The Rag Blog

A second British General has attacked America’s “fatally flawed” policy in Iraq, ratcheting up the tension between the two allies on the issue.

Major General Tim Cross – the most senior British officer involved in planning post-war Iraq – said he raised serious concerns with former US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld BEFORE the invasion.

But he says his worries were dismissed out of hand.

The comments follow ex-Army chief General Sir Mike Jackson’s attack on Mr Rumsfeld as “intellectually bankrupt”.

General Cross, 56, said: “Right from the very beginning we were all very concerned about the lack of detail that had gone into the postwar plan – and there is no doubt that Rumsfeld was at the heart of that process.

” I had lunch with Rumsfeld in Washington before the invasion in 2003 and raised concerns about the need to internationalise the reconstruction of Iraq and work closely with the United Nations.

“I also raised concerns over the numbers of troops available to maintain security and aid reconstruction. He didn’t want to hear that message. The US had already convinced themselves that Iraq would emerge reasonably quickly as a stable democracy.

“Anybody who tried to tell them anything that challenged that idea – they simply shut it out.” The general, who was deputy head of the coalition’s Office Of Reconstruction And Humanitarian Assistance in 2003, added: “Myself and others were suggesting things simply would not be as easy as that.

“But he ignored my comment. He dismissed it. There is no doubt with hindsight the US post-war plan was fatally flawed – and many of us sensed that at the time.” General Jackson calls Mr Rumsfeld’s postwar plan “intellectually bankrupt” in an autobiography. And he described Mr Rumsfeld’s flippant claim that “US forces don’t do nation building” as “nonsensical”.

Yesterday General Cross, who retired from the Army earlier this year, said he backed everything General Jackson had said. And that view was shared by Liberal Democrat leader Menzies Campbell, who said: “There was no plan for what was to happen after a military victory. British military personnel are paying with their lives for that lack of foresight”

While crowds of cheering supporters gathered outside the National Assembly in Venezuela on Wednesday, August 15, President Hugo Chávez outlined what could be the most radical phase of his proposed amendments to the constitution yet, the elimination of any term limits on the re-election of any candidate as well as lengthening each presidential term from six to seven years. These proposals reflect concerns in the Chávez camp over the shortcomings of the present constitution, which mandates that he will not be able to run again in 2012 when his third term comes to an end, according to the current constitution that was drafted under Chávez’s supervision in 1999.

Since winning the presidency for a third term in 2006 (by a confirmed democratic vote of almost 60 percent out of the 75 percent of the electorate that chose to cast their ballot), Chávez has aggressively nationalized the oil, telecommunications and electricity sector. He also introduced land reform and is now moving to end the autonomy of Venezuela’s central bank in order to gain access to the country’s foreign reserves, which he plans to use towards his ambitious social programs for the poor. Before any of this can happen, though, Chávez’s proposed constitutional reforms must first be passed by the National Assembly, almost all 167 of whom are pro-Chávez, to be followed by putting the new amendments before a popular national referendum. If all goes to plan, the referendum could be voted upon in several months time, which leaves scant opportunity for the State Department to mobilize a campaign to thwart Chávez’s ambitions.

Creating a Constituency

Aside from drafting constitutional amendments and initiating dramatic domestic energy strategies, the Venezuela President has been busy making house calls to important trading partners around the region and the world. For several years, his bold socialist economic objectives have to an extent escaped being under the magnifying glass of U.S. suspicion, due in large part to the Bush Administration’s preoccupation with its “War on Terror” in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East, but now with more countries gradually signing up to join Venezuela’s innovative development initiatives, Washington is finally mobilizing itself in a battle for influence throughout Latin America.

Venezuela’s Alternative to the FTAA: The “Dawn” of a New Generation of Regional Cooperation

In an attempt to draw-out any further progress in creating the U.S.-sponsored Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA), the Venezuelan government has been adamantly pushing for a more integrated and dependable trade and financial system for Latin America. For the last several years, Chávez’s cure for economic dependency on the part of under-developed states, ALBA (Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas or Alternativa Bolivariana par las Américas), has been slowly drawing support and gaining members throughout South and Central America. Promoted as a humane alternative to the profit-maximizing logic of the FTAA, ALBA, which translates to “dawn” in Spanish, aims not only on improving the region’s economic integrity, but also to create a vision of social welfare and mutual aid. Using the European Union as a model to decant his visions, Chávez claims that encouraging developing countries in Latin America to work in unison will decrease the number of trade disadvantages for small economies, enable better economic planning as a whole, and provide the region with a stronger international pollination of ideas.

Since ALBA is far from being hemispheric-wide in its acceptance, Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia and Nicaragua also have entered into a People’s Trade Agreement (Tratado de Comercio de los Pueblos or TCP) that points toward the same aforementioned general principals, but leaves the door open to new members. Due to the expansion of Venezuela’s social and economic programs in recent years, as well as the large number of Latin Americans who have directly benefited from Caracas’ bilateral trade pacts, numerous countries—parties who are now receiving bilateral largesse from Venezuela— still remain uneasy about jumping on the ALBA bandwagon, fearing adverse reactions from Washington.

The Union of South American Nations (UnaSur), formerly the South American Community of Nations (CSN), is an alternative regional integration body in the form of an intergovernmental union. Combining MERCOSUR and the Andean Community (CAN), UnaSur, in the long-run, is attempting to adopt most of the same strategies as the EU, including the creation of a common currency, free movement of all South American nationals and the future elimination of tariffs on non-sensitive goods and services. The new Latin American bloc would comprise approximately 17.6 million square miles of territory and a population of over 400 million. The obvious difference between ALBA and the strictly South American UnaSur, is that under the latter, certain Central American and Caribbean countries, such as Cuba, would not be included. This poses a major problem for those who already have signed onto the Chávez-sponsored bloc, because attention will likely be drawn towards the larger and more influential South American trade union.

An Overview: The Members

Cuba, having close ties with Venezuela, was the first to sign onto ALBA in 2004, and has provided a substantial amount of medical and agricultural resources to its effort. For example, the Miracle Operation, which provides free eye surgery to tens of thousands of Latin American and Caribbean citizens each year, has brought positive attention to the politically controversial country as well as ALBA as a whole. The Brazil Report observed that on April 29, 2006, the newly elected president of Bolivia, Evo Morales, who is known to be the leading ideological partner in crafting Chávez’s “21st century socialism,” signed the TCP agreement and soon after enacted his plans to nationalize the country’s enormous gas resources at the encouragement of President Chávez. In a similar feint, President Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, who having previously rejected Brazilian offers of ethanol technology, signed the pact and soon witnessed a $31 million dollar debt-forgiveness plan from Venezuela going into effect in January 2007. This made for an attractive contrast in terms of Managua’s somewhat cautious participation in the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). Other countries considering joining the TCP in the near future include Ecuador, Honduras, and the tiny island nations of St. Vincent, Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica and the Grenadines.

A Risky Partner

In addition to economic factors, there are also political implications that go along with becoming a member of ALBA, most of which stem from the close partnership between Venezuela and Cuba.

For decades, Cuba has helped stir up an array of controversial feelings within the international community. One of the most contentious of these issues has been Havana’s continued explosive relationship with the U.S., policy long advocated as well as stimulated by the conservative exile community in Miami, Florida, just 90 miles away from the socialist island nation. However, even though long-time Cuban strongman Fidel Castro has always been open to talking to the U.S. about economic integration and trade expansion, he realized that most of the miniature Caribbean island nations lack some very important natural resources and natural skills in order to participate in the market place. On December 14, 2004, the Cuba-Venezuela Agreement was signed into action. As a result, Venezuela now delivers approximately 96,000 barrels of oil per day from its state-owned petroleum reserves to Cuba at a very favorable price. In return, Cuba has posted around 20,000 medical personnel to Venezuelan slums. This was, in almost any case, the first step in their progressive partnership in ALBA, since they have been linked up in, what Chávez likes to call, twenty-first century socialism. It seems as though this strong political strategizing by Chávez has not only withstood the negative backlash from Washington, but also has turned heads and brought attention to Latin America as an increasingly important player in world, let alone in regional, politics.

Early this summer, Cuban Agriculture Minister Maria de Carmen Perez and her Venezuelan counterpart Elias Java signed an ALBA-linked agreement to create five joint farming companies in hopes of further reducing their dependence on foreign imports. Located in Venezuela, the farms will produce top priority food and barnyard yields, such as leguminous plants, milk and yogurt, rice and poultry. Since then, five more agreements have been drafted, integrating food producing companies in the two countries and increasing their total bilateral trade to more than $1.8 billion.

The progress being shown in these collaborative programs is closely linked to another Chávez initiative, PetroCaribe, which held its third summit in Caracas on August 11, 2007. After meeting with several PetroCaribe leaders, Chávez said, in referring to future oil needs in the Caribbean Basin region, “the Caribbean shouldn’t have problems this century and beyond.” The populist leader also called for a new underwater pipeline connecting Venezuela to the neighboring islands of Haiti, Puerto Rico and Cuba. According to the Venezuelan president, “If we [Latin America] truly unite…the grandchildren of our grandchildren will have no energy problems.”

The Proposed Programs

Chávez has proposed a variety of different initiatives directed towards improving the social and economic status of regional countries, as well as lowering the extent of their dependence on foreign aid and on multinational corporations. One of the first regional projects was the development of TeleSur, a Pan Latin American television network, which went on the air in October 2005, adding to U.S.-owned CNN, Fox and Univision, among several other similar enterprises, as a round-the-clock TV cable information station. Later that year, PetroCaribe, a Caribbean oil alliance with Venezuela, was established, allowing the sometimes heavily-indebted countries to trade agricultural goods for concessionary oil prices. However, there are many critics of this agreement who believe that Cuba is receiving preferential treatment from Venezuela due to the unusually close relationship between Chávez and Cuban President Fidel Castro. In June 2007, in one of the latest initiatives unfurled by Chávez at the ALBA Summit in Caracas, the idea of launching Banco del Sur was presented. If implemented, the bank would largely take the place of the International Monetary Fund, which for decades has put harsh economic qualifications and restrictive standards on loans being granted to developing countries.

Economic and Political Hurdles: Trade Union Competition and U.S. Initiatives

Several member states aligned with the two main trading blocks in South America, Mercosur and CAN (in 2006 Chávez pulled Venezuela out of the Andean Community because he believed it required making too many concessions to Washington), have joined ALBA. Chávez has been actively soliciting the approval of Brazil, by far the largest economy in South America. Brazil’s success in the biofuel industry has allowed for growing economic self-sufficiency as well as an increased number of trade opportunities with medium economies in the region, including Chile and Colombia. Like those two nations, Brazil is a strong trading partner of the U.S., and Lula has expressed misgivings over a potential negative reaction from Washington if Venezuelan’s trade programs are accepted by Brasilia. Instead, Lula has focused on technology deals, such as expanding the production of ethanol with Mexico and Honduras. Despite quiet efforts made to distance itself from Chávez, Brazil may have another budding relationship to worry about, which is coming from its southern MERCOSUR neighbor, Argentina.

Unlike Brazil, Argentina has been warmly welcoming Venezuelan petrol-dollars. In the past two years, Venezuela has purchased a total of $5 billion in debt relief investments from Argentina, recently adding another one billion dollars in government bonds purchased from Buenos Aires, securing Caracas’ chief lender status to the region. Although criticisms at home and from abroad have been levied against President Kirchner’s decision to further ally himself with Chávez, the Argentine leader decided to meet again earlier this summer in Bolivia, where Chávez and Morales created more oil and gas deals, which this time included Argentina. Plans to transport $16 billion of Bolivian gas to Argentina is already underway, and with one of coldest winters on record taking a heavy toll on the country, the timing couldn’t be better for Chávez’s grand design for the region. Presidential hopeful Christina Kirchner, wife of President Nestor Kirchner, has also made comments supporting Chávez’s initiatives, linking herself all the more to populist ideals.

Venezuela’s oil wealth also has generated energy deals with innovation-minded Evo Morales, signing a $600 million joint venture with Venezuela which consisted of investments involving state-owned Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) and Bolivia’s Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales Bolivianons (YPFB). Not only did Chávez bring his country’s checkbook to La Paz, but he also provided alternative production ideas for Bolivia’s industries, including the cultivation of coca leaves, that have countered U.S. anti-drug strategies. At the same time, plans are underway in Ecuador to build a major oil refinery with the help of around $5 billion in loans from Venezuela. To the south in Uruguay, which in recent years has been one of the most hesitant countries in forming economic and political ties with Venezuela, has now accepted special petroleum conditions that will allow for Uruguay to pay 75 percent up front for its fuel bill and the remaining 25 percent over a period of 15 years, at a convenient two percent interest. At the same time, Uruguay has begun to export dairy cows to Venezuela as a part of several agreements signed between the two countries since 2005. All in all, Latin American governments are finding Venezuelan deals to be too good to pass up, and with the U.S. unwilling to come forth with similarly attractive provisions, the decision for prospective partners has become an increasingly easy one to make.

Meanwhile, a sluggish State Department has been trying to counteract Chávez’s plans by advocating more FTAs in the Americas. However, planning for these has not been going as smoothly as Washington would have liked. In early March 2007, U.S. President George W. Bush began a tour of several Latin American countries (Brazil, Uruguay, Colombia, Guatemala and El Salvador) in hopes of catalyzing the process for jump-staring a sequence of FTAs by promising additional aid to the region, but what he was greeted with in turn were noisy protests rather than warm receptions.

More Latin American Worries for Washington: First Cuba…Then Venezuela…Next…

In July 2007 Iran’s president, President Mahmud Ahmadinejad, announced (via an Iranian website) that his country will join ALBA as an “observer.” In a related development, The New York Times reported that in the past several months Nicaragua has accepted finances from Iran in order to construct a $350 million ocean port as well as promises to choose a site for a $120 million hydroelectric project in hopes of solving the nation’s current energy crisis. These moves were not particularly well received by all Nicaraguans, being seen by some as yet another foreign investment scheme to challenge national sovereignty with ambitious funding operations.

Though it seems improbable that a fiercely Islamic country thousands of miles away would be so interested in Latin America, President Ahmadinejad has forcefully linked Iran’s Islamic revolution to Chávez’s secular revolution that is a mix of socialism and vague ideas drawn from Simon Bolivar. Economically, Iran has been contributing to ALBA since 2005, starting with Iran’s participation in the construction of a tractor manufacturing company, which was jointly inaugurated in Venezuela by Chávez and Ahmadinejad. The factory can annually produce 5,000 tractors and agricultural machinery, of which some already have been exported to Bolivia and 170 of which are now being shipped to Nicaragua. In return for these shipments, Nicaragua and Bolivia have pledged to increase the amount of foodstuffs they export to Iran, including coffee, meat and bananas. Venezuelan Energy Minister Rafael Ramirez, in a July 3 interview with the Iranian newspaper Shargh, announced an agreement to start exporting an undetermined amount of gasoline to Iran. Although Iran produces large volumes of crude oil, it lacks adequate refineries to process the raw crude into gasoline. Ramirez has estimated that the new $4 billion project, set to be built in the Orinoco region, would begin yielding a final product in 2009.

The political implication of having Iran as an ALBA member could bring as many problems as solutions to the table. The U.S. already is wary of Venezuela’s growing relationship with Nicaragua, but now that Iran has come into the mix, particularly when it comes to energy ties, it may make being affiliated with ALBA even trickier for other Latin American states to get too close to the Caracas-led pact.

08/31/07 “ICH” — — The media is silent, Congress is absent, and Americans are distracted as George W. Bush openly prepares aggression against Iran.

US Navy aircraft carrier strike forces are deployed off Iran.

US Air Force jets and missile systems are deployed in bases in countries bordering or near to Iran.

US B-2 stealth bombers have been refitted to carry 30,000 pound “bunker buster” bombs.

The US government is financing terrorist and separatist groups within Iran.

US Special Forces teams are conducting terrorist operations inside Iran.

US war doctrine has been altered to permit first strike nuclear attack on Iran and other non-nuclear countries.

Bush’s war threats against Iran have intensified during the course of this year. The American people are being fed a repeat of the lies used to justify naked aggression against Iraq.

Bush is too self-righteous to see the dark humor in his denunciations of Iran for threatening “the security of nations everywhere” and of the Iraqi resistance for “a vision that rejects tolerance, crushes all dissent, and justifies the murder of innocent men, women, and children in the pursuit of political power.” Those are precisely the words that most of the world applies to Bush and his Brownshirt administration. The Pew Foundation’s world polls show that despite all the American and Israeli propaganda against Iran, the US and Israel are regarded as no less threats to world stability than demonized Iran.

Bush has discarded habeas corpus and the Geneva Conventions, justified torture and secret trials, damned critics as anti-American, and is responsible, according to Information Clearing House, for over one million deaths of Iraqi civilians, which puts Bush high on the list of mass murderers of all time. The vast majority of “kills” by the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan are civilians.

Now Bush wants to murder more. We have to kill Iranians “over there,” Bush says, “before they come over here.” There is no possibility that Iranians or any Muslims who have no air force, no navy, no modern military technology are going to “come over here,” and no indication that they plan to do so. The Muslims are disunited and have been for centuries. That is what makes them vulnerable to colonial rule. If Muslims were united, the US would already have lost its army in Iraq. Indeed, it would not have been able to put an army in Iraq.

Meanwhile the US media focuses on whether Republican Senator Larry Craig is a homosexual or has offended gays by denying to be one of them. The run-up for the public’s attention is why a South Carolina beauty queen cannot answer a simple question about why her generation is unable to find the United States on a map.

The war criminal is in the living room, and no official notice is taken of the fact.

Lacking US troops with which to invade Iran, the Bush administration has decided to bomb Iran “back into the stone age.” Punishing air and missile attacks have been designed not merely to destroy Iran’s nuclear energy projects, but also to destroy the public infrastructure, the economy, and the ability of the government to function.

Encouraged by the indifference of both the American media and Christian churches to the massive casualties inflicted on Iraqi civilians, the Bush administration will not be deterred by the prospect of its air attacks inflicting massive casualties on Iranian civilians. Last summer the Bush administration demonstrated to the entire world its total disdain for Muslim life when Bush supported Israel’s month-long air attack on Lebanese civilian infrastructure and civilian residences. President Bush blocked the attempt by the rest of the world to halt the gratuitous murder of Lebanese civilians and infrastructure destruction. Clearly, turning the Muslim Middle East into a wasteland is the Bush policy. For Bush, civilian casualties are a non-issue. Hegemony uber alles.

The Bush administration has made its war plans for attacking Iraq and positioned its forces without any prior approval from Congress. The “unitary executive” obviously doesn’t believe that an attack on Iran requires the approval of Congress. By its absence and quietude, Congress seems to agree that it has no role in the decision.

In the improbable event that Congress were to make any fuss about Bush’s decision to attack yet another country, the State Department has devised legalistic cover: simply declare Iran’s military to be a “terrorist organization” and go to war under the cover of the existing resolution.

The “Iran issue” has been created by the Bush administration, not by Iran. Iran, like many other countries, has a nuclear energy program to which it is entitled as a signatory to the Nuclear Non- Proliferation Treaty. Inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency have found no evidence of a nuclear weapons program in Iran.

The Bush administration has brushed away this fact, which should be determining, just as the Bush administration brushed away the fact that weapons inspectors reported, prior to Bush’s invasion of Iraq, that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

The Bush administration managed to disrupt the work of the pesky IAEA weapons inspectors in Iran. Iran has been working successfully with the IAEA and has achieved what a senior IAEA official recently described as a milestone agreement. The Bush administration instantly went to work to discredit the agreement and unleashed its new lapdog, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, to threaten “the bombing of Iran.”

The Bush administration’s position is legally untenable and is really nothing but a contrived excuse to start another war. Bush claims that Iran, alone among all the signatories of the Nuclear Non- Proliferation Treaty, must be denied its right under the pact to develop nuclear energy, because Iran, along among all the other signatories, will be the only country able to deceive the IAEA inspectors and develop nuclear weapons. Therefore, Iran must be denied its rights under the agreement.

Bush’s position on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is as legally untenable as his position on every other issue–the Geneva Conventions, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, habeas corpus, the constitutional separation of powers, and presidential signing statements that he cavalierly attaches to new laws in order to override the legislative power of Congress. Bush’s position is that the meaning of laws and treaties varies with his needs of the moment.

Bush has declared himself to be the “decider.” The “decider” decides whether Americans have any rights under the Constitution and whether Iran has any rights under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. As the “decider” has decided that Iran has no such rights, the “decider” decides whether to attack Iran. No one else has any say about it. The people’s representatives are just so much chaff in the wind.

Whatever form of government Bush is operating under, it is far outside an accountable constitutional democratic government. Bush has transitioned America to caesarism, and even if Bush leaves office in January 2009, the powers he has accumulated in the executive will remain. Unless Bush and Cheney are impeached and convicted, there is no prospect of the US Congress and federal judiciary ever again being co-equal branches of government.

When Hurricane Katrina struck two years ago, Americans learned just how ill-equipped the government is to respond effectively to natural disasters. But if you think the government’s response to Katrina was inept, brace yourself for peak oil.

Global oil production will hit its peak in the next few years, at which point oil prices will skyrocket and voracious consumers like the United States, China and Europe will quickly drain every last barrel they can afford to buy. Our per-capita oil consumption is double that of most European nations and more than triple Mexico’s, and shows no sign of slowing. As supplies dwindle, an economic disaster on a par with Katrina will start to unfold.

Global oil demand is at 84 million barrels a day and rising, and there are at most a trillion barrels’ worth still in the ground, most of which is very difficult and expensive to recover. Do the math, and you’ll see that the end of oil is, at most, 30 years away.

But long before oil actually runs out, economists and energy analysts warn that extreme scarcity will cause prices to soar so high that it will no longer be feasible to use petroleum on a wide scale. It is the imminence of this supply-demand shortfall that has people like National Petroleum Council member Matthew Simmons and Reps. Roscoe Bartlett, R-Md., and Tom Udall, D-N.M., worried – very worried – about our economy’s ability to withstand the end of oil.

Cheap and plentiful oil is the foundation of our economy. Everything from food production and distribution to the manufacture of clothing, footwear, medications and plastic goods relies heavily on petroleum. You name it, and we need oil to produce it, ship it and, in many cases, run it.

In February, the U.S. Government Accountability Office dropped a quiet little bombshell: a report on peak oil concluding that there is an urgent need for a swift, coordinated government strategy to assess and develop alternative energy technologies to avert “severe economic damage.”

The agency concluded: “(T)he United States, as the largest consumer of oil and one of the nations most heavily dependent on oil for transportation, may be especially vulnerable among the industrialized nations of the world.” Stark though its conclusion is, the GAO may in fact be understating the gravity of the situation.

Most of you are familiar with our local Spirit of Freedom Republican Women. They are real; they meet monthly. They are one of the few local Republican clubs that doesn’t have a website of its own. I suspect that’s because they’re pretty much positive that the Internet is a tool of the devil, secular humanists, and Jennifer Anniston.

About five years ago, I took to calling them The Belles of Heaven Republican Women’s Club. It kinda stuck and local folks – even Republicans – started calling them that. Well, the Belles have gotten their brassiere straps all uptight and grotesquely twisted over a new locally-owned female-run business: a mother and daughter bakery.

Specifically, Nooky’s Erotic Bakery.

No, I’m not joking. Nooky’s opened a couple of months ago on Highway 6 right in the heart of Sugar Land, within frosting distance of Tom DeLay’s home. It’s in a strip shopping center with other businesses. A mother and daughter team own and run it. They make bakery goods for wedding showers, birthdays, and people too grown up for a Cinderella or Spiderman cake but not so grown up that they don’t want a birthday party.

It’s not something I’d want, but you might and I respect your birthday wishes.

The Belles had their monthly meeting last week and Nooky’s got some free advertising. One blogger described the Belles as being “outraged” over Nooky’s. I can understand that. Women. Baking. Free enterprise. That’s the Trifecta of Torrid. Outrage is a valuable commodity and, bless their hearts, the Belles have cornered the market.

So, poor Criminal District Attorney John Healey, who is a man with absolutely no sense of humor – I mean that literally, we think he had a humorectomy – shows up at the Belles’ meeting and gets cornered by some really pissed-off women who want to know what he’s going to do RIGHT NOW to rid their fair city of the horror of cake.

Healey, as the blogger put it, was “rather put on the spot when he was asked to explain how this occurred.” Well, I imagine so! Envision yourself trying to explain how batter formed itself into a set of ta-tas. You gotta start with that whole spring form cake pan thing, oven temperature, food coloring, and then some other stuff that Julia Childs probably took to her grave.

I would think that not having a sense of humor would be a help in these situations. However, one of my newly found spies tells me that poor Healey walked out of the meeting smelling of Eau de Pious and carrying 40 pounds of grief. It didn’t occur to him that icing is not a criminal act in Texas. In a rare moment of bureaucratic irony, it truly is not his job to do anything about this.

Personally, I think the Belles knew that but brought it up just to hear dirty talk and get themselves all aquiver with outrage. This passes for foreplay in many Republican homes.

By three o’clock that afternoon, County Commissioner Andy Meyers, a man far too obsessed with other people’s hoochy-koochy activities to have much of his own, was issuing press releases and getting everybody in the county drawing a taxpayer salary to quit whatever they were doing and get —- well, outraged!

Andy contends that Nooky’s Bakery is a sexually oriented business.

Dude, it’s flour, sugar, and eggs. If that gets you frisky then you’ve got bigger problems than your diet. I don’t even think that the Mayor of Spokane is that perverted.

Look, there’s a simple solution to this whole thing. Let’s take Andy over to Nooky’s and let him look at the cakes. If Andy gets unduly excited and will sign an affidavit attesting to such, then I’ll help close the place down. I don’t know how we’ll certify Andy’s level of “excitement.” I haven’t worked that out yet. We asked Thelma to help and she said, “Not even for a three-layer dinky cake.”

You would think that at some point Republican women would realize that they should just shut-up about sex. The more they talk, the more Republican men get caught doing really kinky stuff — and I mean kinky in more than running for Governor.

Thelma, Verdelia, and I are going to Commissioners Court when they discuss this just so we can sit in the audience to point and giggle every time a commissioner says “nooky.” The county will probably have to hire a consultant to explain to one commissioner what nooky is and remind the rest.

08/30/07 “Village Voice” — — If and when there’s the equivalent of an international Nuremberg trial for the American perpetrators of crimes against humanity in Guantánamo, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the CIA’s secret prisons, there will be mounds of evidence available from documented international reports by human-rights organizations, including an arm of the European parliament—as well as such deeply footnoted books as Stephen Grey’s Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program (St. Martin’s Press) and Charlie Savage’s just-published Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy (Little, Brown).

While the Democratic Congress has yet to begin a serious investigation into what many European legislators already know about American war crimes, a particularly telling report by the International Committee of the Red Cross has been leaked that would surely figure prominently in such a potential Nuremberg trial. The Red Cross itself is bound to public silence concerning the results of its human-rights probes of prisons around the world—or else governments wouldn’t let them in.

But The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer has sources who have seen accounts of the Red Cross interviews with inmates formerly held in CIA secret prisons. In “The Black Sites” (August 13, The New Yorker), Mayer also reveals the effect on our torturers of what they do—on the orders of the president—to “protect American values.”

She quotes a former CIA officer: “When you cross over that line of darkness, it’s hard to come back. You lose your soul. You can do your best to justify it, but . . . you can’t go back to that dark a place without it changing you.”

Few average Americans have been changed, however, by what the CIA does in our name. Blame that on the tight official secrecy that continues over how the CIA extracts information. On July 20, the Bush administration issued a new executive order authorizing the CIA to continue using these techniques—without disclosing anything about them.

If we, the people, are ultimately condemned by a world court for our complicity and silence in these war crimes, we can always try to echo those Germans who claimed not to know what Hitler and his enforcers were doing. But in Nazi Germany, people had no way of insisting on finding out what happened to their disappeared neighbors.

We, however, have the right and the power to insist that Congress discover and reveal the details of the torture and other brutalities that the CIA has been inflicting in our name on terrorism suspects.

Only one congressman, Oregon’s Democratic senator Ron Wyden, has insisted on probing the legality of the CIA’s techniques—so much so that Wyden has blocked the appointment of Bush’s nominee, John Rizzo, from becoming the CIA’s top lawyer. Rizzo, a CIA official since 2002, has said publicly that he didn’t object to the Justice Department’s 2002 “torture” memos, which allowed the infliction of pain unless it caused such injuries as “organ failure . . . or even death.” (Any infliction of pain up to that point was deemed not un-American.) Mr. Rizzo would make a key witness in any future Nuremberg trial.

As Jane Mayer told National Public Radio on August 6, what she found in the leaked Red Cross report, and through her own extensive research on our interrogators (who are cheered on by the commander in chief), is “a top-down-controlled, mechanistic, regimented program of abuse that was signed off on—at the White House, really—and then implemented at the CIA from the top levels all the way down. . . . They would put people naked for up to 40 days in cells where they were deprived of any kind of light. They would cut them off from any sense of what time it was or . . . anything that would give them a sense of where they were.”

She also told of the CIA interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, who was not only waterboarded (a technique in which he was made to feel that he was about to be drowned) but also “kept in . . . a small cage, about one meter [39.7 inches] by one meter, in which he couldn’t stand up for a long period of time. [The CIA] called it the dog box.”

Whether or not there is another Nuremberg trial—and Congress continues to stay asleep—future historians of the Bush administration will surely also refer to Leave No Marks: Enhanced Interrogation Techniques and the Risk of Criminality, the July report by Human Rights First and Physicians for Social Responsibility.

The report emphasizes that the president’s July executive order on CIA interrogations—which, though it is classified, was widely hailed as banning “torture and cruel and inhuman treatment”—”fails explicitly to rule out the use of the ‘enhanced’ techniques that the CIA authorized in March, 2002, “with the president’s approval (emphasis added).

In 2002, then–Secretary of State Colin Powell denounced the “torture” memos and other interrogation techniques in internal reports that reached the White House. It’s a pity he didn’t also tell us. But Powell’s objections should keep him out of the defendants’ dock in any future international trial.

From the Leave No Marks report, here are some of the American statutes that the CIA, the Defense Department, and the Justice Department have utterly violated:

In the 1994 Torture Convention Implementation Act, we put into U.S. law what we had signed in Article 5 of the UN Convention Against Torture, which is defined as “an act ‘committed by an [officially authorized] person’ . . . specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering . . . upon another person within his custody or physical control.”

The 1997 U.S. War Crimes Act “criminalizes . . . specifically enumerated war crimes that the legislation refers to as ‘grave breaches’ of Common Article 3 [of the Geneva Conventions], including the war crimes of torture and ‘cruel or inhuman treatment.'”

The Leave No Marks report very valuably brings the Supreme Court— before Chief Justice John Roberts took over—into the war-crimes record of this administration. I strongly suggest that Human Rights First and Physicians for Social Responsibility send their report—with the following section underlined—to every current member of the Supreme Court and Congress:

“The Supreme Court has long considered prisoner treatment to violate substantive due process if the treatment ‘shocks the conscience,’ is bound to offend even hardened sensibilities, or offends ‘a principle of justice so rooted in the traditions and conscience of our people as to be ranked as fundamental.'”

Among those fundamental rights cited by past Supreme Courts, the report continues, are “the rights to bodily integrity [and] the right to have [one’s] basic needs met; and the right to basic human dignity” (emphasis added).

098/30/07 “Courage To Resist” — – Two months ago, I took a stand that changed my life forever. As a Soldier, a JVB Protective Service Agent, and a Sniper with the Army who had been in Iraq for a year (running over 250 combat missions), I refused to continue to be a part of the occupation. I regret nothing. This is my story. Currently, as I write this I am sitting in Kuwait, on “stand-by” to return to the States sometime hopefully this week. After getting out of the brig last week, I’m now scheduled to be discharged from the Army within the month. I’m looking forward to joining forces with anti-Iraq-War movements, such as Courage to Resist and Iraq Veterans Against the War.

What led me to this place in my life?

Joining up, the first time

I joined the U.S. Marine Corps in the spring of 1999, the month of my 18th birthday.

I grew up in the custody of the state of Kentucky with little contact with my biological parents since I was 13. I had no family support system and ended up on the streets, doing what street kids do.

By 16, I had eased into hard drugs. I had not been to school since the first part of 9th grade, and I was short on about everything but street smarts, an untapped sense of ambition, and a tough guy attitude.

When I walked into the recruiting station I learned that in order to join the Corps, I would need either a high school diploma or a GED with a waiver—unless I also had certain college credits. When I told them that I was 16 and had only completed 8th grade, they quickly dismissed me, not expecting to see me again.

They were wrong.

Not only did I earn my GED, I also did a semester at the local college. A year and a half later the month I turned 18, March 1999, I walked back into the same recruiting station, spoke to the same recruiter, showed him my GED and my college transcripts and felt my first real sense of pride.

Thirteen weeks after arriving at Parris Island, I was changed forever. I graduated as the leader of a platoon squad with a meritorious promotion, and was now well on my way to a shining career as a Marine.

Then came September 11, 2001.

Re-enlisting for my country

Like many after September 11th I wanted to serve, again. I felt I owed something more to my country after my years of training. I trusted my president and my leadership to tell me the truth. I also trusted my own integrity. I knew that I would never willingly do anything that I knew to be immoral or wrong.

I re-enlisted in 2004—this time in the Army National Guard.

At the time I believed that those serving in the ‘global war on terror’ were doing so because they believed in what they were doing—not because they were under compulsion by a contract or retained by stop-loss. After having seen the situation on the ground, I now believe I was wrong. In 2006, I shipped out to Iraq.

In Iraq I was as a JVB Agent—the JVB (Joint Visitors Bureau) served as the protective service for “three star generals and above” and their “civilian equivalents”. This included the Vice President, the Secretary of Defense, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, their equivalents in a number of our “allied nations”, and others. I trained for my job as part of this “special unit” prior to deployment, and I spent the majority of my tour in the company of the most powerful people connected to the “global war on terror”.

Even as a JVB agent, my primary job was still infantry. On days when we didn’t have any JVB missions, we would be called on for “search and cordon” operations and other infantry assignments. So, although I worked at the JVB, I was still on the roster of a sniper platoon tasked with various missions “outside the wire”—either as “sniper overwatch” or house raids.

I reasoned that my actions during these missions were justified in the name of “self-defense.” However, I came to realize my perception was wrong. I was in a country that I had no right to be in, violating the lives of people, and doing so without regard to the same standards of dignity and respect that we as Americans hold our own homes and our own lives to.

Destroying lives

I have taken and/or destroyed the lives of people who were defending their families from being the “collateral damage” of the day. Iraqi boys are joining groups like “Al Qaeda” for the same reason street kids in the U.S. join the “Cribs” and the “Bloods”. It’s about self protection, a sense of dignity, and making a stand.

The young man whose father and cousin we “accidentally” killed, and whose mother and siblings cry every time the tank rolls through the neighborhood, doesn’t care who Osama Bin Laden is. The “militants” we attacked were usually no different than an armed neighborhood watch group who didn’t trust their government. We didn’t trust the government either, and we put them in power!

Our own sacrifices, as tragic as they are (and they are tragic), are dwarfed in comparison to the carnage that has been brought on the Iraqi people.

“Success” in Iraq is not a matter of the number of coalition deaths “declining”. Success would be an end of the catastrophe we have inflicted on a entire society, and restoration of dignity and sovereignty

Iraqis continue to die at a rate 10 to 20 times that of the coalition forces. In Baghdad alone, five years and $950 billion later, the population suffers power and water outages that last for weeks at a time. Meanwhile, we often impose martial law so that no one can leave. The day I saw myself in the hateful eyes of a young Iraqi boy who stared at me was the day I realized I could no longer justify my role in the occupation.

I envy the soldier who is able to see the injustice of this war from afar, and has the courage and conviction to take the stand against it. There will be those who criticize soldiers for being willing to weigh moral convictions against political ambition. What matters is making the stand. Whether you chose not to join the military in the first place, or you realized after joining that it fell short of the requisite levels of integrity, the moment you realize the truth is the moment to take a stand. My moment came with only three weeks of combat missions remaining during my one year in Iraq. Moral conviction has no timing.

Taking a stand

I informed my chain of command of my beliefs. I could tell from that first conversation that things were not going to go well. I told them that I believed our presence in Iraq was unlawful. I explained that I no longer believed in a policy of war and that I would file as a conscientious objector. Simply put, I could no longer in good conscience participate in a combat role against the Iraqi people.

Seconds after the words left my mouth, my life changed. Inside I had more peace than I had felt in over a year. I knew immediately that I had done the right thing. However, I was aggressively disarmed, confined, and shut off from contacting anyone, including family or an attorney.

I was illegally confined to a cot in an operations room, placed under 24 hour guard, and escorted to the bathroom before I was formally charged with refusal to follow an order two weeks later. I remained confined until I pled guilty (with little choice) less than a week after that. I was immediately sent to Camp Arifjan in Kuwait to serve 30 days in a military prison. I was just released from the brig the other day and I’m now in the process of being “kicked out” with an “Other Than Honorable” discharge. I regret nothing.

After I told my command my beliefs, and once they realized they couldn’t intimidate me and that I was serious, they decided that it was going to become an “information war”.

I had many anti-war friends from MySpace and other online networks that got wind that I was being mistreated and it circulated around the world, literally overnight. Before I knew it, I was dragged into the First Sergeant’s office and they began yelling and screaming about how their names were “all over the internet”. They didn’t try to deny what was being said about them—that I was being treated unfairly and that they refused to acknowledge my claim as a conscientious objector—they were simply mad about the exposure.

Military strikes back

The next day I was told that I had been “flagged” as an OPSEC (operational security) “concern”. No reason given. They were hostile and consumed with the task of making “an example” out of me, and they were looking for ways to ruin my reputation and credibility.

They spent days typing up pages of fabricated “counseling statements” to retroactively discredit my military record. The fact that there were no prior record of statements made these accusations obviously fake, and they knew it. They “needed more”.

They demanded repeatedly all of my Internet user names and pass words—MySpace, personal email, everything. All under the threat that “more charges” would be brought against me if I refused.

They wanted to read my emails, all my blogs, everything, in an attempt to find something. Anything they could use to make it look like I had been giving out classified information. They wanted to charge me and ruin my credibility as much as possible, and they desperately needed to be able to justify my illegal confinement.

Two weeks later, when they finally realized that they were not going to be able to charge me with “divulging intel”, they finally charged me with a series of “not following orders”. Not only did these include my refusal to continue combat missions, but ridiculous stuff like “not standing at parade rest” and “being late for work”. You get the picture.

My command eventually offered to “chapter me out” if I would immediately plead guilty to everything and accept a summary court martial. My options were clear. I could play ball, spend 30 days in a brig, and get my life back. Or I could let them put me back on a fully confined restriction for the next two months, while they took every opportunity to make an example of me—to show everyone in the battalion, “this is what happens if you oppose the war.”

I’ll let them think they won, for now.

Freedom

The truth will come out, and there is nothing they can do to hide it. The occupation is a disaster. I’m convinced that every day it continues that it makes America, and the Iraqis less safe.

Objecting to the war and standing up to the military was without question, one of the best decisions I have ever made. I made a stand that was the right one, and I have my freedom back as a bonus. Maybe ten years from now those of us resisting from within the military today will be seen as some of the first few to speak the truth and to follow up with action. Even now I have many to remind me that I’m not alone in my thinking, even a majority of Americans who know that all the pieces of this conflict simply don’t add up.

Seek the truth. Make the stand

Charles Ferguson, director of “No End in Sight,” talks to NOW about the dangers of filming in Iraq, his career jump from M.I.T. scholar to filmmaker, and his surprise at Sundance.

NOW: What inspired you to tell the story behind the invasion of Iraq?

First, there is the example of my Ph.D. thesis advisor, who had been President Kennedy’s deputy national security advisor, and who taught me to choose important questions and think hard about them. Second, conversations with journalist friends who were covering Iraq made it clear to me that television news was not telling the whole story, and to my astonishment nobody else appeared to be making a film about American policy in Iraq. Finally, it was clear that the Bush Administration didn’t want the story told, and I love a challenge.

NOW: It’s clearly extremely dangerous to be in Iraq, much less film there. What was it like?

Very, very tense. Nobody tried to kill us, but the sense of danger is everywhere. Automatic weapons are as common and normal as cellphones, we heard gunfire and explosions quite often, and several of us came across dead bodies in the street. The tension began as soon as we entered the country. Because the Baghdad airport was closed for a week, we traveled to Baghdad by road, driving overnight from Kurdistan in four armored pickup trucks with machine guns mounted in back. Three times our convoy was forced to stop because roadside bombs had just been discovered, or had just gone off, ahead of us.

In Baghdad, I stayed outside the Green Zone, in a barricaded, guarded compound. When going to meetings, we never gave our true arrival time in advance, and traveled from compound to compound in three armored cars, switching cars every few days. I fired the first director of my security detail, an American ex-special forces soldier, because he drove aggressively and screamed at Iraqis, which drew attention to the fact that we were foreigners. At other times, I would travel “low-profile,” dressed as an Iraqi, with several Kurdish bodyguards carrying concealed weapons walking nearby, pretending not to know me. We never stayed in any one place longer than 20 minutes, never went back to the same place twice, and if someone nearby started using their cellphone, we left immediately. When I read recently of Senator McCain’s comments about visiting a Baghdad market and feeling safe, escorted as he was by dozens of American soldiers supported by armored vehicles and helicopters, I truly wondered what planet the man was on.

NOW: How were you able to get footage of prayers and Moqtada Al-Sadr’s sermon?

We hired an American journalist, Nir Rosen, who had spent the previous three years in Iraq covering the war, and who speaks Arabic. We trained him in the United States in the use of a new, small, high definition camcorder, and he was able to film many things not visible to most journalists.

NOW: What was the most surprising thing you learned about the invasion while making this film?

While I already knew that major mistakes had been made, I was truly shocked when I learned how casually, stupidly, hastily, and carelessly major decisions were made. In the film, we go into considerable detail about one crucial example, the decision to disband the Iraqi military and secret police, a decision made secretly by a handful of men who had never even been to Iraq, and who consulted virtually nobody before making perhaps the most sweeping and destructive decision of the occupation. I cannot recall any other instance in which such enormous decisions have been made by the United States government in such a way.

NOW: You interviewed many people — journalists, American and Iraqi policymakers, experts — for this film. Who left the most lasting impression on you and why?

It is very hard to choose. Colonel Paul Hughes, who watched helplessly as L. Paul Bremer destroyed his careful work to recall the Iraqi Army; Lieutenant Seth Moulton, one of the first Marines to enter Baghdad, and who asks in the film: Is this the best America can do? And all the many Iraqis I spoke with who had welcomed the war, who initially supported the U.S., and who had such high hopes for an Iraq free of Saddam, only to see their country deteriorate into carnage and hopelessness. Of these perhaps the most poignant was Iraq’s deputy human rights minister, a woman who had fought Saddam for decades only to find things even worse after he was overthrown.

NOW: What do you hope your film will do for America?

I hope that it will help Americans understand that we must never go to war casually, and that reconstructing a nation after conquering it is just as important as defeating its army. Wars are sometimes necessary, but war is not a game, and the war is not over when the opposing army surrenders.

NOW: What make you take the unusual leap from scholar to filmmaker?

First, I have always loved film—I started going to film festivals when I was still a high school student. And second, while I love writing and academic work, I would like to reach people beyond the academic world, and to reach them in a way which is emotionally powerful as well as factually accurate.

NOW: This is your first film ever and you won a special jury prize at Sundance film festival. What was your reaction?

Very, very emotional. For both myself and, especially, my two editors, Chad Beck and Cindy Lee, making the film was an extremely intense, emotional experience, and when we heard our film’s name we felt drained and elated at the same time.

WASHINGTON – August 29 – Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) issued the following statement calling on Congress to not appropriate any more funds for the war in Iraq, in response to today’s Washington Post report that President Bush plans on asking Congress for $197 billion in funding for the Iraq war for FY 2008:

“We do not have to fund the war. The Democratic leadership must tell the President NO to any additional funding. No legislation is required. No vote is required. We have the money to bring the troops home. It does not require a vote. The only thing required is honesty, integrity and a willingness to end the war,” Kucinich said.

“The President’s request escalated by $50 billion to continue the surge-a surge that is failing.

“More than 3,700 Americans have died and an estimated one million innocent Iraqis have perished in an unjust and unnecessary war. It is commonly accepted that there is no military solution in Iraq, so why are we there?

“Each year this war is getting more and more costly-both in the amount of money spent and in the number of lives lost. Now the Administration is asking for almost $200 billion for one year alone-just so we can continue down a path of destruction and chaos.

“If the $197 billion was spent on education instead of the war, the federal education budget would triple.

“Congress needs to take a stand against this President and say they will not give him any more money. That is the only way to end this war and bring our troops home.

“The Administration is undermining the political process in Iraq. This money is fueling the occupation, which in turn, is fueling the insurgency. The Democratic leadership must act to end this war and end it now,” Kucinich said.