Under The Same Sun

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October 31, 2004

Shi'ite Migrant Workers Hotel Bombed in Tikrit

This incident is an example of the kind of anti-Shi'a undercurrent that goes unnoticed here: somebody in Tikrit launched a rocket against a hotel housing poor Shi'ite migrant workers, killing 15.

At least one rocket hit a hotel used by migrant workers in Saddam Hussein's home town of Tikrit on Sunday, killing 15 Iraqis and wounding about eight, witnesses said. U.S. forces surrounded the hotel, which is around 800 meters away from an American base in the city. The bodies pulled from the rubble were apparently those of Shi'ite workers from the south who came to make a living in the mostly Sunni Muslim region, a cameraman working for Reuters Television said. ... Tikrit, 110 miles north of Baghdad, became a provincial capital during Saddam's rule. Many poor Kurds and Shi'ites still go to work there.

Now, "hotels" housing migrant workers are usually not what Westerners think of when they hear the word hotel. More often than not, they are crowded squalors. Whoever took aim there meant to kill. Over here, this kind of news item disappears as one more bombing or other in Iraq. I really doubt that anyone in Iraq misses the fact that it was religious targeting.

Posted by zeynep at 06:46 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 28, 2004

[If All You Do is] Vote, They Die

I see that Nader's campaign page has linked to Vote Pact. Frankly, I think it's a sign of political ineptness that it took this long for him to recognize that the realities of the first-past-the-post, winner-takes-all system we have in this country makes it necessary to consider strategic voting. I know he was asked about this at the very first press conference that he announced his candidacy back in spring so he certainly didn't have to wait until the week before the election to actually take it up at least on his website.

Readers of this page know that I harbor no illusions about Kerry. I do, however, wish that he wins rather than Bush if for no other reason that it will send a terrible, terrible message to the rest of the world if Bush wins an election. Right now, most people around the world believe that, in general, Americans don't support these immoral policies and that Bush is only president because he stole the election. Frankly, I think we are more complicit in this crime than that charitable interpretation. But, if Bush were to actually win an election -- rather than steal it a second time, certainly a strong possibility -- we might lose any semblance of connectedness to the rest of the planet's citizenry. After the World Trade Center attacks, Le Monde ran a "We're All Americans" headline. People around the world watched the towers burn and cried for the victims. Yes, sure, Bush is disliked globally. However, many people around the world distinguish between the American people and this administration. A Bush election victory would change that.

Put briefly, Vote Pact is the idea that you find a reluctant would-be Bush supporter and make a pact to both vote for third party candidate of your choice -- since it takes one vote away from both Kerry and Bush, the only winners are the third parties, currently completely erased by the electoral system. Absentee ballots would allow people to sit down and verify each others pledge.

But, more importantly, I think something is wrong if who to vote for is your biggest decision this year. Election's have become a charade to give people the illusion of participation while all real means of participation are curtailed further and further. I can certainly understand people voting for Kerry in non-swing states. But it's a bit like what they say about saving a life -- if you save it, you're responsible for it. Or the rule attributed to Pottery Barn (that Pottery Barn vehemently denies is their policy) -- you break it, you own it. Many people are voting for Kerry because they are against the war. I hope those people will be very actively engaged in making sure Kerry does not carry out his campaign promises such as escalating the bombing of Fallujah and Ramadi; something he criticized Bush for not doing enough of.

And obviously, voting for an anti-war candidate like David Cobb does not absolve us of our responsibility in curtailing our government's immorality. No matter who wins, that's our government. That's the machine. Are we going to be cooperative little clogs in the machine or are we going to at least try our best to make it stop? The substantive question isn't whether or not you're voting your conscience on Election Day; the real question is whether you have your conscience guiding you every other day. Some get out the vote campaigns have been using the slogan Vote or Die. The unfortunate truth of the matter is if all we do is vote, they will continue to die.

Posted by zeynep at 11:33 PM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

Killing Fields

Under the Same Sun reader Bob flags this very important story:

A survey of deaths in Iraqi households estimates that as many as 100,000 more people may have died throughout the country in the 18 months since the U.S.-led invasion than would be expected based on the death rate before the war.

...

Designed and conducted by researchers at Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University and the Al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, the study is being published Thursday on the Web site of The Lancet medical journal.

The survey indicated violence accounted for most of the extra deaths seen since the invasion, and airstrikes from coalition forces caused most of the violent deaths, the researchers wrote in the British-based journal.

"Most individuals reportedly killed by coalition forces were women and children," they said.

...

The most common causes of death before the invasion of Iraq were heart attacks, strokes and other chronic diseases. However, after the invasion, violence was recorded as the primary cause of death and was mainly attributed to coalition forces — with about 95 percent of those deaths caused by bombs or fire from helicopter gunships.

...

Twelve of the 73 violent deaths were not attributed to coalition forces. The researchers said 28 children were killed by coalition forces in the survey households. Infant mortality rose from 29 deaths per 1,000 live births before the war to 57 deaths per 1,000 afterward.

...

"This isn't about individual soldiers doing bad things. This appears to be a problem with the approach to occupation in Iraq," Roberts said.

And, also, the lead author acknowledges he's trying to get the candidates to pledge to protect Iraqi lives, thus the timing of the release before the election:

Les Roberts, the lead researcher from Johns Hopkins, said the article's timing was up to him.

"I emailed it in on Sept. 30 under the condition that it came out before the election," Roberts told The Asocciated Press. "My motive in doing that was not to skew the election. My motive was that if this came out during the campaign, both candidates would be forced to pledge to protect civilian lives in Iraq."

The numbers are much worse than what I had thought they would be. I'll post more as the full report becomes available. Infant mortality is almost double that of the sanctions era. It's hard to know what to say.

Posted by zeynep at 06:53 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

My Calculator Ran Out of Zeroes

New Audit Critical of Halliburton Work in Kuwait:

The audit by the Inspector General for the Coalition Provisional Authority, said a random sample of 3,032 records of items valued at more than $3.7 million, projected KBR could not account for 42.8 percent, or 1,297, of these goods.

Missing weapons, missing prisoners, missing goods... What's the big deal. The weapons we claimed were there didn't exist and the ones that did exist we don't care about. Missing prisoners, they're all terrorists anyway. And missing goods. It's not like we don't have money to burn: check out the latest $260 million plane, "designed to fight a potential Soviet enemy that no longer exists, and a Third World War that - if it ever happens - will be very different from what could have been imagined in 1981." We apparently have 277 orders on these, my calculator ran out of zeros. Done by hand, the total cost looks like $72,020,000,000 unless I missed a zero or two.

Some years ago there was a serious attempt in the Congress to scrap the whole project, especially as the revised cost exceeded four times the original estimate.

It failed largely because of pressure from military contractors and labour unions in states that will directly benefit from this multi-billion dollar programme.

The introduction of the new fighter jet comes in the same week that its manufacturer, Lockheed-Martin, announced a 40% rise in profits as it processes orders for its next generation of fighter aircraft, the F-35.

Posted by zeynep at 06:39 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

October 27, 2004

Equal Pay for All Mercenaries! Justice Now!

Under the Same Sun reader Ripley brings up another instance of the examplary record of the occupation in helping solve the unemployment problems of the unsavory remainders of ex-dictatorships of the world. This bunch is Pinochet's Chile:

The US is hiring mercenaries in Chile to replace its soldiers on security duty in Iraq. A Pentagon contractor has begun recruiting former commandos, other soldiers and seamen, paying them up to $4,000 (£2,193) a month to guard oil wells against attack by insurgents. Last month Blackwater USA flew a first group of about 60 former commandos, many of who had trained under the military government of Augusto Pinochet, from Santiago to a 2,400-acre (970-hectare) training camp in North Carolina.

From there they will be taken to Iraq, where they are expected to stay between six months and a year, the president of Blackwater USA, Gary Jackson, told the Guardian by telephone.

"We scour the ends of the earth to find professionals - the Chilean commandos are very, very professional and they fit within the Blackwater system," he said.

In case you're wondering where you remember the name Blackwater, the mercenary firm doing the hiring -- their employees are implicated in the Abu Ghraib torture scandal.

Now, here's my question. Where's the justice in this? Why are members of the unit responsible for gunning down school children in Soweto are being offered salaries as little as $1,000 and would-be mercenaries from El Salvador being offered $1,700 -- while commando's who had trained under Pinochet are being offered as much as $4,000? Since Bremer signed a bunch of orders just before his performace art piece called "transfer of sovereignty," isn't it fair for progressives to ask why no equal pay for equal work provisions were included in these orders? After all, if the man can ban the honking of horns and lift controls on capital flight, why couldn't he ensure South African mercenaries --who have a track records as fine as Pinochet's goons-- received a fair piece of the action?

Posted by zeynep at 03:12 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

October 26, 2004

Iraqis With Disabilities Demonstrate: Let Her Go

Caption: "A few hundred disabled Iraqis holding banners and posters demonstrate outside the CARE international offices in Baghdad. Several hundred disabled Iraqis on crutches and in wheelchairs begged kidnappers to release British-Iraqi aid director Margaret Hassan, saying their lot has worsened since her abduction a week ago."

Mustafa Ahmed, 12.

Posted by zeynep at 08:13 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Apartheid Over? Need a Job? Iraq Awaits You.

Just what Iraq needs, South African mercenaries:

Fat pay as high as ten times of wage earned at home has allured dozens of South Africa's special-task police to Iraq to work as security personnel for the country's interim government and the coalition forces, South African media reported on Tuesday.

The South African Police Services (SAPS) elite Special Task Force has lost 28 members to Iraqi coalition force recruiters fromits Pretoria base in the past 18 months, with similar numbers leaving the Durban and Cape Town bases, Pretoria News reported.

The newspaper said the Special Task Force "is facing a crisis,"because it is believed nearly 60 percent of its active task force members were lured away throughout the country.
...

The latest victims were former soldier Johan Botha and former policeman Louis Campher, who worked for Omega Risk Solutions, a security company to protect construction workers in Iraq. They died in an attack outside Baghdad on Oct. 12.

Here's a brief nugget from the history of this "Special Task Force" that tells you most of what you need to know:

In 1975, the SAP [South African Police] established an elite anti-terrorist unit known as Unit 19 or the Special Task Force. The Special Task Force played an important role in the training of the police Riot Units established at more or less the same time. Based in several centres around the country, its recruits were drawn largely from those with counter-insurgency training. Thus, for example, Colonel Theunis 'Rooi Rus' Swanepoel, veteran of the sabotage squad and Ongulumbashe, was drafted into Soweto on 16 June 1976 to command a riot unit which was responsible for a high number of civilian casualties. Interviewed in the 1980s about the operations of his unit in Soweto, he stated that he regretted only not using more force. "You can only stop violence by using a greater amount of violence".

You may remember that this protest was instigated by the Apartheid government's order that Afrikaans be mandated as the language of instruction at black schools. Here's the his lifeless body of thirteen year old Hector Peterson, fatally shot by members of this unit on that day:

And here are the questions from that day, still with us in many places of the world including Iraq:

And to illustrate how far we've come along, here's how the famous travel guide Fodor's website describes that day (with an official death toll of 23, although many believe it was in the hundreds):

The march turned nasty quickly. The protesters, mostly young students, got somewhat overexuberant, and so, too, did the police. The police started firing into the youthful crowd.

Got that? The protesters got "over"exuberant, so did the police. We all had a bit of a hangover the next day, you know.

Posted by zeynep at 10:13 AM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

October 25, 2004

Fifty-first state weighs in

Fifty-first state weighs in:

In a survey of 1,285 Iraqis, 58.6 percent said the American elections didn't matter to them. Many said the election process was fixed and that U.S. policy toward Iraq wouldn't change no matter who won.

Posted by zeynep at 09:39 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 24, 2004

Is Zarqawi Trying to Start a Civil War in Iraq?

It has been a constant refrain among apologists for the occupation that "There Will be A Civil War if We Leave" -- and I've tended to largely dismiss the claim as it got thrown upon the dwindling heap of discarded excuses and pretexets. The case seemed even weaker as Iraqis united against the occupation, with Shiite mosques taking up food collections for besieged Fallujuah, and Fallujah residents in turn rushing to bombarded Najaf. In fact, resistance to colonial occupation is probably the most common means of nation formation and cohesion outside of the Western world. There is, and remains, the question the Kurdish population which is very understandably weary and wary of remaining within Iraq. But, other than that, my impression had been that the threat of secterian explosion had been overexaggrated.

However, I think growing evidence suggests that it should be seriously considered whether Jamaat al-Tawhid and Jihad --the group claiming affiliation with Zarwawi which recently renamed itself to "al Qaida of Jihad in the Land of Two Rivers" in what seems to be an attempt to suck up to Bin Ladin and shore up its legitimacy-- is trying to ignite a civil war under the guise of resisting the occupation. The latest execution style killing of 50 Iraqi army recruits for which the group has claimed responsibility continues the trend of targeting Shiites under the guise of resisting the occupation. This trend probably remains relatively unnoticed in the United States because news stories report car bombings as occurring in "Baghdad" without much mention to the religious characteristics of the neighborhood or the victims. The latest mass killing was a targeted, pre-planned ambush, they knew who they were going to kill so they must have known this too:

A senior security official, declining to be named, said most of the soldiers were from poor families in the mainly Shi'ite Muslim cities of Basra, Amara and Nassiriya in southern Iraq.

Rememeber the previous outrage, the murder of 35 children who had lined up to collect candy at the opening ceremony of a sewer plant? That one was in Amal, another poor Shiite neighborhood. And remember the earlier bombings targeting Shiite Ashura worshippers which killed 185, or the car bomb in Basra which blew up a school bus full of kids?

And this extensive targeting of Iraqi military recruits does not really make sense. By all accounts, most recruits and most of Iraqi army and police are very reluctant to do America's bidding. They balked at the idea of fighting in Fallujah and they continually balk at orders to attack their own countrymen. Here's a typical comment from a recent article in the NY Times where the marines echo common refrain among U.S. military about the Iraqi forces:

In this guerrilla war, the marines said, strict rules of engagement have kept their hands tied. They said the Iraqi police and National Guard are unhelpful at best and enemy agents at worst, raising doubts about President Bush's assertion that local forces would soon help relieve the policing duties of the 138,000 American troops in Iraq.

Does that sound like the marines are describing a force which the people of Iraq would approve the killing of its unarmed members, execution style, with a bullet to the back of the head as they laid on the ground? I really doubt such actions are popular. In fact there was a poll about six months ago --I'll post it when I dig it up-- that showed that there was general support among the Iraqi populace for attacking the occupation forces but not for attacking Iraqi police. All that may well change if Ayad Allawi manages to reforge a version of Saddam's rule --and there were some inklings of that in the recent attack on Najaf -- but that is yet to be seen in the future.

And this would all make sense with Jamaat al-Tawhid and Jihad's thinking. The "Tawhid" in their name means monotheism and it's can be interpreted as a code word for "Not Shiite" -- a bit like Bush saying Dred v Scott to mean Roe v Wade. Some Sunni see the shiite reverance for Ali to be beyond acceptable limits, and accuse them of worshipping Ali on the same plane as the Prophet, or even, God -- and prolific professions of monotheism can be one way of expressing disgust at Shiism. As pointed out by Empire Notes, this could sow the seeds for a real civil war.

Here's the part of the letter purported to have been written by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to Osama Bin Ladin "analyzing" the Shiite population of Iraq:

3 [sic]. The Shi`a

[They are] the insurmountable obstacle, the lurking snake, the crafty and malicious scorpion, the spying enemy, and the penetrating venom. We here are entering a battle on two levels. One, evident and open, is with an attacking enemy and patent infidelity. [Another is] a difficult, fierce battle with a crafty enemy who wears the garb of a friend, manifests agreement, and calls for comradeship, but harbors ill will and twists up peaks and crests (?). Theirs is the legacy of the Batini bands that traversed the history of Islam and left scars on its face that time cannot erase. The unhurried observer and inquiring onlooker will realize that Shi`ism is the looming danger and the true challenge. “They are the enemy. Beware of them. Fight them. By God, they lie.” History’s message is validated by the testimony of the current situation, which informs most clearly that Shi`ism is a religion that has nothing in common with Islam except in the way that Jews have something in common with Christians under the banner of the People of the Book.

From patent polytheism, worshipping at graves, and circumambulating shrines, to calling the Companions [of the Prophet] infidels and insulting the mothers of the believers and the elite of this [Islamic] nation, [they] arrive at distorting the Qur’an as a product of logic to defame those who know it well, in addition to speaking of the infallibility of the [Islamic] nation, the centrality of believing in them, affirming that revelation came down to them, and other forms of infidelity and manifestations of atheism with which their authorized books and original sources -- which they continue to print, distribute, and publish -- overflow.

Let me say that I'm really suggesting the question; analysis of this matters requires a lot more expertise and research on the subject than I possess or have done. The first thing would be to map the mass bombings not done by the United States that targeted Iraqi civilians --like the Ashura or Basra bombings-- and see where they fell. The second thing would be to look at targeted killings Iraqi army recruits and map if they are overwhelmingly Shiite. Frankly, I don't know if Abu Musab al-Zarqawi exists as a person, for all I know it's just a name picked up by Jamaat-al Tawhid and Jihad as a convenient leader persona. But that's not really the question: some group is consistently targeting the Shiite under the cover of occupation resistance, and this group is doing it in the most psychologically provacative manner: killing hundreds of worshippers at Ashura, killing dozens of children in Basra and in Alam, executing a bus full of unarmed recruits on their way home.

This doesn't change my opinion: we should withdraw as soon as possible, making it as easy as possible for a transition force to help keep the peace while we're leaving. It's not like we've been a positive force for safety or security for Iraq, let alone democracy and sovereignty. The latest blatant act demonstrating our lack of interest in allowing Iraq resume sovereignty or practice democracy, i.e. our refusal of Muslim troops to help the United Nations organize actual elections in January, speaks volumes to our intent and our role.

Posted by zeynep at 07:58 PM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

Thank God Our Leaders Are Completely Different From Saddam Hussein

"The thing that separates us from the enemy is our respect for human rights" -- that's Sen. John McCain talking about the latest reports that CIA has removed 'unidentified prisoners' out of Iraq -- contrary to international law, Geneva Conventions and who knows how many other treaties.

Yeah.

Posted by zeynep at 02:54 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

What's a Few Billion Between Friends?

Time magazine has an insider account of how cronyism works in day-to-day practice:

Then several representatives from Halliburton entered. Greenhouse, a top contracting specialist for the Army Corps of Engineers, grew increasingly concerned that they were privy to internal discussions of the contract's terms, so she whispered to the presiding general, insisting that he ask the Halliburton employees to leave the room.

Once they had gone, Greenhouse raised other concerns. She argued that the five-year term for the contract, which had not been put out for competitive bid, was not justified, that it should be for one year only and then be opened to competition. But when the contract-approval document arrived the next day for Greenhouse's signature, the term was five years. With war imminent, she had little choice but to sign. But she added a handwritten reservation that extending a no-bid contract beyond one year could send a message that "there is not strong intent for a limited competition."

Greenhouse seems to have got nothing but trouble for questioning the deal. Warned to stop interfering and threatened with a demotion, the career Corps employee decided to act on her conscience ... [and] last week sent a letter—obtained by TIME from congressional sources—on her behalf to the acting Secretary of the Army. In it Kohn recounts Greenhouse's Pentagon meeting and demands an investigation of alleged violations of Army regulations in the contract's awarding. (The Pentagon justified the contract procedures as necessary in a time of war, saying KBR was the only choice because of security clearances that it had received earlier.) Kohn charges that Greenhouse's superiors have tried to silence her; he says she has agreed to be interviewed, pending approval from her employer, but the Army failed to make her available despite repeated requests from TIME.

You know the rest, Halliburton makes big bucks but fails to deliver the services, the deliverables -- or even the receipts at times. But what's a a few billion between friends. We'll forget about it this time, just don't do it so visibly again, okay?

According to the report, Kellogg Brown & Root so far has billed about $12 billion in Iraq, and about $3 billion of that remains disputed by government officials.

The U.S. Army is laying the groundwork to let Halliburton Co. keep several billion dollars paid for work in Iraq that Pentagon auditors say is questionable or unsupported by proper documentation, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.

...

The Journal also cited Pentagon records showing that $650 million in Halliburton billings are deemed questionable. An additional $2 billion is considered to have insufficient paperwork to justify the billing, the report said.

Also, last week, the L.A. Times had a very good piece about Halliburton in specific but well worth reading as an example of how the myriads of decisions taken by the government each day distribute wealth and power to the few and the chosen. Frankly, I should also say that I think Halliburton is but one highly visible example due to its connection to Dick Cheney, and that it's role in the war is a bit overblown by most antiwar analysts -- although one could argue that this is justifiable since it is the most recognizable face of corporate cronyism in the U.S. today. The Halliburton case is also worth looking at detail because we have more data about it than almost any other such example.

Posted by zeynep at 02:36 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

October 23, 2004

We Need Cheaper Lives

It's a sad truth of the current occupation of Iraq that the only kind of human cost that has a political effect is lives of Westerners. Unsurprisingly, the war-mongerers have been looking around for cheaper lives. Central America --long a victim of our brutal campaigns-- seems to be as good a place as any:

For many Salvadorans, the newspaper ad seemed too good to be true: A U.S. company willing to pay experienced security guards a minimum of $1,700 a month to work outside the country. Never mind that it was Iraq.

Hundreds showed up for the interview, and few were dissuaded by the prospect of working in a nation now infamous for beheadings of foreigners by terrorist groups.

"No one lives forever," said Saturnino Hernandez Castilian, 40, the father of four children. "God says how far I am going to get. We may die here or we may die there. If we survive we are going to benefit. If we die, our family will be OK."

The company provides insurance, so if the guards are wounded or killed, their relatives will be taken care of.

Many of Iraq's recent victims have been private contractors from poor nations, lured by high wages. But as violence increases in Iraq and nations like Bulgaria and the Philippines urge their citizens to avoid working there, private contractors are looking toward some Latin American countries, where kidnappings are common and war is nothing new.

Which brings me to the buzz of the week, the draft. Frankly, while hiring large numbers of mercenaries from poor countries seems quite likely, I don't think there is any chance that either Kerry or Bush --or any American president, barring a very significant change in world circumstances-- would even think about reinstating the draft, the one thing that is sure to wake the shopping masses. And places like El Salvador, Chile and Colombia --considered likely places for recruitment-- are perfect, aren't they? They've suffered thorugh brutal civil wars and/or military dictatorships, with a lot of help from us, so have a large supply of ex-paramilitaries, soldiers and plain old poor people who know how to use a gun. And many are desparate for a job that would allow them to lift their family out of poverty but have very few opportunities to do so. And while our media will mourn every American soldier killed in Iraq --listing their name, presenting their face, interviewing their mourning family--, the Iraqis, the Nepalese, the Salvadorans, [fill in name of brown people] are a large undifferentiated mass of humanity that garner little to no sympathy or attention from this side of the line.

And, sad to say, these people will be in a different position than the Nepalese cooks lured to Jordan, kidnapped to Iraq to work for the occupation, re-kidnapped and killed by terrorists claiming to oppose the occupation. It's one thing to take a miserably underpaid job as a cook or a cleaner with an oppressive institution because it's the only way to put food on your family's table. It's another to pick up a gun for $1,700 a month as a part of an imperial power's military in an occupation.

In any case, I suspect whoever has no compulsion blowing up Iraqi police and national guard recruits will have even less compulsion blowing up these people by the hundreds -- and their deaths will hardly register to anyone but their widow and their orphans. Think again, which is more likely: drafting the young ones of the most privileged, pampered, protected people on earth or purchasing large numbers of mercenaries from the brown, battle-hardened, desparate masses of the world?

All that said, I'm slightly pleased that young people are scared of the draft even as I think they are underestimating how valuable keeping them quiet, acquiescent --and shopping-- is to the political system. There are many things they should be scared of that they are apparently not; a false scare here and there might remind them of the instict.

Posted by zeynep at 06:34 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

October 21, 2004

He Can Shoot! He can Kill!

The goose was armed, strong and not wearing a loin-cloth:

Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry said he bagged a goose on his swing-state hunting trip Thursday, but his real target was the voters who may harbor doubts about him.

Kerry returned after a two-hour hunting trip wearing a camouflage jacket and carrying a 12-gauge shotgun, but someone else carried the bird he said he shot.

...

Kerry adviser Mike McCurry said it's important in the final days of the campaign that voters "get a better sense of John Kerry, the guy."

That means the Democratic senator is spending some of the dwindling time before Election Day hunting, talking about his faith and watching his beloved Red Sox.

Tough enough to kill a goose now and tough enough to have killed a "gook" back then: the credentials our presidential candidates try flaunt in order to appeal "to voters who may harbor doubts." Don't you feel reassured?

Speaking of Abu Ghraib convictions today, let me take the opportunity to publish more of young John Kerry's testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Commitee on the issue of responsibility and guilt in atrocities in response to a question of Lieutenant Calley of the My Lai massacre:

Senator Pell: ... Finally, in connection with Lieutenant Calley, which is a very emotional issue in this country, I was struck by your passing reference to that incident.

Wouldn't you agree with me though that what he did in herding old men, women and children into a trench and then shooting them was a little bit beyond the perimeter of even what has been going on in this war and that that action should be discouraged. There are other actions not that extreme that have gone on and have been permitted. If we had not taken action or cognizance of it, it would have been even worse. It would have indicated we encouraged this kind of action.

Mr. Kerry: My feeling, Senator, on Lieutenant Calley is what he did quite obviously was a horrible, horrible, horrible thing and I have no bone to pick with the fact that he was prosecuted. But I think that in this question you have to separate guilt from responsibility, and I think clearly the responsibility for what has happened there lies elsewhere.

I think it lies with the men who designed free fire zones. I think it lies with the men who encourage body counts. I think it lies in large part with this country, which allows a young child before he reaches the age of 14 to see 12,500 deaths on television, which glorifies the John Wayne syndrome, which puts out fighting man comic books on the stands, which allows us in training to do calisthenics to four counts, on the fourth count of which we stand up and shout "kill" in unison, which has posters in barracks in this country with a crucified Vietnamese, blood on him, and underneath it says "kill the gook," and I think that clearly the responsibility for all of this is what has produced this horrible aberration.

Now, I think if you are going to try Lieutenant Calley then you must at the same time, if this country is going to demand respect for the law, you must at the same time try all those other people who have responsibility, and any aversion that we may have to the verdict as veterans is not to say that Calley should be freed, not to say that he is innocent, but to say that you can't just take him alone, and that would be my response to that

I wonder what that young man would say if he were to learn that, three decades later, he would run a presidential campaign on the premise of that his actions in Vietnam constituted a proper defense of his country. One of the favorite soundbites of current Kerry is just that: "I defended this country as a young man and I will defend it as President," Kerry keeps repeating. Here's what he had to say about whether America needed defending from Vietnam then:

In our opinion, and from our experience, there is nothing in South Vietnam, nothing which could happen that realistically threatens the United States of America. And to attempt to justify the loss of one American life in Vietnam, Cambodia or Laos by linking such loss to the preservation of freedom, which those misfits supposedly abuse, is to use the height of criminal hypocrisy, and it is that kind of hypocrisy which we feel has torn this country apart.

Que manly, shooting a goose from a distance with a 12 gauge. Almost as manly as bombing a city from a helicopter gunship. Not as manly as giving the orders though, that's the most macho of them all.

I wonder the bird he killed was a Canada Goose as those often mate for life.

In addition to hunting, Kerry will also talk about faith, the Red Sox, price of milk, NASCAR, low-carb diets, Britney Spear's marriage and whatever else his advisors think that he should talk about:

The last time Kerry went hunting was October 2003 in Iowa, a state where he was trailing in the Democratic primary but came from behind to win.

Hunting is of particular interest in several of the states that are still up for grabs in the presidential race. Kerry bought his hunting license last Saturday in one of the most critical — Ohio, which has 20 electoral votes. ... Kerry plans to deliver a new speech on faith this weekend in Florida, McCurry said, focusing on an explanation of his values. "The fact that Senator Kerry is a person of faith is something that might help voters who are undecided," McCurry said. ... At a town hall meeting Saturday in Xenia, he talked about taking his rosary into battle during the Vietnam War. "I will bring my faith with me to the White House and it will guide me," Kerry said.

On a practical note, I'm not even sure this charade is good political strategy. This is exactly why very few people like Kerry: he will pander to no end without a hint of shame. Is this really the week to remind people Kerry will pull any stunt deemed necessary by his advisors to give you the impression that he is indeed what they think you want him to be?

Posted by zeynep at 12:37 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

"Chip" Gets Eight Years, Pending Appeal

Considering everyone else sentenced so far received a year or less, this is a bit of departure:

"Staff Sgt. Ivan "Chip" Frederick, 38, an Army reservist from Buckingham, Va., was also given a reduction in rank, forfeiture of pay and a dishonorable discharge."

In the meantime, the Army -mirabile dictu- discovered that lack of training wasn't the issue here and, by implication, individual soldiers can and should make moral judgements:

Army Prosecutor Major Michael Holley told the court it was a simple case of right and wrong.

"He's an adult and capable of telling, as we learned, the difference between right and wrong. How much training do you need to learn that it's wrong to force a man to masturbate?" he said.

Now if we could only bring in those gazillion memos, orders, encouragements, assignments from the White House down into the picture, we could -almost- start thinking through the full implications of what we have become. Because even that would be a start. Maybe that's why everyone's running away from this issue; because it has something to do with this culture of cruelty of ours.

Posted by zeynep at 12:13 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

October 20, 2004

Let me Count the Ways

Soldier Pleads Guilty in Iraq Abuse Case

The highest-ranking soldier charged with abusing Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison pleaded guilty Wednesday, telling a military court that prisoners were forced to submit to public nudity and degrading treatment "for military intelligence purposes."

...

But the Army staff sergeant also blamed his chain of command, saying he was given no training or support in supervising detainees and only learned of regulations against mistreatment after the abuses occurred between October and December last year.

First, here they go with the "abuse" again.

Second, let me recount some of the things Mr. Ivan Frederick claims to have done because of his ignorance of regulations:

During an incident last Nov. 4 captured on photos transmitted around the world, Frederick said he helped hook wires on a detainee's hands and told him he would be electrocuted if he fell off a box. An Army investigator encouraged him to abuse the detainee, saying he didn't care what was done to the prisoner "as long as you don't kill him," Frederick said.

In a Nov. 8 incident, Frederick admitted, he joined another soldier in jumping on a pile of seven detainees accused of rioting. He also admitted to stomping on their hands and feet.

"I should have stopped it right there," he said.

But the detainees then were strip-searched and remained naked, even after female soldiers arrived on the scene — which is against military rules, he said. Frederick said he punched the ringleader in the chest so hard that the prisoner needed medical attention.

Finally, Frederick said, soldiers lined the detainees naked against a wall with bags on their heads and then forced three of them to masturbate.

Really, that's such a tough call. Is it wrong to mock-electrocute people or not, hmm. Let's see. Where's that damn rule book again? Do you look it up under "M" or under "E"? It's not my fault the index isn't organized in an intuitive fashion.

Third, does anyone think it's a coincidence that both Ivan Frederick and Charles Graner are former "corrections officers"?

And, last, but by no means least, why is US army reservist Sgt Ivan Frederick the highest-ranking soldier charged ?

Posted by zeynep at 11:51 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

October 19, 2004

Does Mr. Kerry Deserve a Medal For Killing Your Countryman, Ma'am?

In an exemplary feat of the kind of tough journalism we need today, Nightline went back to the Vietnamese village that Kerry now boasts of having chased down and killed Ba Thanh, a Vietnamese fighter with the NLF, to get to the bottom of things. Empire Notes has a must-read post, including transcripts of Nightline's shameful, shameful conduct:

The unlearning of the lessons of Vietnam is now complete. The presidential campaign was for at least two months dominated by an absurd discussion on the subject, in which the only "moral" issue was, apparently, how many Vietnamese Kerry had killed and how tough the ones he killed were. ABC's Nightline finally put the icing on the cake by going to consult the other witnesses to Kerry's action or nonaction -- the Vietnamese.

...

It's difficult to communicate how disgusting and macabre this is. It's like questioning the family members of a murder victim in order to figure out whether the killer deserves a medal. Imagine the reaction of the average American being questioned on whether a particular Iraqi resistance member deserves a medal for personally killing some American soldier or whether the soldier was merely killed in an explosion. And the Iraqi resistance is fighting in its own country to expel foreign invaders, not occupying and destroying another country, as the United States did in Vietnam.

It really is the saddest thing. I've seen some of the Swift Boat ads which include snippets of Kerry's testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 22, 1971. And even in those brief, distorted, weirdly-narrated ads, the young Kerry is very moving. I think it may be one of the best testimonials ever given on the subject of colonial war by a member of the aggressive nation.

Just how did that young man die, and who is this opportunist, war-mongering, death-celebrating politician I can't bear to listen to, masquerading around in the remmants of that man's shell? I really recommend reading his testimony in full, and reading it often. Then he spoke a deep truth -- now he talks about "Iraqification" the same way politicians of his day spoke of Vietnamization, which that Kerry understood perfectly well:

Now we are told that the men who fought there must watch quietly while American lives are lost so that we can exercise the incredible arrogance of Vietnamizing the Vietnamese.

And the Kerry-then, speaking on behalf of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, proclaimed their desire to fight one last battle, a noble one unlike the ignominious one they had been pushed into:

We wish that a merciful God could wipe away our own memories of that service as easily as this administration has wiped their memories of us. But all that they have done and all that they can do by this denial is to make more clear than ever our own determination to undertake one last mission, to search out and destroy the last vestige of this barbarous war, to pacify our own hearts, to conquer the hate and the fear that have driven this country these last 10 years and more and so when, in 30 years from now, our brothers go down the street without a leg, without an arm or a face, and small boys ask why, we will be able to say "Vietnam" and not mean a desert, not a filthy obscene memory but mean instead the place where America finally turned and where soldiers like us helped it in the turning.

Sad to say, that battle has been thoroughly and completely lost. Vietnam did not become the place that America finally turned, that burden remains with us today. On that day, that John Kerry confronted the nation with this unforgettable question: how do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake? I'd like to ask the current Democratic Party presidential nominee, also named John Kerry, another question. How do you kill your own soul for a shot at power? I would have hoped that it were not possible, that once awakened, a conscience could not be discarded as if it were just another empty campaign promise by just another power-hungry politician.

Posted by zeynep at 10:57 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

"Elections" in "Sovereign" Iraq by "January"

Here's the Washington Post story about how there are no real preparations to have real elections in Iraq by January:

The United Nations has failed to fully staff its operation in Iraq, imperiling the timing and quality of the elections there and forcing inexperienced Iraqis to take the lead in preparing for the country's first democratic balloting, due in January, U.S. officials and election experts said.

Of the 35 U.N. officials in Iraq, only four or five are election experts, U.N. officials said. In Afghanistan, which has a similar-size population, the U.N. had 600 international staff, including 266 election experts, for the first democratic poll this month. A major increase in Iraq is unlikely soon because of deteriorating security and the U.S. failure to quickly mobilize Georgian and Fijian troops for a protection force or provide an acceptable alternative, U.S. and U.N. officials said.

U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan is trying to lower expectations that the United Nations will play a central role in the voting, telling reporters in Ireland on Friday that the world body "is not going to Iraq to monitor the elections in January."

And, deep, deep, deep into the piece:

A proposal by Saudi Arabia for a Muslim peacekeeping force in Iraq was quashed by both Iraqi and U.S. officials because of concerns about the chain of command, the White House said yesterday.

Posted by zeynep at 12:46 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

October 18, 2004

Muslim Troops to Help Organize Elections in Iraq? No Thanks. It Would Interfere With Our Attempts to Bring Democracy

What would be a dream arrangement if one were trying to provide security for elections in Iraq and minimize U.S. troop presence? How about muslim troops under United Nations command to help U.N. go back into Iraq to organize democratic elections? Sounds too good to be true, no?

Well, it would have been true if the Bush administration hadn't shot down the offer. No thanks, we don't want any troops that wouldn't be under U.S. command. In fact, we don't want anything in Iraq that's not totally under our control.

Here's the story:

President George W. Bush rebuffed a plan last month for a Muslim peacekeeping force that would have helped the United Nations organize elections in Iraq, according to Saudi and Iraqi officials.

As a result, the UN continues to have a skeletal presence in Iraq, with only four staff members working full time on preparing for elections set for the end of January. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has refused to establish a new UN headquarters in Baghdad unless countries commit troops for a special force to protect it.

Saudi leaders, including Crown Prince Abdullah, personally lobbied Bush in July to sign off on the plan to establish a contingent of several hundred troops from Arab and Muslim nations. Abdullah discussed the plan in a 10-minute phone conversation with Bush on July 28 after meeting with Secretary of State Colin Powell, according to Saudi officials familiar with the negotiations.

Diplomats said Annan accepted the plan. But the Bush administration objected because the special force would have been controlled by the UN instead of by U.S. military officers who run the Multi-National Force in Iraq. Muslim and Arab countries refused to work under U.S. command, and the initiative died in early September.

"Muslim countries that were willing to provide troops were not willing to put them under the command of the U.S.-led coalition," said a senior Iraqi security official, speaking on the condition of anonymity. "In many of these nations, there was too much domestic pressure for the governments to justify putting their troops under U.S. control."

The White House confirmed Friday that U.S. military commanders raised objections because the Muslim troops would not have been under their control. "It was a serious issue for commanders of the Multi-National Force," said a White House spokesman who refused to be identified by name.

Internationalizaton, troop withdrawal, bringing democracy, allowing for sovereignty, blah, blah, blah.

Hey, they don't even trust their hand-picked CIA-asset Dear Leader Ayad Allawi to act as their cover, if it involves giving him a whiff of real power. I suppose they know all too well the myriads of reasons not to trust him.

At one point, the Saudis proposed that Muslim forces be placed under the command of the Iraqi government. That idea won over Allawi, but not the United States. "The Americans wanted ultimate control, and that made it impossible to make this work," said the Iraqi official.

Posted by zeynep at 11:44 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 17, 2004

Guantanamo Detainees "Abused" too

Shocked, we're all shocked.

In one common procedure, uncooperative prisoners were stripped down to their underwear, made to sit in a chair with their hands and feet shackled to a bolt in the floor, and forced to listen to blaring rock and rap music in a room with flashing strobe lights, a military official told the Times.

At the same time, the room was cooled down with the air-conditioning turned to maximum levels, since the detainees were used to high temperatures from their native countries and their prison cells in the Caribbean island, said the official who witnessed the procedure.

"It fried them," the official told the Times, adding that the sessions could last up to 14 hours with breaks.

It's now shamefully standard pratice among all major papers and wire services that all torture by us is always called abuse, no matter how severe -- or even fatal. This particular piece even has a law professor plainly pointing out that what has occured is torture, not abuse. Still, it's referred to as abuse in the headline and all the "objective" descriptions:

"I don't think there's any question that treatment of that character satisfies the severe pain and suffering requirement, be it physical or mental, that is provided for in the Convention Against Torture," said the former official, David Sheffer, who now teaches law at George Washington University.

News stories also have been very poor at explaining how painful these so-called "stress positions" --being shackled at an uncomfortable position for many hours-- actually are. Meanwhile, the detainees are still denied access to a legitimate court as the Supreme Court ordered last summer.

In one sense, this is a small crime compared to everything else we're doing like pounding cities with 500 pound bombs. On the other hand, the idea that everyone gets their day in court has always been hailed as one of those things that are central to the self-definition of this country. To see even that let go so easily by the mainstream, with a murmur of protest here and a hint of unease there, is quite scary.

Posted by zeynep at 11:34 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

October 15, 2004

Responsible for Abu Ghraib? Here, Have Another Star!

A while back, I complained all that the higher-ups who ordered, allowed and set up and environment where torture was routine practice were going get was a slap-in-the-wrist early retirement -- with full benefits, and not even a hint of accountability.

And the most eggregious example in the uniformed military was Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez because cables and other materials had been unearthed which showed that he had directly authorized and ordered the use of some of the torture methods and helped run the place in a manner that allowed and encouraged the whole gamut of despicable practices.

Pentagon did not make these cables public, but some appropriately disgusted government employee turned them over to the Washington Post. Let me recap the key part (I wrote more about it here):

The cable signed by Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez listed several dozen strategies for extracting information, drawn partly from what officials now say was an outdated and improperly permissive Army field manual. But it added one not previously approved for use in Iraq, under the heading of Presence of Military Working Dogs: "Exploit Arab fear of dogs while maintaining security during interrogations."

And:

Unnamed officials at the Florida headquarters of the U.S. Central Command, which has overall military responsibility for Iraq, objected to some of the 32 interrogation tactics approved by Sanchez in September, including the more severe methods that he had said could be used at any time in Abu Ghraib with the consent of the interrogation officer in charge.

...

The high-pressure options that remained included taking someone to a less hospitable location for interrogation; manipulating his or her diet; imposing isolation for more than 30 days; using military dogs to provoke fear; and requiring someone to maintain a "stress position" for as long as 45 minutes. These were not dropped by Sanchez until a scandal erupted in May over photographs depicting abuse at the prison.

It turns out that not only Sanchez not even getting a slap on the wrist, Rumsfeld et al. are determined to put a fourth star on him to reward him:

Senior Pentagon officials, including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have privately told colleagues they are determined to pin a fourth star on Sanchez, two senior defense officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said this week.

Rumsfeld and others recognize that Sanchez remains politically "radioactive," in the words of a third senior defense official, and would wait until after the Nov. 2 presidential election and investigations of the Abu Ghraib scandal have faded before putting his name forward.

Yeah, really, why do they hate us?

Posted by zeynep at 09:37 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

October 14, 2004

Shoppers Rush Past Protesters -- Into the Walmart Built Upon an Ancient Gravesite

I'm normally as unsentimental as it gets about gravesites and cemeteries. I once remember hearing a caller to an advice radio show ask if it was okay to go into some huge amount of debt to built a headstone for their teenage daughter, killed in a traffic accident. The caller -the mom- explained how much this kind of marble cost, and the various estimates they had gotten from different companies, and how much their credit cards would charge in interest...

It made me feel sick. Here was this person who had suffered the losing of a child, perhaps the deepest blow to a parent. And here you have this industry that commodifies this grief and makes sure you feel guilty if you don't spend the maximum amount on the most lavish piece of stone. (Isn't that blasphemous in any case?). You've seen those ads too: buy insurance to pay for your funeral so that your relatives aren't burdened with... thousands of dollars in funeral costs. Why, what, how?

Me, I'd want cemeteries done away with. Bury the dead under trees, here and there. What better way to remind you to live? Or, if there must be a collective place, how about no headstones? People can take a walk in a nice park full of big trees --and big trees is what one will get if the abominable practice of burying people in caskets that separate their bodies from the earth is abolished, please. Take a walk, sit on a bench and reminisce about life: theirs, yours, the trees. No need to purchase dead flowers either, some will grow anyway -- especially if that icky, artificial construct of monoculture called lawn is not inflicted upon the area.

But this one bothered even me, so it must be pretty bad. Wal-Mart opens up a store in Hawaii, during the construction of which they encounter the remains of 44 people. They dig 'em up, put 'em "in an air-conditioned, darkened trailer in a secure location on the site" -- and proceed to open the store. A few native Hawaiian groups protest the opening saying they should kindly rebury those people at the site before opening up the store. Alas, shoppers "lined up hours ahead and then poured into the discount store" -- rushing right past the protesters. I suppose the religion of shopping trumps all.

Posted by zeynep at 11:17 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

The Debates

Wouldn't it be great if they spent as much time talking about issues rather than trying to control their posture, smirk, likeability, whatever else it is they spend hours prepping.

I think the Bush Project has hit a snag, though: it's called George W. Bush. The idea of a brush-clearin', plain talkin', bible thumpin' president to be marketed through tightly-controlled access coupled with merciless destruction of challengers through any means necessary was brilliant. It worked just fine until now, and you gotta admit anything that gets you the presidency of the United States of America for four year is a pretty successful program.

It just doesn't work when Bush has to answer questions, wired or not -- not even softball questions. Can Rove Inc. overcome the snag? I wouldn't count it out, but they are in a lot more trouble than I would've predicted -- especially given the remarkable incompetence and vapidity displayed by the Democrats.

Posted by zeynep at 12:04 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

October 13, 2004

Just shut up. Get through your tour and just shut up. You're going to get a bullet in the back.

Worth quoting in full, from the indispensable A Tiny Revolution:

Seymour Hersh spoke at Berkeley last Friday, October 8th. He told a story about recently receiving a call from an American lieutenant in Iraq who'd just witnessed other American soldiers killing non-combatant Iraqis.

I typed up what he said from the Real Video file here.

HERSH: I got a call last week from a soldier -- it's different now, a lot of communication, 800 numbers. He's an American officer and he was in a unit halfway between Baghdad and the Syrian border. It's a place where we claim we've done great work at cleaning out the insurgency. He was a platoon commander. First lieutenant, ROTC guy.
It was a call about this. He had been bivouacing outside of town with his platoon. It was near, it was an agricultural area, and there was a granary around. And the guys that owned the granary, the Iraqis that owned the granary... It was an area that the insurgency had some control, but it was very quiet, it was not Fallujah. It was a town that was off the mainstream. Not much violence there. And his guys, the guys that owned the granary, had hired, my guess is from his language, I wasn't explicit -- we're talking not more than three dozen, thirty or so guards. Any kind of work people were dying to do. So Iraqis were guarding the granary. His troops were bivouaced, they were stationed there, they got to know everybody...

They were a couple weeks together, they knew each other. So orders came down from the generals in Baghdad, we want to clear the village, like in Samarra. And as he told the story, another platoon from his company came and executed all the guards, as his people were screaming, stop. And he said they just shot them one by one. He went nuts, and his soldiers went nuts. And he's hysterical. He's totally hysterical. And he went to the captain. He was a lieutenant, he went to the company captain. And the company captain said, "No, you don't understand. That's a kill. We got thirty-six insurgents."

You read those stories where the Americans, we take a city, we had a combat, a hundred and fifteen insurgents are killed. You read those stories. It's shades of Vietnam again, folks, body counts...

You know what I told him? I said, fella, I said: you've complained to the captain. He knows you think they committed murder. Your troops know their fellow soldiers committed murder. Shut up. Just shut up. Get through your tour and just shut up. You're going to get a bullet in the back. You don't need that. And that's where we are with this war.

A Tiny Revolution also has a link to the Real Video, if you want to hear it with your own ears.

Posted by zeynep at 11:50 PM | Comments (0)

October 12, 2004

The Disappearing Business

Nuclear materials aren't the only things we're disappearing, but we knew that. Human Rights Watch has tracked down 11 people that the U.S. won't even acknowledge are in custody. The fact that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed as well as Abu Zubaydah are amone the eleven will make many people think, oh, well -- those are bunch of terrorists. Frankly, I'd find it hard to get excited about anyone who planned the mass murder of thousands of people. But this is not about them, but about what kind of society are.

In fact, people's reluctance to respect the rights of the guilty --or those perceived to be guilty as those freed from death-row will testify-- is why we have courts and laws. How do we know it's only eleven people who've disappeared down this Gulag? How do we know they're guilty? Why can't they be brought to justice, be tried in court? What are they hiding?

History is crystal clear on this topic: once a society okays the disappearance of a few without accountability, the unaccountable inevitably widen their scope of operations. We've been warned.

Posted by zeynep at 12:52 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Along with Pretexts for this Invasion, Iraqi Nuclear-Related Materials Vanish

You'd think they'd post guards at the door, or something. That is, if they were really concerned about nuclear proliferation. I guess only the oil ministry gets that kind of attention.

Equipment and materials that could be used to make nuclear weapons are disappearing from Iraq but neither Baghdad nor Washington appears to have noticed, the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency reported on Monday.

Satellite imagery shows that entire buildings in Iraq have been dismantled. They once housed high-precision equipment that could help a government or terror group make nuclear bombs, the International Atomic Energy Agency said in a report to the U.N. Security Council.

Equipment and materials helpful in making bombs also have been removed from open storage areas in Iraq and disappeared without a trace, according to the satellite pictures, IAEA Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei said.

...

The equipment -- including high-precision milling and turning machines and electron-beam welders -- and materials -- such as high-strength aluminum -- were tagged by the IAEA years ago, as part of the watchdog agency's shutdown of Iraq's nuclear program. U.N. inspectors then monitored the sites until their evacuation from Iraq just before the war.

The United States barred the inspectors' return after the war, preventing the IAEA from keeping tabs on the equipment and materials up to the present day.

Posted by zeynep at 11:27 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

October 11, 2004

Only the Crazy

Christopher Reeve died yesterday, at age 52, the way many people with serious levels of paralysis: from an infection from a bed sore. Much will be made, I guess, about stem cell research and the political implications of the inevitable sympathy that follows the death of a public figure.

But let me say what struck me about his post-paralysis stance. I thought the man was nuts. As in loony and delusional. Here he was, after having survived a C1-C2 level injury, (smashed the topmost two two vertebrae, as bad as it gets in other words), spending hours and hours each day ... exercising. Actually, hooked up to machines exercising him in an attempt to slow the atrophying of his muscles. Reeve was getting ready for the day science would catch up to his will -- he predicted he'd walk about the age of 50.

Reeve's effort generated a lot of discussion, especially after a Superbowl commercial, in 2000 if I recall correctly, that digitally created a walking Reeve. In a bizarre turning of political tables, I found myself agreeing with Charles Krauthammer, the war-mongering, generally pretty-vile, but not stupid-by-any-means columnist who himself uses a wheelchair. Krauthammer wrote a column in response to the ad, called "Restoration, Reality Christopher Reeve" -- the only free version I could find is this google cache -- which pretty much summed up my thoughts. Sure, someday research might help spinal cord injury, Krauthammer argued, but that will most likely benefit the newly-injured and even that is far, far away in time, if ever. The best advice to the people who are already injured, Krauthammer argued, is to refashion their lives around what they can achieve in their newly-configured bodies -- and the possibilities in that realm have been expanding steadily as both assistive-technologies and the social understanding of disability and disability rights advance.

But Reeve had the intensity of the crazy and the pocketbook of a movie star. So, hour after hour, day after day, year after year, he trained, exercised, received physical therapy and participated in experimental regimens.

And then, one day, he moved his pinkie at his will. At will, on demand, whenever.

Which is pretty much a miracle by the current standards of medical science. He single-handedly (single-pinkiely?) changed what was considered possible in terms of recovery years after the injury.

Krauthammer's argument, of course, still holds. Being able to move your pinkie is a far cry from being able to walk -- or even sit up, for that matter. I think it would be unconscionable to advise a newly-injured person to spend a good portion of their available waking hours hooked up to machines which move their limbs -- even if they had the resources to afford it, which most will not. Being disabled will already consume up a good portion of their time, which makes what remains even more valuable?

However, both Krauthammer and I missed something more important: the power of the crazy to open doors, often to their own great detriment. You see, taken as a method to help Christopher Reever [fill in name of person with spinal cord injury here], his project was loony and going nowhere. But it should be seen as something else: a crazy act of sacrifice that altered our understanding of the possible. And isn't it exactly what captures the human soul: the noble, quixotic, hopeless, dream for the impossible. We celebrate and admire such men and women -- and sometimes the footnotes concede how the fire burned the torch-bearer, everytime.

As it is often with the crazy of that kind, I'm sure Reeve did what he wanted to do. In other words, he probably didn't see what he did as sacrificing what remaining years he had in the possible service of future generations. (He must have known he'd die relatively early; most people with severe paralysis do). He did the thing that made him happy: he worked like a maniac against impossible odds in the service of an insane and impossible mission. And that very human trait may save or doom our troubled-enough species. I don't know, it's too soon to tell. It is, however, hard not to be awed by it.

Posted by zeynep at 11:37 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 10, 2004

Eye of a Needle

Here's how Dr. Richard Nahin, "a senior adviser at the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, part of the National Institutes of Health," explains why it's a public health imperative to do research into whether being prayed for helps people heal:

He said a recent government study found that 45 percent of adults prayed specifically for health reasons, and suggested that many of them were poor people with limited access to care.

"It is a public health imperative to understand if this prayer offers them any benefit," Dr. Nahin wrote.

Umm, so what's the message here? The poor don't get access to proper health care so we should at least let them have prayer?

Posted by zeynep at 10:45 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

October 08, 2004

"town hall" "debates"

Audience members will have their microphones shut off after they ask a question. No follow-up is allowed. All questions are pre-screened. If anyone tries to ask a different question than the one that was pre-screened, the microphone will be turned off.

Viva democracy.

Well, the "debate" has just started. I think they injected a lot of botox into Bush's face to stop him from frowning, smirking and otherwise acting like a spoiled, petulant son of privilege.

By the way, did you know botulism toxin --i.e. botox-- was one of the weapons of mass destruction that Iraq was accused of stocking? Does that mean that Los Angeles should be considered to be part of the axis of evil -- given the massive stocks of botulism toxin that are actually stored in that city?

Posted by zeynep at 09:04 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

October 07, 2004

Does it Matter if We Were Right -- and There Were no Cameras Around

It's now become relatively well-known among policy circles and journalists covering the issue that we have spent very little money on reconstruction of Iraq, and what little we have spent has largely trickled back up to inefficient an corrupt large American corporations. As so, another report confirming most of what we already know is released:

As little as 27 cents of every dollar spent on Iraq's reconstruction has actually filtered down to projects benefiting Iraqis, a statistic that is prompting the State Department to fundamentally rethink the Bush administration's troubled reconstruction effort.

Between soaring security costs, corruption and mismanagement, contractors' profits, and U.S. governmental costs, reconstruction funding is being drained away, leaving little left to improve the lives of Iraqis, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and International Studies. Senior administration officials and congressional experts on the reconstruction effort called the analysis credible. One senior U.S. official familiar with reconstruction suggested as little as a quarter of the funding is reaching its intended projects.

...

But administration officials, lawmakers and think tanks say major changes are needed not only in what the reconstruction money is spent on but also how it is spent. Too much money has been filtered through major American businesses such as Halliburton Co. and Bechtel Corp. on large-scale electricity, water and oil infrastructure projects, and not nearly enough has gone to smaller, more decentralized reconstruction efforts that could be handled by Iraqis, they say.

What's less-known is that we spent almost all of Iraqi money that we could get our hands on. Readers of this blog know I've written much about it.

But I want to digress from that and highlight a pattern here. Bush still keeps touting how we are doing great things in Iraq and Kerry still says nonsense like "we are opening firehouses in Baghdad and shutting them down in [fill in swing state]". Both claims are based on premises well-known to be false but they can keep on doing it. For one thing, journalists will not challenge them. There will be separate articles telling the truth about the reconstruction but unless you are a detailed and careful reader of many newspapers, you may well miss them. Thus, unsurprisingly, most Americans probably do think we have spent a ton of money and what problems that exist with the reconstruction are due to the more recent security problems.

It's the same thing with the infamous Weapons of Mass Destruction. By now, it's been well-reported that Iraq did not possess any at the time of the invasion. But only with the latest report are we seeing reporters include that fact along with Bush's claims and implications to the contrary. But it's all a bit moot now. After many years of unchallenged assertions by Bush, Cheney, Kerry, Edwards and most everyone else, the whole exercise seems a bit academic. It's well established in most people's heads that Saddam Hussein was some real, grave threat to the American people. It looked like the debate was over how to quantify and best handle this major threat.

So it goes. Parts of the anti-war movement had long ago pointed out most everything that has been "revealed" with great fanfare over the past year or two -- everything from the bogus Niger documents to the limitations of the aluminum tubes cited by Powell before his U.N. speech. However, we don't seem to be able to make inroads into the general popular conciousness just because we were right then, and just because every passing day proves how right we really were. (Here are a few examples of such lengthy compilations: here's a thorough debunking of Bush's speech in Cincinnati on October 7, 2002 (everything from aluminum tubes to Al Qaeda connections is shredded); Here's a detailed analysis of the State of the "Niger" Union speech published the day after --pointing out most everything the media would 'discover' much later.)

This is a serious and entrenched problem we face, one we must find a way to overcome if we are to free the monopoly the warmongers have on general public conciousness.

Posted by zeynep at 11:44 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Third Anniversary

Third Anniversary of the war on Afghanistan. Does anyone even remember that country anymore?

Posted by zeynep at 11:35 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

October 06, 2004

It's the Fiercely Independent Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, Not Us!

So, the Bush administration is now claiming that it's not supporting the provision allowing for outsourcing torture, attached to a bill about the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission Report:

President Bush today distanced himself from his administration’s quiet effort to push through a law that would make it easier to send captured terror suspects to countries where torture is used. The proposed law, recently tacked onto a much larger bill despite the fallout from last spring’s interrogation scandal, is seen as an attempt to counter a recent Supreme Court decision that would free some terror detainees being held without trial.

In a letter published in The Washington Post, White House legal counsel Alberto Gonzales said the president “did not propose and does not support” a provision to the House bill that removes legal protections from suspects preventing their “rendering” to foreign governments known to torture prisoners. Gonzales said Bush “has made clear that the United States stands against and will not tolerate torture.”

But John Feehery, spokesman for House Speaker Dennis Hastert, who introduced the bill last Friday, said the provision had actually been requested by the Department of Homeland Security. “For whatever reason,” Feehery said, “the White House has decided they don’t want to take this on because they’re afraid of the political implications.”

So, in one of the most tightly and vindictively run administrations in a long time, what would actually happen if the administration were actually opposed to the provision? Hastert would immediately back down, of course. One guess as to whether he did or not:

[Spokesman for House Speaker Dennis Hastert, John] Feehery said Hastert still supported the provision in spite of Gonzales’s letter.

Such independent spirit. Such backbone.

Posted by zeynep at 01:14 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 05, 2004

The Anti-War Movement and Electoral Politics

Empire Notes has important comments on the topic:

Across the political spectrum, people know that we were right and they were wrong. Yet there has hardly been a peep out of the antiwar movement. There RNC protest was great, but it was basically an anti-Bush protest – there wasn’t even any messaging about the just-concluded offensive against Najaf in which probably 2000 or more people were killed.

Posted by zeynep at 11:43 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

VP Debate

Painful to watch. It is amazing how much Cheney lies. And Edwards follows the "run to the right of Bush/Cheney" strategy. The "journalist" didn't even try. Don't you love democracy in action.

Posted by zeynep at 10:38 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

One More Veto

Once again, U.S. vetoes a resolution asking Israel cease military operations in Gaza:

The United States on Tuesday vetoed a draft U.N. Security Council resolution demanding an immediate end to Israeli military operations in the Gaza Strip (news - web sites) that have cost some 68 Palestinian lives.

A total of 11 nations voted in favor of the measure in the 15-member council. Britain, Germany and Romania abstained and U.S. Ambassador John Danforth exercised his veto power by voting "no."

The veto was the 80th by the United States in 59 years. Some 29 vetoes concerned the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The last was on March 25 against Israel's assassination of Hamas leader Ahmed Yassin.

The draft resolution would have demanded "the immediate cessation of all military operations in the area of northern Gaza" and the withdrawal of Israeli forces.

Posted by zeynep at 10:24 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

October 04, 2004

Another IMF Meeting

This would have cost so little to the rich countries of the world. It also would have provided them with an opportunity to claim that they arent't always all that bad. But no. I don't know what greedy, short-term callous calculations go into these decisions. At this point, this isn't even smart imperialism.

Debt campaigners attending this week’s annual meeting of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have expressed disappointment and outrage over the failure of the world’s richest nations to cancel the debt of the world’s poorest nations.

Hopes had been running high last week that finance ministers of the Group of Seven (G-7) industrialized nations would agree on a plan that would provide 100 percent debt relief to nearly three dozen of poor countries, most of them in Africa where cash-strapped governments have been overwhelmed by the HIV -AIDS epidemic, drought, and, most recently, skyrocketing oil prices.

But the G-7, which includes the U.S., Canada, France, Germany, Britain, Italy, and Japan, could not agree on ways to finance cancellation of the debt, which totals more than US$100 billion, or roughly two thirds of what the U.S. Congress has thus far appropriated for the war in Iraq .

The kids on the picture on top of this blog are from Wamale, Ghana. This is what I wrote back in May on why I chose that picture:

People ask me about the background picture. Those are school kids in Wamale, Ghana and the picture was taken during the relatively heavily publicized trip to Africa by AIDS activist Bono and former treasury secretary O'Neill.

At the time of the visit Ghana's debt burden was about $3.9 billion. About 19.3 percent of its export revenues went to the never-ending servicing of that debt -- all the while one child in ten died before her fifth birthday.

According to my rough calculations O'Neill was trying to collect roughly $215 from each and every one of those kids. (Per capita income in Ghana was around $290 at the time).

I put that picture up not simply because those kids are sweet, like all kids everywhere, but because I think we all need to be reminded who we're demanding payment from. Read all the economic analysis, World Bank papers, Financial Times articles and what-have-you regarding the debt crisis you want -- and I do read them. It all comes down to something this simple and this uncomfortable: we are loan sharks and those are our victims.

Posted by zeynep at 10:36 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

October 03, 2004

Feel Safer Now?

Former weapons inspector David Albright's think tank has a report coming out about global supplies of plutonium and enriched uranium:

"At the end of 2003, there were more than 3,700 metric tons of plutonium and highly enriched uranium -- uranium enriched to 20 percent or uranium-235 -- enough for hundreds of thousands of nuclear weapons, in about 60 countries," Albright and Kimberly Kramer wrote in an article to be published in the next issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Most of the weapons-useable material is in Russia, followed by the United States.

Nothing very surprising there, unfortunately. Plus, the combination of our belligerent stance in the world, our total hypocricy regarding nuclear disarmament and the existence of many states who would like to possess the power to annihilate a country or two means that we will possibly witness more states going nuclear. Add to the mix our resolute non-action in the face of Israel's open secret nukes, our torpedoing of any and all effective attempts at non-proliferation and inspections, and the fact that we prefer to invade countries that cannot deter us -- expect things to get worse.

And I think this is a real danger. The more nuclear weapons there are in the world, the more likely they will be used. More likely something, somewhere will go wrong.

Putting aside for a moment the hypocrisy of this and every other administration that refuses to dismantle or lessen our stockpiles, already capable of destroying this planet many times over, you'd think they'd actually be concerned about this. You know, from purely a selfish, not a moral, point of view. You'd think they'd at least make some attempts to make sure the existing nuclear states kept their monopoly on this true weapon of mass destruction?

Uh-huh. You know what's coming, right? They can't even find $16 million to employ Iraq's scientists who might have the capacity to advise a WMD development program. That's how many day's of Halliburton's no-bid contracts to do almost nothing at cost-plus guaranteed profit rates?

The dangers of Baghdad and a shortage of cash have set back the U.S. effort to put Iraqi weapons scientists to work rebuilding their country and keep them off the global job market for makers of doomsday arms.

To steer them to civilian projects and training, the State Department had planned a dozen workshops and seminars for hundreds of idled specialists from Iraq's old nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs, starting in the first half of 2004.

It also envisioned an early project, a desalination plant, as a model for other ventures employing scientists, engineers and technicians who once built weapons. Nuclear physicists might work in radiotherapy, for example, and chemists at environmental monitoring stations.

But the department received no new funds for the program, and none of these plans has gotten off the ground, nine months after U.S. officials said they would ''jump-start'' the initiative to discourage weapons experts from emigrating and offering their services to the highest bidder.

...

The Bush administration's request to Congress called for the same $50 million for ''redirection'' in fiscal year 2005 as allocated in 2004, when all of it was spent on a continuing, 12-year-old program in the former Soviet Union to employ ex-weapons builders. No new money is specified for Iraq.

Discussions a year ago suggested $16 million or more in first-year costs for Iraq projects, but so far in 2004 the State Department's nonproliferation office has scraped up only $2 million from a contingency fund.

And yes, they've only allocated $50 million to employ former Soviet scientists who definitely possess this knowledge. Some people will pay $16 million for an Upper East Side co-op --with the proper number of maids' rooms, of course-- but the U.S. government won't cough up this princely sum to slow down the spread of technology that could dust Manhattan.

Now, given that Iraq had no working WMD program I don't know if any of those scientists --estimated to be numbering around 2,000 to 4,000 by the Russian-American Nuclear Security Advisory Council-- are actually capable of spreading this know-how. But they always claimed that Saddam Hussein was just waiting for sanctions to be lifted, that Iraq possessed the know-how and the scientific expertise to rapidly develop and acquire weapons of mass destruction. If this administration actually believed its own rhetoric, it would have found this paltry amount to keep these alleged Iraqi weapons scientists busy and gainfully employed.

Well, even if we won't pay 'em a salary, we can always jail some of 'em indefinitely without charges:

Former chief arms inspectors David Kay and Hans Blix are questioning the continued detention of a dozen Iraqi weapons scientists by U.S. forces more than a year after the prisoners first told interrogators Iraq had no outlawed weapons - a story that turned out to be true.

``What are the accusations?'' ex-U.N. inspector Blix asked in an interview Friday, referring to one leading Iraqi prisoner, Amer al-Saadi.

Kay, former head U.S. arms hunter, told The Associated Press that ``I saw no reason to hold them'' even nine months ago.

The continued detention of the scientists, without charge and largely incommunicado 17 months after the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, appears to violate international law, Amnesty International said.

There, don't you feel safer.

Posted by zeynep at 11:35 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

October 01, 2004

Crank Up the PR

At least 35 children were killed in yesterday's bloodbath in Al-Amel, a contemptible and vicious act of mass murder. Tawhid and Jihad seems to have claimed responsibility. I know some people will claim this shows why we have to stay in Iraq and fight this group. I say: the only reason that group can survive in Iraq is because they can claim to be fighting the occupation, a cause which obviously has sympathy among the populace, while actually engaging in in the murder countless Iraqis and occasionally beheading shackled, unarmed hostages. Without the pretext of the occupation and the presence of American troops they can claim to be attacking, they would be torn from limb to limb very quickly.

Meanwhile, as if to draw attention away from Tawhid and Jihad's monstrosity, U.S. forces "stormed" Samarra on Friday -- and killed 100 people in air strikes and other combat:

Doctors at Samarra's hospital said 47 bodies were brought in, including 11 women, five children and seven elderly men. They said ambulances could not reach many wounded as fighting, which lasted throughout the night, was still going on.

A spokesman for the U.S. 1st Infantry Division said an estimated 94 insurgents were killed. He said a U.S soldier was killed during the offensive and four wounded.

Of course, lest the Iraqis misunderstand why their towns were being bombed by helicopter gunships, the U.S. government is seeking to give out PR contracts:

The U.S. government recently solicited proposals for "aggressive" public relations and advertising to shore up faltering Iraqi support for the U.S.-led operation there, according to a trade newsletter.

The problem, the government feels, is that the Iraqis are not sure what Washington's goals are in Iraq, according to Jack O'Dwyer's Newsletter. The contract will be with something called the Multi National Corps-Iraq, or MNC-I.

MNC-I said in its request for information that "recent polls suggest support for the Coalition is falling and more and more Iraqis are questioning Coalition resolve, intentions and effectiveness," the newsletter said.

So what we've got here is a huge failure to communicate. That's where this PR effort comes in. The idea is to make sure the coalition's "core themes and messages" get more support. Unclear how big this contract is.

A slick ad campaign, yeah, that should do it.

Posted by zeynep at 11:42 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack