Under The Same Sun

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August 31, 2004

Knock it off, will ya?

Pfc. Lynndie England's military hearings continued yesterday, with relatively predictable testimony. Here's a question. You are caught stomping on the fingers and toes of people under your total control -- and the total sum of the reaction you get is being told to "knock it off." What's the predictable reaction: do you decide it's no big deal and continue as you were or do you pull back in realization of what you're doing is wrong? So did Pfc. England.

"They were stomping on the fingers and toes of the detainees," Sivits said, referring to England and Graner. England, wearing a maternity camouflage uniform, listened to the testimony in the Fort Bragg courtroom.

...

Last week, a panel headed by former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger issued a report accusing the U.S. military chain of command from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on down of leadership failures that created conditions for the abuse.

According to Sivits, a noncommissioned officer who was present told the MPs to "knock it off," but after the NCO left, abuse continued.

It now looks like a few generals will also pay the grand price of cozy retirement with full benefits at a time of their choosing for their central role in expanding the use of torture in detention centers around the world. Sanchez looks to be the highest figure who will be assigned some blame --but not any real punishment-- since there are now leaked documents that show he directly authorized some of the torture, including the use of dogs:

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S. Sanchez listed several dozen strategies for extracting information, drawn partly from what officials now say was an outdated and improperly permissive Army field manual.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

The Post story is rather interesting, although it's written in a very convoluted way. It basically says that the Army investigation is portraying clear acts of commission as if they were acts of omission -- even though they have evidence that Sanchez ordered the use of dogs, they attribute the use of dogs to unclear policy and "confusion."

The text of the Sanchez cable was not included in public copies of the Army's report, but was obtained by The Washington Post from a government official upset by what Sanchez approved.

The authors of the Army report did not accuse Sanchez of directly instigating abuse, and they did not cite the contents of his memo in the unclassified version. But Army Gen. Paul J. Kern -- who oversaw the drafting of the report -- said in an interview last week that Sanchez "wrote a policy which was not clear," and that by doing so, he allowed junior officers to conclude mistakenly that they were following an official policy as they stepped over a legal line.

This interpretation of the role senior officials played -- that they committed sins of omission, rather than commission by writing ambiguous instructions and then failing to police the errant ways of subordinates -- is likely to be challenged in court, according to lawyers for some of the soldiers on trial in connection with the prison abuse.

In other words, the Army deliberately hid documents in its possession showing direct orders by its own generals for use of dogs in order to create the infrastructure for the theory that the top brass is only responsible for not being clear enough in discouraging those few bad apples from actions they took totally and completely on their own:

The Army report quoted Sanchez as saying he "never approved use of dogs." Fay also said in the report that "no documentation was found" showing approval by the Combined Joint Task Force 7, headed by Sanchez, "to use dogs in interrogations."

Asked to explain the apparent conflict between language in the report and the text of Sanchez's cable, Kern said that what Sanchez meant is that he never specifically approved an interrogation plan submitted to him for review that involved the use of dogs, while Fay said that Sanchez believes he only endorsed the general presence of muzzled dogs at the time interrogations were being conducted, rather than inside prison interrogation booths -- a practice that was clearly misunderstood.

Posted by zeynep at 01:23 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

August 30, 2004

Peaceful Police to Get Discounts, Smiles

Peaceful NY Police Campaign Launched:

Peaceful police officers will receive smiles and positive responses from RNC protesters, as well as discounts at several New York City stores, if they pledge to remain peaceful during demonstrations that are planned during the Republican National Convention.

...

Police officers who choose to wear the buttons can receive discounts from such businesses as ABC Homes and Carpets (20 % off); Axis Gallery (10 % of art work); The Culture Project (50 % off on any performance); Angelica’s Kitchen (5 % off on meals); and screenings of the movie “Uncovered” at the Angelica Theater (10 % off).

Posted by zeynep at 04:27 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Shortage of Men's Underwear, the Real Culprit

We have now moved beyond the few bad apples theory, and have stepped into the realm of the surreal:

Members of England's unit testified about critical supply shortages that forced them to keep prisoners naked for long stretches and to give male detainees female underwear.

Excuse me?

Can we refresh our memory here about what we're talking about:

Posted by zeynep at 12:22 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

August 29, 2004

"Black-skinned storm troopers" "in a Nazi-like salute"

"Black-skinned storm troopers" who gave "a Nazi-like salute" was how press and pundits described Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who gave the iconic black power salute in in 1968 Mexico City Olympics.

Not surprising to anyone who's been following media leading up to the RNC protests, as pundits and the elites "advise" us with great passion about what kind of protests are acceptable and what kind are not.

Unfortunately, all this unsolicited and insincere advise has generated some unproductive responses: some people seem to have decided to lump together everyone criticizing the current dominant protest model with the insincere criticisms of the powerbrokers; and some people have taken that "advise" to heart and go out of their way to assuage the elites that the protests will be well-behaved and irrelevant. I think we should not let this cacaphony of "advice" and misdirection drown out the need for a real assessment of our methods of dissent.

The current "big-protest-for-one-day" model has run its course. Frankly, I believe, it's become relatively inept and almost disempowering. However, at this point in history, it might be more disempowering not to hold them before the movement can formulate better models so I am not advocating not holding them.

I am, however advocating coming to terms with a model that has been pushed to the limits of its success. The discussion has to be taken beyond those whose main aim is well-behaved protests and those who very mistakenly believe random destruction of a few windows is a sign of radicalness. In fact, window-breaking has evolved into the tamest of protests with a very predictable course. The media gets their images, all the pundits on their side and all our spokespeople know their well-rehearsed lines, the window-replacers come the next day and the whole country shrugs.

We need a new discussion, anchored by a new commitment and unburdened by the current straitjackets. We need a discussion free from the overwhelming worry of the current organizers of those big-protests about receiving a tsk-tsk from the elites or the punditry and free from the mistaken and misplaced energy that equates radicalness with the random destruction of windows and trash cans.

These are difficult and thorny issues and it's hard to judge the success of failure of a method in the heat of the moment. Here’s a bit more about what happened to Carlos and Smith after that iconic moment:

But the reaction was as swift as it was negative. In the US there was outrage from many white Americans. People saw heads bowed as disrespectful towards the American flag. They mistakenly saw the clenched fists as supportive of the Black Panthers.

The Associated Press report described them "in a Nazi-like salute". Chicago columnist Brent Musburger called them "black-skinned storm troopers".

The outspoken Carlos made the kind of comments that only inflamed the establishment. After the ceremony he said: "We're sort of show horses out there for the white people. They give us peanuts, pat us on the back and say, 'Boy, you did fine.' "

The International Olympic Committee demanded the US Olympic Committee ban them from the Games, but it refused. The next day the IOC said if the sprinters were not banned, the entire US track and field team would be barred from further competition. The USOC caved in.
Smith and Carlos were withdrawn from the relays and expelled from the Olympic Village. When they returned home, Smith and Carlos were ostracised. Jobs became scarce. They received death threats and their homes were attacked.

"One rock came through our front window into our living room, where we had the crib," Smith said. "It seemed like everybody hated me. I had no food. My baby was hungry. My wife had no dresses."

Even today, there are those who remain angry and full of hatred.
"There are still threats," Carlos said. "I was never concerned about those punks. I just let them know it will be remembered, that life doesn't stop when you leave this planet."

After graduating, Smith was given an honourable discharge from army service for "un-American activities" That probably did him a huge favour, since the Vietnam war was raging and the body count growing.

"I was going to 'Nam," Smith said. "I could see myself in rice paddies. I believe there's a God. Sixty-eight had its downfall, but it had its protection for me. I might not be alive."

Carlos had two brothers serving, but after his protest both were immediately discharged.

Smith borrowed money to complete his education and get his teaching qualification. He tried gridiron for a few years with the Cincinnati Bengals, then finally got a job as a track coach in Ohio. In 1978 he moved to Santa Monica College, where he has been a social science and health teacher, and coaches track and field.

Carlos had an even more trying time, working as a security guard and bouncer, among other jobs.

"I'd get minimum wage and then go to Vegas and roll the dice to get it up to something to feed my family," he said. "We had to chop up furniture, the kids' beds, to stay warm."

Looking back, the first thing that comes to him is basic.

"That I survived," he said. "That I still have any sanity.

"My first wife is deceased as a result. She took her life because she couldn't deal with the pressure from the results of Mexico."

Posted by zeynep at 01:42 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

August 27, 2004

We will not be wearing black armbands

After the murder of an Italian reporter, much outrage was expressed in Italy and elsewhere. And I'm all for outrage over such vicious acts, but the hypocricy here is so apalling that it's hard to know what to say. Where is the outrage over hundreds and hundreds of deaths in Najaf? Where was the outrage over Fallujah? Will anyone bring this up in this weekend's protests in New York?

I think Iraqi soccer players' refusal to wear the black armbands that the Italians are wearing is quite appropriate. I'm usually for ignoring the hypocricy and doing something simply because it is the right thing to do, and it is certainly right to mourn and protest murder, any murder. But the message here is that your dead by the hundreds simply do not count but you must join us in outrage over even a single one of ours:

Iraq's footballers have refused to join their Olympic bronze medal opponents Italy in donning black armbands as a mark of respect for murdered Italian journalist Enzo Baldoni. The reporter was executed by an Islamic group in Baghdad on Thursday in an act widely condemned throughout the world.

Iraq and Italy meet in Salonika on Friday for the bronze medal but Iraqi coach Adnan Hamd said that his team will not wear black armbands although he said he respected the Italians' wishes.

"We will not be wearing black armbands. The Italians will be and we respect their choice," Hamd said.

"We regret the death of the Italian journalist but it's necessary also to think of the hundreds of Iraqis who have died each day during resistance to the occupation.

"It would be necessary to wear an armband every day. We sent a message to the kidnappers to free the journalist but sadly it was in vain."

Yeah, really, why do they hate us?

As I write this, Italy is leading 1-0 with 10 minutes left to play.

Posted by zeynep at 02:55 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Stanlingrad, Sarajevo, Beirut, Dresden or Najaf

The Washington Post has an article about the destruction to the city of Najaf that basically spells out what I have been pointing out for a long time. Our overwhelming firepower combined with an extreme reluctance towards our own casualties and a near total disregard for ours is resulting in a horrific situation, politically, militarily and morally:

But the core of the city around it, a destination of longing for millions of Shiite Muslims, is so mauled that American commanders debate which famously ruined wartime cityscape Najaf now resembles most.

"It's like Stalingrad," a senior 5th Cavalry officer said.

"Sarajevo," Rainey maintained.

"Beirut," a Marine commander said.

"Not Dresden," an Army field officer said while standing watch at a panorama of blackened, half-destroyed buildings a few dozen yards north of the glittering shrine. "Not enough fire."

The damage to Najaf is the consequence of an urban setting for battle, a woefully overmatched enemy and an American military doctrine that unites terrifying firepower with almost zero tolerance for casualties in its own ranks.

"If we take fire from it, we destroy the whole building," Lt. Col. Myles Miyamasu said Thursday, after he ordered junior officers in his headquarters to do just that against a structure the Mahdi Army militia, the enemy here, was using as a firebase.

And the line that has been repeated by American commanders is that it was Sadr's people who chose to hole up in the city and the shrine, not the Americans. That's good for domestic propaganda here but it's not going to move too many people in Iraq or in the Islamic world. The occupying power does not get to convince the "natives" that the occupiers have the right to pursue whomever, however and wherever, and all casualties inflicted are to be blamed on the insurgents.

Add to this mix the fact that Najaf is a major center for pilgrimage. The destruction will be seen and experienced by many more people than the residents of Najaf.

Posted by zeynep at 12:21 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

August 26, 2004

Najaf

As Sistani arrives in embattled and besieged Najaf, Empire Notes compiles news and U.S. military reports and concludes that "it is reasonable to put the death toll for this assault in the neighborhood of 600 to 1000 Iraqis." And death and suffering does not come by bullets alone in a city under siege:

Deaths are not the only cost to civilians caught up in a city under siege. During the siege on Fallujah, the United States bombed the electrical power plant, and the city was blacked out the entire time. In many places, there was no running water (and, as I can attest personally, the water that was available was contaminated). The entire city was cut up into a series of disconnected areas, divided by the no-man's-lands of Marine snipers' firing paths. As a result, numerous civilians lay wounded on the street or in their houses, unable to get to medical care, and with medical personnel unable to pass the snipers to get to them. Oh, yeah, and the United States at the beginning of the assault deliberately closed the main hospital in Fallujah, causing the additional deaths of perhaps hundreds of civilians who might have been saved had doctors had full access to facilities.

It may not be quite as bad in Najaf -- the al-Hakim hospital at least is open -- but civilians have been cut off and trapped. Medics in the Imam Ali shrine sent a desperate plea to the Iraqi government for medical relief, mentioning not only wounded in the shrine itself but also at least dozens of wounded civilians trapped in nearby neighborhoods, unable to get to the shrine to make use of the makeshift and incredibly overstretched medical facilities there.

Meanwhile, a mosque where Sadr makes regular appearances came under mortar fire, killing somewhere between 3 and 27 people. The U.S. military says it did not fire on the mosque. Of course, I don't know who fired on the mosque and some people will argue that Sadr or some other insurgent force fired on the own mosque -- you can even increase the plasubility of this scenario by pointing out Sistani supporters were gathered there waiting to march up to Najaf. A more likely scenario seems to point towards the Iraqi forces under CIA-asset strongman prime minister Ayad Allawi, they have already fired on the marchers elsewhere.

But, the thing is, very few people in Iraq are going blame anyone but the United States. Once you are an occupying power, and once you kill enough civilians so that you get a reputation for callousness, the people will blame you for most everything -- some justified and some not.

Isn't it obvious to everyone at this point that more American troops would not help pacify the country but further inflame it? Of course, now that we've installed Allawi in power everything he does will be laid on U.S. shoulders as well, not without some justification. I think Allawi is pretty brutal without American encouragement but the truth of the matter is he would never have been anywhere near power had we not single-handedly installed him there.

This situation simply cannot be won militarily.

Posted by zeynep at 09:21 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

My husband did not take the news well

Grieving father torches Marine vehicle

A Hollywood father devastated by the death of his son in Iraq lashed out Wednesday by setting fire to the government van that brought U.S. Marines to deliver the news, severely burning himself in the process.

Carlos Arredondo ran toward the van with a lit propane torch and can of gasoline, smashed windows, doused the inside and set it afire as the stunned three-Marine team yelled at him to stop, just minutes after they had delivered the message that 20-year-old Lance Cpl. Alexander Arredondo was killed in combat.

Carlos Arredondo was thrown from the van when it exploded, and Marines rolled him on the ground to smother the fire at 2:14 p.m., witnesses said.

Arredondo, of 5430 Tyler St., was rushed to Memorial Regional Hospital in Hollywood, where he was reported in serious condition. He was later transferred to the burn unit at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami.

Hollywood Police Capt. Tony Rode said Arredondo, who turned 44 on Wednesday, suffered second-degree burns on his arms and legs, over 30 percent to 50 percent of his body. None of the Marines was injured. Marine Maj. Scott Mack said Arredondo is expected to live.

The Marines were at the house for about 20 or 30 minutes before Arredondo started the fire, Mack said.

''It doesn't appear he was trying to hurt himself,'' Marine Capt. Patrick Kerr, medical officer for Marine Forces Reserve in New Orleans, said in a telephone interview. ``He was trying to destroy the vehicle.''

''This gentleman was determined to exercise some of his grief on the only government entity he saw,'' Mack said. ``This is just a tragedy on top of a tragedy.''

Police said it's too early to determine whether Arredondo would face charges for destroying the Chevrolet van.

...

Melida Arredondo, the Marine's stepmother, said her husband could see the Marines through a window when they pulled up.

''My husband knew that his firstborn son had been killed, and my husband did not take the news well,'' she said.

She said Carlos Arredondo, a Costa Rica native, was proud of his son's service but wished it could have been during a more peaceful time.

But the dead Marine's grandmother, Luz Marina Arredondo Piedra, took a harsher view toward the American invasion of Iraq.

''They should stop this now,'' she said. ``They send them like guinea pigs over there.''

...

Foley said her son had been about 250 yards away from the Muslim shrine in Najaf where three weeks of fighting have raged between U.S.-led forces and the Mahdi Army militia of rebel cleric Muqtada al Sadr.

Arredondo had been stationed at Camp Pendleton, Calif., with the First Marine Division. Seeking a challenge, he joined the Marines about one month before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, when he was in high school, his mother said. He joined because he didn't want to be financial burden to his family, his stepmother Melida Arredondo, said.

What was that in the middle? Too early to determine if Carlos Arredondo would face charges for destroying the van???

I wish someone would interview the recruiter who signed up Alexander Arredondo. What was the conversation? What were the promises, what were the expectations?

Posted by zeynep at 01:41 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

Rampant Hostage-Taking in Iraq

Phil Carter highlights a very important fact coming out of the newly-released Abu Ghraib reports. It's something we knew from sporadic, if widespread, reports. Women and children were taken hostage by the U.S. military:

These two reports will get all the publicity, but it's two lesser-known studies that should trouble Americans even more. The first report, authored by the Center for Army Lessons Learned at Fort Leavenworth in May 2004, indicates that several American units in Iraq detained wives and children of insurgents in an attempt to make the insurgents turn themselves in or talk while in custody. According to a study by U.S. Army Maj. Christopher Varhola (one of the report's authors), it was also common practice for Americans to "collectively detain ... all males in a given area or village for up to several weeks or months." The collective and family detentions served to "alienate much of the population," Varhola concluded. Such collective detentions played a major role in inflating the Abu Ghraib prison population, to the point where the Red Cross reported that 70 percent to 90 percent of detainees were "arrested by mistake." (Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, an Army spokesman in Baghdad, said there is currently no policy endorsing such detentions, and such past detentions fell outside the bounds of standard operating procedure. But Johnson said such detentions could still occur where family members were personally connected to insurgency activities, and commanders decided it was necessary to detain them.)

And, of course, all this constitutes a war crime under pretty much any existing international legal structure you pick governing rules of warfare:

Where international law speaks to these issues, it is generally quite clear. The 4th Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War flatly prohibits the practice of detaining insurgent family members to get intelligence. Article 31 of that treaty prohibits "physical or moral coercion" to obtain information from citizens of an occupied state; taking someone's wife and children hostage certainly qualifies as moral coercion. Likewise, Article 33 proscribes the use of collective punishment, and Article 34 states plainly that "[t]he taking of hostages is prohibited." Similarly, international law and U.S. law clearly prohibit torture, whether for intelligence purposes or not. The U.N. Convention Against Torture makes such acts an international crime, and Section 2340A of the federal criminal code outlaws the practice as well.

I don't know if one needs to explain how incredibly wrong-headed this policy is even on pragmatic grounds -- let alone the blatant immorality and the illegality of the practice. Let's just say people don't like their children being imprisoned in a place like Abu Ghraib and might hold a grudge for a long, long time. Is that too hard to comprehend?

Posted by zeynep at 12:16 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

"Go Nuts on the Kids"

Incidents Grew in Severity, Report Says

One Iraqi, identified in the report only as "Detainee 7," described how in October of last year, he was made to bark like a dog and crawl on his stomach while U.S. soldiers spat and urinated on him. He also was beaten into unconsciousness. On another occasion, he was forced to lie on the ground while MPs jumped on his back and legs. He also was sodomized with a police stick, the report said.

"It is highly probable Detainee 7's allegations are true," the report noted.

In November, the soldiers of Abu Ghraib found more perverse forms of brutality. Some detainees were forced to masturbate. Others were "ridden like animals."

In late November, police dogs were brought in by top commanders to help control prisoner demonstrations and riots. Instead, their presence created the conditions for what Gen. Paul J. Kern, who oversaw Maj. Gen. George R. Fay's investigation, described as the worst of the 44 incidents.

"I think the most horrific one that we found from my perspective is the case of where MP dog handlers were subjecting two adolescents to terror from the dogs for the purposes of playing a game," Kern said. Dog handlers competed, he said, "specifically to see if they could get [the juvenile detainees'] bowel movements and their urination to work."

"Soldier 27 allowed the dog to enter the cell and 'go nuts on the kids,' barking and scaring them," the Fay report states.

But this is all nobody's fault. The soldiers were not properly trained --in, what, not letting dogs attack kids? --, the prison was understaffed --which it might not have been had they not cumulatively detained fifty thousand people most of whom had nothing to do with any crime, as the Red Cross report documented--, Rumsfeld didn't order this stuff, the Commander at Abu Ghraib didn't even know it was going on because it all took place during the night, blah, blah, blah.

Posted by zeynep at 12:04 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 25, 2004

Beach Volleyball

I know this will seem minor as the subjects in this blog go but I couldn't not comment.

A few moments ago, I turned on the television to see what was up with the Olympics. As I write this, I'm looking at a men's beach volleyball game. And they're wearing loose, comfortable shorts and loose, comfortable shirts covering their abs not the teensy-bikinis that I'm sure you've already seen on the women.

(I just edited the above paragraph for the swear-words that just rolled off my fingers to describe my anger at the situation.)

I was getting ready to be upset with the women too because it often angers me to see women willingly play the eye-candy role no matter how immediate the benefits may seem at the time.

So, I check the rules to see what's allowed to be worn. And, lo and behold, the "uniforms" differ for men and women. Here it is from the NBC site:

Teammates in Olympic beach volleyball must wear uniforms of the same color. The women can wear either a one-piece or a two-piece bathing suit, though due to the typically warm playing conditions, most opt for the two-piece. The men must wear shorts and a tank top. Players are allowed to wear hats and sunglasses.

I'm not going to link. Anyway, you'll see it soon enough all over the news: the olympics website is plastered with pictures of the winning female teammates rolling around in the sand in their bikinis locked in an embrace. In other words, get yer soft-porn here.

In one sense, it looks as if it isn't that a big deal in the grand scheme of things. On the other hand, objectification and repression of women is probably one of the most important obstacles to combatting the spread of HIV, along with many other miseries plaguing the globe. The most salient point here is that objectification and repression go hand in hand, a fact many will dispute by trotting out a few young, conventionally attractive celebrities whose power is derived from their looks. I agree that for a few people those two will diverge for a short while in their youth, in other words they will derive some power from being objectified, but I hold that not only is the overall effect of objectification, even of people with conventionally desirable attributes, repressive in general, it will become repressive shortly for that person too -- obviously, because of the temporal nature of these qualities. You can see this in yesteryear's celebrities, desparately injecting toxins into their face and undergoing repeated inhuman surgical procedures trying to cling to vestiges of what gave them that ephemeral power.

Let me add an incident from last week, when I was in San Francisco, that was very striking for me. I was walking down a major street at 8 am in the morning on a quiet, sunny Sunday morning on my way to a early meeting. Almost all the stores were still closed, the little corner groceries, newspaper stands, even breakfast places were just rolling up their blinds. There, in the middle of this lazy morning, stood a porn shop, open at 8 am, neon lights and arrows flashing, already with a few people inside.

I remember thinking isn't that the saddest thing on earth.

And now a lot of people will now urge me not to be a prude -- another great victory of the objectification-camp; this accusation of prudery or wanting to repress sexuality that gets thrown around a lot as soon as one critiques the existing culture of extreme commodification of everything, including human bodies.

Since when is it prudish to be for an actually liberatory sexual-politics: one that celebrates the human body and human sexuality --in their wondrous diversity-- not to make a buck, not to degrade, not to create a perpetually insecure population of women, and not to create such desperation and distortion in men that enough of them will visit a porn shop 8 am on a Sunday morning in sufficient numbers to justify opening the store?

If that's prudery, let me join that club.

Posted by zeynep at 01:43 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

Could You Patent the Sun?

After it became known that the field trials had ended in success for Jonas Salk's polio vaccine, journalist Edward R. Murrow interviewed Salk on "See It Now." "Who owns the patent on this vaccine?" Murrow asked. "Well, the people, I would say," Dr. Salk replied. "There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?"

Sad news today on polio. Patent barriers may not be the problem here, unlike for the biggest killer in Africa, HIV/AIDS, but rather warfare, lack of funds and inattention:

Polio has spread to two more African countries that had been freed of the crippling disease, threatening to become a major epidemic across West and Central Africa, the World Health Organization said yesterday. The disease begins reaching its high season next month.

The spread of polio to Guinea and Mali brings to 12 the number of previously polio-free African countries that have experienced an outbreak of the disease since January 2003. It also deals yet another serious setback to the agency's efforts to eradicate the disease by year's end.

...

As of Aug. 24, there were 602 polio cases worldwide, of which 476, or 79 percent, are in Nigeria. Ninety percent of the world's cases are in Africa, where all but two countries - Nigeria and Niger - had been freed of polio by the end of 2002.

The number of polio cases might reach 1,000 in Nigeria this year, Dr. Aylward said, and it could take a full year of work to get it to zero.

In addition to Guinea and Mali, the countries to which polio has spread from Nigeria are: Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Sudan and Togo.

I knew that the goal was to eradicate it at the end of the year. It would have been one bright spot in a pretty dismal year, to be able to say that in 2004 humanity eradicated polio, 24 years after small pox. It's all very sad, especially considering immunity is lifelong, and the vaccine inexpensive.

Posted by zeynep at 01:16 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

August 24, 2004

Iraqi Teens Tortured in "Sadistic Game" in Abu Ghraib

I can't decide which is worse. If we are to take military top brass' defense at face value --that no high-level direction was involved in Abu Ghraib tortures-- are we then to conclude that our military harbors wanna-be sadists along with conformists who will turn a blind eye to the sadists? I think I'd be slightly less horrified by a scenario where the torture was ordered from the top and practiced by soldiers reared on obedience. In any case, it's getting worse however you want to interpret the chain of events. Washington Post has obtained an advance copy of a report that narrates how detainees were deliberately hidden from international humanitarian organizations, raped by their captors and subjected to sadistic "games," even if they were just kids:

But the new report, according to Pentagon sources, will show that MPs were using their animals to make juveniles -- as young as 15 years old -- urinate on themselves as part of a competition.

"There were two MP dog handlers who did use dogs to threaten kids detained at Abu Ghraib," said one Army officer familiar with the report, one of two investigations on detainee abuse scheduled to be released this week. "It has nothing to do with interrogation. It was just them on their own being weird."

Just them on their own being weird. You know, blowing off some steam. On children.

The Pentagon, predictably, sticks by the few bad apples theory:

"The report will show that these actions were bad, illegal, unauthorized, and some of it was sadistic," said one Defense Department official. "But it will show that they were the actions of a few, actions that went unnoticed because of leadership failures."

What's the message here? Take comfort America, our soldiers torture children of their own iniative? The leadership just happenned to not take notice and that's the only problem we'll own up to?

Meanwhile, the infamous Spc. Charles Graner takes a cue from his leadership and tries to wiggle out of responsibility based on the kind of technicalities that constitute the worst plots on T.V. law dramas. Graner's lawyers want the evidence found on his laptop -- presumably those famous pics and more-- to be thrown out because Graner was too sleepy when he consented to a search of his laptop:

Graner said he had been in Iraq for months under dangerous conditions when he was awakened after no more than 1 1/2 hours of sleep and told by the Army investigating agent, Manora Iem, that he could not return to his quarters until it had been searched. He said he finally signed the search order because he thought it was a "done deal" anyway.

Not the kind of "I can't sleep at night" one would have wished to have heard from him. I don't know how to remark on the irony of a man who tortured detainees under his control claiming his constitutional search and seizure protections weren't fully respected because his consent was obtained when he was too sleepy. The irony is even deeper when considering prolonged sleep deprivation is systematically practiced in U.S. detention facilities around the world. But, I digress.

The judge refused to grant that motion, keeping the laptop in evidence for now but to be reconsidered later if necessary. Graner did indicate he'd plead guilty to some of the charges but it's unclear at the moment which ones, and what that might mean for the investigation.

Meanwhile, the judge also chastised the U.S. military prosecution for moving at an unacceptable pace -- apparently, Army criminal investigators had assigned only one person to go through "hundreds of thousands" of documents on the Abu Ghraib classified computer server. Referring to the reviewing process, the judge angrily asked: "And in what millennium will that be finished?"

Does it matter? We've all moved on. We're all bored of that story already. We'd rather discuss how the U.S. military did not commit any atrocities in Vietnam and anyone who dared suggest otherwise is a traitor.

Posted by zeynep at 12:23 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Abu Ghraib Whistle-Blower in "Protective Military Custody"

Speaking of traitors who dare claim that atrocities were committed during the Vietnam war:

AGERSTOWN, Md., Aug. 17 - The Army reservist who tipped off investigators to abuse of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison by his fellow soldiers is in protective military custody because of death threats, family members said on Tuesday.

The reservist, Specialist Joseph M. Darby, 24, received the threats after his role in the scandal was publicly revealed in May, his sister-in-law, Maxine Carroll, said.

...

Specialist Darby's mother, Margaret T. Blank, of Corriganville, Md., said soldiers moved his and his wife's belongings out of their apartment weeks ago.

Posted by zeynep at 12:07 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 22, 2004

Recruiting Games

There have been a number of articles lately on the tools the military uses to recruit. Military recruiting is a combination of aiming for the kids with limited opportunities in the job market, and creating a military “brand” that is appealing to that demographic. The latest article in the NY Times Magazine continues to explore how computer games have been used quite successfully to create a positive image of the military, to grab the attention of kids who at that age are very much into gaming, and also to provide a simulated, interesting environment that is implicitly promised to the recruit if he or she were to join.

I have also just finished reading “Jarhead” by Anthony Swofford, the memoir of a Marine who was stationed in Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf War. The first thing that strikes the reader is how incredibly misleading army’s current recruiting slogan, “An Army of One,” really is. Swofford’s describes being treated like a cog in a machine, in spite of the fact that he is chosen to be part of an elite unit of snipers, which allows for a lot more utilization of individual skill. It’s just that when there is so much firepower on your side, and so little on theirs, all there is to do is to blow up the enemy from a distance while they rush to surrender. It’s all made very clear in one situation where his skills as a sniper could actually be used, Iraqi officers visible in a distant air command tower seemingly arguing about whether to surrender or not. But, Swofford’s superiors don’t give him permission to fire simply because the question isn’t whether the Americans will win or not, but who will get more combat lines in their service record. In that light, sniping isn’t efficient, Swofford explains:

I can’t help but assume that certain commanders, at the company level, don’t want to use us because they know that two snipers with two of the finest rifles in the world and a few hundred rounds between them will in a short time inflict severe and debilitating havoc on the enemy, causing the entire airfield to surrender. The captains want war, and they must know that the possibilities are dwindling. The captains want war just as badly as we do. And also, the same as us, the captains want no war, but here it is, and when you’re a captain with a company to command and two snipers want to take a dozen easy shots and try to call it a day, of course you tell them no, because you are the captain and you have a company of infantry and what you need is some war ink spilled on your Service Record Book.

Given the hierarchy and the rigidity common to many military environments, the whole machine is designed to crush individuality. But, of course, that doesn’t stop them from what should be called misleading branding because that’s the heart of the contradiction the military shares with the general culture: somehow, our human desire to be distinct is deftly transformed into desire to acquire homogenous products, follow mass fads, and participate in institutions that relate to us as if we were as interchangeable as a bottle of coke or “uniquely you” hair color products, also in a bottle. The army knew to move with the times and the cultural environment:

After the Army missed its quotas by over 6,000 enlistees in 1999, private-sector specialists were brought in to form the Army Marketing Brand Group. Leo Burnett, a top advertising agency that has also worked with McDonald's and Coca-Cola, developed a new Army advertising campaign that debuted in January 2001. The two-decades-old "Be All You Can Be" slogan was dropped in favor of "An Army of One," which aims to promote the dubious notion that the Army is a place where individualism can flourish.

Constructing a highly-organized, rigid, hierarchical, and very technically oriented structure is probably only way an institution could recruit from a pool that is the product of a very, very dysfunctional education system, mostly pick-up the kids that couldn’t grab a scholarship or a job, and still remain the supreme military machine in the world. There is a self-reinforcing logic there: technology allows for overwhelming firepower and both demands and allows for strict organizational control.

One thing the American public is not willing to face is casualties -- no matter how immoral the war, how disproportionate the number of victims on the other side, the argument against the war that seems to resonate with most people is that Americans will die. Now, let me be clear: this not a unique American moral weakness. This would be true for the almost all peoples of the world: that is, most people are overwhelmingly more concerned with whether or not people “on their side” will die than whether or not people on the “other side” will get killed. What is unique in the American case is the absolute imbalance between our and their ability to kill. In some sense, in previous wars even if you were mostly concerned with how many were killed on your side, your concern was intrinsically correlated with how many died on their side because those numbers moved together in some fashion.

With our increasing unilateral military might, there is an almost total disconnect between those two numbers and that’s partially what makes these wars so cruel. The number of Americans killed in the first Gulf War by enemy fire (as opposed to friendly fire) is about 148. The number of Iraqis killed is in the hundreds of thousands -- nobody knows for sure because nobody is counting although I can even find out the name and brief life story of each and every American killed by hostile action in the first and last Gulf war with a few minutes of googling.

So, naturally, the main priority of this military is force protection and minimizing casualties on this side. In other words, there is never any question whether or not the American military can win the military battle. The only questions to be decided are political: how few can we lose, and how many -and what kind- can we get away with killing? That’s what stopped them in Fallujah last April. Of course, they could have leveled the town and “won,” but killing tens of thousands of civilians wasn’t a strategically viable option at that point. They could take the town without killing that many civilians but that would require real urban combat, the kind that might cause maybe hundreds of American casualties. And that is absolutely unacceptable.

Perhaps part of the reason is that there is so much concern over military casualties is the collective guilt the American middle class must feel, knowing that they are the beneficiaries of an empire the footsoldiers of which are never their children. It’s obviously not moral squeamishness about casualties in a war, as hundreds of thousands of Iraqis weren’t much of a concern in the previous Gulf War -- although, there is a growing and welcome sensibility towards what are perceived as civilian casualties on the other side. I say perceived because who counts is a shifting definition. Neither civilians who die from indirect effects of our actions, for example from the sanctions, or the poor, barely armed conscripts on the other side who are thrown into military uniforms by dictators register as high in our consciousness as civilians killed by direct gunshots or bombs. The distaste over casualties on our side does not seem to result from a concern for the poor in this country either: after all, there is very little political will to improve their schools, their crumbling housing projects, their health-care options or their chances in life.

All of this ends up with the expected result: a trigger-happy military with overwhelming firepower. Trigger-happy because they are trained to kill, however many, in order to protect themselves as much as possible so as not to upset the folks back home watching the war on television, between commercials. And given the overwhelming firepower, they do kill many.

All of which leads to a problem for the military if it is to remain engaged in colonial missions. This kind of a military can defeat any force in the world. It can crush everything in its path. It can credibly threaten any other power with annihilation. It cannot, however, carry out an occupation that depends fundamentally on accommodation, which seems to be what the neo-imperialists were counting on. It simply cannot peacefully control an urban area, a population center, any country with the slightest resistance to their presence because their methods will turn that slight resistance into an uprising. The trainees aren’t taught to try to hold their fire when unsure, to try to befriend the locals, to try to isolate the insurgents. They are trained in very rigid operational modes where the rule is to shoot first, then duck and call-in air strikes.

Which brings me to an important consideration when evaluating the strategy the United States ended up carrying out in Iraq. I think it has to be discussed in light not just of the wishes of the planners but rather the nature of the tool, the military. (I also feel that a feeling of superiority, arrogance and strong racism towards non-Americans is and important part of this mix limiting the ability of U.S. military in running more friendly occupations, but that’s another long and complicated subject.) In other words, I don’t know if this is what they intended to do but I suspect that their choices are limited as long as the nature of the U.S. military and the U.S. public remain as they are.

In the latest New York Times article, there is a striking nugget of information which makes it obvious that the military is obviously aware of the problem:

In fact, the Army is now one of the industry's most innovative creators, hiring high-end programmers and designers from Silicon Valley and Hollywood to devise and refine its games. Some of these games are action-packed, like Full Spectrum Warrior. Others, like one that the military's Special Operations Command is currently designing to help recruits practice their Arabic, are less so. All the games, however, speak to the military's urgent need to train recruits for the new challenges of peacekeeping efforts in places like Iraq. Teaching someone to be an accurate shot is not particularly hard to do. Military trainers have learned that if you put someone through a week of intensive work with a point-and-shoot simulator (not unlike today's commercially available shoot-'em-up video games), he will be reasonably good with a rifle. Teaching judgment, however, is much harder than teaching hand-eye coordination. Today's military is in the market for games that train soldiers, in effect, how not to shoot -- how to avoid conflict whenever possible, to recognize danger and find a route around it. As a squad leader in Full Spectrum Warrior, you do not even carry a gun that fires, which makes it the first military-action video game in which the player never discharges a weapon.

Skipping over the revealing absurdity the author of the piece engages in by calling what’s going on in Iraq “peacekeeping,” it’s very striking to hear of a military-initiated game where the main player personally does not have a weapon to shoot --instead deploys people under his command to shoot and kill-- and the main environment is urban combat.

And that’s what the future holds for us if we are to remain a hyper-consumptive society in a world with decreasing resources, a world where we have to permanently occupy key resource regions of the world. That’s what Mike Davis is talking about when he refers to the Pentagon as the Global slumlord:

The battle of Fallujah, together with the conflicts unfolding in Shiia cities and Baghdad slums, are high-stakes tests, not just of U.S. policy in Iraq, but of Washington's ability to dominate what Pentagon planners consider the "key battlespace of the future" -- the Third World city.

As the NY Times article explains, that’s exactly the environment that the military tries to recreate in its virtual and real simulations: Middle Eastern cities reminiscent of Baghdad and installations set up like Iraqi villages:

In early 2003, he landed a $3.5 million, four-year contract from the Army Research, Development and Engineering Command to build a simulator geared to model warfare against insurgents in urban settings.... Forterra's designers also started erecting a Middle Eastern city reminiscent of Baghdad and before long had produced one square mile of tightly nested buildings, which Army soldiers all over the world could roam simultaneously.

Kondrat's unit, a battalion, particularly needed to practice convoy maneuvers -- piloting a large number of vehicles down a road while keeping them safe. Kondrat said that he would like to take the battalion more often to one of the Army's desert outposts in California, where installations are set up like Iraqi villages, but that those resources, too, are now in high demand.

Is this to be the new world order?

Posted by zeynep at 09:00 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

August 20, 2004

Medical Personnel Complicit in Abu Ghraib Torture, says the Lancet

I will practice my profession with conscience and dignity; the health of my patient will be my first consideration. ... I shall not permit considerations of religion, nationality, race, party politics, or social standing to intervene between my duty and my patient;

The prestigious medical journal The Lancet has just published a report about military medical establishment's complicity and participation in torture in Abu Ghraib, Afghanistan and elsewhere. According to the journal, U.S. military medical personnel helped design the torture, participated in it, issued blatantly false "natural cause" death certificates for people tortured to death, and even inserted fake IV catheters into corpses for purposes of cover-up -- "uh, he's not dead; he slipped and fell in the shower and we're just taking him to the hospital."

I don't think I can summarize the article with justice. Here's a depressing excerpt:

An Abu Ghraib prisoner's deposition reports the crutch that he used because of a broken leg was taken from him and his leg was beaten as he was ordered to renounce Islam. The same detainee told a guard that the prison doctor had told him to immobilise a badly injured shoulder; the guard's response was to suspend him from the shoulder.

The medical system collaborated with designing and implementing psychologically and physically coercive interrogations. Army officials stated that a physician and a psychiatrist helped design, approve, and monitor interrogations at Abu Ghraib. This echoes the Secretary of Defense's 2003 memo ordering interrogators to ensure that detainees are "medically and operationally evaluated as suitable" for interrogation plans. In one example of a compromised medically monitored interrogation, a detainee collapsed and was apparently unconscious after a beating, medical staff revived the detainee and left, and the abuse continued.22 There are isolated reports that medical personnel directly abused detainees. Two detainees' depositions describe an incident where a doctor allowed a medically untrained guard to suture a prisoner's lacertation from being beaten.

The medical system failed to accurately report illnesses and injuries. Abu Ghraib authorities did not notify families of deaths, sicknesses, or transfers to medical facilities as required by the Convention. A medic inserted a intravenous catheter into the corpse of a detainee who died under torture in order to create evidence that he was alive at the hospital. In another case, an Iraqi man, taken into custody by US soldiers was found months later by his family in an Iraqi hospital. He was comatose, had three skull fractures, a severe thumb fracture, and burns on the bottoms of his feet. An accompanying US medical report stated that heat stroke had triggered a heart attack that put him in a coma; it did not mention the injuries.

Death certificates of detainees in Afghanistan and Iraq were falsified or their release or completion was delayed for months. Medical investigators either failed to investigate unexpected deaths of detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan or performed cursory evaluations and physicians routinely attributed detainee deaths on death certificates to heart attacks, heat stroke, or natural causes without noting the unnatural aetiology of the death. In one example, soldiers tied a beaten detainee to the top of his cell door and gagged him. The death certificate indicated that he died of "natural causes . . . during his sleep." After news media coverage, the Pentagon revised the certificate to say that the death was a "homicide" caused by "blunt force injuries and asphyxia."

In November, 2003, Iraqi Major General Mowhoush's head was pushed into a sleeping bag while interrogators sat on his chest. He died; medics could not resuscitate him, and a surgeon stated that he died of natural causes. 6 months later, the Pentagon released a death certificate calling the death a homicide by asphyxia.42 Medical authorities allowed misleading information released by military authorities to go unchallenged for many months.24 In 2004, the US Secretary of Defense issued a stringent policy for death investigations.

Finally, although knowledge of torture and degrading treatment was widespread at Abu Ghraib and known to medical personnel, there is no report before the January 2004 Army investigation of military health personnel reporting abuse, degradation, or signs of torture.

Posted by zeynep at 12:36 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

August 19, 2004

More missing, yawn.

I've been writing for months about how the Iraqi Development Fund, which held oil-for-food funds, frozen Iraqi assets and Iraqi money appropriated by the U.S. military, had been bled dry -- while American money allocated for Iraq by Congress had been left almost untouched. Of course, not-coincidentally, this created the perfect conditions for leverage for the incoming U.S. "ambassador" Negroponte -- I still haven't figured out how one appoints an ambassador to a country one is occupying -- as the "interim government" will have very little money of its own to spend.

I also wrote about how a lot of Iraqi money was given to American commanders to spend in cash, without receipts, and to Halliburton and other American corporations in no-bid contracts. There was supposed to be a U.N. mandated audit of the Iraq Development Fund but the coalition authority either refused to let the auditors even enter the green zone or didn't turn over the documentation and gently let the deadline for the audit come and go. Since there wasn't that much of an outrage, that seems to have been that for the U.N.-mandated audit.

Hey, it's only Iraqi money we're talking about, right?

So, we now learn that another $8.8 billion is unaccounted for:

At least $8.8 billion in Iraqi funds that was given to Iraqi ministries by the former U.S.-led authority there cannot be accounted for, according to a draft U.S. audit set for release soon.

...

Among the draft audit’s findings were that payrolls in Iraqi ministries under the control of the Coalition Provisional Authority were padded with thousands of ghost employees.

In one example, the audit said the CPA paid for 74,000 guards even though the actual number could not be validated. In another, 8,206 guards were listed on a payroll but only 603 people doing the work could be counted.

Meanwhile, the actual American tax-payer money that hasn't been spent remains unspent:

A State Department assessment of how the agency will direct almost $18 billion in unspent aid to rebuild Iraq is running about a month behind schedule, a delay frustrating at least one key member of Congress already upset by the slow pace of reconstruction spending.

The delay, acknowledged by senior officials last week, comes just two weeks after Secretary of State Colin Powell promised during a visit to Baghdad to speed up the roughly $18.4 billion Congress approved last year for Iraqi reconstruction.

...

Although Congress approved the $18.4 billion aid package on an emergency basis last year after the Bush administration said it was urgently needed, only about $600 million, or roughly 3 percent, has been spent so far.

We want rebuild your country, but we will not spend any of our money and squander yours -- plus, we'll complain about how much money we're spending on you. We'd like to bring democracy, but let's first shut down a few newspapers and cancel elections. We'd like to turn sovereignty over to you, but we'll keep a few hundred thousand troops under our command on your soil with full immunity from your laws.

And now they don't like us, those ungrateful Iraqis. It's because they're all irrational, I tell you.

Posted by zeynep at 11:13 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

August 18, 2004

Come, protest, shop

When I first saw this story at the Post, I thought it must have been a parody -- that I was reading the Onion and not a real newspaper.

But it's true.

NYC Mayor Bloomberg, a billionaire by the way, has decided that protestor might as well try to do some shopping --and fine wining and dining-- while they are in NY for the Convention.

Here's the Post article and here's the NYC "Welcome Peaceful Political Activist" page. Check out the "special offers" that include $189 a night hotels, a steal. If you are a billionaire, that is.

By the way, before you get too dazzled by the special offers, remember:

Offers are based on availability; offers cannot be combined; not valid on prior purchases; some manufacturers may be excluded; refunds or exchanges may be limited; advance reservations may be required; tax, alcoholic beverages, and gratuity may not be included; offers may not be valid on prix-fixe or other special menus; phone and internet orders subject to service fees; ticket limit may apply; blackout dates may apply; plays, performers, and dates subject to change without notice; additional restrictions may apply. Offers are for 2004 Republican National Convention Peaceful Political Activists who present a Peaceful Political Activists Savings Card, downloaded from this web site, or a Peaceful Political Activists pin, at the NYC businesses listed August 22-September 8; or redeem offers as otherwise indicated in individual listings.

Posted by zeynep at 02:20 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

The Change is Forever

The first law-suit against Army's "stop-loss" orders was filed yesterday:

Attorneys for a decorated combat veteran serving in the Army Reserve are announcing Tuesday the filing of a petition challenging a "stop loss" order that requires the reservist to remain in the military beyond the term of his enlistment for possible duty in Iraq.

The reservist is identified as "John Doe" for reasons of privacy. According to his attorneys, Doe's case is the first legal challenge to the Army's current "stop loss" program. Under the program, tens of thousands of soldiers have been prevented from retiring or leaving the military upon completing their enlistment terms so that they may be deployed to Iraq. The petition asserts that the program is arbitrary, unfair, and unauthorized by law. The stop loss program has been widely criticized as a "backdoor draft."

His attorneys say that Doe, a San Francisco Bay Area resident, served in combat during the invasion of Iraq last year, and has more than nine years of active service in the military. Doe currently serves as a reservist in the California Army National Guard under a one-year enlistment. He has a wife and two daughters, ages 6 and 3. The stop loss order could require Doe's return to Iraq for up to two years, and possible continued military service beyond that time. Doe is one of up to 40,000 service members forced to serve beyond the expiration of their enlistment terms since the war in Iraq began.

I personally think there is no chance of a real draft coming our way anytime soon. Neither this, nor any other, administration is going to do the one thing that will guarantee a middle-class revolt against it's foreign policy. We all gotta do our part appropriately, you see, the poor should enlist in the army and the rest of us should spend money in the mall.

But I suspect they will do more stunts like these stop-loss orders that turn military enlistment into servitude. It's one thing to further entrap the already entrapped segments, it's totally another thing to threaten the "middle class."

Posted by zeynep at 01:27 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

August 17, 2004

Have no shame, will war-profiteer for billions

You might know that Halliburton is unable document a good chunk of its "expenses" in Iraq. Standard operating procedure would have been to withhold a chunk of the payments till the dispute was resolved.

These guys are too good for such petty rules, apparently:

The Army reversed a decision late Tuesday to withhold payment on 15 percent of future payments to the Halliburton Company on its contracts in Iraq and Kuwait, giving the company more time to resolve a billing dispute.

The Army had said earlier Tuesday that it had decided that starting Wednesday it would withhold 15 percent of payments on future bills from the Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root because it had not issued paperwork justifying its costs. But the Army later indicated it would continue to reimburse the company in full.

Government contractors normally cannot be paid more than 85 percent of their invoices until they fully account for their costs. Twice this year, the Army set this rule aside for Halliburton as the company cataloged its costs and explained how it was billing the government. The most recent reprieve expired Sunday.

Posted by zeynep at 11:12 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

August 16, 2004

Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela

It is certainly a moment worth celebrating, as both the Organization of American States and the Carter Center endorse Chavez's victory and thus greatly weakening future pretexts for further illegitimate intervention.

Still, as Empire Notes reminds us, they have tried three times and may yet try again:

Of course, this is not the end. Chavez remains a thorn in the side of the Bush administration, and John Kerry has expressed virtually identical views about him. Where there are three stages to a coup attempt, there may well be four. If Chavez beats the next one back, it will be, once again, by putting his faith in the people rather than in any hope that the elites of the world will play by their own rules.

Then again, let's discuss all that some other day.

Here's for today:

Posted by zeynep at 05:25 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

August 14, 2004

Oops, Chavez Does it Again!

Chavez might actually win yet another election, the recall vote scheduled for this Sunday, against the rich and the elite of Venezuela (and the United States, it seems.)

So, what does the New York Times refer to this rare example of a politican who wins electorally with votes from the poor majority and who doesn't let a small group of already rich elites plunder the nation's economic wealth?

"Free-Spending Chávez Could Swing Vote His Way."

What a headline.

Not the politician poised to once again democratically overcome the umpteenth illegitemate challenge by keeping the promises to the masses who elected him.

Okay, that's too long for a headline but how about "The Poor Masses Approve of Chavez's Politics."

No, it's free-spending Chavez. Not appropriate-spending Chavez.

It's not even "win," it's "swing" the vote. Note how "swing" sounds like swindle, it connotes a scheme, an underhanded plot, something undeserved.

And whatever drivel the Times cannot say directly, unnamed "critics" are quoted. For example:

Critics charge that Mr. Chávez's antipoverty plans are piecemeal and politically motivated, that he has placed incompetent officials in positions of power, and that he is bypassing fiscal controls, with hundreds of millions of dollars in public assistance now circumventing the Congress and the Central Bank and going straight into the barrios.

Now, I understand the need to let the rich elites whine about Chavez not letting them continue steal Venezuela's resources for themselves; that really is part of the news-story here. But what the hell kind of criticism is it to say Chavez's anti-poverty plans are "politically motivated?" He gets elected on his promises the impoverished masses then he tries to keep those promises in order to get re-elected. Okay. So he's politically motivated. As opposed to what? How can that be seriously quoted as criticism? And the criticism that Chavez's anti-poverty plans are piecemeal? Are we to believe that the anti-Chavez opposition wants to implement a larger, more comprehensive anti-poverty plan and that's why they are opposing Chavez?

The piece is full of blather of this kind treated with seriousness an dignity -- it's a striking example of blatant media bias, as opposed to slightly less blatant media bias of usual.

Justin Podur of the Killing Train is in Caracas, Venezuela reporting from the ground. Check out his blog which he will update from Caracas whenever he gets a chance.

Posted by zeynep at 01:58 AM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

August 13, 2004

Stop the Presses

Ok, let's see here.

We learn that American "troops sealed off Najaf's vast cemetery, its old city and a revered Shiite shrine Thursday and unleashed a tank, infantry and helicopter assault against militants loyal to al-Sadr" and the top news seems to be some governor from New Jersey is gay?

I'm on the road so postings will be a little irregular for a few days but everytime I check the news I find it hard to believe my eyes and ears. American troops going for the kill on al-Sadr, son of Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, said to be descendant from the prophet, and his supporters as they take cover in the Imam Ali shrine and the Najaf cemetery?

I cannot even begin to comprehend what military victory could be worth starting this kind of a war with the Shi'ite of the world. Sadr was minding his own business, writing fiery articles in his relatively obscure paper, when Bremer decided to shut down his paper insulting him and almost forcing the first Shi'ite uprising in April. (That's at the same time, they lay siege to Fallujah killing hundreds, if not more.) Then, after Sadr accepts a sort of truce, they decide they want to finish him off?

Presumably, this is being done to get things a little more quite before the election and it may well work if they kill every last one of the current group in Najaf. But it must be clear to them, as it is clear to many observers, that Sadr's movement is not lacking more militants, and Sadr's death in Imam Ali Shrine might be a very, very significant event in Shi'ite history.

Meanwhile, there are reports of various ariel bombings on cities -- which, of course, kill many people who just happen to be there. Here's one about Kut.

Boy, I feel so ignorant of important, world-shaking events. I had never heard of that governor before. Apologies to New Jersey. He's gay, he had been trying act like he wasn't but that didn't work out and he had an affair with a man. Stop the presses. Oh, wait. They already did.

Posted by zeynep at 04:29 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

August 11, 2004

A six-figure salary, great benefits

While Abu Ghraib seem to have receded from the headlines, along with most of Iraq after the "handover," there has been some good reporting being done on aspects of the torture scandal. This week Salon had a piece on the role private contractors in the detention systems in Iraq.

Now, there is a bigger question here. Why use contractors at all? As the piece makes it clear, they used quite a few. And it's not like the contractors had any expertise in the subject. They were first hired and then the companies scrambled to find enough people to fill the required number of posts. So it's not like we were hiring existing talent. And the contractors seem to have literally hired anyone they could get their hands on -- for a lot more than what a soldier would be paid, obviously:

The problem might not have been so serious if there had been only two or three contract workers on interrogation teams. But according to the Taguba report and an inside source, all 20 of the interpreters at Abu Ghraib worked for Titan. The classified documents contain an organizational chart that indicates that on Jan. 23, 2004, nearly half of all interrogators and analysts employed at Abu Ghraib were CACI employees.

How easy was it to get a job with CACI? Torin Nelson, who was sent to Abu Ghraib in November of last year, a few weeks after the photos of abuse were taken, calls it "the strangest job interview I've ever had."

Early last fall, a man phoned Nelson and spent a half-hour selling him on the position. A six-figure salary, great benefits. Only at the end of the call did the man get around to asking Nelson about his qualifications. That lasted a mere five minutes -- and then the 35-year-old Nelson was offered the job. He accepted. No résumé. No follow-up office interview. No fingerprints or permission to run a criminal records check. Granted, those last two items aren't required for most jobs, but this job was ... unique.

I think there is a double motivation. One is, obviously, that the private contractors create an arms-length relationship between the military and the detainees, allowing for practices that one would have thought would be hard for the military to carry out in a systematic manner. Of course, it turned out that the military was also engaged in systematic torture and abuse but I'm sure the higher ranks wished the worse was done more by the private contractors rather than the privates.

But aside from political calculations, I think there is a real profit motive underlying it all. Public officials often make a lot of money advising, directing or lobbying for corporations after they leave office. The more taxpayer subsidized corporate welfare for corporations, the better most officials will do while they switch jobs between the Hill and the boardroom.

Dick Cheney, of course, is the ultimate example. As Secretary of Defense under Bush I, he privatization large swathes of operations that were formerly performed by the military itself. The he went over to the private sector and, without any previous experience running a company, was hired as CEO of Halliburton. Lo and Behold, Kellogg, Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton does exactly that: provide privatized logistical services to the military. So, you see how it all works. As Corpwatch explains:

Well, Cheney comes with even better qualifications; he was Secretary of Defense during the Gulf War and worked in the Washington scene for 25 years before he took the job with Halliburton. He brought with him a trusty Rolodex and his former chief of staff, David Gribbin, whom he appointed as chief lobbyist. In the last two years the pair of them notched up $1.5 billion dollars in federal loans and insurance subsidies compared to the paltry $100 million that the company received in the five years prior to Cheney's arrival.

And that's how private contractors ended up serving as interrogators, translators, torturers and rapists on our dime:

Kasim Hilas told a CID [Army's Criminal Investigation Division] investigator that he witnessed a harrowing incident one night on Tier 1A. "I saw the translator Abu Hamid fucking a kid," Hilas stated. "His age would be about 15-18 years. The kid was hurting very bad and they covered all the doors with sheets. Then when I heard screaming I climbed the door because on top it wasn't covered and I saw Abu Hamid, who was wearing the military uniform, putting his dick in the little kid's ass. I couldn't see the face of the kid because his face wasn't in front of the door. And the female soldier was taking pictures."

Posted by zeynep at 10:17 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

August 10, 2004

The Puppy Dog Close, or How to Recruit for the Marines

There was an eye-opening piece about military recruitment process in the Washington Post magazine this Sunday titled “Uncle Sam Wants Your Children.” It chronicles the work of a marine recruiter in a relatively affluent suburb.

The recruiters have quotas which they work very, very hard to fulfill, seeing everyone who stands in the way of the kids enlisting --parents, promising careers, colleges, scholarships-- as the enemy. At one point, the recruiter complains how a potential was “conned into doing a semester” at a community college by his mom. They try to talk kids out of college, other jobs and possible scholarships.
They learn and use all the pressure-sell techniques and more at a San Diego “Recruiters School.”

Here’s a sample of what the recruiters are taught:

"The first time you call the prospect, his mother states, 'He's not home right now, he's at school rehearsing for the senior play.' (Use this information to get the prospect to do the talking.) Recruiter: I understand you're in the senior play. Tell me more about it!" Baxley also learned how to handle what the textbook refers to as "stallers."

"When you reach the moment of decision and John begins the 'staller two step,' control your urge to strangle him and simply state, 'John, I'm confused. When we began this conversation I asked . . . if you would describe yourself as the type of person who, when given enough information and whose questions have been answered, can make a decision? You said yes. Now were you trying to impress me, or were you serious?' "

If that pressure doesn't work, recruiters can try the "challenge close," where they say something like: "I'm not sure you have what it takes to be a Marine." Or they can try the "Puppy Dog close:" "Have an extra set of dress blues in the office and have the prospect wear the jacket looking into the mirror. Ask them what they see."

At the school, trainers “deprogram” the marine recruiters so they don’t appear as... marines. They teach them to leave behind the “marine mentality” so they won’t scare off the kids with their military mannerisms. They teach them how to change their body language, their words, their smile so they become more approachable.

And the recruiters constantly call the kids, visit them at school, mall, their home, wherever they can get access. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act requires “public high schools to provide military recruiters with lists of students' names and phone numbers” -- unless the parent knows about this and takes steps to opt-out. As usual, opt-out requirements mean most people don’t even know about this and remain accessible by default. (How many have managed to opt-out of the of the complicated privacy “agreements” of credit card issuers and merchants?)

The military also works hard at keeping the teachers and guidance counselors on board. As the article explains, “last year, the Marines spent nearly $1 million transporting almost 2,000 educators from around the country to South Carolina or California for a three-day, all-expenses-paid taste of the rigors of boot camp.”

The trip to Parris Island is a public relations offensive, and the Marines are not coy about their intentions. If the Marines can convince this group of 75 teachers, guidance counselors and principals from the Baltimore-Washington region that the Corps is a viable option for their students, they are that much closer to convincing the students of the same.

Even if the educators don't become die-hard Corps supporters, the recruiters make valuable contacts in the schools. As Lt. Jeff Banasz, the executive officer overseeing many of the recruiting stations in the region, explains, "I can walk into their schools and say, 'Hey, I need this transcript, can you help me out? And, say, remember when we were drinking a beer together in the officers club?' "

There is a point where the recruiter tells the nervous, reluctant kid that “don’t worry, I ain’t gonna do no Jedi mind trick on you” although that’s exactly what they are trying to do to impressionable 17 year olds. That’s what the recruiters are trained to try. I can’t help thinking that even the bad grammar is intentional.

One of the potential recruits is failing two courses which would mean no high school diploma as scheduled, which in turn would mean that he couldn’t be recruited. The recruiter goes ballistic: first visiting the guidance counselor. “I can get drastic,” the recruiter says, “I don’t know what you’ll let me do, but I’ll sit in class with him.... If he has to sit in my office to do his homework, he will.”

Don’t you wish someone paid this much attention to kids for reasons other than to send them to occupy Iraq?

It’s very clear from the article that the recruiters biggest enemy is college, scholarships, good jobs and concerned parents. The worse the economy, the more expensive the higher-education, the more stingy the scholarships, the better for the military.

If fruits of empire are high-standards of consumption, these are the burdens. The trick for the establishment is to separate the rewards from the encumbrances. The United States cannot have a draft because the only thing the middle classes are willing to sacrifice for their gluttonous standard of living is their soul, to be sucked dry in endless hours in corporate cubicles as their life passes on by. So, in order to maintain an army of an imperial scale, there must be a large, impressionable, vulnerable pool of youth, largely drawn from the poor, of course. The economy cannot be doing too well. College cannot become affordable. Scholarships cannot be widespread.

There you have it, a “volunteer” army.

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August 09, 2004

Nagasaki

Death's shadow, imprinted on a house by the strength of the blast.

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August 08, 2004

What's in Your Water: Prozac in Britain, Dysentery in Bangladesh, Typhoid in Sadr City

As unsafe water continues to kill in Iraq, here's an eye-opening article from last week's L.A. Times.

Meanwhile, Bangladesh is in serious trouble. About 40 -yes, forty- percent of the country is still under water. UNICEF needs 50 million more water purification tablets and is facing 10,000 cases of diarrhea a day. UNICEF launched an appeal for $13.5 million but it acknowledges it needs much more.

Meanwhile, British people are consuming so much Prozac that measurable quantities of the drug have found their way into the water supply, the Observer reported.

I can't help think that there might be a connection here.

Posted by zeynep at 05:35 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

August 06, 2004

Hiroshima

59 years.

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August 05, 2004

Running people into walls, that sort of thing

One witness in the Abu Ghraib hearings tells the court "the abusive behavior -- running people into walls, that sort of thing -- seemed to go on all the time."

The military continues to claim all this was the work of those few bad apples. But they did admit to a systematic campaign of hiding detainees from the Red Cross:

Military intelligence officials at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq ordered military police soldiers to keep several detainees hidden from the International Committee of the Red Cross, leaving a coded message on cell doors to indicate which detainees the visitors were not allowed to see or interview, according to court testimony here Wednesday.

That's what people do when they do nothing wrong; they cover it up. This also came up in the case of the two unarmed Iraqis who were pushed off a bridge, killing one. The commanders, who have been granted immunity, ordered the soldiers to cover it up. Not that they had done anything wrong.

Cunningham also testified he and other commanders told the soldiers to clam up because they feared higher-ups would use the incident against them. ``We were not covering up anything that injured anybody,'' he said.

Best yet, Chief Warrant Officer Edward Rivas defended the military by testifying the military wouldn't do such things because, since the detainees are already expecting stuff like that, it doesn't work:

"That's not doctrine, sir, no," Rivas told a military prosecutor. He said putting inmates in sexually humiliating positions and stripping them naked were not techniques used in military intelligence.

Detainees are "expecting that kind of treatment, sir," Rivas said. "It just doesn't work, sir."

Those nutty Iraqis, expecting things that never happen. Even if it didn't happen it was covered up. Even if it was covered up, it didn't happen. Wait, I mean it doesn't work because we covered it up. Or was it they are expecting it because it doesn't happen? Anyway, whatever it is, it's the fault of those few bad apples.

Posted by zeynep at 02:40 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

The Habits of Highly Successful Military Contractors

Nab a contract from the military to "to assist in interrogations and other intelligence-gathering activities." Torture detainees. Get caught because of the overzealous digital camera skills of a few bad apples. Get rehired for a cool $15 million for two months.

It's good to be CACI.

Or, one of CACI's institutional stockholders:

Barclays Bank Plc: $100,185,700*
(T.Rowe) Associates: $56,536,400
FMR Corporation (Fidelity Management & Research Corp): $54,519,700
Putnam Investment Management: $34,340,187
JP Morgan Chase & Company: $33,155,795
A I M Management Group Inc.: $32,673,550
State Street Corporation: $31,656,342
Neuberger Berman, LLC: $30,942,929
Wasatch Advisors Inc: $29,513,480
Deutsche Bank Aktiengesellschaft: $28,949,836

And CACI is peanuts as far as the military-industrial complex goes.

*Value of CACI holdings priced as of 03/31/2004

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