The Rag Blog

The Democrats took the majority of both the House and Senate on January 4th, 2007 since then 192 members of the Armed Services have died as have countless Iraqi civilians. With power comes responsibility, so voters should know that this is now the Democrats War and every death and casualty is their responsibility.

When they came to power their leadership said they would not use the “power of the purse” to end the war. But pressure from voters opposed to the Iraq quagmire has changed their tune. Last week an obviously frustrated Rep. David Obey told Marine Mom, Tina Richardsin a Capitol Hill hallway encounter that his appropriations bill would de-authorize the war.

I went to Capitol Hill as part of a support delegation for Tina Richards this Monday to return to Rep. Obey’s office to seek clarification of his hallway comments. There has been a lot of deal making by Congressional leaders to line up support for the Iraq War supplemental. They are adding billions in goodies for constituents, for Midwest farmers, avocado growers, communities that have lost bases, Katrina relief, Veterans and other goodies to gather votes.

The headline that the Democratic leadership would like voters to hear is “troops out of Iraq by August 2008.” But the headline is more a wolf in sheep’s clothing than a reality. After hearing details of the bill from Obey’s appropriations staff person the loopholes may define the law more than the headline.

For most in the peace movement an August 2008 deadline for withdrawal is already way too slow. Why the delay? On November 17, 2005 Rep. Jack Murtha called for redeployment within six months. Here we are sixteen months later and the Democratic leadership is talking about redeployment in seventeen months! Six months has turned into 33 months ­ and in fact the August deadline is illusory. How many lives ­ U.S. and Iraqi ­ will have been lost in this quagmire over this time period?

WASHINGTON – Top House Democrats retreated Monday from an attempt to limit President Bush’s authority for taking military action against Iran as the leadership concentrated on a looming confrontation with the White House over the Iraq war.

Officials said Speaker Nancy Pelosi (news, bio, voting record) and other members of the leadership had decided to strip from a major military spending bill a requirement for Bush to gain approval from Congress before moving against Iran.

Conservative Democrats as well as lawmakers concerned about the possible impact on
Israel had argued for the change in strategy.

Robert Dreyfuss is an Alexandria, Va.-based writer specializing in politics and national security issues. He is the author of Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam , a contributing editor at The Nation and a writer for Mother Jones, The American Prospect and Rolling Stone. He can be reached through his website, www.robertdreyfuss.com.

Two parliaments, half a world away from each other, struggled with calls to end the war in Iraq yesterday. In Washington, Democrats in the U.S. Congress ended weeks of squabbling to settle on the outlines of a legislative plan to end the war no later than August, 2008, and perhaps sooner. Meanwhile, in Baghdad, a new constellation of political parties is beginning to take shape in the Iraqi parliament, united around the idea of asking U.S. forces to leave Iraq as soon as possible. Tremendous obstacles stand in the way of pro-peace forces both in Congress and in Iraq’s parliament, but if I had to guess, I’d bet that the Iraqis will ask the United States to get out of Iraq long before Congress can force the issue.

Most congressional progressives and members of the Out of Iraq Caucus aren’t thrilled with the plan cobbled together by Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Even so, let’s give credit where credit is due. Four months after an election in which American voters went to the polls to demand an end to the war, the Democrats responded by proposing a timetable to do just that, calling for the withdrawal of U.S. forces by the end of 2007 if President Bush can’t certify that the Iraqi government is meeting a series of specific benchmarks, and by August 2008 even if those benchmarks are met.

The Democratic House leadership is: facing a nearly unified Republican caucus in both the House and Senate opposed to any weakening of the U.S. role in Iraq; threatened by a promised White House veto; and dragged down by the anchor of several dozen conservative, Blue Dog Democrats afraid to challenge President Bush over the war. Nevertheless, House leaders have probably done about the best they could. It won’t satisfy anti-war activists, who’ll have to redouble efforts to turn up the heat on the congressional Dems. And it hasn’t exactly won plaudits from congressional progressives, who are pressing their own plan to force a more definitive exit, and sooner, by making more aggressive use of the power of the purse to force a withdrawal by the end of 2007—even though most of them are likely to hold their noses and vote for Pelosi’s watered-down plan, too.

On March 5, the International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mine and General Workers’ Unions (ICEM), the global union federation for oil workers, issued a call for “strong condemnation” by supporters of workers’ rights of US-led military raids on union offices in Baghdad on February 23 and 25. During the raids, targeting the General Federation of Iraqi Workers (GFIW), a member of the union’s security staff was arrested and office equipment was destroyed. On February 19, the Iraq Syndicate of Journalists was raided and computers and membership records were confiscated.

The ICEM statement says that it “is calling on trade unions worldwide to directly protest this unprovoked attack on a trade union federation that stands for nation building and bettering the living conditions inside Iraq.” The federation calls on “trade unions and others to write to Iraqi embassies in their home countries, as well as to send messages of solidarity to GFIW leaders that their efforts to build strong trade unions in Iraq will succeed and with it, fair and just reconstruction for all Iraqi people.”

Trade unions are asked to register a protest with the Iraqi embassy or consulate in their country by visiting . They are also strongly urged to write to GFIW leaders in Baghdad to tell them they protest these forceful and menacing acts…

“These attacks are a clear violation of fundamental human and trade union rights,” wrote ICEM general secretary Manfred Warda in a letter to Iraq’s prime minister, Nouri al Maliki. “They are also a cynical attempt to not only harass the trade union movement of your country, but to limit their ability to communicate with both their members and their international contacts.

“This is appalling, particularly at the present time. Genuine and democratic trade unions are a cornerstone of democracy and at the same time are a force for reconciliation, peace and stability in a society.”

The Iraqi Government has arrested a woman who alleged last month that she was raped by three Iraqi policemen, claims that provoked a spate of sectarian killing, two Iraqi officials told The Times.

Sabrine Janabi’s rape case has polarised Iraq’s Sunni and Shia communities at a moment when the country is already enmeshed in a low-level civil war. Shia officials have accused her of being a proxy for Sunni militants who want to sabotage a security plan for Baghdad, while Sunni politicians have pointed to her story as proof of the sectarian nature of Shia Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s Government.

Janabi shocked Iraq last month when she appeared on Al-Jazeera television and accused three policemen of detaining her and then raping her in their garrison.

Her story earned a fiery rebuttal from the Shia Prime Minister, who praised the policemen and promised to promote them. His office released a medical report allegedly taken from a US military combat hospital that said the woman had been beaten but showed no signs of sexual penetration.

Rape is a taboo subject in Arab culture and the news of Janabi’s rape sparked anger in the Sunni community.

In turn, the Government accused Janabi of being paid by insurgents to make her claims. An arrest warrant was issued and Janabi then vanished from the scene.

Sunni extremist groups vowed revenge and 14 policemen were executed by the Al-Qaeda linked Islamic State of Iraq in early March.

Since then, Iraqi officials have debated how to handle the Janabi case, which could still fuel even greater violence. However, two Iraqi officials told The Times Monday that Janabi was arrested a few days after the scandal broke and had filmed her confession.

Although initial reports described Janabi as a 20-year-old Sunni Turkman, the officials said that she was actually a Shia woman, who worked as a prostitute and had been paid by the Islamic Party, the largest Sunni faction in parliament, to come forward with the charges. Janabi was a pseudonym she invented for her job.

“She is in Iraqi custody. She was arrested a few days after you heard about her. She lied,” one of the officials told The Times.

“She was interrogated by a doctor and expert in rape cases.” The Government had initially planned to release her videotaped confession this week, but delayed it, the official said.

Another official said that the Government was worried about the impact the video would have on Sunni-Shia relations in Iraq. Sunnis are still seething about the video of Saddam Hussein’s hanging in December that was leaked on the internet.

Before her arrest, Janabi had already been detained briefly by police for living in a displaced person’s house, where she was suspected of working in a medical clinic for insurgents, the official said. She will most likely be prosecuted on these charges, he said.

Salim Abdullah, a spokesman for the Islamic Party, told The Times that the Government was trying to cover up Janabi’s rape. “An arrest warrant was issued against Sabrine al-Janabi so as to prevent her from talking anymore to the media,” Abdullah said.

“From the beginning we figured out her arrest would be aimed at seizing her confessions from the public as well as to fabricate a lie.” He denied the Islamic Party had any role in the case.

The Iraqi Government has raided the homes of eight Sunni MPs in the last week, Salim Abdullah told The Times.

WASHINGTON (March 13) – Senior aides to the chairman of the military Joint Chiefs of Staff said Tuesday that Marine Gen. Peter Pace won’t apologize for calling homosexuality immoral — an opinion that gay advocacy groups deplored.

In a newspaper interview Monday, Pace had likened homosexual acts to adultery and said the military should not condone it by allowing gays to serve openly in the armed forces.

“General Pace’s comments are outrageous, insensitive and disrespectful to the 65,000 lesbian and gay troops now serving in our armed forces,” the advocacy group Servicemembers Legal Defense Network said in a statement on its Web site.

The group has represented some of the thousands dismissed from the military for their sexual orientation.

This past Christmas, family members of 26 political prisoners taken during brutal repression of militant farmers in San Salvador Atenco just outside Mexico City last spring, came up with an ingenious strategy to visit their loved ones in the Santiaguito prison where they have been held practically incommunicado for months. Taken advantage of a Mexico state prison custom that allows outsiders in to entertain the inmates during the holiday season by performing “pastorelas” or Christmas passion plays, the relatives of the prisoners presented themselves at the prison gates dressed as shepherds and wise men, the Virgin Mary, and the Devil himself–a typical pastorela story line involves the Devil trying to divert the Three Wise Men from bringing gifts to the Baby Jesus.

But the authorities at Santiaguito were ready for the relatives of the prisoners. The shepherds and the wise men and the devils were strip-searched. Wooden machetes, a symbol of the farmers’ struggle, which were to be used as props in an updated version of the pastorela, were confiscated. The Virgin Mary was forced to do “sentadillas”, squats so that jailhouse matrons could examine her body cavities for smuggled subversive materials.

At length the troupe was passed in and allowed to perform their pastorela for the inmates of Santiaguito, ending the show with a rousing chant of “Presos Politicos Libertad!” (Liberty for Political Prisoners!), a cry that is being heard all over Mexico these days.

The criminalization of social protest is filling the nation’s jails and prisons with political prisoners. 214 protestors were arrested in the crackdown at Atenco last May 3rd and 4th–all but 26 have been allowed to bail out but still face charges that could lock them up for years. Two young men were killed during the police actions, which involved thousands of state and federal police and appeared to be in retaliation for the farmers’ successful battle to fend off expropriation of their lands for the construction of a new multi-billion dollar international airport in 2002.

Another 140 citizens were beaten, gassed, and arrested in Oaxaca on November 25th by the Federal Preventative Police to break up the seven month-long occupation of the city’s old colonial center by the Oaxaca Popular Peoples’ Assembly (APPO) and striking teachers who have been demanding the removal of a tyrannical governor. 19 activists have been executed by Governor Ulises Ruiz’s death squads and 60 remain disappeared–human rights workers suspect that some are being held in secret state, federal, and military lock-ups.

Many of the prisoners taken November 25th just five days before the chaotic inauguration of Felipe Calderon whose election last July 2nd is questioned by many Mexicans, were hardly political. One mother was trapped outside a downtown pharmacy after she had bought medicine for a sick child, beaten, cuffed, and flown a thousand miles north to a Nayarit state prison–then Secretary of Public Security and now Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora decreed that prisoners deemed to have “a dangerous profile” should be held out of state. A similar fate awaited a Oaxaca architect who had gone downtown to Xerox blueprints. A dozen juveniles were seized and jailed in adult prisons.

As at Atenco where police are accused of sexually abusing 23 women who were being transported to Santiaguito (seven claim they were raped), federal police sexually abused and taunted men and women captured November 25th–in testimony to the International Civil Observation Commission on Human Rights, a European NGO that spent a month investigating abuses in Oaxaca and interviewed over 400 witnesses to the repression, the mother of one young protestor testified that her son was sodomized by the cops. The Calderon government has refused to accept the findings of the Commission, which it insists has no bonafides.

Of the more than 200 prisoners taken in Oaxaca since May, 62 remain imprisoned. Dozens of activists and teachers were already locked up in Oaxaca jails prior to the mass arrests.

Among the most prominent political prisoners seized in the right-wing Calderon government’s rush to make social protest into a crime, is Ignacio Del Valle, the leader of the Popular Front to Defend the Land (FPDT) which spearheaded the “macheteros” movement of Atenco. Although he was arrested on the first day of the May confrontations, “Nacho” Del Valle is charged with an April “kidnapping”–during a meeting with state school officials who had threatened to walk out, Del Valle locked the door. The charge mandates imprisonment at a maximum-security prison and the Machetero leader is now housed at El Altiplano (formerly La Palma and Almaloya) where many of the nation’s toughest narco lords and organized crime figures are locked down.

Also jailed at El Altiplano is Flavio Sosa whom Calderon fingered for being the ringleader of the APPO protests, and who is charged with sedition, riot, and a variety of crimes allegedly committed during demonstrations at which Sosa was not even present. Sosa, who is being held with two brothers whose only apparent crime is to be named Sosa, is a former Oaxaca leader of the right-wing president’s leftist nemesis, the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) whose candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador probably beat Calderon in last July 2nd’s fraud-smeared elections. Sosa who was captured leaving a negotiating session with the new government in early December is considered Calderon’s first political prisoner.

When one thinks of militant political action taking place in the United States, their thoughts usually turn to cities like San Francisco, Chicago and New York. The US South and its Pacific Northwest probably don’t spring immediately to mind. This is despite the rich legacy of militant labor protest in the filed, woods and apple orchards of the northwest and the Seattle General Strike of 1919, not to mention the actions of the Seattle Chapter of the Black Panther Party and the Seattle Liberation Front in the 1960s and early 1970s. As for the US South, one tends to think in terms of militant right wing political action against blacks and labor, but the converse of that is equally true. It was in the South where Martin Luther King, Jr. began his campaign of militant non-violence. It was in the US South where students began the sit-in campaigns to desegregate public facilities and it was in the US South where Robert Williams confronted the night riders of the Ku Klux Klan with and armed force of African-Americans when confronted with the violent racism of the klansmen in white and in blue.

Equally under the radar in terms of militance is the US Midwest. Once again, this misconception is based on an ignorance of history. It was in Madison, Wisconsin where some of the most radical and militant protests against the war in Vietnam took place. The history of the first Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) tells us that the greatest proponents of the direct action form of protest came out of the midwestern colleges: Ann Arbor, MI., Kent, Ohio, Grinell in Iowa, to name a few. Why was this the case? Perhaps because of an anger at discovering that America wasn’t all she was cracked up to be. Perhaps a reflection of a working person’s understanding that action got things done, not words. Or perhaps a combination of these and other factors.

The Northwest Shows the Way

On March 5th, 2007, several people were attacked and at least three arrested by police in Tacoma, WA. at a series of protests against shipments of military supplies at the city’s port. The reasons for the attacks and arrests were not clear to onlookers, who told the press that the protesters were doing nothing but holding signs. In an exchange I had with Jeff Berryhill of Olympia, WA. (who was arrested along with Wally Cudderford and Caitlin Esworthy) I was told that all he was doing when he was shot with a rubber bullet by the police was “holding a sign that read “Courage to Resist. org.'” (Courage to Resist is an organization supporting military resisters.) The next thing he knew he was hit in the thigh by a police-fired projectile. All of this occurred in the predawn hours of March 5th, 2007. The reason for the unusual timing of the arrests is because even though the protest began the evening before, the actual loading of the equipment did not begin until after midnight. Protests continued each evening throughout the week, although no more arrests were made until Friday, March 9th when a woman was taken in by police for carrying a backpack into an unauthorized zone. The Friday protests were some of the largest of the week and were met with tear gas, concussion grenades and other forms of police violence. Among the protesters was Attorney Lynne Stewart, who is out on bail following her questionable conviction on “providing support to terrorists” charges.

If one recalls, there was a similar protest last May at the Port of Olympia, some thirty miles south of Tacoma. Those protests resulted in the arrests of a couple dozen folks and a few injuries. in addition, they appear to have caused the military to relocate its shiploading operations to Tacoma. in fact, the trial of these folks, known as the Olympia 22, begins on March 26th. The judge in the trial has disallowed the necessity defense and, like the military judge in the first trial of war resister Lt, Watada, does not want the trial to be about the war. Although military officials are reluctant to give a clear answer as to why there have been no more shipments loaded at the Olympia port since the May protests, the fact that they are now taking place at Tacoma speaks volumes.

To the credit of all of the antiwar groups in the northwest–from the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation to the sponsors of the direct actions at the Port, the Port Militarization Resistance (PMR)–the solidarity shown for these protests has been constant and clear. The Tacoma action had the backing of Vets for Peace, the Olympia Movement for Justice and Peace, the Washington Greens, Iraq Veterans Against the War, and others. This solidarity is important, especially in the face of attempts by the State and the media to delineate what is good protest and what is bad protest. Indeed, the Tacoma News tribune reported on the actions of the protesters arrested and shot by quoting the police officer in charge of policing the event: demonstrators “have been told they could protest but they have to follow the rules, including, among others, that they can’t block streets, sidewalks or cross a police line.” This was followed by a quote from a military official telling reporters that he only wanted to see the weapons of this brutal war be loaded on in “as safe a manner as possible.”

When I asked Berryhill for the PMR’s rationale behind the direct actions at the ports, he told me, “I believe the strategy we are employing, which is concentrated on ending our communities involvement with the escalation and continuation of the war is one of many that should be utilized. Obviously other methods are valuable and should be continued, but ours is a direct demonstration to the troops that we want to keep them home safely. Traditional avenues have been used repeatedly (like lobbying, letter writing, and standard marches) with varying degrees of effectiveness. We are hoping to try something a bit unconventional, and in doing so have generated significant publicity and prompted serious interest within peace and justice communities.” Asked about the intended effect of the protests on soldiers on the other side of the lines from the protesters, Berryhill responded: “It is also important for the soldiers to witness police repression of democratic assembly. Many joined to uphold the standards and ideals of democracy and liberty and when these are denied to citizens of our country it illustrates the disconnect between the rhetoric of the political elite and the realities we face.”

Many communities across the nation, large and small, are connected to the effort by Washington to militarily subjugate the people of Iraq and Afghanistan. It may be that there’s a military post or base near the town you live in, or it may be that there is a weapons manufacturer in town. Perhaps your town hosts a company involved in the rendition and torture of prisoners under US control. The fact is that there is hardly a town in this country that the military-industrial complex has not stretched one of its bloody tendrils into. This economic reality not only means we all share some culpability for the destruction and bloodshed carried out in Iraq and Afghanistan; it also means that every one of us has the ability to expose that connection wherever we live and from there, hopefully oppose it.