Kucinich Asks Tough Questions of Bush, Rumsfeld
Wants Answers About What the U.S. Is Doing in Iraq and Iran
Congressman Kucinich has been asking tough questions of the President and the Secretary of Defense. He wrote letters in April to both Secretary Rumsfeld and President Bush. The text of the letters appears in the May 4 issue of the Congression Record Extensions of Remarks. Kucinich's April 5 letter to Rumsfeld began, "I am writing to request a copy of all records pertaining to Pentagon plans to use U.S. Special Forces to advise, support and train Iraqi assassination and kidnapping teams." He referred to the January 5, 2005 Newsweek report of Pentagon plans to train elite Iraqi troops to put down growing violence there, dubbed "the Salvador option." He then cited 15 news reports since this time last year, suggesting that "the U.S. has trained and supported highly organized Iraqi commando brigades, and ... some of those brigades have operated as death squads, abducting and assassinating thousands of Iraqis"...
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US Democrat Biden advocates the communal break-up of Iraq
James Cogan, WSWSThe "five point alternative plan" for Iraq put forward last week by Joseph R. Biden, the ranking Democrat member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, can best be described as a proposal for a sectarian bloodbath. He has joined others in the US political establishment whose solution to the catastrophe in Iraq is to tear the country apart along ethno-religious lines and—providing they collaborate with Washington—put anti-democratic regimes in power over the population. Biden is a thoroughly pro-war figure. In 2002, he voted in the Congress to give Bush the authority to carry out the illegal invasion of Iraq (...) Biden’s solution to the disaster facing the United States is to split Iraq into three autonomous statelets within a loose federal structure. He advocates "giving each ethno-religious group—Kurd, Sunni Arab and Shiite Arab—room to run its own affairs, while leaving the central government in charge of common interests". Alongside the de-facto Kurdish state that already exists in northern Iraq, he calls for the creation of a Shiite-controlled autonomous region in the oil-rich southern provinces and a Sunni Arab region in the central and western provinces. The new Iraqi constitution that was drafted by pro-occupation Shiite and Kurdish parties and the US embassy enables such a partition to take place...
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109 Iraqi Journalists killed in Iraq Under Occupation
Sabah Ali - BRussells TribunalThe Iraqi Journalists Union published a report and lists of the Iraqi journalists who were killed in the last 3 years. The list took 5 months of working on the ground, documenting when, where, how and by whom, the journalists were killed as follows: 69 journalists were killed by militias or unknown armed men; 21 were killed in explosions or fighting; 17 were shot by the American troops; 2 were shot by the Iraqi troops. This statistics show that the Iraqi journalist is targeted by everybody, but the question remains who is responsible for targeting them and for the lack of protection journalists among other Iraqis need...
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Is 'Al Qaeda' the modern incarnation of 'Emmanuel Goldstein'?
Michael Rivero, What Really HappenedIs "Al Qaeda" the modern incarnation of "Emmanuel Goldstein", the arch-villain manufactured by the state to rule the population with fear? Is it really far-fetched? If one can accept a real terrorist organization willing to kill people for their political aims, is a fake terror organization willing to kill people for their political aims any less possible. Once you accept that there can be one group of people willing to commit acts of terror you must accept that there can be a second group equally willing to commit acts of terror to blame on the first group...
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Slated for killing: More than 450 Iraqi intellectuals fear for their lives
Abduhussein Ghazal, AzzamanA militia group with immense power in Iraq has issued names of 461 intellectuals which it says it has ordered its armed men to assassinate. The name list is distributed across the country and copies are not hard to obtain in Baghdad. Several Iraq-related websites have issued the names. The list includes some of the brightest Iraqi authors, journalists, doctors and scientists. Azzaman obtained the list from the Iraqi Writers Union which declined to reveal the name of the factional group calling for the killing of the 461 intellectuals, citing security concerns...
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Rummy Logic & Enduring Lies
Robert Parry, Consortiumnews.comIndeed, one of the most enduring and successful lies has been Bush’s insistence that he treated war with Iraq as a "last resort" and that Saddam Hussein was the one who "chose war" by refusing to let United Nations weapons inspectors in. The reality, however, was that Hussein told the truth when he said his country no longer had weapons of mass destruction, as U.S. weapons inspectors later discovered, and he did let in U.N. inspectors to search wherever they wanted for several months before Bush launched the invasion on March 19, 2003. But Bush is almost never challenged when he misrepresents these facts. Insider accounts from former Bush administration officials, such as Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill and counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke, also revealed that Bush and his senior aides were spoiling for a war with Iraq from their earliest days in office – and that they exploited the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks as a pretext...
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Political Prisoners' Resistance from Ireland to Gitmo
"No Less Courage"
KATE McCABEIn a statement to his lawyer, Guantánamo detainee and hunger strike organizer Binyam Mohammed al-Habashi said of his plans to protest his unlawful imprisonment by the United States: "I do not plan to stop until I either die or we are respected. [We] will definitely die. Bobby Sands petitioned the British government to stop the illegitimate treatment of Irishmen without trial. He had the courage of his convictions and he starved himself to death. Nobody should believe for one moment that my brothers here have less courage"...
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Resistance in Basra?!
Abdel Wahab Badrakhan, Al-HayatGunning down a British helicopter in Basra may be a sign that resistance against British occupation forces in the city has started, and that it will continue until the last soldier has been withdrawn. Indeed, the statement signed by the 'Sons of Struggling Basra' is not credible enough to confirm an eruption of such resistance. However, it is a loud and clear warning for Tony Blair and his government...
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'No one knows what we are going through'
Natasha Walter, Guardian...To show the negative effects of these developments on women, Zeina travels to Basra. It will not come as news to those who have followed developments in southern Iraq that women are being forced to wear the hijab and prevented from living their lives freely. But it brings these developments home when we see young women and their families talking about being sent bullets and death threats because they played sport or did not wear a headscarf. As Zeina emphasises, this kind of experience is new to most women in Iraq, who enjoyed economic and social freedom before the occupation. "A while ago, I was looking at photographs of my aunt in college in the 60s, wearing pants and sleeveless tops, playing sports in the college yard; and then I looked at the photographs of the women in college today, and they are covered in black from head to toe, their faces also covered." Zeina says the responsibility for these developments squarely at the feet of the occupation...
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Destroying Iraq To Save It
Robert DreyfussPerhaps the most famous quotation from the Vietnam War was the comment from an American commander who said casually that his forces "had to destroy the village in order to save it." Last week, Senator Joe Biden joined that commander in cold cynicism, proposing to divide Iraq in order to unify it. Specifically, he proposed to redraw the map of Iraq on the Yugoslav model, fracturing it. "The idea, as in Bosnia, is to maintain a united Iraq by decentralizing it, giving each ethno-religious group—Kurd, Sunni Arab and Shiite Arab—room to run its own affairs." Biden added innocently: "Decentralization is hardly as radical as it may seem. … Things are already heading toward partition." It is not the first time that a plan for breaking up Iraq into three or more parts has been floated...
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DAILY WAR NEWS FOR MONDAY, May 8, 2006
Today in IraqA Multi-National Division - Baghdad Soldier died at approximately 11:10 a.m. today when an improvised-explosive device struck his vehicle during a patrol southeast of Baghdad. (CENTCOM) A Soldier from the 1st Brigade Combat Team, 1st Armored Division was killed and another Soldier was wounded May 7 near Tal Afar. (CENTCOM) A roadside bomb exploded near a US convoy on a road between Najaf and Karbala, with witnesses reporting casualties. A car bomb exploded near police patrol on Palestine street in eastern Baghdad, killing two policemen and wounding 12 Iraqis...
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IRAQ: UN report cites vast under-nutrition among children
IRINOne in three Iraqi children is malnourished and underweight, according to a report released by the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) in Amman on 2 May. "Under-nutrition should not be accepted in a country like Iraq, with its wealth of resources," said UNICEF Special Representative for Iraq Roger Wright from the Jordanian capital, Amman. Wright added that ongoing insecurity served to deter parents from visiting health centres for essential services, while many health workers had been kidnapped or killed in different parts of the country. According to the report, a full 25 percent of Iraqi children between six months and five years old suffer from either acute or chronic malnutrition...
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Appeal against electing the occupied Iraq to the Human Rights Council
Monitoring Network of Human Rights in Iraq, BRussells TribunalAs representatives of Iraqi civil society and Human Rights defenders we are deeply concerned over the attempt by the Iraqi regime to be elected as a member of the United Nations Human Rights Council at the UN General Assembly on May 9, 2006 which could do great harm to the credibility of the United Nations. We wish to see an Iraq free from occupation play an important role in the United Nations. The Iraqi state became a founder member of the United Nations as an independent state and not as an occupied country with nearly 200,000 foreign soldiers on its soil and a never ending occupation war. The current Iraqi regime is part of the occupation...
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The USDA's talking points on Iraq …
Joshua HollandThis Washington Post piece by Al Kamen shows how desperate the administration is to spin the un-spinnable reality in Iraq: Career appointees at the Department of Agriculture were stunned last week to receive e-mailed instructions that include Bush administration "talking points" -- saying things such as "President Bush has a clear strategy for victory in Iraq" -- in every speech they give for the department. "The President has requested that all members of his cabinet and sub-cabinet incorporate message points on the Global War on Terror into speeches, including specific examples of what each agency is doing to aid the reconstruction of Iraq," the May 2 e-mail from USDA speechwriter Heather Vaughn began...
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Cronyism At Any Cost, Once Again!
TvNewsLIESLet’s see if the mainstream media once again ignore the incompetence, the ignorance, and the unmitigated hubris of the man whom President George W. Bush has just nominated to head the CIA. Let’s see if they if they bother to go back just five months to point out the shameless liberties that General Michael Hayden recently took with the content of the US Constitution. Let’s see if they remind the American people of the statements made by today’s nominee to succeed Porter Goss as head of the agency. Let’s see if they quote his response from a reporter last January, when asked about the NSA warrantless spying being in violation of the fourth amendment...
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The Oil Boil
Anwaar Hussain...Now let us come to Iran's cardinal sin. Since the beginning of 2003, Iran has required Euros in payment of exports toward Asia and Europe, though prices are still expressed in US dollars. Now Iran is planning to open a commodity exchange, the Iranian Oil Bourse, for the sole purpose of trading oil, petrochemicals and gas in various non-dollar currencies, primarily the Euro. When successful, this would establish a Euro-based pricing mechanism for oil trading. That would, in time, break the stranglehold of NYMEX and IPE on the world’s financial market by sending the US dollar into a graveyard spin. The US economy would be an unfortunate, but sure, accompaniment...
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"BUSH IS NOT HITLER, II"
Steven Jonas, M.D., M.P.H....In conclusion, we have to recognize that there are obviously significant differences between Bush and Hitler. Indeed, based on the examples in this list, Bush is not only not Hitler, but something of a piker by comparison. However, in deference to those who hold that yes, the two do have much in common, we must give Bush time, just give him time and he may well get there, a few details aside...
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My Meeting With Rumsfeld
Ray McGovern...The ACLU of Georgia had invited me to their annual dinner on Thursday, May 4, to receive the National Civil Liberties Award. Friends in Atlanta arranged for me to bookend my remarks at the ACLU dinner with a Wednesday presentation to Pax Christi, the Catholic peace movement, and a talk on Friday evening at Quaker House in Decatur. I planned to put the rationale for looming war with Iran in context by drawing an unhappy but direct parallel with the bogus reasons adduced to "justify" the U.S. attack on Iraq more than three years ago. When those friends learned last Monday that Rumsfeld would be in Atlanta Thursday to give an afternoon speech at the Center, it seemed a natural to go. The event was said to be open to the public, but it took tradecraft skills assimilated over a 27-year career with the CIA to acquire a ticket. (The event was strangely absent from the Center’s website, reportedly at the insistence of the Defense Department.)...
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"New liberation of Baghdad."
Zeyad, Healing Iraq...The deteriorating situation in my neighbourhood is always a very convenient excuse for local generator owners to provide less hours of power (but heaven forbid if someone is late on paying their monthly subscription fee). It hasn't been very pretty in Adhamiya since my last post. The district looks deserted most of the time, with random gunfire here and there. American Apache helicopters circle the area almost non-stop, and residents are whispering to each other about an imminent assault, as part of the American plan to 'liberate' Baghdad again. But to liberate it from whom? Its residents?...
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Neocons Dismember the CIA
Kurt NimmoAs speculated here over the weekend, the impending appointment of General Michael Hayden to the CIA will translate into the wholesale dismemberment of the agency in favor of the Pentagon conducting "paramilitary operations" (i.e., subverting governments around the world). "A senior intelligence community official yesterday said the director of national intelligence, John Negroponte, has indicated 'he is willing to give up covert operations to the Pentagon,’" reports the New York Sun. "The proposed change would give the Pentagon unfettered authority to plan and conduct these operations without consulting an intelligence bureaucracy its civilian leaders have deemed hostile to the president’s war policy," a completely natural opposition since the operations of the Straussian neocons are quite dangerous and insane...
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IRAQ: Displaced from 2003 still homeless , say analysts
IRINLocal aid agencies warn that families displaced immediately following the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 still remain homeless. "We urge international aid agencies to help us support the displaced, especially in terms of food and shelter," said Waleed Rashdi, a spokesman for the Aid Agencies Association in Iraq. "Because all the aid is now being sent to the recently-displaced, while other groups are suffering seriously."...
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news, analysis, documents and texts of iraqi resistance available in Italian and
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