The Rag Blog

NEW YORK – The American Civil Liberties Union today released a new report revealing that the Pentagon monitored at least 186 anti-military protests in the United States and collected more than 2,800 reports involving Americans in an anti-terrorist threat database.

“It cannot be an accident or coincidence that nearly 200 anti-war protests ended up in a Pentagon threat database,” said Ann Beeson, Associate Legal Director of the ACLU. “This unchecked surveillance is part of a broad pattern of the Bush administration using ‘national security’ as an excuse to run roughshod over the privacy and free speech rights of Americans.”

The ACLU report reviews hundreds of pages of Defense Department documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed last year. The documents revealed that the surveillance of peace groups and anti-war activists was more widespread than previously known.

It was Will Rogers who advised: “When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.” Yet the Bush administration is grabbing for every shovel it can find. Faced with his own spectacular failure in Iraq, with violence that his own CIA director termed “satanic, President Bush has chosen to escalate the very policy that catalyzed the slaughter and mayhem in the first place. The White House finds itself in a hole and, incomprehensibly, has decided to keep digging.

It’s long past time that we climb out of the hole. Today in the House of Representatives, I am introducing the Bring Our Troops Home and Sovereignty of Iraq Restoration Act, a comprehensive legislative proposal to quickly end the occupation of Iraq. It is a broad measure, capturing ideas from military and diplomatic experts and including provisions offered in previous legislative proposals. Specifically, the bill would, among other things:

— Withdraw all U.S. troops and military contractors from Iraq within six months from the date of enactment.

— Accelerate, during the six-month transition, training of a permanent Iraqi police force.

— Prohibit the continued funding, except for the redeployment of troops currently in Iraq, of combat troops to Iraq.

— Prohibit any permanent U.S. military bases in Iraq. (Despite official denials, bases are under construction, including one that includes a miniature golf course and a Pizza Hut).

— Authorize, if requested by the Iraqi government, U.S. support for an international stabilization force, which would stay no longer than two years.

— Prohibit U.S. participation in any long-term Iraqi oil production sharing agreements before the enactment by the Iraqi government of new regulations governing the industry.

— Authorize an array of non-military assistance in Iraq, including reconstruction of a public-health system; destruction of land mines, recovery of ancient relics; and distribution of compensatory damages for civilian casualties.

— Honor the sacrifice of our servicemen and women by providing full funding for every health-care treatment, and benefit that they are entitled to under current law.

To be sure, peace and freedom will not bust out spontaneously the moment the last American soldier leaves Iraqi soil. Professor William Polk, co-author with former U.S. Sen. George McGovern of “Out of Iraq: A Practical Plan for Withdrawal Now” (Simon & Schuster, 2006), notes that such an assumption would be as naïve as the neoconservative pre-war fantasy that our soldiers would be met by bouquet-tossing Iraqis weeping with gratitude. But U.S. withdrawal, in addition to removing our own soldiers from harm’s way, will remove the insurgency’s very raison d’etre and put Iraq on track toward national healing and reconciliation.

President Bush, however, has chosen escalation over withdrawal, a choice that is tragically misguided and, with virtually no political support, ultimately unsustainable. No less of a militarist than Oliver North has concluded that “sending more U.S. combat troops is simply sending more targets.”

The president ignored the advice of the Iraq Study Group, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the soon-to-be-replaced Gens. George W. Casey Jr. and John P. Abizaid (despite the president’s repeated insistence that he takes his cues from “commanders on the ground”). This staggering act of presidential arrogance flies in the face of public opinion and reveals nothing but contempt for the electoral verdict delivered by the American voters in November.

That’s why today I am proposing my own plan to bring our troops home, and restore Iraqi sovereignty.

Because of the election and its mandate, the president can no longer expect carte blanche from the House and Senate. As a co-equal branch of government with constitutional war powers, we in the Congress are within our rights to challenge and even forestall both the overall Bush policy and the new deployment of more than 21,500 troops. That the 109th Congress chose not to exercise such authority will not — and should not — restrain the 110th.

WASHINGTON, Jan 18 (Reuters) – A bipartisan group of lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday pushed legislation to prohibit a U.S. attack on Iran without Congress’ permission.

The effort, led by Rep. Walter Jones, a North Carolina Republican who in 2005 joined calls from many Democrats for a phased U.S. withdrawal from the Iraq war, came as lawmakers voiced concerns that the Bush administration might provoke a confrontation with neighboring Iran.

“The resolution makes crystal clear that no previous resolution passed by Congress” authorizes a U.S. attack on Iran, Jones told reporters, referring to the 2002 vote by Congress authorizing the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

The joint resolution, which would have the force of law if passed by the House and Senate and signed by President George W. Bush, would waive the congressional authorization only if Iran attacked the United States or its armed forces, or if such an attack was “demonstrably” imminent.

So far, Jones’ resolution has 11 co-sponsors in the 435-member House.

Rep. Martin Meehan, a Massachusetts Democrat, said he did not trust Iran or its intentions in the Middle East. But he said the resolution on Iran was needed because the Bush administration had “lied so many times” in the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Backers of the legislation said they hoped Democratic leaders in the House would advance their resolution in coming months, possibly as part of Iraq war funding legislation or other Iraq-related measures.

Concerns about a U.S. attack against Iran increased after the United States moved an additional aircraft carrier into the Persian Gulf region and the Bush administration told Arab allies it would do more to contain Tehran.

RAMADI, Iraq, Jan. 16 — Inside a huge shuttered factory on the gritty western fringes of this outlaw desert town, thousands of ornate porcelain sinks, toilets and other fixtures sit in row after row next to the automated ovens and assembly lines that once churned out the products but lie silent under a thin film of yellow desert dust.

However, neither the fancy ceramics nor the machines appear to be damaged, a miracle that no one can quite explain in one of the most dangerous cities of a country that looters have ravaged since 2003.

Whatever the explanation, some American and Iraqi officials believe that surviving factories like this one — once considered inefficient, government-subsidized behemoths — could present a last chance of sorts for dealing with two problems that have remained stubbornly unsolved since the invasion: Iraq’s reconstruction and its insurgency.

The factories, state-owned enterprises under Saddam Hussein’s government, would appear to be the unlikeliest of saviors — things like a bus factory in an ethnically riven area south of Baghdad, a tomato paste factory in the Kurdish north, and a second plant in Ramadi that makes floor tiles with silk-screened floral patterns. The factories went dark after the invasion for a variety of reasons, including an insistence by the initial American occupation authority that once they closed, vibrant free markets would spring into existence to fill the void.

But neither those markets nor the expected commercial and social benefits of the $30 billion American-financed reconstruction program have materialized. So a few officials and local leaders are returning to the shuttered plants in hopes of finding a cheaper way to help the economy and perhaps create jobs to attract young men who might otherwise join the insurgency.

The dusty old plants are more evocative of guys with lunch pails than the big thinkers who once believed that expensive American reconstruction projects would remake the face of Iraq. “Any opportunity to re-employ more people and give the government a chance to get income from these factories is important,” said Sheik Abdul Sattar Buzaigh al-Rishawi, an Anbar tribal leader, as he toured the porcelain and tile factories in his flowing black-and-gold robes. “Especially in this time when Anbar is experiencing terrorism.”

The sheik added, in reference to the idle Iraqis who put the unemployment rate at anywhere from an estimated 30 percent to 60 percent, “They are normal human beings — they would rather work than make violence.”

(01-16) 04:00 PST Washington — Iraq is in the throes of the largest refugee crisis in the Middle East since the Palestinian exodus from Israel in 1948, a mass flight out of and within the country that is ravaging basic services and commerce, swamping neighboring nations with nearly 2 million refugees and building intense pressure for emigration to Europe and the United States, according to the United Nations and refugee experts.

The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, which appealed for $60 million in emergency aid last week, believes 1.7 million Iraqis are displaced inside Iraq, whose prewar population was 21 million. About 50,000 Iraqis are fleeing inside Iraq each month, the United Nations said, and 500,000 have been displaced since last February’s bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra. These figures are as of January 2007.

The Bush administration and the governments of Jordan and Syria, the nations that accept the bulk of the refugees, have been reluctant to acknowledge the humanitarian crisis, experts said.

WASHINGTON, Jan 18 (IPS) – The convoy of flatbed trucks picked up its cargo at Baghdad International Airport last spring and sped northwest, stacked high with crates of expensive medical equipment. From bilirubin metres and hematology analysers to infant incubators and dental appliances, the equipment had been ordered to help Iraq shore up a disintegrating health care system.

But instead of being delivered to 150 brand-new Primary Health Care centres (PHCs) as originally planned, the Eagle Global Logistics vehicles were directed to drop them off at a storage warehouse in Abu Ghraib.

Not only did some of the equipment arrive damaged at the warehouse, owned by PWC of Kuwait, one in 14 crates was missing, according to the delivery documents. The shipment was fairly typical: Military auditors would later calculate that roughly 46 percent of some 70 million dollars in medical equipment deliveries made to the Abu Ghraib warehouse last spring had missing or damaged crates or contained boxes that were mislabeled or not labeled at all.

Not that it really mattered. Just over three weeks before the Apr. 27 delivery, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had canceled the construction of 130 of the 150 PHCs for which the materiel was intended. As a result, the equipment that could help diagnose and treat Iraqi illness (and escalating bomb or gun injuries) now sits idle waiting for someone to figure out what to do with it.

Even if the equipment finally makes it through the bureaucratic logjam, lack of trained personnel to operate it, especially outside major cities, will severely limit its utility. The Army Corps had written a 15-day training plan into the contract, but over time, this had been whittled down to 10 and then to just three days. Iraqi Ministry of Health officials have given up hope that any training at all will accompany the sophisticated equipment.

The desperate plight of children who are dying in Iraqi hospitals for the lack of simple equipment that in some cases can cost as little as 95p is revealed today in a letter signed by nearly 100 eminent doctors.

They are backed by a group of international lawyers, who say the conditions in hospitals revealed in their letter amount to a breach of the Geneva conventions that require Britain and the US as occupying forces to protect human life.

“We are concerned that children are dying in Iraq for want of medical treatment. Iraq, instead of being a country at the top of the league for medicine, as it once was, now has conditions and mortality of a Third World country.

Only in this way can the Iraqi people rebuild their country with its infrastructure, administration, and hospitals.”

Lawrence Wilkerson, an aide to Colin Powell when he was secretary of state says that Iran in 2003 offered to help stabilize Iraq and to cut off aid to Hizbullah in Lebanon and to Hamas. Wilkerson says that the State Department was interested in pursuing the offer, which presumably came from reformist president Mohammad Khatami. He says that when the issue was broached with VP Richard Bruce Cheney, Cheney shot down any notion of “talking to evil.” As if Mohammad Khatami is evil and Richard Bruce Cheney is not. (Cheney’s lies about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and connection to 9/11 have gotten hundreds of thousands of people killed).

Because Khatami kept promising that his reforms would make Iranians better off, and because the US rejected all his overtures and left him with no achievements to show for them, the Iranian electorate turned against the reform movement and put Mahmud Ahmadinejad into power, a loud-mouthed braggart of a sort that Cheney’s Likudniks could then build up into a bogey man to frighten Americans with. Cheney created Iran as a menace.

What this article doesn’t mention is that the rightwing Likud cabal in Cheney’s office, such as Irv Lewis Libby, with its connections to the Israeli far right, almost certainly played a key role in this rejection. I think John Hannah was already there then, too. David Wurmser came later, after getting up the fraudulent case against Iraq in the Pentagon “Office of Special Plans” (i.e. foreign policy plumbers) set up by Likudnik Douglas Feith, then the number 3 man in the Pentagon.

Libby is now on trial for lying to the special prosecutor about his role in betraying CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson. Wilson had been working on anti-proliferation efforts versus . . . Iran. She was outed to punish her husband for publicly challenging Cheney’s lies about WMD in Iraq.

Cheney is the most fascistic high official in US government in history. He recently implied that al-Qaeda is glad that the Democrats won the mid-term elections, as his way of trying to create the impression that anyone who disagrees with him is a terrorist-loving traitor. But it is Cheney who is the traitor, with his office having betrayed Valerie to the Iranians (and everyone else in the world).

Fascism depends on the creation of straw man enemies said to be dire threats to the Homeland. Iran is a poor weak third world country and poses no threat to the US. It hasn’t aggressively invaded another country for over a century. But Cheney needs Iran to substitute for the old Soviet Union, otherwise how could he get you to agree to let him listen in on your telephone calls without a warrant, or let him torture people?

Cheney is the much bigger threat to the integrity of the US constitution than any foreign force. He should be impeached. If lying about a tawdry affair that did not even get to third base is grounds for impeachment, then lying us into a war, slapping Iran’s overtures away and setting the stage for another war, and outing a CIA operative certainly are.

My colleague Mitch Wagner and some other journalists have picked up on a report by an organization called Grass Roots Freedom that a Senate bill designed to bring transparency to the lobbying process could result in the jailing of political bloggers. Did you know that the bill does not even mention the words “blog” or “blogger”? There’s also a couple of things you should know about “Grass Roots Freedom.”

As Mitch reports on his own blog entry, Grass Roots Freedom says Senate bill S. 1 “would require grassroots causes, even bloggers, who communicate to 500 or more members of the public on policy matters, to register and report quarterly to Congress the same as the big K Street lobbyists” or face time in the slammer.

As Bill O’Reilly might say: Folks, that’s just spin. First off, as I mentioned, the bill itself contains no reference to blogs or bloggers. What it does cover are paid lobbying activities, which include “paid efforts to stimulate grassroots lobbying, but do not include grass roots lobbying,” according the text of the bill itself. It also indicates that the lobbyist must be receiving at least $25,000 per quarter from a client to fall under the “paid” definition.

So, sure. If a blogger is receiving what amounts to a six-figure annual salary from a client, say, Acme River Pollutants, Inc., to write blogs urging people to form a campaign to stop, say, a clean water act, then that blogger would have to register as a lobbyist or face the penalties set out in the bill.

(Note that if the blogger was simply opposing the act he or she would not fall under the bill’s definition of a lobbyist. He or she would have to be urging other people to organize and oppose.)

So the notion that this would apply to individual bloggers who use the Web to disseminate their opinions or report news is pure nonsense. But don’t take my word for it, read the bill yourself, it’s The Legislative Accountability and Transparency Act of 2007.

Oh, and about Grass Roots Freedom? If you think it’s an organization with a long tradition of promoting civil disobedience or something like that, you’d be wrong. According to Internet records, GrassRootsFreedom.com did not exist until December 11, 2006.

And its chairman, Richard Viguerie? He’s also chairman of something called American Target Advertising, to which the site GrassRootsFreedom.com is registered. And he also hosts a conservative Web forum called ConservativeHQ.com.