[UrukNet] - [Daily Information from Occupied Iraq] - [newsletter 20 Apr 2006]

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America’s Terror-war in Iraq Mike Whitney ... The Iraqi resistance has never abandoned their original strategy to attack American troops, Iraqi security forces, and oil pipelines. Why would they… their strategy is succeeding? The idea that they suddenly shifted directions from guerilla warfare to sectarian violence following the demolition of the Golden-domed mosque is pure myth intended to persuade the American public that the uptick in violence is not created by the occupation but by deep-seated ethnic and reli! gious divisions. That’s not what is happening. What’s really taking place is that American armed and trained death squads are attacking Sunnis and Shiite alike to facilitate a break-up of Iraq which Pentagon planners and right wing ideologues have sought from the very beginning. The media, of course, is assisting in the disinformation campaign by dumping the Zarqawi fantasy and spinning an entirely new storyline centered on the destruction of the golden-domed mosque. Readers should be sensitive to the reiteration of this theme in nearly every article appearing in the New York Times and the Washington Post; the headwaters of the American propaganda system... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=22729 Iraqi Women Under Siege: Read Report! CODEPINK Women for Peace The Iraqi women who toured the United States last month told us that they were amazed by how misinformed many Americans were about the lives of Iraqi women. Most Americans thought that before the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, Iraqi women were sitting at home oppressed, heavily veiled and secluded, and that thanks to the US invasion, they are now liberated. This is what the Bush administration would like us to believe, but after listening to our Iraqi f! riends many people now know better. To further shed light on the true status of Iraqi women, CODEPINK has released an in-depth report Iraqi Women Under Siege (...) The report shows that from 1958 to the 1990s, Iraq provided more rights and freedoms for women and girls than most of its neighbors (...) After the occupation, with the exception of women in Iraqi Kurdistan, women’s daily lives have been reduced to a mere struggle for survival... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=22746 Of Little Boys and Fat Men Anwaar Hussain, Fountainhead Little Boy and Fat Man were the first nuclear weapons used in warfare. Little Boy was dropped from a B-29 bomber, it exploded approximately 1,800 feet over Hiroshima, Japan, on the morning of August 6, 1945, with a force equal to 13,000 tons of TNT. Immediate deaths were reported to be between 70,000 to 130,000. Fat Man was dropped on Nagasaki three days later, on August 9, 1945, devastating more than two square miles of the city and causing approximately 4! 5,000 immediate deaths. America was the country that first used that weapon. As reported recently in the international press, once again the incumbent President of the same country is planning a massive bombing campaign against yet another country... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=22745 Health care in Iraq: the limited memory of The New York Times Eli Stephens, Left I on the News Two weeks ago, I wrote about the unfulfilled (to put it mildly) "promise" of the United States to build 142 health clinics in Iraq. Today The New York Times editorializes on the subject, calling on the U.S. to keep its promise. But the Times' has rather selective memory of the past (...) Errors of commission and omission abound. First, the claim that it was "30 years ago" that Iraq was a regional leader in health care i! s bogus; that was the case up until the U.S. assault on Iraq and the subsequent sanctions. And why? The Times accurately mentions "lack of clean water and sanitation," but they left out one detail -- the water purification plants of Iraq were deliberately (and illegally) bombed and destroyed during that war by the U.S., with foreknowledge of what the consequences would be -- genocide on a massive scale... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=22744 Weiner “Savage” Calls for Genocide of Muslims Kurt Nimmo Clear Channel’s KNEW 910 A.M. resident fascist and misanthropic beatnik, Michael "Savage" Weiner, has called for slaughtering 100 million Muslims, thus winning this year’s Ann Coulter award for hatemongering. Weiner told listeners that "intelligent people, wealthy people … are very depressed by the weakness that America is showing to these psychotics in the Muslim world. They say, 'Oh, there’s a billion of them’…. I said, 'So, kill 100 million of them, then! there’d be 900 million of them.’ I mean … would you rather us die than them?…. Would you rather we disappear or we die? Or would you rather they disappear and they die? Because you’re going to have to make that choice sooner rather than later"... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=22743 Cindy Sheehan: The Human Cost of Peace Samuel Bostaph ...After her August 2005 vigil in Crawford, there followed a succession of lies, distortions, misrepresentations and facile interpretations designed to paint Cindy Sheehan as an opportunistic, self-centered, lying media whore who uses her son’s death as a means both to enhance her own celebrity and to aid the political left in its war against George Bush. None of this was, or is, true... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=22741 Coup and counter-coup: The struggle for Iraq Sami Moubayed Amid all the political confusion in Iraq, Baghdad is swirling with rumors that former prime minister Iyad Allawi is planning a military coup to end the gridlock over the choice of Ibrahim al-Jaafari as prime minister-designate. Allawi's group currently has 25 seats in the 275-seat parliament - not enough to realize the former prime minister's ambitions through democratic and legal means, justifying, perhaps, a military coup to achieve them by force... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=22734 Sex and money bought Iraq contracts Christian Miller A CONTRACTOR in Iraq has pleaded guilty to providing money, sex and designer watches to US officials in exchange for more than $US8 million ($10.8 million) in reconstruction contracts. Philip Bloom faces up to 40 years in prison after admitting paying more than $US2 million in bribes to US officials with the Coalition Provisional Authority, which ruled Iraq after the US-led invasion in 2003... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=22739 Cheney, the Neocons, and China The Solution to “Enemy Deprivation Syndrome” Gary Leupp, www.dissidentvoice.org Robert Dreyfuss’ article "Vice Squad," about the Office of the Vice President in the American Prospect) is the best piece I’ve seen in awhile on the neoconservatives and their persistent influence in the Bush Administration. But it also places the neocons’ Middle East preoccupation in wider perspective. Dreyfuss notes that the OVP is "very difficult for journalists to penetrate" because of it! s extraordinary, unprecedented degree of secrecy. Even so, "a Prospect investigation shows that the key to Cheney’s influence lies with the corps of hard-line acolytes he assembled in 2001. They serve not only as his eyes and ears, monitoring a federal bureaucracy that resists many of Cheney’s pet initiatives, but sometimes serve as his fists, too, when the man from Wyoming feels that the passive-aggressive bureaucrats need bullying"... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=22736 Street Battles in Adhamiya Zeyad, Healing Iraq ...American Humvees entered Adhamiya and returned fire at everything that moved. The fire was random now and at 1 pm the situation had calmed down again. People were seen on the streets at 5 pm and bakeries and supermarkets opened for a couple of hours. We went out for supplies; bread, petrol, cigarettes and Pepsi. There was no electric power since Monday morning. We heard from friends and relatives that life was going on 'normally' in other parts of the capital; the! obligatory car bomb or roadside bomb, politicians still bickering, corpses still turning up at random locations, people still being kidnapped and assassinated, you know, the usual everyday stuff (...) The district is getting extremely difficult to navigate. As you can see from the photos below, there are barricades blocking every street and back alley. The area is now one huge fortress, armed to the teeth and expecting an attack any moment now... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=22735 The generals’ revolt and the decay of US democracy Bill Van Auken, WSWS The demand by more than a half-dozen former senior military commanders that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld resign has laid bare deep divisions within the state apparatus and the profound decay of America’s bourgeois democratic order. President George W. Bush lashed out at Rumsfeld’s critics Tuesday in shouted remarks in the White House Rose Garden that combined belligerence and hysteria. Declaring that he did not "appreciate the speculatio! n" about the defense secretary’s future, Bush declared, "I hear the voices, and I read the front page, and I know the speculation. But I’m the decider, and I decide what is best, and what’s best is for Don Rumsfeld to remain as the secretary of defense"... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=22731 Iraq PM OKs Reconsideration of Nomination ROBERT H. REID, Associated Press Writer Bowing to intense pressure, Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari agreed Thursday to allow Shiite lawmakers to vote again on their choice to head the new government, abandoning his claim on another term in the face of Sunni and Kurdish opposition (...) It was unclear why al-Jaafari decided to relinquish the nomination that he won by a single vote with backing from radical anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr during a ballot among Shiite! lawmakers two months ago. Al-Jaafari had insisted Wednesday that stepping aside was ``out of the question.''... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=22733 Iraqi Resistance Report for events of Thursday, 20 April 2006 Translated and/or compiled by Muhammad Abu Nasr, member, editorial board, the Free Arab Voice ...In a dispatch posted at 3:30pm Makkah time Thursday afternoon, Mafkarat al-Islam reported that US-installed Iraqi "Prime Minister" Ibrahim al-Ja'fari had issued an order to expel hundreds of Arab refugees from Iran living in the south of Iraq, a number of them for many years. The al-Basrah correspondent for Mafkarat al-Islam reported a source in the al-Basr! ah puppet police as saying that an official direction had been issued to the al-Basrah puppet police command ordering them to expel the families from Iran’s al-Ahwaz province who were living in al-Basrah and in the other southern Iraqi city of al-'Amarah in Maysan Province. The families, members of the Arab ethnic minority that felt persecuted at the hands of the Iranian government, have in many cases been living in the southeast of Iraq since before the American invasion in 2003... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=22732 To Iraqi and Arab brothers and sisters. Hana Abdul Ilah Albayaty, BRussells Tribunal With your help and support, the BRussells Tribunal was able to inform world public opinion on the sufferings of the educated class in Iraq under the occupation and its collaborators. The signatures of support for this campaign reached more than 8000, of persons and organisations, representing the world’s intellectual elite. We are continuing our campaign. We now have a network of relations all over! the world that we hope to mobilise to defend Iraqi academics and help them... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=22730 A Case for the Palestinian Government Ramzy Baroud ...Is it not unfair to demand an occupied nation to recognize the same entity that has illegally expropriated its future capital - East Jerusalem - to become part of its own "greater" capital, in defiance of international law? Wouldn’t the PA be recognizing Israel’s sovereignty over what Israel conceives as part of "proper Israel" which includes much of the West Bank and all of Jerusalem? What’s even more sanctimonious is demanding that the Palestinian government! disown violence. Is this some sort of crude joke that the West insists on playing on Palestinians, keeping in mind that Hamas has religiously adhered to a self-declared one-sided ceasefire with Israel for over a year?... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=22747 Open Letter to SFSU President on Student Protest Dear Dr. Corrigan: On Friday, April 14 ten SFSU students protested military recruitment at the university's career fair. Campus police interrupted their protest and physically took the students from the school's gymnasium where they were protesting. The police then notified the students that they were banned from campus. You officially confirmed the ban that same day, and the campus chief of police notified students that if they returned to campus prior to April 28th, they would be "subject to immediate arrest." When the students called to request a hearing, they were told they would have to wait until May. We were glad to hear - for the sake of the students - that you withdrew the ban three days later, on Monday. Several students who lived or worked on campus became instantly homeless or unemployed by your arbitrary action... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=22727 Try living this Firas Al-Atraqchi, Al-Ahram Weekly ...The Brookings Institution, a "non-profit organisation devoted to independent research and innovative policy solutions", says kidnappings increased from two a day in December 2004 to 10 a day in January 2005 in Baghdad alone. Kidnappings have become such a daily hazard for a host of reasons. First and foremost, the lack of a viable police infrastructure and the infiltration of the police force by criminal gangs and death squads has created a vacuum in the secu! rity environment in which such occurrences have become commonplace... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=22720 Time's Arrow: The Coming Nuclear Epiphany in Persia Chris Floyd Twelve hours. One circuit of the sun from horizon to horizon, one course of the moon from dusk to dawn. What was once a natural measurement for the daily round of human life is now a doom-laden interval between the voicing of an autocrat's brutal whim and the infliction of mass annihilation halfway around the world. Twelve hours is the maximum time necessary for American bombers to gear up and launch an unprovoked sneak attack – a Pearl Harbor in rev! erse – against Iran, the Washington Post reports. The plan for this "global strike," which includes a very viable "nuclear option," was approved months ago, and is now in operation... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=22722 Generals fall out over Rumsfeld Clash over how to win wars, not stop them Deirdre Griswold, Workers World The stresses and strains within the Bush administration, the Pentagon and Congress have reached a new and unprecedented level of intensity. They come not only from the military’s desperate position in Iraq but also from apprehension over reported plans for a new assault on another oil-rich country in the Middle East—Iran. A number of retired generals, obviously speaking for many active-duty officer! s as well, have openly criticized Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and called for his resignation (...) These generals are not doves. They are for winning this and other wars for U.S. imperialist dominance in the world. But they have lost confidence in the Rumsfeld doctrine of doing it with a minimum of ground troops reliant on high-tech air power... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=22719 Coup and counter-coup: The struggle for Iraq Sami Moubayed Amid all the political confusion in Iraq, Baghdad is swirling with rumors that former prime minister Iyad Allawi is planning a military coup to end the gridlock over the choice of Ibrahim al-Jaafari as prime minister-designate. Allawi's group currently has 25 seats in the 275-seat parliament - not enough to realize the former prime minister's ambitions through democratic and legal means, justifying, perhaps, a military coup to achieve them by force... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=22734 The veil of 'American Liberation' descends upon Iraqi Women Imad Khadduri , Free Iraq ...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. Women, who joined these "religious" and political parties or trends, started the new trend of "religious fashion": Wearing Burqa and gloves to hide their faces and ! hands. Not only this, they started giving lectures to the newly joined female members to make them spread the idea of wearing hijab and burqa. A colleague of mine emailed me a disgusting photo of how this issue is changing the shape of the Iraqi women who once were ones of the most fashionable women in the world in former cosmopolitan cities like Baghdad, Basra, and Mosul. I was so disgusted when I saw the photo. Inside me, I was shouting "Nooooooo. It shouldn’t be like this. We were not like this. Enough distortion and abuse to the women"... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=22738 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.