The Rag Blog

WASHINGTON — U.S. officials who say there has been a dramatic drop in sectarian violence in Iraq since President Bush began sending more American troops into Baghdad aren’t counting one of the main killers of Iraqi civilians.

Car bombs and other explosive devices have killed thousands of Iraqis in the past three years, but the administration doesn’t include them in the casualty counts it has been citing as evidence that the surge of additional U.S. forces is beginning to defuse tensions between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.

Others, however, say that not counting bombing victims skews the evidence of how well the Baghdad security plan is protecting the civilian population — one of the surge’s main goals.

“Since the administration keeps saying that failure is not an option, they are redefining success in a way that suits them,” said James Denselow, an Iraq specialist at London-based Chatham House, a foreign policy think tank.

Bush administration officials have pointed to a dramatic decline in one category of deaths — the bodies dumped daily in Baghdad streets, which officials call sectarian murders — as evidence that the security plan is working. Bush said this week that that number had declined by 50 percent, a number confirmed by statistics compiled by McClatchy Newspapers.

The new UN report on human rights criticized Coalition authorities for indefinitely holding detainees without charge or trial, charging, “The current legal arrangements at the detention facilities do not fulfill the requirement to grant detainees due process.”

The UN praised the resumption of joint Iraqi/MNF inspections of detention facilities in January, after the seven-month hiatus following the public exposure of detainee torture by Ministry of Interior personnel in a Baghdad pre-trial holding center. However, the report also cited the “continuing failure of the Iraqi government as a whole to seriously address issues relating to detainee abuse and conditions of detention.”

Further, the report continues, “The practice of indefinite internment of detainees in the custody of the MNF remains an issue of concern to UNAMI. Of the total of 16,931 persons held at the end of February, an unknown number are classified as security internees, held for prolonged periods effectively without charge or trial.”

BAGHDAD, 24 April 2007 (IRIN) – NGOs have warned of increasing numbers of foreign workers being mislead to work in Iraq for little or no pay and at great risk to their lives. Many were destined to work in Gulf countries or other Middle Eastern countries but were deceived by employers organising their travel arrangements.

“When I left Ethiopia for Jordan, they told me that I was going to work in Amman and receive US $200 a month for my services. On the second day of my arrival in Amman, they told me that I had to travel to another city by plane. Soon after, I found myself working in a house in Baghdad,” said Muluken Alemu, a 22-year-old Ethiopian who lives as virtual prisoner in the house she works in.

“I got desperate. They took my passport away and since I came here five months ago, I haven’t received a single dollar for my work – they always tell me that they’ll pay me after I complete one year of service. I pleaded with them to send me back to my country, but each time I do that, the owner of the house beats me,” Muluken added.

Sectarian violence continued to claim the lives of a large number of Iraqi civilians in Sunni Arab and Shiite neighbourhoods of Iraq’s capital, despite the coalition’s new Baghdad security plan, the UN said today.

In its first human rights report since the security plan was launched on February 14 – and began increasing US and Iraqi troops levels in the capital – the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) said civilian casualties in the daily violence between January and March remained high, concentrated in and around Baghdad.

American troops are facing increasing danger as they step up their presence in outposts and police stations in Baghdad and areas surrounding the city, as part of the security crackdown to which US President George Bush has committed an extra 30,000 troops.

Thousands of Iraqi soldiers are also being deployed in the streets of the capital in an attempt to pacify it.

“While government officials claimed an initial drop in the number of killings in the latter half of February following the launch of the Baghdad security plan, the number of reported casualties rose again in March,” the study said.

But UNAMI also said that for the first time since it began issuing quarterly reports on the human rights situation in Iraq, the new January 1-March 31 one did not contain overall mortality figures from Iraq’s Ministry of Health because it refused to release them.

“UNAMI emphasises again the utmost need for the Iraqi government to operate in a transparent manner, and does not accept the government’s suggestion that UNAMI used the (previous) mortality figures in an inappropriate fashion,” the report said.

The UN agency said that after the publication of its last human rights report about Iraq on January 16, Prime Minister Nouri Maliki’s office told UNAMI its mortality figures were exaggerated, “although they were in fact official figures compiled and provided by a government ministry”.

The new UNAMI report said that on March 1 Iraq’s Ministry of Interior announced that 1,646 civilians were killed in Iraq in February, most of them in Baghdad, but that “it is unclear on what basis these figures were compiled.”

UNAMI said that even though its current report’s evidence could not be numerically substantiated with government figures, it showed continued high levels of violence throughout the reporting period, including large scale indiscriminate killings and assassinations by insurgents, militias and other armed groups.

WASHINGTON (April 25) – A little-known federal investigative unit has launched a probe into allegations of illegal political activity within the executive branch, including a White House office led by President Bush ‘s close adviser, Karl Rove .

The new probe grew out of other investigations still under way, namely a presentation made by Karl Rove’s aide to political appointees at the General Services Administration on how to help GOP candidates in 2008.

The new investigation, which began several weeks ago, grew out of two other investigations still under way at the U.S. Office of Special Counsel: the firing of U.S. Attorney David Iglesias from New Mexico and a presentation by Rove aide J. Scott Jennings to political appointees at the General Services Administration on how to help Republican candidates in 2008.

“We’re in the preliminary stages of opening this expanded investigation,” Loren Smith, a spokesman for the special counsel’s office, an independent investigative and prosecutorial agency, said Tuesday. “The recent suggestion of illegal political activities across the executive branch was the basis we used to decide that it was important to look into possible violations of the Hatch Act.”

The Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) is conducting regular interviews and interrogations with hundreds of Arabs and Muslims across Canada at their work places, homes and in the vicinity of local mosques, say national and Montreal-based Arab and Muslim community groups. The groups are reporting major increases in the numbers of calls from distressed community members concerning CSIS interventions. According to the Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations in Canada (CAIR-Canada), CSIS intelligence gathering activities have increased over the past year.

“Community members who have been approached by CSIS across the country are calling our office on a weekly basis,” says Sameer Zuberi, CAIR-Canada’s communications coordinator. “This hike in CSIS visits is alarming to CAIR-Canada as it casts a blanket of fear and intimidation that is spread over our entire community.”

In response to increased CSIS activity, CAIR-Canada has shipped thousands of copies of a publication designed for Canadian Muslims dealing with CSIS and other Canadian authorities, entitled Know Your Rights Guide, to local mosques and community centres.
“I got a call from a CSIS agent a couple of months ago asking for a meeting at a café downtown on Peel street,” says former Concordia student Mohammed over the phone from Kuwait, where he is currently working as a mechanical engineer. He asked that his last name not be used due to fears of possible repercussions. “I was asked numerous questions concerning my own involvement in the Muslim community [and] was asked by the CSIS agent to not bring a lawyer to the meeting. The agents acknowledged that they had no specific incriminating evidence against me but explained in a non-direct fashion that they simply wanted to gather information on our community, leading me to feel suspect in Canada simply because of my religion.”

“People are being targeted by CSIS for simply belonging to a certain ethnic group with certain religious beliefs without any obvious rationale for such targeting,” says Bassam Hussein of the Centre communautaire Musulman de Montréal. “I was recently visited by a mother of four in Montreal who was seeking help due to CSIS harassment against her and her husband,” says Hussein. “CSIS went to her husband’s employer to inquire about him, the employer was terrified when CSIS contacted him and two weeks later, the employer let the husband go.”

The 2007 Conservative federal budget “earmarks new funding for CSIS,” according to the Ministry of Finance Web site, to the tune of $80-million over two years in addition to the approximately $200-million already allocated to Canada’s national spy agency. Media representatives from CSIS did not return repeated requests for an interview from the Mirror before deadline.

CAIR-Canada recently reported that approximately 30 per cent of all CSIS visits in the Muslim community are occurring at the workplace, often putting individuals’ careers in jeopardy.

Thirty-Year Plan Uses Wind, Taxes, Pig Fat; Consumers Pay More

[Rachel’s introduction: Denmark is working steadily to conserve energy and get itself loose from the grip of Big Oil without falling into the twin traps of Big Coal and More Nukes. Their plan is succeeding. Here’s how it works.]

HORSENS, Denmark — Nothing goes to waste in the new Danish Crown slaughterhouse in eastern Denmark. Even the inedible fat of 50,000 pigs killed and processed here each week is used to heat the plant.

Turning pig blubber into heating oil is one of several techniques Danish Crown uses to save heat, water and electricity. The abattoir recently developed a method of scalding and removing hair from pig carcasses that conserves heat.

“We redesigned the whole manufacturing process to save energy,” says Soren Eriksen, technical director of Danish Crown, a meat company that produces $11 billion of pork and beef annually. “Everything is reused.”

Danish Crown is part of Denmark’s successful 30-year effort to keep its energy consumption in check. Through a wide variety of government- driven initiatives, this small northern European country has overcome one thorny challenge of global warming: how to dramatically reduce energy consumption while maintaining a solid growth rate and low unemployment. The downside is higher taxes and costs for businesses and consumers.

Today hundreds of thousands of Danish homes and other buildings are warmed by surplus heat from power plants. Government policies have spurred developers to build homes with thick insulation, and consumers to buy energy-efficient appliances. Utilities that can’t meet government energy-savings guidelines can buy credits from companies that have invested in efficiencies.

The result of these and other policies is that Denmark’s energy consumption — the amount of fuel it uses to heat its buildings, drive its cars and power its economy — has held stable for more than 30 years, even as the country’s gross domestic product has doubled, according to the International Energy Agency, a Paris group that tracks energy prices and policies. During the same period, energy consumption in the U.S. has risen 40%, while its GDP has quadrupled. The average Dane uses 6,600 kilowatt hours of electricity a year, compared with 13,300 for the average American. [Peter Bach]

“You can’t just sit back and wait for market forces to do this for you,” says Peter Bach, a civil engineer who has worked as a regulator at the Danish Energy Authority for 26 years.

Some of Denmark’s approaches can’t be easily replicated elsewhere. U.S. policy makers and businesses have resisted the type of aggressive intervention and regulation behind Denmark’s successes, concerned about higher costs and taxes, reduced competitiveness and slower growth.

But in Denmark, much of the country’s energy sector is in the hands of nonprofit cooperatives, with residents as shareholders, which makes it easier for government to direct policy with little opposition from business interests. With a population of 5.5 million people, Denmark also is a social welfare state that puts a higher priority on things like generous health care, free schools and guaranteed pensions than on profits, low taxes and individualism.

Danish consumers and businesses clearly pay a price for the energy programs. A Dane buying a new car must pay a registration fee of approximately 105% of the car’s value, plus additional taxes on fuel. Danish companies pay 43% more per megawatt hour of electricity than companies in the U.S., 24% more than in France and 19% more than in England, according to Dansk Industri, an industry trade association. Denmark’s high energy costs and its costly social-welfare system likely slow its economic growth in comparison to the U.S., but haven’t kept its economy from becoming one of Europe’s strongest, says Jonathan Coony, an energy specialist at the World Bank.

Yet Denmark has remained dogged about conservation. Like other countries, Denmark embarked upon its energy-saving crusade after 1973, when Arab nations temporarily cut off oil exports to countries that supported Israel. Many nations, including the U.S., relaxed their efforts as soon as the geopolitical situation stabilized. But Denmark, along with Japan, was one of the few countries that persisted.

Denmark was heavily dependent on imported oil in the 1970s, and the oil crisis helped set off a prolonged economic recession. To cope with the immediate energy shortage, driving was banned on Sundays. Some towns turned off street lights and schools cranked down the heat.

The experience convinced government officials that the country couldn’t rely on foreign oil. So in 1976, a government led by the Social Democratic Party laid out a series of ambitious energy plans, including developing renewable energy from wind turbines, exploring the North Sea for oil and natural gas, and conserving energy. Denmark is now self-sufficient in energy and actually exports oil, gas and electricity.

Radical young Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr may have become more important in hiding than he was when he could dare come out in public.

On Monday he pulled his six Cabinet ministers out of the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, and on the same day sponsored a demonstration 20,000 strong against a major provincial government. The previous week, he had brought hundreds of thousands of Iraqis into the streets of An-Najaf and other cities to protest Maliki’s refusal to demand the withdrawal of U.S. troops.

Can the Maliki government survive the defection of a major Shiite faction?

In the wake of the departure of Sadr’s ministers, rumors swirled in Baghdad that Maliki was considering resigning. He was said to be under siege by the leaders of the other parties in his coalition, who want the posts for themselves, and who were engaging in vicious infighting that threatened to tear the alliance apart. Plagued by American demands that his government meet specific benchmarks on national reconciliation and harried by gruesome mass bombings that left hundreds dead this week in Baghdad, Maliki seems more in danger of becoming increasingly irrelevant than of being overthrown.

A member of parliament from another branch of Maliki’s Dawa party, Abdul-Karim al-Unaizi, admitted to the Associated Press that “the withdrawal will affect the performance of the government, and will weaken it.”

Maliki is said to be considering the appointment of technocrats in place of the ministers who resigned. But in the Iraqi system, a prime minister gains support from lawmakers by bestowing ministries on their parties, and technocrats would bring Maliki no support. He is already heading a minority government and can often not muster a quorum for a meeting of parliament.

The Sadrists are the second major Shiite party to withdraw from the ruling coalition, leaving Maliki with fewer than 100 direct supporters in a parliament of 275, and making him deeply dependent on other political forces, especially the Kurds. The Sunni Arab delegates in parliament, under severe pressure from American forces convinced they are linked to the insurgents, have also begun talking about withdrawing their ministers from the national unity cabinet. At any moment, 50 parliamentarians can initiate a vote of no confidence against Maliki, though for now that possibility seems remote.

Nassar al-Rubaie, leader of the Sadrist bloc in parliament, pledged last week that his party, which has not withdrawn from the legislature, “will have a major role in working on a timetable [for withdrawing foreign troops] in parliament.”

CHICAGO, April 23 (Reuters) – Sgt. Eric Edmundson arrived at the U.S. Army’s Walter Reed hospital in October 2005 with a severe head concussion, a victim of one of the many roadside bombs that are a part of daily life for soldiers in Iraq.

Six months later, after intense physical rehab and an infection that made control of his limbs futile, his morale hit bottom. The Department of Veterans Affairs gave him the choice of a nursing home or returning home from a Richmond, Virginia facility, his family said.

“We felt the VA had a ‘wait and see’ attitude, and our belief was that time was our enemy,” said Eric’s father Edward, who left his job at Conagra Foods in North Carolina to be his son’s full-time health advocate. “So we took him home.”

Unsatisfied with the outcome, Eric and his family eventually found treatment at a private hospital, and began a slow path to recovery. But his story is unusual. Wounded vets are seldom treated at private hospitals, which say they offer expertise for severe brain injuries like Eric’s. The VA is resisting using their services, setting up a clash over care for some the war’s most seriously wounded veterans.

Of the nearly 24,000 wounded soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, about a third suffer from some degree of traumatic brain injury, or TBI, according to the General Accounting Office.

The government has been on the defensive about veterans’ medical care after a probe found shoddy living conditions of recovering wounded at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, considered the jewel in the military’s health care system.

A newly-appointed Commission on Care for America’s Returning Wounded Warriors was formed by U.S. President George Bush in response. A major topic is whether the civilian sector could be used more in treating traumatic brain injury, one of the fastest growing injuries of the war.

“That is a $64,000 question, and one that the Commission will be studying,” as it holds hearings in advance of drawing up recommendations for Bush, said Edward Eckenhoff, president of the National Rehabilitation Hospital in Washington and a member of the commission.

CASE BY CASE

The VA has four hospitals to treat severe brain injuries, in Minneapolis, California, Florida and Virginia. Critics say the total of 48 hospital beds in the entire VA system devoted to the brain injuries is inadequate to meet demand.

Barbara Sigford, the VA’s National Director for Physical Medicine and Rehab, said the agency’s expertise in spinal cord injuries and amputations, often intertwined with brain trauma, has been growing for the past 20 years.

“This isn’t new for us by any means,” she said. “I would say that seldom is it in someone’s best interest to transfer them to another (civilian) program.”

Sigford said there is no issue of overcrowding since the four VA trauma centers are running at about 80 percent capacity.

For their part, private hospitals said they have been building expertise by treating tough brain injuries for decades, whether for construction accidents or car crash victims. The VA by contrast has been caring for mostly chronic illness in Vietnam and World War II veterans, they say.

Jeremy Chwat, executive vice president of the advocacy group, the Wounded Warrior project, said the VA does a good job of caring for critical patients once they arrive, but that it could use assistance in the long road of rehabilitation.

The mainstream US media will sidestep this point, but al-Maliki pretty explicitly said that the reason he called off the wall building is that he doesn’t want his government compared to that of Israel. That is, the Adhamiya wall is being likened in the Arab world to the Apartheid Wall being built by the Israelis in the West Bank. Al-Maliki made the statement in Cairo, and when he referred to the “other walls” he didn’t want the one in Adhamiya compared to, he pointed toward Israel. The Western press is bringing up the Berlin Wall as part of his meaning, but the videotape makes it absolutely clear that his referent was Israel’s project. On the other hand, Nassar al-Rubaie, a Sadrist member of the Iraqi parliament, did warn that the US is building a series of Berlin Walls in Baghdad.

The politics of the wall points to the ways in which the Israeli-Palestinian issue is absolutely central to the difficulties the United States is having in being accepted in Iraq. Many Iraqis perceive the US presence as just an extension of Israeli occupation of Arabs and Arab land, and routinely refer to US troops as “the Jews.”

The Israeli government has grossly mistreated the Palestinian people, the current condition of which is grave. The wall the Israelis are building is built on Palestinian land and has stolen more land from Palestinians and has in some instances run through Palestinian villages, cutting them in two and separating families. The Apartheid Wall has provoked demonstrations.

So being a foreign military force in an Arab country and looking like they are building security walls similar to that of the Israelis just puts the US and its ally, al-Maliki, in a very difficult position.

Not to mention that walling people up is intrinsically unappealing as a governing strategy. Mahmud Osman, a member of parliament in the Kurdistan Alliance and a former member of Paul Bremer’s Interim Governing Council, told al-Zaman that the Adhamiya wall is “the peak of failure” for the new security plan and “a violation of human rights.” He added that the wall “is a clear sign of the failure of the American and government policy for safeguarding security.” Other MPs complained that the policy would create and reinforce sectarian divisions in the capital.