|
Spinning death
Imad Khadduri, Free Iraq
…So what did really happen to the 14 dead American Marines (and one Iraqi interpreter)? How come this time the true number of dead American soldiers is announced by DoD, for a change? This is the Iraqi Resistance’s version of what happened to these soldiers: “Today, Pentagon officials have concluded it was a massive roadside bomb that killed 14 Marines in the western city of Haditha! Some people were astonished and surprised by the announcement of this news. Many of us have multiplied this number by 4. All people were correct with respect to their surprise and expectation. But where is the truth?!…
www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=14382&s2=05
Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=14382
Veterans Group Wants Independent Investigation Into Prison Abuse Photos
The Lone Star Iconoclast
Veterans for Common Sense (VCS), a nonpartisan veterans’ organization with 12,000 members, called for a commission to investigate torture allegations in response to the Pentagon refusal to release photos and videos from Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. In an open letter, signed by more than 2,000 veterans and supporters (including five flag-rank officers and more than 200 commissioned officers), the veterans urged Congress and the President to “commit ˜ immediately and publicly ˜ to support the creation of an independent commission to investigate and report on the detention and interrogation practices of U.S. military and intelligence agencies deployed in the war on terror”…
www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=14379&s2=05
Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=14379
A Soldier Speaks: Zechariah
Celina R. De Leon, AlterNet
…We are not going to win this war. The longer we are there, the more people are going to join the fight against us. We asked detainees why? Most said because they had lost a family member. So, if we figure that most families are three to four people and every time we kill one insurgent, they recruit two to three new members that may have not hated the U.S. until they lost a family member by their hands. It’s the same as if they invaded here. Most households have a weapon in the house. That’s millions and millions of weapons and people that are willing to protect their family and country from foreign invaders. They won’t give up until we are all gone off of their soil…
www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=14378&s2=05
Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=14378
Iraq is in ‘a state of war’, admits Jaafari
BASSEM MROUE
IRAQ is in “a state of war” as it struggles to overcome the insurgency that has claimed hundreds of lives since the swearing in of a new government earlier this year, the country’s prime minister admitted yesterday (…)”We will not hesitate in saying this: we are in a state of war,” Mr Jaafari said. “It is one of the most dangerous types of war, because it is not conventional, or a war of borders.” He said the new security plan was a follow-up to Operation Lightning that began in Baghdad in May and involved 40,000 soldiers and policemen plus coalition forces…
www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=14381&s2=05
Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=14381
Vietnam-Speak in Iraq
Juan Cole, Informed Comment
Military historian Tom Collier writes with regard to the killing of 14 Marines in Anbar province with a huge improvised explosive device: “There seem to be two developments in Iraq that are more than eerily Vietnam speak.” The first is the increasing use of bigger and better mines: bundled 155mm artillery shells, 500lb aircraft bombs, shaped charges, and clever booby traps to kill the mine clearers. All of that is old hat dating back through Vietnam and at least to WWII, but the insurgents seem to be able to plant their mines without either being detected by our surveillance [e.g., drone aircraft] or being reported to the police by the local people. That is a bad sign, and means we control neither the terrain nor the populace…”
www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=14377&s2=05
Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=14377
US reporter murdered in Iraq had written his own epitaph
James Hider
…
In fact, the American journalist’s last article for The New York Times read like an epitaph for his own murder on Tuesday night in the southern port city, where thousands of British troops are deployed. He was abducted with Nouriya Itais, the Iraqi woman he employed as a translator. He wrote: “An Iraqi police lieutenant, who for obvious reasons asked to remain anonymous, confirmed to me the widespread rumours that a few police officers are perpetrating many of the hundreds of assassinations, mostly of former Baath Party members, that take place in Basra each month. He told me that there is even a sort of ‘death car’: a white Toyota Mk II that glides through the city streets, carrying off-duty police officers in the pay of extremist religious groups to their next assignment” (…) Most Basrans are too scared to talk about the Islamic covert militias, many of them allegedly funded by Iran. Those who talk do so only behind closed doors, like the young man who told The Times last week how an Islamist group, the Vengeance of God, had come to his family home to assassinate his father, a former officer in the Iraqi navy during the Iran-Iraq war…
www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=14376&s2=05
Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=14376
U.S. Senator petitioned on Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan
The Gaelic Starover
Over 300 individuals have subscribed to a petition calling on U.S. Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York to follow up and press further on correspondance which he had sent last year to the White House pertaining to the leaking of sensitive intellegence on Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan last year. Khan was 25-year-old Al Qaeda computer engineer, who had been providing information to US allies, specifically Britain and Pakistan…
www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=14380&s2=05
Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=14380
U.S. military reports four more American service members killed in Iraq amid upsurge in violence
AP
The U.S. military said Thursday that four more American service members died in Iraq, including a Marine killed in the Euphrates River valley where 14 Marines lost their lives in the worst roadside bombing targeting American forces in the Iraq war. A car bomb also hit members of a radical Shiite militia in northern Iraq as attacks nationwide killed at least 11 people Thursday…
www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=14375&s2=05
Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=14375
Labor and the war
Workers World
The AFL-CIO passed a resolution on July 26 that calls for a rapid end to the Iraq war. The resolution, put forward by the General Executive Council, is being called a “major change of course” for the labor federation by U.S. Labor Against the War. And to some old-timers in the labor movement, this looks like a big change. The AFL-CIO’s failure to oppose the Vietnam War nearly tore the federation apart and was part of the reason the United Auto Workers left it in 1968. Union members! could be found at all the protests against the Vietnam War, but they were there without the official support of the big union federation. This time it is indeed very different…
www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=14374&s2=05
Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=14374
|