Article on Venezuela poll

[ken hanly]

August 15, 2004

U.S. can redeem itself after Venezuelans vote

By Elliott Young
History News Service



 http://www.registerguard.com/news/2004/08/15/f1.ed.col.venezuela.0815.html




Venezuela will face the most important election in its history today. For
the first time, Venezuelans will vote on whether to recall their president.

The United States had better respond more responsibly than it did two years
ago.

In April 2002, the United States stunned the world by immediately
recognizing an illegal government installed after a military coup ousted the
constitutionally elected president, Hugo Chavez.

This time, the United States has the opportunity to support democracy and
allow the Venezuelan people to decide the fate of their country at the
ballot box.

 With heavy scrutiny from the Organization of American States, the Carter
Center, the European Union and thousands of international electoral
observers, there should be no question of the legitimacy of this referendum.

Therefore, there will be no grounds for the United States to reject its
outcome.

Both U.S. presidential candidates have made threatening remarks about
Chavez's supposedly authoritarian and undemocratic rule. John Kerry went so
far as to say that Chavez's close relationship with Cuba's Fidel Castro
``raised serious questions about his commitment to leading a truly
democratic country.''

The opposition-controlled media in Venezuela feed this sort of anachronistic
anti-communism with one-sided coverage. Yet the more relevant historical
analogy for Chavez's Venezuela would be Juan Peron's Argentina, a legacy
that Chavez himself frequently invokes.

In the middle of the 20th century, Latin American populists cultivated
highly personable styles of leadership while they nationalized key
industries, stressed independence from the United States and ultimately
strengthened capitalism in their countries that benefited labor unions and
workers.

Chavez's charismatic hold on the vast majority of poor Venezuelans and his
anti-Yankee rhetoric fit the populist profile.

Inheriting a state-owned oil industry at a time of record high oil prices
has enabled Chavez to pursue his ambitious social program of distributing
resources to the poor without having to expropriate private industry.

As long as oil prices remain high, Chavez may be able to have his cake and
eat it, too.

So why are members of the Venezuelan elite and significant sectors of the
middle classes apoplectic at the thought of Chavez finishing out his term in
office?

Anti-Chavistas point to corruption, crime and economic crisis to justify
their opposition, but crime and corruption are hardly new to Venezuela. And
a good part of Venezuela's economic decline, which has been turned around in
the last year, can be attributed to the three-month-long strike led by
oppositionists. These are the same people who supported the April 2002 coup
and who publicly declared their desire to topple the government by crippling
the economy.

The vehement opposition to Chavez by the Venezuelan elites is cultural as
well as economic. Put simply, they are embarrassed by their president. He's
a ``clown,'' he acts like a ``monkey,'' they complain, pointing to his
impromptu singing and folksy digressions on his six-hour weekly call-in
television program, ``Al Presidente.''

Labeling Chavez a monkey plays the race card, hinting that Chavez (who is
part Indian and part black) is distinct from the lily-white Venezuelan
elites. Historian Samuel Moncada, chair of the history department at the
Universidad Central de Venezuela, calls this the ``aesthetic opposition.''
As Moncada put it, ``The Venezuelan elites will simply not forgive Chavez
for breaking the cultural codes that distinguish them from the rest of
Venezuela,'' the darker-skinned 80 percent of the people who live in
poverty.

Like Peron's descamisados (shirtless ones), Chavez's supporters are mostly
poor and landless, the wretched of the earth. The passionate identification
of the poor with Chavez cannot be chalked up solely to rhetoric or populism;
he has produced results. Sixty thousand peasant families have received more
than 5.5 million acres of land, thousands of schools, health clinics and
low-income housing have been built, an ambitious literacy program has
graduated more than 1 million adults and higher education is being
democratized.

Venezuela is polarized today, as it has always been. On one side are the
rich who drive in caravans of SUVs with designer sunglasses, honking their
horns to get rid of Chavez. On the other side is a heterogeneous crowd of
loud and rambunctious Venezuelans, most too poor to afford cars, who seem
willing to lay down their very lives for their comandante. Most Chavez
supporters carry in their pockets a miniature edition of the new
constitution, a symbol they frequently brandish as if it were a weapon.

The most reliable polls predict that Chavez will win in the referendum, yet
the opposition has already begun to say that 

Over 6, 000 US wounded

[ken hanly]

Note that the post talks of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan both as the war
on terror!! At least Iraq is an occupation after an illegal invasion and
Afghanistan also involved the overthrow of a government and consequent
occupation but with more international junior imperialists than in Iraq at
most in the Afghan case the Taliban gave aid and comfort to terrorists.

Cheers, Ken Hanly

U.S. Military Wounded Numbers More Than 6,000, Wash. Post Says
Aug. 11 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. war on terrorism has wounded about 6,120
soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Washington Post said.

Many soldiers are treated at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington,
D.C., where doctors have seen 3,358 soldiers from Operation Iraqi Freedom,
including 741 battle casualties. The rest have suffered from non-combat
conditions ranging from heat exhaustion to road accidents, the Post said.

A spokesman for Walter Reed said the hospital spent $42.3 million in fiscal
2003 treating wounded soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan. In fiscal 2004,
the cost has been $37.1 million, and that is expected to rise, the Post
said.

(Washington Post 8-11 A1)

Re: Economics and law

[ken hanly]

Actually I dont think that the Pinto Case was one of a straightforward
cost-benefit analysis and didnt even include matters such as the cost of
lawsuits per se except perhaps indirectly since it included the cost of
human lives and of injuries. The human life values were themselves based
upon government figures.


- Original Message -
From: Kenneth Campbell [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Tuesday, August 10, 2004 11:05 AM
Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Economics and law


 Charles wrote:

 You are probably aware that many juries ( composed largely
 on North American workers) have given such high awards
 often that the rightwing has been carrying out tort
 reform for a while, whereby caps are put on the amounts.

 It was my understanding that many of these awards are severely reduced
 on the appellate level... which does not involved juries (hence people
 outside the law).

 There is a buffer there, too, no?

 (But you are right about the political agenda behind removing in the
 initial awards.)

 Left wing lawyers (Maurice Sugar and others) played a big
 role in developing products liability law.

 I do not currently know the development of product liability law. I
 would imagine it came out of the early 1900s in the US. If you have any
 more research, I would appreciate it. It would be helpful to put it in
 context.

 Ken.

 --
 The future is something which everyone reaches at
 the rate of 60 minutes an hour, whatever he does,
 whoever he is.
   -- C.S. Lewis

Re: Economics and law

[ken hanly]

I meant to incude this passage in the last message. Actually even less
costly improvements such as a bladder or a baffle in the gas tank would have
prevented most of the deaths and injuries. But even the original calculation
was not accurate as shown below. THere is nothing about legal costs either.

Cheers, Ken Hanly

http://www.fordpinto.com/blowup.htm
The financial analysis that Ford conducted on the Pinto concluded that it
was not cost-efficient to add an $11 per car cost in order to correct a
flaw. Benefits derived from spending this amount of money were estimated to
be $49.5 million. This estimate assumed that each death, which could be
avoided, would be worth $200,000, that each major burn injury that could be
avoided would be worth $67,000 and that an average repair cost of $700 per
car involved in a rear end accident would be avoided. It further assumed
that there would be 2,100 burned vehicles, 180 serious burn injuries, and
180 burn deaths in making this calculation. When the unit cost was spread
out over the number of cars and light trucks which would be affected by the
design change, at a cost of $11 per vehicle, the cost was calculated to be
$137 million, much greater then the $49.5 million benefit. These figures,
which describe the fatalities and injuries, are false. All independent
experts estimate that for each person who dies by an auto fire, many more
are left with charred hands, faces and limbs. This means that Fords 1:1
death to injury ratio is inaccurate and the costs for Fords settlements
would have been much closer to the cost of implementing a solution to the
problem. However, Fords cost-benefit analysis, which places a dollar
value on human life, said it wasn't profitable to make any changes to the
car.


- Original Message -
From: Kenneth Campbell [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Tuesday, August 10, 2004 11:05 AM
Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Economics and law


 Charles wrote:

 You are probably aware that many juries ( composed largely
 on North American workers) have given such high awards
 often that the rightwing has been carrying out tort
 reform for a while, whereby caps are put on the amounts.

 It was my understanding that many of these awards are severely reduced
 on the appellate level... which does not involved juries (hence people
 outside the law).

 There is a buffer there, too, no?

 (But you are right about the political agenda behind removing in the
 initial awards.)

 Left wing lawyers (Maurice Sugar and others) played a big
 role in developing products liability law.

 I do not currently know the development of product liability law. I
 would imagine it came out of the early 1900s in the US. If you have any
 more research, I would appreciate it. It would be helpful to put it in
 context.

 Ken.

 --
 The future is something which everyone reaches at
 the rate of 60 minutes an hour, whatever he does,
 whoever he is.
   -- C.S. Lewis

Re: Economics and law

[ken hanly]

I meant I do think that it is a straightforward case of cb
analysis...sorry.. By the way a Pinto built in Canada and tested by the govt
in Arizona passed a crash test. Seems that the later models were built a bit
differently in Canada with a baffle that cost about a buck that made a lot
of difference in crash impact.


Cheers, Ken Hanly

Cheers, Ken Hanly
- Original Message -
From: ken hanly [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Tuesday, August 10, 2004 11:46 AM
Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Economics and law


 Actually I dont think that the Pinto Case was one of a straightforward
 cost-benefit analysis and didnt even include matters such as the cost of
 lawsuits per se except perhaps indirectly since it included the cost of
 human lives and of injuries. The human life values were themselves based
 upon government figures.

The New School of the Americas

[ken hanly]

Apologies if this was posted earlier. It seems that renaming is regarded as
a good substitute for doing away with torture and repression.


Cheers, Ken Hanly

http://www.laweekly.com/ink/04/35/news-ireland.php

LA Weekly July 23 - 29, 2004

Teaching Torture

Congress quietly keeps School of the Americas alive

by Doug Ireland

Remember how congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle deplored the
torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib as un-American? Last Thursday, however,
the House quietly passed a renewed appropriation that keeps open the U.S.'s
most infamous torture-teaching institution, known as the School of the
Americas (SOA), where the illegal physical and psychological abuse of
prisoners of the kind the world condemned at Abu Ghraib and worse has been
routinely taught for years.

A relic of the Cold War, the SOA was originally set up to train military,
police and intelligence officers of U.S. allies south of the border in the
fight against insurgencies Washington labeled Communist. In reality, the
SOA's graduates have been the shock troops of political repression, propping
up a string of dictatorial and repressive regimes favored by the Pentagon.

The interrogation manuals long used at the SOA were made public in May by
the National Security Archive, an independent research group, and posted on
its Web site after they were declassified following Freedom of Information
Act requests by, among others, the Baltimore Sun. In releasing the manuals,
the NSA noted that they describe 'coercive techniques' such as those used
to mistreat the detainees at Abu Ghraib.

The Abu Ghraib torture techniques have been field-tested by SOA graduates -
seven of the U.S. Army interrogation manuals that were translated into
Spanish, used at the SOA's trainings and distributed to our allies, offered
instruction on torture, beatings and assassination. As Dr. Miles Schuman, a
physician with the Canadian Centre for Victims of Torture who has documented
torture cases and counseled their victims, graphically wrote in the May 14
Toronto Globe and Mail under the headline Abu Ghraib: The Rule, Not the
Exception:

The black hood covering the faces of naked prisoners in Abu Ghraib was
known as la capuchi in Guatemalan and Salvadoran torture chambers. The metal
bed frame to which the naked and hooded detainee was bound in a crucifix
position in Abu Ghraib was la cama, named for a former Chilean prisoner who
survived the U.S.-installed regime of General Augusto Pinochet. In her case,
electrodes were attached to her arms, legs and genitalia, just as they were
attached to the Iraqi detainee poised on a box, threatened with
electrocution if he fell off. The Iraqi man bound naked on the ground with a
leash attached to his neck, held by a smiling young American recruit,
reminds me of the son of peasant organizers who recounted his agonizing
torture at the hands of the Tonton Macoutes, U.S.-backed dictator
John-Claude (Baby Doc) Duvalier's right-hand thugs, in Port-au-Prince in
1984. The very act of photographing those tortured in Abu Ghraib to
humiliate and silence parallels the experience of an American missionary,
Sister Diana Ortiz, who was tortured and gang-raped repeatedly under
supervision by an American in 1989, according to her testimony before the
Congressional Human Rights Caucus.

The long history of torture by U.S.-trained thugs in Latin and Central
America under the command of SOA graduates has also been capaciously
documented by human-rights organizations like Amnesty International (in its
2002 report titled Unmatched Power, Unmet Principles) and in books like
A.J. Langguth's Hidden Terrors, William Blum's Rogue State and Lawrence
Weschler's A Miracle, a Universe. In virtually every report on human-rights
abuses from Latin America, SOA graduates are prominent. A U.N. Truth
Commission report said that over two-thirds of the Salvadoran officers it
cites for abuses are SOA graduates. Forty percent of the Cabinet members
under three sanguinary Guatemalan dictatorships were SOA graduates. And the
list goes on . . .

In 2000, the Pentagon engaged in a smoke-screen attempt to give the SOA a
face-lift by changing its name to the Western Hemispheric Institute for
Security Cooperation (WHINSEC) as part of a claimed reform program. But,
as the late GOP Senator Paul Coverdale of Georgia (where SOA-WHINSEC is
located) said at the time, the changes to the school were basically
cosmetic.

The lobbying campaign to close SOA-WHINSEC has been led by School of the
Americas Watch, founded by religious activists after the 1990s murder of
four U.S. nuns by Salvadoran death squads under command of one of SOA's most
infamous graduates, Colonel Roberto D'Aubuisson. Lest you think that the
school's links to atrocities are all in the distant past, SOA Watch has
documented a raft of recent scandals postdating the Pentagon's chimerical
reform. Here are just a few of them:

In June 2001, Colonel Byron Lima Estrada, an SOA grad who was head

The West's pursuit of democracy in the Arab world

[ken hanly]

Toronto Star July 20, 2004

Why tyrants rule Arabs

For 60 years, the West has propped up Arab despots, creating poverty and
illiteracy where education once thrived

By Gwynne Dyer

It was just a random statistic, but a telling one: Only 300 books were
translated into Arabic last year. That is about one foreign title per
million Arabs. For comparison's sake, Greece translated 1,500
foreign-language books, or about 150 titles per million Greeks. Why is the
Arab world so far behind, not only in this but in practically all the arts
and sciences?

The first-order answer is poverty and lack of education: Almost half of
Arabic-speaking women are illiterate.

But the Arab world used to be the most literate part of the planet; what
went wrong? Tyranny and economic failure, obviously. But why is tyranny such
a problem in the Arab world? That brings us to the nub of the matter.

In a speech in November, 2003, President George W. Bush revisited his
familiar refrain about how the West has to remake the Arab world in its own
image in order to stop the terrorism: Sixty years of Western nations
excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did
nothing to make us safe ... because in the long run, stability cannot be
purchased at the expense of liberty - as if the Arab world had wilfully
chosen to be ruled by these corrupt and incompetent tyrannies.

But the West didn't just excuse and accommodate these regimes. It created
them, in order to protect its own interests - and it spent the latter half
of the 20th century keeping them in power for the same reason.

It was Britain that carved the kingdom of Jordan out of the old Ottoman
province of Syria after World War I and put the Hashemite ruling family on
the throne that it still occupies.

France similarly carved Lebanon out of Syria in order to create a loyal
Christian-majority state that controlled most of the Syrian coastline - and
when time and a higher Muslim birth rate eventually led to a revolt against
the Maronite Christian stranglehold on power in Lebanon in 1958, U.S. troops
were sent in to restore it. The Lebanese civil war of 1975-'90, tangled
though it was, was basically a continuation of that struggle.

Britain also imposed a Hashemite monarchy on Iraq after 1918, and
deliberately perpetuated the political monopoly of the Sunni minority that
it had inherited from Turkish rule.

When the Iraqi monarchy was finally overthrown in 1958 and the Baath party
won the struggle that followed, the CIA gave the Iraqi Baathists the names
of all the senior members of the Iraqi Communist party (then the main
political vehicle of the Shias) so they could be liquidated.

It was Britain that turned the traditional sheikhdoms in the Gulf into
separate little sovereign states and absolute monarchies, carving Kuwait out
of Iraq in the process. Saudi Arabia, however, was a joint Anglo-U.S.
project.

The British Foreign Office welcomed the Egyptian generals' overthrow of King
Farouk and the destruction of the country's old nationalist political
parties, failing to foresee that Gamal Abdul Nasser would eventually take
over the Suez Canal. When he did, the foreign office conspired with France
and Israel to attack Egypt in a failed attempt to overthrow him.

Once Nasser died and was succeeded by generals more willing to play along
with the West - Anwar Sadat, and now Hosni Mubarak - Egypt became
Washington's favourite Arab state. To help these thinly disguised dictators
to hang on to power, Egypt has ranked among the top three recipients of U.S.
foreign aid almost every year for the past quarter-century. And so it goes.


Britain welcomed the coup by Col. Moammar Gadhafi in Libya in 1969,
mistakenly seeing him as a malleable young man who could serve the West's
purposes.

The United States and France both supported the old dictator Habib Bourguiba
in Tunisia, and still back his successor Ben Ali today. They always backed
the Moroccan monarchy no matter how repressive it became, and they both gave
unquestioning support to the Algerian generals who cancelled the elections
of 1991. They did not ever waver in their support through the savage
insurgency unleashed by the suppression of the elections that killed an
estimated 120,000 Algerians over the next 10 years.

Excuse and accommodate? The West created the modern Middle East, from its
rotten regimes down to its ridiculous borders, and it did so with
contemptuous disregard for the wishes of the local people.

It is indeed a problem that most Arab governments are corrupt autocracies
that breed hatred and despair in their own people, which then fuels
terrorism against the West, but it was the West that created the problem -
and invading Iraq won't solve it.

If the U.S. really wants to foster Arab democracy, it might try making all
that aid to Egypt conditional on prompt democratic reforms. But I wouldn't
hold my breath.



Gwynne Dyer is a Canadian journalist based in London.

Richard Falk on the ICJ decision on Israeli wall.

[ken hanly]

Kerry is obviously not a whit better that Bush on this  matter..If the
Israelis just wanted to protect their own territory they could legally build
the wall on their territory instead of within occupied territory. The self
defence defence is a non-starter.

Cheers, Ken Hanly

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/opinion/9194447.htm?1c

Miami Herald July 20, 2004

Support for wall mocks international law

By Richard Falk

What is most remarkable about the International Court of Justice decision on
Israel's security barrier in the West Bank is the strength of the
consensus behind it. By a vote of 14-1, the 15 distinguished jurists who
make up the highest judicial body on the planet found that the barrier is
illegal under international law and that Israel must dismantle it, as well
as compensate Palestinians for damage to their property resulting from the
barrier's construction.

The International Court of Justice has very rarely reached this degree of
unanimity in big cases. The July 9 decision was even supported by the
generally conservative British judge Rosalyn Higgins, whose intellectual
force is widely admired in the United States.

One might expect the government of Ariel Sharon to wave off this notable
consensus as an immoral and dangerous opinion. But one might expect the
United States -- even as it backed its ally Israel -- at least to take
account of the court's reasoning in its criticisms. Instead, both the Bush
administration and leading Democrats, including Senators John Kerry and
Hillary Clinton, mindlessly rejected the decision.

Even the American justice in The Hague, Thomas Buergenthal, was careful in
his lone dissent. He argued that the court did not fully explore Israel's
contention that the wall-and-fence complex is necessary for its security
before arriving at its sweeping legal conclusions. But Judge Buergenthal
also indicated that Israel was bound to adhere to international humanitarian
law, that the Palestinians were entitled to exercise their right of
self-determination and, insofar as the wall was built to protect Israeli
settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, that he had serious doubt
that the wall would. . .satisfy the proportionality requirement to qualify
as legitimate self-defense.

The nuance in Buergenthal's narrow dissent contrasts sharply with, for
instance, Kerry's categorical statement that Israel's barrier is not a
matter for the ICJ.

To the contrary, Israel's construction of the wall in the West Bank has
flagrantly violated clear standards in international law. The clarity of the
violations accounts for the willingness of the U.N. General Assembly to
request an advisory opinion on the wall from the court, a right it has never
previously exercised in relation to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The
clarity also helps to explain Israel's refusal to participate in the ICJ
proceedings -- not even to present its claim that the barrier under
construction has already reduced the incidence of suicide bombing by as much
as 90 percent.

Significantly, the court confirms that Israel is entitled to build a wall to
defend itself from threats emanating from the Palestinian territories if it
builds the barrier on its own territory. The justices based their objection
to the wall on its location within occupied Palestinian territories, as well
as the consequent suffering visited upon affected Palestinians.

If Israel had erected the wall on its side of the boundary of Israel prior
to the 1967 war, then it would not have encroached on Palestinian legal
rights. The court's logic assumes the unconditional applicability of
international humanitarian law, including the Fourth Geneva Convention, to
Israel's administration of the West Bank and Gaza (a principle affirmed by
Judge Buergenthal). That body of law obliges Israel to respect the property
rights of Palestinians without qualification, and to avoid altering the
character of the territory, including by population transfer.

The decision creates a clear mandate. The ICJ decision, by a vote of 13-2,
imposes upon all states an obligation not to recognize the illegal
situation created by the construction of the wall. This is supplemented by
a 14-1 vote urging the General Assembly and Security Council to consider
what further action is required to bring an end to the illegal situation.

Such a plain-spoken ruling from the characteristically cautious
International Court of Justice will test the respect accorded international
law, including U.S. willingness to support international law despite a
ruling against its ally. The invasion of Iraq and the continuing scandals
have already tarnished the reputation of the United States as a law-abiding
member of the international community. When U.S. officials dismiss the
nearly unanimous ICJ decision without even bothering to engage its
arguments, America's reputation suffers further. In fact, elsewhere in the
world, U.S. repudiation of this decision can only entrench existing views

1.9 billion of Iraqi money to US firms

[ken hanly]

$1.9 Billion of Iraq's Money Goes to U.S. Contractors
By Ariana Eunjung Cha
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 4, 2004; Page A01
Halliburton Co. and other U.S. contractors are being paid at least $1.9
billion from Iraqi funds under an arrangement set by the U.S.-led occupation
authority, according to a review of documents and interviews with government
agencies, companies and auditors.
Most of the money is for two controversial deals that originally had been
financed with money approved by the U.S. Congress, but later shifted to
Iraqi funds that were governed by fewer restrictions and less rigorous
oversight.



For the first 14 months of the occupation, officials of the Coalition
Provisional Authority provided little detailed information about the Iraqi
money, from oil sales and other sources, that it spent on reconstruction
contracts. They have said that it was used for the benefit of the Iraqi
people and that most of the contracts paid from Iraqi money went to Iraqi
companies. But the CPA never released information about specific contracts
and the identities of companies that won them, citing security concerns, so
it has been impossible to know whether these promises were kept.
The CPA has said it has awarded about 2,000 contracts with Iraqi money. Its
inspector general compiled records for the major contracts, which it defined
as those worth $5 million or more each. Analysis of those and other records
shows that 19 of 37 major contracts funded by Iraqi money went to U.S.
companies and at least 85 percent of the total $2.26 billion was obligated
to U.S. companies. The contracts that went to U.S. firms may be worth
several hundred million more once the work is completed.
That analysis and several audit reports released in recent weeks shed new
light on how the occupation authority handled the Iraqi money it controlled.
They show that the CPA at times violated its own rules, authorizing Iraqi
money when it didn't have a quorum or proper Iraqi representation at
meetings, and kept such sloppy records that the paperwork for several major
contracts could not be found. During the first half of the occupation, the
CPA depended heavily on no-bid contracts that were questioned by auditors.
And the occupation's shifting of projects that were publicly announced to be
financed by U.S. money to Iraqi money prompted the Iraqi finance minister to
complain that the ad hoc process put the CPA in danger of losing the trust
of the people.
Kellogg Brown  Root Inc., a subsidiary of Halliburton, was paid $1.66
billion from the Iraqi money, primarily to cover the cost of importing fuel
from Kuwait. The job was tacked on to a no-bid contract that was the subject
of several investigations after allegations surfaced that a subcontractor
for Houston-based KBR overcharged by as much as $61 million for the fuel.
Harris Corp., a Melbourne, Fla., company, got $48 million from the Iraqi oil
funds to manage and update the formerly state-owned media network, taking
over from Science Applications International Corp. of San Diego. The new
television and radio services and newspaper have been widely criticized as
mouthpieces for the occupation and symbols of the failures of the
reconstruction effort. When it was being financed with U.S.-appropriated
funds, the contract drew scrutiny because of questionable expenses,
including chartering a jet to fly in a Hummer H2 and a Ford pickup truck for
the program manager's use.
Fareed Yaseen, one of 43 ambassadors recently appointed by Iraq's
government, said he was troubled that the Iraqi money was managed almost
exclusively by foreigners and that contracts went predominantly to foreign
companies.
There was practically no Iraqi voice in the disbursements of these funds,
Yaseen said in a phone interview from Baghdad, where he is awaiting his
diplomatic assignment.
Even Iraqi officials who served in the government while the CPA was in
charge complained they had little say in the use of their own country's
money. Mohammed Aboush, who was a director general in the oil ministry
during the occupation, said he and other Iraqi officials were not consulted
about expanding the KBR contract. But he said he informed his American
advisers at the CPA that the Iraqis felt KBR's performance had been
inadequate and that he'd prefer that another company take over its work.
Aboush said that he was ignored and that he believes the decision to go with
KBR was political. I am old enough to know the Americans and their
interests and they are not always the same interests as the Iraqi
interests, he said.
U.S. officials contend the CPA was faithful to the terms of a United Nations
resolution that gave the United States authority to manage the Iraq oil
money during the occupation. We believe that contracts awarded with Iraqi
funds were for the sole benefit of the Iraqi people, without exception,
Brig. Gen. Stephen M. Seay, head of contracting activity for the successor
to the CPA's office, wrote in a response to 

Re: What is the total wealth ?

[ken hanly]

The BSers of the world have united. The revolutionary result is mainstream
economics..

Cheers, Ken Hanly


- Original Message -
From: Michael Perelman [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Wednesday, August 04, 2004 11:38 AM
Subject: Re: [PEN-L] What is the total wealth ?


 Right, they should teach that marginal productivity theory created
economic justice because
 everybody got rewarded according to their marginal product.  Sraffa proved
that it was BS.
 Samuelson and others attempted to refute him, but were unsuccessful.
Solow said that it
 was a tempest in a teapot.  Now nobody cares, but they continue to teach
the same BS.

 On Wed, Aug 04, 2004 at 12:07:17PM -0400, Doug Henwood wrote:
 
  Yeah, but nobody cares about that anymore. It was an obsession of
  some weirdos in England a generation ago, but we've moved beyond that
  now.
 
  Doug

 --
 Michael Perelman
 Economics Department
 California State University
 Chico, CA 95929

 Tel. 530-898-5321
 E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu

Re: Bush Using Drugs to Control Depression, Erratic Behavior

[ken hanly]

Joyful gospel songs?

Cheers, Ken Hanly



- Original Message -
From: Carrol Cox [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Wednesday, August 04, 2004 7:23 PM
Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Bush Using Drugs to Control Depression, Erratic
Behavior


 Robert Naiman wrote:
 
   From Capitol Hill Blue
 
  Bush Leagues
  Bush Using Drugs to Control Depression, Erratic Behavior
  By TERESA HAMPTON
  Editor, Capitol Hill Blue
  Jul 28, 2004, 08:09
  http://www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/publish/article_4921.shtml
 
  President George W. Bush is taking powerful anti-depressant drugs to
  control his erratic behavior, depression and paranoia, Capitol Hill Blue
  has learned.

 This sort of thing should be discouraged. Powerful would simply not
 not appear in an honest account as a modifier of anti-depressant
 drugs. I've _never_ seen that adjective in straightforward discussion
 of anti-depressants, and the only excuse for it hear is that the  writer
 is trying to put across bullshit.

 What in the hell would a weak anti-depressant drug be?

 Carrol

Fiske on Iraq

[ken hanly]

August 01, 2004
The War Is a Fraud
Robert Fisk, The Independent, August 1, 2004:
The war is a fraud. I'm not talking about the weapons of mass destruction
that didn't exist. Nor the links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qa'ida which
didn't exist. Nor all the other lies upon which we went to war. I'm talking
about the new lies.
For just as, before the war, our governments warned us of threats that did
not exist, now they hide from us the threats that do exist. Much of Iraq has
fallen outside the control of America's puppet government in Baghdad but we
are not told. Hundreds of attacks are made against US troops every month.
But unless an American dies, we are not told. This month's death toll of
Iraqis in Baghdad alone has now reached 700 - the worst month since the
invasion ended. But we are not told.
The stage management of this catastrophe in Iraq was all too evident at
Saddam Hussein's trial. Not only did the US military censor the tapes of
the event. Not only did they effectively delete all sound of the 11 other
defendants. But the Americans led Saddam Hussein to believe - until he
reached the courtroom - that he was on his way to his execution. Indeed,
when he entered the room he believed that the judge was there to condemn him
to death. This, after all, was the way Saddam ran his own state security
courts. No wonder he initially looked disorientated - CNN's helpful
description - because, of course, he was meant to look that way. We had made
sure of that. Which is why Saddam asked Judge Juhi: Are you a lawyer? ...
Is this a trial? And swiftly, as he realised that this really was an
initial court hearing - not a preliminary to his own hanging - he quickly
adopted an attitude of belligerence.
But don't think we're going to learn much more about Saddam's future court
appearances. Salem Chalabi, the brother of convicted fraudster Ahmad and the
man entrusted by the Americans with the tribunal, told the Iraqi press two
weeks ago that all media would be excluded from future court hearings. And I
can see why. Because if Saddam does a Milosevic, he'll want to talk about
the real intelligence and military connections of his regime - which were
primarily with the United States.
Living in Iraq these past few weeks is a weird as well as dangerous
experience. I drive down to Najaf. Highway 8 is one of the worst in Iraq.
Westerners are murdered there. It is littered with burnt-out police vehicles
and American trucks. Every police post for 70 miles has been abandoned. Yet
a few hours later, I am sitting in my room in Baghdad watching Tony Blair,
grinning in the House of Commons as if he is the hero of a school debating
competition; so much for the Butler report.
Indeed, watching any Western television station in Baghdad these days is
like tuning in to Planet Mars. Doesn't Blair realise that Iraq is about to
implode? Doesn't Bush realise this? The American-appointed government
controls only parts of Baghdad - and even there its ministers and civil
servants are car-bombed and assassinated. Baquba, Samara, Kut, Mahmoudiya,
Hilla, Fallujah, Ramadi, all are outside government authority. Iyad Allawi,
the Prime Minister, is little more than mayor of Baghdad. Some
journalists, Blair announces, almost want there to be a disaster in Iraq.
He doesn't get it. The disaster exists now.
When suicide bombers ram their cars into hundreds of recruits outside police
stations, how on earth can anyone hold an election next January? Even the
National Conference to appoint those who will arrange elections has been
twice postponed. And looking back through my notebooks over the past five
weeks, I find that not a single Iraqi, not a single American soldier I have
spoken to, not a single mercenary - be he American, British or South
African - believes that there will be elections in January. All said that
Iraq is deteriorating by the day. And most asked why we journalists weren't
saying so.
But in Baghdad, I turn on my television and watch Bush telling his
Republican supporters that Iraq is improving, that Iraqis support the
coalition, that they support their new US-manufactured government, that
the war on terror is being won, that Americans are safer. Then I go to an
internet site and watch two hooded men hacking off the head of an American
in Riyadh, tearing at the vertebrae of an American in Iraq with a knife.
Each day, the papers here list another construction company pulling out of
the country. And I go down to visit the friendly, tragically sad staff of
the Baghdad mortuary and there, each day, are dozens of those Iraqis we
supposedly came to liberate, screaming and weeping and cursing as they carry
their loved ones on their shoulders in cheap coffins.
I keep re-reading Tony Blair's statement. I remain convinced it was right
to go to war. It was the most difficult decision of my life. And I cannot
understand it. It may be a terrible decision to go to war. Even Chamberlain
thought that; but he didn't find it a difficult decision - because, 

Walmart costs California

[ken hanly]

Wal-Marts cost state, study says
Retailer refutes UC research that claims taxes subsidize wages
- George Raine, Chronicle Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 3, 2004

Employment practices at Wal-Mart, the nation's largest employer with
relatively lower labor costs in the retail sector, cost California taxpayers
about $86 million annually in public assistance to company workers,
according to a study released Monday by a UC Berkeley research institute.
The study estimates that low wages force employees to accept $32 million
annually in health-related services and $54 million per year in other
assistance, such as subsidized school lunches, food stamps and subsidized
housing.
Wal-Mart questioned the validity of the report, saying the authors
undervalued the wages and benefits the chain's employees receive.
The UC report comes from the Berkeley Labor Center, an institute that is
openly supportive of union causes. Although its researchers have in the past
accepted funding from the grocery workers' union to conduct studies, this
report was not funded by labor, its authors said.
Wal-Mart, and its possible expansion in California, is a major topic in
labor circles as negotiators for 45,000 union grocery clerks in the Bay Area
begin contract talks with Safeway, Albertson's and other major employers.
The current contract expires Sept. 11. The union, the United Food and
Commercial Workers, and management are also working on a separate pact
covering 15,000 Sacramento Valley union workers.
These negotiations follow the disruptive 139-day strike and lockout of
nearly 70,000 union grocery clerks in Southern California that ended Feb.
29.
In all these talks, management is using Wal-Mart's presence and proposed
California expansion as a negotiating tactic, arguing they must lower labor
costs to be competitive with the company and other low-cost grocers. Union
leadership is backing political efforts to limit Wal-Mart's growth. Authors
Arindrajit Dube of the UC Berkeley Institute of Industrial Relations and Ken
Jacobs of the UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education make a
number of assumptions in their study, beginning with a workforce estimate of
44,000 Wal-Mart employees at 143 Wal-Mart and Sam's Club stores in
California who earn an estimated 31 percent less than workers in the large
retail sector as a whole.
The wage difference is even greater when comparing Bay Area Wal-Mart workers
with other union retail workers: The estimate is that Wal-Mart workers earn
on average $9.40 an hour compared with $15.31 for union grocery workers, 39
percent less, and the study estimates that they are half as likely to have
health benefits.
A spokeswoman for Wal-Mart, Cynthia Lin, said, It's disappointing that UC
researchers would release a study which has such questionable findings, but
then again, they are going to arrive at faulty conclusions when they work
off faulty assumptions.''
She said the study reports wages incorrectly. Bay Area workers earn an
average of $11.08 an hour while statewide it is $10.37.
Also, 90 percent of Wal-Mart's workers have health insurance, Lin said.
Of them, 50 percent have coverage through Wal-Mart and 40 percent through
other sources. She added that two-thirds of workers are senior citizens,
college students or second-income providers.
The UC authors do not have data on actual public assistance for Wal-Mart
workers. They take information from several sources, including testimony
about company wages in a sex-discrimination lawsuit brought against
Wal-Mart. They say that, at such low wages, many Wal-Mart workers rely on a
public safety net.
The authors extrapolate that if other large California retailers apply the
Wal-Mart model of wages and benefits to their 750,000 employees, it would
cost taxpayers an additional $410 million a year in public assistance to
employees.
David Theroux, founder and president of the libertarian Independent
Institute in Oakland, said it is important to consider who the Wal-Mart
employees are: They may be former unemployed workers, they may be retirees
or have taken a second job out of necessity, or they may be developmentally
disabled or have any number of disadvantages. If we eliminate Wal-Mart ...
it means those people are unemployed. Is it better for them to be employed
or unemployed?'' Theroux asked.
Theroux also faulted the study for what he said is a presumption that Wal-
Mart employees are more prone to go on welfare rolls. How do they know
that? They need to show that,'' he said.
He added that, historically, competition drives up wages. It sharpens
workers' skills and boosts productivity so workers can command higher wages.
It works in high tech. Why would retail be any different?'' Theroux said.
The study authors say in their conclusion, In effect, Wal-Mart is shifting
part of its labor costs onto the public.'' Co-author Jacobs, in an
interview, said he hopes that policy-makers keep that argument in mind when
Wal-Mart seeks to expand.
Indeed, the Los Angeles City 

Re: No Bounce for Kerry

[ken hanly]

Well I think that Plato argued it a bit earlier..in The Republic..


Cheers, Ken Hanly
- Original Message -
From: Carrol Cox [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Tuesday, August 03, 2004 8:42 AM
Subject: Re: [PEN-L] No Bounce for Kerry


 Michael Perelman wrote:
 
 
  Also, I have never heard of any competitive contest where you aim to
just get over
  the hump.  Sounds like a stupid strategy.

 The alternative strategy would be to arouse public passion (and
 participation!). It has long been my own theory that the DP leadership
 would always choose losing rather than risk such arousal. The Public is
 a great Beast, and dangerous when aroused. (I think Zinn argues this
 someplace, but I'm not sure of my memory on this.)

 Carrol

First unionised walmart?

[ken hanly]

Associated Press
Quebec Wal-Mart Could Become Unionized
08.02.2004, 07:41 PM

A Wal-Mart store in Quebec may become the retail giant's first unionized
outlet after the Quebec Labor Relations Board accredited a union there to
represent the workers.

The Quebec Federation of Labor announced the accreditation Monday. The store
in Saguenay has about 180 employees.

The union represents the large majority of the store's employees, said
Marie-Josee Lemieux, president of the union local of the United Food and
Commercial Workers. We hope that Wal-Mart will accept this decision and
negotiate a labor contract with the union.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the world's largest retailer, has no unionized stores,
although a handful of meat cutters at a Wal-Mart Supercenter in Texas had
voted to join the United Food And Commercial Workers in 2000.

The retailer appealed the decision, and last June, an administrative law
judge ruled in favor of Wal-Mart, saying that the retailer had no obligation
to negotiate an agreement with the union because the meat cutter function
was being eliminated as the chain was moving toward prepackaged meat,
according to Christi Gallagher, a spokeswoman for Wal-Mart's U.S. division.

Wal-Mart, based in Bentonville, Ark., appears ready to battle the Canadian
effort.

We are reviewing the decision, said Andrew Pelletier, spokesman for
Wal-Mart Canada. There was no vote held in the store. This appeared to be
an automatic certification, and employees were not given the opportunity to
vote on the issue on unionization in a democratically held election, which
is of enormous concern.

The Quebec labor board will hold a meeting Aug. 20 to rule on the job
descriptions of those who can be covered by negotiations.

Wal-Mart operates 231 discount department stores and five Sam's Clubs and
employs more than 62,000 people across Canada. Wal-Mart entered Canada 10
years ago with the purchase of 122 Woolco stores.

Wal-Mart has more than 1,300 stores in nine countries employing 300,000
people. Besides Canada, Wal-Mart operates in Argentina, Brazil, China,
Germany, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Puerto Rico and Great Britain.

Several efforts to form unions in other provinces have so far been
unsuccessful.

Wal-Mart has cited the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in its legal challenge
of the Saskatchewan Labor Relations Board's authority. The move halted
hearings which began in May regarding the automatic union certification of a
Wal-Mart store in Weyburn, Saskatchewan.

Re: How Mass is Mass Media?

[ken hanly]

All I know is that Jesus gets to vote first since he saith:

He (sic) who is without sin gets to cast the first ballot..

Cheers, Ken Hanly


- Original Message -
From: Dan Scanlan [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Wednesday, July 28, 2004 5:52 PM
Subject: Re: [PEN-L] How Mass is Mass Media?


 Kenneth Burke repeats a conversation in which one party says, I'm a
 Christian, and the other party replies, Yes, but who are you a
 Christian AGAINST?
 
 according to one observer, the following sign was seen at the DP
convention.
 
 Which Way Would Jesus Vote?

 Only evidence available is who he threw out of the temple. He
 wouldn't attend either one of the corporate orgies.

 Dan Scanlan

 --
 ---
 IMPEACHMENT: BRING IT ON NOW!
 NOVEMBER COULD BE TOO LATE.
 --

 .com

Re: Israel pushing for Kurdish state? -

[ken hanly]

Even the fundamentalist suicide bombers dont usually just target open air
markets. They target police or lineups of people waiting to sign up for
security forces etc. The resistance is manifold. US forces are still prime
targets and the toll of dead and injured is still rising day by day.
Government officials are prime targets and have been dispatched in
increasing numbers. Sabotage of oil and other facilities is also an aim as
is to make supply lines unsafe driving up the cost of what is a continued
occupation. You talk of unreconstructed Saddamites. I guess this contrasts
with the reconstructed Saddamites such as Allawi who front for and
co-operate with the imperial occupation.

Cheers, Ken Hanly
- Original Message -
From: Doug Henwood [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Thursday, July 29, 2004 10:05 AM
Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Israel pushing for Kurdish state? -


 Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:

 Have you added up all the Iraqi civilians killed by various factions
 of Iraqi and non-Iraqi terrorists and compared the number to that of
 Iraqi civilians killed by US and other foreign troops who invaded and
 have occupied Iraq and by economic sanctions before the invasion and
 occupation?
 
 Americans who vote for John Kerry who will be the next POTUS, aka the
 biggest terrorist and war criminal, have no moral standing to pretend
 to be appalled by un-American terrorists.
 
 Only those who do not vote for Kerry or Bush have the moral standing
 to criticize foreign terrorists.

 What a load of crap. Elections are about contesting for power, and
 often involve debased compromises; votes aren't symptoms of moral
 purity.

 And why is it impossible to hold two thoughts in mind at once? The
 sanctions were murderous and the war a horrible crime. There's no
 doubt that the U.S. and its very junior partners have killed far more
 Iraqi civilians than the resistance. But there are some people on
 the western left - some of them members of PEN-L, even - who can't
 acknowledge that a lot of the Iraqi resistance consists of
 jihadists and unreconstructed Saddamites, i.e., absolutely awful
 forces.

 As Christian Parenti said when he returned from his first trip to
 Iraq - there's no way anything good can come of this.

 Doug

Re: Israel pushing for Kurdish state?

[ken hanly]

I posted before I had received the termination notice. Anyway my points are
different. The whole idea that the resistance is mostly from fundamentalist
bombers is misleading and the idea that even the suicide bombers let alone
the resistance in general is mainly targeting open air markets is just plain
wrong to put it politely.

Cheers, Ken Hanly

- Original Message -
From: Michael Perelman [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Thursday, July 29, 2004 3:40 PM
Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Israel pushing for Kurdish state?


 I thought we were dropping this!
 --
 Michael Perelman
 Economics Department
 California State University
 Chico, CA 95929

 Tel. 530-898-5321
 E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu

Big brother's qualifications...

[ken hanly]

Administration picks disgraced judge for Homeland Security
By Michael J. Sniffen and Leslie Miller, Associated Press  |  July 28, 2004
WASHINGTON (AP) A key overseer of the Bush administration's unsuccessful
efforts to create a more comprehensive screening process for airline
passengers resigned in disgrace four years ago from the New Hampshire
Supreme Court to avoid prosecution over his conduct on the bench.

W. Stephen Thayer III, who left New Hampshire's high court in 2000 under a
deal with prosecutors, is now serving as deputy chief of the Transportation
Security Administration's Office of National Risk Assessment.
Thayer resurrected his public career with a stint at a conservative
political group in Washington before landing the job last summer where he
oversees the administration's Computer-Assisted Passenger Prescreening
System. The project encountered such technical difficulty and so much
resistance from privacy advocates that it was sent back to the drawing board
earlier this month.
The project, which was known as CAPPS II, was to develop software to bar any
passenger from getting on an airplane if a computer analysis of unidentified
government terrorist watchlists and private commercial electronic records
judged him or her to be a security threat. The project has been sharply
criticized by congressional auditors.
The administration's selection of Thayer made with no fanfare last summer
has raised some eyebrows.
''To appoint someone who had to resign in public disgrace in lieu of being
indicted is incredibly offensive,'' said Charles Lewis, executive director
the Center for Public Integrity, a private ethics watchdog. CAPPS II has
been ''one of the most sensitive projects in the U.S. government,'' because
''we are talking about data-mining the records of millions of Americans. The
people in charge have got to be beyond reproach in every way.''
Thayer declined to be interviewed.
But TSA spokesman Mark Hatfield said Thayer was qualified for the job
because he helped the American Conservative Union organize a task force with
other conservative and liberal groups, including the American Civil
Liberties Union, to lobby on the government's handling of citizens' personal
information, including CAPPS II.
''That was as direct involvement in that field as you can get,'' Hatfield
said.
Hatfield said the New Hampshire controversy was reviewed by those who
appointed Thayer and posed no bar to his getting the federal job because no
charges were filed and no action was taken against him by the state judicial
conduct committee or the bar association.
''He faced the allegations for a significant time and significant cost and
at some point he chose to withdraw from the battle as it was in the best
interests of himself and his family,'' Hatfield said.
Months behind schedule, the two-year-old CAPPS II was sharply criticized in
February by the Government Accountability Office, the auditing arm of
Congress, for failing to fully address seven of eight targets for accuracy,
privacy and security.
Concerned that the program would invade privacy and leave air travelers with
no way of correcting its errors, Congress has prohibited the program's
deployment until those benchmarks are met. Earlier this month,
Transportation Security Administration chief David Stone told Congress the
program is being ''reshaped and repackaged.''
Thayer's fast-moving legal career U.S. attorney at 35, state supreme court
justice at 40 came to an abrupt halt March 31, 2000, when he resigned from
the state's highest court in a deal with New Hampshire Attorney General
Philip McLaughlin.
In return for Thayer's resignation, McLaughlin agreed to drop plans to
indict him. In a public report, McLaughlin criticized Thayer for
participating in deliberations on a case he was recused from. He also said
he would have sought felony or misdemeanor charges against Thayer for
allegedly trying to influence the choice of a judge to hear his wife's
appeal of their divorce and threatening fellow justices if they allowed his
conduct to be reported to judicial oversight groups.
McLaughlin's report said Supreme Court Justice John T. Broderick quoted
Thayer as saying if his conduct were reported to oversight groups ''I'm
done. It's over for me  We all do it. We can either hang together on
this or hang separately.'' Chief Justice David Brock said Thayer told him,
''I'm not going to hang alone.''
Thayer insisted at the time, ''I committed no criminal act.'' But McLaughlin
had decided to seek the criminal indictment when Thayer volunteered to
resign.
Two years after the episode, McLaughlin wrote Thayer in December 2002 and
cited Thayer's reputation for scholarship and fairness as a judge. He added
that during the investigation, Thayer acted ''in a most professional,
forthright and honest manner.'' But McLaughlin did not back off his
findings, noting his report ''will be a matter of public record forever.''
In a rare public appearance last fall, Thayer did not supply a 

Insurgent attacks in Iraq

[ken hanly]

Here is an article by Fisk that shows the degree to which many attacks go
unreported. It also shows the typical targets...

http://www.counterpunch.org/fisk07292004.html

The Age of Anxiety

[k hanly]

Geological equipment in baggage leads to evacuation of Ottawa airport
Last Updated Wed, 07 Jul 2004 14:30:25
OTTAWA - A piece of geological research equipment found in a passenger's
luggage prompted the evacuation of the Ottawa International Airport on
Wednesday, authorities say.

Airport officials closed the airport after a suspicious package was found at
8:30 a.m. in some checked baggage during screening. Airport security thought
it was an explosive device and called Ottawa police.

The bag belonged to an Ottawa scientist, who was detained by police. After
inspecting the bag and talking with the scientist, the all-clear was given
and the scientist was freed.

Between 400 and 500 passengers and staff had to be escorted from the
building. Twelve flights were cancelled and many others were delayed.

Flights were grounded, and some planes were cleared after passengers had
already boarded. Planes that had recently landed were kept away from the
building.

Officials began allowing passengers and staff back into the terminal
building at 1 p.m.

The airport authority said this was the first total evacuation of the
airport.



Written by CBC News Online staff

Arar inquiry. Government stonewalls on providing info.

[k hanly]

So that every word of an 89 page report on Arar/s detention is blacked out
is not evidence that the government is trying to hide anything from the
inquiry. Huh?

Cheers, Ken Hanly

Ottawa pressed to make Arar files public


By COLIN FREEZE
From Monday's Globe and Mail

 Ottawa  A legal showdown will begin playing out Monday in Ottawa, as one
man's quest for justice and the public's right to know will be pitted
against state secrecy invoked to protect the public from terrorist threats.

Maher Arar, a Canadian jailed in Syria as a suspected al-Qaeda member, has
filed a motion for a vast public disclosure of government documents related
to his ordeal. The motion will be heard by Mr. Justice Dennis O'Connor as he
begins his third week of presiding over the fact-finding inquiry into Mr.
Arar's detention.

Only contextual evidence has been heard until this point, and now Mr. Arar's
lawyers are trying to get down to the nitty-gritty. They argue Ottawa
officials must finally come clean about what they know  and cough up
documents involving Mr. Arar's coerced confessions in Syria, and his
previous interviews with U.S. border guards.

Mr. Arar's lawyers say their client falsely incriminated himself under
torture in Syria after being deported there by the United States in 2002.

They say that Canada has documents stemming from the torture sessions and
that standard national-security secrecy clauses typically used by the state
to keep such information secret no longer hold  leaks and media reports
have established that RCMP officers were investigating the possibility of an
al-Qaeda cell in Ottawa, that these Mounties became suspicious of Mr. Arar
before the U.S. sent him to Syria.

But lawyers acting for the Attorney General continue to push for secrecy
saying Mr. Arar's request for disclosure should be tossed out entirely  as
it relies on an incomplete record, without a proper context and is being
made without regard to ongoing investigations.

In a rebuttal released this weekend, the government argues that the
premature and unfounded conclusion that the government has acted in bad
faith can't be used to justify disclosing information which for legitimate
reason must be protected.

While a roomful of government documents on the Arar affair already exists
and may be easily perused by Mr. O'Connor as he seeks to find the facts,
it's unknown whether the public or even Mr. Arar will ever get to see them.

That's because even though the broader public may want to get at the truth,
the state fears the public may not be able to handle it.

The position is that Canadian officials must be allowed to closely guard
their methods of investigation, their confidential sources, their secret
swapping with other countries, and their ongoing investigations. Otherwise,
much is risked  including the country's security and its relationship with
other states.

[Any] perceptions of a relative weakening in Canada's ability to ensure
protection of information could create a lessening of sensitive information
and/or a downgrading, argues the Attorney General.

Atop fears that international community could get jittery about Canada
becoming an intelligence blabbermouth, there are also insinuations that
sinister forces are watching the Arar inquiry, ever ready to inductively
reason big pictures from benign tidbits.

Seemingly innocuous information...in the hands of an informed reader, can
disclose more about an investigation than would otherwise be obvious,
argues the government.

It says that Mr. Arar's motion is unreliable because it is based largely on
media reports, which may not be accurate, cannot properly be considered as
evidence...and are nothing more than conjecture and generalizations.

Finally, the government, which last week blacked out every word of an
89-page report about Mr. Arar's detention, says it is being as accommodating
as it can be under the circumstances.

There is no basis for the suggestion...that the government is trying to
cover up' or hide' information from any kind or type from the inquiry, it
says.

Re: Sowell

[k hanly]

But what one earth has deciding that incentives rather than goals are more
important in determining the way the world works got anything to do with
rejecting Marxism or showing that there is something lacking in Marxism.?

Also, why  is what Sowell notices inconsistent with considering goals to be
more significant  than incentives in understanding the world? If the goal of
the bureaucracy is to promote its  own power and influence, this goal would
explain  why there is an incentive to promote price and wage controls as
these will advance the power and influence of the bureaucracy. Not only do
his observations have zilch to do with Marxism, they do not show anything to
support his thesis that incentives rather than goals are important in
determining  how things work.


Cheers Ken Hanly


David B. Shemano [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Friday, July 02, 2004 1:23 PM
Subject: Re: Sowell


  retaliate against the minimum wage hike. On analogy to
 I am going to say this one more time.  Sowell does not say that he started
to change his mind because he discovered that minimum wage laws cause
unemployment.  The whole discussion of minimum wage laws is irrelevant to
the point.  The point is that when Sowell suggested an empirical test to
answer the question, he discovered that the bureaucrats were entirely
uninterested in why, as a matter of fact, unemployment was rising, because
the bureacracy had an institutional interest in assuming the usefullness of
wage and price controls.  At that point, it clicked in his mind that
incentives, as opposed to goals, are critical in understanding the way the
world works.

 David Shemano

Imaginary Sowell Dialogue

[k hanly]

Sowell..I came to reject Marxism when I was studying affirmative action
programmes for black entrepreneurs.

Commentator: HOw is that??

Sowell..Well this black business owner benefitted from special loan rates
and other govt. incentives. However, he still had to pay a minimum wage. He
complained that these minimum wages were causing his profit to decline to
where he would soon be bankrupt and that he needed an increase in loan
rebates and other incentives.. Competitors claimed that the decline in his
business was the result of his products being inferior.

Commentator: Well what has this to do with Marx?

Sowell. Well when I suggested that we do an empirical study to find out that
if it was the inferiority of his proudcts that actually was causing the
decline in his business profts or the minimum wage requirements he rejected
this outright. He insisted that it was the level of incentives and
government subsidies combined with the minimum wage requirements.

Commentator : So how does this relate to Marx?

Sowell. Well isnt it obvious. This guy has an incentive to explain things as
lack of govt subsidies since he is dependent upon these affirmative action
programme and the complaint about minimum wages is an excuse for more
subsidies.. He wasnt interested in empirical truth or in finding which
explanation was correct. Now Marx thought that it was the goal that was
important but I now understood that Marx was wrong it is the incentives that
are most important in understanding this black businessman's answer not his
goal.

Commentator. But wouldnt Marx say that the goal is maximising profit and
since this man's profits are dependent upon govt. subsidies then this goal
provides him with the incentive to explain his lack of profits a priori by
suggesting that they are not large enough in the light of his being required
to pay minimum wages?

Sowell..Sorry. Im out of time. I have some hack wrirting to do for some guy
named Shemano.

Re: Sowell

[k hanly]

Exactly! One wonders how anyone with even a minimal understanding of Marxism
would think this somehow showed its shortcomings. At the same time the
conclusion that minimum wages necessarily lead to greater unemployment is
surely not that evident nor does this example show that to be the case. Are
those countries or states with minimum wages those with higher unemployment
rates than those with minimum wage rates?


Anyway even if the conclusion were correct, the conventional economic
explanation assumes some sort of idealised capitalist economic system. Why
would a Marxist not conceive of ways to counteract these effects rather than
just accepting them. For example by nationalising industries and subsidising
them to ensure at lest a living wage etc. by putting controls on capital
flight etc.etc. Passages such as this just confirm that Sowell hasnt a clue
about Marxism .

Prima facie even for a Marxist if wages go up  then capital will tend to
flow to a lower wage regime other things being equal and would thus reduce
employment. Capitalists want to maximise their return after all. But then
there may be no lower wage regime with equal labor skills or equal
productivity, costs of moving might outweigh benefits and so and so on and
on. Why is such a bright light seemingly blind to the obvious.



Cheers, Ken Hanly


- Original Message -
From: Doug Henwood [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Thursday, July 01, 2004 11:16 AM
Subject: Re: Sowell


 Grant Lee wrote:

The wonders of the internet.  Here is Sowell explaining his shift
away
 from Marxism:
http://www.salon.com/books/int/1999/11/10/sowell/index1.html
 
   David Shemano
 
 
 From that interview:
 
 So you were a lefty once.
 
 Through the decade of my 20s, I was a Marxist.
 
 What made you turn around?
 
 What began to change my mind was working in the summer of 1960 as an
intern
 in the federal government, studying minimum-wage laws in Puerto Rico. It
was
 painfully clear that as they pushed up minimum wage levels, which they
did
 at that time industry by industry, the employment levels were falling. I
was
 studying the sugar industry. There were two explanations of what was
 happening. One was the conventional economic explanation: that as you
pushed
 up the minimum-wage level, you were pricing people out of their jobs. The
 other one was that there were a series of hurricanes that had come
through
 Puerto Rico, destroying sugar cane in the field, and therefore employment
 was lower. The unions preferred that explanation, and some of the
liberals
 did, too.

 So how is incompatible with Marxism that raising wages above market
 levels can reduce employment? He just decided that the living
 conditions of sugar workers were less important than the needs of
 the economy.

 Doug

Naomi Klein on Iraq Reconstruction

[k hanly]

Time to hear from a left hack, radical chic jab from the left...

Cheers, Ken Hanly

www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=15ItemID=5786

ZNet | Iraq June 26, 2004

The Robbery of Reconstruction

by Naomi Klein

Good news out of Baghdad: the Program Management Office, which oversees the
$18.4bn in US reconstruction funds, has finally set a goal it can meet.
Sure, electricity is below pre-war levels, the streets are rivers of sewage
and more Iraqis have been fired than hired. But now the PMO has contracted
the British mercenary firm Aegis to protect its employees from
assassination, kidnapping, injury and - get this - embarrassment. I
don't know if Aegis will succeed in protecting PMO employees from violent
attack, but embarrassment? I'd say mission already accomplished. The people
in charge of rebuilding Iraq can't be embarrassed, because, clearly, they
have no shame.

In the run-up to the June 30 underhand (sorry, I can't bring myself to call
it a handover), US occupation powers have been unabashed in their efforts
to steal money that is supposed to aid a war-ravaged people. The state
department has taken $184m earmarked for drinking water projects and moved
it to the budget for the lavish new US embassy in Saddam Hussein's former
palace. Short of $1bn for the embassy, Richard Armitage, the deputy
secretary of state, said he might have to rob from Peter in my fiefdom to
pay Paul. In fact, he is robbing Iraq's people, who, according to a recent
study by the consumer group Public Citizen, are facing massive outbreaks of
cholera, diarrhoea, nausea and kidney stones from drinking contaminated
water.

If the occupation chief Paul Bremer and his staff were capable of
embarrassment, they might be a little sheepish about having spent only
$3.2bn of the $18.4bn Congress allotted - the reason the reconstruction is
so disastrously behind schedule. At first, Bremer said the money would be
spent by the time Iraq was sovereign, but apparently someone had a better
idea: parcel it out over five years so Ambassador John Negroponte can use it
as leverage. With $15bn outstanding, how likely are Iraq's politicians to
refuse US demands for military bases and economic reforms?

Unwilling to let go of their own money, the shameless ones have had no
qualms about dipping into funds belonging to Iraqis. After losing the fight
to keep control of Iraq's oil money after the underhand, occupation
authorities grabbed $2.5bn of those revenues and are now spending the money
on projects that are supposedly already covered by American tax dollars.

But then, if financial scandals made you blush, the entire reconstruction of
Iraq would be pretty mortifying. From the start, its architects rejected the
idea that it should be a New Deal-style public works project for Iraqis to
reclaim their country. Instead, it was treated as an ideological experiment
in privatisation. The dream was for multinational firms, mostly from the US,
to swoop in and dazzle the Iraqis with their speed and efficiency.

Iraqis saw something else: desperately needed jobs going to Americans,
Europeans and south Asians; roads crowded with trucks shipping in supplies
produced in foreign plants, while Iraqi factories were not even supplied
with emergency generators. As a result, the reconstruction was seen not as a
recovery from war but as an extension of the occupation, a foreign invasion
of a different sort. And so, as the resistance grew, the reconstruction
itself became a prime target.

The contractors have responded by behaving even more like an invading army,
building elaborate fortresses in the green zone - the walled-in city within
a city that houses the occupation authority in Baghdad - and surrounding
themselves with mercenaries. And being hated is expensive. According to the
latest estimates, security costs are eating up 25% of reconstruction
contracts - money not being spent on hospitals, water-treatment plants or
telephone exchanges.

Meanwhile, insurance brokers selling sudden-death policies to contractors in
Iraq have doubled their premiums, with insurance costs reaching 30% of
payroll. That means many companies are spending half their budgets arming
and insuring themselves against the people they are supposedly in Iraq to
help. And, according to Charles Adwan of Transparency International, quoted
on US National Public Radio's Marketplace programme, at least 20% of US
spending in Iraq is lost to corruption. How much is actually left over for
reconstruction? Don't do the maths.

Rather than models of speed and efficiency, the contractors look more like
overcharging, underperforming, lumbering beasts, barely able to move for
fear of the hatred they have helped generate. The problem goes well beyond
the latest reports of Halliburton drivers abandoning $85,000 trucks on the
road because they don't carry spare tyres. Private contractors are also
accused of playing leadership roles in the torture of prisoners at Abu
Ghraib. A landmark class-action lawsuit

Reports finds Iraq worse off in some areas than before war.

[k hanly]

Iraq is worse off than before the war began, GAO reports

By Seth Borenstein

Knight Ridder Newspapers



WASHINGTON - In a few key areas - electricity, the judicial system and
overall security - the Iraq that America handed back to its residents Monday
is worse off than before the war began last year, according to calculations
in a new General Accounting Office report released Tuesday.


The 105-page report by Congress' investigative arm offers a bleak assessment
of Iraq after 14 months of U.S. military occupation. Among its findings:


-In 13 of Iraq's 18 provinces, electricity was available fewer hours per day
on average last month than before the war. Nearly 20 million of Iraq's 26
million people live in those provinces.


-Only $13.7 billion of the $58 billion pledged and allocated worldwide to
rebuild Iraq has been spent, with another $10 billion about to be spent. The
biggest chunk of that money has been used to run Iraq's ministry operations.


-The country's court system is more clogged than before the war, and judges
are frequent targets of assassination attempts.


-The new Iraqi civil defense, police and overall security units are
suffering from mass desertions, are poorly trained and ill-equipped.


-The number of what the now-disbanded Coalition Provisional Authority called
significant insurgent attacks skyrocketed from 411 in February to 1,169 in
May.


The report was released on the same day that the CPA's inspector general
issued three reports that highlighted serious management difficulties at the
CPA. The reports found that the CPA wasted millions of dollars at a Hilton
resort hotel in Kuwait because it didn't have guidelines for who could stay
there, lost track of how many employees it had in Iraq and didn't track
reconstruction projects funded by international donors to ensure they didn't
duplicate U.S. projects.


Both the GAO report and the CPA report said that the CPA was seriously
understaffed for the gargantuan task of rebuilding Iraq. The GAO report
suggested the agency needed three times more employees than what it had. The
CPA report said the agency believed it had 1,196 employees, when it was
authorized to have 2,117. But the inspector general said CPA's records were
so disorganized that it couldn't verify its actual number of employees.


GAO Comptroller General David Walker blamed insurgent attacks for many of
the problems in Iraq. The unstable security environment has served to slow
down our rebuilding and reconstruction efforts and it's going to be of
critical importance to provide more stable security, Walker told Knight
Ridder Newspapers in a telephone interview Tuesday.


There are a number of significant questions that need to be asked and
answered dealing with the transition (to self-sovereignty), Walker said. A
lot has been accomplished and a lot remains to be done.


The GAO report is the first government assessment of conditions in Iraq at
the end of the U.S. occupation. It outlined what it called key challenges
that will affect the political transition in 10 specific areas.


The GAO gave a draft of the report to several different government agencies,
but only the CPA offered a major comment: It said the report was not
sufficiently critical of the judicial reconstruction effort.


The picture it paints of the facts on the ground is one that neither the
CPA nor the Bush administration should be all that proud of, said Peter W.
Singer, a national security scholar at the centrist Brookings Institution.
It finds a lot of problems and raises a lot of questions.


One of the biggest problems, Singer said, is that while money has been
pledged and allocated, not much has been spent. The GAO report shows that
very little of the promised international funds - most of which are in
loans - has been spent or can't be tracked. The CPA's inspector general
found the same thing.


When we ask why are things not going the way we hoped for, Singer said,
the answer in part of this is that we haven't actually spent what we have
in pocket.




He said the figures on electricity make me want to cry.


Steven Susens, a spokesman for the Program Management Office, which oversees
contractors rebuilding Iraq, conceded that many areas of Iraq have fewer
hours of electricity now than they did before the war. But he said the
report, based on data that's now more than a month old, understates current
electrical production. He said some areas may have reduced electricity
availability because antiquated distribution systems had been taken out of
service so they could be rebuilt.


It's a slow pace, but it's certainly growing as far as we're concerned,
Susens said.


Danielle Pletka, the vice president of foreign and defense policy studies at
the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said other issues are more
important than the provision of services such as electricity. She noted that
Iraqis no longer live in fear of Saddam Hussein.


It's far better to live in the dark than it is to run 

Re: Enron

[k hanly]

Why does the statement assume the justness of private property? Surely it
assumes the opposite. Of course the thesis is common Proudhon in fact wrote
a book on property that coined the expression property as theft. In spite of
the great bitterness Marx shows towards his views, Proudhon ,as Marx, thinks
of the theft as basically
appropriation of value of labor without the exchange being equivalent---
very much like Marx's appropriation of surplus value through ownership of
means of production etc. by capitalists. What is assumed as just is that a
person should be able to appropriate the value of what they produce through
their labor and that private property in the means of production makes this
impossible and so is inherently unjust.

Cheers, Ken Hanly
- Original Message -
From: David B. Shemano [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Wednesday, June 30, 2004 8:48 PM
Subject: Re: Enron


 In defense of David Shemano, Michael Perelman writes:

  David is a conservative.  He speaks English with a right wing dialect,
but he does so
  with humor (not snottiness).  We can disagree with him.  I usually do,
but we can
  still be polite.
 
  I don't see him as a red meat class warrior, but as a sincere [albeit
misguided]
  conservative].

 As a I said when I first participated on this list so many years ago, I am
here to learn, and believe learning results from dialectic argument.  The
argument that capitalism is legalized fraud and theft is a very interesting
thesis which I would love to explore.  (For instance, doesn't that
statement, as a normative statement, assume the justness of private
property, because if not, what is wrong with theft?).  However, as Prof.
Craven does not appear to suffer from any doubt, I doubt he would enjoy such
an exchange with me.  You can't please everybody.

 David Shemano

Re: Enron

[k hanly]

- Original Message -
From: David B. Shemano [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Wednesday, June 30, 2004 8:48 PM
Subject: Re: Enron


 In defense of David Shemano, Michael Perelman writes:

  David is a conservative.  He speaks English with a right wing dialect,
but he does so
  with humor (not snottiness).  We can disagree with him.  I usually do,
but we can
  still be polite.
 
  I don't see him as a red meat class warrior, but as a sincere [albeit
misguided]
  conservative].

 As a I said when I first participated on this list so many years ago, I am
here to learn, and believe learning results from dialectic argument.  The
argument that capitalism is legalized fraud and theft is a very interesting
thesis which I would love to explore.  (For instance, doesn't that
statement, as a normative statement, assume the justness of private
property, because if not, what is wrong with theft?).  However, as Prof.
Craven does not appear to suffer from any doubt, I doubt he would enjoy such
an exchange with me.  You can't please everybody.

 David Shemano

Re: Enron

[k hanly]

Sorry about the Lockean tabula rasa.. I meant to add a few comments to my
earlier reply.

If you mean by private property, personal property appropriated in a
certain manner then perhaps the justness of private property in that sense
is assumed in saying that private property is theft. However the context of
discussion is capitalism and the relevant private property is private
property in the means of production and associated laws that allow
appropriation of value produced from what is owned: interest, rent, and
profits. Proudhon himself says at another place that property as personal
possession is freedom not theft.

Cheers, Ken Hanly]

- Original Message -
From: David B. Shemano [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Wednesday, June 30, 2004 8:48 PM
Subject: Re: Enron


 In defense of David Shemano, Michael Perelman writes:

  David is a conservative.  He speaks English with a right wing dialect,
but he does so
  with humor (not snottiness).  We can disagree with him.  I usually do,
but we can
  still be polite.
 
  I don't see him as a red meat class warrior, but as a sincere [albeit
misguided]
  conservative].

 As a I said when I first participated on this list so many years ago, I am
here to learn, and believe learning results from dialectic argument.  The
argument that capitalism is legalized fraud and theft is a very interesting
thesis which I would love to explore.  (For instance, doesn't that
statement, as a normative statement, assume the justness of private
property, because if not, what is wrong with theft?).  However, as Prof.
Craven does not appear to suffer from any doubt, I doubt he would enjoy such
an exchange with me.  You can't please everybody.

 David Shemano

Re: Low Taxes Do What!?

[k hanly]

Im not an economist but I think you have the description wrong. This is a
dull jerk from the right. Almost pure ideology, put down and genuflecting
before the idols.
   .

Cheers, Ken Hanly
- Original Message -
From: Grant Lee [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Monday, June 28, 2004 2:12 AM
Subject: Low Taxes Do What!?


 [A sharp jab from the right. Would the economists among us like to
comment?]


 Low Taxes Do What? by Thomas Sowell

 The high cost of economic illiteracy.

 Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.Some years ago,
 the distinguished international-trade economist Jagdish Bhagwati was
 visiting Cornell University, giving a lecture to graduate students during
 the day and debating Ralph Nader on free trade that evening. During his
 lecture, Professor Bhagwati asked how many of the graduate students would
be
 attending that evenings debate. Not one hand went up.

 Amazed, he asked why. The answer was that the economics students
considered
 it to be a waste of time. The kind of silly stuff that Ralph Nader was
 saying had been refuted by economists ages ago. The net result was that
the
 audience for the debate consisted of people largely illiterate in
economics,
 and they cheered for Nader.

 Professor Bhagwati was exceptional among leading economists in
understanding
 the need to confront gross misconceptions of economics in the general
 public, including the so-called educated public. Nobel laureates Milton
 Friedman and Gary Becker are other such exceptions in addressing a wider

More progress in Russia

[k hanly]

This is old but I dont think it has been posted. Perhaps Chris has something
to say about it. Russia is trying hard to catch up with and surpass the west
in elimination of the safety net.

Cheers, Ken Hanly

Russian unions protest cuts to social benefits
Last Updated Thu, 10 Jun 2004 12:02:46
MOSCOW - Russian trade unions held demonstrations across the country on
Thursday to protest against government plans to slash social benefits.
A Kremlin-approved bill, soon to go before parliament, would end billions of
dollars of Soviet-era subsidies.
If passed, the law would cut free bus service for pensioners and for
disabled people, end subsized drugs for veterans and phase out subsidies on
electricity and water bills.
About 1,500 people gathered in front of the government headquarters in
Moscow, while similar demonstrations were planned in dozens of other cities
across the country.
Economist Oxana Sinyavskaya said the government plans to compensate those
hardest hit by the elimination of subsidies with monthly cash payments. The
theory behind the reform is to make sure help goes to those who need it
most, she said.
These benefits are not shared equally, they go more to wealthy people than
to poor people, said Sinyavskaya.
Trade union leaders say unless the government listens to their demands, they
will hold a nationwide strike in September.
Almost 20 per cent of Russia's population lives below the poverty line.

cbc news june 10

More on Iraq sovereignty

[k hanly]

Well at least Bremer didnt outlaw headscarves in school.

Cheers, Ken Hanly

BAGHDAD, June 26 -- U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer has issued a raft of
edicts revising Iraq's legal code and has appointed at least two dozen
Iraqis to government jobs with multi-year terms in an attempt to promote his
concepts of governance long after the planned handover of political
authority on Wednesday.



Some of the orders signed by Bremer, which will remain in effect unless
overturned by Iraq's interim government, restrict the power of the interim
government and impose U.S.-crafted rules for the country's democratic
transition. Among the most controversial orders is the enactment of an
elections law that gives a seven-member commission the power to disqualify
political parties and any of the candidates they support.

The effect of other regulations could last much longer. Bremer has ordered
that the national security adviser and the national intelligence chief
chosen by the interim prime minister he selected, Ayad Allawi, be given
five-year terms, imposing Allawi's choices on the elected government that is
to take over next year.

Bremer also has appointed Iraqis handpicked by his aides to influential
positions in the interim government. He has installed inspectors-general for
five-year terms in every ministry. He has formed and filled commissions to
regulate communications, public broadcasting and securities markets. He
named a public-integrity commissioner who will have the power to refer
corrupt government officials for prosecution.

Some Iraqi officials condemn Bremer's edicts and appointments as an effort
to exert U.S. control over the country after the transfer of political
authority. They have established a system to meddle in our affairs, said
Mahmoud Othman, a member of the Governing Council, a recently dissolved body
that advised Bremer for the past year. Iraqis should decide many of these
issues.

Bremer has defended his issuance of many of the orders as necessary to
implement democratic reforms and update Iraq's out-of-date legal code. He
said he regarded the installation of inspectors-general in ministries, the
creation of independent commissions and the changes to Iraqi law as
important steps to fight corruption and cronyism, which in turn would help
the formation of democratic institutions.

You set up these things and they begin to develop a certain life and
momentum on their own -- and it's harder to reverse course, Bremer said in
a recent interview.

As of June 14, Bremer had issued 97 legal orders, which are defined by the
U.S. occupation authority as binding instructions or directives to the
Iraqi people that will remain in force even after the transfer of political
authority. An annex to the country's interim constitution requires the
approval of a majority of Allawi's ministers, as well as the interim
president and two vice presidents, to overturn any of Bremer's edicts. A
senior U.S. official in Iraq noted recently that it would not be easy to
reverse the orders.

It appears unlikely that all of the orders will be followed. Many of them
reflect an idealistic but perhaps futile attempt to impose Western legal,
economic and social concepts on a tradition-bound nation that is reveling in
anything-goes freedom after 35 years of dictatorial rule.

The orders include rules that cap tax rates at 15 percent, prohibit piracy
of intellectual property, ban children younger than 15 from working, and a
new traffic code that stipulates the use of a car horn in emergency
conditions only and requires a driver to hold the steering wheel with both
hands.

Iraq has long been a place where few people pay taxes, where most movies and
music are counterfeit, where children often hold down jobs and where traffic
laws are rarely obeyed, Iraqis note.

Other regulations promulgated by Bremer prevent former members of the Iraqi
army from holding public office for 18 months after their retirement or
resignation, stipulate a 30-year minimum sentence for people caught selling
weapons such as grenades and ban former militiamen integrated into the Iraqi
armed forces from endorsing and campaigning for political candidates. He has
also enacted a 76-page law regulating private corporations and amended an
industrial-design law to protect microchip designs. Those changes were
intended to facilitate the entry of Iraq into the World Trade Organization,
even though the country is so violent that the no commercial flights are
allowed to land at Baghdad's airport.

Some of the new rules attempt to introduce American approaches to fighting
crime. An anti-money-laundering law requires banks to collect detailed
personal information from customers seeking to make transactions greater
than dol;3,500, while the Commission on Public Integrity has been given the
power to reward whistleblowers with 25 percent of the funds recovered by the
government from corrupt practices they have identified.

In some cases Bremer's regulations diverge from

Re: Putin

[k hanly]

Bentham thought that his body ought to be useful after death and so he
arranged for it to be dissected. It was later reconstructed as per the rest
of the story..This is from the shorter Brittanica story


After Bentham's death, in accordance with his directions, his body was
dissected in the presence of his friends. The skeleton was then
reconstructed, supplied with a wax head to replace the original (which had
been mummified), dressed in Bentham's own clothes and set upright in a
glass-fronted case. Both this effigy and the head are preserved in
University College, London.


- Original Message -
From: Devine, James [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Thursday, June 24, 2004 12:11 PM
Subject: Re: Putin


 I thought it was at LSE. But Bentham is perhaps the exception that proves
the rule, a true wierdo.
 jd

 -Original Message-
 From: PEN-L list on behalf of Ted Winslow
 Sent: Thu 6/24/2004 10:02 AM
 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 Cc:
 Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Putin



 James Devine wrote:

  I doubt that anyone wants to be put on permanent display.

 I think at his own request, Bentham;s stuffed and clothed skeleton
 adorned with a wax replica of his head is permanently on  display in
 University College.  The original head is in a box between his feet.

 Ted

Sovereignty lite in Iraq

[k hanly]

Of course many jails will also be still under US control including Abu
Ghraib. The interim govt. itself was chosen by the UN and vetted by US. The
government is not to make laws but to be a caretaker. The laws are those
passed by the occupation authorities including a recent law that gives US
troops and contractors immunity from Iraq law, although there is dispute
about how wide the exclusion will extend. Final say on security issues rests
with US commanded multinational fig-leaf forces. The CPA is rushing to award
all sorts of contracts that will bind new govt. once sovereignty is handed
over to Iraqis.TheUS and its minions will continue to be kings of Saddam's
castle. The US just recently noted that the new Iraq govt. will not be able
to impose martial law.Only the US multinational force has authority to do
that.

Cheers, Ken Hanly

Iraq's air and sea ports to stay under foreign control
By Nicolas Pelham
Published: June 24 2004 5:00 | Last Updated: June 24 2004 5:00

Iraq's air and sea ports will remain under foreign security control despite
a formal transfer of sovereignty on June 30 to the interim government,
according to coalition officials and security companies.


In the dying weeks of its rule, the occupation administration says it is
issuing contracts worth tens of millions of dollars to British security
contractors in an effort to prolong foreign oversight of strategic ports
that are vital to the US-led reconstruction effort.

We hired a private contractor to train Iraqis and train themselves out of a
job, says one of 16 coalition advisers at the transport ministry who will
remain after June 30.

Responsibility for security at the sea port of Umm Qasr has been awarded to
the British company Olive.

The coalition administration has also awarded Stevedoring Services of
America a three-month contract to handle the administration and collection
of revenue at the port, says SSA's John Walsh.

An American company, Skylink, will continue to oversee air-traffic control
at Baghdad airport at least until the end of September.

Last-minute manoeuvring to keep a tight rein on security illustrates the
coalition's nervousness at the transfer of power over strategic assets to
Iraqis.

Iraqi officials who had hoped the airport would return to Iraqi hands have
voiced frustration at this month's United Nations resolution binding them to
uphold the contracts awarded from the Development Fund of Iraq, the deposit
for Iraq's oil revenues which the US-led administration is using to pay
contractors.

I prefer my people to secure the airport. It's a matter of sovereignty,
says Louay al-Erris, Iraq's newly appointed transport minister. I don't
think foreigners are more capable than Iraqi police and security.

Iraqi officials have repeatedly alleged that military use of Baghdad
International Airport (BIAP), has hampered its opening to commercial
passenger traffic.

Pent-up demand for travel in a country isolated by 25 years of sanctions and
war is intense. While 500 aircraft land at BIAP daily, all but 50 are
military craft.

Coalition officials respond that they have gone out of their way to prepare
BIAP for the handover. BIAP has been the largest American base in Iraq
during the 16-month occupation, and the relocation of 15,000 troops to two
adjacent camps, say US officials, amounts to a big concession.

The coalition is making a sacrifice to give that airport back to Iraq,
says the transport adviser, who adds that he has persuaded US military
commanders they would still have access to Iraq's 160 other airfields.

According to his plan, the ministry of transport would regain control of
BIAP's eastern runway and terminals on July 1 and the western military
runway by mid-August. He said he foresaw security contractors and Iraqi
police working side by side. It remained unclear, he said, who would decide
whether to lift the ban on Iraqi taxis entering the airport perimeter, for
fear they were booby-trapped.

But the security contractor at BIAP, Custerbattles, says its word on access
to the airport remains final. We have the final say and the legal liability
and that will carry over into the next contract, says Don Ritchie,
programme manager for Custerbattles. But he added: If I was the Iraqi
general in charge, I'd be upset because there's a security company doing
things I think I should be doing.

Iraqi officials also resent the contractors' recourse to foreign guards,
viewing the presence of Nepalese, South African and British private security
forces as an extension of the occupation.

Bahnam Boulos, Iraq's former transport minister, who was replaced with the
appointment of a new government on June 1, is sceptical of American US
assurances that the security contracts will be short term.

* A strike by US forces that destroyed a house in the Iraqi city of Falluja
overnight killed about 20 foreign fighters, a senior military official said
on Wednesday.Reuters reports from Baghdad.

The US military says the strike targeted

Perle chickens out..

[k hanly]

The Perle-Hersh Transcript Watch
Richard Perle promised us a 90-page Sy Hersh dossier. So, where is it?
By Jack Shafer
Posted Thursday, June 17, 2004, at 2:19 PM PT





Fifteen months ago, Richard N. Perle very publicly promised to sue Seymour
M. Hersh for libel in an English court over Hersh's investigative profile,
Lunch With the Chairman, published in The New Yorker.

When Perle made his threat, I denounced him as a libel tourist for exporting
his lawsuit to England, where libel law favors plaintiffs, rather than
bringing the suit in an American court. I also predicted that Perle wouldn't
file before the one-year statute of limitations ran out because his case was
groundless. For the next 12 months, I rode Perle like a herring-gutted nag
in this column. Every time he surfaced in the newswhich turned out to be
about once a monthI penned a fresh installment of the Richard Perle Libel
Watch, daring him to sue.

On the first anniversary of his libel threat, the bully Perle chickened out.
Citing the advice of his attorneys, Perle told the New York Sun (March 12,
2004) that instead of a filing in an English docket, he would try his case
in the court of public opinion. The Sun reported:



Mr. Perle will plan to make available either on the Web or through a news
conference 80 to 90 pages of transcripts from his lawyer's interviews with
individuals interviewed by Mr. Hersh that he said make it absolutely clear
that his reporting in his article is false, Mr. Perle said. With the
benefit of that information I would expect The New Yorker to make a
correction.

As a scholar of journalism and a distinguished fellow in Perlean studies, I
would very much like to see those transcripts. Christ knows I could squeeze
another Perle column out of them. So where are they? It can't possibly take
three months to rent some server space and upload 90 pages of text to a Web
site.

Maybe Perle's stumbling block is technological. If that's the case, Perle
can messenger or e-mail the transcripts to me, and I'll get them posted on
the Web overnight. I'll even send the URL for the transcript pages to David
Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, so he can weigh whether a correction is
in order.

If you're reading, Mr. Perle, my e-mail address is [EMAIL PROTECTED] I
hope to hear from you at your earliest convenience. If not, you'll be
hearing from me. Frequently

Independent nation. No jurisdiction.

[k hanly]

It is interesting that Afghanistan does not get to try this guy nor have any
say about the issue even though the crime happened in Afghanistan and was
not even by a member of the multinational forces in the country. This same
sort of exemption of contractors is a key bone of contention with the Iraqi
interim govt. to be.

CHeers, Ken Hanly

June 17, 2004  A CIA civilian contractor was arrested today and charged in
the beating death of a prisoner held in Afghanistan, ABC News has learned.




David Passaro, 37, was arrested today at his place of work in North
Carolina, sources said.

Passaro is charged in connection with the death of a prisoner who was
detained at a U.S. holding facility in Afghanistan's Kunar province, near
the Pakistan border. According to military officials, the man was captured
on June 18, 2003, and died five days later, on June 23. His death was
announced the same day.

It was the earliest of three cases the CIA sent to the Justice Department
last month for criminal prosecution against agency staff and contractors
accused in association with the deaths of prisoners in both Afghanistan and
Iraq, said a Justice official.

The two other cases  both in Iraq  involve the November 2003 death of a
detainee at the Abu Ghraib facility near Baghdad and the death of Maj. Gen.
Abed Hamed Mowhoush, a former commander of Saddam Hussein's air defenses, in
Qiam, Iraq, that same month. Both deaths may have involved CIA officers or
independent contractors.

Passaro, a former U.S. Army Ranger, was to be taken to the federal
courthouse in Raleigh, N.C.

ABC News' Jason Ryan and Mary Walsh contributed to this report

Agent Orange in Vietnam

[k hanly]

Seems the US is a failed state in terms of failing to take responsibility
for its actions and accepting the rules of law and warfare as applying only
to others not to itself. It is not surprising it bribes states to exempt it
from being tried for war crimes.

Cheers, Ken Hanly

Vietnam's war against Agent Orange
By Tom Fawthrop
Cu Chi district, Vietnam

The Vietnam War ended in 1975, but the scourge of dioxin contamination from
a herbicide known as Agent Orange did not.
The damage inflicted by Agent Orange is much worse than anybody thought at
the end of the war, said Professor Nguyen Trong Nhan, the vice-president of
the Vietnam Victims of Agent Orange Association (VAVA).

Between 1962 and 1970, millions of gallons of Agent Orange were sprayed
across parts of Vietnam.

Professor Nhan, the former president of the Vietnamese Red Cross, denounced
the action as a massive violation of human rights of the civilian
population, and a weapon of mass destruction.

But since the end of the Vietnam War, Washington has denied any moral or
legal responsibility for the toxic legacy said to have been caused by Agent
Orange in Vietnam.

The unresolved legacy and US denials of responsibility triggered three
Vietnamese to take unprecedented legal action in January 2004.

The plaintiffs alleged war crimes against Monsanto Corporation, Dow
Chemicals and eight other companies that manufactured Agent Orange and other
defoliants used in Vietnam.

The case has been brought by VAVA, which was set up to promote an
international campaign to gain justice and compensation for Agent Orange
victims.

Preliminary hearings began in January at the US Federal Court in New York,
presided over by senior judge Jack Weinstein.

Birth defects

Agent Orange was designed to defoliate the jungle and thus deny cover to
Vietcong guerrillas.

It contained one of the most virulent poisons known to man, a strain of
dioxin called TCCD.


First it killed the rainforest, stripping the jungle bare.
In time, the dioxin then spread its toxic reach to the food chain - which
some say led to a proliferation of birth deformities.

In a small commune in the heavily sprayed Cu Chi district, the family of
21-year-old Tran Anh Kiet struggles with the problems of daily living.

His feet, hands and limbs are twisted and deformed. He writhes in evident
frustration, and his attempts at speech are confined to plaintive and
pitiful grunts.

Kiet has to be spoon-fed. He is an adult stuck inside the stunted body of a
15-year-old, with a mental age of around six.

He is what the local villagers refer to as an Agent Orange baby.

In Vietnam, there are 150,000 other children like him, whose birth defects -
according to Vietnamese Red Cross records - can be readily traced back to
their parents' exposure to Agent Orange during the war, or the consumption
of dioxin-contaminated food and water since 1975.

VAVA estimates that three million Vietnamese were exposed to the chemical
during the war, and at least one million suffer serious health problems
today.


Some are war veterans, who were exposed to the chemical clouds. Many are
farmers who lived off land that was sprayed. Others are a second and third
generation, affected by their parents' exposure.
Some of these victims live in the vicinity of former US military bases such
as Bien Hoa, where Agent Orange was stored in large quantities.

Dr Arnold Schecter, a leading expert in dioxin contamination in the US,
sampled the soil there in 2003, and found it contained TCCD levels that were
180 million times above the safe level set by the US environmental
protection agency.

Calls for US help

Professor Nhan is sadly disappointed by the US response to calls to help
Vietnamese sufferers.

Vietnam can't solve the problem on its own. Hanoi helped the US military to
track down remains of MIAs (US servicemen missing in action), and we asked
them to reciprocate with humanitarian aid for victims of Agent Orange, he
said.

Around 10,000 US war veterans who were exposed to Agent Orange receive
disability benefits for various types of cancer and other serious health
problems that have been linked to dioxin.

American victims of Agent Orange will get up to $1500 a month. However most
Vietnamese families affected receive around 80,000 Dong a month (just over
$5 dollars) in government support for each disabled child, Professor Nhan
said.


When former US President Bill Clinton visited Hanoi four years ago,
Vietnamese president Tran Duc Long made an appeal to the US to acknowledge
its responsibility to de-mine, detoxify former military bases and provide
assistance to Agent Orange victims.
But Washington offered nothing beyond funding scientific conferences and
further research.

Chuck Searcy, vice-president of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund based in
Hanoi, said: I am baffled that the US has not offered even a small gesture
of cooperation and assistance to the Vietnamese, beyond the endless talk
about scientific research. Such a step would

Modest proposals for psyops

[k hanly]

May 26, 2004
Psyops In Fourth Generation War

by William S. Lind
I recently received an invitation to speak at a conference at Ft. Bragg on
psychological operations, or psyops. Regrettably, a schedule conflict
prevented me from accepting, but the invitation got me thinking: what are
psyops in Fourth Generation war (4GW)?

It is clear what they are not: leaflets saying, No on can hope to fight the
American military, surrender now, or We are here to liberate you. After
the Iraq debacle, those messages will be met with open derision. The only
way such leaflets are likely to be useful is if they are printed on very
soft paper.

Colonel John Boyd said that the greatest weakness a person or a nation can
have at the highest level of war, the moral level, is a contradiction
between what they say and what they do. From that I think follows the basic
definition of psyops in Fourth Generation war: psyops are not what you say,
but what you do.

If we look at the war in Iraq through that lens, we quickly see a number of
psyops we could have undertaken, but did not. For example, what if instead
locating the CPA in Saddam's old palace in Baghdad and putting Iraqi
prisoners in his notorious Abu Ghraib prison, we had located the CPA in Abu
Ghraib and put the prisoners in Saddam's palace? That would have sent a
powerful message.

What if, when we get in a firefight and Iraqis are killed, General Kimmitt
the Frog, our military spokesman in Baghdad, announced that with regret
instead of in triumph? We could use every engagement as a chance to
reiterate the message, We did not come here to fight. That message would
be all the more powerful if we treated Iraqi wounded the same way as
American wounded, offered American military honors to their dead and sent
any prisoners home, quickly, with a wad of cash in their pockets.

Years ago, my father, David Lind, whose career was in advertising, said, If
the day World War II ended, Stalin had sent all his German prisoners home,
giving them a big box of food for their families and a wallet full of
Reichsmarks, the Communists would have taken all of Western Europe. He may
have been right.

In Fallujah, the Marines just showed a brilliant appreciation of psyops in
4GW. How? They let the Iraqis win. At the tactical level, the Marines
probably could have taken Fallujah, although the result would have been a
strategic disaster. Instead, by pulling back and letting the Iraqis claim
victory, they gave Iraqi forces of order inside the city the self-respect
they needed to work with us. Washington and the CPA seem to define
liberation as beating the Iraqis to a pulp, then handing them their
freedom like a gift from a master to a slave. In societies where honor,
dignity and manliness are still important virtues, that can never work. But
losing to win sometimes can.

The CPA's complete inability to appreciate psyops in 4GW was revealed in a
recent episode that suggested Laurel and Hardy are in command. It seems our
Boys in Baghdad decided the new Iraq needed a new flag. Never mind that
the new flag suggested Iraq is still a province of the Ottoman Empire and
also conveniently included the same shade of blue found on the Israeli flag.
What giving any new flag to Iraq's Quisling government in Baghdad really did
was give the Iraqi resistance something it badly needed - its own flag, in
the form of the old Iraqi flag. Couldn't anybody over there see that coming?
Hello?

Perhaps our most disastrous failure (beyond Abu Ghraib) to realize that
psyops are what we do, not what we say, is our ongoing fight with the Mahdi
Army of Muqtada al-Sadr. At the beginning of April, Sadr had almost no
support in the Shi'ite community outside Baghdad's Sadr City, while
Ayatollah Sistani, who has passively cooperated with the occupation, had
overwhelming support. Now, thanks to our attacks on Sadr and his militia,
polls taken in Iraq show Sadr with more than 30% support among Shi'ites
while Sistani has slipped to just over 50%. The U.S. Army has been Sadr's
best publicity agent. Maybe it should send him a bill.

Some of our psyops people probably understand all of this. Unfortunately,
the people above them, in Iraq and in Washington, appear to grasp none of
it. The end result is that, regardless of who wins the firefights, our
enemies win one psychological victory after another. In a type of war where
the moral and mental levels far outweigh the physical level, it is not hard
to see where that road ends.


http://www.antiwar.com/lind/?articleid=2662

Liability of contractors for torture in Iraq

[k hanly]

May 26, 2004
THE LAW
Who Would Try Civilians of U.S.? No One in Iraq
By ADAM LIPTAK

hough civilian translators and interrogators may have participated in the
abuse at Abu Ghraib prison, prosecuting them will present challenges, legal
experts say, because such civilians working for the military are subject to
neither Iraqi nor military justice.

On the basis of a referral from the Pentagon, the Justice Department opened
an investigation on Friday into the conduct of one civilian contractor in
Iraq, who has not been identified.

We remain committed to taking all appropriate action within our
jurisdiction regarding allegations of mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners, Mark
Corallo, a Justice Department spokesman, said in a statement.

Prosecuting civilian contractors in United States courts would be
fascinating and enormously complicated, said Deborah N. Pearlstein,
director of the U.S. law and security program of Human Rights First.

It is clear, on the other hand, that neither Iraqi courts nor American
courts-martial are available.

In June 2003, L. Paul Bremer III, the chief American administrator in Iraq,
granted broad immunity to civilian contractors and their employees. They
were, he wrote, generally not subject to criminal and civil actions in the
Iraqi legal system, including arrest and detention.

That immunity is limited to their official acts under their contracts, and
it is unclear whether any abuses alleged can be said to have been such acts.
But even unofficial conduct by contractors in Iraq cannot be prosecuted
there, Mr. Bremer's order said, without his written permission.

Similarly, under a series of Supreme Court decisions, civilians cannot be
court-martialed in the absence of a formal declaration of war. There was no
such declaration in the Iraq war.

In theory, the president could establish new military commissions to try
civilians charged with offenses in Iraq, said Jordan Paust, a law professor
at the University of Houston and a former member of the faculty at the
Army's Judge Advocate General's School. The commissions announced by
President Bush in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks do not, however, have
jurisdiction over American citizens.

That leaves prosecution in United States courts. There, prosecutors might
turn to two relatively narrow laws, or a broader one, to pursue their cases.

A 1994 law makes torture committed by Americans outside the United States a
crime. The law defines torture as the infliction of severe physical or
mental pain or suffering.

But some human rights groups suspect that the administration may be
reluctant to use the law, because its officials, including Defense Secretary
Donald H. Rumsfeld, have resisted calling the abuse at Abu Ghraib torture.

If they don't want to use the word `torture,'  Ms. Pearlstein said,
prosecutions under the torture act aren't likely.

A 1996 law concerning war crimes allows prosecutions for violations of some
provisions of the Geneva Conventions, including those prohibiting torture,
outrages upon personal dignity and humiliating and degrading treatment.

Bush administration lawyers cited potential prosecutions under the law as a
reason not to give detainees at Guantánamo Bay the protections of the Geneva
Conventions. But the administration has said that the conventions apply to
detainees in Iraq.

Both the torture law and the war-crimes law provide for long prison
sentences, and capital punishment is available in cases involving the
victim's death.

The broader law, the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act, allows
people employed by or accompanying the armed forces outside the United
States to be prosecuted in United States courts for federal crimes
punishable by more than a year's imprisonment. People who are citizens or
residents of the host nations are not covered, but Americans and other
foreign nationals are.

The law has apparently been invoked only once, in a case involving charges
that the wife of an Air Force staff sergeant murdered him in Turkey last
year. The case will soon be tried in federal court in Los Angeles.

The law was passed to fill a legal gap that had existed since the 1950's,
when Supreme Court decisions limited the military's ability to prosecute
civilians in courts-martial during peacetime.

In 2000, a three-judge panel of the federal appeals court in New York,
citing that gap, reluctantly overturned the conviction of an American
civilian who had sexually abused a child in Germany. In an unusual move, the
judges sent their decision to two Congressional committees. That helped
encourage enactment of the law that year.

The law requires the Pentagon, in consultation with the State and Justice
Departments, to establish regulations on how to carry it out. Though it was
enacted four years ago, the regulations are still under consideration.

In any event, there are gaps and uncertainties in the law.

For one thing, it applies only to contractors employed by the Defense
Department. Contractors hired by 

Re: Nick Berg and Ben Linder

[k hanly]

I found the NYT article very suspicious. It ignores or does not resolve
important questions and leaves out important details. Although the article
notes at one point that Iraqi police and US officials both deny they had
custody of Berg it also recounts as fact that he was in Iraqi police
custody. What sort of crappy journalism is that?
  Also it does not mention such important details as the part in the video
execution where the executioners claim he is being executed because a deal
could not be made to trade Berg for Abu Ghraib prisoner(s). Nor as you
suggest it doesnt discuss the execution video details either.
Nor does it mention the fact that Berg was said to have been in
possession of a Koran and anti-semitic literature.
The article is a human interest entertainment fluff job.

Cheers, Ken Hanly
- Original Message -
From: Paul Zarembka [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Wednesday, May 26, 2004 9:01 AM
Subject: Re: Nick Berg and Ben Linder


 I find the question of whether Berg was actually killed by beheading and
 by whom far more interesting than the NYT article about Berg's
 personality. See, for example, The Nicholas Berg execution: A working
 hypothesis and a resolution for the orange jumpsuit mystery

 http://www.brushtail.com.au/nick_berg_hypothesis.html

 Paul Z.

 *
 Vol.21-Neoliberalism in Crisis, Accumulation, and Rosa Luxemburg's Legacy
 RESEARCH IN POLITICAL ECONOMY, Zarembka/Soederberg, eds, Elsevier Science
 ** http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/PZarembka

Draft of UN resolution

[k hanly]

The resolution makes no mention of UNMOVIC. Does this mean that the US will
make the final report to the UN onf WMD or what? THe UN seems to suffer from
severe memory loss. Does it not remember that inspectors were given a day or
so to clear out of Iraq or be bombed by the USUK forces? USUK simply ignored
the UN and did not invite inspectors back in to finish the job. Order of the
day was to have a UN resolution legimitising the occupation. Things have not
changed. Now the hand-picked interim government vetted by the US (and UK?)
is now to be legitimised.

There is no mention that the interim government lacks the power to enact new
laws that I can see but my understanding is that it will simply enforce laws
passed under the occupation. Is this just understood but unwritten?

Item 6 says that the mandate of the international force shall be reviewed in
12 months or at the request of the Transitional
Government of Iraq. The problem is that no such entity is mentioned earlier
just the Interim Government and the Trasitioal National Assembly. If the
latter is meant then the interim government has no say. It is also clear
that the US commanded multinational force has the say over security. The
rest about consultation etc. seems to be windowdressing. No where does it
say that the government has control over its own troops. What about jails
etc.? Of course multinational forces continue to be immune from Iraqi law.
What of all the private contractors and security guards?

The emphasis upon terrorism in the document is hardly surprising. It will
provide ammunition for the Bush garbage that Iraq is central to the war on
terrorism. No doubt any resistance after the transfer of sovereignty will be
dubbed terrorist. I hear that the new jail in Iraq will be called
Guantanamo II..


Cheers, Ken Hanly

The Security Council,

Recalling its previous relevant resolutions on Iraq, in particular
resolutions 1483 (2003) and 1511 (2003),

Reaffirming the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Iraq,

Recognizing the importance of international support, particularly that of
countries in the region, Iraq's neighbors, and regional organizations, for
the people of Iraq in their efforts to achieve security and prosperity,

Determined to mark a new phase in Iraq's transition to a democratically
elected government, and looking forward, to this end, to the end of the
occupations, and the assumption of authority by  sovereign Interim
Government of Iraq by 30 June 2004,

Welcoming the ongoing efforts of the Special Advisor to the
Secretary-General to assist the people of Iraq in achieving the formation of
a sovereign Interim Government of Iraq,

Welcoming the progress made in implementing the arrangements for Iraq's
political transition referred to in resolution 1511 (2003)

Affirming the importance of the principles of rule of law, including respect
for human rights and fundamental freedoms, and of democracy, including free
and fair elections

Recalling the establishment of the United Nations Assistance Mission for
Iraq (UNAMI) on 15 August 2003, and determined that the United Nations
should play a leading role in assisting the Iraqi people in the formation of
institutions for representative government.

Recognizing the international support for restoration of stability and
security is essential to the well-being of the people of Iraq as well as the
ability of all concerned to carry o out their work on behalf of the people
of Iraq, and welcoming Member State contributions in this regard under
resolution 1483 (2003) of 22 May 2003 and resolutions 1511 (2003) of 16
October 2003,

Recalling the report provided to the Security Council on 16 April 2004 under
resolution 1511 (2003) on the efforts and progress made by the multinational
force authorized under that resolution, welcoming the willingness of the
multinational force to continue efforts to contribute to the maintenance of
security and stability in Iraq in support of the political transition,
especially for upcoming elections, and to provide security of the UN
presence in Iraq, as further described in the letter to the President of the
Security Council on XX XX 2004, and recognizing the importance of the
consent of the sovereign government of Iraq for the presence of the
multinational force and of close coordination between the multinational
force and that government,

Noting that the multinational force will operate in accordance with
generally accepted principles of international law and cooperate with
relevant international organizations,

Affirming the important of international assistance in reconstruction and
development of the Iraqi economy,

Recognizing the benefits to Iraq of the Immunities and privileges enjoyed by
the Iraqi oil revenues and by the Development Fund for Iraq, and noting the
importance of providing for continued disbursements of this fund by the
Interim Government of Iraq and its successors upon dissolution of the
Coalition Provisional Authority.

Determining

Bush and the Carlyle Group revisited

[k hanly]

When War is Swell
Bush's Crusades and the Carlyle Group
By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

Across all fronts, Bush's war deteriorates with stunning rapidity. The death
count of American soldiers killed in Iraq will soon top 800, with no end in
sight. The members of the handpicked Iraqi Governor Council are being
knocked off one after another. Once loyal Shia clerics, like Ayatollah
Sistani, are now telling the administration to pull out or face a
nationalist insurgency. The trail of culpability for the abuse, torture and
murder of Iraqi detainees seems to lead inexorably into the office of Donald
Rumsfeld. The war for Iraqi oil has ended up driving the price of crude oil
through the roof. Even Kurdish leaders, brutalized by the Ba'athists for
decades, are now saying Iraq was a safer place under their nemesis Saddam
Hussein. Like Medea whacking her own kids, the US turned on its own
creation, Ahmed Chalabi, raiding his Baghdad compound and fingering him as
an agent of the ayatollahs of Iran. And on and on it goes.

Still not all of the president's men are in a despairing mood. Amid the
wreckage, there remain opportunities for profit and plunder. Halliburton and
Bechtel's triumphs in Iraq have been chewed over for months. Less well
chronicled is the profiteering of the Carlyle Group, a company with ties
that extend directly into the Oval Office itself.

Even Pappy Bush stands in line to profit handsomely from his son's war
making. The former president is on retainer with the Carlyle Group, the
largest privately held defense contractor in the nation. Carlyle is run by
Frank Carlucci, who served as the National Security advisor and Secretary of
Defense under Ronald Reagan. Carlucci has his own embeds in the current Bush
administration. At Princeton, his college roommate was Donald Rumsfeld.
They've remained close friends and business associates ever since. When you
have friends like this, you don't need to hire lobbyists..

Bush Sr. serves as a kind of global emissary for Carlyle. The ex-president
doesn't negotiate arms deals; he simply opens the door for them, a kind of
high level meet-and-greet. His special area of influence is the Middle East,
primarily Saudi Arabia, where the Bush family has extensive business and
political ties. According to an account in the Washington Post, Bush Sr.
earns around $500,000 for each speech he makes on Carlyle's behalf.

One of the Saudi investors lured to Carlyle by Bush was the BinLaden Group,
the construction conglomerate owned by the family of Osama bin Laden.
According to an investigation by the Wall Street Journal, Bush convinced
Shafiq Bin Laden, Osama's half brother, to sink $2 million of BinLaden Group
money into Carlyle's accounts. In a pr move, the Carlyle group cut its ties
to the BinLaden Group in October 2001.

One of Bush Sr.'s top sidekicks, James Baker, is also a key player at
Carlyle. Baker joined the weapons firm in 1993, fresh from his stint as
Bush's secretary of state and chief of staff. Packing a briefcase of global
contacts, Baker parlayed his connections with heads of state, generals and
international tycoons into a bonanza for Carlyle. After Baker joined the
company, Carlyle's revenues more than tripled.

Like Bush Sr., Baker's main function was to manage Carlyle's lucrative
relationship with Saudi potentates, who had invested tens of millions of
dollars in the company. Baker helped secure one of Carlyle's most lucrative
deals: the contract to run the Saudi offset program, a multi-billion dollar
scheme wherein international companies winning Saudi contracts are required
under terms of the contracts to invest a percentage of the profits in Saudi
companies.

Baker not only greases the way for investment deals and arms sales, but he
also plays the role of seasoned troubleshooter, protecting the interests of
key clients and regimes. A case in point: when the Justice Department
launched an investigation into the financial dealings of Prince Sultan bin
Abdul Aziz, the Saudi prince sought out Baker's help. Baker is currently
defending the prince in a trillion dollar lawsuit brought by the families of
the victims of the 9/11 attacks. The suit alleges that the prince used
Islamic charities as pass-throughs for shipping millions of dollars to
groups linked to al-Qaeda.

Baker and Carlyle enjoy another ace in the hole when it comes to looking out
for their Saudi friends. Baker prevailed on Bush Jr. to appoint his former
law partner, Bob Jordan, as the administration's ambassador to Saudi Arabia.

Carlyle and its network of investors are well positioned to cash in on Bush
Jr.'s expansion of the defense and Homeland Security department budgets. Two
Carlyle companies, Federal Data Systems and US Investigations Services, hold
multi-billion dollar contracts to provide background checks for commercial
airlines, the Pentagon, the CIA and the Department of Homeland Security.
USIS was once a federal agency called the Office Federal Investigations, but
it was privatized in 1996 at 

The New UN resolution on sovereignty

[k hanly]

The text does not seem available as yet but there are some odd sections and
some odd omissions.

The article does not mention the fact that the government will in effect not
have any legislative functions. The law in effect will be that passed under
the occupation.

Obviously any corruption in expenditures from oil revenues will be
internationalised. The Iraqis apparently are not to be entrusted with
expenditure of their own assets without proper supervision in the interests
of foreign investors.

The US will be in command of security through a multinational force. There
is no mention of the opt-out provisions where Iraqi troops could refuse to
take part in missions.

Why should UN members agree not to file any lawsuits against Iraq for 12
months?

Given that all the officials are to be chosen by Brahmini after first being
vetted by the US (and UK?) the govt. is not likely to ask the multi-national
force to leave. Furthermore it seems that there are advisors attached to
ministries just to keep them in line and also other groups that have been
set up by the CPA that will have real powers.

I wonder who will be the private mercenaries awarded the special contract to
protect UN personnel.



Cheers, Ken Hanly

By Evelyn Leopold
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - A new U.S.-British drafted U.N. Security Council
resolution endorsing sovereignty for an Iraqi caretaker government approves
the presence of the U.S.-led force there but sets no date for the troops to
leave.

The resolution, distributed to council members on Monday, would endorse the
formation of a sovereign interim government that would take office by June
30 and says that government would assume the responsibility and authority
for governing a sovereign Iraq.

The draft emerged as President Bush prepared a televised speech later on
Monday mapping out his plans for Iraq, where violent attacks on occupying
forces have dimmed U.S. hopes for a peaceful transfer to democratic rule.

The definition of sovereignty is a contentious issue, with the Bush
administration attempting to assure U.N. Security Council members they would
not be asked to approve an occupation under another name.

British ambassador Emyr Jones Parry told reporters the resolution
underlines clearly that all sovereignty will be returned to the Iraqis,
that the interim Iraqi government will assume total responsibility for its
own sovereignty.

But the text is bound to run into criticism by France, Germany, Russia and
others. It does not give a definite timetable for deployment of the U.S.-led
force and instead calls for a review after a year, which a new Iraqi
government can request earlier.

A review, however, would be similar to an open-ended mandate and would not
mean the force would leave unless the Security Council, where the United
States has veto power, decides it should do so.

The resolution, contrary to expectations, does not give an opt out clause
that would allow Iraqi troops to refuse a command from the American
military. Instead it calls for arrangements to ensure coordination between
the two.

As part of the transition process, U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, now in
Baghdad, is due to name a president, a prime minister, two vice presidents
and 26 ministers before the end of May. They would stay in office until
elections for a national assembly, expected to be held by January 2005.

The resolution also says a separate force would be created within the
multinational force for the sole purposes of providing security for U.N.
staff and operations within Iraq.

On oil, the draft resolution says Iraq would have control over its oil
revenues. But it would keep in place an international advisory board, which
audits accounts, to assure investors and donors that their money was being
spent free of corruption, U.N. envoys said.

Under a May 2003 Security Council resolution adopted after the fall of
Saddam Hussein, all proceeds of Iraq's oil and gas sales were deposited into
a special account called the Development Fund for Iraq, controlled by the
U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority.

The new measure calls on all U.N. member-states to take steps to ensure that
no law suits are filed against Iraq or any of its state-owned enterprises
for a period of 12 months.

Curtailing an existing U.N. arms embargo, the draft would allow the
importation of arms by either the multinational force or the Iraqi
government. ((Editing by David Storey; Reuters messaging:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]; 1-212-355-7424)

© Reuters 2004. All Rights Reserved.

Solution to the torture problem: Ban Cameras

[k hanly]

Rumsfeld bans camera phones
From correspondents in London
May 23, 2004

MOBILE phones fitted with digital cameras have been banned in US army
installations in Iraq on orders from Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, The
Business newspaper reported today.

Quoting a Pentagon source, the paper said the US Defence Department believes
that some of the damning photos of US soldiers abusing Iraqis at Abu Ghraib
prison near Baghdad were taken with camera phones.

Digital cameras, camcorders and cellphones with cameras have been
prohibited in military compounds in Iraq, it said, adding that a total ban
throughout the US military is in the works.

Disturbing new photos of Iraqi prisoner abuse, which the US government had
reportedly tried to keep hidden, were published on Friday in the Washington
Post newspaper.

The photos emerged along with details of testimony from inmates at Abu
Ghraib who said they were sexually molested by female soldiers, beaten,
sodomised and forced to eat food from toilets.

http://news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,9643950%255E401,00.html

Schmeiser loses again

[k hanly]

Monsanto can hold plant patent: SCOC
Ottawa - Biotechnology giant Monsanto can hold a patent on its
genetically-modified plant, the Supreme Court of Canada said Friday, ruling
against a Saskatchewan farmer.


In a 5-4 decision, the court upheld Monsanto's patent over its Roundup Ready
canola.

The company alleged farmer Percy Schmeiser grew the patented canola seeds
without paying for them, infringing on the company's patent.

Schmeiser argued the canola seed blew onto his property from a nearby
farmer's truck without his knowledge. He has said the plants polluted his
fields.



Monsanto inserts a gene into a canola plant to make it pesticide resistant,
and holds patents on the gene and the insertion process. It argued the
patents should extend to control of the plant.

In a small victory for Schmeiser, the Supreme Court ruled he does not have
to pay to Monsanto the $19,000 he made from his 1998 crop harvest.

In 2002, the Federal Court of Appeal upheld an earlier ruling that found
Schmeiser guilty of illegally planting the Monsanto canola on his property.
He was ordered to pay $175,000 in damages, plus court costs.

In 2003, the government of Ontario intervened in Schmeiser's Supreme Court
case, saying it has important implications for the development of public
policy in Ontario, including the delivery of health care to its residents.
Ontario argued a gene molecule can be patented, but not the genetic
information within the molecule.

The Supreme Court of Canada has already ruled against patenting a higher
life form in the case of the Harvard mouse.

http://calgary.cbc.ca/regional/servlet/View?filename=ca_monsanto20040521

Avoidgin the Geneva Conventions etc.

[k hanly]

Has anyone ever tried to bring a charge under the 1996 Federal War Crimes
Act?

Cheers, Ken Hanly

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/21/politics/21MEMO.html?ei=1en=fa2af4bbd3884368ex=1086154392pagewanted=printposition=May
21, 2004
GENEVA CONVENTIONS
Justice Memos Explained How to Skip Prisoner Rights
By NEIL A. LEWIS

ASHINGTON, May 20 - A series of Justice Department memorandums written in
late 2001 and the first few months of 2002 were crucial in building a legal
framework for United States officials to avoid complying with international
laws and treaties on handling prisoners, lawyers and former officials say.

The confidential memorandums, several of which were written or co-written by
John C. Yoo, a University of California law professor who was serving in the
department, provided arguments to keep United States officials from being
charged with war crimes for the way prisoners were detained and
interrogated. They were endorsed by top lawyers in the White House, the
Pentagon and the vice president's office but drew dissents from the State
Department.

The memorandums provide legal arguments to support administration officials'
assertions that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to detainees from the
Afghanistan war. They also suggested how officials could inoculate
themselves from liability by claiming that abused prisoners were in some
other nation's custody.

The methods of detention and interrogation used in the Afghanistan conflict,
in which the United States operated outside the Geneva Conventions, is at
the heart of an investigation into prisoner abuse in Iraq in recent months.
Human rights lawyers have said that in showing disrespect for international
law in the Afghanistan conflict, the stage was set for harsh treatment in
Iraq.

One of the memorandums written by Mr. Yoo along with Robert J. Delahunty,
another Justice Department lawyer, was prepared on Jan. 9, 2002, four months
after the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. The 42-page
memorandum, entitled, Application of treaties and laws to Al Qaeda and
Taliban detainees, provided several legal arguments for avoiding the
jurisdiction of the Geneva Conventions.

A lawyer and a former government official who saw the memorandum said it
anticipated the possibility that United States officials could be charged
with war crimes, defined as grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions. The
document said a way to avoid that is to declare that the conventions do not
apply.

The memorandum, addressed to William J. Haynes, the Pentagon's general
counsel, said that President Bush could argue that the Taliban government in
Afghanistan was a failed state and therefore its soldiers were not
entitled to protections accorded in the conventions. If Mr. Bush did not
want to do that, the memorandum gave other grounds, like asserting that the
Taliban was a terrorist group. It also noted that the president could just
say that he was suspending the Geneva Conventions for a particular conflict.

Prof. Detlev Vagts, an authority on international law and treaties at
Harvard Law School, said the arguments in the memorandums as described to
him sound like an effort to find loopholes that could be used to avoid
responsibility.

One former government official who was involved in drafting some of the
memorandums said that the lawyers did not make recommendations but only
provided a range of all the options available to the White House.

On Jan. 25, 2002, Alberto R. Gonzales, the White House counsel, in a
memorandum to President Bush, said that the Justice Department's advice was
sound and that Mr. Bush should declare the Taliban as well as Al Qaeda
outside the coverage of the Geneva Conventions. That would keep American
officials from being exposed to the federal War Crimes Act, a 1996 law,
which, as Mr. Gonzales noted, carries the death penalty.

The Gonzales memorandum to Mr. Bush said that accepting the recommendations
of the Justice Department would preserve flexibility in the global war
against terrorism. The nature of the new war places a high premium on other
factors such as the ability to quickly obtain information from captured
terrorists and their sponsors in order to avoid further atrocities against
American civilians, said the memorandum, obtained this week by The New York
Times. The details of the memorandum were first reported by Newsweek.

Mr. Gonzales wrote that the war against terrorism, in my judgment renders
obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners.

Mr. Gonzales also says in the memorandum that another benefit of declaring
the conventions inapplicable would be that United States officials could not
be prosecuted for war crimes in the future by prosecutors and independent
counsels who might see the fighting in a different light.

He observed, however, that the disadvantages included widespread
condemnation among our allies and that other countries would also try to
avoid jurisdiction of the Geneva Conventions. It also

Qatar to legalise unions

[k hanly]

Qatar labour law opens door to unions


Thursday 20 May 2004, 15:05 Makka Time, 12:05 GMT



The state of Qatar has issued a new labour law allowing for workers in the
tiny Gulf emirate the right to form trade unions and go on strike.



An official statement released from Amir Shaikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani's
office on Thursday said the new law will come into force in six months.

Qatar's Housing and Civil Affairs Minister Shaikh Falah bin Jassim al-Thani
said the legislation allows workers to set up unions within the
establishments in which they work.

It also introduces the right to go on strike when amicable settlements
cannot be reached between employees and employers, he said.

The legislation bans employing youth aged under 16, sets the working day at
eight hours and grants women equal rights with men, in addition to a paid
50-day maternity leave.

Qatar tends to follow its own agenda, it's hard to say if other countries
will follow

Angus Hindley,
Deputy Editor, MEED


The new law comes just a week after the Qatari ruler allowed the formation
of professional associations for the first time in the gas-rich state, which
has only some 150,000 nationals among a population of 650,000.

Angus Hindley, Deputy Editor of Middle East Economic Digest told
Aljazeera.net that Qatar's new labour law is part of the country's
democratisation programme.

This new law is part of the reforming process which has in effect been
going on for more than four years, Hindley said.

'Step by step reform'

It is part of Qatar's gradual process of liberalisation and reform.

Things are happening step by step, from deregulating the media to women
rights - and the next step that is coming will be federal elections, he
added.

Qatar recently introduced a series of reforms, including a first written
constitution that will usher in a partly-elected Shura (consultative)
Council later this year.

Often seen as a trailblazer in the Arab world, analysts remain uncertain
whether other Arab nations will follow Qatar's example of gradual
democratisation.

Qatar tends to follow its own agenda, it's hard to say if other countries
will follow - Bahrain is a possibility - but I doubt other countries will do
the same, Hindley said.

Re: New York Times on Scarcity

[k hanly]

I thought the appropriate psychological orientation for success in
capitalism was to be a psychopath. At least that is the hypothesis of the
Corporation documentary.

http://www.thetyee.ca/Entertainment/current/The+Corporation+Shrinking+the+Psychopath.htm

By a quirk of legal fiction, our courts treat a corporation as if it were a
person. Alas, that person is by design a psychopath, conclude a team of B.C.
filmmakers who put the dominant institution of our time on the couch and
apply to its behaviour the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders.


- Original Message -
From: Charles Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Thursday, May 20, 2004 9:18 AM
Subject: New York Times on Scarcity


 -clip-

 My reading of Mirowsky is that he argues that Nash
 formulated the problem the way he did because he was
 paranoid schizophrenic. I don't think Nash's paranoid
 schizophrenic equilibrium is wrong. I just think it is
 paranoid schizophrenic.

 Sabri

 ^^
 If we say that capitalism has mostly crazy ,socio-economic environments,
 then in a way being crazy is a rational response to getting on in it.
Maybe
 his paranoia was  well founded generalized fear, and may be many of the
 players of the bourgeois game in reality  ( not theoretically) have well
 founded fears. Don't successful Americans have to have a knack for
watching
 their backs ? Don't they have to have the ability to change their
 personalities on a dime , turn on others and stab them in the back, etc. -
 socalled schizophrenia ?

 Charles

US again wants UN to place it beyond the law

[k hanly]

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The Bush administration wants the U.N. Security
Council to renew a controversial resolution exempting American peacekeepers
from prosecution by the new International Criminal Court.

Two years ago the same resolution was adopted unanimously after the United
States threatened to veto U.N. peacekeeping missions, one by one. A year
ago, three countries abstained.

This year at least four nations -- Brazil, Spain, Germany and France -- are
expected to abstain. But the measure will probably reach the minimum nine
votes needed for adoption in the 15-nation council, diplomats said.

Although all 15 European Union nations have ratified the treaty creating the
court and are financing most of its costs, close U.S. ally Britain is
expected to vote in favour.

As the first permanent global criminal court, the ICC was set up to try
perpetrators for the world's worst atrocities -- genocide, mass war crimes
and systematic human rights abuses.

The tribunal went into operation in The Hague, Netherlands, this year and is
investigating massacres in the Congo and by the brutal Lord's Resistance
Army in northern Uganda.

The draft resolution, introduced by the United States on Wednesday, would
place U.S. troops and officials serving in U.N.-approved-missions beyond the
reach of the court.

Specifically, it would exempt current or former officials from prosecution
or investigation if the individual comes from a country that did not ratify
a 1998 Rome treaty that established the tribunal.

The United States argues it cannot put itself under the jurisdiction of a
foreign court it did not authorise and says its many troops abroad would be
open to politically motivated prosecutions.

Proponents of the court say that there are enough safeguards in its statutes
to protect countries like the United States, which has a functioning
judicial system that would take priority over egregious cases.

It's outrageous, considering everything that has happened to U.S. armed
forces in Iraq -- and then to flip it through with less than 48 hours
notice, said Richard Dicker, a counsel with the New York-based Human Rights
Watch.

Of the 15 Security Council members, Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Brazil,
Romania and Benin are among the 94 nations whose legislatures have ratified
the treaty creating the court.

Russia, Chile, Algeria, Angola and the Philippines have signed but not
ratified it and China and Pakistan have neither signed nor ratified.

The United States, under former President Bill Clinton, was one of 135
nations that signed the treaty, but the Bush administration rescinded the
signature.


http://www.reuters.co.uk/newsArticle.jhtml?type=to
pNewsstoryID=5205172

Blow by blow on Reuters staff abuse...

[k hanly]

http://199.249.170.220/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000515956

Reuters Stands by Iraq Abuse Reports, Releases Timeline on Incident

By Greg Mitchell

Published: May 20, 2004 4:00 PM EST

NEW YORK Despite official military statements denying any wrongdoing -- and
an announcement today that the case is closed -- Reuters is standing by
allegations that three of its employees were abused by U.S. soldiers while
confined near Falluja in January.

A chronology produced by Reuters detailing events surrounding the alleged
abuse of three of its staffers in Iraq, obtained by EP today, appears to
support the agency's contention that it has repeatedly pressed the military
for a full and objective probe of this incident from the beginning, with
sometimes disquieting results.

The detailed chronology reveals that the agency's Baghdad bureau chief,
Andrew Marshall, received an e-mail from the military on Jan. 29 containing
an executive summary of the U.S. investigation and its final results, which
claimed no abuse of the staffers -- while the investigation, according to
the Pentagon, was still underway. And none of the three Reuters detainees
had been interviewed by the military.

The military said the summary had been sent in error, but when the final
report was sent to Reuters nearly a month later, the executive summary had
not changed.

On Wednesday, General Ricardo Sanchez reiterated his belief that the
investigation of this case was thorough and he stood by the military's
conduct in the matter. (The official military report on the incident was
posted today at Raleigh's newsobserver.com.)

Our investigation found no abuse of any kind, Maj. Jimmie Cummings,
spokesman for the 82nd Airborne Division, which was responsible for
detaining the Reuters' employees, told the Associated Press today. This is
a closed case.

Reuters told EP today that it had no reason to doubt the testimony of its
staffers.

Responding to questions about why Reuters seemingly waited until now to
press this issue, Stephen Naru, Reuters' global head of media relations,
said, The suggestion that Reuters has not been prepared to go public on
this story until now is just not true. Since the incident first occurred in
early January, we have been open about and consistent in our efforts to
secure a fair and independent investigation into the incident. ... Reuters
took significant steps to provide information and evidence to the Pentagon
and field commanders in this case. This includes testimonies of the three
individuals, which we have no reason to doubt. These testimonials took place
many months before any prisoner abuse claims became public.

Suggestions that the three are motivated by 'anti-coalition' motives are
totally unfounded. Given the awful experiences these individuals went
through these kind of remarks are regrettable. Until the U.S. army takes the
time to interview the three individuals as part of a thorough investigation
it is not really in a position to evaluate the veracity of their evidence.

Here is the internal timeline, created by Reuters, and obtained by EP, that
details the agency's version of its reaction to the alleged abuse of its
staffers in early January, and the response from the U.S. military since:

Jan. 2: First indication of detentions of three Iraqis working for Reuters
and an Iraqi working for NBC in Falluja following the shooting down of a
U.S. helicopter. Military spokesman Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt tells a Baghdad
news briefing that enemy personnel posing as journalists had fired on U.S.
forces and had later been detained. Baghdad bureau informs 82nd Airborne and
other military personnel of identity and status of the detainees within
first hours of their detentions.

Jan. 3-4: Baghdad Bureau Chief Andrew Marshall working with [Combined Joint
Task Force] and [Coalition Provisional Authority] officials in Baghdad and
82nd in Falluja/Ramadi to try to secure employees' release.

Marshall and Baghdad office manager Khaled al-Ramahi travel to [Forward
Operating Base]Volturno near Falluja but are not allowed inside and not
allowed to see the detainees. Captain Ryan Deruoin tells Marshall outside
the base that the detainees are well and are being properly treated.

Jan. 4: Marshall and NBC Bureau Chief Karl Bostic meet Kimmitt in Baghdad to
seek releases. Kimmitt said the detainees would be released the following
day.

Jan. 5: Marshall provides 82nd Airborne, at its request, with footage shot
in Falluja on 2 Jan by Salem Ureibi. Footage is of worshippers in Falluja at
Friday prayers at a mosque and demonstrates that there is no basis for U.S.
assertion that Ureibi and others were seen in the area where the helicopter
was shot down.

Jan. 5: Washington Bureau Chief Rob Doherty, Reuters Global Managing Editor
David Schlesinger and Reuters Americas Television Editor John Clarke meet
with [Chief Pentagon spokesman Lawrence] Di Rita and [Pentagon spokesman
Bryan] Whitman at Pentagon. Detainees released shortly 

US planes attack wedding party killing 40

[k hanly]

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20040519/D82LPGOG0.html

U.S. Reportedly Kills 40 Iraqis at Party


 Email this Story

May 19, 1:24 PM (ET)

By SCHEHEREZADE FARAMARZI
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BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - A U.S. helicopter fired on a wedding party early
Wednesday in western Iraq, killing more than 40 people, Iraqi officials
said. The U.S. military said it could not confirm the report and was
investigating.

Lt. Col Ziyad al-Jbouri, deputy police chief of the city of Ramadi, said
between 42 and 45 people died in the attack, which took place about 2:45
a.m. in a remote desert area near the border with Syria and Jordan. He said
those killed included 15 children and 10 women.

Dr. Salah al-Ani, who works at a hospital in Ramadi, put the death toll at
45.

Associated Press Television News obtained videotape showing a truck
containing bodies of those allegedly killed.

About a dozen bodies, one without a head, could be clearly seen. but it
appeared that bodies were piled on top of each other and a clear count was
not possible.

Iraqis interviewed on the videotape said partygoers had fired into the air
in a traditional wedding celebration. American troops have sometimes
mistaken celebratory gunfire for hostile fire.

I cannot comment on this because we have not received any reports from our
units that this has happened nor that any were involved in such a tragedy,
Lt. Col. Dan Williams, a U.S. military spokesman, wrote in an e-mail in
response to a question from The Associated Press.

We take all these requests seriously and we have forwarded this inquiry to
the Joint Operations Center for further review and any other information
that may be available, Williams said.

The video footage showed mourners with shovels digging graves. A group of
men crouched and wept around one coffin.

Al-Ani said people at the wedding fired weapons in the air, and that
American troops came to investigate and left. However, al-Ani said,
helicopters attacked the area at about 3 a.m. Two houses were destroyed, he
said.

U.S. troops took the bodies and the wounded in a truck to Rutba hospital, he
said.

This was a wedding and the (U.S.) planes came and attacked the people at a
house. Is this the democracy and freedom that (President) Bush has brought
us? said a man on the videotape, Dahham Harraj. There was no reason.

Another man shown on the tape, who refused to give his name, said the
victims were at a wedding party and the U.S. military planes came... and
started killing everyone in the house.

In July 2002, Afghan officials said 48 civilians at a wedding party were
killed and 117 wounded by a U.S. airstrike in Afghanistan's Uruzgan
province. An investigative report released by the U.S. Central Command said
the airstrike was justified because American planes had come under fire.

Cockburn on raiding the Iraq piggybank

[k hanly]

Salon.com

Raiding Iraq's Piggy Bank
If the Bush administration is truly committed to the nation's sovereignty,
it should let Iraqis retake control of their own oil revenues.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Andrew Cockburn


May 17, 2004 | As the occupation of Iraq dissolves further into bloody
chaos, the colonial overseers in Baghdad are keeping their eyes fixed on
what is really important: Iraq's money and how to keep it. Whatever apology
for a sovereign Iraqi government is permitted to take office after June
30 -- and U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi admits in private that he has to do
whatever the Americans tell him to do -- the United States is making sure
that the Iraqis do not get their hands on their country's oil revenues.

We are talking about big money here: Iraq's oil exports are slated to top
$16 billion this year alone. U.N. Security Resolution 1483, rammed through
by the United States a year ago, gives total control of the money from oil
sales -- currently the only source of revenue in Iraq -- to the occupying
power, i.e., the United States. The actual repository for the money is an
entity called the Development Fund for Iraq, which in effect functions as a
private piggy bank for Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority. The
DFI is directed by a Program Review Board of 11 members, just one of whom is
Iraqi.

In case anyone should be moved to challenge this massive looting exercise in
the courts, President Bush followed up the May 2003 resolution with
Executive Order 13303, which forbids any legal challenge to the development
fund or any actions by the United States affecting Iraq's oil industry.
Since then, the Iraqi oil ministry, famously secured by the U.S. military
during post-invasion riots and looting, has been kept under the close
supervision of a senior U.S. advisor, former ExxonMobil executive Gary
Vogler.

Now, whatever President Bush or his officials may spout in public about the
transfer of power being a central commitment, there is absolutely no
intention in Washington of changing the arrangement concerning oil revenues.
Queried on this crucial topic, the CPA has stated that it will continue to
control the revenues beyond June 30 until such time as an internationally
recognized, representative government of Iraq is properly constituted.
Whatever entity is unveiled for June 30, it apparently will not fit these
requirements, so the hand-over date is, essentially, meaningless.

The development fund is not solely dependent on oil money -- of which it had
collected $6.9 billion by March. Under the terms of 1483 the DFI also took
over all funds -- $8.1 billion so far -- in the U.N.'s oil-for-food program
accounts (Russian and Chinese support for the resolution was bought by
agreeing to keep the oil-for-food racket running for a few more months);
various caches of Saddam Hussein's frozen assets around the world, amounting
to $2.5 billion; and further cash left behind by Saddam inside Iraq,
estimated at about $1.3 billion. The money is kept in an account at the
Federal Reserve Bank in New York.

In theory, these vast sums were to be spent in an open, transparent manner
solely for the benefit of the Iraqi people. But how can we be sure they have
been? Along with the development fund, there was meant to be a supervisory
group, the International Advisory and Monitoring Board -- made up of
officials from the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, U.N. and Arab
Fund for Development -- to oversee where the money goes. However, according
to a trenchant report from the Soros Foundation-funded group Iraq Revenue
Watch, which has been keeping an informed eye on the Iraq boondoggle,
because of dogged resistance by the occupation authorities, combined with
bureaucratic sloth by the IAMB, the board got its first look at the books
only this March, 10 months late. Needless to say, there are no Iraqis on the
board, though two have recently and reluctantly been designated as
observers.

Free from independent scrutiny, the DFI piggy bank has disbursed $7.3
billion. For months Bremer's merry men refused to disclose even the most
minimal information on where the money was going, and even now the CPA
releases only the most generalized breakdown, for example: Restore Oil
Infrastructure -- $80,197,742.82.

Assuming that line item is accurate, that would be money paid to
Halliburton -- which as it happens is a fine example of how the piggy bank
has been used by the administration to get around irksome constitutional
restrictions on government spending without congressional approval.

Late last year, when the stench of Halliburton contracts for Iraq became so
strong that even Congress noticed, the $18.4 billion supplemental
appropriations bill for Iraqi reconstruction specifically forbade the award
of any contract worth more than $5 million that had not been competitively
bid. This might have put a spoke in the Halliburton wheel, except that the
CPA simply reached into the DFI to pay Dick Cheney's old company.

Those abused never interviewed in investigation

[k hanly]

Reuters, NBC Staff Abused by U.S. Troops in Iraq



http://news.myway.com/top/article/id/392678|top|05-18-2004::14:44|reuters.html




May 18, 2:30 PM (ET)

By Andrew Marshall
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - U.S. forces beat three Iraqis working for Reuters and
subjected them to sexual and religious taunts and humiliation during their
detention last January in a military camp near Falluja, the three said
Tuesday.

The three first told Reuters of the ordeal after their release but only
decided to make it public when the U.S. military said there was no evidence
they had been abused, and following the exposure of similar mistreatment of
detainees at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad.

An Iraqi journalist working for U.S. network NBC, who was arrested with the
Reuters staff, also said he had been beaten and mistreated, NBC said
Tuesday.

Two of the three Reuters staff said they had been forced to insert a finger
into their anus and then lick it, and were forced to put shoes in their
mouths, particularly humiliating in Arab culture.

All three said they were forced to make demeaning gestures as soldiers
laughed, taunted them and took photographs. They said they did not want to
give details publicly earlier because of the degrading nature of the abuse.

The soldiers told them they would be taken to the U.S. detention center at
Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, deprived them of sleep, placed bags over their
heads, kicked and hit them and forced them to remain in stress positions for
long periods.

The U.S. military, in a report issued before the Abu Ghraib abuse became
public, said there was no evidence the Reuters staff had been tortured or
abused.

Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of ground forces in Iraq, said in a
letter received by Reuters Monday but dated March 5 that he was confident
the investigation had been thorough and objective and its findings were
sound.

The Pentagon has yet to respond to a request by Reuters Global Managing
Editor David Schlesinger to review the military's findings about the
incident in light of the scandal over the treatment of prisoners at Abu
Ghraib.

Asked for comment Tuesday, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said only:
There are a number of lines of inquiry under way with respect to prison
operations in Iraq. If during the course of any inquiry, the commander
believes it is appropriate to review a specific aspect of detention, he has
the authority to do so.

The abuse happened at Forward Operating Base Volturno, near Falluja, the
Reuters staff said. They were detained on January 2 while covering the
aftermath of the shooting down of a U.S. helicopter near Falluja and held
for three days, first at Volturno and then at Forward Operating Base St
Mere.

The three -- Baghdad-based cameraman Salem Ureibi, Falluja-based freelance
television journalist Ahmad Mohammad Hussein al-Badrani and driver Sattar
Jabar al-Badrani -- were released without charge on Jan. 5.

INADEQUATE INVESTIGATION

When I saw the Abu Ghraib photographs, I wept, Ureibi said Tuesday. I saw
they had suffered like we had.

Ureibi, who understands English better than the other two detainees, said
soldiers told him they wanted to have sex with him, and he was afraid he
would be raped.

NBC, whose stringer Ali Muhammed Hussein Ali al-Badrani was detained along
with the Reuters staff, said he reported that a hood was placed over his
head for hours, and that he was forced to perform physically debilitating
exercises, prevented from sleeping and struck and kicked several times.

Despite repeated requests, we have yet to receive the results of the army
investigation, NBC News Vice President Bill Wheatley said.

Schlesinger sent a letter to Sanchez on January 9 demanding an investigation
into the treatment of the three Iraqis.

The U.S. army said it was investigating and requested further information.
Reuters provided transcripts of initial interviews with the three following
their release, and offered to make them available for interview by
investigators.

A summary of the investigation by the 82nd Airborne Division, dated January
28 and provided to Reuters, said no specific incidents of abuse were
found. It said soldiers responsible for the detainees were interviewed
under oath and none admit or report knowledge of physical abuse or
torture.

The detainees were purposefully and carefully put under stress, to include
sleep deprivation, in order to facilitate interrogation; they were not
tortured, it said. The version received Monday used the phrase sleep
management instead.

The U.S. military never interviewed the three for its investigation.

On February 3 Schlesinger wrote to Lawrence Di Rita, special assistant to
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, saying the investigation was woefully
inadequate and should be reopened.

The military's conclusion of its investigation without even interviewing
the alleged victims, along with other inaccuracies and inconsistencies in
the report, speaks volumes about the seriousness with which the U.S.

Quote of the day

[k hanly]

Whereas detainees used to cry at the very thought of Abu Ghraib, for many
the living conditions now are better in prison than at home. At one point we
were concerned they wouldn't want to leave.
- Army Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, the U.S. commander in Iraq in charge of
the prison system /apparatus of terror.


Published December 14, 2003: Her job: Lock up Iraq's bad guys, St.
Petersburg Times

US control behind the scenes

[k hanly]

Behind the Scenes,
U.S. Tightens Grip
On Iraq's Future

Hand-Picked Proxies, Advisers
Will Be Given Key Roles
In Interim Government
Facing Friction Over the Army
By YOCHI J. DREAZEN and CHRISTOPHER COOPER
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
May 13, 2004; Page A1

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Haider al-Abadi runs Iraq's Ministry of Communications, but
he no longer calls the shots there.

Instead, the authority to license Iraq's television stations, sanction
newspapers and regulate cellphone companies was recently transferred to a
commission whose members were selected by Washington. The commissioners'
five-year terms stretch far beyond the planned 18-month tenure of the
interim Iraqi government that will assume sovereignty on June 30.

The transfer surprised Mr. Abadi, a British-trained engineer who spent
nearly two decades in exile before returning to Iraq last year. He found out
the commission had been formally signed into law only when a reporter asked
him for comment about it. No one from the U.S. even found time to call and
tell me themselves, he says.

As Washington prepares to hand over power, U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer
and other officials are quietly building institutions that will give the
U.S. powerful levers for influencing nearly every important decision the
interim government will make.

In a series of edicts issued earlier this spring, Mr. Bremer's Coalition
Provisional Authority created new commissions that effectively take away
virtually all of the powers once held by several ministries. The CPA also
established an important new security-adviser position, which will be in
charge of training and organizing Iraq's new army and paramilitary forces,
and put in place a pair of watchdog institutions that will serve as checks
on individual ministries and allow for continued U.S. oversight. Meanwhile,
the CPA reiterated that coalition advisers will remain in virtually all
remaining ministries after the handover.


In many cases, these U.S. and Iraqi proxies will serve multiyear terms and
have significant authority to run criminal investigations, award contracts,
direct troops and subpoena citizens. The new Iraqi government will have
little control over its armed forces, lack the ability to make or change
laws and be unable to make major decisions within specific ministries
without tacit U.S. approval, say U.S. officials and others familiar with the
plan.

The moves risk exacerbating the two biggest problems bedeviling the U.S.
occupation: the reluctance of Iraqis to take responsibility for their own
country and the tendency of many Iraqis to blame the country's woes on the
U.S.

Nechirvan Barzani, who controls the western half of the Kurdish autonomous
region in northern Iraq, warns that the U.S. presence in the country will
continue to spark criticism and violence until Iraqis really believe they
run their own country. For his part, Mr. Abadi, the communications minister,
says that installing a government that can't make important decisions
essentially freezes the country in place. He adds, If it's a sovereign
Iraqi government that can't change laws or make decisions, we haven't gained
anything.

U.S. officials say their moves are necessary to prevent an unelected interim
government from making long-term decisions that the later, elected
government would find difficult to undo when it takes office next year. U.S.
officials say they are also concerned that the interim government might
complicate the transition process by maneuvering to remain in power even
after its term comes to an end.

The fear is not a hypothetical one: The U.S.-appointed Governing Council
embarrassed and angered the U.S. by publicly lobbying to assume sovereignty
this summer as Iraq's next rulers.


Those concerns are shared by the country's top Shiite cleric, Grand
Ayatollah Ali Sistani. With Shiites making up nearly 60% of Iraq, Mr.
Sistani and his followers don't want important decisions made until an
elected government -- which he expects Shiites to dominate -- takes power.

U.S. officials say many Iraqi political leaders also tacitly approve
severely restricting the powers of the new government, even if they don't
say so publicly. The Iraqis know we don't want to be here, and they know
they're not ready to take over, says a State Department official with
intimate knowledge of the Bush administration's plans for Iraq. We'd love a
welcoming sentiment from the Iraqis, but we'll accept grim resignation.

Currently, the Coalition Provisional Authority, which answers to the
Pentagon, has total control of the governance of Iraq. It can issue decrees
on virtually any topic, which then immediately become law. It will formally
cease to exist on June 30. The Governing Council exists largely as an
advisory body. Its members can pass laws, but the legislation must be
approved by Mr. Bremer. The council has no control over the U.S. military,
and in practice has little influence on civil matters.

It's unclear what powers the interim 

Rumsfeld and Abu Ghraib by S.Hersch

[k hanly]

THE GRAY ZONE
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
How a secret Pentagon program came to Abu Ghraib.
Issue of 2004-05-24
Posted 2004-05-15
The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal
inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year
by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret
operation, which had been focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the
interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. Rumsfeld's decision embittered the
American intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of élite combat
units, and hurt America's prospects in the war on terror.

According to interviews with several past and present American intelligence
officials, the Pentagon's operation, known inside the intelligence community
by several code words, including Copper Green, encouraged physical coercion
and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more
intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq. A senior C.I.A. official,
in confirming the details of this account last week, said that the operation
stemmed from Rumsfeld's long-standing desire to wrest control of America's
clandestine and paramilitary operations from the C.I.A.

Rumsfeld, during appearances last week before Congress to testify about Abu
Ghraib, was precluded by law from explicitly mentioning highly secret
matters in an unclassified session. But he conveyed the message that he was
telling the public all that he knew about the story. He said, Any
suggestion that there is not a full, deep awareness of what has happened,
and the damage it has done, I think, would be a misunderstanding. The
senior C.I.A. official, asked about Rumsfeld's testimony and that of Stephen
Cambone, his Under-Secretary for Intelligence, said, Some people think you
can bullshit anyone.

The Abu Ghraib story began, in a sense, just weeks after the September 11,
2001, attacks, with the American bombing of Afghanistan. Almost from the
start, the Administration's search for Al Qaeda members in the war zone, and
its worldwide search for terrorists, came up against major
command-and-control problems. For example, combat forces that had Al Qaeda
targets in sight had to obtain legal clearance before firing on them. On
October 7th, the night the bombing began, an unmanned Predator aircraft
tracked an automobile convoy that, American intelligence believed, contained
Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban leader. A lawyer on duty at the United
States Central Command headquarters, in Tampa, Florida, refused to authorize
a strike. By the time an attack was approved, the target was out of reach.
Rumsfeld was apoplectic over what he saw as a self-defeating hesitation to
attack that was due to political correctness. One officer described him to
me that fall as kicking a lot of glass and breaking doors. In November,
the Washington Post reported that, as many as ten times since early October,
Air Force pilots believed they'd had senior Al Qaeda and Taliban members in
their sights but had been unable to act in time because of legalistic
hurdles. There were similar problems throughout the world, as American
Special Forces units seeking to move quickly against suspected terrorist
cells were compelled to get prior approval from local American ambassadors
and brief their superiors in the chain of command.

Rumsfeld reacted in his usual direct fashion: he authorized the
establishment of a highly secret program that was given blanket advance
approval to kill or capture and, if possible, interrogate high value
targets in the Bush Administration's war on terror. A special-access
program, or sap-subject to the Defense Department's most stringent level of
security-was set up, with an office in a secure area of the Pentagon. The
program would recruit operatives and acquire the necessary equipment,
including aircraft, and would keep its activities under wraps. America's
most successful intelligence operations during the Cold War had been saps,
including the Navy's submarine penetration of underwater cables used by the
Soviet high command and construction of the Air Force's stealth bomber. All
the so-called black programs had one element in common: the Secretary of
Defense, or his deputy, had to conclude that the normal military
classification restraints did not provide enough security.

Rumsfeld's goal was to get a capability in place to take on a high-value
target-a standup group to hit quickly, a former high-level intelligence
official told me. He got all the agencies together-the C.I.A. and the
N.S.A.-to get pre-approval in place. Just say the code word and go. The
operation had across-the-board approval from Rumsfeld and from Condoleezza
Rice, the national-security adviser. President Bush was informed of the
existence of the program, the former intelligence official said.



The people assigned to the program worked by the book, the former
intelligence official told me. They created code words, and recruited, after
careful screening, highly trained 

Bremer the prophet

[k hanly]

Source: Lucy May, Homeland security adviser speaks to local business
leaders, Business Courier, 25 February 2003,
http://cincinnati.bizjournals.com/cincinnati/stories/2003/02/24/daily23.html



Bremer estimated a war would be over within four to six weeks but said the
process of rebuilding Iraq afterwards is likely to take years.

We're going to be on the ground in Iraq as soldiers and citizens for years.
We're going to be running a colony almost, Bremer said, adding that one of
the most important reasons to get more international support before
launching a war is to get more help in rebuilding the country afterwards.

News source on Iraq

[k hanly]

This is a US govt. funded news source but it nevertheless is a treasure of
world press reports on Iraq. It includes quite a few videos from Islamic
militants as well. With translations.

http://tides.carebridge.org/

Cheers, Ken Hanly

Anything follows from a contradiction

[k hanly]

therefore the US will stay no matter what...unless it decides to bail out is
in its interest.

Cheers, Ken Hanly

When first asked by House International Relations Committee members whether
an interim Iraqi government could force U.S. troops to leave, Grossman
stressed that Iraqi leaders wanted them to remain. He also said that the
Iraqi interim constitution and a U.N. resolution gave them authority to do
so.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, a California Republican, kept asking Grossman, ''If
they ask us to leave, we will leave, will we not?'' Pressed for a yes-or-no
answer, Grossman eventually said yes.

But he later agreed with another panelist, Lt. Gen. Walter L. Sharp, that
the interim constitution and U.N. resolution gave U.S.-led forces
responsibility for Iraqi security for the immediate future.

After the hearing, Grossman was asked if that meant U.S. forces would not
leave if asked by the interim government. ''That is correct,'' he said.

http://www.boston.com/dailynews/135/world/Bremer_tells_Iraqi_leaders_US_:.shtml

Background to Berg Beheading

[k hanly]

Entire analysis is at

http://www.kathymcmahon.utvinternet.com/mrn/NickBergEnemiesList.htm

NOTE: Quite a bit of the stuff is speculation by conspiracy buffs but the
particular material below is a plausible explanation as to why Berg was
detained in Iraq. He was confused with his dad who is strongly anti-war.
Actually Nick supported it. Mainstream media seem to be silent about all
this. Since this came out the Mosul police have denied ever having custody
of Berg a direct contradiction of the official US story. Some conspiracy
buffs see the beheading as a clever black psyops operation to distract
attention away from US prison abuse and to create a counter outrage to
neutralise revelations of US torture.

Cheers, Ken Hanly

The family firm of beheaded American Nick Berg, was named by a conservative
website in a list of 'enemies' of the Iraq occupation. That could explain
his arrest by Iraqi police --a detention which fatally delayed his planned
return from Iraq and may have led directly to his death.

At the time the list was posted, Nick Berg had just come back from an Iraq
trip lasting from late December to Feb. 1. He had reported no problems
whatsoever with Iraqi police during that visit.

Yet, within two weeks of the list being posted, Nick Berg --back in Iraq on
his final fatal trip-- was reportedly detained in Mosul at an Iraqi police
checkpoint. The official explanation is that authorities thought his
identification might have been forged and were checking his authenticity.

But a more likely reason is that by then authorities in Iraq had discovered
that a 'Berg' of Prometheus Methods Tower Service was in the country, and
issued a detention instruction to Iraqi police because they misidentified
Nick Berg as an antiwar activist entering Iraq to work for the 'enemy'.

That could explain why he was held incommunicado for 13 days, without
recourse to a lawyer; why US officialdom was singularly unheeding of his
mother's pleas; why the FBI visited his family to question them; why it took
a US court order secured by the family to pressure his release.

Re: a victory of sorts in india...

[k hanly]

Huh. Many parliamentary systems have first past the post systems and not
systems of proportional representation etc. Canada for example, and the UK.
I believe Australia and New Zealand use this system as well but I am not
positive. While this system is a disadvantage for smaller parties it hasnt
kept third parties from getting seats or even forming the government in
provinces in Canada.

The Communists (CPI-M) and CPI did very well in Kerala. The left won 18 of
20 seats.

Cheers, Ken Hanly


- Original Message -
From: Louis Proyect [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Thursday, May 13, 2004 1:28 PM
Subject: Re: a victory of sorts in india...


  No, but yesterday there would have been plenty around
  to tell us how voting Communist Party (of your choice)
  would throw the election to the BJP.
 
  Shane

 Not really. India, like most civilized countries, has a parliamentary
 system. This means that all parties can get some representation no
 matter how small. The USA has a winner take all system that was if not
 designed to marginalize smaller parties certainly has that effect. That
 being said, it is fascinating to see the similarities between John
 Kerry, the Congress Party and Putin. They all represent something not
 quite as bad as the party to the right. With the deepening crisis of
 world capitalism, you can be sure that lesser-evil scenarios for
 stopping fascism will be played out until either the world blows
 itself up or we finally expropriate the expropriators.

 --

 The Marxism list: www.marxmail.org

Mercenaries in Iraq

[k hanly]

Vancouver Sun   May 11, 2004

Americans have outsourced their Iraq dirty work to a mixed bunch

By Jonathan Manthorpe

A brief news story from Iraq on Sunday night said a bomb had exploded near a
hotel bar in Baghdad wounding six British and Nepalese.

One does not have to have spent much time in the world's trouble spots to
know that when one comes across Nepalese in such places one is not talking
about ordinary people from the mountain kingdom of Nepal.

One is talking about members past or present of the Brigade of Gurkhas,
which for nearly 200 years has formed perhaps the most feared and effective
infantry unit in the British army.

Retired members of the brigade are much sought after by private security
companies. Former Gurkhas can be found doing everything from providing
protection for United Nations compounds in Angola to guarding against
robberies in banks in Hong Kong.

No wonder, then, Gurkhas are also in Iraq where the inability of coalition
forces to establish security has put a premium on what are officially called
security consultants but whom many simply call mercenaries.

To an astonishing degree, the United States-led forces in Iraq have
out-sourced security in the country.

There are about 15,000 mercenaries in Iraq and they constitute the third
largest armed force in the country after the American and British military
contingents.

They are a very mixed bunch ranging from the Gurkhas at the top end to known
war criminals from South Africa and the Balkans at the other.

In between are people who do indeed have the military experience set out on
their CVs. But many others are pure fantasists playing out their Walter
Mitty dreams and getting paid up to $1,200 Cdn a day for doing it.

The loud sucking noise of fortunes to be made in Iraq's outsourced war is
causing all kinds of turmoil.

Britain's elite Special Air Service and Special Boat Service, the most
desired record on a mercenary's CV, recently sent a message to former
members asking them to please stop recruiting current members. About one in
six members of the SAS and the SBS have recently asked permission to quit
their jobs and the British government is getting peeved because they cost
about $4 million Cdn each to train.

In South Africa, President Thabo Mbeke has lost about half his 100-strong
personal security service to the lure of Iraq gold.

It was in South Africa earlier this year that the dubious background of many
of the mercenaries flocking to Iraq first appeared.

On Jan. 28, a suicide bomber hit Baghdad's Saheen Hotel. The bomb killed
four people and wounded scores of others.

One of the killed was a South African named Frans Strydom. Among the wounded
was Deon Gouws. Both men were working for a British-based company, Erinys
International, which has an $80-million US contract to protect Iraqi oil
installations. The conglomerate which hired it includes Haliburton, U.S.
Vice-President Dick Cheney's former company.

Erinys also has strong connections to Ahmed Chalabi of the Iraqi National
Congress whose dubious intelligence information did much to persuade the
White House that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

But let's come back to Strydom and Gouws. Both men were granted amnesties by
South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission after confessing to
killing blacks during the days of apartheid.

Strydom was a leading member of Koevoet, the Afrikaans for Crowbar, a
death squad maintained at arm's length by the white South African government
to kill black activists both at home and in Namibia.

Gouws was a member of another apartheid death squad called Vlakplaas. When
he appeared before the reconciliation commission, Gouws asked for absolution
for killing 15 blacks and firebombing the homes of up to 60 anti-apartheid
militants.

Last month, another South African death squad member, Gray Branfield,
originally a Rhodesian police inspector, was killed in Iraq. In the South
African army, Branfield was in charge of death squad operations in
neighbouring Zimbabwe, Botswana and Zambia.

These three are among 1,500 South Africans, most of them white remnants of
the apartheid regime, working for security companies in Iraq.

Not all the mercenaries in Iraq are undesirables and not all the dubious
characters are South Africans. Shortly before the American-led invasion last
year, Saddam Hussein hired a dozen Serb air-defence specialists, some of
whom are wanted in Europe for their paramilitary activities during the
Balkan wars.

The arrival of the U.S. forces did not trouble the Serbs, some of whom have
now signed on with American security companies for large salaries.

How many contract employees and security guards have been killed in Iraq is
unclear. Haliburton says 34 of its employees have been killed in the region.


This situation is chaotic enough. It borders on the sinister with the
evidence from Abu Ghraib prison that the military police conducted their
much-photographed torture under the directions from 

Re: Who's at fault for gas prices? Partly, it's us

[k hanly]

Isn't gas consumption up considerably in some developing countries such as
China? Also I understand that inventories are at low levels. No mention is
made of the fact that Humvees, tanks, military jets etc. must use a
considerable amount of fuel. Is there any breakdown of how much of total
fuel consumption is military related?

Cheers, Ken Hanly

PS. Larger fuel tanks are hardly a cause of increased fuel consumption!

- Original Message -
From: Charles Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Tuesday, May 11, 2004 3:47 PM
Subject: Who's at fault for gas prices? Partly, it's us


 Us ? Speak for yourself.  And we didn't invade Iraq , either, to the
 extent that that raised gas prices.  YOU invaded Iraq.

 Charles

 ^^



 Who's at fault for gas prices? Partly, it's us


 Big autos, longer commutes gobbling up supplies


 May 11, 2004

 BY JOCELYN PARKER
 FREE PRESS BUSINESS WRITER

 Sorry folks: We're at least partly to blame for the ongoing pain at the
gas
 pump.

 BIG VEHICLES,
 BIG DEMAND

 The surge in fuel consumption over the last 14 years tracks closely with
the
 growth in SUV and pickup-truck sales.

 So you can thank the advent of the Ford Explorer and full-size SUVs like
the
 Ford Expedition and the Cadillac Escalade for the spike in gas use in
recent
 years.

 Those vehicles, which use more gasoline than most passenger cars on the
road
 because of larger fuel tanks, are what made the light-truck craze take off
 in the first place.

Martin Knows Where the WMD are..Bush probably told him..

[k hanly]

Tue, May 11, 2004


Terrorists have Iraq's WMD: PM

Martin's views run counter to those of French, German leaders

By STEPHANIE RUBEC, Ottawa Bureau




Prime Minister Paul Martin says he believes Saddam Hussein had weapons of
mass destruction and they've fallen into the hands of terrorists. Martin
said the threat of terrorism is even greater now than it was following the
Sept. 11, 2001, attacks against the U.S. because terrorists have acquired
nuclear, chemical and biological weapons from the toppled Iraqi leader.

The fact is that there is now, we know well, a proliferation of nuclear
weapons, and that many weapons that Saddam Hussein had, we don't know where
they are, Martin told a crowd of about 700 university researchers and
business leaders in Montreal.

That means terrorists have access to all of that.

The PM's comments run counter to leaders in countries such as France and
Germany who have accused the U.S. and Britain of fudging evidence of WMDs in
Iraq to justify the war.

When asked to assess the threat level since Hussein was captured by U.S.
troops, Martin said he believes it has increased.

I believe that terrorism will be, for our generation, what the Cold War was
to generations that preceded us, the PM said. I don't think we're out of
it yet.

Martin disagreed with former Prime Minister Jean Chretien who publicly
blamed poverty for terrorism and the Sept. 11 attacks.

The cause of terrorism is not poverty, it is hatred, Martin said, adding
he'll lead the charge to convince countries to work together to combat
terrorism and make sure the Third World has the tools to stamp it out.

Martin said he's lobbying the international community to set up an informal
organization comprised of a maximum of 20 heads of state to tackle world
issues such as terrorism.

Martin said he got the nod from U.S. President George W. Bush during his
visit to Washington D.C. last month, and will take his idea to the European
Union and Latin America next.

Martin also announced a $100-million contribution to treat millions of
people who have AIDS.

The money will be given to a new initiative of the World Health Organization
to treat three million people with AIDS by the end of 2005.

The contribution of new money has made Canada the largest donor to the
program so far.


http://www.canoe.ca/NewsStand/WinnipegSun/News/2004/05/11/454532.html

How many history books cite Winnie as War Criminal?

[k hanly]

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article6171.htm

History Forgave Churchill, Why Not Blair and Bush?

by Mickey Z.

19 July 2003 dissidentvoice.org -- On July 17, 2003, U.K. Prime Minister
Tony Blair addressed a joint meeting of the U.S. House and Senate. The
subject of WMD, of course, was on the front burner. If we are wrong, then
we will have destroyed a threat that was at its least responsible for
inhuman carnage and suffering,'' Blair said. I am confident history will
forgive.''

Blair's confidence is justified. History has forgiven U.K. leaders for
plenty. How else, for example, could U.S. News and World Report have dubbed
Winston Churchill The Last Hero in a 2000 cover story? In that article,
Churchill was said to believe in liberty, the rule of law, and the rights
of the individual.

As Sir Winston himself declared: History will be kind to me for I intend to
write it.

This is precisely why so few of us ever discuss Churchill as a war criminal
or racist. In 1910, in the capacity of Home Secretary, he put forth a
proposal to sterilize roughly 100,000 mental degenerates and dispatch
several thousand others to state-run labor camps. These actions were to take
place in the name of saving the British race from inevitable decline as its
inferior members bred.

History has forgiven Churchill for his role in the Allied invasion of the
Soviet Union in 1917. England's Minister for War and Air during the time,
Churchill described the mission as seeking to strangle at its birth the
Bolshevik state. In 1929, he wrote: Were [the Allies] at war with Soviet
Russia? Certainly not; but they shot Soviet Russians at sight. They stood as
invaders on Russian soil. They armed the enemies of the Soviet Government.
They blockaded its ports, and sunk its battleships. They earnestly desired
and schemed its downfall.

Two years later, Churchill was secretary of state at the war office when the
Royal Air Force asked him for permission to use chemical weapons against
recalcitrant Arabs as an experiment. Winston promptly consented (Yes,
Churchill's gassing of Kurds pre-dated Hussein's by nearly 70 years).

I am strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes,
he explained, a policy he espoused yet again in July 1944 when he asked his
chiefs of staff to consider using poison gas on the Germans or any other
method of warfare we have hitherto refrained from using. Unlike in 1919,
his proposal was denied...not that history would not have forgiven him
anyway.

In language later appropriated by the Israelis, Winston Churchill had this
to say about the Palestinians in 1937:

I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger
even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that
right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the
Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that
a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a
higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in
and taken their place.

When not scheming a Bolshevik downfall, gassing the uncivilized, or
comparing Palestinians to dogs, Churchill found time to write soulmate
Benito Mussolini. In January 1927, Sir Winston gushed to Il Duce, if I had
been an Italian, I am sure I would have been entirely with you from the
beginning to the end of your victorious struggle against the bestial
appetites and passions of Leninism. Even after the advent of WWII,
Churchill found room in his heart for the Italian dictator, explaining to
Parliament in 1940:I do not deny that he is a very great man but he became
a criminal when he attacked England.

Mussolini's criminality aside, Churchill certainly took note of Axis
tactics...cavalierly observing that everyone was bombing civilians. It's
simply a question of fashion, he explained, similar to that of whether
short or long dresses are in.

Sir Winston must have been a slave to fashion because he soon ordered a
fire-bombing raid on Hamburg in July 1943 that killed at least 48,000
civilians, after which he enlisted the aid of British scientists to cook up
a new kind of weather for larger German city.

In his wartime memoirs, Winston Churchill forgave himself for the countless
civilians slaughtered in Dresden. We made a heavy raid in the latter month
on Dresden, he wrote benignly, then a centre of communication of Germany's
Eastern Front.

Surely the Nazis were hiding WMD there, right?

Mickey Z. is the author of The Murdering of My Years: Artists and Activists
Making Ends Meet ( www.murderingofmyyears.com ) and an editor at Wide Angle
( www.wideangleny.com). He can be reached at: [EMAIL PROTECTED] .

Forget Al Jazeera. Don't read Fox News says Pentagon

[k hanly]

Saturday, May. 08, 2004
-Original Message-
From: Dunn, Daniel, CTR, OSD-POLICY
Sent: Thursday, May 06, 2004 10:11 PM
To: MLA POL ALL POLICY
Subject: FW: URGENT IT BULLETIN: Tugabe Report (FOUO)
Importance: High


This applies to all Policy users as well. If you have accessed this document
on the Internet, CALL POLICY IT SECURITY IMMEDIATELY!
703-696-0668
--
Daniel R. (Dan) Dunn, EE, CISSP, CCSA/CCSE
USD(P) IA Officer
Office of the Under Secretary of Defense, Policy
Policy Automation Services Security Team

p: 703-696-0668, x153
f: 703-696-0588

-Original Message-
From: Easterling, Ron, CTR, OSD-POLICY
Sent: Thursday, May 06, 2004 2:00 PM
To: Mauer, Bill, CTR, OSD-POLICY; Dunn, Daniel, CTR, OSD-POLICY
Subject: FW: URGENT IT BULLETIN: Tugabe Report (FOUO)
Importance: High


-Original Message-
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Which newspaper will first suggest pulling out?

[k hanly]

When Will the First Major Newspaper Call for a Pullout in Iraq?
The once unthinkable suddenly becomes thinkable.

By Greg Mitchell

(May 07, 2004) -- After a month of uprisings in Iraq, an unexpected hike in
U.S. casualties, and a prison abuse scandal that shattered goodwill in the
Arab street, what do American newspapers have to say?

So far, not very much, at least in terms of advising our leaders how to
clean up or get out of this mess.

But then, they are not alone. Republicans have been cackling for weeks over
John Kerry's inability to distinguish his position on the war from the
president's -- after Bush agreed to bring into the picture the United
Nations, NATO and anyone else who might bail us out.

The two candidates also seem to agree that sending more U.S. troops to Iraq
might turn the tide. Most newspapers like that idea, too. Last month an EP
survey revealed that the vast majority of America's large newspapers favored
this approach to Iraq: Stay the course.

There's no easy strategy for success, but the question is: are newspaper
editorial pages ready to sustain that position now? And if that means
calling for more troops, or remaining in Iraq at present levels
indefinitely, are they willing to accept responsibility (along with the
White House, Pentagon and Congress) for the continuing carnage and the
unmentionable expense?

This, of course, must also be considered in the context of whatever other
responsibility newspapers share for embracing the dubious pre-war claims on
weapons of mass destruction and endorsing the invasion in the first place.
In fact, one might argue that the press has a special responsibility for
helping undo the damage.

In a remarkable episode of ABC's Nightline last night, retired Army Lt.
General William Odom, director of the National Security Agency during the
Reagan administration, called for a phased U.S. pullout from Iraq over the
next six to nine months. And yet no major newspaper has explored this idea.

That is not to say that calling for a U.S. pullout from Iraq is the only
moral, rational or political choice. But if newspaper editors are not going
to endorse that -- then what is YOUR solution?

A month ago, few questioned that the U.S. ought to stay in Iraq. Maybe we
went to war based on lies and fabrications; but now we had to make things
right for the average citizens. As Colin Powell put it: we broke it, we
owned it, but maybe we could patch it up, or buy a better one.

Now this must be contemplated: After our military adventures of the past
month and, particularly, after Abu Ghraib, is the U.S. actually the problem
and not the solution? In other words, as hostile occupiers -- and, in some
cases, torturers -- we are no longer facilitating but possibly standing in
the way of progress in Iraq.

If we are doing more harm than good, then all arguments about our duty to
stay (after we build a few dozen more hospitals and schools) become moot.

And an argument that has been out there all along -- that we should be
deploying our limited military personnel and resources against terrorists
elsewhere (who really can do us harm) -- becomes even more pertinent.

No one should underestimate the impact of the prison torture scandal,
whether Donald Rumsfeld loses his job or not. Last month, when I interviewed
The Washington Post's Rick Atkinson for a column, he told me that every war
inevitably becomes corrupt. Even righteous wars corrupt soldiers, he said.
Two weeks later, the pictures from Abu Ghraib appeared.

But what really got me to thinking the unthinkable -- a phased U.S. pullout
from Iraq -- was a letter that Bill Mitchell (no relation) of Atascadero,
Calif. wrote to his son's former commanding officer in Iraq. His son, Army
SSG Mike Mitchell, was killed in Iraq in early April, as I documented in a
news story last week.

In that letter, Bill wrote about the irony that his son was killed by the
very people that he was liberating. This is insanity!!! He added: I am
having a major problem with being OK with his death under these
circumstances and I really do not believe that Iraq, the world, or the lives
of his family and friends are better due to his death. Imagine the pain
behind those lines.

Steve Chapman, in a Chicago Tribune column last weekend, played a cruel game
of logic. He applied it to Sen. Kerry's position on the war but he could
have been referring to the editorial positions of most American newspapers.

Chapman summed up the stay the course predicament like this: We can't
manage an increasingly turbulent Iraq with the forces we have. We don't have
many extra troops to send. We can't turn over security to Iraqis because
they can't be trusted. We can't get other countries to help us out. And
things keep getting worse.

Yet, he pointed out, Democrats and Republicans agree that we have to go on
squandering American lives because we don't know what else to do.

So what do the editors of American newspapers think we should do?

Are you ready, now, to think 

Cut and Run...

[k hanly]

Globe and MailCoomment Saturday, May 8, 2004 - Page A23

Cut and run, and do it now

To hell with Wilsonian crusades -- the U.S. must get out of Iraq. The longer
it stays, the worse things will get for everyone

By John MacArthur

Not long before U.S. soldiers made news with their sadistic, co-ed photo
shoot of Iraqi prisoners, I dined with a small group of pedigreed New York
liberals -- the ones known as Bush-haters -- and a ghost.

The conversation was following a predictable course -- contempt for the
President pouring forth as freely as the wine -- so I didn't think twice
about proposing a unilateral withdrawal of U.S. troops, the very opposite of
saving face, and a strategy already labelled cut and run by Karl Rove.

All the living beings at the table were old enough to remember the crazy
rhetoric of Vietnam troop escalation, as well as the cruelly absurd policies
of de-escalation, Vietnamization and peace with honour, so why the awkward
silence when I had finished? Suddenly the ghost spoke -- through the medium
of a law school professor, who informed me that America had a moral
obligation to remain in Iraq. Before the medium could go on, his socially
astute wife aborted the seance, and we moved on to safer topics.

The ghost was Woodrow Wilson. Sadly, every debate on Iraq is dominated by
his notion of moral obligation, not by George W. Bush's lies about
atomic-bomb threats; not by the mounting corpses; not by the foolish
distraction from tracking al-Qaeda; not by the war profiteering by Mr.
Bush's friends and patrons; not by the violation of the U.S. Constitution
and the Geneva Convention; not by the waste of money that could rebuild the
United States's degraded public school system; not by the lessons from
Vietnam. The Democratic opposition carps, but its presidential candidate
suggests escalation -- more troops (some in different uniforms) to stabilize
a situation that cannot be stabilized.

Mr. Bush and his friends from Halliburton are busy looting Iraq to enrich
their temporal bank accounts, but Wilsonian liberals remain preoccupied with
their immortal souls. The high-spirited U.S. volunteer army builds pyramids
out of terrified, naked detainees, and John Kerry insists that we cannot
let the actions of a few overshadow the tremendous good work that thousands
of soldiers are doing every day in Iraq and all over the world.

What will people say about us if we pull out? Last week, a Democratic
congressman too young to remember Vietnam even told me that U.S. credibility
is at stake in Iraq, that we can't leave . . . can't cut and run.

Who says we can't leave? Sir Woodrow of the 14 points, that's who.

Liberals rarely invoke Mr. Wilson by name, yet I can always hear the pious,
self-righteous and intolerant intellectual from Virginia creeping into their
voices. If ever there was a time to argue against Mr. Wilson's faith-based
ideology, it's now, before too many more people die guarding gas stations
and oil-field contractors.

Mainstream historians typically attribute Mr. Wilson's simplistic, Manichean
view of the world to his fervent Presbyterian beliefs -- what political
historian Walter Karp summarized as Wilson's tendency to regard himself as
an instrument of Providence and to define personal greatness as some
messianic act of salvation. Mr. Wilson's relentless perversion of
Enlightenment ideals struck a chord in predominantly Protestant America,
this country having been formed partly on a Calvinist idea of an elect
people. At the same time, he sought to impose Rousseau's and Paine's rights
of man on the non-elect peoples of the world, whether or not these noble
savages wanted any part of them. The world must be made safe for
democracy, he famously cried in his war message to Congress in April, 1917.


Forcing democracy down the throats of tribal-based Arab clans was likely not
at the top of Mr. Wilson's agenda at the Paris Peace Conference, but his
lofty language masked the essential contradiction of ordering
self-government at the point of a gun.

(When they colonized Iraq, the British didn't hesitate to borrow Wilsonian
rhetoric about self-determination and liberation from Turkish despotism.)
Mr. Wilson had made a test run of his ideals with his senseless and bloody
interference in domestic Mexican politics, at Vera Cruz in 1914, but it was
the U.S. intervention in the First World War that set the course of
20th-century U.S. foreign policy.

Most Americans wanted to remain neutral in the European butchery; indeed,
political self-interest compelled Mr. Wilson to campaign for re-election in
1916 on a promise to keep us out of the Great War. But before long, on the
grounds that the right is more precious than peace, Mr. Wilson was sending
unwitting farm boys off to inhale poison gas and die in the trenches of
Flanders.

Didn't the Wilsonian Bush-haters like my dinner acquaintance note Mr. Bush's
cynical invocation of St. Woodrow during his state visit to London in
November? Referring to the 

Article on Chalabi

[k hanly]

 From Casi-news clippings originally from Salon. Sorry about the formatting,
thats the way it came to me, but it seems a worthwhile article on Chalabi's
background and machinations.

Cheers, Ken Hanly

This is long

How Ahmed Chalabi conned the neocons

The hawks who launched the Iraq war believed the deal-making exile when he =
promised to build a secular democracy with close ties to Israel. Now the Is=
rael deal is dead, he's cozying up to Iran -- and his patrons look like the=
y're on the way out. A Salon.com exclusive.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By John Dizard

May 4, 2004 | When the definitive history of the current Iraq war is finall=
y written, wealthy exile Ahmed Chalabi will be among those judged most resp=
onsible for the Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq and topple Sa=
ddam Hussein. More than a decade ago Chalabi teamed up with American neocon=
servatives to sell the war as the cornerstone of an energetic new policy to=
 bring democracy to the Middle East -- and after 9/11, as the crucial antid=
ote to global terrorism. It was Chalabi who provided crucial intelligence o=
n Iraqi weaponry to justify the invasion, almost all of which turned out to=
 be false, and laid out a rosy scenario about the country's readiness for a=
n American strike against Saddam that led the nation's leaders to predict -=
- and apparently even believe -- that they would be greeted as liberators. =
Chalabi also promised his neoconservative patrons that as leader of Iraq he=
 would make peace with Israel, an issue of vital importance to them. A year=
 ago, Chalabi was
 riding high, after Saddam Hussein fell with even less trouble than expecte=
d.

Now his power is slipping away, and some of his old neoconservative allies =
-- whose own political survival is looking increasingly shaky as the U.S. o=
ccupation turns nightmarish -- are beginning to turn on him. The U.S. rever=
sed its policy of excluding former Baathists from the Iraqi army -- a polic=
y devised by Chalabi -- and Marine commanders even empowered former Republi=
can Guard officers to run the pacification of Fallujah. Last week United Na=
tions envoy Lakhdar Brahimi delivered a devastating blow to Chalabi's futur=
e leadership hopes, recommending that the Iraqi Governing Council, of which=
 he is finance chair, be accorded no governance role after the June 30 tran=
sition to sovereignty. Meanwhile, administration neoconservatives, once uni=
ted behind Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress he founded, are now spli=
t, as new doubts about his long-stated commitment to a secular Iraqi democr=
acy with ties to Israel, and fears that he is cozying up to his Shiite co-r=
eligionists in Iran,
 begin to emerge. At least one key Pentagon neocon is said to be on his way=
 out, a casualty of the battle over Chalabi and the increasing chaos in Ira=
q, and others could follow.

Ahmed Chalabi is a treacherous, spineless turncoat, says L. Marc Zell, a =
former law partner of Douglas Feith, now the undersecretary of defense for =
policy, and a former friend and supporter of Chalabi and his aspirations to=
 lead Iraq. He had one set of friends before he was in power, and now he's=
 got another. While Zell's disaffection with Chalabi has been a long time =
in the making, his remarks to Salon represent his first public break with t=
he would-be Iraqi leader, and are likely to ripple throughout Washington in=
 the days to come.

Zell, a Jerusalem attorney, continues to be a partner in the firm that Feit=
h left in 2001 to take the Pentagon job. He also helped Ahmed Chalabi's nep=
hew Salem set up a new law office in Baghdad in late 2003. Chalabi met with=
 Zell and other neoconservatives many times from the mid-1990s on in London=
, Turkey, and the U.S. Zell outlines what Chalabi was promising the neocons=
 before the Iraq war: He said he would end Iraq's boycott of trade with Is=
rael, and would allow Israeli companies to do business there. He said [the =
new Iraqi government] would agree to rebuild the pipeline from Mosul [in th=
e northern Iraqi oil fields] to Haifa [the Israeli port, and the location o=
f a major refinery]. But Chalabi, Zell says, has delivered on none of them=
. The bitter ex-Chalabi backer believes his former friend's moves were a de=
liberate bait and switch designed to win support for his designs to return =
to Iraq and run the country.

Chalabi's ties to Iran -- Israel's most dangerous enemy -- have also alarme=
d both his allies and his enemies in the Bush administration. Those ties we=
re highlighted on Monday, when Newsweek reported that U.S. officials say t=
hat electronic intercepts of discussions between Iranian leaders indicate t=
hat Chalabi and his entourage told Iranian contacts about American politica=
l plans in Iraq. According to one government source, some of the informati=
on he gave Iran could get people killed. A Chalabi aide denied the allega=
tion. According to Newsweek, the State Department and the CIA -- Chalabi's

Bush apology?

[k hanly]

Bush actually said that he apologised to the King of Jordan for the torture
of Iraqis by US personnel. Why didn't he directly apologise to the Iraqi
people and the victims and their families? Why this strange and roundabout
way of going about the act of apology. Why should be he be apologising to
the King of Jordan rather than to the Iraqis concerned! First, he refuses to
apologise at all and now he apologises second hand through an apology to the
King of Jordan. Weird. Is there a third instalment?

Cheers, Ken Hanly

Business as usual for intelligence torturers

[k hanly]

Bush sickened, but suspects still at work
By Marian Wilkinson, Herald Correspondent in Washington
May 8, 2004

Page Tools
Email to a friend Printer format
Standing in the Rose Garden at the White House, President George Bush
declared that the graphic photographs of US military guards abusing Iraqi
prisoners made us sick to our stomachs.

Apologising for the first time to the prisoners and their families, he
promised that the wrongdoers will be brought to justice.

Yet as he spoke, two of the central figures named in a US Army report two
months ago as most likely responsible for the abuses were still in their
jobs. They are the head of the army's military intelligence unit in Baghdad,
Colonel Thomas Pappas, and a shadowy private defence contractor who worked
as an interrogator with that unit at the Abu Ghraib prison, Steven
Stephanowicz.

I can't believe that, said one of the lawyers defending a junior officer
charged in the scandal when told by the Herald. But the Pentagon confirmed
this week that Colonel Pappas was still commanding his unit even though he
has been reprimanded over the scandal and there are reports he may soon be
criminally charged.


 It appears to be part of a systemic pattern of abuse by military
intelligence and the CIA that spun out of control. One of the latest
photographs given to The Washington Post reportedly shows a senior military
intelligence officer standing among the guards while Iraqi detainees lie in
a naked heap on the floor of the cell.

Gary Myers, a defence officer for one of the MPs charged, told the Herald
that military intelligence officers would enter the cell blocks in sterile
uniforms, showing no names or ranks, making it difficult to track their
activities.

Mr Stephanowicz's employer, a military contractor to the Pentagon, said he
too had not been removed from his job. The Pentagon had not even asked his
company, CACI, for his resignation. We have not received any information to
stop any of our work, to terminate or suspend any of our employees, said
CACI's chief executive, Jack London.

The secret army report on the scandal by General Antonio Taguba had called
for Mr Stephanowicz to be sacked back on March 8.

But evidence in the report, and from US military officers and human rights
organisations, indicates that what happened at Abu Ghraib prison outside
Baghdad was not just the action of a handful of military police.

The report was handed to US Central Command and other senior Pentagon
officials who knew by then that shocking photographs of US military officers
sexually humiliating prisoners supported evidence of the abuses at Abu
Ghraib.

General Taguba's report clearly stated that Mr Stephanowicz, a private
contractor to US Army military intelligence, was heavily implicated and
recommended that he never be employed by the army again and be stripped of
his government security clearance. The report found that he had instructed
the military guards at Abu Ghraib to help set up conditions to facilitate
interrogations knowing that his instructions equated to physical abuse.

Yet no one in the US command in Iraq or at the Pentagon has removed Mr
Stephanowicz, a highly prized interrogator, or penalised his employer, CACI.
Since the report, CACI has won more lucrative contracts with the Pentagon
including one worth $US650 million ($906 million) announced just weeks after
General Taguba's damning findings.

As calls mount for the resignation of the Secretary of Defence, Donald
Rumsfeld, evidence is growing that the abuse of detainees in US military
custody from Iraqi to Afghanistan has been suppressed by the Pentagon and
the CIA in their drive for actionable intelligence against insurgents and
terrorists.

The Pentagon has now admitted that at least 10 suspicious deaths are being
investigated. Two more deaths have been ruled as murders.

With fresh allegations daily, Mr Rumsfeld is under fire from an angry
Congress, and even Mr Bush, for blindsiding them on the scandal. But Mr
Rumsfeld is aggressively insisting there is no cover-up and says he is
taking whatever steps are necessary to hold those accountable who violated
the military code of conduct.

Mr Bush said he would not sack Mr Rumsfeld but is said to have rebuked him
for failing to warn him about the photographs before they were published.

Mr Bush's interviews with Arab television this week were an admission that
the photographs have inflicted untold damage at home and abroad.

The Secretary of State, Colin Powell, compared the scandal with the My Lai
massacre, the defining event that galvanised US public opinion against the
Vietnam War. But he said it would be dealt with by telling the people of
the world that this is an isolated incident.

But this defence is crumbling. There is no doubt that a few individual
officers took pleasure in abusing detainees at Abu Ghraib.

One of the six junior officers charged so far in the scandal, Specialist
Charles Granier, has a history of vicious domestic violence.

His 

Analysis of Fallujah situation

[k hanly]

This is a bit out of date since it seems that the US is now selecting
another Iraqi general and also saying it is still in Fallujah..ie talking
out of both sides of its mouth  and with multiple voices, but it seems
interesting and of some relevance.
'
Cheers, Ken Hanly

-MIME-Autoconverted: from 8bit to quoted-printable by gmoblfmail2.net.voda=
fone.it id i44JxkE2009722

http://www.uruknet.info/?p=3D2379


Dear comrades, dear readers...


Abu Nicola al Yunani (Free Arab Voice)


This message was prompted by messages by Baath Simpson and Hazem Biqaen,
who have, respectively, asked for information and offered their opinions
on the current situation in Iraq in general and al Fallujah in particular.
I wrote this message yesterday, but for technical reasons have not been
able to post it. It is interesting that in the 1 day that passed, new
evidence is coming in to support the positions elaborated herein.

On Al Fallujah and Jassem Mohamed Salah

I would submit that few people outside Fallujah (and a few American
high-ranking officials) know what Jassem Muhammad Salah intends to do.

But his intentions count for little, actually. Under the appropriate
circumstances, individuals can influence the course of history. But when
bigger historic forces are in motions, individuals are forced - often
against their will - to act in accordance with those forces

  I have a question about that general who should control al Faludja:
  Jassem Mohamed Salah. I heard via TV he wa general of the republican
  guard. But how US can accept him?

The question is, did they have a choice?

When US troops entered Baghdad little more than a year ago, they were
under the delusion that they had won the war (in fact, the real war had
NOT been waged, and they only won due to the defection of a group of
people in the Iraqi leadership - the actual war was lying ahead of them,
not behind them). Acting arrogantly under the influence of this
delusion, they dissolved the army and security services, and fired all
baathists from state positions. At that time, placing a former
republican guard general in charge of a city would have been unthinkable.

Only a calendar year has passed since then - but in the political sense
this year is equivalent to ages.

Nowadays, the resistance has driven some sense into the empty heads of
even the most arrogant and stupid neocons. They are no longer in a
position to choose.

Could they have acted more intelligently a year ago?

I believe yes. Hitler, to name just one case, was much more intelligent.
He knew he would need whatever local help he could get. He placed
general Petain (the hero of WWI) in charge of France. In Greece, the
general Tsolakoglou, who had led the army corps that resisted the
invasion by Italian and later German troops, was placed at the head of
the occupation government. In both cases, the people selected had proven
their ability, and had (initially) some prestige in the occupied
country. Even in the zionist state, we see that some of the less idiotic
rulers have chosen to use people like Arafat and Rajoub to control the
Palestinians - people, once again, who had proven ability and enjoyed
prestige. In the case of Iraq, it would have been much more intelligent
to use the old security services and army, gradually purging them from
patriotic elements, and in combination with new puppet forces of
informers etc. One would assume that the British, who are more subtle,
experienced and intelligent, would have acted thus if they had a choice.
But well-trained dogs don't raise objections against their masters, and
Blair was not in a position to influence the neo-cons, of course.

Would the situation be significantly better for the U.S. if they had
acted differently from the beginning?

Hitler was more intelligent than Bush, but he too was defeated in the
end. Even a genious can not do in an intelligent way something that is
inherently stupid. If the occupiers of Iraq had acted more prudently,
they might have won a couple of months, but I doubt if it would be more.
They would, of course, have been faced with another set of problems in
that case (those arising from the inevitable infiltration of the
resistance into their Iraqi forces). Anyway, their half-hearted
attempt to use the Baath NOW is too little, too late.


  Is he one of the traitors.
  It woud be very useful if you could tell me about that general.

I doubt any personal information would be of any use. There are at least
three possible explanations for this deal, when viewed from a vantage
point that concentrates on general Salah:

a) That the general would like to be a collaborator, to control al
Fallujah FOR THE AMERICANS.

b) That the general would like to play his own game, BETWEEN the
Americans and the resistance, balancing each against the other.

c) That the general is acting in the name of, and for the interests of,
the resistance, and that the Americans have in essence recognised their
defeat, only attempting

Being right means being a prisoner

[k hanly]

Why being right on WMD is no consolation to Iraqi scientist labelled enemy
of America

Chief link to UN weapons inspectors held in solitary confinement for year

Jonathan Steele in Baghdad
Wednesday May 5, 2004
The Guardian

By any measure Amer al-Saadi ought to feel vindicated. The dapper
British-educated scientist who was the Iraqi government's main link to the
United Nations inspectors before the US invasion repeatedly insisted that
Iraq had destroyed its weapons of mass destruction years earlier.
David Kay, the American inspector who headed the Iraq Survey Group and was
sure he would find such weapons when he went to Iraq after the war, now
accepts Dr Saadi was right. So does Hans Blix, the chief UN inspector, who
up to a month before the war still thought Iraq might have had WMD.

Yet, astonishingly, Dr Saadi does not know of their change of mind or of the
political fallout their views have caused in western countries. He is like a
lottery winner who is the last person to be told he has hit the jackpot.

Held in solitary confinement in an American prison at Baghdad's
international airport, Dr Saadi is denied the right to read newspapers,
listen to the radio, or watch television.

In the monthly one-page letters I am allowed to send him through the Red
Cross I cannot mention any of this news. I can only talk about family
issues, says his wife, Helma, as she sits in the couple's home less than
half a mile from US headquarters in Baghdad.

Barely three days after the statue of Saddam Hussein was pulled down by US
troops in central Baghdad Dr Saadi approached the Americans and became the
first senior Iraqi to hand himself in. It was the last time his wife saw
him.

He was sure he would soon be released, Mrs Saadi says. He was a scientist
who had never been part of Saddam's terror apparatus, or even a member of
the Ba'ath party.

Interviews

CIA interrogators have repeatedly interviewed him. Had there been any WMD to
discover Dr Saadi would have had an obvious incentive to reveal their
location once the regime had collapsed. But from the reports of the Iraq
Survey Group it can only be assumed that he has maintained his line that
they were eliminated long ago.

Dr Saadi is described officially by the Americans as an enemy prisoner of
war. This allows them to detain him indefinitely without access to a lawyer
or visiting rights from his family until George Bush declares the war to be
over. Whether he is still held out of spite or to hide Washington's
embarrassment is not clear. He has already been in custody for more than a
year.

His CIA interrogators have finished their work and apparently feel awkward
about his continued detention.

My handlers have appealed to higher authorities for my release but it seems
it's political and God doesn't meddle in politics, Dr Saadi wrote in one
letter.

It would speak well for them if they admitted they were mistaken. They
would look human, Mrs Saadi says. German by birth, she and her husband have
always conversed in English. They were married in Wandsworth register office
in south London 40 years ago last October, when he was studying chemistry at
Battersea College of Technology.

 The prison letters she shares with the Guardian reflect the tenderness of a
long and successful partnership. Despite the censorship they resonate with
affection and occasional whimsical flashes of humour, as well as periods of
depression.

Leave the brooding to me. I have time enough. Be constructive, he urged
her in one letter.

By a second cruel stroke of fate, she was in the UN headquarters last
August, seeking help for her husband, when a suicide bomber blew it up.
Twenty-two people died, including the woman she was talking to when the
upper floor caved in. Mrs Saadi was unconscious for 48 hours and awoke in a
US military hospital.

The couple's children have lived most of their lives in Germany. We didn't
want them to develop under the regime. He never saw his children grow up. It
breaks my heart, Mrs Saadi says. She spent 20 years bringing them up in
Hamburg and making only short visits to Baghdad. Dr Saadi was not allowed to
go abroad except on official business. The regime urged him to divorce her
but he refused.

In prison under US custody he is not even allowed pen and paper, except to
compose his one-page Red Cross letter. He does crosswords by filling in the
blanks in his head. His wife sent him a computerised chess set but was not
allowed to provide replacement batteries when the first ones ran out. He has
been teaching himself German. If it were not for impressing the
grandchildren, I wouldn't bother, he wrote last year.

Last month he joked about Paul Bremer, the top US official in Iraq. Bremer
I found out from the German lessons I am giving myself is a man from Bremen!
Yet another German!

Dr Saadi is kept in his cell all day except for an hour of exercise in a
supervised area. His wife was able to send him running shoes.

Conditions

In October he wrote that his conditions 

Re: Iraq Communist Party statement on Atrocities at Abu Ghraib

[k hanly]

I thought imperialism was in part one nation exerting its control over
another usually against that nation's and not in self defence. Certainly the
US attacked Iraq against its will without asking people on the ground. The
PNAC website makes it clear that the aim is to project US might into the
Middle East and no doubt help protect Israel and also secure vital energy
resources. That is the imperialism that is at issue. THe issue is the status
of those who side with imperialist occupiers when there are obvious
resistant forces at work.

Groups that side with the occupiers are prima facie quislings. Even if it is
merely a tactical move it is exceedingly dangerous and liable to result in
loss of any credibility.

Cheers, Ken Hanly


- Original Message -
From: Grant Lee [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Wednesday, May 05, 2004 10:10 AM
Subject: Re: Iraq Communist Party statement on Atrocities at Abu Ghraib


 Michael said:

  I cannot understand what kind of communist party would join with the US,
 or why we
  should take such a party seriously.

 I don't think that's the real issue. No-one knows whether the insurgents
are
 more popular than the US-backed council; it will take an election to
 establish that. And what is imperialism, if not the presumption that one
 knows better than people on the ground? Why should we take _our_ views ---
 few of us being experts on Iraqi history or politics --- more seriously
than
 the views of Iraqis who live in Iraq at the moment, and have also lived
 there throughout Saddam's regime?

 regards,

 Grant.

Re: The Empire Falls Back - Niall Ferguson

[k hanly]

Come on..the post says EVEN North Korea. As a bully the US has the power to
inflict appalling destruction while sustaining only minimal damage to itself
because bullied countries do not have the power to respond. Russia and China
are not included in the circle of those to be bullied at least not by
inflicting appalling destruction.

But one might argue that Iraq and Vietnam show that the political and
economic damage caused  by playing the bully may be too high eventually.

Strange that the media never seems to detect any immorality at the sight of
the most powerful nation in the world attacking countries such as
Afghanistan, Panama, Grenada and Iraq that are completely outmatched. The
dominant story is the justice of the cause as if the bully were a kindly
benevolent policeman restoring peace and democracy. But this story would not
have the slightest credibility if there were complete wanton destruction.
This is why the US always talks of precision bombing, avoiding civilian
casualties etc. while at the same time often targetting hydro plants, water
treatment facilities, etc. using crippling sanctions imposed by the UN
etc.etc. Civilian casualties will always be collateral damage.

By the way is there confirmation of the use of cluster bombs in the recent
Fallujah battles?

Cheers, Ken Hanly




- Original Message -
From: Chris Doss [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Monday, May 03, 2004 6:04 AM
Subject: Re: The Empire Falls Back - Niall Ferguson


 The United States has the capability to inflict appalling destruction
 while sustaining only minimal damage to itself. There is no regime it
 could not terminate if it wanted to-including North Korea.

 ---
 Why do people keep saying this? One Russian Oskar-class submarine can
destroy the Eastern Seaboard.

Is the tide of outsourcing now retreating?

[k hanly]

It is official. Events in Iraq have shown that US intelligence operatives
are patriots. Rather than rendering those to be interrogated to Syria or
other countries where torture is commonplace, they are developing advanced
torture capacities within US controlled prisons. At the same time they are
providing recreational facilities where guards can ease their boredom and
frustrations. Of course torture is unpleasant and no doubt bleeding heart
liberal namby pambies will be outraged. But surely red-blooded patriotic
Americans can do the dirty work that we now contract out to those filthy
scum in Axis of Evil jails. Why waste taxpayer money on them? Why not
support our own?

Cheers, Ken Hanly

Transitional Law and Occupation Might

[k hanly]

Sovereignty and Iraq after June 30 2004

By James O'Neill

04/29/04 ICH -- At his press conference of 14 April 2004 the United States
President George W. Bush reaffirmed his determination that sovereignty
would pass to Iraq on June 30 2004. The precise legal basis of this
transition is to be found in a number of documents.

After the American and British led invasion of Iraq, the legal basis of
which is widely regarded as untenable, the United Nations Security Council
unanimously passed Resolution 1483 of May 22 2003:

(1) Reaffirming the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Iraq
(2) Stressed the right of the Iraqi people to freely determine their own
political future and control their own natural resources.
(3) Called upon all concerned to comply fully with their obligations under
international law.
(4) Supported the formation by the people of Iraq, with the help of the
Coalition Authority, of an Iraqi interim administration as a transitional
administration run by Iraqis, until an internationally recognised
representative government is established by the people of Iraq and assumes
the responsibility of the Authority.

The Authority referred to in these clauses is the so-called Coalition
Provisional Authority (CPA), a body whose membership was chosen by the
United States as one of the two occupying powers (the other being the U.K.)
The CPA in turn appointed a Governing Council to carry out administrative
functions, with each administrative unit under the control of a member of
the occupying powers. The Governing Council's membership is heavily drawn
from former Iraqi exiles, the most prominent of whom is the convicted
fraudster Ahmed Chalabi, an especial favourite of the Pentagon.

Until recently the Governing Council has been operating at the pleasure of
Paul Bremer the American pro-consul appointed by President Bush. Any
agreements reached between the Governing Council and the American
government and/or military have to be interpreted in the same way as
agreements between a ventriloquist and his dummy.

Resolution 1483 was passed in the immediate aftermath of the invasion and
the defeat of the Iraqi armed forces. It contained few specifics as to how
the Iraqi people were to freely determine their own future. That lacuna was
addressed in United Nations Security Council Resolution 1511 unanimously
passed on October 16 2003. There are four clauses in the resolution of
particular interest.

Clause 1 reaffirms the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Iraq and
underscores in that context the temporary nature of the exercise by the CPA
of its authority and obligations under Resolution 1483. Those powers are to
cease when an internationally recognised representative government is
established by the people of Iraq and sworn in and assumes the
responsibilities of the Authority as set out elsewhere in the resolution.

Clause 4 determines that the Governing Council and its Ministers are the
principal bodies of the Iraqi interim administration which embodies the
sovereignty of the State of Iraq during the transition period.

Clause 13 authorises a multinational force under unified command to take all
necessary measures to contribute to the maintenance of security and
stability in Iraq. It is this clause that provides the cloak of legitimacy
to the occupying powers. It does not exempt them of course from observance
of their obligations under international law (that Resolution 1483
specifically endorsed). It is almost certainly the case that the bombing of
civilian areas; arbitrary detention of civilians; restrictions on freedom of
movement; and the removal of Mr Hussein from the territory of Iraq to
confinement in Qatar, to cite just some examples, are breaches of the Hague
Regulations 1907 and the Geneva Convention of 1949.

Clause 15 decides that the mandate of the multinational force under clause
13 shall expire upon the completion of the political process that is
elsewhere set out in the Resolution. The relevant political process is the
setting up of a Governing Council in the terms specified in the Resolution.

It is with that background that the members of the Governing Council
laboured to produce a blueprint enabling the completion of the steps to the
resumption of self-government set out in Resolution 1511. It is important to
note that at no stage of all of these events has Iraq ever not been a
sovereign nation. The ability to exercise sovereignty, i.e. independent
self-government with dominion over its own affairs, was of course
compromised by the realities of foreign invasion, conquest and occupation.

It is also important to note however, that the United Nations resolutions
clearly envisage the suspension of real sovereignty to be a temporary phase
that terminates with the swearing in of an internationally recognised
representative government.

After some problems all members of the Governing Council signed the Law of
Administration for the State of Iraq for the Transitional Period to give it
its 

Reverse De-Baathification

[k hanly]

FALLUJAH - A former general in Saddam Hussein's army will be responsible for
security in the Iraqi city of Fallujah under a new deal reached on Thursday.
The Fallujah Protective Army will include up to 1,100 Iraqi soldiers and
will be led by a former division commander under Saddam. It will move into
the hotbed of anti-U.S. insurgency beginning on Friday, U.S. marine Lt.-Col.
Brennan Byrne said

source CBC news   cbc.ca

Why didn't the US just hire the insurgents to provide security in the first
place? ;) The US has always claimed that they are mainly remnants of
Saddam's forces. It looks as if Chalabis and INC campaign of getting rid of
all former Baathists is being rejected with a vengeance. I understand that
former Baath intelligence officers have been hired to the new Iraqi
intelligence service as well.. Of course these people may simply be regarded
as turncoats. Maybe the commander will direct security operations from the
Green Zone in Baghdad.


Cheers, Ken Hanly

Article on Iraq

[k hanly]

http://www.helsinginsanomat.fi/english/article/1076152581256

The weakness of power
COLUMN

By Pentti Sadeniemi


The United States occupation authority in Iraq seems
to be undecided over whether or not it wants to act
tough and violent, like Israel in its own occupied
territories, or whether it prefers to try to patiently
win over the hearts and minds of the Iraqis.

An occupier that wants to relinquish its power should
choose the latter policy, while resorting to the
former only on rare occasions, when there are no
options. This is difficult in a country like Iraq that
is full of conflicts, but it is certainly not
impossible; the British seem to have succeeded at
least reasonably well in their own occupation zone.

The worst alternative is unpredictable vacillation
between those two types of policy. Nevertheless, this
is the option chosen by the United States. It is one
of the characteristics of the occupation of Iraq that
make it almost impossible for an outsider to figure
out what Washington is actually up to.

A brutal quadruple murder took place in Falluja, in
the area of the Sunni Arabs. It is understandable that
the occupying power did not feel it could refrain from
reacting in some way or another. The reaction came,
but it was quite incredible.

A US spokesman with the rank of a general insisted
that the occupying power does not plan to blindly
march into the city. He promised that the operation
would be determined, precise, and overwhelming.

Then the US Marines marched blindly into the city,
causing between 500 and 700 deaths. After apparently
getting a bit of a fright themselves, the Americans
stopped their operation and began to negotiate a
truce. In other words, there was plenty of arbitrary
destruction, but no results. The Americans=92 prestige
did not grow - it suffered.

In Najaf, a rebel trainee cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr,
barricaded himself inside a Shiite shrine after days
of provoking the occupiers. The United States moved a
significant proportion of its military firepower to
the edge of the city, and gave orders to either kill
or capture the violator of the peace. The Americans
were reminded that the Shiites, who are a majority in
Iraq, would not look kindly on the desecration of
their holy city. At the time of writing, negotiations
over a rather flimsy agreement are still going on.

After making disdainful threats, the occupiers=92
restraint did not win it any goodwill or achieve any
other benefit. As was the case in Falluja, the
prestige and credibility of the United States received
a blow in Najaf - something which could have been
easily avoided with some consideration.

As if that were not enough, the Americans in Najaf
imitated one of the most disgusting aspects of Israeli
policy. It is not the role of the occupier to choose
members of the population to be murdered on the basis
of a simple administrative decision.

Undoubtedly al-Sadr himself does not hesitate to have
people killed if they are in the way. He faces
prosecution for just such a crime. However, this fact
is no excuse for the actions taken by the United
States. To justify the occupation of Iraq, Washington
has invoked the blessings of democracy, the rule of
law, and civil liberties - all values which should
make such action impossible.

The everyday tactical mistakes in the occupation are
more than matched by equally clumsy strategic mistakes
in controlling the overall situation in Iraq. What is
wrong with the Washington administration of George W.
Bush? One would have to dig through political history
with a lantern to find another group of powerful
people that would have acted so consistently for the
destruction of their own best purposes.

Before the invasion, Bush=92s inner circle did
everything it could to undermine the prestige and
credibility of the United Nations. Now, a year later,
the occupier wants nothing more than to borrow these
very characteristics from the UN.

The invasion itself was described as an attack against
international terrorism. Now few would have the
temerity to deny that the breeding ground for
international terrorism has expanded and deepened in
the past year.

The conquest of Iraq was supposed to be a
demonstration that the whole world would understand of
the overall leadership position of the United States.
A year later it is the most graphic example of the
political and psychological limits of military
superiority.

Explanations of the events will continue for a long
time to come. With the help of a columnist=92s licence -
devoid of any responsibility - at least two come to
mind: a disdain for facts and likelihoods typical of
ideologues, and the illusion of omnipotence resulting
from overwhelming military power. A combination of the
two seems to have seduced the Bush administration into
this massive project, whose costs and prospects for
success it thoroughly miscalculated.

The ideology dictated that the Iraqis should be seen
as a large oppressed nation which would, right after

More on the Iraqi Flag

[k hanly]

Burning with anger: Iraqis infuriated by new flag that was designed in
London
By Patrick Cockburn in Baghdad and David Usborne in Baghdad
28 April 2004


For many Iraqis it was the final insult. Again and again they expressed
outrage yesterday that Iraq's United States-appointed and unelected leaders
had, overnight, abolished the old Iraqi flag, seen by most Iraqis as the
symbol of their nation, and chosen a new one.

What gives these people the right to throw away our flag, to change the
symbol of Iraq? asked Salah, a building contractor of normally moderate
political opinions. It makes me very angry because these people were
appointed by the Americans. I will not regard the new flag as representing
me but only traitors and collaborators.

The outburst of fury over the flag highlights the extraordinary ability of
US leaders and the Iraqi Governing Council to alienate ordinary Iraqis,
already angered by the bloody sieges of Fallujah and Karbala. And yesterday,
in the hotbed of Iraqi rebellion, the flag was burnt in public in a
demonstration of public anger.

When, as expected, the controversial new flag is hoisted inside the security
of the Green Zone in Baghdad today, there is little prospect that the flag
will be fluttering over other Iraqi cities. When security officers at the
United Nations undertake the daily ritual this morning of raising the
standards of the 191 member countries up the white poles arrayed outside UN
headquarters in New York's First Avenue, for Iraq it will be the familiar
flag of Saddam Hussein's rule that is unfurled.

So far, we haven't received anything about this from Baghdad, said Igor
Novichenko, who is in charge of such matters in the UN's protocol unit. For
now, he added, the old Iraqi flag of green and black, with God is Great in
Arabic script across it, will retain its place outside UN headquarters.

That is not to say that the new version may not be fluttering on First
Avenue one day. There are no great formalities involved in changing a
country's flag. All that is required is for the mission of that country in
New York - and the Iraqi mission is still open - to inform the UN of the new
design.

But in Iraq greater problems loom where insurgents will be able to
strengthen their patriotic credentials by sticking with the old and popular
Iraqi flag and portraying the new one as a sign of subservience to foreign
occupiers.

Already anti-US guerrillas are adopting the old red, white and black banner
as their battle flag, tying it to their trucks and sticking it in the ground
where they have their positions. This blend of nationalism and religion has
proved highly successful in spreading resistance to the occupation.

It is increasingly unlikely that the Allies will have any legitimate Iraqi
authority to whom they can transfer power on 30 June, as President George
Bush has promised.

As the security situation deteriorates in Baghdad, Iraqis are more often
refusing to reveal their family names when interviewed. Jassim, standing
behind the counter in his grocery shop, said: That flag is not Saddam's
flag. It was there before Saddam and it represents Iraq as a country. The
whole world knows Iraq by its flag.

A further reason for popular anger is that many Iraqis are convinced that
their new flag is modelled on the Israeli flag. It is white with two
parallel blue strips along the bottom representing the Tigris and Euphrates
rivers with a yellow strip in between symbolising the Kurds. Above the
stripes is a blue crescent to represent Islam. Iraqis say the blue stripes
are suspiciously like those on the Israeli flag. They also ask why the Kurds
have a stripe in the new flag but not the 80 per cent of Iraqis who are
Arabs. Could it be because the Kurds are the only Iraqi community fully
supporting the US?

The old Iraqi flag was modified but was otherwise unchanged by Saddam
Hussein. It had red and black bands across the top and bottom and three
green stars on the white stripe separating them. Just before the 1990-91
Gulf War the words Allahu Akbar,God is Great, were added to boost the
religious credentials of Saddam Hussein's secular regime.

The flag won the loyalty of many Iraqis who did not support the old regime.
Dhurgham, a 23-year-old student, said: We cheered Iraqi footballers under
that flag for a long time. I feel it represents me as an Iraqi. I don't like
this new flag. It does not look Iraqi. It is more like the Turkish or
Israeli flags. The main reason I don't like it is that it comes from the
Americans.

When the idea of getting a new flag was first talked about last year, it
stirred up strong feelings against change. But the Iraqi Governing Council,
made up of former opponents of Saddam Hussein and Iraqis in exile during his
rule, has a well-established reputation for being wholly out of touch with
Iraqi opinion. The council approved the new flag, only asking the artist to
make the crescent a deeper blue.

This is a new era, said Hamid al-Kafaei, the spokesman for 

Articleon Iraq

[k hanly]

Apologies if this is a repeat. I had computer problems just as I sent it
first...

http://www.helsinginsanomat.fi/english/article/1076152581256

The weakness of power
COLUMN

By Pentti Sadeniemi


The United States occupation authority in Iraq seems
to be undecided over whether or not it wants to act
tough and violent, like Israel in its own occupied
territories, or whether it prefers to try to patiently
win over the hearts and minds of the Iraqis.

An occupier that wants to relinquish its power should
choose the latter policy, while resorting to the
former only on rare occasions, when there are no
options. This is difficult in a country like Iraq that
is full of conflicts, but it is certainly not
impossible; the British seem to have succeeded at
least reasonably well in their own occupation zone.

The worst alternative is unpredictable vacillation
between those two types of policy. Nevertheless, this
is the option chosen by the United States. It is one
of the characteristics of the occupation of Iraq that
make it almost impossible for an outsider to figure
out what Washington is actually up to.

A brutal quadruple murder took place in Falluja, in
the area of the Sunni Arabs. It is understandable that
the occupying power did not feel it could refrain from
reacting in some way or another. The reaction came,
but it was quite incredible.

A US spokesman with the rank of a general insisted
that the occupying power does not plan to blindly
march into the city. He promised that the operation
would be determined, precise, and overwhelming.

Then the US Marines marched blindly into the city,
causing between 500 and 700 deaths. After apparently
getting a bit of a fright themselves, the Americans
stopped their operation and began to negotiate a
truce. In other words, there was plenty of arbitrary
destruction, but no results. The Americans=92 prestige
did not grow - it suffered.

In Najaf, a rebel trainee cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr,
barricaded himself inside a Shiite shrine after days
of provoking the occupiers. The United States moved a
significant proportion of its military firepower to
the edge of the city, and gave orders to either kill
or capture the violator of the peace. The Americans
were reminded that the Shiites, who are a majority in
Iraq, would not look kindly on the desecration of
their holy city. At the time of writing, negotiations
over a rather flimsy agreement are still going on.

After making disdainful threats, the occupiers=92
restraint did not win it any goodwill or achieve any
other benefit. As was the case in Falluja, the
prestige and credibility of the United States received
a blow in Najaf - something which could have been
easily avoided with some consideration.

As if that were not enough, the Americans in Najaf
imitated one of the most disgusting aspects of Israeli
policy. It is not the role of the occupier to choose
members of the population to be murdered on the basis
of a simple administrative decision.

Undoubtedly al-Sadr himself does not hesitate to have
people killed if they are in the way. He faces
prosecution for just such a crime. However, this fact
is no excuse for the actions taken by the United
States. To justify the occupation of Iraq, Washington
has invoked the blessings of democracy, the rule of
law, and civil liberties - all values which should
make such action impossible.

The everyday tactical mistakes in the occupation are
more than matched by equally clumsy strategic mistakes
in controlling the overall situation in Iraq. What is
wrong with the Washington administration of George W.
Bush? One would have to dig through political history
with a lantern to find another group of powerful
people that would have acted so consistently for the
destruction of their own best purposes.

Before the invasion, Bush=92s inner circle did
everything it could to undermine the prestige and
credibility of the United Nations. Now, a year later,
the occupier wants nothing more than to borrow these
very characteristics from the UN.

The invasion itself was described as an attack against
international terrorism. Now few would have the
temerity to deny that the breeding ground for
international terrorism has expanded and deepened in
the past year.

The conquest of Iraq was supposed to be a
demonstration that the whole world would understand of
the overall leadership position of the United States.
A year later it is the most graphic example of the
political and psychological limits of military
superiority.

Explanations of the events will continue for a long
time to come. With the help of a columnist=92s licence -
devoid of any responsibility - at least two come to
mind: a disdain for facts and likelihoods typical of
ideologues, and the illusion of omnipotence resulting
from overwhelming military power. A combination of the
two seems to have seduced the Bush administration into
this massive project, whose costs and prospects for
success it thoroughly miscalculated.

The ideology dictated that the 

Iranian influence in Iraq

[k hanly]

Analysis: Iran's influence in Iraq

An official Iranian delegation is in Baghdad at Washington's request to hel=
p
resolve the impasse between the US occupation authorities and Shia cleric
Moqtada Sadr. Middle East analyst Dilip Hiro says this underlies the
influence that the predominantly Shia Iran has on the neighbouring Iraqi
Shias.

The Iranian influence is exercised through different channels - a phenomeno=
n
helped by the fact that there is no single, centralised authority in Iran.

The different centres of power include the offices of the Supreme Leader an=
d
the President; the Majlis (parliament) and the judiciary; the Expediency
Council; and offices of the Grand Ayatollahs in the holy city of Qom, and
their social welfare networks throughout the Shia world.

It was the decision of Grand Ayatollah Kadhim Husseini al-Hairi - an Iraqi
cleric who had gone to Qom for further theological studies 30 years ago,
never to return - to appoint Moqtada Sadr as his deputy in Iraq in April
2003 that raised the young cleric's religious standing.

The more senior Ayatollah Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, a member of the US-appointed
Iraqi Governing Council (IGC), is even more beholden to Iran. He is the
leader of the Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution in Iraq (Sciri), which
was established in 1982 in Tehran by the Iranian government. He returned to
Iraq after spending 22 years in Iran.

Shia militia

Sciri's 10,000-strong militia, called the Badr Brigades, has been trained
and equipped by Iran.

Ayatollah Hakim underscored his continued closeness to Iran on 11 February,
the 25th anniversary of Iran's Islamic revolution. Opening a book fair in
Baghdad, sponsored by the Iranian embassy, he praised the Vilayat-e Faqih
(ie Rule of Religious Jurisprudent) doctrine on which the Iranian
constitution is founded.

Sooner or later, the Americans will be obliged to leave Iraq in shame and
humiliation

Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamanei

Then there is Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the most senior Shia cleric, who
is now being routinely described by the Coalition Provisional Authority
(CPA) as a moderate, even pro-Western, even though he refuses to meet eithe=
r
the CPA chief Paul Bremer or any of his envoys, limiting his contacts
strictly to IGC members.
Ayatollah Sistani was born and brought up in the Iranian city of Mashhad,
and despite his 53 years in Iraq, speaks Arabic with a Persian accent.

Most of his nine charitable ventures, primarily providing housing for
pilgrims and theology students, are in Iran. So too are the four religious
foundations sponsored by him.

Increasing influence

Outside official circles, there are signs of growing Iranian influence amon=
g
Iraqi Shias.

The religious foundations run by pre-eminent clerics in Iran are funding
partially the social welfare services being provided to Iraqi Shias by thei=
r
mosques at a time when unemployment is running at 60%.


Iran's present co-operation with Washington is a tactical move. They want t=
o
help stabilise the situation in Iraq to facilitate elections there so the
Shia majority can assume power through the ballot box, and hasten the
departure of the Anglo-American occupiers

If there is any day-to-day Iranian involvement in the workings of the Sadr
network in Iraq, it is in the sphere of social welfare.

There is no need for Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard to train the
militiamen of Sadr's Mehdi Army since all Iraq males have received three
years of military training under the Baathist regime and the country is
awash with small arms and ammunition.

Also, Iranian Shias are pouring into Iraq, which has six holy Shia sites,
across the unguarded border at the rate of 10,000 a day.

They are thus bolstering the Iraqi economy to the tune of about $2bn a year=
,
equivalent to two-fifths of Iraq's oil revenue in 2003.

Covert activities

Then there are covert activities purportedly sponsored by Iran.

Soon after Saddam's downfall, some 100 security specialists of the
Lebanese Hezbollah arrived in Basra, at the behest of the Iranian
intelligence agency, according to the Anglo-American sources.

Since then two groups of Iraqi Shias calling themselves Hezbollah have
emerged, one of them allegedly sponsored by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary
Guard, with its headquarters in Amara and branches in other cities.

This is widely seen as a move to establish an Iranian intelligence
infrastructure in Iraq. However, such a network can hardly compete with its
Anglo-American rival.

Until a few days ago, conceding any role to the Islamic Republic of Iran ha=
s
been anathema to the George Bush administration.

It is hell bent on seeing that the Iraqi politicians refrain from declaring
Iraq an Islamic republic. Paul Bremer publicly announced that if those
writing the transitional constitution made any such move, he would veto the
document.

But present signs are that a large majority of Shias, led by Ayatollah
Sistani, favour an Islamic entity of some sort for Iraq. About 

The new Occupation Flag in Iraq

[k hanly]

This seems to be a stupid act. Surely this a total insult to the dignity of
Iraqis that they now have a flag opposed upon them. The liberation holiday
didnt work out..Neither will this. Maybe some US company has the contract to
make them and thus will have an endless contract as they are burned up and
have to be replaced..

Cheers, Ken Hanly

BAGHDAD: Iraq's Governing Council has adopted a new national flag to replace
the one flown by Saddam Hussein, with emblems to represent peace, Islam and
Iraq's Kurdish population, spokesman Hamid al-Kefaae said today.

The new flag consists of a pale blue crescent on a white background and has
a yellow strip between two lines of blue at the bottom. It will be raised
over government buildings within days, he said.

http://www.hipakistan.com/en/detail.php?newsId=en62743F_catID=f_type=source

Re: Bush, the lesser evil?

[k hanly]

But at the present juncture both Kerry and Bush take a multilateralist
stand. Bush is not multilateralist just in terms of a coalition of the
billing but also wants the UN to participate and bless US control of
security through a UN force with the US in command. Bush also seems to have
accepted the State department line rather than the Pentagon and is not
complaining that the UN will sideline Chalabi and many of the present IGC.
For his part Chalabi and others are no doubt trying to use the UN oil
for food scandal as a means to discredit the UN and advance their own
agenda. Obviously the hiring of some former Baath generals will not sit well
wtih the INC which always pushed for a wholesale de_Baathification. Chalabi
spouts off that allowing Baathists element back in is like allowing Nazis to
govern post-war Germany. Well heck Heisenberg was OK for US rocket
programmes

Cheers, Ken Hanly
- Original Message -
From: Chris Burford [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Monday, April 26, 2004 4:23 PM
Subject: Re: Bush, the lesser evil?


 - Original Message -
 From: Mike Ballard [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 Sent: Monday, April 26, 2004 9:54 AM
 Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Bush, the lesser evil?


  Chris,
 
  Does this mean that you don't think it mattered

 In my opinion the difference between Kerry and Bush is not of this
 magnitude. It is a policy difference not a class difference. They are
 both imperialists and both hegemonic imperialists. But Bush's policy
 has been to use the massive preponderance of US military might
 unilaterally to impose its hegemony. Kerry would obviously use this,
 but appears by his background, his utterances, and his position on
 Iraq to favour a more multi-lateralist hegemonic position. This may
 matter more outside the US than within it. Even outside it is a matter
 of judgement whether the advantages outweigh the disadvantages for the
 progressive forces of the world versus international finance capital
 headed by US capital, to have Empire consolidated under the more
 complex hegemonic leadership of a Kerry type figure rather than
 fragmented and dramatised by a Bush type figure.

 Chris Burford

Re: mixed economic signals

[k hanly]

Sabri wrote

I knew that you were going to say this but noise
traders are the irrational ones and for their
existence, there has to be non-noise traders, that
is, the rational ones.

My claim is that all market participants are noise
traders, which makes the term meaningless.

Comment: I don't see this. That a class contains all of a given group does
not mean that the class term is meaningless. Consider people killable by
nuclear bombs and those non-killable by nuclear bombs. The latter class is
empty I assume but this does not mean the phrase people killable by nuclear
bombs is meaningless. The situation does not change if you choose classes
that  exhaust the universal class ie non (people who are killable by nuclear
bombs).

Cheers, Ken Hanly

Cognitive Dissonance in US on Iraq

[k hanly]

http://www.antiwar.com/lobe/?articleid=2374

Majority Still Believe in Iraq's WMD, al-Qaeda Ties

by Jim Lobe
U.S. public perceptions about former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein's
alleged ties to al-Qaeda and stocks of weapons of mass destruction (WMD)
continues to lag far behind the testimony of experts, boosting chances that
President George W Bush will be reelected, according to a survey and
analysis released Thursday.

Despite statements by such officials as the Bush administration's former
chief weapons inspector, David Kay; its former anti-terrorism chief, Richard
Clarke; former chief United Nations weapons inspector Hans Blix, as well as
admissions by senior administration officials themselves, a majority of the
public still believes Iraq was closely tied to the al-Qaeda terrorist group
and had WMD stocks or programs before US troops invaded the country 13
months ago.

The public is not getting a clear message about what the experts are saying
about Iraqi links to al-Qaeda and its WMD program, said Steven Kull,
director of the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) at the
University of Maryland, which conducted the survey.

The analysis suggests that if the public were to more clearly perceive what
the experts themselves are saying on these issues, there is a good chance
this could have a significant impact on their attitudes about the war and
even on how they vote in November, he added.

The survey and analysis found a high correlation between those perceptions
and support for Bush himself in the upcoming presidential race in November.

Among the 57 percent of respondents who said they believed Iraq was either
directly involved in carrying out the 9/11 attacks on New York and the
Pentagon or had provided substantial support to al-Qaeda, 57 percent said
they intended to vote for Bush and 39 percent said they would choose his
Democratic foe, John Kerry.

Among the 40 percent of respondents, who said they believed there was no
connection at all between Saddam and al-Qaeda or that ties consisted only of
minor contacts or visits, on the other hand, only 28 percent said they
intended to vote for Bush, while 68 percent said their ballots would go to
Kerry.

The survey, which was based on interviews with a random sample of 1,311
respondents in March, was released amid a series of polls that indicate that
Bush and Kerry are in a virtual tie less than seven months before the actual
election.

While Kerry appeared to be leading in the wake of last month's congressional
testimony by Clarke, who accused the administration of being insufficiently
seized with the threat posed by al-Qaeda before the 9/11 attacks, Bush, who
in recent weeks has spent an unprecedented amount of money on television
advertising so early in the campaign, has closed the gap and, according to
one 'Washington Post' poll published earlier this week, pulled slightly
ahead.

The latest PIPA study is remarkable because it shows that public perceptions
about Iraq, or at least about the threat it posed before the US invasion,
are lagging far behind what acknowledged experts have themselves concluded
and whose findings have been reported in the mass media.

Virtually all independent experts and even senior administration officials
have concluded since the war that ties between Iraq and al-Qaeda before the
war were virtually nonexistent, and even Bush himself has explicitly
dismissed the notion that Baghdad had a hand in the 9/11 attacks.

Yet the March poll found that 20 percent of respondents believe that Iraq
was directly involved in the attacks - the same percentage as on the eve of
the war, in February 2003.

Similarly, the percentages of those who believe Iraq provided substantial
support to al-Qaeda (37 percent) and those who believe contacts were
minimal (29 percent) are also virtually unchanged from 13 months before. As
of March 2004, 11 percent said there was no connection at all, up four
percent from February 2003.

Some - but surprisingly little - change was found in answers to whether
Washington had found concrete evidence since the war that substantiated a
Hussein-al-Qaeda link. Thus, in June 2003, 52 percent of respondents said
evidence had been found, while only 45 percent said so last month.

As to WMD, about which there has been significantly more media coverage, 60
percent of respondents said Iraq either had actual WMD (38 percent) or had a
major program for developing them (22 percent). In contrast, 39 percent said
Baghdad had limited WMD-related activities that fell short of an active
program - what Kay as the CIA's main weapons inspector concluded in
February - or no activities at all.

Moreover, the message conveyed by Kay and other experts appears not to be
getting through to the public, adds the survey, which found a whopping 82
percent of respondents saying either, experts mostly agree Iraq was
providing substantial support to al-Qaeda (47 percent) or, experts are
evenly divided on the question (35 percent).

Perle's of Wisdom

[k hanly]

'Iraq Expert' Perle Shills for Chalabi at Senate Panel

by Juan Cole
It was quite an experience to be on the same panel on Tuesday with Richard
Perle and Toby Dodge, before the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.
Perle wasn't added until the last minute, and it is mysterious why he was
there, since ours was supposed to be an expert panel. Dodge has an
important book on Iraq. Originally Ahmad Hashim was going to be on with us
(he came Wednesday instead), and then we heard Perle had been put on. Perle,
of course, is no Iraq expert. He doesn't know a word of Arabic, and has
never lived anywhere in the Arab world.

Perle's entire testimony was a camouflaged piece of flakking for Ahmad
Chalabi. He complained that the State Department and the CIA had not created
a private army for Chalabi and had not cooperated with him. Perle did not
mention Chalabi's name, but it was clear that was who he was talking about
(State and CIA famously dropped Chalabi in the mid-1990s when they asked him
to account for the millions they had given him, and he could not).

In fact, Perle kept talking about the Iraqis when it was clear he meant
Chalabi. He said the US should have turned power over to the Iraqis long
before now.

But here's an interesting contradiction. I said at one point that I thought
Bremer should have acquiesced in Grand Ayatollah Sistani's request for open
elections to be held this spring, and that if they had been, it might have
forestalled the recent blow-up. I had in mind that Muqtada al-Sadr in
particular would have been kept busy acting as a ward boss, trying to get
his guys returned from East Baghdad  Kufa, etc.

Perle became alarmed and said that scheduling early elections would not have
prevented the flare-up because the people who mounted it were enemies of
freedom and uninterested in elections. Perle has this bizarre black and
white view of the world and demonizes people right and left. A lot of the
Mahdi Army young men who fought for Muqtada are just neighborhood youth,
unemployed and despairing. Some are fanatics, but most of them don't hate
freedom - most of them have no idea what it is, having never experienced
democracy.

But anyway, what struck me was the contradiction between Perle's insistence
that the US should have handed power over to Iraqis months ago, and his
simultaneous opposition to free and fair elections. The only conclusion I
can draw is that he wants power handed to Chalabi, who would then be a kind
of dictator and would not go to the polls any time soon.

Perle also at one point said he didn't think the events of the first two
weeks of April were a mass uprising and said he thought Fallujah was quiet
now. (Nope).

It is indicative of the Alice in Wonderland world in which these Washington
Think Tank operators live that Perle could make such an obviously false
observation with a straight face. Even a child who has been watching CNN for
the past three weeks would know that there was a mass uprising. (Even ten
percent of the American-trained police switched sides and joined the
opposition, and 40% of Iraqi security men refused to show up to fight the
insurgents.)

I replied, pointing out that the US had lost control of most of Baghdad, its
supply and communications lines to the south were cut, and a ragtag band of
militiamen in Kut chased the Ukrainian troops off their base and occupied
it. It was an uprising. I suppose Perle hopes that if he says it wasn't an
uprising, at least some people who aren't paying attention will believe him.
It is bizarre.

It reminded me of the scene in Ladykillers where the fraudsters set off an
explosion in a lady's basement, and she hears it while outside in a car, and
is alarmed, and the Tom Hanks character says in a honeyed southern accent,
Why, Ah don't believe Ah heard anything at all. I could just see Perle in
a Panama hat at that point playing the character.

It is deeply shameful that Perle is still pushing Chalabi, and may well
succeed in installing him. Chalabi is wanted for embezzling $300 million
from a Jordanian bank. He cannot account for millions of US government money
given him from 1992 to 1996. He was flown into Iraq by the Pentagon (Perle
was on the Defense Advisory Board, a civilian oversight committee for the
Pentagon) with a thousand of his militiamen. The US military handed over to
Chalabi, a private citizen, the Baath intelligence files that showed who had
been taking money from Saddam, giving Chalabi the ability to blackmail large
numbers of Iraqi and regional actors. It was Chalabi who insisted that the
Iraqi army be disbanded, and Perle almost certainly was an intermediary for
that stupid decision. It was Chalabi who insisted on blacklisting virtually
all Baath Party members, even if they had been guilty of no crimes,
effectively marginalizing all the Sunni Iraqi technocrats who could compete
with him for power. It was Chalabi who finagled his way onto the Interim
Governing Council even though he has no grassroots support 

Re: capitalism = progressive?

[k hanly]

Didnt many enterprises pay by the piece and give bonuses based upon how much
was produced as in the Stakhanovite movement. Were there medals for
productive achievement as there were in other areas such as the Hero of
SOviet Motherhood etc. Both provide some sort of incentives.

Cheers, Ken Hanly

- Original Message -
From: Chris Doss [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Thursday, April 22, 2004 11:06 AM
Subject: Re: capitalism = progressive?


 I am no expert, but I believe this to be the case. One of Gorbachev's many
blunders was to increase wages a great deal without a corresponding increase
in consumer goods, resulting in huge lines.

 -Original Message-
 From: Devine, James [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 Date: Thu, 22 Apr 2004 07:18:48 -0700
 Subject: Re: [PEN-L] capitalism = progressive?

  one reason why (money) wages weren't increased was that consumer-goods
shortages meant that there was nothing to buy with the extra wages, right?
people hoarded a lot of cash since there wasn't much to buy.
  Jim Devine

Employee sacked for photographing coffins

[k hanly]

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/04/22/1082616268111.html?from=storyrhs

Last Sunday a newspaper in Seattle, Washington, published a rare photograph
of soldiers' coffins, each of them containing the body of an American who
had died in Iraq.

The coffins, each draped with the Stars and Stripes, had been loaded into
the back of a cargo aircraft for a final journey to the US, where they would
be buried. There were at least 18 of them in the picture, which was taken by
a 50-year-old civilian contractor, Tami Silicio.

On Wednesday Ms Silicio was sacked from her job, for taking the photograph
and sharing it with news organisations.

Ms Silicio worked for Maytag Aircraft Corporation, which has a $US18 million
($25 million) contract to handle cargo for the US Government at Kuwait
airport.

As part of that job she would often see soldiers' coffins in the back of
aircraft, on their way from Iraq to burial in the US.

Earlier this month - which has been one of the deadliest for coalition
soldiers - Ms Silicio decided to photograph the coffins. She asked a friend,
Amy Katz, to forward the image to her local newspaper, The Seattle Times.

Ms Katz said she was amazed when she saw the photo. I immediately picked
up the telephone and because [Ms Silicio] is from Washington state, I called
The Seattle Times, she said. Tami wanted to share the image with the
American people.

The US military generally bans photographs of soldiers' coffins, and few
have been published in US newspapers during the war in Iraq. On Wednesday Ms
Silicio engaged an agent, who offered her photograph to newspaper outlets
for $1400 for one-time, non-exclusive use.

The editor of the Times, Mike Fancher, said in a column this week that he
decided to publish the photograph on the front page because it was
undeniably newsworthy. Readers would have differing reactions to the
photo, depending on their views of the war, he said.

The managing editor of The Seattle Times, David Boardman, told the magazine
Editor  Publisher this week that we weren't attempting to convey any sort
of political message.

He disagreed with the military ban on photographs of coffins, saying: The
Administration cannot tell us what we can and cannot publish.

Ms Katz said that after the picture was published Ms Silicio was called
into her supervisor's office and severely reprimanded. She explained why she
did it, but they sacked her and her husband [David Landry] too. She said Ms
Silicio really wanted mothers of the soldiers to know how the coffins were
handled.

In an interview with The Seattle Times, Ms Silicio said the coffins were
prayed over and saluted before being shipped.

Everyone salutes with such emotion and respect, she said. The families
would be proud to see their sons and daughters saluted like that.

She said she had seen a coffin accompanied by the wife and, in another case,
by the father of the fallen soldier.

William Silva, the president of Maytag Aircraft, was quoted by The Seattle
Times as saying the sackings had been for violating US government and
company regulations.

Snowbirds seek new haven..

[k hanly]

N.S. votes to invite Turks and Caicos to join it
Last Updated Thu, 22 Apr 2004 14:16:50
HALIFAX - Nova Scotia's three political parties voted unanimously Wednesday
to invite Turks and Caicos to join the province, if the Caribbean islands
ever become part of Canada.


INDEPTH: Turks and Caicos


Bill Langille
Tory backbencher Bill Langille has never been to the 40-island chain, but he
thinks the union is a natural, given historical trade connections and a
sea-going culture.

He introduced the non-binding resolution in hopes of spurring talks at the
federal level.

Prime Minister Paul Martin agreed last month to meet with Michael Misick,
the Turks and Caicos chief minister, to talk about possibly forming some
sort of relationship.

Talks about forming some kind of alliance were first brought up by Prime
Minister Robert Borden in 1917, and have surfaced several times in the
succeeding decades. However, Canada has turned down an alliance three times,
largely because it doesn't want to be seen as being neocolonialist.

The islands, which are a British colony, are financially self-sufficient and
run a balanced budget.


Edmonton Tory MP Peter Goldring has taken up the latest campaign, visiting
the islands for a fact-finding mission last January.

His sales pitch is that the islands already host 16,000 Canadians each year
and would provide a stable retirement and vacation destination. Thirty per
cent of hotels and resorts are Canadian-owned. He also says the islands
could be the Canadian hub for Caribbean trade.

It's not clear what an alliance between Canada and the Turks and Caicos
would look like, but comparisons have been made with New Zealand and the
Cook Islands or even France and Martinique.

As for Nova Scotia, at least one MP wasn't amused with the idea of annexing
a tropical paradise. Glace Bay MP Dave Wilson said Nova Scotia already has
one island to take care of - Cape Breton.



Written by CBC News Online staff

Re: NYT/Using MRI to See Politics on the Brain

[k hanly]

Won't it be a question of finding out what brain cells need to be destroyed
to cause people to vote for the GOP?:

Cheers, Ken Hanly


- Original Message -
From: Devine, James [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Thursday, April 22, 2004 1:39 PM
Subject: Re: NYT/Using MRI to See Politics on the Brain


 eventually, they'll figure out which parts of the brain to stimulate
(using electrodes) to make people vote GOP.
 JD

 -Original Message-
 From: Michael Hoover [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 Sent: Thu 4/22/2004 10:34 AM
 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 Cc:
 Subject: [PEN-L] NYT/Using MRI to See Politics on the Brain



  By JOHN TIERNEY
 Using M.R.I. to See Politics on the Brain

The new ambassador to Iraq

[k hanly]

Web Exclusives
Editor Matthew Rothschild comments on the news of the day.





April 20, 2004





Negroponte, a Torturer's Friend


Bush's announcement that he intends to appoint John Negroponte to be the
U.S. ambassador to Iraq should appall anyone who respects human rights.


Negroponte, currently U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., was U.S. ambassador to
Honduras in the 1980s and was intimately involved with Reagan's dirty war
against the Sandinistas of Nicaragua. Reagan waged much of that illegal
contra war from Honduras, and Negroponte was his point man.


According to a detailed investigation the Baltimore Sun did in 1995,
Negroponte covered up some of the most grotesque human rights abuses
imaginable.


The CIA organized, trained, and financed an army unit called Battalion 316,
the paper said. Its specialty was torture. And it kidnapped, tortured, and
killed hundreds of Hondurans, the Sun reported. It used shock and
suffocation devices in interrogations. Prisoners often were kept naked and,
when no longer useful, killed and buried in unmarked graves.


The U.S. embassy in Honduras knew about the human rights abuses but did not
want this embarrassing information to become public, the paper said.


Determined to avoid questions in Congress, U.S. officials in Honduras
concealed evidence of human rights abuses, the Sun reported. Negroponte has
denied involvement, and prior to his confirmation by the Senate for his U.N.
post, he testified, I do not believe that death squads were operating in
Honduras.


But this is what the Baltimore Sun said: The embassy was aware of numerous
kidnappings of leftists. It also said that Negroponte played an active role
in whitewashing human rights abuses.


Specific examples of brutality by the Honduran military typically never
appeared in the human rights reports, prepared by the embassy under the
direct supervision of Ambassador Negroponte, the paper wrote.  The reports
from Honduras were carefully crafted to leave the impression that the
Honduran military respected human rights.


So this is the man who is going to show the Iraqis the way toward democracy?


More likely, as the insurgency increases, this will be the man who will
oversee and hush up any brutal repression that may ensue.

-- Matthew Rothschild

http://www.progressive.org/webex04/wx042004.html

Conservatives Becoming more divided over Iraq

[k hanly]

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/19/politics/19CONS.html?ei=5062en=3ead1edf3c2212ddex=1082952000pagewanted=printposition=




April 19, 2004
Lack of Resolution in Iraq Finds Conservatives Divided
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

 growing faction of conservatives is voicing doubts about a prolonged United
States military involvement in Iraq, putting hawkish neoconservatives on the
defensive and posing questions for President Bush about the degree of
support he can expect from his political base.

The continuing violence and mounting casualties in Iraq have given new
strength to the traditional conservative doubts about using American
military power to remake other countries and about the potential for
Western-style democracy without a Western cultural foundation. In in the
eyes of many conservatives, the Iraqi resistance has discredited the more
hawkish neoconservatives - a group closely identified with Paul D.
Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, and William Kristol, the editor
of The Weekly Standard.

Considered descendants of a group of mostly Jewish intellectuals who
switched from the political left to the right at the height of the cold war,
the neoconservatives are defined largely by their conviction that American
military power can be a force for good in the world. They championed the
invasion of Iraq as a way to turn that country into a bastion of democracy
in the Middle East.

In late May of last year, we neoconservatives were hailed as great
visionaries, said Kenneth R. Weinstein, chief operating officer of the
Hudson Institute, a center of neoconservative thinking. Now we are
embattled, both within the conservative movement and in the battle over
postwar planning.

Those of us who favored a more muscular approach to American foreign policy
and a more Wilsonian view of our efforts in Iraq find ourselves pitted
against more traditional conservatives, who have more isolationist instincts
to begin with, and they are more willing to say, `Bring the boys home,' 
Mr. Weinstein said.

Richard A. Viguerie, a conservative stalwart and the dean of conservative
direct mail, said the Iraq war had created an unusual schism. I can't think
of any other issue that has divided conservatives as much as this issue in
my political lifetime, Mr. Viguerie said.

Recent events, he said, call into question how conservatives see the White
House. It doesn't look like the White House is as astute as we thought they
were.

Although Mr. Bush appears to be sticking to the neoconservative view, the
growing skepticism among some conservatives about the Iraqi occupation is
upending some of the familiar dynamics of left and right. To be sure, both
sides have urged swift and decisive retaliation against the Iraqi insurgents
in the short term, but some on the right are beginning to support a
withdrawal as soon as is practical, while some Democrats, including Senator
John Kerry of Massachusetts, the likely presidential nominee, have called
for sending more troops to Iraq.

In an editorial in this week's issue of The Weekly Standard, Mr. Kristol
applauded Mr. Kerry's stance.

Referring to the conservative commentator Patrick J. Buchanan, an outspoken
opponent of the war and occupation, Mr. Kristol said in an interview on
Friday: I will take Bush over Kerry, but Kerry over Buchanan or any of the
lesser Buchananites on the right. If you read the last few issues of The
Weekly Standard, it has as much or more in common with the liberal hawks
than with traditional conservatives.

In contrast, this week's issue of National Review, the magazine founded by
William F. Buckley and a standard-bearer for mainstream conservatives,
adopted a newly skeptical tone toward the neoconservatives and toward the
occupation. In an editorial titled An End to Illusion, the Bush
administration was described as having a dismaying capacity to believe its
own public relations.

The editorial criticized the administration as having an underestimation of
 the difficulty of implanting democracy in alien soil, and an overestimation
in particular of the sophistication of what is still fundamentally a tribal
society and one devastated by decades of tyranny.

The editorial described that error as Wilsonian, another term for the
neoconservatives' faith that United States military power can improve the
world and a label associated with the liberal internationalism of President
Woodrow Wilson.

The Wilsonian tendency has grown stronger in conservative foreign policy
thought in recent years, the editorial continued, adding, As we have seen
in Iraq, the world isn't as malleable as some Wilsonians would have it.

The editorial was careful to emphasize that the war served legitimate United
States interests and that violence against Americans in Iraq deserved harsh
retribution. But it concluded: It is the Iraqis who have to save Iraq. It
is their country, not ours.

Some conservatives who focus on 

Pentagon as Slum Lord

[k hanly]

The Pentagon as Global Slumlord
By Mike Davis

The young American Marine is exultant. It's a sniper's dream, he tells a
Los Angeles Times reporter on the outskirts of Fallujah. You can go
anywhere and there so many ways to fire at the enemy without him knowing
where you are.

Sometimes a guy will go down, and I'll let him scream a bit to destroy the
morale of his buddies. Then I'll use a second shot.

To take a bad guy out, he explains, is an incomparable 'adrenaline
rush.' He brags of having 24 confirmed kills in the initial phase of the
brutal U.S. onslaught against the rebel city of 300,000 people.

Faced with intransigent popular resistance that recalls the heroic Vietcong
defense of Hue in 1968, the Marines have again unleashed indiscriminate
terror. According to independent journalists and local medical workers, they
have slaughtered at least two hundred women and children in the first two
weeks of fighting.

The battle of Fallujah, together with the conflicts unfolding in Shiia
cities and Baghdad slums, are high-stakes tests, not just of U.S. policy in
Iraq, but of Washington's ability to dominate what Pentagon planners
consider the key battlespace of the future -- the Third World city.

The Mogadishu debacle of 1993, when neighborhood militias inflicted 60%
casualties on elite Army Rangers, forced U.S. strategists to rethink what is
known in Pentagonese as MOUT: Militarized Operations on Urbanized Terrain.
Ultimately, a National Defense Panel review in December 1997 castigated the
Army as unprepared for protracted combat in the near impassable, maze-like
streets of the poverty-stricken cities of the Third World.

As a result, the four armed services, coordinated by the Joint Staff Urban
Working Group, launched crash programs to master street-fighting under
realistic third-world conditions. The future of warfare, the journal of
the Army War College declared, lies in the streets, sewers, high-rise
buildings, and sprawl of houses that form the broken cities of the world.

Israeli advisors were quietly brought in to teach Marines, Rangers, and Navy
Seals the state-of-the-art tactics -- especially the sophisticated
coordination of sniper and demolition teams with heavy armor and
overwhelming airpower -- so ruthlessly used by Israeli Defense Forces in
Gaza and the West Bank.

Artificial cityscapes (complete with smoke and sound systems) were built
to simulate combat conditions in densely populated neighborhoods of cities
like Baghdad or Port-au-Prince. The Marine Corps Urban Warfighting
Laboratory also staged realistic war games (Urban Warrior) in Oakland and
Chicago, while the Army's Special Operations Command invaded Pittsburgh.

Today, many of the Marines inside Fallujah are graduates of these Urban
Warrior exercises as well as mock combat at Yodaville (the Urban Training
Facility in Yuma, Arizona), while some of the Army units encircling Najaf
and the Baghdad slum neighborhood of Sadr City are alumni of the new $34
million MOUT simulator at Fort Polk, Louisiana.

This tactical Israelization of U.S. combat doctrine has been accompanied
by what might be called a Sharonization of the Pentagon's worldview.
Military theorists are now deeply involved in imagining how the evolving
capacity of high-tech warfare can contain, if not destroy, chronic
terrorist insurgencies rooted in the desperation of growing megaslums.

To help develop a geopolitical framework for urban war-fighting, military
planners turned in the 1990s to the RAND Corporation: Dr. Strangelove's old
alma mater. RAND, a nonprofit think tank established by the Air Force in
1948, was notorious for war-gaming nuclear Armageddon in the 1950s and for
helping plan the Vietnam War in the 1960s. These days RAND does cities --
big time. Its researchers ponder urban crime statistics, inner-city public
health, and the privatization of public education. They also run the Army's
Arroyo Center which has published a small library of recent studies on the
context and mechanics of urban warfare.

One of the most important RAND projects, initiated in the early 1990s, has
been a major study of how demographic changes will affect future conflict.
The bottom line, RAND finds, is that the urbanization of world poverty has
produced the urbanization of insurgency (the title, in fact, of their
report).

Insurgents are following their followers into the cities, RAND warns,
setting up 'liberated zones' in urban shantytowns. Neither U.S. doctrine,
nor training, nor equipment is designed for urban counterinsurgency. As a
result, the slum has become the weakest link in the American empire.

The RAND researchers reflect on the example of El Salvador where the local
military, despite massive U.S. support, was unable to stop FMLN guerrillas
from opening an urban front. Indeed, had the Farabundo Marti National
Liberation Front rebels effectively operated within the cities earlier in
the insurgency, it is questionable how much the United States could have
done to help maintain 

Nutcase rock and roll psy warfare ops

[k hanly]

http://www.dailysouthtown.com/southtown/dsindex/17-ds3.htm

Dirty deeds done dirt cheap

Along Fallujah's front line, U.S. uses rock 'n' roll to snag insurgents

Saturday, April 17, 2004




By Jason Keyser
The Associated Press




FALLUJAH, Iraq - In Fallujah's darkened, empty streets, U.S. troops blast
AC/DC's Hell's Bells and other rock music full volume from a huge speaker,
hoping to grate on the nerves of this Sunni Muslim city's gunmen and give a
laugh to Marines along the front line.
Unable to advance farther into the city, an Army psychological operations
team hopes a mix of heavy metal and insults shouted in Arabic - including,
You shoot like a goat herder - will draw gunmen to step forward and
attack. But no luck Thursday night.

The loud music recalls the Army's use of rap and rock to help flush out
Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega after the December 1989 invasion on his
country, and the FBI's blaring progressively more irritating tunes in an
attempt to end a standoff with armed members of the Branch Davidian cult in
Waco, Texas, in 1993.

The Marines' psychological operations came as U.S. negotiators were pressing
Fallujah representatives to get gunmen in the city to abide by a cease-fire.

Six days after negotiations halted a U.S. offensive against insurgents in
the city, the Marines continue carving out front-line positions and hope for
orders to push forward. Many are questioning the value of truce talks with
an enemy who continues to launch attacks.

These guys don't have a centralized leader; they're just here to fight. I
don't see what negotiations are going to do, said Capt. Shannon Johnson, a
company commander for the 3rd Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment. Word of truce
talks last week forced his battalion to halt its plunge into the northeast
section of the city just hours after arriving to back up other Marines.

In the meantime, perhaps the fiercest enemy - everyone here seems to agree -
is the boredom, and worst of all the flies that pepper this dusty Euphrates
River city west of Baghdad. Marines burn them, using matches to turn cans of
flammable bug spray into mini blow torches. They also try to kill them by
sprinkling diesel fuel over fly colonies. They joke about calling in air
strikes.

Fallujah's front lines remain dangerous.

On Friday, insurgents fired several mortars at U.S. forces. One of the
shells blasted a chunk out of a house where Marines are positioned, filling
the building with dust and smoke. No one was injured.

A short time later, an F-16 jet dropped a 2,000-pound bomb on the city,
sending up a massive spray of dirt and smoke and destroying a building where
Marines had spotted gunmen.

The longer we wait to push into the city, the more dangerous it's going to
be, said Cpl. Miles Hill, 21, from Oklahoma, playing a game of chess with a
fellow Marine in a house they control.

(The insurgents) have time to set stuff up. He guesses the insurgents are
likely rigging doors with explosives, knowing Marines will kick them in
during searches if they sweep the city.

Up on the roof, Pfc. James Cathcart, 18, kept watch from a sandbagged
machine-gunner's nest Friday. His platoon commander passed along word that
troops found a weapons cache that included a Soviet-made sniper rifle with a
night-sight.

A night-sight, sir? he said, surprised that insurgents had the technology.
His commander told him to keep his head down. Everyone here wants to push
forward. Here, you're just a target, Cathcart said.

The young Marine looked out over grim city blocks around a dusty soccer
pitch and a trash-strewn lot, as a rain shower passed over. He said during
the long hours of duty, he wonders what the insurgents are doing, how many
there are and if they're watching him.

Adding to the eery feeling up, he said, are the music and speeches in Arabic
that come over mosque loudspeakers.

Unable to advance farther, Marines holed up in front-line houses have linked
the buildings by blasting or hammering holes through walls between them and
laying planks across gaps between rooftops, a series of passageways they
call the rat line.

Lying on his stomach on a rooftop and wearing goggles and earplugs, a Marine
sniper keeps an eye to his rifle sight. His main task in recent days has
been trying to hit the black-garbed gunmen who occasionally dash across the
long street in front of him. To dodge his shots, one of the gunmen recently
launched into a rolling dive across the street, a move that had the sniper
and his buddies laughing.

I think I got him later. The same guy came back and tried to do a low
crawl, said Lance Cpl. Khristopher Williams, 20, from Fort Myers, Fla.

Others have run across the street, hiding behind children on bicycles, said
the sniper. In his position - reachable only by scaling the outside ledge of
a building - he sits for hours with his finger poised on the trigger of a
rifle that fires 50-caliber 

Growing Afghanistans Economy

[k hanly]

Record poppy crop makes mockery of Afghanistan's 'jihad' on opium
By Nick Jackson in Kabul
18 April 2004


Blossoms of ripe opium poppies blanket the valleys of Nangarhar province -
colourful proof that another war is not working: Afghanistan's jihad
against opium production.

President Hamid Karzai's promise that 25 per cent of the opium harvest in
Afghanistan would be destroyed is no closer to being realised. Last year,
the harvest provided three quarters of the world's heroin, and 95 per cent
of Europe's. This year a record harvest is expected. Robert Charles, a
narcotics expert from the US State Department, says that 300,000 acres of
opium poppies will be harvested, 30 per cent more than the previous highest.
Already 10 million people worldwide are addicted to Afghan opiates.

At a conference in Berlin this month, US Secretary of State Colin Powell
linked the aid package of $2.3bn pledged to Afghanistan for 2004-05 to the
destruction of the opium harvest. It was then that Mr Karzai called on
farmers to fight opium production with the same commitment as they would a
holy war.

This is not a real policy, says Haji Din Mohammad, the governor of
Nangarhar. We have only told farmers at the end of the season. It is only
now being decided whose fields will be destroyed.

Anger at the destruction of the harvest has led to demonstrations by
farmers, including a 3,000-strong street protest in Kama district in
Nangarhar last week. The fact that the central government did not work out
which plots were to be destroyed earlier has passed control of the
destruction to local authorities.

District authorities are responsible for overseeing the destruction of the
local harvest. Police chiefs in Behsood district and Kama district have been
ordered to destroy 600 acres of opium. The farmer is paid $2,500 for 12kg of
opium that each acre of poppies provides. An acre of wheat is worth only
$120. Each district of 50 villages faces losing more than $1.5m.

The local authorities do not have the funds to replace the massive revenues
from opium farming. Hazrat Ali, the military commander of Nangarhar, admits
that they are not doing their job. Our local administration is lazy and
corrupt when destroying opium, he says. They can be paid off. Bribes of
about $100 per half acre are being paid to prevent the destruction of
fields, according to reports from Kandahar.

It is only the big landlords who can afford to pay off the police chiefs in
this way. All local authorities in Nangarhar province talk of a negotiation
with the local elders, the richest landlords. Abdul Rahib, the police chief
in Behsood district, says they control the selection of fields to be
destroyed. Haji Ajif Khan, District Mayor of Kama, adds: Some people have
100 or 200 acres of land, and we take money from these people. He claims
that it is then distributed to poorer farmers.

When the big landlords who own hundreds of acres of poppies are targeted,
the fields have been carefully selected. In Behsood district only half an
acre of local landlord Haji Jilal Gul's massive crop was being cut down. It
is possible to tell if an opium bud can produce opium or not by the smell of
its seeds. Ripe opium buds smell fresh, like wet grass; buds that have gone
off have a sickly sweet smell. The field destroyed would have been unable to
produce a significant crop. The field next to it, owned by the same man, was
ripe and being harvested.

Local worthies use other methods to counter the opium jihad. Many fields
targeted had already yielded up to 50 per cent of their opium. Every day the
buds are cut with four small slits, the next day or the day after the opium
that seeps out is collected and four more slits cut. A small opium bud can
be harvested over three days, a large opium bud over eight days.

In Shergar village in Kama the opium buds of a local elder which were being
destroyed had been harvested for at least four days. The opium that has been
harvested from these fields is not destroyed. Neither are the stockpiles of
opium that have been built up over the years, and can still be used to make
heroin 10 years after they have been harvested.

One government did cut through the influence of local landlords and the
notoriously corrupt Afghan civil service and radically reduce the opium
harvest - the Taliban. Between 1999 and 2001 the opium harvest fell from
225,000 acres to 20,000 acres, according to UN estimates. But the executions
carried out by the Taliban are not acceptable in the new Afghanistan.

Even imprisonment is considered a draconian measure, even though Hazrat Ali
believes it would be the best way to stop the harvest.

This is a dramatic transition from the policy of compensation used in 2002
by the new government, which Hazrat Ali supported, offering $350 per acre
destroyed.

With $28bn pledged to Afghanistan for development over the next few years at
the Berlin conference, Haji Din Mohammad hopes that development projects and
loans for new businesses will 

Re: Bush Rips up the Road Map

[k hanly]

Doesn't Bush's agreement to allow Israeli 
settlements to remain contradict UN resolutions? Nowhere in any articles have I 
seen a single reference to how UN resolutions fit into the picture. Has the UN 
made any statement on the matter.
Perhaps they are too busy on some new scheme too 
legitimise a transition government in Iraq that will be acceptable to the 
US.
 Interesting that the 
Palestinians are scolded about meeting their road map responsibilities at the 
same time Bush threw the map out the window..

Cheers, Ken Hanly

  - Original Message - 
  From: 
  Diane 
  Monaco 
  To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 
  Sent: Thursday, April 15, 2004 10:41 
  AM
  Subject: Bush Rips up the Road Map
  Bush Rips up the Road MapFor the Record: 15 April 2004, 
  Thursday.The Guardian By Suzanne GoldenbergPresident George 
  Bush swept aside decades of diplomatic tradition in the Middle East yesterday, 
  saying it was "unrealistic" to expect a full Israeli withdrawal from lands 
  occupied during the 1967 war or the right of return for Palestinian refugees. 
  In a significant policy shift, Mr Bush relaxed Washington's objections 
  to Jewish settlements in the West Bank, and attempts by Israel to dictate the 
  terms of a final settlement with the Palestinians. He told a joint 
  press conference with the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, that he was 
  prepared to bless a plan to dismantle Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip, 
  while retaining Israeli control over substantial sections of the West Bank. 
  "These are historic and courageous actions," Mr Bush said about the 
  Gaza withdrawal plan. "If all parties choose to embrace this moment, they can 
  open the door to progress and put an end to one of the world's longest-running 
  conflicts." The concessions offered yesterday by the White House - 
  extracted at a time when Mr Bush is desperate to counter the chaos in Iraq 
  with a foreign policy success - appeared to go further even than Mr Sharon had 
  dared hope. Israeli embassy officials said the US had backed a plan 
  requiring Israel to withdrawal from only four token settlements in the 
  north-west sector of the West Bank with a total of 500 settlers. They 
  said diplomats had prepared four versions of withdrawal proposals, only for 
  Washington to accept the initial one, which was least generous to the 
  Palestinians. The agreement is bound to ignite anger in the Arab 
  world, especially Mr Bush's rejection of a Palestinian right of return, which 
  will have a direct impact on countries such as Jordan, Syria and Lebanon which 
  have substantial populations of refugees. For many, the right of 
  refugees, and the descendants of refugees from the 1948 war, to return to what 
  is now Israel is a sacred tenet. But Mr Bush appeared to rule out the 
  prospect of even a limited number of refugees settling in the Jewish state. 
  "It seems clear that an agreed, just, fair and realistic framework for a 
  solution to the Palestinian refugee issue as part of any final status 
  agreement will need to be found through the establishment of a Palestinian 
  state, and the settling of Palestinian refugees there rather than Israel," he 
  said. Mr Bush appears to have distanced his administration from other 
  principles that have guided Middle East diplomacy. These are the idea that the 
  Palestinians and Israelis should arrive at a negotiated settlement - first 
  promoted by his father, the first President Bush, in the Madrid accords of 
  1991 - and that when a final settlement emerged Israel would broadly adhere to 
  UN resolutions and withdraw to its pre-1967 borders. The president 
  said the wall being built by Mr Sharon across the West Bank should not be 
  viewed as a political boundary, and that the eventual delineation of the 
  borders of an Israeli and a Palestinian state would await final status 
  negotiations. But he made it evident that the ground rules had 
  changed, giving effective sanction to the Jewish settlement blocks that have 
  been built throughout the West Bank since the 1967 war, and which 
  traditionally were described by the state department as "obstacles to peace". 
  "In light of new realities on the ground ... it is unrealistic to 
  expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and 
  complete return to the armistice lines of 1949," Mr Bush said. The twin 
  moves are likely to cause widespread outrage in the Arab world, which accuses 
  Mr Bush of neglecting America's role as an honest broker. They could also 
  reverberate on the Pentagon's attempts to put down the insurrection in Iraq. 
  But they were welcomed by Tony Blair last night. A Downing Street 
  statement said the international community, led by the "quartet" mediators - 
  the US, EU, UN and Russia - must seize the opportunity to inject new life into 
  the road map peace process. "Israel shoul

Re: Revolt fizzling?

[k hanly]

A report I read claimed that he would be willing to submit to trial but only
in an Iraqi court that was in a legitimate and sovereign Iraq, not any
present court or even one in the transitional government.
   Even the moderate clerics are holding out against allowing US forces back
into Najaf and they are also against the arrest of  Sadr. Unlike BUsh the
alleged thug Sadr is willing to give many concessions to avoid bloodshed, a
compromise that may not sit well with some of his followers.
Perhaps the attempt to use Iran to mediate is meant by the US to sow
divisions between Shia and Sunni again. Not surprisingly today an Iranian
diplomat was assasinated in Baghdad.

Cheers, Ken Hanly

Cheers, Ken Hanly
- Original Message -
From: Marvin Gandall [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Thursday, April 15, 2004 7:45 AM
Subject: Revolt fizzling?


 Todays Daily Telegraph is reporting that Moqtada al-Sadr has indicated
his
 willingness to surrender and disband the Mahdi Army, which would likely
halt
 the 10-day old Shia rising.

 According to the Telegraph, Sadr is said to be buckling under the twin
 pressures of a massive build-up of American forces near his base and
demands
 for moderation from the country's ayatollahs.

 Sadr and his militia control Najaf, but his emissaries have reportedly
told
 US authorities and the Iraqi Governing Council (ICG) that, if his personal
 safety is guaranteed, he would agree to submit to trial in an Iraqi court
on
 charges of having last year ordered the assassination of a rival cleric.

 Unless the leak is calculated disinformation, Sadrs sudden capitulation
is
 surprising, because he had vowed a fight to the death, his mass support
was
 growing, and it was widely felt the Americans would not assault Najaf, a
 Shia holy site.

 But the Telegraph says Sadr has been subject to intense pressure from the
 senior Shia clergy and the Iranian government, which favours the SCIRI, a
 rival Shia faction.

 Article on

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;$sessionid$CRGUYNIF1XGP3QFIQMGCFF

4AVCBQUIV0?xml=/news/2004/04/15/wirq15.xmlsSheet=/news/2004/04/15/ixnewstop
 .html

 Also: www.supportingfacts.com

 Sorry for any cross posting.

Re: Paul Berman on the War Democrats

[k hanly]

This is such atrocious trash it is hard to believe that the NY Times is
supposed to be a significant paper. The comfortable pablum about
totalitarianism  and democracy is made up of abstract platititudes worthy of
a Bush speach.
  Where is the desire to intervene against totalitarianism in Uzbekistan
or umpteen other places? Where is the desire for democracy in Iraq when the
US nixed a census way back at the end of 2003 and then complains that there
is not enough time to prepare for elections..etc.etc.
Or where is the democracy in a transition government bound by the laws
passed by the CPA and whose armed forces will continue to be controlled by
the US occupiers.

Cheers, Ken Hanly
- Original Message -
From: Louis Proyect [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Thursday, April 15, 2004 8:43 AM
Subject: Paul Berman on the War Democrats


(Paul Berman is the author of Terror and Liberalism. As a supporter of
the Nicaraguan contras in the pages of the Village Voice in the 1980s
and a major booster of NATO intervention in the Balkans, it should come
as no surprise that he has the same position on Iraq as Christopher
Hitchens. He parts company with Hitchens, however, in believing that
John Kerry can be a far more effective war president.)


NY Times Op-Ed, April 15, 2004
Will the Opposition Lead?
By PAUL BERMAN

(clip)

Now we need allies  people who will actually do things, and not just
offer benedictions from afar. Unfortunately  how many misfortunes can
fall upon our heads at once?  finding allies may not be easy. Entire
populations around the world feel a personal dislike for America's
president, which makes it difficult for even the friendliest of
political leaders in some countries to take pro-American positions.

But the bigger problem has to do with public understandings of the war.
People around the world may not want to lift a finger in aid so long as
the anti-totalitarian logic of the war remains invisible to them.
President Bush ought to have cleared up this matter. He has, in fact,
spoken about conspiracy theories and hatred (including at Tuesday's
press conference). He has spoken about a new totalitarianism, and has
even raised the notion of a war of ideas.