Turn Out The Lights — Before The Party’s Over

Posted on March 29, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer


The Sydney Opera House and Harbor Bridge appear at dusk. The Australian city was the site of the first Earth Hour in 2007, in which lights on prominent landmarks were turned off to raise awareness about global warming. Photograph by Sam Abell/NGS

Earth Hour: Cities, Landmarks to Go Dark
By Ker Thanfor / National Geographic News / March 28, 2008

Cities around the world will briefly go dim Saturday evening as the lights of buildings and landmarks are shut off for one hour to raise awareness about climate change. Called Earth Hour, the event is organized by the conservation nonprofit WWF to encourage people to conserve electricity and reduce the greenhouse emissions that cause global warming.

(Get the facts on global warming.)

Earth Hour started last year with one city, Sydney, Australia.

The response was so strong that WWF decided to take the event global for 2008, said WWF spokesperson Leslie Aun. “We were trying to get a few people to participate, but we ended up getting 2 million people and some 2,500 businesses,” Aun said.

This year, Earth Hour will include 35 official partner cities, as well as dozens of smaller cities spread out across six continents.

Partner cities in the United States include Atlanta, Chicago, Phoenix, and San Francisco. “We have a city in every major U.S. time zone participating,” Aun said.

The event will take place from 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. local time in each time zone.

(National Geographic Channel is the U.S. media partner for Earth Hour. National Geographic Channel and National Geographic News are both owned by the National Geographic Society.)

Landmarks Go Dark

In the United States, WWF President Carter Roberts sent letters to mayors around the country inviting them to take part.

Earth Hour organizers targeted cities where they felt mayors had shown genuine interest in the environment. Cities with iconic skylines were also preferred, Aun said. “It’s an event that everyone can take part in, but it makes a bigger statement if you can see a few skyscrapers go out,” she said.

Last year in Sydney, decorative lights at the city’s Opera House and Harbor Bridge went dark.

Following in that tradition, the lights of major landmarks in participating cities will be turned off for Earth Hour 2008. The Golden Gate Bridge and Bay Bridge in San Francisco will go dark, as will the CNN Tower in Atlanta, the basketball arena in Phoenix, and the Sears Tower and Theater District in Chicago.

“The witch from [the Broadway musical] Wicked is going to come out and wave her wand to turn off the light of the theater there,” Aun said. Individual consumers are also being encouraged to dim their lights for the hour.

Numbers Dispute

Some critics have disputed WWF’s claims that Sydney experienced a 10 percent drop in electricity consumption during Earth Hour last year.

But differences over numbers are beside the point, Aun said. “The point is not to save energy,” she said. “We could turn off the lights of the whole world for an hour, and it wouldn’t really move the needle in terms of making a genuine difference in climate change.

“Instead, Earth Hour is intended to raise awareness about climate change and to get people thinking about what they can do to reduce their energy usage for the coming year,” she said.

When nine o’ clock comes, we hope that’s not the end of this, but really a start in which people are looking at what they can do as citizens of the world,” Aun said. To those who dismiss Earth Hour as just a publicity stunt, Aun responds that so was the Boston Tea Party. “It was a symbolic movement that lit a flame that ultimately led to a revolution,” she said. “We happen to think this is the next revolution, that climate change is the most pressing issue facing our planet today. “

Scientists’ Response

Despite its good intentions, some scientists worry that people will misinterpret the goal of Earth Hour. “It seems to imply that shutting off the lights is the only solution to climate change,” said Gavin Schmidt, a climatologist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Science in New York City.

But Andreas Schmittner, an oceanographer at Oregon State University, said that as long as carbon emissions keep increasing, anything that raises awareness about climate change is a good thing. “We have not gone to any effective measure to reduce those carbon emissions,” Schmittner said. “Until that is achieved, it is good to raise awareness to keep the issue in the public discussion.”

© 1996-2008 National Geographic Society. All rights reserved.

Source.

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They Proposed to Move the Earth

Posted on March 29, 2008 by RagBlog

America Defeated: How Terrorists Turned a Superpower’s Strengths Against Itself
By Mark Danner, Tomdispatch.com. Posted March 26, 2008.

America’s enemies have used an evangelical, redemptive regime, hell-bent on remaking a fallen world, to lay the seeds of their success.

[This essay was adapted from an address first delivered in February at the Tenth Asia Security Conference at the Institute for Security and Defense Analysis in New Delhi.]

To contemplate a prewar map of Baghdad — as I do the one before me, with sectarian neighborhoods traced out in blue and red and yellow — is to look back on a lost Baghdad, a Baghdad of our dreams. My map of 2003 is colored mostly a rather neutral yellow, indicating the “mixed” neighborhoods of the city, predominant just five years ago. To take up a contemporary map after this is to be confronted by a riot of bright color: Shia blue has moved in irrevocably from the East of the Tigris; Sunni red has fled before it, as Shia militias pushed the Sunnis inexorably west toward Abu Ghraib and Anbar province, and nearly out of the capital itself. And everywhere, it seems, the pale yellow of those mixed neighborhoods is gone, obliterated in the months and years of sectarian war.

I start with those maps out of a lust for something concrete, as I grope about in the abstract, struggling to quantify the unquantifiable. How indeed to “take stock” of the War on Terror? Such a strange beast it is, like one of those mythological creatures that is part goat, part lion, part man. Let us take a moment and identify each of these parts. For if we look closely at its misshapen contours, we can see in the War on Terror:

Part anti-guerrilla mountain struggle, as in Afghanistan;

Part shooting-war-cum-occupation-cum-counterinsurgency, as in Iraq;

Part intelligence, spy v. spy covert struggle, fought quietly — “on the dark side,” as Vice President Dick Cheney put it shortly after 9/11 — in a vast territory stretching from the southern Philippines to the Maghreb and the Straits of Gibraltar;

And finally the War on Terror is part, perhaps its largest part, Virtual War — an ongoing, permanent struggle, and in its ongoing political utility not wholly unlike Orwell’s famous world war between Eurasia, East Asia, and Oceania that is unbounded in space and in time, never ending, always expanding.

Snowflakes Drifting Down on the War on Terror

President Bush announced this virtual war three days after September 11, 2001, in the National Cathedral in Washington, appropriately enough, when he told Americans that “our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.”

Astonishing words from a world leader — declaring that he would “rid the world of evil.” Just in case anyone thought they might have misheard the sweep of the President’s ambition, his National Security Strategy, issued a few months later, was careful to specify that “the enemy is not a single political regime or person or religion or ideology. The enemy is terrorism — premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against innocents.”

Again, a remarkable statement, as many commentators were quick to point out; for declaring war on “terrorism” — a technique of war, not an identifiable group or target — was simply unprecedented, and, indeed, bewildering in its implications. As one counterinsurgency specialist remarked to me, “Declaring war on terrorism is like declaring war on air power.”

Six and a half years later, evil is still with us and so is terrorism. In my search for a starting point in taking stock of those years, I find myself in the sad position of pondering fondly what have become two of the saddest words in the English language: Donald Rumsfeld.

Remember him? In late October 2003, when I was in Baghdad watching the launch of the so-called Ramadan Offensive — five simultaneous suicide bombings, beginning with one at the headquarters of the Red Cross, the fiery aftermath of which I witnessed — then Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld was in Washington still denying that an insurgency was underway in Iraq. He was also drafting one of his famous “snowflakes,” those late-night memoranda which he used to rain down on his terrorized Pentagon employees.

This particular snowflake, dated October 16, 2003 and entitled “Global War on Terrorism,” reads almost poignantly now, as the Defense Secretary gropes to define the war that it has become his lot to fight: “Today we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror,” he wrote. “Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?”

Rumsfeld asks the right question, for beyond the obvious metrics like the number of terrorist attacks worldwide — which have gone up steadily, and precipitously since 9/11 (for 2006, the last year for which State Department figures are available, by nearly 29%, to 14,338); and the somewhat subtler ones like the percentage of those in the Middle East and the broader Muslim world who hold unfavorable opinions of the United States (which soared in the wake of the invasion of Iraq and have fallen back just a bit since) — apart from these sorts of numbers which, for various and obvious reasons, are problematic in themselves, the key question is: How do you “take stock” of the War on Terror? At the end of the day, as Secretary Rumsfeld perceived, this is a political judgment, for in its essence it has to do with the evolution of public opinion and the readiness of those with certain political sympathies to move from holding those opinions to taking action in support of them.

What “metrics” do we have to take account of the progress of this “evolution”? Well, none really — but we do have the guarded opinions of intelligence agencies, notably this rather explicit statement from the U.S. government’s National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of April 2006, entitled “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States,” which reads in part: “Although we cannot measure the extent of the spread with precision” — those metrics again — “a large body of all-source reporting indicates that activists identifying themselves as jihadists, although still a small percentage of Muslims, are increasing in both number and geographic distribution. If this trend continues, threats to U.S. interests at home and abroad will become more diverse, leading to increasing attacks worldwide.”

Dark words, and yet that 2006 report looks positively sanguine when set beside two reports from a year later, both leaked in July 2007. A National Intelligence Estimate entitled “The Terrorist Threat to the US Homeland” noted that al-Qaeda had managed — in the summary in the Washington Post — to reestablish “its central organization, training infrastructure and lines of global communication,” over the previous two years and had placed the United States in a “heightened threat environment… The U.S. Homeland will face a persistent and evolving terrorist threat over the next three years.”

This NIE — the combined opinion of the country’s major intelligence agencies — only confirmed a report that had been leaked a couple days before from the National Counterterrorism Center, grimly entitled “Al Qaeda Better Positioned to Strike the West.” This report concluded that al-Qaeda, in the words of one official who briefed its contents to a reporter for the Christian Science Monitor, was “considerably operationally stronger than a year ago,” “has regrouped to an extent not seen since 2001,” and has managed to create “the most robust training program since 2001, with an interest in using European operatives.” Another intelligence official, summarizing the report to the Associated Press, offered a blunt and bleak conclusion: al-Qaeda, he said, is “showing greater and greater ability to plan attacks in Europe and the United States.”

Given these grim results, one must return to one of the more poignant passages in Secretary Rumsfeld’s “snowflake,” released to flutter down on his poor Pentagon subordinates back in those blinkered days of October 2003. Having wondered about the metrics, and what could and could not be measured in the War on Terror, the Secretary of Defense posed a critical question: “Does the U.S. need to fashion a broad, integrated plan to stop the next generation of terrorists?”

For me, the poignancy comes from Mr. Rumsfeld’s failure to see that, in effect, he and his boss had already “fashioned” the “broad, integrated plan” he was asking for. It was called the Iraq War.

Read all of this remarkable article here.

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My Name Is O’Hanlon

Posted on March 29, 2008 by RagBlog

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Ratcheting Up the Pressure on Iran

Posted on March 29, 2008 by RagBlog

The March 20, 2008 US Declaration of War on Iran
By John McGlynn

28/03/08 “ICH” — — March 20, 2008, destined to be another day of infamy. On this date the US officially declared war on Iran. But it’s not going to be the kind of war many have been expecting.

No, there was no dramatic televised announcement by President George W. Bush from the White House oval office. In fact on this day, reports the Washington Post, Bush spent some time communicating directly with Iranians, telling them via Radio Farda (the US-financed broadcaster that transmits to Iran in Farsi, Iran’s native language) that their government has “declared they want to have a nuclear weapon to destroy people.” But not to worry, he told his listeners in Farsi-translated Bushspeak: Tehran would not get the bomb because the US would be “firm.”

Over at the US Congress, no war resolution was passed, no debate transpired, no last-minute hearing on the Iran “threat” was held. The Pentagon did not put its forces on red alert and cancel all leave. The top story on the Pentagon’s website (on March 20) was: “Bush Lauds Military’s Performance in Terror War,” a feel-good piece about the president’s appearance on the US military’s TV channel to praise “the performance and courage of U.S. troops engaged in the global war on terrorism.” Bush discussed Iraq, Afghanistan and Africa but not Iran.

But make no mistake. As of Thursday, March 20 the US is at war with Iran.

So who made it official?

A unit within the US Treasury Department, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), which issued a March 20 advisory to the world’s financial institutions under the title: “Guidance to Financial Institutions on the Continuing Money Laundering Threat Involving Illicit Iranian Activity.”

FinCEN, though part of the chain of command, is better known to bankers and lawyers than to students of US foreign policy. Nevertheless, when the history of this newly declared war is someday written (assuming the war is allowed to proceed) FinCEN’s role will be as important as that played by US Central Command (Centcom) in directing the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In its March 20 advisory FinCEN reminds the global banking community that United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSC) 1803 (passed on March 3, 2008) “calls on member states to exercise vigilance over the activities of financial institutions in their territories with all banks domiciled in Iran, and their branches and subsidiaries abroad.”

UNSC 1803 specifically mentions two Iranian state-owned banks: Bank Melli and Bank Saderat. These two banks (plus their overseas branches and certain subsidiaries), along with a third state-owned bank, Bank Sepah, were also unilaterally sanctioned by the US in 2007 under anti-proliferation and anti-terrorism presidential executive orders 13382 and 13224.

As of March 20, however, the US, speaking through FinCEN, is now telling all banks around the world “to take into account the risk arising from the deficiencies in Iran’s AML/CFT [anti-money laundering and combating the financing of terrorism] regime, as well as all applicable U.S. and international sanctions programs, with regard to any possible transactions” with – and this is important – not just the above three banks but every remaining state-owned, private and special government bank in Iran. In other words, FinCEN charges, all of Iran’s banks – including the central bank (also on FinCEN’s list) – represent a risk to the international financial system, no exceptions. Confirmation is possible by comparing FinCEN’s list of risky Iranian banks with the listing of Iranian banks provided by Iran’s central bank.

The “deficiencies in Iran’s AML/CFT” is important because it provides the rationale FinCEN will now use to deliver the ultimate death blow to Iran’s ability to participate in the international banking system. The language is borrowed from Paris-based Financial Action Task Force (FATF), a group of 32 countries and two territories set up by the G-7 in 1989 to fight money laundering and terrorist financing. As the FinCEN advisory describes, in October 2007 the FATF stated “that Iran’s lack of a comprehensive anti-money laundering and combating the financing of terrorism (AML/CFT) regime represents a significant vulnerability in the international financial system. In response to the FATF statement, Iran passed its first AML law in February 2008. The FATF, however, reiterated its concern about continuing deficiencies in Iran’s AML/CFT system in a statement on February 28, 2008.”

Actually, the February 28 FATF statement does not comment on Iran’s new anti-money laundering law. The statement does say, however, that the FATF has been working with Iran since the October 2007 FATF statement was issued and “welcomes the commitment made by Iran to improve its AML/CFT regime.” Moreover, the February 28 statement, for whatever reason, drops the “significant vulnerability” wording, opting instead to reaffirm that financial authorities around the world should “advise” their domestic banks to exercise “enhanced due diligence” concerning Iran’s AML/CFT “deficiencies.” In linking its March 20 advisory to the recent FATF statements, apparently FinCEN cannot wait for FATF or anyone else to evaluate the effectiveness of Iran’s brand new anti-financial crime laws.

Anyway, the “deficiencies in Iran’s AML/CFT” is probably the main wording FinCEN will use to justify application of one its most powerful sanctions tools, a USA Patriot Act Section 311 designation (see below).

Hammering away at Iran’s state-owned banks is central to US efforts to raise an international hue and cry. Through its state-owned banks, FinCEN states, “the Government of Iran disguises its involvement in proliferation and terrorism activities through an array of deceptive practices specifically designed to evade detection.” By managing to get inserted the names of two state-owned banks in the most recent UN Security Council resolution on Iran, the US can now portray the cream of Iran’s financial establishment (Bank Melli and Bank Saderat are Iran’s two largest banks) as directly integrated into alleged regime involvement in a secret nuclear weaponization program and acts of terrorism.

Read all of it here.

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So?

Posted on March 29, 2008 by RagBlog

Well, this should yield lots of great results. Maybe Darth will even give all of us the same “respect” he gave Patrick Leahy on the Senate floor a few years ago.

Richard Jehn / The Rag Blog

American Public Says Government Leaders Should Pay Attention to Polls: Eight in Ten Say Public Should Have Greater Influence on Government
By Steven Kull

In sharp contrast to views recently expressed by Vice President Cheney, a new poll finds that an overwhelming majority of Americans believe government leaders should pay attention to public opinion polls and that the public should generally have more influence over government leaders than it does.

Eighty-one percent say when making “an important decision” government leaders “should pay attention to public opinion polls because this will help them get a sense of the public’s views.” Only 18 percent said “they should not pay attention to public opinion polls because this will distract them from deciding what they think is right.”

When ABC News correspondent Martha Raddatz cited polling data showing majority opposition to the Iraq war, Cheney responded, “So?” Asked, “So–you don’t care what the American people think?” he responded, “No,” and explained, “I think you cannot be blown off course by the fluctuations in the public opinion polls.”

Americans also roundly reject the position put forward by White House spokeswoman Dana Perino in an effort to explain Cheney’s comments. Asked whether the public should have “input,” she replied, “You had your input. The American people have input every four years, and that’s the way our system is set up.”

When Americans are asked whether they think that “elections are the only time when the views of the people should have influence, or that also between elections leaders should consider the views of the people as they make decisions,” an extraordinary 94 percent say that government leaders should pay attention to the views of the public between elections.

These findings are part of a larger international poll conducted by WorldPublicOpinion.org, an international research project managed by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland. The poll of 975 Americans was fielded from January 18 to 27 by Knowledge Networks. The margin of error was +/-3.2 percent.

The focus of the study is the principle expressed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that “The will of the people should be the basis of the authority of government.” Presented this statement, 87 percent of Americans say they agree with it.

Read the rest here.

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Nuclear Reactors – Recalling Their Consequences

Posted on March 29, 2008 by RagBlog

Three Mile Island at 29: Reactors and Infant Health
By John LaForge

Today marks 29 years since the partial meltdown and radiation disaster at Three Mile Island (TMI) near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. News accounts noted the reactor’s loss-of-coolant, fuel melting, multiple explosions, venting of radioactive gases, dumping of contaminated water and the buildup of explosive hydrogen inside the reactor vessel. The accident caused such a nationwide scare that the expansion of nuclear power ended in the United States.

Yet the environmental and health consequences of the TMI disaster aren’t widely understood. Official cover-ups, industry propaganda, and ignorance of radiation-induced illnesses have led to present-day trivialization of TMI and a supposed revival of reactor construction. Any such revival is totally dependent on billions in federal subsidies included in the recent energy bill, because, as Forbes magazine blazoned across its cover: “The failure of the U.S. nuclear power program ranks as the largest managerial disaster in business history, a disaster on a monumental scale.”

The nuclear industry’s attempt to raise nuclear power from the dead involves denying the damage resulting from TMI itself and flies in the face of 25 years of science regarding the effects of low-dose radiation. One Wisconsin legislator said on the record last December, “Three Mile Island was a success of containment.”

Things weren’t much different in 1979. President Carter’s Kemeny Commission hurriedly finished its report on the disaster issuing it in Oct. 1979. The commission did not consider any data on the effects of wind-borne radiation, although the wind blew 6-to-9 mph toward upstate New York and western Pennsylvania.

Over 10 million curies of radioactive noble gases including 43,000 curies of krypton-85 — which stays in the environment for 100 years — as well as 15-to-24 curies of radioactive iodine-131, were vented from the “containment” building. (A curie — 37 billion disintegrations per second — is a huge amount of radiation.) As the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) later noted, several “deliberate but uncontrolled releases” were used to vent radioactive gas. Official airborne release estimates are just guesses, because of the insufficient number of outside radiation monitors half weren’t working, and a large number of them went off-scale.

On the third day of the venting of these gases, half the population within 15 miles — 144,000 people — fled the area. By this time the bulk of the accident’s airborne radiation was already spewed and drifting on the wind.

In addition, approximately 400,000 gallons of radioactive cooling water that had leaked from the reactor were secretly dumped into the Susquehanna River, a source of drinking water for nearby communities. Later about 2.3 million gallons of radioactively contaminated cooling water were allowed to be “evaporated” into the atmosphere.

In 1980, Pennsylvania State Health Department authorities reported a sharp rise in hypothyroidism in newborn infants in the three counties downwind from the reactor. Late in 1979, four times as many infants as normal were born with the disease. The NRC said the increase was unrelated to radiation released by TMI. Upwind incidence of the disease had dropped to below the national average.

Read the rest here.

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National Propaganda Radio

Posted on March 28, 2008 by RagBlog


NPR News: National Pentagon Radio?
by Norman Solomon

While the Iraqi government continued its large-scale military assault in Basra, the NPR reporter’s voice from Iraq was unequivocal this morning: “There is no doubt that this operation needed to happen.”

Such flat-out statements, uttered with journalistic tones and without attribution, are routine for the U.S. media establishment. In the “War Made Easy” documentary film, I put it this way: “If you’re pro-war, you’re objective. But if you’re anti-war, you’re biased. And often, a news anchor will get no flak at all for making statements that are supportive of a war and wouldn’t dream of making a statement that’s against a war.”

So it goes at NPR News, where — on “Morning Edition” as well as the evening program “All Things Considered” — the sense and sensibilities tend to be neatly aligned with the outlooks of official Washington. The critical aspects of reporting largely amount to complaints about policy shortcomings that are tactical; the underlying and shared assumptions are imperial. Washington’s prerogatives are evident when the media window on the world is tinted red-white-and-blue.

Earlier this week — a few days into the sixth year of the Iraq war — “All Things Considered” aired a discussion with a familiar guest.

“To talk about the state of the war and how the U.S. military changes tactics to deal with it,” said longtime anchor Robert Siegel, “we turn now to retired Gen. Robert Scales, who’s talked with us many times over the course of the conflict.”

This is the sort of introduction that elevates a guest to truly expert status — conveying to the listeners that expertise and wisdom, not just opinions, are being sought.

Siegel asked about the progression of assaults on U.S. troops over the years: “How have the attacks and the countermeasures to them evolved?”

Naturally, Gen. Scales responded with the language of a military man. “The enemy has built ever-larger explosives,” he said. “They’ve found clever ways to hide their IEDs, their roadside bombs, and even more diabolical means for detonating these devices.”

We’d expect a retired American general to speak in such categorical terms — referring to “the enemy” and declaring in a matter-of-fact tone that attacks on U.S. troops became even more “diabolical.” But what about an American journalist?

Well, if the American journalist is careful to function with independence instead of deference to the Pentagon, then the journalist’s assumptions will sound different than the outlooks of a high-ranking U.S. military officer.

In this case, an independent reporter might even be willing to ask a pointed question along these lines: You just used the word “diabolical” to describe attacks on the U.S. military by Iraqis, but would that ever be an appropriate adjective to use to describe attacks on Iraqis by the U.S. military?

In sharp contrast, what happened during the “All Things Considered” discussion on March 24 was a conversation of shared sensibilities. The retired U.S. Army general discussed the war effort in terms notably similar to those of the ostensibly independent journalist — who, along the way, made the phrase “the enemy” his own in a followup question.

It wouldn’t be fair to judge an entire news program on the basis of a couple of segments. But I’m a frequent listener to “All Things Considered” and “Morning Edition.” Such cozy proximity of world views, blanketing the war maker and the war reporter, is symptomatic of what ails NPR’s war coverage — especially from Washington.

Of course there are exceptions. Occasional news reports stray from the narrow baseline. But the essence of the propaganda function is repetition, and the exceptional does not undermine that function.

To add insult to injury, NPR calls itself public radio. It’s supposed to be willing to go where commercial networks fear to tread. But overall, when it comes to politics and war, the range of perspectives on National Public Radio isn’t any wider than what we encounter on the avowedly commercial networks.

And a commenter adds:

Or just National Propaganda Radio…

I stopped listening in 2000, during the presidential campaign.

Polls had shown that two-thirds of us wanted third-party candidates in the debates, but when Cokie Roberts had Bush on the air and asked him about this, he said something like, “No, the American people want to see me and Al Gore go toe-to-toe on the issues.” That was a blatant lie and when Cokie failed to call him on it I knew the whole interview was pure propaganda BS. I turned NPR off permanently at that moment.

The documentary film “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death,” based on Norman Solomon’s book of the same name, went into home-video release this week and is now available on DVD from Netflix, Amazon and similar outlets. For more information, go to: http://www.WarMadeEasyTheMovie.org/.

Source

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Iraq Sucked. Now Get On With It.

Posted on March 28, 2008 by RagBlog

In Iraq, Was I a Torturer?
By Justine Sharrock / Mother Jones / March 27, 2008

The prisons in Iraq stink. Ask any guard or interrogator and they’ll tell you it’s a smell they’ll never forget: sweat, fear and rot. On the base where Ben Allbright served from May to September 2003, a small outfit named Tiger in western Iraq, water was especially scarce; Ben would rig a hose to a water bottle in a feeble attempt to shower. He and the other Army reservists tried mopping the floors, but the cheap solvents only added a chemical note to the stench. During the day, when the temperature was in the triple digits, the smell fermented.

It got even hotter in the Conex container, the kind you see on top of 18-wheelers, where Ben kept his prisoners. Not uncommonly the thermometer inside read 135, even 145 degrees. The Conex box was the first stop for all prisoners brought to the base, most of them Iraqis swept up during mass raids. Ben kept them blindfolded, their hands bound behind their backs with plastic zip ties, without food or sleep, for up to 48 hours at a time. He made them stand in awkward positions, so that they could not rest their heads against the wall. Sometimes he blared loud music, such as Ozzy or AC/DC, blew air horns, banged on the container, or shouted. “Whatever it took to make sure they’d stay awake,” he explains.

Ben was not a “bad apple,” and he didn’t make up these treatments. He was following standard operating procedure as ordered by military intelligence officers. The MI guys didn’t make up the techniques either; they have a long international history as effective torture methods. Though generally referred to by circumlocutions such as “harsh techniques,” “softening up,” and “enhanced interrogation,” they have been medically shown to have the same effects as other forms of torture. Forced standing, for example, causes ankles to swell to twice their size within 24 hours, making walking excruciating and potentially causing kidney failure.

Ben says he never saw anything like that. The detainees didn’t faint or go insane, as people have been known to do under similar conditions, but they also “weren’t exactly lucid.” And, he notes, “I was hardly getting any sleep myself.”

When I first set off to interview the rank-and-file guards and interrogators tasked with implementing the administration’s torture guidelines, I thought they’d never talk openly. They would be embarrassed, wracked by guilt, living in silent shame in communities that would ostracize them if they knew of their histories. What I found instead were young men hiding their regrets from neighbors who wanted to celebrate them as war heroes. They seemed relieved to talk with me about things no one else wanted to hear — not just about the acts themselves, but also about the guilt, pain and anger they felt along with pride and righteousness about their service. They struggled with these things, wanted to make sense of them — even as the nation seemed determined to dismiss the whole matter and move on.

This, perhaps, is the real scandal of Abu Ghraib: In survey after survey, as many as two-thirds of Americans say torture is justified when it’s used to get information from terrorists. In an ABC/Washington Post poll in the wake of the 2004 scandal, 60 percent of respondents classified what happened at Abu Ghraib as mere abuse, not torture. And as recently as last year, 68 percent of Americans told Pew Research pollsters that they consider torture an acceptable option when dealing with terrorists.

Critics of the administration’s interrogation policies warn that the ramifications will be felt across the globe, including by Americans unlucky enough to be imprisoned abroad. Foreign policy scholars fear the fallout from Abu Ghraib has already weakened the U.S. military’s anti-terrorism capabilities. Lawyers warn about war crime tribunals. But hardly anyone is discussing the repercussions already being felt here at home. It’s the soldiers tying the sandbags around Iraqis’ necks and blaring the foghorns through the night who are experiencing the effects most acutely. And the communities they’re returning to are reeling as a result.

When I went to visit Ben in Little Rock, Ark., I wanted to know why this charming, intelligent, and overly polite 27-year-old had done what he’d done. For 10 days we rode around in his beat-up maroon 1970s Mercedes — running errands, picking up job applications, meeting his girlfriend for lunch. Ben wore pink shirts, hipster blazers and color-coordinated Campers; he used hair products, which to his friends meant being a metrosexual; he listened to indie rock, watched “The Daily Show” and wrote attitude-filled blogs on veterans’ rights, which meant being a liberal. He refereed football games, worshipped novelist Dave Eggers and placed special orders at McDonald’s so his meals would be fresh.

He was unemployed, fired from his latest job as a bank teller the day before I arrived. Ben had worked there for four months — the longest he’d held down a full-time job since coming home from Iraq. He’d tried tutoring high schoolers, bagging groceries and doing IT support for Best Buy. Part of the problem, he said, was the lack of good jobs in the area, part of it his own “flailing and procrastinating.” He had toyed with the idea of law school and scored a near-perfect 178 on the LSAT entrance test, but then turned down offers from schools such as NYU. While I was in town he picked up an application for a job at his corner liquor store. In high school he was one of two students voted most likely to become famous. “The other kid became a doctor,” Ben confessed, “and I, well, yeah …”

[snip]

After Ben came home in March 2004, he was treated warmly. “I was at Applebee’s one night and a guy overheard that I had just come back from Iraq,” he recalls, “so he bought me a Jack and Coke.” He was offered discounts on cell phones and cars. “I finally felt appreciated after feeling used for so long.”

But the welcomes couldn’t silence the questions that kept him up at night. Ben loves to debate, perhaps because he usually wins, but now he was endlessly, fruitlessly arguing with himself. “Every human being instinctively knows right from wrong. There is never a justification for torture.” But then again, “Is softening people up wrong on some levels? I don’t know. It wasn’t beneficial to them, but it was presented as necessary.” He had seen a side of himself he didn’t know existed, and now he had to live with that. “In combat you question your mortality,” he told me. “In these prisons you question your morality.”

I asked Ben point-blank if he considered himself a torturer. It was a hard question to ask, a harder one to answer. He said he didn’t know. He asked me how other soldiers in his situation had responded. Most, I told him, didn’t even brook use of the word “torture” instead of “harsh interrogation.” He finally said he guessed he didn’t want to have to think of himself that way, and that it was time to go meet his girlfriend.

When he first got back from Iraq, Ben had nightmares and couldn’t remember things; this was infuriating, since he’d always prided himself on his perfect memory. A psychiatrist diagnosed him with PTSD, but he refused medication. Instead he blew $14,000 on bar tabs his first four months home. “I drank every night. I’d wake up next to a stranger at around 4 p.m. and head off to the strip club again.” He traveled some, because “you can reinvent yourself when you’re out of town.” He also re-enlisted; he’ll be on active duty until 2013, which means that once a month he has to cut his perfectly messy hair and show up at the local base. He thinks the military needs people like him, “people who can see both sides of things.”

Read all of this sad story here.

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Another Adrianople, Manzikert, or Rocroi

Posted on March 28, 2008 by RagBlog

Sadly, Bill Lind usually knows exactly what he’s talkin’ ’bout. Watch your backs, boys and girls …

Richard Jehn / The Rag Blog

Operation Cassandra
By William S. Lind / March 3, 2008

“Lew Rockwell”- — Admiral Fallon’s (forced?) resignation was the last warning we are likely to get of an attack on Iran. It does not mean an attack is certain, but the U.S. could not attack Iran so long as he was the CENTCOM commander. That obstacle is now gone.

Vice President Cheney’s Middle East tour is another indicator. According to a report in The American Conservative, on his previous trip Cheney told our allies, including the Saudis, that Bush would attack Iran before the end of his term. If that report was correct, then his current tour might have the purpose of telling them when it is coming.

Why not just do that through the State Department? State may not be in the loop, nor all of DOD for that matter. The State Department, OSD, the intelligence agencies, the Army and the Marine Corps are all opposed to war with Iran. Of the armed services, only the Air Force reportedly is in favor, seeking an opportunity to show what air power can do. As always, it neglects to inform the decision-makers what it cannot do.

The purpose of this column is not to warn of an imminent assault on Iran, though personally I think it is coming, and soon. Rather, it is to warn of a possible consequence of such an attack. Let me state it here, again, as plainly as I can: an American attack on Iran could cost us the whole army we now have in Iraq.

Lots of people in Washington are pondering possible consequences of an air and missile assault on Iran, but few if any have thought about this one. The American military’s endless “we’re the greatest” propaganda has convinced most people that the U.S. armed forces cannot be beaten in the field. They are the last in a long line of armies that could not be beaten, until they were.

Read all of it here.

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Crisis in Iraq. Big Time.

Posted on March 27, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Five Things You Need to Know to Understand the Latest Violence in Iraq
By Joshua Holland and Raed Jarrar / AlterNet / March 27

The traditional media is incapable of reporting what’s going on in Southern Iraq.

Heavy fighting has spread across Shia-dominated enclaves in Iraq over the past two days. The U.S.-backed regime of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has ordered 50,000 Iraqi troops to “crack down” — with coalition air support — on Shiite militias in the oil-rich and strategically important city of Basra, U.S. forces have surrounded Baghdad’s Sadr City and fighting has been reported in the southern cities of Kut, Diwaniya, Karbala and Hilla. Basra’s main bridge and an oil pipeline connecting it to Amara were destroyed Wednesday.

Six cities are under curfew, and acts of civil disobedience have shut down dozens of neighborhoods across the country. Civilian casualties have reportedly overwhelmed poorly equipped medical centers in Baghdad and Basra.

There are indications that the unilateral ceasefire declared last year by the nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr is collapsing. “The cease-fire is over; we have been told to fight the Americans,” one militiaman loyal to al-Sadr told the Christian Science Monitor’s Sam Dagher by telephone from Sadr City. Dagher added that the “same man, when interviewed in January, had stated that he was abiding by the cease-fire and that he was keeping busy running his cellular phone store.”

A political track is also in play: Sadr has called on his followers to take to the streets to demand Maliki’s resignation, and nationalist lawmakers in the Iraqi Parliament, led by al-Sadr’s block, are trying to push a no-confidence vote challenging the prime minister’s regime.

The conflict is one that the U.S. media appears incapable of describing in a coherent way. The prevailing narrative is that Basra has been ruled by mafialike militias — which is true — and that Iraqi government forces are now cracking down on the lawlessness in preparation for regional elections, which is not. As independent analyst Reider Visser noted:

Most importantly, there is a discrepancy between the description of Basra as a city ruled by militias (in the plural) … [and the] facts of the ongoing operations, which seem to target only one of these militia groups, the Mahdi Army loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr.

Surely, if the aim was to make Basra a safer place, it would have been logical to do something to also stem the influence of the other militias loyal to the local competitors of the Sadrists, the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq [SIIC], as well as the armed groups allied to the Fadila party (sic) (which have dominated the oil protection services for a long time). But so far, only Sadrists have complained about attacks by government forces.

The conflict doesn’t conform to the analysis of the roots of Iraqi instability as briefed by U.S. officials in the heavily-fortified Green Zone. It also doesn’t fit into the simplistic but popular narrative of a country wrought by sectarian violence, and its nature is obscured by the labels that the commercial media uncritically apply to the disparate centers of Iraqi resistance to the occupation.

The “crackdown” comes on the heels of the approval of a new “provincial law,” which will ultimately determine whether Iraq remains a unified state with a strong central government or is divided into sectarian-based regional governates. The measure calls for provincial elections in October, and the winners of those elections will determine the future of the Iraqi state. Control of the country’s oil wealth, and how its treasure will be developed, will also be significantly influenced by the outcome of the elections.

It’s a relatively straightforward story: Iraq is ablaze today as a result of an attempt to impose Colombian-style democracy on the unstable country: Maliki’s goal, shared by the like-minded allies among the Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish communities that dominate his administration, and with at least tacit U.S. approval, is to kill off the opposition and then hold a vote.

To better understand the nature of this latest round of conflict, here are five things one needs to know about what’s taking place across Iraq.

1. A visible manifestation of Iraq’s central-but-under-reported political conflict (not “sectarian violence”)

Iraq, which had experienced little or no sectarian-based violence prior to the U.S. invasion, has been plagued with sectarian militias fighting for the streets of Iraq’s formerly heterogeneous neighborhoods, and “sectarian violence” has become Americans’ primary explanation for the instability that has plagued the country.

But the sectarian-based street-fighting is a symptom of a larger political conflict, one that has been poorly analyzed in the mainstream press. The real source of conflict in Iraq — and the reason political reconciliation has been so difficult — is a fundamental disagreement over what the future of Iraq will look like. Loosely defined, it is a clash of Iraqi nationalists — with Muqtada al-Sadr as their most influential voice — who desire a unified Iraqi state and public-sector management of the country’s vast oil reserves and who forcefully reject foreign influence on Iraq’s political process, be it from the United States, Iran or other outside forces.

The nationalists now represent a majority in Iraq’s parliament but are opposed by what might be called Iraqi separatists, who envision a “soft partition” of Iraq into at least four semiautonomous and sectarian-based regional entities, welcome the privatization of the Iraqi energy sector (and the rest of the Iraqi economy) and rely on foreign support to maintain their power.

We’ve written about this long-standing conflict extensively in the past, and now we’re seeing it come to a head, as we believed it would at some point.

2. U.S. is propping up unpopular regime; Sadr has support because of his platform.

One of the ironies of the reporting out of Iraq is the ubiquitous characterization of Muqtada al-Sadr as a “renegade,” “radical” or “militant” cleric, despite the fact that he is the only leader of significance in the country who has ordered his followers to stand down. His ostensible militancy appears to arise primarily from his opposition to the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq.

He has certainly been willing to use violence in the past, but the “firebrand” label belies the fact that Sadr is arguably the most popular leader among a large section of the Iraqi population and that he has forcefully rejected sectarian conflict and sought to bring together representatives of Iraq’s various ethnic and sectarian groups in an effort to create real national reconciliation — a process that the highly sectarian Maliki regime has failed to accomplish.

It’s vitally important to understand that Sadr’s popularity and legitimacy is a result of his having a platform that’s favored by an overwhelming majority of Iraqis.

Most Iraqis:

Favor a strong central government free of the influence of militias.

Oppose, by a 2-1 margin, the privatization of Iraq’s energy sector — a “benchmark towards progress according to the Bush administration.

Favor a U.S. withdrawal on a short timeline (PDF) (most believe the United States plans to build permanent bases — both are issues about which the Sadrists have been vocal.

Oppose al Qaeda and the ideology of Osama Bin Laden and, to a lesser degree, Iranian influence on Iraq’s internal affairs.

With the exception of their opposition to Al Qaeda, the five major separatist parties — Sunni, Shia and Kurdish — that make up Maliki’s governing coalition are on the deeply unpopular side of these issues. A poll conducted last year found that 65 percent of Iraqis think the Iraqi government is doing a poor job, and Maliki himself has a Bush-like 66 percent disapproval rate.

Read all of it here.
From Roger Baker / The Rag Blog

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Tibetan Monks Spoil Press Party

Posted on March 27, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Tibetan monks at the Jokhang Temple in Lhasa on Thursday. Photo by Andy Wong / AP.

Monks Protest During Press Tour of China
By David Barboza / New York Times / March 28, 2008

SHANGHAI — Tibetan monks shouting pro-independence slogans caught Chinese officials by surprise Thursday during a highly scripted tour for foreign journalists in Lhasa’s central Buddhist temple, disrupting China’s effort to portray the recent Tibetan rioting as the work of violent criminal thugs and separatists.

“Tibet is not free! Tibet is not free!” yelled one young Buddhist monk, who then started crying, said an Associated Press correspondent in the tour.

Government handlers shouted for the journalists to leave and tried to pull them away during the 15-minute protest by about 30 monks at the Jokhang Monastery in the Tibetan capital, one of Tibet’s holiest shrines. It was unclear whether the protesting monks were arrested.

The demonstration amounted to another embarrassment for China, which organized the press tour to help sway international opinion. Foreign coverage and reaction has focused on China’s heavy crackdown and arrests in the aftermath of the riots and has led to talk among some foreign officials of boycotting the Summer Olympic Games in Beijing.

The Chinese wanted the reporters invited on the tour to see damage caused by the rioters and to interview Chinese victims of the violence, the worst here in 20 years.

But during the tour of the temple, reporters said, some monks shouted that there was no religious freedom in Tibet and that the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s spiritual leader in exile, had been wrongly accused by China of responsibility for the rioting. Some journalists even said a monk complained that the government had planted fake monks in the monastery to talk to the media.

China’s official news agency, Xinhua, mentioned the unscripted protest in a brief dispatch, saying 12 monks “stormed into a briefing by a temple administrator to cause chaos.”

Some American news organizations were invited to send representatives on the three-day press tour, but The New York Times was not.

The protest came a day after President Bush encouraged President Hu Jintao of China in a telephone discussion to initiate talks with the Dalai Lama, who is exiled in India.

China’s state-run media said that Mr. Hu responded that China has always been open to discussions with the Dalai Lama, as long as he renounces independence for Tibet and abandons efforts to “fan and mastermind violent crimes.”

There was also pressure Thursday from an international group of distinguished scholars, who wrote an open letter to Mr. Hu calling on China to “take steps to end the harsh repression” in Tibet.

The scholars, who specialize in Tibetan studies and teach at some of the world’s leading universities, also said the “tactic of blaming the unrest on the Dalai Lama masks a refusal on the part of the Chinese government to recognize the failures of its own policies.”

With international pressure mounting, particularly in Europe, China’s Foreign Ministry issued a separate statement Thursday, saying Beijing “bitterly opposes any country’s interference” in the Tibet issue. The ministry labeled foreign reports about Tibet “irresponsible and biased.”

For nearly a week, the state-controlled media have contended that some Western news organizations have wrongly described the riots in Tibet as “peaceful protests” and that some photographs distorted the government’s actions in Tibet.

China’s state-controlled media, though, have only been allowed to publish favorable articles on the government’s role in Tibet. At the same time, some foreign journalists in China have complained about efforts to impede or disrupt their reporting, despite the government’s pledges of greater openness in the months leading up to the Olympics.

On Thursday, the Associated Press reported that after the protest by monks at the Lhasa temple, the area was sealed off. Journalists seeking to report independently, away from government guides, were followed on foot and by car.

Chen Yang contributed research.

Source.

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More On Police State Amerikkka

Posted on March 27, 2008 by RagBlog

We are coming to the point that we must conclude that George W. Bush and his entire administration could not, cannot, and will never do one fucking thing right. Now they turn away Iraqi refugees for having participated 17 years ago in efforts to overthrow Saddam Hussein, and call them terrorists, to-boot. What will come next, aside from the inevitable economic meltdown that is on our horizon?

Richard Jehn / The Rag Blog

“Was George Washington a Terrorist?” Patriots, Refugees and Terrorists
By Joanne Mariner

“Was George Washington a terrorist?” asked Bill Frelick, Human Rights Watch’s refugee policy director, only semi-facetiously.

What sparked his question was the exceedingly broad definition of terrorist activity employed in U.S. immigration law. That definition, as expanded in the USA PATRIOT Act and REAL ID Act, applies to “any activity which is unlawful under the laws of the place where it is committed,” when that activity involves the use of a weapon or “dangerous device” with the intent “to endanger, directly or indirectly, the safety of one or more individuals or to cause substantial damage to property.” The actions of a present-day George Washington would most certainly be covered.

A concrete reason why this broad definition is worrying is that under current U.S. law, people who have engaged in terrorist activities, or who have provided support for terrorist activities–in many cases, even involuntary support–are presumptively barred from resettlement in the United States as refugees. Among the thousands of people negatively affected by this rule in recent years have been Colombians who paid small bribes under duress to paramilitary groups, Burmese who were forcibly conscripted into rebel armies, and Cubans who supported “counter-revolutionary” groups funded by the US government.

The patent unfairness of this broad ban has garnered congressional attention and, as of last year, the problem was supposed to have been remedied. In December, Congress passed legislation that broadened executive authority to grant waivers to deserving refugees who would otherwise be barred under the law’s overly broad “terrorism”-related bans.

Yet the reform does not seem to have worked. In recent months it has become clear that, despite the changes in the terms of the law, the Department of Homeland Security is continuing to bar refugees who should benefit from the expanded waiver authority. These people have fled their countries to escape persecution, and they’re being told that they’re terrorists. What is going on?

Democrats and Mujahideen

Since the December amendments to the immigration laws, a number of refugees have received letters from the Department of Homeland Security informing them that they are being denied permanent residence in the United States because of facts that they stated on their applications for refugee status.

Among those who have received such letters are:

. Iraqi refugees who took part in failed efforts to overthrow Saddam Hussein in the 1990s;

. Afghans who supported the mujahideen groups that fought the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, including groups that the United States funded;

. Sudanese who belonged to the Democratic Unionist Party, a democratic party opposed to the current Sudanese government and a partner in U.S. negotiations in the region.

In rejecting these people’s applications for permanent residence, DHS is relying on facts that, in many cases, were fully disclosed in their initial refugee applications. Circumstances that, in other words, were deemed acceptable under what were supposed to be tougher rules are now being relied upon to bar people from staying in the United States. In some instances, moreover, the department appears to be characterizing First-Amendment-protected speech as support of terrorism.

Politicians and Bureaucrats

Although the omnibus appropriations bill that was passed by Congress last December was lauded as an important immigration law reform, the officials at the Department of Homeland Security charged with implementing the new rules don’t seem to have gotten the message. Before too many deserving refugees are barred from the United States as terrorists, there needs to be clear and authoritative guidance from on high.

Senior DHS officials need to review the rules being applied in these cases to ensure that the Department of Homeland Security is actually implementing the statutory waiver authority that it has been granted. Congress has spoken and the law has changed: “Terrorism”-related immigration bans should not be applied to refugees who do not pose any threat to the United States.

In the longer term, of course, the law’s definition of terrorism should be narrowed to reflect a more meaningful, common-sense understanding of the term. While expanding DHS’s waiver authority was a step forward, it is still absurd that a present-day George Washington would require a waiver to settle in the United States.

Joanne Mariner is a human rights attorney.

Source

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