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

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Ramadi Becomes Another Fallujah Brian Conley These days, Ramadi is nearly impossible to enter. Against the backdrop of the Haditha massacre, IPS has received reports of civilians killed by snipers, and homes occupied with American snipers on their roof, while families were detained downstairs (...) Reports from Ramadi have been few and far between in recent months, and always filed by reporters embedded with U.S. troops working in the area. Witnesses interviewed by IPS in Amman provided a nuanced picture of the s! ituation, one that is very different from the military focus of embedded journalists. Their stories describe death happening any moment, without signals or warning (...) Sheikh Majeed al-Ga'oud is from Wahaj al-Iraq village just outside Ramadi, and visits the city regularly. He also described snipers killing without discretion. "The American snipers don't make any distinction between civilians or fighters, anything that moves, he shoots immediately. This is a very dirty thing, they are killing lots of civilians who are not fighters"... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23738 DAILY WAR NEWS FOR MONDAY, June 5, 2006 Today in Iraq A Soldier assigned to 2/28 Brigade Combat Team died due to enemy action while operating in Al Anbar Province June 3. Pfc. Brett L. Tribble, 20, of Lake Jackson, Texas, died in Ar Ramadi on June 3 of injuries sustained in Ar Ramadi, Iraq on June 2, when an improvised explosive device detonated near his HMMWV during combat operations. Tribble was assigned to the Army's 2nd Battalion, 6th Infantry Regiment, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, Baumholder, Germany. Gunmen ha! ve seized at least 50 people in coordinated raids on bus stations in central Baghdad today. The attackers - dressed in police uniforms - stormed the stations in the centre of the capital, abducting drivers and passengers who were preparing to travel outside Iraq (...) Gunmen in a car killed two Sunni brothers as they were driving to college in the neighborhood of Sadiyah in southwestern Baghdad. The victims, Ahmed and Arkan Sarhan, were in their early 20s... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23741 Saddam's Defense Witnesses Arrested TChris, TalkLeft Some judges are disinclined by nature to credit the testimony of a defense witness, but this is beyond belief: The chief judge in Saddam Hussein's trial said Monday four defense witnesses have been jailed on suspicion of perjury, drawing accusations from defense lawyers that the court was trying to intimidate witnesses. Duh, yeah. Jail is an effective weapon of intimidation. So is thuggery. The defense lawyers said Iraqi soldiers beat several of the ! witnesses during their arrest May 31. It's traditional for a judge to wait until the end of the trial, maintaining at least a pretense of impartiality, before pronouncing judgments on the credility of witnesses. Saddam's new, "get tough" presiding judge isn't a stickler for formality. When lawyers complained at Monday's session about the arrests and beating, chief judge Raouf Abdel-Rahman retorted, "They committed perjury. Should I reward them?" No need for a trial -- go straight to the beating.... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23749 Field commanders tell Pentagon Iraq war 'is lost' DOUG THOMPSON Military commanders in the field in Iraq admit in private reports to the Pentagon the war "is lost" (...) Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has clamped a tight security lid on the increasingly pessimistic reports coming out of field commanders in Iraq, threatening swift action against any military personnel who leak details to the press or public... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23742 Haditha: Newsweek Pulls Its Punches Bush Out The big Newsweek story starts out with some startling revelations (...) But then comes this crap: Haditha may turn out to be the worst massacre since My Lai. And Iraqis may be entirely justified in their outrage. But the scale of the tragedy should not be exaggerated. America still fields what is arguably the most disciplined, humane military force in history, a model of restraint compared with ancient armies that wallowed in the spoils of war or even more-! modern armies that heedlessly killed civilians and prisoners. OK, so we massacred a few people, but at least we are not as bad as Pol Pot, or Genghis Khan... Jeebus! ... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23743 US administration can be behind recent attack against Russian diplomats in Baghdad Pravda.ru ...Some specialists believe that the attack against Russian diplomats in Baghdad could be good for Washington. The US administration is particularly concerned about the Moscow-run politics in Iraq (which contradicts to Washington’s goals) and the activities of Russian special services in Iraq. To crown it all, the Bush’s administration dislikes the image of "a friend of Iraq" which Russia propagandizes. Former Iraqi Ambas! sador to Russia Abbas Halaf stated that the attack against the Russian diplomats had been instigated by US troops in Iraq. The official believes that the USA tries to punish Russia for its political activities in the region, especially in Iraq. It is worthy of note that US soldiers attacked a column of Russian diplomats and wounded five of them in April of 2003... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23747 Iraqi Resistance Report for events of Monday, 5 June 2006 Translated and/or compiled by Muhammad Abu Nasr, member, editorial board, the Free Arab Voice. ...In a dispatch posted at 10:20am Makkah time Monday morning, Mafkarat al-Islam reported that a huge force of hundreds of US troops began moving into al-Anbar province at 3am local time before dawn Monday morning. The columns of American troops had constant air cover from American warplanes as they advanced up the main highway into al-Anbar Province. These are ! the forces that the United States said it was drawing out of Kuwait to reinforce its beleaguered troops in western Iraq. Correspondents for Mafkarat al-Islam in Abu Ghurayb, al-Karmah, al-Fallujah, ar-Ramadi, 'Amiriyat al-Fallujah, and al-Habbaniyah reported that the hundreds of troops are accompanied by dozens of military vehicles of various types. The correspondents reported that the Americans who are riding in on the vehicles do not resemble the US troops already in al-Anbar Province. They have beards and long hair. Some are not wearing the regular American uniform, a large number of them wearing undershirts and have red bandanas on their heads. The giant vehicles that the new American troops are driving also differ from those any of the vehicles that the US has brought into the country since it invaded in 2003... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23746 Bad Day... Riverbend, Baghdad Burning ...We still don’t have ministers in the key ministries- defense and interior. Iraq is falling apart and Maliki and his team are still bickering over who should get more power- who is more qualified to oppress Iraqis with the help of foreign occupiers? On top of all of this, rumor has it that the Iraqi parliament have a 'vacation’ coming up during July and August. They’re so exhausted with the arguing, and struggling for power, they need to take a couple of months off to rest.! They’ll leave their well-guarded homes behind for a couple of months, and spend some time abroad with their families (who can’t live in Iraq anymore- they’re too precious for that). Where does one go to avoid the death and destruction? Are the Americans happy with this progress? Does Bush still insist we’re progressing? Emily Dickinson wrote, "hope is a thing with feathers". If what she wrote is true, then hope has flown far- very far- from Iraq… Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23745 Kevin Zeese: 'Both Parties Selling Country to Highest Bidder!' William Hughes ...Continuing with his remarks, Zeese said: "I’m the only person in the [U.S.} Senate race in Maryland, other than [candidate] Bob Kaufman, who’s opposed [to the U.S.] bombing Iran. And a lot of that again is Hard Right Israeli Lobby pressure. Richard Cohen, who writes for the "Washington Post," said that 65 percent of the Democratic Party’s resources comes from the Hard Right Israeli Lobby and 35 percent of the Republican Party’s resou! rces come from the same [place]." As of today’s date, 2,475 U.S. troops have been killed in Iraq and another 17,869 seriously wounded. We won’t know, however, for years what effects the radioactive depleted uranium dust has had on the health, and sanity, of those required to serve in Iraq, as well as on the 27 million peoples of that unfortunate country. The cost to U.S. taxpayers for the conflict now stands at $286 billion. The number of Iraqis slain may be as high as 300,000... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23744 More than 6,000 corpses found in Iraq in five months Kadhem al-Attabi Every morning as ambulance cars and police vehicles rush to the hospital in Bab al-Mo'adham carrying corpses of unidentified victims, a queue of women, teenagers and elderly men forms in front of the morgue as people search for their relatives, fearing they might be found among the bodies. Usually, one of their family member is lost or kidnapped by gunmen and then turns up after a week or so later as a corpse with gunshot wounds on the body, a ! further victim of the latest wave of sectarian violence that has swept through Iraq in recent months. Iraq's main morgue had never received that huge number of corpses on a daily basis - not since modern Iraq was established in 1920s. According to statistics by Iraq's morgues institute, 6,002 corpses were found in the past five months: 1,068 in January, 1,110 in February, 1,294 in March, 1,155 in April and 1,375 in May... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23739 Puppet “Iraqi Ambassadors” of Kurdish origin issue fake Iraqi passports to Kurds from Syria, Turkey, and Iran in plan to seize oil-rich Kirkuk for hoped for Kurdish ministate alBasrah.net Iraqi sources have reported that Kurdish "Ambassadors" at some embassies of the puppet Iraqi regime in Europe have been waging a campaign to issue Iraqi passports to Kurds from Turkey, Iran, and Syria in an effort to boost the Kurdish "population" of occupied northern Iraq, in order to facilitate the partition of the country alo! ng sectarian and ethnic lines. The patriotic Iraqi website alBasrah.net reported that the pro-American Kurdish separatist political parties issue Kurds from other countries forged Iraqi personal identity cards, indicating their place of birth as "Kirkuk," an oil-rich city in northern Iraq lying outside the Kurdish separatist area, but one that Kurdish separatists have been actively trying to incorporate in their zone... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23740 Who Put the Guns in Their Hands and to What End? Why Haditha Happened BRUCE JACKSON ...But Haditha was no more a function of "inadequate training" than was My Lai or Abu Ghraib. Each of them was a direct consequence of US policies at the highest levels, policies that said the US had the right to apply deadly force halfway around the world in pursuit of what its leaders had decided in secret were the country's national interest. All three atrocities happened because the presidential administrations in p! ower declared the lives of distant individuals trivial, disposable, theoretical... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23737 The Abominations of War: From My Lai to Haditha Cindy Sheehan This is the most difficult article that I have ever had to write, but I have to write it anyway, unfortunately. I, and just about anyone and everyone who criticizes George Bush and this war are accused of "not supporting the troops." Since my son, Casey, was killed in Iraq because of lies and to actually make that country safe for our corporate interests, I have been saying the only way we can support our troops at this point is to get them the hell ou! t of this illegal and immoral war. The massacre in Haditha on November, 19, 2005, is just another way to underscore the fact that our troops are being turned into war criminals... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23736 When will the House of Saud feel safe? Saudi Arabia and Military Expenditure Dr. Abbas Bakhtiar ...But why don’t we see any campaign against Saudi Arabia? Why don’t we hear presidents and prime ministers condemning these atrocities? Why don’t we see articles urging a regime change in Saudi Arabia? How come it is OK to have thousands of people killed to remove a dictator in Iraq, yet it is not OK to even publicly call for change of the system of government in Saudi Arabia? The answer is provided by Mr.! Aburish. "The House of Saud is willing to provide the world with cheap oil and political support in their problems with the Arabs and Muslims in return for elimination of all criticism. It goes further and uses the awarding of huge defence contracts for the same purpose. In reality, the twin policy of using oil and awarding defence contracts is no more than blackmail; they protect the Western economies from high oil prices and buy arms in return for silence"... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23735 New Pentagon Manual Excludes Geneva Torture Ban IslamOnline.net In a shift from strict adherence to international human rights standards, the Pentagon has decided to omit a key tenet of the Geneva Convention that explicitly bans "humiliating and degrading treatment" of detainees from its new manual, an American newspaper reported on Monday, June 5. "The overall thinking is that they need the flexibility to apply cruel techniques if military necessity requires it," an official familiar with a Pentagon debate on de! tainees' treatment told the Los Angeles Times. For more than a year, the Pentagon has been redrawing its policies on treatment of prisoners... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23733 GI Special 4F3: "This Is Horribly Wrong" - June 3, 2006 Thomas F. Barton In December, NEWSWEEK interviewed some Army soldiers going home as conscientious objectors. To fight boredom and disgust, said Clif Hicks, who had left a tank squadron at Camp Slayer in Baghdad, soldiers popped Benzhexol, five pills at time. Normally used to treat Parkinson's disease, the drug is a strong hallucinogenic when abused. "People were taking steroids, Valium, hooked on painkillers, drinking. They'd go on raids and patrols totally stoned." Hicks, who volunteered at the age of 17, said, "We're killing the wrong people all the time, and mostly by accident. One guy in my squadron ran over a family with his tank." Hicks's own revulsion peaked while he was on patrol in January 2004. He came upon a bloody scene in a Baghdad housing project, where some soldiers had mistaken celebratory shots fired at a wedding for an attack, returning heavy fire and killing a young girl. Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23732 JOHN BOLTON / THE FACE OF HUBRIS & FASCISM Allen L Roland Republican stooge and Bush's interim Ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton is the perfect face and voice for the Cheney/Bush neocon fascist agenda of preemptive war and arrogant power politics. Watch closely this two minute interview video as Bolton says : This is Put Up or Shut Up Time For Iran ~ and that military action is on the table . You can literally see the arrogance dripping from his moustache... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23731 Iraqi Resistance Report for events of Sunday, 4 June 2006. Translated and/or compiled by Muhammad Abu Nasr, member, editorial board, the Free Arab Voice. ...In a dispatch posted at 9:15pm Makkah time Sunday night, Mafkarat al-Islam reported that hundreds of US troops deployed along the western and northern perimeter of the city of ar-Ramadi, about 110km west of Baghdad. The ar-Ramadi correspondent for Mafkarat al-Islam reported that US warplanes were, at that moment prowling the skies above the city at low altitu! de, firing large numbers of flares and terrorizing the residents of the city. The Mafkarat al-Islam correspondent in the western part of the city reported that the US forces dropped leaflets in western ar-Ramadi ordering people to stay indoors and offer no help to the Iraqi Resistance fighters – whom the Americans called "terrorists."... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23730 An Emerging Pattern of U.S. War Crimes and Atrocities in Iraq Suggests a Heinous Policy Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy The "few bad applies" defense falls apart in the face of "...countless My Lai massacres" in Iraq and new revelations. A pattern of war crimes emerges. News of other incidents supports the proposition that the Bush administration has deliberately waged a war on the civilian population of Iraq (...) The war itself is illegal under the Principles of Nuremberg. The subsequent murders of civilia! ns and the cover-ups throughout the chain of command are most certainly prosecutable at the Hague. When it is learned that there is probable cause that Bush himself conspired with Donald Rumsfeld to "...export death and destruction to the four corners of the earth", then the people of the United States must rise up and demand that Bush step down and surrender for arrest and war crimes trials... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23748 How a Typical New York Times Article is Really Bushevik Propaganda Disguised as News A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS ...If you read the NYT carefully day after day, most of its news stories about the White House, Bush and foreign policy subtly reflect the administration perspective and spin, but written as though the NYT is offering up a third party "balanced" perspective. You don’t just need to resurrect the debacle of Judith Miller’s pre-Iraq war farcically badly-sourced reporting or the puff pieces that New York Tim! es White House reporter Elisabeth Bumiller writes about Bush and his staff. You can look at almost any daily "background" piece on the White House and see just how much the New York Times political reporters are an extension of the Bush "spin machine." ... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23750 Humiliate Iraqis? Sure, Bob, it's cool ... Truth About Iraqis ...Matters are rapidly deteriorating in Iraq, like today's kidnapping of 50 Iraqi civilians at a bust depot by Iraqi militia dressed as special commando units. But, I am afraid nothing will stop this. It is more than two weeks since the Iraqi government cabinet was announced and more than one week since we heard grand speeches that all militia will be disbanded. Nothing of the sort has happened. Crucial posts - ministry of interior, national security a! nd defense - have not been filled. Instead, Maliki is working closely with US forces to launch a massive campaign in Anbar. Why isn't he working closely with US forces to launch a massive campaign against the militia he said he would not tolerate? You know, like the Badr militia? Oh, wait, Maliki is of the Da'awa party and they are allied with SCIRI who are the matron saints of the Badr militia. Yes, yes, Iran is pleased with you, Maliki... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23734 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.