The Rag Blog

“He reports that among those still being questioned, “11 were Jordanians; 64 Syrians; nine Saudis; two Algerians; six Moroccans; six Yemenis; two Libyans; 57 Palestinians; 284 Egyptians; 113 Sudanese, two Emiratis; three Lebanese and one Somali.”

06/28/07 “Huffington Post” — Today is a banner day for aficionados of the CIA. After a 15-year Freedom of Information Act struggle, the National Security Archive has finally forced the CIA to reveal the “family jewels” — a 702 page treasure trove of documents characterized in The New York Times as a “catalog of domestic wiretapping operations, failed assassination plots, mind-control experiments and spying on journalists.”

Whether or not you wade through the dense coverage of this frightening archive, we all need to keep our perspective on the role of the CIA in U.S. government activities. While the atrocities reported in the “family jewels” are certainly atrocious in their own right, they are actually a tiny corner of a larger history that includes all manner of crimes against humanity, from mayhem against individuals to full fledged state terrorism.

And there is one thing that the “family jewels” will not reveal: how this decades-long criminal history has impacted international politics. Here is a simple summary: most of the world’s current man-made disasters are in some way or another “blowback” from past crimes committed by the CIA and its brethren in the “intelligence,” “security,” or “defense” apparatuses of the United States government. Sadly, this includes (of course) the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, also the multiplex crises in the rest of the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, South Asia, East Asia and…wherever.

A good way to see this is to read Roger Morris’ beautifully presented history three part history of the CIA on TomDispatch, which focuses on the ways in which Secretary of Defense Robert Gates shaped and was shaped by his career in the CIA. I will repeat one example Morris’ comprehensive account that captures so much of the way in which the U.S. has created so much of the ugliness that currently disgraces our world.

This a story about Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shia group that successfully fended off what American and Israeli military planners expected to be an overwhelming onslaught of air power, an onslaught that killed thousands, flattened whole cities, and compromised the Lebanon’s infrastructure.

Many of us remember that in 1983, during a previous crisis there, an American military barracks was bombed, killing 241 marines who were part of an international peacekeeping force sent there in 1982. That bombing was, as Morris tells the story “itself a bloody reprisal for earlier American acts of intervention and diplomatic betrayal in Lebanon’s civil war” which had been raging since 1975.

No one in the American intelligence community knew for sure (and no one knows to this day) who was actually responsible for the bombing, but CIA director William Casey decided nevertheless to undertake reprisals. He chose as his target a Shia cleric, Muhammad Husain Fadlallah, “because of his reputation for fiery sermons in favor of social justice and national independence — and because allied spy agencies — Israel’s Mossad, Saudi Arabia’s GID, and Phalangist informers — claimed he led a militant Shiite group that bore responsibility for the attack on the Marines.”

That was enough evidence for Casey to commission an attack on Fadlallah. It was also enough for his top deputy, Robert Gates, Head of the Directorate of Intelligence, and in charge of processing all the best information the Agency could gather. As the rumors of the coming attack on Fadlallah spread through the agency, Gates’ agents tried to warn him about the lack of evidence against the cleric (does this sound familiar?). Here is Morris’ story of their efforts:

“In our shop, we knew what Casey would be looking for in revenge for the barracks bombing and what the Israelis and Saudis were pushing,” related one analyst who would later become a senior Agency official. “We laid out all the unknowables and caveats and how we were being whipsawed [by allied spy agencies], and we sent it upstairs for Gates to give to Casey, and we recommended it be bootlegged to the NSC and White House and even to Defense if it came to that.”

When there was no sign that Gates had done anything with their warning, two of the analysts confronted the deputy director. “This is terrible,” one of them told him.

“We are not here to pick a fight with the boss,” Gates answered dismissively. “I’m not particularly concerned about some set-to in Lebanon.”

The CIA did not just try to assassinate Muhammad Husain Fadlallah. Instead the Agency carbombed his entire neighborhood with an explosion that was felt “miles away in the Chouf Mountains and well out in the Mediterranean.” Whether or not the cleric was the perpetrator, the message would be clear to all concerned: attacks on American marines would result in retribution against the whole offending community. It was, in short, an act of state terrorism. Eighty-one people were killed and over 200 wounded in the crowded impoverished Bir El-Abed neighborhood where Fadlallah lived. (Fadlallah himself was unhurt — he had been delayed arriving home that evening because he stopped on the street “to speak to an elderly woman.”)

“Study shows that white people are mean and uncaring”

That would have been my headline for a recent story from Diverse: Issues in Higher Education, which was reprinted on AlterNet, and reported an Ohio State University study of white people’s understanding of the black experience (AlterNet’s headline was “Whites Just Don’t Understand the Black Experience”). Curiously, the psychologists who conducted the research spun the data in exactly the opposite direction, and the conflicting interpretations tell us much about race relations in the United States.

The researchers found that whites more accurately assessed the burden of discrimination borne by a hypothetical minority group in a fictional country than they did in the specific case of black people’s experience in the contemporary United States. In the hypothetical, whites estimated that the minority group members (described in the same terms as black Americans) deserved $1 million in compensation, but when presented with the question in the context of black Americans, the median estimate was $10,000.

That result was not surprising, but I was taken aback by the conclusion one of the researchers drew:

“Our data suggest that such resistance is not because White Americans are mean and uncaring, morally bankrupt or ethically flawed. White Americans suffer from a glaring ignorance about what it means to live as a Black American.”

I think the data — along with all my experience both as a white person and someone who writes about white supremacy — suggests exactly the opposite:

White Americans are mean and uncaring, morally bankrupt and ethically flawed, because white supremacy has taken a huge toll on white people’s capacity to be fully human.

My reasoning is simple: Given all the data and stories available to us about the reality of racism in the United States, if at this point white people (myself included) underestimate the costs of being black it’s either because (1) we have made a choice not to know, or (2) we know but can’t face the consequences of that knowledge.

On #1: To choose not to know about the reality of a situation in which one is privileged in an unjust system is itself a moral failure. When a system is structured to benefit people who look like me, and I choose not to listen to the evidence of how others suffer in that system, I have effectively decided not to act by deciding not to know.

On #2: If I do know these things but am not willing to take meaningful action to undermine that unjust system, then my knowledge doesn’t much matter. Again, I have failed in moral terms.

In either case, white people have incentives to underestimate the costs of white supremacy, to avoid facing our moral failing. Rather than suggesting whites “suffer from a glaring ignorance about what it means to live as a Black American,” it’s more accurate to point out that we whites typically choose to turn away from (1) the information readily available to us, or (2) the consequences of the information we do possess.

Much the same argument could be made about men’s assessment of the cost of being female in a patriarchal culture; or the way in which affluent people view the working class and poor; or how U.S. citizens see the rest of the world. In each case, there’s a hierarchical system that allows some to live in privileged positions while consigning others to subordinate status. The systems are unjust, and hence the advantages for the privileged are unjust. There’s no shortage of data and stories available to those of us in the privileged positions if we want to struggle to understand the lived experience of those without those privileges. If we willing avoid learning about that experience, or we know about it but fail to organize politically to change those systems, then we are responsible for the systems’ continued existence.

So, is it too harsh to say that we white folks are mean? Uncaring? Morally bankrupt? Ethically flawed? What about men, the affluent, and U.S citizens?

My point is not to preach from on high. I happen to be a member of all four of those privileged groups: white and male, affluent relative to the vast majority of the world, and a U.S. citizen in a world dominated (for now) by a hyper-militarized United States. Because I have a job as a teacher that allows me to spend a lot of time acquiring information, I know a fair amount about the reality of all four of those systems of power: white supremacy, patriarchy, predatory corporate capitalism, and imperialism. As a result of that study and the privileges of my job, I spend a fair amount of time writing, speaking, and organizing as part of movements trying to undermine these systems.

But this doesn’t leaving me feeling particularly upbeat. The more I study and organize, the more I realize that the system of white supremacy is woven more deeply into this society — and, hence in some sense, into me — than I ever imagined. That leads me to a little thought experiment, a twist on the researchers’ study.

Imagine that you could line white people up in front of a door and get them to really believe that if they walked into a “race-changing room” they would emerge on the other side with black skin and an accent associated with blacks from the South. Then ask whites to set their price — the amount of money it would take them to agree to enter that room. Imagine there was an attendant there with stacks of cash, ready to hand money to the white folks. Just for fun, let’s say the cash award would be tax free. In that setting, when white people really had to face the possibility of being black — knowing all they know about the reality of life in white-supremacist America — what would the price be?

My guess is that a significant percentage of whites would not become black for any amount of money. I also am fairly confident that the median price set by the whites who might be willing to go into the room would be considerably more than $1 million.

In that moment of choice, which would get at the truth about white people think about being black, the problem wouldn’t be that we whites don’t know enough. We know plenty. The issue would be whether or not we had transcended the deeply rooted white supremacy of the culture. In that moment, we would find out about the depth of white people’s commitment to a color-blind society.

I applaud the researchers for devising a study that tries to get at these difficult realities. But we must not fall prey to the temptation to interpret data the way we wish the world were. In this world, we struggle to transcend 500 years of white supremacy. The more we struggle, the more we learn about just how difficult that is.

CAMP PENDLETON, Calif. (July 15) – A Marine corporal testifying in a court-martial said Marines in his unit began routinely beating Iraqis after officers ordered them to “crank up the violence level.”

Cpl. Saul H. Lopezromo testified Saturday at the murder trial of Cpl. Trent D. Thomas.

“We were told to crank up the violence level,” said Lopezromo, testifying for the defense.

When a juror asked for further explanation, Lopezromo said: “We beat people, sir.”

Within weeks of allegedly being scolded, seven Marines and a Navy corpsman went out late one night to find and kill a suspected insurgent in the village of Hamandiya near the Abu Ghraib prison. The Marines and corpsman were from 2nd Platoon, Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 5th Regiment.

Lopezromo said the suspected insurgent was known to his neighbors as the “prince of jihad,” and had been arrested several times and later released by the Iraqi legal system.

Unable to find him, the Marines and corpsman dragged another man from his house, fatally shot him, and then planted an AK-47 assault rifle near the body to make it appear he had been killed in a shootout, according to court testimony.

Four Marines and the corpsman, initially charged with murder in the April 2006 killing, have pleaded guilty to reduced charges and been given jail sentences ranging from 10 months to eight years. Thomas, 25, from St. Louis, pleaded guilty but withdrew his plea and is the first defendant to go to court-martial.

Lopezromo, who was not part of the squad on its late-night mission, said he saw nothing wrong with what Thomas did.

The one-word answer supplied in most news reports to this question is, of course, “Taliban”. It would be astonishing if this was all there was to it, so occasionally we get the admission that it includes other elements. For example, a UNAMA spokesperson says:

“The Taliban are not the only component of Afghanistan’s insurgency. There is factional fighting in parts of the country, insecurity caused by drug traffickers and those fighting because they have been intimidated or paid to do so … They all form important elements of this insurgency.

There is, of course, a way to put this that saves the basic underlying claim that anyone resisting the occupiers, in military or other ways, must have obscure and disreputable motives. The occupiers are innocent, everyone else is guilty until proven innocent. USA Today put it thus last year: “The insurgency is a loose alliance of Taliban guerrillas, followers of former prime minister and fundamentalist warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, al-Qaeda terrorists recruited from across the Islamic world, opium traffickers and local fighters whose murky motives are rooted in tribal politics.” Pro-occupation think-tanks like the Senlis Council and the International Crisis Group advise the occupiers to meet the grievances of the local population, who can thus be won away from supporting the insurgency. The Senlis Council’s report, focusing on Helmand, Kandahar and Nangarhar, describes a number of reasons why local populations are increasingly turning toward support for the insurgency, and thus putting local politicians under pressure to support it as well, and the main one is Dyncorp’s destruction of the opium farms of the poor (those belonging to the wealthy warlords are left well alone). Senlis has advocated legalising opium production for medicinal purposes There is a misperception that opium production is especially controlled by the Taliban. It is true that the biggest increase in product lately has been in Helmand – taking it to almost 70,000 hectares. But across the country, according to the UNODC, total production last year was 165,000 hectares. In those areas controlled by US-allied warlords, and for Afghanistan’s wealthy landlords more generally, opium production is a vital component of their continued control. Various commentators have suggested legalising opium production rather than destroying livelihoods, but this sort of misses the point: keeping it illegal makes it an excellent source of funds for covert action, and right now it is providing America’s allies in Afghanistan with enormous leverage over the country. In other words, the current war to secure a successful client regime relies on extirpating production that could generate revenue for the opposition, while leaving the resources of the ruling elite well alone. Indeed, billions of US dollars have been ploughed through the channels of a patrimonial state into the hands of the pro-American rentier elite. The “war on drugs” is what it has always been: a free-form, wide-ranging counterinsurgency campaign; meanwhile, the insurgency has, as a result of this, an element of class warfare, since what is now fuelling it, in part, is the misery of poor farmers being deprived of their means of livelihood, with massive starvation and misery, while the rich prosper.

So, then, perhaps we should also ask a question about who exactly the Taliban are. For, although we assume we know, Najib Manalai, an Afghan government adviser, insists that the Taliban are a very different kind of movement today: the Taliban are no longer a single group, one single entity. The Taliban, at first, were students — Afghan students who traditionally wanted to study theology. In the beginning, they were a group of Afghans who had very good intentions after five years of anarchy in Afghanistan — they just wanted to bring peace to Afghanistan. They were very popular. Then this movement was somehow hijacked by Pakistani intelligence services and by international terrorist groups. Now when we talk about the Taliban, we are talking about a kind of amalgam of different forces, such as people who are unhappy about government forces because they can’t find their place in the present confederation of Afghan policies; people who are committed to other interests — foreign interests, mainly from the Pakistani circle; and there are people with the fundamentalist ideology of the international Islamic movements. “The Taliban” is a composite of these components.

There is a great deal of euphemism in that. Afghanistan’s current polity is a sectarian one, which largely excludes Pashtuns (Karzai is in this respect a useful token). Recall that the initial success against the Taliban involved the ethnic cleansing of some 50,000 Pashtuns. But this sectarian dynamic is in part a result of the failure of the US to win Pashtun allies prior to the war beginning. They had tried with Abdul Haq, the anti-Taliban ‘moderate’ who had broken with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hizb e-Islami before fighting the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan under the CIA-funded Yunus Khalis. But he wouldn’t follow orders and publicly criticised the bombing of the country. It was his aim to mobilise a domestic insurgency independently of the CIA and the ISI. One or the other of these two agencies leaked his plans to the Taliban during the bombing and ensured his death. At any rate, the US was only interested in pro-American Pashtun leaders, and could find precious few. As such they had to rely on the Northern Alliance with whom they started making a secret alliance in 1999. So, those who “can’t find their place in the present confederation of Afghan policies” are those who are being specifically excluded. The predominantly Pashtun Taliban regime was in fact more representative of the different ethnic groups than the current one. Aside from the various groups in the south, there is a growing insurgency in the north-west of the country, due to conflict with the warlords in government such as Ismail Khan, and the ridiculously brutal spate of Nato bombardment (apparently these recent massacres are the result of a deliberate policy shift).

Aside from the growing armed insurgency, there is of course an unarmed political opposition developing. The Taliban era was a desperate one, but this regime is hardly more progressive. Aside from the fairly serious matter of occupying troops rampaging through cities, airplanes lobbing bombs at villages, secret prisons, torture cells, kidnappings and so on, there is the small problem that the state built and the groups empowered by the occupiers are client despots. They murder and torture their enemies with impunity, and their police chiefs rape and extort. They steal taxes, bulldoze houses, steal land. Northern Alliance rulers kidnap people and ransom them back to their families with the pretense that they were Taliban arrestees. There is nothing the attorney general likes more than to lock up media workers who displease him. Critics like Malalai Joya are unwelcome (she has recently been suspended for the remainder of her term). The Department for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice continues to operate. Reports last year that it would ‘return’ after a resolution passed by Karzai’s cabinet last year were misleading: the department, although now synonymous with Taliban terror, had actually originated under the US-recognised Rabbani regime, and continued under Karzai’s regime in various forms. The Vice and Virtue squads continued to operate in Kabul, warlords like Ismail Khan imposed the old regime, and Karzai’s ‘Accountability Department’ took over many of the roles of the department. In this respect, it is worth noting that, as NGO workers Chris Johnson & Jolyon Leslie point out in their widely praised Afghanistan: The Mirage of Peace, that the Taliban have been demonised out of all proportion. This isn’t simply an artefact of war propaganda, but in part a result of NGO misconceptions. Their repression, as brutal as it was, should not have been understood as simply an emanation of their own peculiar, reactionary ideology. It was rooted in the common social practises of the most conservative elements of society in Afghanistan, which fused with the conditions of war, and then civil war, to produce a militant war on ‘sin’ and ‘vice’ (with well-known, and savage punishments such as stonings and amputations). If you go back and have a look at the scholarly studies of Afghanistan during the rule of the Taliban, this is a frequent theme raised by the regime in justification for some of its worst policies (excluding girls from education for example). Nasreen Ghufran noted in Asian Survey in May 2001 that the regime’s claim was that it needed time to develop the correct environment for girls and women to be educated and work: it saw its model, ironically, as the Islamic Republic of Iran. Nevertheless, women’s struggles were able to exert some effects. As Jeanette O’Malley wrote in 2000: “In early June, supreme leader Mullah Omar issued an edict allowing for the expansion of mosque schools for young boys and girls. The mosque schools are apparently little more than a substitute acceptable to clerics and hard-line officials for state-run schools, as they offer the same curriculum.” NGO groups who worked in Afghanistan were able to set up schooling for girls by simply telling local Taliban officials that it was a mosque. The point is that the assumption that hardline religious and social conservatism was something that could be pinned exclusively on the Taliban has been at best a misguided one. Today, of course, the imposition of the burqa is still enforced even if not by edict. Women must now struggle against empowered warlords, who are given to raping women (and children) they like the look of. A recent study found that most women in Afghanistan suffer mental and physical abuse. So-called ‘honour killings’ continue, as do slavery and stonings.

BAGHDAD — The dress code at the Blue Star restaurant inside Baghdad’s Green Zone now calls for vest and hat.

Flak vest and Kevlar helmet, to be precise. And it’s a good thing.

At least four mortar rounds hit inside the Green Zone about 1:30 p.m. Saturday, killing two Iraqi civilians, according to a U.S. soldier who could not speak for attribution because he’s not authorized to talk to reporters.

Meanwhile, a State Department official, after initially denying that State had ordered its 1,000 Baghdad personnel to wear protective gear, said that a copy of the order obtained by McClatchy Newspapers was an undiscussable security breach.

Saturday’s attack followed a barrage of up to 35 mortars and rockets that slammed into the Green Zone – considered the safest place in Baghdad – on Wednesday.

The embassy issued its memo later that day.

“As a result of the recent increase of indirect fire attacks on the International Zone, outdoor movement is restricted to a minimum,” it states. “Remain within a hardened structure to the maximum extent possible and strictly avoid congregating outdoors. Personal protective equipment (PPE) is mandatory until further notice.

“Public places that are not in a hardened structure – such as the Blue Star Restaurant – should be frequented only in conjunction with the use of your PPE.”

An embassy spokesman on Saturday initially denied that State now requires workers to wear body armor in the Green Zone.

He got upset when shown the memo.

“You’re asking me to comment on an internal document?” he said, refusing to give his name. “How did you get it? We don’t talk to what our security posture is.”

Saturday’s attack, which, like most of the rest, came from the east, the stronghold of Shiite Mahdi Army militia members loyal to anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, closed the Blue Star for lunch. But it reopened at 6 p.m. for dinner.

The place features white plastic tables and chairs, a magnum bottle of Johnny Walker Red scotch on the bar, plastic fish squirming in a faux aquarium and bootleg DVDs in a rack. All beneath a blue-and-white striped canvas tent.

Research Triangle Institute, of Durham, N.C., runs the compound where the Blue Star’s located. The institute is helping local governments ramp up utilities and other projects in Iraq’s provinces.

Five contract workers from the Research Triangle Institute filtered in. All wore flak vests and helmets. Mark Grubb, the first to arrive, ordered a 16.9-ounce Carlsberg beer. A choice of spaghetti, kebabs and burgerish meat lay ahead.

“A (mortar) round landed here in the compound,” Grubb said. The blast severed a water line and the Internet cable. It also hit where the compound’s security chief resides. “You could see it on the closed-circuit camera,” Grubb said.

There were no injuries.

While some 100 British embassy workers and about 55 United Nations personnel living in the Green Zone sleep in hardened housing, State Department personnel sleep unprotected.

Asked how State could require workers to walk around outdoors in body armor while making them sleep in unprotected quarters, the embassy official said: “I wouldn’t characterize it as being a mixed message.”

U.S. embassy workers, speaking on condition of anonymity, have told McClatchy that they’re angry and scared.

As you may know – unless you rely on the corporate media for your news, of course – yesterday the U.S. Senate unanimously declared that Iran was committing acts of war against the United States: a 97-0 vote to give George W. Bush a clear and unmistakable casus belli for attacking Iran whenever Dick Cheney tells him to.

The bipartisan Senate resolution – the brainchild (or rather the bilechild) of Fightin’ Joe Lieberman – affirmed as official fact all of the specious, unproven, ever-changing allegations of direct Iranian involvement in attacks on the American forces now occupying Iraq. The Senators appear to have relied heavily on the recent New York Times story by Michael Gordon that stovepiped unchallenged Pentagon spin directly onto the paper’s front page. As Firedoglake points out, John McCain cited the heavily criticized story on the Senate floor as he cast his vote.

It goes without saying that all of this is a nightmarish replay of the run-up to the war of aggression against Iraq: The NYT funneling false flag stories from Bush insiders. Warmongers citing the NYT stories as “proof” justifying any and all action to “defend the Homeland.” Credulous and craven Democratic politicians swallowing the Bush line hook and sinker.

To be sure, stout-hearted Dem tribunes like Dick Durbin insisted that their support for declaring that Iran is “committing acts of war” against the United States should not be taken as an “authorization of military action.” This is shaky-knees mendacity at its finest. Having officially affirmed that Iran is waging war on American forces, how, pray tell, can you then deny the president when he asks (if he asks) for authorization to “defend our troops”? Answer: you can’t. And you know it.

This vote is the clearest signal yet that there will be no real opposition to a Bush Administration attack on Iran. This is yet another blank check from these slavish, ignorant goons; Bush can cash it anytime. This is, in fact, the post-surge “Plan B” that’s been mooted lately in the Beltway. As you recall, there was much throwing about of brains on the subject of reviving the “Iraq Study Group” plan when the “surge” (or to call it by its right name, the “punitive escalation”) inevitably fails. Bush put the kibosh on that this week (“Him not gonna do nothin’ that Daddy’s friends tell him to do! Him a big boy, him the decider!”), but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a fall-back position – or rather, a spring-forward position: an attack on Iran, to rally the nation behind the “war leader” and reshuffle the deck in Iraq.

Your guide to the ongoing dance between Bush, the Congress, and the Iraqi government; an update on the current status of the proposed oil laws; and some steps you can take to stop the hijacking of Iraq’s oil.

What does a war for oil look like? American troops going into battle with tanks waving “Exxon Mobil” and “Chevron” flags right behind? Are the flags then planted squarely in the ground and the oil beneath officially declared war bounty? Well, some members of the Bush administration and U.S. oil companies may have favored such an approach. But the device ultimately chosen to win this war for oil is only slightly more subtle: a law, to be passed by the Iraqis themselves, which would turn Iraq’s oil over to foreign oil companies.

The president’s benchmark

The U.S. State Department Iraq Study Group began laying the foundations for the new law prior to the invasion of Iraq. Its recommendations, released only after the invasion, were quickly enshrined in a draft oil law introduced to the interim Iraqi government by the U.S.-appointed interim prime minister of Iraq, Ayad Allawi (a former CIA operative).

The Bush administration has spent four years trying to force successive Iraqi governments to pass the law, referred to as either the “hydrocarbons” or “oil” law. While it has gone through several permutations, the basics have remained the same and have followed the original prescriptions set out by the State Department.

The law would change Iraq’s oil system from a nationalized model — all but closed to U.S. oil companies — to a privatized model open to foreign corporate control. At least two-thirds of Iraq’s oil would be open to foreign oil companies under terms that they usually only dream about, including 30-year-long contracts. (For details of the law, see my March 2007 New York Times Op-Ed, “Whose Oil Is It, Anyway?”)

In January, after four years of trying to get the law passed in Iraq, President Bush went public with this demand when he made his “speech to the nation” announcing the “surge” of 20,000 additional American troops to Iraq.

The president explained that the surge would be successful where other U.S. efforts had failed in Iraq because the Iraqi government would be held to a set of specific “benchmarks.” Those benchmarks were laid out in a White House Fact Sheet released the same day that explained that the Iraq government had committed to several economic and political measures, including to “enact [a] hydrocarbons law to promote investment, national unity, and reconciliation.”

After the speech, the administration increased public pressure on the Iraqi government to pass the law. However, that speech was just about the only time that the president or anyone in the administration would use the word “investment” to describe the law. Instead, the adminstration would refer generally to the law’s capacity to bring “national unity and reconciliation” by establishing a mechanism to evenly distribute Iraq’s oil revenues among Iraqis on a per capita basis.

With few exceptions, the American press has adopted the adminstration’s language and continually and virtually exclusively refers to the oil law as a revenue sharing measure — ignoring completely the fact that Iraqis would only be able to share the revenues left over after the foreign oil companies received their very sizeable cut.

The pressure worked. In February, the oil law passed what seemed to be the most important hurdle, Iraq’s cabinet. The cabinet signed off on the law and agreed to send it to the parliament. However, resistance in the parliament was too great, and the law was not introduced.

So the truth comes out.

After a myriad of stories about people being excluded from events where the President is speaking, now we know that the White House had a policy manual on just how to do so.

Called the “Presidential Advance Manual,” this 103-page document from the Office of Presidential Advance lays out the parameters for how to handle protesters at events.

“Always be prepared for demonstrators,” says the document, which is dated October 2002 and which the ACLU released as part of a new lawsuit.

In a section entitled “Preventing Demonstrators,” the document says: “All Presidential events must be ticketed or accessed by a name list. This is the best method for preventing demonstrators. People who are obviously going to try to disrupt the event can be denied entrance at least to the VIP area between the stage and the main camera platform. … It is important to have your volunteers at a checkpoint before the Magnetometers in order to stop a demonstrator from getting into the event. Look for signs they may be carrying, and if need be, have volunteers check for folded cloth signs that demonstrators may be bringing.”

In another section, entitled “Preparing for Demonstrators,” the document makes clear that the intention is to deprive protesters of the right to be seen or heard by the President: “As always, work with the Secret Service and have them ask the local police department to designate a protest area where demonstrators can be placed, preferably not in view of the event site or motorcade route.”

The document also recommends drowning out protesters or blocking their signs by using what it calls “rally squads.” It states: “These squads should be instructed always to look for demonstrators. The rally squad’s task is to use their signs and banners as shields between the demonstrators and the main press platform. If the demonstrators are yelling, rally squads can begin and lead supportive chants to drown out the protestors (USA!, USA!, USA!). As a last resort, security should remove the demonstrators from the event site.”

The document offered advice on how to recruit members for such squads: “The rally squads can include, but are not limited to, college/young republican organizations, local athletic teams, and fraternities/sororities.”