U.S. Foreign Policy Shaped by Energy Supply

"The Cops Had No Reason to Open Up on Them"

Media Groups Condemn U.S. Killings

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Day 12 Displaced in Basra
Day 10 Baghdad Bombarded
Day 9 - Asia Rising
Day 8 - Baghdad Bombarded - Rain of Terror
Day 8 - Day of Dissent: 26 Mar 03
Continuous: Wounded in Baghdad

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Well into the war that was supposed to rid Iraq of its alleged stockpile of weapons of mass destruction, a senior British official admitted on Saturday that no chemical, biological or nuclear weapons of mass destruction may after all be found.

Making the startling confession in a radio interview, British Home Secretary, David Blunkett, added in the same breath that he would in any case rejoice the "fall" of Saddam Hussein and his regime — regardless of whether any weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq or not.

The confession reconfirms the worst fears of opponents of the war that "weapons of mass destruction" is only a ruse for the US and the British to go to war against Iraq.

At the very least the admission certainly deals a serious blow to the moral legitimacy that the US and the British have been seeking in prosecuting the war.

Critics of the war across the world have been accusing the US and the British of aiming for regime change in Baghdad under the guise of "unearthing and dismantling weapons of mass destruction in Iraq."

There have been constant accusations that the US and the British are eyeing Iraq’s huge oil wealth, promoting Israeli interests, and that its campaign against "weapons of mass destruction" is only a convenient cover-up.

Even countries like Germany, Russia and France had been less than impressed with the US-led war against Iraq saying all along that the task of unearthing weapons of mass destruction, if any, is better left to UN weapons' inspectors.

In making the confession in an interview with BBC radio, the British Home Secretary however admitted that the non-discovery of any weapons of mass destruction would "lead to a very interesting debate" about the war.

"We will obviously have a very interesting debate if there are no biological, chemical, radiological or nuclear weapons or facilities to produce them found anywhere in Iraq once Iraq is free," the home secretary added.

The US-led forces stand to face a huge global uproar if no weapons of mass destruction are found in Iraq.

US-led forces moving across the Iraqi deserts have been under pressure since the start of the war to find evidence of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. But instead of solid evidence, the they have so far raised only false alarms.

From time to time, the US-forces have claimed to have unearthed "suspicious" substances. And each time, the claim has turned out to be without substance.

Today Saturday 5 April, US Marines were reported to be digging up a suspected chemical weapons hiding place in the courtyard of a school in the southeast of Baghdad.

Western media reported that the US Marines were digging after being tipped off by an Iraqi informer. "We don’t have a clue now but we are going to dig it up and check," said General James Mattis, the commander of the Marine division at the scene.

Iraq has always insisted that it does not possess any weapons of mass destruction.

UN weapons inspectors, who scoured the country for several months until the US asked them to leave last month, had repeatedly certified that they had found no credible evidence of Iraq possessing any weapons of mass destruction. -- Al Jazeera

WASHINGTON, DC, April 8, 2003 (ENS) - The U.S. government must ensure that the United States can pursue its foreign policy and national security interests unconstrained by energy concerns, a senior State Department official says.

Undersecretary of State Alan Larson said the Bush administration plans to achieve this objective by promoting energy supply diversification, coordinating internationally an effective response to oil supply disruptions and encouraging major oil producing countries to maintain responsible production policies.

Testifying today before a Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee, Larson said that the U.S. economy must have access to energy "on terms and conditions that support economic growth and prosperity." He told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Subcommittee on International Economic Policy, Export and Trade Promotion that the Bush administration has signaled to major oil producing countries that it expects them to follow through on their offers to offset market disruptions. Consuming countries on their part stand ready to use strategic petroleum reserves to calm the market if necessary, he added.

Larson said that energy security cannot be equated with self-sufficiency, "as much as we would like that to be the case," because the United States and its allies' demand for imported oil is forecast to grow until at least 2020.

"So we must find more oil and gas supplies, and these supplies must be reliable and made available on terms that permit sustained economic growth," he said.

Larson reviewed concerns, expectations and U.S. policies related to major oil producing regions and countries. He said that the world needs a "highly flexible, resilient oil market that will allow for some regions to compensate for ebbs and flows in others."

Energy investments are costly, risky and require long-term commitments, he noted. Therefore energy security will be advanced by sustained improvements in the investment climates in Russia, the Caspian region, Africa, and in the Western Hemisphere, as well as by improved investment opportunities in the Gulf region and Venezuela, Larson said.

He said that despite frequently expressed concerns about "dependence" on the Middle East, Gulf producers will continue to play an "indispensable" role in the world oil market.

Larson cautioned that due to complex relationships between political, economic and security considerations "energy security will not be achieved by one dramatic breakthrough but rather by sustained, patient and determined efforts."

The United States is the world's second largest natural gas producer and its third largest oil producer. But imports supply roughly half of the oil needs of the United States, Larson said, and an even greater share of the needs of some of the U.S.'s most important allies and economic partners.

The United States is no longer self-sufficient in natural gas, Larson told the legislators. "We now import 15 percent of our natural gas, almost entirely from Canada, but in growing volumes from Trinidad and other LNG [liquid natural gas] suppliers."

Two-thirds of proven world oil reserves are in the Middle East. In contrast, the United States has two percent of proven world oil reserves.

Copyright Environment News Service (ENS) 2003. All Rights Reserved.

Arriving at 7AM at the Oakland docks on the morning of April 7, I scanned a lively circle of several hundred protestors, including many Palestine solidarity activists, marching in a circular picket and demanding an end to the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq.

The corporate targets for the day's protests (organized by Direct Action to Stop the War) of the Bush imperial war machine were APL (formerly American President Lines), a cargo carrier that has contracts with the Defense Department to ship military cargo to Baghdad, and the Stevedoring Services of America (SSA), which was recently awarded a $4.8 million contract to manage the Umm Qasr seaport in Iraq. As I heard what I took to be tear gas canisters explode further down the docks near another entrance targeted by activists, I grew concerned that my housemates might be trapped in a dicey situation and felt like a cad for showing up an hour later than they had. I harbored no illusions that I could actually do much in response to any Oakland police overreaction aside from blurting out an ineffectual "easy!" or, as I'd done to a cop the week before at the Federal Building in San Francisco who trained a teargas gun at my head while his colleagues put two of my roommates into pain holds, making the sign of the cross as if I was in a vampire flick.

But given that I was joining hundreds of Bay Area activists to act in solidarity with Iraqis under siege by my country's war machine, an advance into potentially teargas-laden airspace seemed the least I could do.

As I began walking down the train tracks that border the road alongside targeted dock entrances, the police approached me and a handful of other peaceniks and told us not to get behind them, then moved around us in what I can only describe as a paramilitary trot and forced us into the mass of protestors they were driving away from dock entrances. At least now I was not faced with getting arrested in isolation, I thought to myself as my pal June yelled from inside a paddywagon to call her job and tell them she'd be missing work that day.

Soon a line of cops was advancing and making some noises I couldn't decipher, then firing what looked to be concussion, or flash, grenades not that far above our heads. They also fired bean bags (innocuous looking when recovered later, they obviously stung like hell from the looks on faces they made contact with) and wooden plugs (or blocks, as a friend who works with prisoners who have been fired upon by similar ordnance calls them) big enough to take out an eye. It was the first time I'd made plans with friends for future anti-war projects in an atmosphere that somewhat resembled what people in Jakarta describe going through on a fairly regular basis (admittedly, without a sense of possible torture or random execution). I can't say it was a treat exactly, especially when I saw a woman who had been hit point blank by either a grenade or one of the wooden projectiles, which had raised a tennis ball-sized bloody lump on her jaw. I quickly grabbed a bunch of well groomed professional types with fancy cameras and dragged them to where she was being comforted by a friend ; a caption that later appeared with her photo said she refused to give her name, but the young woman, called Sre, told me that none of the shutterbugs photographing her wounded face had bothered to ask for it. Sre described bending down in front of a truck to avoid the police onslaught, where a cop ordered her to get up. When she did she was trapped between two cops on motorcycles, who drove her to the gravel bed of train train tracks that I had just been on, then the next thing she knew she was shot. Given that she works with a pacifist affinity group devoted to yoga as a corollary to peaceful protest, it's a bit difficult to see what threat she posed to the cops.

The official explanation for the extreme police actions is that random ruffians made the mistake of provoking security forces by, according to Deputy Police Chief Patrick Haw, throwing "rocks and big iron bolts at officers." But Joel Tena, the constituent liason for Oakland Vice Mayor Nancy Nadel, said "I was there from 5a.m. on, and the only violence that I saw was from the police."

Jeff Grubler, main conspirator behind the notorious insanereagan.com website and its associated series of outrageous political actions, was also on the scene by 5a.m. "I was at the gate where the police first opened fire and no protestor threw anything at any of the cops before they advanced, gave a cursory dispersal order, and opened fire without giving the assembled demonstrators enough time to leave. They continued firing concussion grenades and other projectiles directly at us as we walked or ran away. In fact hundreds of us were forced onto the railroad bed, which is loaded with small stones perfect for throwing back at someone firing on you, but no one responded by doing so, they just kept screaming 'stop shooting.' There may have been one kid who eventually did respond by chucking back a stone , but if that did happen it was only after three cycles of police advancing and then firing on us for no apparent reason that anyone could discern." Even if there had been a hothead or agent provocateur throwing something, it's had to imagine such an isolated action justifying opening fire on hundreds of protestors. As Oakland officer Danielle Ashford told the San Jose Mercury News, "There were a few agitators in the crowd. The majority of them were peaceful''; in the same breath Ashford blandly recounted that the cops nonetheless "fired non-lethal munitions."

The question of how to maintain a respectful yet militant picket without alienating longshoremen not yet won over to the anti-war position was largely solved by the outrageous behavior of the police. Trent Willis, a business agent for the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, responded to cops opening fire on his fellow longshore workers by declaring that they would walk off the job.

"They shot my guys. We're not going to work today," Willis said. "The cops had no reason to open up on them." Seven longshore workers went to the hospital for wounds from police fire.

San Francisco activist Don Paul spent the morning talking to longshore workers and said he encountered 100% support for anti-war protestors. "One guy told me, 'the fucking Oakland police are out of control they should have known better than to piss off longshoremen.' They're clearly mad enough to stand up to the war profiteers."

Repeatedly firing on retreating demonstrators (most activists were hit on their backs or the backs of their legs) was also probably not the most brilliant way to dissuade activists from protesting in Oakland. As a Richmond resident named Scott said of his wounds (shot three times in the back and once in the leg), "this was clearly meant to keep me from coming back to Oakland. But if my country's military continues to slaughter Iraqi civilians, as it appears it will, I'll be back. This crap has only strengthened my resolve to stand up and say no to this insane war."

As Jeff Grubler rightly points out, "the story the media puts out shouldn't be about demonstrators being shot at, it should be about why we're out here being subjected to this nonsense: to stand up for people that are being slaughtered in our names. What we went through with these concussion grenades is nothing compared to what Iraqi civilians have been subjected to we're not dealing with cluster bombs that send shrapnel slicing through people at hundreds of miles an hour. We did an action last week where we told print, TV and radio journalists that we'd be smashing windows in downtown San Francisco. When they arrived and finally figured out, after we subjected them to plenty of carefully worked out anti-war satire describing the civilian casualties in Iraq that they're normally so bored by, that we were actually going to smash Windows software, which we happily did, they weren't all that thrilled. But they filmed, photographed and wrote about it anyway and we got our message out. That's the kind of thing we have to keep on doing, locally, nationally and internationally, until we turn this thing around and help save the Iraqi people from liberation by mass murder."

WASHINGTON, Apr 9 (IPS) - Two major international press watchdogs have denounced three U.S. military strikes in Baghdad on Tuesday that killed three journalists and wounded many more.

Amnesty International also expressed concerns about the attacks, which, according to U.S. Central Command, came in response to "significant enemy fire."

"My understanding is, again, context: we are at war; there is fighting going on in Baghdad; our forces came under fire; they exercised their inherent right to self-defense," Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke told reporters Wednesday.

But journalists at two of the sites said they had seen no shooting by Iraqi forces from the buildings that housed the media workers when they were attacked by U.S. forces.

According to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), U.S. air strikes severely damaged the Baghdad office of the Al-Jazeera satellite network, killing journalist Taraq Ayyoub and injuring cameraman Zouhair al-Iraqi. Just moments later another explosion, reportedly from U.S. artillery, damaged the offices of Abu Dhabi TV less than one mile away, trapping as many as 30 journalists in the debris.

In the third incident, a U.S. tank fired on the Palestine Hotel, which serves as the main base for international journalists covering the war from Baghdad, killing two journalists and wounding at least three others.

Reuters cameraman Taras Protsyuk and a colleague from Spain's Telecinco television, Jose Souso, were killed in the blast and at least three other journalists were wounded, according to CPJ.

Pentagon officials insisted that they had not targeted any of the offices, but Paris-based Reporters Without Borders (RSF) called on Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to provide evidence that none of the attacks was a deliberate attempt to intimidate or retaliate against journalists who are covering the war.

"We are appalled at what happened because it was known that both (the Palestine Hotel and the Al-Jazeera office) contained journalists," said RSF Secretary-General Robert Menard. "We are concerned at the U.S. army's increasingly hostile attitude towards journalists, especially those non-embedded in its military units."

In its statement, CPJ agreed that the incidents were "particularly troubling" because the location of both Arab television offices and the Palestine Hotel were widely known. In addition, before hostilities broke out last month both Al-Jazeera and Abu Dhabi TV provided specific coordinates of their Baghdad offices to Clarke's office to prevent mistakes. CPJ called on Rumsfeld to undertake an "immediate and thorough investigation" into the incidents.

"The attack against Al-Jazeera is of particular concern since the stations' offices were also hit in Kabul, Afghanistan in November 2001," the group said in a letter faxed to Rumsfeld late Tuesday. At that time, the Pentagon insisted that the Al-Jazeera office in the Afghan capital was a "known al-Qaeda facility," and that it did not know that the television network operated from there.

Amnesty and CPJ said that the Baghdad incidents appeared to violate the Geneva Conventions providing that military operations must be "limited strictly to military objectives."

"Although the U.S. has claimed it is going to 'great lengths to minimize civilian casualties and damage to civilian facilities'," Amnesty said, "it has declared Baghdad a 'combat zone' and has fired on media facilities. Challenged to explain attacks on buildings occupied by international media, U.S. authorities have offered shifting explanations."

"Unless the U.S. can demonstrate that the Palestine Hotel had been used for military purposes, it was a civilian object protected under international humanitarian law that should not have been attacked," Amnesty went on. "If it had demonstrably been used for military purposes, it should not have been attacked by a tank shell, clearly incapable of careful targeting in this case."

Journalists at the Hotel said they had neither seen nor heard firing from the building before the attack, while CPJ said that even if firing had taken place from the building, the response of U.S. forces was "disproportionate and thereby violated international humanitarian law."

Of particular concern to the New York-based group was the impression left by Pentagon spokesmen, such as Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks, who said Tuesday that non-embedded journalists--those not traveling under the protection and control of coalition forces--operate at their own risk and that U.S. forces bear no responsibility for protecting journalists who are operating independently in Iraq.

Clarke reiterated that point Wednesday. "We've had conversations over the last couple of days (with) news organizations eager to get their people unilaterally into Baghdad," she said. "We are saying it is not a safe place; you should not be there."

"We remind you," CPJ said in its letter to Rumsfeld, "that journalists are civilians and protected under international humanitarian law and cannot be deliberately targeted. While we recognize the important role of embedded reporters, the Geneva Conventions also contemplate the presence of non-embedded, or 'civilian', journalists on the battlefield, and the U.S. military has an obligation to avoid harming them."

CPJ, RSF, the International Press Institute, and the International Federation of Journalists last week protested the U.S. bombing of Iraqi state television headquarters in Baghdad, which, according to the Pentagon, was being used as a command-and-control facility for the Iraqi armed forces. The groups also questioned the March 29 and 30 bombings of the Information Ministry headquarters, where foreign news media are based.

CPJ and other watchdogs have also charged that reporters who were not "embedded" had been poorly treated by U.S. forces in southern Iraq.

Four journalists--two Israelis and two Portuguese--were arrested March 25 by U.S. troops, accused of spying, and detained in a jeep for 36 hours without access to outside communications, despite providing proof of their press affiliations. One of the four, Luis de Castro of Portugal, says he was beaten badly by U.S. soldiers.

"The U.S. soldiers said we were terrorists and spies and treated us as such," said Dan Scemama, who works for Israel Channel One TV. "They want all journalists in Iraq to have one of their liaison officers with them to supervise the footage they are broadcasting. There is no doubt that this is why they treated us so cruelly."

In a related development Tuesday, the San Francisco-based Association for Progressive Communications (APC) protested the targeting by so-called "patriotic hackers" of the English-language Al-Jazeera website, which was launched March 27. APC said the site had been virtually impossible to access because hackers re-directed viewers to another page that featured the image of the U.S. flag and a message proclaiming "Let Freedom Ring."

London-based Index on Censorship last month awarded Al-Jazeera its free-expression prize for its "courage in circumventing censorship and contributing to the free exchange of information in the Arab world."

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