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Archive: POLITICS

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BeyonD the Deaths

As I've touched on before, there is an appalling, and grossly underreported story about the price being paid by ordinary Iraqis for our reckless invasion and occupation of their country. No, I'm not referring to the fact that virtually everyone in the country has friends and/or family members who have been directly caught up in the extreme violence which has resulted from the actions of the U.S. I'm referring to the terrible refugee crisis.

Marc Perelman has written a story at Salon.com which helps to personalize this awful chapter. Here's an excerpt:

Ahlam Ahmed Mahmoud al Al-Jabouri, a 42-year-old mother of three, belongs to another category of imperiled citizens-turned-refugees whom no one seems to care about. She is among thousands of Iraqis who have worked in seemingly less exposed positions for the U.S. and Iraqi authorities, carrying out administrative tasks, rendering basic services or, as in Ahlam's case, doling out crucial humanitarian aid to the people of her country. But even delivering help to the poor, the handicapped and the displaced did not spare Ahlam from being labeled a traitor by some of her fellow Sunnis. In the past two years, Ahlam has been kidnapped and tortured, was forced to flee Iraq, and lost one of her teenage sons under dubious circumstances. Although she was officially recognized for her exemplary humanitarian work by the U.S. Army more than two years ago, U.S. authorities have done little to help her, and her struggle to find safe haven continues today.

Ahlam's ordeal casts light on the depth of the resentment among Iraqis in general, and Sunnis in particular, over the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the resulting sectarian conflict that has engulfed their country in the past two years. The fact that a respected aid worker like Ahlam has faced brutal reprisal speaks volumes about the fractured state of Iraqi society.

Nowadays, Ahlam lives with her family in a drab three-story building off "Iraqi Street," the new name of the main thoroughfare of Said Azainab, a destitute neighborhood of Damascus overflowing with tens of thousands of Iraqi refugees. This capital city has lured the vast majority of the more than 1.2 million Iraqis who have fled to Syria. An additional estimated 1 million Iraqis eke out a living in neighboring countries, mostly in Jordan, while 2 million Iraqis are displaced within their own country. The Iraq war has caused the most significant population displacement in the region since the Arab-Israeli conflict of 1948, according to the United Nations.

Perelman's full piece

Russia and the U.S.

You may have noticed some recent tension between the two old foes. Tony Karon did, and has some pertinent observations:

As John le Carre once noted, the right side lost the Cold War but the wrong side won. Bush tells Putin that the Cold War is over, but it is Bush who is behaving as if it isn’t. His contempt for international law and international consensus even as he goes about invading countries and threatening to bomb others is hardly encouraging to a humiliated power now beginning to pick itself up thanks to oil revenue increases. It’s no wonder the Russians are pushing back, and it may be a sign of more to come — and not only from Moscow.

Bush’s father knew the Cold War was over; that was why he took the whole matter of going to war in Kuwait very patiently through the U.N. But the current president wants act out the fantasy of every college-age Reaganaut of the 1980s, who believes the Soviet Union collapsed because Reagan threatened to build a missile shield and made speeches demanding that Gorbachev tear down the Berlin Wall.

And it tells you how bad things have gotten with U.S. unilateralism that Vladimir Putin, almost as nasty a piece of work as Dick Cheney, can show himelf to be more adept at diplomacy than his counterpart in Washington.

Karon's full piece

Where Next?

The second Palestinian intifada has been crushed. The 700km wall is sealing the occupied population of the West Bank into a series of prisons. The "demographic timebomb" -- the fear that Palestinians, through higher birth rates, will soon outnumber Jews in the Holy Land and that Israel's continuing rule over them risks being compared to apartheid -- has been safely defused through the disengagment from Gaza and its 1.4 million inhabitants. On the fortieth anniversary of Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, Israel's security establishment is quietly satisfied with its successes.

But like a shark whose physiology requires that, to stay alive, it never sleeps or stops moving, Israel must remain restless, constantly reinventing itself and its policies to ensure its ethnic project does not lose legitimacy, even as it devours the Palestinian homeland. By keeping a step ahead of the analysts and worldwide opinion, Israel creates facts on the ground that cement its supremacist and expansionist agenda.

So, with these achievements under its belt, where next for the Jewish state?

I have been arguing for some time that Israel's ultimate goal is to create an ethnic fortress, a Jewish space in expanded borders from which all Palestinians -- including its 1.2 million Palestinian citizens -- will be excluded. That was the purpose of the Gaza disengagement and it is also the point of the wall snaking through the West Bank, effectively annexing to Israel what little is left of a potential Palestinian state.

It should therefore be no surprise that we are witnessing the first moves in Israel's next phase of conquest of the Palestinians. With the 3.7 million Palestinians in the occupied territories caged inside their ghettos, unable to protest their treatment behind fences and walls, the turn has come of Israel's Palestinian citizens.

These citizens, today nearly a fifth of Israel's population, are the legacy of an oversight by the country's Jewish leaders during the ethnic cleansing campaign of the 1948 war. Ever since Israel has been pondering what to do with them. There was a brief debate in the state's first years about whether they should be converted to Judaism and assimilated, or whether they should be marginalised and eventually expelled. The latter view, favoured by the country's first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, dominated. The question has been when and how to do the deed.

The time now finally appears to be upon us, and the crushing of these more than one million unwanted citizens currently inside the walls of the fortress -- the Achilles' heel of the Jewish state -- is likely to be just as ruthless as that of the Palestinians under occupation.

Jonathan Cook's full piece

No Difference

Ram Caspi has written an article. From the heights of his apartment in Tel Aviv's David Towers, the prominent lawyer has suggested strangulating the Gaza Strip. In the financial daily Globes of May 25, he called for, "neither a land incursion nor an aerial attack, but the creation of a noose ... From the moment that rocket number eight is fired, the government of Israel will act to cut Gaza off from the essential infrastructure systems of fuel, water, electricity and telephones, and will prevent others from providing these utilities to Gaza."

In other words: to cut a million and a half people off from the sources of life. Caspi is a successful attorney, who comes and goes in the tabernacles of justice and rule, a man who moves about in the highest reaches of Israeli society. Not a hair on his head has been mussed as a result of his satanic proposal. This man of the law who incites for the violation of international law has not been chastised. No one has shunned him in the wake of his words. The season for racism, collective punishment and verbal violence is at its height. What was once the reserve of nutcases on the right, the talkbackers and the loony listeners to the call-in radio programs, is now politically correct, in the heart of the consensus, the dernier cri in the violent and overheated Israeli discourse.

Caspi is not alone. Satan is no longer to be found only in Tehran --- he is alive and kicking here in our midst. Israel is being inundated by a murky stream of little blue-and-white Ahmadinejads: If the president of Iran proposes to destroy Israel, they, who are smaller than he, are proposing only to "eradicate" villages, "flatten" them, starve entire populations and in fact to kill them.

There is no difference, in principle or morally, between the Iranian original and his Israeli imitators. The racist and bullying philosophy of Minister of Strategic Affairs Avigdor Lieberman and his ilk has unleashed its malignant tentacles into the heart of society. Meir Kahane, who made proposals more moderate than these, found himself shunned; Caspi continues to advise the top people in the country on legal matters.

Gideon Levy's full piece in Haaretz

Extraordinary Rendition

Shortly before noon on 17 February 2003, the bulky, bearded figure of the Imam of Milan's most important mosque, Abu Omar, was noticed by a woman called Merfat Rezk.

Wearing traditional Arab dress, he was walking down Via Guerzoni towards his mosque. Ms Rezk also saw a man of European appearance wearing sunglasses and standing on the street, talking into a mobile phone. Moments later there was a loud bang, and a light-coloured van that had been parked across the pavement took off at high speed. The Arabic looking man and the man with sunglasses were nowhere to be seen.

Inside the van, the Egyptian cleric was confronted by men "wearing uniforms similar to those worn by the special forces", as he later wrote, men "who never spoke" but blindfolded his eyes and bound him hand and foot with gaffer tape. When he put up a fight, he was "severely beaten", until he began to foam at the mouth and became incontinent.

The van took him at speed to the Aviano airbase at the foot of the Alps, shared by the US and Italian militaries, where in a "small grey room" he was confronted by his captors. "They stood me upright and untied the plastic tape from my feet," he wrote. "Then they started to remove my clothes and the tape that bound my hands. I guess they used some instruments to tear off my clothes because I did not feel their hands touch me.

"They put new clothes on me and removed the blindfold... In a matter of seconds they took photographs of me and covered both my head and face with a wide blindfold that only exposed my nose and mouth. They also tied my hands to my back and feet with plastic ropes. I was then taken on to an aeroplane."

The imam, whose full name is Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, had become a victim of the process known as "extraordinary rendition", the kidnapping of suspected terrorists from their homes in Europe and rapid removal to countries known for their brutal prison regimes.

From Italy, Mr Nasr was flown to Germany and then to Cairo.

A "great Pasha", in Mr Nasr's words, a high-ranking official, asked him if he was willing to return to Italy as an informer. When he refused he was taken to a notorious Cairo prison and tortured. "I was hung like slaughtered cattle," he wrote, "head down, feet up, hands tied behind my back, feet tied together, and I was exposed to electric shocks all over my body." His incarceration lasted for four years.

The American CIA agents accused of kidnapping Mr Nasr go on trial in Milan today. It is the first time in living memory that CIA agents have been prosecuted for non-espionage offences. None of the 26 Americans, most of them indicted under the false names on the passports they used to enter Italy, will be in court for the trial. None of them will go to prison if convicted. But what the trial will do is to expose in detail the extraordinary arrogance of the remaining superpower, its readiness to grab people legally resident in Europe, immobilise and manacle them and fly them off to be tortured.

The full piece by Peter Popham and Jerome Taylor in The Independent (U.K.)

History, learn (or not), repeat

The British [Post World War I, 1919] occupation of Iraq drew heavy criticism at home almost from its inception. In 1920, a large-scale Shiite insurgency cost the British more than 2000 casualties, and domestic pressure to withdraw from Iraq began to build ... The result was what historians have called the 'Quit Mesopotamia' campaign, which remained an issue in British politics until the end of the British mandate in Iraq in 1932. ...

The Conservatives got the message and in 1925 initiated a series of increasingly desperate measures to sell their Iraq policy to the public. Colonial Secretary Leopold Amery led the rhetorical charge. In speeches in Parliament and before audiences throughout England, Amery blasted critics for their 'reckless disregard ... of the honour of their country.' Calls by British newspapers to pull out of Iraq only emboldened the country's enemies, Amery said, and a 'policy of scuttle' would expose the British to far greater dangers. ...

Amery claimed the situation in Iraq was significantly better than his critics realized. ... The whole Middle East was undergoing fundamental changes, he declared, and Iraq would soon be a model of development and democracy for the entire region.

Joel Rayburn, "The Last Exit From Iraq", Foreign Affairs, March/April 2006, pp. 30-32.

via Delancyplace

Human Shields

We are often told how the evil insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan use "human shields" as a cowardly way to avoid attacks on their own forces. This is indeed a heinous, inhuman practice – a war crime, in fact, worthy of the sternest punishment. (Just as dropping thousand-pound bombs into civilian areas and later claiming that all the "collateral damage" was the result of the "enemy using human shields" is an egregious war crime.)

But it seems that it is not only savage and fanatical terrorists who use this foul practice. As Haaretz reports, the Israeli Defense Force is still using involuntary human shields in its incursions into Palestinian areas – despite being explicitly forbidden from doing so by Israel's High Court of Justice.

The IDF likes to grab a Palestinian and force him to search a nearby house, so the "human shield" will be the one who gets killed if a militant is lying in wait inside. Two years ago (yes, in the fifth year of the 21st century), the High Court finally ruled – after "a long and drawn out legal debate" – to outlaw this barbarity. The IDF solemnly pledged to go and sin no more. But three months ago, foreign news crews filmed IDF forces once again thrusting civilian bodies into suspect houses and letting them draw the heat.

The IDF's criminal investigation unit has begun a probe of these violations, which, Haaretz notes, could have "repercussions." Criminal repercussions? Judicial repercussions? Moral repercussions? Not so much. The main danger of the investigation, we're told, is that it "could have repercussions in the next round of general staff appointments." Imagine that. You see, it seems that "in the past, Brigadier General Yair Golan, the commander of the forces in the West Bank, has been mentioned as a possible candidate to replace Major General Gadi Shamni as the prime minister's military secretary. However, IDF Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi decided that Golan would not be among the candidates for the job. Though it is believed that Ashkenazi didn't really want to appoint Golan to the post in the first place, sources in the IDF believe that the investigation has eliminated Golan's chances of getting the promotion."

So there you have it. If it is determined that the IDF is indeed once more rounding up innocent civilians and forcing them into service as human shields, then Yair Golan probably won't end up as military secretary to the prime minister. Now there's a fate worse than death for you.

Chris Floyd's full piece on the relativity of evil

The Fourth Tier

We are at a pivotal moment: World economic growth is posting a 30-year high, yet the consensus on globalization is splintering. With $51 trillion in annual global income, we have the resources to eradicate extreme poverty and promote prosperity, but the G-8 and the international financial institutions it controls are struggling to be effective. Unless our institutions keep pace with changing economics, the chasm will continue to grow between rich and poor.

This is because the world has moved beyond the old divides of North-South and East-West. While being more interconnected, it is now rapidly breaking into four tiers of varying levels of prosperity and hope. I call this the Four Speed World.

The first tier are the rich countries, including the United States and Europe, which for the last 50 years have maintained 80 percent share of global income while accounting for only 20 percent of the world's population. They will continue to enjoy improvements in living standards, but their dominance is being contested by emerging economies.

These emerging economies, comprising a second tier of about 30 poor and middle income nations, have learned how to leverage the global economy. With sustained growth at 7 percent or more per year, countries like India and China will soon become global leaders.

A third tier -- a much larger number of economies, perhaps 50 in all -- have experienced growth spurts, but also periods of decline or stagnation, especially once they hit middle income country status.

Spanning from Latin America to the Middle East, these economies have been forgotten by the G-8 leaders. They are neither poor enough to warrant special aid, nor sufficiently large and fast-growing to be major players in global growth. Yet more than a fifth of the people in the world live in these countries.

A fourth tier, a billion people, live in the poorest countries, which continue to stagnate or decline. These countries, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, gain little from globalization but are among the most vulnerable to its adverse effects, such as climate change and higher natural resource prices. The human tragedy engulfing this group is a huge concern and political challenge to the rest of us.

In the next 50 years, 3 billion people will be added to the 6 billion already on the planet. Barely 50 million will be added to the rich world; most will increase the second, third and fourth tiers.

The above was taken from an editorial published inthe International Herald Tribune and authored by James Wolfensohn. You can read the full piece here, and Steve Clemons provides further thoughts and interesting background on Wolfensohn here

Liberal Media (Not)

Jonathan Schwarz, in a recent post, provided this excerpt from Bob Woodward's book State of Denial:

A powerful, largely invisible influence on Bush's Iraq policy was former secretary of state Kissinger.

"Of the outside people that I talk to in this job," Vice President Cheney told me in the summer of 2005, "I probably talk to Henry Kissinger more than I talk to anybody else. He just comes by and, I guess at least once a month, Scooter [his then-chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby] and I sit down with him."

The president also met privately with Kissinger every couple of months, making him the most regular and frequent outside adviser to Bush on foreign affairs.

And also this, from Woodward's book The Final Days:

In Haig's presence, Kissinger referred pointedly to military men as "dumb, stupid animals to be used" as pawns for foreign policy.

In typically searing style, Schwarz correctly observes:

...imagine a Democratic administration was getting frequent advice from a former Democratic Secretary of State who'd said this. You'd be able to hear the screaming from cable news on Neptune.

Jonathan Schwarz' Tiny Revolution

Modern Conservatism

Patrick Fitzgerald's sentencing brief in the Libby case was released today. He concludes:

Mr. Libby, a high-ranking public official and experienced lawyer, lied repeatedly and blatantly about matters at the heart of a criminal investigation concerning the disclosure of a covert intelligence officer's identity. He has shown no regret for his actions, which significantly impeded an investigation.

Yet conservatives continue to openly defend this convicted felon. As Newsweek reports:

Since his conviction last March, a number of conservative partisans—who shared with Libby his ardent support of the Iraq war—have mounted a vigorous public campaign in his defense and sought to lay the groundwork for a presidential pardon. In mid-May, Libby was a featured guest at a New York dinner honoring Norman Podhoretz, one of the neo-Conservative movement's intellectual godfathers. According to reports from the scene, the dinner, organized by Commentary Magazine, opened with cheers and a "standing ovation" for Libby.

Think about that for a second. This is a man who was convicted of four felonies by a jury that was clearly conscientious and deliberative (they even acquitted him on one of the counts). He was prosecuted by a Republican political appointee, a man who is widely-regarded as one of the best and least political prosecutors in the country. He was represented at trial by the best legal team money can buy. Yet somehow this man has become the cause celebre among the conservative intelligentsia, the very symbol of injustice. How completely and totally absurd.

More from Anonymous Liberal

Beyond repair?

As the Israeli army attempts to imprison an entire nation, it is the youngest who suffer most. Half of all Palestinians killed in the past six years are children

Israel is destroying any notion of a state of Palestine and is being allowed to imprison an entire nation. That is clear from the latest attacks on Gaza, whose suffering has become a metaphor for the tragedy imposed on the peoples of the Middle East and beyond. These attacks, reported on Channel 4 News, were "targeting key militants of Hamas" and the "Hamas infrastructure". The BBC described a "clash" between the same militants and Israeli F-16 aircraft.

Consider one such clash. The militants' car was blown to pieces by a missile from a fighter-bomber. Who were these militants? In my experience, all the people of Gaza are militant in their resistance to their jailer and tormentor. As for the "Hamas infrastructure", this was the headquarters of the party that won last year's democratic elections in Palestine. To report that would give the wrong impression. It would suggest that the people in the car and all the others over the years, the babies and the elderly who have also "clashed" with fighter-bombers, were victims of a monstrous injustice. It would suggest the truth.

"Some say," said the Channel 4 reporter, that "Hamas has courted this [attack] . . ." Perhaps he was referring to the rockets fired at Israel from within the prison of Gaza which killed no one. Under international law an occupied people has the right to use arms against the occupier's forces. This right is never reported. The Channel 4 reporter referred to an "endless war", suggesting equivalents. There is no war. There is resistance among the poorest, most vulnerable people on earth to an enduring, illegal occupation imposed by the world's fourth largest military power, whose weapons of mass destruction range from cluster bombs to thermonuclear devices, bank rolled by the superpower. In the past six years alone, wrote the historian Ilan Pappé, "Israeli forces have killed more than 4,000 Palestinians, half of them children".

Consider how this power works. According to documents obtained by United Press International, the Israelis once secretly funded Hamas as "a direct attempt to divide and dilute support for a strong, secular PLO [Palestine Liberation Orga nisation] by using a competing religious alter native", in the words of a former CIA official. Today, Israel and the US have reversed this ploy and openly back Hamas's rival, Fatah, with bribes of millions of dollars. Israel recently secretly allowed 500 Fatah fighters to cross into Gaza from Egypt, where they had been trained by another American client, the Cairo dictatorship. The Israelis' aim is to undermine the elected Palestinian government and ignite a civil war. They have not quite succeeded. In response, the Palestinians forged a government of national unity, of both Hamas and Fatah. The latest attacks are aimed at destroying this.

With Gaza secured in chaos and the West Bank walled in, the Israeli plan, wrote the Palestinian academic Karma Nabulsi, is "a Hobbesian vision of an anarchic society: truncated, violent, powerless, destroyed, cowed, ruled by disparate militias, gangs, religious ideologues and extremists, broken up into ethnic and religious tribalism and co-opted collaborationists. Look to the Iraq of today . . ."

John Pilger's full piece can be read at newstatesman.com

And a good, related background article

Iraq War Bonus: More Heroin!

And you thought that it couldn't get any worse. Well, not only has the unnecessary, aggressive war and occupation of Iraq allowed opium production to skyrocket in Afghanistan, but it's now being grown in Iraq for the first time!

Farmers in southern Iraq have started to grow opium poppies in their fields for the first time, sparking fears that Iraq might become a serious drugs producer along the lines of Afghanistan.

Rice farmers along the Euphrates, to the west of the city of Diwaniya, south of Baghdad, have stopped cultivating rice, for which the area is famous, and are instead planting poppies, Iraqi sources familiar with the area have told The Independent.

The shift to opium cultivation is still in its early stages but there is little the Iraqi government can do about it because rival Shia militias and their surrogates in the security forces control Diwaniya and its neighbourhood. There have been bloody clashes between militiamen, police, Iraqi army and US forces in the city over the past two months.

The shift to opium production is taking place in the well-irrigated land west and south of Diwaniya around the towns of Ash Shamiyah, al Ghammas and Ash Shinafiyah. The farmers are said to be having problems in growing the poppies because of the intense heat and high humidity. It is too dangerous for foreign journalists to visit Diwaniya but the start of opium poppy cultivation is attested by two students from there and a source in Basra familiar with the Iraqi drugs trade.

Drug smugglers have for long used Iraq as a transit point for heroin, produced from opium in laboratories in Afghanistan, being sent through Iran to rich markets in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. Saddam Hussein's security apparatus in Basra was reportedly heavily involved in the illicit trade. Opium poppies have hitherto not been grown in Iraq and the fact that they are being planted is a measure of the violence in southern Iraq. It is unlikely that the farmers' decision was spontaneous and the gangs financing them are said to be "well-equipped with good vehicles and weapons and are well-organised".

Patrick Cockburn's full article in The Independent (U.K.)

Recycled Lies

It’s an old military adage that bad intel can get soldiers killed, but it now turns out that false talking points may be even more lethal, a lesson that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney continue to teach the world as the death toll mounts in Iraq.

In pounding the Democratic-controlled Congress into submission on Iraq War funding last week, the President and Vice President let loose a withering barrage of non-sequiturs, appeals to fear, long-discredited canards and personal attacks on critics for endangering U.S. troops.

Fearing an escalation of the rhetorical assault over the Memorial Day weekend, Democratic leaders crumbled, reneging on their vow that Bush would never again be given a blank check. Instead they cleared the way for a bipartisan vote that handed the President more than $100 billion without any meaningful strings attached.

But Bush’s Iraq War talking points – while appealing to some Americans and frightening some Democrats – remain a potpourri of cherry-picked intelligence, irrational arguments and outright lies.

Back were some golden oldies – like Saddam Hussein failing to comply with U.N. demands to get rid of his WMD, even though the world knows that he did – and some newer favorites – like the need to listen when al-Qaeda boasts about driving the U.S. out of Iraq, although U.S. intelligence knows al-Qaeda actually believes that “prolonging the war” is in its interest.

Robert Parry's full piece

Gore on Bush

The Bush administration's objective of attempting to establish US domination over any potential adversary was what led to the hubristic, tragic miscalculation of the Iraq war - a painful misadventure marked by one disaster after another, based on one mistaken assumption after another. But the people who paid the price have been the American men and women in uniform trapped over there, and the Iraqis themselves. At the level of our relations with the rest of the world, the administration has willingly traded respect for the US in favour of fear. That was the real meaning of "shock and awe". This administration has coupled its theory of US dominance with a doctrine of pre-emptive strikes, regardless of whether the threat to be pre-empted is imminent or not.

The doctrine is presented in open-ended terms, which means that Iraq is not necessarily the last application. In fact, the very logic of the concept suggests a string of military engagements against a succession of sovereign states - Syria, Libya, North Korea, Iran - but the implication is that wherever the combination exists of an interest in weapons of mass destruction together with an ongoing role as host to, or participant in, terrorist operations, the doctrine will apply. It also means that the Iraq resolution created the precedent for pre-emptive action anywhere, whenever this or any future president decides that it is time. The risks of this doctrine stretch far beyond the disaster in Iraq. The policy affects the basic relationship between the US and the rest of the world. Article 51 of the UN charter recognises the right of any nation to defend itself, including the right to take pre-emptive action in order to deal with imminent threats.

By now, the administration may have begun to realise that national and international cohesion are indeed strategic assets. But it is a lesson long delayed and clearly not uniformly and consistently accepted by senior members of the cabinet. From the outset, the administration has operated in a manner calculated to please the portion of its base that occupies the far right, at the expense of solidarity among all Americans and between our country and our allies. The gross violations of human rights authorised by Bush at Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay and dozens of other locations around the world, have seriously damaged US moral authority and delegitimised US efforts to continue promoting human rights.

President Bush offered a brief and halfhearted apology to the Arab world, but he should make amends to the American people for abandoning the Geneva conventions, and to the US forces for sending troops into harm's way while ignoring the best advice of their commanders. Perhaps most importantly, he owes an explanation to all those men and women throughout our world who have held high the ideal of the US as a shining goal to inspire their own efforts to bring about justice and the rule of law.

Most Americans have tended to give the Bush-Cheney administration the benefit of the doubt when it comes to its failure to take action in advance of 9/11 to guard against an attack. Hindsight casts a harsh light on mistakes that should have been visible at the time they were made. But now, years later, with the benefit of investigations that have been made public, it is no longer clear that the administration deserves this act of political grace from the American people. It is useful and important to examine the warnings the administration ignored - not to point the finger of blame, but to better determine how our country can avoid such mistakes in the future. When leaders are not held accountable for serious mistakes, they and their successors are more likely to repeat those mistakes.

Part of the explanation for the increased difficulty in gaining cooperation in fighting terrorism is Bush's attitude of contempt for any person, institution or nation that disagrees with him. He has exposed Americans abroad and in the US to a greater danger of attack because of his arrogance and wilfulness, in particular his insistence upon stirring up a hornet's nest in Iraq. Compounding the problem, he has regularly insulted the religion, the culture and the tradition of people in countries throughout the Muslim world.

The unpleasant truth is that Bush's failed policies in both Iraq and Afghanistan have made the world a far more dangerous place. Our friends in the Middle East, including most prominently Israel, have been placed in greater danger because of the policy blunders and sheer incompetence with which the civilian Pentagon officials have conducted this war.

The above is an edited extract from Al Gore's new book, The Assault on Reason (via Truthout.org)

Lebanon: Not so simple

The violence that has engulfed the Palestinian refugee camp of Nahr al-Bared in northern Lebanon over the past few days, started after a night raid by internal security forces to arrest alleged bank robbers in Lebanon's second largest city, Tripoli. That turned into armed clashes between police and a small radical Islamist group, Fatah al-Islam. Within hours, the Lebanese army was pulled into the conflict when more than a dozen soldiers were ambushed and killed. The army surrounded and began shelling the camp where Fatah al-Islam militants are based - home to more than 30,000 refugees - with mounting casualties on all sides, including civilians.

The story of Lebanon's US-backed Siniora government and army battling an isolated al-Qaida-type terrorist group allegedly backed by Syria obscures a complex picture that has been years in the making, and which involves a peculiar social environment, Lebanese political manoeuvring, and the wider dynamics of an increasingly volatile region.

North Lebanon, especially Tripoli and Akkar, contains some of the country's most deprived areas, neglected by successive governments. Tripoli, a traditionally conservative Sunni city, and Akkar, a strikingly poor province, became fertile territory for the proselytising of Salafist and radical Sunni groups. But impoverished conditions do not explain the rapid empowerment of radical Sunni movements in recent years; political cover was needed - and was provided by pro-government forces. In the 2005 national parliamentary elections, Saad al-Hariri, the son of slain prime minister Rafik Hariri, appealed to Sunni sentiment to woo northern voters. Significant efforts were made to bring the Sunnis of Tripoli and Akkar under his wing and away from the area's traditional leaders. Fulfilling an electoral pledge, the new parliament pardoned jailed Sunni militants involved in violence in December 2000. Those clashes in Dinnieh between Islamist radicals and the Lebanese army left dozens dead in a precursor of the violence of recent days.

Read the rest of Charles Harb's piece in The Guardian (U.K.)

Christopher Hitchens on Falwell

(When Hitchens is good, he's really good!)

(hat tip to 3 Quarks Daily)

Another Monica

This time around, it was Monica Goodling, who yesterday appeared before the House Judiciary Committee. It was absolutely infuriating to watch the hearing, as the Democrats – including Chairman John Conyers – were terribly ill-prepared. Worse yet, as Greg Palast points out, this Monica dropped a bombshell which our ignorant representatives failed to notice.

This Monica revealed something hotter — much hotter — than a stained blue dress. In her opening testimony yesterday before the House Judiciary Committee, Monica Goodling, the blonde-ling underling to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and Department of Justice Liaison to the White House, dropped The Big One….And the Committee members didn’t even know it.

Goodling testified that Gonzales’ Chief of Staff, Kyle Sampson, perjured himself, lying to the committee in earlier testimony. The lie: Sampson denied Monica had told him about Tim Griffin’s “involvement in ‘caging’ voters” in 2004.

Huh?? Tim Griffin? “Caging”???

The perplexed committee members hadn’t a clue — and asked no substantive questions about it thereafter. Karl Rove is still smiling. If the members had gotten the clue, and asked the right questions, they would have found “the keys to the kingdom,” they thought they were looking for. They dangled right in front of their perplexed faces.

The keys: the missing emails — and missing link — that could send Griffin and his boss, Rove, to the slammer for a long, long time.

Kingdom enough for ya?

But what’s ‘caging’ and why is it such a dreadful secret that lawyer Sampson put his license to practice and his freedom on the line to cover Tim Griffin’s involvement in it? Because it’s a felony. And a big one.

Our BBC team broke the story at the top of the nightly news everywhere on the planet - except the USA - only because America’s news networks simply refused to cover this evidence of the electoral coup d’etat that chose our President in 2004.

Here’s how caging worked, and along with Griffin’s thoughtful emails themselves you’ll understand it all in no time.

The Bush-Cheney operatives sent hundreds of thousands of letters marked “Do not forward” to voters’ homes. Letters returned (”caged”) were used as evidence to block these voters’ right to cast a ballot on grounds they were registered at phony addresses. Who were the evil fakers? Homeless men, students on vacation and — you got to love this — American soldiers. Oh yeah: most of them are Black voters.

Why weren’t these African-American voters home when the Republican letters arrived? The homeless men were on park benches, the students were on vacation — and the soldiers were overseas. Go to Baghdad, lose your vote. Mission Accomplished.

How do I know? I have the caging lists…

I have them because they are attached to the emails Rove insists can’t be found. I have the emails. 500 of them — sent to our team at BBC after the Rove-bots accidentally sent them to a web domain owned by our friend John Wooden.

Here’s what you need to know — and the Committee would have discovered, if only they’d asked:

1. ‘Caging’ voters is a crime, a go-to-jail felony.
2. Griffin wasn’t “involved” in the caging, Ms. Goodling. Griffin, Rove’s right-hand man (right-hand claw), was directing the illegal purge and challenge campaign. How do I know? It’s in the email I got. Thanks. And it’s posted below.
3. On December 7, 2006, the ragin’, cagin’ Griffin was named, on Rove’s personal demand, US Attorney for Arkansas. Perpetrator became prosecutor.

The committee was perplexed about Monica’s panicked admission and accusations about the caging list because the US press never covered it. That’s because, as Griffin wrote to Goodling in yet another email (dated February 6 of this year, and also posted below), their caging operation only made the news on BBC London: busted open, Griffin bitched, by that “British reporter,” Greg Palast.

There’s no pride in this. Our BBC team broke the story at the top of the nightly news everywhere on the planet — except the USA — only because America’s news networks simply refused to cover this evidence of the electoral coup d’etat that chose our President in 2004.

And now, not bothering to understand the astonishing revelation in Goodling’s confessional, they are missing the real story behind the firing of the US attorneys. It’s not about removing prosecutors disloyal to Bush, it’s about replacing those who refused to aid the theft of the vote in 2004 with those prepared to burgle it again in 2008.

Now that they have the keys, let’s see if they can put them in the right door. The clock is ticking ladies and gents…