|
Translation of Saddam Hussein Letter
Saddam Hussein, Translated by “Roads to Iraq”
…Here I am addressing you today in this holy month saying: Resisting the invaders is the right and duty, the same goes to the people who collaborated with western or the eastern enemy. But I ask you, brothers and comrades under different titles and names in the brave Iraqi resistance and the people of proud Iraq to consider truth and justice in your Jihad, and don’t let overreacting mislead you. I ask you to keep the door of forg! iveness rather than tolerance with the one who lost the true path, if they show some hope that they can be right guided, and remembers you have the duty to save him from himself and show him the right path. Keep the door of forgiveness open to everyone until the instant precedes the liberation which is coming soon in God allow it. Remember and don’t forget that your goal is to liberate your country from the invaders and its collaborators and striking the enemy is easier to forgive it even if they chose to retreat, whether internal or external enemy. You recall that after every war there is peace, after each difference there is unity, after separation there is reunion, and after all hatred God will return it as familiarity (…) Brothers, my heart and tongue does not allow me to speak with you and addresses by your colors and titles, which made by the foreigners, Iraq was never been a symbol of separation, we all remember it in its beautiful colors which represent the situat! ion in one great Iraq Arabs, Kurds and from every religion, se! ct or mi nority, we were proud that we are one nation. Dear brothers, you have been oppressed by the invaders, their follower and their associates, so don’t oppress anybody, because you will loss God’s right, and make it easy for the opportunists to distort your struggle, and this is a big loss if its happened, and if you win then remember it is God’s victory and you are his soldiers…
Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.org.uk/?p=27531
Genocide in Iraq
The Numbers Tell the Horrific Story of a Lying Government and Complicit Corporate Media
Kim Petersen, www.dissidentvoice.org
…There is an ongoing genocide in Iraq. What else can over 600,000 killings be deemed but genocide? A price “worth it”? George W. Bush, who some consider the elected president of the United States, labeled the killings in Darfur as genocide over a year ago. But, in totality and proportionally, the number of deaths in Sudan pale in comparison to the number of de! aths in Iraq. Sudan with a population of 41,236,378 (July 2006, CIA Factbook estimate) is purported by some sources to have incurred 200,000 deaths from “fighting, famine and disease.” Using the figure cited in the latest Lancet to-be-published study, Iraq with a population of 26,783,383 (July 2006, CIA Factbook estimate) has a far greater extraordinary fatality rate covering approximately the same period of time…
Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.org.uk/?p=27526
The End of Press Freedom in Iraq?
Juan Cole, Informed Comment
Al-Zaman, the Times of Baghdad, reports [Ar.] that press freedom may soon be a thing of the past in Iraq. The Iraqi parliament on Monday passed a resolution calling on the president of Iraq, Jalal Talabani, to intervene to close down the offices of the al-Sharqiyah television channel in Iraq, and to close down a newspaper, al-Zaman itself! Both are owned by a media group headed by Saad al-Bazzaz, and they have a mild secular, Arab nationalist tone. It ! is not a point of view welcome to the Shiite fundamentalists who dominate the Iraqi parliament. The parliamentarians were upset about the negative coverage in the two news outlets of the vote last Wednesday by a bare majority to create the rules for the establishment of provincial confederacies. The vote was rammed through by a simple majority once a bare quorum had been established, despite the boycott of the vote by several major political blocs, including those of the Sunni Arabs…
Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.org.uk/?p=27525
Iraqi Resistance Report for events of Monday, 16 October 2006.
Translated and/or compiled by Muhammad Abu Nasr, member, editorial board, the Free Arab Voice
…In a dispatch posted at 1:58am GMT time Monday morning, Quds Press reported that US warplanes struck a home in the town of al-Qa’im near the Syrian border, killing all five members of the family that lived there. The correspondent for Quds Press reported a medical source in al-Qa’im Hospital as saying that his facility had received the bodies of five membe! rs of a family – a man, his wife and their three children – after their house was attacked by an American warplane. In a dispatch posted at 11pm Makkah time Monday night, Mafkarat al-Islam reported that the owner of the house was named Ahmad ‘Ali Fayhan al-’Ani…
Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.org.uk/?p=27524
Email
Treasure of Baghdad
Kidnappings, torture and death! What else does an Iraqi see or hear everyday? Even outside Iraq, Iraqis are haunted by reading what is going on there. One of the means that makes me connected to my country is the internet. Yesterday, a friend of mine emailed me and told me about the kidnapping of one of his friends. The kidnapped young man is a reporter and works for an Iraqi media news agency. Here is what happened in my friends own words: I kept the names of the reporters and the news ! agency anonymous for their own protection…
Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.org.uk/?p=27523
Counting the Dead: IBC attempt to undermine Lancet report.
Lenin’s Tomb
I had anticipated that the team behind Iraq Body Count would react to the latest survey on Iraqi mortalities published in the Lancet by trying to minimise their import and undermine their reliability. I was not wrong. The reason is fairly simple: they’re defending their turf. They have been engaged in this operation ever since Media Lens asked them what they thought of the fact that mainstream media outlets were using their figures as reliabl! e maximum estimates of the dead, and why they didn’t challenge this evident untruth even though they acknowledged on their site that it was indeed an untruth. Their place in the media spotlight is threatened, and such is the only occasion under which they have put up any kind of a fight, even going so far during the spat with Media Lens to compare their opponents to terrorists on BBC 2…
Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.org.uk/?p=27521
THE METTLE OF A UN SECRETARY-GENERAL
Stephen Lendman
Annan’s tenure is a shameless and dismal record of failure: — He never condemned or acted to end the devastating economic sanctions against the Iraqi people that killed up to 1.5 million defenseless men, women and children. — He never used his high-profile job to denounce the US criminal war waged there since March, 2003, based on lies and now known to have likely killed another 655,000 or more of them. — He failed to speak out forcefully against or do anyth! ing to prevent that war or the equally brutal and unjustifiable one waged against Afghanistan. — He’s been appallingly silent in the run-up to a potential Middle East apocalypse if the US and/or Israel go ahead with their plans to attack Iran and use nuclear weapons to do it. — He never used his sworn power and influence to uphold the oath he took to work for peace and protest Israel’s genocidal wars on Palestine and Lebanon against defenseless civilians there when the prestige of his office alone might have been enough to stop or at least mitigate them…
Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.org.uk/?p=27522
Black Op Mujahideen Shura Council Declares Islamic State in Iraq
Kurt Nimmo
Iraqi speaker Mahmoud al-Mashhadani is on to something. “Everyone who believes statements made by [the Mujahideen Shura Council] know nothing. All the followers of this organization are fools. It is obvious that the purpose of the council is to stir up hatred between the Sunnis and the Shiites.” The precisely timed statement was devised, with western intelligence connivance, not only to “stir up hatred between the Sunnis and the Shiites,”! but break the country into three pieces based on ethnic and religious affiliation, a plan formulated in Israel, adopted by the neocons, and approved by the bankster global elite…
Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.org.uk/?p=27519
New York Times and CBS News Poll: Most Americans Believe Bushcons Hiding Nine Eleven Crimes
Kurt Nimmo
In most cases, you can’t trust polls far as you can throw them, as they are routinely used to foist propaganda and nonsense upon the unwitting, or rather the intellectually lazy and incurious. However, there is absolutely no propaganda value for the criminal neocons when a large number of people believe “the Bush administration is hiding something” in regard to the attacks of nine eleven. Of course, it does not ! take a rocket scientist to figure this out, even though we now have Fox News pundits calling for the FBI to tail nine eleven researchers. If the overt fascist tactics of Bill “phone sex” O’Reilly, the moral derelict and psychopathic bully, demonstrate anything, it is that the neocons are petrified of nine eleven truth, now emerging from the shadows…
Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.org.uk/?p=27518
Chief Editor of Aliraqnews arrested this morning
Roads to Iraq
Chief Editor of Germany based Aliraqnews website “Aliraqnews” was arrested this morning with other two employees after German police raided their office in Frankfurt. The reason was: Accusations came from US embassy in Baghdad that the website support terrorism. This evening the website updated their statement saying that Dhia Al-Quaz was released after 8 hours in custody. He signed an order that he will not allow people in comments to publish resista! nce support materials (Audio, Video…etc) on their website…
Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.org.uk/?p=27517
WAR NEWS FOR MONDAY, OCTOBER 16, 2006
Today in Iraq
…The bullet-riddled bodies of 11 men were found dumped in the capital overnight, two of them found in a trash pit in Sadr City, the sprawling Shiite slum of about 2 million people. A total of 46 bodies, with gunshot wounds and bearing signs of torture, were found in Baghdad since Saturday night. Three roadside bombs exploded, killing three civilians and wounding seven other people, including a policeman, near a bank in central Baghdad. Gunmen killed Farouq Att! a, an air force brigadier, and wounded two of his companions on Sunday in northern Waziriya district of Baghdad. The death toll in a surge of sectarian killings in Balad swelled to at least 91 on Monday…
Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.org.uk/?p=27516
This is ethnic cleansing
Born at the Crest of the Empire
As the death toll passes 100 around Balad, I want to point out again that Sadr’s militia was called in by local politicians and leaders specifically to do this: Sunni Muslims were fleeing across the Tigris River on Monday, trying to escape a four-day rampage of sectarian fighting in their Shiite-dominated home city north of Baghdad. At least 91 people have died — all but 17 of them Sunnis. Sunnis, a minority in the city of Balad, said militiamen had be! en going door to door, giving them two hours to clear out of their homes, and one police officer said the bodies of the city’s Sunni minority lay unclaimed in the streets. The government and its police and armed forces appeared unable or unwilling to stop the bloodshed in Balad…
Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.org.uk/?p=27515
Seven US troops killed in Iraq
AFP
Seven more US troops have been killed in action in Iraq, bringing the number of American troops to have died this month to 57. A statement from the US-led coalition in Iraq said that two marines from Regimental Combat Team 5, which is based in Fallujah in western Iraq, died on Sunday following unspecified “enemy action”. Another statement said that an army soldier “was killed at approximately 10:45 pm (1945 GMT) Sunday when the vehicle he was riding in was struck by an improvise! d explosive device north of Baghdad.” And two more soldiers were killed and two others wounded Sunday “as a result of enemy action while conducting operations in Kirkuk province”, it said. Another two soldiers from the the same Task Force Lightning died in the central Salaheddin province of wounds sustained in fighting…
Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.org.uk/?p=27514
Death Toll Surges in Iraq Killings
CHRISTOPHER BODEEN, AP
…A police officer in the nearby Sunni-dominated town of Duluiyah said members of the Mahdi Army militia loyal to anti-U.S. cleric Muqtada al-Sadr had moved into the area and were killing Sunni men and boys. Local police were aiding the militias, said the officer, repeating a common claim made against the Shiite-dominated security forces. Balad is a predominantly Shiite city, ringed by Sunni-dominated villages, towns and farmland. Bodies of victims of Bal! ad’s Sunni minority lay in the streets, while elderly people and women were being forced to leave the city, said the officer, who spoke on condition on anonymity for fear of reprisals. Scores of terrified Sunnis had fled to Duluiyah and other neighboring towns, the policeman said. Ahmed Ali, a 32-year-old Sunni truck driver who was trying to reach his wife’s family in Balad, said Sunni families in neighboring towns have armed themselves to fight-off militia raids. He said he’d been told his in-laws were killed on Friday. “Militiamen gave them just two hours to leave the house. But after half an hour, they broke into the house and killed four of them,” Ali said. An army officer at provincial headquarters said authorities have counted 74 Sunnis killed since Friday. The latest deaths came when Sunni houses were attacked with mortars late Sunday, killing five people, including a child, and injuring five others, said the officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wa! sn’t authorized to talk to media…
Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.org.uk/?p=27513
Why is the New York Times silent on massive Iraq death toll? A question for Bill Keller
World Socialist Web Site
The corporate-controlled American media is deliberately suppressing the results of a survey that demonstrates that the US invasion and occupation of Iraq has caused more than 600,000 deaths in the past three years—a figure that in and of itself refutes all the claims by the Bush administration that it carried out the invasion of Iraq in order to foster democracy in the Middle East. What kind ! of “freedom” and “human rights” can be the consequence of such a slaughter? The major American media organizations—including the New York Times—published only brief reports on the study October 11. Taking their cue from President Bush, who declared the survey’s methodology faulty without offering any proof, the Times and other leading media outlets have dropped the subject. There have been no editorials in the Times, the Washington Post, or other major newspapers, nor any demands for a more serious response from the Bush administration…
Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.org.uk/?p=27512
A beginner’s guide to creating a ‘crisis’
William Bowles , I’n’I
Poor old North Korea, the latest bogeyman, its leader variously described as a tyrant, psychopath etc, etc. is once more the focus of Western ire. Now in all likelyhood the reason is because things ain’t going too well in Iraq or Afghanistan and the Iranians have told the West to shove it, so isn’t it real convenient to have North Korea, waiting in the wings as it were, to frighten the kids with. Now whether you’re keen on the kind of system North K! orea (DPRK) has or not, an examination of history shows that it has threatened no one. Instead it has been blasted back into the proverbial stone age, blockaded, starved and demonised into its current predicament, and all because it refused to bow to the demands of the US that it abandon its autonomy and independence and open up its economy to the ravages of US capitalism…
Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.org.uk/?p=27510
Britain: Court finds ITN journalist Terry Lloyd murdered by US forces
Liz Smith,WSWS
An Oxfordshire coroner’s court ruled Friday, October 13 that the Independent Television News (ITN) journalist Terry Lloyd was unlawfully killed by US forces in southern Iraq in March 2003. At the end of a six-day inquest, Assistant Deputy Coroner Andrew Walker told the court, “Having carefully taken into account all the evidence I am satisfied so that I am sure that had this killing taken place under English law it would have con! stituted an unlawful homicide… I shall write to the attorney general [Britain’s highest judge] and the Director of Public Prosecutions with a view to considering the appropriate steps to bring the persons involved in the incident to justice.” Walker stressed, “I have no doubt that Mr. Lloyd was killed by a tracer bullet fired from an American gun.”…
Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.org.uk/?p=27509
Iraqi Resistance Report for events of Sunday, 15 October 2006.
Translated and/or compiled by Muhammad Abu Nasr, member, editorial board, the Free Arab Voice
…In a dispatch posted at 11am Makkah time Sunday morning, Mafkarat al-Islam reported that US occupation forces released Shaykh Turki Hajim al-’Ubaydi after having arrested him together with five members of his family in the village of ash-Shamsiyah south of Kirkuk in the Tuz Khurmatu area at dawn on Tuesday, 10 October. The correspondent for Mafkarat al-Isl! am reported eyewitnesses who are close to the tribal leader as saying that the Shaykh was released on Saturday. The witnesses said that the Americans abducted Shaykh al-’Ubaydi and his relatives after he made remarks calling for the return of Iraqi President Saddam Husayn to office…
Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.org.uk/?p=27508
9 Paradoxes of a Lost War
Tom Engelhardt & Michael Klare
Here’s how the President described the enemy in Iraq at his press conference last week. “The violence is being caused by a combination of terrorists, elements of former regime criminals, and sectarian militias.” “Elements of former regime criminals,” aka “bitter-enders,” aka “Saddamists.” The “sectarian militias” may have been a relatively recent add-on, but this is essentially the same list, the same sort of terminology the President has been using for ye! ars. In the last two weeks, however, rumblings of discontent, the urge for a change of course (or at least a mid-course correction) in Iraq have been persistently bubbling to the surface of already roiling Washington…
Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.org.uk/?p=27507
Gaza as Laboratory
The Great Experiment
URI AVNERY
IS IT possible to force a whole people to submit to foreign occupation by starving it? That is, certainly, an interesting question. So interesting, indeed, that the governments of Israel and the United States, in close cooperation with Europe, are now engaged in a rigorous scientific experiment in order to obtain a definitive answer. The laboratory for the experiment is the Gaza Strip, and the guinea pigs are the million and a quarter Palestinians livi! ng there. In order to meet the required scientific standards, it was necessary first of all to prepare the laboratory…
Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.org.uk/?p=27506
Butchers of Bushland: Is the price worth it?
Luciana Bohne, Online Journal Associate Editor
…Bush’s unprovoked attack on Iraq was a premeditated and documentable conspiracy to subvert the peace — a crime for which the Nazi elites were hanged. The war crimes Nuremberg Tribunal, Protocol, and Principles would have no qualms calling the invasion of Iraq “the supreme crime,” a crime from which all other war crimes have derived, including genocide. The war against Iraq was, as far as international law is concerned,! the mother of all crimes. It violated the Constitution two, three times over, starting with violating the UN Charter, which is the “supreme law of [our] land,” according to the Constitution, and encompasses the principles of the Nuremberg Judgment. The occupation violated the Geneva Conventions against mistreatment of prisoners. It violated the Geneva and Hague Conventions on the occupier’s obligations 1) by failing to provide Iraqis with security and basic services, while at the same time disbanding the Iraqi army, 2) by failing to safeguard the sites of their national patrimony (National Library, museums, etc), 3) by attempting to sell off Iraqi assets, banks, services to foreign bidders 4) by altering Iraq’s tax laws without representation (Bremer’s “Orders”). Now comes evidence of national dying on a genocidal scale from the Lancet study…
Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.org.uk/?p=27511 |