[UrukNet] - [Daily Information from Occupied Iraq] - [newsletter 01 May 2006]

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Bush’s hand in the Terror War Mike Whitney Robert Fisk has pulled the shroud off Bush’s Iraq policy and exposed the rotting corpse below. In his latest article "Seen through a Syrian Lens". Fisk fingers the US as the driving force behind the present "alleged" sectarian violence in Iraq. He’s produced information from a trusted "security source" that America is "desperately trying to provoke a civil war around Baghdad in order to reduce its own military casualties". It is a charge we’ve heard before but never qui! te as persuasively as from a veteran journalist who his relied on for "getting it right" (...) Americans are sending unsuspecting Iraqis in vehicles to crowded areas, detonating the explosives, and then pinning it on Zarqawi or some other racist invention... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=22987 IRAQ: “THE OCCUPATION IS THE DISEASE” Sarah Meyer The following information is from three highly esteemed Iraqi professional people. Their lives are in danger. Two people’s names and professions have, by request, thus been withheld. ONE: "There is no way out of this 'Camp Iraq.’ " Iraq is worse than during sanctions … "By February 2006, 224 (health professionals) had been killed. 1000 had left the country. Since February, I personally know six more highly specialised doctors who have been killed … Many in ! medical training have also left Iraq … Post graduate studies have closed down because of lack of teaching staff. So a (generation) gap has been created. Experienced doctors are unable to pass on their experience to new doctors … Specialised health services have declined. The airport road used to be a lovely area, with trees and roses. Families used to go there for picnics. An American soldier threw a stone at me because I didn’t stop. My architect friend was killed – shot dead on this road by Americans. If you don’t stop, the Americans will shoot you … The US kill civilians and blame the resistance … Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=22986 Iraq Body Count – The acceptable face of slaughter? William Bowles ...Thus Sloboda, who claims to be anti-war and progressive had this to say about the current slaughter taking place in Iraq: He [Sloboda] says IBC’s figures have been used and cited by mainstream news organizations, British politicians in Parliament and even Tony Blair. "More recently, our data – rather than us being branded as some kind of anti-war, pro-Islam, communist exaggerators – has entered the mainstream," he says. "Our figures are now! taken by most responsible media as the best data there is, in fact the only data there is on civilian casualties in Iraq." Responsible media? I can only take this to mean the corporate and state-run media which, having given IBC the stamp of approval makes it (the IBC) the acceptable face of slaughter. Worse still, is the fact that Sloboda’s claim that his numbers have entered the mainstream belies the fundamental principle of the illegality of the war itself, something IBC never, ever mentions (...) Add to this IBC’s ad hominem attacks and unfounded slurs on progressive commentators and we find that the IBC, whether by accident or design has become a weapon of the warmongers... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=22980 GI Special 4E1: "They Were Not Mindless War Machines" - May 1, 2006 Thomas F. Barton To some viewers, "Sir! No Sir!" will come off as a surefire liberal manifesto, but to those who really know what we’re talking about, "Sir! No Sir!" is a documentation of a group of soldiers who served their country, but then decided they just couldn’t do it anymore because it was unjust, so they stood up for their rights and decided they would fight no longer, and were crucified at the stake. Along with it came a domino effect o! f more and more protestors, gathering of activist organizations, and incidents that would further test their wills. But they stood up for their beliefs, and in that process, they became real heroes that chose not to kill. And yes, there are the ever present parallels to the Iraq war... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23001 Iraqi Resistance Report for events of Monday, 1 May 2006 Translated and/or compiled by Muhammad Abu Nasr, member, editorial board, the Free Arab Voice. In a dispatch posted at 1:40pm Makkah time Monday afternoon, Mafkarat al-Islam reported that Iraqi Resistance forces gave the Iraqi puppet army 72 hours to leave the city of al-Qa’im, located in western Iraq near the Syrian border, or meet death as supporters of the occupation. The al-Qa’im correspondent for Mafkarat al-Islam reported that notices had been posted ! on the ar-Rahman Mosque and the old al-Qa’im Mosque threatening the puppet army soldiers with death if they fail to leave the city within 72 hours. The notice, signed by the Mujahideen of al-Qa’im, said: "Failure of the Iraqi Shi'i sectarian army to leave the city will result in the killing of the Iraqi [puppet] army troops."... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23000 DAILY WAR NEWS FOR MONDAY, May 1, 2006 Today in Iraq ...Wife and daughter of a former construction and housing minister kidnapped in Baghdad. Clashes between U.S. forces and gunmen in Ramadi, leave at least two civilian bystanders dead. In Ramadi, gunmen attacked three policemen traveling in a car carrying the salaries of police in Fallujah, killing one, wounding another, and kidnapping the third with the bag of money. Two people killed by gunmen in two separate incidents in a suburb in Baquba, 60 kilometres nort! heast of Baghdad... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=22998 Happy 3rd birthday, Mission Accomplished Sploid ...On May 1 of 2003, America had lost 139 troops to the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Today that number stands at 2,400. In the three years since we won the war, 17,000 more soldiers have been wounded -- many of them mangled beyond recognition and doomed to live their remaining days without arms or legs. The victory pushed "insurgent attacks" up from eight per day back in 2003 to 75 per day in 2006 (...) But there's some good news for the president on this third ! anniversary of the victory in Iraq: Despite everything that's happened and everything that's known, he remains a free man and still occupies the White House. Amazingly, Bush and his team have yet to be removed from office, prosecuted, convicted of treason, imprisoned or executed... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23004 Iraq Still Below Pre-Invasion Levels: US Report IslamOnline.net Iraq's electricity supplies, economic and social living standards are still below pre-invasion levels as the construction process has been stumbling over corruption and unabated violence, a US congressional inspection team has said in a new scathing report. Many Iraqis still have no access to clean water and lack proper health care systems in a country stricken by serious shortage in hospitals and health centers as well as power outages mainly in Bag! hdad, Stuart Bowen, the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction (Sigir) assigned by Congress, said in his detailed report, Britain's the Guardian newspaper reported Monday, May 1... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=22997 “Out of Iraq, Into Darfur”? Just Saying No to Imperialist Intervention in Sudan Gary Leupp, www.dissidentvoice.org At the huge, inspiring antiwar march in New York yesterday, I noticed many placards with the massage, "Out of Iraq, Into Darfur." They were held by members of a group called "Volunteer for Change," described as "a project of Working Assets." I wasn’t sure what to make of the slogan. Was it somehow satirical, playing on "Out of the frying pan, into the fire" and warning about a future Som! alia-like intervention in Africa? Or was this really a call to take US troops out of Iraq and deploy them instead in "humanitarian" "peacekeeping" in western Sudan?... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=22996 Maverick Interview with Israel Shamir Kim Petersen Israel Shamir is a prominent and controversial Russian-Israeli thinker, writer, and translator who lives in Jaffa. Shamir brings to his political writing a refreshing candor, sharp insight, and inspiring humanity. His principled stand supporting the Palestinian refugees’ right of return and the rebuilding of their destroyed villages led to his firing from the "progressive" Israeli newspaper Haaretz (...) Shamir has renounced Judaism and embraced Chris! tianity. He is a strong proponent of the "One Man, One Vote, One State" solution for a united Israel-Palestine. I interviewed the unflinching maverick writer Israel Shamir... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=22995 US Pays for 150 Iraqi Clinics, and Manages to Build 20 James Glanz, The New York Times A $243 million program led by the United States Army Corps of Engineers to build 150 health care clinics in Iraq has in some cases produced little more than empty shells of crumbling concrete and shattered bricks cemented together into uneven walls, two reports by a federal oversight office have found. The reports, released yesterday, detail a close inspection of five of the clinics in the northern city of Kirkuk as well as a ! sweeping audit of the entire program, which began in March 2004 as a heavily promoted effort to improve health care for ordinary Iraqis. The reports say that none of the five clinics in Kirkuk and only 20 of the original 150 across the country will be completed without new financing... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=22994 Chalabi involved US, Iran policy making again, current and former intelligence officials say Larisa Alexandrovna Ahmed Chalabi, the man who helped provide cooked intelligence on Iraq to the Pentagon and the New York Times in the lead-up to war, is once again being engaged in US policy decisions, current and former intelligence officials say. According to two former high level counterintelligence officials, one former senior counterterrorist official and another intelligence officer, Chalabi is acting as broker be! tween the US Ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, and Iranian officials in what are now stalled diplomatic efforts between the US and Iran... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23003 Families Hunt for Iraq's "Lost" David Enders, The Christian Science Monitor At the small, crowded prisoner-tracking department of the Ministry of Human Rights (MOHR), tears often flow freely. "He was arrested from his house on December 25," sobs Jameela Abdullah Hikmet, who was looking for her brother, Jameel Abdullah Hikmet. With thousands of Iraqis kidnapped and arrested over the past three years, often in murky circumstances, the MOHR has become one more place Iraqis look for missing relatives. More than 34! ,000 Iraqis, according to MOHR figures, are held at one of the dozens of prisons across the country run by either the US military or the Iraqi Ministries of Interior, Defense, and Justice... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=22993 GI Special 4D30: 1% Of Iraqis Trust US Troops - April 30, 2006 Thomas F. Barton A majority of Iraqis say their country is in dismal economic shape and getting worse, with 3 of 4 respondents also describing security in the country as poor, according to a new poll conducted by a conservative American think tank. Only 1 percent said they trust U.S.-led coalition forces for their personal protection. The poll reveals a population with little optimism about its economic future. The findings show that Iraqis believe jo! bs are harder to find, electrical service is poorer, and corruption has increased dramatically since last year... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=22990 Covert American killing of Iraqi civilians Imad Khadduri ...One young Iraqi man told us that he was trained by the Americans as a policeman in Baghdad and he spent 70 per cent of his time learning to drive and 30 per cent in weapons training. They said to him: 'Come back in a week.' When he went back, they gave him a mobile phone and told him to drive into a crowded area near a mosque and phone them. He waited in the car but couldn't get the right mobile signal. So he got out of the car to where he received a bet! ter signal. Then his car blew up... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=22989 Ignoring Colbert: A Small Taste of the Media's Power to Choose the News Peter Daou ...The AP's first stab at it and pieces from Reuters and the Chicago Tribune tell us everything we need to know: Colbert's performance is sidestepped and marginalized while Bush is treated as light-hearted, humble, and funny. Expect nothing less from the cowardly American media. The story could just as well have been Bush and Laura's discomfort and the crowd's semi-hostile reaction to Colbert's razor-sharp barbs. In fact, I would g! uess that from the perspective of newsworthiness and public interest, Bush-the-playful-president is far less compelling than a comedy sketch gone awry, a pissed-off prez, and a shell-shocked audience. This is the power of the media to choose the news, to decide when and how to shield Bush from negative publicity. Sins of omission can be just as bad as sins of commission... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23002 Photos fuel probe into how Iraqi civilians died Barbara Starr, CNN Military investigators are reviewing photographs indicating that Iraqi civilians, including women and children, may have been shot deliberately by U.S. Marines in Haditha last November, according to a military source familiar with the ongoing investigation. It is not clear how many photographs are being reviewed. But the source told CNN the photos are evidence that the Iraqis did not die in a roadside blast as the Marines had originally said... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23007 Arabiya airs video of Saddam aide body "desecration" Reuters Al Arabiya television showed on Monday footage of what it said was the body of a detained aide to former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein being trampled at an Iraqi state-run morgue. It said it was the body of Mohammed al-Zubaidi -- a prime minister during Saddam's era. Zubaidi was number 9 on the U.S. list of most wanted former regime leaders and had been detained in April 2003. Zubaidi died in U.S. custody in December 2005 and was handed over to Iraqi auth! orities. The Dubai-based television said the "body was subjected to desecration apparently by Iraqis". It showed the head being trampled repeatedly (...) Arabiya said U.S. forces said their responsibility for Zubaidi ended with his body's handover. But Khalil al-Dulaimi, the lead attorney in Saddam's trial, told Arabiya: "They (U.S. forces) shoulder the moral and criminal responsibility."... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=22988 Calculating the dead in Iraq Jim Silva, Lompoc Record, CA Documenting the number killed in a war zone is "hard work." It takes something called a large scale mortality study. Only one has been done in Iraq, published in the British medical journal, "The Lancet," and released two days before the 2004 election. It did not get much press coverage, partly because its timing drew suspicions of partisanship. Also, the figure was much larger than other estimates at the time, but the more I learn about the study, the mor! e likely it is that 100,000 was the best estimate, and if anything, low. The study was done by a team of public health researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the Columbia University School of Nursing, and the College of Medicine at Al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad. Dr. Roberts, the lead author, has testified before Congress and is a recognized world expert in counting war dead. His Congo study found 1.7 million civilians killed, a figure cited by Secretary of State Colin Powell, and Tony Blair before Parliament (...) In a February 2006 update to the Lancet study, Dr. Roberts estimated 300,000 Iraqi civilian deaths since the invasion... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=22981 "United 93": What Happened on the Planes? Michel Chossudovsky, Globalresearch.ca This article was first published in August 2004, following the release of the 9/11 Commission Report. Our findings cast doubt on the Commission's narrative regarding what actually happened on board the planes. This narrative, which describes in detail the 9/11 Arab hijackers, is almost entirely based on recorded cell phone conversations. The telecom industry is unequivocal. Given the wireless technology available on September 11 20! 01, these cell calls could not have been placed from high altitude. What happened on the planes is now the object of an "an exhilarating, somber and heroic" Hollywood docu-drama entitled "United 93". Directed by British filmmaker Paul Greengrass, the film describes, taking the "findings" of of the 9/11 Commission at face value... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=22979 In the Air Jeff Wells, Rigorous Intuition ...Many of us have been intuiting spoilers to the story arc of the Iraq War for years: The death squads and black ops creating untenable chaos, sectarian strife and intentional failure to the bogus "mission" of democracy, with the objective of generating the "regretable inevitability" of partition. "Civil War" was talked up, because the End Game for Iraq was always division into impotent colonial Bantusans. We just knew it. It seems like the End Game has arrived, because! suddenly partition, which "just months ago was largely dismissed as a fringe thought," is now being described by the usual suspects in the Pravdas of this empire as being the "surest - and perhaps now the only - way to bring stability to Iraq." And just as The Washington Post chimes in, Joe Biden shows up in The New York Times with an editorial contending that Iraq should be split into three separate ethnographic regions... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=22978 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.