The Rag Blog

BAGHDAD, Feb 25 (Reuters) – Iranians have stopped training and providing weapons to Iraqi militants in Iraq in the last few weeks to allow a U.S.-backed security plan in Baghdad to succeed, a senior Iraqi official said on Sunday.

National Security Adviser Mowaffaq al-Rubaie told CNN there was some evidence that Iranians had been supporting some Shi’ite militia groups fighting U.S. troops in Iraq.

“There is no doubt in my mind that recently in the last few weeks they have changed their position and stopped a lot of their tactics and interference in Iraq’s internal affairs,” Rubaie said in an interview.

It was unclear if he was talking of the Iranian government. Washington accuses Shi’ite Iran of fuelling violence in Iraq.

The United States has drafted thousands of extra troops into Iraq in an attempt to crack down on insurgency and curb sectarian conflict.

That the Al Gore film “An Inconvenient Truth” was legitimized by an Oscar Sunday night for “Best Documentary” has wider implications for the future of the United States than it might seem, though admittedly it is a small step.

We know that Exxon Mobil is a significant funder of the American Enterprise Institute and has used it to attempt to bribe “scientists” to cast doubt on global warming. Lee Raymond, who was CEO of Exxon Mobil until 2005, is the vice-chair of AEI’s board of directors.

We also know that the American Enterprise Institute is the most hawkish of the Washington “think tanks,” and that its staffers were key to thinking up and promoting the Iraq War with lies and propaganda.

A=B, B=C, therefore A=C. Exxon Mobil is a big behind the scenes player in the Iraq War by virtue of its support for AEI. In fact, I think a boycott of its gas stations is in order until the company cuts off AEI and stops promoting the Iraq War and muddying the waters on global warming. (It pledged to do the latter in the past, but obviously was lying).

So the point is that the American Enterprise Institute symbolizes the intersection of Oil and War, which are the two most menacing threats to the future of America.

Only by a Manhattan Project-scale government effort to develop green energy can we hope to avert the worst consequences of global warming, which is likely to raise sea levels 20 feet over the next century or century and a half. (That would put a lot of cities on both coasts under water).

But the other problem with petroleum and gas as sources of energy is that they are getting scarcer. No big new fields have been found for some time. And in one recent year China generated 40% of new demand for petroleum. If a billion Chinese and a billion Indians adopt the American lifestyle and all want 1.5 automobiles and superhighways to crawl along on, the existing stocks of oil will become objects of fierce competition. This process has already begun, and there is a sea change from the mid-1990s, when oil was still cheap and competition for it limited.

Iraq is an Oil War in the mind of politicians like Dick Cheney. It was necessary to deny it to China and other rivals thirty to fifty years in the future. It was necessary to open its vast petroleum fields up for exploration and cast aside anti-American Baath socialism.

Likewise, the religious rigidity of the Pushtun peoples of Helmand province is not the real reason for the US insistence on occupying Afghanistan. It is the vast Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan gas fields that Cheney has his eye on. It was the US hope to use a pipeline from Turkmenistan to supply Pakistan and India, and so forestall a deal by those two countries with Iran. The inability of the Bush administration to calm things down in Afghanistan sufficiently for anyone to dream of putting in such a pipeline and having it avoid routine sabotage has made it likely that Iran will break out of the Bush boycott toward the East.

Hunger for future rights to petroleum and positioning the US to remain a superpower in a world of hydrocarbon scarcity is also driving the campaign to get up a war against Iran. Why can Pakistan have a nuclear weapon, and that is all right, but Iran cannot? Pakistan has very little petroleum. Iran has a lot, and maybe 750 trillion cubic feet of gas in the southwest. If it gets a bomb, regime change becomes impossible, and if Iran wants to tie its supplies up in proprietary contracts with China and India, locking out the United States, it will be able to do so.

Continued heavy dependence on gas and oil therefore not only turns the world into a hothouse, with rising seas, ever more destructive hurricanes, and possibly disastrous shifts in the ocean currents, but it also drives the United States to more and more wars.

And, note that the wars are not even successful in allowing a practical oil grab of the sort Cheney and Lee Raymond dreamed of.

Indeed, you could now, in retrospect, turn their whole argument around on them. US militarism cannot secure petroleum and gas supplies from places such as Iraq, because the pipelines are so easily sabotaged and local nationalisms and religious activism make it impossible for people to accept that kind of US hegemony.

Since the Pentagon cannot practically speaking hope to safeguard US petroleum supplies from the Gulf, national security requires a massive and rapid research and development program of green energy. A lot of green technology, especially solar, would come down in price rapidly if enough government money were thrown at it. We need to press Congress on this, and maybe Californians can craft some of their famous referendum items. That would be one way to promote a new generation of electric cars.

America is secretly funding militant ethnic separatist groups in Iran in an attempt to pile pressure on the Islamic regime to give up its nuclear programme.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s regime is accused of repressing minority rights and culture

In a move that reflects Washington’s growing concern with the failure of diplomatic initiatives, CIA officials are understood to be helping opposition militias among the numerous ethnic minority groups clustered in Iran’s border regions.

The operations are controversial because they involve dealing with movements that resort to terrorist methods in pursuit of their grievances against the Iranian regime.

In the past year there has been a wave of unrest in ethnic minority border areas of Iran, with bombing and assassination campaigns against soldiers and government officials.

Such incidents have been carried out by the Kurds in the west, the Azeris in the north-west, the Ahwazi Arabs in the south-west, and the Baluchis in the south-east. Non-Persians make up nearly 40 per cent of Iran’s 69 million population, with around 16 million Azeris, seven million Kurds, five million Ahwazis and one million Baluchis. Most Baluchis live over the border in Pakistan.

Funding for their separatist causes comes directly from the CIA’s classified budget but is now “no great secret”, according to one former high-ranking CIA official in Washington who spoke anonymously to The Sunday Telegraph.

NEW YORK (Feb. 25) – Genealogists have revealed that the Rev. Al Sharpton is a descendent of a slave owned by relatives of the late Sen. Strom Thurmond – a discovery the civil rights activist on Sunday called “shocking.”

Sharpton learned of his connection to Thurmond, once a prominent defender of segregation, last week through the Daily News, which asked genealogists to trace his roots.

“It was probably the most shocking thing in my life,” Sharpton said at a news conference Sunday, the same day the tabloid revealed the story.

“I have always wondered what was the background of my family,” the newspaper quoted Sharpton as saying. “But nothing — nothing — could prepare me for this.”

Huh? According to Condi Rice, the US attempt to put missile shields in Poland and the Czech Republic is to counter some future Iranian missile threat? What would that be? Does Tehran want to conquer Poland? For its strategic position, perhaps? Or maybe to set up an outpost of the Revolutionary Guard? This tale of Ms. Rice’s proves that she not only thinks the US public is gullible, she thinks they are stupid. In addition, she doesn’t have much of an opinion of the Russians either, who are pretty upset about the US attempt to extend its missile shield to Russian borders. To those Russians, Rice dismissed their concern, stating “Anyone who knows anything about this will tell you there is no way that 10 interceptors in Poland and radar sites in the Czech Republic are a threat to Russia, that they are somehow going to diminish Russia’s deterrent of thousands of warheads.”

If that is the case, than it must certainly be true for anyone who knows anything about this will tell you there is no way that 10 interceptors in Poland and radar sites in the Czech Republic need to be constructed since the US has the ability to take care of any imaginary threat from Iran with its existing arsenal and defense system. Now, I’m sure some missile shield proponent would tell me that placing missiles to protect the US on lands thousands of miles await from both the US and Iran is necessary, but they would be hard put to make a convincing case. It sounds to me kind of like putting your alarm system and pit bull in that guy’s house two streets over to prevent anybody from burglarizing your house. Or maybe it’s like a drug dealer keeping his stash at a friend’s so that they’ll get robbed instead of him. Either way, it doesn’t make a lick of sense.

If I were Russian I would be concerned. After all, those shields would be right on my borders. If I were Czech or Polish, I would be even more concerned, since those shields would be in my backyard. Talk about inviting trouble. Especially when the whole threat exists primarily in the paranoid brains of Washington and the hopeful bank accounts of the war industry.

PORT TOWNSEND – A Jefferson County District Court judge on Friday reduced the charges against 36 of those arrested last fall as they blocked the gates to Naval Magazine Indian Island.

Thirty-seven were arrested on Sept. 23 as they gathered at the gates on federal land to protest the Iraq war and the storage of depleted uranium at Indian Island, which is one of the main non-nuclear conventional weapons depots for the Navy’s Pacific fleet.

One of the 37 charged with disorderly conduct – Aldo Sardone, 41, of Seattle – pleaded guilty at his arraignment in October.

The rest pleaded not guilty to the same charge.

On Friday, District Judge Jill Landes dismissed the misdemeanor charges and – based on a motion from the county prosecuting attorney’s office – ruled that the defendants would get lesser infraction citations.

Each defendant was charged with “pedestrian blocking the road,” an infraction punishable by a $76 fine.

The original charge of disorderly conduct carries a maximum penalty of 90 days in jail and/or a $1,000 fine.

Avoid “soapbox trial”

Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Todd DeBray said after the hearing that the move was intended to avoid a “soapbox trial.”

“Our office decided to drop the cases to infractions and, at this point, we are not expecting to have anything to do with this case,” DeBray said.

“This took a lot of hours on the part of the Sheriff’s Office.

“At the same time, we don’t want to put the war machine on trial.”

The New York Times on Thursday published an editorial on this week’s appeals court ruling upholding the Military Commissions Act, which strips Guantánamo prisoners of their habeas corpus rights. The commentary, entitled “American Liberty at the Precipice,” is a model of half-truths and evasions.

Typical of this leading organ of present-day American liberalism, the editorial denounces the ruling and the law it upholds while saying nothing about the complicity of the Democrats and ignoring the social reality underlying the assault on democratic rights.

The writ of habeas corpus—the right to challenge one’s detention in court—is a bedrock principle of democracy and indispensable legal restraint on executive power. Without the protection of the “great writ,” the president (or in an earlier period, the king) has the power to arrest and detain an individual indefinitely without giving any reason. The Bush administration, under the pretext of the so-called “war on terror,” asserts that it has the right to do precisely this.

The decision handed down Tuesday by the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit rejected a case brought by Guantánamo detainees alleging that the Military Commissions Act, passed last September, is unconstitutional because it bars US courts from considering writs of habeas corpus “filed by or on behalf of an alien detained by the United States who has been determined by the United States to have been properly detained as an enemy combatant.”

The Times notes that the “frightening” law “raises insurmountable obstacles for prisoners to challenge their detentions.” The newspaper adds that “it gives the government the power to take away habeas rights from any noncitizen living in the United States who is unfortunate enough to be labeled an enemy combatant.”

However, the Times describes the passage of the law in a manner calculated to place the entire onus on the Bush administration and ignore the critical role played by the Democrats. The act was “stampeded through Congress last fall” by the Bush administration, the editorial states, and further on declares that the Bush administration responded to last year’s Supreme Court ruling striking down its military commissions by “driving” the new law through Congress.

MINISTERS are negotiating multi-million-pound contracts with private security firms to cover some of the gaps created by British troop withdrawals.

Days after Tony Blair revealed that he wanted to withdraw 1,600 soldiers from war-torn Basra within months, it has emerged that civil servants hope “mercenaries” can help fill the gap left behind.

Officials from the Foreign Office and Ministry of Defence will meet representatives from the private security industry within the next month to discuss “options” for increasing their business in Iraq in the coming years.

The UK government has already paid out almost £160m to private security companies (PSCs) since the invasion of Iraq, for a range of services, including the protection of British officials on duty and in transit in some of the most dangerous parts of the world.

But, despite expectations that the booming market for private security would go into decline following the bursting of the “Iraq bubble”, firms have now been told to expect even more lucrative work during the “post-occupation phase”.

A senior official from one of the biggest PSCs already operating in Iraq last night claimed firms had been told to expect increased business opportunities in areas such as personnel protection, highway security and the training of Iraqi police and soldiers.

“It is not entirely surprising that they recognise PSCs still have a value in Iraq,” the source said. “But them wanting to meet us demonstrates that they have accepted just how valuable the industry can be.

“No one is saying PSCs can take over all the jobs of regular military, but the British forces have not been doing regular military work recently. If there is a need to protect people and supply routes and areas, there are a lot of specialised private-sector companies that can do that perfectly well.”

The MoD has consistently maintained that it has not paid a PSC to carry out any security duties in Iraq in almost four years since British forces arrived. But officials from the department are planning to join colleagues from the Foreign Office at a “summit” with members of the British Association of Private Security Companies (BAPSC) next month.

“A Gallup poll surveying US opinion on geopolitics singles out Israel as only foreign nation Americans feel favorably toward and also say that what happens there is vitally important to the US,” the Israeli online newspaper Yedioth Internet reports.

Never mind Israel attacked the USS Liberty in 1967, killing 34 Americans and wounding 171, and never mind Israel was caught red-handed in 1954 plotting to blow up U.S. targets and presumably killing Americans in Egypt, and never mind, according to a German public television (Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen) documentary, the main suspects in the 1986 Berlin disco bombing that killed two U.S. soldiers, an event that provided a pretext for a U.S. air assault on Libya, worked for Israeli intelligence (with more than a little help from American spooks), and never mind that in response to Jonathan Pollard selling U.S. secrets to Israel resulting in the execution of CIA agents in the Soviet Union, Israel granted Pollard citizenship and continues to pester U.S. officials and presidents, demanding the traitor be released, and finally never mind that Israel used nuclear blackmail to force Kissinger and Nixon to airlift supplies during the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

Never mind. Americans like to be stabbed in the back.

“The country viewed as least-favorable by Americans is Iran (9 percent), followed by North Korea (12), Iraq (15), Palestinian Authority (16), Syria (21), Afghanistan (23), Cuba (25), Pakistan (28), Saudi Arabia (35), Venezuela (41) and China (48),” the Gallup poll indicates.