Last week, Lineatus asked me to write a guest Dawn Chorus diary on location in Iraq. I wrote the following last weekend in Suleymaniya, a city in the Kurdistan region, and am posting it this morning:
I’ll give you an update on what’s flying around in my part of the world, but first permit me to share a couple websites, and allow me a short digression on ravens.
Just a short diary about some new developments in an interesting story. As was mentioned last week in the NYT, the National Republican Congressional Committee called in the FBI to investigate financial "irregularities" at the NRCC, possibly including fraud. Now the RNCC has called in a forensic auditor. Ouch. Hard to tap donors when your accountant has his hand in the till.
Politico reports that the forged audits might go back before 2006, and that the NRCC is worried about perception of donors. http://www.politico.com/...
I'll make this a very brief diary and add some caveats right at the beginning. First, I hope this diary doesn't turn into an opportunity for more fighting in the primary wars, because all three Democratic candidates - Obama, Clinton and Edwards - would close Guantanamo, substantially reverse the shameful legacy of torture, restore habeas corpus, bring the United States back into compliance with the Convention Against Torture and the Geneva Conventions, and draw back the curtain on the networks of secret CIA prisons.
Wow. Fourty years ago today, George W. Bush first found his name in print in the New York Times. At the time, Bush was a senior at Yale and former president of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity. Did the NYT report on Bush's academic excellence, future promise, or civic spirit? Uh, not exactly. Follow me below the break to find out more.
The Senate just voted on the DREAM Act. The vote was on a procedural motion, so 60 votes were needed to proceed to vote on the DREAM Act itself. It was not really all that close. 54 voted in favor, 44 against. The Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act, as you may recall, would provide a path to citizenship for immigrant students with the grades and ability to go to college and those who serve two years in the United States military. The bill was initially conceived as a way to help young immigrants who grew up in the United States and play by the rules, and not penalize them for their parents' undocumented status. All major Democratic presidential candidates support the act.
OK, this will be a short diary. There are several diaries up right now about the Turkish invasion of Iraqi Kurdistan, so I feel compelled to post some quick information because we actually work there, and I just communicated with our staff. The situation is not as bad as people describe.
Bush Administration incompetence doomed New Orleans. We created this mess by building levies on the Mississippi, destroying the wetlands, cutting canals through the delta, and overbuilding on one of the most vulnerable coasts in the world. We had no plan, we failed to learn from our early mistakes, and we didn’t have enough boots on the ground when it counted. Events that have been building for decades finally caught up with us, and the dynamic of destruction is irreversible. In the short run it will be painful, but the people of New Orleans will need to find their own solutions, and the sooner we pull out, the better.
This diary won’t be up to my usual standards, but there’s something so grossly offensive about reading the words "White House" and "light touch" in the same sentence, that I feel compelled to comment.
So Laura Bush selected William Yosses as the new White House pastry chef:
"He has a light touch with desserts, and the enthusiasm with which he approaches his profession makes him a real asset for all of us in the White House," [Laura Bush] said.
An Iraqi appeals court upheld Saddam’s death sentence, and the AP reports that he has been handed over to the Iraqi government for execution within the next 24 hours. The inexorable slide toward execution for Saddam Hussein, and irrelevance and disgrace for George Bush, proceeds apace. Saddam’s guilty verdict and certain execution will neither result in vindication for Bush’s policies nor "open the doors of hell" in Iraq, as Saddam’s defense attorneys claim. The bombing of Samarra’s golden shrine blew those doors off their hinges nearly a year ago, and Bush’s ability to impact events evaporates more each day.
This is the latest in a series of periodic diaries from Iraq. I haven’t written one for a few months, but this last week has been unusually depressing and frightening and the week’s events deserve comment. As the week started, I was in Amman, Jordan for a conference on civil society in Iraq. Civil society in Iraq sounds like an oxymoron, but an extraordinary variety of local non-governmental organizations (NGOs) operate in the country, working on everything from women’s rights, to local governance, to anticorruption efforts. In the center and south, many of these local NGOs are the last organized venue for an endangered point of view – a willingness to talk across political and ethnic divides and the desire for rule of law. More Iraqis than you might think oppose both the militias and the insurgents, and many of them take considerable risks for their beliefs. This diary is about the worsening political situation, but it is also about some Iraqis who have been "standing up" as the Americans stand down, to use that silly phrase politicians seem to like so much.
Let me preface this diary by saying the recent Johns Hopkins study on mortality in Iraq may well be accurate, and that I'm not debating the larger questions of US complicity in the war or culpability in Iraqi deaths. I agree with the basic rationale for the study, which is that mortality rates based on morgue information and public news sources underreport violent deaths. However, I was a little shocked by the findings of this report. If the report is true, the death rate from this current war is equal in scale to the Iran-Iraq war, which lasted a couple years longer, but cost an estimated one million lives.
I'm fortunate to have the opportunity to work in Iraq, and occasionally post diaries on Daily Kos. These diaries are an effort to provide more context to the current conflict, from a little closer and in a quieter tone of voice. The media primarily concentrates on Baghdad, and Iraq's peripheral regions do not get much attention. This journal entry covers two taxi rides, one with a taciturn driver across SE Turkey, and the other with a talkative driver across Iraqi Kurdistan.
Imagine for a moment what the Republican Party would do to Sherrod Brown if:
(1) His father in law was an indicted war criminal;
(2) His wife was the political advisor to an indicted war criminal; and,
(3) He met with both to determine US policy on CAFTA
Jerry Weller (R, IL-11), like Sherrod Brown, serves on the US House Committee for International Relations. His father-in-law, Gen. Efriam Rios Montt was just indicted in Spain for his part in war crimes, including torture and extrajudicial executions, during the Guatemalan civil war. Now a US organization has joined in this legal battle. This should be a major issue in the upcoming election in Illinois' 11th Congressional District, where Weller faces challenger John Pavich. More below the fold.
OK, can we find two more unpopular senators here on Daily Kos than Joe Lieberman and Sam Brownback?
Is redemption possible, even for just a little while, and even on one issue?
Contrary to their horrible records on so many other issues, Brownback and Lieberman have actually stood up against the Department of Homeland Security and the evil bloated mollusc from Wisconsin, James Sensenbrenner, author of HR4437. The issue at stake is political asylum. The United States has always recognized and supported the right to seek protection from political persecution, and has welcomed dissidents from around the world since Colonial days. Einstein, Niels Bohr, Mozart's librettist, the Pilgrims, Madeline Albright, the list goes on and on. All came as refugees or asylees.
This diary is as much about rule of law as it is about immigration. The Bush Administration and their allies in Congress have taken it upon themselves to remove judicial oversight abroad in Guantanamo and in the gulag of secret prisons our nation has established in eastern Europe, Iraq and Afghanistan. While we were sleeping, they have started to do the same thing right here at home. The Department of Homeland Security detains more than 200,000 persons per year. Nobody knows exactly how many people are being detained, where, or under what conditions. And now, Congress is stripping federal circuit court oversight from the detention system right here in the U.S.
A few days ago I wrote about the borderlands between Kurdistan and the rest of Iraq. Today I'd like to write about Iraq's Shia' majority. Shia' politics is the politics of raw emotion: despair, fear, anger and hope. An friend of mine has a video stored on his cell phone of Mohammed Bakir al-Hakim, who was an important Shia' political leader until a car bomb went off and blasted him into vapor. Let's turn on my friend's phone and have a closer look at the holy cities and the urban slums of Shia' Iraq:
Let me write about an Iraq that exists as more than a reflection of our anger and outrage at the Bush Administration; an Iraq that existed before the invasion, and will continue after the last US troops leave. I'll slip in some comments on where the US has gone wrong - no surprise there - but I'll also present a perspective on Iraq that is perhaps not as unrelentingly pessimistic as most diaries here on DailyKos. I read a front-page diary about how an Israeli military official had told settlers on the West Bank that the US should have left Saddam in power. The diary frustrated me, but the internet connection was too slow to respond. Who cares what an Israeli army officer has to say about Iraq, especially to a bunch of illegal settlers on Palestinian land? If this is what passes for expert opinion in our Daily Kos community, then surely there is room for more comments from Americans in Iraq. I'm a donkey in the desert, and donkeys are better adapted to conditions here than elephants. It's time I started writing diaries.
Alito's position on reproductive rights is the BIG issue that will energize both the Democratic and Wingnut base. But how does he stand on other human rights issues? Republicans like Alito are known for their zeal in protecting the unborn, but how do they feel about protecting fully conscious human beings? Maybe someone else can comment on what we can expect from Alito in terms of capital punishment. Another lens with which to examine Alito's respect for human life is by examining his rulings on immigration. In the world of immigration law, asylum cases are often the equivalent of death penalty cases. I googled a few asylum decisions to see how he ruled. The results are interesting.
