The Rag Blog

03/17/07 “ICH” — The first confession released by the Bush regime’s Military Tribunals–that of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed–has discredited the entire process. Writing in Jurist, Northwestern University law professor Anthony D’Amato likens Mohammed’s confession to those that emerged in Stalin’s show trials of Bolshevik leaders in the 1930s.

That was my own immediate thought. I remember speaking years ago with Soviet dissident Valdimir Bukovsky about the behavior of Soviet dissidents under torture. He replied that people pressed for names under torture would try to remember the names of war dead and people who had passed away. Those who retained enough of their wits under torture would confess to an unbelievable array of crimes in an effort to alert the public to the falsity of the entire process.

That is what Mohammed did. We know he was tortured, because his response to the obligatory question about his treatment during his years of detention is redacted. We also know that he was tortured, because otherwise there is no point for the US Justice (sic) Dept. memos giving the green light to torture or for the Military Commissions Act, which permits torture and death sentence based on confession extracted by torture.

Mohammed’s confession of crimes and plots is so vast that Katherine Shrader of the Associated Press reports that the Americans who extracted Mohammed’s confession do not believe it either. It is exaggerated, say Mohammed’s tormentors, and must be taken with a grain of salt.

In other words, the US torture crew, reveling in their success, played into Mohammed’s hands. Pride goes before a fall, as the saying goes.

Mohammed’s confession admits to 31 planned and actual attacks all over the world, including blowing up the Panama Canal and assassinating presidents Carter and Clinton and the Pope. Having taken responsibility for the whole ball of wax along with everything else that he could imagine, he was the entire show. No other terrorists needed.

Reading responses of BBC listeners to Mohammed’s confession reveals that the rest of the world is either laughing at the US government for being so stupid as to think that anyone anywhere would believe the confession or damning the Bush regime for being like the Gestapo and KGB.

Humorists are having a field day with the confession: “’I’m a very dangerous mastermind,’ said Mohammed, who confessed to the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby, the Brink’s robbery, St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, and the Lincoln and McKinley assassinations. Mohammed also accepted responsibility for spreading hay fever and cold sores around the world and for rained out picnics.”

“State of Denial” is the title of Bob Woodward’s famous book on the Bush team’s road to disaster in Iraq, but it would have served just as well for a description of their Latin America policy. This week President Bush heads South for a seven-day, five country, trip to Latin America to see if he can counter the populist political tide that has brought left governments to about half the population of the region.

Carrying vague promises of a joint effort on ethanol production – but no offer to lower tariffs protecting the US market – President Bush hopes to entice Brazil into taking his side against his nemesis, President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. This is a fantasy.

President Lula da Silva of Brazil made a point of visiting Venezuela for his first foreign trip after being re-elected last October. There, he presided over the dedication of a $1.2 billion bridge over the Orinoco river, financed by the Brazilian government, while he lavished praise on Chavez and gave the popular Venezuelan president an added boost in his own re- election campaign.

The Bush Administration’s policy of trying to isolate Venezuela from its neighbors has only succeeded in isolating Washington. Last week President Nestor Kirchner of Argentina, speaking in Caracas, flatly rejected the notion that Argentina or Brazil should “contain President Chavez,” whom he called “a brother and a friend.” In another thinly-veiled swipe at Washington, Kirchner said: “It cannot be that it bothers anyone that our nations become integrated.” At the same time he announced that Venezuela and Argentina would jointly issue a “Bond of the South” for $1.5 billion.

If Washington is in denial about the political reality of Latin America, it is even more in denial about the economics. For twenty-five years our government has pushed a series of reforms throughout the region: tighter fiscal and monetary policies, more independent central banks, indiscriminate opening to international trade and investment, privatization of public enterprises, and the abandonment of economic development strategies and industrial policies. The Bush team thinks that these reforms, known as “neoliberalism” in Latin America, were just the right formula to stimulate economic growth.

In fact, Latin America’s economic growth over the last 25 years has been a disaster – the worst long-term growth failure in more than a hundred years. From 1980-2000 GDP per person grew by only 9 percent, and another 4 percent for 2000-2005. Compare this to 82 percent for just the two decades from 1960-1980, and it is easy to see why candidates promising new economic policies have been elected (and some re-elected) in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Uruguay, and Venezuela. They also came close to winning in Mexico, Peru, and Costa Rica.

The left governments that have introduced new economic policies have done pretty well: Argentina has grown by a phenomenal 8.6 percent annually for nearly five years, pulling more than 8 million people out of poverty in a country of 36 million. Bolivia has increased government revenue from hydrocarbons by about 6.7 percent of GDP, an amount that would equal $900 billion in the United States, and is using the additional revenue to help its majority poor. Venezuela is also using the government’s increased take of oil production to provide health care, education, and subsidized food for the poor. All of these governments have succeeded by implementing policies that Washington opposed.

President Bush will get a good reception from the right-wing governments he is visiting: his close allies in Mexico, Colombia, and Guatemala. Colombia is in the midst of a huge national scandal over the responsibility of government officials for mass murder and assassinations of political opponents. More trade unionists are killed in Colombia each year than in the rest of the world combined. Guatemala is another right- wing ally with a terrible human rights record: two weeks ago, three Central American parlimentarians were murdered by a Guatemalan police death squad. All three governments have been linked to narco-trafficking, but President Bush will likely praise them for their cooperation in the war on drugs.

It’s all about denial. The political and economic changes sweeping Latin America are a serious break with the failed policies of the past. Washington’s influence has collapsed, and is not likely to recover.

[Mark Weisbrot is Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC]

[This column was printed by the Contra Costa Times (CA) on Sunday, March 11.]

The radio news magazine “Between The Lines” interviewed Yifat Susskind, communications director with MADRE, an an international women’s human rights organisation based in New York City. Yifat is also author of a report on violence against Iraqi women titled, “Promising Democracy, Imposing Theocracy: Gender-Based Violence and the US War on Iraq.” The report, made public on March 6 at a meeting of the Commission on the Status of Women at the United Nations, exposes what it calls “the incidence, causes, and legalization of gender-based violence in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion.”

The situation for Iraqi women since that invasion four years ago has deteriorated dramatically by every measure of daily survival: lack of access to clean water, electricity, food, education and jobs. And, as a result of the absence of personal security, women have virtually disappeared from public life in Iraq – yet their disappearance has been barely noted by media coverage of the war, which is not surprising. Our male dominated societies impose violence on women not just through physical brutality but also in a very silent way that makes womens’ submission almost appear to be natural. Pierre Bourdieu called it ‘a symbolic violence’, “a violence that is hardly noticed, almost invisible for the victims on whom it is perpetrated; a violence which is exercised principally via the purely symbolic channels of communication and knowledge (or, to be accurate, mis-knowledge).” While Iraqi women suffer from rape, torture, abduction and murder, the media, ignoring their plight, exclusively focuses on crazed males on both sides playing deadly war games. And when it counts the dead, it only mentions the combatants; women and children literally are un-accounted for.

The United States is expanding its two major detention centers in Iraq with the expectation that the new security crackdown in Baghdad will add hundreds and perhaps thousands of prisoners to the 17,000 it holds, U.S. military spokesmen said.

The U.S.-led military coalition in Iraq runs two large prison facilities: Camp Bucca in southern Iraq, and Camp Cropper outside Baghdad. Camp Bucca today holds 13,800 Iraqi detainees, said Navy Lt. Cmdr. Clifford A. Siegfried, a military spokesman, whereas Camp Cropper holds 3,300 Iraqi detainees. But the population at Cropper is expected to grow to 5,000 within 12 months, according to a one-year military contract proposal to handle food services for detainees and Iraqi correctional officers at the facility beginning in July.

Gen. David H. Petraeus, the U.S. commander in Iraq, reiterated the expected increase in detainees when he told reporters last week that the effort “to expand the U.S. capacity for detention” in Iraq was one reason 2,200 U.S. Army military police personnel are part of the troop increase in Iraq.

The Camp Cropper contract proposal, reviewed by The Washington Post, underscores the detainee increase and offers insight into U.S. detention practices in Iraq — including a ban against hiring local staffers and an emphasis on meal practices sensitive to local traditions.

According to the food contract, local Iraqis and Iraqi companies are prohibited from preparing and serving food for the detainees. Neither the U.S. government nor Iraqi government “presently has a vetting process which would accommodate Iraqi employees while ensuring adequate security,” according to the contract proposal.

Instead, the contactor is to use “expatriates and third-country nationals.” Any third-country nationals hired must live in trailers or tents provided by the contractor on a U.S. military base near the food facility. “This was done for the security and safety of the installation and the workers” and at the request of the U.S. military police battalion on the base, Siegfried said.

TANAF, Iraq, March 16 (Reuters) – Hameda Um Firas has lived most of her 70-odd years as a refugee — now she is stranded in a tent again at Iraq’s border with Syria where hundreds of Palestinians have fled to escape violence in Baghdad.

“We escaped in fear of our lives. My granddaughter was decapitated by a missile attack and our sons were killed, we fled Iraq to spare our lives,” she said, barely able to contain tears of anger at Arab countries she said should be helping.

“We are living in a miserable state in this camp,” she said as children played in dusty lanes between white tents with clothes hanging to dry on the guy ropes.

A 25-year-old who gave only his first name, Alaa, fled to the camp at the Tanaf border crossing after gunmen killed one of his brothers. “All my family are separated now, I know nothing about my brothers and where they are,” he said.

Sectarian violence and bomb attacks are driving up to 50,000 Iraqis a month from their homes, according to the U.N. High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), which says close to 2 million Iraqis are displaced within Iraq and another 2 million abroad.

UNHCR spokeswoman Astrid van Genderen Stort said there were around 34,000 Palestinians in Iraq in 2003, before the U.S. invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein, and around 15,000 remain.

The Palestinians came in three waves in 1948, 1967 and in the 1990s, and were given subsidised housing and the right to work — privileges compared to other refugees and a source of tension with some Iraqis forced out to make way for them.

Saddam gave them assistance and portrayed himself as a defender of the Palestinian cause.

While the numbers are relatively small, van Genderen Stort said the Palestinians were in a uniquely difficult situation because without passports they can not go to Syria, Jordan or other neighbouring countries where many Iraqis have fled.

“The difference with Palestinians is they have nowhere to go,” she said. “A lot of them have expired identity papers which the Iraqis are not extending because it’s not their priority.”

“They’re in a Catch-22. They’re targeted, they have death threats, they have these raids, but they can’t flee and when they flee they either have to do it illegally or they are stuck at the border,” she said.

Sunni Arab militant groups including al Qaeda have claimed some of the worst bomb attacks in Iraq, including many targeting Shi’ites, and foreign Arabs are viewed with deep suspicion by many Iraqis, particularly in Shi’ite areas.

“Palestinians are seen as insurgents or trouble makers … because they’re Sunnis,” said van Genderen Stort.

BAGHDAD RAID

The UNHCR said on Friday it was “deeply disturbed” by a raid on Wednesday on a Baghdad compound housing Palestinians in which at least one Palestinian was killed and several more detained.

Interior Ministry spokesman Brigadier Abdul Karim Khalaf said the raid was in response to information a car bomb was in the complex. He said shooting broke out and three gunmen were killed and 25 arrested, including Iraqis and Palestinians.

Speaking on Al Hurra television, he rejected charges that Palestinians were deliberately targeted because of their nationality, saying that violence in Iraq was effecting everybody and the raid was based on specific intelligence.

UNHCR spokesman Ron Redmond said at a briefing in Geneva on Friday the Palestinians resisted the raid out of fear after months of being targeted by militias and other groups.

He said the UNCHR had reports of Palestinians forced to pay thousands of dollars to Iraqi security forces for protection from torture of family members in detention.

Iraq’s police force has been plagued by reports of infiltration by Shi’ite militias, though the Interior Ministry says it has recently taken steps to purge such elements.

The UNHCR said it was also concerned about non-governmental organisations working with Palestinians after a staff member of one group was abducted on Tuesday and found dead the next day.

Wednesday’s raid prompted at least 41 Palestinians to flee the capital to join around 850 others who have been stranded at the Syrian border since last May, the UNHCR said.

Abu Rami, who runs the refugee camp there, said tribal leaders in the mostly Sunni Arab western province of Anbar were helping support the refugees but they needed a place to go.

UNHCR is deeply disturbed by a raid conducted by the Iraqi security forces on Wednesday (14 March) in a Palestinian area in Baghdad. It left at least one Palestinian dead. Nine Palestinians are reportedly still in detention. Fifty-one people were reportedly detained initially, but released later. The raid prompted at least 41 other Palestinians to flee the capital, and they have joined 850 other Palestinians who have been stranded at the Iraq-Syria border since last May. More are expected to be on their way. Police forces and multinational forces have confirmed that the raid took place as part of the Baghdad security plan.

The dead man was a guard at one of the Baghdad mosques and reportedly suffered at least one gunshot to the head. UNHCR and other organisations have also received allegations of physical abuse and possibly torture being carried out in detention, an allegation denied by the Iraqi authorities. One ex-detainee reported he was beaten on his back and suffered a broken hand. He believed that others had been subjected to worse treatment.

The violence reportedly broke out when the Palestinians tried to resist the raid. They said they were frightened following months of being targeted by various groups. Several have been kidnapped, arrested and killed. They have often expressed concern about the lack of protection by the Iraqi security forces.

Recently, UNHCR has received reports that the families of several detained Palestinians have been forced to pay thousands of US dollars to some members of the Iraqi security forces – allegedly for protection from torture and mutilation of their family members while in detention. Higher sums have reportedly been demanded to ensure their release.

The Palestinians who arrived at the border claimed that their houses had been raided by the special forces, their furniture thrown out of their homes and that they were told they had two days to leave their homes. Others claimed they had been detained and maltreated before being released.

UNHCR is also very much concerned about the safety of NGOs working with the Palestinians. On 13 March one NGO staff dealing with the Palestinian community was abducted in front of his son by unknown men and found dead the next day.

UNHCR is working with crucial partners on the ground in Baghdad to get more information on those killed and the detained Palestinians as well as the NGO staff. At least 186 Palestinians have been confirmed murdered in Baghdad between April 2004 and January 2007. UNHCR believes the number may be significantly higher. Their enclaves in Baghdad have been the target of many militia attacks. Hundreds of Palestinian families have been evicted from their homes with nowhere to go, prevented from seeking refuge in neighbouring countries.

NAJAF, Iraq — While the Bush administration works to stop Iran from meddling in Iraq, Iranian air-conditioners fill Iraqi appliance stores, Iranian tomatoes ripen on the windowsills of kitchens here and legions of white Iranian-made Peugeots sit in Iraqi driveways.

Some Iraqi cities, including Basra, the southern oil center, buy or plan to buy electricity from Iran. The Iraqi government relies on Iranian companies to bring gasoline from Turkmenistan to alleviate a severe shortage. Iraqi officials are reviewing an application by Iran to open a branch of an Iranian bank in Baghdad, and Iran has offered to lend Iraq $1 billion.

The economies of Iraq and Iran, the largest Shiite-majority countries in the world, are becoming closely integrated, with Iranian goods flooding Iraqi markets and Iraqi cities looking to Iran for basic services.

After the two countries fought a devastating war from 1980 to 1988, Saddam Hussein maintained tight control over cross-border trade, but commerce has exploded since the American-led invasion of 2003.

Much of the money is heading in one direction, though: Iraq is becoming dependent on imports because industries here have been ravaged by the economic sanctions of the 1990s and the current sectarian violence. Reconstruction and security have lagged so far behind the expectations of ordinary Iraqis that cheap goods from Iran and neighboring countries often provide the only comforts in their lives.

“What is happening in Iraq at the moment is a lot of trade, but it’s almost all one-way trade,” Barham Salih, the Iraqi deputy prime minister for finance, said of the country’s economic ties with Iran and other neighbors. “If you take oil away, there’s a lot of imbalance in this.”

Iraqi leaders from the Shiite bloc currently in power say political and economic ties with Iran, which is governed by Shiite Persians, will inevitably strengthen. As driving factors, they cite the hostility of Sunni Arab nations to a Shiite-run Iraq and the ambivalence of the White House toward the devout Shiite parties here.

“If the Shiites do not feel protected, if they feel what they’ve achieved can’t be maintained, much of the leadership will have to work with Iran,” said Sami al-Askari, a Shiite legislator who advises Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, himself a religious Shiite with close ties to Iran. “The Arabs and the Americans are saying Iran is bad, but it’s the only recourse.”

According to one commonly cited statistic, trade between Iraq and Iran has grown by 30 percent a year since the 2003 invasion. But American officials here say no accurate numbers are available because Iran refuses to release complete figures.

Statistics from the American Embassy’s economic section show that Syria accounted for 22 percent of Iraq’s imports in 2005, and Turkey 21 percent. Iran, which has the longest border with Iraq, would be likely to fall in that range, officials said. The C.I.A. World Factbook estimates Iraq’s total imports in 2006 at $20.8 billion.

Iran has divulged a few trade numbers. Tehran told the government of Iraq’s northern Kurdish region that trade with the region amounted to more than $1 billion in 2006, said Hassan Baqi, president of the chamber of commerce in the Kurdish city of Sulaimaniya.

The Bush administration’s greatest success is its ability to escape accountability for its numerous impeachable offenses.

The administration’s offenses against US law, the US Constitution, civil liberties, human rights, and the Geneva Conventions, its lies to Congress and the American people, its vote-rigging scandals, its sweetheart no-bid contracts to favored firms, its political firing of Republican US Attorneys, its practice of kidnapping and torturing people in foreign hellholes, and its persecution of whistle blowers are altogether so vast that it is a major undertaking just to list them all.

Bush admits that he violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and spied on US citizens without warrants, a felony under the Act. Bush has shown total disrespect for civil liberty and the Constitution and has suffered rebukes from the Supreme Count. The evidence is overwhelming that the Bush administration manufactured false “intelligence” to justify military aggression against Iraq. The Halliburton contract scandals are notorious, as is the use of electronic voting machines programmed to miscount the actual vote.

The chief-of-staff to Vice President Cheney has been convicted for obstructing justice in the outing of a covert CIA officer. Proof of torture is overwhelming, and the Bush administration has even had the temerity to have permissive legislation passed after the fact that permits it to continue to torture “detainees.” The Sibel Edmonds and other whistle blower cases are well known. The Senate Judiciary Committee has just issued subpoenas to Justice (sic) Dept. officials involved in the scandalous removal of US Attorneys who refused to be politicized.

Yet the Democrats have taken impeachment “off the table.” Many Democrats and Republicans and a great many Christians can contemplate illegal military aggression against Iran, but not the impeachment of the greatest criminal administration in US history. Far from being scandalized by what the entire world views as an unjust invasion and occupation of Iraq by the US, leading Democratic and Republican candidates for the 2008 presidential nomination rushed to inform the Israel Lobby, AIPAC, that they, if elected, will keep US troops in Iraq.

The previous occupant of the White House could not escape being impeached by the House of Representatives for lying about a consensual Oval Office sexual affair. President Nixon and his vice president, a saintly pair compared to Bush-Cheney, were both driven from office for offenses that are inconsequential by comparison. Liberals branded Ronald Reagan the “Teflon President,” but the neoconservatives’ Iran-Contra scandal was a mere dress rehearsal for their machinations in the Bush regime.

What explains Bush-Cheney invulnerability to accountability?

Perhaps the answer is that Bush has desensitized us. Like kids desensitized to violence by violent video games and movies and pornography addicts desensitized to sex, we have become desensitized by the avalanche of Bush-Cheney crimes, lies, and disdain for Congress, courts, and public opinion.

Our elected representatives, if not the American people, now regard as normal such heinous actions as war crimes, the rape of the Constitution, self-serving use of government office, and the constant stream of lies and propaganda from the highest offices of the executive branch.

Perhaps that is what disillusioned foreigners, who once looked with hope to America, mean when they say that America does not exist anymore.

If the notion has departed that the highest political offices in the land are supposed to be occupied by people who are honest and faithful to their oath to the Constitution, then we are far advanced on the road to tyranny.

LONDON (AFP) – A coroner on Friday accused the US military of a criminal breach of the international law of armed conflict after the “friendly fire” death of a British soldier in the early days of the Iraq war.

Andrew Walker ruled that Lance Corporal Matty Hull was unlawfully killed when two US jets mistakenly attacked his clearly-marked convoy in southern Iraq and criticised the Pentagon for failing to cooperate fully with the inquest.

Hull’s widow, Susan, said she was relieved with the ruling but accused the United States of letting down its main ally in Iraq by failing to explain the exact circumstances.

The US Defence Department hit back, reaffirming its own finding that the 25-year-old’s death near Basra on March 28, 2003, was a “tragic accident” and said it had given all relevant information to its British counterparts.

In a strongly-worded ruling at the hearing in Oxford, Walker said Hull’s death was avoidable and tantamount to manslaughter.

“I find there was no lawful authority to fire on the convoy. The attack on the convoy therefore amounted to an assault. It was unlawful because there was no lawful reason for it and in that respect it was criminal,” he added.

At a news conference, Susan Hull criticised US President George W. Bush, to whom she appealed directly on Thursday to release 11 censored lines from an interview between a ground controller and one of the pilots.

Al-Quds al-Arabi and Al-Hayat both give prominent play to a report in a Russian newspaper that said the US has past the point of no return for an attack on around 20 Iranian nuclear and military locations, scheduled for April 6 and code-named “Sting”. The report also said the plant the Russians are helping build (Bushehr) will be spared. Russia, for its part, has warned the Iranian authorities of the planned attack and said it can’t count on Russian support if it doesn’t cooperate with the UN process. The original report was in a Russian newspaper called Argumenti Nedelja or some such name, and picked up from there by the Novosti news agency. Al-Quds cites the news agency; Al-Hayat cites the paper.

Al-Quds, after summarizing the gist of the report, adds that the countries of the Gulf are taking steps to get ready for Iranian retaliation, the idea being that although Iran has hinted at preparations for retaliation against the US directly, the Al-Quds reporter says Arab military people don’t believe they have the capacity for that, so the more likely targets (according to these Arab sources) would be US installations and other assets in the region. He mentions Saudi Arabia and the UAE as places where authorities are taking intensive steps for the protection of US installations. “And,” he adds, “they are intensifying domestic intelligence operations within the communities [no doubt meaning Shiite communities], fearing the possible existence of sleeper cells”.