Free Iraq

Regarding Bush's 'intelligence' on Iraqi civilians sacrificed for 'democracy' -
Burying the Lancet report . . . and the children: "Thanks to Les Roberts, his international team, Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and the editorial board of the Lancet, we have a clearer and very different picture of the violence taking place in Iraq than that presented by the 'mainstream' media. Allowing for an additional 14 months of the air war and other violence since the publication of the Lancet report, we can now estimate that somewhere between 175,000 and 650,000 people have died as a direct result of the war; that 120,000 to 500,000 of them have been killed by 'coalition' forces, and that 50,000 to 250,000 of these were children below the age of fifteen. In addition, the combined effect of conservative, even unrealistic, assumptions made to arrive at the lower of these figures makes it extremely unlikely that the actual numbers of deaths are close to the bottom of these ranges."
 

Mortar Lands Near Green Zone As Polls Open


U.N.: Human Rights in Iraq Require Action: "Iraq's U.N. Ambassador Samir Sumaidaie acknowledged Wednesday that his nation's police forces 'have a problem' with prisoner abuse, and vowed the practice would be stopped."
 

World Socialist Web Site, Iraq elections: a democratic façade for a US puppet state: "The final result of the election may not be known until the New Year. As well as the voting inside Iraq, as many as 1.5 million Iraqi émigrés are entitled to vote. Even before a result is in, however, US officials in Iraq will be engaged in sordid behind-the-scenes negotiations between the competing factions to determine the make-up of a government that meets the interests of Washington."
 

Riverbend, Elections...: [ . . . ] The incident of the day yesterday was news of a tanker or truck that had been caught in the town of Wassit full of fake voting ballots from Iran. There is also news that voting centers haven’t been properly equipped in several Sunni provinces. There was a skirmish between Iraqi National Guard and the electoral committee to preside over elections in Salah Al-Din.

More people are going to elect this time around- not because Iraqis suddenly believe in American-imposed democracy under occupation, but because the situation this last year has been intolerable. Hakim and Ja’affari and their minions have managed to botch things up so badly, Allawi is actually looking acceptable in the eyes of many. I still can't stand him.

Allawi is still an American puppet. His campaign posters, and the horrors of the last year, haven’t changed that. People haven’t forgotten his culpability in the whole Fallujah debacle. For some Iraqis, however, he’s preferable to Hakim and Ja’affari after a year of detentions, abductions, assassinations and secret torture prisons.

There’s a saying in Iraq which people are using right and left lately, and that I've used before in the blog, “Ili ishuf il mout, yirdha bil iskhuna.” He who sees death, is content with a fever. Allawi et al. seem to be the fever these days…
 

With delight and fervor, Iraqis cast ballots (Interesting headline - Bush's boys working overtime)
 

Global Research, Freedom of Expression in an Era of State Terror: "What we are witnessing is an era of state terrorism in erstwhile liberal democracies. Terrorism is referred to as a camouflage, though these rag tag groups and neo-fascist gangs , are trained by the very intelligence agencies of these governments, as an instrument of their state policy, to justify mass state terrorism against people mobilizing, to express political opinion on a range of policies which affect them, which mainstream political parties are declining to raise as a part of their compact with an oligarchy of financial and corporate interests. Some of these trained groups are also used as instruments for subversion of rival governments and societies if these societies resist external manipulation of their policies."
 

A Star from Mosul, Grandpa voted

and . . .

(Check this out!)
A Star from Mosul, A little creature
 

Juan Cole, High Turnout Expected as Iraqis go to Polls: [ . . . ] The LA Times probably reflects the thinking of a lot of Americans in hoping that these elections are a milestone on the way to withdrawing US troops from Iraq. I cannot imagine why anyone thinks that. The Iraqi "government" is a failed state. Virtually no order it gives has any likelihood of being implemented. It has no army to speak of and cannot control the country. Its parliamentarians are attacked and sometimes killed with impunity. Its oil pipelines are routinely bombed, depriving it of desperately needed income. It faces a powerful guerrilla movement that is wholly uninterested in the results of elections and just wants to overthrow the new order. Elections are unlikely to change any of this.
 

Wayne Madsen Report, December 15, 2005 -- Bolton leading the charge against Syria: [ . . . ] Bolton and UN investigator Detlev Mehlis of Germany worked closely to ensure that an interim and semi-final report on the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri identified Syria as the culprit. However, intelligence sources in Europe maintain that the assassination of Hariri was never in Syria's interests and the assassination was carried out by a Pentagon special operations cell that relied on rogue Syrian intelligence agents opposed to Assad, right-wing Lebanese militias tied to neo-con Lebanese organizations in the United States, and an Israeli support network in Lebanon. The intention was to trigger the removal of Syrian troops from Lebanon and begin the process of putting pressure, including tough sanctions, on Syria. Mehlis, interestingly, said that it may take up to two years to complete the investigation of Syria.
[ . . . ]

On December 12, anti-Syrian Lebanese parliamentarian Gebran Tueni was killed by a car bomb outside Beirut. This attack suspiciously occurred on the eve of the issuance of Mehlis's latest report. Similarly, since 2002, a number of other anti-Syrian Lebanese politicians have been the targets of car bombs erroneously blamed on the Syrian government. However, the US and its Security Council allies struck down a Russian and Algerian proposal to expand the Mehlis investigation to include other political assassinations in Lebanon, including those of Elie Hobeika in 2002, Lebanese Communist leader George Hawi this year, and others, including Tueni. The Russians and Algerians are aware that a broad investigation by the UN will expose U.S., Lebanese Phalangist, and Israeli involvement in the assassinations.

Intelligence sources report that the neo-cons will continue to target Lebanese politicians for assassination to incite Lebanese public opinion ("constructive chaos") and trigger military action by the United States against Syria. However, that strategy has not worked to date. Many Lebanese continue to rally around Hezbollah and the desired neo-con goal of anointing Aoun as a Lebanese strongman has been unsuccessful.
 

A Citizen of Mosul, The election day: [ . . . ] "At about 10:00 am I went to the nearby center for voting. After they searched me, they allow me in, where I saw the supervisor of the center who told me that I have no right to vote here (although the center is only 300 meter from my house), because I registered in another center about 10 km away from my house, from where I received my food ration (according to Oil for Food program). There aren't any means of transportation."
[ . . . ]
 

War Costs Poised To Reach $500B
The per person $ cost of killing . . .
- Using Bush's figure of 30,000 Iraqis killed, the p.p. cost = $16,666,666.00.
- Using the figure 650,000 (see top posted comment), the p.p. cost = $769,230.76.

Just think what it would mean if these sums were applied to enhancing life, not destroying it. I'll bet Saddam could have been removed without a shot fired.
 

Official: Al-Zarqawi caught, released
And, as noted several times at this blog, Al-Zarqawi was reported dead by the MSM March 2004.
 

Chris Floyd, The coming fire; war with Iran
 

South Africa and Iraq: the missing example
As an example, South Africa is inexact. Significant differences between S.A. and Iraq include the foreign military deployed in Iraq, the extent to which that country has been ravaged by occupation, the oil "issue", and regional/international destabilizing dynamics. And the South African portrait is itself a bit rosy. Nonetheless, the article's central point regarding the critically important leadership of Nelson Mandela, political negotiation and reconciliation, makes it worth reading.
 

The Americans Are Coming!: " On the eve of Condoleeza Rice's visit to Romania, the foreign minister of that country was in a state of great emotion, almost in tears, as he emphasized the global and historical significance of the visit in lyrical terms: 'That which our grandparents and parents have been waiting for for 60 years, and which hundreds of prisoners hoped for back in the time of communism, is now happening: the Americans are coming!'

"And they have indeed arrived.

"It looked like an imitation of Guantanamo, recalls Alvaro Gil Robles, the Human Rights Commissioner for the Council of Europe. In the largest military base in the Balkans and in Europe, camp Bondsteel in Kosovo, Robles saw between 15 and 20 prisoners. All of them were dressed in orange suits. An american soldier who was on the base told him that the prisoners had been sent from Guantanamo to Kosovo. ..."

[ . . . ]
 

Does 30,000 Mean Anything to Bush?: He has said over and over again that he came to liberate the people of Iraq and deliver them the gift of freedom.

But he didn't liberate those 30,000 or those 100,000. They didn't get to unwrap their gift, or if they did, it blew up in their faces.

Each dead Iraqi has a name.

Each dead Iraqi leaves a family that will never be the same again.

At what point does the President acknowledge the horrific pain he has inflicted on the people of Iraq?
 

National Public Radio Swallows Bush Guestimate on Iraqi Dead (A fitting response)
 

I see that al Jazaera news channel has paid no attention to the historic elections today in Iraq. It is rather typical of them to deny that a huge percentage of the Iraqi population have voted! al Jazaera is unpopular amongst Iraqis especially after they threw darts at al Sistani. They failed to cover the main event in the Arab world today because of their underbelly of loyalty to the terrorists.
Democracy will evolve there now. It is not perfect by any standard but it was not perfect in any country that was a young democracy. Now the seeds have been planted the tree can grow.
 

Ghali Hassan, Global Research, The Crimes of U.S. ‘Democracy’: "... If one includes the atrocities in Fallujah, Ramadi, al-Qaim, Tel Afar, Hillah, Baghdad and the daily mayhem instigated by U.S. forces and their collaborators, the number of Iraqis killed since March 2003 would be in the 200,000 mark or even more. It also estimated that 85 per cent of all violent deaths are by 'coalition forces' and that many of these are due to U.S. aerial bombardments. The majority of the victims were innocent women and children.

"According to Robert Fisk of the Independent; 'The Ministry of Health figures in July alone, was 1,100 Iraqi deaths in Baghdad alone. If you spread that across, Mosul, Kirkuk, maybe Irbil [in the north], all way down to Basra [in the south], through the months, and you must be talking of 3,000 to 4,000 a month. That's 36,000 to 48,000 a year'. This makes the '100,000 figure of [the Lancet study] rightly as being quite conservative', added Fisk. This figure has been recently substantiated.

"However, the Lancet study was deliberately ignored or dismissed by the U.S.-British corporate mass media. In fact the study is now censored by mainstream media because it shows a mass murder. ..."
 

Zeina,
Did al-Jazeera news channel really give no election coverage? Online, at least, they reported as follows:

- Iraq turnout estimated at two-thirds

- High turnout for Iraq vote

- Explosions as Iraq votes

- Overseas Iraqis cast first votes

- Iraq shuts down for Thursday's vote

- Early voting begins in Iraq
 

(Full article recommended)
Al-Ahram, Why Saddam is important: The trial of Saddam Hussein is the straw that will break the back of America in Iraq, whichever way it goes. A conviction on the basis of what we are seeing will make a martyr of Saddam, reveal the entire process as a foregone conclusion, and steel the national popular resistance for years. Unless the neocons in Washington have a secret agenda of bankrupting the United States, it is already over for them, bar the shouting. The resistance fights not for Saddam, but the trial will be seen -- like the constitution, like the elections -- as another fait accompli railroaded upon Iraq, and to which the resistance will respond. Even if Saddam's defence fails, America has already lost. It is one thing to establish an illegal tribunal (and under articles 64 and 67 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, the keystone of international humanitarian law, this tribunal is outlawed), but it is quite another to televise proceedings which expose law as machination in naked iniquity. This is what this trial is achieving. On the other hand, if the prosecution fails, and Hussein walks -- and on the basis of its opening salvo it would be hard to proffer otherwise -- the second shoe falls, after the lies about weapons of mass destruction, and no justification remains for the illegal pre-emptive war the neocons waged. Bye, bye the Iraq chapter of the Project for a New American Century.
[ . . . ]

From the start, this trial has had nothing to do with restitution for Iraqis. In a superb piece published last week on uruknet.info, Sara Flounders of the New York-based International Action Centre writes, "Since the days of the Roman Empire, victor's justice has meant humiliation, degradation and placing the defeated leader in the dock in order to establish a new order. It hides the brutality of overwhelming force and gives legitimacy to the new rulers." With this agenda it is no wonder that the trial is flawed. The court is illegal: it was established under occupation, in clear violation of international humanitarian law. The court is not competent: not only had its judges to be schooled in international law and war crimes procedure by US handlers and academic mercenaries, but by definition the court lacks legitimacy in being exceptional and contrary to prior Iraqi judicial practice. The court is far from impartial: funded to the tune of $75 million and politically vetted by the United States, it's hard to imagine that anything but conviction -- which means execution -- awaits those over whom it claims to hold jurisdiction. In previous articles I have outlined these flaws in detail. But this isn't even the point. No armistice was ever declared. The Iraqi army never capitulated. Like it or not, Saddam Hussein is the president of Iraq and this court has no claim over him or his aides.
[ . . . ]

With only flimsy evidence to go on, indication is that the prosecution hopes to deploy the controversial principal of "command responsibility"; that Saddam is guilty because he gave reign to subordinates who acted with murderous violence. In this regard, the absence of a "smoking gun" is moot. Simply by being head of state, Saddam bears responsibility. For human rights advocates who have long opposed the principle of state immunity this is a step forward in the struggle against state violence. The problem for Saddam's prosecutors, however, is that the principle goes both ways. If Iraq is sovereign, as America needs to claim, the US military but subcontracted as mercenaries, how is it that after at least nine major offences across Western Iraq this year, killing thousands and displacing hundreds of thousands more, Iraqi's puppet president, indeed the whole interim Iraqi government, is not standing in the dock alongside Saddam answering to charges of mass murdering their own people?

The answer is simple: the US war against Iraq never ended, and neither did the occupation. On the record, US forces remain in Iraq by request of the US-protected interim government -- a precaution to ensure stability. Yet which stabilisation force, anywhere in the world, uses white phosphorus -- a chemical weapon US officials are working overtime to present as "legal" -- as well as napalm equivalents against civilians in cities? Add to this the "useful" role afforded by US authorities to torture, the deliberate targeting of hospitals and educational institutions, the conscious disbanding of the police, clearing the way for a campaign of covert terrorist operations conducted by British and American operatives aimed at fomenting sectarian and ethnic tensions, and the failure to protect Iraq's cultural and religious heritage, one sees the outline of an unmistakable strategy: the US entered Iraq to divide it and own it.
[ . . . ]

The people of Iraq have the legal right to decide their own future, the use of their resources, and the fate of Saddam Hussein. After all, who knows better than the Iraqi people what Saddam Hussein has done or has not done? Not only will this sham trial never reveal or allow Iraqis to confront the contemporary history of Iraq, it is set up by an occupying power diametrically opposed to everything Saddam represented. Undeniable is his refusal to bend to the will of American imperialism. It was not human rights abuses under Saddam that pricked the ears of the Americans. It was how close Iraq came to the potential of being an independent, secular welfare state, whose population was able to achieve democracy in the Middle East, a function of the insistence of Saddam on the control of Iraqi oil as the age of oil ends. An international court would be victor's justice cloaked in legal precision.
 

Senate rejects reauthorization of Patriot Act (Any possibility, do you suppose, that the "war on terror" theme may begin losing steam?)
 

Experts Cautious in Assessing Iraq Election: "Bush is expected to try to capitalize on the vote to resist calls for setting a timetable for a U.S. exit from Iraq. He will play host today to a bipartisan group from Congress that will discuss Iraq, officials said."


'A Lot of Joy' for Bush as Iraqis Make the Most of Chance to Vote: "Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice echoed Mr. Bush's optimism. 'I believe that Iraq is going to be a great nation again.'"
 

Finally, I understand -
"Victory means troops comin' out, but troops comin' out doesn't mean victory."
 

More -
"They kill innocent people to achieve objectives."
 

A Citizen of Mosul, The election and the people: Another day of freedom from danger, no explosions and no exchange of fire. The only thing disturbs the peacefulness is the sound of the police cars and the American convoys passing at high speed every now and then.

After the end of the voting, we stayed anxious for the results. ...
[ . . . ]

The men are gathered in front of one of the houses and exchange thought about the election and related subjects, the most attractive subject is the claims of almost all the candidate about the fraud which they claim happened in the election process.

As a truth we don't know for sure if this is just a rumors, or there are really a frauds. But as every body said that, we think there should be some truth in it.

I found one report looked to be written by an unbiased side enumerate several events of frauds in many center in different province, the report is in Arabic and I can't translate it so you can read it at this site.
 

An Iraqi Tear, مشاهدات من مدينة كركوك المستلبة: يوما بعد آخر تثبت الاحداث بأن الديمقراطية العراقية الجديدة وليدة رحم عليل ، تارة تحتضر واخرى تحاول استعادة قواها بجرعات من المقويات والمضادات لكنها سرعان ما تنتكس بعد أول تجربة ليدخلوها إلى غرفة الإنعاش لحقنة عبر الوريد دون أن يُجرى لها أية عملية جراحية رُغم مطالبة الأطباء ،وحجة الرافضين أن الوقت لايسمح وان الجدول الذي وضعه سيد البيت الأبيض ومستشاروه يصعب عليهم الأمر .
[ . . . ]
 

Extract -
wsws.org, McCain-Bush “anti-torture” measure gives legal cover for continued abuse: For the US government’s verbal disavows of torture to be taken seriously, Washington would be obliged to officially reverse its policy on the Geneva Conventions, release all those being held illegally in Guantánamo and elsewhere, reveal the location of its secret prisons, and close its gulags down. It will do none of these things.

The McCain amendment will have no effect on US policy toward alleged terrorists detained by Washington. This policy flows organically from the drive by the American ruling elite to achieve by military force a hegemonic position in oil-rich regions such as the Middle East and Central Asia, which is deemed critical to the broader aim of establishing American imperialist hegemony on a global scale.

The hypocrisy that underlies McCain’s position was on display at his joint appearance with President Bush on Thursday. He ended his remarks praising the White House by declaring, “Now I think we can move forward with winning the war on terror and in Iraq.”

The real position of McCain and other congressional backers of his amendment is that such open sanction for torture is politically and militarily inexpedient. McCain is well aware that the US and forces trained and financed by Washington have long engaged in such methods, most notoriously in Latin America and Vietnam. Their basic position can be summed up as: do it, but don’t talk about it.

McCain, a Vietnam-era navy pilot who was held as a prisoner of war in Hanoi, is close to sections of the military brass. He speaks for those in the military, and the ruling elite more generally, who consider the open defense of detainee abuse to be highly damaging to the interests of American imperialism, including the struggle to crush the insurgency in Iraq and prepare future military interventions elsewhere.

They are concerned that Bush’s open repudiation of international law has undermined the ability of the US to present itself as a defender of democratic rights, that it opens up US soldiers to the same type of treatment, and that it could land American officials, military as well as civilian, in the dock in future war crimes trials.

The Washington Post editorial of the same day, which praised the amendment in general, noted that the Bush administration and the Pentagon had sought to redefine torture and inhumane treatment “as not covering in all circumstances such CIA techniques as ‘waterboarding,’ or simulated drowning; ‘cold cell,’ the deliberate induction of hypothermia; mock execution; and prolonged and painful ‘short-shackling.’”

The newspaper added that the administration’s position implied that such methods could be used on US citizens.
 

Wayne Madsen Report, December 17, 2005 -- In Iran, the neo-cons got what they hoped for: "Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad and his rhetoric about Israel being moved to Europe and the Holocaust never occurring is made to order for the neo-cons who want the United States and Israel to attack Iran's nuclear sites."
[ . . . ]
 

An Incredible Day in America: "Today, for two separate reasons, has been an incredible day in America. First, the United States has legitimized torture and secondly, the President has admitted to an impeachable offense.

"First, the media has been totally misled on the alleged Bush-McCain agreement on torture. McCain capitulated. It is not a defeat for Bush. It is a win for Cheney.

"Torture is not banned or in any way impeded.

"Under the compromise, anyone charged with torture can defend himself if a 'reasonable' person could have concluded they were following a lawful order."