Saturday, January 19, 2013

Fringe goes out strong

Mike with a guest post.

Last night, Fringe ended.  The last two episodes of the series.

The bad news, I still don't get the frog thing.  The frogs were supposed to be clues, remember? We were told that in the first two seasons -- not on the show but in press for the show.

Other than that the ending was perfect.  I think the key scene in the first hour was the scene where they learned that Windmark had ordered Michael taken to Liberty Island and that it was too protected for them to get onto.

Olivia: We need an end run.  We need to bypass security all together.

Peter: How?

Olivia: The other side.

Astrid:  The other side of what?

Peter:  You mean the alternate universe.


So Olivia's going to travel to the other side.  She needs to be injected with the drug Walter injected in her as a child.  Remember season four?  When Nimoy was trying to end the world?  To save the world, Olivia had to die.  Walter shot her because Leonard Nimoy's Billy was using her to open a portal.  He shot her in the head.  The only way to keep this universe from being torn. 

Billy immediately bailed and Walter called for Peter to help him remove the bullet.  The drug in Olivia's body was at its height and if they could remove the bullet, she would self-heal.  That's the magic bullet that saved the world.  And they gave it, on a necklace chain, to Etta and then, when Etta died this season (Etta was/is Peter and Olivia's daughter), they got the bullet back.  It's already helped Olivia with the people who grabbed her earlier this season.

So for Olivia to cross over now that all that drugs has burned out of her system (when it brought her back to life in season 4), she'll need to be injected.  There's concern because no one knows much about the drugs or what could happen to Olivia.  She's injected four times and it looks bad.  But she comes to and has 3 hours before the drugs out of her system.  If she hasn't crossed over to the other side and gone to Liberty Island there to cross back over into our side and grab michael, cross back over to the alternate earth to get him out of Liberty Island (our Liberty Island has no escape) and then go to Battery Park to cross back into our world, if this hasn't taken place in 3 hours, then the drug's effects will wear off and Olivia will be trapped on the other side or in on our Liberty Island that she won't be able to escape from.

So she crosses over and the other side has alarms going off.  Forces surround her and she raises her hands in the air.  Olivia2 and Lincoln are with her next.  (Remember in season four, Lincoln met Olivia2 and when the bridge between the 2 was closed, he decided to stay with Olivia2 because he was in love.)  Olivia2 and Lincoln have a family and are happy.  And eager to help our Olivia.

Olivia2 notices that Olivia's not right.  Walter had feared the drug might not be stable and told her to transport back if she's not able to see straight or has headaches, etc.  Olivia2 can tell something's going on but, because she's an Olivia, she just registers it for a second and never mentions it.  The way she'd want our Olivia to do for her if she was on a mission.

She even lightens the mood by telling Lincoln to stop checking out her younger ass. (Olivia is younger than Olivia2 because Olivia was suspended in amber for 20 years.)

They get her onto Liberty Park and to the room the area that, on our side, Michael should be kept in.

Windmark has questioned Michael, or tried.  Instead of making him bleed, Michael makes Windmark's nose bleed.  Windmark goes into the future and tells his commander that Michael has emotional and thought capabilities in advance of humans and watchers.  The commander says the boy is too important and must be studied.  Windmark says they must kill him because the unknown must be feared.  If they don't kill him, Michael could destroy them all.  The commander says the boy must be studied but that doesn't mean the boy has to be alive.  They'll kill him and preserve the parts.

The surgery is starting when Olivia crosses over.  She stumbles and is hazy.  She sees both layers blinking in and out, our universe and universe 2.  But she manages to take out one watcher.  She makes it to the surveillance room.  She kills the loyalist there and sees them about to operate on Michael.  She rushes to that room as alarms go off about an intruder.  A watcher tells the doctor and the nurse to stay with the boy and he rushes out of the room.

Olivia enters, kills the doctor and tells the nurse to stand still.  She then grabs Michael, who smiles at her, and helps him with his gown when a watcher enters.  Olivia transports out with Michael.  She and Michael are running down the hall when the Watcher crosses over.  He and Olivia start fighting.  She's on the ground but uses her brain to set off fireworks of sorts, she's shutting down the electriticy.  He looks away and she's able to kill him.  Another pops in and he's about to kill her when Lincoln and Olivia2 show up and shoot him dead.  Olivia yells, "Behind you!"  They turn and fire on a third watcher that's just crossed over.

They get Olivia to Battery Park.  She and Michael cross over.  She tells Peter, Walter and Astrid that they don't have much time, the watchers know she's been crossing over.

At the lab, during all of this September's been assembling parts of the machine he and Walter planned to save the world.  He needs another part.  He goes to a watcher who owes him and asks him to help.

Episode two (or second hour of the season finale) (last hour of the show) has many key scenes but, for me, it's really this one where Astrid shows Walter Gene.  Remember Gene.  She's the cow they've used for one experiment after another since season one?  This was her only season five appearance.

Walter's letting Peter know he'll be going into the future with Michael and he has to in order to save the world.  He and Peter are both trying not to cry and Astrid tells Walter to come with her for a second.  She takes him into the amber and shows him Gene.  She thought about taking Gene out of the amber but Gene moos so loud, the security guards on the university might have heard her and discovered the lab.

 Astrid:  I at least wanted you to see her.

 Walter:  You always know how to sooth me.  You always have.

 Astrid:  Walter, this is not the end, we're going to win this and when we do, we're going to be drinking strawberry milkshakes in the lab and we're not even going to remember that this happened.

 Walter:  That sounds lovely. [Pause]  It's a beautiful name.

 Astrid:  What is?

 Walter:  Astrid.

It's been a running gag on the show how, for five seasons, Walter's always getting Astrid's name wrong.  (I think he got it right once.)


Astrid and Olivia go to the watcher's house to get the part.  The door's open.  They enter.  There's a
watcher and a loyalist.  Astrid and Olivia hide on either side of a door and see the watcher hanging from a rope.

Olivia shoots the watcher.  Then Olivia slips off and Astrid stands there waiting for the Loyalist who comes into the door frame.  He aims at Astrid who lowers her gun as Olivia comes up behind him.  They want to know what happened to the part?  The part the watcher (December) was getting for September.  They no longer have the part. 

Olivia tells Michael he smiled when he first saw her, like he knew she would be coming.  She needs him to tell her what she needs to do now because without that part they can't get him to the future.  He tells her by putting a finger over his mouth.  Astrid figures out that they can use a shipping path/route.

Meanwhile where's Broyles?

Broyles was getting some things he thought they might be able to use.  But he's the one who found out Michael was on Liberty Island.  Only three people besides Windmark knew that. Windmark questions them and finds out that Broyles was told.

Windmark went to Broyles' office and told him he needed to question him.  They've already used a machine on Broyles' car so they 'heard' the last conversation Broyles had in it, on the phone with Olivia, where he said he'd meet them after he picked up some stuff.

Broyles, using the technqiue Emma taught him is able to stop Windmark from reading him.  He gets in his car and drives off.  But Windmark and the watchers are following him.

One of them was stupid enough to leave gloves in Broyles car.  This clues Broyles in on the fact that he's being followed.  He calls Olivia and they want to rescue him but he says that won't work, he'll just keep them occupied for as long as he can.

He tries to ditch them while he's under Boston Harbor.  Looked like the Callahan Tunnel to me, but ti was probably Ted Williams because that's the one every one uses.  Then again, if they really filmed on site, it would probably be easier to get filming access to Ted Williams Tunnel than to Callahan or Sumner.

So he ditches his car and goes running -- while traffic piles up -- to one of the foot exists and shoots the lock off.  He's in the stairwell and we're hoping he'll escape.  Just as he might, a Watcher shows up to stop him.

He's then taken in for interrogation.  It's the same building  that the part's being held.  Using a past fringe case, they soak the air with chemicals that breed in your stomach (when you breathe them in).  It's like Alien with things bursting out of the Loyalists and Watchers stomachs.  It stops Phillip Broyles' interrogation.  Olivia and Peter enter with gas masks as everyone's being evacuated.  They go to the surveillance room.  Peter figures out where the part is and Olivia sees Broyles on the monitors.  They rescue him.  He's safe because there are no ducts into the interrogation rooms. They give him a gas mask and he leaves with them.



Windmarks discovers that they are trying to reset time.  He pushes for his side to do so first.  September tells Peter and then Walter that he, not Walter, will go into the future with Michael.  Seeing Peter and Walter together and "saw what he meant to you and I understood what my feelings were" towards Michael "and why they were important."  Walter's upset but agrees.

A huge battle ensues as both sides are basically trying to open a portal in time,

Our side's winning and they're ready for Michael.  Where's Michael? Broken glass.

Peter runs to the van and grabs Windmark.  Windmark has Michael and was going somewhere, who knows where?  But Peter grabbing on appears to have limited his travel powers.  So he tosses off Peter and Olivia shows up.  He fights with Olivia and she fights hard, but she loses.  She's tossed to the ground not far from Peter.

Windmark grabs Michael and Olivia sees the magic bullet.  It slid off her during the fight.  She concentrates and begins moving things with her mind.  It distracts Windmark who is watching and she then moves a car so that it crushes him against another.

Michael's safe.  September's going to take him to the future.  In the future, this will all end when they see Michael and what he can do.  Boom.  Someone just shot September dead  Knowing there's no time, Walter takes Michael's hand and goes through the portal.

And we're back at that moment we've seen over and over.

Olivia and Peter in the park with Etta (five or almost five).  Peter calls to her and she runs towards him.  This is where the Watchers pop up and start shooting everyone.

Only that doesn't happen this time.

Instead, Etta runs to Peter's arm and the three of them  go back to their home where Peter finds a letter from Walter -- it's just a drawing of a tulip.

He smiles and that's the end of the show, the end of the series.  Time has been reset and, as Olivia had believed episodes back, they have Etta back.

My second choice of scene for this episode?  When Walter hugs Peter and tells him, "You are my favorite thing, Peter, my very favorite thing."

Great ending to the show.


Here's C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot:"

 
Friday, January 18, 2013.  Chaos and violence continue, protests continue, Nouri's forces attack Mosul protesters again, Nouri's groupies outside of Iraq will need to figure out how to stop Toby Dodge's truth-telling, and more.
The Iraqi people grow ever more disenchanted with the government the United States imposed upon it (Nouri was installed in 2006 by the Bush administration, in 2010 the Obama administration insisted Nouri get a second term as prime minister).  Freedom House is a think tank that studies human rights around the world.  Each year, Freedom House publishes a look at journalism around the world and they publish a look at freedom around the world.  It's time for the latter, [PDF format warning] "Freedom in the World 2013."  The report notes:
Iraq's political rights rating declined due to the concentration of power in the hands of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and growing pressure on the opposition, as exemplified by the arrest and death sentence in absentia of Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi, the country's most senior Sunni Arab politician. 
Iraq is ranked "not free" in the report.  It has declined from last year's report (when its political rights rating was 5 to the new rating of 6).
Protests continued in Iraq and, the Journal of Turkish Weekly points out, they "show no sign of stopping.  For three weeks, tens of thousands of people have taken to the streets in prominently Sunni provinces to shout against the government led by Shi'ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki."  .  Alsumaria reports thousands (check out the photo with the article) turned out today in Salah al-Din to demand that Article IV ('terrorism' law) be abolished and that an amnesty law be adopted.  A sizeable turnout showed up in Hawija as well, Alsumaria notes, and they were out in full force in solidarity with demonstrators in Nineveh, Salahuddin and Anbar. They demanded that the protesters be listened to, that prisoners and detainees be released.

The prisoners.  Over 18,000 -- and possibly over 30,000 -- prisoners in Iraq were arrested on 'terrorism' under Article IV.   Al Mada reports that Wednesday members of Parliament called for a real release and not the for-show stunt Nouri executed earlier this week (which the press lapped up like well-trained dogs).  The for-show stunt was an attempt to defuse the protests.  As turnout today is proving, that didn't work on anyone except some elements of the press.
AFP's Prashant Rao Tweets this morning:
5h
Pictures from today's protests in Baghdad, Kirkuk, Ramadi, and Samarra by @AFP photographers: http://bit.ly/UVkBAQ  #Iraq
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  2. 25m
    Thousands rally in Sunni-majority areas of #Iraq, calling for Maliki to go: http://bit.ly/WddGUM  Pix: http://bit.ly/Wddrcp  @AFP
    Expand
  3. 27m
    .@AFP pictures of today's demonstrations in Baghdad, including a couple by yours truly: http://bit.ly/Wddrcp 
    Expand


AAP notes that protesters turned out in Baghdad, Samarra and Mosul.  In Baghdad they shouted "We don't want committees, we want our rights!" and "Release the prisoners!" while in Samarra they chanted, "They have made promises before, and they made promises yesterday, but let them hear -- we will stay, protesting, until we get our rights."  Next Friday is the day to watch for the protests in Iraq.  Sameer N. Yacoub (AP) observes that this was the fourth consecutive Friday of protests and that, though they were primarily on Anbar Province in the past, "on Friday, they spread to the central city of Samarra and other Sunni strongholds."
The Voice of Russia notes security forces kicked protesters out of the central square in Mosul. Despite this assualt, Alsumaria notes that Iraqis continued protesting elsewhere in Mosul.  Nouri's forces attacked the Mosul protesters earlier this month.  From the January 7th snapshot:
Protests continued today in Iraq and they [the protesters] were injured in Mosul.  All Iraq News reports the Iraqi military attacked the protesters today.  First they fired shots in the air and second they attacked the protesters with batons.  The army then closed the public square.  Alsumaria countsAl Sharqiya reports that soldiers using batons beat protesters.   They add that they protesters had been taking part in a sit-in when the miliatry attacked with batons and at least three people were injured (they have a photo of at least two people on stretchers).   Reuters quotes Nineveh Province Governor Atheel (Ethel) al-Nujaifi declaring, "Security forces opened fire and used batons to disperse demonstrators."  This assault was in contrast to the wishes of the Nineveh government (Mosul is in Nineveh Province).  As Alsumaria notes, the provincial government had ordered that the square be open to the protesters.  Alsumaria notes that Nineveh Council has announced they are opening an investigation as a result of the military crackdown on the protesters.  
On that attack,  Aswat al-Iraq reports today:
The Parliamentary committee entrusted to investigate the aggression against Mosul demonstrators expressed conviction that aggressive actions were committed against them by the security force.
Member of the committee MP Hassan Khala Alou, in a press conference, attended by Aswat al-Iraq, said that the committee met a number of demonstrators who were attacked by the security forces on 7 January instant and saw films that proved these actions.
He added that the security force entrusted for the protection of Ahrar square did not respond for the investigation under the pretext of waiting permission from Baghdad.
In related news, Kitabat notes Iraq's Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistanti favors limiting the three presidencies to two terms.  The Constitution limits the President of Iraq to two terms.  The other two of the three presidencies are Speaker of Parliament and Prime Minister.  The Parliament is currently discussing a proposed bill.
Why the protests now?  For narrative reasons, some want their to be a single incident that kicked them off.  That's rarely the case with any protest and it's not the case with the ones going on in Iraq.  There are mulitple reasons for the protests.  Wadah Khanfar (Guardian) captures recent events very well:
Iraq is much more polarised now than it was under Saddam Hussein. The bitterness and retribution of the civil war that followed the US occupation are still etched on people's minds. The regional and international rivalry for its rich oil resources is now greater than ever. Corruption is rife: today, Iraq is classified by Transparency International as being among the most corrupt countries in the world. In this oil-producing country already basic services and poor infrastructure are continuing to decline.
At a time when democratic leadership is needed to heal sectarian wounds and entrench national reconciliation, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has instead established an autocratic single-sect powerbase. By so doing, he has plunged Baghdad into a deep crisis, which has escalated in recent weeks with thousands taking to the streets in Sunni areas to protest against his Shia-led government.
In the 2010 elections, Iraqiya, a national, non-sectarian coalition, won 91 seats and gained a parliamentary majority, with two seats more than Maliki's State of Law coalition. But Iranian pressure ensured that Maliki emerged as the prime minister.
A power-sharing agreement followed but, two years on, Maliki has failed to stick to it. He now holds all the power in Baghdad: he is prime minister, defence minister, acting interior minister, acting head of intelligence, and chief of the armed forces. Moreover, his partners accuse him of using the judiciary to eliminate political rivals. That has prompted Interpol to issue a memorandum of non-co-operation with Iraq's judiciary (citing its partiality, politicisation and the use of its office to pressure political rivals).
Under Iraq's anti-terrorism law, the authorities can detain and prosecute a suspect on the basis of secret evidence. The most prominent case is that of Tariq al-Hashemi, the vice-president, who was sentenced to death by a court in absentia. Many people regard the charge of terrorism against him as fabricated. Then, last December, security forces arrested several guards and advisers of the minister of finance and leader of the Iraqi National Movement, Rafi al-Issawi. Issawi accused the police of torturing detainees to extract confessions against him. This caused anger among the Sunnis in Anbar province and was in fact the spark that lit the current protests.
Along with protests, this week also saw the assassination of Sahwa leader, Iraqiya member and Sunni Aifan al-Issawi  Jaber Ali (Middle East Confidential) offers, "The assassination arrived in a really critical moment since the country has been in political turmoil because of a long lasting protest mostly led by Sunnis that have been going on for weeks. In addition, Iraqiya, the country's largely Sunni bloc of lawmakers have decided to boycott Parliament sessions until the government agrees to organize proper security. Their main demand that is also backed up by senior opposition politicians is that Mr. Maliki resigns from his actual position."
Nouri is Little Saddam.  That point resonates throughout Toby Dodge's new book Iraq: From  War To A New Authoritarianism.   Dodge is a British political scientist and a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies.  January 15th, he discussed his book at the Virginia Woolf Room at Bloomsbury House in London.  Excerpt.
Toby Dodge:  And I've identified three drivers of the violence that killed so many innocent Iraqis.  The first is undoubtedly the sectarian politics and those Iraqis among us will remember -- fondly or otherwise -- the huge debates that Iraqis had and Iraqi analysts had about the role of sectarian politics.  I'd certainly identify what we could call a series of ethinic entrapenuers, formerly exiled politicans who came back to Iraq after 2003 and specifically and overtly used religious and sectarian identity, religious ethnic identity to mobilize the population -- especially in those two elections in 2005.  Now the second driver of Iraq's descent into civil war was the collapse of the Iraqi state in the aftermath of the invasion  Now this isn't only the infamous disbanding of the Iraqi army and its intelligence services, this isn't only the driving out of the senior ranks of the if tge Ba'ath Party members, the dismembering of the state, 18 of the central government buildings were stripped when I was there in 2003 in Baghdad.  So much scrap metal was stolen from government buildings that the scrap metal price in Turkey Iraq and Iran, it's neighbors dropped as a result of the ill-gotten gain of the looters  was shipped out of the country.  But thirdly, the big issue that drove Iraq into civil war was the political system set up after 2003.  I've gone into that in quite a lot of detail and I've labeled it -- much to the horror of my editor -- an exclusive elite pact -- which basically meant that those former Iraqi exiles empowered by the United States then set up a political system that  deliberately excluded a great deal of the indigeanous politicians -- but anyone associated, thought to be associated with the previous regime, in a kind of blanket attempt to remake Iraqi politics.  Now the conclusions of the book are broadly sobering and pessimistic.  That certainly the elite pact has not been reformed in spite of Iraqiya's electoral victory in the 2010 elections, that sectarian politics and sectarian rhetoric that mobilized Iraqi politics from 2003 to 2010 has come back into fashion with the prime minister himself using coded sectarian language to seek to solidify his electoral base among Iraqis.  And basically the only thing that has been rebuilt since 2003 are Iraq's military and they now employ 933,000 people which is equal to 8% of the country's entire workforce or 12% of the population of adutl males.  However, running parallel to that, the civilian capacity of the Iraqi state is still woefully inadequate.  In 2011, the United Nations estimated that there only 16% of the population were covered by the public sewers network, that leaves 83% of the country's waste water untreated, 25% of the population has no access to clean, running water and the Iraqi Knowledge Network in 2011 estimated that an average Iraqi household only gets 7 and a half hours of electricity a day. Now in the middle of the winter, that might not seem like a big issue.  But in the burning hot heat of Basra in the summer  or, indeed, in Baghdad, Iraq has suffered  a series of heatwaves over the last few years.  Not getting enough elecriticy to make your fan or air conditioning work means that you're in a living hell.   This is in spite of the fact that the Iraqi and US governments have collectively spent $200 billion seeking to rebuild the Iraqi state. So I think the conclusions of the Adelphi are rather pessimistic.  The Iraqi state, it's coercive arm, has been rebuilt but precious little beside that has.  But what I want to do is look, this afternoon, is look at the ramifications of that rather slude rebuilding -- a large powerful army and a weak civil institutions of the state.  And I thought I might exemplify this by examining a single signficant event that occurred on the afternoon of Thursday the 20th of December 2012.  That afternoon, government security forces raided the house of Iraq's Minister of Finance, Dr. Rafaa al-Issawi.  Issawi is a leading member of the Iraqiya coalition that in 2010 won a slim majority of seats in the Iraqi Parliament -- 91 to [State of Law's] 89 on a 62% turnout.  Now the ramifications of attempting to arrest Issawi and indeed arresting a number of his bodyguards and prosecuting his chief bodyguard for alleged terrorist offenses cannot be overstated.  In the aftermath of the elections, there were a series of tortured, fractured, very bad tempered negotiations which finally resulted in the creation of another government of national unity and, much more importantly, let Nouri al-Maliki, the prime minister since 2006, to retain the office of the prime ministership.  Issawi as MInister of Finance is probably the most important, most powerful Iraqiya politician to gain office in the country.  He won plaudits in his professional handling of the Ministry of Finance and attempted to push himself above the political fray not to engage in the rather aggressive, knockabout political rhetoric that has come to identify Iraqi politics.  So in arresting or seeking the arrest of Issawi and charging him with offenses of terrorism, clearly what Prime Minister al-Maliki is doing is throwing down a gauntlet, attempting to seize further power and bring it into the office of the prime minister.  Issawi, when his house was raided, rang the prime minister to ask him who had authorized it -- a call the prime minister refused to take.  He [Issawi] then fled seeking sanctuary in the house of the Speaker of Parliament, a fellow Iraqiya politician, Osama al-Nujaifi.  He then held a press conference where he said -- and this is a politician not prone to wild rhetoric, not prone to political populism -- he said, "Maliki now wants to just get rid of his partners, to build a dictatorship.  He wants to consolidate power more and more."  Now if this wasn't so disturbing, the attack on Issawi's house triggers memories of a very similar event almost 12 months before, on the same day that the final American troops left Iraq in December 2011, Iraqi security forces led by the prime minister's son laid seige to Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi's house.  Hashemi was subsequently allowed to leave to the Kurdish Regional Government's capital of Erbil but a number of his bodyguards were arrested, two of them were tortured to death and the rest of them were paraded on television where they 'confessed' to activities of terrorism.  So basically now let me turn to explain what the raid on Issawi's house in December 2012 is representative of -- what I've called in the book, the rise of the new authoritarianism.  And this authoritarianism has been driven forward by Nouri al-Maliki  who was first appointed prime minister in the early months of 2006.  Now quite fascinatingly why Nouri al-Maliki was appointed was at the time he was seen as a grey politician.  He was the second in command of the Islamic Dawa Party -- a party that was seeking to maximize the vote of Iraq's Shia popluation but a party that had no internal militia, that had no military force of its own.  So it was seen by the competing, fractured ruling elite of Iraq as not posing a threat.  Now upon  taking office in April 2006, Maliki was confronted by the very issue that had given rise to his appointment, his inability to govern.  Under the Iraqi system in 2006, the office of the prime minister was seen as a consensus vehicle.  Maliki was sought to negotiate between the US Ambassador, the American head of the Multi National Coalition and other Iraqi politicians.  He wasn't seen as a first among equals.  What Maliki has done since 2006,  is successfully consolidate power in his own hands.  He first seized control of the Islamic Dawa Party, his own party, and then he built up a small and cohesive group of functionaries, known in Iraq as the Malikiyoun  -- a group of people, friends, followers, but also his family, his son, his nephew and his son-in-law and he's placed them in key points across the Iraqi state, seeking to circumvent the Cabinet -- the official vestibule of power in the Iraqi state -- and seize control of Iraq's institutions.
If you're not frightened for the Iraqi people, you're not paying attention.  If you're an American, you're being strongly encouraged not to pay attention by the US government that screwed up and destroyed the country of Iraq and by a guilty US press that sold the illegal war, has blood on its hands and doesn't have any desire to get honest about the realities in Iraq today.

Turning to the US where Bradley Manning has spent his 970th day behind bars, still waiting for a trial.   Monday April 5, 2010, WikiLeaks released US military video of a July 12, 2007 assault in Iraq. 12 people were killed in the assault including two Reuters journalists Namie Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh. Monday June 7, 2010, the US military announced that they had arrested Bradley Manning and he stood accused of being the leaker of the video. Leila Fadel (Washington Post) reported in August 2010 that Manning had been charged -- "two charges under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. The first encompasses four counts of violating Army regulations by transferring classified information to his personal computer between November and May and adding unauthorized software to a classified computer system. The second comprises eight counts of violating federal laws governing the handling of classified information." In March, 2011, David S. Cloud (Los Angeles Times) reported that the military has added 22 additional counts to the charges including one that could be seen as "aiding the enemy" which could result in the death penalty if convicted. The Article 32 hearing took place in December. At the start of this year, there was an Article 32 hearing and, February 3rd, it was announced that the government would be moving forward with a court-martial. Bradley has yet to enter a plea and has neither affirmed that he is the leaker nor denied it. The court-martial was supposed to begin before the election but it was postponed until after the election so that Barack wouldn't have to run on a record of his actual actions. 
HARI SREENIVASAN:  And joining me now to talk about it is Arun Rath of PBS' "Frontline" and PRI's "The World."  He has been covering the Manning case from the beginning.
So, Arun, this is sort of what sets the ground rules for what will happen in the trial, right?

ARUN RATH, "Frontline":  Yes.
Basically, in these hearings, these pretrial hearings, they're basically arguing about the kind of arguments they can make in court, the parameters of the sort of arguments that Bradley Manning and his defense can make in terms of defending themselves against these charges.
What's a little bit unusual about the hearings that we have been seeing so far is that they have turned into more of a bit of a dress rehearsal for the trial itself and for what might be his sentencing, actually, because his attorneys have already essentially admitted in their court -- in their pleadings so far that Bradley Manning is responsible for the leaks.
So it's changed from a situation of the trial being did he really do it to, yes, he did, but here are the reasons why we think it doesn't rise to the level of being a crime.  
[. . .]
HARI SREENIVASAN:  OK.  You have been in court.  You have had the chance to see Bradley Manning a few weeks ago.  What does he look like?  And what impresses you about him?

ARUN RATH:  I have say, of all the people that have been called to the stand, Bradley Manning came across as the most appealing witness.
He was, I wouldn't say charming -- it's not sort of a traditional charisma, but there's something about the fact that he's a young, kind of geeky kid.  He's a little bit awkward.  And he comes across as a sympathetic character.  He was talking about the ways in which he was held in Quantico in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day.
And he talked about this peculiar kind of a classic catch-22 situation, where he would do these things during the day to keep himself scene, like talking to himself in a mirror or dancing in his cell, as a way to break the tedium to keep himself sane, and at the same time these things were used as evidence against him as evidence that he was actually mentally unstable.  
Finally, let's switch over to England where certain sections of the Socialist Workers Party is in the midst of a major panic as they attempt to deny violence against women. (Elaine wrote of this earlier this week and did a great job.)  What has happened in England has happened a lot and to happen at all is too much.  For example, I will not be promoting any damn thing Eve Ensler and her talking vagina does.  Friends keep asking.  Not interested.  She stayed silent as one woman after another was attacked.  Now the woman wants to use 'girl power' again to promote herself.  You want to stop rape?  Stop the attacks on women who come forward to report rape.  Eve Ensler couldn't go against her radical buddies and speak out so she's of no use to anyone.  In England, Laurie Penny's taking on a very important issue.  From her ZNet piece:
The British Socialist Worker's Party is hardly atypical among political parties, among left-wing groups, among organisations of committed people or, indeed, among groups of friends and colleagues in having structures in place that might allow sexual abuse and misogyny by men in positions of power to continue unchecked. One could point, in the past 12 months alone, to the BBC's handling of the Jimmy Savile case, or to those Wikileaks supporters who believe that Julian Assange should not be compelled to answer allegations of rape and sexual assault in Sweden.
I could point, personally, to at least two instances involving respected men that have sundered painfully and forever friendship groups which lacked the courage to acknowledge the incidents. The only difference is that the SWP actually talk openly about the unspoken rules by which this sort of intimidation usually goes on. Other groups are not so brazen as to say that their moral struggles are simply more important than piffling issues of feminism, even if that's what they really mean, nor to claim that as right-thinking people they and their leaders are above the law. The SWP's leadership seem to have written it into their rules.
To say that the left has a problem with handling sexual violence is not to imply that everyone else doesn't. There is, however, a stubborn refusal to accept and deal with rape culture that is unique to the left and to progressives more broadly. It is precisely to do with the idea that, by virtue of being progressive, by virtue of fighting for equality and social justice, by virtue of, well, virtue, we are somehow above being held personally accountable when it comes to issues of race, gender and sexual violence.
That unwillingness to analyse our own behaviour can quickly become dogma. The image is one of petty, nitpicking women attempting to derail the good work of decent men on the left by insisting in their whiny little women's way that progressive spaces should also be spaces where we don't expect to get raped and assaulted and slut-shamed and victimised for speaking out, and the emotions are rage and resentment: why should our pure and perfect struggle for class war, for transparency, for freedom from censorship be polluted by - it's pronounced with a curl of the upper lip over the teeth, as if the very word is distasteful - 'identity politics'? Why should we be held more accountable than common-or-garden bigots? Why should we be held to higher standards?
Because if we're not, then we have no business calling ourselves progressive. Because if we don't acknowledge issues of assault, abuse and gender hierarchy within our own institutions we have no business speaking of justice, much less fighting for it.
afp
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Protests continue in Iraq

Protests continued in Iraq.  Alsumaria reports thousands (check out the photo with the article) turned out today in Salah al-Din to demand that Article IV ('terrorism' law) be abolished and that an amnesty law be adopted.  A sizeable turnout showed up in Hawija as well, Alsumaria notes, and they were out in full force in solidarity with demonstrators in Nineveh, Salahuddin and Anbar. They demanded that the protesters be listened to, that prisoners and detainees be released.

The prisoners.  Over 18,000 -- and possibly over 30,000 -- prisoners in Iraq were arrested on 'terrorism' under Article IV.   Al Mada reports that Wednesday members of Parliament called for a real release and not the for-show stunt Nouri executed earlier this week (which the press lapped up like well-trained dogs).  The for-show stunt was an attempt to defuse the protests.  As turnout today is proving, that didn't work on anyone except some elements of the press.
AFP's Prashant Rao Tweets this morning:


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    Thousands rally in Sunni-majority areas of , calling for Maliki to go: Pix:
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    . pictures of today's demonstrations in Baghdad, including a couple by yours truly:
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AAP notes that protesters turned out in Baghdad, Samarra and Mosul.  In Baghdad they shouted "We don't want committees, we want our rights!" and "Release the prisoners!" while in Samarra they chanted, "They have made promises before, and they made promises yesterday, but let them hear -- we will stay, protesting, until we get our rights."  Next Friday is the day to watch for the protests in Iraq. 


On the issue of prisoners and detainees, protesters have accused Nouri's government of using Article IV to target Sunnis.  Kitabat reports today that 90% of the managers in Nouri's Ministry of the Interior are Shi'ite and either members of Nouri's political party or friends with Nouri.  The Ministry itself has no real head because Nouri never nominated anyone -- that was part of his power-grab.  Iraqiya (which came in first in the 2010 parliamentary elections and is headed by Ayad Allawi) rightly called it a power-grab in January 2011 but the western press assured everyone it was only temporary and that, in a matter of weeks, Nouri would nominate people to head the ministries.
Back in July, Mohammed Tawfeeq (CNN) observed, "Shiite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has struggled to forge a lasting power-sharing agreement and has yet to fill key Cabinet positions, including the ministers of defense, interior and national security, while his backers have also shown signs of wobbling support." That's still true today.  

 Nouri's forces attacked the Mosul protesters earlier this month.  From the January 7th snapshot:

Protests continued today in Iraq and they [the protesters] were injured in Mosul.  All Iraq News reports the Iraqi military attacked the protesters today.  First they fired shots in the air and second they attacked the protesters with batons.  The army then closed the public square.  Alsumaria countsAl Sharqiya reports that soldiers using batons beat protesters.   They add that they protesters had been taking part in a sit-in when the miliatry attacked with batons and at least three people were injured (they have a photo of at least two people on stretchers).   Reuters quotes Nineveh Province Governor Atheel (Ethel) al-Nujaifi declaring, "Security forces opened fire and used batons to disperse demonstrators."  This assault was in contrast to the wishes of the Nineveh government (Mosul is in Nineveh Province).  As Alsumaria notes, the provincial government had ordered that the square be open to the protesters.  Alsumaria notes that Nineveh Council has announced they are opening an investigation as a result of the military crackdown on the protesters.  
On that attack,  Aswat al-Iraq reports today:
The Parliamentary committee entrusted to investigate the aggression against Mosul demonstrators expressed conviction that aggressive actions were committed against them by the security force.
Member of the committee MP Hassan Khala Alou, in a press conference, attended by Aswat al-Iraq, said that the committee met a number of demonstrators who were attacked by the security forces on 7 January instant and saw films that proved these actions.
He added that the security force entrusted for the protection of Ahrar square did not respond for the investigation under the pretext of waiting permission from Baghdad.

In related news, Kitabat notes Iraq's Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistanti favors limiting the three presidencies to two terms.  The Constitution limits the President of Iraq to two terms.  The other two of the three presidencies are Speaker of Parliament and Prime Minister.  The Parliament is currently discussing a proposed bill.




The e-mail address for this site is common_ills@yahoo.com.





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Eve's day of self?

In today's snapshot (in full at the end), C.I. offers kind words that were not needed (but thank you) and she also points out that she is not promoting Eve Ensler's V-Day.

Good.

I know C.I. has friends who will be participating.  I'm sure that they are well meaning women.  But they are wrong.

Don't participate in Eve Ensler's vanity trip.

It's Valentine's Day and Eve needs attention.

Screw her.

She refused to defend the two women who were attacked non-stop because they may have been raped by Julian Assange.  She refused.  She's a liar.  Women can't count on her.

She was too cowardly to speak up because men on the left didn't want women speaking up.  The number who did speak up and speak out was very small and it did not include Eve Ensler.

From the snapshot:
Finally, let's switch over to England where certain sections of the Socialist Workers Party is in the midst of a major panic as they attempt to deny violence against women. (Elaine wrote of this earlier this week and did a great job.)  What has happened in England has happened a lot and to happen at all is too much.  For example, I will not be promoting any damn thing Eve Ensler and her talking vagina does.  Friends keep asking.  Not interested.  She stayed silent as one woman after another was attacked.  Now the woman wants to use 'girl power' again to promote herself.  You want to stop rape?  Stop the attacks on women who come forward to report rape.  Eve Ensler couldn't go against her radical buddies and speak out so she's of no use to anyone.  In England, Laurie Penny's taking on a very important issue.  From her ZNet piece:



C.I. is exactly right: If you want to stop rape you stop the attacks on women who step forward to report rape. 

Eve Ensler wrote about rape repeatedly in 2010 and 2011 and even last year.  But never did she manage to defend the two women who were trashed by the likes of Ray McGovern, Michael Ratner, Glenn Greenwald, Michael Moore, etc.  Eve Ensler's not just a bad actress, she's a joke.


"Iraq snapshot" (The Common Ills):
Friday, January 18, 2013.  Chaos and violence continue, protests continue, Nouri's forces attack Mosul protesters again, Nouri's groupies outside of Iraq will need to figure out how to stop Toby Dodge's truth-telling, and more.
 
The Iraqi people grow ever more disenchanted with the government the United States imposed upon it (Nouri was installed in 2006 by the Bush administration, in 2010 the Obama administration insisted Nouri get a second term as prime minister).  Freedom House is a think tank that studies human rights around the world.  Each year, Freedom House publishes a look at journalism around the world and they publish a look at freedom around the world.  It's time for the latter, [PDF format warning] "Freedom in the World 2013."  The report notes:
 
Iraq's political rights rating declined due to the concentration of power in the hands of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and growing pressure on the opposition, as exemplified by the arrest and death sentence in absentia of Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi, the country's most senior Sunni Arab politician. 
 
Iraq is ranked "not free" in the report.  It has declined from last year's report (when its political rights rating was 5 to the new rating of 6).
 
Protests continued in Iraq and, the Journal of Turkish Weekly points out, they "show no sign of stopping.  For three weeks, tens of thousands of people have taken to the streets in prominently Sunni provinces to shout against the government led by Shi'ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki."  .  Alsumaria reports thousands (check out the photo with the article) turned out today in Salah al-Din to demand that Article IV ('terrorism' law) be abolished and that an amnesty law be adopted.  A sizeable turnout showed up in Hawija as well, Alsumaria notes, and they were out in full force in solidarity with demonstrators in Nineveh, Salahuddin and Anbar. They demanded that the protesters be listened to, that prisoners and detainees be released.

The prisoners.  Over 18,000 -- and possibly over 30,000 -- prisoners in Iraq were arrested on 'terrorism' under Article IV.   Al Mada reports that Wednesday members of Parliament called for a real release and not the for-show stunt Nouri executed earlier this week (which the press lapped up like well-trained dogs).  The for-show stunt was an attempt to defuse the protests.  As turnout today is proving, that didn't work on anyone except some elements of the press.
AFP's Prashant Rao Tweets this morning:
 
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Pictures from today's protests in Baghdad, Kirkuk, Ramadi, and Samarra by @AFP photographers: http://bit.ly/UVkBAQ  #Iraq
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    Thousands rally in Sunni-majority areas of #Iraq, calling for Maliki to go: http://bit.ly/WddGUM  Pix: http://bit.ly/Wddrcp  @AFP
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    .@AFP pictures of today's demonstrations in Baghdad, including a couple by yours truly: http://bit.ly/Wddrcp 
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AAP notes that protesters turned out in Baghdad, Samarra and Mosul.  In Baghdad they shouted "We don't want committees, we want our rights!" and "Release the prisoners!" while in Samarra they chanted, "They have made promises before, and they made promises yesterday, but let them hear -- we will stay, protesting, until we get our rights."  Next Friday is the day to watch for the protests in Iraq.  Sameer N. Yacoub (AP) observes that this was the fourth consecutive Friday of protests and that, though they were primarily on Anbar Province in the past, "on Friday, they spread to the central city of Samarra and other Sunni strongholds."
 
 
The Voice of Russia notes security forces kicked protesters out of the central square in Mosul. Despite this assualt, Alsumaria notes that Iraqis continued protesting elsewhere in Mosul.  Nouri's forces attacked the Mosul protesters earlier this month.  From the January 7th snapshot:
Protests continued today in Iraq and they [the protesters] were injured in Mosul.  All Iraq News reports the Iraqi military attacked the protesters today.  First they fired shots in the air and second they attacked the protesters with batons.  The army then closed the public square.  Alsumaria countsAl Sharqiya reports that soldiers using batons beat protesters.   They add that they protesters had been taking part in a sit-in when the miliatry attacked with batons and at least three people were injured (they have a photo of at least two people on stretchers).   Reuters quotes Nineveh Province Governor Atheel (Ethel) al-Nujaifi declaring, "Security forces opened fire and used batons to disperse demonstrators."  This assault was in contrast to the wishes of the Nineveh government (Mosul is in Nineveh Province).  As Alsumaria notes, the provincial government had ordered that the square be open to the protesters.  Alsumaria notes that Nineveh Council has announced they are opening an investigation as a result of the military crackdown on the protesters.  
 
 
On that attack,  Aswat al-Iraq reports today:


 
The Parliamentary committee entrusted to investigate the aggression against Mosul demonstrators expressed conviction that aggressive actions were committed against them by the security force.
Member of the committee MP Hassan Khala Alou, in a press conference, attended by Aswat al-Iraq, said that the committee met a number of demonstrators who were attacked by the security forces on 7 January instant and saw films that proved these actions.
He added that the security force entrusted for the protection of Ahrar square did not respond for the investigation under the pretext of waiting permission from Baghdad.



In related news, Kitabat notes Iraq's Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistanti favors limiting the three presidencies to two terms.  The Constitution limits the President of Iraq to two terms.  The other two of the three presidencies are Speaker of Parliament and Prime Minister.  The Parliament is currently discussing a proposed bill.
 
 
Why the protests now?  For narrative reasons, some want their to be a single incident that kicked them off.  That's rarely the case with any protest and it's not the case with the ones going on in Iraq.  There are mulitple reasons for the protests.  Wadah Khanfar (Guardian) captures recent events very well:
 
Iraq is much more polarised now than it was under Saddam Hussein. The bitterness and retribution of the civil war that followed the US occupation are still etched on people's minds. The regional and international rivalry for its rich oil resources is now greater than ever. Corruption is rife: today, Iraq is classified by Transparency International as being among the most corrupt countries in the world. In this oil-producing country already basic services and poor infrastructure are continuing to decline.
At a time when democratic leadership is needed to heal sectarian wounds and entrench national reconciliation, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has instead established an autocratic single-sect powerbase. By so doing, he has plunged Baghdad into a deep crisis, which has escalated in recent weeks with thousands taking to the streets in Sunni areas to protest against his Shia-led government.
In the 2010 elections, Iraqiya, a national, non-sectarian coalition, won 91 seats and gained a parliamentary majority, with two seats more than Maliki's State of Law coalition. But Iranian pressure ensured that Maliki emerged as the prime minister.
A power-sharing agreement followed but, two years on, Maliki has failed to stick to it. He now holds all the power in Baghdad: he is prime minister, defence minister, acting interior minister, acting head of intelligence, and chief of the armed forces. Moreover, his partners accuse him of using the judiciary to eliminate political rivals. That has prompted Interpol to issue a memorandum of non-co-operation with Iraq's judiciary (citing its partiality, politicisation and the use of its office to pressure political rivals).
Under Iraq's anti-terrorism law, the authorities can detain and prosecute a suspect on the basis of secret evidence. The most prominent case is that of Tariq al-Hashemi, the vice-president, who was sentenced to death by a court in absentia. Many people regard the charge of terrorism against him as fabricated. Then, last December, security forces arrested several guards and advisers of the minister of finance and leader of the Iraqi National Movement, Rafi al-Issawi. Issawi accused the police of torturing detainees to extract confessions against him. This caused anger among the Sunnis in Anbar province and was in fact the spark that lit the current protests.
 
Along with protests, this week also saw the assassination of Sahwa leader, Iraqiya member and Sunni Aifan al-Issawi  Jaber Ali (Middle East Confidential) offers, "The assassination arrived in a really critical moment since the country has been in political turmoil because of a long lasting protest mostly led by Sunnis that have been going on for weeks. In addition, Iraqiya, the country's largely Sunni bloc of lawmakers have decided to boycott Parliament sessions until the government agrees to organize proper security. Their main demand that is also backed up by senior opposition politicians is that Mr. Maliki resigns from his actual position."
 
Nouri is Little Saddam.  That point resonates throughout Toby Dodge's new book Iraq: From  War To A New Authoritarianism.   Dodge is a British political scientist and a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies.  January 15th, he discussed his book at the Virginia Woolf Room at Bloomsbury House in London.  Excerpt.
 
Toby Dodge:  And I've identified three drivers of the violence that killed so many innocent Iraqis.  The first is undoubtedly the sectarian politics and those Iraqis among us will remember -- fondly or otherwise -- the huge debates that Iraqis had and Iraqi analysts had about the role of sectarian politics.  I'd certainly identify what we could call a series of ethinic entrapenuers, formerly exiled politicans who came back to Iraq after 2003 and specifically and overtly used religious and sectarian identity, religious ethnic identity to mobilize the population -- especially in those two elections in 2005.  Now the second driver of Iraq's descent into civil war was the collapse of the Iraqi state in the aftermath of the invasion  Now this isn't only the infamous disbanding of the Iraqi army and its intelligence services, this isn't only the driving out of the senior ranks of the if tge Ba'ath Party members, the dismembering of the state, 18 of the central government buildings were stripped when I was there in 2003 in Baghdad.  So much scrap metal was stolen from government buildings that the scrap metal price in Turkey Iraq and Iran, it's neighbors dropped as a result of the ill-gotten gain of the looters  was shipped out of the country.  But thirdly, the big issue that drove Iraq into civil war was the political system set up after 2003.  I've gone into that in quite a lot of detail and I've labeled it -- much to the horror of my editor -- an exclusive elite pact -- which basically meant that those former Iraqi exiles empowered by the United States then set up a political system that  deliberately excluded a great deal of the indigeanous politicians -- but anyone associated, thought to be associated with the previous regime, in a kind of blanket attempt to remake Iraqi politics.  Now the conclusions of the book are broadly sobering and pessimistic.  That certainly the elite pact has not been reformed in spite of Iraqiya's electoral victory in the 2010 elections, that sectarian politics and sectarian rhetoric that mobilized Iraqi politics from 2003 to 2010 has come back into fashion with the prime minister himself using coded sectarian language to seek to solidify his electoral base among Iraqis.  And basically the only thing that has been rebuilt since 2003 are Iraq's military and they now employ 933,000 people which is equal to 8% of the country's entire workforce or 12% of the population of adutl males.  However, running parallel to that, the civilian capacity of the Iraqi state is still woefully inadequate.  In 2011, the United Nations estimated that there only 16% of the population were covered by the public sewers network, that leaves 83% of the country's waste water untreated, 25% of the population has no access to clean, running water and the Iraqi Knowledge Network in 2011 estimated that an average Iraqi household only gets 7 and a half hours of electricity a day. Now in the middle of the winter, that might not seem like a big issue.  But in the burning hot heat of Basra in the summer  or, indeed, in Baghdad, Iraq has suffered  a series of heatwaves over the last few years.  Not getting enough elecriticy to make your fan or air conditioning work means that you're in a living hell.   This is in spite of the fact that the Iraqi and US governments have collectively spent $200 billion seeking to rebuild the Iraqi state. So I think the conclusions of the Adelphi are rather pessimistic.  The Iraqi state, it's coercive arm, has been rebuilt but precious little beside that has.  But what I want to do is look, this afternoon, is look at the ramifications of that rather slude rebuilding -- a large powerful army and a weak civil institutions of the state.  And I thought I might exemplify this by examining a single signficant event that occurred on the afternoon of Thursday the 20th of December 2012.  That afternoon, government security forces raided the house of Iraq's Minister of Finance, Dr. Rafaa al-Issawi.  Issawi is a leading member of the Iraqiya coalition that in 2010 won a slim majority of seats in the Iraqi Parliament -- 91 to [State of Law's] 89 on a 62% turnout.  Now the ramifications of attempting to arrest Issawi and indeed arresting a number of his bodyguards and prosecuting his chief bodyguard for alleged terrorist offenses cannot be overstated.  In the aftermath of the elections, there were a series of tortured, fractured, very bad tempered negotiations which finally resulted in the creation of another government of national unity and, much more importantly, let Nouri al-Maliki, the prime minister since 2006, to retain the office of the prime ministership.  Issawi as MInister of Finance is probably the most important, most powerful Iraqiya politician to gain office in the country.  He won plaudits in his professional handling of the Ministry of Finance and attempted to push himself above the political fray not to engage in the rather aggressive, knockabout political rhetoric that has come to identify Iraqi politics.  So in arresting or seeking the arrest of Issawi and charging him with offenses of terrorism, clearly what Prime Minister al-Maliki is doing is throwing down a gauntlet, attempting to seize further power and bring it into the office of the prime minister.  Issawi, when his house was raided, rang the prime minister to ask him who had authorized it -- a call the prime minister refused to take.  He [Issawi] then fled seeking sanctuary in the house of the Speaker of Parliament, a fellow Iraqiya politician, Osama al-Nujaifi.  He then held a press conference where he said -- and this is a politician not prone to wild rhetoric, not prone to political populism -- he said, "Maliki now wants to just get rid of his partners, to build a dictatorship.  He wants to consolidate power more and more."  Now if this wasn't so disturbing, the attack on Issawi's house triggers memories of a very similar event almost 12 months before, on the same day that the final American troops left Iraq in December 2011, Iraqi security forces led by the prime minister's son laid seige to Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi's house.  Hashemi was subsequently allowed to leave to the Kurdish Regional Government's capital of Erbil but a number of his bodyguards were arrested, two of them were tortured to death and the rest of them were paraded on television where they 'confessed' to activities of terrorism.  So basically now let me turn to explain what the raid on Issawi's house in December 2012 is representative of -- what I've called in the book, the rise of the new authoritarianism.  And this authoritarianism has been driven forward by Nouri al-Maliki  who was first appointed prime minister in the early months of 2006.  Now quite fascinatingly why Nouri al-Maliki was appointed was at the time he was seen as a grey politician.  He was the second in command of the Islamic Dawa Party -- a party that was seeking to maximize the vote of Iraq's Shia popluation but a party that had no internal militia, that had no military force of its own.  So it was seen by the competing, fractured ruling elite of Iraq as not posing a threat.  Now upon  taking office in April 2006, Maliki was confronted by the very issue that had given rise to his appointment, his inability to govern.  Under the Iraqi system in 2006, the office of the prime minister was seen as a consensus vehicle.  Maliki was sought to negotiate between the US Ambassador, the American head of the Multi National Coalition and other Iraqi politicians.  He wasn't seen as a first among equals.  What Maliki has done since 2006,  is successfully consolidate power in his own hands.  He first seized control of the Islamic Dawa Party, his own party, and then he built up a small and cohesive group of functionaries, known in Iraq as the Malikiyoun  -- a group of people, friends, followers, but also his family, his son, his nephew and his son-in-law and he's placed them in key points across the Iraqi state, seeking to circumvent the Cabinet -- the official vestibule of power in the Iraqi state -- and seize control of Iraq's institutions.
 
If you're not frightened for the Iraqi people, you're not paying attention.  If you're an American, you're being strongly encouraged not to pay attention by the US government that screwed up and destroyed the country of Iraq and by a guilty US press that sold the illegal war, has blood on its hands and doesn't have any desire to get honest about the realities in Iraq today.
 
 

Turning to the US where Bradley Manning has spent his 970th day behind bars, still waiting for a trial.   Monday April 5, 2010, WikiLeaks released US military video of a July 12, 2007 assault in Iraq. 12 people were killed in the assault including two Reuters journalists Namie Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh. Monday June 7, 2010, the US military announced that they had arrested Bradley Manning and he stood accused of being the leaker of the video. Leila Fadel (Washington Post) reported in August 2010 that Manning had been charged -- "two charges under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. The first encompasses four counts of violating Army regulations by transferring classified information to his personal computer between November and May and adding unauthorized software to a classified computer system. The second comprises eight counts of violating federal laws governing the handling of classified information." In March, 2011, David S. Cloud (Los Angeles Times) reported that the military has added 22 additional counts to the charges including one that could be seen as "aiding the enemy" which could result in the death penalty if convicted. The Article 32 hearing took place in December. At the start of this year, there was an Article 32 hearing and, February 3rd, it was announced that the government would be moving forward with a court-martial. Bradley has yet to enter a plea and has neither affirmed that he is the leaker nor denied it. The court-martial was supposed to begin before the election but it was postponed until after the election so that Barack wouldn't have to run on a record of his actual actions. 
 
 
 
HARI SREENIVASAN:  And joining me now to talk about it is Arun Rath of PBS' "Frontline" and PRI's "The World."  He has been covering the Manning case from the beginning. 
So, Arun, this is sort of what sets the ground rules for what will happen in the trial, right?

ARUN RATH, "Frontline":  Yes.
Basically, in these hearings, these pretrial hearings, they're basically arguing about the kind of arguments they can make in court, the parameters of the sort of arguments that Bradley Manning and his defense can make in terms of defending themselves against these charges. 
What's a little bit unusual about the hearings that we have been seeing so far is that they have turned into more of a bit of a dress rehearsal for the trial itself and for what might be his sentencing, actually, because his attorneys have already essentially admitted in their court -- in their pleadings so far that Bradley Manning is responsible for the leaks. 
So it's changed from a situation of the trial being did he really do it to, yes, he did, but here are the reasons why we think it doesn't rise to the level of being a crime.  
 
[. . .]
 
HARI SREENIVASAN:  OK.  You have been in court.  You have had the chance to see Bradley Manning a few weeks ago.  What does he look like?  And what impresses you about him?

ARUN RATH:  I have say, of all the people that have been called to the stand, Bradley Manning came across as the most appealing witness. 
He was, I wouldn't say charming -- it's not sort of a traditional charisma, but there's something about the fact that he's a young, kind of geeky kid.  He's a little bit awkward.  And he comes across as a sympathetic character.  He was talking about the ways in which he was held in Quantico in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day. 
And he talked about this peculiar kind of a classic catch-22 situation, where he would do these things during the day to keep himself scene, like talking to himself in a mirror or dancing in his cell, as a way to break the tedium to keep himself sane, and at the same time these things were used as evidence against him as evidence that he was actually mentally unstable.  
 
Finally, let's switch over to England where certain sections of the Socialist Workers Party is in the midst of a major panic as they attempt to deny violence against women. (Elaine wrote of this earlier this week and did a great job.)  What has happened in England has happened a lot and to happen at all is too much.  For example, I will not be promoting any damn thing Eve Ensler and her talking vagina does.  Friends keep asking.  Not interested.  She stayed silent as one woman after another was attacked.  Now the woman wants to use 'girl power' again to promote herself.  You want to stop rape?  Stop the attacks on women who come forward to report rape.  Eve Ensler couldn't go against her radical buddies and speak out so she's of no use to anyone.  In England, Laurie Penny's taking on a very important issue.  From her ZNet piece:
 
The British Socialist Worker's Party is hardly atypical among political parties, among left-wing groups, among organisations of committed people or, indeed, among groups of friends and colleagues in having structures in place that might allow sexual abuse and misogyny by men in positions of power to continue unchecked. One could point, in the past 12 months alone, to the BBC's handling of the Jimmy Savile case, or to those Wikileaks supporters who believe that Julian Assange should not be compelled to answer allegations of rape and sexual assault in Sweden.
I could point, personally, to at least two instances involving respected men that have sundered painfully and forever friendship groups which lacked the courage to acknowledge the incidents. The only difference is that the SWP actually talk openly about the unspoken rules by which this sort of intimidation usually goes on. Other groups are not so brazen as to say that their moral struggles are simply more important than piffling issues of feminism, even if that's what they really mean, nor to claim that as right-thinking people they and their leaders are above the law. The SWP's leadership seem to have written it into their rules.
To say that the left has a problem with handling sexual violence is not to imply that everyone else doesn't. There is, however, a stubborn refusal to accept and deal with rape culture that is unique to the left and to progressives more broadly. It is precisely to do with the idea that, by virtue of being progressive, by virtue of fighting for equality and social justice, by virtue of, well, virtue, we are somehow above being held personally accountable when it comes to issues of race, gender and sexual violence.
That unwillingness to analyse our own behaviour can quickly become dogma. The image is one of petty, nitpicking women attempting to derail the good work of decent men on the left by insisting in their whiny little women's way that progressive spaces should also be spaces where we don't expect to get raped and assaulted and slut-shamed and victimised for speaking out, and the emotions are rage and resentment: why should our pure and perfect struggle for class war, for transparency, for freedom from censorship be polluted by - it's pronounced with a curl of the upper lip over the teeth, as if the very word is distasteful - 'identity politics'? Why should we be held more accountable than common-or-garden bigots? Why should we be held to higher standards?
Because if we're not, then we have no business calling ourselves progressive. Because if we don't acknowledge issues of assault, abuse and gender hierarchy within our own institutions we have no business speaking of justice, much less fighting for it.
 
 
 
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