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Who needs a civil war to deplete Iraqi civilians? The US military continues to do a bang-up job. In fact, civilian casualty rates have risen each year in the three years following the “end of major combat operations.” Here’s the minimum count according to media reports analyzed by Iraq Body Count. And remember, these are civilians, not soldiers or insurgents or whatever other classification of combatant you care to use. These are farmers, businesspeople, families, children (like my daughter, pictured below). These are innocent people trying to live lives of common goals and normal routines. These people are just as innocent and undeserving of a violent death as every person on every floor of the WTC in New York on September 11th, 2001.

* 6,331 from 1st May 2003 to the first anniversary of the invasion, 19th March 2004 (324 days: Year 1)
* 11,312 from 20th March 2004 to 19th March 2005 (365 days: Year 2)
* 12,617 from 20th March 2005 to 1st March 2006 (346 days: Year 3).
- iraqbodycount.net

These numbers are low. Very low. They represent only reported deaths of civilians, not actual full counts, which are impossible to do in bombed out cities. How do Iraqi civilians get killed? They get bombs dropped on them by US planes. They get bombs driven into them by insurgents. The get shot for failing to stop. They get kidnapped and killed for being “traitors”. Many other ways as well. They are being killed because the situation created there by the US-led invasion has destabilized the country and made it horribly unsafe for life. In this case, they get killed by being in the wrong place at the wrong time when a gang of vengeful murderers come looking for payback.

Ali, 76, whose left leg was amputated years ago because of diabetes, died after being shot in the stomach and chest. His wife, Khamisa, 66, was shot in the back. Ali’s son, Jahid, 43, was hit in the head and chest. Son Walid, 37, was burned to death after a grenade was thrown into his room, and a third son, 28-year-old Rashid, died after he was shot in the head and chest, Rsayef and Hamza said.

Also among the dead were son Walid’s wife, Asma, 32, who was shot in the head, and their son Abdullah, 4, who was shot in the chest, Rsayef and Hamza said.

Walid’s 8-year-old daughter, Iman, and his 6-year-old son, Abdul-Rahman, were wounded and U.S. troops took them to Baghdad for treatment. The only person who escaped unharmed was Walid’s 5-month-old daughter, Asia. The three children now live with their maternal grandparents, Rsayef and Hamza said.

Rsayef said those killed in the second house were his brother Younis, 43, who was shot in the stomach and chest, the brother’s wife Aida, 40, who was shot in the neck and chest while still in bed where she was recuperating from bladder surgery. Their 8-year-old son Mohammed bled to death after being shot in the right arm, Rsayef said.

Also killed were Younis’s daughters, Nour, 14, who was shot in the head; Seba, 10, who was hit in the chest; Zeinab, 5, shot in the chest and stomach; and Aisha, 3, who was shot in the chest. Hoda Yassin, a visiting relative, was also killed, Rsayef and Hamza said.

The only survivor from Younis’s family was his 15-year-old daughter Safa, who pretended she was dead. She is living with her grandparents, Rsayef said.

The troops then shot and killed four brothers who were walking in the street, Rsayef and Hamza said, identifying them as the sons of Ayed Ahmed — Marwan, Qahtan, Jamal and Chaseb.

U.S. troops also shot dead five men who were in a car near the scene, Hamza and Rsayef said. They identified the five as Khaled Ayad al-Zawi and his brother Wajdi as well as Mohammed Battal Mahmoud, Akram Hamid Flayeh and Ahmad Fanni Mosleh.

So, yes. The Liberation of Iraq is ongoing. People like you and me are being liberated from life every day.

Deepak Chopra is someone I frequently disagree with, but not today. He recently posted a very simple but accurate piece on The Huffington Post about the hijacking of Jesus.

Chopra speaks of three Jesuses. The first is the historical Rabbi from 1st century Palestine. The second is the Jesus of Christian dogma. The third is the universal teacher Jesus who can be an inspiration to all people because of his core teachings of love, compassion, tolerance and peace.

I don’t think that well-intentioned fundamentalists mean to pervert the third Jesus; I suspect they’ve never heard of him. He has one great disadvantage, however. You can’t own him. You can’t say “he’s all mine and nobody else’s.” The third Jesus won’t work if you need to justify a war, if you need evil enemies, or you want to brand “them” as godless.

Sadly, many fundamentalists need Jesus for all these purposes. So the third Jesus might not return to them, but if Christianity is to survive among moderate and liberal believers, who used to be the mainstream of the religion, won’t it take the return of the third Jesus? The first one is long deceased, the second has fallen prey to politics and narrow-mindedness. What alternative is there? Loss of faith and a slide into deeper and deeper meaninglessness. That would be a terrible fate for all of us, not just the Christians.

I like Jesus. In general, he has a great message; one that stands out among great teachers. Too bad so few people know him. Those who claim him the most insistently certainly do not.

I’ll be the first to give the US credit for favourable accomplishements in Iraq. They simply are not happening. This is now confirmed by Ayad Allawi, the formerly supportive former Iraqi Prime Minister. He says things are worse, and he isn’t just talking about basic conditions of life, like heat, light and water. He’s talking about human rights.

‘People are doing the same as [in] Saddam’s time and worse,’ Ayad Allawi told The Observer. ‘It is an appropriate comparison. People are remembering the days of Saddam. These were the precise reasons that we fought Saddam and now we are seeing the same things.’

Allawi continues:

‘We are hearing about secret police, secret bunkers where people are being interrogated,’ he added. ‘A lot of Iraqis are being tortured or killed in the course of interrogations. We are even witnessing Sharia courts based on Islamic law that are trying people and executing them.’

It would seem that “freedom” was not on the agenda. That agenda was a lie. The lie is well documented by Frank Rich of the NY Times today.

What was on the agenda? Well, it appears it was what we feared all along:

According to the report, from groups including War on Want and the New Economics Foundation (NEF), the new Iraqi constitution opened the way for greater foreign investment. Negotiations with oil companies are already under way ahead of next month’s election and before legislation is passed, it said.

The groups said they had amassed details of high-level pressure from the US and UK governments on Iraq to look to foreign companies to rebuild its oil industry. It said a Foreign Office code of practice issued in summer last year said at least $4bn would be needed to restore production to the levels before the 1990-91 Gulf War. “Given Iraq’s needs it is not realistic to cut government spending in other areas and Iraq would need to engage with the international oil companies to provide appropriate levels of foreign direct investment to do this,” it said.

Yesterday’s report said the use of production sharing agreements (PSAs) was proposed by the US State Department before the invasion and adopted by the Coalition Provisional Authority. “The current government is fast-tracking the process. It is already negotiating contracts with oil companies in parallel with the constitutional process, elections and passage of a Petroleum Law,” the report, Crude Designs, said.

Earlier this year a BBC Newsnight report claimed to have uncovered documents showing the Bush administration made plans to secure Iraqi oil even before the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the US. Based on its analysis of PSAs in seven countries, it said multinationals would seek rates of return on their investment from 42 to 162 per cent, far in excess of typical 12 per cent rates.

So the legacy of the Bush family continues. From his father’s role as CIA head and President during the heyday of latin american conquest, followed by Dubyas conquest of the Middle East, the Bush dynasty has had a very overt theme: neoimerialism and the export of raw torture and late-modern capitalist exploitation.

Note there is little in this that resembles “freedom” and “democracy.” Sham elections and constitutions designed in Washington are not acceptable in western industrialized countries, so why pretend?

Like most of us, I think, I was particularly struck by Wendy Brown’s chapter Specters and Angels, and have been thinking about the idea of hauntology since then. I went back and read Derrida’s piece on Marx where he introduces the concept. What a striking and new meaning the opening phrase of the Communist Manifesto takes when read in that light. A specter is haunting Europe — the specter of communism. If we are to follow Derrida and Brown it seems there are specters haunting us all; haunting and cloaking all epochs, all grand narratives, generations, and civilisations.

There is a computer game that is more popular in Japan than North America called Fatal Frame. Fatal Frame is not like other computer games where you chase and kill endless enemies with an impossible-to-carry array of weaponry and an endless supply of ammunition that happens to be lying around everywhere. In Fatal Frame the only tool or weapon you have is a camera. As the game progresses you can trade up to a better camera with a higher level of functionality. The purpose of the camera is to capture and repel ghosts. The scene of the game is an old mansion, and your character needs to traverse the dangerous nooks and crannies to rescue a lost sibling. The ghosts do not appear to you except through the view finder of the camera, and when you capture them on film you disperse them.

So I started to wonder: what technologies or techniques can we use to cause the ghosts and specters of hauntologies to appear? Or, more importantly, where can we look for them? Where do they emerge most clearly, even if that emergence or becoming visible or sensible is an accident, a by-product of some other process or technology, an unintended consequence of some other project, perhaps even a project that aims at the opposite, a project that does not seek to illuminate ghosts and spectres but to conceal and naturalise them? Perhaps we can call this capturing, whether intentional or unintentional, hauntography. I realize I’m pushing Derrida’s original and much punnier trope to its limit, but what the heck.

I was thinking about this concept as I read Donna Haraway’s essay Teddy Bear Patriarchy. I found the technologies behind dioramics and taxidermy fascinating, not so much for the representational techniques but rather for the total effect of capturing and displaying more clearly the auras and misty edges of these specters and ghosts that haunt the specific grand narrative Haraway so successfully teases out of the dioramas in the African Hall at the American Museum of Natural History.

Is there something unique and powerful in the technology of the diorama? Is the diorama more successful than other modes of representation at capturing and depicting hauntologies? Perhaps it is more dependant on the creator of the diorama, but these aspects all come together and provide Haraway the opportunity for a profoundly insightful close reading of the African Hall, its architecture, its displays, statuary and specifically, dioramics and taxidermics. Read more

We already have drone aircraft that can engage ground-based forces and kill them without human intervention. Currently under development are nuclear versions of same, which could “loiter in the air for months without refuelling, striking at will when a target comes into its sights.” A more complex problem - ground-based drones - is inching closer to a reality with the successful completion of a 132 mile race for driverless vehicles yesterday. I’m glad to see we have our priorities straight. Read more