Selves and Others

QUITO, Mar 7 (IPS) - An international network for the abolition of foreign military bases has been created at a conference attended by over 1,000 activists and experts from 30 countries, which opened in Ecuador’s capital city on Monday. The No Bases Network will coordinate action strategies against the more than 1,000 military bases worldwide.

Lina Cahuasquí, an activist with the Ecuador No Bases Coalition, told IPS that the No Bases Network will be "a plural, democratic space, linked to the permanent struggles of social organisations for a military-free system that is based on respect, equity, justice and a culture of peace."

The first international conference of its kind will continue until Friday, and will analyse the impact of foreign military bases and local people’s struggles against their existence. (...)

It’s been almost one year since the first of six retired US generals began speaking out against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, calling for his departure. Their criticism helped to ignite - or may well have been ignited by — public scrutiny of Rumsfeld, who was confronted by during speeches around the country.

Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst questioning Donald Rumsfeld, May 4 2006.

World Can’t Wait’s Heather Hurwitz, to Donald Rumsfeld, February 2 2006: "You have committed crimes against humanity and BushCommission.org and thousands are coming this weekend to drive you out of office, You and you whole administration. Step down Mr. Rumsfeld, Bush administration step down and take these programs with you. You are torturing people signing off on torture. It’s happening. This world needs to wake up, stop this war, this criminal war."

The public scrutiny of Rumsfeld culminated in his resignation last year after the Republicans lost control of Congress. Well, a new book by investigative journalist Andrew Cockburn goes behind the scenes to reveal never-before told stories about Donald Rumsfeld. Relying on sources that include high-ranking officials in the Pentagon and the White House, it chronicles Rumsfeld’s early career as an Illinois congressman to his rise in the Nixon White House. From his tenure as CEO of pharmaceutical company G. D. Searle to his decisions as Defense Secretary in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The book is titled “Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy.” The author, Andrew Cockburn joins me now from Washington DC.

In this special report we print a carefully reported narrative by Christopher Ketcham. He’s a journalist whom publications such as Harper’s and Salon.com have been happy to publish. Indeed, it was in May of 2002 that Salon featured on its site a 9,000-word story by Ketcham on the so-called Israeli "art students" whose curious activities before 9/11/2001 around U.S. government offices and in locations in many cases identical to those frequented by the 9/11 hijackers had been the subject of much speculation.

In the fall of 2005 Ketcham ran across a short report in the Philadelphia Times-Herald about a 166-page memorandum written by a retired corporate lawyer named Gerald Shea. The memo, which Shea sent to the 9/11 Commission and the relevant Senate and House intelligence committees, reviewed all publicly known information about the activities of possible Israeli intelligence operatives working in New Jersey, Florida and elsewhere, and posed the questions: how much had the Mossad learned about the hijackers’ plans; what had they divulged to the agencies of the U.S. government? (...)

Seymour Hersh in a recent issue of The New Yorker (3-05-07) has written an article suggesting the Bush administration has made a strategic shift in Iraq (“The Redirection: Is the Administration’s new policy benefitting our enemies in the war on terrorism?”)

Because of Hersh’s extensive contacts both within and out of the government his articles are extremely interesting and give the reader a ready source of reliable ant trustworthy facts. One does not have to agree with Hersh’s interpretation of the facts. I am going to put a slightly different spin on the information he presents by suggesting that it is a tactical rather than a strategic shift that is underway, and that the long term neocon strategy is more successful than most war critics think (in getting its hands on Iraq’s oil) even if, in the long run, it will be defeated. (...)

In America at least, we are still in the ‘new toy’ phase of high technology. Every new gadget that comes out receives oohs and aahs in the media, with the subtext, ‘aren’t we the most amazing people for inventing all these wonderful things!’ Hardly.

Multi-tasking can be defined as making a virtue out of doing three or four things at the same time without paying attention to any of them. The very machines that are supposed to free people from slavery to busyness are driving them to mindlessness. We need a basic reorientation in the relationship to our machines. (...)

Consider this my mea culpa for publishing If You Hate America So Much, Why Don’t You Get the Hell Out! on my notoriously unorthodox sociopolitical blog, Thomas Paine’s Corner. When Jay Gould III, the former CEO of a major defense contractor, challenged me to post his viewpoint, I agreed to do so. This despite the fact that most of his positions clash violently with Thomas Paine’s Corner’s stated purpose, which is:

… advancing universal human rights, fostering social and economic justice, and supporting the cause of all oppressed, exploited, and impoverished human beings on our Earth.

After a series of email exchanges with my allies, publishers, partner sites, and with Gould, I realized that I had exercised poor judgment in putting his piece on my blog and in exercising my publishing privileges on his behalf on OpEd News. As Gould himself pointed out in a gleeful email (in which he called me his “useful idiot”), I had provided him with a means to reach online readers to advance his elitist agenda, which could easily have been learned at the knee of the Bush matriarch. (...)

Editor’s note: This story has been corrected since it was originally published.

Many female soldiers say they are sexually assaulted by their male comrades and can’t trust the military to protect them. "The knife wasn’t for the Iraqis," says one woman. "It was for the guys on my own side."

March 7, 2007 | As thousands of burned-out soldiers prepare to return to Iraq to fill President Bush’s unwelcome call for at least 20,000 more troops, I can’t help wondering what the women among those troops will have to face. And I don’t mean only the hardships of war, the killing of civilians, the bombs and mortars, the heat and sleeplessness and fear.

I mean from their own comrades — the men. (...)

Let’s start with the obvious waste. We know that hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have lost their lives since the Bush administration invaded their country in March 2003, that almost two million may have fled to other countries, and that possibly millions more have been displaced from their homes in ethnic-cleansing campaigns. We also know that an estimated 4.5 million Iraqi children are now malnourished and that this is but "the tip of the iceberg" in a country where diets are generally deteriorating, while children are dying of preventable diseases in significant numbers; that the Iraqi economy is in ruins and its oil industry functioning at levels significantly below its worst moments in Saddam Hussein’s day — and that there is no end in sight for any of this.

We know that, while the new crew of American military officials in Baghdad are starting to tout the "successes" of the President’s "surge" plan, they actually fear a collapse of support at home within the next half-year, believe they lack the forces necessary to carry out their own plan, and doubt its ultimate success. What a tragic waste. (...)

BAGHDAD, 6 March 2007 (IRIN) - The United Nations and international agencies have warned that if sectarian violence in Iraq does not abate, up to a million new people could become displaced in 2007, putting an increasing burden on the country’s infrastructure and resources. (...)

The international rights group Madre chastises the Bush administration for supporting Islamist groups and allowing an erosion of women’s rights in Iraq. Rape allegations directed at Iraqi forces are focusing the debate on U.S. involvement in Iraq.

WASHINGTON (WOMENSENEWS)—When two Iraqi women made highly public allegations of rape against Iraqi security forces last month, they drew international attention to a subject that usually is taboo in their war-torn country: sexual assault.

Sexual assault and other forms of violence against women, topics surrounded by cultural silence, are on the rise in Iraq, according to a report released today by Madre, an international women’s human rights organization in New York.

And the United States, according to the report, bears much of the blame. (...)

This report is dedicated to the courageous women of the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq and to all Iraqis working to build a democratic, secular Iraq free of military occupation and religious coercion.

Special thanks to Yanar Mohammed, director of the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq.

Download a PDF version of the report

MADRE has released a groundbreaking report on the incidence, causes, and legalization of gender-based violence in Iraq since the US-led invasion. Amidst the chaos and violence of US-occupied Iraq, women—in particular those who are perceived to pose a challenge to the political project of their attackers—have increasingly been targeted because they are women. Today, they are subjected to unprecedented levels of assault in the public sphere, "honor killings," torture in detention, and other forms of gender-based violence. Promising Democracy, Imposing Theocracy documents the use of gender-based violence by Iraqi Islamists, brought to power by the US overthrow of Iraq’s secular Ba’ath regime, and highlights the role of the United States in fomenting the human rights crisis confronting Iraqi women today.

A re-telling of the Iraq war from the perspective of Iraqi women illuminates the strong links between women’s human rights and democratic rights in general and the Bush Administration’s clear contempt for both.

“Promising Democracy, Imposing Theocracy: Gender-Based Violence and the US War on Iraq." That’s the title of the ground breaking report being released today at the UN.

The announcement follows on the heels of two high-profile cases of Sunni women allegedly raped by Shiite security forces last month.

The report documents the systematic use of violence committed by Islamist militias against Iraqi women. Methods of violence include widespread honor killings, torture, assassination and rape. The report reveals the most extensive violence against women has been committed by Shiite militias armed, trained, and financed by the United States.

The author of the report is Yifat Susskind who is here in the studio with me. Also joining us is Houzan Mahmoud. She is the International Representative of the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq.

UNITED NATIONS, Mar 7 (IPS) - Amid the chaos and violence of U.S.-occupied Iraq, the significance of widespread gender-based violence has been largely overlooked, according to a groundbreaking report released here today by MADRE, an internationally active women’s human rights organisation.

Iraqi women are enduring unprecedented levels of assault in the public sphere, including widespread abductions, public beatings, death threats, sexual assaults, honour killings, domestic abuse, torture in detention, beheadings, shootings and public hangings, said the report titled "Promising Democracy, Imposing Theocracy: Gender-Based Violence and the U.S. War on Iraq". (...)

Women’s basic rights are being rapidly eroded in Iraq and occupation forces seem to have forgotten their promises of empowerment.

The regime in Baghdad’s Green Zone is busy organising a celebration of a different kind for this year’s International Women’s Day on 8 March. Among its highlights will be the execution of four Iraqi women. This follows on from its decision to honour four of its Iraqi officers accused of raping a young woman Zainab Abbas Hussain al-Shummary. The office of prime minister had forged an American medical report. Long gone are the colourful parades of Iraqi women commemorating their achievements. Now we only have parades of death, where the "liberated" and "empowered" Iraqi women and girls, covered head to toe with hijabs and abayas, will queue at police stations, prisons, detention camps, hospital’s "fridges" and crowded morgues looking for the disappeared, kidnapped or their assassinated loved ones.

Briefing MPs on the latest situation on Iraq, on the eve of invading Iraq, Prime Minister Tony Blair, his eyes glowed with messianic determination, said:

"I know the innocent as well as the guilty die in a war. But do not let us forget the 4 million Iraqi exiles, the thousands of children who die needlessly every year ... Let us not forget the tens of thousands imprisoned, tortured or executed by his [Saddam’s] barbarity every year. The innocent die every day in Iraq - victims of Saddam - and their plight too should be heard."

Indeed, let us hear the plight of Iraqi people, especially women. (...)