The Rag Blog

WASHINGTON, March 29 (UPI) — Hassan Jumaa Awad wants Iraq’s oil to stay under state control, and the unionists, who have long worked the rigs, to be supported in developing the national resource. But this is no request from the president of the Iraqi Federation of Oil Unions.

It’s a demand.

“Since we are working to make progress in production, we need a real participation in all the laws that are related to the oil policy,” Awad told United Press International, speaking on his mobile phone from the southern port city of Basra. “We are the sons of this sector and we have the management and technical capability and we have the knowledge on all the oil fields.”

The IFOU represents more than 26,000 workers organized under various unions in the oil-rich southern and northern areas of Iraq. Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds, together they’ve operated Iraq’s oil sector before, during and after Saddam Hussein. Their rights to officially unionize are still denied under a 1978 Saddam law, one of a few of the former president’s laws the U.S. occupation and the Iraqi Parliament upheld.

Iraq’s oil production is still around 2 million barrels per day, down from the 2.6 million bpd before the war, but far below its potential since most of its 115 billion barrels of reserves are untapped. Investment in the world’s third-largest oil market is hampered by conditions past and present, and an unknown future.

Saddam pushed certain oilfields too hard while neglecting maintenance and new technologies. The sector was hit with war starting in 2003, and now regular sabotage and a shortage of electricity.

Kurdish and central government negotiators reached a deal last month on the framework for a law governing Iraq’s oil. Details on ownership rights and revenue sharing are still far from finalized. The Iraq National Oil Co. would restart but compete with foreign oil companies, who could win contracts giving them partial ownership of the respective fields.

INOC “should have full privileges,” Awad said, “and we don’t agree on the production partnership.”

Iraq’s oil has been nationalized for four decades. Iraqis view it with a pride of ownership, something the law would reduce if the contract language allowing for foreign ownership stands.

“We think that to reserve sovereignty of Iraq is to be able to control the oil wealth,” Awad said, and foreign investment should be limited to technical assistance. “I wish if the foreign companies were to come into Iraq, that they help us,” Awad said. “Not to suck the blood of the Iraqi people.”

The unions were kept in the dark, as were most members of Iraq’s parliament, until the draft law was leaked to the media. Even then it was still out the reach of most of Iraq’s citizens.

I have been asked to comment on the question of “whether President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela poses a threat to regional stability and how his critics, including the Bush administration, should respond.” This is an easy one.

One may agree or disagree with any of President Chavez’s policies or statements, but the idea of him or his government posing a threat to regional stability is ridiculous. In fact, a far more reasonable argument can be made that his government has contributed to stabilizing the region.

It has done so by using its $50 billion dollars of foreign exchange reserves to act as a lender of last resort, and provide other forms of financial aid to countries throughout the region. This is what the International Monetary Fund was alleged to have done in the past but almost never did. It is especially important now that Latin America is going through a major historical transition, where governments of the left now preside over about half of the population of the region.

Latin America is emerging from a long period of failed economic reform policies, known as “neoliberalism” there, which resulted in the worst economic growth performance in more than 100 years. From 1980-2000, regional GDP (gross domestic product) per capita grew by just 9 percent, and another 4 percent for 2000-2005. By comparison, it grew by 82 percent in just the two decades from 1960-1980. As a result of the unprecedented growth failure of the last 25 years, voters have demanded change in a number of countries, including Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Uruguay.

Venezuela has loaned more than $3 billion to Argentina, and has loaned or committed hundreds of millions of dollars to Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and other countries. It also provides subsidized credit for oil to the countries of the Caribbean, through its PetroCaribe program, and provided many other forms of aid to neighboring countries. These resources are provided without policy conditions attached – unlike most other multilateral (IMF, World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank) and bilateral aid. By providing these resources, Venezuela is helping other countries to bring their policies more in line with what voters have demanded, and greatly reducing the threat of economic crises in the process of doing so.

For example, before the Nicaraguan elections last November, US government officials made many threats to the voters of that country that if they elected Daniel Ortega, they would suffer greatly from cutoffs of loans, aid, and even the remittances that many Nicaraguans depend upon from their relatives in the United States. None of these threats have been carried out. This is partly because Washington knows it would be useless and counterproductive to do so, since Nicaragua would simply replace US-controlled funding sources with more borrowing from Venezuela. The same is true for Bolivia, which has vastly increased its hydrocarbon revenues, and is in a stronger bargaining position knowing that it has an international lender that will not try to interfere with its domestic political agenda. The new progressive president of Ecuador, who faces a number of important political battles to deliver on his promises of governmental reform, pro-poor and pro-development policies, is also strengthened by having Venezuela as a lender. When the Argentine government decided to say goodbye to the IMF in January of 2006 by paying off their remaining $9.9 billion in debt, Venezuela’s loan of $2.5 billion helped that government to avoid pushing its reserves down to dangerously low levels.

In all of these cases and more, Venezuela’s financial support is helping other governments to deliver on their promises to their own voters, thereby contributing not only to stability but to the strengthening of democracy in the region. Washington-sponsored aid, by contrast, has often had the opposite effect – provoking “IMF riots,” and sometimes economic crises (e.g. the 1998-2002 Argentine depression), by trying to impose policies that were deeply unpopular and, as we now know, economically flawed.

No other government in the region accepts the Bush Administration’s charge that Chavez is a threat to regional stability – not even President Alvaro Uribe of Colombia, which shares a 1300 mile conflict-ridden border with Venezuela. When Uribe met with members of the US Congress last year, he refused to criticize Chavez – reportedly even in private. The vast majority of Latin American governments also supported Venezuela’s bid for the UN Security Council last year, even after he called President Bush “the Devil” at the UN, and despite all the pressure that the United States – whose economy is 67 times the size of Venezuela’s – brought to bear on them.

None of the Democratic Contenders Has Called for the Closure of the Guantanamo Prison

Guantanamo is awash in confessions these days. Walid Mohammad bin Attash claims to have blown up the USS Cole. Khalid Sheik Mohammed confessed to planning 9/11, the bombing of U.S. embassies in Africa, and night clubs in Bali. He also confessed to killing of Daniel Pearl and perhaps Anna Nicole Smith, too.

An Australian prisoner, David Hicks, has confessed to terrorist activity. He spent 5 years at Guantanamo and recently pleaded guilty to providing material support for terrorism, which wasn’t even against U.S. law until October 2006. The only way for him to return home was to confess. He also had to sign an agreement denying his previous statements that he had been tortured. He had to promise not to sue the U.S. government, make any money from telling the story of his ordeal, or talk to the media for at least one year.

These confessions are not taken seriously by any intelligent people in this country and they are certainly not taken seriously by anyone outside of it. Even the namby pamby Congressional actions on Iraq are sending the Bushites into a frenzy of show trials to justify waging endless war on the rest of humanity. The confessions will surely be repeated when the bombing of Iran begins.

Not only are these military tribunals a travesty and a great injustice to the people involved, but they have doomed our country. The hatred that spawned the 9/11 attacks has only grown with time. Now all Americans have bulls eyes on their heads because of the evil people who run this government.

There have been many brave efforts to stop this evil doing, but so far it has come to naught. U.S. courts have dismissed lawsuits, Congress enabled the administration by approving the kangaroo court system. Truth tellers like Democratic Senator Richard Durbin are sent to the wood shed by their own party for rightly comparing Guantanamo to a Nazi prison.

David Hicks is a white Australian who converted to Islam and lived in Afghanistan in 2001. He has been held for five years and was denied the most basic constitutional rights that he would have enjoyed in Australia or the United States. His family made his case a cause celebre in his country and forced his Bush-loving prime minister, John Howard, to negotiate for his release.

Howard is facing a tough election in November, so he doesn’t want Hicks mucking things up by telling his harrowing tales. Get him out but don’t let him talk until a more opportune time. So the man who was called terror enemy number one and originally threatened with a 20 year sentence will now be allowed to serve nine months in his native Australia.

Even if America survives until November 2008 and manages to get the Republicans out of the White House, none of the Democratic front runners has said anything about closing Gitmo and using the court system that successfully tried terror suspects before Bush came to office. Barack Obama thinks military courts are better.

“I’ve heard, for example, the argument that it should be military courts, and not federal judges, who should make decisions on these detainees. I actually agree with that. The problem is that the structure of the military proceedings has been poorly thought through.”

Senator Smarty Pants also predicted that terror suspects would have counsel and be able to present evidence on their behalf.

“He (Khalid Mohammed) will have counsel, he will be able to present evidence, and he will be able to rebut the Government’s case. The feeling is that he is guilty of a war crime and to do otherwise might violate some of our agreements under the Geneva Conventions. I think that is good, that we are going to provide him with some procedure and process.”

It is news to me that guilt of war crimes is determined by a Senator’s feelings. No one at Gitmo checked with the superstar media darling before they kept Khalid Sheikh Mohammed from calling witnesses or having attorneys present. Hillary Clinton, in her typical fear of saying anything of substance, has said nothing about the process.

There will be no respite from the destruction of the Constitution and the dismissal of International Law followed by the rest of the world. We are in great danger from our own government and that danger will not lessen after the inauguration of a new president in January of 2009.

WASHINGTON (April 4) – President Bush named Republican fundraiser Sam Fox as U.S. ambassador to Belgium on Wednesday, using a maneuver that allowed him to bypass Congress, where Democrats had derailed Fox’s nomination.

The appointment, made while lawmakers were out of town on spring break, prompted angry rebukes from Democrats, who said Bush’s action may even be illegal.

Democrats had denounced Fox for his donation to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth during the 2004 presidential campaign. The group’s TV ads, which claimed that Sen. John Kerry exaggerated his military record in Vietnam, were viewed as a major factor in the Massachusetts Democrat ‘s election loss.

Recognizing Fox did not have the votes to obtain Senate confirmation in the Foreign Relations Committee, Bush withdrew the nomination last week. On Wednesday, with the Senate on a one-week break, the president used his power to make recess appointments to put Fox in the job without Senate confirmation.

This means Fox can remain ambassador until the end of the next session of Congress, effectively through the end of the Bush presidency.

Americans don’t have much of a colonial experience. Otherwise we would recognize the war in Iraq for what it is — a colonial occupation.

Whatever dreams we may have had of winning a War on Terror in Baghdad or turning Iraq into a beacon of democracy in the Middle East are now long gone. What we have in Iraq is a series of American fortifications where soldiers live a life that reasonably mirrors conditions back home and then once a day or week put on “full battle rattle” and risk their lives by venturing into what is essentially hostile territory.

Granted we have a lot of people on our side and a sizable portion of the population wants us to stay. “Allah Bless the USA” was one piece of graffiti I saw — although it did occur to me later that it was written in English.

But no American soldier goes anywhere in Iraq without full body armor and a humvee. Helicopter flights are made at night and under conditions of extreme secrecy. Anyone with a rifle is a potential insurgent and there are thousands of them. There is no margin of safety.

Ask military leaders how long this is going to go on and they will give you the same response. “We’ve done a lot of studies of insurgencies. There’s never been one that was put down in less than ten years. The 1920s insurgency in the Philippines, the British experience in Sudan in the 19th century — all of them weren’t quelled in less than a decade. Iraq is going to take the same amount of time. We just hope the people back home have the patience to see it through.”

04/03/07 “ICH” — — I have been thinking a great deal of late about government and its relationship to the citizenry. It should be obvious that any government that claims to be of the people and for the people must also serve the people. Yet it is clear that the current government does not serve the people—it exploits them. When sixty-four percent of the citizenry demand an end to the U.S. occupation of Iraq and the government responds not by withdrawing its troops, but by escalating the war, that government cannot be a government of the people, for the people, and by the people. What is it then?

It is a government of the wealthy; a corporate, fascist government of the highest order. It is a government that spurns ordinary people and uses its power against them. It is the opposite of the kind of representative government it purports to be. It extorts tax dollars from its citizens and sends them to do the bidding of the very wealthy under the pretense of patriotism and national defense. It is, in fact, using citizens against citizens and plundering the national treasure with the tools of empire, class warfare, and imperialism.

Every military weapon that is manufactured and put in use diminishes us as a nation. Militarism enriches the defense contractors and the plutocracy by robbing the citizens. It deprives us of an urgently needed national health care system, better schools, decent jobs that provide living wages; and it exacts social and environmental costs that are incalculable, all of which are important to ordinary Americans.

We do not have a government based upon the rule of law or equality, as evidenced by its own history—even its recent history, as we saw in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina; or in the dilapidated military hospitals across the land where limbless soldiers cannot get the health care they so desperately need, and lie waiting and wasting in filth and ruin. These are the troops the government purports to care so much about. Broken men and women from combat zones are the worn out tools of empire builders. Like unwanted toys, they are used up and no longer played with by our rulers; an embarrassment, something to be warehoused safely from public view.

The president and his minions behave as if they are above the law. Laws apply to his subjects, but not to the King who thinks he is the supreme ruler.

They want us to believe that we support our troops by placing magnetic ribbons on our vehicles and by prominently displaying American flags. But Walter Reed and other military hospitals across the land reveal what we really think about our military veterans in ways that cannot be offset by patriotic trinkets and jingoism. The government honors them in patriotic language even as they abandon them in deed.

There is a constant tension that exists between the government and the governed. The people are disorganized and the government is doing everything in its power to keep them that way. Nearly all of the public good that was ever accomplished in this country came as the result of public outcry for justice, a cry that brought people together in mass to organize against gross injustice. That is how chattel slavery was finally abolished. It is how civil rights were won. Organized mass civil disobedience and protest brought the Viet Nam war to an end.

When enough good people unite in common cause, government is forced to hear their voice and meet their demands. I should note here that it is only unjust governments that have anything to fear from its citizenry. Democratic governments do not treat its own citizens like terrorists by trying to quell dissent or spying on them. Nor do they imprison those who disagree with them and uphold a higher code of ethics and conduct than them.

The Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence—all of them important and eloquent documents—did not bring about the most important achievements in American history. Ordinary citizens did all of that by organizing and demanding justice. Freedom isn’t won in the courts or secured in documents; it is won in the streets through the deeds of an aroused and just citizenry. Just laws can be written but it is ordinary people who must bring them to life and give them meaning. Integrity must live in the hearts of the citizenry. Justice is not a noun—it is a verb that must be driven by principled action.

An alert, thoughtful, rational, conscientious citizenry; an aroused citizenry, is the worst nightmare of tyranny. That is why the government is spying on its citizens. That is why posse comitatus and habeas corpus were revoked by the Bush regime and enabled by a timorous congress. It has nothing to do with fighting terrorism. The government is keeping an eye on us, looking for signs of trouble. They must keep us from coming together, from organizing against the established order just as radical unions are kept out of the work place.

Most of the citizens of the United States, while quite naïve, are, I believe, good and decent people who play by the rules. The majority of them, whose voices are rarely heard above the noise of the corporate media, operate with a sense of justice and fair play. Most of them would not knowingly cheat a neighbor and only a small percentage, actually a fraction of one percent of them, would murder a neighbor. It is their naiveté, their ignorance and trust in authority that gets them into trouble.

Conversely, the government has a murderous history, a long record of criminality, and a track record of lying and deception that any sociopath would envy—especially in its present incarnation under George Bush and Dick Cheney. It has a lot to answer for. When violence is the first resort of a government, the people have no business referring to it as a democratic republic. They must offer resistance to it. They must bring it into line with the values and code of ethics of the citizenry.

Few would argue, no matter what political stripe they wear, that the current government bears no more resemblance to the citizenry than it does to the socio-economic demographics of the population as a whole. Thus the vast majority of us have government without representation. It is government that does not serve the people, but treats them as its servants.

If we are to see improvement, we must stop acting as if we are living on the plantation and take personal responsibility for what the government is doing in our name. This will require organized resistance beginning at the community level and spreading outward. It all begins with the personal choices we make. Ultimately, it will require global solidarity to meet a threat that is also global in extent.

A failed American attempt to abduct two senior Iranian security officers on an official visit to northern Iraq was the starting pistol for a crisis that 10 weeks later led to Iranians seizing 15 British sailors and Marines.

Early on the morning of 11 January, helicopter-born US forces launched a surprise raid on a long-established Iranian liaison office in the city of Arbil in Iraqi Kurdistan. They captured five relatively junior Iranian officials whom the US accuses of being intelligence agents and still holds.

In reality the US attack had a far more ambitious objective, The Independent has learned. The aim of the raid, launched without informing the Kurdish authorities, was to seize two men at the very heart of the Iranian security establishment.

Better understanding of the seriousness of the US action in Arbil – and the angry Iranian response to it – should have led Downing Street and the Ministry of Defence to realise that Iran was likely to retaliate against American or British forces such as highly vulnerable Navy search parties in the Gulf. The two senior Iranian officers the US sought to capture were Mohammed Jafari, the powerful deputy head of the Iranian National Security Council, and General Minojahar Frouzanda, the chief of intelligence of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, according to Kurdish officials.

In late March, Tony Serra — San Francisco’s well known and respected criminal defense attorney — filed suit against the federal government over slave labor practices. Just out of California’s Lompoc prison after serving 10 months for his years-long tax boycott, the celebrated attorney filed suit in an attempt to force the federal government to pay its prisoners a fair wage compensation for the work being done by prison inmates.

At the least, Serra believes that inmates should earn minimum wage for the work they do in prison — and that unions should be allowed to organize and represent the inmates for collective bargaining to negotiate better wages and conditions for workers.

“It’s a class action lawsuit,” says Serra. “I’m a member (plaintiff) of the class, and it was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. We believe that Lompoc’s pay scale is in violation of the Fifth and Thirteenth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution, and the United Nations covenants on political, civil and prisoner rights.

“Prisoners have no rights in America,” said Serra. “They don’t care about the prisoners in this country, and the prisons are profiting from the slave-like conditions being forced upon the inmates. Lompoc has a dairy and meat industry, including a cable factory which is a supplier for the navy and armed forces industry.

“Lompoc generated a lot of money last year,” he said, “little of which was returned to the inmates as compensation for the work that they do. The federal prison workforce generates around $65 million per year in net profits, and I received 19 cents an hour when working at Lompoc, while the other prisoners were only earning anywhere from 5 cents to $1.65 an hour for their labor. These are slave wages, and often the inmates come back from work covered in filth and are worn out at the end of the day.”

Serra and the 300 to 500 other plaintiffs involved in the class action lawsuit, are being represented by attorneys Stephen Perelson of Mill Valley, and John Murcko and Bill Simpich, of Oakland.

When I asked Serra if he believes the lawsuit will succeed; “I think that there’s so many immunities and waivers in regards to how prisons are being operated in this nation that the federal government will do everything possible to toss it out of the courts. If we could manage somehow to bring this class action far enough through the courts to bring it before a jury, we could win.”

By seizing 15 British sailors, the embattled Iranians aim to rally anti-Western sentiment and force the Brits from Iraq.

The lofty invocations of international law by the British and Iranian governments disguise the banal origins of their current dispute: used cars. The British naval personnel had boarded an Indian vessel they thought was smuggling old automobiles into Iraq. Tehran maintains that they then veered into Iranian waters.