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An Absurd Time of It.
Illustration: www.whatnowtoons.com comments on our Bill of Rights.
There is no way to begin other than just jumping right in a letting things unfold.
We have been told a lot about the corruption in the Russian elections, doubtless due to the evil Putin. However, even as Hillary wails about this gross injustice, no one mentions that the second place finishing party in the election was the Communist party. So, if anyone was cheated, it was the democratic Communist party.
To even things out, we encouraged a mogul to run against Putin. A mogul? Who wants a Mogul around? Ever have one hiding in your basement? Believe me, I don’t want to have that happen.
Our best hope is that Rick Perry becomes the next President as he is the most notable of the candidates. He pointed out that Obama gave over $500 million to the country of Solnda. At least he is sticking up for his supporters – the morons.
Newt continues on his merry old fart way, figuring that it is time to get rid of child labor laws and have the children clean the toilets so we can fire the janitors.
He also believes that there “is no such thing as Palestinians, never has been” leaving Biblical scholars confused over who Delilah was and whose ediface Samson collapsed. Contemporary Palestinians are even more angry as is the Anti-defamation League, not the most pro-Arab organization imaginable.
Some one person “family” association got angry about a program on TLC depicting some Moslem families in Michigan on “reality television” as people, not terrorists. One of the sponsors who chickened out and withdrew its advertising is Lowes. That is a kind of “home improvement store”. Most people who even know about this are boycotting it. That’s a good idea. I hate the place anyway, and more so now (but at least I have a nice humanitarian reason for it now).
If you are on Twitter, you can thank @unclerush for jumping in to sponsor the program. He is big into media and helps out with the Occupy movement in New York.
On the “Occupy” front, ports were shut down on the West coast, they marched on a bank in New York, and there is a nice documentary made by Vanguard called the “99%” about the movement. You should also know that the police in Berkeley who wound so many protestors in the city of Jack London were trained in Israel. Milder tactics than were used on the Palestinians.
Apparently, and off the record, the governments of Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, and Jordan have expressed support for Syria. The group of toadies called the Arab League has made motions against Syria.
Of all the Republican candidates, Ron Paul is at least right about 50% of the time and that is on foreign policy and victimless crimes. It is strange that no matter how high he is ranked in the polls, usually either 3rd or 4th, he is never mentioned by corporate media as a contender. One commentator opines that the reason he is able to make sense is that “he is at that age where “I’ll say what I want and don’t give a damn what you think about it.”
Obama followed the Bush agreement on Iraq (as he did on fiscal policy) and announced we were getting out. Following is a couple of interviews that tell us what we achieved in Iraq and how proud we should be, but it is fitting to note that Manning had a birthday and is finally in a courtroom after 19 months of torture and incarceration. Last Friday was Beethoven’s birthday.
Here are the interviews:
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JUAN GONZALEZ: We begin today’s show in Iraq. On Thursday, the United States military announced a formal end to almost nine years of war in Iraq. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta presided over a modest flag-lowering ceremony in Baghdad that was witnessed by few Iraqis due to security concerns. The U.S. media was invited to attend the ceremony, but the Iraqi media was shut out.DEFENSE SECRETARY LEON PANETTA: After a great deal of blood has been spilled by both Iraqis and Americans, the mission of an Iraq that could finally govern and secure itself has become real. The Iraqi army and police have been rebuilt, and they are capable of responding to threats. Violence levels are down. Al-Qaeda has been weakened. The rule of law has been strengthened. Iraq will be tested in the days ahead, by terrorism, by those who would seek to divide, by economic and social issues, by the demands of democracy itself.
JUAN GONZALEZ: On Wednesday night, President Obama spoke at a ceremony at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Fort Bragg, we’re here to mark a historic moment in the life of our country and our military. For nearly nine years, our nation has been at war in Iraq. And you, the incredible men and women of Fort Bragg, have been there every step of the way, serving with honor, sacrificing greatly, from the first waves of the invasion to some of the last troops to come home. So as your commander-in-chief and on behalf of a grateful nation, I’m proud to finally say these two words, and I know your families agree: welcome home. Welcome home. Welcome home.
AMY GOODMAN: During the same address, President Obama told soldiers, quote, "Because you sacrificed so much for a people that you had never met, Iraqis have a chance to forge their own destiny. That’s part of what makes us special as Americans. Unlike the old empires, we don’t make these sacrifices for territory or for resources. We do it because it’s right," President Obama said.Over the past nine years, the U.S. invasion has left a bloody toll on Iraqi civilians and foreign troops. Nearly 4,500 U.S. troops died. Another 32,000 were wounded. An accurate toll of Iraqis killed may never be known. According to Iraq Body Count, at least 104,000 Iraqi civilians have died. In 2006, the British medical journal Lancet estimated 600,000 Iraqis had already been killed. Other studies put the death toll over a million. Hundreds of thousands of more Iraqis died due to the crippling sanctions in the years between the 1991 Gulf War and the 2003 U.S. invasion. After 20 years of war and sanctions, Iraq’s infrastructure has been devastated.
On the streets of Baghdad, many Iraqis have expressed criticism of the role the U.S. played in their country. This is an Iraqi citizen named Hussein Al Najjar.
HUSSEIN AL NAJJAR: [translated] Obama’s speech hailed the U.S. invasion, but we were against the American invasion. In my opinion, what has happened and is still happening in Iraq, including terrorist acts and devastation, were the outcome of the U.S. presence in Iraq. The situation in Iraq is still unstable because of the U.S. presence, in my opinion. The U.S. forces also helped terrorism to enter Iraq.
AMY GOODMAN: While the U.S. military is largely leaving Iraq, the United States is not. The U.S. will operate the largest embassy in the world in Baghdad. The diplomatic effort will be run by the State Department, staffed with thousands of private contractors. It’s estimated more than 16,000 contractors will remain in Iraq.To discuss the U.S. withdrawal further, we will spend the hour talking about Iraq. We will begin, though, with Sami Rasouli. Sami Rasouli began Muslim Peacemaker Team in Iraq. He’s joining us from the Iraqi city of Najaf. He moved back to Iraq in 2004 after living in the United States for nearly 30 years. He was an institution in the Twin Cities, where he was a well-known restaurateur.
Sami Rasouli, we welcome you to Democracy Now! Talk about the last nine years since the United States invaded. What has happened to and come of your country?
SAMI RASOULI: Thank you, Amy, and I really appreciate you having me on your show. I miss seeing it, but checking out the show once a while through the internet.
Well, the war, as President Obama said, is over. But we understood from George Bush back on May 1st, 2003, that major combat operation was over and supposedly mission was accomplished. In terms of destroying Iraq, it’s really "mission accomplished," as I witnessed through the last, let’s say, eight years, since 2004, first time when I came from the U.S. visiting my family. I met you. That was end of 2003.
But to see what we’ve gotten from this war, after the violence went down dramatically and the dust of war has been settled, now we see the damage clearly everywhere in Iraq, where the electricity high—still the basic public services is almost not there, in terms of the electricity, never has been advanced by the two terms of the Iraqi government or even with the—no intervention by the U.S. efforts to improve these needed public services for an average Iraqi. The healthcare system has been really destroyed. As you mentioned, the infrastructure is a total catastrophe that began not only since 2003, and actually, it’s more than 20 years since 1991.
You know, we should not forget the effect of the sanction before the invasion. The Iraqi people have suffered a lot, and many of them have died. And now, death is not stoppable, because of many unknown diseases that’s caused by poisons that the U.S. military has been—has used against major cities in Iraq. In 2001 and, as well, in 2003, tons—hundred tons of depleted uranium has been—have been thrown on the city of Fallujah, where women today cannot get pregnant due to the deformation of their newborn babies. This is happening here in Najaf, as well. When the U.S. fought the resistance, so-called, the insurgents led by Muqtada al-Sadr.
But to go across the country today and hear the news locally, the Iraqi people are really jubilant and happy that the U.S., if this is true, eventually is pulling out its troops. But an average Iraqi is wondering, Amy—the current president of the U.S., Obama, when he ran for an office back in 2008, he was calling this war "the wrong war," and everybody was expecting, when he’d be an office, he will pull the troops from Iraq immediately. But what’s happened, 30,000 troops only were pulled out in 2009 and sent to Afghanistan. But the reality, after he assumed the office, up today—up today, he maintained the status quo what the previous president, George Bush, began with. So, it looks like we expected that Obama, when he tried to deliver his wide smile, but never deliver it, and now, because he’s running for the 2012 presidency, he is calling it—not calling it, but with the withdrawal of the troops, hopefully all the troops by the end of 2011, so he approved that war was wrong.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Sami Rasouli, I’d like to ask you—you returned back at the—to your country at the height of the war, when the dislocation and the mayhem was the worst throughout the war. Can you tell us how—what has happened to the refugee population, the thousands that were forced to flee the country during that period of the most sectarian violence and, of course, of the highest levels of violence with the United States? Have many people returned?
SAMI RASOULI: Well, the numbers of the refugees, there’s no certain, scientific statistically given. We talk about how many Iraqis died through the war. We don’t have numbers. But there is an estimate about five million people have been displaced: within the country, about two million, and out of the country, three million. And those mostly are the middle class, the cream of the crop, the professionals, the engineers, the doctors. Where the country can rely on and get developed and get rebuilt, they are not there, due to the displacement effort through the violent period between 2005, '06, ’07 and middle of 2008. The violence is still on, but those who got displaced internally, they were kept in camps. Then they got integrated within their families that they're related to, like their relatives. For example, the Shiites who were working as farmers in the areas surrounding Baghdad and to the west were—Ramadi province, Al Anbar province—those never got back to their work, to their homes, but they stayed in the southern provinces. Same thing to those who were in the south, but they pulled to the northern [inaudible] they come from originally, and they kept there. But those who are outside the country, in Syria, in a big number, and Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, and there are many got distributed in the rich countries, like the U.S. — so-called the rich countries, now not anymore, but Australia, Canada and European countries, Scandinavian—
AMY GOODMAN: Sami? Sami, we’re—
SAMI RASOULI: They got—Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re having a little trouble understanding you. But finally, you, yourself, were injured. What happened?
SAMI RASOULI: Well, last year I was going to cover some area in Damascus to see what happened there, as the people who were living there before came back. But on my way, I got in a car accident, and I lost my left hip. Right away, I was moved to an emergency department in the hospital in Najaf by an ambulance, and the two doctors were operated on me, but they did the operation like primitively. They screwed the ball of my femur to the cap, and then I couldn’t—for months couldn’t stand up and walk, until I came back to the U.S. in Minneapolis, and I got my hip displaced—I mean, replaced by—totally, by an artificial one. But during the operation in Iraq, the doctors cut—two doctors cut up my sciatica nerve, and as result, I have right now drop foot, which is really causing me problems with walking as I used to.
AMY GOODMAN: Sami Rasouli, I want to thank you—
SAMI RASOULI: So, this [inaudible] — yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you for being with us, founder and director of the Muslim Peacemaker Teams in Iraq, speaking to us from Najaf, moved there in 2004 after living here for more than 30 years, particularly in the Twin Cities, known very well in Minneapolis. When we come back, we’re going to be speaking with Brown University professor Catherine Lutz about the costs of the war and then Yanar Mohammed to talk about the effects of war on women in Iraq. This is Democracy Now! Back in a minute.
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AMY GOODMAN: Professor Catherine Lutz is joining us from Providence, professor of anthropology and international studies at Brown University, co-director of the Costs of War research project based at the Watson Institute for International Studies. Professor Lutz is the author of The Bases of Empire: The Global Struggle against U.S. Military Posts.Tell us what have been the costs of the Iraq War, Professor Lutz.
CATHERINE LUTZ: Amy, the costs have really been staggering. We know about the number of U.S. servicemembers who have died. Most Americans know that. It’s over 4,500 individuals. We know that the Congress appropriated $800 billion over the years for the Iraq War. But the true costs, of course, go much farther than that, starting with the people of Iraq, who have lost lives in the hundreds of thousands, the people of that country who have been displaced from their homes. Again, as your previous speaker pointed out, those numbers are very hard to come by. But the U.N. estimates 3.5 million Iraqis are still displaced from their homes, and again, many widowed, many orphaned, and an environmental damage that has yet to be assessed.
But the idea that the war is over is, I think, what we really need to question, the idea that the war ends the day that the U.S. servicemembers leave that country. We know that many are staying behind in the form of private contractors and State Department employees. We know that the war won’t end for the people who are still, again, struggling to get back home, struggling with missing family members and so on. So I think we need to ask, is the war really over? And the answer is, really, no.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And Catherine Lutz, in terms of those who are staying behind, these contractors, many of them, a huge number, are armed, as well. Could you talk about—break down some of these folks that are staying behind, in terms of numbers?
CATHERINE LUTZ: Well, the State Department mission in Iraq, as Amy pointed out, has the largest embassy on the planet, a $6 billion budget. Much of that is going toward the support of 5,500 security contractors. And those people are guarding State Department employees, civilians, who are, again, engaged in a variety of activities there. But in some very important sense, that’s an index of how significantly—how significant the violence remains and the risk remains to the Americans who are there, because of, again, a continuing attempt to evict all of the Americans from Iraq.
AMY GOODMAN: On Thursday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton addressed the State Department’s new role in Iraq after the pullout of U.S. troops. She was speaking in Denmark.
SECRETARY OF STATE HILLARY CLINTON: We will have to be working closely with the Iraqis to ensure the security of our civilians. And we have had very strong commitments from the Iraqis that whatever assistance we need will be forthcoming. I think it’s understood that this is one of the most challenging missions that the State Department has ever led, but we’ve had a great deal of thought given to what needs to be accomplished, and the team, both here in Washington and, even more importantly, in Baghdad, Erbil, Kirkuk and Basra, is very well prepared.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Catherine Lutz, clearly, one of the reasons why the pullout is happening now is because the United States government could not reach an agreement with the Iraqi government over immunity for any remaining U.S. soldiers. But now what’s going to happen with all of these civilians? What is the—is there any government-to-government agreement about how these civilians, many of whom obviously will be from the United States, will be treated?CATHERINE LUTZ: Well, I think the real question is, how are the Iraqis going to be treated by those contractors? What are the rules of engagement? And what are the ways in which these contractors are permitted to respond when they feel threatened or when they feel that they’re—the people that they’re protecting are threatened? The inspector general for Iraq was not given the kinds of information that Secretary Clinton suggests is something that they’ve worked out, which is to say, those rules of engagement. So I think there’s really quite a risk to the Iraqi people that these contractors will, again, not be operating with that kind of—you know, operating in an environment in which violence is likely.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor Lutz, who are these contractors? Name the companies.
CATHERINE LUTZ: Those companies are Triple Canopy—let me just read you their names. Triple Canopy, the Global Strategies Group, and—and again, some additional contractors—SOC Incorporated are the three main ones.
AMY GOODMAN: And so, this issue of whose laws they abide by?
CATHERINE LUTZ: Well, again, they do not have immunity in the same way that the troops did, and that’s why the Iraqis were allowing them to stay. But I think, again, if we look forward to what the rest of the country can expect in the next several years, it’s to continue to deal with the kinds of things that Sami talked about—a lack of electricity, the kinds of things that this mission is not going to help solve. And so, I think that the basic human needs to recover from injuries and losses of the nine years of war, that’s what we need to be talking about, is, what is the State Department doing vis-à-vis those issues?
The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us. Related Links
- The Organization of Women's Freedom in Iraq
- Democracy Now! Archive of Nearly 9 Years of Reports on the Iraq War
Yanar, talk about this last more than eight years of the invasion and the occupation.
YANAR MOHAMMED: If I start with the basics, the Iraqi cities are now much more destroyed than they were, I would say, like five years ago. All the major buildings are still destroyed. If you drive in the streets of the capital, your car cannot survive more than one month, because all the streets are still broken. So there was no reconstruction for the buildings, for the cities.
And in the same time, we have turned to a society of 99 percent poor and 1 percent rich, due to the policies that were imposed in Iraq. While Iraq has more than one million widows—some of the counts say one million, some of the counts say two million widows—these widows try to survive on a salary of $150, and most of them cannot get this salary because they don’t have proper ID due to internal displacement. And in the same time, the 1 percent, who lives—of Iraqis, who lives in the Green Zone, they drown in a sea of money. And there was a scandal of losing $40 billion from the annual budget of the country, and nobody is accountable for it. So we have—after nine years, we have the most corrupt government in the world.
We are divided to a society of Shias, who are ruling, and Sunnis, who want to get divided from the country of Iraq. We are now on the verge of the division of country according to religions. And to ethnicities, it has already happened. We know that the Kurdish north is now a Kurdistan, the region of Kurdistan. And the constitution that we have in Iraq allows everybody to get divided or to get their autonomy. So now the Sunni parts of Iraq, they want to be their own agents. They don’t want to be part of the central government anymore. And in the same time, destruction is everywhere. Poverty is for all the people but the 1 percent who are living inside the Green Zone.
And I would like to add one thing. If President Obama wants to make it sound like one unified society, that’s not the true story. We are living in a huge military camp, where one million Iraqi men are recruited in the army. And on top of that, there’s almost 50,000 militia members, of the Sadr group and the other Islamist group, who are not only local militias, like army within the country, but they are now being exported to other countries to oppress the Arab Spring in Syria and maybe later on in other countries. We are not a united country, because the Islamic Republic of Iran, which is another country, has the upper hand in Iraq. And the decisions that were done lately about who stays from the Americans and who doesn’t stay inside Iraq was due to the pressure of the Islamic Republic of Iran. They are the decision makers in Iraq.
And the biggest loser out of all of this are the women. Now, by the constitution, there are articles that refer us to the Islamic sharia, when this was not in action in the times of the previous regime. Under Islamic sharia, women are worth half a man legally and one-quarter of a man socially in a marriage. And we still suffer under this. As a women’s organization, we daily meet women who are vulnerable to being bought and sold in the flesh market. We see widows who have no source of income, and nobody to get them IDs for themselves and their children, because they have been internally displaced. So poverty and discrimination against women has become the norm. And the government doesn’t care much about this. They talk about it a lot, but not much is being done about it. And—
JUAN GONZALEZ: Yanar, I’d like to ask you, on another matter, the—we had a quote earlier in the show from President Obama saying that, unlike historical empires of the past, the United States doesn’t go into countries for territory or resources, but because it’s right. Could you talk to us about what has happened to the resources of Iraq, to the oil of Iraq? To what degree now are American companies involved that they were not before the war?
YANAR MOHAMMED: In the last year, we were told that Iraq’s economy is going to be changing, and there’s going to be a new phase of investment. But in reality, those who were invited into the Green Zone were surprised to see that it’s all about privatization, that we have new foreign oil companies. Some of them are already functioning in the south, like British Petroleum, who have an oil field from which they are extracting oil.
They are beginning to—they have brought some foreign workers to work in there, and they have totally discriminatory workplaces where the foreigner is paid much more than the Iraqi. I was told that the foreigners are paid in the thousands of dollars monthly, while an Iraqi employees is paid something like $400. And even the workplaces are very discriminatory and racist, in the sense that the foreigner workers are treated much better than the Iraqi employees.
And the question is, how did they get these foreign oil companies to come into Iraq? Like British Petroleum is one of them. It has many oil fields. It’s functioning. It’s extracting Iraqi oil. On which terms? We, the Iraqi people, don’t know. On which agreement did they come and they are functioning fully in Iraq? We, the Iraqi people, don’t know.
And the question is, why is all the money being shared by the 1 percent who are ruling Iraq and the U.S. administration and all these multinational companies, while the Iraqi widows cannot even have $150 as a salary? Most of the widows we’ve met in our organization do not have one penny coming into their pockets. No government finds themselves accountable for the women of Iraq, who have been turned deprived because of this war.
And I would like to add one thing. There is a new generation of women and men in Iraq who are totally illiterate. You see a woman in her twenties. She might have children, or not, and that’s another story about the widows. But she has witnessed no schooling because of the sectarian war, because of the war on Iraq. It’s a generation of illiteracy in Iraq, while, before this war, you know, we know that Iraq in the 1980s, and even in the following years, it had the highest literacy rate in the Arab world.
And the last point I would like to add, and I would have liked you to ask me about it, is the Arab Spring, when it started in Iraq, specifically on the day of February 25. When the government held a curfew in all the Iraqi cities, especially in Baghdad, we had to walk three hours to reach to the Tahrir Square of Baghdad, and 25,000 people were in that square expressing their political will that this is not the political system that they want to rule them—the Islamist government of the Shia, who is oppressing all the others, the Sunni, who are oppressed in the west, the ethnic divisions on the people.
And mind you, the gender divisions? In the Tahrir Square of Baghdad, many of us women were there, and we were so respected. Nobody told us to put on the veil on, while in these days the prime minister’s office is spreading out policies that all the female workers in the public sector will have to wear decent dress code—decent as in respecting our culture. The prime minister is imposing a mentality of discriminating against women based on Islamic sharia, while the demonstrators of the Arab Spring in Iraq want an egalitarian society.
And one thing that this new democracy, so-called democracy, proved in Iraq is that they were the best in oppressing the Arab Spring in Iraq. They sent us police, army and anti-riot groups to shoot us with live ammunition in the Tahrir Square. They detained and they tortured hundreds and thousands of us demonstrators. And this is because we only led a free demonstration.
And this is not only one demonstration. All the Fridays since the beginning of February have witnessed demonstrations in the main squares of Iraq—Baghdad, Sulaymaniyah, Basra, Samarra, all of Baghdad. People went into the squares, and there were no slogans of asking for a religious government. The U.S. administration came into Iraq: it divided the Iraqi people according to religion, according to their sect, according to their ethnicity. It’s divide and conquer. And now the women are the biggest loser in all of this. We went to the Iraqi squares. We demonstrated. The Arab Spring was there very strongly but got oppressed in ways that were new to Iraqi people. Anti-riot police of the American style was something that we witnessed there. The big vehicles that sprayed us with the hot water, polluted water, pushed us out of these squares. And sound bombs were thrown at us, live ammunition, the full works. This is not a democratic country. And it is not united, because it’s being divided into Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish regions.
AMY GOODMAN: Yanar, I wanted to end by going back to the beginning, if you will, going back to 2003 to the words of then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld after the fall of Baghdad.
DEFENSE SECRETARY DONALD RUMSFELD: Iraqis celebrating in the streets, riding American tanks, tearing down the statues of Saddam Hussein in the center of Baghdad, are breathtaking. Watching them, one cannot help but think of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Iron Curtain. We are seeing history unfold, events that will shape the course of a country, the fate of a people, and potentially the future of the region.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Donald Rumsfeld in 2003. Yanar, we have 30 seconds. Your final response?YANAR MOHAMMED: I think that the victims and the parents of the victims of this war, the half-a-million dead of this war, were not invited to the celebration of the U.S. and the military in Baghdad. They should have been invited to give their say about this Iraqi war that left their families hungry and poor and really unable and helpless.
AMY GOODMAN: Yanar Mohammed, I want to thank you for being with us, president of the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. We’ll be back in a minute.
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JUAN GONZALEZ: Alleged U.S. Army whistleblower Private Bradley Manning is scheduled to make his first court appearance today after being held for more than a year and a half by the U.S. military. The 23-year-old Manning is suspected of leaking hundreds of thousands of secret U.S. diplomatic cables to the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks in the biggest leak of classified U.S. documents in history. The pre-trial hearing begins today at Fort Meade in Maryland. According to news reports, the hearing could last an entire week. Military prosecutors are aiming to show there is sufficient evidence to bring Manning to trial at a general court-martial on 22 criminal charges. If convicted, Manning could face life in prison.AMY GOODMAN: Bradley Manning has been detained since May of 2010. He has not been seen or heard by the public since then. He was initially held on a charge of leaking a classified video to WikiLeaks that showed a 2007 helicopter attack that killed a dozen people in Iraq, including two Reuters employees—a journalist and his driver.
Supporters of Manning are rallying outside Fort Meade today and are planning another protest outside the base tomorrow. Kevin Zeese is an attorney for the Bradley Manning Support Network.
KEVIN ZEESE: The people who should be prosecuted are not Bradley Manning. He’s accused of letting the truth out. He’s not accused of doing any criminal activity. He’s accused of letting the truth out, and he should be given an award for that, not prosecuted. He’s facing the death penalty, potentially. He’s facing the death penalty for exposing war crimes.
AMY GOODMAN: To talk more about Bradley Manning, we turn now to perhaps the nation’s most famous whistleblower, Daniel Ellsberg. In 1971, he leaked the Pentagon Papers, the secret history of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Daniel Ellsberg joins us from the studios of the University of California, Berkeley.Dan, welcome to Democracy Now! You have Bradley Manning first held in Kuwait, then at Quantico, then at Leavenworth, now being brought to Fort Meade. Can you talk about the significance of this Article 32 hearing and what it means?
DANIEL ELLSBERG: Well, it’s equivalent to a grand jury hearing. It’s kind of symptomatic of the present state of law in the United States, sort of like the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland: punishment first, trial afterwards, sentence after that. He’s been effectively punished now ten-and-a-half months in Quantico in isolation, a kind of torture, according to the U.N. standards and to our own domestic law, that he couldn’t be sentenced to under our amendment to the Bill of Rights against cruel and unusual punishment. He couldn’t be assigned to that, but he has already. That, in itself, makes a travesty of this continued trial.
I was the first to face the kind of charges that he’s facing, under the Espionage Act, specifically, a civilian charge that he’s facing, 18 U.S.C. 793, back in 1971, the first time that act had been used against someone disclosing information to the American people. In the end, my trial was ended because of gross governmental misconduct against me under President Nixon. This court-martial should be ended now for exactly the same reason. There has been gross, illegal conduct against Bradley Manning in the form of his incarceration for these many months without trial. And that’s one of several reasons why this trial is a travesty.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, Dan Ellsberg, his defense lawyer has not been given permission to call most of the witnesses that he would like to call for this hearing. Could you talk about that?
DANIEL ELLSBERG: Well, I believe one of the witnesses, I’m not sure whether the defense has specifically called him. I haven’t seen the list. But we know—I know two people who—of official status, who have tried to get in to see him now for most of this year. One is Juan Méndez, the U.N. special rapporteur for torture, who has heard credible reports, as he puts it, of inhumane treatment. And under his mandate, under the U.N., he should see, in private, as an official representative of the U.N., Private Manning to see that. He has not been allowed to do that, either in Quantico or Leavenworth. And he has specifically complained about prevarication of the—by the American government in their unwillingness to let him see that. U.N. and Red Cross representatives have seen people in Guantánamo, but they can’t get in, apparently, to Quantico or Leavenworth. Representative Dennis Kucinich, in his official capacity, tried repeatedly to see him in there, for the same reasons, and was again put off, again and again, told that he would be able to see him, but never allowed to see him.
I think that other witnesses, I see from the witness list without their names, are to establish the point that the strictly military charges that he’s facing, that Bradley Manning is facing, things like unauthorized downloading or uploading of software onto military computers, are done by virtually everyone in his department. And this is selective prosecution, obviously intended to get him, even if they can’t prove the charges that they want to get connecting him to Julian Assange of WikiLeaks. Obviously, the torture to which he was subjected was meant to break him down, to get him to acknowledge links that would enable them to indict Julian Assange. And evidently that pressure has failed against Private Manning.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to play an excerpt of the video WikiLeaks released last year showing U.S. forces indiscriminately firing on Iraqi civilians in New Baghdad, an area of Baghdad. Military prosecutors have accused Manning of giving the video to WikiLeaks. The footage is from July 2007. The video shows U.S. forces killing 12 people, including two Reuters employees: Saeed Chmagh, the driver, and Namir Noor-Eldeen, an up-and-coming videographer working for Reuters.
U.S. SOLDIER 1: Have individuals with weapons.
U.S. SOLDIER 2: You’re clear.
U.S. SOLDIER 1: Alright, firing.
U.S. SOLDIER 3: Let me know when you’ve got them.
U.S. SOLDIER 2: Let’s shoot. Light ’em all up.
U.S. SOLDIER 1: Come on, fire!
U.S. SOLDIER 2: Keep shootin’. Keep shootin’. Keep shootin’. Keep shootin’.
U.S. SOLDIER 4: Hotel, Bushmaster two-six, Bushmaster two-six, we need to move, time now!
U.S. SOLDIER 2: Alright, we just engaged all eight individuals.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s an excerpt of the video that Reuters was not able to get, even after the death of its reporter and driver, for years, but was released by WikiLeaks. Dan Ellsberg, the significance of this? And the significance of Time magazine naming "protester" as the "Person of the Year"?DANIEL ELLSBERG: First of all, on that video, which I’ve seen a number of times, let me speak as a former Marine company commander, and I was a battalion training officer who trained the 3rd Battalion, 2nd Marines on rules of war. No question in my mind, as I looked at that, that the specific leaked pictures in there of helicopter gunners hunting down and shooting an unarmed man in civilian clothes, clearly wounded, in an area where a squad of American soldiers was about to appear, as the helicopter gunners knew, to take custody of anyone remaining living, that shooting was murder. It was a war crime. Not all killing in war is murder, but a lot of it is. And this was.
The Time magazine cover gives protester, an anonymous protester, as "Person of the Year," but it is possible to put a face and a name to that picture of "Person of the Year." And the American face I would put on that is Private Bradley Manning. The fact is that he is credited by President Obama and the Justice Department, or the Army, actually, with having given WikiLeaks that helicopter picture and other evidence of atrocities and war crimes—and torture, specifically—in Iraq, including in the Obama administration. That, in other words, led to the Tunisian uprising, the occupation in Tunis Square, which has been renamed by—for another face that could go on that picture, Mohamed Bouazizi, who, after the WikiLeaks exposures of corruption, in Tunis, himself, Bouazizi, burned himself alive just one year ago tomorrow, Saturday, December 17th, in protest. And the combination of the WikiLeaks and Bradley Manning exposures in Tunis and the exemplification of that by Mohamed Bouazizi led to the protests, the nonviolent protests, that drove Ben Ali out of power, our ally there who we supported up 'til that moment, and in turn sparked the uprising in Egypt, in Tahrir Square occupation, which immediately stimulated the Occupy Wall Street and the other occupations in the Middle East and elsewhere. So, "Person of the Year," one of those persons of the year is now sitting in a courthouse in Leavenworth. He deserves the recognition that he's just gotten in Time. Julian Assange, who published that, another person of the year, I would say, who’s gotten a number of journalistic awards, very much deserve our gratitude. And I hope they will have the effect in liberating us from the lawlessness that we have seen and the corruption—the corruption—that we have seen in this country in the last 10 years and more, which has been no less than that of Tunis and Egypt.
AMY GOODMAN: Dan Ellsberg, I want to thank you for joining us. We’re on the line right now with Jeff Paterson. We only have 30 seconds. He served—was the first resister of the first Gulf War, Marine corporal.
You’re at Fort Meade right now. Can you tell us what’s happening just before Bradley Manning’s hearing?
JEFF PATERSON: Well, we have media entering the base. There’s about 60 to 70 media credentialed to cover the hearing, that will happen every day from today through next Thursday. We have dozens of Bradley Manning supporters out here with banners and flags. We’re on military property, so our relationship with the military mobile police is a little dicey, but it looks like they’re going to let us stay here. Tomorrow we have buses coming from Occupy D.C. and Wall Street. [inaudible]
AMY GOODMAN: Jeff Paterson, we have to leave it there, co-founder of the Bradley Manning Support Network. Bradley Manning turns 24 years old tomorrow.
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Thank you
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/israeli-government-approves-first-bedouin-ecovillage-in-negev-1.399751
When Holocaust Inc. ensures that every year in America features a plethora of Content that is focused on the Holocaust, to keep Americans blindly supporting Israel, yet we are never made to remember that for 2000 years, ALL the Jewish suffering has been at the hands of Christians; from decadent Roman emperors, to Orthodox Christian emperors from Byzantium to the incompetent Tsars of St. Petersburg; Catholics of Italy and France, and Protestants of Germany and beyond. Christians persecuting Jews, not Arabs. Not Muslims.
We conveniently forget that the story of the Exodus and Exile, slavery in Babylon, is but a Christian myth. It never happened, it’s not even Jewish in origin. The ancient Jews of Israel, Judea and Samaria never left. They fought with the Muslims to overthrow Byzantium and establish the Caliphate. They converted to Islam, with the Temple destroyed, Israel a memory, and facing the taxes, Jews and Christians had to pay that Muslims did not, why not? Their descendants are still in Palestine, and were in 1948.
The question is, who are all these European and American Jews who think they can claim Arab land as their homeland? If the Biblical Jews never left, who are they, these modern interlopers from abroad? And what sort of claim can be made after 2000 years, practically the entire arc of civilization? If that becomes a legal precedent, what would become of the borders of the Americas? The US? China? Russia? Or, more cynically, native peoples worldwide?
Israel hasn’t had a clear victory since 1973. It’s occupation of Lebanon, including the murder of over a thousand Palestinians there, created Hizbollah. The siege of Gaza produced Hamas. America’s blind support for Israel and its support of corrupt Arab regimes brought down the World Trade Center and killed 3000 people. America’s war on Iraq and Afghanistan didn’t free either country, but it made lots of enemies for us, and no friends for Israel, and now the Arab spring is finally bringing a version of democracy to the Middle East, and where is Israel and Washington but on the sidelines fretting that the Arabs “aren’t ready” and that Mubarak should have been supported.
Any dictator that takes our money is a dictator we should support?
The future of the Middle East is Arab, and Islamic. The Arabs will never accept a European American Jewish state on Arab land.
The question is, is anybody in America looking far enough ahead?
What are the consequences for our blindly supporting Israel?
When Israel does something stupid, that sets off the war they can’t contain, and the US takes a fall trying to come to Israel’s aid, will American’s become unnaturally introspective, or will we seek to find a scapegoat to take the fall? Will we accept that we brought this upon us, or will we let the demagogues among us convince us that we were betrayed? That someone subverted our foreign policy to benefit Israel, at our expense? Who would the scapegoat be?
Think of the iconic images and how they could be repurposed as “evidence” that AIPAC betrayed America. That tape of Obama being lectured by Netanyahu, saying nothing, clench jawed. Could that not be used as “evidence” that Obama was terrified of the Israel lobby, “proof” that the President was powerless against it? What about the words of Helen Thomas, after the Israeli’s murdered 9 unarmed Turkish peace activists? All she said was that the Israelis should go back where they came from, but the conservative media acted as if she had said they should go back to Auschwitz and Bergen Belsen, and she was sacked. Could this not be repurposed as “evidence” of the overarching power of the Jewish lobby to silence dissent?
There is no natural Jewish homeland, for anyone born beyond the boundaries of the ancient borders of Palestine, and descended from the Jews of the Bible, who never left. The homeland of the so-called Diaspora, is where each member was born, and where he can trace his family. Thinking otherwise is to encourage a delusion that will not only destroy the unsustainable lie that is Israel, but one that will burn away the Diaspora as well.
After all, if Christianity has persecuted the Jews since the time of Rome, it is not inconceivable to the thinking mind that the last act of Western Civilization will be an anti-Semitic holocaust that will make Hitler’s effort seem like a practice run.
When are we going to start thinking of the consequences of blindly supporting a European American Jewish state on Arab land? It is Arab land, and there will be consequences. People are going to be killed. Isn’t it about time we started to think about the consequences and to stop enabling the delusion?