The Rag Blog

BAGHDAD — In a cavernous room that once displayed gifts given to Saddam Hussein, eight men in yellow prison garb sat on the floor facing the wall, guarded by two American soldiers.

Among them was Abdulla Sultan Khalaf, a Ministry of Industry employee seized by American troops who said they found 10 blasting caps and 100 sticks of TNT. When his name was called, he stood, walked into a cagelike defendant’s box and peered over the wooden slats at a panel of three Iraqi judges of the central court.

The judges reviewed evidence prepared by an American military lawyer — testimony from two soldiers, photographs and a sketch of the scene.

The evidence went largely unchallenged, because Mr. Khalaf had no lawyer. The judges appointed one, but Mr. Khalaf had no chance to speak with him. Mr. Khalaf told the judges that the soldiers were probably chasing a rogue nephew and denied that the explosives were his or ever in his house. “Let me examine the pictures,” he insisted. The judges ignored him. His lawyer said nothing, beyond declaring Mr. Khalaf’s innocence. The trial lasted 15 minutes.

BAGHDAD — Browsing the shelves of a cosmetics store in the Karrada shopping district, Zahra Khalid felt giddy at the sight of Alberto shampoo and Miss Rose eye shadow, blusher and powder.

Before leaving her house, she had covered her body in a billowing black abaya and wrapped a black head scarf around her thick brown hair. She had asked her brother to drive. She had done all the things that a woman living in Baghdad is supposed to do these days to avoid drawing attention to herself.

It was the first time she had left home in two months.

“For a woman, it’s just like being in jail,” she said. “I can’t go anywhere.”

Life has become more difficult for most Iraqis since the February bombing of a Shiite Muslim mosque in Samarra sparked a rise in sectarian killings and overall lawlessness. For many women, though, it has become unbearable.

As Islamic fundamentalism seeps into society and sectarian warfare escalates, more and more women live in fear of being kidnapped or raped. They receive death threats because of their religious sects and careers. They are harassed for not abiding by the strict dress code of long skirts and head scarves or for driving cars.

For much of the 20th century, and under various leaders, Iraq was one of the most progressive Middle Eastern countries in its treatment of women, who were encouraged to go to school and enter the work force. Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party espoused a secular Arab nationalism that advocated women’s full participation in society. But years of war changed that.

In the days after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, many women were hopeful that they would enjoy greater parity with men. President Bush said that increasing women’s rights was essential to creating a new, democratic Iraq.

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) – Gunmen in Iraqi army uniforms burst into Red Crescent offices on Sunday and kidnapped two dozen employees and visitors at the humanitarian organization in the latest sign of the country’s growing lawlessness.

“Our task – ours, the Americans, the whole of the coalition, the international community and the Iraqis themselves – is to make sure that the forces of terrorism don’t defeat the will of the people to have a democracy,” Blair said.

In the latest violence, gunmen in five pickup trucks pulled up at the office of the Iraqi Red Crescent in downtown Baghdad and abducted 20 to 30 employees and visitors, the aid group and police said.

Here is a rather bleak prediction for Santa and the rest of his elves.

Abrupt ice retreat could produce ice-free arctic summers by 2040
nächste Meldung
12.12.2006

The recent retreat of Arctic sea ice is likely to accelerate so rapidly that the Arctic Ocean could become nearly devoid of ice during summertime as early as 2040, according to new research published in the December 12 issue of Geophysical Research Letters.

The study, by a team of scientists from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), the University of Washington, and McGill University, analyzes the impact of greenhouse gas emissions on the Arctic. Scenarios run on supercomputers show that the extent of sea ice each September could be reduced so abruptly that, within about 20 years, it may begin retreating four times faster than at any time in the observed record.

“We have already witnessed major losses in sea ice, but our research suggests that the decrease over the next few decades could be far more dramatic than anything that has happened so far,” says NCAR scientist Marika Holland, the study’s lead author. “These changes are surprisingly rapid.”

MOSCOW — Russian authorities pulled hundreds of opposition activists off buses and trains and detained them along with scores of others on Saturday ahead of a rare anti-government rally in Moscow, organizers said.

The police action did not prevent more than 2,000 people from gathering in a central square, where leftist and liberal groups demanded that Russian President Vladimir Putin stop what they called Russia’s retreat from democracy.

“In 15 months political power will be changed,” said Mikhail Kasyanov, a former prime minister who is now an opposition leader, referring to the March 2008 presidential election.

“Next year everyone should make a personal decision about what to do with our country, whether we allow these people to continue their illegal undertakings … or we finally make our main goal to build a democratic and socially oriented state,” Kasyanov told demonstrators.

Garry Kasparov, the former chess grand master who has emerged as one of the Kremlin’s most prominent critics, said the mere fact that the rally took place made it a success, given the efforts by authorities to stop it.

“We are protesting and it means that authorities are not as monolithic and powerful” as they believe, he said. “They are afraid that one day we will tell them ’enough.”’

The demonstrators chanted “Freedom” and held banners reading “No to Police State” and “Russia Without Putin.”

Since he took office in 2000, Putin has taken steady, gradual steps to centralize power and eliminate democratic checks and balances.

The Baathists were miffed and said that the conference “does not concern them.” Guerrilla leader Abu Wisam al-Jash’ami told al-Hayat that he thought he had an agreement with al-Maliki, that the PM would ask parliament to debate the question of debaathification. Instead, al-Maliki foreclosed the debate by just asking parliament to consider abolishing the debaathification law. (Most Sunni Arabs had a connection to the Baath Party, which has been used by triumphant Shiites and Kurds to throw them out of government and military service.)

Al-Hayat also says that Secretary of State Condi Rice has sent envoys to the major Arab countries informing them that Washington will not talk with Syria about Iraq (with the quid pro quo that Damascus gets a free hand in Lebanon), and will not talk to Iran (with the quid pro quo that they get a pass on the nuclear research program).

Women face an increased risk of rape and murder by militias and criminal gangs as lawlessness takes over the country.

Nobody is safe. Taysseer Al-Mashadani, the Sunni woman minister from the al-Tawafuq political party was abducted by members of the Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mehdi army militia July 1 this year. After being held for nearly three months, she was only released after much pressure was applied from both the U.S. and Iraqi governments.

Thousands of other women have not been so lucky. Many have been executed, assaulted, or released only after their families paid considerable ransom money.

Few women like to talk about what they have to go through. “I was taken by Americans for three days recently,” Um Ahmed said in Baghdad. “They told me they would rape me if I didn’t tell them where my husband was, but I really didn’t know.”

She said that she was turned over to the Iraqi National Guard “who were even worse than the Americans.”

Her husband eventually surrendered to the U.S. military, but she continued to be held “to apply pressure on him to confess things he never did,” she said. “They told him they would rape me right in front of him if he did not confess he was a terrorist. They forced me to watch them beat him hard until he told them what they wanted to hear.”

The Organisation for Women’s Freedom in Iraq has estimated from anecdotal evidence that over 2,000 Iraqi women have gone missing in the period from the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003 until spring 2006.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s case for attacking Iraq has been dealt a new blow with the release of once-secret evidence from a former British diplomat who dismissed the threat of weapons of mass destruction.

Carne Ross, who was responsible for handling Britain’s Iraq policy at the United Nations from 1998 to 2002, accused the British government of overstating the danger posed by Saddam Hussein’s regime to support the invasion.

“During my posting, at no time did HMG [her majesty’s government] assess that Iraq’s WMD (or any other capability) posed a threat to the UK or its interests,” Mr Ross wrote in evidence submitted to the Butler inquiry in June 2004.

“It was the commonly held view among the officials dealing with Iraq that any threat had been effectively contained.” Mr Ross said when the United States raised the topic of regime change.

He and others would argue against such a move, “primarily on the grounds that Iraq would collapse into chaos”, he said in written testimony given to an inquiry into the run-up to the March 2003 conflict.

Several years before the 2003 U.S. invasion, western media had already divided the Iraqi society into several ethnic and sectarian groups. Even western powers, particularly the U.S. and the U.K. had their prior invasion policies based on the fact that Iraq was divisible into at least three separate ethnic, sectarian and geographical regions.

The two powers even resorted to military means to translate their strategy of partitioning the country on the ground. They create two no-fly zones one in the north and one in the south ostensibly to protect the northern Sunni Kurds and the southern Arab Shiites from the ‘oppressive’ Arab Sunni regime in the center.

When the two powers occupied Iraq, they pressed ahead with their strategy. Instead of working for a unified and multicolored Iraq, they began driving one wedge after another between the different components of the society.

THE PRESIDENT wanted to continue his crusade despite all opposition. And Robert Gates helped make sure it happened.

Under Ronald Reagan, that meant manipulating CIA intelligence to make the former USSR and its “evil empire” seem like a growing threat–and organizing the covert war against the people of Nicaragua.

Now Gates has a chance to serve another president bent on war–as George W. Bush’s new defense secretary.

Republicans and Democrats alike seem certain that Gates will clip the wings of the White House’s neoconservative hawks and engineer a “change of course” in Bush’s disastrous war on Iraq. Gates got the kid gloves’ treatment in questioning by the Senate Armed Services Committee, and the vote of the full Senate to confirm him was a lopsided 95 to 2.

BAGHDAD — Iraq’s schools, long touted by American officials as a success story in a land short on successes, increasingly are being caught in the crossfire of the country’s escalating civil war.

President Bush has routinely talked about the refurbishment and construction of schools as a neglected story of progress in Iraq. The U.S. Agency for International Development has spent about $100 million on Iraq’s education system and cites the rehabilitation of 2,962 school buildings as a signal accomplishment.

But today, across the country, campuses are being shuttered, students and teachers driven from their classrooms and parents left to worry that a generation of traumatized children will go without education.

Teachers tell of students kidnapped on their way to school, mortar rounds landing on or near campuses and educators shot in front of children.

This month insurgents distributed pamphlets at campuses, some sealed inside an envelope with an AK-47 bullet.