Tag: diplomacy

BBCNews reports:

The US has admitted for the first time that it has not given the Red Cross access to all detainees in its custody.

The state department’s top legal adviser, John Bellinger, made the admission but gave no details about where such prisoners were held.

Correspondents say the revelation is likely to increase suspicion that the CIA has been operating secret prisons outside international oversight.

Video report at streaming at the BBC

In past visits to detainees in Iraq the Red Cross confirmed treatment “tantamount to torture,” and authorities were pressed to admit that 70 to 90 percent of Iraqi detainees had been arrested by mistake.

read: Sidney Blumenthal’s “Condi’s Trail of Lies” Salon column (free Spiegel online mirror)

Ginger Cruz, Deputy Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, a US government office and Isam al-Khafaji, former reconstruction advisor to the Coalition Provision Authority and former director of Iraq Revenue Watch lined up on opposite sides on KCRW’s “To the Point” with Warren Olney (.mp3 download/podcast) (web site).

But in the end, both agreed on the most major issue. As Cruz, described, people don’t understand how in 1991, under Saddam Hussein’s regime, electricity was restored within a year of U.S. air raids, but NOW, under the occupation of the mighty U.S., three years have passed and utilities are occasionally functional at best.

Riverbend, whose postwar blog entries were recently released in the book Baghdad Burning, posted this in her blog last week:

The electricity schedule in what appears to be most areas in Baghdad is currently FIVE hours of no electricity for every one hour of electricity. It?s very frustrating considering the fact that it?s not really cool enough yet for excess electrical heater use- where is it all going? If the electrical situation is this bad now, what happens later when the populace starts needing more electricity?

Approximately 1/6 of the (taxpayers’) funds going to Iraq reconstruction is lost in the shuffle, due to corruption within the CPA and the corrupt middlemen and brokers. Many are already predicting it will completely eclipse and overshadow the UN oil-for-food scandal in terms of both finances and degree of fraudulence.

And it extends beyond Robert J. Stein, Phillip H. Bloom and their cartel. The Boston Globe highlighted last week that “11 investigators in Iraq [are] looking into more than 50?cases of graft involving civilians and the US military.”

Initially the grand plan was for a GLOBAL war on terror; but right now a good portion of our money is vanishing into thin air, while another chunk is inevitably being siphoned into anti-Democracy and anti-American hands, whether you call them sadaamists, insurgents, islamofascists, or pinko commies. There can be no democracy, at least as America envisions it, when corruption, theft, and the influx of foreign funds distracts from the top down. They don’t even have electricity yet.

“Iraqis are ‘seeing tangible progress in their lives,'” President Bush said in an address to the Council on Foreign Relations today.

Only days ago, prior to surviving an apparent mob attack, Former Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi defiantly told the UK’s Observer: “They are doing the same things we saw in the Saddam days and even worse,” referring to the new Iraqi government.

Al Jazeera’s (apparently accidental) broadcast of an old videotape today, starring al Qaeda henchman Ayman al-Zawahri, serves as a harsh reminder that the U.S. mission to “liberate” Iraq has misplaced the power in the region — to the enemy.

The Geneva Conventions offer protection for those who have “fallen into the hands of the enemy.”

Al Qaeda, being a stateless, invisible enemy, has less to do with the Geneva Conventions than even the U.S., although, the organization at least appears to have the courtesy to remind us — albeit with prerecorded propaganda — just who is winning this war, before recklessly attacking.

You could say that they are inviting us to fight them on their home turf, so they don’t have to bother attacking on our soil. (and that’s OUR strategy).

“I call on the holy warriors to concentrate their campaigns on the stolen oil of the Muslims, most of the revenues of which go to the enemies of Islam,” Zawahri said, adding, “…Sheik Osama bin Laden, is still, God protect him, leading the holy war.”

It seems even President Bush has already resolved to losing this war to the phantom-like al Qaeda. “[V]ictory will be achieved when the terrorists and Saddamists can no longer threaten Iraq’s democracy,” proclaimed the president today.

Ugly as it sounds, the U.S. has become so vulnerable to aspire only to share a “victory” with the untouchable Islamic fundamentalists, who terrorize us without even showing face.