Author: Jonathan Schwarz

This is a great new story by James Ridgeway in Mother Jones:

A private security company organized and managed by former Secret Service officers spied on Greenpeace and other environmental organizations from the late 1990s through at least 2000, pilfering documents from trash bins, attempting to plant undercover operatives within groups, casing offices, collecting phone records of activists, and penetrating confidential meetings. According to company documents provided to Mother Jones by a former investor in the firm, this security outfit collected confidential internal records—donor lists, detailed financial statements, the Social Security numbers of staff members, strategy memos—from these organizations and produced intelligence reports for public relations firms and major corporations involved in environmental controversies.

The rest.

Dean Baker, the hardest working man in progressive politics, is writing a new weekly column for the American Prospect.

To your surprise and mine, it turns out there is such a thing. And as is so often the case, what begins in satire ends with actual murder and suicide.

This is from the statement of Ryan Crocker, US Ambassador to Iraq, in front of the Foreign Relations Committee yesterday:

One conclusion I draw from these signs of progress is that the strategy that began with the Surge is working. This does not mean, however, that U.S. support should be open-ended or that the level and nature of our engagement should not diminish over time. It is in this context that we have begun negotiating a bilateral relationship between Iraq and the United States…The heart of this relationship will be a legal framework for the presence of American troops similar to that which exists in nearly 80 countries around the world…

U.S. forces will remain in Iraq beyond December 31, 2008, when the U.N. resolution presently governing their presence expires. Our troops will need basic authorizations and protections to continue operations – and this agreement will provide those authorizations and protections.

The agreement will not establish permanent bases in Iraq, and we anticipate that it will expressly foreswear them. The agreement will not specify troop levels, and it will not tie the hands of the next Administration. Our aim is to ensure that the next President arrives in office with a stable foundation upon which to base policy decisions, and that is precisely what this agreement will do. Congress will remain fully informed as these negotiations proceed in the coming weeks and months.

Both the US constitution and the Iraqi constitution require that treaties be approved by their respective legislative branches. Yet Crocker states that Congress will merely be “fully informed” about the US-Iraq agreement. And he doesn’t even mention the Iraqi parliament. (It is highly unlikely that either the US Congress or the Iraqi parliament would approve this, let alone both.)

Crocker and the Bush administration justify this by claiming the agreement will not rise to the level of a treaty—that it will be a mere Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), which can be concluded just between the respective countries’ executive branches. However, all previous SOFAs have merely governed mundane issues, such as “wearing of the uniform, the carrying of arms, tax and customs relief, entry and exit of personnel and property, and resolving damage claims.” R. Chuck Mason, the Congressional Research Service’s expert on SOFAs, recently stated that a review of over 70 of them found that “none contained the authority to fight.” It has always been treaties which do that. The United States does have a SOFA with Germany, but it is the NATO treaty which makes it legal for US troops there to kill people.

Thus the Bush administration position breaks completely with decades of precedent. Moreover, its extremism can be understood by the fact that it logically goes both ways: if Bush and Maliki can together agree without Iraqi parliamentary approval that Americans can be based in Iraq and kill Iraqis, then Maliki and Bush could together agree without US congressional approval that Iraqis can be based in the US and kill Americans.

So Ambassador Crocker (and other Bush administration functionaries) should have been asked this by congress:

1. Will the US-Iraqi agreement require the approval of the Iraqi parliament?

2. If not, could Bush and Maliki decide tomorrow that Iraqi troops and private contractors will be stationed in Des Moines and have the legal authority to shoot Americans?

Of course, given the administration’s position on similar issues, perhaps we don’t want to know the answer.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by Joseph Biden, had a hearing on Wednesday called “Iraq After the Surge: Political Prospects.” One of the witnesses was journalist Nir Rosen; you can read his prepared testimony here (pdf).

The best part of Rosen’s appearance is when he’s questioned by Biden. This exchange starts around 58:45 of C-Span’s coverage (realplayer):

BIDEN: Based on what you’ve said, there’s really no hope, is there? We should really get the hell out of there right now, right? There’s nothing to do.

ROSEN: As a journalist, I’m uncomfortable advising an imperialist power about how to be a more efficient imperialist power. I don’t think we’re there for the interests of the Iraqi people. I don’t that’s ever been a motivation.

However, I have mixed emotions on that issue. Many of my Sunni friends, beginning about a year ago, many of them who are opposed to the Americans, who supported attacking American troops in Iraq, began to grow really nervous at the idea of the Americans leaving Iraq because they knew they would be massacred. It could be Rwanda the day the Americans leave. The creation of these Sunni militias, the Awakening groups, militates against that kind of a massacre of civilians occurring because now there are actually Sunni safe zones…But I do believe that if Americans were to withdraw you’d seen an increase in violence at least temporarily, until some sort of equilibrium is reached—

BIDEN: But the good news is we wouldn’t be imperialist anymore in Iraq, from your perspective.

ROSEN: (smiling widely) Only elsewhere in the region.

BIDEN: Only elsewhere in the region. I’m sure glad we invited you, I tell you. [Bloviates for ninety seconds, then turns to other witnesses.] Gentlemen, to the non-imperialist side of the witness stand…

I think we can guess Rosen won’t be invited back anytime soon. After all, when the Senate Foreign Relations Committee meets, the last thing you want is for someone to start telling the truth about America’s foreign relations.

MORE UNFORTUNATE REALITY: This is from Rosen’s testimony:

Driving to the Amriya district in western Baghdad last month, my friend pointed to a gap in the concrete walls the American occupation forces have surrounded this Sunni bastion with. “We call it the Rafah Crossing,” he laughed, referring to the one gates to besieged Gaza that another occupying army occasionally allows open…Our car lined up behind dozens of others which had been registered with the local Iraqi army unit and were allowed to enter and exit the imprisoned neighborhood. It often took two or three hours to finally get past the American soldiers, Iraqi soldiers and the “Thuwar,” or revolutionaries, as the Sunni militia sanctioned by the Americans to patrol Amriya was called. When it was our turn we exited the vehicle for Iraqi soldiers to search it as an American soldier led his dog around the car to sniff it and I was patted down by one of the Sunni militiamen. Not knowing I was American, he reassured me. “Just let the dog and the dog that is with him finish with your car and you can go,” he laughed.