The Rag Blog

Cuba: Ahead of the Curve on Food Sustainability

Posted on December 17, 2008 by RagBlog

A banana plantation is seen in San Antonio de los Banos in Havana in this July 18, 2008 file photo. Photo: Reuters/Enrique De La Osa/Files.
In ‘Eat Local’ Movement, Cuba Is Years Ahead
By Esteban Israel / December 16, 2008

HAVANA – After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Cuba planted thousands of urban cooperative gardens to offset reduced rations of imported food.

Now, in the wake of three hurricanes that wiped out 30 percent of Cuba’s farm crops, the communist country is again turning to its urban gardens to keep its people properly fed.

“Our capacity for response is immediate because this is a cooperative,” said Miguel Salcines, walking among rows of lettuce in the garden he heads in the Alamar suburb on the outskirts of Havana.

Salcines says he is hardly sleeping as his 160-member cooperative rushes to plant and harvest a variety of beets that takes just 25 days to grow, among other crops.

As he talks, dirt-stained men and women kneel along the furrows, planting and watering on land next to a complex of Soviet-style buildings. Machete-wielding men chop weeds and clear brush along the periphery of the field.

Around 15 percent of the world’s food is grown in urban areas, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, a figure experts expect to increase as food prices rise, urban populations grow and environmental concerns mount.

Since they sell directly to their communities, city farms don’t depend on transportation and are relatively immune to the volatility of fuel prices, advantages that are only now gaining traction as “eat local” movements in rich countries.

ROOFTOPS AND PARKING LOTS

In Cuba, urban gardens have bloomed in vacant lots, alongside parking lots, in the suburbs and even on city rooftops.

They sprang from a military plan for Cuba to be self-sufficient in case of war. They were broadened to the general public in response to a food crisis that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba’s biggest benefactor at the time.

They have proven extremely popular, occupying 35,000 hectares (86,000 acres) of land across the Caribbean island. Even before the hurricanes, they produced half of the leaf vegetables eaten in Cuba, which imports about 60 percent of its food.

“I don’t say they have the capacity to produce enough food for the whole island, but for social and also agricultural reasons they are the most adequate response to a crisis,” said Catherine Murphy, a U.S. sociologist who has studied Cuba’s urban gardens.

GREEN PRODUCTIVITY

In Alamar, the members get a salary and share the garden’s profits, so the more they grow, the more they earn. They make an average of about 950 pesos, or $42.75, per month, more than double the national average, Salcines said.

The co-op, which began in 1997, now produces more than 240 tons of vegetables annually on its 11 hectares (27 acres) of land, which is about the size of 13 soccer fields.

The gardens sell their produce directly to the community and, out of necessity, grow their crops organically.

“Urban agriculture is going to play a key role in guaranteeing the feeding of the people much more quickly than the traditional farms,” said Richard Haep, Cuba coordinator for German aid group Welthungerhilfe, which has supported these kinds of projects since 1994.

When the Soviet Union fell apart, Cuba’s supply of oil slowed to a trickle, hurting big state agricultural operations. Chemical fertilizers were replaced with mountains of manure, and beneficial insects were used instead of pesticides.

Unlike in developed countries, where organic products are more expensive, in Cuba they are affordable.

“We have taken organic agriculture to a social level,” said Salcines.

Some experts fear that rising international food prices along with the destruction of the hurricanes will return Cuba to the path of agrochemicals. The government is planning to construct a fertilizer plant with its oil-rich ally Venezuela.

But Raul Castro, who replaced ailing brother Fidel Castro as president in February, has also borrowed ideas from the urban gardens as he implements reforms to cut the island’s $2.5 billion in annual food imports, much of it from the United States.

Castro has decentralized farm decision-making and raised the prices that the state pays for agricultural products, which has increased milk production, for example, by almost 20 percent.

And, in September, the government began renting out unused state-owned lands to farmers and cooperatives, measures that met with approval of international aid groups.

“Decentralization and economic incentives. If those elements are expanded to the rest of the agricultural sector, the response will be the same,” said Welthungerhilfe’s Haep.

[Reporting by Esteban Israel; Editing by Jeff Franks and Eddie Evans.]

Source / Common Dreams

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Posted in RagBlog | Tagged Agriculture, Cuba, Environment, Sustainability | Leave a comment

Global Warming : Past the Tipping Point

Posted on December 17, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

The Most Important Number on Earth
Now that we know how far we are past the carbon tipping point, it’s time to freak out—and get to work.
By Bill McKibben

Sooner or later, you have to draw a line.

We’ve spent the last 20 years in the opening scenes of what historians will one day call the Global Warming Era—the preamble to the biggest drama that humans have ever staged, the overture that hints at the themes that will follow for centuries to come. But none of the notes have resolved, none of the story lines yet come into clear view. And that’s largely because until recently we didn’t know quite where we were.

From the moment in 1988 when a nasa scientist named James Hansen told Congress that burning coal and gas and oil was warming the earth, we’ve struggled to absorb this one truth: The central fact of our economic lives (the ubiquitous fossil fuel that developed the developed world) is wrecking the central fact of our physical lives (the stable climate and sea level on which civilization rests). For a while, and much longer in the US than elsewhere, we battled over whether this was true. But warm year succeeded warm year and that fight began to subside. Instead, the real question became, is this a future peril, the kind of thing you take out a reasonably priced insurance policy to guard against? Or is it the oh-my-lord crisis you drop everything else to deal with? Will Hitler be happy with the Sudetenland, or is the world going to spend every cent it has, not to mention tens of millions of lives, fighting him off? Trouble, or TROUBLE? These last 12 months, we’ve found out.

It was September 2007 that the tide began to turn. Every summer Arctic sea ice melts, and every fall it refreezes. The amount of open water has been steadily increasing for three decades, a percent or two every year—it’s been going at about the pace that the hairline recedes on a middle-aged man. It was worrisome, and scientists said all the summer ice could be gone by 2070 or so, which is an eyeblink in geologic time but an eternity in politician time. In late summer of last year, though, the melt turned into a rout—it was like those stories of people whose hair turns gray overnight. An area the size of Colorado was disappearing every week; the Northwest Passage was staying wide open all September, for the first time in history. Before long the Arctic night mercifully descended and the ice began to refreeze, but scientists were using words like “astounding.” They were recalculating—by one nasa scientist’s estimate the summer Arctic might now be free of ice by 2012. Which in politician years is “beginning of my second term.”

The key phrase, really, was “tipping point.” As in “I’d say we are reaching a tipping point or are past it for the ice. This is a strong indication that there is an amplifying mechanism here.” That’s Pål Prestrud of the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research-Oslo. Or this, from Mark Serreze, of the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado: “When the ice thins to a vulnerable state, the bottom will drop out…I think there is some evidence that we may have reached that tipping point, and the impacts will not be confined to the Arctic region.”

“Tipping point” is not, in this context, an idle buzzword. It means that the physical world is taking over the process that humans began. We poured carbon into the atmosphere, trapping excess heat; that excess heat began to melt ice. When that ice was melted, there was less white up north to reflect the sun’s rays back out to space, and more blue ocean to absorb them. Events began to feed upon themselves. And in the course of the last year, we’ve seen the same thing happening in other systems. In April, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released a report showing that 2007 had seen a sudden and dramatic surge in the amount of methane, another heat-trapping gas, in the atmosphere. Apparently, one reason is that when we burned all that fossil fuel and began raising the temperature, we also started melting the permafrost—melting eight times more of it in some places over two decades than had thawed for the previous 1,000 years. And as that frozen soil thaws, it releases methane; enough of it now bubbles out to make “hot spots” in lakes and ponds that don’t freeze during the deepest part of the Siberian winter. The more methane, the more heat, the more methane. Wash, rinse, repeat.

The final piece of the puzzle came early this year, and again from James Hansen. Twenty years after his crucial testimony, he published a paper with several coauthors called “Target Atmospheric CO2” (.pdf). It put, finally, a number on the table—indeed it did so in the boldest of terms. “If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted,” it said, “paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm.”

Get that? Let me break it down for you. For most of the period we call human civilization, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere hovered at about 275 parts per million. Let’s call that the Genesis number, or depending on your icons, the Buddha number, the Confucius number, the Shakespeare number. Then, in the late 18th century, we started burning fossil fuel in appreciable quantities, and that number started to rise. The first time we actually measured it, in the late 1950s, it was already about 315. Now it’s at 385, and growing by more than 2 parts per million annually.

And it turns out that that’s too high. We never had a number before, so we never knew whether we’d crossed a red line. We half guessed and half hoped that the danger zone might be 450 or 550 parts per million—those were still a little ways in the distance. Therefore we could get away with thinking like the young Augustine: “Lord, make me chaste, but not yet.” Not anymore. We have been told by science that we’re already over the line.

And so we’re now in the land of tipping points. We know that we’ve passed some of them—Arctic sea ice is melting, and so is the permafrost that guards those carbon stores. But the logic of Hansen’s paper was clear. Above 350, we are at constant risk of crossing other, even worse, thresholds, the ones that govern the reliability of monsoons, the availability of water from alpine glaciers, the acidification of the ocean, and, perhaps most spectacularly, the very level of the seas. It is at least conceivable that instead of a slow, steady rise in the height of the oceans, we could see rapid melt in Greenland and the West Antarctic, where much of the world’s frozen water resides. We can’t rule out, warns Hansen, a sea level rise of up to 20 feet this century. Plug that into Google Earth and watch waterfront developments turn into high-priced reefs. We can’t rule out, in other words, the collapse of human society as we’ve known it. “If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted…” We should add the phrase to the oath of office for every politico on the third planet.

So what does this mean? If you took 350 to be the most important number on the planet, what would it imply?

In essence, it means that we’ve got to transform the world’s economy far more quickly than we’d hoped. Almost everyone knows that this transformation is coming—that by century’s end we won’t be relying on fossil fuel, both because the oil will have run out and because the environmental damage will be intense. But the question is how quickly. The kind of change envisioned before last year was still a little leisurely—maybe the developed world cutting its carbon emissions 15 or 20 percent by 2020. That’s far more than the Bush administration or its energy-industry cronies would go for, of course—at ExxonMobil’s annual meeting last spring, ceo Rex Tillerson said he envisioned a world that still used fossil fuel for two-thirds of its power in 2030. A world where change came slowly enough that everyone could make every last penny off their sunk investments in coal mines and oil platforms. And a world where politicians didn’t need to raise the price of carbon steeply, and hence didn’t need to arouse voters.

But the 350 world looks different. We’re not worried we might have a weight problem. We’ve been to the doctor and the doctor has said, “Your cholesterol is too high. Scaring me. You’re in the danger zone. You need to change your diet and then you need to pray that you get back down where you’re supposed to be before the stroke that’s coming at you.” When that happens, you clean the cheese out of the refrigerator and go cold turkey.

In energy terms, that would look like this:

[ 1 ] No more new coal plants, because although the world still has immense amounts of coal, it’s immensely dirty. And the people who tell you about clean coal are blowing smoke—literally.

[ 2 ] A cap on the amount of carbon the country can produce—which, in essence, is a tax. America would say, just as it does now with sulfur from coal plants, “We’re only going to release so much carbon every year.” CO2 would stop being free; in fact, it would become expensive. In order to simplify the process, the upstream producer who mines, imports, or sells the fossil fuel would get the tab. ExxonMobil would have to pay dearly for a permit to release x amount of carbon, a cost it would pass on to consumers. Then those consumers would use less, and markets would go to work figuring out all the possible ways to cut demand and boost renewables.

[ 3 ] An international agreement, including China and India, to do the same thing around the world.

Now, these are three of the hardest tasks we’ve even thought about since we took on Hitler. They go to the very heart of the way our economy operates: We get most of our electricity from fossil fuels, any increase in the price of energy affects every single part of the economy, and China and India are pulling people out of poverty largely by burning cheap coal. If you’re a person who uses a lot of fossil fuel, i.e. an American, then they’re unappealing. If you’re a person who would like to use even a little energy, i.e. almost anyone in the developing world, then they’re maddening. And yet they are what the physics and chemistry of the situation dictate. So the question becomes, how to make them happen?

The logic imposed by 350 is fairly straightforward. In order to keep Americans from rebelling, we need to take the money we’re charging ExxonMobil for those pollution permits and return it to the taxpayers—everyone needs to get a check every month to, in essence, buy us all off. To help make us whole for the price rises that will inevitably come, the price rises that will do the work of wringing fossil fuel out of the economy. ExxonMobil would pay, then we’d pay—but we’d get some of the money back in the mail. We’ve got to make the switch so fast that it’s going to be brutally expensive—think $10 gas—and our democracy will never support it for long without that monthly check.

But we can’t give ourselves back all the money. Because some of it is needed to make the rest of the world whole—to build windmills for the Indians so they won’t use the same cheap coal that we used for 200 years in order to get rich. That is, we’re going to need a Marshall Plan for carbon—with the same mix of idealism and self-interest that motivated the Marshall Plan in Hitler’s wake.

We also need serious investment in infrastructure, both technological and human. For instance, concepts like concentrated solar power—those big mirror arrays in the desert—have gained real momentum in the last 18 months. Former Clinton administration energy analyst Joseph Romm recently calculated that such arrays could provide America with all of its electricity from a 92-square-mile grid in the Southwest desert—but only if promoted via loan guarantees for the entrepreneurs who build them and a new generation of transcontinental transmission lines. Meanwhile, demand is skyrocketing for small rooftop solar panels, but increasingly there’s a shortage of trained installers, which means our community colleges need money to start training them. No matter what the price of energy, homes aren’t going to insulate themselves—this is the great opening for a green-jobs revolution. (See “The Truth About Green Jobs.”)

You’ll note here I’m talking more about what we should do in the US House (and Senate) in the next year or two than which bulbs you should be changing in your house. diy conservation makes great practical sense, but we won’t save the planet that way. One by one, trying to do the right thing, we add up to…not nearly enough. You cannot make the math work that way—there are too many sockets and too many tailpipes and most of all too much inertia for voluntary action to do the trick. It didn’t work when President Bush made voluntary reduction by corporations his global warming “policy,” and it won’t work fast enough with individuals either.

Which is not to say that life at home doesn’t need to change. It does—and it will, once we’ve taken the political step of making the price of carbon reflect the damage it does to the environment. Look at what happened this past year when the price of gas finally rose far enough to get our attention. We began riding trains and buses in record numbers. Total miles driven fell, sharply, for the first time since we started keeping records in 1942. We groused and moaned and we started to change. General Motors decided to sell its Hummer factory.

If we get that check every month to cover some of the damage, it will help attenuate the very real heat-or-eat dilemma that will grip many people this coming winter, but the incentive to change will still be there. Buses and bikes. Smaller homes that are easier to heat. Solar panels, bought on the installment plan with loans paid off from the power generated on your roof. Local food (and lots more local farmers). Vacations in the neighborhood—no more jetting off for the weekend.

You can see every one of these trends in embryo already, driven by the run-up in energy prices that we’ve seen so far. The quick contraction of the airline industry. The collapse in home values in the distant suburbs, while homes along the commuter rail lines fare better. Again the question is all about pace—what will make them happen fast enough, across a wide enough swath of the planet. Al Gore set the example with his call for a 10-year conversion to noncarbon electricity. It’s at the outer edge of doable, and the outer edge is where we need to be. We’ll have plug-in hybrid electric vehicles on sale by 2010. The question is, can we have nothing else on sale by 2020? We built more than half of the interstate highway system in a decade. Would rebuilding our rail networks to a European standard be all that much harder? Can we get the price of energy up quickly enough to get markets on the task of finding a low-carbon way of life that works? And by works, I mean reverses the flow of carbon into the atmosphere. Because physics and chemistry won’t reward good intentions. Methane is seriously uninterested in compromise. Permafrost, notoriously, refuses to bargain. Even the absolute political power represented by King Canute couldn’t hold back the rising seas. Those forces will only pay attention if we can scramble back below 350.

Forcing that pace requires a new kind of politics. It requires forging a consensus that this toughest of all changes must happen. The consensus must be broad, it must come quickly, and it must encompass the whole earth—they don’t call it global warming for nothing.

The list of things on which we’ve achieved a broad and deep global consensus is pretty much limited to…Coke Is It. And that took billions of dollars and several decades, and it involved inducing people to drink sugar water. The odds against a strong global movement about anything tougher than that are low, with language barriers, religious barriers, cultural barriers. And we start from such incredibly different places—Americans use 12 times the energy of sub-Saharan Africans.

And yet we do have this one tool that at least offers the possibility, a tool that wasn’t fully there even a few years ago. The Internet—and its attendant technologies, like cell phones and texting—does link up most of the known world at this point. You can get pretty far back of beyond in most of the world, and someone in that village has a mobile.

And we have a number—350. The most important number on earth. If the Internet has a cosmic purpose, this could be it—to take that number and spread it everywhere on the planet, so that everyone, even if they knew little else about climate change, understood that it represented a kind of safety, a bulwark against the monsoon turning erratic, the sea rising over their fields, the mosquito spreading up their mountain.

I’m part of a group of people calling ourselves 350.org. Our goal is simple—to try to get people everywhere to spread that number. We’ve started finding musicians and artists, athletes and video makers, and most of all activists, the kinds of people who are working to save watersheds or babies, or to educate girls or to block dams, or any of the other thousand lovely things that won’t happen if we allow the basic physical stability of the planet to come unglued. We need a lot of noise, and we need it fast, in the scant months—14 now—before the world meets in Copenhagen next December to draw up a new climate treaty. Because one clear implication of 350 is that that treaty is our last real chance to get it right. If we don’t, then all we’ll be dealing with is the consequences. Once the ocean really starts to rise, dike building is pretty much the only project.

It’s not clear if a vocal world citizenry will be enough to beat inertia and vested interest. If 350 emerges as the clear bar for success or failure, then the odds of the international community taking effective action increase, though the odds are still long. Still, these are the lines it is our turn to speak. To be human in 2008 is to rise in defense of the planet we have known and the civilization it has spawned.

[This article was first published in the November/December, 2008, issue of Mother Jones.]

Source / Mother Jones

Thanks to David Hamilton / The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged Carbon Emissions, Energy Crisis, Environment, Fossil Fuels, Global Warming | 3 Comments

Kate Braun: Yule Seasonal Message

Posted on December 17, 2008 by RagBlog

Yule Seasonal Message
By Kate Braun / The Rag Blog / December 16, 2008

“Hark! the herald angels sing: Glory to the new-born King”

Sunday, December 21, 2008 we celebrate Yule, the Winter Solstice. How appropriate that this day, which marks the beginning of Lord Sun’s ascent to prominence, is Sun-day! Lady Moon is in her 4th quarter, seeming to voluntarily minimize her powers in recognition of Lord Sun’s rebirth. The Wheel is turning; the balance is shifting; the Earth is awakening.

Decorate your altar, table, house, and yourself using the colors red, white, and green. In addition to a Yule Tree, there may be boughs of greenery draped across the fireplace mantle, in front of your altar, over doorways, and as a wreath on the front door. A sprig of holly near the front door invites good fortune for the coming year and other sprigs, tied with a shiny red bow, can be used as party favors for your guests to take home and affix near their front doors. A small Yule Log with holes drilled in it to hold candles and surrounded by greenery can make a lovely centerpiece for your table. The use of evergreens in decoration symbolizes everlasting life, just as Lord Sun’s growing vitality after the dark time that began at Samhain symbolizes the earth’s reawakening and rejuvenation. And don’t forget a sprig of mistletoe to hang over the entrance. In the Long Ago, when warring Celtic tribes met to celebrate Yule, they kissed under the mistletoe as a pledge to set aside all differences during the celebration.

Serve your guests roast meats, nuts, apples, pears, Wassail, apple cider, spicy foods; sing carols in praise of Lord Sun’s rebirth. Yule is a season for celebrations as well as one for contemplation. Enjoy and cherish the company of friends and family. The end of a year and the beginning of the next is a good time to look within, to take some time and listen to our souls’ voices. Spiritually, we are awakening from a “long winter‘s nap“, readying ourselves for the next turn of the Wheel and all the delightful joys awaiting us in the coming year.

Yule, which comes from a Celtic word that means “wheel”, celebrates the change of power from the Holly King, who has ruled the planet since the Summer Solstice, to the Oak King, now filled with youthful energy. The Druids considered the Oak and Holly to be sacred trees; part of the Druidic mythology regarding the Solstices is that the Oak and Holly Kings, twin brothers, engage in semi-annual ritual combat to decide who rules for the next half-year. At the Winter Solstice, the Holly King is king of the old year. He dresses in red, trimmed with white fur, and wears a sprig of mistletoe on his cap. he rides in a sled or sleigh pulled by 8 reindeer — all deer were sacred to the Celtic gods and the number 8 refers to the 8 seasons represented by the 8-spoked Wheel of Life — and will be defeated by the Oak King, who symbolizes the young vitality of the New year. As Father Time is ritually succeeded by a diapered baby, so is the Holly King supplanted by the Oak King. Out with the old year; in with the new; sing songs of praise and exaltation to welcome Lord Sun‘s ascendance!

Reminder: I will be Elaine Ireland’s guest on her live-on-the-internet-radio-talk-show on Thursday, December 18, 2008, at 9 PM CDT. To listen on your computer, log on to www.bbsradio.com; from the options shown, select Channel 1 and from the drop-down menu look for “Going Global for Spirit with Elaine Ireland” and click on it. You will be able to hear me and Elaine nattering on about the Solstice and whatever else comes up. There is also a toll-free number for listeners in the US, in Canada, and in the rest of the world, so callers may phone in with a question, a comment, or to get a short Tarot reading from me.

The first Metaphysical Fair of 2009 will be on Saturday and Sunday, January 2 & 3, 2009, at the Radisson Hotel on Middle Fiskville Road between Highland Mall and Lincoln Village. Friday, January 1, 2009, the annual Prediction Panel of 5 of the psychics participating in the fair will be open to the public at 7:00 PM in the lecture room associated with the Metaphysical Fair at the Radisson Hotel. Admission to the Prediction Panel: free. Admission to the Fair: $8, good for both days. If you come to this fair because you read about it here and decide to get a reading from me, let me know you read this Seasonal Message and you will get an additional 5 minutes free. Whether or not you get a reading from me at this fair, please stop by the Tarot by Kate table and say “hi”. This is helps me monitor my advertising efforts.

Tarot by Kate 512-454-2293
www.tarotbykateinaustin.com
kate_braun2000@yahoo.com

The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged Alternative Energy, Spirituality | 1 Comment

If the Shoe Fits Throw it

Posted on December 16, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Cartoons by Ralph Solonitz / The Rag Blog

Ralph Solonitz’ cartoons also appear on MadasHellClub.net

The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged Cartoon, Political Satire | 2 Comments

Brother: Shoe-Throwing Journalist Hospitalized After Beating

Posted on December 16, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Muntazer al-Zaidi risks a miminum of two years in prison for insulting a visiting head of state. Photo by AFP.

Brother says Bush shoe-thrower in hospital after beating: ‘He has been taken to Ibn Sina hospital because he has a broken arm and ribs and is also suffering injuries to his eye and leg.’

December 16, 2008

BAGHDAD — The Iraqi journalist who hurled shoes at US President George W. Bush is in hospital after being beaten up by security guards, his brother charged on Tuesday, as judicial authorities launched a probe into the incident that grabbed headlines around the world.

“He has been taken to Ibn Sina hospital because he has a broken arm and ribs and is also suffering injuries to his eye and leg,” Durgham al-Zaidi said of his brother Muntazer.

The 29-year-old Muntazer al-Zaidi became an instant star in the Arab world when he threw his shoes at Bush on Sunday during the US leader’s farewell visit to the country invaded by American forces in 2003.

Zaidi, a journalist for private Iraqi television channel Al-Baghdadia, was swiftly overpowered by Iraqi security forces after his action, regarded as the supreme mark of disrespect in the Muslim world.

His brother charged that Zaidi had been beaten by Iraqi security guards but was unable to say whether Muntazer had sustained the injuries while being overpowered during Sunday’s protest or while in custody.

He said he had been told that his brother was initially held by Iraqi forces in the Green Zone where the US embassy and most government offices are housed. The Ibn Sina hospital, which is run by American military medical services, is also inside the zone.

An AFP journalist said blood was visible on the ground as he was led away into custody on Sunday although it was unclear if it was his.

“Muntazer al-Zaidi has been transferred to the judicial authorities who have opened an investigation. But it is too soon to say who was behind this act,” General Qassem Atta, spokesman for a Baghdad security plan, told AFP.

Bush, who was on a swansong visit to the battleground that came to dominate his eight-year presidency, ducked when the shoes were thrown and later made light of the incident.

Zaidi’s action won him widespread plaudits in the Arab world where Bush’s policies have drawn broad hostility, although Iraqi reaction was mixed.

In parliament, Baha al-Araji, an MP with the Shiite movement headed by radical anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, demanded an inquiry into the “brutality” of the security guards.

But Sami al-Askari, a Shiite lawmaker close to Prime Minsiter Nuri al-Maliki, lashed out at Zaidi for what he branded a “shameful act which sullies the reputation of the media.”

An Iraqi lawyer said Zaidi risks a minimum of two years in prison if he is successfully prosecuted for insulting a visiting head of state.

In Gaza, around 20 Palestinian gunmen from the Popular Resistance Committees, a hardline militant group behind a spate of rocket attacks on Israel in recent weeks, staged a demonstration in support of Zaidi.

Wearing fatigues and brandishing Kalashnikov assault rifles, they stamped on photographs of the US president and held banners in support of the journalist.

In Iraq, press comment was divided.

The pro-government Al-Sabah expressed concern about the potential impact on press freedom of what it called Zaidi’s “abnormal individual behaviour.”

But the independent Al-Dustur hailed the journalist as the “only Iraqi whose patriotic feelings made him express his opinion in this way.”

“It is not a declaration by the Iraqi media only, but for all Iraqis who have suffered over the years and we demand that he not be handed over to US forces,” the paper said.

Lebanese television channel NTV, known for its opposition to Washington, went as far as offering a job to the journalist, saying he would be paid “from the moment the first shoe was thrown”.

“Pelting the American president with shoes was the best way for expressing what Iraqis and Arabs feel toward Bush,” wrote the editor of Egypt’s government owned Al-Gomhuria newspaper.

Source / AFP / Google News

The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged Direct Action, George W. Bush, Iraq, Social Action | 1 Comment

War Crimes Prosecutions: It’s About Us, Not Them

Posted on December 16, 2008 by RagBlog

It’s not about them…it’s about us: Why We Must Prosecute Bush And His Administration For War Crimes
By Mike Ferner / December 16, 2008

During the rush to get the Nuremberg Tribunals underway, the Soviet delegation wanted the tribunal’s historic decisions to have legitimacy only for the Nazis. U.S. Supreme Court Justice, Robert Jackson, serving as the chief prosecutor for the Allies, strong-armed the Soviets until the very beginning of the tribunal before changing their mind.

In his opening statement Jackson very purposely stipulated, “…Let me make clear that while this law is first applied against German aggressors, the law includes, and if it is to serve a useful purpose it must condemn aggression by any other nations, including those which sit here now in judgment.”

Can there be a better reason for prosecuting George Bush and his administration for war crimes than those words from the chief prosecutor of the Nazis, a U.S. Supreme Court Justice, with the full support of the U.S. government? Robert Jackson’s words and the values this nation claims to stand for provide sufficient moral basis for putting Bush and Cheney, their underlings who implemented their policies and the perverted legal minds who justified them all in the dock. If those are not sufficient reasons, there is a long list of binding law and treaties – written in black and white in surprisingly plain English.

Bush imagined, and his attorneys advised, that he could simply wave aside these laws with “they don’t apply.” Imagine how a judge would treat even a simple traffic court defendant who brazenly stated the law was only a quaint notion, just “words on paper?”

Masses of people and an embarrassingly small number of their elected representatives in this country read the law for themselves and demanded otherwise, only to be silenced by the Guardians of Reality in the corporate news media.

But it’s all there, where it has been for 220 years, the Constitution’s “supremacy clause,” Article II, section 4, and in the War Crimes Act of 1996 (18USC §2441). They provide the authority to make additional treaties legally binding – no matter how much former White House lawyers David Addington and John Yoo may object.

Those additional treaties include among others, the Geneva Conventions, the Nuremberg rulings, the Laws and Customs of War on Land and UN General Assembly Resolution 3314. To give just a snapshot of how serious these laws are, consider this portion of 18 USC 2441 which defines a war crime as “…a grave breach in any of the international conventions signed at Geneva 12 August 1949, or any protocol to such convention to which the United States is a party…” The guilty can be “…fined under this title or imprisoned for life or any term of years, or both, and if death results to the victim, shall also be subject to the penalty of death.”

Here, Justice Jackson answers another question about war crimes – who bears the greater responsibility: those who committed barbaric acts in the field or those who created the conditions for barbarism?

The case as presented by the United States will be concerned with the brains and authority back of all the crimes. These defendants were men of a station and rank which does not soil its own hands with blood. They were men who knew how to use lesser folk as tools. We want to reach the planners and designers, the inciters and leaders without whose evil architecture the world would not have been for so long scourged with the violence and lawlessness, and wracked with the agonies and convulsions, of this terrible war.

And yet it is not just because Bush violated the Constitution and federal law that he and his lieutenants must be prosecuted.

At Nuremberg, the foremost crime identified was starting a “war of aggression,” later codified by U.N. Resolution 3314, Art. 5, as “a crime against international peace.” Launching a war of aggression, as Hitler did against Poland, is considered so monstrous that the nation responsible can then be charged with “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity,” spelled out in detail in the Geneva Conventions. As Tom Paine said long before the U.N. formalized the definition of aggression, “He who is the author of a war lets loose the whole contagion of Hell and opens a vein that bleeds a nation to death.”

A small sampling of the contagion of Hell let loose by Bush includes illegally invading a sovereign state, using banned weapons such as white phosphorous and napalm, bombing hospitals and civilian infrastructure, withholding aid and medical supplies, terrorizing and knowingly killing civilians, torturing prisoners, killing a million people and displacing four million more in Iraq alone.

Following World War II, humanity resolved that wars do more than spark a series of loathsome, individual crimes. Leaders responsible for a war actually commit crimes against the entirety of humanity. They inflict harm on every human being, something that must be put right before humanity can be restored.

There is a final reason why we must prosecute Bush and Co. It is not what some argue, although they point to a serious danger: that Bush trashed the law and usurped powers, encouraging future presidents to expand where he left off. Such reasons are about George Bush and those who hold the office after him, but in the final analysis this is about us.

We are complicit in the horrors of this administration. We can claim neither ignorance nor innocence. We are complicit by the very fact that we are citizens of the United States, more so because we paid for the war, and even more so for this reason. Listen to a village sheik I met in Iraq describe it better than I ever could.

I met this man in a small farming village one afternoon in early 2004. He described how he and a dozen others were swept up in a raid by the U.S. Army and detained on a bare patch of ground surrounded by concertina wire. They had no shelter and but six blankets. They dug a hole with their hands for a toilet. They had to beg for water until one time it rained for three days straight and they remained on that open ground. He somehow found the graciousness to say he understood there was a difference between the American people and our government. Then through his tears he added, “But you say you live in a democracy. How can this be happening to us?”

Do we? Whether or not we bring our own government officials to justice for their crimes will determine the answer.

[Ferner is a writer from Ohio and author of “Inside the Red Zone: A Veteran For Peace Reports from Iraq.”]

Source / Information Clearing House

The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged Bush Administration, Iraq, Torture, War Crimes | Leave a comment

Loving: Killing Organized Labor

Posted on December 16, 2008 by RagBlog

Cartoon by Charlie Loving / The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged Humor, Labor | Leave a comment

Send Your Smelly, Old Shoes to the Whitehouse

Posted on December 15, 2008 by RagBlog

NOTE: Speaking of shoes and the White House, Skip Mendler of Honesdale, PA has a great idea. He suggests that everyone who is disgusted with the outgoing Bush/Cheney administration send a shoe to the White House. Just imagine a pile up of a million smelly old running shoes in the White House mailroom! I think he’s got something. Spread the word!

Muntadar al-Zaidi Did What We Journalists Should Have Done Long Ago
By Dave Lindorff / December 15, 2008

When Iraqi journalist Muntadar al-Zaidi heaved his two shoes at the head of President George W. Bush during a press conference in Baghdad, he did something that the White House press corps should have done years ago.

Al-Zaidi listened to Bush blather that the half-decade of war he had initiated with the illegal invasion of Iraq had been “necessary for US security, Iraqi stability (sic) and world peace” and something just snapped. The television correspondent, who had been kidnapped and held for a while last year by Shiite militants, pulled off a shoe and threw it at Bush-a serious insult in Iraqi culture-and shouted “This is a farewell kiss, you dog!” When the first shoe missed its target, he grabbed a second shoe and heaved it too, causing the president to duck a second time as al-Zaidi shouted, “This is from the widows, the orphans, and those who were killed in Iraq!”

Muntazer al-Zaidi, a TV reporter from al-Baghdadiya, who threw his shoes at President George Bush and called him a dog in Arabic. Photo: Reuters.I’ll admit, listening to Bush lie his way through eight years of press conferences, while pre-selected reporters played along and pretended to get his attention so they could ask questions which had been submitted and vetted in advance, I have felt like throwing my shoes at the television set.

Al-Zaidi, who paid for his courageous act of protest by being brutally beaten by security guards, is a hero of the profession. He stopped taking the president’s BS and called him what he is: a murderer and a criminal, with the blood of perhaps upwards of a million Iraqis on his hands. Al-Zaidi used what was supposed to be a staged photo-op for the president as an opportunity to speak up for those whose lives have been ruined by this president-the ones our suck-up journalists routinely ignore.

I’m not suggesting that journalists should routinely leave presidential press conferences in their stocking feet. We have different ways of expressing our sentiments to people we feel have insulted our intelligence than throwing shoes at them, but it would be nice to see a journalist or two flip the president the bird when he lies so blatantly to them. Or they could all get up and just walk out, leaving him standing alone at the presidential lectern.

It’s time for the press corps to stop treating presidents like royalty. If he accomplished anything at all in eight years in office, President Bush has demonstrated that, to the contrary, the president is a very ordinary-and in his case a rather less than ordinary-man. The office of president deserves no more respect than that of the mayor of Detroit, or of Wasilla.

My suggestion is that the press corps use the remaining five weeks of the Bush administration to develop a new relationship with the presidency-one in which they drop all the phony propriety and tradition and start acting like boisterous newshounds of old, barking questions, laughing cruelly at inane answers, demanding follow-ups when they are given the run-around, and, where necessary, walking out, or perhaps tossing the occasional shoe.

The journalism profession was a full-blown disaster and an utter disgrace during the Bush administration, and with all the crises facing the country and the world, in part because of that failure on their part, we cannot afford to have them continue that failure into the Obama administration.

With the Bush administration reduced to a running joke at this point, it gives the journalism profession a chance to redeem itself by using these few remaining weeks to establish a new tradition for presidential press conferences and photo-ops-one that can continue on into the new presidency.

Meanwhile, I’m suggesting that my alma mater, the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, hire al=Zaidi to teach a class in press conference journalism techniques. They should make it a multi-year appointment, because if he left after just one year, his would be difficult shoes to fill.

[Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net.]

Source / Common Dreams

And then there’s this:

Still Lying, Still Allowed To Lie
By David Michael Green / December 15, 2008

I’m sorry, but there are moments when I just feel like a total alien who stumbled onto some planet full of bizarre life forms. They call this place America, and it sure is weird. And, lemme tell ya, I know what I’m talking about here. I’ve visited some pretty weird places in this part of the universe.

Try this on for size as an example. You might think that a president who is widely known for lying, who leads a party also known for the same, who is at the end of his term and virtually without any punitive power worth speaking of, and who is widely despised at home and abroad – you might think such a president would get a serious grilling when sitting down with the American media for an exit interview. And, even if that might seem like a giant leap for some, perhaps you’d at least be surprised if such an individual was allowed to continue to tell revisionist historical lies without being called to account in the slightest for doing so.

Yeah, well, different galaxy, I guess. On Planet America it seems a lot more like it’s still 2002, and a frightened, compliant press is still learning how to embarrass itself by becoming a tool of a massively deceitful White House. Now that it’s almost 2009, they’ve got it down to a science. Only today they don’t even have the pathetic and shamefully flimsy excuse they did back then, in the wake of the 9/11 scare.

So here’s what happens when one of America’s most prominent journalists – Charles Gibson – sits down to interview George W. Bush. Bush, of course isn’t doing the interview because he can’t think of what else to do with himself anymore (although if you ask him what comes next after January 20, that’s pretty much exactly what it looks like). He isn’t just killing time, waiting for Cheney to dream up some other target for the administration’s predatory instincts. He’s got an agenda, which is why he’s been granting a plethora of (safe) interviews lately. And that agenda is to write the first draft of history. Just like Jackie did her Camelot rap, successfully constructing the frame through which the Kennedy administration would long be seen, so a ham-fisted Burt and Ernie – er, sorry, George and Laura – are running around trying to rehabilitate, for the sake of history, the worst presidency ever.

According to the Washington Post, this is the implementation of a strategy put together at a White House meeting two months ago, where it was decided that administration officials should reiterate key talking points in their speeches and interviews. Per a memo obtained by the LA Times, those include pointing out that the president “‘kept the American people safe’ after the September 11 terrorist attacks, lifted the economy after 2001 through tax cuts, curbed AIDS in Africa and maintained ‘the honor and the dignity of his office'”. That’s a cute list, isn’t it? In a certain nausea-inducing way. I don’t even know where to get started with that, and it’s probably better for all of us if I don’t. One thing I do have to say, though. Just as in our movie rating system, what passes as the standard for honor and dignity in the White House is so very America. You can murder in cold blood as many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis as you need to to get your rocks off, and that’s fine. But if you actually do get your rocks off – literally, the old-fashioned way – you’re considered obscene. Go figure, eh? Like I said, it’s a wacky little planet.

Of course, George W. Bush trying to save his legacy is not, in and of itself, so outlandish. A politician who doesn’t spin is like a conservative who doesn’t lie. It does happen. It has actually been observed in nature. Just not that often. The outlandish part is, first, the magnitude of the tales being told and sold. And, second, that a still obscenely compliant media allows these to be promulgated, without challenge, completely disregarding any notion of fulfilling a public service mandate to actually inform the people, let alone to hold the country’s leaders accountable. What a concept, eh – a critical media and governmental accountability? I guess all that hardball stuff is only for Democrats.

Anyhow, here’s a good example, for starters:

GIBSON: What were you most unprepared for?

BUSH: Well, I think I was unprepared for war. In other words, I didn’t campaign and say, “Please vote for me, I’ll be able to handle an attack.” In other words, I didn’t anticipate war. Presidents – one of the things about the modern presidency is that the unexpected will happen.

Leaving aside for the moment the question of whatever really happened on 9/11, the very best case scenario one might make is not that this president was unprepared for war, but rather that he was unprepared for defense. That’s unforgivable, and had he been a Democrat who also ignored five-alarm warning bells prior to 9/11, and who spent the entire month prior on vacation after being warned about the danger, he would indeed never have been forgiven, least of all by Mssrs. Bush, Cheney and Rove. And then, of course, there’s the impression that Bush’s response to this question leaves, suggesting that the principal war of his administration – the one in Iraq – was somehow thrust upon him. A real interviewer would never have just let this statement go. This was the ultimate war of choice, conducted for the ultimate of disingenuous reasons.

Here’s another:

GIBSON: Given the fact that you did start campaigning for change, said you were going to change the ways of Washington, do you feel you did in any way? Or did 9/11 really stand in the way of doing it?

BUSH: No, you know – actually, 9/11 unified the country, and that was a moment where Washington decided to work together. I think one of the big disappointments of the presidency has been the fact that the tone in Washington got worse, not better. … I mean, there were moments of bipartisanship. But the tone was rough. And I was obviously partially responsible because I was the President, although I tried hard not to call people names and bring the office down during my presidency.

Again, this is remarkably disingenuous, all the more so because it feigns humility and quasi-responsibility. Bush may not have called his opponents names, but he sure as hell marginalized them as rarely ever before in history, and he sure as hell polarized the country. If you weren’t with the president, then you were with the terrorists. If you didn’t agree to his invasion of a country that had not a thing to do with 9/11 nor any other justification for attack, then you couldn’t be trusted with America’s national security. Let’s not kid ourselves here, people. There’s no Democratic equivalent to Karl Rove. There’s no liberal guy called The Hammer, like Tom DeLay was for the GOP. No Democrat ever ran an ad morphing the face of a triple-amputee Republican Vietnam vet into that of Osama bin Laden. True, damn few Republicans – the folks who are so keen on maintaining American security, remember – actually made it over to the jungles of Southeast Asia forty years ago, but that ain’t why ads like those used against Max Cleland in 2002 were never used against the right. It’s a matter of integrity, and there was rarely an occasion when the Bush administration showed any of it. Moreover, Charles Gibson knows that.

But the greatest crime of the Bush administration, of course, was always Iraq, and it is here that the abomination-in-chief lies the most egregiously and the most shamefully. And it is here where he is given the greatest free pass by the media:

GIBSON: You’ve always said there’s no do-overs as President. If you had one?

BUSH: I don’t know – the biggest regret of all the presidency has to have been the intelligence failure in Iraq. A lot of people put their reputations on the line and said the weapons of mass destruction is a reason to remove Saddam Hussein. It wasn’t just people in my administration; a lot of members in Congress, prior to my arrival in Washington D.C., during the debate on Iraq, a lot of leaders of nations around the world were all looking at the same intelligence. And, you know, that’s not a do-over, but I wish the intelligence had been different, I guess.

GIBSON: If the intelligence had been right, would there have been an Iraq war?

BUSH: Yes, because Saddam Hussein was unwilling to let the inspectors go in to determine whether or not the U.N. resolutions were being upheld. In other words, if he had had weapons of mass destruction, would there have been a war? Absolutely.

GIBSON: No, if you had known he didn’t.

BUSH: Oh, I see what you’re saying. You know, that’s an interesting question. That is a do-over that I can’t do. It’s hard for me to speculate.

This astonishing little dialogue packs more deceit, and more permission to engage in deceit, into one passage than any ‘blivet’ (ten pounds of bullshit in a five pound bag) I’ve ever seen. Or a thousand blivets. Stacked in a manure warehouse. In the Republic of Crap. On the planet Turd. What an amazing string of lies. And all of it unanswered.

It starts with the intelligence “failure”, which was no failure at all. Is this 2008 – nearly 2009 – or am I stuck in some sort of time warp here? With all that has been revealed about the lies that were lied, the omissions omitted, and the exaggerations exaggerated, do we still live in a country where the president can continue to tell this tall tale yet again? Is it really possible that a journalist would let such an absurd claim go unchallenged still to this day? Can we really continue to allow this rogue president to surround himself in exonerating complicity, pretending that everyone had the same intelligence reports that he did? And, even more ridiculously, that they all concurred that war was the preferred option at that point? Is that why the Bush administration couldn’t get even half the votes it needed at the United Nations for a war resolution? Even after beating Security Council member-states over the head with skyscraper-sized sticks? Even after offering them more carrots than in all of Bunny Heaven?

It gets worse. To claim that Saddam was unwilling to let the weapons inspectors in is just a sickening and complete inversion of the truth, a full 180 degrees. The inspectors were, of course, absolutely in Iraq. Indeed, not only were they there, they were begging the United States government to tell them where the WMD could be found, an obvious thing to do given that the Bush administration was running around telling the world that it not only knew for sure there were WMD, but even knew where the weapons were located. This is the most massive lie. And, of course, it comes with other cool benefits as well. If you’re already lying in claiming that the inspectors were refused entry, you no longer have to overtly lie about how they left. If they were never there, they could never have been forced to leave in order to avoid being obliterated by Bush’s bomber squadrons. Nor, if they had never been there carrying out most of their inspections, could they ever have begged for just a few more weeks to finish their work. Doesn’t it all just fit together nicely?

And where, exactly was Charles Gibson, so-called ‘journalist’, throughout all this? Is this really what it means to be at the top of this profession? That you allow those whom you’re supposed to be keeping watch over for the benefit of an entire country (not to mention the rest of the world) to say anything – including absolutely the worst self-serving rubbish – without challenge? Why not just sign on to the GOP payroll and get it over with? Or perhaps he already has.

Then there’s Bush telling us that, gosh, he really can’t “speculate” on whether or not there would have been an invasion had there been no WMD. That’s just classic. As if the decision wasn’t his. As if they didn’t build nearly their entire case on the WMD threat. As if Saddam just absolutely had to go, but Mubarak and Musharraf and Abdullah didn’t even get a good talking to about democracy. As if Saddam’s depredations were enough to justify an American invasion, even though we had previously covered for him at his worst, and even as we say almost nothing while Darfur melts down into a genocidal ocean of blood.

Then, on top of all these lies, are the frustratingly silent ones that no one ever mentions, and never really did (and, excuse me for my petulance, but shouldn’t journalists be doing this?). Like this one: Suppose the Bush people had been right in their lies about WMD, after all – so what? Dozens of countries have them, including now North Korea, and the Bush administration never seems to have a problem with that, except when it does. Whatever happened to deterrence, the little dynamic that kept the Soviet Union and the United States from unleashing their tens of thousands of nuclear weapons against each other for over four decades? When did that stop mattering? Does anyone seriously imagine that a nuclear Saddam would have attacked the United States? Knowing that he and his country would instantly have been atomized in response? And, speaking of inconvenient questions, what were we doing invading a country that had never attacked nor even threatened this country?

Somebody please awaken me from this nightmare! Really, I don’t mind a politician acting like a politician. I suppose this is a sad fact in its own right, but truth be told, my expectations there are not huge.

But what’s up with an American media, itself drenched in blood up to its earlobes, still offering this guy a free pass, and a global megaphone? Hey, Charlie Gibson – do you really earn enough to bury all that shame? Me, I wouldn’t have thought there was that much money anywhere on the planet.

As for that good ol’ boy, America’s first cracker president, it seems he has managed to figure out a couple of things, after all. Talking about his parents, who have no doubt been in agony for eight years now (how would you like to have produced Caligula?), he offered up this slightly too accurate assessment of their feelings as he leaves the White House:

BUSH: And so, no doubt they’re going to be relieved to have their boy out of the limelight. And I bet a lot of our friends will be relieved, too.

Ya got that one right, pal, albeit for all the wrong reasons. Which is no doubt what also produced the following exchange:

GIBSON: And final question, just to finish the sentence: I will leave the presidency with a feeling of?

BUSH: I will leave the presidency with my head held high.

Maybe this is the kind of nonsense Gibson had in mind when he asked, “Is the president too much in a bubble?” To which Bush responded:

BUSH: I mean, believe me you understand what’s going on in the world. This idea about how the President doesn’t understand this, that, or the other, just simply is not the case. I mean, there’s a lot of information that comes through the White House.

Yeah, no doubt Cheney’s there every morning to provide the president with “information” about how well it’s all going. No doubt that makes it easy to leave the White House with your head held high, even after you’ve wrecked everything in sight.

That, plus a fawning press that would never dream of being so rude as to interrupt your fantasy with the cognitive dissonance provoked by a tough question or two.

Lordy, lord. Take me back to my home planet, please. This one’s way too messed up!

[David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York. He is delighted to receive readers’ reactions to his articles (dmg@regressiveantidote.net), but regrets that time constraints do not always allow him to respond. More of his work can be found at his website, www.regressiveantidote.net.]

Transcript of complete ABC interview here.

Source / Common Dreams

The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged Bush Administration, Bush Lies, George W. Bush, Journalists | 4 Comments

MSM Silence About Torture, War Crimes Makes Them Complicit

Posted on December 15, 2008 by RagBlog

What I am saying here is that we need to muster all the noise we are able to bring these bastards to justice. We cannot let these crimes go unpunished. Every day, we are uncovering new revelations of the depth of criminality that has existed in this administration from the very beginning. It is time to bring them to justice, and bring all those who are complicit in this criminality to the dock to answer for their silence, starting with the compliant main stream press.

Richard Jehn / The Rag Blog

Senate report links Bush to detainee homicides; media yawns
By Glenn Greenwald / December 15, 2008

The bipartisan Senate Armed Services Committee report issued on Thursday — which documents that “former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other senior U.S. officials share much of the blame for detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba” and “that Rumsfeld’s actions were ‘a direct cause of detainee abuse‘ at Guantanamo and ‘influenced and contributed to the use of abusive techniques … in Afghanistan and Iraq'” — raises an obvious and glaring question: how can it possibly be justified that the low-level Army personnel carrying out these policies at Abu Ghraib have been charged, convicted and imprisoned, while the high-level political officials and lawyers who directed and authorized these same policies remain free of any risk of prosecution? The culpability which the Report assigns for these war crimes is vast in scope and unambiguous:

The executive summary also traces the erosion of detainee treatment standards to a Feb. 7, 2002, memorandum signed by President George W. Bush stating that the Geneva Convention did not apply to the U.S. war with al Qaeda and that Taliban detainees were not entitled to prisoner of war status or legal protections.

“The president’s order closed off application of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which would have afforded minimum standards for humane treatment,” the summary said.

Members of Bush’s Cabinet and other senior officials participated in meetings inside the White House in 2002 and 2003 where specific interrogation techniques were discussed, according to the report.

The policies which the Senate Armed Services Committee unanimously concludes were authorized by Bush, Rumsfeld and several other top Bush officials did not merely lead to “abuse” and humiliating treatment, but are directly — and unquestionably — responsible for numerous detainee murders. Many of those deaths caused by abusive treatment have been formally characterized as “homicides” by autopsies performed in Iraq and Afghanistan (see these chilling compilations of autopsy findings on detainees in U.S. custody, obtained by the ACLU, which reads like a classic and compelling exhibit in a war crimes trial).

While the bulk of the attention over detainee abuse has been directed to Guantanamo, the U.S., to this day, continues to imprison — with no charges — thousands of Iraqi citizens. In Iraq an Afghanistan, detainee deaths were rampant and, to this day, detainees continue to die under extremely suspicious circumstances. Just yesterday, there was yet another death of a very young Iraqi detainee whose death was attributed to quite unlikely natural causes.

The U.S. military says a detainee has died of an apparent heart attack while in custody at a U.S. detention facility in Baghdad.

Monday’s statement says the 25-year-old man was pronounced dead by doctors at a combat hospital after losing consciousness at Camp Cropper. . . .

The U.S. military is holding thousands of prisoners at Camp Cropper near the Baghdad airport and Camp Bucca in the southern desert.

For years, it has been common to attribute detainee deaths to “heart attacks” where the evidence makes clear that abusive interrogation techniques and other inhumane treatment — the very policies authorized at the highest levels of the U.S. government — were the actual proximate cause of the deaths. This deceptive practice was documented in this fact-intensive report — entitled: “Medical Investigations of Homicides of Prisoners of War in Iraq and Afghanistan” — by Steven H. Miles, Professor of Medicine and Bioethics at the University of Minnesota:

It is probably inevitable that some prisoners who reportedly die of “natural causes” in truth died of homicide. However, the nature of Armed Forces’ medical investigations made this kind of error more likely. The AFME reported homicide as the cause of death in 10 of the 23 death certificates released in May 2004. The death of Mohamed Taiq Zaid was initially attributed to “heat”; it is currently and belatedly being investigated as a possible homicide due to abusive exposure to the hot Iraqi climate and deprivation of water.

Eight prisoners suffered “natural” deaths from heart attacks or atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease. Threats, beatings, fear, police interrogation, and arrests are known to cause “homicide by heart attack” or life-threatening heart failure. People with preexisting heart disease, dehydration, hyperthermia, or exhaustion are especially susceptible.[11–15] No forensic investigation of lethal “heart attacks” explores the possibility that these men died of stress-induced heart attacks. There are a number of reports of “heart attack” following harsh procedures in rounding up noncombatants in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A typically sketchy US Army report says, “Detainee Death during weekend combat …. Army led raid this past weekend of a house in Iraq … an Iraqi who was detained and zip-locked (flexi-cuffed with plastic bands tying his wrists together) died while in custody. Preliminary information is that the detainee died from an apparent heart attack.[16]” Sher Mohammad Khan was picked up in Afghanistan in September 2004. Shortly thereafter, his bruised body was given to his family. Military officials told journalists that he had died of a heart attack within hours of being taken into custody. No investigation, autopsy, or death certificate is available.[17]

Or consider this:

Adbul Kareen Abdura Lafta (also known as Abu Malik Kenami) was admitted to Mosul prison on December 5, 2003 and died 4 days later.[20,21] The short, stocky, 44-year-old man weighed 175 pounds. He was never given a medical examination, and there is no medical record. After interrogation, a sandbag was put over his head. When he tried to remove it, guards made him jump up and down for 20 minutes with his wrists tied in front of him and then 20 minutes more with his wrists bound behind his back with a plastic binder. The bound and head-bagged man was put to bed. He was restless and “jibbering in Arabic.” The guards told him to be quiet.

The next morning, he was found dead. The body had “bloodshot” eyes, lacerations on his wrists from the plastic ties, unexplained bruises on his abdomen, and a fresh, bruised laceration on the back of his head. US Army investigators noted that the body did not have defensive bruises on his arms, an odd notation given that a man cannot raise bound arms in defense. No autopsy was performed. The death certificate lists the cause of death as unknown. It seems likely that Mr. Kenami died of positional asphyxia because of how he was restrained, hooded, and positioned. Positional asphyxia looks just like death by a natural heart attack except for those telltale conjunctival hemorrhages in his eyes.

There are countless other episodes like this of human beings in American custody dying because of the mistreatment — authorized by Bush, Rumsfeld and others — to which we subjected them. These are murders and war crimes in every sense of the word. That the highest level Bush officials and the President himself are responsible for the policies that spawned these crimes against humanity have been long known to anyone paying minimal attention, but now we have a bipartisan Senate Report — signed by the presidential nominee of Bush’s own political party — that directly assigns culpability for these war crimes to the President and his policies. It’s nothing less than a formal declaration from the Senate that the President and his top aides are war criminals.

* * * * *

This Report was issued on Thursday. Not a single mention was made of it on any of the Sunday news talk shows, with the sole exception being when John McCain told George Stephanopoulos that it was “not his job” to opine on whether criminal prosecutions were warranted for the Bush officials whose policies led to these crimes. What really matters, explained McCain, was not that we get caught up in the past, but instead, that we ensure this never happens again — yet, like everyone else who makes this argument, he offered no explanation as to how we could possibly ensure that “it never happens again” if we simultaneously announce that our political leaders will be immunized, not prosecuted, when they commit war crimes. Doesn’t that mindset, rather obviously, substantially increase the likelihood — if not render inevitable — that such behavior will occur again? Other than that brief exchange, this Senate Report was a non-entity on the Sunday shows.

Instead, TV pundits were consumed with righteous anger over the petty, titillating, sleazy Rod Blagojevich scandal, competing with one another over who could spew the most derision and scorn for this pitiful, lowly, broken individual and his brazen though relatively inconsequential crimes. Every exciting detail was vouyeristically and meticulously dissected by political pundits — many, if not most, of whom have never bothered to acquaint themselves with any of the basic facts surrounding the monumental Bush lawbreaking and war crimes scandals. TV “journalists” who have never even heard of the Taguba report — the incredible indictment issued by a former U.S. General, who subsequently observed: “there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account” — spent the weekend opining on the intricacies of Blogojevich’s hair and terribly upsetting propensity to use curse words.

The auction conducted by Blagojevich was just a slightly more flamboyant, vulgar and reckless expression of how our national political class conducts itself generally (are there really any fundamental differences between Blagojevich’s conduct and Chuck Schumer’s systematic, transparent influence-peddling and vote-selling to Wall Street donors, as documented by this excellent and highly incriminating New York Times piece from Sunday — “A Champion of Wall St. Reaps the Benefits”)? But Blagojevich is an impotent figure, stripped of all power, a national joke. And attacking and condemning him is thus cheap and easy. It threatens nobody in power. To the contrary, his downfall is deceptively and usefully held up as an extreme aberration — proof that government officials are held accountable when they break the law.

The media fixation on the ultimately irrelevant Blagojevich scandal, juxtaposed with their steadfast ignoring of the Senate report documenting systematic U.S. war crimes, is perfectly reflective of how our political establishment thinks. Blagojevich’s laughable scheme is transformed into a national fixation and made into the target of collective hate sessions, while the systematic, ongoing sale of the legislative process to corporations and their lobbyists are overlooked as the normal course of business. Lynndie England is uniformly scorned and imprisoned while George Bush, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld are headed off to lives of luxury, great wealth, respect, and immunity from the consequences for their far more serious crimes. And the courageous and principled career Justice Department lawyer who blew the whistle on Bush’s illegal spying programs — Thomas Tamm — continues to have his life destroyed, while the countless high-level government officials, lawyers and judges who also knew about it and did nothing about it are rewarded and honored, and those who committed the actual crimes are protected and immunized.

Just ponder the uproar if, in any other country, the political parties joined together and issued a report documenting that the country’s President and highest aides were directly responsible for war crimes and widespread detainee abuse and death. Compare the inevitable reaction to such an event if it happened in another country to what happens in the U.S. when such an event occurs — a virtual media blackout, ongoing fixations by political journalists with petty scandals, and an undisturbed consensus that, no matter what else is true, high-level American political figures (as opposed to powerless low-level functionaries) must never be held accountable for their crimes.

* * * * *

UPDATE: Here — from July of this year — is one of the more remarkable quotes of the Bush era; it’s from Nancy Pelosi, who was explicitly briefed on the CIA’s torture program in 2002:

Q: You’ve ruled against impeaching George Bush and Dick Cheney, and now Kucinich is trying to pass that. Why do you insist on not impeaching these people, so that the world and America can really see the crimes that they’ve committed?

PELOSI: I thought that impeachment would be divisive for the country. . . . If somebody had a crime that the President had committed, that would be a different story.

It’s not like there’s any evidence that Bush committed any crimes or anything, said Pelosi. From Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side (h/t Hume’s Ghost):

One year of the Afghan prison operation alone cost an estimated 100 million, which Congress hid in a classified annex of the first supplemental Afghan appropriation bill in 2002. Among the services that U.S. taxpayers unwittingly paid for were medieval-like dungeons, including a reviled former brick factory outside of Kabul known as “The Salt Pit.” In 2004, a still-unidentified prisoner froze to death there after a young CIA supervisor ordered guards to strip him naked and chain him overnight to the concrete floor. The CIA has never accounted for the death, nor publicly reprimanded the supervisor. Instead, the Agency reportedly promoted him.

Those Blagojevich tapes sure are disgusting, aren’t they? Let’s study those some more.

* * * * *

UPDATE II: Well worth reading on the various implications of the Senate report are Dan Froomkin, Scott Horton, and Andrew Sullivan (scroll down for multiple posts).

Source / Salon

The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged Congress, Criminal Justice, Torture | Leave a comment

Rabbi Arthur Waskow : Autos, Plagues and Passover

Posted on December 15, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Pharaoh 2 by Veronica Winters.
Knowing a Pharaoh when you see one…
Creating a Freedom Seder for the Earth
By Rabbi Arthur Waskow / The Rag Blog / December 15, 2008

What do the Iraq War, the drowning of New Orleans, the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the great Australian drought, and the Senate’s refusal to assist the auto industry all have in common?

They are all the products of arrogance, hard-heartedness, and the addiction of power-holders to their power, even when their misuse of it is ruining their own society. The job description of Pharaoh.

The most recent act of institutional pharaohs was the Senate’s refusal to save the auto industry, even though the proposals for Federal action included strong measures to assure high-mileage, low-emission cars and even though the industry’s collapse would threaten millions of American jobs and the probable onset of another Great Depression.

Or maybe we should say not “even though” but “Because”! That is, some of the Senators who voted No have been in the pockets of Big Oil and Gas for decades, are not anxious to create a low-petroleum auto industry, and are also delighted to shatter the decent wage structure of unionized Detroit.

For those senators, the sticking point was the United Auto Workers’ insistence that the wage reductions they agreed to not go into effect till 2011. Perhaps the union was hoping that a new auto industry, with electric cars and many other innovations, could recreate an American market and save their union. But No, like any pharaoh the senators wanted to break any autonomous center where many people who as individuals have little power can gather to face those few who have a great deal. Just as Pharaoh wanted to turn independent farmers and shepherds into slaves.

Pharaoh’s job description: Arrogance. Hardheartedness. Stubbornness. Addiction to power. Even if it ruins America.

In the biblical story of Pharaoh, he begins by hardening his own heart, and then God hardens his heart. What has happened to Pharaoh’s “free will”? He has addicted himself. He has snorted the cocaine of absolute power and hardhearted arrogance so often that he can no longer choose freely, any more than a crack addict can. His own fate and that of his country are sealed when his own advisers come to him to schrei Gevalt: “Do you not see, you are destroying Egypt!” — and he cannot stop. (Exod. 10:7)

What are the consequences of Pharaoh’s arrogance? What we call the “Ten Plagues.” Oppression of workers becomes oppression of the earth. The Plagues are all what we would today call “ecological disasters”: The rivers, undrinkable. The crops, eaten by locusts. Climate disaster: the most destructive hailstorms in history. Mad cow disease. Dust storms so thick, so strong, that no one could see his hand before his face: a “darkness” so thick that you could touch it.

In our own day, the time has come to gather God’s power in the people. The Chicago workers who took over the Republic Windows and Doors factory — its owners had decided to shut down while they moved the jobs overseas – those workers were following in the steps of Moses, the organizer of Bricklayers Union Local One. And they won!

We who understand how the institutional pharaohs are bringing deadly Plagues upon the earth and our grandchildren must also organize, at every level.

One level: For the week beginning on Thanksgiving Day, Rabbi Phyllis Berman and I were in Sweden. With Rabbi Avraham Soetendorf of the Netherlands and Professor Hava Tirosh-Samuelson (who edited the Harvard University volume on Judaism and ecology), we brought Jewish wisdom to weave with many other spiritual teachings — Buddhist, Russian Orthodix, Native American, Muslim, Catholic, Lutheran, Wiccan (brought by Starhawk — the first time, she qupped, that an Archbishop has welcomed a witch) at the Interfaith Summit on the Climate Crisis called by the Archbishop of the Church of Sweden and opened by Sweden’s Crown Princes. Our roots were “religious”; we worked to birth a fruitful “politics.”

In another Shalom Report, I will share what happened during that week in Sweden. Meanwhile, another level:

This coming spring will be the 40th anniversary of the original Freedom Seder. The traditional Passover Seder celebrated the liberation of ancient israelites from ancient Egypt. The Freedom Seder (which I wrote) did something new: It celebrated the liberation struggles of Black America and other peoples alongside the liberation struggles of the Jewish people.

It was nationally published, was physically celebrated at a Black church in Washington DC on April 4, 1969 — the first anniversary of the death of Martin Luther King — and had a profound impact on the way in which American Jews have celebrated Passover ever since. – For it freed many many Jews to shape Seders to address the many issues of freedom in our own day.

So this spring, The Shalom Center is already working to create a 40th anniversary Freedom Seder that will focus on the Ten Plagues that the pharaohs of pur pwn time are bringing on the earth today, and match them with Ten Blessings that we ourselves can bring to heal our wounded planet.

Blessings of Green Jobs and Green Energy, blessings of workers’ rights to resist environmental and economic disaster, blessings of thwarting the racism that has condemned millions of Africans to drought and death, blessings of peaceful transformation out of fossil fuels instead of war after war to control the reservoirs of the oil to which our economies have become addicted.

The Freedom Seder for the Earth; like the Freedom Seder 40 years ago, will be multireligious, multicultural, multiracial.

The Shalom Center has already brought together a working committee in Washington DC, in which Muslims and Christians have begun to work with a strong nucleus of Jews to plan the time, the place, the form of this Seder.

And we intend to stimulate the celebration of such Seders all across America.

On this, as well as on the Interfaith Summit in Sweden, we will be writing more. Meanwhile, if you are interested in having your community hold such a Seder, let us know.

Shalom, salaam, peace,

Arthur

The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged Automobile Bailout, Ecumenism, Environment, Judaism, Ritual | Leave a comment

Robert King: An Inspiring Story of Human Survival

Posted on December 15, 2008 by RagBlog

Robert H. King, who spent 29 years in solitary confinement at Louisiana’s notorious Angola State Prison, talks with supporters Sunday night, December 14, 2008, at a book signing party for his moving autobiography, “From the Bottom of the Heap” (PMPress, Oakland CA, 2009; see review in San Francisco Bay View.).
Robert King Book Signing Event in Austin
By Mariann Wizard / The Rag Blog / December 15, 2008

Robert King, who moved to Austin from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, has been out of prison for seven years, but continues to fight for the freedom of two other men who, with him, are known as “The Angola 3”. They formed the first chapter of the Black Panther Party created in prison by men who were not activists before incarceration. Prison authorities were less than pleased! Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox have each been in solitary now for over 36 years, and the state of Louisiana, appealing the recent overthrow of Woodfox’s conviction, has denied him bail during its appeal.

A centered, down-to-earth person exerting principled leadership within an international amnesty movement, King also sells his “Freelines”, a milky, sweet, pecan confection he perfected while in prison, to raise funds for the legal battle. His book is drawing praise as an inspiring story of human survival and brotherhood, and, even more importantly, drawing attention to the ongoing struggle of Woodfox and Wallace, and to the plight of everyone held in cruel and unusual conditions in the US. A lawsuit filed by the Three, expected eventually to reach the Supreme Court, could win more humane conditions in prisons nationwide. (See www.Angola3.org.)

The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged Angola, Criminal Justice, Politics | Leave a comment

Bush : Lame Duck Ducks

Posted on December 15, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

‘Fortunately Bush is an expert at ducking things and both shoes zipped by, inches from his head.’
By Larry Ray / The Rag Blog / December 14, 2008

Timing is everything. Sneaking out of the White House under maximum security, “Almost-No-Longer-President” Bush wanted one more long ride on Air Force One. No one even missed him. Then Sunday he appeared on TV at a hastily arranged press conference in Iraq. He had just taken his place beside his inadvertent host, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki, when an Iraqi TV journalist a dozen feet away, bellowing insults and invective, hurled his shoes, one after the other in rapid succession at Mr. Bush.

Fortunately Bush is an expert at ducking things and both shoes zipped by, inches from his head. But it was impossible for America’s commander-in-chief to duck the insulting symbolism the tossing of shoes at him on live TV represented to Middle Eastern viewers. Before being hauled off by security agents, his attacker shouted that the shoes, and the symbolic filth on their soles, were a “farewell present” from the women, children, and innocents killed and injured in the Iraq war. He also called Bush “a dog.” Bush lamely recovered, inappropriately quipping that the shoes “were a size 10,” unaware that he had just been mightily insulted in the worst way.

I mentioned timing. Just yesterday, The New York Times broke the story about a U. S. Governmental “official history” of the the Bush administration’s monumental failures in Iraq. Still in draft form, “Hard Lessons: The Iraq Reconstruction Experience” was meticulously compiled by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. A 513 page draft copy was made available to The NY Times who quickly posted a PDF link to the entire report. It is a damning document.

As the NY Times internet story was being published, Mr. Bush was back-slapping his way through talks about a recently negotiated Iraq-American security pact. This last visit was to have been a high note in his presidential legacy. Instead, he was figuratively smeared with dog crap in front of millions. At the same time a government report detailing his failures in Iraq became available to millions more back home.

The government’s findings mirror Peter W. Galbraith’s acclaimed book, “The End of Iraq.” It is a scholarly, intensely personal and detailed account of Iraq’s complex history, politics and religious counterpoints and how they doomed Bush’s clumsy efforts to utter failure. Galbraith, a former U.S. diplomat with years of experience in Iraq, preceded the government’s just released research and historical findings by almost three years with his award winning book which details the tragedy, waste, incompetence and delusional madness of the neo-conservative Bush loyalists pre and post invasion.

“Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone” written by Rajiv Chandresekaran, Baghdad bureau chief for the Washington Times, offers a darkly humorous personal glimpse of American waste and madness in Iraq. His reporter’s eye for detail captures America’s Catch-22, slap dash bungling following the invasion of Iraq. He shows how totally unqualified, clueless Bush loyalists assigned to the “little America” Green Zone of Baghdad burned through billions of dollars, ultimately accomplishing nothing to speak of.

I highly recommend both these books not only because they are compelling, but because they pre-date and confirm the findings of the “official history” conducted by the U.S. Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. All three sources provide the detailed evidence, names, dates and documentation needed to structure a criminal case against Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and others. Is all there in black and white.

[Retired journalist Larry Ray is a Texas native and former Austin television news anchor. He also posts at The iHandbill.]

The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged George W. Bush, Iraq, Iraq War | Leave a comment

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Rabbi Arthur Waskow : Autos, Plagues and Passover

Robert King: An Inspiring Story of Human Survival

Bush : Lame Duck Ducks

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