3 Sufis 3

1) Check this link for a document purporting to be demands for US/UK withdrawal from Iraq, representing the position of the resistance — courtesy of the Beirut-based Center for Arab Unity Studies. The document is at the bottom of the home page:

http://www.caus.org.lb/ddefault.asp

2) This is a gem for historians of the march to war in Iraq:

http://www.thememoryhole.org/state/future_of_iraq/

Introduction
Russ Kick

Starting in October 2001, about a year and a halfbefore the US and its allies invaded Iraq, the StateDepartment spearheaded an effort called the Future ofIraq Project. Dozens of Iraqi exiles and internationalexperts were brought together to figure out how tocreate a new Iraq should Saddam Hussein somehow betaken out of power.

Within the project, seventeen working groups coveredsuch areas as the justice system, local government,agriculture, media, education, and oil. The variousworking groups began meeting in July 2002 andcontinued through March/April 2003. Twelve of thegroups released reports. The project cost $5 million.
The project’s observations and recommendations werealmost wholly ignored by the administration during itspre-war planning for the occupation. Soon after theinvasion, though, CD-ROMs of the reports were sent tothe staff of the Coalition Provisional Authority.

Among other things, the working groups foresaw thewidespread looting in the aftermath of invasion andwarned against quickly disbanding the Iraqi Army.

The project’s reports have never been made availableto the public. In October 2003, “Congressionalofficials” allowed two New York Times reporters toview the reports, but they were not allowed to takethem. Upon reading this, I immediately filed a Freedomof Information Act request for the reports, which wasgranted in February 2006. Eight of the reports werereleased in their entirety, while the rest wereredacted to some degree. I have scanned them andcreated a PDF file of each report, all of which areposted to the left.

3) Although I agree with this view that the US shouldjust get out of Iraq ASAP, the logic concerning theethics of civil war is atrocious, and itself nearlygenocidal in intent.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/07/AR2006040702031.html

Let Them Have Their Civil War
By Caleb Carr
Sunday, April 9, 2006;
Page B01

As the violence in Iraq has expanded, analysts havebeen asking: Are we witnessing the beginning of aformal Iraqi civil war? But far more important when weconsider what role our troops might play in theextended fighting is the question: Does the UnitedStates have any right to forcibly stop such a war,when and if it begins?
Civil war, as defined by many generations of militarytheorists, shares characteristics with insurgenciesand revolutions, but there are distinct differences,too. Although insurgencies are contests of rivalgroups, insurgents need not control any appreciableterritory to be effective. Civil wars, on the otherhand, involve two or more armed groups, eachcontrolling part of a country. And although civilwars, like revolutions, can be influenced by outsideforces as well as ideological considerations,sometimes they are merely struggles for power. Stillothers — like the American Civil War — are contestsover not just politics or power, but some highmotivating moral principle as well.

No such principle would seem to be at play in Iraq,for one of the insurgency’s glaring deficiencies hasalways been its lack of a coherent ideologicalrallying point for all Iraqis. Its aim, by contrast,has been simple: the return to power of the SunniMuslim minority that held sway under Saddam Hussein,or, failing that, the kind of endless anarchy thatwill make any other government’s rule impossible. Theinsurgents have succeeded at the latter: Although anIraqi National Assembly and executive branch have beencreated and elected, the assembly has met only onceand briefly, and Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jafari iswidely viewed as ineffectual and corrupt. Americans,meanwhile, are voicing overwhelming condemnation ofthe war, creating a perhaps unbridgeable gulf betweenthemselves and the Bush administration. This hasalways been a basic definition of insurgent success,as it tends to severely restrict thecounterinsurgents’ time frame for operations.

Thus, all the courage that went into organizing andcarrying out Iraqi elections would seem to haveproduced a government unworthy of the sacrifices madeto bring it into being. The resulting frustration isclear in the words and increasingly deadly actions ofmany Iraqis who appear to be giving up on a politicalsolution to their country’s problems. This meansmainly the once-persecuted Shiites (who are showingdangerous signs of splintering into fightingsub-factions) and Kurds.

The more the Iraqi government and its U.S. advocatestalk about “fairness” for the Sunni minority, the morethe violence seems to escalate. The insurgents do notwant their people seduced into participating in thenew Iraq, while the Kurds and Shiites seem reluctantto afford true national power to the very people whonot only made Hussein’s genocidal rule possible, butare also leading the insurgency.

This may not be textbook civil war, but it iscertainly shaping up to be the beginning of one.

If Americans ever had the power to stave off such aconflict, the past three years of misguided militarypolicy have exhausted it. But military ability to stopa civil war is not the key issue. Nor should excessiveconcern for our own national security cloud our policydecisions: The first casualties of any expandedfighting will almost certainly be both Saddam Hussein(who has been kept alive thanks to U.S. insistence onhis trial — and thanks to U.S. guards) as well as AbuMusab al-Zarqawi, who is now despised more thanHussein by many Iraqis. No, the real issue ofimportance for Americans with regard to any impendingIraqi civil war is: Are we morally justified in tryingto prevent it?

Before answering, Americans should consider a fewfacts from our own national experience. Our Civil Warwas viewed as an exercise in horrendously destructivenational suicide by most of the nations of Europe –and an expensive one at that, for it cut off Europeantextile mills from Southern cotton. Britain and one ortwo of her fellow members in the European balance ofpower considered intervening — but intervention wasaverted, mostly through the careful warnings ofPresident Abraham Lincoln and his diplomatic corps.They stressed that civil war in America was a moremorally complex affair than the usual European grabfor power. It was, at its heart, a contest to end theinstitution of slavery.

If the Europeans found its violence deplorable andhorrifying, said Lincoln, that was understandable; sodid he. But as he explained in his second inauguraladdress, in words that we revere so deeply that wehave carved them into his memorial:

“If God wills that [the war] continue until all thewealth piled by the bondman’s two hundred and fiftyyears of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and untilevery drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paidby another drawn with the sword, as was said threethousand years ago, so still it must be said, ‘Thejudgments of the Lord are true and righteousaltogether.’ “

Iraqis may refer to their Lord by a different name,but the principle in their case is the same. We arenot dealing with several groups of roughly equalrecent experience; we are dealing with one extrememinority, the Sunnis, many of whom have for years,under the leadership of the worst international tyrantsince Pol Pot, persecuted and murdered the other two– on a genocidal scale.

As Americans, we cannot condone mass m
urder as a formof vengeance. But every time an American officialtries to tell the Shiites and the Kurds (along withthe many smaller minorities in Iraq) that they are notentitled to the same judgments and justice as weourselves received and wrought from 1861 to 1865, theymake civil war in that country more — not less –likely. Such statements reveal the blatantlypaternalistic, even racist, opinion that what wasnecessary in the American experience is not somethingfor which the Iraqis are ready or qualified.

Indeed, if polls in Iraq are reliable (and they seemto have been, thus far) then the American presencethere is only increasing the likelihood that if civilwar comes, it will be more vicious. The presence ofU.S. troops, noble as their efforts at control may be,only fuels more rage, since they keep Kurdish andShiite forces at bay while failing to stop the Sunnisfrom committing daily murder.

And where is the justice for those murders? It doesnot emanate from either an assembly that has met oncein three months or a U.S.-led coalition that continuesto display an extraordinary level of concern for theSunnis. It may well come, in the end, only fromallowing the Kurds and Shiites to fight — yes, tobloodily settle accounts — with the Sunnis forthemselves.

Not only is it impossible for Americans to stand inthe way of an internal Iraqi balancing of the scales,it also reeks of hypocrisy. We went to Iraq, accordingto our president, to make Iraqis free. If that is so,and if their first decision as a free people is todeclare war upon one another, just as Americans oncedid, where do we derive the right to tell them theymay not? We cannot, again, condone genocide (we caneven cut it short by keeping land and air units in theregion); but neither can we any longer delay justice– even if it is to be forcibly dispensed.

Yet right now, that appears to be the unenviableposition into which the Bush administration and Iraqiinsurgents have thrust our troops. Those troops havefulfilled their primary mission of bringing down theHussein regime, and they have done it well, but eventhey cannot create or enforce a just peace in aforeign country — a laundry list of failed recentattempts in other nations should tell us that.

If the Iraqis wish to try it on their own, better thatwe allow them to use a mixture of their own militiasand conventional forces — the kind of combinationthat fought our Civil War. That way, we at leastaccord them the respect of equals. They may evenremember, one day, that we did. And that memory may,over time, ease the bitterness created by occupation.

Caleb Carr is the author of “The Lessons of Terror: AHistory of Warfare Against Civilians” (Random House).He teaches military studies at Bard College.

4) Here is a NY Review of Books article about Markos Moulitsas’ — dailykos.com founder and a great role model — new book concerning internet activism:

The Hope of the Web
By Bill McKibben
Markos Moulitsas Zúniga(click for larger image)
Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics
by Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, with a foreword by Simon Rosenberg
Chelsea Green, 216 pp., $25.00

1.When, less than a decade ago, the Internet emerged as a force in most of our lives, one of the questions people often asked was: Would it prove, like TV, to be a medium mainly for distraction and disengagement? Or would its two-way nature allow it to be a potent instrument for rebuilding connections among people and organizations, possibly even renewing a sense of community? The answer is still not clear— more people use the Web to look at unclothed young women and lose money at poker than for any other purposes. But if you were going to make a case for the Web having an invigorating political effect, you could do worse than point your browser to dailykos.com, which was launched in 2002 by Markos Moulitsas Zúniga…

5) This is a nice rumination on how it all went wrong — without contemplating the possibility that it was doomed no matter what:

http://hnn.us/articles/23637.html

The Day We Lost the Iraq War
By Michael Goldfarb

Mr. Goldfarb is the author of the just published book,Ahmad’s War, Ahmad’s Peace: Surviving Under Saddam,Dying in the New Iraq, which tells the story of AhmadShawkat, his translator during “major combatoperations” in northern Iraq/Kurdistan in the springof 2003.

London — It is Iraq anniversary season, those fourweeks of the year when assessments and opinions onwhat the Bush Administration wrought when it overthrewSaddam Hussein fill up the airwaves, Internet andnewspapers. We’ll be performing these annualassessments for years to come because the final resultof the Bush action is still unknowable and because somuch of the public debate has been led in a spirit ofwillful ignorance.

When it comes to the Iraq conflict “Fog of War”doesn’t refer to the smoke and dust of the battlefieldbut rather to the hot air emanating from the mouthsand pens of partisans and pundits, many of them livinginside the confines of the Green Zone on the Potomac,virtually none of whom were in Iraq during the periodof major combat operations and very few of whom havemade the journey to that country subsequently. Theiranalysis is flawed by their lack of eyewitnessexperience of the conflict.

Given how little objectivity has been brought to bearon understanding Iraq by the official classes, I havecome to realize that the accounts of those of us whoreported this conflict really are the closest thingthe world possesses to a “first draft of history.”Three years on, based on my experience as anunembedded reporter covering “major combat operations”in northern Iraq, I have reached a conclusion: itdidn’t have to turn out the way it did. I base thisconclusion on what I saw in Mosul, a city of around 1and a half million people on April 11th 2003 andsubsequently….

6) Insurgent Tactics:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/09/AR2006040900559.html

Ramadi Insurgents Develop Clever Tactics
By TODD PITMAN
The Associated Press
Sunday, April 9, 2006; 4:34 PM

RAMADI, Iraq — On an eerie, battle-scarred street inthis blown-out urban war zone, a mannequin withpainted black hair stares silently at U.S. Marineshunkered down in sandbagged observation posts atopbuildings a few blocks away.

It’s the latest insurgent ruse in an evolving warpitting the world’s most powerful military againstguerrilla fighters using their most effective weapon:ingenuity….

7) More Vietnam comparisons:

http://hnn.us/articles/23641.html

Iraq, Vietnam, and the Bloodbath Theory
By Scott Laderman
Mr. Laderman is Assistant Professor of History,University of Minnesota, Duluth.

By now we have all seen the analogies drawn betweenthe present war in Iraq and the war in Vietnam decadesago. Some of these analogies have been insightful.Some, to put it charitably, have not. Nearly all,however, have focused on how the United States enteredand fought both wars. Little attention has been heededto what the Vietnam war might tell us about the UnitedStates getting out of this one. It is an issue thatdeserves our attention.

More than thirty-five years ago, as American civilianand military opposition to the Vietnam war increased,those advocating continued warfare found themselves insomething of a bind. The applicability of the dominotheory to Vietnam had been persuasively challenged.The idea that America was fighting for democracy inVietnam appeared to many observers, given the despoticnature of the successive Saigon regimes, risible. Yetdespite the gap between the government’s rhetoric and
observable reality, a minority of Americans clung tothe idea of the war as a righteous and necessarycause. What little credibility the public explanationsfor American intervention enjoyed, however, waslargely demolished when, in 1971, the top secretDefense Department history of American policymaking inVietnam, the Pentagon Papers, was leaked to the pressby Daniel Ellsberg and published in a number ofoutlets. It is no wonder, given the extent to whichthe government’s own analysts put the lie to whatAmerican officials had been telling the public foryears, that the Nixon administration reacted sohysterically to this turn of events. It is hardly anexaggeration to say that, for much of the Americanpublic, the Pentagon Papers shattered what remained oftheir will to continue the fight in Southeast Asia.American policymakers determined to perpetuate the warwere therefore confronted with a crisis….

8) Here is a video of interviewed Iraqis today, and a poem about Iraq:

http://www.iraqsnuclearmirage.com/Media/TheOtherArabs.wmv

http://www.baghdad4us.com/

9) Gay Iraqis under fatwa threat:

Iraqi Exile Speaks Out Against the Targeting of Gay Iraqis by Shia Death Squads

We speak with a gay Iraqi exile about the systematic targeting of gay Iraqis by Shiite death squads in Iraq. The attacks follow a death-to-gays fatwa issued by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani last October. We also speak with independent journalist Doug Ireland who broke the story.

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/23/153203

10) This article explores allegations of US soldier’s war crimes in Iraq:

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0320-01.htm

11) Here’s another proposal for US/UK pullout:

What next for Iraq?
By Hassan Yassin, March 17th 2006.

There is no denying that a point of no return has been reached in Iraq some time ago. Despite a number of democratic and military initiatives, the situation has continued, and continues, to get worse. Public opinion across the world is losing hope in current attempts to consolidate the unity and stability of Iraq, particularly in the military approach.

Politically, the same experts and politicians are rehashing the same failed methods which are supposed to end terrorism and resistance, and restore stability to Iraq. The talk may be about previous mistakes and how to correct them, but all this rh etoric is missing the real point. The argument is always that if coalition troops leave, the situation will only be messier. To the contrary, it seems that withdrawal is the necessary condition for a solution.

Occupation under any name or any banner is an aberration to the people of any country. Nobody wants to see their country occupied by foreign forces, especially when there is no end in sight. We have said this before about Palestine, but we must also say it about Iraq and Afghanistan. The first and foremost thing to do is to make it clear that there will be no long-term occupation of these countries, and to begin implementing a withdrawal strategy.

The most effective way to put this into practice would be by going through a United Nations Resolution. It is not enough for certain officials to occasionally allude to an eventual end to the occupation. There is a saying in Arabic which goes: those who deal out the lashes are not those who count them. It is the Afghan and the Iraqi people who suffer the lashes of humiliation, intrusion and occupation. They must be given a clear assurance that this will end.

A UN resolution would first state that none of the coalition forces intend to stay in Iraq or Afghanistan beyond what is necessary. It would affirm that the UN, coalition forces and local governments would agree on that moment and on a timetable for withdrawal and replacement by UN-sanctioned troops from neutral countries. The most important component of such a resolution would be its intent: withdrawal.

There is no need for endless committees, political psychologists or military experts to analyze the situation. All that is needed is the realization that the occupation itself is the main source of instability and that ending this occupation is a precondition to any progress in Iraq. It has been acknowledged that the planning for the war in Iraq was flawed. Let us at least get our planning for withdrawal right.

12) Shock & Awe Critique:

A war ‘shock and awe’ didn’t winFar from subduing Iraq, flawed doctrine instead produced widespread hatred of a besieged bully

BY FRANK SMYTH
Frank Smyth is a freelance journalist who is writing a book on the 1991 uprisings agaisnt Saddam Hussein
March 21, 2006

Remember when the Bush administration launched its “shock and awe” campaign across Iraq?
Even hardened critics were left starstruck watching the bombs rain down on Baghdad and other targets three years ago this week. It was as if the United States were flaunting its firepower while saying to hostile states and forces around the world: This is what happens to you when you mess with us.

The Pentagon was testing a theory developed seven years earlier by a small team of U.S. National Defense University authors. “The aims of this doctrine are to apply massive or overwhelming force as quickly as possible,” the authors wrote. “While there are surely humanitarian considerations that cannot or should not be ignored, the ability to shock and awe ultimately rests in the ability to frighten, scare, intimidate, and disarm” the enemy’s will.

It seemed to work at first, as supporters boldly proclaimed we had both won a war and taught the Mideast a lesson. And we did so, or so we thought, by beating the Saddam out of Iraq. “[T]he comatose and glazed expressions of survivors of the great bombardments of World War I,” wrote the authors, was exactly the kind of effect on the adversary they proposed.

But the doctrine was even more ambitious. Much the way a schoolyard bully might pummel one smaller kid to send a message to the rest, its proponents wrote that the impressive display of force would compel not only the targeted nation but other states as well to fall into line. This helps explain why the administration thought that the messy politics of Iraq along with the entangled mosaic of the region were not much to worry about, as the other states would all end up coming at least a little more our way once they got wind of shock and awe.

But the doctrine failed its first field test, while the arrogance it dropped on Iraq has since given rise to contingencies its proponents never saw. Far from making Iraqis more pliant, shock and awe helped foment an insurgency that shows no sign of going away, besides helping to uncork sectarian strife that the administration also grossly underestimated. The same hubris has further increased sympathy for al-Qaida in many nations while it has helped Saddam Hussein turn his murder trial into a stage to rally insurgents against the U.S.-led occupation.

Instead of learning to fear us, as the Bush administration’s war planners had hoped, the world now understands that even the tallest of giants can end up bogged down, if not crippled, no matter how fierce it starts out. In a world as complex as ours, military strength is only a part of even our nation’s overall power. Instead of the kind of decisive, demonstrative victory the administration expected, the legacy of shock and awe may be that being mean and dumb doesn’t work.

One lesson we could yet learn is as simple as: The politics matter, stupid. Trying to bully a whole nation along with a region into submission could end up backfiring on us. Showing off our high-tech
muscle on even the most despised despotic regime may only result in turning countless people there and elsewhere against us.
Of course, it is never too late to change. But we have to start with our attitude. Arguably, such a transformation is already under way, although the administration would be the last to admit it. Last week, both the United States and Iran announced that, despite their many disagreements, it is finally time after decades of no diplomatic contact to open talks. Now that we know that shock and awe didn’t scare the Ayatollahs, either, we’ve learned the hard way that we have to treat them, like other people, with respect whether we like them or not.

The same goes for Iraq. Having failed to subdue seemingly any sizable part of the population in the long run, we now know that we need to reach out to not only those Iraqis more or less on our side but also to the leaders of the insurgency whom we still hope to bring into the political process. One might call it bunker diplomacy. Instead of walking tall across the battlefield in the wake of shock and awe, we are the ones looking besieged and desperate for a way out.

Despite the grandiosity America sported when we invaded Iraq, the giant that the administration tried to project there sure looks weaker now. It all comes back to basics. The bully may well beat up one kid after another – only to find himself alone, surrounded by ever more people who hate him and hope, if not plot, for his demise.

Copyright 2006 Newsday Inc.

1) This Seymour Hersch article attracted a lot of attention this weekend, as it’s indicative of a replay from the Bush Administration concerning invasion mobilization. Will Iran in 2006 follow Iraq in 2002-03? This is why the actions of 2002-03 are still so important — to innoculate against just such a repeat:

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060417fa_fact

2) Apropos remembering what was said in 2002-03… Here are some examples:

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/4/3/143621/3020

Hans Blix and Perspective
by georgia
10 Mon Apr 03, 2006 at 11:36:21 AM PDT
George W. Bush,
November 12, 2002:

We don’t know how close he is today, but a SaddamHussein with a nuclear weapon is a grave, grave threatto America and our friends and allies. link

Donald Rumsfeld, September 19, 2002:
There are a number of terrorist states pursuingweapons of mass destruction — Iran, Libya, NorthKorea, Syria, just to name a few — but no terroriststate poses a greater or more immediate threat to thesecurity of our people than the regime of SaddamHussein in Iraq. link

Hans Blix, January 9, 2003:
“We have now been there for some two months and beencovering [Iraq] in ever wider sweeps and we haven’tfound any smoking guns.” link

George W. Bush, January 16, 2006:
“Iran armed with a nuclear weapon poses a grave threatto the security of the world.” link

George W. Bush, March 16, 2006:
“We may face no greater challenge from a singlecountry than from Iran. link

Hans Blix, April 3, 2006:(AP) Former U.N. chief weapons inspector Hans Blixsaid Monday that Iran is a least five years away fromdeveloping a nuclear bomb, leaving time to peacefullynegotiate a settlement. […]

“We have time on our side in this case. Iran can’thave a bomb ready in the next five years,” Blix wasquoted as saying. link

Condoleeza Rice, March 31, 2006:
“If you’re impervious to the lessons you’ve just comeout of you’re brain-dead.” llink

3) Report from the field in Iraq:

http://bostonreview.net/BR31.2/rosen.html

On the Ground in Iraq
The roots of sectarian violence
Nir Rosen

The Americans came for Sabah one Friday night inSeptember. His house in Radwaniya, on the westernoutskirts of Baghdad, stood in a dry, yellow fieldsurrounded by brick walls. Three cars were parked infront the day I came to visit, two weeks afterAmericans had shot him. It was the month of Ramadan,and our mouths were as dry as his yard. The resistancewas active in Radwaniya, and we drove through fieldsand dry canals to avoid any checkpoints that mightreveal to locals that I was a foreigner. Journalistswere targets now too…

4) Here’s a great research source, for those able to use it:

http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/23373.html

Iraqi Documents Are Put on Web, and Search Is On Source:
NYT (3-28-06)

American intelligence agencies and presidentialcommissions long ago concluded that Saddam Hussein hadno unconventional weapons and no substantive ties toAl Qaeda before the 2003 invasion.

But now, an unusual experiment in public access isgiving anyone with a computer a chance to playintelligence analyst and second-guess the government.

Under pressure from Congressional Republicans, thedirector of national intelligence has begun a yearlongprocess of posting on the Web 48,000 boxes ofArabic-language Iraqi documents captured by Americantroops.

Less than two weeks into the project, and with only600 out of possibly a million documents and video andaudio files posted, some conservative bloggers arealready asserting that the material undermines theofficial view.

http://fmso.leavenworth.army.mil/products-docex.htm

6) This was fun the other day. Bush’s handlers decided about 6 months ago that they’d let their little prince interact with actual citizens — with predictable results. Interestingly, he’s performed better than one might have expected back when all of his appearances were 100% stage managed:

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0407-10.htm

Questioner Sharply Criticizes President Bush at Appearance by Ron Hutcheson and Jim Morrill CHARLOTTE, North Carolina – President Bush isn’t used to tongue lashings, but he got a scolding Thursday from a North Carolina man who told the president that he should be ashamed of himself…

7) Iraqi brain drain — somehow this doesn’t seem accidental or coincidental:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,1738575,00.html

The Iraqi brain drain

As hundreds of Iraqi doctors, professors and teachersare being murdered in what some see as a deliberatecampaign, Jonathan Steele meets the ones who managedto escape

Friday March 24, 2006
The Guardian

Still ashen-faced six days after escaping death, DrAli Faraj pulls his hair aside to display a scar abovehis left ear. One of Iraq’s top cardiologists, he wasseeing a patient when a group of kidnappers wearingski-masks stormed into his Baghdad clinic, knocked hisreceptionist to the floor and when he emerged toinvestigate the noise, ordered him to come with them.To his surprise, they said they were taking him to theInterior Ministry. “I know the minister so I said Iwould check if it was really necessary. I put out myhand to pick up the phone, but they knocked my armaside and struck me on the head with a pistol butt.They dragged me to the front gate where a car waswaiting,” he says, safe now in Jordan.

“It was about 7pm, already dark. Suddenly we heardshots. I couldn’t tell where they were coming from.One of the kidnappers fell to the ground. He had beenhit. Three of them started to lift him up. The fifthman ordered me into the car but I ran back to theclinic in the darkness.”

Faraj was not totally unprepared for what has become anormal risk of Baghdad life. “I had a Kalashnikov inthe clinic. My driver took it and started shooting. Ialso had a pistol in my drawer. The kidnappers droveoff.”
Bleeding from his head wound, he was taken home bycolleagues. Only the next day did Faraj discover thatthe firing that saved him came from the garden of atribal sheikh who lives opposite: “The man’sbodyguards saw the gunmen going into my clinic, andwere ordered by the sheikh to take cover and shoot ifthey were obviously abducting somebody when they cameout.”

Who the kidnappers were remains a mystery. Were theycriminals acting for money or, as they claimed to be,people linked to the police? What is certain is that atrickle of kidnappings and murders which began in thefirst lawless months after US and British forcestoppled Saddam Hussein three years ago has now becomea flood. At least 1,000 people have died in thesectarian tit-for-tat killings that followed thedestruction of one of Iraq’s holiest shrines inSamarra last month.

The growing insecurity has set off a massive braindrain, as more and more Iraqis slip away from thecountry, perhaps never to return. While the fall ofSaddam Hussein opened the door for an earliergeneration of Iraqi exiles to go home, now the flow isgoing the other way again. Kidnap survivors are thelucky ones. Hundreds of Iraqi professionals are beingmurdered in what some Iraqis see as a deliberatecampaign to destroy the country’s best and brightest.The Ministry of Higher Education and ScientificResearch says that 89 university professors and seniorlecturers h
ave been killed since 2003, and policeinvestigations have led to nothing.
Iraqi academics have compiled a longer list of up to105 names of assassinated colleagues. The most recentwas Professor Ali Muhawesh, the dean of theengineering college at Mustansiriya University, one ofBaghdad’s two main campuses. He was shot this week.

The rate of killing is increasing. Some 311 teachershave been murdered in the past four months alone,according to the Ministry of Education. It is not onlyBaghdad that is suffering. The medical college inMosul, a city in northern Iraq, has lost nine seniorstaff.

Even outside Iraq, fear consumes many exiles. InJordan’s capital, Amman, the first port of call formost refugees, requests for interviews producedrepeated rejections. Others would only talk if falsenames were used and no mention made of where they workor live. Faraj is one of the few people who have fledwho are willing to speak openly and be photographed.After eluding his would-be kidnappers, he fled toJordan last week. In the chaos and looting whichfollowed the US entry into Baghdad, he had alreadytaken his wife and children to Amman, aiming to waituntil the dust settled. It never did.

His family stayed in Jordan, but he commuted toBaghdad for several weeks at a time. “That’s overnow,” he says with grim determination. “I will nevergo back to Iraq.”

Dr Azzam Kanbar-Agha, a British-educated surgeon,still makes the journey, though he too escaped akidnapping last September. “My whole life has changed.My family is shattered. I’m a sociable person. Ienjoyed sitting in cafes, meeting friends and talkingpolitics, but that’s all over now. It’s too insecurein Iraq,” he says.

In Jordan he earns a third of what he did in Baghdad.So, despite the growing risk, he still goes back onshort visits. His kidnappers did not get as close asthe ones who stormed Faraj’s office, but the threatwas equally sudden. At his clinic one day lastSeptember, Kanbar-Agha took a phone call from someonewho announced, “We are the mujahideen” (the resistancefighters). Assuming it was a friend playing the fool,he replied, “Come off it.”

“We’re serious,” the voice countered. “We’ve beenwatching your clinic and we want you to make adonation to help our cause. We’re fighting theAmericans.”

When he asked what figure they had in mind, the voicewhispered softly, “We don’t want to force you.”
“I told them I wasn’t used to this kind of talk. Theysuggested $10,000 (£5,750) and promised that no oneelse would bother me. I would be protected. I askedhow I could be sure they were mujahideen. They mightbe a gang. If we were a gang, the man said, ‘We wouldjust kidnap you without a phone call’,” he recalls.
Kanbar-Agha was given two days to collect the moneybut a few hours later got a chillingly impatient textmessage: “You’re not worth negotiating with. We’regoing to act.” Next day he threw away his mobile phoneSim card and fled to Jordan with his wife anddaughter.

Despite the danger, he has been back to Baghdad twice.But now he turns up at his clinic at random times. Hisreceptionist gives patients an appointment but warnsthem there could be a long wait. In the afternoons heworks at a crowded hospital where he feels there issafety in numbers.

One family that has strong evidence that the policeare involved in hostage-taking are the Hilmis. Thefather, mother, and four children in their 20s havehad to swap their capacious home in a prosperousBaghdad suburb for a small flat in Amman. Ahmed, 21,who was in his last year at university, was with oneof his sisters in their father’s medical supply storelast autumn in Karrada, a busy Baghdad shopping areanear the river Tigris. His sister had the safe open inthe back room when four men arrived. They displayedofficial IDs from an anti-terrorist squad. They puthandcuffs on Ahmed and marched into the back roomwhere they took $40,000 from the safe. Then theyblindfolded him and bundled him into a vehicle for a15-minute drive.

Ahmed could not identify the place where he was heldbut says it must have been a government building sincethe electricity was never cut. He suspects it was thenotorious Jadriyah detention centre, run by theInterior Ministry, where the Americans discoveredclose to 200 people in December whose bodies showedmultiple signs of torture.

His family was asked to produce 25 daftar, ornotebooks, a slang phrase for a bundle of 100 $100bills – in other words, $250,000. The amount was toomuch, but they managed to raise $40,000. Ahmed waslucky. He was only held for five days. He was notmishandled in detention, and his kidnappers acceptedthe “reduced” amount of $40,000. When the family gotthe money together, he was dumped back on the street.

The next day, the Hilmis fled after quietly movingsuitcases to the homes of relatives. They did not daretell their neighbours they were leaving. Their houseis closed up and their new fear, they say, is that ifthe
Americans hear it is empty, they may smash thedoor and search it, leaving it open to looters oncethey go.
Similar stories can be heard from families in rentedrooms throughout Amman. By some estimates, there are amillion Iraqis in Jordan (compared with 300,000 at thetime of Saddam’s overthrow). Thousands of others havemoved to Syria, Egypt, and the Gulf States.

In one flat I found an elderly gynaecologist and herdentist husband, both with post-graduatequalifications gained in Britain. They left Iraq lastyear with their four children, all fluentEnglish-speakers with university degrees. Now they arelost to Iraq. “I love my patients. I didn’t want toleave them,” says the doctor.

The last straw, says her younger son Ahmed Kamal (nothis real name), was when his mother had severe heartpains one evening and they could not get her tohospital because of the daily curfew which starts at8pm. “There are not enough ambulances. So I tried todrive her myself. We stopped at a police station foran escort because I was afraid we would be shot on theway. The police said they were too busy to help, so wehad to go home,” he says.

With their various degrees – in electricalengineering, chemistry and agronomy – one might thinka family like this could be an asset in Jordan andquickly settle in. But every Iraqi complains ofJordan’s tough immigration rules, under which theyonly get tourist entry permits for three days or aweek. “They hardly ever give residency permits toIraqis. They’re afraid of competition,” says Kamal.”So we have to take work illegally at a quarter of ourIraq salaries. Employers like it that way.”

The Jordanian authorities impose a fine of 1.50 dinars(about £1.25) a day for every foreigner who overstayshis or her permit. When they leave, the border policecount the time since they came in and charge them. Asa result, once in Jordan, many Iraqis say they cannotafford to leave. “We’re trapped here. We can’t workand we can’t leave,” says a car mechanic from Najaf.

The new sectarian tensions have added to the pressureto escape from Iraq. Like thousands of other familiesin Baghdad, the Kamals are mixed Sunni and Shia. Inthe past they had no interest in what sect theirfriends were but now, against their better instincts,they find themselves beginning to want to know.Group-think is gaining ground. “Most Sunnis thinkShias are all traitors. Most Shias think Sunnis areall terrorists,” says Ahmed.

Slow-motion sectarian “cleansing” is under way asminority groups leave home and move to Baghdaddistricts where their sect is in the majority.Kanbar-Agha, who is a Shia but has a Sunni wife, triesto remain optimistic. He blames politicians forexploiting sectarianism. “It’s stronger amongpoliticians than ordinary people. I see it in theireyes. They no longer talk about the Iraqi people. Theyonly talk about their own sect or group”, he says.

But sectarianism is also being exploited for financialgain. Kandar-Agha says he has heard that an estateagent in Adamiyah, a mainly Sunni suburb in northBaghdad, was paying teenagers to
deliver fliers toShia houses, warning them to leave. He hoped to buytheir property cheap or get it to rent out. Faraj sayshis Shia aunt who lives in Amariya, another heavilySunni area of Baghdad, got a letter saying her16-year-old son would be kidnapped if the family didnot leave. “The boy was immediately sent away toTurkey to stay with his married sister, but my aunt isrefusing to go. ‘I’m an old widow. Let them kill me,’she says.”

In another Amman flat, I met Muhammad Taha Yahir, theowner of a mini-market in Mosul, who had arrived inJordan the previous day. “I decided to leave Iraq amonth ago. I kept hoping things would improve, but nowit’s hopeless. Very few people go to the shops. Theyjust come out for an hour or two in the afternoon,” hesays. Mosul has few Shia residents and relationsbetween its main communities, Kurds and Sunni, are notbad, he says. What worries him is the generalinsecurity, bombs, clashes between the Americans andinsurgents, and trigger-happy American reactions. “I’mworried car bombs will go off as my kids travel to andfrom school. Or there could be clashes with theinsurgents, and roadblocks. If an American getskilled, they shoot back in all directions,” he says.”If an Iraqi policeman comes to my shop to buysomething, I have to apologise and ask him to leave.I’m afraid that I’ll be thought to be an informer. I’mcaught between both sides.
We know where theinsurgents live, but we can’t say anything.”

He has never received any threats, but has two friendswho were killed on successive days last week. They hadbeen kidnapped but their families could not raise theransom. Both happened to be from Mosul’s Christiancommunity. One ran a hardware store, another a shopselling electrical appliances. In the last few monthsbefore leaving, Taha Yahir rarely visited his own shopfor fear of being abducted. His staff ran everythingfor him.

His wife and family are still in Mosul, while heorganises a place in Amman for them to stay. In a fewdays he will rejoin them and try to sell his shop andhouse. “It will all have to be done with greatdiscretion and through a bank in Jordan. Otherwise, ifpeople know I am going and think I’m flush with cash,the risk of kidnapping will be even higher,” heexplains.

When will it be safe for Iraqi exiles to go back? Theguesses range from gloom to the deepest pessimism. “Isee no chance of improvement for at least 10 years,”says Taha Yahir. “Maybe we won’t live to see it getbetter,” says Kamal. He is not yet 30.

Muhammad Moher el Din sits in the Central Cafe, afavourite haunt for Iraqi men in the crowded streetsof Old Amman, where hours are spent playing backgammonor smoking hubbly-bubblies. A leading Iraqi artist, hearrived in Jordan last week. “In Baghdad there is athreat to everything civilised. The attacks aretargeting doctors, artists, university people, andeveryone who represents civilisation, as well as allof civilisation’s symbols, like the shrines in Samarraand Najaf,” he says. Suspicion, mistrust, and fear areeverywhere. “Even our character is being changed. Ifeel it in me,” he says.

8) What Bush hath wrought:

Battle for Baghdad ‘has already started’
By Patrick Cockburn in Arbil
Published: 25 March 2006

The battle between Sunni and Shia Muslims for control of Baghdad has already started, say Iraqi political leaders who predict fierce street fighting will break out as each community takes over districts in which it is strongest.

“The fighting will only stop when a new balance of power has emerged,” Fuad Hussein, the chief of staff of Massoud Barzani, the Kurdish leader, said. “Sunni and Shia will each take control of their own area.” He said sectarian cleansing had already begun.

Many Iraqi leaders now believe that civil war is inevitable but it will be confined, at least at first, to the capital and surrounding provinces where the population is mixed. “The real battle will be the battle for Baghdad where the Shia have increasing control,” said one senior official who did not want his name published. “The army will disintegrate in the first moments of the war because the soldiers are loyal to the Shia, Sunni or
Kurdish communities and not to the government.” He expected the Americans to stay largely on the sidelines.

Throughout the capital, communities, both Sunni and Shia, are on the move, fleeing districts where they are in a minority and feel under threat. Sometimes they fight back. In the mixed but majority Shia al-Amel district, Sunni householders recently received envelopes containing a Kalashnikov bullet and a letter telling them to get out at once. In this case they contacted the insurgents who killed several Shia neighbours suspected of sending the letters.

“The Sunni will fight for Baghdad,” said Mr Hussein. “The Baath party already controls al-Dohra and other Sunni groups dominate Ghazaliyah and Abu Ghraib [districts in south and west Baghdad].”

The Iraqi army is likely to fall apart once inter-communal fighting begins. According to Peter Galbraith, former US diplomat and expert on Iraq, the Iraqi army last summer contained 60 Shia battalions, 45 Sunni battalions, nine Kurdish battalions and one mixed battalion.

The police are even more divided and in Baghdad are largely controlled by the Mehdi Army of the radical nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and the Badr Organisation that has largely been in control of the interior ministry since last May. Sunni Arabs in Baghdad regard the ministry’s paramilitary police commanders as Shia death squads.

Mr Hussein gave another reason why the army is weak. “Where you have 3,000 soldiers there will in fact be only 2,000 men [because of ghost soldiers who do not exist and whose salaries are taken by senior officers],” he said. “When it comes to fighting only 500 of those men will turn up.”

Iraqi officials and ministers are increasingly in despair at the failure to put together an effective administration in Baghdad. A senior Arab minister, who asked not to be named, said: “The government could end up being only a few buildings in the Green Zone.”

The mood among Iraqi leaders, both Arabs and Kurds, is far gloomier in private than the public declarations of the US and British governments. The US President George W Bush called this week for a national unity government in Iraq but Iraqi observers do not expect this to be any more effective than the present government of Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari. One said this week: “The real problem is that the Shia and Sunni hate each other and not that we haven’t been able to form a government.”

The Shia and Kurds will have the advantage in the coming conflict because they have leaders and organisations. The Sunni are divided and only about 30 per cent of the population of the capital. Nevertheless they should be able to hold on to their stronghold in west Baghdad and the Adhamiyah district east of the Tigris. The Shia do not have the strength and probably do not wish to take over the Sunni towns and villages north and west of Baghdad.

Though the Kurds have long sought autonomy close to quasi-independence, their leaders are worried that civil war will increase Iranian and Turkish involvement in Iraq. Mr Hussein said he feared that civil war in Baghdad could spread north to Mosul and Kirkuk where the division is between Kurd and Arab rather than Sunni and Shia.

Already Baghdad resembles Beirut at the start of the Lebanese civil war in 1975, when Christians and Muslims fought each other for control of the city.

9) Sudden increase in tracking down Vietnam deserters appears tied to Iraq war:

03/22/06 05:00 PM

Patriot Daily has a good analysis of the current trend of the U.S. military to track down Vietnam war deserters in what the authors call “an effort to set an example to deter the growing number of Iraq War military resisters who are fleeing to Canada.” Since the war in Iraq began, at least 8,000 soldiers have dese
rted, a number which represents a decrease in desertions since September 11, 2001. The U.S. military denies that it has stepped up its campaign to find deserters, but there is some evidence to the contrary.

At least one Marine official has acknowledged that his office was being more aggressive in tracking down Vietnam war deserters. Chief Warrant Officer James Averhart said that he had ordered cold cases reopened, and that in his first year on the job, his sqad had brought in 27 deserters.

One case of particular interest is that of U.S. Marin Allen Abney, who lives in Canada but who has crossed the border “hundreds of times” to shop to take other trips. Just this month, he crossed the border and was arrested and transferred to military custody. Abney’s case received publicity in both the American and Canadian press, and perhaps coincidentally, he will probably be released soon. Abney, like many soldiers, did not apply for amnesty under either the Ford clemency plan or the Carter amnesty plan. Though the Carter plan was much less punitive than the Ford plan, it gave unconditional amnesty to draft evaders only.
– Diane E. Dees

Read the MoJo Blog online for more:

http://www.motherjones.com/mojoblog

@2006 The Foundation for National Progress

10) Send an anti-war message with your tax return, on real stamps:

So you can still join in the movement to send and anti-war message with your tax return this month (and with every letter you mail).

http://www.BringThemHomeNow.com.

Today there is only one topic, the Mearsheimer/Walt report, which has attracted an awful lot of attention since it came out a couple of weeks ago. Here are links to the original report, as well as several reactions to the report. I especially recommend the London Review of Books summary version of the report, Abu Khalil’s analysis of it, and Dershowitz’s response:

1) This is the London Review of Books shortened version of the report. It’s more or less the same as the full report, but without footnotes:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n06/print/mear01_.html

The Israel LobbyJohn Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt

For the past several decades, and especially since theSix-Day War in 1967, the centrepiece of US MiddleEastern policy has been its relationship with Israel.The combination of unwavering support for Israel andthe related effort to spread ‘democracy’ throughoutthe region has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion andjeopardised not only US security but that of much ofthe rest of the world. This situation has no equal inAmerican political history. Why has the US beenwilling to set aside its own security and that of manyof its allies in order to advance the interests ofanother state? One might assume that the bond betweenthe two countries was based on shared strategicinterests or compelling moral imperatives, but neitherexplanation can account for the remarkable level ofmaterial and diplomatic support that the US provides.

Instead, the thrust of US policy in the region derivesalmost entirely from domestic politics, and especiallythe activities of the ‘Israel Lobby’. Otherspecial-interest groups have managed to skew foreignpolicy, but no lobby has managed to divert it as farfrom what the national interest would suggest, whilesimultaneously convincing Americans that US interestsand those of the other country – in this case, Israel– are essentially identical…

2) Full Mearsheimer / Walt Report direct link:

http://ksgnotes1.harvard.edu/Research/wpaper.nsf/rwp/RWP06-011

The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy
By John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt
Working Paper Number:
RWP06-011Submitted: 03/13/2006 Download Instructions

Abstract
In this paper, John J. Mearsheimer of the Universityof Chicago’s Department of Political Science andStephen M.Walt of Harvard University’s Kennedy Schoolof Government contend that the centerpiece of U.S.Middle East policy is its intimate relationship withIsrael. The authors argue that although oftenjustified as reflecting shared strategic interests orcompelling moral imperatives, the U.S. commitment toIsrael is due primarily to the activities of the“Israel Lobby.” This paper goes on to describe thevarious activities that pro-Israel groups haveundertaken in order to shift U.S. foreign policy in apro-Israel direction.

3) Initial Reactions:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,1743767,00.html

US professors accused of being liars and bigots overessay on pro-Israeli lobby
Julian Borger in Washington
Friday March 31, 2006
The Guardian

An article by two prominent American professorsarguing that the pro-Israel lobby exerts a dominantand damaging influence on US foreign policy hastriggered a furious row, pitting allegations ofanti-semitism against claims of intellectualintimidation.Stephen Walt, the academic dean of Harvard’s KennedySchool of Government, and John Mearsheimer, apolitical science professor at the University ofChicago, published two versions of the essay, theIsrael Lobby, in the London Review of Books and on aHarvard website.
The pro-Israel lobby and its sway over American policyhas always been a controversial issue, but theprofessors’ bluntly worded polemic created afirestorm, drawing condemnation from left and right ofthe political spectrum.

Professor Walt’s fellow Harvard professor AlanDershowitz – criticised in the article as an”apologist” for Israel – denounced the authors as”liars” and “bigots” in the university newspaper, TheHarvard Crimson, and compared their arguments toneo-Nazi literature.

“Accusations of powerful Jews behind the scenes arepart of the most dangerous traditions of modernanti-semitism,” wrote two fellow academics, JeffreyHerf and Andrei Markovits, in a letter to the LondonReview of Books. Critics also pointed out that thearticle had been praised by David Duke, a notoriousAmerican white supremacist.

Prof Mearsheimer said the storm of protest proved oneof its arguments – that the strength of the pro-Israellobby stifled debate on US foreign policy.

“We argued in the piece that the lobby goes to greatlengths to silence criticism of Israeli policy as wellas the US-Israeli relationship, and that its mosteffective weapon is the charge of anti-semitism,” ProfMearsheimer told The Guardian. “Thus, we expected tobe called anti-semites, even though both of us arephilo-semites and strongly support the existence ofIsrael.”

He added: “Huge numbers of people know this story tobe true but are afraid to say it because they wouldpunished by pro-Israeli forces.”

Soon after the publication of the article it wasannounced that Prof Walt would step down from his jobas academic dean at the end of June. However, theKennedy School and Prof Walt’s colleagues said thatthe move had long been planned.

The Kennedy school removed its cover page from theonline version of the article but said in a statement:”The only purpose of that removal was to end publicconfusion; it was not intended, contrary to someinterpretations, to send any signal that the schoolwas also ‘distancing’ itself from one of its seniorprofessors.”

“The University of Chicago and Harvard University havebehaved admirably in difficult circumstances. We havehad the full support of our respective institutions,”Prof Mearsheimer said.

The article argues that the US has “been willing toset aside its own security and that of many of itsallies” to advance Israeli interests, largely as aresult of pressure from Jewish American groups such asthe American Israeli Political Action Committee(AIPAC) allied to pro-Zionist Christian evangelistsand influential Jewish neo-conservatives such asformer Pentagon officials Paul Wolfowitz, DouglasFeith and Richard Perle. It argues their combinedinfluence was critical in the decision to go to war inIraq.

Writing in the online magazine, Slate, theBritish-born journalist Christopher Hitchenscriticised the authors’ “over-fondness for Jewishname-dropping” and argued that the first occasion theneo-conservatives had a significant influence onforeign policy was to press the Clinton administrationto intervene on behalf of Muslims in Bosnia andKosovo.

No AIPAC officials would comment about the controversyon the record.

Yesterday Prof Mearsheimer said: “We went out of ourway to say that the lobby is simply engaging ininterest group politics, which is as American as applepie.”

4) WAR OF WORDS OVER PAPER ON ISRAEL

Scholars’ critical examination of U.S.-Israelities is called shoddy and bigoted; others say harshreaction proves the study’s point.

http://insidehighered.com/news/2006/03/27/israel

5) More Meirsheimer/Walt Reactions:

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,1744960,00.html
Editor hits back over Israel row

London Review of Books stands its ground after beingaccused of anti-Semitism in an article attackingpro-Israeli influence on US policy

Peter Beaumont, foreign affairs editor
Sunday April 2, 2006
Th
e Observer

She is, in the words of her many admirers, the ‘materfamilias of London’s liberal intelligentsia’. Thisweekend, however, Mary-Kay Wilmers, editor of theLondon Review of Books, is on the defensive – speakingout for the first time in an escalating transatlanticrow that has seen her respected journal accused ofpromoting anti-Semitism.The argument has erupted over a cover article in thelatest issue of the LRB by two prominent Americanacademics on the influence of the pro-Israel lobby inthe US. The article, which argues that the lobby holdsa disproportionate and damaging sway over Americanforeign policy, prompted a bitter and growingcontroversy, particularly in the US, where rival campshave exchanged claims of anti-Semitism andintellectual intimidation by those accused of beingmembers of ‘the Lobby’.

The article, by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, wasoriginally written for, but rejected by, the AtlanticMonthly and picked up by the LRB, when Wilmers ‘becameaware of its existence’.

The article set out at exhaustive length to list everyway in which it claimed US foreign policy had beencaptured on behalf of Israel by an all-encompassinglobby of academics, campaign groups, journalists andpro-Israeli activists in government. Among thefiercest critics have been Eliot Engel, a Democraticcongressman from New York, who branded the authors’anti-Semites’, and the right-wing New York Sun, whichlikened the piece to the ‘rantings’ of IranianPresident Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
The article has been praised by white supremacist andformer head of the Ku Klux Klan David Duke – a movethat Wilmers admits was ‘unsettling’.

‘I don’t want David Duke to endorse the article,’ hetold The Observer from France on Friday. ‘It makes mefeel uncomfortable. But when I re-read the piece, Idid not see anything that I felt should not have beensaid. Maybe it is because I am Jewish, but I think Iam very alert to anti-Semitism. And I do not thinkthat criticising US foreign policy, or Israel’s way ofgoing about influencing it, is anti-Semitic. I justdon’t see it.’

Harvard University, where Walt is a professor, hasalso weighed into the row, distancing itself from thereport.
It is not the first time in recent years that the LRBhas been embroiled in controversy with the US – it wasaccused of anti-Americanism in a special issuefollowing the attacks on 11 September.

President Bill Clinton’s special Middle East envoy,Dennis Ross, cited by the authors as having ‘closeties’ to pro-Israel organisations, said the authorsdisplayed a ‘woeful lack of knowledge’.

For their part, the two authors, despite the row,describe themselves as ‘philo-Semites’. Wilmers saysthey are members of the Realist School of US ForeignPolicy which insists that America should be guided byits own interests and not by Israel’s.

Wilmers defends the article: ‘I know Israel thinks itis a monstrous presumption. But then I don’t thinkthat the way that Israel behaves is terribly helpful.The article doesn’t talk about a “Jewish Lobby” or a”Cabal”. I feel very clear about that. We were veryconscious of that risk.’

But while Wilmers feels confident that the articleexamines legitimate concerns – in particular about thelobby group American Israel Public Affairs Committee -it is not a view shared by critics of the LRB. Amongthem is Professor Alan Dershowitz, a colleague of Waltat Harvard, who is criticised in the article for beingan ‘apologist’ for Israel. Dershowitz denounced theauthors last week as ‘liars’ and ‘bigots’ and comparedtheir argument to neo-Nazi literature. It is a viewshared by US academics Jeffrey Herf and AndreiMarkovits, who wrote to the LRB: ‘Accusations ofpowerful Jews behind the scenes are part of the mostdangerous traditions of modern anti-Semitism.’

But while some have focused on the issue ofanti-Semitism, others, following Dennis Ross’s lead,have condemned the article as a shoddy piece ofpseudo-academia. It is a view endorsed by journalistChristopher Hitchens, who has accused the authors ofan exercise in Jewish ‘name listing’, and perhaps -most surprisingly – by Noam Chomsky, the Nobel-prizewinning academic who has written on the pro-Israelibias of the US media.
‘Recognising that Mearsheimer-Walt took a courageousstand which merits praise,’ he wrote for onlinemagazine ZNet last week, ‘we still have to ask howconvincing their thesis is. Not very, in my opinion.’

Wilmers rejects the accusation by Hitchens, Ross andothers that the Mearsheimer-Walt article has donelittle more than attempt to join up a disconnectedlist of people and organisations lobbying on differentaspects of Israeli concern into a central ‘IsraelLobby’ – capitalised by the LRB. She admits now,however, that it would have been better to use a lowercase ‘l’ for the word ‘lobby’ – to have avoided therisk of being misunderstood.
‘It is not true that the authors simply lumpedtogether a long list of people and organisations inthe same piece to make their case for an “IsraeliLobby”. To say that because someone is mentioned incontext in a long piece is tainted by association withany other is wrong.’

Wilmers believes, too, that the most angrydenunciations of anti-Semitism – while designed toserve the purpose of censorship by those attempting toforestall criticism of Israel – may actually encourageanti-Semitism in the long run.

‘It serves a purpose. No one wants to be thought of asanti-Semitic because it is thought of as worse thananything else, although it is not worse beinganti-Semitic than being anti-black or Islamophobic.
‘Really, one of the most upsetting things is the wayit can contribute to anti-Semitism in the long runjust by making so many constant appeals and preventinguseful criticism of Israel. No one can say Israel’sposture does not contribute to anti-Semitism, yetcharges of anti-Semitism are used to justify thatpolicy.’

6) More Reactions:

http://hnn.us/roundup/archives/1/2006/3/#23364

Harvey Sicherman:
The flaws in the noisome paper aboutthe Israel LobbySource:
Foreign Policy Research (3-28-06)

[Harvey Sicherman, Ph.D., is President of the ForeignPolicy Research Institute and former aide to threeU.S. secretaries of state.]

John J. Mearsheimer, R. Wendell Harrison DistinguishedService Professor of Political Science at theUniversity of Chicago, and Stephen M. Walt, Robert andRenee Belfer Professor of International Affairs at theJohn F. Kennedy School of Government at HarvardUniversity, have stirred great controversy with theirattack on the “Israel Lobby.” One version of theirindictment was published in the London Review of Bookson March 26, 2006. The other, longer, footnotedversion appeared under the Faculty Research WorkingPapers Series of the Kennedy School….

7) Abu Khalil on Meirsheimer. This was one of the better analyses on the meaning of the report, as Abu Khalil refuses to explain away all US foreign policy on one lobby:

http://politicalissuesofinterest.blogspot.com/2006/03/asad-abukhalilon-mearsheimer-and-walt.html

8) MORE DEBATE OVER REPORT OF ISRAEL’S INFLUENCE INU.S.

By Tom Regan
Christian Science Monitor
April 6, 2006

http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0406/dailyUpdate.html

9) ALAN DERSHOWITZ Response Report. This is a lengthy point by point response to Mearsheimer and Walt’s report:

http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/research/working_papers/dershowitzreply.pdf

This time I’m mixing Katrina and non-Katrina postings, in what I imagine will be a gradual return to Middle East dominant postings. That said, this weekend is all New Orleans all the time, what with the first Mardi Gras after Katrina and my 40th birthday. Time for redemptive release.

1) Here’s a New Yorker article on internal efforts to critique/prevent torture from within the US government establishment. There’s an accompanying memo attached to the article:
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060227fa_fact

2) Hold the Corps Accountable Signs now in NO:
Dear supporters,

A shipment of “Hold the Corps Accountable” signs has arrived!

These signs are incredibly important this week with 800 reporters in town for Mardi Gras and next week with 100 Congressmen in town to get a look-see of the devastation we have suffered.

For a yard sign, there are two pickup spots: Uptown: 1421 Soniat St uptown one block off St. Charles Ave on river side (in garage). River Ridge: 10005 Hyde Place in River Ridge off of Sauve Road (on porch). Drop by any time and take what you need………

Our group got some excellent press today in Bayou Buzz a popular Louisiana electronic newsletter. Check it out at: http://www.bayoubuzz.com/articles.aspx?aid=6311

Keep talking about the Corps! It’s the Corps!Sandy

3) Get these New Orleans t-shirts — I did!:

We’re finally set up to ship shirts again. The website has been updated slightly and includes a paypalbutton to order the black Defend New Orleans t-shirts.Feel free to send people here, spread the word, andpick up some new gifts…

http://www.defendneworleans.com

Thank You for the continued support, and Happy MardiGras!

4) Katrina Paper Submission Call:

Title: Katrina: Race, Class, and Povery: Reflectionsand Analysis. Location: Louisiana Deadline: 2006-06-30 Description: Hurricane Katrina: Race, Class andPoverty: Reflections and Analysis Call for Papers: TheJournal of Black Studies is requesting contributionsfor a special edition examining the effects andaftermath of Hurricane Katrina. We invitecontributions from African-American Studies, History,Economics, Et … Contact: Troy_Allen@subr.edu Announcement ID: 149884 http://www.h-net.org/announce/show.cgi?ID=149884

5) Hmmm. Daniel Pipes here defends himself from setting off the Danish cartoon scandal (from his own email listserve):

Those Danish Cartoons and Meby Daniel PipesNew York SunFebruary 21, 2006

http://www.danielpipes.org/article/3405

Did you know that I had a hand in the Danish cartoons of Muhammad?
No? Well, neither did I until I found this out in early February on a conspiracist Web site. To clear the record, I’ll start with the facts, then outline the conspiracy theory.

What actually happened: Flemming Rose, cultural editor of a Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, sent me an e-mail on September 29, 2004, introducing himself and requesting an in-person interview during his American trip. I agreed and Mr. Rose came to my Philadelphia office on October 25, when he spent about half an hour asking me questions. His article on me, “Truslen fra islamismen” (or “The Threat of Islamism),” appeared on October 29. It is a standard journalistic piece in which Mr. Rose provided some biographical information about me and had me explain my views on radical Islam. (Both the Danish original and an English translation can be found on my Web site, www.DanielPipes.org.)

After that meeting, I had no further contact with Mr. Rose. To be more precise: We have since then not met, talked, or written to each other. I learned only from the press of his decision, nearly a year after our meeting, to commission and publish the cartoons.

That’s the boring reality – a routine interview and nothing else. The more exciting conspiracy theory began when a fringe antisemitic writer named Christopher Bollyn published an analysis on February 3 announcing that “Rose traveled to Philadelphia in October 2004 to visit Daniel Pipes. … Rose then penned a positive article about Pipes.”

Two days later, Mr. Bollyn transmogrified this fact into an elaborate conspiracy theory: “The anti-Muslim cartoon scandal is clearly turning out to be a key event in the Zionist Neo-Cons’ ‘clash of civilizations,’ the artificially constructed struggle to pit the so-called Christian West against the Islamic states and peoples. We know that Flemming Rose is a colleague and fellow of the Zionist Neo-Con Daniel Pipes. He has visited Pipes in Philadelphia and written a friendly biographical article.”

Note Mr. Bollyn’s three assumptions in this account: that Mr. Rose is my “colleague and fellow,” that he and I together intentionally provoked Muslims, and that we are part of a wider conspiracy to worsen Christian-Muslim relations.

Such wild assumptions are standard fare for Mr. Bollyn. Concerning September 11, 2001, for example, he thinks President Bush and press tycoon Rupert Murdoch knew the plans in advance, that the Mossad had a key role in that day’s events, that United Airlines flight 175 was not flown into the southern World Trade Center tower, and that the towers were destroyed either by an Israeli-American laser beam weapon or massive underground explosions.

Mr. Bollyn’s theory connecting me to a clash of civilizations gained momentum within days. Leftist and Islamist writers variously described Mr. Rose as my “close associate,” “disciple,” and “protégé” and the Internet buzzed with rumors of my part in a “Neocon conspiracy.” Even mainstream elements then picked up these ideas. A leading Arabic newspaper, Al-Hayat, speculated on February 10 about the “mutual admiration society” between Mr. Rose and myself. The PLO representative in Washington, Afif Safieh, told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on February 12 that Flemming Rose “is a fan and an admirer” of mine.

The mass-circulation Belgian weekly Knack then called me “the ideologue of the NeoCons” (which will come as news to William Kristol) and accused Mr. Rose, me, and others of instigating an “intentional NeoCon provocation.”

I watched the spread of this fantastical account with bemusement and apprehension. As the author of two books and many articles on conspiracy theories, I have intensively studied these misguided attempts to understand reality. This time, I had the dubious privilege of doing so on the inside looking out. In response, I recalled two recommendations from my 1992 CIA-commissioned report suggesting ways for the American government to handle conspiracy theories.

Deny the validity of conspiracy theories: Following my own advice, I placed a correction on my website, discussed the topic on Al-Jazeera television, and am addressing the matter here.

Anticipate malign interpretations: In today’s vicious and vulgar political discourse, public figures must anticipate that their actions, however minor and innocent, might randomly be plucked out of obscurity and framed as part of some grand design. One cannot prevent this but the damage can be minimized by keeping careful documentation (e-mails, audio recordings, photographs) and producing them to refute distortions.
To subscribe to or unsubscribe from this list, go to http://www.DanielPipes.org/subscribe.php

6) Receipt Check in These United States:

http://www.die.net/musings/bestbuy/

I’m ge
nerally adverse to the whole shopping experienceand tend to operate in the power shopping, “hit andrun” mode.

So four shopping days before Christmas I decide thatmy remaining gifts will be digital satellite systems,and I proceed to the back of the Lakewood, CaliforniaBest Buy and end up at the mixed personalcommunications and odd-things-to-attach-to-your-TVcounter. Surveying my options, I feel vaguely lessmanly as I eschew the top-of-the-line,surround-sound-laden, multiple-receiver-ready modelsin favor of a pair of beginners packs inclusive of thedish, appropriate electronics, and every possiblewire, nut or bolt their future owners would need toget each going. Having made my decision, I’m now readyto be done.

I begin to understand that this would not be my fatetoday, though, as the “helpful” salesperson politelyignores my query for more stock than the one box Ifind and proceeds to tell me about the great featuresof the higher end systems, including the dishes thatallow the use of two receivers simultaneously so Iwon’t need to buy more than one complete system.

After being convinced that I’m not going to budge frommy decision and trekking off to what must’ve been theend of the earth to retrieve my box, I’m told thatthese items must be checked out at the counter I’mstanding in front of. Before he will even take mycredit card, though, I have to fill out my name,address, etc on three different forms which then getlaboriously typed into the register. By the time we’rethrough the repeated sales pitch on the extendedwarranty and the inspection of the contents of mypurchases, I’m in what might be considered a hurry toleave.

So when I’m faced with the prospect of standing in along line at the exit to have yet another person riflethrough my property, I dodge the line and head for anunused automatic door, countering an insistent “Sir,can I see your receipt?” with a polite “No, thankyou.”

I’ve gotten so used to this trick at Fry’s Electronicsthat I don’t really think twice about it. You see,Fry’s doesn’t trust their underpaid staff manning thecash registers to actually do their jobs right, sothey post a door guard to ask people walking away fromthe registers carrying plastic bags to let them verifythat all of the items in the bag were rung up on thereceipt.

But this verification step is purely voluntary.Merchants basically have two rights covering peopleentering and exiting their stores. They can refuse tolet you enter the premises and/or to sell youanything, and they can place you under citizens arrestfor attempting to leave the premises with any propertythat you haven’t paid for. But the second you handover the appropriate amount of cash, they lose allrights to the items. They can’t legally impair youfrom leaving the store with your property.

Apparently the employees of my local Best Buy aren’tvery familiar with annoying pedantic individuals whowill choose principals over convenience when walkingout with a shopping cart full of expensive homeentertainment gear. I manage to get about 5 steps outthe door before the door guard catches up to me andgrabs my cart, with the “sir” in his “I need to seeyour receipt, sir” somehow not very complimentary.This is apparently a stalling tactic, as shortly a fewmore blue-shirted employees make a move to block mefrom making any more progress toward my car.

I ask, still calm, if I am being detained forshoplifting. This suggestion apparently shocks mycaptor into regaining some of his senses, and he letsgo of my cart. I explain that unless he wishes to doso, he has no right to stop me.

This is clearly baffling to the poor fellow. Hesuggests again that my receipt simply needs to bechecked, struggling to grasp why it is that I won’tjust be a nice little customer and submit to the storepolicy. I spend a few moments trying to explainmyself, but clearly have too much adrenaline flowingat this point to be particularly erudite. I give upand proceed in the direction of my car.

Shortly a yellow-shirted fellow, who I take to be amanagerial-type, again tries to plead a case for thereceipt-checking. I ask again if I’m being detainedfor shoplifting. He says no, but shortly thereaftermentions that he’ll need to call the police shortly ifI don’t offer a receipt. I tell him to please do so,while loading my packages into the car. I suggest thatbefore doing so he take a moment to talk to either thehelpful salesperson who rung me up or to compare theirinventory against sales receipts, as to avoid lookinglike an ass to the cops.

As I get in my car to leave, two Best Buy lackeys in apickup truck decide its a good time to park behind me,blocking my path again. By this time, I’ve had justenough of this crap and not very politely ordiscreetly ask them to get out of the way. With only alittle hesitation, the yellow-shirt nods in theirdirection and I’m soon free to leave.

Its been a few hours, but I’m still half expecting aman with a badge and a gun to show up at my door tocheck my receipt.

— Aaron Hopkins

7) Women in War Conference:

Dear activists, community leaders and others,

The Women’s Studies Committee of South Texas Collegeis currently soliticing papers and presenters for our
Women and War conference to be held 18-20 April, 2006.

As we have already booked Yanar Mohammed and JoyceRiley as speakers, we are interested in havinguniversity and high school students talk aboutcounter-recruitment campaigns and or the differencesbetween fantasy (what recruiters say) and reality(what inductees and “volunteers” learn).
We also might be able to pay the travel and lodgingcosts of those attendees who represent student orpeace groups that deal with these issues (viareimbursement).

NB the offer for reimbursement can only be offered tothe first group or person who respond, who meet thisnarrow criteria – so time IS of the essence.

To get a feeling for the mood and interests of ourconference in general, please see the attachedannouncement (a call for papers), distribute widelyand inform, faculty, students, friends, and media.

Thank you

John Calvin Jones, PhD, JDSouth Texas College (Mid-Valley Campus)Weslaco, TX

Call for papers: Women and War Conference in SouthTexas, April 2006

The Women’s Studies committee of South Texas College(McAllen, Texas – only a few miles from the Mexicanborder and 90 minutes from South Padre Island) isorganizing a conference on Women and War this spring(April 18-20, 2006). We have already obtainedcommitments for two dynamic speakers, Ms. YanarMohammed, President, Organization of Women’s Freedomin Iraq (OWFI), and former Capt. (USAF) Joyce RileyvonKleist, RN, BSN.

Ms. Mohammed will provide a first-hand account of thelives of women and their families in Iraq since theU.S. invasion and occupation of March 2003, while Ms.Riley shall provide a lecture on the effects ofAmerica’s depleted uranium weapons that cause illnessand cancer in civilians, our troops, and spouses andchildren of Iraq war veterans.

To learn more about our speakers please visit thefollowing websites:

http://www.equalityiniraq.com (Yanar Mohammed); and

http://www.beyondtreason.com (the work of Joyce Rileyon the effects of Depleted Uranium)

We invite researchers, faculty, graduate students,community and organizational leaders to presentfindings and observations on a wide range of issuesrelated to “women and war” (or understood as theeffects of war on women) from refugees andreproductive disruptions, to economic and socialchanges and the role of arts, media, and governmentpropaganda in wartime.

As well, we encourage people from all disciplineswithin and without Liberal Arts, Humanities, and theSciences. Given the short notice, we extend theperiod to receive abstracts through March 21, 2006. Please send your completed papers or a
bstracts viae-mail to the Chair of the Women’s Studies Committee,Ms. Jenny Clark at: jclark@southtexascollege.edu orJohn Calvin Jones, PhD, JD at:jcjones@southtexascollege.edu. Please include theterm “Women and War” in the subject line.
We shall make prompt responses of acceptance orrejection.

Thank you

8) Is the Iraq invasion a War of Aggression?:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/02/20/nirq20.xml&sSheet;=/news/2006/02/20/ixhome.html

Campaigners ask courts to rule Iraq war a ‘crime ofaggression’

By Joshua Rozenberg, Legal Editor(Filed: 20/02/2006)

Britain’s most senior judges will be asked today for aruling that could lead to the war in Iraq beingdeclared an illegal “crime of aggression”.

Until now, the courts have taken the view that theycannot rule on the Crown’s prerogative powers to wagewar. But today the law lords will start hearingappeals by peace protesters who claim they wereentitled to commit “criminal” acts in an attempt toprevent what they saw as the greater crime oflaunching an illegal war.
Nobody has been punished for aggression ininternational law since the Nuremberg Tribunalexecuted former Nazi officers in 1946. The newInternational Criminal Court does not yet havejurisdiction over the crime, partly because ofdifficulties in agreeing a definition of it.

But the Government has been told by its senior legaladviser that ministers could face such charges underEnglish law.

In the Attorney General’s advice to the Prime Ministerof March 7, 2003, Lord Goldsmith said: “Aggression isa crime under customary international law whichautomatically forms part of domestic law. It mighttherefore be argued that international aggression is acrime recognised by the common law which can beprosecuted in the UK courts.”

Lord Goldsmith warned Tony Blair to expect opponentsof military action to bring a case against theGovernment or military personnel. “We cannot becertain that they would not succeed,” the AttorneyGeneral said. The first test case involves five peacecampaigners who face criminal damage charges relatingto RAF Fairford, Glos, and who are due to stand trialin Bristol later this year.

Another case involves 14 Greenpeace activistsconvicted of aggravated trespass after they occupiedtanks at Marchwood military base in Southampton.

The third appeal has been brought by a woman convictedof aggravated trespass at RAF Fairford.
All of them claim that they are entitled to a defenceunder Section 3 of the Criminal Law Act, which says “aperson may use such force as is reasonable in thecircumstances in the prevention of crime”.

The law lords are not being asked to rule whether thedecision to take military action against Iraq amountedto aggression. Instead, the five campaigners due tostand trial in Bristol want them to rule that they canraise the argument in their defence.

9) ISIM Review Editor’s Position (this is a good job):

International Institute for the Study of Islam in theModern World – Editor ISIM Review (Netherlands)
http://www.h-net.org/jobs/display_job.php?jobID=30470

10) On a Potential Israeli Boycott:

Why an Economic Boycott of Israel is Justified

by Norman G. Finkelstein
Aftenposten 01.14.2006

The recent proposal that Norway boycott Israeli goodshas provoked passionate debate. In my view, a rationalexamination of this issue would pose two questions: 1)Do Israeli human rights violations warrant an economicboycott? and 2) Can such a boycott make a meaningfulcontribution toward ending these violations? I wouldargue that both these questions should be answered inthe affirmative.

Although the subject of many reports by human rightsorganizations, Israel’s real human rights record inthe Occupied Palestinian Territory is generally notwell known abroad. This is primarily due to theformidable public relations industry of Israel’sdefenders as well as the effectiveness of theirtactics of intimidation, such as labeling critics ofIsraeli policy anti-Semitic.

Yet, it is an incontestable fact that Israel hascommitted a broad range of human rights violations,many rising to the level of war crimes and crimesagainst humanity. These include:

Illegal Killings. Whereas Palestinian suicide attackstargeting Israeli civilians have garnered much mediaattention, Israel’s quantitatively worse record ofkilling non-combatants is less well known. Accordingto the most recent figures of the Israeli InformationCenter for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories(B’Tselem), 3,386 Palestinians have been killed sinceSeptember 2000, of whom 1,008 were identified ascombatants, as opposed to 992 Israelis killed, of whom309 were combatants. This means that three times morePalestinians than Israelis have been killed and up tothree times more Palestinian civilians than Israelicivilians. Israel’s defenders maintain that there’s adifference between targeting civilians andinadvertently killing them. B’Tselem disputes this:”[W]hen so many civilians have been killed andwounded, the lack of intent makes no difference.Israel remains responsible.” Furthermore, AmnestyInternational reports that “many” Palestinians havenot been accidentally killed but “deliberatelytargeted,” while the award-winning New York Timesjournalist Chris Hedges reports that Israeli soldiers”entice children like mice into a trap and murder themfor sport.”

Torture. “From 1967,” Amnesty reports, “the Israelisecurity services have routinely tortured Palestinianpolitical suspects in the Occupied Territories.”B’Tselem found that eighty-five percent ofPalestinians interrogated by Israeli security serviceswere subjected to “methods constituting torture,”while already a decade ago Human Rights Watchestimated that “the number of Palestinians tortured orseverely ill-treated” was “in the tens of thousands -a number that becomes especially significant when itis remembered that the universe of adult andadolescent male Palestinians in the West Bank and Gazais under three-quarters of one million.” In 1987Israel became “the only country in the world to haveeffectively legalized torture” (Amnesty). Although theIsraeli Supreme Court seemed to ban torture in a 1999decision, the Public Committee Against Torture inIsrael reported in 2003 that Israeli security forcescontinued to apply torture in a “methodical androutine” fashion. A 2001 B’Tselem study documentedthat Israeli security forces often applied “severetorture” to “Palestinian minors.”

House demolitions. “Israel has implemented a policy ofmass demolition of Palestinian houses in the OccupiedTerritories,” B’Tselem reports, and since September2000 “has destroyed some 4,170 Palestinian homes.”Until just recently Israel routinely resorted to housedemolitions as a form of collective punishment.According to Middle East Watch, apart from Israel, theonly other country in the world that used such adraconian punishment was Iraq under Saddam Hussein. Inaddition, Israel has demolished thousands of “illegal”homes that Palestinians built because of Israel’srefusal to provide building permits. The motive behinddestroying these homes, according to Amnesty, has beento maximize the area available for Jewish settlers:”Palestinians are targeted for no other reason thanthey are Palestinians.” Finally, Israel has destroyedhundred of homes on security pretexts, yet a HumanRights Watch report on Gaza found that “the pattern ofdestruction.strongly suggests that Israeli forcesdemolished homes wholesale, regardless of whether theyposed a specific threat.” Amnesty likewise found that”Israel’s extensive destruction of homes andproperties throughout the West Bank and Gaza.is
notjustified by military necessity,” and that “Some ofthese acts of destruction amount to grave breaches ofthe Fourth Geneva Convention and are war crimes.”
Apart from the sheer magnitude of its human rightsviolations, the uniqueness of Israeli policies meritsnotice. “Israel has created in the OccupiedTerritories a regime of separation based ondiscrimination, applying two separate systems of lawin the same area and basing the rights of individualson their nationality,” B’Tselem has concluded. “Thisregime is the only one of its kind in the world, andis reminiscent of distasteful regimes from the past,such as the apartheid regime in South Africa.” Ifsingling out South Africa for an internationaleconomic boycott was defensible, it would seem equallydefensible to single out Israel’s occupation, whichuniquely resembles the apartheid regime.

Although an economic boycott can be justified on moralgrounds, the question remains whether diplomacy mightbe more effectively employed instead. The documentaryrecord in this regard, however, is not encouraging.The basic terms for resolving the Israel-Palestineconflict are embodied in U.N. resolution 242 andsubsequent U.N. resolutions, which call for a fullIsraeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza and theestablishment of a Palestinian state in these areas inexchange for recognition of Israel’s right to live inpeace and security with its neighbors. Each year theoverwhelming majority of member States of the UnitedNations vote in favor of this two-state settlement,and each year Israel and the United States (and a fewSouth Pacific islands) oppose it. Similarly, in March2002 all twenty-two member States of the Arab Leagueproposed this two-state settlement as well as “normalrelations with Israel.” Israel ignored the proposal.

Not only has Israel stubbornly rejected this two-statesettlement, but the policies it is currently pursuingwill abort any possibility of a viable Palestinianstate. While world attention has been riveted byIsrael’s redeployment from Gaza, Sara Roy of HarvardUniversity observes that the “Gaza Disengagement Planis, at heart, an instrument for Israel’s continuedannexation of West Bank land and the physicalintegration of that land into Israel.” In particularIsrael has been constructing a wall deep inside theWest Bank that will annex the most productive land andwater resources as well as East Jerusalem, the centerof Palestinian life. It will also effectively severthe West Bank in two. Although Israel initiallyclaimed that it was building the wall to fightterrorism, the consensus among human rightsorganizations is that it is really a land grab toannex illegal Jewish settlements into Israel. RecentlyIsrael’s Justice Minister frankly acknowledged thatthe wall will serve as “the future border of the stateof Israel.”

The current policies of the Israeli government willlead either to endless bloodshed or the dismembermentof Palestine. “It remains virtually impossible toconceive of a Palestinian state without its capital inJerusalem,” the respected Crisis Group recentlyconcluded, and accordingly Israeli policies in theWest Bank “are at war with any viable two-statesolution and will not bolster Israel’s security; infact, they will undermine it, weakening Palestinianpragmatists.and sowing the seeds of growingradicalization.”

Recalling the U.N. Charter principle that it isinadmissible to acquire territory by war, theInternational Court of Justice declared in a landmark2004 opinion that Israel’s settlements in the OccupiedPalestinian Territory and the wall being built toannex them to Israel were illegal under internationallaw. It called on Israel to cease construction of thewall, dismantle those parts already completed andcompensate Palestinians for damages.

Crucially, italso stressed the legal responsibilities of theinternational community:
all States are under an obligation not to recognizethe illegal situation resulting from the constructionof the wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory,including in and around East Jerusalem. They are alsounder an obligation not to render aid or assistance inmaintaining the situation created by suchconstruction. It is also for all States, whilerespecting the United Nations Charter andinternational law, to see to it that any impediment,resulting from the construction of the wall, to theexercise by the Palestinian people of its right toself-determination is brought to an end.A subsequent U.N. General Assembly resolutionsupporting the World Court opinion passedoverwhelmingly. However, the Israeli governmentignored the Court’s opinion, continuing constructionat a rapid pace, while Israel’s Supreme Court ruledthat the wall was legal.

Due to the obstructionist tactics of the UnitedStates, the United Nations has not been able toeffectively confront Israel’s illegal practices.Indeed, although it is true that the U.N. keeps Israelto a double standard, it’s exactly the reverse of theone Israel’s defenders allege: Israel is held not to ahigher but lower standard than other member States. Astudy by Marc Weller of Cambridge University comparingIsrael and the Occupied Palestinian Territory withcomparable situations in Bosnia and Herzegovina,Kosovo, East Timor, occupied Kuwait and Iraq, andRwanda found that Israel has enjoyed “virtualimmunity” from enforcement measures such as an armsembargo and economic sanctions typically adopted bythe U.N. against member States condemned for identicalviolations of international law. Due in part to anaggressive campaign accusing Europe of a “newanti-Semitism,” the European Union has also failed inits legal obligation to enforce international law inthe Occupied Palestinian Territory. Although the claimof a “new anti-Semitism” has no basis in fact (all theevidence points to a lessening of anti-Semitism inEurope), the EU has reacted by appeasing Israel. Ithas even suppressed publication of one of its ownreports, because the authors — like the Crisis Groupand many others — concluded that due to Israelipolicies the “prospects for a two-state solution witheast Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine arereceding.”

The moral burden to avert the impending catastrophemust now be borne by individual states that areprepared to respect their obligations underinternational law and by individual men and women ofconscience. In a courageous initiative American-basedHuman Rights Watch recently called on the U.S.government to reduce significantly its financial aidto Israel until Israel terminates its illegal policiesin the West Bank. An economic boycott would seem to bean equally judicious undertaking. A nonviolent tacticthe purpose of which is to achieve a just and lastingsettlement of the Israel-Palestine conflict cannotlegitimately be called anti-Semitic. Indeed, the realenemies of Jews are those who cheapen the memory ofJewish suffering by equating principled opposition toIsrael’s illegal and immoral policies withanti-Semitism.

11) New Orleans Human Rights Festival:

The 2006 Third Annual New Orleans International Human Rights Film Festival

APRIL 6 – 15, 2006

The New Orleans International Human Rights Film Festival was created to support New Orleans’ social justice community. The 2006 festival is dedicated to a vision of justice for New Orleans and worldwide.

We are proud to bring this festival of cinema to New Orleans in partnership with local social justice organizations doing vital work in this city. Our goal is to raise awareness of human rights issues and provide a forum for artistic expression of these themes.

Support The Festival

The Human Rights Festival is an all-volunteer effort. Proceeds support local organizing. Please donate or volunteer to support the festival. Visit www.nolahumanrights.org/support.html for more information.

Call For Entries

The New Orleans International Human Rights Film Festival is now accepting submissions for the 2006 festival. Films can be from anywhere in the world,
fiction or documentary, short or feature – but must deal with issues related to human rights and/or social justice. Film formats can be 16mm, DVD, Super8, VHS or MiniDV. Submissions must be received by February 17. There is no submission fee, however, we cannot guarantee submissions will be returned. For more details email zte@bellsouth.net or info@nolahumanrights.org.

Festival History:
The New Orleans International Human Rights Film Festival was founded in 2004 by a coalition of local organizers and community members, consulting with local organizations including the Louisiana ACLU, Families and Friends of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children, New Orleans Palestine Solidarity, New Orleans American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, Planned Parenthood of Louisiana and the Mississippi Delta, Iron Rail Bookstore and Library, Neighborhood Gallery, Loyola Amnesty International, Zeitgeist Multidisciplinary Arts Center, and more. Although operated by an all-volunteer staff on a shoestring budget, the first annual festival presented a range of local and national premieres including Fourth World War, Until When, Lost Boys of Sudan, Rana’s Wedding, and the first New Orleans showing in at least thirty years of Battle of Algiers.

In 2005, the Second Annual New Orleans International Human Rights Film Festival presented 35 new films in 17 days and eight venues and featured two world premieres, Elections Fever and Four Months and Ten Days: A Journey Through Palestine. The following films from the 2005 festival were chosen for special recognition:
AUDIENCE AWARD, BEST FILM:MARDI GRAS, MADE IN CHINA Directed by David Redmond
JURY PRIZE, BEST FILM:SCARED SACRED Directed by Velcrow Ripper.
OFFICIAL SELECTION: OPENING NIGHT FILM:FOUR MONTHS AND TEN DAYS: A JOURNEY TO PALESTINE Directed by Rebecca Rapp
OFFICIAL SELECTION: CLOSING NIGHT FILM:SHAKE HANDS WITH THE DEVIL: THE JOURNEY OF ROMEO DELAIRE Directed by Peter Raymont
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the people of New Orleans are struggling for justice, human rights, and the right of return.
Despite our hardship and loss, we are dedicated to continuing this festival in tribute to New Orleans’ community of resistance.
SUPPORT JUSTICE FOR NEW ORLEANS

For active Katrina links, see:
http://peoplegetready.blogspot.com/

1) Krewe du Vieux satire pictures, regarding Katrina (note the French float):
http://flickr.com/photos/thethirdbattleofneworleans/sets/72057594063757567/

More Krewe du Vieux pix available at:
http://peoplegetready.blogspot.com/

Krewe du Vieux’s newsletter, entitled “Monde du Merde”:
http://www.kreweduvieux.org/MdM2006.pdf

2) Today the Louisiana State Legislature is debating a one levee proposal. It’s been through a lot of debate in the past couple of days, and the politicians appear to have been trying to protect their patronage over protecting their constituents from flooding. Here’s some stories and websites for the activism:

“Citizens for One Greater New Orleans” website:
http://cgno.convio.net/site/PageServer

Today’s article on the Boasso amendment:
http://www.nola.com/newslogs/tpupdates/index.ssf?/mtlogs/nola_tpupdates/archives/2006_02_14.html#112989

Levee bill passes with separate east, west bank boards
By Robert Travis Scott Capital bureau

BATON ROUGE — In a major turnaround, a unanimous Senate passed the governor’s bills to overhaul the New Orleans area levee boards Tuesday after supporters of the proposal yielded to West Bank lawmakers who want separate authorities on either side of the Mississippi River.

The centerpiece legislation of the current special session, Senate Bills 8 and 9 by Sen. Walter Boasso, R-Arabi, still must pass the House before the session ends Friday to become law. Several challenges to the bills remain, including attempts that will be made to pull St. Bernard Parish out of the new proposed consolidated authority and to give West Bank officials more say in who will sit on their governing board and when the new law will take effect.

Coming just two days after stalling on the Senate floor, the chamber’s approval put the legislation back on track and restored the governor’s momentum in the Capitol after a several of her initiatives failed to muster support even from her legislative leadership team. Several lawmakers said the Blanco administration had not lobbied them for the levee board bills until Tuesday….

3) Jordan’s Katrina Prison Article:
Imprisoned in New Orleans
By Jordan Flaherty and Tamika Middleton
From Colorlines Magazine (www.colorlines.com) February 2006

When hurricane Katrina hit, there was no evacuation plan for 7,000 prisoners in the New Orleans city jail, generally known as Orleans Parish Prison (OPP), or the approximate 1,500 prisoners in nearby jails. According to first-hand accounts gathered by advocates, prisoners were abandoned in their cells while the water was rising around them. They were subjected to a heavily armed “rescue” by state prison guards that involved beatings, mace and being left in the sun with no water or food for several days, followed by a transfer to state maximum security prisons.

Although their treatment brought national attention to the condition of prisoners in Louisiana, and comparison to prison abuse scandals from Attica to Abu Ghraib, local government officials have attempted to dodge accountability and continue with business as usual.

Raphael Schwartz, a 26-year-old Missouri man arrested and imprisoned for public intoxication in New Orleans on August 27, was sprayed with mace and abandoned by officers in a locked cell with seven other prisoners. According to papers filed by the ACLU of Louisiana, the man had no ventilation and nothing to eat or drink for four days.

Quintano Williams, a 31-year-old office manager picked up on marijuana charges just before the storm hit, testified in ACLU papers to being abandoned for days and then relocated to Hunts Correction Facility, a rural Louisiana maximum security prison, where he was left with thousands of detainees on a football field. There, he witnessed stabbings, but, he said, prison staff “did not interfere with anything that was going on as long as people did not try to get out of the area.”

Rachel Francois was arrested in mid-August, and as far as her family was able to discover never had charges filed against her. “We tried to bail her out,” her mother, Althea Francois, said. “It was the day before Katrina, and the bail bonds places were all closed. If they had been open, she would have been released that day. Instead, we could not get her released until two months later.” Francois, a prisoner-rights advocate, searched for two weeks before she found out where her daughter was being held. Rachel and other women were taken to Hunts and then Angola, an all-male prison. “When I found out she was at Angola prison, just the idea really broke my heart,” her mother said. “She didn’t have a bed until the last few days she was there. She had no food for four days. She saw them throw food at the men like they were animals, but even then they didn’t give the women anything. The women were having panic attacks and were in fear for their lives. ”

Most of the people trapped in this brutal web of governmental abuse and neglect would have been released within a few weeks even if convicted. However, as of this writing several months later, many remain locked in maximum security prisons such as Angola, Louisiana’s notorious former slave plantation. The flooding of New Orleans showed vividly the results of local, state and federal governments’ misplaced priorities, as well as the privatizing and militarizing of relief. In the months after the disaster, while the people of New Orleans wanted to return and rebuild their city, what they got instead was “security.” Hundreds of National Guard troops, as well as police forces from across the U.S. and private security forces including Blackwater, Wackenhut and an Israeli company called Instinctive Shooting International began patrolling the nearly empty city.

Long before Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans was hit by hurricanes of disinvestment, deindustrialization, corruption and neglect. Louisiana has the highest rate of incarceration in the country—816 sentenced prisoners per 100,000 state residents. By comparison, Texas comes in a distant second place with 694 per 100,000. Although Blacks make up 32 percent of Louisiana’s population, they constitute 72 percent of the state’s prison population. Pre-Katrina, New Orleans industry had already left, and most remaining work involved low-paying, transient, insecure jobs in the service economy. Orleans Parish Prison was the eighth largest jail in the country, made up of several buildings located in Midcity New Orleans. The population of the jail was predominantly people from the city’s many low-income communities and communities of color. The jail also rented out cells to the federal government to house immigration detainees and other federal prisoners. However, most of the prisoners left behind as the jail flooded had not been convicted of any crime, but were being held pre-sentencing. Lawyers and researchers working on behalf of the prisoners say that most were accused of misdemeanors, such as minor drug possession, parking violations and public drunkenness.

Mary Howell is a civil rights lawyer who has been active in defense of prisoners from OPP for years. “Last year, 80,000 people came into OPP as arrestees,” she said. “Very few were eligible for rehabilitation programs. This prison has mostly been warehousing people. We’ve suffered under a policy where the city b
uilds a huge jail that is then required to be filled with human beings, or else it’s a waste of money.”
“Being a sheriff in Louisiana is one of the most powerful positions in the state,” adds Howell. “ There’s virtually no oversight. At the time of the hurricane they had about 1,200 employees under the Sheriff in Orleans Parish. Those employees, under state law can also be used by the sheriff for political campaigns. That adds up to a political empire and a patronage empire.”

Ursula Price is a staff investigator for A Fighting Chance, a nonprofit organization that works for indigent defense in Louisiana, as well as a part of Safe Streets Strong Communities, a coalition dedicated to transforming New Orleans’ criminal justice system. She has been working around the clock since the hurricane hit, despite losing everything she owned in the flooding of New Orleans. “Investigating what happened to these prisoners and where they are is not supposed to be our job. This should be the city’s concern,” she said. Initial reports gathered from testimony of both inmates and guards put the number of inmates unaccounted for anywhere between a dozen and several hundred. Sheriff Marlin Gusman has been sticking with an official statement that, “all inmates housed in Orleans Parish were safely evacuated from our 10 facilities by boat and transported to state and parish facilities by bus.” He also suggested to media that reports of abuse come from “disgruntled” inmates who “lie.” Human Rights Watch and ACLU responded that these reports are consistent from many different prisoners and also match with reports from interviews with guards at OPP. In late November, Gusman’s office quietly put out arrest warrants for 14 inmates, while still denying that any were missing, other than two who had been recaptured.

The defense of these prisoners has been managed by just a few organizations and individuals. Phyllis Mann, a lawyer from rural Alexandria, Louisiana, found that many of the OPP prisoners had been moved to a prison near her, and she started visiting them. According to Price, Mann dropped everything in her private practice to dedicate herself to their legal defense—and had 12 former prisoners living in her house. Official negligence is just the beginning of the obstacles advocates have faced. “Immediately after the flooding, the governor issued an order suspending the clock on court proceedings,” Price said. The state no longer had a time limit—formerly 60 days—under which to present charges or release prisoners. “It’s stopped due process,” Price continued. “Almost all of the public defenders have been laid off. There are only seven left in Orleans Parish. Meanwhile, in trying to defend these folks, we have massive travel costs and almost no funding.” For the prisoners, there are other hardships. “These are Katrina survivors, but they’re not getting their FEMA money or Red Cross aid or food stamps,” said Price. ” They’ve lost contact with their families; many have children and they don’t know where they are.”

Ross Angle, who has since been released, told Human Rights Watch, “Picture waking up everyday in a prison somewhere—you don’t even know where you are—knowing you were supposed to be free, not knowing how long they were going to keep you there. Not knowing if it would ever end. After they moved me, I kept asking for someone to look at my case, and they just kept telling me, ‘We’re waiting on the DOC guys, we don’t know anything.’ If my lady wasn’t seven months pregnant, calling them everyday and yelling, then I would probably still be there…It made me feel worthless.” After the hurricane, the incarceration of suspected “looters” was the first city function to restart. Due process and civil liberties were almost nonexistent for new arrestees, who were put in cages in a makeshift prison at a Greyhound bus station, with no access to phones or lawyers. When ACLU attorney Katie Schwartzmann went to observe proceedings, a sheriff’s deputy at first refused her access, as well as taking and reading her notepad. According to advocates and recently released prisoners, new arrestees are offered a choice—either plead guilty and be put to work on city cleanup crews, or plead not guilty and face months in Angola prison with no access to a lawyer.

From the initial images broadcast around the world, demonizing the people of New Orleans as “looters,” and criminals, there have been two very different visions struggling for the future of the city. One vision is a vision of “security,” exemplified by Governor Blanco bringing in National Guard troops with the words, “They have M-16s and they are locked and loaded…These troops know how to shoot and kill, and they are more than willing to do so if necessary, and I expect they will.” This is a vision of corporate security and restructuring, handing the city over to Blackwater Security’s armed guards and Halliburton’s disaster profiteers, while “redeveloping” Black neighborhoods into golf courses and luxury housing.

The other vision is of justice and human rights. This vision involves restoring jobs, health care and housing for New Orleans, rather than offering minimum wage dead-end jobs, crumbling infrastructure and more prisons. It is a vision supported by the work of countless activists and organizers from around the US, as well as the overwhelming majority of the people of New Orleans. “Despite all of the horror we are seeing daily, my hope is this is an opportunity for change,” Price said. “OPP corruption is being laid bare—people being held past their time is nothing new in this system, it’s just more extreme now. This is something to organize around and fight against.”

(This article has been slightly altered from the version appearing in Colorlines Magazine)=====================================
Tamika Middleton is the Southern Regional Coordinator for Critical Resistance and a member of the People’s Hurricane Relief Fund and Oversight Coalition. —————

Jordan Flaherty is a resident of New Orleans, an organizer with New Orleans Network and an editor of Left Turn Magazine. His previous articles from New Orleans are at http://www.leftturn.org/articles/SpecialCollections/katrina.aspx

===================================== GRASSROOTS, PEOPLE OF COLOR-LED GULF COAST ORGANIZATIONS TO DONATE TO: http://www.leftturn.org/Articles/Viewer.aspx?id=689&type;=W =====================================
Other Resources for information and action:
Reconstruction Watch – http://www.reconstructionwatch.orgNew Orleans Network – http://www.neworleansnetwork.orgFamilies and Friends of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children – http://www.fflic.orgPeoples Hurricane Relief Fund – http://www.communitylaborunited.net Justice for New Orleans – http://www.justiceforneworleans.org/ Common Ground – http://www.commongroundrelief.org Four Directions Solidarity Network – http://www.eswn.org/Color Of Change – http://www.colorofchange.orgBlack Commentator – http://www.blackcommentator.comComprehensive website for information and action related to prisoners in New Orleans: http://www.criticalresistance.org/katrina/

This long sojourn was something of a self-imposed sabbatical, enhanced by a profound sense of inertia. Interestingly, the blog connected to this listserv still attracts a solid 29 hits a day — no less, no more. I’m convinced that the National Security Administration [NSA] has simply hooked my blog up to its listening network through 29 separate software nodes. Perhaps that sounds like a conspiracy theory, but it makes a lot more sense to me than the idea that 29 different (or same) people check this blog daily when it’s been inactive for nearly 6 weeks now. I’m equally convinced that the FBI visit that my parents were treated to on my behalf in the spring of 2003 was triggered by the NSA listening program. In other words, they were listening to me (in Jordan at the time, with MSF), and they sent the FBI to check up. Perhaps we should be reassured that they’re on the beat, that they didn’t ever really harass us, or that we can all feel safer that we’re all being watched — except that every time Bush repeats the assertion that it’s a “limited” program monitoring the activities of those with “suspected ties to al-Qaeda,” I’m reminded that he means me, and I’m part of a “limited” phenomenon. Folks always wonder why European Jewry didn’t get out of town when the writing was on the wall in the 1930’s. I think I know why — the crawfish boil scenario. That is, if you throw crawfish into boiling water they struggle to get out. If you heat it up slowly, they don’t even struggle. Analogy certainly works.

Back to Katrina affairs. Last night Mr. Bush once again shook all of us New Orleanians out of any sense of laissez-faire by pointedly, intentionally, and brusquely ignoring the long awaited initiatives necessary to bring back New Orleans. In his State of the Union, the greatest national disaster (financially) in US history was all but ignored — and New Orleanians are pissed.

Granted, our fine mayor Mr. Nagin has not helped matters lately, what with his “chocolate city” comments followed by profuse (and sincere, it appears) apologies. Many folks are energized by the recently announced candidacy of Mitch Landrieu (Jesuit graduate, Louisiana Lt. Governor) ibn Moon Landrieu (Jesuit graduate, NO mayor back in the 1970’s, namesake for the “Moonwalk,” and HUD cabinet secretary for President Carter). Although I’ve got nothing against Ray Nagin, I have to admit that Nagin’s national credibility is shot and Mitch would probably be a great improvement at this point.

Following Bush’s symphony of silence last night, today LA Governor Blanco announced state intentions to recover oil and gas royalties which up until now have effortlessly flowed into that Black Hole known as the US Treasury (see article below). Now, that’s what we’re talking about! Her initiative would “only” bring in about 2 billion USD per year, but that would at least give LA state govt enough cash to do something for itself. Pissing it away to — oh, so uncorruptable — DC is simply getting us nowhere.

Which brings me to the main point of today’s posting — secession. I have been talking it up for months now, and have always said that if no significant federal reconstruction funds materialize by this summer, it’ll be time to start talking secession. As far as I’m concerned, last night moved the schedule up. The Gulf Coast is simply no longer on the national agenda. We’re on our own. Period. To paraphrase our friendly neighborhood Evangelicals: “the feds help those who help themselves.”

Here’s a proposal, to “help ourselves”. We need to immediately start a serious petition drive to put on the November 2006 election ballot a referendum on secession from the United States of America. If nothing else, it’ll be hard to ignore the symbolic significance of a secession referendum in any part of the US. One might argue that this would alienate the rest of the US, but I don’t see how we could be more ignored than we were last night. I would argue the opposite — maybe this would wake DC up on the one hand, and spread some useful ideas for community activism in the rest of these United States. So, any ideas for secession petition logistics are hereby welcome.

The argument is as follows: we in the Gulf Coast have been paying our federal taxes and sending our troops to die halfway around the world for decades. As of last night, exactly 50 Louisianians have died serving in the US Armed Forces in Iraq since 2003. When Katrina hit, 1/3 of our LA National Guard was in Iraq — absolutely useless to their home state. We pay oil and gas royalties to the tune of well over 5 billion USD per year. The Port of Louisiana is the primary export gateway for US grain exports. New Orleans is the center for one of the few worthwhile cultural contributions America has ever given the world — Jazz. Widening it out a bit, the Gulf Coast has big time gambling coming soon on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, Keesler Air Force Base, Pensacola Naval Training Facility (where they learn to land planes on old carriers), the (bustling) Port of Mobile, Avondale shipyards, the Biloxi shipyards (where they build state of the art destroyers), Michoud (space shuttle gas tanks), Stennis NASA facility (rocket engine testing facility), etc. In a nutshell, all of this has been provided to the US Government and society. In return, all we’ve ever asked for is protection. In New Orleans, the levees — a federal responsibility — breached. After the breach, recriminations, excuses, clean-up funding, and…no more. Well, it’s time to take “pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps” to the next level.

While it may seem purely symbolic at this point, the utopian vision is as follows: we should push for an independent nation state with the following borders: Lake Charles (or Galveston) to the west, Pensacola (or Mobile) to the east, Lafayette-Baton Rouge-Hattiesburg to the north, and the Gulf Coast to the south. It’s a little sliver of America, but it’s got some jewels. Export tariffs, oil and gas royalties, transport fees, tourism, gambling, etc — we can finance our own recovery. It’s a little sketchy, but there it is. Who knows, maybe France will send some money over, via the EU.

Now that South Park is hitting on Katrina, I guess there’s pleny more to say. But enough for today.

In case I don’t write anything for another 6 weeks, I urge you to follow the following blogs, each of which is kept up frequently and has further links on Katrina:

http://peoplegetready.blogspot.com/
http://worldclassneworleans.blogspot.com/

Our one article today, regarding secession (I have saved many more, but…maybe later):

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uslatest/story/0,,-5586693,00.html

La. Governor Demands U.S. Pay Royalties

Wednesday February 1, 2006 7:46 PM

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) – Gov. Kathleen Blanco isdemanding that the federal government give Louisianamore of the billions in royalties from oil and naturalgas extracted off its coastlines, saying she’ll blockfuture leases without an increase in the state’sshare.

Blanco’s warning, in a letter this week to the federalagency that manages offshore drilling, comes as thestate is struggling to finance up to $40 billion inhurricane recovery and protection projects, andcomplaining that the federal government isn’t helpingenough.

The state wants half the royalties from oil and gasproduced beyond its three-mile boundary – a sum thatcould amount to more than $2 billion a year.

The state currently gets 27 percent of royaltiesproduced between three miles and six miles offshore.For oil and gas production in the Gulf of Mexico fromsix miles offshore to international waters, Louisianareceived just $32 million of the $5.7 billion thefederal government brought in.

Under f
ederal law, for lease sales to go through,governors in adjacent states must agree that the salesare consistent with their states’ coastal managementplans.

The U.S. secretary of the interior, who oversees theMinerals Management Service, could override Blanco ifshe attempts to block the next lease sale. But SidneyCoffee, Blanco’s executive assistant for coastalactivities, said the federal government probably willwant to avoid the yearslong legal battle that couldresult.

The Minerals Management Service has not completed itsreview of Blanco’s letter and has not issued aresponse, an agency spokesman said Wednesday.

The governor met with oil and gas industry officialslast week.

Jeff Copeskey, of Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil and GasAssociation, said Blanco’s letter is meant to bringattention to the issue, and is not a slap at theindustry.