[UrukNet] - [Daily Information from Occupied Iraq] - [newsletter 15 Aug 2006 _ Part One]

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

Rules for reporting on the war Stephen Gowans ...Still, the deception, helped along by the frequent invoking of the red herring of Israel’s right to self defense, is that Hezbollah is attacking Israel. Sure, Israel has a right to self defense, but what does that have to do with this war? Nazi Germany had a right to self defense too, but that didn’t include invading Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, the Soviet Union and on and on. The standard operating procedure, where Israel is concerned, is to turn the ! truth on its head. And the chief truth inverter is the Western media. Rule #1. The "who started it?" rule. It is always the Arabs who attack first, and always Israel that retaliates in self defense. The current Israeli assault on Gaza is attributed to the capture (called a kidnapping) of corporal Gilad Shalit, by a group of Palestinians who tunnelled under the border and attacked an Israeli watchtower. But the day before Shalit’s capture, Israeli forces crossed into Gaza and captured (that’s captured, not kidnapped) a Palestinian doctor and his brother. Israel has kidnapped 64 Hamas members, including cabinet ministers, mayors and legislators. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Rule #2. The terrorism rule. When Arabs kill Israelis, it’s called terrorism. Rule #3. The self defense rule. When Israelis kill Arabs, it’s called self defense. Rule # 4. The reaction of the international community rule. When Israel kills too many civilians all at once, the West calls for restr! aint. Israel pledges it will take care to limit civilian casua! lties, t hen goes about its merry way, blasting apart civilians, blaming the deaths on the militants. "We had to take out the civilians. They were in the way. But we didn’t mean to"... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=25790 Pitch Black Void Manuel Valenzuela ...The cabal, it must be understood, is comprised of pure blooded authoritarians, corporatist (fascists) tyrants that care not one ounce for the well-being of the population. To them we are but mere peasants, nothing but peons and pawns and patsies relegated to playing the grand game of geopolitical and greed-mongering chess, doing our part to advance the neocon Machiavelli wet dream of imperial hegemony. The death of 3,000 citizens means nothing to these monsters, much like the! murder of 250,000 Iraqis or the death of 2,600 American soldiers. The Bush cabal is made up of madmen and monsters, incapable of living in reality or of understanding truth, yet tyrannical enough to create a new Pearl Harbor through the controlled demolition of the Twin Towers (not to mention WTC 7 and a strike on the Pentagon). They dwell in an infallible bubble of make believe and of unrealistic theories, a land of Kool-Aid drinkers and dependents of delusional cocktails... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=25781 Despite US forces, the real power in Iraq is Iran Mustafa Alani Iran's interventionist policy in Iraq has a long history. Tehran's objective to influence developments in Iraq has been motivated by a number of strategic factors, as well as cultural and religious interests. The most important is that the history of the two nations has been characterized by a near permanent state of rivalry and political-military conflict (...) Yet despite over 20 years of effort, and despite unlimited Iranian and Syrian political, ! financial and military support and propaganda, none of these Iraqi Shiite groups proved capable of posing a serious threat to the Iraqi regime. During the course of the Iraq-Iran war (1980-1988), the Iranian leadership mobilized the pro-Iranian, mainly Shiite Iraqi parties - the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq and Al-Daawa - to support Iran's military efforts in the hope of achieving victory. These two parties helped Iran with vital intelligence from Iraq, and their cadres participated in Iranian military operations along the border. This failed, and until the US-led invasion of Iraq in April 2003, Iranian strategy to intervene in Iraq had proved to be a complete failure. By mid-2002, the balance began to tip in Iran's favor with the escalation of the Iraqi-US confrontation. The Iranian leadership accurately judged the seriousness of this looming confrontation. Thus, while the Bush administration was engaged in plotting the removal of the Iraqi regime, th! e Iranian leadership was busy planning how Tehran could strate! gically gain from any US adventure in Iraq... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=25779 Another 'Mission Accomplished' Moment? Dan Froomkin, Washington Post President Bush's startling assertion yesterday -- that at the end of 33 days of warfare between Israel and the Hezbollah militia, Hezbollah had been defeated -- once again raises questions about his ability to acknowledge reality when things don't turn out the way he intended. Here, from the transcript of his appearance at the State Department, are his exact words: "Hezbollah started the crisis, and Hezbollah suffered a defeat in this crisis. An! d the reason why is, is that first, there is a new -- there's going to be a new power in the south of Lebanon, and that's going to be a Lebanese force with a robust international force to help them seize control of the country, that part of the country." My first question: Did he really mean to say that?... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=25792 DAILY WAR NEWS FOR TUESDAY, August 15, 2006 Today in Iraq Fierce gunbattles broke out Tuesday between armed supporters of an anti-U.S. Shiite cleric and Iraqi security forces after a raid on his office in this southern holy city, leaving many people injured, officials and witnesses said. The two sides exchanged gunfire near one of Iraq's holiest shrines containing the mausoleum of Imam Hussein, a revered figure in Shiite history. The fighting, which began early Tuesday, spread to at least four other parts of Karb! ala by afternoon in violation of a curfew. Gunmen in civilian clothes could be seen firing AK-47 rifles, machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades at army patrols and running away. A Karbala Health Directorate official said six people were killed and five people were wounded in the clashes in Karbala. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to journalists. The fighting spread over at least five neighborhoods of Karbala around the office of Mahmoud al-Hassani, a cleric who came into prominence after the ouster of Saddam Hussein in 2003... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=25791 Discourse of the Mean Spirits: False Mantras, Euphemisms and Naked Hypocrisy Paul de Rooij, www.dissidentvoice.org ..."Israel has the right to defend herself" has certainly been one of the most often repeated insufferable mantras. In recent weeks, nearly all US Congressmen and Senators are on record stating this, and none did so in a more craven fashion than US Senator Hillary Clinton. [1] A bit of context may be useful to interpret this mantra. What these Congressmen and Senators are justifying is not the "defen! se" of Israel, but an obscene Israeli war of aggression that may actually destroy an entire country. When General Dan Halutz, the Israeli military supremo, states that Israeli bombing is going to turn back the clock twenty years on Lebanon, then it is very clear what this war is about: terrorizing the civilian population (a.k.a, "draining the swamp"), destroying villages, creating hundreds of thousands of refugees, demolishing the infrastructure (electricity generators, telephone exchanges, water filtration and pumps), demolishing key industrial plants (milk factories, pharmaceutical plants), bombing refugee camps, dropping 24 tons of explosives on a populated area [2]… this constitutes war crimes (or worse), and the generals and politicians responsible for this belong in a war crimes tribunal... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=25788 Hezbollah’s Victory and the Coming Shock and Awe of Iran Kurt Nimmo It is said the United States has "scaled-back" its "expectations" now that the United Nations has declared a "ceasefire" in Lebanon. "The U.N. agreement is only the most recent example in which Bush’s second-term doctrine of spreading freedom has run into the realities of international and domestic politics," notes the Baltimore Sun. Actually, Bush’s doctrine, which has nothing to do with democracy as most people understand the word, ran into the! reality of Hezbollah, the most effective resistance movement in the world. Israel’s defeat at the hands of the Shia resistance group, forged and tempered into steel hard resolve over many years by the experience of a brutal Israeli occupation, has dashed the "expectations" of the neocons, who are cut from the same cloth as the Jabotinksyite fascists in Israel. Consumed with racist hubris, both the Israelis and the American neocons expected a decisive victory over Hezbollah. But it didn’t work out that way... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=25793 Neo-Cons, Nabobs and Empire It's Bigger Than the Neo-Cons CHRIS FLOYD It's a dirty job, but someone's got to do it: it's time to take up the cudgels for the poor neo-cons. Day after day, these dedicated public intellectuals and hardworking federal officials are calumnied from coast to coast, accused of every crime under the sun. Who misled us into the bloodsoaked mire of Iraq? Who's pulling strings to foment a new war with Iran? Who's fanning the flames of Israel's assault on Lebanon, hoping to turn th! e entire Middle East into an arc of "creative destruction" that will transform the region into a pacified, profitable oasis of American power? Why, the neo-cons, of course, guilty on every count--or so we're told... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=25786 What about Gaza and the rest of occupied Palestine? American-Palestinian New Generation For the past month, Gaza and occupied Palestine have fallen off newspaper front pages and mostly out of everyone's' imagination while Lebanon was being devastated by the Israelis. During the entire month of the Lebanon-Israel war, the residents of Gaza, the West Bank and occupied Jerusalem, continued to feel the cruel and relentless wrath of the occupying Israelis. It is likely that even greater damage was dealt to both civili! ans and infrastructure while the world was focused on Lebanon. It is now time to refocus equal attention on Palestine and Lebanon and let the momentum of a United Nations resolution--meant to protect the civilian populations on both sides of the border--reinvigorate the many existing resolutions calling for justice for Palestinian residents and refugees in the land of Palestine... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=25785 Iraqi Resistance Report for events of Tuesday, 15 August 2006 Translated and/or compiled by Muhammad Abu Nasr, member, editorial board, the Free Arab Voice. In a dispatch posted at 7:50pm Makkah time Tuesday evening, Mafkarat al-Islam reported that a short while earlier a US warplane struck a house in ar-Ramadi, about 110km west of Baghdad. The ar-Ramadi correspondent for Mafkarat al-Islam reported a medical source as saying that the American air raid killed four civilians: a man, his wife and their two children,! both under five years of age. The source said that victims were a Sunni family that had fled from the rampant sectarian kidnappings and murders in the southern city of al-Basrah... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=25784 Home Front: Dispatches from the War on America CHRIS FLOYD While your attention has been diverted by the proxy war in Lebanon, the civil war in Iraq, the still-hot shootin' war in Afghanistan and the coming war with Iran, the Bush Regime been busy waging -- and winning -- another take-no-prisoners, give-no-quarter conflict right in the sacred Homeland itself: class war (...)Dispatches from the Bush Faction's war on America come in every day, piecemeal, the dots rarely if ever connected. Last week saw a bumper cro! p of precision strikes, hitting an array of some of the Regime's favorite targets: the cannon fodder they've used up in their wars of crony conquest then tossed aside like so much bad meat; the two million Americans that have been clapped behind bars by the Bush Regime -- more prisoners both in sheer numbers and percentage of the population than any nation on earth; and those ever-popular punching bags, the unwealthy sick... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=25783 My love and gratitude Hanady Salman ...We will be fine, I hope. We will burry our dead, the way they deserve to be buried, we will remember them as long as we live. We will tell their stories to our children; they will tell their own children the story: the story of a great people, one that never lost faith despite all the crimes, pains and injustices. One that started rebuilding the minute the fighting stopped. Rebuilding although they know that the enemy might destroy everything again, as it did so many times ! before. We will also tell them the stories of our enemy : how they killed our children , our elderly , how they hit us from the air, from the sea and from the ground and how we prevailed. How they starved our families in their villages, killed them on the roads, bombed their houses, their shelters, their hospitals, they even bombed vans carrying bread to them; and how in return we did not give up... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=25782 Weak, Passive, Distracted What Next for the American Antiwar Movement? TODD CHRETIEN ...Therefore the anti-war movement must prepare for a new round of mobilizations this fall and be prepared to respond to new emergencies. Three-and-a-half years after the invasion of Iraq, the anti-war movement must put itself on a new footing. We must build a movement that stands for self-determination, rejects vilification of Islam and openly embraces Arabs and Muslim forces, fights to cut ties with Israel and severs! its allegiance to the Democratic Party. This will not happen overnight, but the people of Lebanon and Gaza have paid too high a price in their own blood for us to not take these lessons to heart here in the belly of the beast.... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=25780 The UK Terror plot: what's really going on? Craig Murray I have been reading very carefully through all the Sunday newspapers to try and analyse the truth from all the scores of pages claiming to detail the so-called bomb plot. Unlike the great herd of so-called security experts doing the media analysis, I have the advantage of having had the very highest security clearances myself, having done a huge amount of professional intelligence analysis, and having been inside the spin machine. So this, I believe, is the! true story. None of the alleged terrorists had made a bomb. None had bought a plane ticket. Many did not even have passports, which given the efficiency of the UK Passport Agency would mean they couldn't be a plane bomber for quite some time... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=25778 An Open Letter to George W. Bush on Lebanon Telling the Israelis to "Take Your Time" RALPH NADER The widespread destruction of a defenseless Lebanon-its civilians, its life-sustaining public services, its environment-is a grim and indelible testament to your consummate cruelty and ignorance. Nearly two weeks ago when your tardy Secretary of State met with the Israeli Prime Minister, the message she carried was summarized in a large headline across page one of an Israeli newspaper, "TAKE YOUR TIME." Yes,! take your time, says George W. Bush, pulverizing fleeing refugees in cars full of families, bombing apartment buildings, hospitals and the poor huddled in large south Beirut slums. Take your time, says George W. Bush, in destroying bridges, roads, gasoline stations, airports, seaports, wheat silos, vehicles with medical supplies, clearly marked ambulances taking the wounded to clinics, even a milk factory... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=25777 GI Special 4H15: 172nd Betrayed Again - August 15, 2006 Thomas F. Barton About 300 Alaska-based soldiers sent home from Iraq just before their unit's deployment was extended last month must now go back, the Army said Monday, setting up a wrenching departure for troops and families who thought their service there was finished. The soldiers — all from the 172nd Stryker Brigade — are among the 380 troops who had gotten home to Fort Wainwright when Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld ordered the unit to serve four more months. The remaining 80 will not have to return to Iraq. Army officials have sent a team of personnel and pay experts to Alaska to help sort out all of the soldiers' vacations, school enrollments and other plans torn apart by the decision to return them to Iraq. The unit is now being stationed in Baghdad, one of the most violent parts of the country. Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=25774 Cheney orchestrated Israel’s losing war Michael Carmichael, Globalresearch.ca Dick Cheney orchestrated Israel’s losing war against Hizbullah by authorizing George Bush and Condoleezza Rice to encourage Ehud Olmert to launch the war against Lebanon as a prelude to America’s forthcoming war against Iran. Following briefings from top Israeli military officials, Cheney approved plans for an air war against Lebanon as a preliminary move to disarm Hizbullah in advance of America’s broader military objective - to launch! an air war against Iran. Had the US launched its war against Iran without Olmert’s intervention in Lebanon, Hizbullah would have been free to attack Israel. Cheney’s plan was designed to disarm Hizbullah, but it was based on what now appears to have been a false assumption - that Israel would win their war in Lebanon... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=25775 ‘a thousand PR experts can't turn failure into victory’ The Truth Will Set You Free Taken alone, the statement is true enough. But, who said it - and in what context? [Israeli] MK Aryeh Eldad responded to the ceasefire which took effect this morning: "With the ceasefire taking effect, the government of Israel has gone on a public relations offensive, but a thousand public relations experts cannot turn failure into victory. To him, a ceasefire is not a genuine effort at peaceful resolution for the sake of ! ending bloodshed, but rather a tactical public relations stunt calculated to polish a victory that, in his mind, does not exist... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=25776 GI Special 4H14: " There Are Insurgents Everywhere" - August 14, 2006 Thomas F. Barton As the summer wears on in Iraq, the attacks on Ramadi's government center are subsiding. But rising in their place are the heat, the boredom and the complaints — about the sandbags Marines must carry, about the Ramadi mission, about the war. Marines often brag that their mission is to kill people and break their toys. But for the Marines of Kilo Company, stuck on the roof of Ramadi's government center and Iraqi police headquarters, simply killing insurgents doesn't feel like progress. And so the frustration rises with the mercury for these troops, most on their second deployment to Iraq and their second summer in Al Anbar province's scorching desert. Insurgents have regularly attacked the government center, trying to prevent the provincial government from functioning. Kilo Company has fortified the posts on the roof, manned around-the-clock by Marines charged with returning gunfire and killing assailants who fire rockets and plant roadside bombs. Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=25773 Israelis Plan to Steal Lebanese Food Kurt Nimmo From the military of the only democracy in the Middle East: "If our fighters deep in Lebanese territory are left without food our water, I believe they can break into local Lebanese stores to solve that problem," Brigadier General Avi Mizrahi, the head of the Israel Occupation Forces logistics branch, informs Haaretz. "If what they need to do is take water from the stores, they can take." Of course, this is nothing new, as the Israelis have stolen from Arabs for dec! ades, regardless of what was supposedly inscribed on the stone tablets Moses brought down from Mount Sinai... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=25767 GI Special 4H13A: Military Training And Atrocities - August 13, 2006 - Part 2 Thomas F. Barton A New Generation Of Activists In Solidarity With Active-Duty Personnel And Military Families "Need Not Be Helpless Before The Power Of Illegitimate Authority . " The elemental truth is that generals and war planners call the shots from air-conditioned building and bunkers far from combat, but wars must be fought on the ground by working-class troops who, when organized, can act on their own political principles rather than on those of their commanding officers. Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=25772 www.uruknet.info: a site gathering daily information concerning occupied Iraq: news, analysis, documents and texts of iraqi resistance available in Italian and English.