Joel Wing
Posted in Musings on Iraq
In April 2011 Iraq’s parliament ended one of the main barriers to fighting corruption in the country. That is Article 136B of the Iraqi Criminal Code. The article allows ministers to stop investigations, and has been used more and more in recent times. It’s yet to be seen whether this is part of a real effort to counter the widespread corruption in the country, or just another cosmetic move meant to look like the government is doing something.
On April 18, 2011 Iraq’s parliament ended Article 136B of the Iraqi Criminal Code. The article allows ministers and other top officials to end investigations of their own offices. In the first half of 2010, Article 136B was used 95 times. That was more than all of 2009 when it was employed 54 times. A recent example of its use was when former Interior Minister Jawad Bolani used 136B to stop the inspector general of his own ministry from looking into the purchase of fake bomb detectors. Although the article is employed in only a relatively few of the hundreds of investigations going on within Iraq each year, it does show the country’s top officials personal interest in blocking corruption cases.
This is the third time that the government has rescinded Article 136B. The previous times, it was eventually brought back. That’s because there is no real will within Baghdad to address this pressing issue. Many of the ministers run their offices like personal fiefs to dish out jobs to their friends, family, and followers. Nepotism and patronage leads to stealing and other nefarious practices. Article 136B has allowed these practices to continue with the personal protection of top officials. Baghdad is currently under pressure from the streets to deal with corruption. That was probably a driving factor behind 136B’s repeal. The authorities now have to use this new freedom to prosecute and convict top criminals, something that has never happened since 2003, otherwise this move is simply window dressing meant to appease the public rather than bring about any real change.
SOURCES
Aswat al-Iraq, “Iraqi parliament removes barrier to corruption inquiries,” 4/18/11
Commission of Integrity, “CoI Key achievements and indicators from January 1, 2010 To June 30, 2010,” 7/28/10
Office of Investigations, “Commission of Integrity Annual Report for 2009,” Commission of Integrity, 8/9/10
Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, “Quarterly Report to the United States Congress,” 10/30/10
mercredi 27 avril 2011
US, NATO attempt assassination of Gaddafi, Bill Van Auken
WSWS, April 26, 2011
With the attack Monday morning on the Bab al-Azizyah complex in Tripoli, the US-NATO war on Libya has entered a criminal new phase that incorporates the policy of state-organized assassination.
Two large precision-guided bombs reduced buildings in the complex to rubble. Libyan officials reported three people killed and 45 wounded, 15 of them critically.
This was the third such attack on the complex where Libya's Colonel Muammar Gaddafi lives and works. The compound was hit by a cruise missile fired from a British submarine on March 20, the second day of the US-NATO assault, and again on April 23, when warplanes struck a parking lot just outside of Bab al-Azizyah that reportedly was above an underground bunker.
With each strike, the objective is ever more naked: the murder of Gaddafi and members of his family.
The building struck on Monday housed the Libyan leader’s offices and library and a meeting room where earlier this month he had held talks with South African President Jacob Zuma and other African leaders on an African Union proposal for a ceasefire in Libya's ongoing civil war. The proposal was quickly quashed by the US-NATO alliance and the so-called rebels who are being backed by the US and Europe.
Despite claiming legitimacy for their military actions on the basis of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973, which authorizes "all necessary measures" to protect civilians, Washington, London and Paris have made no secret of the fact that their real aim is "regime change," i.e., the imposition of a puppet government that will be more subservient to their interests (and those of the energy conglomerates) than the Gaddafi regime. To that end, they are prepared to carry out whatever bloodletting is required.
After five weeks of bombing, and with the US military command claiming to have "attrited"—in plain English, slaughtered—up to 40 percent of the military forces loyal to Gaddafi, they appear no closer to realizing their aim. The "rebels," a fractious coalition of ex-Gaddafi officials, aging CIA "assets" and Islamists, have proven wholly incapable of advancing west toward Tripoli. Moreover, the openly stated hopes of the imperialist powers that the bombs and missiles dropped on Tripoli would trigger a palace coup resulting in Gaddafi's ouster have gone unanswered.
Last week, the top US uniformed military commander, Adm. Mike Mullen, warned that the US-led intervention in Libya was "moving towards stalemate."
The Obama administration and its European accomplices, increasingly frustrated by the failure of their tactics, are not willing to accept such an outcome. This is what has placed the policy of assassination at the center of their calculations.
Mullen's warning was accompanied by the announcement that armed US Predator drones have been deployed over Libya. The pilotless warplanes have been employed with ever growing frequency by the Obama administration to carry out its dirty war against the population on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. Pakistan’s Conflict Monitoring Center in Islamabad has documented 2,200 civilian deaths over the past five years from drone attacks.
The CIA and its apologists defend the drone attacks as remote control extrajudicial executions of "terrorists," simply dismissing evidence of the horrific civilian death toll. Now, these same methods are being employed in Libya under the pretext of protecting civilian lives.
Meanwhile, within official Washington, there has been a steady drumbeat for Gaddafi’s assassination, with leading US senators going on television talk shows and sounding as if they had cribbed their remarks from the script of "The Godfather."
Thus, one program had Senator Lindsey Graham, a member of the Senate Armed Services committee demanding that the US-led intervention "cut the head of the snake off" and urging, in reference to Gaddafi, "Let's get this guy gone."
What is striking is that such language evokes not a hint of disagreement, much less protest, from within the US political establishment and the corporate-controlled media.
One would hardly guess that such methods mark a fateful shift from what had long been considered essential tenets of international law. While the assassination of foreign rulers as a tool of statecraft was well known in the Middle Ages, from the 18th century and the dawn of the bourgeois revolutions it was regarded as beyond the pale.
There were, of course, wholly pragmatic considerations, among them the fear of "chickens coming home to roost," with the resort to assassination by leaders of major powers legitimizing the practice and creating the conditions for someone to murder them as well. There was also the calculation by those with the world’s more powerful militaries that the use of assassination would tend to level the playing field with their less well-armed rivals.
But there were also, particularly in the history of the United States, other arguments, rooted in principles of democracy.
Thomas Jefferson in a 1789 letter to James Madison described assassination as one of the "legitimate principles in the dark ages which intervened between ancient and modern civilizations, but exploded and was held in just horror in the eighteenth century."
The US Army’s code of conduct signed by Abraham Lincoln at the height of the Civil War in 1863 warned that "civilized nations look with horror upon" the method of assassinating one’s enemies, regarding such practices as "relapses into barbarism."
This prevailing attitude toward assassination—defined as "treacherous killing"—was written into the international laws of war adopted at the Hague Convention of 1907 and has been continued in largely the same form in subsequent treaties and conventions.
As recently as 1976, the Church Committee, which conducted the US Senate investigations into the CIA's organization of assassination plots against world leaders ranging from Cuba's Fidel Castro to Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, concluded that this bloody practice "violates moral precepts fundamental to our way of life…[and] traditional American notions of fair play."
Today, the outlook expressed in the committee's reports seems, in the context of official discourse in Washington, as anachronistic as if it had been written in the 18th century.
After nearly a decade of the so-called "war on terror," begun by Bush and escalated under Obama, assassination together with wars of aggression, torture, extraordinary rendition, detention without charges has become just one more accepted tool of American foreign policy.
Indeed, the executive order issued in the wake of the Church Committee probe that barred US-sponsored assassinations was overridden by the Bush administration in the name of eliminating alleged terrorists—a right to kill that has been extended under the Obama administration to US citizens. Now, the case is being made that assassination is a legitimate tool for pursuing "humanitarian" missions or whatever other pretext is invented for imperialist looting.
The ongoing war in Libya marks a further escalation in the criminalization of the American ruling elite, which extols the methods of murder and thuggery to achieve its aims abroad while relying on financial swindling, political fraud and state intimidation to enforce its interests at home.
Its open embrace of assassination stands as a stark warning. There is no section of the financial and corporate oligarchy that rules the United States that maintains the slightest adherence to democratic principles. Under conditions of an unrelenting crisis of the world capitalist system, combined with an unprecedented polarization between its obscene accumulation of wealth and the increasingly desperate conditions facing masses of workers, it is compelled to defend its class rule through the use of unrestrained violence.
The struggle against war and the fight against the increasingly grave threats to democratic rights within the US itself can be waged only through the independent political mobilization of the working class in its own party, fighting for workers’ power and the socialist transformation of society.
With the attack Monday morning on the Bab al-Azizyah complex in Tripoli, the US-NATO war on Libya has entered a criminal new phase that incorporates the policy of state-organized assassination.
Two large precision-guided bombs reduced buildings in the complex to rubble. Libyan officials reported three people killed and 45 wounded, 15 of them critically.
This was the third such attack on the complex where Libya's Colonel Muammar Gaddafi lives and works. The compound was hit by a cruise missile fired from a British submarine on March 20, the second day of the US-NATO assault, and again on April 23, when warplanes struck a parking lot just outside of Bab al-Azizyah that reportedly was above an underground bunker.
With each strike, the objective is ever more naked: the murder of Gaddafi and members of his family.
The building struck on Monday housed the Libyan leader’s offices and library and a meeting room where earlier this month he had held talks with South African President Jacob Zuma and other African leaders on an African Union proposal for a ceasefire in Libya's ongoing civil war. The proposal was quickly quashed by the US-NATO alliance and the so-called rebels who are being backed by the US and Europe.
Despite claiming legitimacy for their military actions on the basis of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973, which authorizes "all necessary measures" to protect civilians, Washington, London and Paris have made no secret of the fact that their real aim is "regime change," i.e., the imposition of a puppet government that will be more subservient to their interests (and those of the energy conglomerates) than the Gaddafi regime. To that end, they are prepared to carry out whatever bloodletting is required.
After five weeks of bombing, and with the US military command claiming to have "attrited"—in plain English, slaughtered—up to 40 percent of the military forces loyal to Gaddafi, they appear no closer to realizing their aim. The "rebels," a fractious coalition of ex-Gaddafi officials, aging CIA "assets" and Islamists, have proven wholly incapable of advancing west toward Tripoli. Moreover, the openly stated hopes of the imperialist powers that the bombs and missiles dropped on Tripoli would trigger a palace coup resulting in Gaddafi's ouster have gone unanswered.
Last week, the top US uniformed military commander, Adm. Mike Mullen, warned that the US-led intervention in Libya was "moving towards stalemate."
The Obama administration and its European accomplices, increasingly frustrated by the failure of their tactics, are not willing to accept such an outcome. This is what has placed the policy of assassination at the center of their calculations.
Mullen's warning was accompanied by the announcement that armed US Predator drones have been deployed over Libya. The pilotless warplanes have been employed with ever growing frequency by the Obama administration to carry out its dirty war against the population on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. Pakistan’s Conflict Monitoring Center in Islamabad has documented 2,200 civilian deaths over the past five years from drone attacks.
The CIA and its apologists defend the drone attacks as remote control extrajudicial executions of "terrorists," simply dismissing evidence of the horrific civilian death toll. Now, these same methods are being employed in Libya under the pretext of protecting civilian lives.
Meanwhile, within official Washington, there has been a steady drumbeat for Gaddafi’s assassination, with leading US senators going on television talk shows and sounding as if they had cribbed their remarks from the script of "The Godfather."
Thus, one program had Senator Lindsey Graham, a member of the Senate Armed Services committee demanding that the US-led intervention "cut the head of the snake off" and urging, in reference to Gaddafi, "Let's get this guy gone."
What is striking is that such language evokes not a hint of disagreement, much less protest, from within the US political establishment and the corporate-controlled media.
One would hardly guess that such methods mark a fateful shift from what had long been considered essential tenets of international law. While the assassination of foreign rulers as a tool of statecraft was well known in the Middle Ages, from the 18th century and the dawn of the bourgeois revolutions it was regarded as beyond the pale.
There were, of course, wholly pragmatic considerations, among them the fear of "chickens coming home to roost," with the resort to assassination by leaders of major powers legitimizing the practice and creating the conditions for someone to murder them as well. There was also the calculation by those with the world’s more powerful militaries that the use of assassination would tend to level the playing field with their less well-armed rivals.
But there were also, particularly in the history of the United States, other arguments, rooted in principles of democracy.
Thomas Jefferson in a 1789 letter to James Madison described assassination as one of the "legitimate principles in the dark ages which intervened between ancient and modern civilizations, but exploded and was held in just horror in the eighteenth century."
The US Army’s code of conduct signed by Abraham Lincoln at the height of the Civil War in 1863 warned that "civilized nations look with horror upon" the method of assassinating one’s enemies, regarding such practices as "relapses into barbarism."
This prevailing attitude toward assassination—defined as "treacherous killing"—was written into the international laws of war adopted at the Hague Convention of 1907 and has been continued in largely the same form in subsequent treaties and conventions.
As recently as 1976, the Church Committee, which conducted the US Senate investigations into the CIA's organization of assassination plots against world leaders ranging from Cuba's Fidel Castro to Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, concluded that this bloody practice "violates moral precepts fundamental to our way of life…[and] traditional American notions of fair play."
Today, the outlook expressed in the committee's reports seems, in the context of official discourse in Washington, as anachronistic as if it had been written in the 18th century.
After nearly a decade of the so-called "war on terror," begun by Bush and escalated under Obama, assassination together with wars of aggression, torture, extraordinary rendition, detention without charges has become just one more accepted tool of American foreign policy.
Indeed, the executive order issued in the wake of the Church Committee probe that barred US-sponsored assassinations was overridden by the Bush administration in the name of eliminating alleged terrorists—a right to kill that has been extended under the Obama administration to US citizens. Now, the case is being made that assassination is a legitimate tool for pursuing "humanitarian" missions or whatever other pretext is invented for imperialist looting.
The ongoing war in Libya marks a further escalation in the criminalization of the American ruling elite, which extols the methods of murder and thuggery to achieve its aims abroad while relying on financial swindling, political fraud and state intimidation to enforce its interests at home.
Its open embrace of assassination stands as a stark warning. There is no section of the financial and corporate oligarchy that rules the United States that maintains the slightest adherence to democratic principles. Under conditions of an unrelenting crisis of the world capitalist system, combined with an unprecedented polarization between its obscene accumulation of wealth and the increasingly desperate conditions facing masses of workers, it is compelled to defend its class rule through the use of unrestrained violence.
The struggle against war and the fight against the increasingly grave threats to democratic rights within the US itself can be waged only through the independent political mobilization of the working class in its own party, fighting for workers’ power and the socialist transformation of society.
mardi 26 avril 2011
International Seed Day April 26
An educational day to bring awareness about the patenting of life forms, and the danger of bio-piracy and agricultural monocultures.
Message from:
Institute of Near Eastern & African Studies (INEAS)
We Wish All ISD Endorsers, farmers, organic food advocates, scientists and activists a
Merry Seed Day
and we hope that this seed campaign reaches many African and Asian countries in 2011
Please help us help you
http://www.ineas.org/in/ev/seed-day.htm
We thank you for distributing this greeting widely
Positive Reports:
1. On behalf of 60 family farmers, seed
businesses and organic agricultural organizations, the Public Patent Foundation (PUBPAT) filed suit in March 2010 against Monsanto Company to challenge the chemical giant's patents on genetically modified seed
http://www.pubpat.org/assets/files/seed/OSGATA-v-Monsanto-Complaint.pdf
2. From ISD endorser and farmer Morgana Washington:
"With any luck, we will be putting in our first seeds on the 26th. The weather here in upstate NY has been cruel as far as seed setting is concerned. But we are going to do it on the 26th, as the temp.'s seem to be stabilizing enough for the ground temp. to come up in our cold frame. Then we will lay out our NEW garden from which we hope to mostly feed ourselves in 2011. We are using organic and heirloom seeds as a thumbing of the nose to the eco-terrorist corporatocracies like Monsanto, Syngen et al.
Our only worries are how much radionuclides the plants will absorb, but since gardening under cover is not an option for us, we will accept the risks to ourselves and eat our own food.
Happy planting everyone!" Morgana
3. Since April 18, we have been phoning women, farmers, agriculture experts and activists in India and Iraq to alert them
about International Seed Day (ISD), its mission, the phenomena of seed patenting and genetically modified seeds (GMS). Bringing
awareness to the public and forming an international committee of lawyers, scientists, farmers, journalists and activists that collectively alert, exchange information, take action, protest and defend against the monopoly and bio piracy of the agribusiness corporations is essential and long overdue.
Again
Merry Seed Day
We Love to Hear From You!
Institute of Near Eastern & African Studies (INEAS) is a 501(c)(3) educational and cultural organization geared to educate the public and inform the media on issues related to Africa and Asia. Located in Cambridge, MA, since 1994. Find out more at our website http://www.ineas.org/
and our Youtube channel http://www.youtube.com/user/INEAS
Address:
P.O. Box 425125
Cambridge, MA. 02142 USA
Email: info@INEAS.org
and INEAS@aol.com
Message from:
Institute of Near Eastern & African Studies (INEAS)
We Wish All ISD Endorsers, farmers, organic food advocates, scientists and activists a
Merry Seed Day
and we hope that this seed campaign reaches many African and Asian countries in 2011
Please help us help you
http://www.ineas.org/in/ev/seed-day.htm
We thank you for distributing this greeting widely
Positive Reports:
1. On behalf of 60 family farmers, seed
businesses and organic agricultural organizations, the Public Patent Foundation (PUBPAT) filed suit in March 2010 against Monsanto Company to challenge the chemical giant's patents on genetically modified seed
http://www.pubpat.org/assets/files/seed/OSGATA-v-Monsanto-Complaint.pdf
2. From ISD endorser and farmer Morgana Washington:
"With any luck, we will be putting in our first seeds on the 26th. The weather here in upstate NY has been cruel as far as seed setting is concerned. But we are going to do it on the 26th, as the temp.'s seem to be stabilizing enough for the ground temp. to come up in our cold frame. Then we will lay out our NEW garden from which we hope to mostly feed ourselves in 2011. We are using organic and heirloom seeds as a thumbing of the nose to the eco-terrorist corporatocracies like Monsanto, Syngen et al.
Our only worries are how much radionuclides the plants will absorb, but since gardening under cover is not an option for us, we will accept the risks to ourselves and eat our own food.
Happy planting everyone!" Morgana
3. Since April 18, we have been phoning women, farmers, agriculture experts and activists in India and Iraq to alert them
about International Seed Day (ISD), its mission, the phenomena of seed patenting and genetically modified seeds (GMS). Bringing
awareness to the public and forming an international committee of lawyers, scientists, farmers, journalists and activists that collectively alert, exchange information, take action, protest and defend against the monopoly and bio piracy of the agribusiness corporations is essential and long overdue.
Again
Merry Seed Day
We Love to Hear From You!
Institute of Near Eastern & African Studies (INEAS) is a 501(c)(3) educational and cultural organization geared to educate the public and inform the media on issues related to Africa and Asia. Located in Cambridge, MA, since 1994. Find out more at our website http://www.ineas.org/
and our Youtube channel http://www.youtube.com/user/INEAS
Address:
P.O. Box 425125
Cambridge, MA. 02142 USA
Email: info@INEAS.org
and INEAS@aol.com
lundi 25 avril 2011
Iraq has more than 14,000 people missing: ministry
(AFP) –
BAGHDAD — More than 14,000 people have disappeared in Iraq since 2003, an official said on Monday, revealing for the first time the numbers who have gone missing in the violent aftermath of the US-led invasion.
"We have registered the names of 14,025 people who have gone missing since 2003," Arkan Kamel, an official at the human rights ministry, told a news conference in Baghdad.
"Until now, we have only found seven from the registered names at the morgues," he added.
Kamel is on a committee that officials said will start accepting requests from families who wish to enquire about missing relatives. Officials said the process would remain open for 15 days.
The invasion unleashed a violent Al-Qaeda insurgency and sectarian Shiite-Sunni violence, which peaked in 2006 and 2007, when tens of thousands of people were killed.
Random violence and kidnappings were also rampant. The number of violent incidents has plunged since then, but bombings and abductions are still common.
"Missing persons are those who disappeared during war operations, explosions and terrorism attacks," said Farouk al-Araji, who heads the military section at the prime minister's office.
"The committee will collect information about the missing to answer all questions about them," he told reporters.
Among those whose fate remains unknown is Salah Jali, an administrator with Agence France-Presse who has been missing since April 2006.
The committee comprises members of the Judicial Council and the ministries of justice, interior, human rights, national security and intelligence.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5j52bo75B_nFtvwbMuteowRrYSgHA?docId=CNG.e738123e4ccce6019851c695501ca633.af1
BAGHDAD — More than 14,000 people have disappeared in Iraq since 2003, an official said on Monday, revealing for the first time the numbers who have gone missing in the violent aftermath of the US-led invasion.
"We have registered the names of 14,025 people who have gone missing since 2003," Arkan Kamel, an official at the human rights ministry, told a news conference in Baghdad.
"Until now, we have only found seven from the registered names at the morgues," he added.
Kamel is on a committee that officials said will start accepting requests from families who wish to enquire about missing relatives. Officials said the process would remain open for 15 days.
The invasion unleashed a violent Al-Qaeda insurgency and sectarian Shiite-Sunni violence, which peaked in 2006 and 2007, when tens of thousands of people were killed.
Random violence and kidnappings were also rampant. The number of violent incidents has plunged since then, but bombings and abductions are still common.
"Missing persons are those who disappeared during war operations, explosions and terrorism attacks," said Farouk al-Araji, who heads the military section at the prime minister's office.
"The committee will collect information about the missing to answer all questions about them," he told reporters.
Among those whose fate remains unknown is Salah Jali, an administrator with Agence France-Presse who has been missing since April 2006.
The committee comprises members of the Judicial Council and the ministries of justice, interior, human rights, national security and intelligence.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5j52bo75B_nFtvwbMuteowRrYSgHA?docId=CNG.e738123e4ccce6019851c695501ca633.af1
samedi 23 avril 2011
jeudi 21 avril 2011
mardi 19 avril 2011
Turkmen fight for identity in Kirkuk
Iraq's third largest ethnic group complain of cultural erosion in disputed city.
For the video please click on:
http://english.aljazeera.net/video/middleeast/2011/04/2011418194514456402.html
Last Modified: 18 Apr 2011 21:42
The third largest ethnic group in Iraq, the Turkmen have long complained of discrimination, especially in the city of Kirkuk where the local government has been largely controlled by Kurdish parties.
That began to change recently with a Turkmen politician elected as head of the provincial council, but many say more needs to be done to preserve the Turkmens' ethnic identity.
Al Jazeera's Rawya Rageh reports from Kirkuk.
For the video please click on:
http://english.aljazeera.net/video/middleeast/2011/04/2011418194514456402.html
Last Modified: 18 Apr 2011 21:42
The third largest ethnic group in Iraq, the Turkmen have long complained of discrimination, especially in the city of Kirkuk where the local government has been largely controlled by Kurdish parties.
That began to change recently with a Turkmen politician elected as head of the provincial council, but many say more needs to be done to preserve the Turkmens' ethnic identity.
Al Jazeera's Rawya Rageh reports from Kirkuk.
samedi 16 avril 2011
In memory of Vittorio Arrigoni
May his soul rest in Peace
See:
http://www.worldbulletin.net/?aType=haber&ArticleID=72538
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