Author: ghandi

Written by Chris Floyd   – crossposted at Empire Burlesque

The causes underlying any civil war are always complex, confused, even contradictory — as one would expect in an outbreak of madness. But those seeking to discover some of the key precipitating factors behind Iraq’s furious plunge into chaos and disintegration might find one of them in the records of an obscure Congressional committee meeting on August 10, 2004.

At that meeting, then Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, General Peter Pace (now head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) and General Bryan Brown, head of Special Operations Command, appeared before the House Armed Services Committee. In a long session larded with the usual rhetorical posturing, mutual backscratching with the committee’s rubberstamp Republican majority – and a couple of polite queries from the timid Democratic minority – Wolfowitz announced the Pentagon’s plan to give money, arms and training to a network of local militias in trouble spots around the world. These irregular forces – "not just armies," Wolfowitz emphasized – would be used to "counter terrorism and insurgencies," provide greater internal security" in regions of American interest and "deny sanctuary" to America’s designated enemies, according to Pentagon transcripts of the testimony.
General Brown said the use of militas was part of the "unconventional warfare" being waged by the Bush Administration across the globe, "whereby special forces accomplishes our national objectives through, by and with surrogate forces." General Pace gave the legislators a view of the scope of such operations, mentioning "Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Libya, Georgia, Paraguay, Colombia, Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, North Korea, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Iran" and of course Iraq, which he mentioned twice. Wolfowitz told the Congressman that Bush wanted $500 million to set up this network – his own personal Janjaweed.

Writing in September 2004, I described the session this way:

Two months after this Congressional meeting, Bush duly signed a measure giving Special Operations Command the authority to provide "support to foreign forces, irregular forces, groups or individuals," the Los Angeles Times reports. This was for the Pentagon side of the scheme; any money for militias funneled through the CIA would of course be cloaked in the "black budget." The Special Ops deal marked the first time that the Pentagon had been given such powers, which previously had been reserved for the CIA. The significance of this "liberation"of Special Forces became clear in the following months, when, after securing another four years in power, Bush signed a series of executive orders "authorizing secret commando groups and other Special Forces units to conduct covert operations" in "as many as 10 nations in the Middle East and South Asia," as Seymour Hersh reported in the New Yorker last year. The orders turned the world into "a global free-fire zone," a top Pentagon advisor told Hersh.

In January 2005, I tied the revelations in Hersh’s article to those unearthed back in October 2002 by William Arkin, then writing for the Los Angeles Times, which I had featured in a subsequent column. From the January 2005 piece:

Bush’s executive orders also enabled the Pentagon "to run the operations off the books, free from legal restrictions imposed on the CIA," Hersh noted. The orders signed by Bush after the election in 2004 seem to bring the 2002 plan to fruition.

In January 2005, Pentagon plans to implement such operations in Iraq were leaked to Newsweek. The talk, again, was of the "Salvador Option" and also references to Britain’s brutal and bloody repression of anti-colonial insurgencies in the years after World War II. The Iraq plans called for using Shiite and Kurdish militias to target Sunni insurgents – and civilians. "The Sunni population is paying no price for the support it is giving to the terrorists," a top Pentagon official told Newsweek. "We have to change that equation."

All observers agree that the "equation" has now definitely changed in recent months. The howling chaos of civil war has taken a quantum leap in Iraq since the bombing of the Shiite’s venerated al-Askari shrine in Samarra – an operation of unusual planning and dexterity. As Mike Whitney noted in Information Clearing-House, drawing on AFP reports:

Now Iraq is being devoured in a maelstrom of carnage and fear. Reports of the horror are pouring in from all sides: mass beheadings, unspeakable tortures, the abandonment of vast swathes of Baghdad and other cities to warring militias, the evident complicity of the Iraqi government in many of the atrocities coupled with its obvious inability to stop any of them – and, apparently, a beserker rage infecting American forces, as attested in story after story of civilian massacres.

Yet none of this actually does any real harm to the true war aims behind Bush’s illegal war. I will be taking up this theme in a Moscow Times column that will be posted here in a couple of days, but here is an excerpt from that piece, describing the Bush Faction’s genuine war goals:

Yes, the myriad causes underlying the madness of civil war are always complex and confused. Once loosed, it is a whirlwind that rages in all directions; no one can control it. But it is obvious that certain groups would benefit the most from civil war, and thus would have the most to gain from trying to channel its fury to their own advantage. Ironically, these primary feasters on chaos are the same two gangs that have prospered the most from the global "War on Terror": the Bush Faction and al Qaeda.

 

What happened in the village of Isahaqi, north of Baghdad, on Ides of March? The murk of war – the natural blur of unbuckled event, and its artificial augmentation by professional massagers – shrouds the details of the actual operation. But here is what we know.

Long influenced by the work of takebackthemedia.com’s symbolman – I have always been intrigued the merging of text, images, and sound in a multimedia format. And one of the major reasons I wanted to work with Chris Floyd last year was to explore these territories – as I have always felt his writing style would work well in this kind of scenario.

Last week I decided to take, what can only be described as the Mi Lai (Iraq Lai) of the new war, and turn it into a Flash presentation. All three elements are finite – the number of images, the time span of the song and the length of the body of writing. It was a fairly complicated project – that spanned over an 18 hour period.

Link and more on the flip…

http://isahaqi.chris-floyd.com/ (Be warned: some of the images of the reality of George W. Bush’s handiwork in Iraq are very disturbing, and should not be viewed by children or those of a sensitive nature.***)

We have received a number of emails – most positive… however, we have also been taken to the task.

Chris stated to one critic of the piece who felt he was "lobbing emotional knee-jerk language".

"I reported what the Iraqi officials were saying about the case. I specifically said in my closing paragraphs that whether the incident occurred as the Iraqi officials reported, or was “merely” the result of “collateral damage” by soldiers on an ordinary mission, the incident was part and parcel of a war crime perpetrated by George W. Bush, who, as I said quite clearly, bears the responsibility for every atrocity committed in this action which he set in train. I specifically and deliberately racheted down the “emotive” language concerning the facts of the incident, saving it instead for the condemnation of the ultimate author of those children’s deaths. The post that I wrote made no automatic assumptions of “guilt” in the case — beyond, as I said, the guilt attaching to the man who launched this “war of choice.”

But yes, I am angry that those children are dead; I am angry to see the seven-month-old boy with a gash across his lifeless forehead; I do get a bit “emotive” about such things being done in my name, in the name of my own children, in the name of my country, and, as I made very clear in the post, whether the victims were “massacred” (a word I have never used for the incident) or killed in the “normal” course of events by good soldiers thrust into a hellish situation, it does not attentuate the atrocity of these needless deaths one bit. They did not need to die in this way; they would not have died in this way if George W. Bush had not decided to launch his war — and if the entire American Establishment had not countenanced the launching of this war.

It has been virally making its way around the Net – mainly via www.informationclearinghouse.info – and I thought I would share it here as the response has been quite astounding.

The verve behind the drive to build this work derives mainly from being a father – of (very, very soon to be three) girls. My outrage from seeing the very young children who were killed in this incident manifested in a self-flagellating journey of repetitive editing and building anger from having to see it over and over and over during the process of editing the piece. In the end, I was mentally exhausted and slept most of Saturday.

Chris’s writing was certainly a huge inspiration. As a former journalist, I am cognizant of what is great writing and – what my limitations are. I come from the Canadian small town press (and the Caribbean) and writing for me has always been more of a trade than an art. Floyd consistently takes it to levels that I use to hit once every few years. Hence the reason I decided to approach him in September of 2005 with a request to collaborate. Since I have been leaning towards design and community/blog architecture over the past ten years, I felt my skills were best put to use by working with someone who leaves me drop jawed’ most weeks rather than get in the fray as a mediocre blogger in a sea of mediocre bloggers.

And Flash projects such as this have always been part of my concept in working together with him – Flashblogging if you will. This was our first attempt.

RK

Good evening and welcome to Conglomerate Network News. I’m your host, Teat Hodgkins. Tonight we open with some startling news from Southeast Asia: The United States has won the Vietnam War. Our roving reporter, Jimbo Hooper, joins us from Ho Chi Minh City.

Jimbo?

Thanks, Teat. Yes, long after we all thought the final whistle had blown, plucky Team USA pulled out a last-second miracle to clinch victory in the hard-fought Vietnam War. As our viewers will recall – or maybe not, since it was such a long time ago and it’s been years since they made one of those Rambo movies to explain it all to us – but anyway, the North Vietnamese army and their insurgent allies in South Vietnam, the King Kongs, fought for decades to, as they might put it, liberate Vietnam’s workers from the oppressive hand of the running dog capitalists of foreign imperialism. Or something like that; I can’t get wireless at my hotel here for some reason, so I couldn’t Google it to be absolutely sure.

Anyway, the idea, Teat, was that ordinary people would no longer have to live in crushing poverty just to make money for a few rich folks and foreign corporations. I think quite a few Vietnamesers actually gave their lives fighting for this ideal. And as you’ve probably seen on the History Channel, Teat, these little guys did a pretty good job at it; they pretty much kicked Uncle Sam’s butt right outta here.

Or so it seemed. But it turns out now that what looked like a full-scale, FUBAR bug-out in 1975 was simply a strategic redeployment in depth. The war was fought, of course, on behalf of American big business interests, who bought out the US government and spent the entire Cold War trying to quash, usually by force, the notion that there was any alternative whatsoever – socialist, indigenous, nationalist, democratic, religious – to their own brand of rapacious, unrestrained, unregulated crony kleptocracy, or what President Bush now calls “the single sustainable model of national success.” The military option they tried in Vietnam didn’t work out too well, but heck, the military was only one tool in the toolbox of these big boys. They could well afford to burn 50,000 or so American lives – along with some 2 million Southeast Asians – while playing the long game.

‘Cause here’s the thing, Teat. To the Big Biz boys behind America’s intervention in Vietnam’s anti-colonial insurgency and subsequent civil war, victory was never defined as military success or as freedom, democracy, peace and prosperity for the Vietnamese people. Lord, no! Victory in Vietnam meant only one thing: moolah. If they can make money out of Vietnam, then they win. And they sure made a good pile for a long while there in the old days, through Pentagon contracts – weapons, construction, “military servicing,” you name it – and sweetheart deals with the corrupt militarist regimes in South Vietnam. Now, after a long period of retrenchment, they are back in there again, squeezing that cheap gook labor to bring home the bacon to Main Street USA! Or Wall Street USA, anyway. They’re still using political connections, baksheesh and grease, and a military option to back it all up – but they’ve outsourced the whole shebang, including any use of force, to the Vietnamese government itself, which breaks up strikes, keeps wages low and generally makes sure that huge swathes of ordinary people live in crushing poverty to make money for a few rich folks and foreign corporations.

There’s this site on the Internet that I saw in Bangkok before I came here – hey, it was five-star all the way there, Teat, my laptop was firing on all cylinders – anyway, there’s this CorpWatch site on the net where our viewers can go and get the story: Happy Meals, Unhappy Workers. It’s all about these wildcat strikes by workers who toil at coolie wages in big factory complexes in old Saigon to churn out cheap tat for Disney, Hallmark, Starbuck and McDonald’s Happy Meals.

Here’s how the Corpwatch guys put it: “To remain attractive to foreign investment, government officials argue, Vietnam must provide the kind of cheap, docile labor force that foreign investors demand. But on paper, at least, Vietnam’s workers are supported by has some of the strongest labor laws in the world. ‘When foreign investors enter Vietnam, they must follow the country’s labor rules,’ says security manager Long Nguyen. ‘If they don’t, the Vietnamese government has the responsibility to enforce the law or expel the company. The government has to protect the worker. The unions that represent workers in factories of foreign and joint-stock companies are weak. They don’t have the strength to stand up to the management.’ Since the influx of private companies started a few years ago, however, enforcement of policy has been lax. According to the International Labor Organization, only 10 percent of workers in the export sector are represented by a trade union and observers can’t remember a single case when a company has been forced out for breaking the law. So, most expect continued low wages and increasing numbers of wildcat strikes.”

Here’s more from Corpwatch: “For example, 10,000 workers staged an illegal strike at Hong Kong-owned KeyHinge toys in the Central Vietnamese city, Danang. The workers, who manufactured plastic toys given away in McDonalds Happy Meals, told Lao Dong newspaper that unless they worked 12 hours a day without overtime they would be fired. The workers also complained they were only allowed two bathroom breaks a day and that the factory only had one cup for drinking water. They told Lao Dong they were treated like animals, not allowed sick days, and fined for any mistakes.”

Now, I wonder what your or dinary Joe Ricepaddy thinks about all this, Teat. He might have seen his village destroyed, his mother burned to death with napalm, his father tortured and executed by the CIA’s Operation Phoenix, his daughter born deformed from Agent Orange – and here he is schlepping off to slave 12 hours a day for Ronald McDonald. He might just wonder sometimes, “What was the point of all that death and sacrifice and struggle, just to end up here? Ho might as well have run up the white flag back in ’62 and sold the place to Chase Manhattan.”

So there you have it, Teat: We got McDonald’s, Walt Disney and Starbucks banking big profits from exploited, unprotected, politically repressed cheap labor in the dark, satanic mills of Saigon. And you’re gonna tell me that America lost the Vietnam War? No way, baby. We’re the Comeback Kids! I just wish you were here to drink in the rich aroma spreading from all these factories behind me, the sewage, the smoke, the garbage, the indelible odor of human poverty. It smells like….victory.

 

Crossposted at Empire Burlesque

What happened in the village of Isahaqi, north of Baghdad, on Ides of March? The murk of war – the natural blur of unbuckled event, and its artificial augmentation by professional massagers – shrouds the details of the actual operation. But here is what we know.

We know that U.S. forces conducted a raid on a house in the village on March 15. We know that the Pentagon said the American troops were “targeting an individual suspected of supporting foreign fighters for the al-Qaeda in Iraq terror network,” when their team came under fire, and that the troops “returned fire. utilizing both air and ground assets.” We know that the Pentagon said that “only” one man, two women and one child were killed in the raid, which destroyed a house in the village.
We know from photographic evidence that the corpses of two men, four shrouded figure s (women, according to the villagers), and five children – all of them apparently under the age of five, one as young as seven months – were pulled from the rubble of the house and laid out for burial beneath the bright, blank desert sky. We know that an Associated Press reporter on the scene saw the ruined house, and a photographer for Agence France Presse took the pictures of the bodies.

We know that two Iraqi police officials, Major Ali Ahmed and Colonel Farouq Hussein – both employed by the U.S.-backed Iraqi government – told Reuters that the 11 occupants of the house, including the five children, had been bound and shot in the head before the house was blown up. We know that the U.S.-backed Iraqi police told Reuters that an American helicopter landed on the roof in the early hours of the morning, then the house was blown up, and then the victims were discovered. We know that the U.S.-backed Iraqi police said that an autopsy performed on the bodies found that “all the victims had gunshot wounds to the head.” We know that the U.S.-backed Iraqi police said they found “spent American-issue cartridges in the rubble.”

We know that Ahmed Khalaf, brother of house’s owner, told AP that nine of the victims were family members and two where visitors, adding, “the killed family was not part of the resistance, they were women and children. The Americans have promised us a better life, but we get only death.”

We know from the photographs that one child, the youngest, the baby, has a gaping wound in his forehead. We can see that one other child, a girl with a pink ribbon in her hair, is lying on her side and has blood oozing from the back of her head. The faces of the other children are turned upwards toward the sun; if they were shot, they were shot in the back of the head and their wounds are not evident. But we can see that their bodies, though covered with dust from the rubble, are otherwise unmarked; they were evidently not crushed in the collapse of the house during, say, a fierce firefight between U.S. forces and an “al Qaeda facilitator.” They died in some other fashion.

We know from the photographs that two of the children – two girls, still in their pajamas – are lying with their dead eyes open. We can see that the light and tenderness that animate the eyes of every young child have vanished; nothing remains but the brute stare of nothingness into nothingness. We can see that the other three children have their eyes closed; two are limp, but the baby has one stiffened arm raised to his cheek, as if trying to ward off the blow that gashed and pulped his face so terribly.

These facts are what we know from American officials, American-backed Iraqi officials and reporters for Western press associations on the scene. This is probably all we will ever know for certain about what happened in Isahaqi on March 15. The rest will remain obscured by the murk instigated by U.S. military spokesmen, who are evidently not telling the truth about the body count of the raid, and by the natural confusion that must attend the villagers’ description of an attack that struck without warning in the middle of the night. But beyond this cloud of unknowing, there are a few other facts relevant to the case that can be clearly established.

For instance, we know that the American troops who caused the deaths of these children – either by tying them up and shooting them, an unspeakable atrocity, or else “merely” by storming or bombing a house full of civilians in a night raid “with both air and ground assets” – were sent to Iraq on a demonstrably false mission to “disarm” weapons that did not exist and take revenge for 9/11 on a nation that had nothing to do with the attack. And we now know that the White House – and George W. Bush specifically – knew all along that the intelligence did not and could not support the public case he had made for the war.

We know that the only reason that this dead baby has his arm frozen to his lifeless face is that three years ago this week, George W. Bush gave the order to begin the unprovoked, unjust and unnecessary invasion of Iraq. He hasn’t fired a single shot or launched a single missile; he hasn’t tortured or killed any prisoners; he hasn’t kidnapped or beheaded civilians or planted bombs along roadsides, in mosques or marketplaces. Yet every single atrocity of the war – on both sides – and every single death caused by the war, and every act of religious repression perpetrated by the extremist sects empowered by the war, is the direct result of the decision made by George W. Bush three years ago. Nothing he says can change this fact; nothing he does, or causes to be done, for good or ill, can wash the blood of these children – and the tens of thousands of other innocent civilians killed in the war – from his hands.

And anyone who knows these facts, who sees these facts, and fails to cry out against them – if only in your own heart – will be forever tainted by this same blood.

Crossposted at Empire Burlesque

It turns out that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg presaged the recent comments by former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor about the growing threat of right-wing violence against the judiciary – and the concominant threat to American democracy. (What’s left of it.) Both women emphasize the point that this “fringe” threat is being fed and exacerbated by the bellicose and undemocratic rhetoric of so-called mainstream Republicans, like felonious Tom DeLay, odious Bush bootlicker Tom Feeney of Florida, and Imamess Anne Coulter, with her fatwa calling for the death of Justice John Paul Stevens.
What is remarkable is seeing these bastions of the American Establishment echoing the insights of such “leftist” (to borrow the always ignorantly employed terminology of the Right and the media) com mentators as Dave Neiwert, who for years has been tracking the deadly symbiosis between “mainstream” Republican rhetoric and the violently minded fringe. The two have entered into a sinister dynamic: as the former grows more virulent, the latter become more emboldened, stepping out of the shadows, ready to pursue what Bush once called – in his “National Security Strategy” enshrining aggressive war as a core principle of the United States – the “path of action.” With this exaltation of violence being trumpeted from the highest reaches of American society, is it any wonder that the thugs are slithering out from the bottom?

There is of course another remarkable aspect to the story of the judges’ outcry: the fact that it has meet with almost total silence in the mainstream press. What should be a major scandal – the nation’s top judicial figures saying plainly that the lives of judges, and the life of our Republic, is under direct threat from violence openly abetted by the rhetoric of the nation’s ruling party – is simply ignored, or treated as a minor brief to be buried in the back pages somewhere. But oh, the crocodile tears we will see pouring from the editorial pages of the New York Times and Washington Post, the earnest, furrowed-brow tut-tutting we will see from Tim Russert and Bob Schieffer, when at last the fringe succeeds in Coulter’s dream of assassinating a Supreme Court judge. How, they will cry, did this happen in the land of the free and the home of the brave?

Excerpt from Supreme Court Justice Reveals Death Threats (AP):

Crossposted at Empire Burlesque

Hardened cynics often accuse President George W. Bush of ruthlessly exploiting the tragedy of 9/11 to advance his pre-set agenda of killing a whole heap of foreigners. This is, of course, a calumnious slander against the Dear Leader’s noble ambitions. For as he clearly demonstrated last week, Bush is also exploiting the tragedy of 9/11 to advance his pre-set agenda to kill a whole heap of Americans as well.

In yet another of those momentous degradations of public morality that go unremarked by the ever-vigilant watchdogs of the national media, Bush slipped a measure into the revamped “Patriot (sic) Act” he signed last week that will allow him to expedite the death penalty process across the land, the Austin American-Statesman reports.
Prisoners just aren’t being killed fast enough for ole George, you see. They hang on for years and years, using all them lawyer tricks and court procedures and what all, that DNA hocus-pocus and habeas corpus junk, or even new testimony showing that they’re innocent – as if that mattered. No, you got to strap ’em down and shoot ’em up with that poison juice lickety-split, churn those convict corpses out like so much prime pork sausage – the way ole George did it when he was head honcho down in Texas.

This remarkably vindictive and bloodthirsty measure – which has absolutely nothing to do with the “war on terrorism” or “homeland security,” the ostensible subjects of the Patriot Act – strips the judiciary of its supervision over state-devised “fast track” procedures to speed up the execution process. The history of the move actually goes back to that remarkably vindictive and bloodthirsty precursor to the Bush Regime known as the Reagan Administration. During that glorious “morning in America,” it became all the rage to “cut the red tape” that kept prisoners alive until the appeals process had run its course and determined there were no egregious errors in their cases before the government killed them. The tape-cutting crusade was led by then-Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who once ruled that even new proof of innocence was no bar to killing a prisoner if state courts had earlier upheld his conviction, the Washington Times reports. Urged on by Rehnquist – who was executed by God last year – several states went the fast-track route, limiting the time that prisoners have to file petitions and narrowing the range of factors that judges can consider in death-row appeals.

Unfortunately, America’s courts were not yet fully packed with hard-right cadres, and even the vulturous Rehnquist couldn’t keep them all in line. Fast-track options in state after state were struck down by federal judges – because the fast-trackers’ overall death penalty systems were such a shambles, riddled with literally fatal incompetence. One glaring example could be found in – where else? – Texas, where Guv Dub was mowing them down on his way to becoming the greatest mass killer in modern American history, with 152 notches on his belt.

Bush had set up a veritable execution assembly line in his fiefdom, aided by his trusty legal aide, Alberto Gonzales. Knowing just what the boss wanted, Al would prepare dumbed-down capsules of death penalty cases, stripping away pesky details like “ineffective counsel, conflict of interest, mitigating evidence and even actual evidence of innocence,” as Alan Berlow reported in the Atlantic Monthly. Bush would “sometimes” bother to look at the reports, sometimes not, Gonzales said. In his six years as governor, Bush spared only one condemned prisoner from execution: the serial killer Henry Lee Lucas. All the rest – including women, juvenile offenders, even the mentally retarded – got the spike. Yet one in every eight death row inmates have been exonerated since America resumed the death penalty in 1976, the Washington Times reports – an astonishing percentage of false imprisonment in capital cases. It is virtually impossible that Bush did not kill some innocent people with his relentless 152-1 execution ratio.

In 1996, the courts put a crimp in Bush’s carnival of death, ruling that Texas failed to meet “minimum competency standards” for the fast-track system. He had to make do with the old-fashioned appeals process, which slowed but never stopped his killing spree: he averaged almost two executions a month during the course of his term. But he never forgot – or forgave – the judicial interference with his dominion over life and death. How it must have rankled, to think that this judicial brake on wholesale state-sponsored slaughter still existed in the Homeland, when he – the great Commander, breaker of nations – could now order the “extra-judicial killing” of anyone on earth whom he arbitrarily deemed a “terrorist” and send mighty armies to grind tens of thousands of people into bloody mulch. Who would dare put fetters on the god-like sway of the “unitary executive”?

So now he has taken his revenge. The backdoor measure in the Patriot Act decrees that responsibility for awarding fast-track death-penalty status to the states will now be the sole prerogative of the U.S. Attorney General – one Alberto Gonzales. Yes, the fawning minion whose perversions of law on behalf of his boss have abetted murderous war, systematic torture, mass corruption, assassination, abduction, rendition, dictatorship – and the slipshod Texas death machinery – will now decide if states are legally scrupulous enough to resume lickety-split executions. You can hear those sausage grinders gearing up all over America.

God only knows what festering psychic wounds drive these spiritual cripples and their obsession with death. But for them, power isn’t real unless it’s written on the body of another human being – a prisoner, guilty or not; an “enemy,” real or imagined; or the multitude of slaughtered innocents whose only crime was living in a land that the cripples wanted to conquer.

Crossposted at Empire Burlesque

You know the big story about how Bush was going to (finally) close Abu Ghraib prison? Well, it turns out that it was all a lie. Who says? The Pentagon — the same people who were peddling the false story just last week, generating lots of nice headlines about how U.S. forces were putting all the prison’s “unseemly associations” behind them, etc.</span&gt

That was then; this is now. Here’s the new word from the American Forces Information Service of the U.S. Department of Defense: U.S. Has No Immediate Plans to Close Abu Ghraib Prison: “The United States always has planned to transfer authority for all detention facilities in Iraq to the Iraqis, but announcements regarding the imminent closure at the Abu Ghraib prison are premature, defense officials said today. News reports that the U.S. military intends to close Abu Ghraib within the next few months and to transfer its prisoners to other jails are inaccurate, officials said.
“There’s no specific timetable for that transfer or for closure of the Baghdad prison, they said. Decisions regarding Abu Ghraib and other detention facilities in Iraq will be based largely on two factors: the readiness of Iraq’s security forces to assume control of them and infrastructure improvements at the facilities…”

So Bush will continue to operate the hellhole he took over from Saddam Hussein – despite his long-ago promise to tear it down, despite the prison’s pre-war, long-time, Lubyanka-like association with torture and injustice. Honestly, at some level, Bush’s murky and blood-choked unconscious is constantly leaping out to play merry hell with his public policies. Why else would he take over a monstrous facility like Abu Ghraib, and immediately begin using it as his own center of torture and injustice, thus identifying himself with Saddam in the minds of the Iraqi public – do something that was so completely counterproductive to all of his stated, conscious objectives — unless there was some part of his psyche that was trying to make manifest the addled moral corruption within?

Or maybe he – and his whole sick crew – were just too goddamned stupid to see how taking over Abu Ghraib and running it as a detention-and-torture center would play with the Iraqi public. Generally, when dealing with this gang of thugs, it is better to dispense with psychological theorizing or even political analysis – however fascinating it might be – and strip the situation down to the crudest motivations and causes: greed, stupidity, aggression and fear.

I first wrote about Abu Ghraib back in August 2003 — those heady days when victory against the “handful of dead-enders” was just around the corner. (Die Laughing: Bush Buys Muscle for the Headbanger’s Ball.)

Here are some excerpts:

Here’s a headline you don’t see every day: “War Criminals Hire War Criminals to Hunt Down War Criminals.”

Perhaps that’s not the precise wording used by the Washington Post this week, but it is the absolute essence of its story about the Bush Regime’s new campaign to put Saddam’s murderous security forces on America’s payroll…The logic, if that’s the word, seems to be that these bloodstained “insiders” will lead their new imperial masters to other bloodstained “insiders” responsible for bombing the UN headquarters in Baghdad – and killing another dozen American soldiers while Little George was playing with his putts during his month-long Texas siesta.

Naturally, the Iraqi people – even the Bush-appointed leaders of the Potemkin “Governing Council” – aren’t exactly overjoyed at seeing Saddam’s goons return, flush with American money and firepower. And they’re certainly not reassured by the fact that the Bushists have also re-opened Saddam’s most notorious prison, the dread Abu Ghraib, and are now, Mukhabarat-like, filling it with Iraqis – men, women and children as young as 11 – seized from their homes or plucked off the street to be held incommunicado, indefinitely, without due process, just like the old days. As The Times reports, weeping relatives who dare approach the gleaming American razor-wire in search of their “disappeared” loved ones are referred to a crude, hand-written sign pinned to a spike: “No visits are allowed, no information will be given and you must leave.” Perhaps an Iraqi Akhmatova will do justice to these scenes one day.

Crossposted at Empire Burlesque

Here’s an important story that for some strange reason is not on the network news or splashed across the front pages of America’s leading newspapers:

SAS soldier quits Army in disgust at ‘illegal’ American tactics in Iraq.

…from the Daily Telegraph: An SAS soldier has refused to fight in Iraq and has left the Army over the “illegal” tactics of United States troops and the policies of coalition forces. After three months in Baghdad, Ben Griffin told his commander that he was no longer prepared to fight alongside American forces.

He said he had witnessed “dozens of illegal acts” by US troops, claiming they viewed all Iraqis as “untermenschen” – the Nazi term for races regarded as sub-human. The decision marks the first time an SAS soldier has refused to go into combat and quit the Army on moral grounds. It immediately brought to an end Mr Griffin’s exemplary, eight-year career in which he also served with the Parachute Regiment, taking part in operations in Northern Ireland, Macedonia and Afghanistan.

Mr Griffin, 28, who spent two years with the SAS, said the American military’s “gung-ho and trigger happy mentality” and tactics had completely undermined any chance of winning the hearts and minds of the Iraqi population. He added that many innocent civilians were arrested in night-time raids and interrogated by American soldiers, imprisoned in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, or handed over to the Iraqi authorities and “most probably” tortured.

Mr Griffin eventually told SAS commanders at Hereford that he could not take part in a war which he regarded as “illegal”. He added that he now believed that the Prime Minister and the Government had repeatedly “lied” over the war’s conduct.

“I did not join the British Army to conduct American foreign policy,” he said. He expected to be labelled a coward and to face a court martial and imprisonment after making what “the most difficult decision of my life” last March. Instead, he was discharged with a testimonial describing him as a “balanced, honest, loyal and determined individual who possesses the strength of character to have the courage of his convictions”.

Oh, but wait until the rightwing war bloggers — The Fightin’ Anal Cyst Brigade — get through with him. They’ll soon have him turned into a craven, cowardly, pro-terrorist lunatic — like Jack Murtha.

Meanwhile, “On Wednesday, the pre-trial hearing will begin into the court martial of Flt Lt Malcolm Kendall-Smith, a Royal Air Force doctor who has refused to return to Iraq for a third tour of duty on the grounds that the war is illegal.” (Telegraph). And watch this space for more as the case develops.

For background, see The Philosopher’s Stone.

The flight lieutenant is no ordinary war protestor, and no shirker of combat – unlike, say, the pair of prissy cowards at the head of the Anglo-American “coalition.” Kendall-Smith, who has dual New Zealand-British citizenship — and dual university degrees in medicine and Kantian moral philosophy — has served three tours at the front in Afghanistan and Iraq. He is not claiming any conscientious objections against war in general, nor do religious scruples play any part in his stance. It is based solely on the law.

Central to his case are the sinister backroom legal dealings between Washington and London in the last days before the invasion. Less than two weeks before the initial “Shock and Awe” bombings began slaughtering civilians across Iraq, Lord Goldsmith, the UK’s attorney general, gave Prime Minister Tony Blair a detailed briefing full of doubts and equivocations about the legality of the coming war, adding that Britain’s participation in an attack unsanctioned by the UN would “likely” lead to “close scrutiny” by the International Criminal Court for potential war crimes charges, the Observer reports.

But Blair and Goldsmith withheld this report from Parliament, the Cabinet and British military brass, who were demanding a clear-cut legal sanction for the impending action. Then, just three days before the bloodletting began, Goldsmith suddenly produced another paper, this time for public consumption: a brief, clear, unequivocal statement that the invasion would be legal. This statement was almost certainly crafted in Washington, where Goldsmith had recently been “tutored” by the Bush gang’s consiglieres, including the legal advisers to Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice.

Leading this pack of war-baying legal beagles was George W. Bush’s top counsel, Alberto Gonzales, who had overseen the White House’s own efforts to weasel out of potential war crimes charges by declaring — without any basis in Anglo-American jurisprudence or the U.S. Constitution — that Bush was not bound by any law whatsoever in any military action he undertook: a blank check for aggression, murder and torture that Bush has gleefully cashed over and over. Alberto and the boys leaned hard on Goldsmith, who finally caved in and replicated the Americans’ contorted and specious legal arguments for launching the attack.

Of course, Kendall-Smith knew none of this during his first two tours in Iraq: Goldsmith’s Bush-induced backflip was only divulged in April 2005. Nor did he know then of the “Downing Street Memos,” the “smoking gun” minutes that record Blair’s inner circle dutifully lining up behind Bush’s hellbent drive for war – as far back as 2002 – and their conspiracy with the Bush gang to manipulate their countries into war. The memos — which emerged in May 2005 and have never been denied or repudiated by the UK government — show Blair’s slavish acquiescence in Bush’s criminal scheme to “fix the facts and the intelligence around the policy” of unprovoked military aggression. Confronted with this newly revealed evidence — and the revelations about the mountain of doubts and caveats expressed by American intelligence before the invasion but deliberately ignored by the Bushist war party — Kendall-Smith took the only honorable course for a soldier who has been duped into serving an evil cause.

Crossposted at Empire Burlesque

It was, by all reports, the most heinous terrorist act in history. A ruthless gang of religious extremists, driven by an insatiable hatred for Western civilization, killed multitudes of innocent people in a surprise attack that struck without warning, without mercy. The perpetrators – who posed as ordinary citizens, members of a law-abiding ethnic minority going about their daily business – took advantage of the burgeoning global economy to move easily across borders as they brought their vast conspiracy to its poisonous fruition.

But Western leaders, though they did sleep, finally roused themselves to action. One by one, terrorist operatives fell into their hands. In the face of such an unprecedented threat, the “gloves came off”: captives were subjected to strenuous interrogation as officials worked feverishly to forestall any further attacks. Soon the hard evidence of guilt emerged: the words of the conspirators themselves, set down in black and white, confessing all, in copious detail, irrefutable.
That’s how 14th-century Europe “learned” that the Black Death – the rat-borne plague that killed 25 million people across the continent in just four years – had been “caused” by the Jews. Vague rumor and ancient prejudice were “confirmed” by evidence extracted from captured Jews who had been “put to the question” – the medieval spin-word for “torture.” The story that emerged was full of concrete detail, like a pre-war New York Times report on Saddam Hussein’s WMD: names of the terrorist leaders, the elaborate methods used to poison wells, specific locations, the composition of the various toxins, etc.

Armed with such official reports – earnestly delivered by the Colin Powells of the day, trusted officials oozing gravitas and sincerity – Europe embarked on a frenzy of pogroms. In city after city, country after country, the Jews were rounded up, burned alive, beheaded, beaten to death, slaughtered in every way imaginable, man, woman and child. All of it justified in the name of security – and all of it based on lies, on desperate nightmares wrung from innocent people tormented into madness. The plague pogroms marked a watershed in European anti-Semitism, notes author John Kelly in his sweeping history, The Great Mortality: a new element of outright eliminationism entered into the traditional religious disputes and cultural frictions. The seeds of the Holocaust were sown by the inhumanity of sanctioned torture.

Who knows what seeds of future horror are being sown this very day in the vast, sprawling hive of torture that George W. Bush and his chief minions, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld, have spread across the planet? How many lies condemning how many innocent people are even now being extracted by “stress techniques,” by “sensory disorientation,” by electric shocks and sexual humiliation, by waterboarding and snarling dogs, by the infliction of pain just short of “organ failure or impairment of bodily function,” and other refinements devised by the perverters of law in the White House and Pentagon?

Each week brings fresh confirmation of the continuing atrocities – carried out as deliberate state policy, at the direct order of the highest officials – in the Bushist hellholes of Bagram, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and other sites still hidden from the sun. This week, it was Amnesty International, documenting the plight of 14,000 prisoners held without charges by American occupiers and their native proxies in Iraq: limbo denizens, some incarcerated for years, many of them horribly tortured.

Last week, it was the Bush Administration itself, declaring in open court that the much-ballyhooed “anti-torture” law that Bush signed just last month is a dead letter, the Washington Post reports. The Bushists say that the law’s protections cannot be applied to the captives in Guantanamo, because a backdoor provision in the bill stripped those subhumans of their habeas corpus rights: they have no standing before any court to address any aspect of their eternal detention – until they have gone a progress through the guts of Bush’s self-devised, extra-constitutional “military tribunals.”

And there, they will find that the evidence marshalled against them may have been extracted by torture, Agence France Presse reports. Colonel Peter Brownback, presiding over one of the kangaroo sessions last week, refused to issue a blanket ban on torture-derived testimony, basing his decision on quintessential Bushist reasoning: “What you and I mean by torture might be different.” Indeed, that’s the crux of the matter; Bush and his minions have simply defined torture out of existence. Anything short of deliberate murder or, in Brownback’s own formulation, “a red-hot needle in the eye,” is simply a “strenuous interrogation technique.” (However, “accidental” murder of those “put to the question” is OK, according to the White House legal briefs that undergird the gulag, the Washington Post reports.)

Thus, when Rumsfeld issued an official memo in 2003 authorizing Abu Ghraib’s inquisitors to use “stress positions,” humiliation, hunger, sleep deprivation and sensory assaults to break the minds of prisoners, decorating the page with his hand-written exhortations (“Make sure this happens!!”), as prison commandant General Janis Karpinski has testified. he wasn’t actually committing a war crime by ordering torture. There is no such thing as torture, you see – if a Bush official orders it. No torture, no crime – just the broken minds, broken bodies and, in dozens of cases documented by Amnesty and others, the battered corpses of Bush’s gulag guests.

Torture is the new plague, the real poison, spreading the toxins of untruth and brutality throughout the society that embraces it. The well-documented reality of Bush’s ghastly system is now glaringly obvious for all to see. There can be no more excuses. Anyone who ignores this spreading evil is willfully blind; anyone who defends it is morally corrupt.

That’s how 14th-century Europe learned that the Black Death – the rat-borne plague that killed 25 million people across the continent in just four years – had been “caused” by the Jews. Vague rumor and ancient prejudice were “confirmed” by evidence extracted from captured Jews who had been “put to the question” – the medieval spin-word for “torture.” The story that emerged was full of concrete detail, like a pre-war New York Times report on Saddam Hussein’s WMD: names of the terrorist leaders, the elaborate methods used to poison wells, specific locations, the composition of the various toxins, etc.

by Chris Floyd.
Crossposted at Empire Burlesque.

Crossposted at Empire Burlesque

When I read the passage below from Moazzam Begg’s account of his years in Bush’s Terror War prisons, I had a strange feeling of dislocation: it was as if 30 years had suddenly fallen away and I was back in high school, reading Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago in stunned disbelief at the hideous cruelty inflicted on the prisoners — deliberately, as a carefully calculated instrument of state policy. And all of it done in the name of national security, of course, to protect the nation against “terrorists” and “traitors.”

Solzhenitsyn’s books — not just the factual Gulag but also the deep-delving fiction of his middle years, the powerful First Circle and Cancer Ward — were enormous influences on my own understanding of politics, power and morality. Years later, I was in Moscow when he returned to Russia from his long exile, having outlasted the system of state terror that had consumed so many of his compatriots. However much I had come to disagree with some of his political positions on certain issues, it was a still a moment of triumph for the deeper truths and moral courage that he continued — and continues — to represent.

How sickening, then, to find myself last Saturday reading of the precisely the same kind of state terror that Solzhenitsyn described (and survived) once again being inflicted on innocent people — and this time in my name, under the flag of my country, at the express order of the leaders of my government. Bush is trying to turn us all into the kind of quiet collaborationists and cowed enablers of atrocity that we habitually decry when speaking of the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany: “Oh, how could they have let such awful things go on? Why did they stand silently by? How could they swallow all those monstrous lies? I would never have stood for that kind of thing!”

Well, tens of millions of Americans are standing for it right now –- every bit as quiescent as the most head-down, eyes-averted Soviet citizen or German burgher: countenancing, condoning, even celebrating brutal acts of state terror, and swallowing the tyrant’s eternal lie that his crimes are committed to protect the people. For a few crumbs of prosperity from the elite’s banquet table, for a few flattering fairy tales about national greatness, national goodness and historical destiny, for a few comforting murmurs to chase away the craven fear of madman monsters across the sea, they have sold their priceless birthright of liberty. It’s no longer a matter of what crimes Americans will swallow; now the great question of the day is: what won’t they swallow? They’ve walked this far down the road of darkness – how much farther will they go? Will we one day need a Solzhenitsyn to catalogue our shame, our cruelty and our cowardice?

Excerpt from My Years in Captivity,

from The Guardian:

After that first heavy interrogation they took me into another room and left me there. Guards tied my hands behind my back, hog-tied me so that my hands were shackled to my legs, which were also shackled. Then they put a hood over my head. It was stuffy and hard to breathe, and I was on the verge of asthmatic panic. The perpetual darkness was frightening. A barrage of kicks to my head and back followed. Lying on the ground, with my back arched, and my wrists and ankles chafing against the metal chains, was excruciating. I could never wriggle into a more comfortable position, even for a moment. There was a thin carpet on the concrete floor, and a little shawl for warmth – both completely inadequate.

I lost track of day and night – not only was I usually in the hood but, in any case, the window was boarded up. Eventually, someone came in and removed the hood. I was there in isolation for about a month. Once they kept me from sleeping for about two days and two nights. A guard kept coming in and if I nodded off he woke me. By the end of that I was completely drained and disoriented.

I never knew what was going to happen. Sometimes they’d take me to an outside toilet – used by the military as there wasn’t one upstairs. But even then I was hooded, and the hood came off only when I was in the latrine area. There on the wall, in big black letters, were the words “Fuck Islam”.

For days on end I was alone in the room. Then they’d come for me and go over and over exactly the same ground: the camps, my role in training, my role in al-Qaeda, my role in financing 9/11. Sometimes it was the CIA, sometimes the FBI; sometimes I didn’t even know who they were. All of them wanted a story that didn’t exist. There are no words to describe what I felt like.

 

And yet, underneath the massive slab of state terrorism, tendrils of human understanding and sympathy do survive between individuals, as was widely evident in the Soviet Union and even in Nazi Germany. Begg describes one such thread formed with what he considered the most unlikely suspect: an old, Bible-reading Alabama redneck, one of the guards responsible for holding him captive – away from his family, away from his life, for no reason, without any evidence, save for wild accusations most likely extracted by torture – for weeks, for months, for years on end.

I made a huge discovery during incarceration, about relating to people. When I first saw Sergeant Foshee, I thought, “He’s too old to be in the army; they must be desperate.” And when he asked me, in his Alabama drawl, if I was English, I thought, “Another typical raghead-hating, stars-and-bars, KKK-type redneck.”

Most of the time, when he was in my room, Foshee sat there reading the Bible, and we didn’t speak. I’d heard from other guards that Foshee was racist, didn’t like women in the army, hated JFK, lost his temper quickly and ordered people about.

Back in the US he worked as an undercover narcotics agent. But he was also a Vietnam veteran. “Excuse me, Sergeant, do you mind if I ask you something about Vietnam?”

As a teenager I’d been fascinated by the Vietnam War, and even then I’d identified with the underdog. I felt compelled to ask this vet from Nam about his experiences. I must have asked the right question. Foshee loved giving me his recollections, and I couldn’t get enough. He described graphically the assaults he’d been in, the friends he’d seen killed, the civilian massacres, and the stress he’d suffered on return to the US. Several of his comrades had been POWs. Then came the inevitable comparison between them and us. Foshee was deeply disturbed by our treatment as detainees. He couldn’t understand why we weren’t treated as POWs. For us he had a soldier’s respect.

“I don’t know if you’ve done anything, but they say this is a war. You should all be sent home, ‘cos the war’s over. Or you should be treated like POWs. I know there are people here who fought the Soviets for years and even I’m a baby compared with them — in age and experience. I get so pissed when I see those punkass kids treating y’all that way, when they ain’t done a thing for this country.” He was talking about soldiers in Echo who had soaked detainees with water, then left the air conditioning on full. To me Foshee was an enigma: his attitudes were clearly Republican, and yet he did not like what he was seeing…

When Foshee heard about the incident [an episode when Begg, maddened by years of pointless confinement, exacerbated by the invasion of his room by a stream of maggots, lost control and trashed his cell] , he was very upset and tried to comfort me with stories of the Hanoi Hilton, how some of his friends had survived torture and solitary – and some hadn’t. I had. I made a few friends with guards over the years in US custody, but only one ever earned my respect.

Moazzam Begg was kidnapped in Pakistan in January 2002. As the Guardian notes in an accompanying story: “During his internment, he spent virtually two years in solitary, was kicked and beaten, suffocated with a bag over his head, stripped naked, chained by his hands to the top of a door and left hanging, and led to believe he was about to be executed.” The only “evidence” against him was the statement by a Pakistani captive that his instructor in an al-Qaeda camp had been named “Abu Umamah.” This is a common Arabic construction, whereby parents are called after the names of their children: “Abu Umamah” means, “father of Umamah,” which was the name of Begg’s oldest daughter. (Similarly, the Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas is usually referred to as “Abu Mazen.” Although this is often called his “nom de guerre” in the Western press, as if it were the kind of sinister nickname that Bolshevik terrorists took to cloak their true identity – “Stalin,” the man of steel, “Molotov,” the hammer, etc. – it is in fact just a homely way of saying that Abbas is the father of a boy named Mazen.)

From this tidbit of meaningless information — there are countless Muslims known as “Abu Umamah” – American interrogators spun a wild fantasy of Begg – a British teacher born and raised in Birmingham, where his secular parents sent him to the Jewish King David School for years – as an international mastermind, a veritable Doctor Evil: “Two FBI agents began the questioning, convinced I was involved in some nefarious web of plots, from planning to assassinate the Pope to masterminding al-Qaeda’s finance operation in Europe, or being an instructor in one of its Afghan training camps. They had their perceptions about me and were searching for ways to confirm them – preferably from my own mouth. By now I’d been raised to the status of some rogue James Bond-type figure. They thought I was a graduate from some prestigious British university, that I was fluent in a dozen languages, that I was an expert in computers and several martial arts….Had it not been for this ludicrous situation I’m in, I would have been flattered,” I once said to them. “I should ask you to write my résumé – I’d find a job anywhere.” 

But it was no joke, of course. One of the tools they used to torment Begg was photos of Umamah herself, which they had somehow obtained – stolen from his family home perhaps? – shortly after his capture. When that didn’t work, the beatings and bindings described above began.

As I wrote two years ago, describing the plight of three other innocent British Muslims who’d been ensnared in Bush’s global net: “The treatment of these three innocent men, chained and beaten for two years, is not just a crime, but also – like that other crime, the invasion of Iraq – an enormous waste of time and resources in the “war on terrorism.” We saw the grim fruit of this waste in Madrid on March 11.

“But of course, the Pentagon Archipelago wasn’t designed to fight terrorism; it’s designed to advance terrorism – state terrorism. Its purpose is to establish the principle of arbitrary rule – in the name of “military necessity” – above the rule of law, in America and around the world. It’s part of an overarching system of terror – aggressive war, assassination, indefinite detention, torture – employed to achieve the Regime’s openly-stated ideological goal: “full spectrum dominance” of global politics and resources, particularly energy resources. Al Qaeda has the same goal, and uses the same methods, albeit on a smaller, “asymmetrical” scale.

“Now we are all at the mercy of these entwined terrorist factions – both led by fundamentalist sons of two financially linked elitist clans. We will see more Guantanamos, more Madrids, before this long, dark night is over.”

Moazzam Begg was released from captivity in January 2005, with all the false charges against him dropped.

Crossposted at Empire Burlesque