The Rag Blog

The WaPo has gotten hold of the investigative report on the Haditha massacre (click on the label at the bottom of this post for my previous posts on the subject). It still doesn’t answer whether the Marines were on a rampage after an IED attack killed one of them, or whether they calmly massacred civilians in compliance with rules of engagement that allowed for such massacres. And I’m still not sure which would be worse. One of the most damning aspects is that the events took place over many hours. It was fairly late in the day that Marines “approached a third and fourth house after noticing men they said were peering at them suspiciously,” separated out the men from the women, and executed the men. For peering at them suspiciously.

At the start of the massacre, after the IED blast, the report says that the squad’s leader, Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich, executed five innocent bystanders “one by one,” and that when he ordered Marines to enter civilian houses from which, supposedly, they were being fired upon (I still doubt there was any hostile fire), he told them to shoot first and ask questions later. That quote is from his own statement. (I wonder if they ever did ask those questions.)

Wuterich also told investigators, “I want to make clear that we did not go in intentionally to spray everyone we saw. We were taking fire.” Note that Iraqi bullets = fire, American bullets = spray.

Speaking of spray, another sergeant admits to having peed on the corpses.

The colonel in charge of the unit, Stephen W. Davis, decided that even though there had been many civilian casualties, and an initial attempt at covering up how those civilians had died, there was no need for an investigation: “There was nothing out of the ordinary about any of this, including the number of civilian dead, that would have triggered anything in my mind that was out of the norm.”

Every now and then, you have to take a lesson or two from history. In the case of George Bush’s Iraq, here’s one: No matter what the President announces in his “new way forward” speech on Iraq next week — including belated calls for “sacrifice” from the man whose answer to 9/11 was to urge Americans to surge into Disney World — it won’t work. Nothing our President suggests in relation to Iraq, in fact, will have a ghost of a chance of success. Worse than that, whatever it turns out to be, it is essentially guaranteed to make matters worse.

Repetition, after all, is most of what knowledge adds up to, and the Bush administration has been repetitively consistent in its Iraqi — and larger Middle Eastern — policies. Whatever it touches (or perhaps the better word would be “smashes”) turns to dross. Iraq is now dross — and Saddam Hussein was such a remarkably hard act to follow badly that this is no small accomplishment.

A striking but largely unexplored aspect of Saddam Hussein’s execution is illustrative. His trial was basically run out of the U.S. embassy in Baghdad; Saddam was held at Camp Cropper, the U.S. prison near Baghdad International Airport. He was delivered to the Iraqi government for hanging in a U.S. helicopter (as his body would be flown back to his home village in a U.S. helicopter).

Now, let’s add a few more facts into the mix. Among Iraqi Shiites, no individual has been viewed as more of an enemy by the Bush administration than the radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. American troops fought bloody battles with his Mahdi Army in 2004, destroying significant parts of the old city of Najaf in the process. American forces make periodic, destructive raids into the vast Baghdad slum and Sadrist stronghold of Sadr City to take out his followers and recently killed one of his top aides in a raid in Najaf. The upcoming Presidential “surge” into Baghdad is, reputedly, in part to be aimed at suppressing his militia, which a recent Pentagon report described as “the main threat to stability in Iraq.”

Nonetheless at the crucial moment in the execution what did some of the Interior Ministry guards do? They chanted: “Muqtada! Muqtada! Muqtada!” In all press reports, this has been described as a “taunting” of Saddam (and assumedly of Iraqi Sunnis more generally). But it could as easily be described as the purest mockery of George W. Bush and everything he’s done in the country. If, in such a relatively controlled setting, the Americans couldn’t stop Saddam’s execution from being “infiltrated” by al-Sadr’s followers — who are also, of course, part of Prime Minister Maliki’s government — what can they possibly do in the chaos of Baghdad? How can a few more thousands of U.S. troops be expected to keep them, or Badr Brigade militiamen out of the streets, no less the police, the military, and various ministries?

Consider the “new way forward,” then, just another part of the Bush administration’s endless bubbleworld. And check out exactly what madness to look forward to in next week’s presidential address via Robert Dreyfuss, a shrewd reporter and the author of the indispensable Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam. Tom

The Surge to Nowhere: Traveling the Planet Neocon Road to Baghdad (Again)
By Robert Dreyfuss

Like some neocon Wizard of Oz, in building expectations for the 2007 version of his “Strategy for Victory” in Iraq, President Bush is promising far more than he can deliver. It is now nearly two months since he fired Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, installing Robert Gates in his place, and the White House revealed that a full-scale review of America’s failed policy in Iraq was underway. Last week, having spent months — if, in fact, the New York Times is correct that the review began late in the summer — consulting with generals, politicians, State Department and CIA bureaucrats, and Pentagon planners, Bush emerged from yet another powwow to tell waiting reporters: “We’ve got more consultation to do until I talk to the country about the plan.”

As the Democrats regain control of Congress for the first time in 12 years, the party leaders still don’t seem to understand the forces that sent them into the wilderness in 1994 or the reasons they were summoned back in 2006.

Typical of their cluelessness was a “100 Hours Survey” distributed by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in mid-December. The survey asked Democratic contributors to rank nine priority issues in order of importance for the new Congress.

The issues included raising the minimum wage, financing stem-cell research, revising the Medicare prescription drug program and stiffening ethics rules. The only national security issue on the list was the implementation of all the remaining – but unspecified – recommendations of the 9/11 Commission.

No reference was made to ending the Iraq War, launching investigative hearings on President George W. Bush’s actions, reasserting checks and balances on the Executive, or restoring constitutional safeguards that have been overridden during the “war on terror,” such as the habeas corpus right to a fair trial.

Though many issues on the DCCC’s priority list surely have merit, what’s missing is any commitment to the larger purpose of the American Republic.

The Democratic leaders have yet to grasp that the transcendent principles of democracy were a major factor in the national rejection of Bush and the Republican congressional majority on Nov. 7.

Many traditional conservatives and libertarians, who normally vote Republican, switched their allegiances or stayed home out of disdain for the authoritarian tendencies of the Bush administration and the failure of the congressional Republicans to conduct any meaningful oversight.

These right-of-center voters shared the alarm of many liberals and independents over Bush’s assertion of “plenary” – or unlimited – powers for the duration of the interminable “war on terror”; his abrogation of constitutional rights; his “signing statements” that set aside laws; and his excessive secrecy that often left the American people in the dark.

These voters from across the political spectrum – what might be called the “constitutionalist bloc” – were offended, too, by neoconservative hubris that treated average citizens as children to be frightened with color-coded terror alerts and tricked them into surrendering their liberties.

It is more than a paradox. The United States, the world’s leading military power and the only country to use the atom bomb against humans, is leading the pressure against Iran for its efforts to develop a nuclear energy program for peaceful ends.

The crusade has reached the point that the UN Security Council recently passed sanctions against Iran for exercising its right to use this energy source to meet its development needs.

The paradox is even more apparent when Washington remains silent, like its European partners, about the nuclear weapons arsenal of Israel, its strategic Middle Eastern ally and spearhead of US expansionist and militarist policies in the region, with oil as the top priority.

To guarantee its aims, the White House needs Israel and its nuclear arms and also requires, and to no less a degree, the stopping of other country’s development plans that could consolidate the growth of nuclear science and technology for peaceful ends, such as the program carried out by the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The paradox also applies to the Palestinian issue and explains why Israel has had free reign to massacre and invade under the indifferent and conspiratorial eye of the US, which provides it with sophisticated weapons while the UN and the international community have made endless calls and resolutions that amount to nothing.

In this context, Israel is steeping up its policy of terror and death against the Palestinians by adding the diplomatic disguise and the manipulation of the media to “help the Europeans understand” the importance of condemning Iran and, as ordered by Bush, trying to impede that country from carrying out its plans to develop nuclear
energy for peaceful ends.

ANNOUNCEMENT WITHOUT CONSEQUENCES

If the U.S. or Israel attack Iranian nuclear power facilities “huge amounts of radioactive material will be lofted into the air to contaminate the people of Iran and surrounding countries,” an eminent international authority on nuclear weapons warns.

“This fallout will induce cancers, leukemia, and genetic disease in these populations for years to come, both a medical catastrophe and a war crime of immense proportions,” Dr. Helen Caldicott writes in her new book, “Nuclear Power Is Not The Answer,” published by The New Press.

Dr. Caldicott said the Pentagon has met with its Israeli counterparts “to discuss the participation of Israel in plans to attack Iran” even though President Bush said “this notion that the United States is getting ready to attack Iran is simply ridiculous.”

Citing the accidental meltdown of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Ukraine in April, 1986, as an example of what can happen when radioactivity is released, she termed it a “medical catastrophe (that) will continue to plague much of Russia, Belarus, the Ukraine, and Europe for the rest of time.” Between 5,000 and 10,000 people have died prematurely to date, she said.

Between 1986 and 2001, Belarus suffered 8,358 cases of thyroid cancer as a result of the Chernobyl meltdown, and most of the afflicted have had their thyroids surgically removed, leaving them dependent on thyroid medications for the rest of their lives, said Dr. Caldicott, a physician and anti-nuclear activist. She writes the areas of Europe, and its populations, afflicted by the Chernobyl accident will suffer from its impact “for thousands of years.”

Saddam’s execution, or “execution-gate” as some Iraqi and Arabic media are calling it now, has turned into an international debate. The Iraqi government is being criticized directly and indirectly even by the Bush administration itself!

So it seems that the Iraqi government came up with two new excuses to deal with the situation and shift the blame to someone else.

The first one is: Who Filmed the Execution? Get’em!

As if the problem is about who filmed the shameful scene, not about who designed it and participated in it. “Whoever leaked this video meant to harm national reconciliation and drive a wedge between Shiites and Sunnis,” said National Security Adviser Muwaffaq al-Rubaie, one of a group of 20 officials and other witnesses who were present at the execution at dawn on Saturday.

Is he joking or what?!

Is it really about who had the fancy mobile phone and managed to smuggle it through the U.S. checkpoint? Or is it about who decided to kill Saddam on the morning of Eid and taunt him with sectarian shouts?

“There was an infiltration at the execution chamber.”

Give me a break. The guy with the camera-phone was screaming with the rest of the militiamen and he ran towards the dead body of saddam while everyone else shrieked and took pictures. You can see the other cameras flashing in both the leaked and official videos. There was no “infiltration”, it was perfectly secure and exclusive.

I heard Mr. al-Rubaie on CNN some few minutes after the execution, this was before the videos hit the fan, and he described the execution as “professional”, in accordance with “Iraqi and international standards”, and in conformity with “Islamic law”. He said that everyone treated Saddam in a “respectful” way.

A popular assembly is a self-organized, autonomous, non-hierarchical group of people who come together spontaneously. They come together as gente (people) and metamorphose into pueblo (We the people, not them). In many cases the assemblies are based geographically (by neighborhood, town, county, state, etc.) as in Argentina or Bolivia. (The union base itself is not a popular assembly because it excludes those who don’t belong to the union. Nevertheless, the Bolivian Water Wars depended on the spontaneous participation of the non-union population ready to struggle).

In Oaxaca, as in those countries, the assemblies sprang up virtually simultaneously in many cities and neighborhoods. The assemblies are inclusive as opposed to exclusive, and develop in process rather than being pre-planned.

The immediate grounds giving rise to the a popular assembly movement are particular: a grievance or an assault. The long-standing cumulative grounds are the neoliberal depredations foisted on the people, which include downgrading of quality of life, (loss of middle class status, impoverishment of the poor) loss of jobs and loss of income. Grievances may come to the “ya basta” point, the last straw, with a particular land taking, privatization of water, theft of bank savings, privatization of electricity, oil, gas, increased school fees, etcetera. When the word “harto”, which means “fed up”, appears, as it did in Argentina and in Oaxaca in the popular slogans and songs, I take this to mean that the conflict has been simmering a long time, and the resentment has reached its climax.

The Argentinean popular assemblies set the anti-neoliberal pattern, emerging as spontaneous, unplanned uprisings of the outraged. Popular assemblies form as a furious alternative to electoral politics. In this era we see everywhere, including the United States, the ownership of elected officials by the large, usually transnational corporations. The “elected”, whether honestly or fraudulently installed in office, have a paying boss who is different from the voters from whom the officials are distanced by both their membership in the “political class” and their isolation from the lives of the multitudes they supposedly “represent.” The politicians are often very corrupt; they are often overtly and murderously repressive against their own populations in Mexico (not just Oaxaca), Latin America and around the globe. Some nations like the United States and some European countries keep their repression under wraps; one need only consider the number of persons imprisoned in the United States (According to the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2.2 million in federal or state prisons in December 2005).[2] Some seek to run the prisons as lucrative privatized businesses.

It can be noted in this context that transnational corporations have stripped away the social and financial power that used to belong to the nation states. The nations are now left only with the physical power to repress, and to administer whatever is left of their bureaucracies. The laws serve mainly to enforce the property rights of the ownership class, and facilitate transfers of wealth from the newly “colonized” nations to the transnational corporations.

The asamblea consists of people (pueblos) who define themselves as actors, and the asamblea is their show of power. Direct participation is the hallmark of the asamblea. It takes direct democracy to the participants and abandons the useless representative government – with good reason; “elected” or assumed (royal or dictatorial) governorship cannot respond to the needs of the ordinary people while simultaneously obeying the financial demands of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the corporations controlling social agendas, including health, educational and environmental agendas. (In this context, it is interesting that Hugo Chavez of Venezuela bailed out Argentina from its IMF debt. Subsequently Bolivia declined to accept a loan.)

The menace of global terrorism has been labeled the greatest threat to western civilization since communism and yet swimming pools, peanuts and lost deer kill more Americans every single year. Why are our governments facilitating the terrorist’s agenda by hyping a peril that simply doesn’t exist?

The number of Americans killed as a result of international terrorism since the 1960’s gives us a benchmark from which we can correctly identify and target other dire dangers to our very way of life.

– Allergic reactions to peanuts

– Accident causing deer

– Lightning strikes

That’s correct – all of the above have killed an equal number of Americans since 1960 as terrorism. One could even categorize M&M’s, lost deer and the weather as an “axis of evil arming to threaten the peace of the world,” as George Bush famously once said.

As Ohio State University’s John Mueller concludes in a report entitled A False Sense Of Insecurity, “For all the attention it evokes, terrorism actually causes rather little damage and the likelihood that any individual will become a victim in most places is microscopic.”

Last summer’s much vaunted transatlantic terror plot, a facade that has since collapsed under the weight of its own absurdity, led to ridiculous measures in airports banning any form of liquids in carry on luggage and mother’s were forced to drink their own breast milk. Yet there has not been a bomb planted in a piece of checked luggage on an American carrier since the 1988 Lockerbie disaster, itself a false flag inside job. Since that time hundreds of billions of Americans have been routinely interrogated about the contents of their luggage while cargo remains completely unchecked.

To equal the danger that Americans place themselves in every day by driving their car down the highway, there would have to be a September 11 every month. To reach the same level of risk that one undertakes in boarding an airline, you only have to travel eleven miles in a car.

The principle goal of terrorists is to terrify populations and governments into acquiescing to their political demands. The only way they can achieve this is by generating a substantial amount of fear and making people believe the lie that their life is significantly threatened by potential terrorism, when in reality the swimming pool in their backyard poses more of a danger.

As soon as we lose the fear, the terrorists lose their power over us to control our behavior. If western governments were really trying to win a war on terror as they claim then they would downplay and sideline acts of terror, pointing out that an individual has more chance of being struck by lightning than being killed in a terror attack.

I am an American, and as an American, I often find it very difficult to take responsibility for my actions. This letter is my effort to take responsibility for some of the things I have done to harm you. I speak for no other American but myself.

I am responsible for the many decades of suffering and hardship you have faced (and may well likely continue to face). I helped bring Saddam Hussein to power in order to control your natural resources and to use you as a state agent against Iran. I furnished Saddam with political support, money and deadly weaponry, much of which was used against you with my silent blessings. I protected him and allowed him create a world of misery for you in return for his loyalty to me.

Eventually, for political reasons, I found it useful to make him a bogey man. To his credit, this was a roll he played very well.

However, when I punished him with sanctions, you were the ones who starved. When I punished him with bombs, you were the ones who died. When I removed him from power without a workable transition strategy, you were the ones who were thrust into lawless chaos.

When Saddam was of no more use to me, I had him killed.

I know this letter means next to nothing to you, as you struggle to survive day to day, but I think it is important for at least one single American to acknowledge his silent responsibility in your suffering.

Call me Ishmael. Inspired by a fellow Montanan’s recent diary, “It’s the Contractors, Stupid- A Plan to Get Out of Iraq,” I went rooting for truffles on the internet today and discovered that Iraq is nearing a critical point for a process many of us and almost all ordinary Iraqis know almost nothing about: The Bearing Point plan for Iraq is predicated on WTO membership. Despite Iraq’s not meeting the basic requirements for WTO membership, the application has been fast-tracked since Paul Bremer first put his boots on Saddam’s old desk. Although Iran has applied for and been denied observer status 15 times, Iraq, occupied and already in the throes of civil war, was granted observer status right on Bremer’s schedule, in February of 2004 and is now in the final stage of securing full WTO membership.

Is the WTO accession process is part of a duplicitous, Machiavellian plan by the occupying powers and their globalist corporate backers? Can it be stopped before the Iraqis surrender economic sovereignty in perpetuity? Find out more and what you can do after the jump.

Iraqanomics 101: The WTO Commuter Lane

How to become a member of the WTO: Article XII of the WTO Agreement states that accession to the WTO will be “on terms to be agreed” between the acceding government and the WTO. Accession to the WTO is essentially a process of negotiation — quite different from the process of accession to other international entities, like the IMF, which is largely an automatic process..

Who can apply: *”Any state or customs territory having full autonomy in the conduct of its trade policies is eligible to accede to the WTO on terms agreed between it and WTO Members”*. (Article XII of the WTO Agreement).

http://www.wto.org/…

BAGHDAD, 4 Jan 2007 (IRIN) – Like other minority members in Iraq, Mardon Matrood, a 44-year-old Assyrian shopkeeper in Baghdad, has had enough of the country’s sectarian violence.

“Minorities in Iraq are targeted by insurgents and militias, who want us out of the country as they promote what they call the ‘cleansing of Iraq, of non-Muslim communities’,” said Matrood who is living with his family of six in an abandoned government building.

Four months ago Matrood’s family failed to pay a ransom of US $50,000 to kidnappers who had abducted his nephew. The nephew was later found dead.