The Rag Blog

London-based pan-Arab newspaper Al-Hayat calls attention to a statement by the leader of the Islamic Army in Iraq “On the Safavid Iranian Project”, posted on the IAI website. (Text version here; voice version here). Although the statement is dated December 28, the paper says it was published on the website yesterday (Saturday December 30).

The main point appears to be that as the focus of the battle shifts from the Americans to the Iranians, the Americans in their search for an exit are making the mistake of talking to “opportunists”, including Baathists, who say they represent the Iraqi resistance but don’t.

Laila El-Haddad spent the last three weeks in a dismal apartment she was forced to rent in El Arish, Egypt, together with her son Yusuf, who is two years and nine months old. Every few days the two tried to travel to the Rafah border crossing, about 50 kilometers away, attempting to return to their home in Gaza. These were distressful efforts: Together with another 5,000 or so residents of Gaza, who have also been waiting in recent weeks to return to their homes, she was crammed with her toddler for hours in an endless line at the crossing. “Elbow to elbow, like cattle,” is how she describes this in her blog, until being pushed back in shame once again.

El-Haddad, a young journalist who splits her time between Gaza and the U.S., can afford to pay $9 per night. But most of the unfortunate people around her, including cancer patients, infants, the elderly and students, the injured and disabled, cannot allow themselves such luxuries. Some of them rent a tent for 1.5 Egyptian pounds per night. The rest simply sleep out in the open, in the chill of night, or crowd together in local mosques.

These people want to return home. Israel does not even allow them this. They are human beings with families, plans and commitments, longings and dignity, but who cares. In recent weeks, even the Palestinian Minister of the Environment, Yusuf Abu Safiya, was stuck there. El-Haddad tells of how the minister could be seen one evening collecting twigs on the beach of El Arish to light a bonfire. During the summer, at least seven people died of heat and dehydration while waiting at the border. For many of those who are ill, the wait is a nightmare that threatens their lives. For students, it means losing an academic year. There is almost no mention of this cruel abuse in the newspapers: After all, the occupation in Gaza has ended.

Without anyone paying attention, the Gaza Strip has become the most closed-off strip of land in the world – after North Korea. But while North Korea is globally known to be a closed and isolated country, how many people know that the same description applies to a place just an hour away from hedonist Tel Aviv?

The Erez border crossing is desolate – Palestinians are not allowed to cross there, foreigners are rarely allowed to cross and Israeli journalists have also been prohibited from crossing during the past two weeks. Only wheelchairs are occasionally pushed through the long “sleeves” of the security check, leading a deadly ill person or someone seriously injured by the IDF to or from treatment in Israel. The large terminal Israel built, a concrete and glass monster that looks like a splendid shopping mall, juts up like a particularly tasteless joke, a mockery. At the Karni crossing, the only supply channel for 1.5 million people, only 12 trucks per day have passed since January. According to the “crossings accord” signed a year ago, Israel committed to allowing 400 trucks a day to pass through. The excuse: security, as usual.

ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia — Somali government troops heavily backed by Ethiopian tanks and soldiers pushed Saturday toward Somalia’s port city of Kismaayo, the last stronghold of the Islamic Courts movement swept from power in recent days.

A major battle between the two sides seemed imminent, as Ethiopian jets blew over towns near Kismaayo, and leaders of the Islamic movement rallied fighters who had retreated to the area in the face of Ethiopia’s vastly superior military force.

The Islamic Courts movement is “ready to fight against the enemy of Allah,” Sharif Ahmed, a leader of the group, told residents of Kismaayo, according to the Associated Press.

Somalis are growing impatient with the presence of thousands of Ethiopian troops in their country, but Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, who has backed the interim Somali government now in power, has said his military will not pull out until it has captured the most “extremist” leaders and “international jihadists” within the Courts movement.

Meles has accused those leaders of supporting ethnic Somali separatist groups in Ethiopia, and both the United States and Ethiopia have accused the Islamic Courts fighters of sheltering terrorists, an allegation the movement has called propaganda.

The United States has denied giving Ethiopia the green light to invade Somalia but has steadfastly supported Ethiopia’s right to self-defense, and Meles has characterized this war as defensive, not preemptive. Just days before the Ethiopian action, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for African affairs, Jendayi E. Frazer, accused the Islamic group of being “controlled” by an al-Qaeda cell, an allegation that regional analysts say was exaggerated and intended to justify Ethiopia’s incursion.

The U.S. government, which has a substantial military presence up the coast in Djibouti, has said that four suspects in the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania could be among the 2,000 or so fighters who retreated in recent days to the Kismaayo area, which includes a vast forest ideal for hiding in and staging a guerrilla war.

The Islamic Courts movement came to power in June with the popular support of Somalis tired of the brutish rule of warlords who called themselves an “anti-terrorism coalition” and received financial backing from the CIA.

Somalis tend to adhere to a moderate version of Islam, and for many, supporting a movement that enforced Islamic law with varying degrees of severity was a pragmatic choice rather than a religious one.

Imperial arrogance – the road to chaos

The two mainstays of the neoconservative and neoliberal agenda can be reduced to the accumulation of more wealth for the tiny upper clique of the American population and to assuring the ever-lasting continuation of the U.S. empire. The rest of the world is simply of no consequence to the neocon way of thinking and that’s where they make the huge mistake that is one day going to be their downfall. Willful shortsightedness has always been their hallmark and every day now it is looking ever more likely that their undoing is imminent. When the base caves in, the tower will come tumbling down.

U.S. imperial arrogance has had no bounds since they began to see themselves as an invincible power already in the 19th century. That’s when they began to strike out in Latin America to consolidate their empire in the western hemisphere and the Philippines. The geopolitical situation in the world has recently led Washington to assume preposterous rights to single-handedly reshape the world to their liking and the long-term goal is clearly to become the rulers of the planet. But it now looks increasingly as if the roof is going to fall in on the whole pack of wolves and one day soon the now astronomically rich will find themselves left out in the cold with nothing but worthless paper in their portfolios.[1]

Don’t credit the neocons with any deep ideological thinking in their way of going about conquering the world. The United States must obviously be an empire, its military must be invincible and the country must continue to be by far the wealthiest country in the world. Of course we are the most powerful and the world has to see it clearly and tremble with awe and fear. We are also the moral beacon to the world; we alone know what has to be done to save our moral values, our high-minded law and order high priests read the gospel of righteousness to the world.

Certainly some neocons believe that God has given them the right or even the duty to defy anyone who threatens U.S. hegemony and that therefore they have every right to run roughshod over international law and conventions. The plenipotentiary powers of the pre-revolutionary European kings is their model. Napoleon and Hitler are their forerunners.

By Mary Beth Sheridan and Spencer S. Hsu
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, December 31, 2006; A03

Frustrated by poor federal cooperation, U.S. states and cities are building their own network of intelligence centers led by police to help detect and disrupt terrorist plots.

The new “fusion centers” are now operating in 37 states, including Virginia and Maryland, and another covers the Washington area, according to the Department of Homeland Security. The centers, which have received $380 million in federal support since the 2001 terrorist attacks, pool and analyze information from local, state and federal law enforcement officials.

The emerging “network of networks” marks a new era of opportunity for law enforcement, according to U.S. officials and homeland security experts. Police are hungry for federal intelligence in an age of homegrown terrorism and more sophisticated crime. For their part, federal law enforcement officials could benefit from a potential army of tipsters — the 700,000 local and state police officers across the country, as well as private security guards and others being courted by the centers.

But the emerging model of “intelligence-led policing” faces risks on all sides. The centers are popping up with little federal leadership and training, raising fears of overzealousness such as that associated with police “red squads” that spied on civil rights and peace activists decades ago. The centers also face practical obstacles that could limit their effectiveness, including a shortage of money, skilled analysts, and proven relationships with the FBI and Homeland Security.

Still, the centers are emerging as a key element in a sometimes chaotic new domestic intelligence infrastructure, which also includes homeland security units in local police forces and 103 FBI-led terrorism task forces, triple the number that existed before the Sept. 11 attacks.

Fusion centers are becoming “part of the landscape for local government,” said the incoming D.C. police chief, Cathy Lanier. But she warned that police are navigating a new patchwork of state and federal privacy laws that govern the sharing, collection and storage of information. “We’re in a very precarious position right now,” she said. “If we lose community support, that is going to be a big deal for local law enforcement.”

Civil liberties advocates worry that the fledgling fusion centers could stray into monitoring people engaged in lawful activities, as some members of new police homeland security units have done. A Georgia homeland security officer, for example, was discovered photographing a protest by vegans at a HoneyBaked Ham store in 2003. Privacy advocates are also concerned about the vast amount of information some fusion centers collect — and the sometimes vague limits on its use and storage.

Millions of Americans live on the margins of the American economy, depending on the likes of payday lenders and pawnshops, who charge excessive interest rates and superhigh fees for their services.

Ron Cook is a department manager at a Wal-Mart store in Atlanta. Maria Guzman is an undocumented worker from Mexico; she lives in Houston with her three children and cleans office buildings at night. Marty Lawson works for a large Minneapolis corporation. (The names have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals.) What do these three people have in common? They are all regular fringe economy customers.

The term “fringe economy” refers to a range of businesses that engage in financially predatory relationships with low-income or heavily indebted consumers by charging excessive interest rates, superhigh fees, or exorbitant prices for goods or services. Some examples of fringe economy businesses include payday lenders, pawnshops, check-cashers, tax refund lenders, rent-to-own stores, and “buy-here/pay-here” used car lots. The fringe economy also includes credit card companies that charge excessive late payment or over-the-creditlimit penalties; cell phone providers that force less creditworthy customers into expensive prepaid plans; and subprime mortgage lenders that gouge prospective homeowners.

No one thinks that Donald Rumsfeld will end his days in a German prison. Or that there is any real chance he will have to face trial in Germany over allegations that he authorized policies leading to the torture of prisoners at U.S. detention facilities in Iraq and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

But that doesn’t mean that a complaint filed in Germany last month won’t have some ripple effects. The complaint asks a federal prosecutor there to begin an investigation, and ultimately a criminal prosecution, of the former secretary of defense and other U.S. officials for their roles in the abuses.

“Rumsfeld is no longer untouchable,” says Wolfgang Kaleck, the German lawyer who filed the complaint along with the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights and the International Federation for Human Rights. “He is now deeply connected with claims of abuses and torture. We have taken the first step to begin the legal discussion on his accountability.”

The complaint against Rumsfeld, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, former CIA director George Tenet, and other senior civilian and military officials, was filed in mid-November on behalf of 11 Iraqis who had been detained at Abu Ghraib prison and Mohammed al-Qahtani, a Saudi detained at Guantánamo. It alleges that the defendants ordered, aided, and abetted war crimes and failed to prevent the commission of war crimes by their subordinates. In international law, war crimes are defined as grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions, including torture and inhuman treatment.

Rumsfeld has said the abuse that occurred at Abu Ghraib was the work of a few low-level soldiers and the prisoners affected were mostly not the subject of interrogations, but just “common criminals” who were also detained. “It’s pretty clear that on the midnight shift, for a period of some weeks, there were people there who were behaving in a way that was fundamentally inconsistent with the president’s instructions to treat people humanely [and] my instructions that they were to treat people humanely,” Rumsfeld said in a Dec. 15 television interview.

But the plaintiffs claim that the torture that occurred at detention centers in Iraq and Guantánamo were not isolated incidents or the product of a few soldiers gone bad, but rather was widespread and systemic, having been ordered from the top levels of the military and the Defense Department. “The interrogational torture applied by the United States was not an accident, not a mistake, not a secret action,” the complaint states. (Pentagon and Department of Justice spokesmen declined to comment for this article.)

Stymied in their call for high-level accountability in the United States, the groups thought their best shot was to bring a case in a country, like Germany, that has a strong universal-jurisdiction law, says Michael Ratner, the CCR’s president.

Teaching answers to standardized tests should not be called “education,” especially when problem-solving will be the most important tool for a generation of students destined to inherit the incredible problems we will leave as our legacy.

To repeat the answers we feed is at best, preparing future “patriots” for greater acceptance of official policy. The consequences of this blind trust have become painfully apparent. Our government spent millions of dollars on propaganda to sell a peace-loving populace on an illegal invasion of a sovereign country.

Of all the multiple-choice reasons for this invasion, the one remaining is that Iraq sits in a strategic position for our military to control Asian oil. Imagine the mark this answer would have received on a government-generated standardized test.

Introductory remarks: Most people who can read or have a television have now heard about the recent elections in Mexico and Calderon’s theft of the vote from Obrador – and the aftermath. Many on the Left know something about the election in general terms but do not understand how the fraud was carried out and by whom. Still others know very little about the Zapatistas, the ELZN and The Other Campaign and the revolution now underway in this country that holds strategic importance to the U.S. Many of our readers have also been following the courageous stand the people of Oaxaca have taken against the U.S. backed, neoliberal government in Mexico. In the document that follows, you can learn much more about the background and future of this revolution.

Until now these issues have been passed on through news reports and scattered commentary. To our knowledge, we now have (in the following document) the first comprehensive and exhaustive treatment of these issues by true revolutionaries who are on the front lines in Mexico. The following definitive, organizational and informative document places these events into the revolutionary context which gave them birth. This reading is for those who want to understand what is currently happening and a view toward the future of the revolution in Mexico. Because of it is long and not easily available for cursory “screen reading”, we encourage you to do as we have done – print it out and spend some time with it. We are indebted to Agatha Haun and Fausto Guidice, translators for Tlaxcala for translating this document into English, exclusively for Axis of Logic. Emphases and formatting have been added throughout by Axis editors. If you think it too much work to read and digest this important document, think of it as a book … and imagine the work that went into writing and translating it! Thank you.

– Les Blough, Editor

Like a blue-blood version of a Mob family with global reach, the Bushes have eliminated one more key witness to the important historical events that led the U.S. military into a bloody stalemate in Iraq and pushed the Middle East to the brink of calamity.

The hanging of Saddam Hussein was supposed to be – as the New York Times observed – the “triumphal bookend” to George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq. If all had gone as planned, Bush might have staged another celebration as he did after the end of “major combat,” posing under the “Mission Accomplished” banner on May 1, 2003.

But now with nearly 3,000 American soldiers killed and the Iraqi death toll exceeding 600,000 by some estimates, Bush may be forced to savor the image of Hussein dangling at the end of a rope a little more privately.

Still, Bush has done his family’s legacy a great service while also protecting secrets that could have embarrassed other senior U.S. government officials.

He has silenced a unique witness to crucial chapters of the secret history that stretched from Iran’s Islamic revolution in 1979 to the alleged American-Saudi “green light” for Hussein to attack Iran in 1980, through the eight years of the Iran-Iraq War during which high-ranking U.S. intermediaries, such as Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Gates, allegedly helped broker supplies of war materiel for Hussein.

Hussein now won’t be around to give troublesome testimony about how he obtained the chemical and biological agents that his scientists used to produce the unconventional weapons that were deployed against Iranian forces and Iraqi civilians. He can’t give his perspective on who got the money and who facilitated the deals.

Nor will Hussein be available to give his account of the mixed messages delivered by George H.W. Bush’s ambassador April Glaspie before Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait. Was there another American “green light” or did Hussein just hear what he wanted to hear?

Like the climactic scene from the Mafia movie “Casino” in which nervous Mob bosses eliminate everyone who knows too much, George W. Bush has now guaranteed that there will be no public tribunal where Hussein gives testimony on these potentially devastating historical scandals, which could threaten the Bush Family legacy.

A former United Nations weapons inspector and leading Iraq War opponent has written a new book alleging that Jerusalem is pushing the Bush administration into war with Iran, and accusing the pro-Israel lobby of dual loyalty and “outright espionage.”

In the new book, called “Target Iran,” Scott Ritter, who served as a senior U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998 and later became one of the war’s staunchest critics, argues that the United States is readying for military action against Iran, using its nuclear program as a pretext for pursuing regime change in Tehran.

“The Bush administration, with the able help of the Israeli government and the pro-Israel Lobby, has succeeded,” Ritter writes, “in exploiting the ignorance of the American people about nuclear technology and nuclear weapons so as to engender enough fear that the American public has more or less been pre-programmed to accept the notion of the need to militarily confront a nuclear armed Iran.”

Later in the book, Ritter adds: “Let there be no doubt: If there is an American war with Iran, it is a war that was made in Israel and nowhere else.”

Ritter’s book echoes recent high-profile attacks on the pro-Israel lobby by former President Jimmy Carter and by scholars Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer. Ritter, who recently returned from a weeklong speaking engagement on The Nation cruise, speaks of a “network of individuals” that pursues Israel’s interests in the United States. The former weapons inspector alleges that some of the pro-Israel lobby’s activities “can only be described as outright espionage and interference in domestic policies.” Ritter also accused the American Israel Public Affairs Committee of having an inherent dual loyalty. He called for the organization to be registered as a foreign agent.