Magpie

Thursday, August 9, 2007

Warning! Warning!

A new report proves that Iran is less than 10 years away, and getting closer every minute.

Via The Onion.

| | Posted by Magpie at 11:47 AM | Get permalink

The US occupation of Iraq just keeps on giving.

In this case, that gift is the millions of refugees who've fled Iraq for neighboring countries. About 1.4 million of those refugees have landed in Syria, and they now make up 8 percent of that country's population. The presence of the refugees is 'pushing Syria to the edge,' according to a report by freelance journalist Hugh Naylor.

"The situation is starting to scare a lot of people," said Samir Taqqi, a political analyst at the Orient Center for Studies, a Damascus think tank.

Public services are deteriorating. State-run hospitals, inundated by tens of thousands of Iraqis seeking free medical care, are short on staff and medical supplies. Unable to afford serving cafeteria food, many are asking patients to bring their own.

At public schools across Damascus, the capital, overwhelmed teachers are forced to work double shifts to accommodate Iraqis pushing class sizes to as high as 70 students. Meanwhile, rolling power blackouts blanket the city for up to five hours a day because the country's electrical grid can't meet increasing energy demands during one of the warmest summers on record. Blackouts in some suburbs reportedly last up to 12 hours.

"The Syrian economy doesn't have the resources to sustain current subsidies for food and energy," said Taqqi.

One way to understand the magnitude of Syria's refugee crisis is to try to imagine what things in the US would be like if, over the course of 4 years, more than 28 million Mexican refugees poured into the country as the result of a civil war. Both the sheer magnitude of the immigration and the presence of a large, unstable country next door would wreak havoc on the US economy and political institutions. While I doubt that Dubya's administration had any idea of the refugee problem that would result from the US-led invasion of Iraq, this magpie is certain that Syria's refugee-related troubles aren't causing anyone in the White House to shed even crocodile tears.

As Naylor's report points out, however, Syria is not the only country dealing with a huge influx of Iraqi refugees. Jordan is hosting 700,000 Iraqis — in other words, more than 1 in 10 residents of Jordan have fled Iraq. This situation is no doubt reminding Jordanian officials (and probably the Syrian government as well) of an earlier influx of Palestinian refugees that resulted in armed battles between government forces and armed Palestinian militants in the early 1970s.

Addition: I didn't quite complete my thought there at the end. The reason I brought up the experience of the Jordanians in dealing with a large Palestinian refugee population was to draw an analogy between the regional results of the Israel/Palestine conflict and the current occupation of Iraq. In the latter confict, action — or lack of action — by the US created and perpetuated a state of affairs (lack of a viable Palestinian state) that has kept the region in an uproar for the last 40 years or so. And which, arguably, led to the 9/11 attacks. My suspicion is that the refugee crisis in Syria and Jordan may be one of the first signs that the Iraq occupation is causing similar regional problems — and that no one in the White House gives a sh*t.

Via SF Chronicle.

Labels: Iraq, Occupation, Refugees, Surge, Syria

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:30 AM | Get permalink

Wednesday, August 8, 2007

Slow to nonexistent blogging today.

It's my last day at my current job, and I'm actually having to do work (archiving documents, deleting files, etc.). Hopefully I'll get a real post or two up later today, but I wouldn't recommend holding your breath while you wait.

Labels: Housekeeping

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:07 PM | Get permalink

Tuesday, August 7, 2007

The sun won't be setting on warrantless wiretapping any time soon.

Yeah, I know that the 'Protect America Act' (PAA) passed by Congress a few days ago contains a provision that sunsets the law in six months. Unfortunately, the law was crafted by the White House, and you know they'd never give up the right to spy on ~~victims~~ citizens so easily.

Constitutional scholar Marty Lederman points out a little-noticed provision of the law that shouldn't surprise any of us:

Although section 6(c) provides that the operative provisions of the Act "shall cease to have effect 180 days after the date of the enactment of this Act," i.e., on February 1, 2008, there is an express exception in section 6(d), which reads as follows:
AUTHORIZATIONS IN EFFECT.—Authorizations for the acquisition of foreign intelligence information pursuant to the amendments made by this Act, and directives issued pursuant to such authorizations, shall remain in effect until their expiration. Such acquisitions shall be governed by the applicable provisions of such amendments and shall not be deemed to constitute electronic surveillance as that term is defined in section 101(f) of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (50 U.S.C. 1801(f)).

Thus, "acquisitions" authorized by Attorney General Gonzales will be permissible for one year, even if that period extends beyond the ostensible February 1, 2008 sunset date. I think it's fair to assume that the Attorney General will authorize a system of such acquisitions on or close to February 1, 2008, which will mean that the warrantless surveillance can continue until . . . February 1, 2009, or twelve days after the next President is sworn in.

That's right. Dubya and Attorney General Gonzales didn't get a six-month window in which to spy on everyone and everything—the PAA gives them 18 months. If you (like this mapgie) was worried about all the backdoors that the feds could order installed over the next six months at internet providers, telecommunications networks, and search engines, just think about the permanent spying infrastructure that Dubya's regime will be able to get up and running in 18 months.

And while Congress could decide to pass a law preventing Gonzales from extending warrantless wiretapping until 2009, the cowardice that some Democrats showed when they aided the passage of the 'Protect America Act' speaks volumes about the likelihood that Congress will suddenly grow a spine and start protecting the Constitution.

Via Balkinization.

Labels: 'Protect America' Act, 'War on Terrorism', Al Gonzales, Dubya, Internet, Police state, Spying, Surveillance

| | Posted by Magpie at 10:38 AM | Get permalink

Monday, August 6, 2007

About those 190,000 weapons missing in Iraq.

This magpie wasn't surprised to hear the news, given that Dubya's military has this longstanding problem with keeping tabs on armaments.

If our Dear Leader couldn't see that arms were kept out of the hands of Iraq's insurgents in 2003 and 2004, why should his minions be doing anything different now?

Labels: Dubya, Incompetence, Insurgency, Iraq, Occupation

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:35 PM | Get permalink

Give Dubya an inch.

And he'll come back for the rest of what's left of the Constitution.

Here's some of what our Dear Leader had to say as he signed the so-called Protect America Act, in which spineless Democrats in both houses of Congress helped the GOP ram through an ill-considered expansion of the feds' spying powers under the FISA law:

While I appreciate the leadership it took to pass this bill, we must remember that our work is not done. This bill is a temporary, narrowly focused statute to deal with the most immediate shortcomings in the law.

When Congress returns in September the Intelligence committees and leaders in both parties will need to complete work on the comprehensive reforms requested by Director McConnell, including the important issue of providing meaningful liability protection to those who are alleged to have assisted our Nation following the attacks of September 11, 2001. [Emphasis added]

Obviously, having the right to intercept any phone call, text message, or email that passes through a US network without a warrant isn't enough for the prez. Nor is having six months to turn the internet and domestic phone networks into permanent spying architecture. Dubya has put us on notice that he wants to make his illicit spying program retroactively legal, getting his corporate accomplices out of any responsibility for assisting the ~~regime~~ government poke into the private affairs of its ~~suspects~~ citizens.

Aren't you ever so glad that we put the Democrats in control of the Congress? After all, god knows what would have happened if the elections had left the GOP in charge of protecting the Constitution and our civil rights ...

Labels: 'Protect America' Act, Civil liberties, Dubya, FISA, Police state, Spying

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:13 PM | Get permalink