Monday, January 22, 2007

Law & Disorder, Anthony Arnove, Michael Schwartz

Monday. This is from today's snapshot and I want to pull out for the start:

Ann Wright: Now that's kind of the heart of it all, isn't it? The conduct becoming an officer? The ability to think. The ability to take care of your troops, to keep them out of harm's way, to explore with your chain of command what's going on, why are you having to do certain things? Trusting in your chain of command that you're asking questions that your seniors are asking, are asking, are asking . . .
And I think what we we see in the case of Lt. Watada is that the entire chain of command has failed starting with the four-star generals that were the advisors to the Secretary of Defense and the president, with General Myers, the chief of staff, [. . .] who was such a weak chairman of the Joint Chiefs that he did not question it, he was a toady of the Bush administration.
We did have one four-star general who spoke out -- General Shinseki, chief of staff of the army -- who questioned. He actually didn't question the war, he questioned the number of troops -- how the war was going to be prosecuted. Our generals in the chain of command have not acted as they should have and it's just kind of gone all the way down. The questioning that really goes up and down in the military because there is a dynamic part of the military it's just not one monolythic group there's a lot of debate going on in the scenes and behind the scenes. [. . .]
For the Lt. to be the one that is carrying the load on questioning the war is a little unfair. There should have been people much higher up that were questioning, as they are now, the retired generals are questioning, but that's a little late. [. . .]
It's hard to question sometimes even though you know it's your responsibility and your obligation to do it. But we see here that we've got very few people in the military who are openly questioning but then you look at the polls in newspapers that are being taken of the service members in Iraq and, what is it, 75% of them say we shouldn't be there. So there is an underground movement of the military itself. They're not the ones that can stop wars from beginning but they're the ones that ultimately are the ground fodder for it and what they start saying, "It's not worth my life anymore" that's when these things will start slowing down. And then it's up to us as civilians be going to our Congress to demand that the Congress stop funding the war. If you want to support the troops bring them home, stop the funding of the war.

I really respect Ann Wright and I wanted everyone to think about what she's talking about before I got to anything else.

Now let's talk about WBAI's Law & Disorder. I'm going to focus on the first section with
Anthony Arnove and Michael Schwartz and Rebecca's planning to grab the second half (with Carolyn Ho -- the mother of Ehren Watada). Geoff Brady is the producer of the show and he did a set up for the show today at the opening where he talked about a lot of things. I'm grabbing from his intro to note that he called the kangroo court-martial Watada's facing Feb. 5th a "mere formality" because the judge has stripped Watada of the right to argue a defense (he can't talk about why he decided not to deploy to Iraq) and Brady noted that Watada's actions were "his courageous stand against the Iraq war" -- I know that last part may be real obvious but when you consider that the first time The Nation printed Ehren Watada's name it was in a sentence calling him a coward, I think we need to note the obvious and the real left. (By the way, I have something to note from C.I. at the end of this part.)

So Arrnove and Schwartz talked about the illegal war and covered a huge number of topics. Arnove was talking about how you had to watch yourself and not fall into the Shia and Sunni thing the press promotes because the problems in Iraq stem from the "conflict between an occupation and those under an occupation." Comparing it to Vietnam, he noted that it's a bit more at stake for the bullies because they're focused on the oil and "setting up a client regime."

To excuse the massive failure that is the illegal war, the 'hot' thing to do is to turn it around and blame it on the people who were invaded. He noted that this blaming came from lots of groups
"including among people who are calling themselves, critics, opponents of the war which is this racist idea that we went in to help the Iraq people, to bring democracy . . . but we just didn't realize how 'backwards' they were" and that "'democracy' could not take roots in the hostile" terrain.

Since Katha Pollitt is convinced that the peace movement is lying to the people (I thought that was The Nation's job?), let me address her crap of "Withdrawing from Iraq may be the right thing to do, but it won't mean peace, at least not for Iraqis." That's prefaced with "Be honest." (Thanks to C.I. for that. Ma threw out all of our copies of the rag after the decision was made that until The Nation gets a spine, it never comes back in our home.) That's all of her point seven in "Happy New Year!" in the Jan. 22nd issue. That's all she has to say on Iraq. And yet she still manages to get it wrong.

Before I go on, let me make it easy for Nation readers, here's my point seven: "Be honest. Talking about Iraq, the peace movement and war resisters takes courage, there's little out there, at least for The Nation."

Arnove's addressed this point repeatedly, that violence doesn't stop the minute US forces leave. But US forces breed the violence and when they leave, a big source of the hostility is gone. F**k! I just got something. [I've deleted this in case we need to use it at Third or keep a 'round in the chamber.] Okay, so Phony Pollitt writes a column where she gets one whole wopping sentence about Iraq in -- is that the most she's written since Jan. 2006 about it? Probably. She didn't write about war resisters. She didn't even write about Watada. She didn't write about Abeer. Maybe she was too busy driving to the polls in August?

But if she'd listened to the show today, she would have heard this addressed. Turn off the NPR!
If she'd listened, she would have heard Schwartz making the points that need to be made and he didn't have to say, "Number seven . . ." But then he was being honest.

Now let me note that Alan Wolfe, whom Polltt gives a shout out to, is a stupid idiot. Everyone in the community knows that. They know how stupid Wolfe is. When we were doing the editorial, C.I. was half with us and we asked who Alan Wolfe was and C.I. sighed and said "Brock!" And we all remembered. I'm looking for it online right now.

This is from a roundtable at The Common Ills:

Dona: Well, this may not help, I grabbed the book section. Where you will find yet another book containing text previously printed in the paper and here it is reviewed by the paper in a full page review.

C.I.: Good Lord. Can the paper stop pushing their own writers? Who reviews that nonsense?

Dona: Alan Wolfe.

Jim: "For the record," a stream of curse words are not being included in this transcript.

C.I.: These are the kind of things that make me wish I hadn't made this a work environment safe site. I would love to let fly on the know nothing who knew nothing about David Brock's book. The one who slammed David Brock for not knowing that Chris Matthews was against the war when Brock, in fact, writes that in the book that Wolfe was supposed to be reviewing?

Ty: You know your bylines.

C.I.: On that, the review is notorious within the community. I've probably read hundreds of e-mails on that since The Common Ills started up. So let's be clear here. The Times pays someone to review a book. They turn in a review where they criticize an author for not addressing an issue that is in fact addressed in the book. And yet, they turn around and hire this person who may not have read the book for the first assignment, or else didn't read it closely enough, or else lied, or else just can't retain what he read. That is crap. He was hired to review books, Brock was only one [book, there are several reviewed in the "New Pamphleteers] in his lame ass review, and he couldn't do that job, he wasn't up to it. There needs to be accountability. This wasn't a mistake or a typo. This was a case of someone not doing the work they were hired for. That should keep you from being hired to review a book again.
But the Times never corrected the mistake. You can go to the review today, I think it's called "The New Pamphleteers" or some such nonsense, and you'll still see the mistake. They should be embarrassed. People should boo and hiss Alan Wolfe on his campus. They should say, "Hey professor, you're so big and mighty on ethics and religion but you took money without working for it!" There was not an excuse for the mistake to make it into print. The man obvioulsy didn't read the book. He probably skimmed it, and probably the others he was reviewing as well, and he made a HUGE mistake. Readers of the paper complained repeatedly. The Times never corrected the mistake. Again, you can pull up the review, they're free of charge at the web site, and you can see that the mistake still stands without a correction. They were told, the corrections dept. was repeatedly told, Okrent was informed repeatedly. Members have forwarded countless e-mails on they sent to the paper on this. The paper has had no interest in correcting their mistake. They should be ashamed and embarrassed. And I'm sorry but David Brock needs to do a Media Matters thing on that. He needs to demand a correction. Until he does, the paper won't correct it. They'll continue to ignore the readers. If David Brock, the author, points out, as we've done here in December, the page that Chris Matthews and there's another one, maybe Pat Buchanan, appear on, and that Wolfe got it wrong, the paper will correct it. Until then they are happy to repeatedly ingore multiple complaints by readers over this issue while maintaing that they have a new policy with regards to corrections and getting praise, mind you, for their new openess to corrections.

Now, here's more on that from another entry at The Common Ills:


So let's take the book review that has thirty of you still upset: Alan Wolfe's "The New Pamphleteers." It appeared in the July 11th Sunday Book Review. There's been plenty of time for the Times to issue a correction but the paper has failed to do so. Calls, e-mails and letters have resulted in no correction.

What needs to be corrected?

Read the following two paragraphs closely:

Brock's previous book, ''Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative,'' his 2002 mea culpa for gutter-shouting from the conservative side, was engaging and informative. Too bad, then, that he now seems blinded by the left. ''The Republican Noise Machine'' is as petty in its discussion of people as it is sloppy in its handling of facts. Unable to keep an insult in his quiver, Brock gleefully announces that the Catholic theologian Michael Novak had his thesis rejected at Harvard and that the political scientist Abigail Thernstrom did not get academic tenure, factoids that are either irrelevant (anyone familiar with the academy knows what thesis committees can be like) or wrong (Thernstrom rejected a full-time academic career).

Brock also fails to grasp the conflicts that have emerged within right-wing punditry since he served in its ranks. Chris Matthews was not a supporter of the war in Iraq and Bill O'Reilly has serious questions about it. Lou Dobbs now sounds like Dick Gephardt when he discusses outsourcing. Andrew Sullivan's position on gay marriage is anathema to many other conservatives. Conservatives may well have shared a party line when they were out of power, but now that they have an actual president advancing their worldview, their ideas suddenly have consequences -- and turmoil is the inevitable result. Libertarians attack Bush's statism; fiscal conservatives, his big spending. This kind of behavior among liberals is called political suicide.

Did you note the emphasis? Let's go to the book Wolfe is supposed to have read to review it:

During the George W. Bush era, [Chris] Matthews distinguished himself as the lone host of a cable talk show who opposed the Iraq war, joining hands with both the liberal Left and some members of the Far Right, such as Pat Buchanan (p. 240 of The Republican Noise Machine).

We can quibble over Bill O'Reilly's "serious questions" (if they're so serious, why did O'Reilly admit he was wrong about the war on ABC's Good Morning America -- when pressed to do so -- and not on his own show?). But the fact is Wolfe makes the claim that David Brock doesn't realize some on the right are against the war. Brock is aware of that and notes Pat Buchanan. Wolfe asserts that Brock doesn't realize that Chris Matthews didn't support the war. Right there on page 240 of Brock's book is Brock addressing that issue. The book Wolfe was supposed to have read before reviewing it.

Translation, Wofle is wrong and the Times has addressed this matter by ignoring it.

That's the crappy writer (who writes for The New Republican) that Katha Pollitt's praising and ha-ha on her, he made an idiot out of himself (and slammed the left while attacking the right) Sunday. That's funny because she's griping, in that new year column, that the left applauds the right. I'd say the left wasting time on left-posers is more damaging.

Now new content at The Third Estate Sunday Review:


Editorial: On the useless who know better -- this was not the planned editorial. We had one and I hope we'll rework for this weekend. We had an illustration of the Bully Boy but couldn't post it and without the illustration, since he was the point, we needed something new at the last minute. (Hello! is a program that posts pictures. C.I. and Rebecca have always used it because it's set up to work with Blogger/Blogspot. It went dead. It no longer works with Blogger/Blogspot. They didn't send out e-mails. It was time to send the illustrations and C.I. logs into Hello and gets "Blogger is dead." Rebecca logs into her account and gets the same message. So we lost out on all the planned illustrations.) C.I. didn't realize we were addressing Katha. C.I. was trying to find a new program to use and Jim would ask questions or say, "Ava, C.I. give me an opening here." And they would. They weren't really paying attention. :D (They did a great job.) We all wrote this.


TV: The new Steve McQueen? -- Ava and C.I.'s latest. Roar!! See that's what real feminists can do. They don't need to publish a numbered list, they can actually think for themselves.

Roundtable -- we worked forever and ever on this. And to make sure everyone's most important point got in, they scanned the notes (taken by Ava and C.I.) and e-mailed them to all of us on the phone so we could look over t and say what part we said was most important to us.
This is pretty amazing. Tony said that to me today and I thought it was good but we went into the campus library to read over it and I think it really is amazing. It's dealing with so much and it's a HELL OF A LOT MORE than The Nation's done in the whole year of 2006, if you ask me.
Kat has strong words on Katha Pollitt.

Phoning It In, Sailing Along -- Katha Pollitt, you are everywhere! :D

Mailbag -- This is one of the features we had an illustration for and really wanted it to go up with the feature. At past one a.m. C.I.'s time, C.I. put it in early this morning. I think C.I. got thirty minutes sleep yesterday.

Another confession to the rape and murder of 14-ye... -- just catching people up on Abeer.

The Nation Stats -- Is Katha Pollitt happy with the number of women published by The Nation? If so, she must not be paying attention -- it's basically 4 times as many men as women that are published as of the issue we're noting here. Woo-hoo! How proud that must be.

Highlights-- Cedric, Kat, Betty, Wally, Rebecca, Elaine and me pick out highlights.


The roundtable took FOREVER! And then came the problems with the images and then came having to do a new editorial and having to lose another feature because we needed an illustration for it too.

Okay, Friday, I wrote about Rebecca's mother-in-law's opinions of Katrina vanden Heuvel. You know, if you read the roundtable, I did try to get a response on that from C.I. I didn't. I still don't have one. But Sunday, I was told to get a pen and write something down and I could use if I wanted to. Here it is.

C.I.: Everyone's entitled to their opinions. Had I been asked of my opinion of Katrina vanden Heuvel, as a person, I would've noted her sense of humor which includes a laugh that can warm a room. People rarely note her sense of humor so that's what I would have emphasized. Others may feel differently and that's their right. What's always stood out to me, about the person, was the sense of humor -- one of the most important assets anyone can have.

So that's C.I.'s response in full. I don't even know if C.I. read the post but I was told, "No, I'm not mad. You shared someone's opinion. Everyone's entitled to their opinion. But everyone can look at the same person, movie, painting, whatever and see something different."

Okay, this is from Paul Craig Roberts' "Only Impeachment Can Prevent More War:"

Everyone knows that Bush's Iraq "surge" will not work. Even the authors of the plan, neoconservatives Frederick Kagan and Jack Keane, have emphasized that the plan cannot work with any less than an addition of 50,000 US troops committed to another three years of combat. Bush is only adding 40% of that number of troops, and Defense Secretary Gates speaks of the operation being over by summer's end.
On January 18 a panel of retired generals testifying on Capitol Hill slammed Bush's surge plan as "a fool's errand." Even the easily bamboozled American public knows the plan will not work. Newsweek's latest poll released January 20 shows that only 23% of the public support sending more troops to Iraq and that twice as many Americans trust the Democrats in Congress than trust Bush.
A majority of Americans (54%) believe Bush to be neither honest nor ethical, and 57% believe that Bush lacks "strong leadership qualities."
Nevertheless, Bush defended his surge plan, telling a group of TV stations last week, "I believe it will work."
Bush is correct that it will work--indeed, the surge is working. We have to be clear about how the plan works. It does not mean that 21,500 more US troops will bring order and stability to Iraq. The surge is working, because it is deflecting attention from the Bush Regime's real game plan.
The real game plan is to orchestrate a war with Iran and to initiate wider conflict in the Middle East before public and military pressure forces the Bush Regime to withdraw US troops from Iraq.
Two US carrier attack groups have been deployed to the Persian Gulf. US missile systems are being sent to oil producing countries to counter any incoming missiles from Iran should any survive the US attack. Israeli pilots have been training for an attack on Iran. US war doctrine has been changed to permit pre-emptive nuclear attack on non-nuclear countries. US attack aircraft have been deployed at bases in Turkey. A neocon admiral who attends AIPAC events has been made commander in chief of US forces in the Middle East. Obviously, the ground war in Iraq and Afghanistan are not the focus of the Bush Regime's new military deployments. The Bush Regime is focused on attacking Iran.
In CounterPunch (January 16) Col. Sam Gardiner reports that the Bush Regime has put into operation a group led by National Security Council staff whose mission is to create and foment outrage against Iran. Col. Gardiner details various signs of the Bush Regime's escalation and indicates some of the final deployments that will signal an imminent strike on Iran, such as "USAF tankers moved to unusual places, like Bulgaria" in order to position them for refueling B-2 bombers on their way to Iran.

Check out Like Maria Said Paz for Elaine's thoughts tonight. Here's C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot:"

Monday, January 22, 2007. Chaos and violence continue with over 100 Iraqis reported dead, Bully Boy tanks again in the polls (on a 'reality' show, we could vote him off the island by now), the people prove they don't need the approval of 'judge' to argue Ehren Watada's case in a citizen tribunal on the illegal war held this past weekend, Kurdish forces make like many Iraqis in the military and self-check out, and -- what do you know -- with an eye witness who talked to the press this weekend an unnamed US military flack finally grunts - yeah, maybe they do shoot down US helicopters in Iraq.


Starting with US war resister Ehren Watada, On February 5th, Watada faces a court-martial. "Judge" Head has 'ruled' that Ehren Watada cannot explain the reasons he reached his decision to deploy to Iraq, he cannot explain which orders he honored in his refusal to fight in an illegal war and he cannot really present his case. Saturday and Sunday, Citizens' Hearing on the Legality of U.S. Actions in Iraq was held in Tacoma, Washington and there, in a hearing by, for and of the people, the arguments could be made and were.

Among those testifying were Ann Wright (retired from the State Department, retired US army colonel) who was asked about the duty of Ehren Watada

Ann Wright: Now that's kind of the heart of it all, isn't it? The conduct becoming an officer? The ability to think. The ability to take care of your troops, to keep them out of harm's way, to explore with your chain of command what's going on, why are you having to do certain things? Trusting in your chain of command that you're asking questions that your seniors are asking, are asking, are asking . . .
And I think what we we see in the case of Lt. Watada is that the entire chain of command has failed starting with the four-star generals that were the advisors to the Secretary of Defense and the president, with General Myers, the chief of staff, [. . .] who was such a weak chairman of the Joint Chiefs that he did not question it, he was a toady of the Bush administration.
We did have one four-star general who spoke out -- General Shinseki, chief of staff of the army -- who questioned. He actually didn't question the war, he questioned the number of troops -- how the war was going to be prosecuted. Our generals in the chain of command have not acted as they should have and it's just kind of gone all the way down. The questioning that really goes up and down in the military because there is a dynamic part of the military it's just not one monolythic group there's a lot of debate going on in the scenes and behind the scenes. [. . .]
For the Lt. to be the one that is carrying the load on questioning the war is a little unfair. There should have been people much higher up that were questioning, as they are now, the retired generals are questioning, but that's a little late. [. . .]
It's hard to question sometimes even though you know it's your responsibility and your obligation to do it. But we see here that we've got very few people in the military who are openly questioning but then you look at the polls in newspapers that are being taken of the service members in Iraq and, what is it, 75% of them say we shouldn't be there. So there is an underground movement of the military itself. They're not the ones that can stop wars from beginning but they're the ones that ultimately are the ground fodder for it and what they start saying, "It's not worth my life anymore" that's when these things will start slowing down. And then it's up to us as civilians be going to our Congress to demand that the Congress stop funding the war. If you want to support the troops bring them home, stop the funding of the war.

Amy Rolph (Seattle Post-Intelligencer) reports that David Krieger ("chairman of the tribunal") opened Saturday's proceedings by noting, "We believe that Lt. Watada's contentions about the illegality of the war deserve a full and fair hearing." The Associated Press reported over 400 people were present on Saturday alone. Also appearing was Ehren Watada. Hal Bernton (Seattle Times) reports that Watada declared "Judge" Head's decision to disallow a defense in the court-martial to be "a travesty of justice. That it is a violation of our most sacred due process, and indeed it is un-American." Rolph notes that US war resister Darrell Anderson was also among those offering testimony about what he witnessed in Iraq and the "training that dehumanizes Iraqis". Though arguments can't be made in the court-martial, they were made in in Tacoma. John Nichols (The Nation) blogs at The Notion that: "It appears that the prosecutors do not want to provide Watada with an open and fair forum in which to explain his arguments against the war." Of course, what the prosecution wants or doesn't only matters if the "Judge" rules and he did so when he released his decision on Tuesday of last week.

In a speech given at the Church Center for the UN on December 8th by Watada's mother, Carolyn Ho, (broadcast on WBAI's Law and Disorder today) she explained how her son began researching Iraq in June of 2005 (one year prior to his going public), the basic research to get to know the country he was going to be deployed to, and, as he studied and studied, he came across the shaping of intelligence, the Downing Street Memos exposing that intel was being fixed, the phoney WMDs claims . . . In January of 2006, she received a call from her son who explained that he had decided he wouldn't deploy to Iraq when the time came. On June 7, 2006, Carolyn Ho recounted, "the day before his 28th birthday, he went public and announced his decision not to deploy when the unit went to Iraq." Key point: "I don't believe that my son has committed any crime and that he should be serving any time,"

Also on Saturday, Ehren Watada spoke at the Kitsap Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Bremerton. David Vognar (Kitsap Sun) reports that over 70 people turned out to hear Watada explain how. in June, he came to be the first US officer to publicly refuse to deploy to Iraq -- Watada threw the responsibility back to the people noting, "It is the American people who have the power to end this war, but only if they have the will to do so."

Watada is part of a movement of resistance within the military that also includes Kyle Snyder, Agustin Aguayo, Ivan Brobeck, Darrell Anderson, Ricky Clousing, Aidan Delgado, Mark Wilkerson, Joshua Key, Camilo Meija, Pablo Paredes, Carl Webb, Stephen Funk, David Sanders, Dan Felushko, Brandon Hughey, Jeremy Hinzman, Corey Glass, Patrick Hart, Clifford Cornell, Joshua Despain, Katherine Jashinski, Robin Long, Ryan Johnson, Chris Teske, Tim Richard and Kevin Benderman. In total, thirty-eight US war resisters in Canada have applied for asylum.

Saturday, Patricia Sullivan (Washington Post) reported on the January 15th death of Oliver V. Hirsh:

In 1968, Mr. Hirsch was a 22-year-old enlistee from Bethesda, stationed at Almaden Air Force Station in California, where he was a radar instructor and held the rank of sergeant. He joined eight other military men, representing the four branches of the services, who publicly refused to go to Vietnam and chained themselves to ministers at a chuch in Northern California. Their arrests for desertion were a media spectacle, with polic cutting their chains and removing them from a Communion service. The incident also served as one of the early indications that opposition to the war came not just from campuses but also from soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen who were serving in the ranks.

Hirsh was among the war resisters sharing their experiences in David Zeiger's Sir! No Sir! which is now available with bonus footage including Camilio Mejia, Cindy Sheehan and Jane Fonda discussing "the movement then and now." (Also note the DVD of the film is available free of charge to active duty and deployed soldiers.)

Yesterday was also a signifcant day for war resisters. Patrick Maloney (Canada's London Free Press) noted that Sunday was the thirty year anniversary of Jimmy Carter's pardoning of draft dodgers: "An estimated 50,000 came to Canada, of whom about half remain. Now, in a quiet echo of an earlier generation's anti-war sentiment, the War Resisters Support Campaign is noticing growing interest in Canada as a haven for U.S. soldiers destined for Iraq."

Today, Dan Balz and Jon Cohen (Washington Post) report on the latest Washington Post poll (Washington Post-ABC News) which finds "48 percent of Americans calling the war the single most important issue they want Bush and the Congress to deal with this year. No other issue rises out of the single digits. The poll also found that the public trust congressional Democrats over Bush to deal with the conflict by a margin of 60 percent to 33 percent." And symbolic measures won't build that trust for the Democratic Party, nor will doing nothing. Someone might also want to share those results with independent media -- it will no doubt be a surprise for a great many who ignored Iraq throughout 2006 -- as well as those who tried to sneak it into some fawning coverage of some politician.

In Iraq today . .

Bombings?

Assel Kami (Reuters) reports "[t]wo simultaneous car bombs" which struck "a busy market in central Baghdad." BBC reports 88 dead with 160 more injured. Some of those injured will not recover (die) and some of the dead have likely not been recovered which is why Kami earlier reported 67 dead and 142 injured bu noted "the death toll of 67 could rise." CBS and AP note the immediate aftermath: "body parts strewn on the bloodstained pavement, along with DVDs and compact discs as black smoke rose into the sky." AFP quotes one of their photographers: "There were so many victims they were piled up on wooden market carts, the wounded on top of the dead, and hauled to ambulances and police vehicles. Improvised rescue workers made their way through the carnage amid the cries of those wounded." Mohammed al Awsy (McClatchy Newspapers) reports that an "interiro ministry source" states that one car involved was left running with the driver of the car telling "people nearby that he was just buying things and would return very soon."

Al Jazeera notes: "A few hours later at least 12 people were killed and more than 40 were wounded when a bomb exploded in a market in the village of Khalis, near Baquba." AFP reports it as a "bomb placed in a vegetable cart" combined with a mortar attack. Reuters notes that already the death toll on the Khalis bombing has risen -- 14 people dead. Sinan Salaheddin (AP) reports a mortar attack "on a primary school in the Sunni stronghold neighborhood of Dora in southern Baghdad, killing a woman waiting for her child and wounding eight students". Reuters notes a boming in Mosul that took the life of a woman left four people wounded (two were Iraqi soldiers and they note: "Two more soliders were killed when troops went to the scene to recover the casualties.") and they note a mortar attack "on a house in the Amil district in southwestern Baghdad" that claimed one life and left another wounded.

Shootings?

CBS and AP report that a teacher "was on her way to work at a girls' school" in western Baghdad when she was shot dead and the man driving the car she was in was also wounded. Meanwhile, CNN reports that a police officer and a police acadmy lecturer were shot dead on their way "home in eastern Baghdad." Sinan Salaheddin (AP) reports three shootings -- in Baghdad a "Sunni tribal chieftain" was shot dead in one attack and an employee of a cell phone company was shot dead in another while, in Mosul, an attack left an oil employee dead. Mohammed al Awsy (McClatchy Newspapers) reports "a liquor shop owner [Christian] in AL JAMAAIAT area 8km west of basra" was shot dead today "after some clerics in basra warned the liquor shop owners that they should stop selling liquor in basra."

Corpses?

CNN reports 29 corpses were discovered in Baghdad today.

In addition, Mohammed al Awsy (McClatchy Newspaper) reports that an attack or attempted kidnapping took place when "unknown gunmen tried to storm inside the house of the deputy governor of diyala ABDUL AZIZ AL JUBORI" -- two body guards were wounded "but the deputay governor was not inside the house." A kidnapping took place in Baqubua, Reuters reports: "Khaled al-Sanjari, a local government offical in Baquba," was kidnapped "while he was on his way to work" and the kidnappers "set the office on fire".

As Damien Cave (New York Times) and Borzou Daragahi (Los Angeles Times) reported this morning, at least 27 US troops died over the weekend in Iraq. The 27 number stops with the two marines who died Sunday in Al-Anbar Province. On Saturday, a US helicopter was shot dead. Everyone on board died, all were American soldiers. The BBC notes today that AFP and CNN have reported (today) that an anonymous US military official has stated it's possible that the helicopter was shot down by "a shoulder-fire missile". This after denying -- as they've done with every crash -- that anything was shot down (they've even insisted -- Willie Caldwell, the Giddiest Gabor in the Green Zone, has been especially insistant -- that only coalition forces have those capablities in Iraq -- so note that "a shoulder-fire missile" is possible, according to the US military). Ernesto London (Washington Post) reported Sunday (actually Saturday -- which is when the article first made it online, it was "20 dead" in the headline, now downgraded to 19) that Arkan al-Mujamai told the paper "that the helicopter was shot down by a group of Sunni Muslim insurgents, one of whom is his uncle." al-Mujamai stated that "a heavy machine gun" was used.

The 27 deaths include an attack in Karbala. Leila Fadel and Hussam Ali (McClatchy Newspapers) report: "On Saturday, a civil affairs team of American soldiers sat with local leaders in Karbala's provincial headquarters to discuss security . . . A convoy of seven white GMC Suburbans sped toward the building, breezing through checkpoints, with the men wearing American and Iraqi military uniforms and flashing American ID cards, Iraqi officials said. The force stopped at the police directorate in Karbala and took weapons but gave no reason, said police spokesman Capt. Muthana Ahmed in Babel province. A call was made to the provincial headquarters to inform them an American convoy was on its way, said the governnor of Karbala, Akeel al-Khazaali. But the Americans stationed inside the building . . . had not been informed" because this wasn't a military patrol and, in the attack that followed (grenades, mortars, gunfire), 5 US troops were killed and 3 more wounded. If you've forgotten, a tremendous amount of money was spent on new Iraqi uniforms and a huge publicity push came with that stating that no longer would the resistance or militias be able to impersonate -- that's disproven today and was always disproven because those uniforms don't come off some Mosul sewing machine, they're taken by people working within the forces. Today, the US military announced: "A Task Force Lightning Soldier assigned to 4th Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division, was killed Monday when an improvised explosive device detonated near his vehicle while conducting combat operations in Ninewa province.


On WBAI's Law & Disorder, a discussion by Anthony Arnove and Michael Schwartz was also broadcast today. Many topics were covered. [Mike will be covering this tonight at Mikey Likes It!; Ruth and Rebecca passed on L&D and held the phone up for quotes included.] They spoke, in particular, about the racism at play -- which includes the attitude of those 'sorry' Iraqis who just don't appreciate the illegal invasion the US administration has 'gifted' them with, that those 'bad' and 'backward' Iraqis are just lacking abilities since they can't 'build' a 'democracy' in the midst of the US' illegal occupation, and the racism that forgets who created the secetarian divide (the US). The racism -- that urge to cast 'the other' -- is why they US administration believes that they can recruit more Iraqis to 'pacify' Baghdad and Al-Anbar Province. Schwartz noted that as soon as US troops aren't assinged with Iraqi troops, Iraqi troops melt into the area and disappear -- the desertion rate from the Iraqi army that's rarely noted, especially now when Bully Boy's escalation depends on believing the lie that more US troops on the ground will solve the trick. The admiinstration also believe they can bring the Kurds easily into the Iraqi military. Leila Fadel and Yaseen Taha (McClatchy Newspapers) reported at the end of last week that it wasn't working out quite that way: "Kurdish soldiers from northern Iraq, who are mostly Sunnis but not Arabs, are deserting the army to avoid the civil war in Baghdad, a conflict they consider someone else's problem" and they quote Anward Dolani ("former peshmerga commander who leads the brigade that's being tranferred to Baghdad") declaring: "The soldiers don't know the Arabic language, the Arab tradition, and they don't have any experience fighting terror." If the news of the Kurdish troops doesn't convey how no one wants to fight the illegal US war, Dahr Jamail and Ali al-Fadhily (IPS) report on the latest in souther Iraq where "Shia Arab tribes in the south" are joining the resistance. Jamail and al-Fadhily quote Jassim al-Assadi declaring: "People here have always hated the U.S. and British occupation of Iraq and remembered their grandfathers who fought the British troops with the simplest weapons."

Anthony Arnove, author most recently of IRAQ: The Logic of Withdrawal, will be speaking in DC this weekend:

*January 27, 5 pm, Washington, DC (with Kelly Dougherty) Busboys and Poets http://www.busboysandpoets.com/blog_events.htm

Arnove will be among many in DC on the 27th. From CODEPINK:

Bring the Peace Mandate to D.C. on J27!
On Election Day voters delivered an unmistakable mandate for peace. Now it's time for action. Join CODEPINK in a national march to D.C. on January 27-29, to send a strong, clear message to Congress and the Bush Administration: The people of this country want the war and occupation in Iraq to end and we want the troops home now! See our latest actions, and click here for details.























mikey likes it
Posted by at