The Rag Blog

Odessa Lewis is 62 years old. When I saw her last week, she was crying because she is being evicted. A long-time resident of the Lafitte public housing apartments, since Katrina she has been locked out of her apartment and forced to live in a 240 square foot FEMA trailer. Ms. Lewis has asked repeatedly to be allowed to return to her apartment to clean and fix it up so she can move back in. She even offered to do all the work herself and with friends at no cost. The government continually refused to allow her to return. Now she is being evicted from her trailer and fears she will become homeless because there is no place for working people, especially African American working and poor people, to live in New Orleans. Ms. Lewis is a strong woman who has worked her whole life. But the stress of being locked out of her apartment, living in a FEMA trailer and the possibility of being homeless brought out the tears. Thousands of other mothers and grandmothers are in the same situation.

Renting is so hard in part because there is a noose closing around the housing opportunities of New Orleans African American renters displaced by Katrina. They have been openly and directly targeted by public and private actions designed to keep them away. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) just added their weight to the attack by approving the demolition of 2966 apartments in New Orleans.

Despite telling a federal judge for the last year and a half that approvals of public housing demolition applications take about 100 working days to evaluate, HUD approved the plan to demolish nearly 3000 apartments one day after the complete application was filed. HUD says the 3000 apartments are scheduled to be replaced in a few years with up to 744 public housing eligible apartments and a few hundred subsidized apartments.

Unfortunately, HUD’s actions are consistent with other governmental attacks on African American renters.

After Katrina, St. Bernard Parish, a 93% white adjoining suburb, enacted a law prohibiting home owners from renting their property to anyone who is not a blood relative. Jefferson Parish, another majority white adjoining suburb, unanimously passed an ordinance prohibiting the construction of any subsidized housing. The sponsoring legislator condemned poor people as “lazy,” “ignorant” and “leeches on society”–specifically hoping to guard against former residents of New Orleans public housing. Across Lake Ponchartrain from New Orleans, the chief law enforcement officer of St. Tammany Parish, Sheriff Jack Strain, complained openly about the post-Katrina presence of “thugs and trash from New Orleans” and announced that people with dreadlocks or “chee wee hairstyles” could “expect to be getting a visit from a sheriff’s deputy.”

HUD’s actions are also bolstered by pervasive racial discrimination in the private market as well. The Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center has documented widespread racial discrimination in the metro New Orleans rental market and in the states surrounding the gulf coast.

HUD told a federal judge a few days “the average time [for the process of reviewing applications for demolition] is 100 days.” They did suggest that the process could be expedited in the case of New Orleans. So it was. Instead of reviewing the details of demolishing 3000 apartments and considering the law and facts and the administrative record for 100 days, HUD expedited the process to one day.

HUD and the Housing Authority of New Orleans (HANO, which HUD has been running for years) argued passionately that residents displaced from public housing (referred to once in their argument as ‘refugees’) are financially “better off” than they were before. This echoes the Barbara Bush comment of September 5, 2005 when she said, viewing the overwhelmingly African American crowd of thousands of people living on cots in the Astrodome, “And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this – (she chuckles slightly) this is working very well for them.”

HUD announced approval of demolition of 2966 units of public housing in New Orleans – 896 apartments at Lafitte, 521 at C.J. Peete, 1158 at B.W. Cooper, and 1391 at St. Bernard. A few buildings on each site will be retained for historical preservation purposes.

New Orleans had a severe affordable housing crisis before Katrina when HANO housed over 5000 families. There was a waiting list of 8000 families trying to get in. HUD and HANO together did such a poor job of administering the agency that there were about 2000 more empty apartments that had been scheduled for major repairs for years.

The continuing deceptions by HUD and HANO have been shameless. Since Katrina, HUD has continued to act out both sides of a charade that the local housing authority is making decisions and HUD is waiting on local actions. Yet, the decision to demolish was announced by the Secretary of HUD in DC over a year ago. But in the year since then, HUD has continued to tell a federal judge that any legal challenge to demolitions was premature because HANO had not even submitted an application to HUD for their careful 100 day evaluation. This is while a HUD employee runs the agency, commuting back and forth to DC each week. HANO even announced they would have 2000 apartments ready for people in August of 2006–a deadline not met even in September 2007. HANO later announced to the public that they had a list of 250 apartments ready for people to return only to admit in writing weeks later that no such list existed–nor were the phantom apartments ready.

The list of untruths goes on.

HUD would not agree to delay the demolition of the 3000 apartments until Congress finished reviewing legislation that would give residents the right to return and participate in the process of determining what kind of affordable housing should be in place in New Orleans.

And so HUD’s actions help further restrict the opportunities for African American renters in New Orleans. Adjoining white suburbs do not want African American renters back. HUD does not want them back. The local federal judge has refused to stop the demolitions.

But the mothers and grandmothers and their families and friends are still determined to return and resist demolition. One sign at a recent public housing rally summed it up. “We will not allow the community we built to be rebuilt without us.”

Odessa Lewis, despite her tears, said she is not giving up. She and other public housing residents promise “we did not come this far to be turned back now. We will do whatever is necessary to protect our homes.” Thousands of African American mothers and grandmothers are the ones directly targeted by HUD’s actions.

Forty years ago, Martin Luther King, Jr., said “We as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing-oriented” society to a “person-oriented” societyWhen profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.” We can add sexism to the list, particularly in the fight for the right of public housing residents to return.

The fight of Ms. Lewis and others on the gulf coast shows how much we need a radical revolution of values.

Awake and sing, ye that dwell in dust. —Isaiah 26:19

1.

Of all the various depredations of the Bush regime, none has been so thorough as its plundering of hope. Iraq will recover sooner. What was supposed to have been the crux of our foreign policy—a shock-and-awe tutorial on the utter futility of any opposition to the whims of American power—has achieved its greatest and perhaps its only lasting success in the American soul. You will want to cite the exceptions, the lunch-hour protests against the war, the dinner-party ejaculations of dissent, though you might also want to ask what substantive difference they bear to grousing about the weather or even to raging against the dying of the light—that is, to any ritualized complaint against forces universally acknowledged as unalterable. Bush is no longer the name of a president so much as the abbreviation of a proverb, something between Murphy’s Law and tomorrow’s fatal inducement to drink and be merry today.

If someone were to suggest, for example, that we begin a general strike on Election Day, November 6, 2007, for the sole purpose of removing this regime from power, how readily and with what well-practiced assurance would you find yourself producing the words “It won’t do any good”? Plausible and even courageous in the mouth of a patient who knows he’s going to die, the sentiment fits equally well in the heart of a citizen-ry that believes it is already dead.

2.

Any strike, whether it happens in a factory, a nation, or a marriage, amounts to a reaffirmation of consent. The strikers remind their overlords—and, equally important, themselves—that the seemingly perpetual machinery of daily life has an off switch as well as an on. Camus said that the one serious question of philosophy is whether or not to commit suicide; the one serious question of political philosophy is whether or not to get out of bed. Silly as it may have seemed at the time, John and Yoko’s famous stunt was based on a profound observation. Instant karma is not so instant—we ratify it day by day.

The stream of commuters heading into the city, the caravan of tractor-trailers pulling out of the rest stop into the dawn’s early light, speak a deep-throated Yes to the sum total of what’s going on in our collective life. The poet Richard Wilbur writes of the “ripped mouse” that “cries Concordance” in the talons of the owl; we too cry our daily assent in the grip of the prevailing order— except in those notable instances when, like a donkey or a Buddha, we refuse to budge.

The question we need to ask ourselves at this moment is what further provocations we require to justify digging in our heels. To put the question more pointedly: Are we willing to wait until the next presidential election, or for some interim congressional conversion experience, knowing that if we do wait, hundreds of our sons and daughters will be needlessly destroyed? Another poet, César Vallejo, framed the question like this:

A man shivers with cold, coughs, spits up blood.
Will it ever be fitting to allude to my inner soul? . . .
A cripple sleeps with one foot on his shoulder.
Shall I later on talk about Picasso, of all people?

A young man goes to Walter Reed without a face. Shall I make an appointment with my barber? A female prisoner is sodomized at Abu Ghraib. Shall I send a check to the Clinton campaign?

3.

You will recall that a major theme of the Bush Administration’s response to September 11 was that life should go on as usual. We should keep saying that broad consensual Yes as loudly as we dared. We could best express our patriotism by hitting the malls, by booking a flight to Disney World. At the time, the advice seemed prudent enough: avoid hysteria; defy the intimidations of murderers and fanatics.

In hindsight it’s hard not to see the roots of our predicament in the readiness with which we took that advice to heart. We did exactly as we were told, with a net result that is less an implicit defiance of terrorism than a tacit amen to the “war on terror,” including the war in Iraq. Granted, many of us have come to find both those wars unacceptable. But do we find them intolerable? Can you sleep? Yes, doctor, I can sleep. Can you work? Yes, doctor, I can work. Do you get out to the movies, enjoy a good restaurant? Actually, I have a reservation for tonight. Then I’d say you were doing okay, wouldn’t you? I’d say you were tolerating the treatment fairly well.

It is one thing to endure abuses and to carry on in spite of them. It is quite another thing to carry on to the point of abetting the abuse. We need to move the discussion of our nation’s health to the emergency room. We need to tell the doctors of the body politic that the treatment isn’t working—and that until it changes radically for the better, neither are we.

4.

No one person, least of all a freelance writer, has the prerogative to call or set the date for a general strike. What do you guys do for a strike, sit on your overdue library books? Still, what day more fitting for a strike than the first Tuesday of November, the Feast of the Hanging Chads? What other day on the national calendar cries so loudly for rededication?

The only date that comes close is September 11. You have to do a bit of soul-searching to see it, but one result of the Bush presidency has been a loss of connection to those who perished that day. Unless they were members of our families, unless we were involved in their rescue, do we think of them? It’s too easy to say that time eases the grief—there’s more to it than that, more even than the natural tendency to shy away from brooding on disasters that might happen again. We avoid thinking of the September 11 victims because to think of them we have to think also of what we have allowed to happen in their names. Or, if we object openly to what has happened, we have to parry the insinuation that we’re unmoved by their loss.

It is time for us to make a public profession of faith that the people who went to work that morning, who caught the cabs and rode the elevators and later jumped to their deaths, were not on the whole people who would sanction extraordinary rendition, preemptive war, and the suspension of habeas corpus; that in their heels and suits they were at least as decent as any sneaker-shod person standing vigil outside a post office with a stop the war sign. That the government workers who died in the Pentagon were not by some strange congenital fluke more obtuse than the high-ranking officers who thought the invasion of Iraq was a bad idea from the get-go. That the passengers who rushed the hijackers on Flight 93 were not repeating the mantra “It won’t do any good” while scratching their heads and their asses in a happy-hour funk.

An Election Day general strike would set our remembrance of those people free from the sarcophagi of rhetoric and rationalization. It would be the political equivalent of raising them from the dead. It would be a clear if sadly delayed message of solidarity to those voters in Ohio and Florida who were pretty much told they could drop dead.

5.

But how would it work? A curious question to ask given that not working is most of what it would entail. Not working until the president and the shadow president resigned or were impeached. Never mind what happens next. Rather, let our mandarins ask how this came to happen in the first place. Let them ask in shock and awe.

People who could not, for whatever reason, cease work could at least curtail consumption. In fact, that might prove the more effective action of the two. They could vacate the shopping malls. They could cancel their flights. With the aid of their Higher Power, they could turn off their cell phones. They could unplug their TVs.

The most successful general strike imaginable would require extraordinary measures simply to announce its success. It would require sound trucks going up and down the streets, Rupert Murdoch reduced to croaking through a bullhorn. Bonfires blazing on the hills. Bells tolling till they cracked. (Don’t we have one of those on display somewhere?)

Ironically, the segment of the population most unable to participate would be the troops stationed in the Middle East. Striking in their circumstances would amount to suicide. That distinction alone ought to suffice as a reason to strike, as a reminder of the unconscionable underside of our “normal” existence. We get on with our lives, they get on with their deaths.

As for how the strike would be publicized and organized, these would depend on the willingness to strike itself. The greater the willingness, the fewer the logistical requirements. How many Americans does it take to change a lightbulb? How many Web postings, how many emblazoned bedsheets hung from the upper-story windows? Think of it this way: How many hours does it take to learn the results of last night’s American Idol, even when you don’t want to know?

In 1943 the Danes managed to save 7,200 of their 7,800 Jewish neighbors from the Gestapo. They had no blogs, no television, no text messaging—and very little time to prepare. They passed their apartment keys to the hunted on the streets. They formed convoys to the coast. An ambulance driver set out with a phone book, stopping at any address with a Jewish-sounding name. No GPS for directions. No excuse not to try.

But what if it failed? What if the general strike proved to be anything but general? I thought Bush was supposed to be the one afraid of science. Hypothesis, experiment, analysis, conclusion—are they his hobgoblins or ours? What do we have to fear, except additional evidence that George W. Bush is exactly what he appears to be: the president few of us like and most of us deserve. But science dares to test the obvious. So let us dare.

6.

We could hardly be accused of innovation. General strikes have a long and venerable history. They’re as retro as the Bill of Rights. There was one in Great Britain in 1926, in France in 1968, in Ukraine in 2004, in Guinea just this year. Finns do it, Nepalis do it, even people without email do it . . .

But we don’t have to do it, you will say, because “we have a process.” Have or had, the verb remains tentative. In regard to verbs, Dick Cheney showed his superlative talent for le mot juste when in the halls of the U.S. Congress he told Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy to go fuck himself. He has since told congressional investigators to do the same thing. There’s your process. Dick Cheney could lie every day of his life for all the years of Methuselah, and for the sake of that one remark history would still need to remember him as an honest man. In the next world, Diogenes will kneel down before him. In this world, though, and in spite of the invitation tendered to me through my senator, I choose to remain on my feet.

“United we stand,” isn’t that how it goes? But we are not united, not by a long shot. At this juncture we may be able to unite only in what we will not stand for. The justification of torture, the violation of our privacy, the betrayal of our intelligence operatives, the bankrupting of our commonwealth, the besmirching of our country’s name, the feckless response to natural disaster, the dictatorial inflation of executive power, the senseless butchery of our youth—if these do not constitute a common ground for intolerance, what does?

People were indignant at the findings of the 9/11 Commission—it seems there were compelling reasons to believe an attack was imminent!—yet for the attack on our Constitution we have evidence even more compelling. How can we criticize an administration for failing to act in the face of a probable threat given our own refusal to act in the face of a threat already fulfilled? As long as we’re willing to go on with our business, Bush and Cheney will feel free to go on with their coup. As long as we’re willing to continue fucking ourselves, why should they have any scruples about telling us to smile during the act?

7.

Between undertaking the strike and achieving its objective, the latter requires the greater courage. It requires courage simply to admit that this is so. For too many of us, Bush has become a secret craving, an addiction. We loathe Bush the way that Peter Pan loathed Captain Hook; he’s a villain, to be sure, but he’s half the fun of living in Never-Never Land. He has provided us with an inexhaustible supply of editorial copy, partisan rectitude, and every sort of lame excuse for not engaging the system he represents. In that sense, asking “What if the strike were to fail?” is not even honest. On some level we would want it to fail.

Certainly this would be true of those who’ve declared themselves as presidential candidates and for whom the Bush legacy represents an unprecedented windfall of political capital. One need only speak a coherent sentence—one need only breathe from a differently shaped smirk—to seem like a savior. Ding-dong, the Witch is dead. Already I can see the winged monkeys who signed off on the Patriot Act and the Iraq invasion jumping up and down for joy. Already I can hear the nauseating gush: “Such a welcome relief after Bush!” Relief, yes. But relief is not hope.

How much better if we could say to our next administration: Don’t talk about Bush. We dealt with Bush. We dealt with Bush and in so doing we demonstrated our ability to deal with you. You have a mandate more rigorous than looking good beside Bush. You need a program more ambitious than “uniting the country.” We are united—at least we were, if only for a while, if only in our disgust. If only I believed all this would happen.

A Pentagon group has encouraged some U.S. military snipers in Iraq to target suspected insurgents by scattering pieces of “bait,” such as detonation cords, plastic explosives and ammunition, and then killing Iraqis who pick up the items, according to military court documents.

The classified program was described in investigative documents related to recently filed murder charges against three snipers who are accused of planting evidence on Iraqis they killed.

“Baiting is putting an object out there that we know they will use, with the intention of destroying the enemy,” Capt. Matthew P. Didier, the leader of an elite sniper scout platoon attached to the 1st Battalion of the 501st Infantry Regiment, said in a sworn statement. “Basically, we would put an item out there and watch it. If someone found the item, picked it up and attempted to leave with the item, we would engage the individual as I saw this as a sign they would use the item against U.S. Forces.”

In documents obtained by The Washington Post from family members of the accused soldiers, Didier said members of the U.S. military’s Asymmetric Warfare Group visited his unit in January and later passed along ammunition boxes filled with the “drop items” to be used “to disrupt the AIF [Anti-Iraq Forces] attempts at harming Coalition Forces and give us the upper hand in a fight.”

Eugene Fidell, president of the National Institute of Military Justice, said such a baiting program should be examined “quite meticulously” because it raises troubling possibilities, such as what happens when civilians pick up the items.

“In a country that is awash in armaments and magazines and implements of war, if every time somebody picked up something that was potentially useful as a weapon, you might as well ask every Iraqi to walk around with a target on his back,” Fidell said.

Soldiers said that about a dozen platoon members were aware of the program, and that numerous others knew about the “drop items” but did not know their purpose. Two soldiers who had not been officially informed about the program came forward with allegations of wrongdoing after they learned they were going to be punished for falling asleep on a sniper mission, according to the documents.

Army officials declined to discuss the classified program, details of which appear in unclassified investigative documents and in transcripts of court testimony. Criminal investigators wrote that they found materials related to the program in a white cardboard box and an ammunition can at the sniper unit’s base.

“We don’t discuss specific methods targeting enemy combatants,” said Paul Boyce, an Army spokesman. “The accused are charged with murder and wrongfully placing weapons on the remains of Iraqi nationals. There are no classified programs that authorize the murder of local nationals and the use of ‘drop weapons’ to make killings appear legally justified.”

It is unclear whether the program reached elsewhere in Iraq and how many people were killed through the baiting tactics.

Members of the sniper platoon have said they felt pressure from commanders to kill more insurgents because U.S. units in the area had taken heavy losses. The sniper unit — dubbed “the painted demons” because of the use of tiger-stripe face paint — often went on missions into hostile areas to intercept insurgents going to and from hidden weapons caches.

Free speech took a beating with another round of arrests September 18 in the nation’s capital. It was administered by the police at a rally sponsored by the most unlikely-sounding group to be involved in such a thing: Veterans for Freedom.

U.S. Senators Joe Lieberman, John McCain and Lindsey Graham were among the featured speakers at the rally held in Upper Senate Park on Capitol Hill. About 150 people attended the rally to support the group’s pro-war position, as did about 30 people who were not in support. Before the rally concluded, Leah Bolger, David Barrows, Christine Rainwater, Anne Kitridge, and Anne Katz were arrested by Capitol Police.

Barrows said he had gone to the park because he heard Lieberman was going to speak. When the Senator was talking, Barrows spoke out, “I don’t want your ‘bomb and run genocide’ in Iran.”

“As soon as I did, a plainclothes policeman came up to me and said, ‘You’re under arrest,'” the 60 year-old D.C. resident continued. But, Barrows said, instead of going with the officer immediately he moved another six feet closer to the stage, whereupon he was placed under arrest.

It wasn’t until he was taken to the Capitol Police station that Barrows discovered one of the charges against him was assault. “They told me I was being charged with assaulting a Gold Star mother at the rally. When I looked at their report, the accuser’s name and address had been blacked out but I recognized the photo of a well-groomed Asian-American woman I’d seen around Capitol Hill several times. Why in the world would I assault a Gold Star Mother? It makes no sense.”

Barrows was given a “stay away” order (not allowed to step foot on and Capitol property which includes the Capitol Building, the five House and Senate office buildings, and assorted bits of property adjoining them) and has a trial date pending.

Bolger, a retired Navy Commander and member of Veterans For Peace, said she went to the park for the same reason Barrows did, “to hear Lieberman, McCain and Lindsey Graham.” She was arrested and charged with unlawful assembly. After a night in the D.C. Metro Police lockup she pled not guilty at her arraignment. Trial is set for October 23 in D.C. Superior Court.

“It’s just bizzare,” the Corvallis, Oregon resident said. “How can I be charged with ‘unlawful assembly’ when I was at an outdoor rally in a public park sponsored by someone else? I was in the Hart Senate Office Building when I heard Lieberman was supposed to speak, and I went to hear him.”

She said she was sympathetically talking with a member of a group called “Families United” about the pain of losing a loved one, when a Capitol Hill police officer told her and Adam Kokesh, co-chair of Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) to move to the other side of a sidewalk serving as a rough demarcation line between the Veterans for Freedom members and others, generally defined.

Bolger continued that, “At one point in his remarks, Senator Graham gestured to those of us separated from the main group and said, ‘These people just don’t get it. The reason your loved ones fought and died was for them to have the right to do what they’re doing right now.’ Bolger responded out loud to Lieberman that “You can’t win when you’re killing innocent people.”

“Then the cop told me, ‘this is your second warning,'” Bolger added. “And then when I said to Lieberman, ‘This war is wrong. America is wrong.’ I was arrested. Somehow I doubt the same thing would have happened had I said ‘God Bless America’ really loudly.”

Another person arrested, Annie Katz, from Kingston, New York, said reading the Constitution aloud in Upper Senate Park that day was enough to get her arrested.
Attorney Jack Berringer, who represented Barrows and Bolger, complained of what he called the court’s “preventive” use of stay away orders to limit the movements of protesters and potential protesters, but as aggravating as those are, he said, “they’re not the real story here. The real story is how these people (Bolger, Barrows, and others arrested in peace protests) are fighting to keep free speech alive.”

Berringer referred to a web site that several people are constructing who have represented themselves “pro se” in similar cases. He and attorney Mark Goldstone are advising the group’s work which he hopes will become a legal resource for others.

The generals acted independently, coming in their own ways to the agonizing decision to defy military tradition and publicly criticize the Bush administration over its conduct of the war in Iraq.

What might be called The Revolt of the Generals has rarely happened in the nation’s history.

In op-ed pieces, interviews and TV ads, more than 20 retired U.S. generals have broken ranks with the culture of salute and keep it in the family. Instead, they are criticizing the commander in chief and other top civilian leaders who led the nation into what the generals believe is a misbegotten and tragic war.

The active-duty generals followed procedure, sending reports up the chain of command. The retired generals beseeched old friends in powerful positions to use their influence to bring about a change.

When their warnings were ignored, some came to believe it was their patriotic duty to speak out, even if it meant terminating their careers.

It was a decision none of the men approached cavalierly. Most were political conservatives who had voted for George W. Bush and initially favored his appointment of Donald Rumsfeld as defense secretary.

But they felt betrayed by Bush and his advisers.

“The ethos is: Give your advice to those in a position to make changes, not the media,” said Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, now retired. “But this administration is immune to good advice.”

Eaton has two sons serving in Afghanistan and Iraq; his father, an Air Force pilot, was shot down and killed over Laos in 1969. He said his frustration began festering in 2003, when he was assigned to build the Iraqi army from scratch. His internal requests for more equipment and properly trained instructors went unheeded, he said.

While on active duty, Eaton did not criticize his civilian bosses – almost to a man, the generals agree active-duty officers have no business doing that. But he was candid in media interviews. Building an Iraqi army, he warned, would take years, and the effort might never succeed.

In 2004, he was replaced by Gen. David Petraeus – now the military commander in Iraq – and reassigned stateside. Sensing his once-promising Army career had foundered, Eaton retired Jan. 1, 2006.

“I didn’t think my op-ed would be a big deal,” he said. “It certainly turned out to be otherwise.”

Eaton said he wrote the piece because he believed that three pillars of our democratic system had failed:

The Bush administration ignored alarms raised by him and other commanders on the ground; the Republican-controlled Congress had failed to exercise oversight; and the media had abdicated its watchdog role.

“As we look back, it appears that without realizing it, we were reacting to a constitutional crisis,” Eaton said in a recent interview.

Some of Eaton’s colleagues, both active and retired, endorsed his decision to speak out. Others thought he had stepped out of bounds. He became persona non grata with ethics instructors at the U.S. Military Academy, his alma mater.

Eaton said he has no regrets.

Maj. Gen. John Batiste, former commander of the First Infantry Division in Iraq, chronicled his painful journey from stalwart soldier to outspoken critic in a post on the political Web site Think Progress this month.

Once heralded by many military observers as headed for appointment to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Batiste began his journey of introspection after he retired with two stars in 2005.

The self-described arch-conservative and lifelong Republican made the “gut-wrenching” decision to end his 31-year military career in order to “speak out on behalf of soldiers and their families.”

“I had a moral obligation and a duty to do so,” Batiste wrote. “I have been speaking out for the past 17 months and there is no turning back.”

Code of silence

It is rare in U.S. history for even retired generals to step outside the chain of command and criticize the nation’s civilian leaders.

That was true even at the time of the unpopular Vietnam War.

Andrew Bacevich, a professor of history and international relations at Boston University, said several generals who served in Vietnam now regret they didn’t go public when it might have done the nation some good.

“That has encouraged generals today to voice their unhappiness,” Bacevich said.

Retired Navy Vice Adm. David Richardson said he was surprised that so many retired generals have spoken out against the Iraq war. “They may sound off as they please, but I don’t approve of that,” said Richardson, 93, who lives in North Park.
The once-sacred line between private and public opinion began to blur during the 1991 Gulf War, Bacevich said, when retired generals appeared for the first time as TV network analysts.

“But that war was brief, it seemed to go very well and the generals’ comments were almost uniformly positive,” he said. “This war is very long, it has not gone well and that’s a main reason we’re hearing the voices we’re hearing.”

For retired Brig. Gen. John Johns, the decision to finally stand up against the administration was a deeply personal one.

“My wife lost her first husband in Vietnam,” said Johns, who taught leadership and ethics at West Point.

“To learn later that President Lyndon Johnson and (then-Secretary of Defense) Robert McNamara knew as early as 1965 that we could not win there, that hurts her deeply to this day.”

Six months before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Johns, who retired in 1978, agonized over whether to go public with a paper calling the impending war “one of the great blunders of history.”

He sent it to retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni and to Pete McCloskey, the moderate-Republican former congressman from California who had opposed the Vietnam War.

“At that time, they did not want to go public,” Johns said.

Zinni has since become one of the most war’s most vociferous critics, and McClosky now calls for bringing the troops home.

“And I was not convinced that the invasion would not be stopped internally,” Johns said. “Zinni was close to (then-Secretary of State) Colin Powell; I believed sane heads would prevail.”

But Powell’s notoriously inaccurate speech to the United Nations in February 2003 “sealed the deal,” Johns said, and he knew the war was unstoppable. “I was very disappointed he did that. Powell was used.”

Many sleepless nights, long talks with his wife and solitary walks followed, said the veteran combat officer.

But Johns didn’t reach his tipping point until 2005, when a longtime friend, retired Lt. Gen. Robert Gard, invited him to discuss the war at tiny Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia.

“Four out of five of us retired military panelists there said it was a moral duty for us to speak out in a democracy against policies which you think are unwise,” Johns said. “The time was right.”

The lifelong Republican-leaning conservative joined a pair of liberal organizations opposed to the war and supported the Democrats’ call to get the United States out of Iraq.

“I appreciate those who hold to the old school of not speaking out,” said Johns, 79. “I hope they will appreciate my deeply held feelings that led to my decision to do so.”

Reaction mixed

One of those who falls into that old-school camp is Navy Vice Adm. David Richardson.

A one-time adviser to Pentagon chiefs, Richardson, who retired in 1972, said that while retired generals are “entirely within their rights under the First Amendment,” he was quite surprised to see so many speaking out against the Iraq war.

“They may sound off as they please, but I don’t approve of that,” said Richardson, 93, who served in World War II, Korea, and commanded an aircraft-carrier task force during the Vietnam War. He now lives in North Park and remains active in military circles.

“When we are at war, voices that may give aid and comfort to the enemy can cost American blood,” Richardson said. “I would not want what I said to in any way affect our troops’ morale and effectiveness.”

Gard, who retired from the military in 1981, displayed a stoicism typical of old soldiers when asked about his decision to publicly criticize the conduct of an ongoing war.

“I did some serious soul-searching,” Gard said simply.

A West Point graduate with a doctorate in politics and government from Harvard, Gard saw combat in Korea and Vietnam.

Gard’s introspection ultimately led him to conclude that patriotism means more than following orders and keeping complaints inside the military.

“When you feel the country – to its extreme detriment – is going in the wrong direction, and that your views might have some impact, you have a duty to speak out,” he said.

It may not have been that way during the Vietnam era, Gard added. “But times have changed.”

SPEAKING OUT

Military historians say that before the Iraq conflict, only a handful of active or retired U.S. military officers had publicly criticized civilian leaders’ conduct of a war. Some examples:

In 1864, former Union Army Gen. George McClellan declared the Civil War a failure, called for a peace convention that would leave slavery intact, and ran for president against President Lincoln.

In the 1930s, retired Gen. Smedley Butler – who had spent 33 years in the Marine Corps – wrote a book calling war “a racket” and toured the country labeling civilian leaders who prosecute wars “capitalistic gangsters.”

In 1951, President Truman dismissed Gen. Douglas MacArthur for openly challenging U.S. civilian leadership.

In May 1966, retired Gen. David Shoup, former commandant of the Marine Corps, said this about the escalating war in Vietnam: “I believe if we had, and would, keep our dirty, bloody, dollar-crooked fingers out of the business of these nations so full of depressed, exploited people, they will arrive at a solution of their own … not one crammed down their throats by the Americans.”

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.