Assault and Batteries

Posted by Harkavy at 3:18 PM, May 7, 2008

High-tech horror: Widespread cell-phone violence against women in Iraq and the Congo.

The downside of the 21st century's high-tech age is lower than you can imagine: Cell phones and cell-phone technology are prime culprits in a growing epidemic of rape, beatings, and murder of women in the Congo and Iraq.

A war over "coltan," a crucial ingredient in the manufacture of cell phones and other electronic devices, has helped cause the ongoing tragedy of rape and murder by the millions in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The DRC horrors far outstrip even Darfur as a tragedy, as I noted in June 2005.

Go to Seeing is Believing: Handicams, Human Rights and the News, the website of Czech-Canadian Katerina Cizek's documentary film series of that name, to read "Cell Phones Fuel Congo Conflict." . The series explains how the fight over coltan, only one of the treasures in the resources-rich Congo, is directly responsible for much of the savage war in which millions have died and hundreds of thousands, at the very least, have been raped and otherwise brutalized.

Eve Ensler, famous for the Vagina Monologues, is one of the few Westerners to latch onto the rampage against women in the Congo and try to publicize it. Incongruously, her monologue on the violence, gleaned from a trip there, can be found in Glamour. Here's the second paragraph of Ensler's in-your-face August 2007 article:

Meanwhile, in Iraq, cell phones as finished products are prime weapons — in a high-tech fashion — for brutalizing women.

Amanj Khalil, a young journalist for the Institute for War & Peace Reporting, described on May 2 one recent incident in Iraq's northern Kurdish area:

Salma's just one of many Iraqi women being brutalized in a high-tech way by lower-than-low scumbags.

It's worse in the Congo. Natural disasters, like the cyclone that ravaged Burma, are one thing. Manmade disasters are another. And no manmade disaster is as unnatural as what's going on in the DRC, surely the rape capital of the world.

Here's a grim fact: In the Congo, "vaginal destruction" has become an official term of medical art used by beleaguered doctors and nurses to describe war-related injuries.

Western governments and the mainstream press usually, but not always, ignore the DRC. (Certainly, Western corporations don't ignore it the country's rich natural resources.) So you have to go elsewhere to find out about the situation. Thanks to the Web, the upside of high-tech, you can.

One of the best pieces, and I've referred to it previously, is Sarah J. Coleman's June 2005 article on Beliefnet, "Congo's Conflict: Heart of Darkness." Her lede is worth repeating:

The toll's up to an estimated 5 million now — that's the scope of the Holocaust. Read Stephen Lewis's April 12 speech at Ensler's V-Day Celebration in New Orleans.

Lewis really got down to it in September 2007, quoting from "The Shame of War: Sexual Violence Against Women and Girls in Conflict," a March 2007 major report from IRIN, the U.N.'s excellent and free global news service:

I won't apologize for the graphic nature of this, because we need to face the unexpurgated facts.

The Congo violence is the biggest war tragedy, but of course it's far from the only manmade disaster. Among the many battlegrounds of violence against women is Kurdish Iraq. That northern region of Iraq has long been thought to be the most civilized area of the war-torn country (aside from the increasing number of skirmishes between Turkey and the Kurd separatists). But Salma's story is far from unique.

Here's the intrepid reporter Khalil again to give the broader view of cell-phone-induced violence in Iraq:

Can you hear me now?

May Day! May Day! Cold War Heating Up!

Posted by Harkavy at 5:26 PM, May 5, 2008

The Rooskies are rolling out the hardware once again.

Everybody's talking tough these days. Hillary threatens to nuke Iran and now Vladimir Putin is launching the kind of "Victory Day" parade on Red Square that hasn't been seen since the Soviet Union collapsed.

Here's how France 24's Nick Coleman described it today:

Vlad the Paler may be stepping down as president, but he's still the prime minister, in every sense of the word. He ain't giving up anything.

He's rolling out the big guns, just like in the bad old days when thousands of missiles, troops, and weapons paraded in the square before the doddering conservatives who called themselves Communists.

Coleman's story goes on to note Putin's explanation of how the current display of planes, trained soldiers, and airplanes isn't anything other than peaceful:

Everybody loves a parade. That's an order.

Goodnight, Iran

Posted by Harkavy at 7:39 AM, May 5, 2008

Hope I'm not jinxing anything, but here it is almost two weeks since Hillary Clinton threatened to nuke Iran, and both countries are still standing.

Hard to believe that Clinton's vow to exterminate Iran hasn't gotten more play. Everybody got exercised when Iran's crackpot leader, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was quoted as saying that he wanted to make Israel disappear.

Why not the same outrage about Hillary?

Even grammarians haven't taken her to task for saying that if Iran nuked Israel, she would attack Iran, adding, "We would be able to totally obliterate them." (See it here.)

"Obliterate": "to remove or destroy all traces of; do away with; destroy completely."

Clinton would go beyond that to "totally obliterate" Iran? Whew.

At least the Boston Globe has already made the comparison of Hillary to Dr. Strangelove.

The Globe made an important point:

Barack Obama's campaign got everything mixed up in its response to Hillary's nuke threat. Here's what Obama said:

Wrong. She's more like Dick Cheney.

In fact, she really is a lot like Cheney, except that he had more experience. To deal with energy problems, Cheney called in oil executives early in the Bush administration and met with them secretly and then refused to release info about those meetings.

That was no different from Hillary's decision early in the Clinton administration to call in health-care executives for private meetings. Hillary then refused to release info about those meetings.

In Hillary's case, she's threatening Iran because she clearly wants to nail down as much money from wealthy Jewish donors as she can in her fight with Obama.

Better for her to bomb in her campaign than to bomb anywhere else.

Hope for a Nuclear War Dims

Posted by Harkavy at 9:36 AM, December 4, 2007

NIE report on Iran puts Cheney's quest for a pre-emptive strike on hold.

The Bush-Cheney regime's war drums have fallen silent — at least temporarily — in the wake of the U.S. intelligence analysts' new "estimate" that Iran's nuclear-bomb program really doesn't exist.

The problem is that the intelligence on which this conclusion is based also doesn't exist. This was a political decision by the CIA, not an intelligent analysis based on intelligence.

You won't find that analysis in the major U.S. newspapers. Nor will you find any mention of either Pakistan or Israel, both of which have nuclear weapons. That context is important, because Pakistan is dangerously unstable right now, and any attack on its neighbor Iran could destroy the global oil economy and destabilize the entire planet.

Too far-fetched? Not really. The World Economic Forum analysts' worst-case scenario for the Persian Gulf posits a pre-emptive attack on Iran in 2009, as I noted previously.

West of Tehran, Israeli pols are still pursuing a strike on Iran, and now, with this new NIE report, Israel could well be the Cheney regime's surrogate for such a strike.

Back to the National Intelligence Estimate itself: Even the left-leaning Haaretz recognizes that the report is somewhat ludicrous. Take a look at "Iran Laughing at U.S. Lack of Nuclear Intelligence," Amir Oren's analysis in the Israeli paper. Here's Oren's take this morning:

Burned by the White House (and CIA director George Tenet) in the run-up to the unjustified invasion of Iraq, U.S. intelligence analysts are covering their asses this time by admitting that they have no evidence that Iran is currently building bombs.

There's still hope for Dick Cheney and Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Israel) and other war hawks pushing for a pre-emptive strike. As Oren says:

If you doubt Cheney's determination, go back and read Seymour Hersh's January 2005 New Yorker article, "The Coming Wars."

Fallout from Another War

Posted by Harkavy at 9:00 AM, November 20, 2007

The U.S. launches a military strike on Iran's nuclear plants in 2009. Iran's counterattack on U.S. bases in the Persian Gulf countries ruins the oil bidness and causes a global recession. Oh, and terrorist attacks step up around the rest of the globe.

I'm not the only one imagining pre-emptive attacks on Iran by the U.S. or Israel or both.

That's the "Sandstorm" scenario for the so-called Gulf Cooperation Council countries (Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the UAE). Such grim scenarios are emerging from behind the scenes at World Economic Forum headquarters.

Bomb a nuclear plant or two and you'll see what mass destruction looks like. We'll all be tuned in to the Weather Channel to track the radioactive cloud drifting around the planet.

Don't pay attention to what's said at the forum's gatherings of bigwigs (the next main one is in late January in Switzerland), but read the reports (HTML, PDF), which of course are grossly underplayed in the Western press.

These aren't the reports manufactured by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, who may yet go down in history — if there are any historians left on Earth to write about them — as Radioactive Man and Fallout Boy.

Colin Powell was being a good soldier for the Bush-Cheney regime in February 2003 when he spread the administration's lies at the U.N. about Iraq's WMD.

Now that he's out of the administration, he's just being a good soldier by telling what he really thinks is the truth about the ultimate weapon of mass destruction.

At least we hope so, because Powell is dismissing the idea that Iran is a nuclear threat. The AP, reporting Sunday from a Kuwait confab:

Lucky for us that all of our domestic problems are in good enough shape for us to launch another war.

Slaughterhouse Jive: Jesus, Muhammad, Al Qaeda, and the World Series

Posted by Harkavy at 9:39 AM, October 24, 2007

The convergence of America's pastimes — religious crackpotism, fast food, and immigration — on America's former pastime

Just wait until the World Series, which opens tonight in Boston, shifts to Denver on Saturday. That's when Jesus and Muhammad — and Sayyid Qutb, the spiritual godfather of Al Qaeda — will join the millions of other viewers.

Colorado's a great setting for what used to be America's pastime. Our country's real manias about fast food, religion, and immigration have strong roots there.

South of Denver lies Colorado Springs, headquarters of Focus on the Family's James Dobson, the godfather of America's religious right-wingers. (See my 1997 story "King James's Version.")

North of Denver is Greeley, the slaughterhouse capital for the fast-food industry. Colorado Rockies owner Charlie Monfort owes his good fortune to his daddy's massive abattoirs in Greeley. The family's cattle feedlots are also the stamping grounds for immigrants brought in to deal with the muck and death. (For inhumane treatment of animals, see this. For inhumane treatment of immigrants who perform this inhumane treatment of animals, see this.)

And in a weird confluence of human and animal slaughter philosophies, Greeley is the town where Sayyid Qutb lived in 1949, where he learned to hate Americans' "immoral" behavior before he returned to the Middle East and became the most influential 20th century thinker for radical schnooks like Osama bin Laden. (See Mike Peters's 2002 Greeley Tribune story "Roots of Terrorism Reach to 1949 Greeley" and Daniel Brogan's 2003 story "Al Qaeda’s Greeley Roots" in the Denver magazine 5280.)

Not that all the strange confluences in Colorado are bad. Northern Colorado is also the home of the amazing Temple Grandin, an ingenious autistic person made famous by Oliver Sacks. Grandin, more attuned to animals than people, revolutionized cattle feedlots by at least making the treatment of cattle more humane before they're slaughtered. Her life story is fascinating — especially the "Squeeze Machine" she invented for herself.

You can't make this shit up — except for Charlie Monfort and his family's cattle feedlots. As Eric Schlosser wrote in Fast Food Nation:

The money from Greeley's feedlots wafted down to Denver, enabling Charlie Monfort and his family to buy the Rockies and feed campaign contributions to right-wing religious wackos like Rick Santorum and Tom Tancredo.

As for the Rockies' players themselves, Denver Westword's Michael Roberts pleads, "Please, Don't Play the Jesus Card, Rockies."

Today's timid New York Times article reminds the nation that the Rockies are a Christian team by intelligent design: Monfort is born-again, and General Manager Dan O'Dowd is not only a dedicated Christian but purposely recruits other Christians to be his players.

Bob Nightengale (a former colleague of mine years ago at the Arizona Republic) broke that story nationally in a piece last summer for USA Today. The Times's Ben Shpigel begins his story today with a denial by a Jewish Rockie that the team's Christianity is forced down his throat. Shpigel, in a typical Times skin-back, then notes:

Yeah, right.

In any case, I hope the Rockies slaughter the Red Sox — religious nuts like Qutb and Dobson notwithstanding.

Shake Your Bhutto, Rock Your World

Posted by Harkavy at 8:42 AM, October 16, 2007

Bad news on the global terror front: Unstable Pakistan will become even more shaky when its former leader (and Musharraf's enemy) returns home this week.

As Benazir Bhutto prepares to return to Pakistan later this week from her Dubai exile and becomes a target of strongman prick Pervez Musharraf's assassins, we can only recall how tragic it was for the U.S. to pull back from that volatile region more than five years ago.

Back in 2002, the Bush-Cheney regime abandoned the full-fledged hunt for Osama bin Laden and duped Congress and the country into invading Iraq.

Pakistan was where it was at. Bin Laden was hiding there and in neighboring Afghanistan. As the Soviets found out, you can't fight rebels in Afghanistan without somehow, some way also fighting them as they scurry across the border into Pakistan, where they have even government support.

Officials of Pakistan's spy agency, the ISI — widely credited with co-opting the Taliban and, along with the Saudis and Reagan administration, arming them — were sympathetic to bin Laden as long as he didn't destabilize their own country.

Recall that Porter Goss and Bob Graham, chairs of the House and Senate Intelligence committees, were having breakfast on the morning of 9/11 with Mahmood Ahmed, the Pakistani ISI official who later turned out to be hijacker Mohammed Atta's bagman. It was also Ahmed who had sent $100,000 to Atta on orders from the guy who later kidnapped Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. You can't make this shit up.

Yes, we left Pakistan in 2002. Big mistake.

We invaded Iraq. Bigger mistake.

We inflamed the Shia-Sunni schism in Iraq, widening everywhere else that ancient rift between Islam's main sects. Take Pakistan. Unlike in Iraq, the Sunnis are the majority. Please remember that most of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudis, and despotic monarchy Saudi Arabia is ruled by Sunni fanatics.

There has long been sectarian violence in Pakistan — see this October 2004 BBC backgrounder. Add to that the return to the country of Benazir Bhutto, whose daddy, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was Pakistan's prime minister in the '70s before he was executed by the country's military. Later, Benazir Bhutto — nearly a dead ringer for Andrea Martin/Edith Prickley's version of another South Asia strongwoman, Indira Ghandi — became prime minister, and then she was driven from Pakistan amid corruption charges.

Pakistan was a bigger threat to world stability after 9-11 than Iraq was. Yes, Iraq was a bigger threat to Israel and always a danger to Kuwait, but Pakistan's instability was a much more dangerous threat to the U.S., no matter what the Bush regime's propagandists have drummed into our heads.

Now's the perfect time to recall that the hunt by Musharraf and the ISI for bin Laden was half-hearted at best. Our reaction has been to step up arm sales to Musharraf, as I noted in April 2005.

Don't be surprised if that well-armed Pakistan government sends more Lockheed fighter jets swooping down on Bhutto than it sent to look for bin Laden.

School's a Blast in Middle East

Posted by Harkavy at 11:41 AM, September 26, 2007

Kids of all religions learning a lot about rocketry.

You don't have to be a rocket scientist to know that the Israeli-Palestinian death dance marathon staged by adults is more than annoying to children on both sides.

In schools themselves, the ones that are open, it's like the science fair from hell: The kids are learning immediate lessons in rocket-building and rocket avoidance. After school, the favorite music is rock — the pop of the ones being thrown by Palestinian kids, the house rock of walls inside Gaza homes being pummeled into rubble by Israeli soldiers.

It's a little different in Iraq's schools, where recess is going on and on — millions of people have fled their homes, and those who haven't find it too risky to venture outdoors. Want good grades? Forget the apple. Threaten to kill your teacher or kidnap his son.

Take a break from all the stories about nutcase Mahmoud Ahmadinejad speaking at Columbia. Protest against him — that's your right — but who the hell cares? That's a circus. But the freaky sideshows are in the Middle East, where the age of rock is going to cause permanent damage to kids for generations to come, creating anger and fear on all sides that will be easily stirred up into religious fear. In effect, chapters of Future Terrorists of Arabia are popping up all over.

Here in Springfield, Mrs. Lovejoy would say, "Ohhh, won't somebody please think of the children!" (Listen to her here.)

She's right, and these are a few of the stories — underreported in the U.S. or not reported at all — that explain why:

• Shell shock: Seven Qassams, crude but effective Palestinian-made rockets, blast the Israeli town of Sderot in early September:

• Human shields: Israeli soldiers storm a West Bank refugee camp, blasting through the interior walls of homes and reportedly using Palestinians as shields:

• "Fighting Israel is Islamic duty": Palestinian kids are being taught that fighting Israel is a holy task, and Israeli kids are being taught that there is no West Bank, that Israel has dominion over all of ancient Israel. Palestinian maps and schoolbooks are nuts, and those in Israel border on the insane:

• Hostile entities: After years of Arab countries continually refusing to call Israel anything other than "the Zionist entity," Israel is now labeling Gaza a "hostile entity" and is further strangling its residents:

• Recess in Iraq: Iraqi parents are running on empty. School attendance is sharply down because of an outbreak of ditching — that's residents flinging themselves into ditches to avoid be killed by explosions or soldiers:

• "Either you give us good marks or you will die": If Iraqi kids do somehow manage to reach college, they're practically assured of high grades because professors are scared to death:

A Magna Carta Sales Event!

Posted by Harkavy at 9:26 AM, September 25, 2007

Sotheby's to sell a raggedy-ass copy next month in New York City. Habeas corpus not included.

With the Lieberman-Kyl Amendment's momentous move toward a pre-emptive strike on Iran, now's as good a time as any to sell off the Magna Carta. As everyone can see, George W. Bush has poked enough holes in it to reduce its value.

In our era of take no prisoners, but if you do, hold them unlawfully at Abu Ghraib, Gitmo and various torture chambers around the world — new AG Michael Mukasey is bound to agree and, more importantly, he'll be much more effective at running that game on us than Alberto Gonzales was. So it makes sense to peddle this piece of civil-liberties paper to the highest bidder.

In December, Sotheby's plans to do just that in New York City. The privately owned copy, dated 1297, is expected to fetch $20 million to $30 million — undercoating included. But after the past seven years of the Bush-Cheney regime's erosion of the ancient document's key provision on habeas corpus, the question is whether it's worth the vellum it's scrawled on.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's appearance in New York City coincides perfectly with the attempt by war hawks Joe Lieberman and Jon Kyl to push us into a pre-emptive strike on Iran. Rapping the Iranian ruler's knuckles was so easy that it was bound to stir up the populace and take their minds off the tragedy in Iraq.

The New Yorker's Seymour Hersh wrote years ago about the current administration's thirst for Persian blood, and various Israeli officials have beat those drums too.

That's all we need: another war to produce more prisoners whose rights of habeas corpus we can deny.

Bad Guys at Ground Zero

Posted by Harkavy at 9:32 AM, September 21, 2007

This oily business of dealing with evil foreign leaders.

New York's tabloids and assorted pols came unglued yesterday about the very idea of Iran's crackpot hardliner Mahmoud Ahmedinejad wanting to visit Ground Zero.

Where were they when Uzbek dictator Islam Karimov, whose regime boils people to death, was courted by George W. Bush and Mayor Mike Bloomberg?

Don't let your own blood boil at the thought of a bad guy visiting our sacralized 9/11 site. Condemn it, if you want, but Ahmedinejad was just trying to score political points, as our own pols do all the time at Ground Zero. He got what he wanted: The angry U.S. reaction will play well back home in Tehran, especially with the radical mullahs who really run Iran and like to stir up hatred for the "Great Satan."

Do we even have to say that in international politics, enemies today are pals tomorrow, and vice versa, and that the reasons almost always have to do with greed for money and natural resources?

On the other hand, it would be nice if our press at least reported these events. The Uzbek despot Karimov laid a wreath at Ground Zero in 2002, and there was literally not one word in the U.S. press about it at the time — I'm not talking about criticism or praise but any words at all. Nothing.

So Karimov is not a bad enough guy to get you worked up? Saddam Hussein was brown-nosed by Don Rumsfeld in December 1983. There's no reason to condemn Rumsfeld for that; it was just oil politics — just like the oil politics that Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney played when they seized upon the 9/11 attacks to justify invading Iraq.

After all, when Texas oil execs questioned Cheney in 1998, when he was still at Halliburton, about the physical dangers of pursuing oil in turbulent parts of Asia, the future vice president and de facto commander in chief told them:

Saddam is gone, but we still don't really have Iraq's oil. We do, however, have such evil people as the Taliban to deal with, right? Well, the Taliban were hailed as Afghan freedom fighters by Ronald Reagan during their triumphant visit to the White House on March 21, 1983. Reagan said at the time:

That's ancient history, huh? In fact, they were still our pals 14 years later. In late 1997, the Taliban were wined and dined at the homes of Bush's pals, the Houston oil execs, during Dubya's reign as the hangingest governor in U.S. history.

The oil schnooks were buttering up the Taliban for pipelines and other bidness, of course. See Wayne Madsen's "Afghanistan, the Taliban, and the Bush Oil Team" for details.

At least that courting of the Taliban less than 10 years ago was reported at the time. Of the many words in the mainstream press, my favorites are from a December 14, 1997, story by Caroline Lees in the Telegraph (U.K.), in which she describes the Taliban officials' visit to Unocal vice president Martin Miller's palatial Houston home:

Blackwater's 'Drug War' Bonanza

Posted by Harkavy at 11:59 AM, September 19, 2007

$15 billion of your money up in smoke for under-fire mercenary company, other defense contractors.

While Blackwater's mercenaries beg for mercy for killing a baby and 19 other people in Baghdad on Sunday, they're already working on another lucrative government contract on yet another foreign adventure: the "war on drugs."

In a major new outsourcing deal reported by only a few outlets, including the Army Times, Blackwater will divvy up a $15 billion pot of government gold, along with four huge defense contractors: Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and Arinc.

Blackwater claims to be building remote-control spy airships. Purty darn good for an army based in a little North Carolina town — no, it's Currituck, not Mayberry.

Arinc, a Maryland-based major supplier of airplane surveillance and passenger-counting equipment, is particularly stoked about the deal, which it announced on the sixth anniversary of 9/11:

Hang on, Arinc, you're getting ahead of yourselves. Here's how GovExec.com's Katherine McIntire Peters describes this other privatized war, which apparently is necessary because, even with the privatized war in Iraq, we still don't have enough troops to conduct all these wars:

Blackwater clearly knows how to deal with foreigners. But how does a little ol' company get to share our wealth with such huge defense contractors? No doubt it's got low friends in high places.

It probably didn't hurt the mercenary army that, according to federal campaign records, its top execs gave $1,000 to Tom DeLay's campaign on December 14, 2004. Or that they contributed mostly to other openly God-fearing lawmakers, like Bono pal Rick Santorum, Kansas's Todd Tiahrt, and Indiana's Mike Pence — whose campaign-finance tool is the Principles Exalt a Nation PAC.

Praise the Lord and pass the ammo. Better make that a blunt.

Dreadlock in Baghdad

Posted by Harkavy at 7:28 AM, September 18, 2007

Here's a question, raised in 1979 by the mellifluous Mighty Diamonds:

Thirty years later, the answer's clear: The Pentagon, that's who. At best we'll get the "rogue security contractor" excuse from the Bush regime for Sunday's cacophonous killing of 11 Iraqis in Baghdad by the North Carolina mercenary army Blackwater.

That excuse has worked before. As I wrote in July 2004, it was used by the Pentagon after the Abu Ghraib tortures came to light. SecDef Don Rumsfeld blamed "rogue" soldiers.

Our memories are short when it comes to the mercenaries employed by the Bush regime. As I pointed out in August 2004, private "interrogators" from CACI were employed by the Pentagon at Abu Ghraib, where all that "fear up" went down.

After this latest incident of privatized violence, we have Blackwater saying its boys were ambushed. Blackwater has 1,000 "troops" in Iraq and guards Ambassador Ryan Crocker. Yes, they guard Crocker, and the administration guards them. Monday's Washington Post concisely captured the two versions of the latest Blackwater escapade. Here's the first:

Followed by the second version:

They wanted to shoot them some Ay-rabs, pal. The way I see it, the Mighty Diamonds sang about the possibility of dreadlocked Rastafarians someday making bodyguards pay the price:

But don't worry, Blackwater bodyguards, the Bush regime will shelter you. Iraq's citizens are the ones who can't hide. As of this morning, IBC's "documented civilian deaths from violence" totals somewhere between 72,596 and 79,187.

Yes, the Blackwater "incident" was notable. But as the IBC "recent events" list notes, on that same Sunday, many other Iraqis died, and not at the hands of American mercenaries, whom our press continues to euphemistically label "contractors" or "bodyguards."

One of the victims was a 12-year-old boy who was killed in Diwaniya during a raid by U.S. and Iraqi troops, according to news reports assembled by IBC. Wonder what happened there?

In any case, this particular bloody Sunday was predestined. IBC's list of 38 people who were killed just the day before includes this entry:

And this one:

The 9/11 Cloud

Posted by Harkavy at 7:04 AM, September 10, 2007

Obscuring the view of Iraq.

Great timing by the White House for the so-called Petraeus report, which Bush regime staffers are busily writing as we speak: Remembrance of the horrific day six years ago is clouding our view of the Iraq debacle, where more U.S. troops have been killed than the total number of civilians on 9-11.

The Petraeus report won't compete with 9/11 for news space. The report's being released just as rational mourning and irrational jingoism are at their highest, so it'll just be part of it. One person you're not likely to see on TV or in the mainstream press in the next two days is former Reagan DOD official Lawrence Korb, who actually has a plan for withdrawing troops from Iraq. Korb is reduced to peddling on op-ed pages his sane and detailed plan for realistically pulling troops out of Iraq within a year. Over at BTC News, Weldon Berger wonders: "Why isn't Lawrence Korb on CNN non-stop?" Good question. Berger describes Joe Biden's plan as "hallucinatory" and Salon's Glenn Greenwald already cut through the bullshit of Ken Pollack and others who the press now call "critics of the war." Good points.

God help us if there's another attack on this 9/11, and no offense to the people who lost relatives and friends in the infamous attack in 2001 or will lose them because of the toxic cloud, but we still have to step back from that event and look at the present and future. No peacenik, Korb talks rationally about the here and now.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, brilliant U.S. Navy Photographer's Mate 2nd Class Jim Watson captured Ground Zero as a cathedral. Six years later, 9/11 has become sacralized, a piece of state religion, more so in the rest of the country than here in New York City. And that religiosity is only natural after such an unnatural event.

As always, though, religious feeling becomes a power tool in the hands of schnooks, especially those craftsmen in the Bush-Cheney regime. The Petraeus report could have been prepared and released a month ago or two months ago. But the 9/11 anniversary, with ceremonies at all sporting events and speechifying by all elected or wannabe-elected officials throughout the country, will obscure the current tragedy of Iraq, where at least 80,000 people have been killed by our troops and now mostly by terror attacks.

Of course 9/11 should be remembered, and its victims mourned. Should it obscure everything else and should the ceremonies be used to justify the unwarranted invasion of Iraq and continue the "war on terror"? No and no.

While we're deluged with 9/11 stuff over here, this is what's going on over in Iraq, as portrayed in recent IRIN headlines:

• Iraq's food rationing system failing as Ramadan approaches, specialists warn

• Blood sellers find market niche in Baghdad

• Violence, poverty, unemployment fuel rising alcoholism

• Hospitals under pressure as doctors move abroad

• Hospitals in north struggle to contain cholera outbreak

• Translators forced to quit jobs after being targeted by insurgents

• People flee Baghdad district as gunmen impose Shariah law

• Power cuts getting worse, affecting lives

Pullout Plan? Big Wheels Just Keep Spinning.

Posted by Harkavy at 8:35 AM, September 6, 2007

New reports on Iraq confirm previous reports. Further reports coming. The best report, by Larry Korb, goes unreported.

While we're waiting for the Petraeus report — which will be written by the White House, as previously buried in an L.A. Times story — the press is playing up a new report to Congress that says the Iraqi national police force (its army, kind of) won't be ready to handle the chaos until later this century.

But that's old news. The freshest report wasn't commissioned by Congress or the White House or the Pentagon. And it didn't have anything to do with the Senate Democrats trying to "reframe" the "Iraq debate," as the New York Times put it in a detailed story yesterday about that irrelevant bluster.

The most dynamic and relevant report comes from Larry Korb, a high-ranking Defense official under Ronald Reagan, and it's going unreported. Now a senior fellow at the progressive think tank Center for American Progress, Korb released on August 27 an actual plan for pulling out of Iraq. Read "How to Redeploy: Implementing a Responsible Drawdown of U.S. Forces from Iraq" or listen to Korb talk about it, or do both.

More than a week after its release by the mainstream and highly visible think tank, Korb's report hasn't even hit the news pages and has gotten only a little play on op-ed pages. But it's detailed and realistic, compared with all the other pullout plans — of which there are none, except for the Bush-Cheney regime's current strategy, pictured above.

Seriously, Korb's plan is pretty damn good reading, and it comes from someone who's no flaming liberal pinko. But, then, veteran Iraq watcher Tony Cordesman's reports have been consistently ignored since before the 2003 invasion.

Here's what Korb's report says:

That's nice, but how do we do it?

And not only maps. Korb and his collaborators lay out a detailed month-by-month schedule, division and brigade by division and brigade — which equipment to leave and which to take with us, and doing it all with the least danger to our troops and to the Iraqis who haven't already fled their country.

Now that's a report worth reading. Meanwhile, we're deluged in the press with old news and report upon report upon report that say the same things and don't offer solutions, except to "disband" or "start over." Too late for that talk. Stuck in a bad place, our big wheels are spinning and not getting us or our troops anywhere.

Treating the latest of such reports as fresh, the Washington Post puts it this way this morning.

Yes, but the New York Times broke that very report last week, saying:

The Times played the breakdown of the police as a scoop, and the rest of the media followed right along. But that, too, was mostly old news.

Yet another report, way back on June 7, made the same points, as was reported at the time — or, rather, underreported.

That June report was, and is, readily available from the Pentagon. Check it out yourself (PDF). Its details are devastating, especially for a document just sitting there on the Pentagon website. For instance:

Corruption? Oh, brother. The details reported three months ago were staggering:

And who knows how many instances have gone unreported and haven't been investigated? That's because even the investigators are deathly afraid:

But the Pentagon's June report went relatively unnoticed, maybe because of how it ended:

With such a bland summary of explosive facts, further fact-finding was clearly needed. You'd think enough facts have been found. But do we really need to point out that it's always safer for politicians to either "reframe debates" or commission their own studies and reports than to listen to people like Korb and Cordesman and then hammer out hard decisions?

Tattoo You

Posted by Harkavy at 8:42 AM, August 30, 2007

Art is alive in Baghdad. And just in case you aren't . . .

Amid the sweltering heat, bomb blasts, curfews, fleeing aid workers, and lack of electricity in Baghdad, artistic expression flourishes. But it's for a practical reason: People are getting tattooed so that if they get killed their families will at least be able to identify their corpses.

The news service IRIN puts it another way: "Grim Tattoo Subculture Emerges Amid Daily Violence":

The designs are nice, as you can see from a right shoulder captured by IRIN photographer Abu Malik. But this isn't just your normal hipster fad:

People may have to get their etchings done while on the run. Tattoos aren't likely to stave off persecution not only during religious pilgrimages but by the fanatics roaming Baghdad's streets. Another IRIN report notes that Baghdad residents are fleeing not only from bombs and U.S. troops but also because gunmen are swooping into their neighborhoods to impose strict Islamic laws: