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Iraq For Sale

Saturday, May 26th, 2007

Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers is the story of what happens to everyday Americans when corporations go to war.

Acclaimed director Robert Greenwald (Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, Outfoxed and Uncovered) takes you inside the lives of soldiers, truck drivers, widows and children who have been changed forever as a result of profiteering in the reconstruction of Iraq. Iraq for Sale uncovers the connections between private corporations making a killing in Iraq and the decision makers who allow them to do so.

Brave New Films are both funded and distributed completely outside corporate America. Over 3000 people donated to make Iraq for Sale, and it is up to you to distribute it.

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Did the U.S. Lie About Using Cluster Bombs in Iraq?

Saturday, May 26th, 2007

Nick Turse

At a time when many nations are moving toward banning the use of cluster munitions, which pose a more serious threat to civilians than any other type of weaponry, the U.S. opposes new limits of any kind.

A shorter version of this piece appears in this week’s Nation Magazine.

Did the U.S. military use cluster bombs in Iraq in 2006 and then lie about it? Does the U.S. military keep the numbers of rockets and cannon rounds fired from its planes and helicopters secret because more Iraqi civilians have died due to their use than any other type of weaponry?

These are just two of the many unanswered questions related to the largely uncovered air war the U.S. military has been waging in Iraq.

What we do know is this: Since the major combat phase of the war ended in April 2003, the U.S. military has dropped at least 59,787 pounds of air-delivered cluster bombs in Iraq — the very type of weapon that Marc Garlasco, the senior military analyst at Human Rights Watch (HRW) calls, “the single greatest risk civilians face with regard to a current weapon that is in use.” We also know that, according to expert opinion, rockets and cannon fire from U.S. aircraft may account for most U.S. and coalition-attributed Iraqi civilian deaths and that the Pentagon has restocked hundreds of millions of dollars worth of these weapons in recent years.

Unfortunately, thanks to an utter lack of coverage by the mainstream media, what we don’t know about the air war in Iraq so far outweighs what we do know that anything but the most minimal picture of the nature of destruction from the air in that country simply can’t be painted. Instead, think of the story of U.S. air power in Iraq as a series of tiny splashes of lurid color on a largely blank canvas.

Cluster Bombs

Even among the least covered aspects of the air war in Iraq, the question of cluster-bomb (CBU) use remains especially shadowy. This is hardly surprising. After all, at a time when many nations are moving toward banning the use of cluster munitions — at a February 2007 conference in Oslo, Norway, 46 of 48 governments represented supported a declaration for a new international treaty and ban on the weapons by 2008 — the U.S. stands with China, Israel, Pakistan, and Russia in opposing new limits of any kind.

Little wonder. The U.S. military has a staggering arsenal of these weapons. According to a recent Human Rights Watch report, the Army holds 88% of the Pentagon’s CBU inventory — at least 638.3 million of the cluster bomblets that are stored inside each cluster munition; the Air Force and Navy, according to Department of Defense figures, have 22.2 million and 14.7 million of the bomblets, respectively. And even these numbers are considered undercounts by experts.

A cluster bomb bursts above the ground, releasing hundreds of smaller, deadly submunitions or “bomblets” that increase the weapon’s kill radius causing, as Garlasco puts it, “indiscriminate effects.” It’s a weapon, he notes, that “cannot distinguish between a civilian and a soldier when employed because of its wide coverage area. If you’re dropping the weapon and you blow your target up you’re also hitting everything within a football field. So to use it in proximity to civilians is inviting a violation of the laws of armed conflict.”

Worse yet, U.S. cluster munitions have a high failure rate. A sizeable number of dud bomblets fall to the ground and become de facto landmines which, Garlasco points out, are “already banned by most nations on this planet.” Garlasco adds: “I don’t see how any use of the current U.S. cluster bomb arsenal in proximity to civilian objects can be defended in any way as being legal or legitimate.”

In an email message earlier this year, a U.S. Central Command Air Forces (CENTAF) spokesman told this reporter that “there were no instances” of CBU usage in Iraq in 2006. But military documents suggest this might not be the case.

Last year, Titus Peachey of the Mennonite Central Committee — an organization that has studied the use of cluster munitions for more than 30 years — filed a Freedom of Information Act request concerning the U.S. military’s use of cluster bombs in Iraq since “major combat operations” officially ended in that country. In their response, the Air Force confirmed that 63 CBU-87 cluster bombs were dropped in Iraq between May 1, 2003 and August 1, 2006. A CENTAF spokesman contacted for confirmation that none of these were dropped on or after January 1, 2006, offered no response. His superior officer, Lt. Col. Johnn Kennedy, the Deputy Director of CENTAF Public Affairs, similarly ignored this reporter’s requests for clarification.

These 12,726 BLU-97 bomblets — each CBU-87 contains 202 BLU-97s or “Combined Effects Bombs” (CEBs) which have anti-personnel, anti-tank, and incendiary capabilities or “kill mechanisms” — dropped since May 2003 are, according to statistics provided by Human Rights Watch, in addition to almost two million cluster submunitions used by coalition forces in Iraq in March and April 2003.

Asked about CBU usage by the Air Force in Iraq in 2006, Ali al-Fadhily, an independent Iraqi journalist, commented: “The use of cluster bombs is a sure thing, but it was very difficult to prove because there were no international experts to document it.” In the past, however, international experts have actually had a chance to examine some locations where a fraction of the bomblets that coalition forces used have landed.

On a 2004 research trip to Iraq, for instance, Titus Peachey visited numerous sites which had experienced such strikes. At a farm in northern Iraq, he was shown not only impact craters from exploded bomblets on a farmer’s property but also unexploded bomblets, by a team from the Mines Advisory Group, a humanitarian organization devoted to landmine and bomb clearance. While “the de-miners expressed frustration that the farmer had planted his field before it had been cleared,” Peachey explained that this was a common, if dangerous, practice in such situations. The U.S. used similar ordnance in Laos during the Vietnam War, he pointed out, noting:

“The villagers of Laos waited more than 20 years for clearance work to get started in their fields and villages. During that time they had no choice but to till soil that was filled with bombs. Otherwise they could not eat. In Iraq, the several visits that we made confirmed this very same dynamic. People could not afford to wait until clearance teams made their farms safe for cultivation. They had to take great risks in order to survive.”

Evidence of these risks can be found in U.S. military documents. Case in point: a June 2005 internal memorandum from the U.S. Army’s 42d Infantry Division which describes how a 15-year old Iraqi boy, working as a shepherd, “was leading the sheep through north Tikrit, near an ammo storage site, when he picked up a UXO [unexploded ordnance] from a cluster bomb. The UXO detonated and he was killed.” Asked to pay $3,000 in compensation for the boy’s life, the Army granted that his death was “a horrible loss for the claimant,” his mother, but concluded that there was “insufficient evidence to indicate that US. Forces caused the death.”

Iraqi documents also chronicle the effects of air-delivered cluster munitions. Take a September 2006 report by the Conservation Center of Environment & Reserves, an Iraqi non-governmental organization (NGO), examining alleged violations of the laws of war by U.S. forces during the April 2004 siege of Fallujah. According to its partial list of civilian deaths, at least 53 people were killed by air-launched cluster bombs in the city that April. An analysis of data collected by another Iraqi NGO, the Iraqi Health and Social Care Organization, showed that, between March and June 2006, of 193 war-injured casualties analyzed, 148 (77%) were the result of cluster munitions of unspecified type.

Air War, Iraq: 2006

While cluster bombs remain a point of contention, Air Force officials do acknowledge that U.S. military and coalition aircraft dropped at least 111,000 pounds of other types of bombs on targets in Iraq in 2006. This figure — 177 bombs in all — does not include guided missiles or unguided rockets fired, or cannon rounds expended; nor, according to a CENTAF spokesman, does it take into account the munitions used by some Marine Corps and other coalition fixed-wing aircraft or any Army or Marine Corps helicopter gunships; nor does it include munitions used by the armed helicopters of the many private security contractors flying their own missions in Iraq.

In statistics provided to me, CENTAF reported a total of 10,519 “close air support missions” in Iraq in 2006, during which its aircraft dropped those 177 bombs and fired 52 “Hellfire/Maverick missiles.” The Guided Bomb Unit-12, a laser-guided bomb with a 500-pound general purpose warhead — 95 of which were reportedly dropped in 2006 — was the most frequently used bomb in Iraq last year, according to CENTAF. In addition, 67 satellite-guided, 500-pound GBU-38s and 15 2,000-pound GBU-31/32 munitions were also dropped on Iraqi targets in 2006, according to official U.S. figures. There is no independent way, however, to confirm the accuracy of this official count.

Rockets

Rockets, like the 2.75-inch Hydra-70 rocket which can be outfitted with various warheads and fired from either fixed-wing aircraft or most military helicopters, are conspicuously absent from the totals — so as not to “skew the tally and present an inaccurate picture of the air campaign,” said a CENTAF spokesman mysteriously. If released, these figures might, however, prove impressive indeed. According to a 2005 press release issued by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), who helped secure a five-year, $900 million Hydra contract from the Army for General Dynamics, “the widely used Hydra-70 rocket… has seen extensive use in Afghanistan and Iraq… [and] has become the world’s most widely used helicopter-launched weapon system.” By this April, $502 million in orders for the Hydra-70 had been placed by the Army since the contract was awarded.

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US ‘fundamentally opposed’ to G8 emissions proposals

Saturday, May 26th, 2007

The US appears to have rejected draft proposals by Germany for G8 members to agree tough measures on greenhouse gas emissions, leaked documents have shown.

Wide-ranging US amendments to a draft communiqué prepared ahead of June’s G8 summit in Germany cite a “fundamental opposition” to the proposals.

Germany wants all G8 members to agree timetables and targets for major cuts.

In the document, US officials make major changes to the communiqué.

In comments printed in red ink, the US negotiators express disappointment that earlier concerns have not been taken on board.

The changes strike out entire sentences and significantly reduce the certainty with which the statement addresses climate change.

“The US still has serious, fundamental concerns about this draft statement,” a red-inked note reads.

“The treatment of climate change runs counter to our overall position and crosses ‘multiple red lines’ in terms of what we simply cannot agree to,” it continues.

“We have tried to ‘tread lightly’ but there is only so far we can go given our fundamental opposition to the German position.”

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CCTV cameras ‘focus on the wrong people’

Saturday, May 26th, 2007

Jane Bruccoleri

An Upper Norwood councillor claims CCTV cameras in his ward are more likely to catch people parking illegally than the robbers and muggers blighting the area.

A recent spate of crime in the Upper Norwood triangle has caused unrest among shopkeepers and residents and Councillor Pat Ryan believes cameras should be snaring those responsible.

Coun Ryan added: “If you park in the triangle for just one second you’ll get a ticket or brown envelope through the door. If you get mugged they never have any images of it. A mugger is more likely to get done for parking illegally than for their crime.”

Recently Westow Street newsagents Sweets was targeted by armed robbers who held staff at gunpoint before making off with cash.

Another local newsagents was also targeted the day before, while Barclays Bank was raided last month. Threshers, also in Westow Street, was hit by robbers in March.

Local resident and chair of the Phoenix Community Centre in Westow Street, Kathy Bonds, echoed Coun Ryan’s view and said muggings in the area were on the increase.

She said: “We really want to name and shame these people and say you can’t do that sort of thing up here.”

Both Coun Ryan and Ms Bonds claim most of the crime is committed by those living in neighbouring boroughs.

Upper Norwood has a police Safer Neighbourhood Team and is covered by a team which polices the area which adjoins Croydon, Lambeth and Bromley.

Ms Bonds added: “We are a natural community up here, which is why it should be very easy for the police to get the intelligence they need. People will come and do these sort of things in Upper Norwood if they think they can get away with it. We want to nip this in the bud.”

Coun Ryan added: “The police have got to wake up. The political side of it is done - we got the CCTV, it’s the operational side of it that now needs looking at.”

A council spokesman said: “The cameras installed across Croydon, and operated by the council’s community protection team, produce high-quality images recorded to a digital storage system.

“The captured images are of sufficient quality to be used - indeed, have been used in many instances - in the prosecution of individuals. The specification for the cameras requires that they produce a clear enough image to identify a person of 1.6m height, about 5ft 3in, at a distance of 100m.”

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CIA issued dire warnings before Iraq invasion

Saturday, May 26th, 2007

KATHERINE SHRADER

U.S. intelligence analysts predicted, in two papers widely circulated before the 2003 Iraq invasion, that al-Qaida would see that as an opportunity to increase its operations and that Iran would try to shape the post-Saddam era.

The top analysts in government also said that establishing a stable democracy in Iraq would be a long, turbulent challenge.

Democrats said the documents, part of a Senate Intelligence Committee investigation released today, make clear that the Bush administration was warned about the challenges it now faces as it tries to stabilize Iraq.

“Sadly, the administration’s refusal to heed these dire warnings — and worse, to plan for them — has led to tragic consequences for which our nation is paying a terrible price,” said Senate Intelligence Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va.

But some Republicans rejected the committee’s work as flawed. The committee’s top Republican, Sen. Kit Bond of Missouri, said the report’s conclusions selectively highlight the intelligence agencies’ findings that seem to be important now, distorting the picture of what was presented to policymakers.

He said the committee’s work on the Iraq intelligence “has become too embroiled in politics and partisanship to produce an accurate and meaningful report.”

Asked about the report at his Thursday news conference, President Bush stood by his decision to topple the Iraqi regime. He said he firmly believes the world is better off without Saddam Hussein in power.

“Going into Iraq, we were warned about a lot of things, some of which happened, some of which didn’t happen. And, obviously, as I made a decision … I weighed the risks and rewards of any decision,” he said.

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U.N. rights expert investigating U.S. criticizes counterterror laws

Saturday, May 26th, 2007

The Associated Press

A U.N. expert on Friday criticized U.S. counterterrorism laws, expressed concern over the use of military commissions to try civilians, and said there was evidence the CIA had violated international human rights law.

But Martin Scheinin, the U.N.’s investigator on human rights in the fight against terrorism, dismissed “the perception that the United States has become an enemy of human rights.”

A spokesperson at the U.S. mission in Geneva, who would only speak on condition of anonymity, expressed disappointment at the report and said Scheinin had reiterated unfair and oversimplified criticisms of the United States.

The spokesperson said the 6,000-word preliminary report had missed the opportunity to deepen discussion among democratic nations of how best to deal with the threat posed by armed terrorist groups, and expressed hope that a final report would be more balanced.

Scheinin, an independent legal expert from Finland appointed by the Geneva-based U.N. Human Rights Council, has previously criticized the U.S. for terrorist profiling based on national or ethnic origin, or religion as “unfounded stereotyping.”

In his latest report, which was written after meetings with U.S. diplomats and justice and security officials, he said it was “regretful that a number of important mechanisms for the protection of rights have been removed or obfuscated under law and practice since the events of September 11.”

Scheinin singled out the USA PATRIOT Act, the Detainee Treatment Act, the Military Commissions Act, as well as presidential Executive Orders and classified programs for criticism.

“Various aspects relating to the jurisdiction and operation of military commissions raise significant human rights concerns, including the jurisdiction and composition of military commissions, the potential use of evidence obtained by coercion, and the potential for the imposition of the death penalty,” he said.

But the U.S. spokesperson in Geneva said military commissions were structured in a way that provides for fair trials.

At U.N. headquarters in New York, U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad also said the United States took a very different view.

“We are doing this under U.S. laws and procedures and legitimate decision-making authorities that exist in the United States. We are a rule of law country and our decisions are based on rule of law,” Khalilzad said.

Scheinin expressed concern that obtaining information from terrorism suspects using “enhanced interrogation techniques” amounted to a form of torture, or inhuman or degrading treatment, which is illegal under international law.

He said evidence from multiple sources and a lack of cooperation from CIA officials he met led him to conclude that the intelligence agency had used and continued to use such practices, including exposing prisoners to stress positions, extreme temperature changes, sleep deprivation, and “waterboarding,” in which a detainee is made to believe he is drowning.

U.S. government officials say the questioning has provided critical intelligence information about terrorist activities that has prevented attacks, including with airplanes, within the United States.

Scheinin said his visit also supported the suspicion that the CIA has flown terrorism suspects to countries where they could face abuse and torture under a practice known as “extraordinary rendition.”

The U.S. official in Geneva denied this allegation.

Scheinin said he saw his visit as “one step in the process of restoring the role of the United States as a positive example for respecting human rights, including in the context of the fight against terrorism.”

“It is a country which still has a great deal to be proud of,” he said.

Scheinin will present a final report outlining his findings to the 47-nation Human Rights Council at a later date, possibly at its 6th session in September.

The Geneva-based body replaced the discredited U.N. Human Rights Commission last year, but has itself been accused by some countries — including the United States — of being biased and politicized in its work.

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Bush signs $100 billion Iraq war funding bill

Saturday, May 26th, 2007

Matt Spetalnick

U.S. President George W. Bush signed a bill on Friday providing $100 billion to pay for the Iraq war but congressional Democrats who failed to impose a troop withdrawal deadline said their fight was far from over.

Passage of the emergency spending legislation capped a four-month struggle between Bush and a new Democratic-controlled Congress determined to force him to shift course in the unpopular war. Bush had vetoed an earlier bill that would have required him to begin withdrawing soldiers from Iraq by Oct. 1, and he had vowed to kill any legislation carrying restrictions on troop deployments. With Democrats lacking the votes to override the president and the war funds running out, a divided Congress passed a compromise measure on Thursday. “We’ve got a good bill that doesn’t have timetables or tell the military how to do its job but also sent a clear signal to the Iraqis that there’s expectations here in America …. about how to move forward,” Bush said after visiting wounded military personnel at a naval hospital in Bethesda, Maryland. He signed the bill in private later on Friday at the presidential retreat at Camp David, Maryland, where he planned to spend a long weekend for the Memorial Day holiday honoring America’s war dead. The legislation gives Bush the funds he sought without any requirement that he bring troops home, but it does set a series of “benchmarks” for the Iraqi government to meet and ties a small amount of non-military U.S. aid to achieving progress. Despite losing the latest round to Bush, Democrats vowed to keep up their efforts to force him to start bringing U.S. troops home from Iraq. Slammed by U.S. anti-war groups for allowing the bill to pass, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Democrats would quickly resume their drive to impose deadlines for pulling U.S. forces out of Iraq. She said she would put on the House agenda a bill to repeal Congress’ 2002 authorization of the Iraq war and said Democrats would use next year’s military spending bills to try to end the war that has killed at least 3,420 U.S. soldiers and wounded more than 34,000. Iraqis have suffered far worse casualties. Democrats won control of Congress in November’s midterm elections, propelled by public disenchantment with the war. According to a CBS News/New York Times poll, 76 percent of Americans believe the war is going somewhat or very badly for the United States and only 20 percent said Bush’s recent troop increase is making a positive difference. Some key Republicans are also beginning to talk about the possible need for a change in direction within a few months.Bush has made clear that September will be an important period, when the U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, will report on the impact of the troop buildup and make a recommendation on how to proceed.

Source: Reuters

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