the guy by the door …

Alternet relays an article by Ben Landon of United Press International, Iraqi Troops Face Off Against Striking Oil Workers. The arrest warrants accuse the strikers of “sabotaging the economy”. Its hard to tell whcih labor demands are causing what reaction from the government, but:

The demands include union entry to negotiations over the oil law they fear will allow foreign oil companies too much access to Iraq’s oil, as well as a variety of improved working conditions.

refering to a law before the Iraqi parliament governing the long term [~30 year] “production sharing agreements.”  In drafts to date the law would grant the lion’s share of the profits to foreign [outside of Iraq] oil companies. Labor intervention in these agreements is certain to meet with disfavor in the “foreign investment Community.”

In the first few hours after the U.S.-Iran talks, the wire services offered no specifics, offered differing acounts of when the next meeting would be, and cast a generally negative light on the outcome. It was only later that the highly non-specific “broad general agreement” was offered. According to Michael Hirsh and Mark Hosenball of Newsweek diplomacy generally and Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice specifically are “on the ascendancy” in the administration against Cheney’s desire for war with Iran. One of their sources is former U.N. Ambassador [i.e. Rice subordinate ] and Cheney intimate John Bolton. Hirsh and Hosenball claim that Bolten and others leaving the government have weakened Cheney’s position.

Secretary Provost Dr. Rice is not the first Secretary of State to go head to head with Veep Shooter Cheney. Jeff Stein of the Congressional Quarterly, reports that Cheney’s office actively tried to undermine the “One China” policy forged by Nixon and affirmed by George W. Bush. At stake was possible nuclear war with China.

Stein quotes Lawrence B. Wilkerson, the U.S. Army colonel who was Powell’s chief of staff through two administrations:

“The Defense Department, with Feith, Cambone, Wolfowitz [and] Rumsfeld, was dispatching a person to Taiwan every week, essentially to tell the Taiwanese that the alliance was back on,” Wilkerson said, referring to pre-1970s military and diplomatic relations, “essentially to tell Chen Shui-bian, whose entire power in Taiwan rested on the independence movement, that independence was a good thing.”

Wilkerson said Powell would then dispatch his own envoy “right behind that guy, every time they sent somebody, to disabuse the entire Taiwanese national security apparatus of what they’d been told by the Defense Department.”

According to China experts Richard Bush and Michael O’Hanlon:

A Taiwanese declaration of independence, they said, “could result in the first major war between nuclear weapons states in history, with no guarantee it would be successfully concluded prior to a major escalation.”

Maybe it’s a good thing Cheney’s star is falling? Then again, maybe we should be sure that it is. With the senior military opposed to war with Iran, maybe there is some hope that it won’t happen. Their view is based largely on logistics. Hegemony is just too expensive – in treasure and blood. Slightly more hopeful is to hear a deeper question finally by asked in the “liberal media” i.e. somebody besides Noam. What kind of relationship do we want with the world?

The “historic” talks between U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker and Iranian Ambassador Hassan Kazemi Qomi, the first in 27 years, concluded at 2:30 P.M. Baghdad time [6:30 AM EST] after only four hours with no conclusions reached. Accounts differ about plans for follow-up talks. According to the AP, Ambassador Kazemi expects talks to continue within a month while Ambassador Crocker denies any timetable. As the talks were winding down, a car bomb exploded in the Sinak market area just across the Tigris River from the Green Zone where the talks were held. Tweny one people were killed.

The notion of having diplomatic talks with Iran while holding large military excercises off the Iranian coast reminds me of scenes from gangster movies. Two guys enter a store to talk to the owner about “fire insurance.” The well dressed guy does the talking. The big guy says nothing as he lights matches. The difference in the current circumstance appears to be that any offers made COULD be refused.

Mainstream media are hailing the talks as “historic”. I suppose it’s good to accentuate the positive. But do these talks represent a substantial change in the direction of the winds? Probably not. There are more winds blowing toward war than I knew. John Tirman of AlterNet¹ points to a report by ABC news that Bush has authorized the CIA to “destablize” the Iranian government. The main focus of the article is the use/abuse of Iranian American Middle East scholar Haleh Esfandiari², jailed in Iran, as a geopolitical pawn, because The Right Wing Itches to Strike Iran.

Do the talks mean anything? If Steven C. Clemons is right, it depends on which parts of the government answer to “W” and which parts answer to “Shooter” Cheney³. Whether or not Clemons is right, it ultimately depnds on which parts of the government answer to the American people.

¹Those who view internet publications as suspect might be placated by noting that Professor Tirman is also the Executive Director of the MIT’s Center for International Studies.

²Tirman is refreshingly candid about the intellectual world’s focus on itself.

³Cheney’s shooting career goes back before his assault on his long time friend Harry Whittington, to at least Sept. 11, 2001 when he issued the “shoot down” order for aircraft believed to be a threat to the nation’s capitol. It remains a question whether that order was carried out.

The Congressional Wind

The determination of the Executive Branch to “stay the course” of the Project for a New American Century is anything but news. There was some hope with Election 2006 the Congress might nudge the steersman a bit. Earlier today the House cast doubt on that and a few minutes ago, the Senate dashed those hopes on the rocks. Discouraging as that is, there is more to the story. Bear in mind that there are almost as many “contract security agents” or more properly, mercenary soldiers, as uniformed military in Iraq. In all the discussion about supporting the troops, very little was said about how many billion$ will actually go to private contractors like Blackwater USA and Kellogg, Brown, and Root who are paid much more per capita than uniform military and are almost as numerous. And what accountability do these contractors have?

The Judicial Wind

Yesterday Team Juan/Amy had a report from Jeremy Scahill [author of “Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army] about a further erosion of the rule of law. In defending itself against a lawsuit by the families of four brutally slain employees, Blackwater is claiming immunity of the U.S. Government i.e. sovereign immunity. As I read the Wikipedia entry, it seems to me that the Tucker Act specifically excludes such a claim. In any case, should this defense succeed, and it already has in part, Blackwater will have the immunity of the U.S. Military without any of the accountability of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. The Judiciary has joined the winds of war.

Hot air and Sabre Rattling

Blowing through the Straits of Hormuz: a Horde of Hardware

You cannot simultaneously prepare for war and prevent war. -Albert Einstein.

The military build up in the Persian Gulf has been going on for a while and is well documented. Steven C. Clemons reports on his blog The Washington Note that Veep Dick Cheney is actively planning to give the President and Secretary of State the end run – go directly to war with Iran. [Do not pass Congress. Do not collect public support.] Does this fall within his advertised need to work “on the dark side, if you will?”

Bill Moyers returns to the air tonight with, “Buying the War,” a study of the press during the run-up to the war in Iraq. It airs tonight on PBS. Amy Goodman interviews him for the full hour [after the headlines: bill of impeachment filed] today.

David Halberstam [’55 🙂 ] was the one reporter who, over time, made me realize that it’s not how close you are to power. … The further you get from power the closer you can get to the truth.*

Democracy has become a racket, when it comes to money and politics and the media.*

*Bill Moyers on Democracy Now! April 25, 2007.

• The first casualty of war is truth.¹
• The truth continues to die after the war. There are plenty of truths to kill.²
• Any president is going to feel he needs to compete for time on TV and so what he’s [Bush] going to entertain us with is what I call Republican superbowl played by the lower classes with live ammunition.²

• Religion is the opiate of the masses.³
• He [Marx] said it at a time when opium was the only pain killer. You took it for a tootache. … He might have said religion was the aspirin of the people.²

• There was a time when I could vote for economic justice, now I can’t.²

  __(‘Read the rest of this entry »’)

At the time of the Gulf War, we acquired irrefutable proof that Iraq’s designs were not limited to the chemical weapons it had used against Iran and its own people, but also extended to the acquisition of nuclear weapons and biological agents. — National Security Strategy [September 2002] Section V. Paragraph 6

The Iraq Survey Group also found that pre-war intelligence estimates of Iraqi WMD stockpiles were wrong – a conclusion that has been confirmed by a bipartisan commission and congressional investigations. We must learn from this experience if we are to counter successfully the very real threat of proliferation. — National Security Strategy [March 2006] Section V. 4th Paragraph from the bottom.

And yet, two paragraphs later:

Indeed, prior to the 1991 Gulf War, many intelligence analysts underestimated the WMD threat posed by the Iraqi regime. After that conflict, they were surprised to learn how far Iraq had progressed along various pathways to try to produce fissile material.

Apparently Noam is the only person who reads these things. In Resort to Power from his book Hegemony or Survival, Noam says,

…Bush and colleagues declared the right to resort to force even if a country does not have WMD or even programs to develop them. It is sufficient that it have the “intent and ability” to do so. Just about every country has the ability, and intent is in the eye of the beholder.

All three groups of Harvard students weighed in heavily on intent. It misses the point.

bbiab

On Democracy Now! An MP was giving a TV interview at the time of the bombing. The footage comes from U.S. Government financed Al-hurra. Sourcewatch, a wiki-hosted project of the Center for Media and Democracy has a fairly extensive Al Hurra page [with stuff not on Wikipedia], and an apparently orphaned Alhurra page.

The New York Times reports that a significant number of students and faculty at one of America’s most conservative universities is protesting the invitation of Dick Cheney to speak at commencement. Issues of character were cited as the reason. Appearing first in the article was Cheney’s use of profanity on the Senate floor. And the issues of lying about the connection between Sadam and Al-Qaeda as well as outing CIA agent Valerie Wilson were also mentioned.

According to World Net Daily, even as [or because of] Ahmadinejad announcing atomic ‘good news’ today, the Russians are insistent on U.S. Iran attack¹. The “nibble” I mentioned previously is the U.S. support for Pakistani militants operating in Iran. [Sorry 🙁 ] Scott Ritter claimed more than two years ago that U.S. U2’s were overflying Iranian air space. This is technically an act of war. A friend argued that it is an act of war so frequently used by the U.S. that it doesn’t count. That kind of thinking is part of the problem.

¹That our armed forces will, not that they should :).

Two friends of Dee in Salt Lake City. Photo: Dee

It is 1:08 P.M. in Tehran [UTC +3:30]¹. According to a report from Russian intelligence sevice, the U.S. war with Iran was scheduled to go hot at 4:00 AM today, known to some as Good Friday. Nothing on Yahoo news. Nothing on English Al-Jazeera.² The blogosphere only this. And more recently this from Dee’s Dotes.

With the Nation’s lawyer‘s lawyer threatening to take the 5th before Congress, having Amy Goodman ’84** of Democracy Now! in the area tonight is a rare breath of fresh air. Stonehill College Easton Ma 6:30 PM tonight. Details…

*”of whom Harvard can be proud?” Get real.
** Harvspeak for Class of 1984.

Some were asked of me privately.

Reading the names of U.S. military killed in Iraq on the steps of Memorial Church, Harvard, March 20, 2007 – Invasion + 4 years. A comparable number of names of the much more numerous Iraqi dead were also read.

Others asked quite publicly.

A question of law students, by law students, and for law students, North Yard Harvard, March 20, 2007 – Invasion + 4 years, “Complicit HLS Alums, Chertoff*, Gonzales, You?”

Gotta go hear what Dave Weinberger has to say about the Internets saving democracy. BBL -r

*I’m making you hunt for the Michael Chertoff Wikipedia link, because I have not yet posted about his visit to his alma mater the night before George W. Bush signed the Military Commissions Act of 2006. Coincidence? After he spoke, a phalanx of secret service men escorted him out of the Ames Court Room. The HLS website offers a brief synop and a Realmedia webcast, but does not mention that the event was cohosted by the HLS Federalist Society.

… is a corporation called Blackwater USA. [Wikipedia*] It is headquartered in North Carolina. Being unnoticed by the American public is an essential part of their business model. We are not supposed to notice that the number of “private security contractors”** in Iraq, for example, is comparable to the number of U.S Armed Forces personnel. The war effort is twice as big as what we’re supposed to see.

There was something happening here:

Crossing the Bridge to the Pentagon Saturday

A demonstration sponsored by A.N.S.W.E.R. marched to the Pentagon. [An AP story through CNN. A slightly different AP story through Yahoo.] Some of them are what Professor Roberto would call necessitarians. Some would call them the OLD Necessitarians.

Former four star General Wesley Clark on Democracy Now! for the most of the hour.
www.democracynow.org

Shows are normally archived for post-broadcast streaming by noon.

Highlights:

Re: The Times of London report* that Generals will quit if Iran is invaded, “It’s good the generals are asking these questions.” [He doesn’t know who specifically.]

Gitmo should be closed.

His Stop Iran War website.

The truth about the Middle East – had there been no oil, it would be like Africa.

*In an earlier edition, I attributed this report to Sy Hersch. I apologize for this error. If you read his recent article, The Redirection, you will understand my confusion.

Lt. Watada surrounded by community supporters at Tacoma press conference, June 7, 2006. Photo by Jeff Paterson thankyoult.org.

Lieutenant Ehren Watada refused an order to deploy to Iraq on grounds that it is an illegal war. His court martial, which began yesterday has drawn crowds near Fort Lewis. Through yesterday there were 38 demonstrations of support nationwide. Boston’s contribution will be tonight in Jamaica Plain.

This note from Gold Star Families Speak Out and People United for Peace:

Dear Friends,

Court martial proceedings begin today against Army Lt. Ehran Watada in Fort Lewis, Washington. On June 22, 2006, Watada stepped forward as the first commissioned officer publicly to refuse deployment to the Iraq War. He faces up to 5 years imprisonment if found guilty.

Please join the nationwide movement to support this courageous soldier.

There will be a candlelight vigil held from 5:30 – 7:30 PM at the JP monument located at the intersection of South and Centre Streets in Jamaica Plain in front of Curtis Hall and Unitarian Universalist church.

Boston City Councilor Chuck Turner,

Iraq War Veteran Halsey Bernard,

Melida Arredondo, wife of Carlos Arredondo the Gold Star Father who at Fort Lewis this week to support Watada,

and more…

Please plan to attend. Dress warmly and bring extra candles.

There’s something happening here!

Park Street station on Boston Common. The Statehouse dome is in the background.

The big action was, of course, in Washington D.C. Mainstream media are slowly starting to pay attention, but ‘alternative media’ [ 🙂 ] are still well in the lead. Today’s edition of Democracy Now! dedicated the most of the hour to coverage of Saturday’s protest. Video coverage is available through their website [at low resolution] and through cable systems around the country. Audio is available over some broadcast radio stations. The website has a finder to help you hookup.

I was turned on to DN! by a fellow HUCTW member who is also a member of the Dollars and Sense Collective. DN! was started by Amy Goodman ’84*. Produced from the Downtown Comunity Television Center in a decommisioned firehouse in Chinatown NYC, Amy and her team provide an hour of in depth reportage every weekday. It is subtitled, “The War and Peace Report.”

Dollars and Sense is bimonthly magazine of economic analysis from a left perspective.

* For those of you not inundated by the Harvard Culture, a year after somebody’s name is their year of graduation from Harvard. As my first thesis advisor said, “Harvard is sweet on itself.” Jack Trumpbour has a slightly different view of the same phenomenon. As do I.

… we’re finally on our own…

… or are we?

Couldn’t make it to D.C?

Saturday, Jan 27:

Boston Common at Park Street, from 1-2 PM. A March on Washington solidarity event. Organized by the Committee for Peace and Human Rights and Newton Dialogues on Peace and War. For more information contact Marie-Louise Jackson-Miller marieljm1961@yahoo.com or Linda Nathanson univ@comcast.net. Bring your voices, Bring your signs!

United for Justice with Peace. 

Four dead in Ohio. -30-

Chuck Richardson of Military Families Speak Out.

Would cutting off war funds be deserting the troops? Military Families say no! The administration has already deserted the troops by spending the money on corrupt contractors that don’t deliver what the American people have authorized for the troops.

A simple message.

See/add reports of this and other events around the country at AmericaSaysNo.org.

As of 1:00 PM 1/13/07 there were reports from 369 of the 597 protests registered through the ASN [hung off True Majority] site. An additional 488 protests were registered with the MoveOn site. Unfortunately, MoveOn does not have a report back page. They have produced a small amount of reportage with pictures and Flickr photostream. This is much better than nothing. Still, two half collections of reports is less powerful than one full collection. As I said before, the good thing to do would be for MoveOn to hand it’s list of protests to ASN and put a link to the ASN report page on their site. As for the ideologues at StopTheWars.org, they relied on the bourgeois press for their coverage!!!

Despite popular sentiment against it, U.S. military “projection of power” in the Persian Gulf region has reached new heights. Hours after Bush announced his plan to surge troops into Iraq, U.S. forces raided the Iranian embassy in the Kurdish [Northern] region of iraq [Agence France-Presse]. The Washington Post speculates that this could be a test of of Iraqi Prime Minimster Nouri al-Maliki’s determination to enforce security laws independent of the ethnic and religious affiliation of the suspects. Al-Malikii is a Shiite Muslim. The nightmare scenario of Pentagon Neocons is a unified Iranian-Iraqi Shiite population sitting on top of most of the world’s easily exploitable oil.

Three days before the Bush address a British publication, the Independent reported that the Iraqi parliament was considering a new law concerning production-sharing agreements with foreign oil companies. The report cited terms far more favorable to such firms than is usual in the business. The Bush address confirmed that there is such a law under consideration, but the spin was noticably different – that the law is about equity between competing Iraqi ethnic groups. Chris Floyd argues that this law is the real victory for Bush.
Two days before the Bush address, U.S. forces launched an airstrike on a village in Somalia, the first in over a decade. The target was presumed al-Qaeda. The U.S.S. Eisenhauer strike force [Codename “Ike Strike”] set sail for the Somali coast. A second carrier strike group, the U.S.S. Stennis, is scheduled to deploy to the gulf sometime this month. The specific capability of an aircraft carrier is the “projection of power” as is appointing a navy man as commander of Centcom.

America Says No is staging protests across the country tonight Jan 11, 2007. Their website has a lookup to find one near you. As of 1:30 PM EST, those near Harvard are:

4:00-6:00 PM Boston Park & Tremont Sts.

5:00 PM Natick, Malden, Newton, Sudbury

6:00 PM Revere, Stow, Rockland, Andover, Westborough, Jamaica Plain, Salem, Belmont(2), Concord, Bedford(2),

6:30 PM Rockland

7:00 PM Lexington

11:30 PM Harvard, MA {the town not the university]

Take a camera and post pictures to the web [or look at other people’s event reports]. Send a link to your congresspeople. You’re allowed to drive your car to get there, but carpooling is encouraged.
*Cool Hand Luke.

As the pursuit of bipartisan consensus propagates through the airwaves, a very dark possiblity is also making ripples in the aether. Ed Schulz*, a former republican who now bills himself as ‘a liberal with a microphone’, points out that W has time to pull troops out of Iraq and in the event of a significant increase in ‘civil unrest’ put them back in in time for the 2008 election. “See? You should have let me stay the course.”

Is this a real possiblity? Consider education, disaster management eg Katrina, prescription drugs, etc., etc. We’ve seen how someone dedicated to proving that ‘government can’t work’ can ‘make it not work’. Do we really want to trust him to manage a withdrawal he believes can’t work. There is a risk associated with failing, in the name of bipartisanship, to remove W from office ASAP.

The heat just went on. It is oil. I see dead people again. Maybe I should call Joe for oil. Is Hugo‘s oil less tainted?
*He’s on Air America Radio, the Jones Radio Network, and he has his own cul-de-sac just off the information superhighway.

In exchange for the hawk acceptance of a timetable [of sorts] for withdrawal, the doves have agreed to forgo assigning blame – misfeasance but not malfeasance. Questions: 1) will we be able to get the international support necessary, within the Islamic world and elsewhere without an admission of wrongdoing? Will there be any attempt whatsoever to actually deliver to the Iraqi people any of the economic deliverables which we the American taxpayers bought and paid for? Could the international community freeze the assests of ‘underperforming’ corporations and make them available to an Iraqi government that is a little less the product of American engineering? Or do the Bush crony corporations get to take the money and run?

Shown for free this summer by Brookline Peace Works as part of the International Day of Action to Shut Down Guantanamo, it is being shown tonight at 7:00 PM by the Harvard Film Archive. It is part of their series Where We Are: The War in Iraq on Film. There will be a second showing Tuesday evening. Tomorrow night, Saturday Sept 16, HFA is showing two more in the series Iraq in Fragments at 7:00 PM and Occupation: Dreamland at 9:00 PM. [HFA and the Crawford Peace House both put Operation: Dreamland as the heading, but use the correct film title in the text.]

Brookline Peace Works gathered last July in front of the Holyoke Center.
On the map: The World Doesn’t Need Another Unjust War

You can help the detainees prisoners of an illegal, unjust, unnecessary war by contributing to the Center for Constitutional Rights whose lawyers work to help the Guantanamo prisoners.

And more so now thanks to ABC’s ‘The Path to 9/11’ I have a humongious media agglomeration headache.