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| Taking a Closer Look at the Stories Ignored by the Corporate Media |
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Archive for the Month of June, 2005.
Viewing Iraq War NEWS articles 1 through 75 of 109.
- It could easily be argued now that the siege of Fallujah accomplished the exact opposite of its stated goals - rather than bringing increased security and stability, it has inflamed tempers, deepened sectarian rifts and spurred the Iraqi resistance into levels of attack rarely seen prior to the siege. - Attacks on workers and trade unionists are becoming increasingly common and it is instructive that the railway workers union, in an industry that has been slated for privatisation, seems to have been particularly targeted. Since the beginning of the occupation, some 200 Iraqi academics have been murdered, while control and intimidation has become systematic. Many of the victims worked in the social sciences, where overlap with progressive social movements is unavoidable. - Operation Lightning—the massive deployment of 50,000 US and Iraqi government troops and police into the streets of Baghdad—began on Sunday and is unfolding amid a virtual media blackout and a complete absence of critical commentary. What is taking place amounts to the re-invasion of Iraq’s capital aimed at terrorising the population and cracking down on resistance groups that operate freely across large sections of the city.
- Adults play their perverse war games, and children suffer. This is a severe indictment of any war - and of those who orchestrate war without assessing its potential consequences on the most vulnerable of civilian populations.
- Last week Basra saw its first conference on the threat of privatisation, bringing together oil workers, academics and international civil-society groups. The event debated an issue about which Iraqis are passionate: the ownership and control of Iraq's oil reserves. - US occupation forces announced on their propaganda radio beamed at local residents of ar-Ramadi that the US military would stop raiding houses and mosques, would open roads to local people and turn the electricity and drinking water supply in the city back on if local residents would cooperate by informing the American occupation troops of the locations and bases of Iraqi Resistance fighters operating in the city against the Americans. - It was a huge air assault: Approximately 100 US and British planes flew from Kuwait into Iraqi airspace. At least seven types of aircraft were part of this massive operation, including US F-15 Strike Eagles and Royal Air Force Tornado ground-attack planes. They dropped precision-guided munitions on Saddam Hussein's major western air-defense facility, clearing the path for Special Forces helicopters that lay in wait in Jordan. Earlier attacks had been carried out against Iraqi command and control centers, radar detection systems, Revolutionary Guard units, communication centers and mobile air-defense systems. The Pentagon's goal was clear: Destroy Iraq's ability to resist. This was war. But there was a catch: The war hadn't started yet, at least not officially.
- How the U.S. Intentionally Destroyed Iraq's Water Supply - US Apache helicopters have become a nightmare for Iraqi farmers and villagers who had thousands of acres of their farmlands destroyed by the flash bombs poured on them almost every day.
- The soldiers, part of a 90-strong force called the Defence Force of Rutba, said they had refused to attend training because they feared reprisals from locals if they were seen to have cooperated with the Americans.
- Don't be surprised if, within the next year or so, a fresh, new discovery hits the world's media outlets. A well-hidden, undetectable, long-suspected, and cleverly disguised WMD facility in the ladies lounge of the third palace of the second wife of the suspected, illegitimate son of Saddam Hussein. It was hard to find, but by golly, they did it! - Two years after the invasion of Iraq, the United States has spent $990 million on U.S. "embassy" operations there, but none of that has been put toward building a permanent home for the U.S. diplomatic presence, according to a report for Congress.
- John Bolton flew to Europe in 2002 to confront the head of a global arms-control agency and demand he resign, then orchestrated the firing of the unwilling diplomat in a move a U.N. tribunal has since judged unlawful. Bolton felt Jose Bustani "had to go," particularly because the Brazilian was trying to send chemical weapons inspectors to Baghdad. That might have helped defuse the crisis over alleged Iraqi weapons and undermined a U.S. rationale for war.
- U.S. Military Personnel who died in German hospitals or en route to German hospitals have not previously been counted. They total about 6,210 as of 1 January, 2005. The ongoing, underreporting of the dead in Iraq, is not accurate. The DoD is deliberately reducing the figures. A review of many foreign news sites show that actual deaths are far higher than the newly reduced ones. Iraqi civilian casualties are never reported but International Red Cross, Red Crescent and UN figures indicate that as of 1 January 2005, the numbers are just under 100,000.
- A photo poem about Bush and the Iraq War. - 15 men dressed in traditional white dishdasha robes, their hands tied behind their backs, emerge from a house and are lined up on the ground in front of a wall, bowed heads on their knees. "Bad guy, bad guy, bad guy," a US soldier repeats, following advice from the agents.
- The defendants at last week's trial never met the lawyer who argued their case. They weren't allowed to introduce medical or other evidence. There was no cross-examination of prosecution witnesses, because there were none: the defendants have confessed, but said they did so under torture that included rape with a metal rod.
- Ongoing insecurity in Iraq is hampering the clearance of landmines and unexploded ordnance (UXO), forcing international organisations to leave the country or halt operations. - "We are now living under another dictatorship, you see what kind of democracy we have, seems more like bloodacracy. You see what kind of liberation they brought: unemployment, murder and destruction. We must resist this, it is the right of any occupied people to resist. Especially the women, we can use the simplest weapons of resistance, a financial boycott." - A local Iraqi reporter went to look at the condition of Falluja's school buildings, and found that since the U.S.-led assault on the city last November, hardly any of the promised reconstruction has taken place. Locals also continue to report feeling humiliated by U.S. forces at checkpoints to the city.
- Dozens of Iraqi prisoners rioted against guards in the United States-run Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad and pelted them with stones. - Ahlam Najam just needed a job. At 25, she had a university degree in education but could not find work as teacher. When Kellogg Brown and Root (KBR), subsidiary of the U.S. firm Halliburton offered her a job as a security guard at a U.S. base in Iraq, she took it. On May 18 last year she was shot twice in the head as she waited for a taxi to take her to work. - The accounts of four Iraqis working for Western news organizations who say they were abused by American troops in January 2004 sound hauntingly familiar to the horrors of Abu Ghraib that emerged four months later. But the episode has received little media attention. - From the Pentagon as of January 14th 2005,figures have been released at some 1361 U.S personnel killed and just over 10,000 wounded from the Iraq war and occupation. Is this a true reflection of the actual casualties or a manipulation of the figures ? - In late May, Bush and England’s Prime Minister Tony Blair received personal invitations to attend a session of the World Tribunal on Iraq (WTI). The WTI, made up of thousands of people worldwide including many preeminent scholars and dignitaries, seeks to reclaim justice regarding the Iraqi invasion. The group was formed two years ago with the intent to document the war crimes orchestrated by Bush and Blair and eventually bring both heads of state to justice because of what group leaders say is “an arrogant flaunting of world opinion and established law.” - Top House Democrat Charles Rangel complained on Monday that the Bush administration's decision to concoct a "fraudulent" war in Iraq was as bad as "the Holocaust."
- Sixteen private American security guards are under investigation for shooting at U.S. Marines and Iraqi civilians during a three-hour spree west of Baghdad, the military said Thursday.
- A senior US military chief has admitted "good, honest" Iraqis are fighting American forces. Major General Joseph Taluto said he could understand why some ordinary people would take up arms against the US military because "they're offended by our presence".
- Thousands of people are detained in Iraq without due process in apparent violation of international law, the United Nations said on Wednesday, adding that 6,000 of the country's 10,000 prisoners were in the hands of the U.S. military.
- In addition to the mass killings of Iraqi civilians, U.S. forces deliberately committed cultural genocide against Iraqi national heritage, and Iraqi treasures. “Not even the Nazis would have allowed such crimes”, wrote the Indian philosopher, Aijaz Ahmad. Ahmed added; “Every single Article of the Geneva Convention and the U.N. Charter was violated, and a whole range of war crimes committed, with impunity. Yet, not a single member of the so-called ‘international community’ has come forward to say so: not Kofi Annan and his bureaucrats at the U.N., not the leaders of the Franco-German alliance [for political opportunism] or any other member of the Security Council, not the head of any Arab state” was able to whisper a word of resistance.
- The Bush administration though is pulling no punches with Iraqification. It's a Pandora's box: inside one will find the Battle of Algiers, Vietnam, El Salvador, Colombia. All point to the same destination: civil war. - "The Army is looking at a number of scenarios, including accidental death, attack by an intruder or infiltrator -- and fragging, which is the killing or wounding of a fellow soldier."
- A military spokesman said the soldiers started shooting when a car came too close to an American armored patrol. - US Military in Iraq announcement: "To the 68 year-old man whose house we burst into in the middle of the night, firing stun grenades, and who we then handcuffed, hooded and dragged off to interrogate and then discovered was entirely innocent because we are a bunch of incompetent boobies, we regret any inconvenience."
- MINISTERS were warned in July 2002 that Britain was committed to taking part in an American-led invasion of Iraq and they had no choice but to find a way of making it legal. - The paper, produced by the Cabinet Office on July 21, 2002, is incomplete because the last page is missing. The following is a transcript rather than the original document in order to protect the source.
- Jewish-Zionist plans for war against Iraq had been in place for years. - President George W. Bush’s practiced smiles and his cronies’ anxious denials can’t hide the truth: Exposures of prisoner abuse, the military recruiting crisis, the instability of Washington’s client regime in Baghdad, and especially the powerful resistance movement are slamming the U.S.-led occupation.
- The disease, which has been under control in the area for more than 50 years, has been rising steadily since the conflict in 2003. - Iraqis inspecting the damage left by U.S. airstrikes in western Iraq on Sunday challenged American assertions that 40 insurgents were killed, saying there were no guerrillas in the area. "There were no mujahedin or armed men in the area. The planes attacked indiscriminately."
- If Saddam was really being charged with war crimes then why didn't we hear what he had to say? Or was Saddam telling the court that the United States was behind his regime, that Washington had given him the means to destroy the Halabja Kurds with gas? - "Do you know that most of these trucks are carrying beef, chicken, tobacco, cigarettes and many, many things? Believe me that so much of it is over the expiration dates. Sometimes I can never even open the trucks or enter inside in order to examine the food because the smell is so terrible." -
But this statistically improbable occurrence is just a coincidence.
- Police and security units, forces led by Kurdish political parties and backed by the U.S. military, have abducted hundreds of minority Arabs and Turkmens in this intensely volatile city and spirited them to prisons in Kurdish-held northern Iraq, according to U.S. and Iraqi officials, government documents and families of the victims.
- Since the fall of the Baghdad regime in April 2003, abductions of foreigners have become a sad reality in the new Iraq. In the shade of alleys or on unprotected roads, however, dozens of Iraqi civilians are also kidnapped every week, without the local press's even having the time to relate the facts. - No one knows what Khinaisar saw or thought. She was shot once in the head, and she died five days later, on June 3. She spoke only once during that period, when her husband arrived at the hospital. When she heard him speak, she quietly called out his name: Mohsen - If we haven't all gone down the rabbit hole in Baghdad and come out in the Saigon of another era, you can't prove it by recent news from catastrophic Iraq. Eerie doesn't do it justice. - In the midst of this hated occupation, it’s conceivable that more acts of resistance of all kinds by G.I.s are going unreported or underreported.
- American officials lied to British ministers over the use of "internationally reviled" napalm-type firebombs in Iraq.
- A United Arab Emirates daily, citing unnamed sources, reported Wednesday the United States was massing troops on the Syrian-Iraqi border. - The Israeli espionage apparatus, Mossad, was able to liquidate around 350 Iraqi scientists in various fields of knowledge and 200 university professors with the full cooperation of the US occupation forces in Iraq since the fall of the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, last March 2003, a report prepared by the US State Department revealed.
- Doctors at the main hospital in Baquba, north of Baghdad, have gone on strike, saying they are fed up with constant abuse at the hands of aggressive Iraqi police and soldiers.
- Coalition military intelligence officials estimated that 70% to 90% of prisoners detained in Iraq since the war began last year "had been arrested by mistake," according to a confidential Red Cross report given to the Bush administration earlier this year. - "All Evidence Proves that Al-Zarqawi Works for America" - After his American employers left and monthly food rations began to shrink, Hussein Hadi started selling his furniture. His bed was the last thing to go. Now Hadi, his wife, sister, mother, two brothers, three children and a nephew sleep on his living- room floor in Baghdad, their blankets sewn from flour sacks. Some nights they fall asleep hungry.
- More than two years after the Iraq war started, children continue to be its main victims as the health of the majority of the population continues to deteriorate.
- Attorney Says Iraqi Leader Was NOT Found In 'Spider Hole'
- A SHARP increase in British and American bombing raids on Iraq in the run-up to war “to put pressure on the regime” was illegal under international law, according to leaked Foreign Office legal advice. - Up to 60% of the estimated 12,000 detainees in the country's prisons and military compounds face intimidation, beatings or torture that leads to broken bones and sometimes death. - US occupation forces completed on Sunday, June 19, the release of twenty one Iraqi women held as a bargain chip in the northern city of Mosul.
- One condition that makes his life there so difficult is the myriad levels of security. Almost every major contractor or organization in the Green Zone has its own security unit. Each one is an entity unto itself. He refers to these security guards as cowboys, strutting around with their guns strapped to their thighs. - In his report Harring asserts he will begin publishing, in sections, the Defense Department's official list of war dead from Iraq. Relatives and other loved ones of those whose lives are gone will be asked to examine the lists to see if the names of those they've lost appear there. - Further evidence of US scorched earth policy in Iraq . From Year Zero, to scorched earth. The Vietnam bluprint has surely been dusted down for re-use in this 'liberating' war. Liberated from life, electricity, water, movement, all legaliities, education, Mesapotamia is now being liberated from its ancient agriculture and date palms.
- Ginter said he was kicked, his head bounced off the pavement and his testicle squeezed by a guard during his detention. "I was more worried about my life from the (U.S.) military than from the insurgents," he said. - They were already fighting a war they'd planned long before. They just didn't bother to tell the American public. - Refugees from the city told Mafkarat al-Islam that on Saturday afternoon, they had watched as leading commanders of the Iraqi Resistance in the city hoisted the corpses of four dead American soldiers to the top of electric poles in the city. - While Western media and Western pundits are busy arguing and ranting about the lies and pretexts that led to US-Britain war on Iraq, the Iraqi people are suffering from shortages of food and the daily brutality of the Occupation. The new propaganda twist provides a perfect smokescreen for the continuing US crimes against the Iraqi people.
- By refusing to estimate the costs for the war in Iraq, Bush makes his budget deficits look much smaller than they actually are.
- There are two resistances in Iraq. A true one with a national project which aims at driving out the occupying forces and which attacks the US army and its local allies. And a false one, which has been created to discredit the true resistance and which attacks mosques and markets. »
- The Paris Club’s debt reduction deal obligates the new government in Baghdad to dismantle the largely publicly owned economy established under the previous government, and to junk the large scale system of social supports the former Ba’athist government put in place to furnish Iraqis with jobs and food subsidies out of revenue earned from oil sales. - This webmaster and other researchers have suspected that the so-called "Downing St memo" may grow into an impeachment sideshow that, while legitimate in and of itself, may ultimately distract from the Bush Administration's complicity in 9/11. - Television channel Al-Arabiya said US military authorities had refused to authorize the evacuation from Iraq of reporter Jawad Kazem, who was wounded by armed men Saturday in Baghdad.
- Twelve Nazi officials were sentenced to be hanged, three sentenced to life in prison, four were given prison sentences of 10-20 years, and the rest were acquitted. Presently, the ongoing American and British slaughter of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan civilians constitutes a blatant war crime. Average legal skills should be able to prove that a similar case for the prosecution against the current coalition leaders can easily be constructed on comparable lines.
- An Iraqi official has accused the US forces of "indiscriminate killing" and destruction in the Iraqi town of Al-Qa'im, on the Syrian border.
- Iraqi's justice minister said Tuesday that U.S. officials are trying to delay interrogations of Saddam Hussein. "It seems there are lots of secrets they want to hide," he told The Associated Press in an exclusive interview.
Pages for June, 2005
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