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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 December, 2005.
Viewing Iraq War NEWS articles 1 through 75 of 81.
- Iraqis have asked Saddam Hussein's defence team to mull the possibility of fielding the ousted dictator as a candidate for future elections, according to one of his lawyers. . - Bulgaria and Ukraine will begin withdrawing their combined 1,250 troops by mid-December. If Australia, Britain, Italy, Japan, Poland and South Korea reduce or recall their personnel, more than half of the non-American forces in Iraq could be gone by next summer. - Iraq has the second-largest oil deposits in the world, but Iraqis are forced to sit in excruciatingly long lines, waiting for a meager amount of petrol.
- Private Israeli security firms have sent experts to Iraq's northern Kurdish region to give covert training to Kurdish security forces, an Israeli newspaper reported on Thursday. - While the United States spends billions on troop support in Iraq, the people serving the meals, scooping the ice cream, and washing the dishes make as little as 50 cents an hour. - A U.S. Army officer who served with the U.S. governing administration in Iraq was arrested on charges involving bribery, money laundering and a fraud scheme... - ...what if the truth is even more sinister? What if this murderous chaos is not the fruit of rank incompetence but instead the desired product of carefully crafted, efficiently managed White House policy? - Recently, news reports in US and European newspapers have suggested that Washington and London are considering a major reduction in their forces in Iraq...most of these reports don't bother to state that if the troops are pulled back from the front and brought home, the Pentagon plans to replace their combat capability with air power.
- The Bush administration's covert plan to help energy companies steal Iraq's oil could be just weeks away from fruition, and the implications are staggering: continued price-gouging by Big Oil, increased subjugation of the Iraqi people, more US troops in Iraq, and a greater likelihood for a US invasion of Iran. That's just for starters. - A Norwegian company begins drilling in the north without approval from Baghdad. - Capitalism is alive and well in Iraq. With a 70% unemployment rate, soaring housing costs, and late or non-existent government rations driving up the prices of food staples and energy necessities, the Iraqi people are ‘just lovin it’. Yes, capitalism is alive and well. - "Pacified" Fallujah looks like a dead six year-old child in that city, shot by a US sniper in the Al-Dubbat neighborhood on December 1st, according to Al-Sharqiyah. - War Crimes—It's Not Just Torture - The war on terror is a fabrication so large and all-encompassing that it includes both political parties, the Pentagon, the main-body of corporate and financial elites, and virtually the entire western media. It is the underlying myth that animates the American war-machine and breathes life into the coercive apparatus of state terror.
- Iraqis, rather than foreign fighters, now form the vast majority of the insurgents who are waging a ferocious guerrilla war against United States forces in Sunni western Iraq, American commanders have revealed. - "These Rules of Engagement allow for a structured escalation of force to include opening fire on civilian vehicles under certain circumstances. All incidents of the use of such escalation of force which includes the use of firearms are logged and investigated to ensure that there has been strict adherence to the Rules of Engagement. " - Whoever is responsible for the assassination of academics must also have access to sophisticated intelligence techniques that allow for the widespread targeting of a particular grouping of civilians. - Allawi is promoted by the U.S. and British government for the upcoming December elections, because he fits Western image of the "educated technocrat" who serves Western interests at the expense of the Iraqi people. Allawi provides the best Arab façade of acting on behalf of his masters. Like his relative, Ahmed Chalabi, Allawi is a conman, committed crimes against the Iraqi state and the Iraqi people, and should be held accountable for his crimes. - A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves: Edward R Murrow
- For Ali, 18, his pills allow him to forget his problems. "I float along in another world," he said. "The unbearable conditions of daily life, whether in society or in my family, pushed me to find an escape," he added. - Major US news outlets are dodging the extent of the Pentagon's bombardment from the air, an avoidance all the more egregious because any drawdown of US troop levels in Iraq is very likely to be accompanied by a step-up of the air war. - Who to believe?
- At his trial, Mr. Hussein is charged with crimes against humanity in the killing of 148 men and teenage boys from the Shiite town of Dujail, north of Baghdad, after an assassination attempt against Mr. Hussein there in 1982. But Mr. Clark suggested that Mr. Hussein's secret police had reason to act harshly against Shiite assassins who, he said, almost certainly had political links to Shiite-ruled Iran, then in the early stages of an eight-year war with Iraq. He compared the actions of Mr. Hussein's secret police with the muscular behavior of an American president's security detail. - The officer, 2nd Lt Erick Anderson, 26, was charged in 2004 after two soldiers under his command alleged he gave permission to kill Iraqi civilians. - "Expect black days. Elections won't change anything. This is a long-term struggle. We will fight for the next 20 years," said Abu Mohammed, who used that name as an insurgent.
- One of the many rarely spoken reasons why conservatives in Washington won't let us leave Iraq is the old notion of civilizing a primitive nation. - Explosive anger in Ramadi after US marines stripped naked a wife in front of her husband. - Young Iraqi surgeon testifies about the horrors of the Iraq war
- "PSAs are effectively immune from public scrutiny and lock governments into economic terms that cannot be altered for decades..." - Three men threatened Saddam Hussein’s chief lawyer as he boarded a plane from Baghdad to Jordan today, and they were removed from the flight, said the Iraqi lawyer and his colleague, ex-US. Attorney General Ramsey Clark. - In three different British courtrooms yesterday, three ordinary people stood accused of three very different crimes, but all based simply on their opposition to the war in Iraq. - Former President Jimmy Carter says he doubts whether the U-S military will ever completely pull out of Iraq... - The US military is continuing a controversial "information operations" program that paid Iraqi newspapers to run favorable stories even as it investigates the effort, US defense spokesmen said Wednesday.
- While the Iraqi people are struggling to end the U.S. military Occupation and its associated violence, the fate of their food sources and agricultural heritage is being looted behind closed doors. Unless the colonisation of Iraq ends, the U.S. Occupation of Iraq will continue to have lasting and disastrous effects on Iraq's economy and Iraq's ability to feed its people. - Instead of a requirement that the former Iraqi President’s guilt be proved, there is an assumption of Saddam’s guilt that pervades the American media. And there is a very strong reason for that- It serves as a secondary rationale for the U.S. illegal war on Iraq, with the argument that "no one can say that Iraq isn’t better off without Saddam Hussein." - "This insurgency has got roots, it's got money, and it's got motivation," says a U.S. intelligence official, in an assessment echoed by military officers and insurgent leaders alike. "And the life span of this insurgency could be years."
- Opiates - and cannabis - produced in Afghanistan transit through Iraq before being distributed in Europe. Their consumption is growing in Baghdad and elsewhere...narcotics seem to stubbornly want to surge through the wake of the American Army. - The government wants to postpone the investigation to help its favoured candidate Iyad Allawi, the former prime minister, in the election on 15 December. The money disappeared during his administration.
- It's a shocking charge...Pentagon casualty reports show only a sliver of the injuries, mostly physical ones from bombs or bullets. But war doesn't work like that...the reports skip a horrible panoply of accidents, illness, disease and mental trauma. - Thirteen of the prisoners needed hospital treatment amid torture claims. An Iraqi official speaking anonymously said 12 of the 13 men in hospital had suffered torture, including electric shocks and the loss of finger nails.
- The most striking fact is that the majority of those killed were not sciencists (thus targeted for the alleged knowledge of Iraq’s weapon’s programme) but were involved in field of humanities (such as law, geography and history). The motives for these assassinations are unknown. - Why is the media not reporting crucial information about U.S. bombing runs in heavily-inhabited parts of Iraq? - If George W. Bush's policies on Iraq are mystifying, fret not -- there's a method to his organized chaos after all. - The entire US-controlled political process this year—the January 30 elections for a transitional government, the drafting of a new constitution and the referendum on October 15—has been aimed at giving the veneer of legal legitimacy to the plunder of the country’s oil and gas and the formation of a puppet government that will sanction an indefinite US military presence in Iraq.
- "I done kilt me 10 times as many as old Osama ever done," Exults Bush - In Qaim, near the Syrian border, Newsweek found American soldiers blasting Metallica's "Enter Sandman" at detainees in a shipping crate while flashing lights in their eyes. Near Falluja, three Iraqi journalists working for Reuters were seized by the 82nd Airborne. They charged that "deafening music" was played directly into their ears while soldiers ordered them to dance. And back in Mosul, Haitham al-Mallah described being hooded, handcuffed and delivered to a location where soldiers boomed "extremely loud (and dirty) music" at him. Mallah said the site was "an unknown place which they call 'the disco.'" Disco isn't dead. It has gone to war.
- US ambassador "will remain the critical behind-the-scenes power," says New York Times
- The problem for the U.S. backed oligarchy in Bolivia is that the indigenous people have steadily become more educated and understand as never before what their puppet governments have done to them.
- Since the invasion and occupation of Iraq, Western corporate media have deceptively reported and portrayed the Occupation as a necessary vehicle to "spread democracy" and "fight terrorism"; however the carving up of Iraq's wealth and oil assets is deliberately avoided. The media hype over "reconstruction effort" and illegitimate elections is a cover up for the colonisation of Iraq and Iraq's economy.
- As the Occupation of Iraq is approaching three years, the mass murder of Iraqi civilians is not questioned, but normalised in Western conscience. President Bush reached the stage where he is able to make his own figure of Iraqi deaths, with no remorse or sadness. The war was not the result of "wrong intelligence"; the war was an illegal act of aggression, and a premeditated mass murder. "Democracy" is used as a tool to manipulate the public and justify war crimes. - Leaders of the United States, Britain and Australia are criminals who have committed crimes against humanity and should be hauled up and tried for war crimes, according to two law professors.
- On Saturday, eight "high value" Iraqis held without charge for over two years by the United States were released.They included Dr Huda Ammash, a distinguished internationally renowned, environmental biologist, Professor at Baghdad University, whose earned her PhD at the University of Missouri. Arrested by US troops, this brave, gentle woman suddenly became "Mrs Anthrax" and featured on America's assinine playing cards of their "most wanted", in the wild west, last chance saloon, Iraq became after April 2003. - The latest figures released by US Central Command show a dramatic rise in the number of air raids carried out in Iraq.
- These 24 people should have been freed in December 2004 (not that they ever should have been in jail), but remained jailed (and, based on what we know of other cases, quite likely in solitary confinement) for nearly a full year in order to "ease the political pressure." I wonder if they agreed to sacrifice a year of their lives for that noble goal. - The composition of the next Iraqi government will not...be primarily determined by the votes that were cast on December 15. Rather, the regime in Baghdad will be decided by dealing-making and US arm-twisting to ensure that its leading figures implement Washington’s demands. Above all, US plans involve opening up the Iraqi oil industry to foreign investors, crushing the anti-occupation insurgency and establishing permanent American military bases to extend US influence more broadly in the Middle East.
- Barzan, Saddam's half-brother and co-defendant, repeatedly interrupted the court, protesting at one stage that much of what he was saying was being edited out of video footage of the trial which is being broadcast on televisions with a 20-minute delay. - Sunni Arabs alleged Tuesday that last week’s parliamentary elections were fraudulent, especially in Baghdad province, and they said if the irregularities are not corrected, new balloting must be held in Iraq’s largest electoral district.
- Rome prosecutors are investigating the March 4 death of Nicola Calipari, who was killed by U.S. gunfire near a checkpoint as he headed to the Baghdad airport with Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena, who was held hostage by militants for a month. - It's been talked about for years. But the Pentagon's microwave-like pain ray may finally be headed to Iraq... - Bush hailed the Iraqi elections as a mighty victory. He maintained that Iraq will now become a beacon of democracy in the Middle East. In fact, the elections were even more crooked than the one he manipulated to become president. - Saddam Hussein ‘s lawyers called Thursday for the world to press the Iraqi government to provide them with protection, saying their colleague — former U.S. attorney general Ramsey Clark — was directly at risk.
- Armed men have tried to assassinate an investigative judge on the Iraqi Special Tribunal, a spokesman for the court says. - Eyewitnesses Cite Scores Killed in Marine Offensive in Western Iraq
- It is now more than fifteen years since that fateful meeting on July 25, 1990 between then-US Ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie and President Saddam Hussein that the Iraqi leader interpreted as a green light from Washington for his invasion of Kuwait eight days later. - More than 100,000 Iraqi civilians, including women and children, have died in Iraq since the war was launched in March 2003, mostly as a result of airstrikes by the occupation forces, according Iraqi and U.S. public health experts.
- In Iraq, nobody knows, and few in authority seem concerned to count, just how many civilians have been killed and injured. - Iraq will not be sovereign or independent in the near future, even if President Bush says so. The country’s financial future will instead be dictated by a new colossal economic occupation, complete with ground forces, tanks, foreign military bases and the like -- all thanks to the United States, Britain and the IMF.
- War is big money and, like any other business today, security contractors are scouring the globe looking for the cheapest labor so as to maximize their war profiteering. - Kurdish leaders have inserted more than 10,000 of their militia members into Iraqi army divisions in northern Iraq to lay the groundwork to swarm south, seize the oil-rich city of Kirkuk and possibly half of Mosul, Iraq's third-largest city, and secure the borders of an independent Kurdistan. - Baghdad is getting only around six hours of electricity a day, down from 11 in October... - We are expected to believe the Iraqi resistance is not only vicious, but also uninterested in repairing the damage inflicted on its country by the neocon invasion. It runs around abducting Christian peace activists, western journalists, Sudanese and Moroccan embassy employees, and people from countries that opposed Bush’s invasion. - I heard a man who had been in Abu Ghraib prison say: "The Americans brought electricity to my ass before they brought it to my house."
- 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 outlets and praise the American war effort in Iraq. - US airstrikes in Iraq have surged this fall, jumping to nearly five times the average monthly rate earlier in the year, according to US military figures.
- Iraq's Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Chalabi has assumed direct control of the powerful oil ministry as crude exports ground to a halt due to sabotage attacks and logistics problems.
Pages for December, 2005
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