The Rag Blog

“Iraq’s savage sectarian war is now regarded as a greater obstacle to any semblance of peace returning than the insurgency, and was the main reason for the Americans recently pouring 12,000 troops into the capital – an operation that, they now acknowledge, has failed.

Yet, ironically, the death squads are the result of US policy. At the beginning of last year, with no end to the Sunni insurgency in sight, the Pentagon was reported to have decided to train Shia and Kurdish fighters to carry out “irregular missions”. The policy, exposed in the US media, was called the “Salvador Option” after the American-backed counter-insurgency in Latin America more than 20 years ago, which led to 70,000 deaths and countless instances of human rights abuse.“

Kim Sengupta

Read the full article here.

h/t Today in Iraq

This is one of many of these types of articles across America today.

Postwar life for Iraq, Afghan vets is anything but normal
James Janega and Aamer Madhani
October 29, 2006 3:03 AM

[snip]

When he came home from Iraq two years ago, he found that his infant daughter no longer recognized him and would push away from him when he tried to hold her. When he went to sleep, he sometimes had nightmares in which he dreamed he was under attack. On several occasions, he unknowingly struck his wife while having these nightmares. Binion’s marriage ultimately fell apart as a result of these behavioral changes.

Read it here.

Iraqis See the Little Things Fade Away in War’s Gloom
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
Published: October 29, 2006

“All the elements of society have been dismantled,” said Fawsia Abdul al-Attiya, a sociologist and a professor at Baghdad University. “You are afraid because you are a woman, a man, a Sunni, a Shiite, a Kurd. All these things start to change society.”

Read it here.

Saturday, October 28, 10:30AM

Dear Friends,

A few hours ago it was announced that President Fox had ordered the Federal Police (PFP) to enter the city and they are expected to arrive throughout the day. This follows yesterday’s coordinated attack by undercover municipal police on the city’s barricades which left 4 dead (among them Brad Will, a 36 year old American reporter with Indymedia) and as many as thirty five injured. The city is on edge, and my own understanding of what is happening is based mainly on Radio Universidad, the last surviving movement-controlled radio station.

As some of you may already know, the teachers union, Section 22, ratified a vote on Wednesday to return to work, subject to certain guarantees from the Secretary of the Interior in Mexico City. The vote itself produced a crisis within the union, and the final vote, 30 thousand to return to work against 20 thousand to stay out, appears to have fallen along geographic lines with Oaxaca city and the Valles Centrales strongly determined to stay out. Yesterday (Friday) the leadership of Section 22, including the now widely-discredited leader Enrique Rueda Pacheco sat down with the Interior Minister to finalize an agreement at the very moment that the coordinated attacks were underway here in the city. As teachers and movement supporters were facing roaming death squads, the negotiations in the capital took on a surreal appearance. For among the principal issues being discussed in Mexico City was the government’s former offer of a general amnesty, and the movement’s demand that all political prisoners arrested during this struggle be released, and arrest warrants dropped.

Listening to the radio yesterday was chilling as reports were called in from throughout the city and outlying areas — in the town of Santa Maria Coyotepec (where the ‘Govenor’s Palace’ is now located and the site of one of the largest occupations) we learned that up to twenty five people had been shot, by evening the wounded were gathered in the church and volunteer medics were trying to get to them; in Calicante just east of the historic center, Brad Will and two others were shot at another important barricade; in another part of town a woman was reported dragged from a barricade shouting and taken away in a car. At midday the radio itself came under attack and the student and teacher announcers called for emergency reinforcements of the surrounding barricades. Over and over we heard that people at the barricades were being shot at while they had only rocks and sticks to defend themselves.

This morning, with the news of the imminent arrival of the PFP, I spoke with a friend who is a member of Section 22. A young teacher, she had just returned from bringing food to the barricade in San Antonio de la Cal. It is one of perhaps a dozen barricades in the city that the APPO this morning has directed people to defend — they have called on people to abandon the small barricades of which there are hundreds, and to concentrate forces around the critical ones outside government offices. She told me that though there were only a hundred or so people at the barricade, and though they are hungry and tired, they plan to do everything possible to defend the barricade today against the PFP. On the radio moments ago, the announcer said that they had been informed that the ‘Caravans of Death’ would be reactivated today at noon. Meanwhile, the Federal Police are on their way, and while the Minister of the Interior has insisted that they will enter the city peacefully, everyone here remembers what they did in Atenco in early May. What will happen today is still uncertain — both in terms of what the PFP will do, but also, more importantly, what the hundreds of thousands of residents of the city will do.

Please help to spread the word, and alert others in the network of media to turn their attention to the struggle ongoing.

David

Because someone remarked that the last piece I posted from my Sister Deb Jehn’s recital was ‘amazing and beautiful,’ here is another piece she recorded that day. I could not find the name of it, but it was composed by Louis Andriessen, a Dutch composer. I hope you enjoy it. Richard

This comes via Ed Alexander and Charlie Loving. It seems to have been sent from Oaxaca on Saturday, 28 October at 8 pm (but that is not entirely clear). I post it with spelling corrections, but otherwise as received. I question the possibility that 4,000 people could fit on “6 Boeing planes,” unless those planes arrived several times each after returning to pick up more soldiers.

Federal troops arrived this morning ….6 Boeing planes with 4,000 federal police, marines (?), and army. They have been grouping all day in 3 areas, Brenamiel , Tule, and the airport. They are supposed to attack this afternoon. It is 5 pm and any time now the bloodbath will ensue. It is absurd this need for violence. It is everywhere all over the world and can so easily be solved, but power is an evil thing. There are old people, mothers, fathers, young people defending these barricades, just people like us. It is incredible. Will let you know more. It will be a late night. Laura

American Journalist Slain in Mexico Shootout
By COLLEEN LONG, AP

[snip]

Santa Lucia del Camino Mayor Manuel Martinez Feria said five men had been turned over to state authorities for possible involvement in Will’s killing. He identified them as two members of the local city hall, two municipal police officers and the former justice of the peace of a nearby town.

Read it here.

Special Report: US lackey Alvaro Uribe to spark destabilization in both Colombia and Venezuela
By Les Blough, Editor
Oct 27, 2006, 14:40

[snip]

In the context of these negotiations the bomb attack on the War Academy could not have come at a more surprising time. Two days later on Saturday October 21st, Uribe gave a speech accusing the FARC of planting the bomb citing proof of an intercepted e-mail allegedly sent from Bogotá to a high ranking FARC Commander, Mono Jojoy in the jungle, informing him of the success of the operation. On the basis of this proof, Uribe announced that he was breaking off negotiations with the FARC, ordered all the hostages held to be rescued in military operations and declared an all out war on the FARC.

The story becomes more intriguing. If you’d like to read the exciting end, click here.

This comes from a writer, new to us, discovered today. He is Manuel Valenzuela of Valenzuela’s Veritas.

Collaborators of Catastrophe: Inside the Ministry of Truth

[snip]

[snip]

What strategic defeats such as Vietnam and Iraq do is to plant doubt and uncertainty in the minds of Americans regarding the fictions taught and inculcated from cradle to grave. What wars that are not won and incompetent occupations accomplish is to irrigate the fields of slumbering minds with the enriching fluids of emancipation, if not throughout the population then certainly in the realities of tens of millions, enough for a movement to grow and a momentum to infiltrate into the collective conscious of the American people. Thus, the danger to the Establishment of the Iraq War disaster is that if it is allowed to fester and continue hemorrhaging, just as its momentum dictates that it will continue to do, the American mind may indeed sprout forth the reason and logic and cognitive thinking that has been appropriated for decades by the system, creating the necessary mind shock and thought tempest that might spring in the masses the enlightenment and renaissance that the elite are frightened to death of.

Read the entire essay here, well worth the time.

… W was dead a long time ago. I admired George Lakoff when I studied linguistics in the late 1970’s. Apparently, I still do.

Staying the Course Right Over a Cliff

What the president is discovering is that it’s not so easy to rewrite linguistic history. The laws of language are hard to defy.

Read the rest of it here.

From Healing Iraq, with an excellent accompanying map of the current situation in Baghdad from an Iraqi perspective.

More ‘Coup’ Rumours in Baghdad

Baghdad is rife with the strangest rumours again chiefly as a result of the latest deployment of American troops around major Shi’ite districts in Baghdad, signaling a movement against Shi’ite militias. The rumours also seem to have penetrated the concrete barriers of the Green Zone where anxious Iraqi governmental officials are whispering about an impending American “coup,” and according to some well-connected Iraqis inside the Green Zone, several officials have made travel arrangements. This followed tensions over the last week between the U.S. and a defiant PM Maliki that were supposedly resolved yesterday with the joint Iraqi-American statement reaffirming U.S. support for the Iraqi government and the commitment of the Iraqi government to a timetable for disbanding militias. The heavy deployment of American troops along with elite Iraqi security forces that are not part of the Interior or the Defense ministries aggravated these fears.

Read all of it and more here.

One commentor put it, the point isn’t the chair. it’s a demonstration of a given technology. Imagine dropping boxes of parts out of a plane and then having those parts assemble themselves into a shelter, or a bridge, or a water well without the need for human assistance. Pretty brilliant if you ask me.

Note: SC = Saturday Cartoon