The Rag Blog

I often recall a meeting in October 2003 in Baghdad with an Iraqi engineer who had a master’s from Ball State University and loved America. He wanted to talk to me about corruption in reconstruction projects in Iraq.

Hamid spoke with anger at seeing U.S. officials on the bases pay cash to fly-by-night Iraqi agents to cart away new vehicles and spare parts – along with generators – that had been left behind by Saddam’s army. The Iraqis then sold the valuable equipment in Syria and Jordan and paid kickbacks to the U.S. officials. “You are helping criminals,” he complained, “and wasting your money and ours.”

I never had the opportunity to investigate Hamid’s accusations. He was murdered by Sunni insurgents for working with Americans. Now the sad tale of corruption and wasted billions in America’s Iraq reconstruction program has been laid bare in a spate of new books, and by the U.S. inspector general for Iraq reconstruction.

Bob Woodward’s State of Denial details the incredible lack of planning for the postwar, in which the Pentagon team tasked with running Iraqi reconstruction met together for the first time only a few weeks before the invasion.

To understand what these Pentagon civilians wrought, read Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s Imperial Life in the Emerald City about the Bush team’s decision to send “the loyal and the willing instead of the best and the brightest” to rebuild Iraq.

Chandrasekaran, former Baghdad bureau chief of the Washington Post, describes how Republican connections were the ticket to a job in Baghdad’s Green Zone in 2003-2004, in the occupation era of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). There were some competent folks inside the Green Zone, but they played second fiddle to political appointees.

More typical was James K. Haveman Jr., a 60-year-old Republican social worker and Christian antiabortion activist, who was picked to head the Health Ministry over a physician with degrees in public health and experience in third-world disaster relief.

Haveman treated Baghdad as if it were an extension of his home state of Michigan: He pushed for more maternity hospitals instead of refurbishing Baghdad’s ill-equipped emergency rooms. He pressed for an anti-smoking campaign – and tried to limit the number of drugs distributed to hospitals, ensuring that essential medicines stayed out of stock. He was in over his head.

To get the full flavor of the mismanagement of the postwar, however, you need to go to www.sigir.mil, and read the reports of the special inspector general in Iraq (SIGIR), Stuart W. Bowen Jr.

Amnesty International today issued a ‘Call to Bloggers’, asking them to get online and stand up for freedom of expression on the internet. The organisation says this is a critical time when fundamental rights – particularly freedom of expression and privacy – are under threat from governments that want to control what their citizens say, and what information they can access.

By Guillermo Parra-Bernal

Oct. 30 (Bloomberg) — By 10 p.m. on most nights, the sea wall alongside Havana’s main drag, El Malecon, a 10-kilometer- long highway bordering the sea, is standing room only. Young Cubans listen to street musicians strumming Cuba’s slow, sensuous guajira rhythms, swig from cartons of rum and discuss politics with foreigners out of earshot of the night police patrols.

For the first time in more than 15 years, some see a better future.

Danis Díaz is one. Unemployed right now because he broke his leg working on an oil rig, he says he doesn’t expect any trouble finding a new job once he recovers. “I am optimistic,” Díaz, 24, says. “It’s the first time in years I’ve felt that way. I’m sure that new job opportunities will pop up. I hear the Venezuelans are helping.”

These are prosperous times for the economy of the Republic of Cuba, and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez does indeed have a lot to do with it. Gross domestic product grew at 12 percent last year, according to Cuba’s Economy and Planning Ministry, the fastest rate since President Fidel Castro took power in 1959 and turned the island into a communist state.

Though reliable data on the Cuban economy is hard to come by, and government figures are often out of date and impossible to confirm, anecdotal evidence backs up the Cuban claims.

JOYCE — Gordon Hempton listened all over the world for silence. The quietest spot he found was close to home.

A three-mile walk into the Hoh Rain Forest takes him to a place of peace marked with a small red rock, measuring exactly one square inch, given to him by the late David Four Lines, a Quileute tribal elder.

It marks a spot atop a moss covered log 678 feet above sea level that Hempton calls the quietest place on earth.

From that one spot quiet radiates for hundreds of miles, he said.

It is the one square inch center of Hempton’s quiet battle against noise.

He is working to have airlines agree to detour around the park and to have park management include silence as a natural resource.

Excalibur (Ex): How important is an understanding of the role of states such as the U.S. and the U.K. when examining the question of terrorism?

Chomsky (Ch): It depends on whether we want to be honest and truthful or whether we want to just serve state power ( . . . ) We should look at all forms of terrorism. I have been writing on terrorism for 25 years, ever since the Reagan administration came in 1981 and declared that the leading focus of its foreign policy was going to be a war on terror. A war against state directed terrorism which they called the plague of the modern world because of their barbarism and so on. That was the centre of their foreign policy and ever since I have been writing about terrorism.

But what I write causes extreme anger for the very simple reason that I use the U.S. government’s official definition of terrorism from the official U.S. code of laws. If you use that definition, it follows very quickly that the U.S. is the leading terrorist state and a major sponsor of terrorism and since that conclusion is unacceptable, it arouses furious anger. But the problem lies in the unwillingness to recognize that your own terrorism is terrorism. This is not just true of the United States, it’s true quite generally. Terrorism is something that they do to us. In both cases, it’s terrorism and we have to get over that if we’re serious about the question.

Ex: And what keeps you motivated?

Ch: I’ll just tell you a brief story. I was in Beirut a couple of months ago giving talks at the American university in the city. After a talk, people come up and they want to talk privately or have books signed.

Here I was giving a talk in a downtown theatre, a large group of people were around and a young woman came up to me, in her mid-’20s, and just said this sentence: “I am Kinda” and practically collapsed. You wouldn’t know who Kinda is but that’s because we live in societies where the truth is kept hidden. I knew who she was. She had a book of mine open to a page on which I had quoted a letter of hers that she wrote when she was seven years old.

It was right after the U.S. bombing of Libya, her family was then living in Libya, and she wrote a letter which was found by a journalist friend of mine who tried to get it published in the United States but couldn’t because no one would publish it. He then gave it to me, I published it. The letter said something like this:

“Dear Mr Reagan, I am seven years old. I want to know why you killed my little sister and my friend and my rag doll. Is it because we are Palestinians? Kinda”. That’s one of the most moving letters I have ever seen and when she walked up to me and said I am Kinda, and, like I say, actually fell over, not only because of the event but because of what it means.

A major research institution has just announced the discovery of the densest element yet known to science. The new element has been named “Bushcronium.”

Bushcronium has one neutron, 12 assistant neutrons, 75 deputy neutrons, and 224 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 311. These particles are held together by dark forces called morons, which are surrounded by vast quantities of lepton-like particles called peons.

The symbol for Bushcronium is “W.” Bushcronium’s mass actually increases over time, as morons randomly interact with various elements in the atmosphere and become assistant deputy neutrons in a Bushcronium molecule, forming isodopes. This characteristic of moron-promotion leads some scientists to believe that Bushcronium is formed whenever morons reach a certain quantity in concentration. This hypothetical quantity is referred to as “Critical Morass.”