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Sunday, April 30, 2006

A Witness Describes War Crimes Being Commited in Ramadi Today in Iraq's nature as a news aggregator and clearinghouse for information about Iraq has enabled us to provide a great amount of insight into Ramadi and other areas of conflict with little media coverage. Centralizing as much as possible in one location increases our measure of understanding and comprehension of the conflict. This morning I received an email, not from a journalist, but from a resident living inside Ramadi and currently under siege by United States and New Iraqi Army forces. Qasem and I have communicated a few times, but not since he returned to Ramadi until now. I've posted the entire text of his letter at Alive in Baghdad, as well as detailing some of the media reports that correspond with his own report. To keep it brief for Today in Iraq's readers, I'll simply post some of his more salient remarks here. "I am now with my family in Anbar[A province in western Iraq] I found my family ok…and most friends also…….but the situation was very bad ……burned tank ( US tank ) was in front of my house and my house [was damaged] partially…..there was hard fighting …… At 22/April 2006 the US troops did clear crime in the other side of Ramadi ( Tameem ) …US soldeirs inspect Iraqi family house and after they finished they killed 3 men inside it and one woman were dead when she shocked with this crime …..the resuilt was 4 civilians killed by US troops inside one house after inspection …. The people there told me that the US soldiers seems got mad for no reason and there was no fighting at that day………" 29 April 2006 "For the last week fighting was the daily thing that we got……US tanks moving and fighting started just when US soldiers kill some body ( civilians ) …I can see that the number of fighters increased more and more and I can say that the main reason of this is that the number of killed civilians increased …….2 kids killed by snipers one of them was with his mother going to the doctor, the kid was (7 year-old girl) killed by US sniper in front of (Almustafa private hospital) in the centre of Ramadi, the other kid was (8 years old boy) killed by US sniper in front of his house while he was playing with his friends . Now US troops trying to spread snipers in the houses along my house street ,till now they failed because fighters attacked them during their attempt to occupied houses. Today US army warned the families to leave their houses [within] 4 hours (as period time) or they will be attacked by US tanks!!…….and now some of these empty houses are snipers bases ……one of the snipers attacked my father but he missed him and crashed the rear glass of his car…….. my father is (65 years old man) he is peaceful man… Now my family is planning to leave our house again but there is no place to go." --- posted by aliveinbaghdad.org

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Saturday, April 29, 2006

DAILY WAR NEWS FOR SUNDAY, APRIL 30, 2006 Romanian soldiers carry the coffin of their colleague Bogdan Hancu, who was killed in a blast in Iraq, during the funeral in his hometown of Iasi, 400km (249 miles) northeast of Bucharest, April 30, 2006. The Italian flag at half staff is seen at the Vittoriano,The Unknown soldier monument, in Rome, Sunday, April 30, 2006, to commemorate the three Italian soldiers killed in Iraq this week. Iraqis gather around a damaged vehicle following a roadside bomb explosion in Suwayrah, 50 kilometers (30 miles) south of Baghdad, Sunday, April 30, 2006. Three security contractors were killed in a roadside bomb attack and two others injured, Britain's Foreign Office said. AP photos Bring 'em on: Three British "security contractors" killed in attack on convoy near Basra, two injured. (Note: AP story calls these people "foreign civilians." Apparently UK citizens are "foreigners" in Iraq, but U.S. citizens are not. Bizarrely, althoughthe Foreign office has confirmed this, the British Ministry of Defence now denies it.) Bring 'em on: Multi-National Division -- Baghdad soldier killed by roadside bomb southwest of Baghdad at 4:00 pm, April 29 (Confirmed) Bring 'em on: U.S. Humvee destroyed by bomb in Tikrit. AP reports there are casualties, but U.S. command has not issued any info as of this writing. OTHER SECURITY INCIDENTS Attacks on Iraqi police: CentCom claims 20 "foreign insurgents" killed in raids near Youssifiyah. Bomb planted in minibus in Sadr City kills 2, wounds 6. One of two major export pipelines in southern Iraq in flames. Fire extinguished, impact on exports not yet described. Also, two civilians wounded by bomb in Amriya neighborhood of Baghdad, two people found tortured and shot in head in Amil, police find 12 other bodies in Baghdad, according to CNN. Also, a government worker and a businessman were killed in drive-by shootings in Baghdad, while a policeman was killed in Ramadi, according to this AP report. Also, mortar shells land in Al-Yayji, apparently targeting U.S. base, no report on casualties, and explosions in Kirkuk kill one civilian, injure another, according to this KUNA report. THE DANGEROUS NEIGHBORHOOD Iraqi defence ministry says Iran shelled Kurdish forces, encroached 5 miles into Iraqi territory in Kurdistan. OTHER NEWS FROM IRAQ Note: Much of this news from "sovereign" Iraq is actually about the United States. Funny thing about that. U.S. military and foreign policy functionaries debate merits of petitioning Iraq. Ahh, whose country are we talking about here?
By Thomas E. Ricks Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, April 30, 2006; Page A18 As the U.S. military struggles against persistent sectarian violence in Iraq, military officers and security experts find themselves in a vigorous debate over an idea that just months ago was largely dismissed as a fringe thought: that the surest -- and perhaps now the only -- way to bring stability to Iraq is to divide the country into three pieces. Those who see the partitioning of Iraq as increasingly attractive argue that separating the Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds may be the only solution to the violence that many experts believe verges on civil war. Others contend that it would simply lead to new and dangerous challenges for the United States, not least the possibility that al-Qaeda would find it easier to build a new base of operations in a partitioned Iraq. One specialist on the Iraqi insurgency, Ahmed S. Hashim, a professor at the U.S. Naval War College who has served two tours in Iraq as a reservist, contends in a new book that the U.S. government's options in Iraq are closing to just two: Let a civil war occur, or avoid that wrenching outcome through some sort of partition. Such a division of the country "is the option that can allow us to leave with honor intact," he concludes in "Insurgency and Counter-Insurgency in Iraq." snip The fundamental fact of Iraq is that insurgent attacks on Iraqi police and army troops continue essentially unabated, said Jeffrey White, a former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst of Middle Eastern security issues. "There are peaks and valleys," he said Friday at a seminar of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "It goes up and down, but it seems to grow over time." Also, he said, lately there has been a spate of worrisome, large-scale direct attacks on Iraqi police stations and army outposts, some involving as many as 50 fighters. The goal of U.S. foreign policy right now, said former ambassador James Dobbins, a Rand Corp. expert on peacekeeping, should be to prevent the country from sliding into a large-scale conventional civil war. "Our economic leverage is already essentially gone," he said at a recent discussion at the American Enterprise Institute, and "our military leverage is also a waning asset." So he is calling for a much more intense campaign of regional diplomacy by U.S. officials. Others say it is too late to go shopping for help in a region whose governments are generally hostile to U.S. goals in Iraq. "I agree with Ahmed," said retired Marine Col. T.X. Hammes, a counterinsurgency expert who has worked in Iraq on training security forces there. "The Iraqis are positioning for civil war," and so, he said, the United States should be contemplating a "soft partition" of the country by design, rather than through violence. An all-out civil war would not only endanger U.S. troops more but also would be more likely to spill over into neighboring states and so wreak havoc on the international oil market, Hammes said. On the other side of the debate are many military insiders who believe steady progress is being made in Iraq, despite violence and setbacks. "I do not agree that there are only two options, especially these two options" of civil war or breaking the country apart, said Army Lt. Col. James A. Gavrilis, a Special Forces officer who participated in the invasion of Iraq and now works on Iraq issues for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Gavrilis said that allowing a civil war or a partition of Iraq would be an admission of failure that is not required by the current situation. "The potential for civil war is there, certainly, but it is not as far as many are claiming. We have not seen indicators of full-scale civil war or mass mobilizations or a collapse of politics," said Gavrilis, noting that he was expressing his personal views. He argued for continuing to emphasize the democratic revolution that he believes is changing Iraq. Likewise, Gary Anderson, a retired Marine colonel who in the past advised the Pentagon on the Iraqi insurgency, thinks that the administration should stay the course: "I think drawing down our participation . . . and continuing to grow security forces that are loyal to the central government rather than to sects is the way to go, but that is obviously easier said than done."
This isn't exactly "new" news but this story has a lot of interesting details US Building Massive 104-Acre Embassy in Baghdad
Barbara Ferguson, Arab News WASHINGTON, 28 April 2006 — Three years after a US-led invasion ousted Saddam Hussein’s regime, only one major US building project in Iraq is on schedule and within budget: The massive new American Embassy compound. The fortress-like compound rising beside the Tigris River will be the largest of its kind in the world — the size of Vatican City, or 80 football fields, or six times larger than the United Nations compound in New York — on about 104 acres. With the population of a small town, it is designed to be entirely self-sufficient; it will have its own defense force and self-contained power and water plants. The high-tech compound will have 21 buildings reinforced to 2.5 times usual standards. Some walls as said to be 15 feet thick or more. Scheduled for completion by June 2007, the installation is touted as not only the largest, but the most secure diplomatic embassy in the world. The $592 million facility is being built inside the heavily fortified Green Zone by 900 non-Iraqi foreign workers who are housed nearby and under the supervision of a Kuwaiti contractor, according to a Senate Foreign Relations Committee report. Besides two major diplomatic office buildings, homes for the ambassador and his deputy, and the six apartment buildings for staff, the compound will offer a swimming pool, gym, commissary, food court and American Club, all housed in a recreation building. Security, overseen by US Marines, will be extraordinary: Setbacks and perimeter no-go areas that will be especially deep, structures reinforced to 2.5-times the standard, and five high-security entrances, plus an emergency entrance-exit, the Senate report says. Work for the embassy was quietly awarded last summer to a controversial Kuwait-based construction firm, First Kuwaiti General Trading & Contracting (FKTC). FKTC has been accused of exploiting employees and coercing low-paid laborers to work in Iraq. . . . State Department spokesman Justin Higgins defended the size of the embassy, saying it is indicative of the work facing the United States here. “It’s somewhat self-evident that there’s going to be a fairly sizable commitment to Iraq by the US government in all forms for several years,” he recently told journalists. The current US Embassy in Iraq has nearly 5,5,000 Americans and Iraqis working there, more than at any other US embassy. Almost half listed as security, are far more numerous than at any other US mission worldwide. They rarely venture out into the “Red Zone,” that is, violence-torn Iraq.
Dexter Filkins, with reporting by Khalid al-Ansary, sees political process in Iraq as largely irrelevant to realities "on the ground." This is an overview of the situation. I'll excerpt it very briefly.
The Iraqis who gathered last week around the newly chosen prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, said they saw a fresh chance to bind the communities back together and put the country on a path toward normalcy. Indeed, a sense of relief pervaded the offices of Iraqi officials, who had finally broken a deadlock over results of popular elections that took place more than four months ago. But the question hanging over the parliamentary votes last weekend was whether the elected leaders, most of them now barricaded inside the protected Green Zone, could do anything to stop the slide toward anarchy and civil war. Two years' worth of dealmaking by Iraq's elites has proved largely irrelevant to the realities unfolding on the ground. snip According to the Iraqi government, about 14,000 families — probably close to 100,000 people — have been displaced by the violence. More than 80 percent, the government said, are Shiites. About 2,000 Iraqis have been killed since the Askariya Shrine, a holy Shiite mosque in Samarra, was destroyed in a bombing two months ago. There is no way to verify such figures, but a similar despair pervades conversations with Sunnis. Omar al-Jabouri, who runs the Iraq Islamic Party's human rights office, keeps a photo album by his desk. It contains picture after picture of Sunni men who have been executed and tortured to death by, Mr. Jabouri says, Shiite death squads and their comrades in the Interior Ministry. snip Full-fledged civil war, with widespread ethnic bloodletting and mass migrations, has not yet come to Iraq. But a week's worth of conversations with ordinary Iraqis leaves one wondering if the government, even with American help, can any longer prevent this from happening. In casual discussions, Iraqis already express the view that their country will be split three ways, with a Kurdish state in the north, a Sunni one in the west, and a Shiite one in the south. The Tigris River would form the border where the new Sunni and Shiite states would meet in central Baghdad, and the capital's mixed Sunni-Shiite neighborhoods would be cleansed on each side of the river.
SKIP THIS IF YOU HAVE A WEAK STOMACH U.S. military death toll now at 2,400. Round numbers are only meaningful because we have ten digits on our hands and count by powers of ten, but people do notice them. Maybe people will notice that the counter turns over as we reach the anniversary of one of the most appalling political events in memory. This is a day early, but Zig doesn't deserve to be contaminated by posting this link. This is the Commander in Chief's speech on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln. Count the lies, if you can. Mission Accomplished May 1, 2003. The snips are not misleading -- mostly empty rhetoric.
Thank you all very much. Admiral Kelly, Captain Card, officers and sailors of the USS Abraham Lincoln, my fellow Americans: Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed. (Applause.) And now our coalition is engaged in securing and reconstructing that country. snip Operation Iraqi Freedom was carried out with a combination of precision and speed and boldness the enemy did not expect, and the world had not seen before. From distant bases or ships at sea, we sent planes and missiles that could destroy an enemy division, or strike a single bunker. Marines and soldiers charged to Baghdad across 350 miles of hostile ground, in one of the swiftest advances of heavy arms in history. You have shown the world the skill and the might of the American Armed Forces. This nation thanks all the members of our coalition who joined in a noble cause. We thank the Armed Forces of the United Kingdom, Australia, and Poland, who shared in the hardships of war. We thank all the citizens of Iraq who welcomed our troops and joined in the liberation of their own country. And tonight, I have a special word for Secretary Rumsfeld, for General Franks, and for all the men and women who wear the uniform of the United States: America is grateful for a job well done. (Applause.) snip In the images of falling statues, we have witnessed the arrival of a new era. For a hundred of years of war, culminating in the nuclear age, military technology was designed and deployed to inflict casualties on an ever-growing scale. In defeating Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, Allied forces destroyed entire cities, while enemy leaders who started the conflict were safe until the final days. Military power was used to end a regime by breaking a nation. Today, we have the greater power to free a nation by breaking a dangerous and aggressive regime. With new tactics and precision weapons, we can achieve military objectives without directing violence against civilians. No device of man can remove the tragedy from war; yet it is a great moral advance when the guilty have far more to fear from war than the innocent. (Applause.) snip We have difficult work to do in Iraq. We're bringing order to parts of that country that remain dangerous. We're pursuing and finding leaders of the old regime, who will be held to account for their crimes. We've begun the search for hidden chemical and biological weapons and already know of hundreds of sites that will be investigated. We're helping to rebuild Iraq, where the dictator built palaces for himself, instead of hospitals and schools. And we will stand with the new leaders of Iraq as they establish a government of, by, and for the Iraqi people. (Applause.) The transition from dictatorship to democracy will take time, but it is worth every effort. Our coalition will stay until our work is done. Then we will leave, and we will leave behind a free Iraq. (Applause.) The battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on September the 11, 2001 -- and still goes on. That terrible morning, 19 evil men -- the shock troops of a hateful ideology -- gave America and the civilized world a glimpse of their ambitions. They imagined, in the words of one terrorist, that September the 11th would be the "beginning of the end of America." By seeking to turn our cities into killing fields, terrorists and their allies believed that they could destroy this nation's resolve, and force our retreat from the world. They have failed. (Applause.) In the battle of Afghanistan, we destroyed the Taliban, many terrorists, and the camps where they trained. We continue to help the Afghan people lay roads, restore hospitals, and educate all of their children. Yet we also have dangerous work to complete. As I speak, a Special Operations task force, led by the 82nd Airborne, is on the trail of the terrorists and those who seek to undermine the free government of Afghanistan. America and our coalition will finish what we have begun. (Applause.) From Pakistan to the Philippines to the Horn of Africa, we are hunting down al Qaeda killers. Nineteen months ago, I pledged that the terrorists would not escape the patient justice of the United States. And as of tonight, nearly one-half of al Qaeda's senior operatives have been captured or killed. (Applause.) The liberation of Iraq is a crucial advance in the campaign against terror. We've removed an ally of al Qaeda, and cut off a source of terrorist funding. And this much is certain: No terrorist network will gain weapons of mass destruction from the Iraqi regime, because the regime is no more. (Applause.) Any outlaw regime that has ties to terrorist groups and seeks or possesses weapons of mass destruction is a grave danger to the civilized world -- and will be confronted. (Applause.) And anyone in the world, including the Arab world, who works and sacrifices for freedom has a loyal friend in the United States of America. (Applause.)
THE WOUNDED, WHO DoD WANTS US TO FORGET As usual, thanks to Whisker for this contribution Sergeant Brent Bretz lost most of both legs after a makeshift bomb blew up his truck outside Mosul. Mesa, Arizona soldier was up for the promotion before the December 2004 incident. Wisconsin Sergeant Phillip Schladweiler describes his experiences in Iraq, culminating in severe injuries:
The day that I was injured with two other soldiers Specialist Perry and Specialist Fisher. I remember seeing an explosion about 5 to 10 feet to the west of our position. The next thing that I remember is gagging on a respirator tube and seeing nothing but black. My injuries are severe brain trauma, which they had to crack my skull to relieve pressure, loss of sight in the right eye, complete facial reconstruction to my right face, random shrapnel to the face, shrapnel in my left shoulder and right middle finger. SPC Perry receives severe brain trauma, worse than mine, to the point where he didn’t remember going to Iraq, larger amounts of shrapnel to the left side of the face, and left eye damage, but still useable. About a week later, I find out that Fisher was fine and back home at Fort Campbell, Ky., going through recover for left body burns and shrapnel. All three of us can still not remember what exactly happened.
Private First Class Michael Manning of southern Arizona has serious injuries to his legs. Arkansas City soldier Scott Metz, 31, was struck in the upper hamstring muscle by sniper fire as he patrolled in Baghdad April 3. 24-year-old specialist Luke Abbott of Hobart, Indiana, gets blown up twice. Second time leaves him severely disabled. He now wants to enter the ministry. Quote of the Day: We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces. The first bomb, the first explosion, burst in our hearts. We are cut off from activity, from striving, from progress. We believe in such things no longer, we believe in the war. --Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

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DAILY WAR NEWS FOR SATURDAY, April 29, 2006 Photo: Anti-war activists march down Broadway, to protest the war in Iraq, with thousands of supporters in New York April 29, 2006. The marchers demanded an immediate withdrawal of troops, the same day news organizations noted April as being the most deadly month for U.S. troops in Iraq, with at least 69 killed. REUTERS/Chip East (See below "We are mainstream America") Bring ‘em on: (not confirmed) Two US soldiers killed and three other injured this morning when a person wearing a belt of explosive devices blew himself near US check point in Ramadi in Iraq. Bring ‘em on: Early Friday, the Davis family received word that Sgt. Edward Davis III, 31, had been killed in action in Iraq late Thursday. According to his father, Sgt. Davis' wife was informed around 2 a.m. Friday that his Humvee was struck by a bomb while on patrol, possibly near the Euphrates River. Bring ‘em on: U.S. Army soldier died Saturday when a roadside bomb hit his convoy near Baghdad, the military said. The attack occurred southwest of the capital at about 4 p.m. OTHER SECURITY INCIDENTS Baghdad: Roadside bomb targeting Iraqi police patrol explodes in Ghazaliyah in west Baghdad, killing one policeman and wounding two. Three dead bodies discovered by Iraqi security forces in the east of the capital. Three Iraqi policemen wounded when explosive device blows up in Saadoun Street, central Baghdad. Two Iraqi army soldiers killed and six wounded when “insurgents” open fire on their convoy in Suwera, southeast of Baghdad. Five bullet-riddled bodies found in the Tigris River. Bomb wounds two policemen in southern Baghdad's Al Amel neighborhood. ”Insurgents” with rocket-propelled grenades attack Iraqi army convoy 25 miles south of Baghdad, killing two soldiers and wounding six. Diyala: Gunmen in a village 90 miles north of Baghdad attack minibus carrying female students from Diyala University, killing a woman and her father, who was driving. Jurf Al-Sakhar: In the town of Jurf al-Sakhar, 43 miles south of Baghdad, gunmen kidnapped a policeman and his brother from their home early this morning, lined them up outside and shot them dead. Baiji: Two Iraqi officers killed when roadside bomb hits convoy carrying the police chief of Baiji. Five policemen were also wounded in the attack, apparently targeting the convoy of police chief Sufian Mustafa, who escaped unscathed. Amedi and Zaho: Turkish armed forces launch their first military operation along the Iraqi border where Turkish troops have concentrated for days. The Northern Iraqi cities of Amedi and Zaho, sheltering Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK) militants, were hit with mortar attacks in "Operation Crescent." Iranian forces detain four engineers from Iraq's ministry of water who were on a boat on the Arvand River, which runs along the border and into the Persian Gulf. Iran and Iraq have long argued about their line of control on the waterway. An Anbar Province:
Qaim: Three civilians killed and seven wounded including three policemen when suicide car bomb detonates near Iraqi army base south of the town of Qaim near the Syrian border. Ramadi: Six rockets strike building of al-Anbar Province Bureau in central al-Ramadi. The scale of damage or casualties at the office, where US troops are stationed, was not immediately available, the source said. Al Malaab: U.S. fighter jet strikes targets in al-Malaab, east of the city, with smoke rising from the scene. Tal Afar: One Iraqi civilian killed and two children wounded when mortar round lands on a home in Tal Afar, 90 miles east of Iraq's border with Syria.
Al Diwaniya: Three Iraqis, including a woman, killed in roadside bomb explosion on Saturday. The bomb targeted an Iraqi police patrol and went off while a civilian car was passing in al-Diwaniya, 200 kilometres south of Baghdad, killing all its passengers. Kirkuk: Bomb blasts in Al-Courniche Street crossing (Kirkuk), result in the death of a civilian. Other blasts occured in Kirkuk but with no damages. Huwaija: Two civilians injured in blasts in Huwaija, west of Kirkuk and in the highway between Kirkuk and Tikrit. Today in Afghanistan:
Afghan security forces kill two Taliban rebels during fighting in the southern Helmand province. One Afghan National Army soldier and one policeman were injured in the hour-long clash with rebels in Kajaki district, army commander for southern military corps General Rahmatullah Raufi said. Afghan security forces hunt for Indian telecommunications worker kidnapped by suspected Taliban insurgents. The Indian and his driver were kidnapped after gunmen stopped their car on a main road in Zabul on Friday.
NEWS "We are mainstream America": Thousands of anti-war demonstrators march in New York, demanding immediate withdrawal of troops from Iraq and vowing a summer of protests ahead of mid-term elections in November. The protesters included national figures like civil rights leader Jesse Jackson, Oscar-winning actress Susan Sarandon and the prominent anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan. The mass rally was organised by a broad coalition of groups representing veterans, trade unions, military families, environmentalists and civil rights activists. While the main focus of the march was Iraq, [chief organiser Leslie] Cagan said the rally was also aimed at protesting any plans for military intervention in Iran and at setting the domestic political agenda ahead of the congressional elections later in the year. "Today we march, tomorrow we organise and in November we vote," Cagan told cheering supporters. "We are not the fringe anymore. We are mainstream America," said Sheehan, who gained prominence when she camped outside President George W. Bush's Texas ranch last year to demand a meeting with the US leader. "To be anti- George Bush is to be pro-American," she said. Saddam’s birthday party: Some Iraqis marked what was once cause for mandatory national celebration: the 69th birthday of Saddam Hussein, the former president, who is in jail while being tried by his countrymen. In Auja, Hussein's home town, a group of about 200 young men showed some of the old spirit. A disc jockey played folk music, and guests ate cake as others chanted, "Our blood, our lives, we sacrifice for you, Saddam." Some read poetry describing the ousted leader as a symbol of the Arab nation. The birthday party went undisturbed by a passing police patrol, which left without saying anything. The town resounded with celebratory shooting and songs until midnight.
Video: Celebrations of Saddam's 69th birthday in Tikrit
Summary: Tikrit residents: "Saddam's birthday is a fest for Iraq. We would like to have him in power again." Shots: Tikrit streets, Saddam Hussein’s posters Interview with Iraqi citizen Adil Qamal, more shots of Tikrit streets (in Arabic) Interview with Iraqi citizen Abid Mohammad (in Arabic) Interview with Iraqi citizen Taleb Khamid (in Arabic)
U.S. and Iranian officials held talks on Iraq in Iraq's northern Kurdistan region "a while ago", Iraq's Al-Sharqiya television quoted President Jalal Talabani as saying on Saturday. U.S., Iranian and Iraqi officials could not confirm the report. According to Sharqiya, Talabani told Iraqi and Arab writers during a spring cultural festival that the talks took place in the lakeside mountain resort of Dukan and that discussions were "dedicated to the Iraqi issue". It said Talabani, a Kurd, expected such meetings to continue to be held, but provided no more details. Iranian and U.S. officials have said in the past that they would hold talks to discuss Iraq, without giving a date. A body found with items belonging to a Fort Benning soldier missing for 12 days was discovered Friday at a downtown hotel in Savannah, Ga. after guests complained of a foul odor in the lobby. He had returned to Fort Benning in January from a yearlong tour in Iraq with the 3rd Infantry Division. REPORTS Majority of Iraqis say their country is in dismal economic shape and getting worse, with 3 of 4 respondents also describing security in the country as poor, according to a new poll conducted by a conservative American think tank. The poll reveals a population with little optimism about its economic future. The findings show that Iraqis believe jobs are harder to find, electrical service is poorer, and corruption has increased dramatically since last year. And 62 percent of respondents said Iraq is more politically divided today than in the past. The results were culled from 2,804 face-to-face interviews from across the country by the International Republican Institute in Washington. The interviews were conducted by Iraqi pollsters and included responses from the violence-ridden western Anbar province for the first time since the institute began regular opinion surveys in May 2004. Fifty-two percent think the country is moving in the wrong direction, the most since the institute's polls have been conducted, with 30 percent saying it is going in the right direction -- the lowest percentage since the polling began. A bare majority, 51 percent, believe life will be better or much better within the next five years, down dramatically from the 85 percent of Iraqis who said so in April 2005. Almost the same percentage believe security is deteriorating, though Iraqis said they overwhelmingly trust the Iraqi army and police, but not local militias, to protect them. Only 1 percent said they trust U.S.-led coalition forces for their personal protection. Video: Iraqi Sunnis flee Baghdad for tent city in Fallujah Summary: Baghdad's Sunni population has begun fleeing the capital due to violent ethnic clashes [all we know for sure is Sunnis are fleeing mysterious attacks by militia and death squads --- zig] in recent months. Nearly 25,000 Iraqi Sunnis have left their homes and migrated to Fallujah’s Saklaviye district, where the Red Crescent has built a refugee camp for them. Australian troops in Iraq say they have come under fire numerous times by militants loyal to Moqtada al-Sadr: Task group commander Lieutenant Peter Short says al-Sadr's followers have attempted to convey a message to the Australians that they are not welcome. A full 10 seconds of silence passed after a reporter asked Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld what the intense secrecy and security surrounding their visit to Iraq signified about the stability of the country three years after the U.S.-led invasion. Rice turned to Rumsfeld to provide the answer. Rumsfeld glared at the reporter. "I guess I don't think it says anything about it," he snapped. An Iraqi doctor tells of life under occupation: Luway Al-Salehi "Last January, according to unofficial sources, 26 doctors were assassinated in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities. Physicians are in the line of fire of many entities right now in Iraq. When a member of the national guard died in my care, I was personally beaten by his colleague. Never mind that the casualty was already brain-dead when he entered the hospital, the victim of a booby-trapped car. It's happened to many doctors besides me. But going on strike, we soon realised, only deprived the citizens of necessary medical care. Still, in the last six months alone, four doctors died on the job. Violence on the streets makes the situation unimaginably painful in hospitals. There are too many injured for us to accommodate. We've even begun to spread people out on the floor. That's not to mention the constant lack of life- saving supplies necessary for wounds and burns. The numbers of dead are such that, rather than a month in the morgue, casualties are buried within three days of their photos being published if they haven't been identified. How many civilians have been killed? No one will answer that question; my conviction is that no official agency has undertaken a proper count of civilian casualties. Anyone who tries ends up fleeing the country; that was the case with some people who tried to publicise the number of corpses following the bombing of Samaraa. Despite the sanctions, the regime, the difficult material circumstances, before the occupation I for one was someone who had millions of dreams. I do not dream any more. In fact I'm often scared of my own shadow. Two kinds of Iraqis: After midnight on a bare stretch of highway near this ramshackle town last week, Staff Sgt. Jason Hoover saw what looked like a fishing line strung across the road and ordered his Humvee to a screeching halt. The cord was connected to an old, Russian artillery shell half-buried in the earthen shoulder and rigged to activate with a firm tug. Hoover traced its path nearly a half-mile though a plowed field, over another highway, and across a canal, where he found four Iraqi infrastructure policemen who were supposed to be guarding an oil pipeline. They said they had no idea what the cord was doing there. "There's two kinds of Iraqis here, the ones who help us and the ones who shoot us, and there's an awful lot of 'em doing both," said Hoover, 26, of Newark, Ohio. "Is it frustrating? Yes, it's frustrating. But we can't just stop working with them." COMMENTARY AND ANALYSIS America's brutal tactics: Naturally enough, few details of what American troops do in Iraq and Afghanistan reach the nation's television screens, the main source of news for most Americans. American television takes the approach of the New York Times when it refers to professional soldiers as GIs, as though they were humble mechanics and bricklayers of America drafted into the titanic struggle against Hitler and Tojo. But if you are genuinely interested in discovering the truth, there are plenty of sources for first-hand information. And anyone taking a little time to search through some of these comes away with a sick feeling. From several ex-soldiers comes a vivid image of America's house-to-house methods of searching for "insurgents." A small block of C-4 plastique is fixed to the front door of a house, the door is blown in, and several armored giants rush through the shock and smoke with their automatic weapons at the ready. Women and children are held to one side at gunpoint, while any men are taken roughly for questioning. In most cases, the men have nothing worthwhile to say, but they and other members of their families are left with a terrifying experience they will never forget. These violent procedures have been repeated thousands of times, both in Iraq and in the mountain villages of Afghanistan. Could this be part of what Condoleezza Rice meant when she said recently in Britain that despite thousands of tactical mistakes, America's basic strategy was sound? Can you imagine her saying the same thing if Washington-area police blew her door down and stormed into her home in Chevy Chase or whatever other exclusive area she lives, perhaps looking for drug dealers or murderers, suspecting her home because she is black? Another aspect of America's crude tactics has been their way of responding to periodic mortar fire. The American forces use a high-tech radar gizmo that tracks the path of such shells supposedly to permit accurate return fire by artillery. Unfortunately the gizmo often does not work properly, and even when it does operate well, the tactics of mobile guerillas firing a shell from a truck or car and driving away leave the data of the gizmo useless. Well, not completely useless, because American artillery still responds. It's just that all they hit are innocent residences or businesses. The trigger-happy nature of Americans at check points is a well-established fact. These boys, many of them having joined up for benefits like money for college, do not want to be in these places, and they are irritated by the strange tongues and cultures and the blazing heat and sandstorms. They simply shoot first and ask questions after. I suppose this tactic might have been appropriate on the Eastern Front in World War II, but it is totally unsuited to a place you are occupying after having invaded, a place where the overwhelming majority of people with which you interact are just ordinary people going about their lives. A number of British soldiers, Britain's pathetic Blair being America's only true ally in the phony coalition America's press never fails to name, have gone on record about American tactics. These include several senior officers, an unprecedented criticism of an ally during war. What they have said to the press is that American tactics are brutal and thoughtless, almost certain in the long run to produce more enemies than friends. Few forces in the world have more genuine experience than Britain's after decades in Northern Ireland, yet all their advice is treated with contempt by arrogant American commanders and politicians. It seems both public and press have forgotten the words of Donald Rumsfeld not long after the U.S. triumphed in Afghanistan, the words being among the most shameful in American history and certainly ranking with anything a dread figure like Reinhard Heydrich uttered. On what to do with the thousands of prisoners taken in the invasion, Rumsfeld publicly stated they should be killed or walled away forever. It does appear he was taken at his word, for thousands of prisoners disappeared around the time. There are many eye-witness reports - a documentary film was made by a Scots director - about Afghan prisoners having been taken into the desert in trucks to suffocate in the blazing heat. American soldiers, if they didn't actively help, just stood around and let it happen. In the early part of the invasion of Afghanistan, tens of thousands of emergency de-hydrated food packets were dropped by American planes in some of the same areas that cluster bombs were being dropped. As pictures on the Internet testify, the bomblet canisters (pressure-sensitive cans packed with something like razor wire and high explosive) and the food packages were virtually the same optical yellow color. Imagine how many hungry peasants and children were attracted to these deadly areas by the food packets, only to be torn apart? Bad publicity all over the world did stop the Pentagon's grotesque practice, but the question of using cluster bombs near civilian populations remains. It was done both in Afghanistan and Iraq. The brave journalists of Aljazeera took dozens of pictures of what these bombs did to children in Iraq, their publication providing one of the reasons for the Pentagon's and Bush's intense hatred of the network. The revelations about the behavior of American soldiers in Abu Ghraib prison are well known, although the last round of abuse and torture pictures released did not include the worst stuff that American Senators saw in closed session a while back. It's almost as though the "tamer" stuff was released to defuse demands for more information. America's great investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has said the worst stuff included boys being raped by American soldiers. Of course we know from many sources including amateur plane spotters and flight records that America runs a gigantic secret prison system. Sources in Europe say that 14,000 are held in Iraq alone. There are also secret prisons in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, and at Guantanamo. All of these prisoners are held with no legal rights whatever, just as though they had disappeared into Stalin's Gulag. In most cases the prisoners are simply people who fought Americans in their invasions of two lands. Since when do we do this to the fighters who oppose us in war? Americans themselves in the past have joined foreign wars as idealists or as mercenaries. This happened in South Africa, various African anti-colonial wars, Central America, South America, Indo-China, Spain, and other places. It's an old tradition going back to Lafayette and Pulaski in the American Revolutionary War. The men, and boys, America now holds with no rights were doing no more than what tens of thousands of Americans and others have done previously. As I have written before, if you want the rule of law, you cannot stand outside the law and claim its moral support. What America is doing in its "war on terror" is little more than freshened-up fascism. It wants a pipeline through Afghanistan and a subservient government in Iraq, and it dresses up the brutal tactics used to achieve these goals as a war on terror. ”This guy, George W., as far as I can figure, is just a spoiled preppy“: Robert Scheer spent over 30 years interviewing American presidents and candidates since Nixon, but it was only in retrospect that he discovered a disturbing pattern. Scheer's new book Playing President: My Close Encounters with Nixon, Carter, Bush I, Reagan and Clinton -- and How They Did Not Prepare Me for George W. Bush explores the crippling effects the campaign process had on every candidate he interviewed -- and how our presidents have become increasingly out of touch with American voters. Excerpt from a Robert Scheer interview by Onnesha Roychoudhuri:
OR: You say in your book that George W. Bush is the first electronically projected president. Can you explain that? RS: This administration doesn't feel they need a mindful audience. They don't care about facts, logic or consequences. They are the most cynical people that I've ever encountered in politics. This is the most cynical bunch -- just think about that "reality-based community" quote. They create their own reality. I don't think I've ever seen that kind of cynicism before, and I'm the guy who interviewed Richard Nixon. These guys are, as John Dean keeps pointing out, far worse than the Nixon crowd because they think they can get away with it. Nixon, at the end of the day thought it mattered what the New York Times said. He felt that if there was a big contradiction, a big error, they would catch him and there would be all hell to pay. There's no longer that feeling. Over the years, I'm not getting cynical -- they're cynical. If I were truly cynical I wouldn't be talking to you, and I wouldn't be writing and teaching. Mark Twain said a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth puts its pants on. Well, the fact is the truth does get its pants on, it does catch up, and right now 65 percent of Americans think Bush lied to them. OR: Between that kind of arrogance seen in your interview with George H.W. Bush, and the showsmanship we see with Reagan, who is a better comparison to George W.? RS: As we say in the subtitle of the book, none of them prepared me for Bush. Reagan had been on the election circuit on issues. I didn't have to agree with him, but when he was a salesman for G.E. and head of the Actor's Guild, he was talking about issues of foreign policy and domestic policy. He cared about these things and collected anecdotes and information that supported his views. When he was running, he was aware of the issues and what was at stake. That was true of all of them. They were adults, and this guy, George W., as far as I can figure, is just a spoiled preppy, as he's been described. What he's done is rely on his tutors and he picked, unfortunately for us voters, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.
Diagnosing the U.S. 'national character': Narcissistic Personality Disorder: Can a nation have a coherent character? If we take the question seriously -- investigating reality rather than merely asserting nobility -- we see in the U.S. national character signs of pathology and decay as well as health and vigor. What if, for purposes of analysis, we treated the nation as a person? Scan the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association (the bible of mental-health professionals, now in its fourth edition) and one category jumps out: Narcissistic Personality Disorder. DSM-IV describes the disorder as "a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy" that can be diagnosed when any five of these nine criteria are met:
1. a grandiose sense of self-importance. 2. preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love. 3. believes he or she is special and unique. 4. requires excessive admiration. 5. sense of entitlement. 6. interpersonally exploitative, taking advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends. 7. lacks empathy. 8. often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him or her. 9. shows arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes.
Narcissistic tendencies to self-aggrandize are not unique to the United States, of course. But given the predominance of U.S. power in the world, we should worry most about the consequences of such narcissism here. This disorder is bipartisan, and is virtually required of all mainstream politicians. When the House of Representatives held hearings about the creation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2002, California Democrat Nancy Pelosi declared that America is "the greatest country that ever existed on the face of the earth." Texas Republican Dick Armey described the United States as "the greatest, most free nation the world has ever known." With a "grandiose sense of self-importance," politicians routinely ratchet up the rhetorical flourishes when asserting that the country is "special and unique." As for arrogance and haughtiness: When asked at his pre-war news conference in March 2003 whether the United States would be defying the United Nations if it were to invade Iraq without legal authorization, Bush said, "if we need to act, we will act, and we really don't need United Nations approval to do so." Bush prefaced that promise to defy international and U.S. law with the phrase "when it comes to our security," but since the invasion of Iraq had little or nothing to do with the security of the United States we can ignore that qualifier. Here the younger Bush was merely mimicking his father, who remarked in February 1991 as the United States was destroying Iraq a first time: "The U.S. has a new credibility. What we say goes." On the Gulf War and "lacks empathy": On Feb. 13, 1991, U.S. planes hit a bunker in Baghdad. Whether military planners knew it was an air-raid shelter or thought it was a "command-and-control site," an estimated 300-400 civilians died. Colin Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, referred to this as "one downside of airpower," and said the incident led him to discuss with Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf the need "to look at the target list a little more closely." Was the goal of that review to discuss civilian casualties? No, it was to question the efficiency of bombing an already bombed-out Baghdad. In Powell's words: "I asked questions like, 'Why are we bombing the Baath Party headquarters for the eighth time? ... Why are we bouncing rubble with million-dollar missiles?'" Powell, who went on to serve as secretary of state in George W. Bush's first term, was often referred to as the "dove" of that administration. Perhaps we could call this level of empathy the mark of a "tough dove." The unpleasant subject of the current Iraq war brings up "fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance." Though Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recently acknowledged mistakes in the current Iraq war -- "We've made tactical errors, thousands of them, I'm sure" -- she made it clear that history will vindicate U.S. officials for making "the right strategic decision" to invade. But that small concession to reality was too much for Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who responded, "I don't know what she was talking about, to be perfectly honest." While it's easy to point at the narcissism of soulless and self-indulgent leaders, this diagnosis of Narcissistic Personality Disorder applies to the country as a whole. The belief that the United States is unique -- a shining "city upon a hill" -- is deeply rooted, and for many has divine origins; 48 percent of Americans believe the United States has "special protection from God," according to a 2002 survey. The narcissism of the whole society also is evident in the widespread "sense of entitlement," defined as "unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations." This is difficult to confront, precisely because it takes root to some degree in all of us and can't be so easily displaced onto only the most overtly pathological. The vast majority of the U.S. public -- by comparison to the rest of the world -- lives an extravagant lifestyle that we show few signs of being willing to give up. We are 5 percent of the world's population and consume about a quarter of the world's energy. This state of affairs is clearly unjust, made possible by coercion and violence, not some natural superiority of Americans. Yet the vast majority of the U.S. public, and even much of the left/progressive political community, acts as if they expect this state of affairs to continue. That's real narcissism, and it's at the heart of the political problem of the United States. Even if we swept the halls of Congress and the White House clean of every corrupt and cruel politician, the deeper self-indulgence of an affluent culture would be untouched. Political activism to derail the pathological policies of those politicians must go forward. Critique of the concentrated power of the corporate elites who support those policies is essential. But the critical self-reflection necessary at the collective level also must come home to each of us. ZARQAWI SPECIAL
"How we nearly nabbed Zarqawi - again": [The story below from the Marine Corps Times, SpecOps unit nearly nabs Zarqawi, is obviously about the incident mentioned in this report as posted April 26 in Today in Iraq: "Twelve suspected Iraqi militants and a woman were killed in a U.S. raid and air strike on a house in a town just south of Baghdad, the military said in a statement on Wednesday. As U.S. troops closed in on a house believed to be used by two foreign fighters on Tuesday, they came under fire, a U.S. military statement said. "The troops initially killed five terrorists outside of the safe house and then called for an air strike," it said. "After the precision air strike, the ground troops conducted a tactical search of the destroyed safe house and located the bodies of seven more terrorists and a woman." The statement said U.S. forces were trying to determine the identity of those killed. It did not say how it was known all the men were rebels, although it said each of the dead men were wearing a magazine vest and carrying two grenades." I'd make a lot of comments, but the post is already late… I'll just note that according to the Marine Times "three other women and a child were wounded" in the attack, making it look like another massacre of an innocent Iraqi family… My emphasis in bold in the text. --- zig] Just nine days before al-Qaida in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi released his latest video, a special operations raid killed five of his men, captured five others and apparently came within a couple of city blocks of nabbing Zarqawi himself. Then, the day Zarqawi’s video debuted, special ops forces killed 12 more of his troops in a second raid in the same town. The raids in Yusufiyah, 20 miles southwest of Baghdad in the heart of the Sunni Triangle, were the latest battles in a small, vicious war being waged largely in the shadows of the wider counterinsurgency effort. It is a war fought by a secretive organization called Task Force 145, made up of some of the most elite U.S. troops, including Delta Force and SEAL Team 6. They have one goal: hunting down Zarqawi, Iraq’s most wanted man, and destroying his al-Qaida in Iraq organization. Zarqawi’s escape in Yusufiyah was not the first time special ops troops have nearly had him. In early 2005, they came so close they could see the Jordanian’s panicked face as he fled. The first of the two Yusufiyah raids began at 2:15 a.m. April 16 when SEAL Team 6 operators and Army Rangers approached a terrorist safe house, a U.S. special operations source said. A U.S. Central Command news release said “coalition forces” — the usual shorthand for Task Force 145 elements — were “searching for a wanted al-Qaida associate.” When the U.S. troops arrived, the enemy opened fire with small arms. In the fight that followed, the special ops troops killed five terrorists, three of whom wore suicide belts, according to Central Command. “Two of the suicide bombers were killed before either could detonate his vest, and the third detonated his body bomb, killing only himself and injuring no one else,” the news release said. A woman in the house also was killed. Three other women and a child were wounded and were medically evacuated to the 10th Combat Support Hospital in Baghdad. U.S. forces detained five other occupants, one of whom was wounded. One of the five was later confirmed as “the wanted al-Qaida terrorist for whom the troops were searching,” according to Central Command. (…) Yusufiyah is Zarqawi country. Indeed, intelligence later suggested the terrorist kingpin “was probably 1,000 meters away” at the time of the raid, a special operations source said. In addition to the suicide vests, U.S. forces recovered four AK-series assault rifles, a pistol and several grenades. In an indication of the intensity of the close-quarters, indoor battle, “one grenade was found with the pin pulled, but not yet expended, in the hand of a dead terrorist,” according to Central Command. Five U.S. troops were hurt in the raid, but they have either returned to duty or are expected to shortly. Among items recovered from the safe house, the special operations source said, was a video showing Zarqawi at various times in “black pajamas with New Balance running shoes on.” The source said the video seized in Yusufiyah was the same one released April 25. One section of the video shows Zarqawi firing an M249 squad automatic weapon outside, and another depicts him sitting inside next to an M4 assault rifle. In the video, Zarqawi mocks President Bush, and makes clear his fierce opposition to attempts to establish democracy in Iraq. Produced by al-Qaida in Iraq’s “Media Committee,” the video reflects “Zarqawi’s number one thing … the information campaign,” said the special ops source. (…) Zarqawi-gate: More important than you think...: Is the threat posed by Jordanian-born terror mastermind Abu Musab al-Zarqawi real? Is Zarqawi himself a fiction, as some maintain? The Washington Post's recent revelation that a Pentagon psyop unit hyped up the Zarqawi threat may turn into the next big scandal, especially since the leaked document specifices that the propaganda campaign targeted the "U.S. Home Audience." One segment of the Post story deserves special attention: One slide in the same briefing, for example, noted that a "selective leak" about Zarqawi was made to Dexter Filkins, a New York Times reporter based in Baghdad. Filkins's resulting article, about a letter supposedly written by Zarqawi and boasting of suicide attacks in Iraq, ran on the Times front page on Feb. 9, 2004. That letter, though largely forgotten in the onrush of events, attracted some attention at the time. It's a 17-page "Dear Osama" letter in which Zarqawi helpfully demonstrated a link between the insurgency and Al Qaeda. In other words, the letter fulfilled a propaganda purpose. The message to Americans: U.S. forces must stay in Iraq. Otherwise, an insurgency run by Al Qaeda will prevail. As Rachel Maddow noted on her program today (she provided some juicy sound bites), George Bush somewhat incoherently cited this very letter yesterday during a Q-and-A session with students at Johns Hopkins. Here's a segment of the official (and not quite accurate) transcript: In 2004, we intercepted a letter from Zarqawi to Osama bin Laden. In it, Zarqawi expressed his concern about "the gap that will emerge between us and the people of the land." He declared "democracy is coming." He went on to say, this will mean "suffocation" for the terrorists. Zarqawi laid out his strategy to stop democracy from taking root in Iraq. Bush said these words on the same day the Post story identified this letter as the product of an American psyops team! Incidentally, the transcript has been massaged to make Bush sound more erudite. In the original sound bite, which Maddow played on her program, Dubya's tongue slipped: He referred to this message as something we wrote, as opposed to one Zarqawi wrote. (…) Why do so many of our citizens (especially our troops) still believe in the purported alliance between Al Qaeda, Saddam and the insurgency? The Zarqawi "evidence" did much to perpetuate the legend. What we are looking at here is a true Wag the Dog scenario -- the creation of a political myth. Osama, Abu, and Ayman: al-CIA-Duh Telethon: First it was Osama bin Laden, then Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and now Ayman al-Zawahiri. In the span of a week, these three al-CIA-duh heavyweights (two from beyond the grave) have issued communiqués. "Al-Qaeda in Iraq alone has carried out 800 martyrdom operations in three years, besides the victories of the other mujahidin. And this is what has broken the back of America in Iraq," al-Zawahiri, or somebody we are expected believe is al-Zawahiri, said in a videotape released this evening. Ayman al-Zawahiri made this latest tape-or somebody in the basement of the CIA building did-from the wilds of Pakistan, Afghanistan, or from his prison cell in Iran (on February 18, 2002, the Guardian reported al-Zawahiri was imprisoned in the Evin prison in Iran). Of course, the Iraqi resistance is responsible for breaking the back of the occupation, not al-CIA-duh, the spook league of patsies and useful idiots. It is interesting to note this latest production "was first obtained by IntelCenter, a United States government contractor that does work for various intelligence agencies," according to the New York Times. According to former Army intelligence analyst and consultant William M. Arkin, IntelCenter is one of many cottage industries that have "sprung up since the early 1990's to feed at the counter-terrorism trough" and its "primary client base is comprised of military, law enforcement and intelligence agencies in the US and other allied countries around the world," in other words the folks who have a vested interest in making sure al-Zawahiri and the half-wit al-Zarqawi-by way of magic trick and computer graphics-check in every so often and make absurd claims, stealing the thunder of the Iraqi resistance. "American counterterrorism officials were aware of the video and analyzing it. One American official said it was part of Al Qaeda's ongoing propaganda campaign to try to demonstrate that it remained relevant," the New York Times concludes. No doubt these "counterterrorism officials" will give the video a stamp of approval, as they routinely do to most al-CIA-duh communications, even those demonstrated to be crude forgeries in short order. Naturally, "al-Qaeda" must remain "relevant" (i.e., take all the credit for the Iraqi resistance), otherwise the "long war" would soon peter and fizzle out. Osama and crew must remain front and center, lest the attention of the fickle and generally peace-loving American public turns elsewhere. (…) But never mind. Our rulers need these cardboard villains and it is brand recognition alone that drives the "long war" and its transparent propaganda effort. "In his last Internet message in March, Zawahri called for attacks on the West, urging similar strikes as those against New York, London and Madrid," the Washington Post adds, attacks that have yet to occur. Of course, as time creeps forward, and the coming maelstrom aimed at Iran picks up steam, such attacks become more likely. Bush's approval ratings are in the dumpster and with every passing day he looks more and more like Richard Nixon-although Nixon's crimes were small time by way of comparison.
BILE BITLER!: A correspondent suggests that cyber-pundits ought to replace the phrase "the Bush administration" with "BITLER" -- an acronym for "Bush's Imperialist, Totalitarian, Lawless Evil Regime." The same correspondent offers this top ten list: Q. What are the Top 10 differences between Hitler and GW Bush?
10) Hitler had a snappy brown suit. 9) Hitler could probably pronounce "nuclear." 8) George has had no luck growing 'that little mustache.' 7) Hitler once wrote a book; George has never even read one. (No, "My Pet Goat" does NOT count!) 6) Goering was never known to have personally shot an old guy in the face. 5) Germany didn't have nuclear weapons...the U.S. does. (Uh-Oh!) 4) Hitler said, "Life does not forgive weakness," which isn't quite as pithy as George's "Don't Mess With Texas!" 3) Hitler actually served in his nation's military. 2) Hitler has been described as having had "charisma."
And the #1 difference between Hitler and GW Bush aka "Bitler"...
1). Hitler was elected.
I would add a few points. In contrast to Bush, Hitler had a genuine southern accent. (I've been told that many Germans view that sort of Austrian accent the way an American yankee might view a upper-class "plantation owner" southern accent. You know the kind: "An honuh tuh make yuh acquaintance, suh!") Hitler's wore black boots with his beige Corporal's uniform. Not so snappy if you ask me. Hitler actually had a rather sizable library, which now rests somewhere in the catacombs of the Library of Congress. However, he bragged that he rarely read an entire book, start to finish; he just skimmed for the parts that he considered important. If Bush had heeded that lesson, he wouldn't have sat there for seven long minutes. He would have flipped the pages until he found out what happened to that goat. BEYOND IRAQ More Iranian "threats": The Washington Post tells its readers:
Escalating the threats between Washington and Tehran, Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, warned Wednesday that his country would strike U.S. targets around the world in the event it is attacked over its refusals to curb its nuclear program.
I'm sorry, announcing that you will retaliate if attacked is not a "threat." Announcing that you quite possibly will attack, and that "all options are on the table," up to and including nuclear weapons, when you do -- that's a threat. Anti-Arabs policies pushing for new "Anti-West" alliance: Growing U.S. pressure on Iran amid a stand-off with Western powers over Tehran's nuclear program led to the emergence of a new anti-Western alliance, according to an editorial on The Christian Science Monitor. The article argues that the new alliance, which is centered on Iran, has gained ground in recent months after Tehran shored up old alliances and strengthened its relations with countries --Syria and Iraq -- and with groups --Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Mahdi Army of Iraq's cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, who recently vowed in visits to Tehran and Damascus to defend them "by all possible means" in case of a U.S. attack. According to political analysts, the Islamic Republic, as the driving force behind the alliance, has gained its strategic role in the region through the U.S., which went after the Taliban in Afghanistan in the east and toppled the Baathist regime in Iraq to the west. "The alliance that is emerging in this part of the world is a creation of Iran," says Sami Moubayed, a Syrian political analyst. "It wants to bolster its position by allying itself with countries or groups that can temporarily enhance its regional role and influence." (...) But the August election of Mr Ahmadinejad as president of Iran reinvigorated the long-standing relationship between Tehran and Damascus, which could be seen as a geostrategic linchpin connecting Iran to Hezbollah. This reinvigoration of ties enabled Syria to display greater defiance against international pressure. In November, Mr. Assad asserted in a speech that "the region [faces] two choices: either resistance and steadfastness or chaos. There is no third choice... "If they believe that they [the West] can blackmail Syria, we tell them they got the wrong address," he said. The outcome of other elections in the Middle East also bolstered the emerging alliance. In December, Iraq's Shia parties close to Iran dominated the elections. The following month, Hamas triumphed in the Palestinian elections. In mid-January, Assad hosted a summit in Damascus with Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president's first state visit. Also attending were the leaders of Hezbollah and several pro-Palestinian groups in what analysts regarded as an affirmation of the anti-Western alliance. "The meeting between Ahmadinejad and Assad did not come as a sign of defeat, but rather as a joint warning to the world. A warning that the alliance between the two neighbors is on its way to becoming stronger," Sateh Noureddine of Lebanon's As Safir newspaper wrote at the time. Many analysts believe that this new alliance presents a new powerful challenge to the U.S.'s Middle East plans. "This is an anti-America alliance," says Joshua Landis, professor of history at the University of Oklahoma. "My guess is that the U.S. will end up in a weaker position than it started. The war on terror has alienated the Muslim countries who now believe that America is the big bad ogre and specter of imperialism." May 1st and America's New Race War: We can no longer use the term loosely --America's war against migrants is real, and the nation's rulers mean to sweep the nation's barrios the way Katrina swept the Black wards of New Orleans. And like the military operations visited upon the Black population of that city in the wake of the winds and floods, the war against migrants is a race war --one directed from the highest levels of power. The recent strikes by ICE against migrant workplaces in dozens of cities across 26 states served as a crystal clear declaration: no matter what immigration bill passes in Washington, "enforcement" is the order of the day. Whoever the government "legalizes," it means to round up the rest in massive raids, ship them en masse to detention camps, then deport them, creating an atmosphere of mass repression and terror among brown people nationwide. Everyone with brown skin will be targeted. The only question still on the table is who will be directly subject to deportation. The amnesty provisions of the bills being debated can only be summed up as part of a divide and conquer strategy. The government is laying its bet --that those who are offered a "path to legalization" will be too frightened of losing their "legal" status to resist the mass deportation of those still deemed "illegal." Such divisions are being foreshadowed today in the struggle over the May 1st Huelga General (general strike and boycott). The current division is based in denial --denial that the main aspect of government policy is a massive crackdown and ethnic cleansing --and that "inclusion" has little to do with it. The recent mass raids are part of a Homeland Security / ICE plan called ENDGAME. The plan bluntly states the aim of the Bush administration: to deport all deportable migrants by the year 2012. It's in this context that the government wants pro-migrant groups to accede to a "compromise." The simple truth is that those who are willing to take the bait -like the National Council of La Raza --are accepting terms of surrender in the war against migrants. In a Devil's bargain they are willing to sacrifice as many as 7 million people in order to save some 5 million from the most direct impacts of mass raids, detention camps and deportations. On May 1st these maneuvers will reach a dramatic climax. Those who oppose the General Strike - like the "We Are America" coalition in Los Angeles --are sending a message that resistance is futile; that we should fear an imaginary "backlash" more than the concrete plans of the government to attack our communities, and that the best we can hope for is the "mercy" of the racist Republican Right. They say they don't want us to "provoke" mass repression or legislative defeat. Fearful and trapped between the power of those on high and the power of those below, one section of the movement's middle class leadership has changed its tune. No longer is their slogan a proud, defiant and joyful "!Si, Se Puede!" but a resigned and cautious "No se puede." They want to slip the needle into the vein and put the newly awakened brown giant back to sleep. But let's make it plain, as Brother Malcolm used to say: Krystallnacht --the night of shattered glass that marked the onset of the persecution, mass deportation and ultimately the mass death of the targets of German fascism --was not a "backlash." It was, rather, the implementation of an ongoing racist intent to persecute, exclude and permanently remove unwanted ethnic groups, and to do so by any means necessary. The Gypsies, Slavs and Jews of Europe did nothing to "provoke" the Nazis; Native America did nothing to "provoke" Europe; African Americans did nothing to "provoke" lynching; the migrants of Australia did nothing to "provoke" the white population to carry out the recent anti-migrant race riots there. Such persecutions operate on their own, internally reinforced racist logic. The only thing those who were targeted had to do was exist --and be vulnerable. And no one is more vulnerable than someone whose very existence is deemed "illegal." The race and vulnerability of most migrants to the US made persecution a foregone conclusion; the writing on the wall was clear from the moment a powerful group of racist lawmakers and their media allies made an electric spectacular out of a tiny cult of ultra rightists, vigilantes and "white nationalists" who took up arms and went migrant hunting on the border. The agenda was always straightforward racist persecution enforced with guns --whether it's ICE or the Minutemen makes no difference, just as there is no essential difference between the anti-Mexican Zoot Suit Riots of the 40s, the recent anti-immigrant pogroms in Australia, official mass roundups like Operation Wetback or the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during WW2. The powers that be didn't wait to be "provoked" by impolite behavior or economic boycotts before launching the recent mass raids. In other words, nothing has changed except this: Since the mass pro-amnesty marches in Chicago and Los Angeles our potential for mass resistance against mass repression is now on the table as an absolute factor in the equation. And that's what the May 1st Huelga General is all about. It's about our power and their vulnerability, instead of the other way around. Many of those calling for the general strike understand the power of resistance, and exactly how much is at stake. Over a hundred actions in more than 60 cities are planned. Some --even in the mainstream Spanish language press, are calling on us to take as our banner not only the Black resistance of the 1960s, but to follow the example of the recent student strikes and immigrant rebellions in France, as well. The future of millions lies in the balance on May 1st --and it is the future not only of brown people, but of Blacks, whites, and of everyone who has an investment in stopping the rapidly escalating trend toward fascism in the US. If we fail on that date, there will be no chance to reunite a divided movement. If we fail on that date, a new message will be written on the wall: there was ultimately no mass resistance to the racial scapegoating essential to the development of full blown fascism in the US. The middle ground has fallen away. On May 1st we will send one of two messages: "We Resist" or "We Surrender." It's up to us to shape the future, to shape our own endgame. Everything depends on what we choose. QUOTE OF THE DAY: “The French philosopher René Decartes said I think therefore I am. For the Americans it is I cause damage therefore I am. To prove that they exist they damage.” --- Ali Larijani, Iran's chief nuclear negotiator and head of the Supreme National Security Council

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Friday, April 28, 2006

DAILY WAR NEWS FOR FRIDAY, April 28, 2006 Photo: U.S. occupation recruiting drive in high gear; Recruiting for the armed resistance that is - An Iraqi girl sits in her mother's arms while male family members are searched by a U.S. Marine at a checkpoint in Karmah April 24, 2006. (AP Photo/Jacob Silberberg) Bring ‘em on: U.S. soldier killed in roadside bombing north of Baghdad, the U.S. military said Friday, as April became the deadliest month for U.S. forces in Iraq this year. The U.S. soldier died about 7:15 p.m. Thursday when his vehicle was hit by a roadside bomb north of Baghdad, the military said. That brought the American death toll for the month to at least 67, according to an Associated Press count. April's death toll is the highest monthly figure so far this year. Last month, 31 U.S. troops were killed in Iraq, the lowest monthly toll since February 2004. At least 2,397 members of the U.S. military have died since the Iraq war began in March 2003, according to the AP count. OTHER SECURITY INCIDENTS Baghdad: Two mortars or rockets fired Friday at the Green Zone. One landed inside but failed to detonate, and the other exploded nearby on the other side of the Tigris River, the U.S. military said. No casualties were immediately reported. Roadside bomb goes off close to Iraqi special forces patrol, killing one soldier and wounding three others. Police said the attack took place in al-Amil neighbourhood of western Baghdad. Corpses of two middle-aged Iraqi men found in a neighborhood of western Baghdad. The men were handcuffed, blindfolded and bullet-ridden. Baqubah: Update from 4-27-06 US military says 21 rebels were killed and another 43 captured in the last 24 hours in the eastern province of Diyala, of which Baquba is the capital, after a series of attacks on military and police checkpoints. the brutal attacks that left 16 people dead, including six Iraqi soldiers. In Baqouba, Iraqi police were fighting insurgents in the streets Friday, and witnesses saw at least two wounded police officers being carried to police vehicles for evacuation. Iraqi soldiers also patrolled the city, which was closed to pedestrians and traffic by a curfew. Fallujah: In a rebel attack in Fallujah, two policemen were killed by a roadside bomb against their patrol. Three policemen were killed when roadside bomb hits their patrol near a bridge in Falluja. Najaf: Iraqi armed forces conducted an operation in Najaf on Tuesday aimed at capturing a suspected insurgent bomb maker. Iraqi forces came under attack near the suspect's hideout and returned fire and killed the insurgent. Three suspected individuals were detained following the operation, but were later released. Samarra: Civilian who had been kidnapped in Samaraa was rescued when US soldiers apprehended the assailant. The kidnap victim was found bound in the car trunk and the assailant was arrested. Ramadi: Iraqi forces perched on rooftops in Ramadi exchanged sporadic fire with insurgents in a residential district where guerillas have been active. One Iraqi soldier was killed, the troops said. Kirkuk: ivilian wounded when roadside bomb targeting police convoy explodes on a road 5 km (3 miles) south of Kirkuk. Today in Afghanistan: Senior Afghan police official narrowly escapes assassination attempt but his two guards were wounded when a roadside bomb exploded near his vehicle in southern Afghanistan. NEWS U.S. says killed Samarra al-Qaida in Iraq® franchiser and two other insurgents in raid north of Baghdad: Just outside Samarra, 60 miles north of Baghdad, U.S. forces raided a house where Hamid al-Takhi, the local al-Qaida in Iraq leader, and the two other insurgents were hiding, the military said in a statement. Al-Takhi, known as the "emir" of Samarra, was gunned down while fleeing the house, and the other two militants were killed while trying to defend it with grenades, the U.S. military said. After they were killed, the U.S. troops found a car parked nearby containing a grenade launcher, rockets, AK-47s, grenades and a shotgun, the U.S. military said. Saddam turns 69, spent his third birthday in a row behind bars: His birthday attracted little of the frenzy the date once engendered when it was celebrated as a national holiday during his 24 years of strong-armed rule from 1979 to 2003. Even in his hometown of Tikrit, Saddam's birthday passed unnoticed, although a few dozen posters bearing his portrait were seen in the majority Sunni city of Samarra, north of Baghdad. Although it is generally accepted that Saddam killed tens of thousands of his own citizens, some residents expressed their nostalgia for his brutal, but more stable rule. "The occupiers and their agents among the new leaders are responsible for more massacres in this country than Saddam Hussein," said an elderly Samarra resident, who asked not to be named. "He is better than the politicians of today, who have brought the country neither safety nor stability," added a merchant, who also requested anonymity. American soldiers should be gone from Iraq by the middle of 2008, Iraq's National Security Adviser Mowaffak al-Rubaie said on Friday. In an interview, Rubaie said he expected current U.S. troops of roughly 133,000 to be cut to less than 100,000 by the end of this year and an "overwhelming majority" of U.S. forces should go home by the end of 2007 under a U.S.-Iraqi "roadmap" that calls for progressively handing over security to Iraqi forces. "We have a road map, a condition-based agreement where, by the end of this year, the number of Coalition forces probably will be less than 100,000. By the end of next year the overwhelming majority of Coalition forces would have left the country and probably by middle of 2008 there will be no foreign soldiers in the country," he told Reuters. Rubaie, an official of the outgoing government, made his bullish assessment after Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visited Baghdad to show America's support for Prime Minister-designate Nuri al-Maliki. Iraqi VP warns U.S. against attacking Iran: Adel Abdul Mahdi, the Shi'ite member of the three-man Presidency Council, was asked about speculation U.S. forces might strike to prevent Iran developing nuclear technology: "We will not allow anyone to attack anyone," he said after a meeting in the holy city of Najaf with Grand Ayatollah Ali al- Sistani, Iraq's senior Shi'ite cleric. "We think that the use of force is not appropriate for solving any problem." The leaders of Iraq's Shi'ite majority, including Mahdi's SCIRI party, have close ties to their fellow Shi'ite Islamists ruling neighbouring Iran, where many of them sought refuge from the Sunni-dominated administration of Saddam Hussein. Another leading Iraqi Shi'ite politician, cleric and militia leader Moqtada al-Sadr, recently pledged the support of his Mehdi Army fighters to Iran if U.S. forces attacked. Iraqi VP says 100,000 families -- perhaps some half a million people -- are living as refugees because of violence wracking the country: Adel Abdul Mahdi gave no source for his estimate, which is much higher than the 11,000 families -- or about 60,000 people -- which the Displacement and Migration Ministry said two weeks ago had fled their homes since late February. REPORTS Iraq's oil production has slipped further and further since the U.S.-led invasion:, to an average of 2 million barrels a day. It has never regained even the reduced production levels that prevailed in the 1990s, when Iraq was under tough U.N. sanctions. Iraq's oil could be providing relief to world markets, strained by high demand from China, the nuclear-related showdown with Iran and unrest near Nigeria's oil fields. Instead, it's not even covering its own needs. Stunning poll results: A CNN/Gallup/USAToday poll in March had 39% of people still believing that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the 9/11 attacks. This is better than the numbers of the highly indoctrinated U.S. military, where a Zogby poll in February showed 85% believing that the primary reason for the Iraq invasion was "payback for 9/11," but it's still stunning. The most stunning recent result I've seen, though, from the same poll, is that, when asked if Iraq was better off or worse off than before the invasion, 19% answered "much better off," 48% "somewhat better," 18% "somewhat worse," and 12% "much worse." In other words, 67% said Iraq was better off and 30% worse off. This is true despite reports that infant mortality and child malnutrition have doubled, despite a sensational rise in violence and in the likelihood of violent death, and despite that fact that by the most basic index of all, gross mortality, Iraq was worse off afterward to the tune of 100,000 deaths in the first 18 months and by now most likely well over 200,000. Pentagon Bills Injured Soldiers $1.2 Million: After suffering paralysis, brain damage, lost limbs and other wounds in war, nearly 900 soldiers have been saddled with $1.2 million in government debt because of the military's "complex, cumbersome" pay system, congressional investigators said Thursday. The report from the Government Accountability Office said another 400 who died in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had $300,000 in debt but that the Defense Department did not pursue reimbursement from the estates of those who were killed in combat. "We found that hundreds of separated battle-injured soldiers were pursued for collection of military debts incurred through no fault of their own," said the report. It said that included seeking reimbursement for errors in pay or for equipment left on the battlefield. The problem became known months ago as soldiers began to complain and lawmakers asked for the report. The Pentagon said it had been working to resolve it. "It's unconscionable," Ryan Kelly, 25, a retired staff sergeant who lost a leg to a roadside bomb, told the Washington Post. He said he spent more than a year trying to fend off a debt of $2,231. "It's sad that we'd let that happen," Kelly said. Kelly told the Post that in 2004, months after learning to walk on a prosthesis, he opened his mailbox to find a letter saying he was in debt to the government — and in jeopardy of referral to a collection agency. "It hits you in the gut," he said. "It's like, 'Thanks for your service, and now you owe us.' " An Iraqi professor tells of life under occupation: Sinan Abdul-Aziz, Professor of Arabic literature, Kirkuk University "Deteriorating security means Iraqi academics are an easy target for abduction and assassination; a total of 190 professors have been killed under the occupation. You might be killed in an explosion on the street. Many professors can't afford private cars; they ride on the bus, which makes their death more likely. Not that I'd personally want the attention or misunderstanding incumbent on having a bodyguard. We work to build the students' confidence in us, but since we've grown to fear them sometimes, they too fear us. That said, both parties have resumed the work they do together -- teaching and learning. Iraqi minds are specifically targeted; it's a particularly dangerous dimension of the occupation which the killing of nuclear scientist Mohamed Al-Ardramali in Abu Ghraib prison during the first few months of occupation revealed. They want a backward Iraq to suit Zionist plans. Neo-conservatives in Washington are already admitting that what is happening in Iraq serves Israeli, better than American, interests. So we were right to point to Zionism. Students attacked a colleague of mine; another, Abdul-Razaq Al-Naas, was assassinated. I've received threats since. If not for the absurd situation in which the occupation has placed us, with the vaguest promise of an elected government working towards security and stability, no student would dare hit a teacher. And what's even more of a joke: the government requests that we should protect ourselves. Hundreds of qualified Iraqis have fled their homelands. Many universities are without staff, and campus has turned into a kind of investigative court or interrogation chamber, in which teachers have no right to question or punish students, especially when they belong to a party, much less criticise a political organisation. I hardly know any more where the threat is coming from, whose protection to seek. True, our financial situation has improved a lot; but give me the choice of salary or security, and I'll take the latter. Before the occupation, only one person and his family posed threats; now everyone is a threat, everyone capable of liquidating you at a blink. I don't understand how killing came to be so easy." COMMENTARY AND ANALYSIS Weird?: Iraq must make progress to keep US troops: These two [Condi and Rummy] sneaked inside Iraq under the cover of darkness just like thieves and thieves they are. A translation of they said after meeting Al-Maliki He is focused = he is ready to do what we dictate Donald Rumsfield hurried to say: We refuse to give a time table of withdrawal from Iraq. The reality is they think they are doing Iraq a favor by staying there, read what these few idiot senators are saying: "Iraq must make progress to keep US troops"
A bipartisan group of senators pushed a resolution on Tuesday calling on President George W Bush to tell Iraqi leaders they must meet their own deadlines to form a government as a condition for keeping US forces there.
Irony above irony, Iraq must make progress or (and here comes the threat) the troops will leave. You know this American myth, US politician keep saying; The US will never negotiate with terrorists. Talabani said today American negotiated with the resistance in his presence. Car salesman Abu Mohammed will sell a customer anything they want, including a range of bullet-proof cars costing up to $340,000. "There is a possibility some people buy these cars with violent intent, but we can't go around checking after them," he says. "Our job is to sell cars and make money. "I can get anything you can think of, even an American Humvee if the price is right." View from Russia: We are now witnessing the demise of America: For decades, America successfully marketed its 'values' throughout the world (accompanied often by hefty cash subsidies for corrupt, subservient regimes). The aims of the American ideology were no less ambitious than those of Soviet communism, and the Americans were victorious over the Soviets, for a couple of years anyway. But after the collapse of the Soyuz, the shallowness of American values became evident throughout the world. It turns out now that American-style Brown'n'Root democracy does not, in fact, suit Iraq, a land long plagued by European colonialism and internal division. It is now clear that America never intended to export its American-style democracy to totalitarian regimes in Israel, Egypt, or Saudi Arabia. American democracy is a sham, all double-talk, just like the Soviets' spin on the fraternal brotherhood of nations. Democracy for several generations now has not existed in America. The large corporations continue to increase their power, irregardless of the red or blue façade of the regime. The moral pedigree of a Clinton is as nasty as that of a Bush. As identified by a recent controversial study ignored by the American media, it is, indeed, a cabal of pro-Israeli groups which controls America's purse-strings and foreign policy. America is dying. I assure those Americans who still feel secure about a regular pay check, their job perks, vacations, company cars and cell phones, annual bonuses, benefits, government entitlements, U.S. dollar-based investments and accounts, etc etc., that their lifestyle is crumbling. There is no longer any right or logic in America's prosperity. What gives Americans the right to consume the bulk of the world's energy resources? By what right does an American drive a hummer while much of the rest of the world walks, rides bicycles, and commutes by public transportation? No longer can America's traditional rights be excused. Those rights are mostly derived from a narrow, archaic Anglo-Saxon tradition: the 'right' to carry (and use/abuse) firearms and the 'right' to exploit land and natural resources for personal benefit. The American Middle Class has outlived its period of historical relevance and soon will be replaced, by Hispanics, India's Indians, and Chinese. Those groups have no qualms about bearing and rearing children. It is the twenty-first century. America is rat-infested history. America will fall, overrun by fatwah-inspired Muslims; wild, dispossessed, self-identified Apache or Aztec guerillas; looting, reparations-deluded African-Americans; indignant Eskimos; flaming cross-dressers and advocates of every sort of politically correct nonsense. History doesn't last forever, and anyway, America had a couple of good centuries before it turned to cr*p. It's Official: I Now Pity George Bush: Before you start firing off rude, biting comments hoping to make me cry, just put yourself in his shoes for a minute. He's broken the United States of America. He was given the most powerful nation the world has ever known and driven it right into the ground. I mean, how would you feel? Especially if you came from a high-achieving family. Like most guys he tried to follow in the footsteps of his dad. But what if your dad was a decorated WW II fighter pilot, college baseball star, Ambassador to the U.N., C.I.A. Director and President of the United-States? You might not even try to amount to anything for, say, the first forty-seven-years of your life. But you watch your little brother Jeb get the good grades and the praise from the 'rents. You can't just sit back and watch him rise and rise without making one last stab at success. Like two kids playing Risk, you divide up the nation. You run for governor in Texas, little Jeb takes Florida. This time your the one who wins. Jeb has to try again. Now everything's changed. You're on your way to showing that hardass dad of yours that he was wrong about you all these years. And by the way, he might have been a great war hero but he was only a mediocre President. You'll get to the White House and laugh last and so loud they'll hear you all the way back in Midland. No mediocre Presidency for this son. No. You're swinging for the fence. And it sort of works for a while. Big ideas and big opportunities. Your advisors assure you that you can play war and cakewalk to a win. Then it goes bad. And worse. The damn war never ends. Poll numbers crater. Nobody's comparing you to Lincoln or Roosevelt. Now they're comparing you to Joseph Hazelwood, captain of the Exxon Valdez. First veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas calls you the "Worst President in American History." You laugh it off. She's an old crank anyway. Then professor Sean Wilentz writes a cover story for Rolling Stone calling you, again, the worst President ever. Not only that, but 81% of his fellow history professors have already declared your reign a failure. It's finally starting to sink in that Iraq is officially a defeat, the strongest military in the world dispirited and on its way to breaking, you've run up more debt than a drunken sailor before payday, your seemingly bulletproof political party looks headed back out of favor, Latin America is slipping out of your nation's sphere of influence for the first time in over a century, North Korea has acquired The Bomb. All on your watch. What does he say to his mom and dad when they come over for dinner? Oops? I can't help feeling sorry for him. I'm a Democrat. I always root for the underdog. Rocking out to the sound of impeachment: With Neil Young and Pearl Jam releasing devastating anti-Bush albums in the coming weeks, it looks like rock has rejuvenated its protest past. Young's album, which you can listen to streamed live on his site or no doubt find bootlegs of on the blogs, is scheduled to be released on May 9. The centerpiece of the album -- the song that we'll hopefully hear blasting on the radio from now until the time George Bush leaves office -- is titled in the most straightforward manner, "Let's Impeach the President." The lyrics of that song, reprinted in full below, first appeared on Fox News -- a smart move, considering that that media outlet and its audience are likely going to be the last ones on the planet to agree that impeaching George Bush is a good idea. The lyrics to "Living with War":
Let's impeach the president for lying And leading our country into war Abusing all the power that we gave him And shipping all our money out the door He's the man who hired all the criminals The White House shadows who hide behind closed doors And bend the facts to fit with their new stories Of why we have to send our men to war Let's impeach the president for spying On citizens inside their own homes Breaking every law in the country By tapping our computers and telephones What if Al Qaida blew up the levees Would New Orleans have been safer that way Sheltered by our government's protection Or was someone just not home that day? Let's impeach the president For hijacking our religion and using it to get elected Dividing our country into colors And still leaving black people neglected Thank god he's cracking down on steroids Since he sold his old baseball team There's lot of people looking at big trouble But of course the president is clean Thank God
But perhaps Young won't be the only one pumping out straight up, in-your-face dissent on the mass music level. Pearl Jam will release a self-titled album on May 2 that has every sign of being a direct attack on the state of American politics. Lead singer Eddie Vedder recently told the press, "It's just not the time to be cryptic. I mean, our tax dollars for this (Iraq) war are being funneled through huge corporations -- one of which Dick Cheney used to be head of (Halliburton) -- and there's an even greater disparity between rich or poor in this country. It offends me on a really deep level." Pearl Jam's tour starts on May 9. Hopefully, by the end of this summer, all of us will have rocked out to the sound of impeachment. There is the question of why so many generals (not all of them retired) want Rummy gone: That varies general to general, but when Rumsfeld’s defenders argue that some of his critics are dinosaurs who resent “Transformation” because it disrupts business as usual, they have a point. As anyone who has dealt with the higher ranks of the U.S. military knows, they put the La Brea tar pits in the shade as a dinosaur graveyard. As wedded to old ways of doing things – Second Generation war to be specific – as any other group of senior Gosplan apparatchiki, they hate any hint of change. Years ago, when an unconventional Air Force Chief of Staff had me give my Fourth Generations of Modern War talk to the Air Force’s “Corona” gathering of three- and four-stars, I felt like Milton Friedman speaking to the Brezhnev Politburo. But here too the story is not so simple. While Rumsfeldian “Transformation” represents change, it represents change in the wrong direction. Instead of attempting to move from the Second Generation to the Third (much less the Fourth), Transformation retains the Second Generation’s conception of war as putting firepower on targets while trying to replace people with technology. Its summa is the Death Star, where men and women in spiffy uniforms sit in air-conditioned comfort zapping enemies like bugs. It is a vision of future war that appeals to technocrats and lines industry pockets, but has no connection to reality. The combination of this vision of war with an equally unrealistic vision of strategic objectives has given us the defeat in Iraq. Again, Rumsfeld lies at the heart of both. But, again, his removal and replacement contain no promise of improvement in either. Killing fields: Genocide in Iraq: Pol Pot imposed a revolutionary ideology on Cambodia so radical and rigid that if the countenance of a terrorized Cambodian, indoctrinated through coercion, betrayed even a hint of skepticism, that person would be summarily executed. President George W. Bush seems to have virtually achieved this kind of control in America without the threat of force as evidenced by the meekness of the media, the Democratic pseudo-opposition and the hesitant moderates within the Republican Party. Not only is Congress unwilling to investigate possible impeachment charges, they refuse to even censure him despite all the lies, cover-ups and illegal activities, not to mention war crimes. The accusation that Bush has violated the UN Charter, Geneva Conventions, the Convention on the Use of Some Conventional Weapons and the Convention on Torture is paradoxically inadequate to describe the severity of the crimes against humanity perpetrated by this president. By adding to the war crimes committed by his father, the former President George H. Bush, and President Clinton, President George W. Bush has reached the apogee of war crimes, namely genocide. The accusation that President W. Bush has committed genocide is based on Article 3 section b and e of the Convention on Genocide which assigns guilt to persons who engage in a “Conspiracy to commit genocide” and to those who bear “Complicity in Genocide”. President W. Bush has violated Article 2 section a, b, c of the genocide act which states that “Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethical, racial or religious group such as: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” The most devastating instrument of genocide inflicted on the Iraqi people was the implementation of sanctions which were initiated under the authority of Security Council Resolution 661, approved on August 6 1990, mandating a mandatory and complete embargo on all trade with Iraq. A Security Council Sanctions Committee was created with one representative from each country on the Council, each of whom had a veto. The Americans and British exploited their veto to impose harsh conditions on the people of Iraq by prohibiting parts to repair water treatment plants, medicines, incubators, cardiac equipment, syringes, catheters, chlorine, radiology and laboratory equipment, incubators and sterilization equipment. The most nefarious consequence of the sanctions was a severe shortage of clean water and destruction of the sewage system resulting in high levels of cholera, typhoid, dysentery and diarrhea. According to UNICEF, “Safe drinking water is a nation-wide problem and cases of diarrhea have increased from an average of 3.8 episodes per child/year in 1990 to nearly 15 episodes per by 1996. During the same period, typhoid fever increased from 2,240 to over 27,000 cases.” Tuberculosis rates tripled from 46.1 per 100,000 people in 1989 to an estimated 131.6 per 100,000 people in 2000. UNICEF estimates 4,000 excess child deaths every month above the 1989 pre-sanctions rate. In total, the sanctions were responsible for the deaths of over one million people, half of whom were children. Although the sanctions were intended to force Saddam Hussein to destroy his weapons of mass destruction, in practice they became a weapon to starve the people of Iraq and deny them access to proper medical care in the hope that they would overthrow Saddam Hussein. The sanctions were responsible for “killing members of the group”, “causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group [Iraqis]”, and “inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its [Iraqis] physical destruction in whole or in part.” On top of the sanctions, unleashing the fury of the American war machine on the hapless people of Iraq on January 16 1991, will be recorded as one of the great evil deeds in history. Flying at a safe Nintendo altitude of 40,000 feet, American bombers spewed 80 million tons of explosives over a 42 day period effectively bombing Iraq into the pre-industrial age. Targets included water treatment plants, chlorine plants, communication facilities, electrical generators, industrial plants, irrigation systems, farm silos, hospitals, schools, mosques, densely populated cities and the famous baby milk factory. The U.S. used fuel-air explosives, napalm and cluster bombs all of which had been defined as illegal in international law because of their inability to distinguish between military and civilian targets. Estimates of the number of people killed range from 100,000 to 200,000. This bombing campaign clearly inflicted on Iraqis “conditions of life calculated to bring about its destruction in whole or in part.” President Bush Sr., President Clinton and President Bush Jr. sustained the bombing of Iraq until 2003 under the guise of a humanitarian campaign to protect groups at risk from Saddam Hussein. During that twelve year period, three to four bombing sorties a week wreaked havoc in the two no-fly zones established by the British and Americans. According to the Pentagon, 280,000 sorties were flown between 1991 and 2000 and from 1998 to 2002, the United States dropped 780 tons of bombs during 24,000 combat missions. The UN reported in 1999 that U.S. and British air raids flattened an agricultural school, damaged dozens of schools and hospitals and destroyed water supplies for 300,000 people in Baghdad. Without clean water, water treatment facilities, medicine, medical equipment and sufficient food, it became increasingly difficult to sustain life. Bombing in the no-fly zones further damaged the infrastructure of Iraq and further inflicted “conditions of life calculated to bring about its destruction in whole or in part.” President George W. Bush perpetuated the sanctions and bombings in the no-fly zones undermining even further the ability of the Iraqi people to survive. In addition, he declared war on Iraq in 2003 followed by a military occupation resulting in instability and insecurity. An insurgency consisting mostly of Sunni Muslims adopting terrorist methods of warfare engaged with messianic fervor in a clandestine killing spree of Americans. American forces armed and trained mostly Shiite Muslims in order to ultimately transfer responsibility for peace and order to Iraqis. The country degenerated into sectarian violence expelling any vestiges of stability and security. Between the insurgent-phobic trigger fingers of American troops, American-trained militias, insurgent groups and revenge-seeking citizens there is barely a square foot of safe ground on which to stand. As of April 13, 2006, the war and military occupation have resulted in the death of between 34,139 and 38,280 Iraqis according to Iraq Body Count. As a result, “Three years after the invasion [2003], Iraq remains a living nightmare for many Iraqis. Up to half of Iraq’s labor force is unemployed; more than 60% of the population depend on government rations to survive; over 20% live below the poverty line; and more than 400,000 children are suffering from malnutrition. This, on top of all the destruction, death and disorder.” (Herbert Docena, ZNet) The World Health Organization reports that “The military conflict of March/April 2003 with the following looting and civil unrest led to a further disruption of water treatment and supply plants, of sanitation facilities and power production plants and to the destruction of the remaining medical equipment in health facilities. Continuing widespread insecurity and lawlessness constrain the access to health facilities with the exacerbation of fighting in different areas of the country causing a large number of casualties.” Although the genocide began with the former President Bush and continued with President Clinton, President George W. Bush was complicit in the genocide by destroying the infrastructure even further, by persevering with the sanctions, by continuing with the no-fly zone bombing, by heavy bombing after declaring war and by destabilizing the country during the military occupation. The question “in total or in part” is a no-brainer because the extent of harm caused to the Iraqis meets the criteria in the Genocide Convention given that the entire country was subject to the devastation inflicted by the Americans. The question of intent can be separated into two questions. Whether the extent of the damage was intended is not disputable. It would have been a simple exercise to predict the outcome of the targeting and sanctions. Destroying people’s access to clean water leads to death and disease. Bombing people’s homes and markets leads to deaths. The more difficult question about the intention to destroy “in whole or part” the Iraqi nation” is irrelevant because any reasonable and rational person could have predicted that outcome. The fact that President Bush is neither reasonable nor rational does not excuse his crime of genocide. In addition to his complicity in the genocide, President Bush is guilty of a conspiracy to bomb and impose sanctions on Iraq. Conspiracy can mean to “act in agreement and in secret towards a deceitful or illegal purpose.” When George W. Bush occupied the White House and continued the policies pertaining to Iraq of his father and President Clinton, he endorsed the policies of his two predecessors. That makes him a co-conspirator in genocide. Compared to the damage caused by the Hutus in Rwanda and the Serbs in Bosnia both of which are considered to be genocide by the International Criminal Court, the acts of President Bush constitute no lesser a crime. Denis Halliday, former UN Assistant Secretary-General and Humanitarian Coordinator, resigned his post in 1998 describing U.S. and British policy as “genocidal.” Hans von Sponeck who succeeded Halliday resigned in 2000 asking “How long should the civilian population of Iraq be exposed to such punishment for something they have never done.” Two days later, Jutta Burghardt who headed the World Food Programme in Iraq, also resigned believing that the harm inflicted on the Iraqi people is intolerable. Genocide is substantially different than other international crimes in its diabolical barbarity and is described in UN Resolution 96 (1946) as a crime that “shocks the conscience of mankind” and one that results in “great losses to humanity”. Escaping prosecution for violating the Geneva Convention and UN charter will not only be a travesty of justice but will distort the historical record omitting one the most important aspects of President George W. Bush’s presidency. Escaping prosecution for genocide will be the ultimate injustice and will open a yawning chasm between the historical record and the truth. IRAN Once again: conventional "wisdom" on Iran: Before dinner I was listening to a discussion on NPR (radio) about Iran. The moderator noted that they made sure to have "both sides" of the debate they were having. What were those "both sides"? One was "it is inevitable that Iran will get nuclear weapons," and the other was "no, we can still prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons." The idea that Iran doesn't have a nuclear weapons program, and doesn't want nuclear weapons, simply wasn't on the table. I know I've said this before, but I'm afraid I'll have to keep writing about it because it is clearly the issue of the moment, and the powers that be are sparing no effort to convince the American people of the "danger" from Iran. As with the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, their lies must be exposed continuously, because they aren't going to stop telling them. ”The atomic bomb is no longer important or effective”: Interview with Ali Larijani, Iran's chief nuclear negotiator and head of the Supreme National Security Council, Why don't you want to have an atomic bomb? We don't think it's legitimate in Islam. When the leader of the revolution says that possessing nuclear weapons is haram (forbidden) then we cannot have them. This also includes weapons of mass destruction. We witnessed the effect of WMDs when the Americans and Europeans provided Saddam with them and he used them, in places like Halabja. I was there when he attacked and I can't wipe the images from my mind. Everything and everyone -- children, men, women and animals were exterminated. We know what WMDs do. But this is something that Bush and Rice do not understand. Our influence in Islamic countries does not depend on the possession of an atomic bomb. If we have influence in Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine it is not because of nuclear weapons but because of what we represent morally. Take Pakistan for example. It has an atomic bomb, how does that make it influential? But again, Bush thinks only of bombs. But you are surrounded by five nuclear states. Look, the US has a vast nuclear arsenal but that hasn't stopped it sinking in the Iraq swamp and is totally incapable of doing anything about it. The atomic bomb is no longer important or effective. But the bomb is a deterrent. Israel is a deterring power because of the bomb. If that is the case why did it evacuate south Lebanon? The notion of deterrence was applicable during the cold war. We have entered a new era, with new characteristics. (…) The Iranian Revolutionary Guard is said to be involved inside Iraq. How far is Iran implicated in Iraq? We don't need to intervene in Iraq. And if we were indeed involved then rest assured the Americans would have publicised whatever evidence they have. Besides, why should we intervene? Iraqi President Jalal Talabani is our friend. [Kurdish leader] Masoud Barzani is our friend. [Iraq's Grand] Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani, Abdul-Aziz Al-Hakim, Ibrahim Al-Jaafari and Moqtada Al-Sadr -- they are all our friends. Will Iran consider signing an agreement not to attack its Gulf neighbours? When have we ever attacked a neighbouring country in the last 150 years? When did we ever disturb them? We were the ones who were attacked by Saddam and they backed him. A recent report published in The New Yorker magazine claimed there are US intelligence units operating inside Iran. Is this true? Yes. These groups are everywhere around us. They are in Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Turkey, Iraq, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. How seriously do you take media speculation about US military confrontation with Iran? It is easier said than done and the threats illustrate the impotence [of the Americans] rather than their strength. The problem is America's behaviour in the region. The French philosopher René Decartes said I think therefore I am. For the Americans it is I cause damage therefore I am. To prove that they exist they damage. However, I don't think they will make this dangerous mistake. Iran is a difficult target. Iraq was an easy target. Saddam was weak because of the war he launched on us followed by his invasion of Kuwait. He didn't enjoy any legitimacy nor was he acceptable to Shias or Sunnis. And all neighbouring countries were against him. QUOTE OF THE DAY: "One of the issues of sovereignty for any country is the ability to control their own airspace. We will probably be helping the Iraqis with that problem for a very long time". --- Brig Gen Frank Gorenc, Balad air base commander

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