Category: Uncategorized

So Barack Obama just recorded a radio ad for Rep. John Barrow (D-GA). Barrow has accused Democrats of wanting to “cut and run” in Iraq, and enthusiastically supports telcom immunity. He needs Obama’s support because he’s being challenged in the primary by State Senator Regina Thomas. Bonus ugliness: Barrow is white, Thomas is an African-American woman. Glenn Greenwald has the details here.

Anyone who can afford it may want to donate to a non-partisan effort to prevent an imminent Congressional sellout on warrantless eavesdropping and and immunity for telcoms who broke the law helping the Bush regime spy on us. (People with blogs can also join the blog arm of the left-right alliance Strange Bedfellows.) Again, Greenwald has the background.

Wikileaks has posted what it says is a manual of US counterinsurgency doctrine:

The manual, Foreign Internal Defense Tactics Techniques and Procedures for Special Forces (1994, 2004), may be critically described as “what we learned about running death squads and propping up corrupt government in Latin America and how to apply it to other places”. Its contents are both history defining for Latin America and, given the continued role of US Special Forces in the suppression of insurgencies and guerilla movements world wide, history making.

The document, which has been verified, is official US Special Forces doctrine. It directly advocates training paramilitaries, pervasive surveillance, censorship, press control and restrictions on labor unions & political parties. It directly advocates warrantless searches, detainment without charge and the suspension of habeas corpus. It directly advocates bribery, employing terrorists, false flag operations and concealing human rights abuses from journalists. And it directly advocates the extensive use of “psychological operations” (propaganda) to make these and other “population & resource control” measures more palatable.

The document has been particularly informed by the long United States involvement in the El Salvador…

I have no way of judging whether the document is legitimate, but it certainly reads like it is.

Recall that in 2005 the Defense Department decided on what it called “The Salvador Option” for Iraq, with James Steele, a veteran of counterinsurgency in El Salvador during the eighties, training Iraq’s Special Police Commandos.

A reader forwards a gallery of devastation, here, noting, “These cities (C.R. and Iowa City the most, I think) will be picking up the pieces of this for quite a long time because – just like in N.O. – this wasn’t just water, but heavy chemical and petroleum based pollutants mixing in with the water. And now that stuff is in every building in the flooded area, which for C.R. at least, is basically a very large radius from the center of the city.”

In case you missed this one:

But Akhtiar was no terrorist. American troops had dragged him out of his Afghanistan home in 2003 and held him in Guantanamo for three years in the belief that he was an insurgent involved in rocket attacks on U.S. forces. The Islamic radicals in Guantanamo’s Camp Four who hissed “infidel” and spat at Akhtiar, however, knew something his captors didn’t: The U.S. government had the wrong guy.

“He was not an enemy of the government, he was a friend of the government,” a senior Afghan intelligence officer told McClatchy. Akhtiar was imprisoned at Guantanamo on the basis of false information that local anti-government insurgents fed to U.S. troops, he said.

An eight-month McClatchy investigation in 11 countries on three continents has found that Akhtiar was one of dozens of men — and, according to several officials, perhaps hundreds — whom the U.S. has wrongfully imprisoned in Afghanistan, Cuba and elsewhere on the basis of flimsy or fabricated evidence, old personal scores or bounty payments.

McClatchy interviewed 66 released detainees, more than a dozen local officials — primarily in Afghanistan — and U.S. officials with intimate knowledge of the detention program. The investigation also reviewed thousands of pages of U.S. military tribunal documents and other records.

This unprecedented compilation shows that most of the 66 were low-level Taliban grunts, innocent Afghan villagers or ordinary criminals. At least seven had been working for the U.S.-backed Afghan government and had no ties to militants, according to Afghan local officials. In effect, many of the detainees posed no danger to the United States or its allies.

The investigation also found that despite the uncertainty about whom they were holding, U.S. soldiers beat and abused many prisoners.

Prisoner mistreatment became a regular feature in cellblocks and interrogation rooms at Bagram and Kandahar air bases, the two main way stations in Afghanistan en route to Guantanamo.

While he was held at Afghanistan’s Bagram Air Base, Akhtiar said, “When I had a dispute with the interrogator, when I asked, ‘What is my crime?’ the soldiers who took me back to my cell would throw me down the stairs.”

The rest.

is taking a hell of a hit, and they’re not even getting the worst of it. The Red Cross expects to spend millions helping people with emergency food and shelter; I’m sure they could use some donations right about now.

… more here.

The volunteer effort was really something to behold. We had Mennonites from the surrounding area filling bags held by local hippies who handed off to sorority girls tying off the bags who passed off into bag lines with college hipsters, Iowa City families, U Iowa football players, and international students shuttling bags into place. The fellow on the radio even said he saw inmates over from the Johnson county jail in orange jump suits volunteering. I feel that the university and the city have done a great job organizing the efforts. The university is now directing volunteers to the city. Today my wife and I went and volunteered with the city instead of the university. Currently there is a surplus of filled bags down in front of the Lindquist Center that will certainly be shuttled to where ever they’re needed tomorrow.

I haven’t really seen anyone on Kos saying this but I’ve seen people in other places online making comparisons with Katrina. I’ve seen wingnuts, for example, try to excuse FEMA’s horrible Katrina response by pointing to local efforts in Cedar Rapids and other parts of Iowa as if the local governments should be able to handle things themselves. I even saw a despicable comment (again, not here) to the effect that white people in Iowa know how to take care of themselves unlike the residents of New Orleans. Such bullshit. As devastating as the images out of Cedar Rapids are, it’s not even really close to the scale of Katrina. In Katrina an entire radius was wiped out by a hurricane. When I lived in Cedar Rapids I frequently walked from the campus of Coe College, which is on high ground and totally unaffected, down to the riverfront. All that downtown area you see flooded on tv is like a 15 minute walk from being high and dry. The magnitude is just entirely different and the ability to stage relief efforts is a lot better here. There can be absolutely no comparison.