The Rag Blog

During the press conference however, Bush paid a noticeable amount of attention to Iranian influence in Iraq, particularly administration claims Iranian government forces are arming Iraqi fighters that are attacking and killing US troops.

Before getting into the President’s statements, recent government assessments of Iran’s role in Iraq should be reviewed.

January’s National Intelligence Estimate, titled ‘Prospects for Iraq’s Stability: A Challenging Road Ahead,’ addressed the effects Iraq’s neighbours were having on the war. In the unclassified executive summary, the report, a consensus opinion of all 16 American intelligence agencies, read,

‘Iraq’s neighbors influence, and are influenced by, events within Iraq, but the involvement of these outside actors is not likely to be a major driver of violence or the prospects for stability because of the self-sustaining character of Iraq’s internal sectarian dynamics. Nonetheless, Iranian lethal support for select groups of Iraqi Shia militants clearly intensifies the conflict in Iraq.’

The remaining classified portion has been described by members of Congress who have read it to continue in the same vein.

A recent Congressional Research Service report given to Congresspersons also reviewed Iran’s role in Iraq.

‘Iran’s influence over the post-Saddam government in Iraq is substantial and growing because the dominant parties in Iraq have long-standing ties to Tehran.’

…

‘Iranian influence in Iraq has added to U.S.-Iran tensions over Iran’s nuclear program and regional ambitions, such as its aid to Lebanese Hezbollah. U.S. and allied officials assert that Iran is providing financial and materiel support to the Shiite militias discussed above, although a few reports say some of the weapons might also be flowing to Sunni insurgents. In providing support to armed groups, Iran might be seeking to develop a broad range of options in Iraq that includes sponsoring violence to pressure U.S. and British forces to leave Iraq, or to bog down the United States militarily and thereby deter it from action against Iran’s nuclear program. On the other hand, Iran might not necessarily want attacks on U.S. forces because a U.S. departure from Iraq, if that were the result, might leave the pro-Iranian government in Baghdad vulnerable to collapse. Those who believe Iran is proceeding cautiously in Iraq tend to view Iran’s aid to Shiite militias as a means of increasing its influence over them.’

After listing similar claims made in the Defense Department’s Iran dossier (more on this later), the report threw caution to the allegations.

‘Some might argue that the U.S. accounts have some inconsistencies. High-explosive shaped charges are being used primarily by Sunni insurgents against U.S. armor, and far less so by Shiite militias who generally field light weapons and have not attacked U.S. forces often, to date. This raises the question of whether or not Iran, as a deliberate policy, is aiding Sunni insurgent groups as a means of harming U.S. forces, or whether these explosives are reaching Sunni groups without official Iranian involvement. Other questions have arisen over the quality of U.S. evidence; a U.S. briefing to detail evidence of Iranian involvement in Iraq, planned for late January 2007, has been postponed repeatedly. Others question U.S. assertions that Iran might have helped insurgents conduct a January 20, 2007, attack on a U.S.-Iraq liaison facility in Karbala, in which five U.S. soldiers were killed.’

Early this month the Federal Bureau of Investigation revealed that it has compiled a list of 51 still-unsolved murders reported in connection with Southern civil rights campaigns during the 1950s and 60s. Congressman John Lewis has called for funding their investigation.

The number of unsolved cases suggests that activists and sympathizers of the Movement, as it was called, were participants, not merely in a series of protests, but in an unrecognized and asymmetric civil war.

The nation hasn’t called the civil rights turmoil a war, and the consequence of its lexicon of evasion and elision has been a failure to honor, absolve and compensate hundreds of its veterans.

Those who were killed and brutalized by racists during that period have not been termed, Argentine- or Mexican-style, victims of a “Dirty War,” nor have civil rights soldiers been honored as war heroes, perhaps they were pledged to a strategy of nonviolence–and kept their word. But on the other side of the war, as the FBI’s list makes clear, violence was S.O.P., Standard Operating Procedure.

Dozens bombings and burnings of churches, schools and stores, “acts of terror,” we’d say today, are still officially untallied, not scheduled for even an FBI review. Nor are hundreds of attacks in which bullets missed their marks. Many of these assaults were carried out by Ku Klux Klansmen who, in the current lexicon, would be styled as “members of a Christian extremist militia.” If there’s collusion today between the Malaki government and the Mehdi army, it is a mirror of the nexus between Southern lawmen and the Klan.

Commentators and historians have avoided the term “displacement of the civilian population” to describe events of the civil rights movement. Yet the tents of black sharecroppers who were evicted from their homes for attempting to vote dotted woodlands across the South. In plain language, theirs were “refugee camps.”

A bill introduced last week by Representative Lamar Smith (R-TX) is beginning to raise eyebrows.

[It] would require ISPs to record all users’ surfing activity, IM conversations and email traffic indefinitely . The bill, dubbed the Safety Act by sponsor Lamar Smith, a republican congressman from Texas, would impose fines and a prison term of one year on ISPs which failed to keep full records.

This is a terrifying development and it must be stopped before it gains any significant momentum. Background, Action items and contact information below the fold.

Under the guise of reducing child pornography, the SAFETY (Stopping Adults Facilitating the Exploitation of Today’s Youth) Act is currently the gravest threat to digital privacy rights on the Internet. Given the increasing tendency of people, especially young people, to use the Internet as a primary means of communication, this measure would affect nearly all Americans in ways we are only beginning to understand. Also, given the fact that the Act requires all Internet Service Providers to record the web surfing activity of all Internet users, this amounts to the warrantless wiretapping of the entire Internet.

Amazingly, although the bill was introduced and referred to the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday Feb. 6, it has been virtually ignored by both the corporate media and major blogs alike. By combining such draconian legislation with several child pornography measures, Smith is trying to pull a fast one on the Judiciary Committee and on the democratically controlled Congress as a whole. I say we don’t let this happen. So, first, a little background information. Then below, I’ve outlined a few actions you can take if you’d like to spread the word on this.

Background :
The original SAFETY Act, introduced in June of 2006 by Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ), was shot down due to free speech concerns over aspects of the bill other than the ones I’ve focused on here. At the time, the Center for Democracy and Technology wrote that the bill “would undermine First Amendment free speech protections and do nothing to protect children on the Internet.”

So what was Lamar Smith’s response, you ask? He added the misguided measures discussed above in an attempt to fulfill the demands of the FBI. In an October 2006 conference of police chiefs, FBI Director Robert Mueller made the following statement :

Terrorists coordinate their plans cloaked in the anonymity of the Internet, as do violent sexual predators prowling chat rooms. All too often, we find that before we can catch these offenders, Internet service providers have unwittingly deleted the very records that would help us identify these offenders and protect future victims.

Mueller was signaling to Congress that he would like to see measures put in place that would require ISPs to store records of all Internet usage so he could access it when he felt it was neccessary. But, as has been pointed out :

The thing about retention laws is that they require all data to be maintained, not simply the data from child pornographers and terrorists. This means that such laws are usually favored by other, unrelated groups who would like access to such log files. Groups like the music labels. In Europe, where retention rules are already in place, the entertainment industry has already stated its belief that the data should be available for use in the investigation of any crime, even copyright infringement.

Action:
There are two ways to make members of Congress listen to your concerns.

1. Inundate them with phone calls and emails.
2. Get negative media coverage of what they are trying to accomplish.

Please contact any or all of the people and organizations listed below. Let them know that the SAFETY ACT, as it is written, is not acceptable.

Sponsor:
Rep. Lamar Smith, web form , 202-225-4236

Cosponsors:
Rep. Steve Chabot, (202) 225-2216
Rep. Tom Feeney, (202) 225-2706
Rep. J. Randy Forbes, (202) 225-6365
Rep. Trent Franks, (202) 225-4576
Rep. Elton Gallegly, (202) 225-5811
Rep. Dan Lungren, (202) 225-5716
Rep. Mike Pence, (202) 225-3021

Professor Sami Al-Arian, whose persecution and show trial are parts of a long string of egregious acts of injustice perpetrated by the Bush administration, has been on a hunger strike since Jan. 22 to protest the prolongation of his imprisonment.

Al-Arian’s travels through the halls of American justice, and now the subterranean corridors of the nation’s Stygian prison system, reads like a bad rip-off of Kafka. Al-Arian was acquitted on eight of the 17 counts against him by a Florida jury, which deadlocked on the rest. He agreed to plead guilty to one of the remaining charges four months later in exchange for being released and deported. The judge gave Al-Arian as much prison time as possible under a plea deal – 57 months at his sentencing. He was set to be released this April, something that now appears unlikely.

The trial was a stinging rebuke to the Bush administration’s drive to turn the American judicial system into kangaroo courts. Over the six-month trial a parade of 80 witnesses, including 21 from Israel, attempted to brand the Florida professor as a terrorist. The government submitted thousands of documents, phone interceptions and physical surveillance culled from 12 years of investigations. The trial cost taxpayers an estimated $80 million. The 94 charges against Al-Arian and his co-defendants resulted in no convictions. But because Al-Arian has twice refused to testify before a grand jury in Virginia in a case involving a Muslim think tank, he has now been charged with contempt of court. The date of his release could be extended by as much as 18 months.

Al-Arian, who is a diabetic, began a hunger strike in response.

The number of waivers granted to Army recruits with criminal bacckgrounds has doubled in three years, according to press reports on data released by the Defense Department.

“The Army and Marine Corps are letting in more recruits with criminal records, including some with felony convictions, reflecting the increased pressure of five years of war and its mounting casualties,” Lolita C. Baldor reports for the Associated Press.

In Wednesday’s New York Times, Lizette Alvarez notes that “the number of waivers the military granted to Army recruits with criminal backgrounds has nearly doubled in the past three years, jumping to more than 8,000 in 2006 from about 4,900 in 2003, Department of Defense records show.”

“In the past few years, the Army has employed a range of tactics to expand its diminishing pool of recruits,” Alvarez adds. “It has offered larger cash bonuses for enlisting, allowed more high school dropouts and applicants with low scores on the Army’s aptitude test to join, and loosened weight and age restrictions.”

Excerpts from Associated Press article:

According to data compiled by the Defense Department, the number of Army and Marine recruits needing waivers for felonies and serious misdemeanors, including minor drug offenses, has grown since 2003. The Army granted more than double the number of waivers for felonies and misdemeanors in 2006 than it did in 2003. Some recruits may get more than one waiver.

The military routinely grants waivers to admit recruits who have criminal records, medical problems or low aptitude scores that would otherwise disqualify them from service. Overall the majority are moral waivers, which include some felonies, misdemeanors, and traffic and drug offenses.

The number of felony waivers granted by the Army grew from 411 in 2003 to 901 in 2006, according to the Pentagon, or about one in 10 of the moral waivers approved that year. Other misdemeanors, which could be petty theft, writing a bad check or some assaults, jumped from about 2,700 to more than 6,000 in 2006. The minor crimes represented more than three-quarters of the moral waivers granted by the Army in 2006, up from more than half in 2003.

Army and Defense Department officials defended the waiver program as a way to admit young people who may have made a mistake early in life but have overcome past behavior. And they said about two-thirds of the waivers granted by the Marines are for drug use, because they — unlike the other services — require a waiver if someone has been convicted once for marijuana use.

BAGHDAD, Feb. 13 — The Iraqi government on Tuesday ordered tens of thousands of Baghdad residents to leave homes they are occupying illegally, in a surprising and highly challenging effort to reverse the tide of sectarian cleansing that has left the capital bloodied and Balkanized.

In a televised speech, Lt. Gen. Aboud Qanbar, who is leading the new crackdown, also announced the closing of Iraq’s borders with Iran and Syria, an extension of the curfew in Baghdad by an hour, and the setup of new checkpoints run by the Defense and Interior Ministries, both of which General Qanbar said he now controlled.

He said the government would break into homes and cars it deemed dangerous, open mail and eavesdrop on phone calls.

General Qanbar did not mention the role American forces would play in the crackdown, but his remarks were clearly timed to coincide with more aggressive efforts by American troops on the streets of Baghdad. The Americans have been establishing outposts — called joint security stations — to work alongside the Iraqi Army and police to end the sectarian bloodletting.

On Tuesday, senior American officers expressed surprise about the plan to resettle people who had moved from their homes amid sectarian cleansing. But they declined to be identified, saying they did not want to contradict the Iraqi general.

General Qanbar indicated that the plan would be carried out evenly across Baghdad. But critics said Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, who has come under intense criticism for pursuing a sectarian Shiite agenda, might be trying to appease his detractors and may not actually carry out the plan. Some feared that his government might not apply the same pressure to residents of Shiite areas.

Since the bombing of a sacred Shiite shrine in Samarra a year ago, the sectarian map of Baghdad has been almost completely redrawn, as Shiites pushed Sunnis from neighborhood after neighborhood.

The general faces a monumental task. Even without the daily violence, continuing sectarian killings and a lack of security forces to perform basic policing tasks, there is no system in place to investigate the veracity of people’s claims. In addition, thousands of people took over homes immediately after the invasion, claiming basic squatters’ rights.

Under the general’s plan, people who have illegally occupied homes will have 15 days to leave. While they are there, he said, they must protect the home, not steal from it or damage it.

“Anyone who does not follow this law will be treated according to the antiterrorism laws,” he said, adding that the government would set up committees to determine ownership.

2007-02-13 | “I have thought some of nature’s journeymen had made men and not made them too well, they imitated humanity so abominably.” (Shakespeare: Hamlet.)

“The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them but to be indifferent to them; that is the essence of inhumanity.” (George Bernard Shaw: The Devil’s Disciple.)

The “Contract Interrogator”

Writing in the Washington Post (9th February 2007) Eric Fairm writes of: “an interrogator’s nightmare”. “A man with no face stares at me from the corner of a room. He pleads for help, but I am afraid to move. He begins to cry. It is a pitiful sound and it sickens me. He screams, but as I awaken, I realize the screams are mine.”

Fairm is plagued by nightmares. He was a “contract interrogator”, for the 82nd Airborne Division, in Falluja during part of 2004, one “… of two civilian interrogators, assigned to the division interrogation facility”.

The man who returns to torment his dreams was “… a suspected associate” of a Ba’ath Party leader in Anbar province… who had been captured two months earlier”. In other words, he was a possible pan-Arab nationalist, living in his own country. “Nationalist” becomes a pejorative word when used by Western politicians, in fact, it has the same meaning as patriot (“a person who vigorously supports his country and its way of life”, Collins.) .

The haunted Mr Fairm has “long since forgotten” the name of his nocturnal visitor – something one would have thought might also haunt – but not his instructions: “I was to deprive the detainee of sleep .. forcing him to stand in a corner and stripping him of his clothes.” There will be many that will applaud honesty in admitting Abu Ghraib-like torment, “mistakes” and failing to “uphold the standards of human decency”. Instead: “I intimidated, degraded a man who could not defend himself”, writes Fairm.

He also watched naked prisoners, forced to stand through the night, shivering; saw degradation, deprivation, punching, kicking “used daily”. “Appalled”, he admits lacking the courage to stand up and challenge “friends and colleagues”. With “friends” like these …

Fairm argues, that unless “myriad mistakes” are addressed “there can be no hope of success in Iraq.”

One thing is clear, the man does need help. There is no hope of success in Iraq. Popping round with $2,500 a head (seemingly the current going rate) for blowing families to bits in their beds and blasting their homes over them, or blowing in the door of the family home, to invade in boots, then say “sorry”, or visit the family of the illegally snatched detainee (you are illegal invaders, please remember) is not going to win hearts and minds in millennia. The “damage” done to the people of Iraq, described, hardly addresses the enormity. “Damage” is car dent, a cracked window, an accidental act, not pre-meditated torment, physical damage, physical assault and humiliation.

WASHINGTON – The first major effort by the administration of US President George W Bush to substantiate its case that the Iranian government has been providing weapons to Iraqi Shi’ites who oppose the occupation undermines the administration’s political line by showing that it has been unable to find any real evidence of an Iranian government role.

Contradicting recent claims by both Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates that US intelligence had proof of Iranian government responsibility for the supply of such weapons, the unnamed officials who briefed the media on Sunday admitted that the claim is merely “an inference” rather than based on a trail of evidence.

Although it was clearly not the intention, moreover, the briefing revealed for the first time that the Iranians and Iraqis detained by US forces in recent months did not provide any evidence implicating either the Iranian government or the Islamic Revolutionary Guards in the acquisition of armor-piercing explosive devices and other weapons by Iraqi Shi’ite groups.

In the end, the administration presentation suggested that there could be no other explanation for the presence of Iranian-made weapons than official government sponsorship of smuggling them into Iraq. But in doing so, they had to ignore a well-known reality: most weapons, including armor-piercing projectiles, can be purchased by anyone through intermediaries in the Middle East.

Indeed, General Peter Pace, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in an interview published while he was on a visit to Indonesia that he did not know whether Iranian-made material used to assemble roadside bombs in Iraq had been supplied on Tehran’s orders. And speaking on CNN, CentCom Commander William Fallon, the top commander of US forces in the Middle East, was asked about the administration’s claim over Iran supplying weapons to Iraq. “I have no idea who may be actually hands-on in this stuff,” Fallon said.

The briefing in Baghdad on Sunday displayed a number of weapons or photographs of weapons said to have been found in Iraq, including what were called “explosively formed penetrators” (EFPs), which the officials said were smuggled into the country by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Quds Force. The RPG-7s and 81-millimeter mortar rounds shown to reporters did indeed have markings showing that they had been recently manufactured, and there is no reason to doubt that those weapons were manufactured in Iran.

Google is playing an unlikely role in the Iraq war. Its online satellite map of the world, Google Earth, is being used to help people survive sectarian violence in Baghdad.

As the communal bloodshed has worsened, some Iraqis have set up advice websites to help others avoid the death squads.

One tip – on the Iraq League site, one of the best known – is for people to draw up maps of their local area using Google Earth’s detailed imagery of Baghdad so they can work out escape routes and routes to block.

It’s another example of the central role technology plays in the conflict – with the widespread use of mobile phones, satellite television as well as the internet – by all sides and for many purposes.

For some time now, vigilante-style guard forces have been operating in many neighbourhoods, especially in Sunni areas targeted by Shia militias.

Many Sunnis see the Shia-dominated police forces as just as much of a threat, because of evidence of their involvement in kidnappings.

So part of the job of the local guards is keeping them out.

With Google Earth, the Iraq League website suggests, people can also work out the most likely approach of their attackers.

It’s thought that insurgents have also used the map site, examining the detailed images to pick out potential targets.

‘Killed or tortured’

The advice on the Iraq League site – which is actually run from the UK – begins with a warning to avoid being taken in the first place.

“If they arrest you, you will be killed or tortured.”

The Iraq League says it is aimed at all Iraqis caught up in the violence, but it is slanted towards the Sunni community.

“If they tell you we just have a few questions and you will be back in an hour, don’t believe them. You will be dead in an hour or disappear for months,” the warning continues.

Who “they” are is rarely spelled out, apart from the occasional mention of Ministry of Interior patrols.