The Rag Blog

One of President Bush’s much-vaunted ‘accomplishments’ since the start of his reign of terror is the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security. This cabinet post was created following the September 11, 2001 attacks on the U.S., and brought with it artificial ‘safeguards’ to give the citizenry the illusion of increased security. Among these new ‘safeguards’ were allegedly tightened security at airports, resulting in hours-long delays for many travelers, and the purging of the nation of illegal aliens.

A recent article in New Jersey’s The Star-Ledger brings to light the myth of Mr. Bush’s new cabinet post, and exposes on a micro-scale the waste and home-grown terrorism that ‘Homeland Security’ has produced.

For example there is one Eleuterio Mosquera, a 56-year-old mechanic who had lived in the U.S. for seventeen years, during which time he had committed no crime other than remaining in the country after being told to leave. At 5:30 on a recent morning, Mr. Mosquera was leaving his Newark home for work at the recycling plant that had employed him for seven years, unaware that the two SUVs parked across the street contained a total of seven, heavily-armed federal agents. Mr. Mosquera never made it to his car; the agents arrested him, handcuffed him and took him to jail as his 78-year-old mother, a U.S. citizen, watched in horror.

Now it is certainly admitted that Mr. Mosquera, who came to the U.S. from Ecuador in 1991 and had been ordered back to that country that same year, did not do so. But it must also be admitted that he had lived quietly, working, paying taxes and minding his own business for nearly 17 years. He purchased and renovated a house in Newark, an area in desperate need of such attention. Yet despite his innocuous, productive and totally non-threatening life, seven federal agents were required to arrest him. One has difficulty understanding this. If the government was not going to leave him alone, why not quietly arrest him? How much does it cost to send seven federal agents after such a man? And, as the the old cliché asks: ‘Can’t they find some real criminals to arrest?’

But finding real criminals is no longer the task. Previously in NJ, the goal was that 75% of all illegal aliens arrested had to have a criminal record; there certainly is some logic in pursuing real criminals whether or not they are U.S. citizens. But because they are difficult to catch, that goal has been dismissed. Last year, of all those illegal immigrants arrested, a whopping 12% had criminal records. The rest were guilty of civil offenses, usually involving immigration violations. Scott Weber of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Office of Detention and Removal, is unabashed. Said he: “Many times the criminal fugitives are harder to locate and take more time, but it doesn’t mean we’re not looking.” He further stated that those guilty of immigration (civil, not criminal) offenses need to be caught because they too have violated the law.

Many of those arrested have been in this country for many years; they are homeowners, have children who are U.S. citizens and often only come to the attention of authorities because they have applied for residency. As reported by The Star-Ledger: “Critics say a program that was designed to deport the immigration system’s worst offenders is instead catching thousands of people precisely because they’re the ones trying to legalize their status.”

Among those arrested recently were Isaac Nimni, an Israeli national who only came to the attention of authorities when his wife applied to sponsor him, and Rupi Rana, a 20-year-old student at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), majoring in computer programming and computer engineering, arrested along with his parents and a brother who holds a master’s degree from NJIT in computer programming.

Ironically, most of those arrested wind up at the Elizabeth, NJ Detention Center, not far from the Newark Liberty International Airport. One wonders about any relationship between the work of the ICE agents and the concept of liberty.

If federal agents are busy arresting immigrants guilty of nothing other than being in the U.S. illegally, men and women who are otherwise law-abiding, productive members of society, when other illegal aliens are, in the words of Mr. Weber, “harder to locate,” what then, is the advantage? Why not devote the time that is currently spent harassing and forcibly deporting law-abiding people to finding those with criminal records? The answer, unfortunately, is obvious. In NJ during the last fiscal year which ended in September, ICE teams arrested 2,079 people, more than twice the number arrested the previous year. The fear-mongering Bush administration can point to these figures, and those from other states, to tell a frightened population that Mr. Bush’s efforts are bearing fruit; illegal aliens, who are all busy ramming jetliners into corporate office buildings, when they are not busy at work at recycling plants, raising their children, or studying in graduate school, are being rounded up like so much cattle and summarily deported back to from whence they came. And with names like Eleuterio Mosquera and Rupi Rani, they must certainly be up to no good.

Mr. Bush is busy building a wall on the U.S.-Mexican border, to keep out the likes of Messrs Mosquera and Rani. Yet no one is protecting the U.S. from the crimes of the Bush administration: illegal wiretapping, deprivation of freedom of speech among others, not to mention an illegal, immoral imperial war for oil.

For seven years Mr. Bush has relied on the combination of a gullible public, willing to cower in fear at the mere mention of the word ‘Islam,’ and a weak, spineless Congress without the slightest concept of the idea of ‘checks and balances.’ By finding immigrants seeking permanent residency and sending them back to uncertain and often dangerous futures he is able to foster the illusion that he is ‘protecting Americans.’ While he does so, U.S. citizens and Congress look the other way as the nation’s reputation is shattered throughout the world, as the U.S. attempts to steal Iraq’s oil and individual freedoms fade into a polluted sunset.

The list of victims of Mr. Bush is endless: nearly 4,000 U.S. soldiers have been killed and tens of thousands more seriously injured. Over 1,000,000 Iraqi citizens have died in his war, with millions more wounded. Over 3,000,000 have been displaced. Add to that the thousands of people who have lived blameless lives in the U.S. for years, lacking only the official paperwork allowing them to do so, who are now languishing in detention centers or who have been deported. And then add those who depended on them for a living and who are now bereft of their primary means of support.

This is U.S. society in the first decade of a new millennium. One hopes that a new president, to be inaugurated in January of 2009, will bring about welcome changes, but when looking at the front-running candidates, one is left with little optimism.

Comrades of the National Assembly:

You have no easy task on your hands. On January 1st, 1959, surrounded by the accumulated and deepening grievances that our society inherited from its neo-colonial past under U.S. domination, many of us dreamed of creating a fully independent nation where justice prevailed. In the arduous and uneven struggle, there came the moment when we were left completely alone.

Nearly 50 years since the triumph of the Revolution, we can justifiably feel proud of ourselves, as we have held our ground, for almost half a century, in the struggle against the most powerful empire ever to exist in history. In the Proclamation I signed on July 31, 2006, none of you saw any signs of nepotism or an attempt to usurp parliamentary powers. That year, at once difficult and promising for the Revolution, the unity of the people, the Party and State were essential to continue moving forward and to face the declared threat of a military action by the United States.

This past December 24, during his visit to the various districts of the municipality which honored me with the nomination of candidate to parliament, Raúl noted that all of the numerous candidates proposed by the people of a district famous for its combativeness, but with a low educational level, had completed their higher education. This, as he said on Cuban television, made a profound impression in him.

Party, State and Government cadres and grassroots organizations face new problems in their work with an intelligent, watchful and educated people who detest bureaucratic hurdles and inconsiderate justifications. Deep down, every citizen wages an individual battle against humanity’s innate tendency to stick to its survival instincts, a natural law which governs all life.

We are all born marked by that instinct, which science defines as primary. Coming face to face with this instinct is rewarding because it leads us to a dialectical process and to a constant and altruistic struggle, bringing us closer to Martí and making us true communists.

What the international press has emphasized most in its reports on Cuba in recent days is the statement I made on the 17th of this month, in a letter to the director of Cuban television’s Round Table program, where I said that I am not clinging to power. I could add that for some time I did, due to my youth and lack of awareness, when, without any guidance, I started to leave my political ignorance behind and became a utopian socialist. It was a stage in my life when I believed I knew what had to be done and wanted to be in a position to do it! What made me change? Life did, delving more deeply into Martí’s ideas and those of the classics of socialism. The more deeply I became involved in the struggle, the stronger was my identification with those aims and, well before the revolutionary victory I was already convinced that it was my duty to fight for these aims or to die in combat.

We also face great risks that threaten the human species as a whole. This has become more and more evident to me since I predicted, for the first time in Rio de Janeiro, –over 15 years ago, in June 1992– that a species was threatened with extinction as a result of the destruction of its natural habitat. Today, the number of people who understand the real danger of this grows every day.

A recent book by Joseph Stiglitz, former Vice-President of the World Bank and President Clinton’s chief economic advisor until 2002, Nobel Prize laureate and bestselling author in the United States, offers up-to-date and irrefutable facts on the subject. He criticizes the United States, a country which did not sign the Kyoto Protocol, for being the largest producer of carbon dioxide in the world, with annual emissions of 6 billion tons of this gas which disturbs the atmosphere without which life is impossible. In addition to this, the United States is the largest producer of other greenhouse gases.

Few people are aware of these facts. The same economic system which forced this unsustainable wastefulness on us impedes the distribution of Stiglitz’ book. Only a few thousand copies of an excellent edition have been published, enough to guarantee a margin of profit. This responds to a market demand, which the publishing house cannot ignore if it is to survive.

Today, we know that life on Earth has been protected by the ozone layer, located in the atmosphere’s outer ring, at an altitude between 15 to 50 kilometers, in the region known as the stratosphere, which acts as the planet’s shield against the type of solar radiation which can prove harmful. There are greenhouse gases whose warming potential is higher than that of carbon dioxide and which widen the hole in the ozone layer above Antarctica, which loses as much as 70 percent of its volume every spring. The effects of this phenomenon, which is gradually taking place, are humanity’s responsibility.

To have a clear sense of this phenomenon, suffice it to say that the world produces an average of 4.37 metric tons of carbon dioxide per capita. In the case of the United States, the average is 20.14, nearly 5 times as much. In Africa, it is 1.17, while in Asia and Oceania it is 2.87.

The ozone layer, in brief, protects us from ultraviolet and heat radiation which affects the immune system, sight, skin and life of human beings. Under extreme conditions, the destruction of that layer by human beings would affect all forms of life on the planet.

Other problems, foreign to our nation and many others under similar conditions, also threaten us. A victorious counterrevolution would spell a disaster for us, worse than Indonesia’s tragedy. Sukarno, overthrown in 1967, was a nationalist leader who, loyal to Indonesia, headed the guerrillas who fought the Japanese.

General Suharto, who overthrew him, had been trained by Japanese occupation forces. At the conclusion of World War II, Holland, a U.S. ally, re-established control over that distant, extensive and populated territory. Suharto maneuvered. He hoisted the banners of U.S. imperialism. He committed an atrocious act of genocide. Today we know that, under instructions from the CIA, he not only killed hundreds of thousands but also imprisoned a million communists and deprived them and their relatives of all properties or rights; his family amassed a fortune of 40 billion dollars -which, at today’s exchange rate, would be equivalent to hundreds of billions- by handing over the country’s natural resources, the sweat of Indonesians, to foreign investors. The West paid up. Texan-born Lyndon B. Johnson, Kennedy’s successor, was then the President of the United States.

The news on the events in Pakistan we received today also attest to the dangers that threaten our species: internal conflict in a country that possesses nuclear weapons. This is a consequence of the adventurous policies of and the wars aimed at securing the world’s natural resources unleashed by the United States.

Pakistan, involved in a conflict it did not unleash, faced the threat of being taken back to the Stone Age.

The extraordinary circumstances faced by Pakistan had an immediate effect on oil prices and stock exchange shares. No country or region in the world can disassociate itself from the consequences. We must be prepared for anything.

There hasn’t been a day in my life in which I haven’t learned something.

Martí taught us that “all of the world’s glory fits in a kernel of corn”. Many times have I said and repeated this phrase, which carries in eleven words a veritable school of ethics.

Cuba’s Five Heroes, imprisoned by the empire, are to be held up as examples for the new generations.

Fortunately, exemplary conducts will continue to flourish with the consciousness of our peoples as long as our species exists.

I am certain that many young Cubans, in their struggle against the Giant in the Seven-League Boots, would do as they did. Money can buy everything save the soul of a people who has never gone down on its knees.

I read the brief and concise report which Raúl wrote and sent me. We must not waste a minute as we continue to move forward. I will raise my hand, next to you, to show my support.

“There are few things as odd as the calm, superior indifference with which I and those like me watched the beginnings of the Nazi revolution in Germany, as if from a box at the theater. … Perhaps the only comparably odd thing is the way that now, years later….”

12/28/07 “ICH” — — These are the words of Sebastian Haffner (pen name for Raimund Pretzel), who as a young lawyer in Berlin during the 1930s experienced the Nazi takeover and wrote a first-hand account. His children found the manuscript when he died in 1999 and published it the following year as “Geschichte eines Deutschen” (The Story of a German).

The book became an immediate bestseller and has been translated into 20 languages—in English as “Defying Hitler.”

I recently learned from his daughter Sarah, an artist in Berlin, that today is the 100th anniversary of Haffner’s birth. She had seen an earlier article in which I quoted her father and e-mailed to ask me to “write some more about the book and the comparison to Bush’s America. … This is almost unbelievable.”

More about Haffner below. Let’s set the stage first by recapping some of what has been going on that may have resonance for readers familiar with the Nazi ascendancy, noting how “odd” it is that the frontal attack on our Constitutional rights is met with such “calm, superior indifference.”

Goebbels Would be Proud

It has been two years since top New York Times officials decided to let the rest of us in on the fact that the George W. Bush administration had been eavesdropping on American citizens without the court warrants required by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978.

The Times had learned of this well before the election in 2004 and acquiesced to White House entreaties to suppress the damaging information.

In late fall 2005 when Times correspondent James Risen’s book, “State of War: the Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration,” revealing the warrantless eavesdropping was being printed, Times publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., recognized that he could procrastinate no longer.

It would simply be too embarrassing to have Risen’s book on the street, with Sulzberger and his associates pretending that this explosive eavesdropping story did not fit Adolph Ochs’s trademark criterion: All The News That’s Fit To Print.

(The Times’ own ombudsman, Public Editor Byron Calame, branded the newspaper’s explanation for the long delay in publishing this story “woefully inadequate.”)

When Sulzberger told his friends in the White House that he could no longer hold off on publishing in the newspaper, he was summoned to the Oval Office for a counseling session with the president on Dec. 5, 2005. Bush tried in vain to talk him out of putting the story in the Times.

The truth would out; part of it, at least.

Glitches

There were some embarrassing glitches. For example, unfortunately for National Security Agency Director Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander, the White House neglected to tell him that the cat would soon be out of the bag.

So on Dec. 6, Alexander spoke from the old talking points in assuring visiting House intelligence committee member Rush Holt, D-New Jersey, that the NSA did not eavesdrop on Americans without a court order.

Still possessed of the quaint notion that generals and other senior officials are not supposed to lie to congressional oversight committees, Holt wrote a blistering letter to Gen. Alexander after the Times, on Dec. 16, front-paged a feature by Risen and Eric Lichtblau, “Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts.”

But House Intelligence Committee chair Pete Hoekstra, R-Michigan, apparently found Holt’s scruples benighted; Hoekstra did nothing to hold Alexander accountable for misleading Holt, his most experienced committee member, who had served as an intelligence analyst at the State Department.

What followed struck me as bizarre. The day after the Dec. 16 Times feature article, the president of the United States publicly admitted to a demonstrably impeachable offense.

Authorizing illegal electronic surveillance was a key provision of the second article of impeachment against President Richard Nixon. On July 27, 1974, this and two other articles of impeachment were approved by bipartisan votes in the House Judiciary Committee.

Bush Takes Frontal Approach

Far from expressing regret, the president bragged about having authorized the surveillance “more than 30 times since the September the 11th attacks,” and said he would continue to do so. The president also said:

“Leaders in Congress have been briefed more than a dozen times on this authorization and the activities conducted under it.”

On Dec. 19, 2005, then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and then-NSA Director Michael Hayden held a press conference to answer questions about the as yet unnamed surveillance program.

Gonzales was asked why the White House decided to flout FISA rather than attempt to amend it, choosing instead a “backdoor approach.” He answered:

“We have had discussions with Congress…as to whether or not FISA could be amended to allow us to adequately deal with this kind of threat, and we were advised that that would be difficult, if not impossible.”

Hmm. Impossible? It strains credulity that a program of the limited scope described would be unable to win ready approval from a Congress that had just passed the “Patriot Act” in record time.

James Risen has made the following quip about the prevailing mood: “In October 2001, you could have set up guillotines on the public streets of America.”

It was not difficult to infer that the surveillance program must have been of such scope and intrusiveness that, even amid highly stoked fear, it didn’t have a prayer for passage.

It turns out we didn’t know the half of it.

What To Call These Activities

“Illegal Surveillance Program” didn’t seem quite right for White House purposes, and the PR machine was unusually slow off the blocks.

It took six weeks to settle on “Terrorist Surveillance Program,” with FOX News leading the way followed by the president himself. This labeling would dovetail nicely with the president’s rhetoric on Dec. 17:

“In the weeks following the terrorist attacks on our nation, I authorized the National Security Agency, consistent with U.S. law and the Constitution, to intercept the international communications of people with known links to al-Qaeda and related terrorist organizations. … The authorization I gave the National Security Agency after September 11 helped address that problem…” [Emphasis added]

And Gen. Michael Hayden, who headed NSA from 1999 to 2005, was of course on the same page, dissembling as convincingly as the president. At his May 2006 confirmation hearings to become CIA director, he told of his soul-searching when, as director of NSA, he was asked to eavesdrop on Americans without a court warrant.

“I had to make this personal decision in early October 2001,” said Hayden. “It was a personal decision. … I could not not do this.”

Like so much else, it was all because of 9/11. But we now know…

It Started Seven Months Before 9/11.

How many times have you heard it? The mantra “after 9/11 everything changed” has given absolution to all manner of sin.

We are understandably reluctant to believe the worst of our leaders, and this tends to make us negligent. After all, we learned from former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill that drastic changes were made in U.S. foreign policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian issue and toward Iraq at the first National Security Council meeting on Jan. 30, 2001.

Should we not have anticipated far-reaching changes at home as well?

Reporting by the Rocky Mountain News and court documents and testimony on a case involving Qwest strongly suggest that in February 2001 Hayden saluted smartly when the Bush administration instructed NSA to suborn AT&T, Verizon, and Qwest to spy illegally on you, me, and other Americans.

Bear in mind that this would have had nothing to do with terrorism, which did not really appear on the new administration’s radar screen until a week before 9/11, despite the pleading of Clinton aides that the issue deserved extremely high priority.

So this until-recently-unknown pre-9/11 facet of the “Terrorist Surveillance Program” was not related to Osama bin Laden or to whomever he and his associates might be speaking. It had to do with us.

We know that the Democrats briefed on the “Terrorist Surveillance Program” include House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-California, (the one with the longest tenure on the House Intelligence Committee), Rep. Jane Harman, D-California, and former and current chairmen of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Bob Graham, D-Florida, and Jay Rockefeller, D-West Virginia, respectively.

May one interpret their lack of public comment on the news that the snooping began well before 9/11 as a sign they were co-opted and then sworn to secrecy?

It is an important question. Were the appropriate leaders in Congress informed that within days of George W. Bush’s first inauguration the NSA electronic vacuum cleaner began to suck up information on you and me, despite the FISA law and the Fourth Amendment?

Are They All Complicit?

And are Democratic leaders about to cave in and grant retroactive immunity to those telecommunications corporations—AT&T and Verizon—which made millions by winking at the law and the Constitution?

(Qwest, to its credit, heeded the advice of its general counsel who said that what NSA wanted done was clearly illegal.)

What’s going on here? Have congressional leaders no sense for what is at stake?

Lately the adjective “spineless” has come into vogue in describing congressional Democrats—no offense to invertebrates.

Nazis and Their Enablers

You don’t have to be a Nazi. You can just be, well, a sheep.

In his journal, Sebastian Haffner decries what he calls the “sheepish submissiveness” with which the German people reacted to a 9/11-like event, the burning of the German Parliament (Reichstag) on Feb. 27, 1933.

Haffner finds it quite telling that none of his acquaintances “saw anything out of the ordinary in the fact that, from then on, one’s telephone would be tapped, one’s letters opened, and one’s desk might be broken into.”

But it is for the cowardly politicians that Haffner reserves his most vehement condemnation. Do you see any contemporary parallels here?

In the elections of March 4, 1933, shortly after the Reichstag fire, the Nazi party garnered only 44 percent of the vote. Only the “cowardly treachery” of the Social Democrats and other parties to whom 56 percent of the German people had entrusted their votes made it possible for the Nazis to seize full power. Haffner adds:

“It is in the final analysis only that betrayal that explains the almost inexplicable fact that a great nation, which cannot have consisted entirely of cowards, fell into ignominy without a fight.”

The Social Democratic leaders betrayed their followers—“for the most part decent, unimportant individuals.” In May, the party leaders sang the Nazi anthem; in June the Social Democratic party was dissolved.

The middle-class Catholic party Zentrum folded in less than a month, and in the end supplied the votes necessary for the two-thirds majority that “legalized” Hitler’s dictatorship.

As for the right-wing conservatives and German nationalists: “Oh God,” writes Haffner, “what an infinitely dishonorable and cowardly spectacle their leaders made in 1933 and continued to make afterward. … They went along with everything: the terror, the persecution of Jews. … They were not even bothered when their own party was banned and their own members arrested.”

In sum: “There was not a single example of energetic defense, of courage or principle. There was only panic, flight, and desertion. In March 1933, millions were ready to fight the Nazis. Overnight they found themselves without leaders. … At the moment of truth, when other nations rise spontaneously to the occasion, the Germans collectively and limply collapsed. They yielded and capitulated, and suffered a nervous breakdown. … The result is today the nightmare of the rest of the world.”

This is what can happen when virtually all are intimidated.

Our Founding Fathers were not oblivious to this; thus, James Madison:

“I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations. … The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home.”

We cannot say we weren’t warned.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. He was an Army officer and then a C.I.A. analyst for 27 years, and now serves on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

When the hideous photographs of torture and abuse emerged from Abu Ghraib in the fall of 2004, they created a public relations disaster for the Bush administration. The White House had painstakingly worked to capitalize on the 9/11 attacks by creating a “war on terror.” Never mind the absurdity of declaring war on a tactic. Central to Bush’s new “war” was the portrayal of us as the good guys and al Qaeda, the Taliban, and Saddam Hussein as the bad guys.

But the Abu Ghraib photos of naked Iraqis piled on top of one another, forced to masturbate, led around on leashes like dogs shined the light on U.S. hypocrisy.

After the Abu Ghraib revelations, the Bush administration could not tolerate more bad publicity. So in 2005, the CIA destroyed several hundred hours of videotapes depicting torturous interrogations of Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, probably including water boarding. The former U.S. official involved in discussions about the tapes reported widespread concern that “something as explosive as this would probably get out,” according to the Los Angeles Times. This destruction of evidence may violate several laws. And it remains to be seen how high up the chain of command the criminality goes.

Now that the videotape scandal has come to light, Bush and his men are back in damage control mode. CIA Director Michael Hayden minimized the significance of the destruction, claiming the tapes were destroyed “only after it was determined they were no longer of intelligence value and not relevant to any internal, legislative or judicial inquiries.” These claims are disingenuous.

The tapes likely portray U.S. officials engaged in torture, which violates three U.S.-ratified treaties as well as the U.S. Torture Statute and the War Crimes Act.

Bush justifies his administration’s “harsh interrogation techniques” by maintaining that Zubaydah, under interrogation, fingered Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. But according to investigative journalist Ron Suskind in his 2006 book One Percent Doctrine, it was a “walk-in” who led the CIA to Mohammed in return for a $25 million reward.

Zubaydah evidently wasn’t a top al Qaeda leader. Dan Coleman, one of the FBI’s leading experts on al Qaeda, said Zubaydah “knew very little about real operations, or strategy.” Moreover, Zubaydah was schizophrenic, according to Coleman. “This guy is insane, certifiable split personality.” Coleman’s views were echoed at the top levels of the CIA and were communicated to Bush and Cheney. But Bush scolded CIA director George Tenet, saying, “I said [Zubaydah] was important. You’re not going to let me lose face on this, are you?” Zubaydah’s minor role in al Qaeda and his apparent insanity were kept secret.

In response to the torture, Zubaydah told his interrogators about myriad terrorist targets al Qaeda had in its sights: the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statute of Liberty, shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, and apartment buildings. Al Qaeda was close to building a crude nuclear bomb, Zubaydah reported. None of this was corroborated but the Bush gang reacted to each report zealously.

The Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed the government’s duty to provide criminal defendants with any evidence in the government’s possession that might tend to exonerate the defendant or impeach the prosecutor’s case. Zacarias Moussaoui tried to subpoena Zubaydah to testify at his trial. On May 9, 2003, Assistant U.S. Attorneys David Novak and David Raskin lied to U.S. District Court Judge Leonie Brinkema, who presided over Moussaoui’s trial. When the judge asked “whether the interrogations are being recorded in any format”?, the U.S. Attorneys, evidently relying on information from the CIA, said “No.” This is obstruction of justice.

When Zubaydah and al-Nashiri go before the military commissions, they will undoubtedly raise their torture as a defense to whatever crimes they face. Yet the evidence of that torture has been destroyed by the government.

There was no way of knowing whether these tapes could have intelligence value in the future. Indeed, the government defied the 2003 and 2004 demands of the 9/11 Commission by failing to turn over the videotaped interrogations. Now the CIA is parsing words by claiming the commission never directly asked for videotapes. “We asked for every single thing they had,” commission co-chairman Thomas Kean said. “And then my vice chairman, Lee Hamilton, looked the director of the CIA in the face, and said, ‘Look, even if we haven’t asked for something, if it’s pertinent to our investigation, make it available to us.’” Hamilton said the CIA “clearly obstructed” the commission’s investigation.

At the same time the 9/11 Commission was denied the tapes, the ACLU filed Freedom of Information Act requests seeking records of the treatment of all detainees held in U.S. custody abroad since 9/11. When the government refused to comply with the FOIA requests, the ACLU sued in federal court in New York. On September 15, 2004, U.S. District Court Judge Alvin Hellerstein ordered the CIA and other government agencies to “produce or identify” all requested documents within one month. They are still not forthcoming. The ACLU has filed a motion to hold the CIA in contempt of court for refusing to comply with Judge Hellerstein’s order.

When the destruction of the tapes became public, both the House and Senate intelligence committees opened investigations, and subpoenaed witnesses and documents to shed light on the matter. Attorney General Michael Mukasey refused to cooperate and tried to put the kabosh on the congressional probes, asking them to wait until he had finished his own internal investigation. But after criticism in the media, the CIA relented and agreed to produce documents and the testimony of acting CIA general counsel John Rizzo.

The decision to destroy the tapes was allegedly made by Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., who was chief of the Directorate of Operations, the CIA’s clandestine service. Although the House intelligence committee has subpoenaed Rodriguez, there is no indication his bosses will allow him to testify.

The Sunday Times (London) reported that Rodriguez may seek immunity from prosecution in exchange for testifying before the House intelligence committee. Rodriguez’s testimony could be explosive.

At least four top White House lawyers participated in discussions with the CIA between 2003 and 2005 about whether to destroy the videotapes. They included Alberto Gonzales, David Addington (Cheney’s former counsel, now his chief of staff), Harriet Miers, and John Bellinger (former senior attorney at the National Security Council). The New York Times quoted a former senior intelligence official as saying there was “vigorous sentiment” among some high White House officials to destroy the tapes.

Two former CIA officials, Vincent Cannistrano and Larry Johnson, think it highly unlikely Rodriguez made the decision to destroy the tapes on his own. George W. Bush “has no recollection” of hearing about the existence or destruction of the tapes before Hayden briefed him on December 13. Yet given Bush’s keen interest in Zubaydah’s interrogation, it seems more likely the President was involved with the decision to destroy the tapes.

During his Senate confirmation hearing, Michael Mukasey refused to opine about whether water boarding constitutes torture. Mukasey knew the Bush administration had admitted water boarding prisoners, and that torture is a war crime under the U.S. War Crimes Act. Mukasey was shielding his future bosses from criminal liability as war criminals. Now the Department of Justice, under Mukasey, is investigating the destruction of the tapes.

Justice Department regulations call for the appointment of an outside special counsel when (1) a criminal investigation of a person or matter is warranted, (2) the investigation or prosecution of that person or matter by a United States Attorney’s Office or litigating division of the Department of Justice would present a conflict of interest for the Department, and (3) under the circumstances it would be in the public interest to appoint an outside Special Counsel to assume responsibility for the matter. When these three conditions are satisfied, the attorney general must select a special counsel from outside the government. (28 C.F.R. 600.1, 600.3 (2007).)

When he was a federal judge, Michael Mukasey issued the material witness warrant for Jose Padilla. The warrant was based partly on information from Abu Zubaydah. It is not clear whether Mukasey knew Zubaydah’s statements were obtained by torture. But since he issued the warrant, Mukasey has a real or apparent conflict of interest. He has said it is premature to appoint an outside special counsel. But like the Nixon administration, the Department of Justice cannot be trusted to investigate itself. Congress should be pressured to pass a new independent counsel statute.

In a remarkable symbol of the injustices of post-Katrina reconstruction, hundreds of people were locked out of a public New Orleans City Council meeting addressing demolition of 4500 public housing apartments. Some were tasered, many pepper sprayed and a dozen arrested.

Outside the chambers, iron gates were chained and padlocked even before the scheduled start.

The scene looked like one of those countries on TV that is undergoing a people’s revolution – and the similarities were only beginning. (See video at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMBWAXfGsc4)

Dozens of uniformed police secured the gates and other entrances. Only developers and those with special permission from council members were allowed in – the rest were kept locked outside the gates. Despite dozens of open seats in the council chambers, pleas to be allowed in were ignored.

Chants of “Housing is a human right!” and “Let us in!” thundered through the concrete breezeway.

Public housing residents came and spoke out despite an intense campaign of intimidation. Residents were warned by phone that if they publicly opposed the demolitions they would lose all housing assistance. Residents opposed to the demolition had simple demands. If the authorities insisted on spending hundreds of millions to tear down hundreds of structurally sound buildings containing 4500 public housing subsidized apartments, there should be a guarantee that every resident could return to a similarly subsidized apartment. Alternatively, the government should use the hundreds of millions to repair the apartments so people could come home. Neither alternative was acceptable to HUD. A plan of residents to partner with the AFL-CIO Housing Trust to save their homes was also ignored.

Outside, SWAT team members and police in riot gear and on horses began to arrive as rain started falling. Those locked out included public housing residents, a professor from Southern University, graduate students, the Episcopal Bishop of Louisiana, ministers, lawyers, law students, homeless people who lived in tents across the street from city hall, affordable housing allies from across the country and dozens of others.

Inside the chambers, Revered Torin Sanders and others insisted that the locked out be allowed to come and stand inside along the walls – a common practice for over 30 years. No one could recall any City Council locking people out of a public meeting. The request to allow people to stand was denied. The Council then demanded silence from those inside. Those who continued to demand that the others be let in were pointed out by police, physically taken down and arrested. Ironically, some young men were tasered right in front of the speaker’s podium.

This was a meeting the council had repeatedly tried to avoid. It was only held after residents (100% African American and nearly all mothers and grandmothers) got an emergency court order stopping demolitions until the council acted. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) announced long ago it was going to demolish 4500 public housing apartments despite the Katrina crisis of affordable housing no matter what anyone said. HUD had no plans to ask the council or anyone else for approval. The judge said otherwise, so the meeting was scheduled.

Leaders of the U.S. Congress, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, asked that the decision be delayed 60 days so they could try to move forward on Senate Bill 1668 which would resolve many of the demolition problems. This request was backed by New Orleans Congressman William Jefferson, Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu and Presidential candidates John Edwards and Barack Obama.

Opponents cited the affordable housing crisis in New Orleans. Homeless people camped across from City Hall and for blocks under the interstate. The number of homeless people doubled since Katrina. Thousands of residents in FEMA trailers across the Gulf Coast were being evicted. More on the reasons to oppose demolition can be found here.

Solidarity demonstrations opposing demolition were held in Washington DC, New York, Oakland, Minneapolis, Houston, North Carolina, Maine, Philadelphia, Cleveland, New Jersey, and Boston. Thousands of people across the country contacted city council members. Dozens of community, housing and human rights groups petitioned the Council not to demolish until there was an enforceable requirement of one for one replacement of housing.

But hours before the meeting began, a majority of the council publicly announced on the front page of the local paper that they were going to approve demolition no matter what people said at the meeting. The paper, the developers and others were delighted. Residents and affordable housing allies were not.

Inside, the council started the meeting surrounded by armed police, National Guard and undercover authorities from many law enforcement agencies.

Outside, the locked out could see the people who had been arrested on the inside being dragged away to police wagons. A few of the protestors then pulled open one of the gates. The police started shooting arcs of pepper spray into the crowd. A woman’s scream pierced the chaos as police fired tasers into the crowd. Medics wiped pepper spray from fallen people’s eyes. A young woman who was tasered in the back went into a seizure and was taken to the hospital.

Inside and out, a dozen people were arrested – most for disturbing the peace. They joined another dozen who had been arrested over the past week in protest actions against the demolitions.

The City Council meeting continued. Supporters of demolition were given careful, courteous attention and softball questions by council members. Opponents less so.

Despite pleas from displaced residents, dozens of community organizations and federal elected officials, the New Orleans City Council voted unanimously to allow demolition to proceed. In their approval the Council did promise to urge HUD to listen to residents and to work for one for one replacement of affordable housing. Several city council members read from typed statements about their reasons to support demolition: the deplorable state of public housing; the lack of available money for repair; the oral promises of all, the federal government and developers, to do something better for the community.

After the meeting, residents vowed to continue their struggle for affordable housing for everyone and to resist demolitions – putting their bodies before bulldozers if necessary.

The struggle for affordable housing continues as does the campaign to stop demolition until there is a real right to return and one for one replacement of housing. Residents and local advocates applaud and appreciate the support of allies from across the nation. Critics label national supporters as “outside agitators” – exactly the same charge leveled at civil rights activists historically. But people understand that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. Public housing residents and local affordable housing advocates welcome the humble participation of social justice advocates of whatever age, of whatever race, from whatever place, who join and act in true solidarity.

Residents vow to make sure that the promises made by the Council and the Mayor are enforced. For example, the Mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, announced that he would not allow HUD to demolish two of the four housing developments until HUD gave documentation of funded plans including one for one replacement of the housing demolished and details of the developments and their plans.

The Senate will continue to be lobbied to pass SB 1668 – which would really guarantee one for one replacement of housing. It is currently stalled in the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee because of opposition by Louisiana Republican Senator David Vitter.

Litigation is still pending in state and federal courts to enforce Louisiana and U.S. laws that should protect residents from illegal demolitions. Investigations into the legality of locking people out of a public meeting, the legality of a law passed at such a meeting, the indiscriminate use of tasers and pepper spray, are all ongoing.

Padlocked and chained gates will only amplify the voices of the locked out calling for justice. Pepper spray and tasers illustrate the problems but will not deter people from protesting for just causes. Bulldozers may start up, but just people will resist and create a reality where housing is a real human right.

Stephanie Mingo, a working grandmother who is one of the leaders of the residents, promised to continue the resistance after the meeting: “We did not come this far to turn back now. This fight is far from over. We are not resting until everyone has the right to return home.”

Those wanting additional information should look to: www.justiceforneworleans.org or www.defendneworleanspublichousing.org

12/27/07 “ICH” — — At long last, the age-old problem of health care for the poor and near-poor is being discussed in open forum. The problem has existed since the ethos of class differentiation was begun with the invention of wampum. In this modern age, it is only through the activities of individual greed that it continues, despite the glaring fact that one solution is the only alternative.

Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts experiment has already been exposed as a failure as will be any other program for “mandatory insurance”. As with the assistance that is provided to the elderly holders of policies for Medicare Part D, recipients of the plan must be totally destitute in order to be free of the required “deductible and co-payment” muddle. Even if they have “insurance coverage” they still cannot afford the cash outlay that is necessary in order to obtain the necessary treatment.

How, then, to be sure that even those who are marginally above the “poverty level” can have the health care they need? How do we care for those who are ill before the condition creates a crisis? How to keep the healthy in good condition so that they can continue to lead productive lives?.

Half a century ago, a good businessman named Henry Kaiser joined other automobile and equipment manufacturers in ceasing the making of their former product in order to make the needed equipment that the country needed in order to effectively engage in World War II. He built huge shipyards on the West Coast and people poured in from all over the beleaguered nation to work in them. Soon it was apparent that these folks were physically devastated by the medical neglect, malnutrition, and other maladies inflicted by the Great Depression. The absenteeism troubled him until he reached one infallible conclusion: “It is less costly to keep people healthy than to get them well once they become ill.”

On that philosophy he built his own clinics and hospitals where employees of his operations could receive physical check-ups regularly, necessary medications, dental care, and visual examinations and treatments. A small amount was deducted from the paychecks of the workers and Kaiser workers bcame healthy, happy, and productive. Only later did the Bess Kaiser Memorial Hospital system become the largest Health Maintenance Organization on the West Coast. With the end of the war and the closure of the shipyards, the program became open to other employers on a group plan, though only those who were employed by such an employer could benefit from the total coverage, the excellent care, and the reasonable cost. With the advent of other, similar companies, Kaiser became just another HMO in order to deal with the competition.

But the principle that was discovered by Henry Kaiser remains as true now as then. Even with the S-CHIP program, small chidren must either attend or miss school while suffering from an ear infection or a bad cough while his working father, mother, or both, must wait for a payday so they will have the necessary nine or ten dollars to make the “co-payment”in order to see a doctor. Employees go to work feeling ill but “toughing it out” because they cannot afford to risk a hospital stay for fear of the “deductible” and its devastating effect on the family budget. What we have is not working and the plans that are proposed will not work. The news site, Alternet, has done a good series on the problem which may be read here.

There are many arguments from those who oppose the Universal Health Care plans as proposed by Dennis Kucinich and others. One is that it would raise taxes. Horrors! Have you computed the amount that you pay in insurance premiums each year? The insurance companies have been “taxing” you for half a century and you take it in stride. The added taxes to cover your health care would not be likely to be more than you are paying now to the insurance company and the coverage would be better.

Another is that it would “destroy an industry”. Perhaps an unfeeling industry should be brought to account for the exhorbitant profits that they have amassed as the result of denying care, requiring co-payments and deductibles to deter people from fully utilizing their benefits, and refusing coverage to “high-risk individuals”. Let them go back to insuring lives and property, cars, houses, and business liabilities.

The third argument against free universal health care is that it would cost too much. This argument is the least effective when viewed in the light of realism. The insurance companies declare an annual profit of some Ten Billion Dollars! How many of the 40% of Americans without adequate health care could be kept healthy by the addition of that amount to be paid to physicians, hospitals, and pharmacists?

It is time that the American people take a clear-eyed look at the reasons why our children are being weakened, our workers hindered, and our elderly going without medications at the end of the year because of the dread “donut hole”while we bear the burden of making the rich even richer. We manage our personal budgets with care to be sure that we spend our money in the most efficient and cost-effective manner. Why should we ask less of those firms that are stealing our health care dollars while leaving us without that for which we are paying? As they “cream the market”, insuring only the healthy and discontinuing coverage for those with serious illnesses, those left uninsured must liquidate their homes and other assets to pay for their own medical care until they are destitute and qualify for Medicaid and welfare.

That is why our nation, which spends more for health care than any other can only rank 45th in the quality of care. Those who can afford it have access to the most modern technology and life-saving procedures where those who cannot are left with medical care that is reminiscent of the nineteenth century. This is the great shame of our vaunted democracy where we expound that “all men are created equal”. The big lie is exposed when you learn that the rich get the best while the poor are shunted aside to die of neglect. When a plan is suggested that would care for the poor while costing the rich no more, we owe it to ourselves to give it serious consideration.

CAIRO, Egypt — In Iran, a large red icon pops up on computer screens. In Syria, there’s a discreet note from the filter. Other Arab nations display “blocked” in bold lettering or issue crafty “page not found” replies.

However the censors put it, the message is clear: You’re not permitted to see this Web site.

Governments in the Middle East are stepping up a campaign of censorship and surveillance in an effort to prevent an estimated 33.5 million Internet users from viewing a variety of Web sites whose topics range from human rights to pornography. As a result, millions of Middle Easterners are finding it harder by the day to access popular news and entertainment sites such as Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and Flickr.

Five of the world’s top-13 Internet censors are in the Middle East, according to the most recent report from Reporters Without Borders, the journalism advocacy group that lobbies against Web censorship.

“The Web makes networking much easier, for political activists as well as teenagers,” Reporters Without Borders said in its annual report for 2007. “Unfortunately, this progress and use of new tools by activists is now being matched by the efforts of dictatorships to fight them. Dictators, too, have entered the world of Web 2.0.”

Internet regulations vary widely across the Middle East. Predictably, the most authoritarian governments have the most aggressive filters, but even some without advanced censorship systems have prosecuted bloggers for controversial postings on religion or politics.

Just as Internet users have banded together on social networking sites to challenge the wave of censorship, the region’s governments also are uniting to share filtering software and the latest online surveillance technology, activists said.

“Now there’s some common work among the Arab governments to censor the Internet. They’re acting like they’re fighting terrorists,” said Ihab al Zalaky, the managing editor of a respected Egyptian newspaper and the chief author of a comprehensive report last year on regional Internet censorship. “There’s no good news. They’re all making it harder for people to access the Internet.”

Only four Arab countries have little or no filtering: Lebanon, Morocco, Jordan and Egypt — but Egyptian politicians are considering a law that would criminalize some online activity.

At the other end of the spectrum are Saudi Arabia and Syria, consistently described by human rights groups as the most hostile toward the Internet. The rest of the region falls somewhere in between, with governments importing the latest technology to narrow the number of sites available to the public and drafting laws to curb online dissent.

The prohibitions have led to an explosion in circumventors, proxy servers that allow Internet users to bypass workplace or government filters. In cyber cafes from Damascus to Dubai, patrons furtively browse blocked sites and swap Web addresses for the latest “proxies.”

The most tech-savvy young Arabs and Iranians use new proxies every day, trying to stay a step ahead of government censors.

“We’ve seen on the one hand an increase in Internet usage throughout the region and, in reaction to that, we’ve seen governments getting more sophisticated in how they arrest people and censor online content,” said Nadim Houry, a Human Rights Watch researcher for Lebanon and Syria. “It’s sort of the traditional cat-and-mouse game.”

Last month, Syrian authorities banned several more sites, including the book and music vendor Amazon.com. The government reportedly uses a filtering system called Thundercache to block content from sites such as Blogspot, Hotmail, Skype and YouTube. Many Arabic-language news sites also are banned.

In Iraq and the Palestinian territories, the Internet is policed mainly by the owners of Internet cafes and by Internet users themselves, according to monitoring groups. In both places, Islamist militants have attacked Internet cafes, accusing patrons of looking at pornography or chatting with members of the opposite sex.

In Iraq, the U.S. military is the only official Internet censor — operational security measures prevent American troops from using some sites and commanders have shut down cyber cafes in areas where insurgents use the Internet to share intelligence and plot attacks.

More typical is the censorship that’s spreading throughout Arab states in North Africa. Tunisian authorities block several sites, human rights workers said, but they’ve also begun to hold the owners of Internet cafes liable if political activists use their establishments to post critical news about the government.

After years of Internet freedom, Sudan reportedly has purchased a state-of-the-art blocking program that prohibits access to political sites and literary works that range from racy fiction to a book that the government deemed offensive to Islam’s Prophet Muhammad. Morocco, Algeria and Libya also have come under fire from human rights watchdogs because of their prosecution of online dissidents.

In Egypt, the Arab world’s most populous nation and home to an estimated 6 million Internet users, the government offers cheap dial-up browsing to anyone with a telephone line and authorities do little or no filtering, so video-sharing platforms, social-networking sites, most opposition sites and pornography are all easily accessible.

But police have rounded up at least three bloggers and harassed many more in recent years, according to Reporters Without Border. Activists also fear more filtering after an Egyptian court last year ruled that authorities could block, suspend or shut down any Web site that could pose a threat to “national security,” vague wording that could lead to criminal charges for dozens of Egyptian bloggers.

Abdel Moneim Mahmoud, 28, has been arrested and harassed by Egyptian authorities several times in connection with his blog promoting the Muslim Brotherhood, a powerful Sunni Islamist opposition group. Because he uses Blogspot, the U.S.-based weblog platform, the Egyptian government hasn’t been able to block his blog without banning the site altogether.

“They threatened, ‘If you don’t stop blogging, we will arrest you’ every month,” Mahmoud said. “Police officers ask about specific things on our blogs when they call us in for investigation. They use IP-address tracking to find out who is writing which blog.”

Iran’s hard-line Shiite Muslim leadership is another zealous censor of the Internet. The government boasts of filtering 10 million “immoral” Web sites in addition to all the major social networking outfits and dozens of pages about religion or politics.

For the past year, according to human rights groups, Iranian authorities also have zeroed in on online publications dealing with women’s rights. Two prominent “cyber feminists” were arrested in the past month on charges of distorting public opinion and drawing negative publicity to Iran through the postings on the Web.

Across the Persian Gulf from Iran, the Arabian Peninsula is home to some of the world’s most stringent censors, with Saudi Arabia at the top of the list. Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain and Oman are among other Gulf countries that filter online content.

Even in a place as glitzy and modern as Dubai, the regional shopping hub in the United Arab Emirates, a strict filtering system targets pornographic and political sites. Dubai residents can drink and party all night long, but they’re not allowed to read about such exploits on some blogs penned by Western expatriates.

Earlier this year, residents were outraged by tentative plans to extend the censorship to so-called free zones, where media and multinational companies can — for now — surf the Web unfiltered. Foreign workers in Dubai have decried the ban on voice software such as Skype, which allows them to call home for free. Critics call it economic censorship of the Internet, an attempt by state-backed telecommunications firms to build their revenue from international calls.

The ultraconservative Saudi government, a close U.S. ally, blocks thousands of Web sites that deal with pornography, religion, politics and human rights. Medical students at Saudi universities have complained that they can’t even access scientific sites to study human anatomy.

Fed up with the growing list of banned sites, a 25-year-old finance student named Hani Noor helped his cousin to create a Facebook group called, “We All Hope They Don’t Block Facebook in Saudi Arabia.” As of Monday, the group had 225 members and a message board that focused on tips for the best proxies to get around government bans.

Noor, however, hit on an even better solution: he signed up for satellite Internet, which means his connection is now free from the long arm of the Saudi censors.

“I’m off the hook,” Noor said with a triumphant laugh in a telephone interview from his home in Saudi Arabia. “We are winning. They’re blocking, but we’ve always found a way to overcome it.”

A net of lies has been spun over our heads and it’s been glued over the earth like a heavy fog. It makes it impossible to see through it to the real world that is out there somewhere. We are blindly walking around in the mist breathing in the poison that is belching out of our loudspeakers, feeding us the steady diet of fear and hatred for the other, making us see what’s around us in black and white, draining all things of the colors that make for beauty and compassion.

Far above our heads the vultures are circling, ready to pounce on their prey whenever they see someone weak and helpless. The vultures are devoid of any sort of feeling, in the same way the roaring noise around our heads is constantly centered on making us immune to the needs of the other, making us deaf to the cries of despair from the suffering people and blind to the destruction wrought upon the worthy goals and efforts that once filled their lives.

The vultures are running the world and their rule has only one purpose, making sure that the people are deaf and blind. That they are ignorant of the injustice and inequality that are the centerpieces of world domination. That they are ignorant of the rights they have been deprived of. That they are ignorant of the fairy land of beauty and love which used to be theirs.

The people have no rights and no goals. They are just forced to listen to the ceaseless noise that reshapes their views of what is of any value on this earth, the inanities that fill our ears with roaring noise, making us believe that white is good and black is bad. That buying is good but being on the dole is bad. That the West is good and the East is bad. That Christians are good but Moslems are bad. That wealth should be praised but poverty should be punished.

The vultures keep their counsels and they all approve of the basic principles. Invading and destroying a country is good if the people don’t do the bidding of the Big Vulture. Buying up countries that can be made to support the Big Vulture is praiseworthy. Even if it means that it harms the lives of the ignorant people at home who have to pay out the millions and billions to the client nations. Ruining countries that have riches that the vultures want to get their claws on is good, as long as those countries are defenseless and can’t fight back.

The vultures use their force to control us, to make our lives empty save for the fear and hatred that fit their objectives. Once the world is filled with robots, leader robots and follower robots, it will be much easier to control. Robots don’t rebel.

LITTLE BOXES

Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky tacky,
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes all the same.
There’s a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one,
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.

And the people in the houses
All went to the university,
Where they were put in boxes
And they came out all the same,
And there’s doctors and lawyers,
And business executives,
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.

And they all play on the golf course
And drink their martinis dry,
And they all have pretty children
And the children go to school,
And the children go to summer camp
And then to the university,
Where they are put in boxes
And they come out all the same.

And the boys go into business
And marry and raise a family
In boxes made of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.
There’s a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one,
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.

“Where the dead are ghosts on the fragile abacus used to calculate loss, to estimate tragedy.” – from “Body Count,” by poet Persis Karim

The narrative in the media these days is the success of the U.S. “surge,” which has poured an additional 30,000 U.S. troops into Iraq since early January 2007. In early December, war critic and close ally of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi U.S. Rep. John Murtha (D-Penn.) said, “I think the surge is working.”

Polls indicate that concern over the economy has replaced the war as the major issue for voters and that, while a majority of Americans want the troops out, those saying that things are going better jumped from 33 percent to just under 50 percent.

Are they going better? Car bombings, sectarian violence, and attacks on U.S. troops are down, although 2007 has been the deadliest year of the war for the Americans. But does the reduced violence have anything to do with the “surge”?

As Patrick Cockburn of The Independent points out, Americans and the U.S. media tend to “exaggerate the extent to which the U.S. is making the political weather and is in control of events there.”

Take the attacks on Americans, which are down. The Sunni-based resistance carried out the majority of those. Sunnis, who constitute 5 million of Iraq’s 27 million people (there are 16 million Shi’ites and five million Kurds), dominated the country under Saddam Hussein.

Initially the Sunnis formed an alliance with al-Qaeda that turned out to be a disaster. Al-Qaeda, an extremist Sunni organization, targeted Shi’ites, whom it considers heretics. The relentless bombings and shootings culminating in the 2006 bombing of the Golden mosque in Samarra, spurred Shi’ite militias, such as Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army, to counterattack.

The Sunnis suddenly found themselves fighting a two-front war against the Americans and the Shi’ites, a war they cannot win. They soon were driven out of large sections of Baghdad by the Shi’ites while absorbing massive casualties from the U.S. military campaign.

These defeats forced the Sunnis to turn on al-Qaeda and to reach a détente with the U.S. In return, the new Sunni militias – like the Baghdad Brigade, the Knights of Ameriya, and the Guardians of Ghazaliya – were given vehicles, uniforms, flak jackets and $300 a month for each member by the Americans. Starting months before the “surge,” the so-called “Sunni awakening” soon fielded 77,000 militia members, larger than the 60,000-member Mahdi Army and half the size of the Iraqi army.

But according to the Sunday Times, many of these Sunnis were formerly al-Qaeda members, and the current “truce” with the Americans is little more than a tactical maneuver to buy time. “Of course the coming war is with the [Shi’ite] militias,” Baghdad Brigade intelligence officer Abu Omar told the Times. “God willing, we will defeat them and get rid of them just as we did with al-Qaeda.”

The flashpoint may come if the Shi’ite-Kurdish government of Prime Minster Nouri al-Maliki drags its feet in integrating the Sunni militias into the security forces. “If the government continues to reject them [the Sunni militias],” says Baghdad Brigade commander Abu Maroff in the Sunday Times, “let it be clear this brigade will eventually take its revenge.”

Baghdad is calmer because the city has gone from one of mostly mixed neighborhoods to a city of rigid ethnic enclaves guarded by sectarian militias. While this has reduced the level of violence in the short run, it hardly bodes well for the future.

In short, the “surge” has very little to do with the reduction of violence in Baghdad and virtually nothing to do with the relative peace in Western Iraq. Both are the quiet that follows in the wake of ethnic cleansing.

Iraq’s south has been mostly calm, but once again, this has nothing to do with the “surge.” The U.S. has few forces in the region, and the British have been driven out of Basra. They are currently bunkered down in an airport. Underneath the apparent calm is tension between rival Shi’ite factions, in particular al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army and the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council’s (SIIC) Badr Brigade. Sadr’s forces generally represent the bulk of the Shi’ite masses. The SIIC has fewer followers but much more money than the Badr Brigade and, more importantly, the support of the U.S. Army.

Following a major shoot-out in August between the Mahdi Army and the Badr Brigade in Karbala, Sadr and SIIC head Abdul Aziz al-Hakim signed a cease-fire. For Sadr, the truce has more to do with avoiding a fight with the SIIC while the latter can call on the U.S. to back it up than with any sudden conversion to the “surge.” Speaking in a mosque on Dec. 7, al-Sadr told the Americans, “Get out of our land. We don’t need you or your armies, the armies of darkness; not your planes, tanks, policies, meddling, democracy, fake freedom.”

The recent car bombings in the southern provincial capital, Amarah, were not the work of al-Qaeda – which has no presence in the largely Shi’ite south – but a sign of growing tension between rival Shi’ite groups. At stake is regional control over Iraq’s oil revenues and control of the country’s only port, Basra.

With the recent cross-border attack by Turkey, as well as growing internal tensions in the region, the peace in the north has all the stability of a powder magazine. Iraq’s north has been a place of relative calm since the invasion because it is controlled by the powerful Kurdish militia, the peshmerga. But violence is on the increase, in part because insurgents driven out of Baghdad have moved north. For example, attacks in Mosul during November jumped from 80 to 106 a week.

The most volatile issue in the north is Kurdish autonomy and a future referendum that will decide who controls the oil-rich city of Kirkuk and the strategic city of Mosul. An autonomous Kurdish region is something most Arab Iraqis – and all of Iraq’s neighbors – oppose. The Turks, Syrians, and Iranians worry that an autonomous “Kurdistan” will stir up similar moves for autonomy in their countries. And the Baghdad government fears that it will lose the revenues from the northern oil fields.

“We are now funding all the major Iraqi warring parties, the Sunnis, the Shias, and the Kurds,” says former CIA and National Security Agency official Bruce Reidel. “They are happy to take our weapons and our money, but they’ve not necessarily brought into the same strategy as we have.”

While the U.S. will have to begin drawing down troops this coming June, the Bush administration says it intends to remain in Iraq. Last month Bush and Maliki signed an agreement that, according to the Financial Times, “paves the way for a possible long-term U.S. presence in Iraq.”

Certainly the U.S. embassy in Baghdad is being built with that in mind. When finished, the $736 million project will cover 104 acres, with 21 buildings reinforced against bombs and mortars. The huge complex will cost $1.2 billion a year to run.

According to an ABC/BBC/NHK poll, with the exception of the Kurdish north, Iraqis not only oppose the U.S. presence, 57 percent of them support attacks against coalition forces. Even the Maliki government has to tread softly in this area. Speaking to the press last week, Iraqi National Security Adviser Mowaffaq al-Rubaie said, “Permanent forces or bases in Iraq for any foreign forces is a red line that cannot be accepted by any nationalist Iraqi.”

The success of the “surge” is an illusion. “Nothing is resolved in Iraq,” says Cockburn. “Power is wholly fragmented. The Americans will discover, as the British learned to their cost in Basra, that they have few permanent allies in Iraq. It has become a land of warlords in which fragile cease-fires might last for months and might equally collapse tomorrow.”

Dec. 6 (Bloomberg) — From a Baghdad woman’s despairing comment, Iraqi author Haifa Zangana found an epigraph for the insecurity and erosion of human rights in her country: “Today is worse than yesterday, and yesterday was worse than the day before.”

Imprisoned and tortured for opposing Saddam Hussein’s regime, Zangana was freed from Abu Ghraib after a relative who served as a bodyguard for the dictator secured her release. She now works as a journalist in London.

Her most recent book is “City of Widows: An Iraqi Woman’s Account of War and Resistance.” She details how women’s rights have suffered under the occupation and how violence has left 1 million widows to lead Iraqi households.

Zangana, 57, is slight, parts her wispy gray hair down the middle and conveyed an air of quiet determination as we spoke at Chicago’s InterContinental Hotel. I started by asking her what image of life in Iraq was emerging from the blogs by women there.

Zangana: Girls more than boys are the real losers. Their families fear for their safety so they are kept at home. The fear is of kidnapping, shooting, one family taking revenge on another, car bombs. You name it, it’s there. The minute you step outside your house, you are targeted one way or another. Education is disappearing. The number of kids attending school this year is 30 percent of what it used to be. It’s taking us back to the 1930s.

Crofts: Has the role of Iraqi women in resistance been under-reported or misstated by Western media?

Wrong Women

Zangana: The picture, to start, was very confused because they mixed up Afghani women with Iraqi women. Or at least they selectively chose Iraqi women as victims and as waiting to be liberated from a male chauvinistic society. In Iraq, women were more or less equal to men. They were encouraged to develop. Iraqi women were far ahead compared with other Arab countries. The stereotype doesn’t fit.

Crofts: Is life in Iraq now worse than under Saddam Hussein?

Zangana: Women are saying it is worse in a way because they are losing their freedom of movement and their lives. There have been 1 million civilians killed. Iraqi families consist on average of seven members, the parents and five children.

The killing of every man means a widow left on her own to care and look after and feed five people, plus the extended family. In Baghdad alone there are 300,000 widows.

There is no welfare state or protection net. They are still relying on monthly food rations established under Saddam’s regime and which are still feeding 16 million Iraqis. The rations consist of a couple of kilos of lentils, sugar, baby milk, flour, oil for cooking.

End of Occupation

Crofts: Do you see a decline in violence if foreign troops exit Iraq?

Zangana: The end of the occupation is imminent. It’s only a matter of when and how. We read history and no occupation lasted forever. It is costing us lives and the Americans lives and the British lives. This is needless for all parties involved.

Al-Qaeda came with the occupation. If the foreign troops leave, the main reason for the violence will leave and perhaps we will have the chance to rebuild the country. This is the only solution for Iraq, America and the stability of the region.

Crofts: What role are the nongovernmental agencies playing in Iraq today?

Zangana: Most of the organizations are dealing from a distance, almost by remote control, from Syria, Jordan and even Egypt. Many pulled out after the explosion at the United Nations (U.N. headquarters in Baghdad’s Canal Hotel in August 2003). They are not really in touch except for Oxfam and the International Red Cross.

The Iraqi Red Crescent is doing a fantastic job, but doctors are targeted too. We have lost 80 percent of our medical staff. We are left with whoever has no choice but to stay.

“City of Widows: An Iraqi Woman’s Account of War and Resistance” is published by Seven Stories Press (150 pages, $20).