Under The Same Sun

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April 07, 2005

This is Your Brain on Propaganda

Here's a text-book example of propaganda in action from this Newsweek interview with Paul Wolfowitz:

Newsweek: Your opponents say you are going to use the bank to pursue the Bush administration's philosophy of pushing democracy all around the world.

Wolfowitz: No, but I think when the bank performs its mission, which is reducing poverty and promoting economic development, it makes it more possible for people around the world to achieve their own goals of freedom and democracy.

Gee, once you pose the question that way, what's there to argue about? Why would it even be a bad thing to "push democracy all around the world"? That question is wrong because pushing democracy is not what the Bush administration is doing, and it's wrong because that's not what opponents of Wolfowitz were saying.

You know the saying: if you can get them to ask the wrong questions, the answers don't matter.

Posted by zeynep at 08:14 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 23, 2005

Bury Iraq

Don't you love this reuters headline: "Bush and Schroeder Bury Iraq Hatchet." Oh, great. It's all fine now if they've decided to move past it. I mean, who cares about what actually happens to the people of Iraq. We'll just bury them along with the hatchet.

Posted by zeynep at 06:48 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

February 20, 2005

Bloodshed During Ashura Weekend

The events of last weekend in Iraq were very sad and worrisome. Eight or nine separate suicide bombers killed about 100 Shiite worshippers over Ashura weekend:

Shiites stung by two days of suicide bombings that left nearly 100 dead attended services in fortified funeral tents on Sunday in hopes of avoiding a third straight day of attacks. ... Shiite politicians, poised to take power for the first time in Iraq's modern history, have vowed not to allow the bloodshed to begin a civil war despite attacks Friday and Saturday that left at least 91 dead - including a U.S. soldier - and at least 100 wounded. The attacks came as Shiites celebrated their holiest day of the year.

I have written about such attacks before. It's quite amazing how little coverage these major developments are receiving. It's truly sad that there are so many people in Iraq willing to kill themselves as long as they can kill Shiite worshippers while they're at it. There is no two ways to interpret these attacks: there are people very committed to starting a civil war in Iraq and they are doing everything possible to provoke the Shiite into finally losing it and start attacking Sunnis.

Posted by zeynep at 11:26 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 17, 2005

The Word "Occupation" is Discovered

Thomas Friedman comments on Syria's occupation of Lebanon:

The message was that the Lebanese opposition to the Syrian occupation was getting united - inspired both by the example of Iraq and by the growing excesses of the Syrian occupation. Mr. Hariri, his friend said, was planning to use the coming Lebanese parliamentary elections, and a hoped-for victory by the opposition front, to send a real message to the Syrians: It's time for you to go.

There is no excuse anymore for Syria's occupation of Lebanon, other than naked imperialism and a desire to siphon off Lebanese resources. If the U.S. government and media really care about democracy in the Arab world, Mr. Hariri's envoy said, then the U.S. has to get behind those trying to rescue the oldest real Arab democracy, Lebanon, from the Syrian grip.

...

When Syria's Baath regime feels its back up against the wall, it always resorts to "Hama Rules." Hama Rules is a term I coined after the Syrian Army leveled - and I mean leveled - a portion of its own city, Hama, to put down a rebellion by Sunni Muslim fundamentalists there in 1982. Some 10,000 to 20,000 Syrians were buried in the ruble.

Occupation to siphon off resources? Levelling towns that resist the regime imposed upon them? Isn't there another example? Let me think. Hmmm. What could it be? Gee. Must be some small, obscure country.

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February 15, 2005

"Missile Defense" Fails Another Test

This one didn't even get out of the silo:

A test of the national ballistic missile defense system failed Monday when an interceptor missile didn't get out of its silo, the second failure in as many months.

...

The Dec. 15 test was the first in two years. Before that, the program had gone five-for-eight in attempts to intercept a target. Missile defense officials say each test costs $85 million.

...

Bush proposes to spend $8.8 billion on ballistic missile defense programs in his 2006 plan, down from $9.9 billion authorized for 2005.

Meanwhile, they're cutting foodstamps for poor families and health insurance for kids.

Posted by zeynep at 01:03 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

February 14, 2005

It's all Command and Control Centers

Somethings never change, it seems. We never attack anything but command and control centers. This is how the BBC reported the firebombing of Dresden 60 years ago today:

British and US bombers have dropped hundreds of thousands of explosives on the German city of Dresden. The city is reported to be a vital command centre for the German defence against Soviet forces approaching from the east. Last night, 800 RAF Bomber Command planes let loose 650,000 incendiaries and 8,000-lbs high explosives and hundreds of 4,000-lbs bombs in two waves of attack. They faced very little anti-aircraft fire.

As soon as one part of the city was alight, the bombers went for another until the whole of Dresden was ablaze.

Of course, in reality, that command and control center was bursting with civilians, including many refugees from other fronts -- somewhere between 25,000 to a 100,000 died through being suffocated or being burned alive.

Which reminds me of Truman's announcement of dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima:

The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians. But that attack is only a warning of things to come. If Japan does not surrender, bombs will have to be dropped on her war industries and, unfortunately, thousands of civilian lives will be lost.

Such brazen propaganda. We'd never fall for it now.

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February 10, 2005

North Korea May Have Announced It Has Nukes

North Korea may have announced it has nukes. It sounds like it from the text, but BBC and other organizations are properly cautious since translation problems have caused crisis of this nature before.

Ya think they figured out Saddam Hussein got toppled because he didn't have Weapons of Mass Destruction? Ya think they realized that no amount of inspections and proof that there are no WMDs can hold back the U.S. once you are in the crosshairs? Maybe? Just maybe?

Now we should go back and hold hearings for everyone responsible for naming North Korea, (along with Iran, Libya, Syria and Iraq), as possible targets for a first strike with nuclear weapons in the Nuclear Posture Review. Invading Iraq as we did has killed all legitimate non-proliferation attempts. Who will ever sumbit to an inspection process again? Why won't every country, from dictators to democracies, at least considering arming themselves with the most terrible of weapons in order to stave off an invasion?

The sadder thing is I don't think the U.S. cared if North Korea had WMD or not. I think it was thrown in to balance out the Muslim enemies. That's also why they may be able to play this one down again. North Korea does not have oil, after all.

Posted by zeynep at 08:01 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

February 07, 2005

Nuclear Warhead in Thine Own Eye

This weekend, the Washington Post ran an article titled "What Bin Ladin Sees in Hiroshima," by Steve Coll, former managing editor of the Post. I first thought it would be an article about how Bin Ladin constantly brings up the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as examples of U.S. immorality. Well, it certainly wasn't that. The article was only about how Bin Ladin and his followers were after nuclear weapons:

His inspiration, repeatedly cited in his writings and interviews, is the American atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which he says shocked Japan's fading imperial government into a surrender it might not otherwise have contemplated. Bin Laden has said several times that he is seeking to acquire and use nuclear weapons not only because it is God's will, but because he wants to do to American foreign policy what the United States did to Japanese imperial surrender policy.

You would've thought just typing or reading that paragraph would get some people thinking... Osama Bin Ladin, the master terrorist, looking to us for inspiration; examining our methods in order to copy them.

Worse, Bin Ladin's reading of our motivations in Hiroshima and Nagasaki is pretty charitable; historians have put forth a pretty convincing argument that the U.S. knew Japan was going to surrender but used the bomb anyway, and later manufactured the myth that it was the least bad choice:

Gar Alperovitz: The use of the atomic bomb, most experts now believe, was totally unnecessary. Even people who support the decision for various reasons acknowledge that almost certainly the Japanese would have surrendered before the initial invasion planned for November. The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey stated that officially in 1946.

We found a top-secret War Department study that said when the Russians came in, which was August 8, the war would have ended anyway. The invasion of Honshu, the main island, was not scheduled to take place until the spring of 1946. Almost all the U.S. military leaders are on record saying there were options for ending the war without an invasion. So minimally, as Hanson Baldwin, The New York Times writer, put it, if the goal of the bombing was to end the war without an invasion, that was unnecessary, so it was "a mistake." That's Baldwin's phrase.

Now, did American policy-makers know this at the time? That's a slightly different question. Many scholars now believe that the president understood the war could be ended long before the November landing. J. Samuel Walker, a conservative, official government historian, states in his expert study, perhaps with slight exaggeration but not much, that the consensus of the scholarly studies is that the bomb was known at the time to be unnecessary.

Sojourners: How do you explain the large gap between that consensus and the prevailing popular opinion, which is that the bombing was necessary to prevent the invasion?

Alperovitz: The popular myth didn't just happen, it was created by several official acts, and by many things President Truman and Secretary of War Henry Stimson did. During the early postwar period, there was a slow growth of criticism of the bomb, including from the religious community and from some of the important radio spokespersons of the time. Many conservatives at that point, actually more than liberals, were raising serious questions about the bombing. The Calhoun Commission of liberal Protestant theologians for the Federal Council of Churches-Reinhold Niebuhr and John C. Bennett were members-criticized the bombing, both as unnecessary and as immoral, a sin demanding some sort of contrition.

As the criticism grew, there was an organized, semi-official response to put it down. The argument was that the bomb was the least abhorrent choice we had available. The documents available show that isn't true-but it was an extraordinarily successful propaganda effort.

(Here's a little example of how much the propaganda system that trains us to limited attention spans affects our ability to understand the world. As I was choosing a quote from an interview with historian Gar Alperovitz, I thought to myself that it was a bit too long. Would people read it to the end? But, then again, this is about couple of hundred thousand people that were killed by a decision that we are taught was without alternative, so what's a few long paragraphs?)

And just so you don't think this propaganda machine only worked in the past, consider this: just recently, a federal program has quietly begun designing "new generation of nuclear arms meant to be sturdier and more reliable and to have longer lives." It was reported in science section of the New York Times; I bet not much more will be heard of it for a few years. Who's paying attention? Let's talk about the upcoming Michael Jackson trial, during the break we'll discuss how hateful and irrational they are.

Posted by zeynep at 10:26 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

January 26, 2005

Zarqawi's Bombmaker

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January 23, 2005

"Elections" Occupation Style

As we approach the event that will be called elections in Iraq, it is pretty much confirmed that there will be no election observer stationed anywhere in the country. Except perhaps a single one, who may or may not show up. Even then, he or she will not be touring polling stations, or anything of the sort. So, the "observation" will probably consist of observing the walls of a room in a hotel in the Green Zone. By a single person. At best:

But in Iraq, where 14 million people are eligible to vote, the elections next week may have only one outsider from the hastily organized International Mission for Iraqi Elections to evaluate the balloting. If reluctant governments change their minds at the last minute about letting their officials go to Iraq, a handful of others may show up. But, even then, none is likely to tour polling stations or to be publicly identified, mission and U.S. officials said.

...

There will be no neutral outside group deployed across Iraq to determine whether voters are impeded, ballot boxes are stuffed, any party tries to interfere with the process or votes are counted fairly. No congressional delegation will monitor the polls, and the European Union announced last week that it had declined an invitation from Iraq to send observers. The Carter Center, which has monitored more than 50 elections overseas, also decided not to send observers.

All these precious words have now become something akin to brand names: "democracy", "freedom", "liberty", "empowerment." They don't really mean anything, they're just the names attached to things we do. They aren't defined by any intrinsic quality. It's like the reverse of the abuse/torture dichotomy. If we do it, it's "abuse," if anyone else does it, it's torture. If we do it, it's democracy and freedom.

And on that note, I'm turning the blog over for yet another week as I travel to the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil. These past two months have been a whirlwind of travel and the WSF will bring this fun but hectic period to a close. I still have so much to write especially about my Venezuela trip, and hopefully after this last trip, I can slowly return to blogging all of that.

Rahul Mahajan of the Empire Notes will be guest blogging this week, the timing of which is quite fortuitous for the blog because he's been a very astute observer of the "demonstration elections" that this administrations has been putting on around the world.

P.S. I sincerely apologize to the person whose comment to the previous entry was accidentally deleted -- I noticed it was gone after one of my routine comment-spam clean-ups. I've been informed of some ways that might help limit the enormous comment spam this blog receives, ranging from the ridiculous to the offensive, and I've been mostly manually deleting them which doesn't take that much time but results in the occasional mishap of a genuine comment being deleted. Hopefully, I'll have time to implement a better system soon.

P.P.S. Any WSF suggestions? This is my first trip to The Event.

Posted by zeynep at 11:49 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

January 20, 2005

One of Those Weeks

Some weeks there is so much to say I get bewildered. Where do you start?

At his inaugral, Bush quoted Abraham Lincoln: "Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves; and, under the rule of a just God, cannot long retain it." He also added, "The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world."

May we have the strength to hold him to that.

I was also struck by a slogan on a handmade sign, held up by a middle aged protestor along the inaugral route: "My silence did not make me any safer."

I hope more and more people realize that.

Lastly, if you are as horrified as I am by sense that our world now seems beyond the most outrageous nightmare George Orwell could conjure up, maybe a bit of Edgar Allan Poe will make you feel, well, worse or better.

Posted by zeynep at 03:34 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

January 12, 2005

Oops. No Regrets. Can We Talk About Iran Now?

It was a small item in the evening news. You could have missed it if you went away for a minute or two. They are stopping their "search" for WMD in Iraq. They're acknowledging that Iraq had made no WMD since 1991:

The White House acknowledged Wednesday that its hunt for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction — a two-year search costing millions of dollars — has closed down without finding the stockpiles that President Bush cited as a justification for overthrowing Saddam Hussein. Bush's spokesman said the president had no regrets about invading Iraq. ... Duelfer said then that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction and had not made any since 1991.

That's it. Let's move on. Flip the channel and voila! It's David Kay and Kenneth Pollack on CSPAN talking about the threat posed by Iran and what the U.S. should do about it.

As the peace movement, we have many failings. Failing to stop the war; failing to hold our government accountable for the torture; failing to put withdrawal on the political table...

But this one is inexcusable. Weapons Inspector David Kay and Professional Warmonger Kenneth Pollack are able to show their face in public and talk about Iran. Why haven't we run them out of public life? Why isn't moral outrage enough to at least put the these warmonger apartchiks into the political oblivion they deserve? How come these men are on television pontificating on the very day their lies from the previous war become so unavoidable that they are now part of official history?

Posted by zeynep at 10:33 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

January 09, 2005

Pentagon to Train Paramilitary Death Squads in Iraq -- A la Salvador

Newsweek details a very important development:

NEWSWEEK has learned, the Pentagon is intensively debating an option that dates back to a still-secret strategy in the Reagan administration’s battle against the leftist guerrilla insurgency in El Salvador in the early 1980s. Then, faced with a losing war against Salvadoran rebels, the U.S. government funded or supported "nationalist" forces that allegedly included so-called death squads directed to hunt down and kill rebel leaders and sympathizers. Eventually the insurgency was quelled, and many U.S. conservatives consider the policy to have been a success—despite the deaths of innocent civilians and the subsequent Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal. (Among the current administration officials who dealt with Central America back then is John Negroponte, who is today the U.S. ambassador to Iraq. Under Reagan, he was ambassador to Honduras.)

Following that model, one Pentagon proposal would send Special Forces teams to advise, support and possibly train Iraqi squads, most likely hand-picked Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Shiite militiamen, to target Sunni insurgents and their sympathizers, even across the border into Syria.... It remains unclear, however, whether this would be a policy of assassination or so-called "snatch" operations, in which the targets are sent to secret facilities for interrogation. The current thinking is that while U.S. Special Forces would lead operations in, say, Syria, activities inside Iraq itself would be carried out by Iraqi paramilitaries, officials tell NEWSWEEK.

El Salvador, and Central America, has clearly been in the minds of this administration for awhile. Back in October, Dick Cheney mentioned it as a model for Afghanistan. Of course, the current U.S. "ambassador" to Iraq is John Negroponte, who was the ambassador to Honduras -- where he helped build "Contra" operations against the Nicaraguan people. And it was during his ambassadorship that "deaths quads" trained by CIA rained terror in Honduras. He also lied to Congress about all this and more but since this Congress seems to impervious to all insult I will not dwell on that part.

Here's Bob Parry, commenting on Dick Cheney's laudatory mention of the Salvador example:

People forget that the war on terror was also being applied in Central America, even though it was often the security forces of the governments of El Salvador and Guatemala that were conducting the terror. The 75,000 people killed in El Salvador that Mr. Cheney mentioned, the vast majority, the vast, vast majority were killed by Salvadoran security forces and not in battle but taken out and executed, often tortured and raped first. This was a bloody mess, and the United States, under then President Reagan and Vice President Bush, supported it, and they advocated it, and they tried to cover up the facts of the matter.

It's deplorable that such a shameful chapter in our history is lauded as a success but unfortunately it is not surprising. In fact, El Salvador is indeed a model of how to successfully quell an uprising that has widespread popular support: with enough force, terror and lawlessness most populations can be made to give up.

This may well be more a trial baloon rather than an actual plan at the moment but it's still very significant because it indicates the direction of this administration -- crushing the obviously growing insurgency through very bloody means. Unsurprisingly, Ayad Allawi is reportedly among "the most forthright proponents."

Hopefully, people who were part of the Central America solidarity groups in the eighties, and people from those countries, can step up and speak the truth about the "Salvador Option" as Newsweek calls the death squad plan. This path we are going down is scary and sad, with the worst immediate consequences for the people of Iraq but for all of us in the end.

Posted by zeynep at 09:35 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

January 07, 2005

"Elections" by "Secret" "Ballot," You Said? Ha, ha, ha.

Is anyone reading these major newspapers? Are they just used to fill the recycling bin so that one looks environmentally conscious to the neighbors?

Even amidst all the Pentagon propaganda re-released as news, all the false assumptions, distortions and outright lies, it's hard to not understand what's actually going on in Iraq if one is paying a bit of attention.

This one is from the L.A. Times:

At five heavily guarded entry points to the city [Fallujah], military interrogators are selectively asking returning residents whether they have heard of the upcoming election and, if so, which, if any, candidates they support.

First a foreign occupying army levels your city. Then they tell you that you can't be in your own hometown without I.D cards issued by them and that there will be fingerprinting and retina scans. Then they claim it's so that there can be "elections" free of coercion. Then their military interrogators question you on your vote as you try to return to what's left of your house.

How can something like that be reported just like that, in passing, without much comment? Military interrogators questioning refugees about which candidate they plan to support. If it happened anywhere else in the world, everyone would recognize it for what it was.

Meanwhile government officials continue to declare we're trying to bring democracy to Iraq -- and discussing whether that goal is too noble and lofty for the real world passes as critical punditry.

Posted by zeynep at 05:20 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 06, 2005

"Most Iraq Vote Observers Will Be in Jordan"

Just when you think it can't get more absurd:

Most international experts assessing the fairness of Iraq's elections will monitor the Jan. 30 vote from the safety of neighboring Jordan, but a few observers will head to Baghdad and perhaps other Iraqi cities if security permits, U.N. and other officials said Thursday.

But not to worry. Elections can be observed just as well from another country.

"We believe we can run a very effective operation to assess how well-run the election was even if there are not huge numbers of electoral observers on the ground," said Canada's chief electoral officer, Jean-Pierre Kingsley, who hosted a meeting in Ottawa this week of international election experts to discuss the Iraqi election.

I suggest they don't even bother going to Jordan, really. In fact, why not go on a vacation and watch the whole thing on the news? It's not like the news media will actually be covering it anyway. One way or the other, it will be called "elections" and that's all that matters.

But, wait, it gets better. Here's Kingsley again:

"We have not ruled out going into Iraq or parts of Iraq."

Wow. The "Iraq" "election" "observers" have not ruled out going into Iraq. Or even parts of Iraq. Imagine that.

(Thanks to Left I on the News).

Posted by zeynep at 07:45 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 02, 2005

"Iraq Was Disarmed"

Here's Kofi Annan responding to George Stephanopoulos on a question regarding the oil-for-food program:

The sanctions [on Iraq] were effective. Iraq was disarmed. Iraq is well-fed.

A good journalist would have followed up on that very important statement. Iraq was disarmed. If Iraq was disarmed, what then of this invasion and occupation? And why, Mr. Secretary General, weren't you making this point before the invasion?

And "Iraq is well-fed." Is? I'm not sure there is any tense in which that sentence is correct for the period since 1991: not during the sanctions era, and it's certainly not the first word that comes to mind for Iraq today.

The sad truth is there this administration would like to destroy even this United Nations because, in spite of its pathetic current state, it still represents a global institution, a gathering of nations not under the thumb of the United States. And it seems clear that trying to "appease" the militaristic goals of the United States, as Kofi Annan's leadership did during the run-up to this invasion, does not work. One would hope that with two years left in an unrenewable post, Annan would find more backbone. Instead, he's spending his time at Richard Holbrooke's apartment listening to friendly "advice" about how he has to "repair relations with Washington." Shame on him.

Posted by zeynep at 11:36 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

January 01, 2005

"Elections" in Fallujah Around the Corner

Remember how we were constantly told that the operation in Fallujah was taking place in order to provide a "secure and stable enough situation to be able to conduct nationwide elections in January"? All that talk about we had to make sure Fallujah's residents could vote, and thus had to attack?

Well, here's a glimpse of the current state of the town:

U.S. and Iraqi officials say that they tried to warn Falloujans that it was too soon to return, but that they let them go last week after a groundswell of protest. Officials also face pressure to reopen the city before the election. The U.S.-led invasion of the city last month was prompted, in part, by a desire to clear the way for the vote.

...

After enduring three hours of military checkpoints and searches, Atiya and two brothers anxiously reentered the city Monday, uncertain what to expect.

U.S. troops handed them leaflets warning against a myriad of dangers and advising them that the U.S. military could not guarantee their safety. Don't drink the water, the leaflets warned, or eat food left behind.

Every resident is required to carry a small card outlining special new rules for the city. There's a 6 p.m. curfew. No weapons are allowed. Graffiti and public gatherings are illegal. Cars and visitors are banned.

Males between the ages of 15 and 55 must carry special identification cards. U.S. military officials have announced plans to use fingerprinting and retina scans to prevent insurgents from returning.

The whole L.A. Times article is worth reading.

What amazes me is how it can be reported with a straight face that we do what we do in order to ensure elections can be held in Iraq.

Posted by zeynep at 08:02 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

December 25, 2004

And Merry Christmas to you, too, Mr. Vanunu

Do you remember Mordechai Vanunu? Zeynep has mentioned him before. He spent 18 years in jail for revealing to the world that Israel has a nuclear arsenal. He was released with many ridiculous restrictions on him. He was then re-arrested. And then released again. So on Christmas Eve, Israel decided to give this courageous man the Christmas gift of re-arresting him yet again on his way to prayer in Bethlehem.

Posted by justin at 11:44 PM | Comments (3)

December 20, 2004

"The prisoners will never tell the truth... [the guards] are trained to shoot in the air, not at prisoners."

[From Justin again]

An interesting story by Reed Lindsay of the UK Observer, republished in the Toronto Star, where I spotted it.

Lindsay appears to have done something that is relatively rare. First of all, he went to the place he's reporting about. Second, he covered a topic, a massacre of prisoners in a country under occupation, that doesn't serve established power. Third, he talked to some of the people affected, and presented some of the things they said. In other words, it seems as if a reporter for a mainstream outlet acted as an actual journalist should, and in the process unearthed a horrific story that is very telling about Haiti today.

Here you have a prison, called the Titanic, in which over a thousand people are locked up. One of them says "Everyone in the Titanic is Lavalas" - Lavalas, for readers who don't know, is the political party that is being liquidated by the paramilitary government that was installed early this year by a US-Canada-France coup. Thousands have been killed by this government since the coup and the slaughter is ongoing. Lindsay didn't do a great job of writing the story, but a reader can put a comprehensive story together from what he gathered: police and guards went from cell to cell and massacred the prisoners, then had the bodies dumped in mass graves. Lindsay didn't finish the job and find the graves - he says no one wanted to show him because they feared reprisals, which is quite possible, and I don't want to impugn Lindsay by implying that he didn't do the best he could. If there had been this kind of reporting when it was really needed, during the coup, intensely, and especially on television, things might have worked out differently (that of course speaks to why reports like this can come out now, and are framed in such a way as to make readers wring their hands and say 'gee, haiti sure is awful').

This is all taking place in order to destroy Lavalas, the democratic and popular movement in Haiti that was the target - Aristide wasn't the target - of the coup in February. And Lavalas has to be destroyed for reasons of pure racist contempt for democracy, for the same reasons Haiti has never been given a chance to develop on its own in the 200 years since Haitians waged the first successful slave revolt in history. Lindsay's story even suggests a bit of this.

If I were going to impugn Lindsay, however, I would have some basis to do so. I suppose he had to do this kind of thing to get the story published, but after some serious investigative work unearthing the story of the massacre and discussing the various sources and the different kinds of evidence and testimonies he gathered, Lindsay goes to great lengths to quote official sources discrediting the testimonies.

He quotes the warden: Penitentiary warden Sony Marcellus dismissed the prisoners' accusations as lies and exaggerations. "The prisoners will never tell the truth," said Marcellus. The guards "are trained to shoot in the air, not at prisoners. They would never fire on prisoners in this way."

But that is not nearly as bad as this sentence, a blight on the whole story and, if taken seriously, ought to serve as an indictment of Lindsay himself: Still, evidence that more than seven people were killed at the penitentiary has gone no further than the testimony of prisoners and anonymous sources. (Why didn't you get some evidence, Reed? Oh, you did? Then why do have to discredit your own story? My own feeling is Lindsay didn't write the sentence, but some editor inserted it as a sop to 'objectivity'.)

Lindsay's implied solutions, which come from the United Nations, also deserve at least some contempt (though the contempt should flow from the UN to Lindsay). Again, in the midst of reporting on the conditions in the prison and the evidence of the massacre, he adds context about the lack of resources for a good prison system.

Last February, former soldiers swept across the country, setting fire to police stations and freeing 3,500 prisoners from the penitentiaries in the armed revolt that toppled Aristide. Since then, the prison population has quickly shot back up to nearly 2,000, but with a much reduced capacity as many cells were destroyed.

Dyotte said the U.N. offered $50,000 (U.S.) to repair broken cells and the Canadian government promised to chip in with materials from its own penitentiary system and furniture from the Port-au-Prince embassy. Dyotte said the U.N. also offered $15,000 to buy beds, mattresses and furniture for the women's penitentiary in Port-au-Prince. All these offers of help were turned down by Claude Theodat, director of Haiti's penitentiary system. Theodat refused to be interviewed.

Interesting, isn't it? The paramilitaries freed all those who Aristide's regime had jailed, then turned around and jailed thousands of Lavalas people. The article states that of the 1,100 people in the Titanic prison, 17 have been convicted of any crime.

So what does the United Nations propose?

A couple of thousand bucks to build more prison capacity, of course!

Posted by justin at 07:46 PM | Comments (1)

November 24, 2004

Hardening of Arteries -- or Hearts?

Mother of soldier dies shortly after viewing the remains of her son:

Karen Unruh-Wahrer, 45, had atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease, more commonly known as hardening of the arteries, which led to her October 2 heart attack, said Dr. Bruce Parks, Pima County's chief medical examiner.

Unruh-Wahrer was said to be inconsolable after the death of her 25-year-old son, Army Spc. Robert Oliver Unruh, who was killed September 25 by enemy fire near Baghdad.

She died shortly after seeing his remains for the first time. Her family attributed the death to a broken heart, but Parks said hardening of the arteries generally develops slowly over a long period of time and often goes unnoticed by the victim.

I'm sure the doctor is right about the hardening of the arteries and atherosclerotis in the case of this unfortunate mother. But I believe the correct national diagnosis which led to death of her son, as well as tens of thousands Iraqis, is called hardening of hearts. Most people seem to not care one bit about Iraqi lives -- and barely care about American lives despite loud performances to the contrary on appropriate ceremonial occassions and campaign ads.

Posted by zeynep at 09:19 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

November 22, 2004

Roger That, Sir

This from Kevin Site's blog -- the cameraman who shot the famous video of the killing of an unarmed, wounded Iraqi inside a mosque:

We hear gunshots from what seems to be coming from inside the mosque. A Marine from my squad yells, "Are there Marines in here?"

When we arrive at the front entrance, we see that another squad has already entered before us.

The lieutenant asks them, "Are there people inside?"

One of the Marines raises his hand signaling five.

"Did you shoot them," the lieutenant asks?

"Roger that, sir, " the same Marine responds.

"Were they armed?" The Marine just shrugs and we all move inside.

Immediately after going in, I see the same black plastic body bags spread around the mosque. The dead from the day before. But more surprising, I see the same five men that were wounded from Friday as well. It appears that one of them is now dead and three are bleeding to death from new gunshot wounds. The fifth is partially covered by a blanket and is in the same place and condition he was in on Friday, near a column. He has not been shot again. I look closely at both the dead and the wounded. There don't appear to be any weapons anywhere.

"These were the same wounded from yesterday," I say to the lieutenant. He takes a look around and goes outside the mosque with his radio operator to call in the situation to Battalion Forward HQ.

I see an old man in a red kaffiyeh lying against the back wall. Another is face down next to him, his hand on the old man's lap -- as if he were trying to take cover. I squat beside them, inches away and begin to videotape them. Then I notice that the blood coming from the old man's nose is bubbling. A sign he is still breathing. So is the man next to him.

While I continue to tape, a Marine walks up to the other two bodies about fifteen feet away, but also lying against the same back wall.

Then I hear him say this about one of the men:

"He's fucking faking he's dead -- he's faking he's fucking dead."

Through my viewfinder I can see him raise the muzzle of his rifle in the direction of the wounded Iraqi. There are no sudden movements, no reaching or lunging.

However, the Marine could legitimately believe the man poses some kind of danger. Maybe he's going to cover him while another Marine searches for weapons.

Instead, he pulls the trigger. There is a small splatter against the back wall and the man's leg slumps down.

"Well he's dead now," says another Marine in the background.

I am still rolling. I feel the deep pit of my stomach. The Marine then abruptly turns away and strides away, right past the fifth wounded insurgent lying next to a column. He is very much alive and peering from his blanket. He is moving, even trying to talk. But for some reason, it seems he did not pose the same apparent "danger" as the other man -- though he may have been more capable of hiding a weapon or explosive beneath his blanket.

But then two other marines in the room raise their weapons as the man tries to talk.

For a moment, I'm paralyzed still taping with the old man in the foreground. I get up after a beat and tell the Marines again, what I had told the lieutenant -- that this man -- all of these wounded men -- were the same ones from yesterday. That they had been disarmed treated and left here.

At that point the Marine who fired the shot became aware that I was in the room. He came up to me and said, "I didn't know sir-I didn't know." The anger that seemed present just moments before turned to fear and dread.

The wounded man then tries again to talk to me in Arabic.

He says, "Yesterday I was shot... please... yesterday I was shot over there -- and talked to all of you on camera -- I am one of the guys from this whole group. I gave you information. Do you speak Arabic? I want to give you information."

Once again, what strikes me about both the video and Kevin Site's description of the event is the utter, banal ordinariness of it all. It's clear that it's just one more day and a few more dead. The only difference is that this was captured on camera.

Posted by zeynep at 11:57 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

November 21, 2004

The new figure translates to roughly 400,000 Iraqi children suffering from "wasting," a condition characterized by chronic diarrhea and dangerous deficiencies of protein...

A new study shows that acute malnutrition among Iraqi children has jumped dramatically to 7.7 percent. The conditions are now worse than they were before the invasion under Saddam Hussein, during sanctions. No small feat.

Acute malnutrition among young children in Iraq has nearly doubled since the United States led an invasion of the country 20 months ago, according to surveys by the United Nations, aid agencies and the interim Iraqi government.

After the rate of acute malnutrition among children younger than 5 steadily declined to 4 percent two years ago, it shot up to 7.7 percent this year, according to a study conducted by Iraq's Health Ministry in cooperation with Norway's Institute for Applied International Studies and the U.N. Development Program. The new figure translates to roughly 400,000 Iraqi children suffering from "wasting," a condition characterized by chronic diarrhea and dangerous deficiencies of protein.
...

By one count, 60 percent of rural residents and 20 percent of urban dwellers have access only to contaminated water. The country's sewer systems are in disarray.

The whole article is here.

The big problem in Iraq isn't lack of available calories per se, although that too can be an issue among the poor. It's the contaminated water, which causes chronic diarrhea, which leads to malnourishment. Plus, many families are subsisting on low-quality foods, especially without adequate amounts of protein. That leads to a generally weakened immune system...

All of this could be addressed by repairing the infrastructure devastated by decades of war and suffocating sanctions, by providing widespread employment, by expanding preventive health-care -- in others words a government responsive to the needs of people of Iraq.

Oops, sorry, what am I writing. Government, responsive, needs of people. What silliness. Back to planet Earth. I mean children of Iraq will continue to live and die under appalling conditions which we have helped create and are now helping worsen. Good thing "moral values" "swung" the "election."

Posted by zeynep at 01:31 AM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

Dear Fallujans, Congratulations. Your City Has Been Saved. Destroyed. Reconstructed. Whatever.

The State department is already putting out releases claiming how it will rebuild Fallujah:

Coalition forces in Iraq are turning their attention to the task of rebuilding Fallujah as the military campaign to oust the city's insurgents winds down. Together, the United States and the Iraqi government have earmarked as much as $100 million for the reconstruction effort, according to Ambassador Bill Taylor of the Iraq Reconstruction Management Office.

"We have a commitment to the people of Fallujah -- indeed, to the people of Iraq -- to help them reconstruct their city and their country. We take that commitment very seriously," Taylor told reporters during a November 19 briefing from Baghdad.

And mainstream newspapers spread the good news, with headlines like "Fallujah Reconstruction Team Opens its Doors"

For one thing, it's obvious the city is basically uninhabitable. It's not clear when or if anyone will return there, especially if the Marines refuse to leave, as they have already signalled.

Another thing is that how many times have we been through this? Promises of reconstruction, big spending, etc. followed by nothing? Here's the status of the infamous $18 billion allocated by Congress to be spent on reconstruction:

Of the $18.4 billion in Iraq reconstruction funds allocated by Congress last year, only $1.7 billion has been spent, Hess said, an increase of about $400 million from six weeks ago. He said 873 construction projects have been started, up from 703 six weeks ago. The goal is to have 1,000 started by year's end.

(To put it in context let me remind readers that we have spent billions of Dollars of Iraqi money --some on no-bid contracts to Halliburton-- while spending less than 10 percent of what Congress has already allocated for Iraqi reconstruction -- and much of it going to big American firms and mercenary organizations.)

And last, but not least, this is obviously propaganda aimed at the American, not the Iraqi, public. It's hard to believe that anyone in their right mind really thinks that any "reconstruction" project is going to reconstruct Sahar Muhammad Abdullah's life.

It seems that we are now committed to crushing at least the Sunni minority, and crushing it for the long-haul. The fate of the Shi'a probably depends on how favorable they will be to our permanent occupation of their country.

Posted by zeynep at 12:49 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 19, 2004

Let's Play Raid-A-Mosque

So now they raid the Abu Hanifa mosque, probably the most important Sunni mosque in Iraq --named after founder of one of the biggest schools of Islamic thought-- during Friday prayers, killing at least four people.

Here's most of Dahr Jamail's report from Iraq. Dahr talked to someone inside the mosque via his cell phone during the raid. It's a chilling read:

U.S. soldiers raided the Abu Hanifa mosque in Baghdad during Friday prayers, killing at least four and wounding up to 20 worshippers.

At 12:30 pm local time, just after Imam Shaikh Muayid al-Adhami concluded his talk, about 50 U.S. soldiers with 20 Iraqi National Guardsmen (ING) entered the mosque, a witness reported.

”Everyone was there for Friday prayers, when five Humvees and several trucks carrying INGs entered,” Abu Talat told IPS on phone from within the mosque while the raid was in progress. ”Everyone starting yelling 'Allahu Akbar' (God is the greatest) because they were frightened. Then the soldiers started shooting the people praying!”

Talat said he was among a crowd of worshippers being held back at gunpoint by U.S. soldiers. Loud chanting of 'Allahu Akbar' could be heard in the background during his call. Women and children were sobbing, he said.

”They have just shot and killed at least four of the people praying,” he said in a panicked voice. ”At least 10 other people are wounded now. We are on our bellies and in a very bad situation.”
Talat gave his account over short phone calls. He said he was witnessing a horrific scene.

”We were here praying and now there are 50 here with their guns on us,” he said. ”They are holding our heads to the ground, and everyone is in chaos. This is the worst situation possible. They cannot see me talking to you. They are roughing up a blind man now.” He evidently could talk no further then.

The soldiers later released women and children along with men who were related to them. Abu Talat was released because a boy told him to pretend to be his father.

...

”One Iraqi National Guardsmen held his gun on people and yelled, 'I will kill you if you don't shut up',” said Rana Aziz, a mother who had been trapped in the mosque.. ”So they made everyone lie down, then people got quiet, and they took the women and children out.”

She said someone asked the soldiers if they would be made hostages. A soldier used foul language and asked everyone to shut up, she said. Suddenly, she laughed amid her tears. ”The Americans have learnt how to say shut up in Arabic, 'Inchev'.”

Soldiers denied Iraqi Red Crescent ambulances and medical teams access to the mosque. As doctors negotiated with U.S. soldiers outside, more gunfire was heard from inside.

About 30 men were led out with hoods over their heads and their hands tied behind them. Soldiers loaded them into a military vehicle and took them away around 3.15 pm.

A doctor with the Iraqi Red Crescent confirmed four dead and nine wounded worshippers. Pieces of brain were splattered on one of the walls inside the mosque while large blood stains covered carpets at several places.

A U.S. military spokesperson in Baghdad did not respond to requests for information on the raid.

I think all the indications are clear. The U.S. occupation and the Allawi government are bent on silencing the Sunni minority by using overwhelming force. Arrest of the vice president the of National Assembly, the Fallujah onslaught, the mosque raid. They are hoping, I suppose that the Sunnis will either boycott the elections in disgust, will be too afraid to vote, or will have nobody they want to vote for because most of their leaders will have been banned, arrested or otherwise eliminated from the process.

And this administration is slowly succeeding in establishing the idea that elections --any elections, no matter how fraudulent, restricted and ridiculously undemocratic-- are enough to proclaim democracy in Iraq. Have you been to a voting booth? Check. Do we like the outcome? Check. Mission accomplished.

Posted by zeynep at 10:28 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

November 18, 2004

You Know You're Sovereign When

You know you're sovereign when the occupying army snatches the deputy head of your national assembly after he criticizes the actions of the occupying army, and nobody can even find out what the charges against him are.

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraq's provisional parliament urged U.S.-led forces to free national assembly deputy head Naseer Ayef on Wednesday, a day after he was detained in a dawn raid on his house. "We call for his release and for the matter to be referred to the National Assembly which will investigate and take a legal position," it said in a statement.

...

U.S. forces detained Ayef, a senior member of the influential Sunni Iraqi Islamic Party on Tuesday. U.S. officials would not comment on the arrest.

The party pulled out of Iraq's U.S.-backed interim government a week ago in protest at an offensive to retake the rebel-held city of Falluja.

And why is this referred to as an "arrest"? Arrest is a legal procedure, it involves, laws, judges, charges... Not this: "The Americans took Naseer Ayef from his house at dawn, ... They shot one of his guards in the stomach and searched his house. We don't know why he was detained."

Posted by zeynep at 08:57 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Insurgents? Not Giving Up. Marines? Not Leaving.

The word is already out --can you say du-uh-- that turning Fallujah into rubble may just have stoked the resistance and will not achieve any of its stated goals:

BAGHDAD, Iraq - The recapture of Fallujah has not broken the insurgents' will to fight and may not pay the big dividend U.S. planners had hoped — to improve security enough to hold national elections in Sunni Muslim areas of central Iraq, according to U.S. and Iraqi assessments.

Instead, the battle for control of the Sunni city 40 miles west of Baghdad has sharpened divisions among Iraq's major ethnic and religious groups, fueled anti-American sentiment and stoked the 18-month-old Sunni insurgency.

Here's what to watch out for, though, from the very next paragraph:

Those grim assessments, expressed privately by some U.S. military officials and by some private experts on Iraq, raise doubts as to whether the January election will produce a government with sufficient legitimacy, especially in the eyes of the country's powerful Sunni Muslim minority.

Leaving aside the Kurds, every indication is that each brutal assault by the U.S. military strengthens Sunni-Shia unity:

On the fourth day of the ground attack on Falluja, last Friday, joint Shia-Sunni prayers were held in the four mosques in Baghdad, and were massively well attended. Inter-communal prayers were the hallmark of the 1920 revolution, revived early this year by the Iraqi National Foundation Congress, a loose umbrella organisation of academics, cross-sectarian clerics and veteran political leaders.

And the other claim, that elections must be delayed, cancelled or limited because of the security situation is a bogus pretext that we will hear much more of as the January deadline nears. For one thing, all our actions are making the situation less tenable. Here's how it works. First we flatten Fallujah, claiming that, otherwise, elections cannot be held. Then the claim becomes elections cannot be held because people are too upset over Fallujah being flattenned.

The second obvious point is made by Hussain al-Shahristani, a scientist who was tortured in Saddam's Abu Ghraib for refusing to work on his weapons program:

"I don't understand how delaying elections will improve the security situation," Hussain al-Shahristani, a Shiite scientist who is close to al-Sistani. "I believe that the most important reason for the deteriorating security situation in the country is the postponement of elections."

It's very clear what the occupation and their puppet Allawi will move to cancel elections unless they are assured of being able to control the outcome. That's democracy for you, imperial style.

I understand the security situation is a real issue but the immediate step to take is obvious: withdraw the American forces, especially from the Sunni triangle. Their presence is probably the number one security problem. And how do airstrikes, tanks, and massive firepower improve the security situation?

But, the Marines seem to have no intention of withdrawing even from Fallujah:

WASHINGTON, Nov. 17 - Senior Marine intelligence officers in Iraq are warning that if American troop levels in the Falluja area are significantly reduced during reconstruction there, as has been planned, insurgents in the region will rebound from their defeat. The rebels could thwart the retraining of Iraqi security forces, intimidate the local population and derail elections set for January, the officers say.

They have further advised that despite taking heavy casualties in the weeklong battle, the insurgents will continue to grow in number, wage guerrilla attacks and try to foment unrest among Falluja's returning residents, emphasizing that expectations for improved conditions have not been met.

It is quite amazing what kind of outrageous propaganda gets reported on as serious news these days. Does anyone --any journalist who's actually there, these Marine officers, anyone-- actually doubt that every man, women and child in Fallujah would like the Marines to leave? Especially given the destruction unleashed upon their city? Yet the Marines insist they must stay, otherwise, elections "will be derailed" in January -- when it's clear that if the Marines stay either people will not return at all or, if they return, there will be constant attacks on the U.S. forces -- at which point we will declare the area too unsafe to hold elections, of course.

Posted by zeynep at 08:31 AM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

Collective Punishment

There is a very good piece in the Guardian by Haifa Zangana, an Iraqi-born novelist, painter and former prisoner of the Saddam regime. She correctly names what's happenning to many Iraqi cities: "collective punishment."

The plight of the people of Falluja is not unique. Since the nominal handover of sovereignty on June 30, we have witnessed an escalation of Israeli-style collective punishment of Iraqi cities. Civilian carnage, coupled with enormous damage to homes and infrastructure, has became our daily reality.

In Tall Afar, in the north, US troops cut off water for three days last month and blocked food supplies to 150,000 refugees. Then in Samarra, residents cowered in their homes as tanks and warplanes pounded the city. Bodies were strewn in the streets but could not be collected for fear of American snipers. Of the 130 Iraqis killed, most were civilians. Hospital access was denied to the injured. And Qasim Daoud hailed the massacre as a "very clean" operation.

Every day of occupation brings fresh atrocities. But the architects of that occupation claim that it is Iraqis themselves who are beyond the reach of democracy. They are "militants" and "insurgents", bent on terror ising their own people and destroying hopes of reconstruction. Why can't they get involved in the peaceful democratic political process?

But they did, and they continue to do so. Over the last 19 months there have been protests, appeals, initiatives to set up a reasonable programme for elections, the opening of human rights centres, lecturing at universities, even poetry writing. This torrent of activism is still being practised by a broad variety of political parties, groups and individuals who oppose the foreign occupation. And they have been ignored. Newspapers were closed. Editors were arrested. Demonstrators were shot at, arrested, abused and tortured.

Posted by zeynep at 07:58 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 17, 2004

The Plot Unfolds as Predicted

Here's a little AP snippet that sums up where we are after the predictable military victory:

No one expects the capture of the former Sunni Muslim stronghold to halt the insurgency even within the city itself. One military official said Fallujah would probably wind up like Baghdad, a city under ineffective government control where insurgents have little problem mounting attacks.

By any account, the United States and Iraq's interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, will have a tough time making friends among Fallujah's surviving residents.

The brutal assault has crushed homes and mosques and ground much of the southern neighborhoods into rubble. Survivors are hungry and aid convoys have been unable to reach them.

Reports of civilian suffering, expected to spread after the Americans loosens its grip on the city, could transform Fallujah into a shrine to Muslim warriors killed in the fighting.

Already the fatal shooting of a wounded and apparently unarmed man in a Fallujah mosque by a Marine has incensed Sunni Muslims, complicating efforts by Iraqi authorities seeking to contain a Sunni backlash to the invasion. Many Sunnis saw the Fallujah assault as a plot by the Americans and the Shiites against religious Sunnis and Saturday's shooting strengthened that view, intensifying the hostility there, as elsewhere, to U.S. troops.

As factual events morph into legend, the battle could become a key tool for guerrilla recruiters, already adept at running information campaigns, who want to replace the 1,600 or so fighters killed.

Fallujah remains home to many in the insurgent recruiting pool, including unemployed soldiers from of Iraq's disbanded military. And the city is a key stopping point on the guerrillas' route into Baghdad.

Outside Fallujah, the vast and tough Anbar province, which lacks any credible Iraqi security force or government control, seethes with Sunni discontent and growing poverty.

Is there anything here that wasn't completely predictable and predicted by many? No. Unfortunately, it looks like it's just going to get worse from here on.

I can visualize remembering this moment two or three years down the line, when people are arguing whether it was the first or second assault on Fallujah that was the turning point towards whatever disastrous consequences we will be experiencing then. Remembering that everything was done while many, many people trying to shout how wrong it all was, not just morally and legally, but pragmatically.

Posted by zeynep at 01:34 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Margaret Hassan

The reports are that Margaret Hassan may have been murdered. Watch the very politicians that spent their lives killing the people she tried desparately to save weep crocodile tears for her, as they read eulogies from teleprompters.

I believe this picture of her that's been making the rounds dates from the sanctions era -- those cruel, punishing U.S.-U.K led sanctions that lasted a decade at a great cost to Iraq's population, especially the most vulnerable sections.

There is a lot of talk these days about how much Saddam Hussein might have stolen from the people of Iraq via the Oil-For-Food program. I don't know. He was a evil, brutal tyrant capable of anything. As opponents of the sanctions at the time, we kept pointing out the sanctions were not harming Saddam Hussein but the people of Iraq. Nobody cared. Just as nobody now talks about that decade of cruelty that killed as much as 5,000 children under the age of five, every month, year after year.

Hassan opposed those sanctions vociferously -- don't expect either Bush nor Blair, who supported those sanctions to mention that fact.

Posted by zeynep at 12:58 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Number of Civilians Killed: 800 (says the Red Cross); Number of non-American Foreign Fighters among the detaines: 10-20 (says Colonel Regner); Eviscerating the Geneva Conventions: Priceless

Here's the a bit from the interview with the Red Cross official via invaluable Dahr Jamail:

Speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of U.S. military reprisal, a high-ranking official with the Red Cross in Baghdad told IPS that ”at least 800 civilians” have been killed in Fallujah so far.

His estimate is based on reports from Red Crescent aid workers stationed around the embattled city, from residents within the city and from refugees, he said.

Here's American Leftist crunching the numbers on the "foreign fighters" from information gleaned from a Pentagon briefing:

During an "operational update" on Fallujah today, Colonel Michael Regner accidentally broke with the standard practice of military spokespeople ... He indirectly gave us an estimate on the number of Fallujah's mythical foreign fighters. ...

[The number of] our detainees not too long ago this afternoon was right about 1,052. ... But at this time, out of 1,052 most likely about 1,040 -- or 1,030 are Iraqis.

So 1,030 and 1,040 are approximately 98% and 99% of 1,052, meaning 1% or 2% were non-Iraqis. If we assume that Fallujan prisoners of war are representative of the Fallujan insurgents as a whole, which the Pentagon numbered at 2,000 to 3,000, that gives us a range of between 20 and 60 foreign fighters present in Fallujah during the run-up to the assault. I guess 20 to 60 guys can qualify as "hordes"?

Anyway, enough with this facts and numbers business. Chief of CIA Porter J. Goss has just told Central Intelligence Agency employees that their job is to "support the administration and its policies in our work. ... As agency employees we do not identify with, support or champion opposition to the administration or its policies." Our job is to silently watch it all happen and not ask too many questions. What else?

Posted by zeynep at 12:09 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

November 16, 2004

If You Are Breathing, You are an Insurgent

By now, you've probably seen or heard of the incident, captured on camera, where marines go into a mosque where there prisoners, three of whom had been already shot in the head and, at least one, was wounded, still alive, and unarmed. One of the marines notices the man is breathing, shoots him in the head at point blank range and says "Well, he's dead now."

I know there will be an investigation. But here's what struck me: the other marines in the scene obviously didn't care. In other words, this would not have been a noteworthy incident had it not been captured on camera. This is just the way it works.

And why would we be surprised? Even the lowest estimates acknowledge at least 25,000 Fallujah residents were trapped in the city. The U.S. military urged them to stay in their houses during the fighting. Yet, the troops assumed that if you were alive, i.e. generating body heat, you were an insurgent, fair game:

But since US radio messages and leaflets urged Fallujans to remain in their houses during the assault, it is unclear how many were at home but lying low. Troops with thermal sights often assumed that if there was a "hot spot" inside a house -- indicating body heat -- the people inside were insurgents.

Another thing that's striking about looking at footage from the city is the level of destruction. Many, many houses seem flattened. Will we ever know how many "hot spots" were killed? Who they were?

Here's the thing, you can tell yourself a million excuses. (And you've heard them before: the insurgents were hiding behind women and children; we had to destroy the city so they could vote; we had to take revenge for what was done to the Blackwater mercenaries). The excuses only add to the the moral decay we're undergoing. But, also, the fact of the matter is that our excuses only fool ourselves. The whole world knows we don't care about Iraqi lives. And somehow, that's supposed to make us safer?

Posted by zeynep at 09:49 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

November 15, 2004

No Longer Bothering with Cover, the Administration Dispenses with Powell

So, Powell resigns as expected. In any case, his misson is done. From the time he was sent to cover up My Lai, Powell has been just that: a cover. He was employed to muddy the waters when the administration was clearly bent on invading Iraq. He was purposely deployed at liberals who find it hard to criticize a black man.

This administration no longer needs him because it is no longer covering up; we are now at the brazen, in-your-face, "mandate" phase. Thus Powell can be discarded to take his shameful place in history, and be replaced by someone who will be even worse.

Here's an excerpt from a brief biography of Colin Powell from his lesser known activities in Vietnam, Panama and the first Gulf War. I especially like the part where he threatens to kill all four million residents of Baghdad.

VIETNAM:

In his memoirs, An American Journey on page 140 Gen. Powell writes, about the Vietnam war:

If a helo [helicopter] spotted a peasant in black pajamas who looked remotely suspicious, a possible MAM [military age male] the pilot would circle and fire in front of him. If he moved, his movement was judged evidence of hostile intent, and the next burst was not in front, but at him. Brutal? Maybe so.

Article Three of the Geneva Convention of 1949 to which the United States is a signatory, states that:

(1) Persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause, shall in all circumstances be treated humanely, without any adverse distinction founded on race, colour, religion or faith, sex, birth or wealth, or any other similar criteria. To this end the following acts are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever with respect to the above-mentioned persons:

(a) violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture;

In his memoirs, General Powell also defends the U.S. practice of forcibly displacing peasants and destroying their homes, part of the "strategic hamlet" program – in fact, Gen. Powell's first "combat" assignment was in that program.

In 1968, he was charged with responding to a letter by Tom Glen, a soldier in the Americal division. The letter charged American soldiers with indiscriminately shooting into people’s homes and with severe beatings and torture of civilians. Without interviewing Glen, Powell wrote a response denying the allegations, claiming that "relations between Americal soldiers and the Vietnamese people are excellent." (The New Republic, 4/17/95). Given his involvement in the "strategic hamlet" program and the knowledge expressed in his memoirs of the brutal practices of American soldiers in Vietnam, he had to know his report was false. The report came out shortly after the My Lai massacre, in which hundreds of unarmed men, women and children were murdered and many women raped (Four Hours in My Lai: Penguin, 1993) – an atrocity committed by that same Americal division.

PANAMA:

Gen. Powell was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the invasion of Panama. In his memoirs he states that he recommended the invasion to President Bush (Also see, Bob Woodward, The Commanders, 1993). Previously, the U.S. had supported the then dictator of Panama, Gen. Noriega. -- he was on the CIA’s payroll (Buckley, Panama: The Whole Story, 1991; George Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State, 1993). In terms of international law, there is no difference between the invasion of Panama by the U.S. and the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq -- both are illegal. The number of civilian deaths caused by the invasion in Panama have been estimated to be between 1000 to 4000, greater than the number killed in Kuwait by the invasion of Iraq. The Central American Human Rights commission [CODEHUCA] studied the invasion and reached the following conclusions:

1) The U.S. Army used highly sophisticated and experimental weapons against unarmed civilian populations;

2) Estimates of the number of non- combatants killed run from as few as 2200 to as high as 4000 Many of the mostly black victims were residents of the El Chorrillos slum which was next to the Panamanian military headquarters and was razed to the ground in the attack;

3) U.S. efforts to obscure the actual death toll included massive incineration of corpses prior to identification, burial in mass graves prior to identification, and U.S. military control of administrative offices of hospitals and morgues;

4) "A thorough, well-planned propaganda campaign has been implemented by U.S. authorities to... deny the brutality and extensive human and material costs of the invasion." (CODEHUCA report submitted to Americas Watch 6/5/90)

US Ambassador to Panama Ambler Moss said his "gut instinct is that there is an awful lot of parties around there that have an interest in covering up numbers" (New York Times, 1/10/90) Catholic priest Diego Caffley, claimed that the invasion killed 3,000 people and that the main obstacle to learning the full number was the US Army Southern Command (La Republica, Costa Rica, 11/01/90) Washington Post Columnist Colman McCarthy commented on Powell's actions in Panama:

Of the victims of the one-sided, sure-thing massacre, Powell says the "loss of innocent life was tragic." Of course. Tut tut. This superficial expression of grief was a run-up comment to Powell's telling of "the lessons I absorbed from Panama": "Use all the force necessary, and do not apologize for going in big if that is what it takes." For sure. In the name of peace, kill as many women and children as get in the way of U.S. policies. (Washington Post, 10/3/1995)

GULF WAR
Colin Powell was the highest ranking military officer, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, during the Gulf War. He was thus directly involved in decision making at all levels. In his memoirs, Gen. Powell recounts drafting a warning to Saddam one day before the beginning of the fighting, on Jan. 15, 1991.

If driven to it, I wrote, we would destroy the dams on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and flood Baghdad, with horrendous consequences. (Powell, 1995; p.491)

The city of Baghdad that Gen Powell threatened to flood is home to 4 million civilians who are also victims of the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein.
...

Powell will now go back to collecting many, many pieces of silver for speaking engagements. I suggest that he team up with Kissinger and a few others for a "War Criminals All-Star Tour."

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

Allawi Government Hints at "Delaying" "Elections"; World Gasps in Disbelief and Shock

We are all shocked, shocked:

Iraq's deputy prime minister has indicated for the first time that the much-heralded elections due in January could be derailed by the country's violent insurgency.

CORRECTION: It was deputy prime minister of Allawi, not Allawi himself who suggested that the vote could be delayed -- my headline was misleading. Thanks to Eli.

Posted by zeynep at 12:33 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Give 'em a Zipcode!

Here's USPS mail being "loaded on a truck for Marines inside Fallujah." Fallujah should obviously have its own zipcode, if it already doesn't:

Just one "Public Relations" note though. Maybe they should first let these Red Crescent aid trucks go in, which the U.S. military is still not allowing into the city, before delivering the mail. I know, I know, rain, sleet or snow...

Posted by zeynep at 12:28 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

At this rate, not a heart or mind will be left unshot at

Here's what President Bush would like you to believe has happened:

Bush Paints Rosy Picture of Iraq Situation AP, November 14, 2004

President Bush painted a rosy picture of the situation in Iraq, claiming significant progress Saturday in the U.S. military's battle in an insurgent stronghold.

In his weekly radio address, Bush praised the assault on Fallujah, west of Baghdad. About 80 percent of the city was said to be under U.S. control, with insurgents pushed into a narrow corner.
...
He said "support continues to grow" internationally for the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq, even though the multinational force will see some reductions in the coming months.

Here's a snapshot of what actually happened, from an AP photographer who had stayed behind in order to capture images -- it also tells you a good deal about why we don't have much details: everything that moved was shot at.

The 33-year-old Associated Press photographer [Bilal Hussein] stayed behind to capture insider images during the siege of the former insurgent stronghold.

...

In the hours and days that followed, heavy bombing raids and thunderous artillery shelling turned Hussein's northern Jolan neighborhood into a zone of rubble and death. The walls of his house were pockmarked by coalition fire.

"Destruction was everywhere. I saw people lying dead in the streets, wounded were bleeding and there was no one to come and help them. Even the civilians who stayed in Fallujah were too afraid to go out," he said.

"There was no medicine, water, no electricity nor food for days."

By Tuesday afternoon, as U.S. forces and Iraqi rebels engaged in fierce clashes in the heart of his neighborhood, Hussein snapped.

"U.S. soldiers began to open fire on the houses, so I decided that it was very dangerous to stay in my house," he said.

Hussein said he panicked, seizing on a plan to escape across the Euphrates River, which flows on the western side of the city

"I wasn't really thinking," he said. "Suddenly, I just had to get out. I didn't think there was any other choice."

In the rush, Hussein left behind his camera lens and a satellite telephone for transmitting his images. His lens, marked with the distinctive AP logo, was discovered two days later by U.S. Marines next to a dead man's body in a house in Jolan.

AP colleagues in the Baghdad bureau, who by then had not heard from Hussein in 48 hours, became even more worried.

Hussein moved from house to house dodging gunfire and reached the river.

"I decided to swim ... but I changed my mind after seeing U.S. helicopters firing on and killing people who tried to cross the river."

He watched horrified as a family of five was shot dead as they tried to cross. Then, he "helped bury a man by the river bank, with my own hands."

"I kept walking along the river for two hours and I could still see some U.S. snipers ready to shoot anyone who might swim. I quit the idea of crossing the river and walked for about five hours through orchards."

He met a peasant family, who gave him refuge in their house for two days. Hussein knew a driver in the region and sent a message to another AP colleague, Ali Ahmed, in nearby Ramadi.

At this rate, not a heart or mind will be left unshot at.

Posted by zeynep at 12:09 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

November 14, 2004

Fallujah as an Operation versus Fallujah as a Town

All men between the ages of 15 to 55 are being separated from refugee convoys and their families and turned back into the city:

As [the military]believes many of Fallujah's men are guerrilla fighters, it has instructed U.S. troops to turn back all males aged 15 to 55.

"We assume they'll go home and just wait out the storm or find a place that's safe," one 1st Cavalry Division officer, who declined to be named, said Thursday.

Army Col. Michael Formica, who leads forces isolating Fallujah, admits the rule sounds "callous." But he insists it's is key to the mission's success.

"Tell them 'Stay in your houses, stay away from windows and stay off the roof and you'll live through Fallujah,'" Formica, of the 1st Cavalry Division's 2nd Brigade, told his battalion commanders in a radio conference call Wednesday night.

Most of what you need to understand the nature of this war is right there when Army Col. Michael Formica advises Fallujans how to "live through Fallujah".

To this Army Col., Fallujah is not a place or a town but an operation to be lived through. It's a phase, a thing to be done and gotten over and through with. These people, on the other hand, live in Fallujah.

There's another thing about turning back men. It's a war crime.

Human rights experts said Friday that American soldiers might have committed a war crime on Thursday when they sent fleeing Iraqi civilians back into Fallujah.

Citing several articles of the Geneva Conventions, the experts said recognized laws of war require military forces to protect civilians as refugees and forbid returning them to a combat zone.

"This is highly problematical conduct in terms of exposing people to grave danger by returning them to an area where fighting is going on," said Jordan Paust, a law professor at the University of Houston and a former Army prosecutor.

James Ross, senior legal adviser to Human Rights Watch, said, "If that's what happened, it would be a war crime."

A stream of refugees, about 300 men, women and children, were detained by American soldiers as they left southern Fallujah by car and on foot. The women and children were allowed to proceed. The men were tested for any residues left by the handling of explosives. All tested negative, but they were sent back.

Note that these men tested negative for handling explosives. They weren't detained. They weren't charged. They were simply sent back into the war zone for the crime of being the rightful resident of a city that we are pounding into rubble.

A lot of people ask, well, why didn't they leave earlier? Forget the legality of everything we are doing and why people should have to leave their homes so we can flatten a city -- the effect of which will be to simply spread the "insurgents" around the country, as many experts have already pointed out. Forget the experts, that much is obvious if you think about it for more than ten seconds.

Remember this rule has been in effect since the cordon began. Men have been trapped in that city for sometime. Would you leave your 15 year old son, your husband, uncle, all your male relatives behind and go? Obviously, many people stayed with their families because, well, that's what families tend to do: they don't listen to your instructions to abandon their men. Of course, this "family values" administration neither understands or nor cares about such humanitarian concerns.

And so far, these families are stuck without water or electricity in a war zone, and aid agencies have been barred from entering the town:

FALLUJA, Iraq (Reuters) -- An Iraqi Red Crescent aid convoy waiting at the edge of Falluja will not be allowed to enter the city center on Sunday, a U.S. Marine officer said.

"They will not be allowed to cross the bridge today," Capt. Adam Collier told Reuters at Falluja hospital, where the convoy is waiting to cross the Euphrates River into the main part of the embattled Iraqi city. He cited security reasons.

The Iraqi Red Crescent sent seven trucks and ambulances to Falluja on Saturday, hoping to get food, blankets, water purification tablets and medicine to hundreds of families trapped inside the city during the past six days of fighting.

To enter the city proper, the convoy will have to pass over one of two bridges spanning the Euphrates. U.S. forces have said that those bridges remain unsafe, even though the military has said it has taken almost full control of Falluja.

"We don't know when the bridge will be open for civilian traffic," Collier said.

Red Crescent officials, who are also trying to get aid to thousands of families who fled Falluja ahead of the offensive and are now sheltering in nearby towns and villages, said they would wait in Falluja's hospital until they can go in.

"We will wait for permission and we will stay here tonight," Jamal al-Karbouli, the leader of the convoy, said.

Those trapped inside the city, whose population was put at about 300,000 before the offensive but has fallen to around 60,000 according to some estimates, say they are reaching a point of desperation.

"Our situation is very hard," said one resident contacted by telephone in the central Hay al-Dubat neighborhood. "We don't have food or water. My seven children all have severe diarrhea.

"One of my sons was wounded by shrapnel last night and he's bleeding, but I can't do anything to help him," he told Reuters.

In fact, Empire Notes has a very compelling post why it may not be possible to "live through Fallujah." The rules of engagement have been changed so that "the Geneva Convention has been overtly and specifically abandoned, not just in the treatment of prisoners, but also in the conduct of military assaults." Anything that moves is a target. Any building that is under any suspicion is simply flattenned by air-strikes, sometimes using "bunker-buster"s.

Now, Centcom always tells us it was insurgents, but, seriously, not only do we not know that's the case, we know that Centcom doesn't know that's the case. Think about it: how could anyone know anything if we go around reducing buildings to rubble, bar all aid agencies from entering, make it impossible for anyone to go around by shooting at anything that moves? Empire Notes has a depressingly convincing round-up of evidence of our blatantly illegal rules of engagement. It's bleak, but it's a must-read.

And there's a simple reason it's illegal to shell and flatten any and all houses like that. In one case in a house in the heavily-shelled district, the reason was named Mustafa Adnan:

Reuters caption: An Iraqi nurse treats 2-year-old child Mustafa Adnan, at a Baghdad hospital, who lost a leg when his house in Falluja's Jolan district was shelled during fighting between U.S. forces and insurgents in the war-torn city November 14, 2004.

All this for what? To anyone willing to think for a minute, rather
than turn off their brain and swallow the official propaganda, this whole "blow to the insurgents" story obviously does not make sense. The argument that we had to do this so we could hold elections in Fallujah is even more laughable. There's barely a town left; Sunni groups are moving to boycott the elections; Allawi has declared martial-law -- and elections under military occupation and martial-law, well, usually aren't elections.

What's going on is revenge, plain and simple. Fallujah is being destroyed out of vindictiveness; as revenge for the four mercenaries who were killed and mutilated last spring:

And, along the Euphrates River, which runs through the city, The Associated Press reported Sunday that Marines were expected to reopen a Falluja bridge where -- on March 31 -- insurgents hanged the bodies of two American contractors who were killed and mutilated by militants. The attack on the contractors of Kellogg, Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton Co., sparked the first major U.S. military operation in Falluja, in April.

"This is a big event for us," the AP quoted Maj. Todd Des Grosseilliers, 41, from Auburn, Maine. "It's symbolic because the insurgents closed the bridge and we are going to reopen it."

AP caption: A US Marine of the 1st Division writes the words 'Dark Horse' on a beam of the bridge western Fallujah, Iraq, where the bodies of two American contractors killed by militants were strung up in March, sparking the earlier U.S. siege, Sunday, Nov. 14, 2004. An earlier message left by soldiers reads: 'This is for the Americans of Blackwater that were murdered here in 2004, Semper Fidelis 3/5.'

And remember, the anger in Fallujah that led to that horrible incident goes back to the year before that. On April 28 of 2003, right after the initial invasion, people of Fallujah, many of whom had opposed Saddam Hussein's tyranny and did not fight for him, held a demonstration. Who knows, maybe they watched too many Hollywood movies and thought that's the way to express a demand to the Americans. Charming notions, these primitives have. The U.S. military opened fire on the crowd, killing seventeen and wounding more than seventy. The military claimed that they had been fired upon from a school but a subsequent Human Rights Watch investigation found no evidence that was the case. All calls for an impartial investigation, accountability on the issue, an apology, compensation to the victims, something to show the people of Fallujah we weren't just a bunch of trigger-happy occupier army that viewed their lives as unimportant, disposable nuisances were unheeded -- and the incident, and the town, was ignored by U.S. public until those four mercenaries from Halliburton drove through town on March 31, 2004.

Posted by zeynep at 11:30 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

November 12, 2004

Somebody Tell Lt. Brandon Turner That He's Insane

This from the Los Angeles Times:

"We've got chunks of territory, but these guys (insurgents) are all over the place," Marine Lt. Brandon Turner said Thursday as he stood amid shattered glass and concrete under the green dome of Al Kalfa mosque, his fellow Marines resting on a plush red carpet.

"They just keep coming at us."

And here's the accompanying picture:

Somebody please tell Lt. Brandon Turner that he's insane, that the Pentagon is insane, whoever is allowing the marines or any American soldiers "rest" on that "plush red carpet" with their shoes, uniforms and machines guns is insane. Does anyone understand anything about religious feelings in general or about Islam in particular? Have they spent even half a day watching a documentary or two about Islam and noticed that people carefully and respectfully take their shoes off before entering a mosque, where they will kneel and put their head on that carpet? (Those "plush red carpets", by the way, are prayer rugs, or"sajjade." And you don't step on them with your combat boots, especially inside a mosque, and smile for the cameras unless you really want to fight to the death with up to a billion people.)

Seriously, this is either the most arrogant, incompetent, ignorant occupation, ever, or the most clever, insidious, skillful effort towards bringing about an apocalyptic world war. Are they asleep at the awheel, drowning under their own ignorance, or simply want to end life on earth as we know it?

Posted by zeynep at 12:44 AM | Comments (49) | TrackBack

They've Gone Native!

Operation "Phantom Fury", which sounds like a Star Wars prequel but was actually the name of the current project reducing Fallujah to rubble, has been renamed Operation al-Fajr, or "Dawn" in Arabic.

This apparently happened a few days ago, but I just noticed it. Wow, that's so convincing. An operation that is carried out entirely by U.S. airpower and almost entirely by U.S. ground forces gets an Arabic name and we can all pretend it's the Iraqis fighting anti-Iraqi forces to retake an Iraqi town. What occupation?

Too bad for the Pentagon that the charade seemed to convince only a few prominent liberal bloggers who complained that our troops were taking orders from the Iraqi government.

Posted by zeynep at 12:17 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

November 10, 2004

Orwell, Ye of Little Imagination

Orwell had nothing on these guys:

"Coalition forces are now moving into Fallouja to bring to justice those who are willing to kill the innocent, and those who are trying to terrorize the Iraqi people and our coalition, those who want to stop democracy," Bush said.

And here's Blair:

Under increasing fire at home, with the failure to find weapons of mass destruction having shot down one of the chief arguments for invading Iraq, Blair linked the battle for Fallujah to the broader war on terror.

"Many of those in Fallujah are foreign jihadists (Muslim holy warriors)," who have entered Iraq from outside, he said. "They are not people who have got any right to be in Iraq at all."

Again, how do you think this sounds to the Iraqi people who have been watching their innocents killed, tortured and terrorized, their wishes for democracy smothered by an occupation that cancelled local elections and appointed hand-picked mayors even though at the time this was done, around June of 2003, it was perfectly possible to hold elections since the security situation hadn't detoriated and there was still a lot of "wait-and-see" goodwill towards the occupation. And it is this very occupation that continues to try to set-up sham elections and simply blocks elections when it looks like it won't be a sham election, while continuing to bomb their cities under the guise of promoting elections.

And don't get me started on foreigners who have no right to be in Iraq.

Posted by zeynep at 11:02 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

November 09, 2004

"Attention, attention, terrorists of Fallujah"

Our Psy-Ops sure are talented folks:

A psychological operations unit broadcast announcements in Arabic meant to draw out gunmen. An Iraqi translator from the group said through a loudspeaker: "Brave terrorists, I am waiting here for the brave terrorists. Come and kill us. Plant small bombs on roadsides. Attention, attention, terrorists of Fallujah."

No, I'm not making this up. It would require a lot more comedic talent than I possess. I suspect it's the same people who came up with ""Taliban are Women; They're Bitches"" announcements in Afghanistan.

What's next? Raffles for Terrorists? Toaster-oven giveaways for the first five to show up?

Also, why small bombs?

UPDATE: The link in the above story went to a piece about Turkey-flavored soda. I have no idea why -- cyber-wormholes or something. It's now been corrected.

Posted by zeynep at 05:55 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

Umm, Who Are We kidding Again?

At the New York Times main website today, the central picture is a photo of two soldiers inside a building with sunlight streaming in from the windows -- captioned "Protecting the Islamic cultural center in Falluja was one the U.S. objectives today."

Well, thanks, I spat out my coffee chuckling. The New York Times is well-advised to tone down its level of sucking up to the Pentagon -- there is a point at which it becomes so ridiculous that it backfires.

It's obvious we've abandoned any pretense of propaganda aimed at the Iraqi people -- it is kind of hard when they're being bombed. And most of the rest of their propaganda efforts are so aimed at the domestic populace since, again obviously, you can't make Iraqi people believe lies about what's happenning right in front of their eyes: "In Fallujah, Iraqi Forces are attacking Anti-Iraqi Forces", "No Civilians Will Be Harmed in the Making of Your News Unless It Was Their Fault", and "Allawi is an Independent, Legitimate Iraqi Leader We Happen to Be Supporting"...

But, puh-lease. "Protecting the Islamic cultural center in Falluja was one the U.S. objectives today"? As the most central, visible message of the day, on this day? Chill out, liberal media.

UPDATE: That picture has now moved to the inside pages, replaced by an equally useless --but less outright ridiculous-- "Marines deployed smoke screens as they guarded American tanks." Anyway, here it is:

Caption: "Protecting the Islamic cultural center in Falluja was one the the marine's objectives today."

Posted by zeynep at 01:47 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

"Bombing had gone on all day with only a 15-minute respite"

Bomb the city, bomb clinics, say it's all their fault, rinse and repeat.

One Fallouja resident, Adnan Mohammed Falluji, 37, an engineer who was reached by phone Monday night, said the bombing had gone on all day with only a 15-minute respite. "They were bombing both sides of the city with airplanes and artillery. Then the tanks started to bomb the center of the city," he said.

Dr. Hamid Mohammed, speaking from a makeshift clinic that is serving Falloujans after U.S. and Iraqi forces took over Fallouja General Hospital early Monday, said that 15 dead and 20 injured people had been brought to the clinic.

"There are women and children among them."

That clinic was bombed this morning by the Americans, several witnesses said. It was unclear whether it was still receiving patients.

Despite being advised to leave the city, up to 150,000 residents may remain in Fallouja. In a visit to Iraqi troops accompanying the Americans on Monday, Allawi urged the soldiers to try to avoid civilian casualties and limit raids to places where anti-government forces are holed up.

And everyone keeps repeating this nonsense that the U.S. strategy was based on "training Iraqi army" to "take over security."

This week's battle began with a mixture of confidence and disappointment for U.S. commanders, whose strategy for stabilizing Iraq is based on training Iraqi army and other forces to take over security in the nation.

Upon learning that they would form the vanguard of the Fallouja invasion, an undetermined number of Iraqi troops deserted their units before the battle began, Casey, the top U.S. commander, acknowledged. One Iraqi battalion shrank from more than 500 to 170 over the past week, a National Public Radio correspondent who accompanied U.S. forces said.

I don't know which is better: that the U.S. commanders are so stupid that they actually believe Iraqi forces will take over to "take over" bombing their own cities or that our journalists are so unethical that they keep repeating this as the actual goal that we're striving towards rather than a thinly-veiled propaganda line used to justify our obviously unwelcome presence in somebody else's country.

Posted by zeynep at 11:58 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

All Men are Our Enemies

Here's more from Rumsfeld's press conference yesterday:

Civilians in the city of Fallujah got plenty of warning to steer clear of the fighting between U.S. and insurgent forces, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said in predicting "there aren't going to be large numbers" of civilians killed there.

"Innocent civilians in that city have all the guidance they need as to how they can avoid getting into trouble," Rumsfeld told a Pentagon news conference Monday. He referred to a round-the-clock curfew and other emergency measures announced by interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi.

"There aren't going to be large numbers of civilians killed and certainly not by U.S. forces," Rumsfeld said.

...

Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, appeared with Rumsfeld and said it's likely the insurgents will try to use civilians as shields against attacking U.S. troops.

For one thing, they would not let any man under the age 45 to leave Fallujah. What does it say about the nature of your occupation that you consider all men of fighting age to be your enemy. Plus, what gives you the right to say we will flatten your city -- and it's not our problem if you stay with male members of your family, whom we will kill? We are not responsible for killing people who refuse to leave behind their 17 year old son or cousin?

I've said this often: this is the test of whether or not an occupation has even any transitory justification. If you consider all males of military age to be "enemies," and if these "enemies" and the civilian population seem to be undistinguishable, you're in the wrong country. It means the whole country is united against you and your occupation and the only thing to do is a swift and expeditious withdrawal.
What's the alternative, kill all men? That does seem to be the plan.

Posted by zeynep at 11:38 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

November 08, 2004

Is This an Iraqi Operation Against Anti-Iraqi Forces? Absolutely. Are Americans in Control? Yes. Are We Calling the Shots? Sure. Can This Blog Parody Rumsfeld-Speak? Maybe.

A commenter to the previous post noted this:

"Watching some cable news over lunch, and that includes CNN, Fox, and MSNBC, you seriously would have the idea that this is an Iraqi operation, ordered by the Iraqi government, performed in significant measure by Iraqi forces. The propaganda component is simply overwhelming, from all corners.

Well, let's look at the math a bit. Pentagon's most ambitious claims is that 2,000 Iraqis are involved in this operation, compared to 10,000 U.S. troops. Already, even taking Pentagon's numbers at face value, this hardly looks like a "Iraqi operation":

Pentagon officials said the operation involves more than 2,000 Iraqis and about 10,000 U.S. troops.

Of course, even that 2,000 is the number of people who are supposed to be there. Early reports are that most have already deserted:

A National Public Radio correspondent embedded with the Marines outside Fallujah reported desertions among the Iraqis. One Iraqi battalion shrunk from over 500 men down to 170 over the past two week - with 255 members quitting over the weekend, the correspondent said.

And the Muslim Clerics Association has now openly called for desertion:

Hours before the assault, the Muslim Clerics Association, a national group with influence over some rebels in Falluja, urged Iraqi troops not to join the U.S.-led action.

"We call on the Iraqi forces, the National Guard and others who are mostly Muslims ... to beware of making the grave mistake of invading Iraqi cities under the banner of forces who respect no religion or human rights," it said in a statement.

"Beware of being deceived that you are fighting terrorists from outside the country, because by God you are fighting the townspeople and targeting its men, women and children and history will record every drop of blood you spill in oppressing the people of your nation."

What's their problem?

Well, maybe this:

Missiles rained down indiscriminately on the city, with the action most intense in the Askari district in the northeast and Jolan in the northwest.

"They are in the process of incinerating the sector," a Jolan local said.

But, hey, look on the bright side. Remember how U.S. officals always invoke the danger of civil war as a to continue occupying the country? I must admit, they have a point. Nothing like an assault on a city by an occupation to unite Iraqis:

Anti-U.S. Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr joined a call by a powerful Sunni Muslim group, saying the siege of Falluja risked further destabilizing the rest of Iraq.

"We have called on the Iraqi National Guard, army and police not to participate with the occupation forces in attacking Falluja," Sadr spokesman Abdul Hadi al-Darraji told Reuters.

Posted by zeynep at 10:13 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

No More Pretense

No more pretense about what we are doing:

In April, American troops were closing in on the city center when popular uprisings broke out in cities across Iraq. The outrage, fed by mostly unconfirmed reports of large civilian casualties, forced the Americans to withdraw. American commanders regarded the reports as inflated, but it was impossible to determine independently how many civilians had been killed. The hospital was selected as an early target because the American military believed that it was the source of rumors about heavy casualties. "It's a center of propaganda," a senior American officer said Sunday. This time around, the American military intends to fight its own information war, countering or squelching what has been one of the insurgents' most potent weapons.

This time around, the American military intends to fight its own information war, countering or squelching what has been one of the insurgents' most potent weapons. The military hopes that if it can hold its own in that war, then the armed invasion - involving as many as 25,000 American and Iraqi troops, all told - will smash what has become the largest remaining insurgent stronghold in Iraq.

Got that? Hospitals spread the news of civilian casualties so them must be targeted as part of the "information war."

And note how the many hundreds of people killed in the last siege have become mere "inflated" reports. (At the time, the BBC reported that "a group of five international charities estimated that about 470 people had been killed, while hospital officials put the death toll at about 600" -- and Iraq Body Count has done an extensive study which corroborates these estimates.)

The New York Times also has another article on the targeting of the hospital that is almost a self-parody of propaganda. In the usual self-important tone, it reports that:

[American officials] have made little secret of their irritation with what they contend are inflated civilian casualty figures that regularly flow from the hospital - propaganda, they believe, for the Falluja insurgents, whom they blame for much of the car bombings, beheadings and other acts of terror in Iraq.

Think about the above quote. Forget that it's said by our military, which is bad enough, but imagine what it means that our leading "liberal" newspaper is reporting this snippet without comment. While it's always a tricky question to determine at what point "I'm just doing my job" is not good enough an excuse, I find it hard to forgive reporting that claim without an accompanying explanation of well-confirmed reports of actual massive civilian casualties in Fallujah -- let alone, laws of war regarding protection of hospitals.

The article goes out of its way to try to justify what has been done but at the end of the shameful day, there isn't much to say. The American Special Forces found a Moroccan fighter in a wheelchair who claimed there were four other foreign fighters being treated in the hospital -- which is what hospitals do, they treat all people who show up injured at their door. It would be wrong of them not to so there is no point there. And if one guy in a wheelchair doesn't sound scary enough, here's what else they found:

American troops said they found four or five men at the hospital armed with Kalashnikov rifles, and at least one hand grenade. A poster hanging in an examination room on the first floor displayed scenes of carnage in Iraq and a row of flag-draped American coffins. The writing on the poster encouraged jihad, a translator said.

Perhaps the most intriguing discovery of the night - aside from the Moroccan - were two cellphones found on the roof of the hospital. The Americans said they were clear evidence that someone was monitoring the area in front of the hospital.

"Cellphones work fine on the first floor, if you want to talk to your family," the American Special Forces commander said. "It's pretty clear they were on the roof spotting."

Make no mistake, there is no question that we can flatten Fallujah. We can also play all these propaganda games amongst ourselves, between Centcom releases, New York Times, Fox News, our fight against "anti-Iraqi forces," no civilian casualties except a few regrettable incidents that is to be blamed on the terrorists, blah, blah, blah... But trust me, nobody, nobody else is buying it.

Posted by zeynep at 12:22 AM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

November 07, 2004

Spreading the Word

"By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another." (John 13:15).

Meanwhile, AP provides this picture with this caption: "A boy recovers in a Fallujah hospital after a U.S. airstrike in Fallujah, Iraq Saturday, Nov. 6, 2004, which killed his father, according to hospital officials. U.S. jets pounded Fallujah early Saturday in the heaviest airstrikes in six months, including five 500-pound bombs dropped on insurgent targets." (I guess AP knows that the bomb was dropped on 'insurgent targets' because this is so obviously a terrorist baby.)

I wonder, if the terrorist baby was in this hospital:

Or this one:

In any case, Colonel Gary Brandl and other marines obviously know what they're doing [thanks to Under the Same Sun reader Reko]:

Colonel Gary Brandl of the United States Marine Corps commented: "The enemy has a face. It is Satan's. He is in Fallujah, and we are going to destroy him."

Posted by zeynep at 09:28 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

November 06, 2004

Where Are Your Values

From left i on the news, always a source of incisive analysis:

"Values voters"...

...are looking forward with anticipation to the assault on Fallujah and the impending death of hundreds or thousands of people.

...think that employing antiseptic euphemisms like "mopping up" are perfectly appropriate when it comes to killing people.

...go to church and listen to sermons about the "right to life," but never once hear any reference in those sermons to the 100,000, or 30,000, or 15,000 (however many it is) Iraqis, most of them unarmed non-combatants, who have been killed by the U.S. invasion.

Posted by zeynep at 08:45 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

November 05, 2004

As Fallujah Awaits Its Destruction

They are not going to wait even a few days to establish the principle of naked force in Fallujah:

"U.S. troops sealed all roads to Falluja and urged women, children and non-fighting age men to flee, but said they would arrest any man under 45 trying to enter or leave the city."

It's not enough that we laid siege to your city in spring and laid waste to it. It's not enough we've been pounding from the air you since then, killing untold numbers. We will now kill all your men and all your women and children who refuse to abandon their men and their city.

No morals, no shame, no humanity.

Posted by zeynep at 06:48 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Lessons on How to Report an Impending Assault on a City

G.I.'s Itch to Prove Their Mettle in Falluja

For many marines here, the order cannot come too soon. After a long summer of cat-and-mouse games with shadowy insurgents, they are hungry for a decisive battle.

"Locked, cocked and ready to rock," said Lance Cpl. Dimitri Gavriel, 29, who left an investment banking job in Manhattan 18 months ago to enlist, using a popular Marine expression. "That's about how we feel."

What do you say to this glorification of the imminent destruction of a city where we killed at least 600 people last time around, and who knows how many since then?

The piece also offers insights into the psychology of these people who will soon attack this city with overwhelming firepower:

"It's kind of like the cancer of Iraq," said Lt. Steven Berch, a lanky platoon commander, speaking of Falluja. "It's become a kind of hotel for the insurgents. Hopefully getting rid of them will help to stabilize the whole country."

Others point to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant who is said to be using Falluja as a base.

"We're doing the right thing here," said First Lt. Christopher Wilkens, pausing for breath during a drill. "These guys are terrorists, there are connections to Al Qaeda, and fighting them is what we came here to do."

Cancer of Iraq. I really wonder how people of Iraq would react to that description? And would the readers of New York Times ever hear of it?

Posted by zeynep at 02:30 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

November 02, 2004

Propaganda

While on the question of the ridiculousness of our propaganda, let me post a Centcom press release:

November 2, 2004 Release Number: 04-11-03

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

AIR STRIKE IN FALLUJAH

FALLUJAH, Iraq – A U.S. Air Force plane engaged a pre-planned target using precision ordnance, which destroyed a known enemy cache site on the southeast side of the city, in support of the Regimental Combat Team-7 of the I Marine Expeditionary Force at 11:27 p.m., Nov. 1.

The Multi-National Forces continue to degrade and disrupt the anti-Iraqi forces’ capabilities in the Fallujah-Ramadi area.

So, who is this aimed at? If there is anyone with a brain running this show, they'll hope that no Iraqi ever reads this -- it just doesn't work when you first bomb them, and then call them "anti-Iraqi" when they are the Iraqis and you are the foreign occupier. This one isn't really directly aimed at the American public either but at our opiate-pushers: the press corps. This allows them to say "Centcom claimed that they had destroyed a known weapons cache belonging to foreign terrorists. The hospital director, the morgue doctor, journalists at the site and the neighbors of the pulverized house claimed that the strike had hit a civilian house, killing an extended family including many children. Neither claim could be verified. [Unsaid is the following: in every confirmed instance, the neighbors and the hospital directors turned out to be correct. Centcom never produces any proof that it is hitting weapons caches. It's not even clear what right they'd have to hit anything, since they are an occupying army obligated under international law to withdraw, not bomb. Yes, we call ourselves journalists, why do you ask?]"

UPDATE:
After I posted my made-up version of the story, I found an actual example of how that press release was used in an AFP piece:

FALLUJAH, Iraq (AFP) - A US war plane bombed a suspected weapons site in the restive Iraqi city of Fallujah, where hospital sources said six people were killed and four wounded.

"A US navy jet in support of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force dropped precision ordenance on a weapons cache site," said Major Francis Piccoli.

"We destroyed the site and there was a large secondary explosion," said the marine spokesman, adding that this indicated there had been munitions in the area.

The raid took place at 5:19 pm (1419 GMT).

Doctor Nabil Nuri, from the Fallujah general hospital, said six people were killed and four wounded in the strike, that rocked a residential area in Al-Askari towards the end of the daily fast during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

Witnesses had earlier said casualties were pulled out from under the rubble of a house in Al-Askari.

Scary.

Posted by zeynep at 11:07 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

"Anti-Insurgency" Hotline in Iraq

The U.S. Army has set up an "anti-insurgency" hotline " where Iraqis can phone in anonymous tips."

In two interviews with Arabic TV networks on Monday, Brig. Gen. Jeffery Hammond assumed the role of a big city American police chief, squinting into the camera and beseeching Iraqis to phone in anything they know about planned attacks.

"When you see this terrible insurgent about to do something, pick up your phone and call me. I'll do something about it," said Hammond, deputy commander of the 1st Cavalry Division. "We can fight this war together. You can help me fight — in secret."

...

"The choice is simple," Hammond continued. "You can choose the choice of the insurgent, which is death. Or you can choose the path of the interim government, which is life."

"I understand that you're scared. I'd be scared too," Hammond said. "But someone in Baghdad sees the insurgent, knows the insurgent. Tell me what it is you know."

Yes, it's one of those do you laugh or do you cry stories. As the piece notes later, some of the phone calls they did get were, well, less than helpful. But it got me thinking: who is this aimed at? I mean, if you are really trying to crush the rebellion in Iraq, you know this this "hotline" is worthless -- people have a tendency not to like foreigners who bomb them from helicopter gunships, drop 500 pound bomsb on their houses, and cause deaths of tens of thousands of their countrymen and install puppet regimes. Propaganda loses its potency under such circumstances, you know. On the other hand, I didn't see this touted in U.S. media either, so it doesn't seem to be a propaganda ploy directed at the American public, although much of the news and press releases and announcements made by the occupation is just that: propaganda for domestic, not Iraqi, consumption. In fact, this one was aired specifically at Arab television stations.

This, I think, is an example of propaganda aimed at oneself. It's quite plasuible that the U.S. army needs to continuously indoctrinate itself, especially in the face of the reality of the occupation. Think about it: from the lowest-ranked soldier to the top brass, those stationed in Iraq can't but know, at some level, that the populace is strongly against their presence in the country, sympthasizes with the insurgency, and wants the occupiers out, now. On the other hand it's harder to kill --and to risk life and limb-- when you admit that you're acting as a hired gun for an unpopular, imperial occupation. So, there's a huge need for generating propaganda aimed not only at the American people but at the armed forces itself, including obviously ridiculous gestures like this.

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October 31, 2004

Shi'ite Migrant Workers Hotel Bombed in Tikrit

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

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

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

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October 28, 2004

Killing Fields

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

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

...

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

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

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

...

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

...

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

...

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

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

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

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

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

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October 26, 2004

Iraqis With Disabilities Demonstrate: Let Her Go

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

Mustafa Ahmed, 12.

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October 24, 2004

Is Zarqawi Trying to Start a Civil War in Iraq?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3 [sic]. The Shi`a

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

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

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

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

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

October 23, 2004

We Need Cheaper Lives

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

October 21, 2004

He Can Shoot! He can Kill!

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

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

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

...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

October 19, 2004

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

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

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

...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And, deep, deep, deep into the piece:

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

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October 18, 2004

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

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

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

Here's the story:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

October 13, 2004

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

October 12, 2004

The Disappearing Business

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

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

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

October 07, 2004

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

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

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

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

...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Third Anniversary

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

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

October 05, 2004

One More Veto

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

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

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

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

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

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

October 03, 2004

Feel Safer Now?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There, don't you feel safer.

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

October 01, 2004

Crank Up the PR

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

September 29, 2004

So Maybe It's Not That They're Undertrained

You know how we keep hearing the reason Iraqi forces cannot take over "fighting terrorists" is because they haven't been trained sufficiently? We already knew something was wrong with the portrayal -- in Fallujah and in Najaf, Iraqi soldiers refused to fight their countrymen on behalf of the occupiers. Here's a direct acknowledgement of the possibility that this is the real problem:

Reports from Iraq have made one Army staff officer question whether adequate progress is being made there.

"They keep telling us that Iraqi security forces are the exit strategy, but what I hear from the ground is that they aren't working," he said. "There's a feeling that Iraqi security forces are in cahoots with the insurgents and the general public to get the occupiers out."

Well, how surprising. A nation which does not want to be occupied, who would've thought of that? The above was from a Post article that basically reports the known known about the state of the occupation. There is also a NY Times article out today which is accompanied by a very telling map of the geographic distribution and method of attacks in the last 30 days alone. Take a look. Basically, practically everywhere, they are throwing whatever they can get their hands on at the occupation forces.

Posted by zeynep at 12:57 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

September 28, 2004

Coming Soon: Staged Elections (in Iraq, Afghanistan and maybe in the U.S.)

Something’s very wrong in Iraq and administration’s trying desperately to hide this fact from the American people -- in fact, all the political moves by the administration at this point are directed at us, not Iraqis. I think it’s fair to say that there is little to no effort at convincing or winning over people of Iraq: such an effort would at least require stopping the greatly destructive aerial bombing of Baghdad and Fallujah, withdrawing the U.S. military from the streets, spending money on the already-crumbling infrastructure, allowing for real elections....

But none of that will happen anytime soon because we, not the people of Iraq, are the target audience. So, we get Ayad Allawi touring D.C. as part of Bush’s reelection campaign; we get the U.S. military press releases about bombing “safe houses” in Sadr City and Fallujah that nobody in Iraq believes; and we are now witnessing the initial stages of getting us to accept pretend elections as imperfect but real elections.

All this is to placate and misinform the American people. The people in Iraq will know sham elections from real ones, of course. And of course, imperfect elections can be acceptable at certain times in history; however, what they are trying to market are sham, not imperfect, elections.

This propaganda effort reminds me of the story about the cloud cover over German cities the Allied censors did not want reported to the British and American public during World War II. As Walter Cronkite recounts in a Newsweek article, the information wasn’t being withheld from the Germans:

Once in England the censors held up my report that the Eighth Air Force had bombed Germany through a solid cloud cover. This was politically sensitive; our air staff maintained that we were practicing only precision bombing on military targets. But the censors released my story when I pointed out the obvious--Germans on the ground and the Luftwaffe attacking bombers knew the clouds were there. The truth was not being withheld from Germans but Americans.

Just as such, the propaganda system is currently aimed squarely and almost solely at us. (The opinions of people of Iraq have long ago ceased to matter except to the degree they can kill American soldiers. Is that not a horrible incentive system we have set up here?)

Pretend elections are the last leg of the pretense edifice of the war on Iraq. The Weapons of Mass Destruction have turned into Weapons of Mass Destruction Related Program Activities in My Head. Terrorism threat posed by Saddam Hussein has turned into massively-increased actual terrorism threat due to our occupation of Iraq. Reconstruction, it seems, is just another name for transferring Iraq’s oil money to Halliburton. So it’s crucial for the propaganda system that they make us believe that at least --at least-- Iraq and Afghanistan will have real elections.

It was relatively unsurprising to learn that CIA had plans to secretly throw its weight behind candidates favored by the administration. It was also almost predictable that Rummy would lecture us about how a bit of election would be better than none -- which, of course, is true in the abstract but is no excuse when we are one of the main forces behind limiting electoral possibilities. In fact, that’s the last big lie that is gathering some attention: the last thing the administration wants is real elections in either Afghanistan or in Iraq. But, it desperately needs the appearance of some form of elections.

Empire Notes has been covering all this and more about sham elections in detail -- here’s a great piece about sham elections and here’s analysis of the New York Times and Washington Post editorials on the topic. All are must-read. In fact, Empire Notes makes a plea that people mobilize now to try to expose this latest scandal while there is still time to do something about it -- especially with elections scheduled for January in Iraq. I totally agree. For once, I hope, we can try to be ahead of their sleazy curve.

I guess my one hope is that having suffered through one stolen election, the American people will be more sensitive to the attempts to deny people of Afghanistan and Iraq a chance at real elections -- especially after they were told that this chance was why they had to endure so much suffering, death and destruction.

Posted by zeynep at 09:07 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Bridges to Baghdad

Simona Toretta, Simona Pari, Raad Ali Abdul Azziz and Mahnouz Bassam have just been freed. Many questions remain and hopefully some light will be shed on them.

Posted by zeynep at 01:27 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

September 27, 2004

You Know the No-Fly List Works

When air marshalls end up on it:

Still, the TSA is learning. It recently acknowledged that a Federal Air Marshall, unable to fly for weeks when his name was mistakenly put on the "no-fly" list, was in fact not a threat, and removed his name from the list.

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September 26, 2004

Must-Bomb-Credibility-At-Stake

Here’s a fairly typical rundown of the arguments against withdrawal, from the Week in Review section of the New York Times:

But the counterarguments are also powerful. Withdrawal in the absence of stability would amount to a devastating admission of failure and a blow to America's world leadership. The credibility of the United States, already compromised, would be devastated. More than 1,000 young lives would appear to have been blotted out for naught.

Is this not the definition of insanity? For one thing, it’s abundantly clear that our presence is the primary reason for instability in Iraq. The people of Iraq have little no to no chance at gaining control of their country and bringing about modicum of order as long as we continue to occupy them. Catch the latest numbers from the Iraqi Ministry of Health, obtained by the Knight-Ridder:

Operations by U.S. and multinational forces and Iraqi police are killing twice as many Iraqis - most of them civilians - as attacks by insurgents, according to statistics compiled by the Iraqi Health Ministry and obtained exclusively by Knight Ridder. According to the ministry, the interim Iraqi government recorded 3,487 Iraqi deaths in 15 of the country's 18 provinces from April 5 - when the ministry began compiling the data - until Sept. 19. Of those, 328 were women and children. Another 13,720 Iraqis were injured, the ministry said. While most of the dead are believed to be civilians, the data include an unknown number of police and Iraqi national guardsmen. Many Iraqi deaths, especially of insurgents, are never reported, so the actual number of Iraqis killed in fighting could be significantly higher. During the same period, 432 American soldiers were killed.

Plus, we are continuing to bomb Fallujah, Baghdad, and other cities -- ostensibly in “surgical strikes” against terrorist “safe houses” but from the ground reports keep indicating many children, women and ordinary residents are getting killed.

Of course, the word “safe house” is just plain old disinformation because it connotes a place used by those hiding from the population, keeping a secret from the residents. As all reporting from Fallujah shows, the resistance is quite popular in that town -- which is relatively unsurprising considering we killed about 1,000 of them through aerial bombing in Spring and who-knows-how-many since then.

As for the credibility and the leadership of the United States, how much worse can it get? Here, the media and the political class seems to have forgotten about Abu Ghraib and the uncovering of systematic torture at U.S.-run detention centers -- but why would the rest of the world? And unlike our media here, the rest of the world’s media does not pretend that we’re in Iraq for a noble cause, supported and wanted by at least a majority the people of Iraq.

I suppose we could subdue the whole country by levelling it but someone should explain how that’s supposed to make us safer.

Of course, there is the “1,000 young lives would appear to have been blotted out for naught” argument -- and, of course tens of thousands of Iraqi lives, but who cares about that. Even considering only American lives, this is the most callous, most insane of the reasons. Will the question get any easier after 2,000 American soldiers die in Iraq?

In sum, none of the stated reasons --stability, democracy, weapons of mass destruction, Saddam-Al Qaeda links -- stand the test of reasoned argument. And the sad truth of the matter is that we knew all this before the war. And sadder still is the fact that the truth gets spoken less now, even after so much death and destruction and such blatant evidence of the falsity of the edifice of pretexts.

This is a political reality caused by the fact that the anti-war movement pretty much disappeared from the political scene after the invasion began and the anti-Bush movement -- at least for a while -- decided to try to run to the right of Bush with the vain hope that they could dislodge some of Bush’s base by appearing more war-mongerer-than-thou.

Alas, it didn’t work that way -- and hard to see how it could given the tight organization and ideological control the Republican party has over its base -- so now we have a bit more of some visible political opposition to the war itself rather than just the conduct of the war. So far it’s too little, and it’s certainly very late.

I suppose the real question is how long we’ll avoid the real questions about this war and how many people will die until then.

Posted by zeynep at 09:57 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

September 23, 2004

Casualties in Sadr City

And, here's a little bit of what happens when you bomb a poor, crowded urban slum from warplanes. Meet our newest hearts and minds converts:

Ammar Mahdi:

Hosam Adnan:

Ammar Zaki Nayeem:

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

In Case You Missed It

We're bombing Baghdad, from the air, with warplanes. And it's not even news. You won't even notice the story unless you look for it. That's Baghdad, as in Baghdad the capital of Iraq.

And why are we bombing it?

“The intent is to provide security for the people of Thawra so we can get back to the business of reconstruction,” said 1st Cavalry Division commanding general Maj. Gen. Peter Chiarelli in a Wednesday statement. Thawra is an old name for Sadr City. The district is now named for Muqtada al-Sadr’s father, a revered cleric killed under Saddam Hussein’s regime.

So far, "U.S. military officers monitoring the fighting" put the Iraqi death toll at 40. All this sacrifice we're making just to get back to the the business of reconstructing the place we won't even call by the name used by the actual residents. Guess they should be grateful we aren't calling it Myanmar.

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September 22, 2004

We All Scream About Forged Documents

Tom Toles again, from the Washington Post (9/22/04).

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September 21, 2004

All PowerPoint and No Water

The pretexts for war on Iraq and justifications for our occupation have changed dramatically over the past two years. First it was the non-existing WMD and the bogus Al-Qaeda connection followed by bringing democracy and helping restore the infrastructure we helped destroy. We seem to be left now only with occupation and puppet governments.

The final official steps converting our presence in Iraq to a purely military one are being taken as the State department gets control of the never-spent Iraqi reconstruction money allocated by Congress -- about $3.5 billion is being officially diverted from reconstruction to military spending. Considering we’ve only spent one billion out of the allocated $18 billion in more than one year of occupation, it seems obvious that very little money will ever be spent for improving the water systems, the sewage, the electricity -- the very things Iraqis desparately need:

But the move comes as a grievous disappointment to Iraqi officials who had already seen the bi