Hello,

Here is another ZNet update -- also serving as today's sustainer commentary mailing.

You can add and remove email addresses from our list at the ZNet top page which is at www.zmag.org/weluser.htm

This message is primarily to convey two essays reacting to the arrest of Saddam Hussein.

The first is by ZNet Commentator Stephen Shalom and sets the Washington Post straight (and most others too) as to the chronicle of Saddam's history to date, also raising the key issues that his being brought to trial raises.

The second is by ZNet Commentator Maria Tomchick and assesses the likely unfolding situation in Iraq.

Meanwhile, back at our site, we hope you are enjoing the new layout and the continuous flow of new content. Since the last mailing, we put online a number of interviews done by the Asian section of the BBC with some of ZNet's own contributors, Shalom, Roy, Albert, Shiva, and Monbiot. We have a regular exchange with Le Monde Diplomatique and their most recent set of articles are in place since last message, as well.And of course there is the regular flow of new articles each day.

So please, visit ZNet (www.zmag.org/weluser.htm) and keep up with its contents.

And now, here are the two essays for today...

---

A Saddam Chronology

Stephen R. Shalom

Saddam Hussein is one of the world's great monsters. Nothing would be more welcome than to have him put on trial, a trial which could offer Iraqis and the world an honest accounting of his many crimes. However, as so often happens, when a trial is organized by those who are themselves guilty of serious crimes, truth is not the goal. Instead the historical record is falsified to make the one monster seem uniquely blameworthy and the ones running the show above criticism.

We saw this pattern in the Tokyo trials following World War II, where the crimes of Japanese officials were documented in gruesome detail (except for the biological warfare programs, which Washington wanted to use for itself and except for the involvement of the emperor, who was to serve U.S. purposes during the occupation), while the crimes of the victors, such as the horrific fire-bombing raids and the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were disregarded. Likewise, Panamanian ruler Manual Noriega was a thug who certainly belonged in the dock. But when the U.S. military invaded Panama in violation of international law and
seized him for trial in the United States, there was no intention by the kidnappers that the trial be a forum for revealing the long-time ties between Noriega and the U.S. government, and particularly between Noriega and former CIA director George H. W. Bush.

It is a matter of principle in Washington that Americans not be held to  the same international standards as others. Thus, the U.S. refuses to endorse the International Criminal Court and demands that its allies give up their right to invoke the jurisdiction of the court when U.S. citizens are involved. But those of us who truly care about justice ought to demand that Saddam Hussein be tried before a court that is in no way subject to U.S. control or manipulation. Only in that way can the real truth come out.

Already, however, much of the media is falling into line in framing the crimes of Saddam Hussein. For example, the Washington Post website offered a summary of "Events in the Life of Saddam Hussein" from the  Associated Press. But the chronology was seriously incomplete. Below isthat chronology, corrected to include -- indented and in brackets -- some of the most serious omissions. 
Sunday, December 14, 2003; 8:34 AM

A glance at the life of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein:

April 28, 1937 -- Born in village near desert town of Tikrit, north of Baghdad.

1957 -- Joins underground Baath Socialist Party.

1958 -- Arrested for killing his brother-in-law, a Communist, spends six months in prison.

Oct. 7, 1959 -- On Baath assassination team that ambushes Iraqi strongman Gen. Abdel-Karim Kassem in Baghdad, wounding him. Saddam, wounded in leg, flees to Syria then Egypt.

[This was not the only attempt to assassinate Kassem. In April 1960, the CIA approved using a poisoned handkerchief to kill Kassem. The "handkerchief was duly dispatched to Kassem, but whether or not it ever reached him, it certainly did not kill him." (Thomas Powers, The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA, New York: Knopf, 1979, p.
130.)]

Feb. 8, 1963 -- Returns from Egypt after Baath takes part in coup that
overthrows and kills Kassem. Baath ousted by military in November.

[The coup was backed by the CIA.

"As its instrument the C.I.A. had chosen the authoritarian and anti-Communist Baath Party, in 1963 still a relatively small political
faction influential in the Iraqi Army. According to the former Baathist leader Hani Fkaiki, among party members colluding with the C.I.A. in 1962 and 1963 was Saddam Hussein....

"According to Western scholars, as well as Iraqi refugees and a British human rights organization, the 1963 coup was accompanied by a bloodbath. Using lists of suspected Communists and other leftists provided by the C.I.A., the Baathists systematically murdered untold numbers of Iraq's educated elite -- killings in which Saddam Hussein himself is said to have participated. No one knows the exact toll, but accounts agree that the victims included hundreds of doctors, teachers, technicians, lawyers and other professionals as well as military and political figures." (Roger Morris, "A Tyrant 40 Years in the Making," New York Times, March
14, 2003, p. A29.)]

July 17, 1968 -- Baathists and army officers overthrow regime.
["Again, this coup, amid more factional violence, came with C.I.A. backing. Serving on the staff of the National Security Council under Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon in the late 1960's, I often heard C.I.A. officers -- including Archibald Roosevelt, grandson of Theodore Roosevelt and a ranking C.I.A. official for the Near East and Africa at the time -- speak openly about their close relations with the Iraqi Baathists." (Morris, "A Tyrant 40 Years in the Making," p. A29.)]

July 30, 1968 -- Takes charge of internal security after Baath ousts erstwhile allies and authority passes to Revolutionary Command Council under Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, Saddam's cousin.

[From 1973-75, the United States, Iran, and Israel supported a Kurdish insurgency in Iraq. Documents examined by the U.S. House Select Committee on Intelligence "clearly show that the President, Dr. Kissinger and the [Shah] hoped that our clients [the Kurds] would not prevail. They preferred instead that the insurgents simply continue a level of hostilities sufficient to sap [Iraqi] resources.... This policy was not imparted to our clients, who were encouraged to continue fighting. Even in the context of covert action, ours was a cynical enterprise." Then, in 1975, the Shah and Saddam Hussein of Iraq signed an agreement giving Iran territorial concessions in return for Iran's closing its border to Kurdish guerrillas. Teheran and Washington promptly cut off their aid to the Kurds and, while Iraq massacred the rebels, the United States refused them asylum. Kissinger justified this U.S. policy in closed testimony: "covert action should not be confused with missionary work." (U.S. House of Representatives, Select Committee on Intelligence, 19 Jan. 1976 [Pike Report] in Village Voice, 16 Feb.
1976, pp. 85, 87n465, 88n471. The Pike Report attributes the last quote only to a "senior official"; William Safire, Safire's Washington, New York: Times Books, 1980, p. 333, identifies the official as Kissinger.)]

July 16, 1979 -- Takes over as president from al-Bakr, launches massive purge of Baath.
[In the late 1970s, Saddam also purged the Iraqi Communist Party and other oppositionists. (Marion Farouk-Sluglett and Peter Sluglett, Iraq Since 1958, London: I. B. Tauris, 1990, pp. 182-87) "We see no fundamental incompatibility of interests between the United States and Iraq," declared U.S. National Security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski in April 1980. (Quoted in Barry Rubin, "The United States and Iraq: From Appeasement to War," in Iraq's Road to War, ed. Amatzia Baram and Barry
Rubin, New York: St. Martin's 1993, p. 256.)]

Sept. 22, 1980 -- Sends forces into Iran; war last eight years.
[When Iraq invaded Iran, the United Nations Security Council waited four days before holding a meeting. On September 28, it passed Resolution 479 calling for an end to the fighting, but which significantly did not condemn (nor even mention) the Iraqi aggression and did not demand a return to internationally recognized boundaries. As Ralph King, who has studied the UN response in detail, concluded, "The Council more or less deliberately ignored Iraq's actions in September 1980." The U.S. delegate noted that Iran, which had itself violated Security Council resolutions on the U.S. embassy hostages, could hardly complain about
the Council's lackluster response. (R.P.H. King, "The United Nations and the IranIraq War, 19801986," in The United Nations and the IranIraq War,  ed. Brian Urquhart and Gary Sick, New York: Ford Foundation, August 1987.)

Despite the fact that Iraq had been the aggressor in this war and that Iraq was the first to use chemical weapons, the first to launch air
attacks on cities, and the initiator of the tanker war, the United States tilted toward Iraq. The U.S. removed Iraq from its list of
terrorist states in 1982, sent Donald Rumsfeld to Baghdad as Reagan's envoy to meet with Saddam Hussein in 1983 and 1984 to discuss economic cooperation, re-established diplomatic relations in November 1984, made available extensive loans and subsidies, provided intelligence information, encouraged its allies to arm Iraq, and engaged in military actions in the Persian Gulf against Iran. The United States also provided dual-use equipment that it knew Iraq was using for military purposes. (See Joyce Battle, ed., "Shaking Hands with Saddam Hussein: The U.S. Tilts toward Iraq, 1980-1984," National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 82, Feb. 25, 2003, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82/.)]

March 28, 1988 -- Uses chemical weapons against Kurdish town of Halabja, killing estimated 5,000 civilians.
[From Iraq's first use of chemical weapons in 1983, the U.S. took a very restrained view. When the evidence of Iraqi use of these weapons could no longer be denied, the U.S. issued a mild condemnation, but made clear that this would have no effect on commercial or diplomatic relations between the United States and Iraq. Iran asked the Security Council to condemn Iraq's chemical weapons use, but the U.S. delegate to the U.N. was instructed to try to prevent a resolution from coming to a vote, or
else to abstain. An Iraqi official told the U.S. that Iraq strongly preferred a Security Council presidential statement to a resolution and
did not want any specific country identified as responsible for chemical weapons use. On March 30, 1984, the Security Council issued a presidential statement condemning the use of chemical weapons, without
naming Iraq as the offending party. (Battle,http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82/.)

At the same time that the U.S. government had knowledge of that the Iraqi military was using chemical weapons, it was providing intelligence and planning assistance to the Iraqi armed forces. (Patrick Tyler,  "Officers Say U.S. Aided Iraq In War Despite Use Of Gas," New York Times, Aug. 18, 2002, p. 1.)

When Iraq used chemical weapons in March 1988 against Halabja, there was no condemnation from Washington. (Dilip Hiro, "When US turned a blind eye to poison gas," The Observer, September 1, 2002, p. 17.) "In September 1988, the House of Representatives voted 388 to 16 in favor of economic sanctions against Iraq, but the White House succeeded in having the Senate water down the proposal. In exchange for Export-Import Bank credits, Iraq merely had to promise not to use chemical weapons again, with agricultural credits exempted even from this limited requirement." (Rubin, "The United States and Iraq: From Appeasement to War," p. 261.)]

Aug. 2, 1990 -- Invades Kuwait.
[The chronology omits one of Saddam Hussein's most egregious atrocities, his Anfal campaign against the Kurds from 1987-89, in which at least 50,000 and possibly 100,000 Kurds were systematically slaughtered. (Middle East Watch, Genocide in Iraq: The Anfal Campaign Against the Kurds, New York: Human Rights Watch, 1993.)  The response of the new Bush administration was to increase Iraq's commodity credits from half a billion to a billion dollars, making it the second largest user of the credit program in the world. As late as April 1990, the administration was opposing sanctions against Iraq ("They would hurt U.S. exporters and worsen our trade deficit," said the State Department). (Guy Gugliotta, Charles R. Babcock, and Benjamin Weiser, "At War, Iraq Courted U.S. Into Economic Embrace," Washington Post, Sept. 16, 1990, p. A1.) The administration also blocked efforts to
cut back high-tech exports to Iraq with obvious military applications. (Douglas Frantz and Murray Waas, "Bush insisted on aiding Iraq until war's onset," Chicago Sun-Times, Feb. 23, 1992, p. 17.) And the United States was providing intelligence data to Iraq until three months before the invasion. (Murray Waas, Douglas Frantz, "U.S. shared intelligence with Iraq until 3 months before invasion of Kuwait," Houston Chronicle, March 10, 1992, p. A6.)]

 Jan. 17, 1991 -- Attacked by U.S.-led coalition; Kuwait liberated in a month. [As part of the U.S.-led attack, the civilian infrastructure of Iraq was intentionally targeted (Barton Gellman, "Allied Air War Struck Broadly in Iraq; Officials Acknowledge Strategy Went Beyond Purely Military Targets," Washington Post, 23 June 1991, p. A1; Thomas J. Nagy, "The
Secret Behind the Sanctions," Progressive, Sept. 2001), which together with more than a decade of economic sanctions would lead to hundreds of thousands of excess deaths. (See Richard Garfield, "Morbidity and Mortality Among Iraqi Children From 1990 through 1998: Assessing the Impact of the Gulf War and Economic Sanctions," March 1999, http://www.fourthfreedom.org/php/t-si-index.php?hinc=garf-index.hinc.)]

March, 1991 -- Crushes Shiite revolt in south and Kurd revolt in north.
[After urging Iraqis to rise up against Saddam Hussein, the U.S. denied the rebels access to captured Iraqi weapons and allowed Saddam Hussein to use his helicopters to slaughter the insurgents as U.S. aircraft circled overhead. (Andrew Cockburn and Patrick Cockburn, Out of the Ashes: The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein, New York: Harperperennial. 1999, chap. 1.)]

April 17, 1991 -- Complying with U.N. Resolution 687, starts providing information on weapons of mass destruction, but accused of cheating.

Feb. 20, 1996 -- Orders killing of two sons-in-law who in 1995 defected to Jordan and had just returned to Baghdad after receiving guarantees of safety.

Dec. 16, 1998 -- Weapons inspectors withdrawn from Iraq. Hours later, four days of U.S.-British air and missile strikes begin as punishment for lack of cooperation.

[The bombing was conducted without Security Council approval and without consultations with allies. The withdrawal of the inspectors was ordered by Richard Butler, the head of UNSCOM. "France was also annoyed with Washington for getting Mr. Butler to pull out his inspectors from Iraq without discussion with the Security Council." U.S. Secretary of State "Albright did not speak with Secretary General Kofi Annan at the United Nations, officials said. Mr. Annan issued a personal statement, calling this 'a sad day' for the world and 'me personally,' because of his failure to avert the use of force." (Steven Erlanger, "U.S. Decision to
Act Fast, and Then Search for Support, Angers Some Allies," New York Times, Dec. 17, 1998, p. A14.)]

Nov. 8, 2002 -- Threatened with "serious consequences" if he does not disarm in U.N. Security Council resolution.

Nov. 27, 2002 -- Allows U.N. experts to begin work in Iraq for first time since 1998.

Dec. 7, 2002 -- Delivers to United Nations declaration denying Iraq has weapons of mass destruction; later, United States says declaration is untruthful and United Nations says it is incomplete.

March 1, 2003 -- United Arab Emirates, at an Arab League summit, becomes first Arab nation to propose publicly that Saddam step down.

March 7 -- United States, Britain and Spain propose ordering Saddam to give up banned weapons by March 17 or face war; other nations led by France on polarized U.N. Security Council oppose any new resolution that would authorize military action.

March 17 -- United States, Britain and Spain declare time for diplomacy over, withdraw proposed resolution. President Bush gives Saddam 48 hours to leave Iraq.

[Actually, U.S. officials made clear that U.S. troops would enter Iraq  whether or not Saddam and his sons left the country. (Michael R. Gordon, "Allies Will Move In, Even if Saddam Hussein Moves Out," New York Times, March 18, 2003, p. A16.)]

March 18 -- Iraq's leadership rejects Bush's ultimatum.
["On the eve of war, Iraq publicly offered unlimited access for American and British weapons hunters." (David Rennie, "Saddam 'offered Bush a huge oil deal to avert war'," Daily Telegraph [London], Nov. 7, 2003, p. 17) And privately Iraq went well beyond this. In several back-channel contacts with U.S. officials, Iraq offered the U.S. "direct U.S. involvement on the ground in disarming Iraq," oil concessions, the turn-over of a wanted terrorist, cooperation on the Israeli-Palestinian peace-process, and even internationally-supervised elections within two years. (James Risen, "Iraq Said to Have Tried to Reach Last-Minute Deal
to Avert War," New York Times, Nov. 6, 2003, p. A1) One doesn't know where these offers may have led, since they were rejected by the U.S.: "A US intelligence source insisted that the decision not to negotiate came from the White House, which was demanding complete surrender. According to an Arab source, [a U.S. intermediary] sent a Saudi official a set of requirements he believed Iraq would have to fulfill. Those demands included Saddam's abdication and departure, first to a US military base for interrogation and then into supervised exile, a surrender of Iraqi troops, and the admission that Iraq had weapons of
mass destruction. (Julian Borger, Brian Whitaker, and Vikram Dodd "Saddam's desperate offers to stave off war," Guardian, Nov. 7, 2003, p. 3.)]

March 20 -- U.S. forces open war with military strike on Dora Farms, a target south of Baghdad where Saddam and his sons are said to be. Saddam appears on Iraqi television later in the day.

April 4 -- Iraqi television shows video of Saddam walking a Baghdad street.

April 7 -- U.S. warplanes bomb a section of the Mansour district in Baghdad where Saddam and his sons were said to be meeting.

April 9 -- Jubilant crowds greet U.S. troops in Baghdad, go on looting rampages, topple 40-foot statue of Saddam.

July 22 -- Saddam's sons, Qusai and Odai, killed in gunbattle with U.S. troops. American forces then raid the northern city of Mosul and later say they missed Saddam "by a matter of hours."

July 27 -- U.S. troops raid three farms in Tikrit. Again, officials later say they missed Saddam by 24 hours.

July 31 -- Two of Saddam's daughters, Raghad and Rana, and their nine children are given asylum by Jordan's King Abdullah II.

[That they would need asylum follows from the U.S. policy of detaining family members of those they are seeking, in violation of elementary standards of justice. ("The arrest of close relatives of fugitive regime members has been used by US forces in the past both as a way to gather intelligence - through interrogation - and to put emotional pressure on the hunted men to surrender." Colin Nickerson, "US Troops Detain Wife, Daughter Of Key Hussein Aide Ex-Deputy Suspected Of Plotting Attacks In
Iraqi Insurgency," Boston Globe, Nov. 27, 2003, p. A40.)]

Sept. 5 -- Maj. Gen. Ray Odierno of the 4th Infantry Division says his troops have captured several of Saddam's former bodyguards in the Tikrit area in the past month and may be closing in on the deposed Iraqi dictator.

Nov. 16 -- The last of nine tapes attributed to Saddam Hussein since he was removed from power is released. It tells Iraqis to step up their resistance to the U.S.-led occupation, saying the United States and its allies misjudged the difficulty of occupying Iraq.

[It didn't take a genius to note that "the United States and its allies misjudged the difficulty of occupying Iraq."]

Dec. 13 -- Saddam is captured at 8:30 p.m. in the town of Adwar, 10 miles south of Tikrit. He is hiding in a specially prepared "spider hole."

---

Got Saddam But Not Much Else

By Maria Tomchick

Saddam is in custody, but the war's not over yet. The U.S. faces several important hurdles in the bringing the war to an end and extricating U.S. troops from a seemingly endless fracas.

The most critical problem involves the ceaseless guerrilla attacks. According to a series of interviews with Iraqi guerrillas conducted by the French Press Agency, the guerrillas are composed of three main groups, only one of which supports Saddam Hussein. Of the other two groups one is Iraqi Islamists, who are fighting to drive the infidel Americans from Iraq's holy places. The third group is composed of  ationalists -- disaffected, anti-Saddam, former Baath party members and other pan-Arabists -- who are fighting a war of liberation. And, unsurprisingly, these groups often coordinate their attacks, to devastating effect.

Nor is it safe to assume that the pro-Saddam faction is now beheaded. U.S. military officers said that, when they pulled Saddam Hussein out of his hole in the ground, he had no radio or other communications equipment. Clearly, he wasn't coordinating any attacks, issuing any orders, or in charge of any guerrilla movements.

The main value of having Saddam in custody is that it removes a symbol, a source of inspiration for a sizable contingent of the guerrillas. But to hope that this will bring an immediate end to the war is to forget how adaptable human loyalties are. If Saddam Hussein has not been directing guerrilla attacks, someone else surely has, and that person or group of people command as much or more loyalty than Saddam ever has. In the end, a figurehead is merely a figurehead; the people who do the practical work -- who have the face-to-face contact and provide the weapons and money -- are the ones who command the loyalty of their
troops. And not all the guerrillas look to Saddam for inspiration -- not when there are plenty of other reasons to rebel in Iraq these days.

Take, for example, U.S. military tactics in the Sunni triangle, which  ave increasingly mirrored failed Israeli military tactics in the
Occupied Territories. This past week, both U.S. military planners and Israeli sources have told the press that, yes, U.S. military officers have studied Israeli tactics in the West Bank. And they are now applying those lessons in Iraq.

Such tactics include: destroying buildings suspected of being guerrilla hideouts, bulldozing the homes of suspected guerrillas and their family members, arresting the relatives of suspected guerrillas and/or people who may have information about the guerrillas, and surrounding entire villages with razor wire, forcing the occupants to pass through a single checkpoint in order to come and go. If people can't make it back through crowded checkpoints before curfew, they have to spend the night in the desert. At these checkpoints, Iraqis must show ID cards issued by the U.S. military and printed only in English. Humiliated Iraqis are drawing
clear parallels to the Palestinian situation, and that should be warning sign for the U.S. military. Unfortunately, it's going unheeded.

Lt. Col. Nathan Sassaman, the man in charge of surrounding the village of Abu Hishma with razor wire, told the New York Times, "With a heavy dose of fear and violence, and a lot of money for projects, I think we can convince these people we are here to help them." A sign posted on the wire fence reads "This fence is here for your protection. Do not approach or try to cross or you will be shot." 

One of the "heavy doses of fear and violence" that the U.S. military is currently employing is the use of assassination squads, modeled on the same squads the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) have used in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The U.S. military's new Task Force 121 is being trained by the IDF at Fort Bragg to carry out assassinations of suspected guerrilla leaders. The Guardian newspaper of London recently noted that U.S. special forces teams are already operating inside Syria in an attempt to kill "foreign jihadists" before they cross the border, raising questions of "who is a jihadist and how do we define that?" and "how do we know who's planning to cross the border?" -- not to mention the ultimate question of the legality of assassination under international law.

At least one of those questions can be answered. A principle planner behind Task Force 121 is Lt. Gen. William "Jerry" Boykin who, in October, told an Oregon church congregation that the U.S. is a "Christian army" at war with Satan. Such fanatics will stretch the
definition of "foreign jihadists" to cover whomever they wish to target. And such brutal tactics will be as successful in Iraq as they've been in the Occupied Territories, where assassinations have led to ever more militant attacks against Israeli troops and civilians.

On the "money for projects" end, the Bush administration has failed miserably so far. The major donor's conference in October brought large pledges, but few of them have been honored because of the deteriorating security situation in Iraq and the ongoing, world-wide economic slump. The bulk of the money for reconstruction in Iraq will come from the U.S. -- money that is swiftly disappearing into the pockets of U.S. corporations, like Halliburton, which was recently excoriated for an overpriced contract to ship gasoline into a country that holds theworld's second largest oil reserves.

The rest of the funds will come from the World Bank and the IMF in the form of loans. But, before those funds can be released, the U.S. has to negotiate with Iraq's pre-war debtors to forgive massive loans left over from the Saddam era. In typically brilliant fashion, the Pentagon issued a directive last week that bars French, German, and Russian corporations from bidding on contracts for reconstruction in Iraq. Well, guess who owns most of Iraq's pre-war debt? European nations and Russia, that's who. Vladimir Putin, offended by the Pentagon's action, last week adamantly refused to forgive some $8 billion of Iraq's Saddam-era debt.

Failed military tactics, failed financial policies -- it's all in a day's work for the Bush administration. Finding Saddam Hussein certainly
won't make up for incompetence at the top.
________________________________

Maria Tomchick's writings have appeared on Alternet, Znet, the CounterPunch website, Common Dreams newswire, MotherJones.com and AntiWar.com. I am a co-editor and contributing writer for Eat The State!, a biweekly anti-authoritarian newspaper of political opinion, research and humor, based in Seattle, Washington. Eat the State! can be found online at http://www.eatthestate.org.


Sources for this article include:

"Iraqi resistance deeply divided over Saddam Hussein's role," Agence France Presse, 12/8/03

"Tough New Tactics by U.S. Tighten Grip on Iraq Towns," Dexter Filkins, The New York Times, 12/6/03

"U.S. Adopts New Tactics in Iraq Guerrilla War," Charles Aldinger, Reuters, 12/8/03

"Israel trains US assassination squads in Iraq," Julian Borger, The Guardian, 12/9/03,
www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,4815008-103681,00.html

"US Eyeing Israeli Tactics for Iraq Insurgents," Dan Williams, Reuters, 12/9/03

"High Payments to Halliburton for Fuel in Iraq," Don Van Natta Jr., NYT, 12/10/03

"Fueling Anger in Iraq: Sabotage Exacerbates Petroleum Shortages," Rajiv
Chandrasekaran, Washington Post, 12/9/03,
www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A47474-2003Dec8?language=printer

"After Attack, S. Korean Engineers Quit Iraq," Ariana Eunjung Cha, Washington Post, 12/7/03

"Iraq delays hand Cheney firm $1bn," Oliver Morgan, The Observer, 12/7/03, observer.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,6903,1101341,00.html

"Funds for Iraq Are Far Short of Pledges, Figures Show," Steven R. Weisman, NYT, 12/7/03.


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Miami crowd control would do tyrant proud

 By ROBYN E. BLUMNER, Times Perspective Columnist
Published November 30, 2003

Miami police Chief John Timoney must be mighty proud of the social order he maintained during the Free Trade Area of the Americas summit a couple of weeks ago in Miami - sort of the way Saddam Hussein was proud of quieting dissension in his country.

Timoney has a well-deserved reputation for using paramilitary tactics to turn any city where large protests are planned into a place where the Constitution has taken a holiday. During the FTAA meeting on Nov. 20, Timoney dispatched 2,500 police officers in full riot gear against a crowd estimated at 8,000 people, mostly union members and retirees.

The result was a show of force that would have made a Latin American dictator blush.

Slavish public officials such as Miami Mayor Manny Diaz touted Timoney's handiwork as "a model for homeland defense," and the Miami Police Department has responded to complaints by saying that officers demonstrated "a tremendous amount of restraint."

But this is hardly the way eyewitnesses described it. The scene was a "massive police state," according to the president of the United Steelworkers of America, who has demanded a congressional investigation. Congress gave Miami $8.5-million for security during the FTAA meetings - funds slipped inside the $87-billion measure for Iraq. The steelworkers called it money for "homeland repression."

The National Lawyers Guild, a liberal legal organization, said the day was punctuated by "indiscriminate, excessive force against hundreds of nonviolent protesters with weapons including pepper spray, tear gas, and concussion grenades and rubber bullets."

Observers said the provocation for officers to shoot rubber bullets and paint balls filled with pepper spray at the predominantly peaceable crowd was often one person lobbing an orange in the direction of police or lighting a trash can on fire.

Nikki Hartman, a 28-year-old Pinellas County resident, was shot three times with rubber bullets - once, she said, when a police officer fired point-blank at her behind after she stooped to pick up a bandanna she'd dropped. The officer had kicked it her way before shooting her. She was later shot in the back while retreating from police lines. Her friend Robert Davis was shot seven times while trying to help Hartman to her feet.

In addition to such shootings, police abandoned any legitimate basis for searching and arresting people. Miles Swanson, 25, a legal observer for the lawyers guild, was punched numerous times while being taken in by officers for pointing out undercover police dressed up as protesters. Eight of 60 guild observers were arrested that day; they wore distinctive green hats and were apparently targeted. When Swanson was grabbed off the street by three Broward County sheriff's deputies - two of whom were in ski masks - he said they told him "this is what you get when you f-- with us." Then, Swanson said, the deputies drove him around while looking for another legal observer to arrest. He ultimately pleaded no contest to one charge of obstructing justice so he could return to law school in Washington, D.C.

Celeste Fraser Delgado, a 36-year-old reporter for the Miami New Times, was interviewing protesters when she was arrested. According to an Associated Press report of her ordeal, she overheard police arguing about what to charge her with. The two misdemeanors - failure to obey a legal command and resisting arrest without violence - were dropped the next day.

The police seemed especially sensitive to having their actions photographed or taped. Sean Lidberg, who was stringing for a Minnesota paper, said his group of friends was aggressively detained and searched by police because one of them had picked up and put down a coconut found on the ground.

"We're from Minnesota and never saw coconuts growing wild," said the 20-year-old Lidberg. When he tried to take video of the police searching through his backpack, Lidberg said, "they shoved the camera down and wouldn't let me document anything said or done." Police proceeded to take most of what he had in his backpack, which included two gas masks. He doesn't expect to see his stuff again.

When contacted for comment, the Miami police first asked for case numbers. When those were provided, the public information officer said he didn't have time to comment on the incidents and hung up when his name was requested.

Ever since the melee at the 1999 World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle, where demonstrators blocked streets and vandalized stores, conference planners and public officials have adopted a no-holds-barred approach to potential large-scale protests. And Timoney is their man. Militant protesters, "punks" as he calls them, are anathema to Timoney. Shutting them down with Pinkerton prowess is his specialty. Rights, schmights.

Anyone who cares about civil liberties might remember Timoney as the police commissioner of Philadelphia during the 2000 Republican convention - an event marked by police making pre-emptive arrests on baseless charges and smashing heads. This led to lucrative private consulting offers for Timoney and then, this year, to the top-cop spot in Miami.

His antiprotester philosophy is a fitting sign of the times and intersects nicely with the new FBI protocols established by Attorney General John Ashcroft. Ashcroft recently junked FBI guidelines that prevented agents from monitoring groups without evidence of criminal wrongdoing, saying it was vital for antiterrorism operations. But in a J. Edgar Hoover redux, it turns out that this flexibility is being used to spy on and collect intelligence on antiwar protesters.

When men like Timoney and Ashcroft are on the A-list of the nation's law enforcers, free speech doesn't stand a chance. It is open season on dissent. A vignette reported by the Miami Herald says it all: During the FTAA action, Timoney came upon a protester who was pinned against a car being arrested; without knowing anything about the circumstances, he pointed a finger at the demonstrator's face and said, "You're bad. F-- you!" People exercising their First Amendment rights are now considered the enemy.

Nov 25, 2003

Fragments of the Future:
The FTAA in Miami

By Rebecca Solnit

The future was being modeled on both sides of the massive steel fence erected around the Intercontinental Hotel in downtown Miami last Thursday. Inside, delegates from every nation in the western hemisphere but Cuba watered down some portions of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) agreement and postponed deciding on others in an attempt to prevent a failure as stark as that of the World Trade Organization ministerial in Cancun two months before. Outside, an army of 2,500 police in full armor used a broad arsenal of weapons against thousands of demonstrators and their constitutional rights. "Not every day do you get tear-gassed, pepper-sprayed, and hit in the face," said Starhawk, a prominent figure in the global anticapitalism movement,, who experienced all three Thursday.

Since the Seattle surprise of 1999, it has become standard procedure to erect a miniature police state around globalization summits, and it's hard not to read these rights-free zones as prefigurations of what full-blown corporate globalization might bring. After all, this form of globalization would essentially suspend local, regional, and national rights of self-determination over labor, environmental, and agricultural conditions in the name of the dubious benefits of the free market, benefits that would be enforced by unaccountable transnational authorities acting primarily to protect the rights of capital. At a labor forum held the day before the major actions, Dave Bevard, a laid-off union metalworker, referred to this new world order as "government of the corporations, by the corporations, for the corporations."

The corporate agenda of NAFTA and related globalization treaties is demonstrated most famously by the case of MTBE, a gasoline additive that causes severe damage to human health and the environment. When California phased it out, the Canadian corporation Methanex filed a lawsuit demanding nearly a billion dollars in compensation from the US government for profit lost because of the ban. Under NAFTA rules, corporations have an absolute right to profit with which local laws must not interfere. Poisoning the well is no longer a crime; stopping the free flow of poison is.

The FTAA, modeled after NAFTA, was originally intended to create a borderless trade zone that would encompass the whole hemisphere (except, of course, for Cuba). That globalization is an economic disaster for many existing industries is so apparent that, while paying lip service to a borderless economy, both Presidents Clinton and Bush have attempted to protect the US steel industry from cheap foreign imports, though neither has done anything about the export of former union jobs to the maquilladoras of Mexico (and now those jobs are fleeing Mexico for yet cheaper venues in the infamous "race to the bottom," while more and more white-collar US jobs, from programming to data processing, are also being exported).

And it's the fact that even the richest nations -- the United States and the European Union -- won't live up to their own rhetoric of capitalism without borders that trips up the globalization agendas they pursue. Both maintain high agricultural subsidies that undermine the ability of poorer nations to generate export-crop income or in some cases -- as with corn in Mexico -- even to compete successfully domestically. NAFTA, which will be a decade old this New Year's, devastated hundreds of thousands of Mexican subsistence farmers. Florida's citrus industry would be devastated by tariff-free Brazilian imports, and small Kentucky tobacco farmers are going out of business because of developing-world imports of the crop. The question now is not whether globalized commodities are profitable but who profits, and the answer is usually the already rich, while the rest get poorer.

The Clinton administration genuinely believed in the corporate internationalism that the word ‘globalization' stands for, and the FTAA talks were first launched by Clinton nine years ago. If there's one thing to be grateful to the Bush junta for, it's their commitment to a narrowly defined national self-interest that makes their pursuit of globalization pretty indistinguishable from old-fashioned colonialism: you open your borders to our products and principles, perhaps after a little arm-twisting, and then we'll pretty much do whatever we want. This is much the same screw-the-world-community policy that made Bush and Co. disregard the UN Security Council and world opinion to pursue the current war in Iraq with only a few allies. The solution to the collapse in Cancun and stalemate in Miami will be pursuit of a similarly splintering agenda -- bilateral trade agreements, mostly with nations the US can bully. As the WTO was collapsing, the US was already turning to the FTAA, and as it becomes evident that the FTAA would flop, the US has stepped up its pursuit of bilateral trade agreements with Latin American, southern African and other nations.

Cancun was a watershed victory because more than twenty nations in the global south, led by Brazil, stood up to the US and the EU, urged on by the activists and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), which were part of the continuum of conversation there. In Miami there was no such continuum and no exhilarating victory, but there is room enough for those who oppose corporate globalization to continue resisting it. The FTAA conference dissolved a day early, having only achieved what has been dubbed "FTAA lite." This version allows member nations to withdraw from specific aspects of the FTAA agreement and otherwise weakens its impact. Brazil, the economic giant in the south, had objected to two provisions: protection of foreign investment and intellectual property rules; FTAA lite let Brazil win on those fronts. As Lori Wallach of the NGO Public Citizen put it, "All that was agreed was to scale back the FTAA's scope and punt all of the hard decisions to an undefined future venue so as to not make Miami the Waterloo of the FTAA."

The war at home

It's popular to say that corporate globalization is war by other means, but what went down in Miami during the FTAA skipped the part about other means. And though it was most directly--thanks to clubs, pellet guns, rubber bullets, tear gas, pepper spray and other weapons--an assault on the bodies of protestors, it was first an assault against the right of the people peaceably to assemble and other first amendment rights, a dramatic example of how hallowed American rights are being dismantled in the name of the war on terrorism.

For months beforehand, Police Chief John Timoney -- engineer of the coup against constitutional rights at the 2000 Republican National Convention when he headed Philadelphia's police force -- had portrayed protestors as terrorists and the gathering in Miami as a siege of the city. Much of the money for militarizing Miami came, appropriately enough, from an $8.5 million rider tacked onto the $87 million spending bill for the war in Iraq. Miami will pay directly, however, both in revenue lost from shutting the city down and, presumably, for activists' police brutality and civil-rights-violation lawsuits.

Perhaps the silliest example of the paranoiac reaction to the arrival of protestors was the removal of all coconuts from downtown Miami palm trees, lest activists throw them at the authorities -- whether after first shaking or scaling the trees was not made clear. Every outdoor trash can had also apparently been removed from downtown; second-guessing terrorists is an exercise whose creativity knows no bounds.

One of the most explicit ways the FTAA policing was modeled after "the war on terror" abroad was the police decision to "embed" reporters. While a number of reporters--looking dorky in their borrowed helmets--joined the Miami cops, protestors invited the press to join the other side as well, and many did. (Some got tear-gassed, and reported on it.)

Many activists in the streets said that one of the functions of this Miami police mobilization was to adjust the American public to the militarization of public space and public life, to a John-Ashcroft-style America. It may also have been an attempt to condition police to functioning as a military force against the civil society they're supposed to serve. The city of Miami and a few nearby communities passed emergency laws banning basic civil liberties such as the right of assembly, laws that could easily be challenged -- but not before the FTAA was over. Activists were already talking about what kind of police state will take hold of Manhattan during the Republican Convention next year. And civil libertarians are taking note of the way dissent of every kind is being reconfigured as terrorism.

The war of the possible worlds

Thursday, November 20, was like a day out of the science fiction movies I grew up on, the ones where the world we know is in ruins and guerrilla war rages in the rubble. Central Miami had been totally shut down. Stores and offices were closed, nothing was being bought or sold, no one was driving, the Metromover elevated rail system was locked up, few went to work that day. The FTAA negotiators from the 34 nations of the western hemisphere were sequestered in the tower of the Intercontinental Hotel, and occasionally I'd see some of the hotel people, tiny on the roof of that skyscraper, watching the turbulence below. We must have looked like ants. Helicopters droned overhead, reportedly using high-tech surveillance equipment to pinpoint activists for arrest or assault by ground forces.

Thursday morning the city was abandoned but for those 2,500 cops and an approximately equivalent number of activists. We've seen the world Miami was that day in movies that range from The Terminator to Tank Girl to Terry Gilliam's Brazil. Maybe the earliest and most somber version can be found in H. G. Wells's The Time Machine, in which humanity has diverged into two species: the bestial subterranean Morlocks who prey on the pretty lamblike Eloi. We had moments of being Tank Girl and moments of being lambs to the slaughter. Friday afternoon, Eddie Yuen, who's written about the antiglobalization movement since Seattle, commented to me that at these antiglobalization summits, "There are laboratories of dissent and laboratories of repression, and right now the laboratories of repression are dominant."

The police -- except for a squadron of bare-kneed bicycle cops -- were in full riot gear: black helmets with visors, black body armor that protected limbs, crotches and torso, combat boots. All seemed to carry long wooden clubs and many had the rifles that fire "sublethal" rubber bullets, beanbags and other projectiles capable of causing severe injury -- and even death. Four years before, in Seattle, I had seen the dystopian future: it was a Darth Vader cop guarding the ruins of a shattered Starbucks; now there were 2,500 of them and they weren't guarding, they were marching. As Starhawk commented, "It wasn't the worst I've ever seen, compared to Israel and Palestine, and Genoa [where Italian police engaged in bloody assault and torture against 300,000 activists come to protest the G8 summit in the summer of 2001]. But there was a quality of sheer brute calculated fascism that's hard to equal."

Some activists were picked off or hassled long before they got to the site of the early-morning demonstration. More police were waiting for us when we got there, ranks of cops, two or three thick, blocking off streets, clubs clutched ready for action. Periodically they would move in and herd us in yet another direction, and they never let us get near the steel fence that steelworkers shouting against the FTAA had marched past the afternoon before. Sometimes they would come out clubbing and shooting. Local television claimed that activists threw smoke bombs at the police, but what they videotaped was activists lobbing back the tear-gas canisters that had been fired at us.

At midmorning, when it looked like they might surround us and engage in wholesale arrests, I escorted a noncitizen out of the last possible exit from the scene. Another member of our group, a professor with a bandage around his head -- he'd been clubbed from behind and bled profusely -- joined us, and we stayed on the sidelines until the permitted march of perhaps 10,000 union members came by at noon on its way through the abandoned city and then back to the safety zone of a rented arena.

As the unions dispersed, the violence resurfaced. Puffs of tear-gas rose up from the crowd in the distance. The helicopters roared overhead, the only machine sound on that day when cars had been shut out of the central city but for the occasional police vans and buses bringing reinforcements or hauling away the arrested. What looked like an amphibious tank rolled around in front of the steel fence. Snatch squads moved into the crowd to seize individuals. A few vultures had circled the skyscrapers in the morning, and by mid-afternoon there must have been fifty of them, a flock of black carrion-eaters soaring sometimes above, sometimes below the level of the helicopters.

The police rushed the crowd again, becoming so violent that the activists splintered into small groups fleeing north into Overtown, an African-American neighborhood of lush vacant lots, boarded-up buildings, affable people out on the streets, and evident destitution. Sirens screamed past us and small groups were pounced upon or hunted further from downtown. My group was carrying a number of huge puppets that had been used in the morning's procession and, weary, we came to stop under a row of street trees where we wouldn't be so visible to the helicopters hovering low for surveillance. Just this kind of hiding and being hunted made it clear that what was going on was warfare of a sort. This day, more than a hundred would be injured, twelve hospitalized, and more than 200 arrested.

Later that night people would be pulled out of their cars at gunpoint or stopped on the street for no particular reason -- not just the young but ministers, middle-aged NGO workers, anyone and everyone. And the next day, more than fifty more activists were arrested in a peaceful vigil outside the jail, where many of the previously arrested languished. "They were surrounded by riot police and ordered to disperse," reported organizers. "As they did, police opened fire and blocked the streets preventing many from leaving. We are now receiving reports from people being released or calling from jail that there is excessive brutality, sexual assault and torture going on inside. People of color, queer and transgender prisoners are particularly being targeted." Sunday many of those arrested were released.

The visionary slogan of the antiglobalization movement is "Another world is possible." This time around some of the steelworkers had the slogan emblazoned across the backs of their royal-blue union t-shirts. What we don't talk about so much is that many worlds are possible, and some of them are hell.

Fragments

Seattle in 1999 has become a genesis story in which the revolution began as Eden. There were tens of thousands of us blockading the WTO, the story goes, and we were all as one: "turtles and teamsters," is the cliché. Actually, there were about fifty thousand in the big labor-organized parade, and ten thousand or less -- few union members among them -- shut down the streets around the WTO meeting on November 30, 1999. The various groups coexisted nicely but few articulated a profound common ground for us all (though the globalization issue has pushed activists from labor to the Sierra Club to develop a broader, more encompassing analysis and to reach for broader coalitions).

After the Black Bloc of young anarchist activists first made its presence known by smashing up the windows of Niketown, Starbucks and a few other downtown Seattle corporate entities, some of those who supported the blockade sparked internal squabbles when they decried the property destruction. The Seattle police were brutal, attacking activists, passersby, nearby neighborhoods, and even an older woman on the way to her chemotherapy appointment. Seattle was no Eden but a miracle all the same, and a huge surprise for the world -- both that direct action could be so effective and that globalization was not going to go forward unimpeded. Four years later the tank of corporate capitalism that seemed to be inexorably advancing on the world is idling its engines or going in circles, and it could yet end up in a ditch.

Cancun was another miracle, notable for the fluid circulation of passion and politics between the developing nations that stood up to the United States and the European Union, the NGO activists who were both inside at the Ministerial and outside in the streets, and the street activists, who included Yucatan and Korean farmers and a fair representation of the rest of the world from Canada to Africa. As in Seattle, the activists stiffened the resolve of the poor nations, and the poor nations stood up for themselves against the agendas of the rich ones.

The street activists in Miami were overwhelmingly white Americans, and there was no such porousness: the Intercontinental Hotel was for all intents and purposes hermetically sealed. NGOs had no role in the FTAA talks or even access to the hotel. AFL-CIO President John J. Sweeney went to visit the Convergence Center, the warehouse north of downtown where the direct action was organized and decried the police violence (which never targeted the union people). But the protests felt fragmentary: beforehand, the direct action contingent had had to negotiate long and hard even to get the unions to consent to letting them--as if they owned the day--demonstrate on the same day. Though we joined the labor march, they didn't join us, and the teach-ins held at the Doubletree Hotel and other venues around town seemed to separate out more circumspect activists from the stuff in the street.

Uprisings, protest, civil disobedience--the stuff in the street--still matter, even though they don't change the world every time. Sometimes it's just an exercise of democracy and bravado, exercise in the sense of maintaining the strength and ability to intervene at a time when it will count. A month ago, Bolivians in the streets and roads of their own nation forced the resignation of their millionaire president, who was trying to export the impoverished nation's resources. An insurgent spirit and direct action are radicalizing Bolivia, Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, and Venezuela. The surprise in Miami isn't that so little was agreed to but, with the revolt against neoliberalism well underway in South America, that anything was.

Rebecca Solnit's most recent book is River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, though her 1994 Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Landscape Wars of the American West has the most civil disobedience in it.

Copyright C2003 Rebecca Solnit