The Rag Blog

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.

by Greg Palast
Tuesday, 23 January, 2006

There was that tongue again. When the President lies he’s got this weird nervous tick: He sticks the tip of his tongue out between his lips. Like a little boy who knows he’s fibbing. Like a snake licking a rat.

In his State of the Union tonight the President did his tongue thing 124 times — my kids kept count.

But it wasn’t all rat-licking lies.

Most pundits concentrated on Iraq and wacky health insurance stuff. But that’s just bubbles and blather. The real agenda is in the small stuff. The little razors in the policy apple, the nasty little pieces of policy shrapnel that whiz by between the appearances of the Presidential tongue.

First, there was the announcement the regime will, “give employers the tools to verify the legal status of their workers.” In case you missed that one, the President is talking about creating a federal citizen profile database.

There’s a problem with that idea. It’s against the law. The law in question is the United States Constitution. The Founding Fathers thought the government had no right to keep track on a citizen unless there is evidence they have committed, or planned to commit, a crime.

But the Founding Fathers didn’t imagine there were millions and billions of dollars to be made by private contractors ready to perform this KGB operation for the Department of Homeland Security, tracking each and every one of us to keep tabs on our “status.”

These work databases will tie into “voter verification” databases required by the Help America Vote Act. And these will tie to the databases on citizenship and so on.

Will Big Brother abuse these snoop lists? The biggest purveyor of such hit lists is Choice Point, Inc. – those characters who, before the 2000 election, helped Jeb Bush purge innocent voters as “felons” from Florida voter rolls. Will they abuse the new super-lists? Does Dick Cheney shoot in the woods?

For more than a decade, the Federal Prison Industries has been forcing inmates to handle toxic “e-waste” containing arsenic, mercury, lead and other cancer-causing chemicals.

A single computer contains hundreds of chemicals that are known to cause cancer and other illnesses.

U.S. prisoners working for a computer-recycling operation run by Federal Prison Industries (FPI) are being exposed to a toxic cocktail of hazardous chemicals through their prison jobs while efforts by some prison officials to protect them have been met with stonewalling and subterfuge.

Since 1994, FPI has used inmates to disassemble electronic waste (e-waste) — the detritus of obsolete computers, televisions and related electronics goods — for recycling. According to a new report, “Toxic Sweatshops” — published jointly by the Texas Campaign for the Environment, California-based Computer TakeBack Campaign and the Prison Activist Resource Center — the waste contains high levels of arsenic, selenium, mercury, lead, dioxins and beryllium — all considered dangerous by the Environmental Protection Agency.

The report follows three years of mounting scrutiny of FPI by the U.S. Office of the Special Counsel, the Operational Safety and Health Organization (OSHA) and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. Critics say that the scrutiny has led to few reforms.

FPI, which operates as a unit of the semi-autonomous, government-run corporation UNICOR, opened its first electronics recycling business at a federal prison in Marianna, Florida, in 1994. Since then, the company’s electronics recycling program has spread to six other federal prisons across the country. Inmates working for UNICOR are paid between 23 cents and $1.15 per hour. In 2005 the company recorded $64.5 million in profits.

Not so many years ago, perhaps five, there was a country known as “Iraq.” That Iraq no longer exists. It has been replaced by two Iraqs. No, I am not referring here to the Kurdish Autonomous Region, nor to the nascent Shia statelet likely about to be created in the south, though either of these could be considered as break-up products of that former country.

I am, rather, referring to the two zones into which Iraq has become divided, the Green Zone and the Red Zone. The Green Zone, a.k.a. the “International Zone,” the “Ultimate Gated Community,” or more appropriately, the “United States of Iraq,” is the place where the various would-be rulers of Iraq have congregated since the March-April 2003 invasion. The colonial administration, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), set up its headquarters here. After the June 2004 handover of “sovereignty” but little power to an Iraqi Interim Government with its Prime Minister forced upon United Nations officials nominally in charge by the United States, this government made its home in the Green Zone. The current “elected,” but largely powerless, Shia-dominated government also “rules” from this zone.

For the Americans there, life in the Green Zone resembles life in the United States, with just enough of an exotic tinge to make it interesting. Night clubs serve liquor, women jog in shorts and sports bras, and pool parties sometimes get wild. McDonalds and Burger King are available, though, just as in many modern American cities, kebabs served by real natives are available for the daring.

For the time of the CPA, the Green Zone was a nice career stop-over point for those hoping to get some attention in the modern Republican Party. A few months there helped get that coveted PR job back in the States. Of course there was the occasional mortar shell to contend with, but the hint of danger helped relieve the boredom that was, perhaps, the greater risk of service in the colonies.

So what of the Red Zone? It is the place where those Iraqis not cleared to get near the occupation forces live. The place where people go about their lives in a situation economically much worse off than that before the invasion. In the Red Zone people die by the tens or hundreds of thousands, from bombs and bullets, yes, both Iraqi and American, but also from crime, from disease, and from lack of basic medical care. In the Red Zone clean water is scarce, electricity available but a few hours a day, if that, and doctors are increasingly rare as the few remaining flee to the safety of exile. And boredom, that plague of the Green Zone, also plagues the Red Zone as millions of women and children, and increasingly men as well, are afraid to step outside the house for months on end as fear of murder and abduction keeps them under long-term house arrest.

The Green Zone sometimes sees conflict between US political officials with their fantastic visions of an occupied Iraq willing and able to submit to every whim of the occupiers, and the Iraqi officials with their visions of an ascendant Shia state. The Red Zone, in contrast, sees daily conflict between numerous militias with varied political and governmental loyalties, some labeled police, army, special Interior Ministry death and torture squads, others known as the militias of various political parties and organizations, while yet others are labeled as “insurgents,” “terrorists,” “jihadists,” or “freedom fighters” depending on who is doing the labeling.

As Iraq is divided into these two separate but unequal worlds, there are those who go between them, who cross the barriers separating the two worlds. Among these are the US soldiers, the “grunts,” upon whom the day-to-day tasks of occupation fall. Unlike the politicians, bureaucrats and corporate scam artists of occupation, who can often do their jobs without stepping foot in the Red Zone, these soldiers cross the border between the two Iraqs on a regular basis. Can these ambassadors of freedom, and of occupation, bridge the two Iraqs? How do they construe the situation thrust upon them? Perhaps the experiences of these soldiers can shed light upon the evolving relations of the two Iraqs, relations so complex as to challenge the pundits who attempt to make sense of the Iraqi mess for the folks back home.

AMMAN, Jordan: A truce between insurgents and the U.S. forces in Iraq is possible if the Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad is dismissed and new elections are held, a prominent Sunni tribal leader said Tuesday.

Until a truce is agreed, insurgent attacks on U.S. troops will continue and even escalate in line with instructions from Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, Saddam Hussein’s deputy and perceived successor, said Sheik Majeed al-Gaood, a tribal leader in Anbar province, the heartland of the insurgency.

“Mr. al-Douri’s instructions came in a handwritten letter weeks before President Saddam was martyred,” al-Gaood told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from his house in Amman, Jordan’s capital. “He demanded escalated attacks against certain targets, not civilians,” he said.

I Left My Heart In (a 2500 miles radius of) San Francisco

Continue to contaminate your bed, and you will one night suffocate in your own waste. Your destiny is a mystery to us. – Chief Seattle leader of the Duwanish tribe in Washington Territory in an 1854 letter to U.S. President Franklin Pierce to mark transfer of ancestral Indian lands to the United States

There are efforts underway to oppose explosions of radioactive materials by the US government into the air in which we breathe. This article will outline various reasons why and how radioactive explosive “tests” are harming America – and describe the efforts of citizens in one area of the country who are now working to try to put a stop to them.

Like most people over 21, you may already know that the United States used to “test” nuclear bombs in the NV and NM deserts, right out in the open air. If asked, most people would probably be able to tell us that yes indeed, both above ground and below ground “nuclear testing” in the United States ended years ago. Yet, even though 1992 saw its last nuke bomb “test” inside the United States, how many know that our government is still firing radioactive explosives into our atmosphere? This fact appears to be one of Uncle Sam’s “dirtiest” not-so-little, well-kept secrets.

Yes, they fire radiation out into the very same air that our families breathe. Tons of radioactive munitions, in fact. Depleted Uranium is the name of one of the materials they use. And if that material sounds familiar? It because it’s the same stuff that they’re using on the “enemy” – that is, on civilians – in Afghanistan and Iraq.

No, we do not know what in the world the civilians of Iraq and Afghanistan ever did to deserve the “honor” of being blasted to kingdom come with Uranium-238 – rendering their nations permanently uninhabitable. By the same token, nor do we know what American citizens have done to deserve Depleted Uranium being exploded into our air so that we are gassed with it, either.

But now the country is starting to buzz with the word of radioactive open air “testing” near San Francisco. And with such a progressive part of the nation that has historically fought hard for peace, equal rights, racial equality, gay rights, and ecological sustainability? As one could say, the Greater San Francisco Bay area is now again boldly “coming out of the closet” with regard to letting the proverbial cat out of the bag about this “dirty” business of Uncle Sam’s.

But this is not a story entirely about San Francisco’s troubles. Nor is it even all about California. As you will see, this story affects you and me, no matter where we live in the country. California’s tale is only the proverbial tip of the iceberg. The story about your community and mine? Now that’s the heart of this story.

The fiery “hot” issue of Depleted Uranium explosives “testing” has emerged into the spotlight in the San Francisco Bay area recently all because of some people who live in a city called Tracy. That’s how anything important usually starts – when just a few people who are fed up enough get together and become vocal enough and publicly put up a fuss.

No wonder why they’re upset. Only a few miles away from them on a federally owned 7,000 acre parcel of land in the Altamont Hills at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in San Joaquin and Alameda Counties, California, radioactive explosives containing Depleted Uranium are being shot out into the open air at a location called Site 300. Yes, Depleted Uranium is being exploded across the street from a motorbike recreational area. Site 300 is only a few miles away from where people live.

What started all the ruckus was that on November 13 a new permit, issued by California’s San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District, was put into effect that allows the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to use more than triple the amount of explosive materials in “test” detonations at Site 300 than in the past. This means that the equivalent of 350 pounds of explosives may now be fired instead of the previously permitted 100 pounds.

There are two efforts underway to appeal the new permit for Site 300 that allows for much larger explosions by using greater amounts of radioactive materials. Two appeals have been filed, one by a housing developer and the other by a resident who lives about five miles from the radioactive blast location, Site 300.

Small business owner, Tracy resident, and long-standing member of Tri-Valley Communities Against A Radioactive Environment (CARES), Bob Sarvey is leading the way to protect his community of 72,400 from radioactivity at Livermore’s Site 300 by appealing the permit of the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District. A health risk assessment performed recently shows a higher health risk just from merely inhaling toxic non-radioactive air contaminants than the Livermore Lab shows in its own radiological assessment.

Residents realized something was not quite right about this report. “Previously“, according to Sarvey, “the Lawrence Livermore Lab didn’t need a permit from the Pollution Control District because their chargers were under 100 lbs. equivalent to TNT – and under 1,000 pounds per year. Now, they are going to increase that to 350 pounds per charge, equivalent to TNT …and they are also going to increase the annual limit to 8,000 pounds. That’s eight-fold of what it was annually… and on a per change basis, three and a half times per charge”.

In addition to allowing up to 8,000 pounds of explosives containing radioactive matter annually, as reported in the Tracy Press on December 14 the current county air pollution control permit allows Livermore Laboratory to emit up to 1,440 pounds of particulate matter up to 10 microns in diameter per year into the air. The public does not even have to be notified of such emissions unless the particulate matter exceeds a 20,000 pound limit.

It only takes one invisible micron of Depleted Uranium to cause organ damage and health failure. Can anyone possibly hazard a guess as to how much potential hazard that 1,440 pounds of particulates could cause – never mind the 20,000 pound particulate upper limit? Can you imagine willingly causing up to 1,440 pounds of radioactive particles to be blasted into the open air? If one miniscule particle so tiny as to be invisible can cause a terminal illness, whose mind can even fathom the devastation 1,440 pounds of this stuff could do to countless numbers of people?

ISLAMABAD • Plagued by sectarian violence imported from the Gulf during the 1980s, Pakistan is on guard for any spillover from the conflict between Sunnis and Shi’ites gripping Iraq.

Bombs can go off anytime for many reasons in Pakistan, but the coming days mark an anxious period for the country’s Shi’ite minority as they mourn the death of one their sect’s heroes in the Islamic festival of Moharram.

So far, there has been no reaction to events in Iraq, but Pakistani leaders view what’s happening there with trepidation, as 15 per cent of the Muslim nation are Shi’ites.

As if he didn’t have enough to worry about with Al Qaeda, the Taleban, jihadi groups fighting the Indian army in Kashmir, and Baluch separatist rebels, Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf shudders at the spectre of sectarian strife.

“The Islamic world is heading towards a crisis,” Musharraf told university students earlier this month, at a time when the world was aghast over Shi’ite guards taunting Iraq’s Sunni former ruler, Saddam Hussein, at the gallows.

“If we don’t get our act together, there will be a sectarian catastrophe in the Islamic world,” said Musharraf.

Sunni sectarian extremists have already forged links with Al Qaeda following Musharraf’s alliance with the United States after the September 11, 2001 attacks. Osama bin Laden’s henchmen directed Pakistani Sunni militants to carry out assassination attempts on Musharraf and his Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz in 2003 and 2004.

Syed Sajid Ali Naqvi, a senior Shi’ite leader in an Islamist opposition alliance, made up of one Shi’ite and five Sunni parties, said Pakistan’s political clerics were deliberately avoiding a topic that is consuming Muslims everywhere.