COME TO THE NEXT BAUAW MEETING AND BRING YOUR IDEAS ON HOW TO
ACHIEVE UNITY IN THE MOVEMENT:

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 15TH, 7:00 p.m.
1380 Valencia Street
(Between 24th & 25th Streets, SF)
BAUAW: 415-824-8730

---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

Open letter to Bay Area Activists from Bay Area
United Against War (BAUAW):

Dear friends who organized, participated, and/or spoke in the
demonstrations sponsored by Not in Our Name and ANSWER on
Nov. 3 and Nov. 9.

At the concluding rally of the emergency demonstration ANSWER
called to protest the U.S. assault on Fallujah, Jahahara, of AFSC and
N'COBRA, issued a kind of challenge to all the major antiwar
organizations to make a unified response to the U.S. government's
war against Iraq. He called on the national organizations, of which
we are all affiliated to one or more-ANSWER, UFPJ, NION-to unify
in building a massive antiwar movement.

This call is so timely because the war and occupation continue
unabated, the consequences for the Iraqis are devastating
(over 100,000 civilians killed by U.S. actions) and over 1,110 U.S.
troops are dead and tens of thousands injured.

Those of us who are old enough to have participated in the
movement against the U.S. war on Vietnam know that the most
effective mass actions against that war that called for bringing
all U.S. troops home now [Out Now!] were unified actions where
people of different ideologies were able to come together for
Out Now despite their divergent opinions on other topics. The mass
movement that was built on the streets of the U.S. created
a supportive environment for
U.S. soldiers to resist the war in multiple ways eventually
becoming an unreliable fighting force for U.S. imperialism.

Now, it is very clear from all who spoke at the last two
demonstrations, that we have wide areas of agreement. We
all spoke about the need for the movement to get back into
the streets to protest the war in massive demonstrations. We
all spoke about the need for unity. We all spoke about the way
to bring peace and end the war was for the U.S. government
to get out of
Iraq.

The next step is for all our organizations to meet together
and concretely plan how this unity will be carried out.

Bay Area United Against War is willing to host such a meeting,
or participate in such a meeting called by others. Let's
make it happen.

Bring the Troops Home Now!
Carole Seligman, Bay Area United Against War (BAUAW)

---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

ALL OUT IN SUPPORT OF THE LOCAL 2 HOTEL WORKERS!
SOLIDARITY RALLY
Saturday, November 20 at 11 a.m.
Union Square, Downtown San Francisco

---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

1) Commentary: Will the Antiwar Movement Stand Up This Time?
Iraq Watch: From Peace No War Network
November 13, 2004
URL: http://www.PeaceNoWar.net
Fallujah and the Reality of War
By RAHUL MAHAJAN
November 6, 2004
http://www.counterpunch.org/mahajan11062004.html

2) U.S. Troops Set for Final Attack on Falluja Force
THE INSURGENTS
By DEXTER FILKINS and ROBERT F. WORTH
November 13, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/13/international/middleeast/13iraq.html?hp&ex
=1100408400&en=9553e430c442567f&ei=5094&partner=homepage

3) Humanitarian aid barred from Falluja
Red Crescent says 157 families are still in the heart
of Falluja
An Iraqi Red Crescent convoy blocked from entering Falluja
by US forces has asked the United Nations for help.
Sunday 14 November 2004 11:46 AM GMT
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/443C3B4E-C2D2-4B18-9C5C-7C9B657A8DCF.
htm

4) Falluja Residents Desperate for Food, Water, Aid
By Omar Anwar
FALLUJA, Iraq (Reuters)
Sun Nov 14, 8:43 AM ET
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=578&e=2&u=/nm/20041114/ts_nm
/iraq_falluja_scene_dc

5) U.S. Troops Hunt Falluja Rebels, Keep Aid Out
By Michael Georgy and Omar Anwar
FALLUJA, Iraq (Reuters)
November 14, 2004
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=578&e=1&u=/nm/20041114/ts_nm
/iraq_dc

6) Pentagon Envisioning a Costly Internet for War
By TIM WEINER
November 13, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/13/technology/13warnet.html?hp&ex=1100408400&
en=27b47c63b0a8e037&ei=5094&partner=homepage

7) For the First Time Since Vietnam, the Army Prints
a Guide to Fighting Insurgents
By DOUGLAS JEHL and THOM SHANKER
WASHINGTON
November 13, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/13/politics/13army.html?oref=login

8) CRUSADES - NEW & OLD
By Mumia Abu-Jamal
[Col. Writ. 10/23/04]
Copyright 2004

9) IS FASCISM POSSIBLE HERE?
By Mumia Abu-Jamal
[Col. Writ. 10/28/04]
Copyright 2004

10) It's time to take the "No Blood for Oil" slogan to the
auto companies
Rally Sunday, Nov. 21, 12:00 noon-1:30 p.m.
Opening Day - San Francisco Auto Show
SF Moscone Center, 747 Howard

11) 31 U.S. Troops Killed So Far in Fallujah
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
November 14, 2004
Filed at 11:14 a.m. ET

12) Assemblyman Condemns Palestinian Art Show
November 12, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 9:31 p.m. ET

---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

1) Commentary: Will the Antiwar Movement Stand Up This Time?
Iraq Watch: From Peace No War Network
November 13, 2004
URL: http://www.PeaceNoWar.net
Fallujah and the Reality of War
By RAHUL MAHAJAN
November 6, 2004
http://www.counterpunch.org/mahajan11062004.html

The assault on Fallujah has started. It is being sold as liberation of the
people of Fallujah; it is being sold as a necessary step to implementing
"democracy" in Iraq. These are lies.

I was in Fallujah during the siege in April, and I want to paint for you a
Word-picture of what such an assault means.

Fallujah is dry and hot; like Southern California, it has been made an
agricultural area only by virtue of extensive irrigation. It has been
known for years as a particularly devout city; people call it the City of
a Thousand Mosques. In the mid-90's, when Saddam wanted his name to be
added to the call to prayer, the imams of Fallujah refused.

U.S. forces bombed the power plant at the beginning of the assault; for
the next several weeks, Fallujah was a blacked-out town, with light
provided by generators only in critical places like mosques and clinics.
The town was placed under siege; the ban on bringing in food, medicine,
and other basic items was broken only when Iraqis en masse challenged the
roadblocks. The atmosphere was one of pervasive fear, from bombing and the
threat of more bombing. Noncombatants and families with sick people, the
elderly, and children were leaving in droves. After initial instances in
which people were prevented from leaving, U.S. forces began allowing
everyone to leave except for what they called "military age males," men
usually between 15 and 60. Keeping noncombatants from leaving a place
under bombardment is a violation of the laws of war. Of course, if you
assume that every military age male is an enemy, there can be no better
sign that you are in the wrong country, and that, in fact, your war is on
the people, not on their oppressors,, not a war of liberation.

The main hospital in Fallujah is across the Euphrates from the bulk of the
town. Right at the beginning, the Americans shut down the main bridge,
cutting off the hospital from the town. Doctors who wanted to treat
patients had to leave the hospital, with only the equipment they could
carry, and set up in makeshift clinics all over the city; the one I stayed
at had been a neighborhood clinic with one room that had four beds, and no
operating theater; doctors refrigerated blood in a soft-drink vending
machine. Another clinic, I,m told, had been an auto repair shop. This
hospital closing (not the only such that I documented in Iraq) also
violates the Geneva Convention.

In Fallujah, you were rarely free of the sound of artillery booming in the
background, punctuated by the smaller, higher-pitched note of the
mujaheddin's hand-held mortars. After even a few minutes of it, you have
to stop paying attention to it and yet, of course, you never quite stop.
Even today, when I hear the roar of thunder, I,m often transported
instantly to April 10 and the dusty streets of Fallujah.

In addition to the artillery and the warplanes dropping 500, 1000, and
2000-pound bombs, and the murderous AC-130 Spectre gunships that can
demolish a whole city block in less than a minute, the Marines had snipers
criss-crossing the whole town. For weeks, Fallujah was a series of
sometimes mutually inaccessible pockets, divided by the no-man's-lands of
sniper fire paths. Snipers fired indiscriminately, usually at whatever
moved. Of 20 people I saw come into the clinic I observed in a few hours,
only five were "military-age males." I saw old women, old men, a child of
10 shot through the head; terminal, the doctors told me, although in
Baghdad they might have been able to save him.

One thing that snipers were very discriminating about every single
ambulance I saw had bullet holes in it. Two I inspected bore clear
evidence of specific, deliberate sniping. Friends of mine who went out to
gather in wounded people were shot at. When we first reported this fact,
we came in for near-universal execration. Many just refused to believe it.
Some asked me how I knew that it wasn't the mujaheddin. Interesting
question. Had, say, Brownsville, Texas, been encircled by the Vietnamese
and bombarded (which, of course, Mr. Bush courageously protected us from
during the Vietnam war era) and Brownsville ambulances been shot up, the
question of whether the residents were shooting at their own ambulances, I
somehow guess, would not have come up. Later, our reports were confirmed
by the Iraqi Ministry of Health and even by the U.S. military.

The best estimates are that roughly 900-1000 people were killed directly,
blown up, burnt, or shot. Of them, my guess, based on news reports and
personal observation, is that 2/3 to were noncombatants.

But the damage goes far beyond that. You can read whenever you like about
the bombing of so-called Zarqawi safe houses in residential areas in
Fallujah, but the reports don't tell you what that means. You read about
precision strikes, and it's true that America's GPS-guided bombs are very
accurate when they,re not malfunctioning, the 80 or 85% of the time that
they work, their targeting radius is 10 meters, i.e., they hit within 10
meters of the target. Even the smallest of them, however, the 500-pound
bomb, has a blast radius of 400 meters; every single bomb shakes the whole
neighborhood, breaking windows and smashing crockery. A town under
bombardment is a town in constant fear.

You read the reports about X killed and Y wounded. And you should remember
those numbers; those numbers are important. But equally important is to
remember that those numbers lie in a war zone, everyone is wounded.

The first assault on Fallujah was a military failure. This time, the
resistance is stronger, better-armed, and better-organized; to "win," the
U.S. military will have to pull out all the stops. Even within horror and
terror, there are degrees, and we and the people of Fallujah ain't seen
nothin, yet. George W. Bush has just claimed a new mandate the world has
been delivered into his hands.

There will be international condemnation, as there was the first time; but
our government won't listen to it; aside from the resistance, all the
people of Fallujah will be able to depend on to try to mitigate the horror
will be us, the antiwar movement. We have a responsibility, that we didn't
meet in April and we didn't meet in August when Najaf was similarly
attacked; will we meet it this time?

Rahul Mahajan is publisher of the weblog Empire Notes, with regularly
updated commentary on U.S. foreign policy, the occupation of Iraq, and the
state of the American Empire. He has been to occupied Iraq twice, and was
in Fallujah during the siege in April. His most recent book is Full
Spectrum Dominance: U.S. Power in Iraq and Beyond. He can be reached at
rahul@empirenotes.org ( mailto:rahul@empirenotes.org )
For more photos and Videos from Iraq, visit:
"Report from Baghdad" July, 2003
http://www.actionla.org/Iraq/IraqReport/intro.html

Peace, No War
War is not the answer, for only love can conquer hate
Not in our Name! And another world is possible!
Tel: (213)403-0131

Information for antiwar movements, news across the World, please visit:
http://www.PeaceNoWar.net

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ubscribe@lists.riseup.net

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WHEN SPIDERS UNITE, THEY CAN TIE DOWN A LION -- Ethiopian Proverb

---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

2) U.S. Troops Set for Final Attack on Falluja Force
THE INSURGENTS
By DEXTER FILKINS and ROBERT F. WORTH
November 13, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/13/international/middleeast/13iraq.html?hp&ex
=1100408400&en=9553e430c442567f&ei=5094&partner=homepage

FALLUJA, Iraq, Nov. 12 - American forces moved into position Friday
for a decisive battle with bands of insurgents, pounding some of their
last strongholds with airstrikes and repelling attempts by some fighters
to shoot their way out through the desert countryside south of the city.

But other fighters, among the most resilient the Americans have
encountered in five days of battle, seemed resigned to making a last
stand in Falluja's southern residential neighborhoods.

"Right now they've got no place to go," said Col. Craig Tucker,
commander of a regimental combat team encompassing several
battalions of American troops. "I think they've come here to die."

Twenty-two American servicemen have been killed and 170 wounded
in Falluja since the invasion began on Monday evening, said Lt. Gen.
John F. Sattler, the top Marine commander in Iraq. Of the Iraqi forces,
5 have been killed and 40 wounded, Gen. Abdul Qader Mohammed
Jassim, an Iraqi commander, said.

An audio recording posted Friday on the Internet and attributed
to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian terrorist who has become
the Americans' enemy No. 1 in Iraq, praised the efforts of the
jihadists in Iraq and said the blood spilled in Falluja "will light
the way to God's victory."

"I call for the heroes of Islam in Falluja to endure just for a short
time," he said, "and victory will come soon. I want you to remember
our Prophet Muhammad when he fought in the past."

In the north, Mosul remained restive on Friday as the government
deployed national guardsmen from outside the area to fill a security
vacuum after hundreds of Iraqi policemen fled Thursday in the face
of a guerrilla uprising.

The police chief of Mosul was fired, another senior Iraqi security
officer was assassinated and the top American commander in the
region said the loyalty and reliability of the city's entire 4,000-
to 5,000-member police force was now suspect.

On Friday morning, Al Jazeera, the Arabic satellite television network,
showed a videotape of a Lebanese-American hostage who had
been kidnapped earlier. Reuters also reported that a Syrian driver
who had been kidnapped in August with two French journalists,
Georges Malbrunot and Christian Chesnot, had turned up in Falluja.
No further details were available.

One prominent member of the Senate Armed Services Committee
said the increasing mayhem raised questions about whether the
United States could win the fight against a wider insurgency,
whatever the outcome in Falluja.

"The insurgency is not abating," the member, Senator Jack Reed,
a Rhode Island Democrat who is a former officer in the 82nd
Airborne Division, said in a telephone interview with reporters
after he visited American forces in Iraq on Friday. "In some respects,
it's becoming more pronounced in many parts of the country - not
all parts of the country, but many parts of the country. It's hard to
determine whether that's the last gasp or continued building
momentum."

On Thursday, insurgents overran at least a half-dozen police
stations in Mosul, set fire to squad cars and made off with weapons.

The crisis in Mosul has raised serious doubts about the ability
of Iraqi security forces to take over policing duties anytime soon
from the more than 140,000 American troops here.

"There is a struggle going on," Brig. Gen. Carter Ham, the
commander charged with controlling the north, said in a telephone
interview from his headquarters in Mosul. "I don't want to kid you
and tell you that every neighborhood is one you can walk down
the middle of," he said. "There are some very dangerous
neighborhoods. It's not over."

The American military said one soldier was killed Thursday
in Mosul.

General Sattler, the top Marine commander in Iraq, declared
that the American military controlled 80 percent of Falluja. But
many remaining insurgents waged intense gun battles and
appeared determined to make a last stand in Shuhada,
a neighborhood on the southern edge of the city.

There are indications that the remaining insurgents are running
low on weapons, supplies and morale, military officials said.
"We feel we've broken their back and spirit," General Sattler said.

Some insurgents are firing at the American military cordon
to the south, in an apparent effort to fight their way out, military
officials said. At the same time, insurgents in rural areas south
of Falluja have begun firing more rockets on the American
positions ringing the city.

Iraqi military forces have been going through houses in the city's
northern half, taking prisoners and seizing weapons caches. "We
are doing it very methodically, block by block, going into each
room," said Lt. Col. Rod Symons, the senior advisor to the Third
Brigade of the Iraqi Armed Forces. In one building, Iraqi troops
discovered a box Thursday containing insurgent DVD's and pamphlets,
along with the passport, driver's license and Defense Department
identification card of Cpl. Wassef Ali Hassoun, a Lebanese-American
Marine believed to have been kidnapped in June who later surfaced
in Lebanon. Elsewhere in the building were a new Marine uniform
without name tags and four large sacks of gunpowder and wire.
In the building's basement was a room with what appeared to
be blood on the walls and floor, officials said.

In at least one area of central Falluja, insurgents were already
infiltrating neighborhoods that they had just been rousted from,
forcing commanders to send troops to areas behind the main
battle lines.

About 300 fighters surrendered to Iraqi forces on Friday in
a mosque, General Jassim said at a news conference.

Elsewhere, a Blackhawk helicopter crashed after being struck
by antiaircraft fire near Taji, north of Baghdad, military officials
said. The three crew members were wounded but the helicopter
was recovered. It was the third American helicopter forced down
this week; two others crash-landed Thursday after being fired
on near Falluja.

In southern Baghdad, an American soldier was killed and three
others wounded Friday in an ambush.

A wave of coordinated attacks across Baghdad and the area to the
west appears to be a loosely organized counteroffensive to the
invasion of Falluja. American commanders say insurgent leaders
are likely to have fled Falluja before the invasion and are now
at work elsewhere.

In Baghdad, American and Iraqi forces arrested Sheik Mahdi al-
Sumaydai, a prominent fundamentalist Sunni cleric, and more
than a dozen of his followers after finding weapons in his sheik's
mosque, officials said. Mr. Sumaydai was arrested by the Americans
last winter and was released several months ago. His mosque is the
largest religious sanctuary in the capital for devotees of the Salafiya
branch of Sunni Islam, which Mr. Zarqawi and Osama bin Laden
practice.

A cleric representing Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani gave a lukewarm
condemnation of the invasion of Falluja during Friday Prayer in Karbala.
The ayatollah advocates following "a peaceful means of settling the
security situation and restoring peace in the restive cities," said the
cleric, Ahmed al-Safi.

It was the first statement attributed to Ayatollah Sistani on the
fighting in Falluja. Some Sunni leaders, including Mr. Sumaydai,
have criticized the ayatollah in recent days for not taking a stand
on Falluja.


Though the streets were quieter in Mosul than they had been on
Thursday, insurgents carried out sporadic attacks against Iraqi and
American forces there.

Gunmen raided the home of Brig. Gen. Mowaffak Daham, the head
of the anticrime task force, and led him, his brother-in-law and
a son out onto the lawn, said Salim al-Samedi, 29, a neighbor. The
insurgents stood them up against a wall and shot them dead while
chanting "God is great!" and then set fire to the house.

A fire engine rushed to the scene, and the gunmen shot dead two
of the fire fighters, Mr. Samedi said.

The governor of Ninevah Province had his home burned down on
Thursday, said Yasir Abdul-Razzaq, a relative, though the governor
was still safe in the confines of the government center, which is
protected by American armor and Iraqi troops.

The governor's office fired Mosul's police chief, Brig. Gen.
Muhammad Kheiri Barhawi. The police chief of Samarra, Taleb
Shamel, told The Associated Press that he had also been fired.

Iraqi officials said national guardsmen from near the Syrian border
were being sent to Mosul to help put down the uprising. The brigades
are made up of Kurdish militiamen. Kurds, Christians and Sunni
Arabs are the largest population groups in Mosul, and it was unclear
how the Sunni Arabs, who are leading the attacks, will take to the
heavy presence of Kurdish soldiers.

Reporting for this article was contributed by Eric Schmitt from
Washington; Iraqi employees of The New York Times from
Baghdad, Mosul and Karbala; and James Glanz and Edward Wong
from Baghdad.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times

---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

3) Humanitarian aid barred from Falluja
Red Crescent says 157 families are still in the heart
of Falluja
An Iraqi Red Crescent convoy blocked from entering Falluja
by US forces has asked the United Nations for help.
Sunday 14 November 2004 11:46 AM GMT
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/443C3B4E-C2D2-4B18-9C5C-7C9B657A8DCF.
htm


US troops have directed the convoy, carrying emergency food, water
and medical supplies into the Falluja hospital on the outskirts of the
town, away from the reach of local citizens.



"They will not be allowed to cross the bridge today," Capt. Adam
Collier told Reuters at Falluja hospital, where the convoy is waiting
to cross the Euphrates River into the main part of the embattled
Iraqi city. He cited security reasons.



Abu Fahd, a member of the relief convoy, told Aljazeera that
"the relief convoy wants to enter Falluja town for humanitarian
purposes only, to save women, children and elderly people.



"I hope the United Nations will hear our appeals," he said.



"We are now in Falluja hospital, outside the city. There is no
one in the hospital except the medical team, doing nothing."



But the US military said it saw no need for the Iraqi Red
Crescent to deliver aid to people inside Falluja and said
it did not think any Iraqi civilians were trapped inside the city.



'Aid not needed'



"There is no need to bring [Red Crescent] supplies in because
we have supplies of our own for the people," said US marine
Colonel Mike Shupp.



The relief convoy aims to help
civilians stuck in Falluja town

"Now that the bridge (into Falluja) is open I will bring out
casualties and all aid work can be done here (at Falluja's
hospital)," he added.



He said he had not heard of any Iraqi civilians being trapped
inside the city and did not think that was the case.



But aid workers say there are still hundreds of families left in
the city, which has been pummelled by sustained aerial
bombardment and artillery fire in recent days.



"We know of at least 157 families inside Falluja who need our
help," said Firdus al-Ubadi of the Iraqi Red Crescent.



No medicines



The Iraqi Red Crescent sent seven trucks and ambulances to
Falluja on Saturday, hoping to get food, blankets, water
purification tablets and medicine to hundreds of families
trapped inside the city during the past six days of fighting.



"There is no need to bring [Red Crescent] supplies in because
we have supplies of our own for the people"

Colonel Mike Shupp,
US marine

"None of the injured residents are being allowed to come to the
hospital, while those outside are not allowed to go into the town,"
Abu Fahd said.



"The town is suffering from cuts in power and water supplies.
There are no medicines or ambulances either.



"The injured and the dead are now on the streets. Many families
want to get out of their houses, but they have no alternative
shelters to go into," he said.



"The US forces have prevented us from entering the town
claiming it is not safe. US forces have said they control 80%
of the town."



Relief team



"I have asked them to allow the relief team into the areas they
control, to offer humanitarian aid for women, children and
the elderly, and transfer the injured to the hospital, but they
have refused," Abu Fahd said.

Baghdad hospitals received
wounded refugee children



The Red Crescent sent a convoy of essential goods along with
53 volunteers and three doctors from Baghdad to attend to
people in Falluja.



It believes that 157 families are still in the heart of Falluja, but
it is concerned about the plight of tens of thousands of people
living in refugee camps and villages dotted outside.




"They are dying of starvation and lack of water, especially the
children," Red Crescent spokeswoman Firdus al-Ubadi said.



"If there is no solution to this crisis it will expand to other cities
and other parts of Iraq and there will be a great disaster here."



Earlier, the Red Crescent society despatched a convoy of four
relief trucks and an ambulance to Amiriyat al-Falluja and
a tourist village in Habbaniya, where an additional 1500
refugees are camped.

Aljazeera

---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

4) Falluja Residents Desperate for Food, Water, Aid
By Omar Anwar
FALLUJA, Iraq (Reuters)
Sun Nov 14, 8:43 AM ET
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=578&e=2&u=/nm/20041114/ts_nm
/iraq_falluja_scene_dc

FALLUJA, Iraq (Reuters) - No food. No water. No help. As fierce
fighting casts a pall of smoke over the rubble-strewn Iraqi city
of Falluja, thousands of Iraqi families remain cut off from
desperately needed supplies.

Seven Red Crescent trucks and ambulances have reached the
main hospital on the western outskirts, but it is still too
dangerous for them to cross the Euphrates river to bring help
to locals, including hundreds of children, cut off for six days.

"Our situation is very hard," said one resident contacted by
telephone in the central Hay al-Dubat neighborhood on Sunday.

"We don't have food or water. My seven children all have severe
diarrhea. One of my sons was wounded by shrapnel last night
and he's bleeding, but I can't do anything to help him."

The man, who gave his name only as Abu Mustafa, said he had
seen U.S. troops and Iraqi national guards in his street as
explosions rang out. "There were bodies lying in the street."

Abu Mustafa said he knew of six families nearby in a similar
plight, but then broke down in tears.

"We are still fasting, though it is the Eid (end of Ramadan feast)
today. Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar (God is great)."

Aid groups describe the situation in Falluja, where U.S. and Iraqi
troops launched an full-scale military offensive last Monday to
crush insurgents, as a humanitarian disaster.

Up to half Falluja's 300,000 people fled during daily air strikes
in the countdown to the assault, but thousands remain trapped
as fighting rages around them.

There are no statistics on the number of civilians killed or
wounded in the fighting, only personal accounts of pain, hunger
and fear from those trapped in the city.

Some locals say the stench of decomposing bodies fills the air.
Others tell of children dying because it was too dangerous to get
them to help. One family buried their 9-year-old boy in the garden
after he bled to death over several hours from a stomach wound.

BODIES IN THE STREET

Thousands of refugees are living in makeshift accommodation
at camps outside the city, or with relatives.

"It was terrible. We had no water or electricity. I even saw dead
bodies lying in the street and a tank rolled over them," said Mohammed
Ali Shalal, a 65-year-old truck driver who fled on Friday and is
sheltering with a nephew in nearby Amriya, where 20 people were
crammed into a two-bedroom apartment.

"We ate dry bread and drank dirty water. I can't believe I'm safe
and speaking to you now."

Shalal said troops using loudspeakers told residents to go to
a local mosque, where they were interrogated.

"They let the old people go and detained the young," he said.

Red Crescent secretary-general Jamal al-Karbouli said he was
still waiting for U.S. permission to enter Falluja proper.

"If we have any hope of entering, we will wait here, even for
another night if necessary," he said. "Otherwise we will return
to Amriyat al-Falluja and distribute the goods there."

At least 10,000 civilians from Falluja have been sheltering in
nearby towns such as Amriya and Habbaniya since before the
offensive.

Copyright (c) 2004 Reuters

---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

5) U.S. Troops Hunt Falluja Rebels, Keep Aid Out
By Michael Georgy and Omar Anwar
FALLUJA, Iraq (Reuters)
November 14, 2004
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=578&e=1&u=/nm/20041114/ts_nm
/iraq_dc

FALLUJA, Iraq (Reuters) - U.S. and Iraqi forces hunted rebels in
the devastated Iraqi city of Falluja on Sunday as fighting subsided
after a ferocious six-day-old assault.

No help has reached civilians since the offensive began on Monday
and U.S. forces kept an Iraqi Red Crescent aid convoy of seven trucks
and ambulances waiting at the main hospital near a bridge over the
Euphrates River on the edge of Falluja.

U.S. Marines swept through a last rebel redoubt in a southern quarter
of the city that they see as a bastion for foreign fighters loyal to al
Qaeda ally Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

"These are pretty diehard. These people down there are not sniping
or firing, but waiting in their defenses for the Marines coming to
their buildings. That's when they open fire," Marine Colonel Mike
Shupp told Reuters at the hospital.

A Reuters correspondent who drove through the city saw utter
destruction. Bodies lay in the streets. Homes were smashed,
mosques ruined, and power and telephone lines hung uselessly.

Shupp said the Red Crescent did not need to deliver aid to civilians
in Falluja and questioned whether there were any.

"There is no need to bring supplies in because we have supplies of
our own for the people. Now that the bridge is open, I will bring
out casualties and all aid work can be done here."

Shupp said he had not heard of any Iraqi civilians being trapped
inside the city and did not think that was the case.

"We will wait for permission and we will stay here tonight," Red
Crescent convoy leader Jamal al-Karbouli told Reuters.

Interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, who has vowed to crush a raging
insurgency before elections in January, said on Saturday there had
been no civilian casualties in Falluja.

His assertion contradicted accounts from residents inside the city,
where intense violence has halted medical services and made any
independent assessment impossible since Monday.

"Our situation is very hard," said one resident contacted by telephone
in the central Hay al-Dubat neighborhood. "We don't have food or
water. My seven children all have severe diarrhea.

"One of my sons was wounded by shrapnel last night and he's
bleeding, but I can't do anything to help him."

"BODIES IN STREET"

The man, who gave his name only as Abu Mustafa, said he had
seen U.S. troops and Iraqi national guards in his street as
explosions rang out. "There were bodies lying in the street."

Abu Mustafa said he knew of six families nearby in a similar plight,
before breaking down in tears. "We are still fasting, though it is the
Eid (end of Ramadan feast) today. Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar
(God is great)," he sobbed.

It is unclear how many of Falluja's 300,000 people remain, but
about half are thought to have fled the fighting.

Tank and artillery fire shook Falluja for much of the day but by
nightfall the fighting had died away.

Shupp said U.S. and Iraqi forces controlled the Sunni Muslim city
and were going house to house in search of insurgents.

A senior Iraqi official said more than 1,000 guerrillas had been
killed in the offensive. The U.S. military says at least 22 American
and five Iraqi troops have also died.

The Falluja offensive has fueled violence across Iraq ( news -web
sites )'s Sunni Muslim heartland, especially in the northern city of
Mosul, where an uprising has left gunmen roaming some districts.

Insurgents overran a police station in Mosul on Sunday and U.S.
troops, backed by Iraqi security forces, were battling to retake it
from them, according to a U.S. military spokesman.

The U.S. commander in the north, Brigadier General Carter Ham,
earlier told Reuters all nine Mosul police stations overrun and
looted last week were back in U.S. or Iraqi forces' hands.

In the refinery city of Baiji, U.S. helicopters fired missiles at
insurgents, witnesses said. U.S. forces backed by tanks moved
into the city center after clashing with rebels. A local doctor said
seven people had been wounded in the fighting.

Insurgents mortared a police station in Muqdadiya, northeast of
Baghdad, killing one policeman, on Sunday, police said.

On Saturday evening, rebels attacked a military base outside
Baghdad with "indirect fire," killing one U.S. soldier and wounding
three others, the U.S. military said. (Additional reporting by Luke
Baker and Lin Noueihed in Baghdad, Maher al-Thanoon in Mosul,
Sabah al-Bazee in Baiji)

Copyright (c) 2004 Reuters

---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

6) Pentagon Envisioning a Costly Internet for War
By TIM WEINER
November 13, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/13/technology/13warnet.html?hp&ex=1100408400&
en=27b47c63b0a8e037&ei=5094&partner=homepage


The Pentagon is building its own Internet, the military's world wide
web for the wars of the future.

The goal is to give all American commanders and troops a moving
picture of all foreign enemies and threats - "a God's-eye view" of battle.

This "Internet in the sky," Peter Teets, under secretary of the Air
Force, told Congress, would allow "marines in a Humvee, in a faraway l
and, in the middle of a rainstorm, to open up their laptops, request
imagery" from a spy satellite, and "get it downloaded within seconds."

The Pentagon calls the secure network the Global Information Grid,
or GIG. Conceived six years ago, its first connections were laid six
weeks ago. It may take two decades and hundreds of billions of
dollars to build the new war net and its components.

Skeptics say the costs are staggering and the technological
hurdles huge.

Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the Internet and a Pentagon consultant
on the war net, said he wondered if the military's dream was realistic.
"I want to make sure what we realize is vision and not hallucination,"
Mr. Cerf said.

"This is sort of like Star Wars, where the policy was, 'Let's go out
and build this system,' and technology lagged far behind,'' he said.
"There's nothing wrong with having ambitious goals. You just need
to temper them with physics and reality."

Advocates say networked computers will be the most powerful
weapon in the American arsenal. Fusing weapons, secret intelligence
and soldiers in a global network - what they call net-centric warfare -
will, they say, change the military in the way the Internet has changed
business and culture.

"Possibly the single most transforming thing in our force,'' Defense
Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has said, "will not be a weapons system,
but a set of interconnections."

The American military, built to fight nations and armies, now faces
stateless enemies without jets, tanks, ships or central headquarters.
Sending secret intelligence and stratagems instantly to soldiers in
battle would, in theory, make the military a faster, fiercer force against
a faceless foe.

Robert J. Stevens, chief executive of the Lockheed Martin Corporation ,
the nation's biggest military contractor, said he envisioned a "highly
secure Internet in which military and intelligence activities are fused,"
shaping 21st-century warfare in the way that nuclear weapons shaped
the cold war.

Every member of the military would have "a picture of the battle space,
a God's-eye view," he said. "And that's real power."

Pentagon traditionalists, however, ask if net-centric warfare is nothing
more than an expensive fad. They point to the street fighting in Falluja
and Baghdad, saying firepower and armor still mean more than fiber
optic cables and wireless connections.

But the biggest challenge in building a war net may be the military
bureaucracy. For decades, the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines
have built their own weapons and traditions. A network, advocates
say, would cut through those old ways.

The ideals of this new warfare are driving many of the Pentagon's
spending plans for the next 10 to 15 years. Some costs are secret,
but billions have already been spent.

Providing the connections to run the war net will cost at least $24
billion over the next five years - more than the cost, in today's dollars,
of the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb. Beyond that,
encrypting data will be a $5 billion project.

Hundreds of thousands of new radios are likely to cost $25 billion.
Satellite systems for intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance and
communications will be tens of billions more. The Army's program for
a war net alone has a $120 billion price tag.

Over all, Pentagon documents suggest, $200 billion or more may go
for the war net's hardware and software in the next decade or so.
"The question is one of cost and technology," said John Hamre,
a former deputy secretary of defense, now president of the Center
for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

"We want to know all things at all times everywhere in the world?
Fine," Mr. Hamre said. "Do we know what this staring, all-seeing
eye is that we're going to put in space is? Hell, no."

The military wants to know "everything of interest to us, all the
time," in the words of Steven A. Cambone, the under secretary
of defense for intelligence. He has told Congress that military
intelligence - including secret satellite surveillance covering
most of the earth - will be posted on the war net and shared
with troops.

John Garing, strategic planning director at the Defense Information
Security Agency, now starting to build the war net, said: "The
essence of net-centric warfare is our ability to deploy a war-
fighting force anywhere, anytime. Information technology is
the key to that."

Military contractors - and information-technology creators not
usually associated with weapons systems - formed a consortium
to develop the war net on Sept. 28. The group includes an A-list
of military contractors and technology powerhouses: Boeing ;
Cisco Systems ; Factiva, a joint venture of Dow Jones and Reuters;
General Dynamics; Hewlett-Packard ;Honeywell ;I.B.M. ; Lockheed
Martin; Microsoft ; Northrop Grumman; Oracle ;Raytheon ; and
Sun Microsystems . They are working to weave weapons,
intelligence and communications into a seamless web.

The Pentagon has tried this twice before.

Its Worldwide Military Command and Control System, built
in the 1960's, often failed in crises. A $25 billion successor,
Milstar, was completed in 2003 after two decades of work.
Pentagon officials say it is already outdated: more switchboard
than server, more dial-up than broadband, it cannot support
21st-century technology.

The Pentagon's scientists and engineers, starting four decades
ago, invented the systems that became the Internet. Throughout
the cold war, their computer power ran far ahead of the rest of
the world.

Then the world eclipsed them. The nation's military and
intelligence services started falling behind when the Internet
exploded onto the commercial scene a decade ago. The war
net is "an attempt to catch up," Mr. Cerf said.

It has been slowly evolving for at least six years. In 1999,
Pentagon officials told Congress that "this monumental task
will span a quarter-century or more." This year, the vision
gained focus, and Pentagon officials started explaining it in
some detail to Congress.

Its scope was described in July by the Government Accountability
Office, the watchdog agency for Congress.

Many new multibillion-dollar weapons and satellites are "critically
dependent on the future network," the agency reported. "Despite
enormous challenges and risks - many of which have not been
successfully overcome in smaller-scale efforts" like missile defense,
"the Pentagon is depending on the GIG to enable a fundamental
transformation in the way military operations are conducted."

According to Art Cebrowski, director of the Pentagon's Office
of Force Transformation, "What we are really talking about is
a new theory of war."

Linton Wells II, the chief information officer at the Defense
Department, said net-centric principles were becoming "the
center of gravity" for war planners.

"The tenets are broadly accepted throughout the Defense
Department," said Mr. Wells, who directs the Office of Networks
and Information Integration. "Senior leadership can articulate
them. We still have a way to go in terms of why we should spend
X billion dollars on a certain program. In the fight between widgets
and digits, widgets tend to win."

He said $24 billion would be spent in the next five years to build
new war net connections. "No doubt these are expensive," Mr. Wells
said. "Technology developments always are."

Advocates acknowledge that weaving American military and intelligence
services into a unified system is a huge challenge.

The military is filled with "tribal representatives behind tribal
workstations interpreting tribal hieroglyphics," in the words of Gen.
John Jumper, the Air Force chief of staff. "What if the machines talked
to each other?" he asked.

That is the vision of the new web: war machines with a common
language for all military forces, instantly emitting encyclopedias of
lethal information against all enemies.

To realize this vision, the military must solve a persistent problem. It
all boils down to bandwidth.

Bandwidth measures how much data can flow between electronic
devices. Too little for civilians means a Web page takes forever
to load. Too little for soldiers means the war net will not work.

The bandwidth requirements seem bottomless. The military will
need 40 or 50 times what it used at the height of the Iraq war
last year, a Rand Corporation study estimates - enough to give
front-line soldiers bandwidth equal to downloading three feature-
length movies a second.

The Congressional Research Service said the Army, despite plans
to spend $20 billion on the problem, may wind up with a tenth of
the bandwidth it needs. The Army, in its "lessons learned" report
from Iraq, published in May, said "there will probably never be
enough resources to establish a complete and functioning network of
communications, sensors, and systems everywhere in the world."

The bottleneck is already great. In Iraq, front-line commanders
and troops fight frequent software freezes. "To make net-centric
warfare a reality," said Tony Montemarano, the Defense Information
Security Agency's bandwidth expansion chief, "we will have to
precipitously enhance bandwidth."

The military must also change its own culture.

For decades, the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines have built
separate weapons, radios, frequencies and traditions. They guard
their "rice bowls" - their turf - from rival services.

But Mr. Rumsfeld's vision depends on interoperability: warfare
using all four services in joint operations.

In a net-centric world, "you would not have a Army, Navy, Air Force
and Marines," but a unified force, said William Owens, a former
vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

For the Pentagon's visionaries, Mr. Montemarano said, "the single
biggest obstacle is a cultural one.''

"Breaking these rice bowls - that's a huge job."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

7) For the First Time Since Vietnam, the Army Prints
a Guide to Fighting Insurgents
By DOUGLAS JEHL and THOM SHANKER
WASHINGTON
November 13, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/13/politics/13army.html?oref=login


WASHINGTON, Nov. 12 - For the first time in decades, the Army
has issued a field guide to counterinsurgency warfare, an
acknowledgment that the kind of fighting under way in Iraq
may become more common in the years ahead.

The Army field manual on counterinsurgency operations is the
first since the early Vietnam era, and the first ever intended for
the kind of regular Army units now embroiled in battles in Iraq,
as opposed to the Special Operations forces who have taken the
lead in previous counterinsurgencies.

Under orders issued in February, the manual was prepared on
an accelerated basis by the Combined Arms Center in Fort
Leavenworth, Kan., and was distributed to all officers, in Iraq
and elsewhere, beginning last month. An introduction says the
"aftermath of instability'' in Iraq that followed the toppling of
Saddam Hussein's regime underscored the need for an updated
Army guide to counterinsurgency warfare.

Until now, formal American military doctrine for fighting
insurgencies has been so limited that many Marines were
deployed to Iraq with copies of the Marine Corps' "Small Wars
Manual,'' issued in 1940. The most recent Army guides on the
subject, written principally for Special Operations forces, were
prepared in 1963 and 1965, in the early stages of the Vietnam
War. Like the Army, the Marine Corps is also updating its manual.

The new Army guide contains instructions on such matters as
searching a family car and setting up a hasty checkpoint. Other
passages address the role played by "transnational insurgents,''
like the foreign fighters in Iraq, and emphasize the role of
intelligence, rather than Vietnam-era search and destroy
missions, in finding insurgents.

The guide also includes a stark warning about the dangers
of prolonged counterinsurgency operations, saying that the
longer American forces take the lead in such efforts, the greater
the resentment they breed among the host-country population.

"A long-term U.S. combat role may undermine the legitimacy of
the H.N. government and risks converting the conflict into a U.S.-
only war," the manual says, using an abbreviation for host nation.
"That combat role can also further alienate cultures that are hostile
to the U.S."

In some ways, military officials said, the guide just reflects tactics,
techniques and procedures that troops in Iraq and Afghanistan
already use, such as armoring vehicles against improvised explosives.

But for a hierarchical organization like the Army, the distribution
of the guide is a sign of the importance being attached to the issue.

Army officers who have recently returned from yearlong duty in Iraq
applauded the doctrine, but said its methods were nothing new to
field commanders, who have been employing and refining such tactics
for months. The guide's distribution in October came nearly 18 months
after the Iraq insurgency began in May 2003, following President Bush's
declaration of an end to major combat operations. Army officers have
acknowledged that the Army was ill-prepared to contend with the
new environment.

"The important point here is that the Army has again, a bit late,
recognized the importance of counterinsurgency, and is working
to improve its capability to fight and win low-intensity conflicts,"
said an Army officer who recently returned from Iraq and demanded
anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the issue.

The document is unclassified, but the Army has limited its distribution
to Defense Department personnel, "to maintain operations security,"
the document says. A copy of the document, dated October 2004,
was posted Thursday on a Web site run by the Federation of American
Scientists.

Officially, the document is a "field manual interim,'' a new designation
that allows the Army to accelerate its normal schedule for preparing
doctrine. The guide's principal author, Lt. Col. Jan Horvath of the Army,
said in a telephone interview that it was completed in just five months;
the Army usually insists on developing new doctrine over a period of
three years.

"The stunning victory over Saddam Hussein's army in 2003 validated
U.S. conventional force T.T.P.," the document says, using an
abbreviation for tactics, techniques and procedures. "But the
ensuing aftermath of instability has caused review of lessons
from the Army's historical experience and those of the other
services and multinational partners."

According to the field manual, known as F.M.I. 3-07.22, the impetus
for its creation "came from the Iraq insurgency and the realization that
engagements in the Global War on Terrorism (G.W.O.T.) would likely use
counterinsurgency T.T.P.'s." It says its purpose is to review "what we
know about counterinsurgency" and to explain "the fundamentals of
military operations in counterinsurgency environment."

Even before the document was published, military officers said that
the Army's main training centers at Fort Polk, La., and Fort Irwin, Calif.,
had begun to consider lessons and comments from soldiers engaged
in the Iraq counterinsurgency.

One purpose for the manual, Colonel Horvath said, was to update
archaic language and concepts. The "Small Wars Manual," which
many Marines carried to Iraq, includes sections on the "management
of animals'' like mules, and assertions like a warning that mixed-race
societies are "always difficult to govern, if not ungovernable, owing
to the absence of a fixed character.''

The Army did issue a manual in 1990, F.M. 3-20, on the subject
of military operations in low-intensity conflict, and that document
included a section on counterinsurgency. But Colonel Horvath said
that his commanders, including Lt. Gen. William Wallace, a top Army
commander during the invasion of Iraq who now heads the Combined
Arms Center, had found it to be inadequate.

Senior Army officials said that events on the ground in Iraq and in
Afghanistan made it clear months ago that the service had to revamp
its doctrine for fighting insurgents.

"We needed to update the counterinsurgency doctrine," General Wallace
said in an interview in late summer, as the document's authors were
putting on the finishing touches. "That hadn't been looked at since
the post-Vietnam era."

General Wallace, who commanded the Army's V Corps during the Iraqi
war, said that Army authors worked closely with the Marine Corps and
with the British military, which has extensive counterinsurgency
experience in places like Northern Ireland. But General Wallace
cautioned that successful counterinsurgencies required calibrating
the right degree of force with economic development and political
institutions.

"We've got to strike the right balance," General Wallace said. "Security
has to be there for the economy and government to work. But having
an economy and government is essential for security."

Eric Schmitt contributed reporting for this article.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times

---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

8) CRUSADES - NEW & OLD
By Mumia Abu-Jamal
[Col. Writ. 10/23/04]
Copyright 2004

Shortly after 9-11, US President, George W. Bush,
initially announced the beginning of a "crusade" against
the forces that unleashed September 11th. Under
criticism from his advisers, who said that the term
evoked outrage in much of the Arab world, he relented,
and the term was heard no more.

While the word "crusade" may no longer be used in
presidential speech, there can really be little doubt
that it is precisely the concept of "crusade" that
actuates many of the actions of the US government
vis-à-vis the countries of the Middle East. Bush
has spoken often of "remaking the face of the
region."

There is a reason why Arab countries and
communities reacted with outrage and horror at
the mere mention of the crusades; Arabs and
Europeans view that past differently, because
their respective cultures were in conflict then.
The Europeans saw the Crusades as a noble
assignment from the Popes to "liberate" Jerusalem
from the hands of the "infidels", the Muslim Arabs
and Moors. The Arabs saw the era as one of
unrelenting bloodshed and cruelty at the hands
of the Christians, and saw the dark days of
European colonialism as an echo of that
earlier period.

For many Americans, the notion of
"crusades", while not as loaded as either,
evokes bright, shiny images of knights with
crosses on their shields, defending the poor
and the weak.

Behind the various images of the crusades,
however, lies its awful and bloody history, which
British historian Edward Gibbon, in his classic
The History of the Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire [Abridged], does not hesitate
to relate. He is not one who recites the
glories of these mass military campaigns.
It, "...[Appear[s] to me," Gibbons writes,
"that these 200 years of 'holy wars', have
checked rather than forwarded the maturity
of Europe" (691). Gibbons writes:

The lives and labours of millions, which
were buried in the East, would have
been more profitably employed in the
improvement of their native country:
the accumulated stock of industry and
wealth would have overflowed in
navigation and trade; and the Latins
would have been enriched and
enlightened by a pure and friendly
correspondence with the climates
of the East. [691]

The Crusades were not absolutely evil,
he argues, in that they did away with another
evil: the crusades unleashed an untold number
of Europeans, who were tied to the soil as
serfs. These people were thrown into the
teeming armies of the crusades, and the
costs of such ventures "dissipated" the
estates of the barons, allowing the poor
to agitate for some semblance of freedom,
and some social standing free of the
rapacious nobility.

Gibbons reminds us that wars begin
for many, various reasons; yet few of us
can see their end. Surely, the nobles of
church and state, who alone bore the stamp
of "citizen" or "men," before the 200 years of
war, could not foresee their dissipation, and
loss of power and prestige afterwards. They
saw only the promise of vast wealth, and the
misty inheritances of martial glory.

Yet, as ever, there are lessons in history.

"War," the saying goes, "is the sport of kings."
It is also, often, an engine of societal change,
that transforms the nations that wage war, as
often as the nations that are warred against.
The first crusades weakened, rather than
strengthened Europe, but this was lost to
those ruling and wealthy classes, who could
not see past their own avarice.

We are told that these wars too, will, in
the crippled words of Bush, "last for
generations."

None of us can see the beginning of an
end. But, if history teaches us anything, it
is that change is coming.

It will change them; but assuredly, it will
change us, as well.

Copyright 2004 Mumia Abu-Jamal

---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

9) IS FASCISM POSSIBLE HERE?
By Mumia Abu-Jamal
[Col. Writ. 10/28/04]
Copyright 2004

Fascism.

The very word evokes dark, menacing images of troops,
marching in lockstep, in support of a terrible, malevolent
ideology.

In a word, it suggests the followers of Mussolini in Italy,
or Hitler in Germany.

To most of us, its very mention suggests its foreign
nature; its Otherness.

Therein lies its danger. For, because it is seen as a
foreign ideology, the inevitable idea arises: "It can't
happen here."

Those who say this, either don't know, or don't want
to know, American history. They prefer the safe myths,
to the ugly truths of how this country came to be what it
is.

What is fascism? In short, it is the merger of state
and corporate interests.

What is totalitarianism? On April 23rd, 1976, the U.S.
Congress issued its Final Select Committee report,
which charged:

We have seen segments of our Government adopt
tactics unworthy of a democracy and occasionally
reminiscent of the tactics of totalitarian regimes.
... [T]he chief investigative branch of the federal
government [FBI], which was charged by law
with investigating crimes and preventing criminal
conduct, itself engaged in lawless tactics and
*responded to deep-seated social problems by
fomenting violence and unrest.* [From Dr. Huey
P. Newton, *War Against the Panthers: A Study
of Repression in America* [Ph.D. Dissertation
(New York: Harlem River Press, 1996), p. 110]

Six months earlier, then-Sen. Walter Mondale (D-Minn.)
would make similar comments as he opened hearings
into the COINTELPRO revelations. On Nov. 19, 1975,
he stated:

.... Yesterday, this committee heard some of the
most disturbing testimony that can be imagined in
a free society. We heard evidence that for
decades the institutions designed to enforce the
laws and Constitution of our country have been
engaging in conduct that violates the law and
the Constitution. We heard that the FBI, which is
part of the Department of Justice, took justice
into its own hands by seeking to punish those
with unpopular ideas. We learned that the chief
law enforcement agency in the federal Government
decided that it did not need laws to investigate
and suppress the peaceful and constitutional
activities of those whom it disapproved.

Sen. Mondale added, on the floor of the Senate:

We heard testimony that the FBI, to protect the
country against those it believed had totalitarian
political views, employed the tactics of
totalitarian societies against American citizens.
We heard that the FBI attempted to destroy
one of our greatest leaders in the field of civil
rights [here, he refers to Rev. Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr.], and then replace him with
someone of the FBI's choosing. [From: U.S.
Senate, *Hearings Before the Select Committee
to Study Governmental Operations With Respect
to Intelligence Activities:* [ (Vol.6)-F.B.I.
(Wash., DC: U.S. Gov't Printing Office, 1976),
p. 61.]

The state waged war against its own alleged
'citizens', with impunity.

But now, years after these hearings, thanks to the
cleverly-named U.S. PATRIOT Act, what was illegal
during the COINTELPRO era, is legal today. People
who have opposed the Iraq War, or other actions of the
Bush Regime, have been beaten, pepper-sprayed,
framed, jailed, and tortured, in Los Angeles, New York
City, Philadelphia, and beyond -- for following their
alleged 'rights' under the 1st Amendment. They have
been caged, and corralled into so-called 'Free Speech
Zones!' Which almost literally begs the question: If
cages are 'free speech zones', what do you call the
huge tracts of land and air that are outside these
cages? Non-free-speech zones? And virtually
every judge who has been asked to protect the
people's rights to protest and assemble, over the
cop's 'right' to cage and repress, has gone the
cops way.

Fascism -- the merger of state and corporate
power -- has made the struggle of workers for an
8-hour day, for the right to unionize, for vacation
days, for collective bargaining, one stained with the
blood of thousands of martyrs, martyrs for labor,
like many of the members of the Industrial Workers
of the World (IWW), known as the Wobblies. They
were beaten, thrown off trains, jailed by the dozens,
framed, and slain, for defending worker's rights.

Fascism is more than a funny-sounding word; it
is dyed deep into the fabric of American life; and
creeps forward today, under cover of 'Law.'

[*Sources*: Newton, H.P., *WATP*.; Donner,
Frank. *The Age of Surveillance: The Aims and
Methods of America's Political Intelligence System*.
(NY: Vintage, 1981); McGuckin, Henry E.,
(Memoirs of a WOBBLY) (Chi.: Kerr, 1987).]

Copyright 2004 Mumia Abu-Jamal

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10) It's time to take the "No Blood for Oil" slogan to the
auto companies
Rally Sunday, Nov. 21, 12:00 noon-1:30 p.m.
Opening Day - San Francisco Auto Show
SF Moscone Center, 747 Howard

Dear Friends:

One of the key ways to break the incentives for war and empire
is to break America's addiction to oil.

It's time to take the "No Blood for Oil" slogan to the auto companies
and demand that they act now to dramatically reduce our oil
dependence so that we aren't having to send US troops to Iraq,
or West Africa, or Colombia.

On Sunday, Nov 21, there will be a rally at the opening day of the
SF Auto Show. A call to action is below.

Please mark your calendars and please spread far and wide.
Thanks!

Peace

Jason Mark
Clean Car Campaigner
Global Exchange

Break America's Addiction to Oil!
Jumpstart Ford and Declare Energy Independence!

Rally at Opening Day of San Francisco Auto Show

When: 12:00 Noon - 1:30 p.m., Sunday, November 21

Where: San Francisco Auto Show, SF Moscone Center, 747 Howard

What: Rally, Leafleting and Street Theater Calling on Ford Motor
Company to Break America's Oil Addiction

Who: Global Exchange, Rainforest Action Network, Bluewater
Network, SF Bike Coalition, and YOU.

The United States is addicted to oil. Although less than 5 percent
of the world's population, we consume 25 percent of the world's
oil. This dependence on oil endangers our environment, weakens
our economy, and undermines our national security.

The quickest way to break our oil habit is by challenging Ford
Motor Company to take immediate action to dramatically increase
the fuel economy of its cars. According to the US EPA, Ford is the
worst gas-guzzler in the auto industry, falling last place in fuel
economy rankings for five years in a row.

A great place to challenge Ford is at the wildly popular SF Auto
Show. Attended by hundreds of thousands of people, the show
is a critical venue for Ford to promote its products.

When it comes to making sensible, fuel-efficient vehicles, Ford
has have very little to brag about. And that means the auto shows
offer a fantastic opportunity for concerned citizens to raise public
awareness about the very real costs of our oil addiction.

WHAT YOU CAN DO:

1) Come to the Auto Show rally on Sunday, Nov. 21 and join human
rights activists, environmentalists, cyclists and others for a lively
rally calling on Ford to break America's oil addiction. Add your voice
to the call for energy independence.

2) Reduce your own oil consumption by biking more! It's fun
and easier than you might think. A great way to start is by taking
a FREE Bike Ed class offered by the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition.
For more information & class schedules,
see http://www.sfbike.org/edu


For more information, contact Jason Mark at 415-558-9490 or
jason@globalexchange.org
.

Please act today to break our addiction to oil!

---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

11) 31 U.S. Troops Killed So Far in Fallujah
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
November 14, 2004
Filed at 11:14 a.m. ET

NEAR FALLUJAH, Iraq (AP) -- The U.S. military's ground and air assault
of Fallujah has gone quicker than expected, with the entire city occupied
after six days of fighting, the Marine commander who planned the
offensive said Sunday. The military said 31 Americans have been
killed in the siege.

Marine Maj. Gen. Richard Natonski said he and other commanders
learned from April's failed three-week Marine assault on Fallujah,
which was called off by the Bush administration after a worldwide
outcry over civilians deaths. This time, the military sent in six times
as many troops and 20 types of aircraft. Troops also faked attacks
before the assault to confuse enemy fighters.

``Maybe we learned from April,'' Natonski said in an interview with
The Associated Press. ``We learned we can't do it piecemeal. When
we go in, we go all the way through. We had the green light this time
and we went all the way.

``Had we done in April what we did now, the results would've been
the same.''

Natonski spoke during a visit to the 1st Cavalry Division's 2nd
Brigade, the unit charged with isolating Fallujah under a security
cordon.

More than 1,200 insurgents have been killed during the operation,
he said.

The offensive has killed at least 31 American troops and six Iraqi
soldiers, said Lt. Gen. John Sattler, commander of the 1st Marine
Expeditionary Force. The number of injured Americans was ``up
in the high 200s,'' although some have returned to duty already,
Sattler said.

Rebel attacks elsewhere -- especially in the northern city of Mosul
-- have forced the Americans to shift troops away from Fallujah.

Exploiting the redeployment, insurgents stepped up attacks in areas
outside Fallujah, including a bombing that killed two U.S. Marines on
the outskirts of the former rebel bastion 40 miles west of Baghdad.

On Sunday, Marines and Army units were still battling gritty bands
of defenders scattered in buildings and bunkers across the Sunni
Muslim stronghold. Behind them, Iraqi troops were enmeshed in
the painstaking task of clearing weapons and fighters from every
room of Fallujah's estimated 50,000 buildings.

U.S. forces now occupy -- but have yet to subdue -- the entire city.
It still could take several days of fighting to clear the final pockets
of resistance, the military said.

On Sunday, U.S. soldiers from Task Force 2-2 of the 1st Infantry
Division discovered an immense series of underground bunkers
linked by tunnels that insurgents stocked with medical supplies,
a CNN correspondent embedded with the unit reported.

Warplanes dropped four 2,000-pound bombs on the bunker
network in the city's southeast corner, setting off 45 minutes of
secondary explosions as weapons stockpiles detonated, CNN
correspondent Jane Arraf said.

Also, Marines reopened the bridge where the bodies of two American
contractors killed by militants were strung up in March, sparking the
earlier U.S. siege.

``This is a big event for us,'' Maj. Todd Des Grosseilliers, 41, of
Auburn, Maine, said before Marines rolled back concertina wire
and swept the bridge for booby traps.

Also, Marines in Fallujah found the mutilated body of what they
believe was a Western woman. The body was lying in the street
covered with a blood-soaked cloth.

A Marine officer speaking on condition of anonymity said he was
``80 percent sure'' it was a Western woman. Two foreign women
were kidnapped last month -- Margaret Hassan, 59, the director
of CARE International in Iraq and Teresa Borcz Khalifa, 54, a Polish
-born longtime resident of Iraq.

In Warsaw, the Polish Foreign Ministry said it was seeking more
information.

The Iraqi Red Crescent Society said another convoy would travel
from Baghdad to Fallujah on Monday, carrying food and aid for
about 2,000 families living in the area, director Fardous al-Ubaidi
said. A convoy of four such vehicles arrived in Fallujah on Saturday.

In central Buhriz, 25 miles northeast of Baghdad, demonstrators
marched to protest the Fallujah offensive and denounce Iraq's
interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi.

Associated Press Television News footage showed some armed
men, heads covered with black hoods and brandishing Kalashnikov
rifles, among the marchers. The demonstrators, estimated by police
to number about 70, carried banners calling Allawi a ``thug'' and
``traitor.''

``Allawi, Fallujah will be your tomb!'' some chanted. ``You are
a coward, an American agent!''

In Mosul, Iraq's third-largest city, militants attacked two police
stations, killing at least six Iraqi National Guards and wounding
three others, Iraqi officials said. One insurgent was killed and three
others were wounded, they said. Iraqi security forces regained
control of both stations, witnesses said.

About 300 Iraqi National Guards and a battalion of police from
Baghdad patrolled the streets in a visible show of force after an
insurgent uprising believed to have been mounted in support of
Fallujah's militants.

Three days earlier, armed and masked militants stormed police
stations, bridges and government buildings in Mosul as Iraqi police
apparently failed to put up a fight. Mosul's police chief was fired
after criticism that militants infiltrated police forces.

Planning for Fallujah began in September, with Natonski given
responsibility for the combat phase, said Lt. Col. Dan Wilson,
a Marine planner with the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force.

After troops uproot the insurgents, contractors are supposed
to swarm into Fallujah to cart away rubble, repair buildings
and fix the city's utilities, Wilson and Natonski said.

The Iraqi government already has picked leaders for Fallujah,
and thousands of Iraqi police and paramilitary forces have been
recruited to impose order.

Natonski described the six days of ground war as a ``flawless
execution of the plan we drew up. We are actually ahead of
schedule.''

Several pre-assault tactics made the battle easier than expected,
he said.

Insurgent defenses were weakened by bombing raids on command
posts and safe houses. Air-dropped leaflets also may have
demoralized some defenders and convinced some residents the
city would be better off under government control, he said.

In the days before the raid, ground troops feinted invasions,
charging right up to Fallujah's edge in tanks and armored vehicles.
Natonski said these fake attacks forced the insurgents to build up
forces in the south and east, perhaps diverting defenders from the
north, where six battalions of Army and Marine troops finally
punched into the city Monday.

The deceptive maneuvers also drew fire from defenders' bunkers,
which were exposed and relentlessly bombed before the ground
assault.

``We desensitized the enemy to the formations they saw on the
night we attacked,'' Natonski said.

Another key tactic was choking off the city, the responsibility of
the 2nd Brigade of the Army's 1st Cavalry Division, Natonski said.

That prevented insurgents from slipping out during the assault,
although many, including top leaders like Jordanian Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi, Sheik Abdullah al-Janabi and Omar al-Hadid, are
believed to have fled.

``We never expected them to be there. We're not after Zarqawi.
We're after insurgents in general,'' Natonski said.

Copyright 2004 The Associated Press

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12) Assemblyman Condemns Palestinian Art Show
November 12, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 9:31 p.m. ET

WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. (AP) -- A Jewish assemblyman said Friday
that an exhibit of Palestinian art and crafts, scheduled
for display in a public building, should be canceled
because it is anti-Israel and ``promotes terrorism and
violence.''

Items to be shown include an Arab headdress trapped in a
Star of David made of barbed wire, and a piece paying
homage to ``Palestinian martyrs in the anti-Israel uprising
that began in 2000.''

The curator of the exhibit said that while some of the art
deals with Israel's military presence in the Palestinian
territories and ``the apartheid-type life that Palestinians
are forced to live under ... what comes through is the
desire for a peaceful life.''

Westchester County's executive has demanded a preview of
the exhibit before deciding whether it should be canceled.
The exhibit, scheduled for Nov. 20 at the county center in
White Plains, is entitled ``Made in Palestine.''

Assemblyman Ryan Karben, a Democrat from neighboring
Rockland County, based his objections on artworks from
another exhibit, also called ``Made in Palestine,'' that
was on display at the Station museum in Houston last year.
Those works are in storage, but their images will be shown
as part of the White Plains display, said Nada Khader of
WESPAC, a peace group that is sponsoring the display with
the artists' group Al-Jisser (which means ``bridges'').
Among other things in the Houston exhibit that Karber
objects to are a reference to the creation of Israel in
1948 as a ``catastrophe,'' and works by an artist described
in the Houston exhibit as ``a former general in the
Palestinian Liberation Organization.''

``Whether they are in a display case or on a projection
screen, these divisive and anti-Israel pieces that glorify
terrorism have no business being displayed,'' said Aaron
Troodler, Karben's spokesman.

Haifa Bint-Kadi, the artist who is curating the White
Plains exhibit, said she was disappointed that Karben would
``make something divisive out of this, when what we're
trying to do is get people to know one another rather than
do harm to one another.''

UNITED FOR PEACE & JUSTICE | 212-868-5545

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