[Peace-discuss] Just Foreign Policy News, October 26, 2006

[Robert Naiman]

I would like to particularly call the attention of mathematicians and
physicists to the third item in today's news summary: the New York
Times report that the UN Security Council is considering a resolution
that could prevent Iranian students from studying math and physics at
foreign universities. If anyone would be interested in initiating a
mathematicians' and/or physicists' letter on this topic, please
contact naiman at justforeignpolicy.org.

Just Foreign Policy News
October 26, 2006

No War with Iran: Petition
More than 3200 people have signed the Just Foreign Policy/Peace Action
petition through Just Foreign Policy's website. Please sign/circulate
if you have yet to do so:
http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/involved/iranpetition.html

Get Local: the Just Foreign Policy Tour
If there's an event in your area, try to come. If not, pass the info
to folks you know who live near upcoming events; we'll try to drop by
your neighborhood soon.
http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/tour/index.html

Just Foreign Policy News daily podcast:
http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/podcasts/podcast_howto.html

Summary:
U.S./Top News
Russia's foreign minister on Thursday signaled Russian opposition to a
draft U.N. Security Council resolution proposed by European nations
that would impose sanctions on Iran over its disputed nuclear program,
AP reports.

The US and its European allies split Wednesday over the terms of a
U.N. resolution calling for a ban on Iranian trade in ballistic
missiles and nuclear materials, according to Security Council
diplomats, the Washington Post reports.

The draft text for a Security Council resolution against Iran's
nuclear program includes the extraordinary step of preventing Iranian
students from studying nuclear physics at foreign universities and
colleges, the New York Times reports. It was unclear how far-reaching
the proposed ban against nuclear education for Iranian students abroad
would be. The prohibition would ban any training and education of
Iranian citizens if it could eventually contribute to nuclear and
ballistic missile programs. But whether such a ban would extend to all
physics courses, or even to mathematics and other courses, remained
undetermined.

In both parties, a consensus now exists - buttressed by polls - that
disaffection with a war grown costly and difficult to manage is the
gravest threat to continued Republican rule, the Washington Post
reports.

The encyclopedia of Bush administration misfeasance in Iraq will
include a lengthy section on the contracting fiascos that wasted
billions of taxpayer dollars and turned millions of Iraqis against the
American presence, writes the New York Times in an editorial.

Iraq's Prime Minister lashed out at the US Wednesday, saying his
government would not bend to U.S.-imposed benchmarks and timelines and
criticizing a U.S. military operation in Baghdad that left at least
five people dead, the Washington Post reports.

Vice President Cheney confirmed in a radio interview that U.S.
interrogators subjected al-Qaida suspects to water-boarding, Jonathan
Landay reports for  McClatchy Newspapers. Cheney indicated that the
Bush administration doesn't regard water-boarding as torture and
allows the CIA to use it. "It's a no-brainer for me," Cheney said.

Arab- and Muslim-American voters are poised to vote heavily Democratic
in the Nov. 7 mid-term elections, writes Jim Lobe for Inter Press
Service, summarizing two polls released this week.

Iraq
The way American officials inform the Iraqi government about raids by
coalition forces will be reviewed, a spokesman for the US military
command in Iraq said today, after the country's prime minister
criticized a US operation against a Shiite militia enclave.

David Phinney reports for Inter Press Service on allegations of abuse
of foreign laborers by U.S. contractors in Iraq. A former supervisor
for contractor First Kuwaiti acknowledged the company holds passports
of many workers in Iraq - a violation of U.S. contracting laws.

Afghanistan
Scores of civilians have been killed during NATO operations against
Taliban fighters in southern Afghanistan, according to local officials
and civilians, BBC News reports.

Syria
Horror in Syria at the bloodshed accompanying the claimed U.S. effort
to bring democracy to Iraq has accomplished what Syrian President
Assad had been unable to do: silence public demands for democratic
reforms, the Washington Post reports.

Contents:
U.S./Top News
1) Russian Official Opposes Resolution on Iran
Associated Press, October 26, 2006, Filed at 5:37 a.m. ET
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Russia-Iran.html
Russia's foreign minister on Thursday signaled Russian opposition to a
draft U.N. Security Council resolution proposed by European nations
that would impose sanctions on Iran over its disputed nuclear program.
Russian news agencies reported Sergey Lavrov as saying the resolution,
which imposes limited sanctions on Iran because of its refusal to
cease uranium enrichment, is a departure from existing agreements
between major powers.

"Our goal is to eliminate the risks of sensitive technologies getting
into the hands of Iran until the IAEA clarifies issues of interest to
it, while maintaining all possible channels of communication with
Iran," Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov was quoted as saying. "And it
seems to me that, in this context, the draft resolution clearly does
not correspond to those tasks agreed on by the six sides," he added.

European nations this week proposed sanctions - banning the sale of
missile and atomic technology to Iran and ending most U.N. help for
its nuclear programs - after weeks of exploratory talks with an EU
negotiator ended without progress.

The sanctions impose limits on a Russian project to build Iran's first
nuclear power station in the southwestern city of Bushehr. Russia has
consistently rejected U.S. demands to halt work on the $1 billion
contract and last month it agreed to supply fuel for the plant in
March 2007, enabling the facility to go online in September.

The US has been pushing for even tougher sanctions, and Richard
Grenell, spokesman for the U.S. Mission to the UN, said Wednesday
there would be "American changes to the proposed European text." He
refused to elaborate. The head of the Russian state company that is in
charge of the Bushehr project said Thursday that it would completed on
time.

Lavrov reiterated that Russia favors continued dialogue with Iran
instead of punishment. Moscow's aim is to "create the conditions for
the launch of a negotiated process to resolve the Iranian nuclear
problem," he said, according to ITAR-Tass.

2) U.S., European Allies at Odds on Terms of Iran Resolution
Colum Lynch & Glenn Kessler, Washington Post, Thursday, October 26, 2006; A20
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/25/AR2006102501696.html
The US and its European allies split Wednesday over the terms of a
U.N. resolution calling for a ban on Iranian trade in ballistic
missiles and nuclear materials, according to Security Council
diplomats. The Bush administration supports the Europeans' broad aims
of sanctioning Tehran for refusing to halt nuclear activities. But the
White House declined to endorse a European-backed draft resolution,
fearing it would be too weak to constrain Iran from developing nuclear
weapons, U.S. and European diplomats said.

On Wednesday, France, Britain and Germany presented Russia and China
with the text of a resolution that requires states to "prevent the
supply, sale or transfer" of Iran's nuclear and ballistic programs and
would halt Tehran's ability to secure financing and technical
assistance for them. The resolution would also ban travel and freeze
the assets of individuals associated with the weapons programs, said a
council diplomat who has seen the draft. But it exempts Russia from
the trade embargo, allowing it to continue a previously approved
nuclear energy agreement to support the construction of Iran's Bushehr
nuclear power plant.

The Europeans rejected a series of U.S. amendments that would have
imposed greater restrictions on Russia's nuclear trade with Iran and
that characterized Iran's nuclear activities as a threat to
international peace and security. They said the U.S. proposals may
have provoked a Russian veto. The Europeans also have far stronger
trade relations with Iran than does the US and have been reluctant to
approve tougher sanctions.

European negotiators did agree to include a proposal by U.S.
Ambassador Bolton to invoke Article 41, which obliges states to
enforce U.N. sanctions. They have given China and Russia two days to
respond to the resolution before presenting it to all 15 members of
the Security Council.

European negotiators thought they had secured U.S. backing for the
proposal to exempt Russia from the trade ban at a meeting of political
directors in late September. But the deal failed to secure the full
backing of the Bush administration because of concerns that Iran could
use the Bushehr exemption as a cover for importing other prohibited
goods.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice this week backed a proposal by
Bolton to present the Europeans with tougher language. When the
Europeans refused, Bolton said the US would not co-sponsor their
resolution.

The U.N. nuclear watchdog, the Vienna-based International Atomic
Energy Agency, maintains that it has not found proof that Iran is
developing nuclear weapons. But it charges that Iran's efforts to
develop its nuclear program in secrecy over the past 18 years have
helped fueled international suspicions.

Iran maintains that it prepared to hold talks with the council's five
major powers - the US, Russia, China, France and Britain - as well as
Germany over the fate of its nuclear program. But it has refused to
first halt its nuclear activities, insisting that it has the
authority, under the 1970 Non-Proliferation Treaty, to develop nuclear
energy.

3) Draft Iran Resolution Would Restrict Students
Helene Cooper & Thom Shanker, New York Times, October 26, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/26/world/middleeast/26diplo.html
The US and three European allies have given Russia and China a draft
text for a Security Council resolution against Iran's nuclear program.
The proposal includes the extraordinary step of preventing Iranian
students from studying nuclear physics at foreign universities and
colleges. The draft resolution would also prohibit any technical or
financial assistance that could benefit Iran's nuclear program, and
would impose a visa ban on any Iranians involved in nuclear
activities, according to European diplomats involved in the
negotiations.

Bush administration officials and their European counterparts have
been squabbling over details of the draft resolution for the past
week, and the horse-trading will probably increase now that the
Russians and the Chinese have been given the draft.

UN ambassadors from the six countries - the five permanent members of
the Security Council and Germany - are scheduled to meet Thursday to
debate the resolution, officials said. But after five months of missed
deadlines, counterproposals and diplomatic overtures on Iran, few
officials from any of the six countries involved were willing to
predict when a final sanctions resolution might pass the Security
Council. "A matter of weeks," one senior Bush administration official
said. "Maybe."

"Will it be the resolution that we would have if we had written it by
ourselves? Probably not, but that's part of multilateral diplomacy,"
Sean McCormack, the State Department spokesman, said. "We fully
support this draft, and we look forward to its adoption."

It was unclear just how far-reaching the proposed ban against nuclear
education for Iranian students abroad would be, and the diplomats
involved in the negotiations did not seem to have resolved that issue.
The prohibition would ban any training and education of Iranian
citizens if it could eventually contribute to nuclear and ballistic
missile programs. But whether such a ban would extend to all physics
courses, or even to mathematics and other courses, remained
undetermined.

US Ambassador to the UN Bolton demanded that the draft resolution bar
Russia from continuing to build Iran's first nuclear power plant - at
Bushehr, in the southwest of the country - American and European
negotiators said. While some American officials acknowledged that a
provision against all work on Bushehr was unrealistic, Bolton wanted
to put it on the table as a bargaining chip to get other Russian
concessions, European diplomats said.

The French and British, however, disagreed with that approach, arguing
that Bushehr was a "red line" for the Russian foreign minister, Sergey
Lavrov, and there was no point in putting something in the draft that
would come out anyway. "It's like a flea market," said one European
diplomat. "The Americans say, 'We have to make the text even stronger
because we know the Russians will water it down.' But that's not a
productive way of thinking." The draft resolution states that
sanctions would apply to fuel at Bushehr but not construction,
diplomats said.

4) War Now Works Against GOP
Iraq Often Seen as Hindrance in Campaigns
Peter Slevin & Michael Powell, Washington Post, Thursday, October 26, 2006; A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/25/AR2006102502000.html
Just three months ago, Republican strategists believed that doubts
about Iraq could be contained - or even turned into an electoral
advantage - if the battle was framed as a vital front in the war
against terrorism. Voters would be invited to choose: Stand firm or
capitulate. But the issue is not playing out that way. In both
parties, a consensus now exists - buttressed by polls - that
disaffection with a war grown costly and difficult to manage is the
gravest threat to continued Republican rule.

Iraq is not only a potent issue in its own right, but is also a
resonant metaphor for doubts about the competence and accountability
of the Republican Party. In the most competitive races, Iraq echoes in
varying ways, but almost always for Republicans it is a problem to be
navigated and for Democrats a stick to be brandished.

"We are telling our candidates not to be afraid to talk about it,"
said Sen. Schumer, chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign
Committee. "Who would have thought two years ago the Democrats would
be affirmatively putting ads on television about Iraq and Republicans
would be avoiding it?" Showing how the tables have turned, Senate
Majority Leader Frist told interviewers in New Hampshire this week
that Republican candidates should steer away from the war. "The
challenge," Frist said, "is to get Americans to focus on pocketbook
issues, and not on the Iraq and terror issue."

In Connecticut and Ohio, in Pennsylvania and New Mexico, critical
swaths of voters tell pollsters they are using the war as a lens to
assess - and in many cases punish - the party in control of the White
House and both houses of Congress. This appears particularly true of
independents, who are considered most likely to determine whether the
House and Senate change hands.

A Pew Research Center poll this month found that 50 percent of
independents listed Iraq among their top two national concerns,
compared with 36 percent of Republicans and 68 percent of Democrats.
Overall, 58 percent of respondents said the war is not going well and
only 38 percent said the battle for Iraq is helping the war on
terrorism.

5) Money Down the Drain in Iraq
Editorial, New York Times, October 26, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/26/opinion/26thu1.html

When the full encyclopedia of Bush administration misfeasance in Iraq
is compiled, it will have to include a lengthy section on the
contracting fiascos that wasted billions of taxpayer dollars in the
name of rebuilding the country. It isn't only money that was lost.
Washington's disgraceful failure to deliver on its promises to restore
electricity, water and oil distribution, and to rebuild education and
health facilities, turned millions of once sympathetic Iraqis against
the American presence.

6) Iraqi Premier Denies U.S. Assertion He Agreed to Timelines
Maliki Also Criticizes Sadr City Raid
John Ward Anderson, Washington Post, Thursday, October 26, 2006; A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/25/AR2006102501138.html
Iraqi Prime Minister al-Maliki lashed out at the US Wednesday, saying
his popularly elected government would not bend to U.S.-imposed
benchmarks and timelines and criticizing a U.S.-Iraqi military
operation in a Shiite slum in Baghdad that left at least five people
dead and 20 wounded. Maliki's comments came a day after U.S.
Ambassador Khalilzad said the prime minister had agreed to timelines
for accomplishing several critical goals, including developing plans
to deal with militias, amend the constitution and equitably distribute
Iraq's oil revenue.

With less than two weeks to go before critical midterm elections in
the US, Maliki accused U.S. officials of election-year grandstanding,
saying that deadlines were not logical and were "the result of
elections taking place right now that do not involve us."

In a conference call with reporters, two senior Democratic members of
the Senate Armed Services Committee focused on Maliki's statements on
the Bush administration benchmarks. Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.),
ranking member of the panel, said, "I think the page we are on differs
and is rewritten day to day to try to get past the elections here."
Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), a West Point graduate who just returned from
Iraq, said Maliki's comment "deliberately repudiates what the
president's saying." He called it "disheartening" but said it "might
be a function of politics of Iraq as much as a function of politics of
the US. But it does not appear they're even at the level of how to
talk about the problem."

7) Cheney confirms that detainees were subjected to water-boarding
Jonathan S. Landay, McClatchy Newspapers, Oct. 25, 2006
http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/15847918.htm
Vice President Cheney has confirmed that U.S. interrogators subjected
captured senior al-Qaida suspects to a controversial interrogation
technique called "water-boarding," which creates a sensation of
drowning. Cheney indicated that the Bush administration doesn't regard
water-boarding as torture and allows the CIA to use it. "It's a
no-brainer for me," Cheney said at one point in an interview.

Cheney's comments, in a White House interview on Tuesday with a
conservative radio talk show host, appeared to reflect the Bush
administration's view that the president has the constitutional power
to do whatever he deems necessary to fight terrorism.

The U.S. Army, senior Republican lawmakers, human rights experts and
many experts on the laws of war, however, consider water-boarding
cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment that's banned by U.S. law and
by international treaties that prohibit torture. Some intelligence
professionals argue that it often provides false or misleading
information because many subjects will tell their interrogators what
they think they want to hear to make the water-boarding stop.

Republican Sens. Warner, McCain and Graham have said that a law Bush
signed last month prohibits water-boarding. The three are the sponsors
of the Military Commissions Act, which authorized the administration
to continue its interrogations of enemy combatants.

The radio interview Tuesday was the first time that a senior Bush
administration official has confirmed that U.S. interrogators used
water-boarding against important al-Qaida suspects. Water-boarding
means holding a person's head under water or pouring water on cloth or
cellophane placed over the nose and mouth to simulate drowning until
the subject agrees to talk or confess.

Lee Ann McBride, a spokeswoman for Cheney, denied that Cheney
confirmed that U.S. interrogators used water-boarding or endorsed the
technique.

In the interview on Tuesday, Scott Hennen of WDAY Radio in Fargo,
N.D., told Cheney that listeners had asked him to "let the vice
president know that if it takes dunking a terrorist in water, we're
all for it, if it saves American lives."

"Again, this debate seems a little silly given the threat we face,
would you agree?" Hennen said.

"I do agree," Cheney replied, according to a transcript of the
interview released Wednesday. "And I think the terrorist threat, for
example, with respect to our ability to interrogate high-value
detainees like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, that's been a very important
tool that we've had to be able to secure the nation."

Cheney added that Mohammed had provided "enormously valuable
information about how many (al-Qaida members) there are, about how
they plan, what their training processes are and so forth. We've
learned a lot. We need to be able to continue that."

"Would you agree that a dunk in water is a no-brainer if it can save
lives?" asked Hennen.

"It's a no-brainer for me, but for a while there, I was criticized as
being the vice president 'for torture.' We don't torture. That's not
what we're involved in," Cheney replied.
The interview transcript was posted on the White House Web site:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/10/20061024-7.html

8)  Muslim and Arab Americans Ditch Republicans
Jim Lobe, Inter Press Service, Wednesday, October 25, 2006
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/1025-06.htm
Increasingly disillusioned with more than five years of the "global
war on terror", Arab- and Muslim-American voters are poised to vote
heavily Democratic in the Nov. 7 mid-term elections, according to two
polls released this week. Strong majorities of Arab-American voters in
four key states - Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida - intend to
vote for the Democratic candidates for senator, according to a survey
released Wednesday by the Arab American Institute (AAI).

The same poll, conducted by Zogby International (ZI), found that a
whopping 76 percent of Arab Americans disapprove of the performance of
President George W. Bush, who received a 46 percent plurality of the
Arab-American vote when he was first elected to office six years ago.

Asked which party they would prefer to control Congress, 57 percent of
Arab Americans chose Democrats, while only 26 percent said they
favored Republican control. That was a considerably larger gap than
the general voting public which, according to a CNN poll released
Tuesday, favors a Democratic Congress by a 57-40 percent margin.

Another survey of Muslim-American voters released here by the Council
on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) Tuesday also found widespread
disillusionment with Bush, for whom a majority of Muslim Americans
voted in 2000, particularly regarding the war on terror and foreign
policy.

That poll, conducted by Genesis Research Associates in August, found
that only 17 percent of Muslim-American voters consider themselves
Republican now, while a plurality of 42 percent said they were
Democrats and 28 percent said they did not belong to either party.

The same survey, in which Muslims were identified from voting records
by common names prevalent among Muslims and thus did not include
converts who did not change their legal names, also found widespread
disapproval of the U.S. policies toward the Islamic world.

Seven in 10 respondents agreed with the statement, "A just resolution
to the Palestinian cause would improve America's standing in the
Muslim world;" two-thirds said they were in favor of "working toward
normalization of relations with Iran"; and 55 percent agreed with the
assertion that "The war on terror has become a war on Islam."

Some seventy percent of Muslim voters said they disagreed (46 percent
"strongly disagreed") with the proposition that "The war in Iraq has
been worthwhile for America," while only 12 percent said they believed
that it was. By contrast, only 39 percent of the U.S. general public
currently believes that the U.S. military action in Iraq was the
"right thing", according to the most recent Newsweek poll published
this week.

While overlapping, the CAIR and AAI poll represent different
constituencies. About two-thirds of the roughly 3.5 million Arab
Americans living here are Christian - mostly either Roman Catholic or
Orthodox - rather than Muslim.

Similarly, only about 40 percent of Muslim Americans or their
ancestors hail from the Arab world. Nearly one in three is of Asian
ancestry, another six percent is African, and five percent Iranian. Of
the roughly five million Muslim Americans, about one million are
registered to vote, according to Mohamed Nimer, who conducted the CAIR
survey.

In 2000, Bush gained the largest percentage of votes from both groups
due primarily to his outspoken opposition to ethnic profiling and the
widespread impression, based on the performance of his father's
administration from 1989 to 1993, that he would be more sympathetic to
Arab and Palestinian aspirations than the administration of President
Clinton.

That impression, of course, turned out to be unfounded as Bush, more
than any other modern president, has aligned his Middle East policies
behind those of the Israeli government. And while publicly, Bush still
opposes ethnic profiling, reports of hate crimes and harassment of
suspected Arab- and Muslim-Americans have risen sharply since the 9/11
attacks on New York and the Pentagon.

While the Arab-American population is disproportionately concentrated
in a relatively few states, notably California and New York, AAI and
Zogby have focused their polling over the past six years on the four
"battleground" states, both because of the residence there of a
significant numbers of Arab-American voters and because the
electorates of all four are divided roughly evenly between Democrats
and Republicans.

In three of the four Senate races, the Democratic candidates,
including the Pennsylvania contest in which the Republican incumbent
Rick Santorum has been a strong booster of Bush's war on terrorism and
was one of the first national politicians to use the word
"Islamofascism", lead by a two-to-one margin. Even in Michigan, where
Republicans are running an Arab American, Michael Bouchard, Arab
American voters prefer the Democratic incumbent, Debbie Stabenow, by a
54-31 percent margin.

Iraq
9) U.S. to Review Process for Briefing Iraqi Leader
Christine Hauser, New York Times, October 26, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/26/world/middleeast/27iraqcnd.html
The way American officials inform the Iraqi government about raids by
coalition forces will be reviewed, a spokesman for the US military
command in Iraq said today, after the country's prime minister
criticized an American-backed operation against a Shiite militia
enclave.

Cooperation between American and Iraqi forces can be a sensitive
balancing act, and it has political overtones for the prime minister,
Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. Maliki complained on Wednesday that the Iraqi
government should have been informed about the raid into a Shiite
enclave in the Sadr City neighborhood of Baghdad, and should have a
role in such operations.

10) Complaints Mount at US Fortress in Iraq
David Phinney, Inter Press Service, Thursday, October 26, 2006
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/1026-06.htm
Several months before U.S. construction foreman John Owen would quit
in disgust over what he said was blatant abuse of foreign laborers
hired to build the sprawling new U.S. embassy in Baghdad, Rory
Mayberry would witness similar events when he flew to Kuwait. The U.S.
Army veteran had previously worked in Iraq for Halliburton and the
private security company, Danubia. Mayberry snagged a 10,000-dollar a
month job with MSDS consulting company, working as a medic.

MSDS is a consulting company that assists U.S. State Department
managers in Washington with procurement programming. Never before had
the firm offered medical services or worked in Iraq, but First Kuwaiti
- Owen's employer - hired MSDS on the recommendation of Jim Golden,
the State Department contract official overseeing the embassy project.
Within days, an agreement worth hundreds of thousands of dollars for
medical care was signed.

Like Owen, Mayberry immediately sensed things weren't right when he
boarded a First Kuwaiti flight on Mar. 15 to Baghdad.

At the airport in Kuwait City, Mayberry said, he saw a person behind a
counter hand First Kuwaiti managers a passenger manifest, an envelope
of money and a stack of boarding passes to Dubai. The managers then
handed out the boarding passes to Mayberry and 50 or so new First
Kuwaiti laborers, mostly Filipinos.

"Everyone was told to tell customs and security that they were flying
to Dubai," Mayberry said in an interview. Once the group passed the
guards, they went upstairs and waited by the McDonald's for First
Kuwaiti staff to unlock a door - Gate 26 - that led to an unmarked,
ageing white 52-seat jet.

"All the workers had their passports taken away by First Kuwaiti,"
Mayberry claimed, and while he knew the plane was bound for Baghdad,
he's not so sure the others were aware of their destination. The Asian
laborers began asking questions about why they were flying north and
the jet wasn't flying east over the ocean, he said. "I think they
thought they were going to work in Dubai."

One former First Kuwaiti supervisor acknowledged that the company
holds passports of many workers in Iraq - a violation of U.S.
contracting.

Mayberry believes that migrant workers from the Philippines, India and
Nepal are especially vulnerable to employers like First Kuwaiti
because their countries have little or no diplomatic presence in Iraq.
"If you don't have your passport or an embassy to go to, what you do
to get out of a bad situation?" he asked. "How can they go to the U.S.
State Department for help if First Kuwaiti is building their embassy?"

Owen had already been working at the embassy site since late November
when Mayberry arrived. The two share similar complaints about
management of the project and brutal treatment of the laborers that,
at times, numbered as many as 2,500. Most are from the Philippines,
India, and Pakistan. Others are from Egypt and Turkey.

The number of workers with injuries and ailments stunned Mayberry. He
went to work immediately after and stayed busy around the clock for
days. Four days later, First Kuwaiti pulled him off the job after he
requested an investigation of two patients who had died before he
arrived from what he suspected was medical malpractice. Mayberry also
recommended that the health clinics be shut down because of unsanitary
conditions and mismanagement.

"There hadn't been any follow up on medical care. People were walking
around intoxicated on pain relievers with unwrapped wounds and there
were a lot of infections," he recalled. "The idea that there was any
hygiene seemed ridiculous. I'm not sure they were even bathing."

In reports made available to the U.S. State Department, the U.S. Army
and First Kuwaiti, Mayberry listed dozens of concerns about the
clinics, which he found lacking in hot water, disinfectant, hand
washing stations, properly supplied ambulances, and communication
equipment. Mayberry also complained that workers' medical records were
in total disarray or nonexistent, the beds were dirty, and the support
staff hired by First Kuwaiti was poorly trained.

The handling of prescription drugs especially bothered him. Many of
the drugs that originated from Iraq and Kuwait were unsecured,
disorganized and unintelligibly labeled, he said in one memo. He found
that the medical staff frequently misdiagnosed patients. Prescription
pain killers were being handed out "like a candy store... and then
people were sent back to work."

Mayberry warned that the practice could cause addiction and safety
hazards. "Some were on the construction site climbing scaffolding 30
feet off the ground. I told First Kuwaiti that you don't give
painkillers to people who are running machinery and working on heavy
construction and they said 'that's how we do it'."

The sloppy handling of drugs may have led to the two deaths, Mayberry
speculates. One worker, age 25, died in his room. The second, in his
mid-30s, died at the clinic because of heart failure. Both deaths may
be "medical homicide", Mayberry says, because the patients may have
been negligently prescribed improper drug treatment.

Two State Department officials with project oversight responsibilities
did not return phone calls or emails inquiring about Mayberry's
allegations.

11) Conceding Missteps, Bush Urges Patience on Iraq
Jim Rutenberg, New York Times, October 26, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/26/world/middleeast/26prexy.html
Facing public dismay over the war in Iraq, President Bush on Wednesday
somberly acknowledged the broad scope of American setbacks and
missteps there. But he urged Americans to look beyond the violence on
their TV screens and avoid disillusionment over a war he said was
being won.

Bush's comments were a stark indication of concern within the West
Wing over eroding support for the war. The violence in Iraq has
reached near-record peaks just as voters are considering their final
choices for Congress in midterm elections less than two weeks from
now, a contest that Bush has cast in part as a national referendum on
the conflict.

While most Republican candidates have sought to turn voters' attention
away from the war, Bush chose to address it head-on, adopting a
subdued tone, a new emphasis on tactical flexibility, and directly
acknowledging the public's reservations.

Afghanistan
12) 'Civilians killed' in NATO raids
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6086064.stm
Scores of civilians have been killed during NATO operations against
Taliban fighters in southern Afghanistan, local officials and
civilians say. NATO says it will help Afghan officials investigate
what happened after raids in two districts of Kandahar province. The
alliance had "credible reports" of some civilian casualties, but could
not confirm reports of 60 dead civilians. It said 48 militants had
been killed. In September NATO said it had routed the Taliban in one
of their strongholds in Kandahar province after a two-week-long
operation in which 500 militants were killed.

Locals in Panjwayi and Pashmul districts of Kandahar province say the
NATO raids began on Tuesday, during the Eid al-Fitr festival marking
the end of Ramadan, and continued into the night. They said that
several houses were hit, and civilians killed.

Villagers told the BBC Pashto service that the bodies of many locals
had been pulled from the rubble of their homes after the raids and
buried. "Twenty members of my family are killed and 10 are injured,"
one survivor said. "The injured are in Mirwais hospital in Kandahar
city and anybody can go and see them.

Another man said women and children were among 15 members of his
family who had been killed. "The airplanes came and were bombing until
3 am. And, in the morning, they started hitting our village with
mortars and rockets. They didn't allow anybody to come to our help."

Afghan Interior Ministry spokesman Zmarai Bashiry told the BBC that
local police and officials had confirmed more than 40 villagers killed
in the NATO raids. Other local officials put the death toll at between
60 and 85.

Syria
13) In Syria, Iraq's Fate Silences Rights Activists
Ellen Knickmeyer, Washington Post, Thursday, October 26, 2006; A18
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/25/AR2006102501893.html
Horror at the bloodshed accompanying the U.S. effort to bring
democracy to Iraq has accomplished what human rights activists,
analysts and others say Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had been
unable to do by himself: silence public demands for democratic reforms
here.

The idea of the government as a bulwark of stability and security has
long been the watchword of Syrian bureaucrats and village elders. But
since Iraq's descent into sectarian and ethnic war - and after
Israel's war with Hezbollah in Lebanon, on the other side of Syria -
even Syrian activists concede that the country's feeble rights
movement is moribund.

Advocates of democracy are equated now with supporters of America,
even "traitors," said Maan Abdul Salam, a Damascus publisher who has
coordinated conferences on women's rights and similar topics. "Now,
talking about democracy and freedom has become very difficult and
sensitive," Salam said. "The people are not believing these thoughts
anymore. When the U.S. came to Iraq, it came in the name of democracy
and freedom. But all we see are bodies, bodies, bodies."

Ordinary people in Syria are hunkering down, and probably rightly so,
said Omar Amiralay, a well-known Syrian filmmaker whose documentaries
are quietly critical of Assad's one-family rule. "If democracy brings
such chaos in the region, and especially the destruction of society,
as it did in Iraq and in Lebanon, it's absolutely normal, and I think
it's absolutely a wise position from the people to be afraid to
imagine how it would be in Syria," Amiralay said. "I think that people
at the end said, 'Well, it is better to keep this government. We know
them, and we don't want to go to this civil war, and to live this
apocalyptic image of change, with civil war and sectarianism and
blood.' "

In 2003, a few people in Damascus were bold enough to raise their
glasses in cafes to toast the American tanks then rolling into Baghdad
to overthrow Saddam Hussein. They were dreaming of the changes that
might happen next here, in the only remaining government led by the
Baath Party, a prominent writer in the capital said. "The Americans
came to Iraq to make it an example to the other countries to ask for
change," the writer said. "But what happened was the opposite. Now
everyone is saying we do not want to be like Iraq."

----
Robert Naiman
Just Foreign Policy
www.justforeignpolicy.org

Just Foreign Policy is a membership organization devoted to reforming
U.S. foreign policy so it reflects the values and interests of the
majority of Americans.