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To a voiceless Iraqi Sister.
Layla Anwar
My Dear Sister , I really don’t know how to start this . I am short of words. Seems like all the idioms of the English language will never convey to you what I feel. I will keep it simple. I believe in simplicity. A holocaust survivor from the Abu Ghraib chambers related your story. I had heard it before . But I can never hear enough of it . I am with you in this cell . I am watching it all as it happens. Your cries and screams went unanswered . Your cell mates could do nothing, they were castrated whilst you were being raped by the Americans.
They heard you shout :” Help me my Iraqi brothers, help me “ and they only had their prayers to offer you. Don’t be angry at them , they were “detainees “ like yourself…
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THE RACE FOR IRAQ’S RESOURCES
Will Iraq’s Oil Blessing Become a Curse?
Joshua Gallu, SPIEGEL ONLINE
The Iraqi government is considering a new oil law that could give private oil companies greater control over its vast reserves. In light of rampant violence and shaky democratic institutions, many fear the law is being pushed through hastily by special interests behind closed doors. Oil. The world economy’s thick elixir yields politics as murky and combustible as the crude itself. And no wonder. It brings together some awkward bedfellows: It’s where multinationals meet villagers, where executives meet environmentalists, where vast wealth meets deep poverty, where East meets West (…) The Iraqi government is working on a new hydrocarbons law that will set the course for the country’s oil sector and determine where its vast revenues will flow. The consequences for such a law in such a state are huge. Not only could it determine the future shape of the Iraqi federation — as regional governments battle with Baghdad’s central authority over rights to the riches — but it could put much of Iraqi oil into the hands of foreign oil companies…
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Pre-empting Arab Mediation In Palestinian Divide
Nicola Nasser
The U.S administration and Israel are accelerating their coordinated meddling in the internal Palestinian divide between the Fatah-led presidency and the Hamas-led government to pre-empt a series of Arab mediation efforts, the latest of which is a UAE-Syrian try according to a member of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). The PLO official, who preferred to remain anonymous, said that President Mahmoud Abbas authorized the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to negotiate with Syria on behalf of Hamas, whose politburo chairman, Khaled Misha’al, is based in Damascus, a draft for forming a Palestinian national unity government on the basis of the national consensus document (the prisoners’ document), recognizing the PLO by Hamas, and respecting the accords signed by the PLO with Israel…
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Iraq’s Palestinians threatened once more
Ned Parker, TimesOnline
Thamer Melham, a Palestinian living in eastern Baghdad, called me Friday night. His 22- apartment complex has been under siege by the Shia Mahdi Army. The Palestinians in Baghdad, who are Sunni, have been targeted regularly by Shia militants since the 2003 fall of Saddam Hussein. The Times wrote about his community’s plight in Friday’s paper. Tonight, Thamer called me because the situation has only gotten worse. A Mahdi Army member came to the apartment complex this morning and told the Palestinians there they wanted 100 apartments in the complex. “It is better to be detained by the Americans than to be in Baladiyat without any protection,” Thamer said. In panic, Palestinians canceled their Friday prayer service at the local mosque, fearing an attack…
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Military deaths in Iraq exceed 9/11 toll
LARRY McSHANE, Associated Press Writer
Nearly four years after the war in Iraq began, the number of Americans troops killed there now exceeds the grim toll of victims from the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The U.S. military death toll in Iraq has reached 2,974, one more than the number of deaths in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States, according to an Associated Press count on Tuesday. The U.S. military announced the deaths of two soldiers in a bomb explosion southwest of Baghdad on Monday. The military was withholding the soldiers’ names until relatives could be notified…
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Hundreds Disappear Into the Black Hole of the Kurdish Prison System in Iraq
C. J. CHIVERS, NYTimes
The inmates began their strike with an angry call. “Allahu akbar!” they shouted, 120 voices joining in a cadence punctuated by whoops. They thrust their arms between the metal bars and ripped away the curtains and plastic sheets covering the windows facing the prison courtyard. Their squinting faces were exposed to light. Their Kurdish guards gathered, ready to control a prison break. There was no break. The inmates were able only to shove their bunks against the doors and barricade themselves in their cells. They settled into a day of issuing complaints. They were not allowed the Koran, they said. Their rations were meager and often moldy. Sometimes the guards beat them, they said, and several inmates had disappeared. The entire inmate population had either been denied trials or had been held beyond the terms of their sentences, they said — lost in legal limbo in the Kurdish-controlled region of Iraq…
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GI Special 4L20: The Empire Sends Holliday Greetings – December 25, 2006
Thomas F. Barton
…No, child the Democrats will not stop the slaughter. The wonderful Bill Clinton and his Secretary of State Madeline Albright killed over one million mothers, fathers and children. They did it with bombs and sanctions and now they will help Mr. Bush continue killing us at the rate of 3,650 a month…
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Pregnancy at Israeli Checkpoints
IslamOnline.net & News Agencies
For many Palestinian women in the occupied West Bank, pregnancy has become a nightmarish experience, fearing that their babies would be delivered stillborn at Israeli checkpoints or they would be tear-gassed, and maybe killed, en route to hospital. “Recently, two of our pregnant patients here were tear-gassed in their homes … The women couldn’t breathe and went into premature labor,” Hindia Abu Nabah, a steely 31-year-old staff nurse at Al-Zawya Clinic in Salfit district, told Britain’s The Independent newspaper Saturday, December 23. “By the time we got there, the babies had been delivered stillborn,” she added (…) Many pregnant Palestinian women traveling to hospitals to give birth are usually locked up at Israeli checkpoints. They ended up delivering their babies with no doctors or sterilized equipment, only in the shadow of the Israeli checkpoints and under the watch of occupation soldiers. According to the UN estimates, a total of 36 Palestinian babies have died because their mothers were detained during labor at Israeli checkpoints…
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IRAQ: Children Pick Their Christmas Toys
Dahr Jamail and Ali al-Fadhily, Inter Press Service
Ahmed Ghazi has little reason to stock Christmas toys at his shop in Fallujah. He knows what children want these days. “It is best for us to import toys such as guns and tanks because they are most saleable in Iraq to little boys,” Ghazi told IPS. “Children try to imitate what they see out of their windows.” And there are particular imports for girls, too, he said. “Girls prefer crying dolls to others that dance or play music and songs.” As children in the United States and around the world celebrate Christmas, and prepare to celebrate the New Year, children in Iraq occupy a quite different world, with toys to match…
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Iraq and Iran protest US arrest of Iranian officials
Dave Clark and Mona Salem, AFP
The Iraqi government has protested after US forces arrested a number of Iranian officials in Baghdad, allegedly because they were planning to incite attacks in the already war-torn country. “Two people who were invited by the president to Iraq have now been apprehended by the Americans, and the president is unhappy with the arrests,” Hiwa Osman, President Jalal Talabani’s media adviser, told AFP Monday…
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Iraqi Officers Refuse to Return
Alquds, via Iraqi League
Officers in the former Iraqi armed forces have said that they have no trust the government of AlMaliki’s call to join the new armed forces in Iraq because they don’t believe they can work for a government that commands its armed forces by sectarianism. They went on to say that the current government in Iraq is not only sectarian in its nature, but also actively involved in the liquidation of the military and scientific high-calibre cadre which was thriving in Iraqi before the invasion. The common consensus amongst former officers is that if this government was serious about the return of the former Iraqi army, then it must stop immediately all the cold-blooded murder of their former colleagues and take on a nationalist direction as opposed to the narrow minded racist/sectarian policies of terror against the people of Iraq…
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Jimmy Carter’s Glossary
Joe Mowrey, www.dissidentvoice.org
… Jimmy Carter is engaged in the practice of soft Zionism. He acknowledges that Palestinians are being exploited, but suggests these wrongs are committed by a “minority” of Israelis while most are behaving in a fair and impartial manner. Israel’s policies may be apartheid in nature but he denies they are racist. He admits Zionism is exclusionary but insists it is also democratic. Unfortunately, these two concepts are incompatible. The bread can’t be leavened and unleavened too. A Jewish state cannot foster a culture that includes Palestinians on an equivalent basis because this would threaten the very Jewish majority which the state is intended to preserve. I applaud Jimmy Carter’s willingness to indict Israel for their mistreatment of the Palestinian people in the Occupied Territories. But his promulgation of the myth that Israel is a democratic society, and his dissonant assertion that their apartheid policies are not racist is dangerously misleading. This kind of apologist rhetoric continues to deny the Palestinian people the equality they deserve…
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Signs of a Dying City III
Doctor Shortage
Fatima, Thoughts from Baghdad
So, I’m finally settled down here in my parents’ house, have been for almost a week now. Why did I suddenly leave Baghdad? It’s actually because I’m expecting my second child in a couple more months, and I’m a bit too spoiled to deliver a child in Baghdad’s hospital system. Here’s just some info on what the health system is like there now: When I went back to Baghdad in October, I looked up my old doctor to go see her. She had received a threat from some unknown groups, stopped practicing, and was looking to leave the country. I looked up a few other doctors I knew, and the same story was repeated each time, “Misafra”- ‘she’s travelling.’ I knew of four different young women, all well into their pregnancies, who were receiving no prenatal care, because their doctors had stopped practicing or left the country. One of those women has since given birth to a healthy girl, the other one is expecting any day now. Again, all without any prenatal care…
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WAR NEWS FOR MONDAY, DECEMBER 25, 2006
Today in Iraq
…A total of 29 bodies were found shot dead, with most showing signs of torture, in different districts of Baghdad on Sunday. A car bomb killed at least 10 people and wounded 15 when it exploded on a busy commercial street in a mainly Shi’ite district of Baghdad. A suicide bomber killed three people and wounded 20 others when he blew himself up aboard a crowded bus in the Shi’ite Talibiya district in northeastern Baghdad…
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Iraqi Christians celebrate Christmas
QAIS AL-BASHIR, Associated Press Writer
Umm Salam draws her curtains across her windows, then settles into an armchair in a living room festooned with colored lights and a portrait of Jesus on the cross. Her Christmas tree glitters in the corner. One of Iraq’s estimated 800,000 Christians, the 56-year-old widow celebrates the holiday quietly with her children and grandchildren, as violence sweeps the country. “It is very risky to go the church in our neighborhood, so we will have a party at home and some of our relatives will come to celebrate,” she said. “They’ll have to stay the night at our home due to the security situation and the curfew.”…
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Metaphorical bulldozer
Xymphora
Toronto theater company CanStage, which was to have staged “My Name Is Rachel Corrie” in its coming season, has cancelled the play, obviously at the request of the Lobby. I actually feel sorry for the artistic director, who announced that the play was on the schedule, innocently failing to take into account the awesome power, and Absolute Evil, of the Lobby. He must have been reading too much Noam. He is so terrified of the Lobby that he had to make up a ridiculous excuse for the cancellation. Now, by censoring Rachel Corrie’s words, he is driving a metaphorical bulldozer…
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PANAMA’S EARLY CHRISTMAS GREETINGS
Malcom Lagauche
Seventeen years ago, the U.S. delivered an early Christmas present to the people of Panama: a ruthless and devastating invasion. George Bush gave the reason of wanting to re-introduce democracy to Panama for the brutal scenario. The real reason was that Manuel Noriega, Panama’s president, who once was a CIA asset, refused to allow the Contras to use Panama as a staging ground in its war against the Sandinistas of Nicaragua. The U.S. had to teach him a lesson. Almost every aspect of the invasion, called “Operation Just Cause,” was similar to that of the Gulf War of 1991, except on a smaller scale. A national leader who once was a friend of the U.S. said “no” when the U.S. said ‘yes.” The civilian infrastructure of a country was destroyed. Thousands of civilians lost their lives. Overwhelming force was used. And, the attack was not justified…
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6 U.S. soldiers killed in attacks; Iraqi official tallies police deaths
Lauren Frayer, Associated Press
About 12,000 Iraqi policemen have been killed since the ouster of Saddam Hussein, the country’s interior minister said Sunday, as clashes, a suicide bomber and weekend explosions killed more than a dozen Iraqi officers and six American soldiers. Three members of the U.S. 89th Military Police Brigade were killed Saturday in east Baghdad when a roadside bomb detonated, the U.S. military said. A fourth soldier, assigned to the 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division, died Saturday in an explosion in Diyala, east of the Iraqi capital. Two more U.S. soldiers were killed Saturday in roadside blasts near Baghdad, the U.S. military said. One of them died when a bomb exploded southeast of the capital near a patrol searching for “suspected terrorists,” the military said. Four other soldiers were wounded in that incident…
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Christmas in the Middle East
Juan Cole, Informed Comment
Al-Zaman reports that “The Our Lady of Salvation Church in Baghdad appeared almost deserted on Christmas Eve. Christian celebrations of Christmas were limited to private homes. Iraqi Christians had announced last week that they would suspend official celebration, out of solidarity with the tragedy of the Iraqi people.” Iraqi Christians, who had enjoyed relative freedom under the regime of Saddam Hussein, now face fear of attacks by powerful Islamic groups or Shiite militias. Few are making any use of the Christmas lights and decorations of yesteryear. There were some 600,000 Iraqi Christians in a population of 27 million, but some say the number is now less than 450,000. Thousands have been forced to flee to Syria…
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British Troops Raid Iraqi Police Station, Killing 7
MARC SANTORA, New York Times
Hundreds of British soldiers laid siege to a police station in the southern city of Basra today, killing seven gunmen, rescuing 127 prisoners from almost certain execution and ultimately reducing the building to rubble. The focus of the attack was an arm of the local police called the Special Crimes Unit, which British officials said had been thoroughly infiltrated by criminals and militia members who had used it to terrorize local residents and violently settle scores with political or tribal rivals…
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Again, What is IraqSlogger?
Roads to Iraq
If you already read “Daily Kos” entry “When Iraqi Blogs Fall Silent”, I hope people saw the timing of this post, to help you more, compare the date with this report Former CNN News Chief To Launch ‘IraqSlogger’ Site Many Iraqi Bloggers stopped talking politics, others disabled the comments (even if they write about some private matters). In total, all Iraqi Blogs are/were hijacked by dark, underworld of CIA and other neocons associations, and Iraqslogger is one another step in the same direction, to silence the rest of the Iraqi Bloggers…
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