The Rag Blog

WASHINGTON (AP) — Lt. Daniel Zimmerman, an infantry platoon leader in Iraq, puts a blog on the Internet every now and then “to basically keep my friends and family up to date” back home.

It just got tougher to do that for Zimmerman and a lot of other U.S. soldiers.

No more using the military’s computer system to socialize and trade videos on MySpace, YouTube and nine other Web sites, the Pentagon says.

Citing security concerns and technological limits, the Pentagon has cut off access to those sites for personnel using the Defense Department’s computer network.

The change limits use of the popular outlets for service members on the front lines, who regularly post videos and journals.

“I put my blog on there and my family reads it,” said Zimmerman, 29, a platoon leader with B Company, 1st Battalion, 28th Infantry Regiment.

“It scares the crap out of them sometimes,” he said.

“I keep it as vague as possible,” he said. “I’m pretty responsible about it. It’s just basically to tell a little bit about my life over here” he said.

He’s regularly at a base where he doesn’t have Defense Department access to the Internet, but he has used it when he goes to bigger bases. He’ll have to rely on a private account all the time now.

Memos about the change went out in February, and it took effect last week. It does not affect the Internet cafes that soldiers in Iraq use that are not connected to the Defense Department’s network.

The cafe sites are run by a private vendor, FUBI (For US By Iraqis).

Also, the ban also does not affect other sites, such as Yahoo, and does not prevent soldiers from sending messages and photos to their families by e-mail.

Internet use has become a troublesome issue for the military as it struggles to balance security concerns with privacy rights. As blogs and video-sharing become more common, the military has voiced increasing concern about service members revealing details about military operations or other information about equipment or procedures that will aid the enemy.

At the same time, service members have used the Web sites to chronicle their time in battle, posting videos and writing journals that provide a powerful, personal glimpse into their days at war.

“These actions were taken to enhance and increase network security and protect the use of the bandwidth,” said Col. Gary Keck, a Pentagon spokesman.

The Pentagon said that use of the video sites in particular was putting a strain on the network, and also opening it to potential viruses or penetration by so-called “phishing” attacks in which scam artists try to steal sensitive data by mimicking legitimate Web sites.

His cravenly pro-US policy on the Middle East misunderstood Bush’s real agenda and resulted in catastrophic failure

Tony Blair’s opposition to an immediate ceasefire in the Lebanon war last summer precipitated his downfall. Now that he has announced the date of his departure from Downing Street, his entire Middle East record needs to be placed under an uncompromising lens.

Blair came to office with no experience of, and virtually no interest in, foreign affairs, and ended by taking this country to war five times. Blair boasts that his foreign policy was guided by the doctrine of liberal interventionism. But the war in Iraq is the antithesis of liberal intervention. It is an illegal, immoral and unnecessary war, a war undertaken on a false prospectus and without sanction from the UN.

Blair’s entire record in the Middle East is one of catastrophic failure. He used to portray Britain as a bridge between the two sides of the Atlantic. By siding with America against Europe on Iraq, however, he helped to destroy the bridge. Preserving the special relationship with America was the be all and end all of Blair’s foreign policy. He presumably supported the Bush administration over Iraq in the hope of exercising influence on its policy. Yet there is no evidence that he exercised influence on any significant policy issue. His support for the neoconservative agenda on Iraq was uncritical and unconditional.

Blair failed to understand that America’s really special relationship is with Israel, not Britain. Every time that George Bush had to choose between Blair and Ariel Sharon, he chose the latter. Blair’s special relationship with Bush was a one-way street: Blair made all the concessions and got nothing tangible in return.

American policy towards the Middle East was doomed to failure from the start, and the end result has been to saddle Britain with a share of the responsibility for this failure. The premise behind American policy was that Iraq was the main issue in Middle East politics and that regime change in Baghdad would weaken the Palestinians and force them to accept a settlement on Israel’s terms. The road to Jerusalem, it was argued, went through Baghdad. This premise was wrong. Iraq was a non-issue; it did not pose a threat to any of its neighbours, and certainly not to America or Britain. The real issue was Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories and America’s support for Israel in its savage colonial war against the Palestinian people.

Two elements are necessary to commit the crime of genocide:

1) the mental element, meaning intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, and

2) the physical element, which includes any of the following: killing or causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the group’s physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births; or forcibly transferring children to another group.

Considering that such clear language comes from a UN treaty which is legally binding on our country, things could start getting a little worrisome — especially when you realize that since our government declared economic and military warfare on Iraq we’ve killed well over one million people, fast approaching two.

This summer will be one year since researchers from Johns Hopkins University collected data for a study which concluded 655,000 additional deaths were caused by the military war, and things have only gotten worse since then. Then consider that the economic war killed an additional 500,000 Iraqi kids under the age of five during only the first seven years of sanctions which were in force for a dozen years, according to a 1999 U.N. report.

Based on the Johns Hopkins estimate of Iraqis killed in the war, one could conservatively estimate that another 2.6 million people have been wounded. The U.N. estimates that between 1.5 million and 2 million Iraqis are now “internally displaced” by the fighting and roughly the same number have fled their country, including disproportionate numbers of doctors and other professionals.

If you are sitting down and possess a healthy imagination, try conjuring up similar conditions here in our land. Start with the fact that few people buy bottled water and what comes out of the tap is guaranteed to at least make you sick if not kill you Three times as many of our fellow citizens are out of work as during the Great Depression On a good day we have three or four hours of electricity to preserve food or cool the 110-degree heat No proper hospitals or rehab clinics exist to help the wounded become productive members of society Roads are a mess Reports of birth defects from exposure to depleted uranium have begun surfacing around the country. Reflect for a minute on the grief brought by a single loved one’s death. Then open your heart to the reality of life if we suffered casualties comparable to those endured by the people of Iraq.

In the former cities of Atlanta, Denver, Boston, Seattle, Milwaukee, Fort Worth, Baltimore, San Francisco, Dallas and Philadelphia every single person is dead. In Vermont, Delaware, Hawaii, Idaho, Nebraska, Nevada, Kansas, Mississippi, Iowa, Oregon, South Carolina and Colorado every single person is wounded.

The entire populations of Ohio and New Jersey are homeless, surviving with friends, relatives or under bridges as they can. The entire populations of Michigan, Indiana and Kentucky have fled to Canada or Mexico. Over the past three years, one in four U.S. doctors has left the country. Last year alone 3,000 doctors were kidnapped and 800 killed. In short, nobody “out there” is coming to save us.

We are in hell.

Of course our government didn’t intend to commit genocide, it just sort of happened. The Iraqis kept getting in the way while we were trying to complete the mission. Mistakes were made as we were building democracy, but surely no genocide was intended. After all, we are the international deciders of what is and what isn’t genocide, and we know full well that intent is a requirement.

It was only “collateral genocide” and lord knows we did our very best to avoid it.

Editor’s Comment: Perhaps never before in history has the popular class been so challenged by an illusion of the invincibility of the barbaric state. When the mass media and the state enjoy an alliance for advancing the purpose and direction of the ruling class, ghosts of futility and defeat often visit the consciousness of the people. James Petras’ essay reveals the deepest hopes and abiding power that lives in the “cultural renaissance” now thriving in the face of state’s militarism, mass media control and economic violence. In this essay, we on the left, learn from our mistakes, renew our confidence and reinvest our selves in the mission we share with “the people”. – Les Blough, Editor

“The truth is that the barbaric state is vulnerable, tactically powerful because of money and arms but strategically vulnerable: No institutions, even those that buttress a police state, can stand in the face of a sustained cultural and political resistance that exposes its deceptions, its criminal acts, its corruption and depredations.”

Introduction

We live in a time of imperial-driven destructive wars in the name of ‘democracy’, savage exploitation in the name of ‘emerging world powers’, massive forced population displacement in the name of ‘immigration’ and large-scale pillage of natural resources in the name of ‘free markets’. We live in a time of barbarism and the barbarian elites employ an army of linguistic and cultural manipulators to justify their conquests.

The great crimes against most of humanity are justified by a corrosive debasement of language and thought – a deliberate fabrication of euphemisms, falsehoods and conceptual deceptions. Cultural expressions are a central determinant in class, national, ethnic and gender relations. They reflect and are products of political, economic and social power. But just as power is ultimately a social relation between antagonistic classes, cultural expressions are also mediated through the lenses, experiences and interests of the dominant elites and their rebellious subjects.

Even as the writers of the barbarous elites have fabricated a linguistic world of terror, of demons and saviors, of axes of good and evil, of euphemisms which embellish the crimes against humanity, so have new groups of writers, artists and collective participants come forth to clarify reality and elucidate the existential and collective bases for demystifying the lies and creating a new cultural reality.
In the face of elite barbarism, a cultural renaissance is born. Revelations of crimes are made through journalistic investigations, plays and songs. Affirmations of integrity, social solidarity and individual rejections of the monetary enticements strengthen moral commitment in the face of ever-present threats, assassinations and official censure.

The great crimes of the imperial powers and their local clients include the massacres and daily death counts, propaganda, which pronounces every victim a criminal, and every criminal a savior. The political delinquents have not, do not and cannot silence, deafen or blind a new generation of critical intellectuals, poets and artists who speak truth to the people.

There are several themes which are essential in the advancement of the emerging cultural renaissance and our challenge to the reign of barbarism: These include the politics of language, conceptual misconceptions and intellectual courage in everyday life. The great conflict is between the power of the mass media and collective solidarity, and the false association of class with high and mass culture.

The Politics of Language

The corruption of language is a prescription for complicity in political crimes. Corruption of language takes the form of euphemisms concocted by propagandists, transmitted through the mass media, echoed in the pompous language of academics, judges, and translated into the gutter language of the sensationalist yellow press. Monstrous crimes against rural communities perpetuated by the police state are described as ‘pacification’; reduction of salaries and social services are described as ‘stabilization’; and the elimination of labor legislation protecting employment from arbitrary firings and weakening of trade unions is described as ‘labor flexibilization’.

Human rights advocates defending victims of military violence are called ‘accomplices of terrorists’; systematic state and paramilitary violence is called national security; opposition to military and political linkages to death squads is called terrorism; large scale counter-insurgency plans designed and funded by foreign imperial powers are labeled measures for ‘national salvation’.

There is also the pretext of providing a pseudo-scientific neutral terminology to inhuman acts – destroying thousands of communities and displacing millions is described as ‘liquidating subversive elements’ and likened to the extermination of noxious insects.

Euphemisms are a form of collective anesthesia – to tranquilize the population not directly affected by state violence. The imagery evoked by euphemisms is always portrayed as benign to obscure the malignant reality. To ‘pacify’ suggests a ‘pacifier’ and allows a parent to gently calm an infant and eliminate its irritable cries. ‘Pacification’ of a people means the opposite: the violent eruption of military forces into a tranquil community that causes screams of pain and shudders of death.

Stabilization in the mouths of state authorities means to reduce trade and budget deficits by lowering wages and salaries while retaining subsidies and tax-exemptions for the ruling class. Stabilization for big business and the banks means de-stabilization for the working class and the poor: the loss of health services, increases in the prices of basic commodities like food and transportation and the loss of employment leading to family break-ups, children leaving school, single parent homes and rising rates of suicide and alcoholism.

The dress rehearsal for any political and social transformation is linguistic clarity – speaking and writing in a language in which words and concepts evoke the reality we live, especially the differential class impact of specific policies. The unmasking of euphemisms is not a job for linguists but for all committed intellectuals and artists.

Language and the Left

Too many times the left fails to elucidate the meaning of euphemisms – resorting to the lazy device of hanging quotation marks around the targeted phrase. The quotation marks are meant to indicate irony and criticism or rejection of the euphemism – but they are just as obscurantist as the euphemism they seek to discredit. For example, many writers deal with authoritarian or police state regimes which claim to be democratic by simply putting quotes around ‘democracy’ – as if the quotes are self-explanatory. The critics fail to take the time and make the effort to elaborate a more precise term, which captures the cognitive meaning of the political system. The resort to quotation marks has a long tradition of abuse on the left, an abuse that serves to undermine the pedagogical purposes of educating the popular classes and providing a new and useful political vocabulary.

More recently, especially among intellectuals who have a pretence of communicating or leading the working class and peasantry, they abuse popular understanding by swearing. When using ‘swear words’ intellectuals abdicate their responsibility to widen the vocabulary of the working class or peasant activists. When workers or peasants resort to swear words, much depends on the context and tonality to determine meaning. The same swear word can be a denunciation or a term of affection, depending on the context. But when there is a political vocabulary that is more precise and varied, the pseudo-populist intellectual should introduce and define its meaning instead of pretending to establish rapport on the basis of the most limited and simplistic level of communication: vulgarity.

The intellectual playing down to the workers and peasants doesn’t raise their understanding; instead it reduces the literacy of the intellectual.

Go to Google News search and type in the following: “FISA Modernization Act.” It will return 10 meager results, only but one offered by the corporate media. Of course, you should not be surprised.

Bush and the neocons want to deep six FISA, itself a violation of the Fourth Amendment, not that it matters as the Fourth died an ignoble death some time ago. But even FISA is not acceptable to the authoritarian psychopaths running the government. Even as “the administration asks Congress to expand its leeway under the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the White House continues to insist on the president’s inherent power to disregard even his preferred version of that law. No wonder J. Michael McConnell, the director of national intelligence, received a skeptical reception from Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee when he testified last week in favor of ‘modernizing’ FISA,” the Los Angeles Times reports.

It figures, as well, that a Los Angeles Times op-ed didn’t really find McConnell’s suggestions abhorrent. “But some of what McConnell requested makes sense. The threat of domestic terrorist attack does require greater flexibility, as do changes in technology. FISA was enacted at a time when most international communications traveled by radio or satellite and thus were outside the law’s regulation of wire transmissions; today, those same communications move along fiber-optic cables. Likewise, a court order should not be required just because a phone call or e-mail from one foreign location to another happens to pass through the United States.”

Of course, “modernizing” FISA has nothing to do with a “domestic terrorist attack.” It has to do with surveilling the public at large.

Now for the shell game. It appears there are two versions of this bill—a secret one and yet another sanitized version for public consumption. “The ‘unclassified’ version of this legislation was released only after numerous protests by several organizations with which we work in coalition,” notes Downsize DC. “Our coalition partners have been invited to make ’statements’ about this ‘unclassified’ version but have not been afforded an opportunity to rebut the secret testimony of the Bush administration. How could they, it’s secret.”

In regard to the details:

All we know is that the bill deals with what the Executive Branch can and cannot do with regard to spying—particularly on the American people. And we’re a lot less sure about the “cannot” part than we are about the “can” aspects of this. In other words, this bill may legalize widespread spying on Americans by the President of the United States.

Did you think the Democrats were going to protect you against the lawless Bush administration? You should have heard Intelligence Committee Chairman, Senator Jay Rockefeller, at the “public” portion of their hearings. He didn’t seem resolved to hold the administration accountable for its past civil liberties violations. His was a voice of bi-partisan reconciliation with government lawlessness.

And why not? The Democrats like power too. Perhaps they like the fact that if they give more power to Bush now, they’ll get to use that power too when they get their turn at the wheel, which they expect to happen soon.

The code name for this bill seems to be the “FISA Modernization Act.” The old, supposedly primitive, version of the FISA law at least provided some tissue-thin protections against government spying on innocent Americans. We would prefer NOT to have those protections “modernized” out of existence, thank you very much.

Democrat Bill Nelson of Florida almost reached the promised land, but not quite: “The trick is, we want to go after the bad guys. We want to get the information that we need, but we’re a nation of laws and we want to prevent the buildup of a dictator who takes the law into his own hands, saying I don’t like that. So now we have to find the balance.”

Bill, the balance is in the Fourth Amendment: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

BAGHDAD, 10 May 2007 (IRIN) – Eleven-year-old Seif Abdul-Rafiz and his two brothers were left with no choice but to leave school and work so as to help their unemployed parents make ends meet.

Unable to find a job, Seif resorted to making bombs for Sunni insurgents who are fighting US troops in Iraq.

“We work about eight hours a day and are supervised by two men. They give us food and at the end of the day we get paid for our work. Sometimes we get US $7 and sometimes we get $10, depending on how many bombs we make,” Abdul-Rafiz said.

“The bombs are used to fight American soldiers. I was really afraid in the beginning but then my parents told me that it was for two good causes: the first is to help our family eat; and the second is to fight occupation forces,” he added.

Thousands of poor children in Iraq are forced to work to help their families. Many of them work in one way or another for a variety of armed groups that operate in the war-torncountry.

“If I had choice, I would have preferred to be in a classroom but we need to eat. In the beginning, they were very kind with us but later they started to threaten us, saying that if we leave our work they would kill our family,” Abdul-Rafiz said.

According to NGO the Iraq Aid Association (IAA), reports from Anbar province and two mainly Sunni neighbourhoods of the capital show that children from poor families are helping insurgents make bombs.

“They are in direct contact with dangerous chemicals which when wrongly handled can result in their death. We have secure information that at least three children have died making bombs,” Fatah Ahmed, IAA spokesman, said.

But Abdul-Rafiz said that hunger was worse than anything.

Foreign investment and Shiite control are the primary concerns. A White House deadline for passage is in doubt.

BAGHDAD — It has not even reached parliament, but the oil law that U.S. officials call vital to ending Iraq’s civil war is in serious trouble among Iraqi lawmakers, many of whom see it as a sloppy document rushed forward to satisfy Washington’s clock.

Opposition ranges from vehement to measured, but two things are clear: The May deadline that the White House had been banking on is in doubt. And even if the law is passed, it fails to resolve key issues, including how to divide Iraq’s oil revenue among its Shiite, Kurdish and Sunni regions, and how much foreign investment to allow. Those questions would be put off for future debates.

The problems of the oil bill bode poorly for the other so-called benchmarks that the Bush administration has been pressuring Prime Minister Nouri Maliki’s government to meet. Those include provincial elections, reversing a prohibition against former Baath Party members holding government and military positions and revision of Iraq’s constitution.

Republican leaders in Washington have warned administration officials that if the Iraqi government fails to meet those benchmarks by the end of the summer, remaining congressional support for Bush’s Iraq policies could crumble. Their impatience was underscored Wednesday by Vice President Dick Cheney during a visit here.

“I did make it clear that we believe it’s very important to move on the issues before us in a timely fashion, and that any undue delay would be difficult to explain,” Cheney told reporters.

But Iraqi lawmakers show little sign of bending to accommodate Bush on an issue as crucial as oil.

“We have two clocks — the Baghdad clock and the Washington clock — and this is a perfect example,” said Mahmoud Othman, a lawmaker from the semiautonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq. “This has always been the case. Washington has been pushing the Iraqis to do things to fit their agenda.”

Iraq is believed to have some of the world’s largest oil reserves, about 115 billion barrels. The country’s 2007 budget is based on predictions that oil proceeds will reach $31 billion, 93% of the government’s revenue.

But war and political instability have kept production down. Just before the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003, production was 2.6 million barrels per day. U.S. officials predicted a rapid rise to 3 million barrels. Instead, Iraq often has struggled to push the daily total to 2 million barrels because of obsolete equipment and security problems.

The oil law is supposed to change this by opening the industry to foreign investors who could modernize equipment and increase production. U.S. officials hope that spreading oil profit fairly across the country would cause instability to ebb.

Iraq’s cabinet, the Council of Ministers, approved a draft oil measure in February. From there, it was to go to parliament. U.S. officials predicted passage would be quick, but it has stalled.

The USG Open Source Center paraphrases reports in the Jordanian press on US Vice President Dick Cheney’s current round of diplomacy in the Middle East.

Jordanian Dailies Comment on Cheney’s Middle East Tour, Objectives
Jordan — OSC Summary
Friday, May 11, 2007

Jordanian newspapers published on 10 May are observed to carry the following commentaries on the recent tour by US Vice President Dick Cheney to the Middle East, particularly to Iraq.

BAGHDAD (AP) — Iraq’s parliament objected Saturday to the construction of walls around Baghdad neighborhoods and called on Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to testify about other security issues.

Construction of the walls — particularly in the Baghdad neighborhood of Azamiyah — has been criticized by residents and Sunni clerics who say it is a form of sectarian discrimination. Even followers of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr complained, fearing their strongholds in the capital will soon be split by the barriers.

U.S. and Iraqi officials have defended the construction of the barriers, which began last month, as a temporary measure to protect the neighborhood during the 12-week-old security crackdown in Baghdad. When the wall is finished, Azamiyah will be gated and checkpoints manned by Iraqi soldiers will be the only entries, the U.S. military said, stressing that the decision was made in coordination with the Iraqis.

Parliament took up the issue Saturday in a raucous session that included debate on the continuing U.S. military presence in Iraq, security raids and human rights abuses. Lawmakers interrupted each other and speaker Mahmoud al-Mashhdani struggled to maintain order.

“They (security walls) don’t protect residents because these areas are shelled by mortars and Katyusha rockets. … Will they build roofs too?” said Kurdish lawmaker Mahmoud Othman. “We must build bridges between the different groups, not build walls to separate them.”

The resolution, voted on by a show of hands, passed 138-to-88 in the 275-member house. The president and his two deputies must unanimously approve the legislation for it to become law, or else it will be sent back to the house for re-examination.
Last month, al-Maliki, a Shiite, said he had ordered a halt to the construction in Azamiyah, but his aides later said he was responding to exaggerated media reports and that construction would continue.

The house was about to vote on another resolution, this time to ban American forces from Baghdad, when officials announced the house no longer had a quorum.

The house also decided to summon al-Maliki and the defense and interior ministers to address other security issues, particularly in Diyala province northeast of Baghdad where there has been a spike in attacks against U.S. and Iraqi forces.

The United States militarist plutocracy wrangled in recent weeks over assigning more than 500 billion of worth-less-and-less foreign creditors’ US dollars to its imperialist war machine. The corporate media tried to foment vain interest in what terms the plutocrats may end up negotiating among themselves for that budget’s approval. To confirm the essential obscenity of the US government and the rubber-stamp-with-vaudeville US legislature, their injustice system has just set free a terrorist – Luis Posada Carriles – despite a formal request from Venezuela that Posada Carriles be extradited for bombing an airliner, killing over 70 civilians.

Inherently inhuman, since it is deliberately operated to prioritize corporate profit, the US political system is geared to generate indiscriminate slaughter and death. Serious counting of people absent by death stopped long ago. Most-favoured-genocides, like Darfur, get a reckoning. US generated slaughter does not. Hence the Bush regime’s dismissal of the authoritative Lancet report on Iraq’s lost hundreds of thousands. In Diyala this week a US helicopter killed at least six school children in a strike on a primary school. Might be more, might be fewer – the US authorities could hardly care less. Remember Colin Powell’s reply to a request for a total figure of Iraqi casualties during Desert Storm, “It’s really not a number I’m terribly interested in.”

Powell’s role in the destruction of Iraq is a bit-part in the wider drama of corporate imperialism’s drive to remake colonialism under the guise of globalization. The main coercive components of that drive are gross trade inequities along with heavily conditioned debt and “aid”, accompanied by constant psychological warfare in the corporate media. When the standard components fail to generate sufficient power, covert action or outright aggression are used. Imperialist terror constantly shadows globalization, purposefully shaping and baiting enemies by way of self-justifying propaganda. Corporate media news manufacture and its atomization of information are among the most pernicious and insidious of the strategies involved.

The systemic terror inflicted on countries like Iraq, Haiti, Afghanistan, Palestine and Somalia is a continuation of unfinished colonial business. The terror system is active within countries too. From Mexico to Egypt to the Philippines to the imperial centres themselves, authorities keen to collaborate in the globalization project replicate imperialist terror strategies on a local rather than a global scale. Even the bitty, piecemeal clues thrown out by the corporate news machine make clear the depth and breadth of the challenge to humanity presented by the United States and its European and Pacific allies.

Depleted Uranium – horror by stealth

The deliberate degradation of Iraq’s health system via years of UN sanctions and subsequent maladministration under military occupation is news in the sense that it provides headlines like “Infant mortality in Iraq soars as young pay the price for war” in the Independent of May 8th. Perhaps a more complete contextual report is the World Socialist Web Site article of May 9th “Iraqi infant mortality soars by 150 percent—a damning revelation of US war crimes”. Both help complete part of the overall picture’s foreground but omit the horrific detail and controversy around depleted uranium-provoked cancers and genetic deformations.

Naturally, the US and British governments deny and where possible censor the steadily accumulating evidence of the horrific effects of their criminally reckless use of depleted uranium munitions in the two Gulf Wars. It is certain these munitions have not only irreversibly damaged the health of many hundreds of US and collaborating troops and mercenaries as well as many thousands of Iraqi military and civilians. They have also condemned future generations of the affected multitude to cancer and deformation. Despite its neutral and heavily technical emphasis, the Wikipedia entry on depleted uranium makes two very pertinent points.

Firstly, “DU is considered both a toxic and radioactive hazard that requires long term storage as low level nuclear waste. DU is relatively expensive to store but relatively inexpensive to produce or obtain. Generally the only real costs are those associated with conversion of uranium hexafluoride (UF6) to metal. DU is extremely dense, 67% denser than lead, only slightly less than tungsten and gold, and just 16% less dense than osmium or iridium, the densest naturally occurring substances known. Its low cost makes it attractive for a variety of industrial and military uses.”

Thus, DU poison costs a lot of money to store safely. Cheaper than tungsten and other expensive metals for producing effective armour piercing shells, DU weapons manufacture solves two problems at once. It camouflages the dispersal of nuclear waste and increases shareholder profits all round by removing high storage costs and converting the poisonous trash into expensive munitions. As so well-signalled by incidents like the Bhopal Union Carbide chemical plant disaster and innumerable other cases, human health has next to no place in the corporate profit equation. Costs of any health care for people suffering the effects of DU radiation exposure can be postponed through decades of obfuscation and denial and finally defrayed onto national governments. Arms corporations ultimately externalize potential health and legal costs by passing them on to forever-deceived taxpayers.

A second point in the non-commital Wikipedia article, here in relation to the link between DU, cancer and genetic defects is, “In general, the prevailing scientific view on the matter is that such data, and other scarce data available, do not conclusively prove a poisoning effect of depleted uranium; but that the possibility exists and cannot be ruled out either, and so a precautionary principle would suggest to suspend the use of such weapons.” But the war criminals who launched their illegal aggression against Iraq in March 2003 explicitly and deliberately trashed all international norms by appealing to their factitious, bogus “war on terror”. With them or against them, human life counts for little or nothing. Witness the Walter Reed hospital scandal and the generally despicable treatment of war veterans. If they treat their own side so callously, what can Iraqis expect? Iraqis bear witness to and suffer the terrifying answer day after day.

Figures from the Spanish group Research Collective on Radioactive Weapons (1) suggest that now in Iraq as many as 20 babies in every 4000 are born eyeless. This source argues that the figure in a normal population should be 1 in every 50 million. The article notes, “In Iraq, they call doomed pregnancies “bellies of jelly”. With reason, since from 1991 unformed lumps of meat have been born with deformations never seen before.” The article cites a report from Al-Jazeera reckoning that since 1991 the incidence of cancer in Iraq has increased tenfold and birth defects fivefold, “due to the use of uranium weapons”.

Cover-up

The response of the US and British authorities has been to repress awkward testimony about the facts of their deployment and use of DU armaments. The same article quoted above notes the case of Riyadh Lafta, an internationally recognised Iraqi epidemiologist highly critical of DU munitions and their use. Riyadh Lafta ” tried fruitlessly for six months to get a visa to travel to Seattle to give a conference in Washington. The British government then refused him a 4-hour transit visa from the Middle East to Canada, where he was invited for another conference.”

Back in 1999, four years before the second Gulf War, Felicity Arbuthnot (2) reported the case of Professor Asaf Durakovic “He is one of the world’s leading experts on radiation, and sees a familiar pattern. ‘Any doctor who becomes involved in this subject is pressurized, fired; records and samples go missing…’ ” Durakovic wrote of his concerns about DU munitions to President Clinton in 1997. “Shortly afterwards his senior position at the Department of Nuclear Medicine at the Veterans’ Administration Authority in Wilmington, Delaware, was terminated.” Arbuthnot goes on to note how at the same time in Britain, Iraq war veterans Ray Bristow and Colin Purcell Lee, returning from research in Iraq, “arrived home ‘to find we had been called traitors by a senior Cabinet Minister’ and that their homes had been raided by Ministry of Defence Police.”

INTRODUCTION

Four years since the US-UK led illegal invasion of Iraq, which has brought the ongoing catastrophe for Iraqi people, all peace loving people and antiwar organizations in the world are appalled by the current Iran-US standoff that has a shocking resemblance to the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. The same neo-conservatives and hawks, headed by Dick Cheney in Washington, who championed the cause of invasion of Iraq, are now shamelessly calling for a military attack on Iran. The same Israeli lobby which pushed for the invasion of Iraq, is now pushing for a military attack on Iran. The same strategy of lies and distortions which was used to dupe the international community and soften it up for the invasion of Iraq, is again used to pave the way for another illegal pre-emptive war of aggression against Iran. As in the case of Iraq, the UN Security Council Resolutions against Iran, obtained by massive US pressure and coercion, would provide a veneer of legitimacy for such an attack.

Contrary to the myth created by the western media, it is not Iran, but the US and its European allies which are defying the overwhelming majority of the international community, in that, they have resisted the call to enter into direct, immediate and comprehensive negotiations with Iran without any pre-conditions. The US and its European allies show their lack of good faith in a diplomatic solution to the standoff by demanding that Iran concede the main point of negotiations, namely, suspension of enrichment of uranium which is Iran’s legitimate right under the Non-Proliferation Treaty, before the negotiations actually start.

Here, we examine and debunk the common myths and charges against Iran and provide a list of twenty reasons to oppose sanctions and military intervention in Iran. The Campaign Against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran (CASMII) calls for immediate and direct negotiations between the US and Iran without any pre-conditions in order to avert a new even more horrifying catastrophe in the Middle East.

IRAN’S NUCLEAR PROGRAMME: FACTS AND LIES

1. There is no evidence of a nuclear weapons programme in Iran. The US and Israel pressure Iran to prove that it is not hiding a nuclear weapons programme. This demand is logically impossible to satisfy and only serves to make diplomacy fail in order to force regime change. Numerous intrusive and snap visits by International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors, totalling more than 2,700 person-hours of inspection, have failed to produce any shred of evidence for a weapons programme in Iran. Traces of highly enriched uranium found at Natanz in 2004, were determined by IAEA to have come with imported centrifuges.

In June 2005, Bruno Pellaud, former IAEA Deputy Director-General for safeguards, was asked by Swissinfo if Iran was intent on building a nuclear bomb. He replied: “My impression is not. My view is based on the fact that Iran took a major gamble in December 2003 by allowing a much more intrusive capability to the IAEA. If Iran had had a military programme they would not have allowed the IAEA to come under this Additional Protocol. They did not have to.” Even the ex-British Foreign Minister, Jack Straw, admitted on 9/4/2006 that “there is no smoking gun and therefore no justification for a military attack”. Still, for the US the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

2. Iran’s need for nuclear power generation is real. Even when Iran’s population was one-third of what it is today, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, negotiating on behalf of President Gerald Ford, persuaded the former Shah that Iran needed nuclear power and over twenty nuclear reactors. [1] Today Iran’s electricity output forecast falls so much short of projected needs that even concerns over the preservation of historic sites did not impede Tehran’s plans to dam a river near the national heritage ruins near Pasargad. With Iran’s population of 70 million fast growing, and its oil resources fast depleting, Iran will be a net importer of oil productions in just over a decade from now. Nuclear energy is thus a realistic and viable solution for electricity generation in the country.

3. The “crisis” over Iran’s nuclear programme lacks the urgency claimed by Washington. Even if it were to militarize its nuclear programme, for which there is no evidence at all, Iran would be many years away from mastering the technology, giving proliferation concerns ample time to be resolved by negotiation. Weapons grade uranium must be enriched at least to 85%. A 2005 CIA report determined that it could take Iran 10 years to achieve this level of enrichment. Many independent nuclear experts have stated that Iran would face formidable technical obstacles if it tried to enrich uranium beyond the 3.5% required for electricity generation. According to Dr Frank Barnaby of the Oxford Research Group, because of contamination of Iranian uranium with heavy metals, Iran cannot possibly enrich beyond even 20% without support from Russia or China [2]. IAEA director, Dr. Mohammad ElBaradei, too, has declared that there is no imminent threat and “We need to lower the pitch.”

4. Iran has met its obligations under the Nuclear non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Iran has fully cooperated in the last three years with the IAEA and had voluntarily accepted and enforced safeguards well above the Additional Protocol until Iran’s nuclear file was reported under the pressure of the US to the Security Council in February 2006. (The U.S., by contrast, has neither signed nor implemented the Additional Protocol, and Israel has refused to sign the NPT.)

Iran’s earlier concealment of its nuclear programme took place in the context of the US-backed invasion of Iran by Saddam; Iraqi chemical weapons provided to Saddam by the US, German and UK companies with the approval of their governments which were used against Iranian soldiers and civilians and Israel’s destruction of Iraq’s Osirak reactor in 1981 with impunity. Iranian leaders concluded from these gross injustices that international laws are only “ink on paper” as Rafsanjani put it.

But the most direct reasons for Iran’s concealment were the American trade embargo on Iran and Washington’s organized and persistent campaign to stop civilian nuclear technology from reaching Iran from any source. For example, in 1995 Germany offered to let Kraftwerk Union (a subsidiary of Siemens) finish Iran’s Bushehr reactor, but withdrew its proposal under US pressure [3]. The following year, China cancelled its contract to build a nuclear enrichment facility in Isfahan for the same reason [4]. Thus Washington systematically violated, with impunity, Article IV of the NPT, which allows signatories to “facilitate, and have the right to participate in, the fullest possible exchange of equipment, materials and scientific and technological information for the peaceful uses of nuclear energy”.

Nevertheless, Iran’s decision not to declare all of its nuclear installations did not violate any rules. According to David Albright and Corey Hinderstein, who first provided satellite imagery and analysis of the facilities at Natanz and at Arak in December 2002 [5], under the safeguards agreement in force at the time, “Iran is not required to allow IAEA inspections of a new nuclear facility until six months before nuclear material is introduced into it.”

5. Iran has given unprecedented concessions on its nuclear programme. Unlike North Korea, Iran has resisted the temptation to withdraw from the NPT. Besides accepting snap inspections under Additional Protocol until February 2006, Iran has invited Western companies, including American companies, to participate in a consortium to develop Iran’s civilian nuclear programme. Such joint ventures combined with Iran’s pledge to ratify the Additional Protocol for intrusive IAEA inspections, would create the best assurance that the enriched uranium would not be diverted to a weapons programme. Such concessions are very rare in the world, but the U.S. and its allies have refused Iran’s offer.

6. Enrichment of uranium for a civilian nuclear programme is Iran’s inalienable right. Every member of the NPT has the inalienable right to enrich uranium for a civilian nuclear programme and is entitled to full technical assistance.

But with the US as the back seat driver and in violation of their assistance obligations, France, Germany, and the UK insisted in three years of negotiations, that Tehran forfeit its right, in return for incentives of little value. Some European diplomats admitted to Asia Times-on-line on 7th September 2005, that the package offered by the EU-3 was “an empty box of chocolates.” But “there is nothing else we can offer,” the diplomats went on to say. “The Americans simply wouldn’t let us.”

7. The Western alliance has not tried true diplomacy. Washington has refused to participate in talks with Iran and instead outsourced the task to the EU. But negotiators for France, Britain, and Germany were hamstrung by the Bush Administration, which disapproved any substantive incentives, including a US guarantee not to attack Iran. This was the reason Iran ended its two-year voluntary suspension of uranium enrichment.

WESTERN HYPOCRISY

8. The UN resolutions against Iran in contrast to the treatment of South Korea, India, Pakistan, and Israel smack of double standards. The UN Security Council sanctions on Iran expose the double standards of the Western powers, which ignore the NPT violations by Washington’s allies. For example, in the year 2000, South Korea enriched 200 milligrams of uranium to near-weapons grade (up to 77%), but was not referred to the UN Security Council.

India has refused to sign the NPT or allow inspections and has developed an atomic arsenal, but receives nuclear assistance from the US which is a violation of the NPT. More bizarrely, India has a seat on the governing board of IAEA and, under US pressure, voted to refer Iran as a violator to the UN Security Council. Another non-signatory, Pakistan, clandestinely developed nuclear weapons but is supported by the US as a “war on terror” ally.

Israel is a close ally of Washington, even though it has hundreds of clandestine nuclear weapons, has dismissed numerous UN resolutions and has refused to sign the NPT or open any of its nuclear plants to inspections.