Israel -- realizing that Iraq cannot stay captured is secretly
Dick Eastman
Iraq cannot stay captured is murdering all Iraqi intellectuals who might
have operated government and economy post-occupation -- and killing some
American's who are talking against the operation. They are determined that
Iraq will not be able to sustain a middle class after the conquerors
withdraw.
The specific targeting of doctors and pharmacologists suggests intentions of
future biological warfare against this miserable innocent victim nation.
(Remember the rash of recently dead (accidents, "suicides" etc. and two on
Flight 77 on 9-11-01) leading microbiologists throughout the world as you
read the following.)
Dick Eastman
================
Iraqi intellectuals flee unidentified 'death squads'
By Ahmed Janabi
Tuesday 30 March 2004, 13:04 Makka Time, 10:04 GMT
http://tinyurl.com/2a9cw
Occupied Iraq is suffering a new brain drain as intellectuals flood out of
the country to avoid unemployment and an organised killing campaign.
In recent months assassinations have targeted engineers, pharmacologists,
officers, and lawyers.
More than 1000 leading Iraqi professionals and intellectuals have been
assassinated since last April, among them such prominent figures as Dr
Muhammad al-Rawi, the president of Baghdad University.
The identity of the assailants remains a mystery and none have been caught.
But families and colleagues of victims believe that Iraqi parties with
foreign affiliations have an interest in wiping out Iraq's intellectual
elite.
Media reports suggest that more than 3000 Iraqi academics and high-profile
professionals have left Iraq recently, not to mention the thousands of
Iraqis who are travelling out of the country every day in search of work and
safety.
"Iraqis used to leave Iraq during the 13-year UN sanctions for better work
opportunities, but they are leaving now to avoid being assassinated by
unknown, well-organised death squads," said political analyst and politics
professor Dhafir Salman.
Usama al-Ani, director of the research and development department in the
Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research said top Iraqi
scientists have been targeted by foreign parties.
"I believe Iraqi scientists are being targeted by foreign powers, most
probably Israel."
Terror campaign
Monday's issue of the pro-US Iraqi internet newspaper Iraq of Tomorrow
reported that the decapitated body of mathematics professor Dr Abd al-Samai
Abd al-Razaq had been found in a Baghdad street.
Aljazeera.net contacted Dr Abd al-Samai's family in Baghdad and was
surprised to find him very much alive.
"They published such a story to terrify me and my family," he told
Aljazeera.net, accusing political and religious parties of turning Iraqi
universities into political battlefields.
"Since occupation, universities have become fertile recruitment ground for
political and religious parties. Students should be devoted to their
studies, not to serving the interests of those who seek power.
"These groups are targeting me and all my colleagues who want to preserve
respected Iraqi institutions from destruction."
De-Baathification
Aside from the terror campaign, measures taken by the post occupation
authorities have contributed to Iraq's brain drain.
"I would like to ask the de-Baathification committee why they are so happy
that many thousands of Baathists have been sacked from Iraq's governmental
departments and educational institutions?" Salman says. "Do they think they
have done well? Of course, not.
"They have sacked Iraq's elite professionals; who will replace them? Where
will the replacements come from? After all, these people are Iraqis, is this
in line with the national reconciliation they are talking about?"
Before the war on Iraq, US and UK officials repeatedly accused the Iraqi
government of triggering the exodus of four million educated Iraqis.
But under the occupation the rate of emigration has increased.
"Iraqi universities have lost 1315 scientists who hold MA and PhD degrees,"
al-Ani said. "This number constitutes eight per cent of the 15,500 Iraqi
academics.
"Up until now, 30% of those who were sacked as result of the campaign have
left Iraq."
Education system
Iraq is rich in intellectuals, largely as a result of Saddam Hussein's
policy of sending tens of thousands of Iraqi students abroad to gain
post-graduate degrees in a wide range of disciplines.
The practice fell into abeyance when UN sanctions were imposed in 1990
following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait.
In the country itself, where education has been free since the abolition of
the monarchy in 1958, most of the 20 universities in Iraq also awarded
post-graduate degrees.
===============
KERRY SUPPORTERS SHOULD BE REGARDED THE SAME AS BUSH SUPPORTERS
Bush-Kerry Same policies -- only differentiated by packaging and
ersonel -- the Oligarchy's "A" and "B" teams
The polls say 51 percent for Bush 46 percent for Kerry -- which means I am
part of the 3 percent and have no right to detract from Kerry's needed
votes, right?
If you believe that you are too far fucking gone to bother with.
If you are not for Kuccinich then you should be working toward a
union-of-all-third-parties to prove that "3" is bigger than "96"
green-liberal-oldright-populist-olddemocrat-independent
=================
Ask our aspiring "second black President" about this:
From: WWW.AfricanCrisis.Org
Former United States president Bill Clinton's administration knew Rwanda
was being engulfed by genocide in April 1994 but buried the information
to justify its inaction, according to classified documents made available
for the first time.
Senior officials privately used the word genocide within 16 days of the
start of the killings, but chose not to do so publicly because the
president had already decided not to intervene.
Intelligence reports obtained using the US Freedom of Information Act
show the cabinet and almost certainly the president had been told of a
planned "final solution to eliminate all Tutsis" before the slaughter
reached its peak.
It took Hutu death squads three months from April 6 to murder an
estimated 800 000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus and at each stage accurate,
detailed reports were reaching Washington's top policymakers.
The documents undermine claims by Clinton and his senior officials that
they did not fully appreciate the scale and speed of the killings.
"It's powerful proof that they knew," said Alison des Forges, a Human
Rights Watch researcher and authority on the genocide.
The National Security Archive, an independent non-governmental research
institute based in Washington DC, went to court to obtain the material.
===============
Kerry is part of this sham:
Basra: What the f*** are we doing here?
By Matthew Parris
In his second report from Iraq, this writer says British rule in Basra is a
sham, conducted from behind sandbags in a deal with Shia leaders
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7-1056784,00.html
FORGET all that smug stuff in the British media about the way our troops
(unlike the arrogant and out-of-touch Yanks) know how to get on with the
natives - every soldier a diplomat, etc - and have turned their southern
Iraqi zone around Basra into a haven of peaceful reconstruction.
The place is a stinking mess and the townsfolk are unemployed and desperate.
There is far less to show for a year's occupation than there should be, and
if our (undoubted) attempts to make friends with the locals seem to have
brought peace, then that will be because their Shia leaders have yet to stir
the mob against us. Bigger forces are at work than can be tamed with a
handshake, and all that goodwill could disappear in a puff of smoke.
I went to Basra by train. Incredibly, there still is one - just. Strangely,
almost no Westerners seem to have tried it. True, there have been
explosions, and attacks on trains; but the highway between the two cities is
subject both to insurgency and banditry so that few motorists dare to travel
by night, and goods vehicles travel in 30-strong convoys between US military
Humvees.
The railway from Baghdad to Basra is the first section of what was once no
doubt a grand British plan to link Syria to the Gulf. For some 500
dispiriting kilometres it runs not far from the Tigris but you never see the
river, only a limitless, flat, ugly river basin: muddy scrub, fields of
corn, palm groves sheltering the blackened hulks of Iraqi tanks that failed
to hide and, as you get closer to the Tigris's confluence with the
Euphrates, endless mudflats, then marshes, reeds and trenches to either side
and the occasional raised pole of a Marsh Arab's canoe.
You leave the sad magnificence of Baghdad Central Railway Station at 8.30am,
nosing through vast marshalling yards, derelict, littered with the
occasional rusting hulk of a steam locomotive, and gathering speed across
miles of untidy middle-class suburbs. Roads cross the track everywhere. All
booms, gates and warning lights are long wrecked and the train simply
whistles at trusting goats, Iraqis and motorised traffic to clear the track.
Our smart new green-and-yellow Chinese-made diesel loco pulled only three
carriages, and there cannot have been more than thirty passengers on board.
I quickly saw why. The carriages were smashed to bits. Doors were off, seats
were ripped out, windows cracked and dust came belching up through holes in
the floor. The whole 12-hour train ride to Basra cost little more than a
dollar (a seat in a shared taxi costs 20 times as much) but even
cash-strapped Iraqis have their pride. Only one other compartment in my
carriage was occupied: by a gentle and charming Iraqi family, obviously
poor, and too numerous - with six children - to fit in a car.
>From one or two individuals a sense of luminous goodness is somehow
communicated without words (they had only a few in English) and over the
hours ahead I was seized with an intense fondness for Adnan and Leila, their
four daughters, Hadir (who kept dusting my seat), Gofran, Hadil and Asraa,
their son Ali and their tiny baby boy, Hossain, tightly wrapped in swaddling
clothes. They lived in Basra but had been visiting Leila's relations near
Baghdad. We had a happy photo session together and I would like to have sent
them the results, but there is no postal service in Iraq.
Some 50km out of Baghdad, at a station called Mahmodiga, our train stopped.
There was an IED (improvised explosive device) scare at the next station,
Iskandariyah. Nobody knew if or when we would be able to continue our
journey. I paced the track and stared out over the litter of poor,
flat-roofed little houses on either side of the track, all displaying their
Shia flags of red, green or black - representing different mullahs - and
listened to frogs singing from a big, filthy, reed-strewn puddle.
After an hour, passengers began abandoning our train, bags in hand, seeking
road transport. Everyone was eating nuts (Iraqis pull sunflower seeds and
roasted melon pips from their pockets as Americans pull Wrigley's gum) and
seeking information; nobody had any to offer; a lack which ran like a
leitmotiv through all my time in Iraq. After two hours there was almost
nobody but me and the photographer, and the nice family in the next-door
compartment, too poor to pay for a taxi.
After three hours the loco whistled and moved off, we passengers jumping on
before the carriages got up speed, the broken doors being easy to kick open.
We soon passed Iskandariyah but saw no bomb, only a long-exploded bus and,
later, a totally (but not recently) demolished oil-train, each tanker blown
out by grenades.
This was unwelded track; the train proceeding with an old-fashioned
clickety-click which grew to an urgent and hammering volume as our top speed
of about 50mph was reached and sand (and sometimes, in the marshes, spray)
billowed through the carriages. I hung from the door, a warm desert wind in
my face. Two hundreds yards away a US military convoy kept pace on the
highway which here ran in parallel. The pale, nervy faces of the American
soldiers pointing guns from their Humvees - astonished to see an unarmed
Westerner hanging from the train - were a picture.
We passed through stations whose names - al-Nasiriyah, Najaf - stirred vague
memories of news reports of killings. As dusk fell the plain grew wetter and
the marshes seemed to steal upon us, until the track was confined to a
causeway; sometimes you could see lights, sometimes a little mud house on a
piece of dry ground, and sometimes the outline of a long boat among the
shadowy reeds. The clickety-click grew faster, almost panicky. We were
catching up lost time.
Then the reeds cleared and we were back in near desert. It was dark now and
the skyline was lit by the huge orange flares of the southern oil wells,
ragged flames leaping in the wind and smoke turning the sky from dark blue
to black along the horizon. Then the lights of houses began to crowd in on
us; roads crossed the track again; traffic honked; and by nine - only half
an hour late - we pulled into Basra station. We had caught up almost all the
three hours lost.
I bade my new friends, the Iraqi family, a regretful farewell, sad that
there would be no way to get in touch again, and hailed a taxi to al- Morbad
(regulars call it Morbid) Hotel. It was full of security men: great hulks of
thirtysomething Westerners who look like mercenaries, ex-army (many of
them), British, American, French, German, tattoos with designs such as
barbed wire around bare biceps, guns tucked into belts and earning up to
$500 a day to work with oil companies or foreign contractors. I reckon there
are thousands of these men following fortune into Iraq. Every now and again
one of them gets blown up or shot, but the deaths do not count toward
figures for military casualties. To my amazement I found that Washington is
employing these civilians, in place of the armed forces, to guard American
zones in Iraq. One US agency providing such personnel is called, without
irony, Custer Battles.
I showered off the dust, ate a plateful of tasty Basra prawns, and slept
soundly under a big, slow-revolving ceiling fan.
FLOWING past Basra from the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates into the
Persian Gulf, the Shatt al-Arab river is almost beautiful - and would be,
had the Iranians not blown up all the palm groves across the water during
the Iran-Iraq war. The damaged landscape was pointed out to me by Patrick
Wright, our man in Basra, from the riverside park of palaces and mansions
where the British Army and the civil administration are stationed , moving
around in surreal little white electric golf carts.
Wright, a Foreign and Commonwealth Office Arabist with the weary rationality
of one who has seen more flyblown Middle Eastern countries than he cares to
remember, did tell me his official title, and painstakingly explained how he
fitted into the Coalition Provisional Authority machine, but at the presence
of the word "co-ordinator" I have learnt to switch off and save precious
memory cells. Recourse to this term is a reliable tell-tale sign of an
organisation which does not know, or will not say, what it is there for.
We can co-ordinate until the camels come home in Iraq, but in the end
somebody is going to have to do something; somebody is going to have to
administer; somebody is going to have to clear the rubbish from the Basra
streets.
This is a big, filthy city whose troubles plainly go back long before the
most recent war. Read what you like in the admiring British press, but the
fact is that as the occupying power we have done a deal with local Shia
leaders, and retreated behind the sandbags, restricting ourselves to the
occasional patrol, a sally or two to wave and shake hands with the natives,
and the dispatch of a few no doubt admirable technical teams from Britain to
get the water and the power back on.
They are back on. Beyond that, one has the impression of a well-mannered
holding operation. We are there, as Wright admitted, "on sufferance".
Everybody complains about street crime (we foiled attempts to steal our
satellite phone in the filthy, crowded, well-stocked market and blocked
streets); nobody travels by night; everybody detests the Americans (as
usual), and most people seem to view the British as somewhat less offensive
sidekicks to the real Emperor: George W. Bush.
There is no serious attempt to administer this place. Outside the market,
where ancient street-photographers with ancient cameras take snaps for
passport applications, which scribes with desks on the rubble-strewn
pavement help Iraqi would-be emigrants to fill in, three new-uniformed Iraqi
policemen came up to my interpreter and asked if I would report, without
naming or photographing them, that in order to get their posts as trainees
they had had to pay a lump-sum bribe to a third-party, and now had to pay
one third of their monthly salaries to the same person, to keep their jobs.
And this is a city still under British control. Three young Iraqis
approached me separately in the street and asked if I could help them to get
a job, any job.
In the market I bought a bag of nuts. As I left, the little boy manning the
adjacent stall ran after me holding out a $50 note. I had dropped it getting
out my dinars. He was about 10. Full of gratitude for his honesty, I offered
him a small reward. Gravely he declined my dinars, placing his right hand
over his heart, as Iraqis do, to signify sincerity. Fifty dollars must have
been more than that boy earns in a month.
Back in the British green zone that afternoon I passed the checkpoint of
British squaddies ("The Times, sir? That's the intellectual one, innit?")
and met up with some journalists and press officers who were in Basra on a
visit sponsored by the Department for International Development. Except that
they were not in Basra. They were in a heavily guarded park, sprinkled with
tawdry mansions and occupied by the British, whither they had been brought
from the airport. Allowed a couple of guided excursions to see a generator
and a sewage plant, they asked me what the real Basra was like. "We were
told we could not go there, for security reasons, one told me."
They were shortly to be flown back, via Cyprus. With them I joined a Royal
Navy patrol speedboat for an hour on the river, where the British officer in
charge, the inevitable Tim, pleasant, jokey, public-school, steered us past
the upturned hulk of Saddam's sunken yacht, and an idle dockyard of rusting
cranes and impounded cargo ships.
He and his heavily-armed crew waved to Iraqis on the shore. They did this so
often that I realised they must be under orders to wave whenever possible.
As we sped under a bridge our gunman trained his weapon on the pedestrians
passing above, just in case, then swivelled quickly round to do the same
from behind as we emerged from under the bridge. Meanwhile, his colleagues
just kept waving, frantically. It sort of summed things up.
Before leaving the zone the photographer and I spent a while downloading our
pictures for the crew. This gave me the chance to inspect the interior of a
sizeable palace. Arches were sealed off with plywood. Above, the ceiling was
of fluted domes. Below were a scattering of troops' beds, a ping-pong table
and a television. Girlie pictures were pinned to the cracked walls. Men were
sitting and lying around. I think the question in their minds was the
question in mine. What the f *** are we doing here?
A SIX-HOUR taxi-ride back to Baghdad in an immaculate but elderly white
Chevrolet Classic Caprice may have used up more of my nine lives than
patrolling with the Americans in a Humvee. Death in a road accident remains
the greatest of the dangers faced by Iraqis, who do not seem to care, and
their foreign visitors, who do. There were at least 20 security roadblocks,
but, as our driver pointed out, the town in which motorists were in the
greatest danger of ambush seems to have kept the soldiers out.
Clutching the apricot tree I had bought in Basra to plant in Derbyshire (if
I could get it though Customs), I staggered thankfully back into The Times's
house in Baghdad, which I was to quit the next morning.
As it turned out, my Times colleagues were to quit the house soon, too.
Twice a passing car stopped for a moment for its driver to inform our Iraqi
staff that the foreign journalists had better leave the house, or
retribution would follow. They now have, and moved into a heavily guarded
central hotel.
But I knew nothing of this as I set out early for the most heavily guarded
place in Iraq: the airport. "It can take two hours to get through security
to the terminal," my colleagues had cautioned. It took five minutes. My
Iraqi driver, acting on instinct as Iraqi drivers do, sailed straight past
three lines of waiting traffic at the security checkpoint, and through a
channel marked "military personnel only".
A soldier moved towards us and we reached for our IDs - but he waved us
through. This happened at the next two checks, too. Thus, with neither our
substantial vehicle nor our identities checked, we drove right up to the
terminal doors. Three hours early, I had time to inspect the terminal, which
is as it was left on the eve of invasion, frozen in time, with all the
international flights still marked on the departures board.
There is only one now: to Amman, with Royal Jordanian Airlines. Along with
some Iraqi ministers (more chance of being bombed, then, I thought) and a
man who had come to try to sell a telephone system for Baghdad, I climbed
into an unmarked white Fokker passenger jet.
We took off, then banked immediately into a steep upward corkscrew, keeping
the runway and guarded airport zone directly below us until we had reached
about 5,000ft. Then, high enough to reduce the chances of being shot down,
we headed out across the desert toward Jordan.
In my head I carried a jumble of memories, some, but not all, unhappy and
confused. I thought of all the Iraqis who had asked me: "Where are they
keeping Saddam?" - as though, being a Westerner, I must know; just as we
think that Iraqis, being Iraqis, know what is going on the street. Butnobody
knows anything and we are all in the dark.
I thought of that lovely Iraqi family in the railway compartment. Everywhere
there are good people with simple hopes: for jobs, health and security. I
thought of the little boy in Basra market, handing me back my dropped fifty
bucks with such a fierce sense of honour. And I thought of the British
troops in that tawdry palace by the Shatt al-Arab river; their girlie mags;
their ping-pong table; and their unspoken question: "What the f*** are we
doing here?"
Copyright 2004 Times Newspapers Ltd.