Lynching Saddam
Gabriele Zamparini, The cat's dream... One of the main lawyers defending former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein at his trial has been shot dead. Khamis al-Obeidi's body was found dumped in the capital, Baghdad, hours after he was abducted from his home. Defence lawyers have frequently complained that they have not been given enough protection, calling the trial's fairness into question. Two other defence lawyers were murdered last year in the early stages of the trial, which is set to end next month. Do the United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, the European Union, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the "liberal media" (among others) have anything to say about this peculiar form of "justice"? Or should we assume that in the New World Order we have accepted the pre-emptive concept of justice: lynching!..
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Les Roberts responds to criticism by Iraq Body Count
Stephen SoldzIraq Body Count (IBC) – as part of their effort to defend their work against critics ]including me: When Promoting Truth Obscures the Truth: More on Iraqi Body Count and Iraqi Deaths], who argue that their estimates of Iraqi civilian casualties are severe underestimates – launched a rather nasty attack on Les Roberts, lead author of the classic Lancet study of Iraqi casualties (...) This attack has convinced me that IBC is acting in bad faith. I had originally believed they were misinformed, being not particularly knowledgeable about epidemiology. But gradually this belief of mine has been challenged by IBC’s refusal to do anything to correct misuses of their data...
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War Crimes and World Domination
Schuyler Ebbets, thepeoplesvoice.orgSome have said that the World Trade Center was intentionally destroyed, and over 3000 people were murdered to create a Pearl Harbor stile event to justify the Iraq war. People are free in America to speculate if they want, but we don't have to speculate about the mass murder of some three hundred thousand people in Iraq. It is obvious that America is stealing their oil and privatizing every aspect of the peoples lives. Iraq has been turned into one giant Bush, Cheney, Halliburton, Bechtel, "free market zone', just another name for total corporate enslavement. The Bush regime has broken virtually every one of the Geneva Conventions. They have committed crimes for which there are not yet laws written...
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Washington escalates slaughter in Iraq
Bill Van Auken, WSWS...While there is increasing evidence that the US attempt to conquer Iraq and install a puppet regime to ensure US control over the country’s oil reserves has produced a debacle, there is no indication that either the Bush administration or its nominal political opponents in the Democratic Party have any intention of calling the bloodbath to a halt. On the contrary, the preparations for an assault on Ramadi and the crackdown in Baghdad suggest that the Bush administration is planning to employ naked force and mass terror to produce at least the appearance of a changed situation on the ground in Iraq before the November mid-term elections. While such political calculations play a major role in this military strategy, on a more fundamental level, the US ruling elite remains committed to a policy of subjugating Iraq to semi-colonial domination. The phony debate on the war in Congress and within the Democratic Party is not over whether to end the occupation, but how to make it succeed...
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It's Time to break up the Media
Mike WhitneyThe media is a fully-integrated part of the state power-structure. In its practical application, it is more valuable than the military. There are definite drawbacks to using force, whereas, propaganda and public relations tend to be less disruptive to the normal flow of business. The media’s primary objective is to shape public opinion in a way that elicits support for the corporate agenda. Public TV and the internet pose the biggest threats to that process. They both provide divergent sources of information which eschew the business-friendly filtering process. This explains why the Bush administration installed political appointees at PBS. Their job was to sabotage programs like Bill Moyer’s NOW and the weekly documentary series Frontline. Investigative journalism is a danger to private interests, creating the likelihood that the public will focus more attention on the shadowy activities of big business. The ultimate goal of any privately owned information-system is to assert complete control over the news-cycle so that events can be arranged in a way that serves the needs of business...
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Saddam lawyer's murder blamed on interior ministry
Barbara Bibbo'A lawyer in Saddam Hussain's defence team blamed the Iraqi ministry of the interior for the assassination of his colleague Khamis Al Obaidi yesterday and said that the killing was meant to silence the defence team. Former Qatari justice minister Najeeb Al Nuaimi, one of the lawyers for the former Iraqi leader, also blamed the Americans for failing to protect the defence team, but added that the assassination will not affect the trial. "The responsibility for Al Obaidi's assassination lies with the Iraqi ministry of the interior … They have killed him like they have killed the others before. They are trying to hinder us from continuing our work," Al Nuaimi told Gulf News in Doha. "The statements they [the Iraqi ministry of the interior] gave today about Al Obaidi's death are false … Officials from the ministry went to his house at 7 in the morning and asked him to accompany them for an interrogation. His wife was with him. After an hour his body was found dumped in an area of Baghdad called Hur. It was not true that he was found shot in a car," Al Nuaimi said...
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Third Lawyer in Hussein Trial Is Killed
JOHN F. BURNS and CHRISTINE HAUSERA lawyer on Saddam Hussein's defense team was kidnapped and later found dead this morning in a Baghdad neighborhood, the Interior Ministry said. He was the third lawyer representing Mr. Hussein or his co-defendants to have been killed since their trial started late last year (...) Mr. Obeidi's wife, Um Laith, said that early this morning while she, her husband and three children slept, about 20 men in civilian clothes burst into their house in the neighborhood of Slaikh, on the edge of the predominantly Sunni area of Adamiya, and identified themselves as members of a ministry security brigade. Mr. Obeidi, 39, had little chance to reply before he was seized, she said. Iraqi witnesses said that Mr. Obeidi was transported in a convoy of vehicles by people known as belonging to the Mahdi Army, a Shiite militia known to be affiliated with the rebellious anti-American cleric Moktada al-Sadr...
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Killing Iraqi Children
Jacob G. Hornberger... Some would argue that such "collateral damage" is just an unfortunate byproduct of war. War is brutal. People get killed in war. Compared with the two world wars, not that many people have been killed in Iraq, proponents of the Iraq war and occupation would claim. Such claims, however, miss an important point: U.S. military forces have no right, legal or moral, even to be in Iraq killing anyone. Why? Because neither the Iraqi people nor their government ever attacked the United States. The Iraqi people had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington. Thus, this was an optional war against Iraq, one that President Bush and his military forces did not have to wage. The attack on Iraq was akin to, say, attacking Bolivia or Uruguay or Mongolia, after 9/11. Those countries also had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks and so it would have been illegal and immoral for President Bush to have ordered an invasion and occupation of those countries as well (...) That made the United States the aggressor nation and Iraq the defending nation in this conflict. That incontrovertible fact holds deep moral implications, as well as legal ones, for U.S. soldiers who kill people in Iraq, including people who are simply trying to oust the occupiers from Iraq. Don’t forget that aggressive war was punished as a war crime at Nuremberg...
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GI Special 4F19: Blood For No Oil (2) - June 21, 2006
Thomas F. BartonDid the U.S. invade Iraq to tap its oil reserves or to make sure they stayed under the sand?
World oil production today stands at more than twice the 15-billion a-year maximum projected by Shell Oil in 1956 -- and reserves are climbing at a faster clip yet. That leaves the question, Why this war?
Did Dick Cheney send us in to seize the last dwindling supplies? Unlikely. Our world's petroleum reserves have doubled in just twenty-five years -- and it is in Shell's and the rest of the industry's interest that this doubling doesn't happen again.
The neo-cons were hell-bent on raising Iraq's oil production.
Big Oil's interest was in suppressing production, that is, keeping Iraq to its OPEC quota or less.
This raises the question, did the petroleum industry, which had a direct, if hidden, hand, in promoting invasion, cheerlead for a takeover of Iraq to prevent overproduction?
It wouldn't be the first time.
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Iraqi Resistance Report for events of Tuesday, 20 June 2006
Translated and/or compiled by Muhammad Abu Nasr, member, editorial board, the Free Arab Voice. http://www.freearabvoice.orgFamilies flee planned US offensive in ar-Ramadi, but US troops raid them in refugee encampments in Hit. American forces prevent relief supplies from getting to refugees. In a dispatch posted at 5:40pm Makkah time Tuesday afternoon, Mafkarat al-Islam reported that US occupation troops attacked refugee camps in Hit that house Iraqis who fled their homes in ar-Ramadi several days ago in anticipation of a massive US assault on the city. The Hit correspondent for Mafkarat al-Islam reported that at 3pm local time Tuesday afternoon, a large American force attacked the schools of Hit in which more than 200 Iraqi men, women, and children from ar-Ramadi have found temporary refuge...
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Planting Fields of Corn in the New World Revolution
Les Blough, Editor, Axis of LogicMuch has been written on last month's Rolling Stone Article, written by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. on the theft of the 2004 Presidential Election by the Bush Regime. We think Kennedy's 4 page article it is well worth reading because it reveals the level of corruption and fraud in all national elections in the United States. As most Axis of Logic's regular readers should now know, we do not hold any more truck with the Kennedys or the Democrats in the United States than we do with the Republicans. This should be evident in many Axis publications and from our boycott of the 2004 elections in the U.S. We believe the Republican Party and the Democrat Party are simply 2 sides of the same coin - 2 political parties invented by the ruling class who offer up 2 choices for the U.S. voter every 4 years, both in service to the Global Corporate Empire. We see the vicious political campaigns as nothing more than 2 groups within the oligarchy fighting - over the spoils of wars - wars sanctioned by both of them. A subservient electorate is needed to provide an appearance of validity. We refuse to participate...
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American democracy in decay: US Congress debates the Iraq war
Patrick Martin, WSWSThe congressional debate last week on the Iraq war combined Republican bullying, Democratic hand-wringing and lies piled upon lies from both sides of the aisle. Neither the Republicans, who hold a narrow majority in both the House and Senate and generally support the Bush administration’s conduct of the war, nor the Democrats, the nominal opposition party, could tell the truth to the American public. Neither side in the debate could admit what the vast majority of the world’s politically conscious population, including millions of Americans, already knows: that the US invasion and occupation of Iraq constitute a crime of historic proportions. Instead, the debate was conducted entirely within the framework of what was best for the foreign policy interests of American imperialism and its corporate ruling class...
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Bush's America opposes verifiable ban on nuclear fission
Michael Carmichael, Globalresearch.caIn 2005, Mohammad El Baradei was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his outstanding work in the international control of nuclear weapons. In 2003, El Baradei had proposed a verifiable ban on the production of weapons grade fissile material - a positive move that would severely limit the proliferation of nuclear weapons. In a vote of the Disarmament Committee of the United Nations (UN), one and only one nation voted against El Baradei's proposal - George Bush's America. In that same vote, Israel abstained, apparently fearing international interference with their own outlaw nuclear weapons programme, and Britain abstained in an act of diplomatic fealty to the 'special relationship' between Tony Blair and George Bush...
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DAILY WAR NEWS FOR TUESDAY, June 20, 2006
Today In IraqThirteen Iraqis, including a child, have been killed in an alleged US air strike on a village north-east of Baquba. Four others who were injured in the strike on two farm houses in the Shaikh Qaddur al-Shahin village early on Tuesday were detained by US forces, Haidar al-Tamimi, an Iraqi journalist, told Aljazeera. Al-Tamimi said US troops were dropped to the ground, after the strike. The troops then opened fire at the targeted houses, he added. Residents also say the injured were arrested. They added that the casualties of the strike were poultry farm workers. U.S. forces recovered the bodies of two American soldiers reported captured by insurgents last week. An Iraqi defense ministry official said the men were tortured and "killed in a barbaric way."..
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Left I on the News vs. John F. Burns
Eli Stephens, Left I on the NewsA month ago I wrote to call into question the seemingly preposterous claim that Saddam Hussein's government had razed 250,000 acres of orchards in Dujail following the 1982 assassination attempt, the reaction to which is the subject of the current Hussein (& Co.) trial. New York Times bureau chief John F. Burns had the courtesy to write me back, saying, "This is a claim made by the prosecution at the trial -- in hectares, converted by us into acres. I'll ask the Regime Crimes Liaison Office to throw some light on this when I next meet with them." Burns hasn't written back to me, but in the latest article on the trial, we find this: "They are charged with crimes against humanity for offenses that included...the razing of a vast acreage of orchards and date palm groves around Dujail." So 250,000 acres has now become the more nebulous "vast acreage" (but is still apparently a "crime against humanity," at least according to Burns). Why do I press this seemingly minor point? For one thing, I have a fetish about the truth. For another, there's the old legal maxim, "false in one, false in all." If the prosecutors, or the Times, would lie about this detail, what else are they lying about?...
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Their Barbarism, and Ours
Norman Solomon...When journalists maintain a flagrant double standard in their language -- allowing themselves appropriate moral outrage when Americans suffer but tiptoeing around what is suffered by victims of the U.S. military -- the media window on the world is tinted a dark red-white-and-blue, and the overall result is more flackery than journalism. Based on the available evidence from Abu Ghraib to Afghanistan to Guantanamo, anyone who claims that U.S. foreign policy does not include torture is disingenuous or deluded. Reporters for the New York Times and other big U.S. media outlets would not dream of publicly describing what American firepower does to Iraqi civilians as "barbaric."...
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An Open Letter to A Truth Fighter on US Wars
Tony Soldo, Al-Jazeerah...If a foreign nation invaded the U.S.A. , then there would be a need for some people to stand up to the foreign invaders, like the movie Red Dawn. We would not need the military, we would just be a bunch of small units of civilians in every town , (here is where the 2nd Amendment of the Bill of Rights applies) we would be called insurgents, and we would take out the foreign invaders any way we could, and that is exactly what's going on in Iraq and Afghanistan...
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15 killed in US raids in farmland near Baquba
Ali YussefThe US military said Tuesday it killed 15 "terrorists" during overnight raids in farmland near the restive town of Baquba but Iraqis insisted the dead were innocent poultry farm workers. "Coalition forces killed 15 terrorists and detained three other suspects during simultaneous raids north of Baquba," the military said in a statement. But Iraqi police, relatives of those killed and a human rights organisation in Baquba gave an entirely different version of the incident in the confessionally divided province of Diyala northeast of the capital. They said the victims were all poultry farm workers who had been sleeping in the fields of Bushaheen village in an area known as Al-Salam (peace) when US troops raided the area...
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GI Special 4F18: Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin - June 20, 2006
Thomas F. Barton"The Degradation Of U.S. Forces In Iraq Is A Direct Consequence Of The Derangement Of Political Leadership In Washington"
"Rumsfeld Is Incapable Of Telling The President That There Is No Battle, No Campaign, That Can Win The War"
Jeffrey Record, a prominent strategist at a U.S. military war college, told me: "Perhaps worse still, conventional wisdom is dangerously narcissistic. It completely ignores the enemy, assuming that what we do determines success or failure. It assumes that only the United States can defeat the United States, an outlook that set the United States up for failure in Vietnam and for surprise in Iraq."
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exchange between Les Roberts and John Sloboda on Iraq Body Count and the Lancet
Gabriele Zamparini, The cat's dreamDear Dr. Sloboda (...), I would ask you to think of the obscenity of your comment three. You have been given evidence that you have been publicly and repeatedly speculating about the number of deaths in Iraq and your speculation is perhaps 1/10th of reality. You have expressed not the slightest contrition or interest in correcting your errors. And...you are worried about correcting the dates in a table to show instead of being the lowest of 6 estimates for the first 3 years you were only the lowest for the first year! Is this an attempt to serve the people of Iraq or the people of IBC?...
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Where were the core values to begin with?
Laurie Stone, Online Journal Contributing WriterCan this war get any more disturbing? Now, in the wake of stories where U.S. marines massacred entire families of Iraqis, including babies, women, and the elderly, our soldiers are being taught "core values." Never mind that we invaded this country three years ago with our bombs and missiles and guns. Never mind that we kicked down people’s doors at 3:00 a.m., terrorizing families, hauling off fathers and sons (yet to be proven as bad guys) into prison to languish with no legal process. Never mind that we’ve tortured and maimed civilians, destroyed cities and mosques with no regard to anything in our path. Now we’re going to teach our young 'uns some values...
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www.uruknet.info: a site gathering daily information concerning occupied Iraq:
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