Fresh Hell, dearhearts … Light, Light on this, and the political/military cogs that add to what has so obviously become ethnic cleansing and civil war. And as I solicit your prayers, know that we have not heard from Riverbend, our blogging girl in Baghdad, since the first week of August.
Here’s what is happening in Iraq — the last piece is from earlier in the month, I include it because I believe General Odom gets it right … we will end up cutting and running, not as a political device but in something akin to Saigon — running for our very lives.
Unless there’s a draft, of course … stay tuned.
Jude
U.N.: Iraq civilian deaths hit a record
NICK WADHAMS, AP
1 minute ago
http://tinyurl.com/m6qej
UNITED NATIONS - The number of Iraqi civilians killed in July and August hit 6,599, a record-high number that is far greater than initial estimates suggested, the United Nations said Wednesday.
The report from the U.N. Assistance Mission in Iraq’s Human Rights office highlighted the sectarian crisis gripping the country, offering a grim assessment across a range of indicators — worrying evidence of torture, unlawful detentions, growth of sectarian militias and death squads, and a rise in “honor killings” of women.
That raises new questions about U.S. and Iraqi forces’ ability to bring peace to Baghdad, where the bulk of the violent deaths occurred. Iraq’s government, set up in 2006, is “currently facing a generalized breakdown of law and order which presents a serious challenge to the institutions of Iraq,” it said.
According to the U.N., which releases the figures every two months, violent civilian deaths in July reached an unprecedented high of 3,590, an average of more than 100 a day. The August toll was 3,009, the report said.
The lower August number may have been the result of a security crackdown in Baghdad, though it was partly offset by a rise in attacks elsewhere, including in the northern city of Mosul.
For the previous period, the U.N. had reported just under 6,000 deaths — 2,669 in May and 3,149 in June. That was up from 1,129 in April, and 710 in January.
Of the total for July and August, the report said 5,106 of the dead were from Baghdad.
The report attributed many of the deaths to the rising sectarian tensions that have pushed Iraq toward the verge of civil war.
“These figures reflect the fact that indiscriminate killings of civilians have continued throughout the country while hundreds of bodies appear bearing signs of severe torture and execution style killing,” the report said. “Such murders are carried out by death squads or by armed groups, with sectarian or revenge connotations.”
At the heart of the U.N. findings are casualty figures that combine two counts: from the Ministry of Health, which records deaths reported by hospitals; and the Medico-Legal Institute in Baghdad, which tallies the unidentified bodies it receives.
The U.N. investigators who compiled the report said it was likely that even those numbers were low. In July, for example, the Health Ministry reported no people killed in Anbar, the chaotic province that includes the extremely violent cities of Ramadi and Fallujah.
Also, the Medico-Legal Institute’s number of 1,536 was the same as the number of violent deaths in Baghdad reported by the Iraqi Health Ministry earlier this month.
The U.S. military had initially claimed a drastic drop in the death toll for August, but the estimate was revised upward after the United States revealed it had not counted people killed by bombs, mortars, rockets or other mass attacks.
The report said torture was a major concern in Iraq and the bodies showed significant evidence of it.
“Bodies found at the Medico-legal Institute often bear signs of severe torture including acid-induced injuries and burns caused by chemical substances, missing skin, broken bones (back, hands and legs), missing eyes, missing teeth and wounds caused by power drills or nails,” the report said.
On other issues, the report painted a similarly grim picture. It said about 300,000 people had been displaced in Iraq since the bombing of a shrine in Samarra in February, and reported a rise in honor killings against women.
The U.N. has also received several reports of Iraqi journalists facing prosecution for their reporting. In one case, for example, three reporters working for a newspaper faced trial for articles criticizing a regional government and accusing police and the judicial system there of violating basic human rights.
The report said more than 35,000 Iraqis were under detention, including 13,571 by multinational forces. That represents a 28 percent increase over the number at the end of June, it said.
The U.N. special rapporteur has received allegations of torture in prisons run by Iraq’s interior and defense ministries, as well as ones under multinational control.
Iraqi non-governmental organizations “expressed their frustration at the current situation and stressed the urgent need for the U.N. and other international entities to intervene in order to prevent further human rights violations,” the report said.
However, the U.N. special rapporteur for torture, Manfred Nowak, has so far been unable to go to Iraq because the government has not provided him the necessary invitation, it said.
Home Raids Provoke Increased Unrest in Iraq
Dahr Jamail with Ali al-Fadhily
September 21, 2006
http://www.antiwar.com/jamail/?articleid=9723
BAGHDAD - Renewed raids at Iraqi homes by joint U.S.-Iraqi security forces are angering Iraqis – while failing to improve the worsening security situation.
“Operation Forward Together should be called ‘To Hell Together,’” 53-year-old Hamid Fassal, an estate broker from the Dora region of Baghdad, told IPS, referring to the major U.S.-Iraqi joint security campaign launched in June. “They should be ashamed of what’s going on after four years of plans and such huge expenditure. The result is only more deaths and more agony for all Iraqis.”
U.S. troops accompanied by Iraqi soldiers have conducted raids across much of the Sunni region of Iraq in search of death squads. Several Iraqis say they are surprised about the areas searched because they say U.S . forces know that the majority of death squads are located in the Shia areas.
“I do not understand what they are really looking for and whether they are doing it right,” Salim al-Juboori of the Sherq Journal in Baghdad told IPS. “They searched Amiriya, Adhamiyah, Dora, and other places in Baghdad where citizens are the victims of gangs who come from other places under government flags, and during curfew hours.”
Residents of the Amiriya neighborhood of Baghdad recently faced a week-long blockade after U.S. troops raided more than 6,000 houses. Residents had to face checkpoints and body searches.
“They detained many innocent people and robbed lightweight valuable materials from the houses they raided,” a member of the Amiriya local council told IPS. “It seems they were searching for gold, cash, and expensive mobile devices. They know very well where to search for criminals, so why destroy Amiriya?”
Similar complaints have come from Dora, Adhamiya, and other Sunni areas of Baghdad, and other cities throughout the primarily Sunni province of al-Anbar west of Baghdad. “Hasn’t Fallujah had enough?” asked Mansoor al-Kubaissi of the Fallujah Youth Center. “Those Americans are raiding our houses, looting our savings and business capital, and detaining our sons again and again, as if there were a feud between us. Look at the result of their doings: they are being attacked several times a day, and their soldiers are falling dead every day.”
Kubaissi was referring to joint U.S.-Iraqi security force raids in central Fallujah over this past weekend.
On Sunday Sept. 17, five car bombs and another tied to a bicycle exploded in Fallujah. The bomb attacks targeted U.S. and Iraqi troops during their routine patrols and home raids.
U.S. forces have detained many people, including Reuters/BBC/al-Jazeera correspondent Fadhil al-Bedrani. Bedrani is well known to people in Fallujah for his professional reporting during more than three years of U.S. occupation.
Associated Press (AP) photographer Bilal Hussein, who is also from Fallujah, has been detained for five months by the U.S. military. Hussein was accused by U.S. forces of being a “security threat,” but they have never filed charges or permitted a public hearing. Executives from AP say they did not find any sign of inappropriate contact with resistance fighters. Bedrani and Hussein are only two among an estimated 14,000 people detained by the U.S. military across the world.. At least 13,000 of these are in Iraq.
Most have been held without charge and have been given no date for a court appearance or tribunal hearing where they might argue for their freedom.
The home raids and neighborhood searches that are leading to more such detentions continue to anger Iraqis. Many say the raids are only worsening the already chaotic and violent situation.
“Their searches always end up with terrible failures,” Col. Kathum Jawad of the previous Saddam security directorate told IPS in Baghdad. “Two days after their search in Adhamiya, 14 roadside bombs exploded within a quarter an hour, killing soldiers. This failure only means the Iraqi problem is not coming to an end as long as those people are in power.”
Insurgency Gains Alarming Support Among Iraq’s Sunni Muslims
Pentagon Survey Reveals Significant Growth in Support Since Iraq War Began
JONATHAN KARL
Sept. 20, 2006
http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=2470183&page=1
A confidential Pentagon assessment finds that an overwhelming majority of Iraq’s Sunni Muslims support the insurgency that has been fighting against U.S. troops and the Iraqi government, ABC News has learned.
Officials won’t say how the assessment was made but found that support for the insurgency has never been higher, with approximately 75 percent of the country’s Sunni Muslims in agreement.
When the Pentagon started surveying Iraqi public opinion in 2003, Sunni support for the insurgents stood at approximately 14 percent.
The news comes as September is on track to become one of the deadliest months this year for U.S. troops in Iraq. Forty-nine Americans have been killed this month, with four deaths today.
The Iraqi toll is also climbing. At one Baghdad morgue, taxis and other cars line up to take away the bodies — the U.S. and Iraqi forces’ big push to secure the capital seems to be failing to curb the violence.
“Where is the government?” one man asked. “Where is the promise of security? Where is the prime minister?”
U.S. officials are asking the same questions as they privately express frustration with the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. Officials say Maliki’s government is not doing enough to win support of Iraq’s Sunnis.
Former general Jack Keane said the Iraqi government has been “absolutely unable or unwilling to do anything about the Shia militia groups who are causing so much of the violence in Baghdad.”
White House press secretary Tony Snow said reports that the president has lost faith in Maliki are “absolutely false.” He said the prime minister has been in office just four months, and there has been “significant progress.”
But many of the senior military officials ABC News has spoken to simply do not agree with that assessment.
Fight, flight or decentralization?
Experts clash over strategies for continued U.S. role in Iraq
WILLIAM FINN BENNETT
September 2, 2006
http://nctimes.com/
[thanks, Annie]
As the debate over the continued presence of the United States in Iraq intensifies with congressional elections now just two months away, Washington legislators and talk-show hosts aren’t the only ones with clashing opinions on the best strategy for the war.
Depending on which Middle East policy expert you are talking to, the U.S. should either get out of Iraq immediately, hang in there but make tactical changes, split the country into three parts, or convince other countries in the Persian Gulf region to share the costs of a public works program to put would-be terrorists to work.
Retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. William Odom is one who says it’s time to leave.
“Get out … as fast as you can,” said Odom, who directed the National Security Agency in the 1980s and was a military adviser to the White House from 1977-81.
Now a Yale University professor and senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, a conservative-leaning public policy think tank, Odom opposed the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. The seeming stalemate between the insurgency and U.S. and Iraqi forces is proving him right, Odom said.
“We are suffering a major strategic defeat,” he said in a recent telephone interview from his Vermont home. “We’ve improved al-Qaida’s standing, we’ve improved the Iranians’ influence, we have lost our allies big time and we are down half a trillion dollars.”
Last week, the sectarian violence in and around Baghdad continued unabated with 40 people killed Monday in a clash between the Iraqi army and Shiite militia members. On Wednesday, 39 people were killed —- 24 of them by a roadside bomb that exploded outside a popular marketplace. On Thursday, mortar attacks and bombings in the capital of Iraq killed 46 people and wounded 255 others. On Friday, 64 people were killed and more than 280 wounded in a series of bombing attacks during a half-hour period around the city, mainly in Shiite neighborhoods. And 14 pilgrims from Pakistan and India were killed on their way to the Shiite holy city of Karbala, police said Saturday. The 14 —- 11 Pakistanis and three Indians —- were all shot Friday as they headed to Karbala, 50 miles south of Baghdad, in a minivan, said police Lt. Moahmmed Khayoun.
As of Saturday, at least 2,643 members of the U.S. military have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, and just fewer than 20,000 wounded, according to an Associated Press count. The figure includes seven military civilians. At least 2,102 have died as a result of hostile action, according to the military’s numbers. There are no official totals on the number of Iraqi civilians who have died since the start of the war. However, a Los Angeles Times article in late June reported that more than 50,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed over the last 3 1/2 years.
A Pentagon report released to Congress on Friday noted that illegal militias are becoming a major security threat in Baghdad and the rising sectarian violence is creating “conditions that could lead to civil war.”
One of the most popular targets for insurgent violence in the bloody struggle has been lines of people standing outside of recruiting stations in the hope of finding work. Insurgents target these people as a way of discouraging people from joining the security services and keeping the military and police weak.
Odom said he expects the U.S. troop presence in Iraq will end in a similar fashion to what happened in Vietnam.
“Eventually, we will fly out of the Green Zone in helicopters,” Odom said.
When the U.S. left Vietnam, troops used helicopters to evacuate U.S. Embassy workers —- from atop the embassy —- in a last-minute rescue operation that left behind hundreds of the Vietnamese who had been promised evacuation. Other Vietnamese with connections to the U.S. were rescued.
Odom chided those who argue that an immediate withdrawal would harm U.S. prestige and make the country considered to have the greatest military might on Earth look like a paper tiger.
“If you are a pipsqueak power, you have to worry about saving face,” he said. “If you are a hyperpower, you don’t have to worry. When we left Vietnam, our prestige was back within two years.”
While Odom’s position is clear, opinions on what to do in Iraq run the gamut. North County lawmakers support the administration. The new commanding general at Camp Pendleton, Lt. Gen. James Mattis, says the war is now a test of willpower between the U.S. and the insurgent forces responsible for the deaths of about 60 American troops and hundreds of Iraqi civilians each month.
Others are calling for a timetable to withdraw the troops, saying a certain date would tell the Iraqi government that it has to be ready to defend its own interests and stop relying on U.S. military might.
‘Cannot withdraw abruptly’
Leaving Iraq now would guarantee a catastrophic civil war between Shiites and Sunnis —- the two dominant political and religious forces in Iraq, according to Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s conservative Hoover Institution. His remarks were published recently in an essay in the latest edition of Foreign Affairs magazine.
Such a conflict could draw neighboring countries into the vortex, throwing an already unstable Middle East —- where warring Israel and Lebanon have just recently established a fragile cease-fire —- into more chaos, he wrote.
“The United States cannot in good conscience withdraw from Iraq abruptly. That would remove the last significant barrier to a total conflagration.”
Diamond argued that peace lies in a collaborative effort among the U.S., the United Nations, the European Union and eventually the Arab League. The group would obtain concessions from the Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds, the latter of which controls northern Iraq.
A key negotiating point, according to Diamond, would be changes in the Iraq Constitution to guarantee an equitable division of the nation’s oil wealth.
Iraq’s elected government could succeed and the insurgency stopped “if the Iraqis reach a national consensus in support of a broad-based government,” said Jim Phillips, a research fellow for the Washington-based conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation.
“It is possible that civil war can still be avoided,” Phillips said in a recent phone interview from his Washington office.
Despite the risk of failure, Phillips argues, the U.S. has little choice but to push forward and do everything in its power to help the Iraqis. However, success ultimately lies with the Iraqis themselves as the U.S. plays a supporting role, Phillips said.
If the stakes are clearly explained, support for the war would not be in question, he said.
“This is just not an optional war,” Phillips said. “Now, it’s the center of the war on terrorism against al-Qaida and important for containing Iran.”
Others pessimistic
But the situation in Iraq is going downhill fast, said Michael O’Hanlon, a senior analyst with the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think tank long viewed as liberal, but which the Center for Media & Democracy says has taken steps toward the right since the 1990s.
“The war is going crappy, the violence is worse every month,” O’Hanlon said in a recent interview. “I’m not saying we have lost, but we sure aren’t winning.”
Much of the fighting and terrorism takes place between the two groups of Muslims who make up more than 90 percent of Iraq’s population, the Sunnis and Shiites. The Shiites make up two-thirds of the Muslim population in Iraq.
Saddam Hussein, a Sunni, strongly favored the Arab Sunnis. The country is roughly divided between the Kurds —- most of whom are Sunnis —- the Arab Sunnis in the middle portion of the country, and the Shiites in the south.
Now, however, the government is dominated by the Shiites. The Sunnis, who lost most of their power with the fall of Saddam, are fighting to retain some relevance and power within the new government. That imbalance appears to be driving much of the mayhem. Also contributing to the power struggle is the fact that the majority of the country’s petroleum production is in the Kurdish-controlled north and the Shiite-controlled south.
While the two groups share many fundamental beliefs, Sunnis, who make up 85 percent of Muslims in the world, believe their religious leaders should be elected from among those who are best able to fill that role, according to the Web site, islam.about.com.
Shiites believe their leaders are of the Prophet Muhammad’s bloodline. The differences between the two sects have sometimes led to violent confrontations.
Most of the U.S. military effort in recent months has been focused on trying to control the escalating sectarian struggle. But in the long run, military tactics are not really the key, O’Hanlon said.
“I tend to think more that the things that need to be done are in the realm of economics and political change,” he said. “I don’t think we have very many military options left at this point.”
Dividing under federalist umbrella
Some Middle East experts say the violence and competition for dominance between Sunni and Shiite Muslims may have pushed Iraq’s fledgling unity government too far.
In the same article to which Diamond was a contributor, Leslie H. Gelb, a former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, proposed a kind of Balkanization of Iraq that would create three states, one Kurdish, another Sunni and the third Shiite.
“Helping decentralize Iraq is … more honorable and realistic than either hanging in there or getting out,” wrote Gelb, adding that the U.S. should promise at the same time to withdraw all of its forces within three years.
Gelb said the Bush administration’s policy will fail for a number of reasons, not the least of which are the sectarian militias now roaming the country.
If Bush persists on his current path, a frustrated electorate and Congress could demand an immediate withdrawal. That would have disastrous consequences, according to Gelb, a former New York Times correspondent and editor who has written extensively on the Middle East and international relations.
“A quick U.S. exit from Iraq, however explainable by frustration, would only weaken U.S. national security and the war against terror,” he wrote.
Gelb writes that his concept for a decentralization policy includes five elements:
- Establish three “strong regions, with a limited but effective central government in a federally united Iraq.”
- Bring Sunnis into the fold by offering them control over the central region of the country and a “constitutionally guaranteed share of oil revenues.”
- Protect the rights of women and minorities by making U.S. monetary aid contingent upon efforts to respect those rights.
- Prepare a plan for the “orderly and safe” withdrawal before the end of 2008.
- Develop a regional nonaggression pact.
“All wars are messy, and all plans for ending them are flawed,” Gelb wrote. “But the messy war in Iraq could metastasize into an out-of-control civil war and a regional conflict. The Bush strategy does almost nothing to reduce these terrible risks and only threatens to drag the United States deeper into the Iraq quagmire.”
Already divided?
A de facto split of the country into three parts already exists, according to Iraq policy authority Peter W. Galbraith in his recently published “The end of Iraq —- How American incompetence created a war without end.”
A former U.S. ambassador to Croatia, Galbraith was senior adviser to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from 1979 to 1993 and has written extensively on Iraq.
In “The end of Iraq,” Galbraith accuses the Bush administration of failing to understand the ethnic and religious divisions within that country before the invasion and then making a bad decision to gut the institutions that could have prevented chaos.
In order to prevent the onslaught of a full-blown civil war and allow for a U.S. exit, Galbraith proposes that the U.S. collaborate with Iraqi Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish leaders to strengthen the already existing semi-independent regions.
Risks of partition
Another Middle East expert said in a recent interview that splitting the country into three regions is a recipe fraught with risk.
One major problem is that some of Iraq’s largest cities have mixed populations, said James Dobbins, who directs the International Security and Defense Policy Center at the Rand Corp., a Washington-based public policy think tank that has long had close ties to the Pentagon.
Baghdad, a city of 6 million people, or roughly 20 percent of Iraq’s entire population, is one such city.
If the country is divided into three areas, each with its own army, one of two things are likely to happen, Dobbins said.
One would be the forced relocation of minority populations on a massive scale, thus creating a humanitarian crisis of major proportions.
He said that then, rather than 500,000 refugees, there would millions.
The other is that a Sunni army, a Shiite army and a Kurdish army could begin fighting over oil revenues or the treatment of refugees.
“Instead of 30,000 Iraqi dead, you will have 300,000,” he said.
Dobbins said that one of the many mistakes the Bush administration made was pushing the idea it wanted to install a democratic beachhead in Iraq, one that would eventually see democracy spread to neighboring countries.
By taking such an approach, those countries see the U.S. only as a threat, Dobbins said.
The best hope he sees for Iraq is for the administration to shift gears, drop its democracy-domino rhetoric and begin working to convince neighboring countries such as Syria and Iran that they have a major stake in bringing peace to Iraq.
“You simply can’t put a broken country back together again if your neighbors don’t want you to,” Dobbins said.
The U.S. needs to convince those countries that by supporting stability in Iraq, they will increase stability in the region as a whole, as well as protecting their own territorial integrity and sovereignty, Dobbins said.
Meeting the president
Eric M. Davis was one of several Middle East policy academics and think tank fellows who met with President Bush at the White House in mid-August to discuss possible solutions to the Iraq crisis.
Like Dobbins, Davis said he strongly opposes dividing the country into ethnic or religious regions or states under a federalist umbrella. Such a move would have disastrous consequences, Davis said in a recent telephone interview.
At his meeting with the president, Davis said, he recommended a strategy that rejects such a proposal, saying, “This would only lead to the breakdown of Iraq.
“It would encourage even more conflict among groups within each of the three statelets, and invite more outside intervention, e.g., entice Iran to meddle in the affairs of the (Shiite) state to the south,” Davis said he told the president.
Key recommendations Davis made included:
- reintegrating former members of the Saddam regime into the Iraqi army;
- convincing the European Union and oil-rich nations such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to finance a public works program that would put to work young Iraqi men. “This is precisely the group of people being recruited for death squads,” Davis said;
- and working with community leaders to finance projects that would improve communities and provide jobs.
In a recently published paper, the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Anthony Cordesman said he believes the economy is key. But the economy can only develop if the government can achieve political compromise and provide adequate security for businesses to flourish, wrote Cordesman, an ABC news analyst and former director of intelligence assessment for the secretary of defense. The center is chaired by former Georgia senator and conservative Democrat Sam Nunn.
Otherwise, “the new government will lose momentum and credibility, the country will drift back into increasing sectarian and ethnic violence,” Cordesman wrote.
Four scenarios
In his recently published book on the war, “Fiasco —- The American military adventure in Iraq,” Thomas Ricks also is highly critical of the Bush administration’s handling of the war.
Ricks is the senior Pentagon correspondent for The Washington Post.
He paints four possible scenarios that he believes represent the most likely possible outcomes of the war.
In his best-case scenario, Ricks speculates that the U.S. will make a series of troop withdrawals in 2006 and 2007, but still will likely be forced to keep “thousands of troops” in Iraq for many years.
In what Ricks calls a “middling scenario,” he surmises that the political will to stay in Iraq will run out, causing the U.S. to pull out its troops before the job is done. That in turn would lead to the majority-led Shiite population occupying the Sunni-dominated central portion of the country for years.
“Thus any withdrawal would lead to far more violence,” wrote Ricks. “To push Iraqi forces to the fore before they are ready is not leaving to win, it is rushing to failure.”
A worse scenario would see the U.S. stay, but a civil war break out despite the military presence, Ricks wrote. And a Shiite-dominated government, with its back to the wall because of Sunni insurgency, “might very well invite the Iranian military to join it in putting down the Sunnis.”
Ricks described a final scenario in which a charismatic Iraqi leader surges to the forefront —- a leader who is so strong that he inspires a movement to rid Iraq of any foreign influence.
That leader could then use his popular support and Iraq’s oil revenues to “harness a program to secure nuclear weapons,” Ricks said.
What’s right and good doesn’t come naturally. You have to stand up and fight for it - as if the cause depends on you, because it does. Allow yourself that conceit - to believe that the flame of Democracy will never go out as long as there’s one candle in your hand.
~ Bill Moyers
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September 21st, 2006
OK, look — little Georgie Bush did dark and unhappy things with small animals as a child and we elected him anyway [sorta.] So we have nobody to thank but ourselves if he now wants to do the same [and has] to strangers with [perhaps] secrets. We have examined Dub’s darkness before … his early years revealed him as both rebellious and cruel. As a frat boy he was known for that mean streak — you can’t grow up to be a GOP player like Pappy without a mean streak. He was sold to the nation as born again, supposedly wiping away all those youthful indiscretions. It should be noted that one of the rapist killers at Haditha was also born again, six weeks before deploying.
Dub is frothing at the mouth now not so much because some new law will stop him from torturing [wanna bet?] but because he has treated the Congress of the United States like a two-bit gofer assistant to the assistant … assigning each one a nickname, rather like the Mass’ah named each of the ghostly-quiet house darkies … and now after six years of diligent service, they’re standing up on their hind legs and refusing to be the faithful lackeys he insists they be. It’s a revolt of the “help.” Damned ingrates! With those happy, carefree days of lynching over … at least in THIS country … George can only growl and threaten and tantrum as he is thwarted by his very own!
Uncle Dick has been attractive to Georgie, I expect, because of his obsessive desire to eliminate any blocks to presidential power since the Nixon years; you can hear the pitch from a few years back, can’t you? Stick with me, kid … you won’t be sorry. [Ha! Like THAT would happen in this lifetime!] And on that fateful day, Karma collided in a great flash as the crafty old frail-hearted ideologue met the arrogant, charismatic closed-hearted despot … so here we are, here … and any rebellion by the help will have to be put down immediately. George is not amused … and Uncle Dick will not allow it. Time will tell how it all works out.
Todays upshot is rich … the GOP may fillibuster the GOP on this matter. And some on the Right will have to turn in their Loyalty Card … what Dub values most; if you don’t have one, you are a non-person in Bush’s Washington. So the discussions continue to play out with all the sound and fury of madmen’s maniacal laughter — while what’s actually at stake is the ethical center of this country that defines our reputation in the world … and the end of habeas corpus, that which separates us from the primates.
An MSM article and then a collection of terrific reads, below.
Jude
Dissidents’ Detainee Bill May Face Filibuster
Frist warns GOP opponents of Bush’s proposal they must accept two key provisions.
Charles Babington and Jonathan Weisman
Wednesday 20 September 2006
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/19/AR2006091901463.html
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist signaled yesterday that he and other White House allies will filibuster a bill dealing with the interrogation and prosecution of detainees if they cannot persuade a rival group of Republicans to rewrite key provisions opposed by President Bush.
With Congress scheduled to adjourn in nine days, delaying tactics such as a filibuster could kill the drive to enact detainee legislation before the Nov. 7 elections, a White House priority. Bush faced still more problems in the House, where GOP moderates Christopher Shays (Conn.), Michael N. Castle (Del.), Jim Leach (Iowa) and James T. Walsh ( N.Y.) publicly threw their support behind the bill opposed by the White House. The four Republicans told Majority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) that any House bill must maintain the dissidents’ principles.
On another front, legislation to authorize Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program may be in more jeopardy. Frist said yesterday that he referred the warrantless surveillance matter to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence for further review and would not bring it up for Senate consideration until next week.
Yesterday’s actions significantly dimmed prospects that Congress can complete its national security agenda before adjournment. Frist (R-Tenn.) acknowledged that a majority of the 100 senators back the rival group on military commissions but that there are not enough to block a filibuster, which requires a super-majority of 60.
Senate and administration negotiators talked throughout the day, but no real progress was apparent. “It could all come together in a matter of hours, or it could drag out for another week or so,” said John Ullyot, spokesman for Armed Services Committee Chairman John W. Warner (R-Va.).
The sharp rhetoric of last week was replaced yesterday by softer language from both the Bush administration and the three Republican senators leading the opposition to its proposals: Warner, John McCain (Ariz.) and Lindsey O. Graham ( S.C.).
But Frist struck a more jarring tone, telling reporters that the trio’s bill is unacceptable despite its majority support.
For a bill to pass, Frist said, “it’s got to preserve our intelligence programs,” including the CIA’s aggressive interrogation techniques, and it must “protect classified information from terrorists.” He said that “the president’s bill achieves those two goals” but that “the Warner-McCain-Graham bill falls short.”
The disagreement centers on the Geneva Conventions, which say wartime detainees must be “treated humanely.” Bush backs language saying the United States complies so long as CIA interrogators abide by a 2005 law barring “cruel, inhuman, or degrading” treatment of captives. Warner and his allies say they are concerned that Bush’s approach would invite nations to interpret the Geneva Conventions in lax ways that could lead to abusive treatment of captured U.S. troops.
The Warner contingent also opposes Bush’s bid to allow detainees to be convicted on secret evidence they are not allowed to see.
Yesterday, Warner said negotiators were considering revising the federal War Crimes Act to clarify acceptable interrogation methods by nonmilitary officials. His bill embraces a similar approach, which would sidestep direct references to the Geneva Conventions’ meaning. It was unclear whether the White House would accept such language.
Frist also surprised senators yesterday on the warrantless wiretapping issue, sending surveillance legislation already approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee to the intelligence committee for further review. With one week left to consider the bill on the Senate floor, Sen. Olympia J. Snowe (R-Maine), an intelligence committee member, said passage before the election would be “extremely ambitious.”
The intelligence committee is considered hostile to legislation worked out between Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) and the White House. That bill would allow but not order the administration to submit its warrantless surveillance program to a secret national security court for constitutional review. The program involves monitoring overseas phone calls and e-mails of some Americans when one party is suspected of links to terrorism.
Three Republicans on the intelligence committee - Snowe, Sen. Mike DeWine (Ohio) and Sen. Chuck Hagel (Neb.) - have co-authored competing legislation that would give Congress considerably more oversight of the program.
Two House committees will draft National Security Agency eavesdropping bills this week that would take still another tack on surveillance, but those measures also face resistance, acknowledged Rep. Heather A. Wilson ( R-N.M.), the primary author of the measures.
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist signaled yesterday that he and other White House allies will filibuster a bill dealing with the interrogation and prosecution of detainees if they cannot persuade a rival group of Republicans to rewrite key provisions opposed by President Bush.
With Congress scheduled to adjourn in nine days, delaying tactics such as a filibuster could kill the drive to enact detainee legislation before the Nov. 7 elections, a White House priority. Bush faced still more problems in the House, where GOP moderates Christopher Shays (Conn.), Michael N. Castle (Del.), Jim Leach (Iowa) and James T. Walsh ( N.Y.) publicly threw their support behind the bill opposed by the White House. The four Republicans told Majority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) that any House bill must maintain the dissidents’ principles.
On another front, legislation to authorize Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program may be in more jeopardy. Frist said yesterday that he referred the warrantless surveillance matter to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence for further review and would not bring it up for Senate consideration until next week.
Yesterday’s actions significantly dimmed prospects that Congress can complete its national security agenda before adjournment. Frist (R-Tenn.) acknowledged that a majority of the 100 senators back the rival group on military commissions but that there are not enough to block a filibuster, which requires a super-majority of 60.
Senate and administration negotiators talked throughout the day, but no real progress was apparent. “It could all come together in a matter of hours, or it could drag out for another week or so,” said John Ullyot, spokesman for Armed Services Committee Chairman John W. Warner (R-Va.).
The sharp rhetoric of last week was replaced yesterday by softer language from both the Bush administration and the three Republican senators leading the opposition to its proposals: Warner, John McCain (Ariz.) and Lindsey O. Graham ( S.C.).
But Frist struck a more jarring tone, telling reporters that the trio’s bill is unacceptable despite its majority support.
For a bill to pass, Frist said, “it’s got to preserve our intelligence programs,” including the CIA’s aggressive interrogation techniques, and it must “protect classified information from terrorists.” He said that “the president’s bill achieves those two goals” but that “the Warner-McCain-Graham bill falls short.”
The disagreement centers on the Geneva Conventions, which say wartime detainees must be “treated humanely.” Bush backs language saying the United States complies so long as CIA interrogators abide by a 2005 law barring “cruel, inhuman, or degrading” treatment of captives. Warner and his allies say they are concerned that Bush’s approach would invite nations to interpret the Geneva Conventions in lax ways that could lead to abusive treatment of captured U.S. troops.
The Warner contingent also opposes Bush’s bid to allow detainees to be convicted on secret evidence they are not allowed to see.
Yesterday, Warner said negotiators were considering revising the federal War Crimes Act to clarify acceptable interrogation methods by nonmilitary officials. His bill embraces a similar approach, which would sidestep direct references to the Geneva Conventions’ meaning. It was unclear whether the White House would accept such language.
Frist also surprised senators yesterday on the warrantless wiretapping issue, sending surveillance legislation already approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee to the intelligence committee for further review. With one week left to consider the bill on the Senate floor, Sen. Olympia J. Snowe (R-Maine), an intelligence committee member, said passage before the election would be “extremely ambitious.”
The intelligence committee is considered hostile to legislation worked out between Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) and the White House. That bill would allow but not order the administration to submit its warrantless surveillance program to a secret national security court for constitutional review. The program involves monitoring overseas phone calls and e-mails of some Americans when one party is suspected of links to terrorism.
Three Republicans on the intelligence committee - Snowe, Sen. Mike DeWine (Ohio) and Sen. Chuck Hagel (Neb.) - have co-authored competing legislation that would give Congress considerably more oversight of the program.
Two House committees will draft National Security Agency eavesdropping bills this week that would take still another tack on surveillance, but those measures also face resistance, acknowledged Rep. Heather A. Wilson ( R-N.M.), the primary author of the measures. ++
Rules for the Real World
NYT editorial
September 20, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/20/opinion/20wed1.html
The White House has been acting lately as though the struggle over the proper way to handle prisoners is a debate about how tough to get with Osama bin Laden if he’s ever actually caught.
This week, we’ve had two powerful reminders of the real issue: when a government puts itself above the law, innocent people are put at risk.
On Monday, Canada issued a scathing report about the story of a Canadian citizen, Maher Arar, who was abducted by American agents in late 2002 and turned over to Syrian authorities, who obligingly tortured him for 10 months until he signed a transparently false confession. The report said Mr. Arar never had any connection to terrorism. But the United States stonewalled Canada’s investigation, which concluded that the Americans misled Canada about their plans for Mr. Arar. Sending him to Syria, where he would certainly be tortured, was not just immoral and un-American, it was a violation of international law.
In Iraq, American authorities have been holding an Iraqi-born photographer for The Associated Press for five months without charging him with any crime. Military officials say they have evidence that Bilal Hussein has “strong ties” to insurgents, but refuse to show it to Mr. Hussein, his lawyers, The A.P. or even to the Iraqi courts. We don’t know the truth. But we know how to get at it: If the Americans have evidence against Mr. Hussein, they should present it. If he committed a crime, he should be charged. If not, he should be set free.
These two cases illustrate vividly why Congress needs to pass an effective law on the handling of prisoners that not only provides for legal military tribunals to try dangerous men like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who is believed to have organized the 9/11 attacks, but also deals with the other men, perhaps hundreds, wrongly imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay, and sets rules for the future.
The bills now before Congress don’t meet the test. The White House’s measure endorses the practice of picking up any foreign citizens the United States wants, abusing and even torturing them, and then trying them on the basis of secret evidence. It effectively repudiates the Geneva Conventions, putting American soldiers at risk.
The other bill, written by the only three Republican senators who were willing to defy the White House, preserves the conventions and creates a respectable trial process. But it defines “illegal enemy combatant” so broadly that the administration could apply it to almost any foreigner it chose, including legal United States residents. Both bills choke off judicial review and allow even those acquitted by a military tribunal to be held indefinitely.
Either bill might be acceptable if the United States government were infallible. As it is, they would legalize the sorts of abuses of power that the United States fought against in other countries for most of the 20th century. ++
Why is George So Upset?
Steven Jonas, MD, MPH
BuzzFlash on Tue, 09/19/2006
http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/jonas/018
George Bush is presently engaged in yet another attempt to get Congress to pass the US equivalent of the March, 1933 Nazi-German Enabling Act (which gave Hitler dictatorial powers under the cloak — yes, this is the one Hitler used — of “dealing with matters of national security”). The main piece of legislation is the one that would allow the Georgites to unilaterally amend the Fourth Amendment on their own authority to permit warrantless wiretapping when they say that it is justified to do so. It has already been approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee (see BuzzFlash, Sept. 13, 2006). I have read the Constitution numerous times and I find nothing in it that permits such actions, other than going through the Constitutional amendment process itself. But Bush wants to be able to amend the Constitution on his own and the Republican Congress appears now to be giving him that power.
At the same time, Bush is in trouble with his “military tribunals” bill (see BuzzFlash, Sept. 15, 2006) which to the outside world is known as the “torture has been common practice under my Administration and now I want it codified” bill. In addition to empowering the Administration to torture at will, the bill would empower Bush, on his own authority, to lock up anyone he accused of being a “terrorist” or of aiding or abetting “terrorism” without having any of the Constitutional protections applying to criminal procedures, and then try that person, if he so chose, under a “military tribunal” system. In practice the latter means, in part: no right to confront accusers, no right to see evidence against, no right to legal representation of their choice, no right to be present at the trial. Bush knows that the system he established without Congressional authorization was recently ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. He is counting on the Coulter “we-hope-the-liberal justices-will-succumb-to-mortality” doctrine to knock off one or more of the liberal Justices so that by the time his “law” got to the Court again, he would have his Scalia-ite majority.
So George has gotten the big fish: he can ditch the Fourth Amendment on his own authority. But he is still upset. He appears to have lost one in the vote of the Senate Armed Services Committee on this bill. (I said “appeared.” Senate Republicans have caved to Bush on more than one occasion. “Discussions” are underway. This could become another caving episode.)
But the question becomes why is Bush so upset about the refusal, for now at least, of the Armed Services Committee to approve the use of torture in violation of the Geneva Conventions?
Is it that he really thinks that torture is a good weapon in fighting terrorism? Well, Bush himself is a well-known bully from childhood and he personally may like the idea, but as far as Georgite policy concerned, that’s not it. Virtually every interrogation expert who has expressed an opinion on the matter (and I am not including “Death Squad” Negroponte in the “expert” list on this subject, although he seems to be an expert on death squads) tells us that it is useless for extracting reliable and useful information from torturees.
Is it that he really thinks that Guantanamo would have to be shut down if torture is not permitted? Well, no, for Guantanamo could well stay in place, just without the use of torture and the provision of due process for its inmates. As for the CIA and its procedures themselves, the CIA has been operating under the provisions of the Geneva Conventions for decades and no one has ever complained, out loud at least, about them getting in the CIA’s way, as written.
No, what the Georgites are really upset about is that if the Senate Committee decision stands, the Congress will have re-asserted itself, for the time-being at least, over the Executive Branch. It will have, on the Senate side and most tenuously to be sure, re-established some balance of powers within the Federal government. By golly, they would have actually checked and balanced him. So far, skillfully using the “terrorism” argument (just as Hitler did) the Georgites have been on their way, at a leisurely pace to be sure, to establishing a dictatorship for Bush. The Supreme Court threw up a roadblock in Hamdan, but as noted, Supreme Court justices, like the rest of us are mortal. One more Supreme Court seat and Bush will have his majority there.
So Bush views having the Senate, especially, say “hold on there” even on a relatively minor matter (except to those being tortured and/or being held without charges, and etc.) about the use of this useless technique in fighting the war on flanking maneuvers, as a serious setback on his road from being the decider to being THE DECIDER. And it could be. For violating the Geneva Conventions, which under Article VI of the Constitution are part of it, is violating the Constitution.
The only Constitutional way for the Georgites to “re-interpret” any part of the Geneva Conventions would be to re-negotiate them with all of their signatories. (Interestingly enough, the Republican rebels are not using Constitutional arguments, for the most part. The focus is on “morality” [as if the Geneva Conventions did not exist] and what might happen to captured US service people in the future if the torture system stays in place [that is, if any old country could then "interpret" the Geneva Conventions as they saw fit].) That’s why George is so upset. Even though those Republicans aren’t focused on the Constitution, this one could become a roadblock to Georgites proceeding upon their merry way to creating that “Unitary Executive” of their dreams, regardless of what the Constitution says about how our great nation is to be governed. Or it might not. George will continue to be very unhappy if it is. Do stay tuned. ++
Steven Jonas, MD, MPH is a Professor of Preventive Medicine at Stony Brook University (NY) a weekly Contributing Author for The Political Junkies (www.thepoliticaljunkies.net ) and a Columnist for BuzzFlash
Boys Gone Wild
Pick Your Favorite Homoerotic Torture Technique
Ted Rall
Sep 20 2006
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/794
NEW YORK–Right-wing Republicans are weird. When gays and lesbians want to marry and raise kids in the suburbs, the right-wingers freak out. “Perverts!” they scream at these bland strivers. But when supposedly straight soldiers in the army, marines and CIA engage in male-on-male rape and other acts of homosexual sadism so bizarre and extreme they turn off the average, gay-marriage-craving civilian, Republican legislators think it’s the best thing ever.
No one talked about it much at the time, but those now-forgotten photos of torture and humiliation at Abu Ghraib were the kind of extreme homoerotic kink your local porn vendor keeps hidden under the counter. Iraqi inmates of mental asylums led around like dogs on leashes. Iraqi prisoners, almost all later released as innocent, stripped of their clothes and forced to pile on top of each other naked.
Of course, America’s state media censored the most disturbing images. Hundreds of photos showed sex acts between and among soldiers and detainees. Male prisoners were videotaped while being forced to masturbate and have sex with one another. They were forced to wear women’s underwear. U.S. soldiers, CIA torturers and private mercenaries hired by the Bush Defense Department sodomized them with flashlights and possibly broomsticks. They were kept naked for days at a time. Some were smeared with feces.
The photos, said a spokesman for U.S. military forces in Iraq earlier this year, “do not reflect what is happening at Abu Ghraib now.” Because the Red Cross has long been banned from visiting the prison, there’s no way to know if that’s true. We do know, however, that enforced nudity and other gayer-than-gay torture tactics have become de rigueur at other outposts of Bush’s post-9/11 gulag archipelago, including Guantánamo Bay, Afghanistan’s Bagram concentration camp and the secret CIA prisons in Central and South Asia and Eastern Europe.
Moreover, torture has continued at Abu Ghraib since the United States turned over the facility to Iraq’s puppet regime about two weeks ago. “Prisoners released from the jail this week spoke of routine torture of terrorism suspects and on [September 6], 27 prisoners were hanged in the first mass execution since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s regime,” reported the British Independent newspaper. “Conditions in the rest of the jail were grim, with an overwhelming stench of excrement, prisoners crammed into cells for all but 20 minutes a day, food rations cut to just rice and water and no air conditioning.”
The U.S. government’s Boys Gone Wild, terrified that the courts could force them to fork over millions of dollars to their victims, buy torture insurance from the Arlington, Virginia-based Wright & Co. for $300 a year. If Americans ever come to their senses, however, our homotorturers could also face prison sentences. That’s why George W. Bush wants to legalize the CIA’s “alternative interrogation techniques” prohibited by the Geneva Conventions and the laws of 192 of the world’s 193 nations. (The Pacific island of Nauru, which hasn’t gotten around to ratification, might be a good spot to set up another “secret site.”)
So what are the “alternative interrogation techniques”?
A well-sourced and repeatedly confirmed ABC News report lists six. In the “Attention Grab,” the interrogator shakes a victim by his shirt. (This assumes that he isn’t already nude.) The “Attention” and “Belly Slaps” are “aimed at causing pain and triggering fear.” Then there’s “Long Time Standing,” in which victims are forced to stand for more than 40 hours straight. “Water Boarding” is the medieval practice of tying a victim to a board and dunking him under water. “Cellophane is wrapped over the prisoner’s face and water is poured over him. Unavoidably, the gag reflex kicks in and a terrifying fear of drowning leads to almost instant pleas to bring the treatment to a halt.”
In order to work in American military intelligence, it seems, you really have to like looking at wet naked men with hard, erect nipples. In particular, it helps to be into wet naked Middle Eastern men. As a guy who looks away from other dudes in locker rooms, I doubt I’d fit in.
Now one right-wing Republican, George W. Bush, is fighting a gang of right-wing Republican senators over homoerotic torture tactics. The debate isn’t about whether, but rather what kind, of homoerotic torture ought to be permissible. Bush is pretty much a whatever-it-takes, pro-flashlight-raping freak. Senators John McCain and John Warner are a little more vanilla. They want to set a few limits.
Very few limits.
Jeffrey H. Smith, ex-general counsel for the Clinton-era CIA, says the senators are OK with the current menu of torture. “The senators seem to be prepared to allow some techniques, but not nearly as many as the administration wants,” he told The New York Times. Bush, on the other hand, wants to allow just about any form of pain infliction the human mind can conceive.
This, my fellow citizens, is what we’ve come to. No one, not even the nominally opposition Democrats, dares suggest the obvious–that both sets of gay-torture-loving right-wing Republicans are out of their filthy little minds. ++
Torture Is For Cowards … Stupid Cowards
RJ Eskow
Sep 20 2006
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/782
Here’s where the Republican Party has brought the United States: We are being lectured on the immorality of torture by Uganda. And rightfully so. The nation that was once the most brutal torture capital in the world has changed - and sadly, so have we.
I’m pleased that three GOP Senators and an ex-Secretary of State appear to have had enough - although that one’s still in play.
After all, how do you “negotiate” the allowable limits of torture in a civilized society? The very idea disgraces us. And McCain caved on the torture issue when he had a real card to play — in the 2004 election. But let’s hope they come through this time, for their country’s sake.
Here’s what our leaders are telling us: We’re afraid. We know we’re not very good at national security. We’ve read the reports that say our airports, power plants, and ports are no safer than they were on 9/11. We don’t know how to win wars and protect our homeland the American way, so we need to cheat. We need to jettison the values that make us Americans.
We can’t protect America and preserve the values that make it America. That’s what the Republicans are saying.
Their consigliere is Alan Dershowitz. A year ago, his briefs for torture were the extremist sentiments of a fringe thinker. Now his point of view, which is that the rules for torture should be codified into statutes, is about to become American law.
That’s how radical this government is, and how quickly it moves to undercut core American beliefs.
Americans used to say they were willing to fight and die for their liberties. Not these guys. They were too cowardly to go fight in a war they supported. Now they’re too frightened even to cower in their ’secure undisclosed locations,’ if they’re required to meet the rules of a civilized society. And their cowardice echoed by today’s conservative keyboard warriors and television Rambos.
That’s the “coward” part. Here’s the “stupid” part: Military officers and intelligence officials oppose the hideous Bush bill because they know it will endanger Americans, not protect them. Our military leaders - the ones insulted and belitted by the arrogant amateur Rumsfeld - know that our fighting men and women are far more likely to be tortured horribly if this bill goes through.
(Yes, they’ve been tortured before, but the generals know full well how much worse it can get.)
Like our military leaders, the intelligence experts hate this bill because they know more than the amateurs do. They know that torture gives you lousy intelligence, and that bad intelligence slows you down by sending you down the wrong roads when you’re trying to find the bad guys.
The cowardice is also very personal for Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld. They’re no doubt afraid that, unless this bill is passed, they may someday stand trial for the atrocities they’ve committed - some of which may not yet have come to light.
Lastly, here’s where “stupid” and “coward” come together: An America that’s disrespected in the world community won’t get cooperation from allies and neutral countries. That cooperation is needed if we’re going to root out the terrorists and destroy them.
The crowd that’s in power now talks about our values, but they can’t wait to dump them. They talk about being better than the terrorists, then can’t wait to act just like them. They’re a stain on our national honor.
It’s no coincidence that the guys with the guts to fight the conservatives’ wars think torture is a bad idea, while chickenhawks like Bush, Cheney, and Frist think waterboarding is the best idea to come out of Argentina since the tango.
Cowards, go home. Let the experts do their jobs. If you do, then maybe someday soon Americans will again be able to speak to the world with the moral authority of Ugandans. ++
Dispelling Brutality: The Decay of Moral Government
Col. Daniel Smith
Sep 19 2006
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/747
“To answer brutality with brutality is to admit one’s moral and intellectual bankruptcy.”– Mahatma Gandhi
“The world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism.”
– Colin Powell, September 13, 2006
Twelve months after 19 men steered three hijacked U.S. jetliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and crashed a fourth in Pennsylvania, the Bush administration was citing the brutality of Saddam Hussein toward his own people and his neighbors as the moral justification–indeed, a moral imperative–for forcefully removing him from power.
Unfortunately for the people of Iraq, regime change in their country has transformed Iraq into the “flypaper for terrorists” in the heart of the Middle East. Add to this the inter-sectarian brutality that dominates the daily lives of more than one-quarter of Iraq’s population and that strikes randomly throughout the country, it is impossible to see how this “moral imperative” has made Iraq, the region, or the world safer and better as the president promised. If anything, the brutality that has been unleashed in Iraq (and Afghanistan) is fostering an atmosphere of increased tolerance of brutality around the world, even in places where full-blown combat has not been the daily paradigm. And as so often happens, the consequences fall most heavily on those who do not participate in the violence but end up the victims of collective punishment.
Nowhere has this been truer than in the Occupied Palestinian Territories since the January 25, 2006 parliamentary elections. Tired of years of corrupt and ineffective governance by the Fatah coalition, Palestinians voted for Hamas candidates, returning them in a majority and conferring the right to form the next government which took office at the end of March. The problem is that both the U.S. and Israel regard Hamas as a terror organization and refuse to deal with it.
This “refusal” quickly assumed a programmatic coherence. Israel, which controls all border crossing points into Gaza, whether for people or for supplies, and collects taxes for the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) and forwards them to Ramallah every month, refused to send the money to the new government on the pretext that it would not be spent for the benefit of Palestinians but for more weapons and training Hamas forces. Similarly, the U.S. cut off all financial support to the PNA . Together, these financial hammers quickly wreaked havoc on the PNA, which is the largest employer (40 percent) of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, and in turn on the innocent trying to survive day to day.
Worse was to come. The catalyst was an attack on an Israeli outpost along the Egyptian-Gaza border, the latter under Israeli control, by Palestinian fighters. In the attack, two Israeli soldiers were killed and one was captured. After three days, Israeli troops re-entered Gaza, sweeping all the way through the towns and camps looking for the captured soldier. The Hamas-led government, which still refused to affirm explicitly Israel’s right to exist, was powerless to stop the Israeli Defence Forces. More than 230 Palestinians were killed.
The PNA is also powerless to get its perspective into the international media limelight, particularly in the United States. In a real sense, this is an even more critical failing as the PNA finds itself two or more steps behind Israeli interest groups and partisans.
The collapse of the Gaza economy–the outgrowth of the cut-off of tax remittances and foreign assistance–has led to the disruption of efforts by expatriate Palestinians who, having been successful professionals in other lands, returned to Palestine to contribute to the effort to re-establish a viable and healthy economy encompassing both Gaza and the West Bank. But restrictions on the movement of goods, always a hindrance in the best of times, have been tightened even more. Add in the withholding of vital revenue streams, which means families have no money to buy the few commodities that do get in, and in short order “economic activity” is a dream.
Now Israel has opened a new front that will deepen even further the destitution in Gaza. For years, Israel has exercised a type of informal “guest worker” visa system that allowed Palestinian entrepreneurs to stay in Gaza on a renewable three-month work visa. The same rule applied to foreigners in humanitarian, aid, and nongovernmental groups trying to assist the ordinary people. Under the latest administrative ruling, foreign passport holders–even those of Palestinian ancestry–can get only a single three-month tourist visa in any 12 month period. Any additional visas in that 12 month period will be valid for one week only. A few additional one-month renewals may be possible for some businessmen, but this is not guaranteed even when their homes and families are in Gaza.
Truly, this must be one of the most short-sighted decisions in the whole modern history of Israel–one that runs counter to efforts to go beyond treating symptoms to tackle root causes of terror.
A primary non-military objective of the Bush administration’s “war on terror” is to eliminate what the White House regards as the seedbed of terror: the madras schools financed by wealthy Muslims and attended by young boys whose parents cannot afford any other education for their sons or by older youngsters who cannot find work. All these schools teach is the Koran–word-for-word mastery of the entire scripture and the more important (as determined by the madras’ headmaster) interpretations of the meaning of various verses.
While such a regimen may have some benefits for family and society, if this is the extent of the education received by the majority of young men in Islamic-dominated countries, they will not be equipped to compete in the workforce and contribute to improving their country or region. In areas such as Gaza where the public education infrastructure has been so badly damaged by armed struggle, one option that can help overcome the limitations of the madrasas by supplementing Islamic religious education is the foreign-financed schools that teach the basic skills that serve as a foundation for any number of important occupations. But in Gaza, these schools–including one in Ramallah administered by the Society of Friends–are being threatened by the new “three-month to one-week” visa policy. When their English-speaking staff of teachers has to leave Gaza when their initial three month tourist visa expires, they could simply be denied a re-entry visa or be given a one-week visa by the Israeli military which controls who enters and leaves Gaza.
On the broader scope of the Middle East, Israel’s visa policy will simply reinforce the perception that Tel Aviv has no intention of allowing a viable Palestinian state to form. This week, Hamas agreed to form a new “national unity government” with Fatah and to invest Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas with full authority to negotiate with Israel and to represent the interests of Palestinians in any peace talks. The working platform of the unity government does affirm the “two state solution,” implicitly recognizing the existence of the State of Israel even though Hamas as an organization still retains its opposition to Israel.
Whether this will be enough to ease the restrictions on visas that are brutally strangling both the educational and the economic prospects of Palestinians remains to be seen. The current government in Tel Aviv has certainly made egregious missteps in its relationships with the PNA and with Lebanon to the north since coming into power at the start of 2006. And like George Bush, its only strategy is more of the same–”stay the course.”
The Palestinian unity government itself faces the challenge of reining in the various armed factions operating in the Occupied Territories and turning away from the brutality of constant warfare. To the extent that the PNA can get control of the violence, it will be able to demonstrate that the harsh Israeli tactics–including the short visas–are unnecessary, punitive, and destructive not only of the chances for an economically vibrant PNA but of the bonds of family and communal life that are the basis of moral government. ++
Dan Smith, Colonel, USA (Ret.) - Senior Fellow on Military Affairs - Friends Committee on National Legislation
Bush’s cruel and degrading presidency
Mike Whitney
Sep 19 2006
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/740
Washington is a moral swamp. When the chief executive can stand at the presidential podium and make an unabashed appeal for torture, then the American dream is dead.
Bush hates America and only God knows why. He’s been buoyed-along his entire life on a raft of wealth and privilege; distancing himself from his endless failures, one after the other . . . flop, flop, flop. Still, President Codpiece wants more; another pound of flesh to inflate his battered, alcohol-saturated ego. He wants to snuff out anything that even vaguely resembles honor or decency or dignity, so he can permeate the world with his own fiendish image beaming from TVs across the globe.
Who could ever have imagined the President of the United States making the case for torture like some flannel-mouth medicine man at a tent show?
“Where is your sense of decency, sir?”
The shame that Bush has brought on this country is nearly as great as the ignominy heaped on the nation by the Republican rubber-stamp congress. The House of Representatives is the real moral swamp. Not once, in six years have they stood up to Bush . . . not once!!! Meanwhile the country has trundled off to war on a “pack of lies,” the president has authorized unlimited spying on the American people, 300,000 mostly poor, black people were ethnically cleansed in New Orleans, and countless thousands of innocent Muslims have been kept in bondage in American gulags.
And don’t bother defending that phony McCain and his cadres of far-right toadies jousting with Bush on “secret evidence.” What a joke. McCain never saw a war he didn’t like. He’s chairman of the International Republican Party, a slick-sounding NGO that topples foreign governments (like Hugo Chavez) that don’t believe that every nickel of the world’s wealth should go to the upper 1 percent. Even his fight against “secret evidence” is pure fiction. If McCain “the maverick” wins, American-held prisoners will still not have the right to challenge their case in federal court or sue for damages in the case of unlawful arrest. McCain, Warner and Graham, have removed habeas corpus (the foundation of American jurisprudence dating back 800 years into English law) as a fundamental human right. The only rights that prisoners will have are the right to appear before three of Rumsfeld’s hand-picked stooges to plead for mercy. It is an utter travesty.
Republicans love to lavish praise on that inveterate racist Winston “bomb the niggers” Churchill. Here’s what Churchill said about habeas corpus: “The power of the executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgment of his peers, is in the highest degree odious, and the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist.”
According to the Associated Press (AP) there are more than 14,000 of these unlucky souls in Bush’s gulags right now. That doesn’t include the tens of thousands in Iraqi concentration camps and detention facilities. Bush not only claims the right to hold them indefinitely, but wants the congress to endorse his right to torture them as he sees fit. This is the very definition of tyranny.
Here’s Bush defending torture in his September 6 speech: “Captured terrorists have a unique knowledge about how terrorist networks operate . . . and knowledge of what plots are underway.” (The ‘ticking time-bomb farce) “Our security depends on getting this kind of information.” (Like the Sept PDB “Bin Laden Planning on Striking in America”?) “Many Al Qaida or Taliban fighters try to conceal their identities and withhold information that could save American lives. They have received training on how to resist interrogation. And, so, the CIA used an Alternate Set of Procedures. These procedures were designed to be safe, to comply with our laws, our Constitution, and our treaty obligations. The Dept of Justice reviewed the authorized methods extensively, and determined them to be lawful.”
Then why change the laws, George? No harm, no foul.
Bush wants to change the law because he KNOWS the “procedures” constitute torture; a violation of the War Crimes Act and the Geneva Conventions. His petition for torture goes far beyond a sadistic urge to inflict pain on other human beings. It is a frontal assault on the fundamental principles which underscore the Bill of Rights. It is an expression of the hatred he feels for our system, our laws, and our prevailing ethos. It is a way of forcibly removing any obstacles to absolute power.
The opponents of torture have mounted a flimsy, limp-wristed defense that torture produces unreliable information or that it may put our own soldiers at risk. What gibberish! That’s the spineless equivocating of lawyers not humans.
We oppose torture because it is a moral evil; it makes no difference if you are religious or not.
There is no lower form of human activity than inflicting pain on another person. None. Even killing someone allows them to retain some trace of dignity; torture robs them even of that.
Anyone who thinks torture is “quaint” is unfit to lead; in fact, they are a cancer on society. Bush’s railing against the Geneva Conventions is the sign of a man who accepts no legal or ethical constraints on his behavior. It is a blanket defense of cruelty and an attack on our core principles as Americans. It is the language of a dictator whose sole aspiration is the expansion of his own despotic power.
Bush says that the wording of Geneva is “vague,” and that “outrages against human dignity” is hard to decipher. That is because he plans to push the limits of the law by exacting as much pain as possible from his victims. Geneva is not vague. It intentionally casts a broad net to discourage ANY harsh treatment of detainees in one’s charge. Its condemnation of the “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment of prisoners has never been challenged because it is a clear indictment any such punishment.
What is it that Bush does not understand about our laws and traditions? How can a man reach the pinnacle of power without the slightest resolve to defend even minimal standards of human decency?
“Inalienable rights” have no geographic boundary; they are the province of every person. Prisoners are no less entitled to human rights than anyone else. The president’s plea to repeal the Geneva Conventions is a portentous reminder of how “absolute power corrupts absolutely” and of how quickly America has slipped into the quicksand of moral depravity. ++
What’s right and good doesn’t come naturally. You have to stand up and fight for it - as if the cause depends on you, because it does. Allow yourself that conceit - to believe that the flame of Democracy will never go out as long as there’s one candle in your hand.
~ Bill Moyers
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September 21st, 2006