[uruknet.info] - [daily information from occupied iraq] - [newsletter 13 Sep 2005]

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If We Understand New Orleans; we understand the Bush strategy
Mike Whitney
New Orleans provides us with a reliable template for judging what the Bush
administration will do in the event of a massive "casualty-producing"
terrorist attack. However depressing, this is useful information. Special
military units will be deployed to the affected areas to patrol the streets
in heavily-armored vehicles; conducting house-to-house searches according
to their own discretion.
The cities will be placed under martial law; invoking shoot to kill orders
for anyone either looting or out of doors after the designated curfew.
Heavily-armed mercenaries and paramilitaries will be used on various
assignments that require secrecy or additional security (...) There's
little doubt that the Bush administration capitalized on the hurricane to
activate itsstrategy to militarize the city...

<http://www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=15688&s2=14>Read the full article / Leggi
l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=15688


Tal Afar Under Media Carpet
Linda Heard
...Like the people of New Orleans, almost 90 percent of Tal Afar’s
residents have fled their homes. And like their American counterparts, the
doors of their houses are being smashed in by military forces, there to
pacify the town after weeks of bombing and shelling. The similarities don’t
end there. While people of the US Gulf Coast are suffering the effects of a
cocktail of chemicals and effluent in the flood waters, 170 residents of
Tal Afar have fallen ill to “curious po! isons”, which according to Dr.
Mohammed Qassem of the Iraqi Red Crescent could result from “inhaling
gases”.

<http://www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=15669&s2=14>Read the full article / Leggi
l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=15669


Iraq: US military lays waste to Tal Afar
James Cogan, WSWS
...While thousands of families in outlying areas had already fled to nearby
cities such as Mosul, the Sarai populace has been forced to take refuge in
squalid tent camps to the east and south of the city. A Turkomen leader,
Ezzedin Dowla, told the Los Angeles Times: “Families are homeless and the
government has not provided any shelter, food or drink for them.”
Conditions in the camps are reported to be desperate. While most residents
fled, thousands of f! amilies stayed, primarily due to fear of sectarian
persecution at the hands of the Shiite and Kurdish militiamen that make up
the bulk of the Iraqi government forces. As was the case during the assault
on Fallujah last November, the US military made no attempt to avoid
casualties among the civilians remaining in the city...

<http://www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=15671&s2=14>Read the full article / Leggi
l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=15671


Tal Affar campaign will not end crisis, says official
Khalid Talib, Azzaman
...Azzaman correspondents in the area say the destruction resulting from
the campaign, the growing number of casualties and the human suffering will
dwarf any ‘victory’ U.S. troops and Iraqi forces may claim to have
achieved. Our correspondent inside the city says the troops barged into
empty and deserted streets. “We used to hear (from news reports) of the
presence of some Arab fighters in the city, but we have seen none of them,”
the co! rrespondent quoted a resident as saying. Other residents disputed
reports that the troops had captured or killed scores of insurgents. They
said most of those killed were among the inhabitants who had no where to go
and opted to stay despite the ferocity of shelling by air and artillery...

<http://www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=15690&s2=14>Read the full article / Leggi
l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=15690


Tal Afar as Ethnic Civil War
Juan Cole, Informed Comment
...So Kurds and Shiites are beating up on Sunni Turkmen allies of Sunni
Arabs. That is what is really going on. The number of foreign fighters
appears to be small, and US troops that had been guarding against
infiltration on the Syrian border were actully moved to Tal Afar for this
operation. It is mainly about punishing the Sunni Turkmen for allying with
the Sunni Arab guerrillas. That the attack came in part in response to the
pleas of local Shiite Turkme! n helps explain why why Prime Minister
Ibrahim Jaafari (Shiite leader of the fundamentalist Dawa Party) authorized
it, and went to Tal Afar on Tuesday for a photo op...

<http://www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=15679&s2=14>Read the full article / Leggi
l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=15679


Informants Decide Fate of Iraqi Detainees
U.S. Military Relies on Guidance of 'Sources' in Tall Afar
Jonathan Finer, Washington Post Foreign Service
A masked teenager in an Iraqi army uniform walked slowly through a crowd of
400 detainees captured Monday, studying each face and rendering his verdict
with a simple hand gesture, like a Roman emperor deciding the fate of
gladiators. A thumb pointed down meant the suspect was not thought to be an
insurgent and would be released by U.S. soldiers. A thumb po! inted up
meant a man would be removed from the concertina wire-encased pen,
handcuffed with tape or plastic ties and taken by truck to a military base
to be interrogated...

<http://www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=15666&s2=14>Read the full article / Leggi
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Disaster Capitalism in New Orleans
Xymphora
The cost (or here) of cleaning up the results of Bush's negligence in
failing to deal with global warming and spending money needed for New
Orleans levees on his war in Iraq may be as much as the $300 billion spent
in four years to fight the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Of course, what
most people would regard as a cost, the entrepreneurial politicians in the
Bush White House see as yet another opportunity to transfer money from
taxpayers to their personal friends. The! scheme is blatantly obvious: 1.
Bush has started to issue Iraq-style no-bid contracts, with cost-plus
provisions that guarantee contractors a certain profit regardless of how
much they spend. 2. Old buddies like Halliburton, Bechtel, and Fluor are
first in line. Joe Allbaugh, the former director of FEMA, is lobbying for
Halliburton, and another winner of the Katrina windfall, Shaw Group Inc...

<http://www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=15686&s2=14>Read the full article / Leggi
l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=15686


IRAQ: SADDAM ALREADY CONDEMNED TO DEATH, IRANIAN AGENCY ALLEGES
AKI
An unnamed Iraqi judge has told the Iranian news agency Fars that Saddam
Hussein - whose trial is due to begin in October - is as good as dead. "The
trial of Saddam Hussein will be brief and immediately afterwards the former
dictator will be hanged by a rope in one of the rooms of the Mukhaberat"
(...) The same judge also said that "all efforts by foreign countries to
prevent the death by hanging of the former dictator are useless, as the
senten! ce has already been issued"...

<http://www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=15672&s2=14>Read the full article / Leggi
l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=15672


FLASHBACK: United States War Crimes During the Gulf War
International War Crimes Tribunal
...The Commission of Inquiry will focus on U.S. criminal conduct because of
its destruction of Iraq, killing at least 125,000 persons directly by its
bombing while proclaiming its own combat losses as 148, because it
destroyed the economic base of Iraq and because its acts are still
inflicting consequential deaths that may reach hundreds of thousands. The
Commission of Inquiry will seek and accept evidence of crimina! l acts by
any person or government, related to the Gulf conflict, because it believes
international law must be applied uniformly. It believes that "victors'
justice" is not law, but the extension of war by force of the prevailing
party...

<http://www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=15694&s2=14>Read the full article / Leggi
l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=15694


'They hit me on my head, my back, all over my body'
Simon Freeman, Times Online
An Iraqi taxi driver today described to a court martial how he was beaten
senseless by seven British paratroops in a vicious attack from which one of
his passengers never recovered. Athar Finnijan Saddam, giving evidence to
the hearing in Colchester, Essex, unbuttoned his sleeve and said: "They hit
me on my arm, my forearm. They hit my elbow, my head, my back, all over my
body"...


<http://www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=15685&s2=14>Read the full article / Leggi
l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=15685


Four Americans killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq
Pravda.ru
A roadside bomb exploded Tuesday near a passing convoy of Iraqi security
guards and foreign contract workers south of Basra, killing four people,
police said. Capt. Mushtaq Kadim of the Basra Rapid Response Unit said the
four dead were Americans. But U.S. diplomatic and military officials in
Baghdad were unable to confirm the report, saying only that the victims
were not diplomats or soldiers...

<http://www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=15667&s2=14>Read the full article / Leggi
l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=15667


No Comments: Raed
Juan Cole, Informed Comment
Raed Jarrar, Raed in the Middle
In a sad sign of the times, Raed Jarrar and friends, the Iraqi bloggers,
have closed their comment section. They were alarmed by the recent
launching of a lawsuit against a site for reader comments at the web page.
They were also alarmed by a more draconian form of the phenomenon. What,
they ask, would happen if one of the commenters made deep criticism of the
US troop presence. They fear the new Iraqi government might hold them !
accountable if a commenter supports the guerrilla movement (Raed's brother
was already detained for reader comments that appeared at his blog.)...

<http://www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=15684&s2=14>Read the full article / Leggi
l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=15684


Saddam erased from Iraqi school syllabus
Oliver Poole
Iraq's children returned to school yesterday for the start of a fresh
academic year with a new syllabus that has all but erased Saddam Hussein
from its history (...) Baghdad now no longer wins the Iran-Iraq war nor
confronts the evil of Zionism alone (...) The events of 2003 are described
only as a "major shake-up" of Iraq (...) But few of the children who went
to school, dressed in clean white shirts and grey trousers or blue skirts,
returned with new books i! n their schoolbags. The printing firm hired by
the government to produce them failed to meet its deadline and for at least
a fortnight teachers will have no textbooks at all. The government has
banned the old books even though the new ones have as yet failed to
arrive...

<http://www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=15689&s2=14>Read the full article / Leggi
l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=15689


Levees Made of Lies
Rage, Grief, and the Chimera of the American Dream
Phil Rockstroh, www.dissidentvoice.org
An entire American city has become an uninhabitable mire of fetid water,
sodden ruins, and toxic sludge. Moreover, the destruction will not end
there: the financial, political, and psychological spill-off, incurred by
the deluge, will cause our nation to sink further into a morass of debt,
denial, and despair. How did it come to this? How did we come to buy this
worthless plot of swampl! and known as George Bush's America? Perhaps, at
this point, a brief history lesson, for a nation whose populace possesses
the collective capacity for long-term memory of a Louisiana gnat flurry on
a hot afternoon in high summer, might prove helpful. Let's begin with the
watershed year of 1968...

<http://www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=15682&s2=14>Read the full article / Leggi
l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=15682


The Great New Orleans Land Grab
The 17th Street Canal levee was breached on purpose
Ernesto Cienfuegos, La Voz de Aztlan
There were numerous incidents that occurred during and immediately after
Katrina struck that point to the "unthinkable". It now appears that a
sophisticated plan was implemented that utilized the "cover of a hurricane"
to first destroy and than take over the City of New Orleans? As the world
watched the events unfolding, one could not help think that something was
terribly af! oot concerning the rescue by FEMA of the city's poor and
predominate Black population. It seems that a well laid out plan was put
into effect to grab valuable real estate from well established but poverty
stricken Black families of New Orleans? What is being implemented now is
nothing less than a sophisticated scheme to purge and ethnically cleanse
what Whites have termed "Black and 'welfare bloated' New Orleans"...

<http://www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=15691&s2=14>Read the full article / Leggi
l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=15691


Chanelling Rocky Marciano
Mr. Galloway Goes to Washington
DAVE ZIRIN, CounterPunch
When British antiwar leader and newly elected Member of Parliament George
Galloway hurled these words at Sens. Norm Coleman and Carl Levin last
spring, the cheers were audible from Brooklyn to Baghdad. Finally, Capitol
Hill's bloody lies had been exposed for the congressional record. Finally,
after two years of the "opposition" Democrats doing little more than
"reporting for duty", we got a taste of what real opposition s! ounds like.
Finally, if but for a brief moment, the masters of war were humbled. And
now, finally, we have a book by Galloway himself, Mr. Galloway Goes to
Washington: The Brit Who Set Congress Straight About Iraq, that tells the
story behind the smackdown...

<http://www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=15681&s2=14>Read the full article / Leggi
l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=15681


GI Special 3C51: Soldier Murdered - September 13, 2005
www.militaryproject.org
At Camp Casey, I met a man named Juan Torres who had a compelling story to
tell. It was a story about his son, named Juan Torres Jr., who was
officially listed as the 134th US soldier to die in Afghanistan. Juan
Torres Jr. was a 25-year-old Specialist in the Army Reserve. He was
assigned to the 453rd Transportation Company based out of Houston, Texas.
The US Army has reported that Juan Torres Jr. died at Bagram Air Force Base
on July 1! 2th, 2004 due to a single gunshot wound to the head. His death
was listed as a non-combat related injury. The Army also claimed to have
investigated the death of Juan Torres Jr. and reached the conclusion that
his death was suicide. But here is where the story takes a most horrifying
and repulsive turn; here is where the story turns into an abomination that
will nauseate any American who has ever served - or known someone who has
served - in our once proud Armed Forces...


<http://www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=15678&s2=14>Read the full article / Leggi
l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=15678


New Orleans: Dress rehearsal for lockdown od America
Carolyn Baker, Online Journal Contributing Writer
Good morning, Baghdad! Good morning, Kabul! The war has come home to
America, right here, right now and so have myriad questions so disturbing
that most Americans, even if they know what the questions are, are
terrified to ask: Why is Blackwater USA, the principal mercenary force
outsourced by the Pentagon to fight in Iraq, now patrolling the streets of
New Orleans? Why the disgraceful, ghastly slowness of respo! nse by the
federal government to the Katrina disaster? Why FEMA's destruction of
communication lines and implacable refusal to allow food, water, and
medicine into the city?...

<http://www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=15677&s2=14>Read the full article / Leggi
l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=15677


The Devil made him say it: Mr. President's war on language
Tony Zurlo, Online Journal Contributing Writer
Mr. President has told the nation: "I trust God speaks through me. Without
that, I couldn't do my job." With God's guidance, he spent almost a month
at his Crawford ranch cultivating his tan and avoiding a crowd of campers.
When Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast, Mr. President was
touring the West trying to rescue his sinking Social Security plan and
hyping his war in Iraq. When questioned about t! he flooding of New
Orleans, Mr. President offered these divinely inspired words: "I don't
think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees." Perhaps he
misunderstands God on occasion. Or maybe the Devil messes with the
celestial switchboard. In that case, maybe Mr. President's imperial slogans
and clichés are Lucifer's fault. We know that Mr. President believes that
human beings are in an never-ending wrestling match with evil...

<http://www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=15676&s2=14>Read the full article / Leggi
l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=15676


Zero Tolerance
Patricia Goldsmith
... What it says is we are entering a new phase in this rightwing takeover,
a phase that is marked, appropriately enough, by a new, glitzier approach
to the anniversary of 9/11. While the Bushitters have been shameless in
their exploitation of this catastrophe from the first, this year they
finally busted out with a real celebration in the form of the so-called
Freedom March, culminating in a performance by Clint Black, who sang his
pro-war anthem, “I raq and roll.” The march’s ! stated purpose is to
support our troops, but the obvious intention is to reinforce the false,
discredited, and disavowed link between 9/11 and the war in Iraq. What we
really need is a Truth March. Wouldn’t it be great if we saw a march
designed to show the truth about what’s been going on?...

<http://www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=15674&s2=14>Read the full article / Leggi
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Who Murdered Arafat?
Uri Avnery
...However, a probability, high as it may be, is not proof. At the moment,
there is no proof that Arafat was indeed poisoned by the Israeli services.
But if not the Israelis, who? The US intelligence services also have the
necessary capabilities. President Bush never hid his hatred for Arafat, an
obstinate leader who did not submit to his dictates. He was quick to
embrace Mahmoud Abbas. Even now, American emissaries who visit the
Mukata'ah pointedly abstain from putting wreaths on ! the grave of the
Ra'is in the courtyard...

<http://www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=15673&s2=14>Read the full article / Leggi
l'articolo completo: www.uruknet.info/?p=15673




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