The Rag Blog

AMMAN, March 22 (Reuters) – United Nations agencies working in Iraq warned on Thursday a chronic shortage of safe drinking water risks causing more child deaths and an outbreak of waterborne disease such as cholera during the summer.

Four years after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, millions of Iraqi children still find that safe water is no easier to access, said a statement issued by leading U.N. aid agencies operating in Iraq.

The agencies, whose offices are based in Amman, issued the statement to mark World Water Day.

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said shortages of drinking water threatened to push up diarrhoea rates, particularly among children. Diarrhoea is already the second highest cause of child illness and death in Iraq, it said.

“Latest reports suggest we are already seeing an increase in diarrhoea, even before the usual onset of the diarrhoea season in June,” said Roger Wright, UNICEF representative in Iraq.

Efforts to repair Iraq’s damaged water networks have been hampered by electricity shortages, attacks on technicians, infrastructure and engineering works and underinvestment in the water sector, the agencies said.

Iraq was still relying on U.N. support to provide essential water treatment chemicals with UNICEF alone providing 1,650 tonnes of chlorine last year, the statement said.

The suspension of water tankering services to tens of thousands of people in Baghdad, especially to displaced families and communities hosting them, increased the risk of cholera outbreaks, the agencies warned.

I handed the petition to the German environment minister, Sigmar Gabriel. The meeting continued, with speeches on other issues from other organizations. I wondered if all of the work had been worth it.

And then came Minister Gabriel’s closing speech.

I could hardly believe it: he was saying that climate change must be the number one priority at the G8 summit. And he was holding our petition.

“Thanks to increased pressure from people around the world,” he said, “the tide is turning. When an international NGO can gather this many signatures” (here he holds up the petition), “we cannot ignore this problem anymore… As Environmental ministers, we have a responsibility both to the environment and our voters to make sure our heads of state act!”

And a few days later, German Chancellor and G8 President Angela Merkel vowed to put climate change at the top of the agenda for the G8 Leaders Summit.

WASHINGTON (CNN) — Planners for Iraq reconstruction did not anticipate conditions after the 2003 invasion, setting the scene for lackluster services that still plague the country, according to a report by the Pentagon’s inspector.

The report, released Thursday, made nine recommendations for improvements for future nation-building plans by the United States.

Among the suggestions is for Congress to develop better coordination between the Departments of Defense and State and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the primary agencies that work with other governments and international agencies.

“There is fairly wide agreement that pre-war planning for relief and reconstruction should have been better, and one of the challenges we are seeing in reviewing that is the interagency problem,” Special Inspector General Stuart Bowen told reporters Wednesday ahead of the report’s release.

The efforts of the Defense Department, USAID and the State Department “bumped into each other,” causing much of the difficulty, Bowen said.

“There was a lack of clarity of roles and responsibility and a lack of effective joint-ness. By that I mean a unity of command, and that needs to be developed before we go to war,” he said.

KHALID SHEIK Mohammed’s cold-blooded confession of responsibility for the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and other horrific crimes before a tribunal in Guantanamo Bay got a lot of attention when the Pentagon released a partial transcript last week — and understandably so. But another set of disclosures by the al-Qaeda leader that could also be sensational received almost no attention. That’s because the Pentagon swiftly classified a document submitted by Mr. Mohammed in which he detailed the torture he says he suffered. The rationale is that disclosure of those allegations would harm national security. In fact, the harm the Bush administration’s abuse of prisoners has already done to this country’s ability to combat Islamic extremism will only be compounded if it succeeds in making this shameful record a state secret.

The administration claims it has not used torture on prisoners such as Mr. Mohammed. Yet it has been working aggressively to ensure that he and 13 other accused terrorists formerly held in secret CIA prisons are never allowed to reveal how they were treated. In addition to classifying Mr. Mohammed’s statement, the administration is making the surreal argument in court that in being subjected to “alternative” interrogation methods, al-Qaeda detainees were receiving top-secret information — and so may be prohibited from ever discussing their experience, even to the defense attorneys seeking to represent them.

The government claims that this looking-glass policy is necessary to prevent al-Qaeda members still at large from learning of the CIA’s methods so that they can train against them. Yet some of the harshest action taken against Mr. Mohammed has already been widely reported: He was treated to “waterboarding,” or simulated drowning, an ancient torture method that every U.S. administration prior to this one has considered illegal. CIA detainees are also known to have been subjected to temperature extremes and sleep deprivation. The administration has assured Congress that it has dropped some of these methods, including waterboarding. If that’s true, Mr. Mohammed’s statement will not alert future detainees, but it will open a debate about whether the CIA’s past practices were legal or morally justifiable.

“Paradoxically, preserving liberty may require the rule of a single leader–a dictator–willing to use those dreaded ‘extraordinary measures,’ which few know how, or are willing, to employ.” — Michael Ledeen, White House advisor and fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, “Machiavelli on Modern Leadership: Why Machiavelli’s Iron Rules Are As Timely and Important Today As Five Centuries Ago”

“Gen. Tommy Franks says that if the United States is hit with a weapon of mass destruction that inflicts large casualties, the Constitution will likely be discarded in favor of a military form of government.” — NewsMax, November 21, 2003

In October 2006, Bush signed into law the John Warner National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2007. Quietly slipped into the law at the last minute, at the request of the Bush administration, were sections changing important legal principles, dating back 200 years, which limit the U.S. government’s ability to use the military to intervene in domestic affairs. These changes would allow Bush, whenever he thinks it necessary, to institute martial law–under which the military takes direct control over civilian administration.

Sec. 1042 of the Act, “Use of the Armed Forces in Major Public Emergencies,” effectively overturns what is known as posse comitatus. The Posse Comitatus Act is a law, passed in 1878, that prohibits the use of the regular military within the U.S. borders. The original passage of the Posse Comitatus Act was a very reactionary move that sealed the betrayal of Black people after the Civil War and brought the period of Reconstruction to an end. It decreed that federal troops could no longer be used inside the former Confederate states to enforce the new legal rights of Black people. Black people were turned over to the armed police and Klansmen serving the southern plantation owners, and the long period of Jim Crow began.

During the 20th century, posse comitatus objectively started to play a new role within the bourgeois democratic framework: as a legal barrier to the direct influence of the powerful military establishment and the armed forces over domestic U.S. society. It served to some degree as an obstacle against military coups and presidents seizing military control over the country. (However, National Guard troops have been legally available to the ruling class for use inside the U.S., and there have been other loopholes to the prohibition of the use of armed forces domestically, as in the mobilization of Marine troops during the 1992 L.A. Rebellion.)

So the changes to posse comitatus signed into law by Bush are extremely significant and ominous. Bush has modified the main exemptions to posse comitatus that up to now have been primarily defined by the Insurrection Act of 1807. Previously the president could call out the army in the United States only in cases of insurrection or conditions where “rebellion against the authority of the United States, make it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States in any State or Territory by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings.” Under the new law the president can use the military in response to a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, a terrorist attack or “other condition in which the President determines that domestic violence has occurred to the extent that state officials cannot maintain public order.”

An Orwellian “anti-Hillary” video, posted on YouTube, a remix of Ridley Scott’s “Big Brother” Super Bowl commercial for Apple, supposedly represents “a watershed moment in 21st century media and political advertising,” according to Greg Mitchell, writing for Editor and Publisher. “It’s all there—the blank faces of the mind-controlled citizens; the ominous soldiers chasing the woman athlete; the ‘big brother’ spouting double-speak,” adds USA Today. “And after the woman athlete throws her sledge hammer through the huge screen where Clinton’s face is being shown, the commercial fades to the words ‘BarackObama.com.’”

In other words, for the Obama supporter who remixed this admittedly creative video, Hillary is the visage of “Big Sister,” while Obama represents… well, apparently, not Big Brother.

Obama, a Harvard graduate billed as the “rising star of the Democratic Party,” will not save us from Big Brother. In fact, Obama represents the new, freshly scrubbed face of Big Brother, as he is a Democratic Leadership Council favorite—he made the DLC “100 to Watch” list in 2003—and last November sojourned to the Council on Foreign Relations to pay homage.

A lot of people, politicians and pundits and “regular” people, take the attitude that “we” just can’t leave Iraq, because we’ll be abandoning the Iraqi people to chaos, and the occupation is the only thing preventing that from happening. This is something you hear from people who supported the war but now say they realize it was a bad idea (but they still don’t think we can actually leave) as well as from people who were opposed to the war from the start. This line is said with absolute authority – the speaker knows this is what will happen if U.S. forces leave Iraq.

Even if this conventional wisdom were true, it wouldn’t justify an illegal occupation. But there’s one more little problem though – by a 2-1 margin, the Iraqi people, who are in a lot better position to know than American politicians and pundits, don’t think it’s true! This is what I think is the key result of a new poll (pdf link) that the media are writing and talking about. The question was, “do you believe that the security situation in Iraq will get better or worse in the immediate weeks following a withdrawal of Multi National Forces?” 29% said it would get “a great deal better,” 24% said “a little better,” and 6% said “stay the same.” Only 26% thought it would get a little or a lot worse. So that’s three out of five Iraqis, a clear majority, who think that the security situation in Iraq will not get worse, and only one in four who think it will get worse.

Tyrants have always collected as much information as possible on their civilians (or serfs or slaves). The more information they have the easier it is to exert control. The control comes in many forms – from the elimination of dissidents to appeasement politics – but in all cases the more information available the more predictable the response.

So how much information does your government keep on you?

We can start with the basics: name, birth date, social security numbers, income, place of work, religion, education, etc. All of this information most people hand over to the government during census time. It is, after all your civic duty (to obey). What other information are they collecting to help enhance the census?

The US Census Bureau plans to capture the latitude and longitude of the front door of every house, apartment and improvised shelter in America. This will be done by an army of 100,000 temporary workers down every street and dusty, dirt road in America armed with a handheld GPS device.

So they know who is living in the house (or impoverished shelter) and exactly where the front door is located. A picture sure would be nice.

The Calgary-based company, Zao, is now in the process of photographing and appraising every household in the United States. “That means every house, commercial building, industrial and institutional structure is being photographed and appraised property-by-property and street-by-street”. This process is legal because the photos are taken from public spaces and anyone (to the delight of all peeping toms, pedophiles, stalker, rapists, thieves, tyrants, etc.) willing to pay can access their database. This compliments the satellite photographs of your property as well.

Scary? It gets worse.

Your new North American ID card will contain your fingerprints and other biometric data like retinal scans. This will be pushed through as a new high-tech drivers license in the US under the Real ID act or in Canada as a Hegelian compromise with the American demand for a passport to cross the border. This of course is a very old idea in Canada, but the time seems right to push it through.

Any tyrant would agree that you cannot ignore the children.

European Union children, possibly as young as six, will be subjected to compulsory fingerprinting under European Union rules being drawn up in secret. The prints will be stored on a database which could be shared with countries around the world. Of course this bad idea can only be expanded. European Union ministers of justice and ministers of the interior have proposed a pan-European network of fingerprint and DNA databases.

DNA? The European Union is not alone in that regard either.

In Britain, 750,000 juveniles have their DNA recorded in a national DNA database. This database now includes EVERY newborn child in Edinburgh and the Lothians (with plans to expand). Each file will be closed when the child reaches 16, but it will then be kept on record for up to 75 years.

“Teachers, police, GPs and social workers [that is over 400,000 people] will be able to access the files to check for signs of abuse. If the child is regularly late for school or their behaviour changes dramatically, the details could be put into the system where it is hoped it will build up a picture of the child’s overall welfare.”

And on this side of the pond, the US may soon be collecting DNA of all suspected criminals, even if they are proven to be innocent of any crime.

Sadly, this is an incomplete list of the information (health records, financial history, credit rating, Google searches, …) that is being stored on every civilian (or serf or slave) in the western world. But no need to worry, the new ID cards will be consolidated into a single database to make “protecting” your information that much easier. If this complete invasion of your privacy does not make your blood boil, then you should just let them install a video camera in your home.