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Archive: POLITICS

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Another Nightmare

The Bush Administration continues to do everything it can to strip Guantanamo detainees of their rights, including their right to challenge their detention, and protest their innocence in a court of law. Bear that in mind when you read Victoria Brittain's nightmarish account of how another innocent victim was treated after being caught up in the "War on Terror".

How does a young man from west London find himself landed in a Kenyan police station, hanging from his wrists, his feet tied to buckets of freezing water? How does he find himself, soon after, being dined by MI5 officers at a Nairobi hotel one moment, then imprisoned underground in the desert the next?

The story of Shahajan Janjua, a British Asian, is a little window into the "war on terror". As with the cases of the three young men from Tipton who ended up in Guantánamo Bay, MI5 officials in this case showed themselves apparently incapable of making a judgment of young British Asian men's likely links to terrorism. So, another has come back from an innocent overseas trip traumatised. Would it have happened if he had been white and middle-class?

Read the rest of the story in The Guardian (U.K.)

Deja Vu

WASHINGTON, Feb. 28 — Last October, the North Koreans tested their first nuclear device, the fruition of decades of work to make a weapon out of plutonium.

For nearly five years, though, the Bush administration, based on intelligence estimates, has accused North Korea of also pursuing a secret, parallel path to a bomb, using enriched uranium. That accusation, first leveled in the fall of 2002, resulted in the rupture of an already tense relationship: The United States cut off oil supplies, and the North Koreans responded by throwing out international inspectors, building up their plutonium arsenal and, ultimately, producing that first plutonium bomb.

But now, American intelligence officials are publicly softening their position, admitting to doubts about how much progress the uranium enrichment program has actually made. The result has been new questions about the Bush administration’s decision to confront North Korea in 2002.

“The question now is whether we would be in the position of having to get the North Koreans to give up a sizable arsenal if this had been handled differently,” a senior administration official said this week.

The above is from the NY Times. Josh Marshall has more.

The Dirty Game

While debate rages in the United States about the military in Iraq, an equally important decision is being made inside of Iraq—the future of Iraq’s oil. A new Iraqi law proposes to open the country’s currently nationalized oil system to foreign corporate control. But emblematic of the flawed promotion of “democracy” by the Bush administration, this new law is news to most Iraqi politicians.

A leaked copy of the proposed hydrocarbon law appeared on the Internet last week at the same time that it was introduced to the Iraqi Council of Ministers. The law is expected to go to the Iraqi Council of Representatives within weeks. Yet the Internet version was the first look that most members of Iraq’s parliament had of the new law.

Many Iraqi oil experts, like Fouad al-Ameer who was responsible for the leak, think that this law is not an urgent item on the country's agenda. Other observers and analysis share al-Ameer's views and believe the Bush administration, foreign oil companies, and the International Monetary Fund are rushing the Iraqi government to pass the law.

Not every aspect of the law is harmful to Iraq. However, the current language favors the interests of foreign oil corporations over the economic security and development of Iraq. The law’s key negative components harm Iraq’s national sovereignty, financial security, territorial integrity, and democracy.

National Sovereignty and Financial Security

The new oil law gives foreign corporations access to almost every sector of Iraq’s oil and natural gas industry. This includes service contracts on existing fields that are already being developed and that are managed and operated by the Iraqi National Oil Company (INOC). For fields that have already been discovered, but not yet developed, the proposed law stipulates that INOC will have to be a partner on these contracts. But for as-yet-undiscovered fields, neither INOC nor private Iraqi companies receive preference in new exploration and development. Foreign companies have full access to these contracts.

The exploration and production contracts give firms exclusive control of fields for up to 35 years including contracts that guarantee profits for 25-years. A foreign company, if hired, is not required to partner with an Iraqi company or reinvest any of its money in the Iraqi economy. It’s not obligated to hire Iraqi workers train Iraqi workers, or transfer technology.

The current law remains silent on the type of contracts that the Iraqi government can use. The law establishes a new Iraqi Federal Oil and Gas Council with ultimate decision-making authority over the types of contracts that will be employed. This Council will include, among others, “executive managers of from important related petroleum companies.” Thus, it is possible that foreign oil company executives could sit on the Council. It would be unprecedented for a sovereign country to have, for instance, an executive of ExxonMobil on the board of its key oil and gas decision-making body.

The law also does not appear to restrict foreign corporate executives from making decisions on their own contracts. Nor does there appear to be a “quorum” requirement. Thus, if only five members of the Federal Oil and Gas Council met—one from ExxonMobil, Shell, ChevronTexaco, and two Iraqis—the foreign company representatives would apparently be permitted to approve contacts for themselves.

Antonia Juhasz and Raed Jarrar wrote the above, and their full article can be accessed at TomPaine.com

A revealing glimpse

The scene: a military checkpoint deep in Palestinian territory in the West Bank. A tall, thin elderly man, walking stick in hand, makes a detour past the line of Palestinians, many of them young men, waiting obediently behind concrete barriers for permission from an Israeli soldier to leave one Palestinian area, the city of Nablus, to enter another Palestinian area, the neighbouring village of Huwara. The long queue is moving slowly, the soldier taking his time to check each person's papers.

The old man heads off purposefully down a parallel but empty lane reserved for vehicle inspections. A young soldier controlling the human traffic spots him and orders him back in line. The old man stops, fixes the soldier with a stare and refuses. The soldier looks startled, and uncomfortable at the unexpected show of defiance. He tells the old man more gently to go back to the queue. The old man stands his ground. After a few tense moments, the soldier relents and the old man passes.

Is the confrontation revealing of the soldier's humanity? That is not the way it looks -- or feels -- to the young Palestinians penned in behind the concrete barriers. They can only watch the scene in silence. None would dare to address the soldier in the manner the old man did -- or take his side had the Israeli been of a different disposition. An old man is unlikely to be detained or beaten at a checkpoint. Who, after all, would believe he attacked or threatened a soldier, or resisted arrest, or was carrying a weapon? But the young men know their own injuries or arrests would barely merit a line in Israel's newspapers, let alone an investigation.

And so, the checkpoints have made potential warriors of Palestine's grandfathers at the price of emasculating their sons and grandsons.

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. Read the rest of his illuminating article at Counterpunch

"The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants."

–Albert Camus

Glad I sold the condo

Our friend and colleague Winter Patriot unearths a disturbing new innovation in law enforcement now being pushed down in JebWorld: giving public officials the authority to create phony documents and plant them in public record. This includes court documents and other official papers, all created out of whole cloth in "covert ops" kept secret from other agencies and from -- surely it goes without saying -- that worthless gaggle of teeming rabble known as "the people."

This astounding proposal -- in a bill now being dangled like so much dripping red meat before the rightwing Florida legislature, ever ready to embrace any authoritarian notion that comes along, including "shoot to kill if you're feeling paranoid" laws -- would "convey authority to falsify any public record to prosecutors, judges, mayors, sheriffs, coroners and other public officers," the Miami Herald reports.

Now, if you read a story like this about, say, Iran or China or Venezuela or Zimbabwe, you would probably exclaim, "My god! They're trying to construct a police state! Give government the power to falsify documents, and they will be able to rig up a case against anyone they please -- false confessions, false witness statements, false previous convictions, the works! No matter what excuse is offered for such draconian authority, the risk of its wanton abuse is far too great for any government that pretends to popular legitimacy. Only a tyrant, or a would-be tyrant -- or a bunch of authoritarian bootlickers -- would ever call for such a law!"

And you would be right. But of course, it's OK to give this authority to politicos and prosecutors in America, because we are descended directly from the angels in heaven -- unlike all those other mud people around the world with their greed, ambition, spite, jealousy, lust, fear, extremism and other pathetic human failings that could tempt them to abuse such powers. Right?

Really, this kind of thing not only boggles the mind -- it beggars the imagination of even the most cynical observer of the virulent authoritarianism that is now coursing through the natural gates and alleys of our body politic, covering the Republic, most lazar-like, with vile and loathsome crust. Is there no encroachment of liberty that these people won't countenance?

They now want to use the ordinary court and police services of our communities to run clandestine operations against our own population. ("But only against criminals and terrorists!" they say. Yes, and Stalin's security organs only targeted "criminals and terrorists," too, just like the Gestapo. It's the age-old argument of the apologists for power: "If you are innocent, you have nothing to fear.") This move would also, in true Bushist fashion, call into the question the validity of any public record. As the ACLU's Randall Marshall puts it: "How would we ever be able to trust anything in the judicial record knowing that something could be intentionally falsified with a judicial seal of approval?"

Chris Floyd's full piece

There's that word again

Jimmy Carter was attacked vigorously – and most often ignorantly – for having suggested in his recently published book that Israeli policy toward Palestinians resembles apartheid policies. While Carter's assertion was accurate, and can be backed up rather easily, there's no reason to listen to me when John Dugard, a South African law professor who is the UN's special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, has just issued a report.

Prof Dugard said although Israel and apartheid South Africa were different regimes, "Israel's laws and practices in the OPT [occupied Palestinian territories] certainly resemble aspects of apartheid." His comments are in an advance version of a report on the UN Human Rights Council's website ahead of its session next month.

After describing the situation for Palestinians in the West Bank, with closed zones, demolitions and preference given to settlers on roads, with building rights and by the army, he said: "Can it seriously be denied that the purpose of such action is to establish and maintain domination by one racial group (Jews) over another racial group (Palestinians) and systematically oppressing them? Israel denies that this is its intention or purpose. But such an intention or purpose may be inferred from the actions described in this report."

He dismissed Israel's argument that the sole purpose of the vast concrete and steel West Bank barrier is for security. "It has become abundantly clear that the wall and checkpoints are principally aimed at advancing the safety, convenience and comfort of settlers," he said.

Gaza remained under occupation despite the withdrawal of settlers in 2005. "In effect, following Israel's withdrawal, Gaza became a sealed-off, imprisoned and occupied territory," he said.

Prof Dugard said his mandate was solely to report on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories and he described as a violation of international humanitarian law the firing of rockets by Palestinians from Gaza into Israel. "Such actions cannot be condoned and clearly constitute a war crime," he said. "Nevertheless, Israel's response has been grossly disproportionate and indiscriminate and resulted in the commission of multiple war crimes."

More in The Guardian (U.K.)

Beyond the current debacle

John Robb, a leading expert in fourth generation (i.e. cutting-edge, non-traditional) warfare, is always thinking several steps ahead. And as if the current problems in Iraq weren't enough to worry about, he reminds us of how the insurgents' innovations (chemical weapons, in this case) are likely to be exported and "mainstreamed".

A characteristic of open source warfare is that core strategies and tactics can be modified by any participating group. If the modification works in practice (under the rubric of release early and often), it is then usually adopted by many other participants. In effect, mainstreamed. One recent modification that we have seen move quickly from prototype to mainstream procedure are new methods of ambushing helicopters (used successfully for the eighth on February 21st). Another, and this one is as bad if not worse than innovations in anti-air methods, is do-it-yourself (DIY) chemical weapons. These weapons involve simply blowing up truckloads of deadly chemicals. Recent events that indicate that this is on its way to mainstream activity:

• Baghdad (February 21). Chlorine gas canisters exploded near a diesel-fuel station. Killing 5 and wounding 75.

• North of Baghdad (February 20). A tanker truck of Chlorine gas exploded. Killing 9 and wounding 148.

• Ramadi (January 28). A dump truck with chlorine tank blew up. Killing 16.

Beyond the tactical/strategic problems that this presents in Iraq, and they are plentiful, we can be assured that any innovation that shows up in Iraq will eventually be exported to other global locales.

Robb's Global Guerrillas

From Watergate to this

What a remarkable, and sad turn-around for the Washington Post. Larry Johnson provides the most recent, damning evidence:

Congratulations to Victoria Toensing, former Reagan Administration Justice Department official, for plumbing new depths of delusion and crazed fantasies in her latest Washington Post op-ed. Ms. Toensing's piece--Trial in Error--should have been titled, "I Am Ignorant of Basic Facts". She offers up two special gems:

* Valerie Plame was not covert.

* Ambassador Joseph Wilson (Valerie's husband) misled the public about how he was sent to Niger, about the thrust of his March 2003 oral report of that trip, and about his wife's CIA status

Valerie Plame was undercover until the day she was identified in Robert Novak's column. I entered on duty with Valerie in September of 1985. Every single member of our class--which was comprised of Case Officers, Analysts, Scientists, and Admin folks--were undercover. I was an analyst and Valerie was a case officer. Case officers work in the Directorate of Operations and work overseas recruiting spies and running clandestine operations. Although Valerie started out working under "official cover"--i.e., she declared she worked for the U.S. Government but in something innocuous, like the State Department--she later became a NOC aka non official cover officer. A NOC has no declared relationship with the United States Government. These simple facts apparently are too complicated for someone of Ms. Toensing's limited intellectual abilities.

No, it doesn't end there; Johnson's full demolition of Toensing's piece can be found here

Update: Robert Parry adds his (similar) thoughts here

How many others?

In the early hours of Jan. 6, Laith al-Ani stood in a jail near the Baghdad airport waiting to be released by the American military after two years and three months in captivity.

Before Mr. Ani was released, American guards asked him to select a sentence to describe his treatment by his captors.

He struggled to quell his hope. Other prisoners had gotten as far as the gate only to be brought back inside, he said, and he feared that would happen to him as punishment for letting his family discuss his case with a reporter.

But as the morning light grew, the American guards moved Mr. Ani, a 31-year-old father of two young children, methodically toward freedom. They swapped his yellow prison suit for street clothes, he said. They snipped off his white plastic identification bracelet. They scanned his irises into their database.

Then, shortly before 9 a.m., Mr. Ani said, he was brought to a table for one last step. He was handed a form and asked to place a check mark next to the sentence that best described how he had been treated:

“I didn’t go through any abuse during detention,” read the first option, in Arabic.

“I have gone through abuse during detention,” read the second.

In the room, he said, stood three American guards carrying the type of electric stun devices that Mr. Ani and other detainees said had been used on them for infractions as minor as speaking out of turn.

“Even the translator told me to sign the first answer,” said Mr. Ani, who gave a copy of his form to The New York Times. “I asked him what happens if I sign the second one, and he raised his hands,” as if to say, Who knows?

“I thought if I don’t sign the first one I am not going to get out of this place.”

Shoving the memories of his detention aside, he checked the first box and minutes later was running through a cold rain to his waiting parents. “My heart was beating so hard,” he said. “You can’t believe how I cried.”

His mother, Intisar al-Ani, raised her arms in the air, palms up, praising God. “It was like my soul going out, from my happiness,” she recalled. “I hugged him hard, afraid the Americans would take him away again.”

Just three weeks earlier, his last letter home — with its poetic yearnings and a sketch of a caged pink heart — appeared in The Times in one of a series of articles on Iraq’s troubled detention and justice system.

After his release from the American-run jail, Camp Bucca, Mr. Ani and other former detainees described the sprawling complex of barracks in the southern desert near Kuwait as a bleak place where guards casually used their stun guns and exposed prisoners to long periods of extreme heat and cold; where prisoners fought among themselves and extremist elements tried to radicalize others; and where detainees often responded to the harsh conditions with hunger strikes and, at times, violent protests.

Through it all, Mr. Ani was never actually charged with a crime; he said he was questioned only once during his more than two years at the camp.

The full article in the NY Times

Eric on Roger

Eric Alterman, the excellent media critic whose column can be found at Media Matters, is appropriately aghast at a recent Roger Simon profile of presidential candidate Mitt Romney. Alterman's take is so good, so full of disgust, that I can't resist reprinting it in full. Enjoy!

This is not a joke, unfortunately. This is, for the record, how Washington insider journalists think. Roger Simon was after all, picked by the founders of The Politico -- the hottest place to be right now in covering American politics -- to be their marquee political columnist. Note the complete, total (I can't repeat myself enough here) lack of attention to the substance of Romney's positions here. Note the quotation of the pablum he puts up about Iraq, etc, as if it had any meaning whatever. Note the fact that as the candidate of the hard right, he is, ipso facto, in the post-Bush era, well outside the consensus of American politics as defined by voters right now. Note instead what this Insider's Insider finds important. For instance:

"So polished and looks so much like a president," and "chiseled-out-of-granite features, a full, dark head of hair going a distinguished gray at the temples, and a barrel chest," and "radiates vigor," and "can't wait to stand next to John McCain on a stage and invite comparison." Really, it's embarrassing to read, but it gets worse ...

Quotes of the Day, special Roger-Simon-Is-Impressed-by-Mitt-Romney Edition:

"I believe in God and I believe that every person in this great country, and every person on this grand planet, is a child of God. We are all sisters and brothers."

Runner-Up: " 'I believe we are overtaxed and government is overfed,' Romney said. 'Washington is spending too much money.' "

Second Runner-Up: "I believe the best days of this country are before us because I believe in America!"

Third Runner Up: " 'I believe that so long as there is a reasonable prospect of success, our wisest course is to seek stability in Iraq, with additional troops endeavoring to secure the civilian population,' Romney said."

Can you believe we are going to have to endure almost two years of this kind of crap?

Oh, and if you find the above to be hard to believe, feel free to check out Simon's piece

the Libby "defense of distraction"

The trial of Lewis "Scooter" Libby has been followed closely in both the mainstream press and the blogosphere. From what I've seen, the best and most interesting analysis of Libby's defense was written by Sidney Blumenthal at Salon.com. Here's an excerpt:

Libby's defense was the legal equivalent of the fog of war. He sought to obfuscate the clarity of the prosecution's case by raising irrelevant issues, turning the jury's attention away from the charges themselves and creating doubt by getting witnesses to admit small lapses of memory, thereby underlining Libby's memory defense. So Libby's lawyers highlighted Cooper's incomplete note taking, whether Miller raised the issue of writing a piece based on Libby's information, and whether Russert followed strict journalistic protocol when he spoke freely to the FBI. Libby's team also summoned a parade of reporters to relate that Libby had not dropped Plame's name with them. By demonstrating a negative, Libby sought to dispute a positive. The intent to sow confusion among the jurors in order to raise a shadow of a doubt and produce an acquittal partly depended on their ignorance of Washington anthropology.

Read the full piece at Salon.com

1,000 Words

The World Press Photo awards invariably include stunning images, but the 2007 winner for Portraits (above) by Nina Berman deserves another prize for poignancy as this awful, unnecessary war drags on.

View all of the images

Progress

While we're far from being on the right track – that can't happen until this reckless Administration is gone – there are signs of real progress. Consider that a retired Army General (William E. Odom) wrote an Op-Ed in today's Washington Post entitled "Victory Is Not an Option". This simply would not have happened a few months ago, and is an example of how those with a grip on the realities of foreign policy are beginning to be heard. Here's an excerpt from Odam's piece:

The new National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq starkly delineates the gulf that separates President Bush's illusions from the realities of the war. Victory, as the president sees it, requires a stable liberal democracy in Iraq that is pro-American. The NIE describes a war that has no chance of producing that result. In this critical respect, the NIE, the consensus judgment of all the U.S. intelligence agencies, is a declaration of defeat.

Its gloomy implications -- hedged, as intelligence agencies prefer, in rubbery language that cannot soften its impact -- put the intelligence community and the American public on the same page. The public awakened to the reality of failure in Iraq last year and turned the Republicans out of control of Congress to wake it up. But a majority of its members are still asleep, or only half-awake to their new writ to end the war soon.

Perhaps this is not surprising. Americans do not warm to defeat or failure, and our politicians are famously reluctant to admit their own responsibility for anything resembling those un-American outcomes. So they beat around the bush, wringing hands and debating "nonbinding resolutions" that oppose the president's plan to increase the number of U.S. troops in Iraq.

For the moment, the collision of the public's clarity of mind, the president's relentless pursuit of defeat and Congress's anxiety has paralyzed us. We may be doomed to two more years of chasing the mirage of democracy in Iraq and possibly widening the war to Iran. But this is not inevitable. A Congress, or a president, prepared to quit the game of "who gets the blame" could begin to alter American strategy in ways that will vastly improve the prospects of a more stable Middle East.

Washington Post

Some sense of humor

At a farewell reception at Blair House for the retiring chief of protocol, Don Ensenat, who was President Bush's Yale roommate, the president shook hands with Washington Life Magazine's Soroush Shehabi. "I'm the grandson of one of the late Shah's ministers," said Soroush, "and I simply want to say one U.S. bomb on Iran and the regime we all despise will remain in power for another 20 or 30 years and 70 million Iranians will become radicalized."

"I know," President Bush answered.

"But does Vice President Cheney know?" asked Soroush.

President Bush chuckled and walked away.

From this UPI article

The New York Times: fit to print?

Having been well exposed as a major Bush administration enabler during the run-up to the Iraq war, the New York Times now allows one of its chief perpetrators of government propoganda to lead the charge toward Iran. Michael R. Gordon, who teamed up with Judy Miller to mislead the American public on the purported (and false) dangers of the Iraqi aluminum tubes, is at it again. Here's the headline from his article in today's Times:

Deadliest Bomb in Iraq Is Made by Iran, U.S. Says

Glenn Greenwald eviscerates Gordon and the Times for acting as willing mouthpieces for Administration propaganda, and Greg Mitchell of Editor & Publisher also contributes to the important story. I strongly encourage you to take the time to read both, for the story underscores just how dangerous it is to uncritically accept news from any mainstream outlet, and, I'm sorry to say, especially from the Times.

UPDATE: When you're finished with those two articles, read Chris Floyd, and Jonathan Schwarz's biting take. Then, as I can't directly link to it, here's a brilliant catch by Bernard Chazelle in the comments section of Scwartz's post:

Michael Gordon is not just a voice-activated tape recorder, he is the world's funniest voice-activated tape recorder (or, as anonymous sources call it, WFVATR).

The WFVATR writes this: "The manufacture of the key metal components required sophisticated machinery, raw material and expertise that American intelligence agencies do not believe can be found in Iraq."

Ok, so fancy bomb-making expertise just can't be found in Iraq.

But back in '02 the WFVATR wrote: "Iraq's push to improve and expand Baghdad's chemical and biological arsenals have brought Iraq and the United States to the brink of war."

Those Iraqis, boy, can they make bio/chem/nuclear weapons, mushroom clouds and all! But fancy IED? No way. They just don't have the expertise.

The Scooter Libby Trial

As most of you no doubt know, Scooter Libby is currently on trial for, among other things, lying to a grand jury about his involvement in the Administration's poltically motivated outing of former covert CIA agent Valerie Plame. And while the trial is helping to expose the outrageous behavior of the Bush administration, it serves, in that regard, as mere confirmation to anyone who has been paying attention.

What is arguably more interesting is how the trial is exposing the degree to which the mainstream American media has been complicit in this dark period of American history. Eric Boehlert, probably the best serious media critic in the business, elaborates in a recent piece for Media Matters:

So as the facts of the White House cover-up now tumble out into open court, it's important to remember that if it hadn't been for Fitzgerald's work, there's little doubt the Plame story would have simply faded into oblivion like so many other disturbing suggestions of Bush administration misdeeds. And it would have faded away because lots of high-profile journalists at The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, and NBC wanted it to.

In a sense, it was Watergate in reverse. Instead of digging for the truth, lots of journalists tried to bury it. The sad fact remains the press was deeply involved in the cover-up, as journalists reported White House denials regarding the Plame leak despite the fact scores of them received the leak and knew the White House was spreading rampant misinformation about an unfolding criminal case.

And that's why the Plame investigation then, and the Libby perjury trial now, so perfectly capture what went wrong with the timorous press corps during the Bush years as it routinely walked away from its responsibility of holding people in power accountable and ferreting out the facts.

Read Boehlert's full article

A Principled stand

“Is it the position of this administration that it possesses the authority to take unilateral action against Iran, in the absence of a direct threat, without congressional approval?” Sen. Jim Webb (D-VA) asked Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice during a Senate hearing January 11th. He's still waiting for an answer.

After a couple weeks of radio silence, Webb sent a letter again requesting a response last week. But despite his urging for clarity of what was "basically, a 'yes' or 'no' question," the answer he finally received wasn't good enough.

The written response, sent to Webb from one of Rice's assistant secretaries last week, "didn't adequately answer the specific question," according to Webb's spokeswoman, Jessica Smith. "It wasn't a form letter," she said, but it "was not responsive to the question."

Webb continues to push for an answer, Smith said.

via Josh Marshall's TPM

Iraqi Refugees: shedding some light

While it is, to some extent, understandable that the focus of the media's attention on Iraq has been the grotesque levels of daily carnage, there are a number of deeply insidious issues which remain largely unknown to most Americans. One such issue is the horrible plight of those displaced by this awful, unnecessary war. Warren P. Strobel of the McClatchy Newspapers helps to illuminate the scope of the problem, along with the Administration's (predictably) inadequate response, in a recent article:

One out of every seven Iraqis has fled his or her home or sought refuge abroad, the largest movement of people in the Middle East since the war that followed Israel's creation in 1948, according to United Nations officials and relief workers. Every day, violence displaces an estimated 1,300 more Iraqis in the country; every month, at least 40,000.

Last year, 202 refugees from Iraq were allowed to resettle in the United States.

Against that backdrop, the Bush administration is moving - belatedly, in the view of critics - to address a problem that it's widely seen as having created by invading Iraq in March 2003.

On Monday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced the creation of a high-level State Department task force on the refugee issue. State Department officials said the Bush administration will expand the number of refugees it allows into the U.S., with special attention given to Iraqis who may be at risk because they worked for the U.S. government. But the administration would admit only 20,000 Iraqis at most this year.

In his just-released budget, President Bush asked for $35 million to help Iraq's refugees in fiscal year 2008, plus $15 million in supplemental funding for this year.

The U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, a private nonprofit group, had urged Bush to seek $250 million as part of a supplemental war funding request.

Strobel's full piece

How to stop the impending war

Leonard Weiss and Larry Diamond wrote an editorial in Monday's edition of the L.A. Times, which is well-worth reading in its entirety. Here's a glimpse:

...war [with Iran] is not yet justified, except in the minds of those who have been lobbying for it for years. Iran is still years away from being a nuclear threat, and our experience with "preventive war" in Iraq should teach us a thing or two. Launching another such war without international approval would leave us even more politically isolated and militarily overstretched. Attacking a Middle Eastern country — one much stronger than Iraq and with the ability to cut off oil supplies from the Strait of Hormuz — could inflame the region, intensify Shiite militia attacks on our soldiers in Iraq and stimulate terrorist attacks on Americans and U.S. interests worldwide.

But recklessness, not prudence, has been the hallmark of this administration's foreign policy. Beyond this, the president and vice president subscribe to what some call the "unitary executive," which is a fancy way of saying they believe that Congress cannot prevent the president from doing almost anything he wants. The 1973 War Powers Act, passed in the wake of our disastrous war in Vietnam, allows the president to put U.S. troops in a combat situation under certain conditions before obtaining any congressional authorization to do so. When Bush signed the Iraq war resolution, he issued a statement challenging the constitutionality of the War Powers Act, indicating that he could take the nation to war without obeying its restrictions. Unfortunately, even if the president were to agree to the act's restrictions, he could still attack Iran and have up to 90 days before being required to get congressional authorization for the attack.

What to do? Congress should not wait. It should hold hearings on Iran before the president orders a bombing attack on its nuclear facilities, or orders or supports a provocative act by the U.S. or an ally designed to get Iran to retaliate, and thus further raise war fever.

The full piece

The Genesis of Islamic terrorism?

There is no simple answer, of course, but a book called The Looming Tower: Al-Qaida’s Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright, sheds some light on the important topic. James Meek reviews the book in the current edition of The London Review of Books (via 3 Quarks Daily):

In 1995, in Sudan, Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri put two teenage boys on trial for treason, sodomy and attempted murder, in a Sharia court of his own devising. Of the two boys, one, Ahmed, was only 13. Zawahiri, the partner in terror of Osama bin Laden, had them stripped naked; he showed that they had reached puberty, and therefore counted as adults. The court found the boys guilty. Zawahiri had them shot, filmed their confessions and executions, and put video copies out to warn other potential traitors. His Sudanese hosts were so outraged that they expelled Zawahiri and his group immediately.

It does not exonerate Zawahiri that the boys really had, as Lawrence Wright explains, tried to kill him: Ahmed by telling Egyptian spies exactly when Zawahiri was going to come to treat him for malaria; the other boy, Musab, by twice trying to plant a bomb. The assassination attempts were part of the Egyptian government’s ruthless efforts to destroy Zawahiri and his organisation, al-Jihad, after al-Jihad came close to killing the Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak. ‘Ruthless’, in this instance, is a merited adjective. The way Egyptian intelligence recruited the boys – both were sons of senior al-Jihad members, and Musab’s father was the al-Qaida treasurer – was to drug them, anally rape them, then show them photos of the abuse and blackmail them. The boys were trapped; the photos could have led to their execution by al-Jihad as surely as their subsequent betrayal.

The story does more than illuminate the sheer vileness of the conflict that has been underway for decades between the death-loving hardcore of Islamic revolutionaries and the allies of European and American governments in the Islamic world. It underlines the centrality of Egypt to the origins and perpetuation of the conflict. One of the darker choruses of this excellent work of journalism is the success that three of those allied governments, the Saudi Arabian, Pakistani and Egyptian, have had in diverting the fundamentalist warriors away from their original prime target – them – and towards the West. It’s been a remarkable feat; not only have the rulers of those three countries deflected Islamic revolutionaries by simultaneously repressing them, making concessions to them, and rechannelling their anger abroad, but they have gained additional support from the very Western countries which are now experiencing the consequences of that anger.

Read Meek's full review here

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