The Rag Blog

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.

1. The administration has not come forward with a single piece of concrete evidence to support the claim that the Iranian government has been involved in the training, arming or advising of Iraqi Shiite militias.
• At the same briefing, officials displayed one EFP and some fragments but did not claim that there was any forensic evidence linking that or any other AFP to Iran. (New York Times, February 12, 2007; Washington Post, February 12, 2007)
• One of the briefers at the February briefing admitted that it was only Iraqi smugglers who brought weapons into Iraq, explaining why no direct Iranian involvement could be documented (Washington Post, February 12, 2007).
• The official briefer who was a specialist on explosives, Maj. Marty Weber, claimed in a later interview that the use of “passive infrared sensors” in the deployment of EFPs in Iraq was “one of the strongest markers of Iranian involvement” in the traffic. But he admitted in the same interview that the electronic components needed to make the sensors found in Iraq were “easily available off the shelf at places like RadioShack.” (New York Times, February 25, 2007)
• Another official who participated in the briefing, Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, denied that the military was claiming that Iran was behind the traffic in arms to Iraq. He said in a follow-up press briefing on February 14, “What we are saying is that within Iran, that these EFP component parts are being manufactured. Within Iran weapons and munitions are being manufactured that are ending up in Iraq. And we are asking the Iranian government to assist in stopping that from happening. There’s no intent to do anything other than that.”
• Although an officials at the briefing said shipment of EFPs had been intercepted at the border in 2005 (Washington Post, February 12, 2007), the only press report about such a border interceptions and there was no indication that such interceptions had produced any evidence of Iranian involvement. On the contrary, it quoted “coalition officials” as saying there was “no evidence to suggest that the government in Tehran is facilitating the smuggling of shape charges into Iraq.” Pentagon spokesman Lawrence DiRita and Brig Gen. Carter Ham, deputy director for regional operations for the Joint Staff, continued to deny any knowledge of official Iranian complicity in EFP or any other arm supplies (Trevor Royle, The Sunday Herald, October 9, 2005).
• Despite interrogations since last spring of a top official of an alleged Iraqi EFP network and the Hezbollah operative who was a liaison with the organization, Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, the U.S. Commander for southern Iraq, where most of the Shiite militias operate, admitted in a July 6 briefing that his troops had not captured “anybody that we can tie to Iran”
• On September 8, the commander of the northern region of Iraq, Maj. Gen. Thomas Turner II, admitted in a press briefing, “I don’t think we have any specific proof of Iranians in our area other than reports. We have discovered caches….It has not been a lot. We have seen some evidence of some weapons that were employed against coalition forces that were made in..Iran, where they are coming from across the border, we’re not sure.”
• Despite the assertion by Gen. David Petraeus on September 12, quoted in the proposed Lieberman-Kyle amendment, that the U.S. military obtained evidence of the complicity of Iranian officials in arming and training Shiite militias from interrogations of the above detainees, it has not produced wither detainee or any transcript of the interrogations. Nor has it released a direct quote from either detainee. No apparent intelligence reason exists for withholding such evidence from Congress and the public.
• Despite Petraeus’s assertion in September that the United States obtained “hard evidence” incriminating Iran from computer hard drives seized when the above detainees were captured March 22 of Iranian (Al Pessin, Petraeus Says Iran Wants Iraqi ‘Hezbollah Force’, VOA September 12, 2007.), none of the documentation has been made public, nor have any specifics have been provided on what the files show. Earlier both Petraeus and Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner had discussed the contents of the 22-page memorandum as detailing the planning preparation, approval and conduct of military operations by the Shiite militia organization but without claiming that it showed any Iranian role in any of those activities. (Petraeus April 26 press briefing; Bergner July 2 press briefing).

Senator Joe Lieberman (D-CT) and Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) want the US to attack Iran, but because they know most Americans know that is a crazy idea at a time that the US is already bogged down in a losing war in Iraq, they want to authorize this disastrous expansion of the conflict secretly.

The US Senate, by an outrageous vote of 76-22, just passed the Kyl-Lieberman amendment discussed in this article. This means that the Senate, including half the Democrats in that body, have endorsed war with Iran.

The Democrats in the Senate managed to remove the most incendiary language in the Kyl-Lieberman amendment, which called for military action against Iran, but left in a call to declare Iran’s Revolutionary Guard a global terrorist organization. Since Bush claims to be fighting a global “war” on terror, that’s all he needs to claim he already has the authority to attack them.

With this kind of thing going on, the only thing to do is go to the second article on this page, and, if you are a Democrat, quit the party. We have two war parties in America, one called the Republicans and one called the Democrats.

Call your House member and tell them NO to War with Iran! (202-225-3121)

That’s why, instead of introducing a war authorizing bill in the Senate, they have introduced a war-authorizing amendment, attached to the latest Defense Authorization Bill currently working its way through Congress [1]

Imagine that. If America goes to war against the nation of Iran, it will be courtesy of an obscure little amendment to a funding bill! Home of the Brave my ass. Kyl and Lieberman are giving a whole new meaning to the term “covert war.” Instead of the war being covert, they want the authorization to be.

Their proposed amendment cites the dubious claims made to Congress last week by Gen. David “Peaches” Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker that Iran is promoting the violence in Iraq, and then seeks to authorize “the prudent (sic) calibrated use of all instruments of United States national power in Iraq, including diplomatic, economic, intelligence and military instruments.”

Any member of Congress who supports this sleazy, ill-founded amendment should be hounded from office as the ultimate weasel and coward.

It bears mentioning that the leading weasels in this despicable effort to pour more accelerant on the fires of the Middle East, Lieberman and Kyl, are themselves both notorious “chickenhawks”—that is, neither of these gung-ho warmongers ever wore a military uniform, much less faced the horrors of combat. The biggest challenge these two worthies ever faced was first-year law school classes.

Putting aside the assininity of bombing and/or invading Iran—an action that would instantly more than double world oil prices, and precipitate a global economic collapse, and that would cause an eruption of violence against already beleaguered US forces in Iraq—even if one thought invading that nation of 70 million and taking on its battle-hardened military was somehow a good idea, it hardly makes sense to do so without the support of the American public.

Bush put the US into a war with Iraq in 2003 by way of lies and deception, knowing that the vast public did not support such an invasion. By lying about Saddam Hussein’s links to 9-11 and about Iraq’s having or trying to obtain nuclear weapons, Bush was able to forge an artificial consensus in favor of war, but we’ve watched that support evaporate as the deceit was exposed.

This time around, Lieberman and Kyl aren’t even bothering with a propaganda campaign of lies. They’re going straight to the deceit, trying to pass what amounts to a war authorization by tucking it into a larger military spending bill.

No general in his or her right mind would want to march into battle with that kind of Congressional “support.” But it’s just the kind of thing you’d expect from a devious slimeball like Lieberman or Kyl.

Every American should be contacting their members of Congress to demand that they have no part of this nefarious scheme. The Kyl-Lieberman amendment must be killed.

If Congress wants war with Iran, the pro-war faction should have the gonads to write and then formally pass a resolution authorizing, and explaining the justification for authorizing, such a war.

When others were volunteering to support their country during the Cold War by signing up with one of the military services back in the early 1960s, Joe Lieberman and Jon Kyl, like their patron Vice President Dick Cheney, had “other priorities.” They were busy earning undergraduate and law degrees so they could make the big bucks and then go into politics.

Now they are the big war hawks in Congress, ready to authorize an action that will most assuredly lead to the deaths and maimings of tens of thousands more young Americans and hundreds of thousands or even millions of innocent Iranians.

Showing rare bipartisan consensus over war policy, the Senate overwhelmingly endorsed a political settlement for Iraq that would divide the country into three semi-autonomous regions.

The plan, conceived by Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), was approved 75-23 as a non-binding resolution, with 26 Republican votes. It would not force President Bush to take any action, but it represents a significant milestone in the Iraq debate, carving out common ground in a debate that has grown increasingly polarized and focused on military strategy.

The Biden plan envisions a federal government system for Iraq, consisting of separate regions for Iraq’s Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish populations. The structure is spelled out in Iraq’s constitution, but Biden would initiate local and regional diplomatic efforts to hasten its evolution.

“This has genuine bipartisan support,and I think that’s a very hopeful sign,” Biden said.

One key Republican supporter was Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.), who under strong White House pressure last week abruptly withdrew his support for a proposal to extend home leaves for U.S. troops. Numerous Republicans considered supporting the extension, but they backed off when Warner reversed his stance. The veteran GOP lawmaker called the vote on the Biden plan “the high-water mark” for bipartisan efforts on Iraq this year.

Warner said the vote represented a de facto acknowledgement of the now widely held view that Iraq’s long-term problems cannot be solved militarily. “This amendment builds on that foundation,” said Warner. “This amendment brings into sharp focus the need for diplomacy.”

The resolution collected an unusually diverse group of co-sponsors who disagree sharply on other aspects of the war, in particular how long U.S. combat troops should remain. The list ranges from conservative Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Tex.) and Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), a GOP presidential contender, to liberal Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Barbara A. Mikulski (D-Md.).

“We can’t walk away from Iraq,” said Hutchison. “That would make all the sacrifices that have been made irrelevant. But we do have a potential solution that can save American lives in the future.”

Boxer said: “I see here a light at the end of a very, very dark tunnel. A darkness that is impacting our nation. It’s impacting the Senate. In a way, we are paralyzed.”

The vote also was a political boon for Biden, one of the Democrats’ most respected foreign policy voices, yet a long-shot for his party’s 2008 presidential nomination. The floor debate, which started last week, provided the struggling candidate with a moment in the spotlight — and Biden made the most of it. He spent hours on the Senate floor, held two news conferences, and placed an op-ed Monday in the State, a newspaper in Columbia, S.C., an early 2008 primary state.

Two of Biden’s competitors, Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.), voted with him. Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) missed the vote, as did Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a GOP presidential candidate and a leading war supporter.

PORTLAND, Ore. (Sept. 27) – Two provisions of the USA Patriot Act are unconstitutional because they allow secret wiretapping and searches without a showing of probable cause, a federal judge ruled Wednesday.

U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken ruled that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act , as amended by the Patriot Act , “now permits the executive branch of government to conduct surveillance and searches of American citizens without satisfying the probable cause requirements of the Fourth Amendment.”

Portland attorney Brandon Mayfield sought the ruling in a lawsuit against the federal government after he was mistakenly linked by the FBI to the Madrid train bombings that killed 191 people in 2004.

The federal government apologized and settled part of the lawsuit for $2 million after admitting a fingerprint was misread. But as part of the settlement, Mayfield retained the right to challenge parts of the Patriot Act , which greatly expanded the authority of law enforcers to investigate suspected acts of terrorism.

Mayfield claimed that secret searches of his house and office under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act violated the Fourth Amendment’s guarantee against unreasonable search and seizure. Aiken agreed with Mayfield, repeatedly criticizing the government.

“For over 200 years, this Nation has adhered to the rule of law _ with unparalleled success. A shift to a Nation based on extra-constitutional authority is prohibited, as well as ill-advised,” she wrote.

By asking her to dismiss Mayfield’s lawsuit, the judge said, the U.S. attorney general’s office was “asking this court to, in essence, amend the Bill of Rights, by giving it an interpretation that would deprive it of any real meaning. This court declines to do so.”

Elden Rosenthal, an attorney for Mayfield, issued a statement on his behalf praising the judge, saying she “has upheld both the tradition of judicial independence, and our nation’s most cherished principle of the right to be secure in one’s own home.”

Justice Department spokesman Peter Carr said the agency was reviewing the decision, and he declined to comment further.

The ruling probably won’t have any immediate affect on enforcement under the Patriot Act , according to legal experts who predicted the government would quickly appeal.

“But it’s an important first step,” said Jameel Jaffer, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s national security project.

Jaffer noted that the Patriot Act carries dozens of provisions and that several have been challenged _ but that this is one of the first major rulings on Fourth Amendment rights.

“This is as clear a violation of the Fourth Amendment as you’ll ever find,” Jaffer said.

Garrett Epps, a constitutional law expert at the University of Oregon, said the ruling adds to the poor record that the Bush administration has piled up in defending the Patriot Act .

“It’s embarrassing,” Epps said. “It represents another judicial repudiation of this administration’s terrorist surveillance policies.”

A federal judge in New York this month handed the ACLU a victory in a challenge to the Patriot Act on behalf of an Internet service provider that was issued a “national security letter” demanding customer phone and computer records. The judge in that case ruled the FBI must justify to a court the need for secrecy for more than a brief and reasonable period of time.

Mayfield, a Muslim convert, was taken into custody on May 6, 2004, because of a fingerprint found on a detonator at the scene of the Madrid bombing. The FBI said the print matched Mayfield’s. He was released about two weeks later, and the FBI admitted it had erred in saying the fingerprints were his and later apologized to him.

Before his arrest, the FBI put Mayfield under 24-hour surveillance, listened to his phone calls and surreptitiously searched his home and law office.

The Mayfield case has been an embarrassment for the federal government. Last year, the Justice Department’s internal watchdog faulted the FBI for sloppy work in mistakenly linking Mayfield to the Madrid bombings. That report said federal prosecutors and FBI agents had made inaccurate and ambiguous statements to a federal judge to get arrest and criminal search warrants against Mayfield.

Congress passed the Patriot Act with little debate shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to help counter terrorist activities. It gave federal law enforcers the authority to search telephone and e-mail communications and expanded the Treasury Department’s regulation of financial transactions involving foreign nationals. The law was renewed in 2005.

In early August, the Bush administration persuaded lawmakers to expand the government’s power to listen in on any foreign communication it deemed of interest without a court order, even if an American was a party. The expanded surveillance authority expires early next year. As Congress takes a closer look at the law, many Democrats want to rein in language that many consider overly broad.

It’s not as dramatic as the Downing Street Memo but El Pais, the Madrid daily, has obtained a revealing transcript of a pre-Iraq War meeting between President Bush and Spain’s then-prime minister Jose Maria Aznar. Below is the lead to the story, which ran in El Pais today. One caveat: I did the translation and while I’m sure it’s accurate, it may not be elegant.

Four weeks before the invasion of Iraq . . . George W. Bush made a public demand to Saddam Hussein in the following terms: disarmament or war. Behind closed doors, Bush acknowledged that the war was inevitable. During a long private conversation with [Aznar], which took place on Saturday, February 22, 2003, Bush made clear that the time had come to take out Saddam: “There are two weeks left. In two weeks we’ll be militarily ready. We’ll be in Baghdad by the end of March.”

Here are a few interesting excerpts:

Bush to American Allies: support war or starve

[Condoleezza Rice has just described the diplomatic situation to Bush and Aznar, explaining that Iraq is continuing to insist that it has no weapons of mass destruction.]

Bush: This is like Chinese water torture. We have to put an end to it.

Aznar: I agree, but it would be best to have as much support as possible. Have a little patience.

Bush: My patience has ended. I’m not thinking of waiting beyond mid-March.

Aznar: I’m not asking that you have endless patience. Simply that everything is done to [have maximum international support].

Bush: Countries like Mexico, Chile, Angola, and Cameroon should know that what’s at stake is the security of the United States . . . [Chilean President Ricardo] Lagos should know that the Free Trade Accord with Chile is awaiting Senate confirmation and a negative attitude about this could put ratification in danger. Angola is receiving Millennium Account funds [to help alleviate poverty] and that could be jeopardized also if he’s not supportive…

Aznar: Tony [Blair] wants to wait until March 14.

Bush: I prefer the 10th. This is like a good cop, bad cop routine. I don’t care if I’m the bad cop and he’s the good cop.

Bush on Iraq: the future is bright

“We’re developing a very strong package of humanitarian aid. We can win [the war] without much destruction. We’re planning for a post-Saddam Iraq and believe there is a strong base to build a better future. Iraq has a good bureaucracy and relatively string civil society.”

Bush on French President Chirac: Mister Arab