The Rag Blog

AUSTIN — The Texas Department of Transportation, working to fend off a funding shortfall from the federal government, intends to cut hundreds of millions of dollars budgeted for everything from consulting engineers to right-of-way purchases.

The plan wouldn’t affect existing road projects, and it’s “difficult to say” what future projects would be delayed as a result, agency spokesman Randall Dillard said Friday.

Projections show that if existing plans for awarding contracts and expenditures were to go forward, the department would have at least a $1.8 billion deficit by 2012 and at least $3.6 billion by 2015, agency deputy executive director Steve Simmons said in remarks prepared for Thursday’s commission meeting.

“We in the transportation world cannot wait until then to address the problem,” Simmons said in the remarks.

The move comes as TXDOT staff is poised to recommend to the Texas Transportation Commission a separate $1 billion cut this fiscal year for new roads and expansion projects. Officials say funds aren’t keeping pace with needs and must be focused on key areas like maintenance.

The chairman of the budget-writing House Appropriations Committee said a call from a reporter was the first he’d heard of the agency’s move.

“I’m kind of surprised they didn’t talk to us about that,” said Rep. Warren Chisum, R-Pampa.

“It’s almost to the point you wonder if the agency hasn’t got so big, they’re another branch of government we’re not aware of,” said Chisum, who previously has taken issue with such agency decisions as its projected expenditure of $7 million to $9 million to promote the controversial Trans-Texas Corridor plan and toll roads.

That Keep Texas Moving campaign, while not cited by Simmons in his prepared remarks, could be cut along with other agency programs, Dillard said.

“Everything’s on the table,” he said.

Dillard said agency officials had sought to stir a public discussion on the funding issue and had called some lawmakers Thursday.

The chairman of the Senate Transportation and Homeland Security Committee was aware of the agency’s position on cuts and is supportive in light of the funding situation, said Steven Polunsky, committee director.

Sen. John Carona, R-Dallas, is “in complete agreement about prioritizing maintenance. He believes there is no project in the state of Texas that is worth risking a Minneapolis bridge incident,” Polunsky said.

The agency has an $8.3 billion budget this fiscal year, including $3.3 billion in federal money. Texas is getting less federal transportation money than previously expected, Simmons said. Another funding source that transportation officials had turned to was affected when lawmakers this year sought to rein in state partnerships with private entities on toll roads.

Carona worked for $5 billion in additional authority for road bonds approved Nov. 6 by voters, and he has talked up the need to raise the state’s gasoline tax and for a constitutional amendment to prohibit highway funds from being diverted to other sources.

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — The accidental airing of a closed OPEC session Friday provided a surprise glimpse into a sensitive debate over the weakening U.S. dollar, with Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister warning that even talking publicly about the currency’s decline could further hurt its value.

The high-profile blunder ahead of a rare OPEC summit revealed the debate as Iran attempted to convince other member countries to express concern over dollar depreciation in the meeting’s final declaration.

Oil is priced in dollars on the world market, and its depreciation has concerned oil producers because it has contributed to rising crude prices and has eroded the value of their dollar reserves. Cartel officials have resisted pressure to increase oil production to ease prices.

“The reality is that we have this problem. I think we should draft the declaration to reflect our concerns,” Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said during a pre-summit meeting here with fellow ministers from the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.

But Saud al-Faisal, foreign minister of U.S. ally Saudi Arabia, came out against the proposal with unusually frank comments.

Federal immigration agents were searching a house in Ohio last month when they found a young Honduran woman nursing her baby.

The woman, Saída Umanzor, is an illegal immigrant and was taken to jail to await deportation. Her 9-month-old daughter, Brittney Bejarano, who was born in the United States and is a citizen, was put in the care of social workers.

The decision to separate a mother from her breast-feeding child drew strong denunciations from Hispanic and women’s health groups. Last week, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency rushed to issue new guidelines on the detention of nursing mothers, allowing them to be released unless they pose a national security risk.

The case exposes a recurring quandary for immigration authorities as an increasing number of American-born children of illegal immigrants become caught up in deportation operations. With the Bush administration stepping up enforcement, the immigration agency has been left scrambling to devise procedures to deal with children who, by law, do not fall under its jurisdiction because they are citizens.

“We are faced with these sorts of situations frequently, where a large number of individuals come illegally or overstay and have children in the United States,” said Kelly A. Nantel, a spokeswoman for the agency. “Unfortunately, the parents are putting their children in these difficult situations.”

Yesterday, Immigration and Customs Enforcement released new written guidelines for agents, establishing how they should treat single parents, pregnant women, nursing mothers and other immigrants with special child or family care responsibilities who are arrested in raids.

The guidelines, which codify practices in use for several months and apply mainly to larger raids, instruct agents to coordinate with federal and local health service agencies to screen immigrants who are arrested to determine if they are caring for young children or other dependents who may be at risk. The agents must consider recommendations from social workers who interview detained immigrants about whether they should be released to their families while awaiting deportation.

The new guidelines were a response to intense criticism from officials in Massachusetts about one raid, at a backpack factory in New Bedford in March. They do not specifically address the American citizen children affected by raids, whose numbers have only become clear in recent months.

About two-thirds of the children of the illegal immigrants detained in immigration raids in the past year were born in the United States, according to a study by the National Council of La Raza and the Urban Institute, groups that have pushed for gentler deportation policies for immigrant families.

Based on that finding, at least 13,000 American children have seen one or both parents deported in the past two years after round-ups in factories and neighborhoods. The figures are expected to grow. Over all, about 3.1 million American children have at least one parent who is an illegal immigrant, according to a widely accepted estimate by the Pew Hispanic Center in Washington.

Under the 14th Amendment, any child born in the United States is a citizen and cannot be deported. But with very rare exceptions, immigration law does not allow United States citizen children to confer legal status on parents who are illegal immigrants, until the children are 18 years old. While the federal government does not keep statistics on the children of deportees, immigration lawyers said that most immigrants who are deported take their children with them, even if the children are American citizens.

“Children have no rights to keep family members here because they are citizens,” said Jacqueline Bhabha, a lecturer at Harvard Law School who specializes in citizenship law. When parents face deportation, she said, the law “penalizes United States citizen children by forcing them to choose between their family and their country.”

The Troops Out Now Coalition, a national antiwar organization, released the following statement in response to the Annapolis meting planned for November 27:

On November 8, 1967 the NY Times recounted a Yale Daily News report that five fraternities had been accused of “sadistic and obscene” initiations. The paper said that Delta Kappa Epsilon had used a “hot branding iron” on the backs of new members and quoted a former Delta president, Georg Bush, then a senior, that the resulting wound was “only a cigarette burn.”

This was not Bush’s first bout with sadism. According to an article by Nicholas D. Kristof in Midland Life, “‘We are terrible to animals,’ recalled [Bush childhood pal Terry] Throckmorton, laughing. A dip behind the Bush borne turned into a small lake after a good rain, and thousands of frogs would come out. `Everybody would get BB guns and shoot them,’ Throckmorton said. `Or we’d put firecrackers in the frogs and throw them and blow them up.'”

Psychologists don’t think young men blowing up animals is such a good sign, as this report from Science News notes:

“Psychologist Paul J. Frick of the University of New Orleans recalls a boy who was recently referred to the mental health clinic where Frick works. The 10-year-old had trapped a cat and killed it by slowly slicing it with a knife. The youngster calmly explained to Frick that he wanted to see how much he could cut the animal before it died. ‘He wasn’t upset by the incident at all,” Frick says. “He was a bit annoyed about being brought to me, though.’

THE GATE, TOHONO O’ODHAM NATION (Arizona).

Indigenous delegates to the border on Tohono O’odham Nation land were outraged by the federal agents, hovering customs helicopter, profiteering contractors, federal spy tower, federal “cage” detention center and watching the arrest of a group of Indigenous Peoples, mostly women and children, by the US Border Patrol on an Indian Nation.

“We saw it all firsthand in America,” said Bill Means, Lakota and cofounder of the International Indian Treaty Council on Nov. 8, when an Indigenous delegation went to the US/Mexico border here, south of Sells, to document human rights abuses for a report to the United Nations.

“Now we are going to take this wall down,” Means said, after viewing the construction of a border vehicle barrier by contractors and National Guard on Tohono O’odham land.

Speaking a few hours later to the Indigenous Peoples Border Summit of the Americas II in San Xavier, Means called for solidarity of Indigenous Peoples throughout the world to halt the arrests of Indigenous Peoples who are walking north in search of a better life, and solidarity to bring down the US/Mexico border wall.

“One inch of intrusion into our land is not acceptable!” Mohawk Mark Maracle told the Border Summit. “I became very angry when I saw those guys rounding up our people.

“It is a violation of our Great Law to witness what we did today and do nothing about it.”

The delegation included Mohawks, Oneida, Navajo, Acoma Pueblo, Hopi and O’odham.

Near the border, at the scene of the arrests of a group of Indigenous Peoples, Mohawks stood before US Border Patrol agents and held their fists high in solidarity, as the Border Patrol packed nearly a dozen Indigenous Peoples into one vehicle.

The delegation also viewed the federal spy tower next to Homeland Security’s migrant detention center known as “the cage” on the Tohono O’odham Nation. The first stop, however, was the abomination of the new vehicle barrier wall being constructed on O’odham land.

Kahentinetha Horn of the Mohawk Women Title Holders said she saw the callousness of the Tohono O’odham district official standing before them and speaking in favor of the border barrier.

“This is completely illegal,” Kahentinetha said, adding that it violates human rights legislation. Kahentinetha was outraged at the arrests of the group of Indigenous Peoples, who appeared to be Mayans from Oaxaca, Chiapas or Guatemala.

“We stood in front of the Border Patrol, we started yelling at them,” Kahentinetha told the Indigenous Border Summit. She described how the Mohawks stood with fists held high in solidarity with the Indigenous Peoples being arrested earlier in the day.

“We were passing some of our strength on to them to fight.”

The Indigenous delegation documenting the abuses planned to intervene in the arrests, but the Border Patrol crowded the group into a vehicle and left quickly.

“I came away feeling very frustrated and very discouraged,” Kahentinetha said.

Mohawk warrior Rarahkwisere, among those heartbroken to see the arrest of fellow Indigenous Peoples on Indian land, said these brothers and sisters of the people were not drug runners or criminals, these were women and children walking in search of a better life.

Jay Johnson Castro of Del Rio Texas, leading protests against the imprisonment of migrant children at Hutto prison in Texas and the border wall in Texas, was in the delegation.

“I hear ‘sovereign nation,’ but I didn’t see a sovereign nation.”

Castro said the buildings near the border on the Tohono O’odham Nation are labeled with signs, “Homeland Security and Tohono O’odham Nation, like they are in partnership.”

Maracle said the same atrocities that the United States government is now accusing migrants of doing, is what the invaders did when they arrived on Turtle Island: rape, robbery and murder.

“If you don’t stop and grab hold of your destiny, there is not going to be one for your children.” Maracle said all the nations need to come together and stop what is happening here. “I know from past experience with the Mohawk Warrior Society where our power lies, it is with the people. The power is in the people, don’t ever forget that.”

Chris George, Oneida from Canada, said, “When the Border Patrol came up, they thought we were the enemy,” relaying how the Border Patrol asked the summit delegation who authorized this delegation to be at the border.

“No one authorizes us to do anything. It was the Creator who took us there.

“They were packing, we were packing, too, with a good mind and a good heart.”

“All of the Indigenous Peoples need to come together. Don’t let the United States government tell you who you are. We know who we are. We are Haudenosaunee, People of the Longhouse.”

Lenny Foster, Dine’ (Navajo) and advocate for Native ceremonial rights for inmates, said what he witnessed at the border was “brutal, vicious and evil.”

Foster said Dine’ know that all human beings all have five fingers, but what he witnessed within the district official and federal agents was no internal recognition of being five-fingered people.

“They were robots.”

Referring to the Tohono O’odham district official who led the tour, Foster said she was defending the policies of genocide.

Foster asked who is setting these policies in the United States. “Who is running the government? It is the white man, it surely isn’t the people of color.”

Describing how the Indigenous Peoples were arrested and rushed into a small vehicle, Foster said, “It reminded me of Gallup, N.M., and how they round up our people, stack them up like stacks of wood.”

Foster was at this same place, a dirt path leading to Mexico known as The Gate, years ago when the American Indian Movement protested the violation of human rights here. Foster pointed out that during this day, he viewed the heavy buildup of police and agents. There were police from the BIA, Tohono O’odham Nation, along with US Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs agents. The National Guard were also there, working with the contractor constructing the border vehicle barrier, while a white customs’ helicopter hovered overhead.

At the same time, on the Mexico side, two men sat under a tree.

An attorney for the O’odham in Mexico was prevented from crossing into the United States on Tohono O’odham land by the US Border Patrol, even though he held a letter from Tohono O’odham Nation Chairman Ned Norris requesting him to come and meet with him today. In the letter, Chairman Norris stated that the attorney could enter the Nation for the meeting by way of The Gate here.

However, the Border Patrol officer at the scene refused to allow the attorney to enter, even with a letter from the chairman. Over-ruling Chairman Norris on Tohono O’odham land, the US Border Patrol agent said the attorney must have a US visa to enter, and not just a letter from Chairman Norris. The attorney waited there, with a Tarahumara accompanying him who held a US visa.

Foster pointed out that the Mexican federales or police, who arrived on the other side, could do anything with the two people left there. “They could even be torturing them now.”

Means also pointed out that the delegation was “tailed” or followed from the tribal capitol of Sells. Means also said that the Berlin Wall had come down, but now there are other walls to divide the people, including the wall between Israel and Palestine.

At the border wall construction at The Gate, Means said one of the workers told them, “The Israelis are helping us put up the fence.”

At the US/Mexico border, border wall contractor Boeing has hired a subcontractor Elbit Systems, an Israeli defense contractor, who participated in constructing security at the Apartheid Wall in Palestine.

Speaking of what is happening in the United States now, Means said the “gated communities” of the United States have now expanded into a “gated country.” It is a country where the government welcomes the rich. The Indigenous Border Summit witnessed what the United States does to Indigenous Peoples.

Means quoted Black Hawk of the Sac and Fox Nation: “Why is it you Americans always take with a gun what you could have with love. We experienced America today.”

Supporters of former attorney general Alberto R. Gonzales have created a trust fund to help pay for his legal expenses, which are mounting in the face of an ongoing Justice Department investigation into whether Gonzales committed perjury or improperly tampered with a congressional witness.

The establishment of a legal defense fund for the nation’s former chief law enforcement officer underscores the potential peril confronting Gonzales, who is one of a handful of attorneys general to face potential criminal charges for actions taken in office.

David G. Leitch, a Gonzales friend and general counsel at the Ford Motor Co., wrote in an e-mail solicitation to potential contributors last month that Gonzales is “innocent of any wrongdoing” but does not have the means to pay for his legal defense after a career spent mostly in public service.

“In the hyper-politicized atmosphere that has descended on Washington, an innocent man cannot simply trust that the truth will out,” Leitch wrote. “He must engage highly competent legal counsel to represent him. That costs money, money that Al Gonzales doesn’t have.”

Leitch also wrote that Gonzales’s attorney, George J. Terwilliger III of White & Case in Washington, “has substantially reduced his fees to represent Al Gonzales, but the costs will likely be high nonetheless.” A contribution form asking for donations to the Alberto R. Gonzales Legal Expense Trust suggests amounts from $500 to $5,000.

The Justice Department’s investigation of Gonzales is likely to be completed in the next several months, according to sources with knowledge of the investigation’s progress. The inspector general is looking at whether Gonzales misled Congress in sworn testimony and improperly sought to influence testimony of an aide, Monica M. Goodling, about last year’s firings of nine U.S. attorneys.

The inspector general’s office cannot bring criminal charges, but it can hand over evidence to prosecutors with a recommendation for further investigation and possible charges, officials have said. The results are likely to present a thorny issue for Gonzales’s successor, Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey, who was narrowly confirmed by the Senate last week and took his formal oath of office yesterday.

During Mukasey’s ceremony in the Justice Department’s Great Hall, President Bush vigorously defended Gonzales, his longtime aide and friend. “Al Gonzales worked tirelessly to make this country safer and to ensure that all Americans received equal justice before the law,” Bush said. “Over many years, I have witnessed his integrity, his decency and his deep dedication to the cause of justice.”

The contribution form distributed by Leitch asks that donations be sent to a post office box in Alexandria. Leitch said in an e-mail yesterday that the “fund was formed by friends and colleagues of Judge Gonzales to help him defray the cost of legal representation in his continuing cooperation with various inquiries concerning matters that occurred during his tenure as attorney general.” He declined to provide details about the trust, such as whether Gonzales played a role or how much money has been donated so far.

Terwilliger, who served as deputy attorney general during the presidency of George H.W. Bush, did not respond to telephone messages at his office yesterday.

Legal defense funds are common in Washington, but not for attorneys general. Reagan-era attorney general Edwin Meese III faced legal expenses after being accused of ethics violations in his financial dealings but did not open a defense fund, according to news accounts. Meese was not indicted, and the government reimbursed his legal costs.

11/15/07 “ICH” — — On Remembrance Day 2007 – Veterans Day in America – the great and the good bowed their heads at the Cenotaph. Generals, politicians, newsreaders, football managers and stock-market traders wore their poppies. Hypocrisy was a presence. No one mentioned Iraq. No one uttered the slightest remorse for the fallen of that country. No one read the forbidden list.

The forbidden list documents, without favor, the part the British state and its court have played in the destruction of Iraq. Here it is:

1. Holocaust denial

On 25 October, Dai Davies MP asked Gordon Brown about civilian deaths in Iraq. Brown passed the question to the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, who passed it to his junior minister, Kim Howells, who replied: “We continue to believe that there are no comprehensive or reliable figures for deaths since March 2003.” This was a deception. In October 2006, the Lancet published research by Johns Hopkins University in the US and al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad which calculated that 655,000 Iraqis had died as a result of the Anglo-American invasion. A Freedom of Information search revealed that the government, while publicly dismissing the study, secretly backed it as comprehensive and reliable. The chief scientific adviser to the Ministry of Defense, Sir Roy Anderson, called its methods “robust” and “close to best practice.” Other senior governments officials secretly acknowledged the survey’s “tried and tested way of measuring mortality in conflict zones.” Since then, the British research polling agency, Opinion Research Business, has extrapolated a figure of 1.2 million deaths in Iraq. Thus, the scale of death caused by the British and US governments may well have surpassed that of the Rwanda genocide, making it the biggest single act of mass murder of the late 20th century and the 21st century.

2. Looting

The undeclared reason for the invasion of Iraq was the convergent ambitions of the neocons, or neo-fascists, in Washington and the far-right regimes of Israel. Both groups had long wanted Iraq crushed and the Middle East colonized to US and Israeli designs. The initial blueprint for this was the 1992 “Defense Planning Guidance,” which outlined America’s post-Cold War plans to dominate the Middle East and beyond. Its authors included Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and Colin Powell, architects of the 2003 invasion. Following the invasion, Paul Bremer, a neocon fanatic, was given absolute civil authority in Baghdad and in a series of decrees turned the entire future Iraqi economy over to US corporations. As this was lawless, the corporate plunderers were given immunity from all forms of prosecution. The Blair government was fully complicit and even objected when it looked as if UK companies might be excluded from the most profitable looting. British officials were awarded functionary colonial posts. A petroleum “law” will allow, in effect, foreign oil companies to approve their own contracts over Iraq’s vast energy resources. This will complete the greatest theft since Hitler stripped his European conquests.

3. Destroying a nation’s health

In 1999, I interviewed Dr. Jawad Al-Ali, a cancer specialist at Basra city hospital. “Before the Gulf War,” he said, “we had only three or four deaths in a month from cancer. Now it’s 30 to 35 patients dying every month. Our studies indicate that 40 to 48 per cent of the population in this area will get cancer.” Iraq was then in the grip of an economic and humanitarian siege, initiated and driven by the US and Britain. The result, wrote Hans von Sponeck, the then chief UN humanitarian official in Baghdad, was “genocidal … practically an entire nation was subjected to poverty, death and destruction of its physical and mental foundations.” Most of southern Iraq remains polluted with the toxic debris of British and American explosives, including uranium-238 shells. Iraqi doctors pleaded in vain for help, citing the levels of leukemia among children as the highest seen since Hiroshima. Professor Karol Sikora, chief of the World Health Organization’s cancer program, wrote in the BMJ: “Requested radiotherapy equipment, chemotherapy drugs and analgesics are consistently blocked by United States and British advisers [to the Sanctions Committee].” In 1999, Kim Howells, then trade minister, effectively banned the export to Iraq of vaccines that would protect mostly children from diphtheria, tetanus and yellow fever, which, he said, “are capable of being used in weapons of mass destruction.”

Since 2003, apart from PR exercises for the embedded media, the British occupiers have made no attempt to re-equip and resupply hospitals that, prior to 1991, were regarded as the best in the Middle East. In July, Oxfam reported that 43 per cent of Iraqis were living in “absolute poverty.” Under the occupation, malnutrition rates among children have spiraled to 28 per cent. A secret Defense Intelligence Agency document, “Iraq Water Treatment Vulnerabilities,” reveals that the civilian water supply was deliberately targeted. As a result, the great majority of the population has neither access to running water nor sanitation – in a country where such basic services were once as universal as in Britain. “The mortality of children in Basra has increased by nearly 30 per cent compared to the Saddam Hussein era,” said Dr. Haydar Salah, a pediatrician at Basra children’s hospital. “Children are dying daily and no one is doing anything to help them.” In January this year, nearly 100 leading British doctors wrote to Hilary Benn, then international development secretary, describing how children were dying because Britain had not fulfilled its obligations as an occupying power under UN Security Council Resolution 1483. Benn refused to see them.

4. Destroying a society

The UN estimates that 100,000 Iraqis are fleeing the country every month. The refugee crisis has now overtaken that of Darfur as the most catastrophic on earth. Half of Iraq’s doctors have gone, along with engineers and teachers. The most literate society in the Middle East is being dismantled, piece by piece. Out of more than four million displaced people, Britain last year refused the majority of more than 1,000 Iraqis who applied to come here, while removing more “illegal” Iraqi refugees than any other European country. Thanks to tabloid-inspired legislation, Iraqis in Britain are often destitute, with no right to work and no support. They sleep and scavenge in parks. The government, says Amnesty, “is trying to starve them out of the country.”

5. Propaganda

“See in my line of work,” said George W. Bush, “you got to keep repeating things over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda.”

Standing outside 10 Downing Street on 9 April 2003, the BBC’s then political editor, Andrew Marr, reported the fall of Baghdad as a victory speech. Tony Blair, he told viewers, “said they would be able to take Baghdad without a bloodbath, and that in the end the Iraqis would be celebrating. And on both of those points he has been proved conclusively right. And it would be entirely ungracious, even for his critics, not to acknowledge that tonight he stands as a larger man and a stronger prime minister as a result.” In the United States, similar travesties passed as journalism. The difference was that leading American journalists began to consider the consequences of the role they had played in the buildup to the invasion. Several told me they believed that had the media challenged and investigated Bush’s and Blair’s lies, instead of echoing and amplifying them, the invasion might not have happened. A European study found that, of the major western television networks, the BBC permitted less coverage of dissent than all of them. A second study found that the BBC consistently gave credence to government propaganda that weapons of mass destruction existed. Unlike the Sun, the BBC has credibility – as does, or did, the Observer.

On 14 October 2001, the London Observer’s front page said: “US hawks accuse Iraq over anthrax.” This was entirely false. Supplied by US intelligence, it was part of the Observer’s staunchly pro-war coverage, which included claiming a link between Iraq and al-Qaeda, for which there was no credible evidence and which betrayed the paper’s honorable past. One report over two pages was headlined: “The Iraqi connection.” It, too, came from “intelligence sources” and was rubbish. The reporter, David Rose, concluded his barren inquiry with a heartfelt plea for an invasion. “There are occasions in history,” he wrote, “when the use of force is both right and sensible.” Rose has since written his mea culpa, including in these pages, confessing how he was used. Other journalists have still to admit how they were manipulated by their own credulous relationship with established power.

These days, Iraq is reported as if it is exclusively a civil war, with a US military “surge” aimed at bringing peace to the scrapping natives. The perversity of this is breathtaking. That sectarian violence is the product of a vicious divide-and-conquer policy is beyond doubt. As for the largely media myth of al-Qaeda, “most of the [American] pros will tell you,” wrote Seymour Hersh, “that the foreign fighters are a couple per cent, and then they’re sort of leaderless.” That a poorly armed, audacious resistance has not only pinned down the world’s most powerful army but has agreed to an anti-sectarian, anti-al-Qaeda agenda, which opposes attacks on civilians and calls for free elections, is not news.

6. The next blood letting

In the 1960s and 1970s, British governments secretly expelled the population of Diego Garcia, an island in the Indian Ocean whose people have British nationality. Women and children were loaded on to vessels resembling slave ships and dumped in the slums of Mauritius, after their homeland was given to the Americans for a military base. Three times, the High Court has found this atrocity illegal, calling it a defiance of the Magna Carta and the Blair government’s refusal to allow the people to go home “outrageous” and “repugnant.” The government continues to use endless recourse to appeal, at the taxpayers’ expense, to prevent upsetting Bush. The cruelty of this matches the fact that not only has the US repeatedly bombed Iraq from Diego Garcia, but at “Camp Justice,” on the island, “al-Qaeda suspects” are “rendered” and “tortured,” according to the Washington Post. Now the US Air Force is rushing to upgrade hangar facilities on the island so that stealth bombers can carry 14-ton”bunker busting” bombs in an attack on Iran. Orchestrated propaganda in the media is critical to the success of this act of international piracy.

On 22 May, the front page of the London Guardian carried the banner headline: “Iran’s secret plan for summer offensive to force US out of Iraq.” This was a tract of unalloyed propaganda based entirely on anonymous US official sources. Throughout the media, other drums have taken up the beat. “Iran’s nuclear ambitions” slips effortlessly from newsreaders’ lips, no matter that the International Atomic Energy Agency refuted Washington’s lies, no matter the echo of “Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction,” no matter that another bloodbath beckons.

Prosecuting private security contractors for shooting Iraqi civilians might be impossible.

Federal agents investigating the Sept. 16 killing of 17 Iraqi civilians by operatives of the Blackwater security company have concluded that 14 were victims of unjustified and unprovoked shootings. Some died in a hail of bullets as they fled. The investigators also have rejected assertions by Blackwater that its forces were defending themselves, saying there is no evidence to support that claim.

This initial glimpse into the evidence uncovered by the FBI bolsters the Iraqi government’s claim (made within hours of the shootings in Baghdad’s Nisoor Square) that the killings were criminal, as well as the findings of a U.S. military investigation that called all 17 of the killings unjustified. But that raises a crucial and complicated question: Who will prosecute the killers?

The answer may be no one. That certainly seemed to be the view of veteran diplomat Patrick Kennedy, who recently reviewed the State Department’s use of private security. Kennedy and his team came back from Baghdad concluding that they were “unaware of any basis for holding non-Department of Defense contractors accountable under U.S. law.”

Although the FBI conclusions appear damning, each of the three potential avenues for prosecuting Blackwater have fatal flaws:

U.S. civilian law: The Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act of 2000 provides for prosecution in federal court of U.S. contractors for crimes committed overseas. The problem is that this law only applies to contractors working for or directly accompanying the U.S. military. Blackwater works for the State Department in Iraq as “diplomatic security,” which is separate from military operations. Legislation has been introduced that would expand the act to apply to all contractors, but not retroactively. The Justice Department might argue that the Blackwater guards were indeed accompanying the military, but courts could well throw out such a case.

U.S. military law: In late 2006, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) inserted an amendment in the Defense Authorization Act that places all U.S. contractors under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the court-martial system. But this has not been tested, and the Department of Defense has shown no desire to use this option against any security contractors — let alone ones who aren’t working for the military. Facing a military prosecution, Blackwater could even get support from civil libertarians, who would see it as a creep toward applying military law to civilians.

Iraqi law: The Iraqi government wants to prosecute the Blackwater shooters in its courts, but that isn’t going to happen. The day before L. Paul Bremer III ended his tenure as the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq in June 2004, he issued Order 17. It grants all contractors sweeping immunity from prosecution in Iraqi courts. There is a provision that allows the U.S. to lift immunity in individual cases, but Washington would never hand over a U.S. citizen to an Iraqi court.

“These legal loopholes amount, in practice, to a license to kill with impunity,” says Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which is suing Blackwater for wrongful death and war crimes in federal court over the shootings. “There is no genuine deterrence to acting unlawfully.”

Even if the Justice Department moves forward, the investigation was contaminated from the start. The State Department’s initial report on the shooting was drafted by a Blackwater contractor on U.S. government stationery. Two weeks passed before the FBI was dispatched to investigate; for two weeks, the only people looking into this crime were from a non-law-enforcment agency, the State Department, which had potential culpability of its own.

Then there is this fact: The State Department inspector general, Howard Krongard, who previously has been accused of impeding investigations into Blackwater, has direct family ties to the company. His brother, A.B. “Buzzy” Krongard, former CIA executive director, this year joined Blackwater’s advisory board as a paid consultant. While at the CIA, Krongard played a role in Blackwater’s first soldier-for-hire contract in Afghanistan in 2002.

Late last month, it emerged that the State Department had granted “limited use immunity” to some Blackwater operatives involved in the shootings before taking their statements. The result? Some Blackwater agents reportedly have refused to answer FBI questions, and those statements cannot be used as evidence, nor can any charges be based on them.

The immunity-for-statements deal calls the State Department’s motivation into question, says military law expert Scott Horton of Human Rights First. “It seems less to be to collect the facts than to immunize Blackwater and its employees.” This makes prosecution in any venue difficult, if not impossible.

The Bush administration has overseen a radical privatization of the U.S. war machine. There are now more private contractors in Iraq — tens of thousands of them armed — than U.S. troops. At the same time, the White House has militarized the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security, staffing it with private warriors from Blackwater, DynCorp International and Triple Canopy. This force, conceived as a small-scale bodyguard operation for U.S. diplomats, now constitutes a paramilitary squad thousands strong, seemingly accountable to no one.

Although Blackwater’s operatives must be held accountable, this is not just a case of rooting out “bad apples.” These forces were deployed without any accountability structure or effective oversight; their mission was to keep U.S. officials alive by any means necessary. Blackwater has done that job, but we may never know how many Iraqis have died as a result. The investigation must determine which operatives killed the Iraqis on Sept. 16, but it can’t stop there. It must extend to those who hired them and deployed them, armed, dangerous and apparently above the law.

The Wall Street Journal gave the top half of its opinion page yesterday to a long essay by Peter Berkowitz titled “The Insanity of Bush Hatred.” If anything, it deserves a gold medal for political propaganda – make that political lies. What caught my attention immediately was the frequent use of the word “progressive” to describe the people Berkowitz was attacking. It was used ten times. In other words, progressives were attacked for hating Bush.

There is a major lie of omission. No mention was made of the vast number of Americans that certainly do not call themselves progressives that hate Bush. Surely there are many millions of sane independents, moderates, libertarians, conservatives and liberals that rightfully hate Bush. To ignore all these Americans betrays the intellectual legitimacy of the article and its arguments.

Here are the few core reasons given by Berkowitz for condemning Bush hatred:

It is not a rational force in politics. It clouds and impairs political judgment. It subverts sound thinking. It has addled minds. It damages the intellect. It reduces “complicated events and multilayered issues to simple matters of good and evil.” It “blinds to the other sides of the argument, and constrains the hater to see a monster instead of a political opponent.”

There is no detailed analysis of all the ways that the Bush administration has betrayed our Constitution. No mention, for example, of Bush signing statements that self-justifies not obeying the laws passed by Congress. No mention that the Bush claim of not using torture is so obviously a lie. No mention of using illegal surveillance of Americans and lying about it. No mention of countless lies used to get us into the absurd and costly Iraq war. No mention of the enormous amount of evidence showing that 9/11 was not solely an operation by foreign terrorists, but involved the federal government. And on and on.

The only rational and sane conclusion is that hating Bush is justified and completely sane.

There is some truth to the opening statement: Hating the president is almost as old as the republic itself. But the growing consensus that George W. Bush will go down in history as the nation’s worst president is a much larger truth. It is perfectly reasonable for ALL Americans to hate Bush for squandering the lives of the many people in our armed forces, for squandering the nation’s wealth, and for squandering our nation’s good name and reputation. Bush is a national embarrassment and disgrace, and for that he deserves to be hated.

All those with a clear and sound intellect, rational objectivity, sensible judgment, and the ability to know evil when they see it should hate Bush. Hating Bush is nothing to be ashamed of. The real challenge is moving beyond Bush hatred to seeing the need for deep political reforms that restores American democracy. We must convert the national Bush-hatred-energy into rebellious action. We must re-establish our constitutional checks and balances and removing the unlawful and excessive powers of the presidency. How do we achieve reforms? That is the right question.

As to insanity: I say we must stop doing the same thing and expecting different results. That same thing is voting for Democrats or Republicans. We must remember that virtually all the evil and corrupt things Bush has done could not have been accomplished without the tacit or explicit support of Democrats in Congress. The two-party partnership also deserves our hatred. It has removed political competition and the ability of third party candidates from winning national office. To let Bush hatred result in knee-jerk support for Democrats is a mistake.

The only way to restore American democracy is to remove the legitimacy and credibility of the two-party-controlled political system. The way to do that is through a voter boycott in the 2008 elections for the president and members of Congress. Neither Democrats nor Republicans faithfully represent the interests of the public and that makes our representative democracy a sham. To keep playing the game and voting for any candidates that are members of the vast two-party criminal conspiracy is plain stupid. If Americans keep sustaining this corrupt and dishonest two-party system, then they will continue to witness the decay of our society.

www.delusionaldemocracy.com

BLACKWATER, the secretive private army now emerging into public view, is a perfect hinge linking two key elements of the Republican political base: America’s war machine and a muscular form of fundamentalist Christianity.

Military contractors such as Halliburton and Blackwater are the brainchild of Vice President Dick Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. A major goal of Cheney when he was secretary of defense in the first Bush administration was to privatize as much military work as possible, ostensibly to make it more efficient. He commissioned a study by Halliburton, which predictably liked the idea and wound up as America’s largest military contractor. Cheney was hired as Halliburton’s chief officer, awaiting the return of a Republican administration.

When that occurred, Cheney and Rumsfeld enthusiastically promoted privatization, and went so far as to include private contractors in the “Total Force” of the American military, standing never before given to contractors. When Rumsfeld left the Pentagon in 2006, there were nearly as many private contractors in Iraq (100,000) as American troops (130,000). Contractors provided food, fuel, housing and, in the case of Blackwater, heavily armed soldiers with a license to kill and an aggressive attitude.

Blackwater operated basically without oversight since proconsul Paul Bremer gave it a no-bid $27.7 million security contract in 2003, with immunity from Iraqi law. In 2004, four of its soldiers were ambushed in Fallujah and their bodies desecrated, bringing retaliation that killed hundreds of Iraqis, leveled the city and fueled the insurgency. A month ago, Blackwater guards killed 17 Iraqi civilians, in an incident that has drawn the attention of Congress and the FBI.

Blackwater soldiers, often with Navy SEAL or Army Special Operations backgrounds, are paid from $500 to $1,500 a day, far more than regular-duty troops. Their image is straight from central casting: young men, tanned biceps bulging from black T-shirts, wearing wraparound sunglasses and brandishing automatic weapons. For young veterans who loved military action but couldn’t afford to stay in, Blackwater offered big money and plenty of opportunities to order people around. Blackwater’s aggressive guards became the image of American cultural insensitivity, sometimes erasing the best efforts of our uniformed soldiers.

Blackwater is the private empire of billionaire Erik Prince, a major Republican fundraiser and bankroller of several fundamentalist Christian organizations. His private army employs some 2,300 active gunners and boasts a register of 21,000 ready to serve on call. He has the largest privately held arsenal in the country and the expertise and firepower to bring down a small country.

In 2006, Prince expanded internationally, forming a new subsidiary in Barbados, outside American taxes and regulation, to train foreign forces, often funded by American military aid. Elite Blackwater soldiers have conducted secretive “black jobs” for the CIA or other spy agencies.

Despite its financial success, Blackwater is under fire from two sides: Democratic critics who want accountability and families of the four men killed in Fallujah in 2004. The families have sued, alleging negligence.

Blackwater’s lawyers assert it cannot be sued because it is part of the “Total Force.” But, while Congress demands that it be subject to American military codes and international treaties, Blackwater takes the opposite view — it is not military, it’s a civilian contractor. Big money has gone into D.C. lawyers, lobbyists and public-relations spinners to sell this apparent contradiction.

There have always been mercenaries, and a case can be made for limited use of contractors, but the Bush administration has erased the line between a national military and a private war machine. Iraq is our first outsourced war, siphoning billions of taxpayer dollars into the private war machine.

Military contractors have become an integral part of the American military, allowing the White House to understate troop numbers and avoid a military draft. Unpopular wars for oil or ideology can be waged without calling on middle-class families to send their children; mercenaries will fill the jobs if volunteers don’t come forth.

In Prince, the Republicans’ radical Christian base is wed to the war-machine base, the one providing votes and manpower, the other providing campaign funds.

The resulting combination is one of rigid ideology and eagerness to solve any problem with overwhelming force. The Bush administration convinced itself its views on Iraq were right, pushing aside contrary evidence, then failed to think beyond “shock and awe,” with resultant horrors.

In a world of nuance and gray areas, ideological purity and bulging biceps will cause as many problems as they solve. Blackwater seems to epitomize a dark side of our psyche that should be troubling to all Americans.

The shootings of 14 of the 17 Iraqi civilians killed by Blackwater security personnel in a September confrontation were unjustified and violated rules on the use of deadly force, according to a newspaper report.

Citing civilian and military officials briefed on the case, the New York Times reported on its website last night that the US justice department was reviewing the findings of the FBI, which was continuing to investigate the incident in Baghdad on September 16.

No evidence supported assertions by Blackwater employees that they were fired upon by Iraqi civilians, the Times reported.

It said the FBI had concluded that three of the deaths may have been justified under rules that allow lethal force in response to an imminent threat.

Investigators concluded that as many as five of Blackwater guards opened fire during the shootings, the newspaper said.

One guard has become the focus of the investigation, the Times reported, because that guard was responsible for several deaths.

A government official familiar with the investigation told the Associated Press that no conclusions had been reached about any of the fatalities. A US state department official said he was not aware that the department had been informed of any findings. Both requested anonymity because the investigation was continuing.

A Blackwater spokeswoman, Anne Tyrrell, said the company “supports the stringent accountability of the industry”.

She said: “If it is determined that one person was complicit in the wrongdoing, we would support accountability in that. The key people in this have not spoken with investigators.”

Blackwater has said its convoy was attacked before its personnel opened fire, but an Iraqi government investigation concluded that the shootings were unprovoked.

WASHINGTON, Nov 14 (Reuters) – The State Department’s top investigator recused himself on Wednesday from probes into the Blackwater security firm after discovering — during a break in a congressional hearing — that his brother was connected with the company.

Howard Krongard, who began a hearing of Rep. Henry Waxman’s government oversight committee by denying the “ugly rumors” that his brother “Buzzy” was linked to Blackwater, returned after a recess to say he had just contacted his brother and learned he had attended a Blackwater advisory board meeting.

“I had not been aware of that. And I want to state on the record right now that I hereby recuse myself from any matters having to do with Blackwater,” Krongard, who acts as an independent internal investigator for the State Department, told the panel.

Waxman’s committee is examining allegations by current and former officials in Krongard’s office that he thwarted probes into waste, fraud and abuse in Iraq, including alleged arms smuggling by Blackwater, which protects U.S. diplomats and other State Department officials in Iraq.

In September, the private security contractor denied it was involved in illegally shipping automatic weapons and military goods to Iraq after a report that federal officials were investigating.

The North Carolina firm is also under scrutiny after several violent incidents involving its contractors, including the shooting of 17 Iraqi civilians in a September incident. The New York Times reported on Wednesday that FBI agents found at least 14 of those shootings were unjustified.

Waxman, a California Democrat with a reputation for tenacity as an investigator, has charged Krongard with interfering in ongoing investigations to protect the State Department and White House from political embarrassment — a charge Krongard flatly denied.

“I have never impeded any investigation,” Krongard said, adding he had never worked in government before now, had no political ties and never met President George W. Bush.

Republicans belittled Waxman’s investigation, saying the only thing he might pin on Krongard was an abrasive management style.

But they admitted surprise at Krongard’s revelation his brother was in fact linked to Blackwater, after he started the hearing denying it.

“He has done you tremendous damage,” said Rep. Christopher Shays, a Connecticut Republican.

Krongard seemed unfazed. “I’m not my brother’s keeper, and we do not discuss our business with each other,” he said.

A.B. “Buzzy” Krongard is a former executive director of the CIA. Howard Krongard is a former general counsel at Deloitte & Touche.

Krongard contacted his brother after Democratic lawmakers waved e-mails showing Blackwater had invited him to be on the company’s advisory board and attend a meeting in Williamsburg, Virginia, this week.