News & Views 10/13/07

Photo: An Iraqi security officer stands guard as civilians inspect the site of a car bomb explosion in Baghdad, killing two policemen and two civilians and wounding 15 people. Elsewhere, Iraqi civilians bore the brunt of a bloody start to Eid al-Fitr as a US air raid killed 15 women and children and a sinister suicide attack on a playground shocked a northern town.(AFP/Ali Yussef)

REPORTS – LIFE IN IRAQ

Saturday: 3 GIs, 55 Iraqis Killed; 11 Iraqis Wounded

Eight unknown bodies found in Iraq

Iraqi police found eight bodies in Baghdad and near a town in northern Iraq's Salahudin Province, four of them identified as militants affiliated to al-Qaida network in Iraq, police said. "Our patrols picked up four bodies, believed they are belonging to al-Qaida militants, from an area near the town of Duluiyah, 90km north of Baghdad on Saturday," a provincial police source told Xinhua on condition of anonymity. Also on Saturday, police patrols collected four unidentified bodies from different parts of the capital during the past 24 hours, police official said.

Turkey shells Iraqi village

Turkish artillery fired seven to eight shells into a village in northern Iraq late on Saturday, witnesses in the area said. The witnesses said the shells landed in Nezdoor village, about 5 km (3 miles) from the Turkish border, in Dahuk province. No casualties or damage was reported.

U.N. Report on Iraq Details An 'Ever-Deepening' Crisis

A U.N. report issued Thursday outlined an "ever-deepening humanitarian crisis" in Iraq, with thousands of people driven from their homes each month, ongoing indiscriminate killings and "routine torture" in Iraqi prisons. Also Thursday, a U.S. airstrike in Iraq killed 15 civilians - nine women and six children - and 19 suspected insurgents, the military said. "We regret that civilians are hurt or killed while Coalition forces search to rid Iraq of terrorism," Maj. Brad Leighton, a U.S. military spokesman, said in a statement. U.S. troops targeting leaders of the Sunni insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq came under fire while approaching a building near Lake Tharthar in Anbar province northwest of Baghdad, and aircraft fired on the site in response, the military said. The bombing also wounded six people, including a woman and three children. The assessment by the U.N. Assistance Mission for Iraq, which covered a three-month period ending June 30, found that civilians were suffering "devastating consequences" from violence across the country. It documented more than 100 civilians allegedly killed by U.S.-led forces during airstrikes or raids. The report described Iraq in more dire terms than last month's congressional testimony from top U.S. military and embassy officials, which stressed improvements in the security situation. "The killings are still taking place, the torture is still being reported, the due process issues are still unresolved," said Ivana Vuco, a U.N. human rights officer in Baghdad.

UN calls for inquiry into deadly US strike in Iraq

The United Nations mission in Iraq urged U.S. forces on Friday to pursue a "vigorous" probe into an air strike that killed 15 women and children and said its findings must be made public so that lessons can be learned. It said the safety of civilians should be a top priority during military operations. In a human rights report published on Thursday, the same day as the attack, the mission highlighted the number of Iraqi civilians killed in recent U.S. air strikes. The civilian death toll in Thursday's operation was one of the largest acknowledged by U.S. forces from an air strike since former president Saddam Hussein was toppled in 2003. "Civilians are getting caught far too often between warring combatants," said U.N. mission spokesman Said Arikat. "We understand the security concerns, but we also hope that every possible safety measure is taken not to harm any civilians. The U.S. military said it was conducting a "thorough investigation" into the strike by its attack helicopters on a suspected meeting of senior al Qaeda leaders north of Baghdad on Thursday that killed nine children, six women and 19 insurgents. "In every instance we take as many precautions as possible to ensure innocent lives are not at risk," military spokesman Rear Admiral Greg Smith said.

The permanent danger

Oh God that is great. I’m alive. I was driving my car near a high way when four vehicles (4 wheel drive vehicles) came from the high way. They were in my side (driving in the wrong side) and they faced me. I didn’t expect them because I didn’t expect to see cars coming in the wrong side on a high way. There was a sedan car leading the convoy and covered faces men waving to the cars. At the last moment, I saw them. I cant describe my condition but all I can say is (I was totally lost). I was so confused to the extent that I stopped my car in the intersection. OMG, Im a dead woman but the miracle happened, the convoy stopped or to be more specific, Im a hero because I forced the convoy to stop. YES, Im a super woman. At that time I thanked Allah thousands times because they didn’t shoot me. I think they adjusted some of their roles after the last two incidents but my dreams vanished with the new that a security private guards killed two Christian women in Baghdad. Why they were killed? what kind of danger that two innocent ladies were carrying to those guard. They had nothing might threaten the convoy but it was their bad luck that put them in that street at this moment….. Now I believe that this danger will accompany Iraqis as long as the occupier is still in their country and as long as the Iraqi government is unstable to protect its people. We will keep paying our lives as a price for the weakness of our government but we will always blame the (bad luck).

Still heading backwards

Crowds of Iraqis gathered at the gate of the Syrian Embassy in the once elegant neighbourhood of Al-Mansur in Baghdad, hoping against hope. The UN asked Syria to remove visa requirements for Iraqi applicants, but it didn't ask US occupation forces to improve conditions in Iraq or abide by international law; nor did it ask the Iraqi government to stop making excuses for deteriorating conditions in the country. Hundreds of Iraqis congregate every day in front of the embassy, hoping to find refuge for their families. Syria used to receive about 30,000 Iraqis refugees every month until visa restrictions were introduced in early October. Many Iraqis claim that Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki asked the Syrians to impose visa restrictions during his visit to Damascus in August. The government is not responding to this claim. It is busy deflecting accusations made by Justice Radi Al-Radi, chairman of the Iraqi Probity Committee.

….Following reports of torture and rape in Iraqi prisons, Tareq Al-Hashemi, vice-president and leader of the Islamic Party of Iraq, started touring detention centres around the country. He visited the women's prison in Baghdad, where he voiced shock at the lack of proper medical care. "The visit revealed a complex, thorny, and tragic situation, beginning with the manner of detention and ending with the deteriorating conditions in the prison regarding health and other services," a statement by Al-Hashemi's office said. Two women died in prison due to the shortage of medicine, the statement added. Some inmates were being held as hostages, to pressure their spouses into surrendering to the authorities. One prisoner said that she was sentenced to death without being interrogated. Another, a school principal, said that she was arrested while searching for her son who went missing over a year ago.

Iraqi Shiite Muslims to start celebrating Eid al-Fitr on Saturday

REPORTS – IRAQI MILITIAS, POLITICIANS, POWER BROKERS

Son of key Iraqi leader criticizes US for civilian deaths

The son of a key U.S. ally chided the United States today for recent bombings that killed Iraqi civilians and rejected the idea of permanent U.S. bases in the country. Ammar Hakim, son of influential Shiite Muslim leader Abdelaziz Hakim, was addressing hundreds of followers at a gathering marking the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. The younger Hakim expressed sorrow about the civilians he said were killed in a U.S. assault this month on Jizan Imam, a Shiite village northwest of Baghdad, and he urged U.S. forces to be more cautious. The U.S. military maintains that the 25 people killed were criminals involved in militia activities. "We are working to enter into a security agreement with the international community to ensure that Iraq retrieves its full sovereignty," wire service reports quote Hakim as saying. "We will work not to have fixed bases for foreign troops on Iraqi lands." Ammar Hakim has stepped in for his ailing father at the helm of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, one of the two largest Shiite political blocs in parliament and a key backer of Prime Minister Nouri Maliki. Abdelaziz Hakim attended today's gathering outside the party's Baghdad headquarters. It was his first public appearance since he returned this week from Iran, where he had gone for cancer treatment.

REPORTS – US/UK/OTHERS IN IRAQ

U.S. must face huge death toll of Iraqi civilians

Not wanting to think about civilian deaths in Iraq has become almost universal. But ignorance of the Iraqi death toll is no longer an option. An Associated Press poll in February found that the average American believed about 9,900 Iraqis had been killed since the end of major combat operations in 2003. Recent evidence suggests that things in Iraq may be 100 times worse than Americans realize. News report tallies suggest that about 75,000 Iraqis have died since the U.S.-led invasion. But a study of 13 war-affected countries presented at a recent Harvard conference found that more than 80 percent of violent deaths in conflicts go unreported by the press and governments.

City officials in Najaf were recently quoted on Middle East Online stating that 40,000 unidentified bodies have been buried in that Iraqi city since the start of the conflict. In a speech Sept. 5, Samir Sumaidaie, the Iraqi ambassador to the United States, stated that there were 500,000 new widows in Iraq. The Iraq Study Group similarly found that the Pentagon undercounted violent incidents by a factor of 10. Finally, last month, the respected British polling firm ORB released the results of a poll estimating that 22 percent of households had lost a member to violence during the occupation of Iraq, equating to 1.2 million deaths. This finding roughly verifies a less precisely worded BBC poll last February that reported 17 percent of Iraqis had a household member who was a victim of violence.

So multiple polls and scientific surveys all suggest the official figures and media-based estimates in Iraq have missed 70 percent to 95 percent of all deaths. The evidence suggests that the extent of underreporting by the media is only increasing with time. Being forthright about the human cost of the war is in our long-term interests. How can military and civilian leadership comment intelligently about security trends in Iraq, or about whether any security policies are working, if they are not detecting most of the estimated 5,000-plus violent deaths that occur each week? Can American plans for the future of Iraq be respected within Iraq if they do not openly address the toll that they imply? Avoiding the issue of Iraqi deaths will likely come back to haunt us as young people in the Middle East grow up with ingrained hostility toward America.

Who Will Be Punished for Haditha?

Few people will dispute the carnage that took place in the Iraqi town of Haditha on Nov. 19, 2005: Women and children were killed in their homes alongside adult males by U.S. Marines. The Marines originally said that the civilians were killed as a result of a roadside bomb. TIME first brought the incident and its contradictions to light in March 2006, beginning a series of official investigations and contributing to the loud public debate on the deployment of the U.S. military in Iraq. The trouble, however, has been with coming up with a prosecutable case against the Marines involved in the incident. The commander of the First Marine Expeditionary Force, Lt. Gen. James Mattis, is expected to decide in the next few weeks which charges, if any, to bring against three remaining Marines under investigation for the Haditha killings. The likelihood is that none of the charges will be for murder.

Trial date set for US soldier in Iraq who 'aided enemy'

A US officer accused of "aiding the enemy" by smuggling a cellphone to a detainee in his Iraqi prison will stand trial at a military base in Baghdad next week, the American military said Saturday. Lieutenant Colonel William Steele at a pre-trial hearing on October 7 pleaded guilty to unauthorised possession of classified materials and to unlawfully possessing pornographic videos, a military statement said. Steele, who before his arrest was in charge of Camp Cropper, a detention centre on the outskirts of Baghdad, faces four other charges when the trial begins on Monday. These include providing an unmonitored cellular phone to detainees and that he did "wrongfully provide special privilege to and maintain an inappropriate relationship with an interpreter."

Ankara incursion threatens only part of Iraq still at peace

Turkey is threatening to send its troops into northern Iraq in pursuit of Kurdish guerrillas in a move likely to destabilise the one part of Iraq which is at peace. The Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan will ask parliament next week to authorise a military incursion into Iraqi Kurdistan after attacks by Turkish Kurds killed more than 10 Turkish troops last Sunday. Threatening a push into Iraq would also underline Turkish anger at the US Congressional vote describing the Ottoman Turk killing of Armenians in 1915 as genocide. A statement from Mr Erdogan's office said: "The order has been given for every kind of measure to be taken [against the PKK] including, if needed, by a cross-border operation." An attack into Iraqi Kurdistan by Turkey would be deeply embarrassing for the US because the five million Iraqi Kurds are the only Iraqi community which fully supports the US occupation of Iraq. US reliance on Kurdish military units was emphasised yesterday by a report that Peshmerga 34th Division is to move outside the autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) area to guard roads between Kurdistan and Baghdad.

U.S. Contractors in Iraq Rely on Third-World Labor

In many of the fortress-like U.S. bases in Iraq, Ugandan soldiers pull security duty. Many American military officers confuse these Ugandans with members of the "coalition of forces" fighting the global "war on terror." But in fact, they're paid private security guards. An estimated 1,500 Ugandans work for an American security firm called Special Operations Consulting-Security Management Group (SOC-SMG). The company is based in Minden, Nev., and was founded by two ex-Navy SEALs. Over the past two years, SOC-SMG has racked up nearly $30 million in Pentagon contracts in Iraq alone. SOC-SMG is now the target of litigation in Uganda among former employees, many of whom claim they were misled about the amount of money they would be paid. The average Ugandan guard will earn about $3.33 an hour, leaving the bulk of the rest of the contract money in the hands of their American employers.

IRAQI REFUGEES

Iraqi refugees shed sectarian bitterness in exile

A dozen Iraqi men — Sunnis and Shiites alike — sat around a table in a Damascus restaurant, singing, drinking and sharing a camaraderie all but impossible in the sectarian killing fields back home. "We can certainly choose our religious beliefs. But we have to realize the inevitable — that eventually we have to share everything in order to live in peace," said Salam Mohammed, a 34-year-old Sunni from Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit. More than 2 million Iraqis have fled their homeland to escape Sunni-Shiite reprisal killings. [Or the US military or US mercenaries. – dancewater] Once they reach the safety of Syria and other countries, many Iraqis shed sectarian bitterness and seek support from fellow countrymen regardless of religious sect. Back in Baghdad, "being Sunni or Shiite is an issue that a lot depends on — including your life," said Saad Kadhem, a Shiite from the Iraqi capital. "The situation is different when you are out, because people see things differently. But inside Iraq, people are still blinded by hatred and grudges they carry against one another." [The sectarian tensions did not exist before the US military showed up and evilly “shocked and awed” them into a dreadful condition, and now that they have left Iraq, the sectarian differences does not matter any more. – dancewater]

Hussein Al-alak, The Iraq Solidarity Campaign

What I mean by this "double speak", is that there seems to be no real depth to the understanding within the UK, in relation to the Post Traumatic Stress that both British Soldiers and Iraqis in the UK are facing, that when trying to explain a situation, or even your own experiences, people look at you with a glazed expression and a fixed smile on their faces. When you are given a response, the sound that seems to come out of many peoples mouths is almost like a foreign language or sounds like you are totally submerged under water, like being at a swimming pool and you can hear the noises above and around you. You can be watching a persons lips move and find yourself trying to read them, hoping that you might understand or even get a faint grasp of what they are saying but are unable to do so and then you start feeling frustrated.What comes next is a feeling that you need to explain even more clearly but then you're asked to "calm down", or are told that your "behaviour", "comments" are "inappropriate". As the person you are talking to, actually believes they are trying to keep a situation under control, you can feel your temperature rising, you hear your voice having to compete with an almost deafening noise and a running slide show playing in your mind of people who you have seen or conversations you have had. You see relatives, people who you know or have worked with and your hearing the loud noises and still you find yourself still trying to explain.

How to Help Iraqi Refugees

ANOTHER Way to help: The Collateral Repair Project

COMMENTARY

Many Americans Don't Realize Iraq War Is Illegal

Mistakenly, many Americans still believe President Bush's war on Iraq is justified because Congress supported it and funds it. Yet, as international legal authority Francis Boyle of the University of Illinois points out, President Bush got congressional backing by lying that Hussein had W.M.D. and that Hussein was connected to 9/11. That's fraud, probably the bloodiest, costliest lie in White House history. Also, to start a war, a country needs UN Security Council approval, which Bush failed to get. Otherwise, a nation can fight only in self-defense when attacked. By attacking Iraq, Bush violated the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact of 1928, the UN Charter, the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunals, and the Nuremberg Charter, Judgment and Principles, Boyle said.

As all treaties become the supreme law of the land under Article VI of the U.S. Constitution, the Bush-Cheney presidency is guilty of breaking all of the above, warmongering in spades. In testimony defending U.S. soldiers who have refused to fight in Iraq, Boyle noted that, under Nuremberg, "a soldier has a right to absent himself or herself from committing international crimes." In short, if given a criminal order, the defense used by Adolf Eichmann, Hitler's master killer, that he was only doing his job, is a phony. Boyle testified that First Lt. Ehren Watada had the right, "if not the obligation," to say, "I don't want to participate in this." Watada faced an army court martial for not deploying with his unit for Iraq. Watada won a victory when the judge ruled a mistrial.

AMERICA'S GREATEST CRIME IS RADIOACTIVE GENOCIDE

America's greatest crime against humanity is radioactive genocide particularly against the children of Iraq who are the innocent victims of our illegal war, occupation and economic rape of Iraq ~ We have the blood of countless innocent children on our hands and it will take generations to remove the stain of our illegal and inhumane transgressions. Currently, more than 50 percent of Iraqi cancer patients are children under the age of 5, up from 13 percent. Children are especially vulnerable because they tend to play in areas that are heavily polluted by depleted uranium. America's greatest crime against humanity is radioactive genocide, and prepare to be shocked when you see the pictures of these maimed and disfigured Iraqi children ~ who are the innocent victims of our illegal war, occupation and economic rape of Iraq. http://tinyurl.com/adoq2 We have the blood of countless innocent children on our hands and it will take generations to remove the stain of our illegal and inhumane transgressions.

Monitoring the Iraq 'surge'

The number of people killed in Iraq fell to 269 during the monitoring period of 5 to 12 September. This was down from 283 a week ago and 400 the week before that. It is the lowest figure reported since the surge began. The numbers coincided with a report by the US commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, who told Congress that violence had declined significantly since the operation started. …. Electricity supplies became increasingly erratic over the week, with family three left without any power at all. They have had the least reliable supply throughout the monitoring period. Family one's supply halved to two hours a day, while family two's supply remained steady at two hours in every 24. It followed the previous week's announcement from the Ministry of Electricity that it was setting up 150 generators around Baghdad to supplement the national grid. The continued power cuts and the approach of Ramadan led to queues of at least eight hours for gas, as people opted to buy fuel for their private generators.

Ex-Commander Blasts Iraq 'Nightmare'

The U.S. commander in Iraq for the first year of the occupation lambasted George W. Bush's national security team for "incompetence" that created an endless "nightmare." Breaking almost a year of silence since leaving the Army, retired Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez lashed out at almost everyone associated with the debacle. He even acknowledged that the U.S. high command displayed "an absolute lack of moral courage" in acquiescing to the poorly planned war. [Too little, too late, asshole. – dancewater]

It's the Oil

Iraq is ‘unwinnable’, a ‘quagmire’, a ‘fiasco’: so goes the received opinion. But there is good reason to think that, from the Bush-Cheney perspective, it is none of these things. Indeed, the US may be ‘stuck’ precisely where Bush et al want it to be, which is why there is no ‘exit strategy’. Iraq has 115 billion barrels of known oil reserves. That is more than five times the total in the United States. And, because of its long isolation, it is the least explored of the world’s oil-rich nations. A mere two thousand wells have been drilled across the entire country; in Texas alone there are a million. It has been estimated, by the Council on Foreign Relations, that Iraq may have a further 220 billion barrels of undiscovered oil; another study puts the figure at 300 billion. If these estimates are anywhere close to the mark, US forces are now sitting on one quarter of the world’s oil resources. The value of Iraqi oil, largely light crude with low production costs, would be of the order of $30 trillion at today’s prices. For purposes of comparison, the projected total cost of the US invasion/occupation is around $1 trillion. Who will get Iraq’s oil? One of the Bush administration’s ‘benchmarks’ for the Iraqi government is the passage of a law to distribute oil revenues. The draft law that the US has written for the Iraqi congress would cede nearly all the oil to Western companies. The Iraq National Oil Company would retain control of 17 of Iraq’s 80 existing oilfields, leaving the rest – including all yet to be discovered oil – under foreign corporate control for 30 years. ‘The foreign companies would not have to invest their earnings in the Iraqi economy,’ the analyst Antonia Juhasz wrote in the New York Times in March, after the draft law was leaked. ‘They could even ride out Iraq’s current “instability” by signing contracts now, while the Iraqi government is at its weakest, and then wait at least two years before even setting foot in the country.’ As negotiations over the oil law stalled in September, the provincial government in Kurdistan simply signed a separate deal with the Dallas-based Hunt Oil Company, headed by a close political ally of President Bush.

……. The occupation may seem horribly botched on the face of it, but the Bush administration’s cavalier attitude towards ‘nation-building’ has all but ensured that Iraq will end up as an American protectorate for the next few decades – a necessary condition for the extraction of its oil wealth. If the US had managed to create a strong, democratic government in an Iraq effectively secured by its own army and police force, and had then departed, what would have stopped that government from taking control of its own oil, like every other regime in the Middle East? On the assumption that the Bush-Cheney strategy is oil-centred, the tactics – dissolving the army, de-Baathification, a final ‘surge’ that has hastened internal migration – could scarcely have been more effective. The costs – a few billion dollars a month plus a few dozen American fatalities (a figure which will probably diminish, and which is in any case comparable to the number of US motorcyclists killed because of repealed helmet laws) – are negligible compared to $30 trillion in oil wealth, assured American geopolitical supremacy and cheap gas for voters. In terms of realpolitik, the invasion of Iraq is not a fiasco; it is a resounding success.

RESISTANCE

Quote of the day: "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on
military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching
spiritual death." - Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.