The Rag Blog

Sudan and Kansas might not have much in common at first glance, but only an ignoramus would deny the connections between this purple state and that bloody one in today’s globally interconnected economy. Officially, the State of Kansas makes mutual fund investments through the Kansas Public Employees Retirement System (KPERS). KPERS, in turn, manages and administers retirement plans for state and local employees. Glenn Deck, executive director of KPERS, says that while Kansas does not have any direct holdings in Sudan or any Sudanese businesses, “it does hold securities of companies that have business connections to Sudan,” to the tune of about $43.5 million, according to the Lawrence Journal-World.. This is why activists have asked Kansas lawmakers to divest the state’s assets from Sudan, thereby joining a blossoming movement to use economic tools against a genocidal regime. But so far, the GOP-controlled Kansas Senate and House of Representatives have offered a polite, but firm, “No.”

The violence in Sudan is, by now, almost a cliché in its horror and scope—as is the apathetic Western reaction. Everyone knows what’s happening—200,000 dead and 2.5 million homeless since 2003—and no one is sure what to do, or who should do it. Aside from a few rhetorical flourishes, the West, and especially President Bush, has been largely passive in response to the steady, gruesome reports from Darfur and the surrounding region.

The National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) won’t say what it plans to do with thousands of dollars in campaign donations it received from an accused terror financier.

Abdul Tawala Ibn Ali Alishtari gave $15,250 to the NRCC since 2002, according to FEC records published on the Web site opensecrets.org.

On Friday, Alishtari pled not guilty to funding terrorism and other crimes, including financial fraud.

The NRCC is the main political group dedicated to helping the Republican party win seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. Reached Monday morning for comment, an NRCC spokeswoman declined to discuss the matter on the record.
The indictment against Alishtari unsealed in Manhattan federal court Friday charges him with providing material support to terrorists by transferring $152,000 between banks to allegedly be used to purchase night-vision goggles and other equipment needed for a terrorist training camp.

Ever wondered where to find classic DVDs of British rock, blues, or the progessive works of Pink Floyd, Yes, or Tangerine Dream? Look no further than Voiceprint UK, home to an ever growing and an incredible array of vintage music from the British Isles. One of the best and most revered music documentaries of the 1960’s enjoys it’s long awaited release in this spring.

“All My Loving” was filmed and produced in the late sixties and was one of the early directorial films from celebrated director Tony Palmer. The film features rare footage of the Beatles, Pink Floyd, The Who, Cream, Frank Zappa and Jimi Hendrix. Considered a landmark release at the time, (1968), this film is shortly to be available on DVD.

There are so many near forgotten greats of the sixties and seventies, that it’s amazing so much of that footage has even survived and been digitally remastered by Voiceprint. Fans can visit their website, www.voiceprint.co.uk. One needn’t worry too much about figuring out the pounds vs. dollars, they do it for you and the DVDs actually arrive in a reasonable amount of time. (16 pounds for a DVD comes to roughly around $30).

After bringing Iraq close to destruction, President Bush is trying to rescue his Iraq policy from another: “We had to destroy them to save them” plan.

Considering the lack of expertise of the Iraq security forces and the obvious divided loyalties of its components, it is incomprehensible how Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s government can complement the United States ‘surge’ and severely contain the Iraq Civil War. Bush’s final thrust is destined to be brutal, an all-out and no holds barred military push that takes no prisoners and reduces to dust anyone who gets in the way. The warning to Iran, disguised as preventing the Islamic Republic from supplying support to the insurgents, is actually a warning not to interfere with U.S. plans. The expected results: accusations that Iranian interference has prevented a resolution of the civil strife, diversion of United States resources to settle issues with Iran and, although not immediate, a renewed Civil War that brings Iraq to its last gasp.

The Fallacies

The lies, distortions, and fallacies never end. The proposition that “faulty intelligence” was responsible for the rash actions against Iraq is easily contradicted by the incredibility of the intelligence. Testimonies from responsible government personnel certify that the Bush administration manipulated the intelligence and then tried to blame intelligence agencies for the faulty Iraq operation.

In an April 23, 2006 interview with CBS’ 60 Minutes program, former CIA official Tyler Drumheller said: “The policy was set. The war in Iraq was coming and they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy.” Former Foreign Service officer Joseph C. Wilson 4th, in a New York Times op-ed, “What I Didn’t Find in Africa,” July 6, 2003, described his pre-invasion fact-finding trip to Niger for certifying the transfer of “yellowcake” to Iraq, and concluded “there’s simply too much oversight over too small an industry for a sale to have transpired.” Wilson accused the Bush administration of “exaggerating the Iraqi threat in order to justify war.”

The latest fallacy has the Bush government ending the sectarian warfare by assisting the al-Maliki government to suddenly become neutral and fight all insurgents with equal ferocity. This maneuver can be temporarily effective, but is implausible in the long run for one simple reason; the root causes of the sectarian warfare, which are the unresolved antagonisms and political ambitions between the three major groups exaggerated by the presence of foreign fighters including those from the United States, are not being resolved. So, what can be the reasons for the ‘surge?’

US contingency plans for air strikes on Iran extend beyond nuclear sites and include most of the country’s military infrastructure, the BBC has learned.

It is understood that any such attack – if ordered – would target Iranian air bases, naval bases, missile facilities and command-and-control centres.

The US insists it is not planning to attack, and is trying to persuade Tehran to stop uranium enrichment.

The UN has urged Iran to stop the programme or face economic sanctions.

But diplomatic sources have told the BBC that as a fallback plan, senior officials at Central Command in Florida have already selected their target sets inside Iran.

That list includes Iran’s uranium enrichment plant at Natanz. Facilities at Isfahan, Arak and Bushehr are also on the target list, the sources say.

Two triggers

BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner says the trigger for such an attack reportedly includes any confirmation that Iran was developing a nuclear weapon – which it denies.

Alternatively, our correspondent adds, a high-casualty attack on US forces in neighbouring Iraq could also trigger a bombing campaign if it were traced directly back to Tehran.

Long range B2 stealth bombers would drop so-called “bunker-busting” bombs in an effort to penetrate the Natanz site, which is buried some 25m (27 yards) underground.

Much of Washington assumes that withdrawing from Iraq will lead to a bigger bloodbath. We need to question that assumption.

The Bush administration famously based its argument for invading Iraq on best-case assumptions: that we would be greeted as liberators; that a capable democratic government would quickly emerge; that our military presence would be modest and temporary; and that Iraqi oil revenues would pay for everything. All these assumptions, of course, turned out to be wrong.

Now, many of the same people who pushed for the invasion are arguing for escalating our military involvement based on a worst-case assumption: that if America leaves quickly, the Apocalypse will follow. “How would [advocates of withdrawal] respond to the eruption of full-blown civil war in Iraq and the massive ethnic cleansing it would produce?” write Robert Kagan and William Kristol in the Weekly Standard. “How would they respond to the intervention of Iraq’s neighbors, including Iran, Syria, and Turkey? And most important, what would they propose to do if, as a result of our withdrawal and the collapse of Iraq, al Qaeda and other terrorist groups managed to establish a safe haven from which to launch attacks against the United States and its allies?”

Similar rhetoric has been a staple of President Bush’s recent speeches. If the United States “fails” in Iraq — his euphemism for withdrawal — the president said in January, “[r]adical Islamic extremists would grow in strength and gain new recruits. They would be in a better position to topple moderate governments, create chaos in the region, and use oil revenues to fund their ambitions … Our enemies would have a safe haven from which to plan and launch attacks on the American people.”

This kind of thinking is also accepted by a wide range of liberal hawks and conservative realists who, whether or not they originally supported the invasion, now argue that the United States must stay. It was evident in the Iraq Study Group, led by James Baker and Lee Hamilton, which, participants say, was alarmed by expert advice that withdrawal would produce potentially catastrophic consequences. Even many antiwar liberals believe that a quick pullout would cause a bloodbath. Some favor withdrawal anyway, to cut our own losses. Others demur out of geostrategic concerns, a feeling of moral obligation to the Iraqis, or the simple fear that Democrats will be blamed for the ensuing chaos.

There is something ludicrous about the attempt by the US military in Iraq to persuade the world that the simple but devastating roadside bomb or IED (improvised explosive device) is a highly developed weapon requiring Iranian expertise.

Here is the official police report of one IED attack. It reads: “At about 8.25am, 100 men of the X Regt with their colonel in charge, marched with their band from the military barracks at Y to their rifle range via fixed route. When they got to place Z a land mine exploded, killing three outright and wounding 22 others, three of these died shortly afterwards. The mine was connected to an electric battery by about 150 yards of cable. It is believed that there were only two men involved in carrying out this outrage.”

This is fairly typical of a roadside bomb. It might have happened in Iraq yesterday – except it didn’t. The IED in question exploded in the town of Youghal in County Cork on 21 June 1921. I happen to have read the Royal Irish Constabulary report on the incident, because I was born 29 years later about two miles away from the site.

IEDs have not changed much in the decades that followed. They have been used everywhere from Cyprus to Vietnam. They are cheap and easy to make, and can be detonated by a single person. They came as a nasty shock to the incoming US soldiers who invaded Iraq in 2003 because they were so well equipped to fight the Soviet army – American military procurement long ago detached itself from real conditions on the battlefield.

In early 2004 I met some US combat engineers, or sappers, charged with the lethal job of finding these bombs, which were nicknamed “convoy killers”. Because the Pentagon was in a state of denial about their very existence, the sappers had received no training in locating them. A sergeant told me that he had obtained with great difficulty an old but still valid US army handbook, printed during the Vietnam War, about IEDs. The book had not been reissued because to do so might appear to contradict the Pentagon’s line that Iraq was not like Vietnam.

The US Army is pretending that “explosively formed penetrators” are a new form of weapon which could only have been obtained in Iran. It claimed last week that the so-called EFPs had been supplied to the Shia militias and had killed 170 US troops. But the US has been primarily fighting a Sunni insurgency, and has had only intermittent clashes with Shia militiamen.

18 February 2007 – From a thriving middle income economy in the 1970’s and 1980’s, one third of today’s Iraqi population lives in poverty with more than 5 per cent living in extreme poverty, a new United Nations-backed study says.

Prepared by the Iraqi Central Organization for Statistics and Information Technology with the support of the UN Development Programme (UNDP), the statistics show that a high percentage of people in Iraq live under various levels of poverty and human deprivation despite the country’s huge economic and natural resources.

The policies applied to transform the Iraqi economy to a free market, such as the lifting of subsidies and the dismantling of state instruments, are exacerbating deprivation levels, UNDP said.

The study also highlights significant variations in living standards across the country, with the southern region in Iraq showing the highest level of deprivation, followed by the centre and then the north. Rural areas show three times higher levels of deprivation than urban areas, with the Baghdad area being the best in the country.

“This study will be an important addition to the toolkit of policy makers, development planners and practitioners” said UNDP Iraq Director Paolo Lembo.

The Democrats and Republicans who oppose Bush’s war in Iraq face a political quandary–pulling the plug on the war seems (or can be portrayed as) pulling the plug on the American troops before they’ve finished their mission there. But the mission there has become so complex, and so interwoven with other issues, that it’s become a Gordian Knot–so intricately interwoven it can not be untangled. Well, the myth tells us that the real Gordian Knot was undone with a simple slice of a sword. Similarly, opponents of the war can slice through it with an equally elegant solution, which can be summarized in two words:

The last few of weeks were very busy. I spent a couple of weeks in Malaysia and South Korea, and I’ll share two of my pictures with you below.

But more importantly, I spent the weekend translating this leaked copy of the Iraqi oil law with niki (thank you salam for sending me the link). Translating legal documents can be really hard!

We just finished the translation, and you can download it by clicking here.

Please feel free to widely distribute this document. It’s important to start a stronger debate and to try to educate Iraqis and Americans about this catastrophic law that will facilitate the further looting of Iraqi oil, and will achieve nothing other than increasing the levels of violence and anger in Iraq.

This law legalizes PSAs (production sharing agreements) in Iraq. Iraq will be the only country in the middle east with such contracts privatising Iraqi oil and giving foreign companies crazy rates of profit that may reach to more than three fourth of the general revenue. Iraq and Iraqis need every Dinar that comes from oil sales. In addition to the financial aspects of this law, it can be considered the funding tool for splitting Iraq into three states. It undermines the central government and distributes oil revenues directly to the three regions, which sets the foundations for what Iraq’s enemies are trying to achieve in terms of establishing three independent states.

SPARTANBURG, S.C. (Feb. 18) – Republican presidential candidate John McCain , looking to improve his standing with the party’s conservative voters, said Sunday the court decision that legalized abortion should be overturned.

“I do not support Roe versus Wade. It should be overturned,” the Arizona senator told about 800 people in South Carolina, one of the early voting states.

McCain also vowed that if elected, he would appoint judges who “strictly interpret the Constitution of the United States and do not legislate from the bench.”

The landmark 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade gave women the right to choose an abortion to terminate a pregnancy. The Supreme Court has narrowly upheld the decision, with the presence of an increasing number of more conservative justices on the court raising the possibility that abortion rights would be limited.