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News :: International Relations |
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AWARE News Notes 030817 |
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by Carl Estabrook
Email: cge (nospam) shout.net (unverified!) |
18 Aug 2003
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Notes on the week's "war on terrorism," prepared for the AWARE meeting, Sunday, August 17, 2003. AWARE -- Anti-War Anti-Racism Effort -- is a group of people from C-U and environs who are opposed to the policies of the US government -- neo-imperialism and favoritism of the rich. We hold open meetings every Sunday 5-7pm at the IMC (218 W. Main, U.) to discuss the situation and plan a variety of responses. |
"The most important thing is for us to find Osama bin Laden. It is our number one priority and we will not rest until we find him!"
--George W. Bush, September 13, 2001
"I don't know where he is ... I just don't spend that much time on him really, to be honest with you ... I truly am not that concerned about him.
--George W. Bush, March 13, 2002 [PR 0812]
Eighty-five years ago, some hundred members of the IWW union were sentenced in Chicago for opposing US participation in WW I, some receiving sentences of 20 years in prison. Collectively, the defendants were fined a total of $2,500,000. The IWW was virtually destroyed. The suppression of dissent in the US during and after the first World War -- when "liberal" presidents and judges jailed even presidential candidates -- suggests comparisons with the present. After all these years, the labor movement remains obsequious: "The AFL-CIO Executive Council, at its meeting in Chicago on Aug. 5-6, decided to continue its virtually unbroken silence about events in Afghanistan, the Middle East and the war in Iraq. At a press conference, AFL-CIO's political director Karen Ackerman stated that organized labor would have the 'biggest ever' campaign to defeat President George Bush in the 2004 elections. But in response to reporters' questions, she said that the AFL-CIO campaign would focus exclusively on domestic issues." [PR 0817]
STOPPING THE FIRST AMENDMENT ON THE NET. An interesting interview in Counterpunch with 20-year old Sherman Austin who has gone to jail for a "crime" invented by Senator Diane Feinstein -- linking to a site that described the making of explosives. [CP 0816]
STOPPING THE FIRST AMENDMENT ON THE STREETS. The UC IMC site has an important story about pre-emptive police attacks on people planning to demonstrate at the National Governors' Association meeting in Indianapolis. [UCIMC 0815] And it's the 35th anniversary of the police riot against demonstrators at the Chicago Democratic Convention. [PR 0817]
WHAT TO DO WITH GOOD INTELLIGENCE. As Liberia's humanitarian crisis was approaching its peak this summer, the Pentagon quashed a report by its own team of specialists calling for an immediate U.S. intervention to stop the fighting and permit the delivery of emergency aid. [LAT 0817]
WE'RE HERE TO HELP YOU. Sabotage in Iraq disrupts the oil pipeline to Turkey and Baghdad's water supply. Repairs could take up to a month following an attack just three days after it reopened. A fire engulfed a section of the pipeline at Baiji, north of Tikrit, on Friday and burned for 24 hours. The US governor of Iraq, Paul Bremer, says the closure of the pipeline will lose the country $7m a day. [BBC 0817]
WE'RE HERE TO HELP YOU (II). "As many as 8,000 people have disappeared since Saddam's regime collapsed, and many relatives are searching for answers about their fate. More than 5,000 are in U.S. custody; others may be among those killed by fellow Iraqis, and in some cases by American troops [sic]. Those who have been detained are nearly always held incommunicado, without access to lawyers or even the right to contact their families. In most cases their loved ones can't find out where they are. With Iraqi prisons looted and destroyed, captives are jailed in barbed-wire compounds, converted warehouses and vast tent camps." Conditions are primitive; at their worst they amount to what Amnesty International describes as "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment." [NEWSWEEK, remarkably enough 0817]
BUT WE DON'T KNOW WHO YOU ARE. The US government said today it had neither an exact count nor all the names of hundreds of people captured in Afghanistan over a year ago and now detained at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba. US government lawyers made the disclosure during a court hearing in a case on behalf of Falen Gherebi, a Libyan national believed to be in US custody in Cuba. [REUTERS 0815]
HOW US CLIENTS CONDUCT THEIR PRISON. An anonymous Palestinian official said this week, "Israel has built a prison, and it wants the Palestinian Authority to be the guards." [LAT 0816] Israeli troops killed a Palestinian militant commander on Thursday -- a six-week-old truce could collapse. Israeli raids last week prompted two avenging Palestinian suicide bombings on Tuesday. Witnesses in Hebron said Israeli troops surrounded a building in search of Mohammad Seder, local head of Islamic Jihad's armed wing. A senior Islamic Jihad official said a body found at the house was that of Seder. A Reuters reporter at the scene said the body was removed with a machine gun still in his hands ... The Israeli army demolished the family home of one suicide bomber on Wednesday and the other early on Thursday, both in Nablus's Askar refugee quarter. [REUTERS 0816]
THE RICH AND THE BLACKOUT. On Friday, Iraqis gave New Yorkers tips on how to survive without electricity. [AP 0815] Even the major papers mention deregualtion and the resulting Enrons as the culprit. The story is devastatingly told in an article by Greg Palast. <http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=257&row=0>. As recently as June of 2001, Bush opposed and the congressional GOP voted down legislation to provide $350 million worth of loans to modernize the nation's power grid because of known weaknesses in reliability and capacity.
REMEMBER THAT OTHER DEFENSELESS COUNTRY WE LIBERATED? On Wednesday, more than 50 died violently in Afghanistan: 15 people, including 6 children, were killed when a bomb exploded on their bus in southern Afghanistan; more than 40 others were killed in fighting in the country's east and south. In the east, suspected Taliban guerrillas attacked government [A COURTESY TERM -- THERE ISN'T REALLY A GOVERNMENT] soldiers in the province of Khost, about four miles from the border with Pakistan, late Tuesday night ... In Oruzgan Province, a clash between the forces of rival warlords ... left more than 20 fighters dead ... The attacks came two days after the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, in a historic departure from its traditional European theater of operations, assumed control of the International Security and Assistance Force, the multinational peacekeeping force that patrols Kabul and the areas surrounding it. And they came as the United States was preparing to invest another $1 billion in Afghanistan, possibly supplemented by another $600 million from other countries, in an attempt to accelerate the pace of reconstruction. [I WONDER WHO WILL BENEFIT FROM THAT?] A significant amount of the aid, according to Afghan officials, will be devoted to strengthening national institutions -- particularly the national army and police -- that could help provide security outside Kabul. Warlords remain entrenched around the country, and Afghanistan is once again the world's largest opium producer. [NYT 0813]
SUCCESSFUL SELF-EXAMINATION. The New York Times is reporting that the Pentagon, after conducting an internal investigation, has acquitted itself of any fault in the death of two journalists by Abrams tank fire on the Palestine Hotel, well-known location of most of the foreign press, during the U.S. attack on Baghdad ... This conclusion contradicts the findings of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ - http://www.cpj.org/), which found in a report released in May that "Pentagon officials, as well as commanders on the ground in Baghdad, knew that the Palestine Hotel was full of international journalists and were intent on not hitting it. However, these senior officers apparently failed to convey their concern to the tank commander who fired on the hotel." The Pentagon's report thus seems focused on avoiding any culpability, rather than an earnest search for the failures in the chain of command in passing important information to operational units assigned to do the actual fighting. [UCIMC 0813]
WE'RE HERE TO HELP (III). On Wednesday, U.S. soldiers shot into a crowd of thousands of demonstrators in a Baghdad slum, killing one civilian and wounding four. In Sadr City, a Shiite Muslim slum, about 3,000 demonstrators gathered around a telecommunications tower where they said American forces in a helicopter tried to tear down an Islamic banner. U.S. military spokesman Sgt. Danny Martin said it was apparently blown down by rotor wash from a helicopter. However, amateur video footage obtained by Associated Press Television News showed a Black Hawk helicopter hovering a few feet from the top of the tower and apparently trying to tear down the banner. Later, U.S. Humvees drove by and the crowd threw stones at them. Heavy gunfire could be heard and demonstrators were seen diving to the ground. U.S. forces said they opened fire after stones, gunfire and one rocket-propelled grenade were directed at soldiers of the 1st Armored Division. No soldiers were hit. Sadr City, formerly known as Saddam City, is a Shiite stronghold in the otherwise Sunni Muslim-dominated capital.
THE STORY IS EXPECTED, THE SOURCE IS REMARKABLE. "Administration officials are leaving out key facts and exaggerating the significance of the alleged plot to smuggle a shoulder-launched missile into the United States, law enforcement officials told ABCNEWS. They say there's a lot less than meets the eye. The accused ringleader, British national Hemant Lakhani, appeared today in federal court in Newark, N.J., and was ordered held without bond on charges of attempting to provide material support and material resources to terrorists and acting as an arms broker without a license. Outside the courtroom, U.S. Attorney Christopher Christie called Lakhani an ally of terrorists who want to kill Americans. 'He, on many occasions, in recorded conversations, referred to Americans as "bastards" [and] Osama bin Laden as a hero,' said Christie. But what he did not say was just how much of the alleged missile plot was a government setup from start to finish. For example, Lakhani had no contacts in Russia to buy the missiles before the sting and had no known criminal record for arms dealing, officials told ABCNEWS. 'Here we have a sting operation on some kind of small operator ... who's bought one weapon when actually, on the gray and black market, hundreds of such weapons charge hands,' said military analyst Pavel Felgenhauer. Court documents show much of the case is based on the government's key cooperating witness, an informant seeking lenient treatment on federal drug arges, officials told ABCNEWS. He was the first person who led the government to Lakhani. The missile shipped into the New York area last month was not a real missile -- just a mockup -- also arranged entirely by the government. The government also arranged the meetings at a New Jersey hotel and elsewhere, where Lakhani allegedly told undercover agents posing as al Qaeda terrorists about his support of bin Laden. 'One would have to ask yourself, would this have occurred at all without the government?' said Gerald Lefcourt, a criminal defense attorney. In London today, Lakhani's neighbors described him as a quiet man who worked in the garment industry and had faced serious financial problems. 'I would have hoped the United States is thwarting real terrorism and not something manufactured because here all they're doing is stopping something they created,' said Lefcourt. Government officials said the case will show that akhani went along with the scheme willingly and was not entrapped. *But the question remains whether any of this would have happened if the government had not set it up.*" [ABC NEWS! (emphasis added) 0815]
SUPPORT OUR TROOPS IN THE BEST WAY. A group of about 600 U.S. military families, upset about the living conditions of soldiers in Iraq, are launching a campaign asking their relatives to urge members of Congress and President George W. Bush to bring the troops home. Families Speak Out, was formed last fall to oppose the war in Iraq .. A spokesman for U.S. Central Command said that as of Monday, 167 U.S. soldiers had died and 1,006 soldiers were injured as a result of hostile action in Iraq. He told Reuters that 91 other soldiers had died from non-hostile actions and 277 others were wounded. [REUTERS 0813]
EVEN THE REPUBLICAN CONGRESS IS WORRIED ABOUT THE MADMEN IN THE PENTAGON. Congress is set to impose new restrictions on the use of Special Operations Forces that for the first time will require a presidential order before deploying commandos in routine but hidden activities. The restrictions are contained in the classified Senate report accompanying the current version of the intelligence authorization bill for fiscal 2004. The restrictions were added to the report by members of the Senate Intelligence Committee after consultations with Stephen Cambone, the defense undersecretary for intelligence ... A senior U.S. intelligence official said the new report language undermines the efforts of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and CIA Director George J. Tenet to loosen restrictions on covert action in the war on terrorism since the September 11 attacks. Mr. Rumsfeld told Congress in February that the Bush administration is expanding the use of Special Operations Forces and has added $1.5 billion to its budget and nearly 2,000 more troops... [WT 0813]
THIS THING IS GOING TO BE VERY COSTLY. Private analysts have estimated that the cost of U.S. military and nation-building operations in Iraq could reach $600 billion. But the closest the administration has come to estimating America's postwar burden was when Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator of occupied Iraq, said last month that "getting the country up and running again" could cost $100 billion and take three years. . . President Bush and other administration officials have refused to provide projections, saying too much is unpredictable. That has angered lawmakers of both parties, who are writing the budget for the coming election year even as federal deficits approach $500 billion. "I think they're fearful of having Congress say, 'Oh, my God, this thing is going to be very costly,'" said Rep. Jim Kolbe, R-Ariz., chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee that controls foreign aid. [AP 0812]
ADMINISTRATION PROPAGANDA WEARING THIN. More than twice as many Americans say it is more important for the president to focus on the economy as say that about the war on terrorism (57% vs. 27%). That represents a dramatic shift since January when a 43% plurality felt Bush should devote more attention to the war on terrorism. [PEW RESEARCH CENTER]
WE'RE HERE TO HELP RICH PEOPLE. The "support our troops" crowd draws the line when that support might actually cost something [WRITES PAUL KRUGMAN OF THE NYT]. According to the Newhouse News Service, "U.S. troops in Iraq suffered through months of unnecessarily poor living conditions because some civilian contractors hired by the Army for logistics support failed to show up." Not surprisingly, civilian contractors -- and their insurance companies -- get spooked by war zones. The Financial Times reports that the dismal performance of contractors in Iraq has raised strong concerns about what would happen in a war against a serious opponent, like North Korea. Military privatization, like military penny-pinching, is part of a pattern. Both for ideological reasons and, one suspects, because of the patronage involved, the people now running the country seem determined to have public services provided by private corporations, no matter what the circumstances. For example, you may recall that in the weeks after 9/11 the Bush administration and its Congressional allies fought tooth and nail to leave airport screening in the hands of private security companies, giving in only in the face of overwhelming public pressure. In Iraq, reports The Baltimore Sun, "the Bush administration continues to use American corporations to perform work that United Nations agencies and nonprofit aid groups can do more cheaply." In short, the logistical mess in Iraq isn't an isolated case of poor planning and mismanagement: it's telling us what's wrong with our current philosophy of government. [Krugman NYT 0812] The White House quickly backpedaled Thursday on Pentagon plans to cut the combat pay of the 157,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan after disclosure of the idea quickly became a political embarrassment. [SFC 0815]
KNITTING UP NEOIMPERIALISM. Air Force Gen Richard Myers, chairman of the U.S. military Joint Chiefs of Staff, departed on Monday for a visit to Colombia and four other Latin American and Caribbean countries, the Pentagon said. The brief announcement did not provide details or a schedule for Myers's trip -- which will also take him to El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, Honduras and Nicaragua ... The United States is moving to establish closer military ties with Colombia ... The Pentagon statement said Myers would thank officials of the countries for their contributions to the U.S.-led military effort in Iraq. [REUTERS 0811] The first contingent of Honduran troops readied for deployment Monday to Iraq, while ... Nicaragua and El Salvador prepared to dispatch their forces in the coming days ... the troops are being sent despite protests from the public and the political opposition. In all, the three countries will send nearly 1,000 soldiers. The troops can also expect a raise -- from about 150 dollars a month to four hundred dollars and even 1,000 dollars in some cases, according to the participating governments. Officers will receive more. Honduras plans to send 370 soldiers, El Salvador 364 and Nicaragua 230. The troops will join a contingent under Spanish leadership ... The Quisqueya (Dominican) Task Force will be under the command of Spanish forces inside the military sector overseen by Poland. [AFP 0811]
WE'RE HERE TO HELP (IV). On Monday, the US military killed two Iraqi policeman, and there was deadly rioting in Basra.
BUT SHE'S CERTAINLY NOT. A retired schoolteacher who went to Iraq to serve as a "human shield" against the U.S. invasion is facing thousands of dollars in U.S. government fines, which she is refusing to pay. The U.S. Department of the Treasury said in a March letter to Faith Fippinger that she broke the law by crossing the Iraqi border before the war. Her travel to Iraq violated U.S. sanctions that prohibited American citizens from engaging in "virtually all direct or indirect commercial, financial or trade transactions with Iraq. "She and others from 30 countries spread out through Iraq to prevent the war. She spent about three months there. Only about 20 of nearly 300 "human shields" were Americans, she said. Fippinger, who returned home May 4, is being fined at least $10,000, but she has refused to pay. She could face up to 12 years in prison ... "She was (in Iraq) in violation of U.S. sanctions," said Taylor Griffin, a Treasury Department spokesman. "That's what happens." [AP 0811]
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