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Archive: POLITICS

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Journalists as (Political) Targets

Bilal Hussein is the Pulitzer Prize-winning Associated Press photographer who was detained by the U.S. military in Iraq back in April -- almost six months ago. Along with 14,000 other people other people around the world (at least), he continues to remain in U.S. custody without being charged with any crime. The U.S. military has vaguely claimed that he has close ties with Iraqi insurgents but refuses to specify what it is specifically that he is alleged to have done, refuses to provide any hearing or process of any kind for him to learn of the charges or contest them, and refuses to respond to AP's requests for information about why he is being held.

Hussein's detention in April was preceded by months of vicious complaints from Bush followers that his photojournalism was anti-American and suggestive of support for the insurgents. Before there were even any news reports anywhere about Hussein's detention, Michelle Malkin learned of Hussein's detention -- she claims "from an anonymous military source in Iraq" -- and blogged about it. She claimed that "Hussein was captured earlier today by American forces in a building in Ramadi, Iraq, with a cache of weapons." It will surprise nobody that, as was conclusively revealed once AP was able to talk publicly about Hussein's detention, many of the "factual claims" on which these accusations against Hussein were based were just outright false.

The power to detain people indefinitely -- meaning forever -- without so much as charging them with any crime is, of course, the very power that Congress just weeks ago vested in the President when it enacted the so-called Military Commissions Act of 2006. While it is customary for soldiers captured on a battlefield to be held as prisoners of war until the end of hostilities, Hussein and many (if not most) of those who have been detained around the world were not captured on any battlefield at all, nor were they caught in the act of waging war against the U.S.. Instead, they have simply been arrested in apartments, homes, and off the street and then thrown into prisons with no charges or process of any kind.

Read the rest of Glenn Greenwald's typically excellent post here

Not the slightest Clue

If you pay attention to what Republicans are actually saying about the current predicament in Iraq, the only reasonable conclusion to arrive at is that they don't have the foggiest idea what to do. Glenn Greenwald makes the point quite clearly with these examples, and finishes with this excellent flourish:

For an example of the serious, responsible, tough-on-national-security approach which the Republican Party is taking on Iraq, this is what GOP Senate nominee in Minnesota (and current GOP Congressman) Mark Kennedy said when asked about Iraq in an interview he did yesterday with John Hinderaker:

HINDERAKER: Let's talk about the war in Iraq. What's the difference between you and your opponent, Democrat Amy Klobuchar, when it comes to the war in Iraq?

KENNEDY: You know, I've been consistently focused on adapting to win - whatever it takes to make sure that we prevail against an emey that has stated that their goal is to - y'know - eliminate us from the face of the earth.

My opponent came out on Meet The Press and twice said that the approach should be a diplomatic and political solution - that we should negotate with people who would just as soon kill us as look at us. We need to make sure we prevail, but we can't just get there by wishing it would go away. We have to make sure we support our troops and do what is necessary to achieve victory.

HINDERAKER: How about the economy?

Does anyone even know what that means? Mark Kennedy's serious, responsible plan for winning in Iraq seems to amount to nothing more than this: "support our troops and do what is necessary to achieve victory." That answer -- which he has presumably formulated over the course of many months -- is basically the foreign policy equivalent of a junior high cheerleader squad. The Republican plan for Iraq is to keep things exactly as they are. That view can be characterized by many adjectives, but "serious" and "responsible" aren't among them.

The Awakening of the NY Times

The NY Times deserves plenty of criticism for the performance of the paper during the first five years of Bush's reign. But it is refreshing to see the recent editorial shift from uncritical enabler, to unvarnished truth teller. From today's Times:

A Dangerous New Order

Once President Bush signed the new law on military tribunals, administration officials and Republican leaders in Congress wasted no time giving Americans a taste of the new order created by this unconstitutional act.

Within hours, Justice Department lawyers notified the federal courts that they no longer had the authority to hear pending lawsuits filed by attorneys on behalf of inmates of the penal camp at Guantánamo Bay. They cited passages in the bill that suspend the fundamental principle of habeas corpus, making Mr. Bush the first president since the Civil War to take that undemocratic step.

Not satisfied with having won the vote, Dennis Hastert, the speaker of the House, quickly issued a statement accusing Democrats who opposed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 of putting “their liberal agenda ahead of the security of America.” He said the Democrats “would gingerly pamper the terrorists who plan to destroy innocent Americans’ lives” and create “new rights for terrorists.”

This nonsense is part of the Republicans’ scare-America-first strategy for the elections. No Democrat advocated pampering terrorists — gingerly or otherwise — or giving them new rights. Democratic amendments to the bill sought to protect everyone’s right to a fair trial while providing a legal way to convict terrorists.

Americans will hear more of this ahead of the election. They also will hear Mr. Bush say that he finally has the power to bring to justice a handful of men behind the 9/11 attacks. The truth is that Mr. Bush could have done that long ago, but chose to detain them illegally at hidden C.I.A. camps to extract information. He sent them to Guantánamo only to stampede Congress into passing the new law.

Read the full editorial here

Imminent Voter Purges?

KStreetProjector has written a piece on the Daily Kos site which is very frightening. Here's the lead in:

A friend, in a position to be present at lunches of GOP insiders here in DC called me on Thursday, they know of my ongoing efforts to make hackable voting end.

My friend was present as a group of Moderate GOP members with Ohio ties lamented how far the party had strayed. There was consensus at the table there was no way they should retain control. The table conversation began with the assumption they party would lose control in this election. The moderates started planning how to take back control of the GOP from the extremists.

Then, one insider, probably an extremist, but certainly very close to Mr. Ken Mehlman abruptly stopped the conversation. He told table that it was impossible they would lose either house. He also predicts an Ohio GOP sweep.

He informed the group that over the last year, in four critical states the GOP needs to hold huge purges of the voter rolls have just been finished.

The insider did not say which four states, but did say Ohio was among them.

His claim was a new Diebold voter registry system had been installed over the last year. The last week of July and the first week of August a "test run" was made of the systems ability to purge ineligable voters. The purge generated names and test letters sent out to 1.2 million Ohio addresses with a focus on University's, Apartment addresses with high turnover. He claims they made the letters seem just functionary, but they have an action component to avoid being purged from the rolls.

The Insider warmed and said that Blackwell was brilliant in how he did this. The letter went on for a long time about changes in Ohio voting and security and suggested people who might have any concerns about their voting status could come by county offices and confirm their continued voting eligability before election day.

He further added, that since it was conducted as a "test" they only sent letters to a limited number of suspect addresses and "I suspect Blackwell chose criteria very very favorable for us."

Further the insider stated that Blackwell had only purged the lists after a full 60 days was given for people to respond. Which means even if a voter was on the "termination" list, they would still have been eligable to vote in the primary.

He told they table they believe the purge has probably caught up "hundreds of thousands of students, activists and wanderers with no real job" would show up at the polls and have to vote provisionally.

He predicted to the table that tens of thousands of voters will show up on election day, and once the provisionals are used up will simply not be able to at all.

Read the full piece here

The essence of the MCA

George Bush has just signed the controversial Military Commisions Act of 2006 into law. Jack Balkin reduces the terribly insidious bill to its essence:

The bottom line is simple: The MCA preserves rights against torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, but it severs these rights from any practical remedy.

This means that the President can have his "alternative sets of procedures"-- i.e., torture lite-- if he can persuade CIA personnel to violate the law with the promise that they will never be prosecuted or punished for doing so. When Rickard suggests that someday CIA officials will have to answer to judges and juries, he assumes precisely what the new bill acts to forestall-- judicial inquiries into the conduct of CIA interrogations.

Read Balkin's full post here

AMen

Statement of U.S. Senator Russ Feingold On the President Signing the Military Commissions Act, October 17, 2006

“The legislation signed by the President today violates basic principles and values of our constitutional system of government. It allows the government to seize individuals on American soil and detain them indefinitely with no opportunity to challenge their detention in court. And the new law would permit an individual to be convicted on the basis of coerced testimony and even allow someone convicted under these rules to be put to death.The checks and balances of our system of government and the fundamental fairness of the American people and legal system are among our greatest strengths in the fight against terrorism. I am deeply disappointed that Congress enacted this law. We will look back on this day as a stain on our nation’s history.”

Denial: simple, though hardly pure

Not surprisingly, the Administration and its lackeys are desperately attempting to discredit the recently released Lancet report which suggests that there have been between (roughly) 400,000 and 900,000 excess deaths in Iraq since the U.S. invasion began. If you haven't seen or heard those reactions, you haven't missed much, given that none of the detractors has produced any meaningful evidence to support their case.

Those who support the accuracy of the study, do, on the other hand, provide evidence to back up their views. Daniel Davies makes the following point in The Guardian (U.K.)

First, don't concentrate on the number 600,000 (or 655,000, depending on where you read). This is a point estimate of the number of excess Iraqi deaths - it's basically equal to the change in the death rate since the invasion, multiplied by the population of Iraq, multiplied by three-and-a-quarter years. Point estimates are almost never the important results of statistical studies and I wish the statistics profession would stop printing them as headlines.

The question that this study was set up to answer was: as a result of the invasion, have things got better or worse in Iraq? And if they have got worse, have they got a little bit worse or a lot worse. Point estimates are only interesting in so far as they demonstrate or dramatise the answer to this question.

The results speak for themselves. There was a sample of 12,801 individuals in 1,849 households, in 47 geographical locations. That is a big sample, not a small one. The opinion polls from Mori and such which measure political support use a sample size of about 2,000 individuals, and they have a margin of error of +/- 3%. If Margaret Beckett looks at the Labour party's rating in the polls, she presumably considers this to be reasonably reliable, so she should not contribute to public ignorance by allowing her department to disparage "small samples extrapolated to the whole country". The Iraq Body Count website and the Iraqi government statistics are not better measures than the survey results, because one of the things we know about war zones is that casualties are under-reported, usually by a factor of more than five.

And the results were shocking. In the 18 months before the invasion, the sample reported 82 deaths, two of them from violence. In the 39 months since the invasion, the sample households had seen 547 deaths, 300 of them from violence. The death rate expressed as deaths per 1,000 per year had gone up from 5.5 to 13.3.

Davies' full post can be found here

Richard Horton has more here and here

Here's what the expert pollster John Zogby had to say about it:

I can't vouch for it 100 percent, but I'll vouch for it 95 percent, which is as good as it gets in survey research. I know PIPA, the group at the university that conducted the polling in the U.S. I know of the group that -- the university that published and conducted the survey on the Iraq side. In fact, we've used them ourselves. These are good researchers. I have read their methodology statement. It is a good one and a sound one. ...

I don't think that there's anybody in my business who responsibly believes that 30,000 to 40,000 or 45,000 Iraqis have been killed since March of 2003.

[snip]

And CNN, and my company are others are able to call U.S. elections and European elections with pinpoint precision using a sample of a thousand; 1,800-plus sample in a country like Iraq is more than enough to do the job and to get the ballpark figure that they got here.

And finally, here's an excellent interview with Les Roberts, who was at Johns Hopkins (now Columbia) when he co-authored the study

Worth revisiting

Over three years ago (actually closer to four), Josh Marshall made this point:

Speak softly and carry a big stick. Or, speak loudly and carry a big stick. Or maybe even speak softly and get by with a small stick. But, for God’s sake, don’t speak loudly and carry a small stick. And yet that’s precisely what President Bush has been doing on the Korean Peninsula issue for two years…

And look where we are now. What a surprise.

Billmon interprets Bushspeak

QUESTION: Do you believe that the biggest drag on the Republican Party is the situation in Iraq?

THE PRESIDENT: I believe that the situation in Iraq is, no question, tough on the American psyche . . . no question this is an issue, but so is the economy. And I believe there'll be -- I still stand by my prediction, we'll have a Republican Speaker and a Republican leader of the Senate. And the reason I say that is because I believe the two biggest issues in this campaign are, one, the economy. And the economy is growing.

George W. Bush
Press Conference
October 11, 2006

Translation: "Iraq is the central front in the global war to save civilization from the Islamic Caliphate, but you, the voter, should focus your attention on the fact that the civilian unemployment rate is one tenth of a percentage point lower than it was a month ago. God bless America."

Billmon's Whiskey Bar

Business as usual

Chris Floyd makes a fine catch in today's NY Times business section:

China is planning to adopt a new law that seeks to crack down on sweatshops and protect workers’ rights by giving labor unions real power for the first time since it introduced market forces in the 1980s.

The move, which underscores the government’s growing concern about the widening income gap and threats of social unrest, is setting off a battle with American and other foreign corporations that have lobbied against it by hinting that they may build fewer factories here.

He then (typically) minces no words:

Read that again. Let it soak in. The corporate elite are threatening to lash out because China is considering a few very belated and, as the story makes clear, most likely ineffective steps to provide a modicum of protection for its working people, many of whom labor in conditions of near-slavery in order to stuff the bellies and the wallets of foreign fat-cats. The elite are saying – openly, brazenly – that they might choke off economic growth in China if they can't keep paying peon wages to defenseless people in hell-hole conditions.

Otherwise, the clear implication is that they will look elsewhere for drones to exploit. Hey, maybe Burma is ready for an "economic miracle?" Or North Korea? We could trade their nuke program for Wal-Mart sweatshops and Goodyear plantations, give a nice slice to Kim and let the good times roll.

This is the true face of "globalization" – predatory elites moving relentlessly, remorselessly around the world, swooping in wherever they're allowed to put profits over people, to treat human beings like so much meat to be chewed up and discarded, then moving on when there's the slightest hint of measure that might impact their already unfathomable riches by some infinitesimal degree. This is the true and ugly face of greed that lies behind the grinning masks of the great and good as they slap backs at Davos or grin for the cameras at G8 summits.

Read Floyd's full piece here

Anna Politkovskaya's final Story

As many of you know by now, the courageous Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya was recently murdered outside of her apartment in Moscow. It's unclear who was responsible (she had ruffled many feathers), but there is little doubt that she was silenced for good by someone who wouldn't stand for her relentlessly honest reporting.

You can read much more about her here, at Chris Floyd's site. And Michael Mainville has more in this Salon article (via trueblueliberal).

The Independent (U.K.) has just published her final, unfinished report, which reflects both the quality of her journalistic work quality, and the tremendous courage which ultimately led to her demise. Here's an excerpt:

Dozens of files cross my desk every day. They are copies of criminal cases against people jailed for "terrorism" or refer to people who are still being investigated. Why have I put the word "terrorism" in quotation marks here?

Because the overwhelming majority of these people have been "fitted up" as terrorists by the authorities. In 2006 the practice of "fitting up" people as terrorists has supplanted any genuine anti-terrorist struggle. And it has allowed people who are revenge-minded to have their revenge - on so-called potential terrorists.

Prosecutors and judges are not acting on behalf of the law and they are not interested in punishing the guilty. Instead, they work to political order to make the Kremlin's nice anti-terrorist score sheet look good and cases are cooked up like blinys.

This official conveyor belt that turns out "heartfelt confessions" is great at providing the right statistics about the "battle against terrorism" in the north Caucasus (where Chechnya is).

This is what a group of mothers of convicted young Chechens wrote to me: "In essence, these correctional facilities (where terrorist suspects are held) have been turned into concentration camps for Chechen convicts. They are subjected to discrimination on an ethnic basis. The majority, or almost all of them, have been convicted on trumped-up evidence.

"Held in harsh conditions, and humiliated as human beings, they develop a hatred towards everything. An entire army (of ex-convicts) will return to us with their lives in ruins and their understanding of the world around them in ruins too..."

In all honesty, I am afraid of this hatred. I am afraid because, sooner or later, it will burst into the open. And for the young men who hate the world so much, everyone will seem like an outsider.

Read the full piece here

The difference between Rhetoric and action

Gideon Levy paints a stark, realistic portrait of current U.S. Middle East policy:

The declared aim of U.S. policy in the Middle East is to bring democracy to the region. For this reason, ostensibly, the U.S. also went to war in Iraq. Even if one ignores the hypocrisy, self-righteousness and double-standard of the Bush administration, which supports quite a few despotic regimes, one should ask the great seeker of democracy: Have your eyes failed to see that the most undemocratic and brutal regime in the region is the Israeli occupation in the territories? And how does the White House reconcile the contradiction between the aspiration to instill democracy in the peoples of the region and the boycott of the Hamas government, which was chosen in democratic elections as America wanted and preached?

The U.S. also speaks loftily about peace. At the same time, its president warns Israel against any attempt to forge peace with Syria. Here America is taking a stance that not only fails to advance an accord but even undermines it. Ever since it began to give Israel a free hand to impose the brutal occupation in the territories, it has become a party that bequeaths undemocratic values to the entire world. Where are the days when there was still concern in Jerusalem about the U.S. reaction before each military operation? Israel then thought twice before every liquidation and each arrest. Every demolition of a Palestinian home and each nocturnal groundbreaking of a settlement raised fears about how Uncle Sam would react. And now - carte blanche. There is a blank check for every belligerent action by Israel. Should this also be called an effort for peace, for democracy?

Read Levy's full piece at Haaretz

"And you want us to be grateful?"

Robert Fisk is an author, and writes regularly for The Independent (U.K.). He has, for years, been one the finest Western journalists covering the Middle East. On Sunday, a report of his was published in the above-mentioned newspaper. In it, Fisk uses his vast personal experience and knowledge of the Middle East to weave together a truly exceptional summary of how Western policies have contributed to the deep problems which now exist throughout that troubled region. It is, in both content and scope, an extraordinary piece, one which should be read and disseminated as widely as possible, and the likes of which, unfortunately, would never be found these days in a mainstream American publication. Here's an excerpt:

A different kind of alienation, of course, is reflected in our dispute with Iran. "We" think that its government wants to make nuclear weapons - in six months, according to the Israelis; in 10 years, according to some nuclear analysts. But no one asks if "we" didn't help to cause this "nuclear" crisis. For it was the Shah who commenced Iran's nuclear power programme in 1973 and Western companies were shoulder-hopping each other in their desire to sell him nuclear reactors and enrichment technology. Siemens, for example, started to build the Bushehr reactor. And the Shah was regularly interviewed on Western television stations where he said that he didn't see why Iran shouldn't have nuclear weapons when America and the Soviets had them. And we had no objection to the ambitions of "our" Policeman of the Gulf.

And when Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamic revolution engulfed Iran, what did he do? He called the nuclear programme "the work of the devil" and closed it down. It was only when Saddam Hussein invaded Iran the following year and began showering Iran with missiles and chemical weapons - an invasion supported by "us" - that the clerical regime decided they may have to use nuclear weapons against Iraq and reopened the complex. In other words, it was the West which supported Iran's original nuclear programme and it was closed by the chief divine of George Bush's "axis of evil" and then reopened when the West stood behind Saddam (in the days when he was "our strongman" rather than our caged prisoner in a dying state).

The greater irony, of course, is that if we were really concerned about the spread of nuclear technology among Muslim states, we would be condemning Pakistan, most of whose cities are in a state of almost Iraqi anarchy and whose jolly dictator now says he was threatened with being "bombed back to the Stone Age" by the Americans if he didn't sign up to the "war on terror". Now it happens that Pakistan is infinitely more violent than Iran and it also happens that it was a close Pakistani friend of the Pakistani President- General Pervez Musharraf - a certain scientist called Abdul Qadeer Khan - who actually gave solid centrifuge components to Iran. But all that has been taken out of the story. And so they will remain out of the narrative because Pakistan already has a bomb and may use it if someone decided to create a new Stone Age in that former corner of the British empire.

But all this raises a more complex question. Are we really going to carry on arguing for years - for generation after generation of crisis - over who has or doesn't have nuclear technology or the capacity to build a bomb? Are "we" forever going to decide who may have a bomb on the basis of his obedience to us - Mr Musharraf now being a loyal Pakistani shah - or his religion or how many turbans are worn by ministers in the government. Are we still going to be doing this in 2007 or 2107 or 3006?

What I suspect lies behind much of our hypocrisy in the Middle East is that Muslims have not lost their faith and we have. It's not just that religion governs their lives, it is the fact that they have kept the faith - and that is why we try to hide that we have lost it by talking about Islam's "difficulty with secularism". We are the good liberals who wish to bestow the pleasures of our Enlightenment upon the rest of the world, although, to the Muslim nations, this sounds more like our desire to invade them with different cultures and traditions and - in some cases - different religions.

And Muslims have learnt to remember. I still recall an Iraqi friend, shaking his head at my naivety when I asked if there was not any cup of generosity to be bestowed on the West for ridding Iraqis of Saddam's presence. "You supported him," he replied. "You supported him when he invaded Iran and we died in our tens of thousands. Then, after the invasion of Kuwait, you imposed sanctions that killed tens of thousands of our children. And now you reduce Iraq to anarchy. And you want us to be grateful?"

Fisk's original piece can be found at The Independent (U.K.)

If the above link is inaccessible, try this Znet archive

Politics of the worst kind

This is such a disgrace:

The Navy lawyer whose successful defense of Osama bin Laden's driver led to the Supreme Court's landmark Hamdan decision has been passed over for promotion.

Under the Navy's "up or out" promotion system, the decision forces Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift into early retirement. He learned of the decision about two weeks after this summer's ruling in Hamdan, which was a historic rebuke to the Bush Administration, and not long after the National Law Journal named Swift one of the top 100 lawyers in America.

Military promotion practices are notoriously byzantine and take into account many factors, but I think it's safe to say that this is a disgrace and a black-eye for the Navy.

The above was written by DK at Josh Marshall's TPM

Here's the full report at Kansas.com

Heck of a Job, George

This Administration has made it a cliche´, but you really can't make this stuff up. Marty Lederman reveals the latest absurdity at the Balkinization blog:

Yesterday, the President signed H.R. 5441, the annual Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Act. In his signing statement, the President noted constitutional objections to more than 37 different provisions of the bill.

[snip]

Many of those objections are perfectly proper, such as with respect to those provisions that would require congressional committee approval before the Executive could execute them, thereby violating the principles of INS v. Chadha. Others are subject to reasonable dispute.

Some of the objections, however, are just ridiculous.

[snip]

Remember Katrina?

Remember Michael Brown, the FEMA Administrator who did such a bang-up job dealing with the crisis?

Well, in this bill Congress took a very modest step to try to prevent that sort of incompetence in cases of future disasters: Section 611 of the Act imposes the following qualifications for the Administrator of FEMA:

The Administrator shall be appointed from among individuals who have—

(A) a demonstrated ability in and knowledge of emergency management and homeland security; and

(B) not less than 5 years of executive leadership and management experience in the public or private sector.

According to the President, this provision apparently transgresses the Appointments Clause because it "purports to limit" -- purports to limit! -- "the qualifications of the pool of persons from whom the President may select the appointee in a manner that rules out a large portion of those persons best qualified by experience and knowledge to fill the office." Accordingly, "[t]he executive branch shall construe [the qualification] in a manner consistent with the Appointments Clause of the Constitution."

This is simply mind-boggling. Qualifications for presidential appointees are ubiquitous in federal law, and have been since the dawn of the Republic.

[snip]

[The bill, as written] would leave the President with the authority to appoint virtually anyone who has the actual capacity to run FEMA.

[snip]

Instead, the signing statement has the temerity to state that the qualifications in the bill "rule[] out a large portion of those persons best qualified by experience and knowledge to fill the office"!

That's right -- in the views of this President, requiring a demonstrated ability in and knowledge of emergency management and homeland security and at least five years of executive leadership and management experience "rules out a large portion of those persons best qualified by experience and knowledge to fill the office" of FEMA Administrator -- and thus the President apparently will not feel bound to satisfy those qualifications.

Of course, this makes no sense at all . . . unless, in the Administration's view, what a FEMA Administrator really needs to "fill the office" is not experience and knowledge of disaster relief and management skills, but instead "experience [in] and knowledge" of how to be blindly loyal to the Republican Party.

Read Lederman's full breakdown here

Iraq's Universities: further horror

Behind the awful statistics which dryly reveal the extent of the daily violence in Iraq, there are stories of an infrastructure which is disintegrating. Peter Beaumont of The Guardian (U.K.) has an extremely depressing piece on the current state of the educational system.

Iraq's school and university system is in danger of collapse in large areas of the country as pupils and teachers take flight in the face of threats of violence.

Professors and parents have told the Guardian they no longer feel safe to attend their educational institutions. In some schools and colleges, up to half the staff have fled abroad, resigned or applied to go on prolonged vacation, and class sizes have also dropped by up to half in the areas that are the worst affected.

Professionals in higher education, particularly those teaching the sciences and in health, have been targeted for assassination. Universities from Basra in the south to Kirkuk and Mosul in the north have been infiltrated by militia organisations, while the same militias from Islamic organisations regularly intimidate female students at the school and university gates for failing to wear the hijab.

Women teachers have been ordered by their ministry to adopt Islamic codes of clothing and behaviour.

"The militias from all sides are in the universities. Classes are not happening because of the chaos, and colleagues are fleeing if they can," said Professor Saad Jawad, a lecturer in political science at Baghdad University.

"The situation is becoming completely unbearable. I decided to stay where many other professors have left. But I think it will reach the point where I will have to decide.

"A large number have simply left the country, while others have applied to go on prolonged sick leave. We are using MA and PhD students to fill in the gaps."

Read Beaumont's full article here

What if?

Mark Schmitt thinks ahead:

The big question in my my mind is whether the revelations about Foley were merely the spark that ignited the war within leadership, or whether they were actually a tactical move on the part of some faction. There’s no obvious beneficiary -- certainly not Fordham/Reynolds -- so I can’t flesh out this theory, but maybe when we know more it will make sense.

Much more interesting to me about this leadership crisis is not what it heralds for the election, but what it means for the next era of American politics. I’ve generally operated under the assumption that if the Dems win the House, they actually don’t win much besides subpoena power. (Not that there’s anything trivial about subpoena power, except why would an administration that believes in absolute presidential power obey a subpoena?) I’ve assumed that the narrow Democratic House majority would face off against an extraordinarily disciplined and fierce opposition party, working with the Republicans in the Senate whether minority or not, that would continue to frame the agenda and define the fights much as they did in the early Clinton years. In many ways the modern Republicans are a machine constructed for opposition, and far less effective as a governing party that has to make choices based on consequences. I want the Democrats to win, but I’m terrified of it at the same time. I’m worried that to win they will promise things they intend to "do," but they will not have the power to do anything.

Read Mark's full post here

Bijlmermeer, and the United States lack of credibility

Lawrence of Siberia is one of the constistently excellent blogs devoted to Middle Eastern affairs. The most recent post found there reminds us of the details surrounding the 1992 crash of a Boeing 747 airliner of the Israeli airline El Al in Amsterdam. The airliner crashed into a large apartment building, and killed 47 people on the day. The much more disturbing aspect, however, wasn't disclosed until seven years later.

Local residents had suspected very early on that LY1862 was not a routine flight. Eyewitnesses reported seeing men in hazmat suits removing unidentified debris from the site immediately after the crash. And in the months that followed hundreds of local people and rescue workers complained of a range of chronic health problems, including depression, fatigue and listlessness, breathing difficulties and stomach pains. Tests commissioned by a Dutch citizens' group revealed traces of uranium at the crash site and abnormally high levels of uranium in the bodies of survivors. An independent Dutch nuclear research group revealed that – despite government claims to the contrary – only about half of the depleted uranium that the plane had been carrying as ballast had ever been recovered. As for the 114 tons of cargo on flight 1862: El Al, Israeli and Dutch officials rushed to assure the public that the doomed flight carried nothing but "perfume and gift articles." El Al insisted that the plane carried "a regular commercial load." As late as April 22, 1998, Israeli Transport Minister Shaul Yahalom maintained that there were "no dangerous material on that plane. Israel has nothing to hide."

Almost six years after the event, on 30 September 1998, editors Harm van den Berg and Karel Knip of the Dutch paper NRC Handelsblad published the results of an extensive investigation they had carried out into the crash. They had obtained the freight documentation for the flight, and made public for the first time its real cargo. The manifest confirmed the plane was carrying 400 kilograms of depleted uranium as ballast, but also showed that it carried among its cargo about 10 tons of assorted chemicals. The chemicals included ten 18.9-litre plastic drums of dimethyl methylphosphonate (DMMP), and smaller amounts of isopropanol and hydrogen fluoride: three of the four chemical precursors for the production of Sarin nerve gas.

A spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu's office immediately denied that Flight 1862 had been carrying Sarin precursors. When this was contradicted hours later by an El Al spokesman, the Prime Minister's office acknowledged that the chemicals were onboard but stated that "the material was non-toxic and was to have been used to test filters that protect against chemical weapons". An explanation that Earth Island Journal found "puzzling", since "it only takes a few grams to conduct such tests. Once combined, the chemicals aboard Flight 1862 could have produced 270 kilos of sarin - sufficient to kill the entire population of a major world city".

And where, exactly, did those deadly chemicals originate? Pennsylvania.

Read the full, damning piece here

Any Questions?