Antiwar.com Blog

This is a mini blog tour because I had a crazy day!

How about that Iraqi soccer team?

How bad IS the missile defense system the Bushies are insisting on deploying pre-election? Noah Schachtman at Defense Tech posts that the former Pentagon testing chief Phillip Coyle says it is about this bad. More.

Mark Elf posts that Israel Shamir has been outed as a Swedish neo-Nazi.

Everyone’s talking about those lying Swift Boat Vets. The best treatment of the SBVT (Notice how that acronym spells subvert?) controversy is by Arthur Silber, of course.

Salam Pax is back and is posting on a new blog. He called the new blog shut up you fat whiner!, probably so people wouldn’t doubt it was really him. He was in Najaf today. Meanwhile, the mathematically challenged Raed Jarrar is still AWOL.

The San Francisco Chronicle ran a very nice obituary of Mike Mayakis, longtime libertarian and antiwar activist, and my best friend. Following is the article:

Mike Mayakis – Libertarian activist and agile debater

by Charlie Goodyear, Chronicle Staff Writer
August 19, 2004

Mike Mayakis, a prominent Libertarian whose surprising political positions made him a formidable debater, has died. He was 53.

Mr. Mayakis died at his home in San Francisco on Sunday after a long struggle with leukemia.

A native of Los Angeles, he moved to San Francisco in 1971 and worked for more than a decade at the Haight Ashbury Switchboard as a counselor and trainer for the service that provided information, assistance and counseling to the city’s growing counterculture.

Mr. Mayakis was elected to the switchboard’s Board of Trustees in 1973 and became its president in 1980.

During the 1970s, he worked as an aide to liberal Republican state Sen. Milton Marks of San Francisco and eventually became active in Libertarian politics, founding a chapter of Students for a Libertarian Society at San Francisco State University.

In 1982, Mr. Mayakis was the Libertarian Party’s candidate for state Senate. He was elected chair of the San Francisco Libertarian Party and held that position three times during the 1980s.

He became well known for defying assumptions in political debates. He argued frequently for the rights of smokers when he himself was an asthmatic.

In 1988, he worked for the Libertarian Republican Organizing Committee at the Republic Convention in New Orleans. But he was never a Republican, and in 1995 helped found the popular Web site Antiwar.com.

His failing health took its toll on his political activism. But Mr. Mayakis turned his frustrating experiences with the medical system into a guide called "Express Hospital Emergency Room Admission & Survival Kit" to help other patients.

He is survived by his wife, Betty Honeycutt; siblings Matthew Mayakis, Martha Mayakis and Sara Tisher, all of Los Angeles; and stepfather Lloyd Daic, also of Los Angeles.

A memorial service is being planned. For details, phone (650) 838-0381.

Chapter 7 meticulously chronicles the arrival and actions of the nineteen hijackers. Little interesting information is found in the chapter. However, one is surprised by the remarkable ease at which many of the men moved around and in and out of the United States. Also, beyond stopping each at the border, it seems little could have been done once the men were inside the U.S. Their lives consisted of time at the mosque, the gym and flight training, setting off few alarms at the FBI or CIA.

The government has attempted to adjust its law enforcement capabilities to these simple methods of assimilating and moving about the country [read: PATRIOT Act]. However, this chapter’s narrative suggests that new methods of hiding and concealing identities will adapt to anything the government implements. This scenario suggests more should be done on the policy front; i.e. altering those policies that anger individuals enough to lead them to commit suicide in response.

Chapter 8 is best summed up by its conclusion:

“We see little evidence that the progress of the plot was disturbed by any government action. The U.S. government was unable to capitalize on mistakes made by al Qaeda.Time ran out.” (page 294)

Entitled “The System Was Blinking Red,” the chapter details a plethora of missed opportunities. Simply, various government bureaucracies failed to connect the dots. This problem stemmed from a few issues. One was a problem of information sharing. The report describes a meeting between CIA and FBI who were separately investigating the attack on the USS Cole. Each attendee held information, that if put together, would have suggested al Qaeda was planning something in the US. However, due to technical issues between bureaucracies, the information was never shared:

“It is now clear that everyone involved was confused about the rules governing the sharing and use of information gathered in intelligence channels.”(page 288)

Upon investigation, each member of this meeting told the commission that if they had seen the others’ info, action would have been taken.

The government also struggled with the new and unseen threat of domestic terrorism:

The September 11 attacks fell into the void between the foreign and domestic threats. The foreign intelligence agencies were watching overseas, alert to foreign threats to U.S. interests there.The domestic agencies were waiting for evidence of a domestic threat from sleeper cells within the United States. (page 290)

Despite the above setbacks, DCI Tenet still claimed that the “system was blinking red.” Here’s a quick overview of some of the warnings the administration received in 2001:

“In the spring of 2001, the level of reporting on terrorist threats and planned attacks increased dramatically to its highest level since the millennium alert.” (page 272)

“On May 17, based on the previous day’s report, the first item on the CSG’s agenda was ‘UBL: Operation Planned in U.S'”(page 273)

“One al Qaeda intelligence report warned that something ‘very, very, very, very’ big was about to happen, and most of Bin Ladin’s network was reportedly anticipating the attack.” (page 274)

“On June 30, the SEIB contained an article titled ‘Bin Ladin Threats Are Real.’ Yet Hadley told Tenet in July that Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz questioned the reporting.”(page 276)

“To give a sense of his anxiety at the time, one senior official in the Counterterrorist Center told us that he and a colleague were considering resigning in order to go public with their concerns.” (page 276)

Unfortunately, no one in the government was “looking for foreign threats to domestic targets” and “time ran out.” (page 280)

OK, too much is happening, so I’m doing an Iraqi mayhem post.

Moqtada al Sadr’s militants have torched the headquarters of Iraq’s South Oil Company on Thursday and set the company’s warehouses and offices on fire.

Rebels mortared the American “embassy” in Baghdad, wounding two Americans and damaging the roof. Negroponte was elsewhere.

Grand Ayatollah Ali al Sistani is still in London. Since nothing important was happening in Iraq, he had eye surgery on Monday. Interestingly, all four of Iraq’s Grand Ayatollah’s have business outside of Iraq.

Sources in Najaf state that all four clerics of the Maraji are out of Iraq.

Ayat Najafi has left for Iran.
Ayat Hakim has left for Germany.
Ayat Sistani is in London.
Ayat Fayadh has left Najef, his whereabouts and destination are uclear. Fayadh was born in Pakistan.

Thanks grrpy and Angry Arab.

UPDATE: The US military is using AC-130 gunships on the Old City of Najaf.

UPDATE: US warplanes bomb Fallujah. Again.

Iraqi Olympic soccer player, Ahmed Manajid, angered by George Bush using the team in a (fatuous – read the article to see how stupid it is) campaign commercial said:

“How will he meet his god having slaughtered so many men and women?” Manajid told me. “He has committed so many crimes.”

The Bush campaign was contacted about the Iraqi soccer player’s statements, but has yet to respond.

To a man, members of the Iraqi Olympic delegation say they are glad that former Olympic committee head Uday Hussein, who was responsible for the serial torture of Iraqi athletes and was killed four months after the U.S.-led coalition invaded Iraq in March 2003, is no longer in power.

But they also find it offensive that Bush is using their team for his own gain when they do not support his administration’s actions in Iraq. “My problems are not with the American people,” says Iraqi soccer coach Adnan Hamad. “They are with what America has done in Iraq: destroy everything. The American army has killed so many people in Iraq. What is freedom when I go to the [national] stadium and there are shootings on the road?”

At a speech in Beaverton, Ore., last Friday, Bush attached himself to the Iraqi soccer team after its opening-game upset of Portugal. “The image of the Iraqi soccer team playing in this Olympics, it’s fantastic, isn’t it?” Bush said. “It wouldn’t have been free if the United States had not acted.”

Sadir, Wednesday’s goal-scorer, used to be the star player for the professional soccer team in Najaf. In the city in which 20,000 fans used to fill the stadium and chant Sadir’s name, U.S. and Iraqi forces have battled loyalists to rebel cleric Moktada al-Sadr for the past two weeks. Najaf lies in ruins.

“I want the violence and the war to go away from the city,” says Sadir, 21. “We don’t wish for the presence of Americans in our country. We want them to go away.”

Manajid, 22, who nearly scored his own goal with a driven header on Wednesday, hails from the city of Fallujah. He says coalition forces killed Manajid’s cousin, Omar Jabbar al-Aziz, who was fighting as an insurgent, and several of his friends. In fact, Manajid says, if he were not playing soccer he would “for sure” be fighting as part of the resistance.

“I want to defend my home. If a stranger invades America and the people resist, does that mean they are terrorists?” Manajid says. “Everyone [in Fallujah] has been labeled a terrorist. These are all lies. Fallujah people are some of the best people in Iraq.”

The truth hurts, doesn’t it, Shrubbie? Funny how people can hate you just because you kill their cousins and friends.

Blustery threats are issuing from the Puppets who claim “Iraqi forces” are going to storm the Imam Ali shrine “within hours” and teach the Mahdi Army and Moqtada al Sadr a lesson.

To prevent an imminent attack on his forces, who are holed up in the revered Imam Ali Shrine in Najaf, al-Sadr must immediately disarm his Mahdi Army militia and hand over its weapons to the authorities, Minister of State Qassim Dawoud said.

The cleric must also sign a statement saying he will refrain from future violence and release all civilians and Iraqi security forces his militants have kidnapped. In addition, al-Sadr must hold a news conference to announce he is disbanding the Mahdi Army.

“The military action has become imminent,” Dawoud told reporters. “If these conditions are not met, then the military solution will prevail.”

After hearing Dawoud’s threat, Sheik Abdul Hadi al-Daraji, a spokesman for al-Sadr in Baghdad, called for talks to quickly “stop the bloodbaths in the holy city of Najaf.”

“What we want is for the parties to sit down and cooperate. To ask a side, or the Sadrist movement, to disarm, I think is not logical and not right. They should rather sit around a negotiating table and determine what’s right and wrong,” he told Al-Arabiya television.

In the chaos that is Najaf, it is difficult to separate truth from bluster and confusion, so lets look at a few of the claims making the rounds this morning.

I’m no military strategist, but inside the Imam Ali Shrine compound are at least 2,000 Iraqis who are acting as human shields, probably more. The 2,000 figure was reported last weekend as Shi`a and Sunni muslims from all over Iraq began arriving in Najaf after Friday sermons. Al Sadr’s forces are supposed to number about 2,000, or they were last I saw a count. Allegedly, American tanks have Sadr’s forces “trapped” in the shrine complex. If that were true, who did this?

A mortar attack on a police station in the Iraqi city of Najaf has killed seven people and wounded 21 others, police said.

Police told reporters three mortar bombs hit the station in quick succession, although they added it was not near the city’s holy sites where a radical Shiite Muslim cleric and his militia are engaged in a two-week battle with US forces.

It was unclear how many of the victims were police from the mortar attack.

Not near the holy sites. How “trapped” are Sadr’s men if they can mortar the police station and kill at least seven police?

Go here and look at this Imam Ali mosque complex. How many troops would it take to “storm” this enormous shrine which encloses at least 4,000 people happily waiting to die as martyrs? True, they are not heavily armed and armored, but they have AK47s, RPGs, the advantage of an urban battlefield which is also a holy site, damaging which will have to give attacking Muslim troops at least a little hesitation.

Who will die for Allawi and the occupiers as their Muslim Storm Troopers? Who are the “Iraqi troops” fighting alongside the Americans? Clearly, they are the only organized Iraqi militia still allied with the Americans – the Kurdish peshmerga. If the peshmerga attack the shrine of Ali for the Americans, it may well be a fatal blow for Arab-Kurd relations, already strained by the Kurdish participation in the siege of Fallujah. If the attack incites a violent Shia reaction, the Kurds may well end up paying the price for the folly of collaborating with the hated occupation. It is difficult to imagine how the Americans and Allawi’s thugs might be persuading the peshmerga to do their bidding, but if they succeed in using them for this attack all of the Kurdish eggs will be in the Occupation’s basket, and considering the tradition of American sellouts of the Kurds that is not a good place to store anything valuable or fragile.

Be that as it may and for whatever reasons, both sides appear to have created positions that make a violent conflict inevitable. In 1991, the last violent takeover over of the Imam Ali Shrine occurred when Saddam Hussein put down the last of the Shi`a revolt encouraged by George I by slaughtering thousands of Shi`a inside the mosque, even allegedly using poison gas. Will George II follow Saddam down this historic path?