That’s the theme of today’s news round-up. Law and order (or the lack thereof) seems to be the thread that links these stories together. Strangely enough “law and order” seems to work in certain powerful people’s favor.
For example, take looting. We’ve all heard by now how Rumsfeld lightly dismissed looting as people exercising freedoms as “stuff” that happens - even in the US. But is looting limited to stealing kitchen sinks, drapes and knick-knacks? Here is a humorous attempt to understand just why Rumsfeld could exhibit such sang froid concerning the break down of law and order in Iraq:
Looting: as American as apple pie
It would seem that looting (as depicted in the cartoon above) may even be a prerequisite of political preferment with the Bushies. First Kenny boy Lay and the whole Enron etc crowd, and now Ahmed Chalabi – who ran his own Enron-type looting operation in the Middle East before running away (literally):
Our man in Iraq
An Iraqi aristocrat who fled Jordanian justice in the trunk of a car is now back in Baghdad as a possible U.S. choice to lead post-Saddam Iraq, and his return could prove a headache for neighboring Jordan.
Ahmad Chalabi, the scion of a wealthy Shi'ite Muslim family, left for Syria in a hurry in 1989 after the collapse of the bank he founded shook Jordan's political and financial system.
The controversial politician with close ties to Washington returned to Baghdad on Wednesday for the first time since going into exile as a schoolboy in 1958.
"Our problem does not stem from the fact that he is an Iraqi opposition member but that he is wanted in Jordan and convicted of a criminal offence and that is why we have serious reservations about Mr Chalabi," Foreign Minister Marwan Muasher was quoted as saying this week.
Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi National Congress, was the first major political exile to reach Baghdad after Saddam Hussein's government collapsed last week.
After his flight from Jordan, authorities unravelled a web of gross irregularities involving the siphoning off millions of dollars of depositors' money to Chalabi's offshore funds.
Maybe it runs in the family
Fresh information has emerged of banking scandals involving the family of the Pentagon's preferred candidate to shape post-war Iraq, Ahmad Chalabi.
Dr Chalabi's brother, Jawad, confirmed that he and another brother, Hazem, had been convicted by the Swiss authorities of false accounting in connection with the collapse of Socofi, an investment firm in Dr Chalabi's widespread financial empire.
He also confirmed that a Genevan bank linked to Mr Chalabi, Mebco, had its banking licence withdrawn by the Swiss federal banking commission in April 1989, and also collapsed.
No wonder the Bushies are so comfortable with Chalabi – he’s just like them: rich, pampered and corrupt!
Yet somehow I don’t think that Rumsfeld or Cheney or Bush would be as comfortable with looting if it were the employees of Enron who were taking “frontier justice” into their own hands and assaulting the mansions of Kenny boy Lay and other Enron malefactors… It seems that Junior and his cronies only like to bend, break or circumvent the law when the results are in their favor - as illustrated by our next story:
Cheney above law?
A government lawyer for Vice President Cheney received a scolding yesterday from a panel of federal appeals judges over the Bush administration's use of an unusual legal maneuver to avoid disclosing information about Cheney's energy policy task force.
Arguing for Cheney, Justice Department lawyer Gregory G. Katsas said that the appellate court should intervene to halt a district court effort to force Cheney to release records about the task force. But Judge Harry T. Edwards, the senior jurist on the three-member panel hearing the case, said it was hard to see why the case merited preemptive action.
"There's not one single case anywhere that supports what you're asking," Edwards… told Katsas. Edwards said that in asking the appeals court to intervene, the government was ignoring American jurisprudence. "You pretend there's no law on the books," he said. "You have no case."
The spirited scene at the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington was the latest development in a two-year effort by public-interest groups and Congress to obtain information such as who attended those meetings and for what purpose.
Imagine! Our present regime ignoring American jurisprudence! Pretending there’s no law on the books. Pretty much sums up the fear and intimidation campaign they’ve been cranking up to stifle and silence domestic criticism… Of course, you only need tolerate domestic criticism in a functioning democracy. We’ve already seen what contempt the Bush regime and their Supremo cronies have for the will of the people
So what about the current waves of protest in Iraq?
Has democracy come to Iraq?
Tens of thousands of Iraqi Muslims took to the streets of Baghdad after Friday prayers today to demand the departure of U.S. and other foreign troops and the establishment of an Islamic state. …
Converging from several mosques, the demonstrators carried banners with such slogans as "No Bush, No Saddam, Yes to Islam," and "No to America, No to Secular State, Yes to Islamic State." Organizers said the demonstrators included both Shiite Muslims and Sunnis, who represent the majority branch of Islam is most Muslim countries but a minority in Iraq.
"We are Sunni and Shiite brothers, we will not sell this nation," some of them chanted, according to the Reuters news agency.
Hmmm an Islamic Republic in Iraq – wasn’t it in order to prevent just such an outcome that Rumsfeld and other GOPers first propped up Saddam during the 80s?
Yet this is not an isolated setback - here’s another example of how Bush’s war has made the world more dangerous and the US more vulnerable – by encouraging nations to seek nuclear weapons:
How Bush’s war has made us more vulnerable… an ongoing series
In a cryptic statement, North Korea's official news agency said the country had been reprocessing spent rods from its nuclear power plant, a process used to extract weapons-grade plutonium. Over a decade of wrangling over the North Korean nuclear program, U.S. officials dating back to the Clinton administration have deemed the reprocessing of the fuel rods a "red line" whose crossing would never be tolerated and might even be a cause for war.
The North Korean statement implied that the United States already knew about the reprocessing of the fuel rods and in fact had been notified by North Korea itself last month. If true, that raises the possibility that the Bush administration kept quiet about the growing crisis in North Korea to avoid complications during the war with Iraq.
The lesson of Iraq is…
North Korea said today it was in the final stages of reprocessing more than 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods, which intelligence experts say could allow it to build several atomic bombs within months. …
A North Korean foreign ministry spokesman emphasised the importance that the North sees in a military deterrent to stave off a possible US attack in the wake of the war against Iraq.
"The Iraqi war teaches a lesson that in order to prevent a war and defend the security of a country and the sovereignty of a nation it is necessary to have a powerful physical deterrent force only," the unnamed spokesman told North Korea's official news agency, KCNA.
Now that Bush has reintroduced the “law of the jungle” into international affairs this should not be a surprise. And for what? Not to prevent the proliferation of WMD:
US admits weapons may not be found in Iraq
US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld… has conceded that it is possible no weapons [of mass destruction] would be found at all.
The United States, which used allegations of Iraqi weapons programs as justification for its invasion, has yet to turn up chemical, biological or nuclear weapons or hard evidence Iraq was developing the banned weapons.
(Also see here for an in-depth analysis of this issue.)
But I would be remiss if I only focused on the negative effects that Bush’s war has had on law and order in foreign affairs. What about those freedoms that separate us from the Taliban? Aren’t the US’s unique freedoms the very reason bin Laden hates us?
If so then what can be said of the Bush regime? Wasn’t much of the praise heaped upon it after 9/11 due to the fact that it didn’t simply start harassing all US citizens of Arab descent? If so, then what does one say when they start?
Didn’t BushCo pledge not to do this?
FBI agents this year questioned nearly 10,000 citizens and former citizens of Iraq living in the United States, as part of an effort to glean intelligence to help the U.S.-led war in their homeland and to head off any terrorist attacks planned to coincide with the military effort, Attorney General John Ashcroft said Thursday.…
"We know of five formal complaints on one score alone -- agents accosting people at their work, which the FBI had agreed not to do because of the impression it might give employers or colleagues that the interviewee was in some way seen as a threat," said Hussein Ibish, of the American-Arab Anti-discrimination Committee -- a civil rights group that had attorneys or other third party observers at about 200 of the interviews.
Ibish said that some of the interviews were conducted in an "intimidating" manner -- although he added that this was normally the fault of the people who were conducting the policy, rather than the policy itself.
"We (in the Arab-American community) have a great deal of experience with these so-called voluntarily interviews," he said. "The tone -- and the type and tone of questions -- depends a lot on the expectations and attitude of both parties involved. Do the questioners have a belligerent and combative approach? Do they see themselves as inquisitors? Do they view the subject with suspicion or in a neutral way? Is the subject relaxed and confident? Or is he nervous?"
In some cases, said Ibish, attempts by interviewees to exercise their constitutional prerogative not to answer certain questions were treated as "hostile acts" by agents.
Jean Abinader, of the Arab-American Institute -- a Washington-based research organization -- said that his group was aware of at least 100 complaints -- mainly concerning people being told they could not bring a lawyer, or being asked about their visa status -- but pointed out that this number was still a very small proportion of the 10,000 interviews.
"The great majority of the interviews were conducted in the proper way ... I think the reason it went so well was that FBI Director Mueller called in our organizations -- the Arab-American and American Muslim organizations -- and said 'I need your help.' By involving the community, it helped the interviews to go a lot more smoothly than they would have ... it raised the comfort level."
There was also controversy about the effectiveness of the program.
"These round ups that they've been doing have not been effective in tracking down terrorists," said Abinader, "It's because they've been using a dragnet approach instead of good law enforcement."
"They're looking at the haystack instead of for the needle," he concluded.
These are extraordinary times – but that is no excuse to surrender our hard-won liberties. Indeed it is precisely due to the times that such liberties must be defended all the more jealously – because such times encourage naked opportunism.
If “conservatism” ever meant anything it should mean conserving the very liberties that make this country great. Now is the time for true conservatives to make common cause with liberals already fighting to prevent the descent of the US into banana-republic status: a status where personal interests count for more than public ballots and media courtiers who owe their positions to connections freely slander patriots who defend freedom of conscience and freedom of speech.
3:14:22 PM 
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