The Rag Blog

During a White House meeting last week, a group of governors asked President Bush and Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, about their backup plan for Iraq. What would the administration do if its new strategy didn’t work?

The conclusion they took away, the governors later said, was that there is no Plan B. “I’m a Marine,” Pace told them, “and Marines don’t talk about failure. They talk about victory.”

Pace had a simple way of summarizing the administration’s position, Gov. Phil Bredesen (D-Tenn.) recalled. “Plan B was to make Plan A work.”

In the weeks since Bush announced the new plan for Iraq — including an increase of 21,500 U.S. combat troops, additional reconstruction assistance and stepped-up pressure on the Iraqi government — senior officials have rebuffed questions about other options in the event of failure. Eager to appear resolute and reluctant to provide fodder for skeptics, they have responded with a mix of optimism and evasion.

03/02/07 “ICH” — — “The Star-Spangled Banner” painted the United States in 1814 as “The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.” These words, though still mumbled by apathetic consumers at sporting events, amount to a cruel satire of the American people in 2007.

The 4th sentence of the Declaration of Independence reads “…That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends (ie, Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness) it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government…” It would be hard to find a more apt description of the US government in 2007, or a more appropriate remedy for this oppressive regime, increasingly loathed and feared by the citizenry.

We have a Constitution which defines a separation of powers. It also defines procedures for impeaching officials who violate its bedrock principles — in particular, its Bill of Rights, its separation of powers, and its foundational notion that power derives from the consent of the governed. We make elected officials swear an oath to “protect and defend” this Constitution. Why bother with all this, if, when the day of tyranny finally arrives, the Constitution’s own provisions are not used to defend the document’s principles against the would-be tyrants who have so egregiously violated them?

In November, US voters told Washington that the public does not support the war; sees with increasing clarity that it is immoral and was launched on false pretexts; and wants it terminated. In response, Vice-Emperor Cheney snarled in a TV interview with an obsequious Bush toady that regardless of what the public or Congress might say about it, the White House intends not only to continue the war, but to escalate it.

Let’s examine this extraordinary position. Here is a top official of a “democracy” — in a war marketed as an effort to “spread democracy” — stating publicly & with imperial scorn that he and his co-conspirators have the right to order the US war machine to bombard and occupy any nation they wish to target, even if their war is launched under demonstrably false pretexts. They claim the right to compel the public to furnish lives and bodies to be killed and maimed in the war, and to bear the moral and financial burdens of the war, in an action which not incidentally lets administration allies in the “defense” and oil industries profit handsomely from the ensuing mayhem. Needless to say, from Cheney’s viewpoint, it’s also of no moment that the war violates the Nuremberg Principles and UN Charter forbidding aggressive war, and that the conduct of the war violates international accords to which the US is a signatory.

BAGHDAD, 5 March (IRIN) – Apart from dodging bombs and bullets in their schools and neighbourhoods, children in Iraq are suffering from worryingly high levels of malnourishment, according to specialists.

Poverty and insecurity are said to be the main causes of the children’s deteriorating diets. Despite efforts by NGOs and the Iraqi government, violence and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people are making it very difficult for monthly food rations to reach those families that need them most.

“We are displaced and have to change our place [because of spreading sectarian violence] every month, making it difficult for us to get our food rations. As a result, our children are constantly ill and are malnourished because we don’t have enough money to afford good food,” said Samira Abdel-Kareem, a mother-of-three who was forced to flee her Yarmouk neighbourhood of Baghdad to the outskirts of the city.

“I lost a child three months ago because of malnutrition. He was only two years old. I don’t want to lose my other three children and hope someone can help us overcome this problem,” she added.

According to the United Nations Children’s Agency (UNICEF), about one in 10 children under five in Iraq are underweight and one in five are short for their age. This means that some 4.5 million children in the country are under-nourished.

CARACAS, Venezuela (March 4) – President Hugo Chavez on Sunday said he believes enemies including the CIA are out to kill him, and called U.S. diplomat John Negroponte a “professional killer.”

Chavez said Venezuelan officials have intelligence that associates of jailed Cuban anti-communist militant Luis Posada Carriles also are involved in plotting to assassinate him.

He said the death plot idea has “gained weight” due to various factors, including the recent appointment of Negroponte, the former director of national intelligence, as deputy to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice .

I was folding fliers for a high school workshop on nonviolence when my husband, a mortar platoon sergeant with the Army National Guard 81st Brigade, walked into my office and said, “I got the call.”

We hadn’t talked about the possibility of him being deployed for months, not since President Bush had declared, “Mission accomplished.” But I knew exactly what he meant; I didn’t know then what it would mean for us.

We weren’t prepared, and neither was the Guard. The Guard sent him into harm’s way without providing some of the basic equipment and materials, such as global positioning systems, night vision gear, and insect repellant, that he would rely on during his year-long tour of duty at LSA Anaconda, the most-attacked base in Iraq, as determined by the sheer number of incoming rockets and mortars, which averaged at least five per day.

Unlike active duty military, the National Guard had no functional family support system or services in place. While the Guard was scrambling to get it together, my husband was already gone, and I was alone, just months after we had moved to Seattle. It is the soldiers, their families, and the people of Iraq that pay the human costs. The tab so far: more than 3,000 dead U.S. troops, tens of thousands of wounded, over half a million Iraqi casualties, roughly 250,000 American servicemen and women struggling with PTSD, and almost 60,000 military marriages that have been broken by this war.

Twenty-four hours after Lorin boarded the plane for Iraq, I hung a blue star service flag–denoting an immediate family member in combat–in the front window. Then I closed the blinds, hoping to keep the harbingers of death at bay. They still got in, through the phone, the Internet, the newspaper, and the TV.

Each week, I heard of a friend’s husband or son: wounded, maimed, shot, hit, hurt, burned, amputated, decapitated, detonated, dead. A glossary of pain. I checked icasualties.org all the time, cursing and crying as the numbers rose relentlessly, praying that Lorin wouldn’t be next.

On January 11, 2007, the Pentagon discarded the time limit that prevented Guard members and Reservists from serving more than twenty-four total months on active duty for either the Iraq or Afghan wars. The Pentagon’s announcement came in the wake of President Bush’s decision to deploy an additional 21,500 troops to Iraq.

The escalation contradicts the advice of top U.S. military officials. Although the majority of Americans are opposed to the “surge,” most members of Congress are reluctant to block the supplemental appropriations request that will fund it, claiming that they don’t want to abandon the troops. Congress has abandoned the troops for nearly four years.

It is the soldiers, their families, and the people of Iraq that pay the human costs. The tab so far: more than 3,000 dead U.S. troops, tens of thousands of wounded, over half a million Iraqi casualties, roughly 250,000 American servicemen and women struggling with PTSD, and almost 60,000 military marriages that have been broken by this war.

Including mine.

It was hard to reconnect after more than a year apart, and the open wound of untreated PTSD made it virtually impossible. Lorin is still the best evidence I have of God’s grace in this world, but we just couldn’t find our way back together after the war came home.

“TOWNS PUT DREAMS IN PRISONS”

Sometimes it’s the silences that speak the loudest. Consider, for example, a page-one article that appeared in the New York Times in the summer of 2001 under the title “Rural Towns Turn to Prisons to Re-ignite Their Economies.” According to this piece, non-metropolitan America was relying like never before on prison construction for jobs and economic development. Formerly, Times reporter Peter Kilborn noted, rural communities had depended for employment and economic development on agriculture, manufacturing, and/or mining. Now, however, they were counting on mass incarceration to deliver the goods. Reporting that “245 prisons sprouted in 212 of the nation’s 2,290 rural counties” during the 1990s, Kilborn quoted the cheerful city manager of Sayre, Oklahoma, which had just opened a prized new maximum-security lockdown. “There’s no more recession-proof form of economic development,” this local official told Kilborn, than incarceration because “nothing’s going to stop crime.”

By Kilborn’s account, “prisons have been helping to revive large stretches of rural America. More than a Wal-Mart or a meatpacking plant, state, federal, and private prisons, typically housing 1,000 inmates and providing 300 jobs, can put a town on solid economic footing.” Thanks to money brought in through taxes on prisoners’ telephone calls, sales taxes paid by prisoners and prison staff, and to water, sewer, and landfill fees, Killborn added, Sayre’s city budget increased from $755,000 in 1996 to $1,250,000 in 2001, permitting the town to set aside 15 percent of its revenues for capital improvements. No such savings or investment were possible before the prison, when Sayre “was surviving largely on federal crop support payments to its dwindling farm population” in the wake of the collapse of the state’s oil and gas industry(1).

But each article also made three critical omissions for those who wish to understand the meaning and impact of the rise of a giant rural American prison industrial complex fed by primarily urban, human “raw material.” The first thing missing was any appropriate sense of horror at a society in which local officials sell the nightmare of mass human confinement as a ticket to the American Dream. As Huling observes, “hundreds of small rural towns and several whole regions have become dependent on an industry that itself is dependent on the continuation of crime-producing conditions” [emphasis added] in other parts of the nation (6).

For the past thirty years, the United States has been on an imprisonment binge unprecedented in world history. In 1980, the total number of people incarcerated in the U.S. was 500,000. Today the number stands at 2.2 million, with a further 4.8 million on probation or parole. The total U.S. prison budget increased from $9 billion in 1980 to $61 billion by 2003.

While the U.S. has less than 5 percent of the world’s population, it now has 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. In other words, the country that often proclaims itself the freest in the world, imprisons its population at a rate over six times higher than the rest of the planet. The U.S. incarceration rate stands at 737 per 100,000, over five times higher than Great Britain and over twelve times higher than Norway. The statistics for minority populations are even more shocking. For Latinos, the imprisonment rate is twice the national average. For Blacks it is four times the national average, with over one million African-American men in prison or jail. In 2002, 10.4 percent of all Black males between the ages of 25 and 29 were imprisoned, and the numbers have not improved since then.

In a report presented to Congress last year, the bipartisan Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons concluded, “We should be astonished by the size of the prisoner population, troubled by the disproportionate incarceration of African-Americans and Latinos, and saddened by the waste of human potential.” The report found medical and mental health care in prisons to be grossly inadequate, and noted a “desperate need for the kind of productive activities that discourage violence and make rehabilitation possible.”

Another report, issued in February by the Public Safety Performance Project of The Pew Charitable Trusts, predicted that the prison population alone (not including jails, juvenile institutions, and other detention facilities) will rise by 13 percent, or another 192,000 people, over the next five years, at an increased cost of $27.5 billion. The report identified long mandatory minimum prison sentences, reduced use of parole, and harsh parole and probation rules, which often send people to prison for minor violations, as mainly responsible for the increase. “Every additional dollar spent on prisons,” it pointed out, “is one dollar less that can go for preparing for the next Hurricane Katrina, educating young people, providing health care to the elderly or repairing roads and bridges.”

Nowhere is the crisis worse than in California. In 1977, the state had fewer than 20,000 prisoners. Thirty years later the number stands at 173,000. In its first 130 years as a state, California built twelve prisons. Between 1980 and 2005 it added another twenty-one, at enormous cost. Today, California spends $35,000 a year for every prisoner, compared to $7,000 for K-12 students and only $4,500 in support for college and university students.

Many years ago, when my older cousin Bruce headed off to college on a basketball scholarship, I asked him where he was going to. “UCLA?, UNC?, Georgetown?”. “No, I’m going to Wilberforce, in Ohio,” he told me. “Wilberforce?”, I naively asked him. “Who was he?” Bruce smiled and said, “He’s the cat who ended slavery in England, look him up.” Indeed, Wilberforce is considered one of the Historically Black Colleges, and rightly so. The new film, “Amazing Grace”, recounts the life of William Wilberforce, abolitionist, statesman, and his lifelong friendship with then British Prime Minister William Pitt. This is a truly inspiring film and will leave anyone who watches it, moved by an incredibly important and compelling true story.

Amazing Grace the film, was directed by Michael Apted and chronicles the campaign against the slave trade in 19th century Britain, led by it’s most famous abolitionist William Wilberforce. Wilberforce was responsible for steering anti-slave trade legislation through the British parliament.

The US, NATO and the expanding EU: In a statement reflecting the growing distrust between Moscow and the West, a top Russian general warns that Poland and the Czech Republic risk being targeted by Russian missiles if they agree to host U.S. missile defense bases. The rest of Europe has illegal US nukes already.

THE EXPANDING EU WILL PRESENT A ‘MINI TREATY’

FPF – Europe – Febr. 21st – 2007 – Next month, March 25th in Berlin, the managers of the 26 US/NATO countries in the so called ‘European Union’ will not only celebrate the EU’s 50th anniversary. Shill and chancellor Angela Merkel who ‘runs’ Germany, will present the plan of further expanding the EU by a new ‘European treaty’ next June. We are not supposed to know this, but they will call and sell it to Europeans as a ”mini-treaty”. A plan which of course has been ready for ages, but is ‘adjusted’ so the populace is kept unaware and doesn’t protest. “And don’t ever use the expression Constitution again!” is the warning to all EU shills. To avoid losing another ‘referendum’ none will be held… Also the European people are denied a vote, and ‘democracy’ is now ‘facts fixed around the policy’.

The collaborating buffers between the people and the managers – also called and ‘sold’ as ‘governments’ or ‘civil servants’ – will use their lightning rod position to shove more fascism down the throat of the Europeans. And, like ‘constitution’, the word ‘referendum’ or ‘taxes’ will be avoided at all cost in the brainwashing propaganda. This, by the way, is one of the very few positive signs for humanity: the people pulling the tricks are afraid. As many in the Bush and ‘crazies’ administration in Washington are. The ‘front men’ and women are scared. They know they are corrupt and mortal, so it has to look ‘real’ on the surface. ‘Legal’ in an acceptable way. Because they understandably are afraid of people finding out and – wanting revenge – the stooges may find themselves ending up in a lantern pole á la Mussolini, or like Romanian dictator Ceaucescu and his wife: summarily heard and shot without further ado. [http://www.securitate.org/trial.htm]

SHEER MADNESS: GULAG AND/OR GUILLOTINE

The further expansion and placement of US/NATO bases, troops and arms in the turf war on EU territory – without any thought about the growing distrust and threats from all sides – is sheer madness, but just planned to go on. No wonder the Russian leadership gets nervous with the US/NATO’s EU-expansion crawling up its doorstep. Needless to say of course that 99% of the people who are forced to pay for this by taxes extorted from them, is absolutely not informed. Journalism in the EU too has for 90% turned into foul propaganda and has betrayed mankind by making the war crimes and fight for hegemony possible. Those cowards in the warmonger’s media don’t even ask nor debate anymore but keep stenographing the propaganda, spreading it and help others to a Gulag or guillotine. Without all those compliant traitors and assorted Quislings in the massmedia the war crimes would NEVER have been possible.

And every day now the US war machine, including NATO and a hundred thousand mercenaries, the EU and its blood money, the people are further lied to and misused for the cancerous growth of the US junta’s empire and interests. Leading in all of the by them invaded and usurped countries to more death, destruction, hatred and counter attacks which are called “terror by insurgents”. But the real terror is spread by the US junta and its ‘Coalition of the Killing’. The latest warning by Russian missile forces chief General Nikolai Solovtsov is one of the most bellicose comments this far. And the signs are getting worse: ten days ago Russian president Vladimir Putin send shock waves through the warmonger’s spines with his frank description of the US junta manager’s profit and power plans for a unipolar world. Concerning the warmongers wrecking the world today, meaning the US/NATO/EU war machine, president Putin said:

“However one might embellish this term, at the end of the day it refers to one type of situation, namely one centre of authority, one centre of force, one centre of decision-making. It is a world in which there is one master, one sovereign. And at the end of the day this is pernicious not only for all those within this system, but also for the sovereign itself because it destroys itself from within.”

Yesterday I went to the bank.

Wow! I thought. So many people!

Iraqis are not “bank oriented” people, if they have any excess; they tend to keep it at home.

Previous experiences have taught us not to trust banks; they have been known to hold on to your money when you need it in a jiffy!

But looking at the numbers inside that bank, I thought, “I have been out of touch; bad girl.”

I go in, only to find people pushing and shoving one another; fighting, shouting and cursing each other. “This is not normal,” I said to myself.

I try to reach the employee with whom I have business, but my efforts are to no avail. One human current pushes me this way and another pulls me that. A proper riot!

I began to have serious misgivings.

“What is this all about?” I asked a lady who was trying, in vain, to keep from being crushed between two men, to my right, “Have you got any idea?”

“Where do you come from? Don’t you know that the government is giving people relief? At last we are remembered!”

“Really!! That’s excellent!!” It was my good fortune to be at the bank this day! Although half suffocated, I felt elated at being “remembered”. “How much?”

“10 000 Dinars!” (Equivalent to $7.75, purchasing power: 50 eggs).

….. Numbness.. …..

Fighting ….. Rioting ….. Flayed nerves and hot tempers flying ….. for 10 000 Dinars.

Where do I come from?

How many thousands have been decommissioned?

How many thousands were in Saddam’s army, police and intelligence agencies?

Thousands of others – professionals – dismissed from their government jobs on pretext of debathhification?

Yet more thousands displaced; and more still terrorized into a futile stay-at-home existence??

Riots in the bank for ID 10 000, $ 7.75.

And for $100; what would they be prepared to do?

For $500?

For $1000??

How many will cross that line? It’s not easy to see your family starve for principles.

Mercenaries on Iranian payroll.

Mercenaries on American payroll.

Mercenaries on ANY payroll.

Cairo, March 4, (VOI) – On Sunday, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), António Guterres, urged the international community to shoulder its responsibilities towards Iraqi refugees and to help the countries that host them, particularly Jordan and Syria.

“The mass media showed great interest in developments in Iraq but no one showed interest in the ensuing tragedy: the largest displacement in the region since 1948,” Guterres said in his inaugural address of the 127th session of the Arab foreign ministers meeting in Cairo on Sunday.

Guterres pointed out, “millions of Iraqis decided to leave their homes to escape threats against their lives or to relocate to other areas inside the country.”

The UNHCR praised Jordan and Syria for having taken on the largest refugee burden. Syria hosts about one million Iraqis and Jordan 750,000, adding that these two countries have been left unassisted, which caused price hikes there as well as other problems.

“I totally understand the fears these two countries have about their own national security but after all the (Iraqi) refugees are victims of terrorism and can never be terrorists,” said Guterres.

The UNHCR chief also announced that an international conference on Iraqi refugees would be held in Geneva in April, and said he had discussed with Syria and Jordan “the preparation of this conference and the way to make it a success.”

Between 600,000 and one million Iraqi refugees are believed to have fled to Syria, and around 750,000 are estimated to be in neighboring Jordan.

Syria’s vice president has blamed Washington for the “humanitarian catastrophe” caused by the outflow of refugees from war-torn Iraq, and told Guterres the arrivals had “imposed heavy economic, social and security burdens.”

George W. Bush learned at least one lesson from his father: You want your federal prosecutors to be team players who will throw a political elbow or two when the White House needs some help.

When George H.W. Bush faced a tough reelection battle in 1992, his administration tried to destroy Bill Clinton by implicating him in criminal investigations. But those plans collapsed when federal law enforcement officials, including a U.S. Attorney in Arkansas, resisted what they saw as improper White House political pressure.

Now, the younger George Bush is moving to ensure that he won’t be sabotaged by similarly independent-minded prosecutors. The Washington Post reported that the White House approved the firing of seven U.S. attorneys at the end of 2006 after the Justice Department identified them as insufficiently supportive of the President’s policies.

The Justice Department got input on the firings from congressional Republicans, including Sen. Pete Domenici of New Mexico who criticized the performance of U.S. Attorney David Iglesias, the Post reported. [Washington Post, March 3, 2007]

Iglesias has alleged that two New Mexico legislators – whom he says he will identify only under oath – pressured him to speed up indictments of Democrats before Election 2006. At the time, the Republican congressional majority was in jeopardy, in part, because of a series of GOP corruption scandals.

Some of the fired prosecutors handled those Republican corruption cases or served in offices that could play significant political roles in Campaign 2008. For instance, ousted San Diego U.S. Attorney Carol Lam oversaw the prosecution of Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham, whose case had opened a window on Washington war profiteering.

President Bush also replaced the U.S. Attorney in Arkansas, which was a focal point of investigative activity during Campaign 1992 when George H.W. Bush’s reelection campaign was digging for dirt on Bill Clinton – and which could be mined again if Hillary Clinton becomes the Democratic presidential nominee.

In 1992, the elder George Bush found himself in an uphill battle against the upstart Arkansas governor who had impressed many Americans with his energetic plans for the future, especially when contrasted with Bush’s difficulty in articulating a clear rationale for a second term.

Ross C. “Rocky” Anderson, Mayor of Salt Lake City, has called for the impeachment of George W. Bush before the Washington State Senate Governmental Operations Committee.

“I am honored to address you today and am pleased that you, unlike so many members of Congress and most state legislatures, have recognized your solemn responsibility to examine whether proceedings should be commenced for the impeachment of the President of the United States,” the Mayor said.

“Never before has there been such a compelling case for impeachment and removal from office of the president of the United States for heinous human rights violations, breaches of trust, abuses of power injurious to the nation, war crimes, misleading Congress and the American people about threats to our nation’s security and the supposed case for war, and grave violations of treaties, the Constitution, and domestic statutory law,” Anderson proclaimed.

The mayor has attended anti-war, anti-Bush rallies in Salt Lake City, one in August 2006, another in August 2005, addressing the demonstrators that Bush and Cheney should be probed into and possibly impeached by the Congress.

His written testimony, which was read before the committee, indicted Bush for “mislead(ing) the congress and the American people” by implicating the nation in an unwanted war in Iraq, violating basic human rights by kidnapping, torturing and detaining people on suspicion of terror without bringing any charges in a legal way, and reneging on all his duties as a president to observe the constitution and laws passed by congress.”

He also accused Bush administration of subjecting U.S. citizens to illegal surveillance methods through spying and wire-trapping.”

“Impeachment and removal from office is the only appropriate remedy for a president who asserts such abusive, totalitarian power, in contravention of fundamental rights and liberties embodied in the U.S. Constitution,” Anderson told the hearing committee.

Hundreds of anti-war activists in Olympia (Wash. State) had urged state lawmakers on Thursday to support a resolution asking that Congress investigate the Bush administration’s handling of the Iraq war and possibly consider impeachment of the president and vice president.

“This memorial is not directly about the war. In fact, it’s not even directly about impeachment. It’s about getting answers,” said state Sen. Eric Oemig, D-Kirkland, who sponsored the resolution.

“It’s a petition to Congress asking them to do a legitimate, real, serious investigation,” he added.