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Potential Afghan War Crime Ignored by US

Posted on December 14, 2008 by RagBlog

As possible Afghan war-crimes evidence removed, U.S. silent
By Tom Lasseter / December 11, 2008

DASHT-E LEILI, Afghanistan — Seven years ago, a convoy of container trucks rumbled across northern Afghanistan loaded with a human cargo of suspected Taliban and al Qaida members who’d surrendered to Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, an Afghan warlord and a key U.S. ally in ousting the Taliban regime.

When the trucks arrived at a prison in the town of Sheberghan, near Dostum’s headquarters, they were filled with corpses. Most of the prisoners had suffocated, and others had been killed by bullets that Dostum’s militiamen had fired into the metal containers.

Dostum’s men hauled the bodies into the nearby desert and buried them in mass graves, according to Afghan human rights officials. By some estimates, 2,000 men were buried there.

Earlier this year, bulldozers returned to the scene, reportedly exhumed the bones of many of the dead men and removed evidence of the atrocity to sites unknown. In the area where the mass graves once were, there now are gaping pits in the sands of the Dasht-e-Leili desert.

A U.N.-sponsored team of experts first spotted two large excavations on a visit in June, one of them about 100 feet long and more than 9 feet deep in places. A McClatchy reporter visited the site last month and found three additional smaller pits, which apparently had been dug since June.

Faqir Mohammed Jowzjani, a former Dostum ally and the deputy governor of Jowzjan province, where the graves were located, told McClatchy that it’s common knowledge that Dostum sent in the bulldozers.

He speculated that Dostum wanted to destroy the evidence because of local political trouble that could have made him more prone to prosecution for the killings.

Last year, Dostum and the then-Jowzjan governor became embroiled in a feud that killed seven people and wounded more than 40. This year, Dostum and his men kidnapped and reportedly beat a rival Afghan leader.

“Maybe General Dostum did it because of a fear of prosecution in the future,” Jowzjani said.

Another local Afghan official said that Dostum had begun to worry that the 2001 killings could come back to haunt him. “Everyone in the city (Sheberghan) knows that the evidence has been removed,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of worries about being killed for talking about the subject.

“When the crime happened, (Dostum and his commanders) didn’t think they would ever be prosecuted,” the official said. “But later they began to worry . . . they have taken all the bones and thrown them into the river” that’s about half a mile from the graves.

NATO — which has command authority over a team of troops less than three miles from the grave site — the United Nations and the United States have been silent about the destruction of evidence of Dostum’s alleged war crimes.

“The truth is that General Dostum went out with bulldozers and dug up those graves,” Jowzjani charged. “I don’t know why UNAMA” — the U.N. mission in Afghanistan — “hasn’t said anything in this regard . . . maybe because of fears about his power, or maybe they made a deal.”

Gen. Ghulam Mujtaba Patang, the commander of Afghanistan’s national police in the north, said that he knew that the graves had been emptied. He noted that “the digging was done very professionally” and said that U.N. and NATO-led teams in the area were also aware. (While provincial reconstruction teams are led by individual nations, their military components are under NATO command.)

“I don’t understand why they didn’t secure the area,” Patang said in an interview. Perhaps, he said, Western officials “are nervous” about the power that Dostum has locally and don’t want to upset local security by pushing him on the matter.

Dostum was unavailable for comment, and one of his senior aides, Gen. Ghani Karim Zada, declined several interview requests.

The Bush administration, too, has remained silent. U.S. officials claimed that they had no knowledge of the deaths of the prisoners in the convoy until the news media revealed them in 2002, and now the administration has remained silent about Dostum’s reported effort to destroy the evidence of them, which also would be a major violation of international law.

American officials say that Dostum’s alleged war crimes are a matter for the Afghan authorities. But the U.S.-backed government of President Hamid Karzai is weak and depends on American and NATO troops to fight a growing Taliban insurgency that now operates in most of Afghanistan and all but surrounds Kabul, the capital.

However, the fact that U.S. special forces and CIA operatives were working closely with Dostum in late 2001, when the killings took place, has fueled suspicions that the warlord got a free pass.

The U.S. Defense Department has said that it found no evidence of American involvement or presence during the 2001 incident. If there was an investigation, however, its findings have never been made public.

“At the time, we had a handful of special forces and CIA, and there was no way we could have exercised any oversight” of the thousands of detainees under Afghan control, said Joseph Collins, who was then the deputy assistant secretary of defense for stability operations.

When he was asked about the detainees suffocating in metal shipping containers, Collins, who’s now a professor at the National War College, said that “I think most people just took for granted what he (Dostum) said: that it was a horrible accident.”

McClatchy interviewed eight Pakistani men last year who said that Dostum’s gunmen had stuffed them in the containers. The men, mostly low-level Taliban volunteers, said they’d had to climb over dozens of dead bodies to get out of the containers.

“We were all sitting on the dead bodies which were lying on the floor; they were lifeless,” said Abdul Haleem, who said that many of the approximately 200 men in his container died. “An arm was sticking up in the air here, a leg was sticking up in the air there.”

Another man who said he’d made the trip to Sheberghan in a container full of dead and dying men was Tariq Khan. He said that when Dostum’s men shot into the metal box, “some people were shot in the eye; some were shot in the neck.”

Dostum offered to take Pierre-Richard Prosper, who was then the U.S. ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues, on a tour of the grave site in late 2002, but Prosper declined. He was pressing a reluctant Afghan government and the U.N. to take the lead in investigating the killings.

“We felt the Afghans needed to play a role,” Prosper said in a telephone interview. “If you’re a new government, and you want to move forward, you have to deal with the past.”

However, no investigation was likely without strong U.S. backing, and Prosper said that he couldn’t recall whether Washington ever gave funding for a probe.

Farid Mutaqi, a senior investigator for the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission in the nearby city of Mazar-e-Sharif, said that it was almost impossible to visit the site because of Dostum’s power in northern Afghanistan.

Mutaqi said there’d been threats on his life and those of his staff members from Dostum. There are rumors that the site was mined and that Dostum’s men would torture or kill people if they were caught researching in the area. At least three Afghans who witnessed the original digging of the mass grave or who investigated it later reportedly were killed, and a handful of others were beaten.

Mutaqi said that he told officials at the United Nations and the local provincial reconstruction team that Dostum’s men had disturbed the mass graves this year. They did nothing, he said.

Now, Mutaqi said, “You can see only a hole. In the area around it you can find a few bones or some clothes. The site is gone . . . as for evidence, there is nothing.”

A spokesman for the United Nations in Afghanistan, Adrian Edwards, acknowledged in an e-mail statement that the U.N. had known that the graves had been dug up but had kept quiet.

“You’re right that we don’t always make public statements, but that’s because we’re in a conflict environment and have to weigh up whether doing so will stall chances of progress against impunity in other areas or put lives at risk,” the statement said. “It’s a judgment call we constantly strive to get right, and this is not the only instance where the choices we have to make can be extraordinarily tough ones.” Edwards noted that the U.N. is awaiting a report about the site by a forensic specialist.

The spokesman for the U.N.’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Rupert Colville, said that while he didn’t know the details of the digging at the site, “there cannot be impunity for war crimes of this nature and scale . . . it’s a real shame.”

Spokesmen for NATO and the U.S. Embassy in Kabul denied knowing that the remains of hundreds of men had been removed from the site, and had no further comment.

“We have no information about bulldozers or digging at the site,” said Lt. Cmdr. James Gater, a spokesman for the NATO mission in Afghanistan. The U.S. general who heads NATO forces in Afghanistan, Gen. David McKiernan, wouldn’t do an interview, Gater said.

U.S. Embassy spokesman Mark Stroh said that he’d checked with several officials at the embassy and “nobody seemed to have any visibility on this.” Stroh added that “We don’t necessarily monitor all of Dostum’s behavior.”

A McClatchy reporter, traveling without official escort, took GPS readings of the open pits last month, and a forensic investigator with Physicians for Human Rights, a group contracted by the U.N. to examine the site, confirmed that they were in the same area where the grave site was found in early 2002.

In May 2002, the U.N. announced that a Physicians for Human Rights team had dug a test trench in the area and found 15 bodies, three of which had been exhumed and found to have died recently of asphyxiation

In November 2002, amid the Physicians for Human Rights findings and news reports, a top-secret cable from the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research said that the number of people killed during transport to Sheberghan “may approach 2,000.”

The cable also said that while there was no security at Dasht-e Leili, U.N. personnel from Mazar-e-Sharif were monitoring the grave ” ‘every few days’ for signs of tampering.” There’d been plans for a detailed forensic investigation of the site in spring 2003.

“The hope had been to do a full exhumation in 2003,” said Nathaniel Raymond, a senior investigator at Physicians for Human Rights. “It didn’t happen.”

The U.N. monitoring of the site stopped. Edwards, the U.N. spokesman, said that he was still trying to reach officials who’d been present to get an explanation. The U.N., NATO, U.S. forces and the Afghan government never took any formal responsibility for patrolling the grave site.

Physicians for Human Rights made several requests to top U.S. officials to secure the mass graves, including an August 2002 letter to then-Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld asking that he “reconsider the position of the Defense Department and assure security at the grave site.” Four months later, the organization sent a letter to then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz saying that it was crucial to provide a small security detachment.

“From the time we discovered the site in January 2002, we had been advocating privately and publicly to the United Nations, the U.S. and the Afghan government to ensure consistent site protection and protection of forensic evidence,” Frank Donaghue, the chief executive officer of Physicians for Human Rights, said in a statement to McClatchy. “And clearly that did not happen.”

Dostum has long experience with mass graves being used in the Afghan political arena. In 1997, he revealed the discovery of mass graves of Taliban members killed by a former ally turned rival, Gen. Abdul Malik Pahlawan, in the Dasht-e Leili desert. The grave sites, which Dostum’s men brought in international journalists to document, helped cement Pahlawan’s exile from the area at the time.

Afghanistan’s attorney general, its top law enforcement official, said that given the bad security conditions in the country it was hard to think about investigating possible war crimes.

“So for the time being, we have put these issues off for the future,” Mohammed Ishaq Aloko said in an interview at his Kabul office.

Aloko, who’s seen as being very close to President Karzai, didn’t respond directly to repeated questions about Dostum.

“I believe that those who committed crimes against humanity will be prosecuted one day,” Aloko said. Just not anytime soon, he said.

Source / McClatchy

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US, Russia, China Refuse to Sign Cluster Treaty

Posted on December 14, 2008 by RagBlog

Just a reminder: this is what cluster bomblets do to people.
Cluster Bomb Treaty and The World’s Unfinished Business
By Ramzy Baroud / December 13, 2008

The United States, Russia and China are sending a terrible message to the rest of the world by refusing to take part in the historic signing of a treaty that bans the production and use of cluster bombs. In a world that is plagued by war, military occupation and terrorism, the involvement of the great military powers in signing and ratifying the agreement would have signaled – if even symbolically – the willingness of these countries to spare civilians’ unjustifiable deaths and the lasting scars of war.

Nonetheless, the incessant activism of many conscientious individuals and organizations came to fruition on December 3-4 when ninety-three countries signed a treaty in Oslo, Norway that bans the weapon, which has killed and maimed many thousands of civilians.

The accord was negotiated in May, and should go into effect in six months, once it is ratified by 30 countries. There is little doubt that the treaty will be ratified; in fact, many are eager to be a member of the elite group of 30. Unfortunately, albeit unsurprisingly, the US, Russia, China, Israel, India and Pakistan – a group that includes the biggest makers and users of the weapon – neither attended the Ireland negotiations, nor did they show any interest in signing the agreement.

The US argues that cluster bombs are a legitimate weapon, essential to repel the advancing columns of enemy troops. If such a claim carried an iota of legitimacy, then the weapon’s use should have ended with the end of conventional wars in the mid twentieth century. However, cluster bombs are still heavily utilized in wars fought in or around civilian areas.

Most countries that have signed the accords are not involved in any active military conflict and are not in any way benefiting from the lucrative cluster munition industry. The hope, however is that once a majority of countries, including the Holy See, sign the agreement, the use of the lethal weapon will be greatly stigmatized.

The treaty was the outcome of intensive campaigning by the Cluster Munition Coalition (CMC), a group of non-governmental organizations. CMC is determined to carry on with its campaigning to bring more signatories to the fold.

But without the involvement of the major producers and active users of the weapon, the Oslo ceremony will remain largely symbolic. However, there is nothing symbolic about the pain and bitter losses experienced by the cluster bombs’ many victims. According to the group Handicap International, one-third of cluster-bomb victims are children. Equally alarming, 98 percent of the weapon’s overall victims are civilians. The group estimates that about 100,000 people have been maimed or killed by cluster bombs around the world since 1965.

It certainly is unconscionable that countries who have the chutzpa to impose themselves as the guardians of human rights are the same who rebuff such initiatives and insist on their right to utilize such a killing tool. Unlike conventional weapons, cluster bomblets survive for many years, luring little children with their attractive looks. Children have often mistaken them for candy or toys.

Steve Goose, the arms director of Human Rights Watch described the countries that refused to sign as standing “on the wrong side of history. Some of them are clinging to what is now a widely discredited weapon.”

But there is more to that refusal than clinging onto an outdated military philosophy. The cluster munition industry is thriving. The weapon was used in massive quantities by the US army in Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel in Lebanon and both parties in the S. Ossetia conflict. The British also used it in Iraq, making handsome deals with the weapons’ Israeli manufacturer.

13 year-old Ayat Suliman now lives in Sweden. In an AFP report, she complained, referring to her peers: “Nobody understands me. They all think I’m ugly.” It was on May 5, 2003 that Ayat’s brother came running with what he thought was a dazzling toy. “I remember that it was very colorful and very nice,” said Ayat. The explosion that rocked the little girl’s house in Iraq claimed the lives of her four brothers and cousin, aged 3 to 15. Most of Ayat’s body was burned as a result, and she is still unable to walk independently.

Ahmad Mokaled of the Lebanese town of Nabatieh at the border with Israel was about to celebrate his fifth birthday when he too found a shiny object. Ahmad’s last words, according to his father, who was busily setting up his son’s birthday picnic in a park, were: ‘Dad, Help me.’ He died, but after “four long hours of suffering.”

The tragic stories of Ahmad and Ayat are repeated throughout the world, almost everyday, with some countries paying a much more disproportionate price than others, notably, again, Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon.

But neither terrible statistics nor the heart- wrenching personal stories of the many victims seem enough to compel manufactures and active users of the weapon to quit. Countries with sizable military power tend to avoid any entanglement in international law or treaties that limit their flexing or application of their military muscle. The US and Israeli attitudes towards international law carry similar traits, both act as entities above the law, tirelessly infusing ‘national security’ as an excuse for their rebuffing of such international initiatives. It’s also no surprise that the US, Israel, but also Russia refuse to ratify the 1997 Ottawa Treaty, signed by 158 countries – as of 2007 – which prohibits the production, transfer or use of landmines.

Of course, neither the Ottawa nor the Oslo treaties are the exception to the rule as far as Washington’s attitude towards positive international initiatives are concerned. The US under the Bush administration developed a mind-set of animosity towards the rest of the international community, reaching the point of dubbing the UN irrelevant.

Needless to say, CMC, world governments and citizens throughout the world are hoping that the new American administration of Barack Obama will truly bring an end and reverse Bush’s ruinous legacy. Realists say it will take years for an effective change of policy to take place. In the meantime, the millions of unexploded cluster bomblets and landmines scattered the world over, wait for no one. They will continue to claim lives and maim thousands, just like Ahmad of Lebanon, and Ayat of Iraq.

[Ramzy Baroud (www.ramzybaroud.net) is an author and editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His work has been published in many newspapers, journals and anthologies around the world. His latest book is The Second Palestinian Intifada: A Chronicle of a People’s Struggle (Pluto Press, London).]

Source / Common Dreams

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Posted in RagBlog | Tagged U.S. Foreign Policy, War | 3 Comments

Loving: What Are You Looking At ?

Posted on December 13, 2008 by RagBlog

Cartoon by Charlie Loving / The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged Bank Bailouts, Humor | Leave a comment

Rogers: "We’re Going to Have a Lost Decade"

Posted on December 13, 2008 by RagBlog

Jim Rogers calls most big U.S. banks “bankrupt”
By Jonathan Stempel / December 11, 2008

NEW YORK – Jim Rogers, one of the world’s most prominent international investors, on Thursday called most of the largest U.S. banks “totally bankrupt,” and said government efforts to fix the sector are wrongheaded.

Speaking by teleconference at the Reuters Investment Outlook 2009 Summit, the co-founder with George Soros of the Quantum Fund, said the government’s $700 billion rescue package for the sector doesn’t address how banks manage their balance sheets, and instead rewards weaker lenders with new capital.

Dozens of banks have won infusions from the Troubled Asset Relief Program created in early October, just after the Sept 15 bankruptcy filing by Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc (LEHMQ.PK: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz). Some of the funds are being used for acquisitions.

“Without giving specific names, most of the significant American banks, the larger banks, are bankrupt, totally bankrupt,” said Rogers, who is now a private investor.

“What is outrageous economically and is outrageous morally is that normally in times like this, people who are competent and who saw it coming and who kept their powder dry go and take over the assets from the incompetent,” he said. “What’s happening this time is that the government is taking the assets from the competent people and giving them to the incompetent people and saying, now you can compete with the competent people. It is horrible economics.”

Rogers said he shorted shares of Fannie Mae (FNM.P: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) and Freddie Mac (FRE.P: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) before the government nationalized the mortgage financiers in September, a week before Lehman failed.

Now a specialist in commodities, Rogers said he has used the recent rally in the U.S. dollar as an opportunity to exit dollar-denominated assets.

While not saying how long the U.S. economic recession will last, he said conditions could ultimately mirror those of Japan in the 1990s. “The way things are going, we’re going to have a lost decade too, just like the 1970s,” he said.

Goldman Sachs & Co analysts this week estimated that banks worldwide have suffered $850 billion of credit-related losses and writedowns since the global credit crisis began last year.

But Rogers said sound U.S. lenders remain. He said these could include banks that don’t make or hold subprime mortgages, or which have high ratios of deposits to equity, “all the classic old ratios that most banks in America forgot or started ignoring because they were too old-fashioned.”

Many analysts cite Lehman’s Sept 15 bankruptcy as a trigger for the recent cratering in the economy and stock markets.

Rogers called that idea “laughable,” noting that banks have been failing for hundreds of years. And yet, he said policymakers aren’t doing enough to prevent another Lehman.

“Governments are making mistakes,” he said. “They’re saying to all the banks, you don’t have to tell us your situation. You can continue to use your balance sheet that is phony…. All these guys are bankrupt, they’re still worrying about their bonuses, they’re still trying to pay their dividends, and the whole system is weakened.”

Rogers said is investing in growth areas in China and Taiwan, in such areas as water treatment and agriculture, and recently bought positions in energy and agriculture indexes.

[For summit blog: summitnotebook.reuters.com. Reporting by Jonathan Stempel; Additional reporting by Jennifer Ablan and Herbert Lash.]

Source / Reuters

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Posted in RagBlog | Tagged Bank Bailouts, Banking, Bankruptcy, Economy | 1 Comment

Shades of Whitewater : Media Attempts to Tie Obama to ‘Blagogate’

Posted on December 13, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Media Frenzy by Amer Sahoury of Clio High School in Michigan, from the 2008 Congressional Art Competition.

The similarities between the media’s current behavior and their shameful performance in the 1990s doesn’t stop with their bizarre suggestions that geography is destiny. …One of the central flaws of the media’s coverage of the Clintons was that they portrayed nearly everything as evidence of guilt.

Media Matters: Media pick up where they left off 8 years ago
by Jamison Foser / December 12, 2008

To anyone who lived through the media feeding frenzy of the 1990s, during which the nation’s leading news organizations spent the better part of a decade destroying their own credibility by relentlessly hyping a series of non-scandals, the past few days, in which the media have tried to shoehorn Barack Obama into the Rod Blagojevich scandal, have been sickeningly familiar.

Whenever reporters think — or want you to think — they’ve uncovered a presidential scandal, they waste little time in comparing it to previous controversies.

Yesterday, CNN’s Rick Sanchez tried desperately to get the phrase “Blagogate” to stick — the latest in a long and overwhelmingly annoying post-Watergate pattern of ham-handed efforts to hype a scandal by appending the suffix “-gate” to the end of a word.

Sanchez’s efforts to create a catchphrase aside, the criminal complaint filed against Blagojevich this week isn’t the Watergate of the 21st century — though it shows signs that it may become this decade’s Whitewater.

Right about now, you may be scratching your head, trying to remember what, exactly, the Whitewater scandal was. Didn’t it have something to do with a bank? Or a land deal? But didn’t the Clintons lose money? How did the congressman who shot the pumpkin fit in?

But Whitewater is quite simple, when it is understood as it should be — as a media scandal, not a presidential scandal.

As an endless series of investigations, costing taxpayers tens of millions of dollars, revealed, the Clintons broke no law and violated no ethics regulations in connection with Whitewater. They lost money on a failed land deal in which their business partner cheated them. That’s all there was. Republicans Ken Starr, Robert Fiske, Robert Ray, Al D’Amato, and Jim Leach, among others, investigated the matter, and none of them found illegality. There was simply nothing there — except year after year of obsessive, and often dishonest, media coverage, fueled by conservatives who would stop at nothing to destroy the president.

As Joe Conason explains today, “The madness that was eventually classified under the quasi-clinical rubric of ‘Whitewater’ began, in no small degree, with the dubious idea that Arkansas, the Clintons’ home state, was a peculiarly corrupt place — and that any politician from Arkansas by definition was suspect (but only if he or she happened to be a Democrat).”

Arkansas journalist Gene Lyons noted in Fools for Scandal, his 1994 book about how the media invented Whitewater, “Scarcely a Whitewater story has appeared in the national press that hasn’t made references to the state’s uniquely ‘incestuous’ links between business, government, and the legal establishment — concepts utterly foreign to places like Washington, D.C., and New York City, of course.” (Conason and Lyons co-wrote The Hunting of the President, a book that — along with Fools for Scandal — are must-reads for anyone interested in the media or politics.)

By portraying Arkansas as thoroughly, and uniquely, corrupt, the media (and Clinton’s political opponents) tied him to a long line of misbehavior that had nothing to do with him — and created the impression that Clinton must be corrupt merely for being from such an ethical cesspool.

Of course, Arkansas was neither thoroughly nor uniquely corrupt.

In addition to the ages-old clichés — big cities like New York and Chicago; the anything-goes Wild West of Las Vegas and Texas; perennial whipping boy New Jersey — countless other states and cities have reputations for “unparalleled” corruption. People experienced in Connecticut politics will forcefully argue that their state takes a back seat to no other when it comes to the frequency with which public officials are caught in various degrees of wrongdoing. Then there’s Florida, about which the less said, the better. And on and on and on.

Such reputations stem not only from actual examples of actual corruption — California gave us Nixon; Maryland gave us Agnew; two of the Keating Five, including John McCain, hailed from Arizona — but from the fact that many people, particularly those who work in politics and the media, tend to engage in a bit of tongue-in-cheek bragging about their home city or state’s propensity for scandal.

The point isn’t that everyplace is corrupt, or that nowhere is. It’s that no location has a monopoly on crooked politicians (nor has there yet been a location over which crooked politicians held a monopoly) — and that any claim of a city or state’s unique history of public officials abusing their office should be taken with a whole shaker of salt. (For what it’s worth, USA Today determined this week that “[o]n a per-capita basis … Illinois ranks 18th for the number of public corruption convictions the federal government has won from 1998 through 2007,” behind both Dakotas, Alaska, Alabama, Florida and several other states.)

And yet, here we are again, with an incoming Democratic president who hails from a city we are all supposed to believe is the most corrupt place this side of Dick Cheney’s undisclosed location. Chicago, we are told, is a den of villainy so irredeemable it defies credulity to suggest anyone could emerge from so much as a long layover at O’Hare without a closet full of skeletons.

This nonsense was well under way during the presidential campaign, during which John McCain suggested a lack of integrity on Obama’s part simply because he is from Chicago. You might think that a man who was a participant in one of the most notorious scandals in the history of the U.S. Senate would be laughed at if he tried to claim his opponent lacked integrity simply because of his ZIP code. Instead, the national media laughed along with McCain, endlessly repeating his witty zinger about Chicago.

And so this week, we’ve heard over and over how politics in Illinois are rotten to the core.

At Obama’s press conference yesterday, the third questioner asked, “What’s wrong with politics in Illinois?” Chris Matthews made sure viewers knew that “Barack Obama, of course, rose to political power in a city, Chicago, in a state, Illinois, known for corruption.”

ABC’s Rick Klein chimed in: “[W]ith one stiff wind, Chicago has grabbed Obama and his transition — and blown it off-course. … The underbelly of the Obama political operation, with all its Chicago tints and taints, is now fair game for reporters looking for a story.” (Nonsense. If the “Obama political operation” has an “underbelly” featuring actual wrongdoing, it’s fair game whether or not a governor is busted in a scandal that has nothing to do with Obama. And if that “underbelly” hasn’t actually done anything wrong, Blago’s bust doesn’t change that — regardless of tint or taint.)

On his radio show, Bill O’Reilly asked Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass if it is even possible for Obama to have existed in Chicago without being dishonest, leading Kass to reply: “Yes, that is possible. It’s also possible that he was found as an infant in a reed basket floating in the Chicago River.”

The similarities between the media’s current behavior and their shameful performance in the 1990s doesn’t stop with their bizarre suggestions that geography is destiny.

One of the central flaws of the media’s coverage of the Clintons was that they portrayed nearly everything as evidence of guilt. Perhaps most perverse was the suggestion that the conviction of Clinton Justice Department official Webster Hubbell was evidence of wrongdoing by the Clintons. What made that so perverse? Hubbell was convicted, essentially, of stealing money from the law firm in which he and Hillary Clinton were both partners. Hubbell, in other words, stole from Hillary Clinton. The Clintons were Hubbell’s victims — and yet many journalists portrayed his conviction as evidence of their guilt.

Which brings us to Tuesday’s New York Times. As Will Bunch has explained, the Times reported that Obama supported an Illinois ethics reform package that passed over Blagojevich’s veto, which led to Blagojevich pressing state contractors for contributions before the reform takes effect, which “indirectly contributed to the downfall.” Good news for Obama, right? He supported a reform package, even urging the state Senate to pass it over Blagojevich’s veto. And yet the Times concludes that this story demonstrates that Obama “has never quite escaped the murky and insular world of Illinois politics” — as though the fact that Blagojevich allegedly did something improper in an effort to avoid the effects of the reform Obama championed somehow taints Obama. Bizarre.

Most telling is the tendency of many journalists to speculate that the Blagojevich scandal may ensnare Obama without acknowledging that the complaint against Blagojevich contained absolutely no evidence of wrongdoing by Obama, or that U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald has said, “I should make clear, the complaint makes no allegations about the president-elect whatsoever, his conduct.” (You may remember The New York Times’ reaction to the Resolution Trust Corporation investigation that exonerated the Clintons of Whitewater wrongdoing in 1995: The “paper of record,” which had been relentlessly hyping the non-scandal, all but ignored the RTC report and continued pushing Whitewater.)

Even worse than ignoring Fitzgerald’s exculpatory comments, Time actually suggested they are bad news for Obama:

On more than one occasion during his stunning press conference on Tuesday, U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald bluntly said he has found no evidence of wrongdoing by President-elect Barack Obama in the tangled, tawdry scheme that Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich allegedly cooked up to sell Obama’s now vacant Senate seat to the highest bidder. But for politicians, it’s never good news when a top-notch prosecutor has to go out of his way to distance them from a front-page scandal.

Got that? Fitzgerald said there’s no evidence Obama did anything wrong. Bad news for Obama! (For the record: The reason Fitzgerald “has to go out of his way” to distance Obama from the scandal is that news organizations like Time keep going out of their way to baselessly link Obama to the scandal.)

Such attempts to link Obama to scandal via tortured logic and geography rather than more substantive ties were necessary because of the complete lack of substantive ties.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the media’s attempts to link Obama to the Blagojevich scandal has been the volume of news reports that are purely speculative — and not only speculative, but vaguely speculative. That is, they don’t even consist of conjecture about specific potential wrong doing. They simply consist of completely baseless speculation that Obama might in some way become caught up in the investigation at some point in the future, for some reason. It’s little more than, “Maybe Obama will be involved.” Well, sure. And maybe he’ll play shortstop for the Washington Nationals next year.

Associated Press reporter Liz Sidoti set the standard for pointlessly speculative news reports with an “analysis” piece declaring that “President-elect Barack Obama hasn’t even stepped into office and already a scandal is threatening to dog him.” In the very next sentence, Sidoti had to admit that “Obama isn’t accused of anything” — but that didn’t stop her from continuing to offer ominous warnings that Obama could be implicated in the scandal, interspersed with concessions that he, you know … isn’t.

Not that Sidoti was unique in stringing together a bunch of coulds and mights and maybes and ifs to create something that vaguely resembles — but is certainly not — an actual news report.

ABC’s Rick Klein, for example:

The scandal surrounding Blagojevich, the Democratic governor of Illinois, may or may not implicate members of Congress, in addition to at least the outer ring of advisers in the incoming Obama administration.

Got that? The scandal may or may not implicate members of Congress. Awfully hard to argue with that. The modifier “at least” is a nice touch, too — suggesting that the outer ring of Obama advisers has already been implicated in the scandal (they haven’t).

That was par for the course this week, as reporters breathlessly asked what Obama knew and when he knew it (the decidedly non-scandalous answers are apparently “very little” and “very recently”).

If you want to make a “scandal” stick to someone despite the inconvenient truth that they aren’t actually guilty of the purported wrongdoing in question, one thing you do — if you’re the media covering a Democratic president, or an overzealous conservative — is continually expand the scandal’s definition. So the “scandal” grows and evolves into an amorphous mass of innuendo as political opponents and journalists begin throwing everything against the wall, hoping something will stick.

Eventually what begins as a land deal (in which the Clintons did nothing wrong and lost money) includes an investigation of the tragic suicide of a White House staffer — and the next thing you know, some B-list congressman is traipsing into his backyard with a shotgun, taking aim at a perfectly innocent pumpkin because the voices in his head told him that gunning down some produce would somehow “prove” that the staffer was murdered as part of an elaborate cover-up of … well, of nothing. There was nothing to cover up, and no murder to cover it up. The pumpkin died in vain.

And so on Wednesday, the Associated Press issued an article headlined “Questionable associations of Obama.” Prompted by the Blagojevich scandal — which, again, involves no indication that Obama did anything wrong — the article announces, “In his life and career in Illinois, President-elect Barack Obama has crossed paths with some notable figures who have drawn scorn and scrutiny.”

From there, the AP proceeds to describe several such “notable figures,” most of whom have little if anything to do with Obama — or the Blagojevich scandal. What, for example, is Jeremiah Wright doing here? None of their connections to Obama involve so much as a hint of an allegation of legal or ethical wrongdoing. To the extent they are controversial, it is for their views. They couldn’t possibly have less to do with the Blagojevich scandal; there is no conceivable reason for the AP to bring them up now — except to try to fling a bunch of garbage against the wall in hopes of something, somehow, sticking. It’s as though the AP, recognizing how tenuous Obama’s ties to the Blagojevich scandal are, tried to make it look more substantial by tossing in a bunch of other “notable” ties.

Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz complained that it took Obama “24 hours” to decide that Blagojevich should resign, worrying “that kind of excessive caution” could “define his presidency.”

Obama called for Blagojevich’s resignation within 24 hours, and Howard Kurtz thinks that wasn’t fast enough. It’s so fast, Kurtz had to measure the time elapsed in hours rather than days. And yet, Kurtz thinks it constituted excessive foot-dragging. This is simply not a sane assessment. It’s a desperate attempt to find something to criticize about Obama. Obama is not involved in the scandal, so Kurtz sits by with a stopwatch, trying to document Obama’s slow response to it.

CNN’s Wolf Blitzer announced yesterday that “some are calling this Obama’s first presidential scandal.” It isn’t. There is no evidence he has done anything wrong. This is not Obama’s first presidential scandal — but it shows signs of becoming the first media scandal of the Obama presidency.

Obviously, the news media should aggressively investigate and report on actual involvement in actual wrongdoing by public figures. There was far too little of that reporting during the Bush administration. (Remember when the media refused to report on the Downing Street Memo? Good times.)

If the news media regains a bit of the skepticism so many of them set aside for the past eight years, that would be an unequivocally good thing, and it should be applauded.

But this week brought signs that much of the media is set to resume the absurd and shameful behavior that defined the 1990s — guilt by association, circular analysis whereby they ask baseless questions about non-scandals, then claim they have to report on the “scandal” because the White House is “besieged by questions,” grotesque leaps of logic, downplaying exculpatory information, and too many other failings to list.

If that happens — if the media continue to behave as they did in covering Whitewater — they will damage the country. It’s really that simple. We cannot afford to be distracted from serious problems by overheated conjecture and baseless insinuation masquerading as journalism.

Not to mention the outright fabrications. To take just one of many examples, Jeff Greenfield and ABC selectively edited Hillary Clinton’s comments during a Whitewater press conference, then accused her of lying — an accusation that, based on Clinton’s full comments, was clearly false. It was a shockingly dishonest report; Greenfield and ABC were simply lying about Clinton — there’s really no other way to put it. Those involved should have seen their reputations take a serious hit — at the very least. Yet they suffered no consequences due to their dishonorable and unprofessional actions.

That’s how the media behaved the last time we had a Democratic president. They devoted wall-to-wall coverage to invented “scandals,” ignored exculpatory evidence, saw evidence of guilt everywhere, took people out of context in order to accuse them of lying, and generally behaved like a pack of wild animals who couldn’t tell right from wrong or truth from fiction — or who simply didn’t care. As a group, they behaved without ethical standards and without regard for the truth.

It’s our responsibility — all of us — to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

[Jamison Foser is Executive Vice President at Media Matters for America.]

Source / Media Matters

The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged Barack Obama, Clintons, Media, Media Distortion, Political Corruption, Political Scandal, Rod Blagojevich, Whitewater | 2 Comments

Drag Queen Daddy : What Do We Tell the Kid?

Posted on December 13, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

We are running the following important advice as a special service to our readers. It comes from ‘Dear Prudence: Advice on Manners and Morals’ from the online magazine Slate. Go here to read more from Prudence, to get her to answer your own ridiculous question or to get her much needed advice delivered to your mailbox.

Drag Queen Daddy…
How do we explain my husband’s cross-dressing to our child?

Dear Prudence,

I have been happily married for several years, and we are expecting our first child. The only problem is that my husband is a cross-dresser. This is a fetish that I know he could never give up. We keep this behind closed doors so as not to alienate friends and family and to keep his work associates from finding out (if they did, he could lose his job).

Our question is how do we incorporate this facet of our life with a new child? If we keep it hidden, our child will most likely find out someday—when mom is doing the wash for two dress sizes—and then feel betrayed and hurt. If we keep on as we are, then our child will likely tell someone that daddy wears dresses, and it wouldn’t be fair to burden anyone with that secret. What is the best thing for us to do?

—Daddy in Dresses

Dear Daddy in Dresses,

I know that when you’re expecting, you feel a need to get everything perfect for your new addition, but you’re getting way ahead of yourself if you think you should dress a teddy bear in a peignoir so you can start explaining to the baby that, just like Teddy, Daddy likes to wear pretty ladies’ clothes. Let’s say you two were into bondage and had a closetful of whips and chains. I would advise you to keep the closet secured and get a heavy-duty lock for the bedroom door, rather than try to “incorporate this facet” of your life with your child by teaching your toddler how to snap Daddy into handcuffs for Mommy. If your husband lounges around at home every night in a bustier, palazzo pants, and a wig, then I’m voting for repression.

It’s time for your husband to limit his dressing up to times when he’s not with the baby. As your child gets older and mobile, your husband will have to take more steps to separate his fetish from your family life. Perhaps he will need to check into a motel occasionally when he just can’t stifle the need to dress up as Madonna. Your husband has to live with this compulsion, but surely you both want to do your best to keep your child from growing up amid such sexual confusion. You feel this aspect of your private lives is none of your family’s business, or your husband’s colleagues’, and that is an excellent attitude to maintain with your child.

—Prudie

Source / Slate

The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged Education, Fetishes | 1 Comment

A Lesson From Canada (and Detroit) : Single Payer Health Care is Way to Go

Posted on December 13, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

‘Canada pays LESS for health care per person than the US — with far better results in terms of general wellness of the population.’
By Tommie Sue Montgomery / The Rag Blog / December 13, 2008

See ‘If G.M. Were a Canadian Company It Wouldn’t Be Asking for Help’ by Dean Baker, and ‘Obama and Daschle should opt for single-payer’ by Rose Ann DeMoro, Below.

I have no idea where you are on the health care issue but I can tell you that the first article is accurate, at least in so far as Canadian companies do NOT have the burden of health care costs. More important, Canada pays LESS for health care per person than the US — with far better results in terms of general wellness of the population. In fact, the US has a partial single-payer system: Medicare.

Living in Canada for the last 7.5 years, I can tell you that the single-payer system is the only rational way to go. This is NOT “socialized medicine.” We have our choice of doctors, including specialists; while there is often a waiting list — especially in high-population southern Ontario — for elective care, there is NEVER a wait for critical care.

Charles, my stepson, who had a heart transplant last May, is our No. 1 example. He has never had to wait for anything. His care, at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, has cost, over the last four years (since diagnosis) at least a million dollars. The entire family, put together, could not have paid this. Nor did we have to deal with insurance companies with the power to decide what care would be paid for. Decisions regarding care were made by his doctors. His anti-rejection drugs are also covered, with a deductible calculated on income. We have never seen a bill and never will.

Yes, we pay higher taxes and in Ontario we pay an additional $800/year “health tax.” But we see a doctor when we need one; we do not have to rely on emergency rooms for non-critical care; we get a physical once a year with all the tests the doc feels we need; eye exam every 2 years; and now that we’re over 65, we pay the first $100 for our prescriptions each year; the rest is covered. If I wanted to move back to the states (I don’t), I could not do so at this point because I could not afford the supplemental health insurance—and I am still quite healthy.

Below is an article and a call to action.

If G.M. Were a Canadian Company It Wouldn’t Be Asking for Help
By Dean Baker / December 11, 2008

The Detroit automakers have made many mistaken business decisions that have been important factors contributing to their current crisis. However, they are not responsible for some of the factors that have brought them to the brink of bankruptcy.

Most obviously, they are not responsible for the collapse of the housing bubble and the subsequent loss of more than $15 trillion in housing and stock wealth. This falloff in wealth has sent consumption plummeting. The auto industry has been especially hard hit, with sales falling by more than 30 percent year over year in the last two months.

The Big Three are also not responsible for the broken U.S. health care system. If we paid the same amount for health care as Canada, G.M. would have accumulated an additional $22 billion in profits over the last decade.

That would be the savings if we assumed that General Motor’s health care expenditures were reduced by roughly 48 percent to be in line with expenses in Canada. Of course, not all the savings in this counterfactual would have gone to profits. Some of it would have gone to workers in the form of higher wages or to consumers in the form of lower car prices.

On the other hand, G.M. is also picking up the tab for many spouses and dependent children. It would not have to pay these health care expenses in a Canadian type system. So the $22 billion figure is probably not a bad first approximation of the additional money that G.M. might have today if the United States had a more efficient health care system.

Even with these additional profits G.M. and the other domestic manufacturers would still face serious problems. They have made some bad choices in betting their future on SUVs and other low-mileage vehicles. They also have lagged foreign manufacturers in producing high quality, reliable cars.

But the real reason that Big Three are on their deathbeds right now is the economic crisis created by the Wall Street crew and their friends in Washington. It will be tragic if the people of the Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio are made to suffer through a depression because of the failed financial dealings of the Wall Street crew.

This situation is made even worse by virtue of the fact that most of the Wall Street executives who are directly responsible for this disaster are still quite wealthy, in large part because of the generosity of Congress and the Bush administration. While they demanded that the auto manufacturers produce plans for returning to profitability in exchange for providing loans, no similar conditions were imposed on Citigroup and the rest of the Wall Street gang.

As the autoworkers at the Big Three look at their last paychecks before an indeterminate period of unemployment, they should think about the portion deducted for income taxes. With this money, they have helped to ensure that Robert Rubin and other Wall Street types continue to enjoy pay packages in the millions or even tens of millions of dollars.

Happy Holidays!

[Dean Baker is the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). He is the author of The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer ( www.conservativenannystate.org). He also has a blog, “Beat the Press,” where he discusses the media’s coverage of economic issues. You can find it at the American Prospect’s website.]

Source / Talking Points Memo

Obama and Daschle should opt for single-payer
By Rose Ann DeMoro / December 11, 2008

Barack Obama needs to make good on his campaign pledge to reform health care. It is not enough to throw the issue off to former Senator Tom Daschle, Obama’s choice to head the Department of Health and Human Services.

Daschle says he wants to hear from us, the American people, on this issue. So we should oblige him.

Obama and Daschle have a choice: Rely on a private insurance-based plan that does little to mitigate the escalating health care crisis, or solve the problem once and for all and adopt universal, single-payer health care.

Many in Congress, the media, conservative think tanks and some advocacy groups — led by the Service Employees International Union and its business allies — are stumping for piecemeal changes.

Such a path would perpetuate the crisis and deal a cruel blow to the hopes of Americans for real reform. Those in Congress and liberal policy organizations who are embracing caution or promoting more insurance, not more care, are playing a risky game. It could jeopardize the health security of tens of millions of Americans and, in the process, fatally erode public support for the Obama administration.

Hardly a day passes without fresh signs of the health-care implosion.

Just days after the election, the New York Times reported a sharp increase in cost-shifting in employer-paid health plans, with more employers pushing high deductible plans that typically cost workers thousands of dollars in out-of-pocket payments.

Similarly, the Wall Street Journal reported a huge spike in health care premiums for small businesses, which prompted many to raise deductibles or cut coverage.

The consequences are chillingly apparent. In October, the Washington Post cited a study that found one-fourth of Americans are skipping doctors’ visits, and 10 percent could not take their child to the doctor because of cost.

That same month, USA Today reported that one in eight patients with advanced cancer turn down recommended treatment because of the bills.

America is falling embarrassingly behind.

A study by the Commonwealth Fund in November compared adults with chronic conditions, such as high blood pressure, diabetes, or heart disease, in seven major industrialized countries. A stunning 54 percent of the American respondents said they were likely to go without recommended care, compared to just 7 percent of chronically ill patients in the Netherlands. Over 40 percent of the Americans spent more than $1,000 on medical bills, compared to just 4 percent of British and 5 percent of French patients.

If we adopted a universal, single-payer system like these European countries, or if we simply expanded Medicare to all Americans, we would rectify this problem.

The need is urgent. Today 46 million Americans are without health care.

Millions more are at risk of losing it during this recession. And huge numbers of Americans with insurance can’t afford the cost hikes.

At some point, our government must stop subsidizing these private companies and start investing in the American people.

The time to do so is now.

The best way to get it done is to guarantee all Americans health care in a single-payer system.

Tell Obama and Daschle to support improved Medicare for all.

[Rose Ann DeMoro is executive director of the 85,000-member California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee.]

Source / The Progressive

Thanks to Mercedes Lynn de Uriarte / The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged Automobile Bailout, Detroit, Economic Crisis, Health Care, Health Care Reform, Universal Health Care | Leave a comment

P. Cockburn: Iraq SOFA* Hands US Total Defeat

Posted on December 13, 2008 by RagBlog

It’s All Spelled Out in Unpublicized Agreement: Total Defeat for U.S. in Iraq
By Patrick Cockburn / December 11, 2008

On November 27 the Iraqi parliament voted by a large majority in favor of a security agreement with the US under which the 150,000 American troops in Iraq will withdraw from cities, towns and villages by June 30, 2009 and from all of Iraq by December 31, 2011. The Iraqi government will take over military responsibility for the Green Zone in Baghdad, the heart of American power in Iraq, in a few weeks time. Private security companies will lose their legal immunity. US military operations and the arrest of Iraqis will only be carried out with Iraqi consent. There will be no US military bases left behind when the last US troops leave in three years time and the US military is banned in the interim from carrying out attacks on other countries from Iraq.

The Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), signed after eight months of rancorous negotiations, is categorical and unconditional. America’s bid to act as the world’s only super-power and to establish quasi-colonial control of Iraq, an attempt which began with the invasion of 2003, has ended in failure. There will be a national referendum on the new agreement next July, but the accord is to be implemented immediately so the poll will be largely irrelevant. Even Iran, which had furiously denounced the first drafts of the SOFA saying that they would establish a permanent US presence in Iraq, now says blithely that it will officially back the new security pact after the referendum. This is a sure sign that Iran, as America’s main rival in the Middle East, sees the pact as marking the final end of the US occupation and as a launching pad for military assaults on neighbours such as Iran.

Astonishingly, this momentous agreement has been greeted with little surprise or interest outside Iraq. On the same day that it was finally passed by the Iraqi parliament international attention was wholly focused on the murderous terrorist attack in Mumbai. For some months polls in the US showed that the economic crisis had replaced the Iraqi war as the main issue facing America in the eyes of voters. So many spurious milestones in Iraq have been declared by President Bush over the years that when a real turning point occurs people are naturally sceptical about its significance. The White House was so keen to limit understanding of what it had agreed in Iraq that it did not even to publish a copy of the SOFA in English. Some senior officials in the Pentagon are privately criticizing President Bush for conceding so much to the Iraqis, but the American media are fixated on the incoming Obama administration and no longer pays much attention to the doings of the expiring Bush administration.

The last minute delays to the accord were not really about the terms agreed with the Americans. It was rather that the leaders of the Sunni Arab minority, seeing the Shia-Kurdish government of prime minister Nouri al-Maliki about to fill the vacuum created by the US departure, wanted to barter their support for the accord in return for as many last minute concessions as they could extract. Some three quarters of the 17,000 prisoners held by the Americans are Sunni and they wanted them released or at least not mistreated by the Iraqi security forces. They asked for an end to de-Baathication which is directed primarily at the Sunni community. Only the Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr held out against the accord to the end, declaring it a betrayal of independent Iraq. The ultra-patriotic opposition of the Sadrists to the accord has been important because it has made it difficult for the other Shia parties to agree to anything less than a complete American withdrawal. If they did so they risked being portrayed as US puppets in the upcoming provincial elections at the end of January 2009 or the parliamentary elections later in the year.

The SOFA finally agreed is almost the opposite of the one which US started to negotiate in March. This is why Iran, with its strong links to the Shia parties inside Iraq, ended its previous rejection of it. The first US draft was largely an attempt to continue the occupation without much change from the UN mandate which expired at the end of the year. Washington overplayed its hand. The Iraqi government was growing stronger as the Sunni Arabs ended their uprising against the occupation. The Iranians helped restrain the Mehdi Army, Muqtada’s powerful militia, so the government regained control of Basra, Iraq’s second biggest city, and Sadr City, almost half Baghdad, from the Shia militias. The prime minister Nouri al-Maliki became more confident, realizing his military enemies were dispersing and, in any case, the Americans had no real alternative but to support him. The US has always been politically weak in Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein because it has few real friends in the country aside from the Kurds. The leaders of the Iraqi Shia, 60 per cent of the total population, might ally themselves to Washington to gain power, but they never intended to share power with the US in the long term.

The occupation has always been unpopular in Iraq. Foreign observers and some Iraqis are often misled by the hatred with which different Iraqi communities regard each other into underestimating the strength of Iraqi nationalism. Once Maliki came to believe that he could survive without US military support then he was able to spurn US proposals until an unconditional withdrawal was conceded. He could also see that Barack Obama, whose withdrawal timetable was not so different from his own, was going to be the next American president. Come the provincial and parliamentary elections of 2009, Maliki can present himself as the man who ended the occupation. Critics of the prime minister, notably the Kurds, think that success has gone to his head, but there is no doubt that the new security agreement has strengthened him politically.

It may be that, living in the heart of the Green Zone, that Maliki has an exaggerated idea of what his government has achieved. In the Zone there is access to clean water and electricity while in the rest of Baghdad people have been getting only three or four hours electricity a day. Security in Iraq is certainly better than it was during the sectarian civil war between Sunni and Shia in 2006-7 but the improvement is wholly comparative. The monthly death toll has dropped from 3,000 a month at its worst to 360 Iraqi civilians and security personnel killed this November, though these figures may understate the casualty toll as not all the bodies are found. Iraq is still one of the most dangerous places in the world. On December 1, the day I started writing this article, two suicide bombers killed 33 people and wounded dozens more in Baghdad and Mosul. Iraqis in the street are cynical about the government’s claim to have restored order. “We are used to the government always saying that things have become good and the security situation improved,” says Salman Mohammed Jumah, a primary school teacher in Baghdad. “It is true security is a little better but the government leaders live behind concrete barriers and do not know what is happening on the ground. They only go out in their armoured convoys. We no longer have sectarian killings by ID cards [revealing that a person is Sunni or Shia by their name] but Sunni are still afraid to go to Shia areas and Shia to Sunni.”

Security has improved with police and military checkpoints everywhere but sectarian killers have also upgraded their tactics. There are less suicide bombings but there are many more small ‘sticky bombs’ placed underneath vehicles. Everybody checks underneath their car before they get into it. I try to keep away from notorious choke points in Baghdad, such as Tahrir Square or the entrances to the Green Zone, where a bomber for can wait for a target to get stuck in traffic before making an attack. The checkpoints and the walls, the measures taken to reduce the violence, bring Baghdad close to paralysis even when there are no bombs. It can take two or three hours to travel a few miles. The bridges over the Tigris are often blocked and this has got worse recently because soldiers and police have a new toy in the shape of a box which looks like a transistor radio with a short aerial sticking out horizontally. When pointed at the car this device is supposed to detect vapor from explosives and may well do so, but since it also responds to vapor from alcohol or perfume it is worse than useless as a security aid.

Iraqi state television and government backed newspapers make ceaseless claims that life in Iraq is improving by the day. To be convincing this should mean not just improving security but providing more electricity, clean water and jobs. “The economic situation is still very bad,” says Salman Mohammed Jumah, the teacher. “Unemployment affects everybody and you can’t get a job unless you pay a bribe. There is no electricity and nowadays we have cholera again so people have to buy expensive bottled water and only use the water that comes out of the tap for washing.” Not everybody has the same grim vision but life in Iraq is still extraordinarily hard. The best barometer for how far Iraq is ‘better’ is the willingness of the 4.7 million refugees, one in five Iraqis who have fled their homes and are now living inside or outside Iraq, to go home. By October only 150,000 had returned and some do so only to look at the situation and then go back to Damascus or Amman. One middle aged Sunni businessman who came back from Syria for two or three weeks, said: “I don’t like to be here. In Syria I can go out in the evening to meet friends in a coffee bar. It is safe. Here I am forced to stay in my home after 7pm.”

The degree of optimism or pessimism felt by Iraqis depends very much on whether they have a job, whether or not that job is with the government, which community they belong to, their social class and the area they live in. All these factors are interlinked. Most jobs are with the state that reputedly employs some two million people. The private sector is very feeble. Despite talk of reconstruction there are almost no cranes visible on the Baghdad skyline. Since the Shia and Kurds control of the government, it is difficult for a Sunni to get a job and probably impossible unless he has a letter recommending him from a political party in the government. Optimism is greater among the Shia. “There is progress in our life, says Jafar Sadiq, a Shia businessman married to a Sunni in the Shia-dominated Iskan area of Baghdad. “People are cooperating with the security forces. I am glad the army is fighting the Mehdi Army though they still are not finished. Four Sunni have reopened their shops in my area. It is safe for my wife’s Sunni relatives to come here. The only things we need badly are electricity, clean water and municipal services.” But his wife Jana admitted privately that she had warned her Sunni relatives from coming to Iskan “because the security situation is unstable.” She teaches at Mustansariyah University in central Baghdad which a year ago was controlled by the Mehdi Army and Sunni students had fled. “Now the Sunni students are coming back,” she says, “though they are still afraid.”

They have reason to fear. Baghdad is divided into Shia and Sunni enclaves defended by high concrete blast walls often with a single entrance and exit. The sectarian slaughter is much less than it was but it is still dangerous for returning refugees to try to reclaim their old house in an area in which they are a minority. In one case in a Sunni district in west Baghdad, as I reported here some weeks ago, a Shia husband and wife with their two daughters went back to their house to find it gutted, with furniture gone and electric sockets and water pipes torn out. They decided to sleep on the roof. A Sunni gang reached them from a neighboring building, cut off the husband’s head and threw it into the street. They said to his wife and daughters: “The same will happen to any other Shia who comes back.” But even without these recent atrocities Baghdad would still be divided because the memory of the mass killings of 2006-7 is too fresh and there is still an underlying fear that it could happen again.

Iraqis have a low opinion of their elected representatives, frequently denouncing them as an incompetent kleptocracy. The government administration is dysfunctional. “Despite the fact,” said independent member of parliament Qassim Daoud, “that the Labor and Social Affairs is meant to help the millions of poor Iraqis I discovered that they had spent only 10 per cent of their budget.” Not all of this is the government’s fault. Iraqi society, administration and economy have been shattered by 28 years of war and sanctions. Few other countries have been put under such intense and prolonged pressure. First there was the eight year Iran-Iraq war starting in 1980, then the disastrous Gulf war of `1991, thirteen years of sanctions and then the five-and-a-half years of conflict since the US invasion. Ten years ago UN officials were already saying they could not repair the faltering power stations because they were so old that spare parts were no longer made for them.

Iraq is full of signs of the gap between the rulers and the ruled. The few planes using Baghdad international airport are full foreign contractors and Iraqi government officials. Talking to people on the streets in Baghdad in October many of them brought up fear of cholera which had just started to spread from Hilla province south of Baghdad. Forty per cent of people in the capital do not have access to clean drinking water. The origin of the epidemic was the purchase of out of date chemicals for water purification from Iran by corrupt officials. Everybody talked about the cholera except in the Green Zone where people had scarcely heard of the epidemic. .

The Iraqi government will become stronger as the Americans depart. It will also be forced to take full responsibility for the failings of the Iraqi state. This will be happening at a bad moment since the price of oil, the state’s only source of revenue, has fallen to $50 a barrel when the budget assumed it would be $80. Many state salaries, such as those of teachers, were doubled on the strength of this, something the government may now regret. Communal differences are still largely unresolved. Friction between Sunni and Shia, bad though it is, is less than two years ago, though hostility between Arabs and Kurds is deepening. The departure of the US military frightens many Sunni on the grounds that they will be at the mercy of the majority Shia. But it is also an incentive for the three main communities in Iraq to agree about what their future relations should be when there are no Americans to stand between them. As for the US, its moment in Iraq is coming to an end as its troops depart, leaving a ruined country behind them.

[Patrick Cockburn is the author of ‘The Occupation: War, resistance and daily life in Iraq’, a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award for best non-fiction book of 2006. His new book ‘Muqtada! Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia revival and the struggle for Iraq’ is published by Scribner.]

Source / CounterPunch

Thanks to David Hamilton / The Rag Blog

* SOFA = Status of Forces Agreement

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged Iraq, Iraq Occupation, Iraq Withdrawal | Leave a comment

On Revoking Israel’s UN Membership Pending Compliance with International Law

Posted on December 13, 2008 by RagBlog

Of course, one key issue with this proposal is that UN membership of a whole bunch of nations would have to be revoked for consistency, starting with the US. Can’t see too many folks going along with that scenario.

Richard Jehn / The Rag Blog

Israeli Ambassador to United Nations, Dan Gillerman. Photo: AP.
Revoking Israel’s UN Membership
By Snorre Lindquist and Lasse Wilhelmson / December 3, 2008

Israel membership at the UN is conditional on its respect for international law.

The Gaza Strip is now the largest concentration camp in the world. The situation grows steadily more insufferable for the 1.5 million Palestinians who live there. Deliveries of food, medicine and fuel are made difficult or stopped altogether. Child malnutrition is increasing. Water supplies and drainage have ceased to function. Children die for lack of healthcare. Tunnels to Egypt, dug by hand, are the only breathing space. Journalists and diplomats are denied entry. Israel is planning more military efforts. The Palestinians in Gaza are now to be starved into surrender and become an Egyptian problem.

The UN should use the word apartheid in connection with Israel and consider sanctions with the former South Africa serving as a model. Miguel dÉscoto Brockman, president of the UN General Assembly, conveyed this message at a meeting on November 24th 2008 with the UN General Secretary Ban Ki-moon present.

The 1976 Nobel peace prize laureate, Mairead McGuire from Ireland, recently suggested a popular movement demanding that the UN revoke Israel’s membership. The international community now needs to put tangible pressure on Israel in order to stop its war crimes.

Not once, during the past 60 years, has Israel shown any intention of living up to the requirements stipulated by the UN, in connection with the country’s membership in 1948, namely that the Palestinians who had been evicted from their homes should be allowed to return at the earliest possible opportunity. Moreover, Israel holds the hardly flattering world record of ignoring UN resolutions.

It can be questioned from the aspect of human rights legislation whether Israel is a legitimate state. Established practice between states usually requires borders that are legally maintained and a constitution, neither of which Israel has. These requirements are also named in the UN resolution (181) Partition Plan for Palestine, approved by the General Assembly in November 1947. The plan was accepted by the Zionists Jews in Palestine but rejected for excellent reasons as unjust by the Arab states. Only decisions made by the UN Security Council are mandatory. Later on, Israel unilaterally laid claim to a considerably larger portion of land than that suggested by the UN.

The eviction of eighty per cent of the Palestinians who lived west of the 1947 armistice line, and Israel’s refusal to allow them to return is the human rights argument for expelling Israel from the UN. Not only has Israel played the Partition Plan false but has, by its actions, thwarted the grounds – fragile from the start – for its UN membership.

Israel makes use of various strategies to achieve its goals, the same goals as for over a hundred years ago: As few and as well controlled and weakened Palestinians as possible in areas as small as possible between the Mediterranean and the River Jordan. And to try and get acceptance worldwide for the theft of land that is vital to the “state” that calls itself “Jewish and democratic”. This obviously bears no similarity to a peace process.

Why does nobody ever comment on the fact that Israel’s prime minister never misses an opportunity to harp on about how important it is that the rest of the world and the Palestinians recognise Israel, not as a democratic country for all its citizens, but as a “Jewish state”?

What would we have said if South Africa’s Prime Minister, in a similar way, had demanded recognition of South Africa as a “white and democratic state”, thus de facto accepting the racist apartheid system that allowed non-whites to be classified as lesser human beings?

In the article The end of Zionism, published in the Guardian on September the 15th 2003 the Jewish dissident and former speaker of Knesset, Avraham Burg wrote:

“Diaspora Jews for whom Israel is a central pillar of their identity must pay heed and speak out … We cannot keep a Palestinian majority under an Israeli boot and at the same time think ourselves the only democracy in the Middle East. There cannot be democracy without equal rights for all who live here, Arab as well as Jew … The prime minister should present the choices forthrightly: Jewish racism or democracy.”

No support can be found in The UN recommendation concerning a Jewish and a Palestinian state for unequal rights for the citizens of each country. Neither is there any indication as to how a “Jewish” state could become Jewish. There is support, however, for the intention that demographic conditions should be held intact at partition. Interpreting into the text an intention concerning characteristics of a “Jewish state” tailored to the ideology of Zionism is wholly in contradiction with the text of the resolution.

Even the Balfour Declaration, which entirely lacks human rights status, notes that the Jewish national home in Palestine should in no way encroach upon the rights of the Palestinians. Neither did US President Truman recognise Israel as a Jewish state. On the contrary, he ruled out precisely that formulation before making his decision to recognise Israel.

Thus, the legitimacy of a “Jewish state” so urgently sought by Israel lacks support in international documents that concern the building of the state. Israel’s government is, of course, fully aware of this. Why else would it keep on searching for this recognition?

The UN should now embark on a boycott of the apartheid state of Israel and, with the threat of expulsion from the UN, demand that Israel allows the evicted Palestinian refugees to return in accordance with the UN resolutions 194 and 3236.

With this done, meaningful peace talks can proceed and various solutions be reached for co-habitation with equal rights for all people between the Mediterranean and the River Jordan. No such solution can be compatible with the preservation of a Jewish apartheid state.

[- Snorre Lindquist is a Swedish Architect of, among other things, the House of Culture in front of the Nativity Church in Bethlehem on the West Bank. Contact him at snorre_lindquist@hotmail.com.

– Lasse Wilhelmson is a commentator on the situation in the Middle East, and is a member of a local government in Sweden for 23 years, four of which in an executive position. Contact him at: lasse.wilhelmson@bostream.nu.]

Source / Palestine Chronicle

The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged Israel, Palestine, United Nations | 1 Comment

Juan Cole: Obama’s Greatest Foreign Policy Challenge: The Complexity of Pakistani Politics

Posted on December 13, 2008 by RagBlog

President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan holds up a picture of his late wife, Benazir Bhutto, before addressing the 63rd United Nations General Assembly Sept. 25 in New York. Photo: Reuters/Eric Thayer.
Does Obama understand his biggest foreign-policy challenge?
By Juan Cole / December 12, 2008

The president-elect wants to work with the Pakistani government to “stamp out” terror. It’s not nearly that simple.

A consensus is emerging among intelligence analysts and pundits that Pakistan may be President-elect Barack Obama’s greatest policy challenge. A base for terrorist groups, the country has a fragile new civilian government and a long history of military coups. The dramatic attack on Mumbai by members of the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e Tayiba, the continued Taliban insurgency on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, the frailty of the new civilian government, and the country’s status as a nuclear-armed state have all put Islamabad on the incoming administration’s front burner.

But does Obama understand what he’s getting into? In his “Meet the Press” interview with Tom Brokaw on Sunday, Obama said, “We need a strategic partnership with all the parties in the region — Pakistan and India and the Afghan government — to stamp out the kind of militant, violent, terrorist extremists that have set up base camps and that are operating in ways that threaten the security of everybody in the international community.” Obama’s scenario assumes that the Pakistani government is a single, undifferentiated thing, and that all parts of the government would be willing to “stamp out” terrorists. Both of those assumptions are incorrect.

Pakistan’s government has a profound internal division between the military and the civilian, which have alternated in power since the country was born from the partition of British India in 1947. It is this military insubordination that creates most of the country’s serious political problems. Washington worries too much about other things in Pakistan and too little about the sheer power of the military. United States analysts often express fears about an internal fundamentalist challenge to the chiefs of staff. The main issue, however, is not that Pakistan’s military is too weak, but that it is too strong. And that is complicated by the fact that elements within the military are at odds, not just with the civilian government, but also with each other.

Gen. Pervez Musharraf ruled the country with an iron fist from the fall of 1999 (when he staged his coup against an elected prime minister) until he resigned under threat of impeachment in August of this year. His civilian rival, Asaf Ali Zardari, was elected president in September. Zardari had become the de facto head of the left-of-center Pakistan People’s Party after his wife, Benazir Bhutto, was assassinated while campaigning for Parliament in late December 2007. In the parliamentary elections of February 2008, which were relatively free and fair, the PPP emerged as the largest party in Parliament.

Zardari and his prime minister, Yousuf Raza Gilani, have vowed to crack down on terrorism. Zardari is said to be committed to vengeance against the Pakistani Taliban, since he blames them for his wife’s assassination. The possibility that a Western-educated woman liberal might again become Pakistan’s prime minister had been unbearable for the fundamentalist Taliban. Since Zardari became president, the Pakistani military has vigorously pursued a massive campaign against the Taliban in the tribal agency of Bajaur. The fierce fighting is said to have displaced some 300,000 persons. Of these operations against the Pakistani Taliban, Obama said on “Meet the Press” that “thus far, President Zardari has sent the right signals. He’s indicated that he recognizes this is not just a threat to the United States but is a threat to Pakistan as well.”

Likewise, after the attack on the Indian financial and cultural center of Mumbai on Nov. 26-29 of this year, Zardari argued that Pakistan as well as India has been targeted by terrorism, and that it is a legacy of the ways in which the U.S. used radical Islam to fight the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Zardari wrote: “The Mumbai attacks were directed not only at India but also at Pakistan’s new democratic government and the peace process with India that we have initiated. Supporters of authoritarianism in Pakistan and non-state actors with a vested interest in perpetuating conflict do not want change in Pakistan to take root.”

But Zardari will find it difficult to get control of the entire Pakistani government and the various “non-state actors” it has spawned to pursue Pakistani military interests in Afghanistan and Kashmir. Among his biggest challenges will be to gain the loyalty not only of the regular military but also of those officers detailed to the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence, an organization of some 25,000 that was founded in 1948 to promote information-sharing among the army, navy and air force. In the 1960s, military dictator Ayoub Khan used the ISI to spy on domestic rivals, and over time it developed a unit focusing on manipulating civilian politics. Zardari tried to abolish that political unit in late November.

During periods of military dictatorship, the ISI has tended to be given a much-expanded role, both domestically and abroad. During the 1980s, Gen. Zia ul-Haq created an Afghanistan bureau in the ISI, through which the Reagan administration funneled billions to the mujahedin to fight the Soviet occupation. In the late 1980s, dictator Zia initiated an ISI-led covert operation, Operation Tupac, aimed at detaching the disputed Muslim-majority state of Kashmir from India.

Kashmir had been a princely state in British India, ruled by a Hindu raja who took it into Hindu-majority India during partition. The Pakistanis fought an inconclusive war but failed to annex it to Pakistan, and the United Nations called for a referendum to allow the Kashmiris to decide their fate. India, which viewed Jammu and Kashmir as an Indian state, never allowed such a plebiscite to be held. Obama has suggested that he might send former President Bill Clinton as a special envoy in a bid to resolve the Kashmir dispute once and for all.

From a Pakistani nationalist point of view, Indian rule over Kashmir differed only in longevity from the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, and both involved the illegitimate occupation of a Muslim people by an infidel government. The ISI helped create six major guerrilla groups to operate against India in Kashmir, including the Lashkar-e Tayiba (Army of the Good), a paramilitary arm of the Center for Missionizing and Guidance (Da’wa wa Irshad) of former Islamic studies professor and mujahed in Afghanistan, Mohammad Hafiz Saeed.

From 1994, the ISI backed the Taliban in the quest to take over Afghanistan from the warlords who came to power after the fall of Soviet-installed Muhammad Najibullah in the early 1990s. Elements in the ISI favored a hard-line form of fundamentalist Islam and so were pleased to support the Taliban on ideological grounds. Others were simply being pragmatic, since the Taliban, from the Pushtun ethnic group, had been refugees who attended seminary or madrasah in Pakistan. They were pro-Pakistan, while many of the warlords had become clients of India, Iran or, ironically, Russia.

In 2001, immediately after the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration gave Pakistani military dictator Pervez Musharraf an ultimatum. He had championed the Taliban policy despite being a secularist himself, but was forced to turn against his former allies, who were then overthrown by the U.S.-backed warlords of the Northern Alliance.

Elements in the ISI and the military, however, continued to back the Taliban. They were deeply dismayed that the Karzai government in Kabul was independent of Islamabad and had strong ties to India. Under U.S. and Indian pressure, in 2004 the Musharraf government blocked the Pakistan-based guerrilla groups from further attacking Indian Kashmir from Pakistan, causing many of their members to go fight instead alongside the resurgent Taliban in northwestern Pakistan and southern Afghanistan. In response to the need to distance themselves from the terrorist groups, the Pakistani government and the ISI are alleged to have created cells made up of former officers who covertly give training, arms and other support to the Taliban and to the organizations fighting India in Kashmir.

To some extent, then, Pakistan’s powerful national-security apparatus has been divided against itself for much of the past decade. The contradictory agendas of various parts of the Pakistani government and of its shadowy networks of retired or ex-officers have created policy chaos. Even while the army is engaged in intense fighting against the Pakistani Taliban of Bajaur, it appears to be backing other Taliban groups that have struck at targets inside Afghanistan from south Waziristan, another tribal agency on the border of the two countries. Last June, when U.S. forces engaged in hot pursuit of these Taliban staging cross-border raids, they came under fire from Pakistani troops who sided with the Taliban.

The complex layers of the ISI, a state within the state, make it questionable whether Musharraf ever really controlled it. Now Pakistan’s new civilian president is even less well-placed to control it, or to discover how the militant cells work, both inside the ISI and among the retirees. It is not even clear whether the ISI is willing to take orders from Zardari and other officials in the new government. When Prime Minister Gilani announced that the ISI would have to report to the civilian Interior Ministry, the decree was overturned within a day under “immense pressure from defense circles.” When the government pledged to send the head of the ISI to India for consultations on the Mumbai attacks in late November, it was apparently overruled by the military.

The captured terrorist in Mumbai, Amir Ajmal Qassab, appears to have told Indian interrogators that his group was trained in Pakistani Kashmir by retired Pakistani officers. It is certain that President Zardari, Prime Minister Gilani, and Army Chief of Staff Ashfaq Kiyani were uninvolved in the terrorist strike on Mumbai. But were there rogue cells inside the ISI or the army officer corps that were running the retirees who put the Lashkar-e Tayiba up to striking India? On Sunday, Zardari’s forces raided the Lashkar-e Tayiba camps in Pakistani Kashmir and arrested a major LeT leader, Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, whom Indian intelligence accused of masterminding the Mumbai attacks. The move was considered gutsy in Pakistan, where there is substantial popular support for the struggle to free Muslim Kashmir of India, a struggle in which the Lashkar has long been the leading organization.

This murky Chinese puzzle raises the question of how Obama can hope to cooperate with the Pakistani government to curb the groups mounting attacks in Afghanistan and Kashmir. The government itself is divided on such policies, and there appear to be cells both within the state and outside it that have their own, militant foreign policy. The United States, going back to the Cold War, has long viewed the Pakistani army as a geopolitical ally, and Washington tends to prefer that the military be in power. Since Gen. Musharraf was forced out, U.S. intelligence circles have been lamenting the country’s “instability,” as though it were less unstable under an unpopular dictatorship. If Pakistan — and Pakistani-American relations — are to have a chance, it will lie in the incoming Obama administration doing everything it can to strengthen the civilian political establishment and ensure that the military remains permanently in its barracks. The military needs to be excluded from political power, and it needs to learn to take orders from a civilian president. At the same time, Obama should follow through on his commitment to commit serious diplomatic resources to helping resolve the long-festering Kashmir issue.

Source / Salon

The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged Barack Obama, India, Pakistan, U.S. Foreign Policy, War on Terror | Leave a comment

Constitutional Conventions: The Power to Reform Government to Eliminate Corruption

Posted on December 12, 2008 by RagBlog

Illinois Citizens Deserve Corrupt Government
By Joel Hirschhorn / December 12, 2008

Public Corruption Runs Rampant Because Americans Do Not Seek Genuine Political Reforms

The current Illinois governor, Rod Blagojevich, recently charged with crimes by the federal government, just follows in the footsteps of previous convicted Illinois governors and a huge number of other Illinois officials convicted of crimes. What is remarkable is that in the 2008 election Illinois voters had the opportunity to recognize that they needed to use their constitutional convention opportunity to reform state government. They voted not to use it.

Which raises the question: How stupid or brainwashed are most Illinois citizens?

Here is the story behind the headlines. According to the Illinois state constitution, voters must be given the opportunity every twenty years to vote for or against having a state constitutional convention that can be used to amend the constitution or rewrite it altogether. Considering an incredibly long history of public corruption you would think that Illinois voters would be inclined to give serious thought to how they could improve their government by means of a state constitutional convention. Many prominent people and groups worked hard to educate citizens why they should vote in favor of a constitutional convention.

In November, two-thirds voted against having a convention. Twenty years earlier they also voted against one. But even with twenty more years of public corruption, Illinois citizens could not be convinced to pursue a path to political reform free from the chains of their corrupt state government. The last convention was in 1970.

Those advocating passage of the convention measure included: Lieutenant Governor Pat Quinn, the Chicago Tribune, the Springfield State Journal Register, state representatives Mike Boland and Jack Franks, former state treasurer Judy Baar Topinka, political journalists Rich Miller and Scott Reeder, and several groups with websites.

Back in January 2008 this is what John Bambenek, who wrote a book supporting the convention, had the good sense to say: “Gov. Rod Blagojevich has done something remarkable in Illinois. He has managed to unite people across the political spectrum to create consensus that he absolutely stinks as a governor. Illinois deserves better than Rod Blagojevich. Because of his low approval in both parties and the budget fiasco of last year, legislators (even those in his own party) are talking about amending the constitution to allow recall votes of sitting politicians. The timing for such talk is opportune because on the November ballot this year there will be a question on whether to have a constitutional convention for Illinois to rewrite or amend the state constitution.” Like other pro-convention advocates, Bambenek wanted to return power to Illinois citizens. Most of them did not listen.

A key argument in favor of convention was that the cost of a no-frills convention (around $23 million) would surely be repaid by the savings to taxpayers of constitutional amendments that could get the state out of the lobbyist-run budget crisis it was in. Not to mention the possibility of an amendment that could make it easier to get rid of corrupt governors and other officials by, for example, recall by citizens. How sensible, considering that even before the charges against the current governor three previous Illinois governors had been convicted of crimes.

Otto Kerner (D) governor 1961-1968 was convicted on 17 counts of bribery, conspiracy, perjury, and related charges. He was sentenced to three years in federal prison and fined $50,000. Daniel Walker (D) governor 1973-1977 was convicted of improprieties related to a savings and loan association. He reportedly received over a million dollars in fraudulent loans for his business and repairs on his yacht. He pleaded out to three felonies and was freed after 17 months in prison because he was supposedly frail and chronically ill, but is still living 20 years later and living near the ocean in Mexico. And George Ryan (R) governor 1999-2003 was convicted on 20 federal counts that included racketeering, bribery, and extortion

And consider this amazing statistic: From 1995 to 2004, 469 politicians from the federal district of Northern Illinois were found guilty of corruption.

And then there was the famous case of Rep. Dan Rostenkowski (D) who was indicted in 1994 on 17 felony charges, including the embezzlement of $695,000 in taxpayer and campaign funds. The longtime powerful House ways and means committee chairman plea-bargained his way down to just two counts of mail fraud and served only 17 months in a minimum-security prison.

So what did the opponents to the convention use to sway voters? And why did they oppose a convention? They lied a whole lot and tried to instill fear, and succeeded. But what they feared was losing political power that they had used for so long to corrupt state government. Opponents included most of the state’s influential lobbying organizations: American Insurance Association, Associated Fire Fighters of Illinois, Center for Tax and Budget Accountability, Chicago Urban League, Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce, Citizen Action/Illinois, Illinois Association of Convenience Stores, Illinois Association of School Administrators, Illinois Business Round Table, Illinois Civil Justice League, Illinois Education Association, Illinois Farm Bureau, Illinois Federation of Teachers, Illinois Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, Illinois Manufacturers Association, Illinois Petroleum Marketers Association, Illinois Retail Merchants Association, Illinois Retired Teachers Association, Illinois State AFL-CIO, Illinois State Chamber of Commerce, Illinois State Black Chamber of Commerce, Illinois Trial Lawyers Association, League of Women Voters of Illinois, Lincoln Park Chamber of Commerce, National Federation of Independent Businesses/Illinois, Peoria Area Chamber of Commerce, Police Benevolent and Protective Association of Illinois, SEIU Illinois, State University Annuitants Association, Taxpayers’ Federation of Illinois, Tooling and Manufacturing Association, Union League Club of Chicago, Illinois Rifle Association. The convention was also opposed by House Speaker Michael Madigan (D) and former governor Jim Edgar (R) who both represented the corrupt status quo political establishment.

There is an important lesson from what happened in Illinois and several other states, as well as why the US Congress has refused to obey Article V of the federal constitution that prescribes a convention of state delegates to propose constitutional amendments when two-thirds of states ask for one, which has happened long ago. It is this: those with political power fear constitutional conventions that can truly reform our corrupt political system. What Americans need to constantly remember is that “we the people” must use constitutional conventions to improve our government and political system. All constitutions are meant to be revisited and amended if necessary.

We must not depend on electing individuals to public office to truly reform the system. We have a corrupt two-party plutocracy. It is time to stop believing the lies of both Democrats and Republicans. We can keep putting many of them in prison, but all that happens is that more corrupt and dishonest politicians get elected. Just as it has happened for the Illinois governorship.

Finally, you might ask whether Illinois Senator Barack Obama supported the 2008 convention proposal. What do you think? Obama’s key advisor, David Axelrod, who crafted his “change” message, shared a multimillion dollar contract provided by opponents to the convention who feared change.

Source / Associated Content

Thanks to Joel Hirschhorn / The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged American Society, Constitution, Corruption, U.S. Government | Leave a comment

Ricardo Rachell and Criminal Justice in Harris County

Posted on December 12, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

The victim never mentioned facial scars when he identified Ricardo Rachell, above. Photo: Harris County Sheriff’s Office / Houston Chronicle.

‘This form of justice has become commonplace in Harris County with its history of unforgivable crime lab mistakes and outright malfeasance, of evidence lost or withheld, of bloodthirsty prosecutors and juries eager to keep the lethal injections flowing.’

By Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog / December 12, 2008

Ricardo Rachell has spent five years in prison, even though DNA evidence existed all along that could have proven his innocence. According to the Houston Chronicle, DNA tests now prove that Rachell could not have committed the crime of which he was accused, and, as a result, he was scheduled for release today.

This is another mind-boggling example of justice misfired: in this case, a man convicted of sexual assault of a child based only on the testimony of an eight year old and his friend who didn’t even mention the man’s severely disfigured face in their testimony.

The District Attorney’s office admits it was aware of the DNA evidence all along, but says that its existence was mentioned in offense reports and that the defense could have requested testing. Defense attorneys however say they were not made aware of the evidence. And what kind of justice system is it anyway when prosecutors feel driven to seek convictions at all costs, where their response to the existence of possibly exculpatory evidence is, “Well, they didn’t ask.”

This form of justice has become commonplace in Harris County with its history of unforgivable crime lab mistakes and outright malfeasance, of evidence lost or withheld, of bloodthirsty prosecutors and juries eager to keep the lethal injections flowing.

The Houston Press described the qualifications for Harris County District Attorney as follows: “The job description was clear — kill as many defendants as possible, talk tough on crime, have an ‘R’ after your name on the ballot and you’re there for life.” But DA Chuck Rosenthal didn’t have the charm and political skills – or the exquisite mustache – of his predecessor, the legendary John B. Holmes, though they shared the same “hang ‘em” approach. And his “life” as Harris County DA was cut short.

The clumsy Rosenthal stumbled out of office in the face of a scandal involving a proliferation of racist and pornographic emails. And, even though Harris County largely turned to Democrats in the recent election, Rosenthal’s successor is Pat Lykos, a Republican district judge who professes a commitment to reform.

In recent years virtually all Harris County judges have been Republicans, and they have a proven “law and order” track record, inclined, as a rule, toward convictions, long sentences and parole revocation based on technical violations. They do a fine job of feeding the Texas prison complex, a voracious big bucks operation designed as a continually self-fulfilling prophecy.

But this is not a Houston or a Texas problem; it’s symptomatic of a major crisis in our criminal justice system with its cockamamie “war on drugs,” its tunnel-visioned and racially-charged mega drive to imprison first and foremost. Rehabilitation isn’t even in the equation. The whole thing’s fueled by money.

As for the case of Ricardo Rachell, it highlights the extreme unreliability of eyewitness accounts and the sloppiness with which evidence is handled. But bottom line, it points to a serious societal question of professional ethics, as district attorneys, politically driven, become so willing to overlook the “justice” part of criminal justice.

5 Years Lost in Prison Before DNA Got Tested
Evidence stored in 2002 clears Houston man in child sex case
By Roma Khanna / December 12, 2008

Five years after he was wrongfully convicted of sexually assaulting a child, Ricardo Rachell will be released from custody today.

Prosecutors and Rachell’s attorney appeared before state District Judge Susan Brown this morning to request the 51-year-old Rachell’s release on a personal recognizance bond after DNA tests cleared him of committing the 2002 attack.

The judge agreed and the Harris County Sheriff’s Office began the process of organizing his release.

Rachell, who was brought to Houston Wednesday night from a prison in Tennessee Colony, in East Texas, did not attend the hearing, nor did any members of his family.

After the hearing, Assistant District Attorney Roe Wilson said her office will work to ensure that Rachell’s conviction is overturned.

“Our goal is to make sure justice is done. And today, that means making sure Mr. Rachell is out of custody and returned to his family,” Wilson said.

Wilson could not say why DNA evidence available in 2002 was not tested until this year.

“That is a really good question,” she said. “It should have been tested. The defense attorney also could have requested testing.”

Rachell’s original defense attorney, Ron Hayes, said he knew nothing of the biological samples before the 2003 trial.

“It was not disclosed in any offense report that I saw,” Hayes said. “If I had been aware, I would have pushed for DNA testing, without question. I am disappointed that somehow it did not come to somebody’s attention who could have done something about it sooner.”

But Wilson said today that Houston police offense reports, which were available to defense counsel, included the fact that biological evidence had been collected.

In 2003, jurors convicted Rachell, who was severely disfigured by a shotgun blast to the face years before, largely based on eyewitness testimony from the 8-year-old victim and one of his friends.

Five years later, DNA tests show that Rachell could not have committed the crime and instead point to another man who is serving time for committing similar attacks, Rachell’s lawyer Deborah Summers said.

“This is the last case I thought would come back this way,” Summers said on Thursday. “When I took this case, I didn’t even know if there would be evidence to test. But (Rachell) just kept fighting and plugging away and kept demanding his rights. I am really pleased this worked out for him.”

Rachell is the fifth Harris County man exonerated with DNA evidence in recent years.

The biological samples that cleared his name were collected by the Houston Police Department after the October 2002 attack on the boy, who had been lured into a vacant south Houston home by a stranger.

Until recently, however, those samples hadn’t been tested. Their existence was never mentioned at trial.

The district attorney’s office confirmed today that it knew of the evidence in 2002. District Attorney Kenneth Magidson said in a written statement on Thursday that it was a mistake not to test the rape kit before trial.

“As soon as the evidence was found to exonerate him, we acted as swiftly as possible to see that justice is done in this case,” he said.

Summers, who was not available for comment after this morning’s hearing, said on Thursday that she did not know of any physical evidence when she atook the case.

“I wasn’t giving Mr. Rachell a great deal of encouragement because I thought, if there had been DNA collected, surely it would have been raised before now,” she said.

HPD has a history of not testing biological evidence despite its availability in a high number of cases, according to an independent investigation of its crime lab, which officials shuttered two months after the attack in which Rachell was accused.

“The crime lab’s failure to generate … results in cases where it was possible to conduct such testing … is very troubling,” wrote a former U.S. Justice Department official at the conclusion of a $5.3 million investigation of the crime lab. “This failure has implications both for ensuring that the guilty are convicted and that the innocent are exonerated.”

Seen around neighborhood

Rachell’s legal troubles began Oct. 20, 2002, when a stranger asked the child victim if he would be interested in earning money by helping move some trash, according to prosecutors. The boy agreed. The man took him to a vacant house and sexually assaulted him.

The next day, the boy’s family called HPD to say the youngster saw his attacker, Rachell — a man with a disfigured face known to some for riding his bicycle around the neighborhood, according to his attorneys.

Police arrested Rachell and he was charged with aggravated sexual assault of a child. Biological evidence was collected, as was a reference sample from Rachell, for comparison to the evidence. But it never was used.

The core of the case against Rachell were the identifications from the 8-year-old and his friend. He went to trial in June 2003 and began serving his 40-year sentence, all the while pursuing various appeals.

Shawna Reagin, a defense attorney recently elected state district judge, handled Rachell’s first appeal.

“I always had questions about this whether he was innocent,” she said. “The child omitted any mention of the facial disfigurement.”

Other similar crimes

In addition, Reagin said, there was another man known to be committing similar crimes in the area at the same time.

Reagin raised those arguments, but Rachell’s conviction was affirmed. Rachell then pursued the possibility of post-conviction DNA testing and a judge appointed Summers to his case.

This March, prosecutors contacted Summers to say they had located evidence and wanted to move forward with testing. The results came back last month. Prosecutors have not said whom the tests implicates, but they have reopened the case.

Prosecutors also said they will support Rachell should he seek a full pardon. That would fully clear his name and entitle him to almost $300,000 in reparations from the state, if he agrees not to file any lawsuits.

Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle

Source / Houston Chronicle

Read follow-up story: Cleared of child sex assault, Houston man is free by Roma Khanna, Lise Olsen and Dane Schiller / Houston Chronicle / Dec. 13, 2008

The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged Criminal Justice, DNA, Harris County, Houston, Prisons, Texas | Leave a comment

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Ricardo Rachell and Criminal Justice in Harris County

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