Tuesday. Elaine's hitting hard tonight, so be sure to check out Like Maria Said Paz. She keeps alternating calls to me with calls to C.I. because it's a topic she's covered before but one that's only become obviously wrong (the liars at FactCheck.org) in the last few days. I think I'm going to focus on Hillary Clinton for this entry because I've got some stuff that Leigh Ann e-mailed, some stuff Tony found and a thing I've been wanting to share.
But we're still on health care, single payer, this is from Corporate Crime Reporter's "Why Hillary, Obama, Edwards, Romney and Schwarzenegger Don't Support Single-Payer Health Care:"
The majority of the American people want a single-payer health care system Medicare for all.
The majority of doctors want it.
A good chunk of hospital CEOs want it.
But what they want doesn't appear to matter.
Why?
Because a single-payer health care plan would mean the death of the private health insurance industry and reduced profits for the pharmaceutical industry.
Presidential candidates John Edwards, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Mitt Romney and California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger talk a lot about universal health care.
But not one of them advocates for single-payer because single-payer too directly confronts the big corporate interests profiting off the miserable health care system we are currently saddled with.
"Currently, we are spending almost a third of every health care dollar on administration and paperwork generated by the private health insurance industry," said Dr. Stephanie Woolhandler, an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and co-founder of Physicians for a National Health Program. "Countries like Canada spend about half that much on the billing and paperwork side of medicine. If we go to a single-payer system and are able to cut the billing and paperwork costs of health care, that frees up about $300 billion per year. That's the money we need to cover the uninsured and then improve the coverage for those who have private insurance but are under-insured."
"The idea behind single-payer is you don't have to increase total health care spending," Woolhandler said in an interview with Corporate Crime Reporter. "You take the money we are now spending but cut the administrative fat and use that money to cover people."
None of the declared Presidential candidates with the exception of Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) is supporting single-payer.
So she's too busy pleasing big business to help the people. That's just one side of Hillary the War Hawk. Here's another from Robert Scheer's "Hillary's Calculations Add Up to War:"
Let's face it: No matter how much many of us who oppose the war in Iraq would also love to elect a female president, Hillary Clinton is not a peace candidate. She is an unrepentant hawk, a la Joe Lieberman. She believed invading Iraq was a good idea, all available evidence to the contrary, and she has, once again, made it clear that she still does.
"If the most important thing to any of you is choosing someone who did not cast a vote [to authorize the war] or has said his vote was a mistake, then there are others to choose from," she said in New Hampshire last week, confusing contempt for antiwar Americans--now a majority--with the courage of her indefensible conviction that she bears no responsibility for the humanitarian, economic and military disaster our occupation has wrought.
As a candidate for '08, Hillary clearly calculates that her war chest, star power, gender and pro-choice positions will be sufficient for her to triumph in the primaries, while being "tough," pro-military and "supporting our president" will secure her flank in the general election against those who would paint her as that horrible beast, "a liberal."
A winning strategy? That remains to be seen. It certainly does not bode well for the future of the nation, however, should it be. Consider the parallel case of President Lyndon Johnson, who can be heard on tapes of his White House conversations ruminating that he never believed in the Vietnam War and pursued it only to deny Barry Goldwater and the Republicans a winning campaign issue.
It's worth remembering that back then, Hillary was a "Goldwater Girl" and those roots appear to be showing more and more. I also want to note C.I.'s thing on this from yesterday's snapshot because I thought it was pretty cool and pretty funny:
In US political news, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton has underscored that, although politically active for many years, she has held public office for far too few. As Amy Goodman noted on Monday's Democracy Now!, Clinton, speaking in New Hampshire, not only continued to refuse to term her vote supporting the invasion of Iraq "a mistake," she went further by stating: "If the most important thing to any of you is choosing someone who did not cast that vote or has said his [or her] vote was a mistake, then there are others to choose from." Indeed there are and it takes an arrogance born of campaign stupidity to make such a public declaration. We'll also note that "[or her]" was added here to be inclusive -- something that Hillary Clinton once could have take care of all on her own. But who would have ever guessed she'd waste the opening weeks of her campaign refusing to say something as simple as "I made a mistake"? Probably the same people who would have guessed that a candidate who cannot count on peeling off Republican voters, who may or may not have a hard time with swing voters, would thumb her nose at the Democratic base with one of the most idiotic statements made on the campaign trail. When you are campaigning for a national office, the last thing you need to do is to tell voters "there are others to choose from." Despite rumors to the contrary, Clinton's not scripted but New Hampshire may demonstrate that she needs to be. In one decade, we've gone from Bill Clinton's "I feel your pain" to what passes for "Piss off" from Hillary Clinton. (Which may remind many of the health care debacle which went from universal to some managed care option when, as Robin Toner pointed out, Clinton got cozy in the backrooms.)
That's really what it was. Bill's tag line was "I feel your pain" and Hillary appears eager to make her tag line "Piss off." That's really what it says: Piss off if you're expecting me to apologize.
She's a dumb ass. If she'd just said, "I made a mistake" she could have moved on. But she didn't. I don't know why. Guess she just doesn't think she makes mistake. But there's another reason and it's that she supported this illegal war. She supported it before she was senator. Jeremy Scahill can really talk about that live, how Bill Clinton isn't innocent in the Iraq war. And Hillary knew all that (I'm saying that, JS might say it or might not). She knew it and she still wanted to support an illegal war.
She didn't make a mistake. That's why she won't say she did. She wanted an illegal war and that's why she voted for one. And if she gets in office, we'll end up with a lot more illegal wars because she's no different from than Bully Boy.
Now this is from Alan Maas and Jeffrey St. Clair's discussion "The Clintons: the Art of Politics Without Conscience:"
ALAN MAASS: With the Bush presidency being such a disaster in every way, a lot of people now seem to look back at the Clinton years with nostalgia. Do the Clintons deserve this?
JEFFREY ST. CLAIR: I GUESS it depends on what side of those years you were on. If you made a lot of money in the stock market in those days, you might look back on it with nostalgia. For the rest of us, I think you only look back if you're forced to--at the scene of eight years of crime.
The Clinton administration opened the doors for Bush Junior in ways that Junior's father never did. Aside from the obvious Oedipal things going on with Bush Junior, his father hasn't been a big help to him. But Clinton certainly has. When Bush talks about his "other father," people are assuming that he's talking to the supreme deity. But I think that maybe it's Clinton who's on the speed dial.
Because in so many ways, Clinton provided the final transition between decaying old-style liberalism and the new neoliberalism and neoconservatism--which are kind of incestuous first cousins.
That goes for trade policy; for deregulation of major industries, from the utilities to communications companies to the banking industry to the insurance industry; all the way to continuing to wage war on Iraq. All of that is a living artifact of Clinton Time.
It goes for the USA PATRIOT Act. People say they rushed in the Patriot Act--this thousand-page bill that the person who wrote it probably didn't even have a chance to read. Well, the fact is that the Patriot Act had been sitting on the desk at the Department of Justice for the last two years of Clinton Time. They were all ready to update their horrendous and horrifying Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which was passed in 1996 after the Oklahoma City bombing.
For a lot of these things, the left has a case of political Alzheimer's disease. That's the most gracious way of putting it--how they could immediately wipe from their minds every betrayal of Clinton Time, and heap all of it on poor Bush.
I look back at the Clinton administration as eight years of a fundamental transformation in the direction of the country--toward favoring big business, and toward almost frontal assaults on the most underprivileged members of the society.
It was much more than cutting the social safety net. Clinton followed that by the abuse of those at the lowest rungs of our society--in ways that I don't think Bush, for all of his manifest faults, has done to the same degree.
For example, blaming the victim. It's almost like a political spelunking or something when you go into Clinton's psyche. This is a guy who always saw himself as a victim, the wounded little boy president.
But at the drop of a hat, he would be the first one to sort of blame the victim--whether it was Ricky Ray Rector, who he executed as a way to boost his poll numbers during the campaign for the Democratic nomination, or the treatment of Lani Guinier, when Clinton nominated her for assistant attorney general for civil rights, and then withdrew her name.
Loyalty, personal or political, has never been a big thing for the Clintons. Jim McDougal, who was once Bill's closest friend, adviser and financier, later said that the Clinton's tore through people's lives like a tornado, leaving behind only wreckage.
The McDougals weren't alone. So many close friends and allies were pitched overboard when they became inconvenient: Lani Gunier, Peter Edelman, Joycelyn Elders. All road kill on the Clintons' path to power. They've perfected the art of politics without conscience.
That last line really sums it up. But to look at what happened to unions and the working class, read this from Sharon Smith's "Where have all the liberals gone?:"
Class inequality predictably escalated during Reagan's eight years and the four years of his Republican successor, George H.W. Bush. But Democratic President Bill Clinton, elected in 1992, hammered the nail in the coffin of the New Deal Coalition.
Clinton pledged to "put people first" and end the misery caused by "12 years of trickle-down economics" while on the campaign trail in 1992. But Clinton was a new breed of Democrat, at the helm of a conservative Democratic Party faction that formed the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) in 1985 to break the Democratic Party’s identification with so-called "special interests"--organized labor, civil rights, and other traditionally liberal causes. Clinton sought to dismantle the New Deal, once and for all. As he assured BusinessWeek while campaigning, "I want to generate a lot of millionaires."36
One of Clinton's first accomplishments as president was the successful ratification of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1993. Deregulation and open markets were the watchwords of the Clinton administration, and protests from labor and environmentalists did not get in the way. "NAFTA established 'free trade' as the holy writ of the Clinton-Gore foreign economic strategy," Lance Selfa noted in the International Socialist Review.37 Clinton went on to pursue other free trade initiatives--including the 1994 ratification of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the 2000 approval of "permanent normal trade relations" with China, further advancing the cause of unbridled corporate greed around the globe.
But welfare reform was Clinton's domestic trump card, as he made good on his campaign pledge to "end welfare as we know it." In 1994, he transformed AFDC into a temporary program requiring all able-bodied recipients to go to work after two years. In 1996, facing reelection, Clinton signed the Republican-sponsored Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, extinguishing the hallmark of the New Deal by relieving the government of any responsibility to care for the poor, limiting poor women and children to a five-year lifetime limit.
Clinton succeeded in shifting the political parameters of mainstream discourse, as the Democratic Party lurched rightward in the 1990s. Yet liberal organizations continued to support Clinton as he embraced a range of conservative domestic policies.
The feminist movement never protested against Clinton, even as he allowed the erosion of legal abortion and dismantled welfare for poor women and children. Most gay rights organizations maintained their loyalty even after Clinton signed the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, banning same-sex marriage. The collapse of liberalism as a force during the Clinton era allowed mainstream politics to shift rightward in the years before Bush took office in 2001. The Defense of Marriage Act paved the way for Bush's more draconian proposal for a federal ban on gay marriage, while the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act made more palatable the more repressive Patriot Act passed after September 11, 2001.
Likewise, no significant antiwar movement materialized to protest Clinton's so-called humanitarian invasions that paved the way for U.S. imperialism's post 9-11 wars against Afghanistan and Iraq.
Liberalism was extinguished as a political force well before George W. Bush took office in 2001. The Democrats' failure to offer an aggressive opposition to the corruption of the Bush administration enabled all of Bush's post 9-11 policies.
That's just a part of the article and not even my favorite part. But this part was on the Clintons and I'm working a mood here :D. Seriously though, the International Socialist Review. I didn't even know of the magazine (my grandfather told me later that he'd tried to pass that on to me and this must have been like years ago because I don't remember it). We were in Tacoma to show our support for Ehren Watada and I was always still charged at the end of the evening and just talking and bouncing off the walls. So that first night, I don't think I slept at all. C.I. was up returning calls and making calls so I played tag along and was reading through magazines C.I. had brought and we'd be talking in between calls. So I pulled this magazine and C.I. saw me and motioned for me to flip to the contents. I did and C.I. tapped on this article and the one by Anthony Arnove. I read the Arnove one first because I knew him and I really liked that one. Then I read this one and it's a long because it's a history. It's like FDR to present. But you'll read it real quick.
That's it for me, here's C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot:"
Wednesday, February 21, 2007. Chaos and violence continue in Iraq, Mr. Tony soaks up headlines with his non-statements, Abeer was gang raped but the same press that couldn't mention her name appears too delicate to use the word "gang rape" (one wire report even uses "assault" to avoid the term "rape" -- such shy maidens), the Black Hawk was shot down and it takes the US military the better part of a daily news cycle to come forward with that information, and rape may be the thing that finally gets the puppet pulled from Baghdad as he continues to botch things up.
Starting with Mr. Tony. Tony Blair, Bully Boy's lapdog and personal poodle, was hailed during a mini-news cycle for his talk of bringing British troops home. Now the bloom is off the rose as reality sets in. AFP and Reuters report that 5,500 British troops will remain in Iraq, as Mr. Tony puts it, "for as long as we are needed." Mr. Tony had hoped to use the slight withdrawal as the staging for a series of victory laps as he prepares to step down as prime minister but, as with his earlier plans of how to get slavish praise from the press, it didn't turn out quite the way he wanted. Mark Rice-Oxley and Dan Murphy (Christian Science Monitor) note that it's only a 25% withdrawal of British forces from Iraq.
Interviewed by Amy Goodman (Democracy Now!) today, Tony Benn cut through Mr. Tony's nonsense noting that "there wasn't really any change. But Blair is due to retire in a matter of weeks. And I'm afraid, I suspect, that this is a gimmick at this stage, so that he can claim that the mission is being accomplished and, therefore, the troops can be withdrawn. And on the question of Iran, he repeated ominous warnings. So I don't think too much will be read into this." Amy Goodman noted: "Here you have Tony Blair just moments ago making this announcement in the House of Commons. Then you have Cheney speaking on an aircraft carrier near Tokyo, saying the American people will not support a policy of retreat."
Goodman was referring to Cheney's attempt to shore up the support of the Japanese government in a little trip that Brendan Murray (Bloomberg News) reports didn't turn into a love-fest what with the embassy 'greeting' of "Yankee Go Home" blared over a speaker as he arrived and the lies and fear he has to resort to in order to get even a sliver of copy. Pulling from his bag of tricks, Dick -- who avoided Vietnam -- is using the same if-we-leave-they-will-come-after-us. Now that didn't frighten Dickie enough to enlist during Vietnam but he obviously thinks the American people are stupider than he is (prolonged exposure to the Bully Boy will make one feel smarter). As for the retreat, perhaps it's time polls started asking "Should Cheney and Bully Boy announce a retreat from their war" because that is how many Americans see this illegal war. Murray notes 63% of Americans now favor US forces pulling out of Iraq.
Though Cheney attempts to scare up support for the war and put the blame for inept leadership on the backs of the American people, Sharon Smith (CounterPunch) voices the reality that more Americans are coming around to: "The Iraq war marks the first major war in the last century fought in the interests of America's ruling elite without even the pretense of 'shared sacrifice.' During the First World War, the tax rate for top income earners stood at 77 percent; during the Second World War, at 94 percent. Even during Vietnam, the wealthiest taxpayers faced a rate of 70 percent on personal income. Yet, as the bloodletting in Iraq has been proven a war for nothing more than U.S. control over Middle Eastern oil, the corporate class continues to enjoy an income tax rate that has been capped at only 35 percent since 2003 -- the year the U.S. invaded Iraq. Bush's plan to permanently extend these tax cuts, which are set to expire in 2010 would cost an estimated $211 billion in 2012 and $1.6 trillion over the next decade. Added to their profit windfalls and soaring executive salaries, the corporate class has every reason to celebrate. Bush's budget makes clear that the growing numbers of economically disadvantaged Americans -- already supplying the cannon fodder to kill and die in Iraq and Afghanistan -- must also continue to shoulder the suffocating financial burden for U.S. imperialism's twenty-first centruy follies.Bush's budget proposal brazenly takes aim at veterans themselves, nearly doubling their out-of-pocket fees from $8 to $15 for prescription medications when they return home from a war zone battered and traumatized, and often looking for work. In this war, only the working class is expected to sacrifice."
Smith's statements are echoed in the AP data Kimberly Hefling (AP) reported on yesterday which found that those Americans paying the costs with their own lives tend to come from small, rural communities "where the per capita income was below the national average. More than half came from towns where the percentage of people living in poverty topped the national average."
Meanwhile, speaking with Jason Farbman and Darrin Hoop (Socialist Worker), US war resister Darrell Anderson explains why he decided to return to the US and turn himself in,
"I felt that I had to go to jail and stand with these other resisters. There's nothing more powerful than soldiers who have been to Iraq saying that it's wrong, and we're not going to do it again. That's where I believe the heart of the movement is -- in these 20 or 30 or 40 of us who resisted now. . . . When I turned myself in, they gave me a piece of paper that asked why I'd gone AWOL. I said because I'm a combat veteran, I have post-traumatic stress, and the war is wrong. Basically, I said that I dare you to put my uniform on me, put my Purple Heart on me and send me to prison so people can see that we're going to jail." On the topic of Ehren Watada and court-martials, Anderson declares: "These court-martials are the front line of where we're fighting the war. This needs to be the focus for the antiwar movement -- Watada and all the war resisters. We need more soldiers like Watada, and more soldiers who come back from Iraq and say, 'I'm a veteran, I watched my buddies die in Iraq, and now I'm going to jail because I won't do it anymore."
Agustin Aguayo is set for a March 6th court-martial in Germany. Eric Ruder (Socialist Worker) speaks to Helga Aguayo, Agustin's wife, who tells him: "One of the care packages sent to the soldiers was a book on the history of Iraq. He said that it really changed what he believed, I mean he was a conscientious objector, he believed that killing was wrong, but after reading that book he realized that the war in Iraq has essentially been created for the personal gain of a few people. What he told me was that for a few corporations, it's in their best interests to keep the chaos going in Iraq. And he just came to believe that killing is wrong, but this war is wrong, too, because it's all motivated by money."
Anderson, Aguayo and Watada are a part of a movement of resistance with the military that includes others such as Kyle Snyder, Patrick Hart, Ivan Brobeck, Mark Wilkerson, Ricky Clousing, Aidan Delgado, Joshua Key, Camilo Meija, Pablo Paredes, Carl Webb, Jeremy Hinzman, Stephen Funk, David Sanders, Dan Felushko, Brandon Hughey, Corey Glass, Clifford Cornell, Joshua Despain, Katherine Jashinski, Chris Teske, Matt Lowell, Jimmy Massey, Tim Richard and Kevin Benderman. In total, thirty-eight US war resisters in Canada have applied for asylum.Information on war resistance within the military can be found at Center on Conscience & War, The Objector, The G.I. Rights Hotline, and the War Resisters Support Campaign. Courage to Resist offers information on all public war resisters.
Bombings?
Mohammed al Dulaimy (McClatchy Newspapers) reports the following bombings in Baghdad, a roadside bomb on Al Jadiria Bridge that killed one police officer and left three more wounded, a parked car bomb that killed two civilians left seven wounded and 25 poisoned from bottles of Chlroine gas that were in the car, a parked car bomb in Sadr city that took 3 lives and left five more wounded, a mortar attack that wounded 2 police officers near a bus station, a mortar attack the killed three people and left ten wounded. Reuters notes a mortar attack that "wounded four children in Adil district in western Baghdad." Outside of Baghdad, Reuters notes 11 people dead 38 wounded in Najaf from a car bomb. Mohammed al Dulaimy (McClatchy Newspapers) reports: "Diyala - Mortar shelling targeted Al Abara town north of Baqouba. The shelling claimed the life of one resident and injured other three. - A security source in Baladrouz city (45 Km east of Baqouba) said that men in Iraqi military uniforms raided the houses of Al Shah town (6 km from Baladrouz) and executed 17 men." And AFP reports: "In the flashpoint northern city of Kirkuk, a hub of Iraq's oil industry that is disputed by Kurds and Arabs, a car bomb and two booby-traps exploded in Kurdish areas, wounding 19 people, police Captain Imad Jassim told AFP
Corpses?
Reuters reports seven corpses discovered in western Baghdad today and, on Tuesday, 25 discovered in Baghdad, 8 in Mosul.
Today, the US military announced: " A Marine assigned to Multi-National Force-West was killed Feb. 20 while conducting combat operations in Al Anbar Province." And they announced: "On Feb. 20, an MND-B unit was conducting a clearing operation in order to search a residential area and reduce the levels of violence in a northern urban district of the Iraqi capital when they received small arms fire, killing one Soldier."
In other US military news do the paid flacks enjoy spinning? Do they ever get tired of egg on their face? The day began with news of a Black Hawk having a "hard landing" north of Baghdad. It's a crash. It's not a "hard landing." Later in the day, the US military released this statement: "A U.S. Army UH-60 Blackhawk helicopter went down today north of Baghdad while conducting operations." Still later, CBS and AP reported: "A U.S. helicopter that crashed Wednesday north of Baghdad was shot down, the military said, reversing its initial statement that the chopper made a 'hard landing.' Military spokesman Lt. Col. Christopher Garver said all the occupants were safely evacuated by a second helicopter." Nine people on board and the military didn't know from the start what happened?
Turning to the topic of rape, we'll start with Abeer Qassim Hamza al-Janabi. Andrea Hopkins (Reuters) reports on Paul Cortez confession ("broke down in tears as he described how he and others planned the rape of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl, murdered along with her family") that those paying attention in November already knew of when James P. Barker confessed -- gang rape of Abeer, she's then shot dead, kerosene is poured on her body as they try to burn her body and hide the evidence of their crimes, etc. Hopkins "While we were playing cards Barker and Green started talking about having sex with an Iraq female" -- only rape isn't "sex," is it? -- "Barker and Green had already known" where Abeer, 14-years-old, lived "what house they wanted to go to . . . knew only one male was in the house, and knew it would be an easy target."
Now let's remember that Carolyn Marshall and Robert F. Worth of the New York Times worked overtime to cover up what happened -- the paper even refused to print Abeer's name or a photo of her, USA Today was able to locate photos of her and her family -- but the Times was far from alone. Those brave voices sat the summer out. Scolds online tried to intimidate people into even discussing the case with b.s. about "Don't you dare call them baby killers!" We never called the gang rapists of Abeer 'baby killers' -- apparently someone had slapped their bumper stickers across their brains. What they did do was murder two parents, a 14-year-old and a 5-year-old. Cortez, confronted with evidence and the confession of Barker wants to blubber in court -- he should and it doesn't change the fact that they stalked Abeer, they planned to rape her and he can kid that it was "sex" all he wants but it was gang rape.
Let's repeat that because the press seems to have a really hard time doing so: GANG RAPE. Three men taking turns raping a female is GANG RAPE. It's not just rape -- as bad as rape is -- it's GANG RAPE. Abeer was gang raped and while she was being gang raped she could hear the gun going off as her parents and her sister were shot dead. Barker and Cortez both say that Steven D. Green killed the three, then he joined them in the living room where he raped Abeer and then shot her dead. Green will get to offer his version in a civilian court.
But a 14-year-old girl was gang raped and murdered, while she was being gang raped she heard her own parents and her five-year-old sister being murdered. And all the little enablers from May to now, the ones who helped shut this story down, need to step into the real world and own up to the fact that despite their denials and their silences, Abeer was gang raped and murdered by US soldiers. In retaliation, US soldiers who had nothing to do with the gang rapes were killed. But for some of the big babies (and this includes the Big Babies of the left) it was more important to live in denial than to acknowledge what happened to Abeer.
Cortez states of his part in the gang rape, "She kept squirming and trying to keep her legs closed and saying stuff in Arabic. During the time me and Barker were raping Abeer, I heard five or six gunshots that came from the bedroom. After Barker was done, Green came out of the bedroom and said that he had killed them all, that all of them were dead. Green then placed himself between Abeer's legs to rape her". Somehow the report leaves out the drinking before and after, the changing of clothes after, the grilling of chicken breasts and the party atmosphere that followed these crimes. Hopkins tells you he was tearful. So was Abeer back when she could still cry.
As CNN reported during the August Article 32 hearing, Captain Alex Pickands' closing remarks included: "They gathered over cards and booze to come up with a plan to rape and murder that little girl. She was young and attractive. They knew where she was because they had seen her on a previous patrol. She was close. She was vulnerable." It's really amazing that these war crimes received a stronger rebuke from the military than they did from much of the so-called left press.
Meanwhile the Iraqi government is much more involved in the allegations of another rape. As noted yesterday, a 20-year-old woman told Al Jazeera that she was detained by a Shia militia and gang raped. Recapping, Nouri al-Maliki voiced some of the same strong statements he made when Abeer was in the news last year. However, he backed off even quicker. After promising a full investigation, he then issued a statement calling the woman a liar, saying she would be charged criminally, and denying that anything had happened. The US press still can't report what the European press reported yesterday -- that Omar Jaburi maintains an "initial hospital report confirmed what she has said." However, Marc Santora (New York Times) reports: "A nurse who said she treated the woman after the attack said that she saw signs of sexual and physical assault. The woman, according to the nurse, could identify one of her attackers because he was not wearing a mask, as were the others, and could identify a second attacker by a mark on his genitals."
This as Hamza Hendawi (AP) reports that Nouri al-Mailiki has fired the head of the Sunni Endowments, Abdul-Ghafour al-Samaraie, for calling "for an international investigation into the rape allegations leveled by a Sunni Arab woman against three members of the Shiite- dominated security forces." CBS and AP report that Willie Caldwell, Giddiest Gabor in the Green Zone, has confirmed that the US military took the woman to a hospital but says that patient privacy prevents him from adding much more. They also note a 'report' al-Maliki faxed to the media which is one page of a three page report that has no name on it and appears to prove nothing. al-Maliki has been teetering for months with many of his US handlers eager to dump him. The way he's botched this incident makes that very easy to do so now.
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