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By Ali al-Fadhily and Dahr Jamail
Baghdad - Despite the huge media campaign led by U.S. officials and a complicit corporate-controlled media to convince the world of U.S. success in Iraq, emerging facts on the ground show massive failure.
The date March 25 of this year will be remembered as the day of truth through five years of occupation.
"Mehdi army militias controlled all Shia and mixed parts of Baghdad in no time," a Baghdad police colonel, speaking on condition of anonymity, told IPS. "Iraqi army and police forces as well as Badr and Dawa militias suddenly disappeared from the streets, leaving their armoured vehicles for Mehdi militiamen to drive around in joyful convoys that toured many parts of Baghdad before taking them to their stronghold of Sadr City in the east of Baghdad."
The police colonel was speaking of the recent clashes between members of the Shia Muqtada al-Sadr's Mehdi Army, the largest militia in the country, and members of the Iraqi government forces, that are widely known to comprise members of a rival Shia militia, the Badr Organisation.
Dozens of militiamen from both sides were killed in clashes that broke out in Baghdad, Basra, Kut, Samawa, Hilla and most of the Iraqi Shia southern provinces between the Mehdi Army and other militias supported by the U.S., Iran and the Iraqi government.
The Badr Organisation militia is headed by Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, who is also head of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC) that dominates the government. The Dawa Party is headed by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
The number of civilians killed and injured in the clashes is still unknown. Iraqi government offices continue to keep largely silent about the events.
"Every resident of Basra knew the situation would explode any minute between these oil thieves, and that Basra would suffer another wave of militia war," Salman Kathum, a doctor and former resident of Basra who fled for Baghdad last month told IPS.
For months now there has been a struggle between the Sadr Movement, the SIIC, and the al-Fadhila Party for control of the south, and particularly Basra.
Falah Shenshal, an MP allied to al-Sadr, told al-Jazeera Mar. 26 that al-Maliki was targeting political opponents. "They say they target outlaw gangs, but why do they start with the areas where the sons of the Sadr movement are located? This is a political battle...for the political interests of one party (al-Maliki's Dawa party) because the local elections are coming soon (due later this year)."
The fighting came just as the U.S. military announced the death of their 4,000th soldier in Iraq, and on the heels of a carefully crafted PR campaign designed to show that the "surge" of U.S. troops in Iraq has successfully improved the situation on the ground.
"I wonder what lies General David Petraeus (the U.S. forces commander in Iraq) will fabricate this time," Malek Shakir, a journalist in Baghdad told IPS. "The 25th March events revealed the true failure of the U.S. occupation project in Iraq. More complications are expected in the coming days."
Maliki has himself been in Basra to lead a surge against Mehdi Army militias while the U.S. sent forces to surround Sadr City in an attempt to support their Badr and Dawa allies.
News of limited clashes and air strikes have come from Sadr City, with unofficial reports of many casualties amongst civilians. Curfew in many parts of Baghdad and in four southern provinces had made life difficult already.
"This failure takes Iraq to point zero and even worse," Brigadier-General Kathum Alwan of the Iraqi army told IPS in Baghdad. "We must admit that the formation of our forces was wrong, as we saw how our officers deserted their posts, leaving their vehicles for militias."
Alwan added, "Not a single unit of our army and police stood for their duty in Baghdad, leaving us wondering what to do. Most of the officers who left their posts were members of Badr brigades and the Dawa Party, who should have been most faithful to Maliki's government."
The Green Zone of Baghdad where the U.S. embassy and the Iraqi government and parliament buildings are located, was hit by missiles. General Petraeus appeared at a press conference to accuse Iran of being behind the shelling of the zone that is supposed to be the safest area in Iraq. At least one U.S. citizen was killed in the attacks, and two others were injured.
"The Green Zone looked deserted as most U.S. and Iraqi personnel were ordered to take shelter deep underground," an engineer who works for a foreign company in the zone told IPS. "It seemed that this area too was under curfew. No place in Iraq is safe any more."
Further complicating matters for the occupiers of Iraq, the U.S.-backed Awakening groups, largely comprised of former resistance fighters, are now going on strike to demand overdue payment from the U.S. military.
Thursday, April 3, 2008
John Yoo's war crimes
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By Glenn Greenwald
By Glenn Greenwald
Yet again, the ACLU has performed the function which Congress and the media are intended to perform but do not. As the result of a FOIA lawsuit the ACLU filed and then prosecuted for several years, numerous documents relating to the Bush administration’s torture regime that have long been baselessly kept secret were released yesterday, including an 81-page memorandum (.pdf) issued in 2003 by then-Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo (currently a Berkeley Law Professor) which asserted that the President’s war powers entitle him to ignore multiple laws which criminalized the use of torture:
If a government defendant were to harm an enemy combatant during an interrogation in a manner that might arguably violate a criminal prohibition, he would be doing so in order to prevent further attacks on the United States by the al Qaeda terrorist network. In that case, we believe that he could argue that the executive branch’s constitutional authority to protect the nation from attack justified his actions.As Jane Mayer reported two years ago in The New Yorker -- in which she quoted former Navy General Counsel Alberto Mora as saying that "the memo espoused an extreme and virtually unlimited theory of the extent of the President’s Commander-in-Chief authority" -- it was precisely Yoo’s torture-justifying theories, ultimately endorsed by Donald Rumsfeld, that were communicated to Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the commander of both Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib at the time of the most severe detainee abuses (the ones that are known).
It is not, of course, news that the Bush administration adopted (and still embraces) legal theories which vest the President with literally unlimited power, including the power to break our laws. There are, though, several points worth noting as a result of the disclosure of this Memorandum:
(1) The fact that John Yoo is a Professor of Law at Berkeley and is treated as a respectable, serious expert by our media institutions, reflects the complete destruction over the last eight years of whatever moral authority the United States possessed. Comporting with long-held stereotypes of two-bit tyrannies, we’re now a country that literally exempts our highest political officials from the rule of law, and have decided that there should be no consequences when they commit serious felonies.
John Yoo’s Memorandum, as intended, directly led to -- caused -- a whole series of war crimes at both Guantanamo and in Iraq. The reason such a relatively low-level DOJ official was able to issue such influential and extraordinary opinions was because he was working directly with, and at the behest of, the two most important legal officials in the administration: George Bush’s White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales, and Dick Cheney’s counsel (and current Chief of Staff) David Addington. Together, they deliberately created and authorized a regime of torture and other brutal interrogation methods that are, by all measures, very serious war crimes.
If writing memoranda authorizing torture -- actions which then directly lead to the systematic commission of torture -- doesn’t make one a war criminal in the U.S., what does? Here is what John Yoo is and what he did:
"It depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that." Yoo wasn’t just a law professor theorizing about the legalization of torture. He was a government official who, in concert with other government officials, set out to enable a brutal and systematic torture regime, and did so. If this level of depraved criminality doesn’t remove one from the realm of respectability and mainstream seriousness -- if not result in war crimes prosecution -- then nothing does.
That John Yoo is a full professor at one of the country’s most prestigious law schools, and a welcomed expert on our newspaper’s Op-Ed pages and television news programs, speaks volumes about what our country has become. We sure did take care of that despicable Pvt. Lyndie England, though, because we don’t tolerate barbaric conduct of the type in which she engaged completely on her own.
(2) While Yoo’s specific Torture Memos were ultimately rescinded by subsequent DOJ officials -- primarily Jack Goldsmith -- the underlying theories of omnipotent executive power remain largely in place. The administration continues to embrace precisely these same theories to assert that it has the power to violate a whole array of laws -- from our nation’s spying and surveillance statutes to countless Congressional oversight requirements -- and to detain even U.S. citizens, detained on American soil, as "enemy combatants." So for all of the dramatic outrage that this Yoo memo will generate for a day or so, the general framework on which it rests, despite being weakened by the Supreme Court in Hamdan, is the one under which we continue to live, without much protest or objection.
(3) This incident provides yet more proof of how rancid and corrupt is the premise that as long as political appointees at the DOJ approve of certain conduct, then that conduct must be shielded from criminal prosecution. That’s the premise that is being applied over and over to remove government lawbreaking from the reach of the law.
That’s the central argument behind both telecom amnesty and protecting Bush officials from their surveillance felonies (it’s unfair to hold them accountable for their illegal spying behavior because the DOJ said they could do it). It’s the same argument that CIA Director Gen. Michael Hayden just made on Meet the Press as to why CIA interrogators should be immunized from the consequences of their illegal conduct ("when I go and tell him to do something in the shadows and point out to him it is perfectly lawful, that the Department of Justice has reviewed it . . . I need him to have confidence in that DOJ opinion").
The DOJ is not the law. They are not above the law and they do not make the law. They are merely charged with enforcing it. The fact that they assert that blatantly illegal conduct is legal does not make it so. DOJ officials, like anyone else, can violate the law and have done so not infrequently. High DOJ officials -- including Attorneys General -- have been convicted of crimes in the past and have gone to prison.
Embracing this twisted notion that the DOJ has the authority to immunize any conduct by high government officials or private actors from the reach of the law is a recipe for inevitable lawlessness. It enables the President to break the law, or authorize lawbreaking, simply by having his political appointees at DOJ -- including ideologues like John Yoo -- declare that he can do it. As these incidents ought to demonstrate rather vividly, the mere fact that Bush officials at the DOJ declare something to be legal cannot provide license to break the law with impunity.
(4) Since the Nuremberg Trials, "war criminals" include not only those who directly apply the criminal violence and other forms of brutality, but also government officials who authorized it and military officials who oversaw it. Ironically, the Bush administration itself argued in the 2006 case of Hamdan -- when they sought to prosecute as a "war criminal" a Guantanamo detainee whom they allege was a driver for Osama bin Laden -- that one is guilty of war crimes not merely by directly violating the laws of war, but also by participating in a conspiracy to do so.
That legal question was unresolved in that case, but Justices Thomas and Scalia both sided with the administration and Thomas wrote (emphasis added):
"[T]he experience of our wars," Winthrop 839, is rife with evidence that establishes beyond any doubt that conspiracy to violate the laws of war is itself an offense cognizable before a law-of-war military commission. . . . . In [World War II], the orders establishing the jurisdiction of military commissions in various theaters of operation provided that conspiracy to violate the laws of war was a cognizable offense. See Letter, General Headquarters, United States Army Forces, Pacific (Sept. 24, 1945), Record in Yamashita v. Styer, O. T. 1945, No. 672, pp. 14, 16 (Exh. F) (Order respecting the "Regulations Governing the Trial of War Criminals" provided that "participation in a common plan or conspiracy to accomplish" various offenses against the law of war was cognizable before military commissions).The political reality is that high government officials in the U.S. are never going to be held accountable for war crimes. In practice, "international law" exists as a justifying instrument for powerful countries to impose their will on those which are less powerful, and war crimes tribunals are almost always a form of victor’s justice. So neither John Yoo, David Addington nor Alberto Gonzales, and certainly not their bosses at whose behest they were working, are going to be sitting in a dock charged with war crimes any time soon -- regardless of whether they ought to be.
But those who propound these principles and claim to believe in them ought to apply them consistently. John Yoo is not some misguided conservative legal thinker with whom one should have civil, pleasant, intellectually stimulating debates at law schools and on PBS. Respectfully debating the legality and justification of torture regimes, and treating systematic torture perpetrators like John Yoo with respect, isn’t all that far off from what Yoo and his comrades did. It isn’t pleasant to think about high government officials in one’s own country as war criminals -- that’s something that only bad, evil dictatorships have -- but, pleasant or not, it rather indisputably happens to be what we have.
UPDATE: Yale Law Professor Jack Balkin makes a critical point (h/t John Cole):
Lawyers can make really bad legal arguments that argue for very unjust things in perfectly legal sounding language. I hope nobody is surprised by this fact. It is very commonplace. Today we are talking about lawyers making arguments defending the legality of torture. In the past lawyers have used legal sounding arguments to defend slavery, the genocide of Native Americans, rape (both spousal and non-spousal), Jim Crow, police brutality, denials of habeas corpus, destruction or seizure of property, and compulsory sterilization. . . . .The fact that a lawyer does something in his capacity as a lawyer does not mean it’s proper, legitimate or legal. The fact that an argument is packaged in lawyerly wrapping doesn’t mean it’s reasonable or offered in good faith. All sorts of lawyers -- from those representing crime families to those representing terrorists -- have been convicted of crimes because they concealed and/or promoted their clients’ illegal acts. Lawyers aren’t any more immune from the rule of law than anyone else.Orin [Kerr] wants to know whether John [Yoo]’s theories are consistent with my views of the living constitution. If he wants to know as a substantive matter whether John’s theories of Presidential dictatorship are consistent with the Constitution’s text and underlying principles, they are not.
Harper’s Scott Horton makes the point in much the same way:
These memoranda have been crafted not as an after-the-fact defense to criminal charges, but rather as a roadmap to committing crimes and getting away with it. They are the sort of handiwork we associate with the consigliere, or mob lawyer. But these consiglieri are government attorneys who have sworn an oath, which they are violating, to uphold the law.Along those lines, Marcy Wheeler and Slate’s Emily Bazelon both demonstrate how un-lawyerly Yoo’s opinions were. Yoo wasn’t acting as a lawyer in order legally to analyze questions surrounding interrogation powers. He was acting with the intent to enable illegal torture and used the law as his instrument to authorize criminality.
* * * * *
DISCLOSURE: In the interest of full disclosure, it occurs to me, given my mention of the ACLU’s work here, that I ought to note that, as of six weeks ago or so, I began consulting with the ACLU on various matters. Obviously, I have been expressing the views in this post long, long before that began.
Building a Legal Framework for Torture
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By Jason Leopold
By Jason Leopold
On Jan. 17, 2003, Mary Walker, the Air Force general counsel, received an urgent memo from the Pentagon’s top attorney. Attached to the classified document was a set of directives drafted two days earlier by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
"Establish a working group within the Department of Defense to assess the legal, policy and operational issues relating to the interrogations of detainees held by the U.S. Armed Forces in the war on terrorism," the directives said.
Among the issues to be addressed were “policy considerations with respect to the choice of interrogation techniques, including contribution to intelligence collection, effect on treatment of captured U.S. military personnel, effect on detainee prosecutions, historical role of U.S. armed forces in conducting interrogations, recommendations for employment of particular interrogation techniques by [Defense Department] interrogators."
Earlier this week, the Defense Department turned over an 81-page document to the American Civil Liberties Union in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit that provides further insight into the extraordinary Executive Branch powers granted to President George W. Bush following the 9/11 attacks.
John Yoo, then a deputy in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, drafted the document, dated March 14, 2003. It essentially provided military interrogators with legal cover if they resorted to brutal and violent methods to extract information from prisoners.
"If a government defendant were to harm an enemy combatant during an interrogation in a manner that might arguably violate a criminal prohibition, he would be doing so in order to prevent further attacks on the United States by the al Qaeda terrorist network," Yoo wrote. "In that case, we believe that he could argue that the Executive Branch’s constitutional authority to protect the nation from attack justified his actions."
The legal opinion for military interrogators was virtually identical to an earlier memo that Yoo had written in August 2002 for CIA interrogators. Widely called the “Torture Memo,” it provided CIA interrogators with the legal authority to use long-outlawed tactics, such as waterboarding, when interrogating so-called high-level terrorist suspects.
But Yoo’s legal opinions were not entirely the work of Yoo.
Pentagon Frustrations
In early January 2003, commanders stationed at Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba complained to Rumsfeld that military officials were unable to glean information from prisoners about alleged terrorist plots in the U.S. and abroad using conventional interrogation methods.
Following his conversation with military officials, on Jan. 15, 2003, Rumsfeld sent William Haynes II, the Pentagon’s general counsel, a memo requesting that he form a "working group" to determine what methods military interrogators could use to extract information from a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay.
Haynes asked the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel for guidance and selected Walker to chair a "working group" to write a report on legally permissible interrogation techniques.
The members of the group included former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, officials from the Defense Intelligence Agency, representatives of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and judge advocate generals (JAGs) from all four branches of the military.
By the time Walker’s group had settled in for its first meeting, interrogators at Guantanamo Bay had already begun to violate the Geneva Convention.
To ratchet up pressure on prisoners, U.S. military personnel were experimenting with unusual tactics, including placing women’s underwear on prisoners’ heads, a technique that later reappeared in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison.
A military official, who took part in discussions with Mary Walker’s group, told the Wall Street Journal in June 2004 that there was a growing frustration among interrogators.
"We’d been at this for a year-plus and got nothing out of them," the official said, adding that threats were even made against the families of detainees.
The official said the message to a detainee would be: "I’m on the line with somebody in Yemen and he’s in a room with your family and a grenade that’s going to pop unless you talk."
Framing the Debate
While Walker’s report was being drafted, the group discussed 35 different interrogation techniques that could be used to obtain information from prisoners.
Early drafts of the report advocated intimidating prisoners with dogs, removing prisoners’ clothing, shaving their beards, slapping prisoners in the face and waterboarding.
Though some of the more extreme techniques were dropped as the list was winnowed down to 24 from 35, the final set of methods still included tactics for isolating and demeaning a detainee, known as "pride and ego down."
Such degrading tactics violated the Geneva Convention, which bars abusive or demeaning treatment of captives.
The more extreme interrogation methods that made it into the final draft of the report rankled some of the JAGs, who feared the methods would put U.S. soldiers in danger if they were captured – and would tarnish the reputation and image of the U.S. abroad.
"Will the American people find we have missed the forest for the trees by condoning practices that, while technically legal, are inconsistent with our most fundamental values,” wrote Rear Adm. Michael Lohr, a member of the "working group," in a February 2003 letter to Walker.
“How would such perceptions affect our ability to prosecute the Global War on Terrorism," asked Lohr.
The admiral was so upset with the draft report and the advice provided by the Justice Department that he requested Walker include a sentence in the final report making it clear that the legal findings were based exclusively on attorneys in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel.
Lohr was not alone. Maj. Gen. Jack Rives, who at the time was judge advocate general of the Air Force, also wrote a letter to Walker warning that the interrogation techniques in the report would violate military law.
"Several of the exceptional techniques, on their face, amount to violations of domestic criminal law and the [Uniform Code of Military Justice]," Rives wrote. "Treating detainees inconsistently with the [Geneva] Convention arguably ‘lowers the bar’ for the treatment of U.S. POW’s in future conflicts."
Maj. Gen. Thomas Romig, an Army JAG, and Brig. Gen. Kevin M. Sandkuhler, a Marine Corps JAG, also voiced concerns, specifically the determination that the President has the power to override the Uniform Code of Military Justice and other federal statutes and international treaties in the name of national security.
Defending Bush’s Authority
Walker’s group addressed these concerns, according to the report, by stating, in legal terms, that the President had the constitutional authority as Commander in Chief to ignore torture laws if national security were in jeopardy.
On March 6, 2003, eight days before Yoo issued his legal opinion, Walker sent Rumsfeld a draft 53-page "working group" report that said international treaties forbidding torture did not apply to prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay.
The report, which asserted that President Bush had "sweeping" powers as Commander in Chief, said Bush could suspend international laws and treaties governing torture in the name of national security.
"In order to respect the President’s inherent constitutional authority to manage a military campaign . . . (the prohibition against torture) must be construed as inapplicable to interrogations undertaken pursuant to his Commander-in-Chief authority," the report stated.
The Justice Department could not prosecute military interrogators "who had acted pursuant to an exercise of the President’s constitutional power," the report added.
Further, the report said that if a prisoner died as a result of a brutal interrogation technique, the interrogator would not be subject to prosecution if he had acted in a "good faith" effort to save lives.
"Good faith may be a complete defense," the report said. "Sometimes the greater good for society will be accomplished by violating the literal language of the criminal law.”
The report cited a legal text, "Substantive Criminal Law" by Wayne LaFave and Austin W. Scott, to support the legality of the interrogation methods: "In particular, the necessity defense can justify the intentional killing of one person . . . so long as the harm avoided is greater."
Rumsfeld signed the final report on April 2, 2003, two weeks after Bush ordered U.S. forces to invade Iraq.
One year later, photos depicting U.S. soldiers abusing and humiliating detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were publicly released.
Congressional Reaction
The tide began to turn against Yoo’s and Walker’s expansive attitudes toward presidential authority when Jack Goldsmith took over as chief of the Office of Legal Counsel and, by early 2004, had rescinded Yoo’s opinions.
On June 15, 2004, the Senate passed an amendment to the Defense Authorization Bill backed by Republican Sen. Lindsay Graham, to give JAGs the same legal authority as military attorneys, like Walker, who are appointed by the President.
The amendment, dubbed the “Mary Walker bill,” was spurred by complaints from JAGs who said Walker had ignored their legal concerns about the interrogation of detainees at Guantanamo Bay.
In February 2008, the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) confirmed that it had launched a formal investigation into whether Yoo and other attorneys in the Office of Legal Counsel gave the White House poor legal advice in authorizing CIA interrogators to use waterboarding to glean information about terrorist plots from prisoners.
In effect, the legal opinions from Walker and Yoo sought to provide a basis for the Bush administration to circumvent U.S. and international laws prohibiting torture of prisoners.
Immediately after the 9/11 attacks, the United Nations Committee Against Torture reaffirmed the prohibitions contained in the 1984 Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.
The Convention – approved by 145 nations, including the United States – states that "no exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture."
Moreover, the convention says individuals who resort to torture cannot defend their actions by saying they were acting on orders from superiors.
The United States signed the Convention Against Torture in 1988 under President Ronald Reagan, who hailed it as “a significant step” in preventing torture, which he called “an abhorrent practice unfortunately still prevalent in the world today.”
In a May 20, 1988, message to the U.S. Senate, Reagan noted that “the core provisions of the Convention establish a regime for international cooperation in the criminal prosecution of torturers relying on so-called ‘universal jurisdiction.’
“Each state party is required either to prosecute torturers who are found in its territory or to extradite them to other countries for prosecution.”
It was this Convention, ratified by the Senate in 1994, that Walker, Yoo and other Bush administration officials sought to bypass.
Although the treaty mandates that the United States cooperate in the criminal prosecution of torturers, the administration’s post-9/11 legal opinions sought to shield American interrogators.
The Walker report, which was tailored to fit with Yoo’s legal arguments, advised military interrogators that they could defend their actions by saying Justice Department lawyers told them that their methods were legal.
American Grand Delusions
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By Tom Engelhardt
Why the Testimony of General Petraeus Will Be Delusional
Yes, their defensive zone is the planet and they patrol it regularly. As ever, their planes and drones have been in the skies these last weeks. They struck a village in Somalia, tribal areas in Pakistan, rural areas in Afghanistan, and urban neighborhoods in Iraq. Their troops are training and advising the Iraqi army and police as well as the new Afghan army, while their Special Operations forces are planning to train Pakistan's paramilitary Frontier Corps in that country's wild, mountainous borderlands.
Their Vice President arrived in Baghdad not long before the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki launched its recent (failed) offensive against cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia in the southern oil city of Basra. To "discuss" their needs in their President's eternal War on Terror, two of their top diplomats, a deputy secretary of state and an assistant secretary of state for South Asian affairs, arrived in Pakistan -- to the helpless outrage of the local press -- on the very day newly elected Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani was being given the oath of office. ("I don't think it is a good idea for them to be here on this particular day… right here in Islamabad, meeting with senior politicians in the new government, trying to dictate terms..." was the way Zaffar Abbas, editor of the newspaper Dawn, put it.)
At home, their politicians have nationally televised debates in which they fervently discuss just how quickly they would launch air assaults against Pakistan's tribal areas, without permission from the Pakistani government but based on "actionable intelligence" on terrorists. Their drones cruise the skies of the world looking for terrorist suspects to -- in the phrase of the hour -- "take out." Agents from their intelligence services have, these last years, roamed the planet, kidnapping terrorist suspects directly off the streets of major cities and transporting them to their own secret prisons, or those of other countries willing to employ torture methods. Their spy satellites circle the globe listening in on conversations wherever they please, while their military has divided the whole planet into "commands," the last of which, Africom, was just formed.
As far as they are concerned, nowhere do their interests not come into play; nowhere, in fact, are they not paramount. As their President put it recently, "If [our] strategic interests are not in Iraq -- the convergence point for the twin threats of al Qaeda and Iran, the nation Osama bin Laden's deputy has called 'the place for the greatest battle,' the country at the heart of the most volatile region on Earth -- then where are they?" (And you could easily substitute the names of other countries for Iraq.)
Their President makes a habit of regularly telling other countries what they "must" do. "At the same time," he said recently, "the regimes in Iran and Syria must stop supporting violence and terror in Iraq." It's especially important to him and his officials that other nations not "interfere" in situations where, as in Iraq, they are so obviously "foreigners" and have no business; no fingers, that is, are to be caught in other people's cookie jars. Their Vice President made this point strikingly in an exchange with a TV interviewer:
"Q: So what message are you sending to Iran, and how tough are you prepared to get?
"Vice President: I think the message that the president sent clearly is that we do not want them doing what they can to try to destabilize the situation inside Iraq. We think it's very important that they keep their folks at home."
A range of other countries, all with a natural bent for "interference" or "meddling," must regularly be warned or threatened. After all, what needs to be prevented, according to a typical formulation of their President, is "foreign interference in the internal affairs of Iraq."
None of this advice do they apply to themselves for reasons far too obvious to explain. Wherever they go -- sometimes in huge numbers, usually well-armed, and, after a while, deeply entrenched in bases the size of small towns that they love to build -- they feel comfortable. They are, after all, defending their liberties by defending those of others elsewhere. Though there are natives of one brand or another everywhere, they consider themselves the planet's only true natives. Their motto might be: Wherever we hang our hats (or helmets) is home.
Others, who choose to fight them, automatically become aliens, intent as they are on destroying the stability of that planetary "home." So, for years, their military spokespeople referred to the Sunni insurgents they were battling in Iraq as "anti-Iraqi forces." It mattered little that almost all of them were, in fact, Iraqis; for the enemy is, by nature, so beyond the pale as to be a stranger to his or her own country or, just as likely, a cat's-paw of foreign forces and powers. Only when the very same "anti-Iraqi forces" suddenly decided to become allies were they suddenly granted the title, "concerned citizens," or even, more gloriously, "Sons of Iraq."
When off duty, their luckier soldiers have the option of taking "rest and recreation" in "the homeland" at places like the Hale Koa ("House of the Warrior") Hotel in Honolulu, Hawaii, or in the extended homeland at, say, the Edelweiss Lodge and Resort in the Bavarian Alps or the Dragon Hill Lodge near thrilling downtown Seoul, South Korea -- all part of their global system of Armed Forces Recreation Centers.
This is their world -- and welcome to it.
It's not exactly a mystery what country I'm talking about. You knew from the beginning. Since the Soviet Union vanished in 1991, only one nation has made itself at home everywhere on Earth; only one nation has felt that the planet's interests and its own interests were essentially one; only one nation's military garrisons and patrols our world from Greenland to the tropics, from the sea bed to the edge of space; only one nation's military talks about its vast array of bases as its "footprint" on the planet; only one nation judges its essential and exceptional goodness, in motivation if nothing else, as justification for any act it may take.
Putting an Iraqi Face on Iraq
Soon, U.S. surge commander General David Petraeus will return to Washington to report to Congress on our "progress" in Iraq -- and he'll do so with the worst crisis in that country in almost a year still unresolved. He'll do so, in fact, shrouded in yet another strategic disaster for the Bush administration. With that in mind, let's take a moment to look back at just how, militarily at least, the Bush administration first made itself at home in Iraq.
In the U.S., the administration's lack of planning for the occupation of Iraq -- starting with the wholesale looting of Baghdad after American troops had taken the capital -- has been the subject of much debate and discussion in Congress and the media. While it's usually noted in passing that, amid the chaos, orders had in fact been issued to American troops to guard the Oil Ministry, little is made of that. In fact, orders for U.S. troops to guard that ministry and the Interior Ministry, and nothing else, were indeed given, which simply indicates that administration planning was extremely focused -- on oil and the secret police (and perhaps Saddam Hussein's secret archives).
In addition, we know that the administration ignored the 13-volume "Future of Iraq" project put together by the State Department to guide an occupation -- largely because its neocon officials were so intent on sidelining the State Department more generally. On the other hand, the Pentagon did plan for what it thought would matter. Specifically, from a front-page April 19, 2003 New York Times article, we know that, by the time the invasion began, the Pentagon already had on the drawing boards plans for building four permanent mega-bases in Iraq. (They were meant to replace our bases in Saudi Arabia.) And these were indeed built (along with others and the largest embassy on the planet) in more or less the locations originally described. From the beginning, whatever planning it didn't do, the Bush administration was certainly planning to make itself at home in Iraq in a big way for a long, long time.
Much has also been made of the disastrous, seat-of-the-pants decision by the administration, in the person of L. Paul Bremer III, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) then ruling Baghdad, to disband the Iraqi army. But few now recall what the administration, the CPA, and the Pentagon had in mind (and leaked to the press soon after the invasion) for a future Iraqi military of their dreams.
They had, in fact, reconceived the Iraqi army as a force of perhaps 40,000 lightly armed, largely border-guarding troops. Keep in mind that Saddam Hussein had a military of 400,000 heavily armed troops and -- until the First Gulf War in 1990 -- a powerful air force (as well as copious supplies of chemical weapons). In the Middle East, for a country to have only a 40,000 man military without tanks, artillery, or an air force to call on meant but one thing: that the U.S. military and the U.S. Air Force, from bases in Iraq and in the region, were to be Iraq's real fighting force in any crisis. This was the true planning message of the Bush administration and it indicated just how "at home" its officials thought they would be in occupied Iraq.
By the time it became obvious that such thinking was fantastical and George Bush was starting to repeat the mantra, "As Iraqis stand up, Americans will stand down," the idea of a 40,000-man force had been long forgotten. By then, the U.S. military was at work creating a large Iraqi army and national police force. But the effects of such planning remain debilitatingly present, even today.
After all, the "crack" Iraqi units sent into Basra by Prime Minister Maliki were still relatively lightly armed. (Hence, their complaints that the Sadrist militia they came up against were often better armed than they were.) They still had no significant Iraqi air force to call on, because as yet it hardly exists. When they got desperate, they had to call on U.S. and British air support as well as U.S. Special Forces units. And, of course, in the fighting in Basra, as in Baghdad where American units quickly entered the fray, they showed no particular flair for "standing up." In fact, according to the Associated Press's fine reporter Charles J. Hanley, the chief American trainer of Iraqi forces, Lt. Gen. James Dubik, now estimates that Iraq's military will not be able to guard the country's borders effectively until, at the earliest, 2018.
There was a period, back in 2004-05, when the Bush administration regularly wielded a telling image. They talked often about the importance of putting "an Iraqi face" on various aspects of the situation in that country. Here's a typical passage from the New York Times from that period: "By insisting that they not be identified, the three officers based in Baghdad were following a Pentagon policy requiring American commanders in Baghdad to put 'an Iraqi face' on the war, meaning that Iraqi commanders should be the ones talking to reporters, not Americans." This caught something of the strangeness of that moment, a strangeness that has yet to disappear. After all, as an image, to put a "face" on anything actually means to put a mask over an already present face, which was (and, even today, in military terms largely remains) American power in Iraq.
The presentation of the recent Maliki government offensive, launched on the eve of Petraeus's return, also represented, in part, an attempt to put an Iraqi face on American at-homeness in that country. The fictional story put out as the "Iraqi" offensive was launched -- printed up quite seriously in our media -- was that Maliki had only informed the American high command (and the British in Basra) of his prospective move in the hours just before it was launched. This was, on the face of it, ludicrous. The "Iraqi" army has been stood up -- trained, that is -- by U.S. advisors; some of its units have U.S. advisors embedded in them; it is almost totally reliant on the logistical support of the U.S. military. It could not move far offensively without the significant prior knowledge of U.S. commanders (and this was later admitted by the President's National Security Council Advisor Stephen J. Hadley).
While Maliki had his own reasons for launching his forces (and allied militias) against Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army in Basra, the Americans certainly imagined a triumphant moment for Petraeus in his upcoming hearings, thanks to new evidence that the Iraqi government was finally, in George Bush's words, "in the lead" and its military shaping up well. As Leila Fadel of the McClatchy Newspapers reported, "Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said the Iraqi operation was a 'byproduct of the success' of the year-old U.S. troop surge." This was a fantasy, of course. And the result was the success of Sadr's forces from Basra to Baghdad -- and ongoing American attempts to disavow any real involvement in the planning of the offensive.
Grand Delusions
The United States is hardly the first empire whose representatives have felt at home anywhere in its world (if not, in past times, in the world). When you are at the peak of your imperial powers, you can ignore the problems and contradictions that such a feeling, such an attitude, naturally calls up. This is no longer the situation for the United States and so the contradictions ripen, the problems only grow, and the plunge into delusional thinking deepens.
Take just the seeming conundrum of the recent battle in Basra. On one side, you have an Iraqi army, trained for years by the Americans, to the tune of approximately $22 billion in U.S. funds. On the other side, you have an (at best) partially trained "militia" -- an "army" in name only. It may be that the Iranians have put some effort or money into equipping the Mahdi Army -- though the evidence for this is slim indeed -- but, if so, this would be minor by comparison.
When the two forces clashed, what was the result? Some Iraqi soldiers and policemen simply put down their weapons and, in certain cases, surrendered or went over to the other side, or deserted, or fought half-heartedly; while the Mahdis fought fiercely, cleverly, and, in the end, successfully, until called off in triumph by their leader. They "stood up" (just as they had against the full might of the American military in the southern holy city of Najaf back in 2004). Could there, then, be two different races of Iraqis, one set willing to fight with or without training or outside help, the other unwilling, no matter the support?
The American military faced a similar situation four decades ago in Vietnam, where American advisors training the South Vietnamese military regularly swore that they would turn in their brigades of Vietnamese troops for just a few platoons of Vietcong, who would stand and fight as if their lives depended on it.
Of course, the answer here is anything but mysterious. On the one hand, you have a foreign-trained, foreign-advised, foreign-supplied force with confused and divided loyalties that is only partially an "Iraqi" army; on the other, you have a local force, fighting in a community, for the safety and wellbeing of its own sons and wives, friends and relatives. The Mahdi Army members know why they fight and who they fight for. They have "faith," and not just in the religious sense. They are, in a word, at home.
The history of the last 200 years has regularly piled up evidence that this matters far more than firepower. Human beings, that is, regularly "stand up" for something other than shiny weapons or the interests of a foreign power, no matter how at home its leaders may think they are in your country. The inability to see this obvious point -- repeatedly and over decades -- represents delusional thinking stemming, at least in part, from an inability of Americans to imagine their own foreignness in the world.
In such cases, you misperceive who is on your side, why they are there, and what, exactly, they are capable of. You misunderstand what the actual natives of a place think of you. You don't grasp that, whatever the brute force and finances at your command, you, as a foreigner, may never understand the situation you believe you should control. Even the Maliki government itself, after all, is only "on our side" thanks to its abysmal weakness. (Otherwise, it would be far more closely allied with that other foreign power, Iran.) Sooner or later -- usually sooner -- you simply delude yourself. You mistake your trained army for an "Iraqi" or a "Vietnamese" one and so come to believe that, if only you adjust your counterinsurgency tactics correctly, it will fight like one. Then you act accordingly, which is, of course, disastrous.
Whatever General Petraeus says before Congress next week, however sane and pragmatic he sounds, however impressive looking his charts and graphs, it's worth keeping in mind that his testimony cannot help but be delusional, because it stems from delusional premises and it can lead only to further disaster for Americans and Iraqis.
Yes, of course, American planes and drones will continue to cruise the skies of the globe "taking out" enemies (or missing them and taking out citizens elsewhere whom we could care less about); American diplomats and high military officials will continue to travel the planet in packs, indicating, however politely, what politicians, military men, and diplomats elsewhere "must" do; and American military men will continue to train the Iraqi army in the hopes that, in 2018 if not sooner, it will stand up.
And yet, as long as we mistake ourselves for "the natives," as long as we are convinced that our interests are paramount everywhere, and feel that we must be part of the solution to every problem, our problems -- and the world's -- will only multiply.
Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project. His book, The End of Victory Culture (University of Massachusetts Press), has been updated in a newly issued edition that deals with victory culture's crash-and-burn sequel in Iraq.
[Tomdispatch Recommendation: A recent Noam Chomsky piece, "We Own the World," took up an allied set of topics to those in this essay. It's a fascinating read and I urge you to check it out.]
By Tom Engelhardt
Why the Testimony of General Petraeus Will Be Delusional
Yes, their defensive zone is the planet and they patrol it regularly. As ever, their planes and drones have been in the skies these last weeks. They struck a village in Somalia, tribal areas in Pakistan, rural areas in Afghanistan, and urban neighborhoods in Iraq. Their troops are training and advising the Iraqi army and police as well as the new Afghan army, while their Special Operations forces are planning to train Pakistan's paramilitary Frontier Corps in that country's wild, mountainous borderlands.
Their Vice President arrived in Baghdad not long before the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki launched its recent (failed) offensive against cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia in the southern oil city of Basra. To "discuss" their needs in their President's eternal War on Terror, two of their top diplomats, a deputy secretary of state and an assistant secretary of state for South Asian affairs, arrived in Pakistan -- to the helpless outrage of the local press -- on the very day newly elected Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani was being given the oath of office. ("I don't think it is a good idea for them to be here on this particular day… right here in Islamabad, meeting with senior politicians in the new government, trying to dictate terms..." was the way Zaffar Abbas, editor of the newspaper Dawn, put it.)
At home, their politicians have nationally televised debates in which they fervently discuss just how quickly they would launch air assaults against Pakistan's tribal areas, without permission from the Pakistani government but based on "actionable intelligence" on terrorists. Their drones cruise the skies of the world looking for terrorist suspects to -- in the phrase of the hour -- "take out." Agents from their intelligence services have, these last years, roamed the planet, kidnapping terrorist suspects directly off the streets of major cities and transporting them to their own secret prisons, or those of other countries willing to employ torture methods. Their spy satellites circle the globe listening in on conversations wherever they please, while their military has divided the whole planet into "commands," the last of which, Africom, was just formed.
As far as they are concerned, nowhere do their interests not come into play; nowhere, in fact, are they not paramount. As their President put it recently, "If [our] strategic interests are not in Iraq -- the convergence point for the twin threats of al Qaeda and Iran, the nation Osama bin Laden's deputy has called 'the place for the greatest battle,' the country at the heart of the most volatile region on Earth -- then where are they?" (And you could easily substitute the names of other countries for Iraq.)
Their President makes a habit of regularly telling other countries what they "must" do. "At the same time," he said recently, "the regimes in Iran and Syria must stop supporting violence and terror in Iraq." It's especially important to him and his officials that other nations not "interfere" in situations where, as in Iraq, they are so obviously "foreigners" and have no business; no fingers, that is, are to be caught in other people's cookie jars. Their Vice President made this point strikingly in an exchange with a TV interviewer:
"Q: So what message are you sending to Iran, and how tough are you prepared to get?
"Vice President: I think the message that the president sent clearly is that we do not want them doing what they can to try to destabilize the situation inside Iraq. We think it's very important that they keep their folks at home."
A range of other countries, all with a natural bent for "interference" or "meddling," must regularly be warned or threatened. After all, what needs to be prevented, according to a typical formulation of their President, is "foreign interference in the internal affairs of Iraq."
None of this advice do they apply to themselves for reasons far too obvious to explain. Wherever they go -- sometimes in huge numbers, usually well-armed, and, after a while, deeply entrenched in bases the size of small towns that they love to build -- they feel comfortable. They are, after all, defending their liberties by defending those of others elsewhere. Though there are natives of one brand or another everywhere, they consider themselves the planet's only true natives. Their motto might be: Wherever we hang our hats (or helmets) is home.
Others, who choose to fight them, automatically become aliens, intent as they are on destroying the stability of that planetary "home." So, for years, their military spokespeople referred to the Sunni insurgents they were battling in Iraq as "anti-Iraqi forces." It mattered little that almost all of them were, in fact, Iraqis; for the enemy is, by nature, so beyond the pale as to be a stranger to his or her own country or, just as likely, a cat's-paw of foreign forces and powers. Only when the very same "anti-Iraqi forces" suddenly decided to become allies were they suddenly granted the title, "concerned citizens," or even, more gloriously, "Sons of Iraq."
When off duty, their luckier soldiers have the option of taking "rest and recreation" in "the homeland" at places like the Hale Koa ("House of the Warrior") Hotel in Honolulu, Hawaii, or in the extended homeland at, say, the Edelweiss Lodge and Resort in the Bavarian Alps or the Dragon Hill Lodge near thrilling downtown Seoul, South Korea -- all part of their global system of Armed Forces Recreation Centers.
This is their world -- and welcome to it.
It's not exactly a mystery what country I'm talking about. You knew from the beginning. Since the Soviet Union vanished in 1991, only one nation has made itself at home everywhere on Earth; only one nation has felt that the planet's interests and its own interests were essentially one; only one nation's military garrisons and patrols our world from Greenland to the tropics, from the sea bed to the edge of space; only one nation's military talks about its vast array of bases as its "footprint" on the planet; only one nation judges its essential and exceptional goodness, in motivation if nothing else, as justification for any act it may take.
Putting an Iraqi Face on Iraq
Soon, U.S. surge commander General David Petraeus will return to Washington to report to Congress on our "progress" in Iraq -- and he'll do so with the worst crisis in that country in almost a year still unresolved. He'll do so, in fact, shrouded in yet another strategic disaster for the Bush administration. With that in mind, let's take a moment to look back at just how, militarily at least, the Bush administration first made itself at home in Iraq.
In the U.S., the administration's lack of planning for the occupation of Iraq -- starting with the wholesale looting of Baghdad after American troops had taken the capital -- has been the subject of much debate and discussion in Congress and the media. While it's usually noted in passing that, amid the chaos, orders had in fact been issued to American troops to guard the Oil Ministry, little is made of that. In fact, orders for U.S. troops to guard that ministry and the Interior Ministry, and nothing else, were indeed given, which simply indicates that administration planning was extremely focused -- on oil and the secret police (and perhaps Saddam Hussein's secret archives).
In addition, we know that the administration ignored the 13-volume "Future of Iraq" project put together by the State Department to guide an occupation -- largely because its neocon officials were so intent on sidelining the State Department more generally. On the other hand, the Pentagon did plan for what it thought would matter. Specifically, from a front-page April 19, 2003 New York Times article, we know that, by the time the invasion began, the Pentagon already had on the drawing boards plans for building four permanent mega-bases in Iraq. (They were meant to replace our bases in Saudi Arabia.) And these were indeed built (along with others and the largest embassy on the planet) in more or less the locations originally described. From the beginning, whatever planning it didn't do, the Bush administration was certainly planning to make itself at home in Iraq in a big way for a long, long time.
Much has also been made of the disastrous, seat-of-the-pants decision by the administration, in the person of L. Paul Bremer III, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) then ruling Baghdad, to disband the Iraqi army. But few now recall what the administration, the CPA, and the Pentagon had in mind (and leaked to the press soon after the invasion) for a future Iraqi military of their dreams.
They had, in fact, reconceived the Iraqi army as a force of perhaps 40,000 lightly armed, largely border-guarding troops. Keep in mind that Saddam Hussein had a military of 400,000 heavily armed troops and -- until the First Gulf War in 1990 -- a powerful air force (as well as copious supplies of chemical weapons). In the Middle East, for a country to have only a 40,000 man military without tanks, artillery, or an air force to call on meant but one thing: that the U.S. military and the U.S. Air Force, from bases in Iraq and in the region, were to be Iraq's real fighting force in any crisis. This was the true planning message of the Bush administration and it indicated just how "at home" its officials thought they would be in occupied Iraq.
By the time it became obvious that such thinking was fantastical and George Bush was starting to repeat the mantra, "As Iraqis stand up, Americans will stand down," the idea of a 40,000-man force had been long forgotten. By then, the U.S. military was at work creating a large Iraqi army and national police force. But the effects of such planning remain debilitatingly present, even today.
After all, the "crack" Iraqi units sent into Basra by Prime Minister Maliki were still relatively lightly armed. (Hence, their complaints that the Sadrist militia they came up against were often better armed than they were.) They still had no significant Iraqi air force to call on, because as yet it hardly exists. When they got desperate, they had to call on U.S. and British air support as well as U.S. Special Forces units. And, of course, in the fighting in Basra, as in Baghdad where American units quickly entered the fray, they showed no particular flair for "standing up." In fact, according to the Associated Press's fine reporter Charles J. Hanley, the chief American trainer of Iraqi forces, Lt. Gen. James Dubik, now estimates that Iraq's military will not be able to guard the country's borders effectively until, at the earliest, 2018.
There was a period, back in 2004-05, when the Bush administration regularly wielded a telling image. They talked often about the importance of putting "an Iraqi face" on various aspects of the situation in that country. Here's a typical passage from the New York Times from that period: "By insisting that they not be identified, the three officers based in Baghdad were following a Pentagon policy requiring American commanders in Baghdad to put 'an Iraqi face' on the war, meaning that Iraqi commanders should be the ones talking to reporters, not Americans." This caught something of the strangeness of that moment, a strangeness that has yet to disappear. After all, as an image, to put a "face" on anything actually means to put a mask over an already present face, which was (and, even today, in military terms largely remains) American power in Iraq.
The presentation of the recent Maliki government offensive, launched on the eve of Petraeus's return, also represented, in part, an attempt to put an Iraqi face on American at-homeness in that country. The fictional story put out as the "Iraqi" offensive was launched -- printed up quite seriously in our media -- was that Maliki had only informed the American high command (and the British in Basra) of his prospective move in the hours just before it was launched. This was, on the face of it, ludicrous. The "Iraqi" army has been stood up -- trained, that is -- by U.S. advisors; some of its units have U.S. advisors embedded in them; it is almost totally reliant on the logistical support of the U.S. military. It could not move far offensively without the significant prior knowledge of U.S. commanders (and this was later admitted by the President's National Security Council Advisor Stephen J. Hadley).
While Maliki had his own reasons for launching his forces (and allied militias) against Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army in Basra, the Americans certainly imagined a triumphant moment for Petraeus in his upcoming hearings, thanks to new evidence that the Iraqi government was finally, in George Bush's words, "in the lead" and its military shaping up well. As Leila Fadel of the McClatchy Newspapers reported, "Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said the Iraqi operation was a 'byproduct of the success' of the year-old U.S. troop surge." This was a fantasy, of course. And the result was the success of Sadr's forces from Basra to Baghdad -- and ongoing American attempts to disavow any real involvement in the planning of the offensive.
Grand Delusions
The United States is hardly the first empire whose representatives have felt at home anywhere in its world (if not, in past times, in the world). When you are at the peak of your imperial powers, you can ignore the problems and contradictions that such a feeling, such an attitude, naturally calls up. This is no longer the situation for the United States and so the contradictions ripen, the problems only grow, and the plunge into delusional thinking deepens.
Take just the seeming conundrum of the recent battle in Basra. On one side, you have an Iraqi army, trained for years by the Americans, to the tune of approximately $22 billion in U.S. funds. On the other side, you have an (at best) partially trained "militia" -- an "army" in name only. It may be that the Iranians have put some effort or money into equipping the Mahdi Army -- though the evidence for this is slim indeed -- but, if so, this would be minor by comparison.
When the two forces clashed, what was the result? Some Iraqi soldiers and policemen simply put down their weapons and, in certain cases, surrendered or went over to the other side, or deserted, or fought half-heartedly; while the Mahdis fought fiercely, cleverly, and, in the end, successfully, until called off in triumph by their leader. They "stood up" (just as they had against the full might of the American military in the southern holy city of Najaf back in 2004). Could there, then, be two different races of Iraqis, one set willing to fight with or without training or outside help, the other unwilling, no matter the support?
The American military faced a similar situation four decades ago in Vietnam, where American advisors training the South Vietnamese military regularly swore that they would turn in their brigades of Vietnamese troops for just a few platoons of Vietcong, who would stand and fight as if their lives depended on it.
Of course, the answer here is anything but mysterious. On the one hand, you have a foreign-trained, foreign-advised, foreign-supplied force with confused and divided loyalties that is only partially an "Iraqi" army; on the other, you have a local force, fighting in a community, for the safety and wellbeing of its own sons and wives, friends and relatives. The Mahdi Army members know why they fight and who they fight for. They have "faith," and not just in the religious sense. They are, in a word, at home.
The history of the last 200 years has regularly piled up evidence that this matters far more than firepower. Human beings, that is, regularly "stand up" for something other than shiny weapons or the interests of a foreign power, no matter how at home its leaders may think they are in your country. The inability to see this obvious point -- repeatedly and over decades -- represents delusional thinking stemming, at least in part, from an inability of Americans to imagine their own foreignness in the world.
In such cases, you misperceive who is on your side, why they are there, and what, exactly, they are capable of. You misunderstand what the actual natives of a place think of you. You don't grasp that, whatever the brute force and finances at your command, you, as a foreigner, may never understand the situation you believe you should control. Even the Maliki government itself, after all, is only "on our side" thanks to its abysmal weakness. (Otherwise, it would be far more closely allied with that other foreign power, Iran.) Sooner or later -- usually sooner -- you simply delude yourself. You mistake your trained army for an "Iraqi" or a "Vietnamese" one and so come to believe that, if only you adjust your counterinsurgency tactics correctly, it will fight like one. Then you act accordingly, which is, of course, disastrous.
Whatever General Petraeus says before Congress next week, however sane and pragmatic he sounds, however impressive looking his charts and graphs, it's worth keeping in mind that his testimony cannot help but be delusional, because it stems from delusional premises and it can lead only to further disaster for Americans and Iraqis.
Yes, of course, American planes and drones will continue to cruise the skies of the globe "taking out" enemies (or missing them and taking out citizens elsewhere whom we could care less about); American diplomats and high military officials will continue to travel the planet in packs, indicating, however politely, what politicians, military men, and diplomats elsewhere "must" do; and American military men will continue to train the Iraqi army in the hopes that, in 2018 if not sooner, it will stand up.
And yet, as long as we mistake ourselves for "the natives," as long as we are convinced that our interests are paramount everywhere, and feel that we must be part of the solution to every problem, our problems -- and the world's -- will only multiply.
Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project. His book, The End of Victory Culture (University of Massachusetts Press), has been updated in a newly issued edition that deals with victory culture's crash-and-burn sequel in Iraq.
[Tomdispatch Recommendation: A recent Noam Chomsky piece, "We Own the World," took up an allied set of topics to those in this essay. It's a fascinating read and I urge you to check it out.]
General William Odom Tells Senate Rapid Withdrawal Is Only Solution
Go to Original
Two related audio files:
Media conference call with StandUpCongress.org on April 1st.
Radio show with ThePeopleSpeakRadio.net on March 17th.
Testimony before Senate Commitee on Foreign Relations:
Here’s the PDF.
TESTIMONY BEFORE THE SENATE FOREIGN RELATIONS COMMITTEE ON IRAQ
By William E. Odom, LT General, USA, Ret.
2 April 2008
Good morning Mr. Chairman and members of the committee. It is an honor to appear before you again. The last occasion was in January 2007, when the topic was the troop surge. Today you are asking if it has worked. Last year I rejected the claim that it was a new strategy. Rather, I said, it is a new tactic used to achieve the same old strategic aim, political stability. And I foresaw no serious prospects for success.
I see no reason to change my judgment now. The surge is prolonging instability, not creating the conditions for unity as the president claims.
Last year, General Petraeus wisely declined to promise a military solution to this political problem, saying that he could lower the level of violence, allowing a limited time for the Iraqi leaders to strike a political deal. Violence has been temporarily reduced but today there is credible evidence that the political situation is far more fragmented. And currently we see violence surge in Baghdad and Basra. In fact, it has also remained sporadic and significant in
several other parts of Iraq over the past year, notwithstanding the notable drop in Baghdad and Anbar Province.
More disturbing, Prime Minister Maliki has initiated military action and then dragged in US forces to help his own troops destroy his Shiite competitors. This is a political setback, not a political
solution. Such is the result of the surge tactic.
No less disturbing has been the steady violence in the Mosul area, and the tensions in Kirkuk between Kurds, Arabs, and Turkomen. A showdown over control of the oil fields there surely awaits us. And the idea that some kind of a federal solution can cut this Gordian knot strikes me as a wild fantasy, wholly out of touch with Kurdish realities.
Also disturbing is Turkey’s military incursion to destroy Kurdish PKK groups in the border region. That confronted the US government with a choice: either to support its NATO ally, or to make good on its commitment to Kurdish leaders to insure their security. It chose the former, and that makes it clear to the Kurds that the United States will sacrifice their security to its larger interests in Turkey.
Turning to the apparent success in Anbar province and a few other Sunni areas, this is not the positive situation it is purported to be. Certainly violence has declined as local Sunni shieks have begun to cooperate with US forces. But the surge tactic cannot be given full credit. The decline started earlier on Sunni initiative. What are their motives? First, anger at al Qaeda operatives and second, their financial plight.
Their break with al Qaeda should give us little comfort. The
Sunnis welcomed anyone who would help them kill Americans,
including al Qaeda. The concern we hear the president and his aides
express about a residual base left for al Qaeda if we withdraw is utter
nonsense. The Sunnis will soon destroy al Qaeda if we leave Iraq.
The Kurds do not allow them in their region, and the Shiites,
like the Iranians, detest al Qaeda. To understand why, one need only
take note of the al Qaeda public diplomacy campaign over the past
year or so on internet blogs. They implore the United States to bomb
and invade Iran and destroy this apostate Shiite regime.
As an aside, it gives me pause to learn that our vice president
and some members of the Senate are aligned with al Qaeda on
spreading the war to Iran.
Let me emphasize that our new Sunni friends insist on being
paid for their loyalty. I have heard, for example, a rough estimate that
the cost in one area of about 100 square kilometers is $250,000 per
day. And periodically they threaten to defect unless their fees are
increased. You might want to find out the total costs for these deals
forecasted for the next several years, because they are not small and
they do not promise to end. Remember, we do not own these people.
We merely rent them. And they can break the lease at any moment.
At the same time, this deal protects them to some degree from the
government’s troops and police, hardly a sign of political
reconciliation.
Now let us consider the implications of the proliferating deals
with the Sunni strongmen. They are far from unified among
themselves. Some remain with al Qaeda. Many who break and join
our forces are beholden to no one. Thus the decline in violence
reflects a dispersion of power to dozens of local strong men who
distrust the government and occasionally fight among themselves.
Thus the basic military situation is far worse because of the
proliferation of armed groups under local military chiefs who follow a
proliferating number of political bosses.
This can hardly be called greater military stability, much less
progress toward political consolidation, and to call it fragility that
needs more time to become success is to ignore its implications. At
the same time, Prime Minister Maliki’s military actions in Basra and
Baghdad, indicate even wider political and military fragmentation. We
are witnessing is more accurately described as the road to the
Balkanization of Iraq, that is, political fragmentation. We are being
asked by the president to believe that this shift of so much power and
finance to so many local chieftains is the road to political
centralization. He describes the process as building the state from
the bottom up.
I challenge you to press the administration’s witnesses this week to explain this absurdity. Ask them to name a single historical
case where power has been aggregated successfully from local
strong men to a central government except through bloody violence
leading to a single winner, most often a dictator. That is the history of
feudal Europe’s transformation to the age of absolute monarchy. It is
the story of the American colonization of the west and our Civil War.
It took England 800 years to subdue clan rule on what is now the English-Scottish border. And it is the source of violence in Bosnia and Kosovo.
How can our leaders celebrate this diffusion of power as
effective state building? More accurately described, it has placed the
United States astride several civil wars. And it allows all sides to
consolidate, rearm, and refill their financial coffers at the US expense.
To sum up, we face a deteriorating political situation with an
over extended army. When the administration’s witnesses appear
before you, you should make them clarify how long the army and
marines can sustain this band-aid strategy.
The only sensible strategy is to withdraw rapidly but in good order. Only that step can break the paralysis now gripping US
strategy in the region. The next step is to choose a new aim, regional
stability, not a meaningless victory in Iraq. And progress toward that
goal requires revising our policy toward Iran. If the president merely
renounced his threat of regime change by force, that could prompt
Iran to lessen its support to Taliban groups in Afghanistan. Iran
detests the Taliban and supports them only because they will kill
more Americans in Afghanistan as retaliation in event of a US attack
on Iran. Iran’s policy toward Iraq would also have to change radically as we withdraw. It cannot want instability there. Iraqi Shiites are Arabs, and they know that Persians look down on them. Cooperation between them has its limits.
No quick reconciliation between the US and Iran is likely, but
US steps to make Iran feel more secure make it far more conceivable
than a policy calculated to increase its insecurity. The president’s
policy has reinforced Iran’s determination to acquire nuclear
weapons, the very thing he purports to be trying to prevent.
Withdrawal from Iraq does not mean withdrawal from the
region. It must include a realignment and reassertion of US forces
and diplomacy that give us a better chance to achieve our aim.
A number of reasons are given for not withdrawing soon and completely. I have refuted them repeatedly before but they have more lives than a cat. Let try again me explain why they don’t make
sense.
First, it is insisted that we must leave behind military training
element with no combat forces to secure them. This makes no sense
at all. The idea that US military trainers left alone in Iraq can be safe
and effective is flatly rejected by several NCOs and junior officers I
have heard describe their personal experiences. Moreover, training foreign forces before they have a consolidated political authority to command their loyalty is a windmill tilt. Finally, Iraq is not short on military skills.
Second, it is insisted that chaos will follow our withdrawal. We
heard that argument as the “domino theory” in Vietnam. Even so, the
path to political stability will be bloody regardless of whether we
withdraw or not. The idea that the United States has a moral
responsibility to prevent this ignores that reality. We are certainly to
blame for it, but we do not have the physical means to prevent it.
American leaders who insist that it is in our power to do so are
misleading both the public and themselves if they believe it.
The real moral question is whether to risk the lives of more
Americans. Unlike preventing chaos, we have the physical means to
stop sending more troops where many will be killed or wounded. That
is the moral responsibility to our country which no American leaders
seems willing to assume.
Third, nay sayers insist that our withdrawal will create regional instability. This confuses cause with effect. Our forces in Iraq and our threat to change Iran’s regime are making the region unstable. Those who link instability with a US withdrawal have it exactly backwards. Our ostrich strategy of keeping our heads buried in the sands of Iraq has done nothing but advance our enemies’ interest.
I implore you to reject these fallacious excuses for prolonging the commitment of US forces to war in Iraq.
Thanks for this opportunity to testify today.
U.S. Must Embrace Obligations of Global Citizenship and Ratify and Apply International Treaties
Go to Original
By Austin Dacey
The recent United States Supreme Court decision in Medellin v. Texas, allowing the State of Texas to ignore a judgment of the International Court of Justice, highlights the country’s shameful failure to live up to its obligations as a global citizen, according to the Center for Inquiry, a leading humanist organization.
By Austin Dacey
The recent United States Supreme Court decision in Medellin v. Texas, allowing the State of Texas to ignore a judgment of the International Court of Justice, highlights the country’s shameful failure to live up to its obligations as a global citizen, according to the Center for Inquiry, a leading humanist organization. The Center for Inquiry’s representative to the United Nations, Dr. Austin Dacey, commented, “If the United States has made a unique contribution to the world, it is the foundational American idea that the power of nation-states is shaped by norms that come before and go beyond the nation-state.”
The International Court of Justice had ruled that the convictions of José Medellin and other Mexican nationals be reviewed because they had been denied their rights under the Vienna Convention—a treaty to which the United States is a party. The Vienna Convention requires foreign consulates to be informed when one of their citizens is arrested.
The Supreme Court’s decision forms part of a disturbing pattern in recent years in which the United States has either repudiated or refused to honor its international commitments and obligations. Since 2000, United Nations members have committed themselves to 929 new treaty actions. In that same period, the United State reversed its support for at least five major treaties, including the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons Treaty and the International Criminal Court.
In a recent editorial in Free Inquiry magazine, Center for Inquiry chairman Dr. Paul Kurtz observes that this stance represents a betrayal of America’s commitments. “Following World War II, there was great support in the United States for a new kind of world order based on cooperation among nations,” Kurtz said. “This country was in the vanguard of those proclaiming and defending explicit visions of human rights. By contrast, U.S. foreign policy in recent years has been unilateral and preemptive, costing us friends worldwide.”
Refusal to honor our obligations to the global community squanders this country’s moral capital around the world.
As an expositor of humanist values that transcend boundaries of state, ethnicity, and sect, the Center for Inquiry calls on the United States to honor our international commitments and implement fully the provisions of the Vienna Convention and all other international treaties and covenants to which the United States is a party.
The Center for Inquiry also calls upon Congress and the leadership of both major parties to work to ratify other important treaties that have been accepted by the vast majority of the international community.
The Center for Inquiry/Transnational, a nonprofit, educational, advocacy, and scientific-research think tank based in Amherst, New York, is also home to the Council for Secular Humanism, founded in 1980; the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (formerly CSICOP), founded in 1976; and the Commission for Scientific Medicine and Mental Health. The Center for Inquiry’s research and educational projects focus on three broad areas: religion, ethics, and society; paranormal and fringe-science claims; and medicine and health. The Center’s Web site is www.centerforinquiry.net.
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
Why al-Maliki attacked Basra
Go to Original
By Juan Cole
The three reasons the Iraqi prime minister launched his ill-fated assault on the Sadrists of southern Iraq.
Why did Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki attack the Mahdi army in Basra last week?
By Juan Cole
The three reasons the Iraqi prime minister launched his ill-fated assault on the Sadrists of southern Iraq.
Why did Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki attack the Mahdi army in Basra last week?
Despite the cease-fire called Sunday by Shiite leader Sayyid Muqtada al-Sadr, leader of the millions-strong Sadr Movement, last week’s battles between the Mahdi army and the Iraqi army revealed the continued weakness and instability of al-Maliki’s government. Al-Maliki went to Basra on Monday, March 24, to oversee the attack on city neighborhoods loyal to al-Sadr. By Friday, the Iraqi minister of defense, Abdul Qadir Jasim, had to admit in a news conference in Basra that the Mahdi army had caught Iraqi security forces off guard. Most Sadrist neighborhoods fought off the government troops with rocket-propelled grenades and mortar fire. At the same time, the Mahdi army asserted itself in several important cities in the Shiite south, as well as in parts of Baghdad, raising questions of how much of the country the government really controls. Only on Sunday, after the U.S. Air Force bombed some key Mahdi army positions, was the Iraqi army able to move into one of the Sadrist districts of Basra.
By the time the cease-fire was called, al-Maliki had been bloodied after days of ineffective fighting and welcomed a way back from the precipice. Both Iran, which brokered the agreement, and al-Sadr, whose forces acquitted themselves well against the government, were strengthened. As of press time Tuesday morning in Iraq, the truce was holding in Basra, and a curfew had been lifted in Baghdad, though sporadic fighting continued in the capital. Estimates of casualties for the week were 350.
The campaign was a predictable fiasco, another in a long line of strategic failures for the sickly and divided Iraqi government, which survives largely because it is propped up by the United States. So why did al-Maliki do it? With no obvious immediate crisis in Basra that called for such desperate measures, what could have motivated the decision to attack?
Three main motivations present themselves: control of petroleum smuggling, staying in power (including keeping U.S. troops around to ensure it), and the achievement of a Shiite super-province in the south. A southern super-province would spell a soft partition of the country, benefiting Shiites in the long term while cutting Sunnis out of substantial oil revenues, both licit and illicit. But all of the motivations have to do with something President Bush established as a benchmark in January 2007: upcoming provincial elections.
The Sadr Movement leaders themselves are convinced that the recent setting of a date for provincial elections, on Oct. 1, 2008, and al-Maliki’s desire to improve the government’s position in advance of the elections, precipitated the prime minister’s attack. It is widely thought that the Sadrists might sweep to power in the provinces in free and fair elections, since the electorate is deeply dissatisfied with the performance of the major incumbent party in the southern provinces, the Islamic Supreme Council of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim.
Provincial elections could radically change the political landscape in Iraq. Both the Sunni Arabs and the Sadr Movement sat out the last round, in late January 2005. Thus, governments in the Sunni Arab areas are unrepresentative and in one case a Sunni-majority province, Diyala, is actually ruled by the Shiite Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI), which Sunnis tend to see as a puppet of Iran.
Likewise in the Shiite south, the ISCI, led by Shiite cleric Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, is largely in power, even though probably a majority of the population favors Sadr. To have a minority in power and the majority feeling disenfranchised is especially dangerous in a violent society such as Iraq. The disjuncture has contributed to endemic fighting in the capital of Qadisiya Province, Diwaniya, for instance, between Sadr’s Mahdi army and the paramilitary of the Islamic Supreme Council, or Badr Corps. In many provinces, ISCI has infiltrated members of its Badr paramilitary into the police and security forces, thus giving them the presumption of legitimacy and allowing the branding of the Mahdi army as violent militiamen with no popular mandate, won at the polls.
That the week’s fighting was intended to bolster pro-government forces in preparation for the October provincial elections is at least plausible. During the fighting, the Iraqi army was allied with the Badr Corps paramilitary of the ISCI, which was trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. ISCI, the leading Shiite political party in parliament, is now al-Maliki’s main backer in the government, along with his own smaller Da’wa (Islamic Call) Party. And U.S. military spokesman Maj. Gen. Kevin Bergner told a news conference on Wednesday that the Iraqi army’s military operation, which U.S. forces aided, was aimed at improving "security" in the city ahead of provincial elections.
And then there is the super-province. On the same day that Bergner spoke, a Sadrist leader told the Times of Baghdad, "The objective of the operations in Basra is to impose a provincial confederacy on the south, which the Sadr Movement opposes." The reference to a provincial confederacy, confusingly called "federalism" in Iraq, is to the plan of ISCI leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim to establish an eight-province regional government for the Shiite south. Were the Sadrists to win the southern provinces in October’s provincial elections, they would halt any move toward such a confederacy, since they favor strong central government on the French model and view al-Hakim’s plan for a Shiite super-province as the first stage in a soft partition of Iraq.
The issue of whether to create a Shiite super-province and risk a soft partition of Iraq is not the only source of conflict between the Sadrists and the Iraqi government. The Sadr Movement demands the setting of a timetable for the departure of U.S. troops, a demand supported by a majority of the members of parliament but which is not shared by most ministers in the Iraqi cabinet.
Indeed, the Sadr Movement, which helped bring al-Maliki to power in spring of 2006, broke with him precisely over his refusal to demand that the U.S. set a timetable for troop withdrawal from Iraq. The Sadrists also objected to al-Maliki’s direct meetings with Bush, which they saw as a humiliating capitulation to colonialism. In summer of 2007, the Sadrists withdrew their ministers from al-Maliki’s cabinet.
The Bush administration wants its current partners to stay in power in the Shiite areas, since ISCI and al-Maliki’s Da’wa party support a continued U.S. military presence in Iraq. Washington would probably therefore have preferred that the provincial elections in the Shiite south be postponed. Yet the administration knows that there is little hope of mollifying the Sunni Arabs unless they have an opportunity to vote for their own provincial leadership. The very step that might help calm down the Sunni Arab provinces, however, may inflame tensions in the Shiite south, if the Sadrists toss ISCI out on its collective ear.
The upcoming provincial elections are a potential public relations nightmare for both the Iraqi government and its allies in the Bush administration. What if fighting breaks out in September between the Badr Corps and the Mahdi army? They are the paramilitaries of the two major parties that will be heatedly contesting the south. A campaign now might weaken the Mahdi army, suggesting to the electorate in the south that the Sadrists cannot protect them. Iraqi Shiites appear mainly to vote for parties that they hope can protect them and establish security.
Other issues, such as petroleum smuggling, are also bound up with the power struggle. The various political parties in Basra are using their paramilitaries to capture and smuggle Iraqi government gasoline and kerosene, worth billions, which allows them to build up big war chests for fighting the elections and doing charitable work in rundown neighborhoods. A decisive defeat of the Mahdi army in Basra now would possibly have deprived the Sadrists of the funding they need to win the October elections.
If the Sadr Movement rules most Shiite-majority provinces, including Baghdad, that will make it difficult for the U.S. military to remain in the country. It will stop any move toward a soft partition of the country of the sort endorsed by the U.S. Senate. It will ensure that the Sadr Movement can continue to siphon off billions in petroleum revenue through smuggling, strengthening it for the future.
The survival of the current Iraqi government, based on rivals to the Sadrists such as ISCI and the Da’wa Party of al-Maliki, hangs in the balance. Clearly, al-Maliki felt that the operation had to be launched, and may well have thought that it is better to do it now, so that it will not be fresh in the minds of the Iraqi or American electorate when they go to the polls in the fall. Now that al-Maliki’s campaign has gone so badly, it raises the question of whether there will be a sympathy vote for al-Sadr in October. The Iraqis, a majority of whom say they want a short timetable for U.S. withdrawal, may well have an opportunity to elect provincial governments that, practically speaking, want the same thing, in October. If that happens, it is hard to see how the U.S. presence can last, since the U.S. needs bases in Shiite provinces like Baghdad so as to function.
US Truckers Disrupt Traffic to Protest Fuel Prices
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By Janet McGurty
New York - U.S. truckers caused minor traffic snags in parts of the country on Tuesday to protest soaring costs for diesel, according to members of a major trucking association and law enforcement officials.
The mild disruptions from New Jersey to Chicago came in the midst of a week-long effort by independent truckers to get federal help easing the strain of high fuel prices through public protests or work stoppages.
"Our fuel costs have doubled over the past five years and the cost of doing business has doubled," said one Florida-based driver. "Our industry is in ruins and the rest of the economy is going into a huge tailspin."
On the New Jersey Turnpike, one of the most heavily traveled highways in the United States, hundreds of people took part in a protest at a service area and truckers reportedly were driving at slow speeds to back up traffic.
"There are some localized minor disruptions. We have taken enforcement actions which resulted in issuing summonses," said Lt. Gerald Lewis, a spokesman for the New Jersey State Police.
Police also handed out tickets to a few truckers driving below the legal minimum speed on a three-lane interstate near Chicago, while other small protests were reported in several other states.
The protests, however, did not appear widespread. A spokesman for the California Highway Patrol said there was no evidence of any disruptions in the state, which has some of the nation's worst highways and biggest ports.
In Florida, four dozen truckers gathered near the Port of Tampa to rail against high fuel prices but no attempts to block traffic were reported.
"We haven't experienced any traffic delays or any protests," said Lt. Ron Castleberry, at the Florida Highway Patrol headquarters in Tallahassee.
Diesel Squeeze
The protests by independent truckers - who make up 90 percent of the U.S. trucking industry - came amid a 50 percent spike in diesel prices since last year that has brought the cost of a gallon to nearly $4 on average nationwide, according to the latest U.S. government survey.
The Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, which represents many of the truckers taking part in the protests, said it wants Congress to mandate a 100 percent pass-through of fuel surcharges to drivers as well as full transparency from trucking brokers to match loads and drivers.
The OOIDA has about 161,000 members, slightly less than half of the 350,000 independent truckers in the United States. The group said it does not call for strikes and gave no estimates of now many of its members might participate in protests or work stoppages this week.
The protests are loosely organized over Internet chat boards, members said, with truckers opting for the level of participation that suits their needs - including just putting up protest signs on their trucks.
"If you have an obligation to a customer and can't stop driving, you can put up a sign even if you can't come off the road," said an independent trucker.
One South Carolina-based independent trucker, who said he pays thousands of dollars up front for fuel, said he has not worked for three weeks.
"There is not enough money to take my truck on the road," he said.
Mike Schermoly, a spokesman for OOIDA, warned that without help easing the strain of high fuel costs on the trucking industry, prices of groceries and other goods could rise.
"Some drive home, some find another job, some go fishing," he said. "Whatever they do the effect is to take the more trucks out of the market and there will be a shortage of trucks. Price of milk, lettuce will continue to rise." (additional reporting Nick Zieminski in New York, Andy Stern in Chicago, Dan Whitcomb in Los Angeles, and Jane Sutton in Miami; Editing by David Gregorio)
By Janet McGurty
New York - U.S. truckers caused minor traffic snags in parts of the country on Tuesday to protest soaring costs for diesel, according to members of a major trucking association and law enforcement officials.
The mild disruptions from New Jersey to Chicago came in the midst of a week-long effort by independent truckers to get federal help easing the strain of high fuel prices through public protests or work stoppages.
"Our fuel costs have doubled over the past five years and the cost of doing business has doubled," said one Florida-based driver. "Our industry is in ruins and the rest of the economy is going into a huge tailspin."
On the New Jersey Turnpike, one of the most heavily traveled highways in the United States, hundreds of people took part in a protest at a service area and truckers reportedly were driving at slow speeds to back up traffic.
"There are some localized minor disruptions. We have taken enforcement actions which resulted in issuing summonses," said Lt. Gerald Lewis, a spokesman for the New Jersey State Police.
Police also handed out tickets to a few truckers driving below the legal minimum speed on a three-lane interstate near Chicago, while other small protests were reported in several other states.
The protests, however, did not appear widespread. A spokesman for the California Highway Patrol said there was no evidence of any disruptions in the state, which has some of the nation's worst highways and biggest ports.
In Florida, four dozen truckers gathered near the Port of Tampa to rail against high fuel prices but no attempts to block traffic were reported.
"We haven't experienced any traffic delays or any protests," said Lt. Ron Castleberry, at the Florida Highway Patrol headquarters in Tallahassee.
Diesel Squeeze
The protests by independent truckers - who make up 90 percent of the U.S. trucking industry - came amid a 50 percent spike in diesel prices since last year that has brought the cost of a gallon to nearly $4 on average nationwide, according to the latest U.S. government survey.
The Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, which represents many of the truckers taking part in the protests, said it wants Congress to mandate a 100 percent pass-through of fuel surcharges to drivers as well as full transparency from trucking brokers to match loads and drivers.
The OOIDA has about 161,000 members, slightly less than half of the 350,000 independent truckers in the United States. The group said it does not call for strikes and gave no estimates of now many of its members might participate in protests or work stoppages this week.
The protests are loosely organized over Internet chat boards, members said, with truckers opting for the level of participation that suits their needs - including just putting up protest signs on their trucks.
"If you have an obligation to a customer and can't stop driving, you can put up a sign even if you can't come off the road," said an independent trucker.
One South Carolina-based independent trucker, who said he pays thousands of dollars up front for fuel, said he has not worked for three weeks.
"There is not enough money to take my truck on the road," he said.
Mike Schermoly, a spokesman for OOIDA, warned that without help easing the strain of high fuel costs on the trucking industry, prices of groceries and other goods could rise.
"Some drive home, some find another job, some go fishing," he said. "Whatever they do the effect is to take the more trucks out of the market and there will be a shortage of trucks. Price of milk, lettuce will continue to rise." (additional reporting Nick Zieminski in New York, Andy Stern in Chicago, Dan Whitcomb in Los Angeles, and Jane Sutton in Miami; Editing by David Gregorio)
ACLU: Military Skirting Law to Spy
Go to Original
By Larry Neumeister
New York - The military is using the FBI to skirt legal restrictions on domestic surveillance to obtain private records of Americans’ Internet service providers, financial institutions and telephone companies, the ACLU said Tuesday.
By Larry Neumeister
New York - The military is using the FBI to skirt legal restrictions on domestic surveillance to obtain private records of Americans’ Internet service providers, financial institutions and telephone companies, the ACLU said Tuesday.
The American Civil Liberties Union based its conclusion on a review of more than 1,000 documents turned over by the Defense Department after it sued the agency last year for documents related to national security letters, or NSLs, investigative tools used to compel businesses to turn over customer information without a judge’s order or grand jury subpoena.
"Newly unredacted documents released today reveal that the Department of Defense is using the FBI to circumvent legal limits on its own NSL power," said the ACLU, whose lawsuit was filed in Manhattan federal court.
ACLU lawyer Melissa Goodman said the documents the civil rights group studied "make us incredibly concerned." She said it would be understandable if the military relied on help from the FBI on joint investigations, but not when the FBI was not involved in a probe.
The FBI referred requests for comment Tuesday to the Defense Department. A department spokesman, Air Force Lt. Col. Patrick Ryder, said in an e-mail that the department had made "focused, limited and judicious" use of the letters since Congress extended the capability to investigatory entities other than the FBI in 2001.
He said the department had acted legally in using a necessary investigatory tool and noted that "unusual financial activity of people affiliated with DoD can be an indication of potential espionage or terrorist-related activity."
Ryder said the information in the ACLU claims came in part from an internal review of DoD’s use of the letters.
"We have since developed training and provided it to the services for their use," he said.
He said that there was no law requiring it to track use of the letters but that the department had decided it was in its best interest to do so.
Goodman, a staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project, said the military is allowed to demand financial and credit records in certain instances but does not have the authority to get e-mail and phone records or lists of Web sites that people have visited. That is the kind of information that the FBI can get by using a national security letter, she said.
"That’s why we’re particularly concerned. The DoD may be accessing the kinds of records they are not allowed to get," she said.
Goodman also noted that legal limits are placed on the Defense Department "because the military doing domestic investigations tends to make us leery."
In other allegations, the ACLU said:
- The Navy’s use of the letters to demand domestic records has increased significantly since the Sept. 11 attacks.
- The military wrongly claimed its use of the letters was limited to investigating only Defense Department employees.
- The Defense Department has not kept track of how many national security letters the military issues or what information it obtained through the orders.
- The military provided misleading information to Congress and silenced letter recipients from speaking out about the records requests.
Goodman said Congress should provide stricter guidelines and meaningful oversight of how the military and FBI make national security letter requests.
"Any government agency’s ability to demand these kinds of personal, financial or Internet records in the United States is an intrusive surveillance power," she said.
Dance of the Oil Fairies
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By Kelpie Wilson
On April Fools’ Day, the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming invited executives from the five biggest US oil companies to answer questions about high gas prices, oil company profits and the future of oil. Executives from Exxon, Shell, BP America, Chevron and ConocoPhillips responded to a battery of questions from committee members who ranged from strongly skeptical to downright sycophantic (all the sycophants were Republicans).
By Kelpie Wilson
On April Fools’ Day, the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming invited executives from the five biggest US oil companies to answer questions about high gas prices, oil company profits and the future of oil. Executives from Exxon, Shell, BP America, Chevron and ConocoPhillips responded to a battery of questions from committee members who ranged from strongly skeptical to downright sycophantic (all the sycophants were Republicans).
Even the most hard-hitting questioners, however, failed to pin the execs down on the real issue, which is how to convince an oil industry that is running up against absolute supply limits to switch gears and invest resources in what Rep. Jay Inslee (D-Washington) called the "clean energy revolution." With practiced facility, the oil execs danced around the question and reconfirmed their commitment to the relentless pursuit of hydrocarbons in any form, no matter how dirty or expensive to extract.
Committee Chair Ed Markey opened with the observation that today the poorest 20 percent of Americans are spending 10 percent of their income on gasoline, while oil company profits have quadrupled in the past six years. Markey said that much of this profit was wasted last year and alleged that the five companies spent $50 billion on what he called "financial engineering" to prop up the price of their stock.
Markey called on the companies to consider the plight of the poorest Americans and pledge 10 percent of their profits to renewable energy investments. He also asked them to stop opposing the renewable energy legislation passed by the House (but not yet by the Senate) that would shift $18 billion in tax breaks for oil over to support renewable energy.
J. Stephen Simon, senior vice president for Exxon, responded that the oil industry needs the profits it makes in good years to carry it through the bad years. He stressed the cyclical nature of the oil business, citing the oil price spike in 1980 that reached over $100 a barrel in today’s dollars. He said the prediction at that time was for oil to go to over $250 a barrel in today’s dollars, but it never did. By the mid 1980s, prices had fallen dramatically and the industry was "in dire straights." That could happen again, he implied.
John Hofmeister, president of Shell Oil Company, seemed more connected to the reality of oil today. He called the energy supply and demand outlook "sobering," acknowledging that "demand is increasing unrelentingly." He said that he agreed with Chairman Markey that the country needs a Manhattan Project or Apollo-style project to develop new energy sources. Shell supports a cap and trade system to reduce carbon emissions, and Hofmeister said, "We must work now to address CO2 emissions as we make the transition from fossil fuels to new energy sources." But while giving lip service to climate issues, Shell is also making major investments in the most carbon-intensive energy sources: Canadian tar sands, US oil shale and coal gasification technologies.
Peter Robertson of Chevron acknowledged that "the system is straining" to provide oil for increasing consumption. He called for "urgent action" and increased efficiency to moderate demand. Between 2007 and 2008, Chevron plans to spend $2.5 billion on renewables and energy efficiency services. One example is a partnership with Weyerhauser Corporation to develop an advanced biofuels project. But Robertson cautioned on the scale of the challenge to replace fossil fuels. He said, "a large biofuels plant in the US produces in a year what one of our refineries produces in a week."
John Lowe of ConocoPhillips said renewables were not part of their core business and he would "disavow the concept that alternatives can be quickly deployed." He said the US is in a global race with other countries to increase supplies and warned that "punitive taxes" would "undermine our capabilities."
Bob Malone of BP America said, "we support renewable incentives, but taxing one form of energy to support another will mean less energy overall." BP is nearly doubling the capacity of its Maryland solar photovoltaic plant and investing in next-generation biofuels that do not use a fuel crop, he said.
During the two-and-a-half-hour hearing, the oil executives repeatedly referred to a study by the National Petroleum Council released last July called "Facing the Hard Truths about Energy." This study maintains that oil, gas and coal will continue to dominate the energy mix in 2030, with renewables playing only a small part. The execs used this conclusion to dance around the need for rapid deployment of renewables, saying their study shows you can’t get there from here.
Energy analyst Tom Whipple has disparaged the petroleum industry’s study, saying: "The NPC artfully camouflaged the enormous near-term challenges in producing sufficient oil and gas to fuel the global economy. Hard truths are hinted at but never clearly identified. Troubling trends are referenced, but their ramifications are dodged."
In the course of the hearing, only one Congressional representative actually uttered the words "peak oil." Jerry McNerney (the Democratic wind energy consultant who defeated arch anti-green California Congressman Richard Pombo in 2006) asked the oil executives if they thought opening up Alaska and offshore areas to oil development would make much difference in the timing of peak oil.
Shell Oil’s Hofmeister quickly responded that he did "not subscribe to peak oil" and that Shell believes that world oil production will rise from the current 85 million barrels a day to the 110 to 115 million barrels needed to meet future demand. He said peak oil theory is "based on very narrow assumptions" that do not include unconventional oil sources like the Canadian tar sands.
Chairman Markey continued to sharpen his sword for Exxon, the oil company that has made the most profits and invested the least in renewable energy. He extracted from J. Stephen Simon the information that Exxon’s investments in renewable energy amount to only about one-half of one percent of its revenue.
Jay Inslee of Washington pursued the matter of Exxon’s investments further. He pointed to the global warming challenge that will require reducing emissions 80 percent below present levels by 2050 and said to Simon, "If your company continues on its present course, it will fall several hundred orders of magnitude short of what we must to do to prevent cataclysmic global climate changeÉif you don’t put research dollars into it, where are these new technologies going to come from? The oil fairies?"
Inslee asked Simon to consider a study done at Stanford called "A Renewable Energy Solution to Global Warming" by Mark Jacobson. The study concluded that the US could replace all of its vehicles with battery electric vehicles powered by 71,000 to 122,000 five megawatt wind turbines. Building those turbines would be the industrial equivalent of building all the aircraft used in World War II. It could be done.
"Wouldn’t you agree," he asked Simon, "that this vision from Stanford is one the US really needs? With your pathetically small research budget, we are not going to get there."
Inslee said that Simon’s testimony had made him even more determined to act. Addressing Simon again, he said: "I don’t see things changing, and obviously we’ve got to change you by changing this tax policy."
While Big Oil fights any reduction in its subsidized tax breaks, the struggling renewable energy industry is facing a catastrophe as its small but vital production and investment tax credits expire at the end of 2008. Already the lack of certainty is constraining investment.
Renewable energy lobbyist Scott Sklar of the Stella Group said that the industry is seeing job losses and market moves into Europe and out of the US. He expects that even if Congress manages to pass a temporary one-year extension of the subsidies, the industry will still lose 20,000 jobs and utility-scale renewable projects will stop.
Jens Søby, president of Vestas Americas, a wind turbine manufacturer, said, "An extension of the federal Production Tax Credit is crucial, as it will enable investments in facilities and jobs in our industry to be fully realized and allow us to develop our long-term strategies. There is a need for market stability; for example, when the PTC expired and was not extended at the end of 2003, the wind industry saw a 77 percent drop in the annual installation of new wind generating capacity according to the American Wind Energy Association."
On March 5, 2008, Vestas opened its first North American manufacturing facility, producing turbine blades in Windsor, Colorado. The factory will employ 650 people. This kind of news could be repeated in towns all over the country, but not as long as Bush Republicans and Big Oil stand in the way.
Inside Story - Turkey's division
Country's top court is set to hear a case that could close down the ruling AK party.
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