The Rag Blog

Lina Massufi is fed up because her house in Baghdad has been raided by US and Iraqi soldiers more than 12 times in the past three months.

BAGHDAD, 22 Jan 2007 (IRIN) – “My name is Lina Massufi. I’m a 32-year-old laboratory assistant who works 10 hours a day just to make enough money to raise my children.

“My life has been like hell over the past three months. US and Iraqi soldiers have raided my house more than 12 times.

“My husband, Khalil, was killed during the US invasion in 2003 when he drove through a closed road and soldiers shot him dead.

“I live in Haifa Street, one of the most dangerous places to live in Baghdad today. The area is infamous for its huge number of insurgents. This is why Iraqi and US soldiers have increased their activity in the area, constantly raiding homes and arresting men for interrogation.

“Last month, they arrested my 23-year-old brother Fae’ek, who lives with me. He is a pharmacy student but nonetheless they took him and kept him in prison for more than a week – even after knowing he was innocent. He returned with signs of torture on his body and was crying like a baby because of the pain.

“I cannot stand the constant military raids in my home. Every time they [the soldiers] raid my house, they break the door. They don’t know how to knock at a door. One day, when I asked them why they were entering like that instead of ringing the bell, they laughed at me and called me an idiot.

“My furniture is all broken into pieces because of the way they conduct their searches. I no longer have dishes or glasses to speak of because they destroyed most of them during the raids.

“I have two children and for most of the time, they are scared. Muhammad, a four-year-old, cannot sleep well at night. He has nightmares every day and when he wakes up he cries, asking me not to let the soldiers take him as they took his uncle.

“Fadia, my daughter, who is only eight years old, doesn’t want to go to school because she says that if they raid our home and I’m not around, they would do something bad to her brother. But with her at home, she can help him not be afraid.

“Our neighbourhood is in the middle of a constant war. It is not safe for us to leave or enter our houses. Most of the shops around here are closed. We have to walk about 5km to buy food like vegetables and rice.

“Sometimes, when I return by taxi from my job, which is about 45 minutes from my home, I find the street closed and bullets flying around everywhere.

“I start to cry as I become afraid that something might have happened to my children even though I know that my brother is there. I know that when I get home, I will find Muhammad crying and Fadia scared but I cannot stay all day at home because if I leave my job, there will be no one to feed them.

“It is common to see at least three corpses on Haifa Street each day and sometimes up to eight, as happened last week. They are fighters, innocent civilians or soldiers. No one takes care of them [the bodies] because if you tried to get closer, you could become the next victim.

Peace activists from around the United States will converge on Washington Saturday for what organisers hope will be the largest demonstration to date against the Iraq war.

“We expect a turnout in the six figures,” said Tom Andrews, a former Democratic congressman who now runs the group Win Without War, which is organising the march along with True Majority, Working Assets, the RainbowPUSH Coalition, the National Organization for Women and the national umbrella group United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ).

UFPJ’s Leslie Cagan told IPS that the level of energy in the antiwar movement has spiked since the November election, when voters ended Republican majorities in both houses of Congress.

“The voters of this country figured out that they could use the November elections as a vehicle to voice their opposition to the war,” Cagan said. “What happened there was that the voters gave Congress a mandate to end the war in Iraq and bring the troops home.”

That success at the polls gave antiwar citizens more optimism that a large demonstration might make an impact, she said.

In mid-November, United for Peace and Justice called a demonstration for the nation’s capital for Jan. 27, with other large mobilisations planned for Los Angeles, Seattle and San Francisco.

In addition, smaller actions are planned for more than 50 cities. In Bismark, North Dakota, the group Surge for Peace will be delivering petitions to members of the local congressional delegation. In Austin, Texas, the Stop the War coalition is hosting a march and rally featuring student activists, Green Party activists, and members of the group Veterans for Peace.

A full listing of all marches nationwide is on the group’s website unitedforpeace.org.

“People started saying to us right after the election ‘well, what is Congress going to do?'” Cagan said. “And we quickly realised the real question is ‘what are we going to do to push this Congress to do what they said they were going to do to get elected’. So we figured we got to get people into Washington as soon as possible after the new session of Congress began.”

Organisers said five or six Democratic lawmakers are expected to speak at the rally in Washington, and that Representative Barbara Lee will speak at the Los Angeles gathering.

“By 2010 we will need on the order of an additional fifty million barrels a day. So where is the oil going to come from? … While many regions of the world offer great oil opportunities, the Middle East with two thirds of the world’s oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies.” -Dick Cheney, who was CEO of oil services company Halliburton, in a speech to the Institute of Petroleum in London- 1999

It hadn’t even been seen by Iraqi legislators yet, but details of a new “Iraqi” hydrocarbons law, drafted in reality by U.S. contractors, were revealed Jan. 7 in the Independent, a major London newspaper that has been critical of the Iraq war.

Once information about the leaked document got out, it was condemned around the world as an unprecedented giveaway to the multinational oil companies—in particular, those based in the U.S. and Britain.

“Its provisions are a radical departure from the norm for developing countries,” wrote the Independent. “[U]nder a system known as ‘production-sharing agreements,’ or PSAs, oil majors such as BP and Shell in Britain, and Exxon and Chevron in the U.S., would be able to sign deals of up to 30 years to extract Iraq’s oil.

“PSAs allow a country to retain legal ownership of its oil, but give a share of profits to the international companies that invest in infrastructure and operation of the wells, pipelines and refineries. Their introduction would be a first for a major Middle Eastern oil producer. Saudi Arabia and Iran, the world’s number one and two oil exporters, both tightly control their industries through state-owned companies with no appreciable foreign collaboration, as do most members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, OPEC.”

Iraq has the third-largest proven oil reserves in the world

The article quoted Greg Muttitt of Platform, a human rights and environmental group that monitors the oil industry. “He said the new legislation was drafted with the assistance of BearingPoint, an American consultancy firm hired by the U.S. government, which had a representative working in the American Embassy in Baghdad for several months.”

Muttitt added: “Three outside groups have had far more opportunity to scrutinize this legislation than most Iraqis. The draft went to the U.S. government and major oil companies in July, and to the International Monetary Fund in September. Last month I met a group of 20 Iraqi MPs in Jordan, and I asked them how many had seen the legislation. Only one had.”

Microsoft Corp. landed in the Wikipedia doghouse Tuesday after it offered to pay a blogger to change technical articles on the community-produced Web encyclopedia site.

While Wikipedia is known as the encyclopedia that anyone can tweak, founder Jimmy Wales and his cadre of volunteer editors, writers and moderators have blocked public-relations firms, campaign workers and anyone else perceived as having a conflict of interest from posting fluff or slanting entries. So paying for Wikipedia copy is considered a definite no-no.

BAGHDAD, Jan. 24 — The shouting in his Baghdad apartment building woke Luay Mohammed seconds before intruders broke down his door.

The men, some wearing police uniforms, entered before dawn demanding identification cards, Mohammed recalled. They tore the doors off the closet, threw the television on the floor and hauled Mohammed and his two barefoot brothers outside to be blindfolded. They and 14 other men were taken to what they thought was a government office, where a man others kept calling “sir” spoke to their huddled group.

“You are Palestinians. Why are you still living in Iraq?” Mohammed recalled the man saying. “You have 48 hours to leave.”

Within 24 hours, Mohammed was gone. The 36-year-old was among dozens of people who loaded their meager belongings onto buses at dawn Wednesday inside Baghdad’s main Palestinian enclave in the Baladiyat neighborhood. They drove north toward the Syrian border, joining a growing exodus of Palestinians now following their familiar story line: an unwelcome people searching for a home.

Baghdad is a dangerous place for anyone to live, and the fighting between Sunni and Shiite Muslims has displaced hundreds of thousands. Largely forgotten amid this violence is the plight of thousands of Palestinians in Iraq, who face an increasingly hostile environment because they are predominantly Sunni and perceived as having been favored during the rule of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

Baghdad is paralysed by fear. Iraqi drivers are terrified of running into impromptu checkpoints where heavily armed men in civilian clothes may drag them out of their cars and kill them for being the wrong religion. Some districts exchange mortar fire every night. This is mayhem beyond the comprehension of George Bush and Tony Blair.

Black smoke was rising over the city centre yesterday as American and Iraqi army troops tried to fight their way into the insurgent district of Haifa Street only a mile north of the Green Zone, home to the government and the US and British embassies. Helicopters flew fast and low past tower blocks, hunting snipers, and armoured vehicles manoeuvred in the streets below.

Many Iraqis who watched the State of the Union address shrugged it off as an irrelevance. “An extra 16,000 US soldiers are not going to be enough to restore order to Baghdad,” said Ismail, a Sunni who fled his house in the west of the city, fearing he would be arrested and tortured by the much-feared Shia police commandos.

It is extraordinary that, almost four years after US forces captured Baghdad, they control so little of it. The outlook for Mr Bush’s strategy of driving out insurgents from strongholds and preventing them coming back does not look good.

On Monday, a helicopter belonging to the US security company Blackwater was shot down as it flew over the Sunni neighbourhood of al-Fadhil, close to the central markets of Baghdad. Several of the five American crew members may have survived the crash but they were later found with gunshot wounds to their heads, as if they had been executed on the ground.

Baghdad has broken up into hostile townships, Sunni and Shia, where strangers are treated with suspicion and shot if they cannot explain what they are doing. In the militant Sunni district of al-Amariyah in west Baghdad the Shia have been driven out and a resurgent Baath party has taken over. One slogan in red paint on a wall reads: “Saddam Hussein will live for ever, the symbol of the Arab nation.” Another says: “Death to Muqtada [Muqtada al-Sadr, the nationalist Shia cleric] and his army of fools.”

01/24/07 “ICHBlog” — — In recent years American police forces have called out SWAT teams 40,000 or more times annually. Last year did you read in your newspaper or hear on TV news of 110 hostage or terrorist events each day? No. What then were the SWAT teams doing? They were serving routine warrants to people who posed no danger to the police or to the public.

Occasionally Washington think tanks produce reports that are not special pleading for donors. One such report is Radley Balko’s “Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America” (Cato Institute, 2006).

This 100-page report is extremely important and should have been published as a book. SWAT teams (Special Weapons and Tactics) were once rare and used only for very dangerous situations, often involving hostages held by armed criminals. Today SWAT teams are deployed for routine police duties. In the US today, 75-80% of SWAT deployments are for warrant service.

In a high percentage of the cases, the SWAT teams forcefully enter the wrong address, resulting in death, injury, and trauma to perfectly innocent people. Occasionally, highly keyed-up police kill one another in the confusion caused by their stun grenades.

Mr. Balko reports that the use of paramilitary police units began in Los Angeles in the 1960s. The militarization of local police forces got a big boost from Attorney General Ed Meese’s “war on drugs” during the Reagan administration. A National Security Decision Directive was issued that declared drugs to be a threat to US national security. In 1988 Congress ordered the National Guard into the domestic drug war. In 1994 the Department of Defense issued a memorandum authorizing the transfer of military equipment and technology to state and local police, and Congress created a program “to facilitate handing military gear over to civilian police agencies.”

Today 17,000 local police forces are equipped with such military equipment as Blackhawk helicopters, machine guns, grenade launchers, battering rams, explosives, chemical sprays, body armor, night vision, rappelling gear and armored vehicles. Some have tanks. In 1999, the New York Times reported that a retired police chief in New Haven, Connecticut, told the newspaper, “I was offered tanks, bazookas, anything I wanted.” Balklo reports that in 1997, for example, police departments received 1.2 million pieces of military equipment.

With local police forces now armed beyond the standard of US heavy infantry, police forces have been retrained “to vaporize, not Mirandize,” to use a phrase from Reagan administration defense official Lawrence Korb. This leaves the public at the mercy of brutal actions based on bad police information from paid informers.

SWAT team deployments received a huge boost from the Byrne Justice Assistance Grant program, which gave states federal money for drug enforcement. Balko explains that “the states then disbursed the money to local police departments on the basis of each department’s number of drug arrests.”

Like most Americans, 81-year-old Dan Tilli isn’t a big fan of President Bush. And like many older Americans, he writes letters to the editor of his local paper, The Express-Times in Easton.