The Rag Blog

To the Editor:

I have a son in Iraq: the 1st Armored Division of the Army, stationed at a remote outpost near the hotbed Ramadi.

Last week his platoon lost two to injuries — one a result of shrapnel to the testicles, the other a leg wound from small arms fire.

They’re down to 15 in the platoon. Nearly every day they’re out on patrol, generally by foot. Every day, they’re vulnerable, their lives held open to the potential of death or injury.

Two weeks ago he called by satellite phone, awakening Amy and me in the dead of the night. Machine gun fire was all around him, the sound of war filling our ears and hearts with grief and fear of loss.

He wanted to tell us that he loves us, that he was on a dangerous patrol and that if anything happened to his life, he would take his love for us to his death and beyond.

He made it through that day and night. As this is written, he is still here with us. His tour was to end the first week in November but he was extended until next February.

He said that the morale of the platoon was at an all-time low.

He said that the war is creating more insurgency, rather than less.

He says that he cannot trust anyone in an Iraqi military uniform.

He said that most of the Iraq people do not want us there.

He says that this war cannot be won!

He has no faith in the politicians who sent him there.

Question, America: Whom would you listen to, the soldier in the field or the padded politician in office in reference to how this war is really going?

Ramadi, Dec 19, (VOI) – U.S. forces early on Tuesday arrested the correspondent of Reuters news agency in the western Iraqi city of Ramadi, Iraqi police said.
“A large number of U.S. Hummer vehicles cordoned the house of Ammar al-Dulaimi, a correspondent for Reuters in Ramadi, and Marines raided his house and scattered his papers and equipment,” a police source told the independent news agency Voices of Iraq (VOI).

The source said “the Marines arrested the journalist and confiscated his possessions including a camera,” adding the journalist “was taken to the U.S. base of al-Warrar in western Ramadi.”

For the first time since Vietnam, an organized, robust movement of active-duty US military personnel has publicly surfaced to oppose a war in which they are serving. Those involved plan to petition Congress to withdraw American troops from Iraq. (Note: A complete version of this report will appear Thursday in the print and online editions of The Nation.)

One night in mid-April, the steel door clanked shut on detainee No. 200343 at Camp Cropper, the United States military’s maximum-security detention site in Baghdad.

American guards arrived at the man’s cell periodically over the next several days, shackled his hands and feet, blindfolded him and took him to a padded room for interrogation, the detainee said. After an hour or two, he was returned to his cell, fatigued but unable to sleep.

The fluorescent lights in his cell were never turned off, he said. At most hours, heavy metal or country music blared in the corridor. He said he was rousted at random times without explanation and made to stand in his cell. Even lying down, he said, he was kept from covering his face to block out the light, noise and cold. And when he was released after 97 days he was exhausted, depressed and scared.

Detainee 200343 was among thousands of people who have been held and released by the American military in Iraq, and his account of his ordeal has provided one of the few detailed views of the Pentagon’s detention operations since the abuse scandals at Abu Ghraib. Yet in many respects his case is unusual.

The detainee was Donald Vance, a 29-year-old Navy veteran from Chicago who went to Iraq as a security contractor. He wound up as a whistle-blower, passing information to the F.B.I. about suspicious activities at the Iraqi security firm where he worked, including what he said was possible illegal weapons trading.

But when American soldiers raided the company at his urging, Mr. Vance and another American who worked there were detained as suspects by the military, which was unaware that Mr. Vance was an informer, according to officials and military documents.

At Camp Cropper, he took notes on his imprisonment and smuggled them out in a Bible.

“Sick, very. Vomited,” he wrote July 3. The next day: “Told no more phone calls til leave.”

During a round table meeting held by the ICRC in the Jordanian capital Amman from 11 to 13 December, 16 representatives of non-governmental organizations and associations from all over Iraq met to discuss the effects of armed conflict on women in Iraq.

“In times of conflict women face specific challenges.

Issues such as missing persons and the implications for their families, detention and reintegration into society following release, sexual violence, access to reproductive health and means of maintaining family links are all difficulties they have to cope with in their daily lives”, said Florence Tercier Holst-Roness, who is in charge of the ICRC’s “Women and war” project.

BAGHDAD, Dec 17 (Reuters) – The U.S. military plans to speed up the training of Iraq’s army by tripling its number of embedded trainers to about 9,000, while keeping a close eye on units’ sectarian loyalties, a U.S. general said on Sunday.

Brigadier General Dana Pittard, whose Iraqi Assistance Group oversees training of Iraq’s security forces, also said each of the nine police brigades would be taken off the streets over the next nine months for one month-long training.

A number of police units have been accused of colluding with, or being infiltrated by Shi’ite militia death squads targeting minority Sunnis. An explosion of sectarian violence since February has pushed the country towards all-out civil war.

“Over the next couple of months we will augment the transition teams to double or triple their size,” Pittard said, noting that the teams training the Iraqi army were now 3,000-strong.

FALLUJAH, Dec 9 (IPS) – People living in areas where resistance to U.S.-led occupation is mounting are facing increased levels of collective punishment from the occupation forces, residents say.

Siniyah town 200 km north of Baghdad with a population of 25,000 has been under siege by the U.S. military for two weeks.

IPS had earlier reported unrest in Siniyah Jan. 20 when the U.S. military constructed a six-mile sand wall in a failed attempt to check resistance attacks.

Located near Beji in the volatile but oil-rich Salahedin province, Siniyah has become a vivid example of harsh tactics used by occupation forces, who have lost control over most of the country.

“Thirteen children died during the two-week siege due to U.S. troops’ disallowance for doctors to open their private clinics as well as closure of the general medical centre there,” a doctor from the city reported to IPS via satellite phone.

ON a strangely balmy late autumn afternoon, while the art world busied itself in Miami with beachfront reservations and limo drivers, Rick Lowe was, as he generally is, on Holman Street in southeast Houston’s predominantly black Third Ward, greeting another out-of-towner.

In the gloaming, decrepit houses and weedy lots dotted some surrounding blocks, on the edges of which were new double-garage brick homes — signs of encroaching gentrification, an unwanted side effect of Mr. Lowe’s work.

Although it’s hard to tell at a glance, this stretch of Holman may be the most impressive and visionary public art project in the country — a project that is miles away, geographically and philosophically, from Chelsea and Art Basel and the whole money-besotted paper-thin art scene.

Mr. Lowe, a lanky, amiable, remarkably youthful-looking 45-year-old artist from Alabama, moved to Houston 21 years ago and lives here in the Third Ward, where he founded Project Row Houses. In 1990, “a group of high school students came over to my studio,” he recalled. “I was doing big, billboard-size paintings and cutout sculptures dealing with social issues, and one of the students told me that, sure, the work reflected what was going on in his community, but it wasn’t what the community needed. If I was an artist, he said, why didn’t I come up with some kind of creative solution to issues instead of just telling people like him what they already knew. That was the defining moment that pushed me out of the studio.”

He tried to think afresh what it meant to be a truly political artist, beyond devising the familiar agitprop, gallery decoration and plop-art-style public sculpture. He considered what the German artist Joseph Beuys once described as “the enlarged conception of Art,” which includes, as Beuys put it, “every human action.” Life itself might be a work of art, Mr. Lowe realized: art can be the way people live.

Warning!!

This IS a RANT!

…and not a very nice or funny one.

I knew we had an abnormally warm November here, I lived it, but the hair on the back of my neck stood up when I saw these Yahoo!/Weather Channel temperature charts!

If these numbers are accurate, and I’m assuming they are, we’ve just had one extremely freakish November.

In Big Bear City we surpassed our previous record high November temperature by 15° F.

FIFTEEN DEGREES!!!

And, not only that! We surpassed the previous November record of 74° on 22 of those 30 days, with seven days of 80°+ temps. And not one day of the month did we dip down to even the average low temp of 25°.