The Rag Blog

Wheelchair dumping is a relatively new term and age-old phenomenon. Few people ever heard of wheelchair dumping until this week. Thanks to a surveillance videotape and websites such as You Tube many of us know about Brian Sterner, a quadriplegic, who was literally dumped out of his wheelchair by a Tampa Florida police officer on January 29. The videotape is damning.

Conversely, the lack of any action on the part of the other police officers present that witnessed what happened to Sterner was equally inexcusable.

Even I, a hardened crippled man accustomed to social abuse, was shocked to see Sterner on the ground as officers casually laughed, put on plastic gloves and proceeded to frisk Sterner. The tape shows Sterner’s body was moved front to back, his pants askew, as though he were a sack of potatoes. This was not a scene from Cool Hand Luke where hardened criminals are treated brutally. Sterner, a quadriplegic, represented no physical threat.

What particularly fascinated me was one aspect of the press coverage. Headlines exploded across the United States and abroad. A random sampling includes: “Deputy dumped quadriplegic out of wheelchair” (MSNBC), “Deputies Suspended for Wheelchair dump” (AP), “Police dumped paralyzed man” (BBC News), “Fla. Deputy dumps quadriplegic from chair” (WFAA TX). Many news stories failed to mention an important part of the story: the actual name of the human being who was dumped out of his wheelchair. Thus the assault on Sterner did not end at the Tampa police department. The nameless Sterner was not fully human. He was merely “paralyzed”, “paraplegic”, “quadriplegic”.

This story brought two thoughts to mind: first, after my father died two years ago I needed to get my fingerprints taken. My father owned thoroughbred racehorses and most states, including New York where I reside, require all registered race horse-horse owners have their fingerprints taken and kept on file. I went to the local police station to have my prints taken only to discover there was no wheelchair access. I then went to the nearest New York State police department and there was no wheelchair access to this building either. Eventually I found a police station that was accessible — that is unless I was arrested. All the holding cells were impossible enter. This was comforting and alarming. I asked the officer who took my prints about wheelchair access and his reply was “don’t get arrested and you will not have a problem”. These were not comforting words. What I did not and should have said to this officer was that buildings housing police offices were required by the ADA circa 1990 to be accessible, a law that the town has ignored for 15 years.

The second thing that sprang to mind when I read and saw the raw video of a fellow crippled man being dumped out of his wheelchair was how common this has become. Here I am not referring to a horde of paralyzed people who are dumped out of their wheelchair by the police but rather the phenomenon and term “wheelchair dumping” itself. This phenomenon is not restricted to people that use wheelchairs. I consider “wheelchair dumping” to be a broader term that refers to all those who have a physical or mental deficit whose existence is no longer valued. The people that are dumped are generally poor, many elderly, often have no home to go to, lack adequate health insurance, and are estranged from family and friends. The people that are dumped are not wanted by a host of institutions such as my local police station, jails, mental institutions, rehabilitation hospitals, half way houses, homeless shelters etc. Sterner is thus far from unusual. Indeed the only surprise was that the actions of the officer that arrested him were caught on videotape. No tape no story.

This is not speculation. This is a fact. “Dumping” is a convenient, cost-effective way of eliminating people who have no social standing. Such events appear in the news with alarming regularity but are quickly forgotten. They are never perceived as a violation of a person’s civil rights. For example, last month Gabino Olvera, a mentally ill paraplegic man was dumped on Skid Row. Hollywood Presbyterian medical Center “discharged” Olvera in a soiled hospital gown without a wheelchair. Several witnesses reported that Olvera was clutching hospital documents between his teeth and was crawling back toward the van that dumped him on the street.

Wheelchair dumping is the antithesis of inclusion. Disability rights activists coined the term inclusion over the well-known concept mainstreaming. For nearly two decades disabled people have fought to be included, their existence valued. This effort has met stiff resistance — especially in the court and educational system. Disability rights activists have fought for inclusion because it reflects the idea that all members of society are equal and capable. In theory this idea is accepted but rarely if ever put into practice. It’s easier and cheaper to ignore the rights of disabled people and “dump” all those who don’t fit in. In the past we had institutions to dump people into — most of which were closed in the 1980s, thanks to Ronald Reagan. In their place we have a host of inaccessible facilities, like my local police station, or other government facilities, many of which contain “resource rooms”. The vast majority of these rooms accomplish what institutions once did — segregate those that are not wanted. It is easier for institutions such as public schools to “dump” all children with learning disabilities into a “resource room” than include them in classrooms with other children. If the parent or child balks, they can deem the child disruptive and the district can literally force the child out of the district and into “special programs”. It is up to the parent to hire experts and prove their child is not a disruption to other students. To me, this is the legacy that Reagan should be known for because he took dumping to an extreme — especially for those with mental illnesses who were dumped on urban street corners across the country.

Since the 1980s, I have seen this phenomenon of dumping spread inexorably. All sorts of people from police officers like the one who tipped Sterner out of his wheelchair, to hospital and school administrators, can now dump people they deem objectionable. The Sterner case is out of the norm in that the abuse he was endured was caught on videotape and involved a man who was not afraid to assert his rights (Sterner was the former director of the Florida Spinal Cord Injury Source Center and is currently working on his PhD). Sterner was arrested on a traffic related charge. Last fall he blocked an intersection with his car, was accused of fleeing an officer, and did not show up for a court appointment. Sterner readily admits he made mistakes that led to his arrest. He also says that when he was in the booking room of the Orient Road Jail, he told the arresting officer that he was a quadriplegic and could not stand up. According to officers, Sterner made a number of stupid comments, hardly justification for abuse. Apparently the arresting deputy did not believe Sterner was paralyzed and became agitated when he said he could not stand. This is when Sterner was unceremoniously dumped out of his wheelchair to the ground and frisked. The local sheriff in Tampa has publicly apologized to Sterner and the officer that arrested Sterner and those present when he was dumped out of his wheelchair was suspended and has now been charged with a third-degree felony, abuse of a disabled person. In his apology to Sterner the sheriff pointed out that over “72,000 inmates were processed through central booking, more than 230 of them came to jail in wheelchairs”. I sincerely doubt these words are comforting to Sterner.

Two thoughts: why was Sterner not using his own wheelchair instead of a markedly inferior jailhouse special.

Sterner, so often the nameless cripple, constrasts with Rodney King, a name that has instant recognition. Unless the media radically changes the way it has covered this case, Sterner will remain anonymous, reduced to “paralyzed man”, a secondary assault Mr. King was never subjected to.

Wheelchair dumping is not a new phenomenon. As noted in a history of the Black Panthers, in February 1945 Blues singer Blind Willie Johnson died of pneumonia after being denied hospital treatment. He was barred from the hospital not cause he was black but because he was blind. Wheelchair dumping is also not to be confused with “patient dumping”. There are laws against patient dumping. There are no laws to protect disabled people from wheelchair dumping. This has not prevented Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum from asking his Office of Civil Rights to review the video (the Hillsborough County Sheriff Office will cooperate fully). If McCollem’s office finds deputy’s violated Sterner’s civil rights it could sue on his behalf for up to $10,000 per infraction.

In spite of the obvious civil rights violation not one mainstream news outlet has stated the obvious or framed the story within the realm of civil rights. Sterner and other disabled Americans are routinely discriminated against yet of the hundreds of stories I read only one has a direct quote from Sterner stating as much. In a February 13 report by KXAN Sterner is quoted as stating “Do I believe people with disabilities have been getting the shaft for a long time? Yea. Do I want to do something about it? Yes. Absolutely.”

Within the disabled community there is much outrage — shock really, and the grim reminder that somehow the rights of those that have a physical deficit are somehow different. There is no question in my mind that Sterner was the victim of a hate crime. Why, I wonder, is this so hard to accept? Instead, replies posted to news reports all harp on the same thing, pity: no police officer should hurt a poor defenseless disabled person. There is outrage but it is grossly misplaced. What needs to be done is clear: first, disabled people must assert their civil rights — even if under less than desirable conditions — and their bipedal peers must support this effort. Second, we should follow the lead of the British disability rights group Disability Now and create a highly public hate crime dossier.

Disability Now has created “No Hiding Place” as part of their website that consists of a dossier of crimes against disabled people. It is categorized by impairment and lists the responses given by the Crown Protection Service (police forces involved). This is hardly a solution to hate crimes against disabled people but at least represents a start toward framing the issue as a civil rights violation.

Or Kyrgyzstan. Or Turkmenistan. But as your kids will be fighting there among the oil pipes, you should kiss Ted Rall’s crazy ass for going there first – and getting it all down in a book of dead-on cartoons and reportage, Silk Road to Ruin.

Rall almost didn’t make it back. The Taliban who was supposed to execute Rall spoke English – the gunman picked it up as an NYU grad student. As happens when two guys from New York get together, they talked about New York women. Rall told his executioner that you could learn a lot about women by looking at their legs. The Talib said he looks at their eyes. “Not like you got much choice,” Ted opined, noting the draped figures nearby.

This was, by definition, gallows humor. Lucky for Ted, the fanatic shooter needed a couple of chuckles. We all do. And Ted gives us plenty to laugh at in his journey through a horrific wonderland run by a gaggle of lunatic, blood-guzzling dictators (in other words, allies in our War on Terror) where locals play hockey with goat heads.

Silk Road even includes the recipe of Uzbekistan’s President, Islam Karimov, for boiling dissidents alive. (I suggest you skip page 160 where Rall includes a photo of a boiled father of four.)

Instead of a bullet through Rall’s head, the Taliban gave him a “safe-conduct” pass. But Rall’s conduct was anything but safe. When, recently, Bill Clinton flew to Kazakhstan to cuddle up to the dictator Nursultan Nazarbeyev, he was ferried in on private jet of a high-roller locking in a creepy deal for Kazakh uranium. Rall, apparently, missed the jet.

Instead, Rall caroms through the ‘Stans by bus, barfing and bribing and joking his way past sex-starved, over-armed fanatics and avaricious body guards. He’s too whacked by dehydration and diarrhea to worry about the stark-raving danger of such a journey in war-time (it’s always war time in the ‘Stans) to tell us the story you won’t find in the captions of Bill shaking hands with a despot du jour.

Ultimately, what Rall’s story is about is what everything’s all about: oil. The ‘Stans are drenched in it, floating on it, or in the way of it. Thus, the book’s sub-title, “Is Central Asia the New Middle East?”

The presidential campaign of Barack Obama has become a media parade on its way to a coronation. Journalists and leading Democrats have done shockingly little to pin Obama down, to hold him specifically responsible for anything beyond his slogans of “yes we can” and “change we can believe in”. Prominent Black Democrats, many ministers and the traditional Black leadership class are doing less than anybody to hold Obama accountable, peddling instead a supposed racial obligation among African Americans to support this second coming of Joshua and his campaign as “the movement” itself. What would holding Barack Obama accountable on war and peace, on social security, health care and other issues look like, and is it possible to hold a political “rock star” accountable at all?

Whether it is truly possible to hold elected officials accountable in a political system where big money, big media, big corporations and the very rich call all the shots is uncertain. But we have tried and will keep trying. So will others. The stakes are too high not to.

How We Held Obama’s Feet to the Fire in 2003

Although close friends and confidants had been talking up a run for national office since the early 1990s, Barack Obama in 2003 was still an Illinois state senator running in the Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate. This reporter, a longtime and former Chicago community and political organizer, had worked with Obama in 1992’s highly successful Project VOTE Illinois registration drive. After moving to Georgia in 2000, I managed to keep in touch with events at home, and was well aware of Obama’s run for the US Senate.

While researching a story on the Democratic Leadership Council for the internet magazine Black Commentator in April and May of 2003, I ran across the DLC’s “100 to Watch” list for 2003, in which Barack Obama was prominently featured as one of the DLC’s favorite “rising stars”. This was ominous news because the DLC was and still is the right wing’s Trojan Horse inside the Democratic party.

The DLC exists to guarantee that wealthy individuals and corporations who make large campaign donations have more say in the Democratic party than do flesh and blood Democratic voters. The DLC achieves this by closely examining and questioning the records, the policy stands and the persons of officeholders and candidates to ensure that they are safe and worthy recipients of elite largesse. The DLC also supplies them with right wing policy advisers beholden to those same interests, and hooks up approved candidates with the big money donors.

Then as now, the DLC favors bigger military budgets and more imperial wars, wholesale privatization of government functions including social security, and in so-called “free trade” agreements like NAFTA which are actually investor rights agreements. Evidently, the giant insurance companies, the airlines, oil companies, Wall Street, military contractors and others had closely examined and vetted Barack Obama and found him pleasing.

I revisited Obama’s primary election campaign web site, something I had not done for a month or two. To my dismay I found the 2002 antiwar speech, the same one which Barack Obama touts to this day as evidence of his antiwar backbone and prescience, which had been prominently featured before, had vanished from his web site, along with all other evidence that Obama had ever taken a plain spoken stand against the invasion and occupation of Iraq. With the president riding high in the polls, and Illinois’ Black and antiwar vote safely in his pocket, Obama appeared to be running away from his opposition to the war, and from the Democratic party’s base. Free, at last.

After calls to Obama’s campaign office yielded no satisfactory answers, we published an article in the June 5, 2003 issue of Black Commentator effectively calling Barack Obama out. We drew attention to the disappearance of any indication that U.S. Senate candidate Obama opposed the Iraq war at all from his web site and public statements. We noted with consternation that the Democratic Leadership Council, the right wing Trojan Horse inside the Democratic party, had apparently vetted and approved Obama, naming him as one of its “100 to Watch” that season. This is what real journalists are supposed to do — fact check candidates, investigate the facts, tell the truth to audiences and hold the little clay feet of politicians and corporations to the fire.

Facing the possible erosion of his base among progressive Democrats in Illinois, Obama contacted us. We printed his response in Black Commentator’s June 19 issue and queried the candidate on three “bright line” issues that clearly distinguish between corporate-funded DLC Democrats and authentic progressives. We concluded the dialog by printing Obama’s response on June 26, 2003. For the convenience of our readers in 2007, all three of these articles can be found here.

It was our June 2003 exchange with candidate Obama that prompted him to restore the antiwar speech on his web site, though not as prominently as before, the same antiwar speech which is now touted as evidence of his early and consistent opposition to the war. Our three “bright line” questions invited him to distinguish himself as an authentic progressive on single payer national health care, on the war in Iraq, and on NAFTA. And it was our public exposure of the fact and implications of the DLC’s embrace of Obama’s career which caused him to explicitly renounce any formal ties with the Democratic Leadership Council. We didn’t do it because we were haters. We were doing our duty as agitators.

Holding Barack Obama Accountable in 2008

That was then. This is now.

The 2008 Obama presidential run may be the most slickly orchestrated marketing machine in memory. That’s not a good thing. Marketing is not even distantly related to democracy or civic empowerment. Marketing is about creating emotional, even irrational bonds between your product and your target audience. From its Bloody Sunday 2007 proclamation that Obama was the second coming of Joshua to its nationally televised kickoff at Abe Lincoln’s tomb to the tens of millions of dollars in breathless free media coverage lavished on it by the establishment media, the campaign’s deft manipulation of hopeful themes and emotionally potent symbols has led many to impute their own cherished views to Obama, whether he endorses them or not.

To cite the most obvious example, the Obama campaign cynically bills itself as “the movement”, the continuation and fulfillment of Dr. King’s legacy. But the speeches of its candidate carefully limit the application of all his troop withdrawal statements to “combat troops” and “combat brigades”, omitting the six figure number of armed mercenary contractors in Iraq, along with “training”, “counterinsurgency” and other kinds of troops. Obama also presses for an expansion of the US Army and Marines by more than 100,000 troops and a larger military budget even than the Bush regime. The fact that both these stands fly in the face of the legacy of Martin Luther King, and flatly contradict the wishes of most Democratic voters is utterly invisible in the establishment media, and in the discourse of established Black leaders on the Obama campaign. The average voter is ill-equipped to read Obama’s statements on these and other issues as closely as one might read a predatory loan application or a jacked up insurance policy, trying to determine exactly what is covered.

As we pointed out back in December

The Obama campaign is heavy on symbolism, and long on vague catch phrases like “new leadership,” “new ideas,” “a politics of hope,” and “let’s dream America again” calculated to appeal to millions of disaffected Americans without actually meaning much of anything. Corporate media actively bill Obama as “the candidate of hope,” and anointed representative of the “Joshua generation.” There are good reasons campaign placards at Obama rallies say “change we can believe in” instead of “stop the war — vote Obama” or “repeal NAFTA – Barack in ‘08.” The first set of messages are hopeful and vague. The second are popular demands among the voters Obama needs against which his past, present and future performance may be checked. When the comparison is made, the results are dismaying to many who want to support Barack Obama.

Who Will Speak Truth to Power? And When?

No less a luminary than Dr. Michael Eric Dyson last month asserted that the time to pressure Obama to cut the military budget would not come till after the election when, as he said “we have a seat at the table.” We think this is transparently wrong. Obama responded to our calling him out in 2003 because he was still in an election campaign, and needed every vote he could get. The day after the election, he could have ignored us with relative safety, just as Cheney and Bush ignore their approval ratings in the twenty and thirty percent range the last three years and more.

But in 2003 Obama was a mere mortal. Now corporate media have made him a rock star, Joshua, a prince on his way to a coronation. Those who raise questions about Obama’s commitment to a progressive agenda will have to struggle to be heard. That’s just the way it is. They may even have to be impolite at times. That’s just the way it is too. Rock stars, royalty and the uncritical adulation they require make little room for polite criticism or democratic discussion.

Third party runs for the presidency have sometimes succeeded in exerting leftward pressure on Democratic presidential candidates. The best example is 1948, when Henry Wallace campaigned for president on the Progressive Party ticket with Paul Robeson at his side defying Jim Crow laws in dozens of states. It was this credible threat on the part of the Progressive Party to peel Black voters away from the Democratic party which led Truman to issue his election year executive order de-segregating the armed forces. This year, Cynthia McKinney and Ralph Nader have both declared their intention to explore presidential candidacies this year outside the Democratic party. Both have exemplary records of public service. Neither is a hater. Both are agitators in the best sense of that word. If Barack Obama, or for that matter Hillary Clinton is to be the Democratic presidential nominee, it’s time they felt the heat to line up with Democratic voters, rather than with the DLC and the party’s biggest donors.

Ironically, Hillary Clinton, also a corporate DLC candidate to the core, may have been more responsive to some heat from the party’s grassroots on a few questions than Barack Obama. Clinton has at least promised to repeal No Child Left Behind, the legislation that has forced an unproven and unworkable “teach to the test” regime upon public schools nationwide, and carved tens of billions nationwide from the budgets of schools to foster a privatized, for-profit education industry. By contrast, Obama is still mumbling about “adequately funding” this failed and malevolent educational experiment. Similarly, in a California debate which showed the tiny differences between the Democratic front runners, it was Hillary Clinton who broke the corporate taboo by at least mentioning single payer, the workable universal health care system implemented by every other advanced industrial country on earth and favored by most American voters. Clinton didn’t do this because she loves us, or because she is innately more progressive than Obama. She did it because she hard pressed and because activists are less confused and less likely to he silenced by the pernicious notion that her campaign is “the movement” itself.

It’s time for a little less respect for the high and mighty of either party, and a little more action. It’s high time for activists inside and outside the Democratic party to look for creative, innovative, sometimes impolite and civilly disobedient ways to reach larger audiences as they speak truth to the powerful. Even and especially when those in power are nominal Democrats.

Below are links to the original pages in which we called Barack Obama out for apparently running away from his early opposition to the war, and his ties with the DLC:

This is the June 5, 2003 issue of Black Commentator, with the story “In Search of the Real Barack Obama” www.blackcommentator.com/45/issue_45.html

This is the June 12, 2003 issue of Black Commentator with the DLC story www.blackcommentator.com/46/issue_46.html

On June 19, 2003 we printed Obama’s response and his reason for eliminating the speech from his web site. He said the web site was for current stuff implied with the “formal” end to hostilities in Iraq it was “outdated” and removed by his staff to make room for more current stuff. Yeah. Right. www.blackcommentator.com/47/issue_47.html

BAGHDAD (AFP) — Baghdad is drowning in sewage, thirsty for water and largely powerless, an Iraqi official said on Sunday in a grim assessment of services in the capital five years after the US-led invasion.

One of three sewage treatment plants is out of commission, one is working at stuttering capacity while a pipe blockage in the third means sewage is forming a foul lake so large it can be seen “as a big black spot on Google Earth,” said Tahseen Sheikhly, civilian spokesman for the Baghdad security plan.

Sheikhly told a news conference in the capital that water pipes, where they exist, are so old that it is not possible to pump water at a sufficient rate to meet demands — leaving many neighbourhoods parched.

A sharp deficit of 3,000 megawatts of electricity adds to the woes of residents, who are forced to rely on neighbourhood generators to light up their lives and heat their homes.

“Sewerage, water and electricity are our three main problems,” said Sheikhly, adding that many of these problems date back to the Saddam Hussein regime when not enough attention was paid to basic infrastructure.

Insurgency, sectarian violence and vandalism since the US-led invasion in March 2003 had further ravaged services in the capital, he added.

More positively, he said, the extensive Baghdad security plan, known as Operation Fardh al-Qanoon (Imposing Law) and launched on February 14 last year, was allowing services to be gradually restored.

“After the destruction there is now the reconstruction,” Sheikhly said. “We have solved many of the security problems, now we can focus on rebuilding.”

Education and health across Iraq had both seen improvements, according to US military commander Brigadier General Jeffrey Dorko of the US Gulf Regional Division which is engaged in reconstruction projects.

Dorko told the news conference that 76 new health clinics — 21 of them in Baghdad — had been built while 1,885 new schools had been constructed countrywide and another 1,604 repaired.

He said that the demand for electricity was likely to outstrip supply for several years because many Iraqi power stations had been damaged or destroyed and commissioning new ones would take anything up to four years.

Demand was increasing, Dorko added, because Iraqis were increasingly buying electrical appliances as the security situation improved.

Asked if it may take 10 years before Baghdad receives full power 24 hours a day, he replied: “There are so many variables… but I think it will be less than 10 years.”

Sheikhly believed that once the annual budget is approved by parliament — possibly on Monday — new funds would allow a faster roll-out of services in the beleaguered capital.

Iraqi capital fears an epidemic if stricken sewerage system collapses as the rainy season arrives

Baghdad is facing a ‘catastrophe’ with cases of cholera rising sharply in the past three weeks to more than 100, strengthening fears that poor sanitation and the imminent rainy season could create an epidemic.

The disease – spread by bacteria in contaminated water, which can result in rapid dehydration and death – threatens to blunt growing optimism in the Iraqi capital after a recent downturn in violence. Two boys in an orphanage have died and six other children were diagnosed with the disease, according to the Iraqi government. ‘We have a catastrophe in Baghdad,’ an official said.

The United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) said 101 cases had been recorded in the city, making up 79 per cent of all new cases in Iraq. It added that no single source for the upsurge had been identified, but the main Shia enclave of Sadr City was among the areas hardest hit.

As Iraq’s rainy season nears, its aging water pipes and sewerage systems, many damaged or destroyed by more than four years of war, pose a new threat to a population weary of crisis. Claire Hajaj, a spokeswoman for Unicef, said: ‘Iraq’s water and sanitation networks are in a critical condition. Pollution of waterways by raw sewage is perhaps the greatest environmental and public health hazard facing Iraqis – particularly children. Waterborne diarrhea diseases kill and sicken more Iraqi children than anything except pneumonia. We estimate that only one in three Iraqi children can rely on a safe water source – with Baghdad and southern cities most affected.’

Although US forces in Baghdad have found that security is improving, on daily patrols they face complaints from residents about streets plagued by piles of household waste and fetid cesspools, often near schools and where children are playing. Captain Richard Dos Santos, attached to the 3rd squadron of the 2nd Stryker Cavalry Regiment, said that in the al-Hadar area of south Baghdad sewage pumps were only 30 to 40 per cent operational. ‘There is sewage near schools and there is an increased threat of cholera and flu in winter when resistance is low,’ he said.

The UN has reported 22 deaths from cholera this year, and 4,569 laboratory-confirmed cases, almost exclusively in northern Iraq where it was first detected in Kirkuk in August. It has now spread to half of the country’s 18 provinces, but anxiety is focused on Baghdad.

Unicef said it was providing oral rehydration salts and water purification tablets for families – it distributed three million to the worst hit areas two weeks ago – as well as jerry cans at water distribution points. It is transporting 180,000 liters (47,552 gallons) of safe water per day to Baghdad’s worst hit districts.

Unicef issued an urgent appeal to the Iraqi government to clean water storage tanks in all institutions as one preventive measure. Hajaj said: ‘Only 20 per cent of families outside Baghdad have access to sewage services, and Iraq’s sewage treatment plants operate at just 17 per cent of capacity.’

Cholera is preventable by treating drinking water with chlorine and improving hygiene, but it is estimated that around 70 per cent of Iraqis do not have access to clean water. Many have been too poor or too afraid to go out to buy bottled water, relying instead on tap water, often from polluted sources. Companies responsible for collecting waste and sewage have been reluctant to enter Baghdad’s most violent areas.

The government has been trying to educate Iraqis through advertisements on TV and in newspapers and with leaflets handed out at checkpoints. But it admits that six hospitals have unsafe water supplies.

BAQUBA, Feb 11 (IPS) – The violence around the continuing U.S. military operations in this city has robbed children of their childhood.

Only two provincial schools and one private kindergarten school are functioning in this city of 280,000, located 50 km north of Baghdad. Most children know neither school nor play.

Or even the food they want. “We parents can hardly meet the basic requirements of food,” Mahdi Hassan, a father of four, told IPS.

“Nobody even mentions chocolate or pastries or anything else because Iraqis know they are not important,” Baquba resident Wissam Jafar told IPS. “Children eat what the other members of the family eat. Toys and games are offered only at festivals and on special occasions.”

Baquba city, capital of Diyala province, has been at the centre of major U.S. military operations to fight al-Qaeda like forces. People have suffered from the violence from both sides.

By now Iraq has seen a generation of children pass with just survival a major issue. During the period of economic sanctions imposed on Iraq in the 1990s, more than half a million children died, according to the United Nations.

In 1996, former U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright was asked by Lesley Stahl on the CBS ླྀ Minutes’ show if she thought the price of half a million dead children was worth it. She replied, “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price — we think the price is worth it.”

One in eight children in Iraq died during that period of malnutrition, disease, and lack of medicine.

The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq during March 2003 brought hope that things might change, but that change has only been for the worse.

“During the nineties, they were malnourished but they could find a place to play in the streets,” Khalid Ali, a local economist, told IPS. “Nowadays, they cannot even get out of their home because of the violence. And a large number of children have been killed through the violence.”

There is one park in Baquba with some basic swings for children; another was recently renovated by an Iraqi NGO. Both get overcrowded on festivals and holidays. Parents feel obliged to take their children out on these days, despite the risk.

On other days, no more than two or three families visit the parks.

Sajid Asim who earns 175 dollars a month from his job in the water department says the money is barely enough for food for the family. “Surely, there won’t be any extra money to bring the children special food or clothes, or games, or even taking them to picnics.” For those without work — and there are many — the situation is worse.

Schoolteachers and managers spoke to IPS of the problems facing children who do manage to go to school.

“Teaching has been hit by the political situation in Iraq,” said Salma Majid, manager of a local primary school. “Children can often not get to the school, and we may have more than three days off in a week. The whole academic year may be delayed because the violence has been so extreme this year.”

Schools can provide children a chance to play but sometimes it is not safe,” she said. “A number of school buildings have been hit by mortar.”

According to an Oxfam report on Iraq released Jul. 30, “92 percent of children had learning impediments that are largely attributable to the current climate of fear. Schools are regularly closed as teachers and pupils are too fearful to attend. Over 800,000 children may now be out of school, according to a recent estimate by Save the Children UK — up from 600,000 in 2004.”

The Oxfam report also said that child malnutrition rates in Iraq have risen from 19 percent before the invasion in 2003, to 28 percent. “More than 11 percent of newborn babies were born underweight in 2006, compared with 4 percent in 2003.”

Scarcity has brought all sorts of difficulties for children. “I put a sandwich in the bag for my son to take to school,” said a mother who declined to give her name. “When he got back home, he said he could not have it because his classmates do not bring their own sandwiches; their parents do not give them sandwiches.”

A local primary school teacher, Ali Abbas, said it is common now for students to arrive at school without breakfast.

“One day, one of the children suddenly passed out,” Abbas said. “We immediately took her to the administration room. When she regained consciousness, I asked her why she fainted. She told me that she did not have breakfast because there was no breakfast at home.”

There have been far too few accountability moments since Democrats retook control of the U.S. House and Senate in January, 2007.

But one came Thursday, when the House voted 223-32 to hold former White House Counsel Harriet Miers and White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten in contempt of Congress for refusing to comply with subpoenas to testify before Congress in relation to the firing of nine United States Attorneys in 2006.

A pair of resolutions — one that directs the U.S. Attorney in Washington, D.C. to bring criminal contempt charges against Bolten and Miers to a grand jury and another that authorizes the House general counsel to bring a civil suit against the White House to settle the question of whether the testimony of Bolten and Miers should be covered by executive privilege — received the backing of 220 Democrats and three anti-war Republicans (Ron Paul, the renegade presidential candidate from Texas; Wayne Gilchrest, who lost his seat in a Maryland primary Tuesday; and Walter Jones of North Carolina).

The move was opposed by 31 Republicans and one Democrat (Texan Henry Cuellar, who backed Bush for reelection in 2004 and this year backs Hillary Clinton.) At the behest of House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, 163 Republicans were recorded as “not voting.” Ten Democrats did the same.

Thursday’s House decision was historic, not just for its specific response to the lawlessness of two prominent members of the Bush-Cheney administration but for its broader message. With this action, Congress is beginning to reassert itself as a separate and equal branch of the federal government.

If the imperial presidency is to be ended, however, it will take more than an accountability moment.

The House Judiciary Committee and the House as a whole – which delayed the contempt vote for far too many months because of Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s misguided caution about confronting the administration – must now aggressively pursue Miers and Bolten.

As American Freedom Campaign campaigns director Steve Fox correctly notes, “In order for our system of checks and balances to be effective, Congress must have oversight over the executive branch. When Bolten and Miers – with the encouragement of the President – refused to comply with the congressional subpoenas last summer, they were tacitly saying that this oversight power no longer existed. If they are not held in contempt — and prosecuted in the courts — our Constitution will have been defiled.”

But nothing that is wrong with the Bush-Cheney administration or the federal government began with Miers and Bolten. And no fix will be complete if it stops with them.

The Judiciary Committee must hold to account the president and vice president who encouraged Miers and Bolten to disregard the rule of law.

Miers and Bolten refused to testify not as individuals but as members of an administration that has assaulted the constitutionally-defined system of checks and balances at every turn. They acted always, and in every way, at the behest of President Bush and Vice President Cheney.

It is important to hold the former counsel and the current chief of staff to account. Certainly, as People For the American Way Director of Public Policy Tanya Clay House says, “Congress has a responsibility to enforce its congressional powers, and moving forward with contempt citations is the appropriate response to this administration’s stonewalling and arrogance.”

But this “appropriate response” must not be seen as an end in itself.

For there to be accountability, more than a moment is required. And more than Miers and Bolten must be held to account for the high crimes and misdemeanors of an administration that has treated the Constitution and the Congress as afterthoughts.

“Members of the Bush administration have spent the last seven years pretending that the law doesn’t apply to them,” says House, who musters proper passion to add, “Congress has a responsibility to enforce its congressional powers, and moving forward with contempt citations is the appropriate response to this administration’s stonewalling and arrogance.”

John Nichols’ new book is The Genius of Impeachment: The Founders’ Cure for Royalism. Rolling Stone’s Tim Dickinson hails it as a “nervy, acerbic, passionately argued history-cum-polemic [that] combines a rich examination of the parliamentary roots and past use of the ‘heroic medicine’ that is impeachment with a call for Democratic leaders to ‘reclaim and reuse the most vital tool handed to us by the founders for the defense of our most basic liberties.’”

What can one even say about this quote, included in Carl Hulse’s NYT article on the Democrats’ refusal yesterday to pass the Senate’s FISA bill before expiration of the Protect America Act:

“I think there is probably joy throughout the terrorist cells throughout the world that the United States Congress did not do its duty today,” said Representative Ted Poe, Republican of Texas.

This is the kind of pure, unadulterated idiocy — childish, cartoonish and creepy — that Democrats for years have been allowing to bully them into submission, govern our country, and dismantle our Constitution. Outside of Andy McCarthy, Mark Steyn and their roving band of paranoid right-wing bloggers who can’t sleep at night because they think (and hope) that there are dark, primitive “jihadi” super-villains hiding under their beds — along with the Very Serious pundit class which proves their Seriousness by placing blind faith in the fear-mongering pronouncements and demands of our military and intelligence officials for more unchecked power — nobody cares about adolescent Terrorist game-playing like this any longer. In the real world, it doesn’t work, and it hasn’t worked for some time.

Americans are worried and even angry about many things. Whether Osama bin Laden is throwing a party because AT&T and Verizon might have to defend themselves in court isn’t one of them. Outside of National Review, K Street, and the fear-paralyzed imagination of our shrinking faux-warrior class, there is no constituency in America demanding warrantless eavesdropping or amnesty for lawbreaking telecoms.

On one level, it’s difficult to maintain any sustained optimism about the House’s defiance yesterday. They were acting far more out of resentment over the procedural treatment to which they were subjected by the White House and, more so, the Senate — having a bill dropped in their lap again just a couple of days before a deadline and told that they had to pass it, as is, and immediately — than out of any principled objection to warrantless eavesdropping or telecom amnesty.

And it’s painfully easy to envision more than enough “Blue Dogs” eventually joining their GOP colleagues to pass the Senate bill, thus handing the White House yet another complete victory, even if it comes a little later than it was demanded. In light of the endless series of events over the last twelve months, the hope that some sort of actual conviction will cause this obstructionism to be permanent is far too naive for any rational person to entertain seriously.

Still, basic human nature — if nothing else — dictates that having finally liberated themselves, however fleetingly, from the truly moronic rule of the Ted “Osama-is-Celebrating” Poes of the world, and having seen that — as McJoan put it — “the Democrats stood up to Bush, and the world didn’t end,” Democrats will crave more of the sweet taste of dignity and autonomy.

To judge from the talk in Washington, the ‘surge’ that put 30,000 more US troops on the ground in Iraq has succeeded in bringing stability to a nation still riven by ethnic, religious and tribal conflict. Life, the Pentagon boasts, is returning to normal. But the truth is a very different story.

People in Baghdad are not passive victims of violence, but seek desperately to avoid their fate. In April 2004, I was almost killed by Shia militiamen of the Mehdi Army at a checkpoint at Kufa in southern Iraq. They said I was an American spy and were about to execute me and my driver, Bassim Abdul Rahman, when they decided at the last moment to check with their commander. “I believe,” Bassim said afterwards, “that if Patrick had an American or an English passport [instead of an Irish one] they would have killed us all immediately.”

In the following years, I saw Bassim less and less. He is a Sunni, aged about 40, from west Baghdad. After the battle for Baghdad between Shia and Sunni in 2006, he could hardly work as a driver as three-quarters of the capital was controlled by the Shia. There were few places where a Sunni could drive in safety outside a handful of enclaves.

What happened to Bassim was also to happen to millions of Iraqis who saw their lives ruined by successive calamities. As their world collapsed around them they were forced to take desperate measures to survive, obtain a job and make enough money to feed and educate their families.

In the US and Europe, the main measure of whether the war in Iraq is “going well” or “going badly” is the casualty figures. The number of American soldiers and Iraqi civilians being killed went down to 39 US soldiers and 599 Iraqi civilians in January. The White House is promoting the idea that the United States is finally on the road to success, if not victory, in Iraq.

On the back of this renewed optimism about the war, Senator John McCain, the premier hawk among the Republican candidates for the presidency, has been able to revive his foundering campaign and is set to be his party’s nominee. Despite the skepticism of many US journalists permanently stationed in Iraq, television and newspaper newsrooms in New York and Washington have largely bought into the idea that “the surge”–the wider deployment of 30,000 extra US troops since February 2006–has succeeded.

But any true assessment of the happiness or misery of Iraqis must use a less crude index than the number of dead and injured. It must ask if people have been driven from their houses, and if they can return. It must say whether they have a job and, if they do not, whether they stand a chance of getting one. It has to explain why so few of the 3.2 million people who are refugees in Syria and Jordan, or inside Iraq, are coming back.

At the time we had our encounter with the Mehdi Army in Kufa, Bassim was living in a house in the mixed Sunni-Shia area of Jihad in south-west Baghdad. He loved the house, which had a sitting room and two bedrooms, because he had built it himself in 2001. “I didn’t complete it because I didn’t have enough money,” he said. “But we were so happy to have our own home.”

He was living there in the summer of 2006 with his wife Maha, 38, and his children Sarah, 13, Noor, eight, and Sama, three, when Shia militiamen took over Jihad. The struggle for the capital had begun on February 22 when Sunni insurgents blew up a revered Shia shrine in Samarra. Bassim fled to Syria with his family and, when he returned to Jihad three months later, he found pictures of Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia nationalist cleric who heads the Mehdi Army, pasted to the gate of his house.

Neighbors told Bassim to get out as fast as he could before the Mehdi Army militiamen came back and killed him. He drove with his family to his father-in-law’s house in the tough Sunni district of al-Khadra, where he and his wife and three children were to live in future in a single small room. He did not dare go back to his old home, but he heard about it in the summer of 2007 from a friendly Shia neighbour who said it had been taken over by militiamen. “They accused me,” says Bassim, “of being a high-rank officer in the former intelligence service and because of that they got a permit [from al-Sadr’s office] to take it over.”

Two Shia families moved in for a couple of months and, when they left, they took all his remaining belongings. They left the house unlocked, and soon the wooden doors and other fittings were gone. The permanent loss of his home, his only possession of any value apart from his car, was a terrible blow to Bassim and his wife. “I have nothing else to lose aside from my house,” he wrote to me in a sad letter in the autumn of 2007, “and because of what happened I had a heart attack. I worked as a taxi driver for a few days, but I couldn’t do it any longer because of the dangerous situation and I had no other way of earning a living. Finally, I sold my car and my wife’s few gold things and I will try to go to Sweden even if I have to go illegally.”

I thought his plan to travel to Sweden was a terrible one, as Bassim spoke only Arabic and had not travelled outside Iraq, apart from a few trips to Syria and Jordan. But there was nothing I could do to dissuade him. I did not see or hear from him for six months, though I heard from his friends that his bid to reach Sweden had failed and that he was stuck in Kuala Lumpur.

Then, on February 1, he appeared at the door of my hotel room in Baghdad, looking shrunken and miserable, and told me of his strange and disastrous odyssey.

I had originally hoped that his plan to travel illegally to Sweden was a fantasy he would never try to realize, but everything he had said in his letter turned out to be true. He had sold his car, his wife’s gold jewellery and some furniture for $6,500 (about £3,300) and borrowed $1,500 from his sister and the same amount from friends. Of this, $6,900 was paid to Abu Mohammed, an Iraqi in Sweden, who provided Bassim and a friend called Ibrahim with Lithuanian passports (these turned out to be genuine, but one of Bassim’s many fears over the next three months was that his passport was a fake and he would be thrown in jail). The two men went first to Damascus and then, instructed over the phone by Abu Mohammed in Sweden, they flew to Malaysia.

This would seem to be the wrong direction, but Malaysia has the great advantage of being one of the few countries to give Iraqis entry visas at the airport. Bassim and Ibrahim took rooms at the cheapest hotel they could find in Kuala Lumpur.
They were then told by Abu Mohammed to get a plane to Cambodia and take a bus to Vietnam. Though their money was fast dwindling, they did so. Somehow, still speaking only Arabic, they made their way from Phnom Penh to Ho Chi Minh City. The plan was to get a ticket to Sweden by way of France (Bassim now thinks that this was a mistake and it would have been better to travel first to Lithuania, posing as citizens returning home, but this would have left the two Iraqis with the problem of explaining to officials there why they did not speak Lithuanian).

In the check-in queue at the airport in Vietnam on January 5 this year, Bassim was desperately worried he would be detected. He had staked all his remaining money and his family’s future on getting to Sweden. In fact, he and Ibrahim had little chance of being allowed on to the plane. Too many Iraqis, claiming to be citizens of small East European states, had tried this route before. Suspicious Vietnamese immigration officials took them to an investigation room where Bassim felt ill and asked for a glass of water, which was refused. He and Ibrahim continued to protest that they were Lithuanian citizens and demanded to be taken to the Lithuanian embassy, knowing full well that Lithuania is unrepresented in Vietnam.

It was all in vain. The officials guessed that they were Iraqis. They sent Bassim and Ibrahim back to Cambodia. Half-starved because he did not like the local food–“I was used to Iraqi bread,” he recalled later–and with his money almost gone, Bassim made his way back to Kuala Lumpur by the end of January. He last saw his friend Ibrahim heading for Indonesia in a small boat.

Abu Mohammed in Sweden became elusive and, when finally contacted by phone after six days, admitted that “for Iraqis, all the ways from Asia to Sweden are shut”. He did not offer to return Bassim’s $6,900. Demoralized, and hearing that many Iraqi refugees trying to get to Europe through Indonesia simply disappeared, Bassim used his last few dollars to fly to Damascus and took a shared taxi across the desert to Baghdad. “The journey took three months but it felt like 10 years,” he said. “I have lost everything.”

Life in the Iraq to which Bassim has returned is said by foreigners and Iraqis alike to be getting better. Perky pieces in the foreign media breathlessly describe how Sunni children are once again playing football in al-Zahra park near the Green Zone, where they would have been murdered a year ago. “The problem,” complained one American correspondent in Baghdad, “is that newsrooms back home have two mindsets–‘War Rages’ and ‘Peace Dawns’–and not a lot in between.”

Previous claims of an improvement in security by the US or the Iraqi government had been wholly false. I remembered Paul Bremer, the US viceroy during the first year of the occupation, claiming that the Sunni insurgents were a doomed remnant battling against “the new Iraq”. When Bremer left in 2004, he was shown on television clambering into one helicopter and then, when the cameras departed, scuttling on to a second aircraft in case those same insurgents might shoot him down.

In contrast to the spurious turning-points of the past, the most recent political changes in Iraq, which had led to the fall in American and Iraqi casualties, are quite real. But they differ significantly from the way in which they are portrayed in the outside world, and have less to do with al-Qa’ida and the US than the continuing struggle for power between Sunni and Shia in Iraq.

From the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003 to the summer of 2006, the five million-strong Sunni community had battled the US and the Shia-Kurdish Iraqi government. Then, quite suddenly, last year many of the Sunni rebel groups switched sides and allied themselves with the Americans, formed the “al-Sahwa” or “Awakening” movement and declared war on al-Qa’ida.

Dramatic changes of side when enemies embrace each other are not unknown in Iraqi politics and may stem from its traditions of tribal warfare. I was in Iraqi Kurdistan in 1996 when the Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani, many of whose family and tribe had been murdered by Saddam Hussein, called in Saddam’s tanks to capture the city of Arbil and to repulse an offensive by the rival Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani, now president of Iraq.

The US commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, and the US ambassador, Ryan Crocker, are cautious about claiming too much success. But the White House and the Republicans have been quick to suggest that a turning point had been reached in the war. As in 2003, after the American overthrow of Saddam, both the Democrats and much of the American media could be easily intimidated by the fear that they were being unpatriotic or defeatist when military victory was in sight.

“The problem in Iraq is that the agenda is driven not by what is really happening, but by the perception in America of what is happening,” Ahmad Chalabi, veteran of the opposition to Saddam and one of the most astute observers of the Iraqi scene, told me. A problem is that US politicians and commentators assume far greater American control of events in Iraq than is the case. The US is the most powerful player there, but it is by no means the only one.

The dramatic change of sides of Sunni guerrilla organizations such as the “1920 Revolution Brigades” and the “Islamic Army” came about for many reasons. In Anbar province west of Baghdad (perhaps one-third of Iraq by area), the Sunni tribes had become enraged by al-Qa’ida’s attempt to establish total dominance, and to replace or murder traditional leaders and set up a Taliban-type state. But the Sunni community could also see that, although its guerrilla war was effective against the US, it was being defeated by the Shia who controlled the Iraqi government and armed forces after the elections of 2005.

The only source of money in Iraq is oil revenues, and the only jobs–four million, if those on a pension are included–are with the government. The Shia, in alliance with the Kurds, controlled both. “The Sunni people found that the only way to be protected from the Shia was to be allied to the Americans,” said Kassim Ahmed Salman, a well-educated Sunni from west Baghdad. “Otherwise we were in a hopeless situation. For the last two years it has been possible for Sunni to be killed legally [by death squads covertly supported by the government] in Baghdad.”

The “surge”–the 30,000 extra US troops implementing a new security plan in Baghdad–has helped to make Baghdad safer. In effect, they have frozen into place the Shia victory of 2006. The city is broken up into enclaves sealed off by concrete walls with only one entrance and exit.

Areas that were once mixed are not being reoccupied by whichever community was driven out. Bassim can no more reclaim, or even visit, his house in the Jihad district of Baghdad than he could a year ago. He can still work as a taxi driver only in Sunni areas. The US military and the Iraqi government are wary of even trying to reverse sectarian cleansing because this might break the present fragile truce.

“People say things are better than they were,” says Zanab Jafar, a well-educated Shia woman living in al-Hamraa, west Baghdad, “but what they mean is that they are better than [during] the bloodbath of 2006. The situation is still terrible.”

Baghdad still feels and looks like a city at war. There are checkpoints everywhere. “You seldom see young girls walking in the streets, or in restaurants,” adds Zanab Jafar, “because their families are terrified they will be kidnapped, so they send private cars to pick them up directly from school.” New shops open, but they are always in the heart of districts controlled by a single community because nobody wants to venture far from their home to shop.

For all the talk of Baghdad being safer, it remains an extraordinarily dangerous place. One Western security company is still asking $3,000 to pick a man up at the airport and drive him six miles to his hotel in central Baghdad. The number of dead bodies being picked up by the police every morning in the capital is down to three or four when once it was 50 or 60.

“People are being killed in the back streets and alleyways but not in the main roads as they were 12 months ago,” says one Shia leader with a network of contacts throughout Baghdad. “About twice as many people are being killed as the government admits.” This figure is still well below what it was 18 months ago, and is unlikely to return to its previous level as long as al-Qa’ida does not resume its suicide bombing campaign, using trucks loaded with a ton of explosives detonated in the middle of Shia markets or religious processions, killing and wounding hundreds. If the attacks on the two bird markets in Shia areas on February 1, killing 99 people, are repeated, then Shia death squads will start a fresh cycle of tit-for-tat killings of Sunni.

The new element in Iraq is the development of the Awakening Council, or al-Sahwa, movement. Suddenly there is a Sunni militia, paid by the US, that has 80,000 men under arms. This re-empowers the Sunni community far more than any legislation passed by the Iraqi parliament. But it also deepens the divisions in Iraq because the leaders of the Awakening do not bother to hide their hatred and contempt for the Iraqi government.

At the end of January, I visited Abu Marouf, one of the leaders of the Awakening, in his headquarters near Khan Dari, halfway between Abu Ghraib and Fallujah. Asked about his attitude to the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, Abu Marouf, until recently a commander of the 1920 Revolution Brigades, said: “Maliki has got 13 divisions [in the army] most of whom are Shia, and half are from militias controlled by Iran.”

In his State of the Union address, President Bush spoke of the 80,000 Awakening Council members–also labelled “concerned local citizens”, as if they were respectable householders who have taken up arms against “terrorists”.

The picture Bush evoked is similar to that often seen in Hollywood Westerns when outraged townsfolk and farmers, driven beyond endurance by the crimes of a corrupt sheriff or saloon owner and their bandit followers, rise in revolt. In reality, in Iraq the exact opposite has happened. The Awakening Council members of today are the “terrorists” of yesterday.

Even the police chief of Fallujah, Colonel Feisal, the brother of Abu Marouf, cheerfully explained that until he was promoted to his present post in December 2006 he was “fighting the Americans”. Abu Marouf is threatening to go back to war or let al-Qa’ida return unless his 13,000 men receive long-term jobs in the Iraqi security services. The Iraqi government has no intention of allowing this because to do so would be to allow the Sunni and partisans of Saddam Hussein’s regime to once again hold real power in the state.

Bizarrely, the US is still holding hundreds of men suspected of contacts with al-Qa’ida in Afghanistan and elsewhere, while in Iraq many of the Awakening members are past and, in many cases, probably current members of al-Qa’ida being paid by the US Army.

“I knew a young man, aged 17 or 18,” says Kassim Ahmed Salman, “who was a friend of my brother and used to carry a PKC [a Russian light machine-gun] and fight for al-Qa’ida. I was astonished to see him a few days ago in al-Khadra where he is a lieutenant in al-Sahwa, standing together with Iraqi army officers.”

The present state of Iraq is highly unstable, but nobody quite wants to go to war again. It reminds me of lulls in the Lebanese civil war during the 1970s and 1980s, when everybody in Beirut rightly predicted that nothing was solved and the fighting would start again. In Iraq the fighting has never stopped, but the present equilibrium might go on for some time.

All the Iraqi players are waiting to see at what rate the US will draw down its troop levels. The Mehdi Army is discussing ending its six-month ceasefire, but does not want to fight its Shia rivals if they are supported by American military power. Al-Qa’ida is wounded but by no means out of business. Four days after I had seen Abu Marouf, who was surrounded by bodyguards and maintains extreme secrecy about his movements, al-Qa’ida was able to detonate a bomb in a car close to his house and injure four of his guards.

Protestations of amity between Shia security men and Awakening members should be treated with scepticism. My friend, the intrepid French television reporter Lucas Menget, filmed a Shia policeman showering praise on the Awakening movement. He introduced two of its members, declaring enthusiastically to the camera: “You see, together we will defeat al-Qa’ida.” Back in his police car, the policeman, lighting up a Davidoff cigarette and shaking his head wearily, explained: “I don’t have a choice. I was asked to work with these killers.”

Iraq remains a great sump of human degradation and poverty, unaffected by the “surge”. It was not a government critic but the civilian spokesman for the Baghdad security plan, Tahseen Sheikhly, who pointed out this week that the city is drowning in sewage because of blocked and broken pipes and drains. In one part of the city, the sewage has formed a lake so large that it can be seen “as a big black spot on Google Earth”.

In the coming weeks, we will see the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq by American and British forces on March 19, and the fall of Saddam Hussein on April 9. There will be much rancorous debate in the Western media about the success or failure of the “surge” and the US war effort here.

But for millions of Iraqis like Bassim, the war has robbed them of their homes, their jobs and often their lives. It has brought them nothing but misery and ended their hopes of happiness. It has destroyed Iraq.

Olbermann: The president is demanding immunity for the telecoms yet, he can’t confirm they did anything for which they need to be cleared

A part of what I will say, was said here on Jan. 31. Unfortunately it is both sadder and truer now than it was then.

“Who’s to blame?” Mr. Bush also said this afternoon, “Look, these folks in Congress passed a good bill late last summer…. The problem is, they let the bill expire. My attitude is: If the bill was good enough then, why not pass the bill again?”

Like the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. Or Executive Order 90-66. Or The Alien and Sedition Acts. Or slavery.

Mr. Bush, you say that our ability to track terrorist threats will be weakened and our citizens will be in greater danger. Yet you have weakened that ability!

You have subjected us, your citizens, to that greater danger! This, Mr. Bush, is simple enough for even you to understand.

For the moment, at least, thanks to some true patriots in the House, and your own stubbornness, you have tabled telecom immunity, and the FISA act.

You. By your own terms and your definitions, you have just sided with the terrorists. You’ve got to have this law, or we’re all going to die. But, practically speaking, you vetoed this law.

It is bad enough, sir, that you were demanding an ex post facto law that could still clear the AT&Ts and the Verizons from responsibility for their systematic, aggressive and blatant collaboration with your illegal and unjustified spying on Americans under this flimsy guise of looking for any terrorists who are stupid enough to make a collect call or send a mass e-mail.

But when you demanded it again during the State of the Union address, you wouldn’t even confirm that they actually did anything for which they deserved to be cleared.

“The Congress must pass liability protection for companies believed to have assisted in the efforts to defend America.”

‘One Small Step for Freedom of Speech,’ Writes One Member of Cindy Sheehan’s Courageous Band of Iraq War Protesters…

That’s “one small step for freedom of speech,” our friend Jesse Dyen writes to us this afternoon.

Dyen was arrested, along with a number of other freedom fighters who had the temerity to show up near Bush’s “brush ranch” in Crawford, Texas, several years ago to protest against the war, only to be arrested (twice) by police enforcing an ordinance, passed by the locals after Cindy Sheehan’s original stand there in the Summer of 2005, that no such protests on public lands were to be allowed.

Today, he writes to let us know that the guilty charges were overturned by an appellate court that decided [PDF] in favor of the U.S. Constitution, the First Amendment, and other quaint old notions such as those.

The author commissioned the “Lancet” study recently attacked in a National Journal report and by the Wall Street Journal. He calls the criticism a “hatchet job,” fraudulent or based on innuendo.

(February 14, 2008) — (Commentary) One puzzling aspect of the news media’s coverage of the Iraq war is their squeamish treatment of Iraqi casualties. The scale of fatalities and wounded is a difficult number to calculate, but its importance should be obvious. Yet, apart from some rare and sporadic attention to mortality figures, the topic is virtually absent from the airwaves and news pages of America. This absence leaves the field to gross misunderstandings, ideological agendas, and political vendettas.

The upshot is that the American public—and U.S. policy makers, for that matter—are badly informed on a vital dimension of the war effort.

As an academic interested in the war’s violence, I commissioned a household survey in October 2005 to gauge mortality, and I naturally turned to the best professionals available—the Johns Hopkins University epidemiologists who had conducted such surveys before in Iraq, Congo, and elsewhere. Their survey of 1,850 households resulted in a shocking number: 600,000 dead by violence in the first 40 months of the war. The survey was extensively peer reviewed and published in the British medical journal, the Lancet, in October 2006.

The findings caused a ripple of interest (in part because President Bush, during a press conference, called the results “not credible”) and stirred a very lively debate among the few people interested in the methods. By and large, however, the survey passed from public view fairly quickly, and the news media continued to cite the very low numbers produced by the Iraq Body Count, a U.K.-based NGO that counts civilian deaths through English-language newspaper reports.

Another survey, this one undertaken by a private U.K. firm, Opinion Business Research (ORB), found more than one million dead through August 2007. Yet another, a much larger house-to-house survey was conducted by the Iraq Ministry of Health (MoH). This also found a sizable mortality figure—400,000 “excess deaths” (the number above the pre-war death rate), but estimated 151,000 killed by violence. The period covered was the same as the survey published in The Lancet, but was not released until January 2008.

The ORB results were almost totally ignored in the American press, and the MoH numbers, which did get one-day play, were covered incompletely. Virtually no newspaper report dug into the data tables of the Iraqi MoH report, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, for that total excess mortality figure, or to ask why the MoH report showed a flat rate for killing throughout the war when every other account shows sharp increases through 2005 and 2006. The logical explanation for this discrepancy is that people responding to interviewers from the government, and a ministry controlled by Moktada al Sadr, would not want to admit that their loved one died by violence. There were, instead, very large numbers of dead by road accidents and “unintentional injuries.” The American press completely missed this.

What some in the news media did not miss, however, was a full-scale assault on the legitimacy of the Lancet article by the National Journal, the “insider” Capitol Hill weekly.

The attack, by reporters Carl Cannon and Neil Munro, which was largely built on persistent complaints of two critics and heaps of innuendo, was largely ignored—its circulation is only about 10,000—until the Wall Street Journal picked up on one bit of their litany: that “George Soros” funded the survey. “The Lancet study was funded by anti-Bush partisans and conducted by antiwar activists posing as objective researchers,” said the January 9, 2008, editorial (titled “The Lancet’s Political Hit”) and concluded: “the Lancet study could hardly be more unreliable.” The editorial created sensation in the right-wing blogosphere and in several allied news outlets.

Let me convey what I thought was a simple and unremarkable fact I told Munro in an interview in November and one of the Lancet authors emailed Cannon the details of how the survey was funded. My center at MIT used internal funds to underwrite the survey. More than six months after the survey was commissioned, the Open Society Institute, the charitable foundation begun by Soros, provided a grant to support public education efforts of the issue. We used that to pay for some travel for lectures, a web site, and so on.

OSI, much less Soros himself (who likely was not even aware of this small grant), had nothing to do with the origination, conduct, or results of the survey. The researchers and authors did not know OSI, among other donors, had contributed. And we had hoped the survey’s findings would appear earlier in the year but were impeded by the violence in Iraq. All of this was told repeatedly to Munro and Cannon, but they choose to falsify the story. Charges of political timing were especially ludicrous, because we started more than a year before the 2006 election and tried to do the survey as quickly as possible. It was published when the data were ready.

The New York Post and the Sunday Times of London, both owned by Rupert Murdoch, followed the WSJ editorial and trumpeted the Soros connection and the supposed “fraud” which Munro and Cannon hinted. “$OROS IRAQ DEATH STORY WAS A SHAM” was a headline in the Post, which was followed by a story in which scarcely anything stated was true.

The charges of “fraud” that were also central to the National Journal piece were based on distortions or ignorance of statistical method, such as random sampling and sample size, or speculations about Iraqi field researchers fabricating data. Nothing close to proof of misdeeds was ever offered.

The two principal authors, Gilbert Burnham and Les Roberts, parried the fraud charges effectively on their web site and in letters to the editors, but of course these are rarely noticed as much as the original charges. Those charges were wholly speculative and at times based on small irregularities in the collection of data, hardly a crime in the midst of the bloodiest period of the war. For example, some death certificates were not collected from respondents; about 80 percent of the time they were. (In the Iraqi MoH survey, death certificates were never collected, making their claims about violence v. nonviolent causes unconfirmable.)

In any case, the many peer reviews of The Lancet article, including one by a special committee of the World Health Organization, gave the survey methods and operations passing grades.

Munro then went on the Glenn Beck program and suggested the Iraqi researchers were unreliable (“without U.S. supervision”) and that the Lancet authors “made it clear they wanted this study published before the election.” Both of those assertions are untrue. Beck then repeated these allegations on his radio program, and added that there was no peer review of the fatality figures, another falsehood, and “we’re getting it jammed down our throat by people who are undercover who are pulling purse strings, who are manipulating the news.”

The charge, repeated in all these media, that the Iraqi research leader, Riyadh Lafta, M.D., operated “without U.S. supervision” and was therefore suspect is particularly interesting. Munro, in a note to National Review Online, asserted that Lafta “said Allah guided the prior 2004 Lancet/Johns Hopkins death-survey,” which he also had noted in the National Journal piece. When he interviewed me he pestered me about two anonymous donors, demanding to know if either were Arab or Muslim. A pattern here is visible, one which reeks of religious prejudice.

Munro had also ignored the corroborating evidence I sent him, the 4.5 million displaced (suggesting hundreds of thousands of fatalities, drawing on the ratio of all other wars); estimates of new widows (500,000 from the war); and the other surveys done in Iraq suggesting enormous numbers of casualties (ABC/USA Today poll of March 2007, showing roughly 53% physically harmed by war). When I mentioned these things to him on the telephone, he literally screamed that such data didn’t matter, that the Lancet probe was “a hoax.” Lancet article authors also cite several cases where they were misquoted. The National Journal’s editors have been informed of their reporters’ misconduct and errors, and have not responded.

So the smear is complete—a “political hit” by the “anti-Bush billionaire,” complicity by anti-war academics, fraud by Muslims devoted to Allah—and repeated over and over in the right-wing media. Little has of this has appeared in the legitimate news media, apart from right-wing columnists like Jeff Jacoby in the Boston Globe.

One might expect that such nonsense is obvious to neutral observers, but it constitutes a kind of harassment that scholars must fend off, diverting from more important work. Gilbert Burnham, the lead author on the Lancet article, runs health clinics in Afghanistan and East Africa, and is spending inordinate amounts of time responding to the attacks. Les Roberts, a coauthor, and I have both had colleagues at our universities called by Munro to ask if they would punish us for fraud. The OSI people have also been writing letters to set the record straight. Most important, Riyadh Lafta, who has been threatened before, may be in more danger due to these attacks.

As to the issue of the human cost of the war, even the legitimate press that has avoided this kerfuffle might be intimidated from taking on the issue in depth. The fact that the National Journal hatchet job and the MoH survey appeared within days of each other sent a message to editors around the United States—one survey is “discredited” and one is legitimate. The treatment of the MoH survey that week often noted its death-by-violence number was one-fourth of the Lancet figure — forgetting, again, that total war-related mortality were much closer in both, and congruent with other surveys. The New York Times did run an editorial in early February about the dead in Iraq — the 124 journalists killed in the war.

The topic of the war’s exceptional human costs, now inflamed by these calumnies, appears to be too hot to handle. Even with all this fuss in January, no explorations of the Iraqi mortality from the war have appeared in the major dailies. No editorials, no examination of the methods (or the danger and difficulty of collecting data), no sense that the scale of killing might affect the American position, or might shed some light on U.S. war strategy, or might point to honorable exits and reconstruction obligations. Remarkably, no curiosity at all about the dead of Iraq, and what they can tell us.