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Iraq as a Living Hell
Dahr Jamail, TomDispatch
The situation in Iraq has reached such a point of degradation and danger that I’ve been unable to return to report — as I did from 2003 to 2005 — from the front lines of daily life. Instead, in these last months, I have found myself in a supportive role, facilitating the work of some of my former sources, who remain in their own war-torn land, to tell their hair-raising tales of the new Iraq. What I know from these emails is that the articles on Iraq you normally read in your local newspaper, even when, for instance, they cover the disintegration of the Iraqi health system or the collapse of the economy, are providing you, at best, but a glimpse of what daily life there is now like. After all, who knows better what’s happening than those who are living it? (…) I’ve long since abandoned asking myself the question: How much worse can it get in Iraq? My Iraqi friends and colleagues tell me that one of the more popular sayings in Baghdad nowadays is, “Today is better than tomorrow.”..
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The “Iraq Memorial” should go on the White House Lawn
Mike Whitney
Where will we put the Iraq Memorial? Eventually, there’ll be a memorial to the men and women who died in Iraq, so where do we put it? (…) I have an idea. Let’s tear down the rot-iron gates surrounding the White House. Let’s remove the cement abutments and the cyclone fencing. Let’s put up a 10 ft high crescent of black marble on the White House lawn skirting both sides of the presidential walkway. That way, we can be sure that any future president will be forced to pass by the stone monuments that bear the names of the men and women who lost their lives in Bush’s Folly (…) The war in Iraq is winding down and the nation needs to take stock of its losses. We need to remove our dead from the shadows and let everyone see the real price of arrogance. We have destroyed Iraq, killed our young people, and created a legacy of hatred towards America. We’ve been led into a moral swamp by demagogues and liars…
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Marauding militia butcher families as troops look on
Abdulhussein Ghazal
Residents from the Hurriya District in Baghdad say they were attacked by militias of the so-called Mahdi Army who killed several women and children and forced more than 200 families to flee. The attack took place in the presence of units from the new Iraqi army. The troops did not even interfere to save the victims, the residents said. Many residents went to the streets the second day protesting the massacre which like many others taking place in Iraq went unreported by international media. Hurriya, like many other areas in the capital, is a mixed district but the Mahdi militias of the radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr have the upper hand there. The remaining Sunni families were forced to leave following threats of receiving the same fate if they stayed…
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How low can you go? The Anatomy of a Zionist Smear Campaign PLUS: Gilad Atzmon – On Anti-Semitism
Followed by Gilad Atzmon – On Anti-Semitism
Mary Rizzo, peacepalestine
If you want to be able to hold your head up with dignity in public, if you want to win friends and influence people, all you need to do is point out the obvious, but with a new twist. Say, “prejudice and racism is wrong,” (we can all agree on that one) “but criticising Israel makes one prejudiced and racist, for the fact that it is the State of the Jewish people.” That accusation of being an anti-Semite is the fate that awaits anyone who dare speak out loud, and especially if one critically analyses the structure of Israel and the mechanisms it uses to maintain itself as the State of the Jewish people. Zionism means one thing: sustaining Jewish rule, dominance and control over the land that the Zionists themselves claim shall be populated exclusively (well, that’s the goal, ladies and gentlemen) by Jews…
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Iraqi Resistance Report for events of Monday,11 December 2006
Translated and/or compiled by Muhammad Abu Nasr, member, editorial board, the Free Arab Voice
…In a dispatch posted at 1:36pm Makkah time Monday afternoon, Mafkarat al-Islam reported that the province of Salah ad-Din on Monday declared a day of civil disobedience in all its departments to protest the continuing blockade of as-Siniyah, and the American massacre in al-Ishaqi, where 30 civilians were shot and bombed to death. The Samarra’ correspondent for Mafkarat al-Islam reported eyewitnesses as saying that the main Bayji oil refineries that supply a third of Iraq’s oil shut down on Monday in protest. Salah ad-Din University also closed its doors as did all puppet government departments. Public schools and institutes also shut down in denunciation of the continuous toll of civilian lives being taken by US occupation forces…
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Lucky You!
Layla Anwar
…Radhee paused for a minute or so, took a deep breath and said : “ By the way , I forgot to mention that Uncle Kamal died”. “How, when, who killed him, was he tortured, was he imprisoned, who found him, where, was he dumped ? A street, a prison, the morgue ?… I bombarbed him with questions. “No, no , he died a natural Death.” Natural Death means in today’s lingo: old age, an illness, lack of medication or medical care, that kind of stuff. I sighed with relief so did Radhee. “Praise to God, may he rest in Peace”, we both uttered at the same time.
And Radhee concluded by saying: “ He is lucky, now he can rest. What about us left behind, when will we find rest?” Yes Ladies and Gentlemen, the “living” or more aptly the “surviving” Iraqis envy the Dead. Some miles away cherish Life and hold on to it and some wish it’s clement ending. A crazy paradox ? I don’t know. All I know is from whichever way one looks at it- It’s lucky You…
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Elephants Not in the Room
Kim Petersen, www.dissidentvoice.org
…Palast does, briefly, manage to rip into the architects of the genocidal plunder of Iraq calling them “neo-con nuts.” Ouch! Of course, Palast dares not mention “Zio nuts.” Palast asserts, “But the Shias only shifted into mass killing mode in response to the murder spree by Sunni ‘insurgents.’” Is Palast shifting culpability for the genocide in Iraq to the victims? Palast’s omissions speak loudly. The “murder spree” is a US-UK murder spree encouraged by Zionists. [3] The Shia death squads were set up by the Americans. What does that make such Shia squads? It makes them collaborators of the occupiers. Collaborators are a legitimate target for the Iraqi resistance forces. Palast points to “Saudis” as financing Sunni “mayhem.” Who does Palast cite as an authority? The same organization that has been dissed by the Bush administration for providing faulty information on the danger that the Iraqi regime posed to the US (a risible proposition): US intelligence…
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Video
Homeless because they are Sunni
Reuters
Scores of Sunni families have marched through a mixed area of Baghdad after gunmen from a Shi’ite militia forced then from their homes. Police say Shi’ite militias stormed the religiously mixed Hurriya neighbourhood in western Baghdad on Saturday, killing two people and forcing dozens of Sunni families to flee. The evictions took place as the outgoing Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld visited U.S. troops in Baghdad…
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Bush – “I’m the master of low expectations”
Hussein Al-alak, The Iraq Solidarity Campaign
An strange democracy is taking form in Baghdad, with Iraqi politicians running back and forward to Washington, to seek the advice of President Bush as to whom is going to run, the alleged “democratically elected” Iraqi government. The former Iraqi opposition, who regularly accused Saddam Hussain of running a “one party state”, appear to be regularly falling out of favour with their US puppet masters, as President Bush seems to be upset by yet another Iraqi PM, Nouri al-Maliki and his “failure to quell raging violence”. According to the Associated Press on 11/12/2006, behind the scenes talks are taking place to oust Maliki and replace him with a “new alliance” led by senior Shiite or “Iranian insurgent” Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim…
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Video: Not Enough Cemetery to Go Around
Alive in Baghdad
The Abu Hanifa Mosque is a famous Sunni mosque in Adhamiya. After the invasion the mosque constructed a new cemetery originally for fighters in the war but it has since been expanded. Now the cemetery takes all manners of victims of Iraq sectarian violence and it has open to Shi’as as well. Although stories about Iraq accentuate sectarian violence and the possibility of a looming civil war, there are many accounts of Iraqi’s coming together in opposition to sectarianism. One story is about how the Abu Hanifa mosque helped survivors of the Kadhmiya bridge tragedy in 2005. Unfortunately this new cemetery can not hold all of the martyrs and others dying each day in Iraq, and they expect to build many more in the coming months…
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MEDIA ALERT: THE BBC BURIES THE TRUTH WITH THE DEAD IN IRAQ
MEDIA LENS
Last week, yet more innocent civilian lives were claimed by a US air attack in Iraq. How many times this tragedy has been repeated across that country is completely hidden from public view – a second, deeper tragedy. According to Iraqi police major Khedr Hussein, 32 people were killed in the attack at Ishaqi, 90 km north of Baghdad. The local mayor, Amer Alwan, said that US aircraft bombed two homes around 1 a.m last Friday morning. Of 25 bodies pulled from the rubble so far, eight were women and six were children. And yet the BBC news website chose to headline the US military’s claim that “al-Qaeda militants” had been killed in the attack…
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What does ‘Global Human Rights Day’ means to us?
Sabbah’s blog
International Human Rights Day is marked every year on 10 December. This year, it was a start of a new week after a week of rabid racist and anti-human rights rhetoric and work carried around the US by the usual suspects. The US media has had little coverage of human rights issues. Instead the vicious attacks on Jimmy Carter continue even though many of us consider his book far too leaning and accommodating to racist Zionism…
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Clearly it’s best to “cut and run”
Arthur Shaw, Axis of Logic
…”We can’t ‘cut and run’ … oh no, for God’s sake … because Iraq will drown in a bloodbath if we leave,” both the flagrant and closet varieties of reactionaries in the USA warn us. Between March 2003 and October 2006, over 650,000 Iraqis died as a result of the US aggression. This staggering Iraqi bloodbath is a consequence of US presence, not US absence. An unchallenged study released in October 2006 by John Hopkins University found that over 650,000 Iraqis … pro-imperialist and anti-imperialist and military personnel and civilians … have perished as a result of the US lies about WMDs and about Iraq’s complicity in 9/11, US invasion of Iraq, and the US occupation of Iraq, between 2003 and 2006. The George W. Bush, the leader of the imperialist regime in Washington, said that the John Hopkins study “wasn’t creditable,” … as if he … of all persons … was a suitable person to talk about credibility. In Dec. 2005, ten months before the John Hopkins study, this George W. Bush said that only 30,000 Iraqis had died as a result of the war between March 2003 and December 2005. After Bush told this big lie about only 30,000 Iraqis dying as result of his lies, his aggression, and his occupation, the US capitalist media repeated Bush’s lie about 30,000 dead Iraqis at least a thousand times, to brainwashed the people of the USA that the USA had not already wreaked a bloodbath in the neighborhood of 650,000 casualties on Iraq. It’s too late to prevent the monstrous bloodbath th! at US im perialism has already produced in Iraq…
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Bethlehem mayor appeals the world not to forget the Birthplace of Jesus Christ
Sabbah’s blog
Bethlehem Mayor, Victor Batarsa, said on Monday that Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus Christ, is facing the most difficult economic, political and touristic conditions as a result of the continuous and illegal practices of the Israeli occupation against the city and the surrounding area. During a press conference on Monday, Batarsa stated that the Wall forced dozens of families to leave their houses, and isolated the residents from their orchards, which led to the immigration of hundreds of families. Batarsa stated that the Wall isolated at least 700 Dunams of farmlands and orchards from their owners in Bethlehem, in addition to the Israeli annexation of 15% of the lands especially in the northern part of the city…
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Former detainees argue right to sue Rumsfeld over torture
Kate Randall
Nine former detainees are seeking the right to sue outgoing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and three other senior US Army leaders for torture suffered at US-run prisons in Afghanistan and Iraq. The suit was argued Friday before Chief Judge Thomas F. Hogan of the US District Court for the District of Columbia. The case marks the first time a federal court has considered whether top US officials can be held legally accountable for torture and abuse of detainees held in military custody. It has far-reaching implications for the thousands of prisoners held and tortured in the name of the “war on terror” by the US at facilities in Guantánamo, Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries worldwide…
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Admission of Loss of War, but What Else?
m taqi, Iraqi League
The new US Defence minister, Mr Robert Gates, admitted recently that his country ‘is not winning in Iraq’; this was in view of the increasing price being paid by the US in human and material costs. Some 3,000 US soldiers have been killed so far, that is approximately 300 more than the number of lives lost in the tragic events of September 11th and more than 20,000 injured; and the running financial cost of the Iraq occupation to the US taxpayer is averaging at $9billion per month on top of an initial outlay of up to $13 billion for the deployment of troops to the region, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office. Strangely, Mr Gates’ statement did not give any indication of any withdrawal from Iraq in order to bring the human and financial costs to control, if not to a halt, as appears to be the recommendation by the recent Iraq Study Group of which he was a member…
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Failed Sectarian Government
AlQuds Editorial
The daily massacre of the innocent has continued in Iraq and estimates of the number of daily killings are becoming difficult to make. The difficulty is because the huge number of dead bodies which are being discovered across the country as whole. Also, the refusal of the hospitals and the morgues to give statistics. Reports confirm that instructions have been issued by the ruling regime to all hospitals and morgues barring their staff from talking to the media, as a clear attempt by the ruling criminal regime to hide its despicable crimes against the people of Iraq, and the rest of humanity. Yesterday, AlHoreyah District which lies at the heart of the capital Baghdad witnessed yet another hideous crime against the innocent people of Iraq. 50 Iraqis were killed in broad daylight. Eyewitnesses said that this massacre took place yards from a policing station belonging to the security services of the current ruling regime in Iraq, and under the gazing eyes of the occupation’s forces whose high-tech flying machines continue to roam the skies of Iraq…
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WAR NEWS FOR MONDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2006
Today in Iraq
An improvised explosive device detonated near a Multi-National Division – Baghdad patrol, killing three Soldiers in the northern part of the Iraqi capital Dec. 10. As the Soldiers conducted a late night combat patrol, the roadside bomb detonated killing three Soldiers and wounding two others. Gunmen kidnapped four bank employees outside their bank in central Baghdad on Monday, an Interior Ministry source said. “Gunmen wearing Iraqi army uniforms attacked the four employees in their armored minibus outside the Warkaa Bank in Sa’adoun Street, kidnapping them and took a large amount of money,” the source told Xinhua on condition of anonymity. The attack took place while the employees were transforming the money from their bank, he said…
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The South Continues to “Make” Race: Will the Supreme Court Follow?
Walter C. Uhler
A few years ago, in exasperation over pre-invasion polls indicating that a large majority of Americans erroneously believed that Saddam Hussein was involved in al Qaeda’s terrorist attacks on 9/11, I was forced to return to Walter Lippmann’s classics about Public Opinion and The Phantom Public, along with other books explaining why Americans were so highly susceptible to political manipulation. Ultimately, that reading led to the article, “Democracy or dominion?” written for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists…
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Roadside bomb kills 3 U.S. soldiers, wounds 2 in Baghdad
USA Today
Car bombs and mortar fire killed at least 16 people in Baghdad today while gunmen stole $1 million in a daring daytime robbery of a bank truck. In addition, the U.S. command reported today that three American soldiers were killed by a roadside bomb while on patrol in northern Baghdad late Sunday. The three U.S. deaths raised to 46 the number of American troops who have died this month. At least 2,934 members of the U.S. military have died since the war started in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count…
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US Zionist Media and International Human Rights Day
Mazin Qumsiyeh
Today is International human rights day. It is a start of a new week after a week of rabid racist and anti-human rights rhetoric and work carried around the US by the usual suspects (joined by a few others who finally outed themselves as racists). The US media has had little coverage of human rights issues. Instead the vicious attacks on Jimmy Carter continue even though many of us consider his book far too leaning and accommodating to racist Zionism (see below). Behind the scenes and with no debate allowed, a a bill passed in Congress to apply draconian sanctions on Palestinians, collective punishment, until they “elect” (I put quotes because people under occupation do not have full freedom to engage in modalities of elections as International and Human Rights laws require) more acceptable leaders who will agree to Israeli and US demands of surrender…
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