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Saturday, November 27, 2004
BAUAW NEWSLETTER-SATURDAY, NOV.27, 2004
Bay Area United Against War Presents a film screening of:
"WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception Meet film director Danny Schechter "The News Dissector." Danny will be available for a question and answer period right after the movie. Saturday, Dec. 11th, 2004 (Showtime to be announced) Embarcadero Center Cinema One Embarcadero Center, Promenade Level San Francisco, CA 94111 (415) 267-4893 " 'WMD' paints a meticulous and damning portrait of the media's coverage of the Iraq war. In sobering detail, Danny Schechter shows us how the TV networks now prefer the role of cheerleader, to that of objective journalist," says Mike Nisholson of austinnforkerry.org. "Schechter tackles his subject like a cross between Errol Morris and a Dashiell Hammet detective, following close on the tail of big media reporters as they in turn track the march toward war, embed themselves in the military industrial complex and then get out when the fighting gets tough and leave the cleanup work to stringers, " writes Shandon Fowler of film's Hamptons International Film Festival appearance, Oct. 20-24. To learn more about the film visit: www.wmdthefilm.com www.bauaw.org (Distributed by Cinema Libre Studio, www.cinemalibrestudio.com) ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 1) Saving the Iraqi Children By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF OP-ED COLUMNIST November 27, 2004 http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/27/opinion/27kristof.html?oref=login&hp [Note: This Op-Ed piece is an example of the bankruptcy of the arguments in favor of the continued American occupation of Iraq. After claiming, ³Among Iraqis, the risk of death by violence was 58 times greater after the war than before, and infant mortality nearly doubled.² the author argues, ³If U.S. troops leave Iraq too soon, the country will simply fall apart.² But while the article accurately exposes the depth of the mayhem this war has brought to the people of Iraq, especially its children, the authors convoluted reasoning leads to more occupation, more bombing, more troops, more of the same. Kristof goes on to conclude his argument against the withdrawal of U.S. troops by claiming, ³The best answer to that question, I think, is that our mistaken invasion has left millions of Iraqis desperately vulnerable, and it would be inhumane to abandon them now. If we stay in Iraq, there is still some hope that Iraqis will come to enjoy security and better lives, but if we pull out we will be condemning Iraqis to anarchy, terrorism and starvation, costing the lives of hundreds of thousands of children over the next decadeÂThose hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children, whose lives we placed at risk by invading their country, are the reasons we should remain in Iraq, until we can hand over security to a local force. Saving hundreds of thousands of lives is a worthy cause to risk American lives for, even to die for.² The antiwar movement must counter this sinister argument by demanding that all the troops be withdrawn from Iraq and Afghanistan immediately. Our movement must demand that the entire U.S. military budget be wrested from the hands of the warlords. We must insist that these billions of dollars be used, instead, for massive humanitarian aid to the people of Iraq and Afghanistan--with no American strings attached; as well as for healthcare, education, jobs, affordable housing and social services here at home. There is enough money to pay for all of this if we do away with this filthy, illegal, immoral war and the giant U.S. corporate war machine that controls and profits from it. As musical artist Michael Franti says, ³You can bomb the world to pieces but you can¹t bomb it into peace.² The world is at a great turning point that will determine the fate of all life on Earth. The time for the worldwide antiwar movement to stand united is now. If we wish to prevent genocide against the entire planet by the greedy few who seek to own the wealth of the world through force of violence we must stand united against them. The extent of the cynicism expressed by Kristof in this apology for the continued bombing and killing of Iraqi children is astounding. Killing children in order to ³save them² goes beyond even George Orwell. More importantly, this argument can be applied wherever resistance to U.S. domination arises. No one is safe from their plundering rampages for oil, wealth and power. This article stands as a clear mandate to all of us who are horrified by this reasoning to gather all of our forces together to bring this war to an end NOW! ALL OUT JANUARY 20TH  BRING THE TROOPS HOME NOW! Bonnie Weinstein, Bay Area United Against War] 2) Sentencing-Guideline Study Finds Continuing Disparities WASHINGTON November 27, 2004 http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/27/national/27sentencing.html 3) Foreign Interest Appears to Flag as Dollar Falls By EDMUND L. ANDREWS WASHINGTON November 27, 2004 http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/27/business/27dollar.html ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 1) Saving the Iraqi Children By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF OP-ED COLUMNIST November 27, 2004 http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/27/opinion/27kristof.html?oref=login&hp Iraqis are paying a horrendous price for the good intentions of well-meaning conservatives who wanted to liberate them. And now some well-meaning American liberals are seeking a troop withdrawal that would make matters even worse. Heaven protect Iraq from well-meaning Americans. Lately, I've been quiet about the war because it's easy to rail about the administration's foolishness last year but a lot harder to offer constructive suggestions for what we should do now. President Bush's policy on Iraq has migrated from delusional - we would be welcomed with flowers, we should disband the Iraqi army, security is fine, the big problem is exaggerations by nervous Nellie correspondents - to reasonable today. These days, the biggest risk may come from the small but growing contingent on the left that wants to bring our troops home now. Consider two recent reports. First, The Lancet, the London-based medical journal, published a study suggesting that at least 100,000 Iraqis, and perhaps many more, had died as a result of the invasion of Iraq. Among Iraqis, the risk of death by violence was 58 times greater after the war than before, and infant mortality also nearly doubled. That's apparently because of insecurity. A doctor in Basra told me last year how physicians and patients alike had had to run for cover when bandits attacked the infectious diseases unit, firing machine guns and throwing hand grenades, so they could steal the air-conditioners. Given those conditions, women are now more likely to give birth at home, so babies and mothers are both more likely to die of "natural" causes. The second troubling report, in The Washington Post, recounted that acute malnutrition among children under 5 soared to 7.7 percent this year from 4 percent before the war. Those are preliminary figures, but they suggest that 400,000 Iraqi children are badly malnourished, and suffering in some cases from irreversible physical and mental stunting. Those glimpses at the public health situation in Iraq are a reminder not only of the disastrous impact of our invasion, but also of the humanitarian impact if we pull out our troops prematurely. If U.S. troops leave Iraq too soon, the country will simply fall apart. The Kurdish areas in the north may muddle along, unless Turkey intervenes to protect the Turkman minority or to block the emergence of a Kurdish state. The Shiite areas in the south might establish an Iranian-backed theocratic statelet that would establish order. But the middle of the country would erupt in bloody civil war and turn into something like Somalia. What would that mean? If Iraq were to sink to Somalia-level child mortality rates, one result by my calculation would be 203,000 children dying each year. If Iraq were to have maternal mortality rates as bad as Somalia's, that would be 9,900 Iraqi women dying each year in childbirth. Granted, my argument for staying the course is a difficult one to make to American parents whose immediate concerns are the lives of their own children. There is no getting around the fact that if we stay, more Americans will die, and this burden will fall inequitably on working-class families and members of minority groups. I also have to concede that those calling for withdrawal may in the end be proven right: perhaps we'll stick it out in Iraq and still be forced to retreat even after squandering the lives of 1,000 more Americans. Those of us who believe in remaining in Iraq must answer the question that John Kerry asked about Vietnam: "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" The best answer to that question, I think, is that our mistaken invasion has left millions of Iraqis desperately vulnerable, and it would be inhumane to abandon them now. If we stay in Iraq, there is still some hope that Iraqis will come to enjoy security and better lives, but if we pull out we will be condemning Iraqis to anarchy, terrorism and starvation, costing the lives of hundreds of thousands of children over the next decade. Those hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children, whose lives we placed at risk by invading their country, are the reasons we should remain in Iraq, until we can hand over security to a local force. Saving hundreds of thousands of lives is a worthy cause to risk American lives for, even to die for. Copyright 2004 The New York Times ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 2) Sentencing-Guideline Study Finds Continuing Disparities WASHINGTON November 27, 2004 http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/27/national/27sentencing.html WASHINGTON, Nov. 26 (AP) - The number of minority inmates in federal penitentiaries, as a percentage of all federal prisoners, has increased sharply since sentencing guidelines took effect in 1987 and now accounts for a majority of the prison population, a study reviewing 15 years of data has concluded. The study was conducted by the United States Sentencing Commission, which sets the guidelines for federal judges. The panel examined how well the guidelines had brought uniformity to punishments, and found that while sentencing had become "more certain and predictable," disparities still existed among races and regions of the country, with blacks generally receiving harsher punishment than whites. The findings come as the Supreme Court considers the constitutionality of the guidelines, which advocates say are crucial to achieving fairness in punishment. The justices could decide as early as next week whether to throw out the system because it allows judges, rather than juries, to consider factors that can add years to sentences. Yet before the guidelines were created in 1987, judges had wide discretion in issuing sentences. The guidelines, in contrast, give them a range of possible punishments for a given crime and make it difficult for them to go outside those boundaries. The study found that the average prison sentence today is about 50 months, twice what it was in 1984, when lawmakers began calling for a uniform sentencing system. The difference, the study determined, is due mostly to the guidelines' elimination of parole for offenses like drug trafficking. "The big unanswered question is, Do we need to have sentences growing this way?" said one sentencing expert, Douglas A. Berman, a law professor at Ohio State University. "Nobody wants to go back to the bad old days of complete unguided judicial discretion." Whites made up 35 percent of the prison population in 2002, a sharp decline from nearly 60 percent in 1984, according to the report. It attributed the decrease to a striking growth in Hispanics imprisoned on immigration charges - to 40 percent of federal prisoners, from about 15 percent. In addition, the gap in punishment between blacks and whites widened. While blacks and whites received an average sentence of slightly more than two years in 1984, blacks now stay in prison for about six years, compared with about four years for whites. The report attributed this disparity in part to harsher mandatory minimum sentences that Congress imposed for drug-related crimes like cocaine possession. In 2002, 81 percent of offenders in such cases were black. The study found harsher punishments generally in the South than in the Northeast and the West, though it concluded that legal differences in individual cases "explain the vast majority of variation among judges and regions." A bigger problem causing sentencing disparities, it said, is plea bargaining. The study said that as an incentive for getting guilty pleas, prosecutors offered more lenient punishments than those mandated in the guidelines in as many as one-third of cases. Copyright 2004 The New York Times ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 3) Foreign Interest Appears to Flag as Dollar Falls By EDMUND L. ANDREWS WASHINGTON November 27, 2004 http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/27/business/27dollar.html WASHINGTON, Nov. 26 - Investors and market analysts are increasingly worried that the last big source of support for the American dollar - heavy buying by foreign central banks - is fading. The anxiety was on full display Friday, when the dollar abruptly slid to a record low against the euro after a report suggesting that the Chinese central bank might start to reduce its holdings in the American currency. Though Chinese officials later denied the report, and the dollar recovered, analysts say the broader trend is that foreign governments are becoming less willing to finance the growing debt of the United States government. On Tuesday, a top official with the Russian central bank said his government had become worried about the sinking value of the dollar and might switch some foreign reserves to euros. A day later, India's central bank hinted that it was worried about the same issue and might shift some reserves into other currencies. Japan and China, which together have amassed nearly $900 billion in United States Treasury securities, have both slowed their buying sharply from the frenetic pace in February and March. "There is an emerging consensus that banks around the world are moving to expand their reserves of euros at the expense of dollars," said Laidi Ashraf, chief currency analyst at MG Financial Group in New York. The Bush administration has essentially condoned the dollar's decline. At meetings with foreign ministers last week, the Treasury secretary, John W. Snow, repeated the American mantra of support for a "strong dollar" but also for letting "market forces" determine exchange rates. A continued decline of the dollar would be good for American manufacturers, because it would make exports cheaper in foreign markets and push up the cost of imports. But a diminished foreign appetite for dollars could push up interest rates. The Federal Reserve has already raised short-term rates four times this year, but the shift in the sentiment of foreign investors may soon seriously affect long-term rates that influence the cost of home mortgages. "Sell U.S., buy Europe," summed up Richard Berner, chief United States economist at Morgan Stanley , in a report last week. Mr. Berner noted that investors have begun demanding higher yields for 10-year Treasury securities than for comparable European bonds, and he predicted that the spread would widen. Recent data from the Treasury Department indicated that foreign governments had sharply slowed their purchases of Treasury securities. The question is whether those purchases will continue to slow or start to increase again as countries try to shore up the American currency to help maintain their own industries' competitiveness. Japanese purchases of Treasury securities, which ballooned by about $100 billion from October 2003 to March of this year, have slowed sharply and actually declined slightly in September. Largely as a result, the dollar has sunk to its lowest level against the Japanese yen, about 102.5 yen to the dollar on Friday, in four and a half years. Chinese purchases of Treasury securities slowed to a crawl, increasing just $2 billion in September, to $174 billion. On Friday, a top Chinese central bank official denied reports in a Chinese newspaper that the government planned to reduce its holdings of Treasury bonds. But Chinese officials, under prodding from the Bush administration, have repeatedly said they want to gradually relax their 10-year-old policy of locking its currency, the yuan, at a fixed exchange rate to the dollar. Any move to a more flexible exchange rate for China would probably cause the dollar to drop in value and allow the Chinese central bank to stop buying United States debt securities. America's current account deficit, the broadest measure of its indebtedness to other countries, is on track to exceed $600 billion next year, about 6 percent of its gross domestic product. The United States needs to attract about $2 billion a day to keep its spending at current levels. The nation attracted enormous sums of foreign money in the late 1990's as well, but the character of that money has changed. Back then, a big part of the inflow was through foreign direct investment and purchases of American stocks. This year, by contrast, foreigners have been net sellers of stocks. The big growth has been in foreign purchases of Treasury securities, and the big buyers have been foreign central banks that wanted to prevent their own currencies from rising too much against the dollar. Tony Norfield, currency strategist for ABN Amro in London, said he was convinced that central banks were trying to scale back their purchase of dollar assets, a move that could push the euro, already up about 30 percent in the last years, even higher. "You do not need the central banks to sell Treasuries for the dollar to go down," Mr. Norfield said. "All they have to do is buy less and the dollar is going to be in trouble." The euro hit a new high of $1.3329 on Friday in light trading, before settling back about a half-penny. European leaders are alarmed about the potential damage of a sinking dollar to their exports. "Recent moves on exchange markets of the dollar versus the euro are unwelcome," said Jean-Claude Trichet, president of the European Central Bank, at a banking seminar on Friday in Rio de Janeiro. "I want to underline the importance of recent statements by the Treasury secretary of the United States on his determination to pursue a strong dollar policy," Mr. Trichet added. But Mr. Snow and Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, offered no hint that they would intervene in currency markets to prop up the dollar. "The market for U.S. Treasury securities is deep and liquid and continues to be attractive to a broad and diverse pool of investors," a spokesman for Mr. Snow, Robert Nichols, said. That remains to be seen. According to the most recent Treasury data, the biggest source of growth in securities came not from China, Japan or Europe but from Caribbean banking centers. Copyright 2004 The New York Times
Friday, November 26, 2004
BAUAW NEWSLETTER-FRIDAY, NOV.26, 2004Bay Area United Against War Presents a film screening of: "WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception" Meet film director Danny Schechter "The News Dissector." Danny will be available for a question and answer period right after the movie. Saturday, Dec. 11th, 2004 (Showtime to be announced) Embarcadero Center Cinema One Embarcadero Center, Promenade Level San Francisco, CA 94111 (415) 267-4893 " 'WMD' paints a meticulous and damning portrait of the media's coverage of the Iraq war. In sobering detail, Danny Schechter shows us how the TV networks now prefer the role of cheerleader, to that of objective journalist," says Mike Nisholson of austinnforkerry.org. "Schechter tackles his subject like a cross between Errol Morris and a Dashiell Hammet detective, following close on the tail of big media reporters as they in turn track the march toward war, embed themselves in the military industrial complex and then get out when the fighting gets tough and leave the cleanup work to stringers, " writes Shandon Fowler of film's Hamptons International Film Festival appearance, Oct. 20-24. To learn more about the film visit: www.wmdthefilm.org www.bauaw.org (Distributed by Cinema Libre Studio, www.cinemalibrestudio.com) ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 1) 'Unusual Weapons' Used in Fallujah ** Dahr Jamail's Iraq Dispatches ** ** http://dahrjamailiraq.com ** November 26, 2004 2) U.S. Still Has Half of Falluja to Clear of Weapons By Michael Georgy NEAR FALLUJA, Iraq (Reuters) Fri Nov 26, 2004 04:03 AM ET http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=6926834&src=eD ialog/GetContent§ion=news 3) TRANSLATION: EU creating 13 rapid intervention 'tactical groups' 4) Of Mice, Men and In-Between Scientists Debate Blending Of Human, Animal Forms By Rick Weiss Washington Post Staff Writer Saturday, November 20, 2004; Page A01 http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A63731-2004Nov19 5) A Moment of Silence, Before I Start this Poem by Emmanuel Ortiz 9.11.02 6) Where's Picasso? Falluja: The 21 st Century Guernica By Saul Landau http://www.progresoweekly.com/index.php?progreso=Landau&otherweek=110136240 7) Radio exchange contradicts army version of Gaza killing Chris McGreal in Jerusalem Wednesday November 24, 2004 The Guardian An Israeli army officer who repeatedly shot a 13-year-old Palestinian girl in Gaza dismissed a warning from another soldier that she was a child by saying he would have killed her even if she was three years old. 8) January 20 Call to Action: RISE Against Bush/SHINE For A Peaceful (Can't we all just unite together on Jan. 20 and March 20, 2005? ...as I said, people the world over will be demonstrating on January 20, 2005 against the death and devastation the U.S.Government has brought upon Iraq-based all on lies.) 9) Vietnam Vet, 53, Called for Duty in Iraq-Report PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) 10) Still Worlds Apart on Iraq EDITORIAL November 26, 2004 http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/26/opinion/26fri1.html?oref=login&hp 11) Leading Iraqi Parties Call for Election Delay By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) Filed at 12:33 p.m. ET November 26, 2004 http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq-Elections.html?hp&ex=1 101531600&en=ab08003b4e7ba050&ei=5094&partner=homepage ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 1) 'Unusual Weapons' Used in Fallujah ** Dahr Jamail's Iraq Dispatches ** ** http://dahrjamailiraq.com ** November 26, 2004 Dahr Jamail BAGHDAD, Nov 26 (IPS) - The U.S. military has used poison gas and other non-conventional weapons against civilians in Fallujah, eyewitnesses report. "Poisonous gases have been used in Fallujah," 35-year-old trader from Fallujah Abu Hammad told IPS. "They used everything -- tanks, artillery, infantry, poison gas. Fallujah has been bombed to the ground." Hammad is from the Julan district of Fallujah where some of the heaviest fighting occurred. Other residents of that area report the use of illegal weapons. "They used these weird bombs that put up smoke like a mushroom cloud," Abu Sabah, another Fallujah refugee from the Julan area told IPS. "Then small pieces fall from the air with long tails of smoke behind them." He said pieces of these bombs exploded into large fires that burnt the skin even when water was thrown on the burns. Phosphorous weapons as well as napalm are known to cause such effects. "People suffered so much from these," he said. Macabre accounts of killing of civilians are emerging through the cordon U.S. forces are still maintaining around Fallujah. "Doctors in Fallujah are reporting to me that there are patients in the hospital there who were forced out by the Americans," said Mehdi Abdulla, a 33-year-old ambulance driver at a hospital in Baghdad. "Some doctors there told me they had a major operation going, but the soldiers took the doctors away and left the patient to die." Kassem Mohammed Ahmed who escaped from Fallujah a little over a week ago told IPS he witnessed many atrocities committed by U.S. soldiers in the city. "I watched them roll over wounded people in the street with tanks," he said. "This happened so many times." Abdul Razaq Ismail who escaped from Fallujah two weeks back said soldiers had used tanks to pull bodies to the soccer stadium to be buried. "I saw dead bodies on the ground and nobody could bury them because of the American snipers," he said. "The Americans were dropping some of the bodies into the Euphrates near Fallujah." Abu Hammad said he saw people attempt to swim across the Euphrates to escape the siege. "The Americans shot them with rifles from the shore," he said. "Even if some of them were holding a white flag or white clothes over their heads to show they are not fighters, they were all shot.." Hammad said he had seen elderly women carrying white flags shot by U.S. soldiers. "Even the wounded people were killed. The Americans made announcements for people to come to one mosque if they wanted to leave Fallujah, and even the people who went there carrying white flags were killed." Another Fallujah resident Khalil (40) told IPS he saw civilians shot as they held up makeshift white flags. "They shot women and old men in the streets," he said. "Then they shot anyone who tried to get their bodies...Fallujah is suffering too much, it is almost gone now." Refugees had moved to another kind of misery now, he said. "It's a disaster living here at this camp," Khalil said. "We are living like dogs and the kids do not have enough clothes." Spokesman for the Iraqi Red Crescent in Baghdad Abdel Hamid Salim told IPS that none of their relief teams had been allowed into Fallujah, and that the military had said it would be at least two more weeks before any refugees would be allowed back into the city. "There is still heavy fighting in Fallujah," said Salim. "And the Americans won't let us in so we can help people." In many camps around Fallujah and throughout Baghdad, refugees are living without enough food, clothing and shelter. Relief groups estimate there are at least 15,000 refugee families in temporary shelters outside Fallujah. More writing, photos and commentary at http://dahrjamailiraq.com You are subscribed to the Dahr Jamail's email Iraq Dispatches because you requested a subscription at some point. You can visit http://dahrjamailiraq.com/email_list/ to subscribe or unsubscribe to the email list. Or, you can unsubscribe by sending an email to iraq_dispatches-request@dahrjamailiraq.com and write unsubscribe in the subject or the body of the email. Iraq_Dispatches mailing list http://lists.dahrjamailiraq.com/mailman/listinfo/iraq_dispatches ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 2) U.S. Still Has Half of Falluja to Clear of Weapons By Michael Georgy NEAR FALLUJA, Iraq (Reuters) Fri Nov 26, 2004 04:03 AM ET http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=6926834&src=eD ialog/GetContent§ion=news NEAR FALLUJA, Iraq (Reuters) - U.S. Marines have cleared over 50 percent of Falluja's houses of weapons caches after mounting an offensive that crushed the Iraqi city's rebels, their top commander said Friday. Lieutenant General John Sattler told reporters Marines would search every house in Falluja to pave the way for rebuilding and stabilizing the city ahead of elections scheduled for January. He spoke after the visiting secretary of the U.S. Navy told Marines at a Purple Heart medal award ceremony that the Falluja offensive "broke the back" of the insurgency in Iraq. U.S. air strikes, artillery barrages and infantry operations wrested control of Falluja this month, and the military said they killed over 1,000 foreign Muslim militant fighters and insurgents loyal to toppled Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. But Marines still face resistance in Falluja, where many buildings were reduced to piles of rubble. Sattler said insurgents threw grenades at Marines as they entered a house Thursday, killing two. Three insurgents were killed in return fire, he said. "We will keep searching for weapons until we put a green X on the last house in Falluja," he said. Marine officers have said they would inspect an estimated 50,000 houses in the city west of Baghdad, a tedious task that involves searching everything from ventilation systems to couches as guerrilla snipers await opportunities to fire. The United States hopes the searches will deprive Iraq's guerrillas of their main base and weapons point, putting a lid on insurgent suicide bombings, shootings and kidnappings. Asked if he thought the offensive will seriously damage the insurgency across Iraq, U.S. Navy Secretary Gordon England said: "It will at least in Falluja. This was their stranglehold. It will hurt them." The Purple Heart award was a reminder that the U.S. military remains vulnerable in Iraq. More than 50 U.S. troops were killed in the Falluja offensive and hundreds were wounded. In all, more than 1,200 have been killed since the invasion. Lance Corporal Joseph Judans, 26, of Jacksonville, Florida, received the medal for sustaining a shrapnel wound to the forehead on Nov. 4 when a roadside bomb exploded near his convoy on the outskirts of Falluja. He is a combat engineer who regularly defuses those types of bombs, which U.S. military officials say are behind about 30 percent of the deaths of soldiers killed in action. Sattler was optimistic despite remaining risks in Iraq. "Our goal is to get every single person in Falluja to vote in the elections," he said. (c) Copyright Reuters 2004. ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 3) TRANSLATION: EU creating 13 rapid intervention 'tactical groups' [On Friday, *L'Humanité* (Paris) reported on the decision of the defense ministers of the European Union to create 13 tactical combat groups able, within a matter of days, to intevene militarily anywhere in the world. -- Since the operational capability of these groups will continue to depend on NATO's logistical transport capability, which is controlled by the U.S., Okba Lamrani believes they are likely to end up functioning as support troops for U.S. military missions. --Mark] http://www.ufppc.org/content/view/1818/ [Translated from *L'Humanité* (Paris)] Europe EUROPEAN SUPPORT TROOPS FOR THE BENEFIT OF THE UNITED STATES By Okba Lamrani ** Creation beginning in 2005 of 13 "tactical groups," able to intervene anywhere in the world, complements combat forces of NATO, an organization dependent on Americans ** L'Humanité (Paris) November 26, 2004 Page 13 The ministers of defense of the Twenty-Five [member states of the European Union (EU)] have decided to put in place a new rapid intervention structure. This is not to be confused with the so-called "global" objective defined at Helsinki foreseeing the creation of a force that could reach 65,000 men and be deployed in 60 days. According to the very pro-NATO Henk Kamp, Dutch minister of defense and president of the council of defense ministers, the Union is planning to dispose of 13 "tactical" groups "able to be deployed independently in a matter of days anywhere in the world in case of an emergency." The objective (defined at last week's meeting between Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac) is to put at the disposition of the Union beginning in 2005 one tactical group permanently on stand- by, and two in 2006. All the groups are supposed to be operational in 2007. The goal is one or several groups composed of 1,500 men, their weapons, and means of transport, permanently available for deployment on more than one front. For example, in Africa and in the Balkans. This process would be placed under the European political authority symbolized by Javier Solana, whose functions, so far, no one is able to define clearly in the dense institutional tangle of Europe. Four of these groups would be organized around one of the leader countries (United Kingdom, France, Italy, Spain), and the others being multinational and able to join the four leader countries in the event of a large-scale intervention. The operational model was Operation Artemis, sent to Ituri in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which was made up in large part of French soldiers; it also included Belgian and British soldiers. According to London and Paris, "these tactical groups will be particularly useful in the support that we are able to bring to the United Nations in Africa, in Europe, or in other crisis areas." From the point of view of the British minister, COPS (meaning 'policemen' in English, or, more prosaically, Comité politique et de sécurité ['Political and Security Committee']), and in every case from the point of view of the Dutch minister and that of new NATO members, the United States remains at the heart of decision-making [sic -- the sentence is also incoherent in the original --MKJ]. All the more easily, in that only the United States disposes of the logistical means needed to transport "Defense Europe" units to the operational theaters they are designed for. Given these conditions, it looks as if European COPS are likely to serve as support troops for the United States, as they are doing in Iraq and Afghanistan. The temptation for a military confrontation with the Americans is illusory and dangerous. Europe has another card to play. Namely, that of defusing far in advance developing crises. But this implies not only conferences, but also concrete economic, social, and political operations. Otherwise, the United States risks turning European capabilities into instruments of its own policies, with the tacit accord of the EU to boot. -- Translated by Mark K. Jensen Associate Professor of French Department of Languages and Literatures Pacific Lutheran University Tacoma, Washington 98447-0003 Phone: 253-535-7219 Web page: http://www.plu.edu/~jensenmk/ E-mail: jensenmk@plu.edu ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 4) Of Mice, Men and In-Between Scientists Debate Blending Of Human, Animal Forms By Rick Weiss Washington Post Staff Writer Saturday, November 20, 2004; Page A01 http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A63731-2004Nov19 In Minnesota, pigs are being born with human blood in their veins. In Nevada, there are sheep whose livers and hearts are largely human. In California, mice peer from their cages with human brain cells firing inside their skulls. These are not outcasts from "The Island of Dr. Moreau," the 1896 novel by H.G. Wells in which a rogue doctor develops creatures that are part animal and part human. They are real creations of real scientists, stretching the boundaries of stem cell research. Biologists call these hybrid animals chimeras, after the mythical Greek creature with a lion's head, a goat's body and a serpent's tail. They are the products of experiments in which human stem cells were added to developing animal fetuses. Chimeras are allowing scientists to watch, for the first time, how nascent human cells and organs mature and interact -- not in the cold isolation of laboratory dishes but inside the bodies of living creatures. Some are already revealing deep secrets of human biology and pointing the way toward new medical treatments. But with no federal guidelines in place, an awkward question hovers above the work: How human must a chimera be before more stringent research rules should kick in? The National Academy of Sciences, which advises the federal government, has been studying the issue and hopes to make recommendations by February. Yet the range of opinions it has received so far suggests that reaching consensus may be difficult. During one recent meeting, scientists disagreed on such basic issues as whether it would be unethical for a human embryo to begin its development in an animal's womb, and whether a mouse would be better or worse off with a brain made of human neurons. "This is an area where we really need to come to a reasonable consensus," said James Battey, chairman of the National Institutes of Health's Stem Cell Task Force. "We need to establish some kind of guidelines as to what the scientific community ought to do and ought not to do." Beyond Twins and Moms Chimeras (ki-MER-ahs) -- meaning mixtures of two or more individuals in a single body -- are not inherently unnatural. Most twins carry at least a few cells from the sibling with whom they shared a womb, and most mothers carry in their blood at least a few cells from each child they have born. Recipients of organ transplants are also chimeras, as are the many people whose defective heart valves have been replaced with those from pigs or cows. And scientists for years have added human genes to bacteria and even to farm animals -- feats of genetic engineering that allow those critters to make human proteins such as insulin for use as medicines. "Chimeras are not as strange and alien as at first blush they seem," said Henry Greely, a law professor and ethicist at Stanford University who has reviewed proposals to create human-mouse chimeras there. But chimerism becomes a more sensitive topic when it involves growing entire human organs inside animals. And it becomes especially sensitive when it deals in brain cells, the building blocks of the organ credited with making humans human. In experiments like those, Greely told the academy last month, "there is a nontrivial risk of conferring some significant aspects of humanity" on the animal. Greely and his colleagues did not conclude that such experiments should never be done. Indeed, he and many other philosophers have been wrestling with the question of why so many people believe it is wrong to breach the species barrier. Does the repugnance reflect an understanding of an important natural law? Or is it just another cultural bias, like the once widespread rejection of interracial marriage? Many turn to the Bible's repeated invocation that animals should multiply "after their kind" as evidence that such experiments are wrong. Others, however, have concluded that the core problem is not necessarily the creation of chimeras but rather the way they are likely to be treated. Imagine, said Robert Streiffer, a professor of philosophy and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin, a human-chimpanzee chimera endowed with speech and an enhanced potential to learn -- what some have called a "humanzee." "There's a knee-jerk reaction that enhancing the moral status of an animal is bad," Streiffer said. "But if you did it, and you gave it the protections it deserves, how could the animal complain?" Unfortunately, said Harvard political philosopher Michael J. Sandel, speaking last fall at a meeting of the President's Council on Bioethics, such protections are unlikely. "Chances are we would make them perform menial jobs or dangerous jobs," Sandel said. "That would be an objection." A Research Breakthrough The potential power of chimeras as research tools became clear about a decade ago in a series of dramatic experiments by Evan Balaban, now at McGill University in Montreal. Balaban took small sections of brain from developing quails and transplanted them into the developing brains of chickens. The resulting chickens exhibited vocal trills and head bobs unique to quails, proving that the transplanted parts of the brain contained the neural circuitry for quail calls. It also offered astonishing proof that complex behaviors could be transferred across species. No one has proposed similar experiments between, say, humans and apes. But the discovery of human embryonic stem cells in 1998 allowed researchers to envision related experiments that might reveal a lot about how embryos grow. The cells, found in 5-day-old human embryos, multiply prolifically and -- unlike adult cells -- have the potential to turn into any of the body's 200 or so cell types. Scientists hope to cultivate them in laboratory dishes and grow replacement tissues for patients. But with those applications years away, the cells are gaining in popularity for basic research. The most radical experiment, still not conducted, would be to inject human stem cells into an animal embryo and then transfer that chimeric embryo into an animal's womb. Scientists suspect the proliferating human cells would spread throughout the animal embryo as it matured into a fetus and integrate themselves into every organ. Such "humanized" animals could have countless uses. They would almost certainly provide better ways to test a new drug's efficacy and toxicity, for example, than the ordinary mice typically used today. But few scientists are eager to do that experiment. The risk, they say, is that some human cells will find their way to the developing testes or ovaries, where they might grow into human sperm and eggs. If two such chimeras -- say, mice -- were to mate, a human embryo might form, trapped in a mouse. Not everyone agrees that this would be a terrible result. "What would be so dreadful?" asked Ann McLaren, a renowned developmental biologist at the University of Cambridge in England. After all, she said, no human embryo could develop successfully in a mouse womb. It would simply die, she told the academy. No harm done. But others disagree -- if only out of fear of a public backlash. "Certainly you'd get a negative response from people to have a human embryo trying to grow in the wrong place," said Cynthia B. Cohen, a senior research fellow at Georgetown University's Kennedy Institute of Ethics and a member of Canada's Stem Cell Oversight Committee, which supported a ban on such experiments there. How Human? But what about experiments in which scientists add human stem cells not to an animal embryo but to an animal fetus, which has already made its eggs and sperm? Then the only question is how human a creature one dares to make. In one ongoing set of experiments, Jeffrey L. Platt at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., has created human-pig chimeras by adding human-blood-forming stem cells to pig fetuses. The resulting pigs have both pig and human blood in their vessels. And it's not just pig blood cells being swept along with human blood cells; some of the cells themselves have merged, creating hybrids. It is important to have learned that human and pig cells can fuse, Platt said, because he and others have been considering transplanting modified pig organs into people and have been wondering if that might pose a risk of pig viruses getting into patient's cells. Now scientists know the risk is real, he said, because the viruses may gain access when the two cells fuse. In other experiments led by Esmail Zanjani, chairman of animal biotechnology at the University of Nevada at Reno, scientists have been adding human stem cells to sheep fetuses. The team now has sheep whose livers are up to 80 percent human -- and make all the compounds human livers make. Zanjani's goal is to make the humanized livers available to people who need transplants. The sheep portions will be rejected by the immune system, he predicted, while the human part will take root. "I don't see why anyone would raise objections to our work," Zanjani said in an interview. Immunity Advantages Perhaps the most ambitious efforts to make use of chimeras come from Irving Weissman, director of Stanford University's Institute of Cancer/Stem Cell Biology and Medicine. Weissman helped make the first mouse with a nearly complete human immune system -- an animal that has proved invaluable for tests of new drugs against the AIDS virus, which does not infect conventional mice. More recently his team injected human neural stem cells into mouse fetuses, creating mice whose brains are about 1 percent human. By dissecting the mice at various stages, the researchers were able to see how the added brain cells moved about as they multiplied and made connections with mouse cells. Already, he said, they have learned things they "never would have learned had there been a bioethical ban." Now he wants to add human brain stem cells that have the defects that cause Parkinson's disease, Lou Gehrig's disease and other brain ailments -- and study how those cells make connections. Scientists suspect that these diseases, though they manifest themselves in adulthood, begin when something goes wrong early in development. If those errors can be found, researchers would have a much better chance of designing useful drugs, Weissman said. And those drugs could be tested in the chimeras in ways not possible in patients. Now Weissman says he is thinking about making chimeric mice whose brains are 100 percent human. He proposes keeping tabs on the mice as they develop. If the brains look as if they are taking on a distinctly human architecture -- a development that could hint at a glimmer of humanness -- they could be killed, he said. If they look as if they are organizing themselves in a mouse brain architecture, they could be used for research. So far this is just a "thought experiment," Weissman said, but he asked the university's ethics group for an opinion anyway. "Everyone said the mice would be useful," he said. "But no one was sure if it should be done." (c) 2004 The Washington Post Company washingtonpost.com ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 5) A Moment of Silence, Before I Start this Poem by Emmanuel Ortiz 9.11.02 Before I start this poem, I'd like to ask you to join me in a moment of silence in honor of those who died in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon last September 11th. I would also like to ask you to offer up a moment of silence for all of those who have been harassed, imprisoned, disappeared, tortured, raped, or killed in retaliation for those strikes, for the victims in both Afghanistan and the U.S. And if I could just add one more thing... A full day of silence for the tens of thousands of Palestinians who have died at the hands of U.S.-backed Israeli forces over decades of occupation. Six months of silence for the million and-a-half Iraqi people, mostly children, who have died of mall-nourishment or starvation as a result of an 11-year U.S. embargo against the country. Before I begin this poem: two months of silence for the Blacks under Apartheid in South Africa, where homeland security made them aliens in their own country Nine months of silence for the dead in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where death rained down and peeled back every layer of concrete, steel, earth and skin and the survivors went on as if alive. A year of silence for the millions of dead in Viet Nam - a people, not a war - for those who know a thing or two about the scent of burning fuel, their relatives' bones buried in it, their babies born of it. A year of silence for the dead in Cambodia and Laos, victims of a secret war ... ssssshhhhh .... Say nothing ... we don't want them to learn that they are dead. Two months of silence for the decades of dead in Colombia, whose names, like the corpses they once represented, have piled up and slipped off our tongues. Before I begin this poem, An hour of silence for El Salvador ... An afternoon of silence for Nicaragua ... Two days of silence for the Guetmaltecos ... None of whom ever knew a moment of peace in their living years. 45 seconds of silence for the 45 dead at Acteal, Chiapas 25 years of silence for the hundred million Africans who found their graves far deeper in the ocean than any building could poke into the sky. There will be no DNA testing or dental records to identify their remains. And for those who were strung and swung from the heights of sycamore trees in the south, the north, the east, and the west... 100 years of silence... For the hundreds of millions of indigenous peoples from this half of right here, Whose land and lives were stolen, In postcard-perfect plots like Pine Ridge, Wounded Knee, Sand Creek, Fallen Timbers, or the Trail of Tears. Names now reduced to innocuous magnetic poetry on the refrigerator of our consciousness ... So you want a moment of silence? And we are all left speechless Our tongues snatched from our mouths Our eyes stapled shut A moment of silence And the poets have all been laid to rest The drums disintegrating into dust Before I begin this poem, You want a moment of silence You mourn now as if the world will never be the same And the rest of us hope to hell it won't be. Not like it always has been Because this is not a 9-1-1 poem This is a 9/10 poem, It is a 9/9 poem, A 9/8 poem, A 9/7 poem This is a 1492 poem. This is a poem about what causes poems like this to be written And if this is a 9/11 poem, then This is a September 11th poem for Chile, 1971 This is a September 12th poem for Steven Biko in South Africa, 1977 This is a September 13th poem for the brothers at Attica Prison, New York, 1971. This is a September 14th poem for Somalia, 1992. This is a poem for every date that falls to the ground in ashes This is a poem for the 110 stories that were never told The 110 stories that history chose not to write in textbooks The 110 stories that CNN, BBC, The New York Times, and Newsweek ignored This is a poem for interrupting this program. And still you want a moment of silence for your dead? We could give you lifetimes of empty: The unmarked graves The lost languages The uprooted trees and histories The dead stares on the faces of nameless children Before I start this poem We could be silent forever Or just long enough to hunger, For the dust to bury us And you would still ask us For more of our silence. If you want a moment of silence Then stop the oil pumps Turn off the engines and the televisions Sink the cruise ships Crash the stock markets Unplug the marquee lights, Delete the instant messages, Derail the trains, the light rail transit If you want a moment of silence, put a brick through the window ofTaco Bell, And pay the workers for wages lost Tear down the liquor stores, The townhouses, the White Houses, the jailhouses, the Penthouses and the Playboys. If you want a moment of silence, Then take it On Super Bowl Sunday, The Fourth of July During Dayton's 13 hour sale Or the next time your white guilt fills the room where my beautiful people have gathered You want a moment of silence Then take it Now, Before this poem begins. Here, in the echo of my voice, In the pause between goosesteps of the second hand In the space between bodies in embrace, Here is your silence. Take it. But take it all Don't cut in line. Let your silence begin at the beginning of crime. But we, Tonight we will keep right on singing For our dead. ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 6) Where's Picasso? Falluja: The 21 st Century Guernica By Saul Landau http://www.progresoweekly.com/index.php?progreso=Landau&otherweek=110136240 On November 12, as U.S. jets bombed Falluja for the ninth straight day, a Redwood City California jury found Scott Peterson guilty of murdering his wife and unborn child. That macabre theme captured the headlines and dominated conversation throughout workplaces and homes. Indeed, Peterson "news" all but drowned out the U.S. military's claim that successful bombing and shelling of a city of 300,000 residents had struck only sites where "insurgents" had holed up. On November 15, the BBC embedded newsman with a marine detachment claimed that the unofficial death toll estimate had risen to well over 2,000, many of them civilians. As Iraqi eyewitnesses told BBC reporters he had seen bombs hitting residential targets, Americans exchanged viewpoints and kinky jokes about Peterson. One photographer captured a Falluja man holding his dead son, one of two kids he lost to U.S. bombers. He could not get medical help to stop the bleeding. A November 14 Reuters reporter wrote that residents told him that "U.S. bombardments hit a clinic inside the Sunni Muslim city, killing doctors, nurses and patients." The U.S. military denied the reports. Such stories did not make headlines. Civilian casualties in aggressive U.S. wars don't sell media space. But editors love shots of anguished GI Joes. The November 12 Los Angeles Times ran a front page shot of a soldier with mud smeared face and cigarette dangling from his lips. This image captured the "suffering" of Falluja. The GI complained he was out of "smokes." The young man doing his "duty to free Falluja," stands in stark contrast to the nightmare of Falluja. "Smoke is everywhere," an Iraqi told the BBC (Nov 11). "The house some doors from mine was hit during the bombardment on Wednesday night. A 13- year-old boy was killed. His name was Ghazi. A row of palm trees used to run along the street outside my house - now only the trunks are left... There are more and more dead bodies on the streets and the stench is unbearable." Another eyewitness told Reuters (November 12) that "a 9-year- old boy was hit in the stomach by a piece of shrapnel. His parents said they couldn't get him to hospital because of the fighting, so they wrapped sheets around his stomach to try to stem the bleeding. He died hours later of blood loss and was buried in the garden." U.S. media's embedded reporters - presstitutes? - accepted uncritically the Pentagon's spin that many thousands of Iraqi "insurgents," including the demonized outsiders led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi ,who had joined the anti-U.S. jihad, had dug in to defend their vital base. After the armored and air assault began and the ground troops advanced, reports filtered out that the marines and the new Iraqi army that trailed behind them had faced only light resistance. Uprisings broke out in Mosul and other cities. For the combatants, however, Falluja was Hell. Hell for what? Retired Marine Corps general Bernard Trainor declared that: militarily "Falluja is not going to be much of a plus at all." He admitted that "we've knocked the hell out of this city, and the only insurgents we really got were the nut-cases and zealots, the smart ones left behind_ the guys who really want to die for Allah." While Pentagon spin doctors boasted of a U.S. "victory, Trainor pointed out that the "terrorists remain at large." The media accepts axiomatically that U.S. troops wear the "white hats" in this conflict. They do not address the obvious: Washington illegally invaded and occupied Iraq and "re-conquered" Falluja - for no serious military purpose. Logically, the media should call Iraqi "militants" patriots who resisted illegal occupation. Instead, the press implied that the "insurgents" even fought dirty, using improvised explosive devices and booby traps to kill our innocent soldiers, who use clean weapons like F16s, helicopter gun ships, tanks and artillery. Why, Washington even promised to rebuild the city that its military just destroyed. Bush committed the taxpayers to debts worth hundreds of millions of dollars, which Bechtel, Halliburton and the other corporate beneficiaries of war will use for "rebuilding." Banality and corruption arise from the epic evil of this war, one that has involved massive civilian death and the destruction of ancient cities. In 1935, Nazi General Erich Luderndorff argued in his "The Total War" that modern war encompasses all of society; thus, the military should spare no one. The Fascist Italian General Giulio Douhet echoed this theme. By targeting civilians, he said, an army could advance more rapidly. "Air-delivered terror" effectively removes civilian obstacles. That doctrine became practice in late April 1937. Nazi pilots dropped their deadly bombs on Guernica, the ancient Basque capital - like what U.S. pilots recently did to Falluja. A year earlier, in 1936, the Spanish Civil War erupted. General Francisco Franco, supported by fascist governments in Italy and Germany, led an armed uprising against the Republic. The residents of Guernica resisted. Franco asked his Nazi partners to punish these stubborn people who had withstood his army's assault. The people of Guernica had no anti-aircraft guns, much less fighter planes to defend their city. The Nazi pilots knew that at 4:30 in the afternoon of market day, the city's center would be jammed with shoppers from all around the areas. Before flying on their "heroic mission," the German pilots had drunk a toast with their Spanish counterparts in a language that both could understand: "Viva la muerte," they shouted as their raised their copas de vino . The bombing of Guernica introduced a concept in which the military would make no distinction between civilians and combatants. Death to all! Almost 1,700 people died that day and some 900 lay wounded. Franco denied that the raid ever took place and blamed the destruction of Guernica on those who defended it, much as the U.S. military intimates that the "insurgents" forced the savage attack by daring to defend their city and then hide inside their mosques. Did the public in 1937 face the equivalent of the Peterson case that commanded their attention? Where is the new Picasso who will offer a dramatic painting to help the 21 st Century public understand that what the U.S. Air Force just did to the people of Falluja resembles what the Nazis did to Guernica? In Germany and Italy in 1937, the media focused on the vicissitudes suffered by those pilots who were sacrificing for the ideals of their country by combating a "threat." The U.S. media prattles about the difficulties encountered by the marines. It never calls them bullies who occupy another people's country, subduing patriots with superior technology to kill civilians and destroy their homes and mosques. On November 15, an embedded NBC cameraman filmed a U.S. soldier murdering a wounded Iraqi prisoner in cold blood. As CNN showed the tape, its reporter offered "extenuating circumstances" for the assassination we had witnessed. The wounded man might have booby-trapped himself as other "insurgents" had done. After all, these marines had gone through hell in the last week. The reporting smacks of older imperial wars, Andrew Greely reminded us in the November 12, Chicago Sun Times. "The United States has fought unjust wars before - Mexican American, the Indian Wars, Spanish American, the Filipino Insurrection, Vietnam. Our hands are not clean. They are covered with blood, and there'll be more blood this time." Falluja should serve as the symbol of this war of atrocity against the Iraqi people, our Guernica. But, as comedian Chris Rock insightfully points out, George W. Bush has distracted us. That's why he killed Laci Peterson, why he snuck that young boy into Michael Jackson's bedroom and the young woman into Kobe Bryant's hotel room. He wants us not to think of the war in Iraq. We need a new Picasso mural, "Falluja," to help citizens focus on the themes of our time, not the travails of the Peterson case. The Bush Administration sensed the danger of such a painting. Shortly before Colin Powell's February 5, 2003, UN Security Council fraudulent, power point presentation, where he made the case for invading Iraq, UN officials, at U.S. request, placed a curtain over a tapestry of Picasso's Guernica, located at the entrance to the Security Council chambers. As a TV backdrop, the anti-war mural would contradict the Secretary of State's case for war in Iraq. Did the dead painter somehow know that his mural would foreshadow another Guernica, called Falluja? Landau directs digital media at Cal Poly Pomona University's College of Letters, Arts and Social Sciences. He is also a fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies. His latest book is THE BUSINESS OF AMERICA: HOW CONSUMERS HAVE RPELACED CITIZENS AND HOW WE CAN REVERSE THE TREND. Copyright 2004(c) Progreso Weekly, Inc. ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 7) Radio exchange contradicts army version of Gaza killing Chris McGreal in Jerusalem Wednesday November 24, 2004 The Guardian An Israeli army officer who repeatedly shot a 13-year-old Palestinian girl in Gaza dismissed a warning from another soldier that she was a child by saying he would have killed her even if she was three years old. The officer, identified by the army only as Captain R, was charged this week with illegal use of his weapon, conduct unbecoming an officer and other relatively minor infractions after emptying all 10 bullets from his gun's magazine into Iman al-Hams when she walked into a "security area" on the edge of Rafah refugee camp last month. A tape recording of radio exchanges between soldiers involved in the incident, played on Israeli television, contradicts the army's account of the events and appears to show that the captain shot the girl in cold blood. The official account claimed that Iman was shot as she walked towards an army post with her schoolbag because soldiers feared she was carrying a bomb. But the tape recording of the radio conversation between soldiers at the scene reveals that, from the beginning, she was identified as a child and at no point was a bomb spoken about nor was she described as a threat. Iman was also at least 100 yards from any soldier. Instead, the tape shows that the soldiers swiftly identified her as a "girl of about 10" who was "scared to death". The tape also reveals that the soldiers said Iman was headed eastwards, away from the army post and back into the refugee camp, when she was shot. At that point, Captain R took the unusual decision to leave the post in pursuit of the girl. He shot her dead and then "confirmed the kill" by emptying his magazine into her body. The tape recording is of a three-way conversation between the army watchtower, the army post's operations room and the captain, who was a company commander. The soldier in the watchtower radioed his colleagues after he saw Iman: "It's a little girl. She's running defensively eastward." Operations room: "Are we talking about a girl under the age of 10?" Watchtower: "A girl of about 10, she's behind the embankment, scared to death." A few minutes later, Iman is shot in the leg from one of the army posts. The watchtower: "I think that one of the positions took her out." The company commander then moves in as Iman lies wounded and helpless. Captain R: "I and another soldier ... are going in a little nearer, forward, to confirm the kill ... Receive a situation report. We fired and killed her ... I also confirmed the kill. Over." Witnesses described how the captain shot Iman twice in the head, walked away, turned back and fired a stream of bullets into her body. Doctors at Rafah's hospital said she had been shot at least 17 times. On the tape, the company commander then "clarifies" why he killed Iman: "This is commander. Anything that's mobile, that moves in the zone, even if it's a three-year-old, needs to be killed. Over." The army's original account of the killing s aid that the soldiers only identified Iman as a child after she was first shot. But the tape shows that they were aware just how young the small, slight girl was before any shots were fired. The case came to light after soldiers under the command of Captain R went to an Israeli newspaper to accuse the army of covering up the circumstances of the killing. A subsequent investigation by the officer responsible for the Gaza strip, Major General Dan Harel, concluded that the captain had "not acted unethically". However, the military police launched an investigation, which resulted in charges against the unit commander. Iman's parents have accused the army of whitewashing the affair by filing minor charges against Captain R. They want him prosecuted for murder. Record of a shooting Watchtower 'It's a little girl. She's running defensively eastward' Operations room 'Are we talking about a girl under the age of 10?' Watchtower 'A girl of about 10, she's behind the embankment, scared to death' Captain R (after killing the girl) 'Anything moving in the zone, even a three-year-old, needs to be killed' ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 8) January 20 Call to Action: RISE Against Bush/SHINE For A Peaceful (Can't we all just unite together on Jan. 20 and March 20, 2005? ...as I said, people the world over will be demonstrating on January 20, 2005 against the death and devastation the U.S.Government has brought upon Iraq-based all on lies.) Can't we all just unite together on Jan. 20 and March 20, 2005? ...bw) January 20 Call to Action: RISE Against Bush/SHINE For A Peaceful ------- Forwarded message ------- From: jsmacdonald@riseup.net To: counter-inauguration@lists.riseup.net, stop-the-inauguration@lists.riseup.net Subject: [stop-the-inauguration] January 20 Call to Action: RISE Against Bush/SHINE For A Peaceful Tomorrow Date: Wed, 24 Nov 2004 14:03:13 -0800 (PST) RISE Against Bush SHINE For A Peaceful Tomorrow A Call for Anti-War Actions in Washington, DC, January 20, 2005 Every morning, the sun rises up, penetrating and overcoming the darkness of night. What once was dark becomes bright, changed by the force of the sun's rays. Our world is in darkness tonight, plagued with war, poverty, environmental destruction, and attacks on many of the liberties that so many of us hold dear. The darkness over our world has grown yet darker with the election of George W. Bush to another 4 years in office. In the dark of the night, we need only wait for the sun. However, in the dark of our world, we cannot wait. If we are to see a new dawn, we must take action now. The DC Anti-War Network (DAWN) calls on the people of the world to RISE Against Bush and SHINE For A Peaceful Tomorrow. We RISE · Against the needless slaughter in and occupation of Iraq; · Against the assault on civil liberties, as represented by such acts as the Patriot Act and the immoral detaining of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay; · Against U.S. support of Israel's apartheid against the Palestinian people; · Against U.S. overthrow of Aristide in Haiti; · Against U.S. attempts to overthrow any other democratically elected leader, including Hugo Chavez in Venezuela; · Against any U.S. military action in Iran. We SHINE · For a world that embraces peaceful dialogue instead of war; · For a world where we respect the liberty of all beings; · For a world that looks out for all those who are now oppressed, including the poor, women, racial minorities, workers, the disabled, homosexuals, transgendered, as well as the earth and its creatures; · For a world that embraces social justice; · For democracy and the autonomy of all people to have a full say in how they are governed; · For each other. The Call DAWN calls for people all over the nation and world to converge on Washington, DC, on the day of George W. Bush's Inauguration, January 20, 2005, for peaceful anti-war actions. While DAWN is coordinating with many groups for a day of actions, DAWN calls additionally for these specific actions: 1. A permitted nonviolent anti-war rally followed by a march to Bush's inaugural parade route 2. A nonviolent civil disobedience die-in, following the rally, in memorial to the dead at the hands of Bush and his Administration DAWN also calls for organizations, affinity groups, and individuals to partner with us in organizing these two actions. Next Steps If you or your group or organization wants to endorse DAWN's call to action, please send an e-mail to info@dawndc.net. Write also if you wish to collaborate in the planning or offer financial donations or other material support. Find out more information about DAWN's and other groups' actions at http://www.counter-inaugural.org, by participating in the DC Cluster Spokescouncil meetings (refer to website), or by participating in DAWN's weekly meetings. Check our website, http://www.dawndc.net for more details. Housing boards, events boards, working group information, and (soon) ride boards can be found at http://www.counter-inaugural.org. We will post updates of our actions, as they become available, to that website. The new dawn begins with our rising up. It will take a lot of light to break through such darkness, but we can do it. We have no other choice. Join us on J20! ***please forward widely*** -- Coalition for Peace and Justice UNPLUG Salem Campaign; 321 Barr Ave, Linwood NJ 08221; 609-601-8583; cell 609-742-0982 ncohen12@comcast.net; www.unplugsalem.org ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 9) Vietnam Vet, 53, Called for Duty in Iraq-Report PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - A 53-year-old Vietnam veteran from western Pennsylvania has been called up for active service with the U.S. military in the Iraq (news - web sites) war, The Tribune Review of Greensburg, Pennsylvania reported on Wednesday. Paul Dunlap, a sergeant in the Army National Guard, will join an armored division next month as a telecommunications specialist in Kuwait, and expects to be there for at least a year, the newspaper reported. Dunlap, who has not been in combat since serving as a 19-year- old Marine in Vietnam, could not be reached for comment. He will leave behind his wife Mary, four children and three grandchildren. "I don't think any of them want me to go," Dunlap told the paper. "I'm thinking it's a long time since I've been in war." Dunlap, from the town of Pleasant Unity, near Greensburg, Pennsylvania, said he received a call from his sergeant major and was told to report for a soldier readiness program, the newspaper said. Dunlap's wife was quoted as saying the entire family "prayed that he wouldn't pass his physical." "It's very, very scary," she said. "He's been a soldier since I met him, but there's a part of me that wonders at 53: Is he going to be up to doing what he needs to do over there?" Critics of the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq have argued that the current level of U.S. troops there is too low to control an insurgency that has destabilized the country since the ouster of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein (news - web sites). The dependence of full-time troops on national guard members such as Dunlap shows the military is stretched too thin in Iraq and elsewhere, critics say. Change Links Progressive Newspaper. Act. Act in Love and Spirit. ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 10) Still Worlds Apart on Iraq EDITORIAL November 26, 2004 http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/26/opinion/26fri1.html?oref=login&hp Foreign ministers from all the right countries were present. The timing - two months before the scheduled date of Iraq's all-important elections - was promising. The Mideast location was symbolically apt. Too bad, then, that this week's big international conference on Iraq in the Egyptian seaside resort of Sharm el Sheik, bringing together all of Baghdad's neighbors and every permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, did so little to change the dismal overall equation. The ministers came, they dined and they endorsed the familiar uncontroversial list of desirable goals. They encouraged free elections. They condemned terrorism. They endorsed Iraq's territorial integrity. They reiterated the importance of humanitarian assistance. Then, still fundamentally disagreeing about how to achieve these goals, they flew off again, without committing themselves to anything likely to make any real difference. International conferences like these can be quite useful when the participants start out with some basic agreement about the nature of the problem and the outlines of some possible solutions. On Iraq, there is still no such agreement. More than 20 months after the United States unilaterally assumed responsibility for Iraq's future by invading without the support of the Security Council or most neighboring countries, it still finds itself largely on its own, with much of the rest of the world watching skeptically from the sidelines. This is not a healthy situation - for Iraq, for the United States, for the Middle East or for the international community. How things go in Iraq over the next few months will probably have widespread and lasting consequences for all. And they are unlikely to go very well unless all, or at least most, of the governments represented at Sharm el Sheik begin actively working together. But don't expect that to happen any time soon. The newly re-elected Bush administration seems more determined than ever to rely on military force to crush the Sunni insurgency, even if that means going ahead with elections next January that are not broadly inclusive. Most of the rest of the world, doubting that this strategy can bring security, legitimacy or real sovereignty, seems equally determined to remain largely aloof. The preferred strategy seems to be to hope for the best and offer such low-risk gestures as forgiving bad Iraqi debt that would surely never be repaid anyway. But even debt relief, which Western and Japanese government creditors agreed to last weekend, is further than Iraq's major Arab creditors, like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, are now prepared to go. That makes it far more difficult for the new Iraqi government to obtain the credit it will need to revive and rebuild a devastated country. And so far only Romania and tiny Fiji have offered soldiers for the protective force needed to send more election workers to Iraq. That leaves America still going it almost alone. Apart from the British, most remaining multinational troops are more symbolic than militarily significant. Washington's other main partner is Iraq's interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, who has not done enough to reach out to the estranged Sunni minority and now may be in danger of losing Shiite support to the new anti-American alliance of the former rebel leader Moktada al-Sadr and the former Pentagon favorite, Ahmad Chalabi. The newly trained Iraqi security forces the administration likes to talk about still do not exist in large enough numbers to safeguard polling places in January, nor has their reliability under fire yet been convincingly demonstrated. The more than 135,000 United States troops now on long-term occupation duty cannot remain there indefinitely without seriously eroding America's worldwide readiness and credibility. To begin changing this bleak picture, the Bush administration will have to work much harder at international bridge building than it did in its first term. Simply soliciting support for current American policies will not be enough. Washington must also be willing to consider changing some of those policies as part of a renewed process of international consultation. That might lead to more productive international conferences in the future. Copyright 2004 The New York Times ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 11) Leading Iraqi Parties Call for Election Delay By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) Filed at 12:33 p.m. ET November 26, 2004 http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq-Elections.html?hp&ex=1 101531600&en=ab08003b4e7ba050&ei=5094&partner=homepage BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- Seventeen political parties on Friday demanded postponement of the Jan. 30 elections for at least six months until the government is capable of securing polling places. The parties, mostly Sunni Arab, Kurdish and secular groups, made the call in a manifesto signed at the home of Sunni elder statesman Adnan Pachachi, who said he believed the government was waiting for such a request before seriously addressing the question of whether an election could be held by the end of January. Parties of the majority Shiite community strongly support holding the elections on time but there is widespread doubt within the minority Sunni community because of insurgent unrest in Sunni regions of central and northern Iraq. Sunni clerics from the Association of Muslim Scholars have called on Sunnis to boycott the election to protest this month's U.S.-led assault on the insurgent stronghold of Fallujah. A widespread boycott by the Sunni community could deny the elected parliament and government the legitimacy that U.S. and Iraqi authorities believe is necessary to help bring stability to Iraq and curb the insurgency. Mohsen Abdul Hamid, leader of the Iraqi Islamic Party, said that delaying the election was necessary because of ``threats facing national unity, and fears of inciting sectarian tensions if a certain sect was excluded from the elections,'' referring to the Sunnis. Other politicians said that the government was incapable of protecting voters from terror attacks if they tried to cast ballots. Mohel Hardan al-Duleimi of the Arab Socialist Movement said most people were afraid to vote and that the government's election commission had failed to educate the public about the election. ``There is strong political polarization with sectarian roots,'' al-Duleimi said. Copyright 2004 The Associated Press
Wednesday, November 24, 2004
BAUAW NEWSLETTER-TUES.-THURS. NOV. 23-25, 2004Bay Area United Against War Presents a film screening of: "WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception" Meet film director Danny Schechter "The News Dissector." He will be available for a question and answer period right after the movie. Saturday, Dec. 11th, 2004 (Showtime to be announced) Embarcadero Center Cinema One Embarcadero Center, Promenade Level San Francisco, CA 94111 (415) 267-4893 " 'WMD' paints a meticulous and damning portrait of the media's coverage of the Iraq war. In sobering detail, Danny Schechter shows us how the TV networks now prefer the role of cheerleader, to that of objective journalist," says Mike Nisholson of austinnforkerry.org. "Schechter tackles his subject like a cross between Errol Morris and a Dashiell Hammet detective, following close on the tail of big media reporters as they in turn track the march toward war, embed themselves in the military industrial complex and then get out when the fighting gets tough and leave the cleanup work to stringers, " writes Shandon Fowler of film's Hamptons International Film Festival appearance, Oct. 20-24. To learn more about the film visit: www.wmdthefilm.org www.bauaw.org (Distributed by Cinema Libre Studio, www.cinemalibrestudio.com) ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 1) Fallujah Refugees ** Dahr Jamail's Iraq Dispatches ** ** http://dahrjamailiraq.com ** November 23, 2004 (See below...bw) 2) Occupier of a Prime Minister's Chair ** Dahr Jamail's Iraq Dispatches * November 23, 2004 (See below...bw) 3) U.S. Starts New Offensive South of Baghdad By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) Filed at 12:13 p.m. ET November 23, 2004 http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq.html?hp&ex=1101272400& en=049a4b3f977459eb&ei=5094&partner=homepage (link only...bw) 4) U.S. Death Toll in Iraq for Nov. Tops 100 By ROBERT BURNS AP Military Writer WASHINGTON (AP) Nov 23, 8:01 AM EST http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/I/IRAQ_MARINE_DEATHS?SITE=NYSTA&SECTION =HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT (Link only...bw) 5) Iraq: the unthinkable becomes normal John Pilger Green Left Weekly, issue #607, November 24, 2004 Mainstream media speak as if Fallujah were populated only by foreign "insurgents". In fact, women and children are being slaughtered in our name. http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/2004/607/607p15.htm (Link only...bw) 6) Convention Protesters File Lawsuit Over Detentions By JULIA PRESTON November 23, 2004 http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/23/nyregion/23protest.html?oref=login (Link only...bw) 7) Confusion Reigns as U.S. Raid Misses Target in Iraq By Luke Baker MOSUL, Iraq Published on Tuesday, November 23, 2004 by Reuters http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1123-09.htm (Link only...bw) 8) The Netherlands tobogganing from crisis to crisis The end of the "polder" model By Erik Demeester (See below...bw) 9) In a Land Torn by Violence, Too Many Troubling Deaths CASES WITHOUT BORDERS By JUAN FORERO RIOSUCIO, Colombia November 23, 2004 http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/23/health/psychology/23trib.html (Link only...bw) 10) Alert! Fed Massive Raid and Arrest Chinese Restaurant Workers Across U.S.! National Immigrant Solidarity Network Urgent Updates November 23, 2004 URL: http://www.immigrantsolidarity.org (See below...bw) 11) MILLION CON MARCH! (See below...bw) 12) Rights Group Calls on Caterpillar to Halt Bulldozer Sales to Israel By Jim Lobe WASHINGTON Published on Tuesday, November 23, 2004 by OneWorld.net http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1123-02.htm (Link only...bw) 13) A Mother Deported, and a Child Left Behind By NINA BERNSTEIN November 24, 2004 http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/24/nyregion/24deport.html?oref=login (Link only...bw) ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 1) Fallujah Refugees ** Dahr Jamail's Iraq Dispatches ** ** http://dahrjamailiraq.com ** November 23, 2004 "Doctors in Fallujah are reporting there are patients in the hospital there who were forced out by the Americans," said Mehdi Abdulla, a 33 year-old ambulance driver at a hospital in Baghdad, "Some doctors there told me they had a major operation going, but the soldiers took the doctors away and left the patient to die." He looks at the ground, then away to the distance. Honking cars fill the chaotic street outside the hospital where they'd just received brand new desks. The empty boxes are strewn about outside. Um Mohammed, a doctor at the hospital sat behind her old, wooden desk. "How can I take a new desk when there are patients dying because we don't have medicine for them," she asked while holding her hands in the air, "They should build a lift so patients who can't walk can be taken to surgery, and instead we have these new desks!" Her eyes were piercing with fire, while yet another layer of frustration is folded into her work. "And there are still a few Iraqis who think the Americans came to liberate them," she added while looking out the broken window. The glass lay about outside-shattered from a car bomb that had detonated in front of the hospital. "These people will change their minds about the liberators when they, too, have had a family member killed by them." Mehdi then takes us to a refugee camp of Fallujans over on the campus of the University of Baghdad. Tents surround an old mosque. Kids run about several of them kicking around a half-inflated soccer ball. Some women are using two water taps to clean pots and wash clothing. Many people stand around, walking aimlessly, waiting. We contact a sheikh for permission to talk to some of the families. He greets us then says, "You can see how much we have suffered. We have 97 families here now, with 50 more coming tomorrow. People are kidnapping refugee children and selling them." A 35 year-old merchant from Fallujah, Abu Hammad, starts telling us what he experienced, and barely breathes while doing so because he is so enraged. "The American warplanes came continuously through the night and bombed everywhere in Fallujah! It did not stop even for a moment! If the American forces did not find a target to bomb, they used sound bombs just to terrorize the people and children. The city stayed in fear; I cannot give a picture of how panicked everyone was." He is shaking with grief and anger. "In the mornings I found Fallujah empty, as if nobody lives in it. Even poisonous gases have been used in Fallujah-they used everything-tanks, artillery, infantry, poison gas. Fallujah has been bombed to the ground. Nothing is left." Several men standing with us, other refugees, nod in agreement while looking at the setting sun, the direction of Fallujah. Abu Hammad continues, "Most of the innocent people there stayed in mosques to be closer to God for safety. Even the wounded people were killed. Old ladies with white flags were killed by the Americans! The Americans announced for people to come to a certain mosque if they wanted to leave Fallujah, and even the people who went there carrying white flags were killed!" One of the men standing with us, a large man named Mohammad Ali is crying; his large body shuddering with each bit of new information revealed by Abu Hammad. "There was no food, no electricity, no water," continues Abu Hammad, "We couldn't even light a candle because the Americans would see it and kill us." He pauses, then asks, "This suffering of the people, I would like to ask everyone in the world if they have seen suffering like this. The people in Fallujah are only Fallujans. Ayad Allawi was a liar when he said there are foreign fighters there." He continues on, "There are bodies the Americans threw in the river. I saw them do this! And anyone who stayed thought they would be killed by the Americans, so they tried to swim across the river. Even then the Americans shot them with rifles from the shore! Even if some of them were holding a white flag or white clothes over their heads to show they are not fighters, they were all shot! Even people who couldn't swim tried to cross the river! They drowned rather than staying to be killed by the Americans." Mohammad cuts in and begins his plea. He is from the Julan district of Fallujah, where much of the heaviest fighting occurred, and continues to occur. "They call us terrorists when we live in the city. We own the city. We didn't go to fight the Americans-they came to our city to fight us. Fallujans are defending our city, our houses, our mosques, our honor. Ayad Allawi says we are his family-can you attack your family Allawi? Do you attack your own family Allawi?" He now raises his hands to the sky and asks loudly, "We are asking Islam, all the Islamic countries to have a clear conscience to look at what is happening to Fallujah. We were the most secured city with the police and ING (Iraqi National Guard) without the presence of the Americans. But now when we come to Baghdad we are afraid because our cars and belongings will be looted." His large body continues to shudder as he talks on, "We did not feel that there is Eid after Ramadan this year because of our situation being so bad. All we have is more fasting. They said they are going to reconstruct Fallujah-but I would like to ask when and how, and what did they do to Sadr City when they stopped fighting there? They did nothing." I notice a man with one leg sitting near the mosque nodding while he smokes his cigarette while Mohammad continues, "I would like to ask the whole world-why is this? I tell the presidents of the Arab and Muslim countries to wake up! Wake up please! We are being killed, we are refugees from our houses, our children have nothing-not even shoes to wear! Wake up! Wake up! Stop being traitors! Be human beings and not the dummies of the Americans!" He is weeping even more when he adds, "I left Fallujah yesterday and I am handicapped. I asked God to save us but our house was bombed and I lost everything." As Mohammad no longer speaks, a 40 year-old refugee, Khalil, speaks up. "When the Americans come to our city we refuse to accept any foreigner coming to invade us. We accept the ING's but not the Americans. Nobody has seen any Zarqawi. If the Americans don't come in our city, who do Fallujans attack? Fallujans don't attack other Iraqis. Fallujans only attack the American troops when they come inside or near our city." Rather than weeping like so many others I interviewed, Khalil is raging. His sadness is being covered with anger. "If we have a government-the government should solve the suffering of the people. Our government does not do this-instead they are always attacking us, our government is a dummy government. They are not here to help us. The Minister of Defense and Interior are speaking that we are their family-so why do they collapse our houses on our heads? Why do they kill all of us?" But then tears find his eyes, and while pointing to several small children nearby he says, "Eid is over. Ramadan is over-and the kids are remaining without even a smile. They have nothing and nowhere to go. We used to take them to parks to amuse them, but now we don't even have a house for them." He continues pointing at the children, along with some women nearby, "What about the children? What did they do? What about the women? I can't describe the situation in Fallujah and the condition of the people-Fallujah is suffering too much, it is almost gone now." He then explains, "We got some supplies from the good people of Baghdad, and some volunteer doctors came on their own with some medicines, but they ran out daily because conditions are so bad. We saw nothing from the Ministry of Health-no medicines or doctors or anything." He said those who left Fallujah did not think they would be gone so long, so they brought only their summer clothes. Now it is quite cold at night, down to 10 degrees C at night and windy much of the time. Khalil adds, "We need more clothes. It's a disaster we are living in here at this camp. We are living like dogs and the kids do not have enough clothes." As of today, a spokesman for the Iraqi Red Crescent told me none of their relief teams had been allowed into Fallujah, and the military said it would be at least two more weeks before any refugees would be allowed into their city. More writing, photos and commentary at http://dahrjamailiraq.com You are subscribed to the Dahr Jamail's email Iraq Dispatches because you requested a subscription at some point. You can visit http://dahrjamailiraq.com/email_list/ to subscribe or unsubscribe to the email list. Or, you can unsubscribe by sending an email to iraq_dispatches-request@dahrjamailiraq.com and write unsubscribe in the subject or the body of the email. Iraq_Dispatches mailing list http://lists.dahrjamailiraq.com/mailman/listinfo/iraq_dispatches ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 2) Occupier of a Prime Minister's Chair ** Dahr Jamail's Iraq Dispatches * November 23, 2004 Dahr Jamail BAGHDAD, Nov 23 (IPS) - The prime minister is following in the footsteps of the last president. The rule of Ayad Allawi, the U.S. appointed interim prime minister of Iraq, is now more in the style of the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein than a leader of a supposedly democratic state. Most Iraqis had celebrated the overthrow of the regime of Saddam Hussein. But under what has developed into a brutal and bloody occupation people are turning against the interim prime minister as they turned against Saddam. One of Allawi's earliest moves after his appointment was to form a new version of the feared secret police in Iraq. The Economist reported that Allawi's rivals accused him of "recruiting former torturers to man a new apparatus of oppression." In July Paul McGeogh of the Sydney Morning Herald reported that two eyewitnesses saw Allawi execute six people at the security centre in the al-Amadiyah district of Baghdad. The men had been detained for allegedly attacking U.S. forces two weeks before the handover of power. The appointed interim prime minister has instituted martial law, threatened to detain journalists, and banned the Arab channel al-Jazeera from reporting within Iraq. Allawi's minister of justice has brought back the death penalty and spoken of chopping off the hands and heads of those described as insurgents. Now comes the siege of Fallujah. At a refugee camp in Baghdad filled with families from the besieged city, anger erupts at the mention of Allawi's name. "Ayad Allawi says we are his family," said Mohammad Ali, a 53-year-old refugee wounded by U.S. bombs in his home in Fallujah. "Can you attack your family, Allawi? Do you attack your own family, Allawi?" Allawi is a traitor to the people of Iraq, said Dr. Um Mohammed who works at a hospital in Baghdad. "He is an American puppet who enjoys the killing of Iraqis." A trader in central Baghdad Abdel Hakim Abdulla said Allawi has "never made a decision that benefits Iraqis." Anger is building up against Allawi also over the role he played before he was appointed interim prime minister. He is the man many hold responsible for providing fraudulent intelligence that Saddam Hussein posed a threat to the United States. His now discredited statements to U.S. intelligence that Saddam Hussein had links to the terrorist attacks of Sep. 11 were used to justify the invasion of Iraq. This had shaken his credibility amongst Iraqis from the beginning. The right-wing Daily Telegraph of London published a "newly discovered" document from Allawi Dec. 14 last year. Allawi, who was then a member of the Iraqi Governing Council stated that the mastermind of the Sep. 11 terrorist attacks Mohammad Atta had been trained in Iraq with support from Saddam Hussein. This fraudulent information was cited by U.S. intelligence as compelling evidence that Saddam Hussein had contacts with al-Qaeda. It was cited as justification for the failing occupation of Iraq. A second part of the memo also believed to have been provided by Allawi alleged shipment of uranium from Niger to Iraq. This is another claim that has been proved false. Allawi was reported by the International Herald Tribune to have said that Saddam Hussein had stashed billions of dollars in banks around the world. No evidence of these billions has emerged. Allawi again was said again to have provided the 'intelligence' in a British government dossier that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction which could be made operational in 45 minutes, according to a report in the New York Times May 29 this year. This 'intelligence' has been acknowledged to be false. Allawi, a Shia Muslim, was "unanimously nominated" to the post of interim prime minister May 28 by the U.S.-appointed former Iraqi Governing Council. Adam Daifallah wrote in the New York Sun that Allawi heads a group comprising primarily former Baathist associates of deposed dictator Saddam Hussein and "has received funding from the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency of the United States) and has unsuccessfully worked with American intelligence for years to oust Saddam through coup attempts." Born in Baghdad in 1946 into a well-known business family, Allawi became a member of the Baath party after it rose to power. He left Iraq in 1971 to go to university in London, and did not return to his home country until just after the U.S.-led invasion last year. You are subscribed to the Dahr Jamail's email Iraq Dispatches because you requested a subscription at some point. You can visit http://dahrjamailiraq.com/email_list/ to subscribe or unsubscribe to the email list. Or, you can unsubscribe by sending an email to iraq_dispatches-request@dahrjamailiraq.com and write unsubscribe in the subject or the body of the email. Iraq_Dispatches mailing list Iraq_Dispatches@dahrjamailiraq.com http://lists.dahrjamailiraq.com/mailman/listinfo/iraq_dispatches ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 8) The Netherlands tobogganing from crisis to crisis The end of the "polder" model By Erik Demeester Rarely have we seen a country being catapulted from being one of the most stable and apparently harmonious parts of the world into a profound abyss of instability and uncertainty. This is the story of the Netherlands over the last two and a half years. It all started with the economy. After a period of rapid economic growth in the 1990's, well above the average of the other European countries, the GDP of the Netherlands has since moved at a snail's pace. From a peak of more than 7 percent in 2000 the economic growth fell to a mere 2 percent in 2003. Over the last five years the economy has gone through a severe boom-and-bust cycle. This is because of the high dependence on world trade, which has made the country very sensitive to changes on the world market. The "polder" model, which consists in the agreement that all big social and economical changes are to be negotiated between the government, the unions and the bosses, was clearly going to be seriously tested by this new situation. Through the polder model - a policy of intense class collaboration - the idea was cultivated of finding solutions to problems thanks to compromise and consensus. Dutch people, and also the workers, had even come to believe that consummate pragmatism and the tendency of avoiding conflict had become part of their national character. A model under attack The raw economic growth figures of the 1990's did not say everything about was happening in Dutch society. | |