The Rag Blog

Earlier this month, I had the opportunity to attend a remarkable gathering of the global peace movement in London. The World Against War conference, held December 1-2 in the British capital, brought together over 1200 delegates from almost 30 countries to discuss Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, the threat of an attack against Iran, and much more.

Tony Benn, the octogenarian who served 51 years as a Member of Parliament and remains a stalwart opponent of war and privatization, opened the conference by noting that the venue, the Methodist Central Hall, had been the site of the first meeting of the UN General Assembly more than 60 years ago.

Benn reminded delegates of the stated aims of the original UN gathering, “It pledged to end the scourge of war, to reaffirm commitment to human rights, to establish conditions under which justice could be maintained, and to promote social progress. And that was after 105 million people had died in two world wars.”

“With the invasion of Iraq,” Benn argued, “that Charter was torn up and thrown into the wastepaper basket by Bush and Blair and others, and we are here to reaffirm those demands on behalf of the human race.”

The achievement of that ambitious goal, in the UK as in Canada and elsewhere, faces two related obstacles: the glaring lack of adequate anti-war representation in the arena of electoral politics, and the relative weakness of peace and other social movements in the face of government, media, and military PR juggernauts.

Superficially, Prime Minister Gordon Brown finds himself in a spot similar to that faced by Paul Martin during his short term at the helm in Ottawa. Tony Blair, like Jean Chrétien, clung to power for a decade, leaving his successor to deal with low poll numbers and gathering scandals.

But while the Liberals in Canada steered away at least from official involvement in the Iraq War, Blair and Brown’s Labour Party went shoulder-to-shoulder with the Bush administration into the most disastrous imperial war in a generation.

Ten years ago, “New Labour” swept into power, shiny and triumphant. The much-hyped “Third Way” cast aside the remnants within the Labour Party of so-called dogmas like income redistribution and class struggle, and cast itself as modern and forward-looking. In the end, New Labour ended up returning to the old discredited territory – literally and in terms of policy – of the British Empire by occupying Iraq and Afghanistan.

And so it is that many thousands of members have deserted the Labour Party, and many millions of voters have stayed home and now threaten to take their support elsewhere. Brown, with hands bloodied by war (and without the acting skills of Blair), may now well lose the next election to his Conservative challenger, David Cameron.

This is the grim reality of parliamentary politics in the UK, which does not reflect at all the anti-war majority of British public opinion. (There are notable exceptions, of course. Two sitting MPs, Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn and George Galloway, the only Respect Party member in Westminster, made powerful presentations to the conference.)

Facing this situation, activists have to think hard about how the movement against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan can be effective. Demoralization undoubtedly hit people in the UK as it did elsewhere after unprecedented coordinated protests failed to stop the invasion of Iraq in 2003. February 15 of that year in London saw the largest protest in the country’s history, with over 1.5 million people on the streets.

Today, there is certainly a feeling of helplessness with the looming threat of an attack on Iran by the U.S. and Israel, with all the catastrophic results and human suffering that would entail. There is obviously a serious divide amongst the U.S. elite about the advisability of such an attack. Anti-war activists, however, have to find ways to mobilize against such a strike, as depending on the sanity of the U.S. administration would be, well, insane.

The World Against War conference was a unique opportunity to compare notes with other activists, many of whom struggle under extremely adverse conditions. Some of the most inspiring speakers were from the Middle East. Hassan Juma’a Awad, a leader of the Iraqi Federation of Oil Unions, was warmly received as he told of their effort to resist the oil privatization law.

Hamdeen Sabahy, an independent MP and opponent of the Mubarak regime in Egypt, was a revelation. In a special meeting of international delegates, he left his interpreter idle and gave a moving speech in English. Outlining the obstacles facing the pro-democracy movement in Egypt, Sabahy made it clear he felt optimistic at least about the company he was keeping on that weekend in London:

“It is a very ugly world, in many ways, with so much injustice. But here, with all of you, struggling for peace and for justice, it is a beautiful world.”

Derrick O’Keefe is the editor of rabble.ca. He attended the London conference as a representative of the Vancouver StopWar Coalition.

It’s that time of year, again. Time to wander the web searching for Holiday gifts for all those hard-to-buy-for folks, the usual cast of characters who make the holidays especially nerve-wracking. Well, have no fear and wander no more. This year Tomdispatch takes care of all the fuss and muss. We’ve scoured the web and assembled a one-stop-shop that will make your gift-buying a breeze. So forget about that already over-the-Hillary Clinton nutcracker or the Rudy Giuliani head that you affix to a tree so it appears the Republican front-runner is a stalker lurking in your yard — both so last year — and enjoy the Fifth Anniversary TomDispatch Holiday List from Hell. Because if you don’t, the terrorists win.

Black(water) Xmas

Let’s face it, nobody wants a White Christmas DVD these days, so how about making it a Black(water) Xmas? Some, no doubt, think Jeremy Scahill’s bestselling book, Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, is a suitable gift. But we here at TomDispatch have a tad more imagination than that. So, head with us to Blackwater’s own website and purchase that wonderful “cuddly black bear… sporting a Blackwater logo t-shirt.” It’s sure to be a hit with your young mercenaries-in-training or anyone else who likes to snuggle with a plush toy totally unaccountable to the laws of war.

And while you’re there, you’ll certainly want to pick up a classic Blackwater Christmas ornament. Undoubtedly manufactured from spent shell casings and metal taken from genuine Blackwater-shot-up cars, these $11.50 tree adornments are a perfect way to show your holiday spirit.

Does your tree still look a tad bare? PatriotShop.US asks, “What could be more jolly than a Patriotic Snowman proudly waving the United States flag?” Nothing in our book, so click on over and pay a mere $21.95 for one of them.

Silver B*lls

Sure, you can get a CD with the Xmas fave “Silver Bells” on it just about anywhere. And what a great gift idea — for anyone who’s been locked in a basement for the last 60 years. But if silver’s on your brain, here’s a different kind of classy treat for that special someone. You can stuff his stocking and blow his mind — thanks to coin-connoisseur Ken Potter — with the “Operation Iraqi Freedom, Iraqi Mobile Scud Missile Launcher Commemorative Silver Ingot.” No description of this .999 pure 1 oz. bar of silver can do it full justice; but, in an accompanying explanation, the seller does eloquently describe the ins-and-outs of enemy missile technology: “The Iraqi Mobile Scud Missile Launcher ingot depicts a camel with a scud missile upright in his mouth and Iraqi soldier swinging a sledge hammer at the camel’s exaggerated testicles laying on a tree-stump.”

Of course, if that’s not quite your cup of tea, the company has thoughtfully cast a stirring, patriotic “challenge coin” of pure, unadulterated, 100% genuine bronze especially for that U.S. Marine on your holiday list. One side sports the Marine Corps motto, “semper fidelis,” and the iconic image of the flag-raising at Iwo Jima. The flipside, no less moving, shows Santa relieving himself at a urinal beneath his own special motto: “Tinkle Bells.” The manufacturer notes that if the design “proves popular” — and how could it not? — “we’ll make more next year.”

A Gift for the Otherwise Occupied

For those who can’t come home for the holidays, because they are currently occupying somebody else’s country, there are gifts galore, but there’s one that tops any list. While it might have come in even handier a couple of years back, when body armor was often lacking for troops in Iraq, there’s still reason to pick up the “Soldier’s Companion,” a “unique, metal plated Bible” — “the perfect gift for the uniformed Patriot on your list.” Since IEDs and EFPs (or Explosively Formed Penetrators) are still a threat, why not buy a bunch of these metal Bibles (at only $30 bucks a pop). So handy not just to read, but to line any Humvee with.

It’s Xmas in Karachi, With All of the Folks at Home

We’ve all been there before. It’s the last minute and you need to buy a gift for a shaky strongman who seized power in a “devastating military coup.” What to do? Why not follow the lead of the Bush administration? This year the holidays came early for Pakistani ruler Pervez Musharraf — #15, even before his latest crushing crackdown, on Parade magazine’s list of the World’s Worst Dictators — when he scored a whole slew of goodies through the U.S. Foreign Military Sales Program. Pervez must have been an awfully good boy because Santa subcontracted out loads of toys way early, including F-16 fighters from Boeing, 200 AIM-9M missiles from Raytheon, 10 Harpoon missiles from Boeing’s McDonnell Douglas Corporation, and more than $54 million worth of targeting pods — long-range precision-targeting systems for aircraft-delivered munitions — from Lockheed Martin. Should you have a dictator to cozy up to, any one of these will be sure to make him sleep a little easier this holiday season.

War Toys for Tots

What would Christmas be without war toys? After all, who hasn’t stationed GI Joe atop that Middle Eastern manger? And this year there are so many options for toys that celebrate America’s multiple on-going wars. For a measly $109, for example, you can buy little Bobby an Operation Iraqi Freedom Marine Corps sniper action figure, including bayonet and pistol, M-4 Carbine, and M40 sniper rifle. For little Suzie, there’s the “Jennifer” 101st Airborne Division action figure with enough fire power to tell any Barbie or Bratz in Iraq to sit down and shut up — or pay the ultimate price.

Let’s not forget that U.S. occupations are supposed to be multicultural affairs. So check out McFarlane’s rifle-toting “Ethnic Air Force Special Operations Command” action figure for just $9.99 — or, for $40 more, the mustachioed “Operation Enduring Freedom Jose.”

Holiday Reflection

Keep in mind that the holidays aren’t always about fun, fun, fun. It’s also a time for serious reflecting, as well as for mourning losses past and future. Admit it, you and your friends are already getting weepy at the prospect of having only one last Xmas with President Bush as your commander-in-chief (barring, of course, a Musharraf-esque power grab). Not to worry, the memory of his rule will never fade with the lovely, “museum quality” bust of Bush, in gorgeous “high quality polyresin.” Imagine, he can smirk on your mantle for decades to come!

Have you already moved on? Looking for new heroes to beautify your home? Then, it’s back to Blackwater! If you thought they only supplied lawless mercenaries, teddy bears, and tree ornaments, how wrong you were! Consider their inspirational “Evolution of Excellence” posters. Many have tough-looking, gun-wielding, white men like the “Train Hard… Or Don’t Train At All” one — showing a plainclothes Blackwater gunman flanked by a host of other black-ops operators, engaging in Blackwater black ops; or, if you’re of a more metaphorical mind, don’t miss the “Vigilance” poster that shows a Blackwater bear battling a scary sand-monster — assumedly born of the place U.S. troops and their mercenary brethren call “the sandbox.”

Spirit of the Season

When the holiday season comes round, which of you don’t head for your favorite haunts to shop till you drop? For most of us, that certainly means a trip to RightwingStuff.com. But for the few of you out there who aren’t regulars at the site that proclaims itself “back-handing the Left into submission,” here’s a helpful hint: think t-shirts. Take the “I’d fly 10,000 miles to smoke a camel… jockey” fitted T. What a perfect gift idea! But don’t rush to buy quite yet. After all, RightwingStuff isn’t the only made-in-the-USA game in town. You might also think about the “Give Peace a Chance. Bomb Iran” fitted t-shirt from SnafuGear. Or slip over to ConservativeBuys.com to pick up that “Tic Tac Toe Anti-Iran” T, featuring the snazzy game-board motif, with Afghanistan and Iraq already Xed out and all those bombs heading Iran-wards. Or what about the “Tehran Forecast” t-shirt that reads: “15,000 degrees, high radioactive winds.”

Had enough of shirts? Feelin’ a tad sad because the latest National Intelligence Estimate wrecked that plan to take out Iran? How about a trucker hat emblazoned with a picture of Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s face on toilet paper and the phrase “Shiite Head” in faux Arabic script?

And, for goodness sake, don’t forget the Xmas cards you’ll need to accompany your gifts. Perfect for the T’s and the hat are DareWare’s “Funny Anti-Iran Anti-Muslim Greeting Cards” with a lovely image of a mushroom cloud and the classic all-seasonal line: “Nuke Iran for Peace.”

Spirit of the (Primary) Season

Thanks to the phenomenon of migrating primaries, this year we’re truly blessed to have the holiday season and the primary season coincide for the first time. Not only is it great for our country, our news cycle, and our many pundits, but it’s a bonanza for shoppers. For Republicans on your list, you won’t want to miss the gear they’ve been giddy for — like the “In Fred We Trust” Fred Thompson shirt that calls for “laws and borders” or the slightly incongruous “Mitt Romney Stein.” That’s beer to you, buddy, as the manufacturer indicates in advising a potential purchaser to “heft a cold one in this 22 oz. ceramic stein with gold trim… [and] make any day Oktoberfest.” You’d better lift two, because poor Mitt, a Mormon teetotaler, can’t.

At the Fred Thompson site, you can pick up this year’s safest holiday idea: “Fred Thompson 2008 Silicone Wristbands.” These Live Strong band knock-offs are “Certified Lead Free, Made in the USA of 100% USA-made ingredients [with] NO Chinese components.” You can adorn both wrists with these all-American bracelets — and your toddler can chew on them, to boot.

If you don’t want to commit to a candidate until the primary season shakes out, then how about just opting for a generic “War On Terror, Surveil This!” canary yellow messenger bag — with a handsome image of a Republican elephant holding up a satellite dish by its trunk. And don’t miss that magnifying glass placed over its rear either. (All the better to see the small donkeys it’s defecating, my dear.)

For Democrats — though obviously made by patriotic Republicans — there’s that “Bros Before Hoes” shirt featuring images of Barrack Obama and Hillary Clinton; or the T with “Barack Osama” in a turban (and this explanation at the site selling it: “Who would have ever guessed that 6 years after 9/11 and 4 years after the invasion of Iraq we would have a Presidential candidate running with the name ‘Barack Hussein Obama.'”) And don’t skip over the tile coaster featuring Hillary Clinton as Cerberus — that three-headed hound of hell from Greek mythology — complete with a Bill Clinton-snake tail attacking the White House. Just the thing to prevent unsightly stains on your coffee table!

Stress Free Holidays

Well dear shopper, how does it feel to have all your holiday gift worries taken care of in one fell swoop? And don’t worry about that other source of holiday gift anxiety — returns; Tomdispatch has a solution for that, too. Say you get two or three “Chuck for Huck” buttons, featuring action-hero-has-been Chuck Norris and Mike Huckabee, or one-too-many Rhinestone Rudy Giuliani pins (is there such a thing?) under the tree this year? No worries. Just head to Mitt Romney’s official campaign site where the candidate has set up his own private Ebay called the “Mitt Market” for you to sell “items with little hassle and the added benefit of supporting Governor Mitt Romney.”

What more can you ask for? With all the time saved and aggravation averted, you can sit back, relax, and admire your Blackwater ornament-adorned tree, hoist your Mitt Romney beer stein (just remember to set it down on that Hillary Clinton coaster), and enjoy the holidays all courtesy of the Christmas elves at Tomdispatch.

Names are still trickling in, 11 of the 15 now identified.

Afghanis transferred yesterday…
Ghulam Rohani, ISN 003 (if cleared for transfer attorney not told)
Abdullah Wazir Zadran, ISN 976 (cleared for transfer in 2006)
Dr. Hafizullah, ISN 1001 (cleared for transfer in 2007)
Abdullah Mujahid Haq, ISN 1100 (cleared for transfer in 2005)
Abdul Matin (ISN 1002) (not cleared for release)
Gul Chaman (ISN 1021)

ISN 222 wrongly identified by our military as “Omar Abdullah al Kunduzi” (it should make you wonder how they could investigate this man when they couldn’t even get his name straight! I will update when I get the correct name from his attorney.)

Abdul Akhouzada (ISN 954) (corrected) (not cleared for release)
Abdul Rauf Aliza (ISN108)

Sudanese:
Salim Muhood Adem (ISN 710). (released for transfer more than 2 years ago).
Adel Hamad (ISN 940) (released for transfer more than 2 years ago).

A Yemeni man never charged by the U.S. details 19 months of brutality and psychological torture — the first in-depth, first-person account from inside the secret U.S. prisons. A Salon exclusive.

12/16/07 “Salon” — – The CIA held Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah in several different cells when he was incarcerated in its network of secret prisons known as “black sites.” But the small cells were all pretty similar, maybe 7 feet wide and 10 feet long. He was sometimes naked, and sometimes handcuffed for weeks at a time. In one cell his ankle was chained to a bolt in the floor. There was a small toilet. In another cell there was just a bucket. Video cameras recorded his every move. The lights always stayed on — there was no day or night. A speaker blasted him with continuous white noise, or rap music, 24 hours a day.

The guards wore black masks and black clothes. They would not utter a word as they extracted Bashmilah from his cell for interrogation — one of his few interactions with other human beings during his entire 19 months of imprisonment. Nobody told him where he was, or if he would ever be freed.

It was enough to drive anyone crazy. Bashmilah finally tried to slash his wrists with a small piece of metal, smearing the words “I am innocent” in blood on the walls of his cell. But the CIA patched him up.

So Bashmilah stopped eating. But after his weight dropped to 90 pounds, he was dragged into an interrogation room, where they rammed a tube down his nose and into his stomach. Liquid was pumped in. The CIA would not let him die.

On several occasions, when Bashmilah’s state of mind deteriorated dangerously, the CIA also did something else: They placed him in the care of mental health professionals. Bashmilah believes these were trained psychologists or psychiatrists. “What they were trying to do was to give me a sort of uplifting and to assure me,” Bashmilah said in a telephone interview, through an interpreter, speaking from his home country of Yemen. “One of the things they told me to do was to allow myself to cry, and to breathe.”

Last June, Salon reported on the CIA’s use of psychologists to aid with the interrogation of terrorist suspects. But the role of mental health professionals working at CIA black sites is a previously unknown twist in the chilling, Kafkaesque story of the agency’s secret overseas prisons.

Little about the conditions of Bashmilah’s incarceration has been made public until now. His detailed descriptions in an interview with Salon, and in newly filed court documents, provide the first in-depth, first-person account of captivity inside a CIA black site. Human rights advocates and lawyers have painstakingly pieced together his case, using Bashmilah’s descriptions of his cells and his captors, and documents from the governments of Jordan and Yemen and the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights to verify his testimony. Flight records detailing the movement of CIA aircraft also confirm Bashmilah’s account, tracing his path from the Middle East to Afghanistan and back again while in U.S. custody.

Bashmilah’s story also appears to show in clear terms that he was an innocent man. After 19 months of imprisonment and torment at the hands of the CIA, the agency released him with no explanation, just as he had been imprisoned in the first place. He faced no terrorism charges. He was given no lawyer. He saw no judge. He was simply released, his life shattered.

“This really shows the human impact of this program and that lives are ruined by the CIA rendition program,” said Margaret Satterthwaite, an attorney for Bashmilah and a professor at the New York University School of Law. “It is about psychological torture and the experience of being disappeared.”

Bashmilah, who at age 39 is now physically a free man, still suffers the mental consequences of prolonged detention and abuse. He is undergoing treatment for the damage done to him at the hands of the U.S. government. On Friday, Bashmilah laid out his story in a declaration to a U.S. district court as part of a civil suit brought by the ACLU against Jeppesen Dataplan Inc., a subsidiary of Boeing accused of facilitating secret CIA rendition flights.

Bashmilah said in the phone interview that the psychological anguish inside a CIA black site is exacerbated by the unfathomable unknowns for the prisoners. While he figured out that he was being held by Americans, Bashmilah did not know for sure why, where he was, or whether he would ever see his family again. He said, “Every time I realize that there may be others who are still there where I suffered, I feel the same thing for those innocent people who just fell in a crack.”

It may seem bizarre for the agency to provide counseling to a prisoner while simultaneously cracking him mentally — as if revealing a humanitarian aspect to a program otherwise calibrated to exploit systematic psychological abuse. But it could also be that mental healthcare professionals were enlisted to help bring back from the edge prisoners who seemed precariously damaged, whose frayed minds were no longer as pliable for interrogation. “My understanding is that the purpose of having psychiatrists there is that if the prisoner feels better, then he would be able to talk more to the interrogators,” said Bashmilah.

Realistically, psychiatrists in such a setting could do little about the prisoners’ deeper suffering at the hands of the CIA. “They really had no authority to address these issues,” Bashmilah said about his mental anguish. He said the doctors told him to “hope that one day you will prove your innocence or that you will one day return to your family.” The psychiatrists also gave him some pills, likely tranquilizers. They analyzed his dreams. But there wasn’t much else they could do. “They also gave me a Rubik’s Cube so I could pass the time, and some jigsaw puzzles,” Bashmilah recalled.

The nightmare started for him back in fall 2003. Bashmilah had traveled to Jordan from Indonesia, where he was living with his wife and working in the clothing business. He and his wife went to Jordan to meet Bashmilah’s mother, who had also traveled there. The family hoped to arrange for heart surgery for Bashmilah’s mother at a hospital in Amman. But before leaving Indonesia, Bashmilah had lost his passport and had received a replacement. Upon arrival in Jordan, Jordanian officials questioned his lack of stamps in the new one, and they grew suspicious when Bashmilah admitted he had visited Afghanistan in 2000. Bashmilah was taken into custody by Jordanian authorities on Oct. 21, 2003. He would not reappear again until he stepped out of a CIA plane in Yemen on May 5, 2005.

Bashmilah’s apparent innocence was clearly lost on officials with Jordan’s General Intelligence Department. After his arrest, the Jordanians brutally beat him, peppering him with questions about al-Qaida. He was forced to jog around in a yard until he collapsed. Officers hung him upside down with a leather strap and his hands tied. They beat the soles of his feet and his sides. They threatened to electrocute him with wires. The told him they would rape his wife and mother.

It was too much. Bashmilah signed a confession multiple pages long, but he was disoriented and afraid even to read it. “I felt sure it included things I did not say,” he wrote in his declaration to the court delivered Friday. “I was willing to sign a hundred sheets so long as they would end the interrogation.”

Bashmilah was turned over to the CIA in the early morning hours of Oct. 26, 2003. Jordanian officials delivered him to a “tall, heavy-set, balding white man wearing civilian clothes and dark sunglasses with small round lenses,” he wrote in his declaration. He had no idea who his new captors were, or that he was about to begin 19 months of hell, in the custody of the U.S. government. And while he was seldom beaten physically while in U.S. custody, he describes a regime of imprisonment designed to inflict extreme psychological anguish.

I asked Bashmilah which was worse: the physical beatings at the hands of the Jordanians, or the psychological abuse he faced from the CIA. “I consider that psychological torture I endured was worse than the physical torture,” he responded. He called his imprisonment by the CIA “almost like being inside a tomb.”

“Whenever I saw a fly in my cell, I was filled with joy,” he said. “Although I would wish for it to slip from under the door so it would not be imprisoned itself.”

After a short car ride to a building at the airport, Bashmilah’s clothes were cut off by black-clad, masked guards wearing surgical gloves. He was beaten. One guard stuck his finger in Bashmilah’s anus. He was dressed in a diaper, blue shirt and pants. Blindfolded and wearing earmuffs, he was then chained and hooded and strapped to a gurney in an airplane.

Flight records show Bashmilah was flown to Kabul. (Records show the plane originally departed from Washington, before first stopping in Prague and Bucharest.) After landing, he was forced to lie down in a bumpy jeep for 15 minutes and led into a building. The blindfold was removed, and Bashmilah was examined by an American doctor.

He was then placed in a windowless, freezing-cold cell, roughly 6.5 feet by 10 feet. There was a foam mattress, one blanket, and a bucket for a toilet that was emptied once a day. A bare light bulb stayed on constantly. A camera was mounted above a solid metal door. For the first month, loud rap and Arabic music was piped into his cell, 24 hours a day, through a hole opposite the door. His leg shackles were chained to the wall. The guards would not let him sleep, forcing Bashmilah to raise his hand every half hour to prove he was still awake.

Cells were lined up next to each other with spaces in between. Higher above the low ceilings of the cells appeared to be another ceiling, as if the prison were inside an airplane hanger.

After three months the routine became unbearable. Bashmilah unsuccessfully tried to hang himself with his blanket and slashed his wrists. He slammed his head against the wall in an effort to lose consciousness. He was held in three separate but similar cells during his detention in Kabul. At one point, the cell across from him was being used for interrogations. “While I myself was not beaten in the torture and interrogation room, after a while I began to hear the screams of detainees being tortured there,” he wrote.

While he was not beaten, Bashmilah was frequently interrogated. “During the entire period of my detention there, I was held in solitary confinement and saw no one other than my guards, interrogators and other prison personnel,” he wrote in his declaration. One interrogator accused him of being involved in sending letters to a contact in England, though Bashmilah says he doesn’t know anybody in that country. At other times he was shown pictures of people he also says he did not know.

“This is a form of torture,” he told me. “Especially when the person subjected to this has not done anything.”

In his declaration, Bashmilah made it clear that most of the prison officials spoke English with American accents. “The interrogators also frequently referred to reports coming from Washington,” he wrote.

After six months he was transferred, with no warning or explanation. On or around April 24, 2004, Bashmilah was pulled from his cell and placed in an interrogation room, where he was stripped naked. An American doctor with a disfigured hand examined him, jotting down distinctive marks on a paper diagram of the human body. Black-masked guards again put him in a diaper, cotton pants and shirt. He was blindfolded, shackled, hooded, forced to wear headphones, and stacked, lying down, in a jeep with other detainees. Then he remembers being forced up steps into a waiting airplane for a flight that lasted several hours, followed by several hours on the floor of a helicopter.

Upon landing, he was forced into a vehicle for a short ride. Then, Bashmilah took several steps into another secret prison — location unknown.

He was forced into a room and stripped naked again. Photos were taken of all sides of his body. He was surrounded by about 15 people. “All of them except for the person taking photographs were dressed in the kind of black masks that robbers wear to hide their faces,” Bashmilah wrote in the declaration.

He was again examined by a doctor, who took notations on the diagram of the human body. (It was the same form from Afghanistan. Bashmilah saw his vaccination scar marked on the diagram.) The doctor looked in his eyes, ears, nose and throat.

He was then thrown into a cold cell, left naked.

It was another tiny cell, new or refurbished with a stainless steel sink and toilet. Until clothes arrived several days later, Bashmilah huddled in a blanket. In this cell there were two video cameras, one mounted above the door and the other in a wall. Also above the door was a speaker. White noise, like static, was pumped in constantly, day and night. He spent the first month in handcuffs. In this cell his ankle was attached to a 110-link chain attached to a bolt on the floor.

The door had a small opening in the bottom through which food would appear: boiled rice, sliced meat and bread, triangles of cheese, boiled potato, slices of tomato and olives, served on a plastic plate.

Guards wore black pants with pockets, long-sleeved black shirts, rubber gloves or black gloves, and masks that covered the head and neck. The masks had tinted yellow plastic over the eyes. “I never heard the guards speak to each other and they never spoke to me,” Bashmilah wrote in his declaration.

He was interrogated more. Bashmilah recalls an interrogator showing him a lecture by an Islamic scholar playing on a laptop. The interrogator wanted to know if Bashmilah knew who the man was, but he did not. It was in this facility that Bashmilah slashed his wrists, then went on his hunger strike, only to be force-fed through a tube forced down his nose.

The CIA seems to have figured out that Bashmilah was not an al-Qaida operative sometime around September 2004, when he was moved to another, similar cell. But there was no more white noise. And while his ankles were shackled, he wasn’t bolted to the floor with a chain. He was allowed to shower once a week. He was no longer interrogated and was mostly left alone.

Bashmilah was given a list of books he could read. About a month before he was released, he was given access to an exercise hall for 15 minutes a week. And he saw mental healthcare professionals. “The psychiatrists asked me to talk about why I was so despairing, interpreted my dreams, asked me how I was sleeping and whether I had an appetite, and offered medications such as tranquilizers.”

On May 5, 2005, Bashmilah was cuffed, hooded and put on a plane to Yemen. Yemeni government documents say the flight lasted six or seven hours and confirm that he was transferred from the control of the U.S. government. He soon learned that his father had died in the fall of 2004, not knowing where his son had disappeared to, or even if he was alive.

12/16/07 “ICH” — — -It could, rightfully, be a cause of shame to the world. But the world, besieged by violence and injustice, hardly notices it. The people of Gaza, 1.4 million of them, are slowly and purposely being deprived of basic foods and medicines by the so called civilized countries in the West and there is hardly a protest. And all this happens because the people in Gaza want to be free and independent. Never mind that in the process children and innocent civilians are killed or families dispossessed.

Dr. Mona Elfarra, a Palestinian physician and human rights activist, thus describes a situation in her personal blog, “I don’t know exactly what was going on inside the little heads of the kids who were preparatory school children, of Al Buriege boy’s preparatory school. But the two tiny bodies were shot, with many bullets, as I was told by my colleagues at the emergency room at the Al Aqsa hospital…On November 10, the dreams of two tiny kids has stopped forever.”

As Dr. Elfarra states, both the children as well as the Israeli soldiers who killed them are victims of the occupation, “…the occupation that deprives the soldiers of their humanity, when under the false pretence of Israeli security, daily crimes are committed against my country. And against my people.” This is particularly true in the lack of food and medicines for the people in Gaza.

Most of the basic goods in Gaza are imported. Because of border closures, there is limited delivery of those goods, in particular sugar and wheat flour, which represent 80 percent of the caloric intake of Palestinians. The majority of the population depends on food aid from international organizations.

At the same time, the flow of exports leaving Gaza has practically stopped, while the commercial and humanitarian goods allowed to come in continues to decline. The Gaza Strip is practically sealed off from the outside world. Approximately 80 percent of the population lives on less than $2 a day. It is estimated that 70 percent of the potential workforce is out of work or without pay. The Gaza Strip is not receiving tax monies owed to by Israel, which amounts to almost half of its budget.

Also critical is the public health and medical situation of the inhabitants of the Strip. The World Health Organization (WHO) indicates that the public health system is facing an unprecedented crisis. UNICEF reports that children are living in an environment of extreme violence, insecurity and fear. Shelling and sonic bombs have increased children’s signs of distress and exhaustion.

UN agencies have appealed for Israel to restore full energy supplies to the Gaza Strip, stating their concern over the status of the public health system. “In the last months, the situation has become intolerable, with problems of referral outside of Gaza for patients who need specialized care that cannot be delivered in Gaza,” states Dr. Ambroggio Manenti, head of the WHO office for the West Bank and Gaza.

The Israeli government General Security Service (Shabak) cites unspecified “security concerns” when denying medical patients exit permits from Gaza, a situation that has been denounced by Human Rights Watch and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel (PHR-Israel.) “Israel denial of medical care to those in urgent need amounts to collective punishment against the population, which violates international law,” states Sarah Leah Whitson, director of Human Rights Watch Middle East division.

In June, PHR-Israel and Gisha, another Israel-based human rights group, challenged Israel’s restrictions on medical evacuees in Israel’s Supreme Court. One of those denied permission to leave Gaza was a 16-year-old girl with a heart condition. “Israel has legitimate security concerns about militant groups firing rockets from Gaza into civilian areas. But denying medical treatment to a 16-year-old girl with a congenital heart defect doesn’t make Israel any safer,” said Leah Whitson.

Leah Whitson’s words are confirmed by Gideon Levy, the Israeli journalist, writing in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. “But we have no right to do what we are doing. Just as no one would conceive of killing the residents of an entire neighborhood, to harass and incarcerate it because of a few criminals living there, there is no justification for abusing an entire people in the name of our security. The question of whether ending the occupation would threaten or strengthen Israel’s security is irrelevant. There are not, and cannot be, any preconditions for restoring justice.”

Mike McConnell, director of national intelligence, says industry deserves “thanks, not lawsuits.”

WASHINGTON — For months, the Bush administration has waged a high-profile campaign, including personal lobbying by President Bush and closed-door briefings by top officials, to persuade Congress to pass legislation protecting companies from lawsuits for aiding the National Security Agency’s warrantless eavesdropping program.

But the battle is really about something much bigger. At stake is the federal government’s extensive but uneasy partnership with industry to conduct a wide range of secret surveillance operations in fighting terrorism and crime.

The N.S.A.’s reliance on telecommunications companies is broader and deeper than ever before, according to government and industry officials, yet that alliance is strained by legal worries and the fear of public exposure.

To detect narcotics trafficking, for example, the government has been collecting the phone records of thousands of Americans and others inside the United States who call people in Latin America, according to several government officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the program remains classified. But in 2004, one major phone carrier balked at turning over its customers’ records. Worried about possible privacy violations or public relations problems, company executives declined to help the operation, which has not been previously disclosed.

In a separate N.S.A. project, executives at a Denver phone carrier, Qwest, refused in early 2001 to give the agency access to their most localized communications switches, which primarily carry domestic calls, according to people aware of the request, which has not been previously reported. They say the arrangement could have permitted neighborhood-by-neighborhood surveillance of phone traffic without a court order, which alarmed them.

The federal government’s reliance on private industry has been driven by changes in technology. Two decades ago, telephone calls and other communications traveled mostly through the air, relayed along microwave towers or bounced off satellites. The N.S.A. could vacuum up phone, fax and data traffic merely by erecting its own satellite dishes. But the fiber optics revolution has sent more and more international communications by land and undersea cable, forcing the agency to seek company cooperation to get access.

After the disclosure two years ago that the N.S.A. was eavesdropping on the international communications of terrorism suspects inside the United States without warrants, more than 40 lawsuits were filed against the government and phone carriers. As a result, skittish companies and their lawyers have been demanding stricter safeguards before they provide access to the government and, in some cases, are refusing outright to cooperate, officials said.

“It’s a very frayed and strained relationship right now, and that’s not a good thing for the country in terms of keeping all of us safe,” said an industry official who believes that immunity is critical for the phone carriers. “This episode has caused companies to change their conduct in a variety of ways.”

With a vote in the Senate on the issue expected as early as Monday, the Bush administration has intensified its efforts to win retroactive immunity for companies cooperating with counterterrorism operations.

“The intelligence community cannot go it alone,” Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, wrote in a New York Times Op-Ed article Monday urging Congress to pass the immunity provision. “Those in the private sector who stand by us in times of national security emergencies deserve thanks, not lawsuits.”

Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey echoed that theme in an op-ed article of his own in The Los Angeles Times on Wednesday, saying private companies would be reluctant to provide their “full-hearted help” if they were not given legal protections.

The government’s dependence on the phone industry, driven by the changes in technology and the Bush administration’s desire to expand surveillance capabilities inside the United States, has grown significantly since the Sept. 11 attacks. The N.S.A., though, wanted to extend its reach even earlier. In December 2000, agency officials wrote a transition report to the incoming Bush administration, saying the agency must become a “powerful, permanent presence” on the commercial communications network, a goal that they acknowledged would raise legal and privacy issues.

To judge from firsthand documents obtained by the ACLU through a FOIA lawsuit, we can guess what is probably on the missing CIA interrogation tapes — as well as understand why those implicated are spinning so hard to pretend the tapes do not document a series of evident crimes. According to the little-noticed but extraordinarily important book Administration of Torture: A Documentary Record from Washington to Abu Ghraib and Beyond (Jameel Jaffer and Amrit Singh, Columbia University Press, New York 2007), which presents dozens of original formerly secret documents – FBI emails and memos, letters and interrogator “wish lists,” raw proof of the systemic illegal torture of detainees in various US-held prisons — the typical “harsh interrogation” of a suspect in US custody reads like an account of abuses in archives at Yad Vashem.

More is still being hidden as of this writing — as those in Congress now considering whether a special prosecutor is needed in this case should be urgently aware: “Through the FOIA lawsuit,” write the authors, “we learned of the existence of multiple records relating to prisoner abuse that still have not been released by the administration; credible media reports identify others. As this book goes to print, the Bush administration is still withholding, among many other records, a September 2001 presidential directive authorizing the CIA to set up secret detention centers overseas; an August 2002 Justice Department memorandum advising the CIA about the lawfulness of waterboarding [Italics mine; nota bene, Mr. Mukasey] and other aggressive interrogation methods; documents describing interrogation methods used by special operations forces in Iraq and Afghanistan; investigative files concerning the deaths of prisoners in U.S. custody; and numerous photographs depicting the abuse of prisoners at detention facilities other than Abu Ghraib.’

What we are likely to see if the tapes documenting the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah and Abd Al-Rahim Al-Nashiri are ever recovered is that the “confessions” of the prisoners upon which the White House has built its entire case for subverting the Constitution and suspending civil liberties in this country was obtained through methods such as electrocution, beating to the point of organ failure, hanging prisoners from the wrists from a ceiling, suffocation, and threats against family members (”I am going to find your mother and I am going to fuck her” is one direct quote from a US interrogator). On the missing tapes, we would likely see responses from the prisoners that would be obvious to us as confessions to anything at all in order to end the violence. In other words, if we could witness the drama of manufacturing by torture the many violently coerced “confessions” upon which the whole house of cards of this White House and its hyped “war on terror” rests, it would likely cause us to reopen every investigation, including the most serious ones (remember, even the 9/11 committee did not receive copies of the tapes); shut down the corrupt, Stalinesque Military Commissions System; turn over prisoners, the guilty and the innocent, into a working, accountable justice system operating in accordance with American values; and direct our legal scrutiny to the torturers themselves — right up to the office of the Vice President and the President if that is where the investigations would lead.

By the way: “The prohibition against torture [in the law] is considered to be a jus cogens norm, meaning that no derogation is permitted from it under any circumstances.”

This is what the FOIA documents report, belying White House soundbites that “we don’t torture” and explaining the intent pursuit on the part of the CIA and the White House of the current apparent obstruction of justice:

Late 2002 — the FBI objects to the illegality of abuses being put into place by the Defense Department in its “special interrogation plan” to use isolation, sleep deprivation and menacing with dogs against prisoners.

Dec 2, 2002 — Defense Secretary Rumsfeld personally issues a directive authorizing the use of stress positions, hooding, removal of clothing, and the terrorizing of inmates at Guantanamo with dogs.

Dec 3, 2002 — at Baghram, interrogators kill an Afghan prisoner “by shackling him by his wrists to the wire ceiling above his cell and repeatedly beating his legs. A postmortem report finds abrasions and contusions on the prisoner’s face, head, neck, arms and legs and determines that the death was a “homicide” caused by “blunt force injuries.”

April 16, 2003 — Rumsfeld approves yet another directive for abusive interrogation.

This directive for Afghanistan restores to the interrogators’ arsenal many forms of torture that had been resisted by the FBI. [Notably, the FBI had resisted complying with the direct commission of torture since as early as 2002 because, as its Behavioral Analysis Unit complained to the Defense Department at that time in an internal email, “not only are these tactics at odds with legally permissible interviewing techniques [italics mine: in other words, all concerned know these are apparent war crimes]…but they are being employed by personnel in GTMO who have little, if any, experience eliciting information for judicial purposes.” In other words, as any trained interrogator knows, the abuses are both doubtless illegal and certainly ineffective for getting real intelligence. [Jaffer and Singh, Timeline of Key Events, pp. 45-65,op. cit.]

Oct 22 2003 — Final autopsy report relating to death of “52 y/o Iraqi Male, Civilian Detainee” held by U.S. forces in Nasiriyah, Iraq. Prisoner was found to have “died as a result of asphyxia…due to strangulation.”

November 14, 2003 — a sworn statement of a soldier stationed at Camp Red, Baghdad, states that “I saw what I think were war crimes” and that “the chain of command….allowed them to happen.”

May 13, 2004 — a sworn statement of the 302nd Military Intelligence Battalion recounts an incident in which “interrogators abused 17-year-old son of prisoner in order to ‘break’ the prisoner.”

May 18, 2004 — a Privacy Act statement of an Abu Ghraib sergeant notes that prisoners had been forced to stand “naked with a bag over their head, standing on MRE boxes and their hand[s] spread out…holding a bottle in each hand.”

May 24, 2004 — Sworn statement of interrogator who arrived at Abu Ghraib in October 2003, discussing use of military dogs against juvenile prisoners.

June 16, 2004 — Marine Corps document describing abuse cases between September 2001 and June 2004, including “substantiated” incidents in which marines electrocuted a prisoner and set another’s hands on fire.

Undated: Sworn statement of screener who arrived at Abu Ghraib in September 2003, indicating that prisoners at Asamiya Palace in Baghdad had been beaten, burned and subjected to electric shocks.

Subsequent internal documents record prisoners being stripped, made to walk into walls blindfolded, punched, kicked, dragged about the room, observed to have bruises and burn marks on their backs, and having their jaws deliberately broken. Still other reports document further incidents classified by the military itself as probable murders committed by US interrogators.

The book also reveals an extraordinary original transcript of a Dept. of the Army Inspector General interview with Lieutenant General Randall Marc Schmidt. Lt. Gen. Schmidt had interfaced with MG Geoffrey Miller on the one hand — the most brutal overseer of such abuses, the one who was sent to “Gitmo-ize” other prisons — and the honorable JAG military lawyers on the other hand, over the abuses under investigation at that time. [Lt. Gen. Schmidt advised MG Miller of his rights under Article 31 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice at that time — in other words, those involved know something serious is at stake, p. a-16].

The transcript of this internal document reveals Lt. Gen. Schmidt’s own words that it was his understanding that the directives to commit these acts, many of which are apparently war crimes, came right from the top.

The interview was not primarily intended to be a public document:

“An Inspector General” notes the document, “is an impartial fact-finder for the Directing Authority Testimony taken by an IG and reports based on that testimony may be used for official purposes. Access is normally restricted to persons who clearly need the information to perform their official duties. [italics mine]. In some cases, disclosure to other persons may be required by law or regulation or may be directed by proper authority.” As in the case, clearly, here — though the immense implications of this privately taken testimony have not reverberated fully yet in a public forum: “I thought the Secretary of Defense in good faith was approving techniques,” testified Lt. Gen. Schmidt. “In good faith after talking to him twice. I know that — and these weren’t interrogations or interviews of him. This was our hour and forty-five minutes and then another hour and fifteen kind of thing were [sic] we sat in there and had these discussions with him.” [Testimony of Lt. Gen. Randall M Schmidt, Taken 24 August 2005 at Davis Mountain Air Force Base, Arizona, Dept. of the Army Inspector General, Investigations Division, pp. a-30 to a-53, Jaffer and Singh, op. cit].

So what should Congress know as it decides what is to be done?

We torture, illegally, by directive; the directives come from the top; those who torture know it is probably criminal; when we torture prisoners, the guilty and the innocent, they will tell us anything they think we want to hear — including implicate themselves falsely, as many reports from Human Rights Watch and other rights organizations testify to — to make the torture stop; and the White House routinely uses that faked or coerced unverifiable “intelligence” to buttress its wholesale assault on our liberties.

As the CIA tries to spin its apparent crimes and claim that its waterboarding and other forms of criminal torture “saved lives” — while conveniently offering no evidence to back that up, and while the administration withholds evidence to the contrary from the lawyers of the detainees — we should bear in mind that the decades of research on torture summarized in the magisterial survey “The Question of Torture” show beyond the shadow of a doubt that prisoners being tortured will indeed “say anything.” When American prisoners were tortured by the North Vietnamese, their confessions were phrased in Communist cliches.

We should note too — as the White House tries to muddy the waters by pretending that there has ever been a “debate” about such acts as these — that the US in the past prosecuted waterboarding itself: when the Japanese had waterboarded US prisoners they were convicted with sentences of fifteen years of hard labor.

We should also bear in mind that the Bush White House has deliberately crafted its memos and laws — such as the Bybee/Gonzales “torture memo” and the Military Commissions Act of 2006 — with a keen eye to seeking indemnification of its own guilt regarding having committed evident crimes, because those involved know quite well that acts committed could be criminal acts. (An historical note worth mentioning, when we consider how hyperalert the Bush White House has been to the issue of seeking retroactively to protect itself and its subordinates from prosecution for war and other crimes, is that the Nuremberg Trials eventually swept up influential Nazi industrialists such as Fritz Thyssen of IG Farben — who relied on Auschwitz slave labor — and with whom Prescott Bush had collaborated in amassing the Bush family millions; some of the sentences given to those industrialists found guilty in the postwar trials were severe.) For a moment postwar, the legal spotlight was also about to search out and hold accountable the several prominent US investors who had partnered with Nazi industrialists (see the exhaustively documented study of US/Nazi corporate collaboration, IBM and the Holocaust.)

Prosecution for war crimes and other criminal acts, which the administration so clearly recognizes that it may well have committed — which its legislation so clearly shows it realized it may well commit in advance of the commission — is the only consequence the Bush team seems to be really afraid of as it attempts its multiple subversions of the rule of law. This is why the nation’s grassroots call for a truly independent investigation into possible criminality is so very urgent and so necessary to restore the rule of law in our nation.

Mr. Mukasey could look up his own department’s files and understand that waterboarding is a war crime; not only that, the US Military prosecuted waterboarding as a war crime itself in 1902 — it had been used against prisoners in the Phillipines — and those Americans who had committed it received convictions from the military. It is hopeless to rely on the Justice Department.

An independent special prosecutor must be appointed. The people who are found guilty, in America, must face justice.

Let the investigations begin.

There is something untrustworthy about a man who can’t conduct a decent affair. Rudy Giuliani never could. He flaunted his girlfriend Judi Nathan (now a proper lady with a proper lady’s name, Mrs. Judith Giuliani) at public events while he was mayor and married to Donna Hanover, with whom he had no understanding about elective affinities. He used his son Andrew as his beard, claiming he was teaching the boy golf those many weekends when he was cavorting with Judi in Southampton. He announced his new love, and concomitant dumping of the old, at a 2001 press conference, thus informing Donna their marriage was over at the precise moment that any New Yorker listening to 1010 WINS learned of it. Then he tried to push her and the children out of Gracie Mansion so he could get on with his life.

In the return whiff of scandal around Rudy and Judi the hoary details of their crass courtship are said to be of no consequence. Let’s not get into his private life, commentators quickly warned, eager to steer political discussion clear of anything that might actually rub up against realities of life experienced by the common horde. Let’s talk about the issues, the “new” ones here being hardly newer than what any New Yorker had long known: that the NYPD accompanied the pair on their trysts; that, hark!, these police escorts were paid for from the public purse and involved some finagled accounting. The parched details and dollar amounts in the latest revelations are nowhere nearly as telling as the rough picture of things sketched in Newsday by Jimmy Breslin back in 2000, when he wrote about a cop nicknamed Wrong Way because once while pulling into Gracie Mansion with Judi in the backseat he almost collided with the cop pulling out of the mansion with Donna.

Wrong Way was later part of a five-car police detail assembled simply to get the king and his court to the ballgame: one car for Rudy, one for Judi, one for Andrew, one for Donna and one for the Other Girl he’s said to have kept on the side, the two girlfriends given separate corporate seats at Yankee Stadium. The only evocative tidbits among the latest are news that someone from the NYPD walked Judi’s dog and accompanied her on a shopping trip when she selected her sapphire and diamond engagement ring–in Atlanta, while business in post-9/11 New York bordered on the berserk insisting that Love NY meant Shop NY. At least the cops didn’t torture or kill the dog, a practice that in an earlier life was part of young Judi’s job. That would have twinned Giuliani’s personal and political deficits, probably irreparably.

In the main, the huff and puff over “taxpayer expense” is not likely to blow down much to obstruct Rudy Giuliani’s presidential campaign. Once we collectively concede that some maximum leader requires maximum protection, and so too his loved ones–either for the sake of his happiness or as a hedge against ransom threats–then there’s really not much difference between the wife, the kids, the dog, the girlfriend. The reporters at Politico didn’t sift through those FOIA documents out of a passion for fiscal probity. Sex is the story that sells here, so why not talk about sex?

Granted it was more fun–the last time adultery and presidential ambitions coincided so publicly–to imagine Governor Clinton bound to a bedstead with silken ties, maddened by the big-haired blonde with her animal prints and scented light bulbs, a woman who claimed he was never so happy as when he could bury his face in her muff, than it is to contemplate Mayor Giuliani panting over his soon-to-be-new-missus, the “princess,” according to Vanity Fair, who’s always longed to be “a queen.” To toss around the subject of adultery and politics now is to raise that specter of Saturday Night Bill, and of the other big-haired girl, the frisky Monica, with her kneepads and cigar tricks and oral-anal games in the Oval Office. And no one much wants to do that: not partisans of Hillary Clinton; not her opponents, who may have to support her come November or ask for the Clintons’ support; not conservatives, who may find themselves having to back their own philanderer down the road.

Already, this is a repression election. Rumors are afloat that Rudy needs a short leash, his eyes wandering toward a former rhythmic twirler with eclectic tastes, a fan of The Lonely Crowd, The Indispensable Chomsky and Leadership, by Rudolph Giuliani. Democratic bloggers bleat pathetically, “At least he [Bill] stayed married.” Although Hillary’s great asset, she sometimes wears it like a cross. Rudy is said to be similarly chafing now that Judith is his wedded wife. Christians take heart in Mike Huckabee and, maybe, the knowledge that if Giuliani does turn out to be the chosen one, his sins won’t matter anyway. David got away with Bathsheba, after all, and with dispatching her husband, Uriah the Hittite, to the enemy’s spears. The rest of us can take heart that at least Rudy doesn’t hold the power of life and death over anyone. Bill executed a man as the Gennifer Flowers story swirled in 1992. He bombed Iraq as the Senate considered removing him from office over Monica Lewinsky. Nothing beats death for distraction.

The trouble, in fact, is in treating sex as a distraction. Usually it isn’t. Usually it’s just life, like the mortgage and the bad school and the checkbook that’s balanced or not, the dinner that’s sublime or not. Adultery may thrillingly divert from one reality, but in the form practiced by Bill and Rudy and millions of others it tends to create its own parallel universe, with its own set of mores and unwritten rules. Rudy broke them all. One doesn’t bring the paramour to the marriage bed (unless it’s a threesome), or involve the children, or deliberately humiliate the spouse. Bohemians, hippies, gay people, adventurers in polyamory have all experimented with different levels of truth-telling, and have all decided, at one time or another, when a lie or reticence is the kindest act of all. But they’ve also understood, at some deep level, why the English called adultery a “criminal conversation”: the criminal part could be jettisoned, as it was by English law in the nineteenth century, but the conversation, measured physically, emotionally, intellectually, could not.

Only a madman or a monk would count it a moral failure to converse with more than one person for a lifetime, yet most Americans call adultery just that, even when they’re involved in it. And most married people probably are involved in it, or have been. Poll numbers are as schizoid as the culture, with overwhelming majorities telling surveyors they “know someone” who’s not monogamous while only a minority own up to it. A politics that’s similarly evasive–that counts as irrelevant the ways in which people arrange their lives, their joys, needs and sorrows; that cares nothing for how and why they converse–is no politics at all. It doesn’t matter that Rudy had sex with Judi or anyone else, or that he had that police escort, frankly. What matters is that Rudy was a prick. Rudy made it cruel.

A bill is on its way to President George W. Bush with an enclosure that encapsulates the atmosphere of a disoriented US Congress. Euphemistically titled “Sense of Congress on Federalism in Iraq” and attached to the 2008 defence authorisation bill that was passed in the House of Representatives yesterday (and is expected to pass easily in the Senate today*), this latest Iraq-related opus to emerge from Capitol Hill is so riddled with inconsistencies that it is the opponents of the idea of US interference in internal Iraqi affairs that emerge as the clear victors in this strange affair.

It may be useful to briefly recapitulate the flaws of the precursor to the text which is now being turned into law. Contrary to accounts in the US press, the Senate’s “Biden amendment” of September 2007 did not specifically seek to divide Iraq into any particular number of federal states, nor did it advocate full partition. It did however violate the Iraqi constitution in two major ways. Firstly, by introducing the idea of a “conference settlement” of Iraq’s federal question, it sought to circumvent the democratic procedures for creating federal regions “from below” through grassroots initiatives as outlined in the Iraqi constitution. Secondly, by anticipating an Iraq that would be wholly divided into federal regions it usurped, by implication, the constitutional rights of individual Iraqi governorates to retain their unitary state status if that should be the wish of their populations. In short, the “Biden amendment” ignored Iraq’s status as a unique specimen within the world’s family of federations, namely, an asymmetrical federation where the demarcation of federal entities is gradual and where the right to create new federal entities is vested exclusively in the local populations of the existing governorates. This is a dual system combining federal and unitary-state elements, and it may well end up with one federal region only (Kurdistan, the sole federal entity explicitly mentioned in the 2005 constitution) – although existing governorates, like for instance Basra, or Najaf, can try to opt for a federal status at a future stage if their populations should strongly favour this. To those searching for comparisons, the United States is entirely irrelevant; it is to Spain and Russia (and, arguably, the United Kingdom) one should look for cases with certain parallels to the asymmetric division of power between centre and regions in force in today’s Iraq.

The “Biden amendment” of last September also highlighted the logical flaws of the US senators’ approach as they seek to apply the concept of federalism to create an alternative Iraq policy. Their problem is that Iraqi parliamentarians and the Bush administration happen to speak with one voice on this particular issue: they follow the 2005 constitution and the law on implementing federalism of October 2006, which together provide detailed principles, procedures and timelines for creating federal regions in those parts of the country where there is a genuine desire for such federalisation. These procedures are finite and clearly defined: unless one intends to break the law, there is no need for additional “conferences” or “international assistance” of any kind. Accordingly, if US senators wish to produce something that is somehow “more federal” than this, they will have to violate the Iraqi constitution – which is just what they did through their September resolution.

Unsurprisingly, Senator Joseph Biden and his allies flatly deny that they are transgressing the Iraqi constitution. But their handling of this in the final Congress conference version of the bill has been particularly awkward. The two elements of the original amendment that are clearly in breach of the Iraq constitution are still there – the “conference for Iraqis”, and the idea of a “comprehensive”, one-off settlement where, by implication, the entire country is to be subjected to federalisation. Instead of resolving this (for instance by suggesting a more limited mandate for the projected “conference”, or by explicitly recognising the constitutional right of existing governorates to remain non-federated), the US congressional conferees have simply littered their text with caveats that invite the Iraqis to break their own constitution if that is seen to be the popular will! The key clause is now rendered as follows: “if the Iraqi people support a political settlement in Iraq based on the final provisions of the constitution of Iraq that create a federal system of government and allow for the creation of federal regions, consistent with the wishes of the Iraqi people and their elected leaders, the United States should actively support such a political settlement in Iraq [emphasis added]”, followed by the suggested ingredients for this kind of settlement – including action by the international community to “support” a federalism deal, as well as the previously mentioned federalism conference, neither of which, of course, is actually mentioned anywhere in the 2005 Iraqi constitution.**

This is disingenuous in two ways. First, the Iraqi federal system as outlined in the 2005 constitution is simply not of the “settlement” sort (i.e. one big, convenient conference of “major” factions, of the kind that would seem palatable and perhaps manageable to US senators) but instead is based on gradual evolution through bottom–up processes. The reason for this is that the concept of federalism is so contested in Iraq that, for fear of popular resistance, even the elites who wrote the 2005 constitution did not dare to impose any particular federal formula on the country beyond recognising Kurdistan as a federal region. Basically, the arrangement is supposed to guard against any federal entities being imposed on parts of Iraq where there is no popular demand for federalism. Second, how could the existence of “popular support” for such a “settlement” be ascertained prior to the proceedings themselves? Through a popular referendum? In that case, the question to be put to the Iraqi voters would have to be framed in a very inventive way, because the real question would be: “Do you support the idea of temporarily dispensing with the 2005 constitution and the 2006 law for implementing federalism (and their long-drawn procedures), so that Iraq instead can have a (US-designed, more effective) process including international ‘support’ and (maybe) a (one-day?) ‘conference for Iraqis’ to divide their country into federal regions?”

The irony is that during this work the senators were actually quite close to the key to an alternative Iraq policy. They even touched on it when they inserted the words “final provisions of” before “the Iraqi constitution” in the conference version of the bill – presumably a reference to the fact that the Iraqi constitution itself is an evolving project, with an ongoing process of revision by committee. Where the senators made their big mistake was in focusing on federalism instead of constitutional revision. This is where there is room for the “grand settlement” (including features related to federalism) which the senators so clearly want. This is also where such “settlement” can be sought without violating the Iraqi constitution, because the process of revision itself is constitutionally mandated. But the direction of change likely to meet with Iraqi approval would again be the opposite of the general thrust in the latest US Congress bill. Instead of asking for more federalism (or a more rapid path towards federalism), many Iraqis seem to favour delays for implementing federalism, stricter criteria for forming federal regions, or guarantees against a federal arrangement where new demarcation lines would correspond to ethnic and sectarian divisions – in short, they maintain the general scepticism towards federalism that has been reflected in successive opinion polls among Shiites and Sunnis alike. But because the committee charged with revising the Iraqi constitution clearly is not responding to these signals from below, this may constitute an area where Iraqi nationalists might actually appreciate some kind of input or support from the international community – perhaps even from the US Congress.

The “Biden amendment” of September 2007 was provocative in its flagrant violation of the Iraqi constitution. Thanks to the efforts of Iraqis who protested the bill, Congress has now been sufficiently shaken to present yet another version, this time with so many additional contradictions that the new text is best characterised as illegible. All in all, it is quite hard to see why the language on federalism was included at all.

ENDNOTES

* Postscript: the bill formally cleared the final hurdle in the Senate on 14 December with an almost unanimous vote.

WASHINGTON – The FBI is investigating the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, Justice Department officials said, following allegations of misconduct from former employees.

The investigation of Stuart Bowen involves possible electronic tampering, including alleged efforts by the inspector general to go through e-mails of employees in his office, said two officials close to the inquiry Thursday. It is being handled by the FBI’s Washington field office, according to law enforcement officials, who like the first officials spoke on condition of anonymity because of the ongoing investigation.

According to one of the officials close to the investigation, the FBI is looking into several issues of possible fraud and abuse and has interviewed a number of former and current employees — some two or three times. A grand jury has been impaneled, and has issued subpoenas for documents.

The official said that in addition to the allegations involving Bowen accessing employee e-mails, the FBI is also looking into whether Bowen and his deputy, Ginger Cruz, may have inappropriately used taxpayer funds to pay their legal expenses associated with an administrative investigation that began in 2006.

In addition, the FBI probe may also review whether Bowen misled investigators about the cost of an expensive book project about the special inspector general’s activities in Iraq, which is being put together by his office.

A spokeswoman for the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction said nobody in the office had been notified of any FBI investigation.

“I can neither confirm or deny the existence of any investigation. However, no SIGIR official has received notice that they are the subject or target of a criminal investigation,” SIGIR spokeswoman Kristine Belisle said.

Belisle also released a copy of a memo written by Bowen that addressed some of the issues raised in the investigation. In the memo, he said the office paid for $32,700 of Cruz’s legal fees and none of his own. He said that SIGIR’s general counsel determined that some of her fees could be paid by the agency since the administrative review “covered actions taken in her official capacity.”

Bowen also issued a broad defense of his office — from its budget and pay policies to employee turnover — and concluded that, “I take seriously the requirement that SIGIR maintain the highest standards of integrity and transparency as we carry out our demanding oversight effort.”

Congress Daily, a publication that focuses on Capitol Hill, first reported the FBI’s investigation into the matter on its Web site Thursday.

Bowen denied any wrongdoing and also said he hadn’t been notified by the FBI that he was a target, according to the report.

“I am confident that this is going to amount to nothing,” Bowen was quoted by Congress Daily.

In May, the White House confirmed that Bowen’s office, whose revelations of waste and corruption in Iraq have repeatedly embarrassed the Bush administration, was being investigated by the President’s Council on Integrity and Efficiency after complaints from former employees. The executive branch organization was created to investigate allegations of misconduct by inspectors general at federal agencies.

At the time, the White House rejected suggestions the integrity inquiry was an act of retribution against Bowen, with then-press secretary Tony Snow saying the council was “an independent investigative organization” that did not directly follow the White House’s direction.

That investigation, triggered by a lengthy anonymous complaint filed by former staff members, focused on a number of fraud and abuse allegations, as well as descriptions of possible workplace violations, including sexual harassment. It included charges that Bowen’s office overstated the amount of savings that it generated in order to justify a budget request and that money was wasted on the book project.

The military is among the most conservative of societal institutions. Before they use a tactic in a full-up war, they look for ways to test it. Small wars and other minor conflicts frequently provide the opportunity.

One such opportunity seems to have presented itself last spring, when the Estonian government relocated a Soviet war memorial from central Tallinn to a military cemetary. The memorial had been a traffic-stopping center of protests, those protests incited by Russia.

Estonia, a Soviet Republic between 1945 and 1991, sees the internet as a way toward economic success for a small country starting from ‘way behind. Estonians have given us Kazaa, pioneering peer-to-peer file-sharing software, and Skype, the free internet phone service. More than 90% of bank transactions in Estonia are carried out over the internet. A few years ago, my friends’ front yard was trenched along the street. Optical fiber to every home. Estonians vote via the internet, and the government has just opened a virtual embassy in Second Life.

So what better way to send a message and test a tactic than by the internet?

For several days, internet providers and Estonian government, banking and news sites were shut down by denial-of-service attacks, many of thousands of hits arriving in torrents to large for servers to handle. NATO, of which Estonia is now a member, and some of its member countries sent experts to observe and advise.

The attacks appeared to be organized and came in three waves over a well-defined period of time; if they were coming from individuals, a tailing-off would have been expected. Attacks on banks focused on one bank at a time. The source cannot be traced; it is easy to achieve anonymity over the internet, and denial-of-service attacks are organized by commandeering unprotected personal computers, without the awareness of the owners of those computers. The estimate is that one million computers in fifty countries were attacking.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies recently invited Jaak Aaviksoo, Estonia’s Minister of Defense, to speak on lessons learned from that internet battle.

Aaviksoo had more questions than answers. The Estonian government is evaluating the attack and their response. He emphasized that there is much thinking-out to be done. Unlike physical attacks, computer attacks come from everywhere and nowhere. “Boundaries become increasingly dissolved between the international and domestic affairs, between civil and military spheres, between the private and the public, between peace and conflict.” Insufficiently protected personal computers (yours could have been one!) were “zombified” by intruders who then sell the computers for as little as ten cents per computer to those who want to make the attacks.

Should the individual owners who left their computers insufficiently protected and therefore part of the attack be held liable?

How should privately-owned internet resources like those of the banking industry be protected? To what extent should government and the private sector cooperate?

Who is responsible within the government? Commerce? Defense?

The effects of the attack were mainly psychological. At a time when Estonians wanted news of the protests in Tallinn, their internet news sources became unavailable. Being unable to access their bank accounts at the same time was frightening. Some of our more imaginative future-war strategists like to worry about electromagnetic pulse effects from nuclear weapons being used to shut down communications, but here was a much simpler and cost-effective method.

Any country is vulnerable, although an attacker faces the question of how to scale up to larger numbers of computers. Estonia’s population is 1.4 million people.

The Council of Europe has a convention on cyber crime that has been ratified by twenty European countries and the United States. NATO will consider cybersecurity issues at the summit meeting in Bucharest next spring. Clearly these are just beginnings, and evaluation of the Estonian attack will help to clarify what needs to be done relative to treaties and security measures.

Finally, a typically Estonian observation:

We are extremely thankful for the publicity we had due – or thanks to the cyber attacks early April this year. This is the positive side of the story. We have modest resources; we could have never managed that publicity to our cyber activities in Estonia.

Update: Meanwhile, China may be hacking US National Laboratory computer systems.

And is this the botnet that did it? Do you click on e-mail attachments from unknown senders?