[UrukNet] - [Daily Information from Occupied Iraq] - [newsletter 18 Apr 2006]

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The Ongoing War on Truth in Iraq Dahr Jamail, t r u t h o u t | Perspective On Monday, April 17, my sources in Baghdad reported fierce fighting in the al-Adhamiya neighborhood of the capital city, as well as fighting in the al-Dora neighborhood. One source, who lives in the predominantly Sunni area of Adhamiya, had been telling me the situation was disintegrating for days leading up to this. There had been clashes every day for four days leading up to yesterday's huge clash there, with sporadic fighting between! Sunni resistance fighters and members of the two largest Shia militias. The armed wing of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the Badr Organization, and Muqtada al-Sadr's Mehdi Army have been launching ongoing attacks against fighters in the neighborhood (...) Disturbingly, this obvious US-backed Shia militia invasion of a Sunni neighborhood may well be a prelude to what the US military is calling a "second liberation of Baghdad" which they will carry out with the Iraqi army when a new government is installed... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=22679 Vice Squad Robert Dreyfuss Bad heart, errant shotgun, and Halliburton stock options in tow, Dick Cheney has ruled the White House roost for the past five years, amassing enough power to give rise to the joke that George W. Bush is "a heartbeat away from the presidency." Yet, despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of words have been written on Cheney’s role in the Bush administration, most of what’s been written fails to explain how the vice president wields his extraordinary authority. Notoriously opaque, th! e Office of the Vice President (OVP) is very difficult for journalists to penetrate... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=22667 Who is behind "Al Qaeda in Iraq"? Pentagon acknowledges fabricating a "Zarqawi Legend" Michel Chossudovsky, Globalresearch.ca ...If indeed Zarqawi's role was fabricated as part of the Pentagon's PSYOP, what is the accuracy of these media reports? The internal military documents leaked to Washington Post confirm that the Pentagon is involved in an ongoing propaganda campaign which seeks to provide a face to the enemy. The purpose is to portray the enemy as a terrorist, to mislead public opinion. Counterterrorism! and war propaganda are intertwined. The propaganda apparatus feeds disinformation into the news chain. The objective is to present the terror groups as "enemies of America." responsible for countless atrocities in Iraq and around the World. The underlying objective is to galvanize public opinion in support of America's Middle East war agenda. US military-intelligence has created it own terrorist organizations... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=22668 Robbery, not reconstruction, in Iraq Derrick Z. Jackson, Boston Globe Columnist The great liberator of Iraq was actually the hyena that cleaned out the nation. Piece by piece, Halliburton over here, a corrupt company over there, we have heard various individual cases of overcharging and fraud by American firms in the reconstruction of Iraq. Last weekend, a Globe story connected some of the dots of corruption. Of $20.7 billion in Iraqi bank accounts and oil revenues seized by the Coalition Provisional Authority in! the US-led invasion of Iraq, $14 billion was given out for reconstruction but tens of millions of dollars were unaccounted for. A year ago, an audit by the inspector general found no evidence of work done or goods delivered on 154 of 198 contracts. Sixty cases of potential swindles are under investigation... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=22669 The Splendid Failure of Occupation Part 43: The scheme behind the bombardment of Iraq B. J. Sabri, Online Journal Contributing Writer In retrospect, the effective date for U.S. imperialists to destabilize Iraq and attack it at an opportune moment began on August 20, 1988. On that date, Iran had finally accepted a ceasefire offered by Iraq years earlier (...) Having explored thus far U.S. determination to attack Iraq even before it invaded Kuwait, and having established the ideology to destroy vital ! civilian and military infrastructures during the military phase of the aggression, we must now ask, what was the extent of measures U.S. planners sought to asphyxiate Iraq as a working nation and as a society? And to what extent did American Modified and Accepted Hitlerism (as an ideological tool of U.S. imperialism) play in the execution of Iraq’s destruction? (...) First, based on the rejection of all proposals advanced by Iraq, the Soviet Union, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, and France to resolve the standoff, the spasmodic intentionality for war is a solid fact, meaning U.S. imperialism had an agenda that exploits regional conflicts to further its interest and impose its hegemonic tentacles around the globe. Nevertheless, the decision for war could not find exclusive explanations solely in the objectives of American imperialism. A decisive factor, as we shall explore that in the upcoming parts, is Zionism because of its history in the Middle East (...) Second, because U.S. pla! nners were intent on obliterating Iraq as a nation through the! decimat ion of population, destruction of the industrial base, polluted air, contaminated water, unsafe food, lack of electricity, broken health system, and by impeding postwar recovery, it is a historical responsibility to proclaim that the United States as a system goes beyond Nazism... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=22672 The New Fashion Brought to Iraq Treasure of Baghdad In 1999, I was a freshman in college. Living in a former secular country, most Iraqis had no difference in dealing with each other. In college, I had a wonderful group of friends, males and females. Our group consisted of two males and two females. I have to say that those days we spent at college were the best in my life (...) My female friends did not put on scarf, like most Iraqi female students before the war. They did not even believe in putting it on. Eve! ry year, there was a graduation celebration in colleges and universities marking the end of four-year undergraduate studies. University students decorate their colleges and sections with roses and colorful ribbons, female students dress up like models with their hair playing in the fresh air, and male students compete on who is going to dress more elegantly to look handsome. Female and male students gather according to their sections and hand in hand, they all dance on the loud DJ music (...9 This no longer exists. After the U.S.-led occupation to Iraq, religious parties brought by the occupier from neighboring Iran and from other countries imposed their own understanding of the scarf on the secular society. They started forcing women to wear scarves directly and indirectly... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=22673 DAILY WAR NEWS FOR TUESDAY, April 18, 2006 Today in Iraq ...Bomb explodes Baghdad cafe frequented by policemen, killing at least seven people and wounding more than 20. Three policemen were among those killed, and the rest were civilians. Roadside bombing in western Baghdad misses police patrol, wounding a civilian driver instead. Four civilians killed and 22 others including four policemen wounded when roadside bomb blast hits police patrol in a eastern Baghdad district. 15 bullet-riddled bodies found across Bag! hdad of men shot execution-style. Two bombings target small Shiite mosques in northern and eastern Baghdad. There were no casualties, but one of the mosques was severely damaged, police said. Bodies of four unidentified men with multiple gunshot wounds and showing signs of torture found northeast of Yusufiya, 15 km (9 miles) south of Baghdad... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=22680 Can Hamas make the change to a Political Organization? Mike Whitney Occupation is the seed-bed for terrorism. It creates a uniquely fertile environment for random acts of violence directed at civilians. The insightful analysis of Robert A. Pape "Al Qaeda's Smart Bombs" NY Times 7-9-05 dispels many of the commonly held misconceptions about suicide bombing and provides statistical evidence of the real factors that are involved. What is involved in nearly every case is occupation; the root cause of suicide b! ombing. Occupation, not religious fanaticism, is the seminal act of terror from which all the smaller, independent acts emerge... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=22681 Wurmser knew Xymphora Robert Dreyfuss writes about the power of the Office of the Vice President, and in particular here on David Wurmser, the Likudnik neocon who has largely gotten a free pass in discussions of who to blame for Iraq (...) Even among ardent supporters of Israel, Wurmser - and his wife, Meyrav, who runs the Hudson Institute’s Middle East program - is considered an extremist. In 1996, the Wurmsers, Perle, and Feith co-authored the famous 'Clean Break’ paper for then-Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu! , which called for radical measures to redraw the map of the entire Middle East (Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Palestine) to benefit Israel. Later, in a series of papers and a book, Wurmser argued that toppling Saddam was likely to lead directly to civil war and the breakup of Iraq, but he supported the policy anyway: 'The residual unity of [Iraq] is an illusion projected by the extreme repression of the state.’ After Saddam, Iraq will 'be ripped apart by the politics of warlords, tribes, clans, sects, and key families,’ he wrote. 'Underneath facades of unity enforced by state repression, [Iraq’s] politics is defined primarily by tribalism, sectarianism, and gang/clan-like competition.’ Yet Wurmser explicitly urged the United States and Israel to 'expedite’ such a collapse... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=22685 The Statue and I Bari Attwan, Alquds Alarabi ...Before the fall of the statue, Iraq was under a criminal sanction regime. Whilst, cooperating with the UN inspectors, Iraq was proactive in the distribution of food rationing to every Iraqi family in a timely monthly manner. Iraq was relatively safe, stable and united. Iraqis had water and electricity; and were able to go to work in the morning with the knowledge they would get to work alive and safely return at the day’s close of play; all were equal in their pligh! t under the criminal UN sanction regime that had claimed the lives of 500,000 babies by the year 1998. The Iraq of today, and after three years from the fall of the statue, is without security and tranquillity of any sort. Iraq is without a present and certainly with no future the way things stand; no water, no electricity, and no jobs. But there is plenty of car bombs, hundreds of unknown dead bodies litter the streets; bodies of dead ordinary Iraqis who had been blind-folded and had their hands tied behind their backs before executed with a single bullet in the back of the head; with often evidence of sever torture 'presumably’ before execution... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=22682 GI Special 4D18: Carve It On Your Heart - April 18, 2006 Thomas F. Barton The latest opinion polls in the United States show that most Americans are now against the military campaign in Iraq. Garett Reppenhagen's experience in Iraq, where he served for a year, has changed his mind on the occupation and has led him to leave the US Army. He now campaigns for a group of former soldiers, Iraq Veterans Against the War. hey have fought there, become disillusioned and say it is time for America to pull out... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=22683 Iraqi Resistance Report for events of Tuesday, 18 April 2006 Translated and/or compiled by Muhammad Abu Nasr, member, editorial board, the Free Arab Voice ...In a dispatch posted at 11:25am Makkah time Tuesday morning, Mafkarat al-Islam reported that fierce fighting was raging at the time of reporting in the northern Baghdad area of al-A'zamiyah between Iraqi Resistance fighters and US and Iraqi puppet troops. The correspondent for Mafkarat al-Islam reported eyewitnesses in al-A'zamiyah as saying that the battle ! broke out on Tuesday morning when the joint US-Iraqi puppet forces attempted to storm the district in order to carry out mass arrests among the residents. Iraqi Resistance fighters among the local residents, armed with light and medium weapons and pipe rockets resisted the American-led assault. The Americans were seen bringing in numerous US and Iraqi puppet army reinforcements backed up by helicopter gun ships that had all been massing on perimeter of al-A'zamiyah in preparation for a major assault... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=22686 public service announcement - things aren't born from nothing peacepalestine ...9,400 Palestinian men, women, and children are in prison. According to numerous human rights reports, Palestinian prisoners are frequently tortured. Defense for Children International reports that 4,000 Palestinian children have been arrested in the past five years, 400 of them currently in prison, including a fifteen-year-old girl, who has been in prison for over a year after being shot in the stomach by Israeli soldiers. DCI reports! that the arrests are increasing. Additional Information from Defense for Children International: According to DCI: "The process of arrest and detention of Palestinian children is a process of systematic abuse and mistreatment which flouts international legal standards and denies the basic human rights of detainees first as children and secondly as prisoners...[children are] handcuffed and blindfolded, humiliated and threatened and often beaten and kicked from the moment they are arrested up to and often throughout their interrogation and detention. They are deprived of sleep, food and access to the bathroom until so-called confessions are coerced out of them..." Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=22684 In glorious al Anbar district Fierce fighting at this very moment with the fascist US occupiers. Special blog from Al-Anbar - Al Moharer Right this very moment there are ongoing fierce battles in heroic al Ramady, in al Anbar district, the invaders' killer, al Ramady whose only name petrifies the US army rabble scary cowards. The US invading army themselves is recognizing idol Zion defeat in the immaculate land of the two rivers.. Mesopotamia the graveyard of every Zion invaders.. They admitted losing 40 of their! idol Zion mercenaries in the first two weeks of April only... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=22675 Fears grow over Sunni backing for Iraq insurgency Steve Negus, Financial Times ...It is significant that the street fighting in Adhamiya has been portrayed, by the Iraqi media and Sunni leaders, as neighbourhood self-defence rather than an insurgent attack on security forces. It could strengthen the insurgents’ claim to be fighting for the Sunni population as a whole. It comes after months of accusations from Sunni leaders that the Shia-dominated government is sanctioning death squad activity, both by the securit! y forces and by independent Shia militias such as the Mahdi Army or Badr Forces... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=22688 The oil reason for Iran talk Xymphora ...Oil prices were sagging, so we recently heard, out of the blue, that the Kuwaiti oil fields were failing. There was no evidence for this, but it succeeded in keeping the price up for a while. Keeping the price per barrel as high as possible is the single most important reason for all the talk about Iran. All the talk about the United States wanting to control the oil fields of Iraq or Iran is more spin; the key is to control the oil market... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=22670 Malkin crosses the line in Santa Cruz Crooks and Liars Here's a video from FOX & Friends with Cody James, a student at the university who wanted to see the recruiters and says the protesters were not violent. Whatever your beliefs are regarding military recruiting at colleges, Michelle Malkin crosses the line of decency by printing the telephone numbers of the students that formed the protest. They have been receiving death threats non-stop. An emailer wrote me and said: "The protest was reported on by Hannity! and OReilly. Michelle Malkin put actual students' phone numbers on her blog and they've been getting death threats nonstop."... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=22678 Sunni District in Baghdad Is Sealed Off EDWARD WONG, NYTimes American and Iraqi troops sealed off one of Baghdad's most prominent Sunni Arab neighborhoods on Monday after a night of raging gun battles that left homes and storefronts riddled with bullets and at least one civilian dead, Iraqi officials and witnesses said. The closing of Adhamiya, in northern Baghdad, seemed to signal deteriorating security in a neighborhood where attacks on American and Iraqi forces had ebbed in recent months. The area is home to h! ard-line Sunni Arabs who remain hostile to the Shiite-led government and the American presence. At its center is the well-known Abu Hanifa Mosque, where Saddam Hussein made his final public appearance in April 2003 before fleeing Baghdad and the American invasion force... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=22671 Marines Repel Large Attack in Ramadi, Iraq, U.S. Military Says Bloomberg Marines in western Iraq damaged a mosque in Ramadi after coming under what the U.S. military said were coordinated attacks involving heavy machine guns, mortars and rocket-propelled grenades. A series of attacks, which also involved ``multiple homicide car bombs'' and small-arms fire, were directed at Marines in central Ramadi from locations including the Fatemat Mosque yesterday afternoon, the U.S. Army said in a statement from Baghdad rece! ived this morning. Marines responded with tank fire aimed at the minaret of the mosque, ending that attack... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=22674 State Department Memo: "16 Words" Were False Jason Leopold, t r u t h o u t Sixteen days before President Bush's January 28, 2003, State of the Union address in which he said that the US learned from British intelligence that Iraq had attempted to acquire uranium from Africa - an explosive claim that helped pave the way to war - the State Department told the CIA that the intelligence the uranium claims were based upon were forgeries, according to a newly declassified State Department memo. The revelation of the! warning from the closely guarded State Department memo is the first piece of hard evidence and the strongest to date that the Bush administration manipulated and ignored documents information in their zeal to win public support for invading Iraq... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=22676 Rumsfeld Shouldn't Be Fired. He Should Be Indicted. Matthew Rothschild, The Progressive It's not Donald Rumsfeld's colossal arrogance or his glaring misjudgments we should be focusing on. It's his potential crimes. The mainstream media in the U.S. is giving enormous attention to the retired generals who are demanding Donald Rumsfeld's resignation because of his autocratic style and his bungling in Iraq. But the mainstream media is barely discussing Rumsfeld's alleged culpability in the abusive treatment of detai! nees, up to and including torture... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=22687 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.