The Rag Blog

Lupe Valdez, gay hispanic sheriff of Dallas County, at Gay Pride Parade

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From Harry Edwards / The Rag Blog

No Standing to Lecture on Justice
By JACOB HORNBERGER

U.S. officials are hopping mad over the outcome of a criminal prosecution in Iraq. Two Iraqi officials who had been accused of kidnapping and murder walked out of an Iraqi court Monday as free men after the prosecutor moved to drop the case for lack of evidence. The two men were former Iraqi Health Ministry officials. The case was being tried in the multimillion-dollar Rule of Law Complex, which is quite a site to behold.

Why were the American officials, who chose to remain anonymous, so angry and upset? Because the prosecutor’s decision was not in accord with what American officials felt should have been done. They felt that the defendants should have been prosecuted and convicted. According to one anonymous U.S. official quoted in the Washington Post, the dropping of the charges “shows that the judicial system in Iraq is horribly broken.”

One obvious question arises: What business do U.S. officials have intervening in Iraqi judicial matters? But a much more important question arises: What standing does the U.S. government have to be lecturing anyone, including the Iraqis, on a proper judicial system?

After all, let’s not forget the U.S. government’s model “judicial” system in Cuba. It’s “principles” include:

1. The accused are denied the right to an independent judiciary to preside over their case. Instead, the trials are conducted by military tribunals headed by biased U.S. military officials who answer to President Bush as their commander in chief.

2. Trial by an impartial jury is not permitted. The guilt or innocence of the accused is decided by military officials who have to answer to President Bush as their commander in chief.

3. The judges get to make up the rules of procedure as they go along, producing a perfect model of arbitrariness at every step of the proceeding.

4. The accused are denied speedy trials. Some of them have been incarcerated for several years without trial.

5. The accused are tortured into confessing their guilt.

6. Evidence acquired by torture can be used to convict the accused.

7. Hearsay evidence is admissible to convict the accused.

8. Defendants are not guaranteed the right to confront their witnesses and cross-examine them.

9. Cruel and unusual punishments, including torture, can be inflicted on the defendants, even before conviction.

10. Defendants are denied the right to habeas corpus.

In fact, it’s entirely appropriate that this despicable and shameful kangaroo system is located in Cuba because it is quite similar to the one run by Fidel Castro’s minions on the other side of the island. One thing is for sure: the U.S. government’s model “judicial” system in Cuba flies in the face of every procedural principle of due process enunciated in the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

Also, it’s ironic that the judicial complex in Iraq is called the Rule of Law Center, given it would be difficult to find a better example of a violation of the “rule of the law” than the U.S. government’s arbitrary post-9/11 power to send accused terrorists either down the federal-court route or the kangaroo military-tribunal route.

We also shouldn’t forget the U.S. government’s kidnappings, torture, rendition, torture-through-proxy, indefinite incarceration, murder, disappearances of detainees, spying, and warrantless searches, along with its practice of granting immunity to U.S. officials and their compatriots in the private sector who commit such crimes.

The best thing that U.S. officials could do is close down their kangaroo “judicial” tribunal system at Guantanamo Bay, transfer all prisoners to the jurisdiction of U.S. federal courts, leave the Iraqi people alone, and stop lecturing the world on law and justice. It would be a good first step toward restoring America’s moral standing in the world.

Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.

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Arms Dealer’s Planes Flew U.S. Missions in Iraq
By Justin Rood and Maddy Sauer

Viktor Bout Was an International Fugitive at the Time His Planes Were Used by the U.S.

06/03/08 “ABC News ” — — When U.S. officials announce the arrest of a notorious arms dealer and drug-runner this afternoon, the fact that his planes flew U.S. supply missions in Iraq will likely go unmentioned.

In a January 2005 letter to Congress, then-Assistant Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz admitted the Defense Department “did conduct business with companies that, in turn, subcontracted work to second-tier providers who leased aircraft owned by companies associated with Mr. Bout.”

At the time, Bout was already a wanted international fugitive. Intelligence officials had considered Bout one of the greatest threats to U.S. interests, in the same league as al Qaeda kingpin Osama bin Laden. Interpol had issued a warrant for his arrest; the United Nations Security Council had restricted his travel.

But that didn’t stop U.S. government contractors from paying Bout-controlled firms roughly $60 million to fly supplies into Iraq in support of the U.S. war effort, according to a book released last year by two reporters who investigated Bout. And it didn’t prevent the U.S. military from giving Bout’s pilots millions of dollars in free airplane fuel while they were flying U.S. supply flights.

From 2003 through at least 2005, Pentagon contractors used air cargo companies known to be connected to Bout to fly an estimated 1,000 supply trips into and out of Iraq, according to “Merchant of Death: Money, Guns, Plans, and the Man Who Makes War Possible” by Douglas Farah and Stephen Braun. A Pentagon spokesman confirmed to the authors that the military gave 500,000 gallons of fuel to Bout’s pilots.

In an interview Thursday, Farah said he understood Bout may have worked on behalf of the U.S. government as recently as last year.

Read it here.

Who leaked the details of a CIA-Mossad plot against Iran?
By Yossi Melman

06/03/08 “Haaretz” — — The Bush administration is prolonging the hunting season against journalists. The latest victim is James Risen, The New York Times reporter for national security and intelligence affairs. About three months ago, a federal grand jury issued a subpoena against him, ordering Risen to give evidence in court. A heavy blackout has been imposed on the affair, with the only hint being that it has to do with sensitive matters of “national security.”

But conversations with several sources who are familiar with the affair indicate that Risen has been asked to testify as part of an investigation aimed at revealing who leaked apparently confidential information about the planning of secret Central Intelligence Agency and Mossad missions concerning Iran’s nuclear program.

Risen included this information in his book, “State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration,” which was published in 2006. In the book, he discusses a number of ideas which he says were thought up jointly by CIA and Mossad operatives to sabotage Iran’s nuclear capabilities.

One of these ideas was to build electromagnetic devices, smuggling them inside Iran to sabotage electricity lines leading to the country’s central nuclear sites. According to the plan, the operation was supposed to cause a series of chain reactions which would damage extremely powerful short circuits in the electrical supply that would have led to failures of the super computers of Iran’s nuclear sites.

According to the book, the Mossad planners proposed that they would be responsible for getting the electromagnetic facilities into Iran with the aid of their agents in Iran. However, a series of technical problems prevented the plan’s execution.

Another of the book’s important revelations, which made the administration’s blood boil about James Risen, appeared in a chapter describing what was known as Operation Merlin, the code name for another CIA operation supposed to penetrate the heart of Iran’s nuclear activity, collect information about it and eventually disrupt it.

Operation Merlin

The CIA counter proliferation department hired a Soviet nuclear engineer who had previously, in the 1990s, defected to the United States and revealed secrets from the Soviet Union’s nuclear program. His speciality was in the field of what is called weaponization, the final stage of assembling a nuclear bomb.

The scientist was equipped with blueprints for assembling a nuclear bomb in which, without his knowledge, false drawings and information blueprints were planted about a nuclear warhead that was supposedly manufactured in the Soviet Union. The plan’s details had been fabricated by CIA experts, and so while they appeared authentic, they had no engineering or technological value.

The intention was to fool the scientist and send him to make contact with the Iranians to whom he would offer his services and blueprints. The American plot was aimed at getting the Iranians to invest a great deal of effort in studying the plans and to attempt to assemble a faulty warhead. But when the time came, they would not have a nuclear bomb but rather a dud.

However, Operation Merlin, which was so creative and original, failed because of CIA bungled planning. The false information inserted into the blueprints were too obvious and too easily detected and the Russian engineer discovered them. As planned, he made contact with the Iranian delegation to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna and handed over to them, also as planned, the blueprints.

Read all of it here.

Israeli Researcher : Moses High on Psychedelics

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Five YouTube Videos Show US Soldiers At Their Worst. Axis of Logic says they show them at their best.
Mar 5, 2008, 21:06

The Digg story “U.S. Soldier throws puppy off cliff” had, at last count, 5,527 votes. Digg commenters, never a demure crowd, aren’t holding back their rage. One comment, itself voted for 540 times, reads “Wow. I hope he got shot in the face later that day.”

This video exposes something about the dehumanization of American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan that most of us don’t want to think about. Here are five more videos that show just how far gone our troops are.

A warning: These videos are explicit and — with the known correlation between violence toward animals and violence toward other humans in mind — savagely disheartening.

To see the other videos, click here.

Here are two important articles discussing the Democratic presidential race and especially the destructive turn the Hillary Clinton campaign has taken, much of it under the direction of Mark Penn. These pieces put current events in a little perspective.

Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog

Hillary, And a Little History
By Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair / CounterPunch / March 5, 2008

The race for the Democratic nomination now lurches on to what is already being billed as the next major battleground in Pennsylvania on April 22, and any Democrat with any memory of kindred blood lettings in the past should shiver as history begins to repeat itself. After eight disastrous years of Bush, with a candidate like John McCain, who says he knows nothing the economy and thinks the US will be in Iraq for the next 100 years, almost the only way any Democratic nominee can lose the presidential face off in the fall with be a protracted internecine battle, ultimately decided by the Democratic convention in the last week of August.

The press is blaring tidings of a great Clinton comeback in Ohio and Texas last night, both states in which she had twenty point leads in late February. But in terms of delegates Obama is ahead by what appears to be an insurmountable margin. The only way Hillary Clinton can win the nomination is to savage Obama with calumnies, bloodying him to a point where the Clintons can make the case to the super delegates in the convention that in a race against McCain Obama has already been fatally wounded.

It’s a course to which the Clinton campaign is now totally committed, exactly along the lines advocated by Mark Penn, Hillary’s pollster and chief strategist. Penn’s policy has been the antithesis of any grand coalition of the kind put together by Roosevelt in the 1930s. Already in South Carolina the Clinton campaign was willing to throw the black vote overboard. In Texas Clinton deliberately exploited Hispanic-black animosities.

Obama has plenty to be rueful about. He managed the astounding feat of being on the defensive in Ohio about trade, at the hands of a Clinton. The history of the late 1980s and 1990s was the Clintons at the head of the Democratic Leadership Council, arguing that the free trade agreements were essential to America’s future. Ohio, devastated by job flight was treated to the spectacle of the Obama campaign failing on this very issue, because Obama shrank from making the full case against what Clinton did to working people in the 1990s. He could have slaughtered the Clinton record on Hillary’s disastrous effort at health care reform, on the trade agreements, on the welfare bill, on the well- documented fact that the people who did well in the Clinton era were the rich. He was too innately cautious to play the populist card and he paid the price.

The adulatory press coverage that Obama enjoyed throughout February took the edge of his campaign and left it flatfooted when Hillary had the effrontery to claim that Obama was the one who had to do the explaibing on NAFTA. Obama was similarly slow to counter Hillary’s decision to play the national security card, telling the voters that the American people would be safe in either her on John McCain’s hands but not those of the young senator.

If Obama could not swiftly counter by pointing out that Clinton bought the Bush line on the war hook, line and sinker, doing no independent checking of her own, then his prospects of standing up to McCain don’t look too rosy. A campaign has to be ready to throw mud and there’s mud by the barrow load for Obama to throw at Clinton but in the end she was the one who put him on the defensive.

In 1968 the antiwar forces came to the convention in Chicago fired with the sense that their candidates, Eugene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy, had crushed Hubert in the primaries. But just as Richard Daley’s police battered the protesters, so too did the party machine crush the antiwar forces and force Hubert Humphrey down their throats inside the convention hall. Humphrey was never able to reunite the fractured party and lost to Richard Nixon.

In 1972 the party bosses never accepted George McGovern, who finally accepted the nomination at three am in Miami and was sabotage by the Democrats and the AFL-CIO and crushed by Nixon in the fall.

Not learning from this, the Democrats saw Teddy Kennedy launch an insurgency against Jimmy Carter in 1980 which spluttered all the way to the convention, where Kennedy refused to concede and drew blood from Carter until the bitter end. A weakened Carter went down before Reagan in a terrible rout for the Democrats.

The Clintons have never been confused their own political fortunes with those of the Democratic Party. In 1996 and 1998 Bill Clinton refused to release campaign surpluses from his own war chest to help elect Democrats to the House and the Senate. Obama’s campaign has most certainly rallied blacks and the young to the Democratic Party. These new recruits will surely melt away as they see the party machine grind the politics of hope in the dirt.

McCain couldn’t have hoped for a better day.

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From David Hamilton / The Rag Blog

Hillary Plays the Gender Card:
The Democrats and Identity Politics
By Robert Parry / Consortiumnews.com / March 6, 2008

The campaign press corps missed what may have been the most important comment in the Feb. 26 debate – when Hillary Clinton reminded women that their chance of electing the first female president was slipping away.

“You know, obviously, I am thrilled to be running to be the first woman president, which I think would be a sea change in our country and around the world, and would give enormous… [applause] … you know, enormous hope and, you know, a real challenge to the way things have been done and who gets to do them and what the rules are,” she said in the debate.

The impact of this appeal to women to rally around one of their own – combined with well-coordinated negative attacks on Barack Obama – worked wonders in the March 4 contests, much like a similar strategy helped Clinton overcome a surprise loss in Iowa with a rebound victory in New Hampshire.

Sen. Clinton has vowed not to play the gender card – sometimes even as she was playing it – but it may represent the strongest suit in her political deck. In Ohio, in particular, she used it to reestablish her electoral dominance among middle-aged and older white women.

On March 4, Clinton won Ohio, Texas and Rhode Island, while Obama carried only Vermont. But what was striking – especially about the Ohio exit polls – was how Clinton solidified her hold on white women and trounced her black male rival among white voters in all but the youngest demographic group.

Overall in Ohio, white women went for Clinton by 67 percent to 31 percent, but the numbers were surely even higher among older white women when one looks at the rejection of Obama among white voters 30-years-old and over.

Though white voters 17-to-29-years-old narrowly favored Obama, 48 percent to 47 percent, whites 30-to-44-years-old voted for Clinton by 60 percent to 40 percent; whites 45-to-59-years-old backed Clinton 66 percent to 32 percent and whites over 60 favored Clinton by a whopping 72 percent to 24 percent. [See CNN’s Ohio exit poll.]

So, at least for now, the Clinton campaign strategy has achieved two key goals – to play the gender card in a positive way to unite white women behind Hillary and to play the race card in a negative way to “ghetto-ize” Obama as the “black candidate” who is somehow unsettling to whites.

By defining Obama more by his race, the Clinton campaign also gained an important wedge issue that helped drive Hispanic voters to Clinton’s side, a development that proved important in Texas. [See CNN’s Texas exit poll.]

In addition, the Clinton campaign’s sub-rosa attempts to dirty up Obama by planting negative stories about him in friendly media outlets – as well as “working the refs” by insisting that the press corps needed to be more critical of Obama – contributed to Clinton’s success by helping to generate more critical coverage of the Illinois senator.

While the Clinton strategy finally seems to be clicking, it has alarmed some Democratic leaders who now view this summer’s convention in Denver as likely to be a showdown between two bitterly divided camps.

Hillary Clinton has made clear she will insist on the nomination even if she trails in elected delegates, and Obama’s side is sure to be furious if the “establishment” rips the prize away from its candidate. Whoever emerges the bloodied victor will face a daunting task of reuniting the party and defeating Republican John McCain in November.

Identity Politics

The Democrats’ descent into “identity politics” was always a danger for a party with two trailblazing candidates representing the first serious chance for a black or a woman to be elected president. But the slippery slope largely was avoided prior to the Iowa caucuses.

Obama shunned overt references to race, instead stressing his appeal as a candidate who could bring unity to the country. Clinton slid into gender appeal only on occasion, like when she was confronting criticism for a controversial vote on declaring Iran’s Revolutionary Guard a “global terrorist organization.”

On Nov. 1, 2007, after a bruising Democratic debate against male rivals, Clinton returned to her alma mater, Wellesley College, and declared that “in so many ways, this all women’s college prepared me to compete in the all boys’ club of presidential politics.”

Clinton then urged Wellesley students to help her win the presidency. “We’re ready to shatter that highest glass ceiling,” Clinton said. [NYT, Nov. 2, 2007]

But it was only after Obama stunned Clinton with a decisive victory in the Iowa caucuses that she laid down the gender card in spades.

In New Hampshire, Clinton presented herself as an embattled woman facing unfair treatment. On Jan. 7, a day before the primary, her voice cracked when responding to a question about how she managed to hold up.

“It’s not easy, it’s not easy,” Clinton responded slowly in a softer voice than she normally uses. “I couldn’t do it if I did not passionately believe it was the right thing to do. It’s very personal to me.”

As her eyes grew moist, she added, “It’s about our country, it’s about our kids’ future.” Her wet-eyed moment – a woman daring to show her vulnerable side – immediately became a campaign turning point.

Read all of it here.

From Jim Baldauf / The Rag Blog

Democracy is ill served by its self-appointed guardians
By Simon Jenkins

Our sonorous moralising lies behind so much bloodshed in the past 50 years. A sense of history surely counsels humility

05/03/08 “The Guardian” — – This week’s Russian elections were “limited” and “less than free and fair”, according to western monitors. The last elections in Iraq, by contrast, were “a triumph for democracy”. The forthcoming elections in Zimbabwe and Iran have been pre-emptively dismissed as a travesty. Those in Pakistan were, by general consent, an affirmation of freedom.

Democracies are like two-year-olds: adorable when they belong to you, but you never see them as others do. Downing Street had a problem with the new Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, since the procedure by which he was chosen was little short of feudal. Yet Gordon Brown could hardly slap him on the back as the victor in some great electoral tourney. Medvedev might hit back with a joke about western leaders also being slid into office by friends and predecessors – and at least he had an election of sorts. The British prime minister wisely muttered something noncommittal and put down the phone.

We are in the midst of an astonishing festival of elections in countries as diverse as Russia, Pakistan, Iran, Taiwan, Kenya, Georgia, Armenia, Cyprus, Thailand, Serbia, Zimbabwe, Spain and Italy. And then there is the daddy of them all, America’s primaries. Only one generalisation can be made of them, that no generalisation applies.

Democracy is the new Christianity. It is the chosen faith of western civilisation, and carrying it abroad is the acceptable face of the Crusader spirit. In reinterpreting Tony Blair’s interventionism, the foreign secretary, David Miliband, spoke recently of the west’s “mission” to promote democracy, even by economic and military warfare. With his eyes fixed on Iraq and Afghanistan, Miliband contrived both to assert that “we cannot impose democratic norms” and then demand that we do just that.

The truth is that neither Blair nor Miliband, nor the rest of us, has any idea of what we are about. We expect far too much of democracy, and of others who claim to espouse it. We treat it as a rigid set of rules from which no wavering is tolerable. The ballot is a sacred rite and any contamination is blasphemy. We incant the Nicene creed when we should stick to the Sermon on the Mount.

Let us upend the customary analysis. At one extreme stands an ideal: democracy as the full table d’hôte of secret ballots, civil rights, a free press, freedom of assembly, balance of power and discretionary local government. It applies in pathetically few states, even in the supposedly democratic west. Menken reasonably dismissed it as “a dream, to be put in the same category as Arcadia, Santa Claus and Heaven”.

At the other, more crowded extreme is a rough and ready electoral process exerting some form of restraint on a ruling elite. One of Africa’s nastiest dictators, Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, regards as a genuine threat the electoral challenge of his former finance minister, Simba Makoni, in an election Mugabe feels he cannot avoid. In Kenya what is significant is not that the leadership rigged an election but that the outcome was denied popular consent, and order collapsed as a result. The same happened in Serbia in 2000. Even Hugo Chávez, hero of Venezuela, had to concede defeat last autumn after a referendum denied his bid to rule for life.

Read all of it here.

Tomgram: Iraq, 2003-2008, Two Recipes for Disaster

The Commander-in-Chef Cooks Up a Storm: Recipes for Disaster in Iraq
By Tom Engelhardt and Frida Berrigan

In the week that oil prices once again crested above $100 a barrel and more Americans than at any time since the Great Depression owed more on their homes than the homes were worth; in the year that the subprime market crashed, global markets shuddered, the previously unnoticed credit-default swap market threatened to go into the tank, stagflation returned, unemployment rose, the “R” word (for recession) hit the headlines (while the “D” word lurked), within weeks of the fifth anniversary of his invasion of Iraq, the President of the United States officially discovered the war economy.

George W. Bush and Laura Bush were being interviewed by NBC’s Ann Curry when the subject turned to the war in Iraq. Curry reminded the President that his wife had once said, “No one suffers more than their president. I hope they know the burden of worry that’s on his shoulders every single day for our troops.” The conversation continued thusly:

“Bush: And as people are now beginning to see, Iraq is changing, democracy is beginning to tak[e] hold. And I’m convinced 50 years from now people look back and say thank God there was those who were willing to sacrifice.

“Curry: But you’re saying you’re going to have to carry that burden… Some Americans believe that they feel they’re carrying the burden because of this economy.

“Bush: Yeah, well —

“Curry: They say — they say they’re suffering because of this.

“Bush: I don’t agree with that.

“Curry: You don’t agree with that? Has nothing do with the economy, the war? The spending on the war?

“Bush: I don’t think so. I think actually, the spending on the war might help with jobs.

“Curry: Oh, yeah?

“Bush: Yeah, because we’re buying equipment, and people are working. I think this economy is down because we built too many houses.”

In other words, in honor of the soon-to-arrive fifth anniversary of his war without end, the President has offered a formula for economic success in bad times that might be summed up this way: less houses, more bases, more weaponry, more war. This, of course, comes from the man who, between 2001 and today, presided over an official Pentagon budget that leapt by more than 60% from $316 billion to $507 billion, and by more than 30% since Iraq was invaded. Looked at another way, between 2001 and the latest emergency supplemental request to pay for his wars (first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq), supplemental funding for war-fighting has jumped from $17 billion to $189 billion, an increase of 1,011%. At the same time, almost miraculously, the U.S. armed forces have been driven to the edge of the military equivalent of default.

Read Tom and Frida’s two recipes and much more here.