The Rag Blog

Freedom as Theft: Honoring American Liberators
By Tom Engelhardt

Let’s take a trip down memory lane.

The Presidential Medal of Freedom is America’s highest civilian award, ranking second only to the Congressional Medal of Honor. According to its official website, the medal “is reserved for individuals the President deems to have made especially meritorious contributions to the security or national interests of the United States, to world peace, or to cultural or other significant public or private endeavors.” In 2004, George W. Bush had already awarded the medal to Estee Lauder, Arnold Palmer, Norman Podhoretz, and Doris Day, among others, when, on December 14 in a ceremony at the White House, he hit the trifecta.

Only the previous month, in a close race to the finish line — not so much against opposing Presidential candidate John Kerry as against a ragtag fundamentalist insurgency in Iraq — he had just slipped under the reelection wire and, in a press conference, promptly crowed about how “free” he was. (“You asked, do I feel free. Let me put it to you this way: I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it.”) The next month, he would launch his second term with an inaugural address that put “freedom” as a global mission at the very center of his presidency. He would grandiloquently promise nothing less than a crusade to end tyranny globally and bring liberty to the world. (He would, in fact, use the word “freedom” 27 times, and “liberty” 15 times, in that address.) He also had a few debts to pay and, having already brought “freedom” to Iraq at the point of a cruise missile, he now paid those debts in the coin of “freedom” as well. He slipped medals around the necks of three men — each recently retired from the field of action — who had been crucial to his first term “freedom” policies.

I’m talking here about the former commander of his Afghan War and Iraq invasion, General Tommy (“we don’t do body counts”) Franks; the former director of the CIA and proprietor of a global secret prison and torture network, as well as the man who oversaw the intelligence process that led to the Iraq invasion, George (“slam dunk”) Tenet; and his former viceroy and capo in Baghdad, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, L. Paul (“I didn’t dismantle the Iraqi Army”) Bremer III.

Of Franks, Bush said that the general had “led the forces that fought and won two wars in the defense of the world’s security and helped liberate more than 50 million people from two of the worst tyrannies in the world.”

Of Tenet, the President claimed that he had been “one of the first to recognize and address the threat to America from radical networks” and, after Sept. 11, was “ready with a plan to strike back at al Qaeda and to topple the Taliban.”

Of Bremer, he offered this encomium: “For 14 months Jerry Bremer worked day and night in difficult and dangerous conditions to stabilize the country, to help its people rebuild and to establish a political process that would lead to justice and liberty.” And the President added: “Every benchmark…. was achieved on time or ahead of schedule, including the transfer of sovereignty that ended his tenure.” (“He did not add,” the Washington Post pointed out at the time, “that the transfer was hurriedly arranged two days early because of fears insurgents would attack the ceremonies.”)

Looking back, it’s clearer just what kinds of “benchmarks” were achieved, what kinds of freedoms each of these men helped bring to the rest of the world.

Tommy Franks helped to deliver to southern Afghanistan’s desperate, beleaguered peasants, the freedom to be caught, years later, in a deathlike vise between a resurgent Taliban and regular American air strikes. He also brought them the freedom to grow just about the total opium crop needed to provide for the globe’s heroin addicts — 8,200 tons of opium in 2007, representing 93% of the global opiates market. This was a 34% jump from the previous year and represented opium production on what is undoubtedly a historic scale. Afghanistan’s peasants, surviving as best they can in a land of narco-warlords, narco-guerrillas, and deadly air attacks have, once again, set a record when it comes to this unique freedom.

George Tenet, though a holdover from the Clinton years, wholeheartedly agreed with one of the earliest post-9/11 liberatory impulses of top Bush administration officials — the desire, as Donald Rumsfeld liked to say, to take off “the gloves,” or, as Tenet himself put it when it came to the CIA (so Ron Suskind tell us in his book, The One Percent Doctrine), “the shackles.” Those were the “shackles” that Dick Cheney and others believed had been placed by Congress on the imperial presidency after Richard Nixon came so close to committing the constitutional coup d’état that we have come to call Watergate, but that involved an illegal war in Cambodia, illegal wiretapping, illegal break-ins, robberies, black-bag jobs, and so many other crossing-the-line activities. As CIA Director, Tenet then delivered to Agency operatives the freedom to target just about anyone on the planet who might qualify (however mistakenly) as a “terror suspect,” kidnap him, and “render” him in extraordinary fashion either to a foreign prison where torture was regularly practiced or to a CIA secret prison in Afghanistan, Eastern Europe, or who knows where else. He also freed the Agency to “disappear” human beings (a term normally used in our world only when Americans aren’t the ones doing it) and freed the Agency’s interrogators to use techniques like waterboarding, known in less civilized times as “the water torture” (and only recently banned by the Agency) as well as various other, more sophisticated forms of torture.

At the 2004 Medal of Freedom ceremony, the President spoke of 50 million people being liberated in his first term, but he probably should have used the figure 50,000,002. After all, Tenet, like Franks, had offered a necessary helping hand in the liberation of Bush — and Cheney as well. Both men took part in loosing a “wartime” commander-in-chief presidency (and vice-presidency) to which just about no traditional American check-and-balance restraints or oversight of any sort were said to apply.

L. Paul Bremer III may, however, be the most interesting of the three freedom-givers, in part because, thanks to Blackwater USA, the private security firm whose mercenaries continue to run wild in Iraq, his handiwork is in the news and in plain sight right now. In December 2004, less than six months had passed since Bremer, in his role as head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in occupied Baghdad, had turned over “sovereignty” to a designated group of Iraqis and, essentially, fled that already chaotic country. A day before he left, however, he established a unique kind of freedom in Iraq, not seen since the heyday of European and Japanese colonialism. By putting his signature on a single document, he managed to officially establish an “International Zone” that would be the fortified equivalent of the old European treaty ports on the China coast and, at the same time, essentially granted to all occupying forces and allied companies what, in those bad old colonial days, used to be called “extraterritoriality” — the freedom not to be in any way under Iraqi law or jurisdiction, ever.

Creating the Free World Anew

General David Petraeus, the President’s surge commander in Iraq, has often spoken about a “Washington clock” and a “Baghdad clock” being out of sync and of the need to reset the Washington one. Bremer, who arrived in Baghdad in May 2003, quickly went to work setting back that Baghdad clock. When it came, for instance, to Iraqi oil, he ensured that Ibrahim Bahr al-Ulum, who had been involved in the State Department’s energy working group, would be tapped as Iraq’s oil minister, was surrounded by Western advisors who had worked for the oil giants, and set his mind to “privatizing” the Iraqi energy industry. With the third largest oil reserves on the planet, Iraq was, sooner or later, to be thrown open to investment from American energy firms and, in the process, that “clock” in Baghdad would be turned back perhaps 40 years to a time before energy resources were nationalized everywhere in the Middle East. (That the effort has, so far, largely, though not completely, failed wasn’t due to lack of effort.)

When it came to the freedoms of Western occupiers (or liberators, if you will), including armed mercenaries, however, Bremer achieved a true medal-snatching feat. He essentially turned that Baghdad clock back to the nineteenth century and made that “time” stick to this very day. On the eve of his departure, he issued a remarkable document of freedom — a declaration of foreign independence — that went by the name of “Order 17” [PDF file] and that, in the U.S. mainstream media, is still often referred to as “the law” in Iraq.

Order 17 is a document well worth reading. It essentially granted to every foreigner in the country connected to the occupation enterprise the full freedom of the land, not to be interfered with in any way by Iraqis or any Iraqi political or legal institution. Foreigners — unless, of course, they were jihadis or Iranians — were to be “immune from any form of arrest or detention other than by persons acting on behalf of their Sending States,” even though American and coalition forces were to be allowed the freedom to arrest and detain in prisons and detention camps of their own any Iraqis they designated worthy of that honor. (The present prison population of American Iraq is reputed to be at least 24,500 and rising.)

All foreigners involved in the occupation project were to be granted “freedom of movement without delay throughout Iraq,” and neither their vessels, vehicles, nor aircraft were to be “subject to registration, licensing or inspection by the [Iraqi] Government.” Nor in traveling would foreign diplomat, soldier, consultant, or security guard, or any of their vehicles, vessels, or planes be subject to “dues, tolls, or charges, including landing and parking fees,” and so on. And don’t forget that on imports, including “controlled substances,” there were to be no customs fees (or inspections), taxes, or much of anything else; nor was there to be the slightest charge for the use of Iraqi “headquarters, camps, and other premises” occupied, nor for the use of electricity, water, or other utilities. And then, of course, there was that “International Zone,” now better known as the Green Zone, whose control was carefully placed in the hands of the Multinational Force or MNF (essentially, the Americans and their contractors) exactly as if it had been the international part of Shanghai, or Portuguese Macao, or British Hong Kong in the nineteenth century.

Promulgated on the eve of the “return of sovereignty,” Order 17 gave new meaning to the term “Free World.” It was, in essence, a get-out-of-jail-free card in perpetuity.

Above all else, Bremer freed an already powerful shadow army run out of private security outfits like Blackwater USA that, by now, has grown, according to recent reports, into a force of 20,000 to 50,000 or more hired guns. These private soldiers, largely in the employ of the Pentagon or the U.S. State Department — and so operating on U.S. taxpayer dollars — were granted the right to act as they pleased with utter impunity anywhere in the country.

More than three years later, the language of Order 17, written in high legalese, remains striking when it comes to the contractors. (The man who, according to the Washington Post, composed the initial draft of the document, Lawrence T. Peter, is, perhaps unsurprisingly, now director of the Private Security Company Association of Iraq, which “represents at least 50 security companies.”) Order 17 begins on private security firms with a stated need “to clarify the status of…. certain International Consultants, and certain contractors in respect of the Government and the local courts.” But the key passage is this:

“Contractors shall not be subject to Iraqi laws or regulations in matters relating to the terms and conditions of their contracts… Contractors shall be immune from Iraqi legal processes with respect to acts performed by them pursuant to the terms and conditions of a Contract or any sub-contract thereto… Certification by the Sending State that its Contractor acted pursuant to the terms and conditions of the Contract shall, in any Iraqi legal process, be conclusive evidence of the facts so certified…”

In other words, when, in June 2004, Bremer handed over “sovereignty” to an Iraqi “government” lodged in the foreign-controlled Green Zone and left town as fast as he could, he essentially handed over next to nothing. He had already succeeded in making Iraq a “free” country, as only the Bush administration might have defined freedom: free of taxes, duties, tolls, accountability, or responsibility of any kind, no matter what Americans or their allies and hirelings did or what they took. In Iraq, in a twist on the nightmare language of Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, freedom meant theft.

When it came to the Iraqi government, freedom also meant the freedom not to be informed. Take an example: The U.S. military recently announced that it was about to build a new base in Iraq, right up against the Iranian border, that would be ready for operation this November. Officially, such decisions are, of course, supposed to be made in conjunction with the sovereign government of the country, but Kaveh L Afrasiabi of Asia Times on-line informs us that “Iraqi officials were apparently not even consulted prior to an announcement on this issue.”

The Freedom of Bloody Sunday

“I saw women and children jump out of their cars and start to crawl on the road to escape being shot, but still the firing kept coming and many of them were killed. I saw a boy of about 10 leaping in fear from a minibus, he was shot in the head. His mother was crying out for him, she jumped out after him, and she was killed. People were afraid.”

This is the testimony of Hassan Jabar Salman, a lawyer “shot four times in the back, his car riddled with eight more bullets” as he attempted to escape a fusillade from Blackwater hired guns guarding a U.S. convoy in the middle of Baghdad. Only the latest of many Blackwater “incidents,” “Bloody Sunday” — depending on which report you read, between eight and 28 Iraqi men, women, and children died — brought into sharper focus the Free World that L. Paul Bremer III had helped create at the behest of his President.

In this rare case, the Iraqi government publicly and vociferously complained. As in Vietnam in the 1960s, even the officials of puppet governments often turn out to be nationalists; even they get fed up with their patrons’ arrogance sooner or later; and, often, their officials, having spent so much time close up and personal with the occupiers, have nothing but contempt for them. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki promptly called Bloody Sunday a “crime” by out of control private security contractors. “We will never,” he said at a news conference, “allow Iraqi citizens to be killed in cold blood by this company that is playing with the lives of the people.” (Blackwater, unsurprisingly, denied that its guards had done anything but respond to an attack.) The Iraqi government then threatened to withdraw the company’s license and kick it out of the country.

As it happened, the State Department, which had inked contracts worth $678 million with Blackwater and had just recently awarded a new one for “helicopter-related services” to the outfit, had already “exempted the company from U.S. military regulations governing other security firms” and had allowed its estimated 1,000 or more employees in Iraq to operate without an Interior Ministry license of any sort that could be withdrawn. In addition, top State Department officials had praised the company’s work to the skies. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice promptly called Prime Minister Maliki to express her “condolences” and then the State Department suspended all diplomatic movement (other than by helicopter) out of the Green Zone and announced an “investigation.”

This was, of course, a classic tactic to diffuse such a crisis. Scores of similar “investigations” in Iraq have been launched, led nowhere (except in the case of extraordinary publicity), and been forgotten, including one set in motion by the State Department only last May after consecutive Blackwater shooting incidents and an armed stand-off between its guards and Interior Ministry commandos in front of the ministry itself. And who better to lead another such investigation than, once again, the second most interested party, the State Department? This, too, followed a Bush administration pattern of freedom from accountability in Iraq. In the same way, the Pentagon had investigated possible war crimes committed by its own troops (as at Haditha and Abu Ghraib); just as David Petraeus, the general involved in creating and implementing the President’s surge plan, was designated the perfect person to assess the efficacy of his own actions in a so-called Progress Report to Congress.

Can anyone be surprised that, despite Iraqi government protestations, three days after standing down, Blackwater mercenaries were again back on the job protecting U.S. diplomats — even while its employees faced possible charges for “illegally smuggl[ing] into Iraq weapons that may have been sold on the black market and ended up in the hands of a U.S.-designated terrorist organization”?

Stuff Happens

Of course, the very idea of taking “freedom” abroad through what our President has hailed as “the greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known — the men and women of the United States Armed Forces,” is an absurdity, unless you realize who is being freed. Ostensibly entering Iraq in search of weapons of mass destruction, our military proved itself — what are massively armed forces for, after all — a weapon of massive destruction. It finished the task of breaking an already oppressed and half-broken land. What the “greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known” opened the way for was a looter’s paradise; the freedom it brought was the freedom to plunder.

The Iraqi looting began almost as soon as American troops entering Baghdad in April 2003 — and those occupying troops, without orders to lift a finger, did just about nothing (except, tellingly, guard the Oil Ministry) as Baghdad burned. Then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld signaled just what kind of an era of liberation was indeed dawning. At a press briefing, with the verbal equivalent of a wink and a nod, he responded to a question about the looting of the Iraqi capital by saying, “Freedom’s untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things. They’re also free to live their lives and do wonderful things. And that’s what’s going to happen here.” And he offered his infamous tag line for the ongoing disaster, “Stuff happens.”

It’s been happening ever since as those liberated by the invasion — the privateers, the freebooters, the crony capitalists, the neocon dreamers, the black marketeers and oil siphoneers, the mercenaries and criminals of every sort — were freed to do their damnedest in an atmosphere that combined the “wild East” with a gold-rush mentality amid spiralling chaos, mayhem, and destruction. Stuff just happened again in a square in the Iraqi capital on Bloody Sunday; it also happened in Haditha and at Abu Ghraib; it happened in neighborhoods being ethnically cleansed; it happens every day as roadside bombs go off and death squads and mercenaries and U.S. soldiers kill, and normal Iraqis flee for their lives. This is George Bush’s Free World and welcome to it.

In such a world, the looters and plunderers are even free to cleanse the past. Recently, British journalist Robert Fisk offered an update on the smash of civilizations that started with the invasion. He described an Iraq in which even farmers had been transformed into looters, while “heritage sites,” from the dawn of human civilization, from the literal Ur-moment of our world, when not destroyed down to the bedrock (to provide objects for Western art connoisseurs), were being turned into parts of U.S. military bases. He reported:

“2,000-year-old Sumerian cities torn apart and plundered by robbers. The very walls of the mighty Ur of the Chaldees cracking under the strain of massive troop movements, the privatisation of looting as landlords buy up the remaining sites of ancient Mesopotamia to strip them of their artifacts and wealth. The near total destruction of Iraq’s historic past — the very cradle of human civilisation — has emerged as one of the most shameful symbols of our disastrous occupation.”

Faced with such a world, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates recently gave a speech at the College of William and Mary in which, for the first time in memory, a top administration official didn’t wholeheartedly plug the spreading of freedom and democracy abroad in typical Bush fashion. In fact, at the World Forum on the Future of Democracy, he gave a talk entitled “A Realist’s View of Promoting Democracy Abroad,” in which he reminded his audience of the value of allying with despots to advance American interests: “Over the last century, we have allied with tyrants to defeat other tyrants. We have sustained diplomatic relations with governments even as we supported those attempting their overthrow. We have at times made human rights the centerpiece of our national strategy even as we did business with some of the worst violators of human rights.”

This talk was greeted enthusiastically by the nation’s pundits. Finally, a realist! Given the realities of our world, it’s not hard to understand why. Perhaps the rest of us can now breathe a small sigh of relief. Whereas, in the previous six-plus years, freedom was theft; now, perhaps, clarity has entered the picture and theft is simply theft itself.

Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute’s Tomdispatch.com, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project. His book, The End of Victory Culture (University of Massachusetts Press), has just been thoroughly updated in a newly issued edition that deals with victory culture’s crash-and-burn sequel in Iraq.

Many years ago there was a song called “Why do we all love Australia” which was a bit of a spoof although funny and to the point. The main thing was that it was ironic and encouraged people to laugh at themselves, which does us all good from time to time. But there is nothing funny or ironical about a major international matter of the moment: Why do they all hate America?

It isn’t good for the world to have such a hate figure. Recent and current actions by Washington haven’t bound nations together, as fear and loathing of an outsider sometimes do. There is no benefit from the world-wide perception that the America of Bush and Cheney is astonishingly arrogant. And the problem is that this arrogance has created and continues to spawn an unknown but obviously large number of fanatics who want to destroy a country whose leader revels in displaying an insolent and unjustified superiority.

Consider the absurd contention in Washington that it is entirely the fault of Iraq’s Prime Minister Maliki that his country is an ungovernable shambles. “Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki is unable to govern his country effectively and the political situation is likely to become even more precarious in the next six to 12 months, the nation’s intelligence agencies concluded in a new assessment”, announced the LA Times on August 24. Of course the man can’t govern the country. Nobody can govern the country so long as US troops and their mercenary comrades swagger round the place acting as a law unto themselves. Here’s an AP report of August 31:

“Everybody was pretty much upset,” [Sergeant Sanick] Dela Cruz told the prosecutor, Lt. Col. Sean Sullivan. “We were smoking outside . . . for whatever reason Staff Sergeant Wuterich made this comment that if we ever got hit again we should kill everybody in that vicinity, sir, to teach them a lesson.” . . . . Dela Cruz testified that he saw Wuterich shoot the five men by the car, then follow up with close-range chest shots to make sure they were dead. Dela Cruz said he too fired at the men.

Wuterich has previously said he shot the men because they were running away from the scene of the bomb blast. Military rules at the time allowed Marines to kill those seen fleeing in this way. But Dela Cruz claimed the men were “just standing around,” some with their hands interlocked on their heads. “Those men [were] not running, sir,” Dela Cruz testified. “Some of them had their hands up.”

“Some of them had their hands up”. How could ANY soldier kill an unarmed man with his hands up? Who trained and motivated the man who killed a defenseless human being? Who was in command of the soldiers who did this? The American people must ask why they should tolerate a regime that authorizes the shooting in the back of a terror-stricken civilian fleeing a bomb blast. (The report’s caveat “at the time” is meaningless. Nothing has changed in the Rules of Engagement.) And it’s even worse when you consider the filthy money-grubbing gung-ho mercenaries who, among other things, are responsible for the security of US diplomats.

When Blackwater’s thugs killed eleven Iraqi civilians a few days ago it wasn’t just bizarre and indefensible: it was yet another example of such action. Prime Minister Maliki said on September 20 that there had been six other instances of murder by Blackwater’s band of brutes, all of which had been reported to US officials. No action had been taken.

“. . . the Americans told us to turn back,” [Mr Jabir] said. “They shouted ‘Go’ ‘Go’ ‘Go.’ . . . When we started turning back, the Americans began shooting heavily at us. The traffic policeman was the first person killed.” The shooting set off a panic, Jabir said, with men, women and children diving from their vehicles, trying desperately to crawl to safety. “But many of them were killed,” he said. [He saw a] “boy jump in fear from one of the minibuses. He was shot in his head. His mother jumped after him and was also killed.” Suddenly, Jabir felt two bullets strike his back — one pierced his left lung and the other lodged in his intestines.” ­ AP September 20.

Make no mistake: there is no law in Iraq other than that imposed, tolerated or endorsed by the US occupation force that is not accountable to any Iraqi government orders or decisions.

The people of Iraq detest American rule. The government of Mr Maliki can say anything it likes. It can even pass laws. But nothing it says or tries to do will have the slightest effect on the country. There is only one government in Iraq, and that is the imperial regime of the invader (except for the independent north where Kurds are running their own affairs and conducting US-tolerated ethnic cleansing as regards Arabs). Soldiers and mercenaries care nothing for Iraq’s own laws. They follow the orders of their demented leaders in Washington who despise and deride (and have almost destroyed) international conventions intended to make it easier for us all to live together on what has become a truly horrible planet, courtesy of Bush and Cheney. Consider another imperial exercise of power in Baghdad:

US forces have released seven Iranians who were detained in a swoop on a hotel in Baghdad, Iraqi officials say. The men were seized overnight from one of the main hotels in the capital and led away blindfolded and in handcuffs. The Iranian embassy in the city said the men were helping rebuild electricity power stations in Iraq. (BBC, August 29, 2007.)

Who ordered US soldiers to blindfold, handcuff and detain foreigners who were in Iraq at the invitation of the Iraqi government? The fact that they were released is proof that nothing they were doing was of assistance to those fighting against occupation troops. There is no point in trying to guess what was in the minds of US commanders in Iraq when they gave orders for the snatch-job. Their myopic, self-defeating operation was in line with Bush-Cheney policy as sent down the line to the forelock-tugging generals: all Iranians are Bad Guys, so go get them. And the result, as could be predicted by anyone who is not George Bush or a US general, is that more and more Iranians and Iraqi Shias think, with justification, that the Bush Administration understands only force and doesn’t care a toss about any sort of law, be that national or international ­ or even its own legal system, politicized and debased as it has become. So what is the US commander in Iraq, General Petraeus, doing about the situation?

Do you remember Art Buchwald’s wonderful column in 1969 about the US generals’ reaction to the Tet Offensive in Vietnam? (A year before I arrived there, incidentally, having believed all the propaganda we were fed at the time. This makes me feel sorry for young officers presently in Iraq: I was in a similar situation, fellas. I was a sucker, too.)

Part of the Buchwald column read:

Dateline: Little Big Horn, Dakota. General George Armstrong Custer said today in an exclusive interview with this correspondent that the Battle of Little Big Horn had just turned the corner and he could now see light at the end of the tunnel. “We have the Sioux on the run”, General Custer told me. “Of course we’ll have some cleaning up to do, but the Redskins are hurting badly and it will only be a matter of time before they give in.”

Is the wonderful General Petraeus (My name’s Petraeus, what’s YOUR hobby?) going to turn the corner in Iraq? Or is the corner going to turn him into a Custer? He wrote an Op-Ed piece in a national newspaper in support of the Republican Party’s presidential candidate, an act of blatant and indefensible political sniveling. Petraeus is the very model of the Cold War Warrior. He favors military confrontation over diplomacy. And it’s military confrontation that Bush-Cheney America is all about.

It isn’t just President Putin and his government and people who realize that Washington has gone out of control by surrounding Russia with anti-missile systems and increasing its military footprint in as much of a threatening circle as it can. The latest instance of needless provocation is Washington’s arrangement for “military facilities” (not BASES of course) in Romania, adding to the scores of existing US military airfields and troop staging posts that directly menace Russia. Naturally Putin has reacted to such arrogance. Bush-Cheney picked a quarrel with Russia, and nobody would care if it were only their personal problem. But they have insulted and aggravated a world power of immense importance, adding to the rapidly growing number of America-haters.

Then there is the amazingly idiotic US announcement of a 30 billion dollar military support program for Israel over the next decade. Has nobody in Washington got any idea just how much resentment and hatred this proclamation caused in the Islamic world? It is regarded as contemptuous spurning of the Muslim community, irrespective of the other billions to be given to rich oil-producing Arab countries. The process is only transfer of money from American taxpayers to US weapons’ manufacturers, but in international political terms it is disastrous.

The State Department could have made it clear to the White House that cash for Israel would send an incendiary message. In fact it is probable that State’s professionals did warn that there would be uproar and reaction. But since the time that State was right in its advice about the war on Iraq it has been distrusted and reviled by the warniks. The Secretary of State has become a joke and one of her Under Secretaries, Nicholas Burns (a career officer, alas), has sold his soul to the Company Store and declared that the 30 billion dollar endorsement of the nuclear-armed Israeli military machine “says to the Iranians and Syrians that the United States is the major power in the Middle East and will continue to be and is not going away.”

What right has America (or any other country) to trumpet itself so imperiously as “the major power” anywhere in the world? In fact, most people very much want the United States to cease meddling in the Middle East because its influence, activity and undeviating support of Israel have produced nothing but chaos.

We don’t have to ask: “Why Do They All Hate America?”

It’s obvious.

The stench surrounding the office of Louisiana’s LaSalle Parish prosecutor Reed Walters, for his discriminatory decisions in the Jena 6 case, is about to become more malodorous activists announced during recent anti-Walters protests across America.

Activists leading these coordinated coast-to-coast protests announced plans to collect dirty sneakers and send them to Walters.

Sending sneakers is a mocking slap at Walters’ decision to press serious assault charges against six black teens arising from a school yard fight on the specious claim that they used deadly weapons against the white victim: their sneakers.

Walters’ claims kicking the white youth during the fight where the victim sustained no serious injury constituted use of deadly weapons ­ an offense that could land the black youths in prison for decades.

Walters is the same prosecutor who initially refused to press charges against white teens who bashed a black teen in the head with a beer bottle while ejecting him from a ‘whites-only’ party last fall in Jena, a small rural town about 40-miles northeast of Alexandria, La.

And, this is the same prosecutor still refusing to charge a young white man for pulling a shotgun on a few black teens in Jena yet the same prosecutor who has lodged theft of firearm charges against those black teens for refusing to return that weapon to its owner.

“We are collecting sneakers ­ dirty, stinky sneakers ­ to send to that racist DA in Jena,” declared Philadelphia NAACP branch president J. Whyatt Mondesire during remarks at a protest in that city held simultaneously with a massive demonstration that recently paralyzed Jena.

The actions of Walter plus those of other officials and individuals in Jena, LA are now the latest flashpoint in America’s cauldron of race-related problems.

That school yard fight involving the Jena 6 culminated a series of interracial incidents at Jena’s high school that began in Fall 2006 when three white students placed lynch nooses on a tree in the high school’s yard.

The nooses appeared after blacks sat under that school yard tree traditionally considered a ‘whites-only’ shade spot.

Incidents after the nooses involved white teens attacking black teens ­ with fists, beer bottles and that gun incident.

Top Jena school district officials overruled the high school principal’s recommendation to expel the trio responsible for hanging the nooses, dismissing their inflammatory action as an adolescent prank.

DA Walters is the lawyer for Jena’s school district. It is unclear if Walters played any role in overruling decision to suspend not expel.

Yet, a recent report from Jena by Democracy Now host Amy Goodman states Walters refused the school board access to a school district report on the school yard fight during the board’s deliberations before it voted to expel those black teens’ involved in that fight.

Some see Walters’ withholding information from school board members (the district’s report) as analogous to a prosecutor withholding evidence from a jury during a criminal proceeding ­ which is misconduct.

Walters strenuously rejected charges that race played any role in his prosecutorial decisions during a press conference the day before that protest in Jena that drew tens-of-thousands of participants from across America.

Flanking Walters at his press conference was the white victim of that fight, a young man treated at a hospital yet well enough to attend a high school function hours after the fight. Witness claim this youth precipitated the fight by taunting the black teen beat with the beer bottle with racist epithets.

Walters declared, “It is not and never has been about race. It is about finding justice for an innocent victim and holding people accountable for their actions. That’s what it is about.”

During that press conference Walters said he wanted to prosecute the students accused of hanging the nooses but couldn’t find any applicable Louisiana law.

Many ridicule Walters’ proposition.

Critics contend since Walters was creative enough to find deadly weapons in sneakers he could have made some creative use of laws regarding disorderly conduct or terroristic threatsif in fact he felt as claimed that the noose hanging was a “villainous act”

In July 1934 a prosecutor in Bastrop, La ­ about 60-miles north of Jena ­ refused to investigative the lynching of a black man in that town’s public square.

This white prosecutor told a mob numbering 3,000 that he “sympathized with its attitude” moments before the hanging of this suspected criminal, according to an account in a New York newspaper.

The sympathy shown to whites by that 1934 prosecutor in Bastrop is eerily similar to sympathies displayed by Walters whose impermissible race based charging practices violate any legal discretion given prosecutors for lodging charges.

The reality is Walters making sneakers ‘deadly weapons’ to press the most serious criminal charges against the Jena 6 arguably abuses if not violates Louisiana’s Rules of Conduct for prosecutors.

Rule 3.8 of that lawyer Conduct code is captioned: Special Responsibilities of a Prosecutor.

Rule 3.8(a) states prosecutors should “refrain from prosecuting a charge that the prosecutor knows is not supposed by probable cause.”

Probable cause, according to standard legal definitions, includes an apparent state of facts which would induce a reasonably prudent person to believe that the accused committed the crime charged.

A school yard fight (even a beat-down) with no serious injury does not rise to the level of attempted murder ­ the charge Walters’ initially lodged against the Jena 6.

Presumably Walters knows Rule 3.8(a).

When Walters declared his refusal to answer all reporters’ questions about aspects of the Jena 6 case that press conference, he cited restrictions on public comments by prosecutors regarding pending cases contained in Rule 3.8(f).

A claim by Walters that he is bound by Rule 3.8(f) but is unaware of Rule 3.8(a) would sizzle with more idiocy than his previous statements defending his actions.

While racism is rampant in matters revolving around the Jena 6, this incident exposes a deep seated problem infecting American society: abusive misconduct by prosecutors.

Abuse by prosecutors is a profound problem nationwide routinely dismissed by authorities and the public at-large. The mandate for prosecutors is to seek justice not just conviction ­ a duty too many prosecutors disregard.

“Prosecutors have destroyed the rule of law and put rule by prosecutors in its place,” Paul Craig Roberts noted in an excellent article posted on Counterpunch in August 2006.

In 1999, the then head of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers remarked that the “problem of prosecutors breaking the law is more frightening, and does more damage to society, than any common criminal.”

While the numbers of certified bigots among prosecutors engaged in misconduct may be small, the number of prosecutors knowingly offering false testimony (often from police), fabricating evidence, concealing evidence of innocence and chucking fair play is alarmingly large.

A win-at-any-cost attitude is widely viewed a driver for prosecutorial misconduct.

Rare public outrage at prosecutorial misconduct appears reserved to high profile cases involving whites like the Duke lacrosse players. Authorities stripped the law license from the DA in that case, Mike Nifong, even sending him to jail for a day following televised disciplinary proceedings that constituted a very public flogging.

In contrast to Nifong, the Texas prosecutor responsible for the false convictions of 38 people in an infamous 1999 drug raid occurred outside televised glare.

Offending prosecutor Terry McEachern received a wrist slap penalty of paying $6,225 in fines and promising to not break lawyer rules for two years.

The misconduct of now ex-prosecutor McEachern, lead to authorities paying $5-million to the victims of that Tulia, TX drug case resting solely on claims of a corrupt undercover agent.

One speaker at that pro-Jena 6 protest in Philadelphia, respected defense attorney Michael Coard, said the best defense against prosecutorial misconduct is aggressive, consistent action against offenders.

“If prosecutors knew they would lose their law licenses and get locked-up, they won’t engage in misconduct,” Coard said acknowledging little likelihood of that happening because most judges are ex-prosecutors.

Despite saber-rattling, and the Washington buzz that a strike is coming, the president doesn’t intend to bomb Iran. Cheney may have other ideas.

Sept. 19, 2007 | WASHINGTON — During a recent high-powered Washington dinner party attended by 18 people, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft squared off across the table over whether President Bush will bomb Iran.

Brzezinski, former national security advisor to President Carter, said he believed Bush’s team had laid a track leading to a single course of action: a military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities. Scowcroft, who was NSA to Presidents Ford and the first Bush, held out hope that the current President Bush would hold fire and not make an already disastrous situation for the U.S. in the Middle East even worse.

The 18 people at the party, including former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, then voted with a show of hands for either Brzezinski’s or Scowcroft’s position. Scowcroft got only two votes, including his own. Everyone else at the table shared Brzezinski’s fear that a U.S. strike against Iran is around the corner.

In the national debate about America’s next moves in the Middle East, an irrepressible and perhaps irresponsible certainty that America will attack Iran now dominates commentary across the political spectrum. Nerves are further frayed by stories like this one, about the Pentagon making a list of 2,000 military targets inside Iran.

The left — and much of the old-school, realist right — fears that Bush means to bomb Iran sometime between now and next spring. Both would like to rally public opinion against the strike before it happens. The neoconservative right, meanwhile, is asserting that we will bomb Iran but that we need to get to it posthaste.

But both sides are advancing scenarios that are politically useful to them, and both sides are wrong. Despite holding out a military option, ratcheting up tensions with Iran about meddling in Iraq and Afghanistan, and deploying carrier strike-force groups in the Persian Gulf, the president is not planning to bomb Iran. But there are several not-unrelated scenarios under which it might happen, if the neocon wing of the party, led by Vice President Cheney, succeeds in reasserting itself, or if there is some kind of “accidental,” perhaps contrived, confrontation.

One of the reasons so many believe action is near is the well-known neoconservative preference that it be so. There is still a strong neoconservative faction within the Bush team, and their movement allies outside the administration, such as Michael Ledeen, John Bolton and Norman Podhoretz, have openly advocated striking Iran before it can develop nuclear weapons. The neoconservatives believe that in the end, Bush’s team will indeed launch a military strike against Iran, or will nudge Israel to do so.

There is also evidence that the administration has given serious thought to the bombing option. In June 2006, I helped organize a round table on Iran for the New America Foundation, where I work, that attracted some heavy hitters in the national security world, including some of the names associated with the Aspen Strategy Group co-chaired by Brent Scowcroft and former National Intelligence Council chairman and Harvard Kennedy School dean Joseph Nye. As at the Aspen Strategy Group, comments made in my session were on a “not for attribution” basis. Several current and former Bush administration officials were in attendance.

I moderated the session. The task of those participating was to think and talk through the “unthinkables.” On the one hand, was an Iran with nukes so hard to live with that the potentially disastrous consequences of an attack, even if it negated Iran’s nuclear gains, would be worth it? Would an Iran with nukes be less paranoid about its security and thus less prone to meddling in other countries, or would it use the nukes as a shield to protect itself while continuing to finance terrorism?

Alternatively, if we bombed Iran would we be prepared to cede American primacy over the world’s fossil fuel regime and see Iran, China and Russia develop what Flynt Leverett calls a “new axis of oil”? Would we be prepared for a post-bombing terrorist superhighway to erupt from Iran and race through Iraq, Syria and Jordan to the edge of Israel? America might not just see its global geo-energy position undermined, but could see a set of falling dominoes among Sunni Arab states that could dramatically remake the map of the Middle East — and not in America’s favor.

In other words, the task was to ponder what each of these bleak binary choices meant for America. They are often framed as “bombing” vs. “appeasement.” The emerging polite term for the appeasement option is “strategic readjustment.”

After the session, two Bush administration senior officials who were not present sent me letters, one to say the binary “to bomb or not to bomb” scenario was premature, the other to say it was not premature.

But a former administration official who was present at the session vigorously and emphatically embraced the either/or formula. He also had this to share about the inner workings of the Bush White House on Iran and the inevitability of military action:

The President is going to receive a memo — some time in the next 6 to 12 months — that presents a “bleak binary choice”. Either he takes action to preempt Iran from reaching a nuclear threshold and calls for a military strike or he stands down and accepts a future with Iran with nuclear weapons.

Condi’s job is to develop a “third option”. She will dance round and round, waltzing with that third option. She will dance faster and faster with it, spinning and spinning, all around she’ll go — but when she’s done she’ll see that she’s dancing with a corpse.

This President is the kind of president who believes it is his moral responsibility to address serious problems now and not to leave these tough actions to a successor.

Those are the cold, harsh realities that we face — and to me, as I look ahead, I don’t see how we come out of this without military action. Unless Iran abandons its nuclear weapons intentions, which I don’t see happening, there will be a war.

So 15 months later, the president has now, presumably, received that memo, and those who hold the deterministic view that bombing Iran is around the corner could argue that they are in good company.

To try to discern what the president himself thinks, however, is very difficult. It’s particularly hard when Bush is trying to convince Iran that the military option is real, and that if Iran doesn’t work out a mutually acceptable deal with the U.S., he will launch a strike.

To date, however, nothing suggests Bush is really going to do it. If he were, he wouldn’t be playing good cop/bad cop with Iran and proposing engagement. If the bombs were at the ready, Bush would be doing a lot more to prepare the nation and the military for a war far more consequential than the invasion of Iraq. There is also circumstantial evidence that he has decided bombing may be too costly a choice.

First, journalist Joe Klein documents a December 2006 meeting in which Bush met in “the Tank” with his senior national security counselors and the military’s command staff and walked out with the impression that either the costs of military action against Iran were simply too high, or that the prospects for success for the mission too low.

Klein writes:

Then Bush asked about the possibility of a successful attack on Iran’s nuclear capability. He was told that the U.S. could launch a devastating air attack on Iran’s government and military, wiping out the Iranian air force, the command and control structure and some of the more obvious nuclear facilities. But the Chiefs were — once again — unanimously opposed to taking that course of action.

Why? Because our intelligence inside Iran is very sketchy. There was no way to be sure that we could take out all of Iran’s nuclear facilities. Furthermore, the Chiefs warned, the Iranian response in Iraq and, quite possibly, in terrorist attacks on the U.S. could be devastating. Bush apparently took this advice to heart and went to Plan B — a covert destabilization campaign reported earlier this week by ABC News.

After this meeting, Bush immediately tilted away from the Cheney-dominant view that military action was the most preferable course and empowered and released other parts of his administration to animate a third option.

Secondly, we know via material first reported on my blog, the Washington Note, and subsequently confirmed by the New York Times, Time and Newsweek, that Cheney and his team have been deeply frustrated by the “engage Iran team” that the president empowered and felt that they were losing ground to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell and the president’s new chief of staff, Joshua Bolten.

One member of Cheney’s national security staff, David Wurmser, worried out loud that Cheney felt that his wing was “losing the policy argument on Iran” inside the administration — and that they might need to “end run” the president with scenarios that may narrow his choices. The option that Wurmser allegedly discussed was nudging Israel to launch a low-yield cruise missile strike against the Natanz nuclear reactor in Iran, thus “hopefully” prompting a military reaction by Tehran against U.S. forces in Iraq and the Gulf. When queried about Wurmser’s alleged comments, a senior Bush administration official told the New York Times, “The vice president is not necessarily responsible for every single thing that comes out of the mouth of every single member of his staff.”

We know Bush rebuffed Cheney’s view and is seeking other alternatives. That is the most clear evidence that Bush is not committed to bombing Iran. Even if Bush wanted to make the Iranians believe that he could go either way — diplomacy or military strike — Bush would not so clearly knock back one side in favor of the other to the point where the “bad cops” in a good cop/bad cop strategy would tell anyone on the outside that they did not enjoy the favor and support of the president.

Bush is aware that America’s intelligence on Iran is weak. Even without admitting America’s blind spots on Iraq, the intelligence failures on Iraq’s WMD program create a formidable credibility hurdle.

Bush knows that the American military is stretched and that bombing Iran would not be a casual exercise. Reprisals in the Gulf toward U.S. forces and Iran’s ability to cut off supply lines to the 160,000 U.S. troops currently deployed in Iraq could seriously endanger the entire American military.

Bush can also see China and Russia waiting in the wings, not to promote conflict but to take advantage of self-destructive missteps that the United States takes that would give them more leverage over and control of global energy flows. Iran has the third-largest undeveloped oil reserves in the world and the second-largest undeveloped natural gas reserves.

Bush also knows that Iran controls “the temperature” of the terror networks it runs. Bombing Iran would blow the control gauge off, and Iran’s terror networks could mobilize throughout the Middle East, Afghanistan and even the United States.

In sum, Bush does not plan to escalate toward a direct military conflict with Iran, at least not now — and probably not later. The costs are too high, and there are still many options to be tried before the worst of all options is put back on the table. As it stands today, he wants that “third option,” even if Cheney doesn’t. Bush’s war-prone team failed him on Iraq, and this time he’ll be more reserved, more cautious. That is why a classic buildup to war with Iran, one in which the decision to bomb has already been made, is not something we should be worried about today.

What we should worry about, however, is the continued effort by the neocons to shore up their sagging influence. They now fear that events and arguments could intervene to keep what once seemed like a “nearly inevitable” attack from happening. They know that they must keep up the pressure on Bush and maintain a drumbeat calling for war.

They are doing exactly this during September and October in a series of meetings organized by the American Enterprise Institute on Iran and Iraq designed to reemphasize the case for hawkish, interventionist deployments in Iraq and a military, regime-change-oriented strike against Iran. And through Op-Eds and the serious political media, the “bomb Iran now” crowd believes they must undermine those in and out of government proposing alternatives to bombing and keep the president and his people saturated with pro-war mantras.

We should also worry about the kind of scenario David Wurmser floated, meaning an engineered provocation. An “accidental war” would escalate quickly and “end run,” as Wurmser put it, the president’s diplomatic, intelligence and military decision-making apparatus. It would most likely be triggered by one or both of the two people who would see their political fortunes rise through a new conflict — Cheney and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

BRASILIA (AFP) — A first group of 35 Palestinians who were forced to flee Iraq arrived Friday in Brazil where they will receive government and UN assistance to build their new lives, officials said.

The 35 are part of a group of 117 Palestinian-Iraqi refugees who are making their way to Brazil after fleeing Iraq and seeking shelter in neighboring Jordan following the fall of Saddam Hussein.

“The 35 who arrived Friday are part of a group that lived in the Ruwaished refugee camp in Jordan,” said Luiz Paulo Barreto who heads the government’s national refugee commission.

The others “will probably begin to arrive in October,” he said.

They spent around three years at the refugee camp, according to Luis Varese, a United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees representative.

Varese also said authorities did not want to say yet exactly where the Palestinians would make their homes.

“You must understand that these people lost everything. They have suffered a lot, they are afraid and they want to keep a low profile,” he said.

Brazil plans to give them identity papers so they will have the same status as Brazilian citizens. They will be enrolled in Portuguese classes and will receive monthly financial aid until they are able to support themselves, officials said.

An estimated 4.2 million Iraqis have been forced to flee their homes due to violence and sectarian unrest, according to the UN refugee agency.

GENEVA (AFP) — The UN’s human rights chief has expressed her “grave concern” at Israel’s decision to declare the Gaza Strip a “hostile territory,” and its threats to cut off fuel and electricity supplies.

In a statement issued late on Thursday, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour warned that “the implementation of such measures would impose an unbearable burden on the civilian population of Gaza.”

She reiterated condemnation of “indiscriminate” rocket attacks launched from Gaza, but called on Israel to show restraint and abide by its responsibilities under international humanitarian law.

Israel’s Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said on Wednesday that the Jewish state needed to answer what she termed daily “terror attacks” on its soil from Gaza.

The Gaza Strip, home to some 1.5 million people, has been ruled by the Islamist Hamas movement since a bloody power struggle with its secular Fatah rivals in June.

Hamas blasted the move as “collective punishment” while the UN Secretary General urged Israel to reconsider.

Cutting supplies “would be contrary to Israel’s obligations towards the civilian population under international humanitarian and human rights law,” Ban Ki-moon warned.

A U.S. Army captain in Africa waxes philosophical. It’s like the old saying, he opines; “give a man a fish, he’ll eat for a day, teach him how to fish and he’ll eat forever.”

Is he talking about skills-building, or community empowerment? No: Captain Joseph Cruz goes from channeling the musician Speech from the American hip-hop group Arrested Development back to his military-approved talking points: “the same can be said about military to military training and that’s why we do it.”

The Delta company soldier is one of 1,800 based in Djibouti at an old French Foreign Legion base, and he is comparing lessons in small naval patrol boat tactics, approaches to counter terrorism operations, and how to use an M-16 rifle, to teaching a man to fish.

It is not just the Djiboutians who are receiving these lessons — members of the Ethiopian, Ugandan and Kenyan armed forces have also been on “fishing trips” with the U.S. military.

Most Americans have never heard of Djibouti, and fewer can pronounce it correctly, but here — far from the bombed bridges of Baghdad and the flourishing poppy fields of Afghanistan — is the third front of the war on terrorism. As Rear Admiral Richard Hunt, the Commander of Combined Joint Taskforce-Horn of Africa (or CJT-HOA, in inimitable military style), explains: “Africa is the new frontier that we need to engage now, or we are going to end up doing it later in a very negative way.”

As part of the CJT-HOA these soldiers are also building schools, digging wells and sanitizing slaughterhouses. Their work is delineated by the four Ps and the three Ds: Prevent conflict, promote regional stability, protect coalition interests and prevail against extremism in East Africa and Yemen through diplomacy, development and defense.

Amid the commemorations, tributes, and critiques that cluster around the September 11 anniversary, we should not lose sight of how the war on terrorism is militarizing Africa. With under-tapped oil reserves, vast stretches of ungoverned space, impoverished populations and pandemics of AIDS/HIV and other diseases, Africa is now on Washington’s radar screen. The National Security Strategy for the United States, 2006 says: “Africa holds growing geo-strategic importance and is a high priority of this administration.” But the most significant way that high priority status is being expressed is through commitments of military aid, training, troops and equipment.

The U.S. base in Djibouti is just one plank in a new platform of military engagement in Africa. There is also the Trans Sahara Counter Terrorism Initiative (TSCTI), which Congress funded at $500 million over six years in 2005. There are also increased naval maneuvers in West Africa’s Gulf of Guinea, and establishment of a P3 Orion aerial surveillance station in Algeria.

And now, as though the Pentagon does not have enough on its plate, President George W. Bush has established United States African Command (AFRICOM) as the newest U.S. military sphere of influence. The command brings together most of the continent (Egypt will remain under CENTCOM) for the first time, and according to President Bush it “will enhance our efforts to bring peace and security to the people of Africa and promote our common goals of development, health, education, democracy, and economic growth in Africa.”

But the administration is mostly trying to define AFRICOM by what it is not:

Theresa Whelan, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for African Affairs, says: “Africa Command is not going to reflect a U.S. intent to engage kinetically in Africa. This is about prevention. This is not about fighting wars.” At another point, Whelan also said “This is not about a scramble for the continent.”

“We are not at war in Africa. Nor do we expect to be at war in Africa. Our embassies and AFRICOM will work in concert to keep it that way,” notes Jendayi Frazer, Assistant Secretary of State for Africa.

Despite these reassurances, many African nations view this move with a healthy dose of skepticism. They are expressing this view by shutting their doors. AFRICOM is temporarily based in Germany, but commanders hope to make the move to the region by fall 2008. The military seems to be favoring a “lily pad” approach of small bases across West Africa and the Horn region so as to not commit significant troops or lend credence to African concerns of a U.S. occupation. But where are these lily pads going to go?

Zambia has said no. In early September, President Levy Mwanawasa said that within the Southern African Development Community (a network of fourteen nations) “none of us is interested” in hosting the command. The South Africa Defense Minister Mosiuoa Lekota has refused to meet with U.S. General William “Kip” Ward, who will command AFRICOM. Lekota said recently, “Africa has to avoid the presence of foreign forces on her soil.”

But, some countries are viewing AFRICOM as an opportunity. The United States has already secured access agreements with Senegal, Mali, Ghana, Gabon and Namibia. And the United States’ close ally Liberia has aggressively promoted of the Command. President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf penned a widely cited and circulated op-ed for AllAfrica.Com that hyped the Command as an opportunity for African nations. She has lobbied hard for AFRICOM to come to Liberia. The United States is also looking at Sao Tome and Principe, Equatorial Guinea, Kenya, Djibouti, and Ethiopia as possible locations.

In case none of these options work out, the Navy has a novel (and very expensive) idea to forgo land completely and house AFRICOM on a high-tech joint command and control ship that would circumnavigate the region.

Even as these discussions continue, some African nations are receiving significant increases in military aid and weapons sales; most of these increases have gone to oil-rich nations and compliant states where the U.S. military seeks a strategic toehold. The Center for Defense Information recently completed “U.S. Arms Exports and Military Assistance in the “Global War on Terror;” an analysis of increases in military aid since September 11, 2001. The report compares the military aid and weapons sales in the five-year leading up to 2001 and the five years since.

For example: since September 11, Kenya, which the State Department describes as a “frontline state” in the war on terrorism, has received eight times more military aid than in the preceding five years.

Djibouti, which has opened its territory to U.S. forces, received forty times more military aid, and an eightfold increase in the value of weapons transfers.

Oil-rich Algeria, where the surveillance equipment is based, has received ten times more aid and a warm embrace from Washington.

Nigeria, the fifth largest supplier of oil to the United States, is slated to receive $1.35 million in Foreign Military Financing for 2008 despite persistent human rights abuses.

Mali is described as an “active partner in the war against terrorism” by the State Department and is a good example of a little military aid going a long way. The desert nation is slated to receive just $250,000 in International Military Education and Training (IMET funding) and no Foreign Military Financing in 2008. But, Mali participates in both the Regional Defense Counter Terrorism Fellowship Program and the Anti-terrorism Assistance program, receiving additional funding through these programs. Aid comes in other forms too. Just this week, a U.S. C-130 military transport plane dropped food aid to Malian soldiers as they pursued armed members of the Tuareg ethnic group. This sort of assistance is not documented or quantified in any ledger or report but — if repeated regularly — could significantly increase the Malian military’s capabilities.

U.S. arms sales to Ethiopia, which has one of Africa’s largest armies, have roughly doubled and military aid has increased two and a half times. But the nation has not received military Humvees since 2002, when it used them against its own people. During protests following the May 2002 elections, the Ethiopian military fired on crowds from the Humvees, killing 85 people. The U.S. sold the Humvees to Ethiopia for counter-terrorism operations. Will the other military assistance Ethiopia receives be similarly abused?

It is always heartening (and non-threatening) to hear soldiers speaking of their mission in altruistic terms. “The hope is to prevent another Iraq or Afghanistan by giving back,” says John Harris, commander Command Senior Enlisted Leader of CJT-HOA. But, the soldiers are not there to make friends. The base had been used twice to launch incursions into Somalia (without the permission or even knowledge of the Djiboutian government).

Richard Lugar (R-IN), one of the wise men in the Senate, commented during an AFRICOM hearing that the Pentagon enjoys far greater resources than the State Department. He observed, “This imbalance within our own structure will be reflected in AFRICOM initially — hopefully not perpetually.” There is no indication that humanitarian investments will outpace military contributions any time soon — especially when the justification for aid remains the war on terrorism.

The Congressional Research Service’s latest accounting of the Global War on Terrorism, of which AFRICOM would be a part, puts the cost at $611 billion since 2001, not including additional recent requests of $147 billion and another $50 billion.

For less than that $808 billion spent in the last six years, we could provide universal primary education, reduce infant mortality by two thirds and provide universal access to potable water and not just for the United States, but also for the world. These Millennium Development Goals have languished with sporadic investment and big promises, while military solutions to problems are funded robustly.

Reexamining this imbalance seems like a crucial first step. And the battle for African hearts and minds will not be won if it’s clear that it is being waged more for the sake of U.S. strategic interests than African needs.

Six courageous families in the small Louisiana town of Jena sent out a call for justice that has now been amplified around the world. Yesterday’s mass protests in Jena were unlike anything I have seen in my life, a beautiful and enormous outpouring of energy and outrage that may have the potential to ignite a movement.

The basic facts of the case are by now widely known. In this 85% white town, where the high school yard was segregated by race, a Black student asked to sit under a tree that had been reserved for white students only. The next day, three nooses hung from the tree. The white students who hung the nooses received only a minor punishment, and more importantly, no one in the white power structure of LaSalle Parish, where Jena is located, seemed to take the nooses seriously as racial incident. There were no lectures to the students on the meaning of the nooses, or the legacy of racism, slavery and Jim Crow in the rural south. Instead, the Parish’s district attorney told protesting Black students that he could take away their lives, “with a stroke of my pen.” He then proceeded to attempt to do just that, charging six students with attempted murder after a schoolyard fight later that year.

In the nine months since their children were charged with attempted murder, the family members of the Jena Six organized meetings, hosted rallies, sent out press releases and letters and made phone calls – whatever they could think of. They were determined to not let this stand. For months, they stood nearly alone, accompanied by solidarity visits from activists from nearby towns and cities in Louisiana and Texas. Many of their friends and neighbors were afraid to speak out, and some reported having their jobs threatened. One white couple who spoke out said they felt pressured to leave town. But, in the face of what seemed like overwhelming obstacles, and with no organizing experience or friends in high places, the people of Jena continued to struggle. After months of silence from the media and from mainstream civil rights organizations, the first media stories began appearing, which were widely forwarded by mail, and amplified by homemade videos. After Mychal Bell’s conviction at the end of June, and stories on Democracy Now and in the Final Call newspaper, support started growing exponentially, with hundreds of letters bringing tens of thousands of dollars in donations. By September, it became a movement that even the corporate media could not ignore.

At 5:00am, the buses were already arriving. A full bus from Chicago emptied out, some people brushing their teeth as they stepped into the slightly cold pre-dawn air. They seemed exhausted, but also charged and energized. Next came buses from Baton Rouge, Los Angeles and Philadelphia. By 7:00am, reports were coming in that hundreds of buses were lined up outside of town, some having been briefly prevented by State police from entering. Meanwhile, hundreds of people, from cars and buses and motorcycles, were pouring into Jena, while many thousands more were gathering in the streets outside the Jena courthouse. As simultaneous rallies began in the two locations, thousands of more people streamed into the city. By 9:00am, there were, by some estimates, up to 50,000 people in this town of 2,500. Almost every business in town was shut down, many roads were closed by police checkpoints, and a sea of protest filled the city for miles.

This demonstration was not initiated by any one national organization, and there was little coordination between some of the major organizations involved. The initial call came from the families themselves, and most people had heard about the demonstration through local Black radio stations, especially on syndicated shows like the Michael Baisden and Steve Harvey shows, as well as through blogs and youtube (one activist-made youtube video, recommended by Baisden, has already been seen well over a million times) as well as on social networking sites like myspace. As Howard Witt has pointed out in the Chicago Tribune, “Jackson, Sharpton and other big-name civil rights figures, far from leading this movement, have had to scramble to catch up. So, too, has the national media, which has only recently noticed a story that has been agitating many black Americans for months.”

This decentralization was beautiful, although sometimes chaotic. As thousands gathered at the rally at the ball field, which was sponsored by the NAACP, thousands more demonstrators marched from the courthouse to the Jena High School, and tens of thousands continued to arrive and fill the streets around downtown Jena. Because this movement was without central leadership, there were many agendas, and also some confusion, as people were unsure when the march began, or if there was a march, and also unsure about parallel events, such as an afternoon hiphop concert at the ball field, which was mostly attended by people from the local community. People seemed unconcerned about the lack of clarity, however, and marched on their own schedule, which led to a more democratic feel to the day, unlike the more controlled, and sometimes disempowering, marches that some mainstream groups have organized in the past.

The t-shirts on display reflected the lack of central control – every community had made their own t-shirt, literally hundreds of variations on the theme of Free The Jena Six, many personalized to reflect their school or community. Hours of speakers delivered messages of solidarity and calls to action, from Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson to performers such as Mos Def and Sunni Patterson, while the enormous crowds marched and chanted, and also simply basked in a truly historic outpouring of activism. Participants varied from children and teens at their first demonstration to civil rights movement veterans. Many people who had never before been to a demonstration ended up organizing a delegation or booking a bus for this journey.

While the vast majority of the white community of Jena chose to stay either indoors or out of town, hundreds of Black Jena residents proudly displayed their “Free The Jena Six” shirts, and continued to gather in the ball field hours after most out of town visitors had left. White activists from across the US also largely stayed away from this historic event – perhaps 1 to 3 percent of the crowd was white, in what amounts to a disturbing silence from the white left and liberals. This silence indicates that the US Left is divided by race in many of the same ways this country is.

Yesterday’s march, however, was not about division. It was a generational moment – the kind of watershed event that could signal a turning point in our movements. But what does the gigantic crowd in Jena mean? For some supporters, it felt like a fulfillment of those months that the families stood alone – a moment where the world stood with them, and the power structure backed down. In the last week Mychal Bell’s convictions have been overturned, and most of the other students saw their charges lessened. Yesterday was also a moment for grassroots independent media, who built this story, and kept it alive until the 24 hour news channels could no longer ignore it. It was a moment for historically black colleges and universities to shine – Student activists organized bus convoys – five or more buses arrived from many southern schools – which were quickly filled by a broad range of students.

Yesterday was a moment for the unaffiliated left, for people everywhere concerned about a criminal justice system that has locked up two million and keeps growing. It was a moment for those concerned about school systems in the US, and especially the policing of our schools, what activists have called the School to Prison Pipeline. It was a moment for those that feel that the US has still not dealt with our history of slavery and Jim Crow, and our present realities of white supremacy. Perhaps that is where the power in yesterday’s demonstration lies; if this undirected and uncontrolled outrage can be directed towards real societal change, if outrages like Jena can finally bring about the conversation on race in this country that we were promised after Katrina, if this united movement to support these six kids can show that we can unite for justice and win, then Jena will truly have been a victory.

As writer Andre Banks asked yesterday, “What would happen if every person who wore a t-shirt today or handed out a flyer or wrote a blog post woke up tomorrow and looked for the Mychal Bell in their own backyard? He, or she, won’t be hard to find. What if our outrage, today directed at the small Louisiana town of Jena, extended to parallel injustices in Detroit or Cincinnati or Sacramento or Miami? What if we viewed this mobilization not as the end of a successful, innovative campaign, but as the moment that catalyzes us into broader and deeper action in every place where we are?” If this happens, we can say that it all began with six families in Jena, Louisiana, who refused to stay silent.

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Jordan Flaherty is an editor of Left Turn Magazine , a journal of grassroots resistance. His May 9, 2007 article from Jena was one of the first to bring the case to a national audience. His previous articles from Jena are online at http://www.leftturn.org. To contact Jordan, email: neworleans@leftturn.org. On myspace: http://www.myspace.com/secondlines.

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Resources:

New York Collective of Radical Educators (NYCoRE) and Network of Teacher Activist Groups (TAG) have developed: Revealing Racist Roots: The 3 R’s for Teaching About the Jena 6, a curriculum guide for teachers to address what’s happening in Jena. Download the resource guide in PDF Version or Word Version for free at: www.nycore.org OR www.t4sj.org.

Donate to support the legal defense fund:
Jena 6 Defense Committee
PO BOX 2798
Jena, LA 71342

Sign the petitions at: http://www.colorofchange.org/jena/

For more information or to offer concrete support, email:
jena6defense(at)gmail.com

Coverage from The Final Call newspaper: http://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/article_3937.shtml

Andre Banks’ Blog: writewhatilike.typepad.com

The Jena Six and the School To Prison Pipeline: http://naacpldf.org/content.aspx?article=1208

If you are in nyc and want to get involved Jena Six Support, email: da_bla2@yahoo.com.
In New Orleans, email: neworleans@leftturn.org.

Has anyone noticed that our commander-in-chief no longer plays dress up? He hasn’t done so for a while and that’s no small thing. It’s a phenomenon that came and went almost without comment in the media.

I don’t remember the first time I noticed that George W. Bush liked to dress up. It could have been in May 2003 when he strutted across that carrier deck all togged out to announce that “major combat operations had ended” in Iraq, or when he started appearing before massed, hoo-ahing troops in military-style jackets with “George W. Bush, Commander in Chief” hand-stitched across the chest, or when he served that inedible turkey in Baghdad. I can’t tell you either when it first registered that he was visibly enjoying himself “in uniform”; or when it occurred to me that this was not just play-acting, but actual play of a very young and un-presidential sort; or when I first noticed that, “in uniform,” he looked strangely like a life-sized version of the original 12-inch GI Joe doll. (“Action figure” was the term first invented for it, because who wanted a boy to think he had a Barbie, even if it came with its own “beach assault fatigue shirt” and “bivouac pup-tent set”?)

Here’s something I suspect goes with the above. With rare exceptions, the fiercest post-9/11 “warriors” of this administration were never in the military. They had, in the Vice President’s words, “other priorities in the ’60s.” Hence that old (and not very useful) term “chickenhawks.” On the other hand, a surprising number of Democrats in Congress had actually served in the military — not that, from Senators Max Cleland and John Kerry to Jack Reed, it’s done them much political good. Americans have preferred, it seems, to hear their war stories from the men who sat out the wars.

The reason, I suspect, is simple enough. I’m about George Bush’s age. My father, like his, fought in Asia in World War II. In the 1950s, my childhood years, that generation of fathers — the ones I knew, anyway — were remarkably silent on their actual war experiences, but to us kids that made no difference. All we had to do was walk to the nearest neighborhood movie theater, catch Merrill’s Marauders, or some other war flick, and it was obvious enough just what heroic things they had accomplished. George Bush and I both sat in the dark, enveloped in the same American mythic tradition — already then a couple of hundred years old — that I’ve called “victory culture”; we knew Americans deserved to, and would, triumph against savage enemies out on some distant frontier; we both thrilled to the sound of the bugle as the blue coats charged; we both felt the chills run up our spine as, with the Marine Hymn welling up, the Marines advanced victoriously while “The End” flashed on the screen.

Here’s the difference: I left that movie theater in the Vietnam era. Much of the Bush administration seems to have remained in the dark. There, it seems, they sat out defeat and emerged strangely untouched, as I’ve written elsewhere, as the Peter Pans of American war play. While, in the 1980s, G.I. Joe shrunk to 3¾-inch size to squeeze into the Star-Wars universe and began fighting fantasy villains, while others absorbed the Vietnam lesson, they arrived in the post-9/11 moment with a still untarnished dream of American triumphalism. And that, as Ira Chernus makes clear in a recent essay, “Glued to Our Seats in the Theater of War,” is what Americans wanted–and many, against all odds, still want–to hear.

The President and his top officials were the ones who could still embody the idea of a “Good War,” both enjoying the performance themselves and making it seem thrilling; and, for some years, a remarkable number of Americans suspended Vietnam-style disbelief and went with the flow. Under the circumstances, a surprising number still do. It just turned out–and who in the “reality-based” world can truly be surprised–that they couldn’t translate their all-American fantasy world, or the President’s dress-up dreams, into reality. Fighting actual wars proved a painfully different matter.

09/21/07 “The Nation” – – Blackwater USA’s mercenary mission in Iraq is very much in the news this week, and rightly so. The private military contractor’s war-for-profit program, which has been so brilliantly exposed by Jeremy Scahill, may finally get a measure of the official scrutiny it merits as the corporation scrambles to undo the revocation by the Iraqi government of its license to operate in that country. There will be official inquiries in Baghdad, and in Washington. The U.S. Congress might actually provide some of the oversight that is its responsibility. Perhaps, and this is a big “perhaps,” Blackwater’s “troops” could come home before the U.S. soldiers who have been forced to fight, and die, in defense of these international rent-a-cops.

But it is not the specific story of Blackwater that matters so much as the broader story of imperial excess that it illustrates.

If Blackwater, with an assist from the U.S. government, beats back the attempt by the Iraqis to regulate the firm’s activities — as now appears likely, considering Friday’s reports that the firm has resumed guarding U.S. State Department convoys in Baghdad — we will have all the confirmation that is needed of the great truth of the U.S. occupation of Iraq: This is a colonial endeavor no different than that of the British Empire against America’s founding generation revolted.

But even if Blackwater loses its fight to stay, even if the corporation is forced to shut down its multi-billion dollar, U.S. Treasury-funded operation in Iraq, the brief “accountability moment” may not be sufficient to open up the necessary debate about Iraq’s colonial status. The danger, for Iraq and the United States, that honest assessment of the crisis will lose out to face-saving gestures designed to foster the fantasy of Iraqi independence.

It is not enough that Blackwater is shamed and perhaps sanctioned. A Blackwater exit from Iraq will mean little if its mercenary contracts are merely taken over by one or more of the 140 other U.S.-sanctioned private security firms operating in that country — such as Vice President Dick Cheney’s Halliburton.

Whatever the precise play out of this Blackwater moment may be, the likelihood is that the colonial enterprise will continue. That’s because, in the absence of intense pressure from grassroots activists and the media, Congress is unlikely to go beyond a scratch at the surface of what is actually going on in Iraq.

The deeper discussion requires that a discussion about the substance that no less a figure than former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan describes as the reason for the invasion and occupation of this particular Middle Eastern land: oil

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. aptly observed that “colonialism was made for domination and for exploitation,” and there is no substance that the Bush-Cheney administration is more interested in dominating and exploiting than oil.

Thus, while it is right to pay close attention to the emerging discussion about Blackwater’s wicked work in Iraq, Americans would do well to pay an equal measure of attention to the still largely submerged discussion about an Iraqi oil deal that will pay huge benefits to the Hunt Oil Company, a Texas firm closely linked to the administration. How closely? When he was running Halliburton, Cheney invited Hunt Oil Company CEO Ray Hunt to serve on the firm’s board of directors. Hunt, a “Bush Pioneer” fund raiser during in 2000 who went on to serve as donated the tidy sum of $35 million to the Bush presidential library building fund.

The new “production sharing agreement” between Hunt Oil and the Kurdistan Regional Government puts one of the administration’s favorite firms in a position to reap immeasurable profits while undermining essential efforts to assure that Iraq’s oil revenues will be shared by all Iraqis. Hunt’s deal upsets hopes that Iraq’s mineral wealth might ultimately be a source of stability, replacing the promise of economic equity with the prospect of a black-gold rush that will only widen inequalities and heighten ethnic and regional resentments.

The Hunt deal is so sleazy — and so at odds with the stated goals of the Iraqi government and the U.S. regarding the sharing of oil revenues — that even Bush has acknowledged that U.S. embassy officials in Baghdad are deeply concerned about it. What Bush and Cheney have been slow to mention is the fact that Iraq’s oil minister, Hussain al-Shahristani, says the deal is illegal.

As with the Blackwater imbroglio, however, there is no assurance that the stance of the Iraqi government is definitional with regard to what happens in Iraq.

That is why it is disturbing that, for the most part, members of Congress — even members who say they do not want the United States to have a long-term presence in Iraq — have been slow to start talking about Hunt’s oil rigging.

One House member who has raised the alarm is Ohio Democrat Dennis Kucinich, who in his capacity as a key member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, has asked the committee’s chairman, California Democrat Henry Waxman, to launch an investigation into the Hunt Oil deal.

“As I have said for five years, this war is about oil,” Kucinich, who is mounting an anti-war bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, declared on the floor of the House this week. “The Bush Administration desires private control of Iraqi oil, but we have no right to force Iraq to give up control of their oil. We have no right to set preconditions to Iraq which lead Iraq to giving up control of their oil. The Constitution of Iraq designates that the oil of Iraq is the property for all Iraqi people.”

With that in mind, Kucinich explains, “I am calling for a Congressional investigation to determine the role the Administration may have played in the Hunt-Kurdistan deal, the effect the deal will have on the oil revenue sharing plan and the attempt by the Administration to privatize Iraqi oil.”

Waxman has been ahead of the curve on Blackwater, seeking testimony from the firm’s chairman at hearings scheduled for early October.

But Waxman needs to expand his focus, and the way to do that is by heeding Kucinich’s call for an investigation into the Hunt deal.

That inquiry should begin with two fundamental questions:

And, if the claim is that the Iraqis are in charge, then why is Ray Hunt about to start steering revenues from that country’s immense oil wealth into the same Texas bank accounts that have so generously funded the campaigns of George Bush and Dick Cheney?

WASHINGTON (Sept. 22) – Federal prosecutors are investigating whether employees of the private security firm Blackwater USA illegally smuggled into Iraq weapons that may have been sold on the black market and ended up in the hands of a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, officials said Friday.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Raleigh, N.C., is handling the investigation with help from Pentagon and State Department auditors, who have concluded there is enough evidence to file charges, the officials told The Associated Press. Blackwater is based in Moyock, N.C.

A spokeswoman for Blackwater did not return calls seeking comment Friday. The U.S. attorney for the eastern district of North Carolina, George Holding, declined to comment, as did Pentagon and State Department spokesmen.

Officials with knowledge of the case said it is active, although at an early stage. They spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter, which has heightened since 11 Iraqis were killed Sunday in a shooting involving Blackwater contractors protecting a U.S. diplomatic convoy in Baghdad .

The officials could not say whether the investigation would result in indictments, how many Blackwater employees are involved or if the company itself, which has won hundreds of millions of dollars in government security contracts since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, is under scrutiny.

In Saturday’s editions, The News & Observer of Raleigh reported that two former Blackwater employees – Kenneth Wayne Cashwell of Virginia Beach, Va., and William Ellsworth “Max” Grumiaux of Clemmons, N.C. – are cooperating with federal investigators.

Cashwell and Grumiaux pleaded guilty in early 2007 to possession of stolen firearms that had been shipped in interstate or foreign commerce, and aided and abetted another in doing so, according to court papers viewed by The Associated Press. In their plea agreements, which call for a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine, the men agreed to testify in any future proceedings.

Calls to defense attorneys were not immediately returned Friday evening, and calls to the telephone listings for both men also were not returned.

The News & Observer, citing unidentified sources, reported that the probe was looking at whether Blackwater had shipped unlicensed automatic weapons and military goods to Iraq without a license.

The paper’s report that the company itself was under investigation could not be confirmed by the AP.

Meanwhile, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice ordered a review of security practices for U.S. diplomats in Iraq following a deadly incident involving Blackwater USA guards protecting an embassy convoy.

Rice’s announcement came as the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad resumed limited diplomatic convoys under the protection of Blackwater outside the heavily fortified Green Zone after a suspension because of the weekend incident in that city.

In the United States, officials in Washington said the smuggling investigation grew from internal Pentagon and State Department inquiries into U.S. weapons that had gone missing in Iraq. It gained steam after Turkish authorities protested to the U.S. in July that they had seized American arms from the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, rebels.

The Turks provided serial numbers of the weapons to U.S. investigators, said a Turkish official.

The Pentagon said in late July it was looking into the Turkish complaints and a U.S. official said FBI agents had traveled to Turkey in recent months to look into cases of missing U.S. weapons in Iraq.

Investigators are determining whether the alleged Blackwater weapons match those taken from the PKK.

It was not clear if Blackwater employees suspected of selling to the black market knew the weapons they allegedly sold to middlemen might wind up with the PKK. If they did, possible charges against them could be more serious than theft or illegal weapons sales, officials said.

The PKK, which is fighting for an independent Kurdistan, is banned in Turkey, which has a restive Kurdish population and is considered a “foreign terrorist organization” by the State Department. That designation bars U.S. citizens or those in U.S. jurisdictions from supporting the group in any way.

The North Carolina investigation was first brought to light by State Department Inspector General Howard Krongard, who mentioned it, perhaps inadvertently, this week while denying he had improperly blocked fraud and corruption probes in Iraq and Afghanistan .

Krongard was accused in a letter by Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, of politically motivated malfeasance, including refusing to cooperate with an investigation into alleged weapons smuggling by a large, unidentified State Department contractor.

In response, Krongard said in a written statement that he “made one of my best investigators available to help Assistant U.S. Attorneys in North Carolina in their investigation into alleged smuggling of weapons into Iraq by a contractor.”

His statement went further than Waxman’s letter because it identified the state in which the investigation was taking place. Blackwater is the biggest of the State Department’s three private security contractors.

The other two, Dyncorp and Triple Canopy, are based in Washington’s northern Virginias suburbs, outside the jurisdiction of the North Carolina’s attorneys.

On January 6, 2007, two days after Nancy Pelosi became Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, about 1,000 activists laid down on San Francisco’s Ocean Beach to spell out the word “IMPEACH!” in 100-foot letters. Photos of the clear message to Pelosi taken from a helicopter appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, and on websites around the world (for photos and footage, see www.beachimpeach.org).

On April 28, five days after Representative Dennis Kucinich filed articles of impeachment against Dick Cheney, the second “Beach Impeach” event spelled out the words “IMPEACH NOW!” In the neighborhood of 1,500 people participated in that event, which also involved standing in formation to spell out “PEACE NOW!”

When by mid-summer Pelosi was still disinterested taking action against Cheney or Bush, Brad Newsham, the principal organizer of the first two events, was ready for a third. On September 15, he struck again on Crissy Field near San Francisco’s Marina district.

Newsham wrote in a September 7 email: “Today I managed to speak to the senior staff member in Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco office, and through him I invited Ms. Pelosi to occupy the fourth seat in our helicopter. After all, there is going to be a crowd of impeachment-impassioned folks right there in her constituency, and maybe this would be a perfect time for her to at least have a bird’s eye view of them. When he said that Rep. Pelosi was not available that day, I invited him, the senior staff member himself, but he quickly said he was not available either — in fact no one from Pelosi’s office would be available that day. ‘So is this a dead end?’ I asked. ‘Yes.’ End of curt, even icy, conversation.”

As with the first two beach mobilizations, at the September 15 protest volunteers circulated with postcards and pens to generate constituent messages to Pelosi, while a photographer circled in a helicopter overhead.

I spoke to San Francisco resident Valerie Coshnear at the event’s end, who told me, “The last two times I did the Impeach-on-the-beach-thing, I did it with “E”s. I did not have to become any other letter. Just get up and down and do the wave thing, touch the sea wall, do the boogey woogey.”

Warming to the topic, Ms. Coshnear went on, “This time I wanted more of a challenge. I decided to be in the “M” in IMPEACH, which required moving to make up the the “N” in ” REASON:” and “TREASON!” [the second two words spelled out]. It was a wonderful letter to be in because previously I could only say “I think therefore I “M”, but today I was lying with over a thousand people in the grass at Crissy Field, tendrils of fog stretching from the tip of the Golden Gate swirling overhead. In our 100 foot letter alone, several hundred people who don’t buy the lies of those unconscionable traitors and warmongers in the White House, could lay down their bodies and say as one mammoth letter “We think, and are willing to move, therefore we ‘M.'” Other participants seemed equally giddy with enthusiasm, and Brad Newsham, who directed the sitting-to-standing human wave activities from a step ladder, was jubilant afterward. (It was also the cabdriver/writer/activist’s birthday, and the assembled protestors serenaded him with “Happy Birthday to You” several times.)

Like many of those I spoke to at Crissy Field, Newsham was pleased that anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan recently threw her hat into the ring to run against Pelosi. Sheehan committed to running against the veteran politician because of the Speaker’s refusal to push impeachment.

“Cindy is a Voice of the People ­ the freshest one I’ve heard recently,” he told me. “She strikes me as uniquely un-bought, and seems fueled not by ambition but by the pain of having her son ripped away from her by a band of criminals. Imagine a House of Representatives full of people like Cindy — like us — instead of the elite who have eternally toyed with us.”

Sheehan’s son Casey was killed in Iraq, which led her to camp out near President Bush’s vacation ranch in Crawford, Texas, to send an unwavering anti-war message to Bush and the entire world.

Sheehan’s statement upon launching her candidacy clearly showed she was out to rock the boat: “An electorate disgusted with the policies of the Bush regime put the Democrats in the majority in Congress in November ’06. We voted for change, however, Congress, under the Speakership of Ms. Pelosi has done nothing but protect the status quo of the corporate elite and, in fact, since she has been the Speaker, the situation in the Middle East has grown far worse, with Congress’ help, and recently more of our essential freedoms were given to BushCo by Congress. That is not what we elected them to do!”

In a commentary largely supportive of Sheehan’s initiative, Nation Magazine political corresponent John Nichols noted, “Pelosi has all the advantages of incumbency — and more. Closely tied for decades to the Democratic political establishment of San Francisco, Pelosi and her campaign team know just about everything there is to know about winning elections there. And, as the Speaker of the House, she has the ability to deliver both on the practical and egotistical needs of the city by the bay. Additionally, she has the ability to raise and spend more money than any opponent.”

But given that 58% of San Franciscans voting in November 2006 endorsed Proposition J, which called for impeachment proceedings against Bush and Cheney, on one of the most important issues of the day Sheehan is clearly more in line with the majority of Pelosi’s constituents than the Speaker. It should be an interesting campaign.

Why are a growing number of young women in this relatively safe corner of Iraq showing up in local hospitals, dying of suspicious burns?

Sept. 18, 2007 – The doctor knows, just from glancing at the burns, that someone is lying to him. Srood Tawfiq, a reconstructive surgeon at Sulaimaniya Hospital in Iraq’s northern Kurdish region, buttons his white lab coat and steps into the burn unit. “Busy day yesterday,” he says, pulling back a curtain to reveal a sleeping 16-year-old girl with kerosene burns over 90 percent of her body. The mother of the young woman, hovering over the hospital bed, tells Tawfiq that her daughter slipped and scalded herself while carrying a portable stove. The doctor listens sympathetically. But later, out of the woman’s earshot, he explains that he doubts the mother’s explanation. If it were really an accident, he whispers, “you don’t get this degree of burn.” Outside the hospital room he pulls off his hygienic mask and shakes his head. “We never tell them that they’re going to die,” he says quietly.

Kurdistan has long been considered the one consistently safe and relatively prosperous region of Iraq. So why, in increasing numbers, are the territory’s young women showing up at local hospitals dying of suspicious burns? According to the Women’s Union of Kurdistan, there were 95 such cases in the first six months of 2007, up 15 percent since last year. A December 2006 report from the Asuda women’s rights group in Sulaimaniya says that the “phenomenon is increasing at an alarming rate.” Ninety-five percent of the victims are under 30, and roughly half are between 16 and 21. On the day before I stopped by the emergency hospital in Sulaimaniya, six young women were admitted with major burns, three of them telling suspicious stories. When I called Zryan Yones, the Kurdish health minister, he said that the trend among young women is more disturbing than a recent outbreak of cholera. He provided a startling statistic: since August 10, Kurdistan had had nine deaths from its cholera epidemic; in the same period, there were 25 young women dead of burns. “I have one young girl lying in our morgues every single day,” he told me.

So what’s going on? Most of the survivors tell doctors that the burns resulted from a “cooking accident.” But surgeons told me they can tell that the vast majority are not telling the truth. Kerosene, the fuel used to cook here, is not particularly volatile; if a woman comes in with burns over the majority of her body, it is likely intentional. Women’s rights advocates in Sulaimaniya believe that the majority of the burn cases are suicide attempts; the remainder are suspected to be honor killings or other murders disguised as accidents or suicide. (“Cooking accident” has long been a euphemism for dowry killing in India.) Doctors told me that it’s virtually impossible to distinguish between murder and suicide based on the burns and the women’s stories. Still, anecdotal evidence suggests that the trend may be aggravated by a copycat effect among Kurdistan’s teenagers. One 20-year-old woman, Heshw Mohammad, who briefly considered burning herself after her father killed her boyfriend two years ago, told me that self-immolation has become a sort of fashion among teenage Kurdish women. “They imitate each other,” she says.