The Rag Blog

On 14 November, Bridget Ash wrote to the BBC’s Today programme asking why the invasion of Iraq was described merely as “a conflict”. She could not recall other bloody invasions reduced to “a conflict”. She received this reply:

Dear Bridget You may well disagree, but I think there’s a big difference between the aggressive “invasions” of dictators like Hitler and Saddam and the “occupation”, however badly planned and executed, of a country for positive ends, as in the Coalition effort in Iraq. Yours faithfully, Roger Hermiston Assistant Editor, Today

In demonstrating how censorship works in free societies and the double standard that props up the facade of “objectivity” and “impartiality”, Roger Hermiston’s polite profanity offers a valuable exhibit. An invasion is not an invasion if “we” do it, regardless of the lies that justified it and the contempt shown for international law. An occupation is not an occupation if “we” run it, no matter that the means to our “positive ends” require the violent deaths of hundreds of thousands of men, women and children, and an unnecessary sectarian tragedy.

Those who euphemise these crimes are those Arthur Miller had in mind when he wrote: “The thought that the state . . . is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied.” Miller might have been less charitable had he referred directly to those whose job it was to keep the record straight.

Christopher King explores the phenomenon of the American peasant – that segment of US society which, through suspension of all critical faculties and indifference to the truth, defy logic and evidence by supporting the war against Iraq.

The peasant is a type who has disappeared from Western Europe with excellent effects both socially and politically. The American peasant however has a lot to answer for. This is most vividly shown in the public’s judgment about the rightness of the Iraq war where views are sharply divided between Europe and America.

The historical peasant was an agricultural worker who was poor, uneducated and usually worked so hard he had no time or energy for anything else. Any opinions or judgments that such a man might make would necessarily be of poor quality. In America, the land of plenty, opportunity and electronic information which has never seen a peasant class of this sort, how can the peasant possibly exist and indeed be blamed for his judgments?

I wish to discuss here one strand, but an important one, of many that made the Iraq war possible. Others for example are those of the Rumsfelds who were in it for the money, the Condoleezza Rices and Colin Powell who were careerists and the Richard Perles together with sundry Zionist supporters and collaborators for whom Saddam was their worst enemy. We can easily understand them and their self-interests. Everyone got what s/he wanted except for Colin Powell whose unwise United Nations performance in identifying mobile chemical factories will make him a joke far beyond his lifetime. I am not concerned about these. I am interested in the major segment of quiet peasants who believed uncritically what they were told and supported the war by their compliance. I am speaking of a peasant state of mind. We cannot blame our historical peasant for poor judgment or lack of knowledge. He cannot help his position. The American peasant has no such excuse.

The first step must be the recognition that the solution to the Iraq crisis must be generated first internally, and then, importantly, at the regional level. . . No foreign power, no matter how benevolent, should be allowed to dictate the terms of a possible historic and stable settlement in the Middle East. . .

Secondly, the basis of a settlement must take into account the fact that the forces that have been unleashed by the invasion of Iraq must be acknowledged and accommodated. These forces, in turn, must accept limits to their demands and claims. That would apply, in particular, to the Shias and the Kurds, the two communities who have been seen to have gained from the invasion of Iraq.

Thirdly, the Sunni Arab community must become convinced that its loss of undivided power will not lead to marginalisation and discrimination. . .

Fourthly, the existing states surrounding Iraq feel deeply threatened by the changes there. That needs to be recognised and treated in any lasting deal for Iraq and the area. . .

The Iraqi government that has arisen as a result of the admittedly flawed political process must be accepted as a sovereign and responsible government. No settlement can possibly succeed if its starting point is the illegitimacy of the Iraqi government or one that considers it expendable.

01/07/07 “Tribune” — — ALEXANDRIA, Egypt — According to Abu Omar’s wife, a few months ago two Egyptian officials visited her husband in his Cairo prison cell and made him an offer they hoped he wouldn’t refuse.

The offer was $2 million cash, according to the radical cleric’s wife Nabila Ghali. All Abu Omar needed to do was sign a paper saying he had come to Egypt of his own accord on Feb. 17, 2003, and to repeat that statement to the news media.

Feb. 17, 2003, is when Abu Omar vanished while walking down a side street in Milan, Italy. Prosecutors in Milan charge that he was kidnapped by the CIA and flown to Egypt, where he has been imprisoned for most of the time since then.

When Abu Omar asked where the money would come from, he was told simply “a foreign intelligence service,” according to an Italian investigator in the case. In a letter to another Milan imam after visiting her husband in prison, Ghali described the offer and said her husband never responded to it.

Milan’s deputy public prosecutor, Armando Spataro, has the letter now, preserved with other evidence to be used at the trial of 25 CIA operatives, a U.S. Air Force colonel and five senior Italian intelligence officials accused of participating in Abu Omar’s kidnapping.

Had Abu Omar agreed to the purported $2 million deal, there would have been no kidnapping, and therefore no case. Spataro’s investigators are working to find out who, if anyone, authorized a $2 million payment. A source close to the investigation said Spataro has confirmation from within the Italian intelligence community that the offer was genuine, though not that the Italians were to be the source of the funds.

A few days after the alleged visit by the two Egyptians, Abu Omar was moved from Torah Prison on the southern edge of Cairo to police headquarters in this Mediterranean port city, where he was born and where his family assembled on a Sunday evening in late October to discuss his case.

Gathered in the high-rise apartment of his sister, Rawya, and her husband, Magdi, a prominent Cairo lawyer–both asked that their last name not be used–were Abu Omar’s younger brother, Hitham, a chemical engineer and devout Muslim with a long gray beard, and Ghali, a schoolteacher dressed head to toe in black.

Recent disturbing incidents on the US/Mexico border, coupled with mainstream news reports concerning government aiding of illegal immigration serves to once again remind US citizens that the sovereign borders are systematically being broken down and the country is being quietly amalgamated into a Pan American Union.

Last week it was reported that a U.S. Border Patrol entry Identification Team site was overrun by a team of armed Mexicans Wednesday night along Arizona’s border with Mexico, somewhere along the 120 mile section of the border between Nogales and Lukeville, an area known for being a drug corridor.

The guard were forced to flee as troops are not allowed to apprehend illegal entrants and do not carry armed weapons.

“We don’t know if this was a matter of somebody coming up accidentally on the individuals, coming up intentionally on the individuals, or some sort of a diversion?” said Rob Daniels, Border Patrol Tucson Sector spokesman. “We just don’t know and that’s why everything’s got to be looked into.”

Imagine if muslims or Arabs were caught shooting at national guard and overrunning them, we would never hear the end of it. This incident however, is the latest in a long line of stories that barely reach the footnotes of the local nightly news.

In late 2005 there were dozens of American citizens kidnapped over the Texas border and taken down to Mexico and held. This was kept very quiet. There was a huge stand off, some were killed. 800+ US citizens were killed on the Texas border in 2005, hundreds more were killed in 2006.

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.