The Rag Blog

02/23/07 “ICH” — — Hugo Chavez Frias was reelected by an overwhelming nearly two to one margin over his only serious rival on December 3, 2006 giving him a mandate to proceed with his agenda to build a socialist society in the 21st century on a Bolivarian model designed to meet the needs of the current era in Venezuela and Latin America overall. Chavez first announced his intentions on January 30, 2005 at the Fifth World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and his people affirmed they want him to proceed with it in his new term to run until December, 2012.

Chavez wants to build a humanistic democratic society based on solidarity and respect for political, economic, social and cultural human and civil rights, but not the top-down bureaucratic kind that doomed the Soviet Union and Eastern European states. He said he wants to build a “new socialism of the 21st century….based in solidarity, fraternity, love, justice, liberty and equality” as opposed to the neoliberal new world order model based on predatory capitalism exploiting ordinary people for power and profit that’s incompatible with democracy. Newly appointed Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte expressed Washington’s concern about the challenge to its hegemony in his Senate Foreign Relations Committee confirmation hearing saying Chavez’s “behavior is threatening to democracies in the region (because he exports a form of) radical populism.” He didn’t mention how glorious it is.

He also never explained Venezuelans voted for it and love it and so do people throughout the region wanting what Venezuelans now have. Since first taking office in February, 1999, Chavez radically transformed the country from one of power and privilege to a participatory democracy governed by principles of political, economic and social equity and justice. He now wants to advance his social democratic agenda well into the new century, and his landslide electoral victory empowers him more than ever to do it. Like a true democrat, he intends to serve his people and deliver what they asked for.

Chavez began his new term with the formation of a new unity party called the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) to “construct socialism from below,” built “from the base” in communities, patrols, battalions, squadrons, neighborhoods “to carry out the battle of ideas for the socialist project (to) build Venezuelan socialism.” He wants it to be an “original Venezuelan model” to become the most democratic in Venezuela’s history and include a coalition of many smaller parties along with his former Movement for the Fifth Republic (MVR) party that completed its work and “must now pass into history.”

In December, 23 parties joined with the MVR to reelect Chavez, including three major ones that can add strength and credibility to the PSUV – For Social Democracy (PODEMOS), Homeland For All (PPT), and the Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV). The inclusion of all or most allied parties in the new PSUV will be a step toward building a foundational unity to address the agenda ahead – building 21st century socialism using state revenues to benefit people in new and innovative ways. Chavez wants to reform the constitution, eliminate a two-term presidential limit, and institute new progressive changes giving more power to people at the grass roots the way democracy should work.

He also wants to transform the country’s economic model believing it’s “fundamental (to do) if we wish to build a true socialism (therefore) we must socialize the economy (including the land and create) a new productive model.” He wants all proposed changes submitted to popular referendum so Venezuelans decide on them, not politicians. That’s how it should be in a participatory democracy from the bottom up Chavez says must “transcend the local framework (to achieve) “a sort of regional federation of Communal Councils.” There are 16,000 of them already organized across the country dealing with local issues, each with 200 – 400 families, and that number is expected to grow to 21,000 by year end 2007. “They are the key to peoples’ power,” Chavez stressed, and he sees them as the embryo of a new state driven by the PSUV.

Communal Councils are central to Chavez’s plan for people empowerment. They were created in April, 2006 with the passage of the Communal Council Law. Once fully in place and operational, they’ll represent true participatory democracy unimaginable in the US now governed from the top down by authoritarian rule allowing no deviation from established policies people have no say on and often don’t know exist.

Councils work the opposite way. They’re to deal with all community issues in local umbrella groups addressing matters of health, education, agriculture, housing and all other functions handled up to now by Social Missions and Urban Land Committees. They represent grass roots democracy in action giving them muscle and meaning and are administered by the Intergovernmental Fund for Decentralization that will distribute $5 billion to them in 2007 or more than triple the $1.5 billion allocated in 2006. Additionally, Chavez hopes $7 billion more will be put in the Venezuelan National Development Fund for industrial development use.

These are dramatic examples of two nations going opposite ways. In Venezuela, Hugo Chavez supports free expression, social democracy, and using state revenues to insure and improve both. In the US, both parties support wealth and power, are jointly running a criminal enterprise masquerading as legitimately elected government, scorn the law and constitutional freedoms, are heading the country toward despotism in a national security police state conducting wars without end, and want to rule the world including its oil-rich parts inside Venezuela’s borders.

Editor’s Note: The author identifies the most obvious problem facing the people of the United States in the corporate government: corporate influence in government decision-making. He also identifies a slew of lobby groups who have Senators and House Members feeding at their troughs. We find it interesting that neither he nor NYT finds room in this analysis to identify the most powerful lobby of all: American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Here’s how Wikipedia describes APAIC:

“The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is a special interest group that lobbies the United States Government in favor of maintaining a close US-Israel relationship. Describing itself as “America’s Pro-Israel Lobby,” it is a mass-membership organization including both Jews and non-Jews. AIPAC was formed during the Eisenhower administration, and since then has helped increase American aid and support to Israel. In 1997, Fortune magazine asked Congressmen to rank the “25 most powerful” lobbying organizations in DC. In 2005, the National Journal did the same. Both times, AIPAC came in 2nd – ahead of, for instance, the AFL-CIO and the NRA, but behind the AARP. In 2001, it came in 4th on the Fortune list, cementing its reputation for effectiveness.”

Join us during the week of March 12 for the Encampment to Stop the War when we confront Congress and demand an immediate end to the US war on the people of Iraq. – Les Blough, Editor

Congress Finds Ways to Avoid Lobbyist Limits
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
Published: February 11, 2007

WASHINGTON, Feb. 10 — The 110th Congress opened with the passage of new rules intended to curb the influence of lobbyists by prohibiting them from treating lawmakers to meals, trips, stadium box seats or the discounted use of private jets.

But it did not take long for lawmakers to find ways to keep having lobbyist-financed fun.

In just the last two months, lawmakers invited lobbyists to help pay for a catalog of outings: lavish birthday parties in a lawmaker’s honor ($1,000 a lobbyist), martinis and margaritas at Washington restaurants (at least $1,000), a California wine-tasting tour (all donors welcome), hunting and fishing trips (typically $5,000), weekend golf tournaments ($2,500 and up), a Presidents’ Day weekend at Disney World ($5,000), parties in South Beach in Miami ($5,000), concerts by the Who or Bob Seger ($2,500 for two seats), and even Broadway shows like “Mary Poppins” and “The Drowsy Chaperone” (also $2,500 for two).

The lobbyists and their employers typically end up paying for the events, but within the new rules.

Instead of picking up the lawmaker’s tab, lobbyists pay a political fund-raising committee set up by the lawmaker. In turn, the committee pays the legislator’s way.

Lobbyists and fund-raisers say such trips are becoming increasingly popular, partly as a quirky consequence of the new ethics rules.

By barring lobbyists from mingling with a lawmaker or his staff for the cost of a steak dinner, the restrictions have stirred new demand for pricier tickets to social fund-raising events.

Lobbyists say that the rules might even increase the volume of contributions flowing to Congress from K Street, where many lobbying firms have their offices.

Some lawmakers acknowledge that some fund-raising trips resemble the lobbyist-paid junkets that Congress voted to prohibit.

Jennifer Crider, a spokeswoman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said its leaders had decided to stop holding fund-raising events for lobbyists with political action committees because of the seeming inconsistency.

So the committee canceled its annual Colorado ski weekend for lobbyists and lawmakers to raise money for the next campaign. Gone, too, is its Maryland hunting trip with Representative John D. Dingell of Michigan, the avid hunter who is chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

AN EGYPTIAN blogger was jailed for four years yesterday after being convicted of insulting Islam and Egypt’s president, Hosni Mubarak.

Abdel Karim Suleiman, 22, a former law student, was the first blogger to stand trial in Egypt for his internet writings. He was charged in connection with eight articles written since 2004.

Rights groups and opposition bloggers said they feared it could set a legal precedent, limiting internet freedom in Egypt.

Amnesty International said: “This is yet another slap in the face of freedom of expression in Egypt.” It added that it considered Suleiman to be a prisoner of conscience, jailed for peacefully expressing his opinion.

Something remarkable is going on in a Miami courtroom. The cruel methods US interrogators have used since September 11 to “break” prisoners are finally being put on trial. This was not supposed to happen. The Bush administration’s plan was to put José Padilla on trial for allegedly being part of a network linked to international terrorists. But Padilla’s lawyers are arguing that he is not fit to stand trial because he has been driven insane by the government.

Arrested in May 2002 at Chicago’s O’Hare airport, Padilla, a Brooklyn-born former gang member, was classified as an “enemy combatant” and taken to a navy prison in Charleston, South Carolina. He was kept in a cell 9ft by 7ft, with no natural light, no clock and no calendar. Whenever Padilla left the cell, he was shackled and suited in heavy goggles and headphones. Padilla was kept under these conditions for 1,307 days. He was forbidden contact with anyone but his interrogators, who punctured the extreme sensory deprivation with sensory overload, blasting him with harsh lights and pounding sounds. Padilla also says he was injected with a “truth serum”, a substance his lawyers believe was LSD or PCP.

According to his lawyers and two mental health specialists who examined him, Padilla has been so shattered that he lacks the ability to assist in his own defence. He is convinced that his lawyers are “part of a continuing interrogation program” and sees his captors as protectors. In order to prove that “the extended torture visited upon Mr Padilla has left him damaged”, his lawyers want to tell the court what happened during those years in the navy brig. The prosecution strenuously objects, maintaining that “Padilla is competent” and that his treatment is irrelevant.

The US district judge Marcia Cooke disagrees. “It’s not like Mr Padilla was living in a box. He was at a place. Things happened to him at that place.” The judge has ordered several prison employees to testify on Padilla’s mental state at the hearings, which began yesterday. They will be asked how a man who is alleged to have engaged in elaborate anti-government plots now acts, in the words of brig staff, “like a piece of furniture”.

It’s difficult to overstate the significance of these hearings. The techniques used to break Padilla have been standard operating procedure at Guantánamo Bay since the first prisoners arrived five years ago. They wore blackout goggles and sound-blocking headphones and were placed in extended isolation, interrupted by strobe lights and heavy metal music. These same practices have been documented in dozens of cases of “extraordinary rendition” carried out by the CIA, as well as in prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Many have suffered the same symptoms as Padilla. According to James Yee, a former army Muslim chaplain at Guantánamo, there is an entire section of the prison called Delta Block for detainees who have been reduced to a delusional state. “They would respond to me in a childlike voice, talking complete nonsense. Many of them would loudly sing childish songs, repeating the song over and over.” All the inmates of Delta Block were on 24-hour suicide watch.

Human Rights Watch has exposed a US-run detention facility near Kabul known as the “prison of darkness” – tiny pitch-black cells, strange blaring sounds. “Plenty lost their minds,” one former inmate recalled. “I could hear people knocking their heads against the walls and the doors.”

The partial British military withdrawal from southern Iraq announced by Tony Blair this week follows political and military failure, and is not because of any improvement in local security, say specialists on Iraq.

In a comment entitled “The British Defeat in Iraq” the pre-eminent American analyst on Iraq, Anthony Cordesman of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, in Washington, asserts that British forces lost control of the situation in and around Basra by the second half of 2005.

Mr Cordesman says that while the British won some tactical clashes in Basra and Maysan province in 2004, that “did not stop Islamists from taking more local political power and controlling security at the neighbourhood level when British troops were not present”. As a result, southern Iraq has, in effect, long been under the control of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (Sciri) and the so-called “Sadrist” factions.

Mr Blair said for three years Britain had worked to create, train and equip Iraqi Security Forces capable of taking on the security of the country themselves. But Mr Cordesman concludes: “The Iraqi forces that Britain helped create in the area were little more than an extension of Shia Islamist control by other means.”

The British control of southern Iraq was precarious from the beginning. Its forces had neither experience of the areas in which they were operating nor reliable local allies. Like the Americans in Baghdad, they failed to stop the mass looting of Basra on the fall of Saddam Hussein and never established law and order.

American and British officials never appeared to take on board the unpopularity of the occupation among Shia as well as Sunni Iraqis. Mr Blair even denies that the occupation was unpopular or a cause of armed resistance. But from the fall of Saddam Hussein, mounting anger against it provided an environment in which bigoted Sunni insurgents and often criminal Shia militias could flourish.

The British forces had a lesson in the dangers of provoking the heavily armed local population when six British military police were killed in Majar al-Kabir on 24 June 2003. During the uprising of Mehdi Army militia of Muqtada al-Sadr in 2004, British units were victorious in several bloody clashes in Amara, the capital of Maysan province.

But in the elections in January 2005, lauded by Mr Blair this week, Sciri became the largest party in Basra followed by Fadhila, followers of the Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr, the father of Muqtada al-Sadr. The latter’s supporters became the largest party in Maysan.

Mr Cordesman says the British suffered political defeat in the provincial elections of 2005, and lost at the military level in autumn of the same year when increased attacks meant they they could operate only through armoured patrols. Much-lauded military operations, such as “Corrode” in May 2006, did not alter the balance of forces.

Yifat Susskind is communications director of MADRE , an international women’s human rights organization. She is the author of a new report on violence against women in U.S.-occupied Iraq.

The international news media is flooded with images of a woman in a pink headscarf recounting a shattering experience of rape by members of the Iraqi National Police. Most of the media coverage has focused on her taboo-breaking decision to speak publicly about the assault, but has missed two crucial points for understanding—and combating—sexual violence by Iraqi police recruits.

As Iraqi women’s organizations have documented, sexualized torture is a routine horror in Iraqi jails. While this woman may be the first Iraqi rape survivor to appear on television, she is hardly the first to accuse the Iraqi National Police of sexual assault. At least nine Iraqi organizations as well as Amnesty International, the U.N. Assistance Mission in Iraq and the Brussels Tribunal have documented the sexualized torture of Iraqi women while in police custody. These include Women’s Will, Occupation Watch, the Women’s Rights Association , the Iraqi League, the Iraqi National Association of Human Rights, the Human Rights’ Voice of Freedom, the Association of Muslim Scholars, the Iraqi Islamic Party and the Iraqi National Media and Culture Organization.

According to Iraqi human rights advocate and writer Haifa Zangana, the first question asked of female detainees in Iraq is, “Are you Sunni or Shia?” The second is, “Are you a virgin?”

t’s no surprise that we’re hearing allegations of rape against the Iraqi National Police, considering who trained them. DynCorp, the private contractor that the Bush Administration hired to prepare Iraq’s new police force for duty, has an ugly record of violence against women. The company was contracted by the federal government in the 1990s to train police in the Balkans. Human Rights Watch reports that DynCorp employees were found to have systematically committed sex crimes against women, including “owning” young women as slaves . One DynCorp site supervisor videotaped himself raping two women. Despite evidence, the contractors never faced criminal charges.

In the second raid on an Iraqi press building in less than 72 hours, US forces stormed the offices of the newspaper al-Da`wa today, located in the Wazariyah area of Baghdad.

Al-Da’wa is associated with the Islamic Da`wa Party, the Shi`a party whose deputy leader is the Iraqi PM Nuri Maliki.

Ali Laftih Abbas, editorial secretary of the paper, said that the “American forces came suddenly, storming the building and smashing furniture and other contents.” Abbas added that the Americans detained everyone in the building, including journalists, administrators and security guards, and confiscated the guards’ weapons. The women, including four female journalists were released after being interrogated for a number of hours separately from the men, but the Americans continued to detain the remaining employees in the building, Aswat al-Iraq reported in Arabic.

Abbas criticized the position of the Iraqi government, which has not issued a statement condemning the raid.

The Supreme Court of Canada has struck down the security certificate system used by the federal government to detain and deport foreign-born terrorist suspects.

In a 9-0 judgment handed down Friday, the court found that the system, described by the government as a key tool for safeguarding national security, violates the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

The high court gave Parliament one year to re-write the law that’s keeping three men at the centre of the case in legal limbo.

The system was challenged on constitutional grounds by three men — Algerian-born Mohamed Harkat, Moroccan-born Adil Charkaoui and Syrian native Hassan Almrei, who have all denied having ties to al-Qaeda and other such groups.

“It’s a very good decision and we’re certainly very pleased,” said lawyer Barbara Jackman, who represents Almrei. “What the Supreme Court decided was the law was not fair.”

The court said while it might not be arbitrary to detain the suspects in the first instance, it’s arbitrary to continue the detention without a review for such a long time, she said.

The decision “upheld the principle” of security certificates, but indicated that some changes need to be made, Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day said Friday in Ottawa.

“We are going to look at the ruling carefully and it is our intention to follow the Supreme Court’s rulings,” Day said after a day of talks with U.S. and Mexican officials on a range of issues, including security measures.