The Rag Blog

Senator John McCain has contracted Rumsfeld’s Disease. This malady consists of a combination of bad temper, misuse of language to obfuscate reality, and a Panglossian optimism in the face of stubborn, sanguinary facts on the ground.

McCain, for instance, hailed that deployment of Iraqi brigades “at or above 75% of their programmed strength”! Put another way, a quarter of the Iraqi troops ordered to Baghdad technically speaking went AWOL instead! If a quarter of all US troops ordered to Iraq fled to Canada or refused to leave their home base, that would be a catastrophe. But McCain manages to deploy weasel words to make this incredible statistic seem a positive thing. Moreover, even his basic facts may be wrong. Last I knew, one of the Iraqi brigades ordered to Baghdad only came at half strength.

McCain alleged that only about 500 civilians were killed in political violence in Baghdad in February, down from December’s toll.

But McCain is wrong to look only at Baghdad. Here is what I wrote on March 1:

An Iraqi official leaked government figures on Iraqi civilians killed in January and February, and tried to spin the US press by saying that there had been a significant drop in such casualties.

But this official reported deaths for 1-31 January and compared them for the toll 1-27 February. Uh, the per day total isn’t that different, it is just that February is a short month and the figures were given through the day before it ended!

1990 divided by 31 is 64 per day.

1646 divided by 27 is 61 per day.

While human life is precious and a drop of 3 a day is welcome, I wouldn’t call that drop significant.

That is, the Iraqi government statistics for deaths in February were not 500 but 1646. And, as I pointed out, the decline in daily deaths is so far small. In addition, it would not actually be good news that 500 innocent civilians were slaughtered in Baghdad alone in February. Baghdad is a fourth of Iraq by population– that would be a monthly death rate of about 2000, some 24,000 a year (the Lancet study published last fall found that deaths from violence occur at a similar rate throughout the country). All the real numbers are much worse than the above discussion implies, since passive information- gathering is notoriously unreliable.

A water bearer in India had two large pots, each hung on the ends of a pole which he carried across his neck. One of the pots had a crack in it while the other pot was perfect and always delivered a full portion of water. At the end of the long walk from the stream to the house, the cracked pot arrived only half full.

For a full two years this went on daily, with the bearer delivering only one and a half pots full of water to his house. Of course, the perfect pot was proud of its accomplishments, perfect for which it was made. But, the poor cracked pot was ashamed of its own imperfection, and miserable that it was able to accomplish only half of what it had been made to do.

After 2 years of what it perceived to be a bitter failure, it spoke to the water bearer one day by the stream. “I am ashamed of myself, and I want to apologize to you. I have been able to deliver only half my load because this crack in my side causes water to leak out all the way back to your house. Because of my flaws, you have to do all of this work, and you don’t get full value for your efforts.”

The bearer said to the pot, “Did you notice that there were flowers only on your side of the path, but not on the other pot’s side? That’s because I have always known about your flaw, and I planted flower seeds on your side of the path.

Every day as we walk back, you’ve watered them. For two years I have been able to pick these beautiful flowers to decorate the table. Without you being just the way you are, there would not be this beauty to grace the house.”

MORAL: Each of us has our own unique flaws. We’re all cracked pots. But, it’s the cracks and flaws we each have that make our lives together so interesting and rewarding. You’ve just got to take each person for what they are, and look for the good in them. Blessed are the flexible, for they shall not be bent out of shape.

03/26/07 “ICH ” — — What is this thing called democracy? So easy to talk about, so difficult to make real. Pure democracy is not what our Founders gave us. Who would want a simple majority to control the minority? Instead, America was given a representative democracy within a constitutional republic where laws that protect all people trump majority rule. Standing between majority-won elections and government power are elected representatives: writing, overseeing and implementing laws. But when you can no longer trust the elected representatives what happens to American democracy? It becomes an oxymoron.

We have arrived at a delusional democracy. Delusional because Americans overwhelmingly cannot admit the painful truth that their limited democracy no longer works for the good of most citizens. Instead, through corruption and dishonesty, our representative democracy has morphed into a plutocracy that serves the wealthy, power elites and corporate masters that control the political system and through that the economic system.

The Framers of the Constitution had deep concerns about the long-term viability of the government structure they created. Some think that the checks and balances among the three branches of the federal government preserve its integrity. Really? The money that controls the legislative branch also controls the executive branch, and both of those control the judicial branch. Even worse, it has become clearer to increasing numbers of Americans that many parts of the Constitution – the supreme law of the land – have been directly or more deviously disobeyed or distorted. Constitutional rule is a myth.

We have a Congress that gives its constitutional power to declare war to the President and refuses to impeach him for his many violations of laws. We have a President that openly signs laws but says he will not honor them. We have a Supreme Court that decides who becomes President rather than the voters and often amends the Constitution unconstitutionally. We have elections that are not to be trusted. We have a government using free trade globalization hogwash to sell out the middle class. We have rising economic inequality that is creating a two-class society: the wealthy Upper Class and the Lower Class for everyone else.

Overlaid on this delusional system is the myth that having just two major political parties somehow is right and necessary for our representative democracy. In reality, partisan differences are just another layer of corruption, dishonesty and deceit. Artificial political competition distracts. Big money from the wealthy and corporate and other special interests controls both parties, producing mutually assured corruption. They are two faces of the same coin, two heads of the same monster, two puppets controlled by the same masters. Of course the two-party system provides stability. It has stabilized a criminally corrupt government.

Delusional political competition supports a delusional democracy based on a set of delusional checks and balances. The whole system that once worked has become a sham.

Did the Framers anticipate that their system could become such a travesty? They did.

So, in addition to the better known parts of the Constitution, they imbedded what might be called a legal loophole – a kind of escape clause, just in case things went terribly wrong. They have.

The public is largely ignorant of Article V’s option for a convention, when asked for by two-thirds of states, to propose amendments to the Constitution. Worse, nearly all people with political power have opposed using it. Even worse, despite Article V explicitly saying that Congress “shall” call such a convention when a sufficient number of states have asked for one – and that is the ONLY specified constitutional requirement – for over 200 years Congress has willfully disobeyed the constitution and NOT granted a convention. In fact, Congress never had the integrity and constitutional respect to even set up a system of any kind to collect state requests for an Article V convention. Still, we know from the hard work of many that there have been well over 500 such state requests.

People with power in the present corrupt political system fear an Article V convention. Operating independently of Congress and the White House, it might reduce their power and ignite widespread public interest in deep reforms. One trick of the power elites has been to fool people that an Article V convention would inevitably become “runaway” and threaten all that Americans hold dear – especially their freedom. Nonsense. A convention can only propose amendments that, just like proposals made by Congress, must be ratified by three-quarters of the states. Most absurd are the anti-convention right-wingers who profess total allegiance to the Constitution, except for Article V. John T. Noonan, Jr., observed in 1985: “RESPECT, indeed reverence, for the Constitution is a proper attitude for conservatives to cultivate. Is it respectful to the Constitution to maintain that of the two methods of amendment specified by Article V one is too dangerous to be put to use?”

Exactly why did the Framers give us the option of an Article V convention? Listen to the wise words of one of the nation’s foremost legal scholars. Professor Paul Bator wrote this in 1980:

I think the Article V convention represents a profound political protection for us, as a people, against the tyranny of central government. And whatever we say about Article V, I think it is very, very wrong, just because we may disagree with the content of any particular constitutional amendment that is now being proposed, to interpret Article V in such a way as to clip its wings as a protection for the liberties of the people. That is why I think it is profoundly important, particularly for constitutional scholars, to be hospitable toward the concern that Article V represents, which is that there be a way out for the states and the people if a willful and intransigent central authority governs us in a way we find unacceptable.

We definitely need a way out. Two of our best presidents explicitly supported using the Article V convention option – Abraham Lincoln and Dwight Eisenhower.

Have any recent presidential candidates expressed support for an Article V convention, even mavericks like Dennis Kucinich, Ron Paul, Mike Gravel, and Pat Buchanan? They have not. Have any third parties demanded an Article V convention? They have not. Have any mainstream media exposed Congress’ failure to obey the Constitution’s Article V? They have not. Has the Supreme Court or any elected official that swore to obey the Constitution faulted Congress for disobeying the Constitution? They have not.

If you are not a rich and powerful American, ask yourself: Has your government become so untrustworthy, dysfunctional and unacceptable that you should demand what our Constitution gives you a right to – an Article V convention?

Thomas Jefferson said “a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms are in the physical.” Have many Americans concluded that rebellion has become necessary? They have not.

But some of us want to pursue political rebellion, not by using violence and not hoping against reality that necessary reforms will come from within the two-party controlled political system. No, we want to use what the Constitution grants us. We have created Friends of the Article V Convention to inform the public about this constitutional option and also to prod the states to demand a convention and the Congress to finally obey the Constitution and give us one. Check the group out at www.foavc.org to learn much more, and seriously consider becoming a member.

03/26/07 “ICH ” — – Jared Diamond, E. O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins and many other reputable scientists from diverse fields cite human overpopulation as a root cause of many seemingly disparate, catastrophic problems that our planet, currently, faces. Whether the issue is extinction of an inordinate number of species over a small period of time, warfare over resources, ruin of all oceans through acidification, inevitable loss of major energy sources (i.e., oil and coal), massive migration by large segments of various social groups, ozone layer depletion, global warming, worldwide loss of potable water, large-scale increase in various kinds of poisonous pollution, an overwhelming proliferation of waste materials or any number of other severe myriad indicators, every one of these dilemmas point to one common denominator — too many people using up too much before it can be replenished or before alternative sources are put in place (i.e., for oil, minerals, coal, etc.).

However, governmental and other world leaders are surprisingly silent when it comes to citing overpopulation as an ultimate cause of sweeping planetary destruction. In the same vein, they don’t strive to find a workable solution. Indeed, many, instead of expending lavish amounts of money on developing feasible substitutes for oil and coal or encouraging universal access to birth control, choose to spend funds in enormously expensive war efforts.

Deep down and whether it is publicly announced or not, we all know the covert reason for these actions. It is simply a bid to garner the last remaining vestiges of oil or other resources for their own country’s citizens at the expense of others. How shortsighted and brutal is that?

Meanwhile, is there an absolute limit to human growth — a finite carrying capacity for earth? Yes. How long can earth’s natural support systems sustain exponential expansion? This is not known and, to a certain extent, the answer is dependent on the way that we want to live and the types of surrounding environments that we want to have. Dystopian films, like “Soylent Green,” point out this fact all too clearly — presenting a warning that is terrifyingly clear.

In any case, information about and realistic solutions for the ravages of overpopulation desperately need to be examined on a global scale. Attempting to address the symptoms — the assorted environmental dilemmas and social conflicts that are signs of this larger crisis — is simply not enough!

Upon the Laguna Atascosa Wildlife Refuge where the chachalacas gather in small groups to screech for dawn, John Neck takes Jay Johnson-Castro for a winding-down ride. The two friends have returned here nightly during their five-day walk against immigrant prisons, because out here where the desert plants drink freely from estuary water, life is in love with itself.

Even looking at the people out here tending to their backyard citrus groves, you can’t help but breathe a vision of life harmonious and full of grace. True, it’s a different lay of land than what the friends saw recently on the Texas Rolling Plains, but what’s the same is rural people who know the earth well enough to live off her.

As they crisscross the winding resacas of the Rio Grande Delta on their paths to and from a poisoned sampler of South Texas prisons, Laguna Atascosa always welcomes them back with a grin as if to say, wasn’t that some fukked up bullshit you saw back there, and thanks for being men enough to cry.

Not that the child prison of Los Fresnos wasn’t grim enough on Wednesday, or that the hidden secrets of Port Isabel didn’t moan underground Thursday from back behind the thicketed gates, but Sunday at Raymondville was a special spike through the heart-a concentration camp of windowless plastic hothouses where a babel of forty or more languages gets melted into one universal cry of injustice.

On a hot day you can walk into one of those steaming plastic shells and smell nothing but puke as the earth’s most fukked over stomachs do everything possible to disgorge the poisonous foods they have been conned into eating. On a cold day you can do the same thing shivering.

Once a day at Raymondville, they let the hapless masses out to remind them of sky, and then an hour later they are shoved back in. It gets to be too much. What is there for everyone to do but watch the young man who ties his bed sheet somehow to the ceiling and makes himself a noose. Everyone watches, even the guards, because there is nothing else to do. In the end, they don’t let the man finish his act, but the guards never lift a finger either way.

For a dedicated attorney such as Jodi Goodwin who walks with Jay and John this Sunday, her willingness to help overflows her ability. For one thing is the sheer number of languages that greet you. Even if you want to help that woman from Ethiopia, it would cost thousands of dollars to hire an interpreter, which is money you don’t have.

Goodwin remembers a time before blankets at Raymondville–a time before winter coats. Both of these things she demanded for her clients and got. From August through December she even demanded press coverage which is impossible to sue for these days.

Sunday Goodwin was the walk’s guest of honor. She showed up on time, got a friend to help her park her car at Raymondville, and then returned to talk and walk with Johnson-Castro as loyal cars followed slowly behind. During the final hour, the walk was joined by Dallas supporters Dr. Asma Salam and Jose Delarocha who will host prison vigils in Dallas on Wednesday and Thursday. The Dallas vigils will call attention to a forthcoming federal ruling in the matter of habeas corpus for the Hazahza family who were split up between Texas prisons last November and who have yet to be reunited in freedom.

In a widening circle of conscience that began in Austin last December, the walks of Jay Johnson-Castro and John Neck have exorcised the secrets of five immigrant prisons in Texas: T. Don Hutto, Rolling Plains, International Educational Services, Port Isabel, and Raymondville. In Dallas they will try to pry another family free.

I was the adult, a 25-year old journalism student on my first reporting trip abroad. She was the child, 16 going on 40. I had the translator, the driver waiting outside, a hotel room in the safest part of the city, a ticket out of the country in three days. She had her mother, fidgeting nervously in the waiting room, a multitude of STD tests, a house she rarely left in a violent neighborhood, and one of the most dangerous gangs in Guatemala City threatening her life if she talked.

A journalist’s job is to ask questions. Journalism school emphasizes the need to get “color,” “scenes,” “details.” Final articles are to be written in an authoritative, confident voice. And yet, what rules of engagement apply when a reporter — OK, in my case a young reporter — is faced with a source as vulnerable and traumatized as this girl?

Increasing violence against women in Guatemala City, that was what I had come down to investigate. Although I knew my subject, had read the literature, the government briefings and the daily local news reports, there was no way I could have prepared myself for the reality. Covering violence means being physically exposed to its final product: its victims, dead or alive.

Two weeks, visiting the morgue, the cemetery, prosecutors, police, human rights lawyers, forensic scientists, a women’s shelter, families of victims. A litany of horrors running through my head. Nearly 600 Guatemalan women murdered in 2006, according to the national police. Almost two a day. Only seven men put behind bars for murdering women last year. Witnesses to crimes threatened into silence, sometimes killed. Domestic abuse, still legal. Bodies buried alone, unnamed, without family, without prayers.

Until you see a man, woman, child slipped into the ground without a headstone or an identity you have no idea how alone a body can be in this world. But here it was and here she was: all the violence, all the statistics and one kid. One kid, in perfect honesty, that I was almost afraid of — her story so powerful that it threatened to overwhelm sheltered American me.

I began interviewing her confidently enough in that small room in a women’s center in the heart of Guatemala City, but soon I noticed my voice had become unrecognizably soft, motherly. I was all too aware I had abandoned my confident journalistic-authority voice for fear that she might shatter. Each of my questions — Who did this to you? What prison did they take you to? How long did they keep you there? What did they do to you? Did you go to the police? — pushed deeper into her still fresh pain. And yet — and this was the most unnerving thing of all — each of her replies came in that steady, flat voice of hers, as if she were the reporter and her subject were as dull as the weather:

Do journalists comfort their subjects? I didn’t remember that from my J-school courses. Do journalists get this nervous? I didn’t remember my professors mentioning that either. Had I gone too far?

I kept thinking each question was inappropriate, too personal. I told her she could walk away anytime. Say something off the record. Refuse to answer a question. I said these things early on, almost as a prayer. Maybe I was trying to get her to stop. For my own sanity, did I really want to know the answers to these questions? Maybe I also wanted to protect her from the media, from me. Did she know what she was doing? In the end, do sources ever really know what they are doing? And what was I anyway — all these things were spinning in my head — just a parachute journalist, jumping into the ashes of Guatemalan violence to bring out this jewel of a story — the perfect example of one society’s indifference to women?

Whether warning her was the correct thing to do journalistically, it felt like the only thing to do humanly. She was risking her life speaking with me and I could offer her no protection other than her anonymity.

In the end, she answered every question. Willingly. And she seemed to grow bolder with each statement.

Abstract

One of the most startling aspects of musical culture in the post-Cold War United States is the systematic use of music as a weapon of war. First coming to mainstream attention in 1989, when US troops blared loud music in an effort to induce Panamanian president Manuel Norriega’s surrender, the use of “acoustic bombardment” has become standard practice on the battlefields of Iraq, and specifically musical bombardment has joined sensory deprivation and sexual humiliation as among the non-lethal means by which prisoners from Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo may be coerced to yield their secrets without violating US law.

The very idea that music could be an instrument of torture confronts us with a novel—and disturbing—perspective on contemporary musicality in the United States. What is it that we in the United States might know about ourselves by contemplating this perspective? What does our government’s use of music in the “war on terror” tell us (and our antagonists) about ourselves?

This paper is a first attempt to understand the military and cultural logics on which the contemporary use of music as a weapon in torture and war is based. After briefly tracing the development of acoustic weapons in the late 20th century, and their deployment at the second battle of Falluja in November, 2004, I summarize what can be known about the theory and practice of using music to torture detainees in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo. I contemplate some aspects of late 20th-century musical culture in the civilian US that resonate with the US security community’s conception of music as a weapon, and survey the way musical torture is discussed in the virtual world known as the blogosphere. Finally, I sketch some questions for further research and analysis.

Exordium

This paper reports on the earliest stages of a project that began not in my musicological work but in a moment of my real life. In spring, 2003, I was reading Nuha al-Radi’s Baghdad Diaries, an account of her life before, during and after the first Gulf War. I read

After the war ended, the Allies spent all day and all night flying over our heads, breaking the sound barrier. Just like Panama when they blasted Noriega, holed up in the Vatican Embassy with music. For fifteen days, Bush deafened the poor ambassador and Noriega with hard rock. Our torture went on for months– 20 or 30 times, day or night… (al-Radi 1998: 58)

“So,” I thought, “perhaps it wasn’t just silliness, the actions of bored or excitable soldiers who’d seen Apocalypse Now too many times. Perhaps it was a policy.” As press reports conflating music’s use on the battlefield with its use in interrogations proliferated, I began desultory research on a phenomenon of the current “global war on terror” that particularly wounds me as a musician–wounds me in that part of my sensibility that remains residually invested in the notion that music is beautiful, even transcendent–is a practice whose contemplation would always lead me to contemplation of bodies and pleasures. Not bodies in pain.

There’s a novel by Russian author Ilya Ehrenburg titled The Life of the Automobile that chronicles humanity’s relationship with that form of transportation. As any critical observer knows (whether they drive a car or not) the automobile has forever changed the world in which we live, for better and worse. This is an essential point of Ehlenburg’s witty and underhandedly sarcastic novel. Mike Davis’s newest offering, Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb, could be considered a bloody sequel to Ehlenburg’s novel. It is, of course, not a novel but a disheartening recitation of incident after murderous incident of death and mayhem caused by lots of explosives packed into automobiles by numerous different groups with just as many agendas.

The title is taken from the carriage bomb set off by the anarchist Marco Buda on Wall Street in protest of the arrest of Sacco and Vanzetti. According to Davis, this bomb was the genesis of the “poor man’s air force” — a weapon that killed as indiscriminately as the explosives dropped from airplanes in almost every war since the Wright Brothers. The comparison between air war and car bombs is not made lightly here. Indeed, Davis refers to the morality involved in both and constantly reminds the reader of the moral high ground car bombing removes from a group claiming to fight for justice. At the same time, he asks the reader why the same moral outrage the media reserves for car bombings is not displayed when a superpower carpet bombs an opponent with considerably less resource: the US Air Force versus Vietnam, for example.

In what is certain to be a revelation for many supporters of the state of Israel, Davis explains the car bomb’s modern origins in the tactics of the Zionist terrorists known as the Stern Gang. This group, composed of men — some who went on to help rule Israel — was ruthless in its application of car bombs. They genuinely did not seem to care who died in the explosions they caused, although they preferred them to be Arab. It was the success of their terror campaign that helped “cleanse” Palestine of Palestinians so that Israelis could take the lands. The Stern Gang’s success would also prove to cause what we nowadays call blowback. Indeed, car bombs set off in civilian spaces have been a favorite tactic of the Palestinian resistance to Israel ever since its founding. Davis relates this story, too.

How the Democratic Congress betrayed American voters, the troops in Iraq and extended the occupation for at least another 18 months.

03/24/07 “ICH” — — THE DEMOCRATS ARE FUNDING IRAQ ESCALATION: The Democratic leadership has proposed $100 billion of supplemental funding for an increased troop presence in Iraq. The leadership opted for the “slow bleed” policy over a month ago. This extends the occupation for at least another 18 months, and allows permanent placement of troops thereafter for “training” or “combating terrorism”. It also will permit the Bush Administration to initiate a war with Iran without Congressional oversight. The surge of 20,000 troops recently increased to 30,000 and will likely increase to 100,000 by year-end. Will the hapless Democrats then claim, “If only I knew then what I know now” as they have for the past year?

The “slow bleed” policy has some toothless requirements for presidential assertions of progress like those we’ve heard for the past four years from the Administration; these reporting requirements allow “slow bleed” proponents to make the preposterous claim they are “ending the war” by funding it. Amendments that would require withdrawal of US forces this year, the policy overwhelming favored by Americans, and the troops themselves, are not even being allowed for a vote by the leadership! The shameless short-term purpose of the Democratic policy is to embarrass Republicans with a Senate filibuster of the supplemental, or a presidential veto, and the longer-term aim is to help Democrats in the 2008 election by saddling the Republicans with intervention in an untenable civil war.

In 2002 the Democrats authorized Bush to invade Iraq (or any other country he deemed to support terrorism, for example Iran) in hope he would become involved in an unpopular war which would produce a Democratic White House. The Democrats 2007 policy is equally political, and may have the paradoxical effect of producing Republican victories in 2008. The prolongation of the occupation is now opposed by two-thirds of all Americans; we want our troops safely home by this Christmas, not political chicanery. As a consequence Americans now think even more poorly of Congress than ever; the failure to withdraw from Iraq dropped Democratic support of Congress from 44% to 33% according to the latest Gallup poll. The Democrats failure to stem what has become a Democrats war will be a factor in the 2008 elections.

A year ago 72% of the troops in Iraq said all troops should come home in 2006 but politicians did not heed their message. How much better we would be if our support included listening to them. Not another drop of blood should be spilled to protect cowardice by both political parties.

AMERICANS WANT TROOP WITHDRAWAL: The Democratic leadership has disregarded national polls showing that 60% of all Americans and 80% of Democratic voters oppose the increase troop levels in Iraq. Grassroots progressive organizations overwhelmingly oppose the occupation of Iraq and the recent escalation. One group closely allied to the Democratic leadership, MoveOn, has used antiwar sentiment to triple both its membership and fundraising, but has been AWOL from antiwar activity; its members are prohibited from demonstrations, and only vigils for the war dead are posted as events on their website. A month ago I wrote that MoveOn began efforts to support “slow bleed” while antiwar forces actively opposed it. Recently MoveOn fabricated a biased push-poll in which “85%” of respondents supported “slow bleed”; however, the 96% of the MoveOn members who favor withdrawal, and who were not offered a vote on that option, refused to participate in a sham. Congressional sources report that the spurious MoveOn poll, together with intensive bullying and bribing, was used to erode the principled opposition of congressional progressives.

A reliable poll conducted by True Majority, another group with progressive membership, found that only 24% favored the “slow bleed” policy while 76% favored immediate or near-term withdrawal. A Zogby poll sponsored by CODEPINK found that 90% of progressives/liberals favored near-term withdrawal. 96% of progressives question the push-poll used by MoveOn that gave such contrary results. Antiwar groups that fought for withdrawal (United for Peace and Justice, Progressive Democrats of America, US Labor Against the War, After Downing Street, Democrats.com, Peace Action, Code Pink, Democracy Rising, True Majority, Gold Star Families for Peace, Military Families Speak Out, Backbone Campaign, Iraq Veterans Against the War, Voters for Peace, Veterans for Peace, the Green Party) are irate at the MoveOn duplicity.

MoveOn is now raising funds from antiwar supporters to attack Senate opposition to the supplemental., but the activist community is now aware that MoveOn is not the cathartic needed to address Democratic Party constipation. There is at least one Democratic senator, Russ Feingold, who could oppose the funding farce. MoveOn is an autocratic organization run by a small group of elitist wannabe power-brokers; it cannot be reformed, but you can let their politburo know your feelings eli@moveon.org, Namrita.Chaudhary@gmail.com , tom@moveon.org, and you can unsubscribe! You also can refuse to lend them your name (their petitions are mainly for fund-raising), your efforts, and your money, and instead join with one of the many active progressive and antiwar organizations (check out United for Peace and Justice- UFPJ for a detailed listing of local and national groups, which incidentally does not include MoveOn). None of the MoveOn leadership has served their country in the armed forces; like Dick Cheney and 95% of Congress they had more important things to do, which did not and do not include supporting the troops that are in harms way.

The “slow bleed” strategy favored by the Democratic leadership and MoveOn is an immoral political calculation that will cause more heartache and disaster in Iraq. That leadership should understand that being perceived as “weak on principle” is much worse politically than being “weak on defense”. Democratic politicians need to vote their conscience on the supplemental. On November 7th we voted for an antiwar, anti-Bush policy; make that vote count for peace.

Please tell the Democratic leadership: Bring Our Troops Home Now!

One day, not so long ago, the US State Department handpicked Texas-based DynCorp for an $800-million contract to train over 100,000 Iraqi police officers, a top-priority project of the Bush administration’s effort to stabilize the war-torn country and strengthen the fragile civilian government there. But State Department wanted a contractor with strong ties in Iraq, so DynCorp obligingly teamed up in 2004 with a company known as Corporate Bank Financial Service, a Washington-based business better known as The Sandi Group.

It seemed to have the makings of a winning partnership. DynCorp had a track record for building police forces in Haiti, Bosnia and other trouble spots around the Globe for the State Department since the early 1990s, so it easily won the contract with little competition and supplied 700 or so trainers largely recruited from police departments in the United States and other coalition allies.

The Sandi Group, run by Rubar Sandi, an Iraqi who immigrated to the United States in the late 1970s, would perform the logistics, provide security, hire interpreters, and perform other services as required. The 54-year-old Sandi, a member of a wealthy Kurdish family, had the well-established political and social connections in Iraq. Those connections and his entrepreneurial know-how served Sandi very well, not only in Iraq, but at the State Department where he had been an influential advisor to the “Future of Iraq Project”, a pre-war planning effort,

After the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003, Sandi immediately opened shop in Iraq where he took control of major Baghdad hotels, a newspaper, and several banks. The one-time Kurdish resistance fighter also recruited an armed private security force with a payroll of 7,500, laid plans for establishing an Iraqi airline, and positioned himself for US-administered contracts in the reconstruction effort. Those contracts included dozens with DynCorp for construction projects, leases on posh hotels, security, logistics and other support services as needed.

“Could You Determine Any Value Added?”

All the while, The Sandi Group kept a low profile in Washington until its affiliate, Corporate Bank, was singled out in a February 7 Congressional hearing for its controversial handling of a multimillion-dollar DynCorp contract to build an Iraqi police training camp in Baghdad near parade grounds of Adnan Palace, a once luxurious domed castle used by Saddam Hussein’s family.

Two weeks after receiving the $55.1-million DynCorp contract in August 15, 2004, Sandi’s Corporate Bank hired an Italian company, Cogim SpA, for $47.1 million to do all the work in the contract, which included providing 1,048 living trailers and building an Olympic-sized swimming pool. On paper, the deal had the look of an effortless $8-million profit for Sandi at the US taxpayers expense — just for being the middleman and flipping the contract to Cogim.

A skeptical Rep. Stephen Lynch, D-Mass., laid out the arrangement before the crowded House congressional hearing teeming with scribbling reporters and TV cameras.

“The problem is the tiering of all these contracts. You have a general contractor, a subcontractor and a sub-subcontractor and a sub-sub-sub contractor,” Lynch noted to witness Stuart Bowen, the leading investigator of the US-funded reconstruction efforts in Iraq.

Chances are there could be plenty of sub-sub-sub-subs in the final mix, but Lynch was especially keen on Corporate Bank’s $8 million handling fee. His eyes widened with the puzzled look of a straight man setting up the punch line: “I just want to understand, is that right?”

Bowen didn’t crack a smile. Sitting with hands calmly folded on the witness desk during his testimony before the House Government Oversight and Reform Committee, the special inspector general for Iraq Reconstruction cascaded into what is now a familiar, but still opaque, explanation for deciphering the contracting chaos in Iraq. The mess squandered $10 billion in taxpayer money through sloppy bookkeeping, job delays, bloated expenses and work that was paid for, but never performed.

“Quality assurance,” Bowen said, “expects that the contractor execute a quality control program over his subcontractors and the lack of visibility by the operational overseer of the government doing the program results in the loss of visibility and cost control.”

(Translation: The government tossed cost control and job performance issues to DynCorp. The government didn’t have a clue to what was going on except for what it learned from DynCorp.)

Lynch reframed his question about the $8 million flip: “Could you determine any value added?”

“No we didn’t,” Bowen said, but stopped short of singling out a possible bad guy.

Someone using the screen name %u201CNancy Pelosi%u201D instantly uploaded the C-SPAN video of Bowen%u2019s testimony on to youtube.com, but Lynch may have had his curiosity more satisfied by catching a short cab ride to The Sandi Group’s elegant office just 1 ½ miles away on Connecticut Avenue in the fashionable DuPont Circle neighborhood of Washington, DC.

After passing a wall-sized collage of folded dollar bills portraying an American flag near the front door, Lynch may have found a digital trail littered with dozens of contracts and agreements of Sandi’s work for Dyncorp with apparently even larger paper profits.

‘Corporate Stuff’: Cash Margins and Profit

According to Adnan Palace agreements leaked out on the Internet more than a year ago, Sandi indeed planned to make $8 million on the Adnan Palace while giving the work to Cogim. That was the charge to DynCorp an — 11 percent for general administration costs, known as G&A, and 6 percent profit for an exact total of just over $8 million. The contracts between DynCorp and Corporate Bank and Corporate Bank and Cogim read almost exactly the same. An administrative assistant sitting at a computer could have easily employed a copy-and-paste approach and just replaced a few words with “Cogim.”

Tim Crawley, who left DynCorp as vice president of contracting last June to join The Sandi Group as executive vice president and general manager of The Sandi Group, defends the standard G&A and profit included in the contract as an industry standard. The G&A reimburses the back office administration; it keeps the office lights on, pays for health insurance, payroll systems, legal advice, business development, “thought processes” and operational “guidance.”

“There’s a lot of confusion about this,” he said. “It pays for the corporate stuff.”