The Rag Blog

The Selective Service System last year studied whether it should revert to a Cold War-era plan of being able to draft people within 13 days of a crisis, compared to its current goal of carrying it out within six months. But the agency ultimately decided not to make such a major change because of opposition from within the Selective Service System.

William Chatfield, the Selective Service System director, ordered the Arlington, Va.-based agency to study how the organization would shift to what is known as “emergency mobilization.” The agency defines emergency mobilization as being able to conduct a lottery of young American men and delivering 500,000 of them through the doors of military processing stations within 13 days from the start of a draft.

The last time the agency was geared up for an emergency mobilization was in the 1980s, when the U.S. and its NATO allies faced a numerically superior Soviet Union during the Cold War. The 13-day draft option was officially eliminated in 1993.

Since then, the Selective Service System has had its current, less aggressive mission of getting draftees to the military in 193 days-or a little more than six months-in the event of a draft. “Nothing has changed at all,” Chatfield said in an interview, adding: “We are taking a look at all different kinds of scenarios.”

Richard Flahavan, a spokesman for the agency, said of the 13-day option, “We have it on the shelf. We intend to do nothing with it.”

President Bush and Defense Secretary Robert Gates have said they oppose bringing back the draft–as do most members of Congress–to address severe personnel shortages in the armed forces caused by ongoing military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A US federal appeals court on Friday upheld a refusal to hear the case of a Lebanese-born German man who says he was tortured by the CIA, citing national security reasons.

Khaled el-Masri claims was detained by the CIA for several months in 2004 on suspicion of links to terrorism.

Masri, 43, filed suit in December 2005 saying he had been snatched while on a trip in Macedonia, taken to Afghanistan, jailed, beaten and harassed before being set free without charge after five months.

He demanded an explanation and an apology from the United States for his detention, as well as 75,000 dollars in damages.

The US government had urged the court to reject the appeal saying that for national security reasons it could not confirm or deny any of the allegations because they were related to the activities of the CIA.

The court said that to make his case, el-Masri “would be obliged to produce admissible evidence not only that he was detained and interrogated, but that the defendants were involved in his detention and interrogation in a manner that renders them personally liable to him.

“Such a showing could be made only with evidence that exposes how the CIA organizes, staffs and supervises its most sensitive intelligence operations.

“The defendants could not properly defend themselves without using privileged evidence,” the decision said.

American Civil Liberties Union director Anthony Romero said the court was wrong.

“Regrettably, today’s decision allows CIA officials to disregard the law with impunity by making it virtually impossible to challenge their actions in court,” he said in a statement.

“The state secrets doctrine has become a shield that covers even the most blatant abuses of power,” he said.

Masri has also taken his case to the German courts and a court in southern Munich in January ordered the arrest of 13 people, thought to be CIA agents, in connection with his alleged kidnapping.

His is one of the most high-profile cases of the suspected “extraordinary renditions” by the CIA — flying terror suspects through European states to detention in third countries where they risk being tortured.

After meeting with US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in December 2005, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Masri’s case “was accepted as a mistake by the US government,” but US officials later suggested her remark was the result of a misunderstanding.

Things began looking more sketchier than ever to John Owen as he boarded a nondescript white jet on his way back to Iraq in March 2005 following some R’n’R in Kuwait city.

Employed by First Kuwaiti Trading & Contracting, the lead builder for the new $592-million US embassy in Baghdad, Owen remembers being surrounded at the airport by about 50 company laborers freshly hired from the Philippines and India. Everyone was holding boarding passes to Dubai — not to Baghdad.

“I thought there was some sort of mix up and I was getting on the wrong plane,” says the 48-year-old Floridian who was working as a general construction foreman on the embassy project.

Seven months after signing on with First Kuwaiti in November 2005, he quit.

In the resignation letter last June, Owen told First Kuwaiti and US State Department officials that his managers physically assaulted and beat the construction workers, demonstrated little regard for worker safety, and routinely breached security.

And it was all happening smack in the middle of the US-controlled Green Zone — right under the nose of the State Department that had quietly awarded the controversial embassy contract in July 2005.

He also complained of poor sanitation, squalid living conditions and medical malpractice in the labor camps where several thousand low-paid migrant workers lived. Those workers, recruited on the global labor market from the Philippines, India, Pakistan and other poor south Asian countries, earned as little as $10 to $30 a day. As with many US-funded contractors, First Kuwaiti prefers importing labor because it views Iraqi workers as a security headache not worth the trouble.

Despite numerous emails and phone calls about such allegations, neither First Kuwaiti general manager Wadih Al Absi nor his lawyer Angela Styles, the former top White House contract policy advisor, have responded. After a year of requests, State Department officials involved with the project also have ignored or rejected opportunities for comment.

Your Passports Please

That same March Owen returned to work in Baghdad, Rory Mayberry would witness similar events after he flew to Kuwait from his home in Myrtle Creek, Oregon.

The gravely voiced, easy-going Army veteran had previously worked in Iraq for Halliburton and the private security company, Danubia. Missing the action and the big paychecks US contractors draw Iraq, he snagged a $10,000 a month job with MSDS consulting Company.

MSDS is a two-person minority-owned consulting company that assists US State Department managers in Washington with procurement programming. Never before had the firm offered medical services or worked in Iraq, but First Kuwaiti hired MSDS on the recommendation of Jim Golden, the State Department contract official overseeing the embassy project. Within days, an agreement worth hundreds of thousands of dollars for medical care was signed.

The 45-year-old Mayberry, a former emergency medical technician in the Army who worked as a funeral director in Oregon, responded to a help wanted ad placed by MSDS. The plan was that he would work as a medic attending to the construction crews on the work site in Baghdad.

Mayberry sensed things weren’t right when he boarded a First Kuwaiti flight on March 15 to Baghdad — a different flight from Owen’s.

At the airport in Kuwait City, Mayberry said, he saw a person behind a counter hand First Kuwaiti managers a passenger manifest, an envelope of money and a stack of boarding passes to Dubai. The managers then handed out the boarding passes to Mayberry and 50 or so new First Kuwaiti laborers, mostly Filipinos.

“Everyone was told to tell customs and security that they were flying to Dubai,” Mayberry explains. Once the group passed the guards, they went upstairs and waited by the McDonald’s for First Kuwaiti staff to unlock a door — Gate 26 — that led to an unmarked, white 52-seat jet. It was “an antique piece of shit” Mayberry offers in a casual, blunt manner.

03/02/07 “ICH” — — The president and the Pentagon now wield the omnipotent power to arrest, torture, and execute any American they label an “enemy combatant.” It is impossible to overstate the significance of this power. It has totally upended the relationship of the military and civilian in the United States. The assumption of this particular power easily constitutes one of the most monumental revolutions of liberty and power in history. It is a revolution that every American must confront now, not later. If people wait until later to confront the expanded use of this power, it will be too late, because by that time it will be too dangerous to do so.

As long as this particular power is permitted to stand, there is no possibility for Americans to be considered a free people. A necessary prerequisite for restoring freedom to our land is the removal of this power from the arsenal of government officials.

Everyone needs to understand the nature of this power and its enormous significance. Historically, the U.S. military has lacked the power to arrest, incarcerate, or inflict harm on American civilians. If Americans committed a federal crime, they were subject to being indicted by a federal grand jury and then prosecuted in U.S. District Court. The Bill of Rights guaranteed that the accused would be accorded certain rights of due process of law, such as the right to defend himself with the assistance of an attorney, to confront the witnesses whose testimony the prosecutors were relying on, to summon witnesses in his behalf, to remain silent, and to have a trial by jury. Everyone was presumed to be innocent and the government had to prove the defendant’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

Those constitutional protections and guarantees were upended on 9/11, without even the semblance of a constitutional amendment. On 9/11 the president and the Pentagon assumed to themselves the power to take any American into custody and inflict violence on him, without according him any of the protections provided by the Bill of Rights. Today, the Pentagon has the authority, on orders of its commander in chief, to send American soldiers into any neighborhood in the country and take into custody any American citizen and inflict harm on him simply by labeling him an “enemy combatant” in the “war on terror.”

Let me emphasize something important here, especially for libertarians, who have long committed their lives to the achievement of a free society: There is no way – none – to reconcile the assumption of this power with a free society. In fact, it is the most powerful government power of all – the ultimate power that can ever be wielded by a tyrannical government. No infringement on economic liberty – hyperinflation, confiscatory taxation, oppressive regulation, or the like – can compare in significance with the omnipotent power of a government official to arbitrarily pick up anyone he wants for any reason he wants and incarcerate him, torture him, and execute him.

The Democrats’ obfuscation and confusion

To use Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi’s favorite opening line, “Let me be clear” – The Democrats are hell-bent for war and everyone with brain-1 knows it. All their talk of the non-binding resolution against the war, their newly found, vociferous opposition to the war, their attacks on the Bush regime (internicine fighting for the spoils of war) and of bringing the troops home by 2008 (2 more years of slaughter), their refusal to defund the war to “support the troops”, their claim that their hands are tied leaving them helpless to stop the war – all this talk is nothing less than obfuscation intended to make a simple matter a complex and confusing one.

On December 5, shortly after the people voted for the Democrats to end the war in the mid-term elections, Pelosi went on record, “Let me be clear. We will not cut off funding for the troops. Absolutely not!”. Two days ago she repeated that position, stating that the Democrats would not cut off funds arguing incredibly that to do so would put U.S. troops in jeopardy. Yesterday NPR recorded her again, “Let me be clear. We will not cut off funding for our troops.”

What is it that the Democrats are Refusing to Defund?

Let’s take a look at exactly what it is that the Democrats in Congress are refusing to stop:

Recently, the Bush regime has targetted the Iraqi Resistance in Baghdad when he asked congress to give him “one last chance” to win the war. The most recent U.S. tactic to accomplish this bloody affair has been mass-scale bombing of neighborhoods in Baghdad, currently being carried out under the rubric, “Joint U.S.-Iraqi Security Operation”, otherwise dubbed by the Pentagon, “Operation Enforce-the-Law” or “Operation Law Enforcement”. This “security operation” is certainly not providing security for those dying and fleeing from U.S. bombs in the neighborhoods.

Yesterday (March 1, 2007), Tom Bullock, NPR’s mouthpiece in Baghdad, reported that the U.S. military has been carrying out “heavy bombing … in numerous neighborhoods in and around Baghdad” attempting to wipe out “car bomb factories”. Almost immediately after these latest U.S. attacks, Tom Bullock described these neighborhoods as “densely populated”. When asked about reports of casualties, the NPR reporter said the bombing continued for about 2 hours and just ceased “so it’s too early to know the extent of casualties”. True to form, NPR couched this report in terms sypathetic to this U.S. attack on the people of Iraq, citing the numbers of U.S. troops previously killed by IED explosives and a recent bombing of the Iraqi police who serve the puppeteer of the U.S. installed regime. NPR referred to this escalation of the war using the Pentagon’s new coinage: “Operation Law Enforcement” intended to bring about “security” in Baghdad. They undergirded their report with references to prior IED attacks by “Sunni Insurgents” rather than the Iraqi Resistance forces against the occupation.

20 minutes after the NPR report cited above, the NPR script was apparently rewritten for Bullock deleting references to the “heavy bombing” in “dense neighborhoods”. In the new version, NPR described this as a “security crackdown”.

Iraqi victims of the war

Here’s an Axis transcript of Tom Bullock’s words on NPR:

“Dozens of loud explosions were heard today throughout Baghdad. In a city where explosions are common these stood out. A series of blasts coming in quick succession. A U.S. official … says the explosions were an artillary barrage targetting predominantly Sunni neighborhoods in and around the city, part of a planned U.S. military operation targeting a car-bomb network in and around Baghdad. A high level military official says the operation will last for days and be followed up with U.S. and Iraqi ground troops. Car bombs remain a serious threat throughout Iraq. At least one exploded on Thursday in the City of Fallujah targetting a police convoy. The blast killed at least 5 Iraqi policemen and wounded at least 10 others. The group was heading to a wedding.”

Note the emotional pull at the end of the NPR report: “The group was heading to a wedding party”, Bullock stated, with his voice dipping into pity, but no pity for those children, women and men who are being killed and wounded in Iraq today under the current, escalation of U.S. attacks in Baghdad.

Robust Military Response by the Resistance

In the midst of this intensified U.S. bombing of dense neighborhoods in Baghdad, the BBC tells us today (March 2) that the Iraqi Resistance has carried out a successful military operation, killing 14 Iraqi policemen who are working under their employer and paymaster, the United States government. The Democrats will not have to defund the salaries for those “police” – the Iraqi Resistance has done it for them.

The Democratic Congress Supports the War

This aggression and violence being brought down on the heads of the Iraqi people this week is precisely what the Democrats are supporting with their refusal to end the war. Immediately after the Democratic Party was voted into control of both houses of the Congress they began to depict the U.S. occupation in Iraq as “complicated” by “sectarian conflict” and “impending civil war”. Upon this “complicated situation” they layered additional “concerns” with predictions of a Shia slaughter of Sunnis if the U.S. were to abruptly withdraw from Iraq. This argument amounts to nothing less than killing Iraqis to save Iraqis … or to save Iraqis from themselves – burning the village to save the village. Either way, it amounts to murder – not “collateral damage” – not even “killing” – let’s not mince our words – the term is mass murder. What else can it be called? Nearly a million Iraqi people have been slaughtered, directly or indirectly by the U.S. government in the last 4 years of war and occupation.

The Democrats join Bush Fear-Mongering

Some years ago, I read a beautiful Sufi treatise by Farradin’Attar entitled “Conference of the Birds”.
Like all powerful Sufi stories, this one stayed with me.
The story, an allegory, is basically about a flock of different kinds of birds wanting to meet the Simorgh. The Simorgh being none other than the “highest” Bird.
After a lengthy and torturous travel route, only a few made it to the Simorgh.
Many gave up half way. Some got stuck in their own stories, others just dropped out from sheer exhaustion and others were afraid to venture beyond…
But only those that were earnestly seeking to meet Him, managed to make it and reached their final destination.
Of course, Farradin’Attar in his brilliant way, meant the Simorgh as a metaphor for Truth.

Now, I have been receiving tons of mail, from all kinds of people…
I assume they too are searching for the Truth.
But like some of the birds in the Sufi tale, they are stuck.

Some write to me with the same old verbiage, regurgitated about a thousand times…
And it goes like this:” I am anti-occupation, but…Saddam was an Imperialist thug”…”I am against what is happening but you see, you have to understand, that Saddam was a tyrant”…”I really don’t like this, but frankly you guys brought it onto yourselves…after all he was a dictator”…” It is all because of him…he was nothing but a traitor”…” He was a CIA/Zionist agent…yeah that’s him”…

Some are slightly more sophisticated. They use “important” terminology.
Like big impressive words and get their nickers in a twist with detailed analysis that amounts to nothing really. Others are plain obnoxious…

But none of the above actually bother me …I see them for what they are.
Either a very ignorant bunch, or people who can’t be bothered to think for themselves and opt instead for ready made slogans and that is so much easier, I do concede that.
And some are simply too “basic” to articulate …
In the past, this would anger me. Then it irritated me. Now I simply don’t care.

I have studied closely what is happening to Iraq – too closely, for comfort.
I know who the main players are. I know what the long term plan is. I know what the regional interests are all about…And more importantly, I am made of the “same mud” and “some things” you just know. Informed comment or no informed comment, with and without Empire analysis…

And I know enough about human psychology to realize how power plays, influence and coercion, manipulation and outright deceit work…

I like details but I prefer the end result. I like to see the trees, but I prefer gazing at the forest.
I, in fact, like to see the bigger picture. And for that, one needs to fly high above.

You see, am a bird too… and I love soaring…
And during one of my flights, this is what I saw:

That an imperialist thug would not voluntarily walk to the gallows when he had a chance for a compromise with his predators…
That a dictator who cares about Unity is no longer a dictator…
That a tyrant would save his backside. He could become another Pinochet or a Shah in exile…
That a traitor would not have men loyal to (his) similar ideals still fight the Occupation, sacrificing their families, their future, their lives ….in the same manner that he did.
That a CIA/Zionist agent who wants the blessings of the twinsouls, would still be alive now and running the show…Just look at the majority of the other Arab leaders.

I also saw that Freedom with no dignity is worthless…That democracy with no voice is an empty corrupt word…That love with no commitment is cheap…
And, that parrots look good on the outside. They have a colorful and exotic plumage…but their language is ….oh well….you know…only slogans.
And like in the Conference of the Birds, the parrots kept talking to themselves whilst other birds reached the Simorgh…

The U.S. government and military has undergone a series of jolting expansions in the Bush years. We got, for instance, a second Defense Department called the Department of Homeland Security. We got a military command for North America called United States Northern Command. More than anything else, however, while we already had an “imperial presidency,” we also got an add-on — an imperial vice-presidency, a new form of shadow government in the United States, a startlingly unbound, constitutionally unmandated new institutional power.

On taking office, Dick Cheney promptly began to set up a vice-presidential office that essentially mimicked, and then to some extent replaced, the National Security Council (NSC). Just as promptly, his office plunged itself into utter, blinding secrecy — as journalist Robert Dreyfuss discovered when he simply tried to chart out who was working in this new center of power. No information, it turned out, could be revealed to a curious reporter, not even the names and positions of those who worked for the Vice President, those who, theoretically, were working for us. Cheney’s office would not even publicly acknowledge its own employees, no less let them be interviewed.

From that office (and allied posts elsewhere in the executive branch and the federal bureaucracy), the Vice President and his various right-hand men like I Lewis “Scooter” Libby and present Chief of Staff David Addington, both fierce believers in the so-called unitary executive theory of government (in which a “wartime” commander-in-chief president is said to have unfettered power to command just about anything), elbowed the State Department, the NSC, and the Intelligence Community. With the President’s ear, and in league with Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon (among others), they spearheaded a series of mis- and disinformation operations that led to Iraq and beyond. (Reporter Jim Lobe wrote about this at Tomdispatch in August 2005, “Dating Cheney’s Nuclear Drumbeat.”)

Now shorn of Rumsfeld, Cheney and his men, increasingly beleaguered, are nonetheless pushing on as the Vice President secretively travels the world, warning and scheming. Only this week, in “The Redirection,” a New Yorker piece as chilling as any you might ever want to read, our premier journalist of this era (as well as the Vietnam one), Seymour Hersh reports that, two years ago, old hands from the Iran-Contra fiasco of the Reagan era, well-seeded into the Bush administration, had an informal meeting led by Deputy National Security Advisor Elliott Abrams. Their conclusions: “As to what the experience taught them, in terms of future covert operations, the participants found: ‘One, you can’t trust our friends. Two, the C.I.A. has got to be totally out of it. Three, you can’t trust the uniformed military, and four, it’s got to be run out of the Vice-President’s office.”

That’s what passes for learning from experience in the Bush/Cheney White House. Indeed, the same folks are now evidently running an updated version of Iran-Contra (without the CIA) out of the Vice President’s office. At the same time, according to Hersh, Cheney, in his urge to roll back Iranian regional power as well as undermine Hezbollah, Moqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army militia in Iraq, and the Syrians, has set the Saudis loose to fund Sunni jihadis — just as they did in Afghanistan at American behest in the 1980s. The result then was, among other things, al-Qaeda and the Taliban. So imagine: Cheney’s office is now working hard to combine the worst of the Reagan-era Iran-Contra scandal with the worst of the Afghan disaster. I wonder what the results could possibly be?

The history of this sudden explosion of ultra-secretive vice-presidential power remains to be written, based on documents that have not yet seen the light of day. The Libby trial has recently offered us a glimpse into the most secretive and powerful office in the land and its interplay with the White House, State Department, and CIA. As former federal prosecutor Elizabeth de la Vega points out below, that glimpse should be enough to trigger a Congressional investigation into the Plame case. It’s time, she tells us, for Congress to investigate all the President’s and Vice President’s men and women.

De la Vega has written a remarkable, must-read book about how we were defrauded into war in Iraq, United States v. George W. Bush et al. Every day since it first appeared, our country has come to look ever more like a United States v. Bush/Cheney world. De la Vega is a woman who should be heeded. Tom

Public Misconduct: A Call to Investigate All of the President’s Men
By Elizabeth de la Vega

Last week, apparently belatedly realizing the obvious — that the attack on former Ambassador Joseph Wilson and his wife Valerie Plame was a White House family affair — New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof called for the administration to come clean. Bush and Cheney owe “the American people a candid explanation” of their conduct with regard to the leaking of Plame’s identity as a CIA agent, Kristof insisted.

If, after observing this administration for over six years, Nicholas Kristof thinks that the President and Vice President are going to suddenly be overcome by conscience and tell all because he has put his foot down, then Nicholas Kristof is downright adorable.

The trial of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby was merely a snapshot view of this administration in daily action; but incomplete as it was, it nevertheless starkly revealed what many had known all along: that the most powerful officials in the United States government — including, but not limited to, the Vice President, the Vice President’s Chief of Staff, the Deputy Secretary of State, the President’s Press Secretary, the President’s Chief of Staff, and, yes, the President himself — had responded to the barrage of criticism being aimed at their fictitious case for war in the spring and summer of 2003 by focusing their sights on a man and woman who had devoted their lives to public service.

Such people — those who will use the highest offices of the United States government to protect themselves and their prospects for reelection by whatever means they deem necessary, regardless of the damage they leave in their wake — are not going to confess to anything…ever.

Indeed, in answer to questions from a reporter about this very issue on February 14, President Bush explained helpfully, “I’m not going to talk about any of it.” We will surely all expire if we hold our collective breath waiting for the President to change his mind about this (or anything else, for that matter). Fortunately, we do not need to hear what Bush and Cheney have to say about “it” right now.

Nor do we have to wait for the outcome of any further investigation by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, even though it is entirely possible he and his eminently capable prosecutors Peter Zeidenberg, Debra Bonamici, and the rest of their team will continue to explore possible criminal activity on the part of Vice President Cheney and others. A continued investigation would, in fact, be both appropriate and warranted, given the abundant evidence of Cheney’s wrongdoing.