[UrukNet] - [Daily Information from Occupied Iraq] - [newsletter 02 Mar 2006]

uruknet.info   اوروكنت.إنفو :: information from occupied iraq :: informazione dall'iraq occupato

Beaten to death in Basra Finian Cunningham Baha Moussa was working as a night-shift receptionist at the Ibn al Haithan Hotel in Basra when British troops raided the premises. The 23-year-old was arrested along with other members of the hotel staff, and taken to a nearby British military base for questioning. Four days later his father identified Baha’s corpse in a morgue. He had been beaten to a pulp. "When they took the cover off his body I could see his nose was badly broken," said Daoud Moussa, a senior Iraqi police officer. "The skin of his wrists had been torn off. The skin on his forehead was torn away. On the left side of his chest there were clear blue bruises. On his legs I saw bruising from kicking... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=21165 Depleted Uranium is "blowing in the wind" Arun Shrivastava, GlobalResearch.ca The Veterans Administration (VA) that deals with the problems of returning soldiers in the United States of America (USA), a country whose President is due to land in our capital soon to sign nuke-deals with Indian neocons and who also happens to be the Supreme Commander of the US Forces, has determined that 250,000 troops are now permanently disabled, 15,000 troops are dead and over 425,000 troops are ill and slowly dying from what the Department of Defense still calls a "mystery disease." The supine media in the western countries, especially US, UK and Australia, calls it Gulf War Syndrome (GWS), something not much to be worried about and not worth even a few lines, forget about headlines. The question posed by responsible citizens of the USA, not necessarily those in the current administration, is "How many more will have to die before action is taken?"... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=21152 Mass Starvation and Democracy Prevention Ghali Hassan, Axis of Logic ...To satisfy it Zionist ideology, Israel is proceeding to impose a Nazi-like economic siege over nearly 4 million defenceless Palestinians, intended to starve them into surrendering their democratic freedoms. On Sunday 19 February 2006, Israel moved to withhold funds of $50 million per month owed to the Palestinians from tax and customs revenue, causing great hardship and financial crisis in occupied Palestine. The money is part of the value-added tax of 17% that Israel collects on behalf of the Palestinian Authority. In 2005 Israel collected $711 million on behalf of the Palestinian Authority. The money is simply stolen from the Palestinians by the Israeli government. The Jewish state which is in violations of international laws and UN resolutions is imposing – with the support of the US and Europe – sanction measures that will starve the victims of its brutal occupation... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=21158 PSL Editorial: Stop the war on the Middle East! U.S. imperialist plans go beyond Iraq Socialism and Liberation The Bush administration’s proposed 2007 budget includes $439.3 billion for the Department of Defense and its "war on terror." While that includes another $120 billion for the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon’s investment has much wider aims. Syria and Iran are more and more in the crosshairs of the U.S. ruling class. If the U.S. anti-war movement is to keep Bush’s promised "endless war" from becoming a reality, it must recognize that the war in Iraq is not a mistake, an aberration or an example of misguided leadership. It is inherent in the U.S. imperialist system and its endless quest for profit and conquest... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=21169 GI Special 4C1 - Bush Approval Rating At New Low - March 1, 2006 Thomas F. Barton The latest CBS News poll finds President Bush’s approval rating has fallen to an all-time low of 34 percent, while pessimism about the Iraq war has risen to a new high. Just 30 percent approve of how Mr. Bush is handling the Iraq war, another all-time low. In a separate poll, two out of three Americans said they do not think President Bush has responded adequately to the needs of Katrina victims. Only 32 percent approve of the way President Bush is responding to those needs, a drop of 12 points from last September’s poll, taken just two weeks after the storm made landfall. Mr. Bush’s overall job rating has fallen to 34 percent, down from 42 percent last month. Fifty-nine percent disapprove of the job the president is doing... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=21174 Shiite Militiamen Reclaim Mosque From the Sunnis EDWARD WONG In government records, the building in eastern Baghdad with a tan dome and archways of blue tile is designated Mosque No. 5-833 of Sector 3. Until last week, it was known throughout the neighborhood as the Saddam Hussein Mosque, a name favored by the Sunni Arab imam. Now, to the Shiite militiamen with Kalashnikov rifles who expelled that cleric and stand guard, the building is called the Imam Ali Mosque, after the cousin of the Prophet Muhammad whose murder catalyzed the epochal Sunni-Shiite split. "I have only four bullets in here," said Jabar Hashem al-Mousawi, 40, the militia's commander at the mosque, as he popped the cartridge out of his pistol at an outer checkpoint. "I take this to defend against those who want to attack the poor people here"... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=21171 Iraqi Resistance Report for events of Thursday, 2 March 2006 Translated and/or compiled by Muhammad Abu Nasr, member, editorial board, the Free Arab Voice ...In a dispatch posted at 12:20pm Mecca time midday Thursday, Mafkarat al-Islam reported that an Iraqi Resistance bomb exploded by a US military patrol on the highway near the southern Baghdad suburb of ad-Durah. The Baghdad correspondent for Mafkarat al-Islam reported a source in the Iraqi puppet police as saying that a bomb that had been planted by the side of the highway to Baghdad al-Jadidah blew up near ad-Durah as a US patrol was driving past. The explosion disabled one American Humvee, wounding two US troops... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=21172 Iraq Bans Cars After Another Bloody Day QASSIM ABDUL-ZAHRA A bomb ripped through a vegetable market in a Shiite section of Baghdad, and a leading Sunni politician escaped an attack on his convoy Thursday as at least 36 people were killed in unrelenting violence, pushing Iraq toward civil war. Al-Jaafari met with representatives of the main political parties Thursday night to discuss ways of containing the sectarian attacks, reversing an earlier decision to cancel the meeting after the move against him... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=21168 U.S. signs $38 million deal for depleted uranium tank shells John Byrne, RAW STORY The U.S. Army quietly placed an order for $38 million in depleted uranium rounds last week, bringing the total order from a West-Virginia based company to $77 million for fiscal year 2006, RAW STORY has learned. The munition is highly controversial. While the Pentagon has been ambiguous about its health toll, leftover rounds from the first Gulf War are believed to have caused a significant increase in cancer and birth defects in Iraq. According to a detailed article by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 2002, "Many researchers outside Iraq, and several U.S. veterans organizations, agree; they also suspect depleted uranium of playing a role in Gulf War Syndrome, the still-unexplained malady that has plagued hundreds of thousands of Gulf War veterans"... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=21167 Ex-Envoy: Execution Victims Spike at Baghdad Morgue Ellen Knickmeyer, Washington Post Foreign Service .. In one Baghdad neighborhood Thursday, a widow draped in black said black-clad gunmen had burst into a mosque on Feb. 23 and abducted her husband and other men as they were finishing afternoon prayers. The captured men were subjected to a one-hour mock trial in a detention center near Sadr City, the heart of Baghdad's Shiite population and Sadr's base in the city, the widow said. Some of the men were released, but her husband and three others were executed, she said. His family found his corpse in the Baghdad morgue on Saturday, shot in the face and chest, with his hands cuffed behind his back. Fearful, the widow hesitated to say who she believed killed her husband. "Who is running the country?" she finally responded. "The Americans. The Mahdi Army. The Badr Brigade. They are responsible." She hushed her daughters and granddaughter when they assigned blame more specifically. "Mahdi Army," her 8-year-old granddaughter whispered into her ear. "Darling," the widow said, frowning and quieting the girl. Sadr officials have rejected responsibility for the killings. Sadr aides said other factions' militiamen were adopting black clothes to deflect blame onto the Mahdi Army... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=21166 Tomgram: The Precipice, the Brink, the Abyss -- Iraq Tom Engelhardt ...Nearly three years have passed since George Bush stood under a "mission accomplished" banner on the deck of that aircraft carrier. Almost 2,300 Americans have now been killed and almost 17,000 wounded in Iraq; untold numbers of Iraqis -- undoubtedly well over 100,000 -- have died since our invasion, while families and livelihoods have been destroyed and, ever more commonly, neighborhoods ethnically cleansed and religious institutions damaged or destroyed. The country itself has been turned into an impoverished failed state, riddled with terrorists, filled with sectarian or religious militias, bled by a still growing insurgency, and threatened by ethnic and religious divisions which seem to widen by the week. Its government exists, to the degree it does, inside a fortified zone in a capital city that itself seems beyond normal rule, and whose streets are controlled by a variety of armed groups, militias, police, and gangs... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=21164 The Hussein trial Eli Stephens, Left I on the News ...And it is also ironic to be talking about a trial for the aftermath of an event, the attempted assassination of the head of state, which did actually occur (that seems to be undisputed), and for which we learned today (not for the first time) that those who were executed actually had trials (however fair or not), which is more than can be said for anyone incarcerated by the Americans in Bagram or Guantanamo or dozens of other secret prisons, dozens of whom have been killed (including being tortured to death)... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=21163 Burying The Lancet Report Nicolas J. S. Davies, Z Magazine ... Thanks to Roberts, his international team, Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, and the editorial board of the Lancet, we have a clearer picture of the violence taking place in Iraq than that presented by "mainstream" media. Allowing for 16 months of the air war and other deaths since the completion of the survey, we have to estimate that somewhere between 185,000 and 700,000 people have died as a direct result of the war. Coalition forces have killed anywhere from 70,000 to 500,000 of them, including 30,000 to 275,000 children under the age of 15... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=21162 'Torture Boy' Signals More Spying Robert Parry Correcting misleading testimony to Congress, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has signaled that George W. Bush’s warrantless surveillance of Americans went beyond the known eavesdropping on communications to suspected terrorists overseas. In a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Feb. 28, Gonzales recanted testimony he gave on Feb. 6 when he declared that Bush had only authorized a narrowly constructed warrantless wiretapping program by the National Security Agency against Americans in touch with foreign terror suspects... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=21159 Robert Fisk: Somebody is trying to provoke a civil war in Iraq. Robert Fisk & Tony Jones ...It made me doubt myself when I heard him say that. I still go along and say what I said before - Iraq is not a sectarian society, but a tribal society. People are intermarried. Shiites and Sunnis marry each other. It's not a question of having a huge block of people here called Shiites and a huge block of people called Sunnis any more than you can do the same with the United States, saying Blacks are here and Protestants are here and so on. But certainly, somebody at the moment is trying to provoke a civil war in Iraq. Someone wants a civil war. Some form of militias and death squads want a civil war. There never has been a civil war in Iraq. The real question I ask myself is: who are these people who are trying to provoke the civil war?... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=21161 What Bush Was Told About Iraq Murray Waas, The National Journal Two highly classified intelligence reports delivered directly to President Bush before the Iraq war cast doubt on key public assertions made by the president, Vice President Cheney, and other administration officials as justifications for invading Iraq and toppling Saddam Hussein, according to records and knowledgeable sources. The first report, delivered to Bush in early October 2002, was a one-page summary of a National Intelligence Estimate that discussed whether Saddam's procurement of high-strength aluminum tubes was for the purpose of developing a nuclear weapon... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=21170 The Other Bad War: More Torture in Occupied Afghanistan Ted Rall ...It's widely accepted that the torture at Abu Ghraib, combined with U.S. troops' rough and intimidating treatment of civilians on streets and in their homes, motivates Iraqis to join, fund and provide logistical support to a growing resistance movement. Now we know that the same thing is going on in Afghanistan. When will American public opinion catch up with reality? Both wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, are equally unjustifiable, illegal, corrupt and unwinnable. Both make us less humane and less safe. Anti-Iraq War liberals who have given the Administration a free pass on Afghanistan have merely encouraged more abuse. "For some reason," a senior Bush official marvels to the Times, "people did not have a problem with Bagram. It was in Afghanistan"... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=21160 Leaked Security Memo Critical of Iraqi Government Ma'ad Fayad A leaked security memo from the Iraqi Ministry for National Security Affairs, headed by Abdul-Karim al-Anzi, and security reports seen by Asharq al Awsat allege that the outgoing government was aware of security violations around the Imam Ali al Hadi shrine in Samarra, two weeks before it was bombed but did not take any action to prevent the attack (...) Salman al Jamili, spokesman for the Iraqi Accord Front said, "The fractures in the Shia coalition because of divisions between al Jaafari and the movement [of Muqtada] al Sadr and the Supreme Council [for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq] prompted groups closely linked to government members to bomb the shrine"... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=21156 A Common Cause Cindy Sheehan and Sam Bostaph Three years ago, President George Bush ordered United States military forces to invade and occupy Iraq. Since that invasion, which was unconstitutional, illegal by all international standards, and immoral by any just-war theology, the world has watched as the Bush administration has directed the killing of tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers, civilians, and insurgents at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars. It has watched as over 2300 U.S. troops have been killed to date and almost 18,000 more wounded or maimed for life. It has watched the Bush administration kidnap, imprison, and torture hundreds of foreign nationals, as well as American citizens, without trial or conviction. It has watched as Bush administration lackeys have transported prisoners to secret prisons and then delivered them to torturers in less-developed countries. For three years, it has heard George Bush, Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, and Condi Rice move from one lie to another to justify each of these actions... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=21155 Energy Wars: Beneath Iraq and a hard place Ian Fraser, Mail and Guardian Watching the news from out of the Middle East, you might be wondering what's going on and why -- and, mostly, when's it going to stop. The simple answer is: it isn't. The world is now in the first stages of a multistep "end game" for global domination by the last remaining superpowers. The "energy wars" have begun in earnest and will keep on going, from here onwards. These are the times that backward, politically unimportant weak little countries such as South Africa should shut up and keep their heads down if they want to remain untouched during the coming covert and overt conflicts... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=21153 Iraqi Resistance Report for events of Wednesday 1 March 2006 Translated and/or compiled by Muhammad Abu Nasr, member, editorial board, the Free Arab Voice. ...Since the bombing of the Shi'i Shrine in Samarra’ on 22 February, the Western media have sought to stoke sectarian conflict in Iraq. On Wednesday, 1 March, the American Washington Post carried a story that echoed earlier claims published in the media of the puppet regime in occupied Baghdad that Shi'i residents of al-Fallujah and other Sunni areas were being expelled. The American paper claimed specifically that nine Shi'i families were pulling out of the city on Tuesday The al-Fallujah correspondent for Mafkarat al-Islam reported that the story of the nine families supposedly being driven out of al-Fallujah originally appeared in the pro-American paper Sawt al-'Iraq and on the al-'Irqiyah television network which is run by the US-installed puppet government. The story also appeared in the newspaper al-Furat, which is published by the pro-American Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) run by 'Abd al-'Aziz al-Hakim. To check on the truth of the allegations, the Mafkarat al-Islam correspondent headed to the al-'Askari neighborhood of eastern al-Fallujah, one of the poorest parts of the city, which is home to nine Shi'i families. There the correspondent met with Abu Sahib, one of the Shi'i residents who works in a bakery. Abu Sahib affirmed that the report was completely untrue, saying that the TV station al-'Iraqiyah was simply lying and added, "and the best proof ! of that is that I’m standing here in front of you right now."... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=21151 www.uruknet.info: a site gathering daily information concerning occupied Iraq: news, analysis, documents and texts of iraqi resistance available in Italian and English.   You receive this newsletter because you subscribed it. If you think it was an abuse, or simply if you don't want to receive it any more, click here to unsubscribe from the newsletter.