Wednesday, April 07, 2004
What’s Happening, Iraq: Bombing of a mosque, Shiite militiamen drove Ukrainian soldiers and coalition officials from the town of Kut. And, heavy casualties…
Though the BBC reports that "it's not getting better, yet," IslamOnline reports that Sadr is trying to cool the situation.
"Shiite leader Moqtada Sadr said Tuesday, April 6, he ended his sit-in at a mosque in Kufa and traveled to the holy city of An-Najaf to prevent `more bloodshed,' while Shiites’ spiritual leader Ayatollah Ali Sistani called for calm and voiced his solidarity with the young firebrand leader. http://www.islamonline.net/English/News/2004-04/06/article03.shtml
A "reassuring" note is that the major Shiite political parties are not (yet) part of the insurgency/uprising. But, fighting Sunnis and at least some Shiites is a two-front war that is a nightmare for the Wolfowitz-Rumsfeld-Cheney operation…and for us. Now there is talk of adding more U.S. troops, despite Rumsfeld’s denials. As in similar situations, all Bush can do is repeat his refrain, variations on ‘We’re resolved to stay; the deadline is still June 30’, etc. http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0407/p01s02-wome.html
Juan Cole: The oft-quoted Cole, a U. of Michigan prof, offers insights from his web log. He’s fearful that the Shiite leader has innumerable followers, that Sadr is more popular than U.S. spokespersons have claimed.
Rather, it is clear that urban crowds are supporting the uprising in some numbers. Even when the Coalition puts the uprising down, it may well incur the wrath of many persons who had earlier viewed it with favor. And if the US cannot control Iraq now, when it has its hands directly on all the levers of power, how will it do so in the coming year, as it loses its grip on those levers?…
(Previously: )
In fact that is the size of his formal militia. Muqtada's movement is like the layers of an onion. You have 10,000 militiamen. But then you have tens of thousands of cadres able to mobilize neighborhoods. Then you have hundreds of thousands of Sadrists, followers of Muqtada and other heirs of Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr. Then you have maybe 5 million Shiite theocrats who sympathize with Muqtada's goals and rhetoric, about a third of the Shiite community. The Sadrists will now try to shift everything so that the 5 million become followers, the hundreds of thousands become cadres, and the tens of thousands become militiamen.
It said that Muqtada al-Sadr had withdrawn into his mosque in Kufa, south of Baghdad, for a spiritual "retreat," and that it was reported that Coalition military forces had surrounded the mosque. (Mosques are considered sanctuaries in the Muslim world, and there are always protests when they are invaded by security forces or military troops). http://www.juancole.com/2004_04_01_juancole_archive.html#108109946449807198
The thoughtful Naomi Klein opined that the U.S. is purposely provoking Sadr, that it is seeking to demonstrate that chaos reigns so as to enable them to abandon the June 30 date.
Make no mistake: this is not the "civil war" that Washington has been predicting will break out between Sunnis, Shias and Kurds. Rather, it is a war provoked by the US occupation authority and waged by its forces against the growing number of Shia who support Moqtada al-Sadr...
At first, Bremer responded to Sadr's growing strength by ignoring him; now he is attempting to provoke him into all-out battle. The trouble began when he closed down Sadr's newspaper last week, sparking a wave of peaceful demonstrations. On Saturday, Bremer raised the stakes further by sending coalition forces to surround Sadr's house near Najaf and arrest his communications officer.
Predictably, the arrest sparked immediate protests in Baghdad, which the Iraqi army responded to by opening fire and allegedly killing three people. At the end of the day on Sunday, Sadr called on his supporters to stop staging demonstrations and urged them to employ unnamed "other ways" to resist the occupation - a statement many interpreted as a call to arms.
On the surface, this chain of events is mystifying. With the so-called Sunni triangle in flames after the gruesome Falluja attacks, why is Bremer pushing the comparatively calm Shia south into battle?
Here's one possible answer: Washington has given up on its plans to hand over power to an interim Iraqi government on June 30, and is creating the chaos it needs to declare the handover impossible. A continued occupation will be bad news for George Bush on the campaign trail, but not as bad as if the hand-over happens and the country erupts, an increasingly likely scenario given the widespread rejection of the legitimacy of the interim constitution and the US- appointed governing council.
But by sending the new Iraqi army to fire on the people they are supposed to be protecting, Bremer has destroyed what slim hope they had of gaining credibility with an already highly mistrustful population. http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1186566,00.html
Meanwhile David Kay, ye olde WMD fella, has been coming clean, step-by-step. He notes that he was convinced by last summer that Saddam was not accumulating weapons. Then, he wanted to resign in December, but was convinced to stay by CIA Director Tenet, who advised, “If you resign now, it will appear that we don’t know what we’re doing and the wheels are coming off.” http://www.nydailynews.com/news/wn_report/v-pfriendly/story/180602p-156891c.html
Blackwater “Security”: The employer of the slain four-some continues to be examined. The Guardian reported last month as to Blackwater hiring Chilean mercenaries, some of whom had been trained during the Pinochet dictatorship. They do not merely guard individuals; they have their own helicopter fleet and are well-enough equipped to defend themselves unless ambushed. These well-paid ‘professionals’- some are army/marines who quit for the higher pay- have known to be equipped with especially lethal weapons/ammunition. Army Times reported an example where a wound to the buttocks was instantly fatal. I’ll skip the details, which are at http://www.armytimes.com/story.php?f=1-292925-2426405.php http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1162392,00.html
Depleted Uranium:
The New York Daily News has reported that three U.S. soldiers have come down with radiation poisoning because of exposure to U.S. depleted uranium weapons. The scourge of the Persian Gulf War, has been omnipresent during the invasion/occupation. There are assertions that 4 million pounds have been used, which generates a heck of a lot of uranium dust (which is what it turns into when it’s exploded).
"A special investigation by Democracy Now! co-host Juan Gonzalez of the New York Daily News has found four of nine soldiers of the 442nd Military Police Company of the New York Army National Guard returning from Iraq tested positive for depleted uranium contamination. They are the first confirmed cases of inhaled depleted uranium exposure from the current Iraq conflict. After repeatedly being denied testing for depleted uranium from Army doctors, the soldiers contacted The News who paid to have them tested as part of their investigation. More at http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Mar04/Nichols0327.htm
Polls on Iraq:
Not surprising that Bush’s numbers as to his handling of Iraq have steadily dropped- from 56% in January to 43% now. More intriguing is that the Pew Research folk found that Americans are more focused on gas prices than on developments in Iraq. 58% are “paying close attention” to reports on gas prices, 36% closely following Iraq fighting/developments. http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=210
Spinners in Baghdad!
An AP report captures how Republican ‘operatives’ are busy spinning the war from their new Baghdad headquarters .
Inside the marble-floored palace hall that serves as the press office of the U.S.-led coalition, Republican Party operatives lead a team of Americans who promote mostly good news about Iraq. Dan Senor, a former press secretary for Spencer Abraham, the Michigan Republican who's now Energy Secretary, heads the office packed with former Bush campaign workers, political appointees and ex-Capitol Hill staffers.
One-third of the U.S. civilian workers in the press office have GOP ties, running an enterprise that critics see as an outpost of Bush's re-election effort with Iraq a top concern. Senor and others inside the coalition say they follow strict guidelines that steer clear of politics…." http://start.earthlink.net/newsarticle?cat=9&aid=D81O71000_story
Afghanistan: Comment from Seymour Hersh:
Afghanistan is regaining the Bush Administration’s attention, in part because the worsening situation in Iraq has increased the need for a foreign-policy success. State Department and intelligence officials who have worked in Kabul said that it is widely understood that Afghanistan’s Presidential and parliamentary elections, which had already been rescheduled, must be held before the American Presidential elections, on November 2nd. The upside to the political timetable has been a new commitment of American reconstruction funds—more than two billion dollars, a fourfold increase over the previous year—for schools, clinics, and road construction in Afghanistan. Richard Clarke wrote in his memoir that initially the aid funds were “inadequate and slowly delivered,” and far below the thirteen hundred and ninety dollars per capita that was spent in the first years of the rebuilding effort in Bosnia and the nearly twenty billion dollars now earmarked for Iraq. http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040412fa_fact
Outsourcing: Globe report (Hiawatha Bray)
The spread of outsourcing, beyond hard-hit technology workers, is a big reason the US economic recovery so far is a jobless one, and has stayed that way much longer than in previous upturns. A study released recently from the University of California at Berkeley says the country lost more than 1 million white-collar jobs in the 1990s and "hundreds of thousands more since the turn of the century."
Precise data are hard to come by and estimates vary widely, but the UC study says that outsourcing is accelerating. "If you simultaneously read Indian newspapers and US newspapers, you're going to get a good correlation between layoffs here and jobs being created there," said Ashok Deo Bardhan, a researcher for the study. He added that as many as 30,000 jobs were lost to India alone in June, and that 14 million US service jobs are vulnerable. http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2003/11/02/as_economy_gains_outsourcing_surges?mode=PF
Corporations Avoiding Taxes Most large firms avoided taxation from 1996-2000.
Using data collected by the Internal Revenue Service, the auditors found that 71 percent of foreign corporations paid no federal income tax. During the same time, 61 percent of American corporations paid no income tax.
Among the largest corporations, American businesses were more likely to avoid taxation than foreign businesses.
The study was done by the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress.
Investigators also looked at companies that paid less than 5 percent of their total income in tax.
In 2000, the most recent year for which data was available, an estimated 94 percent of American corporations and 89 percent of foreign corporations paid less than 5 percent of their total incomes in taxes.
The two Democratic senators who asked the GAO to study corporate taxation said the results expose gaping loopholes in the tax system.
"They don't pay their fair share, and the net result is that average taxpayers - working families - wind up paying more to make up that difference," said Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D. "That's not fair or right." http://www.marinij.com/cda/article/print/0,1674,234%257E26641%257E2060815,00.html
9/11: Chair Thomas Kean expressed fears that the White House would ultimately revise/edit the report, as it will check it "line by line to find out if there's anything in there which could harm American interests in the area of intelligence." Will it be delayed…beyond the election? Meanwhile, don’t expect much from Condi tomorrow. Without follow-up, this is left as a ‘he said, she said’, or “perspectives”, i.e. irresolvable. Most important is that this process has contributed to the slow, steady erosion of the Administration’s credibility.
Environment: Antony Barnett of The Observer reminds us of the Administration’s record, sharing an email that the Observer obtained.
George W. Bush's campaign workers have hit on an age-old political tactic to deal with the tricky subject of global warming - deny, and deny aggressively.
The Observer has obtained a remarkable email sent to the press secretaries of all Republican congressmen advising them what to say when questioned on the environment in the run-up to November's election. The advice: tell them everything's rosy.
It tells them how global warming has not been proved, air quality is 'getting better', the world's forests are 'spreading, not deadening', oil reserves are 'increasing, not decreasing', and the 'world's water is cleaner and reaching more people'.
The email - sent on 4 February - warns that Democrats will 'hit us hard' on the environment. 'In an effort to help your members fight back, as well as be aggressive on the issue, we have prepared the following set of talking points on where the environment really stands today,' it states.
The memo - headed 'From medi-scare to air-scare' - goes on: 'From the heated debate on global warming to the hot air on forests; from the muddled talk on our nation's waters to the convolution on air pollution, we are fighting a battle of fact against fiction on the environment - Republicans can't stress enough that extremists are screaming "Doomsday!" when the environment is actually seeing a new and better day.'
Among the memo's assertions are 'global warming is not a fact', 'links between air quality and asthma in children remain cloudy', and the US Environment Protection Agency is exaggerating when it says that at least 40 per cent of streams, rivers and lakes are too polluted for drinking, fishing or swimming. http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1185292,00.html
-R
Though the BBC reports that "it's not getting better, yet," IslamOnline reports that Sadr is trying to cool the situation.
"Shiite leader Moqtada Sadr said Tuesday, April 6, he ended his sit-in at a mosque in Kufa and traveled to the holy city of An-Najaf to prevent `more bloodshed,' while Shiites’ spiritual leader Ayatollah Ali Sistani called for calm and voiced his solidarity with the young firebrand leader. http://www.islamonline.net/English/News/2004-04/06/article03.shtml
A "reassuring" note is that the major Shiite political parties are not (yet) part of the insurgency/uprising. But, fighting Sunnis and at least some Shiites is a two-front war that is a nightmare for the Wolfowitz-Rumsfeld-Cheney operation…and for us. Now there is talk of adding more U.S. troops, despite Rumsfeld’s denials. As in similar situations, all Bush can do is repeat his refrain, variations on ‘We’re resolved to stay; the deadline is still June 30’, etc. http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0407/p01s02-wome.html
Juan Cole: The oft-quoted Cole, a U. of Michigan prof, offers insights from his web log. He’s fearful that the Shiite leader has innumerable followers, that Sadr is more popular than U.S. spokespersons have claimed.
Rather, it is clear that urban crowds are supporting the uprising in some numbers. Even when the Coalition puts the uprising down, it may well incur the wrath of many persons who had earlier viewed it with favor. And if the US cannot control Iraq now, when it has its hands directly on all the levers of power, how will it do so in the coming year, as it loses its grip on those levers?…
(Previously: )
In fact that is the size of his formal militia. Muqtada's movement is like the layers of an onion. You have 10,000 militiamen. But then you have tens of thousands of cadres able to mobilize neighborhoods. Then you have hundreds of thousands of Sadrists, followers of Muqtada and other heirs of Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr. Then you have maybe 5 million Shiite theocrats who sympathize with Muqtada's goals and rhetoric, about a third of the Shiite community. The Sadrists will now try to shift everything so that the 5 million become followers, the hundreds of thousands become cadres, and the tens of thousands become militiamen.
It said that Muqtada al-Sadr had withdrawn into his mosque in Kufa, south of Baghdad, for a spiritual "retreat," and that it was reported that Coalition military forces had surrounded the mosque. (Mosques are considered sanctuaries in the Muslim world, and there are always protests when they are invaded by security forces or military troops). http://www.juancole.com/2004_04_01_juancole_archive.html#108109946449807198
The thoughtful Naomi Klein opined that the U.S. is purposely provoking Sadr, that it is seeking to demonstrate that chaos reigns so as to enable them to abandon the June 30 date.
Make no mistake: this is not the "civil war" that Washington has been predicting will break out between Sunnis, Shias and Kurds. Rather, it is a war provoked by the US occupation authority and waged by its forces against the growing number of Shia who support Moqtada al-Sadr...
At first, Bremer responded to Sadr's growing strength by ignoring him; now he is attempting to provoke him into all-out battle. The trouble began when he closed down Sadr's newspaper last week, sparking a wave of peaceful demonstrations. On Saturday, Bremer raised the stakes further by sending coalition forces to surround Sadr's house near Najaf and arrest his communications officer.
Predictably, the arrest sparked immediate protests in Baghdad, which the Iraqi army responded to by opening fire and allegedly killing three people. At the end of the day on Sunday, Sadr called on his supporters to stop staging demonstrations and urged them to employ unnamed "other ways" to resist the occupation - a statement many interpreted as a call to arms.
On the surface, this chain of events is mystifying. With the so-called Sunni triangle in flames after the gruesome Falluja attacks, why is Bremer pushing the comparatively calm Shia south into battle?
Here's one possible answer: Washington has given up on its plans to hand over power to an interim Iraqi government on June 30, and is creating the chaos it needs to declare the handover impossible. A continued occupation will be bad news for George Bush on the campaign trail, but not as bad as if the hand-over happens and the country erupts, an increasingly likely scenario given the widespread rejection of the legitimacy of the interim constitution and the US- appointed governing council.
But by sending the new Iraqi army to fire on the people they are supposed to be protecting, Bremer has destroyed what slim hope they had of gaining credibility with an already highly mistrustful population. http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1186566,00.html
Meanwhile David Kay, ye olde WMD fella, has been coming clean, step-by-step. He notes that he was convinced by last summer that Saddam was not accumulating weapons. Then, he wanted to resign in December, but was convinced to stay by CIA Director Tenet, who advised, “If you resign now, it will appear that we don’t know what we’re doing and the wheels are coming off.” http://www.nydailynews.com/news/wn_report/v-pfriendly/story/180602p-156891c.html
Blackwater “Security”: The employer of the slain four-some continues to be examined. The Guardian reported last month as to Blackwater hiring Chilean mercenaries, some of whom had been trained during the Pinochet dictatorship. They do not merely guard individuals; they have their own helicopter fleet and are well-enough equipped to defend themselves unless ambushed. These well-paid ‘professionals’- some are army/marines who quit for the higher pay- have known to be equipped with especially lethal weapons/ammunition. Army Times reported an example where a wound to the buttocks was instantly fatal. I’ll skip the details, which are at http://www.armytimes.com/story.php?f=1-292925-2426405.php http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1162392,00.html
Depleted Uranium:
The New York Daily News has reported that three U.S. soldiers have come down with radiation poisoning because of exposure to U.S. depleted uranium weapons. The scourge of the Persian Gulf War, has been omnipresent during the invasion/occupation. There are assertions that 4 million pounds have been used, which generates a heck of a lot of uranium dust (which is what it turns into when it’s exploded).
"A special investigation by Democracy Now! co-host Juan Gonzalez of the New York Daily News has found four of nine soldiers of the 442nd Military Police Company of the New York Army National Guard returning from Iraq tested positive for depleted uranium contamination. They are the first confirmed cases of inhaled depleted uranium exposure from the current Iraq conflict. After repeatedly being denied testing for depleted uranium from Army doctors, the soldiers contacted The News who paid to have them tested as part of their investigation. More at http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Mar04/Nichols0327.htm
Polls on Iraq:
Not surprising that Bush’s numbers as to his handling of Iraq have steadily dropped- from 56% in January to 43% now. More intriguing is that the Pew Research folk found that Americans are more focused on gas prices than on developments in Iraq. 58% are “paying close attention” to reports on gas prices, 36% closely following Iraq fighting/developments. http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=210
Spinners in Baghdad!
An AP report captures how Republican ‘operatives’ are busy spinning the war from their new Baghdad headquarters .
Inside the marble-floored palace hall that serves as the press office of the U.S.-led coalition, Republican Party operatives lead a team of Americans who promote mostly good news about Iraq. Dan Senor, a former press secretary for Spencer Abraham, the Michigan Republican who's now Energy Secretary, heads the office packed with former Bush campaign workers, political appointees and ex-Capitol Hill staffers.
One-third of the U.S. civilian workers in the press office have GOP ties, running an enterprise that critics see as an outpost of Bush's re-election effort with Iraq a top concern. Senor and others inside the coalition say they follow strict guidelines that steer clear of politics…." http://start.earthlink.net/newsarticle?cat=9&aid=D81O71000_story
Afghanistan: Comment from Seymour Hersh:
Afghanistan is regaining the Bush Administration’s attention, in part because the worsening situation in Iraq has increased the need for a foreign-policy success. State Department and intelligence officials who have worked in Kabul said that it is widely understood that Afghanistan’s Presidential and parliamentary elections, which had already been rescheduled, must be held before the American Presidential elections, on November 2nd. The upside to the political timetable has been a new commitment of American reconstruction funds—more than two billion dollars, a fourfold increase over the previous year—for schools, clinics, and road construction in Afghanistan. Richard Clarke wrote in his memoir that initially the aid funds were “inadequate and slowly delivered,” and far below the thirteen hundred and ninety dollars per capita that was spent in the first years of the rebuilding effort in Bosnia and the nearly twenty billion dollars now earmarked for Iraq. http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040412fa_fact
Outsourcing: Globe report (Hiawatha Bray)
The spread of outsourcing, beyond hard-hit technology workers, is a big reason the US economic recovery so far is a jobless one, and has stayed that way much longer than in previous upturns. A study released recently from the University of California at Berkeley says the country lost more than 1 million white-collar jobs in the 1990s and "hundreds of thousands more since the turn of the century."
Precise data are hard to come by and estimates vary widely, but the UC study says that outsourcing is accelerating. "If you simultaneously read Indian newspapers and US newspapers, you're going to get a good correlation between layoffs here and jobs being created there," said Ashok Deo Bardhan, a researcher for the study. He added that as many as 30,000 jobs were lost to India alone in June, and that 14 million US service jobs are vulnerable. http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2003/11/02/as_economy_gains_outsourcing_surges?mode=PF
Corporations Avoiding Taxes Most large firms avoided taxation from 1996-2000.
Using data collected by the Internal Revenue Service, the auditors found that 71 percent of foreign corporations paid no federal income tax. During the same time, 61 percent of American corporations paid no income tax.
Among the largest corporations, American businesses were more likely to avoid taxation than foreign businesses.
The study was done by the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress.
Investigators also looked at companies that paid less than 5 percent of their total income in tax.
In 2000, the most recent year for which data was available, an estimated 94 percent of American corporations and 89 percent of foreign corporations paid less than 5 percent of their total incomes in taxes.
The two Democratic senators who asked the GAO to study corporate taxation said the results expose gaping loopholes in the tax system.
"They don't pay their fair share, and the net result is that average taxpayers - working families - wind up paying more to make up that difference," said Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D. "That's not fair or right." http://www.marinij.com/cda/article/print/0,1674,234%257E26641%257E2060815,00.html
9/11: Chair Thomas Kean expressed fears that the White House would ultimately revise/edit the report, as it will check it "line by line to find out if there's anything in there which could harm American interests in the area of intelligence." Will it be delayed…beyond the election? Meanwhile, don’t expect much from Condi tomorrow. Without follow-up, this is left as a ‘he said, she said’, or “perspectives”, i.e. irresolvable. Most important is that this process has contributed to the slow, steady erosion of the Administration’s credibility.
Environment: Antony Barnett of The Observer reminds us of the Administration’s record, sharing an email that the Observer obtained.
George W. Bush's campaign workers have hit on an age-old political tactic to deal with the tricky subject of global warming - deny, and deny aggressively.
The Observer has obtained a remarkable email sent to the press secretaries of all Republican congressmen advising them what to say when questioned on the environment in the run-up to November's election. The advice: tell them everything's rosy.
It tells them how global warming has not been proved, air quality is 'getting better', the world's forests are 'spreading, not deadening', oil reserves are 'increasing, not decreasing', and the 'world's water is cleaner and reaching more people'.
The email - sent on 4 February - warns that Democrats will 'hit us hard' on the environment. 'In an effort to help your members fight back, as well as be aggressive on the issue, we have prepared the following set of talking points on where the environment really stands today,' it states.
The memo - headed 'From medi-scare to air-scare' - goes on: 'From the heated debate on global warming to the hot air on forests; from the muddled talk on our nation's waters to the convolution on air pollution, we are fighting a battle of fact against fiction on the environment - Republicans can't stress enough that extremists are screaming "Doomsday!" when the environment is actually seeing a new and better day.'
Among the memo's assertions are 'global warming is not a fact', 'links between air quality and asthma in children remain cloudy', and the US Environment Protection Agency is exaggerating when it says that at least 40 per cent of streams, rivers and lakes are too polluted for drinking, fishing or swimming. http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1185292,00.html
-R
