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Lynching Saddam – Part 10: Virtue, Terror and the Western public opinion’ s bloodthirsty schizophrenia
Gabriele Zamparini, The cat’s dream
…On 20 March 2003, the day of the “illegal act that contravened the UN charter” by the US-led “coalition of the willing”, Saddam Hussein was the legitimate president of Iraq and his government the legitimate government of Iraq. This is not an opinion or a political position but a fact of life, a simple observation of the status quo ante bellum. Opposing the “supreme international crime” that cost the lives of about one million human beings means upholding international law and calling for its restoration (…) The sacrosanct US-led coalition troops withdrawal must be the consequence of the restoration of international law to the status quo ante bellum, while the future of Iraq must be left to its own People. Anything else would be a betrayal of those principles of peace, justice and self-determination we claim to uphold. Killing Saddam Hussein, the legitimate president of Iraq, will be the real turning point; after there won’t be anymore a country called Iraq. How can the anti-war movement be so tragically blind?…
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How to execute Saddam?, A recent tour around Iraq will be enough
Roads to Iraq
Here the list of real crimes committed by Saddam, and he committed them alone with his full responsibility: 1- Saddam, even when he was a deputy, he nationalized Iraqi oil, the unilateral unfair decision. This caused a lot of harm and damage to foreign oil companies. 2- Launching an unfair campaign against illiteracy, even his intelligence, were watching the children, in order to go to school, and even their parents as well, the illiteracy rate dropped to less than 10% in a country that was three-quarters are happy to live without reading and writing, most of the people today known as the “Shiite majority.” 3- Issued a law to make education compulsory up to secondary school, thus deprived hundreds of thousands of Iraqi families to benefit from the decision instead of selling cigarettes in the streets. 4- Granting autonomy to the Kurdish people, said it was “a formality” granting which gives authorities more than England gave to Wales, especially since the Kurds in neighboring countries enjoy much greater rights and subjected to persecution and discrimination. 5- Used the wealth of Iraq for the construction of industrial installations, while it was necessary to focus on importing from abroad (…) Not so for a fair trial of such crimes to take into consideration? Such a criminal, deserves dictator and tyrant deserves executions 20th time. Nevertheless, there is a reason to keep alive: Torturing him in a tour around Iraq, to see with his own eyes the bodies that are ! burning in the Interior Ministry. To see how many university professors are still alive in Iraq. To see how hospitals are functioning. To see displaced children who have returned to selling cigarettes in the streets. To see how houses get few hours of electricity per day, after spending 2 billion dollars on “reconstruction “projects. To see how billions to convert external accounts for scrap deals, To see ethnic massacres that killing dozens daily . To see what remains of the rights of the “noble women”…
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What has long been a catastrophic tragedy is also now a horrific farce
The British occupation army’s assault on its own police force in Basra confirms Iraq as a far greater disaster than Suez
Roy Hattersley, The Guardian
Iraq – which for years has been an unmitigated tragedy – has turned into Grand Guignol, and, true to the traditions of that genre, horror and farce combine in equal measure. No doubt we should rejoice that al-Jamiat police station in Basra has been destroyed and its prisoners taken to the relative security of a compound in which detainees are hopefully not routinely tortured. But if a sick satire on an obscure television channel included a sketch about British troops attacking a unit of the police that they established and with whom they had been theoretically working for nearly four years, the outcry would not have been limited to complaints about undermining the morale of our troops under fire. We would have been told that the whole idea was too fantastical to sustain the lampoon. But that is what really happened on Monday…
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Military considers recruiting foreigners
Expedited citizenship would be an incentive
Bryan Bender, Boston Globe Staff
The armed forces, already struggling to meet recruiting goals, are considering expanding the number of noncitizens in the ranks — including disputed proposals to open recruiting stations overseas and putting more immigrants on a faster track to US citizenship if they volunteer — according to Pentagon officials. Foreign citizens serving in the US military is a highly charged issue, which could expose the Pentagon to criticism that it is essentially using mercenaries to defend the country. Other analysts voice concern that a large contingent of noncitizens under arms could jeopardize national security or reflect badly on Americans’ willingness to serve in uniform…
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Iraqi Resistance Report for events of Tuesday, 26 December 2006.
Translated and/or compiled by Muhammad Abu Nasr, member, editorial board, the Free Arab Voice
…In a dispatch posted at 11:57am Makkah time Tuesday morning, Mafkarat al-Islam reported that puppet “Iraqi National Guards” stormed into the area near Suq an-Naflah, Qa’at ‘Ablah, and the Eighth Market in al-Ghazaliyah area of Baghdad at midday Monday. This impelled local residents to take up arms in self defense against the puppet troops. The correspondent for Mafkarat al-Islam reported that fighting between local people and the attacking puppet “Guards” lasted for about half an hour. It came to a close when US aircraft and patrols surrounded and entered the area and began carrying out searches of houses in the area where the “Guards” had been attacking. No information on the nature or extent of puppet “Guard” casualties was available…
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Ways of denial
The Holocaust must be contextualised, and its lessons learned
Azmi Bishara, Al-Ahram Weekly
…In the course of Zionism’s attempts to portray the history of the entire Jewish people as one uninterrupted stream of oppression and persecution that culminated inevitably in the Holocaust, Holocaust history has been transformed into an exclusively Israeli property. Victims of the Nazi gas chambers have been nationalised and converted, in spite of themselves, either into an episode in the Zionist struggle to create a state or into an instrument for blackmailing others into supporting Zionist aims or for justifying the crimes the Zionist state perpetrates against others. It is as though the magnitude of the crime entitles Israel to play the victim par excellence or the victims’ sole proxy, placing it beyond accusations of wrongdoing because it is the victim by definition…
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Politics of Fragmentation
Roger H. Lieberman, PalestineChronicle.com
It is very difficult to believe that the Bush Administration has the best interests of the Palestinian people at heart in its attempts to exacerbate the internecine divide between Fatah and Hamas in the Occupied Territories. Is it even possible for politicians who have shown such maliciousness and deceit regarding the Middle East in their six years in office to harbor honorable intentions? Machiavellian statecraft has never been a healthy thing for the human race, but it’s hard to imagine anything more disgusting and morally repugnant than the world’s most powerful nation employing it against an impoverished, stateless, and humiliated people who have been bereft of virtually everything they once possessed…
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“PRESS RELEASE”
THE CEASELESS BLOOD SHED IN IRAQ
Defense and Support Committee of President Saddam Hussein, his Comrades and all P.o.W.s and Detainees in Iraq. (ISNAD)
In an outrageous intervention in the judiciary, Mr.Mowafaq Al-Rubaie, who is not a judge or an official of any Iraqi court, was quick to announce the decision of the Cassation Panel to approve the death sentences, which were issued by the first trial panel of the Iraqi court. Al-Rubaie did not wait for the panel of the court to announce its decision by itself. In the aftermath of a show trial which lacked the basic standards of a fair trial, and after five lawyers were martyred while they were doing their noble duty, and after wasting the rights of defense, the Cassation Panel of the court issued its decision to be the final say in (this) recklessness of law, its rules and all the applicable norms in such cases, let alone this trial of the age…
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Baquba under Al Qaeda/Sunni control
Born at the Crest of the Empire
“They (the Sunni insurgents) took me in one of their cars, and drove me around the areas of Baqouba under their control. There were no police on the streets. They had just killed a policeman. His body was still in the car where they shot him. “There are no more journalists working in Baqouba,” he told me. For three months, or so, up through mid-November, about 40% of the pictures I put up from Iraq were from Baquoba. It was the main sectarian conflict point outside of Baghdad, and now there are no more pictures. The Sunnis have won. This battle for Baquba is part of a larger significant strategic effort by the Sunni insurgents. While the Shia are attempting to clear neighborhoods inside Baghdad, it seems the Sunnis are attempting to control the highways and access points to the city…
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DAILY WAR NEWS FOR TUESDAY, December 26, 2006
Today in Iraq
Three U.S. soldiers looking for roadside bombs were killed northwest of Baghdad, the U.S. military said. One soldier was wounded. Two U.S. soldiers were killed and one wounded in a roadside bomb attack southwest of Baghdad on Monday, the military said. Another roadside bomb in the same area killed one U.S. soldier and wounded two on Monday. One U.S. soldier was killed and two injured when their vehicle rolled over during a combat mission south of Baghdad on Tuesday, the U.S. military said. Another four US soldiers died Tuesday, including three in a bomb attack near Baghdad, bringing the total number of American defence personnel killed in Iraq to 2,976, according to an AFP tally…
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Iran Oil Revenue Quickly Drying Up, Analysis Says
Associated Press
Iran is suffering a staggering decline in revenue from its oil exports, and if the trend continues income could virtually disappear by 2015, according to an analysis published yesterday in a journal of the National Academy of Sciences. Iran’s economic woes could make the country unstable and vulnerable, with its oil industry crippled, Roger Stern, an economic geographer at Johns Hopkins University, said in the report and in an interview…
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Insecurity and poverty in Iraq put pregnant women in danger
Report, IRIN
For years Salah Hussein, 26, had dreamed of having a child, but he never imagined that his wish would be marred by the death of his wife in childbirth. Hussein’s wife, Fadiya, died of complications during a delivery which, doctors said, were caused by malnutrition and the stress of living in a war-torn country. “We are a poor family and I couldn’t afford to buy her good food. This was not my fault but the fault of this destroyed country in which the conditions of the health sector are worsening day by day,” said Hussein who works as a barber in the capital, Baghdad. Dozens of pregnant women with life-threatening conditions are being admitted to Iraq’s hospitals every month…
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Haditha: The Mai Lai of Iraq
Sarah Meyer, INDEX RESEARCH
In spite of all the evidence in The Haditha Doctor and the Media Dissemblers “ about media who accept money from foundations to perpetrate their cover-ups, the “right wing” media is still trying to twist the Haditha facts. The Reuters Connection to Haditha (25.12.06. Robin Boyd, Newsbusters) Newsbusters is connected with the Media Research Center – the conservative media watchdog group. Mr. Baker is the Vice President of the Media Research Center. According to Source Watch, The Media Research Center is funded by the same rich foundations mentioned in The Haditha Doctor and Media Dissemblers, ie: the Sarah Scaife Foundation, John M. Olin Foundation, Castle Rock Foundation, The Lynne and Harry Bradley Foundation…
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Shiite Militias and Iran in Iraq
Juan Cole, Informed Commentnd
…The US military conducted raids against the Badr Corps militia of the Shiite Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, in the course of which it arrested four Iranian officials. It had to let two of them go when it transpired that they were diplomats invited into Iraq by President Jalal Talabani, a close US ally. SCIRI and Badr were in exile in Iran for over two decades and have close ties to the Iranian regime. Nevertheless, the Bush administration hosted SCIRI leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim recently. (…) That Badr had close ties to Iran was well known, so it is a little unclear what new developments could have provoked this raid…
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Bombings Kill 44 Iraqis; 7 Americans Die
CHRISTOPHER TORCHIA, AP
At least 44 Iraqis died Tuesday in bombings, officials said, including a coordinated strike that killed 25 in western Baghdad. Separately, the U.S. military announced the deaths of seven American soldiers, raising the death toll significantly in one of the bloodiest months for the military this year. The three coordinated car bombs in western Baghdad injured at least 55 people, a doctor at Yarmouk hospital, where the victims were taken, said on condition of anonymity because of safety concerns. The attacks occurred in a mixed Sunni and Shiite neighborhood…
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Iraqi Resistance Report for events of Monday, 25 December 2006
Translated and/or compiled by Muhammad Abu Nasr, member, editorial board, the Free Arab Voice
…In recent months relations between Iran and the Anglo-American occupation authorities in Iraq have deteriorated and as a result the US and British occupation authorities have begun trying to reassert control over the activities of the pro-Iranian Shi’i sectarian militias on whom they have long relied for local security in occupied Iraq. For its part, the regional hegemonic regime in Iran has been seeking to secure its hold in Iraq by using Shi’i sectarian leaders and organizations. They hope to step into the shoes of the American occupation authorities whose grip on the country has been weakened by three years of increasingly severe Resistance attacks. To forestall Iran’s attempt to replace America as colonial power in Iraq, the Iraqi Resistance continues its battle against pro-Iranian as well as US and pro-US groups and facilities…
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Saddam to hang within 30 days
Times Online
Saddam Hussein will be executed by hanging within 30 days after a panel of appeal court judges upheld the death sentence passed on the former Iraqi dictator last month. Aref Abdul-Razzaq Shahin, the head of the appeals tribunal, told a news conference in Baghdad today: “The appeal court has approved the death sentence. They (the government) has the right to choose the date starting from tomorrow up to 30 days. After 30 days it will be an obligation to implement the sentence.” UN human rights experts have called on Iraq’s government not to carry out the death sentence, saying Saddam’s trial was seriously flawed…
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