[UrukNet] - [Daily Information from Occupied Iraq] - [newsletter 25 May 2006 - Part One]

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What's the price of Iraqi lives? Linda S. Heard, Online Journal Contributing Writer ..."There was no firefight. There was no IED that killed those innocent people," said Congressman John Murtha commenting on the outcome of a military investigation. "Our troops overreacted because of the pressure on them, and they killed innocent civilians in cold blood." While I appreciate John Murtha bringing this atrocity into the public spotlight, shame on him for making excuses for those murderers for that's what they are. Th! e poor things were under so much pressure they overreacted by slaughtering women and children? In the civilian arena, such a defence would be laughed out of court, the defendants carted off to death row or a secure mental institution. Naturally, the Pentagon is outraged at the behaviour of this bunch of killers. Or is it? Cheryl Irwin, speaking on its behalf, says the military hasn't decided what action, if any, to take against the Marines in question. An initial probe found that the Marines had not behaved maliciously and surviving family members were offered a shameful $2,500 for each of the 15 dead. Contrast this with the millions offered to families of September 11 victims. Is $2,500 the worth of an Iraqi child in Washington's eyes?... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23513 Why this part from Aziz’s testimony in court, not translated to English? Baghdad Dweller From Tariq Aziz testimony in the court today [in Saddam's trial] a significant part, you cannot find any translation by western media. Deliberately not mentioned by the media because its touch a sensitive issue (the US), while everything else mentioned (Iraq's internal affairs) because it's not very interesting for westerners. On the accusation issue of razing the farms in the village of Dujail, Tarik Aziz said the following:! The American razed the trees on the both sides of the Airport road, farms around Fallujha and Ramadi why they are not in court for trial. Tariq Aziz is right. US military in some parts of Iraq changed the whole geography of the area, destroying farms, razing trees and building sand fences around cities and villages... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23507 How Bush killed 100,000 American infants Dr. Gideon Polya ...SO FAR Bush has a major responsibility for the deaths of 2,752 American soldiers (2,456 in Iraq and 296 in Afghanistan), the wounding of 18,587 American soldiers (17,869 in Iraq and 718 in Afghanistan) (see: ), for about 50,000 post-2001 American opiate drug deaths due to Coalition restoration of the Taliban-destroyed Afghan opium industry to a current 87% of world market share and for about 100,000 under-5 year old American infant deaths due to gros! s dereliction of duty. How many Americans does Bush have to kill before he is impeached? Americans, write your Congressman NOW. Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23522 Left, Right, Left, Right David Horton ...And consider that among the very first acts of Bremer was to get rid of socialist features like subsidies for food and the supply of basic food needs, basic health care and so on. This was going to be a country at the year zero of scorched earth - get rid of all the socialist features of the Iraq government and start again with pure capitalism. It may not have been the primary motivation but it was sure somewhere near the top. So I suspect that it was not the mythical WMDs! that Hussein was being hounded to give up, but the Iraqi version of socialism. If he had got rid of all that stuff that actually benefited people, and begun behaving purely like a right wing dictator (perhaps acquiring religion along the way), he might well be still living in his palaces now, like so many other right wing dictators in the middle east and Africa are doing, while laughing all the way to their Swiss banks... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23514 Iran has the right to self-defence Ghali Hassan, Online Journal Contributing Writer The U.S. and Israel are in the process of manufacturing a "crisis" to justify a war of aggression against Iran in flagrant violations of international law and norms. The current crisis is reminiscent to the crisis which was manufactured to justify the illegal war of aggression against a defenceless Iraq. On its part, Iran poses no threat to other nations. Nor is Iran in violation of international law and norms. Therefore, Iran has! an inalienable right to self-defence against aggression. Contrary to media reports and distortions, Iran is not engaged in the development of nuclear weapons and Iran is not threatening other nations. Like many other nations, Iran is pursuing legitimate peaceful nuclear research. Under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), Iran has the right to enrich uranium for peaceful uses. There is absolutely no evidence that Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapons program. The accusations that Iran has "nuclear weapon ambitions" are ridiculous at best... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23524 Tariq Aziz surfaces Eli Stephens, Left I on the News ...Tariq Aziz has not been charged with any crimes. His continued detention is itself a violation of all norms of international law. As for today's testimony in the Dujail case, the broadcast media provided little detail, but buried in some of the print coverage was this information: He turned the accusations around, saying members of the Shiite Dawa Party--which carried out the shooting attack on Saddam--should be put on trial. He pointed to Dawa leaders w! ho, since Saddam's fall, have become leaders of Iraq's first elected governments: current prime minister Nouri al-Maliki and his predecessor, Ibrahim al-Jaafari. Speaking in a hoarse voice, he said the Dujail attack was "part of a series of attacks and assassination attempts by this group (Dawa), including against me." He said that in 1980, Dawa activists threw a grenade at him as he visited a Baghdad university, killing civilians around him. "I'm a victim of a criminal act conducted by this party, which is in power right now. So put it on trial. Its leader was the prime minister and his deputy is the prime minister right now and they killed innocent Iraqis in 1980," he said.... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23515 The Issue of Depleted Uranium maracatu, Daily Kos ...In what he terms a public health disaster for the people of Iraq and Afghanistan, Doug Westerman points out that: The Japanese began studying DU effects in the southern Iraq in the summer of 2003. They had a Geiger counter which they watched go off the scale on many occasions. During their visit,a local hospital was treating upwards of 600 children per day, many of which suffered symptoms of internal poisoning by radiation... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23529 Groups Armed by US Propel Iraq Toward Chaos Dexter Filkins, NYTimes Even in a country beset by murder and death, the 16th Brigade represented a new frontier. The brigade, a 1,000-man force set up by Iraq's Ministry of Defense in early 2005, was charged with guarding a stretch of oil pipeline that ran through the southern Baghdad neighborhood of Dawra. Heavily armed and lightly supervised, some members of the largely Sunni brigade transformed themselves into a death squad, cooperating with insurgents and executin! g government collaborators, Iraqi officials say. "They were killing innocent people, anyone who was affiliated with the government," said Hassan Thuwaini, the director of the Iraqi Oil Ministry's protection force... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23527 US military massacres 80 villagers in Afghanistan Tom Carter, WSWS ...The US military is now maintaining the position that US and Afghan troops in the area had come under fire from resistance fighters in or near the village. In the US military version of events, the ordinary men, women, and children dismembered in the air strikes are labeled "human shields," the A-10 strafing runs are "self-defense," and the operation itself is a "victory" against "hard-core Taliban fighters." In reality, the US puppet regime and! its military forces face a population that is overwhelmingly hostile to the occupation. Faced with ever-dwindling popular support for the so-called "war on terror" in Afghanistan, as well as in America itself, the US military is resorting to increasingly brutal colonial methods. The atrocity carried out Monday morning is a form of indiscriminate collective punishment, designed to terrorize and intimidate a hostile population... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23525 Iraqi Resistance Report for events of Wednesday, 24 May 2006 Translated and/or compiled by Muhammad Abu Nasr, member, editorial board, the Free Arab Voice In a dispatch posted at 12:37pm Makkah time Wednesday afternoon, Mafkarat al-Islam reported that a US tank fired two cannon shells at a mosque in the middle of ar-Ramadi, about 110km west of Baghdad on Wednesday morning, damaging the place of worship. The ar-Ramadi correspondent for Mafkarat al-Islam reported eyewitnesses as saying that the tank shot two shells! from its cannon at the al-Bakriyah Mosque in the middle of ar-Ramadi. One of the shells struck the minaret, seriously damaging it. The second shell landed in the sanctuary of the mosque setting parts of it on fire... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23521 Innumeracy in the orchards? Eli Stephens, Left I on the News A while back, when the Hussein trial began, I wrote about the irony that one of the crimes Hussein and his associates were being accused of was of destroying the orchards of Dujail. As I wrote then: Orchard destruction is a routine practice in Palestine and Iraq, and I haven't heard a word of criticism of those practices in the Western corporate media. Indeed, the whole situation would be laughable were it not so tragic for those involved. And don'! t even ask about the destruction of Vietnamese farms and forests by the U.S. application of Agent Orange. I'm sure that dwarfs Hussein's destruction of farmland in Dujail by many orders of magnitude. But in today's trial coverage, we got a number to go along with the accusation when we read of "the razing of 250,000 acres of palm groves and orchards." Let's see. There are 640 acres per square mile, that makes 390 square miles of palm groves and orchards allegedly razed. Dujail has (had?) a population of 10,000 people (this article says 75,000). I don't know how big it is, but Baghdad, by far the largest city in Iraq, covers 250 square miles. That means the defendants are charged with levelling an area more than 50% larger than Baghdad, in a town (and, ok, surrounding countryside) with less than 0.2% of the population of Baghdad (6 million)... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23520 Israel's "internal" ethnic cleansing Mark Elf ... Ali Abu Sheita recounted how his parents had been torn from their tribal land and transferred to a barren region where for years they had had to walk fifteen kilometers with their camels and donkeys just to bring water to the village. Yet in the Jewish village nearby, Abu Sheita continued, pipes delivered water directly to every sink. Halil al-Aseiby pointed to the high-voltage electric poles just outside the shack, emphasizing the regulation that forbids "unr! ecognized Bedouins" from connecting their homes to the power grid. "Even people who need to keep life-saving medicine refrigerated do not receive an exception," he said. Another man suddenly waved a demolition order that was pasted on his "illegal" shack on April 25. "Any day now," he said, "the bulldozers might arrive." These Bedouins are Israeli citizens just as I am; their only crime is that they are not Jewish. It should be noted that this is happening within the pre-1967 boundaries of Israel. Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23530 DAILY WAR NEWS FOR WEDNESDAY, May 24, 2006 Today in Iraq A U.S. soldier was killed when his patrol was attacked by small arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades south of the town of Balad on Tuesday, the U.S. military said on Wednesday (...) The deputy chief of special protection forces in Baghdad municipality was shot dead while on his way to work by unknown militants. No other details on the incident were available. The bodies of eight people who apparently had been kidnapped and tortured by death squads also w! ere found in Baghdad and another area... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23511 Should Noam Chomsky Reset His Compass? William Hughes ...In Chomsky’s book, the word, "Zionism," only appears once, and that is on p. 173, where he admitted that in his youth, during his Philadelphia salad days, he was "very involved in the Zionist Movement." I also noticed that the enormously powerful Israeli Lobby wasn’t worth a cite at all in this paperback. Yet, we now know, thanks to the prestigious Harvard Study, that the Israeli Lobby, for over 40 years has exercised "unmatched power," which was not in the! national interest, over the foreign policy of the U.S. (1) Yet, Chomsky ignored this group completely! Why? Is this the same Chomsky, that Barsamian solemnly tells us, "sets the compass headings and describes the topography"? Barsamian goes on to say, "It is up to us to navigate the terrain...He [Chomsky] has an extraordinary power to distill and synthesize reams of information. And he misses nothing. "Really? Misses nothing! How can that be true if Chomsky missed that six ton elephant in the room of American politics: the Israeli Lobby?... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23517 When medicine is another casualty of war Andra Jackson Salam Ismael was head of junior doctors in Baghdad when America began bombing Iraq in March 2003. Dr Ismael has undertaken missions to the most remote and besieged areas to get medical help to the injured or dying. He says doctors are being stopped by American troops and Iraqi police and soldiers from entering conflict zones to treat the wounded, and six were recently detained in al-Qaim city for treating insurgents (...) Ismael says fighting powers in comba! t zones have a Geneva Convention obligation to respect and protect medical personnel, units and logistics. Illegal weapons are causing some of the injuries medics have seen, he says... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23512 Tareq Aziz testifies in defense of Saddam Hussein Thibauld Malterre, AFP Former Iraqi deputy prime minister Tareq Aziz took the witness stand to defend Saddam Hussein and his associates in their trial for crimes against humanity. His testimony focused on the series of assassination attempts against Baath-era officials, which Aziz blamed on the Shiite Dawa Party of the current Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. "The president is not guilty, nor are any of the officials in the government, just because they punished those who tried to assassinate the head of state," the 70-year-old told the court, looking thin and frail in a frayed pyjama top (...) "The Dujail case is part of a chain of assassination operations against officials and I am one of the victims," he said, laying the responsibility for the attempt at the feet of Maliki's Dawa Party. "I am also a victim of the criminal acts of a party which is now an official party in the government," he said. "I want them tried for their criminal acts, like the assassination attempt in the Mustansiriyah university." In 1980, Aziz was attacked by militants who tossed grenades at him at ! the university in Baghdad, killing and wounding dozens of students... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23506 Same Old Stuff, Just a Different Face! AlQuds Alarabi President Bush hailed that the formation of the new Iraqi Government, formed by Prime Minister Noori AlMaliki, as a new beginning in the new history of Iraq. There is no doubt that a few Iraqis share this opinion with Mr Bush because the continued killings, bombing and terror, be it state sponsored or otherwise, which have greeted the formation of this government, reflect the chaotic reality of the situation on the ground, all of which has been brought about i! n Iraq by the illegal and immoral invasion which subsequently turned into an occupation... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23505 GI Special 4E24: "I Am Now Part Of The Terror" - May 24, 2006 Thomas F. Barton ... I've been here for three months now, and it occurs to me that the war being fought back at home is very different from the war being fought here in Afghanistan. Back home everyone is fighting the Taliban, fighting with their American flags and their "support our troops" bumper stickers, catching highlights on the news that have been edited by the media to make all this look like a war. Meanwhile I'm here fighting with a .50 cal an! d an M249 that I don't shoot, fighting with weapons that are only pointed at children who get too close to the trucks, fighting not with the Taliban, but with insanity... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23504 Not the Hay Festival: Juhasz, Muttit, Christodopoulos Sarah Meyer, Index Research ...I became a fan of Loukas Christodopoulos when I read his excellent report, Corporate Carve-up: the role of UK corporations in Iraq (03.03. – 03.06). He spoke on this subject. "It was a political decision to bring corporations into Iraq. The corporations then support the Occupation." Thus, he said, "it is important to find out who is there. The majority are US corporations." Perhaps, he thought, the UK felt they were not getting v! alue for money. A great deal of money could be made "all in the name of helping Iraqis." However, "the restructuring of Iraq's economy is providing fertile opportunities for an army of consultants.".. Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23523 Osama comes to Moussaoui’s defense? Jerry Mazza, Online Journal Contributing Writer That Osama, what a standup guy! No sooner did Judge Brinkema reaffirm the ruling on Moussaoui evidence, which denied his appeal to reverse his plea from guilty to innocent of conspiracy in connection with the hijacked airliner attacks on the World Trade center . . . no sooner than the ink dried on the tabloids did old Osama bin Laden show his face in a plain pipe-rack video (a still of him with voiceover) and say Moussaoui had "no! connection whatsoever." . . . wow! Moreover, if there was any credibility whatsoever about the 9/11 Osama did it tale, he admitted once again "I am certain of what I say, because I was responsible for entrusting the 19 brothers, Allah have mercy upon them, with those raids." He also mentions the brothers were split into "pilots and support teams" but Moussaoui was "only learning to fly." Actually Zach flunked out of a Norman Oklahoma flight school after 55 lessons. He was grounded, baby. A no-fly. Of course the authenticity of the tape could not be verified... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23528 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.