The Rag Blog

It’s like asking the Mafia to investigate its own drug-running and prostitution operations.

“A long awaited Pentagon Inspector General’s report into the Office of Special Plans and its activities surrounding pre-war intelligence in the lead up to the Iraq war has been completed,” writes Larisa Alexandrovna for Raw Story. “According to sources close to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the classified version of the Pentagon IG’s report will be released to committee members Friday…. it remains unclear how objective the Inspector General’s report will be, given that the Pentagon was tasked with investigating itself.”

Since the Pentagon is neocon occupied territory with an Iran-Contra criminal overseeing daily operations, we can assume objectivity will be tossed out the window. “It’s also uncertain just how much light two to three declassified pages will shed on questions surrounding what many consider a rogue Pentagon intelligence unit created to feed the White House information favoring a case for war.”

The ‘surge’ is going well. With streets blocked by check points and American troops ‘advising’ Iraqi forces, on consequtive days, the Bab Sharqi market was attacked, body parts strewn amongst stalls, goods – and bodies and injured hauled away on the wooden carts used to bring goods to sell. Shorja market was next in firing line, with its covered and outdoor stalls, alleys, serving all from traders who used to come from Kurdistan for the cheaper Baghdad price (road now too dangerous) locals, the Catholic priest, workers and refugees housed in the church moments walk away.

Next was the Friday Ghazil animal market, believed the oldest in the Middle East, a weekly amble through the exotic, the heartbreaking, the songbirds, snakes and the illicit. An exceptional act of bravery was the attack on the bird market. It takes a particularly fearless mindset to declare a war on birds. The mortars which landed in the Kholoud secondary school, in west Baghdad’s Adil district, killing five students and injuring twenty, shredding young bodies with flying glass, were reportedly fired just thirty metres from a ‘surge’ crackdown checkpoint.

In 2003 Baghdad’s ancient Muntanabi book market, a place to wander in wonder at its offerings, was blown up. It had stood on the site for inumerable generations, books laid out on the street, on tressles, on laps – and in the ancient alleyways and covered nooks and crannies, near dark, where the dust was blown off seventeenth century gems and first editions of the wonders of french philosphers, poets. Goethe, Shakespeare, Dickens, hid on piled shelves, no country’s greats seemingly not to be found. The booksellers, professional or amateur, handled their volumes as if fragile, utterly precious. A purchase meant a parting.

‘Bring ’em on’ : the books, the birds, the kids, in this ‘last ditch crackdown’, part of a plan devised by George W. Bush, according to Al Jazeera. Perhaps when the last remnant of Mesapotamia’s ancient heart and soul has been finally ripped out and the last Iraqi has left or been slaughtered, the new pioneers will arrive and build Walmarts, Starbucks, Kentucky Frieds, Mesapotamia Mackburgers, from northern Nineveh’s wonders to Basra, from Babylon to Eden (Qurna.) The myriad marvels of this extraordinary land are truly pearls cast amongst swine – the occupying, brute forces.

The duty of care these illegal occupiers have is total, thus they are responsible for ever tragedy. But so depraved are these new Mongols, they have moved on from sending pictures of burned and slaughtered Iraqis to porn sites in exchange for their revolting images and reportedly now collect Iraqis’ brain matter for ‘trophies’ to put in the fridge back at base. Heaven help the communities to which they return and the children they raise. And again, from where are these deviants recruited? Such psychotic sicknesses could surely only have come from a recruiting drive in secure psychiatric institutions, or maximum security penal institutions.

Our occupation of Iraq has been a losing game for a lot of reasons. Consider one Army unit’s effort to hand out hundreds of soccer balls to Iraqi kids.

Feb. 7, 2007 | On a hot summer morning in 2004, Garett Reppenhagen dragged himself out of his cot at a rudimentary Army base, 40 miles north of Baghdad, for a briefing on the day’s combat mission. His battalion of the 1st Infantry Division was holed up in an abandoned warehouse and sleeping in steel trailers with sandbags stacked in the windows. They were stationed on the outskirts of Baquba, a city rife with insurgents in the violent Sunni Triangle. As the soldiers gathered around their Humvees, Reppenhagen, a scout and sniper, figured he knew what his lieutenant was going to say.

There had probably been another roadside bomb nearby. That meant Reppenhagen and his platoon, acting on intelligence that might be good or bad, would drive their Humvees into a nearby neighborhood, seal off entire town blocks, search houses and round up a bunch of men who might or might not have some tie to the insurgency.

What the lieutenant told them, however, had nothing to do with the enemy. They were going to hand out soccer balls to Iraqi kids in the surrounding villages. Reppenhagen was surprised. “You do so much crappy shit over there that when you get a mission to actually help people, it’s encouraging,” he said.

It wasn’t clear who came up with the idea to win over Iraqis with soccer balls. A March 2004 press report from the Pentagon describes a unit of the 1st Armored Division handing out soccer balls in the Karadah district of Baghdad. “The children were thrilled to receive new soccer balls as soldiers tossed the balls to the boys and girls,” the report said. In a December 2004 release, Kiowa helicopter pilots with the 1st Cavalry Division are described tossing soccer balls to grateful kids in an operation aptly dubbed “Operation Soccer Ball.” Spc. Thom Cassidy, who worked in the logistics shop in Reppenhagen’s battalion, recalled that giving out soccer balls to the kids around Baquba was passed down from higher command to a battalion colonel at the base. In any event, Cassidy said, “this was a very, very Army idea. This was the prototypical Army idea.”

At Forward Operating Base Warhorse, Reppenhagen and his fellow soldiers encountered a five-ton truck stacked with large cardboard boxes. They began to unload the truck and open the boxes. There were maybe 50 soccer balls in each box. But the balls had not been inflated. They were all flat. Reppenhagen scoured the boxes. No pumps. What was worse, nobody had bothered to pack the needles to inflate the balls.

KUALA LUMPUR, Feb 7 (Bernama) — The killing of hundreds of people in Fallujah was sparked off when children below the age of 16 demonstrated in the streets of the city protesting against the American occupation of their school and the invasion of Iraq, a war crime victim told a war conference, here Wednesday.

Abbas Abid, 43, said when the demonstrators reached the school, the American troops shot at these children and killed 16 of them, one of whom was his nephew.

“After the shooting, some relatives of the murdered children, decided to fight the American troops for killing their children. This occurred at a time when resistance fighters throughout Iraq began their fight against the US occupation,” he said.

Presenting his statutory declaration at the three-day War Crimes International Conference organised by the Perdana Global Peace Organisation at the Putra World Trade Centre, which ends today, Abas said after the invasion by the US army in Iraq, Fallujah city was not occupied immediately by any US troop.

He said it was only about four months later that American troops entered Fallujah city and divided themselves into different groups, and they used the government buildings and schools as their military bases and/or locations. These buildings were surrounded by tall barbed wire fences.

He said the American troops allowed the Iraqi army camps and bases to be unguarded, and this lack of security enabled the people to take weapons and ammunition from these camps to protect themselves.

“This was planned by the American troops as they wanted a civil war to erupt between the Iraqi people.

“At the time, the US troops did not think that the Iraqi people would oppose the occupation and fight them and that we would welcome them as liberators. They did not understand that the Iraqi people opposed occupation and did not want foreign troops in their country,” he said in a session chaired by former Prime Minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad.

Abas, who is an electrical engineer, said the military operation continued for about two months and the majority of the citizens left Fallujah waiting for the end of the military operation.

When the military operation ended, the American troops could not enter the city following a deal made between the defenders and the attackers. The situation in Fallujah became a lot better and things were calmer with the people who had fled the city earlier returning to their homes.

About six months later, the American troops again attacked the city as they could not accept their earlier defeat at Fallujah, Abbas said.

“This time, the American troops used all sorts of weapons and equipment like planes, heavy tanks, heavy canons, missiles and weapons with traces of uranium. They killed a lot of people using this method.

“The football field became a cemetery to bury the Fallujah people who died. Injured Fallujah people were not allowed to be admitted into the hospital. They were left in the open to die.”

CAMP PENDLETON, United States (AFP) – A US Marine squad leader congratulated soldiers “for getting away with murder” after an Iraqi civilian was bound and shot dead at point-blank range, a military court has heard.

Sergeant Lawrence Hutchins, who will stand trial for murder next month, made the comments after the abduction and killing of 52-year-old Hashim Ibrahim Award in Hamdania outside Baghdad last April, a witness testified.

Navy medic Melson Bacos, who was jailed for one year last September for his role in Awad’s killing, recounted Hutchins’ comments while giving evidence at a sentencing hearing for another Marine, Trent Thomas.

Bacos said that after Awad had been shot in a roadside hole, squad members had to work quickly to remove “zip ties” used to bind his hands and feet.

The squad wanted to make it look like they had just come upon the victim, when in fact they had dragged him from his home, Bacos said.

Baghdad – At least 33 Iraqis were killed and 58 wounded in a series of blasts across Iraq over a 24-hour period, sources said Thursday.

Meanwhile, joint Iraqi and US forces stormed Thursday the Iraqi Health Ministry building, detaining Deputy Health Minister Hakem al-Zamli, ministry spokesman Kasem Allawi told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

Joint Iraqi and US forces stormed the ministry premises, firing several gunshots in the air as they forced reception employees to remain still.

The forces broke into al-Zamli’s office and took him to some unknown place, Allawi added. It was reported that some ministry employees were also detained.

FORT LEWIS — The court-martial of 1st Lt. Ehren Watada ended in a mistrial Wednesday.

The case’s judge, Lt. Col. John Head, declared the trial over after a day of wrangling over a stipulation of facts that Watada had signed before the trial and that would have been part of the instructions to the jury. The judge decided that Watada never intended when he signed the stipulation to mean that he had a duty to go to Iraq with his unit.

Again the issue was Watada’s views on the Iraq war — opinions that kept him from going with his unit to the conflict and that the judge didn’t want brought up at the court-martial.

Watada, a Stryker Brigade soldier, is the first commissioned officer to refuse to be deployed to Iraq. Watada’s unit left this sprawling base for Iraq in June, but Watada remained behind. He said he believes the war is illegal and that his duty is to not abide by illegal orders.

But Head tried to keep the court-martial from becoming a tribunal on the war and its legality and has ruled that Watada’s attorney cannot present witnesses to question the war’s legality. Outside the base, that has been the issue as peace activists from across the country have rallied to Watada’s side.

Watada is charged with missing movement to Iraq and with two counts of conduct unbecoming an officer. Those last two charges result from statements Watada made against the war in a video tape released to reporters after he made his refusal to go to Iraq public and to a Veterans for Peace convention at the University of Washington.

He had been charged with two other counts of conduct unbecoming for interviews he gave. Prosecutors dropped those charged in return for Watada’s signing a stipulation that he had given the interviews. He also acknowledged in the stipulation that he didn’t go with his unit to Iraq, though he didn’t admit his guilt to the missing movement charge.

With the jury of officers out of the courtroom Wednesday morning, Head wanted to question Watada about the stipulation to make sure that it was accurate and to protect the lieutenant against any mistakes in it.

There are many shades of rightwing punditry in our country. Among the shadiest is Jonah Goldberg.

With arrogance seemingly matched only by his ignorance, Goldberg was just being Goldberg when he offered this wager two years ago:

Let’s make a bet. I predict that Iraq won’t have a civil war, that it will have a viable constitution, and that a majority of Iraqis and Americans will, in two years time, agree that the war was worth it.

I’ll bet $1,000 (which I can hardly spare right now).

The two-year period comes due Thursday, Feb 8. Even Goldberg now realizes his prediction was totally wrong — with poll after poll showing most Americans do not “agree that the war was worth it.” (Not to mention what Iraqis think of the war or Goldberg’s boast that “Iraq won’t have a civil war.”)

So shouldn’t Goldberg – or somebody — pay off the $1,000?

The bet was offered near the end of an overheated blogo-debate between Goldberg (at National Review Online) and Dr. Juan Cole, the Middle East scholar from University of Michigan. In proposing the wager to Cole, Goldberg goaded: “Money where your mouth is, doc. One caveat: Because I don’t think it’s right to bet on such serious matters for personal gain, if I win, I’ll donate the money to the USO.”

Cole reacted to the proposed bet with disgust – calling it symbolic of “the neo-imperial American Right. They are making their own fortunes with a wager on the fates of others, whom they are treating like ants.” Wrote Cole: “Here we have a prominent American media star. . .betting on Iraqis as though they are greyhounds in a race.”

BAGHDAD, 7 February (IRIN) – Nearly 500 Arabs took to the streets on Wednesday morning in the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, some 290km north of the capital, Baghdad, denouncing a decision by a governmental committee to relocate tens of thousands of mostly Shi’ite Arabs currently living in the city.

“We vehemently reject this decision. We will not leave Kirkuk by force or without force. If they [Kurds] try to force us out of the city, then there will be dangerous reactions against them,” said Sheikh Raad al-Najafi, 37, an Arab Shi’ite religious cleric at the Kirkuk office of the radical Shi’ite leader Muqtada al-Sadr.

“Implementing this decision is against the benefit of Iraq in general, and Kirkuk in particular, in terms of security and stability,” al-Najafi told IRIN in a telephone interview while he was taking part in the demonstration.

A drug company was last week accused of concealing evidence about the safety of the antidepressant Seroxat. According to leading psychiatrist Professor David Healy, this is just the latest in a string of cases where patients and medical professionals have been misled about a drug’s adverse effects.

Ten years ago, I sat faced with boxes and boxes that contained a dirty secret. Inside were thousands of confidential internal company documents about Prozac, an anti-depressant then being prescribed to millions.

The secret they revealed was that public statements about the safety of the drug were a lie; that the company knew Prozac was responsible for a raised risk of suicide and was only slightly more effective than a placebo.

Several years later I was faced with the secrets of another antidepressant – Seroxat.

No one outside the two companies, and few within them, knew what those boxes contained; I saw them because I was an expert witness in a court case.

Unfortunately, such revelations have since become all too common. Documents prised out of companies by American court cases have become the main way we have of discovering the truth about some of our best-selling drugs.