Antiwar.com Blog

The Battle of Basra, where British troops “rescued” two out-of-uniform British soldiers who’d gotten into a contretemps with Iraqi police, gets more fascinating by the moment. A news item put out by China’s Xinhua News Agency’s contains the following fascinating paragraph:

“‘Two persons wearing Arab uniforms opened fire at a police station in Basra. A police patrol followed the attackers and captured them to discover they were two British soldiers,’ an Interior Ministry source told Xinhua. The two soldiers were using a civilian car packed with explosives, the source said.”

By “Arab uniforms” they no doubt mean traditional Arab dress, long flow-y Lawrence of Arabia drag, but as for the explosives ….

I’m not sure how much truth there is in this report, but the source doesn’t necessarily rule it out. After all, what were those two Brit Special Forces types doing out of uniform — and seemingly gone native? They were apparently riding around Basra, with whatever it was they had in their car: explosives, surveillance devices, or maybe just candy to hand out to children….

The more we learn about this war, the more sinister the picture that emerges. Check out my recent column on this subject, but here I’m talking about an aspect of the Basra incident that deserves particular attention. What sort of mission were those two British soldiers, from an elite unit, embarked on before they were spotted and arrested? If Iraqi “sovereignty” doesn’t deserve the ironic quote marks, then an explantion, preferably one that sounds like an apology, will be forthcoming.

However, if I were an Iraqi government official, let alone a relative of those killed, I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Writing on his famous weblog, Andrew Sullivan has always tried to balance his various manias — the wonders of homosexuality, the glories of war — so that one didn’t necessarily overshadow the other. Now, however, he’s shown us where his priorities are with this blog entry hailing Harvard for caving in to the Pentagon’s threat to invoke the evil Solomon Amendment — cutting off federal aid — if they didn’t let in military recruiters. In any conflict between c*cksucking and warmongering, with Sullivan the latter wins out. Now thats what I call true patriotism.

I see that Arianna Huffington has finally discovered the John Bolton -Plame scandal connection. Of course, Antiwar.com’s readers were in on this waaaay back in July:

“After the War Party met in solemn conclave, and the command went out from Cheney: ‘Bring me the head of Joe Wilson!’, there was only one logical place for Cheney’s minions to go. Who in the administration would’ve had access to the specific information regarding Plame-Wilson’s role in a deep-cover CIA operation involving nuclear proliferation? Why, the man who was the State Department deputy secretary in charge of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ – the somewhat irritable if not downright reckless John Bolton, would-be ambassador to the UN, who played a central role in promulgating the Niger Uranium Myth.”

Not to denigrate Arianna’s gossip grapevine as a source of news, but only to point out that it merely confirms what in-the-know cognoscenti read here first.

Now if only Arianna hadn’t kicked me off her blog for not being appreciative enough of Israel — not to mention dissing Huffpuff contributor Mrs. David Frum — Huffpuff’s readers would have had this story months ago.

Oh well, what was that old adage about pearls and swine ….?

In a move that is sure to send fissures through the Democratic party “leadership,” antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan is squaring off against Hillary Clinton:

“Sheehan isn’t stopping her critique with Bush. On the contrary, she has begun to set her sights on Congress and the Democratic Party as well. When she spoke in Brooklyn on the night before, she took note of the fact that Senator Hillary Clinton voted to authorize Bush to use force in Iraq and– like most Senate Democrats–has done little to bring the troops home. Clinton, in fact, has filed legislation calling for more troops.

“In an interview after her speech, Sheehan told the Voice she was ‘so frustrated’ by leading Democrats like Clinton ‘who should be leaders on this issue, but are not.’ Already, she has set up a future meeting with New York’s junior senator this weekend. And she plans to sit down with the state’s senior senator, Chuck Schumer, too. ‘It’s time for them to step up and be the opposition party,’ she said. ‘This war is not going to end unless the Democrats are on board with us.’”

Good luck with those meetings, Cindy — especially the one with Hillary — but if I were you I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for the Democratic party to step up to the plate. You’ll remember that the legislation authorizing U.S efforts to intervene in Iraq, the “Iraq Liberation Act,” was sponsored by Hillary’s hubby, the Great Pants-Dropper, and Senator Schumer was one of the more vociferous in supporting the bill.

Yes, it’s true that a great many rank-and-file Democrats are opposed to this war, and, unlike Hillary and her fellow Hillary-crats, don’t want to send additional troops to Iraq to “finish the job.” However, they don’t control the Democratic party, which has slavishly tied itself to neoconservative foreign policy goals — albeit with a slightly different emphasis than the Republicans.

This is a learning process that the anti-war left is going through, and it will be interesting to see how it develops. We can, in any case, be sure of this: Cindy and her admirers will come away from this looming confrontation with the Democratic party leadership with a far more realistic view of “who should be leaders on this issue” — and, more importantly, who are their friends, and who qualifies as an enemy.

UPDATE: According to my sources, the meeting with Schumer did not go well, to begin with, because he refused to meet with her, and instead sent an aide. She asked the aide if Senator Schumer would help in the effort to bring this war to an end, and the aide replied that: “Senator Schumer thinks this war is good for America.” According to the source, Sheehan walked out, remarking “Wel, I guess this means Schumer thinks my son’s death was good for America.” Or words to that effect.

Juan Cole (start at the link and read the next two posts as well) has assembled a timeline of events in Basra which is helpful in understanding yesterday’s chaos, while lenin parses MOD’s ongoing bizarre series of statements.

As yet, the Iraqi and British stories are still at odds.

Mohammed al-Waili, the governor of Basra province, condemned the British for raiding the prison, an act he called “barbaric, savage and irresponsible”

“A British force of more than 10 tanks backed by helicopters attacked the central jail and destroyed it. This is an irresponsible act,” al-Waili said, adding that the British force had spirited the prisoners away to an unknown location.

In other violence in Basra, an Iraqi journalist working for the New York Times was killed in a manner frighteningly similar to the murder of Steve Vincent after men claiming to be police officers abducted him from his home. The Times reports:

An Iraqi journalist investigating the infiltration of Basra’s police force by extremists from the Shia militia was abducted and killed by masked men who identified themselves as police.

Fakher Haider, a 38-year-old Shia Muslim reporter covering Basra for The New York Times, was found dead with his hands bound and a bag over his head in a deserted area on the city’s outskirts yesterday morning.

On Sunday, Haider filed reports about the angry demonstrations that followed the arrest by British forces of two high-ranking members of the Mahdi Army, the militia loyal to the hardline Shia cleric Moktada al-Sadr.

Shortly after midnight, two cars – one unmarked, the other a police car – were driven up to his apartment building. Three men, carrying AK-47 assault rifles, ransacked the flat removing mobile phones and videotapes.

Haider, a father with three children aged 5, 7and 9, told his wife not to worry as he was led outside and bundled into one of the waiting vehicles.

Hours later, she was called to identify his body at the city morgue. He appeared to have been shot more than once in the head. His back was bruised, suggesting he had been beaten.

In recent months, Haider had confided to friends that he was worried about the increasingly violent atmosphere in Basra. In July, gunmen in a pick-up truck chased his car and fired at him – he escaped after driving off-road and firing his pistol into the air, he told a friend.

Many of Haider’s most recent photographs, showing British military vehicles targeted in Basra, had been published on the ironically-titled They Love Us Really website which highlights the difficult relationship between locals and the coalition forces.

Among the images is a chilling picture of US consulate workers loading the body of Steven Vincent, a freelance journalist attached to the New York Times who was executed in Basra last month, into the back of an ambulance.

Vincent, too, had been inquiring into the extent to which the police force in Basra had become a tool of Shia extremists. Their deaths have taken on an enhanced political significance with the breakdown of relations between the local police force and British troops based in the city following yesterday’s prison ram-raid.

The website the Times mistakenly reports as “They Love Us Really” is actually Crisis Pictures. Here’s the page of Basra photos, including the Steve Vincent shots.

Cindy Sheehan spoke to about 150 people in Union Square today — but her talk was cut short when a NYPD goon squad charged into the crowd, yanked her off the stage, and pulled the plug on the rally. Whole story here. It isn’t clear if she was arrested or not: this story says she was.

Remember how the last major antiwar march in NYC had such a hard time getting a permit? The little commissars over at the New York Sun were agitating to delay granting the march a permit as long as possible:

“Mayor Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Kelly are doing the people of New York and the people of Iraq a great service by delaying and obstructing the anti-war protest planned for February 15. The longer they delay in granting the protesters a permit, the less time the organizers have to get their turnout organized, and the smaller the crowd is likely to be.”

The neocons know they can’t win the argument over this war, so they’re turning to the State to minimize and even crush the antiwar opposition.

With all the serious crimes [.pdf file] being committed in New York City’s 13th Precinct, you would think the cops would have better things to do.

Don’t let them get away with it. Call the 13th Precinct and tell them this is still America, bud, and you can’t do that!

Here are the phone numbers:

PRECINCT (212) 477-7411
COMMUNITY AFFAIRS (212) 477-7427
COMMUNITY POLICING (212) 477-7446
CRIME PREVENTION (212) 477-7427
DOMESTIC VIOLENCE (212) 477-3863
YOUTH OFFICER (212) 477-7411
AUXILIARY COORDINATOR (212) 477-7446
DETECTIVE SQUAD (212) 477-7444

UPDATE: It turns out that Cindy Sheehan wasn’t arrested, but she was roughed up in the police-provoked melee:

“‘I was speaking and someone grabbed my backpack and pulled me back pretty roughly,’ Sheehan said, describing the scene at Manhattan’s Union Square on Monday. ‘I was shoved around. ‘I think their use of force was pretty excessive for someone that didn’t have a permit.'”

Paul Zulkowitz, the rally organizer, was arrested and taken into custody. The charge: conducting a rally without a sound permit. When this happened in Ukraine, the U.S. sent millions of dollars in covert aid to the opposition, and denounced the authorities as aspiring dictators.