[UrukNet] - [Daily Information from Occupied Iraq] - [newsletter 10 May 2006]

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

LOOK IN THE MIRROR Malcom Lagauche ...People have forgotten the embargo years in Iraq. Nobody gave a shit. Now, today we may see a suicide bomber kill three Americans in an attack. Does anyone realize that the bomber may have had his grandparents and a sister die during the embargo because Iraq was not allowed to import medicine? Or because they were poisoned by drinking water? After a few days of bombing Iraq in 1991, Schwarzkopf took to the podium and proudly stated that the Iraqi drinking water would be poison! ed for years to come. He laughed about it. Many resistance fighters now in Iraq did not laugh and they are getting back for the deaths of family members (...) From 1991 to today, the U.S. has killed about three million Iraqi civilians. In other words, Iraq has suffered one thousand nine-elevens. That's quite a statistic. Those fighting the U.S. occupation today have not forgotten (...) I'm sending you a photo. In April 2004, U.S. Marines killed 800 Iraqi women and children in Fallujah. And this was long before the major destruction of Fallujah. Prior to April 2003, the mass graveyard was the city's soccer stadium.... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23214 Oh my, how things haven’t changed William Bowles, I'n'I ...Admiral Nelson, the Battle of Waterloo and the rest of 'our’ imperial past has been recast to fit the new circumstances but the message is clear; we were Great then and we can be Great again (I’ve even seen the tag-line used 'Let’s put the Great back in Britain’). For a population deep in debt and dissatisfaction and one that never escaped its parochialism, such images are powerful medicine. How else does one explain the fact that the awful nightmare that! has been visited on the people of Iraq doesn’t provoke one almighty howl of outrage and horror? We are complicit as a nation in a crime of such monstrous proportions that it beggars belief, yet it sinks like a lead balloon beneath our vision, drowned in a sea of sentimentality and nostalgia for a past that never existed in the first place and which also seeks to rationalise it, drawing yet again on a completely fictitious notion of civilisation that is alleged, we are 'giving' the Iraqi people! Yes, we can blame master criminals Bush and Blair and an utterly complicit and criminal media but ultimately we cannot escape our own responsibility for permitting a crime of this scale from taking place... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23213 Interview w/ Cindy Sheehan in Seattle for McDermott Fundraiser natasha, Daily Kos ...Sheehan noted that even redeployment might not be what people expect. Of the phrase strategic redeployment, she said that what it meant was withdrawing ground troops while increasing aerial bombardment and using death squads. The comment was a reminder that Iraq's recent ambassador, John Negroponte is intimately familiar with supporting and organizing death squads, that Pentagon discussions on using death squads in Iraq are publi! c knowledge and that U.S. trained Iraqi police forces are known to be among the groups in Iraq using terror tactics that would have been familiar to any Central America watcher during the Reagan administration of which Negroponte is a veteran... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23211 Liar Mike Whitney Rumsfeld is a pathological liar. Nothing he says can be trusted. In 6 years, he’s never uttered a completely reliable statement, just convoluted pronouncements that have to be parsed by experts. That’s why it was so satisfying to see him skewered by Ray McGovern’s questions. McGovern had Rumsfeld backpedaling like he’d just been harpooned. Honesty has that kind of effect on people like Rumsfeld; that’s why they surround themselves with goons like a Mafia kingpin. They need a human-shield to pro! tect them from the truth. The American people have been ripped off big-time by Rummy. From the onset, it’s been one wretched excuse after another. Nothing is ever his fault; not the occupation; not the lack of soldiers; not the looting in Baghdad, not the faulty-armor, not the resistance, nothing. Ever!... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23203 Uniformed Death Squads: Terrorizing Iraq into Disintegration Sabah Ali , The BRussells Tribunal Two long queues of empty coffins are waiting at the hospital gate. Men and women, weary faces under the blazing sun, looking for a father, a son, a husband, a brother, a cousin…etc who disappeared days ago. The families are (hoping) that they would find their loved ones today. They heard that police patrols, specialized in looking for dead bodies in Baghdad streets every morning, have collected 93 bodies from different! garbage and sewage places. The hospital cold storage can not keep more than few tens (in the past they had no more than 10), but they added new ones. Still they can not cover. They keep the bodies for few days, or they do not keep them at all, it all depends on the number. They take pictures of the unidentified bodies, give them numbers, try to find whatever distinguishable mark before burying them, so that they have answers for the families who are waiting in the sun... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23207 The nightmares that fill the Baghdad night In the 'new Iraq' beloved of Bush and Blair, women can be arrested just for complaining. Haifa Zangana ...Those women were killed for giving a voice to the voiceless, but other women are differently abused in the "new Iraq". Under the democracy that is still so highly acclaimed by Bush and Blair, women face arrest just for complaining. Here is an example: On May 3, US forces arrested Sanaa al-Badri, a woman doctor, in Dhuluiya, 25 miles north of Baghdad, a da! y after she accused US forces of stealing $4,000 (£2,145) in gold during a raid on her house, officials said... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23216 Depleted Uranium Stories Breaking Through Media David Swanson Bob Nichols, an investigative reporter for the San Francisco Bay View, tells me that U.S. Airforce Lt. Col. Roger Helbig often threatens media outlets to intimidate them into not covering stories about depleted uranium and radiation. Today, Nichols says, he's been unsuccessfully threatening Rob McConnell, host of http://www.xzone-radio.com...which at 11 p.m. ET this evening and for the following! three hours will be covering the story... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23218 The nuclear hypocrites ERIC RUDER, Socialist worker ...WHILE IRAN hasn’t violated the provisions of the NPT, the same can’t be said of the U.S. (...) The U.S. is in flagrant violation of the NPT’s provisions calling on nuclear powers "to facilitate the cessation of the manufacture of nuclear weapons, the liquidation of all their existing stockpiles, and the elimination from national arsenals of nuclear weapons and the means of their delivery." .. Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23223 Iraqi Resistance Report for events of Wednesday, 10 May 2006 Translated and/or compiled by Muhammad Abu Nasr, member, editorial board, the Free Arab Voice In a dispatch posted at 10:30am Makkah time Wednesday morning, Mafkarat al-Islam reported that US occupation forces began their anticipated new offensive against the people of ar-Ramadi, about 110km west of Baghdad, at dawn on Wednesday. The ar-Ramadi correspondent for Mafkarat al-Islam reported eyewitnesses in the city as saying that more than 500 US troops wi! th air cover from helicopter gunships and warplanes and accompanied by soldiers in the Iraqi puppet army launched their assault on the city from several directions. They began their campaign against the north of the city, specifically the areas around ar-Ramadi General Hospital and then spread out to the center of the city, carrying out house-to-house raids and arrests of local residents. The correspondent reported that US warplanes put up a show of military strength in the sky over the city, firing four rockets at empty houses that harmed neither local civilians nor Resistance fighters... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23224 Feith's Pearl Harbor Xymphora Conspiracy theorists have noted that the events of September 11 look suspiciously like the desired event in the PNAC document "Rebuilding America’s Defenses": ". . . the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor." The Feith/Maloof/Wurmser/Wolfowitz (quite a group right there, but don’t forget, there is no Lobby, and it has no power!) cynicism is so extr! eme that they are ready to use September 11 as their Pearl Harbor for attacks wherever and whenever it is most convenient (note that even early on the liars didn’t believe their own lies, describing Iraq as a "non-Al Qaeda target"). It didn’t matter to them whether there was even the slightest reason to believe that the area under attack had anything to do with the attacks on the United States... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23227 The biggest con: Democrats & Republicans work together to destroy America, part 3 of 3 Tibor S. Friedman, Online Journal Contributing Writer Depleted uranium weapons were first given by the US to Israel for use under US supervision in the 1973 Sinai war against the Arabs. Since then the US has tested, manufactured, and sold depleted uranium weapons systems to 29 countries. An international taboo prevented their use until 1991, when the US broke the taboo and used them for the first time, on the battlefields of Ir! aq and Kuwait. Depleted uranium (DU) is a weapon of mass destruction (WMD) that was used under the direction of George H. W. Bush and then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney in the 1st Gulf War in 1991. Democrat Bill Clinton used it in the Balkans (and in Iraq, using the no-fly zones as cover) and it continues to be used today in Afghanistan and Iraq... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23225 Mossad murdered 530 Iraqi scientists. The Plight of Iraqi Academics. Aljazeera.com Numerous reports for many months have stated that with collaboration from American occupation forces, Israel’s espionage apparatus, Mossad, slaughtered at least 530 Iraqi scientists and academic professors. Assassinations of Iraq academics in Iraq never existed prior to April 2003. Persistent Israeli hit squads against Iraqi scientists had been active in Iraq since April 2003, but the latest chapter was uncovered on Tuesday, 14 Jun! e 2005 by the Palestine Information Center which, citing a report compiled by the United States Department of State and intended for the American President, stated that Israeli and foreign agents sent by Mossad, in cooperation with United States, to Iraq, killed at least 350 Iraqi scientists and more than 200 university professors and academic personalities... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23222 Stop the Neocons from Digging our Graves! William Hughes ...Yet, as Jeffrey Blankfort, correctly pointed out: because the Neocons and the Israeli Lobby have "paid no price for it [their Iraqi warmongering]...They are preparing to do the same with Iran." (4) In light of the recently published Harvard Study on the enormous influence over U.S. policies of the Israeli Lobby, (which includes the cunning Neocons), Blankfort's opinion was validated. Unfortunately, Iran isn't the end of it. Russia is now being put on the! defensive, too, by the War Hawks. While attending a conference in Vilnius, Lithuania, on May 4, 2006, the ultra-Neocon, Dick Cheney, accused Vladimir Putin's Russia of "unfairly and improperly" restricting the rights of its people and of using oil and gas as "tools of intimidation or blackmail" against neighboring countries. "Russia has a choice to make," Cheney barked menacingly... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23219 All of Us Participate in a New Iraq Dahr Jamail, t r u t h o u t ...That same evening after my presentation, I received an email from a doctor friend in Baghdad. The email pertains to the question I was asked, so I quote it here: "Dear Mr. Dahr, I am wondering why? Americans and coalition forces were supported by pro-Iranian Militias, like the Badr Organization! The support and help of Iraqi Shiites at first helped to somewhat stabilize and maintain the occupation. Death squads trained by the coalition forces a! re working day and night under cover of the Ministry of Interior, attacking innocent people: both Sunnis and Shiites!!!! In spite of knowing very well who is doing what, we still see no improvement in the security situation. On the contrary, the situation is getting worse. I have many colleagues, doctors and other professionals, who are now begging for help to get out of Iraq for their lives and for their families' lives! The only losers are the Iraqis. The only Iraqis who are benefiting from this war are those who spend all their life outside Iraq and are now living in their big castle, the green zone!!!!! Everyone now knows that the invasion of Iraq was carried out upon falsified testimonies and lies!!!! What is going on on the ground differs a lot from what the media tells!!!!! I mean that"... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23206 Exodus of the Iraqi middle class Shia militias are driving out professionals in Baghdad Daniel McGrory COLLEAGUES were astonished when Hussain, a nurse at Kadimiyah Hospital in Baghdad, turned up for work in a new suit with a pistol strapped around his waist and announced that he was now in charge. A doctor who ridiculed the idea of this 34-year-old appointing himself administrator of the 700-bed hospital was slapped across the face by his new boss, who ordered armed security guards to escort the medic! from the building. The expulsion was a brutal warning to other staff who might question the right of the al-Mahdi Army, a Shia militia, to install one of their own to run the hospital (...) Nurse Hussain won promotion at the Kadimiyah Hospital simply because his father was appointed to a senior position in Mr al-Sadr’s head office in east Baghdad. On his first day in charge, the inspector general of the Health Department accompanied the nurse on a tour of the wards. Several staff were fired without any reason being given... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23215 Baghdad Morgue Daily Visit for Iraqis IslamOnline.net The aging and gloomy Baghdad morgue has become the last stop for many Iraqis, who desperately search for their loved ones brutally killed in the tit-for-tat sectarian attacks that recently plagued the occupied country. "I came to search for my neighbor who was kidnapped three days ago," an Iraqi man standing at the morgue's iron gate waiting to be allowed inside the complex, told Agence France-Presse (AFP) Saturday, May 6. "He was found yesterday with three bu! llets in the body. He was also tortured. There were signs of electric shocks on his body." Another friend of the victim said his friend had been murdered in a sectarian attack. "His name was Ali Hassan Al-Duri. He was 36 years of age and had two children," he noted. "He was killed because he was a Sunni and he lived in Sadr City," he added, referring to the Shiite suburb in the south of Baghdad... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23121 DAILY WAR NEWS FOR WEDNESDAY, May 10, 2006 Today in Iraq Sgt. Matthew J. Fenton, 24, of Little Ferry, N.J., died May 6 at National Naval Medical Center, Bethesda, Md., from wounds received while conducting combat operations against enemy forces in Al Anbar province, Iraq on April 26 (...) Gunmen fatally shot the director of the Defense Ministry's public relations office. He was on his way to work when his car was stopped by another vehicle in the residential neighborhood of Bayaa. Three men then got out of anothe! r car and opened fire, killing him and wounding an Iraqi pedestrian. South African security guard working for American company killed. According to his mother, he was in an armoured car that was hit by a bomb in Baghdad on Monday. He died immediately. Bodies of two Iraqis who had been handcuffed and shot found in eastern Baghdad. Gunmen in two cars killed two traffic policemen in western Baghdad... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23210 Iran and US: Nuclear Standoff or Realpolitik? Ramzy Baroud ...But that alone can hardly justify the seemingly irrational readiness to expand the battlefield for an already overstretched U.S. military. That's where the infamous pro-Israel neoconservative warmongers are most effective. In the same way they managed to concoct a pro-war discourse before the disastrous war on Iraq -- using the military and ever willing mainstream media -- they're working diligently to create another false doomsday scenario required fo! r a military encroachment on Iran... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23226 The Analytical Skewer Kim Petersen ...What kind of "clear standard" is it when genocide can be a pick-and-choose affair? If there is a genocide in Sudan, where the fatality figures range from 60,000 to 400,000, [3] out of a population of 41.2 million, and this is compared to Iraq, where since 1991, approximately 1.5 million Iraqi civilians have perished out of a population of 26.8 million, [4] then proportionally the number of fatalities is far greater in Iraq and Bush has by dint of statistical inference implica! ted the US government as involved in a genocide. Meanwhile the ongoing war in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has claimed 4 million lives? Why then has the US government failed to declare a genocide in the DRC? Where and what is the "clear standard"?... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23209 5 escape from U.S. prison in Iraq THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Five people escaped from a U.S. detention center in northern Iraq, the U.S. command said Wednesday. The detainees escaped early Tuesday from the Fort Suse Theater internment facility near Sulaimaniyah, 160 miles northeast of Baghdad, said Spc. Stacy Sanning, a spokesman for the U.S. command in Baghdad. U.S. soldiers and Iraqi forces were searching for them, he said... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23217 GI Special 4E10: Recruiter Scum Do It Again - May 10, 2006 Thomas F. Barton Predator Recruiter Scum Sign Up Autistic Kid: Jared Guinther is 18. Tall and lanky, he will graduate from Marshall High School in June. Girls think he's cute, until they try to talk to him and he stammers or just stands there -- silent. Diagnosed with autism at age 3, Jared is polite but won't talk to people unless they address him first. It's hard for him to make friends. He lives in his own private world. Jared didn't know ther! e was a war raging in Iraq until his parents told him last fall -- shortly after a military recruiter stopped him outside a Southeast Portland strip mall and complimented him on his black Converse All Stars. "When Jared first started talking about joining the Army, I thought, 'Well, that isn't going to happen,' " said Paul Guinther, Jared's father."I told my wife not to worry about it. They're not going to take anybody in the service who's autistic." But they did. Last month, Jared came home with papers showing that he not only had enlisted, but also had signed up for the Army's most dangerous job: cavalry scout. He is scheduled to leave for basic training Aug. 16... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23205 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.