The Rag Blog

The largely unstated word at the massive anti-war demonstration and march in Washington on Saturday was “impeachment.” Not that it wasn’t on demonstrators’ lips and signs, but it wasn’t coming from the podium.

The march, organized by United for Peace and Justice, was instead deliberately focused narrowly on the issue of ending the war in Iraq and preventing an invasion of Iran. But clearly, behind that was the sense that the US government is in the hands of a cabal of warmongers and anti-democratic usurpers who are intent on broadening the war in the Middle East, not ending it , and that the Democrats in the 110th Congress haven’t got the spine to stop them (a group from Seattle actually addressed this with a giant white spine float emblazoned with the words “investigate, impeach, indict”).

Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), the new head of the House Judiciary Committee, was a late addition to the roster of speakers at the rally on the National Mall. He told the cheering throng that while Bush may have been “firing the generals who tell him that we’re losing the war in Iraq,” he “can’t fire you.” Then he added, in a none-too-veiled hint that impeachment may be coming, “But we can fire him!”

The crowd went wild, with chants of “Impeach him!”

The stage has been set.

Bush and Cheney have stated publicly that they will not be swayed by the November election, or by polls or demonstrations, all making it clear that the vast majority of Americans want the Iraq War ended quickly. They have thrown down the gauntlet saying that they will ignore any Congressional resolution condemning the escalation of American involvement in Iraq. They have made it clear by sending a Naval armada to the Persian Gulf and by their threatening statements, that they are getting ready to attack Iran despite universal international opposition and warnings from military experts that it would be a disaster.

There is really only one way to stop the madness: impeachment.

In Bush’s case, there is ample evidence already in the public record to justify multiple bills of impeachment. Just to name a few, we know:

* A federal judge has ruled, after hearing evidence from both sides, that President Bush violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), a felony, and the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution by authorizing warrantless monitoring of the communications of American citizens.

* The president violated the US Criminal Code and the Geneva Conventions by both authorizing torture of prisoners in captivity, and by failing to act to prevent and to punish torture when it was brought to his attention.

* The president has abused his power by assuming legislative powers to invalidate duly passed acts of Congress through his issuance of so-called “signing statements”-a process not even mentioned by the Constitution, which assigns “all legislative authority” to the Congress. On these and a number of other issues, there is really no need for investigations at all. The crimes against the Constitution are obvious, blatant and self-evident. (And in the case of NSA spying, are actually laid out in a federal judge’s opinion.)

The FBI appears to have adopted an invasive Internet surveillance technique that collects far more data on innocent Americans than previously has been disclosed. Instead of recording only what a particular suspect is doing, agents conducting investigations appear to be assembling the activities of thousands of Internet users at a time into massive databases, according to current and former officials. That database can subsequently be queried for names, e-mail addresses or keywords.

Such a technique is broader and potentially more intrusive than the FBI’s Carnivore surveillance system, later renamed DCS1000. It raises concerns similar to those stirred by widespread Internet monitoring that the National Security Agency is said to have done, according to documents that have surfaced in one federal lawsuit, and may stretch the bounds of what’s legally permissible.

Call it the vacuum-cleaner approach. It’s employed when police have obtained a court order and an Internet service provider can’t “isolate the particular person or IP address” because of technical constraints, says Paul Ohm, a former trial attorney at the Justice Department’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section. (An Internet Protocol address is a series of digits that can identify an individual computer.)

That kind of full-pipe surveillance can record all Internet traffic, including Web browsing–or, optionally, only certain subsets such as all e-mail messages flowing through the network. Interception typically takes place inside an Internet provider’s network at the junction point of a router or network switch.

The technique came to light at the Search & Seizure in the Digital Age symposium held at Stanford University’s law school on Friday. Ohm, who is now a law professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and Richard Downing, a CCIPS assistant deputy chief, discussed it during the symposium.

In a telephone conversation afterward, Ohm said that full-pipe recording has become federal agents’ default method for Internet surveillance. “You collect wherever you can on the (network) segment,” he said. “If it happens to be the segment that has a lot of IP addresses, you don’t throw away the other IP addresses. You do that after the fact.”

“You intercept first and you use whatever filtering, data mining to get at the information about the person you’re trying to monitor,” he added.

On Monday, a Justice Department representative would not immediately answer questions about this kind of surveillance technique.

“What they’re doing is even worse than Carnivore,” said Kevin Bankston, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who attended the Stanford event. “What they’re doing is intercepting everyone and then choosing their targets.”

When the FBI announced two years ago it had abandoned Carnivore, news reports said that the bureau would increasingly rely on Internet providers to conduct the surveillance and reimburse them for costs. While Carnivore was the subject of congressional scrutiny and outside audits, the FBI’s current Internet eavesdropping techniques have received little attention.

Washington Dispatch: A reform law put together with lots of help from U.S. consultants could finally open Iraq’s massive reserves to ExxonMobil & Co.

The biggest story out of Iraq so far this year may not be the surge, or the latest mass bombing, or the escalating sectarian violence; it might, instead, be a decision that further complicates all of the above. Over the next few weeks, a law to reform Iraq’s oil industry — essentially the only source of income the country has aside from U.S. subsidies — is expected to move toward implementation, and the consequences could be enormous.

Coverage of the proposal has focused on the fact that it doesn’t break up the country’s oil resources, as some had suggested, to various ethnic groups — a piece for the Kurds, a piece for the Shiites, etc. But the real story may be that once the proposal is put into place, international oil companies will have a far better shot at Iraq reserves than ever before.

Iraq has the planet’s largest oil reserves, roughly 10 percent of the world total; it’s also thought to have the largest unexplored potential, primarily in its western desert. “On top of its 115 billion barrels of proven reserves, Iraq is estimated to have between 100 and 200 billion barrels of further possible (as yet undiscovered) reserves,” according to the British public interest group Platform.

Three decades of war and sanctions have left much of Iraq’s oil industry decrepit and outmoded. Under Saddam, the industry was state-controlled; the Bush administration made it clear even before the war that it intended to open Iraqi oil up to more private involvement, and ever since 2003 representatives of various major oil companies have been closely involved in guiding Iraqi oil policy. The State Department’s Future of Iraq Project, which prior to the invasion drew up a reconstruction blueprint, had a special oil and energy working group whose report recommended using “production sharing agreements” to encourage foreign investment in Iraq’s oil industry. Production sharing agreements are contracts between governments and businesses that nominally leave control in the hands of the government, but de facto turn resources over to the private sector.

A few months after U.S. troops rolled into Baghdad, in July 2003, Coalition Provisional Authority head Paul Bremer appointed Ibrahim Bahr al-Uloum, a member of the State Department’s energy working group, as Iraq’s oil minister. Al-Uloum soon proposed a privatization program, and endorsed production sharing agreements as the route to that goal. Ever since then, the issue of how to open Iraq oil to bidding by international oil firms has been a major topic for Iraqi and American officials.

January 29, 2007, Santa Monica, Calif. — Over one million residents of Baghdad could be driven from their homes in the next six months if Iraq’s sectarian violence continues at its current level, according to an in-depth assessment conducted by the Santa Monica-based humanitarian assistance group, International Medical Corps.

The study finds that residents of the Iraq capital account for about 80% of the 546,078 Iraqis civilians who have already fled their homes because of the sectarian fighting in the 11 months since the Feb. 2006 bombing of the Holy Shrine in Samara. The pace of those fleeing is accelerating at a dramatic rate. Since November alone, the number of those displaced has jumped by 43%.

The humanitarian situation is deteriorating at an increasingly rapid rate and there are few indicators of any change in this trend in the short term. While often over-used, the words “humanitarian crisis” accurately describe conditions now unfolding inside Iraq. Long-term displacement seriously reduces the ability of many Iraqis to sustain their livelihood, while the disruption to the lives of IDPs and restricted movements caused by sectarian fighting deny particularly women, children, and minorities of access to basic healthcare services.

“It is a brewing humanitarian crisis of enormous proportions that is being overshadowed by the fighting itself and the debate surrounding the war,” said Nancy Aossey, IMC’s President and CEO. “It must be acknowledged and addressed.”

The population movement constitutes a large-scale reshaping of the city’s neighborhoods along sectarian lines. Some of the displaced have sought refuge with family or friends in “sectarian friendly” neighborhoods within the capital, while others have fled the capital altogether to outlying governorates.

PARIS: Former U.S. envoy to the United Nations John Bolton said in an interview published in France that the United States has “no strategic interest” in a united Iraq.

Bolton, who resigned last month from his temporary appointment as U.N. ambassador, also told the French daily Le Monde that U.S. President George W. Bush’s administration acted too slowly to hand power over to Iraqis after toppling Saddam Hussein in 2003.

“We did a disservice to Iraqis by depriving them of political leaders,” Bolton was quoted as saying, adding that the Coalition Provisional Authority that initially ran Iraq allowed terrorists to regroup. Bolton was speaking in English, and the interview was published in French. An English-language copy of the interview was not available.

Bolton suggested in the interview that the United States shouldn’t necessarily keep Iraq from splitting up. The Bush administration and the Iraqi government have said they don’t want Iraq divided.

“The United States has no strategic interest in the fact that there’s one Iraq, or three Iraqs,” he was quoted as saying. “We have a strategic interest in the fact of ensuring that what emerges is not a state in complete collapse, which could become a refuge for terrorists or a terrorist state.”

The president’s decision to use force against Iranian “agents” inside Iraq could snare innocent pilgrims, and raises the risk of open warfare.

Jan. 30, 2007 | George W. Bush last week announced that American troops in Iraq were henceforth authorized to “kill or capture” any Iranian intelligence agents they discovered in Iraq. The announcement came on the heels of his pledge in the State of the Union address to bring another aircraft carrier into the Persian Gulf, a move that clearly targeted Iran. A prominent Iranian parliamentarian responded to Bush’s threat by saying, “Such an order is a clear terrorist act and against all internationally acknowledged norms.” Iraq’s deputy prime minister, meanwhile, put a pox on both Iran and the U.S. for conducting their geopolitical battle on Iraqi soil.

The danger of Bush’s approach may be realized in short order. Tuesday, Jan. 30, marks the 10th day of Muharram, and is the Islamic holy day known as Ashura. Iraq is the Shiite holy land, the site of the passion and martyrdom of revered figures such as Ali, the son-in-law of the Prophet Mohammed, and al-Husayn, the Prophet’s grandson. Thousands of Iranians come on pilgrimage to the Shiite shrine cities of Najaf and Karbala in Iraq every year, and the flow of pilgrims peaks at Ashura, which commemorates the martyrdom of al-Husayn. Ashura is an especially important holiday to Shiites, drawing up to 1 million pilgrims to Karbala, 60 miles southwest of Baghdad. In 2004 Sunni insurgents exploited the presence of so many Shiite pilgrims by setting off massive explosions that killed more than 100 people.

Given Bush’s new directive, how will U.S. troops distinguish between innocent Iranian devotees and spies? What if U.S. troops kill pilgrims in a mistaken belief that they are covert operatives? Leaving aside whether U.S. law authorizes such a broad, vague use of deadly force against foreign nationals, which is unclear, Shiite religious sensibilities would be inflamed in both Iraq and Iran, furthering the potential for a widening conflict.

Or maybe the spark for a wider conflict is just what the increasingly desperate President Bush seeks. His fixation on Iranian activities in Iraq cannot be explained by his cover story, which is that Tehran is supplying weapons to forces that kill U.S. troops. To date, no hard evidence that the Iranian government is sending high-powered weaponry into Iraq has been made public, and no credible proof may be forthcoming. In general, one should take such claims with a large grain of salt, much like the skepticism with which one should greet the official U.S. story about the firefight in Najaf on the weekend that supposedly claimed the lives of 250 insurgents.

To begin with, some 99 percent of all attacks on U.S. troops occur in Sunni Arab areas and are carried out by Baathist or Sunni fundamentalist (Salafi) guerrilla groups. Most of the outside help these groups get comes from the Sunni Arab public in countries allied with the United States, notably Saudi Arabia and other Gulf monarchies. Washington has yet to denounce Saudi aid to the Sunni insurgents who are killing U.S. troops.

Meanwhile, the most virulent terror network in Iraq, which styles itself “al-Qaida in Mesopotamia,” has openly announced that its policy is to kill as many Shiites as possible. That the ayatollahs of Shiite Iran are passing sophisticated weapons to these, their sworn enemies, is not plausible.

Left parties and organizations from all over Latin America and the Caribbean and their allies converged in San Salvador Jan. 12-15 for the Sao Paulo Forum XIII, an ongoing meeting whose first session was in Brazil in 1990.

They called this forum “A New Stage of the Struggle for the Integration of Latin America and the Caribbean.” Over 500 delegates from El Salvador, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Guatemala, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Curacao, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Venezuela, Bolivia, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Mexico (including Oaxaca), Peru, Chile, and Colombia discussed the need to combat U.S. imperialism and neoliberalism, the “globalization” policies ravaging the Third World.

Outside the forum one could observe the impact of neoliberal policies. Salvadorans who work in factories called “maquilas,” owned by capitalists in the imperialist countries (the U.S. and Western Europe) are paid $4 a day. The rest survive on $2 a day. People in the countryside have no running water, no clean water, no medical care or free schools.

Although the delegates had political differences, the theme of the four-day forum was unity and support for all the left parties and formations in the region.

The forum delegates were ebullient as Raphael Correa was about to be inaugurated as Ecuador’s president, and Daniel Ortega, who had led Nicaragua during the Sandinista period, had just been inaugurated Jan. 11. Ortega had announced then that Nicaragua was leaving the neoliberal Central American Free Trade Agreement and had signed the ALBA (the Bolivarian Alternative of the Americas) accords as Cuban Vice-President José Ramón Machado, Bolivia’s President Evo Morales and Venezuela’s President Hugo Chávez embraced him.

At the Sao Paulo Forum, the Faribundo Martí National Liberation Front of El Salvador (FMLN) General Coordinator Medardo González, said, “Today we are in position to affect the defeat of neoliberalism, and not just to defeat it, but to overcome it and to construct a new model for Latin America and the Caribbean.”

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The White House urged Congress on Monday to renew key trade negotiating authority that expires in just a few months and said time was running short for countries to reach a new world trade deal.

“We certainly think it is important that Congress renew it,” White House spokesman Tony Snow said, referring to fast-track trade legislation that requires lawmakers to vote “yes” or “no” on agreements negotiated by the White House without making any changes.

“It is an important device in extending free trade, and also allowing negotiators to operate effectively,” Snow said.

The White House’s current fast-track trade promotion authority expires on July 1. Bush is expected to need an extension to complete the Doha round of world trade talks and possible trade deals with
South Korea and Malaysia.

Bush planned to talk about it this week in remarks either in Illinois or New York, Snow said. Many business groups were disappointed when Bush did not call for renewal of fast-track authority in his State of the Union speech last week.

The outlook for world trade talks, suspended six months ago because of disagreements over how far to cut farm subsidies and tariffs, has brightened in recent weeks, raising hopes for a possible breakthrough in coming months.

“We are in a very important part of negotiations. We have a small window to get a lot of things done. I know all sides are working very hard on this. The president is deeply committed to working with all our allies and they’ve assured us that they’re committed also to working with us,” Snow said.

The inexorable peoples’ movement in the U.S. against the government’s war on the people of Iraq has begun. And it is not a movement of the anti-war leaders. It is a movement of the people. Saturday, January 27 was a beautiful day that will be remembered by a quarter million people who came in Washington DC. to take a stand against the U.S. war on the people of Iraq. The Mall was packed shoulder-to-shoulder all the way to the National Monument and people were angry. It was without doubt, the largest anti-war march we have seen since the 1970s and we’ve seen them all on the East Coast since 9/11/01. I interviewed many who were present and our dialogue followed these lines:

“Why are you here today?

This is the first protest I’ve been to. I’m just angry. I can’t watch the news on television anymore. We voted against the war and the government has escalated the war.

“Where are you from?

“Here in Washington … New York … Florida … Arkansas … Cleveland … Minnesota … Maine … Texas … California … Washington State … Colorado … Germany … England … France … etc., etc.”

They poured in on buses from all over the United States and some even came from foreign countries to demand an end to the war. This was not a light-hearted “feel-good” anti-war demonstration. The mood of the people was as somber as it was angry – and deadly serious. They know that the immovable object of the government has met the irresistable force of the people. There was a strong sense that the more the object obfuscates, deceives and refuses to yield to the demands of the force – the more angry and rebellious the people will become. Cries of “We will not stop” could be heard throughout the day. This inveterate rebellion of the people has come to the implacable shove of the RDR (Republican-Democrat-Regime) in Washington. In the interviews I conducted there was as much rage expressed to the Democrats as there was to the Republicans … and that rage is clearly growing. People are refusing to accept the Democrats’ “Non-binding Resolution” against the war as enough. They want funds for the war to be cut off and they want them cut off now.

Staying in Washington on the 4th Anniversary of the Invasion of Iraq – March 17, 2007

Our mission in going to Washington on Saturday was three-fold:

* To support the March.

* To cover and report the March on Axis of Logic

* To promote the upcoming March 17 March on Washington with a new tactic in the anti-war movement – not seen since the Vietnam War.