Media’s Distortions to Justify the Occupation of Iraq
Ghali HassanThe flurry of news, hypotheses, and media’s distortions about the nature of U.S. Occupation and the Iraqi people resistance to the Occupation continues unabated. How much of this is managed propaganda to justify the Occupation and distort the image of the Resistance to U.S. murderous and unprovoked war? According to both the Western mainstream media and the so-called "alternative" media, the U.S. is "fighting terrorism", "building democracy", and "preventing civil war" in Iraq. The distortion of facts and lack of oppositional media leave people in the West, Americans in particular, ill informed. The Western media diligently divert public attention from the illegal Occupation of Iraq and the responsibility of the U.S. and its allies for the horrendous crimes committed against the people of Iraq. Western journalists and pundits are the main agents of this distorted propaganda campaign. The aims are to justify the ongoing violent Occupation of Iraq and to portray the Iraqi Resistance as "violent insurgency" composed of "religious fanatics" and "foreign fighters" isolated from the rest of the population "with nothing to lose" is the Occupation's way of discrediting the Iraqi people legitimate right to resist U.S. Occupation...
Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23552
|
|
CHANGING HISTORY
Malcom LagaucheJournalists and historians have been granted the most power on Earth: they can change things that have already happened. It is amazing how a few years can not only create a cataclysmic situation in Iraq, but how the history of the country prior to March 2003 changes daily. Much of the change comes not from U.S. administration officials, but from the so-called "progressive" press that opposes the U.S. occupation of Iraq. A few days ago, I read an article about how Iraqi doctors are suffering because they have little technical literature and what they have is often outdated. That I agreed with, but the following reasons were preposterous. The writer said that the Iraqi medical system was in bad shape for 30 years and that Saddam Hussein would not allow doctors and healthcare professionals to leave Iraq, under penalty of death. I have no idea where this assumption originated. It is well known that under the Ba’athist regime, a priority was medical care. The government paid for tens of thousands of healthcare people to go to foreign countries to study, primarily in the U.S. and U.K. During the Ba’ath years, not only medical students studied abroad, but engineers and scientists as well. When they came back to Iraq, they participated in the growth and development of the country that led it to be the most progressive country in the Middle East...
Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23547
|
|
Olmert should have stayed Home
Mike WhitneyEhud Olmert never should have been invited to Washington. He shouldn’t have been given a platform to spout his defiance of UN resolutions. The Bush administration does the country a disservice by rewarding leaders who ignore the international community and carry out their own self-serving agenda. This doesn’t mean that Israel should be bombed into the Stone Age like Iraq, or that Olmert should be targeted for regime change. And, it doesn’t mean that the Israeli people should be collectively punished with lethal sanctions like those that are being levied against the Palestinians. It simply means that Israel should be isolated as much as possible until it complies with UN resolutions to return to the 1967 borders (...) Olmert’s speech should have been denounced as a cheap appeal for more hostilities. Instead it was praised as inspirational and statesmanlike. The passionate reaction from congress implies that we have reached another milestone on the winding path to war with Iran. Are we really ready to sacrifice American lives at the request of Ehud Olmert?...
Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23540
|
|
DAILY WAR NEWS FOR FRIDAY, May 26, 2006
Today in IraqTwo Multi-National Division - Baghdad Soldiers were killed at approximately 2 p.m. May 25 when their vehicle was struck by a roadside bomb in southern Baghdad. (CENTCOM). A U.S. Marine was killed on Tuesday in combat in Anbar province, the U.S. military said. A Knoxville soldier, Army Pfc. Class Caleb Lufkin, died Thursday while under treatment for severe wounds he suffered early this month from a roadside bomb in Iraq, family members said (...) U.S. soldiers brought 14 bullet-riddled bodies, including those of two children, to the morgue in Tikrit. It was unclear who had killed them...
Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23544
|
|
World is blind to real situation in Iraq: activists
ERIC JOHNSTONAn Iraqi journalist and a Japanese human rights activist said the public has a poor idea of the situation in Iraq and warned of an impending health catastrophe as more Iraqis contract cancer from exposure to depleted uranium shells used by the U.S. and Britain. "It is now virtually impossible for foreign journalists to move around independently in Iraq," Nishitani said. "Most (journalists) are embedded with U.S. forces or operate from the Green Zone, a walled fortress in central Baghdad. As a result, few people in the West, or in Japan, have seen the true extent of the damage and suffering in Fallujah, while the U.S. government continues to deny responsibility for the cancer and leukemia outbreaks." (...) Rasheed told the story of one 12-year-old boy he interviewed who began playing in a field contaminated with depleted uranium at the age of 10. Shortly after he began showing signs of illness and was eventually diagnosed with leukemia... Journalists have discovered that since 2003, parts of Baghdad have radiation levels 1,900 times higher than normal...
Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23557
|
|
US massacre of civilians at Hajiyan and manipulation of public opinion
Charles Jenks, Traprock Peace CenterTraprock Peace Center has published a new paper by Professor Marc Herold on the May 22nd massacre of civilians at the Afghan village of Hajiyan. The massacre provides a case study in US manipulation of public opinion. His analysis is available as a pdf download with photos of civilians wounded by the US attack on the village (...) Herold concludes: A reasonable counting of the dead in the village of Hajiyan indicates that at least 35-40 innocent Afghan civilians perished in the hail of 'precision fire' by A-10 Warthogs..." (A-10's have used radioactive munitions, so-called 'depleted' uranium (DU), to devastating and tragic effect in Iraq and elsewhere. DU munitions are pyrophoric and release an ultra-fine radioactive and highly toxic dust that threaten health through inhalation and contamination of the environment. Uranium is a known carcinogen. It is not reported whether the US used DU in its attack on Hajiyan.)
Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23539
|
|
On Privation and War: In Iraq and Palestine, First Casualties Are Those Least Able to Defend Themselves
Geov Parrish...Now, some three million Iraqi children are malnourished due to an economy that has completely disintegrated, a government that supplies absolutely no social services, and international aid groups rendered pointless by raging war. It makes pointless the debate over whether more people are dying due to the US/UK occupation and the insurgency against it, or through sectarian strife and Iraq's emerging civil war. People are dying, and most of them, on all sides, are non-combatants. Many, inevitably, are children. Almost completely without notice in American media, children and the infirm are also quickly becoming the victims du jour in the latest, strikingly vicious effort by the United States and its European allies to help Israel keep the Palestinians under lock and key...
Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23533
|
|
My Lai, Iraq
The Few, the Proud, the Murderers
PIERRE TRISTAM...What's almost as repulsive, though in this case only ink is being spilled, not blood, is the way the subsequent reporting about the massacre is being laid out. The New York Times this morning, with its usual, but in this case nauseating, restraint in balance's name, pulls a classic example of mitigating atrocity with qualifiers. The lead paragraph refers to a small number of marines carrying out "extensive, unprovoked killings of civilians," establishing right away the rogue-soldier theory that was attempted in the aftermath of Abu Ghraib. The downplaying of U.S. torture as an institutional rather than an exceptional strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan was successful, at least in the public's mind. The evidence suggests otherw ise. It does so as well when it comes to wanton killings, whether it's the trigger-happy soldiering at Iraqi checkpoints or the killing of civilians in allegedly collateral circumstances...
Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23555
|
|
Why Exiting Iraq Is Not That Hard
David Swanson...It will be a blessing for Iraq when the last American soldier, mercenary, and businessman leave Iraq. It will not be a "noble course of action" for after invading a country illegally and killing hundreds of thousands in a textbook case of colonialism, we’ve lost the right to even think the word "noble." And I agree that it won’t be a "panacea for Iraq’s ills." But it will be the first step in the right direction. And it is easy. Ask anyone who’s been in Iraq, and I don’t mean the Green Zone...
Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23554
|
|
Dujail - searching for the facts
Eli Stephens, Left I on the News...The only reference to "Dujail" in the New York Times prior to early 2005 is an article from March 29, 1991, written by Elaine Sciolino. I'm accessing it in PDF format via ProQuest, so I can't link to it, but here's what it says: The Government also found other, more creative ways to punish Shiite dissent. In July 1982, for example, assassins tried to kill Mr. Hussein during a visit to the village of Dujail, a stronghold of Shiite militancy about 40 miles northeast of Baghdad. Mr. Hussein ordered the entire population deported and the village was razed. Aside from the curious assertion that an assassination attempt constitutes "dissent," note that there is no mention of 250,000 acres or orchards at all. Now let's move forward to July 3, 2005, and the last major article in the Times on the subject, written by John F. Burns. Here's a portion of the narrative that Burns spins: In small groups at first, then in larger roundups, about 1,500 townspeople were arrested (...) bEarlier in the article, he has quoted a population figure of 75,000. So now we've gone from the more contemporaneous article in the Times claiming that "the entire population [was] deported and the village was razed" to arresting 1,500 people (2% of the town), and no mention of "razing the village" at all...
Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23537
|
|
Galloway responds to Blair ‘assassination’ row
George GallowayLike the Prime Minister’s wife commenting on suicide bombings in Israel I understand why such desperate acts take place and why those involved might believe such actions are morally justifiable. From the point of view of someone who has seen their country invaded and their family blown apart it’s possible, of course, for them to construct a moral justification. But I’ve made my position clear. I would not support anyone seeking to assassinate the Prime Minister. That’s why I said in the interview I would report to the authorities any such plot that I knew of. What I did make abundantly clear to Piers Morgan in the GQ interview is that I would like to see Tony Blair in front of a war crimes tribunal for sending this country to war illegally and for the appalling human consequences which resulted...
Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23548
|
|
2006: The year the carving of Iraq goes into effect
Truth About IraqisIn the past few months, we have heard such grand statements as "This is a make it or break it year for Iraq", or "The next six months are crucial". We have also heard Bush and Blair call for the international community to support Iraq and the new government, but I noticed there was no mention of the unity of Iraq. Hmmm ... in previous statements from US and UK officials we have heard that the two powers are committed to keeping Iraq unified. So, what do they make of the fact that the Iraqi national flag is prohibited from being raised in the Kurdish areas of Iraqi. Kurdish areas of Iraq. Of Iraq. Is there not a Kurdish President of Iraq? And a Kurdish Foreign Minister of Iraq? Is the national flag of a country not a symbol of the country's unity and sovereignty? Furthermore, why was there not even a murmur in Baghdad when the Kurdish areas of Iraq began to issue their own passports...
Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23546
|
|
Baath Party Statement
The Baath and the Resistance confront the puppet authority in order to destroy it and wipe it out
The Arab Baath Socialist PartySome of the kids were happy, others sulked, and after the end of the game we got a "government" wanted by the occupation but after the failed but forgotten parliamentary election episode, as the other political episodes. This was praised by the stuck in the mud, the idiot Bush as a "victory strategy" for the US in Resisting Iraq. Finally there was an "adorned sectarian government" run by racist pagan Iranian collaborators working together who were bought wholesale by the U.S. occupation and other puppets in Amman, Jordan, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and Cairo But, on a positive note, just as the Iraqi Resistance hit both the puppet provisional and temporary governments before, the Resistance and in its strategic plan, will continue to hit and destroy "the puppet permanent government" mercilessly and incessantly...
Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23543
|
|
GI Special 4E26: Anti-War GI Podcast - May 26, 2006
Thomas F. Barton... However, the Taliban's spring offensive is fast turning into a massive resistance against the foreign presence all over Afghanistan, and already some influential characters are jockeying for a post-spring role. And the indications are that the resistance could transcend a simple Taliban-led insurgency to evolve into a powerful Islamic movement. Thousands of Taliban have emerged in the provinces of Helmand, Ghazni, Urgzan, Kandahar, Kunar and Zabul, and in all of them the story is the same: where allied forces have taken on the Taliban, the ANA holds the "fort". In places beyond the access of allied forces, the Taliban are in control (...) [A]sia Times Online spoke to a man who knows Afghan society and most of its characters inside out, former Pakistani army general and director general of the Inter-Services Intelligence Hamid Gul. Gul has for many years been associated with the various groups of the Afghan resistance, since the days it fought against the Soviets in the 1980s. "Firstly, when this sort of mass resistance starts, it means that it is a collective decision of Afghans..."
Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23542
|
|
Iraqi Minister Backs Iran on Nuclear Research
RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr. and JOHN O'NEILForeign Minister Hoshyar Zebari of Iraq today endorsed the right of Iran to pursue the "technological and scientific capabilities" needed to create nuclear power for peaceful purposes, in the first high-level meeting between officials from the new Iraqi government and its eastern neighbor. But Mr. Zebari's statement, made at a news conference after a meeting with the Iranian foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, appeared deliberately ambiguous and reflected the complex position of Iraq between the United States, which wants Iran to abandon efforts to enrich uranium, and Iran, which says it needs enrichment to create fuel for nuclear reactors...
Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23556
|
|
The Iraq war and the truth--between blog and corporate media
Faiza al-Arji...I think the day will come, sooner or later, when Iraq will be free of the occupation, sooner or later. My grandchildren will be proud that we did all we could to defend Iraq and the Iraqis against the occupation, violence, bloodshed, sectarianism, division and the theft of our resources. We put ourselves in danger both inside Iraq and outside so we can tell the truth. It is as if we are in a state of clandestine struggle, like Germans under Nazi rule. However, the crisis in Iraq is worth this risk...
Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23541
|
|
Inquiry points to atrocity by marines
Thom Shanker, Eric Schmitt and Richard A. Oppel Jr. The New York Times...Evidence indicates that the civilians were killed during a sustained sweep by a small group of marines that lasted three to five hours and included shootings of five men standing near a taxi at a checkpoint and killings inside at least two homes that included women and children, officials said. That evidence, described by congressional, Pentagon and military officials briefed on the inquiry, suggested to one congressional official that the killings were "methodical in nature"...
Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23538
|
|
Iraqi Resistance Report for events of Thursday, 25 May 2006
Translated and/or compiled by Muhammad Abu Nasr, member, editorial board, the Free Arab VoiceIn a dispatch posted at 10:50am Makkah time Thursday morning, Mafkarat al-Islam reported that US forces sealed off the city of al-Hadithah, about 300km northwest of Baghdad, at dawn on Thursday. The correspondent for Mafkarat al-Islam reported that US forces completely encircled the city at dawn, preventing anyone from entering or exiting the city. Inside al-Hadithah, US forces imposed a curfew, completely closing schools and government departments...
Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23536
|
|
Oil for Occupation, But None for Iraqis
Iraq's Ongoing Fuel Crisis
ROBERT BRYCEThe ongoing war in Iraq will likely be won or lost based on the availability of one commodity: motor fuel. For the moment, the U.S. military has all the fuel it needs--about three million gallons per day -- to continue prosecuting the war in Iraq. The same cannot be said for Iraqi civilians. Indeed, the supply of motor fuel in Iraq remains highly precarious...
Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23534
|
|
The Latest Confrontation Between the US Empire and Evo Morales and Hugo Chavez
Stephen LendmanI've said before it's easy to know what the empire is thinking (especially its powerful movers and shakers sitting in corporate boardrooms) by reading the Wall Street Journal daily as I do. Despite its heavy pro-empire bias, readers can also get some real news and information - something nearly impossible elsewhere in the corporate media especially from the venerable New York Times I've before labeled the closest thing we have in the US to an official ministry of information and propaganda...
Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23553
|
|
DAILY WAR NEWS FOR THURSDAY, May 25, 2006
Today in IraqGunmen wounded an Iraqi general Thursday in southeast Baghdad. Brig. Gen. Khalil al-Abadi, head of the Defense Ministry logistics office, was ambushed as he was driven to work in the Zafraniyah district. His driver was also wounded. A blast killed three people in central Baghdad, It occurred in a building on Tahrir Square, killing three and wounding 11. Police suspect the building housed a bomb-making factory. Four bodies were discovered in Baghdad. Three civilians were wounded when two bombs exploded on the central Tahrir Square, sending a thick white cloud drifting over the Tigris river. At least one of the explosions took place inside a building on Tahrir Square...
Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=23531
|
|
www.uruknet.info: a site gathering daily information concerning occupied Iraq:
news, analysis, documents and texts of iraqi resistance available in Italian and
English.
You receive this newsletter because you subscribed it.
If you think it was an abuse, or simply if you don't want to receive it any more,
click here to unsubscribe from the newsletter.
|