The Rag Blog

The life of an American soldier is more important than the lives of tens of thousands of Iraqis. This is not a personal opinion, but one based on facts and truth. Simply put, everyone knows what was done by American forces after one of their soldiers was kidnapped in central Baghdad’s Karada district. They rushed to launch search and rescue operations, prevented people from leaving their homes and searched inside each and every house.

Against a backdrop of spiralling violence in Baghdad, The Times persuaded six ordinary Iraqis to visit its bureau to describe their lives. Sunni or Shia, they all had a strikingly similar tale to tell

Saad Hassam
Street cleaner
Shia
Single
Age 23

Saad was a conscript in Saddam’s army when US tanks rolled into Baghdad in April 2003. He deserted, went home and celebrated with his family. “We were dancing. I felt like I was reborn,” he said. He dreamt of getting a job at the airport that might let him travel.

Today the eyes of this thin young man brim with tears as he recounts what actually happened.

The Americans launched an effort to clear up the rubbish around the capital. Saad risked the charge of collaboration by taking a job as a street cleaner in the Rashid district of west Baghdad for a meagre $5 a day.

That was dangerous enough, but the work became even more perilous when insurgents began seeding roads with improvised explosive devices disguised as rubbish. Street cleaners were blown up, or denounced as informers when they betrayed the location of such devices. “You can’t just turn a blind eye. If you leave them there they might kill innocent passers-by,” Saad said through an interpreter.

One morning in 2005, two cars drew up beside Saad and his four fellow sweepers and opened fire. Two of his colleagues were killed. Saad wept. “It was a bitter feeling. It was such a minor and simple job, yet you were not safe doing it,” he said.

Saad quit. Four months later his older brother and a neighbour were killed in a random attack by Sunni gunmen as they chatted with friends outside the family home in the Hey Amal district of Baghdad. A few days later gunmen opened fire on the funeral.

For a long time Saad did not go out, but eventually he and two younger brothers had to return to work as street cleaners to support their parents and three other siblings. “My friends told me I couldn’t keep going on like that and that I had to go out and start working again.” Saad has since found eight improvised bombs. He knows five street cleaners who have been killed, and hears of many more.

Two months ago Saad was caught in a car bomb as he was buying cooking gas at a petrol station near his home. He now has a festering wound on his right hand, and although a neighbour drives him to hospital, it lacks the right medicine. He cannot afford proper medical treatment and cannot work.

He has told his younger brothers to go and work in a safer area of Baghdad and, even though the pay is derisory, he will return to his old job if his hand heals — because there is no other work and the family has no other income. “Sometimes my brothers and I look at each other when we get home and laugh at what we have earned,” he said.

TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras: The Honduran government said Friday it has fined the local subsidiary of a U.S. company US$25,000 (€19,000) for allegedly training more than 300 Hondurans and foreigners last year to work as mercenaries in Iraq.

The company Your Solutions trained 340 Hondurans, Chileans and Nicaraguans in violation of labor laws, Public Safety Department spokesman Santos Flores told a news conference.

“The fine was imposed because the company was training mercenaries, and the act of being a mercenary is a form of violating labor rights in whatever country,” Flores said, adding that the company, which he said is based in Chicago, llinois, “operated without permission in Honduras.” Benjamin Canales, general manager of the Honduras-based subsidiary of Your Solutions, fled the country six months ago, Flores said.

The company could not immediately be reached in Chicago for comment late Friday.

In September 2005, Canales, a retired member of the Honduran military, said the company’s trainees were private security guards “not mercenaries, as some people have called them.”

“These are just people who want a job, and we have offered them one,” Canales said.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Department of Agriculture on Friday formally approved a strain of genetically engineered rice whose discovery in commercial stocks earlier this year triggered a food market dispute with the European Union and Japan.

“The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) today announced that after a thorough review of scientific evidence it will deregulate genetically engineered LLRICE601 based on the fact that it is as safe as its traditionally bred counterparts,” USDA said in a statement.

WASHINGTON — In 1984, Robert Gates, then the No. 2 CIA official, advocated U.S. airstrikes against Nicaragua’s pro-Cuban government to reverse what he described as an ineffective U.S. strategy to deal with communist advances in Central America, previously classified documents say.

Gates, President Bush’s nominee to be defense secretary, said the United States could no longer justify what he described as “halfhearted” attempts to contain Nicaragua’s Sandinista government, according to documents released Friday by the National Security Archive, a private research group.

In a memo to CIA Director William Casey dated Dec. 14, 1984, Gates said his proposed airstrikes would be designed “to destroy a considerable portion of Nicaragua’s military buildup” and be focused on tanks and helicopters.

He also recommended that the United States prevent delivery to the Sandinistas of such weapons in the future. The administration, he said, should make clear that a U.S. invasion of the country was not contemplated.

The target of Gates’ anxieties was Nicaragua’s leftist president, Daniel Ortega.

October 12, 2005
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“Whether one million or 10 million or 100 million died, … the pall of sorrow that engulfed the hemisphere was immeasurable. Languages, prayers, hopes, habits, and dreams­ entire ways of life hissed away like steam. The Spanish and the Portuguese lacked the germ theory of disease and could not explain what was happening (let alone stop it). Nor can we explain it; the ruin was too long ago and too all-encompassing. In the long run, … the consequential finding is not that many people died but that many people once lived. The Americas were filled with a stunningly diverse assortment of peoples who had knocked about the continents for millennia…”
Elizabeth Fenn, cited in 1491- An article by CHARLES MANN in The Atlantic of March 2002

http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Chumash/Population.html

This article, and Mann’s new book provided much of the data contained in the following. Pls see below for more information and links. Brilliant stuff.
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To honor Columbus Day, let us pause for a short moment of appropriate reverence to recall the Wondrous Gifts we White People have — in our bottomless generosity – bestowed and continue to bestow on uncountable Godless Savages throughout history.

First among these surely is Wondrous Gift #1- the gift of immeasurable Human Arrogance.
The notion that Humans are the last, ultimate, and unimprovable final step in Evolution.
That Humans have been granted Dominion over The Earth and all of its beings and creations and inhabitants.
That every Thing on earth is Human property, and belongs to Humans to do with as they wish.

The government must go further, and much faster, in its response to the moral question of the 21st century.

It is a testament to the power of money that Nicholas Stern’s report should have swung the argument for drastic action, even before anyone has finished reading it. He appears to have demonstrated what many of us suspected: that it would cost much less to prevent runaway climate change than to seek to live with it. Useful as this finding is, I hope it doesn’t mean that the debate will now concentrate on money. The principal costs of climate change will be measured in lives, not pounds. As Stern reminded us yesterday, there would be a moral imperative to seek to prevent mass death even if the economic case did not stack up.

But at least almost everyone now agrees that we must act, if not at the necessary speed. If we’re to have a high chance of preventing global temperatures from rising by 2C (3.6F) above preindustrial levels, we need, in the rich nations, a 90% reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions by 2030. The greater part of the cut has to be made at the beginning of this period. To see why, picture two graphs with time on the horizontal axis and the rate of emissions plotted vertically. On one graph the line falls like a ski jump: a steep drop followed by a shallow tail. On the other it falls like the trajectory of a bullet. The area under each line represents the total volume of greenhouse gases produced in that period. They fall to the same point by the same date, but far more gases have been produced in the second case, making runaway climate change more likely.

Al-Hayat printed yesterday (Thursday November 23) an opinion piece whose argument goes like this:

Everyone recognizes that the Iraq policy was based on lies (AlQaeda, WMD and so on), but what is now under discussion is merely how to extricate the troops, and not the formation of a policy freed from those lies.

In fact there is another swindle going on, namely that lying and lawbreaking of the type that the Bush administration indulged in is nothing more than what you can see in the Dirty Harry pictures where the heroic detective breaks the law in order to catch the criminal. (In this case, in order to replace dictatorship with democracy).

Not only that. As befits a great nation with an intellectual infrastructure, the lies are anchored to a quasi-scientific set of arguments. (Terrorists are bred and thrive mainly because they live under dictatorial regimes, etcetera) . Naturally there isn’t any point in refuting these assumptions and arguments, because their proponents don’t let reality bother them. We know that AlQaeda came to Iraq with the occupation and achieved unprecedented expansion thereafter, but that doesn’t matter.

You call yourself a “progressive.” You’ve been down to the Capitol or on the Congress Bridge a time or two, protesting yet another egregious abuse of power by your elected officials. You’re familiar with the pro-choice buttons, the UT kids hawking the Socialist Worker, the honking car bearing an impeachment sticker, and the same six people chanting “Whose streets? Our streets!” You know this is a good thing that everyone is doing, but you can’t help but wonder: Is this really the only way to do it?

Jim Rigby, Robert Jensen, and Eliza Gilkyson hope to offer Austin’s progressive community an alternative to the traditional political response with Last Sunday, a monthly salon where progressives can meet and talk at Saengerrunde Hall, and maybe share a beer next door at Scholz Garten. You know, just get to know each other, exchange ideas, and see what happens.

BAGHDAD, Nov 23 (IPS) – After three and a half years of occupation, Iraq’s medical system has sunk to levels lower than seen during the economic sanctions imposed after the first Gulf war in 1990.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has said Iraqis are now extremely vulnerable in their health needs.

“Several wars and 13 years of economic sanctions left a heavy toll on the nutrition of the population, on the social structure, on the economy and on the health infrastructure and services,” according to a statement on the WHO website.

“This is well depicted in the morbidity and mortality rates of the population of Iraq, particularly of infants, children and mothers. The majority of Iraqis completely depend on the food Public Distribution System for their nutritional requirements.”

The health situation in Iraq has been in constant decline since the beginning of the U.S.-backed UN-imposed sanctions in 1990. Iraqi doctors were reputed to be the best in the Middle East during the 1980’s, but now they are short of medicines, medical equipment and funding to maintain the hospitals.

“We were angry with Saddam’s government for the poor health situation in the country, but now we wish we could get that back,” 55-year-old teacher Ahmed Zaydan from Sadr City in Baghdad told IPS. “There was not enough medical care, but there was something that one could live with and the private sector market was cheap. We were hoping for the change of regime to improve our lives, but the result is that we practically have no government healthcare.”