Increased distrust and violence in Iraq

Compiled by Patrick Byrne

Oct. 27 (AGR) -- Gathering at the Umm al Qura mosque outside Baghdad on Wed., Oct. 20, the Muslim Scholars Association, Iraq’s largest group of Sunni Muslim clerics, ruled that Iraqis have a religious duty to fight US-led forces. They ordered their followers to boycott January’s parliamentary elections if American forces don’t break off their military campaign in Fallujah, the city surrounded by 1,400 marines and besieged by daily aerial bombardment.

The US army has stepped up its violence in Fallujah by about 25 percent since the beginning of Ramadan on Oct. 22. US warplanes hit the main road leading out of north Fallujah Sun., Oct. 24, killing six civilians and wounding seven. US attacks also killed a family of six within the city. Fallujah leaders on Oct. 21 had called on the Iraqi government to pursue a peaceful solution to the military standoff around the city and order a halt to frequent airstrikes. But Al-Arabiya television reported that the Iraqi government had rejected the demands.

The Oct. 11 LA Times reported anonymous Pentagon officials saying the Bush administration will not try to retake cities such as Fallujah and Ramadi until after what is likely to be a close election. Instead, they said the US military will continue its daily air strikes on the city.

Forty-nine members of the Iraqi National Guard who had just finished three weeks of training at the Kir Kush military base were ambushed on Sat. Oct. 23 at a bogus checkpoint northeast of Baghdad. The unarmed ING soldiers were ordered from their buses by men in police uniforms, told to lie face down on the ground in rows, and then shot in the back of the head. The militant group led by Jordanian extremist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi claimed responsibility.

On Sat. Oct. 23 two suicide car bombings and a drive-by shooting killed at least 22 people in separate incidents. A suicide attack in western Iraq killed 10 Iraqi police and wounded 30 others. Another car bomb targeted a police station, where dozens of Iraqis were lined up to surrender their weapons and/or join the police force. At least eight Iraqis, mostly women and children, were killed in a double car bombing in Samarra on Oct. 20. Attackers reportedly exploded the bombs in the path of a US army convoy near a nursery school. Eleven soldiers were wounded in the blasts. Gunmen attacked a bus carrying Iraqi employees to the US base at Baghdad’s international airport, and six US soldiers were wounded in an ambush on the road to the airport -- one of the country’s most dangerous routes.

At least 16 Iraqi policemen were killed and 40 others were wounded when a suicide driver detonated his car at a police station near a US Marine base in Khan al-Baghdadi. A car bomb targeting a US military convoy exploded near the Australian embassy in central Baghdad killing three Iraqi civilians. Four Iraqi National Guardsmen were killed and 80 injured after a mortar attack on a base near Taji, north of Baghdad. Near the northern city of Mosul, insurgents killed two Turkish truck drivers and wounded two others in an attack on a convoy. Saboteurs on Oct. 24 blew up a 500 foot section of the Khana oil pipeline north-east of Baghdad and another oil pipeline in the Mashahdeh area, both of which are still on fire.

Hundreds of Iraqis and more than 150 foreigners, mostly civilian workers and contractors, have been kidnapped since last year. Among the most shocking of the kidnappings was that of Margaret Hassan, a CARE aid worker with joint British, Irish and Iraqi citizenship who has spent over 30 years delivering food and medicine in Iraq. Hassan, who is married to an Iraqi, was seized Oct. 20 in western Baghdad as she rode to work. Commanders of five rebel groups in Fallujah have said that they were not holding Hassan and see no evidence that members of al- Zarqawi network had kidnapped her.

On Oct. 22, Hassan appeared in a wrenching televised statement begging for her life and urging British Prime Minister Tony Blair to withdraw his country’s troops from Iraq. The statement puts new political pressure on Blair’s government shortly after it agreed to a US request to transfer 850 British troops of the First Battalion, Black Watch Regiment from southern Iraq to an area near Baghdad so US troops could be shifted to insurgent hotspots. The Pentagon’s request for Britain to move troops to more dangerous areas closer to Baghdad underlines how over-extended US forces are. The decision has been highly controversial within the British parliament who saw it as a political move to aid President Bush ahead of November elections. Military experts warned Iraqi insurgents are likely to target British troops if they redeploy. “They will see this as a weakness they can attack,” said Colonel Christopher Langton. “It is like saying, ‘Stick the chisel in here.’”

At Karmah military barracks near Fallujah, where US marines and Iraqi national guardsmen live together, the marines are convinced that many, perhaps most, of the 140 members of the Iraqi National Guard they share the camp with are working on behalf of the insurgents. Under the Combined Action Platoon scheme, first developed in Vietnam, US soldiers train Iraqi guardsmen, live with them in the same barracks and venture out on joint patrols, all steps towards the eventual withdrawal of US troops. However, US troops work with their poorly equipped Iraqi colleagues in an atmosphere of increasing distrust. Marines suspect the ING of involvement with attacks against the patrols. “We know when this place is about to come under mortar attack because the ING suddenly disappear,” one Marine said. In the past week alone the Marines have arrested five of the guardsmen, including their commanding officer, Capt. Ali Mohammed Jasim. Since the arrest ING are refusing to turn up at work, between 2 and 60 turning up on any given day. ING members accuse the marines of arrogance, bullying and a cavalier disregard for civilian life, alleging that the Marines publicly humiliate and physically assault them for minor misdemeanors. Guardsmen arrested on suspicion of involvement with the insurgency have been held in tiny “coolers” for weeks and tortured during interrogations.

In a recently-discovered confidential memo from March 19, 2004, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, at the request of the CIA, gave the agency authorization to transfer Iraqi detainees out of the country, in violation of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. A violation of this provision constitutes a war crime under international law. The CIA have transported dozens of prisoners out of Iraq in the past few months, concealing others from International Red Cross and UN authorities.

On Oct. 21, Sgt Ivan Frederick, a US army reservist, pleaded guilty to five charges of abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib jail, receiving an eight-year prison sentence. Witnesses in the trial told the court that the CIA often directed abuse, and that orders were received from higher up the chain of command to “toughen interrogations.” Also this week, interim Iraqi chief investigating magistrate Zuhair al-Maliky was removed from office after repeated clashes with state security agencies over arbitrary arrests and other suspected abuses, fueling concerns that the US-backed government is adopting strong-arm tactics reminiscent of the Hussein regime.

Sources: AP, BBC, Independent(UK), London Telegraph, Reuters, Washington Post

US election system flawed, say international monitors

Compiled by Willy Rosencrans

Oct. 27 (AGR) — A team of international observers who are monitoring the Nov. 2 elections is calling for major reforms in the US electoral process.

The team, which was invited by Global Exchange, a human rights group based in San Francisco, compiled a report based on visits with polling officials and independent experts in Washington DC, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Missouri, and Ohio over the past month. Another delegation of monitors, from the Organization for Security Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), was invited by the State Department in August.

The Global Exchange group’s report calls for a “paper trail” for much-criticized touch-screen voting systems, which are being introduced in a number of states across the country.

The group also advocated the universal use of provisional ballots for voters who might otherwise be disqualified for technicalities, such as showing up at the wrong voting site.

This was a particular concern in Ohio and Florida. A recent directive from Ohio’s secretary of state discouraged poll workers from providing provisional ballots to voters who go to the wrong voting precinct. Florida has rejected provisional ballots from eligible voters for the same reason.

The delegation strongly criticized the lack of impartial bodies, rather than political party representatives, to administer, oversee, and certify the elections.

The group also called for the enfranchisement of former felons who have served their time in prison and denounced “felon purge” laws of the kind that improperly disenfranchised tens of thousands of Floridians in the 2000 election and still exist in Florida, Virginia, Nebraska, Mississippi, Kentucky, Iowa, Arizona, and Alabama.

“This practice falls outside of international or even US norms and is an unreasonable restriction that creates subcategories of citizenship,” the group said.

Florida redux: improper “felon purges,” plus e-voting worries

In 2000, the Supreme Court halted a recount after 36 days and handed a 537-vote victory to Bush. With polls showing nearly equal numbers of Florida voters for President Bush and Sen. John Kerry, the upcoming election’s outcome may again hinge on a Florida recount. If this proves to be another ultra-close vote, many critics of electronic balloting say they’ll take to the streets.

Fifteen counties — home to just over half the registered voters in the crucial swing state —use paperless voting systems.

Black voters in the state are among the most distrustful of e-voting. They have experienced a disproportionate number of problems in elections — from felon purges that included non-convicts to early voting polling stations set up miles away from the nearest black neighborhood.

Florida law requires a manual recount in any race with a victory margin of one-quarter of one percent or less. In April, Secretary of State Glenda Hood, Florida’s top elections official, issued an order prohibiting manual recounts on touch screens. The rule was struck down after the ACLU suit.

New rules require election administrators to tally and print out incomplete ballots to see if they match the number of incomplete ballots the computer said existed when polls closed.

But “If you have a machine with a bug or glitch,” said Avi Rubin, a Johns Hopkins University computer scientist and expert on electronic voting, “printing out the incorrect votes is an exercise in futility and an absolute waste of time.”

And, in an echo of the Florida debacle in 2000, millions of eligible voters may be prevented from casting their ballots on Nov. 2 due to non-existent or flawed procedures used by state election officials to purge felons from voter rolls.

An ACLU report, “Purged! How a patchwork of flawed and inconsistent voting systems could deprive millions of Americans of the right to vote,” shows that states conduct purges very unevenly because of flawed or nonexistent legislative guidance. As a result, legal voters, including voters who share similar names with felons, are mistakenly taken off of voter rolls.

The report examines 15 states. The ACLU surveyed the states’ election authorities and researched state laws to answer questions including how state elections officials “match” people with felony convictions against individuals listed on their voter registration list before purging them from the rolls, and whether states notify the individuals deemed “matched.”

None of the states surveyed requires its officials to use any specific or minimum criteria to ensure that an individual with a felony conviction is the same individual being purged. Two-thirds of the states surveyed do not require elections officials to notify voters who are purged, denying them an opportunity to contest erroneous purges.

Florida’s Gov. Jeb Bush ignored advice in May of this year to throw out faulty felon purge lists, which (as in 2000) mistakenly contained the names of thousands of eligible voters, before they went out to county election offices despite warnings from state officials, according to a report published Oct. 16. The lists were eventually junked.

In a May 4 e-mail obtained by the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, Florida Department of Law Enforcement computer expert Jeff Long informed his boss that a Department of State computer expert had told him “that yesterday they recommended to the Gov that they ‘pull the plug’” on the voter database.

The e-mail said state election officials “weren’t comfortable with the felon-matching program they’ve got,” but added, “The Gov rejected their suggestion to pull the plug, so they’re ‘going live’ with it this weekend.”

Long, who was responsible for giving elections officials his department’s felon database, said that Paul Craft, the Department of State’s top computer expert, had told him about the meeting with Bush.

A software program matched data on felons with voter registration rolls to create the list of 48,000 names. Secretary of State Glenda Hood junked the database in July after acknowledging that 2,500 ex-felons on the list had had their voting rights restored.

Most were Democrats, and many were black. Hispanics, who often vote Republican in Florida, were almost entirely absent from the list due to a technical error.

Under Florida law, county election officials may still purge voters based on their own, locally generated lists.

New citizens could determine election

A new report by the Immigration Policy Center, “Power and Potential: The Growing Clout of New Citizens,” found that in the last election period, the number of new adult citizens — predominantly Latinos and Asian and Pacific Islanders — who were registered to vote grew 20 percent, to a total of 6.2 million people.

With Bush and Kerry virtually tied in the polls — and the last race decided by a mere 537 votes — this means that the newest US citizens could well determine the next leader of the nation.

More than two million Arab Americans live in swing states like Michigan, Illinois, and Ohio, where instances of blatant intimidation have occurred in the past.

In 1999, two candidates, one with close ties to the Arab-American community, were running for mayor of Hamtramck, Michigan, a community that had been predominantly Polish until an influx of Arab immigrants shifted its demographic make-up.

On Election Day, an anti-Arab group calling itself Citizens for Better Hamtramck approached people waiting in line who appeared to be Arab and demanded that they prove they were US citizens, even ordering them to swear the oath of citizenship.

Sources: ACLU, Associated Press, Inter Press Service, LA Times, OneWorld.net

Critics see drug industry behind mental health plan

By Ritt Goldstein

Stockholm, Germany, Oct. 20 (IPS) — Bush Plans to Screen Whole US Population for Mental Illness, read the headline in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), and the project, with increasingly controversial drug treatment at its core, is underway as you read this.

Structures to put the scheme in place have been developed under a so-called “Federal Action Agenda,” announced in Washington on June 9, and include mandatory mental health screenings, which the plan recommends be linked with “treatment and supports.”

The plan’s full details have yet to emerge as the Action Agenda still “has not been publicly released,” according to A. Kathryn Power, director of the Center for Mental Health Services (CMHS), the Bush administration body spearheading the effort.

Developed by the President’s New Freedom Commission on Mental Health, the effort, critics charge, is a pharmaceutical industry marketing scheme to mine customers and promote sales of the newest, most expensive psychiatric medications.

Under New Freedom, mental health screening of adult US is slated to occur during routine physical exams while that of young people will occur in the school system. Pre-school children will receive periodic “development screens.”

The plan highlights the importance of “state-of-the art medications,” though a scandal has erupted recently regarding the safety and effectiveness of the main types of drugs in question, particularly antidepressants. Deadly side effects of these drugs have already claimed numerous lives.

In mid-September an advisory committee of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said antidepressants should come with “the nation’s strongest warning” that they can cause suicidal behavior in children and young people.

Recently released studies by famed British scientist and psychiatrist Dr. David Healy highlight that some of these drugs — Seroxat and Prozac, both SSRI (Selective Serotonin Reptake Inhibitor) antidepressants — appear linked to “homicidal” behavior in adults.

“In the last 50 years, the quality of the new drugs hasn’t matched the hype,” says Healy, author of Let Them Eat Prozac and the person responsible for originally blowing the whistle on the link between antidepressants and suicide in children.

Asked if he was saying: “the major breakthroughs, then, have been in terms of marketing instead of medicine,” the drug scientist told IPS: “Yes, I think so. And that extends all the way to having [the pharmaceutical industry’s] policies put forward by departments of health in the US, the UK — things like the Bush plan.”

Drug therapy based upon “evidence-based” practices is the backbone of the New Freedom program’s approach to treatment. But such practices have now been badly tarnished, with recent findings indicating the drug industry (called “Big Pharma” by critics) has manipulated what were thought to be independent evaluations of new drugs, as reported in previous IPS stories.

An Apr. 24, 2004 article in the British medical journal Lancet said while, “selective reporting of favorable research should be unimaginable,” it appeared ongoing, distorting findings in the drug industry’s favor.

“In a global medical culture, where evidence-based practice is seen as the gold standard for care, these failings are a disaster,” the journal charged.

While questions surround the dangers of drugging large numbers of citizens, also notable is who the New Freedom plan envisions will deliver psychiatric services.

“Mental health education and training will be provided to general health care providers, emergency room staff, and first responders, such as law enforcement personnel and emergency medical technicians, to overcome the uneven geographic distribution of psychiatrists, psychologists, and psychiatric social workers,” the plan states.

New Freedom, “the future of mental health care in America,” is being rolled out on a state-by-state basis, according to Power, who added in an Aug. 13 speech that the federal role is to “motivate, facilitate, and compel change.”

According to Dr John Read — one of the Pacific’s leading authorities on psychiatric medications, author of Models of Madness, and director of clinical psychology at the University of Auckland — “this is all about expanding the market for drug companies.”

On Sept. 13, US Congressman Ron Paul, a medical doctor, denounced the Bush plan for its “forced mental health screening for every child in America,” pointedly writing in a weekly column on his website, the “obvious beneficiary of the proposal is the pharmaceutical industry.”

According to Paul, who had introduced an amendment to eliminate funding for the plan, “Soviet communists attempted to paint all opposition to the state as mental illness.”

Read also warns that the New Freedom plan “conjures up the image of ‘state control’ of private lives, extending to an individual’s feelings ... the increasing medi-calization of life problems and the massive increase in the prescriptions of all types of psychiatric drugs is ‘social control.’ “

According to noted Canadian-American psychologist, educator and author Dr. Daniel Burston, “any number of things that are, or could be, perfectly natural responses to an environment can be construed as a sign of mental disorder.”

Read told IPS that New Freedom appears essentially a way to “identify between 10 and 20 percent of the population who will be labeled … offered nothing other than medication in 90 percent of the cases, and the drug companies will be laughing all the way to the bank.”

According to Power, about 20 percent of the US population is “experiencing mental disorders in any given year.”

In Auckland, on Sept. 16 to discuss the Bush plan, Power also said that an associate, Charles Curie, was working with mental health ministers from Australia, New Zealand, and the UK to “promote policy innovation that fosters improved mental health around the world.”

Allen Jones, a “whistleblower” who worked as an investigator in the Pennsylvania State office of the Inspector General, voiced concerns similar to Read’s, linking the pharmaceutical industry to many of those who developed Bush’s New Freedom plan.

The industry was also instrumental in funding a prior state scheme that became a “model program” for the Bush plan, the Texas Medication Algorithm Project (TMAP).

TMAP favors use of the newest medications over older, much less costly alternatives.

It began in 1995, while Bush was Texas’ governor. According to the British Medical Journal, TMAP was funded by a Robert Wood Johnson (as in Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceuticals) grant and by several drug companies.

On June 19 the journal reported that Jones believed “the same ‘political-pharmaceutical alliance’ that generated the Texas project was behind the recommendations of the New Freedom Commission.”

According to his report, the effort would “consolidate the TMAP effort into a comprehensive national policy to treat mental illness with expensive, patented medications of questionable benefit and deadly side effects,” added the Journal.

New Freedom’s pharma-oriented programs have garnered considerable and broad support, including from the Carter Centre, the organization founded by former President Jimmy Carter and best known for its human rights programs and election monitoring.

The “Carter Center Mental Health Program supports the spirit and findings of the President’s New Freedom Commission on Mental Health report,” says Thomas H. Bornemann, director of the Georgia-based center’s mental health program.

He added the center is, “engaged with a variety of partners to use the report as a platform to transform the current mental health system. Two of the program’s annual Rosalynn Carter Symposia on Mental Health Policy (2003 and 2004) are dedicated to meet the challenges of funding and achieving these goals.”

According to the Carter Center, 77 percent of its budget is devoted to health programs, with 6.6 percent of the budget going to peace activities. Drug firms such as GlaxoSmithKline, Merck & Co, Pfizer, and Wyeth are listed as having provided one million dollars or more to the centre, as is the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, associated with Johnson & Johnson and TMAP.

Queries to the Carter Center regarding the total amounts of pharmaceutical industry funding, the programs that that money was applied to and the industry’s influence on the center’s policy, were not answered.

But in the “donated goods and services” section of the notes to the center’s annual report’s financial statements it is written that unattributed “medication” donations totaled 54 million dollars in 2003 and 43 million dollars in 2002.

The center’s “total expenses” for those years were respectively 82 million dollars and 85 million dollars, according to its website.

Critics have repeatedly charged the drug industry with using its wealth and power to manipulate advocacy and professional groups. The non-profit National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI) has repeatedly faced such criticism, as has the American Psychiatric Association (APA), which have both endorsed New Freedom.

Nevertheless, Read observed of New Freedom: “I would guess that there are some ... who genuinely believe that these ideas are good for people, and completely unaware of the sinister connotations, the Orwellian connotations, and the huge advantages for the drug companies ... well-meaning, but totally misguided people.”