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Playing God in Iraq
Richard Marsden, The Business of Emotions
But “nation-building” in Iraq is horribly real, and the characters behind it are devoid of all charm or, indeed, other redeeming qualities. They are also woefully ignorant of the nature of Iraq and the history of their own countries. Regarding the first, the U.S. and the U.K. are not founded on a type of voting system, they are founded on a type of property system—the private kind. It is that they are installing in Iraq. It is, in plain terms, theft. A! nd it is being practised on a massive scale in Iraq. Regarding the last, listen to these words of anthropologist Laurie-King Irani, published in Lebanon’s The Daily Star, September 15, 2003: Had the Bush administration consulted with anthropologists before occupying Iraq, it might have learned that democracy is not alien to the Arab-Islamic world; nor is the Arab version a replica of American democracy. Democracy in the Arab world is a collective, not an individualistic, concept. It is more a matter of duties than rights, more about obligations than freedoms. In Arabic, you spell democracy “d-i-g-n-i-t-y.” There was a form of democracy in Iraq prior to the invasion, even if Americans could not see it. It centred on tribes, not individuals. An understanding of dignity is key to understanding Saddam Hussein’s behaviour before and after the invasion. An understanding of dignity is key to understanding Iraqi’s feelings regarding their treatment by the occupying forces..! .
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Charnel House
MIKE WHITNEY
… There is no “government” under occupation, just foreign-military rule. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has no power and he governs nothing beyond the walls of America’s the Green Zone. The Bush administration has begun to criticize al-Maliki for not stopping the sectarian violence, but no one is paying attention. Al Maliki follows in the long progression of American stooges; al-Allawi, al-Jaafari, al Maliki; none of them have any bearing on events, nor will they have any part to pl! ay in the final outcome. No one is fooled by the actions or pronouncements of Washington’s puppets. It is a public relations scam that has outlived its usefulness. If we are serious about concluding the war in Iraq, we must deal directly with the leaders of the Iraqi resistance, many of whom were part of the former Ba’athist regime. There are rumors that talks are currently taking place in Amman, Jordan between representatives of the resistance and American officials, but there is no solid confirmation of this…
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Evidence: Militias are working with the Iraqi Police and Army
Roads to Iraq
Before you read this, I will tell you what happened Monday to my uncle: He was going to his work in the morning with his friend and a driver (he works for one of the ministries, I can’t say which one). Four cars blocked their car, and 16 gunmen stepped out asking my uncle and his friends to come with them, so the gun men started to kick him force him to rid with them but he kept resisting tell them if you want to kill me then do it here, ! at least my body can be found and identified. Then came two police cars, to his surprise the police were shaking hands with the gunmen asking them to hurry up because roads are getting very crowded with people going to their works. With my uncle keep reinstating to go with them and totally covered with blood they left him and his friends, saying there will a next time. If you want to understand what’s behind the story then, Islammemo obtained this document and I translated it to check by yourself how bad it is…
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The Jackal’s Feast Goes On
Chris Floyd
…In other words, as oft reported here, much of that money has simply disappeared – into corporate coffers, into copious baksheesh for the Bush-backed Iraqi government, into kickbacks for Congressional vultures, and doubtless into slush funds both for covert ops (including perhaps the Bushists’ deliberate fomenting of terrorism and arming of militias) and domestic politics. We are most likely seeing the fruits of some of this blood money wash up on American screens at this ! very moment, as the GOP’s last-ditch “Smear and Fear” campaign goes into hyperdrive…
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ToR-tuRe — all in favor, say ‘Aye’
The Truth Will Set You Free
Last week, the use of torture became a permanent fixture in America’s legal landscape – a necessary evil in a world forever changed by terrorism – or so our government and some mainstream media pimps would have US believe. But, HOW MANY people in the world agree that torturing suspected terrorists (really just glorified criminal defendants) is NECESSARY to protect against terrorism? WHO are these people? And WHY do they favor it? [In a BBC poll relea! sed Thursday October 19th,] nearly a third of respondents (some 27,000 people were questioned in 25 countries) consider the use of torture acceptable under certain circumstances. Although a clear majority, worldwide, OPPOSES even the occasional use of torture, there are significant groups willing to say they favour it. WHO are these significant groups??? Not surprisingly, israelis top the list of groups that support torturing others to protect themselves…
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Soldiers in Revolt: 125 active-duty troops call to end the U.S. occupation of Iraq
Christian Avard, RAW STORY
For the first time since the U.S. invasion of Iraq, active-duty members of the military are publicly appealing members of Congress to end the U.S. occupation, RAW STORY has learned. Under the Military Whistleblower Protection Act (DOD directive 7050.6), active-duty military, National Guard, and Reservists can send a protected communication to a member of Congress regarding any subject without reprisal. Ea! rlier this week, 65 military service members and National Guardsmen sent appeals for redress to members of Congress to urge an immediate withdrawal from Iraq. That total is now up to 346 service men and women, 125 of whom are on active duty…
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Collaborators of Catastrophe: Inside the Ministry of Truth
Manuel Valenzuela
The creators of American reality, those propagators of charades and mirages who dwell inside the hallways of the Ministry of Truth – otherwise known as the Corporate Media – continue their dance of deception and whitewash, festering in their offices of propaganda, directing the narratives and the epics hundreds of millions of Americans consider truth. Much like the disappearance of warmth giving way to the crispness of cold arrives with ! each annual changing of leaves, so the remarketing of American reality is altered by the changing faces of circumstance. Today, this change is the complete disaster that is the occupation of Iraq, an endeavor whose initial fruition could not have taken shape without the blitzkrieg marketed incessantly into every home and mind in America by the Department of Propaganda, the Ministry of Truth and its army of pseudo-journalists…
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Selling Satan: Iraqi War Dead And The Collateral Damage To America’s Soul
Phil Rockstroh
All human beings have a talent for the denial of the more unpalatable aspects of ourselves, but we Americans have turned denial into a form of collective genius. There is no need to burn books, if the public is too ignorant to know they exist — or too benumbed to resonate with their content. Regarding the death of well over half-a-million Iraqis, the majority of the citizenry of The Corporatists States of America have experi! enced a comparable degree of regret and remorse that their oligarchic overlords experience when topping-off the tanks of their corporate jets with fuel purchased with money plundered from their employee’s retirement accounts … Sans conscience above — sans conscience below. Dante posited Limbo (that quiet suburban community ringing Hell) was a place reserved for those who evinced indifference to the world around them. It would seem our corporate/consumer version of Damnation (which now includes Casual Fridays in Hell itself) requires prescriptions for anti-depressants, urine tests, and Reality Television competitions to enter its inner most circles…
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John Pilger: exposing the rotten heart of the empire
Socialist Worker
…”The notion that British squaddies are defending democracy in Afghanistan is absurd. ‘President’ Karzai dare not leave his bunker without a squad of US Special Forces guards. “The Taliban’s achievement in power was to ban the opium business. Flushed with CIA money, ‘our’ warlords restored it following the Taliban’s demise. John Reid neglected to mention this when he sent the British army off to put down the ‘drug barons’.”…
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Iraqi Resistance Report for events of Wednesday, 25 October 2006
Translated and/or compiled by Muhammad Abu Nasr, member, editorial board, the Free Arab Voice
In a dispatch posted at 9:50pm Makkah time Wednesday night, Mafkarat al-Islam reported that a short while earlier Iraqi Resistance fighters attacked a US checkpoint located in the al-Mal’ab in ar-Ramadi, about 110km west of Baghdad. The correspondent for Mafkarat al-Islam reported that more than 10 Resistance fighters armed with pipe rockets and medium mach! ine guns attacked the checkpoint inflicting dead and wounded on the Ameicans. Local sources told the correspondent that US swarms of US helicopters flew into the area as Marines on the ground surrounded the attack zone. Two American ambulances were seen racing to the stricken checkpoint…
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US Occupation of Iraq: A Reason to be Proud!
Larry Parker
…Death, suffering, poverty, disease, and conflict are going to plague the Iraqi people for many years to come. And yet those responsible don’t seem to be overly concerned about the destruction they’ve wrought. Is this possibly because their priorities, carved in stone some twenty or thirty years ago, have always been about control of the region’s resources and never about the welfare of it’s inhabitants…
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GI Special 4J26: Payback Time – October 26, 2006
Thomas F. Barton
More than 200 men and women from the United States armed services have joined a protest calling for the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, organisers say.
The soldiers said they did not think it was worth their while to be in Iraq and questioned the use of repeated tours of duty.
In a conference call with reporters, a sailor, a marine and a soldier who had served in the Iraq operation said American troops there have increasingly had difficulty seeing the purpose of lengthy and repeated tours of duty since the fall of Saddam Hussein.
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The Future of Man and the Neolib Malthusian Population Management Program
Kurt Nimmo
I am guilty of killing off the South African Cape vulture. I lead a “consumptive lifestyle that is unsustainable,” according to the WWF conservation group. “If everyone around the world lived as those in America, we would need five planets to support us,” declares WWF Director-General James Leape in China, the darling nation, indeed the template, of the Neoliberal Order. I’ll be honest. I didn’t know anything about the WWF, so I ! looked it up over the “consumptive” internet. At first, I thought WWF stood for the World Wrestling Federation, a common enough mistake for an American, even though I don’t watch much television, and not because it is consumptive, but rather because I don’t take kindly to brainwashing. As it turns out, the the World Wrestling Federation changed its name to the World Wrestling Entertainment because the real WWF, or the World Wide Fund, sued the wrestlers for unfair trade practices…
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The Empire’s Foot Soldiers Ape Its Master
No longer any confusion about who “the bad guys” are
Paul Joseph Watson/Prison Planet.com
It was Jesus Christ who told his disciples, “You will know them by their fruits,” and the fruits of the Neo- Cons in Iraq and Afghanistan have been the deliberate creation of chaotic, fear-ridden deadly hellholes. It comes as no surprise therefore that since the empire’s imperial foot soldiers were deployed in the name of “democracy,” their behavior has aped the dark inten! tions of their superiors. The BBC reports today, “Photos apparently showing German troops posing with a skull in Afghanistan have caused outrage in Germany.” “The tabloid newspaper Bild, which carried the photos, says they show German troops in Afghanistan in 2003.” “On one of the pictures, a soldier is seen holding the skull next to his exposed penis, on another – soldiers pose with the skull on their jeep.” This of course is only the first in a never-ending cycle of atrocities and abominations against humanity inflicted upon the people of Iraq and Afghanistan by the coalition of the killing…
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IRAQ: Hear Our Voices – “I will only leave this house in a coffin”
IRIN
…”They [militias] are monsters, they killed my two sons in front of my house and later shouted saying that we Palestinians are like pigs [because] we rely on what people can give us. This is not human; they [her sons] were the only good thing I had in my life and now they have gone leaving behind their seven children to their unemployed widows to look after. “I saw the head of my son being blown apart with bullets and in the eyes of those c! owards I could see just happiness and excitement from doing that. Justice should be done and we have to be protected. “We are human and every human being has the right to live. We have been warned to leave our house in a week but I think it will be my last day in life because I will only leave this house in a coffin.”…
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GI Special 4J25: The Slaughter Of The Firemen – October 25, 2006
Thomas F. Barton
Great Moments In U.S. Military History: The Slaughter Of The Falluja Firemen.
U.S. troops pulled over a fire truck and killed four Iraqi firefighters in a case of mistaken identity on Monday after a report that a fire truck had been hijacked in western Falluja, the military said.
The firefighters, who U.S. troops first believed were armed insurgents, were responding to a call.
Ishikawa and Kuroshima would understand: insert troops into a hell on earth and there’s no way to prevent atrocities. Yet the real fiends in their capital suites are never spattered with a single drop of blood.
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WAR NEWS FOR WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2006
Today in Iraq
A roadside bomb targeting a police patrol wounded two policemen in the Christian neighbourhood of Camp Sara of Baghdad. Iraqi special forces backed by U.S. air strikes killed five people and wounded at least six in a Shi’ite district of Baghdad in a raid the U.S. military said was targeted at a death squad commander. The overnight raid was launched in the sprawling Sadr City, a stronghold of the Mehdi Army militia loyal to firebrand Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-! Sadr. Fourteen bodies were found dumped or pulled from the Tigris River. Police in the al-Yarmouk district found four unidentified bodies of people who had been handcuffed, tortured and shot in the head. Six people were killed when a roadside bomb destroyed their vehicle in Balad Ruz, about 40 miles northeast of Baghdad. Other mortar and bomb attacks in the area wounded several people…
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General Peter Pace and His Dumb Bombs
Kurt Nimmo
First, General Peter Pace, current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Sec. Offense Donald Rumsfeld receives his marching orders from God, and now he declares the United States military “could defeat any enemy with overwhelming power,” never mind a few thousand moth-eaten “insurgents” with homemade bombs have brought Pace’s vaunted military to a stand still in Iraq. “But none of our potential enemies should miscalculate the capacity of this nation to genera! te overwhelming combat power, tomorrow, to defend our national interests,” or, in the case of Iraq, the combined interests of Israel and a brood of military contractors. It is said the neocons shape their own reality, apparently at the expense of the alternate reality the rest of the world experiences, and thus the stalemate in Iraq is considered a victory, or maybe “mission accomplished” in slow motion…
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Iraqi PM condemns US raid on Shia stronghold
The Guardian
The Iraqi prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, today denounced a US raid against a Shia militia position and denied that his government had agreed to a timetable to crack down on violence. Mr al-Maliki said he had not been consulted about the operation to snatch a militia commander from inside Sadr City and insisted, “It will not be repeated”. He also hit out at an announcement yesterday by the most senior US general in Iraq, General George Casey, and the US am! bassador Zalmay Khalizad, Stating that the Iraqi government had agreed to a timetable to curb violence in the country. The US military said Iraqi army special forces, backed by US advisers, carried out a raid to capture a “top illegal armed group commander, directing widespread death squad activity throughout eastern Baghdad”…
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Olmert Paving the Way for Avigdor Lieberman
A Rigid Ultra Nationalist Zionist
Hayam Noir Palestin
Be aware of Avigdor Lieberman- he is a rigid facist and zionist from Chisinau in then-Soviet Moldovia.He emigrated to Israel in 1978 – today the 48-year-old Lieberman heads a party that draws support mainly from immigrants from the former Soviet Union. Lieberman is known for his extremist views.He has served as a member of the rightwing Likud party until 1999, when he formed the extermist party Yisrael Beitenu (”! Our home is Israel”) and was elected as an MP to the Knesset for the first time…
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