[Peace-discuss] News notes 030817

[C. G. Estabrook]

	Notes on the week's "war on terrorism" --
	for the AWARE meeting, Sunday, August 17

	"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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  Carl Estabrook
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