Morning Report 5/31/05
Iraq Strategy: Addition by Distraction

Posted by Harkavy at 11:56 AM, May 31, 2005

Nothing like a celebrity trial to distract people from their problems. Apparently, that's the latest strategy from the Bush regime's puppet administration in Baghdad.

Or is the puppet really Chucky? Subduing Iraq was going to be child's play, according to the smug predictions by Paul Wolfowitz and Don Rumsfeld, and George W. Bush's handlers told him to declare in May 2003, "Mission accomplished."

Summer heat, no electricity, Baghdad encircled by soldiers, civil war in Iraq, the war on Social Security in America—let's give everyone the circus of Saddam's trial.

Dahr Jamail nails it in "Things Are Getting Worse By the Day," posted yesterday on uruknet.info:

Keep in mind that all of this is against the backdrop of well over 50% unemployment, horrendous traffic jams, and an infrastructure in shambles that continues to degrade with next to no reconstruction occurring in Baghdad.

"Electricity shut offs drive us crazy in this hot summer," one of my friends wrote me recently, "Even we can't read at night because of long hours of electricity cuts and because the outside generators can't withstand running these long hours and we have to turn these generators off for some time to cool them!"

He continues, "Two years of occupation—for God sake, where is the rebuilding, where the hell are these billions donated to Iraq? Even not 1% improvement in services and electricity! They say again and again the terrorists are to blame and I would accept this, but why they do not protect these facilities? Do the American camps have cuts of electricity? No, no, and nobody will allow this to happen … but poor Iraqis, nobody would be sorry for them if they burn with the hell of summer, small kids and old men they get dehydrated because no electricity, no cold water, etc. Have you heard about the tea that is mixed with iron particles? It is real in our life. People have to make sure their tea is not mixed with iron by use of magnets."

Aw, quit your bitchin'. Iraq can be a great place in the summer—if you have connections. While Iraqis suffer in squatter camps or in their own paralyzed cities, U.S. soldiers and officials have seized Saddam's palaces and turned them into lush headquarters. And back in July 2003, grateful U.S. soldiers spent time at a mountain resort next to Lake Dukan in northern Iraq (see photo below).

The Kurdish proprietors, at the behest of U.S. pal Jalal Talabani, gave them the run of the place—swimming pool, showers, air conditioning:

"There isn't a better place in Iraq to spend my 4th of July," [one soldier] said. He added, with a sly grin, he wished he could spend more time at Lake Dukan, maybe even finish out his tour at the resort.

Now, Talabani is the president of the chaotic country. And it looks as if his strategy (and maybe the Pentagon's) is to distract everyone with the long-awaited show trial of Saddam. As Luke Baker of Reuters reported today:

Saddam Hussein could go on trial for crimes against humanity within two months, far earlier than expected, Iraq's new president, Jalal Talabani, said on Tuesday.

Asked in an interview televised on CNN when Saddam's trial would begin, Talabani said: "I hope within two months."

Leading Iraqi politicians have said several times that the trial could start within months. But Iraqi prosecutors and their U.S. advisers say a trial is more likely in 2006, after several of Saddam's lieutenants have been tried, to help build the case against the former dictator.

Iraqi leaders hope that trials of Saddam and his allies will help restore public confidence, sapped by relentless insurgent violence and political bickering that delayed the formation of a cabinet for months.

Maybe there's a dispute between the Bush regime and Kurdish leader Talabani, who's an unwilling puppet, unlike the country's former puppet ruler, the gangster Ayad Allawi. Maybe the Pentagon likes the idea of distracting the press and public with a Saddam trial. Or maybe everyone just wants to hurry up and start the trial before all the judges—like Barwiz Mahmoud Marwani—are assassinated.

Memorial Day in Iraq: Life's Never Been Cheaper

Posted by Harkavy at 11:57 PM, May 30, 2005

What a day to commemorate dead soldiers: Iraq nears a meltdown into civil war, thanks to separate suicidal gestures by crazed insurgents and stupid U.S. officials.

As the Washington Post reported today:

Three suicide bombers strapped with explosives detonated themselves Monday morning amid a crowd of police commandos in the city of Hilla, southeast of Baghdad, killing 31 people and wounding 108, according to Dr. Muhammed Hadi of the Hilla hospital.

The attack targeted about 1,000 police commandos who were gathered for the second consecutive day to protest a decision by the governor of Babil province to disband their units.

Bloody hell. It was said to be the worst attack in Iraq in more than a year. The report by the Post's Saad Sarhan, Khalid Saffar, and Jonathan Finer continued:

The attacks came during a month of sustained violence by insurgents, who have killed more than 700 people across Iraq since the announcement of the country's new government at the end of April. The explosions in Hilla left the streets soaked in blood and strewn with body parts.

Now for our own suicidal gesture: U.S.-led troops stormed the house of Sunni moderate Mohsen Abdul-Hamid (left), put a bag over his head, cuffed him, and hauled him and his three sons away. Adrian Blomfield of the Telegraph (U.K.) reported:

He was freed 10 hours later, but the US military offered no explanation for his detention and stopped short of apologising.

"It was determined that he was detained by mistake and should be released," US central command said in a statement. "Coalition forces regret any inconvenience and acknowledge Mr Hamid's co-operation in resolving this matter."

What a heavy-handed blunder—I thought Jerry Bremer had already left Iraq.

Abdul-Hamid is the last Sunni you'd want to arrest. The head of the Iraqi Islamic Party, he's also a noted Koran scholar—do we get an apology now from the Pentagon for trashing, if not the Koran, at least a Koran scholar? I didn't think so.

This guy is perhaps the most influential Sunni politician who's willing to deal with the Bush regime and its puppet administration in Baghdad. Of course, Abdul-Hamid doesn't always agree, but he has been trying to pull his fellow Sunnis into the political process. Or at least he had been until the blustering raid. As the AP's Patrick Quinn reported:

The arrests came on the second day of Operation Lightning, a massive Iraqi-led anti-insurgent offensive in Baghdad that Abdul-Hamid's party opposes, believing security forces will trample on innocent people's rights.

Abdul-Hamid was taken from his home in the western Baghdad suburb of Khadra at about 6 a.m., along with his three sons and four guards, said party secretary-general Ayad al-Samarei.

"This is a provocative and foolish act and this is part of the pressure exerted on the party," al-Samarei said. "At the time when the Americans say they are keen on real Sunni participation, they are now arresting the head of the only Sunni party that calls for a peaceful solution and have participated in the political process."

Despite what Quinn says, this is a U.S.-led operation. Hell, the Iraqi "government" didn't even know this raid had taken place. And Abdul-Hamid and his party won't soon forget what the troops did. The indefatigable Dahr Jamail, known for The Face of War and other images and words from Iraq, blogged on the Italian site uruknet.info:

Abdul-Hamid refused [the U.S.] apology in the Arab media, and stated that he was humiliated when US soldiers held their boots on his head for 20 minutes.

It was also stated that he accused American soldiers of removing items from his home, including a computer. This is standard operating procedure with home raids—I can't tell you how many Iraqis I've interviewed after their homes were raided who complained of money, jewelry, and other belongings being looted by American soldiers.

The Islamic Party released a statement after the release of Abdul Hamid which said, "The U.S. administration claims it is interested in drawing Sunnis into the political process but it seems that their way of doing so is by raids, arrests, and violating human rights."

As far as Jamail is concerned, the civil war has already started:

At least 740 Iraqis have been killed since the new “government” took power in late April, and with the ongoing operations sparking more attacks each day, it doesn't look like there is an end in sight.

Keep in mind, the vast majority of the Iraqi security forces are either Shia or Kurdish battling against a primarily Sunni resistance (for now). It can easily be argued that we are witnessing a US-backed Iraqi government who is deliberating using its power to wage a civil war.

Of course, maybe the only thing that could stop a civil war is a united hatred of the bungling U.S. occupation. As the Telegraph's Blomfield wrote of the reaction to Abdul-Hamid's arrest:

Iraq's constantly bickering Sunni Arabs, Shias, and Kurds were united in condemnation of what was generally perceived as an outrage.

It appeared that the Americans had not sought permission for the raid from the Iraqi government, again raising questions about its supposed sovereignty.

Morning Report 5/28/05
Downing Street Memo: Coverup Then, Coverup Now

Posted by Harkavy at 11:34 AM, May 28, 2005

Almost as scandalous as the searing evidence that the Cheney and Blair regimes decided in early 2002 to invade Iraq without justification and then cook up the justification later is the U.S. press's reaction.

Don't blame the government this time for the press's coverup.

Considering the global, electronic reach of the media, there's no excuse. And I have to say that I told you so.

Sparking my frustration is an e-mail that reader Richard Agler sent me on May 18, as news of the "Downing Street Memo"—and lamentations about why it was ignored over here—finally started circulating in the U.S. press.

More has been written in the U.S. about whether the memo should have been written about than about the contents and implications of the friggin' memo itself.

Anyway, Agler wrote me:

So where is your coverage of the Downing Street memo???

Thanks for writing, Richard, and bless your heart for reading, but don't blame me. I first wrote about it on April 30 in this Bush Beat item: "Bush, Blair Decided in '02 to Invade Iraq and Worry About Justification Later, Say Brit Papers":

A British government memo from '02 indicates that the Bush regime got Tony Blair to go along in July of that year with a plan to invade Iraq and then build the "intelligence and facts" to justify the decision, British newspapers are reporting tonight.

The bombshell memo, leaked to The Sunday Times (U.K.), was written a few weeks after Prime Minister Tony Blair traveled to George W. Bush's Crawford ranch for what the papers described as basically a "council of war" between the dumbass POTUS and the bright Brit who should have known better.

And why should Blair have known better? The Independent (U.K.) is also reporting tonight [April 30] that the Foreign Office told Blair even earlier, in March '02, that it had grave reservations about invading Iraq.

If what the papers are saying is true, we're not exactly shocked. But we're in awe of their gall.

That same night, I posted a follow-up piece, "Phony War, Real Deaths: More About the Blockbuster British Memos About Bush-Blair Pre-Invasion Plotting."

The next day, May 1, I wrote another piece, "Runaway Betrayal: How The Bush Regime Cooked Up Its Justifications For War. Read About It In The British Press."

Hey, I'm not taking credit for prying the memos out of 10 Downing. Michael Smith of the Times of London deserves all that credit. And other British reporters worked hard on the story, too. There's far more than just the "Downing Street Memo" in this tale of lying by Cheney and Blair and their minions.

In fact, my colleague Jarrett Murphy, who sits six feet from me in our Lower East Side rabbit warren, didn't ignore the Brits' work. He wrote about a related aspect of pre-war scheming and lying in an April 29 piece, "Blair and Dubya: War and Words," that's well worth reading.

Murphy's clever, but here's something else that's darkly funny: On the weekend that British news people were feverishly writing about these scandalous memos—a case of presidential abuse and lies far worse, and of course far more deadly, than Watergate—Laura Bush strapped it on and gave the Washington press corps a reacharound at the 91st annual White House Correspondents' Association dinner. I wrote about that absurdity at the time, in a May 1 piece, "That Bush is a Real Comedian." ABC News "reported" at the time: "Mrs. Bush Steals Show at Reporters' Dinner".

Good job, ABC and the rest of you. Now what about those stolen lives of American soldiers and Iraqi civilians? Take off your fucking tuxes, celebrity journalists, and get to work.

Jihad Fever: Catch It!

Posted by Harkavy at 4:26 PM, May 26, 2005

Updated 5/27/05 7:30 a.m.

Religious warfare got a major boost yesterday not only in parts of the globe where heathens live but also right here in America.

Activist judge Priscilla Owen (left), whose combination of corporate greed and holy zeal long ago won the hearts of Karl Rove and George W. Bush, finally won Senate confirmation for a lifetime seat on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. She's the kind of religious zealot you'd find on courts in Iran—theocrats who try to use their beliefs to control others' behavior.

Case in point has been written about extensively: Owen's ridiculous opinion in a teen abortion case that came before the Texas Supreme Court. The case involved the Texas Parental Notification Act. Here are a couple of paragraphs from the Alliance for Justice that sum it up:

• Prior to her original nomination, in each of the many cases that came before her involving Texas' Parental Notification Act, Justice Owen voted against allowing a minor to obtain an abortion without notifying her parents, often ignoring the law's explicit exceptions. In one case, she advocated requiring a minor to show an awareness of the "philosophic, moral, social and religious arguments that can be brought to bear" before obtaining judicial approval for an abortion without parental consent. The statute contains no such requirement.

• Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, when he was one of Justice Owen's colleagues on the Texas Supreme Court, criticized Justice Owen in another case for attempting to re-write the parental notification statute, calling her dissent "an unconscionable act of judicial activism."

Yes, I know that Gonzales later explained it during his own confirmation hearing in January by insisting that he was actually criticizing himself for "judicial activism." Gonzales lied to the Senate. If you don't believe me, read his words from that opinion.

See the Alliance for Justice analysis of Owen's judicial work for more.

Owen is a Sunday School teacher at St. Barnabas the Encourager, a breakaway neo-orthodox Episcopalian congregation in Austin. You can read Pastor Jeff Black's Morning by Morning meditations if you want, but here's a passage from the Daily Texan last summer that should tell you what kind of behavior the church doesn't encourage:

Disagreements over tradition have led to a break within one Austin church. St. Barnabas the Encourager, a congregation founded in 1998, will leave the Episcopal Church because the church does not condone certain practices or believe in the Bible as the sole instrument of salvation.

And what "practices" are we talking about?

Phil Mallory, senior warden of St. Barnabas, said the break was provoked by the evolution of the Episcopal Church's doctrine. …

[The] beliefs of the St. Barnabas congregation leave no room for a gray area, Mallory said. "If they're practicing homosexuals, then the Bible is clear about that," Mallory said. "What it says is that God gave human beings a sexual relationship, but that is to be only in a marriage—a marriage defined between a man and a woman. And outside of marriage, you are to remain celibate."

Other instances of good ol' American tortured logic caught the eye of Amnesty International, whose annual report castigates the U.S. for setting the tone for Earth's last 12 months of inhumanity. AI's secretary-general, Irene Khan, notes:

The USA, as the unrivaled political, military, and economic hyper-power, sets the tone for governmental behaviour worldwide. When the most powerful country in the world thumbs its nose at the rule of law and human rights, it grants a license to others to commit abuse with impunity and audacity. From Israel to Uzbekistan, Egypt to Nepal, governments have openly defied human rights and international humanitarian law in the name of national security and "counter-terrorism."

Khan points out that AI published its first report on torture in 1973 and said at the time:

Torture rears its head when the legal barriers against it are barred. Torture feeds on discrimination and fear. Torture gains ground when official condemnation of it is less than absolute.

Then Khan adds:

Despite the near-universal outrage generated by the photographs coming out of Abu Ghraib, and the evidence suggesting that such practices are being applied to other prisoners held by the USA in Afghanistan, Guantánamo and elsewhere, neither the US administration nor the US Congress has called for a full and independent investigation.

Instead, the US government has gone to great lengths to restrict the application of the Geneva Conventions and to "re-define" torture. It has sought to justify the use of coercive interrogation techniques, the practice of holding "ghost detainees" (people in unacknowledged incommunicado detention) and the "rendering" or handing over of prisoners to third countries known to practise torture. The detention facility at Guantánamo Bay has become the gulag of our times, entrenching the practice of arbitrary and indefinite detention in violation of international law. Trials by military commissions have made a mockery of justice and due process.

Yeah, well, the U.S. president was the hangingest governor in his country's history, so what do you expect?

What's worse is that we're likely to have even more opportunities to display our arrogance to the world about torture—and not just because John Bolton is just about to be confirmed as U.N. ambassador.

It's likely to be at least five more years until Iraqi forces can impose law and order and the U.S. can start pulling out troops, says the International Institute of Strategic Studies, a London think tank that's closer to the views of Genghis Khan than it is to the views of Irene Kahn. The IISS also notes that Iraq is proving to be a fine breeding ground for terrorists—something that's been obvious to me and a lot of other people for a long time—so that means full employment for defense contractors. In other words, all is not lost.

As usual, it took the foreign press to put two and two together. In this case, Richard Norton-Taylor and Michael Howard, on the ground in Iraq for the Guardian (U.K.), wove the IISS report into the deadly chaos:

The report said that, on balance, US policy over the past year had been effective in emboldening regional players in the Middle East and the Gulf to rally against rogue states.

But it warned that the inspirational effect of the intervention in Iraq on Islamist terrorism was "the proverbial elephant in the living room. From al-Qaida's point of view, [President] Bush's Iraq policies have arguably produced a confluence of propitious circumstances: a strategically bogged down America, hated by much of the Islamic world, and regarded warily even by its allies."

Iraq "could serve as a valuable proving ground for 'blooding' foreign jihadists, and could conceivably form the basis of a second generation of capable al-Qaida leaders … and middle-management players", the report said.

I'd predict that before Iraq calms down, we're going to be torturing Muslims in Central Asia—oops, we're already doing that. In fact, a cluster of 25 million repressed and boiling mad Muslims are yearning for revolution in Uzbekistan, one of the friendly dictatorships to which we're shipping prisoners for final answers. They could use some democracy, but what they have in mind is not a secular state. The U.S. has already picked its poison in that battle by continuing to prop up tyrant Islam Karimov. He's a ruthless, brutal, repressive sonofabitch who tortures his own people and he demands that they live in a secular state. That remind you of anyone else? Saddam Hussein, for instance? But for now, Karimov is our boy. Of course, that's going to ultimately be the losing side.

So let's see: Amid the bubbling revolts in Central Aphasia, just down the road in southwest Asia, the recruiting of hyper-conservative Muslim terrorists is up. Across the ocean in America, the recruiting of hyper-conservative Christian judges is up. All in all, prospects look great for an increase in religious warfare. The 21st century version of the Great Game looks more and more like the Crusades. It should last a while.

Uzbekistan's Terrible Beauty

Posted by Harkavy at 3:17 PM, May 25, 2005

China's authoritarian government, facing millions of pissed-off Muslims within its own borders, has reached out to Uzbek dictator Islam Karimov, vowing "unequivocal support," as the New York Times puts it this morning.

Wow, that's a real shocker. As the New Statesman notes:

In an era when TV determines an event's importance, the massacre in the Uzbek town of Andijan has received less coverage than it deserves. Camera access denied, few stories supplied.

The reported death toll of more than 700 constitutes one of the worst cases of bloodshed involving government troops and civilian protesters since Tiananmen Square in 1989.

The upheaval in, first, Kyrgyzstan and now Uzbekistan has complicated the Great Game for George W. Bush's handlers.

Kyrgyz despot Askar Akayev was merely a supporting player in the imperial drama over Central Asia—though not to his people, who booted his ass out in March. But Karimov and Uzbekistan are a different matter.

As much as Karimov is a rich caricature of an unenlightened despot, Uzbekistan is simply rich. Aesthetically, the place is miraculous—Samarkand, Bukhara, Tashkent, palaces, domes, mosques, 3,000-year-old burgs, staggering mountains, terrible deserts, fertile valleys, grand canyons.

That wouldn't make it valuable except as a vacation spot for Wall Streeters. What the U.S., Russia, and China are fighting over is a country incredibly rich in money-making resources, which I guess also makes it a vacation spot for Wall Streeters. As Alisa Newman pointed out in '99 in "Investing in Uzbekistan: a rough ride on the Silk Road," a shrewd piece in Law and Policy in International Business:

Although Uzbekistan lacks the vast Caspian Sea oil reserves of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan … , its lands swell with other valuable resources. These are known as Uzbekistan's three "golds": white (cotton), of which it is the world's fourth largest producer; blue (natural gas), of which it is the world's 10th largest producer; and gold, of which it is the world's eighth largest producer.

Like flies to shit, various capitalists, like Enron's Ken Lay (with Bush's personal help), have been drawn to Uzbekistan.

So have far less harmful and much more creative people, like M.J. Engh and John Candy.

Engh's well-regarded 1987 novel Arslan is truly a shocker—a Central Asian dictator swiftly conquers the modern-day U.S. and sets up his HQ in a small town in Illinois, where he rapes youngsters and becomes friends with a school principal and … well, just read it. Author Mary Jane Engh, also a scholar of Roman history, places the title character as hailing from Turkiston, which is what the modern Uzbekistan once was.

The late John Candy and the rest of the old SCTV crew savaged "Uzbek treachery" in a send-up of Soviet-era Russian TV.

More recently, a real-life sex drama linked Islam Karimov's daughter to a bitter divorce battle in New Jersey. Peter Baker of the Washington Post wove a terrific tale last year:

It turns out that divorcing Gulnora Karimova, known as "the Uzbek princess," is no simple matter. Her father is Islam Karimov, president of Uzbekistan and autocrat nonpareil, who rules over a repressive Central Asian country where prisoners have been boiled alive. He also happens to be a key ally in America's war on terrorism.

Karimova took the kids in 2001 and has been ducking an arrest warrant issued by a New Jersey judge ever since, hiding out in Moscow, where she knows officials won't cross her father.

Whatever Gulnora wants, Gulnora gets—or "Lola," as the New Statesman's Julian Holloway recalls the delectable daughter of the despot in "Dancing As the People Die." Here's how Holloway starts his piece:

I once danced with President Karimov's daughter Lola at her nightclub, the Katakomba. After a few seconds her bodyguard cut in, and off she went past Uzbekistan's elite, her head set like a princess's under the flashing lights.

Since then things have changed in Tashkent.

The real change, an overthrow of Lola's dad, hasn't happened yet. But it will.

Morning Report 5/24/05
Compromising Democracy

Posted by Harkavy at 10:17 AM, May 24, 2005

Judgment day must be near: Discourse is rough everywhere in America except where it should be—in Congress.

Striking a blow against democracy, the entrenched members of the nation's most exclusive club preserved their civil atmosphere Monday but poisoned the civic atmosphere for the rest of us.

As the Washington Post notes this morning:

Fourteen Republican and Democratic senators broke with their party leaders last night to avert a showdown vote over judicial nominees, agreeing to votes on some of President Bush's nominees while preserving the right to filibuster others in "extraordinary circumstances."

The dramatic announcement caught Senate leaders by surprise and came on the eve of a scheduled vote to ban filibusters of judicial nominees, the "nuclear option" that has dominated Senate discussions for weeks. The deal clears the way for prompt confirmation of three appellate court nominees—Priscilla R. Owen, Janice Rogers Brown, and William H. Pryor Jr.

If you don't know who Janice Rogers Brown is, you haven't been reading The Black Commentator, which recently wrote:

Brown is a disciple of the Federalist Society, far-right lawyers who hate almost everything that has occurred since ratification of the Constitution, with the exception of the establishment of corporations as virtual legal persons.

In an October 2003 profile of Brown, The Black Commentator, borrowing from the Guardian (U.K.), noted:

The California state judge “has such an atrocious civil rights record she makes Clarence Thomas look like Thurgood Marshall," said Rep. Diane Watson (D-CA) at a Congressional Black Caucus press conference, last week. "She's cut from the same cloth as Clarence Thomas," declared Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District of Columbia’s non-voting representative in the House, and one of the caucus’s leading legal lights.

The buzz words of this monumental cave-in by the Senate just kill me. "Armageddon has been avoided," the BBC quoted New York Democratic senator Chuck Schumer as saying.

Schumer was referring to the Bush regime's vow to shut down the Senate if a compromise wasn't reached about the fight over a few of Bush's reactionary judges.

It was the GOP that cooked up the phrase "nuclear option" to warn what would happen if the Democrats filibustered. The Democrats, eager to preserve the decorum of the clubby Senate, bought into that language. Armageddon, it's not. Armageddon tired of these so-called Democrats running scared.

Once again, the extremists among the Republicans have set not only the agenda but the words used during this war over filibusters. As the BBC says this morning:

Republicans have been accusing Democrats of behaving in an unconstitutional manner by advocating the tactic, and threatened to abolish the rule for judicial nominations.

Democrats—and some critics on the Republican side—have pointed out that the same tactic was used against former President Bill Clinton's nominees.

They also point out that there is little difference between the ratio of approvals to blocked nominations under President Bush and that of the Clinton administration.

If the Republican side had gone ahead, in a plan which would have used the vote of Vice-President Dick Cheney to declare the filibuster unconstitutional, the upshot could have been to freeze Senate business altogether.

Republicans originally called this the "nuclear option", before switching to the term "constitutional option."

More and more, Congress is drifting away from the people who supposedly elect it. The U.S. House is assuredly no longer small-D democratic, as I noted last September. The Center for Voting and Democracy says:

More than 90 percent of Americans live in congressional districts that are essentially one-party monopolies.

Meanwhile, the Senate, set up to be more exclusive with its six-year terms, is increasingly clubby. Another of its 14 "moderates," John McCain, said, "The Senate won and the country won."

No, actually it was C. Boyden Gray, Bush-Cheney Inc.'s fix-it guy during the Florida Fiasco of '00 and a major player behind the scenes in Ohio in the '04 election, who won. Jeffrey H. Birnbaum of the Washington Post dug behind the scenes of this current mess to produce a shrewd piece this morning that sussed out Gray's role:

The eccentric Gray stood at the center of what had threatened to become a historic confrontation between the political parties. The former White House counsel was as responsible as anyone for the attempt to change Senate rules to smooth the way for approval of the president's judicial nominees. Yesterday evening, his efforts were upended by an eleventh-hour compromise that apparently has averted the showdown. But Gray won a partial victory because filibustering of federal judgeship nominations will now be much more rare.

One reason that Gray, White House counsel for George W. Bush's pappy, is considered "eccentric" is that he's loathed by the neocons when it comes to foreign policy but he's cherished by the Bush regime as a supreme troubleshooter on domestic issues.

Gray's been on the inside of some heavy political maneuvering for decades. In an interesting piece last week about Gray's pitch to be named Bush's ambassador to the European Union, Marc Perelman wrote in The Forward:

C. Boyden Gray, who was White House counsel in the administration of George H.W. Bush, is a top contender to be named to the increasingly important diplomatic position in Brussels. This is said to have angered some powerful neocon figures. …

Gray's deeper problem appears to be his alignment with Republicans from the so-called "realist" school of foreign policy. The realist school, often associated with Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser to the senior Bush, opposes the neoconservatives' vision of projecting American force in order to bring democracy to the Middle East.

Gray is identified with the younger Bush on domestic policy, and is known as a leading advocate of the administration's effort to appoint conservative judges to the federal bench. At the same time, Gray is a member of a small group of Republicans, known as the Committee for the Republic, who oppose parts of the president's foreign policy. After America's invasion of Iraq, the committee issued a manifesto to "educate Americans about the dangers of empire and the need to return to our founding traditions and values."

Yeah, fine, send the guy overseas, for God's sakes. Anything to keep him from meddling any more with the Senate.

Morning Report 5/23/05
Pat Tillman as Prop

Posted by Harkavy at 9:04 AM, May 23, 2005

Now that Pat Tillman's family has spoken out about the government's "disgusting" coverup of his futile death, the former NFL star (left) can finally rest in peace. It's clear that his third and final career—as a propaganda tool for the Bush regime—is mercifully over. As Josh White writes in today's Washington Post:

More than a year after their son was shot several times by his fellow Army Rangers on a craggy hillside near the Pakistani border, Tillman's mother and father said in interviews that they believe the military and the government created a heroic tale about how their son died to foster a patriotic response across the country. They say the Army's "lies" about what happened have made them suspicious, and that they are certain they will never get the full story.

"Pat had high ideals about the country; that's why he did what he did," Mary Tillman said in her first lengthy interview since her son's death. "The military let him down. The administration let him down. It was a sign of disrespect. The fact that he was the ultimate team player and he watched his own men kill him is absolutely heartbreaking and tragic. The fact that they lied about it afterward is disgusting."

The Post's former managing editor Steve Coll dug up the coverup last year in a memorable series of stories. Coll wrote in December:

Tillman died unnecessarily after botched communications, a mistaken decision to split his platoon over the objections of its leader, and negligent shooting by pumped-up young Rangers—some in their first firefight—who failed to identify their targets as they blasted their way out of a frightening ambush.

The records show Tillman fought bravely and honorably until his last breath. They also show that his superiors exaggerated his actions and invented details as they burnished his legend in public, at the same time suppressing details that might tarnish Tillman's commanders.

Meanwhile, the boss of Tillman's commanders—Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld—wasted no opportunity to use Tillman's death to make the Bush regime's dirty war schemes sparkle. On September 10, 2004, before Coll broke the full story of the Tillman scandal, Rumsfeld took the podium at the National Press Club in D.C. to say:

A few short years after Osama bin Laden ridiculed the American soldier as a paper tiger, saying that after a few blows, they run in defeat, the names of Todd Beamer and Pat Tillman, and so many other brave Americans, live as symbols of our country's courage and determination.

Yes, Tillman is a symbol of the bungled search for bin Laden, which was slowed to a crawl so the Bush regime could divert troops to Iraq, liberate Halliburton, and set the stage for a generation of war—the kind of profitable undertaking that the officials of Oceania would be proud of.

Morning Report 5/20/05
Bush's Fight for Human's Rights in Uzbekistan

Posted by Harkavy at 2:06 PM, May 20, 2005

Uzbek dictator Islam Karimov has put the lid on a rebellion, but it's just a matter of time before he gets burned so badly that he has to run for his life from a country that ranks in the world's top 10 in both natural wealth and torture.

While we're waiting for the 25 million angry and poor Uzbeks to come to a boil again, here's evidence that George W. Bush doesn't neglect human rights—at least when the human is one of his low friends in high places.

It's also proof that Bush has been nothing more than a puppet, a front man, for his entire public life.

In this case, the Señor Wences who pulled his strings was Enron's Ken Lay, Bush's single biggest campaign contributor.

In February 2002, The Smoking Gun posted 40 pages of Bush-Lay love letters, and Slate's Timothy Noah and the Washington Post's Hanna Rosin, among others, had some fun with them.

My current favorite is Lay's April 3, 1997, letter to Bush (then the Texas governor), instructing Dubya to lobby Uzbekistan's U.S. ambassador, Sadyq Safaev (left). Posted by The Smoking Gun, it's addressed "Dear Governor Bush," but Ken crossed that out and wrote "George." It continued:

You will be meeting with Ambassador Sadyq Safaev, Uzbekistan's Ambassador to the United States, on April 8th. Ambassador Safaev has been Foreign Minister and the senior advisor to President Karimov before assuming his nation's most significant foreign responsibility.

There was no pretense. Lay didn't write, "I understand you have a meeting with … " or "Do you have time in your schedule to … ." No, Lay instructed Bush: "You will be meeting … " Lay's four-paragraph letter was a script; its second paragraph contained the talking points:

Enron has established an office in Tashkent and we are negotiating a $2 billion joint venture with Neftegas of Uzbekistan and Gazprom of Russia to develop Uzbekistan's natural gas and transport it to markets in Europe, Kazakhstan, and Turkey. This project can bring significant economic opportunities to Texas, as well as Uzbekistan. The political benefits to the United States and to Uzbekistan are important to that entire region.

The third paragraph alerted Bush to the fact that the Uzbek envoy was not only a dignitary but also a politician:

Ambassador Safaev is one of the most effective of the Washington Corps of Ambassadors, a man who has the attention of his president, and a person who works daily to bring our countries together.

Lay, who always had the attention of his future president, wrapped up the letter with boilerplate stuff:

For all these reasons, I am delighted that the two of you are meeting. I know you and Ambassador Safaev will have a productive meeting which will result in a friendship between Texas and Uzbekistan.

Anything you say, Ken. By the way, Enron got its deal with the Karimov regime. Enron eventually pulled back, and Exxon stepped in.

Not that those were the first U.S. companies to make deals with Karimov. In 1993, Dresser Industries—on whose board Dubya's grandpa, Prescott Bush, sat for 22 years, and which gave Dubya's pappy his first job after World War II—agreed to design and build a $200 million gas plant for the dictator's state-owned Neftegas—the deal was helped along by $50 million from the U.S. Export-Import Bank, one of our many government agencies protecting, nourishing, and subsidizing corporate humans' rights.

A few years later, in '98, the CEO of Halliburton decided to acquire Dresser Industries. That CEO was Dick Cheney.

Morning Report 5/19/05
U.S. on Uzbek Terror: A Familiar Rendition

Posted by Harkavy at 11:33 AM, May 19, 2005

Now that Uzbekistan is finally boiling over, it's heartening to know that millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars are being used by dictator Islam Karimov to kill his rebelling citizens.

You didn't know that? It's old news. In 2002, British ambassador to Tashkent Craig Murray publicized Karimov's appalling torture—and the fact that the U.S. and Great Britain used Uzbekistan to torture terrorism suspects—and the British Foreign Office fired him and tried to silence him. But the press picked up on Murray's courageous rendition of Karimov's sordid abuses. Back in May 2003, Nick Paton Walsh of the Guardian (U.K.) pointed out the hell that Uzbeks endure:

Independent human rights groups estimate that there are more than 600 politically motivated arrests a year in Uzbekistan, and 6,500 political prisoners, some tortured to death. According to a forensic report commissioned by the British embassy, in August two prisoners were even boiled to death.

The U.S. condemned this repression for many years. But since September 11 rewrote America's strategic interests in Central Asia, the government of President Islam Karimov has become Washington's new best friend in the region.

The U.S. is funding those it once condemned. Last year Washington gave Uzbekistan $500 million in aid. The police and intelligence services—which the State Department's website says use "torture as a routine investigation technique"—received $79 million of this sum.

Mr. Karimov was President Bush's guest in Washington in March [2002]. They signed a "declaration" which gave Uzbekistan security guarantees and promised to strengthen "the material and technical base of [their] law enforcement agencies."

You didn't know about Karimov's visit? EurasiaNet's Kenan Aliyev explained at the time:

Uzbek President Islam Karimov is maintaining a low profile during his visit to the United States, apparently out of a desire to keep controversy over Uzbekistan’s human-rights record to a minimum.

Karimov was scheduled to meet with U..S Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld early March 13, then travel to New York for several appointments, including a discussion with Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

On March 12, Karimov had a 45-minute White House meeting with President George W. Bush. After the meeting, Karimov left the White House without pausing to speak with gathered journalists. In general, Uzbek Embassy representatives have been reluctant to divulge information about the visit, and media access to members of the visiting Uzbek delegation has been extremely limited. U.S. officials have likewise provided only general information concerning the Karimov visit, declining to reveal specifics about discussions.

You can be sure that the next regime in charge of Uzbekistan will remember not only that Karimov's government has boiled prisoners to death but also how the Bush regime has propped him up. Bill Clinton's crew would occasionally condemn human-rights abuses in Uzbekistan, but our military help to Karimov began during Clinton's regime, as Bob Kaiser of the Washington Post reported back in August 2002 in a prescient piece titled "U.S. Plants Footprint in Shaky Central Asia":

During the 1990s the United States began to quietly build influence in the area. Washington established significant military-to-military relationships with Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan. Soldiers from those countries have been trained by Americans. Uzbekistan alone will receive $43 million in U.S. military aid this year. The militaries of all three have an ongoing relationship with the National Guard of a U.S. state—Kazakhstan with Arizona, Kyrgyzstan with Montana, Uzbekistan with Louisiana. The countries also participated in NATO's Partnership for Peace program.

"We wanted to extend our influence in the region, and promote American values, too," said Jeffrey Starr, a Pentagon official who was responsible for these relationships during the second Clinton administration as deputy assistant secretary of defense.

Under Bush's handlers, any half-hearted attempts to pressure Karimov were forgotten after 9/11, and we stepped up our training of Karimov's military.

The Uzbek people will remember that—in their nightmares. As the U.N. news service IRIN reports from a refugee camp (see photo) across the border in Kyrgyzstan:

The refugees told IRIN they wanted to stay in Kyrgyzstan in order to escape persecution in Uzbekistan.

"What we witnessed in Andijan was slaughter—a regime capable of that is capable of anything," said a woman who had left her two children behind in the city when she fled for her life early on Saturday morning.

The next government of Uzbekistan will be Islamic—you can bet on it. As Bagila Bukharbayeva of the Associated Press writes this morning from Korasuv:

The leader of a group of rebels claiming to control this Uzbek border town said Wednesday that he and his supporters intend to build an Islamic state and would fight back if government troops attempt to crush their revolt.

"We will be building an Islamic state here in accordance with the Koran," Bakhtiyor Rakhimov told The Associated Press while leaning down from the back of a horse.

That's just one town and one horseman. But this is no game. Robin Williams (see photo) won't be back here any time soon. This is just another chapter in the Great Game, and we're on the wrong side, in a more obvious way than we were in the recent (and successful) populist revolt against Kyrgyz dictator Askar Akayev. Akayev didn't get our strong support because he balked at cooperating with the Bush regime's War of Terror. Karimov, on the other hand, has been one of our stalwarts, a part of the "coalition of the willing."

That must be troubling to the thousands of U.S. soldiers stationed in Uzbekistan, especially at Karshi-Khanabad, where the New York-flavored troops have given the "streets," where they pitch their tents and build permanent structures, such names as Fifth Avenue, Wall Street, and the Long Island Expressway. (That's old news, too, reported by the Washington Post's Kaiser.)

Here in America, New Yorkers complain about the traffic jams on the L.I.E. as they go to the Hamptons for polo matches. But in Uzbekistan, the New York-based soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division, who proudly travel on their own L.I.E., are faced with horsemen of a different color.

How much longer will we be keeping our permanent-looking base at Karshi-Khanabad? Will it survive if Uzbekistan, currently ruled by a hardline secular regime, is taken over by a hardline Islamic regime?

Our soldiers sit in the midst of 25 million angry Muslims long repressed by a dictator we're arming and have kept in power. A question for Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney: Will you dispatch troops from the base to help Karimov "maintain order"?

The dictator is keeping his usual tight grip on information, so we don't know what's happening with this inevitable, bloody revolt against his rule. As IRIN puts it:

A Western diplomat, who wished to remain anonymous, told IRIN that a government-organized trip to Andijan—the scene of mass killings by Uzbek forces on Friday—had been "completely stage managed by Tashkent" in order to prevent foreigners and journalists from gaining information to support claims that more than 500 people were gunned down in and around the city's central square. "We were not allowed to talk to local people, see hospitals or morgues, or move freely around the city," the diplomat said.

Sooner or later, though, Karimov will fall, and we may still be clutching at his coattails as he plummets.

Morning Report 5/18/05
Let George Do It

Posted by Harkavy at 8:27 AM, May 18, 2005

Telling the U.S. Senate what millions of Americans are yearning to say about the unjustified Iraq war, British MP George Galloway came to D.C. after being named in the oil-for-food scandal and delivered a historic ass-whipping.

The BBC called it "one of the most flamboyant Senate testimonies ever."

Galloway brought up numerous topics, including the oil-for-slush scandal, which Congress has chosen to ignore.

The U.S. press—don't blame me—has practically ignored the colorful Scot who's Great Britain's most prominent war critic and who just regained a seat in Parliament.

Determinedly establishment as always, the New York Times, twitched its nose at the pungent dialogue and let a Reuters story do the work. The Washington Post's Colum Lynch described the scene this way in a story buried inside this morning's edition:

A British lawmaker forcefully denied allegations in a Senate hearing yesterday that he received rights to purchase millions of barrels of Iraqi oil at a discount from Saddam Hussein's government, and he delivered a fiery attack on three decades of U.S. policy toward Iraq.

George Galloway, a formidable debater recently ousted from the British Labor Party after attacking Prime Minister Tony Blair for supporting the war in Iraq, used his appearance before the Senate permanent subcommittee on investigations as a forum to challenge the veracity of the Bush administration's case for going to war.

He also unleashed a personal attack against panel Chairman Norm Coleman (R-Minn.), calling his investigation the "mother of all smoke screens" designed to "divert attention from the crimes that you supported" by endorsing President Bush's decision to invade Iraq.

The BBC's Matthew Davis, familiar with the blunt style of politics practiced in every democracy but our own, put it this way:

Far from displaying the forelock-tugging deference to which senators are accustomed, Mr. Galloway went on the attack

He rubbished committee chairman Norm Coleman's dossier of evidence and stared him in the eye.

"Now I know that standards have slipped over the last few years in Washington, but for a lawyer, you are remarkably cavalier with any idea of justice," the MP declared.

The whole room scanned Mr. Coleman's face for a reaction. The senator shifted in his seat—nervously it seemed.

It was the first time a British politician had been interrogated as a hostile witness at the U.S. Senate—but Mr. Galloway cast himself not as the accused, but the accuser.

On stage at the heart of American power, he attacked the U.S.-led war on Iraq and accused Washington of installing a "puppet" regime there.

Thanks to the dogged people at Information Clearing House, you can listen for yourself—plus read the transcript of his remarks.

Galloway didn't look at notes. He stared directly at Coleman and, as the Info Clearing House's tape will show you, eloquently told the Bush gang just how far it had gone agley:

Senator, this is the mother of all smokescreens. You are trying to divert attention from the crimes that you supported, from the theft of billions of dollars of Iraq's wealth.

"Have a look at the real Oil-for-Food scandal. Have a look at the 14 months you were in charge of Baghdad, the first 14 months when $8.8 billion of Iraq's wealth went missing on your watch. Have a look at Halliburton and other American corporations that stole not only Iraq's money, but the money of the American taxpayer.

"Have a look at the oil that you didn't even meter, that you were shipping out of the country and selling, the proceeds of which went who knows where? Have a look at the $800 million you gave to American military commanders to hand out around the country without even counting it or weighing it.

"Have a look at the real scandal breaking in the newspapers today, revealed in the earlier testimony in this committee. That the biggest sanctions-busters were not me or Russian politicians or French politicians. The real sanctions-busters were your own companies with the connivance of your own Government."

Morning Report 5/17/05
Torture is 'Morally Justifiable,' Say Aussie Law Profs

Posted by Harkavy at 12:49 AM, May 17, 2005

An upcoming University of San Francisco Law Review article by two Australian law professors argues that the current worldwide proscription—in lip service only, obviously—against torture is not only unrealistic but is also morally unsound.

Take an early peek at its content by reading a defense of the article by its lead author, Mirko Bagaric, hot off the press at The Age in Melbourne. And don't freak out about their take on torture. Others are already doing that for you.

Bagaric, head of Deakin Law School, in the Melbourne area, and Julie Clarke, a lecturer at the school, came up with a long, but pretty good, title for their law review article: "Not Enough (Official) Torture in the World? The Circumstances in Which Torture is Morally Justifiable."

I got an e-mail over the weekend from someone purporting to be an Australian journalist who sent me (and presumably many others) not only a copy of the law review article but also an e-mail she addressed to the university's provost, basically blasting him for allowing such a thing to be printed. Her note was way over the top and morally unjustified, in my view.

She did, however, also ask the provost whether the article was a "hoax." I immediately thought of the ruckus Alan Sokal raised in 1996 with his clever piece in the journal Social Text, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity."

But no, this law review article is the real thing—I checked it out with the USF Law Review editor, Megan K. Rosichan, and she confirms that it's real—except that I have only an "early, unedited version" so don't quote it or even summarize it.

Events have overtaken her proscription. Word is already gushing out of the Australian papers The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald, and people are simply outraged.

Bagaric and Clarke will no doubt take lots of heat for saying that an innocent person could justifiably be tortured—even to death—but only if that would save a great many other lives.

People on the left may scream about how horrible the two law profs are, and people on the right may point to the article as "evidence" that what has happened at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo is thus justified. Both sides are wrong, and the lead author, Bagaric, is already answering the critics.

In The Age, Bagaric's retort in the storm is simply titled "The Case for Torture," in which he says:

Our reflex rejection of torture needs to be replaced by recognition that it can be a moral means of saving lives.

Hold on. Just follow his logic:

Recent events stemming from the "war on terrorism" have highlighted the prevalence of torture. This is despite the fact that torture is almost universally deplored. The formal prohibition against torture is absolute—there are no exceptions to it.

The belief that torture is always wrong is, however, misguided and symptomatic of the alarmist and reflexive responses typically emanating from social commentators. It is this type of absolutist and short-sighted rhetoric that lies at the core of many distorted moral judgments that we as a community continue to make, resulting in an enormous amount of injustice and suffering in our society and far beyond our borders.

Torture is permissible where the evidence suggests that this is the only means, due to the immediacy of the situation, to save the life of an innocent person. The reason that torture in such a case is defensible and necessary is because the justification manifests from the closest thing we have to an inviolable right: the right to self-defence, which of course extends to the defence of another. Given the choice between inflicting a relatively small level of harm on a wrongdoer and saving an innocent person, it is verging on moral indecency to prefer the interests of the wrongdoer.

Yes, but who decides what "saving an innocent person" means? George W. Bush's handlers treat Halliburton and other corporate profiteers like cute little innocent puppies. Would you have those handlers decide whether torture is justified? The Bush regime has a terrible history of ignoring torture not only in places they control but in out-of-control places like Uzbekistan. (Well, I didn't say that Bagaric and Clarke were being 100 percent practical.)

But you have to give the Aussies their due. On down in his newspaper article, Bagaric notes:

Torture in order to save an innocent person is the only situation where it is clearly justifiable. This means that the recent high-profile incidents of torture, apparently undertaken as punitive measures or in a bid to acquire information where there was no evidence of an immediate risk to the life of an innocent person, were reprehensible.

Bagaric and Clarke's 31-page USF Law Review piece (at least the early version I've seen) is much more densely argued. Their foundation is utilitarianism, for you philosophy buffs out there. And they even provide an equation where you could supposedly work out a "threshold" for situations in which you yourself might want to take pains before inflicting them on anyone else.

Speaking of pain, Bagaric and Clarke are already feeling it. As Liz Minchin of The Age writes:

Even before their paper has been printed, Professor Bagaric and Mrs. Clarke have begun receiving hate mail from students and staff at Deakin University, as well as being heavily criticised by some of their legal peers.

Professor Bagaric told The Age that he expected to be criticised for his views, particularly on torturing innocent people.

To me, what's refreshing about the law review article (the version I've seen) is that it clears away some of the overblown, moralistic rhetoric on the issue of crime and punishment. Bagaric and Clarke also say emphatically that torture should not be used as punishment—and they conclude that harsh punishment does not deter.

Those of us who think that the death penalty is one of the few absolute wrongs can take heart from the profs' piece, based on my reading of it.

In the case of Bagaric and Clarke, however, there will be people on all sides of the political spectrum calling for their execution.

Morning Report 5/16/05
Newsweek, Flushed With Embarrassment, Pens 'Dear John' Note

Posted by Harkavy at 11:38 AM, May 16, 2005

Newsweek's little item earlier this month about U.S. soldiers' supposedly throwing a prisoner's Koran into a GITMO toilet just went down the drain. But the Pentagon's self-righteous protests can also be eliminated.

And the fact is that there have been other abuses reported not just by detainees about U.S. soldiers' anti-Islam behavior—like wrapping a Muslim detainee in an Israeli flag, which I wrote about last December.

Mark Whitaker, Newsweek's editor, explaining why the mag went with the original story, says:

Although other major news organizations had aired charges of Qur'an desecration based only on the testimony of detainees, we believed our story was newsworthy because a U.S. official said government investigators turned up this evidence. So we published the item.

Then it turned out that the anonymous official who told Newsweek the tale started pedaling the other way. That gave the Pentagon an excuse to get all huffy. In this morning's New York Times, for instance, Katherine Q. Seelye writes:

Pentagon officials said that no such information was included in the internal report and responded to Newsweek's apology with unusual anger.

In a statement, Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, said: "Newsweek hid behind anonymous sources, which by their own admission do not withstand scrutiny. Unfortunately, they cannot retract the damage they have done to this nation or those that were viciously attacked by those false allegations."

The original account, he said, was "demonstrably false" and "was irresponsible and had significant consequences that reverberated throughout Muslim communities around the world."

Now the Pentagon's civilian officials, who constantly wrap themselves in the U.S. flag during this Crusades epoch, are talking about "consequences"?

Let's talk about another flag-wrapping drill carried out by the Pentagon: Take a Muslim prisoner, wrap him in an Israeli flag (no religious overtones there, right?), and blast him with rock music and strobe lights.

Read it for yourself at the ACLU's Torture FOIA page—an FBI agent filed this report last summer:

Following a detainee interview exact date unknown, while leaving the interview building at Camp Delta at approximately 8:30 p.m. or later, I heard and observed in the hallway loud music and flashes of light. … From the monitoring room, I looked inside the adjacent interview room. At that time I saw another detainee sitting on the floor of the interview room with an Israeli flag draped around him, loud music being played, and a strobe light flashing. … I understood prior to deployment to [GITMO] that such techniques were not allowed, nor approved by FBI policy. …

At least not until somebody at GITMO got their hands on a disco version of "Hava Nagila."

Central Aphasia

Posted by Harkavy at 7:24 PM, May 15, 2005

Our high-priced spread of "democracy" is leaving a bitter taste in the mouths of 25 million angry Muslims in Uzbekistan as an ominous revolt spreads across Central Asia.

Not even a major clampdown on information by Uzbek dictator Islam Karimov can stop the news of his goonish behavior—CNN reports tonight about the blood in the streets, with 500 corpses laid out on the pavement in the city of Andijan, in the fertile Fergana Valley in eastern Uzbekistan.

By the way, in the coming months, as Central Asia's corrupt "republics" crumble, you'll be reading all about the strategically key Fergana Valley, by the way.

Neighboring Kyrgyzstan's dictator, Askar Akayev, has already been driven out. Karimov is thrashing in the final throes of his torturous and tortured reign and, wouldn't you know it, we've been his richest uncle lately.

What's worse for our future credibility with Uzbekistan's next generation of leaders is that Karimov's goons have been cracking heads in the act of defending the U.S. embassy in the capital, Tashkent, according to death-defying dispatches filed by the Institute of War & Peace Reporting's project director in Uzbekistan, Galima Bukharbaeva.

Every new report from Uzbekistan presages the likely overthrow of Karimov—he's unlikely to be hanging with Don Rumsfeld any more—not that Karimov won't be hanging.

For evidence backing that observation, go back a few days to the intrepid IWPR journalist Bukharbaeva's report of the cruel, vindictive, and sorry-ass behavior of the dictator's domos.

It was May 4, and a group of about 70 peasants—mostly women, and some with children—had trekked to Tashkent to demand that the government return a farm it wrongly seized—they were also incensed about having to live in poverty, and they called for government officials to resign. The peasants headed to the U.S. embassy and camped right outside, hoping to stir the U.S. State Department into action. Good luck. The U.S. ambassador, Jon Purnell, has said barely anything about Karimov's insane tortures of the citizenry—unlike his former British counterpart, Craig Murray. On the scene of the protest, Bukharbaeva wrote:

The group set up tents on the pavement outside the embassy compound and said they would remain there until their demands were met. They chose the venue because they said they would seek asylum in the U.S. if their own government refused to respond.

Placards and banners called on government officials to resign and called for an end to poverty.

Although the protest clearly reflected local concerns rather than opposition politics, and there were so many women and children present, the authorities resorted to tough measures.

No surprise, considering that Karimov's government has been known to boil people to death.

Anyway, 50 plainclothes cops and an array of fire trucks, ambulances, and police vans converged on the scene. Here's Bukharbaeva again:

At 11:20 in the evening, when some of the adults and children were asleep inside the tents, two buses drew up and about 50 people armed with truncheons jumped out. Some were in police uniform and others in camouflage, but most were in plain clothes.

The demonstrators were so intimidated that they put their hands in the air and called out that they would stop their protest action and go home immediately.

Their pleas were ignored and the security forces waded in, beating people apparently indiscriminately.

Reports of various broken bones couldn't be confirmed, but the protesters were dragged away, and so were some journalists. A Tashkent cop rescued the journalists. The farmers, who had traveled a long way from their homes in southwestern Uzbekistan, were sent back home. The IWPR report continued:

A spokesman for the Uzbek interior ministry, Vyacheslav Tutin, said the following day that all the participants in the protest had been put on buses and sent back home. The spokesman said 11 men, 13 women, and 19 children were detained in all.

Tutin said it was the protesters’ own fault if security forces behaved in a heavy-handed way, because earlier in the day, police and National Security Service officers had been stoned by the crowd.

Speaking before the evening police assault, protesters said they had thrown stones that morning, but only when members of the security forces attempted to grab a 9-month-old baby from its mother’s arms. They said police retreated after this initial intervention.

Caught in the middle was the U.S. embassy, which issued a statement saying the protesters were simply "exercising their rights to freedom of expression and assembly accorded them in United Nations conventions," as the IWPR reporter put it. women in the war zone.

That's funny. No such message was forthcoming last summer from U.S. officials when Americans were prevented from protesting at Republican Square Garden during the GOP convention.

Karimov always insists that he's fighting terrorists, but the whole damn country wants to give him the bum's rush. As a United Press International story after the Tashkent protest noted:

"Having trusted Karimov's promises, we were left with nothing," one protester said. "We can't study. We have no food to eat. We were left on the street with nothing."

After the group threatened to set up a tent city, police encircled them, and soon after, several protesters were beaten and bloodied by batons, the report said.

The Tashkent protesters were probably lucky that they were merely sent home—if, indeed, that's what happened to them. They had come to Tashkent hungry and stayed that way. As the IWPR's Bukharbaeva wrote:

It did appear that the protesters were an unusually vulnerable group. They began their action without providing themselves with food and water. For the first few hours, residents of a nearby apartment block supplied them with tea and water until police ordered them to stop, so by the evening they were in no fit state to go on.

A foreign observer present on the scene said it made no sense to use crude force against such an unthreatening group of people who could easily have been persuaded to end their protest.

"Brute force against a group of women and children and the deployment of resources en masse may, on the one hand, demonstrate the power of the state. On the other hand, it may be a sign of cowardice," said the Westerner, who asked not to be named.

Karimov's regime won't last much longer, unless the U.S. intervenes in his behalf—there's a huge U.S. base in the country. But even Rumsfeld and the other handlers of George W. Bush are unlikely to overtly offer the dictator support at this point. Uzbekistan is headed for a major revolution, if the Uzbeks who talked to Bukharbaeva are correct: Tolib Yakubov of Human Rights Society of Uzbekistan condemned the way the police had acted, and said it seemed inevitable both that the regime would grow ever more repressive and that people would continue protesting against it.

"There’s no other option—either for them or for us," he said.

Morning Report 5/13/05
Rider On the Storm

Posted by Harkavy at 10:54 AM, May 13, 2005

Whatever plans George W. Bush's handlers have for the rest of the world, they'd better get it in gear.

We don't know how many revolutions per minute the POTUS was spinning Wednesday on his bike ride while that Cessna, unbeknownst to him, was heading for the White House. But on the other side of the planet, it's no joke: Things are spinning out of control in the dictatorships we've embraced.

Their revolutions, in other words, may trump Bush's, and his helmet (see photo above) won't protect him when he crashes.

Anti-American rioting has spread from Afghanistan into Pakistan, as the Washington Post reports:

The unrest was triggered by a brief report in the May 9 edition of Newsweek that interrogators at Guantánamo had placed Korans in bathrooms and "flushed a holy book down the toilet." Desecration of the Koran is punishable by death in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Pakistan protested to the U.S. government last weekend about the alleged abuse.

Diplomats and officials have been taken aback by the intense reaction, which was exacerbated by a police crackdown on anti-U.S. protesters in the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad on Wednesday that left four dead and more than 70 wounded.

How in the world could they be taken aback?

Anyway, there's more. The long-oppressed people of Uzbekistan, one of the Bush regime's key allies, are starting to openly rebel against dictator Islam Karimov, whose 15 years of arresting people for practicing Islam are surely coming to an end.

Prisoners in Uzbekistan are beaten and boiled to death and their family members are raped in front of them. Meanwhile, Karimov's strictly controlled press celebrates his reign, and he proudly shows himself off with celebrities like Don Rumsfeld.

U.S. officials have had many chances to speak out against Karimov's outrageous human-rights violations—as the U.K.'s Craig Murray courageously did when he was ambassador to Tashkent—but we pointedly haven't. Our ambassador, Jon Purnell, has barely opened his mouth.

Forget the hype from the Bush regime. When it comes to democracy, this administration is usually on the wrong side.

That's certainly true in Asia. In a February 24, 2004, press conference in Tashkent starring Rumsfeld, Karimov, and Purnell, a Reuters reporter had this exchange with Rumsfeld:

Reuters: You spoke of this strategic framework, of the relationship between two countries. Uzbekistan said yesterday they’re going to free a 62-year-old woman from jail, who human rights activists say was jailed on trumped-up charges because she revealed that her son had been tortured to death in prison. Do you welcome this, sir, and to what extent will improvements in human rights in this country deal with continued U.S. military aid to Uzbekistan?

Rumsfeld: Well, obviously our relationship with this country and other countries is multi-faceted. I mentioned the military-to-military relationship because I’m involved with the Department of Defense, but it’s also a political and economic relationship. Needless to say the United States and the other NATO countries are always interested in seeing reform not just in the military, but also in the political and economic areas. I’m not intimately knowledgeable about the statement you just made, but my understanding is that from the Ambassador that—that is in fact the case and that the Embassy has expressed their awareness of that and I forget what the phrase was but—the Ambassador pointed out that they were pleased that the decision was made.

No wonder we're seen by common folk the world over as a defender of human rights and democracy. The Reuters reporter pressed the issue:

Reuters: Sir, did you discuss human rights with the President and the other officials?

Rumsfeld: In all of our meetings, the broad range of topics were discussed, the political and human-rights issues, as well as, economic issues and military-to-military issues. Yes—

A little more than a year later, Karimov had better get on his own bicycle and pedal his way out of the country as fast as he can. Peter Finn of the Washington Post explains why:

Resentment over a government campaign against alleged Islamic extremists exploded into violence in the Central Asian republic of Uzbekistan Friday when protesters stormed a local prison in the eastern city of Andijan, freeing thousands of inmates and triggering protests that left at least nine people dead, according to government officials and telephone interviews with local residents.

We've got a big military base in Uzbekistan—built by Halliburton, of course. If we have to start packing it up, why not hire Halliburton to do it for us?

The fact is that the enmity we've sowed in the Muslim world is just about ready for harvest.

Meanwhile, Bush pedals away, and if anyone needed more proof that he's merely a prop for Dick Cheney et al., the Cessna scare the other day in D.C. was it.

A testy press briefing by White House flack Scott McClellan yesterday reads like a "Who's on First Alert?" routine. (Thanks to colleague Syd Schanberg for the tip.) Editor & Publisher scooped it up, publishing choice excerpts and saying:

On the day after more than 30,000 people—including the vice president, the first lady, and a former first lady—were evacuated from their offices or homes in Washington, D.C., but the president, who was biking in Maryland, was not notified until the threat passed, reporters grilled Press Secretary Scott McClellan at his daily briefing.

For those who might have missed it on TV—that is, nearly everyone— … McClellan continually refers to "protocols" and reporters essentially ask, "Wouldn't most men like to know when their home is evacuated and their wife is hustled to a secure bunker?" They also wonder about the small matter of the president being commander in chief and the capital, theoretically, coming under attack.

What's even more bizarre is that Cheney was evacuated and taken away from the place while Laura Bush and Nancy Reagan, who was visiting the White House at the time, weren't. Meanwhile, George W. Bush, who was riding his bike outside the city, wasn't even notified about the Cessna incident until after it was over. Sure, he was riding his little bike and he had his little helmet on, but c'mon.

Now we're told there's an investigation of this "47-minute delay" in notifying the president. Can't wait for the results of that probe.

Meanwhile, here's part of the exchange between reporters and McClellan, from the White House site:

Q: I'm just finishing up the timeline. Mrs. Bush and Mrs. Reagan were put in a secure location in the White House—so the bunker, I assume?

McClellan: I will just leave it at that they were taken to a secure location.

Q: In the White House?

Q: On the grounds?

McClellan: They were here at the White House and they were taken to a secure location.

Q: You can't say on the grounds or off the grounds? All right. But you're saying that—but the Vice President was actually evacuated—

McClellan: That's right.

Q: —off the grounds?

McClellan: That's correct.

Q: That's correct. Why the distinction, given the history of this?

McClellan: Well, the Secret Service has security precaution protocols that are in place. And as I mentioned at the beginning, those precautions were followed. That's what they have in place. And it was consistent with the protocols that were in place.

In other words, if Bush is pedaling his bike, don't bother the little feller. Let him play. We'll put him before the cameras when we need him. But for God's sake, protect Cheney. He's the one who made all the decisions, such as they were, on 9/11. As long as there's oil underneath other countries, protect Cheney.

In the unlikely event that Bush isn't biking but is reading—say, The Pet Goat—don't disturb him then either. The grownups have everything under control. Except for the billions of Muslims angry at us.

Morning Report 5/12/05
Misery Accomplished

Posted by Harkavy at 10:48 AM, May 12, 2005

Has it really been two years since George W. Bush stuffed his codpiece and solemnly announced, "Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed"?

Mark Follman dredged up that quote the other day in Salon's War Room, which is always worth the price of admission.

The price of Bush's admission? He'll never admit to failure, but the Marines of Lima Company are feeling the pain of that, as the Washington Post's Ellen Knickmeyer reports this morning. The major combat operation in Anbar Province, near the Syrian border, has practically wiped out one of Lima's squads. Knickmeyer's story is a brilliant piece of frontline writing:

The explosion enveloped the armored vehicle in flames, sending orange balls of fire bubbling above the trees along the Euphrates River near the Syrian border.

Marines in surrounding vehicles threw open their hatches and took off running across the plowed fields, toward the already blackening metal of the destroyed vehicle. Shouting, they pulled to safety those they could, as the flames ignited the bullets, mortar rounds, flares and grenades inside, rocketing them into the sky and across pastures.

Gunnery Sgt. Chuck Hurley emerged from the smoke and turmoil around the vehicle, circling toward the spot where helicopters would later land to pick up casualties. As he passed one group of Marines, he uttered one sentence: "That was the same squad."

The Amtrac had blown up. Wipeout in Iraq. Knickmeyer summed it up:

In 96 hours of fighting and ambushes in far western Iraq, the squad had ceased to be.

Every member of the squad—one of three that make up the 1st Platoon of Lima Company, 3rd Battalion, 25th Regiment—had been killed or wounded, Marines here said. All told, the 1st Platoon—which Hurley commands—had sustained 60 percent casualties, demolishing it as a fighting force.

"They used to call it Lucky Lima," said Maj. Steve Lawson, commander of the company. "That turned around and bit us."

In the best tradition of wartime reporting, Knickmeyer didn't let the color stand alone; she added perspective:

Wednesday was the fourth day of fighting in far western Iraq, as the U.S. military continued an assault that has sent more than 1,000 Marines down the ungoverned north bank of the Euphrates River in search of foreign fighters crossing the border from Syria. Of seven Marines killed so far in the operation, six came come from Lima Company's 1st Platoon.

Lima Company drew Marine reservists from across Ohio into the conflict in Iraq. Some were still too young to be bothered much by shaving, or even stubble.

Senate pays back Galloway

Reaching across the Atlantic Ocean to do a favor for Tony Blair, a U.S. Senate panel has released an oil-for-food report that accuses impudent war critic George Galloway of making money off of Saddam Hussein.

Thrown out of Blair's Labor party, Galloway formed his own party, called it Respect, and got some last week by winning back a seat in Parliament. In the oil-for-food scandal, he's faced similar accusations before, and he's even won libel suits defending his honor.

"I have never profited from anything related to Iraq," Galloway tells the BBC about the latest allegations, adding:

"This is a lickspittle Republican committee, acting on the wishes of George W. Bush."

Galloway's reaction to the Senate report is predictable:

"One of the companies named, with ostensible links to me—Aredio Petroleum—I have never heard of until today and I have certainly had no dealings with. The other company, Middle East Advanced Semiconductors, was owned by Fawaz Zureikat, who was the chairman of the Mariam Appeal. It is well-known that Mr Zureikat traded with Iraq but he did not do so on my behalf. I have not received a penny piece or any oil voucher from Iraq, directly or indirectly.

"You would have thought that natural justice would have demanded that these allegations would have—must have been!—put to me, but they haven't been. Senator Joseph McCarthy would have proud of this committee."

This time, however, the accusations come from the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Sounds credible, right? After all, Carl Levin of Michigan is the ranking Democrat on the panel, and Levin broke the Riggs Bank scandal, which savaged the Bush regime, big oil, and their pals for shuffling money for Equatorial Guinea's absurd dictator, Teodoro Obiang.

And the Senate committee insists that this is fresh evidence. But wait a minute. The new report accusing Galloway carries the imprimatur of Levin and panel chairman Norm Coleman of Minnesota. It's "bipartisan," in other words, whereas Levin's monumental investigation of Riggs Bank was produced solely by the committee's minority staff—the Democrats.

This is definitely payback for Galloway's embarrassing Blair, and it's likely an attempt to keep Galloway embroiled so that he doesn't have time to properly harangue Blair during question time. As CNN reported after Galloway's win:

Galloway declared his victory as a victory for Iraq.

"All the people you killed, all the lies you told, have come back to haunt you," Galloway said in a message to prime minister Blair.

"The best thing the Labour party could do is sack you tomorrow morning," he said to cheers from the audience.

Funny, isn't it, that the Senate rushes to probe Galloway (and a former French minister) for their alleged links to Saddam. Meanwhile, Republicans like Norm Coleman have refused all requests for Congressional investigations of the oil-for-slush scandal and other war-related matters that might embarrass the Bush regime.

Guess there's just not enough time in the Senate's day to investigate Halliburton.

A Chicken in Every Plot

Posted by Harkavy at 6:27 PM, May 10, 2005

Lynndie England's life has degenerated into little more than a double-wide soap opera. But before you wash your hands of her, feast on this link between her and last week's holier-than-thou National Day of Prayer—and to the Bush campaign chest and predatory lending. Connect the dots and you'll see there's a chicken in every plot:

• Before enlisting in the Army, the Abu Ghraib poster girl worked in a chicken-processing plant an hour's drive from her Fort Ashby, West Virginia, trailer, according to USA Today.

• The most popular such plant for Fort Ashby residents—it's exactly 59 minutes away, according to MapQuest—is the huge Pilgrim's Pride chicken-processing complex in Moorefield, West Virginia.

• In July 2004, PETA released a video— secretly shot inside the Pilgrim's Pride plant in Moorefield—that showed murder most fowl:

Workers were caught on video stomping on chickens, kicking them, and violently slamming them against floors and walls. Workers also ripped the animals’ beaks off, twisted their heads off, spat tobacco into their eyes and mouths, spray-painted their faces, and squeezed their bodies so hard that the birds expelled feces—all while the chickens were still alive.

This stomach-turning stuff—and its link to England's home state—was noted at the time by several bloggers, including those on Digestible News.

Say, that "stomping" sounds familiar. I wrote about that technique last summer in "You Flinched!"—an item about testimony from an Abu Ghraib soldier.

Also last summer, Princeton ethicist Peter Singer made the connection between the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and the torture of chickens at Moorefield. In a Los Angeles Times op-ed piece he co-wrote (and that was re-posted by Dangerous Citizen), Singer noted:

The sickening images echo the snapshots and videotapes that found their way out of another inhumane facility: Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

In both Baghdad and Moorefield, W.Va., a simple cruel dynamic was at work. When humans have unchecked power over those they see as inferior, they may abuse it. Slaughterhouse workers do not expect to be chastised for hurting animals. And the American soldiers at Abu Ghraib clearly did not expect punishment, or they would not have posed for photographs. In both instances, laws or treaties that should have protected against the abuses were unknown or ignored. That is not surprising: Where much abuse is allowed, the protections that do exist are unlikely to be taken seriously.

The Department of Justice has considered in detail when prisoners in the war on terror may be exempt from the humane protections of the Geneva Convention. The government has long since made that leap with animals. Chickens, for example, are exempt from the U.S. Humane Methods of Slaughter Act.

Singer didn't mention Lynndie England, but I'll bet she didn't treat chickens any better than she treated Iraqis.

• Pilgrim's Pride is the second largest chicken producer in the country. Here's how Reuters (through Yahoo's page on the company) puts it:

During fiscal year ended October 2, 2004 (fiscal 2004), the company sold 5.3 billion pounds of dressed chicken and 310.2 million pounds of dressed turkey and generated net sales of $5.4 billion.

Its profit margins were gross:

For the 26 weeks ended 4/2/05, revenues rose 13% to $2.74 billion. Net income totaled $104.9 million, up from $43.2 million. Revenues reflect an increase in chicken sales. Net income also reflects an increase in gross profit margins.

• Operating out of the Pilgrim's Pride home office in Pittsburg, Texas, the company's owner, Lonnie "Bo" Pilgrim (see photo), is one of the country's major individual donors to George W. Bush and the Republican Party. He was a "Minor League Pioneer" for Bush in 2000 and a "Major League Pioneer" for Bush in 2004, according to Texans for Public Justice.

Recall the company's history: In 2002, TPJ reminds us, Pilgrim's Pride recalled 27 million pounds of meat after one of its plants was thought to be the source of "a listeria outbreak that killed eight people, caused three miscarriages, and hospitalized dozens of victims." Heavily fined by environmental regulators for illegally discharging massive amounts of chicken shit and other filth, Pilgrim's Pride was at the same time "the 10th largest recipient of federal agricultural subsidies from 1995 through 2002," adds TPJ.

• Bo Pilgrim wears his fundamentalist Christianity on his sleeve and on his butcher's apron. As Marv Knox of the Baptist Standard quoted him as saying in 2002:

There's no doubt that God wanted me to exemplify being a Christian businessman. I have that feeling, and I am forever conscious of that. I'll go out and make lots of talks around the country. There's where I give Jesus credit for everything I am.

Start of digression: Knox tried to get Pilgrim to solve an age-old puzzle. Here's the exchange:

Knox: With all your history in chickens, do you know why the chicken crossed the road?

Pilgrim: I wish I could give you the answer. I guess everybody has a different answer, but I never really coined an answer for why the chicken crossed the road.

End of digression.

• Last year, Bo Pilgrim, who controls more than 60 percent of his huge, publicly traded company, put Keith W. Hughes on its board of directors.

Hughes was the CEO of Associates First Capital, a subprime lender accused of predatory lending.

Associates First was so notorious that in 2000, the giant company's last year of independent existence, the United Methodist Church's pension fund, the Priests of Sacred Heart, the Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word brought a shareholders resolution to try to get the company to investigate itself for predatory lending and clean up its act. The resolution failed.

The government's case against Associates First was settled only after Citigroup swallowed Hughes's company and coughed up $215 million to the Federal Trade Commission to pay off 2 million former customers. At the time of the 2002 settlement, it was the largest in FTC history.

• Last Thursday (May 5), George W. Bush hosted the annual National Day of Prayer ceremony in the East Room of the White House. The first speaker was Shirley Dobson, wife of right-wing radio evangelist James Dobson. Shirley Dobson is also chairman of the National Day of Prayer—yes, she calls herself "chairman" and "Mrs. Shirley Dobson."

After the choir stopped singing, Shirley Dobson stepped to the microphone in the White House, fawned over the Bushes for a little bit and officially launched the National Day of Prayer. (You can watch her performance, and Bush's speech, on the White House site.)

Millions of Americans, she said, "will seek the grace of God" today. She added:

For example, Pilgrim's Pride, one of America's largest producers of chicken products, is holding prayer observances in 56 of its facilities in 17 countries.

It was the only company she mentioned. (She did say that 150,000 people were supposed to gather at Daytona Beach Speedway to try to crash the pearly gates. Yee-haw!)

With the saccharine tone and sing-song cadence of a beauty pageant contestant's spiel, she praised Pilgrim's Pride but scolded the rest of us.

That scolding stuff is a familiar rap by the right-wing Christians—it's all explained by Shirley Dobson on her "Prayerfully Yours" page of the National Day of Prayer website:

As sinners saved by grace we must realize not only that we don't deserve God's favor, but that we do deserve His wrath! The miracle of God's grace is that He extends mercy to us in spite of our wickedness and rebellion against Him. Put another way, "mercy" is not getting what we deserve, and "grace" is getting what we don't deserve.

We need not look very far to see that our country stands in desperate need of God's healing touch. We have killed over 40 million babies since 1973, and saturated ourselves and our children with pornography and filth. We have numbed ourselves with drugs and alcohol, and taught our kids that premarital sex is a good thing if it is simply done right. We have pursued materialism and false security, while ignoring the Architect of our souls.

As a nation, we have rebelled against the Creator. Our culture is steeped in immorality and self-sufficiency and is growing increasingly hostile toward religious expression.

Self-sufficiency? Have we fallen that far?

I know some chickens that could use "God's healing touch." But anyway, back to the White House. To her audience in the East Room, Mrs. Shirley Dobson toned it down a little bit, saying that her dictionary defines "grace" as something that's "undeserved," and adding:

Almighty God continues to bless America despite the fact that we corporately and individually have turned our backs on Him in many ways.

But our Creator is patient with us, granting His favor and forbearance even though we don't deserve it.

Speak for yourself, Mrs. America.

The president, of course, is a key part of any Christian puppet show. When Bush took the microphone, he smiled at the Dobsons and said:

I want to thank Shirley Dobson, the chairman of the National Day of Prayer. Thank you for organizing this event and thank you for your wonderful comments.

Why did the chicken cross the road? To escape from these religious nuts. The rest of us humans could also use a wing and a prayer.

Morning Report 5/10/05
Neocons Fight Back

Posted by Harkavy at 11:51 AM, May 10, 2005

You can always depend on humorless people for a good laugh. Especially the neocons, who are dead serious about making other people die for their ideology and profits.

Paul Wolfowitz and Doug Feith have already said they're leaving the Pentagon, Wolfowitz for the World Bank and Feith for, well, maybe his old job of shilling for defense-contractor pals here and in Israel.

I can't wait to see what these guys do about the powder keg that is Pakistan, a huge nation that's desperately poor and ruled by a military dictator, Pervez Musharraf, who naturally is one of our supposed allies.

The Bush regime's stated policy is to sell more arms to Pakistan and India—marketing death and calling it democracy, as I called it last month.

World Bank president-elect Wolfowitz will be a major player in Pakistan's future. He'll help determine whether Musharraf will be able to keep as firm a grip on Pakistan as he has on the many presents the U.S. government has given him (see photo below).

The neocons' choice is to arm Musharraf to the hilt. Once again, these civilian hard-liners ignore advice from their own Pentagon analysts. I wrote yesterday about the interesting studies produced by the Naval Postgraduate School's Strategic Insights electronic journal. Here's another one.

In December 2002, Robert Looney of the school's Center for Contemporary Conflict analyzed the seeming conflict between the International Monetary Fund's work in Pakistan and the "Global War on Terror." The IMF, by the way, is part of the World Bank Group, which Wolfowitz is about to formally take over.

What has Musharraf done with the IMF money, with which he is supposedly engaging in "reforms"? Pakistan is poorer, while its "elites," including military officials, are getting richer. Looney's piece, "IMF Stabilization Programs and the War on Terrorism: Conflicting or Complementary Objectives in Pakistan?" includes this passage:

Critics of the Musharraf reforms also stress the fact that their whole orientation is inappropriate: in addition to the growing level of poverty noted above, 60 percent of the population has no access to education. 50 percent has no access to basic health services, while the same number does not have access to sanitation facilities. At the same time the country has one of the highest population growth rates at 2.8 percent. Growing unemployment of the youth has led to increased frustration, but more importantly has created an environment where radical Islamists have been able to capitalize, as evidenced by their striking gains in the last election.

In sum, while many macroeconomic indicators targeted by the IMF show encouraging improvement, the indicators that really count in terms of standards of living—investment, GDP growth, health and education and so on have not shown much of an advance, and in some cases have even deteriorated. This has lead some observers to believe that the reforms are fundamentally flawed due to the inability of the IMF and Pakistan to learn from past mistakes—most notably, redistributing income toward elites while failing to promote economic growth and attack poverty.

Feith, too, is ignorant. Blinded by his fervor for war, he blustered his usual bullshit to the Council on Foreign Relations last February:

We’re working with allies and partners to develop common views on the nature of the threat of terrorist extremism. We’re assessing with them the capabilities needed to confront it. We urge our partners to do their duty as sovereign states to regulate their borders and otherwise control their territories.

Those "partners," he noted, include Pakistan, whose military is getting our best "counter-terrorist train-and-equip efforts."

No matter that we're ignoring the scary rumblings of a deteriorating Pakistani regime that might lose its grip on a poorer, and angrier, populace.

That's 150 million people, most of them hungry, thirsty, and without adequate sanitation. They're probably deliriously happy about our new arms deals with their government. Lucky for the neocons that most of them can't read.

More grins from the neocons. This morning, Salon's Tim Grieve pricks the bubble of National Review online hawk Jonah Goldberg, a prickly prick who doesn't like being questioned about why he's not laying his own sorry ass on the line in Iraq even though he's young enough to do so.

Grieve points out that Goldberg "finally explains why he can't be bothered to put his own life on the line in the war he believes is so critical." Go to Goldberg's own words for that:

As for why my sorry a** isn't in the kill zone, lots of people think this is a searingly pertinent question. No answer I could give—I'm 35 years old, my family couldn't afford the lost income, I have a baby daughter, my a** is, er, sorry, are a few—ever seem to suffice.

But this chicken-hawk nonsense is something that's been batted around too many times to get into again here. What I do think is interesting is that out of the thousands upon thousands of emails I've gotten from people in the military over the years, maybe a dozen have ever asked this question. Invariably, it's anti-war leftists who believe that their personally defined notions of hypocrisy trump any argument and any position. Meanwhile, the military guys have been overwhelmingly friendly and very often grateful for the support we offer around here.

Good logic: As a promoter of the military establishment, Goldberg gets a pass. What does he think he's doing? Following orders? Being a good soldier?

Regarding Goldberg's point about how it's just "anti-war leftists" and their "personally defined notions of hypocrisy," take a look at my colleague Tom Robbins's rundown of the military heroics of the pols who clamor for war. Grieve also puts the lie to that part of Goldberg's wimpy response:

As Daily Kos' Markos Moulitsas Zuniga notes today—and yes, he did serve in the U.S. Armed Forces—any number of the soldiers who have fought and died in Iraq could have offered up the same litany of excuses Goldberg provides: The eligibility age is now 38, there is almost always financial hardship associated with serving, lots of fallen soldiers have left young children behind, and we're betting that not everyone who turns up at the local recruiting station is in fighting shape.

Shattered Illusions

Posted by Harkavy at 7:09 PM, May 9, 2005

The Bush regime and its pals do more than their share of hiding. Don't want to reveal information, sure, but it goes deeper than that. Remember Halliburton's invisible meals served to troops?

Here's some more food for thought: Back in the summer of 2002, when Bush's handlers were plotting the invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon neocons were warned of the consequences: chaos, a fractured country. All we heard about was the propaganda about "liberation."

In June 2001, James A. Russell, a Persian Gulf expert in the Department of Defense, was assigned by Doug Feith, Don Rumsfeld's undersecretary for policy, to the National Security Affairs Department at the Naval Postgraduate School. Just a guess, but I would imagine that meant that Russell was not part of Feith's inner circle.

Anyway, the Naval Postgrad School, a slice of governmental academe, formed something called the Center for Contemporary Conflict and started pumping out research papers, posting them in an electronic journal, Strategic Insights. They make for interesting, and relatively jargon-free, reading. In June 2002, for instance, Russell produced "Shibboleth Slaying in a Post-Saddam Iraq," a nice little report that charted our options for Iraq while we were already planning to invade it. "As the United States marches inexorably towards regime change in Baghdad," Russell wrote, "the critical issue facing policy makers is determining what happens after Saddam is removed from power."

Russell noted that Iraq is an unnaturally unified country—and he concluded that maybe it shouldn't even stay that way:

U.S. policy today continues the approach taken over the last 20 years. U.S. officials want to preserve the territorial integrity of Iraq, however artificial its borders may have been when they were created by Winston Churchill in 1921. The continued banding together of Iraq's three incongruous components—a minority Sunni center, a Kurdish north and a Shiite south—is deemed essential to regional security and stability.

The U.S., he noted, propped up Iraq in the '80s, a fact widely noted but one that the Bush regime always plays down. As Russell put it:

During the 1980s, a consensus existed between the United States and its Gulf partners that a strong and viable Iraq—even a heavily armed one—served the region's interests. The main purpose of a Sunni-led Iraq was to provide a counter balance to the more populous and potentially dangerous Shiite Iran. The understanding during the 1980s—and it was a mantle taken by Saddam willingly and aggressively—was that Iraq would serve as the bulwark against any military expansion of the Islamic revolution by Iran into the Tigris and Euphrates valley and onto the Arabian Peninsula. The Gulf States consequently provided Iraq with billions of dollars in support during the Iran-Iraq war, and the United States provided intelligence to assist in the war effort when it appeared that the Iranians were winning.

But by the summer of '02, things had changed. Everyone in D.C. knew the Bush regime had made up its mind to go to war. Russell wrote:

A potential ouster of Saddam provides U.S. officials and their partners in the region a unique opportunity to review the assumption that Iraq serves as a bulwark against Iranian aggression and to reach a consensus on the makeup of a post-Saddam Iraq and the role that Iraq will play in fostering regional security and stability.

That assumption, he said, is in fact wrong. Here's what he said:

A compelling argument can be made that a unified Iraq under Baath-strongmen, most notably Saddam Hussein, has been a primary cause of regional insecurity and instability for the last 30 years.

Now here's the scary part:

It further remains unclear whether and how Iraq's Sunni, Kurdish, and Shiite communities can function together in any sort of "modern" political context.

Iraq has been led by an authoritarian Sunni-led minority regime since its inception, starting with the Hashemite monarchy imposed by Great Britain, which was followed by a Sunni-led Baath party apparatus and its series of military strongmen.

Thus, the country has always been held together by coercion and force—not by an underlying congruence of interests among Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds that translated into common consent of the people. In fact, quite the opposite has been the case. The Sunni minority has been openly hostile to the Shiites and the Kurds virtually since the inception of the Iraqi state.

You're wondering why the Iraqis have done nothing but squabble since the January 30 election? How could they have done anything else? Russell called it back in '02:

Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds present contending histories and circumstances that limit their ability to cooperate in a more representative form of democratic government. Each of these groups has more of an interest in governing themselves than in cooperating with each other.

As Bush criticizes how the spoils of Europe were divided after World War II, we might want to remember how parts of Europe broke apart after the Cold War. Russell wrote:

When confronted with the breakup of the states in Europe at the end of the Cold War, the West gave in to the inevitable—no matter how hard U.S. officials and their European partners tried, they could not keep artificial entities together if the people in them could not or would not live in peace.

The same kind of Balkanization could very well happen in Iraq. Russell concluded:

Whatever the practical difficulties of keeping Iraq together, the United States must declare its intention to preserve the territorial integrity of Iraq to attract what political support it can for regime change in Iraq. But we should be under no illusions about the difficulties of unifying the three groups.

U.S. officials should consider that by allowing the breakup of Iraq, the United States may find a viable path toward realizing its overriding policy objective, which is to prevent the re-emergence of another military dictator who will continue to develop WMD and threaten his neighbors if not the entire international community.

But who gets the oil? Hmmm. It seems hard to imagine that Dick Cheney would let us withdraw from Iraq without trying to make sure we were going to wind up with a hell of a lot of its oil. That's why we embarked on this in the first place, isn't it?

But maybe Bush's handlers saw all along that a post-Saddam Iraq could never function as a unified country. Maybe this is the sort of de-stabilizing—a fractured, split-in-three Iraq—that the neocons, and their pal Ariel Sharon, hoped for all along. Hmmm.

Morning Report 5/9/05
Bush Re-enacts Battle of Sedan

Posted by Harkavy at 10:09 AM, May 9, 2005

It's not enough that George W. Bush is driving us crazy with his war on Social Security. He had to go to Russia and fight a new Battle of Sedan with Vladimir Putin (see top photo). Then Bush went to Western Europe to commemorate the dead from past wars while he refuses to acknowledge the dead civilians in Iraq, which incidentally has devolved into a civil war strewn with car parts and body parts (see bottom photo).

The Bush regime has already made it clear that us 'Mericans don't do body counts in Iraq.

Of course, the Europeans do them—by the millions. Take a look at today's Pravda; it's worth a snicker to read Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey's "George W. Bush: An Insult to Our Collective Intelligence." It's a faintly ridiculous piece. Scolding Bush for all the wrong reasons, like this passage:

On the eve of the celebrations to mark the 60th anniversary of the victory over Fascism in Europe, instead of being conciliatory to Russia, George Bush waltzes into Latvia, a country with a deplorable human rights record, complete with concentration camps during the Fascist occupation and with a revisionist tendency to glorify its Fascist part in the country's history and declares that the Soviet presence in Eastern Europe was one of the "greatest wrongs of history."

So, what was the Soviet Union supposed to do, after 25 million of its citizens had been killed in the most vicious fighting in the war, after a quarter of a million of its citizens had lost their lives killing between 75 and 85 percent of the Nazi troops in the Second World War? Allow the USA to occupy its resources and install disgusting fast-food restaurants before colonizing the country with pornography, filth, and depravity?

Pornography, filth, and depravity? Well, yeah. So what's his point? Then the Pravda guy waxes wroth, wrongly:

Diplomacy, debate, dialogue and discussion are for sure the four words which summarize Moscow's foreign policy, while Washington's continues to be dominated by bullying, blackmail, belligerence, and bullishness.

Where do we start? For one thing, Moscow gets no more than a "D" for, say, Chechnya.

However, reading Pravda is a blast, especially the "Fun Story" column on the home page, which features these headlines:

• Airline Claims Damages from Airport with Birds
• To Cheat the Police Women Pickled Marijuana Like Cucumbers
• Two Underage Girls Steal Cell Phones and Hide Them in Most Intimate Places of Their Bodies
• Football Club Owner Wants to Become Jesus Christ

No wonder Bush went to Europe. He wanted to not only take some shots at the Europeans but also kick around some ideas with that team owner.

Morning Report 5/6/05
Yelling 'Bliar! Bliar!' In a Crowded Theatrical

Posted by Harkavy at 8:02 AM, May 6, 2005

This may not be much solace to the U.S. anti-war crowd, but finally a politician ran on an anti-war plank and wasn't forced to walk off it. But what a candidate!

George Galloway (left), the reviled and libeled Scottish MP who was thrown out of the Labor Party for telling Arab TV that Tony Blair and George W. Bush were "wolves," has fully revived his political career by storming back into Parliament.

What a campaign! Galloway ran in a heavily Muslim constituency in London's East End and played his anti-war stance to the hilt. He formed a new party, called it Respect, and that's what he got, after a brawling battle.

A 2003 profile of Galloway in the Mail on Sunday gives a good, brief look at his stormy career. Then there was a vicious libel against Galloway, linking him to illegal payments by Saddam Hussein. The Christian Science Monitor broke that "story"—and was proved wrong, by the way.

And what an opponent! Oona King, the sitting MP, was a new darling of the Labor Party, referred to as one of "Blair's Babes." And she backed Blair on Iraq. In the heaviest irony, King is the daughter of a black American, Preston King, who fled to Great Britain in the '50s as a civil-rights activist and draft dodger from the racist South and became a respected academic.

Like a majority of her former constituents, King is a person of color. But her mother is Jewish, and so is she, and that can't have helped her. Here's how the BBC described it this morning:

She was media savvy and a high-profile MP for some of the poorest people in the country.

But eight years on, those constituents have punished her closeness to the Prime Minister—not over the bread-and-butter East End issues of jobs and housing—but over her support for the war in Iraq.

And so it was to the cheers of his supporters that the new member for Bethnal Green and Bow declared: "Mr. Blair, this is for Iraq."

Everyone knew the campaign was going to be bitter. King was firmly aligned with Blair and Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer who is likely to succeed Blair as Labor's prime minister.

Galloway, of course, was Blair's harshest critic. He had mobilized more than a million protesters against the war during a 2003 rally. He threw everything at King, and so did other people, as Richard Alleyne of the Telegraph (U.K) reported on April 11:

The campaign for what promises to be one of the most bitterly contested parliamentary seats got off to an explosive start yesterday when the MP Oona King was pelted with eggs and vegetables as she attended a memorial to Jewish war dead.

Miss King, 37, the black Jewish Labour MP for Bethnal Green and Bow, was attacked as she joined mourners to commemorate 60 years since the Hughes Mansions Disaster, when 134 people, almost all Jewish, were killed by the last V2 missile to land on London.

The eggs missed her, but one hit a war veteran, Louis Lewis, 89, in the chest and an onion struck Richard Brett, a bugler from the Jewish Lads and Girls Brigade who sounded the Last Post at the ceremony.

"The Jewish Lads and Girls Brigade"—there'll always be an England. Anyway, King was angry, but as the story pointed out:

The incident demonstrated how high feelings are running in the east London constituency, which has 55,000 Bangladeshi Muslims, more than half its electorate, most of whom bitterly opposed the war in Iraq.…

Even though [Galloway] has no connections to the constituency—his former seat is 400 miles away in Glasgow— he hopes that personal animosity towards Miss King will help him overturn her 10,000 majority.

Yesterday's display of hatred proved he may be on to something. Even a police van called in to make sure the ceremony remained peaceful was pelted with eggs.

The incident also showed the changing face of the East End. Back in 1945 when the bomb struck, the area was predominantly Jewish.

But since the war most of those have moved out, and been replaced by Muslims.

You can't read too much into Galloway's win. After all, Blair's party won what amounts to a third term.

But the back story is fascinating. Talk about truth and reconciliation. The saga of Preston King has that and more. Robert Fikes Jr., laid it out on the African American Male Research site in 1999:

It was 1956 when Preston King, son of a prominent black Albany, Georgia, businessman and civil rights leader, returned home from studying abroad. It was then that his all-white draft board, which had previously granted him a deferment, discovered King was black and started addressing him in correspondence as "Preston" instead of "Mr. King."

Fully comprehending the racial implications of the draft board's action, King, who was quite willing to serve in the military, reacted by notifying the board that he would refuse to respond to any correspondence from the board addressing him as "Preston."

In 1958, he returned to study at the London School of Economics, where he eventually earned his doctorate. When he arrived in the U.S. in 1960 he was promptly arrested, tried by a segregated jury, and jailed for 18 months as a draft dodger. Out on bail while his case was being appealed, he left town and made his way back to England where he has remains to this day, stripped of his American citizenship.

Recently, the federal judge who sentenced King admitted that the trial had been thoroughly compromised by racial bias, that "race was everything" and, knowing this, the all-white draft board and trial jury acted in accord with the conventions of the old South.

In early 2000, Bill Clinton granted a pardon to King. That April, Clinton hosted King and his family at the White House. As a fawning story from Howard University noted at the time:

Preston's homecoming was a riveting chapter in the story of a great American family and its long rendezvous with leadership to reform the Old South and to keep the New South on a just and steady course. That role was memorialized at a stunningly symbolic rapprochement between Professor King and Judge William A. Bootle, the federal judge who presided over his trial and sentenced him to jail.

In an extraordinary act, the retired judge, now 97, joined in King's petition to President Clinton for a pardon. A meeting of reconciliation took place in Macon, Georgia, where Judge Bootle hosted the Kings and some of their friends to lunch and conversation at his home.

Must be bitter for Oona King to have lost a food fight five years later in the East End.

Craig Murray, the brash ex-ambassador to Uzbekistan whom I wrote about on May 3, got kilt by Foreign Secretary Jack Straw (Brent Musburger's doppelganger) in Blackburn, but that was no surprise.

Like Galloway, Murray is a Scot. Unlike Galloway, Murray ran as an independent, and Blackburn is only 25 percent Muslim. Throughout the campaign, though, Murray wrote a hilarious column for the Guardian (U.K.) called Our Man in Blackburn.

His fight against the rendition of prisoners to countries that openly torture will have to wait for a bigger outcry. But his column was really funny. As he wrote, in part, on the eve of the vote:

I was delighted to be approached by a whole crowd in the pub last night wanting my autograph. I was overwhelmed by my own popularity and thought I was home and dry. Then I discovered that they thought I was "that bloke that's shagging Sally on Corrie". I don't know who that actor is, but evidently he must be a man of great good looks and charisma. Now that Ian McKellen is on Coronation Street, I console myself that being mistaken for one of the cast is socially acceptable.

One of our slogans has been "British Bulldog, not Bush's Poodle", which has the advantage of confusing people entirely about the political direction we are coming from. This at least gets them to open the leaflet and read more. It was devised by Edward, who used to work for Saatchi and Saatchi. He claims it appeals to both left and right. It could, of course, alienate both instead. I suppose we'll soon know.

My mate Matt was canvassing when he was attacked by the two largest poodles imaginable. The unrepentant owner of these gruesome animals declared herself deeply offended by the jibe at poodles. Happily, the militant poodle front seems outnumbered by the gratified bulldog owners.

Getting a platform has proved difficult. The local council has failed to meet its legal obligation to provide public meeting rooms in schools, community centres, etc. We had Moazzam Begg on Sunday to talk about his detention in Guantánamo, and we had to hire a private ballroom. The council claimed they couldn't staff a public room over the bank holiday, but community centres were used by Straw for public meetings on the bank holiday Monday.

What's more, on the Saturday of the bank holiday weekend the Returning Officer [elections official] tracked me down to Puccino's cafe, where he told me that there had been a complaint that my posters did not meet the legal requirement for a publishing imprint. I pointed out the publishing imprint to him, and he vanished. There seems to be no shortage of energy for stifling democracy, but less for promoting it.

Morning Report 5/5/05
Following Ordures

Posted by Harkavy at 11:41 AM, May 5, 2005

Yesterday's stunning decision by the judge to reject Lynndie England's guilty plea may have put the lie to the Pentagon's contention that there was no top-down conspiracy to abuse prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

But the judge, Colonel James Pohl, works for the Pentagon, and there is a chain of command, isn't there? So who knows what will happen? Radically different stories in this morning's Washington Post and New York Times both point to the confusion.

You can almost hear Don Rumsfeld bark at General Dick "Quag" Myers, "Who the hell is this colonel?!"

T.R. Reid's Post story gets right to the heart of the matter:

The judge's rejection of her guilty plea—together with evidence at her sentencing hearing that senior Army commanders tolerated chaotic, dangerous and illegal conditions at the notorious prison outside Baghdad—could undermine the Pentagon's assertion that the Abu Ghraib scandal was solely the fault of a small clique of enlisted soldiers.

The Times' story isn't nearly as focused, but Ralph Blumenthal provides a better picture of the drama:

The judge, Col. James L. Pohl, ordered the mistrial after Pvt. Charles A. Graner Jr., testifying on behalf of Private England, his former lover, portrayed their handling of a leashed prisoner as legitimate, contradicting her sworn admission of guilt and said she had acted at his request in helping to remove an obstructive prisoner from his cell.

"I was asking her as the senior person at that extraction," Private Graner said.

Clearly taken aback, Colonel Pohl broke in, lecturing the defense lawyers. "If you don't want to plead guilty, don't," he said. "But you can't plead guilty and then say you're not. Am I missing something here?"

A few paragraphs later, Blumenthal writes:

The drama of the two former intimates and accused co-conspirators confronting each other across a courtroom went unaddressed, although the tangle of relationships has grown with a former wife of Private Graner on hand Wednesday to testify as a witness if called, and revelations that he recently married another convicted defendant, Specialist Megan M. Ambuhl.

Private England seemed to betray her feelings when she looked over the shoulder of a courtroom artist sketching Private Graner and commented, "You forgot the horns and goatee."

The case now goes back to the Army commander at Fort Hood, General Thomas Metz, who has numerous options.

In the meantime, we can all go back and read the Army CID interviews of England, Graner, and the other Abu Ghraib soldiers—start at the documents overview from the Center for Public Integrity.

Anyone who does so can reasonably conclude that, in fact, there was a conspiracy: Graner was softening up the prisoners at the request of Military Intelligence.

Graner and other MPs told investigators that MI people wanted the prisoners at Abu G's so-called Hard Site softened up for interrogation. Graner then asked some of his soldier pals—people who weren't supposed to even be at the Hard Site—to help him out and have some fun. Hence, the pyramid scheme.

If you read the Taguba Report and other documents, you'll see that the chain of command was responsible for letting all hell break loose on the heads of the Iraqi prisoners.

The key figure in all this was Spc. Joseph M. Darby, who blew the whistle. Darby told investigators in January 2004:

I thought about the pictures showing the prisoners in sexual positions and I thought that it was just wrong. When I learned Cpl. Graner was going to go back and work at the Hard Site, which is where the photos showing the prisoners being abused occurred, I knew I had to do something. I didn't want to see any more prisoners being abused because I knew it was wrong. So I created another Compact Disk with the photos showing the prisoners being abused and wrote an anonymous letter and gave it to CID.

Darby's complete statement can be found on page 89 of a fascinating 128-page collection of CID interviews, part of a massive array of Abu G docs posted by the Center for Public Integrity.

While we're waiting for General Metz to announce his plans for Lynndie's case, take a look at Darby's statement. Right from the start, it fascinates:

I arrived at Abu Ghraib sometime around 25 or 26 Oct 03. Shortly after I arrived, I was talking with Cpl. Graner and he showed me pictures on his digital camera of a prisoner chained to his cell.

The prisoner's arms were chained above his head and he was naked. At the time I didn't think too much of it, as I thought perhaps it was procedure in the Hard Site.

Cpl. Graner told me, "The Christian in me says it's wrong, but the Corrections Officer in me says I love to make a grown man piss himself.

You can almost hear General "Quag" Myers barking into his phone, "Get me General Metz! And tell Damage Control to send up some fresh trousers for me and the SECDEF!"

Morning Report 5/4/05
U.S. Soldiers' Deaths: Don't Look, Don't Tell

Posted by Harkavy at 10:22 AM, May 4, 2005

The coverup of NFL star Pat Tillman's death by friendly fire in April 2004 in Afghanistan was even worse than previously reported.

And as more and more facts and photos emerge, the lies and bullshit of the Pentagon come into sharper focus.

The Washington Post, whose former managing editor Steve Coll wrote a blistering account in December about Tillman's unnecessary death, is now reporting that the Pentagon hid the truth from his family until weeks after the Bush regime had milked the tragedy for all the p.r. it could get.

Josh White's story this morning says:

The first Army investigator who looked into the death of former NFL player Pat Tillman in Afghanistan last year found within days that he was killed by his fellow Rangers in an act of "gross negligence," but Army officials decided not to inform Tillman's family or the public until weeks after a nationally televised memorial service.

A new Army report on the death shows that top Army officials, including the theater commander, Gen. John P. Abizaid, were told that Tillman's death was fratricide days before the service.

In my previous item about Coll's story, I quoted his piece:

The records show Tillman fought bravely and honorably until his last breath. They also show that his superiors exaggerated his actions and invented details as they burnished his legend in public, at the same time suppressing details that might tarnish Tillman's commanders.

In White's follow-up, he pored through thousands of pages of documents and found that despite what was called "gross negligence" in Tillman's death, the soldiers responsible got off lightly. Of the coverup, he also wrote:

The documents … show that officers made erroneous initial reports that Tillman was killed by enemy fire, destroyed critical evidence, and initially concealed the truth from Tillman's brother, also an Army Ranger, who was near the attack on April 22, 2004, but did not witness it.

White doesn't say so, but what's so surprising about this? At the time of Tillman's death, the Abu Ghraib scandal was breaking, and the Bush regime desperately needed the great p.r. generated by the heroic Tillman's tragic death to counter the ugly torture scandal.

In other words, use Tillman's square-jawed face to blot out images of Lynndie England's moon-faced mug.

"Blot out" is the operative phrase of our current administration. Just look at the photos of soldiers' coffins, like the picture above, pried out of the government after a long court battle.

Kudos to former CNN journalist Ralph Begleiter and the hard-working truth fanatics of the National Security Archive for obtaining these images. The government only wants you to focus on celebrities' deaths, when it can spin some p.r. It has steadfastly played down the relentless offloading of coffins at Dover, Delaware, but Begleiter, now a journalism prof at the University of Delaware, fought long and hard to open up those secret operations.

Just a few days ago, the National Security Archive, one of the best NGOs around, posted another batch of photos previously suppressed by the government. You can look at them, download them, pass them around. People can see the human cost of war. I know it's bad for military recruiting. Tough.

But let's go back to exactly one year ago.The memorial service for Tillman was on May 3, 2004. The coverup was in full swing. As White's story notes:

An initial investigation found fratricide just days [after Tillman's April 22 death]. Top commanders within the U.S. Central Command, including Abizaid, were notified by April 29—four days before Tillman's memorial service in San Jose, where he was given a posthumous Silver Star Award.…

The family learned about Tillman's fratricide over Memorial Day weekend, several weeks later. Commanders felt they could not hold on to the old version because the Rangers were returning home and "everybody knows the story," the documents show.

Meanwhile, the very day after the memorial service, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz was interviewed on the government's Pentagon Channel. The topic was Military Appreciation Month. Here's a snatch of the TV show's May 4, 2004, Q&A:

Q: With Military Appreciation Month, what are some of the things that we can do to help them understand or help them get the message back to the United States that progress is being made?

WOLFOWITZ: Well, I think, first of all, just keep making progress. I mean, I do believe eventually the facts get through over the statements—false statements. And it is absolutely critical that we win Iraq and that we win Afghanistan.

The interviewer of course had to bring up families:

That critical job obviously, it’s very difficult for our military, but it’s also difficult for their families. Is there something you’d like to say to the families?

Wolfowitz, a pretend soldier himself, obviously didn't have anything to say to Tillman's family. The coverup was going on at that moment. All Wolfie said was the usual platitudinous crap, including this:

It’s an enormous burden on families just to be separated so long and to be separated under combat conditions where every day you’re hoping that the bad news isn’t coming. The anxiety is enormous. And I think our whole country has got to be enormously grateful that there are men and women ready to serve our country in that way and families who support the way these families do.

Well, then, just don't show them the pictures of death and of coffins, and don't tell the families the bad news—especially the truth.

Morning Report 5/3/05
Like a Boil on Blair's Butt

Posted by Harkavy at 10:24 AM, May 3, 2005

Thursday's British election will cap a delightfully raucous campaign—delightful even if you forget about the underlying issues of the Bush-Blair war of terror.

No one puts this in clearer focus than Craig Murray, who was hounded out of his post as U.K. ambassador to Uzbekistan after he publicly rebuked that dictatorship for torture, including boiling people to death. Now Murray is running for Parliament in Thursday's election against his former boss, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw.

Murray's a key figure in exposing the evil practice of "rendition," in which the U.S. and Great Britain send detainees to Uzbekistan and other countries to be literally squeezed for information. The CIA, in fact, has done this.

Since the Bush regime's deadly combination of neocons and profiteers decided to use 9/11 as an excuse to launch a "war on terror," Uzbekistan's dictator, Islam Karimov, has become a big buddy of ours.

And for all the God talk by the Bush regime, it's supporting a dictator who tortures people for practicing their religion—in Karimov's case, the main religion he persecutes is Islam, so I guess it's OK. Here's how Guardian (U.K.) columnist George Monbiot wrote about it in '03:

There are over 6,000 political and religious prisoners in Uzbekistan. Every year, some of them are tortured to death. Sometimes the policemen or intelligence agents simply break their fingers, their ribs and then their skulls with hammers, or stab them with screwdrivers, or rip off bits of skin and flesh with pliers, or drive needles under their fingernails, or leave them standing for a fortnight, up to their knees in freezing water. Sometimes they are a little more inventive. The body of one prisoner was delivered to his relatives last year, with a curious red tidemark around the middle of his torso. He had been boiled to death.

His crime, like that of many of the country's prisoners, was practising his religion.

Strictly by coincidence, Halliburton "won" a $22.1 million contract to build something called Camp Stronghold Freedom in Uzbekistan.

Karimov is a harsh, repressive schmuck, like Saddam Hussein, who, as you may recall, was once our pal. In the '80s, Don Rumsfeld traveled to Iraq to pal around with Saddam. Now he does the same thing with Karimov (see photo below).

Don Van Natta of the New York Times wrote a lengthy piece about the U.S.'s "rough ally" a couple of days ago, including this passage:

Uzbekistan's role as a surrogate jailer for the United States was confirmed by a half-dozen current and former intelligence officials working in Europe, the Middle East and the United States. The C.I.A. declined to comment on the prisoner transfer program, but an intelligence official estimated that the number of terrorism suspects sent by the United States to Tashkent was in the dozens.

Big surprise. Murray has been talking about this for a couple of years, making headlines everywhere in the world except the U.S.

Not until the jump did Van Natta's May 1 story mention Murray:

"If you talk to anyone there, Uzbeks know that torture is used—it's common even in run-of-the-mill criminal cases," said Allison Gill, a researcher for Human Rights Watch who is working inside Uzbekistan. "Anyone in the United States or Europe who does not know the extent of the torture problem in Uzbekistan is being willfully ignorant."

Craig Murray, a former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, said he learned during his posting to Tashkent that the C.I.A. used Uzbekistan as a place to hold foreign terrorism suspects. During 2003 and early 2004, Mr. Murray said in an interview, "C.I.A. flights flew to Tashkent often, usually twice a week."

In July 2004, Mr. Murray wrote a confidential memo to the British Foreign Office accusing the C.I.A. of violating the United Nations' Prohibition Against Torture. He urged his colleagues to stop using intelligence gleaned in Uzbekistan from terrorism suspects because it had been elicited through torture and other coercive means. Mr. Murray said he knew about the practice through his own investigation and interviews with scores of people who claimed to have been brutally treated inside Uzbekistan's jails.

"We should cease all cooperation with the Uzbek security services—they are beyond the pale," Mr. Murray wrote in the memo, which was obtained by the Times.

Well, they didn't. In fact, Murray got into trouble with his bosses. Van Natta glossed over it, writing:

Mr. Murray, who has previously spoken publicly about prisoner transfers to Uzbekistan, said his superiors in London were furious with his questions, and he was told that the intelligence gleaned in Uzbekistan could still be used by British officials, even if it was elicited by torture, as long as the mistreatment was not at the hands of British interrogators. "I was astonished," Mr. Murray said in an interview. "It was as if the goal posts had moved. Their perspective had changed since Sept. 11."

A Foreign Office spokesman declined to address Mr. Murray's allegations. Last year, Mr. Murray resigned from the Foreign Office, which had investigated accusations that he mismanaged the embassy in Tashkent. An inquiry into those allegations was closed without any disciplinary action being taken against him.

Actually, the Foreign Office went to war on Murray. They fired his staff and then Murray was accused of sexual hijinks—selling visas for sex. He was chewed out a few times by his bosses, collapsed of a nervous breakdown, suffered a near-fatal pulmonary embolism, and finally was cleared of all allegations.

After he rested up, he traveled from his home in Scotland to Blackburn, where he's challenging Jack Straw's seat in Parliament. Could he upset Straw? Murray thinks it's possible.

He's been charting his campaign progress in a column in the Guardian (U.K.). Murray refuses to let the Blair government "move on" from its disastrous decision to tag along with the Bush regime and invade Iraq. Here's a snatch from Murray's April 21 column:

I could actually win this election. The realization came as something of a shock. It was not really part of the original game plan. Two months ago I arrived here alone, standing forlornly with my rucksack on Blackburn railway station, in the midnight snow. I wanted to make a stand on principle against illegal war, and against Jack Straw's decision that we should use intelligence obtained under torture. I wanted to get some national publicity for these issues during the campaign, to counter Tony Blair's mantra: "Let's move on" from the war.

(Am I the only one to find this mantra insulting? I think I'll rob a bank to get some campaign funds. When the police come to take me away, I'll say, "Hey, let's move on. OK, so I robbed a bank. Whatever the rights and wrongs, that phase is over. What is important is that we all come together now and get behind the really great things I'm going to do with the money.")

Sorry, Craig, but Paul Wolfowitz got to the bank ahead of you.

Morning Report 5/2/05
The Face That Launched a Thousand Fits

Posted by Harkavy at 9:26 AM, May 2, 2005

In a different universe, Lynndie England might still have wound up on TV. Uneducated, no prospects, trapped in a trailer park in West Virginia, working in a chicken-processing plant … someone could have dialed 1-800-96JERRY for her.

But instead, the soldier wound up as the Abu Ghraib poster child. She's scheduled to plead guilty today to various charges, with the understanding that she'll be imprisoned for no more than 11 years.

A term that long is outrageous, considering that her bosses have practically all been absolved. Just remember that it was Alberto Gonzales who advised George W. Bush in January 2002 (as my colleague Nat Hentoff and thousands of others have pointed out) that the "war on terror … renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions."

And now Gonzales is our attorney general? Why are we being punished?

Thanks to the British press—not the American papers or TV—we're learning more every day about how the unjustified invasion of Iraq was cooked up. Once we got there, Gonzales and the Pentagon hawks like Don Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz put our soldiers in position to fail—even overruling JAG lawyers' protests against dispensing with the Geneva Conventions. (Read Seymour Hersh's "The Gray Zone," in the May 24, 2004 New Yorker for details.) Lower the standards for behavior, and human nature takes care of the rest. We're imperfect. That's why we have laws and standards, right?

Thanks to Rolling Stone reporter Osha Gray Davidson and the Center for Public Integrity, you can read Abu Ghraib documents at the CPI site until your eyeballs lock up. In the Army CID investigation reports from January 2004, you can even look at England's story in her own words, starting on page 81 of a particular 128-page bundle of reports, how she posed next to "masterbating" prisoners and all that.

Yeah, Lynndie England was an idiot and should be punished. But not like a scapegoat. Now let's look at some more of those cool, bizarre, disgusting, shameful pictures.

Start with the invaluable Wikipedia page on England for more fun photos and facts.

Wolfowitz Leaves Pentagon Without Causing Further Casualties

Posted by Harkavy at 11:42 PM, May 1, 2005

Paul Wolfowitz, leaving the Pentagon for the World Bank, got a grand send-off Friday, a complete military review with marching troops, flags, speeches, and all that. And he saluted back.

It was one of the few military exercises lately that Wolfowitz, architect of our Iraq debacle, had anything to do with in which no American soldiers were killed or wounded. Collaterally, no Iraqis were harmed during the production of this ceremony.

Permanently embedded reporter Jim Garamone of the American Forces Press Service wrote:

Wolfowitz thanked the men and women of the military and the civil service. "They are the ones who serve America quietly and professionally every day," he said. "They are the ones who deserve our special and lasting gratitude."

More than 1,500 of them, plus upwards of 21,000 Iraqis, are permanently quiet.

The current crop of Pentagon civilians and other top Bush regime officials slays me. They just love the military trappings of their jobs, even though most of them did all they could to stay out of action when they were young enough to fight.

I stayed out. I was No. 13 in the first draft lottery for the Vietnam War and was called up for an Army physical in Kansas City in early 1970. I flunked it with a psychiatric 4-F, thanks to a sympathetic doctor who wrote, "If inducted into the Army, Mr. Harkavy will become psychotic." Many of us college mooks that day in Kansas City were fortunate to stay out of that disastrous and wrong war. Not so the farm boys and inner-city kids who didn't want to go; they didn't have friendly draft counselors and doctors to help them stay out of the slaughter.

Thirty-five years later, all I can say is that, unlike fellow draft dodgers Wolfowitz, Cheney, and Bush (yeah, he dodged it by joining the National Guard), I'm not sending young Americans overseas to risk death for the sake of corporate profits.

My colleague Tom Robbins produced a list last August of the current administration's draft-dodger codgers; check it out. He dug up one of my favorite quotes, student- and marriage-deferred Dick Cheney's excuse: "I had other priorities in the '60s than military service."

My favorite fellow 4-F'er is Rush Limbaugh: He got his because of a case of anal cysts, as I noted back in March '04.

Wolfowitz skated by on student deferments at Cornell and the University of Chicago. But he knows how to salute (see photo).

A sadder Wolfowitz-related exit is the announced end of worldbankpresident.org, the lively site that sizzled with inside info from before Wolfowitz's nomination to now.

Belgium-based Alex Wilks, a co-producer of the site, penned his farewll the other day, but promised to release the hounds on Wolfie if the situation warrants. In the meantime, the site will stay up, he says. And it's a good resource and record of recent history.

For ongoing news on Wolfie and the World Bank, see Wilks's organization, Eurodad, and other NGO sites, like IFIwatchnet and the Bretton Woods Project.

And there are plenty of thoughtful stories analyzing the new reign of Wolfie the World Banker, like Daphne Eviatar's April 26 Salon analysis of "the war hawk's fealty to the oil industry."

Actually, I'm glad Wolfie was moved into the World Bank job by George W. Bush's handlers. That just gives more visibility to the World Bank and to poor countries (most of the planet).

Expressing that idea in a more sophisticated and lively way is progressive George Monbiot, a columnist for the Guardian (U.K.), whose April 5 "I'm With Wolfowitz" piece is provocative and shrewd. Here's part of Monbiot's reasoning:

Wolfowitz's appointment is a good thing for three reasons. It highlights the profoundly unfair and undemocratic nature of decision-making at the bank. His presidency will stand as a constant reminder that this institution, which calls on the nations it bullies to exercise "good governance and democratization" is run like a medieval monarchy.

It also demolishes the hopeless reformism of men such as [Joseph] Stiglitz and George Soros who, blithely ignoring the fact that the US can veto any attempt to challenge its veto, keep waving their wands in the expectation that a body designed to project US power can be magically transformed into a body that works for the poor. Had Stiglitz's attempt to tinker with the presidency succeeded, it would simply have lent credibility to an illegitimate institution, enhancing its powers. With Wolfowitz in charge, its credibility plummets.

Best of all is the chance that the neocons might just be stupid enough to use the new wolf to blow the bank down. Clare Short laments that "it's as though they are trying to wreck our international systems". What a tragedy that would be. I'd sob all the way to the party.

Monbiot probably did goof on Harry Dexter White (below, left), the guy who brainstormed the creation of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in the '40s.

Monbiot characterized White as an evil genius, but White's daughter Joan Pinkham wrote from Amherst, Massachusetts, to defend her departed dad, who was branded a Commie-lover by the right wing way back when. Here's most of what Pinkham had to say:

Monbiot correctly attributes to White the conception of the International Monetary Fund and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (now the World Bank). But he goes on to speak of White's nefarious intentions (the burden of economic stabilization should be placed on the countries least able to bear it); of the completely negative response of the allied nations to the Bretton Woods proposals; of White's insistence on an undemocratic voting system and a US veto; of his decision that the new institutions would be in Washington etc.

As conceived by my father, these two institutions were designed to create a more equitable, stable, and prosperous world economy. Being neither an economist nor a historian, I cannot pretend to explain how they were eventually converted into the instruments of reaction that Monbiot so rightfully excoriates today. An economist friend, when I asked him how this had come about, once responded with a laugh: "The bankers took them over!" In any event, I would like to assure Monbiot that the present incarnations of the progressive institutions imagined by my father are perversions of their original purposes. The irony is that Harry White, a loyal civil servant with a humane and internationalist outlook, is now attacked from both ends of the political spectrum. Since his untimely death in 1948, he has been repeatedly accused of having betrayed US interests in favor of Soviet communism. Now he is also accused of having relentlessly promoted the hegemony of US capitalism.

See, Wolfie's appointment to the World Bank is a good thing if it focuses more attention on the Bank, its history, and the countries it supposedly helps.