[UrukNet] - [Daily Information from Occupied Iraq] - [newsletter 05 May 2006]

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Kill them all and let God sort it Out Mike Whitney Genocide is a political term completely devoid of meaning. When Colin Powell first made his claim that genocide was taking place in Sudan the most reliable figures showed that approximately 98,000 people had been killed in Darfur. At the same time the UK’s most-respected medical journal Lancet estimated that 100,000 Iraqis (mostly civilians) had been killed in the invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq. That was in 2004.Recent estimates put that figure at 250! ,000 to 300,000. So, which country was really undergoing genocide; Sudan; with a population of 48 million or Iraq with a population of 25 million? It’s clear that Iraq, in terms of population, suffered at least 4 times the number of casualties as Sudan although the term genocide has never appeared in any western newspaper nor will it... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23101 PICNIC in Herzliya Xymphora From a question asked by a real journalist (whose name we do not know) of John Bolton (my emphasis in red): "REPORTER: Sir, you talked quite often about the credibility of the UN ... JOHN BOLTON: And so has Secretary Rice. REPORTER: yes and Rice has as well but that seems to work in your favor when they do what you want them to do but you violated the UN Charter when you went to war against Iraq and you consistently lied to us about the reasons that we went to war. And this war was drawn up in Herzlia, Israel, in 1996, with the Project of a New American Century; and why do you have credibility other than that you've just got the biggest guns?"(...)The Project for a New American Century was officially founded in Washington in 1997. Almost immediately, it tried to stir up an American attack on Iraq. Is the reporter telling us that PNAC and the attack on Iraq were actually planned at the 1996 Jerusalem Summit held in Herzliya? Should PNAC in really be called the Project in Connivance of a New Israeli Century, or PICNIC? Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23094 GI Special 4E5 - It's Not Worth It HTML - May 5, 2006 Thomas F. Barton ...Having served in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam era, I recall vividly how another arrogant secretary of defense with a poor understanding of military science, Robert McNamara, led America to a humiliating defeat in Indochina. The generals should have taken him on then, but remained mute. Today, no Washington official will yet admit it, but the U.S. has suffered a major strategic defeat in Iraq by failing to achieve its political objective! of turning it into an obedient colony. The generals’ revolt reflects this unspoken fact and is clearly intended to lay blame for the Iraq fiasco where it belongs: the White House. These patriots are not going to suffer another Robert McNamara in silence. Once the "who lost Iraq?" cry goes up, the White House will try to blame the military, just as it sought to lay blame on the CIA for so-called "intelligence failures" over Iraq’s non-existent WMDs... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23115 9/11, American Empire, and Christian Faith David Ray Griffin, Globalresearch.ca In this essay, I offer a Christian critique of the American empire in light of 9/11, and of 9/11 in light of the American empire. Such a critique, of course, presupposes a discussion of 9/11 itself, especially the question of who was responsible for the attacks. The official theory is that the attacks were planned and carried out entirely by Arab Muslims. The main alternative theory is that 9/11 was a "false flag" operation, orchestra! ted by forces within the US government who made it appear to be the work of Arab Muslims... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23109 Iraqi Resistance Report for events of Friday, 5 May 2006 Translated and/or compiled by Muhammad Abu Nasr, member, editorial board, the Free Arab Voice. http://www.freearabvoice.org In a dispatch posted at 2:40pm Makkah time Friday afternoon, Mafkarat al-Islam reported that an Iraqi Resistance bomb exploded by a foot patrol of US occupation troops and Iraqi puppet army soldiers in the al-Bu Hazim area of Jazirat al-Khalidiyah near the town of al-Khalidiyah, about 80km west of Baghdad. The correspondent for Mafkar! at al-Islam reported eyewitnesses in al-Bu Hazim as saying that the bomb went off by the joint foot patrol in their village, killing one American and two Iraqi puppet troops. Two other American troops and one more Iraqi puppet soldier were wounded in the blast, the witnesses said... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23108 Cole versus Hitchens Xymphora ...Concentrating on what Ahmadinejad says or might have said plays entirely into the Zionist ploy of depicting Israel as the victim on the verge of suffering an annihilation which requires it to do the terrible things it does to the Palestinians and other peoples in the Middle East. It is not a coincidence that MEMRI collects such statements. Anything Ahmadinejad says pales into insignificance against Israel calling for the destruction of Iraq and then using its agents in the Ameri! can government to ensure that such destruction occurred. The real and not fantasy destruction of Iraq is the issue, as is the issue of the real and not fantasy destruction of the aspirations of the Palestinian people to have their own country. By getting into this tiff with Hitchens, and in fact by opening the door to this debate by trying to clarify what Ahmadinejad said, Cole leaves everybody with the impression that what Ahmadinejad says is important, which is more ammunition for the Zionist propagandists... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23106 Bush Clears the Way for Corporate Domination Joshua Holland When George W. Bush says that he wants to spread freedom to every corner of the earth, he means it. But of course the president that turned Soviet-era gulags into secret CIA prisons in order to do God-knows-what to God-knows-whom isn't talking about individual freedom. He means corporate freedom - freedom for the great multinationals to extract everything they can from the world's resources and labor without the hindrance of public interest laws, environ! mental regulations or worker protections.Bush's vision of a free world actually looks just like the corporate globalization agenda pushed by a succession of American presidents in institutions like the World Trade Organization. But this administration yearns for freedom too much to leave it up to trade negotiators. Unlike his predecessors, Bush isn't content to use carrots and sticks and a liberal dose of arm twisting to advance that agenda. His administration has made the neoliberal policies euphemistically referred to as "free-trade" a centerpiece of its national security policy... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23105 Is It Possible to Have a Civilized Discussion About the Role of Israel in American Foreign Policy? The Storm over "the Israel Lobby" JOHN MEARSHEIMER and STEPHEN WALT ...We close with a final comment about the controversy surrounding our article. Although we are not surprised by the hostility directed at us, we are still disappointed that more attention has not been paid to the substance of the piece. The fact remains that the United States is in deep trouble in the Middle East, and it will not be able! to develop effective policies if it is impossible to have a civilised discussion about the role of Israel in American foreign policy... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23104 DAILY WAR NEWS FOR FRIDAY, May 5, 2006 Today in Iraq Three U.S. soldiers were killed when a roadside bomb struck their vehicle in Babil province, south of Baghdad, the U.S. military said in a statement. A police spokesman said the blast struck a Humvee patrol vehicle near the town of Mahaweel, 75 km (50 miles) south of the capital (...) A roadside bomb struck a U.S. patrol near Mahaweel, 75 km (50 miles) south of Baghdad, causing casualties, an Iraqi police spokesman said. The U.S. military had no immediate comm! ent. Bodies of five Iraqis who apparently were kidnapped and killed in captivity were found Friday, four in Baghdad and one on the outskirts of the city, police said. Gunmen kill local community leader in Baqubah. Three bodies of men who had been handcuffed and shot to death found in the town of Khalis, about 10 miles northeast of Baqubah... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23103 The $2 trillion war Eli Stephens, Left I on the News Just a few posts ago, I wrote: "And including the money that will need to be spent in the future, even if the war stops today, closer to $1 trillion." That was a valid statement...sort of. The $1 trillion figure comes from a paper (pdf link) by Linda Bilmes, a lecturer at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, and Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Professor at Columbia University and a 2001 Nobel laureate in economics. News reports of the study appeared in the press ! a few days ago, but now an extensive yet easy-to-read summary of the article has been published in the latest issue of Harvard Magazine. Reading that article reminded me of the conclusion I had seen in the press but forgotten -- that although $1 trillion is the estimated amount of "money that will need to be spent" (obviously dependent on assumptions about what will happen in the future!), it is not the total economic cost of the war... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23102 Ahmed’s Story – A Cruel, Barbaric Death Ali Hili Ahmed Khalil was a likeable, playful 14 year old boy, born in the southern Iraqi town of al-Ammara. The eldest child, he came from an uneducated family who lived in great poverty (...) In early April 2006, Ahmed was found dead on the doorstep of his house. He had been shot, with two bullets in the head and several bullets in the rest of his body. According to a neighbour, who saw Ahmed’s execution from his bedroom window, four uniformed police officers arrived at ! Ahmed's house in a four-wheel-drive police pick-up truck. The neighbour saw the police drag Ahmed out of the house and shoot him at point-blank range. Several other neighbours confirm this account, although they did not see the actual shooting. They say they heard gunshots and saw the police leaving the scene. They then found Ahmed’s body lying on the ground outside his house. It is believed by these neighbours that Ahmed was executed by the police. Two days before Ahmed’s execution, his father was arrested and interrogated by the police. They demanded to know what he knew about Ahmed’s sexual activities and blamed Ahmed for corrupting the community... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23100 Iraq at the mercy of 'kingmaker' Muqtada Sami Moubayed ...Muqtada is accused of engineering death squads while Maliki was head of the de-Ba'athification committees that purged all former Ba'athists (most were Sunnis) from government and the civil service. Maliki had refused to differentiate between those who had joined the party out of simple need for professional development and those who were loyal to Saddam. To him, all of them were enemies who had to be punished. With such a record, Maliki has much in common ! with Muqtada. It was Muqtada who helped Jaafari (a split image of Maliki) win the internal UIA vote in February. He wanted Jaafari and Da'wa to counterbalance the influence of the SCIRI and his traditional opponent in Shi'ite politics, Abdu Aziz al-Hakim. Muqtada and Maliki also share a similar vision - as was the case with Jaafari - in not wanting to see a divided Iraq with a Shi'ite region in the south. At heart, they say - and we have no reason not to believe them - that they are Arab nationalists who believe in Iraq's Arabism. Their only condition is that it be a Shi'ite-dominated Iraq... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23098 Five US soldiers killed in Iraq Middle East Online Three US soldiers were killed in Iraq's Babil province Friday when their vehicle was hit by a roadside bomb, the military said. It said the incident occurred at 11:45 am (0745 GMT), south of Baghdad in the Babil province. Two US soldiers were killed in Baghdad Thursday when their vehicle was hit by a roadside bomb. The incident occurred at 11:45 am (0745 GMT) in south-central Baghdad. Earlier Thursday the military announced the death of a soldier in a non-combat ! incident a day earlier... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23097 Resistance and terrorism in Iraq Saudi writer says media confusing terrorism with resistance in Iraq Jasir Abd-al-Aziz al-Jasir, Globalresearch.ca Therefore, all these grave mistakes have contributed towards the rise of several terrorist groups, among which are the following: 1. The occupation forces, which are morally and legally forces of organized terrorism. The occupation of others and the imposition of their presence by force despite the people's rejection are, by all standards, organized terroris! m, even if the UN considers the occupation of Iraq a reality with which one must deal. 2. Terrorism carried out by the governments that have been formed by the occupation and by their security apparatuses, which are responsible for all the revenge and destructive actions that befell Sunni cities in particular. 3. The terrorism of racist and sectarian militias that came with the occupation... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23096 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.