The Rag Blog

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.

There’s a new sheriff in town–and it’s neither the U.S. nor a U.S.-sponsored surrogate “invited” by the U.S. It’s another of those pesky international conventions the administration loves to hate and refuses to join–but still cannot stop from taking effect. Fifteen years in the making, the pact outlaws state terrorism of a type frequently practiced by the United States: “extraordinary rendition.”

On this topic, February was a month of unwelcome revelations (from the administration’s perspective) and long overdue (from the people’s perspective) media attention on the policies and programs the White House created and justified for incarcerating “known” or suspected terrorists in the extensive acknowledged and unacknowledged Defense Department and CIA prison systems created nearly 5 years ago.

This is an interesting juxtaposition of dates. Work on the treaty started some nine years before 9/11. This suggests at least two possibilities: the French (the chief UN Security Council sponsor of the treaty) were prescient about the flow of events to come, or they were aware that some governments (e.g., the United States), unknown to their people, were systematically and on a large scale violating (or at least were preparing to violate) fundamental human rights of individuals alleged to pose a dire threat to a country’s “national security.”

We may never know just how extensive these prison systems were prior to 9/11 anymore than after that date. Some numbers but few exact locations have come to light because of the abuses perpetrated in Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, the CIA’s 14 (or more) “black sites” in Europe and other locations abroad. There are also a few U.S. legal residents and even citizens that have been incarcerated for aiding and abetting or providing “material support” for terror activities. Nonetheless, enough is known to suggest that the Bush administration has gravely over-reached itself in its claims that it is only exercising the inherent “right of self-defense” which absolves it of all counterclaims that its actions constitute international crimes. What does the record of the last few months show?

Exposing Overreach Abroad

The 2007 record chronologically opens on January 31 when German prosecutors issued warrants for 13 CIA agents suspected of engineering the “extraordinary rendition” of Khaled al-Masri, a German citizen of Lebanese heritage, who was “disappeared” at the Serbian-Macedonian border in December 2003. Khaled says he was flown to a CIA prison in Afghanistan where he says–as do many others who were caught up in the CIA’s global “black prison” complex–that he suffered abusive treatment for a number of months before being turned over to Lebanese security personnel.

As February opened, in Brussels, the European Parliament approved the findings of an internal European Union investigation ordered by the Council of Europe into the complicity of European nations in the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” program in violation of EU policy–citing Britain, Germany, and Italy in particular but also noting that others knew of but ignored CIA flights carrying drugged and kidnapped victims such as al-Masri through their national airspace.

While these two threads evolved, Italian courts were proceeding with preliminary enquiries in a criminal complaint against 26 CIA agents (in absentia) and five Italian security agents (present in court) accused of kidnapping and transporting from Milan to Cairo the Egyptian cleric and U.S. terror “suspect” Osama Mustafa Hassan Nasr (also known as Abu Omar). Nasr, who entered Italy seeking asylum, claims in an eleven-page letter that he was tortured repeatedly by Egyptian security personnel.

By February’s midpoint, the Swiss government (the Federal Council) had given a green light to the country’s courts to begin criminal prosecution of anyone involved in transporting Nasr through Swiss air space. (Allegedly, the CIA flew Nasr from Aviano Airbase in Italy to Ramstein Airbase in Germany and thence to Egypt.)

Three weeks later, on March 6, Representative Ed Markey (MA) introduced “reciprocal” legislation intended to halt arbitrary kidnappings by the CIA. Entitled the “Torture Outsourcing Prevention Act,” the legislation (H.R. 1352) “prohibits the return or other transfer of persons by the United States, for the purpose of detention, interrogation, trial, or otherwise, to countries where torture or other inhuman treatment of prisons occurs.”

Ed. Note: For background on this story go to:
http://www.axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/article_23968.shtml

and

http://www.axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/article_24008.shtml

The top news stories out of Iraq March 5 and 6 showed that the occupation continues to make Iraq a deadly place for Iraqis and for the U.S. occupation forces. Nine GIs were killed, six north of Baghdad by a roadside explosion. And dozens of Iraqis were blown up or burned in explosions or killed by U.S. fire.

Up to two million Iraqis have fled the country, unable to bear the insecurity that the U.S. occupation has imposed on many areas of Iraq since the March 20, 2003 invasion, killing and maiming hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. U.S. imperialism is a conquering power that has brought repression and humiliation to Iraqis without constructing a viable economy or a stable society.

A key event that has captured the attention and activities of the worldwide solidarity movement with Iraq is the attempt of the Iraqi government to schedule the execution of three women for their alleged participation in the resistance movement.

The women are 31-year-old Wassan Talib, charged with the killing of five police officers in an attack on the police; 25-year-old Zainab Fadhil, charged for an attack on a joint patrol of the Iraqi and U.S. armies in Baghdad; and 26-year-old Liqa Muhammad, charged with the killing of an official in the Green Zone in the course of a kidnapping.

All are in Baghdad’s Al-Kadhimiya Prison. Two are caring for their small children, who are with them in prison. The 1-year-old daughter of Liqa Muhammad was born in prison. All the women deny the charges for which they face death by hanging.

Fearing a quick execution on March 3, leading activists in the BRussell’s Tribunal in Belgium, from the Turkish anti-war movement, from the British anti-war movement, from the International Action Center in the U.S. and many others around the world, joined to wage a petition campaign to protest and stop the impending executions. (brusselstribunal.org)

As a result of the campaign, high officials in Turkey, Britain and the European Union protested to the Baghdad regime.

According to a March 2 statement signed by Hana Al Bayaty, Ian Douglas, Abdul Ilah Albayaty, Iman Saadoon, Dirk Adriaensens and Ayse Berktay, the U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has stated that “the three Iraqi women will not be executed until an appeals court has ruled on their cases.”

The statement continues: “This assurance came from Iraqi authorities. It is not enough. We demand to know the charges on which these three Iraqi women stand convicted. We demand to know the date of their appeal hearings. We demand that a public statement is made. We demand that they be afforded all due protections under international human rights and humanitarian law.”

And it makes what is the most powerful point: “If charged with resisting foreign occupation and aggression, we declare this charge illegal.”

The Bush administration has perfected the art of fall-guy selection. The more convoluted the plot, the more credible the fall guy must be. As Lewis “Scooter” Libby was the fall guy in Washington, Premier Nuri al-Maliki will be the fall guy in Baghdad.

The Baghdad conference on Saturday was a derivative talk-fest setting up three committees to prepare the way for another meeting at the foreign-minister level next month in Istanbul. The subtext, though never explicit, is more glaring: it is the absolute

US impotence to guarantee security or stability in Iraq, and the desperate search for a way out, now pitting the “axis of fear” (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates) against the “axis of evil” (Iran and Syria).

The spiraling equation in Iraq is stark. The more that a lone Sunni Arab mujahid with a rocket-propelled grenade launcher can take down a US$25 million Apache helicopter, the more Pentagon counterinsurgency tactics will include “surgical strikes” with minimal “collateral damage” on occupied civilians.

The more President George W Bush displays brute force in the non-stop surge, and the more Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mehdi Army lies low, even in a monster slum like Sadr City (whose “street” name is Madinat al-Thawra, “City of the Revolution”), and the more Sunni guerrillas wreak havoc over unprotected Shi’ites (114 dead and more than 150 wounded pilgrims to Karbala last Tuesday; 31 pilgrims coming back from Karbala on Sunday – the day after the Baghdad conference).

The everyday safety of scores of Shi’ites used to be guaranteed by the Mehdi Army. The Jaish al-Mehdi’s main tasks are socio-economic, with a heavy focus on education and charity, but they also involve security, most of all in impoverished Baghdad. The Mehdi Army was already splintered into at least three factions. But now, as a consequence of the surge, neighborhood associations as well as commanders not totally faithful to Muqtada have decided not to lie low anymore – and in effect to reorganize Shi’ite civilian defense.

If a US Army base, rather a Fort Apache, is set up in the “City of the Revolution” – as is taken for granted in Baghdad – it won’t fall in the short term. But it will fall eventually – when the Mehdi Army totally unmelts from the civilian population. For the moment, the US Cavalry is bombing their houses (in Karbala) or raiding them (in Najaf) just to find nothing.

Munthir al-Kewther, born in Najaf, holding a PhD in Islamic philosophy from Kufa University and currently dean of a Dutch journalism faculty, has been adamant in denouncing a systematic US assassination spree targeting key Mehdi Army and Sadrist leaders. The best example, according to Dr Kewther, “was the assassination last December of Sahib al-Ameri in front of his wife and children in his house in Najaf. Al-Ameri was the secretary general of the Shahidollah Institute, a charitable organization that helps poor and displaced people. He had no connections whatsoever to the Mehdi Army” (see The Sadr movement ‘will eventually triumph’, Asia Times Online, March 7).

This fits in a much bigger picture – the apocalyptic devastation of a whole country directly or indirectly engineered by the Bush administration. No fewer than 4 million Iraqis have been killed directly or indirectly, or been forced into exile.

“Sunnis vs. Shi’ites, Why they Hate each other. What’s really driving the civil war that’s tearing the Middle East apart.”

So proclaims the cover of the March 5th, 2007, issue of Time magazine, U.S and Pacific editions. Presumably, they know better than to put it on the cover of the European edition.

It reminds me of the “Iraq at war with itself” cover of The Economist, May 2006, which featured the face of a bawling Iraqi man. I commented on it here.

Then it was the face of grief. Now it’s the face of hate.

In both cases, Iraqis are portrayed as unfortunately emotional before the typical reader of Time, whose “person of 2006”, let us recall, was You, the face of which is rationality itself, a computer.

Note the shades of “Why do they hate us?” which followed the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.

There is now a rat’s nest of attacks and retaliation, causes and effects. But let’s start with the event which seems to have transformed a united Iraqi resistance to the occupation into a civil war, the bombing of the al-Askari mosque, a little over a year ago.

My own thoughts on this at the time are in The al-Askari mosque: who were those masked gunmen?

Is it true that the mood on the street following the destruction of the dome was anti-Sunni? Not according to Sami Ramadani, writing in The Guardian: The word on the street was (and is) that this was the work of the U.S. and its allies—U.S. and Israeli flags were burned in protest—not Sunni extremists. The mood was anti-occupation, not sectarian.

So who were those masked gunmen who took around 12 hours to plant the explosives under that dome, in the then U.S. controlled Samarra?

It’s a question many Iraqis are asking even now. It underlies Akram Abdulrazzaq’s Iraq’s Car Bombers—Who are They? Why is it that of the thousands of car bombs, not a single owner of these cars has been identified?

He goes on:

Before Baghdad fell to U.S. troops, the country had a sophisticated car registration system, and the authorities were able to identify the owner of any wrecked vehicle in a matter of minutes.

So why not now?

Don’t these cars have registrations and serial numbers? We have yet to hear of the authorities identifying the owner of a single vehicle used in a car bombing or even where it came from.

Iraqis, he argues, are not persuaded by the authorities’ “naive excuses”.

They need the Americans and the Iraqi authorities they support to tell them where in the world all these car bombs are coming from. How is it that they manage to sneak through so many American and Iraqi checkpoints and road blocks, especially in Baghdad?

With more than 80,000 American troops now in Baghdad, and every modern means of technology available to them, how indeed.

Amin al-Hashmee, in Hiding Iraq’s Death Squads is No Game, asks:

How can one ignore the fact that with all of their capabilities, the occupiers and the government failed to prevent a vehicle carrying hundreds of kilos of explosives from freely crossing the border, traveling the streets and passing through check point after check point? On top of that, the authorities have been unable to identify even a single car bomb or person who prepares them; and they have failed to inhibit their passage through government checkpoints on their way to park amid shops and innocent people.

Wouldn’t you think that the “security services” would make a special effort at the February 12 ceremony at the Shorja market to mark the one year anniversary of the bombing of the al-Askari mosque? Two car bombs. At least 80 people killed. [Link]

Hitting out at lawmakers who profess to back the troops but oppose Bush’s plans in Iraq, Cheney said proof of their commitment would come as they consider legislation to provide nearly $100 billion for the rest of this year’s costs of the wars.

The House plans to begin considering a bill this week that would fully finance the administration’s request. Senate action is expected to come later.

“When members of Congress pursue an anti-war strategy that’s been called ‘slow bleeding,’ they are not supporting the troops, they are undermining them,” Cheney said in a speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.