The Rag Blog

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.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (Feb. 13) – Kansas activities officials are investigating a religious school refusal to let a female referee call a boys’ high school basketball game.

The Kansas State High School Activities Association said referees reported that Michelle Campbell was preparing to officiate at St. Mary’s Academy near Topeka on Feb. 2 when a school official insisted that Campbell could not call the game.

The reason given, according to the referees: Campbell, as a woman, could not be put in a position of authority over boys because of the academy’s beliefs.

Campbell then walked off the court along with Darin Putthoff, the referee who was to work the game with her.

“I said, ‘If Michelle has to leave, then I’m leaving with her,”‘ Putthoff said Wednesday. “I was disappointed that it happened to Michelle. I’ve never heard of anything like that.”

The Activities Association said it is considering whether to take action against the private religious school. St. Mary’s Academy, about 25 miles northwest of Topeka, is owned and operated by the Society of St. Pius X, which follows older Roman Catholic laws. The society’s world leader, the late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, was excommunicated by Pope John Paul II in the late 1980s.

Gary Musselman, the association’s executive director, said the organization will not make a decision until it confirms whether St. Mary’s Academy has a policy of not allowing female referees to work boys basketball games.

In its lame-duck year, the administration has been conducting a PR campaign for waterboarding.

They’re baack!

The Bushies, that is. I was so preoccupied with the presidential primaries that I almost forgot about that guy who keeps hanging around in the White House, despite the nation’s fervent desire that he disappear. And I’m sure I wasn’t alone in my memory lapse. With the news so full of Obama, Clinton, McCain and Huckabee, Bush and Cheney had started to seem like dead men walking.

But I was making the classic horror movie mistake. You know … you let down your guard for an instant, and that’s when you realize that the dead men walking are actually vampires — and they’re stalking you.

That’s what happened this week. While we were all fixated on who will be the next president, loyalists to the outgoing president took advantage of our collective distraction to try to leave a last gruesome legacy for the American people: torture.

Remember waterboarding? In most versions of waterboarding, detainees are blindfolded and then strapped to a board. After that, they have water poured into their mouth and nose, sometimes through a cloth or cellophane (to enhance the sensation of simultaneous smothering and drowning). It was a favorite interrogation method of the Spanish Inquisition. U.S. courts have recognized it as torture, and in past wars, the U.S. government prosecuted it as a war crime.

Not anymore! While the rest of us were obsessing over the 600 possible methods of counting delegates, the Bush administration was busily conducting a PR campaign on behalf of waterboarding.

It began last week. First, Atty. Gen. Michael B. Mukasey told Congress that no one could be investigated or prosecuted for “whatever was done” as part of a covert CIA interrogation program because the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel had given its blessing to a bunch of secret “whatevers.” Then CIA Director Michael V. Hayden openly acknowledged, for the first time, that “whatever” had, in fact, included waterboarding, which was used on at least three Al Qaeda suspects.

Did Hayden blush to confess that U.S. intelligence agencies were incapable of getting critical intelligence through means other than torture? Nope. Along with National Intelligence Director J. Michael McConnell, Hayden suggested that waterboarding might well be handy again in the future.

The White House was equally blase about waterboarding. White House spokesman Tony Fratto defended its legality and asserted that whether we waterboard more detainees in the future “will depend on circumstances.” What’s more, Fratto emphasized, it’s the president who will make the call, not Congress. Vice President Dick Cheney called the interrogation of the three suspects who were waterboarded “a good thing,” and cheering from the sidelines, Antonin Scalia, the administration’s favorite Supreme Court justice, mused in a radio interview that it would be “absurd” to assume any clear constitutional restrictions on “so-called torture” when potential terrorist threats are at issue.

The administration’s PR push on waterboarding doesn’t enjoy much support, either internationally or here at home. Our closest allies, the British, reaffirmed Tuesday that they consider waterboarding a form of torture prohibited by international law. That’s an opinion shared by the U.N. human rights commissioner.

Here in the U.S., Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, the leading Democratic presidential candidates, have condemned waterboarding as torture. They’ve been joined by the leading GOP presidential candidates, John McCain and Mike Huckabee. Speaking in October 2007, McCain said that waterboarding “is not a complicated procedure. It is torture.” In December 2007, Huckabee added his voice to McCain’s: “Waterboarding is torture, and torture violates the moral code of Americans and jeopardizes the country’s security.”

Just for good measure, on Wednesday the Senate joined the House in passing legislation that prohibits the CIA from using waterboarding or any similar “harsh” interrogation techniques.

But President Bush says he’ll veto the bill. And here’s what I don’t get. Bush has less than a year left in office. His approval ratings are already abysmally low. Why is he determined to compound his problems by going down in history as the first president to openly order and justify torture? Is this really the legacy he wants to leave behind?

The task for the next president, Democrat or Republican, is clear. Very soon after taking office, our next president needs to lay this monster to rest by unambiguously repudiating waterboarding and all forms of torture.

That’s the easy part of the next president’s task, though. The hard part? Prying the thumbscrews out of the Bush administration’s cold, dead hands.

WASHINGTON (Feb. 14) – President Bush has ordered the Pentagon to use a Navy missile to attempt to destroy a broken U.S. spy satellite — and thereby minimize the risk to humans from its toxic fuel — by intercepting it just before it re-enters the atmosphere, officials said Thursday.

The effort — the first of its kind — will be undertaken because of the potential that people in the area where the satellite would otherwise crash could be harmed, the officials said.

Deputy National Security Adviser James Jeffrey, briefing reporters at the Pentagon, did not say when the attempted intercept would be conducted, but the satellite is expected to hit Earth during the first week of March.

“This is all about trying to reduce the danger to human beings,” Jeffrey said.

Gen. James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at the same briefing that the “window of opportunity” for such a shootdown, presumably to be launched from a Navy ship, will open in the next three or four days and last for seven or eight days. He did not say whether the Pentagon has decided on an exact launch date.

Cartwright said this will be an unprecedented effort; he would not say exactly what are the odds of success.

12/02/08 “Once Upon A Time” – — -Let us begin with the proposition of greatest importance. From my essay, “The Missing Moral Center: Murdering the Innocent”:

There is one final point to be made about all this — and that has to do with the supreme value of a single human life. In our desensitized, dehumanized age, most people have almost no appreciation for what I’m talking about, and our political establishment and media only make this grievous failing worse. Each of us is unique; not one of us can be replaced. Each of us has a family, loved ones, friends and a life that is a web of caring, interdependence, and joy. When even one of us is killed or horribly injured for no justifiable reason, the damage affects countless people in addition to the primary victim. Sometimes, the survivors are irreparably damaged as well. Even the survivors’ wounds can last a lifetime.

This is of the greatest significance. There is nothing more important or meaningful in the world. No moral principle legitimizes our invasion and occupation of Iraq, just as it will not justify an attack on Iran. Therefore, when the first person was killed in Iraq as the result of our actions, the immorality was complete. The crime had been committed, and no amends could ever suffice or would even be possible. That many additional tens or hundreds of thousands of people have subsequently been killed or injured does not add to the original immorality with regard to first principles. It increases its scope, which is an additional and terrible horror — but the principle is not altered in the smallest degree.

So think of the five-year-old Iraqi girl who is no more, or think of any one of the countless other victims of this criminal war and occupation. Think of their families and friends. Think of the lives that have been altered forever, and of the wounds that will never heal. Think about all of that.

Contemplate the devastation and the horror. Make it real to yourself. And ask yourself if forgiveness is possible.

We now know — at least, those of us who are minimally honest know — that the United States government has murdered in excess of one million Iraqis. In yet another attempt to break through the massive wall of resistance erected by our government, the U.S. media, and the American public, I once put this in terms that I hoped would hit home more directly:

For ease of computation, we’ll use approximate figures. Assume the U.S.’s war crimes have resulted in one million deaths. That is roughly 1/26 of the total Iraqi population. An equivalent number of American deaths would be 11.5 million people. 3,000 Americans were murdered on 9/11. In terms of casualties, 11.5 million deaths represent 3,800 9/11s — or a 9/11 every day for ten and a half years.

Let me repeat that: a 9/11 every day for ten and a half years.

Perhaps you think these casualty figures are highly inflated. Fine. Cut them in half. That’s a 9/11 every day for a little over five years.

Every day.

Do you begin to understand now?

Our government, our media and most Americans remain absolutely determined not to understand.

Let us proceed to a second proposition of great significance. The ruling elites in the United States have been committed to a foreign policy of American hegemony for over a century; this has been especially true in the decades following the end of World War II. This foreign policy of global hegemony, to be actualized by overthrow, assassination, war, murder, torture and occupation as required, has been and remains a fully bipartisan affair. Both Republicans and Democrats, insofar as the parties bearing those names are central institutions of power in the United States, embrace this policy; very often, Democrats have been notably more aggressive and ruthless in pursuit of this end than Republicans (always excepting the current war criminals in charge of the executive branch). I have detailed this bipartisan policy of murder and conquest in numerous essays; see all of my “Dominion Over the World” series (all the essays in that series are linked at the end of that article), and the other articles linked in those pieces. Scan the archives for still more.

The Democrats were never going to end the occupation of Iraq, as I noted in a post just prior to the 2006 election: “An Election Conceived in Nausea.” The other predictions in that post have also been borne out by events. Predicting how loathsome the loathsome Democrats will be is not a difficult task — not if you are minimally honest.

In a new article, Matt Taibbi details the nauseating depths of the Democrats’ abominable record over the last year. Taibbi notes the Democratic leaders’ lofty calls to inspirational principles — from Harry Reid (“We have the presidential election,” Reid said recently. “Our time is really squeezed.”), and from Nancy Pelosi (“We’ll have a new president,” said Pelosi. “And I do think at that time we’ll take a fresh look at it.”) Reid and Pelosi offer such resounding calls to first principles as more and more people are slaughtered every day. Couldn’t you just die? Lots of people are dying, but not anyone you know (or Reid or Pelosi knows) — so you don’t give a shit.

Taibbi writes:

Working behind the scenes, the Democrats have systematically taken over the anti-war movement, packing the nation’s leading group with party consultants more interested in attacking the GOP than ending the war. “Our focus is on the Republicans,” one Democratic apparatchik in charge of the anti-war coalition declared. “How can we juice up attacks on them?”

The story of how the Democrats finally betrayed the voters who handed them both houses of Congress a year ago is a depressing preview of what’s to come if they win the White House. And if we don’t pay attention to this sorry tale now, while there’s still time to change our minds about whom to nominate, we might be stuck with this same bunch of spineless creeps for four more years. With no one but ourselves to blame.

Taibbi makes two errors here, one that is obvious and one that is implied. The obvious error is to speak of the Democrats’ “betrayal.” It is only betrayal if the Democrats had, in fact, been committed to ending the occupation. That in turn would require that they question the basic assumptions of United States foreign policy. But they weren’t and they don’t, as many of my essays demonstrate. It was betrayal only to those stupid enough to have believed what the Democrats said, as opposed to what their actions — and the underlying dynamics at work — showed. I suppose I should add that one need not necessarily have been stupid (and here, I cast my eye around the “progressive” blogosphere): a person might be so consumed with achieving power for the Democrats above all else that he or she is willing to lie endlessly — so as to curry favor with those in power (or who might be), to wield “influence,” and/or to make a sufficient number of mindless readers happy (or keep them suitably intellectually sedated).

Taibbi’s implied error is his talk about “whom to nominate.” He names Hillary Clinton as one of those who peddles endless “bullshit” about wanting “to do the right thing” — and he notably fails to mention Obama. Memo to Taibbi: if you’re thinking that Obama represents a genuinely different point of view on these questions, you’re wrong — he doesn’t. (I’ll have more about the particular dangers represented by Mr. Obama, and they are considerable, in the next few days.)

Later in his article, Taibbi offer these sickening details concerning the mechanics of the Democrats’ actions:

Rather than use the vast power they had to end the war, Democrats devoted their energy to making sure that “anti-war activism” became synonymous with “electing Democrats.” Capitalizing on America’s desire to end the war, they hijacked the anti-war movement itself, filling the ranks of peace groups with loyal party hacks. Anti-war organizations essentially became a political tool for the Democrats — one operated from inside the Beltway and devoted primarily to targeting Republicans.

This supposedly grass-roots “anti-war coalition” met regularly on K Street, the very capital of top-down Beltway politics. At the forefront of the groups are Thomas Matzzie and Brad Woodhouse of Americans Against the Escalation in Iraq, the leader of the anti-war lobby. Along with other K Street crusaders, the two have received iconic treatment from The Washington Post and The New York Times, both of which depicted the anti-war warriors as young idealist-progressives in shirtsleeves, riding a mirthful spirit into political combat — changing the world is fun!

But what exactly are these young idealists campaigning for? At its most recent meeting, the group eerily echoed the Reid-Pelosi “squeezed for time” mantra: Retreat from any attempt to end the war and focus on electing Democrats. “There was a lot of agreement that we can draw distinctions between anti-war Democrats and pro-war Republicans,” a spokeswoman for Americans Against the Escalation in Iraq announced.

What the Post and the Times failed to note is that much of the anti-war group’s leadership hails from a consulting firm called Hildebrand Tewes — whose partners, Steve Hildebrand and Paul Tewes, served as staffers for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC). In addition, these anti-war leaders continue to consult for many of the same U.S. senators whom they need to pressure in order to end the war. This is the kind of conflict of interest that would normally be an embarrassment in the activist community.

Worst of all is the case of Woodhouse, who came to Hildebrand Tewes after years of working as the chief mouthpiece for the DSCC, where he campaigned actively to re-elect Democratic senators who supported the Iraq War in the first place. …

With guys like this in charge of the anti-war movement, much of what has passed for peace activism in the past year was little more than a thinly veiled scheme to use popular discontent over the war to unseat vulnerable Republicans up for re-election in 2008.

Taibbi goes on:

Even beyond the war, the Democrats have repeatedly gone limp-dick every time the Bush administration so much as raises its voice. Most recently, twelve Democrats crossed the aisle to grant immunity to phone companies who participated in Bush’s notorious wiretapping program. Before that, Democrats caved in and confirmed Mike Mukasey as attorney general after he kept his middle finger extended and refused to condemn waterboarding as torture. Democrats fattened by Wall Street also got cold feet about upsetting the country’s gazillionaires, refusing to close a tax loophole that rewarded hedge-fund managers with a tax rate less than half that paid by ordinary citizens.

After all this, the liberal-progressive blogosphere continues to propagandize endlessly and raise huge amounts of money for “more and better Democrats” — on the model of Jim Webb, I suppose, one of those “better” Democrats who offered one of the most pathetically stupid defenses in the history of the universe in support of his vote for last summer’s atrocious FISA legislation.

Here’s a rule you can take to the bank:

Any individual who rises to the national political level is, of necessity and by definition, committed to the authoritarian-corporatist state. The current system will not allow anyone to be elected from either of the two major parties who is determined to dismantle even one part of that system.

Yes, yes: there are a handful of exceptions. That’s so some of you can continue to prattle about the virtues of “participatory democracy.” That’s so you don’t notice that the ruling elites don’t give a damn what you think, except for brief periods surrounding elections — when they’ll tell you what you want to hear, even though history, including yesterday’s history, proves they don’t mean a single damned word of it. And please note that the two or three exceptions are not those individuals championed by these same liberals and progressives: note how the leading progressive bloggers themselves led the marginalization of Dennis Kucinich.

I’ll be blunt, even rude: You can call it Republican shit. You can call it Democratic shit. You can call it progressive shit. It’s still shit. It’s still murder, and torture, and criminal war, and a growing surveillance state. If you vote for the Democratic or the Republican candidate for president — and if you vote for almost any of the candidates for national office — you’re voting for murder. You’re voting for torture. You’re voting for criminal war. You’re voting for the growing surveillance state.

Is that what you choose to do? Is that what you choose to support? Is it?

At the end of his article, Taibbi writes:

How much of this bullshit are we going to take? How long are we supposed to give the Reids and Pelosis and Hillarys of the world credit for wanting, deep down in their moldy hearts, to do the right thing?

Look, fuck your hearts, OK? Just get it done. Because if you don’t, sooner or later this con is going to run dry. It may not be in ’08, but it’ll be soon. Even Americans can’t be fooled forever.

Perhaps not forever, but most Americans are perfectly willing to be fooled (hell, they’re enthusiastic about it) until the Empire begins to crumble around them — that is, in ways that directly affect them in their lives. That day may be coming, perhaps sooner than we might prefer to think.