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  • CHINA ANNOUNCES SUCCESSFUL FUSION TEST

    EAST is based at the Institute of Plasma Physics under the Chinese Academy of Sciences. During the experiment, reports indicate, the superheated plasma attained a temperature of about 100 million Celsius. The first tests lasted nearly three minutes, and generated an electrical current of 200 kiloamps, a scientist taking part in the experiment told Xinhua. The experiments are continuing, he added.

    Li Jiangang, director of the Institute of Plasma Physics, said the results of the tests met the expectations of the sicentists and signified a great breeakthrough in the research of thermonuclear fusion. "That means we lead all our competitors by at least a decade," said Li. "The breakththrough will make it possible for mankind to harness a safe, clean, and endless source of energy."

    The data of the EAST test will be submitted to the International Atomic Energy General Conference in Vienna.

  • Standing Up as the Republic Crashes

    First, and most importantly: it comes very, very late in the game – perhaps too late. All of the tnical powers enumerated by the editorial were claimed – and put into practice – by Bush and Cheney five years ago. I began writing columns about these very claims in October 2001. In November 2001, I first wrote of Bush’s claim that he could not only declare anyone on earth an "enemy combatant" and jail them forever in black holes without charges, but he could also have them summarily killed. This was not classified information that I got from some bold Ellsbergian whistleblower; these were claims being made openly and proudly by "senior Administration officials" to – the New York Times, among others. I’ll be writing more on this point later in the week.

    Second, the editorial, as strong as it is, doesn’t go far enough: We not looking at "our generation’s version of the Alien and Sedition Acts" as the newspaper puts it; things are much farther gone than that. What we are looking at is the death knell of the constitutional republic of the United States. Bush has long claimed dictatorial powers in secret; if Congress writes these liberty-gutting strictures into law, then the fundamental nature of the American state will be transformed. It will not be, in any sense – not even formally – a free country anymore. All of our rights and liberties will be the "gift" of the President, who can bestow them – or revoke them – as he sees fit.

    Third, many legal experts note that the language of the laws in question here does not specifically exclude their application to citizens of the United States. Although Bush’s willing executioners of liberty among the Senate leadership – such as Lindsay Graham, John McCain and the lipless, cat-torturing, money-grubbing excuse for a man named Bill Frist – insist that these draconian powers will apply only to "furreners" (as though that made it all OK), Cheney and his minions have in fact ensured that the measures can be used against American citizens as well – as they already have been, over and over, during the past five years.

    The Times has taken a good, strong first step; now they need to march forward boldly and tell the rest of the truth. Bush’s "War on Terror" is coming to the Homeland, and its target is the American people. Bush and his handlers want to destroy the ability of anyone to oppose their hard-right – and overwhelmingly unpopular – agenda. It’s the only way the Faction can maintain its domination – and avoid prosecution for its many crimes. They’re fighting for their freedom – so they’ll take ours. They’re fighting for their lives – so they’ll take ours.

    Next time, the NYT should put a piece like this on the front page – and end it with a call for mass marches in the street, exhorting the American people to rally for their liberty and bring down the bloodstained tyrants who have usurped the Republic and dishonored our name.

  • NY Times editorial shifts the agenda

    It was only after the Supreme Court issued the inevitable ruling striking down Mr. Bush’s shadow penal system that he adopted his tone of urgency. It serves a cynical goal: Republican strategists think they can win this fall, not by passing a good law but by forcing Democrats to vote against a bad one so they could be made to look soft on terrorism.

    Last week, the White House and three Republican senators announced a terrible deal on this legislation that gave Mr. Bush most of what he wanted, including a blanket waiver for crimes Americans may have committed in the service of his antiterrorism policies. Then Vice President Dick Cheney and his willing lawmakers rewrote the rest of the measure so that it would give Mr. Bush the power to jail pretty much anyone he wants for as long as he wants without charging them, to unilaterally reinterpret the Geneva Conventions, to authorize what normal people consider torture, and to deny justice to hundreds of men captured in error.

    These are some of the bill’s biggest flaws:

    Enemy Combatants: A dangerously broad definition of “illegal enemy combatant” in the bill could subject legal residents of the United States, as well as foreign citizens living in their own countries, to summary arrest and indefinite detention with no hope of appeal. The president could give the power to apply this label to anyone he wanted.

    The Geneva Conventions: The bill would repudiate a half-century of international precedent by allowing Mr. Bush to decide on his own what abusive interrogation methods he considered permissible. And his decision could stay secret ­ there’s no requirement that this list be published.

    Habeas Corpus: Detainees in U.S. military prisons would lose the basic right to challenge their imprisonment. These cases do not clog the courts, nor coddle terrorists. They simply give wrongly imprisoned people a chance to prove their innocence.

    Judicial Review: The courts would have no power to review any aspect of this new system, except verdicts by military tribunals. The bill would limit appeals and bar legal actions based on the Geneva Conventions, directly or indirectly. All Mr. Bush would have to do to lock anyone up forever is to declare him an illegal combatant and not have a trial.

    Coerced Evidence: Coerced evidence would be permissible if a judge considered it reliable ­ already a contradiction in terms ­ and relevant. Coercion is defined in a way that exempts anything done before the passage of the 2005 Detainee Treatment Act, and anything else Mr. Bush chooses.

    Secret Evidence: American standards of justice prohibit evidence and testimony that is kept secret from the defendant, whether the accused is a corporate executive or a mass murderer. But the bill as redrafted by Mr. Cheney seems to weaken protections against such evidence.

    Offenses: The definition of torture is unacceptably narrow, a virtual reprise of the deeply cynical memos the administration produced after 9/11. Rape and sexual assault are defined in a retrograde way that covers only forced or coerced activity, and not other forms of nonconsensual sex. The bill would effectively eliminate the idea of rape as torture.

    •There is not enough time to fix these bills, especially since the few Republicans who call themselves moderates have been whipped into line, and the Democratic leadership in the Senate seems to have misplaced its spine. If there was ever a moment for a filibuster, this was it.

    We don’t blame the Democrats for being frightened. The Republicans have made it clear that they’ll use any opportunity to brand anyone who votes against this bill as a terrorist enabler. But Americans of the future won’t remember the pragmatic arguments for caving in to the administration.

    They’ll know that in 2006, Congress passed a tyrannical law that will be ranked with the low points in American democracy, our generation’s version of the Alien and Sedition Acts.

  • Mini-gulags, hired guns and lobbyists

    Camp Cropper itself turns out to be an interesting story, but one with a problem: while the emptying of Abu Ghraib made the news everywhere, the filling of Camp Cropper made no news at all. And yet it turns out that Camp Cropper, which started out as a bunch of tents, has now become a US$60 million "state-of-the-art" prison. The upgrade, on the drawing boards since 2004, was just completed and hardly a word has been written about it. We really have no idea what it consists of or what it looks like, even though it’s in one of the few places in Iraq that an American reporter could safely visit, being on a vast US military base constructed, like the prison, with taxpayer dollars.

    Had anyone paid the slightest attention – other than the Pentagon, the Bush administration, and whatever company or companies had the contract to construct the facility – it would still have been taken for granted that Camp Cropper wasn’t the business of ordinary Americans (or even their representatives in Congress) – despite the fact that the $60 million, which made the camp "state of the art", was surely Americans’, no one in the United States debated or discussed the upgrade and there was no serious consideration of it in Congress before the money was anted up, any more than Congress or the American people are in any way involved in the constant upgrading of US military bases in Iraq.

    While Iraq and future Iraq policy are constantly in the news, almost all the US facts-on-the-ground in that country – of which Camp Bucca is one – have come into being without consultation with the American people or, in any serious way, Congress (or testing in the courts).

    Camp Bucca is a story you can’t read anywhere in the United States – and yet it may, in a sense, be the most important American story in Iraq right now. While arguments spin endlessly here at home about the nature of withdrawal "timetables", and who’s cutting and running from what, and how many troops the US will or won’t have in-country in 2007, 2008 or 2009, on the ground a process continues that makes mockery of the debate in Washington and in the country. While the "reconstruction" of Iraq has come to look ever more like the deconstruction of Iraq, the construction of an ever more permanent-looking American landscape in that country has proceeded apace and with reasonable efficiency.

    First we had those huge military bases that officials were careful never to label "permanent". (For a while, they were given the charming name of "enduring camps" by the Pentagon.) Just about no one in the mainstream bothered to write about them for a couple of years as quite literally billions of dollars were poured into them and they morphed into the size of US towns with their own bus routes, sports facilities, Pizza Huts, Subways, Burger Kings, and mini-golf courses. Huge as they now are, elaborate as they now are, they are still continually being upgraded. Now, it seems that on one of them we have $60 million worth of the first "permanent US prison" in Iraq. Meanwhile, in the heart of Baghdad, the Bush administration is building what’s probably the largest, best-fortified "embassy" in the solar system, with its own elaborate apartment complexes and entertainment facilities, meant for a staff of 3,500.

    If, for a moment, Americans stop listening to the arguments about, or even the news about, Iraq here at home and just concentrate on the ignored reality of those facts-on-the-ground, you’re likely to assess our world somewhat differently. After all, those facts being made on the ground – in essence policy-put-into-action without the trappings of debate, democracy, media coverage, or checks and balances of any sort – are unlikely to be altered or halted in any foreseeable future by debate or opinion polls in the US. All that is likely to alter them is other facts on the ground – a growing insurgency, the deaths of Americans and Iraqis in ever greater numbers, a region increasingly thrown into turmoil, and maybe, one of these days, a full-scale, in-the-streets reaction by the Shi’ites of Iraq to the occupation of their country by a foreign power intent on going nowhere any time soon.

    A Bermuda Triangle of injustice
    Recently, speaking of the Bush administration’s urge publicly to redefine and so abrogate the Geneva Conventions, former secretary of state Colin Powell said: "If you just look at how we are perceived in the world and the kind of criticism we have taken over Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and renditions, whether we believe it or not, people are now starting to question whether we’re following our own high standards."

    It’s a comment not atypical of the present debate in Washington and possibly of feelings in the country. The media play up the courageous stands of Republican Senators John McCain, Lindsay Graham and John Warner in bringing us back to those "high standards". In the process, the details of how much of what we can use in questioning whomever and what modest protections prisoners might or might not receive in America’s offshore prison system are hashed out. But no matter what is decided on any of these matters, in the real, on-the-ground world, Americans’ "high standards" are quite beside the point – the point being the globally outsourced penal system being created.

    For example, President Bush recently announced that the United States was emptying other prisons as well – previously officially unacknowledged "secret prisons" around the globe – of 14 "high value" al-Qaeda detainees. "There are now no terrorists in the CIA program", he said, though that is unlikely to be the actual case.

    Looked at another way, however, that secret Central Intelligence Agency detention system, which seems to consist of makeshift or shared or borrowed facilities around the world, sits in place, ever ready for use. It’s not going anywhere and in the most basic sense it probably cannot be shut down. Nor, it seems, are the almost 14,000 prisoners the US holds in Iraq, the 500 (or more) in Afghanistan, and the nearly 500 in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, going anywhere. Even with Abu Ghraib empty and the secret prison system officially emptied, nearly 15,000 prisoners are being held by the US in essence incommunicado, most beyond the eyes of any system of justice, beyond the reach of any judges or juries. In many cases, as in that of Bilal Hussein, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Iraqi photojournalist, who has been held, probably at Camp Cropper, without charge or trial "on suspicion of collaborating with insurgents" for the past five months, even that most basic right – to know exactly why you are being held, what the charges are against you – is lacking.

    Whatever arguments may be going on in Washington over which "tools" or "interrogation techniques" the CIA is to be allowed to use or over exactly how the 14 al-Qaeda detainees just transferred to Guantanamo will be tried, this set of facts-on-the-ground adds up to America’s own global Bermuda Triangle of Injustice into which untold numbers of human beings can simply disappear. The "crown jewel" of America’s mini-gulag is, of course, Guantanamo. And again, whatever the fierce arguments in the US may be about Guantanamo "methods" or what kinds of commissions or tribunals (if any) may finally be chosen for the run-of-the-mill prisoners there, one fact-on-the-ground points us toward the actual lay of the land. A little-publicized $30 million maximum-security wing at Guantanamo is now being completed by the US Navy, just as at the US prison at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan, there has been an upgrade.

    In all-too-real worlds beyond our reach, everything tends toward permanency. Whatever the discussion may be, whatever issues may seem to be gripping Washington or the nation, whatever you’re watching on TV or reading in the papers, elsewhere the continual constructing, enlarging, expanding, entrenching of a new global system of imprisonment, which bears no relation to any system of imprisonment Americans have previously imagined, continues non-stop, unchecked and unbalanced by Congress or the courts, unaffected by the Republic, but very distinctly under the US flag.

    Contractors and mercenaries
    And don’t imagine that this is an anomaly, applicable only to imprisonment abroad. Almost anywhere you look, the facts on the ground tell a story at odds with what’s important, what’s real as we Americans imagine it.

    Let’s take, for instance, what’s now referred to as the Intelligence Community (IC), a collection of at least 16 agencies, ranging from the CIA and the National Security Agency (NSA) to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. Consider then just one recent piece about the IC by Greg Miller of the Los Angeles Times, headlined "Spy agencies outsourcing to fill key jobs".

    As Miller points out, the overall intelligence budget has gone up about $10 billion a year in recent years and for that we’ve got an upgrading (or at least upsizing) of almost every one of those 16 agencies plus a whole new, sprawling layer of intelligence bureaucracy headed by John Negroponte, the intelligence tsar, who runs the new Office of the Director of National Intelligence (not even included in the count above). Miller reports another interesting fact-on-the-ground as well: enormous numbers of private contractors are flooding into the IC.

    "At the National Counterterrorism Center – the agency created two years ago to prevent another attack like [that of] September 11 [2001] – more than half of the employees are not US government analysts or terrorism experts. Instead, they are outside contractors. At CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, senior officials say it is routine for career officers to look around the table during meetings on secret operations and be surrounded by so-called green-badgers – non-agency employees who carry special-colored IDs."

    At some clandestine CIA overseas posts such as Islamabad and Baghdad, Miller reports, private contractors can make up as many as three-quarters of the employees, while at home private contractors at the CIA now also outnumber its estimated 17,500 employees. He concludes: "Senior US intelligence officials said that the reliance on contractors was so deep that agencies couldn’t function without them. ‘If you took away the contractor support, they’d have to put yellow tape around the building and close it down,’ said a former senior CIA official who was responsible for overseeing contracts before leaving the agency earlier this year."

    The same could, of course, be said of the US military, which is quite literally incapable of existing today without its private contractors such as Halliburton’s KBR, nor could its wars be carried on without the proliferation of hired guns – mercenaries – who are now a given in any such situation. This transformation of the military into first an all-volunteer, then an increasingly privatized as well as outsourced, and now an increasingly mercenary institution is another fact-on-the-ground, another building block to America’s future.

    A reality built on fear
    Around all such "facts", of course, ever more entrenched and ever more expansive sets of interests arise: companies to organize the private contractees, or to deal with the outsourcing, or to handle contracts and construction work, not to speak of whole worlds of consultants, specialists, and lobbyists.

    This is a reality that no future US administration, nor any better-empowered Congress, would be likely to reverse, no less erase, any time soon. No matter how the details of the argument about NSA spying turn out, for example, it’s in essence a given that the National Security Agency will continue to grow and make itself ever more available in ever more ingenious ways, trolling ever more extensively in communications of every sort. These are the facts being established on the ground, while in Washington they argue over the (sometimes significant) details and the media focus their main attention on all of this as the essence of the news of the day.

    Take for example the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), yet another sprawling, ill-organized, inefficient bureaucracy established after September 11 and not likely to do anything but grow in our lifetimes. Around it has sprung into existence an anti-terrorism homeland-security industry (thank you, Osama bin Laden!) of staggering proportions. "Seven years ago," writes Paul Harris of The Guardian, "there were nine companies with federal homeland-security contracts. By 2003 it was 3,512. Now there are 33,890."

    Think about that. They are there to divide a terrorism/security pie that has, since 2000, resulted in about $130 billion in contracts and now, according to USA Today, is a $59 billion a year business globally – one based on that surefire best-seller, fear, whose single major customer is, of course, the DHS.

    Not surprisingly, around those 33,000 companies has sprung up a whole network of Washington-based lobbyists (including the lobbying firm of John Ashcroft, the previous attorney general, the Ashcroft Group), a plethora of security conferences and trade magazines; in short, the full panoply of a thriving business world. Already at least 90 officials have left the Homeland Security Department to become lobbyists or consultants in the business that surrounds it, including Tom Ridge, the first head of the department. After only five years, the homeland-security business, according to USA Today, has already eclipsed "mature enterprises like movie-making and the music industry in annual revenue".

    These are truly facts on the ground, and no discussion in Washington of homeland security is likely to shake them much. An industry tracker, Homeland Security Research, points the way to one possible future on which Americans are never likely to vote. "A major attack in the United States, Europe or Japan could increase the global market in 2015 to $730 billion, more than a twelvefold increase."

    Or consider the Pentagon’s Northcom – United States Northern Command, now responsible for "the continental United States, Alaska, Canada, Mexico and the surrounding water out to approximately 500 nautical miles", including the Gulf of Mexico and the Straits of Florida. Before October 1, 2002, there was no Northern Command. Less than four short years later, it’s not only up and running but has multiple missions. It’s preparing for the next hurricane (since we already know the Federal Emergency Management Agency can’t do the job), deploying forces to battle wildfires in the west, and getting ready for an avian-flu pandemic. And don’t think for a moment that where an institution springs up (especially one with a budget like the Pentagon’s behind it), a world of on-the-ground realities doesn’t arise as well. Just as it will when, in the near future, the Pentagon redivides its imperial domains by creating a new Africacom (United States Africa Command), supposedly to "anchor US forces on the African continent" – a decision that will be sold around town based on "terrorism security threats", but will in essence be about energy flows and oil (see America’s Africa Corps, September 21). Each new structure like this, each decision, will result in new facts on the ground, new flows of money, and new sets of private contractors.

    These are increasingly the crucial realities of our world – and it’s not the world of a republic. It’s not a world of checks and balances. It’s not a world where even a change of ownership in one or both houses of the US Congress in November would prove a determining factor. It’s not a world where people out there are just "starting to question whether we’re following our own high standards". It’s distinctly not the world as we Americans like to imagine it, but it is the world we are, regrettably enough, lost in. It’s the world created not just by a commander-in-chief presidency, but by a Pentagon-in-chief-dominated government, and by a corporation-in-chief style of imperial rule.

    It is a world striving for permanence, which doesn’t faintly mean that it’s permanent – not in Iraq and not here. But it might be helpful if we began to register more fully not just the latest flurry of whatever passes for news, but the facts-on-the-ground that are, every minute, every hour, every day, transforming our lives and our planet.

    Tom Engelhardt is editor of Tomdispatch and the author of The End of Victory Culture. His novel, The Last Days of Publishing, has recently come out in paperback.

  • The Torturer-in-Chief

    According to Bush, the problem is that Common Article 3, which prohibits "cruel," "humiliating" and "degrading treatment" and "outrages upon personal dignity," is vague. He claims it doesn’t give "clear" guidance about what is permitted and what is prohibited during interrogations.

    That’s not what Bush is actually worried about, though. His real problem is precisely the opposite ­ Common Article 3 and the War Crimes Act aren’t nearly vague enough. If called on to determine whether several of the administration’s "alternative" techniques violate Common Article 3 ­ and thus the War Crimes Act ­ virtually any court in the land would agree that they do.

    Our Constitution prohibits "cruel and unusual punishment." That’s vague too, but our courts have always managed to define it. As the Supreme Court put it in the 2002 case Hope vs. Pelzer, the argument that a standard is vague and provides insufficient notice of what’s prohibited just doesn’t cut it sometimes. Some practices are just plain "antithetical to human dignity" and characterized by "obvious" and "inherent" cruelty.

    True, one man’s degradation may be another man’s idea of a rousing good time. But unless the administration is claiming that U.S. detainees are grateful for the opportunity to wear dog collars and be dragged around on leashes, "degrading treatment" isn’t a terribly vague concept in practice. And are there people ­ other than psychopaths ­ who honestly can’t figure out whether repeatedly suffocating a prisoner while pouring water over his mouth and nose is cruel or inhuman?

    If in doubt, take any of the "alternative" methods that Bush wants to use on U.S. detainees and imagine someone using those methods on your son or daughter. If the bad guys captured your son and tossed him, naked, into a cell kept at a temperature just slightly higher than an average refrigerator, then repeatedly doused him with ice water to induce hypothermia, would that be OK? What if they shackled him to a wall for days so he couldn’t sit or lie down without hanging his whole body weight on his arms? What if they threatened to rape and kill his wife, or pretended they were burying him alive? What if they did all these things by turns? Would you have any problem deciding that these methods are cruel?

    Behind the antiseptic talk of "alternatives," "dietary modification" and "stress positions" lie methods designed to break human bodies and human minds. Legally and morally, many of the alternative interrogation methods championed by our president are torture, plain and simple. And there is no doubt at all that they’re cruel, inhuman and degrading.

    That’s what the president is so worried about. He knows, too well, that the practices he authorized or ordered violate Common Article 3 of the Geneva Convention. The recent Supreme Court decision in Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld made that explicit, but the court’s holding shouldn’t have come as a surprise. It only confirmed what most legal scholars (and military lawyers) have been telling the White House for years.

    After all, Common Article 3 is not exactly a recent innovation in international law. It’s been around, with the very same language, since 1949, and the U.S. has never seen any problem with it before. We signed and ratified the Geneva Convention in 1949; in fact, American diplomats helped draft the language. And the War Crimes Act was passed overwhelmingly by a Republican-controlled Congress in 1996. There’s nothing unexpected or vague about any of this. We know the article prohibits torture and the "torture lite" favored by the White House.

    Back in 2002, then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales warned Bush that some of his policies raised "the threat of domestic criminal prosecution." But the extremists who have captured the White House ignored half a century of American law and the advice of the nation’s top military brass. Instead, Bush went ahead and authorized practices that even Gonzales predicted might be seen by "future prosecutors" as violations of the War Crimes Act.

    Today, the chickens are coming home to roost. But though the word "accountability" isn’t in the White House dictionary, there’s a long entry under "CYA ­ covering your ass."

    Bush isn’t stupid. He understands that it’s far too late for him to leave a legacy that won’t be a source of shame to future generations. So he’s going for second best: a congressionally delivered "get-out-of-jail-free" card.

  • Iraq is Bush’s Reflection Pond

    :: The address of this page is : www.uruknet.info?p=26892

    Every part of the American occupation has failed. The only project which has succeeded has been the propaganda campaign which continues to frame the conflict as "the central battle in the war on terror". This is a lie. Even high-ranking government officials have admitted that foreign fighters (terrorists) comprise a very small segment of the total resistance. The vast majority have joined the struggle to end the American occupation and restore Iraqi national sovereignty. 70% of the daily attacks in Iraq are on occupation forces. However dismal the fighting between the ethnic and religious groups may seem, it is secondary to the viciousness of the occupation.

    The resistance is growing in strength despite the massive casualties, despite the torture and imprisonment, despite the indiscriminate bombing of civilians and infrastructure, and despite the largest counter-insurgency operation in American history. A confidential Pentagon assessment has shown that in 2003 Sunni support for the resistance was only 14% of the population. A recent poll now shows that figure has risen to 75%. There is near unanimity among the 5 million Sunnis that killing Americans is justifiable in order to end the occupation.

    A new report confirms that the use of "violence and torture has increased exponentially" since the 2003 invasion. According to political analyst Barak Ibrahim, "The human rights situation has worsened considerably when compared to former President Saddam Hussein."

    "If we go deep into the cause," Ibrahim added, "we will find in the end that the presence of US troops in the country has generated revolt and loss of patience by fighters and only when they leave will we be able to talk about improving security."

    Ibrahim’s comments prove that the United States is a greater purveyor of human rights abuses than Saddam, a fact that is distressingly clear in recent appearances by George Bush who now defends torture at every opportunity. Ibrahim’s remarks are reinforced by Manfred Nowak, United Nation’s chief anti-torture expert, who described the present human rights situation in Iraq as "completely out of hand."

    The western "embedded" media has attempted to shift the blame for the growing incidents of torture and killing onto the Shiite and Sunni militias, but this is misleading. Sectarian violence is the logical consequence of a brutal occupation. America has spawned a culture of cruelty and impunity which has corrupted every part of Iraqi society. The AOF intentionally fuels the ethnic animosities as a means of achieving its overall political objectives, which are the division of Iraq into smaller more-manageable regions, and crushing all indigenous resistance groups through the application of extreme violence.

    The media is wrong. The problem is not sectarian fighting or civil war. The problem is the American occupation.

    American forces are now enclosing Baghdad within a 60-mile long mound of dirt that will be ringed with concertina wire and watch-towers. Every citizen will be forced to produce biometric identification and undergo retinal scans to enter or leave the city.

    Is this democracy or tyranny?

    What will it take before we leave these people alone and stop the suffering?

    Enough is enough.

    Are we afraid that perhaps one military-aged male between 15 and 65 slipped away and wasn’t sufficiently kicked or clubbed or dressed in women’s underwear for the amusement of his foreign jailors?

    Are we worried that perhaps one Iraqi family is still intact and hasn’t lost a member or two to the roaming death squads, the trigger-happy mercenaries or the myriad bombing raids?

    Are we concerned that one blameless victim eluded the hooding, the electrodes, and the Belgian Sheppard’s snapping at his testicles?

    When will this ghoulish parody of liberation come to an end?

    Iraq has descended into utter chaos. Its people are forced endure unspeakable misery every day. The battered and disfigured bodies, which appear on the streets or are plucked from the rivers, all bear the fingerprints of their American executioner. The Baghdad morgue, with its corpses stacked three-high, is little more than a reflection-pond for the assassins in Washington.