Antiwar.com Blog

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.

Times reports:

Two British undercover soldiers were arrested in by Iraqi authorities in Basra today after exchanging gunfire with Iraqi police and killing one, officials said. The arrests prompted British troops to send a military patrol to the police station where the soldiers are being held which then led to a riot, during which two British tanks were set on fire, according to witnesses.

An Iraqi official told the Reuters news agency that the two British soldiers, who were travelling in a civilian car, were detained this morning. The official said he had been informed by the British military that they were undercover soldiers. "They were driving a civilian car and were dressed in civilian clothes when a shooting took place between them and Iraqi patrols," he said. "We are investigating and an Iraqi judge is on the case questioning them." A Basra police source said the two men, who he said were wearing Arab costume, had opened fired at a police patrol when they were asked to stop. Photographs of the British soldiers showed them with light beards. One of them was wearing bandage around his head. A spokesman for the Ministry of Defence confirmed that two British soldiers were in Iraqi custody but said he was unsure of the circumstances of their arrest. "We are urgently liaising with the Iraqis to find out what is happening," said the spokesman, who declined to comment on reports of the events that followed the arrests. Ismail al-Waili, head of Basra’s Security Committee, told the Associated Press that once news of the gun battle spread, British soldiers surrounded the building where men are being held and a crowd quickly gathered. Reports and television pictures showed the crowd pelting the British vehicles with stones and setting two tanks on fire. Soldiers could be seen scrambling out of the tanks.

itv adds:

The tank is seen coming under attack, apparently from petrol bombs.

A crowd gathers around the tank as it tries to reverse away from trouble.

Within moments the top of the tank was ablaze, although it was not clear if the vehicle itself was on fire or if the flames came from materials burning on top of the tank.

One soldier climbed out of the tank’s hatch and jumped clear of it, as the crowd pelted him with stones.

AWC reader DB sends in this additional Reuters photo from Yahoo:

Riverbend is blogging about the draft Iraqi constitutions.

Saturday on the Weekend Interview Show (6-8 pm eastern), I’ll be talking with Lew Rockwell from the Mises Intitute about economics, Katrina and the war. In the second hour, I’ll be talking again with Antiwar.com’s own Gordon Prather about Iran and North Korea.

Update: Show’s over, archives here.