The Rag Blog

Taking a cue from Cold War Soviet policy in Berlin – not to mention the enlightened approach of the Israeli government in the West Bank – the Bush Regime has begun walling off a Sunni enclave in Baghdad, driving a stake into the heart of the flickering reconciliation efforts among the Iraqi grassroots and solidifying the nation’s deadly sectarian divisions — thus abetting the aims of the violent extremists operating both within and outside the Bush-backed Iraqi government.

The Sunnis of Adhamiya are being sealed into a ghetto by three miles of concrete, 12 feet high, made up of giant 14,000-pound slabs being installed by monstrous cranes and heavy machinery in the dead of night, the Los Angeles Times reports. When the enclosure is finished, Adhamiya will be an open-air prison, with access into and out of the ghetto controlled by U.S. and, presumably, Iraqi government forces. Already the wall is destroying fragile personal and commercial ties between the area’s Sunni population and the surrounding Shiite areas, say residents. It will also draw even more violence to the area, they add:

“Are they trying to divide us into different sectarian cantons?” said a Sunni drugstore owner in Adhamiya, who would identify himself only as Abu Ahmed, 44. “This will deepen the sectarian strife and only serve to abort efforts aimed at reconciliation.”

Some of Ahmed’s customers come from Shiite or mixed neighborhoods that are now cut off by large barriers along a main highway. Customers and others seeking to cross into the Sunni district must park their cars outside Adhamiya, walk through a narrow passage in the wall and take taxis on the other side.

Several residents interviewed likened the project to the massive barriers built by Israel around some Palestinian zones. “Are we in the West Bank?” asked Abu Qusay, 48, a pharmacist who said that he wouldn’t be able to get to his favorite kebab restaurant in Adhamiya.

Residents complained that Baghdad already has been dissected by hundreds of barriers that cause daily traffic snarls. Some predicted the new wall would become a target of militants on both sides. Last week, construction crews came under small-arms fire, military officials said.

“I feel this is the beginning of a pattern of what the whole of Iraq is going to look like, divided by sectarian and racial criteria,” Abu Marwan, 50, a Shiite pharmacist, said.

(04-19) 15:08 PDT WASHINGTON, (AP) — Strange things sometimes come out of President Bush’s mouth. “Polls just go poof.””Remember the rug?”

When Bush went to Ohio on Thursday to talk about terrorism, he ended up musing about marriage and chicken-plucking plants, the agony of death and his Oval Office rug, which resembles a sunburst.

About his legacy, Bush said historians are still assessing George Washington, the nation’s first leader. “My attitude is, if they’re still writing about (number) one, 43 doesn’t need to worry about it.”

On being married: “A good marriage is really good after serving together in Washington, D.C.”

Maybe the president just felt like jabbering at the town hall-style event in Tipp City, Ohio. He began talking about terrorism and ended 90 minutes later after chattering about everything from life after the White House to Vietnam War and the brutal Khmer Rouge regime.

Some highlights:

_”Politics comes and goes, but your principles don’t. And everybody wants to be loved — not everybody. … You never heard anybody say, `I want to be despised, I’m running for office.'”

_”The best thing about my family is my wife. She is a great first lady. I know that sounds not very objective, but that’s how I feel. And she’s also patient. Putting up with me requires a lot of patience.”

_”There are jobs Americans aren’t doing. … If you’ve got a chicken factory, a chicken-plucking factory, or whatever you call them, you know what I’m talking about.”

_”There are some similarities, of course” between Iraq and Vietnam. “Death is terrible.“

_”I’ve been in politics long enough to know that polls just go poof at times.”

As he has before, Bush told the story about how his first presidential decision was to pick a rug for the Oval Office, a task he quickly cast to his wife. He told her to make sure the rug reflected optimism “because you can’t make decisions unless you’re optimistic that the decisions you make will lead to a better tomorrow.”

Two scenes from the tube did a job on me tonight.

The first one was from a documentary called “Iraq’s missing millions”.
Yes you guessed right. It referred to the 20 Billion Dollars of Iraqi money that simply evaporated during Bremer’s “governance” of the “new” Iraq.
The 20 Billion dollars of Iraqi money that were meant to “reconstruct” Iraq.

The program filmed a hospital in Diwaniya, the Southern part.
This was no hospital, this looked like a run down insalubrious toilet. No hospital sheets, no curtains, no medication, no oxygen masks, no surgical gloves, no intravenous serums…

In something that looked like an ancient non-functional incubator, laid Zahra, an infant girl and not too far, Abbas, her twin infant brother.

Zahra looked blue black, the colors of asphyxiation. She lacked Vitamin K and some other drug. She was terribly malnourished. She lacked air, she lacked life.

The doctor had no oxygen mask. He pressed a long thick tube, the only one available, against her tiny nostrils, trying to insert bits of it, hoping to give her some oxygen, hoping to revive her ever slowing heart beat.

Zahra’s father was absent. He went searching for the drug and the vitamin K on the black market. Zahra’s father had to pay for them from his own pocket.
By the time he made it back to the hospital and despite the doctor’s best efforts, Zahra was gone.

The doctor told Zahra’s grandmother: “This infant is finished”.
The following day, Abbas, her twin brother was finished too.

Zahra’s father rushes in with two ampoules of Vitamin K. It was too late.
Someone hands him a cardboard box. Zahra’s face is covered with a tiny piece of cloth and placed in the box. Just like that.

A cardboard box. You know the one you store your shoes in, or your old newspapers, or any junk you want to eventually get rid of. In the “new” Iraq, infants are placed in those boxes.

The second scene was from Guantanamo. You know Gitmo Bay, your seaside resort.
380 “prisoners” are still with no trial. Many of them are on hunger strike.
One of them is Sami al-Hajj, a sudanese cameraman working for Al Jazeera. Married, father of small boy.

Sami Al-Hajj amongst others, has been in Gitmo for over three years now and still no charges and no trial.
Sami has been on a hunger strike for 100 days already.

One of the lawyers in charge of Sami’s “case” gave a demonstration of how Sami and others are force fed by the democratic american authorities there.

They take the “detainee”, strap him with leather belts to a sturdy wooden chair. Tie his arms, feet and head, paralyzing any movement.

A 1 meter long tube is then thrust into the “detainee’s” nostrils, with no anesthesia of course, past his larynx, through his oesophagus right into his stomach and the food is thus forcefully ingested.

This “procedure” is repeated twice a day.
Sami Al-Hajj has been undergoing this tubal “nourishment” twice a day for 100 days.

Zahra and Sami have much in common. They are Arab “speaking”, muslims, brown skinned and share the same “tube” destiny.

In fact they were both caught in the american dark, tight, tunnel of torture with no end in sight…as if trying to live through an interminable tube…

Why do 32 deaths in Virginia receive blanket coverage while nearly 200 fatalities in Iraq are barely reported?

04/20/07 “The Guardian’ — 04/19/07 – Thirty-two die in American university shooting. Result? Huge media coverage in the US and Britain. In Iraq, almost 200 die, arguably the worst day of carnage in that beleaguered country since the coalition invasion. Result? Coverage so restrained as to be, in many cases, totally negligible. Could you even find it in the Times this morning? Why?

General reasons first. The media operate what amounts to a hierarchy of death. Here are the criteria: foreign deaths always rank below domestic deaths. Similarly, on the basis that all news is local, deaths at home provide human interest stories that people want to know about, while the deaths of foreigners are merely statistics.

Sure, the victims and their families are human beings, too, but if they are thousands of miles away they cannot – in the eyes of the media’s editorial controllers – generate the same sympathy and interest as deaths near at hand.

Deaths in ongoing conflicts always receive less coverage than unexpected deaths elsewhere (because the latter are, by their nature, unpredictable and news values always rate new-ness above old-ness).

Now let’s get down to some other controversial home truths. The deaths of non-white people in foreign parts – and, I would contend, often at home – are never accorded equal status by the white, western media. The deaths of Arabs and Muslims (and, in many media eyes, there is no difference) are overlooked because they are, variously, anti-western, anti-Christian or anti-capitalist, or all three, and are therefore undeserving of sympathy. By virtue of their religion and their ethnicity they cannot expect the same treatment as the people in the west (who, of course, are also more civilised, better educated and altogether more wholesome). In other words, it’s racist.

Finally, specific reasons. Iraq is considered to be a basket case.

There’s no hope. We cannot understand it. Sunni v Shia (like Catholic v Protestant) is surely too difficult to resolve. There’s no point in going into depth about deaths among fanatics and fundamentalists. They are, as I said earlier, just statistics now. So home-grown massacres are infinitely more newsworthy and (dare I say so) sexier.

An Iraqi doctor who made international headlines after stating that civilian deaths in the Iraq war far exceeded officially reported numbers is not being allowed to travel to North America to meet other academics.

Riyadh Lafta and his colleagues have been trying for months to get a U.S. travel visa so the doctor could speak at a medical conference at the University of Washington today.

The State Department has cited miscommunication as the reason for the visa holdup.

As an alternative, Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, B.C., invited Lafta to deliver his lecture today, which was to have been broadcast by video to the UW. But this week, the British government denied him a four-hour transit visa for a stopover between the Middle East and Canada.

Lafta, an epidemiologist, teaches at Al-Mustansiriya University College of Medicine in Baghdad and co-wrote an October 2006 article about Iraqi civilian deaths in The Lancet, a respected British medical journal.

The UW’s School of Public Health and Community Medicine invited him to talk about that study and elevated cancer levels, particularly affecting children, in southern Iraq, said Amy Hagopian, an acting assistant professor.

Hagopian, who is conducting research with Lafta, believes the Bush administration is purposely blocking his travel to the United States. “My hypothesis is the Bush administration was extremely threatened by The Lancet study,” she said.

State Department spokesman Steve Royster denied that politics played a role in Lafta’s visa never being issued.

“This is a matter of a simple but unfortunate miscommunication,” he said.

A British foreign affairs spokesperson could not be reached Thursday for comment.

U.S. Embassy officials in Amman, Jordan, where Lafta applied for a visa in July 2006, tried contacting the doctor twice by e-mail for information, Royster said. But they say they never received a response, and incomplete visa applications can be held.

Royster was uncertain if embassy staff members tried contacting him in other ways, or if his North American colleagues knew of the miscommunication.

Hagopian called his explanation disingenuous.

MONTPELIER, Vt. (April 20) – Vermont senators voted Friday to call for the impeachment of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney , saying their actions in Iraq and the U.S. “raise serious questions of constitutionality.”

The non-binding resolution was approved 16-9 without debate – all six Republicans in the chamber at the time and three Democrats voted against it. The resolution was the latest, symbolic, effort in the state to impeach Bush. In March, 40 towns in the state known for its liberal leaning voted in favor of similar, non-binding resolutions at their annual meetings. State lawmakers in Wisconsin and Washington have also pushed for similar resolutions.

The Vermont Senate is believed to be the first state chamber in the country to pass such a resolution, said Bill Wyatt, a spokesman for the National Conference of State Legislatures.

“Many chambers passed resolutions about the war in Iraq, but none that we are aware have called for impeachment,” he said.

The resolution says Bush and Cheney’s actions in the U.S. and abroad, including in Iraq, “raise serious questions of constitutionality, statutory legality, and abuse of the public trust.”

“I think it’s going to have a tremendous political effect, a tremendous political effect on public discourse about what to do about this president,” said James Leas, a vocal advocate of withdrawing troops from Iraq and impeaching Bush and Cheney.

Researchers funded by the federal government want to shut down the internet and start over, citing the fact that at the moment there are loopholes in the system whereby users cannot be tracked and traced all the time.

Time magazine has reported that several foundations and universities including Rutgers, Stanford, Princeton, Carnegie Mellon and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are pursuing individual projects, along with the Defense Department, in order to wipe out the current internet and replace it with a new network which will satisfy big business and government:

One challenge in any reconstruction, though, will be balancing the interests of various constituencies. The first time around, researchers were able to toil away in their labs quietly. Industry is playing a bigger role this time, and law enforcement is bound to make its needs for wiretapping known.

There’s no evidence they are meddling yet, but once any research looks promising, “a number of people (will) want to be in the drawing room,” said Jonathan Zittrain, a law professor affiliated with Oxford and Harvard universities. “They’ll be wearing coats and ties and spilling out of the venue.”

The projects echo moves we have previously reported on to clamp down on internet neutrality and even to designate a new form of the internet known as Internet 2.

This would be a faster, more streamlined elite equivalent of the internet available to users who were willing to pay more for a much improved service. providers may only allow streaming audio and video on your websites if you were eligible for Internet 2.

Of course, Internet 2 would be greatly regulated and only “appropriate content” would be accepted by an FCC or government bureau. Everything else would be relegated to the “slow lane” internet, the junkyard as it were. Our techie rulers are all too keen to make us believe that the internet as we know it is “already dead”.

Google is just one of the major companies preparing for internet 2 by setting up hundreds of “server farms” through which eventually all our personal data – emails, documents, photographs, music, movies – will pass and reside.

However, experts state that the “clean slate” projects currently being undertaken go even further beyond projects like Internet2 and National LambdaRail, both of which focus primarily on next-generation needs for speed.

THE crisis over Iraq’s refugees is the first major policy issue in which Iraqi civilians are front and center. We debate how the surge looks today or how oil will be distributed tomorrow on the banks of a swelling river of human misery: two million Iraqis who couldn’t bear to live in Iraq anymore, and another two million displaced internally but too poor to flee.

This week, representatives from dozens of countries and international nongovernmental organizations have gathered in Geneva to discuss what might be done in the wake of the largest population shift in the Middle East since 1948. The world is asking what George W. Bush, who started the war in Iraq and presides over the country that historically accepts more refugees than any other, will do for these desperate people.

Many of them will most likely be denied refuge in the United States because, under the Patriot and Real ID Acts, they are tarred with having provided material support to terrorists — in the form of ransoms paid to kidnappers to secure a family member’s release. Last month, Congress tried to create a waiver for those who provided material support “under duress.” Lamentably, it was killed by Senator Jon Kyl, who said he’d respond with legislation to “provide relief from terrorism-related immigration bars to … groups that do not pose a threat to the United States.”

Are we so imprecise in our fifth year of this war that our government cannot distinguish between those who worked and ate alongside us and a member of Al Qaeda?

Consider Rita, an Iraqi Christian woman who worked for the Coalition Provisional Authority and helped manage the TIPS Hotline, which Iraqis can call to share critical information about wanted terrorists or pending attacks on the United States military. Her supervisor, Bernard Kerik, wrote in a recommendation letter that her “courage to support the coalition forces has sent an irrefutable message: that terror will not rule, that liberty will triumph, and that the seeds of freedom will be planted into the great citizens of Iraq.”

But Rita’s courage was repaid by insurgents who abducted her 16-year-old son at gunpoint on his way to school one August morning. Terrorists demanded $600,000 for his release. She doesn’t know how much her husband ultimately paid the kidnappers because he divorced her, blaming her work for the American government for the calamity that had befallen the family. He took her traumatized son and daughter to Syria, and she hasn’t seen or heard from them since. When the death threats became unbearable, she fled to Jordan.

Appallingly, Rita’s family cannot be resettled in the United States because of the material support bar. Unless the secretary of homeland security himself applies a waiver for her, she’ll never reach American soil. Does this woman, who lost everything because she worked for the Americans, who had a security clearance from our government to work in its embassy, pose a threat to the United States? If she does, then who doesn’t?

After all this time, we see hearts and minds as bombs and guns. If we cannot recover such basic distinctions, then we have surely lost more than the war.

Five years before we invaded Iraq, one senator had the remarkable foresight to speak about our responsibility to any Iraqis who might help the United States: “If we would have people in Iraq, or elsewhere in the world, trust us and work with us, then we need to take care that the United States maintains a reputation for trustworthiness and for taking care of its friends.” He was even more direct about what was at stake: “The world will be watching and judging how America treats people who are seen to be on our side. We cannot afford to foster a perception of unfairness that will make it more difficult for the United States to recruit supporters in the future.” So spoke Senator Kyl in 1998.

I thought I had witnessed the depths of our government’s inability to rapidly help Iraqis during the year that I worked for the United States Agency for International Development in Baghdad and Falluja. That was until I went to Washington in February with a list of all of my former Iraqi colleagues who are now refugees because they helped us.

While the State Department bureau in charge of refugee resettlement has been trying feverishly to respond belatedly to the crisis, it is not equipped or authorized to act expeditiously. In her Jan. 16 testimony to the Senate, the assistant secretary of state for population, refugees and migration, Ellen Sauerbrey, said that the plight of Iraq’s refugees was the bureau’s “very top priority.” More than two months later, she reported to the House that it could take six months (and likely longer) before our Iraqi friends might find refuge here.

What kind of superpower can’t convert its “very top priority” into a program that starts saving its allies’ lives before their visas expire and they are forced to return to Iraq? Rita is on my list, which has grown to include hundreds of former colleagues and others who endured similarly shattering fates because they believed in America enough to help us in Iraq. They wonder if they chose poorly when they signed on with us, and they are rapidly losing hope that the United States will offer them a life preserver before it’s too late. Those who paid ransoms for their lives or those of their loved ones are scared to explain in their asylum applications the chief reason they fled their country, because they worry it will disqualify them — a perverse indication of the extent to which our government has lost its way since we invaded.

This is not an issue President Bush can delegate anymore. His bureaucracies are moving perilously slowly. They need the leadership of an American president. How will the United States help those whose belief in us cost them their country? We need to honor the sacrifice of these Iraqis — and start recovering the moral credibility our country forfeits each day they go without our help.

Yale Divinity School students burned a copy of the Bill of Rights and the Ten Commandments at a recent Ash Wednesday service before marking their foreheads with the ashes – not as protest, they say, but to repent for their own complicity in “the ongoing injustice being perpetuated by our nation.”

“Ash Wednesday is the beginning of Lent where we remember our sins and the ways that we are complicit in evil in our society. As an American, the way that’s most clear today is through the War on Terror and the war on Iraq,” said Christopher Doucot, a first-year master’s student who came up with the idea for the service. About 40 to 45 students, faculty, administrators and local residents attended the service, intended to provide an opportunity for reflection on such topics as secret prisons, “indiscriminate bombings,” domestic spying and torture.

“We were reminding ourselves of our own complicity,” said Doucot. “We’re not pointing fingers at anyone but ourselves.”

A Tuesday Yale Daily News account of the unusual Ash Wednesday service indicated that the ritual burning has “sparked concern among the school’s alumni and some students.” But while it’s obvious that in a country that periodically debates banning flag-burning, such an approach to melding politics and prayer might not prove popular, Doucot said that he has not heard from anyone who was offended, “not a soul.” Rev. Dale Peterson, associate dean of students at Yale Divinity School, said that if there was any controversy, he wasn’t aware of it. It was just a small service, said Reverend Peterson, who was among the attendees, held on a day that at least two much larger services were occurring on campus.

Doucot did acknowledge however that organizers were hoping the action would draw attention to their concerns. “You don’t do things to be provocative,” he said of the service. “But one of the fears I have is being ignored.”

“I absolutely hope people have a visceral reaction … if they have that strong of a reaction to how a symbol is treated, how it’s burned, then there’s hope that upon reflection, they will have as strong of a visceral reaction to that symbol being violated in practice, which is what searches without warrants do, which is what torture does.”

The service was conducted quietly, without signs or fanfare. Participants stood in a circle and read each commandment or constitutional amendment aloud. Each text was then burned, one by one.

“As the organizers of the service, we believe that the rights and responsibilities held up in those two documents have already been violated by this government, as well as by ourselves as citizens and Christians,” said Tamara Shantz, a third-year divinity student, via e-mail. “The burning was then symbolic of what has already been accomplished, not as a symbol of our lack of respect for the values upheld in the Bill of Rights and the 10 Commandments.”

“It wasn’t burning these documents as if they were not of importance,” explained Reverend Peterson. “It was the exact opposite. We were putting them on our foreheads, after asking God’s forgiveness for not living up to the ideals of them.”

But while Jessica Anschutz, a third-year divinity student who also helped organize the service, said that the first she heard of any controversy was from The Yale Daily News reporter, Tuesday’s article has succeeded in raising the profile of the small service.And not all Yalies, it turns out, are comfortable with the premise behind this particular approach to prayer.

“[Ash Wednesday] is a fully spiritual event; it’s not political in any sense. To pervert it like that is really inappropriate especially at a place like a divinity school,” said Stephen Schmalhofer, a Yale junior and author of the blog, ” For God, For Country and For Yale.“

“It seems that to put this in a political context completely removes this from the Christian tradition of the event, which is something that too often happens at the Yale Divinity School … they have the tendency to manipulate these traditions for political statements, to really rip these traditional devotions from the Christian community in which they were conceived,” Schmalhofer said.

Jonathan Serrato, a sophomore at Yale and the student outreach chair for the St. Thomas More Undergraduate Council, said that while he believes the organizers of the Ash Wednesday service had good intentions and were trying to make a good point, their approach was inappropriate.

“I do believe that there is a call for Christians of all denominations to ‘wake up’ and realize that we must live our faith and do everything in our power to correct what we see as wrong in society, even if the most we can do is try,” Serrato said in an e-mail. “However, I don’t feel that this event was appropriate for the time or the message that they were trying to convey. For me, Lent is a time of personal cleansing and preparation for life after death. Also for me, the ashes given on Ash Wednesday are sacred and come from the blessed palms from the previous year’s Palm Sunday, and I feel that this event could be considered unintentionally disrespectful.”

“It does seem like this is the kind of thing that you have to do very, very delicately, but it appears that this is something they did do delicately,” said William “Beau” Weston, a professor of sociology at Centre College in Kentucky and a Yale Divinity School alumnus.

“It’s actually a pretty classy act. It does raise one’s alarm to have students burning anything, but there are circumstances in which that’s an appropriate thing to do. Ash Wednesday names the context,” said Weston.

“The tradition of using worship as a time to engage the hearts of the people and engage in dramatic action is a rich one,” added Bill McKinney, president of the Pacific School of Religion, a Berkeley seminary, and a professor of American religion. “If you think of liturgy as the work of the people, which is its original meaning, then for the people to express ritually their most powerful hurts and pains and needs, for those who feel that our country’s on the wrong track, it’s very much consistent with the way worship works.”