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Only resistance is legal
Hana Albayaty, Abdul Ilah Albayaty, Ian Douglas (BRussells Tribunal Committee)
…Only the national popular resistance in Iraq — armed, political and civil — is empowered, both as an objective fact and under international law, to determine a path towards peace and stability in Iraq. No other player, certainly not US-installed stooge politicians in a 10-kilometre square “Green Zone”, can speak on behalf of the Iraqi people or embodies the Republic of Iraq. Full responsibility for the disa! sters that have befallen the Iraqi people lies with the US, its failed “political process” and failed security measures. No escalation can provide a solution. The occupation must end and end now…
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The US Occupation of Iraq: Casualties Not Counted
Dahr Jamail, t r u t h o u t | Perspective
In all past wars the United States has been involved in, including the two World Wars, Vietnam and the first Gulf War, the military was self reliant and took care of its basic support functions like cooking, cleaning and other services. That changed when the Cheney administration took control of the government in 2000. War has now been privatized, and the shining examples of this privatization are Afghanistan and Iraq. ! As you read this there are approximately 100,000-125,000 American civilian contractors working in Iraq and Afghanistan. Their jobs range from providing security to desk work to interrogating prisoners to driving convoy trucks to clearing unexploded ordnance. A year back, in November 2005, the US Department of Labor listed 428 civilian contractors dead and 3,963 wounded in Iraq – none of which are ever counted in the official casualty counts…
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Annals of Liberation: The End of Education in Iraq
Chris Floyd
…Ignorance, extremism, fear, death, ruin — and oodles and oodles of bribes and war profits for the cronies, the crooks, and the cranks…yes, Iraq is definitely the wave of the future! After all, it’s the first nation in the world where the Bush Agenda has been applied in its purest, most unfettered form. If you want to know what the future holds for America at the hands of the Bush Faction (in whatever permutation it replicates itself after 2008),! then just cast your beady eyes to Baghad and environs…
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Bush’s Failed Policy of Kill, Kill, Kill
Robert Parry
On March 30, 2003 – 3 ? years ago and only 10 days after the U.S. invasion of Iraq – I solicited assessments from a few trusted military analysts and wrote that “whatever happens in the weeks ahead, George W. Bush has ‘lost’ the war in Iraq. The only question now is how big a price America will pay, both in terms of battlefield casualties and political hatred swelling around the world.” The article, entitled “Bay of Pigs Meets Black Hawk Down,” argued that one! of Bush’s most egregious miscalculations was his assumption that the Iraqis wouldn’t fight a foreign invader. Like the wishful thinking in the Bay of Pigs disaster (Cuba, 1961), U.S. policymakers assumed an invasion would be welcomed, not opposed…
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A Maliki déjà vu?
Firas Al-Atraqchi
…Stepping into the increasing sectarian forays, PM Nour al-Maliki announced a plan to end the Shia-Sunni rift by forming local security committees throughout Baghdad with equal representation from every political party, sect and tribe. The committees would monitor whether police and the Iraqi army effectively pursue militia fighters after an attack. But the plan falls far short of any significant effort to curb violence because it does not address the disarming of militias, w! hich Maliki had promised in late May, and focuses entirely on Baghdad. The rest of the country, it seems, can go to hell…
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Of course, he’s not dead!
The Truth Will Set You Free
For the first time in the history of this administration, I can say with confidence that I believe them. “We believe he is still alive,” U.S. military spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Barry Johnson said, dismissing claims by several Iraqi politicians that Abu Ayyub al-Masri and several associates were killed in a U.S. airstrike this week. If he’s dead, it’s not from a US airstrike in Iraq. Perhaps, he starved to death in the Egyptian jail cell he’s been ro! tting in for the past seven years…
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Rice, in Baghdad, Insists That Iraqis Are ‘Making Progress’
PHILIP SHENON
Wearing a helmet and a flak jacket and flanked by machine-gun-toting bodyguards to defend against insurgents, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice came here Thursday, insisting that there were new signs of progress in Iraq and that the Bush administration had never sugarcoated its news about the American occupation. “It is a quite critical time for the Iraqi government,” Ms. Rice said of the reasons for her brief unannounced visit to the Ira! qi capital. “What the American people see on their television screens is the struggle,” she said. “It is harder to show the political process that is going on at local levels, at provincial levels and indeed at the national level.” Iraqis, she said, are “making progress.” (…) Yet signs of progress were not much in evidence in the first hours of her visit. It began inauspiciously when the military transport plane that brought her to Baghdad was forced to circle the city for about 40 minutes because of what a State Department spokesman later said was either mortar fire or rockets at the airport…
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Divide and rule
Hassan Nafaa
Condoleezza Rice is on her third visit to the region since the onset of Israel’s assault against Lebanon when the US was not only Israel’s wholehearted supporter but an accomplice, shoring up the diplomatic front in the battle to shape a “new” Middle East more conducive to Washington’s imperialist ambitions. The US secretary of state may have a reputation for being the most moderate senior official in today’s White House but she was one of the fiercest supporters of the war. The backg! round to Rice’s current visit is very different from that prevailing during her previous two trips when Israel was still decimating southern Lebanon in an attempt to destroy Hizbullah and deliver a debilitating blow to what Washington perceives as obstructive forces in the region…
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Iraq: Palestinians Targeted With Death Threats
Human Rights Watch
Shi’a armed groups have threatened to kill Palestinian refugees living in Baghdad if they do not leave Iraq within 72 hours, Human Rights Watch said today. Human Rights Watch urged the Iraqi government and the Multi-National Forces to investigate these threats and provide greater security to Palestinians in Iraq. A new leaflet obtained by Human Rights Watch and bearing the name of the Al-Bayt Revenge Brigade Rapid Response Units states tha! t “there is no place for Palestinians in the Iraq of Ali, Hassan, and Hussain.” The names refer to three revered Shi’a imams; in contrast, virtually all Palestinians are Sunni Muslim. The leaflet also warns that “our swords can reach necks” and urges Palestinians to leave within 72 hours and “fight occupation in your own country,” referring to Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories…
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Palestinian child deaths in conflict with Israel already nearly double that of 2005 – UN
UN News Centre Home
Ninety-one Palestinian children have already been killed this year in the West Bank and Gaza, almost double the number for the whole of 2005, with youngsters suffering increasing levels of stress from violence and fear in the Israeli-Palestinians conflict, according to the latest United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) update. “They are confronted with regular military operations, shelling, house demolitio! ns, checkpoints on their way to schools,” UNICEF Child Protection Officer Anne Grandjean said. “As a result we find high prevalence of signs of stress such as anxiety, eating and sleeping disorders, and difficulties concentrating in school…
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DAILY WAR NEWS FOR THURSDAY, October 5, 2006
Today in Iraq
Condoleezza Rice flew into Baghdad on Thursday for a previously unannounced visit, Iraqi officials said. Rice has been on a tour of the Middle East, having already visited Israel, the Palestinian Territories, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. She was likely to hold meetings with Iraqi government officials, including Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. A military transport plane that flew Rice and her party into Baghdad Thursday had had its landing delayed by 35 minutes ! by “indirect fire” — either from mortar rounds or rockets — in the airport area, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters. For the second time in two days, four U.S. soldiers were killed in a single incident around Baghdad, this time in what appears to have been a substantial skirmish involving mortars or rockets and gunfire to the northwest. It took the death toll in four days of the month to 15 around Baghdad and 22 in total. The Iraqi police patrols found 30 bodies in different Baghdad neighborhoods during the past 24 hours, police said on Thursday…
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They Lied About Iraq’s WMDs; They’re Lying About Iran’s
Luciana Bohne
In the pre-dawn hours of Saturday, 30 September, the US Senate approved a bill, authorizing sanctions that target foreign countries continuing [completely legal] nuclear cooperation with Iran. The bill stipulates “not to bring into force an agreement for cooperation with the government of any country that is assisting the nuclear program of Iran or transferring advanced conventional weapons or missiles.” Unmentioned in the bill, the intended ta! rgets are Russia and China. The previous day, the bill was approved by the House of Representatives…
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Al Qaeda Tapes: Direct Link To Military Psyops And Donald Rumsfeld
Following the trail for five minutes leads to Pentagon
Steve Watson / Infowars
We can reveal that further investigation into the origin of Al Qaeda video and tape release leads straight back to US military intelligence and Donald Rumsfeld. The origin of the latest video, starring Mohammed Atta and flight 93 hijacker Ziad Jarrah, has been swept under the carpet by the mainstream media who bizarrely admit that the government has had the t! ape since late 2001 but still suggest it is a new release by Al Qaeda. Interesting also is the fact that in an NBC article, they admit that before receiving the “exclusive US analysis” of the London Sunday Times’ tape, they had filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the same tape of Atta earlier this year…
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Torture: An American Institution
Mickey Z.
A casual glance at the news these days might give one the impression that the Bush Administration invented torture last month. However, in the corporate media equivalent of a scoop, the Washington Post “broke” the story of U.S. torture of Arab and Afghan “detainees” nearly four years ago. A December 26, 2002 article, perfectly timed to get lost in the holiday shuffle, began like a bad spy novel: “Deep inside the forbidden zone at the U.S.-occupied Bagram air base in Afgh! anistan, around the corner from the detention center and beyond the segregated clandestine military units, sits a cluster of metal shipping containers protected by a triple layer of concertina wire. The containers hold the most valuable prizes in the war on terrorism-captured al Qaeda operatives and Taliban commanders.”…
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Building Up al-Masri Only to Shoot Him Down
Kurt Nimmo
It is said there is “confusion” in Baghdad over the announcement that an American airstrike has killed Abu Ayyub al-Masri, the new al-Zarqawi. “US military officials promptly denied the claim, but said that DNA tests were being carried out on the bodies of several militants caught in the bombing of a safe house near the volatile town of Haditha in western Iraq on Monday,” reports—or stenographs from a Pentagon hand-out—the Times Online. How exactly DNA tests ! are performed on the remains of shadowy, heretofore unknown terrorists is not explained, and nobody at the Times seems inclined to ask…
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Iraqi Resistance Report for events of Thursday, 5 October 2006
Translated and/or compiled by Muhammad Abu Nasr, member, editorial board, the Free Arab Voice
…In a dispatch posted at 2:45pm Makkah time Thursday afternoon, Mafkarat al-Islam reported that a short time earlier, Iraqi Resistance forces launched an organized simultaneous attack on all the American checkpoints in the city of ar-Ramadi, about 110km west of Baghdad, at 1:30pm local time Thursday afternoon. The correspondent for Mafkarat al-Islam reporte! d eyewitnesses as saying that in the course of the offensive four US checkpoints were totally burned down, killing the personnel manning them. The checkpoints attacked were located in al-Mal’ab, on al-Ma’arid Street, in the areas of as-Sufiyah and al-Mu ‘allimin, and on 20 Street…
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Commentary: Universal instincts
Azmi Bishara
Demonstrations by security forces in Gaza demanding back pay owed to them erupted into violence. On the surface this seems like a syndicate action gone sour. But beneath it lurks something more sinisterly political. Of course, civil servants want their pay, like other workers; especially now that it’s Ramadan and purchasing demands are up. And, civil servants, like other workers, are subject to the same economic blockade, which, however, was imposed for political purpo! ses. The division, here, is not a horizontal one between civil servants and other classes of workers, but a vertical one tearing through society on the basis of political affiliations. On one side are those who are the object of the blockade, because of their collective stance against the conditions of the Quartet. On the other are those who see the blockade as an attack against their political adversaries and, therefore, a form of support for their own positions…
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Transcript of Sgt. Ricky Clousing describing war crimes in Iraq
Charles Jenks, Traprock Peace Center
On September 16th, Sgt. Ricky Clousing spoke on his witnessing of US war crimes in Iraq and why he became a resister to this war. The transcript of 9/16 talk, with the Q and A session, is available at www.traprockpeace.org He is facing court martial on a charge of desertion. He spoke at Camp Democracy’s encampment at the National Mall in Washington,! DC. before an overflow audience that included activists from across the nation as well as many tourists.
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In Bill’s Fine Print, Millions to Celebrate Victory
THOM SHANKER, NYTimes
Even as the Bush administration urges Americans to stay the course in Iraq, Republicans in Congress have put down a quiet marker in the apparent hope that V-I Day might be only months away. Tucked away in fine print in the military spending bill for this past year was a lump sum of $20 million to pay for a celebration in the nation’s capital “for commemoration of success” in Iraq and Afghanistan. Not surprisingly, the money was not spent…!
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‘Lebanese working very hard to rebuild’
Firas Al-Atraqchi, Aljazeera.net
Israel completed its withdrawal from Lebanese territory this week but local and international relief workers say the army has left a trail of destruction and devastation in its wake. According to the Lebanese interior ministry, at least 1,180 people were killed during the conflict, a third of them children, while another 4,036 were injured. Around 15,000 homes were destroyed and 80 vital bridges are now unusable. Ray Jureidini is an associat! e professor of sociology and the acting director of the Forced Migration and Refugee Studies department at the American University in Cairo. Jureidini is part of a task force initiative on relief and recovery in Lebanon from where he recently returned. He says he saw a nation still traumatised by the 33-day conflict that ended on 15 August but that the Lebanese are slowly rebuilding and reviving their economy…
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Put down the champagne for a while
Xymphora
It is curious that the Republicans are in the middle of a sex and cover-up scandal (which seems to go further than cover-up and amounts to aiding and abetting the commission of a series of criminal acts) at the same time that the most damning evidence of Bush Administration foreknowledge – and negligent, or worse, ignoring of foreknowledge – of the September 11 attacks has come out. Rice and Hadley received a detailed warning from Tenet on July 10, 2001 concerning an i! mminent al Qaeda attack on targets which could include those within the United States (the first time this story came out, from Time, the warning was supposed to emphasize overseas attacks), and Rumsfeld and Ashcroft received the same briefing within a week…
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