Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion: Thou Shall Not Mock Obama's Mustard

Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion: Thou Shall Not Mock Obama's Mustard

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Prepping public for attack on Iran

You know it's bad when...

Pre-Iraq war propagandist Judith Miller's co-author writes today in the New York Times:

Deadliest Bomb in Iraq Is Made by Iran, U.S. Says
By MICHAEL R. GORDON

WASHINGTON, Feb. 9 — The most lethal weapon directed against American troops in Iraq is an explosive-packed cylinder that United States intelligence asserts is being supplied by Iran.

The assertion of an Iranian role in supplying the device to Shiite militias reflects broad agreement among American intelligence agencies, although officials acknowledge that the picture is not entirely complete.

In interviews, civilian and military officials from a broad range of government agencies provided specific details to support what until now has been a more generally worded claim, in a new National Intelligence Estimate, that Iran is providing "lethal support" to Shiite militants in Iraq.

For analysis, Alexander Cockburn quotes Col. Sam Gardiner:

we know there is a National Security Council staff-led_group whose mission is to create outrage in the world against Iran. Just like before Gulf II, this media group will begin to release stories to sell a strike against Iran. Watch for the outrage stuff...

The entire Cockburn column is essential reading.

Also see Jonathan Schwarz. He has Gordon's sourcing in a nutshell.

Yellow narrative: uranium, Wilson, and wingnuts

Ann Coulter off the rails and scientifically illiterate

Coulter is an idiot. Her piece on Ambassador Joseph Wilson and cable news media, "Yellowcake and Yellow Journalism", is terribly confused and amounts to blithe assertions, exactly what she accuses others of using.

She doesn't even know the difference between "yellowcake" and "enriched uranium." In reference to the 2002 trip to Niger by Wilson, she makes it sound like yellowcake = bomb-ready uranium:

Wilson's unwritten "report" to a few CIA agents supported the suspicion that Saddam was seeking enriched uranium from Niger because, according to Wilson, the former prime minister of Niger told him that in 1999 Saddam had sent a delegation to discuss "expanding commercial relations" with Niger. The only thing Niger has to trade is yellowcake. If Saddam was seeking to expand commercial relations with Niger, we can be fairly certain he wasn't trying to buy designer jeans, ready-to-assemble furniture or commemorative plates. He was seeking enriched uranium.

Wrong. We've always known that Coulter is scientifically illiterate, as here she again demonstrates.

Yellowcake is slightly processed ore, containing uranium that still has natural isotope concentrations. Enriched uranium for fission reactors (low enrichment) or bombs (high enrichment) has enhanced U-235 concentration. Enriching uranium is a technically difficult process. Niger does not produce enriched uranium. Coulter's whole piece is written using this incorrect terminology. But it sounds good enough to make wingnut media and blogs run with gleeful diarrhea.

Rightist bloggers commenting on the Coulter piece crow, "Coulter = money again" because her unimpeachable telling of true history "smacks the revisionist historians of the left square across the nose with a rolled up newspaper, eliciting the chorus of now familiar yelps of collective pain from the angry, exposed left." Coulter's brilliance has once and for all, as she puts it, slapped down the "nut-cable stations...'reportage'" consisting of "endless repetition of arbitrary assertions, half-truths and thoroughly debunked canards" where "the passionate left is allowed to invent a liberal fable without correction."

Meanwhile, Brit Hume and Jim Angle of Fox Noise are beating on the long-standing "Wilson is a liar" drum. Now that the forged Niger documents and Joseph Wilson's role in exposing the deceits of the president is the underlayment of the Libby trial, they have to trot that out again. See http://mediamatters.org/items/200702090007 for a good analysis.

Let’s briefly go back over what all the fuss is about. The whole Libby matter arose because Vice President Cheney felt that Ambassador Wilson had been disloyal in publishing a New York Times commentary entitled "What I Didn't Find in Africa." Evidently from Cheney’s point of view, Wilson had revealed too much truth about the propaganda thrust behind the war. Therefore, Wilson had to be punished and made an example of—through his wife. Cheney’s brand of discipline led to Valerie Plame Wilson’s status as a covert CIA operative being publicized, a career ender.

Coulter and the wingnuts either entirely miss or willfully ignore the most important truths revealed by Wilson. Coulter should actually read the July 2003 Times piece. Wilson points out what has never been disputed in any media, wingnut or otherwise: "It would be exceedingly difficult for Niger to transfer uranium to Iraq" and "there's simply too much oversight over too small an industry for a sale to have transpired."

But the president had gone ahead and highlighted "uranium from Africa" as an element of the threat from Iraq in his January 2003 State of the Union address. The claim turned out to be based exactly on what was initially an October 2001 intelligence report—absolutely false as it turned out—concerning an actual "transaction" between Iraq and Niger. Forged documents later appeared to support the transaction, but as Wilson clearly stated in his 2003 piece, they never were shown to him. The crux of the matter, never disputed by anyone, was Wilson’s correct report in 2002 and public statement in 2003 that such a transaction would have been next to impossible. This public revelation by a former diplomat, supposedly loyal to the empire, that was totally at odds with the president's speech is what so angered the vice president.

It is obvious why the "uranium from Africa" canard was used, even though it was known to be false. The administration had decided it was going to take Iraq by force and it was willing to use the thinnest tissue of over-amplified lies and half-truths to build and maintain public consent for the conquest. To generate noise now, the likes of Coulter can point back to real information, also reported by Wilson, concerning past diplomatic and commercial contacts between Iraq and Niger—speculatively involving Iraq "seeking" uranium in 1999—to cover for Bush’s rhetoric.

The image of a truthful president sincerely believing his own faulty narrative about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is irresistible for Coulter and the wingnuts. However, Bush's falsehood was in insistent elevation of a non-existent threat, obviously known by responsible people in US intelligence to be non-existent, partly due to Wilson's trip. Minute parsing of the word "sought" does not change that.

So, let's go on to Coulter's use of what she calls the "massive investigations" embodied by the 2004 "bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee" report. No report has been more misused by media wingnuts than this one. I wrote a highly illustrative post on this in November 2005. In that, I quoted media mouthpiece Tony Snow on HBO's Real Time (before he spun through the revolving door from Fox Noise to the Whitehouse), speaking to the 2004 SSI report:

SNOW: Yeah, that's right. ... The wife is the one who arranged for Joe Wilson to go over to Niger. What's interesting is that the people that really smeared Joe Wilson were the people who looked into his charges, the Senate Intelligence Committee, who said, "You know what, Joe? All that stuff you said in the New York Times, was lies. You're wrong!'' ... [to audience] Read the Senate Intelligence Committee Report. I know it's uncomfortable, because it's a view you don't want to hear. But if you're going to call "bullshit,'' at least read it, and then get back to me. Sorry, go ahead.

What Snow, and Coulter, forget to tell you is that what really provides the wingnut narrative on Wilson's credibility in the 2004 SSI report was a hack job appended by Pat Roberts, Kit Bond and other Republicans then interested in carrying water for the Whitehouse. The Democrats refused to endorse that section of the report.

If you do want to click through stuff on that November 3, 2005 post of mine (and you should), here is the correct link to that very instructive Larry Johnson item:

http://www.tpmcafe.com/story/2005/10/19/142419/59

Coulter also forgets to tell you that the bottom line in the real part of the 2004 SSI report on "Former Ambassador", as stated above, says that Wilson's report upon return from Niger in 2002 was in fact exactly what he wrote in his July 2003 NYT piece:

Niger's former Minister for Energy and Mines (REDACTED), Mai Manga, stated that there were no sales outside of International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) channels since the mid-1980s. He knew of no contracts signed between Niger and any rogue states for the sale of uranium. He said that an Iranian delegation was interested in purchasing 400 tons of yellowcake from Niger in1998, but said that no contract was ever signed with Iran. Mai Manga also described how the French mining consortium controls Nigerien uranium mining and keeps the uranium very tightly controlled from the time it is mined until the time it is loaded onto ships in Benin for transport overseas. Mai Manga believed it would be difficult, if not impossible, to arrange a special shipment of uranium to a pariah state given these controls.

(U) In an interview with Committee staff, the former ambassador was able to provide more information about the meeting between former Prime Minister Mayaki and the Iraqi delegation. The former ambassador said that Mayaki did meet with the Iraqi delegation but never discussed what was meant by "expanding commercial relations." The former ambassador said that because Mayaki was wary of discussing any trade issues with a country under United Nations (UN) sanctions, he made a successful effort to steer the conversation away from a discussion of trade with the Iraqi delegation."

Then, Republican staffers make a big deal about a supposed discrepancy about when Wilson actually saw or heard about the details of the forged documents. Sure, there is a point of confusion about what Wilson told them, possibly on their part (but not about what he wrote). This has endlessly been beaten to death by the right. And herein lies the danger of relying too much on the Republican-dominated 2004 report. Granted, it is an essential document with volumes of significant pieces of the story of the weapons of mass destruction ruse. But it also is ladled with Republican talking points that "snow" under an uninformed audience.

Taking up Tony Snow's challenge to actually read the 2004 SSI report, it becomes clear that Coulter seems to have missed the whole section dealing with Niger in general outside the part about the "Former Ambassador". She writes, "Indeed, the United States didn't even receive the 'obviously forged' documents until eight months after Wilson's trip to Niger!"

So what? The "eight months" may be true, but as Wilson accurately wrote, the trip was based on an "intelligence report" about the existence of an actual uranium transaction between Iraq and Niger.

The 2004 SSI report says, "Reporting on a possible uranium yellowcakes sales agreement between Niger and Iraq first came to the attention of the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) on October 15, 2001." It goes on to describe that this "possible sales agreement" was "very limited and lacking needed detail", but that suddenly in February 2002, "the CIA's DO issued a second intelligence report [DELETED] which again cited the source as a '[foreign] government service.' Although not identified in the report, this source was also from the foreign service. The second report provided more details about the previously reported Iraq-Niger uranium agreement and provided what was said to be 'verbatim text' of the accord."

Much later it turns out, these were the "forged documents" that led to Wilson's trip, exactly as Wilson wrote in 2003, "While I never saw the report, I was told that it referred to a memorandum of agreement that documented the sale of uranium yellowcake -- a form of lightly processed ore -- by Niger to Iraq in the late 1990's. The agency officials asked if I would travel to Niger to check out the story so they could provide a response to the vice president's office."

Could he be clearer that he did not in fact "see" the forged documents? Coulter wrote her piece without even reading Wilson's.

Of course, in March 2003, the documents were exposed as fraudulent by Mohamed ElBaradei,

Based on thorough analysis, the IAEA has concluded, with the concurrence of outside experts, that these documents — which formed the basis for the reports of these uranium transactions between Iraq and Niger — are, in fact, not authentic.

As early as March 22, 2003, Dana Priest and Karen DeYoung noted in a Washington Post story that even the CIA had its doubts "about the evidence backing up charges that Iraq tried to purchase uranium from Africa." This busts up the wingnut version, which has all intelligence prior to the war in a solid front, where "everyone agreed" that Saddam had WMD at his disposal. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The whole story of how those fraudulent Niger documents came into being in the first place is very interesting. It's too long to go into here, but it has been investigated by Seymour Hersh in "The Stovepipe") and Josh Marshall (hard to get his whole story in one neat piece, but
you can refer to [this search result].

And now with the Libby trial, hard evidence that the concocted "uranium from Africa" threat was a rouge job based in Cheney's office has come to light. Larry Johnson had a critical post on this just last weekend, where he explains "we now know that Dick Cheney received a preliminary brief from the CIA and the the Senate Intelligence Committee, in its 2004 report, covered up this fact."

This documentary evidence, totally supportive of Ambassador Wilson, ought to be at the top of Coulter's sources for her apology note to Wilson. It'll never happen. An unethical writer like Coulter, whose work barely is good enough to provide wingnuts with entertainment, likely will continue to peddle bullshit while indicting real reporters for doing in fact what she herself is doing.

Judge blocks Maine phone record contempt hearing

US District Judge John Woodcock in Bangor says Maine Public Utilities Commission cannot force Verizon to tell truth about record searches on grounds that "sensitive information pertaining to national security" would be at risk

This story in the Boston Globe describes the case.

An extended talk on this matter and others by Shenna Bellows, Executive Director of the Maine Civil Liberties Union, given at the University of Maine on October 26 was recorded by yours truly. Some audio excerpts of the talk can be downloaded here from WERU Community Radio, under Weekend Voices for 11/11.

More on this story later today. I will try to get the entire Shenna Bellows presentation up on peacecast.us shortly.

War with Iran foregone conclusion?

Israel lobby demands Democrats promise not to allow negotiation or compromise, essential campaign fund$ in the balance


John Edwards getting tough with bin Laden in Bangor during the 2004 campaign

A few weeks ago, I received a flurry of emails from the John Edwards presidential campaign about an impending speech, given at the Riverside Church in New York on January 15. Edwards was to celebrate the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King 40 years after the famous anti-war speech King gave at the same place. Since then Edwards has continued to promote his opposition to escalation in Iraq.

An longer excerpt of the speech arrived with one of the emails:

EDWARDS: Forty years ago, almost to the month, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. stood at this pulpit, in this house of God, and with the full force of his conscience, his principles and his love of peace, denounced the war in Vietnam, calling it a tragedy that threatened to drag our nation down to dust.

As he put it then, there comes a time when silence is a betrayal -- not only of one's personal convictions, or even of one's country alone, but also of our deeper obligations to one another and to the brotherhood of man.

That's the thing I find the most important about the sermon Dr. King delivered here that day. He did not direct his demands to the government of the United States, which was escalating the war. He issued a direct appeal to the people of the United States, calling on us to break our own silence, and to take responsibility for bringing about what he called a revolution of values.

A revolution whose starting point is personal responsibility, of course, but whose animating force is the belief that we cannot stand idly by and wait for others to right the wrongs of the world.

And this, in my view, is at the heart of what we should remember and celebrate on this day. This is the dream we must commit ourselves to realizing.

A week or so thereafter, this story circulated around the blogosphere (thanks, Avedon):

Edwards: Iran Threat Serious
By Ronen Bodoni - TotallyJewish.com - Tuesday 23rd of January

The challenges in your own backyard "represent an unprecedented threat to the world and Israel," the candidate for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination told the Herzliya Conference, referring mainly to the Iranian threat.

In his speech, Edwards criticised the United States' previous indifference to the Iranian issue, saying they have not done enough to deal with the threat. Hinting to possible military action, Edwards stressed that "in order to ensure Iran never gets nuclear weapons, all options must remain on table."

On the recent UN Security Council's resolution against Iran, Edwards said more serious political and economic steps should be taken. "Iran must know that the world won't back down," he said.

Addressing the second Lebanon war , Edwards accused the Islamic Republic of having a significant role, saying Hizbullah was an instrument of Iran, and Iranian rockets were what made the organization's attack on Israel possible....

I commented on a private mailing list that this sounds like quite a contradiction, Edwards the self-styled peace candidate speaking like war on Iran is just around the corner. To this, a friend on the list asked, ``The problem is--Is there anyone who stands a chance of getting the nomination who would say anything different? Israel is being treated like the 51st state.''

I replied, ``Welcome to the Democratic Party (or Republican for that matter).''

My analysis was that I thought that this helps Edwards raise money, while taking an "even-handed" position may well cause his campaign to starve for money and drown in bad press at the same time. The Democratic Party position on Israel/Lebanon/Iran/Syria can be discerned from H. Res. 921 of last summer, passed in the House during the Israeli bombardment of Lebanon, for the purpose of ``Condemning the recent attacks against the State of Israel, holding terrorists and their state-sponsors accountable for such attacks, supporting Israel’s right to defend itself, and for other purposes.''

The resolution was a panoply of pro-Israel propaganda, lacking any notion that the effect of the Israeli bombardment was to end over a thousand innocent lives and smash civilian infrastructure to smithereens. Of course, the Israelis said they tried to avoid harming the innocent--ergo war crimes, not. The resolution passed 410-8 and even Dennis Kucinich did not vote against it. (See this post. Also, please read this extended critique of the resolution by Professor Stephen Zunes.)

Pressure for war on high
Glenn Greewald has a breathtaking, clear-headed post on how these `` enforced orthodoxies'' must be maintained in order for candidates to raise money. It confirms everything I wrote a few days ago, with a hell of a lot more style.

Greenwald writes about an astonishing piece in the hard-line pro-Israel New York Sun about recent fund-raising activity by Democratic presidential candidates, including Edwards and Hillary Clinton,

On Thursday, the neoconservative New York Sun published a remarkable article reporting on an event to be held that night by AIPAC, at which Hillary Clinton was to deliver the keynote address and John Edwards was to appear at the pre-speech cocktail party. The article made several points which are typically deemed off-limits to opponents of neoconservatism -- ones which almost invariably provoke accusations of anti-semitism when made by others.

First, the Sun noted how important AIPAC's support and financial contributions are to presidential candidates:

"When it comes to important gatherings like this, there is going to be a lot of pressure on the major candidates to not let one of their competitors have the room to themselves," a Democratic strategist [and former Joe Lieberman aide], Daniel Gerstein, said.

"Tonight's event is the first time any of the 2008 candidates have competed for attention in the same room since they launched their campaigns in earnest. It is also an important illustration of just how much stock all of the presidential candidates, Democrats and Republicans alike, will put in the pro- Israel community, particularly for campaign dollars.

...

according to the Sun, what do presidential candidates have to do in order to ensure access to 'the ATM for American politicians' -- the 'large amounts of money from the Jewish community' in New York? What is the 'issue that matters most to them'? Belligerence towards Iran.''

...

It is simply true that there are large and extremely influential Jewish donor groups which are agitating for a U.S. war against Iran, and that is the case because those groups are devoted to promoting Israel's interests and they perceive it to be in Israel's interests for the U.S. to militarily confront Iran. That is what the Sun and the Post have made clear.''

On the other hand, in issuing an accurate and important disclaimer, Greenwald also broaches the deepest depths of long-standing US Middle East policy:

It goes without saying that there are other factions and motives behind the push for war with Iran besides right-wing Jewish groups. There is the generic warmongering, militarism and oil-driven expansionism represented by Dick Cheney. And there are the post-9/11 hysterics and bigots who crave ever-expanding warfare and slaughter of Muslims in the Middle East for reasons having nothing to do with Israel. There are evangelical Christians who crave more Middle Eastern war on religious and theological grounds, and there are some who just believe that the U.S. can and should wage war against whatever countries seem not like to us. And, it should also be noted, a huge portion of American Jews, if not the majority, do not share this agenda.

On the essential aspects of ``militarism and oil-driven expansionism,'' it seems to me quite clear that calls to ``negotiate'' with Iran ring hollow. Walking a tightrope while recognizing that very few in America, especially in Democratic primaries, are particularly in a mood to jump into a bigger war, Edwards appeared to be conciliatory in a recent interview with Ezra Klein of The American Prospect. The trouble is, there is really no aspect of US imperial policy in the Middle East that possibly could be conceded in a negotiation with Iran, and Edwards failed to offer such.

In that Klein interview, Edwards explains what America would "give" Iran. They would be allowed to have a nuclear fuel cycle, controlled by Washington. Presumably Iran would be also be allowed to pay its oh-so-``hard'' oil $ in exchange for these benefits brought to it by the elite technocratic contracting entities in the multinational Nuclear Suppliers Group. Also, Iran would get economic "help," presumably from a dose of neoliberal medicine. If I were Iranian, that deal would be totally a non-starter.

Why does Iran scare US and Israeli elites so much that transparently hollow diplomatic postures threats of war against Iran are now at nearly a fever pitch going into the 2008 campaign? It's obvious that Iran has a great potential to develop as a significant power in the mid-21st century. I have no doubt that at least some measure of the propaganda concerning Iran's efforts to make the US ``fail'' in Iraq are true. This is all so important because of the energy reserves--most importantly Washington's ability to keep control of taps throughout the region.

Even though Iran's oil fields are mature and declining, there is still enormous and increasing wealth there, if they can keep more of the oil in the ground for a longer period of time. And they have more natural gas than just about anybody besides Russia. That's why nuclear power makes sense for Iran. The oil & gas are precious export commodities certain to grow in value well into the future.

What kind of genuine, reasonable concession could be made to Iran that would defuse the nuclear tripwire? We could start by bringing Israel into the non-proliferation system (like Iran has been and remains to this day) while establishing a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East. In my view Israel is a far more dangerous rogue nuclear state now than Iran could possible be for decades. But such an even-handed approach is just not in the cards for elites like those in the Israel lobby's and Cheney's realms. And not in the realm of Edwards or Clinton either.

So, is war on Iran a foregone conclusion? Does it even matter to these people what a disaster the war on Iraq, and also to some extent the war on Lebanon have become? It's going to take a much more informed, much stronger peace movement if this thing is going to work out without at least the kind of war discussed in that New York Sun piece.

Iraq: biggest Middle East population displacement since 1948

Patrick Cockburn: ``The US and UK are loath to admit that one of the world's great man-made disasters is taking place''

Recent White House rhetoric and obfuscation on Iraq mainly has ignored the enormous and accelerating exodus of Iraqis from their homes that is now taking place. The word ``refugee'' was not uttered by Steven Hadley in his Iraq briefing yesterday, or in two major speeches delivered in January by President Bush.

Yesterday's subject for Hadley's spin was a partially declassified intelligence estimate (NIE) entitled "Prospects for Iraq's Stability: A Challenging Road Ahead." According to news reports, the NIE says that "Iraq is unraveling at an accelerating rate, and even if U.S. and Iraqi forces can slow the spreading violence, the country's fragile government is unlikely to deliver stability to its people during the next year."

Hadley was trotted out to spin the intelligence estimate. He used it as support for the president's escalation policy, at one point quoting it:

Let me continue to read: "If coalition forces were withdrawn, if such a rapid withdrawal were to take place, we judge that the Iraqi security forces would be unlikely to survive as a nonsectarian national institution. Neighboring countries, invited by Iraqi factions or unilaterally, might intervene openly in the conflict. Massive civilian casualties and forced population displacement would be probable.

Probable? Massive population displacement is happening now.

According to Patrick Cockburn:

Iraqis are on the run inside and outside the country. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees said 50,000 Iraqis a month are abandoning their homes. Stephanie Jaquemet, regional representative of the UNHCR, said that two million Iraqis have fled abroad and another 1.5-2 million are displaced within the country - many of them from before the fall of Saddam Hussein.

They flee because they fear for their lives. Some 3,000 Iraqis are being killed every month according to the UN. Most come from Baghdad and the centre of the country, but all of Iraq outside the three Kurdish provinces in the north is extremely violent. A detailed survey by the International Organisation for Migration on displacement within Iraq said that most people move after direct threats to their lives: "These threats take the form of abductions; assassinations of individuals or their families."

The presence of the US occupation so far has accelerated and massively compounded the displacements of the Saddam era, rightly decried in White House propaganda four years ago:

According to Human Rights Watch, "senior Arab diplomats told the London-based Arabic daily newspaper al-Hayat in October [1991] that Iraqi leaders were privately acknowledging that 250,000 people were killed during the uprisings, with most of the casualties in the south." Refugees International reports that the "Oppressive government policies have led to the internal displacement of 900,000 Iraqis, primarily Kurds who have fled to the north to escape Saddam Hussein's Arabization campaigns (which involve forcing Kurds to renounce their Kurdish identity or lose their property) and Marsh Arabs, who fled the government's campaign to dry up the southern marshes for agricultural use. More than 200,000 Iraqis continue to live as refugees in Iran."

Look at the numbers. We have a scale of refugee creation equivalent to the entire Saddam era happening on a monthly basis. But now, Bush and Hadley can't even utter the word "refugee."

In fairness, I should point out that there is a State Department official concerned with the Iraqi refugee problem. She is Ellen Sauerbrey, assistant secretary of state for population, refugees and migration. She told the Senate Judiciary Committee on January 16, that

due to the upsurge in sectarian violence in 2006, this trend has reversed, and at present more Iraqis are fleeing their homes to other areas of Iraq and to neighboring countries then are returning. UNHCR estimates that between 1 to 1.4 million Iraqis are in countries bordering Iraq, though a large percentage of them had left Iraq prior to 2003. We believe the current population of Iraqis in Jordan and Syria is a mixture of the Iraqis who departed before 2003 and newer arrivals. Many organizations, including UNHCR, have raised concerns about new arrivals and growing numbers of Iraqis in these countries, though neither UNHCR nor the governments of Jordan or Syria have definitive figures on the size of the population. UNHCR has argued that the refugee crisis it predicted would occur, but did not materialize after the invasion in 2003 is now upon us.

So, somebody at State recognizes the problem. Still, it is soft-peddled, without proper attribution of the fundamental cause--the disintegration of Iraqi society as a direct result of US attack, conquest, occupation, and domination.

State of delusion

President Bush evidently is fighting a very different war in his mind than the one that is going on in Iraq

Tonight on the News Hour, a discussion about the new US Iraq Commander, General Petraeus, with ``two Army officers who have known and worked with him,'' Retired Army Major General William Nash, now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. And retired Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor, author of two books on Army transformation, now an independent businessman:

MARGARET WARNER: Let's look at Mosul more deeply here, because there he really -- he had his men going into the neighborhoods, did he not, tried to use less force, more persuasion. He had, as I understand it, little precinct bases, much like -- it sounds like what they're hoping to do in Baghdad. One, do you think, at least that the -- I think your point that, after it ended, Colonel Macgregor, it didn't last -- but do you think that the strategy and the approach itself worked? And can it be applied in Baghdad?

DOUGLAS MACGREGOR: No. First of all, in Mosul when he arrived with the 101st, there was no insurgency. That area was fairly pacific. I spoke with some soldiers in the 101st who'd been on patrol, and they talked about patrolling there over 30 days without any incident, until finally they were approached. And someone at marketplace walked up and, in perfect English, said, "Do you see a problem here?" And they said, "No." And they said, "Well, then, why are you here?" The next day, they had their first RPG attack on the patrol. Soldiers said, "We were not attacked -- we did not patrol because we were attacked. We were attacked because we patrolled."

MARGARET WARNER: Take that to Baghdad now, because that's what we're looking at here.

DOUGLAS MACGREGOR: Well, if you go to Baghdad, and now you have an absolutely hardened population against you. We are hated in that country. The Sunni Muslim population has good reason to hate us, based upon how we've treated them over the last couple of years. But the Shiite population has joined that particular throng. We have no friends, if you will. Sending men with rifles in small numbers to go into these neighborhoods, to stay in these neighborhoods, is a very, very dangerous thing to do, in my estimation. We could end up taking very serious casualties. We don't know. We can't predict the future. But this is not the environment that General Petraeus found when he got to Mosul.

Jesus Christ!! There is nothing more ``important at this moment in our history'' than THAT????

BUSH: The people of Iraq want to live in peace, and now it's time for their government to act. Iraq's leaders know that our commitment is not open-ended. They have promised to deploy more of their own troops to secure Baghdad -- and they must do so.They pledged that they will confront violent radicals of any faction or political party -- and they need to follow through, and lift needless restrictions on Iraqi and coalition forces, so these troops can achieve their mission of bringing security to all of the people of Baghdad....My fellow citizens, our military commanders and I have carefully weighed the options. We discussed every possible approach. In the end, I chose this course of action because it provides the best chance for success. Many in this chamber understand that America must not fail in Iraq, because you understand that the consequences of failure would be grievous and far-reaching. If American forces step back before Baghdad is secure, the Iraqi government would be overrun by extremists on all sides. We could expect an epic battle between Shia extremists backed by Iran, and Sunni extremists aided by al Qaeda and supporters of the old regime.A contagion of violence could spill out across the country -- and in time, the entire region could be drawn into the conflict. For America, this is a nightmare scenario. For the enemy, this is the objective.Chaos is the greatest ally -- their greatest ally in this struggle. And out of chaos in Iraq would emerge an emboldened enemy with new safe havens, new recruits, new resources, and an even greater determination to harm America.To allow this to happen would be to ignore the lessons of September the 11th and invite tragedy. Ladies and gentlemen, nothing is more important at this moment in our history than for America to succeed in the Middle East, to succeed in Iraq and to spare the American people from this danger. (Applause.)

No further comment is needed.

Friday Garden Blogging

Pretty snow!


Winter is here.

Winter arrived last weekend with a good 15 cm snowfall on Saturday. The temperature took a dive to low of about -23 C by midweek. Now that's winter! Actually colder than it's been around here since 2005. Today, about 10 cm more snow came down, icy this time.

The bird feeder is out. So far, I've seen cardinals, chickadees, and juncos grabbing seeds out there.

Update: I changed the incorrect unit labels to cm from mm.

K explains Bush

The US can't leave Iraq--it is about the oil, in a deeply strategic way

Henry Kissinger (via Corrente):

The disenchantment of the American public with the burdens it has borne alone for nearly four years has generated growing demands for some form of unilateral withdrawal, usually expressed in the form of benchmarks to be put to the Baghdad government which, if not fulfilled in specific time periods, would trigger American disengagement.

But under present conditions, withdrawal is not an option. American forces are indispensable. They are in Iraq not as a favour to its government or as a reward for its conduct. They are there as an expression of the American national interest to prevent the Iranian combination of imperialism and fundamentalist ideology from dominating a region on which the energy supplies of the industrial democracies depend.

I suppose K is just adding to what President Bush said about oil on January 10:

President Bush (1/10/07):

The consequences of failure are clear: Radical Islamic extremists would grow in strength and gain new recruits. They would be in a better position to topple moderate governments, create chaos in the region, and use oil revenues to fund their ambitions.

Kissinger paints a fuller picture. US troops are not just holding the line against a ``failure'' where the wrong people then get oil revenue. The troops are really the last line protecting the entire way of life of the ``industrial democracies,'' indeed an entire economic system of exploitation and profit.

Sure, the US has enemies in this regard. But there has to be a better solution than endless war.

Axis of oil

Coming to their senses on energy; the US is ``in deep, deep trouble''

This story by Richard Bell, Communications Director for the Post Carbon Institute, on the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources recent hearing about ``The Geopolitics of Oil'' is worth noting. Bell reports,

There appeared to be a genuine sense that some members really were surprised at how bad things look for the U.S. The shock was so great that after declaring himself a ``free-market conservative,'' Republican Jeff Sessions (R-AL) concluded the session by admitting that if you looked at energy as a national security issue rather than as a market commodity, Congress might be justified in spending more money on energy R&D and tax credits.

The focus of the testimony was on oil in the transportation sector, which will be responsible for most of the predicted increase in demand over the next two decades. Dr. Fatih Birol described this dependence on oil in the auto, truck, and plane sectors as ``the Achilles heel'' of the energy problem.

Linda Stuntz, who participated in a Council of Foreign Relations report last fall on ``National Security Consequences of U.S. Oil Dependency,'' stunned the Senators when she said that there was consensus among the report's authors that talking about ``energy independence'' for the United States was chasing an impossible dream. Stuntz said that it was not clear whether the U.S. could achieve energy independence even with the most ``draconian'' government interventions. Dr. Flynt Leverett from the New America Foundation echoed Stuntz's analysis:

``…there is no economically plausible scenario for a strategically meaningful reduction in the dependence of the United States and its allies on imported hydrocarbons during the next quarter century.''

Reminds me of what John Howe said last summer about the energy alternatives people often bandy about as solutions to the energy crisis in his Good Life Center program on peacecast.us, ``You have to put numbers on these delusions.''

It appears the witnesses at this hearing have crunched those numbers. World oil intensity of 85 million barrels per day, with the US consuming 1/4 of that, will be extremely difficult to grow, or even maintain within a few years.

A whole lot of Americans, myself included, are sleepwalking into the energy future. We haven't even begun to see it hit the fan yet. But when it does, the times will be surprising.

Worry

Washington hands nervous on Bush Iran/Syria war signals;
Olbermann: ``Simply, it is madness''


Brzezinski on the Thursday PBS News Hour

President Jimmy Carter's national security adviser fears that the White House and Pentagon are setting Iran and Syria up to take the blame for America's failure in Iraq.

ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: And this is what really worries me. There are hints in the president's speech and in Rice's testimony today about the possibility of escalation, not necessarily in the number of troops, but in the range of the military operations, namely perhaps against Syria or Iran.

And the incident with the Iranian consulate, the rhetoric about Iran, the increasing temptation to blame our failure on the Iranians and the Syrians could push us in that direction. And there are a lot of people still around here, particularly the neocons, who would like us to have a crack at Iran.

The Washington Note has much more, taking off on the president's promise that ``we will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq'':

Washington intelligence, military and foreign policy circles are abuzz today with speculation that the President, yesterday or in recent days, sent a secret Executive Order to the Secretary of Defense and to the Director of the CIA to launch military operations against Syria and Iran....

Some are suggesting that the Consulate raid may have been designed to try and prompt a military response from Iran -- to generate a casus belli for further American action.

If this is the case, the debate about adding four brigades to Iraq is pathetic. The situation will get even hotter than it now is, worsening the American position and exposing the fact that to fight Iran both within the borders of Iraq and into Iranian territory, there are not enough troops in the theatre.

Bush may really have pushed the escalation pedal more than any of us realize.

This Bush has a way of turning everything crazy, making a pit in the stomach that won't go away.

Bush declares bigger, wider war

After president's laundry list of escalations, Democrats reinforce despicable theme of the ``ungrateful'' Iraqis

This is how Bush will spend thousands more lives in his ``surge'':

Counter-terror operations against Al Qaeda and insurgent organizations; troops will have ``wider authority'' to ``pursue extremists'' while ``going door-to-door to gain the trust of Baghdad residents''

Iran and Syria are interfering in Iraq so he will ``disrupt'' this meddling -- thus making a grave threat to these countries

He will chasten Iran with a new carrier battle group he has ordered to the Gulf

In previous failed surges, Bush said there ``weren't enough troops'', and they had ``too many restrictions.'' What does this mean? Will there be more mayhem, more bombardment, more homes smashed in by those ``door-to-door'' raids, and more detention, torture, and killing now than before?

The rationale Bush is using remains the same: failure in Iraq would mean ``disaster'' -- historical failure leading to the end of America under a future assault from terrorists who would base there. The irony is lost. What extremely violent operation is based there now? Who has threatened Iraq's neighbors, possibly with nuclear war?

And the mis-identification of the ``enemy'' being fought remains. Bush says the ``terrorists and insurgents'' cause ``political and sectarian interference''. They just keep coming back when the troops are gone. He speaks of the ``local population'' as if it is something different than the people his forces are killing. In fact, the US attacks are killing everybody, and therein lies the catalyst for the violence to escalate.

Durbin's response feels pathetic to me, and highly condescending to the Iraqi people. We've given them so much, everything they wanted, we dug their dictator ``out of a hole.'' Now, we won't be Iraq's ``911''. What does this say? That the Iraqis enjoy the occupation of their country? Sure, the quislings installed in the Iraqi government are propped up by the American military. But it is a remarkable conceit for Durbin to suggest the big punishment the Iraqi public fears is to see the backs of the Americans.

Bangor activists sentenced to jail

Snowe, Collins not moderate on Iraq


Sign at Olympia Snowe's office in Bangor, 9/21/2006 (Eric T. Olson photo)

Let me be very clear about so-called Maine ``moderate'' Republican Senators Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins: Up to now they have been absolutely terrible leaders on Iraq. They have both been part and parcel in helping President Bush lead America in the disastrous war in Iraq. Archive postings making the cases against our war-loving senators are here, here, and here.

Today, several Maine activists finished a 24-hour sentence for the September 21, 2006 protest that Doug Allen described in his piece, reproduced in the previous post. The Bangor Daily News reported some details in this story:

Six anti-war activists got their wish Tuesday when a district court judge sentenced them to 24 hours in the Penobscot County Jail rather than ordering them to pay a $200 fine as prosecutors originally recommended.

Judge David B. Griffiths also ordered the six to reimburse the county $80, the maximum allowed by law, toward the more than $90 per day cost of housing them at the jail.

The jailed protesters, along with five others, were arrested in September at U.S. Sen. Olympia Snowe’s Bangor office. Four of the 11 agreed to pay the $200 fine, while one woman served her 24-hour jail sentence in December.

"We chose to engage in nonviolent civil disobedience in the tradition of Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi, who felt civil disobedience was necessary when elected representatives fail to act to stop extreme injustice," Douglas Allen, 65, of Orono told the court. "We are willing to face the consequences of our action with the hope that others will take whatever steps they can to put an end to the occupation of Iraq and bring our troops home safely."

Allen and the others were arrested on Sept. 21 and charged with criminal trespass for refusing to leave Snowe’s third-floor offices and hallway at One Cumberland Place when asked to do so by the building’s owner and the police.

There is no greater gift we could give our troops, and the Iraqi people, than to bring our troops home. That's why the protesters at Sen. Snowe's office are so important -- to let her know that her policies and those of her president are wrong -- and in a way that calls attention to her failures after she has ignored this majority position for so many years, and after the loss of so many lives.

Nonviolent civil disobedience and Iraq

Guest writer Doug Allen invokes spirits of King & Gandhi in effort to stop this disastrous war


Doug Allen is led out of Senator Olympia Snowe's office by Bangor police

On Sept. 21, 2006, International Day of Peace, 11 of us were arrested for refusing to leave Sen. Olympia Snowe’s office. She, along with Sen. Susan Collins, has consistently voted to support and fund the Bush administration’s Iraq war and occupation, and she was unwilling to pledge to work for a speedy end to the war in Iraq by endorsing the national Declaration of Peace.

We preferred not to face arrest. With the overwhelming majority of Mainers opposing the war, we hoped that Snowe might represent the views of her constituency and perhaps take a desperately needed leadership role in ending this illegal, immoral, disastrous war.

We planned our action of nonviolent civil disobedience in the tradition of Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi. Our court date for sentencing, Jan. 9, is just before Martin Luther King Jr. Day and should remind us of King’s true activist commitment to peace and justice.

For more than three years, even well before the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, we assembled the facts. There was no imminent threat to the United States. Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. Saddam Hussein and Iraq had no ties with Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida. Iraq had no connection with the terrorist attacks of 9-11. The Bush administration’s policies leading up to the invasion and then justifying the occupation of Iraq were based on the manipulation and distortion of U.S. intelligence information and other data and involved blatant lies told to the American public.

In short, we assembled the facts that clearly show that U.S. political and corporate policies have resulted in an illegal, immoral and unjust war and occupation of Iraq. Our direct action was the next step after assembling the facts, sharing information, phone calls, petitions, letters, office visits, rallies, calls for town meeting, and arrests of others for acts of nonviolent civil disobedience.

Following the Gandhi-King model, civil disobedience must be carried out upholding the following three criteria. First, direct action is done openly. The police, authorities, media and others know ahead of time what may occur so they can prepare to handle the action in a calm, orderly manner. The main point is to minimize any potential for violence. In addition, when one takes such a dramatic action openly, it increases possibilities for discussion and engaging others about the injustices of the Iraq war that gave rise to the action.

Second, direct action is done lovingly. Gandhi equates hatred with violence. One undertakes action with a spirit of love, compassion and nonviolence. You keep open the possibility for reconciliation with those opposing the action. However, this nonviolent action is not passive. You are determined to be active in exposing, resisting and overcoming the injustice.

Third, those committing the nonviolent civil disobedience are willing to accept the consequences. Even if such punishment seems unjust, this shows that you are well intentioned, and this directs attention to the injustice that must be removed. In addition, you show that you are willing to accept suffering rather than inflicting suffering on others. As Gandhi and King repeatedly assert, such a position can be educational and transformative in motivating others to struggle against injustice.

I accept a basic teaching in the ancient Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita, that inaction or nonaction is an action and has consequences. This applies to us today with regard to the Iraq war and occupation, as well as other examples of imperialism and militarism, class exploitation, racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, domestic violence, environmental devastation, and concern for family and neighbors. Through our nonviolent civil disobedience, we affirmed that inaction is an action and has disastrous consequences. We must resist and not be complicit. We must send a clear message: Not in our name. Nonviolent civil disobedience can be one of many ways not to be complicit, to send such an antiwar peace message, and to build a peace and justice movement

Previously those arrested for nonviolent civil disobedience for the first time had been sentenced to community service. We felt by performing community service we would be able to contribute in a positive way to our community. However, it now appears that that will not be an option, and we are willing to accept sentences of jail time and fines. We still hope Collins and Snowe will work with us to end the Iraq war and occupation, bring our troops home, and redirect resources from war to reconstruction of Iraq and to providing health care, education, good jobs, and real security in Maine.

If our nonviolent civil disobedience is effective, it will be one part of building an antiwar, peace and justice movement. If we are effective, it will be because others will be motivated to join us in doing more to stop the death, suffering and destruction. Nonviolent civil disobedience is not for everyone. It should be a small part of antiwar actions to end the war.

In building a larger and more effective peace and justice movement, we can share information, speak with others, write letters, make phone calls, sign petitions, and help publicize actions. We can support current impeachment campaigns. We can help organize the major demonstration of our concern for the human and financial costs of war planned for March l7, the fourth anniversary of the Shock and Awe bombing of Iraq. We can join or support antiwar, peace and justice groups that focus on war, violence, human rights abuses, class exploitation, racism, sexism and environmental destruction.

Doug Allen is education coordinator of the Peace and Justice Center of Eastern Maine.

Note: This post first appeared as an op-ed in the Bangor Daily News for January 9, 2007.

Sacrifice, why?

For the madmen in the White House, it was and is about exchanging blood for oil


Olbermann on target

Today a story at the BBC says that the big, shiny, new Iraq strategy President Bush is set to announce next week will have ``sacrifice'' as its ``central theme.'' The BBC has been told that the strategy ``involves increasing troop numbers.''

Keith Olbermann at MSNBC tonight took a good, solid anti-war shot at Mr. Bush's new lunacies:

If in your presence an individual tried to sacrifice an American serviceman or woman, would you intervene? Would you at least protest? What if he had already sacrificed 3,003 of them? What if he had already sacrificed 3,003 of them — and was then to announce his intention to sacrifice hundreds, maybe thousands, more?

...

[Your] simplistic logic ignores the inescapable fact that we have indeed already show[n] weakness to the enemy, and to the terrorists. We have shown them that we will let our own people be killed for no good reason. We have now shown them that we will continue to do so. We have shown them our stupidity. Mr. Bush, your judgment about Iraq — and now about ``sacrifice'' — is at variance with your people's, to the point of delusion.

...

Sacrifice, Mr. Bush? No, sir, this is not ``sacrifice.'' This has now become ``human sacrifice.''

And it must stop. And you can stop it... Our meaningless sacrifice in Iraq must stop.

And you must stop it.

All the stuff I skipped in the middle is just as solid. Olbermann does grope a bit to explain why, despite the total failure of use of force in Iraq, the president now would wish seemingly senselessly to want to escalate and compound the sacrifices already made.

Olbermann comes up with two pithy observations that do get near the acutual reasons of empire behind the tenacious US death grip: (1) Iraq inures America to far-away conflict and the deaths of young Americans for reasons presented as ``too complicated to be interpreted except in terms of the very important-sounding but ultimately meaningless phrase `the war on terror,''' and (2) Iraq is about war profiteering.

I'd go farther than Olbermann does: Iraq is a strategic asset that neither Bush, nor Cheney, nor even most Democrats want to see ``lost'' if the US can't hang onto it. The General Union of Oil Employees in Basra, Iraq understand this all too well. Recently they issued a call to halt approval of the new oil law that would give total control--everything except actual title to the fields--to the US-connected multinational oil corporations (see here for explanation). This worker group explains exactly the nature of American interests in Iraq. Here is just one point from the longer statement:

For example, through production sharing agreements these companies shall not be subject to the Iraqi courts in the event of any dispute, nor to the general audit, nor to democratic control. The proprietorship of the oil reserves under this draft law will remain with the State in form, but not in substance.

This means that the occupier seeks and wishes to secure themselves energy resources at a time when the Iraqi people are seeking to determine their own future while still under conditions of occupation....

The biggest disaster is that there will be an excuse and a pretext for the occupier to extend the stay of the occupying forces in Iraq to protect the foreign oil companies.

Ahhh.... There you have it. Bush's escalation is intended to enable more than just a continuation of war profiteering, which it will. It is a security force to be used for enforecement of the oil law, and therefore protection of the strategic asset the war planners have be after all along.

Friday Garden Blogging

Dry and cold


Snowless

The big change this week is it's gotten cold, sort of (-11C overnight, -7C during the day). This is almost laughable, considering -10C ``cold'' for this time of year. Where is the -20C or -30C that we should be getting by now?

In other news, Friday Garden Blogging is now on hiatus until there is some pretty snow on a Friday.

US dead in Iraq exceeds 9/11 total

15 Saudis and no Iraqis were among the hijackers

President Bush has now sent more Americans to their deaths in Iraq than were killed in the 9/11 attacks. With seven more reported today, the toll is now 2,978, five more US deaths than on 9/11.

This FBI list of the 9/11 hijackers contains no one from Iraq. Yet the likely number of Iraqis killed as a direct result of the invasion and occupation of their country under the command of President Bush is over 600,000.

Friday Garden Blogging

Winter solstice


Dusk at 3:45pm


Outdoor laundry on winter solstice?


Seen in the neighborhood, reindeer family

I love the long shadow from the clothesline pole at noontime. It is quite notable that this year we have no snow on the first full day of winter. A pretty good rainstorm is due tomorrow, after several days of near-picnic weather.