Want strengthen the progressive movement on your campus, bring engaging speakers and films to jumpstart dialogue, and engage in activism on local and national issues?

Then join the Campus Progress Student Network for 2008-2009! We’re currently still accepting applications to join the team of Student Representatives from the across the country who work with the staff of Campus Progress to advance progressive causes at the local level and make their voices heard on the issues they care most about.

***  New deadline! Applications are now due by Wednesday September 3rd, so click here to learn more and to apply. ***

White Paper Justifying Iraq War Written
Three Months before Intel Report Arrived

A war based on deception and fraud Worldpassion cc

National Security Archive Stunner

Michael Collins
Washington, DC

The National Security Archive released a report Friday Aug. 22, 2008 that sheds even more light on the premeditated lying and deception that took the United States to war in Iraq.   The findings are based on new evidence compiled by Dr. John Prados and published by the National Security Archive.  See "White Paper" Drafted before NIE even Requested , "Scoop" Independent News, Aug. 24, 2008.

Most notably, Prados shows the depth of the deception perpetrated against citizens and Congress regarding the alleged threat to U.S. security posed by Iraq. It had appeared that the White House rewrote the Oct. 1, 2002 National Intelligence Estimate and then issued that doctored report to Congress on Oct. 4, 2002.  Prados reveals convincing evidence that the Oct. 4 White Paper had already been written by July 2002.  He shows that it was only slightly altered after the final NIE arrived. This White Paper served as the basis for the war.

So let’s recap the last few weeks.

In both the US and Iraq there are efforts to get more Iraqi students to American universities.

In the states, educators have been working with their counterparts in Syria to help relocate students. NPR reports that they have formed the “Iraqi Student Project,” in which fourteen universities are currently participating. It sounds like they are doing good work:

…program coordinators visit promising applicants in their homes for personal interviews. Students are selected after further review of their academic performance and grasp of English; then, they spend time working with tutors on their English and other skills. Students then apply to participating American schools that offer programs in their major fields of interest.
 

Students from the Campus Anti-War Network and other groups helped to pass a referendum at UW-Madison that would raise money from student fees to help bring Iraqi students to campus. Apparently, it wasn’t too hard (so you should do it too!):

“It was actually a lot easier than I thought it was. I wasn’t expecting people to be as supportive of this as they were,” said Wustmann, who was heavily involved in collecting signatures. “Some reactions were so enthusiastic, like ‘how can I help this? It’s such a great idea.’”

This is the top headline on the frontpage of the CNN website:

The GI Bill of Rights for the 21st Century (S.22) is expected to be on the  Senate floor this week, and America's veterans need your help. S. 22 would  make sure that veterans who served on active duty after September 11, 2001  have education benefits that measure up to the needs of today’s veterans.

 Since the first GI Bill was signed in 1944 benefits have been scaled back  while tuition has skyrocketed. Currently, it covers only 60-70% of the  average costs of a four year education at a public college. The House of  Representatives has already passed similar legislation, so please call the  US Capitol at (202) 224-3121 and urge your Senators to support our veterans  by passing the GI Bill of Rights for the 21st Century (S.22).

Five years after President Bush declared the Iraq War “Mission Accomplished,” more than 4.7 million Iraqis have been displaced from their homes –about 15% of Iraq’s population or the populations of Iowa, New Hampshire, and Washington DC combined. Five years later, the humanitarian crisis in Iraq is still one of the most underreported catastrophes of the Iraq war and it’s not getting better.

This is the largest refugee crisis in the Middle East since 1948 and was directly caused by the U.S. invasion. Yet, the United States has done little to alleviate this massive humanitarian crisis.  Fewer than 6,000 Iraqis have been resettled in the U.S. since the war began.

Just on Tuesday, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees released a survey of Iraqi refugees in Syria. 95 percent of respondents said they “fled Iraq because of direct threats or general insecurity” and only 4 percent of the respondents had any plans to return home.

Timesonline reports that Llewellyn Werner, chairman of C3, a Los Angeles-based holding company for private equity firms, is dumping $500 million into The Baghdad Zoo and Entertainment Experience – an American-style amusement park featuring a skatepark, rides, a concert theatre, and a museum.

The park is being designed by the same firm that developed Disneyland.

Werner will retain exclusive rights to the development project. He told the Timesonline: 

“I wouldn’t be doing this if I wasn’t making money,” he said. “I also have this wonderful sense that we’re doing the right thing – we’re going to employ thousands of Iraqis. But mostly everything here is for profit.” 

Petraeus is a “big supporter” of the park, according to the Timesonline.  

Does a Disneyland-style amusement park in a volatile, war-torn country reek of cultural hegemony and yet another excuse to privatize more of Iraq’s resources for US profit? It does to me.

This Thursday, May 1st, is the 5th anniversary of President Bush declaring "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq. On this day in 2003, he stated that all major combat operations had ended and that our goals had been achieved.

We know better.

Maybe someone who's smarter than me can answer this convincingly, but this graf from today's Wall Street Journal confused me:

The U.S. military says it has found caches of newly made Iranian weapons in Iraq, leading senior officials to conclude Tehran is continuing to funnel armaments into Iraq despite its pledges to the contrary.

How does the premise (there are newly made Iranian weapons in Iraq) lead to the conclusion (the Iranian government is responsible)? Given that a newly-manufactured weapon has to go somewhere, and given the huge amount of instability in Iraq, all of which goes back to the Sunni-Shia divide and numerous other ethnic and political conflicts, what would prevent someone with access to Iranian arms from shipping them to his favored side in the civil war? Isn't this a supremely likely occurrence?

Politically and strategically, there is a miles-wide difference between some random Iranian lieutenant funneling arms to Iraq and the Iranian government doing the same. Where's the hard evidence that the latter is the case? Certainly the fact that the weapons are new points us slightly in that direction, but on its own that's a pretty flimsy case.

Zubaydah, Bush and the Bureaucracy of Torture

Michael Collins
Washington, D.C.

The devastating attack of 9/11 conferred unprecedented popularity on the Bush administration. This was more a reflection of the strong desire for national unity in the wake of a tragedy than an endorsement of Bush policies.

After the attack, there was a frantic effort inside the administration to show a major success in their newly proclaimed war on terror. The administration knew what the public didn't: Far from being surprised by airplanes used as weapons, they'd had a series of warnings from intelligence sources that commercial airplanes were indeed the next weapon of choice by terrorists. Once that information became public, the Bush administration would need something more to boost its image.

Last night I went to a Winter Soldier panel Campus Progress co-hosted down here in Gainesville, FL. It was a smaller scale than the one Spencer reported on in DC, consisting of six Iraq veterans, four of whom are with Iraq Veterans Against the War and two who just came forward to talk about their experiences unaffiliated. The event was extremely intense, gripping the audience during each soldier's story and lasting nearly four hours. The stories ranging from witnessing deaths of Iraqis, suicide bombers, self-medicating drug use, lack of veterans benefits, and sexual assault of both American female soldiers and Iraqi women.

Clifton Hicks, who was once suspected of being the author of TNR's disputed "Shock Troops" article, said, "None of us are here to make American soldiers look bad, because anyone in this room is capable of the same thing." Hicks blames the evil of war and not the individual troops. Many soldiers said they were still "pro-military" but opposed the Iraq war in particular. The opinions on pullout varied from immediately and as quickly as possible to a strategic and slow withdrawl. Unsurprisingly, the veterans aren't a monolithic group and don't have one opinion about the war.

Cross posted. 

Via CNN.

Users can now view refugee camps through the popular Google Earth service. 

The maps will aid humanitarian operations as well as help inform the public about the millions who have fled their homes because of violence or hardship, according to the office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, which is working with Google on the project.

Users can download Google Earth software to see satellite images of refugee hot spots such as Darfur, Iraq and Colombia. Information provided by the U.N. refugee agency explains where the refugees have come from and what problems they face.

I think this has the potential to do good by raising awareness about refugees around the world. 

Christian Miller reported in the L.A. Times that, "Westhusing seemed especially upset by one conclusion he had reached: that traditional military values such as duty, honor and country had been replaced by profit motives in Iraq, where the U.S. had come to rely heavily on contractors for jobs once done by the military."

Unfortunately, what is publicly known about the extent to which corruption and deceit is rooted in the activities of U.S.-led initiatives in Iraq is probably just the tip of the ice burg. Not only has the Pentagon manipulated the structure of power and responsibility to eliminate any system of accountability, but there have been increasingly eerie reports on the ways in which the American public has been receiving incomplete, absent, manipulated or slanted news coverage on the war (and how the DoD has been behind a large part of this).

Reports reveal that in the first quarter of 2008, media coverage of the war dropped to a meager 3.5 percent . At the height of Iraq War reporting, immediately following the initial invasion, reporting was at around 30 percent.

It has long been a known fact that the administration has made it a personal policy not to do body counts, learning the lessons from Vietnam that visibility of casualties leads to public outcry. But now a report indicates that the Pentagon is considering hiring, commissioning, or co-opting bloggers “to verbally attack a specific person or promote a specific message." This coincides with a GOP strategy to bolster support for the presumed Republican nominee John McCain (a staunch supporter of the war) by launching multi-lateral attack campaigns against what they see as Democratic attempts to "legislate defeat" in Iraq.

Bottom line: whether its through the tragedies of formerly deployed troops upon their return stateside, the depletion of our economic infrastructure by the careless and fraudulent spending of our tax money on the war, or the descent of our international reputation from the surfacing stories of contractor corrosion, the consequences of the administration's mishandling of the war will follow us home. We need to take action while our country still has some integrity to defend. Sign Progressive Future's petition to enforce accountability for the events that take place in Iraq in our name.

Haifa Zangana was the keynote speaker this morning at WAM! She talked of how women are targeted for rape in today's Iraq. The surge was designed, she said to bring in more troops to "clean" out terrorists. The label of terrorist, sadly is easily applied to anyone.

One of the real tragedies, she says, is the Iraqi refugees that have been displaced by the war. Refugees are dealing with poverty and forced prostitution. Unemployment in Iraq is as high as 60-70 percent among men and 90 percent among women, despite the fact that there are 1 million widows in Iraq today, Zangana said. Women have suffered greatly because of the Iraq war. Before the 2003 invasion, women had a lot of legal protections including equal employment laws, required maternity leave, and nurseries attached to factories. Zangana said she would have never believed that things could be worse for women than under Saddam's regime, but they are.

Sectarian violence has been inflamed by the Iraq invasion. What they are creating in Iraq, she says, is armed terrorist groups. Politically we have a "puppet government." Outside the Green Zone, she says, the government doesn't have much respect or power. On the streets, democracy is a joke. Mothers will say, '"Shut up, or I'll call democracy.' That's all that's left of democracy."

One particular story Zangana told was of a hospital -- desperately needed in Iraq -- has gone unfinished for years. Finally, last year, the American contractors called work on the hospital finished, despite the fact that the building is nowhere near complete. This is eerily representative of the state of Iraq today. There seems to be no clear way to "complete" the work that Bush started on Iraq. If we cannot even successfully build hospitals for the people of Iraq, how can we possibly hope to build a functioning democracy?

Cross posted. 

"These brave individuals have lived out the words of the Gospel: `Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends,"

- George Bush

A day after President Bush's heart warming radio address reminding America to remember the ongoing sacrifices of U.S. troops in Iraq on Easter Sunday, four U.S. soldiers were blown apart by a roadside bomb in Baghdad bringing the total number of dead over 4,000. President Bush marked the occasion Monday with resolve and assurance for the American people. 

"One day people will look back at this moment in history and say, 'Thank God there were courageous people willing to serve, because they laid the foundations for peace for generations to come."

If someday our war and occupation in Iraq are heralded as blessed peacemaking, it will likely be by a disconnected American public and not the Iraqi people. In January, a joint UN World Health Organization and Iraqi government study concluded that between 104,000 and 233,000 Iraqi's have died violently from the invasion. 

Um Mohammed, a Sunni Arab woman in Iraq said regarding the U.S. military death toll,

"The world regards the American soldiers as our saviours but they are murderers..All the killings in Iraq are because of the Americans. They are the cause of all the bloodshed. I ask Allah to kill all the American soldiers --to count them all and not leave any one of them."