The Rag Blog

A House panel reveals a letter telling the firm not to disclose information about its Iraq operations without the administration’s OK.

WASHINGTON — The State Department has interceded in a congressional investigation of Blackwater USA, the private security firm accused of killing Iraqi civilians last week, ordering the company not to disclose information about its Iraq operations without approval from the Bush administration, according to documents revealed Tuesday.

In a letter sent to a senior Blackwater executive Thursday, a State Department contracting official ordered the company “to make no disclosure of the documents or information” about its work in Iraq without permission.

The letter and other documents were released Tuesday by Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles), whose House committee has launched wide-ranging investigations into contractor abuses and corruption in Iraq.

The State Department order and other steps it has taken to limit congressional access to information have set up a confrontation between Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Waxman, who has repeatedly accused the State Department of impeding his inquiries.

In his own letter to Rice on Tuesday, Waxman called her department’s latest efforts to withhold information from the committee “extraordinary” and “unusual.”

“Congress has the constitutional prerogative to examine the impacts of corruption within the Iraqi ministries and the activities of Blackwater,” Waxman wrote. “You are wrong to interfere with the committee’s inquiry.”

In response to Waxman’s letter, Kiazan Moneypenny, a senior contracting officer in the State Department’s office of acquisition management, appeared to soften the department’s stand, saying later Tuesday that it would allow Blackwater to hand over unclassified documents.

Classified documents still would be subject to State Department review. The committee has accused the administration of using secrecy designations to keep bad news about Iraq out of the hands of Congress.

The firm’s contract

The State Department’s order to Blackwater last week cited a provision in the North Carolina security firm’s contract that makes all records produced by the company in Iraq property of the U.S. government, and prohibits the company from releasing documents without State Department approval.

Waxman had sought information about Blackwater’s contract with the State Department, under which it provides nearly 1,000 armed guards to protect U.S. diplomats when they travel outside Baghdad’s Green Zone.

The request was part of a probe into a Sept. 16 incident in which at least 11 Iraqis were killed after Blackwater employees protecting a U.S. Embassy convoy opened fire.

The incident enraged the Iraqi government, which accused the firm of routinely shooting civilians with impunity.

L. Paul Bremer III, the former U.S. administrator for Iraq, granted contractors immunity from prosecution in an order he signed the day before handing over sovereignty in June 2004.

A preliminary Iraqi investigation said the shootings occurred without provocation; Blackwater and the State Department said the convoy was ambushed and the guards opened fire after being attacked.

Hearing scheduled

Waxman has scheduled a Blackwater hearing for next Tuesday, but Blackwater’s attorneys warned the committee that the State Department’s letter may complicate company executives’ testimony.

“In the fluid setting of a congressional hearing it may become difficult, if not impossible, for Blackwater personnel to meet the terms of” the State Department finding, wrote Stephen M. Ryan, an attorney advising Blackwater in the congressional investigation.

“This contractual direction from the [State Department] is unambiguous.”

A company spokeswoman said Tuesday that Blackwater interpreted the State Department’s apparent shift Tuesday as permission to release documents sought by Waxman.

The State Department has repeatedly defended Blackwater in the aftermath of the Sept. 16 incident. After a brief ban on diplomatic travel outside the Green Zone, department officials have resumed trips under Blackwater guard and have said that the company’s status has not changed.

In his letter to Rice, Waxman also objected to a move by the department to bar its officials from speaking with committee investigators about corruption inside the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki.

An e-mail received by the committee Monday night indicated that the State Department was treating information about corruption as classified, suggesting it might undermine bilateral relations.

“The scope of this prohibition is breathtaking,” Waxman wrote. “On its face, it means that unless the committee agrees to keep the information secret from the public . . . the committee cannot obtain information about whether Mr. Maliki himself has been involved in corruption or has intervened to block corruption investigations.”

Leaders of ACORN, the nation’s largest grassroots community organization, reacted with deep concern to the findings in a report released by Project Vote on Sept. 27th titled, Caging Democracy: A 50-Year History of Partisan Challenges to Minority Voters. “The report details a systematic effort by a number of state and national Republican officials to employ the practice of ‘voter caging’ to stifle minority participation in elections,” said Florida ACORN Board Chairwoman Tamecka Pierce. “Disenfranchising or intimidating legitimate voters is wrong and un-American.”

In vote caging schemes, political operatives obtain a list of registered voters and send them a piece of non-forwardable direct mail. The vote cagers then compile a list of names associated with pieces of returned mail onto “caging lists,” which are used to challenge voters’ eligibility to cast ballots. These mailings overwhelmingly target voters of color, residents of cities and likely Democratic voters.

In the lead-up to the 2004 election, Florida Republicans with the support of the national party compiled caging lists that included the names of military personnel deployed in Iraq and sent poll watchers to challenge voters in disproportionately minority, urban communities. Fifty-nine percent of precincts in predominantly African-American districts in Miami-Dade County, for example, were scheduled to have at least one Republican poll watcher armed with caging lists, compared with only 37 percent in predominantly white precincts.

“A single returned letter from a political party does not serve as evidence upon which to challenge a citizen’s right to vote,” said Pierce. “Those who use voter caging to discourage and suppress minority voters would obviously rather disenfranchise these people than campaign for their support. States must protect all voters from frivolous challenges and partisan intimidation.”

Partisan operatives use the lists they generate to demand that boards of elections remove voters from the rolls, to intimidate voters in person, and to generate media stories that give the false impression that a large number of people are attempting to commit “voter fraud,” the Project Vote report says.

ACORN’s voter registration drives have submitted over 1.6 million new voter registration applications from low-income and minority Americans since 2004. ACORN has been repeatedly attacked in the press by partisan officials eager to counteract this success.

Permissive state voter challenge statutes allow partisan individuals to challenge and disqualify voters, frequently without providing clear grounds on which such challenges are allowed. The Project Vote report chronicles how many of these state laws originated in Post-Civil War effort by Southern Democrats to disenfranchise newly emancipated blacks.

Challenging a voter’s right to cast a ballot on the basis of racial or ethnic profiling violates the First, Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments to the Constitution. It also violates the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which prohibits voting practices or procedures that discriminate on the basis of race or language. The Project Vote report recommends that states provide better training for poll workers, that states appoint elections observers representing all political parties, that no voter challenge be permitted within 30 days of an election and that grounds for challenges be narrowed to age, residence and citizenship.

ACORN is calling on partisan leaders to renounce the practice of voter caging and on state Legislatures and the United States Congress to enact laws prohibiting political parties from compiling caging lists based on returned, non-forwardable mail.

09/28/07 “Truthdig” — — – The long-awaited “progress report” of Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker on the status of the occupation of Iraq has been made, providing Americans, via the compliant media, with the spectacle of loyal Bush yes men offering faith-based analysis in lieu of fact-based assessment. In the days and weeks that have since passed, two things have become clear: Neither Congress nor the American people (including the antiwar movement) have a plan or the gumption to confront President Bush in anything more than cosmetic fashion over the war in Iraq, and while those charged with oversight mill about looking to score cheap political points and/or save face, the administration continues its march toward conflict with Iran unimpeded.

Bush responded to the Petraeus report by indicating that he would be inclined to start reducing the level of U.S. forces in Iraq sometime soon (maybe December, maybe the spring of 2008). But the bottom line is that the troop levels in Iraq keep expanding, as does the infrastructure of perpetual occupation. The Democrats in Congress are focused on winning the White House in 2008, not stopping a failed war, and as such they not only refuse to decisively confront the president on Iraq, they are trying to out-posture him over who would be the tougher opponent of an expansionist Iran.

Here’s the danger: While the antiwar movement focuses its limited resources on trying to leverage real congressional opposition to the war in Iraq, which simply will not happen before the 2008 election, the Bush administration and its Democratic opponents will outflank the antiwar movement on the issue of Iran, pushing forward an aggressive agenda in the face of light or nonexistent opposition.

Of the two problems (the reality of Iraq, the potential of Iran), Iran is by far the more important. The war in Iraq isn’t going to expand tenfold overnight. By simply doing nothing, the Democrats can rest assured that Bush’s bad policy will simply keep failing. War with Iran, on the other hand, can still be prevented. We are talking about the potential for conflict at this time, not the reality of war. But time is not on the side of peace.

Three story lines unfolded earlier this month which underscore just how easily manipulated the American people, via the media, are when it comes to the issues of Iran and weapons of mass destruction. In the first, Rear Adm. Mark Fox, a spokesperson for the U.S. military in Iraq, let it be known that U.S. forces had captured a “known operative” of the “Ramazan Corps,” the ostensible branch of the Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard command responsible for all Iranian operations inside Iraq. This “operative,” one Mahmudi Farhadi, was, according to Fox, the “linchpin” behind the smuggling of “sophisticated weapons” into Iraq by the Quds Force.

We’ve heard this story before. In January of this year a similar raid by U.S. forces in Irbil netted six Iranians, five of whom are still in U.S. custody. Senior American officials let it be known that these Iranians were likewise members of the Quds Force, and included that organization’s operations director. All were tied to the (unspecified) transfer of arms and munitions into Iraq from Iran. The Iranian government claimed, and the Iraqi government confirmed, that the detained Iranians were all attached to a trade mission in Irbil, where they oversaw legitimate commerce between Iran and Iraq along the Kurdish frontier.

The United States continues to hold the Iranians prisoner, undoubtedly subjecting them to “special treatment” in order to elicit some sort of confession, if our handling of other Iranian diplomats previously captured in Iraq is any guide. Their release any time soon is unlikely, given the impact a de facto admission that the Bush administration got it wrong would have on the overall case against Iran it is trying to build. The fate of Farhadi is likewise up in the air. None other than Kurdish President Jalal Talabani, a staunch pro-American, condemned the detention of Farhadi by U.S. military forces, noting that the Iranian was a well-known businessman who was in Iraq as part of an official trade delegation. The Iranians have threatened to close down cross-border trade in Talabani’s sector of Iraqi Kurdistan, shutting down a key income stream for the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the Iraqi Kurdish faction Talabani heads. Such is the reality of modern Iraq.

But this reality is nowhere to be found in the White House. The president himself has led the charge, as recently as this past August, when in a speech to the American Legion’s national convention in Reno, Nev., Bush threw down the gauntlet against Iran, declaring, “I have authorized our military commanders in Iraq to confront Tehran’s murderous activities … the Iranian regime must halt these actions.” His remarks were built on assertions he first set forth in February 2007 when he highlighted his assessment of Iranian involvement inside Iraq. At that time the president declared, “I can say with certainty that the Quds Force, a part of the Iranian government, has provided these sophisticated IEDs [improvised explosive devices] that have harmed our troops.” Bush avoided direct implication of the Iranian regime, stating, “ … I do not know whether or not the Quds Force was ordered from the top echelons of the government. But my point is, what’s worse—them ordering it and it happening, or them not ordering it and it happening?” I might suggest that the American president putting the weight of the United States behind unsubstantiated speculation in order to build a case for war might, in fact, be worse, but since he got away with it regarding Iraqi WMD, why stop now?

In March 2007 the U.S. military paraded yet another general-cum-spokesperson before the assembled media, where it was announced that the United States had captured Qais Khazali, the head of the mysteriously named “Khazali network,” together with one Ali Musa Daqduq, an alleged Lebanese Hizbollah mastermind who helped plan and facilitate the actions of the Khazali network, including, it seems, an attack on U.S. forces in Karbala in January 2007 which left five American soldiers dead. This attack, in which insurgents dressed in U.S. military uniforms, drove vehicles similar to those used by the U.S. military and sported U.S. identification documents and weapons, has been linked to Iran by many in the U.S., citing nothing more than the level of sophistication involved as proof.

The golden nugget in this story was Ali Musa Daqduq. According to the U.S. military, he was a 24-year member of the Lebanese Hizbollah Party possessing extensive contacts with the Iranian Quds Force. The U.S. military referred to Daqduq as a proxy or surrogate of the Quds Force in Iraq. An alleged “special forces commander” and bodyguard to none other than Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Hizbollah in Lebanon, Daqduq was alleged to have been ordered to Iraq in 2005 for the purpose of coordinating training and operations on behalf of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard command. Daqduq supposedly helped the Iranians by training, together with the Quds Force and the Lebanese Hizbollah operatives, teams of 20 to 60 Iraqi insurgents at secret bases just outside Tehran.

With this plethora of specificity, however, comes only one item sourced directly from Ali Musa Daqduq himself—that the Iraqi insurgents responsible for the January attack on American forces in Karbala could not have conducted such a complex operation without the support and direction of the Iranian Quds Force. Daqduq wasn’t quoted as saying the Iranian Quds Force was in fact involved, but simply that, in his opinion, such an operation could not have been conducted without the knowledge of the Quds Force. This, of course, brings us back full circle to the immediate period after the attack in Karbala, when U.S. military sources speculated that such an attack had to have been planned by Iran given its complexity. Nothing else is directly attributed to Daqduq, leaving open the question of sourcing and authenticity of the information being cited by the U.S. military.

From speculation to speculation, the case against the Quds Force by the Bush administration continues to lack anything in the way of substance. And yet the mythological Daqduq has become a launching platform for even graver speculation, fed by the media themselves, that the highest levels of leadership in Iran were aware of the activities of Daqduq and the Quds Force, and are thus somehow complicit in the violence. Not one shred of evidence was produced to sustain such serious accusations, and yet national media outlets such as The New York Times and The Washington Post both ran stories repeating these accusations. Politicians are formulating policy based upon such baseless accusations, and the American public continues to be manipulated into a predisposition for war with Iran largely because of such speculation. No one seems to pay attention to the fact that the U.S. military itself has subsequently contradicted its own briefings, noting in July 2007 that no persons had been captured by the United States that can provide a direct link between insurgents in Iraq and Iran. Again, in August of 2007, the U.S. military stated that it had yet to catch anyone smuggling weapons into Iraq from Iran.

And what of Daqduq himself? It seems that his Iraqi sponsor, Qais Khazali, had fallen out of favor with Muqtada al-Sadr over the strategic direction being taken, and sometime in 2006 split away from Sadr’s Mehdi Army, taking some 3,000 fighters with him. In the lawless wild-West environment which dominates Iraq in the post-Saddam era, the formation of splinter militias of this sort is an everyday occurrence. Radical adventurers have historically been drawn to places of conflict, which would explain the presence of Daqduq. And it would not surprise me to find that Qais Khazali had secured funding from extremist elements inside Iran which operate outside the mandate of government, including some from within the Iranian Revolutionary Guard itself. But the notion of Iran and Hizbollah aligning themselves directly with a splinter element like the “Khazali network” is highly unlikely, to say the least.

But fiction often mirrors reality, and in the case of Iran’s Quds Force, the model drawn upon by the U.S. military seems to be none other than America’s own support of anti-Iranian forces, namely the Mujahedin el-Khalk (MEK) operating out of U.S.-controlled bases inside Iraq, and Jundallah, a Baluchi separatist group operating out of Pakistan that the CIA openly acknowledges supporting. Unlike the lack of evidence brought to bear by the U.S. to sustain its claims of Iranian involvement inside Iraq, the Iranian government has captured scores of MEK and Jundallah operatives, along with supporting documents, which substantiate that which the U.S. openly admits: The United States is waging a proxy war against Iran, inside Iran. This mirror imaging of its own terror campaign against Iran to manufacture the perception of a similar effort being waged by Iran inside Iraq against the U.S. has been very effective at negating any Iranian effort to draw attention to the escalation of war-like activities inside its borders. After all, who would believe the Iranians? They are only trying to divert attention away from their own actions inside Iraq, or so the story goes.

The second story line demonstrates, apparently, that Iranian perfidy knows no bounds. Just this month, the Iranian government tried to organize a visit to Ground Zero in Manhattan by its president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who wanted to present a wreath of condolence over the tragedy that occurred there on Sept. 11, 2001. The Iranian president’s proposed actions were consistent with the overall approach the Islamic Republic of Iran has taken concerning the 9/11 attack on America. Iran was one of the first Muslim nations to openly condemn the attack, expressing its condolences to those who lost their lives and calling for a worldwide mobilization against terrorism. But why let facts get in the way of fiction. Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Dan Gillerman, set the standard for intellectual discourse on the matter when he told the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organization that a visit by President Ahmadinejad to Ground Zero would be “similar to a visit by a resurrected Hitler to Auschwitz.” Sen. John McCain continued in this vein, stating that allowing Ahmadinejad to visit the site “would be an affront not only to America but to the families of our loved ones who perished there in an unprecedented act of terror.” Both remarks clearly attempted to link the Iranian president, and by extension Iran, to events that they had nothing whatsoever to do with, and which they openly condemned.

9/11 linkage strategies have worked in the past, regardless of factual merit. One only need recall Saddam Hussein and Iraq to understand how easily the American public, courtesy of war-minded politicians and their co-conspirators in the mainstream media, can be so easily led down the path of holding one party accountable for the actions of another. Saddam had nothing to do with the events of 9/11, and we now occupy Iraq. Similarly, Iran had nothing to do with 9/11, and yet due in part to the distortion of fact taking place concerning allegations of Iranian “terror” activity inside Iraq, the link is clear, at least in the minds of many Americans. President Bush calls Iran a “state sponsor of terror.” The military claims Iran is carrying out terror attacks against U.S. forces in Iraq. The Iranian president wanted to visit Ground Zero and was widely condemned by those who plot regime change in Iran. The Americans, bombarded with these false connections, then conclude Iran was part of the 9/11 plot. The logic is so simple, so flawed and yet so dangerously accessible to the minds of an American people fundamentally ignorant of the true situation in Iran and the Middle East today.

Which leads us to the third, and final, story line of the month: Don’t believe the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Iran does have a nuclear weapons program! For weeks now, the cornerstone for the justification of American military intervention in Iran has been crumbling away, the layers and layers of fear-based fiction crafted by the Bush administration meticulously peeled away by Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei and his team of inspectors from the IAEA. After treading water for years in a sea of political intrigue, ElBaradei and his experts have finally assembled enough data to enable them to close the books on the Iranian nuclear program, noting that all substantive questions have been answered and that contrary to the speculative assessments put forward by the Bush administration it appears that Iran’s nuclear program is, in fact, dedicated to permitted energy-related activities.

Not so fast. In recent days, Israeli military aircraft, in coordination with special operations forces on the ground, launched a preemptive raid on a suspected “nuclear” target in northeast Syria. According to Israeli and U.S. intelligence sources, this site was jointly developed by Syria and North Korea for the purposes of transferring North Korea’s proscribed nuclear weapons program to Syrian control. Worse, we are told by none other than former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton that this Syrian-North Korean project was being done at the behest of none other than Iran. The Syrian site, an established agriculture research center, was linked to a shipment from North Korea invoiced as cement. Israel apparently believed different. Israel has been monitoring any activity taking place inside Syria which could be linked to nuclear activity. Syria had, in the past, conducted exploratory investigation into whether phosphate deposits in Syria were viable for the manufacture of uranium for use in a nuclear energy program. Whether this activity, which has been suspended since the 1980s, was being resurrected, and whether the target bombed by Israel had anything to do with such a resurrection, is unknown at this time. What is obvious to anyone with any understanding of nuclear activities is that Syria was not pursuing a nuclear weapons program and North Korea was not supplying Syria with the components of such a program, either for Syrian use or as a proxy for Iran.

But this sort of fact-based reasoning is irrelevant, especially in the secretive circles of power that make the life-or-death decisions regarding war. The Syrian raid by Israel seems to represent a sort of “proof of capability” drill, instilling a sense of confidence in an Israeli military badly shaken from its debacle in Lebanon during the summer of 2006. The planning for the Syrian raid was a closely held secret, limited to a small cabal of right-leaning politicians in Israel and, surprisingly, the United States. The American end of the deal centered on the office of the vice president, Dick Cheney, who gave final approval to attack the Syrian target only after being rebuffed in his effort to get the Israelis to bomb the Natanz nuclear facility in Iran. Cheney, it seems, is desperate for any action that might trigger an expanded conflict with Iran. Even though the Syrian adventure did not succeed in producing such a trigger, it did wipe off the front pages of American newspapers uncomfortable story lines from the IAEA, contending as they did that Iran had no nuclear weapons program. Now, thanks to the Israeli action against Syria, which had no nuclear weapons program, the American public is in the process of being fooled into speculating that one does in fact exist not only in Syria but in Iran.

Continued war in Iraq is a tragedy. Having the conflict spread to Iran would be a disaster. No one can claim to possess a crystal ball showing the future. There are many who, when confronted with the potential for conflict with Iran, choose to brush these warnings aside, noting that such a conflict would be madness, and that the United States currently lacks the resources to fight a war with Iran. Such wishful thinking borders on irresponsible foolishness. If the headlines from this month tell us anything, it is that war with Iran is very much a possibility. The Bush administration has been actively planning war with Iran since the fall of 2004. Since that time, several windows of opportunity have presented themselves (most recently in spring 2007), but the Bush administration found itself unable to pull the trigger for one reason or another (the Navy’s rejection of the presence of a third carrier battle group in the Persian Gulf scuttled the spring 2007 plans).

The administration always heeded the justifications for aborting an attack, primarily because there was time still left on the clock, so to speak. But time is running out. Israel has drawn a red line across the calendar, indicating that if Iran has not pulled back from its nuclear ambitions by the end of 2007, military action in early spring 2008 will be inevitable. The attack on Syria by Israel sent a clear message that attacks are feasible. The continued emphasis by the Bush administration on Iran as a terror state, combined with the fact that the administration seems inclined to blame its continuing problems in Iraq on Iran, and not failed policy, means that there is no shortage of fuel to stoke the fire of public opinion regarding war with Iran. Add in the “reality” of weapons of mass destruction, and war becomes inevitable, regardless of the veracity of the “reality” being presented.

The antiwar movement in America must make a strategic decision, and soon: Contain the war in Iraq, and stop a war from breaking out in Iran. The war in Iraq can be contained simply by letting war be war. There is no genuine good news coming out of Iraq. There won’t be as long as the United States is there. As callous as it sounds, let the war establish the news cycle, and let the reality of war serve to contain it. The surge has failed. Congress may not act decisively to bring the troops home, but it is highly unlikely that Congress will idly approve any massive expansion of an unpopular war that continues to fail so publicly.

Iran, however, is a different matter. Congress has already provided legal authority for the president to wage war in Iran through its existing war powers authority (one resolution passed in 2001, the other in 2002). Likewise, Congress has allowed the Bush administration to forward deploy the infrastructure of war deep into the Middle East and neighboring regions, all in the name of the “global war on terror.” The startup costs for a military strike against Iran would therefore be greatly diminished. Sustaining such a conflict is a different matter, but given current congressional reticence to stand up to a war-time president, it is highly unlikely any meaningful action would be taken to stop an Iranian war once the bombs start falling. And we should never forget that Iran has a vote in how this would end; once it is attacked, Iran will respond in ways that are unpredictable, and as such set in motion a string of cause-effect military actions with the United States and others that spins any future conflict out of control.

The highest priority for the antiwar movement in America today must be the prevention of a war with Iran. The strategic objectives should include getting Congress to repeal the war-powers authorities currently on the books, thereby forcing the president to seek new congressional approval for any new war. Likewise, a concerted effort must be undertaken to counter the disinformation being spread by the Bush administration and others about the nature of the Iranian threat. Every action undertaken by the antiwar movement must be connected to one or both of these strategic objectives. This is not the time for one-off sophomoric newspaper advertisements, but rather for sustained action focused on generating congressional hearings and public debate across the entire spectrum of American society. From the colleges and universities to the churches and on to the public square of small-town America, public information talks, presentations and panels must be held. Communities should flood local media outlets with requests for coverage and appeal to regional media to run stories. Mainstream media will follow. Demonstrations, if useful at all, must be focused events linked to an overall campaign designed to facilitate a strategic objective.

We all should remember the fall of 2002. Many felt that there was no chance for a war with Iraq, especially once U.N. inspectors made their return. In March 2003, everyone who thought so was proved wrong. The fall of 2007 is no different. There is a sense of complacency when one speaks of the potential for a war with Iran. But time is not on the side of those who oppose conflict. If nothing is done to change the political situation inside America regarding Iran, there is an all too real possibility for a war to break out in the spring of 2008.

Sadly, there really is no alternative for the antiwar movement: Put opposition to the war in Iraq on the back burner and make preventing a war with Iran the No. 1 priority, at least until the national election cycle kicks in during the summer of 2008. If a war with Iran hasn’t happened by then, it probably won’t. And the national debate on Iraq won’t be engaged until that time, anyway. A war with Iran would make the current conflict in Iraq pale by comparison, and would detrimentally impact the whole of America, not just certain demographics. As such, it is critical that we all put aside our ideological and political differences and focus on the one issue which, if left unheeded, will have devastating consequences for the immediate future of us all: Prevent a future war with Iran.

“The world is watching the people of Burma take to the streets to demand their freedom, and the American people stand in solidarity with these brave individuals,” – George W. Bush

09/28/07 “ICH” — — Watching the pro-democracy marches in Burma both inspires and sickens me. I am inspired by seeing thousands of red-robed monks leading the demonstrations and sickened by the violence they are being met with by the military.

Seeing the images of the monks and others being beaten reminds me of the Democratic Convention in 1968 where Chicago police beat the living daylights out of demonstrators who were there to try and force the party to come closer to the budding anti-war movement. It didn’t work. Instead of wonderful pro-peace candidate, Eugene McCarthy, the party nominated Johnson’s VP, Hubert Humphrey. We know what happened next: Nixon. After last night’s Democratic “debate” I am terrified and assured that the Democrats will have another pro-war nominee.

The other event in my memory that the pro-democracy movement in Burma reminds me of is Kent State, Ohio in May, 1970. Four students were killed and nine were wounded marching against escalation of the Vietnam debacle.. I have heard from many people who were of age to protest the Vietnam war at that time that the killings had the affect of frightening them into not protesting, or scaling their protests back.

Of course the present state of our nation is not as overtly oppressive as the government of Myanmar (Burma), presently where a Nobel Peace Laureate Aung Sang Suu Kyi has been under house arrest there for years, but we who have been paying attention to events can see that America is on the precipice of serious fascism and only the brave actions of Americans committed to freedom, democracy and peace will help stem the tide of this rising neo-fascism that doesn’t march through our streets in goose-step and swastikas, but is creeping into our lives like cat’s paws.

According to Chris Rowthorn, in his brilliant article, When America Went Fascist, we went fascist on December 11, 2000 when the Supreme Court appointed George as our unelected, un-democratic and illegal President. Although it is easy and tempting to blame everything on BushCo, this is about the only assertion that I disagree with in his article.

What about during the Clinton regime? Does anyone remember Elian Gonzales or The Branch Davidians in Waco? Let’s go back further. What about when Truman dropped two WMD on hundreds of thousands of innocent victims in Japan? What about Korea? Eisenhower and the Military Industrial Complex? What about the Gulf of Tonkin? What about Watergate? What about Panama? Kosovo? Nicaragua? Free trade agreements that hurt workers in all countries that are involved in them and what about the abuse of language in this country: Patriot Act; Homeland Security; Clear Water and Clean Skies—and the No Child Left Behind Act that leaves every child behind and is just a funnel to the recruiter’s office?

There are just a few measures that we can use to stop this slide and Rowthorn articulates what has become an important part of my platform. Only vote for candidates that promise the following things…for president, or any other federal elective offices:

* Repeal the Patriot Act
* Repeal No Child Left Behind
* Scale down the Department of Homeland Security and rename it so it loses its Nazi
tone and is brought under civilian control.
* Restore habeas corpus and close all torture camps by repealing the Military Commissions’ Act.
* Repeal all contracts with paid mercenary killer companies.
* Restore the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878.
* Repeal all BushCo-Presidential directives (especially Directive 51) and review all laws that contain signing statements.
* Restore the 4th Amendment by enforcing warrants for spying on Americans.
* Impeach Bush and Cheney-post presidency so they can’t receive federal benefits.
* Bring all troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan and review military needs for other bases around the world.
* Repeal all free trade agreements.
* Kick AIPAC and other lobbyists out of the halls of Congress where they have no business.

One of the most profound ways we can stop this descent into fascism is by impeaching, removing from office and incarcerating George Bush and Dick Cheney, et al. I am very skeptical of a complicit Congress, Inc doing anything about them in this term. I am also very skeptical of a “professional” and fascist military leadership taking their oath of service seriously and above their corporate-military allegiance to the Executive Branch recently and so tellingly revealed by General Betray-Us, so a military coup is out of the question and has the tricky element of becoming a military dictatorship.

I was supposed to be in court today in Washington, DC for my last arrest. I didn’t go because I am not under allegiance and repudiate the fascists that run our government and the enforcers who are doing their best Nazi-job of “following orders” in oppressing our rights as Americans.

Why are they beating up a Reverend who served in the Air Force, and honorably left after the illegal and immoral invasion of Iraq, for wanting to attend a hearing in Congress?

Why are they arresting a Gold Star Mother for exercising the very freedoms for which George Bush freakishly says her son died?

Why are my daughter and assistant under indictment for Contempt of Congress when BushCo have steadily refused to testify before committees under oath, or any other way? As a matter of fact, Betray-Us wasn’t even put under oath that day in the House.

Why are college students being tasered for asking the same questions that we all want answered from John Kerry who threw our Representative Republic in the garbage along with the 2004 election?

Why are nooses being hung in the South?

Why do any of us pay our Federal Taxes to a government that we abhor and which we adamantly disagree with? Why do we allow our hard earned money to be used for murder and oppression?

Why is Congress giving BushCo more authority to begin a New World War?

Where are religious leaders to lead us in pro-democracy demonstrations? Most of our mainstream religions suffer from the same neo-fascism that our governmental leaders suffer from.

Why do we march in DC on Saturdays and get arrested just to get arrested? It’s time to descend on DC on a weekday and make commitments to our world and our posterity to over throw this fascism right now?

When can we have a country-wide massive general strike?

Recent reports show that Saddam made overtures to America through the UAE and Spain to go into exile weeks before the March, 2003 invasion of Iraq. Of course, the overtures were rejected because George’s small mind was already made up to invade Iraq before he became president in some sick way to either show up or gain approval from a dysfunctional family. What if Spain’s former President Aznar had spoken up then? What if Colin Powell, George Tenet, or any of the criminal neocons had spoken up to prevent this horrible loss of life and pain before it even started?

I wouldn’t be under a bench warrant right now. Rev wouldn’t be recovering from a badly sprained ankle. Casey would be alive and hundreds of thousands of others would be alive.

We can’t count on anyone but ourselves. It’s now up to we the people to follow the example of our brothers and sisters in Burma to courageously confront the anti-democracy/pro-fascist elements of our society.

Contact Cindy at: Cindy@CindyforCongress.org

URGENT MOMENT IN A LONG HAUL

It’s not easy to maintain a sense of urgency and outrage at the same time as a long-haul strategic view. Still, that’s what’s demanded of antiwar activists right now.

Regarding reasons to be outraged, even George Bush’s spin machine can’t hide the blood-soaked list:

• The Iraq war is already lost, but still the President promises permanent occupation and endless war: “It is clear that Mr. Bush refuses to recognize the truth of his failure in Iraq and envisions a military commitment that has no end,” the New York Times editorialized Sept. 14.

• This policy is bound up with imperial ambitions to control the oil-rich Middle East: “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil,” wrote former head of the Federal Reserve Board and conservative Republican Alan Greenspan in his just-released memoir.

• The result is a human disaster. The U.S. war and occupation has already led to a million or more Iraqi deaths, and 3,000-plus deaths among U.S. troops. Over two million Iraqis have been driven from their homes. The latest horror is an outbreak of cholera as Iraq’s water purification system has all but totally broken down. Even if a best-case scenario of peace, independence, and reconstruction miraculously started tomorrow, the destruction wrought would leave scars for generations.

MILITARISM AND RACISM, MERCENARIES AND TORTURE

There’s more:

• Iraq is the centerpiece of a much broader U.S. posture of militarism and occupation. Every day the U.S. stays in Iraq heightens the danger of attacking Iran or otherwise engulfing the entire region in armed conflict. The “war on terror” serves as cover for Washington’s blank-check support for Israeli occupation of Palestinian land.

• The Iraq/”war on terror” mantra has normalized practices that previously were suppressed or at least had to be hidden. The U.S. government now brazenly practices torture. It employs mercenaries accountable to no law whatsoever. It has relegated 800 years of habeas corpus rights to the dustbin.

• Reinforcement of racism is integral to the whole enterprise. Demonization of Arabs and Muslims along with institutionalization of a racially coded “us” vs. “them” framework are the battering rams. And this is a county where racism hardly needs further reinforcement to entrench inequality: witness many pundits and politicians thinking it’s acceptable (even a potential vote-getter!) to excuse the hanging of a noose on a “white tree” in Jena Louisiana as simply a “teen-age prank.”

• The war/racism/fear-mongering package is used as a wedge against all social movements at home: “illegal immigrants bring crime and terrorism!… we need more prisons to keep us safe!… blah blah blah!”

ELITE NOT READY TO BITE THE BULLET

Other than Bush’s die-hard supporters, almost the entire U.S. policy-making elite recognizes “there can be no military solution” to the disaster they are facing in Iraq. Still, no substantial sector is yet willing to bite the bullet and commit to complete withdrawal. They are too scared of the negative impact such a retreat would have on U.S. power generally, and of the domestic political consequences of being blamed for “losing Iraq.” So no serious Republican presidential candidate, and none of the three top-tier Democratic contenders, promises to end the war in the only way it is possible to do so: getting out.

The majority of U.S. people now think the war was a mistake and has lost confidence in a U.S. “victory.” But many have been intimidated or confused by misinformation and fear-mongering. Millions are vulnerable to Bush’s demagogic argument that dire consequences for both Iraq and the U.S. would flow from immediate and total withdrawal. So the antiwar movement has an uphill struggle to translate broad antiwar sentiment into sustained, large-scale and militant protest.

MAKING A DIFFERENCE THIS MONTH

With a whole country being destroyed, and Washington’s Iraq policy at the pivot of threats to the entire world, a groundswell of outrage and urgency is more than warranted. So is reminding ourselves that a great lesson of the Vietnam War era is that every act of protest actually DOES make a difference – no matter how much the powers-that-be work to convince us otherwise.

Yet a hard-nosed assessment simultaneously tells us that: (1) it will take another level of crisis and resistance – in Iraq and/or here – before Washington’s power-brokers are forced to admit defeat; (2) it will take time for that to happen, indeed, the likelihood is for quite a long haul; and (3) constant protest along the way is necessary even to prevent the diehard neocon faction centered in Dick Cheney’s office from expanding the Iraq war to Iran and the entire Middle East.

In combining our urgent outrage and long-haul vision, the month right ahead of us offers some special opportunities.

September’s All-Hail-General-Petraeus-Show on Capitol Hill bought Bush some time with wavering members of his own party. But it didn’t make a dent in public opinion. Since the war-makers’ best shot fizzled this way, the time is ripe for counter-attack: for the antiwar movement to show that our determination and capacity to protest in the streets and via the net and everywhere in between is undeterred.

And there is a clear target, in that the congressional vote on Bush’s “supplemental request” for funding the Iraq war has been postponed from its original September date. A bloc of Congress members has pledged to vote no funds for anything but organizing a U.S. military withdrawal. Popular pressure can expand their ranks and remind every member of Congress that there will be consequences for allowing this war to continue.

Vehicles for mass actions along these lines are already planned for October. The Iraq Moratorium – www.iraqmoratorium.org – which kicked off September 21 will continue with Moratorium Day No. 2 on October 26. Regional mobilizations October 27 are planned for 11 cities sponsored by United for Peace and Justice – go to www.unitedforpeace.org for information. A range of other actions by veterans, in support of military resisters, on campuses, and elsewhere – many confronting the war-makers with civil disobedience – are also in motion.

What happens this month sets the stage for the long stretch from New Year’s Day through the 2008 election. The challenge during that period will be to launch and sustain a level of independent antiwar activism that – in its breadth, creativity and tactics – insists to all candidates and the public at large that as long as the occupation continues there will be No Campaigning As Usual and No New Administration As Usual.

This is also a moment when antiwar activists can “make the connections” on the ground as well as in literature and educational work. Across the country local immigrant rights groups are mobilizing against the new wave of government intimidation raids. The struggle to support the Jena 6 is galvanizing a new wave of anti-racist activism anchored in the African American community. Swinging its muscle behind these vital battles would mark an important step toward constructing a durable and more deeply rooted antiwar movement. Likewise, the “No War, No Warming” offensive – see www.nowarnowarming.org for information about October 21-23 actions in particular – makes the vital links between oil, global warming and U.S. militarism, and taps into the concern that many polls say is number one among the country’s youth.

Many in the Iraqi port city say social freedoms are eroding as radical militias gain power.

Basra, Iraq – The billboard in Umm al-Broom Square was meant to advertise a cellphone service. Instead, it has become a message to those who dare to resist the rising tide of fundamentalist Islam in Iraq’s second largest city.

The female model’s face is now covered with black paint. Graffiti scrawled below reads, “No! No to unveiled women.”

That message joins the chorus of ultraconservative voices and radical militias that are transforming this once liberal port city that boasted some of Iraq’s most lively nightclubs into a bastion for hard-line Shiite Islamists since the fall of Saddam Hussein.

Now, as the British prepare to exit Basra Province altogether after pulling out from this provincial capital last week, they leave behind what has been described by many here as an emerging “Shiite Taliban state,” a reference to Sunni extremists in Afghanistan.

And with the British gone, many say, they leave open the possibility that Iran could extend its influence within the mosques, religious schools, and militant party headquarters. Over the past four years, Basra has undergone its own Islamic revolution of sorts.

Posters of the leader of Iran’s 1979 social and religious revolt, Ayatollah Khomeini, who at the time imposed similar limits on his society, are plastered everywhere in Basra.

“There is pressure from parties backed by Iran to sideline liberal, secular, and leftist forces,” says a labor union leader and a former communist, who, like most people interviewed for this story, did not want to be named for fear of retaliation. “Personal freedoms are being squashed … the fabric of Iraqi society has been ruined.”

Public parties are banned. Selling musical CDs is forbidden in shops. Those who sell or consume alcohol face recrimination, even death. Artists and performers are severely restricted and even labeled as heretics. A famous city landmark, a replica of the Lion of Babylon statue that stood here for decades was blown up by militants in July. It was considered idolatrous, according to the strict interpretation of Islam.

Signs ordering women to cover up appear throughout the city. One woman, an Iraqi female activist from Basra, says the notices even threaten death. One banner, she says, said unveiled women could be murdered and no one could remove their bodies from the street.

Religious conservatism grows throughout Iraq

Although Basra is mostly Shiite, it has long prided itself on being home to a vibrant mix of Sunnis, Christians of all sects, and ancient communities like the Sabean Mandaeans.

But after Mr. Hussein’s regime fell, the sway of radical Islamic militias, such as Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army, began growing in the city, as happened in the rest of the country.

“Ultimately, what we will see in Iraq is a conservative society, whether in the Shiite or Sunni areas. Sunnis, too, are going through a very difficult process that will result in the rise of conservatism and fundamentalism,” says Ahmed Moussalli, a lecturer and expert on Islamic movements at the American University in Beirut. From the perspective of many, he says, “Iraq and other places [in the Arab world] are under attack … by the West and there is a lot of return to religion in order to empower themselves to fight the ‘infidels.’ “

The creators of new exhibition asked ordinary women to take pictures of daily life under occupation. Here are a selection of their extraordinary photo diaries.

Dima

I love Iraq. I don’t want to live anywhere else. Everyone I love is here: my granny, my aunt, my uncle, all my family and friends. Everyone we know and love is going away, my friends Nazaline and Aya and Hayat, the school bus drivers. My friend Taqa’s dad went to Syria, my friend Nour’s uncle to Egypt. The most important thing in my life, besides my mother and family, are my friends. Nour and Zeinab are my best friends now. In my class, we used to have three rows of desks, 10 in each row. Now we have two rows, with just five girls in each row.

Lu’lu’a

My husband distanced himself from me for a month after I was kidnapped and my mother still blames me for ruining the family. I open my eyes. I see the gun by my bed. My husband and I no longer talk, nor do we laugh together. We worry someone will attack us. I used to watch out of the window and feel alive. Now I make sure my face is hidden by the curtain. I look with longing at the street that was alive once upon a time.

Um Mohammad

Everything in my city has been looted, stolen and burnt. Basra used to be full of life. Now, everything is black. Women are compelled to wear black robes and veils. My life has becomeblack. Everything is forbidden now: laughter, coloured clothes, music, walking in the markets, going to the parks. And the British who came in the name of liberating just watch it all, smiling.

Raya

WASHINGTON – Amid growing speculation about prospects for US military action against Iran, neo-conservatives and other hawks won a significant – if somewhat incomplete – victory in rallying the Democratic-led Congress to its side.

In a 76-22 vote on Wednesday, senators approved a non-binding amendment to the 2008 defense authorization bill that called for the administration of President George W Bush to designate Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) “a foreign terrorist organization”.

Among those voting for the measure was the Democratic front-runner for the 2008 presidential election, Senator Hillary Clinton.

At the same time, the House of Representatives voted nearly unanimously – 408-6 – for another measure, the Iran Sanctions Enabling Act, which would force Bush to impose sweeping sanctions against foreign companies that invest more than US$20 million in Iran’s energy sector.

That bill, which is opposed by the Bush administration itself because of strong pressure from Washington’s European and Asian allies and key US multinational companies, is considered likely to stall in the Senate through the remainder of this year.

But its huge margin of approval, which some observers said was boosted by this week’s controversial visit to New York by Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad, helped demonstrate once again how responsive members of both major parties are to the so-called “Israel lobby”, which has made the sanctions bill its top legislative priority this year.

Both votes took place amid an intensifying struggle within the administration over control of Iran policy, with hawks, led by Vice President Dick Cheney and his neo-conservative advisers, pitted against the State Department and Pentagon chief Robert Gates and his top military brass.

The State Department, while never ruling out military action, has consistently argued for continuing diplomatic efforts to address both alleged Iranian backing for anti-US Shi’ite militias in Iraq and Iran’s rejection of United Nations Security Council demands that it freeze its uranium-enrichment program.

For the past two months – since the last time the US and Iranian ambassadors met in Baghdad – the struggle appears to have reached an impasse.

In late July, Bush agreed in principle to a proposal by Cheney for cross-border military strikes against IRGC targets that have allegedly been involved in training and supplying Iraqi Shi’ite militias, according to Philip Giraldi, a former military intelligence and Central Intelligence Agency officer, writing recently in The American Conservative.

But the Pentagon brass, which has become increasingly outspoken about the overextension of US ground forces in Iraq and the uncertainty about how Iran would react, countered with a more cautious strategy of building a new military base and extending patrolling along suspected smuggling routes, according to knowledgeable sources.

Similarly, the diplomatic dialogue between the US and Iranian ambassadors in Baghdad over stabilizing Iraq – originally launched last May – has not resumed since their second meeting in late July when Ambassador Ryan Crocker publicly complained about Tehran’s alleged increase in support, via the IRGC, for Shi’ite militias that were attacking US troops.

In testimony here two weeks ago, Crocker said he “found no readiness on the Iranians’ side at all to engage seriously on these issues”, while General David Petraeus, Washington’s top military commander in Iraq, charged that Tehran was engaged in a “proxy war” against the US in Iraq.

Last month, the Washington Post reported that the Bush administration had decided in principle to designate the IRGC, which, in addition to its military role, controls a number of large businesses that could be subject to sanctions, a terrorist group, but had yet to determine whether it would name the entire organization or only its elite unit, the Quds Force. That no announcement has yet been made is indicative of the continuing infighting around Bush.

That paralysis, however, appears to have favored the hawks, who have pressed their campaign for cross-border military action against Iran in the opinion pages of such neo-conservative publications as The Weekly Standard, The National Review, and the Wall Street Journal.

Their calls for action became so intense that the commander of the US Central Command and Petraeus’s superior, Admiral William Fallon, who has been trying to get authorization to negotiate an “incidents at sea” agreement with Iran, complained publicly that “this constant drumbeat of conflict is … not helpful and not useful. It is not a good idea to be in a state of war. We ought to try to do our utmost to create different conditions,” he told Al-Jazeera.

In fact, the first call for cross-border attacks on Iranian targets was made by the Senate’s “independent” Democrat, Joseph Lieberman, who is regarded as particularly close to the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

But those paragraphs were deleted after Democratic Senator Jim Webb delivered a passionate speech in which he charged that the amendment “is Dick Cheney’s fondest pipe dream” and “could be read as tantamount to a declaration of war”.

In a further softening, the drafters changed one policy statement that claimed it was a vital US national interest to prevent Iran from turning Shi’ite militias in Iraq into its proxies to a “critical national interest”. The previous wording generally connotes an interest over which the US would be prepared to go to war.

WHAT GENERAL PETREAUS and his master, President Bush, would like us to believe is that recent American policy in Iraq can be seen as a military success but a political failure judged in terms of the inability of the country’s sectarian leaders to unite. What they cannot see is that the two are much more closely related than they are willing to admit.

One factor is that by arming and financing the Sunni tribes in Anbar Province as local militias, the American military is both recognizing the lack of central government control and helping to undermine it still further. But there is much more to it than that.

The major reasons why sectarian leaders cannot come together to create a united leadership for a united Iraq is that, rather than being able to control their followers outside the Green Zone, they are now, to a larger extent, controlled by them.

How and why this came about can be summed up under two related reasons. One concerns the long history of the devolution of local power by British and American authorities, first to the Kurds, then to those Iraqi sectarian parties that won a majority in the provincial elections in 2005.

In the case of the British in particular, control over the local administration and the police was simply handed to whichever Shi’ite party, or coalition of parties, gained the most electoral support. The same happened in the northern provinces, for example in the Mosul region, a process that greatly added to sectarian fighting in and around the city itself as a result of the fact that the Sunnis, by boycotting the election, had excluded themselves from the official political process.

The second, increasingly important reason is the fact that, as in the case of Lebanon during its own civil war, there were enough economic resources scattered around the country for local warlords who controlled them to maintain their own loyal militias and civilian constituencies without having to rely on the leadership’s financial support.

These included such tangible assets as police stations and armories, as well as economic assets like oil pipelines or refineries, electricity substations able to route local supplies, ports, and vital roads where traffic coming in and out of Kuwait in the south and Jordan and Syria in the east could readily be taxed, used for the smuggling of drugs and weapons or both.

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. (Sept. 27) – In an age of al-Qaida, sleeper cells and the threat of nuclear terrorism, Huntsville is dusting off its Cold War manual to create the nation’s most ambitious fallout-shelter plan, featuring an abandoned mine big enough for 20,000 people to take cover underground.

Others would hunker down in college dorms, churches, libraries and research halls that planners hope will bring the community’s shelter capacity to 300,000, or space for every man, woman and child in Huntsville and the surrounding county.

Emergency planners in Huntsville – an out-of-the-way city best known as the home of NASA ‘s Marshall Space Flight Center – say the idea makes sense because radioactive fallout could be scattered for hundreds of miles if terrorists detonated a nuclear bomb.

”If Huntsville is in the blast zone, there’s not much we can do. But if it’s just fallout … shelters would absorb 90 percent of the radiation,” said longtime emergency management planner Kirk Paradise, whose Cold War expertise with fallout shelters led local leaders to renew Huntsville’s program.

Huntsville’s project, developed using $70,000 from a Homeland Security grant, goes against the grain because the United States essentially scrapped its national plan for fallout shelters after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Congress cut off funding and the government published its last list of approved shelters at the end of 1992.

After Sept. 11, Homeland Security created a metropolitan protection program that includes nuclear-attack preparation and mass shelters. But no other city has taken the idea as far as Huntsville has, officials said.

Many cities advise residents to stay at home and seal up a room with plastic and duct tape during a biological, chemical or nuclear attack. Huntsville does too, in certain cases.

Local officials agree the ”shelter-in-place” method would be best for a ”dirty bomb” that scattered nuclear contamination through conventional explosives. But they say full-fledged shelters would be needed to protect from the fallout of a nuclear bomb.

Program leaders recently briefed members of Congress, including Rep. Charlie Dent, R-Pa., who called the shelter plan an example of the ”all-hazards” approach needed for emergency preparedness.

”Al-Qaida, we know, is interested in a nuclear capability. It’s our nation’s fear that a nuclear weapon could get into terrorists’ hands,” Dent said.

As fallout shelters go, the Three Caves Quarry just outside downtown offers the kind of protection that would make Dr. Strangelove proud, with space for an arena-size crowd of some 20,000 people.

Last mined in the early ’50s, the limestone quarry is dug 300 yards into the side of the mountain, with ceilings as high as 60 feet and 10 acres of floor space covered with jagged rocks. Jet-black in places with a year-round temperature of about 60 degrees, it has a colony of bats living in its highest reaches and baby stalactites hanging from the ceiling.

It is some years now since I first heard the expression “foghorn diplomacy” when it was used to describe the Northern Irish politician Mr Ian Paisley, well known for the deafening volume of his voice when speaking.

He was also well-known for the outrageous content of his speeches, by which he gave no sign of being willing to make peace with his political opponents.

What is interesting is that he is now the First Minister in the government of the territory of Northern Ireland, with as his Deputy Mr Martin McGuiness of Sinn Fein, his former pet hate. Perhaps within that comparatively small territory – six of the nine counties in the Irish Province of Ulster – Mr Paisley has come to realise that more can usually be accomplished by quiet talk with one’s opponents than by shouting at them.

Mr George W. Bush has obviously never learned this lesson, and it is sickening to hear him mouthing a mixture of lies and discourtesies when speaking to the whole world. It was extraordinary to hear him claim once again that he was speaking for freedom and democracy, when the whole world outside the USA is only too well aware that both concepts are among those which he is trying to destroy under the cover of his infamous “War on Terra”. It is also curious that the well-known newspaper “El Pais” has revealed how this same Mr Bush in early 2003 told the then Spanish Prime Minister that he was going to attack Iraq whatever the UN Security Council might decide. In law such behaviour is defined as premeditation to commit his undoubted extremely serious crimes against humanity.

His masters should keep a closer eye on the behaviour of Mr Bush, who shows signs of becoming a puppet out of control – what is often described as a “loose cannon” – and we have to hope that his dementia will become obvious even to his deliberately mis-informed electorate and that he will then be prevented from doing anything other than answering before a court of justice for his criminality. Any sane and well-informed person will ask how such a man can criticise the current rulers of Myanmar (aka Burma) when their (equally undoubted) crimes are so much less serious than his own.

Mr Bush has not yet caused as many deaths by violence as Stalin, or even as Hitler, but his evil actions have caused thousands of deaths as well as terrible suffering to so many around the world. He is, with his “allies” within and without the USA, responsible for an enormous proportion of the tragic causes of suffering around the world, and not least to the poor within the USA, but above all for the attacks which he and his masters make against our civilisation – a subject on which I have often written. When we have the pleasure of encountering civilised educated citizens of the USA, we find it difficult to believe that they come from the same country which encapsulates for us every danger which threatens us and our way of life, and whose successive rulers have for many years done everything that they can to drive back all civilising influences.

Part of Mr Bush’s stated aims is summed up in his use of the word “leadership”, since he seems to believe the impossible, namely that his anti-civilisation can destroy all dissent and stifle the truth. We are bound to ask what he wishes to lead, apart from his obvious tyrannical desire to rule to world, an ambition which the world is most unlikely to permit. If the USA are ever going to be among the world’s leading nations, they will have first to decide to oppose the primacy of brute force, but Mr Bush apparently still has the hubris to think (if that word is not an oxymoron if applied to him) that his country is the world’s only super-power. What he does not seem to have understood is that his praise of any political tendency is received by the world as a kiss of death, since the world (at least outside the USA) knows that he is one of its worst terrorists together with his “allies” and thus automatically sees virtue in anybody who declares opposition to his imperialistic ambitions. It is now comparatively easy to gain popularity around the globe by declaring oneself to be against his form of imperialism, even if one has equally criminal aims.

Diplomacy needs to be carried on quietly and with a sufficient degree of secrecy which explains why the extremely nasty rulers of Myanmar can gain support from such powers as China and India in reaction to the crude threats trumpeted forth by Mr Bush. Both of these powers have so far been reassured by these tyrants that they will ensure the gas and oil supplies on which they count. These two powers both also need reassurance that any possible successor government, with support from the international community (whatever that happens to be at any given moment), will continue to export these supplies across the frontiers.

Shouting should give way to the still small voice, which is so distrusted and derided by Mr Bush and his masters, and which can nevertheless do far more in time to bring peace with justice to many troubled parts of the world. In other words, Mr Bush should quite simply make a vow of silence on all delicate matters affecting the future for all of us and turn to genuine diplomats to negotiate with his fellow criminals and those who feel bound to back them against his insistence on loud imperial rhetoric.