From:
YubaNet.comLife
Cindy Sheehan Welcomed Back to Camp Casey With 3,300 RosesAuthor: Working Assets
Published on August 26, 2005, 07:17
When the long distance and wireless company Working Assets offered to deliver roses to Cindy Sheehan in Crawford, it was surprised by the massive response from citizens eager to show their support. The mother of a soldier slain in Iraq has been the emotional anchor for a growing vigil less than one mile from President and Mrs. Bush's Crawford compound.
Within hours of posting the opportunity online, over 3,300 people took advantage of the company's offer to deliver a rose to Camp Casey for anyone who contributed $3. The roses will be delivered to Crawford on Saturday, August 27.
"Our hearts go out to Cindy Sheehan," said Michael Kieschnick, President of Working Assets. "For those of us who can't travel to Crawford, we wanted to offer a visible way to stand with Cindy Sheehan and the Gold Star Families For Peace."
The roses will be placed on the over 1,800 white crosses at Camp Casey, with help from the citizen action group, Code Pink.
Visitors to
http://www.workingassets.com/flowers can purchase one rose for $3. Any contribution above the $3 amount supports the efforts of the nonprofit organization Code Pink on behalf of Cindy Sheehan and Camp Casey.
Working Assets is a co-founder of the Leave My Child Alone coalition, which helps parents protect their children from unwanted military recruiting. The coalition has helped thousands of parents remove their children from the lists high schools turn over to military recruiters. Cindy Sheehan is featured in a powerful 11-minute film created by Working Assets and Mainstreet Moms to increase awareness about military recruiting in our schools. For more information and to view the film online, visit
http://www.leavemychildalone.org/Established in 1985, Working Assets helps busy people make a difference in the world through everyday activities like talking on the phone. To date, over $47 million has been raised for progressive causes. For more information about Working Assets, visit
http://www.workingassets.com/ © Copyright 2005 by
YubaNet.comSend your letters to the editor to:
news@yubanet.com*** NOTE: After I had posted this article, I went to the Working Assets site:http://www.workingassets.com/flowers, where the latest updated figures are 4,500 roses for Cindy. That should not deter anyone from sending more, as they will be delivered the following days. So please send a rose to Cindy as a show of solidarity! Thank you and God bless. ---- Annamarie
**
For more dispatches, go to TomDispatch.comTomgram: Greenberg on Why U.S. Military Lawyers Opposed Torture
Extraordinary renditions, torture, abuse, humiliation, detention without charge or end, an obsession with protecting American officials (and military men) from future foreign or domestic criminal charges for their acts -- these are the cornerstones of foreign policy under George Bush, and they have produced horror stories galore. His is a presidency that has made the beautiful speech about the spreading of freedom and human rights just the sunny-side up version of the infliction of pain, the double standard, and the detention center. There is, not surprisingly, no accurate count of those held by this administration without charge or recourse. Perhaps 15,000 prisoners are at present incarcerated by the American military in Iraq; 505 in Guantanamo; untold numbers are shuttled in and out of various forward military bases and detention centers in Afghanistan (which has become something like a giant Central Asian Guantanamo for detainees from all over the world); scores of "ghost detainees" are in ghost prisons at unknown places around the globe (including, possibly, on U.S. Navy warships, on the American-controlled island of Diego Garcia, and in the ! prisons of various allies, especially those known to have a propensity for using torture themselves); and a few are in military brigs here in the U.S. Of this large group of detainees, most without rights of any sort, many beyond the reach of the world or of anyone who has ever known or cared for them, significant numbers are -- as has been seen in case after case -- innocent men (or women, or, in some cases, children) who were simply swept up in the hysteria of the Bush administration's "war on terror" and the actual wars and occupations that followed.
To take but one example, at Camp Bucca in Iraq, where prisoners are kept by the U.S. military for a year on average, Steve Fainaru and Anthony Shadid of the Washington Post reported the following:
"Many of the freed detainees express bewilderment at why they were held; even the U.S. commander who oversees Bucca, Col. Austin Schmidt, 55, of Fairfax, estimated that one in four prisoners ‘perhaps were just snagged in a dragnet-type operation' or were victims of personal vendettas. ‘This is like Chicago in the '30s: You don't like somebody, you drop a dime on them,' Schmidt said. ‘And by the time the Iraqi court system figures it out, they go home. But it takes a while.'"
Others have offered far higher estimates of the numbers of such detainees; but whatever the number, multiplied globally, it adds up to a lot of angry, resentful people (and families and friends and associates). Alienating the world has, however, been something of a sub-specialty of the Bush administration. Almost alone among those they did not alienate were, until recently, a bare majority of the American people -- all they needed to do what they wanted to do. With that support, they have been unfazed not just by moral arguments against the use of torture and detention without end, but by practical arguments against them as well. As Karen J. Greenberg, co-editor of The Torture Papers, indicates below, we now know that such arguments were made quite forcefully by a range of military lawyers back in 2003 when the details of administration torture policies were just being hammered out. These lawye! rs pointed out (though to no purpose at the time) that torture is a surefire way, in the long run, to create the very atmosphere within which terrorist groups can recruit and thrive
Some thought has, at least, been given to the tortured in the last couple of years; little, however, has been given to the torturers. It is often argued, for instance, that torture produces unreliable information for all the obvious reasons; mostly because sooner or later people will say what's necessary to make it stop. No one ever mentions that torturers are unlikely themselves to be reliable or that their sense of the world and its boundaries is simply not to be trusted. After all, one of the hallmarks of torture is that it takes not just the tortured but the torturer beyond all normal bounds and into another psychic universe where perverse fantasies of every sort are likely to run wild. The very position of interrogator in a situation where a prisoner is without rights and in a detention without end is likely to lead to mirror-fantasies of power beyond all bounds.
Here, for instance, is a description offered by Benyam Mohammed, an Ethiopian who was kidnapped in a CIA extraordinary-rendition operation, passed through the prisons of Pakistan, Morocco, and our Afghan detention centers (and claimed he was tortured in all three places) before landing in Guantanamo. According to his lawyer, "he is being held without charges. Mohammed's remarks to the lawyer do not allege physical torture there. But he said one interrogator, who said his name was Matthew, screamed in his ear: ‘I am GOD here! I can do whatever I want with you. Don't think you're safe here.'"
Click here to read more of this dispatch.** For more dispatches, go to
TomDispatch.com
The Washington PostPat Robertson's GiftA Washington Post EditorialThursday, August 25, 2005; A18
WE WON'T even pretend to have given television evangelist Pat Robertson's latest obnoxious utterance much thought, considering his long history of pious bloviations that have made him come across to most Americans as, well, witless. Were it not for the widespread attention being given in Latin America to Mr. Robertson's call on Monday for the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, we would have preferred to allow the Christian Coalition's founder to continue his slide from America's mainstream into the obscurity he has so richly earned. But his latest bit of foolery is worth a comment or two -- if for no other reason than Mr. Robertson, in an act of stupidity only he could outdo, has handed Fidel Castro's acolyte a propaganda gift of immeasurable value.
Mr. Chavez, who, like Mr. Robertson, is infatuated with the absurd, fancies that the United States is out to kill him. It so happens that Mr. Chavez, when not meddling in the affairs of his neighbors and spawning anti-democratic movements, seems to enjoy portraying himself as a target of U.S. assassins -- a charge that he makes without evidence and that has been strongly denied by the Bush administration.
Enter Mr. Robertson. It's a pity Venezuelans don't know that "The 700 Club" broadcaster is a fading shadow of the Republican Party figure he once was. That Mr. Robertson once ran for his party's nomination, built a conservative religious advocacy group that had aspiring office-seekers quaking in their boots and -- entrepreneur that he is -- befriended every sub-Saharan kleptomaniac he managed to meet.
But Mr. Robertson's slide from the mountain peak of evangelical pontification was not because of his politics but because of his mouth. When his words were not ill-advised, they were moronic; when not callow, downright loopy, as in: predicting God would curse Orlando with a hurricane if gay-pride events were celebrated at Disney World; wishing a nuclear bomb would be dropped on the State Department; and suggesting that America had it coming on Sept. 11 because God had been insulted "at the highest level of our government." Venezuelans just may not know the Pat Robertson that America knows. Yesterday, Mr. Robertson apologized. We are used to that, too.
Still, it is curious how some of Mr. Robertson's fellow travelers have not been able to locate their tongues over this latest Robertson-inspired international disturbance. The Family Research Council and Traditional Values Coalition spare no moments in rushing forth to denounce irresponsibility on the part of those they dislike. Not so with Mr. Robertson, who only called for the United States to murder a foreign head of state. Even the Bush administration can't bring itself to censure a fellow conservative who publicly calls for his country to break the law. "Inappropriate," the State Department managed to say. The White House, embarrassed by Mr. Robertson yet again but too afraid to mix it up with his narrow but loyal base of support, simply averts its gaze. For all that, Mr. Chavez owes Mr. Robertson a thank-you note.
© 2005
The Washington Post Company
ReutersAnti-Iraq war parents to take protests across nationWed Aug 24, 2005 02:03 PM ET
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Parents of soldiers killed in Iraq plan to follow President George W. Bush around the country in the coming months, hoping to generate nationwide anti-war sentiment after camping out at his Texas ranch.
Through much of August, Cindy Sheehan, who lost her son in Iraq, has stationed herself with other protesters outside Bush's Crawford ranch, garnering international media coverage at a time when more than 1,800 U.S. military have died in the Iraq conflict.
Sue Niederer, who with Sheehan and other families of dead soldiers founded "Gold Star Families for Peace," on Wednesday vowed to pursue the president with her anti-war message.
"We are going to be continuously on Mr. Bush and make him understand we are not going away. We are very, very steadfast in what we doing," said the 56-year-old housewife, real estate agent and substitute teacher from Hopewell, New Jersey.
Niederer, whose 24-year-old son Seth Dvorin died in Iskandariya, Iraq, on February 3, 2004, said she and others plan to travel to wherever Bush will be speaking.
Anti-war groups kept the pressure on the president this week as he made speeches in Utah and Idaho, where he promised that U.S. troops would remain in Iraq to complete their job to honor those who already died there -- a logic Niederer disputed.
"You are dishonoring the soldiers, you are not honoring them," she said of Bush's speech.
"Given the reasons for why we went into this war, why have their deaths not been in vain?" she asked, referring to Bush's now disproved pre-war assertion in 2003 that Iraq might have stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction.
Sheehan, the Vacaville, California, mother whose son Casey was killed in combat in Iraq, has become the center of the anti-war effort by camping out near Bush's ranch and demanding to meet face-to-face with the president.
She plans to speak in Brunswick, Maine, in September and in Brooklyn, New York, in October.
After Bush ends his Crawford stay at the end of August, the anti-war families are also considering crisscrossing America in buses in hopes of building a national protest movement similar to that seen during the Vietnam War, when public sentiment against the war contributed to the eventual U.S. withdrawal.
"This is Vietnam No. 2. As we are seeing in the polls, the American people are beginning to realize this war was created on lies, deceit and deception," Niederer said.
A majority of the U.S. public doubts the United States will win the war in Iraq and believes the Bush administration deliberately misled Americans over Iraq's weapons capabilities, according to a July 27 USA Today/CNN/Gallup Poll.
It was the first poll to find that more than half of Americans -- 51 percent -- believed the administration was deliberately misleading when it asserted that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
But creating a Vietnam-style nationwide protest against the Iraq conflict will be near impossible without a draft to focus dissent, said Stanford University Political Science Professor and Hoover Institution Senior Fellow Morris Fiorina.
"If you had a draft, you would affect everybody and break beyond the usual protesters," Fiorina said.
From:
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-iraq-reuters.htmlAugust 25, 2005
Media Groups Demand Release of Reuters CameramanBy REUTERS
Filed at 7:53 a.m. ET
LONDON (Reuters) - Media rights groups demanded on Thursday that U.S. forces immediately release a Reuters journalist held in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq unless they could explain why he is being held without charge.Reporters Without Borders, a Paris-based organization that campaigns to protect journalists detained or threatened because of their work, said it had written to top U.S. Middle East commander General John Abizaid to demand the release of 36-year-old Ali Omar Abrahem al-Mashhadani.
It also accused U.S. forces of carrying out summary arrests of journalists in Iraq without providing any justification.
``We point out that the decision to arrest a journalist should only be taken on an absolutely exceptional basis,'' the organization said.
``Journalists, especially Iraqi journalists, are already running very great risks to go into the field. More than 60 have already lost their lives in this country in two years. It is shocking that they are also being mistreated by the U.S. army.''
The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists also urged the release of Mashhadani, unless the U.S. military could offer an explanation for his detention.
``U.S. officials must credibly explain the basis for the detention of Ali Omar Abrahem al-Mashhadani and other journalists being held without charge, or release them at once,'' CPJ Executive Director Ann Cooper said.
``U.S. forces continue these alarming detentions of working journalists without any acceptable explanation, or anything resembling due process,'' she said.
``We believe our colleagues are being detained for merely carrying out their professional work. These long-term detentions by the U.S. military are a further unacceptable curb on journalists who already operate under near-impossible conditions in the field in Iraq.''
NO EXPLANATIONU.S. military spokesmen have refused to say why they are holding Mashhadani, 36, who has worked for Reuters for a year as a freelance cameraman and photographer in the city of Ramadi.
Lieutenant Colonel Guy Rudisill, spokesman for U.S. detainee operations in Iraq, said the journalist was in Abu Ghraib prison and would not be allowed visitors for 60 days.
Reuters has demanded that the military release Mashhadani or provide a full account of the accusations against him.
An account from Mashhadani's family of his arrest on August 8 suggests that images found by U.S. Marines on his cameras during a general sweep in the neighborhood prompted his detention.
Relatives said that Marines conducting a routine search of the house turned hostile after viewing images stored on Mashhadani's video and stills cameras and his desktop computer.
Reuters has provided U.S. forces with footage by Mashhadani that shows scenes of conflict and gunmen operating in plain view of civilians. Nothing in his work has indicated activity incompatible with his status as an independent journalist.
U.S. military officials have responded neither to offers of further information from Reuters nor to proposals for meetings with Reuters editors to clarify Mashhadani's activities.
Journalists for Reuters and other media organizations in Iraq have been wrongly accused in the past by U.S. forces of having prior information of insurgent attacks -- suspicions apparently raised by their quick response to news events.
``U.S. and Iraqi military forces routinely detain Iraqi journalists without charge or explanation, and some have been held for months,'' the CPJ said. It said it had raised concerns in May about eight Iraqi journalists in detention in Iraq, including local staff for CBS News and Agence France Press.
Reporters Without Borders said the arrest and detention of Iraqi journalists ``does not reflect well on the United States, which nonetheless does not hesitate to give the rest of the world lessons on freedom of expression and democracy.''
Tomgram: Appy on Vietnam and Iraq, the Heartland Experience
On the April day in 2003 when American troops first entered Baghdad, historian Marilyn Young suggested that Operation Iraqi Freedom was "Vietnam on crack cocaine." She wrote presciently at the time: "In less then two weeks a 30 year old vocabulary is back: credibility gap, seek and destroy, hard to tell friend from foe, civilian interference in military affairs, the dominance of domestic politics, winning, or more often, losing hearts and minds."
That language -- and the Vietnam template that goes with it -- has never left us. Only this week Republican Senator and presidential hopeful Chuck Hagel, who served in Vietnam, publicly attacked the administration's Iraq policy for "destabilizing" the Middle East and suggested that the President's constant "stay-the-course" refrain was "not a policy." He added, "We are locked into a bogged-down problem not... dissimilar to where we were in Vietnam. The longer we stay, the more problems we're going to have."
Put another way, Young's statement might now be amended to read: "Iraq is what history looks like once the Bush administration took the equivalent of crack cocaine"; "the United States is now Vietnam on a bad LSD trip."
After all, in Iraq, to put events in a bizarre nutshell, the squabbling government leadership just presented (kind of) on deadline a new "constitution" that has blank passages in it and then insisted on taking an extra three days, not allowed for in the present interim constitution, for further "debate." All this despite the intense pressure U.S. "super-ambassador" Zalmay Khalilzad put on the negotiators to make it on time to the deadline, another of the Bush administration's much needed "turning points." (Imagine, a representative of the French king half-running our constitutional convention!) At his Informed Comment blog, Juan Cole has already referred to this as a coup d'état, though the New York Times more politely terms it a "le! gal sleight of hand." ("The rule of law," writes Cole, "is no longer operating in Iraq, and no pretence of constitutional procedure is being striven for. In essence, the prime minister and president have made a sort of coup, simply disregarding the interim constitution. Given the acquiescence of parliament and the absence of a supreme court [which should have been appointed by now but was not, also unconstitutionally], there is no check or balance that could question the writ of the executive.")
More important yet, the politicians involved -- many of them exiles, some of them with few roots in Iraq, the Sunnis among them with limited roots in the insurgent Sunni community (and in any case largely cut out of the bargaining process between Kurdish and Shiite politicians) -- are fighting for a retrograde-sounding constitution (religiously based and without a significant emphasis on women's rights) inside Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone. It is a constitution aimed at creating an almost impossibly starved central government guaranteed to control little.
Meanwhile, outside the Green Zone, amid a brewing stewpot of internecine killing and incipient civil war, vast parts of the country have simply passed beyond Baghdad's rule, and significant parts of central Iraq seemingly beyond any rule at all. The Kurdish areas in the north have long been autonomous with their own armed militia. In the largely Sunni areas of central Iraq, chaos is the rule, but whole towns like Haditha are now "insurgent citadels," run, as Falluja was less than a year ago, as little retro-Islamic statelets. (Grim as this may be, such statelets can offer -- as Taliban-ruled Afghanistan did after two decades of civil war and chaos -- order of a harsh kind that ensures personal safety for most inhabitants. This is no small thing when conditions are desperate enough.) The Shiite south, on the other hand, has largely fallen under the control of Islamic parties and their armed militias, all allied to one degree or another with the neighboring Iranian fundamentalist regime. In the north and the south, security is increasingly in the hands of local parties, not the central government, or even the occupying forces.
Click here to read more of this dispatch.**For previous dispatches by Tom Engelhardt, please go to:
www.tomdispatch.com
Memo for the President By Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
t r u t h o u t | Statement Wednesday 24 August 2005 Memorandum for: The President
From: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
Subject: Recommendation: Try a Circle of "Wise Women"
By way of re-introduction, we begin with a brief reminder of the analyses we provided you before the attack on Iraq. On the afternoon of February 5, 2003, following Colin Powell's speech before the UN Security Council that morning, we sent you our critique of his attempt to make the case for war. (You may recall that we gave him an "A" for assembling and listing the charges against Iraq and a "C-" for providing context and perspective.) Unlike Powell, we made no claim that our analysis was "irrefutable/undeniable." We did point out, though, that what he said fell far short of justification for war. We closed with these words: "We are convinced that you would be well served if you widened the discussion beyond the circle of those advisers clearly bent on a war for which we see no compelling reason and from which we believe the unintended consequences are likely to be catastrophic." To jog your memory further, the thrust of our next two pre-war memoranda can be gleaned from their titles: "Cooking Intelligence for War" (March 12) and "Forgery, Hyperbole, Half-Truth: A Problem" (March 18). When the war started, we reasoned at first that you might had been oblivious to our cautions. However, last spring's disclosures in the "Downing Street Memo" containing the official minutes of Tony Blair's briefing on July 23, 2002 - and the particularly the bald acknowledgement that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" of war on Iraq - show that the White House was well aware of how the intelligence was being cooked. We write you now in the hope that the sour results of the recipe - the current bedlam in Iraq - will incline you to seek and ponder wider opinion this time around.
A Still Narrower Circle With the departure of Colin Powell, your circle of advisers has shrunk rather than widened. The amateur architects of the Iraq war, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, seem still to have your ear. At a similar stage of the Vietnam War, President Lyndon Johnson woke up to the fact that he had been poorly served by his principal advisers and quickly appointed an informal group of "wise men" to provide fresh insight and advice. It turned out to be one of the smartest things Johnson did. He was brought to realize that the US could not prevail in Vietnam; that he was finished politically; and that the US needed to move to negotiations with the Vietnamese "insurgents."
It is clear to those of us who witnessed at first hand the gross miscalculations on Vietnam that a similar juncture has now been reached on Iraq. We are astonished at the advice you have been getting - the vice president's recent assurance that the Iraqi resistance is "in its last throes," for example. (Shades of his assurances that US forces would be welcomed as "liberators" in Iraq.) And Secretary Rumsfeld's unreassuring reminders that "some things are unknowable" and the familiar bromide that "time will tell" are wearing thin. By now it is probably becoming clear to you that you need outside counsel.
The good news is that some help is on its way. Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey has taken the initiative to schedule a hearing on September 15, where knowledgeable specialists on various aspects of the situation in Iraq will present their views. Unfortunately, it appears that this opportunity to learn will fall short of the extremely informative bipartisan hearings led by Sen. William Fullbright on Vietnam. The refusal thus far of the House Republican leadership to make a suitable conference room available suggests that the Woolsey hearing, like the one led by Congressman John Conyers on June 16, will lack the kind of bipartisan support so necessary if one is to deal sensibly with the Iraq problem.
Meanwhile, we respectfully suggest that you could profit from the insights of the informal group of "wise women" right there in Crawford. You could hardly do better than to ride your bike down to Camp Casey. There you will find Gold Star mothers, Iraq (and Vietnam) war veterans, and others eager to share reality-based perspectives of the kind you are unlikely to hear from your small circle of yes-men and the yes-woman in Washington, none of whom have had direct experience of war. As you know, Cindy Sheehan has been waiting to get on your calendar. She is now back in Crawford and has resumed her Lazarus-at-the-Gate vigil in front of your ranch. We strongly suggest that you take time out from your vacation to meet with her and the other Gold Star mothers when you get back to Crawford later this week. This would be a useful way for you to acquire insight into the many shades of gray between the blacks and whites of Iraq, and to become more sensitized to the indignities that so often confound and infuriate the mothers, fathers, wives, and other relatives of soldiers killed and wounded there.
Names and Faces Here are the names, ages, and hometowns of the eight soldiers, including Casey Sheehan, killed in the ambush in Sadr City, Baghdad on April 4, 2004:
Specialist Robert R. Arsiaga, 25, San Antonio, Texas
Specialist Ahmed A. Cason, 24, McCalla, Alabama
Sergeant Yihjyh L. Chen, 31, Saipan, Marianas
Specialist Israel Garza, 25, Lubbock, Texas
Specialist Stephen D. Hiller, 25, Opelika, Alabama
Corporal Forest J. Jostes, 22, Albion, Illinois
Sergeant Michael W. Mitchell, 25, Porterville, California
Specialist Casey A. Sheehan, 24, Vacaville, California
Mike Mitchell's father, Bill, has been camped out for two weeks with Cindy Sheehan and others a short bike ride from your place. They have a lot of questions - big and small. You are aware of the big ones: In what sense were the deaths of Casey, Mike Mitchell and the others "worth it?" In what sense is the continued occupation of Iraq a "noble cause?" No doubt you have been given talking points on those. But the time has passed for sound bites and rhetoric. We are suggesting something much more real - and private.
Questions There are less ambitious - one might call them more tactical - questions that are also accompanied by a lot of pain and frustration. Those eight fine soldiers were killed by forces loyal to the fiercely anti-American Muqtada al-Sadr, the young Shia cleric with a militant following, particularly in Baghdad's impoverished suburbs. The ambush was part of a violent uprising resulting from US Ambassador Paul Bremer's decision to close down Al Hawza, al-Sadr's newspaper, on March 28, 2004.
And not only that. A senior aide of al-Sadr was arrested by US forces on April 3. The following day al-Sadr ordered his followers to "terrorize" occupation forces and this sparked the deadly street battles, including the ambush. Also on April 4, Bremer branded al-Sadr an "outlaw" and coalition spokesman Dan Senior said coalition forces planned to arrest him as well. In sum, before one can begin to understand the grief of Cindy, Bill, and the relatives of the other six soldiers killed, you need to know - as they do - what else was going on April 4, 2004.
You may wish to come prepared to answer specific questions like the following:
1. Closing down newspapers and arresting key opposition figures seem a strange way to foster democracy. Please explain. And how could Ambassador Bremer possibly have thought that al-Sadr would simply acquiesce?
2. Muqtada al-Sadr seems to have landed on his feet. At this point, he and other Shiite clerics appear on the verge of imposing an Islamic state with Shariah law and a very close relationship with Iran. With this kind of prospect, can you feel the frustration of Gold Star mothers when the extremist ultimately responsible for their sons' deaths assumes a leadership role in the new Iraq? Can you understand their strong wish to prevent the sacrifice of still more of our children for such dubious purpose?
Perhaps you will have good answers to these and other such questions. Good answers or no, we believe a quiet, respectful session with the wise women and perhaps others at your doorstep would give you valuable new insights into the ironic conundrums and human dimensions of the war in Iraq.
A member of our Steering Committee, Ann Wright, has been on site at Camp Casey from the outset and would be happy to facilitate such a session. A veteran Army colonel (and also a senior Foreign Service officer until she resigned in protest over the attack on Iraq), Ann has been keeping Camps Casey I and II running in a good-neighborly, orderly way. She is well known to your Secret Service agents, who can lead you to her. We strongly urge you not to miss this opportunity.
/s/
Gene Betit, Arlington, Virginia
Sibel Edmonds, Alexandria, Virginia
Larry Johnson, Bethesda, Maryland
David MacMichael, Linden, Virginia
Ray McGovern, Arlington, Virginia
Coleen Rowley, Apple Valley, Minnesota
Ann Wright, Honolulu, Hawaii
Steering Group Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
From:
Truthout.org My Private Idaho By Maureen Dowd
The New York Times Wednesday 24 August 2005
W. vacationed so hard in Texas he got bushed. He needed a vacation from his vacation. The most rested president in American history headed West yesterday to get away from his Western getaway - and the mushrooming Crawford Woodstock - and spend a couple of days at the Tamarack Resort in the rural Idaho mountains.
"I'm kind of hangin' loose, as they say," he told reporters.
As The Financial Times noted, Mr. Bush is acting positively French in his love of le loafing, with 339 days at his ranch since he took office - nearly a year out of his five. Most Americans, on the other hand, take fewer vacations than anyone else in the developed world (even the Japanese), averaging only 13 to 16 days off a year.
W. didn't go alone, of course. Just as he took his beloved feather pillow on the road during his 2000 campaign, now he takes his beloved bike. An Air Force One steward tenderly unloaded W.'s $3,000 Trek Fuel mountain bike when they landed in Boise.
Gas is guzzling toward $3 a gallon. US troop casualties in Iraq are at their highest levels since the invasion. As Donald Rumsfeld conceded yesterday, "The lethality, however, is up." Afghanistan's getting more dangerous, too. The defense secretary says he's raising troop levels in both places for coming elections.
So our overextended troops must prepare for more forced rotations, while the president hangs loose.
I mean, I like to exercise, but W. is psychopathic about it. He interviewed one potential Supreme Court nominee, Harvie Wilkinson III, by asking him how much he exercised. Last winter, Mr. Bush was obsessed with his love handles, telling people he was determined to get rid of seven pounds.
Shouldn't the president worry more about body armor than body fat?
Instead of calling in Karl Rove to ask him if he'd leaked, W. probably called him in to order him to the gym.
The rest of us may be fixated on the depressing tableau in Iraq, where the US seems to be delivering a fundamentalist Islamic state into the dirty hands of men like Ahmad Chalabi, who conned the neocons into pushing for war, and his ally Moktada al-Sadr, the Shiite cleric who started two armed uprisings against US troops. It was his militiamen who ambushed Casey Sheehan's convoy in Sadr City.
America has caved on Iraqi women's rights. In fact, the women's rights activists supported by George and Laura Bush may have to leave Iraq.
But, as a former CIA Middle East specialist, Reuel Marc Gerecht, said on "Meet the Press," US democracy in 1900 didn't let women vote. If Iraqi democracy resembled that, "we'd all be thrilled," he said. "I mean, women's social rights are not critical to the evolution of democracy."
Yesterday, the president hailed the constitution establishing an Islamic republic as "an amazing process," and said it "honors women's rights, the rights of minorities." Could he really think that? Or is he following the Vietnam model - declaring victory so we can leave?
The main point of writing a constitution was to move Sunnis into the mainstream and make them invested in the process, thereby removing the basis of the insurgency. But the Shiites and Kurds have frozen out the Sunnis, enhancing their resentment. So the insurgency is more likely to be inflamed than extinguished.
For political reasons, the president has a history of silence on America's war dead. But he finally mentioned them on Monday because it became politically useful to use them as a rationale for war - now that all the other rationales have gone up in smoke.
"We owe them something," he told veterans in Salt Lake City (even though his administration tried to shortchange the veterans agency by $1.5 billion). "We will finish the task that they gave their lives for."
What twisted logic: with no WMD., no link to 9/11 and no democracy, now we have to keep killing people and have our kids killed because so many of our kids have been killed already? Talk about a vicious circle: the killing keeps justifying itself.
Just because the final reason the president came up with for invading Iraq - to create a democracy with freedom of religion and minority rights - has been dashed, why stop relaxing? W. is determined to stay the course on bike trails all over the West.
This president has never had to pull all-nighters or work very hard, because Daddy's friends always gave him a boost when he flamed out. When was the last time Mr. Bush saw the clock strike midnight? At these prices, though, I guess he can't afford to burn the midnight oil.
From:
Truthout.org Who Will Say 'No More?' By Gary Hart
The Washington Post Wednesday 24 August 2005
"Waist deep in the Big Muddy and the big fool said to push on," warned an anti-Vietnam war song those many years ago. The McGovern presidential campaign, in those days, which I know something about, is widely viewed as a cause for the decline of the Democratic Party, a gateway through which a new conservative era entered. Like the cat that jumped on a hot stove and thereafter wouldn't jump on any stove, hot or cold, today's Democratic leaders didn't want to make that mistake again. Many supported the Iraq war resolution and -- as the Big Muddy is rising yet again -- now find themselves tongue-tied or trying to trump a war president by calling for deployment of more troops. Thus does good money follow bad and bad politics get even worse.
History will deal with George W. Bush and the neoconservatives who misled a mighty nation into a flawed war that is draining the finest military in the world, diverting Guard and reserve forces that should be on the front line of homeland defense, shredding international alliances that prevailed in two world wars and the Cold War, accumulating staggering deficits, misdirecting revenue from education to rebuilding Iraqi buildings we've blown up, and weakening America's national security.
But what will history say about an opposition party that stands silent while all this goes on? My generation of Democrats jumped on the hot stove of Vietnam and now, with its members in positions of responsibility, it is afraid of jumping on any political stove. In their leaders, the American people look for strength, determination and self-confidence, but they also look for courage, wisdom, judgment and, in times of moral crisis, the willingness to say: "I was wrong."
To stay silent during such a crisis, and particularly to harbor the thought that the administration's misfortune is the Democrats' fortune, is cowardly. In 2008 I want a leader who is willing now to say: "I made a mistake, and for my mistake I am going to Iraq and accompanying the next planeload of flag-draped coffins back to Dover Air Force Base. And I am going to ask forgiveness for my mistake from every parent who will talk to me."
Further, this leader should say: "I am now going to give a series of speeches across the country documenting how the administration did not tell the American people the truth, why this war is making our country more vulnerable and less secure, how we can drive a wedge between Iraqi insurgents and outside jihadists and leave Iraq for the Iraqis to govern, how we can repair the damage done to our military, what we and our allies can do to dry up the jihadists' swamp, and what dramatic steps we must take to become energy-secure and prevent Gulf Wars III, IV and so on."
At stake is not just the leadership of the Democratic Party and the nation but our nation's honor, our nobility and our principles. Franklin D. Roosevelt established a national community based on social justice. Harry Truman created international networks that repaired the damage of World War II and defeated communism. John F. Kennedy recaptured the ideal of the republic and the sense of civic duty. To expect to enter this pantheon, the next Democratic leader must now undertake all three tasks.
But this cannot be done while the water is rising in the Big Muddy of the Middle East. No Democrat, especially one now silent, should expect election by default. The public trust must be earned, and speaking clearly, candidly and forcefully now about the mess in Iraq is the place to begin.
The real defeatists today are not those protesting the war. The real defeatists are those in power and their silent supporters in the opposition party who are reduced to repeating "Stay the course" even when the course, whatever it now is, is light years away from the one originally undertaken. The truth is we're way off course. We've stumbled into a hornet's nest. We've weakened ourselves at home and in the world. We are less secure today than before this war began.
Who now has the courage to say this?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
** The writer is a former Democratic senator from Colorado. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
My Response to George as He Speaks from His Vacation Away from His VacationBy: Cindy Sheehan, in
The Huffington Post, 23 August 2005
"President Bush charged Tuesday that anti-war protesters like Cindy Sheehan who want troops brought home immediately do not represent the views of most U.S. military families and are 'advocating a policy that would weaken the United States.'"
Bringing our troops home from the quagmire that he has gotten us into will be weakening the United States? George: even if you pretend you didn't know that Saddam did not have weapons of mass destruction and Iraq was not threat to the USA before you invaded, Americans know differently. We have read the reports and the Downing Street Memos. We know you had to "fit the intelligence around the policy" of invading Iraq. I want to know what your real reasons were.
"In brief remarks outside the resort where he is vacationing, Bush gave no indication that he would change his mind and meet with Sheehan after he returns to his Texas ranch Wednesday evening. Sheehan lost a son in Iraq and has emerged as a harsh critic of the war."
I will be back in Crawford, George: Even closer to you now in Camp Casey II. Why don't you channel some courage from my son and come down and face me. Face the truth. Your house of cards built on smoke and mirrors is crumbling and you know it.
"Sheehan has been maintaining a vigil outside Bush's ranch, a demonstration that has been joined by more and more other anti-war protesters."
Because I am not the only one in America who wants the answers, America wants the answers.
"Bush said that two high-ranking members of his staff already met with her earlier this month and that he met with her last year."
I didn't go to Crawford to meet with Steven "Yellow cake uranium liar" Hadley or the other "high-ranking" official they sent out. I went to meet with George. Does he get that yet? I did meet with him 10 weeks after his insane and arrogant Iraq war policies killed Casey and 9 weeks after I buried my oldest child. George: things are different between you and I now.
"'I've met with a lot of families,' Bush said. 'She doesn't represent the view of a lot of families I have met with.'"
I never said I did. I want one answer: What is the "noble cause" MY son died for. There are also dozens, if not hundreds of families from all over the country who want to know the same thing.
"On Iraq, Bush said that a democratic constitution 'is going to be an important change in the broader Middle East.' Reaching an accord on a constitution after years of dictatorship is not easy, Bush said."
A Democratic Constitution? Is anyone else insulted that he thinks we are stupid and think that the Constitution they will form in Iraq will be democratic and ensure equal rights to all citizens? Does anyone else know what "democratic" means? It simply means majority rule. Not some high-minded, free-floating, pie in the sky ideal. It means 50 percent plus one. Up to 62% of Americans think our troops should be coming home soon. That is a majority, so why don't we force our employee, the president, to do what we want him to do?
"He spoke after the head of the committee drafting Iraq's constitution said Tuesday that three days are not enough to win over the minority Sunni Arabs, and the document they rejected may ultimately have to be approved by parliament as is and submitted to the people in a referendum."
Another sham election where the country is shut down for the day and no one knows what the heck they are voting for?
"'The Iraqi people are working hard to reach a consensus on their constitution,' Bush said, speaking outside the Tamarack Resort, in the mountains 100 miles north of Boise. 'It's an amazing process to work. First of all, the fact that they're even writing a constitution is vastly different from living under the iron hand of a dictator.'"
As hard as George is working riding bikes and taking naps? If he cares so much about an Iraqi Constitution, why doesn't he take some time from his busy vacation activities and read the US Constitution. He may find out that he started an un-Constitutional war in Iraq. He may lose some sleep over it. (What am I saying?)
"'The Sunnis have got to make a choice,' Bush said. 'Do they want to live in a society that's free? Or do they want to live in violence?'"
Too bad George didn't give them that option before he invaded and occupied their country resulting in the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent people. I bet they would choose to live in a peaceful country free of foreign occupiers.
"He said he thought that most mothers, regardless of their religion, would prefer to live in peace rather than violence."
Amen to that George. You got one thing right. Thanks to you and your lies the people of Iraq are suffering from a tragic and unnecessary war and my son was violently killed and ripped out of the heart of our family.
"He said Rice had assured him that the rights of women were being protected. 'Democracy is unfolding,' the president said. 'We just cannot tolerate the status quo.'"
Then bring our troops home. The status quo in Iraq is awful. Besides the Iraqi people suffering from lack of adequate infrastructure, clean water, and medical attention, our troops still don't have armored humvees or the proper body armor. I got a letter from a soldier over in Iraq who says that he feels like an innocent man in prison. All of the soldiers and Marines who contact me say that they were lied to about the "mission." They were told that they would be rebuilding the country and all they are doing is trying to survive so their moms won't go through what I am going through. I think the Camp Casey movement is taking a hold and growing because America is sick of the status quo. We are sick of needless death and suffering on both sides. We are sick of paying for a war with our taxes and with our lifeblood that is not making our country more secure. George: your employers cannot tolerate the status quo, either.
"On Sheehan, the grieving mother who has camped near his ranch since Aug. 6, the president said he strongly supports her right to protest. 'She expressed her opinion. I disagree with it,' Bush said. 'I think immediate withdrawal from Iraq would be a mistake,' he said. 'I think those who advocate immediate withdrawal from not only Iraq but the Middle East are advocating a policy that would weaken the United States.'"
This is the biggest smokescreen from him yet. I didn't ask him to withdraw the troops, I asked him what Noble Cause did Casey die for. I am still waiting for one member of the press corps to ask him that. I am still waiting for that answer. First, we were told WMD: false. Then we were told Saddam=Osama: false. Then we were told Saddam was a bad man to his own people and we had to get rid of him: he's gone. Then we were told the Iraqi people had to have elections: they did. Now we are spreading "freedom and democracy" but we are building 14 permanent bases, some the size of Sacramento, Ca. To me that indicates that we are spreading the cancer of imperialism and usurping THEIR natural resources.
"Bush has scheduled more than two hours to meet with family members of slain soldiers Wednesday at the Mountain Home Air Force Base near Boise."
I am just asking for an hour from his vacation, and he just has to come down the road, not travel to Idaho. I wonder if any of the hand-picked family members will ask what noble cause their child died for. I hope so.
"Bush said he planned to go on a hike and have dinner later Tuesday with Kempthorne and the Idaho congressional delegation. Bush said he also planned to spend 'quality time' with first lady Laura Bush, who is traveling with him."
I would give everything I own, will own, or have owned to have one more glimpse of my son. Dare I even say...one last hug or phone call? How dare he go on vacation and live a normal life when he has ruined mine by his lies? How dare he take 5 weeks off when he is waging a devastating and needless war?
"Bush, who is seeking to quell growing criticism at home over the Iraq war, told the Veterans of Foreign Wars national convention in Salt Lake City on Monday that 'a policy of retreat and isolation will not bring us safety.'"
His policies of preemptive wars of aggression for power and greed don't bring America safety, either.
"Bush made a rare reference of the U.S. military death toll -- more than 2,000 killed in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. 'We owe them something. We will finish the task that they gave their lives for ... by staying on the offensive against the terrorists, and building strong allies in Afghanistan and Iraq that will help us win and fight -- fight and win the war on terror,- he told the VFW convention."
How does he honor the soldiers by killing more of their buddies? People say Casey is ashamed of me and I dishonor his memory! I knew my son better than anyone on earth and I know he is appalled by the continued carnage in his name. George: you can't win the war on terror by killing more of our soldiers and innocent Iraqi people. You are breeding more terror. And judging from the fact that you are now tied with the worst president in US history (Nixon) in your abysmal poll numbers, the people of our country realize this too and want you stopped.
(The quotes are from an AP story:
"Bush: Iraq Withdrawal Would Weaken U.S.")
www.huffingtonpost.com/
Bush's Further Twisted Logic on Iraq By Stephen Schlesigner,
The Huffington PostTue Aug 23,12:09 PM ET
President Bush told a convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars yesterday that America owed it to the more than 2000 Americans killed in Iraq and Afghanistan not to end their mission prematurely. "We will finish the task that they gave their lives for." By this logic, we should have continued fighting in Vietnam because we "owed" it to the over 50,000 Americans killed in that conflict. Or Ronald Reagan should have kept troops in Lebanon in the early 1980s after terrorists wiped out 200 or so American marines rather than -- as he did -- withdraw them because we "owed" it to the dead US GIs in that battle. This logic is twisted. The issue in Iraq today is assessing where our true national security interests lie. They are to set a date for withdrawal and force the three tribal groups at war in Iraq to come to their own peaceful settlement. They are not in prolonging the American presence in Iraq for a cause that has never been clarified or explained.
Copyright © 2005
HuffingtonPost.com.
ACTION ALERT * UNITED FOR PEACE AND JUSTICE www.unitedforpeace.org | 212-868-5545 |
Click to subscribe Statement about a joint rally and joint march for September 24The two major antiwar coalitions that have initiated and organized for a massive anti-war March on Washington for September 24 have agreed to organize a joint rally followed by a joint march. Both coalitions will organize under their own banners, slogans, and with their own literature for the September 24 demonstration. The joint rally will begin at 11:30 am at the Ellipse in the front of the White House. We urge everyone around the country to unite and come out for the largest possible anti-war demonstration on September 24.
Signed by:
United for Peace and Justice
A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition(on behalf of the September 24 National Coalition)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ACTION ALERT * UNITED FOR PEACE AND JUSTICE
www.unitedforpeace.org" | 212-868-5545
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The Independent UKBirth of a new Iraq, or blueprint for civil war? By Kim Sengupta
Published: 23 August 2005
Iraq's new constitution, supposedly the blueprint for a democratic future, was threatening to drag the country into civil war last night. As Shia and Kurdish factions presented the document to the National Assembly, minutes before a midnight deadline, Sunni Muslims strongly opposed to its federal structure made accusations of "betrayal" and warned of a violent sectarian backlash. A vote on the draft was later delayed for three days in the hope that the sides could come to an agreement on its wording.
The draft constitution is the principal plank of President George Bush's exit strategy from the Iraq conflict, which has made his popularity collapse among American voters.
American diplomats, led by the ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, had been frantically lobbying for it to be adopted before last night's deadline. But far from sealing Iraq's post-Saddam era, the draft appeared to be quickly fracturing the fragile edifice of government, with Shia and Kurdish parties declaring they were prepared to use their parliamentary majority to push through the document in the teeth of Sunni opposition.
The Sunni reaction was immediate, with politicians queuing to denounce the move and warning of a cataclysmic reaction. Soha Allawi, one of the leading negotiators, declared: "We will not be silent. We will campaign for public awareness to tell both Sunnis and Shias to reject the constitution, which has elements that will lead to the break-up of Iraq and civil war." Another Sunni delegate, Hussein Shukur al-Fallu, said: "If they pass this constitution, then the rebellion will reach its peak."
Sunni leaders said the text had dropped wording that forbade secession from Iraq; Kurdish parties maintained they did not want to break away entirely but wanted to keep the option open.
There were also warnings from Sunni insurgent groups, engaged in a war of attrition, that they will increase their attacks, targeting those responsible for the constitution.
But some militant Shias, including followers of the radical cleric Muqtada Sadr with their powerbase in relatively resource-poor central Iraq, are also opposed to federalism and yesterday renewed their call for "Iraqi unity". In a further sign of growing polarisation, several minority and tribal groups also said guarantees made about their roles had been changed in the draft document.
A spokesman for the tribal umbrella group said: "The text of the constitution was destroyed in violation of what it had been agreed on. We shall now boycott the political process." Mohaim Ased Abdul, the chairman of the Assembly of Minorities, added: "We must oppose this because it does not represent minorities."
Yonadem Kanna, a representative of Iraq's dwindling Christian community, said he expected Sunni leaders to start mobilising their supporters against the constitution. "Tomorrow on the street, on the ground, they will move against the constitution, that we can say for sure."
There was also controversy over the role of Islam in a future administration, with the main Shia party insisting it should be the main source of law and womens' groups warning that it would lead to the denial of female rights.
The most contentious issue in the document was federalism, which the majority Shia and Kurdish factions are determined to make the basis of government.
The Sunnis, who have already seen their dominance under Saddam and previous regimes overturned in elections this year, are convinced this is a pretext for the Shias and Kurds carving out the oil-rich regions in the north and south of the country.
A copy of the document, seen by the media, described the future Iraq as a "republican, parliamentarian, democratic and federal state" without specifying the exact nature of the federalism. The draft needs to be approved by a majority of the 275-member National Assembly, but Hussain al-Shahristani, the Shia deputy speaker, insisted it would be passed with a substantial majority. If approved, the constitution will be put to a referendum on 15 October; it can become defunct if any of the 18 provinces reject it by two-thirds or more.
Jalaaldin al-Saghir, a Shia negotiator, said: "There is a time limit and we do not want to breach it. We had talks with our Sunni brothers. We cannot wait for all the time needed by those people to be convinced. We agree that the constitution, including federalism, be put before the people. If the Sunni Arabs do not want to vote for federalism, they can reject the constitution."
Mr al-Saghir said Shias and Kurds had also agreed that no laws would be allowed to contradict the principles of Islam. He said: "In addition, no law shall be adopted that contradicts human rights and democratic principles. Also it was stated that the constitution ensures the Islamic identity of the majority of Iraqi people."
Meanwhile, violence has continued unabated. Yesterday, gunmen killed 10 people, including eight policemen, in a van north of Baghdad, and two American soldiers were killed in a bomb attack near Samarra.
As talks continued into last night, the talk of insurrection and of a steadily deteriorating situation continued to grow.
Iraq's new constitution, supposedly the blueprint for a democratic future, was threatening to drag the country into civil war last night.
As Shia and Kurdish factions presented the document to the National Assembly, minutes before a midnight deadline, Sunni Muslims strongly opposed to its federal structure made accusations of "betrayal" and warned of a violent sectarian backlash. A vote on the draft was later delayed for three days in the hope that the sides could come to an agreement on its wording.
The draft constitution is the principal plank of President George Bush's exit strategy from the Iraq conflict, which has made his popularity collapse among American voters.
American diplomats, led by the ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, had been frantically lobbying for it to be adopted before last night's deadline. But far from sealing Iraq's post-Saddam era, the draft appeared to be quickly fracturing the fragile edifice of government, with Shia and Kurdish parties declaring they were prepared to use their parliamentary majority to push through the document in the teeth of Sunni opposition.
The Sunni reaction was immediate, with politicians queuing to denounce the move and warning of a cataclysmic reaction. Soha Allawi, one of the leading negotiators, declared: "We will not be silent. We will campaign for public awareness to tell both Sunnis and Shias to reject the constitution, which has elements that will lead to the break-up of Iraq and civil war." Another Sunni delegate, Hussein Shukur al-Fallu, said: "If they pass this constitution, then the rebellion will reach its peak."
Sunni leaders said the text had dropped wording that forbade secession from Iraq; Kurdish parties maintained they did not want to break away entirely but wanted to keep the option open.
There were also warnings from Sunni insurgent groups, engaged in a war of attrition, that they will increase their attacks, targeting those responsible for the constitution.
But some militant Shias, including followers of the radical cleric Muqtada Sadr with their powerbase in relatively resource-poor central Iraq, are also opposed to federalism and yesterday renewed their call for "Iraqi unity". In a further sign of growing polarisation, several minority and tribal groups also said guarantees made about their roles had been changed in the draft document.
A spokesman for the tribal umbrella group said: "The text of the constitution was destroyed in violation of what it had been agreed on. We shall now boycott the political process." Mohaim Ased Abdul, the chairman of the Assembly of Minorities, added: "We must oppose this because it does not represent minorities."
Yonadem Kanna, a representative of Iraq's dwindling Christian community, said he expected Sunni leaders to start mobilising their supporters against the constitution. "Tomorrow on the street, on the ground, they will move against the constitution, that we can say for sure."
There was also controversy over the role of Islam in a future administration, with the main Shia party insisting it should be the main source of law and womens' groups warning that it would lead to the denial of female rights.
The most contentious issue in the document was federalism, which the majority Shia and Kurdish factions are determined to make the basis of government.
The Sunnis, who have already seen their dominance under Saddam and previous regimes overturned in elections this year, are convinced this is a pretext for the Shias and Kurds carving out the oil-rich regions in the north and south of the country.
A copy of the document, seen by the media, described the future Iraq as a "republican, parliamentarian, democratic and federal state" without specifying the exact nature of the federalism. The draft needs to be approved by a majority of the 275-member National Assembly, but Hussain al-Shahristani, the Shia deputy speaker, insisted it would be passed with a substantial majority. If approved, the constitution will be put to a referendum on 15 October; it can become defunct if any of the 18 provinces reject it by two-thirds or more.
Jalaaldin al-Saghir, a Shia negotiator, said: "There is a time limit and we do not want to breach it. We had talks with our Sunni brothers. We cannot wait for all the time needed by those people to be convinced. We agree that the constitution, including federalism, be put before the people. If the Sunni Arabs do not want to vote for federalism, they can reject the constitution."
Mr al-Saghir said Shias and Kurds had also agreed that no laws would be allowed to contradict the principles of Islam. He said: "In addition, no law shall be adopted that contradicts human rights and democratic principles. Also it was stated that the constitution ensures the Islamic identity of the majority of Iraqi people."
Meanwhile, violence has continued unabated. Yesterday, gunmen killed 10 people, including eight policemen, in a van north of Baghdad, and two American soldiers were killed in a bomb attack near Samarra.
As talks continued into last night, the talk of insurrection and of a steadily deteriorating situation continued to grow.
The Independent UK
Iraq Dispatches: Urgent Humanitarian Crisis in Western Iraq ** Dahr Jamail's Iraq Dispatches **
**
http://www.dahrjamailiraq.com ** *This is an appeal written by Iraqi Doctors concerning what is happening
in western Iraq. It is both extremely informative as well as an
important appeal. Operations in many of these areas are ongoing today,
despite the fact that this press release is a week old:
DOCTORS FOR IRAQ WARNS OF URGENT HUMANITARIAN CRISIS AS US/IRAQI
MILITARY ATTACKS CONTINUE IN THE WEST OF IRAQ *As US/ Iraqi military attacks continue in Haditha, Rawa, Parwana and
Heet in the West of Iraq, Doctors for Iraq is warning of an urgent
health and humanitarian crisis unfolding on the ground.
Haditha, Rawa and Parwana have been under attack for the past three
weeks with US/ Iraqi military activities intensifying over the past few
days. The main hospitals in the area are reporting shortages of medicine
oxygen, surgerical kits, anti-biotics and other basic medicines.
Civilians have fled to neighbouring towns and villages such as Ana and
are in need of basic foods, water and shelter. Shop keepers are unable
to open their premises because of the US/ Iraqi operation, and trucks
with urgent food supplies are facing serious difficulties entering the
seiged areas.
Eyewitnesses and medical personnel have told Doctors For Iraq that
snipers are operating inside some of the seiged cities. Haditha hospital
estimates that at least eleven civilians were killed during the attack
and 15 injured. The US military prevented ambulances from entering the
areas and medics from working freely. The area remains under siege.
Local people say that US marines invaded the town of Rawa and carried
out air strikes, bombing many buildings and homes. It unclear how many
civilians have been killed or injured in the areas where the military is
carrying out operations. A school building in Parwana was bombed with
people inside the school. It is unclear how many people were inside the
school and who they were.
Doctors for Iraq has organised for medical aid to reach some of the
hospitals and a medical team has been sent to the affected areas.
The military operations in the West of Iraq have left the healthcare
system paralysed. Hospitals in the area are unable to provide sufficient
medical services for the population. The new military attacks are
further compounding the suffering of people in the area.
Doctors for Iraq is calling for the
*_immediate_* *_end_* of US/ Iraqi
military attacks in the area.
Doctors for Iraq is calling for an independent investigation into the
serious breaches of the Geneva Convention, the alleged killing of
civilians and obstructing medical personnel from carrying out their work.
We urgently need medical supplies to be delivered to the hospitals in the
area.
For more information or to find out how you can send medical aid to the
areas contact: Dr. Salam Ismael_
Salam.obaidi@doctorsforiraq.org_Or
Aisha Ismael_
Press.officer@doctorsforiraq.org_ _______________________________________________
More writing, photos and commentary at
www.dahrjamailiraq.comc)2004, 2005 Dahr Jamail.
All images and text are protected by United States and international copyright law. If you would like to reprint Dahr's Dispatches on the web, you need to include this copyright notice and a prominent link to the
DahrJamailIraq.com website. Any other use of images and text including, but not limited to, reproduction, use on another website, copying and printing requires the permission of Dahr Jamail. Of course, feel free to forward Dahr's dispatches via email.
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George's Lucky "Top 13" Summer-of-Cindy Reading List, by Tom Engelhardt
**
This is a delightful tongue-in-cheek article of suggested summer reading for George Bush from Tom Engelhardt.
For your summer reading enjoyment, I'd like to suggest Tom Engelhardt's latest book, "The Last Days of Publishing". “A satisfyingly virulent, comical, absurd, deeply grieving true portrait of how things work today in the sleek factories of conglomerate book producers... a skillful novel of manners -- of very bad manners”
—Herb Gold, LA Times
Click to read author interview, reviews and blurbs, first pages of novel, or to buy.
--- AnnamarieTomgram: George’s Lucky "Top 13” Summer-of-Cindy Reading List
A Besieged-in-Crawford Reading List for the PresidentBy Tom Engelhardt
It's been a month of momentous White House announcements. First, there was Laura's gender-bending, glass-soufflé-dish breaking decision to choose Cristeta Comerford for the previously all-male post of White House head chef. Then came the issuing of the presidential vacation reading list. Besieged in Crawford's Green Zone by Cindy Sheehan and her supporters, but also by sinking poll numbers, rising casualty figures in Iraq, Republican fears for the 2006 midterm elections, soaring gas prices, and a world generally spinning out ! of control, the President has sworn to stick to vacation normalcy -- biking, brush-cutting, and, of course, reading. "I think it's also important for me to go on with my life" has been his response to the building pressure -- and to prove it, we're told, he's settled in with three good books: Mark Kurlansky's history of salt, John Barry's tale of the great flu pandemic of 1918, and... hmmm... Edvard Radzinsky's upcoming Alexander II: The Last Great Tsar.
But in his summer of non-fun, further steps on the book front may be in order. Admittedly, he's already signed on for 1,500 pages of heavy reading, but tsars, salt, and the flu? As the berms go up and the universe closes in, what the President really needs is a genuinely useful summer-of-Cindy reading list and, as a longtime editor in publishing, I decided I could provide exactly that. So I took an informal survey of editors and writers I know, asking for their thoughts on a presidential reading list that might bring closure to George's beleaguered August. The books, I suggested, should be attention-grabbing, informative, and above all utilitarian.
The list that resulted from my survey includes several books on (or recently on) bestseller lists, a couple of eternal classics (child as well as adult), and other intriguing suggestions that add up to a hefty 4,000 pages of help. I've taken the liberty of arranging them into four categories -- a lucky "top 13" list of books whose order is meant to offer a shape to the last weeks of a long, hot presidential summer.
13 Problem-solving Books for George:
On Handling the New Neighbors 1. Waiting for the Barbarians by J. M. Coetzee: A South African fable about strangers at the gates of a disintegrating empire.
Click here to read more of this dispatch.
