There will be protests around the country March 20 as we mark the one-year anniversary of the Iraq war. Here's what's happening in Taos, NM, where Donald Rumseld has "several area homes."

To mark the one-year anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq war, Action Coalition of Taos and Veterans for Peace will topple a twenty-foot effigy of Taos resident Donald Rumsfeld. This action will take place during a rally at the Taos Plaza calling for the end of the Iraqi occupation, one of hundreds worldwide taking place on Saturday, March 20th with the theme "The World Still Says No to War."

The 20-foot-tall statue, built by area residents, will be pulled down at the climax of the rally, which will begin at 3pm on March 20th at the Taos Plaza in Taos, New Mexico. The event will feature a variety of speakers as well as "The Radical Cheerleaders" who will help entertain the crowd with antiwar and anti-Rummy cheers. The statue will be toppled by the five winning participants of a "Why I want to topple Rumsfeld" contest, who will read their submissions prior to the Rumsfeld’s fall. Rumsfeld, who the activists consider to be a war criminal for his part in promoting the illegal war in Iraq, has been protested in Taos several times before. The largest march was in October of 2002 drawing 3,000 demonstrators who marched on one of his several area homes.

What's happening in your neck of the woods? [link via What Really Happened]

Nathan Newman writes that a feature of the new Iraqi Constitution makes sure the incoming interim government is a complete US puppet regime. President Bush has said that with the new Constitution passed, power will be turned over to Iraqis after June of this year. Nathan says it's a lie:

The new government under the new constitution will be barred from overturning any laws that the US has imposed on the country since the Occupation. Why can't they change them? Because of this provision in the Constitution, Article 26:

A) Except as otherwise provided in this Law, the laws in force in Iraq on 30 June 2004 shall remain in effect unless and until rescinded or amended by the Iraqi Transitional Government in accordance with this Law.

Nathan has a lot to say about what that means.

by TChris

Camilo Mejia had enough of war. Tired of being used as bait to lure Iraqi fighters into the open, and uncomfortable with the efforts taken by the military to avoid civilian casualties, Mejia made a decision when he returned home on leave last fall. He wasn't going back.

Now, after five months in hiding, Mejia ... aims to become the first Iraq war veteran to publicly challenge the morality and conduct of the conflict. At a time when Americans increasingly hold grave concerns about the bloody war, Mejia intends to seek conscientious objector status to avoid a court-martial.

Soldiers aren't supposed to question orders, but Mejia knew he couldn't live with himself if he continued fighting a war he believed to be unjust. That realization was partially motivated by an order to shoot at Iraqi protestors who, in Mejia's judgment, were too far away to harm troops.

"It was the first time I had fired at a human being," Mejia recalled. "I guess you could say it was my initiation at killing a human being. ... It was part of a general feeling that we had no right to be there, and every killing, whether provoked or not provoked, was unjustified because we had no right to be there."

Although Mejia could face execution for deserting during time of war, his lawyer thinks that extreme outcome is unlikely. He's probably right, as about 600 other soldiers have gone AWOL during home leaves from Iraq, and an administration facing reelection might have a difficult time explaining why it would want to execute more American soldiers than have died in combat.

That doesn't mean that Mejia will be granted conscientious objector status or spared a court martial. A soldier recently convicted of deserting, Kenneth Carter, received a six-month sentence in a Fort Knox prison after his court martial.

Mejia's company commander complains that Mejia is nothing but a "mommy's boy." His view may parallel that of the military establishment. But not everyone agrees with that assessment.

by TChris

Military families walked to the Dover Air Force Base Sunday -- the site of the military's largest mortuary -- in the opening leg of a protest march that concludes Monday morning with a six mile hike from Walter Reed Army Medical Center to the White House.

They walked Sunday to mourn those who have died since the beginning of the war in Iraq, to call for an end to the U.S. occupation of Iraq and to protest the Pentagon policy that keeps families and the media from attending the return of remains at Dover's mortuary.

Recent media coverage of violence in Iraq has focused on attacks against Iraqi citizens who further the interests of the United States, but attacks upon American soldiers continue, too often with tragic success.

One American soldier was killed early Sunday when his convoy west of Baghdad was blasted by a roadside explosive. Three soldiers died Saturday when their patrol in southeast Baghdad also fell victim to a homemade bomb.

Those deaths, announced by a military spokesman on Sunday, followed an attack on Saturday with an improvised explosive device and small-arms fire in Tikrit that left two soldiers dead.

by TChris

So which George is in trouble here? Tenet or Bush?

The Senate Intelligence Committee will soon release a report blaming Tenet for the claim that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons.

The committee report criticizes Tenet and the CIA for consistently seizing on the worst-case scenario of the Iraq threat and overriding the views of intelligence agencies in areas where those agencies had expertise.

Different agencies made conflicting intelligence assessments, but "poor coordination at the top" only contributed to the confusion of policy makers, says the report.

The Bush administration would love to keep the focus on Tenet, and the report furthers that aim by failing to address the administration's complicit demand for any intelligence, however questionable, that served its political needs.

Fortunately, there are people who have longer attention spans than the president, and those people will remember that the administration manipulated intelligence to its own ends. Those people will not stop with the conclusions reached by the Intelligence Committee but will continue to insist that the buck move farther up the chain of command.

This editorial in the Virginian-Pilot, for instance, adds up the evidence and concludes that "hawkish administration officials, intent on invading Iraq, went around Tenet and grasped at any shard of intelligence they could find to bolster their case." One of those hawkish officials, Donald Rumsfeld, put together a "personal intelligence team" that "briefed the National Security Council and Vice President Dick Cheney’s staff, channeling information to the top, without Tenet’s knowledge."

So as much as the administration might like to see Tenet blamed for intelligence failures, blame goes all the way to the top -- to the other George, and to Rumsfeld and Cheney for cutting Tenet out of the loop.

Here is an example of the very best in lawyering - from an article from The Daily Oklahoman. Fern Leona Holland, dead at 33, was a graduate from the University of Oklahoma and the University of Tulsa Law School. She worked for a prestigious Tulsa law firm and set up legal clinics in Guinea and Iraq to work for women's rights. Her's was a life well-lived. We're sorry we didn't know her.

Fern Leona Holland, 33, was killed as she traveled near the town of Hillah. Holland, along with another civilian and a translator, were stopped at a checkpoint where they were shot by gunmen posing as Iraqi police, a military source said. Holland's family said she was the leader of Iraq's women's rights movement, a brilliant woman who loved democracy. "She believed in freedom," said her sister Vi Holland of Oklahoma City. "She believed that every man and woman born should enjoy the right of freedom."

Fern Holland had been working in Iraq as a member of the Coalition Provisional Authority. She was investigating human rights violations, setting up women's rights conferences and assisting with the new constitution.

After Guinea, the U.S. hired her to set up women's clinics in Iraq.

Holland set up women's centers across Iraq and organized a trip in October for a group of Iraqi women to travel to the United States and meet President Bush...."She wasn't military, she wasn't a soldier," [a former partner] said. "She was over there working for human rights, and because of that, those people assassinated her."

A new report by Human Rights Watch charges that American troops are killing and abusing Afghans:

US troops in Afghanistan are operating outside the rule of law, using excessive force to make arrests, mistreating detainees and holding them indefinitely in a "legal black hole" without any legal safeguards, a report published today says. Having gone to war to combat terrorism and remove the oppressive Taliban regime, the United States is now undermining efforts to restore the rule of law and endangering the lives of civilians, Human Rights Watch says.

Its military forces have repeatedly used deadly force from helicopter gunships and small and heavy arms fire during "what are essentially law-enforcement operations" to arrest suspected criminals in residential areas where there is no military conflict, the report says. "The use of these tactics has resulted in avoidable civilian deaths and injuries, and in individual cases may amount to violations of international humanitarian law."

The report is also sharply crtical of our treatment of those we arrest in Afghanistan:

Human Rights Watch is also concerned about the treatment of those arrested. "The United States is setting a terrible example in Afghanistan on detention practices," said Brad Adams, executive director of the organisation's Asia division.

"Civilians are being held in a legal black hole with no tribunals, no legal counsel, no family visits and no basic legal protections." The US holds detainees at its Bagram, Kandahar, Jalalabad and Asadabad bases, where there have been complaints of their being severely beaten, doused with cold water, forced to stay awake or made to stand or kneel in painful positions for long periods.

"There is compelling evidence suggesting that US personnel have committed acts against detainees amounting to torture or cruel, inhumane, or degrading treatment," Mr Adams said.

The full report is available here.

U.S. Marines are bringing a new weapon to Iraq--one that can deafen and cause cellular damage.

Marines arriving in Iraq this month as part of a massive troop rotation will bring with them a high-tech weapon never before used in combat — or in peacekeeping. The device is a powerful megaphone the size of a satellite dish that can deliver recorded warnings in Arabic and, on command, emit a piercing tone so excruciating to humans, its boosters say, that it causes crowds to disperse, clears buildings and repels intruders.

"[For] most people, even if they plug their ears, [the device] will produce the equivalent of an instant migraine," says Woody Norris, chairman of American Technology Corp., the San Diego firm that produces the weapon. "It will knock [some people] on their knees."

American Technology says its new product "is designed to determine intent, change behavior and support various rules of engagement." The company is careful in its public relations not to refer to the megaphone as a weapon, or to dwell on the debilitating pain American forces will be able to deliver with it. The military has been equally reticent on the subject.

The new megaphone being deployed to Iraq can operate at 145 decibels at 300 yards, according to American Technology, well above the normal threshold for pain. The company posits a scenario in which Al Qaeda terrorists would run screaming from caves after being subjected to a blast of high-decibel sound from the devices, their hands covering their ears. But in Baghdad or other Iraqi towns, where there are crowds and buildings, the sick and elderly, as well as children, are likely to be in the weapon's range.

Military analyst William Arkin asks, shouldn't there be a discussion about this new weapon before it's deployed?

Is actual combat in a foreign country the appropriate place to test a new weapon? Apparently, we are about to find out.

[comments now closed]

by TChris

Justice Department personnel are heading to Iraq, where they will begin to build evidence for a war crimes prosecution of Saddam Hussein. While the administration envisions a trial conducted by Iraqi prosecutors, Condoleezza Rice authorized the Justice Department to take the lead in preparing the case.

The administration acknowledges the difficulty of "helping" the Iraqis without dominating the process and destroying the "independence" of the Iraqi authorities. But too much independence might prove inconvenient for a president hoping to capitalize on news coverage of Hussein's atrocities, allowing Bush to justify the war on that ground while shifting attention away from WMD's and the missing link to Osama bin Laden. To maximize its political value, the trial must take place before the election.

Salem Chalabi, the Iraqi lawyer in charge of the war crimes issue, said in a recent interview that while he understood the administration's political needs, the trials might not occur until late in the year, after the American elections, and that Mr. Hussein might not even be the first defendant.

Don't count on that kind of "independent" thinking prevailing after the Justice Department swarms in. The administration wants to put on a show as soon as it can.

M. Cherif Bassiouni, an Egyptian-born international lawyer who is an authority on the Arab legal world, said he believed that the United States was interested in orchestrating a wide-ranging Nuremberg-style war crimes trial against Mr. Hussein. "The administration is looking to have a political vindication of why the U.S. went into Iraq," he said. "With no weapons of mass destruction to be found, the next best thing is to show how bad Saddam was, how his regime was like the Nazis'."

Bassiouni and others worry that the approach may backfire by giving Hussein the opportunity to put on a show of his own, calling witnesses (Donald Rumsfeld?) to testify about U.S. support for Hussein at the time many of the atrocities were committed.

by TChris

In his radio address today, President Bush declared that Iraq's interim constitution shows the "excellent progress" that Iraq is making toward democracy. The consitution was to be signed yesterday, but new objections raised by five members of Iraq's governing council caused the signing ceremony to be cancelled, a glitch the president neglected to mention during his radio address.

by TChris

Thanks to "carefully worded hints" from the Bush Administration before the invasion of Iraq, 70 percent of Americans thought the administration had knowledge that Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks. It turns out that the administration's evidence was even more dubious than the intelligence supporting the claim that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

A Knight Ridder Newspapers review of the Bush administration statements on Iraq's ties to terrorism and what is currently known about the classified intelligence has found that administration advocates of a pre-emptive invasion frequently hyped sketchy and sometimes false information to make their case. On two occasions, they neglected to report information that painted a less sinister picture.

The CIA's Directorate of Intelligence concluded in a January 2003 report that, despite occasional meetings between Hussein's government and Osama bin Laden's terrorism network, the meetings never produced an "operational relationship."

“We could find no provable connection between Saddam and al-Qaida,” a senior U.S. official acknowledged. He and others spoke on condition of anonymity, because the information involved is classified and could prove embarrassing to the White House.

If the administration had shared the results of that report prior to the war, the 70 percent who concluded that Saddam shared responsibility for 9/11 may not have been duped. But duping was necessary to build support for the war, and despite all the evidence to the contrary, the administration continues to defend its prewar descriptions of Hussein as a terrorist threat.

A group of anti-war lawyers in Britain have submitted a petition to the International Criminal Court in the Hague seeking to indict British PM Tony Blair for war crimes:

The group Legal Action Against War have submitted a petition to the international criminal court in the Hague today, asking them to investigate alleged offences by Mr Blair, Jack Straw, Geoff Hoon, and the attorney general, Lord Goldsmith.

The group said "a principal charge" was "intentionally launching an attack knowing that it will cause incidental loss of life or injury to civilians". The legal team said the reasons given for the war - from weapons of mass destruction to the violation of UN resolutions and regime change - were not justified under the UN charter. Michael Mansfield QC, who is leading the campaign, said "The consensus of international legal opinion suggests the basis for the war was illegal."