney innocence, these already hazy memories fade even further. The hard evidence still exists, of course, carefully archived in the tens of thousands of declassified documents available from the National Security Archive. But inside US collective memory, the disappeared are being disappeared all over again.
This casual amnesia does a profound disservice not only to the victims of these crimes but also to the cause of trying to remove torture from the US policy arsenal once and for all. Already there are signs that the Administration will deal with the current torture uproar by returning to the cold war model of plausible deniability. The McCain amendment protects every "individual in the custody or under the physical control of the United States Government"; it says nothing about torture training or buying information from the exploding industry of for-profit interrogators. And in Iraq the dirty work is already being handed over to Iraqi death squads, trained by US commanders like Jim Steele, who prepared for the job by setting up similarly lawless units in El Salvador. The US role in training and supervising Iraq's Interior Ministry was forgotten, moreover, when 173 prisoners were recently discovered in a Ministry dungeon, some tortured so badly that their skin was falling off. "Look, it's a sovereign country. The Iraqi government exists," Rumsfeld said. He sounded just like the CIA's William Colby, who when asked in a 1971 Congressional probe about the thousands killed under Phoenix--a program he helped launch--replied that it was now "entirely a South Vietnamese program."
And that's the problem with pretending that the Bush Administration invented torture. "If you don't understand the history and the depths of the institutional and public complicity," says McCoy, "then you can't begin to undertake meaningful reforms." Lawmakers will respond to pressure by eliminating one small piece of the torture apparatus--closing a prison, shutting down a program, even demanding the resignation of a really bad apple like Rumsfeld. But, McCoy says, "they will preserve the prerogative to torture."
The Center for American Progress has just launched an advertising campaign called "Torture is not US." The hard truth is that for at least five decades it has been. But it doesn't have to be.
Part 3
Howard,
you should publish your longer comments as proper posts instead!!! Will provide for easier reading.
Robert
A) A ceasefire should be offered by the Occupying side to representatives of both the Sunni insurgency and the Shiite community. These representatives would be guaranteed safe passage, to any meetings. The individual insurgency groups would designate who would attend.
At this meeting a written document declaring a one-month ceasefire, witnessed by a United Nations authority, will be fashioned and eventually signed. This document will be released in full, to all Iraqi newspapers, the foreign press, and the Internet.
B) US and British command will make public its withdrawal, within sixth-months of 80 % of their troops.
C) Every month, a team of United Nations observers will verify the effectiveness of the ceasefire.
I am sorry, but at this point, I stop reading. One can always hire somebody in Iraq to sign whatever paperwork you want. The question is, who will enforce it? Not UN, they have zero credibility in Iraq.
inplainviewmonitor-
Your reluctancy to continue reading is probably the reason for your objection.
Any ceasefire that is signed will be the result of negotiations between the Occupying forces and any insurgency forces who agree to meet with all the proposed representatives. The virtue of safe passage and the inclusion of international monitoring agencies, including the United Nations and Arab League, will make it easier to develop a dialogue leading to peace.
I am aware that many elements in Iraq have suspicion of the United Nations, and these suspicions are based on fact, given the complicity of the United Nations in both of the Iraq vs U.S wars, with the cruel and vicious sanctions sandwiched in between.
But there are some trusted United Nations diplomats and organizations that would be in a position to aid in the implementaion of my plan.
A truly honest offering of all the seven parts of my plan, and a following out of the steps toward withdrawal, would attract many of the insurgency who are now talking with the interim Iraqi government. I hope it would also convince the recalitrant insurgents to send some of their fighters and leaders to speak with the assembled negotiators.
This process will take time -but I feel that it will eventually lead to a ceasefire flexibly monitored by many agencies, both national and international, which will lead to the further implementation of my plan.
Please continue reading and keep the faith.
Howard
Any ceasefire that is signed will be the result of negotiations between the Occupying forces and any insurgency forces who agree to meet with all the proposed representatives.
This cartoon gives an idea of what negotiations with Iraqi factions may look like.
So I guess we should abandon all hope to find a negotiated solution to this war.
Stay the course.
Or maybe send in another few hundred thousand troops to do the job right !
All these are not options , but cynical schemes to waste our time. Just reactionary approaches long dead in this new world where the multitude, given a transparent process, can work to alleviate war and poverty.
I don't need to watch the cartoons when the film of history is more interesting-and offers more hope if it is read with care and consistency.
So I guess we should abandon all hope to find a negotiated solution to this war.
I don't think there is any diplomatic solution for the Iraqi conflict. It is not WW2 or even Vietnam. It is not even Korean war.
Stay the course. Or maybe send in another few hundred thousand troops to do the job right!
This is what war supporters say - because they don't want to know what happens on the ground.
Knowing the situation, I say that any real withdrawal will be as unilateral as the invasion. It is like what happened to Israelis in Lebanon and in Gaza.
Book recommendation:
Neo-Conned Again-
Hypocrisy, Lawlessness, and the Rape of Iraq.
Light in Darkness Publications
-An Eight-Hundred page indictment of this evil War in Iraq.
Will become the textbook of the new activist against those criminal actions which lead to the conflict.
I have a problem with a unilateral withdrawal.
I feel it would not correct the problems we created by this war.
It would also create a power vacuum-which could lead to dire circumstances.
I agree with your perception that a clean break may be a fitting end to our unilateral invasion.
But the harm perpetrated by us has to be accounted for-with the iraqi people, finally being on the receiving end of some postive events, leading to the formation of a better society.
Any war that is started can be ended by negotiations-if this fact is bypased we will always be dwelling in an unnatural Hobbesian world where brute force rules.
I have a problem with a unilateral withdrawal. I feel it would not correct the problems we created by this war. It would also create a power vacuum-which could lead to dire circumstances. I agree with your perception that a clean break may be a fitting end to our unilateral invasion. But the harm perpetrated by us has to be accounted for-with the iraqi people, finally being on the receiving end of some postive events, leading to the formation of a better society.
Any war that is started can be ended by negotiations-if this fact is bypased we will always be dwelling in an unnatural Hobbesian world where brute force rules.
This is literally multi-hundred-billion question. IMO, quite unfortunately, diplomatic solution of the Iraqi crisis belongs to the same realm as IWMD.
Simply, put no such solution exists, it is hystorical equivalent of perpetuum mobile. Neocons don't do diplomacy and they don't have a partner. The way they understand diplomacy, it makes no sense to be their negotiation partner!
*New Element Found*
The recent hurricane and gasoline issues helped prove existence of a
new element. In early October [2005] a major research institution
announced discovery of the heaviest element yet known to science.
The new element has been named "Governmentium".
Governmentium (Gv) has one neutron, 25 assistant neutrons, 88 deputy
neutrons, and 198 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic
mass of 312.
These 312 particles are held together by forces called morons, which
are surrounded by vast quantities of lepton like particles called
peons. Since Gv has no electrons, it is inert. However, it can be
detected, because it impedes every reaction with which it comes into
contact. A minute amount of Gv causes one reaction to take over four
days to complete, when it would normally take less than a second!
Gv has a normal half-life of 4 years; it does not decay, but instead
undergoes a reorganization in which a portion of the assistant
neutrons and deputy neutrons exchange places. In fact,
Governmentium's mass will actually increase over time, since each
reorganization will cause more morons to become neutrons, forming
isodopes.
This characteristic of moron promotion leads some scientists to
believe that Gv is formed whenever morons reach a certain quantity
in concentration. This hypothetical quantity is referred to as
Critical Morass.
When catalyzed with money, Gv becomes Administratium (Am) - an
element which radiates just as much energy as Gv since it has half
as many peons but twice as many morons.
(from Ilsa)
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
The discussion on why the US invaded Iraq is a long one, but saying that it was to "steal and privatize the last vestige of Iraqi freedom" is certainly an over simplification. Watch out for the worst conspiracy theorists!
That something had to be done about the oppressive regime is something almost all nations within the UN agreed upon. The debate was about the method...
Anyway, I still do not see who will sign a cease fire. These insurgents are moreover not of the same kind as the ideologically driven movements in the 20th century. The new global jihad insurgent is playing by a set of rules that we still have to figure out and understand.
However, your idea about a federal Iraq based on smaller units than the three ethnic lines I find very interesting. Might very well be a more useful model than the current one!
Robert
I agree with you that there were many reasons offered by the invaders why they went in. None of these reasons have been backed up by facts.
But the actions of the occupying forces and its corporate and ideological sponsers significantly points to developing an economic process of privatization and control of the major industries, and resources of Iraq. This is not a conspiracy theorized by nuts with unsubstantiate proof. The document trail points to this advantage of occupation.
I also agree that the oppressive regime was involved in wholesale slaughter and repression.
But we didn't give much thought to the possible consequences of putting Saddam in charge, throughout the first 10 years of his brutal regime when we supported him, and turned a blind eye to his gassing of his own people.
As for oppressive regimes that most nations need to do something about: Israel-a nation with 300 nuclear weapons-targeted many times on its neighbors-and oppressing millions of Palestinians-
this oppressive regime was called to task by more than 60 U.N. resolutions.
What did we do about them?
Sell them more weapons-and give them 5 billion in aid each year.
They buy your products-you praise us-you have no oil-you escape our wrath.
As concerning the insurgents, let me break down who they are.
Former military personal who were forced to fight for Saddam to protect his power and wealth, police who served their community-but were also used to
inforce Saddams law of the jungle, bureaucrats who received education in Iraq through their liberal social programs, teachers, activists, jihadists who see a holy cause in fighting against the United States.
All these were motivated by the Occupation of Iraq and the stealing of their jobs and their resentment to the Occupation.
Occupation creates various lines of resistence-and guerilla tactics-with the aim of putting an end to the Occupation.
Would we as Americans put up with this type of situation?
i am sure we who call these guerrilla fighters terrorists and Saddamist-like our President did just hours ago-if faced with the conditions of Occupation-would also become insurgents.
The problem with this War is not who we are fighting against-but that we are fighting, in the first place.
How's the weather in Tanzania ?
Keep the faith.
Howard
Published on Monday, December 12, 2005 by the Associated Press
Poll: Most Iraqis Oppose Troops' Presence
by Will Lester
Most Iraqis disapprove of the presence of U.S. forces in their country, yet they are optimistic about Iraq's future and their own personal lives, according to a new poll.
More than two-thirds of those surveyed oppose the presence of troops from the United States and its coalition partners and less than half, 44 percent, say their country is better off now than it was before the war, according to an ABC News poll conducted with Time magazine and other media partners.
But Iraqis are surprisingly upbeat on many fronts, the poll suggests.
Three-quarters say they are confident about the parliamentary elections scheduled for this week. More than two-thirds expect things in their country to get better in the coming months.
Attitudes about Iraq's future were sharply different in the Sunni provinces and other parts of Iraq, however. Only a third in the Sunni regions were optimistic about their country's future. Shiites, who with the Kurds dominate the current parliament, had a much more positive view than the Sunnis of their own personal safety and whether their own lives are going well.
A majority of both the Sunni and Shiite population say they favor a unified country, however.
In other poll findings:
Two-thirds express confidence in the Iraqi army and in police.
Half now say the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq was wrong, up from 39 percent in February 2004.
More than six in 10 say they feel safe in their neighborhoods, up from 40 percent in June 2004.
Six in 10 say local security is good, up from half in February 2004.
But the national concern mentioned most often is security, named by 57 percent.
A fourth of those surveyed, 26 percent, say U.S. forces should leave now, and another 19 percent say troops should leave after those chosen in this week's election take office. The other half say U.S. troops should stay until security is restored, 31 percent, until Iraqi forces can operate independently, 16 percent, or longer, 5 percent.
The poll was conducted by Oxford Research International face-to-face with 1,711 Iraqis age 15 and over from Oct. 8 to Nov. 22. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 2.5 percentage points.
Copyright © 2005 Associated Press
Kucinich wants Iraqi vote on withdrawal
Originally published by United Press International
Kucinich wants Iraqi vote on withdrawal
WASHINGTON, Dec. 9 (UPI)
Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, wants the Iraqis to decide whether the United States military should be withdrawn from Iraq.
"Congressman Kucinich believes that Iraq, as a free nation and a blossoming democracy, should have the right of self determination," said his spokesman Doug Gordon.
Kucinich is working on a resolution to be introduced on the floor of Congress "soon" that would make it the sense of Congress that the United States would support an Iraqi referendum on the future of the U.S. occupation of the country.
Kucinich "strongly believes that the Iraqi people cannot fully be free until decision made about their future are made in Baghdad and not Washington," said Gordon.
Kucinich waged an unsuccessful campaign for the presidency in 2004, in part based on his opposition to the war.
According to recent polls, some 80 percent of Iraqis oppose the U.S. occupation. Officially the U.S. military is in Iraq at the invitation of Iraq's interim government.
A February poll conducted by the U.S. military in urban areas found that 71 percent of Iraqis oppose the presence of coalition forces in Iraq.
A January 2005 poll conducted by Abu Dhabi TV/Zogby International showed that 82 percent of Sunni Arabs and 69 percent of Shiite Arabs favor the withdrawal of U.S. troops either immediately or once an elected government is in place.
Insurgents seek dialogue with U.S., role in new Iraq
The Baathist in Iraq are living hand-to-mouth:
BAGHDAD, Iraq - As Iraq moves toward crucial legislative elections Thursday, homegrown Iraqi insurgent groups are reaching out to the United States in the hope of launching a dialogue that would draw them into the political process and end their 2 1/2-year rebellion, according to U.S. officials and Iraqis close to the insurgency.
Spurred by fears of the growing influence of Iran and encouraged by signals from Washington that the United States will start drawing down troops next year, insurgents who see themselves as fighting for an Iraqi nationalist cause are looking for ways to distance themselves from the religious radicals and the hard-core Baathists who have dominated the insurgency in the public eye, with a view to establishing a foothold in Iraq's political landscape, the Iraqis say.
At the same time, U.S. officials also have indicated that they are willing to open a dialogue with people representing insurgent groups, as long as they have not been directly involved in violence.
"We're not going to talk to people with blood on their hands," said Gen. George Casey, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, in a recent interview. "We talk to others who talk to them."
A number of exploratory meetings have taken place between U.S. officials and people who claim to represent insurgent interests, Iraqis and Americans say, though there have been few tangible results. "They haven't got very far," said Casey. "There's too much mistrust."
But the signals from both sides point to a building momentum toward negotiations that could help ease the violence as U.S. forces prepare to start reducing troops next year.
Insurgents also have been reaching out to the Iraqi government. Since President Jalal Talabani told the National Reconciliation Conference in Cairo late last month that he was prepared to "listen" to "any armed group" that wanted to talk, his office has been contacted by a number of people who claim to be leaders of the insurgency offering to negotiate, his officials say.
Dividing the insurgency is central to America's exit strategy for Iraq. In his recent speeches outlining his strategy for winning the war, President Bush has drawn a distinction between what he calls the "terrorists" led by Jordanian-born militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and the "Saddamists" on the one hand, and what he termed the Sunni "rejectionists" on the other. The "rejectionists," he said, could be persuaded to abandon armed struggle in favor of the political process.
Insurgent groups who identify themselves as fighting for a nationalist Iraqi cause are keen to draw a similar distinction, said Talal Gaaod, an Iraqi businessman and tribal leader based in Jordan who is in the forefront of one effort to unite insurgent groups against the al-Zarqawi loyalists.
"There is a difference between terrorists and the national Iraqi resistance," he said. "Zarqawi's group does nothing but suicide attacks and killing Iraqis. That's not resistance."
Where were these enemies before we attacked iraq ?
Did they not walk the streets of Baghdad or sell papers in Basra ?
Were they traffic police, bureaucrats, or school teachers? Did they run small clothes boutiques or work as janitors ? Were they forced to defend Saddams brutal militarism or were they interogators who were threatened by enforcers ?
Were they merchants who bartered in the souk, or barbers who cut Bathists hair ? Did they work in the oil production cycle?
Were they restaurant cleaners or street sweepers ?
Did they work in offices in crowded buildings ?
Or on farms in back breaking labor ?
Those people who you call terrorists, and Saddamists-are just these people !
Those who lived under the grotesque tyranny of one dictator are tired of being dictacted to.
Especially by the one that propped up that dictactor,sold him arms and WMD's, looked away when he gassed the poor of Halabja, turned against him when it wasn't profitable by supporting Iranian jihadists,bait him into attacking Kuwait by supporting slant-drilling in his country, set up unreachable and always changing goals for his surrender to a loss of soverignity, imposed draconian sanctions that murdered 1 million people, bombed his country under these sanctions 3500 times, fabricated out of thin air the lie that he had WMD's, that he is sleeping with Al-Queda, and that he was a grave threat to his neighbors, attacked his country without any justication and destroyed his government, military,police, cultural infrastructure, common boundaries betweeen tribes and sects, vital national resources and the pride of it's people.
Nothing makes me sicker than the pompous arrogance of corrupt American power.
We have no enemy in Iraq.
Only the monster we created by our failure to understand the signs of history.
We were wrong in going in, let us be honest enough to be right when we leave.
My plan exposes the nakedness of using coercion and force to create a viable society,
and gives the common multitude of iraqiis the chance to create a true democracy, not imposed by Washington, London, Mecca, Geneva,Damascus, Teheran or Moscow.
My plan creates a military, police and government
made by the multitude: which includes the majority of those insurgents who are fighting coercion and usurpation of freedom, and who are willing to join in the common goals of self-government.
When we are gone, and the iraqi's will rule their own destiny, they will fight to the death to expel the terrorists, that George Bush opened the door
and let in.
Victory to the people of Iraq.
Victory to the multitude who stand up against
the ideologies of conquest and hegemony.
My plan can only work if enough refuse the sham patriotism of the trenches and profit motive..
When the patriots' voice barks commands it does not hear the voices of the victims.
When the patriots voice is wise,strong, compassionate and gentle, it can hear the voices of the angels.
The Nadir of Occupation
Last week's election does little to heal the wounds that are splitting Iraq up into violent fiefdoms
by Salim Lone
In American proconsul Paul Bremer's 2003 master plan, last week's election was meant to be the culminating act in entrenching democratic rule in Iraq. Instead it marks the nadir of the American enterprise there. The brutal failure of that enterprise, and of the similarly unlawful tactics employed in the war on terror, has boosted terrorist ranks worldwide, dealt grievous blows to the notion that human rights and the rule of law are essential elements in building democracy, and brought the US's standing to its lowest point in generations.
But the real victim of the war is Iraq. Despite the exercise of awesome US power and the expenditure of billions of dollars, the security situation grows worse by the month. Iraq remains the most violent country in the world, with a leadership that dare not set foot among its people. But President Bush is not prepared to countenance any compromise in his original war goals. Despite recent talk of pulling down troop levels, he finally declared that "we will settle for nothing less than victory".
The carnage in Iraq is not primarily caused by the insurgents. It is the death squads run by the Shia and Kurdish militias - according to former US diplomat James Dobbins, who is now with the Rand Corporation - who bring about a greater threat of civil war. Indeed the former US-appointed Iraqi leader Ayad Allawi has accused Jalal Talabani's regime of committing human-rights abuses against Sunnis that are as egregious as those under Saddam Hussein.
Last week's election will do nothing to hasten the winding-down of the occupation, which is the principal obstacle to peace in Iraq, and the country is breaking down into violent communal fiefdoms. The US introduced sectarianism in Iraq as one of its very first acts of occupation, by reorganizing this secular nation's politics along explicitly religious and ethnic lines. This was purportedly done to crush the Ba'ath party, but the larger target was Arab nationalism, as was the case when Israel encouraged Hamas as a counterpoint to the PLO.
This election, apart from the fact that it is taking place under occupation, was held amid such insecurity and violence that few candidates dared to campaign in public. In addition, all three main presidential candidates are long-term exiles, and two of them, Allawi and Ahmed Chalabi, are known to have been in the pay of US security services. This election will not enhance Iraqi sovereignty or the new government's legitimacy, nor would it be recognized as free and fair in any democratic country.
The large Sunni vote on Thursday will regrettably make little difference to their marginalization. They turned out to vote in the October referendum when assured that some key constitutional provisions they considered repugnant could be rewritten by the new parliament elected in December. Laith Kuba, a spokesman for the prime minister, Ibrahim Jaafari, revealed after the voting closed that any such constitutional amendments would be virtually impossible since any three provinces could reject them with a two-thirds majority.
When awful terrorist bombs ripped through a wedding party in Amman last month the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, rightly said the world must unite to act against terror. Who will unite the world in preventing unlawful wars and occupations that are now the root causes of terrorism?
Meanwhile the destruction and division of Iraq continues. The key challenges are the occupation, the comprehensive marginalization of the Sunnis and the mass violence generated by these two wounds. The election does little to address any of these calamities, even though - as in October's referendum - prayerful hopes for peace were evident on Sunni faces as they decided to vote in their hundreds of thousands.
Salim Lone is a former spokesman for the UN mission in Iraq.
“Peace on Earth” Means “No More War”
by John Dear
The story goes that when the nonviolent Jesus was born into abject poverty to homeless refugees on the outskirts of a brutal empire, angels appeared in the sky to impoverished shepherds singing, “Glory to God in the highest and peace on earth!” That child grew up to become, in Gandhi’s words, “the greatest nonviolent resister in the history of the world,” and was subsequently executed by the empire for his insistence on justice.
This weekend, as tens of millions of Christians across the country celebrate the birth of the Prince of Peace, the U.S. wages war in Iraq, Afghanistan, Colombia and elsewhere; crushes the hungry, homeless, elderly, imprisoned and refugee; and maintains the world’s ultimate terrorist threat--its nuclear arsenal.
Like Herod, Pilate and their soldiers, we have rejected the angels’ call for “peace on earth.” When Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and their warmaking supporters celebrate Christmas, they mock Christ and his steadfast nonviolence, and carry on the massacre of the innocents.
If the angels are correct, then Christmas requires us to welcome God’s gift of peace on earth. In such a time, that means we have to work for an end to war. Christmas calls us to become like Christ--people of active, creative, steadfast nonviolence who give our lives in resistance to empire and war.
In pursuit of this Christmas gift, a group of us met this week with Bill Richardson, the Governor of New Mexico, and asked him to dismantle our nuclear weapons and disarm Los Alamos, the birthplace of the bomb. In this day and age, it is surprising that any elected official would meet and listen to anti-war activists. Yet Richardson asked to begin a public dialogue with us about nuclear disarmament. We take this as a sign of hope, even as we continue our protests at Los Alamos.
When Gandhi was asked one Christmas day for his thoughts about Christmas, he spoke about the connection between the wood of the crib--Christ’s poverty--and the wood of the cross--Christ’s nonviolent resistance to evil. He said Christmas summons us to the same lifelong nonviolence. It has social, economic, and political implications. I think, like Gandhi, that we have to make those connections and pursue those implications. Here are a few of them.
First, Christmas celebrates the birth of a life of perfect nonviolence and calls us to become people of active nonviolence. Christmas invites us to practice the vulnerable, disarming simplicity of children, to live the disarmed life in solidarity with the children of the world, and to spend our lives in resistance to empire. It summons us to study, teach, practice and experiment with creative nonviolence that we too might live the life of nonviolence which Jesus exemplified so that one day peace might reign one earth.
Second, Christmas demonstrates that God sides with the poor, becomes one with the poor, and walks among the poor. God does not side with the rulers, the rich or the powerful, but with the homeless, the hungry and the refugees. Christmas puts poverty front and center and demands that we work to abolish poverty itself so that every human being has food, clothing, housing, healthcare, education, employment and a lifetime of peace.
Third, since Christmas illustrates how God sides with the poor in order to liberate the oppressed from poverty and injustice, it calls us to reject greed, give away our money and possessions to those in need, and also live in solidarity with the disenfranchised.
Fourth, Christmas pushes us to stand on the margins of society, where we will find God. Christmas announces that every human being is a beloved son and daughter of the God of love. Every human life is beautiful in the eyes of God, since God has become one of us. From now on, we reject exclusivity, racism, sexism, and discrimination of any kind, and embrace everyone as equal. We stand on the margins with the excluded, the marginalized, the outsiders and outcasts. From there, we envision a new reconciled humanity.
Fifth, as Gandhi pointed out, there is a straight line from the crib to the cross. Christ practiced steadfast nonviolent resistance to imperial injustice and was brutally executed. That bloody outcome is crucial to the story, and calls us to work for the abolition of the death penalty so that Christ will never be crucified again and the killing stops once and for all.
Sixth, since the birth of Christ means that every human life is beloved by God, that all human beings are God’s children, we have to treat every human being on the planet as our very own sister and brother which means we must oppose war and work for the abolition of war itself. In particular, we denounce Bush’s war on Iraq, demand that the troops return home, and call for reparations and nonviolent solutions to the horrors we have brought upon the people of the Middle East.
Seventh, if the angels celebrate the coming of “peace on earth,” that means they are environmentalists. We too have to protect the earth, oppose its destruction, defend God’s creatures and the universe, and help make the earth a place of peace for every life form.
Eighth, Christmas means working for the abolition of nuclear weapons. These weapons are idolatrous and blasphemous. Their very existence insults the God of peace and mocks the nonviolent Jesus. We can’t celebrate Christmas and at the same time work at Los Alamos, Livermore Labs, the Nevada Test Site, or the Pentagon, or be silent while this work goes on We must reject this love or death and destruction, and pursue life, the God of life, and a new world without nuclear weapons.
Ninth, Christmas calls us individually to prepare for the gift of peace on earth. It invites us to welcome peace in our hearts and our personal lives, and learn to be at peace with ourselves, with God, with our families, friends, neighbors, and local communities, and with the whole world.
Finally, Christmas invites us to be human in an inhuman time. The scandal of the story is that God wants to become human and show us how to be human. We, on the other hand, want to play God, to be powerful, in charge, in control, to dominate the world. Perhaps the best way to celebrate Christmas and welcome the beautiful gift of peace on earth is simply to be human, despite the callous inhumanity around us, and to trust that our modest, vulnerable humanity--our nonviolence, compassion and love--like the humanity of the child in the crib, will one day bear good fruit and sow the seeds of peace on earth.
John Dear is a Jesuit priest, peace activist, and the author/editor of 20 books on peace and nonviolence, including most recently “The Questions of Jesus” and “Living Peace,” both published by Doubleday. He is the coordinator of Pax Christi New Mexico. For information, see: www.fatherjohndear.org and www.paxchristinewmexico.org
Sevenpointman,
Let me print this out before I comment (or link to it).
From what I've seen so far though - including here - I see nothing that says it's untenable in the least.
G.W.-
The implementation of my plan must be done with all the steps following upon themselves in a very short time period. Each step can be broken up into stages determined by the parties involved.
The amount of time it takes for the withdrawal should be stuck to as close to the amount indicated in my plan.
But some adjustments of this time-frame and the logistics of some of my points, can be fine-tuned by the parties involved.
The essence of my plan's intent is threefold:
1) Withdrawal of all Occupying forces.
2) An accord between the insurgency and the Occupying forces.
3) An attempt by the Iraqis to develop a process of self-government and security that will be lasting.
Primal Smirk: The War God Has His Eyes on Iran — Can We Stop Him?
by Robert C. Koehler
I ache with fresh hope and foreboding at this time of year. The time is ripe for an overarching vision of a world without war — a tough, smart vision that can claim headlines and hold its own with the spin machines of government. Without it, we’re doomed to . . . war with Iran?
“Of course, Bush has publicly stated for months that he would not take the possibility of a military strike (against Iran) off the table. What’s new here, however, is that Washington appears to be dispatching high-level officials to prepare its allies for a possible attack rather than merely implying the possibility as it has repeatedly done during the past year.”
This is from the German publication Der Spiegel, at the end of 2005. Even the cynic in me is shocked by the lack of subtlety in these calculations: “During his trip to Turkey,” the article goes on, “CIA chief (Porter) Goss reportedly handed over three dossiers to Turkish security officials that purportedly contained evidence that Tehran is cooperating with Islamic terror network al-Qaida. A further dossier is said to contain information about the current status of Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program.”
Terror link, WMD program. Uh oh.
Suddenly Ares’ primal smirk is all over this story, especially when you factor in the Bush administration’s plummeting poll numbers and its obvious need to do something decisive. It stops the heart. Are we once again watching the slow, methodical buildup to folly? Are we once again helpless to stop these guys from doing what they do best?
Our primary institutions are locked in a cycle of violence the public has been in the process of abandoning for several generations. The same poll numbers that bode so poorly for Bush point to Americans’ serious loss of appetite for militarism. In a University of Maryland survey a while back, 76 percent of respondents, asked what role the country should assume globally, agreed that, “The U.S. should do its share in efforts to solve international problems with other countries.” Only 12 percent thought it should be the predominant world leader. And 57 percent disagreed that the U.S. “has the right or even the responsibility to overthrow dictatorships”; only 12 percent agreed.
“Should we begin to think, even before this shameful war is over, about ending our addiction to massive violence and instead using the enormous wealth of our country for human needs?” asks Howard Zinn in the current Progressive. “That is, should we begin to speak about ending war — not just this war or that war, but war itself? Perhaps the time has come to bring an end to war, and turn the human race onto a path of health and healing.”
Perhaps indeed! Here at the dawn of 2006, I am allowing myself to slip into the current of this idea, to feel it quicken and fill the void in the public conversation about war, as purveyed by a fatalistic and self-importantly complicit media.
“You supply the pictures and I’ll supply the war,” said William Randolph Hearst a century ago. Today the cynicism is a little more couched, a little more craven. The New York Times and the Washington Post make a pretense at public soul-searching when reality exposes their atrocious pre-war drum-beating. Judith Miller theatrically atones for her propaganda pieces by going to jail (in defense of the public’s right not to know who fed her the B.S.). It’s all show.
When it’s time to make the case for the invasion of Iran, the administration’s horrific gobbledygook will be all over the front page and all over the op-ed page, and tenure-track journalists will once more put career ahead of principle and, in the words of Watergate icon Bob Woodward, join the groupthink. Our major institutions are hell-bent on making the same mistake over and over again. This is the myth of the “inevitability of war.”
We the American public experience the falseness of this myth one dead son or daughter at a time, but such lessons burn into the soul. Many who have learned it will be marching on Jan. 18 — Martin Luther King Day — in Washington, D.C., in opposition to the war in Iraq, a known disaster. Will they be outflanked by a fresh new undertaking in Iran?
“I don’t believe that our government will be able to do once more what it did after Vietnam — prepare the population for still another plunge into violence and dishonor,” Zinn writes.
I would phrase this great hope a little more cautiously. I think our government is perfectly capable of perpetrating another such plunge because most of the machinery of our society is calibrated to assist in the effort. But I believe the force to oppose this folly is enormous, and this time it will find leaders, and a voice.
Robert Koehler, an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist, is an editor at Tribune Media Services and nationally syndicated writer. Email to: bob@commonwonders.com
I am very happy to here the following about the United States trying to engage in talks with the insurgency. They must continue along these lines and broaden the scope of their contact. Then the first stages of my plan could become a reality.
US officials in talks with Iraqi insurgents: NYT
Sat Jan 7, 2:06 AM ET
NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. officials have been talking with local Iraqi insurgent leaders to exploit a rift between homegrown insurgents and radical groups such as Al Qaeda, The New York Times reported on Saturday.
Citing a Western diplomat, an Iraqi political leader and an Iraqi insurgent leader, the Times said that the talks were also aimed at drawing the local leaders into the political process.
According to interviews with insurgents and both U.S. and Iraqi officials, clashes between Iraqi groups and al Qaeda have broken out in several cities across the Sunni Triangle and they appear to have intensified in recent months, the Times said.
A Western diplomat who supports the talks told the Times that the Americans had opened face-to-face discussions with insurgents in the field, and were also communicating with senior insurgent leaders through intermediaries.
The diplomat said the goal was to take advantage of rifts in the insurgency, in particular those between local groups, whose main goal is to expel U.S. forces, and more radical groups like al Qaeda, which have alienated many Iraqis with violent campaigns that have resulted in mass killings of Iraqi civilians.
The diplomat said the talks were taking place "inside and outside Iraq" and began in the fall around the time of the referendum on the new Iraqi constitution on October 15, the Times said. While U.S. officials have made contact with insurgent groups in the past, the diplomat said the more recent contacts were far more significant.
In particular, the diplomat said the talks, of which few details were available, aimed to take advantage of a perceived willingness among Sunni Arabs to take part in politics after large numbers went to the polls for the first time.
Tarik al-Hashimy, the leader of the Iraqi Islamic Party, who said he was in periodic contact with insurgent leaders and had asked them to hold their fire during the elections, told the Times he did not think the talks had made much progress. But the Western diplomat said he hoped to begin to convince insurgent groups that the new government, which is expected to contain a number of Sunni leaders, was worth supporting.
The diplomat did not specify which groups the Americans were speaking to, but the Times said it seemed likely that they included groups like the Islamic Army in Iraq and Muhammad's Army, which are believed to comprise mainly Iraqi nationalists and former members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party.
Insurgents told the newspaper that there is widespread hatred for al Qaeda among ordinary Iraqis. Abu Amin, an insurgent leader in Yusefiya and a former captain in the Iraqi Army, told the Times the Americans were especially interested in securing help against al Qaeda, about whom they asked many questions: "Do you have a relationship with? Can you help us attack al Qaeda? Can you uproot al Qaeda from Iraq?"
A Plan For Iraq
In lieu of watching the Scalito hearings, I want to point some of you in the direction of Sevenpointman (Howard Roberts).
He placed out a seven point plan for restoring, and getting us out of, Iraq early last month. If the past week hasn't been proof enough that things are going to hell there, then just wait another week or so, and you'll probably see it clearly.
Here's an important piece of the logic behind this in a response Howard made (to a small comment I offered):
The implementation of my plan must be done with all the steps following upon themselves in a very short time period. Each step can be broken up into stages determined by the parties involved.
The amount of time it takes for the withdrawal should be stuck to as close to the amount indicated in my plan.
But some adjustments of this time-frame and the logistics of some of my points, can be fine-tuned by the parties involved.
The essence of my plan's intent is threefold:
1) Withdrawal of all Occupying forces.
2) An accord between the insurgency and the Occupying forces.
3) An attempt by the Iraqis to develop a process of self-government and security that will be lasting.
I've read it - and the comments where he answers critics - over a few times now, and while it would require new elections (which probably wouldn't be an objection to some in Iraq), among other processes that would be hard to accomplish under the current U.S. Administration, it sounds like an actual plan for getting things done.
Give it a read, make a comment if you see a hole in the plan and wait for a response, and consider the ramifications of an exit strategy that might work both for us, and the Iraqi's.
posted by General Washington
G.W,-
Your comment about having a new election if my plan is implemented is only partially correct.
It is true that my plan calls for a streamlined body of representatives which number 90. I think that the choice of a 275 member congress is ridiculous given the population of Iraq, as well as other factors. But a list of voters and participants of each province can be established right now by checking voting rolls-and from this list a run-off of all previously elected candidates could be presented to the voters in each province. From each province the voters could pick their five representatives. All smaller parties that do not achieve 15% of the populace of their region would be encouraged to either support those who have acheived that 15%, or to form smaller echelon grassroots parties on a local level to improve the nature of their provinces governance.
I forsee that this paring down process could be done well before all the troops leave and the legislature meets.
My plan was formulated in September of 2004-and its basic thrust rejects imposed elections by an Occupying force. But the nature of the beginnings of a process of democratization, even the one that was organized in the present case, can be used as a postive encounter that could lead to a verification of Iraqi self-government.
As for your point that this administration would probably never implement my plan, I call upon the resistive and persistent force of progressive thinking to reject that premise, and to use our best efforts to convince those in power to begin to change course. The negotiations going on with some insurgency groups by our government and military, could be a turning point for this change of course.
One can only hope that through our concerted efforts we can end this war.
Howard...
Cost of Iraq war could top $2 trillion: study
By Jason Szep
BOSTON (Reuters) - The cost of the Iraq war could top $2 trillion, far above the White House's pre-war projections, when long-term costs such as lifetime health care for thousands of wounded U.S. soldiers are included, a study said on Monday.
Columbia University economist Joseph E. Stiglitz and Harvard lecturer Linda Bilmes included in their study disability payments for the 16,000 wounded U.S. soldiers, about 20 percent of whom suffer serious brain or spinal injuries.
They said U.S. taxpayers will be burdened with costs that linger long after U.S. troops withdraw.
"Even taking a conservative approach, we have been surprised at how large they are," said the study, referring to total war costs. "We can state, with some degree of confidence, that they exceed a trillion dollars."
Before the invasion, then-White House budget director Mitch Daniels predicted Iraq would be "an affordable endeavor" and rejected an estimate by then-White House economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey of total Iraq war costs at $100 billion to $200 billion as "very, very high."
Unforeseen costs include recruiting to replenish a military drained by multiple tours of duty, slower long-term U.S. economic growth and health-care bills for treating long-term mental illness suffered by war veterans.
They said about 30 percent of U.S. troops had developed mental-health problems within three to four months of returning from Iraq as of July 2005, citing Army statistics.
Stiglitz, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2001 and has been an outspoken critic of the Bush administration's Iraq policy, and Bilmes based their projections partly on past wars and included the economic cost of higher oil prices, a bigger U.S. budget deficit and greater global insecurity caused by the Iraq war.
They said a portion of the rise in oil prices -- about 20 percent of the $25 a barrel gain in oil prices since the war began -- could be attributed directly to the conflict and that this had already cost the United States about $25 billion.
"Americans are, in a sense, poorer by that amount," they said, describing that estimate as conservative.
The projection of a total cost of $2 trillion assumes U.S. troops stay in Iraq until 2010 but with steadily declining numbers each year. They projected the number of troops there in 2006 at about 136,000. Currently, the United States has 153,000 troops in Iraq.
HIGHER COSTS
Marine Corps Lt. Col. Roseann Lynch, a Pentagon spokeswoman, said on Monday that the Iraq war was costing the United States $4.5 billion monthly in military "operating costs" not including procurement of new weapons and equipment.
Lynch said the war in Iraq had cost $173 billion to date.
Another unforeseen cost, the study said, is the loss to the U.S. economy from injured veterans who cannot contribute as productively as they otherwise would and costs related to American civilian contractors and journalists killed in Iraq.
Death benefits to military families and bonuses paid to soldiers to re-enlist and to sign up new recruits are additional long-term costs, it said.
Stiglitz was an adviser to U.S. President Bill Clinton and also served as chief economist at the World Bank.
A seize fire agreement with Sunnis and Shias is rediculous because its not a war between the occupation and them! Between themsleves I also do not see the need for such an agreement. The insurgents will never sit down and talk with the occupation forces or anyone else
Your wrong...it has already happened in many areas. The Marines have negotiated in other areas-apparently because your president has no such skills or judgement.
I could go into many other ways you are wrong, but I do not have time.
Sevenpoint man-Excellent job on the plan. You may be interested in the US Army's War, Strategic Studies Institute (search it on my blog for the link). One of their newer green books from Nov 2005 has several disengagement strategies.
Robert, you sound like a guy who watches too much CNN...I am a recovering CNN fan myself.
I did not appreciate being repeatedly lied to, so I quit watching. Aaron Brown got tired of telling stories too-much to his credit.
I know people who have just returned from Iraq. The Iraqi people do not want us there-no matter how many times Bush says it- I am very sorry, but it is simply not true. I do not appreciate the misuse of the military, my loved ones- for an illegal , ill-conceived, ill-planned war of choice. It is time to pull out, before they have to draft a guy like you...
Recently I received an e-mail from Tom Hayden.
He responded to my exit strategy by saying it was
"very solid, a more detailed version of what many people are considering". In my e-mail to him I expressed my views on the possibility of negotiations with the insurgency that could lead to an American withdrawal with security and honor.
His most recent article answers this and many other questions, that we as activists can look to for guidance in the resolution of this war.
I present it here for your perusal and comment:
Published on Wednesday, January 11, 2006 by The Nation
Pacifying Iraq: Insurgent Scenarios
by Tom Hayden
AMMAN, JORDAN - Iraq's armed national resistance is willing to support an honorable American troop withdrawal and recognize "the interests of the US as a superpower," according to a Baghdad source with intimate knowledge of the insurgents. He was interviewed this week in Amman, where he had driven twenty hours from Baghdad for conversations.
I interviewed this source, who insisted on anonymity, to explore the political aims of the resistance movement against the US occupation. Is theirs only a decentralized military strategy, or is there a shared set of demands that might lead to peace? The source, who is known and respected by several American media outlets, comes from one of Baghdad's once-mixed neighborhoods of Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds and Christians. In his mid-40s, he ekes out a living as a guide and translator for visiting reporters and occasional peace activists. The source spoke with urgency about the need for greater American understanding of the Iraqi resistance, so far faceless in the West.
While recent surveys show 80 percent of Iraqis supporting a US military withdrawal, opposition voices are rarely ever reported in American public discourse. Security conditions do not permit the insurgents to establish an overt political arm, like Sinn Fein in Northern Ireland. Meanwhile, American officials celebrate the large Iraqi voter turnout in the December 15 elections while not acknowledging that most of those same voters favor a US withdrawal. Instead of heeding the Iraqi majority, Newsweek reported that American military officials accused the insurgents of "cynically using the election process" in a new strategy they called"talk and fight."
The United States can be accused of the same designs, continuing its air war and offensive ground operations while attempting to co-opt local insurgents into an alliance with the "coalition" (a k a "occupation" forces against the jihadists linked with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The "sticking point" in this US gambit is the insurgents' demand for a timetable for US troop withdrawal. If the United States secretly decides to withdraw, which is a distinctly remote scenario, an "invitation" might be arranged with a red carpet and flowers. Otherwise, the insurgency will continue to develop in response to the occupation.
While the insurgency is essentially decentralized and local, it seems capable of achieving a political consensus where necessary, as obviously demonstrated in the several-day cease-fire arranged so that Iraqis, including supporters of the insurgents, could vote on December 15. The source from Baghdad, who spoke knowingly of the various local resistance groups, emphasized that a consensus exit strategy already has emerged. It was in this context that he mentioned respecting such US superpower interests as access to oil and avoidance of humiliation. He also informally outlined a proposed framework for ending the conflict, including these steps:
Immediate inclusion of more opposition voices in the current discussion of how to reform the constitution. Groups like the Islamic scholars and clerics, and the newly formed National Dialogue Council, could politically represent the implicit demands of the resistance.
Citizen diplomacy, possibly including direct talks with some resistance leaders, outside of Iraq, if security obstacles can be overcome.
An announced US timetable for troop withdrawals, as voiced by the Cairo conference organized by the Arab League in November, which also endorsed the legitimacy of "national resistance," as opposed to the jihadist path represented by Al Qaeda of Mesopotamia.
A transitional new caretaker government, including representation of the opposition as well as main Kurdish and Shiite parties now controlling the Baghdad regime.
A deadline for "free and democratic" elections for an inclusive parliament.
A peacekeeping force, under the United Nations, composed of units from countries not involved in the occupation--for example, France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, Egypt, Algeria, Sudan, Yemen and Morocco.
Renewed economic reconstruction, including contracts with American countries. As another Iraqi explained, "We don't want to drink our oil. We want to sell it on the market."
Removal of Saddam Hussein and high-ranked Baathists must not erase the Iraqi national state. The new government would determine whom to punish and whom to restore from the Baath era.
Most of Iraq's half-million formal professional army personnel, rendered jobless by a 2003 US decree, would be restored to military service to insure stability and protection in Sunni areas. Recent reports in the New York Times confirm that Sunnis are underrepresented in Iraqi security forces, which are dominated by the Kurdish peshmerga and pro-Iranian Shiite Badr militias.
Failure to accept an agenda along these lines, in the source's view, will guarantee a continued war of national resistance alongside the Zarqawi-inspired terrorism campaign. On the other hand, he said, if the end of occupation is negotiated politically, "the Zarqawi group would shrink and die, and if they didn't all disappear, we would finish them off in six months."
A somewhat similar perspective came from a royal and respected voice, that of Prince Hassan bin Talal, in an interview at his Amman palace. Currently the president of the prestigious Club of Rome, Prince Hassan is from the Hashemite family that once ruled Iraq, and which traces its descent directly from the Prophet Muhammad. Long expected to become Jordan's monarch before his brother, the late King Hussein, made a deathbed decision to revert the succession to his son Abdullah in 1999, Prince Hassan remains widely respected in the region. Recently he published his views in London's Sunday Telegraph, declaring in an essay he co-wrote with former military officials Tim Garden and David Ramsbotham that it is "time to change course" through a "sustained process of dialogue and negotiations to turn the rhetoric of Cairo into reality."
Sitting next to Hassan was his son, the youthful Prince Rashid, who asked the question, "Does the US want a more representative government in Baghdad, which inevitably will be more anti-US, or a friendly, almost-patsy one?" The answer, which I heard over and over during interviews, is that the United States has unleashed, knowingly or not, a sectarian conflict that will divide Iraq into three or more de facto states, mostly under Iranian hegemony. In Prince Hassan's words, the Iranians want to "fan the conflict, not only against the Sunnis but against the Arab Shiites as well."
In the source's analysis, "The US let the pro-Iranians in because they would help attack the Iraqi resistance groups, but now the Iranians are passing the limits set by the Americans." The United States has swung into a damage-control effort after discoveries of death squads and torture centers with links to the Interior Ministry, itself directed by a pro-Iran Badr Brigade leader. Reminiscent of the "tiger cages" in South Vietnam and the paramilitary "301" units in Honduras under previous US occupations, more secret prisons will be uncovered, the source predicted.
My contacts repeatedly asked: Is the de facto dismemberment of Iraq a deliberate American strategy or a blowback based on ignorance, or both? The most reasoned answer may lie in Robert Dreyfuss's new book, Devil's Game, which documents how the United States has flirted with and funded a generation of Islamic extremists as an alternative to secular Arab nationalism, either as a divide-and-conquer strategy or a means to impose privatization of state-run economies. The current Shiite-Kurdish coalition, for example, immediately hiked the price of gasoline after the December election, and a greater privatization of the oil industry is expected. A more strategic danger is that the pro-Iranian elements controlling southern Iraq will expand their power to the Gulf States and Saudia Arabia's oilfields.
The notion that the American military occupation can silence the armed resistance, I was told, is arrogant folly. The claim that the Sunni minority is too small to defy the Shiite-Kurdish majority is the premise of the occupation. But surveys show that two-thirds of Iraqis favor a near-term US withdrawal. Many Shiites, like the rebellious followers of Muqtada al-Sadr, are Arab, not Persian, and favor a unified Iraq. In addition, the Sunni minority will be supplemented by Sunnis from neighboring countries if their existence is threatened. As one former Jordanian minister, Munther Haddadin, told me, "The Sunnis are not really a minority because the Arab League is their counterweight to Iran."
Prince Hassan pledged to take any opportunity to promote a win-win settlement that would include oil guarantees for the West along with real Sunni representation in Iraq's governance. The recent bombings of four Amman hotels underscored his urgency about containing and reversing a conflict that threatens to ignite wider sectarian violence across the region.
The American strategy after December 15 appears to be outreach to the Sunnis to become junior partners in their own occupation, combined with an invisible air war and reliance on "Iraqization" in order to lessen American casualties during the 2006 election season. The only alternative, the source emphasized, is acceptance of talks with opposition Iraqis about ending the unpopular occupation itself.
Former California State Senator Tom Hayden, the Nation Institute's Carey McWilliams Fellow, has played an active role in American politics and history for over three decades. Described as "the conscience of the Senate", he is author of more than 175 Congressional measures and eleven books, including Irish Hunger and his autobiography, Reunion. He is the editor of The Zapatista Reader (Nation Books).
Hi Howard(?),
I've read your plan and I started to read some of your defense in these comments, but unfortunately I think you are being a little naive.
First you are assuming (or hoping that) we have an administration that really wants to solve this problem. If there's one thing that we learned from the World Trade Center attacks, it's that chaos is a good manipulative tool. Chaos creates a common enemy, a distraction from real problems, an opportunity to be a calming force (look like a leader), a scapegoat for existing issues, an excuse to spend more money, a justification for cutbacks on alleged gratuitous spending. Didn't you see Brazil or 1984?
But even if you believed in altruism in government (it most likely doesn't exist anywhere), your naïveté continues in believing that the people with power in Iraq want a solution as you propose. Unless you create three separate states and expel most of the minorities out of each of the three states, you're going to have a civil war as soon as the equalizing force leaves.
If you're just wanting to make a show of it and really look like you're trying to help, then what you propose is not the worst option, but if you want to stop the needless death and maiming of our soldiers, then we should just pack up and go offering asylum in a neutral country to anyone who would like to leave before the massacre escalates.
Hi Avandeg-
Thank you for reading my plan.
I have been called naive many times. I hope to dispel that my aspirations for peace are stronger than the beligerant perceptions of our leaders. I am not after acceptance by the government. I offer a plan that when implemented can create the groundwork for the end to the killing and help in the evolution of a better society for iraq.
I totally reject your jungle analogy and tripartite solution.
Iraq has a vast tradition of cultural and social accomplishments that has sown a seed for change in millions of educated iraqi's. The majority want to handle a transformation to this better society-under conditions of their choosing.
Iraq under my plan will not be a theocracy or a divided country-but a federal republic with representative elements of all groupings.
The call for dividing Iraq in three seperate nations is not the wish of the Iraq people-but is the scheme of the Occupiers-to divide the resources in neat, manageable packets of capital, for expropriated distribution.
No person in Iraq wants or is aiming for civil war.
The reasons given for this fabricated scenario matches the plans of conquest of the imperial powers.
I am aiming to present my plan to enough people and convince enough who have access to power to give it a chance to be implemented.
I will wear the mask of the naive peacemaker to expose the terror mask of war.
I need the help of all those who can spread the word.
Are you in ?
Howard
Sevenpointman:
I applaud your plan and your efforts. I'll do what I can to spread the word.
Thanks for your comment on my blog. It's good to make these connections, so we can all stand together for peace.
...unfortunately I think you are being a little naive. . . .
Didn't you see Brazil or 1984?
We've all read it, we've all seen it.
So what shall we do? Lie down? Acquiese to power? Not even try, because we believe the outcome is preordained?
In my lifetime alone I've seen the end of Jim Crow in the US, the end of apartheid in South Africa, and a dozen other examples of people's movements succeeding.
These freedom fighters were all supposedly naive. They all faced impossible odds.
I agree with much of what Avendeg says. I certainly have no faith in the US govt or some naive belief in its morality. That would be absurd.
But shall we allow them to have their way unopposed? Shall we silence ourselves because the odds are against us - and thus do them a great big favour?
Or shall we be a constant thorn in their side? Gather together others who feel the same, build strength through our numbers and our passion, and work to dismantle their folly?
It's easy to criticize. It's hard to organize. Let's not lament about the chances, let's do the work.
An easy answer to the inertia of the circumstances is to doubt our ability to both change ourselves and the world. Both of these dynamic courses in our individual and social praxis are possible if we are determned to analyse our situation with new eyes and to create new options for our life. The psychology of oppression and death is not inevitable or written in the stars. The precious balancing properties of communithy,giving, healing and human labor, against the negative forces of greed, malfeasance, poverty, violence,patriarchy, class conflict,ignorance and subterfuge, can add vital values of wonder,sustainability, and free association to our lives.
Then we can all restore our world and work for a more promising future-one where war will be only the very,last resort in defense of these sacred values, and not the first choice of power, as an offense against our own existence.
The problem with cease-fires and group cohesion in a tribal area such as Iraq is that most groups are vying for authoritative power.
Also, the psychological make up of the area needs to be taken into consideration, which is what we did during the first Iraq war, and I believe will be found to be in favor of theocratic and or authoritarian rule.
With this and the power struggles that will ensue, Iraq will never be a civil place, or at least will not become a civil place for about fifty to one hundred years from now, when the information age will demolish their primitive belief systems.
Jury Orders Reprimand, No Jail for Soldier
By JON SARCHE, Associated Press Writer 52 minutes ago
FORT CARSON, Colo. - A military jury on Monday ordered a reprimand but no jail time for an Army interrogator convicted of killing an Iraqi general by stuffing him headfirst into a sleeping bag and sitting on his chest.
Chief Warrant Officer Lewis Welshofer Jr. also was ordered to forfeit $6,000 salary and was largely restricted to his barracks and workplace for 60 days.
Welshofer, 43, had originally been charged with murder and faced up to life in prison. But on Saturday he was convicted instead of negligent homicide and negligent dereliction of duty.
On the lesser charges, he had faced a maximum of three years and three months in prison, a dishonorable discharge, loss of his pension and other penalties.
After hearing the sentence reached by the jury of six Army officers, Welshofer hugged his wife. Soldiers in the gallery — many of whom had worked with Welshofer and who had testified as character witnesses — broke into applause.
The sentence now goes to the commanding general, Maj. Gen. Robert W. Mixon. He cannot order a harsher sentence, but could lighten it or set the whole verdict aside, defense attorney Frank Spinner said.
Spinner said he might ask the general the vacate the verdict.
Prosecutors said Welshofer put a sleeping bag over the head of Iraqi Maj. Gen. Abed Hamed Mowhoush, sat on his chest and used his hand to cover the general's mouth while questioning him at a detention camp in Iraq in 2003.
Prosecutors said the general suffocated.
Spinner said he was gratified by Monday's verdict but said his client should never have been charged.
"When you send our men and women over there to fight, and to put their lives on the line, you've got to back them up, you've got to give them clear rules, and you've got to give them enough room to make mistakes without treating them like criminals," he said.
Welshofer said he had "the utmost respect for the decision the panel members came to tonight. ... I'm sure it was difficult for them."
Earlier in the day during the sentencing hearing, Welshofer fought back tears as he apologized and asked the military jury not to separate him from his wife and children by sending him to prison.
"I deeply apologize if my actions tarnished the soldiers serving in Iraq," Welshofer said.
His wife, Barbara, testified that she was worried about providing for their three children if her husband was sentenced to prison, but she said she was proud of him for contesting the case.
"I love him more for fighting this," she said, tears welling up in her eyes. "He's always said that you need to do the right thing, and sometimes the right thing is the hardest thing to do."
Lt. Col. Paul Calvert, also testifying on Welshofer's behalf, said attacks by Iraqi insurgents around the western Iraqi city of al Qaim, the area where Mowhoush was taken into custody, "went to practically none" when Mowhoush died.
Prosecutor Maj. Tiernan Dolan did not question the assertion but suggested Mowhoush's death likely denied coalition forces valuable information. Dolan did not call any witnesses at the sentencing hearing.
Welshofer, dressed in his Army uniform and seated between his attorneys, listened quietly Monday as other witnesses praised his abilities as a solider.
The defense had argued a heart condition caused Mowhoush's death, and that Welshofer's commanders had approved the interrogation technique.
Prosecutors described Welshofer as a rogue interrogator who became frustrated with Mowhoush's refusal to answer questions and escalated his techniques from simple interviews to beatings to simulating drowning, and finally, to death.
############################
This article clearly shows a type of wanton brutality that we as patriotic citizens are fighting against, We strongly feel that justice is being seen, through the eyes of our government and military, as a cruel joke. This defendent beat almost unconsciously an Iraqi prisoner-then water-boarded him until he nearly drowned. When he found out that he wasn't dead yet-he tied a sleeping-bag around his head and sat on him until he suffocated.
Unbelievable !
I am speechless !
THE FIRST SIGN OF FASCISM
A short article by sevenpointman
History becomes incomprehensible when one nation sets it's standards above all the others. This view of exceptionalism is a form of isolation from the ever changing realities of global and international law and governance. No nation,especially in the area where greater communication and participation is becoming more prevalent, can isolate themselves from democratic global decision making and its consequential actions.
A keen observer of recent events will be easily lead to the conclusion that the United States is placing itself in jeopardy, by moving more away from it's
natural democratic roots, towards an early stage
of hegemonic fascism. This word ,fascism, though weighted by the genocide of past totalalitarian states, holds a growth curve that begins in the process of isolation, militarism, disregard for international law, and vengence, displayed by the United States at the present.
The war in iraq-a war of aggression without any basis, against a soverign state that did not attack us, or was not a threat to us-has created an untenable polarity between many groups, nations, and actors, on the cultural-political world stage.
These polarities are deepening and are becoming more dangerous to world peace.
An exceptionalism of this nature divides people and makes compromise, valid alternatives, justified
defenses of freedom, and the cultivation of global moral and humane values, very diffiicult.
This impossible dilemma can only be solved by the forceful activism of the multitudes, against the power of this rising tide of empire, leading, if not
slowed down soon, to the ineveitable succumbing
to a future maturing of the impulses towards a more defined fascism.
This period of our history must be attentive to this drift towards a culture of death based on unassailable national will-power searching for
more victims-because, within a short period of time, we will all be it's victims.
I have to tell you, this is one of the cklearest proposals for dealing with Iraq that I have seen yet. Perhaps THE clearest proposal.
Where we would part company is the notion of keeping the troops there now nearby for violations of the agreement, and the reason for this is simple-there were never enough troops to begin with. To effectvely act as a deterrent to further violence, the troop numbers absolutely have to be dramatically increased, and I do not see that happening.
Jolly roger-
The use of an enclave system is an evolution of the gradual withdrawal aspect of my plan. When the early stages of my plan are implemented,given the slow training of competant iraqi troops, there will be a power vacuum for about six to eight months.
This will be a period when the new iraqi government and military, and its police and security apparatus, will be faced with some resisitence from groups who infiltrated into Iraqi society with an intention to
fight with the insurgency-but also use this insurgency as a force to develop their jihadist aims.
The existence of American and British troops
and the proper training of Iraqi forces, with the guidance of a core of diplomatic peacekeepers, would be a deterrent to this small element who oppose the process of a participatory democracy.
I am not convinced the number who want an Islamic theocratic State is a small one. I actually see a lot of evidence that there are significant numbers of Shi'ites that believe the Islamic theocracy is their only protection against the brutality they knew under the previous regime.
Moqtada, in any case, is here to stay-I don't know how you get around him anymore. And he has a formidable number of men under arms.
I agree with you that many in the Shiite community want to have an Islamic state. But I see this development as part of a movement towards this goal which began in the 1970's. It is a troublesome path.
But I feel that if some autonomy is given to the Sunni's and an effort is made towards compromise by the Kurdish population, than a more pragmatic shift towards a less autocratic system of governance can take place.
But this must be coupled with a process of free access to the economic and cultural resources of iraq by all it's citizens. This means that women and minorities, and viewpoints of secularism must be allowed to express themselves.
As for Moqtada-he has accomplished many positive things for the local populations he serves.
I can only hope that these effort can continue when he becomes part of a democratic movement to liberate Iraq from the Occupation, and also, from the jihadists elements of the insurgency.
Iraq should never be divided into three states.
It's form as a federation of 18 autonomous regions,
working through a federal authority, will lessen
the aspiration towards autocracy, and the cult of personality.
James Madison, Letters of Helvidius, 1793
Those who are to conduct a war cannot in the nature of things, be proper or safe judges, whether a war ought to be commenced, continued, or concluded. They are barred from the latter functions by a great principle in free government, analogous to that which separates the sword from the purse, or the power of executing from the power of enacting laws.
It may happen also, that different independent departments, the legislative and executive, for example, may, in the exercise of their functions, interpret the constitution differently, and thence lay claim to the same power . . . . If the legislature and executive have both a right to judge of the obligations to make war or not, it must sometimes happen . . . that they will judge differently. The executive may proceed to consider the question to-day; may determine that the United States are not bound to take part in a war, and, in the execution of its functions, proclaim that determination to all the world. Tomorrow, the legislature may follow in the consideration of the same subject; may determine that the obligations impose war on the United States, and, in the execution of its functions enter into a constitutional declaration, expressly contradicting the [executive’s] constitutional proclamation.
In what light does this present the constitution to the people who established it? In what light would it present to the world a nation, thus speaking, through two different organs,. . . two opposite languages, on the same subject, and under the same existing circumstances?
In no part of the constitution is more wisdom to be found, than in the clause which confides the question of war or peace to the legislature, and not to the executive department. beside the objection to such a mixture to heterogeneous powers, the trust and the temptation would be too great for any one man; not such as nature may offer as the prodigy of many centuries, but such as may be expected in the ordinary successions of magistracy. War is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement. In war, a physical force is to be created; and it is the executive will, which is to direct it. . . . Hence it has grown into an axiom that the executive is the department of power most distinguished by its propensity to war; hence it is the practice of all states, in proportion as they are free, to disarm this propensity of its influence.
When I started this blog I gave myself the option to write about different topics other than the main thrust of my seven point plan.
I am taking this option now:
BROWN OUT IN THE GARDEN
by SEVENPOINTMAN
I remember sitting behind the basket in the late fifties, at the Old Madison Square Garden, with my father and brother.
The swift moves of Sweetwater Clifton, the bumbling feints and falls of Ray Felix, the gliding
sweeping ballet leaps of Willie Naulls, and best of all the long two-handed arching swish heaves of Richie Guerin. This was a youth well spent.
As I Iook back on those days and the interim between, many fond memories and frustrations, about being a long time Knick fan surface.
But nothing increases my angst more than the present situation. As the evening is beginning and as I prepare myself to watch another Knick game, I ask myself what pleasure can I get from
seeing failure ,and being bored by the same unstable coaching of Larry Brown. I have watched this team,certainly talented and athletic enough to possibly contend in the Eastern conference, be confused and berated by a coach who makes countless mistakes of decision in developing and managing this team. After thirty different starting line-ups, playing odd-ball combinations of players, lengthening and shortening playing time without any reason, not establishing any motion in an offense, and chiding his players to perform when they are not given the training and options to do so, I feel that “Brownie is “not’ doing a heck of a job”. True there have been injuries. True the new players are going through a learning curve. True the contracts of some of the players don’t match their talent and efforts-but these factors call out more for a stable guiding hand with consistent but innovative tactics, to teach confidence and strengthen fundamentals.
I am not sure if it’s burn-out or due to stress, or a result of physical problems, but Larry Brown,
should not be coaching the Knicks for much longer. Of course this must lead, eventually, to eating Brown’s contract. I am sure Dolan will not like this –one bit.
But the writing is on the wall,
We true Knick fans cannot sit through four more years of this.
The Knick players cannot be forced to play under these conditions.
We want to see the raining arcs of threes by Q, the Baby Shaq domination and finesse of Curry,
the cross –over shuffle and sailing shots of Mal, the ever-present grit and leadership of Steph, the
the tenacious courage and skillful panache of Nate, the versatility and gun slinging of Channing ,and the leaping feats of Lee.
Something must be done to make this happen.
So we can have a mature later life well spent.
With the reality of a championship preceding the senility of old age.
A 9/11 Conspirator in King Bush's Court?
Sheehan Wasn't Welcome But a Saudi Accused of Support for al Qaeda Was
by Jeremy Scahill
While Cindy Sheehan was being dragged from the House gallery moments before President Bush delivered his State of the Union address for wearing a t-shirt honoring her son and the other 2,244 US soldiers killed in Iraq, Turki al-Faisal was settling into his seat inside the gallery. Faisal, a Saudi, is a man who has met Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants on at least five occasions, describing the al Qaeda leader as "quite a pleasant man." He met multiple times with Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar. Yet, unlike Sheehan, al-Faisal was a welcomed guest of President Bush on Tuesday night. He is also a man that the families of more than 600 victims of the 9/11 attacks believe was connected to their loved ones' deaths.
Al-Faisal is actually Prince Turki al-Faisal, a leading member of the Saudi royal family and the kingdom's current ambassador to the US. But the bulk of his career was spent at the helm of the feared Saudi intelligence services from 1977 to 2001. Last year, The New York Times pointed out that "he personally managed Riyadh's relations with Osama bin Laden and Mullah Muhammad Omar of the Taliban. Anyone else who had dealings with even a fraction of the notorious characters the prince has worked with over the years would never make it past a U.S. immigration counter, let alone to the most exclusive offices in Washington." Al-Faisal was also named in the $1 trillion lawsuit filed by hundreds of 9/11 victims' families, who accused him of funding bin Laden's network. Curiously, his tenure as head of Saudi intelligence came to an abrupt and unexpected end 10 days before the 9/11 attacks.
"Nobody explained the circumstances under which he left," says As'ad AbuKhalil, author of The Battle for Saudi Arabia: Royalty, Fundamentalism, and Global Power. "We know for sure that he was tasked by the United States government back in the late 1970s and on to assemble the kind of Arab Muslim fanatical volunteers to help the United States and the C.I.A. in the fight against the Soviet communist regime [in Afghanistan]. In the course of doing that, this man is single-handedly most responsible for the kind of menace that these fanatical groups now pose to world peace and security." Yet, there al-Faisal sat on Tuesday as President Bush spoke of his war on terror and Cindy Sheehan was being booked. At one point, the cameras even panned directly on al-Faisal listening intently to Bush.
The 9/11 families' lawsuit charged that al-Faisal secretly traveled to the southern Afghan city of Kandahar twice in 1998 where he met with bin Laden's representatives and Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar. Based on sworn testimony from Taliban intelligence chief, Mullah Kakshar, the lawsuit claimed that al-Faisal allegedly received assurances that al Qaeda would not use "the infrastructure in Afghanistan to subvert the royal families' control of Saudi government." In return, according to the lawsuit, the Saudis promised not to seek bin Laden's extradition or the closing of his training bases. Al-Faisal also allegedly promised Mullah Omar financial assistance. Shortly after the meetings, the Saudis reportedly shipped the Taliban 400 new pickup trucks. According to the London Observer, Kakshar also said that al-Faisal "arranged for donations to be made directly to al-Qaeda and bin Laden by a group of wealthy Saudi businessmen. 'Mullah Kakshar's sworn statement implicates Prince Turki as the facilitator of these money transfers in support of the Taliban, al-Qaeda and international terrorism,'" according to the lawsuit.
Al-Faisal does not deny he traveled to Afghanistan in 1998 for meetings with Mullah Omar, but he insists it was to "convey an official Saudi request to extradite Osama bin Laden." al-Faisal has a long history in Afghanistan. He worked closely in the 1980s with the both the CIA and the mujahadeen that would later form both al Qaeda and the Taliban.
Ultimately, a judge dismissed the 9/11 families' lawsuit against al-Faisal and his cohorts, saying US courts lacked jurisdiction over the matter. But many of those families believe firmly that al-Faisal was connected to the attacks that killed their loved ones. The obvious question is: how does the president justify the ejection of a Gold Star Mother from the State of the Union, while openly welcoming a man believed by hundreds of victims' families to be connected to the attack Bush uses to justify every shred of his violent policies?
During his speech, Bush said, "It is said that prior to the attacks of September the 11th, our government failed to connect the dots of the conspiracy." Perhaps he should have just looked over his wife's shoulder up there in the gallery during the State of the Union.
Jeremy Scahill, a correspondent for the national radio/TV program Democracy Now!, is a Puffin Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute. He can be reached at jeremy(at)democracynow.org.
It’s Munich In America. There Will Be No Normandy.
by David Michael Green
This is it, folks. This is the scenario our Founders lost sleep over. This is the day they prepared us for.
Outside the Philadelphia convention Benjamin Franklin was asked what sort of government he and his colleagues were crafting. His reply? “A republic. If you can keep it.” And that is just the question at issue today. Can we keep it?
Sure, it can sound melodramatic to use the f-word (no, not the one Churlish Cheney hurled at Patrick Leahy), and I have mostly avoided doing so for just that reason. Especially where the politically less informed are concerned, arguing that America is slipping into fascism can be the first and last point they’ll hear you make.
But, nowadays, even George F. Will is worried. You know you’re in a seriously bad place when that happens.
America may not be a fascist country today, but it’s not for want of trying. I have no question but that through Dick Cheney’s dark heart courses the blood of Mussolini. No wonder the damn thing’s so diseased. And I have no doubt that Karl Rove has only admiration and envy for Joseph Goebbels. Hey, why can’t we do that here? (Hint: We are.)
America is not a fascist country (if it was, you wouldn’t be reading this), but pardon me if I don’t defer to Bush defenders and ringside Democrats who consider me hysterical for worrying about the direction in which we’re heading.
These are the same people who’ve spent the last two decades denying the existence of global warming, while we now learn with each passing week how much worse than we had ever imagined is that environmental wreckage. These are the same people who said Iraq would be a cakewalk, and planned accordingly. These are the same people who prepared us for 9/11, the Iraq occupation, Hurricane Katrina and the prescription drug plan, and who have set new records for ineptitude in responding to those crises. These are the people who can’t get body armor on our troops, three years after launching the war, and who are getting flunking grades in terrorism preparation from the 9/11 Commission four years after that attack. These are the same people who have turned a massive surplus into a record-setting debt, and coupled it with equally breathtaking trade deficits. And now they want to cut federal tax revenue even more.
Yes, he is the president, but golly gee, Sargent Carter, he sure seems to make an awful lot of mistakes!
So forgive me if I don’t trust their judgement on matters of rather serious importance. Forgive me if I don’t stand by hoping they’re right as the two hundred year-old experiment in American democracy goes down the toilet. Besides, I thought being a conservative meant taking the prudent course, anyhow. Even if there was only a one in a hundred chance that a grenade was live, would you play with it? Wouldn’t it have been better to have acted ‘conservatively’ with the fate of the planet at stake, and assumed that global warming might be real? And, likewise, shouldn’t we worry about what is happening to American democracy now, while we still can?
The truth is, there is a government in office which seeks such complete power and dominance that even some conservatives have started to notice. Too blind to see the true intentions of this bunch, they can at least figure out that an imperial presidency created by George Bush might one day be inherited by Hillary Clinton (complete with her plans for a revolutionary dope-smoking lesbian Marxist state and global UN domination, enforced by an armada of black helicopters), so now even these fools are getting nervous about where this goes. They know that the only difference between the monarchism our Founders so reviled and contemporary Cheneyism is that the technology of our time allows George Bush to turn George III into George Orwell.
It’s Munich in America, people. We can dream the pleasant dream that if we just stand by quietly while the Boy King gobbles up some of our liberties, he won’t want any more, but that would be a lot like Chamberlain dreaming that a chunk of Czechoslovakia would be enough to appease Hitler. It wasn’t, and it won’t be.
Do I overstate the concern? The New York Times recently editorialized “We can't think of a president who has gone to the American people more often than George W. Bush has to ask them to forget about things like democracy, judicial process and the balance of powers – and just trust him. We also can't think of a president who has deserved that trust less.” The Times should know. Between rah-rah’ing the war for Bush, sitting on the Downing Street Memos as if they were banana import trade policy documents, and covering for Judith Miller while she covered for The Cheney Gang, they have about as much blood on their hands as does Donald Rumsfeld. But if even the Times can work up the concern to print a line like that, we’re in a world of hurt.
And we are, in fact, in a world of hurt. Those shreds of parchment on the floor of the National Archives aren’t from Mrs. Washington’s shopping list, I’m afraid to say.
It is true, of course, that other presidents – even the best of them – have taken enormous liberties with the Constitution, especially during wartime. Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, FDR jailed Americans on the West Coast for the crime of having Japanese ancestry, Truman and Eisenhower stood by while McCarthyism ripped a gaping hole through American civil liberties, and Nixon and his plumbers went to work on his political enemies in the name of national security. Of course, we now look back on those episodes as among the most shameful in American history. But the present crew is even more dangerous for their intentions of creating permanent war to justify permanent repression.
Already they’ve torn large chunks out of the Constitution.
Article One creates the legislative branch, that which the Founders intended to be the most powerful and consequential. Today, we have a president who makes the stunning assertion that he is the “sole organ for the nation in foreign affairs”. This Congress seems mostly to agree, even though the Founders gave them the power to declare war, to fund all governmental activities, to ratify treaties and to oversee the executive. Who, us? Bye-bye Article One.
Article Three creates a Supreme Court to adjudicate disputes (especially over governmental powers) and to protect the Constitution. But BushCo can’t be bothered to follow even the Court’s tentative interventions into due process concerning Guantánamo and beyond. And why should it? By the time they get done with loading the damn thing up with ‘unitary executive’ fifth-column shills like Roberts and Alito, it will be a moot court, just like the ones in law school. Once the Supreme Court becomes a wholly-owned subsidiary of the executive branch (about one vote from now), it’s bye-bye Article Three.
The First Amendment guarantees the freedom to assemble in protest. But protest is a joke in Bush’s America. People are kenneled off into pens so far from the president he is never confronted with any contrary views at all, apart from the odd funeral he has to show up at but Rove can’t script. The halls of Congress are ground zero for American democracy, much boasted about at home and jammed down the throat of the world (except when the results don’t favor American corporate or strategic interests). But go there and sit in the balcony wearing a t-shirt with the number of dead soldiers in Iraq printed on it and see how fast you get a lesson in Bush’s interpretation of the Bill of Rights. And that little display at the state of the union address was no freak event, either. That kind of thing happened all the time during the 2004 campaign. At Bush rallies, people were getting arrested for the bumper-stickers on their cars.
The First Amendment also protects freedom of the press. That freedom has not been eliminated, per se, but it has been effectively neutered beyond effectiveness. Between the White House intimidating most of the press, coopting the rest, stonewalling information requests, planting stories in the American and foreign media, and buying off journalists, today’s mainstream media has too often become a pathetic megaphone for White House lies, and that includes those supposed bastions of liberalism, the New York Times and the Washington Post. Bye-bye First Amendment.
The Fourth Amendment guarantees “against unreasonable searches and seizures” and requires that “no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation”. Can you say “NSA”? “Guantánamo”? “Abu Ghraib”? It’s bad enough that Bush has authorized himself to bug anybody, arrest anybody, convict anybody and silence anybody, but his NSA chief doesn’t even appear to have read the Fourth Amendment. That whole thing about probable cause was lost on him, as he and his president simultaneously trampled the separation of powers and checks and balances doctrines by eliminating two out of three branches of government from their little surveillance loop.
Meanwhile, informed estimates repeatedly assert that the majority of detainees rotting away in Guantánamo are there either because they were standing in the wrong place at the wrong time simply and got swept away like so much garbage into a dustpan, or were reported as al Qaeda so that one Afghan clan could use the US military to burn another. And so there they sit, unable to be charged, to be tried, to exercise habeas corpus, to have representation, to confront witnesses – unable now even to starve themselves to death in protest. If this wasn’t precisely the fear of the Founders when they put this language into the Constitution, then Dick Cheney is a poster boy for the ACLU. Strike the Fourth Amendment.
And take with it the Fifth (no one shall “be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law”), the Sixth (“the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury”, the right “to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense”), and the Eighth, providing against “cruel and unusual punishments”). Boom, boom, boom.
In a disgusting display of legal sophistry, the administration would argue that these provisions don’t apply because of jurisdiction, which of course was the entire purpose for putting their gulag in Guantánamo in the first place. As if it is not American territory since we ‘lease’ it from Cuba. As if Castro could send in the police to clean up the open sore of Bush’s human rights travesty there, and the US could do nothing about it, since it is Cuban land. Right.
But even if Fun With Domestic Jurisprudence is to be their game, the actions of the administration also represent a massive breach of international law, since the Geneva Conventions prohibit precisely these sorts of horrors which the Creature from Crawford has visited upon the poor SOBs caught in his dragnet.
Your scissors are probably getting a bit dull by now, but this means that not only is international law in scraps, but you can also go ahead and cut out Article Six of the Constitution as well, which provides that “all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land”. Ah, how ‘quaint’. How very ‘obsolete’.
Such treaties may be the supreme law in some land, but apparently not in Bush Land. Or, at least not if you don’t mind another cute legal charade, in which a new category of POWs called “unlawful combatants” is fabricated with the intention of rendering – with disingenuousness extraordinaire – the detainees as falling outside the Geneva provisions.
That’s precious, as if a ‘lawful’ Bush all of a sudden got religion for the fine points of international jurisprudence. Except, of course, when it came to the need for obtaining a Security Council resolution to invade Iraq. Except when it comes to the International Criminal Court, which the Bush junta has been desperately trying to undermine at every opportunity (gee, I wonder why, given the Court’s mandate to prosecute war criminals). Except for nuclear nonproliferation. Except for the use of white phosphorus in Falluja. Apparently the only legal distinctions these guys follow are the ones Bush orders Alberto Gonzales, that paragon of legal independence and the rule of law, to create for him out of whole cloth. That international law.
There’s not much left of the Constitution now that these guys have tortured it as if it were some personal project in Lynndie England’s basement. Of course, they’ve made damn sure that the Second Amendment is fully protected, to the point where John Ashcroft wouldn’t investigate the gun purchase records of the 9/11 hijackers. You gotta love that. I wish they gave the rest of the Bill of Rights a tenth of the attention the Second Amendment gets. Heck, for that matter, I wish they’d even interpret the Second Amendment properly. Maybe in my next lifetime.
Meanwhile, arguably the three most brilliant inventions of the Constitution are separation of powers, the guarantee of civil liberties, and federalism. Even the latter – which has least to do with foreign affairs or checking executive power, and therefore has been least assaulted – is under duress as the Bush Gang attack state power any time it strays from their regressive political agenda, for instance with respect to euthanasia, medical marijuana or affirmative action.
In fact, all three of these key constitutional doctrines are suffering under a brutal assault from a regime which finds democracy and liberty fundamentally inconvenient to their aspirations for unlimited power. The administration absurdly claims to be bringing democracy to the Mid-East. (After that whole WMD thing went MIA, and Saddam’s links to al Qaeda proved equally credible, what the hell else were they going to say?). But far from the ludicrous claims that they are agents for the spread of democracy abroad, they are busy unraveling it with furious industry here at home.
It is, I’m afraid, Munich in America, and now we must decide whether to appease the bullies and pray for happy endings, or fight back to preserve a two hundred year-old experiment in democracy. Despite all its flaws and failures, Churchill was still right about it: Democracy is the worst system of governance except for all the others. And that makes it worth fighting for.
But the spot we’re in now is actually worse than Munich, because there will be no Normandy in this war, and no Stalingrad. No country with the deterrent threat of a nuclear arsenal can ever be invaded by another country or group of countries, regardless of the magnitude of the latter’s own military power.
That means we’re on our own, folks. If we flip completely over to the dark side, nobody will be storming our beaches and scrambling up our cliffs to liberate us from our own folly. Hell, if they weren’t so worried about the international menace we represent, they’d probably be laughing at us, anyhow, thinking how richly we deserved the government we got.
But there’s nothing funny about this situation. Hitler dreamed of a thousand year reich, but didn’t count on the resilience of an endless army of Slavs, or the technological prowess of a nation of shopkeepers’ great-grandchildren hammering his would-be millennium down to a decade. If the US goes authoritarian (or worse), on the other hand, who will play Russia or America to our Germany? The answer is no one, and it is not apocalyptic paranoia to fear a very, very long period of unrelenting political darkness, once the curtain comes down.
Is this the beginning of the end for American democracy? Maybe. I have no doubt that unchecked Cheneyism intends precisely that. It’s therefore up to the rest of us to stop it. It’s up to us to say yes to Philadelphia, and no to Munich. Because there will be no Normandy.
Now we find out if we can keep Mr. Franklin’s republic, after all.
David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York. He is delighted to receive readers' reactions to his articles (pscdmg@hofstra.edu), but regrets that time constraints do not always allow him to respond.
What if we had ended sanctions after we fully knew in early 1996, that their were no weapons of mass destruction ?
What if we had stopped bank-rolling muhjadeen
thugs to carry arms to Afganistan to overthrow
the Taliban, and secure the oil-pipeline for our interests, in 1999 ?
What if we had listened to Saddam and the forty-or fifty experts who told us that Islamic fascism is the greatest threat to us ?
What if we had cut a deal-based on insisting on regular and random inspections and some movement toward democratic reforms for an aid package that could have offered enough profit
and immunity, so we could go after those indivdual miltary officiers and secret police,who were the one's most guility of acts of terrorism against the iraqi people? This would have avoided this insane oil-war and put a permanent clamp on the jihadists.
What if we stopped supporting the desert totalitarian theocracies that repress their
people ?
What if would have been a little more even handed in the Israel-Palestinian situtaion, instead of following a knee-jerk pro-zionist policy, in catering to a nuclear
threat ?
What if we had used at least one half of our three-quarters of a trillion defense-security
budget on the needs of our people ?
No Islamic terrorism.
No 9-11.
No Taliban.
No nuclear blackmail.
No more poverty.
This was our future-if we would have taken control of our past.
George Soros, Hillary Clkinton, Nancy Pelosi, Howard Dean, the Shadow Party, MoveOn.org, John Conyers, The Progressice Caucus, The Congressional Black Caucus, the ACLU, NEA, NAACP, Maxine Waters, Lynn Woosley, Russel Feingold, Sheila Jackson-Lee to name a few people and organizations, all have two things in common,socialism and marxism and the Democreatic Party.
Why negotiating with terrorists won't work:
"TWENTY-YEAR PLAN FOR USA
ISLAM TARGETS AMERICA
1. Terminate America’s freedom of speech by replacing it with hate crime bills state-wide and nation-wide.
2. Wage a war of words using black leaders like Louis Farrakhan, Rev. Jesse Jackson and other visible religious personalities to promote Islam as the original African-American’s religion while Christianity is for the whites! Strange enough, no one tells the African-Americans that it was the Arab Muslims who captured them and sold them as slaves, neither the fact that in Arabic the word for black and slave is the same, “Abed.”
3. Engage the American public in dialogues, discussions, debates in colleges, universities, public libraries, radio, TV, churches and mosques on the virtues of Islam. Proclaim how it is historically another religion like Judaism and Christianity with the same monotheistic faith.
4. Nominate Muslim sympathizers to political office for favorable legislation to Islam and support potential sympathizers by block voting.
5. Take control of as much of Hollywood, the press, TV, radio and the internet by buying the corporations or a controlling stock.
6. Yield to the fear of imminent shut-off of the lifeblood of America – the black gold. America’s economy depends on oil, (1000 products are derived from oil), so does its personal and industrial transportation and manufacturing -41% comes from the Middle East.
7. Yell, “foul, out-of-context, personal interpretation, hate crime, Zionist, un-American, inaccurate interpretation of the Quran” anytime Islam is criticized or the Quran is analyzed in the public arena.
8. Encourage Muslims to penetrate the White House, specifically with Islamists who can articulate a marvelous and peaceful picture of Islam. Acquire government positions, get membership in local school boards. Train Muslims as medical doctors to dominate the medical field, research and pharmaceutical companies. Take over the computer industry. Establish Middle Eastern restaurants throughout the U.S. to connect planners of Islamization in a discreet way. Ever notice how numerous Muslim doctors in America are, when their countries need them more desperately than America?
9. Accelerate Islamic demographic growth via:
a. Massive immigration (100,000 annually since 1961)
b. No birth control whatsoever – every baby of Muslim parents is automatically a Muslim and cannot choose another religion later.
c. Muslim men must marry American women and Islamize them (10,000 annually). Then divorce them and remarry every five years – since one cannot have the Muslim legal permission to marry four at one time. This is a legal solution in America.
d. Convert angry, alienated black inmates and turn them into militants (so far 2000 released inmates have joined Al Qaida world-wide). Only a few have been captured in Afghanistan and on American soil. So far – sleeping cells!
10. Reading, writing, arithmetic and research through the American educational system, mosques and student centers (now 1500) should be sprinkled with dislike of Jews, evangelical Christians and democracy. There are 300 exclusively Muslim schools with loyalty to the Quran, not the U.S. Constitution.
11. Provide very sizeable monetary Muslim grants to colleges and universities in America to establish “Centers for Islamic studies” with Muslim directors to promote Islam in higher education institutions.
12. Let the entire world know through propaganda, speeches, seminars, local and national media that terrorists have high-jacked Islam, not the truth, which is Islam high-jacked the terrorists. Furthermore in January of 2002, Saudi Arabia’s Embassy in Washington mailed 4500 packets of the Quran, videos, promoting Islam to America’s high schools--free. They would never allow us to reciprocate.
13. Appeal to the historically compassionate and sensitive Americans for sympathy and tolerance towards the Muslims in America who are portrayed as mainly immigrants from oppressed countries.
14. Nullify America’s sense of security by manipulating the intelligence community with misinformation. Periodically terrorize Americans of impending attacks on bridges, tunnels, water supplies, airports, apartment buildings and malls. (We have experienced this too often since 9-11.)
15. Form riots and demonstrations in the prison system demanding Islamic Sharia as the way of life, not American’s justice system.
16. Open numerous charities throughout the U.S. but use the funds to support Islamic terrorism with American dollars.
17. Raise interest in Islam on America’s campuses by insisting that freshman take at least one course on Islam. Be sure that the writer is a bonafide American, Christian, scholarly and able to cover up the violence in the Quran and express the peaceful, spiritual and religious aspect only.
18. Unify the numerous Muslim lobbies in Washington, mosques, Islamic student centers, educational organizations, magazines and papers by internet and an annual convention to coordinate plans, propagate the faith and engender news in the media of their visibility.
19. Send intimidating messages and messengers to the outspoken individuals who are critical of Islam and seek to eliminate them by hook or crook.
20. Applaud Muslims as loyal citizens of the US by spotlighting their voting record as the highest percentage of all minority and ethic groups in America."
Wow, Devil dog must have a little to much sugar
this morning-after his five-mile goose step.
Hey the studious ways of listing hate-points fashionable in the early 1920's by imprisoned wacko's with mustaches, continues.
But this time lets go after those Muslims.
Intolerance and persistent ignorance of the cultural aspects of different societies has always been the mind-set of bigots.
Those who are afraid of diversity and confrontation with new ideas, always succumb to these vast warped theories of conspiracy.
They are sucked into this anal logic by rabid
baiters of militaristic and abusive thinking.
As they grow up-who ever is in charge, and who is domineering, plays them,transfixes them, polarizes them, and prods them to form opinions based on incredible evidence of crimes committed by every
"other", they are told is our enemy.
Islam has warts.
Some of it's practices are counterproductive to tolerant and humane relationships.
This is a result of it's sectarian and mullah based
misinterpretation of Quranic wisdom.
The true, sacred message of islam has been distorted by power, grinding poverty, and the malfeasance of some of their leaders.
But their is no American take over scheme, that devildog envisions.
No plot to control the world by sharias and suicide bombers.
No cabal of clerics ripping the bible or the torah,
the constitution or the magna carta, out of the pearly-white hands, of Mr. and Mrs American citizen.
Or does this take place anywhere on the globe on such a wide-scale as devildog's cruel and unsubstantiated diatribe indicate.
This imagined crusade is only being floated and set sail by sycophants of battles unwon, against imaginary enemies, to compensate for battles lost
against enemies created by power, on distant shores.
As for socialism and marxism being paired with the Democratic party-the chance of that is about as possible as walking ass-backwards into a seething ,vortexing black hole in space, and coming out with a smile on your face.
Socialism must be grown out of the sweat of labor and the love of diversity.
It must propel this sickened capitiialist planet to be healed by increasing social wealth, human consciousness, and participatory democracy.
In a world that has this enlivened and super rational, and empathetic world-view, the survivial of despots of the governing chamber, the boardrooms. and the blogospheres, will be predicated on facing the other across the table, the room, or the globe, not as an enemy, but as a partner in planetary evolution and individual freedom.
Another Iraq story gets debunked
By Dave Zweifel
March 6, 2006
The Capital Times (Madison, WI)
In November 2001, just two months after the terrorist attacks on New York
and Washington, two high-profile U.S. journalists Chris Hedges of the New
York Times and Christopher Buchanan of PBS' "Frontline" were ushered to a
meeting in a Beirut hotel with a man identified as Jamal al-Ghurairy, an
Iraqi lieutenant general who had fled Saddam Hussein.
The high-ranking Iraqi military officer claimed he had witnessed terrorist
training camps in Iraq where Islamic militants learned how to hijack
airplanes. About 40 foreign nationals were based there at any given time,
he said.
"We were training these people to attack installations important to the
United States," he told the journalists at the meeting arranged by the
Iraqi National Congress.
Reporter Hedges and producer Buchanan found Ghurairy to be very
convincing, worried for his life and very insistent that his face couldn't
be shown on camera. He was accompanied by a well-organized entourage.
A story appeared a couple of days later on the front page of the Times and
then "Frontline" followed with a report on public television. The stories
generated numerous editorials and op-ed pieces and, of course, became the
topic of the week on cable talk shows.
Now, the liberal investigative magazine Mother Jones has exposed the
"general" as a fake.
"The story of Saddam training foreign fighters to hijack airplanes was
instrumental in building the case to invade Iraq," a detailed report in
the March-April issue says. "But it turns out that the Iraqi general who
told the story to the New York Times and 'Frontline' was a complete fake a
low-ranking former soldier whom Ahmed Chalabi's aides had coached to
deceive the media."
The Mother Jones investigator, Jack Fairweather, was even able to track
down a Lt. Gen. Ghurairy in Iraq. He interviewed him in Fallujah and this
Ghurairy said he had never left Iraq, nor had he ever spoken to the U.S.
journalists.
According to the magazine, the Ghurairy tale was one of 108 stories the
Iraqi National Congress and Chalabi, who was exiled from Iraq, planted in
the American and British media between October 2001 and May 2002. Chalabi
is the figure on whom the Bush administration relied for much of the Iraqi
intelligence about weapons of mass destruction and Saddam's supposed
connection with the 9/11 terrorists.
After the war started, the Bush neocons had a falling out with Chalabi,
discovering that much of the information he had provided was fabricated.
They also accused him of spying on the U.S. for neighboring Iran. He has
had a resurgence in Iraq, though, and is now the deputy prime minister in
the new U.S.-sponsored government and apparently back in favor with the
Bush people.
He obviously had a major role in helping sell the war to the American
people. Thanks to the deceptions, which a compliant American press didn't
uncover, some 69 percent of the American public believed that Saddam had a
role in the 9/11 attacks.
Just how hookwinked Americans were is underscored by this Mother Jones
expose.
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Hawks Prevail In Preventing U.S. Troop Withdrawal
by Tom Hayden
The strong possibility that Pentagon commanders might recommend the beginning of American troop withdrawals this week is vanishing, derailed by the Feb. 22 bombing of the Shiite shrine in Samarra as well as the Democratic Party’s default on the war.
The British press has been more forthright in reporting troop withdrawal plans since last September’s peace rallies. Just a month ago [Feb. 2] the London Times announced an “acceleration” of plans by Britain and America for pulling out one-third of their troops this year. On March 5, the Telegraph’s defense correspondent followed up by reporting that “all” British and American troops will be withdrawn in the next 12 months. Two days later, the British commander in Iraq withdrew the withdrawal hints, saying instead that a pullout of most troops might be “reasonable” by summer 2008. [NYT, Mar. 8, 06]. The New York Times says that the “widely expected” announcement of US troop cuts now was “muted.”[NY Times, Mar. 2, 06]
The stated reason, or pretext, for suspending the withdrawal plan was the bombing of the Shiite shrine and several days of sectarian bloodletting at the end of February. The US ambassador delivered the message “just before key US decisions are expected on whether the situation in Iraq has improved enough to allow for a reduction in US forces this year”, the LA Times reported.[Mar 7, 06]
We may never know who blew up the shrine and, with it, the prospects for troop withdrawals. It is assumed that the villains were either deranged Sunnis acting on their own, or al-Zarqawi cadres intent on civil war.
There is another perspective for close observers of dirty wars, the possibility that the bombing was planned and handled by elements of Western counter-terrorism forces. Similar tactics were employed by British agents during the long conflict in Northern Ireland, and heavily-armed British commandos disguised as Arabs were captured in Basra just last year. One of the oldest imperial strategems is to divide and conquer, incite sectarian divisions, and justify military occupation to keep the natives from killing each other. This is precisely the justification for continued war that is heard from those who have admitted the original invasion was a “mistake.”
Bernard Lewis, the leading American “Arabist” authority, himself a former British intelligence officer in the Middle East, and later an advisor to the Democratic hawk Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, has long defended the strategy of dismembering Arab states through violent sectarianism. He calls it “Lebanonization.” A decade ago, as the first Gulf War against Saddam Hussein was underway, Lewis wrote about Arab states that if the central power is sufficiently weakened, there is no real civil society to hold the polity together, no real sense of common identity...the state then disintegrates – as happened in Lebanon – into a chaos of squabbling, feuding, fighting sects, tribes, regions and critics. [Foreign Affairs, fall 1992]
A former director-general of Israel’s foreign ministry, Shlomo Avineri, has expressed similar views more diplomatically. In an op-ed piece titled “Israel could live with a fractured, failed Iraq”, he wrote an Iraq split into three semi-autonomous mini-states, or an Iraq in civil war, means that the kind of threat posed by [saddam] Hussein...is unlikely to rise again. [LA Times, Dec. 4, 05]
The default of the national Democrats, who seemed poised to oppose the war when Rep. John Murtha called for a six-month pullout in December, is about the refusal of leaders to put rank-and-file Democrats first in their thinking. Instead, Democratic consultants obsess for political reasons on erasing any image of “weakness” left over from the days when Democrats at least stood for something. More deeply, those who aspire to the presidency begin to worry personally about weakening the nation’s status as a superpower. Internal divisions among Democratic Party elites, such as the Democratic lobby for Israel, play an unspoken role too. For all these reasons, as a top Democratic “source” explains, “there will not be a unified position on Iraq...there’s a recognition, pragmatically, that [unity] ain’t there, it hasn’t been there, and isn’t going to be there.” [Roll Call, Feb. 21, 2006]
The tragedy is that key Democrats at the Center for American Progress [CAP], headed by former Clinton chief of staff John Podesta, have been promoting a careful but realistic withdrawal plan since last fall, code-named “Strategic Redeployment” to avoid any posture of retreat. The tone is like a hawk’s guide to withdrawal, but substantively it calls for the withdrawal [“drawdown”] of 80,000 US troops this year, beginning as soon as a new regime is installed in Baghdad. The 2006 withdrawals would include all National Guard and Reserve troops. The second phase, beginning in January 2007, would remove the nearly all other troops in the next 12 months, leaving unspecified counter-terrorist units, military advisers, and 14,000 troops re-positioned to Kuwait and the Persian Gulf. The document is strikingly similar to what some commanders have been advising Murtha and others from behind the scenes. The principal author is Lawrence Korb, a Pentagon official under Ronald Reagan.
On the Iraqi side, there also is a proposed withdrawal plan that generally fits the contours of the American “strategic redeployment” proposal. According to reliable sources in Amman, the author is Dr. Khair-eddin Haseeb, a former governor of Iraq in the Sixties. The core provisions of the draft, titled “Iraqi National Initiative to End Occupation of Iraq Unconditionally, Reflecting the Will and View of the Iraqi National Resistance and Other Major Political Forces Opposing Occupation”, are these:
an American declaration of intention to full withdrawal in six months;
a cease-fire by the insurgents during the American withdrawal;
a United Nations-authorized transitional government, pending internationally-supervised elections;
a peacekeeping force composed of countries not involved in the present occupation;
US and UK commitments to compensation in the range of $70 billion US.
permission for US-based contractors to bid on reconstruction contracts.
This document suggests a Sunni nationalist agenda, and will require further dialogue, but it is Arab nationalism, mainly Sunni but also Shiite, that the US is fighting on the battlefield. In addition, according to recent surveys, 45 percent percent of all Iraqis support armed resistance against occupation, while seventy percent support a timetable for withdrawal between six months and two years. If Sunnis constitute only twenty percent of the population, then the demands of the peace proposal must be supported far beyond the so-called Sunni Triangle, though one would never be aware of this from reading the American press.
The “Iraqi National Initiative to End Occupation” document also proves that political negotiations are possible, and have been possible for some while, despite claims by the war camp that there is no “other side” to negotiate with. Negotiating is a process, sometimes indirect, not necessarily representatives sitting down at one table. There is growing evidence that the Iraqi resistance, leaving aside the al-Zarqawi elements, has signficant capacity to coordinate its operations without being represented through a political organization or party. They observed a several-day cease-fire in observance of the recent elections. More recently, “the activities of the resistance are at a halt, now until we have a new government...that’s the information we have from the resistance”, said one tribal source. [LA Times, Feb. 10, 06].
When the political negotiations stalled and bombs went off in Samarra, it was Iraqi religious, military and political forces, not American troops, that restored considerable calm in comparison to the initial counter-attacks. It is at least conceivable that social violence could be minimized and contained during an American pullout, rather than the specter of a post-occupation bloodbath that justifies the perpetual war.
The situation is unpredictable. No one knows at this point what the generals will tell President Bush behind closed doors. When and if the new Iraqi government is established, the issue of troop withdrawals will return, since several of the winning political parties campaigned on a promise to set a withdrawal date. One source tells me that “perhaps they would encourage American withdrawal from the quiescent Kurdish north – though the Kurds would not like to see them go. It seems unlikely that the reduction would reach 40,000 this year. Ten thousand seems the more likely figure, but that is conjecture.” [private communication]
All this is somewhat disorienting for an American peace movement built around the core demand of “out now”. But after three years, the movement continues to make a major contribution, here and abroad, in putting pressure against the key pillars of power. Public opinion supports withdrawal. Thousands of activists continue taking to the streets. Hawkish candidates face huge pressure as they face their constituents. Bush may be facing his “Watergate moment.” Military recruiting is nearing a catastrophic dead-end, and a decision to deploy, rather than reduce, several Army combat brigades will “destroy the all-volunteer Army”, in the words of the CAP report. The “coalition of the willing” has a sagging façade. Establishment heavyweights, not to mention ordinary taxpayers and their congressional representatives, are pondering the trillion-dollar cost of the war recently projected by leading economist Joseph Stiglitz and a team at Harvard.
Anything may happen. The power of the superpower is limited and at-risk. But for now it appears that the long war will continue to the bitter end. An exit strategy is available, but the policy remains no exit.
Documents Show Saddam's WMD Frustrations
By CHARLES J. HANLEY, AP Special Correspondent BAGHDAD, Iraq - Exasperated, besieged by global pressure, Saddam Hussein and top aides searched for ways in the 1990s to prove to the world they'd given up banned weapons.
"We don't have anything hidden!" the frustrated Iraqi president interjected at one meeting, transcripts show.
At another, in 1996, Saddam wondered whether U.N. inspectors would "roam Iraq for 50 years" in a pointless hunt for weapons of mass destruction. "When is this going to end?" he asked.
It ended in 2004, when U.S. experts, after an exhaustive investigation, confirmed what the men in those meetings were saying: that Iraq had eliminated its weapons of mass destruction long ago, a finding that discredited the Bush administration's stated rationale for invading Iraq in 2003 — to locate WMD.
The newly released documents are among U.S. government translations of audiotapes or Arabic-language transcripts from top-level Iraqi meetings — dating from about 1996-97 back to the period soon after the 1991 Gulf War, when the U.N. Security Council sent inspectors to disarm Iraq.
Even as the documents make clear Saddam's regime had given up banned weapons, they also attest to its continued secretiveness: A 1997 document from Iraqi intelligence instructed agencies to keep confidential files away from U.N. teams, and to remove "any forbidden equipment."
Since it's now acknowledged the Iraqis had ended the arms programs by then, the directive may have been aimed at securing stray pieces of equipment, and preserving some secrets from Iraq's 1980s work on chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.
Saddam's inner circle entertained notions of reviving the programs someday, the newly released documents show. "The factories will remain in our brains," one unidentified participant told Saddam at a meeting, apparently in the early 1990s.
At the same meeting, however, Saddam, who was deposed by the U.S. invasion in 2003 and is now on trial for crimes against humanity, led a discussion about converting chemical weapons factories to beneficial uses.
When a subordinate complained that U.N. inspectors had seized equipment at the plants useful for pharmaceutical and insecticide production, Saddam jumped in, saying they had "no right" to deny the Iraqis the equipment, since "they have ascertained that we have no intention to produce in this field (chemical weapons)."
Saddam's regime extensively videotaped and audiotaped meetings and other events, both public and confidential. The dozen transcribed discussions about weapons inspections largely dealt with Iraq's diplomatic strategies for getting the Security Council to confirm it had disarmed.
Scores of Iraqi documents, seized after the 2003 invasion, are being released at the request of the U.S. House Intelligence Committee chairman, Rep. Peter Hoekstra (news, bio, voting record), who has suggested that evidence might turn up that the Iraqis hid their weapons or sent them to neighboring Syria. No such evidence has emerged.
Repeatedly in the transcripts, Saddam and his lieutenants remind each other that Iraq destroyed its chemical and biological weapons in the early 1990s, and shut down those programs and the nuclear-bomb program, which had never produced a weapon.
"We played by the rules of the game," Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz said at a session in the mid-1990s. "In 1991, our weapons were destroyed."
Amer Mohammed Rashid, a top weapons program official, told a 1996 presidential meeting he laid out the facts to the U.N. chief inspector.
"We don't have anything to hide, so we're giving you all the details," he said he told Rolf Ekeus.
In his final report in October 2004, Charles Duelfer, head of a post-invasion U.S. team of weapons hunters, concluded Iraq and the U.N. inspectors had, indeed, dismantled the nuclear program and destroyed the chemical and biological weapons stockpiles by 1992, and the Iraqis never resumed production.
Saddam's goal in the 1990s was to have the Security Council lift the economic sanctions strangling the Iraqi economy, by convincing council members Iraq had eliminated its WMD. But he was thwarted at every turn by what he and aides viewed as U.S. hard-liners blocking council action.
The inspectors "destroyed everything and said, `Iraq completed 95 percent of their commitment,'" Saddam said at one meeting. "We cooperated with the resolutions 100 percent and you all know that, and the 5 percent they claim we have not executed could take them 10 years to (verify).
"Don't think for a minute that we still have WMD," he told his deputies. "We have nothing."
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IN SOLIDARITY WITH THE BRAVE STUDENTS AND WORKERS OF FRANCE.
TO THE BARRICADES TO ALL WHO SUPPORT THEM !
One wonders what would happen if American activists
applied the same passion to it's opposition to Bushism, like the French students did to the youth work law ?
Maybe we could end a war and maybe even end a regime !
I just called a representative of Qwest to thank them for not caving in to the illegal wire-tapping data mining of millions of Americans. These actions must be confronted by trying to find out, through contact with your telephone server, if they can indicate to you if you were on the NSA list. If they refuse for any reason-then you must let them know you are contemplating organizing a class action suit against them. When enough people do this a decision must be made to approach legal experts in the feasability of suing these companies in federal court for domestic spying without legal ground, and on privacy regulations.
I feel we, as activists, must get 1-2 million people to join in on this suit.
If you have any suggestions how to do this contact me.
Since so many people visit your blog, I want to call attention to the Rockridge Institute, a think-tank with which every progressive should familiarize him or herself.
Republicans have been reframing language for decades. Their spin and Orwellian language is very effective.
If you want to get a million people involved on an issue, you have to counter the spin. To counter the spin, you have to reframe the issue. Rockridge explains why and how to do it.
Thanks.
Bumper Progress
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