http://www.infoshop.org/inews/stories.php?story=03/06/01/6134520
The Troops Are Afraid To Go Out At Night
by Robert Fisk
The Independent
May 31, 2003
I was travelling into the Shia Muslim Iraqi city of Nasiriyah on Friday
evening when three American soldiers jumped in front of my car. "Stop the
car, stop the car!" one of them shouted, waving a pistol at the
windscreen. I screamed at the driver to stop. He hadn't seen them step
into the road. Nor had I. Two other soldiers approached from the rear,
rifles pointed at our vehicle. I showed our identity passes and the
officer, wearing a floppy camouflage hat, was polite but short. "You
should have seen our checkpoint," he snapped, then added: "Have a good
stay in Nasiriyah but don't go out after dark. It's not safe."
What he meant, I think, was that it wasn't safe for American soldiers
after dark. Hours later, I went out in the streets of Nasiriyah for a
chicken burger and the Iraqis who served me in a run-down cafe couldn't
have been friendlier. There were the usual apologies for the dirt on the
table and the lack of paper napkins, along with the usual grimy square on
the wall where, just two months ago, a portrait of Saddam Hussein must
have been hanging. So what was going on? The "liberators" were already
entering the wilderness of occupation while our masters in London and
Washington were still braying about victory and courage and - here I quote
Tony Blair on the same day, addressing British troops 60 miles further
south in Basra - of how they "went on to try to make something of the
country you liberated".
Only a few hours earlier, one of Ahmed Chalabi's militiamen in Nasiriyah
had shouted at me that the Americans there were "humiliating" the people,
of how "they made a man crawl on all fours in front of his friends just
because they didn't obey their orders". There would be a revolt if this
went on, he warned.
Now I don't know if his story was true, and I have to say that every Shia
I spoke to in Nasiriyah spoke warmly of the British soldiers further
south, but something has already gone terribly wrong. Even the local
museum guard who had earlier been travelling in my car had spoken of oil
as the only reason for the war. "One hundred days of Saddam were better
than a day of the Americans," he roared at me.
I don't think that's true - the Americans weren't slaughtering this man's
fellow Shias by the tens of thousands as Saddam did 12 years ago - but
it's a new "truth" that is being written here. Washington may hope that
the charnel-house of corpses now being dug out of the desert to the north
will provide a posthumous new reason for the recent conflict. "Now the
truth can be told... " But we knew that truth a long time ago, after
George Bush Senior called on these same poor people to fight Saddam and
then left them to be butchered.
"Saddam was a shame upon Iraq," one man told me as we stood beside more
than 400 skulls and bones in a school hall near Hillah. "But America let
them die."
In reality, the lies that took us to war in Iraq are slowly being stripped
away from the men who sent the American and British armies to Mesopotamia.
Mr Blair could turn up in Basra this week with his sub-Churchillian
rhetoric about "valour", with his talk of "bloodshed and real casualties"
and his sorrowful refrain for the British soldiers "who aren't going back
home". But who sent the British to die in Iraq? If they were "real
casualties", what happened to the weapons of mass destruction that were so
real when Mr Blair wanted to go to war but which seem to be so unreal the
moment the war is over?
Mr Blair says we'll still find them and we must be patient. But Donald
Rumsfeld, the US Secretary of Defence, tells us they may not have existed
when the war began. The domestic repercussions of all this continue in
London and Washington, but the reaction in Iraq is far more ominous. New
graffiti on the wall of the slums of Baghdad's Sadr City (formerly Saddam
City) which I saw on Wednesday tells its own story. "Threaten the
Americans with suicide killings," it said bleakly.
It isn't difficult to see how this anger is building. The road from
Nasiriyah to Baghdad is no longer safe at night. Robbers prowl the highway
just as they slink through the streets of Baghdad. And I note an odd
symmetry in all this. Under the hateful Taliban, you could drive across
Afghanistan, day or night. Now you can't move after dark for fear of
theft, killing or rape. Under the hateful Saddam, you could drive across
most of Iraq without danger, day or night. Now you can't. American
"liberation" has become synonymous with anarchy.
Then there's the confetti of daily newspapers appearing on the pavements
of Baghdad which tell their readers of America's business earnings from
this war. Iraq's airports are for auction, management of the port of Umm
Qasr has been grabbed for $ 8.4m (pounds 5m) by a US company, one of whose
lobbyists just happens to have been President George Bush's deputy
assistant when he was governor of Texas. Halliburton, Vice President Dick
Cheney's old company, has major contracts to extinguish oil fires in Iraq,
build US bases in Kuwait and transport British tanks. The most likely
giant to hoover up the reconstruction contracts in Iraq is the Bechtel
corporation whose senior vice president, retired general Jack Sheehan,
serves on President Bush's defence policy board. This is the same Bechtel
which - according to Iraq's pre-war arms submission to the UN, which
Washington quickly censored - once helped Saddam build a plant for
manufacturing ethylene, which can be used in the making of mustard gas. On
the board of Bechtel sits former secretary of state George Schultz, who
again just happens to be chairman of the advisory board of the Committee
for the Liberation of Iraq which has, of course, close links to the White
House. Iraqi reconstruction is likely to cost $ 100bn which - and this is
the beauty of it - will be paid for by the Iraqis from their own future
oil revenues, which in turn will benefit the US oil companies.
All this the Iraqis are well aware of. So when they see, as I do, the
great American military convoys humming along Saddam's motorways south and
west of Baghdad, what do they think? Do they reflect, for example, upon
Tom Friedman's latest essay in The New York Times, in which the columnist
(blaming Saddam for poverty with no mention of 13 years of US-backed UN
sanctions) announces: "The Best Thing About This Poverty: Iraqis are so
beaten down that a vast majority clearly seem ready to give the Americans
a chance to make this a better place."
I am awed by this and other "expert" comments from the US East Coast
intelligentsia. Because it sounds to me, watching America's awesome
control over this part of the world, its massive firepower, bases and
personnel across Europe, the Balkans, Turkey, Jordan, Kuwait, Iraq,
Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Bahrain, Doha, Oman, Yemen and
Israel, that this is not just about oil but about the projection of global
power by a nation which really does have weapons of mass destruction. No
wonder that soldier told me not to go out after dark. He was right. It's
no longer safe. And it's going to get much worse.
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Subject: [pjnews] The lies that led us into war
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Independent-UK
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/story.jsp?story=411300
The lies that led us into war ...
Glen Rangwala shows how the UK and the US manipulated UN reports - and
conjured an anthrax dump from thin air
01 June 2003
One key tactic of the British and United States governments in their
campaign on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction was to talk up
suspicions and to portray possibility as fact. The clearest example was
the quotation and misquotation of the reports of United Nations weapons
inspectors.
Iraq claimed it had destroyed all its prohibited weapons, either
unilaterally or in co-operation with the inspectors, between 1991 and
1994. Although the inspectors were able to verify that unilateral
destruction took place on a large scale, they were not able to quantify
the amounts destroyed.
For example, they were able to detect that anthrax growth media had been
burnt and buried in bulk at a site next to the production facility at
al-Hakam. There was no way - and there never will be - to tell from the
soil samples the amount destroyed. As a result, UN inspectors recorded
this material as unaccounted for: neither verified destroyed nor believed
to still exist.
Translated into statements by the British and US governments, it became
part of "stockpiles" that they claimed Iraq was hiding from the
inspectors. Both governments knew UN inspectors had not found any nuclear,
chemical or biological weapons in Iraq since at least 1994, aside from a
dozen abandoned mustard shells, and that the vast majority of any weapons
produced before 1991 would have degraded to the point of uselessness
within 10 years.
Even the most high-profile defector from Iraq - Hussein Kamel, Saddam
Hussein's son-in-law and director of Iraq's weapons programmes - told UN
inspectors and British intelligence agencies in 1995 that Iraq had no more
prohibited weapons. And yet Britain's dossier last September repeated the
false claim that information "in the public domain from UN reports ...
points clearly to Iraq's continuing possession, after 1991, of chemical
and biological agents and weapons produced before the Gulf War".
There is no UN report after 1994 that claims that Iraq continued to
possess weapons of mass destruction. This was well known in intelligence
circles. That such a claim could appear in a purported intelligence
document is a clear sign that the information was "pumped up" for
political purposes, to support the case for an invasion.
The Government began to resort to more direct misquotation in the
immediate prelude to war, with UN chief inspector Hans Blix reporting on 7
March that Iraq was taking "numerous initiatives ... with a view to
resolving long-standing open disarmament issues", and that this "can be
seen as 'active', or even 'proactive' co-operation".
In response, Mr Blair and Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, seized on the
Unmovic working document of 6 March entitled "Unresolved Disarmament
Issues",about matters that are still unclear. Although Mr Blix
acknowledged Iraqi efforts to resolve these questions, the Prime Minister
and Foreign Secretary repeatedly claimed that the document showed Iraq
still had prohibited weapons, a claim the report never made. They relied
on the presumption - probably accurate - that few MPs would have time to
go through its 173 pages, and would accept the Government's misleading
précis.
Mr Blair quoted from the report in his speech to the Commons two days
before the war began, to the effect that Iraq "had had far-reaching plans
to weaponise" the deadly nerve agent VX. Note the tense: that quotation
was from a "background" section of the report, on Iraq's policy before
1991.
US and British leaders repeatedly referred to the UN inspectors' estimate
that Iraq produced 1.5 tonnes of VX before 1990. But in March Unmovic
reported that Iraq's production method created nerve agent that lasted
only six to eight weeks. Mr Blair's "evidence" was about a substance the
inspectors consider to have been no threat since early 1991. The Prime
Minister didn't mention that.
Glen Rangwala is a lecturer in politics at Newnham College, Cambridge
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Subject: [pjnews] Action: Roll Back the FCC's Rule Changes
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Moveon.org
Tell your Senators to overturn the FCC's bad decision. Go to:
http://www.truemajority.org/ctt.asp?u=184283&l=15
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting
Media analysis, critiques and activism
ACTION ALERT:
Roll Back the FCC's Rule Changes
June 18, 2003
Over the protests of hundreds of thousands of Americans, a range of public
interest advocacy groups and two dissenting Democratic commissioners, the
FCC on June 2 voted to repeal or weaken some of the few remaining checks
on the dominance of big media companies. Attention now moves to Congress,
as a number of lawmakers attempt to roll back at least some of the
changes, some of which now appear to be more drastic than previously
reported.
For instance, most media outlets have reported that under the FCC's new
rules, a single company can now own TV stations that reach 45 percent of
U.S. households, up from 35 percent. Because of a little-reported
loophole, however, a single company could actually reach far more people--
in theory, as much as 90 percent of U.S. viewers (New York Times,
5/13/03).
The loophole, known as the "UHF discount," exists because of a 1980s
regulation that requires the FCC to count every two viewers of a UHF
station (TV channels 14 and above) as one viewer As explained by the New
York Times' Stephen Labaton (5/13/03), one of the few journalists to
report on the "discount," the provision was passed at a time when people
relied on broadcast TV "and had to use special equipment like antennas
that resembled rabbit ears to pick up UHF stations. Today, about 85
percent of viewers use paid services from cable and satellite providers,
rendering the distinction between VHF and UHF largely a relic."
The commission also eliminated, in all but the smallest markets, the ban
on cross-ownership of newspapers and broadcast outlets, meaning that
communities that are already "one-paper towns" (and that's most
communities in the country) could now see one company own that paper plus
the top TV station, too. Local TV ownership rules were weakened as well,
so that one company may own as many as three stations in the largest
markets, and two in many smaller markets.
Critics-- including FAIR-- contended that the changes will decrease
diversity and localism in media, but the FCC's Republican majority made
little effort to address such concerns. FCC chair Michael Powell dismissed
as "garbage" the idea that the public was insufficiently informed about
the decisions, despite the fact that a February poll showed that some 70
percent of the public knew "nothing at all" about them.
The FCC received an estimated 750,000 comments from the public, which,
according to Commissioner Michael Copps, ran "99.9 percent" opposed. Yet
Powell claims that a "silent majority" of Americans support the
deregulation that, in the words of Sen. Ron Wyden (D.-Ore.), "rings the
dinner bell for conglomerates to make a meal out of media outlets."
The FCC's actions also met criticism from both parties in Congress.
Senators Ernest Hollings (D.-S.C.) and Ted Stevens (R.-Alaska) are
cosponsoring a bill (S.1046) to return the TV ownership cap to 35 percent,
and Sen. Byron Dorgan (D.-N.D.) hopes to add an amendment that would undo
the new rules on cross-ownership of newspapers and broadcast outlets. The
Commerce Committee, chaired by John McCain, will decide whether to support
the Hollings-Stevens bill on June 19.
In the House, Rep. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has gone further, proposing the
"Protect Diversity in Media Act" (H.R. 2462), which would rescind all of
the new rules made by the FCC, and prohibit the Commission from conducting
any more of the biennial reviews of broadcast media ownership rules that
were mandated under the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
Corporate broadcast media outlets lobbied hard for the recent
deregulation, but did a poor job of informing the public about it.
Research by FAIR showed only a tiny handful of TV stories, most of them in
the week preceding the FCC's vote (Media Advisory, 5/30/03). As the battle
moves to Congress, media will have another chance to cover these issues so
vital to democracy.
ACTION: Please contact media outlets, including the nightly network
newscasts, to encourage them to cover the ongoing efforts to reverse the
FCC's rule changes.
ABC World News Tonight
Phone: 212-456-4040
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CBS Evening News
Phone: 212-975-3691
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NBC Nightly News
Phone: 212-664-4971
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
CONTACT CONGRESS: Write to your representatives in support of the
Hollings-Stevens bill and Sanders's "Protect Diversity in Media Act."
To write to the Senate about the Hollings-Stevens bill, you can use the
web form that Common Cause has set up to make the process easier:
http://causenet.commoncause.org/afr/issues/alert/?alertid=2555996&type=CO
To write to Congress about the Sanders Act, you can look up your
representative and their contact info on Congress's own web page:
http://www.house.gov/
As always, please remember that your comments are taken more seriously if
you maintain a polite tone. Please cc [EMAIL PROTECTED] with your
correspondence.
----------
To make a donation to FAIR:
http://www.fair.org/donate.html
Please support FAIR by subscribing to our bimonthly magazine, Extra! For
more information, go to: http://www.fair.org/extra/subscribe.html . Or call
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FAIR SHIRTS: Get your "Don't Trust the Corporate Media" shirt today at
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FAIR produces CounterSpin, a weekly radio show heard on over 130 stations
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http://www.fair.org/counterspin/stations.html .
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Subject: [pjnews] Senate inquiry into how case for war was made
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US Senate inquiry into how case for war was made
Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington
Tuesday June 3, 2003
The Guardian
The Bush administration faces a major test of its credibility from a Senate
committee investigation into whether officials misused intelligence to
make the case for a war on Iraq.
With US forces in Iraq unable to produce clear evidence of an active threat
from Saddam Hussein's nuclear, chemical or biological weapons programmes,
the televised hearings will represent the most serious examination so far
of how prewar statements on Iraq failed to live up to postwar reality.
The investigation could begin later this month, Senator John Warner, the
Republican head of the the armed services committee, said.
Administration officials are embarking on new explanations for why US forces
have been unable to find evidence of deadly weapons at known sites, amid
growing public unease about recent statements from the Pentagon and CIA that
Saddam's arsenal may never be found.
"People are challenging the credibility of the use of this intelligence, and
particularly its use by the president, the secretaries of state and defence,
the CIA director and others," Mr Warner told USA Today.
The investigation is expected to review public statements from senior
officials about Saddam's weapons programmes as well as the intelligence
reports which formed the basis for their comments.
"If we don't find these weapons of mass destruction, it will represent a
serious intelligence failure or the manipulation of that intelligence to
keep the American people in the dark," said the Democratic senator Bob
Graham, the former chairman of the intelligence panel and a presidential
candidate.
That could prove uncomfortable for the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld,
and the CIA director, George Tenet, who appeared before Mr Warner's
committee in February, confident of finding evidence of Saddam's
prohibited arsenal.
The Senate scrutiny will be seen as vindication by analysts at the CIA who
have become increasingly public with their dismay at how their findings
were
projected by administration officials.
Washington received qualified backing in a report from Hans Blix, the
chief UN weapons inspector, who said Iraq had not accounted for stocks of
anthrax and had failed to declare what appeared to be mobile biological
arms laboratories.
The Australian defence minister, Robert Hill, has indicated that crucial
intelligence information about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction may have
been flawed.
"On the basis of what we understood, the action was the right action to
take," Mr Hill told the Sydney Morning Herald. "If it turns out there were
flaws in what we understood, then I think we ought to say there were
flaws. But it's too early to say that."
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Subject: [pjnews] A Face for the Faceless
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http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=15865
In These Times
May 9, 2003
A Face for the Faceless
By J. D. Lloyd
While a few of those detained under the provisions of the October 2001 USA
Patriot Act have been naturalized U.S. citizens, most have been immigrants
with green cards or here on work or student visas. One such faceless
person is Kuwaitee national Hasan Hasan.
After emigrating to the United States in 1996 to study English at
California State University in Long Beach, California, Hasan immersed
himself in campus, civic and left-leaning political affairs. At the same
time, Hasan also completed a Master’s degree in mathematics and began to
teach the subject as an adjunct instructor.
Did you experience any anti-Muslim sentiment after the attacks of
September 11, 2001?
Actually, I found many people were nicer to me than usual, because they
thought I was going through a difficult time. I didn’t fear as much as
many people from the Middle East and from Asia who limited their movements
and stayed in their houses most of the time. I didn’t think I would be
hurt. I felt very positive, and I thought that the law enforcement
agencies were for me. I didn’t think that one day they would be used to
oppress many American citizens, or American residents, or immigrants who
are from foreign regions.
You were arrested and detained for two periods, for over three months
combined. What happened when you were arrested the first time, in April
2002?
I was in my classroom at Cerritos College teaching mathematics. The dean
entered my classroom and asked me to see him after class. When I went to
the dean’s office, he seemed very uncomfortable. He was mumbling a
lot—very apologetic. He said, “I don’t know how to put it for you. I am
just a messenger.” He told me I was one of the best instructors he had,
that I had done all the paperwork he asked and he had received no
complaints whatsoever about me. Then he said, “I am very sorry, but I need
you to turn over the keys right now and leave.” I asked him at least to
give me a reason, but he said, “No reason was given; I am just following
orders.” I told him it was a critical time for the students because they
had an exam the day after next. I asked that he at least wait two days,
but he said, “Sorry, I can’t.”
I turned my keys over to him, shook his hand and left. Outside the door of
the dean’s office, two cops from Cerritos College were waiting for me.
They escorted me to the exit of the division building, where two more cops
from the Long Beach Police Department were standing. One of the Long Beach
cops told me, “Put your hands behind your ass and spread your legs.” Then
they handcuffed me and led me to the parking lot.
The police never read you your Miranda rights?
No, not at all. [An INS agent] told me I was under arrest. When I told her
that I had a work visa valid until December 2002, she said that I was
violating my work visa because I was not working. “I just came out of my
classroom,” I said. The agent told me, “You were working till an hour ago,
but now you are not.”
They kept me for a day in the Long Beach jail, and the next day I was
transferred to the L.A. County Jail. After spending a day there, I was
taken to the Mira Loma Detention Center in Lancaster. So, one day I was
teaching mathematics at Cerritos College, and the next thing I knew I was
in INS custody in Lancaster.
You met other detainees at Mira Loma who had a more difficult time than you.
Yes. One such prisoner was Gary LeMaitre, an Arab-Armenian and Canadian.
He is about 50 years old. He is a lawyer. He has lived in the U.S. for the
last 15 years. He is married to an American woman, and he has three
American daughters. He went to the INS, accompanied by his wife, to
receive his green card. The employee asked him to step outside for five
minutes. While waiting outside the office, four cops appeared and arrested
him. When he protested, they insulted him in front of his wife. He had
been at Mira Loma for almost eight months when I met him. He was there
without any charge and without a court date.
What was it like there?
When I first arrived at the check-in desk, there was an Armenian gentleman
sitting next to me. The handcuffs were hurting him unbearably. An officer
asked me to act as a translator between him and the Armenian. He clearly
didn’t know the difference between an Armenian and an Arab, and that we
speak different languages.
What happened the second time you were arrested?
When the Long Beach police and the FBI came to arrest me on June 6, they
questioned me especially about three paintings. One of them had tall
buildings and lightning from the sky, and they asked me, “Is this New
York, and does lightning mean attack from the air?” I said that this is a
new interpretation I never thought of, even though I made this painting
four or five years ago.
Then they went to another painting which had an island within a lake or a
river, and some buildings across from the canal, and they told me, “This
seems kind of like Ellis Island. But we don’t see the Statue of Liberty.
Are you planning to blow up the Statue of Liberty? Is this a kind of
future projection?”
There was a third painting of a power plant. They asked me, “Is it the one
in San Pedro?” And I said, “Actually, it is the one down in Long Beach on
Pacific Coast Highway. It was part of a project in which you go outside
and choose any building and you draw it.”
I had many other paintings, nudes, modern, and so on, but they didn’t pay
attention to those. Many of my friends, when I came out of jail, were
joking with me. They said, “Hasan, from now on, just hang nudes and modern
paintings only. So you won’t have this problem again.”
When you went to hearings and your attorneys made discovery motions—for
example, to find out why you were being detained and what the basis of
your charge was—the government initially would not disclose that
information. Eventually you learned, through your attorney, that you’d
been charged with making terrorist threats. What was the basis of those
threats?
They came from my roommate. He was an immigrant also, and I was letting
him live with me as a favor to a friend. About a month after my first
arrest, I evicted him. He was beating his girlfriend and causing problems
with the neighbors, so I changed the locks and moved his possessions out
onto the sidewalk. When he found his things outside, he called the police.
He told them that I had threatened his life and that I was a terrorist—a
member of the Fatah group from Kuwait. He was making up stories because he
was angry. I never threatened him; I gave him a place to live for seven
months. And the Fatah is actually part of the Palestine Liberation
Organization.
Although the average American citizen may have treated you well, the
authorities have not. How do you feel about that?
I fear that these authorities will not hesitate in the future to expand
their campaigns to include all categories or slices of the society,
regardless of color or origin. Maybe they will start with foreigners on
visa from certain countries. Then maybe they will expand to the people who
have green cards from certain countries. Then maybe they will move to
American citizens who are originally from countries put on the blacklist
after 9/11. Then later on maybe they will include any American, white or
black or Latino, who has been seen hanging around with Middle Easterners,
or who has just spoken to someone who is Middle Eastern or Asian. So I
think the campaign will expand, will include everyone in the future. The
people who feel they are safe—it will come to them.
In the long run, you protect yourself by getting involved. But if you say
to yourself, “I don’t like politics, I don’t like to get involved, I want
my quiet life—home to work, work to home,” you will find nobody there to
stand for you when the police or authorities arrest you.
J.D. Lloyd is a freelance writer in Venice, California.
