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Handwritten Letter by Saddam Hussein in Protest Against the Court
Saddam Hussein, translated by “Roads to Iraq”
Peace upon the people of peace, upon the people who deserve it and feel it in their hearts. Peace our nation and our people who are trying honestly and with honor to resist the invasion forces and their followers, who took the evil side. Peace upon the people who followed the right path in the world, and God’s mercy and blessings. Having said that, many judges were in charged of so called “The trial of ! President Saddam Hussein and his comrades”, some real and some judges entrusted with the task of false judges (…) Although it is known that the court procedures lacked the minimum level of legitimacy and intent to offend, the great July revolution, its people, its leaders and their national noble objectives , so that orders issued by the evil invaders and their followers for the replacement of the judge Rauf Rizkar and the replacement of Judge Abdullah Al-Amri with an amateur lawyer. Defense team were silenced, witnesses were threaten, Arab and foreign lawyers forced to offer advice only, and later forcing them to leave the room and not attending the defense lawyers hearing, and that forced the Iraqis lawyers to leave the court in protest at the bad treatment and the lack of respect for justice, in addition to threats on their lives has been cited by and umber of them were killed by Iran’s intelligence villains…
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Basra Police officers and Shiite Ba’thists face death after a public rejection for Federalism
Iraqi League Correspondent in Basra
After Ammar al Hakeem last visit to Basra, trying to gain support for the division project and the wide opposition he has faced by the political blocks, Basra has witnessed after his departure a huge assasination campaign targeting the ex Ba’ath members. SCIRI and Badr forces have realized Basra people rejection for the federalism project, people have assaulted his convoy in Haiyaniah ! area by throwing him with stones, an IED detonation targeted his convoy in al Ebellah area, moreover, Sestani agents in Basra have opposed his project as well, all these incidents have been interpreted by SCIRI and the Badr forces, that who ever is standing behind that, are (Shiite) Ba’thists. Groups affiliated to Badr forces have return back to what they have been doing of killing the Shiite Ba’thists since non of the Sunni Ba’thists have stayed in Basra, they have either left escaping from assasination, or have already faced death…
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Nearly 21 Million Iraqis Not Yet Killed
Ion Zwitter, Avant News Editor
Washington, D.C., November 4, 2006 In a press release issued today by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s special Office of Looking on the Bright Side, the administration pointed out that despite continuing widespread and escalating violence in the chaotic region, nearly 21 million Iraqis have not yet been killed or wounded. This, while a decrease from the 21.5 million not yet killed or wounded highlighted in an earlier announcement, st! ill represents, according to a Rumsfeld spokesmen, “a very large percentage of the populace thus far not yet killed or wounded.” (…) Rumsfeld’s Office of Looking on the Bright Side release also pointed out that well over 100,000 U.S. soldiers have not yet been killed or wounded in the ongoing U.S. occupation of Iraq. With the recent planned increases in U.S. troop levels in Iraq, those positive numbers are likely to go even higher…
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Dispatch from the State of Delusion: exposing the myth of the American “mission” in Iraq
Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy
Bush will not only preside over a military defeat in Iraq, he has already ushered in a new era —the end of the “American Century”, the end of American ascension, the end of American empire. The new era is already characterized by increased nuclear proliferation and defiance, the decline of Democratic ideals and outright opposition to US interests all over the world. Much was made of the “d! e-stabilization” of Iraq. More should have been made of the consequences of our failure. More attention should have been paid to the good will that Bush has now pissed away —perhaps forever…
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Iraqi journalists stare death in the face
Firas Al-Atraqchi
…Dahr Jamail, an independent American journalist who spent eight months reporting from Iraq, believes the US military is mostly to blame for the killing of journalists. “It has been clear since the US invasion that the policy of the Pentagon has been to target non-embedded reporters. More journalists have died in Iraq than did during the entire Vietnam War, and even world war two. “It is so dangerous because not only must one be careful from the US mil! itary, but also the criminal element. One never knows if a criminal gang will decide to kidnap you and sell you to some militia or resistance group,” he told Aljazeera.net. But for Ali F, who reports from Baghdad and surrounding towns, it is not the US soldier he is worried about. “Now I am mostly worried about being killed or strangled by those who are dressed in ministry of interior uniforms or men in black who move freely because of their ties to the security forces.”…
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US troops kidnap a 15 year old girl and lie about her whereabouts to cause a dispute between two rival tribes
Iraqi League Correspondent in Salaadin Province
Three weeks ago the town of Yathrib in the province of Saladdin experienced a barrage of raids in which the people of the Qadisiya neighborhood were utterly humiliated. 167 individuals who were adults, adolescents, elders and even children were detained in the Al-bawasil Elementary school. They were left for 3 days and some for 4 days under no shelter withou! t food or drink and were prohibited from using the bathroom such that some of the elderly could no longer control their bowels. In addition, their eyes were blind folded and they were beaten until they lost coconsciousness. Other forms of torture were used that included taking these individuals out under the scorching heat of the sun. I have the honor of reporting that I was among these individuals…
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GI Special 4J8: “ It’s Just So Far We Can Go” – October 8, 2006
Thomas F. Barton
“American Troops Increasingly Ask Themselves If This Is Their Fight Anymore”
“We’ve Been Here For So Long And We’ve Done So Much, But It’s Just So Far We Can Go”
The U.S. Cavalry’s Crazy Horse, 3rd Platoon ventures out into Southern Baghdad, where the enemy is invisible, Iraqi allies untrustworthy, and where American troops increasingly ask themselves if this is their fight anymore.
And who is the enemy?
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Homo Moronus; Republican Man
MIKE WHITNEY
Charles Darwin never knew Denny Hastert. If he had, he probably have revised his theories in “The Origin of Species” or, perhaps, scrapped the project altogether. Evolution is a hoax. We are inextricably linked to a distant ancestor whose mental acuity has not increased in 5 million-years: Homo Moronus; Republican Man. The truth is that Hastert is to “evolution”, what Bush is to “intelligent design”; concrete proof that both theories are firmly planted in evidentiary quic! ksand. The Christo-fundamentalists will undoubtedly be enraged to discover that their elected officials can trace their lineage back to single-cell organisms who predictably respond to heat, light and the bribes of well-dressed lobbyists…
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Iran Tied to Closure of TV Station in Iraq
Arab Press Freedom Watch
A report by the Iraqi television channel al-Zora’a said that a newspaper reporter with ties to Iran was behind Alarabiya’s closure. Employees at the office of the Prime Minister’s Media Adviser cooperate closely with Iranian authorities. The Prime Minister’s Media Office closely monitors Media reports and instructs penalties against individual journalists and media organizations. Media freedom is a joke in Iraq as journalists are in danger day an! d night. 135 of them lost their lives since the war to remove Saddam in 2003 and hundreds have been injured, attacked and detained. Executive orders Number 165 and 166control the Iraqi media, however, the administration has hijacked the role of regulating the media instead of an independent media regulating body…
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Iraqi Resistance Report for events of Monday, 9 October 2006
Translated and/or compiled by Muhammad Abu Nasr, member, editorial board, the Free Arab Voice
In a dispatch posted at 9:25pm Makkah time Monday night, Mafkarat al-Islam reported that an Iraqi Resistance bomb exploded by a four-wheel drive vehicle on the main road linking Kubaysah with the city of al-Qa’im in western Iraq, near the Syrian border on Monday morning. The correspondent for Mafkarat al-Islam reported eyewitnesses coming from Kubaysah as sayin! g an Iraqi Resistance bomb exploded by the side of the Kubaysah – al-Qa’im Road (the “Strategic Road”) as an American armor-plated four-wheel drive vehicle carrying five US civilians, believed to be American intelligence officers, drove past…
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An Unknown City Erupts
Ali Al-Fadhily and Dahr Jamail
The little known city of Baquba is emerging as one of the hotbeds of resistance in Iraq, with clashes breaking out every day. The violence in this city 50km northeast of Baghdad is also now spreading elsewhere around Diyala province. “The new waves of terror are now forming a variety that we predicted long ago,” a political leader in the city told IPS. “The Iraqi people have complained to everyone, but naturally no one will do anything about it. We know who is! in charge and who is responsible and eventually who is to be damned. It is the government of the United States of America.”…
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Elections in the USA: Justice and Perversion and the Perversion of Justice
James Petras, www.dissidentvoice.org
In a month in which the US Congress voted to legalize torture, discard the US Constitution by abolishing habeas corpus and increase the military budget to prolong the daily slaughter of hundreds of Iraqis and Afghanis, the big controversy among the mass media and elected officials is the sexual overtures of a Republican Congressman to adolescent boys employed by Congress. Millions of fundamentalist Chri! stians, who blindly supported the Republican Congress’ deadly War on Terror are in revolt against their Party because of its tolerance toward a single pervert — overlooking the torture at Abu Ghraib, Israel’s massive bombing of Lebanon and the Bush Administration’s criminal abandonment of the hundreds of thousands of poor (mostly black) citizens in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina…
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Fallujah, the Guernica of Our Times, Part 1
Mac McKinney
…Guernica is memorialized in history as the first city to be destroyed by air assault. Pablo Picasso went on to immortalize this terrible event with his famous and disconcerting painting, simply entitled “Guernica.” Fast forward some 66 years, past decade upon decade of ongoing, world-wide wars and destruction, to April of 2003 and the Iraqi city of Fallujah, in the Sunni triangle of Iraq, situated some 43 miles west of Baghdad on the Euphrates River. An ! historical city dating back to Babylonian times, Fallujah is known as the “City of Mosques”, housing some 200 of Islamic houses of worship. It was also an important center of Jewish academies for several centuries. When Operation Iraqi Freedom, the American-dominated invasion of Iraq began in March, 2003, the city’s population was some 350,000…
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George Bush’s War of the Words
Tom Engelhardt
For Homer, those epithets attached to his heroes and gods were undoubtedly mnemonic devices — the fleet-footed Achilles, Poseidon, the Earth-shaker, the wily Odysseus, the ox-eyed Hera. But isn’t it strange how many similar, if somewhat less heroic, catch words and phrases have adhered to key officials of the Bush administration these last years. Here’s my own partial list: President George (”Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job”) Bush, Vice President Dick (”last th! roes”) Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald (”stuff happens”) Rumsfeld, then-National Security Advisor, now-Secretary of State Condoleezza (”mushroom cloud”) Rice, CIA Director George (”slam dunk”) Tenet, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul (”[Iraq] floats on a sea of oil”) Wolfowitz, Centcom Commander Gen. Tommy (”We don’t do body counts”) Franks, then-White House Counsel, now-Attorney General Alberto (”quaint”) Gonzales, withdrawn Supreme Court nominee and White House Counsel Harriet (”You are the best governor ever”) Miers, and most recently Dennis (”The buck stops here”) Hastert…
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WAR NEWS FOR MONDAY, OCTOBER 09, 2006
Today in Iraq
Police recovered 35 bullet-riddled bodies across the Iraqi capital Sunday. Some of the bodies showed signs of torture. The bodies could not be immediately identified. Gunmen killed Amer al-Hashemi, the brother of Iraq’s Sunni Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi in northern Baghdad on Monday. Police reported the discovery in Baghdad of the bullet-riddled body of Colonel Thamir Selman, a senior Interior Ministry official. Eleven soldiers were kidnapped when gunmen ove! rran a military checkpoint in Baghdad on Monday. The gunmen arrived at the Sadr City checkpoint in a minivan and a car at 7 am, said police lieutenant Thaer Mahmoud. They seized all the soldiers on duty and made off. In west Baghdad, two security guards at a municipal building were killed by unidentified gunmen. Gunmen shot dead police Colonel Faleh al-Obeidi in the religiously mixed city of Baquba. Monday, gunmen killed police Lt. Col. Salih al-Karkhi in the Diyala capital of Baqouba…
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Sample threat letters from Iraq
Zeyad, Healing Iraq
Threat letters and fliers are a common everyday experience in Iraq these days. Below are several samples from different areas of the country, including one that was posted on the door of the health centre I used to work at. Some of them contain shameless spelling and grammatical mistakes, and a few were even pointed out as obvious fakes. I cannot absolutely prove that these are authentic, but they were distributed in areas in which the threatening parties had no! qualms about carrying out their threats. The sample letters were collected from various Iraqi message boards…
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IRAQ: Military continues to violate the rights of civilians
IRIN
Raid Othman al-Dulaimi, a 36-year-old engineer, still vividly recalls his suffering on a night last winter when his five-month ordeal with the Iraqi army began. The army raided his house in Baghdad in late December 2005 following a roadside bomb attack nearby. “They accused me of having links to the attackers. They put all of us in the garden and beat me in front of my wife and children. They overturned all the furniture and stole my private compute! r, money and gold,” al-Dulaimi said, adding that he was taken to prison and beaten to elicit a confession. “After five months of insults and bad treatment they said, ‘We are sorry, you have nothing to do with the terrorists,’” he said…
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Four U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq in 24 hours
Reuters
U.S. soldier was killed when guerrillas attacked his patrol in eastern Baghdad on Monday, the U.S. military said. In another statement earlier, the military said three U.S. Marines were killed in action in Anbar province in western Iraq on Sunday. The largely desert province is the heartland of the Sunni Arab insurgency against Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s Shi’ite-led government and U.S forces. It is the deadliest area in Iraq for U.S. soldiers…
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Has Washington found its Iranian Chalabi?
Laura Rozen
This past summer, an op-ed appeared in the Washington Post under the byline of Richard Perle, the influential former Pentagon adviser who was a chief booster of Ahmed Chalabi in the run-up to the war in Iraq. As he had prior to the invasion of Iraq, Perle urged the Bush administration to shun appeasement and take an uncompromising stand toward Tehran; as with Iraq, he argued that a hard line was critical to help the population overthrow a brutal regime. And on! ce again, Perle had an exile leader he wanted America to know about: Amir Abbas Fakhravar, “an Iranian dissident student leader who escaped first from Tehran’s notorious Evin prison, then, after months in hiding, from Iran.”…
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Wars and propaganda machines
Rodrigue Tremblay, Online Journal Guest Writer
Propaganda machines are dangerous, even more so in a democracy than in a totalitarian regime, because their goal is to confuse, disinform, lie, raise fear and manipulate the opinions of the people. Indeed, those few hands that control the media have the power to turn lies into truth and truth into lies, without being contradicted, because they also have the power to silence any competing voices. This is the worse monopoly one can find, mu! ch worse than any economic monopoly. Indeed, when a small elite in power start using propaganda intensively, it makes a mockery of the democratic principle of self-government by the people. In fact, people begin to distrust the government because it has become a source of half-truths, lies and disinformation. Discouragement and apathy follow because people know that their views do not count and that the oligarchy in power will do whatever it wants, no matter what the supposedly ‘sovereign’ people thinks. It is only when the media are free and independent that people can hope to be honestly informed and be free from government manipulation…
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Hundreds of Iraqi police poisoned
Aljazeera.net
Hundreds of Iraqi policemen have been taken ill at a base in southern Iraq after the evening meal breaking their daily Ramadan fast. Officials said they were investigating whether the poisoning was intentional. An official with the environment ministry said 11 policemen had died. However, the governor of Wasit province – where the poisoning took place – denied any deaths, though he said some of the victims were in a critical condition…
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