The Rag Blog

NEW YORK–Newly released internal CIA documents assert that former president George Herbert Walker Bush’s oil company emerged from a 1950’s collaboration with a covert CIA officer.

Bush has long denied allegations that he had connections to the intelligence community prior to 1976, when he became Central Intelligence Agency director under President Gerald Ford. At the time, he described his appointment as a ‘real shocker.’

But the freshly uncovered memos contend that Bush maintained a close personal and business relationship for decades with a CIA staff employee who, according to those CIA documents, was instrumental in the establishment of Bush’s oil venture, Zapata, in the early 1950s, and who would later accompany Bush to Vietnam as a “cleared and witting commercial asset” of the agency.

According to a CIA internal memo dated November 29, 1975, Bush’s original oil company, Zapata Petroleum, began in 1953 through joint efforts with Thomas J. Devine, a CIA staffer who had resigned his agency position that same year to go into private business. The ’75 memo describes Devine as an “oil wild-catting associate of Mr. Bush.” The memo is attached to an earlier memo written in 1968, which lays out how Devine resumed work for the secret agency under commercial cover beginning in 1963.

A detention camp in Tyler Texas that currently holds hundreds of rebuffed asylum seekers who legally entered the country, half of which are children swept up in midnight raids, is a potential prime location for the enforced transfer of American citizens during a time of national emergency.

The privatized Hutto jail, which is also administered by Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), currently interns political asylum seekers who came to the U.S. on legal visas. Most of them are families including pregnant women and children who have never been accused of any wrongdoing but are forced to endure squalid conditions inside literal concentration camps.

In 2004 the facility was on the verge of being shutdown due to lack of occupancy but new immigration policies, allied to the burgeoning growth of the prison industry and future plans to detain American citizens on masse, have revived the potential scope of the camp, and a new contract to intern 600 individuals was finalized with immigration authorities in December 2005.

The facility is euphemistically called a “Residential Center,” yet charges of overcrowding and poor conditions are rife, with an estimated 645 people filling a facility that has only 512 beds.

Iraq’s massive oil reserves, the third-largest in the world, are about to be thrown open for large-scale exploitation by Western oil companies under a controversial law which is expected to come before the Iraqi parliament within days.

The US government has been involved in drawing up the law, a draft of which has been seen by The Independent on Sunday. It would give big oil companies such as BP, Shell and Exxon 30-year contracts to extract Iraqi crude and allow the first large-scale operation of foreign oil interests in the country since the industry was nationalised in 1972.

The huge potential prizes for Western firms will give ammunition to critics who say the Iraq war was fought for oil. They point to statements such as one from Vice-President Dick Cheney, who said in 1999, while he was still chief executive of the oil services company Halliburton, that the world would need an additional 50 million barrels of oil a day by 2010. “So where is the oil going to come from?… The Middle East, with two-thirds of the world’s oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies,” he said.

FALLUJAH, Jan. 8 (IPS) – Ten-year-old Yassir aimed a plastic gun at a passing U.S. armoured patrol in Fallujah, and shouted “Bang! Bang!”

Yassir did not know what was coming. “I yelled for everyone to run, because the Americans were turning back,” 12-year-old Ahmed who was with Yassir told IPS.

The soldiers followed Yassir to his house and smashed almost everything in it. “They did this after beating Yassir and his uncle hard, and they spoke the nastiest words,” Ahmed said.

It is not just the children, or the people of Fallujah who are frightened.

“Those soldiers are terrified here,” Dr. Salim al-Dyni, a psychotherapist visiting Fallujah told IPS. Dr Dyni said he had seen professional reports of psychologically disturbed soldiers “while serving in hot areas, and Fallujah is the hottest and most terrifying for them.”

Dr. Dyni said disturbed soldiers were behind the worst atrocities. “Most murders committed by U.S. soldiers resulted from the soldiers’ fears.”

Local Iraqi police estimate that at least five attacks are being carried out against U.S. troops in Fallujah each day, and about as many against Iraqi government security forces. The city in the restive al-Anabar province to the west of Baghdad has been under some form of siege since April 2004.

That has meant punishment for the people. “American officers asked me a hundred times how the fighters obtain weapons,” a 35-year-old resident who was detained together with dozens of others during a U.S. military raid at their houses in the Muallimin Quarter last month told IPS.

“They (American soldiers) called me the worst of names that I could understand, and many that I could not. I heard younger detainees screaming under torture repeating ‘I do not know, I do not know’, apparently replying to the same question I was asked.”

U.S. soldiers have been reacting wildly to attacks on them.

I wasn’t fully moved by 24’s post on a cousin leaving Baghdad until a similar situation happened in our family. Just about the time I was looking for a flight out of Baghdad, I heard the news that Aunt W and her family were leaving Baghdad for Syria. I was shocked by that news.

Aunt W has always been a cornerstone in the family. It was at her house that we spent our first weeks in Baghdad while we were looking for a place of our own; it was at her house that the family gathered for Eid celebrations; it was at her house that we went to chill when we needed a change of pace. She was the one who mainly took care of my grandmother in law, who drove her around, made sure her needs were met. And in early December 2006, we got the call that she had finally had it; they were leaving their beloved homeland and families within a matter of days.

Aunt W lived at the border of Adhamiya/Seleikh. The final straw for them came after the Sadr City car bombings, when the family got numerous calls from friends to leave their home, who feared for their safety against reprisal attacks. Aunt W had already faced having her husband’s office damaged by a nearby bomb, had faced having a son arrested by the Iraqi army, had seen numerous friends’ husbands and sons disappear and die. The only thing she could think of was being slaughtered in her own home. She could take no more.

What is so significant about this story is two things. First of all, that people who are so settled in their homes, in their lands, are forced to leave is a huge misfortune and hardship. Imagine right now that you have to leave your comfortable, newly furnished house in Anytown, USA because suddenly, it isn’t safe to live there anymore. What do you do with your home? You can’t sell it for a profit, you can’t sell your furniture for a profit; everyone else is leaving town, and no one wants to buy. You end up losing everything, and moving to a new, unknown world, with no friends, no relatives. It’s difficult.

The other thing that struck me about Aunt W’s leaving is that we could not even say our goodbyes to her. The situation has become so bad in Baghdad, that many people are choosing not to travel to different parts of the city, fearing for their lives. We couldn’t hold a farewell party for her, we couldn’t even drop by for five minutes of goodbyes. One day, she just up and left Baghdad, after making her phone calls to her sisters, mother, nieces and nephews.

And the same thing happened with me when I left Baghdad. In the summer time, when I came to the States for a visit, I made my rounds to the relatives, for a short goodbye. This time around, when I will likely not go back for a long while, I could not make those rounds. I could not visit our grandmother in Adhamiya to bid her farewell; and I don’t know when I will next see her, if I will ever see her again.
The best summary of the situation there was seen in the eyes of my 25 year old cousin in law, who travelled with me by airplane from Iraq to Amman. She has also left the country, to complete her medical studies in Jordan. In the car, on the way to the airport, she sat with her 8 month old daughter in her hands, wiping silent tears from her eyes. She was saying goodbye to her beloved family, and to her beloved Baghdad, which had been so changed by this last war. She did not know when she would next see her Baghdad, and she did not know what it would be like next time she saw it.

One in eight Iraqis have been forced out of their homes because of conflict, the United Nations Refugee Agency has found.

According to the Agency, the current exodus from Iraq is the largest population movement in the Middle East since the displacement of Palestinians following the creation of Israel in 1948.

The Red Crescent’s suspension of its work in Baghdad has seriously affected the lives of thousands of Iraqis

BAGHDAD, 8 Jan 2007 (IRIN) – Displaced families in the capital, Baghdad, have urged the Iraqi Red Crescent Society to continue supporting people who have been displaced as a result of sectarian violence.

“We need urgent help because since the [Red Crescent] volunteers in the capital stopped their work, we have been seriously suffering with the lack of assistance, medical care at camps, and especially food,” said Ibraheem Rabia’a, a displaced metal-worker who acts as a spokesperson for a group of 120 families living in abandoned government buildings on the outskirts of the capital.

According to the Brookings Institution, 650,000 Iraqis are internally displaced, living in camps or abandoned buildings. A further one million people are estimated to have been displaced before March 2003. Local NGOs, like the Red Crescent and Iraqi Aid Association, believe that at least 30 percent of the total number are living in the capital, Baghdad.

The Red Crescent suspended its activities in Baghdad after 36 people were abducted, 30 of them Red Crescent staff members, on 17 December. The move spurred the organisation, which was the main provider of aid in Baghdad, into closing 40 of its subsidiary offices in the capital.

Editor’s Note: From both the White House and Congress, there’s lots of talk about how important it is to look to the future, not dwell on the past. But one of the painful lessons from the Iraq debacle is that Official Washington’s failure to understand the past — and the real histories of key players — contributed to the present catastrophe.

In this guest essay, two former U.S. intelligence analysts — Ray McGovern and W. Patrick Lang — argue that the United States can ill afford letting the Iraq War-era liars off lightly, even if that means taking a hard look back over the past several years:

Lies have consequences.

All those who helped President George W. Bush launch a war of aggression—termed by Nuremberg “the supreme international crime”—have blood on their hands and must be held accountable. This includes corrupt intelligence officials. Otherwise, look for them to perform the same service in facilitating war on Iran.

“They should have been shot,” said former State Department intelligence director, Carl Ford, referring to ex-CIA director George Tenet and his deputy John McLaughlin, for their “fundamentally dishonest” cooking of intelligence to please the White House. Ford was alluding to “intelligence” on the menacing but non-existent mobile biological weapons laboratories in Iraq.

Ford was angry that Tenet and McLaughlin persisted in portraying the labs as real several months after they had been duly warned that they existed only in the imagination of intelligence analysts who, in their own eagerness to please, had glommed onto second-hand tales told by a con-man appropriately dubbed “Curveball.”

In fact, Tenet and McLaughlin had been warned about Curveball long before they let then-Secretary of State Colin Powell shame himself, and the rest of us, by peddling Curveball’s wares at the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 5, 2003.

After the war began, those same analysts, still “leaning forward,” misrepresented a tractor-trailer found in Iraq outfitted with industrial equipment as one of the mobile bio-labs. Former U.N. weapons inspector David Kay, then working for NBC News, obliged by pointing out the equipment “where the biological process took place… Literally, there is nothing else for which it could be used.”

George Tenet knows a good man when he sees him. A few weeks later he hired Kay to lead the Pentagon-created Iraq Survey Group in the famous search to find other (equally non-existent, it turned out) “weapons of mass destruction.”

He was especially hard on the little things. — said of the Lone Biker of the Apocalypse, from Raising Arizona (1987)

This is a reflection on a previous botched and very public murder in this Iraq undertaking.

“He tried to kill my dad,” or so GWB is reported to have said of the late Saddam. This unfounded statement motivated or so it seems, the House of Bush to bring down a biblical scourge upon the House of Hussein and collaterally, the peoples of Iraq and America. This war looks like a personal vendetta bankrolled by the American taxpayer. The little things to which the title refers are those of us who are paying, in blood or money.

Of course the fact is that the Bush daddy is still alive and living large off his Carlyle Group profits and his taxpayer-funded federal retirement, but the House of Hussein is obliterated in the clearest Old Testament terms.

Saddam Hussein’s sons and grandson were murdered by the U.S. military. In effect, a pestilence of the Angel of Death eliminated his first born, not to mention second and grandson, thrown in as a bonus point.

The U.S. military must be capable of blocking off, barricading and controlling a small gunfight. Intelligence indicated the location of the Hussein heirs and the U.S. Army then went “balls to the wall.” Clearly, the Army could have isolated the brothers and negotiated or starved them out. It worked with Noreiga, so why not the Hussein family? Every indicator I read implied that Qusay and Uday could have been captured if the U.S. were so inclined.

Well, it was easy to kill them all, but that hasn’t brought peace and security to Iraq or America. In fact, when and if Osama bin Laden is treated to a similar fate, the world will not automatically become a safer place. The opposite is a more likely outcome. Target stores everywhere will have to be especially vigilant in their department which trolls for sanitizing images of political martyrs. Finding Che on the DVD boxes was just the beginning.

Last month a coincidence of birth and death signaled a transition for South America and indeed for the world.

The former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet died even as leaders of South American nations concluded a two-day summit meeting in Cochabamba, Bolivia, hosted by President Evo Morales, at which the participants and the agenda represented the antithesis of Pinochet and his era.

In the Cochabamba Declaration, the presidents and envoys of 12 countries agreed to study the idea of forming a continent-wide community similar to the European Union.

The declaration marks another stage toward regional integration in South America, 500 years after the European conquests. The subcontinent, from Venezuela to Argentina, may yet present an example to the world on how to create an alternative future from a legacy of empire and terror.

The United States has long dominated the region by two major methods: violence and economic strangulation. Quite generally, international affairs have more than a slight resemblance to the Mafia. The Godfather does not take it lightly when he is crossed, even by a small storekeeper.

Previous attempts at independence have been crushed, partly because of a lack of regional cooperation. Without it, threats can be handled one by one. (Central America, unfortunately, has yet to shake the fear and destruction left over from decades of U.S.-backed terror, especially during the 1980s.)

To the United States, the real enemy has always been independent nationalism, particularly when it threatens to become a “contagious example,” to borrow Henry Kissinger’s characterization of democratic socialism in Chile.

On Sept. 11, 1973, Pinochet’s forces attacked the Chilean presidential palace. Salvador Allende, the democratically elected president, died in the palace, apparently by his own hand, because he was unwilling to surrender to the assault that demolished Latin America’s oldest, most vibrant democracy and established a regime of torture and repression.

The official death toll for the coup is 3,200; the actual toll is commonly estimated at double that figure. An official inquiry 30 years after the coup found evidence of approximately 30,000 cases of torture during the Pinochet regime. Among the leaders at Cochabamba was the Chilean president, Michelle Bachelet. Like Allende, she is a socialist and a physician. She also is a former exile and political prisoner. Her father was a general who died in prison after being tortured.

At Cochabamba, Morales and President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela celebrated a new joint venture, a gas separation project in Bolivia. Such cooperation strengthens the region’s role as a major player in global energy.