The Rag Blog

WASHINGTON (AP) – Frustrated by delays in health care, injured Iraq war veterans accused VA Secretary Jim Nicholson in a lawsuit of breaking the law by denying them disability pay and mental health treatment.

The lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, filed Monday in federal court in San Francisco, seeks broad changes in the agency as it struggles to meet growing demands from veterans returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Suing on behalf of hundreds of thousands of veterans, it charges that the VA has failed warriors on numerous fronts. It contends the VA failed to provide prompt disability benefits, failed to add staff to reduce wait times for medical care and failed to boost services for post-traumatic stress disorder.

The lawsuit also accuses the VA of deliberately cheating some veterans by allegedly working with the Pentagon to misclassify PTSD claims as pre-existing personality disorders to avoid paying benefits. The VA and Pentagon have generally denied such charges.

“When one of our combat veterans walks into a VA hospital, then they must see a doctor that day,” said Paul Sullivan, executive director of Veterans for Common Sense, which filed the lawsuit. “When a war veteran needs disability benefits because he or she can’t work, then they must get a disability check in a few weeks.”

“The VA has betrayed our veterans,” Sullivan said.

VA spokesman Matt Smith said Monday he could not comment on a pending lawsuit.

“Through outreach efforts, the VA ensures returning Global War on Terror service members have access to the widely recognized quality health care they have earned, including services such as prosthetics or mental health care,” Smith said. “VA has also given priority handling to their monetary disability benefit claims.”

The lawsuit comes amid intense political and public scrutiny of the VA and Pentagon following reports of shoddy outpatient care of injured soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and elsewhere.

The complaint seeks to represent between 320,000 and 800,000 veterans of the Iraq war who lawyers say are at risk of having PTSD. Ultimately, a federal judge will have to decide whether the lawsuit is properly deemed a class action that adequately represents them.

As of March 31, roughly 52,375 Iraq veterans were evaluated at VA facilities for suspected PTSD, according to an internal quarterly VA report released Monday to The Associated Press.

“Unless systemic and drastic measures are instituted immediately, the costs to these veterans, their families and our nation will be incalculable, including broken families, a new generation of unemployed and homeless veterans, increases in drug abuse and alcoholism, and crushing burdens on the health care delivery system,” the complaint says.

It asks that a federal court order the VA to make immediate improvements.

Earlier this month, a federal appeals court in San Francisco issued a strong rebuke of the VA in ordering the agency to pay retroactive benefits to Vietnam War veterans who were exposed to Agent Orange and contracted a form of leukemia.

“The performance of the United States Department of Veterans Affairs has contributed substantially to our sense of national shame,” the opinion from the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals read.

Nicholson abruptly announced last week he would step down by Oct. 1 to return to the private sector. He has repeatedly defended the agency during his 2 1/2-year tenure while acknowledging there was room for improvement.

More recently, following high-profile suicide incidents in which families of veterans say the VA did not provide adequate care, Nicholson pledged to add mental health services and hire more suicide-prevention coordinators.

Some veterans say that’s not enough. In the lawsuit, they note that government investigators warned as early as 2002 that the VA needed to fix its backlogged claims system and make other changes.

Yet, the lawsuit says, Nicholson and other officials still insisted on a budget in 2005 that fell $1 billion short, and they made “a mockery of the rule of law” by awarding senior officials $3.8 million in bonuses despite their role in the budget foul-up.

Today, the VA’s backlog of disability payments is between 400,000 and 600,000, with delays of up to 177 days to process an initial claim and an average of 657 days to process an appeal. Several congressional committees and a presidential commission are now studying ways to improve care.

“While steps can and will be taken in the political arena, responsibility for action lies with the agency itself,” Melissa W. Kasnitz, managing attorney for Disability Rights Advocates, said in a telephone interview. Her group is teaming up with a major law firm, Morrison & Foerster, to represent the veterans.

“We don’t believe the problems will be fixed by the VA if we wait for them,” she said.

Gordon P. Erspamer, a partner at Morrison & Foerster, stressed that the lawsuit does not seek to make a partisan statement about the Iraq war but instead finally force action after years of delay.

“This is the worst it’s ever been for veterans, and it’s only going to get worse,” he said.

The lawsuit cites violations of the Constitution and federal law, which mandates at least two years of health care to injured veterans.

The veterans groups involved in the lawsuit are Veterans for Common Sense in Washington, D.C., which claims 11,500 members, and Veterans United for Truth, based in Santa Barbara, Calif., with 500 members.

On the Net:

Copy of the complaint: http://www.mofo.com/docs/pdf/PTSD070723.pdf

Alexander Cockburn raises the pertinent question: When every antiwar event takes pains to offer its support to the troops engaged in an illegal and immoral war against a sovereign nation, why no one is offering similar support to those defending their homeland?

Lawrence McGuire, a North Carolinian now teaching in Montpellier, France, organized a meeting of antiwar Americans and various interested French parties there at which I spoke last fall. Since then, we’ve been discussing off and on the strange fact that while two-thirds of all Americans oppose the war in Iraq and want the troops to come home, the antiwar movement is pretty much dead. McGuire raises the matter of direct solidarity with Iraqis fighting the US presence in Iraq. In other words, support their troops:

“I was reading a recent piece by Phyllis Bennis recently. She talked about the ‘US military casualties’ and the ‘Iraqi civilian victims’ and it struck me that the grand taboo of the antiwar movement is to show the slightest empathy for the resistance fighters in Iraq. They are never mentioned as people for whom we should show concern, much less admiration.

“But of course, if you are going to sympathize with the US soldiers, who are fighting a war of aggression, than surely you should also sympathize with the soldiers who are fighting for their homeland. Perhaps not until the antiwar movement starts to some degree recognizing that they should include ‘the Iraqi resistance fighters’ in their pantheon of victims (in addition to US soldiers and Iraqi civilians) will there be the necessary critical mass to have a real movement.”

Now there are many obvious reasons why the direct solidarity with resistance fighters visible in the Vietnam antiwar struggle and the Central American anti-intervention movement has not been visible in the movement opposing the Iraq war. The “War on Terror” means-and was designed to mean-that any group in the US with detectable ties or relations with Iraqi resistance movements would be in line for savage legal reprisals under the terms of the Patriot Act. Another important factor: The contours of the Iraqi resistance have been murky and in some aspects unappetizing to secular progressive coalitions in the West, or so they virtuously claim.

But such cavils were familiar in the Sixties and Eighties too as huge chunks of the solidarity movement found endless reasons to distance themselves from the Vietnamese NLF or the Nicaraguan FMLN. That said, ignorance about the Iraqi resistance is somewhat forgiveable. This time there has been no Wilfrid Burchett reporting from behind the lines, and that has had consequences of the kind McGuire sketches out above.

The personal aspect of international political solidarity is not just the stuff of nostalgic anecdote. In the late 1980s the Central American resistance was constantly among us here in the United States in physical form. While Daniel Oretega and Rosario Murillo worked the Hollywood liberal circuit, the sanctuary movement sheltered militants and sympathizers in churches across the country and defied federal efforts to seize them. Labor organizers from El Salvador traveled across North America from local to friendly local. I can remember being at a picnic of a union local striking a door factory in Springfield, Oregon, southeast of Eugene, where a man from a radical labor coalition in El Salvador got a cordial reception from the strikers and their families as they swapped stories of their respective battles.

The other day I found in a box of old papers in my garage a directory to “sister cities”-towns in the United States that had paired with beleagured towns in Nicaragua, regularly exchanging delegations. The directory was as thick as a medium-sized telephone book. There were hundreds of such pairings and many were the individual pairing they led to. People’s Express, the “backpackers’ airline,” as it used to be called, would shuttle demure sisters in the struggle from Vermont or the Pacific Northwest to Miami, for onward passage to Managua and a rendezvous with some valiant son of Sandino or oppressed Nica sister liberated by North American inversion from the oppressions of Latin patriarchy.

Today there is no draft, a prime factor in stocking the Vietnam antiwar movement. This absence of the draft is certainly a major factor in the weakness of the antiwar movement. But though there was no draft in the Reagan years, there was certainly was that very lively political culture of anti-intervention in the 1980s.

It looked as though just such a vibrant left antiwar movement was flaring into life in 2003. But many of its troops have either veered into 9/11 kookdom, or whining about global warming or nourished an often unspoken resolve to vest all hopes in a Democratic presidency after 2008. The bulk of the antiwar movement has become subservient to the Democratic Party and to the agenda of its prime candidates for the presidency in 2008, with Hillary Clinton in the lead.

To describe the antiwar movement in its effective form is really to mention a few good efforts-the anti-recruitment campaigns, the tours by those who have lost children in Iraq-or three or four brave souls-Cindy Sheehan, who single-handedly reanimated the antiwar movement last year and now vows to run against house speaker Nancy Pelosi unless the latter stops blocking impeachment proceedings, or the radical Catholic Kathy Kelly, or Medea Benjamin and her “Code Pink” activists occupying Hilary Clinton’s office and ambushing her for youtube.

A simple question: Has the end of America’s war on Iraq been brought closer by the recapture of the US Congress by the Democrats in November 2006? The answer is that when it comes to the actual war, which has led to the bloody disintegration of Iraqi society, the deaths of up to 5,000 Iraqis a month, the death and mutilation of US soldiers every day, nothing at all has happened since the Democrats rode to victory in November courtesy of popular revulsion in America against the war. I don’t think there is much of an independent Left in America today, if there was, then Lawrence McGuire’s statement about the lack of solidarity with the Iraqi resistance wouldn’t be so obviously on the mark.

Meanwhile, Sami Ramadani offers insights into how the Iraqi resistance can bring together its disparate elements and turn events to its decisive advantage.

Yesterday’s Guardian report on armed resistance organisations in Iraq and their plans to form a political front was a fresh and illuminating snapshot of the most dangerous and far-reaching conflict of our times. By eschewing the usual cliches and bundles of distortions about any Muslims bearing arms, the report enriches our understanding of the best organised of the resistance groups active in parts of Baghdad and the areas up to and including Mosul, north of the capital. What they say indicates a major shift in tactics and strategy, but also reveals these groups’ achilles heels.

Politically, one of the most telling statements was from the spokesperson of a faction of the Ansar al-Sunna resistance group:

“Resistance isn’t just about killing Americans without any aims or goals … Our people have come to hate al-Qaida, which gives the impression to the outside world that the resistance in Iraq are terrorists. Suicide bombing is not the best way to fight because it kills innocent civilians. We are against indiscriminate killing – fighting should be concentrated only on the enemy. They [al-Qaida] believe that all Shia are kuffar [unbelievers]- and most of the Sunnis as well … The Americans magnify their role, even though they are responsible for a minority of resistance operations – remember that the Americans brought al-Qaida to Iraq.”

The statement is significant in two respects. One is the fact that al-Qaida is being denounced openly, and the second is that the man making the statement is from Ansar al-Sunna, one the organisations that gained notoriety in its indiscriminate methods of fighting and sectarian ideology. Equally significant is the fact that the other faction of Ansar al-Sunna is being accused of working with al-Qaida.

One of the least sectarian of the seven groups forming the new alliance is the 1920 Revolution Brigades, whose leader, Harith al-Dhari, was assassinated recently by al-Qaida, according to Muthanna al-Thari, spokesperson of the very influential Association of Muslim Scholars. The leader of the AMS, Sheikh Harith al-Dhari, is the assassinated leader’s uncle and the most influential of the anti-occupation Sunni cleric. Reversing earlier statements, Sheikh Dhari, has also become very critical of al-Qaida. His and other recent anti al-Qaida statements are fuelled by the enormous loathing that Iraqis of all sects and ethnicities have for al-Qaida and all sectarian attacks. Indeed, popular opinion in the streets of Iraq habitually accuse the occupation of backing al-Qaida to spread sectarian divisions and split the struggle against the occupation.

The seven groups are not only anti al-Qaida but also keen to distance themselves from the Saddamist wing of the Ba’ath party, led by Izz’at al-Douri, Saddam Hussein’s deputy until the 2003 invasion.

Such political credentials should in theory make the task of unity with Muqtada Sadr’s movement less difficult. However, the resistance leaders who talked to the Guardian accuse Sadr’s Mahdi army of sectarian killings while ignoring the fact that most of the sectarian attacks have been aimed at Sadr City, Najaf, Kufa and Karbala. For his part, Sadr has conceded that his movement has been infiltrated by its enemies, including the occupation authorities. Referring to the climate of chaos and occupation presence, Sadrist spokesmen have often referred to “the ease with which sectarian crimes could be committed by anyone wearing black and claiming to be from the Mahdi army.”

Following the second attack on the Samarra Shia shrine, Sadr accused the occupation of being behind the attack – a position echoed by Sunni clergy and secular forces – and stressed unity with Sunnis. He later accused the US of sabotaging his attempts to unite with Sunnis. While it obviously suits the US to divide the opposition to its occupation of the country, Sadr’s own tactics are attacked for being one of the biggest obstacles to greater anti-occupation unity. These tactics include on-off participation in the government and the Sadrists’ presence in parliament (in the sect-based Coalition List that won most of the seats in the January 2006 occupation-controlled elections).

Though some of the criticisms of Iranian policies by the resistance leaders interviewed by the Guardian are based in fact, the seven groups’ hostility to Iran is still trapped within the old Saddamist-style anti-Iranian chauvinism that fuelled his eight-year war against Iran following the 1979 overthrow of the US-backed Shah regime. Racist propaganda against the Iranian people lasted for a quarter of a century and permeated Iraqi society and its educational system. The US-led propaganda campaign against Iran has thus fallen on receptive ears. The US is happy to see Iraqis directing their wrath against the fictitious “presence of hundreds of thousands of Iranians fighting alongside the US forces to evict Sunnis from Baghdad and replace them with Shia” – in the words of one Iraqi victim of the occupation who, with her daughter, was forced to leave Iraq after the murder of her brother.

The seven resistance groups don’t appear to be facing up to the fact that effectively by far the biggest organised armed resistance group in Iraq is Sadr’s Mahdi army, estimated to be well over 100,000 strong – or that, in the absence of strong non-religious anti-occupation organisations, millions of people across Iraq are supporters of Muqtada Sadr’s anti-occupation message. US jets and helicopters are daily bombarding Sadr City in Baghdad and towns south of Baghdad. Thousands of Sadrists are in jail and the US is acutely aware that the Sadrists remain one of the biggest obstacles to controlling Iraq.

Last but not least, when talking about the resistance in Iraq it’s important to remember that most of the thousands of military operations that the Pentagon reports are carried out monthly against the occupation forces go unclaimed by any organisation. This confirms the impression that I and many Iraqis have that most of the armed resistance to the occupation is conducted by localised groups in the villages and cities of Iraq. Armed resistance to the occupation has much deeper and more popular roots than the politicians in Washington and London dare to admit. For admitting it, at least in public, means abandoning their much trumpeted “exit strategy”, otherwise known as having your cake and eating it. Having a pro US government in Baghdad, withdrawing most of the troops but keeping military bases in Iraq is not what Iraqis mean by ending the military and economic occupation of Iraq. Such an exit strategy will not stop the resistance and the sea of popular support that feeds and protects it.

Another two gay-bashing, Klan-loving, pulpit-slurping Republicans have disgraced themselves. But there is much more we can learn from the improprieties of David Vitter and Bob Allen.

Another Gay-bashing, Klan-loving, Pulpit-Slurping, Republican has disgraced himself.

No, make that two.

Let’s start with the Christian Coalition’s favorite son, Louisiana senator David Vitter.

There’s not enough Boudreaux Buttpaste in the world that can wipe-clean a career like Vitter’s– now better known as The Guy Who Frequents Prostitutes and Asks To Wear a Diaper.

Apparently the whores of New Orleans call him “Vitter the Shitter.” And don’t even ask about his love child — who, one can only hope, is kept well-stocked with Pampers.

I hate the way a hypocrite like this can drag the good name of kinky sex through the mud.

Vitter refuses to resign, of course. He and his wife took the neo-Antoinette position at their recent press conference: “Let them eat shit.”

David said God, and His Wife Wendy, were willing to move on — and so should everyone else. After all, he still has plenty of gay marriages to wreck, and black voters to disenfranchise! Let the man get on with his work!

But his better half upstaged him. Wendy showed up for the cameras in a low-cut leopard print dress and giant hoop earrings, to say she’s forgiven Davy for everything and it was time for the press to leave their family alone.

She needs more than sartorial assistance:

In 2000, Vitter was included in a Newhouse News Service story about the strain of congressional careers on families.

His wife, Wendy, was asked by the Newhouse reporter: If her husband were as unfaithful as Livingston or former President Bill Clinton, would she be as forgiving as Hillary Rodham Clinton?

“I’m a lot more like Lorena Bobbitt than Hillary,” Wendy Vitter told Newhouse News. “If he does something like that, I’m walking away with one thing, and it’s not alimony, trust me.”

“I think fear is a very good motivating factor in a marriage,” she added. “Don’t put fear down.”

I’m scared.

Watch the campaign videos of Vitter’s last election, where his wife asked him to change their baby’s nappie.

Read Jon Swift’s satire on how Gay Marriage Ruined Vitter’s Life.

Follow the Diaper investigation, load by load.

Or maybe you’ve been turned into a pillar of salt and find yourself unable to move.

Don’t worry, there’s another distraction. Vitter is momentarily overshadowed by Congressman Bob Allen of Florida. Allen is such a pest at the men’s public toilets that that it was only after the THIRD time (in an hour) that he waltzed in to make a play, that an undercover cop finally busted him for solicitation.

And gee, Bob was offering men $20 to go down on them. Jeff Gannon must be wrending his garments:

…The 48 year old Republican Representative was arrested today on second degree misdemeanor charges for solicitation for prostitution. And the twist is that he’s a married man, and was asking an undercover cop in a men’s room if he could pay him to give him a blowjob. It’s so GOP!

Allen was out for a little afternoon delight and got nabbed at noon in Titusville, Florida. “Officers say they noticed Allen acting suspicious as he went in and out of the men’s restroom 3 times. Minutes later, he solicited an undercover male officer inside the restroom, offering to perform oral sex for $20.”

He was first elected in 2000 and lists “water sports” as a hobby on his official state website.

The Christian Coalition loves loved Rep. Allen. Like Vitter (and Foley) and the rest of the Republican hypocrites, he was strong on the family values bullshit. In the last session of the Florida legislature, the Christian Coalition commends him for supporting their (extremist, hateful) positions 92% of the time. The Rainbow Democratic club also rates all the elected officials in the area. Allen? “Wicked Witch: Worst of the Worst.”

The headlines and photos say it all. I don’t know how The Daily Show could improve it. But I do have a couple of editorial comments:

1. Vitter’s defiance, to refuse resignation, is the default Bush strategy, the corporate-politics vamp. You refuse to take responsibility for anything, and deny the obvious. If they can’t force the scepter out of your hand, you hold on for dear life, and keep cashing the checks. You simply write your own reality.

2. A few sincere conservatives are calling for Vitter’s scalp. But not most of his base. If you read the Times Picayune comments and stories, you’ll see the general sentiment– most people haven’t budged from their original position, be it Democrat, Republican, or Indifferent.

The one thing that could change Vitter’s standing with his supporters, sad to say, is if evidence appears that Vitter is a “race-traitor.”

I wish I could laugh at such a quaint expression, but it’s very much alive in this man’s community. If Vitter is found to have had so much as a chaste vanilla kiss with a black woman over 21, he will be crucified by the segregationist, white supremacist freaks who put him into office.

This fear of “the unpardonable sin” may be why Larry Flynt still has a swarm of detectives interviewing the New Orleans sex trade to unearth the worst. Flynt’s not looking for more diapers — Louisiana good ole’ boys don’t care if Vitter walked around with a pacifier in his mouth — as long as his momma was white.

Perhaps the most Gothic twist on American racism is that it has sat out its “politically incorrect” phase by hiding its language under homophobia and sex-bashing, which is still (marginally) more palatable.

“Code-switching” is exactly what Jerry Falwell did in his “make-over,” along with all the other publicity-minded, “whites-only” conservative figures of the South.

In 1981, as he lay dying, Lee Atwater (Karl Rove’s mentor) confessed the GOP’s “Southern Strategy” to win elections. Note the use of the second person narative:

…You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.”

[But] by 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’ — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like “forced busing,” “states’ rights,” and all that stuff.

You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things … and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.

If I could raise Atwater from the dead, I bet he’d agree with me that when the GOP realized that “abstraction” didn’t raise the passion/votes they needed, they turned to abortion-screaming and gay-bashing.

Not because of sentiment or faith! — No, the South had a traditional tolerance for queers and hushed-up pregnancies — read your Tennessee Williams. But this new kind of sex-fiend pandering is a device to proclaim, “nigger nigger nigger” without mentioning the forbidden words.

Ibrahim Izzat al-Douri, leader of the part of the Iraqi Baath party, says he is planning to call together Baathists and Iraqi islamist groups to consider forming a united front to “escalate the military resistance” to the occupation, on a common program of defeating not only the occupation itself, but everything that has been derived from it, including the government and the constitution, in order to make a clean start under occupation-free conditions. This was conveyed to Al-Quds al-Arabi by unnamed sources, who added that a rival Baath figure Ahmed al-Yunis, isn’t being invited, but that another big Baathist name is expected to attend, namely Fawzi al-Rawi, leader of a wing that is said to be close to the Syrian Baath party. It is hard to know what to make of the internal Baath comings and goings, and similarly it is hard to know what to make of the list of a half-dozen Iraqi islamist groups, none of which are familiar names. Overall, as Marc Lynch noted in his thumbnail tag on this item, it appears al-Douri is responding to the fact that he and the Baath party were left out of the group whose existence was announced yesterday in the Guardian piece. The program is identical: Defeat of the occupation and all that it brought with it, while at the same time being prepared to negotiate the withdrawal process.

US forces have fired so many bullets in Iraq and Afghanistan – an estimated 250,000 for every insurgent killed – that American ammunition-makers cannot keep up with demand. As a result the US is having to import supplies from Israel.

A government report says that US forces are now using 1.8 billion rounds of small-arms ammunition a year. The total has more than doubled in five years, largely as a result of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as changes in military doctrine.

“The Department of Defense’s increased requirements for small- and medium-calibre ammunitions have largely been driven by increased weapons training requirements, dictated by the army’s transformation to a more self-sustaining and lethal force – which was accelerated after the attacks of 11 September, 2001 – and by the deployment of forces to conduct recent US military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq,” said the report by the General Accounting Office (GAO).

Estimating how many bullets US forces have expended for every insurgent killed is not a simple or precisely scientific matter. The former head of US forces in Iraq, General Tommy Franks, famously claimed that his forces “don’t do body counts”.

But senior officers have recently claimed “great successes” in Iraq, based on counting the bodies of insurgents killed. Maj-Gen Rick Lynch, the top US military spokesman in Iraq, said 1,534 insurgents had been seized or killed in a recent operation in the west of Baghdad. Other estimates from military officials suggest that at least 20,000 insurgents have been killed in President George Bush’s “war on terror”.

John Pike, director of the Washington military research group GlobalSecurity.org, said that, based on the GAO’s figures, US forces had expended around six billion bullets between 2002 and 2005. “How many evil-doers have we sent to their maker using bullets rather than bombs? I don’t know,” he said.

BAGHDAD, Iraq — This much is agreed upon: at least six Iraqis died overnight Saturday when American attack helicopters pounded a cluster of homes in a dusty, nondescript neighborhood on the northern outskirts of Baghdad.

But the story of why those homes were targeted and who was killed depends on the storyteller.

The U.S. military said the dead were insurgents and the homes in the Husseiniya district probably served as weapons depots; troops observed seven or more secondary explosions after the air assault. By the military’s tally, six fighters were killed and five wounded.

Iraqi residents told a different version: the dead came from two Shiite Muslim families who lived in an area controlled by the powerful Mahdi Army militia. The bodies pulled from the rubble, locals say, were ordinary parents killed with their children in the middle of the night. Locals counted 11 corpses – two men, two women, and seven children. Another 10 were injured. Some Iraqi authorities put the death toll as high as 18.

In Iraq, where new bombings occur before authorities can even investigate the previous day’s violence, the truth about Husseiniya might never come to light. Roadblocks erected around the neighborhood prevented reporters from reaching the scene.

“Lies, lies, lies,” sputtered Salam al Rubaiye, 35, a computer technician who lives in Husseiniya and works in Sadr City. “The Americans always try to change the truth, especially when it concerns the Sadrists,” the collective name for followers of the Mahdi Army commander, cleric Muqtada al Sadr.

Rubaiye visited the scene of the air strike twice Saturday. He first showed up early in the morning when, he said, volunteers were still digging the corpses of women and children from the rubble. Later, he brought a camera and snapped 14 photos.

They showed several piles of cinderblock where homes once stood. The interior of a severely damaged home showed only the detritus of family life: a potted plant, a wall hanging, a refrigerator, an electrical generator. “For Sale” was written in Arabic on the only surviving wall of one home.

Rubaiye also e-mailed two short cell-phone video clips that showed at least seven bodies swathed in blankets, some with grayish feet sticking out at the ends. Two of the bundles were tiny, as if they shrouded young children.

Residents said they’d finished retrieving the dead by 8 a.m., and that two young girls were still missing.

“I took out with my own hands the bodies of two young children, two men, two adult women and four little girls,” said Bassem al Musawi, 30, who lives in the neighborhood. “I don’t know why the Americans bombed these homes. I know one was the house of Abu Mustafa. He’s a very poor man with only one boy and the rest of his family are girls. And he didn’t even have a rifle.”

In an e-mail response to questions on the incident, an American military spokesman wrote that U.S. troops had come under small-arms fire from gunmen in the area just before midnight. The troops “returned fire and attack helicopters, armed with missiles, engaged the structure the gunmen were firing from.”

When three of the gunmen fled into another building, the military statement continued, “attack aircraft dropped a bomb on that structure and observed at least seven secondary explosions, likely caused by explosives and munitions stored inside the building.” Iraqi police who inspected the site reported to the Americans that the home was destroyed, six insurgents were killed and five wounded.

Presented with the dueling accounts, both sides modified their versions.

Iraqi residents acknowledged hearing gunfire before the air strikes. And the U.S. military no longer insisted that only militants perished, though a spokesman emphasized that the air raid was a self-defense measure.

“The adversary is ruthless and puts no value on human life and will endanger innocent civilians – women, children – by hiding and cowering in buildings they take over,” read a statement from Lt. Col. Michael Donnelly, spokesman for U.S. forces north of Baghdad.

Burials were planned, though it was unclear who had custody of the bodies. By late Saturday, there were plans for a large Mahdi Army demonstration to accompany the expected funeral procession.

“They say they target the terrorists, so where are they?” asked a 45-year-old Husseiniya resident who identified himself only as Abu Ghufran. “Most of the dead are women and children. There is no justice in this life.”

07/21/07 “ZNet” — – How many pipe bombs might it take to end U.S. democracy? Far fewer than it would have taken a year ago. The Defense Authorization Act of 2006, passed on September 30, empowers President George W. Bush to impose martial law in the event of a terrorist “incident” or if he or other federal officials perceive a shortfall of “public order” or even in response to antiwar protests that get unruly as a result of government provocations.

The media and most of Capitol Hill ignored or cheered on this grant of nearly boundless power. But now that the president’s arsenal of authority is swollen and consecrated, a few voices of complaint are being heard. Even the New York Times recently condemned the new law for “making martial law easier.”

It took a few paragraphs in a $500 billion, 591-page bill to destroy one of the most important limits on federal power. Congress passed the Insurrection Act in 1807 to severely restrict the president’s ability to deploy the military within the United States. The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 tightened these restrictions, imposing a two-year prison sentence on anyone who used the military within the U.S. without the permission of Congress. But there was a loophole: Posse Comitatus is waived if the president invokes the Insurrection Act.

Section 1076 of the John Warner National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2007 changed the name of the key provision in the statute book from Insurrection Act to Enforcement of the Laws to Restore Public Order Act. The Insurrection Act of 1807 stated that the president could deploy troops within the United States only “to suppress, in a State, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy.” The new law expands the list to include “natural disaster, epidemic, or other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack or incident, or other condition”—and such “con- dition” is not defined or limited.

These new pretexts are even more expansive than they appear. FEMA proclaims the equivalent of a natural disaster when bad snowstorms occur and Congress routinely proclaims a natural disaster when there is a shortfall of rain in states with upcoming elections. A terrorist “incident” could be something as stupid as the flashing toys scattered around Boston last fall.

The new law also empowers the president to commandeer the National Guard of one state to send to another state for up to 365 days. Bush could send the New York National Guard to disarm the residents of Mississippi if they resisted a federal law that prohibited private ownership of semiautomatic weapons. Governors’ control of the National Guard can be trumped with a simple presidential declaration.

The story of how Section 1076 became law demonstrates how expanding government power is almost always the correct answer in Washington. Some people have claimed the provision was slipped into the bill in the middle of the night. In reality, the Administration signaled its intent and almost no one in the media or Congress tried to stop it.

The Katrina debacle appears to have drowned Washington’s resistance to military rule. Bush declared, “I want there to be a robust discussion about the best way for the federal government, in certain extreme circumstances, to be able to rally assets for the good of the people.”

His initial proposal generated only a smattering of criticism and there was no “robust discussion.” On August 29, 2006, the Administration upped the ante, labeling the breached levees “the equivalent of a weapon of mass effect being used on the city of New Orleans.” Nobody ever defined a “weapon of mass effect,” but the term wasn’t challenged.

Section 1076 was supported by both conservatives and liberals. Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI), the ranking Democratic member on the Senate Armed Services Committee, co-wrote the provision, along with committee chair Sen. John Warner (R-VA). Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) openly endorsed it and Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA), then-chair of the House Armed Services Committee, was an avid proponent.

Every governor in the country opposed the changes and the National Governors Association repeatedly and loudly objected. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, warned on September 19 that, “We certainly do not need to make it easier for Presidents to declare martial law,” but his alarm got no response. Ten days later, he commented in the Congressional Record: “Using the military for law enforcement goes against one of the founding tenets of our democracy.” Leahy further condemned the process, declaring that it “was just slipped in the defense bill as a rider with little study. Other congressional committees with jurisdiction over these matters had no chance to comment, let alone hold hearings on, these proposals.”

Congressional Quarterly’s Jeff Stein wrote an excellent article in the December issue on how the provision became law with minimal examination or controversy. A Republican Senate aide blamed the governors for failing to raise more fuss: “My understanding is that they sent form letters to offices. If they really want a piece of legislation considered they should have called offices and pushed the matter. No office can handle the amount of form letters that come in each day.”

Thus, the Senate was not guilty by reason of form letters. Plus, the issue was not on the front page of the Washington Post within the 48 hours before the Senate voted on it. Surely no reasonable person can expect senators to know what they were doing when they voted 100 to 0 in favor of the bill? Apparently, they were simply too busy to notice the latest coffin nails they hammered into the Constitution.

This expansion of presidential prerogative illustrates how every federal failure redounds to the benefit of leviathan. FEMA was greatly expanded during the Clinton years for crises like the New Orleans flood. It, along with local and state agencies, floundered. Yet the federal belly flop on the Gulf Coast somehow anointed the president to send in troops where he sees fit.

“Martial law” is a euphemism for military dictatorship. When foreign democracies are overthrown and a junta establishes martial law, Americans usually recognize that a fundamental change has occurred. Perhaps some conservatives believe that the only change when martial law is declared is that people are no longer read their Miranda rights when they are locked away. “Martial law” means obey soldiers’ commands or be shot. The abuses of military rule in southern states during Reconstruction were legendary, but they have been swept under the historical rug.

Section 1076 is Enabling Act-type legislation—something that purports to preserve law-and-order while formally empowering the president to rule by decree. The Bush team is rarely remiss in stretching power beyond reasonable bounds. Bush talks as if any constraint on his war-making prerogative or budget is “aiding and abetting the enemy.” Can such a person be trusted to reasonably define insurrection or disorder?

Bush can commandeer a state’s National Guard any time he declares a “state has refused to enforce applicable laws.” Does this refer to the laws as they are commonly understood—or the laws after Bush fixes them with a signing statement? Some will consider concern about Bush or future presidents exploiting martial law to be alarmist. This is the same reflex many people have had to each administration proposal or power grab, from the USA PATRIOT Act in October 2001 to the president’s enemy-combatant decree in November 2001 to setting up Guantanamo prison in early 2002 to the doctrine of preemptive war. The Administration has perennially denied that its new powers pose any threat even after evidence of abuses—illegal wiretapping, torture, a global network of secret prisons, Iraq in ruins—became overwhelming. If the Administration does not hesitate to trample the First Amendment with “free speech zones,” why expect it to be diffident about powers that could stifle protests en masse?

On February 24, the White House conducted a highly publicized drill to test responses to Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) going off simultaneously in ten American cities. The White House has not disclosed the details of how the feds responded, but it would be out of character for this president to let new powers he sought to gather dust. There is nothing to prevent presidents from declaring martial law on a pretext than there is to prevent them from launching a war on the basis of manufactured intelligence.

Senators Leahy and Kit Bond (R-MO) are sponsoring a bill to repeal the changes. Leahy urged his colleagues to consider the Section 1076 fix, declaring, “It is difficult to see how any Senator could disagree with the advisability of having a more transparent and thoughtful approach to this sensitive issue.”

He deserves credit for fighting hard on this issue, but there is little reason to expect most members of Congress to give it a second look. The Section 1076 debacle exemplifies how the Washington establishment pretends that new power will not be abused, regardless of how much existing power has been mishandled. Why worry about martial law when there is pork to be harvested and photo ops to attend? It is still unfashionable in Washington to worry about the danger of the open barn door until after the horse is two miles down the road.