Iraq Archives — Page 26 of 32 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

Brothers in arms

April 3, 2007

› cheryl@sfbg.com

In a vulnerable country occupied by a foreign power, civilian frustration leads to anger, which soon explodes into a violent, uncontainable insurgent movement. It could be ripped from today’s headlines — but The Wind That Shakes the Barley is set in 1920s Ireland, where the oppressors are the British and the rebels are members of the nascent Irish Republican Army.

Directed by Ken Loach (Bread and Roses) in his trademark naturalistic style (few close-ups, overlapping dialogue) and with immaculate attention to period detail, Wind makes the guerrillas sympathetic — to a point. But it’s also a film that avoids drawing strict boundaries; it exactly captures the uncertainty that arises when conflict and emotion become hopelessly tangled. At the beginning, brothers Teddy (Pádraic Delaney) and Damien (Cillian Murphy, the only cast member with a Hollywood hand stamp) know precisely where they stand. Tensions between British soldiers and Irish villagers are already sky-high when the young men are accosted by the Black and Tans for daring to hold a forbidden public meeting (really a harmless sporting match). Amid the shouting and gun pointing, an Irish teen refuses to speak his name in English, with fatal consequences.

With that first act of brutality, Wind ‘s tone is set. It’s war, and a dirty one at that. Damien abandons his med-school plans to join the fiery Teddy in his quest to drive out the Brits. As hostility escalates — humiliation, torture, and cold-blooded execution are the daily norm — Damien becomes more warrior than intellectual, a changeover that crystallizes once he’s asked to perform a terrible deed in the name of the cause. "I hope this Ireland we’re fighting for is worth it," he mutters.

But is it, at least for Damien? The affairs of state play out as you’d expect; for our benefit, events are explained via a newsreel the townsfolk watch in the local movie theater. The headline "Peace Treaty Signed by British and Irish Leaders!" is greeted first with cheers, then chagrin when it’s revealed the country will still be a dominion of the British empire and Northern Ireland will still be part of the United Kingdom. Clearly, there’s no way the bloody mess in the countryside will be tidily ended by a piece of paper signed by far-off dignitaries.

For Teddy and Damien, the ruling forces an impenetrable wedge between them. Teddy accepts the compromise, figuring he’ll work within the system to change it — for him, "this Ireland" is worth it. Damien’s actions during the war have pushed him to the point of no return; he has no choice but to keep fighting. When the brothers have their climactic clash, even their deep love for each other can’t overcome their political beliefs.

Wind was the Palme d’Or winner at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, a surprise victory for a movie that seems, at least on paper, to be about a pretty specific moment in Irish history. The tale of two brothers is admittedly an obvious storytelling device — check your Civil War cinema for other me-versus-him tales, or foreign epics such as the 2004 Korean drama Taegukgi: The Brotherhood of War. Wind ‘s leg up is its echoing of current events; you can’t help but watch the film through the framing of the nightly news. It could be in rural Ireland, it could be in rural Iraq, but fighting for freedom can take many forms, with all involved believing victory for their side will produce the only acceptable result. But what happens when the clear-cut realms of a battlefield mutate into the murky waters of courts, laws, and governments? To paraphrase Damien, it’s easy to know what you’re against — but another thing entirely to figure out what you’re for. *

THE WIND THAT SHAKES THE BARLEY

Opens Fri/6 in Bay Area theaters

See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com

From Iraq and back

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April 3, 2007
0

› amanda@sfbg.com

Omar Fekeiki sits alertly at a café table on the terrace of International House, his dorm at UC Berkeley. His straight posture belies his relative ease. It’s the only sign that he may not be entirely at home.

Like any other 28-year-old graduate student, he’s wearing jeans — not the pressed slacks necessary for a meeting with Iraqi officials. His hands are resting on his knees, rather than poised with a pen and a reporter’s notepad, scribbling Arabic words from an informed source. His smooth, tan face, with just a hint of unshorn shadow, is turned up toward a mild afternoon sun, not away from the heat of a Baghdad noon. The dark stubble on his head is no longer covered by a helmet. His slim chest is free to breathe without the pressure of a flak jacket. His heart may or may not be racing, but it’s definitely beating.

It’s difficult to believe that the quiet cell phone on the table in front of him once rang regularly with field reports of car bombings, kidnappings, and execution-style shootings. It’s unsettling to think it could ring now, that something irrevocable could be happening at home, 7,500 miles away, as he sits in this idle sunshine.

What does Fekeiki find unbelievable? That he’s in the United States, that he’s finally on his way toward a real life, studying journalism at one of the best universities in the world.

"It was not even a dream," he told the Guardian with the careful pronunciation that can sound like a proclamation often heard in the voices of nonnative English speakers. "It’s something beyond a dream. It was such an impossible thing to do. Now I flash back memories of when I spent hours on the phone with my best friend. We would say, ‘Could you imagine if we could go to the States and find work and live there?’ I always think about this and say, ‘Wow, I’m lucky.’ "

According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, at least 3.9 million Iraqis have fled their homes since the US invasion. Half are displaced within their country, and the other two million have crossed borders, with 700,000 in nearby Jordan, 100,000 in Egypt, and 60,000 finding a sort of solace in Sweden.

By contrast, in four years only 692 Iraqis have been resettled in the United States. Despite the danger at home and a flood of applications, the State Department routinely denies Iraqi visa applications, apparently believing Iraqis need to stay home to rebuild their tattered country. Of the record 591,000 student visas given last year, only 112 went to Iraqis, an increase from 46 in 2005.

"I waited months," said Fekeiki, who thinks his affiliation as a special correspondent with the Washington Post is what got him the necessary piece of paper in the nick of time.

But his status here is temporary, and even though a civil war rages in the streets of his hometown and no US, UN, or Iraqi politician has yet to forcefully present a viable solution to the quagmire, he has no plans to apply for citizenship.

"Every Iraqi I know in the States now doesn’t want to go back. I don’t blame them," he said. But staying here is not for him. And that’s the other unbelievable thing about Fekeiki: he can’t wait to return to Baghdad.

"I belong in Iraq."

FINDING HIS POST

Fekeiki says he’s always been lucky, and April 2003 was no exception. The day after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s government, Fekeiki was hoping to track down a BBC reporter at the Palestine Hotel who might lend him a phone to make a "we’re alive" call to his uncle in London. He noticed a Washington Post reporter struggling to interview a civilian and stopped to lend a hand. The reporter was impressed with Fekeiki’s translation and suggested he go to the paper’s offices and see about a job.

He did and was temporarily hired by bureau chief Rajiv Chandrasekaran, but after a week he was let go. The Post had enough translators. "He was pretty young, just out of school," Chandrasekaran told the Guardian. The Post did, however, make a point of noting the directions to the young man’s house in case it ever needed him. In a matter of days the paper was knocking on his door.

Initially, Fekeiki continued working as a translator but quickly graduated to fixer, a sort of guide to the Post journalists — scouting out stories, digging up contacts, arranging transportation and interviews. Within weeks he was the bureau’s office manager, overseeing a busy newsroom of 42 American and Iraqi journalists who were all older than him and vastly more experienced.

Chandrasekaran says one thing he always told his Post colleagues was to listen to the Iraqi staff. "They have a better sense of when something is going bad. I empowered people like Omar to put their foot down, to say no."

That empowerment, coupled with the important tasks of monitoring news wires and Iraqi and American television stations, dispatching staff to daily disasters, and maintaining order in the office, suited Fekeiki. He rose to the challenge and fell in love with his job. Pretty soon he was contributing to stories, then writing his own and, to his surprise, really enjoying the work.

Raised by a family of journalists and writers, Fekeiki never thought he’d be one. His father, a former politician and vocal critic of Hussein, had lived the nomadic life of an exile as a punishment for his writing. Fekeiki grew up with wiretapped phones, regular house searches, and a father with his neck in a threatened noose. He was taught that if you wrote what the government approved, you’d be wasting your time. If you didn’t, you’d be killed.

The motives have changed, but the risk remains. Life was always dicey. Fekeiki was raised with the fear that he would "disappear" if he weren’t carrying the proper card identifying him as a student, not a soldier. Censorship was part of life.

"If you repeat what we say in this house, you will get killed," he was told by his parents. "Imagine saying that to a five-year-old?" he asks. "I had to live with fear all the time."

He could never slip — it would put his family in grave risk. But now, taking up the family tradition and being a journalist in his native country is almost like asking to die.

DEADLY PROFESSION

Targeted violence toward news gatherers is on the rise everywhere, and 2006 was the deadliest year for journalists since 1994, mostly because of Iraq. Though statistics vary depending on the definition of journalist, Reporters Without Borders says 155 journalists and media staff have been killed during the four years of Iraq War coverage. The Committee to Protect Journalists, which investigates every claim and only counts confirmed deaths of credentialed reporters, puts the figure at 97. Both counts already lap the Vietnam War’s 20-year tally of 66, and both organizations say the fallen are overwhelmingly Iraqi.

"I’m hard-pressed to think of a more dangerous profession in the world today than being an Iraqi journalist in Iraq," said Chandrasekaran, who was bureau chief there for 18 months and has covered past conflicts in Afghanistan, Indonesia, and the Philippines. "By spring of 2004 it was too dangerous for Western reporters out in the street."

So journalists came to depend even more on the Iraqis, who were about the only ones able to do on-the-ground reporting after anti-American sentiments and violence took hold.

"You cannot stand in a Baghdad street and do a piece for camera," Robert Mahoney, deputy director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, told us. "An Iraqi journalist can blend in with the local population. They’re the only ones that can literally move around…. I think the only good news is we’re getting any news at all."

Iraqis are the only bridge for any respectable news organization attempting to gain access to what’s going on, but alliances with Americans paint clear targets on their backs. "One of the things that distinguishes this war from others is that most journalists are not being caught in cross fire. They are being murdered," Mahoney said. Murders account for about two-thirds of the Iraqi journalist deaths, and without those reporters, he said, the American public "doesn’t have all the information it should have at their fingertips to make informed decisions."

One wonders if the military and the administration do either. Camille Evans, an Army intelligence sergeant, said during a March 20, 2007, panel of Iraq war veterans at the Commonwealth Club, "For most of our intelligence, we did use CNN."

Though affiliations with Americans put all Iraqi journalists in peril, other risks lie along the sectarian divides. If they work for an independent Iraqi newspaper attempting unbiased journalism, they’re just as bad as Americans. If they spin for one side, they’re targeted by the other. In short, the only agreement between Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias could be their shared attitude toward journalists: work for us or you’re dead.

There were many times Fekeiki believed he would die — when he was covering the November 2004 assault in Fallujah as mortars hummed over his tent, or when he was kidnapped by Mahdi Army fighters who told him, "You will disappear behind the sun," before he managed to escape into a passing ambulance. And then there were the straight-up death threats.

"I was threatened three times," he told us. "The first time, my bureau chief was Karl Vick, and he said, ‘We’ll fly you out to any place you want. We’ll take care of you,’ and I said no. He said, ‘We have to do something. We can’t risk your life.’ I said, ‘OK, I’ll go embed with the Marines in Fallujah, to cover the assault.’ "

Fekeiki saw this as a way to disappear from his neighborhood for a little while but still be involved at the Post and give the paper something he thought it needed — an Iraqi to cover the Iraqi side of the story. "They didn’t have one. The Iraqis in our office didn’t want to do it."

Fekeiki didn’t tell a soul about the second death threat, a letter on his doorstep. "I didn’t want them to fly me out of Iraq. I wanted to stay. I knew that if I told the Post, they would ask me to leave, give me another job somewhere else. I didn’t want that."

He had dreams of using this opportunity at the Post to eventually start a newspaper in Iraq and, if that went well, perhaps a career in politics. First he would need the hard currency of an American education. Reluctant to leave his family, Fekeiki bargained with himself and decided he would only apply to UC Berkeley, where some of his Post friends had attended journalism school. If he didn’t get in, he would stay in Iraq.

The final death threat came June 15, 2006. "A car chased me from the office to my house," he recalls. Flooring the gas pedal of his Opal, he managed to get away.

By then he’d received his acceptance letter to Berkeley and had a scholarship fund started by Post owner Don Graham and continued by his colleagues at the paper. All he needed was a student visa, but the risks were mounting. "I was supposed to leave early August. I thought, why would I risk two months? Let’s just leave now," he said. He hid in the Post office for four days until he could catch a flight to Amman, Jordan, where he waited two more weeks for his ticket to the States.

LOOKING BACK

Just three months after he left Iraq for Berkeley, he received a phone call from his aunt, telling him that a recent raid of an insurgent house had turned up a "to kill" list for assassins. Fekeiki’s name was near the top.

It’s incomprehensible to many that he’d want to be back in Baghdad, but to a seasoned war correspondent, it’s not entirely unbelievable. Chris Hedges spent 15 years as a foreign bureau chief for the New York Times covering conflicts around the world and is the author of the 2002 book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. He describes the typical war reporter as an "adrenaline junkie," hooked on a certain kind of bravado. "They’re people who don’t have a good capacity to remember their own fear," he told the Guardian.

"The enduring attraction of war is this: Even with its destruction and carnage it can give us what we long for in life. It can give us purpose, meaning, a reason for living," Hedges wrote in the introduction to his book.

"I never felt safe, but I always felt productive," Fekeiki said. "If I wanted productive or safe, I chose productive. I never thought about being safe or not. That’s why I was the only Iraqi in the Washington Post to embed with the military and Marines, because the others feared for their lives. I did fear for my life. I just didn’t let it stop me. If I fear for my life, I shouldn’t be a journalist in Iraq."

In one sense the war was a blessing for Fekeiki. Before the war began in 2003, he says, "I didn’t have a future."

Although he had a college degree in English language and literature from Al-Turath University College, he was denied admission to grad school at Baghdad University. "He doesn’t meet the security requirements," Fekeiki quotes wryly from the code language of the blacklist, for his family doesn’t play nice with Hussein’s.

Fekeiki supported the American invasion, and once the war began he had no intention of leaving. After Hussein’s regime was eradicated, he knew that smart young people with local knowledge and solid English skills would be in high demand from American businesses, reconstruction contractors, and government workers.

"My last thought was to leave Iraq after the invasion, because here’s a country that needs to be rebuilt. We’ll have all the foreign companies working in Iraq. I’ll use the language I studied for four years, English, and I’ll have the best job in Iraq," he recalled.

And eventually, he did. Offers came in from the New York Times for double his Post salary and from Fox News for triple, but he admired the ethics of the Post, which made a point of encouraging its Iraqi writers and crediting their work, so he stuck with that paper.

Fekeiki found more than money and a ticket out of the crippled country. He found his calling. His enthusiasm for his job at the Post sounds like that of a classic American workaholic.

"I miss my office," he said, remembering his desk at the center of the newsroom. "I called it the throne. I spent at least 14 hours a day there, for two years, nonstop. Not one single day off. After two years, in theory, I had a chance to take a day off every week. I spent it in the office, not working but in the office with people."

"My only motivation now is that desk," he says. He hopes to return to it after school. "I’m going to help journalists in Iraq and the future of Iraq."

Without this thought, he says, "I don’t think I’d be able to endure what I’m going through now. It’s just dull. The boredom is hard. In Baghdad I had fun not knowing what was going to happen every day. Here, I wake up, go to school, reply to e-mails on my blog, go to dinner, go to sleep. That’s not a life. That’s retirement."

He feels guilty that his life is now so easy when his family and friends are still threatened back home.

"Being safe terrifies me. I can’t get used to it."

WAR JUNKIE

For Fekeiki, staying abreast of the violence is like keeping in touch with reality, though here in the States he has to turn to fiction to find his fix.

The Situation, a film about an American journalist covering the war in Iraq, recently screened at the Lumiere Theatre in San Francisco. One of the first dramas about the war, it opens with a scene of two young Iraqis being thrown off a bridge in Samarra by US troops. One of them drowns, causing a stir in the province.

"That actually happened," Fekeiki says. Throughout the film, his eyes rarely left the screen, except for fleeting moments to scribble a few notes on a pad and near the end to wipe away a couple tears. Though the characters are fictional, the plot is very real, centering on misguided US intelligence, the schism between Iraqis and Americans, and the overall futility of war.

"Wow," he said, getting up from his seat as the last credit rolled and the screen went completely black. "I could identify with every aspect of that movie."

The violence doesn’t bother him as much as it reminds him of where he’s come from, where his family is, and what his friends are doing. "I want to still feel connected," he says.

In Berkeley he doesn’t. The first semester of basic reporting, de rigueur for all journalism students, was difficult for Fekeiki. He found the Bay Area beat more terrifying than Baghdad. "Some people think reporting in a war zone is difficult, but I did it, and I know how to do it," he says.

"In Iraq everything you think about is a story. Here you have to squeeze your mind to find a story that interests the readers. That’s really challenging. I don’t know the place. It’s not my culture. I don’t know the background. I need a fixer," he says, laughing.

He was as lost working on a story about Merrill Lynch as an American reporter might have been covering the Al-Askari Mosque in Samarra. "At 7 a.m. I get an assignment to go write about Merrill Lynch in San Francisco. What’s Merrill Lynch?"

Lydia Chavez, Fekeiki’s professor for basic reporting, said she usually pushes her students to cover stories they wouldn’t normally choose. But she told us, "Someone like Omar, I was trying to find something that would be comfortable because everything is so foreign."

His turning point came when he covered a psychic fair in Berkeley. "He came back with something I never would have expected," she said.

"They didn’t want me to write anything," Fekeiki said of the psychics he encountered at the fair. "They wouldn’t let me interview the people there who came to heal their aura. So I was, like, ‘OK, can I heal my aura and take notes?’ They said, ‘Yes, why not?’ So I did it, and it turned into a personal piece."

The amazing part of the story is what the healer saw about him even though he hadn’t told her his name, let alone that he was from Baghdad. "The woman just shocked me with her information about me. She started to talk about how my family is in danger and how I am terrified about being in a place I don’t think I belong to and have to compete with other people. It was amazing," he says, still somewhat aghast.

"She couldn’t heal my aura, though. She said I have conflicting thoughts: ‘You’re very protective of your thoughts, and you’re confused, and it’s messed up.’ Which is true."

IRAQ’S FUTURE

Fekeiki has the cockiness of youth and the undaunted faith of a survivor but also a certain attitude toward life he doesn’t always see in his fellow Iraqis. "I tell people I will live to be 94. And I will," he says, believing that all it takes to succeed is to say that you will.

He states his ambitions solidly: to be the charming dictator of his own newspaper, to rise through the ranks of parliamentary politics, to one day rule the country as a prime minister. To stay in this country, to be "nothing" in Berkeley, is just not satisfying enough.

"I’m Iraqi," he says. "I just want to feel that I’m spending my time doing something to benefit my country. If everyone leaves Iraq, we’ll not have an Iraq on the map in the future. I don’t want that to happen."

The newspaper he hopes to own and manage will be fiercely independent and printed daily in Arabic, Kurdish, and English. It will be called Al Arrasid (The Observer), after the publication his family used to run, which folded in 1991 for lack of subscribers. Beyond bringing the truth to the people of Baghdad and penning editorials from his secular point of view, he’s looking forward to being in power once again.

"I can’t wait to have my own newspaper," he said. "I can’t wait to sit behind my desk and tell people what to do."

Yet he has a strong sense of morality. Fekeiki said his personal mantra is a proverb his father often told him: "Harami latseer min el sultan latkhaf…. Don’t be a thief. You will fear no judge."

He says these words have always made his life easy and kept his choices simple. Chavez says she saw the same spirit in him when he passed the bulk of the credit to his cowriter, David Gelles, for a story about jihad videos on YouTube that they contributed to the front page of the New York Times, a near-impossible feat for a first-year journalism student.

"It’s so rare to see someone that generous, that honest," said Chavez, who actively worries about him returning to Iraq.

Berkeley’s curriculum demands a summer internship in the field, and Fekeiki pressed the Post to put him back at the Baghdad bureau this June. He planned to report without telling his family he’d returned to the country, so they would be safe. However, the hands of American bureaucracy are holding him here. His one-entry visa status means if he leaves the United States, he can’t come back without restarting the application process. On top of that, the United States is only accepting the newest Iraqi passports, the G series. They’re so new that most Iraqi embassies aren’t even making them, and Fekeiki doesn’t have one.

"It’s frustrating," he says. Besides being unable to report from home this summer, if something were to happen to his family, he wouldn’t be able to respond beyond a phone call or an e-mail. "My father is 77 years old. I don’t know when he’s going to farewell us. And if it happens, I can’t go and be with my family. It’s not fair," he says. Instead, he’ll be spending the summer break in Washington, DC, reporting for the Post‘s metro desk.

"I’m very glad for the visa problems," Chavez said. "It really scares me. I couldn’t convince him to stay at all."

What would keep him in the States? "If going back to Iraq is not going to help me get my newspaper started, I’m not going to do it," he says. What might not make his paper succeed? "People wouldn’t buy it. They just bomb the place where it’s published. The government turns against me." He knows he could speak his mind outside Iraq, but the whole point is to do it in Iraq, and he feels very strongly that solutions will only come from within, that his country needs people like him.

"The toughest moments I have to deal with," he says, pausing, "are when I think maybe I’m not going back." *

The Guardian Iraq War casualty report (4/2/07): 500 Iraqis killed this week.

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April 2, 2007
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The Guardian Iraq War casualty report (4/2/07): 500 Iraqis killed this week.

Compiled by Paula Connelly

Suicide bombings in Iraq against Iraqi civilians have increased since the start of the year and are deadlier than ever, according to the Associated Press.

Source.

Casualties in Iraq

Iraqi civilians:

At least 500 Iraqi civilians killed this week, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Source.

98,000: Killed since 3/03

Source: www.thelancet.com

60,411 – 66,280: Killed since 1/03

For a week by week assessment of significant incidents and trends in Iraqi civilian casualties, go to A Week in Iraq by Lily Hamourtziadou. She is a member of the Iraq Body Count project, which maintains and updates the world’s only independent and comprehensive public database of media-reported civilian deaths in Iraq.

Source: http://www.iraqbodycount.net

A Week in Iraq: Week ending 1 April 2007:
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/editorial/weekiniraq/38/

For first hand accounts of the grave situation in Iraq, visit some of these blogs:
www.ejectiraqikkk.blogspot.com
www.healingiraq.blogspot.com
www.afamilyinbaghdad.blogspot.com

U.S. military:

7 U.S. soldiers were killed this weekend in Iraq, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Source.

3,484: Killed since the U.S. invasion of Iraq 3/20/03

Source: http://www.icasualties.org/

For the Department of Defense statistics go to: http://www.defenselink.mil/

For a more detailed list of U.S. Military killed in the War in Iraq go to:
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2003/iraq/forces/casualties/2007.01.html

Iraq Military:

30,000: Killed since 2003

Source:http://www.infoshout.com

Journalists:

153 journalists have been killed in Iraq since the start of the war four years ago, making Iraq the world’s most dangerous country for the press, according to Reporters without borders.

Source: http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=21339

155: Killed since 3/03

Source: http://www.infoshout.com/

Refugees:

The Bush administration plans to increase quota of Iraqi refugees allowed into the U.S. from 500 to 7,000 next year in response to the growing refugee crisis, according to the Guardian Unlimited.

Source.

Border policies are tightening because one million Iraqi refugees have already fled to Jordan and another one million to Syria. Iraqi refugees who manage to make it out of Iraq still can’t work, have difficulty attending school and are not eligible for health care. Many still need to return to Iraq to escape poverty, according to BBC news.

Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6293807.stm

1.6 million: Iraqis displaced internally

1.8 million: Iraqis displaced to neighboring states

Many refugees were displaced prior to 2003, but an increasing number are fleeing now, according to United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ estimates.

Source: http://www.unhcr.org/iraq.html

U.S. Military Wounded:

47,657: Wounded since 3/19/03 to 1/6/07

Source: http://www.icasualties.org/

The Guardian cost of Iraq war report (4/2/07): So far, $413 billion for the U.S., $52 billion for California and $1 billion for San Francisco.

Compiled by Paula Connelly

On the fourth anniversary of the start of the Iraq war, Bush asks congress to pass an emergency war-spending bill, according to the New York Times.

Source.

Bush asked congress to approve $622 billion for defense spending, most for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, in a $2.9 trillion budget request for 2008, according to Reuters.

Source: http://today.reuters.com/

Here is a running total of the cost of the Iraq War to the U.S. taxpayer, provided by the National Priorities Project located in Northampton, Massachusetts. The number is based on Congressional appropriations. Niko Matsakis of Boston, MA and Elias Vlanton of Takoma Park, MD originally created the count in 2003 on costofwar.com. After maintaining it on their own for the first year, they gave it to the National Priorities Project to contribute to their ongoing educational efforts.

To bring the cost of the war home, please note that California has already lost $46 billion and San Francisco has lost $1 billion to the Bush war and his mistakes. In San Francisco alone, the funds used for the war in Iraq could have hired 21,264 additional public school teachers for one year, we could have built 11,048 additional housing units or we could have provided 59,482 students four-year scholarships at public universities. For a further breakdown of the cost of the war to your community, see the NPP website aptly titled “turning data into action.”

While McCain Walks in McNamara’s Footsteps

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April 2, 2007
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The media spectacle that John McCain made of himself in Baghdad on April 1 was yet another reprise of a ghastly ritual. Senator McCain expressed “very cautious optimism” and told reporters that the latest version of the U.S. war effort in Iraq is “making progress.”

Three years ago, in early April 2004, when an insurrection exploded in numerous Iraqi cities, U.S. occupation spokesman Dan Senor informed journalists: “We have isolated pockets where we are encountering problems.” Nine days later, President Bush declared: “It’s not a popular uprising. Most of Iraq is relatively stable.”

For government officials committed to a war based on lies, such claims are in the wiring.

When Defense Secretary Robert McNamara visited Vietnam for the first time, in May 1962, he came back saying that he’d seen “nothing but progress and hopeful indications of further progress in the future.”

In October 1966, when McNamara held a press conference at Andrews Air Force Base after returning from a trip to Vietnam, he spoke of the progress he’d seen there. Daniel Ellsberg recalls that McNamara made that presentation “minutes after telling me that everything was much worse than the year before.”

Despite the recent “surge” in the kind of media hype that McCain was trying to boost in Baghdad, this spring has begun with most news coverage still indicating that the war is going badly for American forces in Iraq. Some pundits say that U.S. military fortunes there during the next few months will determine the war’s political future in Washington. And opponents of the war often focus their arguments on evidence that an American victory is not possible.

But shifts in the U.S. military role on the ground in Iraq, coupled with the Pentagon’s air war escautf8g largely out of media sight, could enable the war’s promoters to claim a notable reduction of “violence.” And the American death toll could fall due to reconfiguration or reduction of U.S. troop levels inside Iraq.

Such a combination of developments would appeal to the fervent nationalism of U.S. news media. But the antiwar movement shouldn’t pander to jingo-narcissism. If we argue that the war is bad mainly because of what it is doing to Americans, then what happens when the Pentagon finds ways to cut American losses — while continuing to
inflict massive destruction on Iraqi people?

American news outlets will be inclined to depict the Iraq war as winding down when fewer Americans are dying in it. That happened during the last several years of the Vietnam War, while massive U.S. bombing — and Vietnamese deaths — continued unabated.

The vast bulk of the U.S. media is in the habit of defining events around the world largely in terms of what’s good for the U.S. government — through the eyes of top officials in Washington. Routinely, the real lives of people are noted only as shorthand for American agendas. The political spin of the moment keeps obscuring the human moment.

Awakening from a 40-year nap, an observer might wonder how much has changed since the last war that the United States stumbled over because it could not win. The Congressional Record is filled with insistence that the lessons of Vietnam must not be forgotten. But they cannot be truly remembered if they were never learned in the
first place.

______________________________________

Norman Solomon’s book War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep
Spinning Us to Death is out in paperback. For information, go to:
www.normansolomon.com

The Guardian Iraq War casualty report (3/29/07)

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March 29, 2007
0

The Guardian Iraq War casualty report (3/29/07): 70 Iraqi civilians killed in civil massacre.

Compiled by Paula Connelly

The Senate voted today to keep a withdrawal date of March 31, 2008 in the $122 billion bill for war funding.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/27/washington/28cnd-cong.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

Congress passes bill requiring troop withdrawal from Iraq by fall 2008. Bush promises veto, according to NPR.

Souce: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9104337

More than 770 U.S. civilians working for U.S. firms have lost their lives supporting the U.S. military in Iraq, according to the Chicago Tribune.

Source: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0703260081mar26,1,5984421.story?coll=chi-newsnationworld-hed

Casualties in Iraq

Iraqi civilians:

At least 70 Iraqi Sunni civilians were killed this week in a massacre that was meant as a retaliation for Tuesday’s bombings, according to the New York Times.

Source: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/03/29/MNGUHOTSGR1.DTL

At least 65 Iraqi Shiite civilians were killed Tuesday when car bombs exploded in Tal Afar markets, according to the Associated Press.

Source: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2007/03/27/international/i145909D65.DTL

98,000: Killed since 3/03

Source: www.thelancet.com

60,187 – 66,050: Killed since 1/03

For a week by week assessment of significant incidents and trends in Iraqi civilian casualties, go to A Week in Iraq by Lily Hamourtziadou. She is a member of the Iraq Body Count project, which maintains and updates the world’s only independent and comprehensive public database of media-reported civilian deaths in Iraq.

Source: http://www.iraqbodycount.net

A Week in Iraq: Week ending 25 March 2007:
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/editorial/weekiniraq/37/

For first hand accounts of the grave situation in Iraq, visit some of these blogs:
www.ejectiraqikkk.blogspot.com
www.healingiraq.blogspot.com
www.afamilyinbaghdad.blogspot.com

U.S. military:

3,470: Killed since the U.S. invasion of Iraq 3/20/03

Source: http://www.icasualties.org/

For the Department of Defense statistics go to: http://www.defenselink.mil/

For a more detailed list of U.S. Military killed in the War in Iraq go to:
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2003/iraq/forces/casualties/2007.01.html

Iraq Military:

30,000: Killed since 2003

Source:http://www.infoshout.com

Journalists:

153 journalists have been killed in Iraq since the start of the war four years ago, making Iraq the world’s most dangerous country for the press, according to Reporters without borders.

Source: http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=21339

155: Killed since 3/03

Source: http://www.infoshout.com/

Refugees:

The Bush administration plans to increase quota of Iraqi refugees allowed into the U.S. from 500 to 7,000 next year in response to the growing refugee crisis, according to the Guardian Unlimited.

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,2013034,00.html

Border policies are tightening because one million Iraqi refugees have already fled to Jordan and another one million to Syria. Iraqi refugees who manage to make it out of Iraq still can’t work, have difficulty attending school and are not eligible for health care. Many still need to return to Iraq to escape poverty, according to BBC news.

Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6293807.stm

1.6 million: Iraqis displaced internally

1.8 million: Iraqis displaced to neighboring states

Many refugees were displaced prior to 2003, but an increasing number are fleeing now, according to United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ estimates.

Source: http://www.unhcr.org/iraq.html

U.S. Military Wounded:

47,657: Wounded since 3/19/03 to 1/6/07

Source: http://www.icasualties.org/

The Guardian cost of Iraq war report (3/29/07): So far, $412 billion for the U.S., $52 billion for California and $1 billion for San Francisco.

Compiled by Paula Connelly

On the fourth anniversary of the start of the Iraq war, Bush asks congress to pass an emergency war-spending bill, according to the New York Times.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/19/washington/19cnd-prexy.html?hp

Bush asked congress to approve $622 billion for defense spending, most for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, in a $2.9 trillion budget request for 2008, according to Reuters.
Source: http://today.reuters.com/

Here is a running total of the cost of the Iraq War to the U.S. taxpayer, provided by the National Priorities Project located in Northampton, Massachusetts. The number is based on Congressional appropriations. Niko Matsakis of Boston, MA and Elias Vlanton of Takoma Park, MD originally created the count in 2003 on costofwar.com. After maintaining it on their own for the first year, they gave it to the National Priorities Project to contribute to their ongoing educational efforts.

To bring the cost of the war home, please note that California has already lost $46 billion and San Francisco has lost $1 billion to the Bush war and his mistakes. In San Francisco alone, the funds used for the war in Iraq could have hired 21,264 additional public school teachers for one year, we could have built 11,048 additional housing units or we could have provided 59,482 students four-year scholarships at public universities. For a further breakdown of the cost of the war to your community, see the NPP website aptly titled “turning data into action.”

The Guardian Iraq War casualty report (3/27/07)

-

March 29, 2007
0

The Senate voted today to keep a withdrawal date of March 31, 2008 in the $122 billion bill for war funding.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/27/washington/28cnd-cong.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

Congress passes bill requiring troop withdrawal from Iraq by fall 2008. Bush promises veto, according to NPR.

Souce: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9104337

More than 770 U.S. civilians working for U.S. firms have lost their lives supporting the U.S. military in Iraq, according to the Chicago Tribune.

Source: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0703260081mar26,1,5984421.story?coll=chi-newsnationworld-hed

Casualties in Iraq

Iraqi civilians:

At least 65 Iraqi civilians were killed today when car bombs exploded in Tal Afar markets, according to the Associated Press.

Source: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2007/03/27/international/i145909D65.DTL

98,000: Killed since 3/03

Source: www.thelancet.com

59,801 – 65,660: Killed since 1/03

For a week by week assessment of significant incidents and trends in Iraqi civilian casualties, go to A Week in Iraq by Lily Hamourtziadou. She is a member of the Iraq Body Count project, which maintains and updates the world’s only independent and comprehensive public database of media-reported civilian deaths in Iraq.

Source: http://www.iraqbodycount.net

A Week in Iraq: Week ending 25 March 2007:
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/editorial/weekiniraq/37/

For first hand accounts of the grave situation in Iraq, visit some of these blogs:
www.ejectiraqikkk.blogspot.com
www.healingiraq.blogspot.com
www.afamilyinbaghdad.blogspot.com

U.S. military:

U.S. military deaths at 3,241, according to the Associated Press.

Source: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/03/27/MNGRUORUHB1.DTL

3,468: Killed since the U.S. invasion of Iraq 3/20/03

Source: http://www.icasualties.org/

For the Department of Defense statistics go to: http://www.defenselink.mil/

For a more detailed list of U.S. Military killed in the War in Iraq go to:
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2003/iraq/forces/casualties/2007.01.html

Iraq Military:

30,000: Killed since 2003

Source:http://www.infoshout.com

Journalists:

153 journalists have been killed in Iraq since the start of the war four years ago, making Iraq the world’s most dangerous country for the press, according to Reporters without borders.

Source: http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=21339

155: Killed since 3/03

Source: http://www.infoshout.com/

Refugees:

The Bush administration plans to increase quota of Iraqi refugees allowed into the U.S. from 500 to 7,000 next year in response to the growing refugee crisis, according to the Guardian Unlimited.

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,2013034,00.html

Border policies are tightening because one million Iraqi refugees have already fled to Jordan and another one million to Syria. Iraqi refugees who manage to make it out of Iraq still can’t work, have difficulty attending school and are not eligible for health care. Many still need to return to Iraq to escape poverty, according to BBC news.

Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6293807.stm

1.6 million: Iraqis displaced internally

1.8 million: Iraqis displaced to neighboring states

Many refugees were displaced prior to 2003, but an increasing number are fleeing now, according to United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ estimates.

Source: http://www.unhcr.org/iraq.html

U.S. Military Wounded:

47,657: Wounded since 3/19/03 to 1/6/07

Source: http://www.icasualties.org/

The Guardian cost of Iraq war report (3/27/07): So far, $411 billion for the U.S., $52 billion for California and $1 billion for San Francisco.
Compiled by Paula Connelly

On the fourth anniversary of the start of the Iraq war, Bush asks congress to pass an emergency war-spending bill, according to the New York Times.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/19/washington/19cnd-prexy.html?hp

Bush asked congress to approve $622 billion for defense spending, most for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, in a $2.9 trillion budget request for 2008, according to Reuters.
Source: http://today.reuters.com/

Here is a running total of the cost of the Iraq War to the U.S. taxpayer, provided by the National Priorities Project located in Northampton, Massachusetts. The number is based on Congressional appropriations. Niko Matsakis of Boston, MA and Elias Vlanton of Takoma Park, MD originally created the count in 2003 on costofwar.com. After maintaining it on their own for the first year, they gave it to the National Priorities Project to contribute to their ongoing educational efforts.

To bring the cost of the war home, please note that California has already lost $46 billion and San Francisco has lost $1 billion to the Bush war and his mistakes. In San Francisco alone, the funds used for the war in Iraq could have hired 21,264 additional public school teachers for one year, we could have built 11,048 additional housing units or we could have provided 59,482 students four-year scholarships at public universities. For a further breakdown of the cost of the war to your community, see the NPP website aptly titled “turning data into action.”

666 days until Bush is history

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March 26, 2007
0

By Sarah Phelan
When a friend gave me a Bush countdown clock, it was registering 1,111 days until Bush will be gone.
At first, I was excited. (You can see the seconds hand ticking away.)
The next day, I was pissed off. (There were still 1,110 days of Bush and Cheney to go.)
434 days later, and a Justice Department official has just taken the Fifth in the firing of the US Attorneys scandal.
The House has set a date for withdrawal from Iraq.
The Senate is debating the same.
Climate change is no longer in doubt, but it’s clear that the Bush admin worked hard to cloud the issue.
It’s also clear that Cheney had a hand in the leaking of Valerie Plame’s name and the falsification of prewar intelligence that led the US to invade Iraq, kill thousands, maim thousands more and spend billions.
666 days is a spooky length of time for this nation to continue to be misled, misinformed–and mistrusted.
Impeach Bush and Cheney now.

An urgent message to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi: cut off funding for the Iraq War

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March 22, 2007
1

On the eve of the historic House vote to end the Iraq War, I sent the following note to Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), with a copy of the current Guardian editorial and editor’s notes updating our longtime position opposing the war and occupation. I urge others to do the same. (Pelosi office in Washington: (202) 225-4965. pelosi@mail.house.gov.)

Rep. Pelosi:

The Guardian, and many many people in your district and around the country, urge you to push hard and harder to cut off the funding for the Iraq War. Thanks very much, Bruce B. Brugmann, editor and publisher, San Francisco Bay Guardian

Editorial

Cut off war funding

The cost is spectacular and almost unfathomably tragic

While the Democrats have offered an alternative plan to withdraw from Iraq, party leaders are still refusing to do what Congress has every right to do: demand that no more money be spent on combat operations in Iraq, set a timetable for pulling out the last troops – and specify that not a single dollar will be spent on anything except safely removing US personnel.

Full editorial:
http://www.sfbg.com/entry.php?entry_id=3150&catid=4&volume_id=254&issue_id=287&volume_num=41&issue_num=25

Editor’s Notes

We can still end this war

By Tim Redmond

Four years ago we shut down the city. None of us who were there will ever forget it: so many peaceful protesters showed up that the police had to close down Market Street. Mission Street was pretty much the same way. You couldn’t get anywhere downtown; nobody seemed to be at work. The police were, in more than a few instances, out of control – but there were no water cannons or rubber bullets, just a lot of arrests. Overall, it was a day of joy: the United States was going to war, and San Francisco would have no part of it.

Full editorial: http://www.sfbg.com/entry.php?entry_id=3148&catid=4&volume_id=254&issue_id=287&volume_num=41&issue_num=25

Screaming for vengeance

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March 21, 2007
0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

It was the unquiet dead, whispering in the dark, who set John Cobbett on his path.

In December 2001, Cobbett — a longtime Mission District rocker and guitar hero with such notably heavy outfits as Slough Feg, Ludicra, and Hammers of Misfortune — was on the East Coast visiting his identical twin brother, Aaron, a photographer living in Brooklyn, just across the East River from the smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center.

"I visited the site. It was at night and freezing cold," Cobbett notes. "I remember the sounds of the cranes and demolition machinery wrenching huge slabs of twisted metal and concrete from the wreckage. All through the night these eerie, mournful sounds reverberated off the surrounding towers. It was an incredibly haunted place."

The wound at that time was still so fresh, you see. But the grief, fear, and uncertainty were being transformed, alchemically, inexorably, into something very different: a television spectacle and a justification for war far removed from the dust, the heat, and the stench of burning corpses that Cobbett says lingered in his brother’s neighborhood for months.

As the tragedy played out — the dead painstakingly named and numbered, the TV newscasters falling easily into the cadence of wartime rhetoric — Cobbett realized he had to respond. But the methods of political rock seemed far too self-righteous, and even patronizing, given the scale of bloodletting and demagoguery.

The way forward was finally revealed one month later, during the 2002 Super Bowl halftime show, which included a performance by U2 and a remarkable moment of patriotic kitsch: at the show’s climax, Bono, with the names of the 9/11 victims scrolling overhead on a huge banner, opened his leather jacket to reveal the Stars and Stripes beneath.

The crowd went wild, but for Cobbett it was shameless propaganda. The phrase "trot out the dead" leaped into his head, and music and lyrics quickly followed.

"I got so fucking pissed," Cobbett says. "These victims are rolling over in the superheated rubble below Ground Zero. It was so cheap and so tawdry. I decided, ‘I’m going to take these motherfuckers to task.’ "

Gloriously rocking and extraordinarily angry, "Trot Out the Dead" would become one of several jaw-dropping centerpieces of The Locust Years (Cruz del Sur Music), a record that took five more years and several new band members to complete and may well be one of the most urgent and affecting works of rock ‘n’ roll — not to mention protest music — produced by a band in San Francisco or anywhere else. It is the soundtrack to the George W. Bush years, a musical wail of sorrow and fury all the more overwhelming for its mythic metal lyrics and its seamless blend of prog rock ambition, hard and heavy bombast, and massively killer riffage.

If this sounds over the top, well, it is, a fact to which Cobbett gleefully cops.

"No matter how ridiculous we are, no way can we get more stupid and ridiculous than the real thing," he says. "No matter how grandiose I can get with a metal song, there’s no way I can go to Iraq and start a war. No matter how sanctimonious I get, there’s no way I could match what was coming out of Rumsfeld’s mouth. The shit coming out of those people’s mouths — it was gold."

HAMMERS COME AND GO

One of five siblings born to a middle-class Rochester, NY, family ultimately sundered by divorce, the teenage Cobbett wound up in Washington, DC, in the 1980s and quickly fell in with the breakthrough hardcore scene of the era. Minor Threat, Bad Brains, and the Obsessed were his bread and butter, but with the emergence of Revolution Summer’s early emo bands in 1986, the music became, in his words, "specious and cloying."

Taking his cue from a friend who said he’d like San Francisco, Cobbett spontaneously packed his gear and hit the road. "Within a week I was living in the Mission District," he says, "and still do."

Before too long he had fallen in with Chewy Marzolo, a drummer with the heavy and hardcore outfit Osgood Slaughter. That carried them both into the 1990s, at which point the musical chairs began in earnest. Cobbett joined the Lord Weird Slough Feg, a band packing equal parts Celtic folk mythos and old-school metal pomp. There he connected with vocalist Mike Scalzi, who would later help define Hammers’ sound with a manly, operatic holler that would do Rob Halford proud.

Marzolo, meanwhile, was busily following what he calls a "one-band-to-the-next continuum" all the way to Cobbett’s first incarnation of Hammers of Misfortune in 1998. Along the way he founded Poverty Records, a vital imprint that documented the Mission’s explosion of grimy and creatively unfettered rock ‘n’ punk with a slew of 7-inch records and CDs from such essential bands as Fuckface, Lost Goat, Towel, and Hickey.

After an initial outing as Unholy Cadaver — a devil-voiced combo that congealed around San Francisco’s cultish homegrown black metal scene, along with such peers as Weakling and Ludicra — Hammers’ lineup was refined and completed with the addition of vocalist-bassist Janis Tanaka, late of L7 and Stone Fox. Black metal became not an end in itself but a subordinate element in a larger musical palette that came together on Hammers’ full-throttle debut, The Bastard (tUMULt, 2001). Despite its acoustic flourishes, spooky harmonies, medievalist illustrations, and Joseph Campbell–inspired lyrics, it ain’t no teenage Dungeons and Dragons fantasy adventure rewarding its heroes with heaps of treasure and experience points. The Bastard turns out to be an ecological revenge fantasy, in which the "trolls of wood and stone" storm the village to "slay the ones who chop and cut / Slay them in the their wooden huts." It’s a wicked metaphor for the fate awaiting those mortals who dare abuse the blessings of nature.

Despite the record’s subcultural acclaim from magazines such as Terrorizer and Lamentations of the Flame Princess — and the admiration heaped on its follow-up, The August Engine (Cruz del Sur Music, 2003), a hard rock parable of cliquish music-scene self-destruction — Hammers of Misfortune had chosen a road that was neither wide nor easy. What kind of metal was this anyway? True? Black? Epic? These fine points of genre fidelity may seem irrelevant to a die-hard music fan, but for labels the difference is a record they can sell or not. "I loved Hammers the first time I heard them, and it never occurred to me to question or examine their sound, which was this gloriously confusional, amazing, and intricate chunk of mind-blowing music, metal or otherwise," says Andee Connors, who put out The Bastard on his tUMULt imprint. "It might be confusing for folks who are very strict with their genre divisions."

There is only so much small labels can do, however, and Tanaka’s departure to play with pop vocalist Pink was another monkey wrench. The addition of Jamie Myers on bass and vocals carried Hammers through The Locust Years‘ recording sessions until she too took a bow, moving to Texas to raise her first child. Scalzi, disinclined to divide his time between two bands, also departed, to focus his attention entirely on Slough Feg.

ANTHEMS FOR DARK DAYS

Today Hammers are touring with a refreshed and potent lineup, teaming Marzolo and Cobbett with bassist Ron Nichols; vocalist and second guitarist Patrick Goodwin of retro muscle rockers Dirty Power; and the musically omnivorous vocalist Jessie Quattro, who was raised on Doc Watson and the hymns and "occasional barking" of Pentecostal Christianity. Sigrid Sheie, a classically trained pianist, has been a constant on the last two records, bringing musical formality and some of the most boss Hammond B-3 and Leslie keyboards heard in rock since the ’70s heyday of Deep Purple — particularly notable on "Election Day," the penultimate track on The Locust Years. The tune is a whirlwind instrumental workout that recalls such classics as Focus’s "Hocus Pocus" and Edgar Winter’s "Frankenstein."

The song is a joy to hear simply as rock ‘n’ roll and exemplifies the real musical exuberance Hammers bring to what is otherwise grim and woeful fare. The whole record leavens its bleak social commentary with what Cobbett describes as "little-kid enthusiasm" for rocking out in high style. The lyrics, while not necessarily dactylic hexameter, are still richly allusive as metalhead poetry, inviting listeners to suspend their disbelief, find their own meaning, and let the emotional sweep of the music fill in the blanks. Anything unstated by, for example, "Chastity Rides," a harmonically gorgeous paean to the Platonic ideal of politically conservative virtue, is made ever so explicit by the snarling, minor-key instrumental bridge. The same technique is also applied to great effect in "War Anthem," a stirring call to arms that blatantly steals its sentimental grandeur from "The Star-Spangled Banner" then yanks the veil aside to reveal the bald-faced rapacity of the masters of the war on terror — be they Islamofascists, Christian supremacists, or military-industrial profiteers.

From the record’s opening moments, with Cobbett’s guitar wailing like a thousand 9/11 banshees, to the dreadful prophecy of "Famine’s Lamp" — certainly one of the great rock ‘n’ roll dirges — clear through to the gleaming, high-tech, satellite-guided apocalypse of the album-closing "Widow’s Wall," The Locust Years appeals to me as a ferocious summation of all the shameless hypocrisy, betrayal, and avarice of the last six years. It is tremendously cathartic but not necessarily hopeful. The album’s title — borrowed from Winston Churchill, who coined the phrase in reference to the declines and compromises of the 1930s and their resolution in the gas chambers and killing fields of World War II — is an embittered indictment of the flag-waving, churchgoing citizen-consumer. Good Germans all, dutifully following their leader as the abyss yawns ever wider.

LITTLE USE FOR ILLUSION

No one in the band has any delusions that their underground heavy metal record is going to change the world — and not one of them seems willing to suck up to a music industry that would only turn it into focus-group approved, prechewed rage against the generic machine. Hammers is truly a Mission District group, deeply rooted in a seething community of fiercely — even dysfunctionally — independent musicians, labels, and fans with roots dating back at least 20 years.

But Hammers of Misfortune are also a band with a mission and a message — and a whole of good rockin’ to come. Sheie modestly hopes for at least a European tour and enough earnings to not have to worry about covering practice-space fees — then confesses she thinks the record deserves a Grammy. Quattro is in a similar mood, daydreaming of playing to an arena of "30,000 screaming fans." I hope it all comes true in spades.

As for Cobbett, he’s been touring with Ludicra and, fresh from exhibiting Hammers at South by Southwest, has a new concept album germinating in his mind. Something to do with a perfect storm known as Hurricane Katrina and the drowned city of New Orleans. Another victim of the locust years, to be immortalized in song.

The gods of metal are angry and sharpening their swords. *

HAMMERS OF MISFORTUNE

With Genghis Tron and Kylesa

Sun/25, 9 p.m., $10, all ages

Bottom of the Hill

1233 17th St., SF

(415) 621-4455

www.bottomofthehill.com
>

Antiwar movement turns four

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March 20, 2007
0

By Amanda Witherell

› amanda@sfbg.com

The Iraq War turned four years old March 19, but so did the antiwar movement, and thousands of people marked the event with protests, rallies, and direct actions around the Bay Area.

The largest event was the March 18 march on Market Street, led by the ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) coalition, one of more than 1,000 rallies around the country. The protesters marched under a "No Blood for Oil" banner, "Impeach" signs donated by Working Assets, and Whole Earth flags that fluttered in the westerly wind funneling down San Francisco’s main drag. The Chronicle estimated the crowd at 3,000; ANSWER claimed it was 40,000. We estimated the march at 10,000 strong.

Education seemed to be the point protesters were driving home, as if the knowledge of the war’s injustices would reverberate like the chanting voices against the walls of the Financial District and into the minds of the children who wandered through the crowds of thousands.

"Will this stop the war May First?" Glenn Borchardt asked. "No, but it will stop it some day."

Sandee Dickson, a retired teacher, was with about 50 other purple-shirted Democrats of Napa Valley and said she was protesting "to keep it on the front page."

"There are all sorts of people here, from all walks of life, sending the message that American people say, ‘No more war.’ "

More than 40 cops watched the chanting crowd from their post, leaning against the front of the Westfield shopping center, guarding the commerce. "A couple of years ago a couple windows got smashed," one of the police officers said to the Guardian. "I guess they’re pretty expensive."

The crowd was pretty tame, though, and there were no arrests. There seemed to be just as many baby strollers in the crowd as people marching alongside them. Balloons bounced from the wrists of children, and a Girl Scout was making a killing selling cookies off the back of her Radio Flyer wagon for $3.50 a box.

Captain Denis O’Leary from Southern Station said there were about 270 officers on patrol, plus additional platoons of traffic and tactical officers, prepared for violence he wasn’t really anticipating.

"They might get arrested," he said, gesturing to some anarchists waving red and black flags at the edge of Larkin Street. A cop in this city for 25 years, O’Leary has responded to many demonstrations of all sizes and flavors and thinks they’ve changed a lot over the years. He mentioned the 1989 protest outside the Westin St. Francis against the first President George Bush. "That was an angry tone, it was massive, and there were arrests."

When asked if he looks at the crowd and worries about the safety of all the children who could get caught up in a sudden action, he said, "Yes, because my daughter is out there." He said she’s 15.

Sue Martin was marching with her son, Sean Martin-Hamburger. For his first protest, the eight-year-old had made a colorful cardboard sign that read, "Have some peace in your heart." He was too shy to say much to us, but his mom was less reticent: "We’re demonstrating because we don’t want to see any more violence, anywhere actually."

Though it was Sean’s first march on Market, his mother has been protesting for 35 years and agreed the age range was one of the big differences, as was the energy. "It feels more creative and less angry, like we’re starting to embody the peace and not respond to the violence with violence. It doesn’t feel vengeful, but maybe I’m just getting older."

On March 19, there were some people willing to face off with the police at a die-in. Hundreds of protesters lay down on the sidewalks and in the streets of downtown San Francisco, representing the 3,200 American soldiers and the estimated 160,000 Iraqi civilians who have died in the past four years. A helicopter whirring overhead and the corpses under blood-spattered sheets gave the direct action an eerie Vietnam feel, but there seemed to be more cops than corpses. They got something to do when 57 protesters became the walking dead, rising up from the sidewalk and dying again in Market Street traffic, disrupting the flow of daily life and garnering some misdemeanor charges.

Across the bay, 14 people also prepared for arrests, locking themselves into a human chain across the entrance to Chevron’s corporate headquarters in San Ramon. For the third time in four years, more than 100 representatives from Bay Rising, US Labor Against War, Amazon Watch, and Students for a Democratic Society gathered to speak against the other axis of evil: oil, profits, and war.

"Under the new Iraqi Oil Law, Chevron is standing to directly benefit from a law that comes from Bush. Two-thirds of [Iraq] oil will be owned by foreign companies," Sam Edmondson of Bay Rising said. "The fear is that US troops will be used to secure that oil."

Back in San Francisco, in front of the office of Rep. Nancy Pelosi, "Stop Funding the War" called on the woman who controls the purse strings to tighten them.

A few hundred people gathered outside the Federal Building to hear veterans, mothers of soldiers, local progressives, and city officials, such as Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, who’s authored local resolutions against the war.

"I think [Pelosi] should be lining up votes to cut off funding for the war," former supervisor and 2003 mayoral candidate Matt Gonzales said. "If they cut off money, there’d be an interesting crisis."

Former congressional candidate Krissy Keefer was there as well. When asked where she’d be if she’d been voted into Pelosi’s seat, she said, "I would be here to provide leadership to San Francisco. San Francisco is really, really important, and we need to constantly reinforce the position that we play. The middle-of-the-road position that Pelosi takes squashes the best intentions of the Democratic Party." *

Sam Devine and Sarah Phelan contributed to this story.

Cut off war funding

-

March 20, 2007
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EDITORIAL On Jan. 12, a couple months shy of the fourth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, the secretary of defense, Robert Gates, appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee and put to rest any question of whether the conflict in that country can be declared a civil war:

"We face, in essence, four different wars," he said. "The war of Shia on Shia, principally in the south; sectarian conflict, principally in Baghdad and the environs of Baghdad; third, a Baathist insurgency; and fourth, al-Qaeda."

The Pentagon made it official March 14, when a report declared that "in some ways" Iraq is in the throes of a civil war. The report also noted that October through December 2006 was the most violent three-month period since 2003.

The carnage is horrible: more than 3,000 US troops have been killed. The United Nations, according to Reuters, says some 34,500 civilians were killed in 2006 alone. About 2 million Iraqis have fled abroad, and another 1.7 million have moved elsewhere in Iraq to escape violence and sectarian cleansing.

The cost is spectacular and almost unfathomably tragic: more than $400 billion so far. The money that San Francisco alone has spent on the war could have paid for 12,000 affordable housing units, the National Priorities Project estimates. All of that money has come in special supplemental budget requests, so it hasn’t been a part of any rational budget discussion.

And yet while the Democrats have offered an alternative plan to withdraw from Iraq, party leaders are still refusing to do what Congress has every right to do: demand that no more money be spent on combat operations in Iraq, set a timetable for pulling out the last troops — and specify that not a single dollar will be spent on anything except safely removing US personnel.

Hillary Clinton, by many accounts the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, even said last week that she thinks the United States will have a military presence in Iraq for years to come.

The opposition party has to do better than that.

Seventy percent of Americans oppose the war. The allies are getting ready to bail: Prime Minister Tony Blair just announced the British have set a timetable for withdrawing troops. The protests in the streets during the past few days should be a signal to Rep. Nancy Pelosi: Congress can’t pass nonbinding resolutions and come up with plans that the president can simply veto. George W. Bush has no intention of listening to what the public wants. In a March 19 speech he proclaimed that "the fight is difficult, but it can be won." Translation: the war will continue as long as Bush is in office — unless Congress forces him to stop it. And the only way to do that is to cut off funding.

Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-Petaluma) has introduced legislation that would block further war spending but fully fund a deliberate withdrawal aimed at pulling the last US troops out by the end of this year. Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Oakland) is a cosponsor. Pelosi needs to sign on and put the power of the new Democratic majority behind the only feasible plan to end what the New York Times is calling an "unnecessary, horribly botched and now unwinnable" war. *

Editor’s Notes

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March 20, 2007
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› tredmond@sfbg.com

Four years ago we shut down the city. None of us who were there will ever forget it: so many peaceful protesters showed up that the police had to close down Market Street. Mission Street was pretty much the same way. You couldn’t get anywhere downtown; nobody seemed to be at work. The police were, in more than a few instances, out of control — but there were no water cannons or rubber bullets, just a lot of arrests. Overall, it was a day of joy: the United States was going to war, and San Francisco would have no part of it.

The anniversary protests, while exuberant, weren’t quite that dramatic. I understand: it’s been a long, long war, and we’ve all be fighting for a long, long time, and things just seem to be getting worse. The antiwar movement, and the frustration of the nation at a conflict that has dragged on longer than US involvement in World War II, tossed the Republican majority out of both houses of Congress, but the Democrats are still talking about nonbinding resolutions and incremental plans that can’t be backed up. The war seems to be without end. Even the New York Times, that voice of mainstream moderation, is starting to sound pissed off: the March 18 lead editorial referred to "the unnecessary, horribly botched and now unwinnable war."

I know this doesn’t help the families of the more than 3,000 already dead soldiers or the tens of thousands more who are still stuck in a desert quagmire, but the good news is we’ve won the debate. Almost nobody running for president wants to say the war was a good idea, has been handled well, or ought to continue much longer. The only question on the table now is how best to get the hell out. And in the long term, this really has become the new Vietnam — just as the very name of that southeast Asian country struck fear in the hearts of American imperialists and military adventurists for a quarter century, the legacy of Iraq will almost certainly be stricter controls on the ability of rogue presidents to invade countries for their own geopolitical agendas.

So let’s keep the pressure on the likes of Nancy Pelosi (it’s so heartwarming to see protesters camped outside the house of the new House speaker — and it’s stunning that Pelosi has been such a jerk and refused to be civil to them). And take heart: we can still end this war — and go a long way toward preventing the next one.

And on a totally different note: I was somewhat amazed to see that the Hearst Corp. and MediaNews Group — the companies that own all the major newspapers in the central Bay Area — have come up with a new tactic to get rid of that pesky antitrust suit filed by Clint Reilly.

The suit charges that the deal giving two giant corporations control of so much of the region’s media will deprive readers of diverse viewpoints and advertisers of competitive alternatives. The evidence in favor of Reilly’s claim is pretty strong.

So now the newspaper barons are taking a new tack, arguing that Reilly has no standing to sue. He’s just one person; what’s the harm to him?

Well, gee, if one person who cares about the community has no standing to sue, who does? Hearst and MediaNews, I suspect, would like to leave that to the state and federal attorneys general. And look how that’s worked out. *

No Oil War at Chevron’s Front Door

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March 20, 2007
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Intern Sam Devine reports from Monday morning’s Chevron protest

At approximately 6:30 a.m. on March 19, 2007, the fourth anniversary of the Iraq War, nine activists locked themselves in a human chain across the main entrance to Chevron-Texaco’s corporate headquarters. They tied ropes and carabineers to their wrists. The carabineers where then attached to metal rods concealed inside empty oil drums and large red pipes, both covered with slogans. By 8:30, five more people had willingly joined the chain. They were all ready to get busted.

This was the third protest at Chevron’s San Ramon since talk of Iraq began a little over 4 years ago. The demonstration, which forced employees to use a side entrance and fouled up traffic on Bollinger Canyon Road, was organized to protest of the new Iraqi Oil Law.

Emergency exits

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March 19, 2007
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› marke@sfbg.com

I’ve got one copy of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace strapped under my right foot, one strapped under my left. The new 1,400-page Penguin Classics translation by Anthony Briggs makes for a great pair of platforms. My fantasy party posse’s at my side: Felicia Fellatio rocking a hot red bandito bandanna, a full white tutu, and a number 5 Tim Hardaway jersey; Baby Char Char in an oversize pajama-print homeboy hoodie and a pair of random, paint-spattered Levi’s; Nova all angles on her retro-future ’80s Nagel dangling neon banana earrings, turquoise ruffled skirt, and shoulder-padded acid-washed cropped jacket trip; and Hunky Beau in Juicy Couture pipe pants and war paint.

Somebody else is in the corner, wearing pink panties on his head and a giant chain, but no one knows his name.

I feel great. I just finished six weeks of Third Street Gym boxing boot camp, and you could bounce a full congressional subpoena off my abs, darling. (OK, that’s a lie — but I think about going to the gym every time I light up a smoke. That should count for something, no?) We’re out the door to my drag idol Juanita More’s weekly Saturday all-nighter, Playboy, at the Stud (www.juanitamore.com), when suddenly it hits me: today is Saturday, right? I better check the Internet.

I put down my flask of Cuervo and log on, and this little box of "gay news" pops up. (How does the Internet know? Oh, that’s right: all my online porn accounts.) "UN Confirms Anti-Gay Death Squads in Iraq" the top headline reads. Kidnappings, mutilation, charred bodies found by the road. Hmm. A few clicks later: "Iraqi Leaders OK Gay Pogroms." According to activists, Shiite militias are engaging in one of the "most organized and systematic sexual cleansings in history" with the government’s two-cheeked kiss of approval, and the US is refusing asylum to gay Iraqis.

Oh dear. Suddenly the thought of whooping it up while my gay Iraqi rainbow family burns seems kind of, you know, gross.

I’m so fucking sick of feeling powerless against this stupid war. Of always tucking the grief of it somewhere in the back of my mind as I down another shot and hit the dance floor. Not only is it a major buzzkill among other omnipresent buzzkills — global warming, fundamentalist terror, constant surveillance, government-sanctioned queer discrimination, bad hair days — but, as a citizen of the allegedly participatory democracy that started the whole thing, I feel somehow responsible, no matter whom I voted for however many times. And just admitting that, I feel like a spoiled American. It sucks.

On top of that, I have to watch myself and many of those around me struggle to keep the flame of resistance sparkling. It seems exhaustion has seeped into our consciousness and may actually be taking root. I fondly recall the first exhilarating flush of protest — of taking back the streets until my pumps wore through on the first night of "shock and awe," of lying down and blocking traffic in an orange jumpsuit (on purpose for once) as the bombs continued to rain down on civilians half a world away, of wildly dancing with Code Pink and cute Puerto Rican socialists in the NYC streets during the 2004 Republican Convention, hoping the nets the cops threw over us wouldn’t snag my weave. Sure, I still bang my pan with a stick at the occasional ANSWER weekend protest, despite my massive hangover. But after four years of war, it often seems I’m banging fruitlessly. If a club freak chants in a vacuum, will the killing please stop now?

Thank goddess I’ve got the beautiful souls I’ve met at the clubs around me. The kind of nightlife I love is inherently subversive: when one kind of music, location, or style becomes dominant, a host of alternatives immediately springs up. That energy refuels my rebellious spirit and keeps my fight up during the day. Yes, yes, partying is an escape from reality — but it’s also a play space, a way to work out the anxieties of the world by fooling with your identity, a place to push the boundaries of society into a personal utopia.

To me, underground nightlife can also be a fascinatingly warped mirror of the problems facing the world, its trends the raw expression of deep-seated angst. As W. consolidated his political power in the early ’00s, nightlife fashions and music (and drugs) returned to the tastes of the Reagan and Thatcher ’80s, when angular pop and cold synths were a loud rebuke to false sincerity and hubris. The recent explosion of pre-AIDS-era disco and imagery in many gay clubs may be an unconscious wish to transport ourselves to the time before the Republicans’ disastrous "morning in America." And the vibrant local hyphy scene is based on auto sideshows: literally wasting gas (use it while you got it!). Now, well into W.’s second term, we’re reliving the rococo styles of Bush the Elder without irony. Dance floors are looking like a punk rock Cosby Show, and I’m into it.

But that’s all theoretical musing. The most important thing about nightlife is community, whether you’re a full-time club kid or just going out for a drink after work with your friends. You want to be around other people, to not feel so alone in this crazy world, to make a connection. You walk into a bar, and suddenly you’re in a minisociety, one you hope you can handle better than society at large.

Can this community make a difference? Sure. The nightlife community, gay and straight, was instrumental in the fight against AIDS (and still is). It banded together to defeat the antirave legislation of the early ’00s. Tons of parties raise money for good causes. Currently, party-oriented groups such as the League of Pissed Off Voters (sf.indyvoter.org), which reaches out to young people through DJ events, and the SF Party Party (www.sfpartyparty.com), which influences local politics by combining education with clubbing, are doing their best to change the world.

"People on the left these days seem to think that denying themselves pleasure is the only way to take back the government. The early energy of protest against Bush has turned into a kind of self-punishment. That’s so dry and boring — and ultimately useless," says Dr. Stephen Duncombe, editor of the Cultural Resistance Reader and author of the new book Dream: Re-imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy. I called him because I wanted to talk about the guilt some of us feel about partying when the world’s going to shit. He’s been a prime mover in theatrical resistance groups such as Reclaim the Streets, the Lower East Side Collective, and the utterly fabulous Billionaires for Bush. (He’s also kind of cute in a young-professor-at-NYU way.)

"We should be using the positive energy of nightlife to show people that politics can be both entertaining and transformational," he continues. "Politics should be a fun, interactive spectacle, like the kind nightlife provides. No one wants to get involved with something if it seems like more work."

Yet still I worry. What would life be like if the war were here? What if I were a gay Iraqi? I trolled the Internet gay hookup sites to find a gay Iraqi to talk to about it. All I could find at first were half-naked American soldiers stationed in the Middle East (we are everywhere!). I eventually came upon a Western-educated gay Iraqi refugee living in Jordan who identified himself as Arje. He said I was being foolish. "Go out and have fun," he replied when I wrote that I didn’t feel like partying off the weight of the world. "Have a dance for me."

The Guardian Iraq War casualty report (3/15/07)

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March 15, 2007
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Casualties in Iraq

U.S. military:

4 U.S. soldiers were killed today by a roadside bomb in Baghdad, according to the New York Times.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Iraq-US-Casualties.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

3,433: Killed since the U.S. invasion of Iraq 3/20/03

Source: http://www.icasualties.org/

For the Department of Defense statistics go to: http://www.defenselink.mil/

For a more detailed list of U.S. Military killed in the War in Iraq go to:
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2003/iraq/forces/casualties/2007.01.html

Iraqi civilians:

98,000: Killed since 3/03

Source: www.thelancet.com

58,862 – 64,682: Killed since 1/03

For a week by week assessment of significant incidents and trends in Iraqi civilian casualties, go to A Week in Iraq by Lily Hamourtziadou. She is a member of the Iraq Body Count project, which maintains and updates the world’s only independent and comprehensive public database of media-reported civilian deaths in Iraq.

Source: http://www.iraqbodycount.net

A Week in Iraq: Week ending 11 March 2007:
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/editorial/weekiniraq/35/

For first hand accounts of the grave situation in Iraq, visit some of these blogs:
www.ejectiraqikkk.blogspot.com
www.healingiraq.blogspot.com
www.afamilyinbaghdad.blogspot.com

Antiestablishmentarianism attitudes among Iraqi religious groups is fueling intolerance and violence towards homosexuals in Iraq, according to the UN.

Source: http://www.gaypeopleschronicle.com/stories07/february/0202071.htm

Iraq Military:

Despite the Bush administrations promise to empower Iraqi women, opportunities remain limited, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

Source

30,000: Killed since 2003

Source:http://www.infoshout.com

Journalists:

151: Killed since 3/03

Source: http://www.infoshout.com/

Refugees:

The Bush administration plans to increase quota of Iraqi refugees allowed into the U.S. from 500 to 7,000 next year in response to the growing refugee crisis, according to the Guardian Unlimited.

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,2013034,00.html

Border policies are tightening because one million Iraqi refugees have already fled to Jordan and another one million to Syria. Iraqi refugees who manage to make it out of Iraq still can’t work, have difficulty attending school and are not eligible for health care. Many still need to return to Iraq to escape poverty, according to BBC news.

Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6293807.stm

1.6 million: Iraqis displaced internally

1.8 million: Iraqis displaced to neighboring states

Many refugees were displaced prior to 2003, but an increasing number are fleeing now, according to United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ estimates.

Source: http://www.unhcr.org/iraq.html

U.S. Military Wounded:

47,657: Wounded since 3/19/03 to 1/6/07

Source: http://www.icasualties.org/

The Guardian cost of Iraq war report (3/15/07): Bush asks congress to approve $622 billion for 2008. So far, $408 billion for the U.S., $51 billion for California and $1 billion for San Francisco.
Compiled by Paula Connelly

Bush asked congress to approve $622 billion for defense spending, most for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, in a $2.9 trillion budget request for 2008, according to Reuters.
Source: http://today.reuters.com/

Here is a running total of the cost of the Iraq War to the U.S. taxpayer, provided by the National Priorities Project located in Northampton, Massachusetts. The number is based on Congressional appropriations. Niko Matsakis of Boston, MA and Elias Vlanton of Takoma Park, MD originally created the count in 2003 on costofwar.com. After maintaining it on their own for the first year, they gave it to the National Priorities Project to contribute to their ongoing educational efforts.

To bring the cost of the war home, please note that California has already lost $46 billion and San Francisco has lost $1 billion to the Bush war and his mistakes. In San Francisco alone, the funds used for the war in Iraq could have hired 21,264 additional public school teachers for one year, we could have built 11,048 additional housing units or we could have provided 59,482 students four-year scholarships at public universities. For a further breakdown of the cost of the war to your community, see the NPP website aptly titled “turning data into action.”

TUESDAY

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March 14, 2007
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March 20

EVENT

“Four Years Later: American Soldiers Share Their Stories on the Anniversary of the War”

Once a skilled firefighter, National Guard Sgt. Brett Miller was unable to dial a phone number after a roadside blast in Iraq left him with a brain injury. But Miller is one of the lucky ones. After four years of war in Iraq, more than 3,000 soldiers have died and countless others been permanently disabled. Miller and fellow veterans Army Sgt. Camille Evans and Infantry Officer Paul Reickhoff will mark this grave anniversary trading traumatic war tales at InForum’s “Four Years Later.” (Joshua Rotter)

6:30 p.m., $7-$20
Commonwealth Club of California
595 Market, second floor, SF
(415) 597-6705
www.commonwealthclub.org

MUSIC

Two Sheds

There are clips floating around YouTube of Two Sheds performing in a San Diego television studio. The cameras track across the soundstage and dissolve between Unplugged-style close-ups of fret boards and musicians, who look perfect under the parcan lighting. Though they clearly nail renditions of “Perfect” and “For Theresa,” the sterile TV-land setting seems an unbefitting package for Two Sheds, whose charm lies in the direct, personal effect of singer Caitlin Gutenberger’s lyrical inventions. (Nathan Baker)

9 p.m., $7
Make-Out Room
3225 22nd St., SF
(415) 647-2888
www.makeoutroom.com

Antiwar protest events

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March 13, 2007
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PROTEST EVENTS

FRIDAY, MARCH 16

Remembering Rachel Corrie

At this third annual memorial, celebrate the life of Rachel Corrie, a 23-year-old International Solidarity Movement volunteer who was killed by an Israeli soldier while nonviolently resisting the demolition of a Palestinian home in the Gaza Strip.

7 p.m., $10–$20 suggested donation

Malonga Casquelourd Center for the Arts

1428 Alice, Oakl.

www.norcalism.org/events.htm

SATURDAY, MARCH 17

Starve War, Feed Peace

Participate in a march and rally sponsored by the Mt. Diablo Peace and Justice Center. The march goes through downtown Walnut Creek, and continues to Civic Park for a rally at noon with speakers and music.

11 a.m.

Walnut Creek BART station

200 Ygnacio Blvd., Walnut Creek

Civic Park

1375 Civic Drive, Walnut Creek

www.mtdpc.org

SUNDAY, MARCH 18

March and rally in San Francisco

Marchers will assemble at Justin Herman Plaza and go to the Civic Center.

Noon

Justin Herman Plaza

One Market, SF

(415) 821-6545, answer@actionsf.org, www.actionsf.org/#local4

MONDAY, MARCH 19

Protest, rally, and nonviolent direct action at Chevron headquarters

End Chevron’s oil crimes from Richmond to Iraq. It’s a short ride to the Chevron headquarters from the Walnut Creek BART station; take County Connection shuttle 121. Vans will be shuttling protesters too.

7–11 a.m.

Chevron headquarters

6001 Bollinger Canyon, San Ramon

www.MySpace.com/ProtestChevron

Stop Funding the War

Join us at Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco district office to urge her and her fellow representatives to deny the White House its war funding requests and to support HR 508, the Bring Our Troops Home and Sovereignty of Iraq Restoration Act.

Noon

San Francisco Federal Bldg.

450 Golden Gate, SF

www.stopfundingthewar.com/home

Die-in on Market Street

The protest is a die-in designed to highlight the war’s death toll by showing what the heart of San Francisco would look like strewn with dead bodies.

Noon

Meet-up points:

Spear and Market, SF

Montgomery and Market, SF

Powell and Market, SF

Market and Seventh St., SF

www.dieinmarch19.org, www.ActAgainstTorture.org *

Escautf8g the antiwar movement

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March 13, 2007
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› news@sfbg.com

It was four years ago this March 19 that the United States invaded Iraq, triggering massive street protests in San Francisco and a widely criticized military occupation that has become one of the longest in US history.

The war has proved to be as bloody and shortsighted as its opponents always claimed it would be. More than 3,100 American soldiers have been killed, as have as many as hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, with little hope of the violence abating anytime soon, despite President George W. Bush’s recent deployment of 21,500 more troops. The war has cost the United States about $400 billion so far, a price tag increasing by about $250 million every day of the occupation. And it has spurred anti-Americanism around the world.

Opinion polls show a strong majority in the United States favors immediate withdrawal from Iraq, and a growing number of Democrats in Congress now appear to be moving in that direction. But antiwar activists are planning an escalation of their own, arguing that only through a ramped-up and more widely disseminated peace movement will this war come to an end.

To mark this inauspicious anniversary, United for Peace and Justice, the nation’s largest antiwar coalition, has issued a call for "a massive outpouring of opposition to the war in locally based, decentralized actions throughout the U.S." from March 17 to 19. It’s a clear departure from the peace movement’s norm of massive, centralized marches located in Washington, DC, New York, and San Francisco.

Tens of thousands of people poured into the streets of San Francisco on March 20, 2003, with more than 1,500 people arrested in civil disobedience actions that effectively shut down the city. Antiwar groups are still hoping for a big turnout in the city next week, even as they shift their strategy to include more of Middle America.

Instead of relying on charismatic visionaries, influential organizations, and hierarchical organizing in the big cities, the new strategy calls on citizens to take the initiative and organize — from Mobile, Ala., to Jonesboro, Ark., to Fayetteville, N.C. — and demonstrate a broad base of active opposition to the war.

"The resistance isn’t only in San Francisco," Jim Haber, a member of the steering committee for United for Peace and Justice Bay Area, told the Guardian. "Large demonstrations here get attributed to San Francisco being out of step with the rest of the country — although less so these days."

While it is important to have big showings, Haber said it’s also important to demonstrate that the opposition is widespread. "Rather than making people who want to protest come to us, we’re going to them — and they’re all over."

Several of the affinity groups that were instrumental in the shutdown of San Francisco four years ago are regrouping for a rally and nonviolent direct action at Chevron’s headquarters in San Ramon.

"Four years ago we not only shut down San Francisco’s Financial District, we also shut down Chevron," Antonia Juhasz, one of the organizers and a Tarbell fellow with Oil Change International, told us. "Neither our message nor our tactics have changed."

The Iraqi parliament is set to pass a law that would transform Iraq’s nationalized oil system to a commercialized model, completely open to corporate pillaging, following the trail first blazed by the US-installed Coalition Provisional Authority, headed by L. Paul Bremer. "The law is the brainchild of the Bush administration," Juhasz said. "Now is a particularly critical time to expose the oil agenda behind the war."

David Solnit, a longtime organizer and member of the Bay Rising affinity group, told us, "This is a similarly strategic moment for the antiwar movement to escalate. Hopes of getting the Democrats to do anything are fading. It’s up to us, and folks are hungry for taking direct action."

Just about everyone organizing for March 17 to 19 agrees that relying on the congressional Democrats to bring the troops home is an abysmal plan.

"We’re telling people to stop looking up and start looking around," Ben Rosen, youth organizer and media coordinator with World Can’t Wait, told us. "There is no Democratic savior here."

World Can’t Wait has allied with the ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) coalition to organize a massive march up Market Street to the Civic Center on March 18. ANSWER still favors centralized protests, including a massive march on the Pentagon.

"The real direction for this war is coming from the Pentagon," Richard Becker, ANSWER’s West Coast regional coordinator, told us. "A powerful march on the Pentagon would be the most significant thing that could happen right now."

Rosen agrees that centralized coordination is required to build a cohesive and powerful movement.

"They argue that marching in San Francisco is preaching to the choir," Rosen said. "But actually we’re setting an example for people in the middle of the country who look to San Francisco, New York, and DC as models."

Massive centralized marches have been the linchpin of this country’s peace movement, but many observers are questioning whether they are the most effective strategy.

"People say ‘the movement’s failed,’ " Becker said. "That’s an incorrect conclusion. Building a movement powerful enough to stop war when all the resources of the state are mobilized for it is very difficult."

Max Diorio, co–national coordinator of Not in Our Name, which has joined the ANSWER coalition organizing for March 18, agrees. "If San Francisco has a paltry march, what does that say about the rest of the country? It took 10 years from the first big mobilization against Vietnam to end that war. People are used to instant gratification in this country, but it takes a while. That’s why they call it a struggle."

On March 19 there will be a die-in on Market Street, also initiated by former members of Direct Action to Stop the War.

"The die-in will help to make personal the real cost of war in human lives," Suzanne Sam Joi, a coordinator for Codepink Bay Area, told us. "Too often we can forget that someone who was loved and treasured — a mother, a sister — their life has been destroyed."

In another national antiwar effort, UFPJ member group the Voices for Creative Nonviolence initiated the Occupation Project. Demonstrators have sat in at their legislators’ offices across the country, and 159 people have been arrested so far.

The shift in the UFPJ’s strategy — calling for decentralized, localized actions all over the country — is significant. Until Middle Americans stop looking east and west for models and start organizing themselves, their representatives can safely ignore calls to bring the troops home. *

Marisa Handler’s first book, Loyal to the Sky: Notes from an Activist, chronicles her experiences in the global justice movement from Miami to Lima to Kathmandu.

Web trenz!

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March 13, 2007
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› annalee@techsploitation.com

TECHSPLOITATION It’s the time of year when we celebrate new ideas and fresh memes on the Interwebs. For some reason, March is the month for all the big Webbish conferences, such as South by Southwest Interactive and O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology shindig in San Diego. Strange new Web apps are announced; venture capital is hurled forcefully at people who wear hoodies over button-down shirts; everybody does freaky shit with their cell phones. In case you’re feeling left out, I’ll preview a few Web trenz (that’s how the kids spell it) for you.

Everybody is sick of the blogosphere because there’s only one. I mean, who wants to write things that appear in only one place? That’s why the Interwebbers are going crazy for the new blogomultisphere trend. Liberal bloggers need an antisphere where their parallel selves are writing about why Bush’s new plan to beef up troops in Iraq is a great idea. Or a bizarro sphere where their bizarro selves write about the expressionist era in cute art. One of the breakout content sites of the blogomultisphere is the sliderzone, where bloggers can jump from sphere to sphere, guest writing for parallel universe blogs and antimatter wikis. Questions raised by denizens of the sliderzone include whether copyright licenses in the sphere also hold for anticontent produced in the antisphere. Or are there antilicenses? What about bizarro licenses? You can see why this is an idea whose time has come.

MyMeganSpace is a social network like Facebook that sprang organically from California’s "Megan’s Law Database" of sex offenders. People with similar sex offenses wanted to figure out ways to connect and form special-interest groups, so they started tagging their profiles in the Megan’s Law database. They can add other members as "buddies" or "prison pals." Next MyMeganSpace added RSS feeds so that users could update their MeganBuddies on new events in their lives, like which street they slept on after getting kicked out of apartments by landlords who don’t like streakers. Another great feature of MyMeganSpace is that you can search on which year people got out of prison as well as things like hobbies and parole officers. People who are sick of having to use Kevin Poulsen’s software program to find convicted sex offenders on MySpace are totally psyched about MyMeganSpace!

Last year was all about podcasting, but this year it’s podthrusting. At last, Apple has figured out that its hardware-design sensibility is perfect for mobile sex toys with media capability. With podthrusting you don’t have to go to iTunes to suck down the latest episode of The Office. Instead The Office will thrust itself at you. Each time you get a data thrust, your iPod or other mobile device will play the ringtone of your choice. Then it will burrow into the orifice of your choice. What’s great about podthrusting, as you may have guessed, is that it’s all about choices. Plus, it’s perfect for selling every kind of content, from new ringtones and songs, to new vibration patterns and lube. After just one week of podthrusting, I really can’t believe that I ever thought of my dildo and my phone as separate entities.

One of the biggest problems with wikis is writing. People like the idea of wikis, and they like the word wiki — but they just don’t like writing wikis. That’s where Annoturk comes in. Using micropayments, Annoturk helps you pay people in the developing world very tiny amounts of money to annotate all the information on all the wikis you’re supposed to be using. It’s like micro-outsourcing. You might pay 50 cents to a guy in Sri Lanka to add historical information about Lowell, Mass., to a wiki devoted to an upcoming Boston-area conference you’re planning. Or you could pay kids in China’s Shandong province to write small articles about every noun on your work-collaboration wiki. Annoturk is good for the developing world, and it’s good for writing. Plus, it’s just convenient when you’re trying to fill up space with information.

When I think about how crazy these trenz are getting, I really feel like the future is happening. We are so connected! *

Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who is currently being punished for being a pop-up ad in a previous life.

The Guardian Iraq War casualty report (3/12/07)

-

March 13, 2007
0

Casualties in Iraq

Iraqi civilians:

31 Iraqi civilians were killed yesterday as a part of the violence targeting Shiite religious pilgrims, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. This week’s toll for Shiite religious pilgrims is 220.

Source

98,000: Killed since 3/03

Source: www.thelancet.com

58,598 – 64,405: Killed since 1/03

For a week by week assessment of significant incidents and trends in Iraqi civilian casualties, go to A Week in Iraq by Lily Hamourtziadou. She is a member of the Iraq Body Count project, which maintains and updates the world’s only independent and comprehensive public database of media-reported civilian deaths in Iraq.

Source: http://www.iraqbodycount.net

A Week in Iraq: Week ending 11 March 2007:
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/editorial/weekiniraq/35/

For first hand accounts of the grave situation in Iraq, visit some of these blogs:
www.ejectiraqikkk.blogspot.com
www.healingiraq.blogspot.com
www.afamilyinbaghdad.blogspot.com

Antiestablishmentarianism attitudes among Iraqi religious groups is fueling intolerance and violence towards homosexuals in Iraq, according to the UN.

Source: http://www.gaypeopleschronicle.com/stories07/february/0202071.htm

U.S. military:

3,421: Killed since the U.S. invasion of Iraq 3/20/03

Source: http://www.icasualties.org/

For the Department of Defense statistics go to: http://www.defenselink.mil/

For a more detailed list of U.S. Military killed in the War in Iraq go to:
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2003/iraq/forces/casualties/2007.01.html

Iraq Military:

30,000: Killed since 2003

Source:http://www.infoshout.com

Journalists:

151: Killed since 3/03

Source: http://www.infoshout.com/

Refugees:

The Bush administration plans to increase quota of Iraqi refugees allowed into the U.S. from 500 to 7,000 next year in response to the growing refugee crisis, according to the Guardian Unlimited.

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,2013034,00.html

Border policies are tightening because one million Iraqi refugees have already fled to Jordan and another one million to Syria. Iraqi refugees who manage to make it out of Iraq still can’t work, have difficulty attending school and are not eligible for health care. Many still need to return to Iraq to escape poverty, according to BBC news.

Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6293807.stm

1.6 million: Iraqis displaced internally

1.8 million: Iraqis displaced to neighboring states

Many refugees were displaced prior to 2003, but an increasing number are fleeing now, according to United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ estimates.

Source: http://www.unhcr.org/iraq.html

U.S. Military Wounded:

47,657: Wounded since 3/19/03 to 1/6/07

Source: http://www.icasualties.org/

The Guardian cost of Iraq war report (3/12/07): Bush asks congress to approve $622 billion for 2008. So far, $407 billion for the U.S., $51 billion for California and $1 billion for San Francisco.
Compiled by Paula Connelly

Bush asked congress to approve $622 billion for defense spending, most for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, in a $2.9 trillion budget request for 2008, according to Reuters.
Source: http://today.reuters.com/

Here is a running total of the cost of the Iraq War to the U.S. taxpayer, provided by the National Priorities Project located in Northampton, Massachusetts. The number is based on Congressional appropriations. Niko Matsakis of Boston, MA and Elias Vlanton of Takoma Park, MD originally created the count in 2003 on costofwar.com. After maintaining it on their own for the first year, they gave it to the National Priorities Project to contribute to their ongoing educational efforts.

To bring the cost of the war home, please note that California has already lost $46 billion and San Francisco has lost $1 billion to the Bush war and his mistakes. In San Francisco alone, the funds used for the war in Iraq could have hired 21,264 additional public school teachers for one year, we could have built 11,048 additional housing units or we could have provided 59,482 students four-year scholarships at public universities. For a further breakdown of the cost of the war to your community, see the NPP website aptly titled “turning data into action.”

Why people get mad at the media (part l2) The New York Times answers questions about its slow coverage of the Walter Reed scandal but stonewalls on its censorship of Project Censored

-

March 12, 2007
0

By Bruce B. Brugmann

Byron Calame, the public editor of the New York Times, spent an entire column in the Sunday New York Times (March ll) answering an important question:

“Why,” Calame asked in his lead, “were readers of the New York Times left without a word of news coverage of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center scandal for six days after it had been exposed by the Washington Post?
That was the question posed to me in the wake of the Post’s Feb. l8 scoop by readers thirsty for readers thirsty for news of the poor care given those wounded in Iraq.”

As attentive readers of the Bruce blog will recall, I raised an even more important question as to why the Times and its sister paper in Santa Rosa (the Press Democrat) have for 30 years refused to run the Project Censored story from the local Sonoma State University. I have also asked Calame, and Times and PD editors, why they won’t run the Project Censored story, even though its stories before and during the Iraq War laid out much of the key neocon policy behind the war and the anti-war strategies in opposing it. Neither Calame nor any Times nor editor would answer me nor provide an explanation to Carl Jensen, the project’s current founder, nor Peter Phillips, the current director, for their censorship of the Censored Project through the years.

This is highly significant in light of Calame’s Sunday column. “Readers have every right to be angry about the Times’s slowness in telling them about the compelling news in The Post’s two-part series,” he wrote.
((I won’t raise the question here as to why neither the Post nor the Times, nor any of the beltway journalists, didn’t get the stories months earlier at nearby Walter Reed and why they didn’t respond earlier to the accelerating drumbeat of criticism of lousy treatment of returning soldiers from veterans, their families, and veteran’s organizations.)

Calame did find the culprit: “Excessive pride, I believe, is the fundamental problem. The desire to be first with the news still permeates the newsroom at the Times and other newspapers in a way that makes editors and reporters feel defeated when they have to conclude that the information in another publication’s exclusive article is so newsworthy that it has to be pursued.” Good point: but what about newsworthy stories broken by other publications, picked up by Project Censored, stamped “Censored,” and put out as a major package that the Times and other mainstream media then refused to print? Was “excessive pride” at work here for 30 years? Is that much of an excuse on stories as big as Iraq and Bush?

I pointed out in my earlier blog that the Censored stories were particularly timely during the war years.
For example, on Sept. l0, 2003, while the Times and the PD and affiliated papers on its news service, were running the stories of the disgraced Judith Miller that helped Bush make the case for the Iraq War and then seeking to justify it, the Guardian ran the Censored package with a headline that read, “The neocon plan for global domination–and nine other big stories the mainstream press refused to cover in 2002.” I noted that our introduction to the timely censored package made the critical point: “If there’s one influence that has shaped world-wide politics over the past year, it’s the extent to which the Bush administration hs exploited the events of Sept. ll, 200l, too solidify its military and economic control of the world at the expense of democracy, true justice, and the environment. But President George Bush W. Bush hasn’t simply been responding to world events. The agenda the administration has followed fits perfectly with a clearly defined plan that’s been in place for a decade.”

I noted that the neocon story, and the many other such stories that Project Censored put out during the war years and again this year, laying out the drumbeat to war and the dark side of the Bush administration, got no play in the Times nor the PD and very little play in the rest of the mainstream press and its “embedded” and “mission accomplished” journalism that marched us into war and is now keeping us there. Who was right, the Guardian and Project Censored stories or Judith Miller and the Times?

Calame wrote that “readers would benefit if the
Times could swallow a bit of its pride and make use of two readily available approaches to dealing with important news in the scoops of competing competitors.” He said the Times could put the stories of competitors up on its web and they could be encouraged to use “solidly reported wire stories” of significant exclusives in other publications. What about the Censored stories?

Calame concluded, “The reality is that when significant news breaks–even in the form of an exclusive in a competing publication–the Times must be committed to getting on the story. Anything less seriously damages the paper’s value to the readers.”

Another good point: so repeating for emphasis: Why won’t the Times and the PD run the Project Censored stories
that were so often on target when the Times wasn’t? And why won’t the Times and its public editor answer or even acknowledge the question and underlying issues of biased reporting, flawed news judgment, and too much lapdog access to the Bush administration? I’m sending this blog to them and asking once again.

I am waiting for the public editor and Times/PD editors to reply. Is this like waiting for Godot? Stay tuned. B3

Project censored blog:

http://www.sfbg.com/blogs/bruce/2007/02/new_blog_project_censored.html

Byron Calame’s The public editor:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/11/opinion/11pubed.html?ex=1331269200&en=7f7f89dff165cf09&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Josh Wolf vs. Howard Kurtz, the Washington Post, and the inside-the-beltway gang

-

March 8, 2007
2

By Bruce B. Brugmann

Marvelous. Simply marvelous. While ten of the l9 witnesses testifying in the Libby trial were singing journalists, and three of them were central to securing Libby’s conviction, Howard Kurtz, the media critic of the Washington Post and the voice of the inside-the-beltway media establishment, did not raise any of the obvious issues and questions in this unprecedented mass outing of sources by journalists in federal court in Washington, D.C. It was a “spectacle that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago,” as Adam Liptak put it rightly in the New York Times March 8.

Instead, one day after the Libby guilty verdict, Kurtz went after Josh Wolf, the longest jailed journalist in U.S. history for contempt of court, in his March 8 column headlined “Jailed Man Is A Videographer And a Blogger but Is He a Journalist?” Kurtz, who tosses softballs about every Sunday morning in his media show on CNN, hit Josh hard with a lead that said, “He is being cast by some journalists as a young champion of the First Amendment, jailed for taking a lonely stand heavy-handed federal prosecutors.”

Then: “But Wolf’s rationale for withholding the video, and refusing to testify, is less than crystal clear. There are no confidential sources involved in the case. He sold part of the tape to local television stations and posted another portion on his blog. Why, then, is he willing to give up his freedom over the remaining footage?”

And then he quoted, not a media lawyer nor a journalist with knowledge of
California law, but a professor who ought to be flunked out of law school (Eugene Volokh, a law professor at the University of California Los Angeles). Kurtz quoted Volokh as saying without blushing, “It’s one thing to say journalists must respect promises of confidentiality they made to their sources. It would be quite another to say journalists have a right to refuse to testify even about non-confidential sources. When something is videotaped in a public place, it’s hard to see even an implied agreement of confidentiality.”

Tom Newton, general counsel of the California Newspaper Publishers Association, had the appropriate polite response in an email to Kurtz: “Huh?”

“That, as they say, would be a settled right in California. In California, the people have flatly rejected the idea that police and prosecutors ought to be able to deputize journalists whenever they can’t figure out how to do their job themselves.”

“Moreover,” Newton continued, “the test for whether Josh is a journalist or not should not be based on who the U.S. attorney says he is, (“simply a person with a video camera”), or even who Josh says he is (an “artist, an activist, an anarachist and an archivist”), but on what he does and what he was doing when gathering the information at issue (i.e., creating videotape of a public and newsworthy event and actually selling portions of it for a profit to a news organization which made it part of the local evening TV news).” Read Newton’s full comment below.

So, when the chips are down and the question is raised in time of war, who stood the test of being a real journalist? Josh Wolf, who went to jail on principle, and is still there, and may be there until a new federal jury is impaneled in July? Josh Wolf, who was put in jail in my view by the Bush administration to send a don’t-mess-with-us message to anti-war protestors inside and outside of San Francisco and to journalists at large. Or the l0 journalists warbling away in federal court and thereby avoiding jail (excepting Judith Miller from the New York Times, who did jail time but still ended up testifying)?

I stand with Josh Wolf. I think he is not only a real journalist in the best sense of the word, but a journalistic Hero and a First Amendment Hero who is paying his dues and more every day he serves in federal prison in Dublin, California. As for Howard Kurtz and the Washington Post and the inside-the-Beltway gang, well, they helped George Bush march us into Iraq, no real questions asked, and they are now helping keep us there with this kind of logic and reporting.

There are lots of real questions for Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post/inside the beltway gang who asked the is-Josh-a-journalist question the day after the verdict and to some extent for Debra Saunders of the San Francisco Chronicle who asked the same question a few days before the verdict. The questions do not involve whether whether Josh Wolf is a journalist or not. The questions are, how in the world did those hotshot inside-the-beltway journalists with access and those hotshot inside-the-beltway media organizations with access so screw up the story of the biggest foreign policy mistake in U.S. history? And how did they so screw it up when millions of us without access, in San Francisco and around the world, figured out the real story, knew it was a terrible mistake to go to war with Iraq, and went into the streets to protest the decision? And when will they start reporting the real story behind the Libby trial: that Bush and Cheney lied us into war, that Libby was key to the much larger story of the cover up of the campaign of lies, that the war is now lost but the lies go on, and that our only option left is to get out as quickly as possible? Kurtz and the inside-the-beltway gang are the journalists who have the explaining to do, not Josh Wolf.

<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/07/AR2007030702454.html>

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/08/washington/08fitzgerald.html?n=Top%2fReference%2fTimes%20Topics%2fPeople%2fL%2fLiptak%2c%20Adam

Newton’s email to Kurtz:

“While the national attention on shield law issues has focused almost entirely on the protection of confidential sources, out here in California we have for many years granted journalists the ability to protect both their confidential sources and unpublished information associated with newsgathering. Had the San Francisco situation not rather bizarrely become a federal case (it was, after all, an incident involving a San Francisco crowd, a San Francisco peace officer and a San Francisco police car), there would be no question that Josh, assuming for a moment he is a journalist covered by California law, would be immune from a contempt order for his steadfast refusal to disclose his unpublished information to a state prosecutor. This immunity is squarely set by popular vote in the state’s constitution (Article I. Sec. 2).

“I am totally puzzled by this quote in your column from an esteemed constitutional scholar: “It’s one thing to say journalists must respect promises of confidentiality they made to their sources,” says Eugene Volokh, a law professor at the University of California at Los Angeles. “It would be quite another to say journalists have a right to refuse to testify even about non-confidential sources.” Huh? That, as they say, would be a settled right in California. In California, the people have flatly rejected the idea police and prosecutors ought to be able to deputize journalists whenever they can’t figure out how to do their job themselves.

“Moreover, the test for whether Josh is a journalist or not should not be based on who the U.S. Attorney says he is, (“simply a person with a video camera”), or even who Josh says he is (an “artist, an activist, an anarchist and an archivist”), but on what he does and what he was doing when gathering the information at issue (i.e., creating videotape of a public and newsworthy event and actually selling portions of it for a profit to a news organization which made it a part of the local evening TV news). Based on a recent California case involving a blogger’s attempt to quash a subpoena pursued by Apple in an attempt to identify an internal leak, it’s clear to me Josh would be found to be a journalist for purposes of California’s Shield Law and would be a free man right now, but for this becoming a federal case.”

Full disclosure: I asked CNPA, as a member publisher, to support Wolf, his cause, and a federal shield law. To its immense credit, the CNPA board and staff rose to the occasion and has supported Wolf, a member of no media organization, with skill and passion. From CNPA to the Society of Professional Journalists to the California First Amendment Coalition to the International Free Press Institute in Vienna to other international free press groups to labor unions to the grassroots movement of Andy Blue and Julian Davis in San Francisco and beyond, this is quite a massive and growing coalition of the willing for Josh Wolf. Keep it rolling till Josh is out of jail and the U.S. is out of Iraq. B3

The Guardian Iraq War casualty report (3/7/07)

-

March 8, 2007
0

Casualties in Iraq

Iraqi civilians:

70 Iraqi civilians were killed today in the second day of violence targeting Shiite religious pilgrims, according to the New York Times

Source

98,000: Killed since 3/03

Source: www.thelancet.com

58,022 – 63,800: Killed since 1/03

For a week by week assessment of significant incidents and trends in Iraqi civilian casualties, go to A Week in Iraq by Lily Hamourtziadou. She is a member of the Iraq Body Count project, which maintains and updates the world’s only independent and comprehensive public database of media-reported civilian deaths in Iraq.

Source: http://www.iraqbodycount.net

A Week in Iraq: Week ending 4 March 2007:
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/editorial/weekiniraq/32/

For first hand accounts of the grave situation in Iraq, visit some of these blogs:
www.ejectiraqikkk.blogspot.com
www.healingiraq.blogspot.com
www.afamilyinbaghdad.blogspot.com

Antiestablishmentarianism attitudes among Iraqi religious groups is fueling intolerance and violence towards homosexuals in Iraq, according to the UN.

Source: http://www.gaypeopleschronicle.com/stories07/february/0202071.htm

U.S. military:

3,414: Killed since the U.S. invasion of Iraq 3/20/03

Source: http://www.icasualties.org/

For the Department of Defense statistics go to: http://www.defenselink.mil/

For a more detailed list of U.S. Military killed in the War in Iraq go to:
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2003/iraq/forces/casualties/2007.01.html

Iraq Military:

30,000: Killed since 2003

Source:http://www.infoshout.com

Journalists:

151: Killed since 3/03

Source: http://www.infoshout.com/

Refugees:

The Bush administration plans to increase quota of Iraqi refugees allowed into the U.S. from 500 to 7,000 next year in response to the growing refugee crisis, according to the Guardian Unlimited.

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,2013034,00.html

Border policies are tightening because one million Iraqi refugees have already fled to Jordan and another one million to Syria. Iraqi refugees who manage to make it out of Iraq still can’t work, have difficulty attending school and are not eligible for health care. Many still need to return to Iraq to escape poverty, according to BBC news.

Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6293807.stm

1.6 million: Iraqis displaced internally

1.8 million: Iraqis displaced to neighboring states

Many refugees were displaced prior to 2003, but an increasing number are fleeing now, according to United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ estimates.

Source: http://www.unhcr.org/iraq.html

U.S. Military Wounded:

47,657: Wounded since 3/19/03 to 1/6/07

Source: http://www.icasualties.org/

The Guardian cost of Iraq war report (3/7/07): Bush asks congress to approve $622 billion for 2008. So far, $406 billion for the U.S., $51 billion for California and $1 billion for San Francisco.
Compiled by Paula Connelly

Bush asked congress to approve $622 billion for defense spending, most for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, in a $2.9 trillion budget request for 2008, according to Reuters.
Source: http://today.reuters.com/

Here is a running total of the cost of the Iraq War to the U.S. taxpayer, provided by the National Priorities Project located in Northampton, Massachusetts. The number is based on Congressional appropriations. Niko Matsakis of Boston, MA and Elias Vlanton of Takoma Park, MD originally created the count in 2003 on costofwar.com. After maintaining it on their own for the first year, they gave it to the National Priorities Project to contribute to their ongoing educational efforts.

To bring the cost of the war home, please note that California has already lost $46 billion and San Francisco has lost $1 billion to the Bush war and his mistakes. In San Francisco alone, the funds used for the war in Iraq could have hired 21,264 additional public school teachers for one year, we could have built 11,048 additional housing units or we could have provided 59,482 students four-year scholarships at public universities. For a further breakdown of the cost of the war to your community, see the NPP website aptly titled “turning data into action.”

The Guardian Iraq War casualty report (3/6/07)

-

March 7, 2007
0

Casualties in Iraq

Iraqi civilians:

Over 100 Iraqi civilians were killed today in bombing attacks that targeted Shiite pilgrims heading to Karbala for a religious celebration, according to the New York Times.

98,000: Killed since 3/03

Source: www.thelancet.com

57,805 – 63,573: Killed since 1/03

For a week by week assessment of significant incidents and trends in Iraqi civilian casualties, go to A Week in Iraq by Lily Hamourtziadou. She is a member of the Iraq Body Count project, which maintains and updates the world’s only independent and comprehensive public database of media-reported civilian deaths in Iraq.

Source: http://www.iraqbodycount.net

A Week in Iraq: Week ending 4 March 2007:
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/editorial/weekiniraq/32/

For first hand accounts of the grave situation in Iraq, visit some of these blogs:
www.ejectiraqikkk.blogspot.com
www.healingiraq.blogspot.com
www.afamilyinbaghdad.blogspot.com

Antiestablishmentarianism attitudes among Iraqi religious groups is fueling intolerance and violence towards homosexuals in Iraq, according to the UN.

Source: http://www.gaypeopleschronicle.com/stories07/february/0202071.htm

U.S. military:

3,411: Killed since the U.S. invasion of Iraq 3/20/03

Source: http://www.icasualties.org/

For the Department of Defense statistics go to: http://www.defenselink.mil/

For a more detailed list of U.S. Military killed in the War in Iraq go to:
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2003/iraq/forces/casualties/2007.01.html

Iraq Military:

30,000: Killed since 2003

Source:http://www.infoshout.com

Journalists:

151: Killed since 3/03

Source: http://www.infoshout.com/

Refugees:

The Bush administration plans to increase quota of Iraqi refugees allowed into the U.S. from 500 to 7,000 next year in response to the growing refugee crisis, according to the Guardian Unlimited.

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,2013034,00.html

Border policies are tightening because one million Iraqi refugees have already fled to Jordan and another one million to Syria. Iraqi refugees who manage to make it out of Iraq still can’t work, have difficulty attending school and are not eligible for health care. Many still need to return to Iraq to escape poverty, according to BBC news.

Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6293807.stm

1.6 million: Iraqis displaced internally

1.8 million: Iraqis displaced to neighboring states

Many refugees were displaced prior to 2003, but an increasing number are fleeing now, according to United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ estimates.

Source: http://www.unhcr.org/iraq.html

U.S. Military Wounded:

47,657: Wounded since 3/19/03 to 1/6/07

Source: http://www.icasualties.org/

The Guardian cost of Iraq war report (3/6/07): Bush asks congress to approve $622 billion for 2008. So far, $405 billion for the U.S., $51 billion for California and $1 billion for San Francisco.
Compiled by Paula Connelly

Bush asked congress to approve $622 billion for defense spending, most for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, in a $2.9 trillion budget request for 2008, according to Reuters.
Source: http://today.reuters.com/

Here is a running total of the cost of the Iraq War to the U.S. taxpayer, provided by the National Priorities Project located in Northampton, Massachusetts. The number is based on Congressional appropriations. Niko Matsakis of Boston, MA and Elias Vlanton of Takoma Park, MD originally created the count in 2003 on costofwar.com. After maintaining it on their own for the first year, they gave it to the National Priorities Project to contribute to their ongoing educational efforts.

To bring the cost of the war home, please note that California has already lost $46 billion and San Francisco has lost $1 billion to the Bush war and his mistakes. In San Francisco alone, the funds used for the war in Iraq could have hired 21,264 additional public school teachers for one year, we could have built 11,048 additional housing units or we could have provided 59,482 students four-year scholarships at public universities. For a further breakdown of the cost of the war to your community, see the NPP website aptly titled “turning data into action.”

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