Through the Wolf Brigade, the US carried out its policy of intensifying sectarian violence in Iraq in 2005 and 2006:

A visit from the unit to any neighbourhood was sure to bring trouble – as it it did for Omar Salem Shehab on 25 June that year.

We were at home that night, Shehab recalled this week. We were three brothers sleeping above my ice-cream shop. We were woken by soldiers entering our house by force. They came with Americans. They said we were wanted and produced a document. The Americans took our pictures, then the soldiers we now knew were the Wolf Brigade took us to the Seventh Division camp [of the Iraqi army].

Shehab and his brothers lived in Dora, in Baghdad's south, a lethal enclave of the city that was rapidly deteriorating into chaos. Like most of Dora's residents, they are Sunni Muslims.

The trio were at the army camp for a day, then transferred to Baghdad's main prison, known as Tsferrat.

We were tortured all the time, he said. We were never investigated, just tortured. The commander of the Wolf Brigade, Abu al-Walid was one of the torturers. My brother had a kidney problem and they continued to torture him without giving him medicine.

He died after a month and the doctor wrote 'kidney failure' as a cause of death, despite his body being covered with torture marks. When he died, they let me and my other brother out. I later learned that another man we had met in prison, Khalid Hussein, had also died.

Torture and death seemed synonymous with the almost exclusively Shia unit, which was tasked with rooting out Sunni insurgents from post-Saddam Iraq. As security unravelled across the country, they were often seen alongside US forces, particularly in Baghdad and Mosul.

As a consequence of the WikiLeaks document release, US support for Iraqi death squads is finally being exposed to the light of day.

Labels: "Support the Troops", American Empire, Iraqi Deaths, Neoliberalism, Occupation of Iraq, US Military

No doubt those of you who frequent this blog has noticed that I have said very little about the upcoming election, with the exception of this post on September 8th. Ideologically, this should not be surprising, as I have gravitated away from the bedrock principle of liberal democracy, namely, that people can be effectively represented by others within a constitutional system of governance. Indeed, I have posted a series about its defects, labeled Vote or Die, a label ironically derived from what I considered to be a hysterical assertion that we faced the choice of either voting or dying in the 2008 election.

Yet again, we are faced with a desultory choice between the lesser of two evils. But, in this instance, the choice is especially disturbing, given how the candidates of both major parties appear divorced from the struggles of day to day life. With an economy in free fall, and millions of Americans still unemployed and millions of others facing foreclosure, there is no sense of urgency. President Obama, despite the insistence of many economists, has indicated that austerity, not job creation, is the emerging priority, as planned reductions in Social Security and Medicare benefits move forward. Of course, the financial sector remains the great exception as investors have already concluded that the Federal Reserve will initiate another round of quantatitive easing of the money supply right after the election.

In other words, there will be another jolt of stimulus for the banks, while the rest of us, (with the predictable exception of those who live in Manhattan), suffer from either stagnant wages or continued unemployment. We are living through the remorseless implementation of the neoliberal doctrine that exhalts the decisions of market participants over those who participate in political processes. Hence, while there has been some stimulus directed towards government programs and assistance, most of it has been for the benefit of those people and institutions dependent upon the financial markets. Now, they will get even more, while just about every other kind of government expenditure for the general welfare, such as funding for education, health care, child care and the environment, faces the prospect of significant reductions.

Naturally, it goes without saying that the military-industrial complex will continue to receive substantial funding for its wars around the globe, although, interestingly, even the Pentagon and its concentric circles of private contractors may find their funding needs subordinated to those of financial institutions. The shocking thing here is how rapidly elected officials have relinquished the power of the federal government to spend, thus transferring almost complete control over the economy to an appointed, elite group of bankers. As the beneficiaries of federal action narrows even more, the operation of the economy grows more and more undemocratic as well. As Martin Wolf has concluded: A lost decade seems quite likely. That would be a calamity for the US – and the world. Will it be a lost decade for the left as well?

Labels: American Empire, Bailout of Finance Capitalists, Elections, Neoliberalism, Sub-Proletarianization of America

Perhaps, you've already read about this subject in relation to the WikiLeaks release of material associated with the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Even if you have, please bear with me, starting with the following from The Guardian:

A frago is a fragmentary order which summarises a complex requirement. This one, issued in June 2004, about a year after the invasion of Iraq, orders coalition troops not to investigate any breach of the laws of armed conflict, such as the abuse of detainees, unless it directly involves members of the coalition. Where the alleged abuse is committed by Iraqi on Iraqi, only an initial report will be made … No further investigation will be required unless directed by HQ.

Frago 242 appears to have been issued as part of the wider political effort to pass the management of security from the coalition to Iraqi hands. In effect, it means that the regime has been forced to change its political constitution but allowed to retain its use of torture.

The systematic viciousness of the old dictatorship when Saddam Hussein's security agencies enforced order without any regard for law continues, reinforced by the chaotic savagery of the new criminal, political and sectarian groups which have emerged since the invasion in 2003 and which have infiltrated some police and army units, using Iraq's detention cells for their private vendettas.

Hundreds of the leaked war logs reflect the fertile imagination of the torturer faced with the entirely helpless victim – bound, gagged, blindfolded and isolated – who is whipped by men in uniforms using wire cables, metal rods, rubber hoses, wooden stakes, TV antennae, plastic water pipes, engine fan belts or chains. At the torturer's whim, the logs reveal, the victim can be hung by his wrists or by his ankles; knotted up in stress positions; sexually molested or raped; tormented with hot peppers, cigarettes, acid, pliers or boiling water – and always with little fear of retribution since, far more often than not, if the Iraqi official is assaulting an Iraqi civilian, no further investigation will be required.

Beyond allowing the US and the other participants in the coalition to outsource the brutalization of detainees, Frago 242 created opportunities for a perverse voyeurism, whereby US troops were permitted to watch the most gruesome abuse of people without any obligation to do anything about it.

If there was any question that the US was complicit in much of this abuse, Justin Raimondo helpfully directs our attention to another article in the The Guardian that eliminates any remaining doubt:

Within the huge leaked archive is contained a batch of secret field reports from the town of Samarra. They corroborate previous allegations that the US military turned over many prisoners to the Wolf Brigade, the feared 2nd battalion of the interior ministry's special commandos.

In Samarra, the series of log entries in 2004 and 2005 describe repeated raids by US infantry, who then handed their captives over to the Wolf Brigade for further questioning. Typical entries read: All 5 detainees were turned over to Ministry of Interior for further questioning (from 29 November 2004) and The detainee was then turned over to the 2nd Ministry of Interior Commando Battalion for further questioning (30 November 2004).

The field reports chime with allegations made by New York Times writer Peter Maass, who was in Samarra at the time. He told Guardian Films: US soldiers, US advisers, were standing aside and doing nothing, while members of the Wolf Brigade beat and tortured prisoners. The interior ministry commandos took over the public library in Samarra, and turned it into a detention centre, he said.

An interview conducted by Maass in 2005 at the improvised prison, accompanied by the Wolf Brigade's US military adviser, Col James Steele, had been interrupted by the terrified screams of a prisoner outside, he said. Steele was reportedly previously employed as an adviser to help crush an insurgency in El Salvador.

The Wolf Brigade was created and supported by the US in an attempt to re-employ elements of Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard, this time to terrorise insurgents. Members typically wore red berets, sunglasses and balaclavas, and drove out on raids in convoys of Toyota Landcruisers. They were accused by Iraqis of beating prisoners, torturing them with electric drills and sometimes executing suspects. The then interior minister in charge of them was alleged to have been a former member of the Shia Badr militia.

According to this post by lenin in 2006, the situation in Samarra was not unique:

6,000 bodies in Baghdad's mortuaries since the start of the year, and what's more, no-one believes these are the true figures from the violence in and around Baghdad as many bodies are not taken to the morgue, or are never found.

Here's the thing: the US government can openly announce its intentions. It can even be reported once in a while (albeit with a rather crude apologia bracketing the facts). Knight Ridder correspondent Yasser Salihee can die while uncovering the truth behind it. Yet somehow, invariably, it's simply taboo to mention what is richly evident. The BBC did not mention any of this either on television or on the internet. No one mentions that the bulk of these deaths are attributed to the Special Police Commandos, who were formed under the experienced tutelage and oversight of veteran US counterinsurgency fighters, and from the outset conducted joint-force operations with elite and highly secretive US special-forces units.

Yasser Salihee found that many of the dead were apprehended by large groups of men driving white Toyota Land Cruisers with police markings. The men were wearing police commando uniforms and bulletproof vests, carrying expensive 9-millimeter Glock pistols and using sophisticated radios. He died shortly after reporting this at a US checkpoint, with a bullet in the head.

As Patrick Cockburn drily observed: Of particular interest to Iraqis, when WikiLeaks releases the rest of its hoard of documents, will be to see if there is any sign of how far US forces were involved in death squad activities from 2004.

Labels: "Support the Troops", American Empire, Death Squads, Iraqi Deaths, Occupation of Iraq, Sadomasochism, US Military

Just to show that I'm not entirely devoid of sentimentality:

And all the colors that you see, are all a part of me, in this crazy world of mine. Has anyone ever so concisely captured the personal alienation that so many of us feel from the world in which we live? Such a lightning flash of recognition can lead people to travel down many paths, including, but not necessarily, political activism. For my money, Donna Summer remains one of the most unappreciated pop musicians of my lifetime because of the racially tinged ridicule of disco. Another of my favorites, On the Radio, was a prominent feature on the soundtrack of an excellent, but now forgotten, Jodie Foster film, Foxes, where it was used to ironically comment upon the naive expectations of the teen protagonists in a jaded, late 1970s Los Angeles. Apparently, I'm a Rainbow was recorded in 1981, but not released until 1996. One of the impressive subtleties of this composition by her husband for her is the thread of self-doubt (or is it self-awareness?) that runs throughout: I'm a rainbow and sometimes I can shine.

Rarely have the personal and the political been as brilliantly fused as in this 1964 Holland-Dozier-Holland composition for Diana Ross and the Supremes. As accurately noted by wikipedia: The song seemed to strike a chord in the USA as, while on one level it can be seen as a simple tale of a failed relationship, it can also been as capturing the spirit of the time after the assassination of JFK, racial tension, deepening problems in Vietnam and foreseeing the end of the early optimism of the 1960s.

But, at the gut level, this reaction by someone over at YouTube has it exactly right:

When this song came out I was 13 yrs old and my best friend Denise and I were walking up the street listing to the radio and it just blew my mind. I started walking backwards and she and I walked up Clinton Ave and I said, "Denise, this song will last FOREVER!" And it has.

And, finally, along similar lines, there is Angie, the Rolling Stones' valedictory to the communal spirit of the late 1960s:

Angie, Angie, when will all those clouds all disappear, Angie, Angie, where will it lead us from here, with no lovin' in our soul and no money in our coat, you can say we're satisfied, Angie, Angie, you can't say we never tried . . .

Typically, the Stones gave expression to a stark pessimism, which suggested a socially Darwinian future. Being the good cultural capitalists that they are, though, they continued to flourish by highlighting the sybaritic aspect of their music to the detriment of its other, more ambivalent qualities, so as to be compatible with Reaganism. If there could be said to be a pop music representation of neoliberalism, the Rolling Stones would be a strong candidate for it.

Labels: African Americans, American Culture, Music, Neoliberalism, YouTube

(snip)

According to a study by the Foundation for Child Development, 2010 will see the highest rate of children living in poverty in two decades. Study results reported in USA Today (June 7, 2010) showed staggering increases since the start of the recession: One in five children live in poverty, approximately 18% of families are unsure where they will obtain food and an estimated 500,000 children are homeless. As always, poverty and health problems go hand in hand. The president of the American Academy of Pediatrics states, Family poverty increases many risks for children, including low birth weight, premature delivery, learning problems, asthma and other health problems.

(snip)

The government reported this week that the real wage and salary income of finance industry employees based in Manhattan rose nearly 20 percent in the first quarter of this year. That surge helped make Manhattan the fastest-growing county in the United States in terms of terms of year-over-year gains in income.

Labels: Bailout of Finance Capitalists, Barack Obama, Democrats, Neoliberalism, Second Reagan Revolution, Sub-Proletarianization of America

Louis Proyect has two excellent on the scene reports of what transpired in France earlier this week:

Report on the French Struggle

Report #2 on the French Struggle

Both provide a sense of immediacy of what it has been like for people at the center of the conflict.

Labels: Europe, France, Neoliberalism, Sub-Proletarianization of Europe, Unions

UPDATE 2: Photo gallery of protests across France

UPDATE 1: About 2000 youths are roaming the streets in an insurrectional climate of urban guerrilla combat.

INITIAL POST: Despite the admirable qualities of this mobilization, it remains, by and large, an example of what Zizek has described, another instance of the left limiting itself to the preservation of social democracy, with the possible exception of the Black Bloc youth that have appeared on the streets of Paris, Nanterre and, possibly, Lyon. As noted in the update, the protests in Lyon have been riotous, with widespread looting and property destruction, so much so that the French government called upon counter-terrorist and hostage taking specialist teams to restore order.

A close reading of the remarks toward the end of video by a trade unionist, Patrick Sciruca, suggest that the unions are playing their historic role, serving as a release of anger in advance of an inevitable adverse outcome. Note, for example, how he characterizes the conflict as one centered around Sarkozy's refusal to negotiate. And what, one wonders, would the unions concede in such negotiations? John Mullen of the New Anti-Capitalist Party in Paris explains the ambivalence of the unions:

You might think that with such levels of public support, union leaders would pull out all the stops for a general strike, but professional negotiators don't think like that. The main trade union confederations have so far been united about the need for one-day mass strikes, which has made impossible the standard government tactic of luring one confederation to their side with minor concessions, and using this fact in propaganda to reduce public support for the strikers.

But union leaders aren't pushing for renewable strikes and are calling for negotiations, not for the simple defeat of Sarkozy's pension law. The union leaders' banner at the head of Saturday's demonstration read Pensions, jobs and wages are important to society when it should have read General strike to beat Sarkozy.

Please consider reading Mullen's article in its entirety, as it provides a thorough presentation of the current political situation in France in relation to the strikes and protests. Meanwhile, in the US, the public passively awaits cuts in Social Security and Medicare.

Labels: Anarchism, Europe, France, Neoliberalism, Sub-Proletarianization of Europe, Unions, YouTube

UPDATE: For a media chronology of how the Pentagon disseminated the lie that the WikiLeaks document release endangered people who had worked with the US occupation in Afghanistan, consider reading this article by Glenn Greenwald.

INITIAL POST: Remember this from August?

Want a good, shorthand way to determine if an NGO is collaborating with the occupation in Afghanistan? Look and see if they are scrambling to climb aboard the US public relations campaign against wikileaks. So far, we have Amnesty International, CIVIC, the Open Society Institute, the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission and the the Kabul office of International Crisis Group, and, now, Reporters Without Borders:

The Pentagon has a task force of about 100 people reading the leaked documents to assess the damage done and working, for instance, to alert Afghans who might be identified by name and now could be in danger.

Taliban spokesmen have said they would use the material to try to hunt down people who've been cooperating with what the Taliban considers a foreign invader. That has aroused the concern of several human rights group operating in Afghanistan — as well as Paris-based media watchdog Reporters Without Borders, which on Thursday accused Wikileaks of recklessness.

Jean-Francois Julliard, the group's secretary-general, said that WikiLeaks showed incredible irresponsibility when posting the documents online.

The presence of the Open Society Institute, an organization funded by George Soros, is an interesting one. Perhaps, it is to be expected that an NGO funded by a currency speculator is, at the end of the day, supportive of the violent modernization project underway in Afghanistan. Indeed, don't all of these organizations rely upon such an endeavor for their very existence?

Well, here's the update:

With a new round of document leaks from the whistleblower organization WikiLeaks expected on Monday, a separate leak of a letter related to a previous leak suggests administration claims regarding the risks to intelligence sources were, as with so many statements beforehand, a lie.

The August letter, from Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to Senate Armed Services Committee chair Sen. Carl Levin (D – MI), conceded that the WikiLeaks documents related to the Afghan War did not expose any sensitive intelligence sources. He insisted the documents were still a threat to national security.

The private letter was released at roughly the same time that Secretary Gates and other Pentagon officials were making public proclamations about the number of people WikiLeaks had potentially killed in releasing the information.

No doubt all five of the organizations that rushed to the microphone to malign WikiLeaks have been rewarded handsomely for their participation in this recent PSYOPS campaign.

Labels: Afghanistan, American Empire, NGOs, US Military