The Rag Blog

Less than one week after announcing his intention to resign from office, embattled Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho) changed course today, telling reporters in Washington, “I will not blow this job.”

Over the past few days, there had been whispers in Republican circles that Sen. Craig had, in the words of one of the Idaho senator’s associates, “pulled out too early.”

“At the end of the day, Larry does not want to blow this job,” the associate said. “He will do whatever it takes to win back the support of his constituents, even if it means getting down on his knees.”

Another associate of Sen. Craig’s agreed that the Idaho senator announced his intention to vacate his Senate seat too hastily: “I think Larry now feels that to leave office on September 30 would be a premature evacuation.”

Sen. Craig got a key vote of support from Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Penn), who held a press conference at the Senate today to call the charges against the Idaho senator a “bum rap.”

But even as Sen. Craig picked up the support of Sen. Specter, a source close to the Republican caucus indicated that most Republicans are “backing away” from Sen. Craig.

For his part, Sen. Craig told reporters that he would take whatever steps are necessary to find favor with his Republican colleagues: “I will absolutely bend over backwards.”

Two months ago, the suitcases were packed. My lone, large suitcase sat in my bedroom for nearly six weeks, so full of clothes and personal items, that it took me, E. and our six year old neighbor to zip it closed.

Packing that suitcase was one of the more difficult things I’ve had to do. It was Mission Impossible: Your mission, R., should you choose to accept it is to go through the items you’ve accumulated over nearly three decades and decide which ones you cannot do without. The difficulty of your mission, R., is that you must contain these items in a space totaling 1 m by 0.7 m by 0.4 m. This, of course, includes the clothes you will be wearing for the next months, as well as any personal memorabilia- photos, diaries, stuffed animals, CDs and the like.

I packed and unpacked it four times. Each time I unpacked it, I swore I’d eliminate some of the items that were not absolutely necessary. Each time I packed it again, I would add more ‘stuff’ than the time before. E. finally came in a month and a half later and insisted we zip up the bag so I wouldn’t be tempted to update its contents constantly.

The decision that we would each take one suitcase was made by my father. He took one look at the box of assorted memories we were beginning to prepare and it was final: Four large identical suitcases were purchased- one for each member of the family and a fifth smaller one was dug out of a closet for the documentation we’d collectively need- graduation certificates, personal identification papers, etc.

We waited… and waited… and waited. It was decided we would leave mid to late June- examinations would be over and as we were planning to leave with my aunt and her two children- that was the time considered most convenient for all involved. The day we finally appointed as THE DAY, we woke up to an explosion not 2 km away and a curfew. The trip was postponed a week. The night before we were scheduled to travel, the driver who owned the GMC that would take us to the border excused himself from the trip- his brother had been killed in a shooting. Once again, it was postponed.

There was one point, during the final days of June, where I simply sat on my packed suitcase and cried. By early July, I was convinced we would never leave. I was sure the Iraqi border was as far away, for me, as the borders of Alaska. It had taken us well over two months to decide to leave by car instead of by plane. It had taken us yet another month to settle on Syria as opposed to Jordan. How long would it take us to reschedule leaving?

It happened almost overnight. My aunt called with the exciting news that one of her neighbors was going to leave for Syria in 48 hours because their son was being threatened and they wanted another family on the road with them in another car- like gazelles in the jungle, it’s safer to travel in groups. It was a flurry of activity for two days. We checked to make sure everything we could possibly need was prepared and packed. We arranged for a distant cousin of my moms who was to stay in our house with his family to come the night before we left (we can’t leave the house empty because someone might take it).

It was a tearful farewell as we left the house. One of my other aunts and an uncle came to say goodbye the morning of the trip. It was a solemn morning and I’d been preparing myself for the last two days not to cry. You won’t cry, I kept saying, because you’re coming back. You won’t cry because it’s just a little trip like the ones you used to take to Mosul or Basrah before the war. In spite of my assurances to myself of a safe and happy return, I spent several hours before leaving with a huge lump lodged firmly in my throat. My eyes burned and my nose ran in spite of me. I told myself it was an allergy.

We didn’t sleep the night before we had to leave because there seemed to be so many little things to do… It helped that there was no electricity at all- the area generator wasn’t working and ‘national electricity’ was hopeless. There just wasn’t time to sleep.

The last few hours in the house were a blur. It was time to go and I went from room to room saying goodbye to everything. I said goodbye to my desk- the one I’d used all through high school and college. I said goodbye to the curtains and the bed and the couch. I said goodbye to the armchair E. and I broke when we were younger. I said goodbye to the big table over which we’d gathered for meals and to do homework. I said goodbye to the ghosts of the framed pictures that once hung on the walls, because the pictures have long since been taken down and stored away- but I knew just what hung where. I said goodbye to the silly board games we inevitably fought over- the Arabic Monopoly with the missing cards and money that no one had the heart to throw away.

I knew then as I know now that these were all just items- people are so much more important. Still, a house is like a museum in that it tells a certain history. You look at a cup or stuffed toy and a chapter of memories opens up before your very eyes. It suddenly hit me that I wanted to leave so much less than I thought I did.

Six AM finally came. The GMC waited outside while we gathered the necessities- a thermos of hot tea, biscuits, juice, olives (olives?!) which my dad insisted we take with us in the car, etc. My aunt and uncle watched us sorrowfully. There’s no other word to describe it. It was the same look I got in my eyes when I watched other relatives and friends prepare to leave. It was a feeling of helplessness and hopelessness, tinged with anger. Why did the good people have to go?

I cried as we left- in spite of promises not to. The aunt cried… the uncle cried. My parents tried to be stoic but there were tears in their voices as they said their goodbyes. The worst part is saying goodbye and wondering if you’re ever going to see these people again. My uncle tightened the shawl I’d thrown over my hair and advised me firmly to ‘keep it on until you get to the border’. The aunt rushed out behind us as the car pulled out of the garage and dumped a bowl of water on the ground, which is a tradition- its to wish the travelers a safe return… eventually.

The trip was long and uneventful, other than two checkpoints being run by masked men. They asked to see identification, took a cursory glance at the passports and asked where we were going. The same was done for the car behind us. Those checkpoints are terrifying but I’ve learned that the best technique is to avoid eye-contact, answer questions politely and pray under your breath. My mother and I had been careful not to wear any apparent jewelry, just in case, and we were both in long skirts and head scarves.

Syria is the only country, other than Jordan, that was allowing people in without a visa. The Jordanians are being horrible with refugees. Families risk being turned back at the Jordanian border, or denied entry at Amman Airport. It’s too high a risk for most families.

We waited for hours, in spite of the fact that the driver we were with had ‘connections’, which meant he’d been to Syria and back so many times, he knew all the right people to bribe for a safe passage through the borders. I sat nervously at the border. The tears had stopped about an hour after we’d left Baghdad. Just seeing the dirty streets, the ruins of buildings and houses, the smoke-filled horizon all helped me realize how fortunate I was to have a chance for something safer.

By the time we were out of Baghdad, my heart was no longer aching as it had been while we were still leaving it. The cars around us on the border were making me nervous. I hated being in the middle of so many possibly explosive vehicles. A part of me wanted to study the faces of the people around me, mostly families, and the other part of me, the one that’s been trained to stay out of trouble the last four years, told me to keep my eyes to myself- it was almost over.

It was finally our turn. I sat stiffly in the car and waited as money passed hands; our passports were looked over and finally stamped. We were ushered along and the driver smiled with satisfaction, “It’s been an easy trip, Alhamdulillah,” he said cheerfully.

As we crossed the border and saw the last of the Iraqi flags, the tears began again. The car was silent except for the prattling of the driver who was telling us stories of escapades he had while crossing the border. I sneaked a look at my mother sitting beside me and her tears were flowing as well. There was simply nothing to say as we left Iraq. I wanted to sob, but I didn’t want to seem like a baby. I didn’t want the driver to think I was ungrateful for the chance to leave what had become a hellish place over the last four and a half years.

The Syrian border was almost equally packed, but the environment was more relaxed. People were getting out of their cars and stretching. Some of them recognized each other and waved or shared woeful stories or comments through the windows of the cars. Most importantly, we were all equal. Sunnis and Shia, Arabs and Kurds… we were all equal in front of the Syrian border personnel.

We were all refugees- rich or poor. And refugees all look the same- there’s a unique expression you’ll find on their faces- relief, mixed with sorrow, tinged with apprehension. The faces almost all look the same.

The first minutes after passing the border were overwhelming. Overwhelming relief and overwhelming sadness… How is it that only a stretch of several kilometers and maybe twenty minutes, so firmly segregates life from death?

How is it that a border no one can see or touch stands between car bombs, militias, death squads and… peace, safety? It’s difficult to believe- even now. I sit here and write this and wonder why I can’t hear the explosions.

I wonder at how the windows don’t rattle as the planes pass overhead. I’m trying to rid myself of the expectation that armed people in black will break through the door and into our lives. I’m trying to let my eyes grow accustomed to streets free of road blocks, hummers and pictures of Muqtada and the rest…

Even I question the ‘truth’ about 9/11

As it was easily predictable, Independent’s Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk’s latest column, Even I question the ‘truth’ about 9/11, generated a mixture of deafening silences, sarcastic responses and the usual choir of accusations of conspiracy theories.

In Bravo! Mr. Fisk – Robert Fisk and 9/11, praising Robert Fisk’s courage, I quoted Gore Vidal, “Apparently, ‘conspiracy stuff’ is now shorthand for unspeakable truth.”

This is what Gore Vidal had to say on those 11 September 2001 events. [Quoted from my documentary XXI CENTURY and book American Voices of Dissent]

GORE VIDAL: The United States is not a normal country. We are under… we are a homeland now, under military surveillance and military control. The president asked the Congress right after 9/11 not to conduct a major investigation as it might deter our search for terrorism wherever it may be in the world. So, Congress obediently rolled over. . . I remember Pearl Harbor. I was a kid then, and within three years of it I enlisted in the Army. That’s what we did in those days. We did not go off to the Texas Air Force and hide.

I realize the country has totally changed, that the government is not responsive to the people either in protecting us from something like 9/11, which they should’ve done, could’ve done, did not do. And then when it did happen, to investigate, investigate, investigate. So, I wrote two little books. One called Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, in which I try to go into why Osama bin Laden, if it were he or whoever it was—why it was done.

Then I wrote another one, Dreaming War, on why we were not protected at 9/11, which ordinarily would’ve led to the impeachment of the president of the United States, would allow it to happen. They said they had no information. Since then, every day the New York Times prints another mountain of people who said they had warned the government, they had warned the government. President Putin of Russia; he had warned us. President Mubarak of Egypt; he had warned us. Three members of Mossad claimed that they had come to the United States to warn us that some time in September something unpleasant might come out of the sky in our direction. Were we defended? No, we were not defended. Has this ever been investigated? No, it hasn’t.

There was some attempt at the mid-term election. There was a pro forma committee in Congress, which has done nothing thus far. What are we? Three years later. This is shameful. The media, which is controlled by the great conglomerates which control the political system, has done an atrocious job of reporting. Though sometimes good stories get in. I’ve worn my eyes out studying the Wall Street Journal, which, despite its dreadful editorial policies, is a pretty good newspaper of record, which the New York Times is not.

If you read the Wall Street Journal very carefully, you can pretty much figure out what happened that day. At the time of the first hijacking, according to FAA [Federal Aviation Administration] law, it is mandatory, within four minutes of hijacking, [that] fighter planes from the nearest airbase military base go up to scramble; that means go up and force the plane down, find out who they are, find out what’s happening. For one hour and fifty minutes, I think it was, no fighter plane went up. During that hour and twenty minutes, we lost the two towers and one side of the Pentagon. Why didn’t they go up? No description from the government, no excuse. A lot of mumbling stories, which were then retracted, and new stories replaced them. That, to me, was the end of the republic. We no longer had a Congress, which would ask questions, which it was in place to do, of the Executive.

We have a commander-in-chief who likes strutting around in military uniform, which no previous commander-in-chief ever did, as they’re supposed to be civilians keeping charge of the military. This thing is surrealistic now, and it is getting nastier and nastier. This government is culpable, if nothing less, of negligence. Why were we not protected, with all the airbases [and] fighter planes up and down the eastern seaboard? Not one of them went aloft while the hijackings took place. Finally, two from Otis Field in Massachusetts arrived at the Twin Towers. I think at the time the second one was hit. If anybody had been thinking, they would’ve gone on to Washington to try and prevent the attack on the Pentagon. They went back to Otis, back to Massachusetts. So, I ask these questions, which Congress should ask, does not ask; which the press should ask. But it’s too frightened.

Also, in perpetual war for perpetual peace; that’s another question that goes unanswered. The head of the Pakistan Secret Service was in Washington a week or so before 9/11. While he was there, and it was just a ceremonial visit with the head of the CIA, they work together. And he sent back word to Islamabad for one of his henchmen to wire $100,000 to Mohammed Atta in the United States, which was duly done. The FBI—I think it was the Wall Street Journal, that’s where I got this story from—only said American Secret Services found out about this. They complained to the Pakistani government. What is the head of your Secret Service in Washington telling to send $100,000 to a guy that we now know was the lead hijacker just a week before 9/11? Times of India published the whole story. The Wall Street Journal did a pretty good version for them. Now, shouldn’t that be examined? Wouldn’t Congress be interested in what this guy in Washington, meeting with all of our top secret people, says? “Okay, send him $100,000”? Not one more word. Not one more word.

Now, in a country with any curiosity, in a public that was informed of anything, there would be a great deal of outcry. I couldn’t imagine this happening in England. There’d be questions in Parliament. Papers would be full of it until it was solved. This couldn’t happen in Italy, which dearly loves a conspiracy, or Germany. In the United States everybody listens to 19th-century FOX TV News, in which a bunch of loons just scream and scream and scream. And with each scream they tell another lie. How are we ever going to have an informed citizenry? Which means, then, how can we have an informed election?

Put your hand on my head, baby;
Do I have a temperature?
I see people who ought to know better
Standing around like furniture.
There’s a wall between you
And what you want — you got to leap it.
Tonight you got the power to take it;
Tomorrow you won’t have the power to keep it.
— Bob Dylan

I.

Tomorrow is here. The game is over. The crisis has passed — and the patient is dead. Whatever dream you had about what America is, it isn’t that anymore. It’s gone. And not just in some abstract sense, some metaphorical or mythological sense, but down in the nitty-gritty, in the concrete realities of institutional structures and legal frameworks, of policy and process, even down to the physical nature of the landscape and the way that people live.

The Republic you wanted — and at one time might have had the power to take back — is finished. You no longer have the power to keep it; it’s not there. It was kidnapped in December 2000, raped by the primed and ready exploiters of 9/11, whored by the war pimps of the 2003 aggression, gut-knifed by the corrupters of the 2004 vote, and raped again by its “rescuers” after the 2006 election. Beaten, abused, diseased and abandoned, it finally died. We are living in its grave.

The annus horribilis of 2007 has turned out to be a year of triumph for the Bush Faction — the hit men who delivered the coup de grâce to the long-moribund Republic. Bush was written off as a lame duck after the Democrat’s November 2006 election “triumph” (in fact, the narrowest of victories eked out despite an orgy of cheating and fixing by the losers), and the subsequent salvo of Establishment consensus from the Iraq Study Group, advocating a de-escalation of the war in Iraq. Then came a series of scandals, investigations, high-profile resignations, even the criminal conviction of a top White House official. But despite all this — and abysmal poll ratings as well — over the past eight months Bush and his coupsters have seen every single element of their violent tyranny confirmed, countenanced and extended.

The war which we were told the Democrats and ISG consensus would end or wind down has of course been escalated to its greatest level yet — more troops, more airstrikes, more mercenaries, more Iraqi captives swelling the mammoth prison camps of the occupying power, more instability destroying the very fabric of Iraqi society. The patently illegal surveillance programs of the authoritarian regime have now been codified into law by the Democratic Congress, which has also let stand the evisceration of habeas corpus in the Military Commissions Act, and a raft of other liberty-stripping laws, rules, regulations and executive orders. Bush’s self-proclaimed arbitrary power to seize American citizens (and others) without charge and hold them indefinitely — even kill them — has likewise been unchallenged by the legislators. Bush has brazenly defied Congressional subpoenas — and even arbitrarily stripped the Justice Department of the power to enforce them — to no other reaction than a stern promise from Democratic leaders to “look further into this matter.” His spokesmen — and his “signing statements” — now openly proclaim his utter disdain for representative government, and assert at every turn his sovereign right to “interpret” — or ignore — legislation as he wishes. He retains the right to “interpret” just which interrogation techniques are classified as torture and which are not, while his concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay and his secret CIA prisons — where those “strenuous” techniques are practiced — remain open. His increasingly brazen drive to war with Iran has already been endorsed unanimously by the Senate and overwhelmingly by the House, both of which have embraced the specious casus belli concocted by the Bush Regime. And to come full circle, Democratic leaders like Hillary Clinton and Carl Levin are now praising the “military success” of the Iraq escalation — despite the evident failure of its stated goals by every single measure, including troop deaths, civilian deaths, security, infrastructure, political cohesion and regional stability. This emerging “bipartisan consensus” on the military situation in Iraq (or rather, this utter fantasy concealing a rapidly deteriorating reality) makes it certain that the September “progress report” will be greeted as a justification for continuing the “surge” in one form or another.

It is, by any measure, a remarkable achievement, one of the greatest political feats ever. Despite Bush’s standing as one of the most despised presidents in American history, despite a Congress in control of the opposition party, despite a solid majority opposed to his policies and his war, despite an Administration riddled with scandal and crime, despite the glaring rot in the nation’s infrastructure and the callous abandonment of one of the nation’s major cities to natural disaster and crony greed — despite all of this, and much more that would have brought down or mortally wounded any government in a democratic country, the Bush Administration is now in a far stronger position than it was a year ago.

How can this be? The answer is simple: the United States is no longer a democratic country, or even a degraded semblance of one.

It is well-nigh impossible to imagine a force in American public life today rising up to thwart the Administration’s will on any element of its militarist and corporatist agenda, including the arbitrary launch of an attack on Iran. What’s more, even if some institution had the will — and made the effort — to balk Bush, it wouldn’t matter. As the New York Times noted a couple of weeks ago:

…Bush administration officials have already signaled that, in their view, the president retains his constitutional authority to do whatever it takes to protect the country, regardless of any action Congress takes. At a tense meeting last week with lawyers from a range of private groups active in the wiretapping issue, senior Justice Department officials refused to commit the administration to adhering to the limits laid out in the new legislation and left open the possibility that the president could once again use what they have said in other instances is his constitutional authority to act outside the regulations set by Congress.

At the meeting, Bruce Fein, a Justice Department lawyer in the Reagan administration, along with other critics of the legislation, pressed Justice Department officials repeatedly for an assurance that the administration considered itself bound by the restrictions imposed by Congress. The Justice Department, led by Ken Wainstein, the assistant attorney general for national security, refused to do so, according to three participants in the meeting. That stance angered Mr. Fein and others. It sent the message, Mr. Fein said in an interview, that the new legislation, though it is already broadly worded, “is just advisory. The president can still do whatever he wants to do. They have not changed their position that the president’s Article II powers trump any ability by Congress to regulate the collection of foreign intelligence.”

Thus the Administration’s own spokesmen are now saying openly, in plain English, what they once only insinuated beneath layers of legal jargon: that the president of the United States does not have to obey the law of the land. He does not have to obey acts passed by Congress. He is free to act arbitrarily, to do anything whatsoever that he claims is necessary to “defend national security,” in his capacity as Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces. There is literally nothing anyone can do – not Congress, not the courts – to stop him.

That is Bush’s claim — and it has been accepted. The American Establishment has surrendered to an authoritarian takeover of the American state. If this was not the case, then Bush and Cheney would have been impeached long ago (or least months ago) for their treason against the Constitution, their coup d’etat against the Republic. At the very least, they would have been mocked, scorned, censured and shunned for their ludicrous and dangerous pretensions to royal power. All manner of institutional, legal and political fetters would have been put upon them, as happened in the last days of Richard Nixon’s presidency.

Instead, Bush’s power has only grown with each new outrageous claim of unchallengeable presidential authority. It is too little understood how vital — and how fatal — Congress’ acquiescence in all of this has been. By continuing to treat the Bush Administration as a legitimate government, to carry on with business as usual instead of initiating impeachments or refusing to cooperate with a gang of usurpers, Congress instead confirms the New Order day after day. Some Democrats may grumble, whine or bluster — but they DO nothing, and their very participation in the sinister farce ensures its continuance.

Again, look at the facts, the reality: Bush wants Congressional approval of his illegal surveillance; he gets it. Bush wants to launch spy satellites against the American people; he does it. Bush wants concentration camps and secret prisons with torture; he’s got them. Bush wants to escalate a ruinous, murderous, unpopular war; he does it. He wants to declare people “enemy combatants” and imprison them indefinitely; he does it. Bush’s spokesmen openly claim that the laws passed by the people’s representatives are “just advisory” and “the president can still do whatever he wants to do,” and there is no outcry, no action, no defense of the Republic against this overthrow of the Constitution.

Who could look at this reality and declare that the United States is still a republic, in any genuine form? Who could see this and deny that the nation is now an authoritarian state under an “elected” dictator?

Those who insist on seeing the current situation as “politics as usual” (even if an extreme version of it) will point to peripheral elements that still retain some of the flavor of the old order: such as the Justice Department scandal, with its forced resignations and Congressional probes, or the occasional criminal trial of Bush Regime minions like Scooter Libby. Some will say such things are proof that we don’t really live under tyranny, that deep down, the “system works.”

But all of this is indeed “politics as usual” — the kind of politics that occurs under every system of rule. Even the Caesars were subject to such pressures, forced to remove (and sometimes execute) officials who had become too controversial due to scandal, crime, corruption or factional opposition, or even unpopularity with “the rabble.” Sometimes the Caesars themselves were removed for such causes — but the tyrannical system went on. Likewise, the kings and queens of England in their autocratic heyday were forced to give up ministers — even court favorites — due to similar pressures. And so too the Russian czars, the Chinese emperors, the Persian monarchs, the Muslim Caliphs, the Egyptian pharaohs, etc. Even Hitler was sometimes thwarted or hampered in his polices by factional strife or public displeasure. “Politics” does not disappear in undemocratic regimes. It is a function of human relations, and carries on regardless of the political system imposed on a society.

Yet the belief persists that if there are not tanks in the streets or leather-jacketed commissars breaking down doors, then Americans are still living in a free country. I wrote about this situation almost six years ago — six years ago:

It won’t come with jackboots and book burnings, with mass rallies and fevered harangues. It won’t come with “black helicopters” or tanks on the street. It won’t come like a storm – but like a break in the weather, that sudden change of season you might feel when the wind shifts on an October evening: everything is the same, but everything has changed. Something has gone, departed from the world, and a new reality has taken its place.

As in Rome, all the old forms will still be there: legislatures, elections, campaigns – plenty of bread and circuses for the folks. But the “consent of the governed” will no longer apply; actual control of the state will have passed to a small group of nobles who rule largely for the benefit of their wealthy peers and corporate patrons.

To be sure, there will be factional conflicts among this elite, and a degree of free debate will be permitted, within limits; but no one outside the privileged circle will be allowed to govern or influence state policy. Dissidents will be marginalized – usually by “the people” themselves. Deprived of historical knowledge by an impoverished educational system designed to produce complacent consumers, not thoughtful citizens, and left ignorant of current events by a media devoted solely to profit, many will internalize the force-fed values of the ruling elite, and act accordingly. There will be little need for overt methods of control.

The rulers will often act in secret; for reasons of “national security,” the people will not be permitted to know what goes on in their name. Actions once unthinkable will be accepted as routine: government by executive fiat, the murder of “enemies” selected by the leader, undeclared war, torture, mass detentions without charge, the looting of the national treasury, the creation of huge new “security structures” targeted at the populace. In time, all this will come to seem “normal,” as the chill of autumn feels normal when summer is gone.”

WASHINGTON (AFP) — Former US administrator in Iraq Paul Bremer clashed in print with George W. Bush Tuesday, rejecting the US president’s suggestion in an interview that he was unaware of Bremer’s plan to disband the Iraqi army.

The disbanding is seen as one of the biggest US errors in post-Saddam Hussein Iraq. Bremer, the head of the coalition provisional authority in Iraq from April 2003 to June 2004, announced it May 23, 2003, two months after the US invasion.

In an interview for a book to be released Tuesday, Bush appears to suggest he was caught off-guard by the decision to break up the armed forces when the original plan was to keep them.

In one of six interviews with Robert Draper for the book “Dead Certain,” Bush said US policy had been “to keep the army intact” but that it “didn’t happen,” The New York Times reported.

Asked how he reacted when he learned that the policy was being reversed, Bush told Draper, “Yeah, I can’t remember, I’m sure I said, ‘This is the policy, what happened?'” the Times report added.

Bremer, among officials blamed for mistakes for which the United States continues to pay dearly, gave the Times letters which he said refute the notion that Bush was in the dark about the shift.

“We must make it clear to everyone that we mean business: that Saddam and the Baathists are finished,” the Times quoted a Bremer letter sent to the president on May 22, 2003 through then secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld.

After detailing US efforts to strip from civilian agencies Baathist Saddam supporters, Bremer told Bush that he would “parallel this step with an even more robust measure” to dismantle Iraq’s armed forces, the Times report said.

A day later, Bush wrote back a short thank you letter saying: “Your leadership is apparent. You have quickly made a positive and significant impact. You have my full support and confidence.”

No doubt, for a large number of Americans, it is a good enough excuse: “Gasoline prices could rise to about $9 per gallon if the United States withdraws troops from Iraq prematurely, Rep. Jon Porter said he was told on a trip to Iraq that ended this week,” the Las Vegas Review-Journal reports. “To a person, they said there would be genocide, gas prices in the U.S. would rise to eight or nine dollars a gallon, al-Qaida would continue its expansion, and Iran would take over that portion of the world if we leave,” said the Nevada Congress critter.

Of course, it hardly matters that genocide is well underway in Iraq—more than a million Iraqis have lost their lives, thanks to the U.S. imposed “liberation,” according to an estimation produced by Just Foreign Policy, based on results by the Lancet and Iraq Body Count—but naturally this is of little concern to the average American worried about an escalating gas bill for his SUV or pickup truck… and that is precisely why Jon Porter mentioned it.

It should be remembered that Porter chaired the Hill & Knowlton front group, the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, responsible for parading a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl—known only by her first name of Nayirah—before a complicit corporate media prior to Bush Senior’s invasion of Iraq in 1991. “I volunteered at the al-Addan hospital,” Nayirah lied. “While I was there, I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns, and go into the room where . . . babies were in incubators. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators, and left the babies on the cold floor to die.” In fact, Nayirah was a member of the Kuwaiti royal family. Her father was Saud Nasir al-Sabah, Kuwait’s ambassador to the U.S.

Once again, Jon Porter, acting the part well as a fear and hate monger, is attempting to sell us a passel of disinformation in response to the feeble and weak-kneed attempts by Democrats to put an end to the “war” (invasion and occupation) prior to the election.

“As lawmakers warm up for a renewal of the Iraq war debate in the fall, Porter accused Democrats of failing to offer solutions to the war and avoiding a debate on the ramifications of withdrawal,” the Las Vegas Review-Journal continues. According to Porter, “some Democratic organizations, including the Searchlight Leadership Fund operated by Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., have funded anti-war groups. The Searchlight Leadership Fund made $5,000 donations to VoteVets.Org in 2006 and again earlier this year, according to federal records.” In response, “Democrats claim that organizations defending President Bush’s war strategy, such as Vets for Freedom or the newly formed Freedom’s Watch, are fronts linked to the Bush administration whose aim is to attack Democrats and boost GOP fortunes in Congress.”

But never mind. Democrats are so disordered and politically enervated they will not be able to muster the two-thirds vote required to defeat a commander and decider guy veto of any effort to impose a withdrawal timetable. “President Bush is about to ask Congress for $50 billion more to keep fighting the war in Iraq. He is betting—almost certainly correctly—that the Democrats will give him a rough time over the money, probably try to attach timetables for withdrawal to the bill and ultimately give in and pass it,” the Cincinnati Post notes.

In other words, Democrats, through lack of intestinal fortitude and no shortage of felonious complicity, are guilty as the perfidious neocons for the continued mass murder in Iraq, now well surpassing a million souls. Indeed, the “war” will continue and—if the neocons have their day—Iran will be thrown into the depraved mix. In the coming months, Democrats will dutifully line up behind Hillary, on record—emphasized before the AIPAC gathered—as wanting to confront Iran, that is to say shock and awe it back to the Stone Age, although Paleolithic humans did not endure depleted uranium and epidemic leukemia.

For the last quarter century, corporate America has been at war against the labor movement. After a long period in which unions were an accepted part of the economic and political landscape, most corporations adopted a much more hostile attitude toward unions. Where unions already were present, employers sought to weaken or break them. In workplaces without unions, employers were prepared to do whatever was necessary to prevent workers from organizing.

This anti-union drive has largely enjoyed the support of the government. For example, it is now a standard practice for employers to fire workers engaged in an organizing drive. A study by John Schmitt and Ben Zipperer, of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, found one in five organizers will be fired during an average organizing drive (see here). Such firings are illegal, but enforcement is sufficiently slow, and the penalties sufficiently small, that most employees eagerly embrace this effective anti-union tactic.

Government policies have also supported anti-union practices in other ways. A main purpose of trade agreements like NAFTA was to make it as easy as possible to relocate factories overseas. The high dollar policy Robert Rubin initiated in the Clinton era also put US manufacturing, and its unionized workers, at a huge disadvantage. A 30 percent over-valued dollar effectively imposes a 30 percent tariff on goods exported from the United States, while providing a subsidy of 30 percent on goods imported into the United States.

As a result of these policies, much manufacturing has, in fact, been moved overseas in the last quarter century, giving the country a trade deficit of more than $700 billion annually. And the jobs lost in manufacturing have been disproportionately union jobs. While the unionization rate in manufacturing was more than 40 percent in the sixties, in 2006 it was just 11.6 percent, less than the 12 percent average for all workers, although still somewhat higher than the 7.4 percent average for the private sector as a whole.

The weakening of the labor movement is not just bad news for the workers who lose union jobs. According to polling data, there are tens of millions of workers who would like to be represented by a union at their workplace, but don’t currently have the option. The best way to get a guide as to how many workers would be in unions if they could opt to do so, in the absence of employer threats and harassment, is to look at the unionization rate in the public sector.

While public sector managers are not generally friendly to unions, they can’t fire union organizers or use the other harsh anti-union tactics that are now standard practice in the private sector. As a result, more than 36 percent of public sector employees are members of unions. Given the freedom to choose, it is likely a comparable share of private sector workers would also be in unions. This would imply an additional 30 million workers in unions.

In addition to directly benefiting the workers they represent, unions also benefit the larger workforce and society as a whole. In an industry with a strong union presence, non-union firms know they must maintain comparable wages and benefits if they are want to keep their workers from joining a union. The decline of unions has undoubtedly been an important factor in the growth of inequality in the last quarter century.

Unions have also been essential to a wide range of political initiatives over the post-war period. Programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Head Start would not have been possible without the strong support of the labor movement. The same is true of the key civil rights legislation of the sixties. More recently, the labor movement was at the center of the effort to prevent President Bush from privatizing Social Security. It will be difficult to make much progress on a wide range of social and economic issues without the support of a strong labor movement.

Congress is currently debating a bill that would take an important step toward re-establishing the right of workers to join a union. The Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) would require a company to recognize a union once a majority of workers have signed a card indicating they want to be represented by a union. This gets around the election process, which gives employers a chance to intimidate workers and fire the leaders of an organizing effort. (Under the EFCA, workers can still request an election supervised by the National Labor Relations Board.)

The EFCA would restore some meaning to the right to organize. The bill that has been passed by the House by is currently being blocked by a Republican filibuster in the Senate. While the EFCA is not likely to become law under this Congress (President Bush would almost certainly veto the bill even if it did pass), progressives should recognize the importance of legislation. The right to organize is not the concern of just a small special interest group; it is a basic right that should concern us all. In the same vein, all progressives have an interest in seeing a strong labor movement. For this reason, the EFCA and other measures that level the playing field between labor and management should be top items on the progressive agenda.

On the two year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, George Bush stood in the middle of the still devastated Ninth Ward of New Orleans, and crowed, “This town is better today than it was yesterday, and its going to be better tomorrow than it is today.”

This is not because Bush failed to notice the boarded up homes, the overgrown empty lots, or the fact that most of the residents have not and will never return. It is not government neglect or mismanagement of funds. Speaking for a system that was built on slavery and genocide, that has white supremacy built into its structures, laws and culture, George Bush looked at all this and saw progress.

Survivors: “They was trying to wipe us out.”

Beginning the evening of August 29 and continuing for four more days the International Tribunal on Hurricanes Katrina and Rita included sessions on the abuse of prisoners, police brutality, lack of evacuation plans and neglect of the levees, environmental racism, labor and migrant rights, schools, gentrification, and displacement and other outrages.

Nkechi Taifa opened the indictment against the U.S. Government for Crimes Against Humanity by invoking the memory of Mamie Till whose son Emmett was brutally lynched by white men in Mississippi in 1955. Mamie Till courageously insisted that the casket of her 14-year-old son, Emmett, be opened up for the world to see. She displayed his battered and water-soaked body publicly, shocking the conscience of the world.

Two years after Katrina and Rita, Nkechi insisted that the barbarity and criminality of what was-and is continuing to be done-to Black people and others in and around New Orleans still needs to be opened up for the whole world to see.

For two and a half days over Katrina’s anniversary, I visited New Orleans. Through the Tribunal, at protests, in Cooper projects, and in the Lower Ninth Ward, I heard bitter stories

Of prisoners hurling fists, broom sticks and wheelchairs against the walls of their confinement amidst rising flood waters till they collapse in exhaustion. Guards long since gone. Lights out. Water, thick and putrid with sewage, rising to their necks in the pitch black.

That still haunt

Children swept out of the arms of parents. Elderly folks stranded in wheelchairs for days as maggots and waterbugs, soaked out of the building foundations, crawl all around and over them.

That flow from-and were enforced by-a system

“You know what hurt me?” asked an older woman from Cooper Projects, as two years later tears pile out of both eyes, “When we was going through all that water, that filth, that oil, all that to get over to that bridge I see nothing but FEMA cars police lights big Army helicopters sitting in that spot. Those people sitting there not trying to help us. They was looking at us die. Come on now! That hurts. That hurts I will die saying they was trying to wipe us out.”

Protest and Anger

On August 29, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of residents and activists from around the country held commemorative events and protests around the city. Robert Green held a public memorial in the Ninth Ward where his home had been swept off the ground in twenty feet of raging floodwater. His mother died there, and his granddaughter had slipped off the roof and disappeared into the water two years before. After being abandoned to die in the storm, the authorities refused to retrieve his mother’s body from the rooftop where she was clearly visible from a distance and weeks later Green had to go in and do it himself.

Later that day, up to a thousand residents, volunteers, and activists gathered at the levee wall where it had broken and marched through the Ninth Ward. Most of its residents have not returned because of obstacles thrown up by city, state and federal government. People marched through pouring rain to Congo Square some five miles into town.

Throughout the afternoon a Day of Presence, organized by Susan Taylor, editor of Essence magazine, brought together Dr. Michael Eric Dyson, poet Jessica Care Moore, and other Black leaders and artists in front of the Convention Center where tens of thousands had been stranded without food or water for days during the storm. This, however, is downtown. Everything is cleaned up here. A “David Duke for Governor” (a notorious Klan white-supremacist) bumper sticker taunted those who gathered.

For five days, the International Tribunal on Hurricanes Katrina and Rita pried open the crimes of the government before, during, and after Katrina with first-hand testimony from prisoners, witnesses of summary executions, victims of severe police brutality, folks still dispersed and living in trailers, people locked out of public housing and activists and experts from the ACLU, National Conference of Black Lawyers, Center for Constitutional Rights, NAACP, National Lawyers Guild, Louisiana Justice Institute, People’s Hurricane Relief Fund and Malcolm X Grassroots Committee.

I spoke with Phyllis Montana LeBlanc, famous for her honest and angry testimony about surviving the storm in Spike Lee’s documentary, When the Levees Broke. She told me that she’s met people who were ready to kill themselves before they heard her testimony in the film. Hearing her speak the truth gave them the strength to keep struggling.

Housing and the Right to Return

One very sharp concentration of the system’s plans to “rebuild” New Orleans is the forced displacement of people, a refusal to rebuild privately owned housing, and the shuttering of public housing. Large housing projects in New Orleans, like St. Bernard, Lafitte, and C.J. Peete are completely shut down while several others, including Iberville and B.W. Cooper are mostly fenced off and unoccupied. These projects could house more than 5,000 families, and they comprise some of the least damaged housing in New Orleans post Katrina. The government used Hurricane Katrina to empty the projects and keep the people who lived there, most of them poor Black people, from returning to the city. One of these projects is going to be replaced by a golf course!

On August 31, residents of public housing, public housing advocates and others protested at the office of the executive director of the Housing Authority of New Orleans (HANO), demanding an end to the destruction of public housing and the right of all New Orleans residents to return. In response, the HANO office closed for the day, police and National Guardsmen cordoned off the building, entered it and surrounded the Director’s office for several hours until protesters marched out of the building.

An encampment of homeless folks has sprung up across the street from Mayer Nagin’s office downtown demanding that housing be opened up to those who need it. Activists there told me that Mayor Nagin at one point offered to open up housing to the protesters, but they refused, choosing to continue sleeping in the park with others until housing is provided for everyone.

Two years after Katrina, the crimes against the people continue.

New Orleans population is less than two-thirds of what was before Katrina, yet estimates say there are now three times as many homeless people. While New Orleans moves to permanently shut down its four largest housing projects, nearby St. Bernard Parish passed a “whites only” law in the form of requiring that anyone who moves there must have a blood relative already living in the Parish, which is 93% white (the law is being challenged in court).

33,000 people are estimated to be still living in FEMA trailers, many of which are infested with dangerous levels of formaldehyde. A man who lives in a FEMA park with about 23 trailers housing 75 people told me that, of the adults, there is one woman who works26 miles away at a Wendy’s. The only town nearby is almost entirely white and the 1,500 or so people who live there don’t want the evacuees around. “My thirteen-year-old, he finished second in his class. But on awards day, they didn’t give him anything,” the man explains with pain in his voice. “He was very disappointed, you know? I know what it is. A thirteen year old don’t understand that.”

One thing that makes every resident of New Orleans I meet smile is the volunteers who have come through to rebuild. Over 14,000 volunteers, including students from over 200 colleges, have been part of rebuilding just with the Common Ground effort. They helped residents clear debris from their homes and yards in the Ninth Ward, they set up volunteer clinics and risked arrest to clean out and reopen schools-including the one Bush had the audacity to pose for a photo-op in.

Most of the volunteers have come not only from long distances, but also from very different walks of life. The ones I spoke with have been changed by the survivors they’ve met and from their close-up look at how this system treats those at the bottom. One told me, “When I was back in California there were a lot of things I worried about that really now this experience kind of gives me an appreciation for how little some of that matters.”

But despite the wonderful spirit of these volunteers, and despite the burning, fierce desire of the people of New Orleans to survive and rebuild, the system stands in the way at every turn. The system is shuttering housing when people need housing, moving jobs when people need work, creating a viciously two-tiered educational system when people need schools Everywhere you turn, the system is the problem not the solution.

There is a great challenge to everyone to step forward in political resistance, and to not let what is happening in New Orleans go down like this.

On Labor Day we customarily give a nod to America’s underpaid and overworked blue- and pink-collar workers–janitors, flight attendants, forklift operators and the like. But this year let’s go a step further and salute the most reviled and despised of the people who make our economy happen, the mere mention of whom causes the average forklift operator to spit on the floor. You are thinking, perhaps, of telemarketers, human traffickers and the fiends who answer the phone when you to try to make a claim on your health insurance. But I’m talking about our CEOs.

Just in time for the holiday, two liberal groups–United for a Fair Economy and the Institute for Policy Studies–have issued a gleefully malicious new attack on our CEO class. They point out that the CEOs of large companies earn an average of $10.8 million a year, which is 362 times as much as the average American worker, and retire with $10.1 million in their exclusive pension funds. The groups further point out that the compensation of US CEOs wildly exceeds that of their European counterparts, who, we are invited to believe, work equally hard.

And, in what they must think is their cleverest point of all, the UFE/IPS folks state: “The 20 highest-paid individuals at publicly traded corporations last year took home, on average, $36.4 million. That’s…204 times more than the 20 highest-paid generals in the U.S. military.” You know what we’re supposed to think here: Wow, but generals have all that responsibility! They’re responsible for national security, or at least for conducting the wars that increase the threats to our national security and thus help justify ever greater increases in our national security apparatus!

But someone has to speak up for our beleaguered CEO class, and let me begin with that spurious comparison to the top military brass. Could we put patriotic emotion aside for a moment and look at this in a hardheaded, bottom-line sort of way?

Suppose you are the general responsible for all the service people in Iraq, about 130,000, and suppose you manage to lose every single one of them in some ghastly miscalculation. With the death benefit for the family of one dead soldier running at $100,000, your mistake will cost a total of $13 billion. Sounds like a lot, I know, until you consider that a hedge fund manager or financial company CEO can lose that much in a single afternoon, without anyone even noticing. There is simply no comparison between a general and a CEO.

That’s a side issue, though. The real point, which the CEOs and their usual defenders are strangely reticent to make, is that it’s damn expensive to be rich, and extravagantly expensive to be super-rich. Before you start playing your air violins, consider the costs of maintaining as many as five different homes, some of them as large as 45,000 square feet, most with swimming pools, tennis courts, guest houses and wine cellars requiring constant supervision.

The poor whine about having no home at all, or maybe a two-bedroom apartment for a family of six. They should just think for one moment of the tribulations involved in running four or more mansions, each with its own full-time staff. There’s the problem of getting between them, for example. A friend of mine, of very modest means himself, consults for a billionaire couple who commute between London and Los Angeles by private jet, with their dogs following in a second private jet.

But much of what we know about the extreme costs of wealth comes from Wall Street Journal columnist Robert Frank’s recent book Richistan. The ultra-rich, drawn largely from the CEO class, require staffs of about forty to fifty people, including not only cooks, maids and nannies but “lifestyle managers” (to set up the entertainment schedule) and–in a throwback to the original Gilded Age–butlers. It’s the butler’s job, among other things, to deal with any issues that may arise from the proliferation of homes. For example, if the boss is in Palm Beach, Frank reports, “and wants to send his jet to New York to pick up a Chateau LaTour from his South Hampton cellar, the butler makes it happen, no questions asked.”

Nor are the ultra-rich in a position to cut back on their expenses–by, say, running down to the supermarket for a $12 bottle of Chardonnay. If they were to do so, their friends would despise them. As Frank explains, the Richistani word “affluent,” meaning someone with less than $10 million in assets, translates into English roughly as “scum.”

A mean-spirited critic of the ultra-rich CEO class might grumble that the rich should simply find a new circle of friends. But who exactly might these new friends be? If you were in the $100 million-in-assets set, you could hardly consort with the class of people for whom a pittance like $10,000 might be a transformative sum, possibly allowing Granny to get her insulin and the children to have warm winter clothes. People of that class could not be trusted not to pocket the silverware or rip out the gold fixtures in your powder room. They might even make a lunge for your throat.