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Will The US Government Accept Responsibility For The Slaughter Of Over 1,000,000 Iraqis.

November 20, 2008


By Michael Schwartz | Huffington Post, Nov 18, 2008

Will The US Government And Media Finally Report The Slaughter Of Iraqis By The US Military?

I recently received a set of questions from Le Monde Diplomatique reporter Kim Bredesen about the 2007 Project Censored story about 1,000,000 Iraqi deaths due to the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. The questions and answers are, I think, useful in framing both the untold story of the slaughter in Iraq and the failure of the U.S. media to report on its extent or on U.S. culpability for the deaths of 4% of the Iraqi population.

Bredeson : I observed recently that your story on Iraqi deaths caused by US occupation became story no. 1 in this year’s listing by Project Censored. I wondered if I could ask you a few questions on e-mail regarding this issue?

Regards,
Kim Bredesen, Le Monde diplomatiqe (Norway)

These are my questions.

1.Do you expect that the new administration under Barrack Obama will acknowledge the validity of the statistics concerning Iraqi deaths caused by the US occupation force?

It is always difficult to predict the political future, but even if the Obama administration pursues a very different policy in Iraq and the Middle East, I doubt it will acknowledge the amount of violence caused by the war during its first six years. Historically, the U.S. government has a poor record of acknowledging its responsibility for death and/or destruction of other peoples, beginning with the genocide against Native Americans (never officially acknowledged), continuing through two hundred years of the slave trade and slavery (there has actually been a limp official apology), and culminating in the ongoing refusal to acknowledge one to three million deaths in Vietnam caused by the U.S. attempt to conquer that country.

2.You mention in your update to Censored 2009 that there is a media blackout about the dramatic statistics in US mass media. Do you think this will change?

I think that the U.S. mainstream media has a poor record of acknowledging the many instances in which it has (collectively) failed to  maintain its constitutionally mandated independence from government policy, and instead has ignored or written false reports supporting government malfeasance and tyranny. It was refreshing that the New York Times and Washington Post acknowledged their failure to report the contrary evidence to the US government claims about WMDs in Iraq, but this is a rare moment that has not led to more independent reporting on other U.S. government action in the Middle East.

I think that we can expect the U.S. mainstream media to continue to compromise its journalistic integrity in reporting on Iraq, and this will mean failing to report its own suppression of the Lancet studies and continuing to misreport the U.S. role in the Iraq war. This expectation is, of course, speculation, but the best evidence for this speculation is the fact that the major media have been withdrawing their personnel from Iraq, instead of taking advantage of more favorable security conditions to send reporters to locations that were previously inaccessible and therefore more thoroughly report the impact of the war on Iraqi life.

3.How have you experienced the coverage about the issue in other Western or international media, have they taken the situation in Iraq more seriously?

I find the reporting in Al Jazeera, the British national press, other international media, and independent U.S. media far more comprehensive in their coverage of the Iraq war. I would not say that they take the situation more “seriously,” – there has never been a problem with the U.S. media taking the war seriously. The differences are in very specific parts of the coverage: reporting on U.S. involvement in deaths and destruction, reporting on Iraqi resistance to the U.S. presence; reporting on the economic and social chaos caused by U.S. military, political, and economic policies in Iraq; reporting on who is fighting against the U.S.; reporting on the actual reality of life under U.S. occupation; and reporting on the day-to-day antagonism of Iraqis to the U.S. presence.

I should add, however, that these failures are not so much failures of U.S. mainstream reporters, but of the editors and publishers who assign reporters to particular stories and not to others. There are many reporters who fit information about all these issues into assignments that are aimed at other subjects. One small example will illustrate what I mean. In reporting about the U.S. offensive in Haifa Street in January 2007, mainstream reporters (for McClatchy and the Washington Post, if memory serves me) whose assignment was to report on the successful capture by U.S. troops of an insurgent stronghold also described the destructiveness of the U.S. attack and mentioned that U.S. soldiers stood idly by while Shia death squads cleansed the neighborhood of Sunnis. This information appeared toward the end of published reports, but it was published nevertheless. In contrast, a CBS report on the overarching destructiveness of the offensive and of the anger of residents at U.S. military actions was not broadcast and was only made public because of the protests of the censored reporter.

4.The journalist Joshua Holland compare the mass killings in Iraq with Pol Pot’s genocide in Cambodia. Is this an accurate comparison in your opinion?

Holland’s purpose in this comparison is the same as my purpose in comparing the deaths in Iraq to those in Darfur: we are trying to give people a sense of the scale of the violence wrought in Iraq by the U.S. military. The mass murders in Cambodia under Pol Pot and the displacements and genocide in Darfur–as well as so many other recent and more distant instances of such violence–all have different sources, intentions, and outcomes from the Iraq violence and from each other. The point of making these comparisons is to point out the magnitude of the slaughter in Iraq, not to make analytic comments about the dynamics of the war.

5. Do you believe it is appropriate that the Bush-administration should face trial for their actions?

In “The Fog of War,” former U.S. Secretary of Defense McNamara said to the camera that if the U.S. had lost World War II, then he and other American leaders would have stood trial as war criminals for the terrorist fire bombings of Japanese and German cities by the U.S. air force. Certainly the actions of U.S. political leaders and military commanders in ordering their troops to attack civilian targets in Iraq (for example the destruction of the city of Falluja—well publicized everywhere in the world except in the United States) fall under the same definition of war crimes that McNamara was considering in making this statement, and so it would be perfectly appropriate for Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, and the various commanding generals to stand trial for these actions.

But take note that McNamara said that trials would have taken place if the U.S. had “lost.” This statement has actually turned out to be a kind of half truth. In World War II, the Japanese and Germans certainly lost, but only a relative handful of those responsible for their war crimes stood trial (the Japanese Emperor, for example, was actually restored to his throne). In the Vietnam War, most observers say that the U.S. “lost” the war, but no U.S. leaders stood trial for the many war crimes they committed during that long conflict. There is no predicting the future, but I expect that, no matter how the Iraq war ends–with either McCain’s “victory” or with the “defeat” that President Bush has repeatedly warned the U.S. citizens about—there will be no war crimes trials of U.S. political and military leadership.

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2011 US Iraq withdrawal depends on conditions on the ground, says Admiral Mullen

November 20, 2008

US military leaders are comfortable with a 2011 deadline for the withdrawal of all US forces from Iraq but it should depend on conditions on the ground, the US military chief has said

Telegraph.co.uk
Last Updated: 2:20PM GMT 18 Nov 2008

“I do think it is important that this be conditions-based,” Admiral Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters.

A US-Iraqi agreement approved over the weekend by the Iraqi cabinet calls for all 150,000 US troops to be out of the country by the end of 2001 regardless of the conditions on the ground.

President-Elect Barack Obama set an even tighter deadline of 16 months during the campaign.

In a television interview on Sunday, Mr Obama said he would call in the Joint Chiefs after his inauguration and “start executing a plan that draws down our troops”.

Adml Mullen said he would offer his advice to the new president, who takes office on January 20, and then follow his orders.

“Should president-elect Obama give me direction, I would carry that out. I mean, that’s what I do as a senior member of the military.”

Referring to the 2011 deadline contained in the so-called Status of Forces Agreement reached with Baghdad, Mullen said, “I certainly understand the boundaries.”

But he suggested the deal might be revisited at some point between now and then.

“And so three years is a long time. Conditions could change in that period of time,” said Adml Mullen, adding the United States will continue to talk with Baghdad “as conditions continue to evolve.”

Asked if the agreement could be changed, he said “that’s theoretically possible”.

Adml Mullen said he had discussed the agreement with General David Petraeus, the commander of US forces in Middle East and southwest Asia, and General Raymond Odierno, the US commander in Iraq.

“We’re all very comfortable that we have what we need. Conditions continue to improve,” he said.

“Clearly, moving forward in a measured way, tied to conditions as they continue to evolve over time is important,” he added.

Adml Mullen said it would take two to three years to safely withdraw all US forces from Iraq.

“It is very doable, but it’s not the kind of thing that we could do overnight,” he said.

“To remove the entire force would be, you know, two to three years, as opposed to something we could do in a very short period of time, as we’ve looked at it thus far.

“Clearly, we’d want to be able to do it safely. So when I talk about that kind of range of time, it really is conditioned by what’s going on,” he said.

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US-Iraq: A Pact With The Devil

November 18, 2008


By Pepe Escobar | Asia Times, Nov 17, 2008

WASHINGTON – The big bang is not that Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s majority Shi’ite/Kurdish 37-member cabinet in Baghdad has approved the draft of a security pact with the George W Bush (and Barack Obama) administrations allowing the US military to stay in Iraq for three more years; it’s that the 30-strong Sadrist bloc will move heaven and Earth – including massive nationwide protests – to bloc the pact in the Iraqi National Assembly.

The proposed Status of Forces Agreement not only sets a date for American troop withdrawal – 2011 – but also puts new restrictions on US combat operations in Iraq starting on January 1 and requires a military pullback from urban areas by June 30. The pact goes before parliament in a week or so.

Sadrist spokesman Ahmed al-Masoudi stressed this Sunday that the pact “did not mean anything” and “hands Iraq over on a golden platter and for an indefinite period”.

Masoudi is right on the money when he says the overwhelming majority of popular opinion is against it and the Sadrists and many Sunni parties insist a popular referendum to approve it is essential.

Shi’ite leader Muqtada al-Sadr’s position is and has always been “end the occupation now”. That happens to be the same view from Tehran: the pact further extends Iraq’s agony as an American colony. But Iranian state TV has been spinning it as a victory for the Maliki government – stressing the US was forced to make concessions (in fact Maliki did not extract all the concessions he wanted in terms of prosecuting US troops for crimes in Iraq).

Last week, a spokesman for the Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani in Iraq said he would “directly intervene” if he felt the pact was against Iraqi sovereignty. In this case, he’d better start intervening this week – when a debate about the pact starts ahead of a vote on November 24. Parliament can vote for or against it, but cannot make any changes to the text.

As for how much of the 275-member parliament in Baghdad is against the pact depends on how much they are in the US pocket – like Maliki’s Interior and Defense ministries. As much as US General Ray Odierno, the top commander in Iraq, has charged that Iran has been bribing parliamentarians to reject the pact, the reverse also applies.

Muqtada, make your move
This version of the pact was basically supported by Maliki’s Defense, Interior, Foreign Affairs and Finance ministries, by the Kurdistan Alliance and by the Sunni Iraqi Accord Front, led by former US intelligence asset and former interim prime minister, Iyad Allawi. So the backbone of support is Kurdish and “establishment” Shi’ite. That does not account for the crucial leader of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC), Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, very close to Iran, who recently has been less critical of the pact. The SIIC in the end caved in.

In theory, all US troops should be out of Iraq on January 1, 2012. For all practical purposes, this is the new timeline for the end of the occupation – way longer than Obama’s 16 months.

Even though the pact allows Iraq limited authority to try US soldiers and the Bush administration-enabled army of defense contractors (only in the case of serious crimes committed off-duty and off-base), and formally forbids the Pentagon to use Iraq as a base to attack Syria or Iran, the pact does make a mockery of Iraq’s “sovereignty”. For the first time, occupying US troops will have a clear mandate straight from Iraq’s elected leadership, instead of a United Nations Security Council resolution enacted after Bush invaded Iraq in 2003.

The US has to end all patrols of Iraqi streets by June 2009 – five months into the Obama presidency – and has to fully withdraw by the end of 2011, unless the Iraqi government miraculously asks the US to stay.

From an anti-imperial point of view, the only good thing about the pact is that it does not allow the establishment of permanent US military bases in Iraq – a point that has been stressed ad infinitum by Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari. Inter Press Service correspondent Gareth Porter, among others, has stressed this is the final nail in the coffin of the neo-conservative, neo-imperial dream of having Iraq at the Middle East center of an empire of bases. In a quirky historical twist, Maliki knocks out US Vice President Dick Cheney.

The Sadrists anyway are not convinced. Last month, Muqtada said, “If they tell you that the agreement ends the presence of the occupation, let me tell you that the occupier will retain its bases. And whoever tells you that it gives us sovereignty is a liar.”

So what will the Sadrists do in practice? Before the approval Muqtada, in a statement read out by his spokesman Salah al-Ubaidi at the Kufa mosque, said, “If the American forces remain, I will reinforce the resisters, especially the brigades subsumed under the banner of the Judgment Day,” Muqtada rallied all these “Bands of the Eternal Truth” to “enlist behind this mujahid banner”. This Sadrist version of special forces would only attack American forces, and not the Iraqi military (controlled by the Maliki government).

Muqtada is in a difficult position. He has to confront the problem that strategically Tehran subscribes to not attacking US troops as the best way for the Americans to eventually leave. And Muqtada at the moment is studying in Qom, the spiritual capital of Iran – he could hardly afford to antagonize his hosts. To top it all, the Sadrist movement had been adopting a Hezbollah approach and reconverting from militia activities to being firmly embedded in the Iraqi political landscape. Maliki has made his move. Now it’s time for Muqtada’s.

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.

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Blackwater Busted?

November 18, 2008

After more than five years of rampant violence and misconduct carried out by the massive army of private corporate contractors in Iraq–actions that have gone totally unpunished under any system of law–the US Justice Department appears to be on the verge of handing down the first indictments against armed private forces for crimes committed in Iraq. The reported targets of the “draft” indictments: six Blackwater operatives involved in the September 16, 2007, killing of seventeen Iraqi civilians in Baghdad’s Nisour Square.

The Associated Press reports, “The draft is being reviewed by senior Justice Department officials but no charging decisions have been made. A decision is not expected until at least later this month.” The AP, citing sources close to the case, reports that the department has not determined if the Blackwater operatives would be charged with manslaughter or assault. Simply drafting the indictments does not mean that the Blackwater forces are certain to face charges. The department could indict as few as three of the operatives, who potentially face sentences of five to twenty years, depending on the charges.

If the Justice Department pursues a criminal prosecution, it would be the first time armed private contractors from the United States face justice.

But that is a very big “if.”

“The Justice Department has had this matter for fourteen months and has done almost everything imaginable to walk away from it–including delivering a briefing to Congress in which they suggested that they lacked legal authority to press charges,” says Scott Horton, distinguished visiting professor of law at Hofstra University and author of a recent study of legal accountability for private security contractors. “They did this notwithstanding evidence collected by the first teams on the scene that suggested an ample basis to prosecute. The ultimate proof here will be in the details, namely, what charges are brought exactly and what evidence has Justice assembled to make its case. Still, it’s hard to miss Justice’s lack of enthusiasm about this case, and that’s troubling.”

Even if some Blackwater operatives face charges, critics allege it is the company that must be held responsible. “I am encouraged that the Justice Department is finally making progress in the investigation, but I am disappointed that it took over a year and a lot of pressure for the department to take any action,” says Illinois Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky, who introduced legislation that seeks to ban using Blackwater and other armed security companies in US war zones. (She was also the national campaign co-chair of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign and is a top candidate to replace him in the US Senate.)

“While it is important to hold these individual contractors accountable for their actions, we must also hold Blackwater accountable for creating a culture that allows this type of reckless behavior,” adds Schakowsky. “The indictments do nothing to solve the underlying problem of private security contractors performing critical government functions. The indictments will likely get rid of a few bad apples, but there will be no real consequences for Blackwater. This company is going to continue to do business as usual–the solution is to get them out of this business.”

News of potential indictments over the Nisour Square shootings comes as the State Department is reportedly preparing to hit Blackwater with a multimillion-dollar fine for allegedly shipping as many as 900 automatic weapons to Iraq without the required permits. Some of the guns may have made their way to the black market.

Blackwater has served as the official bodyguard service for senior US occupation officials since August 2003, when the company was awarded a $27 million no-bid contract to guard L. Paul Bremer, the original head of the Coalition Provisional Authority. To date, the company has raked in more than $1 billion in “security” contracts under its arrangement with the State Department.

Despite widespread accusations of killings of civilians and other crimes, not a single armed contractor from Blackwater–or from any other armed war corporation–has faced charges under any legal system. Instead, they have operated in a climate where immunity and impunity have gone hand in hand. At present, private contractors–most of them unarmed–outnumber US troops in Iraq by roughly 50,000 personnel.

Continued . . .

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Lord Bingham: US and UK acted as ‘vigilantes’ in Iraq invasion

November 18, 2008

Former senior law lord condemns ‘serious violation of international law’

A British soldier patrols the northern suburbs of the southern Iraqi city of Basra

A British soldier patrols the northern suburbs of the southern Iraqi city of Basra. Photograph: Dave Clark/AFP/Getty images

One of Britain’s most authoritative judicial figures last night delivered a blistering attack on the invasion of Iraq, describing it as a serious violation of international law, and accusing Britain and the US of acting like a “world vigilante”.

Lord Bingham, in his first major speech since retiring as the senior law lord, rejected the then attorney general’s defence of the 2003 invasion as fundamentally flawed.

Contradicting head-on Lord Goldsmith’s advice that the invasion was lawful, Bingham stated: “It was not plain that Iraq had failed to comply in a manner justifying resort to force and there were no strong factual grounds or hard evidence to show that it had.” Adding his weight to the body of international legal opinion opposed to the invasion, Bingham said that to argue, as the British government had done, that Britain and the US could unilaterally decide that Iraq had broken UN resolutions “passes belief”.

Governments were bound by international law as much as by their domestic laws, he said. “The current ministerial code,” he added “binding on British ministers, requires them as an overarching duty to ‘comply with the law, including international law and treaty obligations’.”

The Conservatives and Liberal Democrats continue to press for an independent inquiry into the circumstances around the invasion. The government says an inquiry would be harmful while British troops are in Iraq. Ministers say most of the remaining 4,000 will leave by mid-2009.

Addressing the British Institute of International and Comparative Law last night, Bingham said: “If I am right that the invasion of Iraq by the US, the UK, and some other states was unauthorised by the security council there was, of course, a serious violation of international law and the rule of law.

“For the effect of acting unilaterally was to undermine the foundation on which the post-1945 consensus had been constructed: the prohibition of force (save in self-defence, or perhaps, to avert an impending humanitarian catastrophe) unless formally authorised by the nations of the world empowered to make collective decisions in the security council …”

The moment a state treated the rules of international law as binding on others but not on itself, the compact on which the law rested was broken, Bingham argued. Quoting a comment made by a leading academic lawyer, he added: “It is, as has been said, ‘the difference between the role of world policeman and world vigilante’.”

Bingham said he had very recently provided an advance copy of his speech to Goldsmith and to Jack Straw, foreign secretary at the time of the invasion of Iraq. He told his audience he should make it plain they challenged his conclusions.

Both men emphasised that point last night by intervening to defend their views as consistent with those held at the time of the invasion. Goldsmith said in a statement: “I stand by my advice of March 2003 that it was legal for Britain to take military action in Iraq. I would not have given that advice if it were not genuinely my view. Lord Bingham is entitled to his own legal perspective five years after the event.” Goldsmith defended what is known as the “revival argument” – namely that Saddam Hussein had failed to comply with previous UN resolutions which could now take effect. Goldsmith added that Tony Blair had told him it was his “unequivocal view” that Iraq was in breach of its UN obligations to give up weapons of mass destruction.

Straw said last night that he shared Goldsmith’s view. He continued: “However controversial the view that military action was justified in international law it was our attorney general’s view that it was lawful and that view was widely shared across the world.”

Bingham also criticised the post-invasion record of Britain as “an occupying power in Iraq”. It is “sullied by a number of incidents, most notably the shameful beating to death of Mr Baha Mousa [a hotel receptionist] in Basra [in 2003]“, he said.

Such breaches of the law, however, were not the result of deliberate government policy and the rights of victims had been recognised, Bingham observed.

He contrasted that with the “unilateral decisions of the US government” on issues such as the detention conditions in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

After referring to mistreatment of Iraqi detainees in Abu Ghraib, Bingham added: “Particularly disturbing to proponents of the rule of law is the cynical lack of concern for international legality among some top officials in the Bush administration.”

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U.S. Task Force Found Few Iranian Arms in Iraq

November 17, 2008

By Gareth Porter | Inter Press Service

WASHINGTON, Nov 15 (IPS) – Last April, top George W. Bush administration officials, desperate to exploit any possible crack in the close relationship between the Nouri al-Maliki government and Iran, launched a new round of charges that Iran had stepped up covert arms assistance to Shi’a militias.

Secretary of Defence Robert M. Gates suggested that there was “some sense of an increased level of [Iranian] supply of weapons and support to these groups.” And Washington Post reporter Karen DeYoung was told by military officials that the “plentiful, high quality weaponry” the militia was then using in Basra was “recently manufactured in Iran”.

But a U.S. military task force had been passing on data to the Multi-National Force Iraq (MNFI) command that told a very different story. The data collected by the task force in the previous six weeks showed that relatively few of the weapons found in Shi’a militia caches were manufactured in Iran.

According to the data compiled by the task force, and made available to an academic research project last July, only 70 weapons believed to have been manufactured in Iran had been found in post-invasion weapons caches between mid-February and the second week in April. And those weapons represented only 17 percent of the weapons found in caches that had any Iranian weapons in them during that period.

The actual proportion of Iranian-made weapons to total weapons found, however, was significantly lower than that, because the task force was finding many more weapons caches in Shi’a areas that did not have any Iranian weapons in them.

The task force database identified 98 caches over the five-month period with at least one Iranian weapon, excluding caches believed to have been hidden prior to the 2003 U.S. invasion.

But according to an e-mail from the MNFI press desk this week, the task force found and analysed a total of roughly 4,600 weapons caches during that same period.

The caches that included Iranian weapons thus represented just 2 percent of all caches found. That means Iranian-made weapons were a fraction of one percent of the total weapons found in Shi’a militia caches during that period.

The extremely small proportion of Iranian arms in Shi’a militia weapons caches further suggests that Shi’a militia fighters in Iraq had been getting weapons from local and international arms markets rather than from an official Iranian-sponsored smuggling network.

The database was compiled by MNFI’s Task Force Troy, which was directed to examine all weapons caches found in Iraq beginning in early January 2008 to identify Iranian-made weapons. The database was released by MNFI last July to the Empirical Studies of Conflict project, co-sponsored by the U.S. Military Academy and Princeton University, and was published for the first time by West Point’s Counter-Terrorism Centre last month as an appendix to a paper on Iranian strategy in Iraq by Joseph Felter and Brian Fishman.

In late April, the U.S. presented the Maliki government with a document that apparently listed various Iranian arms found in Iraq and highlighted alleged Iranian arms found in Basra. But the U.S. campaign to convince Iraqi officials collapsed when Task Force Troy analysed a series of large weapons caches uncovered in Basra and Karbala in April and May.

Caches of arms found in Karbala late last April and May totaled more than 2,500 weapons, and caches in Basra included at least 3,700 weapons, according to official MNFI statements. That brought the total number of weapons found in those former Mahdi Army strongholds to more than 6,200 weapons.

But the task force found that none of those weapons were Iranian-made. The database lists three caches found Apr. 19, but provides no data on any of them. It lists no other caches for the region coinciding with that period, confirming that no weapons had been found to be of Iranian origin.

In announcing the weapons totals discovered in Basra to reporters on May 7, Maj. Gen. Kevin Bergner said nothing about the provenance of the weapons, implicitly admitting that they were not Iranian-made.

Only two months before the new high-level propaganda push on alleged Iranian weapons supply to Shi’a militias, the U.S. command had put out a story suggesting that large numbers of Iranian-supplied arms had been buried all over the country. On Feb. 17, 2008, U.S. military spokesman Rear Admiral Gregory Smith told reporters that Iraqi and coalition forces had captured 212 weapons caches across Iraq over the previous week “with growing links to the Iranian-backed special groups”.

The Task Force Troy data for the week of Feb. 9-16 show, however, that the U.S. command had information on Iranian arms contradicting that propaganda line. According to the task force database, only five of those 212 caches contained any Iranian weapons that analysts believed might have been buried after the U.S. invasion. And the total number of confirmed Iranian-made weapons found in those five caches, according to the data, was eight, not including four Iranian-made hand grenades.

The task force database includes 350 armour-piercing explosively formed penetrators (EFPs) found in Iraqi weapons caches. However, the database does not identify any of the EFPs as Iranian weapons.

That treatment of EFPs in the caches appears to contradict claims by U.S. officials throughout 2007 and much of 2008 that EFPs were being smuggled into Iraq by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. The allegedly Iranian-manufactured EFPs had been the centrepiece of the U.S. military’s February 2007 briefing charging Iran with arming Shi’a militiamen in Iraq.

Press reports of a series of discoveries of shops for manufacturing EFPs in Iraq in 2007 forced the U.S. command to admit that the capacity to manufacture EFPs was not limited to Iran. By the second half of 2008, U.S. officials had stopped referring to Iranian supply of EFPs altogether.

Felter and Fishman do not analyse the task force data in their paper, but they criticise official U.S. statements on Iranian weapons in Iraq. “Some reports erroneously attribute munitions similar to those produced in Iran as Iranian,” they write, “while other Iranian munitions found in Iraq were likely purchased on the open market.”

The co-authors note that Iranian arms can be purchased directly from the website of the Defence Industries of Iran with a credit card.

*Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, “Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam”, was published in 2006.

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A new Middle East under Obama?

November 5, 2008
Al Jazeera, Nov 5, 2008
By Firas Al-Atraqchi

Many in Egypt remain sceptical that change will come to the Middle East [EPA]

Even though Barack Obama has been elected the 44th president of the United States, there are some in the Middle East who believe his policies towards the region will differ little from those of his defeated Republican rival, John McCain.

Al Jazeera asked a number of people in Egypt, the Arab world’s most populous country, whether Obama would bring change to the US presidency.

Omar Kamel, musician

“In terms of actual policy, I do not think there is much difference at all when it comes to Obama or McCain’s Middle Eastern viewpoints.They have both committed themselves publicly and explicitly to the Zionist cause, with Obama promising Aipac an ‘undivided Israeli Jerusalem’ as a goal.

More so, they have both said that ‘nothing is off the table’ when dealing with Iran, which implicitly means they both consider a military attack on Iran a strategic option.

That Obama has implied he would not want to use nuclear weapons is a small consolation when we consider the devastation wrought on Iraq by ‘conventional’ warfare.

Obama has also made it quite clear that he is a subscriber to the whole ‘war on terror’ notion – which to the rest of the world simply means he will continue the march of Empire Amerika.

Unfortunately, there is a geist of optimistic negative-racism that chooses to see Obama as an actual opportunity for change – when in fact he offers absolutely nothing new save for his skin colour and relative eloquence.

Obama reminds me far too much of Clinton. Clinton, quite literally, got away with murder simply because the world found him charismatic and charming.

Clinton helped destroy Iraq with sanctions and was an accomplice to the murder of over 500,000 Iraqi children and yet most people in the Middle East still like the murderer, still believe that, somehow, he was a good man.

That is my fear with Obama, that he will pacify the world as he rapes it.

At least with McCain, like Bush, the world would have been acutely aware of its rape.”

Abdel-Rahman Hussein, journalist

“There is an apathy among Egyptians regarding the US election because many say it makes no difference who wins. The US will always pursue the same policies in the region.

Even with a Democratic win in the White house, it is American – and almost by default Israeli – interests which will always come first.

The fulcrum of American policy in the region is support for Israel above all else, and both parties unequivocally adhere to that.

Additionally, as opposed to Great Britain where the divide between left and right has become less pronounced in recent years, the American political spectrum has always been more centrist.

One position both candidates straddled quite comfortably is their staunch support for Israel.

Obama’s promise to the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) that Jerusalem will remain the “undivided” capital of Israel does not bode well for the future of the peace process which is currently proposing East Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state.

Nevertheless, Jewish and pro-Israel groups remain sceptical about Obama and feel he is merely paying lip service to secure the election, so again it is difficult to surmise exactly how it will pan out.”

Jen Zaki Hanna, university professor

“Unfortunately, I do not believe that Obama will have significantly different foreign and financial policies.

I considered the one person who could have brought about real change in the Middle East, to be Ralph Nader.

Nader dissected the real problem with America’s financial policies – that being the unfettered control of the transnational corporations and their lack of respect for human rights and environmental rights at home and globally.

Unfortunately, every time Nader tries to enter the presidential race he is called a spoiler for the Democrats. This just goes to shows me, and I believe others around the world and in the Middle East, that the Democrats and Republicans are one and the same.

Perhaps Hillary Clinton was the lesser of the two evils than Obama who has changed his mind multiple times on issues such as Iraqi troop withdrawal.

Both parties will always be loyal first and foremost to Israel as a necessary ingredient to US foreign policy and according to most Middle Easterners it has always meant one thing: there will be no progress on Israeli-Palestinian peace.

There has yet to be a Democratic or Republican party in the US which has demonstrated a real significant move on a two-state solution.

I do not think things will change now.”

Yousef Gamal il Din, broadcast journalist with NileTV

“There is also … a belief that the foreign policies of both candidates do not really vary much.The debates did not highlight key differences that will help regional problems in the Arab World, Afghanistan, Sudan, Lebanon, Iraq and Palestine.

My impression from talking to Egyptians who are well-read in international affairs and business is that they perceive McCain to be hawkish (more so than Obama) and that his policies would have been less-suitable for Arab interests.

Obama appears to be better for our region, but the key word here is appears.

The Middle East would look different under Obama but it will be difficult to judge because the rhetoric during the campaign does not necessarily translate into decisions or policies once the candidate reaches the White House.

Once candidates are confronted with certain realities in the White House or realities that emerge later on, they may have to adapt their policies. The international arena is very dynamic, things change very quickly.

It is difficult to accurately predict US foreign policy.”

Ahmed Samy, marketing analyst

“Israel won’t be that happy that Obama won because they might not trust that he would fully back them, even though he has said before that he would fully support them.

As for the Middle East, not much would change with Obama in office.

The situation in the region might stay the same or get a bit better or put on hold till the following elections.

The American people are the only ones to benefit if Obama wins.

Now Obama being the first black president in America is a history-making event; if he stays in office the full term, that is good. But if he gets assassinated or something like that, then it will be a tragedy.”

Ahmed Kafafi, author

“An Obama win doesn’t mean so much to me because whoever comes to power will never dare to change certain basics in the US foreign policy and assuming there will be any, those will be slight changes that would never reverse the situation in the Middle East.

I do not think Egypt and the Middle East will look any different; there is a fear that things will move from bad to worse. The financial crisis has peaked and the wealth of the Middle East is the only way out for the US.

Egyptians see the US as working for its own interests and is a big supporter of Israel. For them the US is a big power that will never ever work for their interest, so it doesn’t matter if Obama or McCain is in power.”

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MEDIA-US: Massive Iraqi Death Toll Ignored by Tabloid Culture

November 5, 2008

By Marie-Helene Rousseau | Inter Press Service

NEW YORK, Nov 4 (IPS) – The year is 1994. Pictures of Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley cover the pages of prominent U.S. newspapers and magazines. Yet hidden from national view is the attempted elimination of the Tutsi ethnic group in Rwanda.

When news of pop stars and their marriages and divorces takes precedence over stories about the Iraq War or privacy concerns in an age of increasing security measures, U.S. citizens are faced, as described by the director of Project Censored, “with a truth emergency”.

To address this emergency, Project Censored, a non-profit media project within the Sonoma State University Foundation, each year compiles 25 stories which they say have been neglected by the mainstream media. Since 1976, when Carl Jensen founded the research facility, these stories have comprised a yearbook of controversial stories that have gone largely unread and underreported.

The organisation, now headed by Peter Phillips, a professor of sociology at Sonoma State University, works with students and faculty of SSU to review and select which of the 700-1,000 annually submitted stories make the final cut. A panel of judges that includes noted writers Noam Chomsky and Susan Faludi then ranks the 25 stories in order of importance.

How do they determine what constitutes “censorship”? An explanation on ProjectCensored.org states, “We define Modern Censorship as the subtle yet constant and sophisticated manipulation of reality in our mass media outlets.”

The organisation outlines a set of criteria by which individuals can determine if a story is suitable for the “censored” list. The first of these criteria reads, “A Censored news story is one which contains information that the general United States population has a right and need to know, but to which it has had limited access.”

Indeed, none of the selected stories have appeared in the mainstream press, a category encompassing widely read publications such as The New York Times and the network news channels. Rather, the stories have been covered by a select number of independent media that are free from the constraints of corporate ownership.

The number one story this year gave a staggering answer to a question that has been glossed over in the mainstream press — just how many Iraqi lives have been lost because of the U.S. occupation? The answer is one million, and it exceeds the death toll of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, points out the Censored entry.

But that figure, calculated by British the polling group Opinion Research Business (ORB), was reported in just three independent media outlets — AlterNet, Inter Press Service (IPS), and After Downing Street.

Michael Schwartz, of the nonpartisan coalition After Downing Street, also refuted in Censored the idea that most violence occurs only between Iraqis, placing the percentage of U.S.-inflicted Iraqi deaths at about 80 percent.

Censored also points to what may be the most ominous consequence of media censorship — a public lack of awareness.

Schwartz, in Censored, refers to a February 2007 Associated Press poll in which U.S. citizens were asked how many Iraqis died because of the U.S. occupation. The most common answers placed casualties at below 10,000.

“This remarkable mass ignorance, like so many other elements of the Iraq War story, received no coverage in the mass media, not even by the Associated Press, which commissioned the study,” he writes.

Many of the stories included in this year’s compilation dealt with the aftermath of the Iraq War as well as privacy concerns in an age of increasing security measures.

At number three on the list, “InfraGard: The FBI Deputizes Business” reveals that members of the business community may be part of an anti-terrorism line of defence, but are also the first ones reaping the benefits of it. This programme is called InfraGard, and goes as far back as 1996, when it started in Cleveland with 350 members from the Fortune 500.

By transmitting information about private individuals to the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, 23,000 members of private industry guarantee that they will receive warnings of a terrorist attack before private individuals — even before certain elected officials, reported The Progressive in an article by Matt Rothschild.

Rothschild’s article also asserts that an InfraGard member can even shoot to kill in the case of martial law “without fear of prosecution”.

Although in February, the FBI released a statement denouncing the piece, Rothschild is sticking by his story.

The Winter Soldier hearings, which took place in Silver Springs, Maryland in March of 2008 organised by Veterans against War, also found a place on the list at number nine. The testimonies of more than 300 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans revealed atrocities they not only saw, but also participated in, such as desecrating corpses and targeting civilians.

These revelatory hearings were covered in just three print media outlets — The Nation, One World, and Inter Press Service — as well as one radio station, Pacifica Radio.

If the U.S. government deems that a person, directly or indirectly, poses the risk of threatening U.S. operations in the Middle East, the U.S. treasury department can seize their property and freeze their assets — a story on this is number five on the list.

Two executive orders were established giving the treasury department this power, one in July of 2007 and more recently in August of 2007. The first executive order is limited to Iraq, and threatens seizure of property in the event someone committing, or posing a risk of committing violent acts in opposition to U.S. operations there.

The second order, targeted to operations in Lebanon, goes a little further, broadening the scope to actions, non-violent or otherwise, that undermine U.S. involvement in Lebanon. Under this order, dependents of the individuals (spouse, children) would also have their assets frozen, and would not be allowed to receive humanitarian aid, Censored states.

The two executive orders were covered in The Progressive, and Global Research.

While mass media closely followed such stories as Angelina Jolie’s pregnancy and Alec Baldwin’s marital problems, reports regarding the aftermath of the Iraq War and privacy concerns were hidden.

News of abuse and death in juvenile detention centres, unprecedented rates of arrests for marijuana possession in the U.S., corporate profiteering from No Child Left Behind, and the American Psychiatric Association’s sanctioning and aiding in torture methods lay buried underneath images of Paris Hilton’s new escapades. And those are just the top 25.

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Iraq: Did the Surge Work?

October 24, 2008

Published on Thursday, October 23, 2008 by CommonDreams.org

by George Hunsinger

Violence, Alexander Solzenitsyn once observed, finds refuge in falsehood, even as falsehood is supported by violence. “Anyone who has once acclaimed violence as his method must inexorably choose falsehood as his principle.” (Nobel Prize acceptance speech, 1972) A practical rule can be deduced. Where there is violence, look for falsehood; where there is falsehood, look for violence. If Solzenitsyn is correct, they go together.

According to conventional wisdom, it seems that the “surge” in Iraq was a huge success. For example, a recent CNS News story was headlined: “With Success of Surge, NY Times’ Iraq War Coverage Drops to All-Time Low” (October 21, 2008). The Times’ coverage has dropped 60 per cent since 2004, and this is not terribly different from other news outlets. The media has lost interest in Iraq. Whether the surge really “worked,” however, is another story.

In September 2007, Juan Cole, the respected Middle East expert, wrote an article called “Big Lies Surround the Iraq ‘Surge.'” At that time he stated: “US troop deaths in Iraq have not fallen and . . . violence in Iraq has not fallen because of the Surge. Violence is way up this year.” But, one might reply, that was then and this is now. How do matters stand more than a year after this gloomy verdict? A widespread consensus exists today throughout the political campaigns and the mainstream media that the great success of the Surge is beyond doubt.

The so-called Surge — a euphemism for escalation — was designed to increase security in Iraq. U.S. presence in the country was to be increased by 30,000 personnel along with a three-fold contribution in Iraqi forces. Additional troops were to be provided by coalition partners. Baghdad was selected as the center of the campaign. If security could be increased for the country’s largest city, the rest would surely follow. A Shi’ite and Sunni “fault line” ran throughout the city.

In January 2007, a year after being launched, the Surge was widely acclaimed as a triumph. Contrary to naysayers like Cole, violence across the country was said to be down by 60 percent. Al Qaeda in Iraq, expelled from Baghdad and Anbar Province, was said to be on the run, and the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior reported that it was 75 percent destroyed. Not only was the violence in Iraq reduced, but Al Qaeda was being decimated.

Again, however, Cole, who relies on independent sources in the original languages, argued otherwise. What actually seems to have happened, he wrote in the summer of 2008, was that, first, the Sunni Arabs in Baghdad were disarmed by the escalation troops. Then, “once these Sunnis were left helpless, the Shiite militias came in at night and ethnically cleansed them.”

Mixed neighborhoods in Baghdad ended up with almost no Sunnis. In 2007 Baghdad went from being predominantly Sunni to being overwhelmingly Shiite. According to Brian Katulis of the Center for American Progress, Baghdad, once having a 65 percent Sunni majority, “is now 75 percent Shia.”

“My thesis,” wrote Cole, “would be that the U.S. inadvertently allowed the chasing of hundreds of thousands of Sunni Arabs out of Baghdad (and many of them had to go all the way to Syria for refuge). Rates of violence declined once the ethnic cleansing was far advanced, just because there were fewer mixed neighborhoods.”

Cole’s thesis has received important confirmation. According to Bob Woodward, in his new book The War Within (Simon & Schuster, 2008), the biggest factor behind the reduced violence in Iraq was “very possibly” not the Surge, but a resort to Death Squads. A “Top Secret” memo viewed by Woodward indicates that the Sunnis were systematically targeted and assassinated. What took place was reminiscent of the infamous Phoenix Program instituted by the U.S. in Vietnam. It was a strategy of summary executions.

Yet another confirmation appeared in a recent study conducted by scientists at the University of California. Based on an examination of satellite photos across Baghdad, the study observed that Sunni neighborhoods, which showed a dramatic decrease of nighttime light in Sunni neighborhoods, had been abandoned by their inhabitants. The surge, the study concluded, “has had no observable effect.” The study attributed the tremendous decline in Baghdad’s Sunni population to relocations and ethnic cleansing.

Tom Hayden raises some disturbing questions. “Why were the targets killed instead of being detained? How many targeted individuals were killed or made to disappear? . . . How are the operations consistent with US constitutional law and international human rights standards?” Why has thee been no congressional investigation?

According to UN reports, the number of Iraqi refugees has spiked during the Surge. Between 2.5 and 4 million are now estimated to exist outside their country, while another 2.5 are internal refugees. At least 2 million Sunni refugees cannot return to their homes without fear of being slaughtered.

People’s lives remain shattered. One in four has had a family member who was murdered. “The humanitarian situation in most of the country remains among the most critical in the world,” according to the Iraqi Red Cross/Red Crescent. Iraq’s health care system is “now in worse shape than ever.”

Unemployment remains high, sanitation and electrical facilities remain degraded, families use up to a third of their monthly income to buy drinking water. Tens of thousands are being held in detention camps. According to the UN, “the detention of children in adult detention centers violates U.S. obligations under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, as well as accepted international human rights norms.” (AP, May 19, 2008)

Resorting to Death Squads, while ignoring the humanitarian crisis and touting the Surge, seems to offer yet another instance of Solzenitsyn’s bleak prognosis that violence seeks refuge in falsehood.

George Hunsinger teaches at Princeton Theological Seminary

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Washington warns Iraq to accept security deal

October 23, 2008

By ROBERT BURNS | Associated Press, Oct 22, 2008

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Bush administration on Wednesday warned of “real consequences” for Iraq if it rejects a newly negotiated security pact. Without a deal, the United States could be forced to end its military operations.

The White House said Iraqi security forces are incapable of keeping the peace without U.S. troops, raising the specter of reversals in recent security and political gains if the proposed security deal is not approved by the time the current legal basis for U.S. military operations expires Dec. 31.

“There will be no legal basis for us to continue operating there without that,” White House press secretary Dana Perino said. “And the Iraqis know that. And so, we’re confident that they’ll be able to recognize this. And if they don’t, there will be real consequences, if Americans aren’t able to operate there.”

At the Pentagon, press secretary Geoff Morrell said the U.S. fallback position is to extend the U.N. Security Council mandate authorizing U.S.-led coalition operations in Iraq, but he emphasized that the Bush administration’s preference is to complete a bilateral U.S.-Iraqi agreement.

“Our focus is entirely on trying to get this deal done,” Morrell said.

Morrell said Defense Secretary Robert Gates has not had direct contacts with Iraqi officials since Baghdad announced earlier this week that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki determined that unspecified changes to the draft accord are required. The spokesman said it was not clear what changes the Iraqis are demanding.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the draft agreement “both protects our troops and the Iraqi sovereignty” and would stand as it was negotiated.

“It is a good agreement,” Rice told reporters traveling with her Wednesday to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, where she was to meet her Mexican counterpart, Patricia Espinosa.

Rice would not say whether she opposes the Iraqi Cabinet petition to reopen negotiations.

“I understand the Iraqis themselves recognize they are not ready to operate without the coalition forces yet,” Rice said.

At the State Department, spokesman Robert Wood said time was running short.

“It’s time for the Iraqis to step up to the plate and take a decision,” Wood said. He insisted that the administration had yet to hear anything official from the Iraqi government on its position or its suggestions for possible amendments.

The U.S. has 155,000 troops in Iraq. In addition to conducting combat operations against a weakened insurgency and hunting down al-Qaida fighters, the U.S. military is training Iraqi security forces, assisting in the resettlement of displaced persons, coordinating efforts to restore and improve basic services like water and sewage, and providing personal security for senior Iraqi government officials.

Iraqi government on Wednesday decried what it called the “not welcomed” statements from Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who cautioned the Iraqis of unwelcome consequences in the event that the security pact is not signed by the end of the year.

Mullen, who was traveling in Europe, told reporters on Tuesday that time was running out for the Iraqis to sign the deal and that he was concerned the Iraqis may not fully appreciate the seriousness of the situation.

“These statements are not welcomed in Iraq,” Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said in a statement. “All Iraqis realize the volume of their responsibilities and they appreciate the importance of signing the pact or not in the way they deem it proper.”

Al-Dabbagh added: “A compulsory method must not be imposed on their choice and it is improper to address Iraqis in such manner.”

Morrell said the Iraqis should not take Mullen’s comments as an attempt to force anything on them.

“That couldn’t be further from the truth,” Morrell said. “We are not trying to pressure the Iraqis or force the Iraqis into signing anything they don’t wish to sign.”

In subsequent remarks Wednesday, Mullen said he believes the Iraqis are not ready to provide their own defense, according to a Pentagon account of comments to reporters traveling with him.

Mullen also made clear in those remarks that if there is no U.S.-Iraqi deal and the U.N. mandate runs out on Dec. 31 without being extended by the Security Council, then all U.S. military operations would have to cease. Mullen and other senior U.S. military officials have said repeatedly that the security situation in Iraq is too fragile to justify a full U.S. withdrawal anytime soon.

The proposed security pact calls for all U.S. combat forces to be removed from Iraqi cities by June 2009 and for all forces to leave the country by the end of 2011, unless both sides agree to an extension.

In a satellite video-teleconference from Baghdad, an Army commander told reporters at the Pentagon on Wednesday that his understanding is that by June 2009 U.S. troops would not be based inside cities but would be allowed to operate as trainers and advisers attached to Iraqi military units.

“We will have embedded teams,” Col. William Hickman, commander of the 2nd Brigade, 101st Airborne Division, said. “And those teams will remain with Iraqi army and the Iraqi police in execution of our mission. So that is how we’re seeing our situation here — to continue to focus on the training of the Iraqi security forces so that they are prepared as we go into spring and summer of next year.”

Hickman’s brigade operates in western Baghdad.

Morrell announced that on Thursday the Iraqis would regain security responsibilities for Babil province, making it the 12th of Iraq’s 18 provinces to be restored to Iraqi control.

Associated Press writers Lolita C. Baldor, Matthew Lee, Terence Hunt and Nestor Ikeda contributed to this story.

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