chris hedges and lalia al-arian:
The terror that I saw on the patriarch’s face, like I said, that really was the turning point for me. I imagined in my mind what he must have been thinking, understanding that he had lived under Saddam’s brutal regime for many years, worried about—you know, hearing stories about Iraqis being carried away in the middle of the night by the Iraqi secret service and so forth, to see all those lights, all those soldiers with guns, all the uniform things that we wear, as far as the helmet, the night vision goggles, very intimidating, very terrifying for the man. He screamed a very guttural cry that I can still hear it every day. You know, it was just the most awful, horrible sound I’ve ever heard in my life. He was so terrified and so afraid for his family. And I thought of my family at that time, and I thought to myself, boy, if I was the patriarch of a family, if soldiers came from another country, came in and did this to my family, I would be an insurgent, too.
(...) And when they do join the resistance, President Bush says, “They’re al-Qaeda. They’re al-Qaeda.” But they’re not. They’re just regular Iraqi people who feel occupied, and they’re reacting to an occupation.
(...) Well, Amy, the numbers are that less than one percent of the Iraqis actually support a US presence in Iraq, and this has been demonstrated time and time again in polls and also in the result when troops do withdraw from the region. For example, last December, British troops withdrew from Basra, and we saw a calm in the area and a rapid decrease in violence. Some estimates are that it was a 99 percent decrease in violence. So we do see that the results are very clear once troops do withdraw and that there is some stability in this certain region.
(...) These are the pillars of the occupation, and we wanted to give readers a kind of lens or view into the gritty details of how these mechanisms works, such as convoys. I mean, these are just freight trains of death. You have to remain moving once you leave what they call the wire, once you leave the safe perimeter of a base. And so, these heavily armored convoys will drive at breakneck speeds, fifty, sixty miles an hour down the middle of roads, smashing into Iraqi cars, shoving Iraqi vehicles to the side, running over Iraqi civilians, and then, of course, any time an IED goes off, unleashing withering what they call suppressing fire with belt-fed weapons—these are light machine guns like SAWs, .50-caliber machine guns—into a densely populated areas. And so, I think that rather than sort of do a Studs Terkel kind of memoir, we wanted to focus specifically on sort of key mechanisms that make the occupation work, how these mechanisms function, and the effect that these mechanisms have on Iraqi civilians.
(...) checkpoints are deadly for Iraqi civilians, in part because checkpoints are often put up very quickly, so that you can turn a corner in Baghdad, Fallujah or any other city, and there could never have been a checkpoint there, and there suddenly is a checkpoint there. Also, you know, as a kind of security measure, American forces will often put Iraqi forces before their checkpoints. So there’s actually two checkpoints. So you’ll go through the Iraqi forces, and many Iraqi civilians, by the way, are terrified, because they don’t know who those Iraqis are in the uniform. So sometimes they’ll just try and gun it, which will mean that their cars—American forces or Iraqi forces or both will open fire on their car, or they’ll get through the Iraqi checkpoint not expecting another checkpoint, or it’s night, or their breaks don’t work. And in Iraq, the situation is so volatile and so deadly for the occupation forces that the response is to open fire repeatedly. Checkpoints are a very common form of death for Iraqi civilians, and these, you know, incidents where cars are fired upon and whole families are killed are rarely investigated or documented.
(...) You would be hard-pressed to find one single Iraqi family who hasn’t experienced the terrifying experience of a raid. And basically, as John Bruhns described on your show a year ago, they storm into a house, they turn the entire house upside-down, making it look like a hurricane hit it. They usually separate the men from the women and children. Most of the time, the vast majority of the time, they actually arrest the men. They zipcuff them, and they take them to a detention facility or a prison, which leaves the family looking for them for days.
(...) They would say that this is something that’s standard operating procedure, that the convoys that race down the streets, they jump over medians in the middle of the street, they drive on the wrong side of the road. They—again, men get arrested for months, sometimes years, at a time, with their families not even knowing where they are. And this just shows that an occupation not only destroys the people that are under occupation, but the soldiers and Marines who are asked to carry out the occupation, because when these troops return from their service, they’re haunted by what they’ve seen and they’re haunted by what they’ve done.
(...) Well, you know, this is sort of perhaps the great irony of the occupation itself. There is an understanding—and Petraeus wrote the counterinsurgency manual, the new one that’s used by the occupation forces—that you can’t win an insurgency unless you win the support of the civilian population. And yet, I think as this book points out, every single mechanism used to enforce the occupation alienates and enrages the average Iraqi. It is not only a form of collective humiliation of great indignity, but violence and danger and terror is the right word. And that is the experience of these Iraqis.
(...) And so, I think if there’s a kind of summation of the book, it is that we are not a force for stability. We are not a force that in any way dampens or inhibits or minimizes violence. But we are another mix in the cauldron of horror and violence and terror, along with militias and criminal gangs and warlords that go into making Iraqi society essentially a kind of Hobbesian nightmare.
Showing posts with label withdrawal. Show all posts
Showing posts with label withdrawal. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
blackwater: from the nisour square massacre to the future of the mercenary industry:
And what I should say at the onset here is that what’s become very, very clear over the past year is that without Blackwater, the occupation of Iraq would be untenable. I mean, this is a company now that has become so central to the US occupation that it can be responsible for one of the single greatest killing sprees of Iraqi civilians and face basically no consequences for that action and in fact continue to win hundreds of millions of dollars in US State Department contracts. Blackwater in Iraq was awarded over $100 million in contracts just in the two weeks following the Nisour Square shooting. It’s had over a billion dollars in contracts from the United States State Department. And the men who were alleged to have been responsible for those killings at Nisour Square, to this day, are walking around as free individuals.
(...) So, according to the witnesses, including this individual, the shooting of this young Iraqi medical student and his mother really began a shooting—a series of shootings in the square that would ultimately leave seventeen Iraqi civilians dead. And what he’s talking about there is that when the initial shots were fired, what happened was that this mother is sitting in the car and sees her son’s head essentially explode after being shot, and she grabs onto him. And it was an automatic car, and so what may have happened is that the car continued to sort of veer toward the Blackwater men, although aerial photos that were later obtained by the Washington Post revealed that that car hadn’t even really come anywhere close to the Blackwater operatives. That’s the allegation that the Washington Post made based on these aerial photos that they obtained.
(...) But let’s be clear here, we’re talking about what is alleged to be the single greatest massacre of Iraqi civilians by a private force in Iraq. The individuals alleged to have been responsible for that have faced no consequences right now. When the Iraqi government said, “We want to prosecute them as criminals for what they’ve done in our country,” the Bush administration had to remind Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki that he in fact is not the prime minister of Iraq, that George Bush is the prime minister of Iraq and that the United States has imposed on Iraq a law, going back to the Bremer era, Order 17, that says that no private contractors in Iraq can be prosecuted by any Iraqi legal system. And Bremer issued this order at the time he was allegedly handing over sovereignty to the Iraqi government. No armed private security contractors have ever been prosecuted for any crimes in Iraq, not to mention killing of Iraqi civilians. So while this grand jury is meeting, I think that the odds of actual justice being achieved here for the victims of the Nisour Square massacre is highly unlikely. Maybe one or two people will go down as a symbolic gesture. Blackwater, as a company, is not facing any consequences for this.
(...) Right. I mean, what happened after the Nisour Square killings was extraordinary. You have the puppet Iraqi government saying, “These guys need to leave the country immediately, and we’re going to prosecute them.” And in fact, Blackwater’s work shut down for three days. As one Iraqi friend of mine said, they turned the Green Zone into the green zoo, because we saw how embedded Blackwater is in the occupation. No US officials could leave the Green Zone when Blackwater’s work was shut down. And so, you understand that, in the words of one US official, Blackwater has a client that will go to the ends of the earth to protect it, to shield it, because the US needs, the Bush administration needs, Blackwater. And so, the response of the Bush administration at every turn was to try to cover up for the individuals who did this shooting, try to protect Blackwater and shield the company from public scrutiny or any consequences for its actions.
(...) The other thing I have to add, Amy, is that when the first—they call it the “first blush” report on this incident came out, it purported to be the State Department’s view of what happened at Nisour Square. It said that they were ambushed, that there was enemy fire, that the Blackwater men were defending American lives in a war zone. And it was written on State Department letterhead, official stationery of the United States State Department. Well, it turns out it was actually written by a Blackwater contractor named Darren Hanner and put forward as the State Department’s official report on it. I mean, this is all what happened right away.
(...) But what has gotten almost no attention is that a US military unit did respond right after the shooting, arrived on the scene. And Lieutenant Colonel Mike Tarsa and his men did an investigation, and what they found is that there was no evidence of enemy fire. They examined the shell casings on the scene and found no evidence that there were any shots fired at the Blackwater convoy. And they labeled it a criminal event and said that all of the Iraqis killed that day were killed as a result of unjustified and unprovoked gunfire. Now, this has gotten almost no attention whatsoever.
(...) But the reality here, Amy, is that if you step back for a minute and you look at the situation, Blackwater’s role in Iraq is completely secure. I mean, what we learned through this in a very clear way is that this occupation cannot continue without Blackwater. It’s now ceased to be just a political dedication on the part of the Bush administration to these kinds of companies. It literally is now the case that they couldn’t do the work of the occupation without Blackwater.
(...) And so, if you say, well, Blackwater’s contract should be cancelled, as some have called for, then the question becomes, who’s going to do their job in Iraq? The military said it doesn’t want to do that, because it conflicts with the mission of the United States military. The State Department says it would take two to three years to recruit, train and vet a force of that size. And Blackwater’s competitors don’t seem to have the personnel to step in and fill Blackwater’s role. So Blackwater’s vice president, Martin Strong, Erik Prince and others, they actually don’t even need to have this debate anymore, because the money is in the bank and the boots are on the ground.
(...) But Erik Prince said shortly after this that he sleeps the sleep of the just. No, he sleeps the sleep of a man who knows that his business is going to be very secure, whether there’s a Democrat or a Republican in the White House. One of the most pathetic things that happened during that hearing where Erik Prince was there was watching the members of the House Oversight Committee who were Democrats reading the report, the investigative report, done by the committee for that hearing during Erik Prince’s testimony. The Democrats were completely unprepared. And in reality, Erik Prince sort of won the day. He was able to avoid having to talk about Nisour Square, which was what brought him there in the first place, and he was never faced, with few exceptions, with a very substantive follow-up to the things he was saying, some of which were totally untrue.
(...) Well, this is one of Erik Prince’s new initiatives. It’s a private CIA, essentially, called Total Intelligence Solutions. It opened for business in February of 2007 and could prove to be one of Blackwater’s most successful ventures. As I said, it’s like a private CIA. In fact, it’s run by three former very senior US intelligence officials. At the top of the Total Intelligence pyramid is J. Cofer Black, who is the former head of counterterrorism at the Central Intelligence Agency, a twenty-eight-year veteran of the CIA, the man who on 9/11 was responsible at the CIA for the hunt for bin Laden. And we’ve talked about him on this show before. He also ran the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program, the government-sanctioned kidnap and torture program, where people like Maher Arar are abducted at JFK airport or in other places around the world and then sent to a third country to be tortured, often while being read questions provided by US interrogators. So this man Cofer Black, who said there was a before 9/11 and an after 9/11, and after 9/11 the gloves come off, he’s the head of Total Intelligence Solutions, along with Robert Richer, who is the former deputy director of operations at the Central Intelligence Agency and Enrique “Ric” Prado, who was a veteran of the CIA in Latin America and worked for the CIA’s paramilitary division for a solid decade.
(...) The US has sixteen intelligence agencies now under one umbrella. 70 percent of their combined budget is now in the hands of the private sector. You have private contractors working basically at every level of the US intelligence apparatus. And so, what we see now, through Total Intelligence Solutions, is that Erik Prince is taking the decades and decades of CIA experience, the careers of people like Cofer Black, Robert Richer, Enrique “Ric” Prado, and putting all of their contacts, their knowledge, their networks, their intimate relationships with governments and heads of state around the world, on the open market for bidding.
(...) Blackwater has recruited soldiers from Chile, from Colombia. They paid their Colombian soldiers $34 a day, which is about $1,000 a month. The Chileans were paid somewhere in the ballpark of $4,000. But a US operative working for Blackwater right now is making about $600 to $650 a day. So there’s a real disparity in pay. When you go down to the bottom, you’ve got the Colombians at $34, the US soldiers at $650 a day working for Blackwater.
(...) But on Barack Obama, he’s in a very complicated situation, because his Iraq plan actually is not a plan to end the occupation of Iraq. It’s to continue it with a different label attached to it. And so, you hear him there talking about how “I don’t want to replace contractors with US troops.” The reality is, and Barack Obama knows this very well, his Iraq plan could not be implemented if he was against the use of Blackwater or other private security forces. And the reality is, he’s probably going to have to use these companies for two to three years at a minimum, unless he makes it an aggressive point of trying to shut them down. He might even have to use Blackwater for the first year of his administration.
And what I should say at the onset here is that what’s become very, very clear over the past year is that without Blackwater, the occupation of Iraq would be untenable. I mean, this is a company now that has become so central to the US occupation that it can be responsible for one of the single greatest killing sprees of Iraqi civilians and face basically no consequences for that action and in fact continue to win hundreds of millions of dollars in US State Department contracts. Blackwater in Iraq was awarded over $100 million in contracts just in the two weeks following the Nisour Square shooting. It’s had over a billion dollars in contracts from the United States State Department. And the men who were alleged to have been responsible for those killings at Nisour Square, to this day, are walking around as free individuals.
(...) So, according to the witnesses, including this individual, the shooting of this young Iraqi medical student and his mother really began a shooting—a series of shootings in the square that would ultimately leave seventeen Iraqi civilians dead. And what he’s talking about there is that when the initial shots were fired, what happened was that this mother is sitting in the car and sees her son’s head essentially explode after being shot, and she grabs onto him. And it was an automatic car, and so what may have happened is that the car continued to sort of veer toward the Blackwater men, although aerial photos that were later obtained by the Washington Post revealed that that car hadn’t even really come anywhere close to the Blackwater operatives. That’s the allegation that the Washington Post made based on these aerial photos that they obtained.
(...) But let’s be clear here, we’re talking about what is alleged to be the single greatest massacre of Iraqi civilians by a private force in Iraq. The individuals alleged to have been responsible for that have faced no consequences right now. When the Iraqi government said, “We want to prosecute them as criminals for what they’ve done in our country,” the Bush administration had to remind Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki that he in fact is not the prime minister of Iraq, that George Bush is the prime minister of Iraq and that the United States has imposed on Iraq a law, going back to the Bremer era, Order 17, that says that no private contractors in Iraq can be prosecuted by any Iraqi legal system. And Bremer issued this order at the time he was allegedly handing over sovereignty to the Iraqi government. No armed private security contractors have ever been prosecuted for any crimes in Iraq, not to mention killing of Iraqi civilians. So while this grand jury is meeting, I think that the odds of actual justice being achieved here for the victims of the Nisour Square massacre is highly unlikely. Maybe one or two people will go down as a symbolic gesture. Blackwater, as a company, is not facing any consequences for this.
(...) Right. I mean, what happened after the Nisour Square killings was extraordinary. You have the puppet Iraqi government saying, “These guys need to leave the country immediately, and we’re going to prosecute them.” And in fact, Blackwater’s work shut down for three days. As one Iraqi friend of mine said, they turned the Green Zone into the green zoo, because we saw how embedded Blackwater is in the occupation. No US officials could leave the Green Zone when Blackwater’s work was shut down. And so, you understand that, in the words of one US official, Blackwater has a client that will go to the ends of the earth to protect it, to shield it, because the US needs, the Bush administration needs, Blackwater. And so, the response of the Bush administration at every turn was to try to cover up for the individuals who did this shooting, try to protect Blackwater and shield the company from public scrutiny or any consequences for its actions.
(...) The other thing I have to add, Amy, is that when the first—they call it the “first blush” report on this incident came out, it purported to be the State Department’s view of what happened at Nisour Square. It said that they were ambushed, that there was enemy fire, that the Blackwater men were defending American lives in a war zone. And it was written on State Department letterhead, official stationery of the United States State Department. Well, it turns out it was actually written by a Blackwater contractor named Darren Hanner and put forward as the State Department’s official report on it. I mean, this is all what happened right away.
(...) But what has gotten almost no attention is that a US military unit did respond right after the shooting, arrived on the scene. And Lieutenant Colonel Mike Tarsa and his men did an investigation, and what they found is that there was no evidence of enemy fire. They examined the shell casings on the scene and found no evidence that there were any shots fired at the Blackwater convoy. And they labeled it a criminal event and said that all of the Iraqis killed that day were killed as a result of unjustified and unprovoked gunfire. Now, this has gotten almost no attention whatsoever.
(...) But the reality here, Amy, is that if you step back for a minute and you look at the situation, Blackwater’s role in Iraq is completely secure. I mean, what we learned through this in a very clear way is that this occupation cannot continue without Blackwater. It’s now ceased to be just a political dedication on the part of the Bush administration to these kinds of companies. It literally is now the case that they couldn’t do the work of the occupation without Blackwater.
(...) And so, if you say, well, Blackwater’s contract should be cancelled, as some have called for, then the question becomes, who’s going to do their job in Iraq? The military said it doesn’t want to do that, because it conflicts with the mission of the United States military. The State Department says it would take two to three years to recruit, train and vet a force of that size. And Blackwater’s competitors don’t seem to have the personnel to step in and fill Blackwater’s role. So Blackwater’s vice president, Martin Strong, Erik Prince and others, they actually don’t even need to have this debate anymore, because the money is in the bank and the boots are on the ground.
(...) But Erik Prince said shortly after this that he sleeps the sleep of the just. No, he sleeps the sleep of a man who knows that his business is going to be very secure, whether there’s a Democrat or a Republican in the White House. One of the most pathetic things that happened during that hearing where Erik Prince was there was watching the members of the House Oversight Committee who were Democrats reading the report, the investigative report, done by the committee for that hearing during Erik Prince’s testimony. The Democrats were completely unprepared. And in reality, Erik Prince sort of won the day. He was able to avoid having to talk about Nisour Square, which was what brought him there in the first place, and he was never faced, with few exceptions, with a very substantive follow-up to the things he was saying, some of which were totally untrue.
(...) Well, this is one of Erik Prince’s new initiatives. It’s a private CIA, essentially, called Total Intelligence Solutions. It opened for business in February of 2007 and could prove to be one of Blackwater’s most successful ventures. As I said, it’s like a private CIA. In fact, it’s run by three former very senior US intelligence officials. At the top of the Total Intelligence pyramid is J. Cofer Black, who is the former head of counterterrorism at the Central Intelligence Agency, a twenty-eight-year veteran of the CIA, the man who on 9/11 was responsible at the CIA for the hunt for bin Laden. And we’ve talked about him on this show before. He also ran the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program, the government-sanctioned kidnap and torture program, where people like Maher Arar are abducted at JFK airport or in other places around the world and then sent to a third country to be tortured, often while being read questions provided by US interrogators. So this man Cofer Black, who said there was a before 9/11 and an after 9/11, and after 9/11 the gloves come off, he’s the head of Total Intelligence Solutions, along with Robert Richer, who is the former deputy director of operations at the Central Intelligence Agency and Enrique “Ric” Prado, who was a veteran of the CIA in Latin America and worked for the CIA’s paramilitary division for a solid decade.
(...) The US has sixteen intelligence agencies now under one umbrella. 70 percent of their combined budget is now in the hands of the private sector. You have private contractors working basically at every level of the US intelligence apparatus. And so, what we see now, through Total Intelligence Solutions, is that Erik Prince is taking the decades and decades of CIA experience, the careers of people like Cofer Black, Robert Richer, Enrique “Ric” Prado, and putting all of their contacts, their knowledge, their networks, their intimate relationships with governments and heads of state around the world, on the open market for bidding.
(...) Blackwater has recruited soldiers from Chile, from Colombia. They paid their Colombian soldiers $34 a day, which is about $1,000 a month. The Chileans were paid somewhere in the ballpark of $4,000. But a US operative working for Blackwater right now is making about $600 to $650 a day. So there’s a real disparity in pay. When you go down to the bottom, you’ve got the Colombians at $34, the US soldiers at $650 a day working for Blackwater.
(...) But on Barack Obama, he’s in a very complicated situation, because his Iraq plan actually is not a plan to end the occupation of Iraq. It’s to continue it with a different label attached to it. And so, you hear him there talking about how “I don’t want to replace contractors with US troops.” The reality is, and Barack Obama knows this very well, his Iraq plan could not be implemented if he was against the use of Blackwater or other private security forces. And the reality is, he’s probably going to have to use these companies for two to three years at a minimum, unless he makes it an aggressive point of trying to shut them down. He might even have to use Blackwater for the first year of his administration.
Friday, August 24, 2007
the forgotten vietnam-iraq parallel:
The Republicans are showing an uncanny ability to control the public debate. Remember just a couple of months ago, when it was Democratic Party gospel that this was indeed a war we couldn’t win? Somehow the gospel is being rewritten. As the Washington Post reports, the Dem party line now says that we are indeed “making progress” on the military front. Our troops are doing a superb job. It’s just those incompetent Iraqi politicians — looking for “power, revenge, and personal advantage,” Hillary Clinton says — who are blocking the path to a glorious victory.
(...) Long ago, historians of the Vietnam war noted that the intense debate about the war that gripped America rarely made much reference to the suffering of the Vietnamese people. Only “peaceniks” on the far left paid much attention to the two million or more Vietnamese who died, to the corpses and torched villages and napalmed children that were the living — and dying — reality of the war. In the mainstream, where the “serious” discussion unfolded, the only question that mattered was: What is this war doing to the USA? Is it to our benefit to keep on fighting, or are we better off withdrawing?
(...) Is it Bush and Cheney or their antiwar critics who are wearing the white hats? That’s for you to decide. In either case, political leaders and the mainstream media make it clear that you are deciding for a particular vision of what America is all about, what makes America great, and what direction America should take in the future. What happens to the people of Iraq is mentioned only in passing, if at all.
(...) Sad to say, this is probably a fairly accurate reflection of U.S. public opinion. Most people here don’t care too much what happened to the people of Vietnam or what is happening to the people of Iraq. A recent poll showed that the average American thinks under 10,000 Iraqi civilians have died in this war — a vast underestimate. More importantly, the number of Iraqi dead scarcely figures into the public debate. As with the Vietnam war, it’s all about what is happening to us.
(...) That is why Bush’s speechwriters could take the gamble of raising the specter of Vietnam, and why they may very well win. Since the war was turned into a fictional drama, few people know, or care, what really happened in Vietnam. Therefore, it’s easy to change the story around. Few can refute Bush’s absurd version, in which the forecast “bloodbath” supposedly actually happened, and the U.S. withdrawal triggered the Khmer Rouge outrages in Cambodia.
(...) On all those counts, the yarn Bush is spinning could easily prove a winner. It says that we were close to winning in Vietnam. But then the antiwar “cut and run” crowd snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. That let loose a bloody tide of chaos that engulfed southeast Asia, humiliated the U.S., and emboldened the terrorists, who now want to make Iraq a home base from which to launch their next attack upon us. But we have a chance to right all those wrongs — to stem the tide of chaos, regain our pride, crush the terrorists, keep our children safe, and show what America is really made of — if only we have the courage to fight for God’s truth.
The Republicans are showing an uncanny ability to control the public debate. Remember just a couple of months ago, when it was Democratic Party gospel that this was indeed a war we couldn’t win? Somehow the gospel is being rewritten. As the Washington Post reports, the Dem party line now says that we are indeed “making progress” on the military front. Our troops are doing a superb job. It’s just those incompetent Iraqi politicians — looking for “power, revenge, and personal advantage,” Hillary Clinton says — who are blocking the path to a glorious victory.
(...) Long ago, historians of the Vietnam war noted that the intense debate about the war that gripped America rarely made much reference to the suffering of the Vietnamese people. Only “peaceniks” on the far left paid much attention to the two million or more Vietnamese who died, to the corpses and torched villages and napalmed children that were the living — and dying — reality of the war. In the mainstream, where the “serious” discussion unfolded, the only question that mattered was: What is this war doing to the USA? Is it to our benefit to keep on fighting, or are we better off withdrawing?
(...) Is it Bush and Cheney or their antiwar critics who are wearing the white hats? That’s for you to decide. In either case, political leaders and the mainstream media make it clear that you are deciding for a particular vision of what America is all about, what makes America great, and what direction America should take in the future. What happens to the people of Iraq is mentioned only in passing, if at all.
(...) Sad to say, this is probably a fairly accurate reflection of U.S. public opinion. Most people here don’t care too much what happened to the people of Vietnam or what is happening to the people of Iraq. A recent poll showed that the average American thinks under 10,000 Iraqi civilians have died in this war — a vast underestimate. More importantly, the number of Iraqi dead scarcely figures into the public debate. As with the Vietnam war, it’s all about what is happening to us.
(...) That is why Bush’s speechwriters could take the gamble of raising the specter of Vietnam, and why they may very well win. Since the war was turned into a fictional drama, few people know, or care, what really happened in Vietnam. Therefore, it’s easy to change the story around. Few can refute Bush’s absurd version, in which the forecast “bloodbath” supposedly actually happened, and the U.S. withdrawal triggered the Khmer Rouge outrages in Cambodia.
(...) On all those counts, the yarn Bush is spinning could easily prove a winner. It says that we were close to winning in Vietnam. But then the antiwar “cut and run” crowd snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. That let loose a bloody tide of chaos that engulfed southeast Asia, humiliated the U.S., and emboldened the terrorists, who now want to make Iraq a home base from which to launch their next attack upon us. But we have a chance to right all those wrongs — to stem the tide of chaos, regain our pride, crush the terrorists, keep our children safe, and show what America is really made of — if only we have the courage to fight for God’s truth.
bush rewrites history:
“The price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens,” he told the Veterans of Foreign Wars. By the way, he’s counting the victims of the Khmer Rouge, who came to power only after the U.S. ruined Cambodia.
(...) he’s not counting the three million people the U.S. killed in Southeast Asia during that war.
“The price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens,” he told the Veterans of Foreign Wars. By the way, he’s counting the victims of the Khmer Rouge, who came to power only after the U.S. ruined Cambodia.
(...) he’s not counting the three million people the U.S. killed in Southeast Asia during that war.
bush, vietnam, and 14 more GIs dead:
Naturally, Mr. Bush fails to note that if the United States had never been in Vietnam, there would not have been the need to add these terms to "our vocabulary." It was the decision by Washington to refuse the right of the Vietnamese to hold countrywide elections as agreed to in the 1954 Geneva agreements and the subsequent machinations by the US military and intelligence agencies to install a client government in southern Vietnam that created the situation that precipitated all of the newly termed phenomena.
Naturally, Mr. Bush fails to note that if the United States had never been in Vietnam, there would not have been the need to add these terms to "our vocabulary." It was the decision by Washington to refuse the right of the Vietnamese to hold countrywide elections as agreed to in the 1954 Geneva agreements and the subsequent machinations by the US military and intelligence agencies to install a client government in southern Vietnam that created the situation that precipitated all of the newly termed phenomena.
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
achievement-based rhetoric:
One week ago when I read in the newspaper about the achievements I tried to remove the fog from my eyes to see these achievements … they should be somewhere here or there but, sorry I can’t find any of these except infamous achievements like absence of electricity for four year ...
(...) But this crisis has become worse within last year, that our refrigerator turned to ordinary box to hide useless things, no pure water or any kind of water, the tap is always dry, the prices have been doubled within this year, no building has been raised, on the contrary there are many buildings have been destroyed, no plot of land has been distributed to solve the housing problems although Iraq has large empty land that transfers to shelters of terrorists. ...
One week ago when I read in the newspaper about the achievements I tried to remove the fog from my eyes to see these achievements … they should be somewhere here or there but, sorry I can’t find any of these except infamous achievements like absence of electricity for four year ...
(...) But this crisis has become worse within last year, that our refrigerator turned to ordinary box to hide useless things, no pure water or any kind of water, the tap is always dry, the prices have been doubled within this year, no building has been raised, on the contrary there are many buildings have been destroyed, no plot of land has been distributed to solve the housing problems although Iraq has large empty land that transfers to shelters of terrorists. ...
Monday, May 28, 2007
sadr, sectarianism, withdrawal:
An account given Pentagon officials by a military officer recently returned from Iraq suggests that Sunni tribal leaders in Anbar province, who have generally reflected the views of the Sunni armed resistance there, are open to working with Sadr.
(...) Sadr's aides say he was encouraged to launch the new cross-sectarian initiative by the increasingly violent opposition from nationalist Sunni insurgents to the jihadists aligned with al Qaeda. One of his top aides, Ahmed Shaibani, recalled that the George W. Bush administration was arguing that a timetable was unacceptable because of the danger of al Qaeda taking advantage of a withdrawal. Shaibani told Raghavan that sectarian peace could be advanced if both Sadr's Mahdi Army and Sunni insurgent groups could unite to weaken al Qaeda.
(...) The demonstration not only showed that Sadr could mobilize crowds comparable to the largest ever seen in post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, but also made clear Sadr's commitment to transcending sectarian interests. The demonstrators carried Iraqi flags instead of pictures of Sadr or other Shiite symbols. It also included a small contingent of members of the Sunni-based Islamic Party of Iraq.
(...) a Navy Seal special operations officer recently returned from eight months in Anbar province, who discussed the situation there with high-ranking Pentagon officials at the end of April, suggests that that the views of Sunni leaders are quite compatible with those of Sadr. A source familiar with the officer's account said the Sunni Sheiks in Anbar have been telling U.S. commanders that the United States must withdraw its troops, and that the Sunnis know how to handle both al Qaeda and the Shiites.
(...) Sadr's project for a Sunni-Shiite united front against both al Qaeda and U.S. occupation offers a potential basis for an eventual settlement of the sectarian civil war in Iraq as well as for U.S. withdrawal. But it could also be the basis for a new and more deadly phase of fighting if Sadr returns once more to military resistance.
An account given Pentagon officials by a military officer recently returned from Iraq suggests that Sunni tribal leaders in Anbar province, who have generally reflected the views of the Sunni armed resistance there, are open to working with Sadr.
(...) Sadr's aides say he was encouraged to launch the new cross-sectarian initiative by the increasingly violent opposition from nationalist Sunni insurgents to the jihadists aligned with al Qaeda. One of his top aides, Ahmed Shaibani, recalled that the George W. Bush administration was arguing that a timetable was unacceptable because of the danger of al Qaeda taking advantage of a withdrawal. Shaibani told Raghavan that sectarian peace could be advanced if both Sadr's Mahdi Army and Sunni insurgent groups could unite to weaken al Qaeda.
(...) The demonstration not only showed that Sadr could mobilize crowds comparable to the largest ever seen in post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, but also made clear Sadr's commitment to transcending sectarian interests. The demonstrators carried Iraqi flags instead of pictures of Sadr or other Shiite symbols. It also included a small contingent of members of the Sunni-based Islamic Party of Iraq.
(...) a Navy Seal special operations officer recently returned from eight months in Anbar province, who discussed the situation there with high-ranking Pentagon officials at the end of April, suggests that that the views of Sunni leaders are quite compatible with those of Sadr. A source familiar with the officer's account said the Sunni Sheiks in Anbar have been telling U.S. commanders that the United States must withdraw its troops, and that the Sunnis know how to handle both al Qaeda and the Shiites.
(...) Sadr's project for a Sunni-Shiite united front against both al Qaeda and U.S. occupation offers a potential basis for an eventual settlement of the sectarian civil war in Iraq as well as for U.S. withdrawal. But it could also be the basis for a new and more deadly phase of fighting if Sadr returns once more to military resistance.
Thursday, May 24, 2007
thoughts on afghanistan, paraguay, and iraq:
Remember when the U.S. used to claim things like '250 Vietcong' killed during a firefight, most of whom turned out to be civilians? On April 27 the U.S said 'more than 130 Taliban' were killed after Special Forces called in air strikes during a two-day battle in western Afghanistan. Except local residents said there were no Taliban in the village and that the dead included many women and children. With U.S. and NATO forces relying more and more on air power, large numbers of civilian casualties are inevitable.
(...) Drugs. With the help of the CIA, the U.S.-supported regime in South Vietnam and Laos shipped opium from Laos to Thailand, making the Vietnam War ground zero in the heroin epidemic that gripped Europe and the U.S in the late '60s and early '70s. For details see 'The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia,' and Frontline's 'Guns, Drugs and the CIA.' Well, 2006 was a banner year for opium production in Afghanistan and, according to an investigation by the Financial Times, Afghan government claims that it had eradicated 21,000 hectares of poppies in Kandahar and Helmand provinces 'bore little resemblance to reality.' Afghanistan produces 92 percent of the world's opium.
(...) Meanwhile, a number of NATO members are having second thoughts about the Afghan adventure. A recent Der Spiegel poll indicates that 57 percent of Germans want to withdraw from Afghanistan.
(...) 'It costs a couple of hundred dollars for a bomb,' says Sunil Ram, a professor at the American Military University in West Virginia, 'but they can knock out a $3 million or $4 million vehicle, and kill troops that cost millions of dollars to train.'
[on to paraguay]
(...) Lugo's politics are populist-he calls himself 'the bishop of the poor' and says he is 'inspired by some elements of socialism.' There is a lot to work with in Paraguay. It has the singular distinction of having the most unequal distribution of land in Latin America. Some one percent of the population owns 77 percent of the land.
(...) Benjamin Dangl, editor of Upsidedownworld.com, who has traveled widely in the area, says 'for Paraguay, Lugo is a revolutionary.' Dangl says Lugo could 'significantly' change the culture of repression and corruption, but that 'he is not Evo Morales or Chavez. He isn't likely to do too many radical things economically. Perhaps he will be more like Tabare Vasquez of Uruguay.' He says radicals are more 'hopeful' than they are 'satisfied' with his candidacy.
[iraq]
(...) So why are weapon systems that don't work being sent into war? Because Boeing and Bell made $20 billion off of the V-22, and General Dynamics raked in $11 billion on the Stryker. And now the Army and the Marines are pushing for a new Mine Resist and Ambush Protected (MRAPS) armored vehicle. The Pentagon ordered almost 8,000 of them at a cost of $8.4 billion from the International Truck and Engine and an Israeli armor maker. Plans are to order thousands more. War may be Hell, but for some, Hell is very profitable.
Remember when the U.S. used to claim things like '250 Vietcong' killed during a firefight, most of whom turned out to be civilians? On April 27 the U.S said 'more than 130 Taliban' were killed after Special Forces called in air strikes during a two-day battle in western Afghanistan. Except local residents said there were no Taliban in the village and that the dead included many women and children. With U.S. and NATO forces relying more and more on air power, large numbers of civilian casualties are inevitable.
(...) Drugs. With the help of the CIA, the U.S.-supported regime in South Vietnam and Laos shipped opium from Laos to Thailand, making the Vietnam War ground zero in the heroin epidemic that gripped Europe and the U.S in the late '60s and early '70s. For details see 'The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia,' and Frontline's 'Guns, Drugs and the CIA.' Well, 2006 was a banner year for opium production in Afghanistan and, according to an investigation by the Financial Times, Afghan government claims that it had eradicated 21,000 hectares of poppies in Kandahar and Helmand provinces 'bore little resemblance to reality.' Afghanistan produces 92 percent of the world's opium.
(...) Meanwhile, a number of NATO members are having second thoughts about the Afghan adventure. A recent Der Spiegel poll indicates that 57 percent of Germans want to withdraw from Afghanistan.
(...) 'It costs a couple of hundred dollars for a bomb,' says Sunil Ram, a professor at the American Military University in West Virginia, 'but they can knock out a $3 million or $4 million vehicle, and kill troops that cost millions of dollars to train.'
[on to paraguay]
(...) Lugo's politics are populist-he calls himself 'the bishop of the poor' and says he is 'inspired by some elements of socialism.' There is a lot to work with in Paraguay. It has the singular distinction of having the most unequal distribution of land in Latin America. Some one percent of the population owns 77 percent of the land.
(...) Benjamin Dangl, editor of Upsidedownworld.com, who has traveled widely in the area, says 'for Paraguay, Lugo is a revolutionary.' Dangl says Lugo could 'significantly' change the culture of repression and corruption, but that 'he is not Evo Morales or Chavez. He isn't likely to do too many radical things economically. Perhaps he will be more like Tabare Vasquez of Uruguay.' He says radicals are more 'hopeful' than they are 'satisfied' with his candidacy.
[iraq]
(...) So why are weapon systems that don't work being sent into war? Because Boeing and Bell made $20 billion off of the V-22, and General Dynamics raked in $11 billion on the Stryker. And now the Army and the Marines are pushing for a new Mine Resist and Ambush Protected (MRAPS) armored vehicle. The Pentagon ordered almost 8,000 of them at a cost of $8.4 billion from the International Truck and Engine and an Israeli armor maker. Plans are to order thousands more. War may be Hell, but for some, Hell is very profitable.
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
sadism in samarra:
At least 10 residents have died as the result of a curfew imposed by the U.S.-backed Iraqi government, local doctors say.
(...) The Iraqi government and the U.S. military imposed a strict curfew on the city that day after a suicide car bomb killed a dozen police officers, including police chief Abd al-Jalil al-Dulaimi. Samarra has been a hotspot of resistance to the U.S. occupation of Iraq since close to the beginning of the occupation in March 2003.
(...) Local people told IPS that the main bridge in the city has been closed, ambulances have not been allowed to reach people, and residents are facing an increasingly dire situation.
(...) "We are being butchered here by these Americans," Majid Hamid, a schoolteacher in Samarra told IPS. "People are dying because we lack all of the necessities, and our government seems to be so happy about it."
(...) Residents and service providers told IPS that electricity has been cut. "There is no life in the city because of the collective punishment," an employee in the electricity service office of Samarra, speaking on condition of anonymity, told IPS. "Depriving people of electricity means depriving them of water, healthcare and all of life's maintenance necessities, especially with such hot temperatures now."
(...) The power grid and water supply in Samarra were already in a state of disrepair. Both IPS correspondents have been in the city several times throughout the occupation and witnessed first-hand the U.S. military tactics of cutting water and electricity to residents after occupation forces had been attacked. U.S. and Iraqi military tactics have also included bulldozing houses, home raids and detentions.
(...) "This is not the first siege that we have suffered," Nahla Alwan, a pharmacist in the city told IPS. "The Americans have done this so often and they will keep doing it since we do not accept their occupation and all the disasters it has brought us." She added, "They should know that we resent them more now, and we will teach the future generations to take revenge for the innocent souls killed by the American criminals."
(...) A doctor in Samarra's main hospital, speaking like many others on condition of anonymity, told IPS that at least 10 people, including seven babies, had died because of lack of fuel for generators needed to run incubators and life-saving equipment. At least two elderly patients were among the dead.
(...) "This collective punishment is unfair and it clearly shows how cruel Americans are," a member of Samarra's city council told IPS. "They are punishing innocent people in a cowardly way."
(...) The doctors demanded immediate end to the blockade, which they called "an act of collective punishment." They called for local NGOs and health workers to be allowed access to the city.
(...) "Those cowards are enjoying killing our children and so are the Persian (Prime Minister Nouri) Maliki government officials," 45-year-old Abu Nabhan in Samarra told IPS. "They seem to be in need of further attacks from our blessed sons in the resistance because this attack on the people of Samarra will only increase our hatred against the Americans."
(...) Residents are becoming ever more angry with the occupation forces. "The situation is getting much worse because of this irresponsible behavior of the U.S. forces," a worker with a local NGO who gave his name as Yassin told IPS. "They are raising more anger and inclination for violence. All our efforts to calm the people are wasted now as more people than ever believe in violence instead of peace."
At least 10 residents have died as the result of a curfew imposed by the U.S.-backed Iraqi government, local doctors say.
(...) The Iraqi government and the U.S. military imposed a strict curfew on the city that day after a suicide car bomb killed a dozen police officers, including police chief Abd al-Jalil al-Dulaimi. Samarra has been a hotspot of resistance to the U.S. occupation of Iraq since close to the beginning of the occupation in March 2003.
(...) Local people told IPS that the main bridge in the city has been closed, ambulances have not been allowed to reach people, and residents are facing an increasingly dire situation.
(...) "We are being butchered here by these Americans," Majid Hamid, a schoolteacher in Samarra told IPS. "People are dying because we lack all of the necessities, and our government seems to be so happy about it."
(...) Residents and service providers told IPS that electricity has been cut. "There is no life in the city because of the collective punishment," an employee in the electricity service office of Samarra, speaking on condition of anonymity, told IPS. "Depriving people of electricity means depriving them of water, healthcare and all of life's maintenance necessities, especially with such hot temperatures now."
(...) The power grid and water supply in Samarra were already in a state of disrepair. Both IPS correspondents have been in the city several times throughout the occupation and witnessed first-hand the U.S. military tactics of cutting water and electricity to residents after occupation forces had been attacked. U.S. and Iraqi military tactics have also included bulldozing houses, home raids and detentions.
(...) "This is not the first siege that we have suffered," Nahla Alwan, a pharmacist in the city told IPS. "The Americans have done this so often and they will keep doing it since we do not accept their occupation and all the disasters it has brought us." She added, "They should know that we resent them more now, and we will teach the future generations to take revenge for the innocent souls killed by the American criminals."
(...) A doctor in Samarra's main hospital, speaking like many others on condition of anonymity, told IPS that at least 10 people, including seven babies, had died because of lack of fuel for generators needed to run incubators and life-saving equipment. At least two elderly patients were among the dead.
(...) "This collective punishment is unfair and it clearly shows how cruel Americans are," a member of Samarra's city council told IPS. "They are punishing innocent people in a cowardly way."
(...) The doctors demanded immediate end to the blockade, which they called "an act of collective punishment." They called for local NGOs and health workers to be allowed access to the city.
(...) "Those cowards are enjoying killing our children and so are the Persian (Prime Minister Nouri) Maliki government officials," 45-year-old Abu Nabhan in Samarra told IPS. "They seem to be in need of further attacks from our blessed sons in the resistance because this attack on the people of Samarra will only increase our hatred against the Americans."
(...) Residents are becoming ever more angry with the occupation forces. "The situation is getting much worse because of this irresponsible behavior of the U.S. forces," a worker with a local NGO who gave his name as Yassin told IPS. "They are raising more anger and inclination for violence. All our efforts to calm the people are wasted now as more people than ever believe in violence instead of peace."
Friday, May 18, 2007
iraq update (may 18th):
Meanwhile. although the Al-Adhamiya wall is nearing completion, the Iraqi parliament has passed a unanimous decision calling on the occupation forces to stop building it. "We know that our decision will be ignored, but we had to make the point for the record," an Iraqi parliamentarian who did not wish to be identified said. "The wall was built, ostensibly to protect Al-Adhamiya from attacks, but it will only serve to exacerbate factional segregation," he said. [a sovereign, democratic nation indeed!]
(...) In a rare sign of unity, the inhabitants of the Sunni neighbourhood of Al-Adhamiya and the Shia neighbourhood of Al-Kadhimiya staged a joint demonstration from Al-Adhamiya to Al-Kadhimiya, calling for the wall to be removed. However, the demonstration was barely covered in the media.
(...) On another front, 144 parliamentarians signed a petition calling upon the occupation forces to set a timetable for their withdrawal. The parliamentary spokesman for the Sadr Block, Saleh Al-Uqayli, said the petition was the idea of Al-Sadr supporters. "Those who signed the petition call themselves the Liberal Block. This is not a new parliamentary block, but only a group of parliamentarians who demand a timetable for withdrawal."
(...) At present, the Iraqi parliament is debating an oil law, but some argue that the law is designed to promote US interests. A source at the Probity Committee said that up to $1.5 billion have been lost due to wastage and mismanagement in the Iraqi oil sector. Foreign sources add that, since the beginning of the occupation, billions of dollars in oil revenues are believed to have vanished due to oil- related corruption.
Meanwhile. although the Al-Adhamiya wall is nearing completion, the Iraqi parliament has passed a unanimous decision calling on the occupation forces to stop building it. "We know that our decision will be ignored, but we had to make the point for the record," an Iraqi parliamentarian who did not wish to be identified said. "The wall was built, ostensibly to protect Al-Adhamiya from attacks, but it will only serve to exacerbate factional segregation," he said. [a sovereign, democratic nation indeed!]
(...) In a rare sign of unity, the inhabitants of the Sunni neighbourhood of Al-Adhamiya and the Shia neighbourhood of Al-Kadhimiya staged a joint demonstration from Al-Adhamiya to Al-Kadhimiya, calling for the wall to be removed. However, the demonstration was barely covered in the media.
(...) On another front, 144 parliamentarians signed a petition calling upon the occupation forces to set a timetable for their withdrawal. The parliamentary spokesman for the Sadr Block, Saleh Al-Uqayli, said the petition was the idea of Al-Sadr supporters. "Those who signed the petition call themselves the Liberal Block. This is not a new parliamentary block, but only a group of parliamentarians who demand a timetable for withdrawal."
(...) At present, the Iraqi parliament is debating an oil law, but some argue that the law is designed to promote US interests. A source at the Probity Committee said that up to $1.5 billion have been lost due to wastage and mismanagement in the Iraqi oil sector. Foreign sources add that, since the beginning of the occupation, billions of dollars in oil revenues are believed to have vanished due to oil- related corruption.
Thursday, May 10, 2007
civilianity in afghanistan:
Afghan officials said Wednesday that airstrikes called in by American Special Forces against Taliban fighters in Helmand Province had killed 21 civilians, the latest in a series of claims of noncombatant casualties that have strained relations with the Afghan government.
(...) In a sign of the growing anger with the presence of foreign troops, the upper house of the Afghan Parliament passed a motion on Wednesday calling for a military cease-fire and negotiations with the Taliban. The resolution, which is not expected to be approved, also calls for a date to be set for the withdrawal of foreign troops.
(...) “We understand there are reports of civilian casualties but don’t have any confirmed reports,” Sergeant Welch said, adding that an investigation would be started if reports of civilian deaths are confirmed.
(...) NATO has overall command of the international military effort in Afghanistan, including most of the American forces. But all three of the recent episodes involving allegations of civilian casualties have involved American Special Forces units that operate outside the NATO umbrella. They often work in small units and rely heavily on calling in air cover to compensate when they are attacked.
Afghan officials said Wednesday that airstrikes called in by American Special Forces against Taliban fighters in Helmand Province had killed 21 civilians, the latest in a series of claims of noncombatant casualties that have strained relations with the Afghan government.
(...) In a sign of the growing anger with the presence of foreign troops, the upper house of the Afghan Parliament passed a motion on Wednesday calling for a military cease-fire and negotiations with the Taliban. The resolution, which is not expected to be approved, also calls for a date to be set for the withdrawal of foreign troops.
(...) “We understand there are reports of civilian casualties but don’t have any confirmed reports,” Sergeant Welch said, adding that an investigation would be started if reports of civilian deaths are confirmed.
(...) NATO has overall command of the international military effort in Afghanistan, including most of the American forces. But all three of the recent episodes involving allegations of civilian casualties have involved American Special Forces units that operate outside the NATO umbrella. They often work in small units and rely heavily on calling in air cover to compensate when they are attacked.
Sunday, May 6, 2007
al-qaeda in iraq:
"This bill will deprive us of the opportunity to destroy the American forces which we have caught in a historic trap," Zawahiri says in answer to a question posed to him an interviewer. Continuing in the same tone, Zawahiri says, "We ask Allah that they only get out of it after losing 200,000 to 300,000 killed, in order that we give the spillers of blood in Washington and Europe an unforgettable lesson."
"This bill will deprive us of the opportunity to destroy the American forces which we have caught in a historic trap," Zawahiri says in answer to a question posed to him an interviewer. Continuing in the same tone, Zawahiri says, "We ask Allah that they only get out of it after losing 200,000 to 300,000 killed, in order that we give the spillers of blood in Washington and Europe an unforgettable lesson."
withdrawal?:
And here is James Baker, establishment eminence, co-chair of the Iraq Study Group, on CNN with Anderson Cooper:
(...) In spite of all of the above we are told that the presence of the United States military has been and will continue to be a buffer against violence. Iraqis themselves do not believe this. A poll published in September found that Iraqis believe, by a margin of 78 to 21 percent, that the US military presence is "provoking more conflict that it is preventing".[3]
And here is James Baker, establishment eminence, co-chair of the Iraq Study Group, on CNN with Anderson Cooper:
Cooper: And is it possible that getting the U.S. troops out will actually lessen that violence, that it will at least take away the motivation of nationalist insurgents?
Baker: Many people have argued that to us. Many people in Iraq made that case.
Cooper: Do you buy it?
Baker: Yes, I think there is some validity to it, absolutely. Then we are no longer seen to be the occupiers.[2]
(...) In spite of all of the above we are told that the presence of the United States military has been and will continue to be a buffer against violence. Iraqis themselves do not believe this. A poll published in September found that Iraqis believe, by a margin of 78 to 21 percent, that the US military presence is "provoking more conflict that it is preventing".[3]
Friday, May 4, 2007
withdrawal:
Some 133 Iraqi lawmakers from different political blocs, calling themselves the "free deputies," signed a document demanding a scheduled withdrawal of the U.S.-led multinational troops from their country, according to the Sadrist bloc in Parliament.
Some 133 Iraqi lawmakers from different political blocs, calling themselves the "free deputies," signed a document demanding a scheduled withdrawal of the U.S.-led multinational troops from their country, according to the Sadrist bloc in Parliament.
Monday, April 30, 2007
a private surge after a public withdrawal:
While all of this is troubling, there is another disturbing fact which speaks volumes about the Democrats' lack of insight into the nature of this unpopular war -- and most Americans will know next to nothing about it. Even if the President didn't veto their legislation, the Democrats' plan does almost nothing to address the second largest force in Iraq -- and it's not the British military. It's the estimated 126,000 private military "contractors" who will stay put there as long as Congress continues funding the war.
(...) The 145,000 active duty U.S. forces are nearly matched by occupation personnel that currently come from companies like Blackwater USA and the former Halliburton subsidiary KBR, which enjoy close personal and political ties with the Bush administration. Until Congress reins in these massive corporate forces and the whopping federal funding that goes into their coffers, partially withdrawing U.S. troops may only set the stage for the increased use of private military companies (and their rent-a-guns) which stand to profit from any kind of privatized future "surge" in Iraq.
(...) While many of them perform logistical support activities for American troops, including the sort of laundry, fuel and mail delivery, and food-preparation work that once was performed by soldiers, tens of thousands of them are directly engaged in military and combat activities. According to the Government Accountability Office, there are now some 48,000 employees of private military companies in Iraq. These not-quite G.I. Joes, working for Blackwater and other major U.S. firms, can clear in a month what some active-duty soldiers make in a year. "We got 126,000 contractors over there, some of them making more than the secretary of Defense," said House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman John Murtha. "How in the hell do you justify that?"
(...) House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Rep. Henry Waxman estimates that $4 billion in taxpayer money has so far been spent in Iraq on these armed "security" companies like Blackwater -- with tens of billions more going to other war companies like KBR and Fluor for "logistical" support. Rep. Jan Schakowsky of the House Intelligence Committee believes that up to forty cents of every dollar spent on the occupation has gone to war contractors.
(...) David Petraeus, the general running the President's "surge" plan in Baghdad, cited private forces as essential to winning the war. In his confirmation hearings in the Senate, he claimed that they fill a gap attributable to insufficient troop levels available to an overstretched military. Along with Bush's official troop surge, the "tens of thousands of contract security forces," Petraeus told the Senators, "give me the reason to believe that we can accomplish the mission." Indeed, Gen. Petraeus admitted that he has, at times, been guarded in Iraq not by the U.S. military, but "secured by contract security."
(...) lthough contractor deaths are not effectively tallied, at least 770 contractors have been killed in Iraq and at least another 7,700 injured. These numbers are not included in any official (or media) toll of the war. More significantly, there is absolutely no effective system of oversight or accountability governing contractors and their operations, nor is there any effective law -- military or civilian -- being applied to their activities. They have not been subjected to military courts martial (despite a recent Congressional attempt to place them under the Uniform Code of Military Justice), nor have they been prosecuted in U.S. civilian courts -- and, no matter what their acts in Iraq, they cannot be prosecuted in Iraqi courts. Before Paul Bremer, Bush's viceroy in Baghdad, left Iraq in 2004 he issued an edict, known as Order 17. It immunized contractors from prosecution in Iraq which, today, is like the wild West, full of roaming Iraqi death squads and scores of unaccountable, heavily-armed mercenaries, ex-military men from around the world, working for the occupation. For the community of contractors in Iraq, immunity and impunity are welded together.
(...) Despite the tens of thousands of contractors passing through Iraq and several well-documented incidents involving alleged contractor abuses, only two individuals have been ever indicted for crimes there. One was charged with stabbing a fellow contractor, while the other pled guilty to the possession of child-pornography images on his computer at Abu Ghraib prison. While dozens of American soldiers have been court-martialed -- 64 on murder-related charges -- not a single armed contractor has been prosecuted for a crime against an Iraqi. In some cases, where contractors were alleged to have been involved in crimes or deadly incidents, their companies whisked them out of Iraq to safety.
(...) "These private contractors are really an arm of the administration and its policies," argues Rep. Dennis Kucinich, who has called for a withdrawal of all U.S. contractors from Iraq. "They charge whatever they want with impunity. There's no accountability as to how many people they have, as to what their activities are."
(...) Not surprisingly, then, the mercenary trade group with the Orwellian name of the International Peace Operations Association (IPOA) has pushed for just this Democratic-sponsored approach rather than the military court martial system favored by conservative Republican Senator Lindsey Graham. The IPOA called the expansion of the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act -- essentially the Democrats' oversight plan -- "the most cogent approach to ensuring greater contractor accountability in the battle space." That endorsement alone should be reason enough to pause and reconsider.
(...) As originally passed in the House, the Democrats' Iraq plan would have cut only about 15% or $815 million of the supplemental spending earmarked for day-to-day military operations "to reflect savings attributable to efficiencies and management improvements in the funding of contracts in the military departments." ... But even that mild provision was dropped by the Democrats in late April. Their excuse was the need to hold more hearings on the contractor issue. Instead, they moved to withhold -- not cut -- 15% of total day-to-day operational funding, but only until Secretary of Defense Robert Gates submits a report on the use of contractors and the scope of their deployment. Once the report is submitted, the 15% would be unlocked. In essence, this means that, under the Democrats plan, the mercenary forces will simply be able to continue business-as-usual/profits-as-usual in Iraq.
(...) Consider the case of Blackwater USA. A decade ago, the company barely existed; and yet, its "diplomatic security" contracts since mid-2004, with the State Department alone, total more than $750 million. Today, Blackwater has become nothing short of the Bush administration's well-paid Praetorian Guard. It protects the U.S. ambassador and other senior officials in Iraq as well as visiting Congressional delegations; it trains Afghan security forces and was deployed in the oil-rich Caspian Sea region, setting up a "command and control" center just miles from the Iranian border. The company was also hired to protect FEMA operations and facilities in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, where it raked in $240,000 a day from the American taxpayer, billing $950 a day per Blackwater contractor.
(...) At present, it has forces deployed in nine countries and boasts a database of 21,000 additional troops at the ready, a fleet of more than 20 aircraft, including helicopter gun-ships, and the world's largest private military facility -- a 7,000 acre compound near the Great Dismal Swamp of North Carolina. It recently opened a new facility in Illinois ("Blackwater North") and is fighting local opposition to a third planned domestic facility near San Diego ("Blackwater West") by the Mexican border. It is also manufacturing an armored vehicle (nicknamed the "Grizzly") and surveillance blimps.
(...) The President likes to say that defunding the war would undercut the troops. Here's the truth of the matter: Continued funding of the Iraq war ensures tremendous profits for politically-connected war contractors. If Congress is serious about ending the occupation, it needs to rein in the unaccountable companies that make it possible and only stand to profit from its escalation.
While all of this is troubling, there is another disturbing fact which speaks volumes about the Democrats' lack of insight into the nature of this unpopular war -- and most Americans will know next to nothing about it. Even if the President didn't veto their legislation, the Democrats' plan does almost nothing to address the second largest force in Iraq -- and it's not the British military. It's the estimated 126,000 private military "contractors" who will stay put there as long as Congress continues funding the war.
(...) The 145,000 active duty U.S. forces are nearly matched by occupation personnel that currently come from companies like Blackwater USA and the former Halliburton subsidiary KBR, which enjoy close personal and political ties with the Bush administration. Until Congress reins in these massive corporate forces and the whopping federal funding that goes into their coffers, partially withdrawing U.S. troops may only set the stage for the increased use of private military companies (and their rent-a-guns) which stand to profit from any kind of privatized future "surge" in Iraq.
(...) While many of them perform logistical support activities for American troops, including the sort of laundry, fuel and mail delivery, and food-preparation work that once was performed by soldiers, tens of thousands of them are directly engaged in military and combat activities. According to the Government Accountability Office, there are now some 48,000 employees of private military companies in Iraq. These not-quite G.I. Joes, working for Blackwater and other major U.S. firms, can clear in a month what some active-duty soldiers make in a year. "We got 126,000 contractors over there, some of them making more than the secretary of Defense," said House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman John Murtha. "How in the hell do you justify that?"
(...) House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Rep. Henry Waxman estimates that $4 billion in taxpayer money has so far been spent in Iraq on these armed "security" companies like Blackwater -- with tens of billions more going to other war companies like KBR and Fluor for "logistical" support. Rep. Jan Schakowsky of the House Intelligence Committee believes that up to forty cents of every dollar spent on the occupation has gone to war contractors.
(...) David Petraeus, the general running the President's "surge" plan in Baghdad, cited private forces as essential to winning the war. In his confirmation hearings in the Senate, he claimed that they fill a gap attributable to insufficient troop levels available to an overstretched military. Along with Bush's official troop surge, the "tens of thousands of contract security forces," Petraeus told the Senators, "give me the reason to believe that we can accomplish the mission." Indeed, Gen. Petraeus admitted that he has, at times, been guarded in Iraq not by the U.S. military, but "secured by contract security."
(...) lthough contractor deaths are not effectively tallied, at least 770 contractors have been killed in Iraq and at least another 7,700 injured. These numbers are not included in any official (or media) toll of the war. More significantly, there is absolutely no effective system of oversight or accountability governing contractors and their operations, nor is there any effective law -- military or civilian -- being applied to their activities. They have not been subjected to military courts martial (despite a recent Congressional attempt to place them under the Uniform Code of Military Justice), nor have they been prosecuted in U.S. civilian courts -- and, no matter what their acts in Iraq, they cannot be prosecuted in Iraqi courts. Before Paul Bremer, Bush's viceroy in Baghdad, left Iraq in 2004 he issued an edict, known as Order 17. It immunized contractors from prosecution in Iraq which, today, is like the wild West, full of roaming Iraqi death squads and scores of unaccountable, heavily-armed mercenaries, ex-military men from around the world, working for the occupation. For the community of contractors in Iraq, immunity and impunity are welded together.
(...) Despite the tens of thousands of contractors passing through Iraq and several well-documented incidents involving alleged contractor abuses, only two individuals have been ever indicted for crimes there. One was charged with stabbing a fellow contractor, while the other pled guilty to the possession of child-pornography images on his computer at Abu Ghraib prison. While dozens of American soldiers have been court-martialed -- 64 on murder-related charges -- not a single armed contractor has been prosecuted for a crime against an Iraqi. In some cases, where contractors were alleged to have been involved in crimes or deadly incidents, their companies whisked them out of Iraq to safety.
(...) "These private contractors are really an arm of the administration and its policies," argues Rep. Dennis Kucinich, who has called for a withdrawal of all U.S. contractors from Iraq. "They charge whatever they want with impunity. There's no accountability as to how many people they have, as to what their activities are."
(...) Not surprisingly, then, the mercenary trade group with the Orwellian name of the International Peace Operations Association (IPOA) has pushed for just this Democratic-sponsored approach rather than the military court martial system favored by conservative Republican Senator Lindsey Graham. The IPOA called the expansion of the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act -- essentially the Democrats' oversight plan -- "the most cogent approach to ensuring greater contractor accountability in the battle space." That endorsement alone should be reason enough to pause and reconsider.
(...) As originally passed in the House, the Democrats' Iraq plan would have cut only about 15% or $815 million of the supplemental spending earmarked for day-to-day military operations "to reflect savings attributable to efficiencies and management improvements in the funding of contracts in the military departments." ... But even that mild provision was dropped by the Democrats in late April. Their excuse was the need to hold more hearings on the contractor issue. Instead, they moved to withhold -- not cut -- 15% of total day-to-day operational funding, but only until Secretary of Defense Robert Gates submits a report on the use of contractors and the scope of their deployment. Once the report is submitted, the 15% would be unlocked. In essence, this means that, under the Democrats plan, the mercenary forces will simply be able to continue business-as-usual/profits-as-usual in Iraq.
(...) Consider the case of Blackwater USA. A decade ago, the company barely existed; and yet, its "diplomatic security" contracts since mid-2004, with the State Department alone, total more than $750 million. Today, Blackwater has become nothing short of the Bush administration's well-paid Praetorian Guard. It protects the U.S. ambassador and other senior officials in Iraq as well as visiting Congressional delegations; it trains Afghan security forces and was deployed in the oil-rich Caspian Sea region, setting up a "command and control" center just miles from the Iranian border. The company was also hired to protect FEMA operations and facilities in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, where it raked in $240,000 a day from the American taxpayer, billing $950 a day per Blackwater contractor.
(...) At present, it has forces deployed in nine countries and boasts a database of 21,000 additional troops at the ready, a fleet of more than 20 aircraft, including helicopter gun-ships, and the world's largest private military facility -- a 7,000 acre compound near the Great Dismal Swamp of North Carolina. It recently opened a new facility in Illinois ("Blackwater North") and is fighting local opposition to a third planned domestic facility near San Diego ("Blackwater West") by the Mexican border. It is also manufacturing an armored vehicle (nicknamed the "Grizzly") and surveillance blimps.
(...) The President likes to say that defunding the war would undercut the troops. Here's the truth of the matter: Continued funding of the Iraq war ensures tremendous profits for politically-connected war contractors. If Congress is serious about ending the occupation, it needs to rein in the unaccountable companies that make it possible and only stand to profit from its escalation.
Saturday, April 28, 2007
canada and afghanistan:
Canadian lawmakers have been caught up in the Afghanistan issue most of this week. The Conservative government narrowly blocked a motion calling for Canadian troops to return home by 2009. The New Democratic Party, which wants immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan and not to wait until 2009, voted with the Conservatives. The Liberals and Bloc Quebecois supported the motion. Some observers say that this issue could bring down the Conservative minority government.
(...) "This is totally appalling," Steven Staples, spokesman for the Canadian peace lobbying group Ceasefire.ca, told IPS. "Canadians are in shock that detainees were tortured after being in the custody of Afghan guards. The government seems to have known about it. This will be a real turning point for the Conservative government. The calls for resignation should be taken seriously. Legal experts are calling for complaints under international law."
Canadian lawmakers have been caught up in the Afghanistan issue most of this week. The Conservative government narrowly blocked a motion calling for Canadian troops to return home by 2009. The New Democratic Party, which wants immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan and not to wait until 2009, voted with the Conservatives. The Liberals and Bloc Quebecois supported the motion. Some observers say that this issue could bring down the Conservative minority government.
(...) "This is totally appalling," Steven Staples, spokesman for the Canadian peace lobbying group Ceasefire.ca, told IPS. "Canadians are in shock that detainees were tortured after being in the custody of Afghan guards. The government seems to have known about it. This will be a real turning point for the Conservative government. The calls for resignation should be taken seriously. Legal experts are calling for complaints under international law."
Friday, April 13, 2007
on Obama's 'peace' politicking:
Obama also called for a "surge of honesty" and insisted that he was still for a withdrawal from Iraq.
(...)
"That's not a surprise, the degree to which people are surprised is the degree to which they've been sleeping," said Rep. Dennis Kucinich, who voted against authorizing the Iraq War in 2002 and is running for president for the second time. "He's voted to fund the war at least ten times, each time, it's like reauthorizing it all over again. If they keep voting to fund the war, it's not credible to say they are for peace."
Obama also called for a "surge of honesty" and insisted that he was still for a withdrawal from Iraq.
(...)
"That's not a surprise, the degree to which people are surprised is the degree to which they've been sleeping," said Rep. Dennis Kucinich, who voted against authorizing the Iraq War in 2002 and is running for president for the second time. "He's voted to fund the war at least ten times, each time, it's like reauthorizing it all over again. If they keep voting to fund the war, it's not credible to say they are for peace."
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