Photo: Members of Local Concerned Citizens detain alleged al-Qaida suspects in a small village of al-Aswad near the city of Baqouba, 60 kilometers (35 miles) northeast of Baghdad, Iraq, Thursday, Dec. 13, 2007. Local concerned citizens together with Iraqi police arrested three alleged al-Qaida suspects during their joint operation on Thursday. (AP Photo) [They look like thugs to me, just like the Wolf Brigade looked like thugs. – dancewater]
REPORTS – LIFE IN IRAQ
Stray Bullets
First they raided a home two doors down, blew the doors out and went in looking for their target. The soldiers pulled the family out of the home and the second floor was destroyed, the family said. A picture shows a burned out room and shattered glass. The soldiers progressed to the second house, searching for their target, an Al Qaida in Iraq member who was believed responsible for attacks on U.S. and Iraqi forces. At the second house in this place, once an Al Qaida bastion, they blew the doors off and pulled the residents from the house. The Iraqi soldiers toyed with them, telling them to raise their arms up, drop their arms and raise them again. A few soldiers walked away speaking a language the families didn't understand. It was then that a bullet pierced the window where Suheila held her daughter Hadil. The bullet pierced Hadil's neck and passed through her, embedding in the wall of the room. No one came into the house and Suheila was too afraid to call out for help, she said. Hadil bled to death in her mother’s arms. Three men were detained, two were later released. The U.S. military said the man detained is an Al Qaida in Iraq member. There were no reports of Hadil's death, they said.
This morning Ali walked into my room. He works at the hotel where our offices are housed. We chat while he works most mornings. Today he was visibly tired. "How's your neighborhood," I asked. "Not good Leila, not good," he replied. He stopped his work and walked over to my desk. "They came at 3 a.m. looking for someone from the Mahdi Army," he said, referring to the U.S. military. The Shiite militia loyal to Shiite cleric Muqtada al Sadr controls his neighborhood. He described how the "Amerkan," the Americans, pulled him and his family from their beds and forced them against the walls, guns pointed to their backs. The U.S. soldiers had broken down the doors and taken them by surprise, looking for their target. His daughter and son, Wafaa, 6, and Hussein, 7, shook with fear. Because I didn't understand the word shiver, he impersonated his children quivering. The soldiers searched the home and found nothing.
Freedom lost
In March 2004 George Bush said that "the advance of freedom in the Middle East has given new rights and new hopes to women ... the systematic use of rape by Saddam's former regime to dishonour families has ended". This may have given some people the impression that the American and British invasion of Iraq had helped to improve the lives of its women. But this is far from the case. Even under Saddam, women in Iraq - including in semi-autonomous Kurdistan - were widely recognized as among the most liberated in the Middle East. They held important positions in business, education and the public sector, and their rights were protected by a statutory family law that was the envy of women's activists in neighbouring countries. But since the 2003 invasion, advances that took 50 years to establish are crumbling away. In much of the country, women can only now move around with a male escort. Rape is committed habitually by all the main armed groups, including those linked to the government. Women are being murdered throughout Iraq in unprecedented numbers.
….In a nondescript building on a busy road in the north I visit one of the few secret shelters in Iraq for women fleeing violence. A broom-cupboard door is unlocked to reveal a hidden staircase, leading to a two-room apartment where the morning sunshine and the hum of traffic filter through high-set windows. A pile of thin mattresses show that up to 20 women can stay here at any one time. The most recent arrivals are a woman and her two children from the local area. The woman, Zaynab, says she wants to divorce her abusive husband, a drunk, but he has refused. She had gone to live with her mother but he had come to threaten her. "I love my children. My family wanted me to marry again but I don't want to marry anyone, I want to be with my children." She stretches her arm out towards the room next door where her curly-haired daughter, eight, and son, seven, are playing. Nur is here because she helped someone on impulse. Near her home in Diyala she heard the screams of a man locked in a compound and helped him escape. It turned out he was being tortured by a militia group. Later, the militia found out she had helped the man. "My father is dead, I have no brothers, just my mother and my little sister. They can't protect me." She fled north to Kirkuk, where she heard about the shelter.
A Trip to Fallujah
On Monday the trip from Baghdad to Fallujah was peaceful, quick and no troubles of any kind. The taxi driver lost three of his uncles in Baghdad. I don’t recall talking to any one who didn’t suffer losing a relative or a son. So any way I am home after sunset and every thing went so peaceful. On Tuesday the Fallujah stringer and I in the city, Jamal, tried to talk to many officials and tribal sheikhs but we couldn’t. It was an odd experiment was for the first time I enjoyed the capability to identify myself as a journalist without fear. It was unique moments. For the first time I see a gathering of journalists in Fallujah saying with no fear they work for foreign news agencies. It was happy moments to be able to tour Fallujah and talk to everyone as a reporter seeking for the truth. Any way on the way back yesterday, it was different. The first route was blocked by an American military convoy. The driver decided this would take a long time and turned back to another route. Ahead of us there was another military convoy, also American, driving slowly, and stopped random cars on the other side of the street and this took more than an hour. Any way the convoy left the highway to a near by guarding post of the Iraqi police. Passed Abu Ghraib prison, our least favorite scene, I avoid looking at it. Driving about 90 miles per hour an Iraqi humvee came from no where, we couldn’t stop and the driver had to pass the humvee as he couldn’t stop to avoid collision. Few minutes later as we approached an Iraqi army check point soldiers pointed their new M16 rifles and shouted Enzil (get down) and ran to the car and took us all down. The humvee suspected the car to be a car bomb or transporting weapons. The soldiers were shouting and opening the doors of the car. They got on their knees, aiming their weapons. We were frightened, we know their lack of discipline.
Mass Grave Found With 18 Iraqi Corpses
A mass grave of armed victims was found on Thursday in Diyala Province east of the Iraqi capital. A security official, in remarks to Kuwait News Agency (KUNA), charged that 18 corpses were killed by the militias of the so-called Iraq Islamic state -- 12 of whom were headless -- noting that all the victims were males who were kidnapped and assassinated two months ago.
In Iraq, a Grieving Father Hungers for Revenge
Finally his relentless pursuit for the truth paid off. After 16 months, the tribal leaders told Abu Fuad his son had been killed and his body dropped in Baghdad's Al-Qanat irrigation canal -- favourite dumping ground of Shiite death squads. "They told me to go to the Al-Muthanna police station in Zayuna neighbourhood to get more information," he said. At the police station officials confirmed that his son's body had been found in the ditch, and that it had been so badly disfigured they had initially not been able to distinguish whether it was that of a man or a woman. Since the start of the sectarian violence in Iraq, the security forces, who are dominated by Shiites, have been accused of carrying out a campaign of terror against Sunni Arabs. But the murder of Fuad and thousands like him indicates that the violence is carried out often without distinction and fuels claims gangs are being paid to carry out killings to ignite community violence.
Abu Fuad finally found his son's body in the cemetery in Najaf. "The crime was terribly ugly, the murder was hideous. I saw but could not recognise my son because of the burns he sustained. They even cut away his body parts. He was still dressed in a sports tracksuit." Officials at Al-Muthanna police station identified one of the killers as a "Captain Firas" but said they had no evidence against him. The father said one of the members of the death squad was killed in an explosion and another was arrested but escaped. "I am still collecting information on them and will find them. I have heard they are still abducting and killing people."
IRAQ: Not Even the Hajj is Free of Corruption
Many Iraqis are angry that the government seems to be picking favourites for the Hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. Muslims are obliged to carry out the pilgrimage, as long as they are able-bodied and can afford to, at least once in their lifetime. Saudi Arabia, where the holy site of Mecca is located, limits the number of pilgrims to one in every 1,000 people of the total population of each Islamic country. The quota for Iraq for the last four years was agreed at 28,000 pilgrims. Iraqis who want to go on the pilgrimage say officials have issued approvals only for relatives and party members. The Iraqi government led by U.S.-appointed Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is Shia dominated, and many Iraqis say selection for the pilgrimage is sectarian. "It is a shame that corruption now goes as far as the Hajj," Sheikh Fadhil Mahmood of the Sunni religious group, the Association of Muslim Scholars, told IPS in Ramadi, 110 km west of Baghdad. "This is the fifth year that many Iraqis are deprived of their right to go to Mecca, while those who are members of parties in power, and militiamen, go every year. Most of our pilgrims are going for political and commercial purposes."
Iraq’s youthful militiamen build power through fear
On the first day of class, two male teenagers entered a girls’ high school in the Tobji neighborhood, clutching AK-47 assault rifles. The young Shiite fighters handed the principal a handwritten note and ordered her to assemble the students in the courtyard, witnesses said. “All girls must wear hijab,” she read aloud, her voice trembling. “If the girls don’t wear hijab, we will close the school or kill the girls.” That October day Sara Mustafa, 14, a secular Sunni Arab, also trembled. The next morning, she covered up with an Islamic head scarf for the first time. The young fighters now controlled her life. “We could not do anything,” Sara recalled. The Mahdi Army of Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr is using a new generation of youths, some as young as 15, to expand and tighten its grip across Baghdad, but the ruthlessness of some of these young fighters is alienating Sunnis and Shiites alike.
Harsh reality of Iraqi orphans
Unlike orphans in many countries in the world, most Iraqi orphans lost their parents around the same time and under horrible circumstances. In addition to their desire for compassion and care, those children need to overcome their sad memories and make a new beginning in life. Recounting her traumatic memories, Halima, a nine-year-old girl who is living in a public orphanage, said that she lost her parents in a blast that ripped through a local market in a Baghdad neighborhood. "We were shopping in a popular market in Baghdad al-Jadida neighborhood when a car bomb detonated. I still recall how bodies turned into charcoal," Halima told the independent news agency Voices of Iraq (VOI). "I was taken to the hospital for treatment and was told that my parents were killed. My younger brother survived and was adopted by a loving family. It was my relatives who brought me to this orphanage," the girl added. "Our problem here is that we do not receive academic education. If only the government could build special schools for us to guarantee our future," she said.
Iraqi children's play shows "We are all friends"
The young performers were funny, the audience giggled and clapped, and the message at a children's theatre festival in Iraq's National Theatre was as serious as it was entertaining. "I am fast! I am fast! Ha ha!" taunted 11-year-old Abathir Fadhil, bouncing around the stage in a furry bunny suit in the classic story of the tortoise and the hare. "You want to be my friend? But you are so slow! You can't be my friend," he teased the tortoise, played by a young girl in a short green skirt and cardboard shell. For those who don't know the story, the quick hare ends up getting hurt and relies on the slow tortoise to help him. "Help me, my friend!" shouted the hare, to the crowd's delight. A chorus of children shouted back: "What did you say?" "Help me, my friend!" The play was called "How Beautiful Is Friendship" and in a country where tens of thousands of civilians have been killed in sectarian violence, the point was clear.
Italy to help Iraq modernize museums
Italy has promised to modernize the country’s museums which were looted and vandalized in the aftermath of the 2003-U.S. invasion. Prior to the invasion Italy had wide-ranging cultural ties with Iraq. Its excavation teams dug up ancient Mesopotamian mounds and its experts helped Iraqi counterparts repair and preserve ancient relics. The provincial museum of Najaf, Nasiriya and Diwaniya will be the first to be modernized, according to the Antiquities Department. “The sides have agreed for the work to start in a few weeks,” said Bahaa al-Mayah, a consultant at the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities. Mayah said Italian experts were also to examine the leaning minaret (al-Hadba) of Mosul, one of the most fascinating and important Islamic landmarks in the country.
Three high-voltage pylons blown up
Saboteurs have blown up three high-voltage pylons linking power plants in the northern city of Baiji with Baghdad, the electricity ministry said. Aziz Sultan, the ministry’s information officer, said the loss of the three pylons has increased blackouts in Baghdad home to nearly six million people. Baiji is Iraq’s oil refining and power generating center. But the city and surrounding areas are still among the most violent in the country. Anti-U.S. rebels have almost total control of the region at night. “Three pylons for the transfer of high voltage electricity linking Baiji with western Baghdad have been subjected to sabotage operations,” Sultan said.
Hundreds of vehicles and 20 tons of lead disappear from government ware houses
Unidentified gunmen stormed government ware houses in the southern city of Basra and stole 375 government cars and 20 tons of lead, police sources say. The robbery is reported to be the largest and most organized in the years since the U.S. invasion of the country. The robbers were said to by carrying forged papers which enabled them to drive away with the vehicles, the sources refusing to be named said. The lead has disappeared from government warehouses in central Iraq. The lead robbers are also said to have used faked papers to empty the ware house of its contents. Lead can be used in the preparations of explosive materials and bombs. The cars were in customs warehouses in Basra.
REPORTS – IRAQI MILITIAS, POLITICIANS, POWER BROKERS
New awakening council for Samarra
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has allowed Sunni tribes in the restive city of Samarra north of Baghdad to set up their own militias to guard their city against al-Qaeda. Samarra, north of Baghdad, has exchanged hands several times since the 2003-U.S. invasion, with anti-U.S. rebels using it as a major stronghold for their attacks. The city is still restive but Maliki hopes the new tribal militias will eventually manage in forcing al-Qaeda to leave. Other violent cities such as Ramadi and Falluja have been almost purged of Qaeda with tribal militias patrolling the streets and manning checkpoints. Similar councils are found in other predominantly Sunni areas like Baaqouba and Mosul but tribal militias there are far from imposing their full control.
REPORTS – US/UK/OTHERS IN IRAQ
U.S. forces raid education ministry building in Sadr City
U.S. troops on Thursday stormed a Ministry of Education building in Sadr City in eastern Baghdad and confiscated some documents, a media source from the ministry said. "This morning, U.S. forces raided the general directorate of Rasafa education in central Sadr City in eastern Baghdad," the source told the independent news agency Voices of Iraq (VOI) under condition of anonymity. "The forces did not detain any of the building's employees or explain reasons behind the raid," he also said, pointing out that they confiscated some documents. No word was immediately available from the U.S. army on the incident.
340 detainees released from U.S.-run detention centres in Iraq
U.S. army in Iraq released on Thursday 340 non-convicted detainees under a plan launched three months ago, U.S. army media source said. “The U.S. troops set free 340 detainees, in the presence of Iraqi Human Rights Minister Wijdan Michael, in a continuation of mechanism used by the U.S. army to release detainees started on July19th”, said Janah Hamoud, the U.S. army Media centre coordinator. He noted “the mechanism was implemented in cooperation between the Iraqi government and Multi-National Forces”. He added “the joint administrative committee revising the detainee’s files would examin the detainees’ files every six month in addition to reviewing the file periodically throughout detention period”. The media coordinator pointed out that the committee consisted of “Iraqi officials and high ranking American officers”. Detainees in MNF and Iraqi run detention centers amounts to 32 thousands according to Human Rights Minister Wijdan Michael, 18 thousands detainees in Bucca prison at Um Qasr town in Basra, south of Iraq, about nine thousands are in Cropper detention centre located at Baghdad airport. As most detainees were not brought to court, The Iraqi minister called for accelerating submitting the cases of all detainees to the Iraqi courts and finalizing their cases. She affirmed the necessity of registering the detainee in all prisons to check whether they were wanted for other cases.
US marine guilty of Iraq killing
A US marine has been found guilty of killing an Iraqi soldier when they were on night-time patrol in Fallujah. Lance Corporal Delano Holmes was convicted of negligent homicide. But he was found not guilty of a more serious unpremeditated murder charge. Holmes told a military court in San Diego that he suspected the Iraqi soldier might be signalling to an insurgent sniper. He now faces up to eight years in prison and a dishonourable discharge.
Bulgarian oil trader gets probation for UN scandal
Bulgarian oil trader Ludmil Dionissiev was sentenced to two years' probation on Thursday for his role in paying secret kickbacks to Iraq in the U.N. oil-for-food program
Iranian rockets handed over by Iraqis: US-led military
Iraqi civil defence members have found 14 Iranian-made rockets and handed them to coalition forces, the US-led military said on Thursday. The 107 mm rockets, which the military said were made in Iran and dated from 2006, were handed to Khazak soldiers serving in Wasit province, southeast of Baghdad on December 4. Colonel Peter Baker, quoted in the statement, said: "This is another indication of the cooperation of Iraqi officials who in all earnestness want to have a better society." [Or they are playing you for suckers. – dancewater]
HISTORY
CIA recruiting Saddam’s secret police (September 2003)
The Sunday Times has reported that the CIA is recruiting former agents from Saddam Hussein’s notorious security forces in Iraq. According to the newspaper, “American forces have launched a covert campaign to recruit former officers of the Mukhabarat, Saddam Hussein’s infamous secret police, who were responsible for the deaths and torture of tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis.” It reports that dozens of these sadistic and brutal murderers are now employed by the US “for help in hunting resistance groups” within Iraq, as well as “identifying and tracking down Iraqis suspected of spying for Iran and Syria, the neighbouring countries most hostile to Washington”. The Times interviewed one such new recruit, Mohammed Abdullah, who had spent 10 years in the Mukhabarat and eight in military intelligence. Abdullah confirmed that he had been working with the CIA since May, for which he is paid $700 a month.
“We are under strict instructions not to publicise our work with the Americans, but dozens of former Mukhabarat officers have already been recruited,” he said. “They need us. The Mukhabarat was one of the best state security organisations in the world.” Abdullah’s new job description is to help identify Iraqis, described as Baath party loyalists, who “could be worth questioning”. In truth, this means tracking down anyone that could be involved in the ongoing and growing resistance to the US and British occupation, as it is now routine for the coalition to brand any acts of opposition to its illegal takeover of the country as the work of Saddam Hussein loyalists.
Death squads, disappearances, and torture — from Latin America to Iraq
The world is made up, as Captain Segura in Graham Greene’s 1958 novel Our Man in Havana put it, of two classes: the torturable and the untorturable. “There are people,” Segura explained, “who expect to be tortured and others who would be outraged by the idea.” Then — so Greene thought — Catholics, particularly Latin American Catholics, were more torturable than Protestants. Now, of course, Muslims hold that distinction, victims of a globalized network of offshore and outsourced imprisonment coordinated by Washington and knitted together by secret flights, concentration camps, and black-site detention centers. The CIA’s deployment of Orwellian “Special Removal Units” to kidnap terror suspects in Europe, Canada, the Middle East, and elsewhere and the whisking of these “ghost prisoners” off to Third World countries to be tortured goes, today, by the term “extraordinary rendition,” a hauntingly apt phrase. “To render” means not just to hand over, but to extract the essence of a thing, as well as to hand out a verdict and “give in return or retribution” — good descriptions of what happens during torture sessions.
IRAQI REFUGEES
*_The Reality Tour_*
All my life I have never seen poverty like I saw among the Iraqis in Syria… widows or women who lost their sons because of criminal gangs and militias that entered Iraq after the occupation, and killed all Iraqis alike… whenever I met a woman who told her story while crying, I cried with her, at her situation, at the conditions of the sad Iraq, and at what happened to it; the destruction, the shredding. And when the women all gathered and we heard their stories with a member of the American delegation, I had my friend with me; Selma; a Turkish-American, a Muslim… I asked the women, with sorrow- but I had to ask the silly question: Are you Sunnies? Shia'ats? It turned out they were a mixture of both sides… This woman was a Sunnie; they threatened her and killed her son…and this is a Shia'at; threatened, and her husband was killed… There is no difference; the Sunnies and the Shia'ats were displaced from Iraq to live side by side in exile, waiting for that who would pity them, give them a charity of food rations, a blanket, or a heater because winter is near, await some humanitarian organization to take care of their disabled children, or afflicted with cancer as a result of the depleted Uranium, with which the Iraqi environment is contaminated, since the Kuwait war in 1991, then the occupation war in 2003.
And there is another sad phenomenon among the Iraqis in Syria, especially the women… the phenomenon of prostitution because of poverty… I mean- here in Amman we hear about Iraqi women working in night clubs, more perhaps because they are professionals than being poor women driven by poverty into this path… but in Syria, when I met the women at the Sayeda Zainab area; the widows or the young women with children and a crippled, disabled husband; who shall stop those from drifting into the road of depravity if the doors of honest living were closed into their faces? One women said- I work as a maid in a house, they give me (6,000) Syrian Liras a month, and my apartment rent is (7,000) S.L. a month. Another has a 15 years old son who works at a café, for a daily wage of (250) S.L.…(= 5 $) We were staying in a hotel at Al-Marja Sq. in Damascus. I went to have a cup of fruit juice at the restaurant next door; I asked him what he thought about the Iraqis here. He said- their numbers are high, perhaps two millions, they caused a rise in rents in the country and a shortage of housing. "They also say, and please, Madame, don't be cross", he said, "that anyone who goes to Al- Sayeda Zainab area can get an Iraqi woman for 250 S.L…."… ( =5 $ ) I remained silent, and smiled…. This is the new Iraq that Bush and the villains who came with him, built for us….. This is the liberation of the Iraqi women that we got…. The free women became prostitutes…. Well, well, well…. And where are the leaders of Islam, and the Arab Nation? Are they a sleep or ignorant about what is happening to the Iraqi men, and women? Or are they Bush's partners in the "Liberation of Iraq"?
IRAQ-JORDAN: Government introduces entry visas for Iraqis
In a bid to control the flow of migrants from Iraq, Jordan is now demanding that Iraqis wishing to enter the kingdom first secure entry visas, the official Jordanian news agency Petra said on 11 December. Jordan is home to over half a million Iraqi refugees or asylum-seekers and they are placing a considerable burden on public services, especially health and education. The government has tried to reduce the influx by barring those aged 18-45 from entry and making it harder for those in the country to obtain permanent residency. Last month Iraq gave Jordan US$8 million to help it cope with the burden of Iraqi migrants, but Interior Ministry officials say the concern is not purely economic. "The concern now is that terrorists could enter and do damage in the kingdom," said an official from the ministry who did not wish to be named.
Iraqi mother's choice: Which child goes to school?
The Zuhairy family lives in a freezing one-room apartment in Jaramana, a growing Iraqi refugee enclave in Damascus. There's no bathroom door, no hot water, no furniture, no heat and no privacy. Seven people sleep and eat in the same room, where a battered television set provides the only entertainment. The mother, who goes by the nickname Umm Sundus, has fought to keep her family fed since her husband, a goldsmith, was killed in Iraq last year and the rest of the family fled here. Rent is $150 a month, but the family's main income is $100 a month, wired from a relative in Australia, and Umm Sundus is always behind on bills. There's no way of educating so many children: Adam, 4; Bahram, 10; Ram, 14; Ranya, 17; Samir, 20; and Suzanne, 22. In Syria, residency permits are issued to Iraqis who enroll at least one of their children in school. Umm Sundus couldn't afford to send them all, so she faced a heartbreaking choice: Which child would be the one to go?
EU grants 50 million euros to help Iraqi refugees in Syria, Jordan
The European Union on Thursday said it was granting a total of 50 million euros (73.4 million dollars) to Syria and Jordan to help pay for schools and hospitals hosting Iraqi refugees. 'Iraqi refugees deserve access to education and health services. The authorities of Syria and Jordan have made a tremendous effort to welcome displaced Iraqi families. This is highly appreciated knowing that the large number of refugees are a strain to existing public services in both countries,' said EU External Relations Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner. EU officials said part of the money - 10 million euros - would be used to provide immediate and basic humanitarian assistance to the most vulnerable refugees.
How to Help Iraqi Refugees
ANOTHER Way to help: The Collateral Repair Project
RESISTANCE
“Not us. We’re not going.”
“A scheduled patrol is a direct order from me,” Strickland said. “‘They’re not coming,’” Strickland said he was told. “So I called the platoon sergeant and talked to him. ‘Remind your guys: These are some of the things that could happen if they refuse to go out.’ I was irritated they were thumbing their noses. I was determined to get them down there.” But, he said, he didn’t know the whole platoon, except for Ybay, had taken sleeping medications prescribed by mental health that day, according to Ybay. Strickland didn’t know mental health leaders had talked to 2nd Platoon about “doing the right thing.” He didn’t know 2nd Platoon had gathered for a meeting and determined they could no longer function professionally in Adhamiya — that several platoon members were afraid their anger could set loose a massacre.
“We said, ‘No.’ If you make us go there, we’re going to light up everything,” DeNardi said. “There’s a thousand platoons. Not us. We’re not going.” They decided as a platoon that they were done, DeNardi and Cardenas said, as did several other members of 2nd Platoon. At mental health, guys had told the therapist, “I’m going to murder someone.” And the therapist said, “There comes a time when you have to stand up,” 2nd Platoon members remembered. For the sake of not going to jail, the platoon decided they had to be “unplugged.” Ybay had gone to battalion to speak up for his guys and ask for more time. But when he came back, it was with orders to report to Old Mod. Ybay said he tried to persuade his men to go out, but he could see they were not ready. “It was like a scab that wouldn’t heal up,” Ybay said. “I couldn’t force them to go out. Listening to them in the mental health session, I could hear they’re not ready.” At 2 a.m, Ybay said, he’d found his men sitting outside smoking cigarettes. They could not sleep. Some of them were taking as many as 10 sleeping pills and still could not rest. The images of their dead friends haunted them. The need for revenge ravaged them. But Ybay was still disappointed in his men. “I had a mission,” he said. “The company had a mission. We still had to execute. But I understood their side, too.” Somehow, the full course of events didn’t make it to Strickland. All he knew, the commander said, was his men had refused an order, and he was determined to get them to Apache.
Significant win for US Iraq War resisters in Canada
On December 6, the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration of the House of Commons in Ottawa, Canada adopted a motion that was a critical victory for U.S. Iraq War resisters seeking sanctuary. Courage to Resist organizers Lori Hurlebaus and Jeff Paterson traveled to Ottawa for this hearing, along with supporters and resisters from across Canada, and have contributed to this report. In collaboration with the Toronto, Canada-based War Resisters Support Campaign (WRSC), Courage to Resist is calling for U.S.-Canada consulate delegations, vigils, and actions on January 24-25 to build momentum in the wake of this important first victory. After hearing the testimony of former U.S. Army sergeant Phillip McDowell, along with representatives of the Mennonites and Quakers, the Citizenship and Immigration Committee voted 7 to 4 to recommend that the Canadian government immediately implement a program to allow Iraq War resisters (and resisters of any war not sanctioned by the United Nations) and their families to stay in Canada.
We Support the Troops Who Oppose the War
On the weekend of 13-15 March, 2008, Iraq Veterans Against the War will assemble history's largest gathering of US veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as Iraqi and Afghan survivors. They will provide first hand accounts of their experiences and reveal the truth of occupation. We support Iraq Veterans Against the War and their Winter Soldier: Iraq & Afghanistan Investigation. Join us in supporting the effort to reveal truth in the way that only those who lived it can.
Please go to this website to sign the petition.
Quote of the day: “They are torturing people. They are torturing people on Guantanamo Bay. They are engaging in acts which amount to torture in the medieval sense of the phrase. They are engaging in good old-fashioned torture, as people would have understood it in the Dark Ages.” ~ Richard Bourke, Australian attorney
Photo: Members of Local Concerned Citizens detain alleged al-Qaida suspects in a small village of al-Aswad near the city of 
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