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information from occupied iraq ::
informazione dall'iraq occupato
Statement of the Council of Nineveh Province Notables, Sheikhs and Uleima BRussells Tribunal
...We demand an International Committee of Enquiry in addition to an Iraqi committee formed by representatives of Uleima, Sheikhs and Notables drawn from central and southern Iraq to investigate the crimes committed by the American occupation forces assisted by members of the Interior Special Forces and National Guard. We especially point to the sectarian crimes and the rape of Iraqi women which count as grave precedent i!
n Iraq. The Iraqi Government is partner to all of these crimes in the absence of the media and in particular the killing and kidnapping of journalists by mercenaries of the occupation after terrorising and excluding satellite stations and Arabic and International media preventing the coverage of what is going on to enable the slaughter of Iraqi people without witnesses...
Can the president of the United States imprison an American citizen for 3 and a half years as an enemy combatant and then in a flash change his mind and charge him as a criminal? Isn’t that double jeopardy? And, doesn’t it imply that Bush has created a parallel justice system where he’s free to determine guilt or innocence according to his own discretion? Two weeks ago the Bush legal team completely reversed its position in the Jose Padilla, "dirty bomber" case; d!
ropping its claim that Padilla be held as an enemy combatant and, instead, charging him with 3 counts of conspiracy to murder US nationals, conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists and providing material support to terrorists in an 11 count indictment...
Back to the Neoconservatives (4) Jihad el Khazen, Al-Hayat
I hope that Paul Wolfowitz is put on trial some day with the rest of the neoconservative mafia, on charges of killing 100,000 Iraqis and more than 2,000 American soldiers. I think that in the end, he will go on trial, instead of being rewarded for his role in the war against Iraq by being appointed head of the World Bank. I'm not alone in calling for him to be put on trial, for the same reasons. Many people have begun feeling the same way as I do...
James Petras - Israel's War with Iran - the unabridged version James Petras, peacepalestine
Israel’s political and military leadership have repeatedly and openly declared their preparation to militarily attack Iran in the immediate future. Their influential supporters in the US have made Israel’s war policy the number one priority in their efforts to secure Presidential and Congressional backing. The arguments put forth by the Israeli government and echoed by their followers in the US regarding Iran’s nuclear th!
reat are without substance or fact and have aroused opposition and misgivings throughout the world, among European governments, international agencies, among most US military leaders and the public, the world oil industry and even among sectors of the Bush Administration...
The Politics of Language, Escalation or "Retaliation" James Petras, peacepalestine
It is commonplace to read each day in the most prestigious newspapers (Financial Times, New York Times, London Times, Washington Post) of Israeli "retaliation"/ The reportage frequently mentions a Palestinian attack on an Israeli colonial settlement in the West Bank or urban population center in Israel. The action and reaction always is located in a limited time frame. Palestinian action is always the initial moment and the Israel!
i military attack is always described as a response or "retaliatory" and therefore, presumably a form of defensive action, "justifiable". Thus what appears as objective reportage on two sets of military actions, is in fact an arbitrary selection of time frames which lays the basis for a highly biased interpretive framework...
Sizeable Minorities Still Believe Saddam Hussein Had Strong Links to Al Qaeda, Helped Plan 9/11 and Had Weapons of Mass Destruction Harris Interactive Inc.
More than four years after the attacks of September 11, 2001, many U.S. adults still believe some of the justifications for the invasion of Iraq, which have now been discredited, according to a new Harris Poll. For example:
* Forty-one percent (41%) of U.S. adults believe that Saddam Hussein had "strong links to Al Qaeda."
* Twenty-two percent (22%) of adults believe that Saddam Hussein "helped plan and support the hijackers who attacked the United States on September 11."
* Twenty-six percent (26%) of adults believe that Iraq "had weapons of mass destruction when the U.S. invaded."
* Twenty-four percent (24%) of all adults believe that "several of the hijackers who attacked the United States on September 11 were Iraqis."...
...I saw in a report today that Rep Marcie Kaptur OH-09 stated that in Iraq there are now 100,000 civilian security contractors and that she wonders if the Bush administration would simply replace the US Military with they're corporate friendly paid mercenaries to continue the Iraq war effort indefinitely costing the American treasury more and more money going to Haliburton and the others. What a windfall for these companies...
Pentagon propaganda program orders soldiers to promote Iraq war while home on leave DOUG THOMPSON, Publisher, Capitol Hill Blue
Good soldiers follow orders and hundreds of American military men and women returned to the United States on holiday leave this month with orders to sell the Iraq war to a skeptical public. The program, coordinated through a Pentagon operation dubbed "Operation Homefront," ordered military personnel to give interviews to their hometown newspapers, television stations and other media outl!
ets and praise the American war effort in Iraq...
Top Ten Anti-War News Stories of 2005 and the Underreported Stories of the Year Kevin Zeese , DemocracyRising
1. Cindy Sheehan stands up to President Bush in Crawford, TX and reawakens the anti-war movement. When the 'Peace Mom' was at the Veterans for Peace conference in Dallas,Texas this summer she decided she was going to Crawford to see the President. She went but only saw the President as he sped by to a fund raiser for Republican candidates. But Bush - and the world - heard her question: "Mr. President what!
was the noble cause for which my son Casey died?" The President is still having trouble with that basic question. Sheehan's stand awakened the nation in what Nancy Lessin of Military Families Speak Out described as "the acoustics of ditch." Sheehan usually appears on stage with other Gold Star Families, family members of soldiers serving in Iraq and veterans of the Iraq War recognizing that she is just one of hundreds of thousands of family members whose loved ones have been killed or seriously injured in the war and occupation...
Iran and Syria Still in the Crosshairs GARY LEUPP, www.dissidentvoice.org
Another year over, and we still haven’t seen the widely predicted U.S. (or U.S.-Israeli) attacks on Syria and Iran. But keep paying attention. The Turkish press reports that in a December trip to Turkey, CIA Director Porter Goss "asked Ankara to be ready for a possible US air operation against Iran and Syria." Coming hot on the heels of FBI Director Robert Mueller, he brought with him a large delegation and three dossiers laying out the !
case against Iran. The first purportedly documents the existence of Iranian nuclear weapons, the second of Iranian ties to al-Qaeda and the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK), and the third depicts Iran as a mortal enemy of the secular Turkish state...
“The Face of Sacrifice”: Another Example of the New York Times’ Service to Imperial Power Paul Street, www.dissidentvoice.org
Here's a little new wrinkle in the story of the corporate-liberal New York Times' servility to imperial power. Last Monday's Times contained an outwardly progressive item: a two-page photo essay on civilian casualties (what the paper calls "The Face of Sacrifice") in Iraq ("The Face and Voice of Civilian Sacrifice in Iraq: Photographs by Adam Nadel," NYT, 26 December 2005, pp. A16-A17)...!
US to spend £30million on Iraq prisons to hold insurgents Francis Harris
American forces in Iraq have launched a £30 million programme to expand military prisons after the number of suspected insurgents in custody doubled to 15,000. The programme forms part of a two-pronged scheme which aims to ensure there is space to keep captured gunmen locked up and to hand over the task to the Iraqis. More than 3,700 US troops are involved in guarding prisoners in Iraq and Washington wants to bring them home...
Sore losers in Iraq? Eli Stephens, Left I on the News
A propos of my discussion the other day about American media not paying much attention to demonstrations in Iraq, on today's local CBS news (KPIX), they showed a bit of film of demonstrations today, described by the anchor thusly: "The demonstrators were unhappy with the results of the election." No, you moron, they were unhappy with what they perceive as election fraud in the election, not with the "results"...
Rumsfeld Admits to "Ghosting" Detainee David Swanson, AfterDowningStreet.org
U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has admitted that he "ghosted" a detainee, meaning that he made the decision to hold a prisoner without keeping any records of the fact. While prisoners of war can be theoretically stripped of their rights by calling them other names (like "unlawful combatants"), they are probably most effectively stripped of all rights by keeping their imprisonment secret. That is what Rumsfeld says he did...
Seymour Hersh warned a few months back that the Pentagon was going to be relying more on airpower in the next phase of the Iraq War. Now there is more evidence to prove it. Bradley Graham of The Washington Post reveals that the number of U.S. air strikes has gone up by a factor of five in the last year, with U.S. pilots now going on four sorties a day and dropping their 500-pound bombs. Military analysts expect this reliance on air power to continue—or even to increase—as the U!
.S. withdraws some of its ground troops. Those sorties are killing civilians, though we’re not seeing the video on our nightly news and the Pentagon is not tabulating the deaths, or at least not making the tally public...
Let's Stop a US/Israeli War on Iran BILL and KATHLEEN CHRISTISON, Former CIA analysts
The peace movements of the entire world should be in crisis mode right now, working non-stop to prevent the U.S. and Israel from starting a war against Iran. The reckless and unnecessary dangers arising from such a war are so obvious that one wonders why normal political forces in the two aggressor countries -- both of whom love to glorify themselves as democracies -- would not prevent such a war from happening. But the "normal !
political forces" in both the U.S. and Israel have become badly distorted. Democracy has been seriously undermined in both...
International Team to Review Iraq Results PATRICK QUINN, Associated Press Writer
An international team agreed Thursday to review Iraq's parliamentary elections, a decision lauded by Sunni Arab and secular Shiite groups who have staged repeated protests around Iraq complaining of widespread fraud and intimidation. Meanwhile, gunmen killed 12 members of an extended Shiite family near Latifiyah, a Sunni Arab-dominated town about 20 miles south of Baghdad. Police said the men were taken from their homes, packed into !
a minivan and shot...
Iraq's jailed former deputy prime-minister, Tariq Aziz, is to remain in prison, Judge Raid Juhi, president of the panel investigating deposed Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has told the pan-Arab al-Sharq al-Awsat daily in an interview. Aziz has been in US custody since April, 2003, held in isolation in an unspecified location. A Christian, Aziz was allowed over Christmas to speak to his family for the first time since his detention. "I have seen Tariq Aziz's file, !
and this has been handed over to another public prosecutor. No request has been made for his release, because he is still under investigation," said Juhi. Aziz has so far not been charged with any specific crimes...
GI Special 3D57A: Announcement www.militaryproject.org
...In the final analysis the stationing of American forces abroad serves not the national interest but the class interest of the corporate and political elite. The maintenance of a massive, interventionist-oriented military establishment is based on the need to protect multinational investment and preserve regimes friendly to American capital. Imperialism is at the heart of the national-security system and is the force fundamentally responsible for the counte!
rrevolutionary, repressive aims of U.S. policy...
The release of Dr. Rihab Taha and Dr. Huda Ammash Eli Stephens, Left I on the News
Robert Scheer writing at The Huffington Post wonders why there hasn't been more coverage of the recent release of Iraqi scientists Rihab Taha and Huda Ammash. His musing was probably triggered by this article by Melinda Liu in Newsweek online. As an aside before I get to the main points, the article's headline talks about "Mrs. Anthrax." But the article itself reveals that Huda Ammash has a doctorate in microbiology from the Univer!
sity of Missouri. Doesn't that qualify her as "Dr. Anthrax"? Just asking...
US Air Forces shelled a village near Hauiya city, north of the Iraqi capital, killing 10 civilians, Arab television channels reported Thursday. Arab sources quoted the US Central Command in Iraq as saying the air strike took place last Tuesday when they fired two rockets at a building where alleged resistance members were hidden. Earlier on Thursday, a police major, Ali al Issawi, was critically wounded in a rebel attack in Saqlawiy locality, west of Baghdad, said the Ir!
aqi ministry of interior...
www.uruknet.info: a site gathering daily information concerning occupied Iraq:
news, analysis, documents and texts of iraqi resistance available in Italian and
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