Hussein's lawyer repeats assertion US beat ex-leader
BAGHDAD -- Assailants kidnapped a Sudanese diplomat and five other Sudanese as they left prayers at a mosque yesterday, authorities said.
Those seized included four employees at the country's diplomatic mission in Baghdad, including a diplomat identified as Abdel Moneam Mohammad Tom.
One employee managed to call the Sudanese mission briefly on his cellphone immediately after the kidnapping, Sudanese Foreign Ministry spokesman Jamal Mohammed Ibrahim said in a telephone call in Cairo. But so far there had been no contact with the kidnappers, he said.
Sudan has been planning to push for a large Iraqi reconciliation conference in Baghdad.
Gunmen have kidnapped more than 240 foreigners and killed at least 39 since the Iraqi insurgency began after US-led forces overthrew Saddam Hussein.
In Amman, Jordan, Saddam Hussein's chief Iraqi lawyer echoed charges by the ousted leader that he was beaten and tortured by US troops, saying he had seen the bruises himself. The United States has strenuously denied American guards harmed Hussein. The Iraqi judge who investigated Hussein said that until this week the former dictator had never claimed any mistreatment, even when asked if he had been abused.
Attorney Khalil Dulaimi, who still regards Hussein as Iraq's president, said the torture was revealed to him during a brief interview with his client during the leader's trial sessions in Baghdad on Wednesday and Thursday.
''The president was tortured severely by the American forces and I saw bruise marks on his body. They are visible," Dulaimi said by telephone after arriving in Jordan. ''They are still torturing him psychologically," Dulaimi added.
He did not say where the bruises were or describe them. He also gave no details on what he meant by psychological torture.
Violence continued yesterday. The US military said two American soldiers were killed yesterday when their vehicle struck a roadside bomb in Baghdad. It also reported that a bomb killed another soldier in the capital Thursday.
Gunmen attacked an Iraqi Army checkpoint in the city of Adhaim in religiously and ethnically mixed Diyala province, killing eight soldiers and wounding 17, an Iraqi Army officer said on condition he not be identified.
In Balad Ruz, 45 miles northeast of Baghdad, a suicide bomber detonated his explosives belt outside a Shi'ite mosque, killing four people and wounding eight, police said. Among the dead was a policeman guarding the mosque.
In other developments:
# The families of four Christian peace activists kidnapped in Iraq are making a new appeal for their release in the pages of Iraqi newspapers, Britain's Foreign Office announced yesterday.
# Iraq won a crucial loan accord with the International Monetary Fund and a $14 billion debt swap with private lenders, moving toward a wider debt deal and access to world financial markets. The $685 million IMF standby credit arrangement was the fund's first with Iraq, and is designed to support the nation's economic program over the next 15 months.
ROME - A U.S. Marine is being investigated for his alleged role in the March killing in Baghdad of an Italian secret service agent, who had just secured the release of a journalist held hostage, a prosecutor and news reports said Thursday.
Rome prosecutors are investigating the March 4 death of Nicola Calipari, who was killed by U.S. gunfire near a checkpoint as he headed to the Baghdad airport with Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena, who was held hostage by militants for a month.
Prosecutor Franco Ionta confirmed reports in Italian news agencies ANSA and Apcom that the Marine is being investigated, but he refused to discuss details. The reports said prosecutors are considering charging the Marine with murder. Prosecutors did not identify the Marine, who is believed to be the only one to fire at the car.
According to Apcom, prosecutors also are considering attempted murder charges concerning the other two people in the car: Sgrena and a second secret service agent, who was driving. Both were wounded.
Rome and Washington issued separate reports on the killing, which has strained relations between the two countries.
The Italian government report, issued in May, blamed U.S. military authorities for failing to signal there was a military checkpoint ahead on the road. It also contended that stress, inexperience and fatigue played a role in the shooting.
The Americans insisted that the car, a rented Toyota Corolla, was going fast enough to alarm the soldiers. The Italians have said the vehicle was traveling slowly on the dark, rain-slicked road.
Police and ballistic experts assigned by Rome prosecutors to examine the car have concluded the Toyota was traveling slower than the U.S. military claimed. However, they agreed with U.S. findings that only one soldier fired at the car.
The shooting angered Italians, already largely opposed to the war in Iraq, and led many to step up calls for withdrawing the Italian contingent. Premier Silvio Berlusconi, who sent some 3,000 troops to Iraq after Saddam Hussein's ouster, insisted the incident would not affect troop levels or Italy's friendship with Washington.
Iraqi forces have often been the target of attacks by insurgents
Twelve Iraqis have been killed and 25 wounded in two separate attacks by insurgents near the city of Baquba.
Eight Iraqi soldiers were killed and 17 wounded when rocket-propelled grenades were fired at their checkpoint on the main Baghdad-Kirkuk road at Adhaim.
In a separate incident, four people were killed and eight wounded when a suicide bomber blew himself up outside a Shia mosque in Balad Ruz.
Baquba and the area around the city have often been the scene of violence.
At least 19 Iraqi soldiers were killed in an ambush in Adhaim at the beginning of the month.
'Five more years'
The attack came shortly after the UK's former envoy to Iraq, Sir Jeremy Greenstock, said Iraq's insurgency could continue for five more years.
Map of Iraq
"I think [the insurgency] has got at least five years of life, because there are men and there are materials," he told Sky News.
"There's motivation there from the Sunni insurgents, the left over Baathists, the Saddamists and... the al-Qaida franchise."
But Sir Jeremy suggested that half the 160,000-plus multi-national troops serving in Iraq could be withdrawn by the end of 2006 if things went well.
If the situation does not improve, he told the BBC, the total withdrawal "may be some way away".
A grab taken from a video posted on the internet by a Sunni Arab extremist group close to al-Qaida shows what they said was the execution of Ronald Schulz, an American contractor who was held hostage in Iraq.
An Iraqi extremist group today posted a video on the internet which it said showed the execution of the American hostage Ronald Allen Schulz.
The video, seen by the Associated Press, showed an unidentified man being shot in the back of the head.
A separate piece of footage, put together with the murder video as a split screen, showed Mr Schulz alive.
In an earlier internet posting last week, the group claimed it had killed Mr Schulz, a civilian contractor, and would later show the murder.
The video was posted a day after the 43-year-old German archaeologist Susanne Osthoff was released by her captors.
Ms Osthoff and her driver, Khalid al-Shimani, disappeared on November 25. They were later shown on video wearing blindfolds and sitting on a floor as militants, one armed with a rocket-propelled grenade, stood beside them.
The captors threatened to kill the hostages unless Germany stopped dealing with the Iraqi government. It was Angela Merkel's first major crisis as the new German chancellor, and she said the country would not be "blackmailed" by the kidnappers.
A German foreign ministry spokesman, Martin Jaeger, today refused to comment on the circumstances of Ms Osthoff's release or say who, other than German authorities, may have been involved.
The interior minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, said he would not comment "in the interest of all those those who helped to solve the problem".
Berlin said yesterday that the kidnappers had also promised to free Mr al-Shimani.
There has been no news on the fate of Norman Kember, the 74-year-old British peace activist who was abducted in Baghdad with two Candians and one US citizen.
They were abducted on November 26 by a previously unknown group calling itself the Swords of Righteousness Brigade, which demanded Iraqi prisoners be freed and troops removed from Iraq. The deadline by which the kidnappers said they would kill them passed last weekend.
Around 24 former leading officials in Saddam Hussein's government - including two female detainees known as Dr Germ and Mrs Anthrax - have been released from jail, it was reported today.
Rihab Taha, a British-educated biological weapons expert, was known as Dr Germ because of her role in making biological weapons in the 80s. Huda Salih Mahdi Ammash, called Mrs Anthrax, was a former senior Ba'ath party official and biotech researcher.
An Iraqi lawyer, Badee Izzat Aref, said 24 or 25 former officials in Saddam's government had been released from jail, and some had already left Iraq.
"The release was an American-Iraqi decision and in line with an Iraqi government ruling made in December 2004, but hasn't been enforced until after the elections in an attempt to ease the political pressure in Iraq," he said.
Lieutenant Colonel Barry Johnson, a US military spokesman in Baghdad, would say only that eight individuals formerly designated as high value detainees had been released on Saturday.
The releases came after a board process found they were no longer a security threat, and no charges would be filed against them.
Iraqi gunmen have freed a German hostage kidnapped on Nov. 25, the German government announced Sunday.
* INDEPTH: Iraq
German archeologist Susanne Osthoff. (AP File Photo/Peter Hinz-Rosin)
"I'm pleased to announce today, also on behalf of the German chancellor, that Mrs. Susanne Osthoff is no longer in the hands of the kidnappers. She is in the safe care of the German embassy in Baghdad," Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier told reporters in Berlin.
She is healthy, he added, but would not reveal the conditions, if any, of her release.
Many groups had appealed for the release of Osthoff, an archeologist who had worked in Iraq for more than 10 years and who was an opponent of the U.S.-led attack on Iraq in 2003.
Her release may provide hope to those working to free four C aid workers – including Canadians James Loney, 41 and Harmeet Singh Sooden, 32 – who were kidnapped on Nov. 26.
* FROM DEC. 12, 2005: Fate of Canadian hostages in Iraq still unknown
Nothing has been heard about the fate of those four hostages for more than a week. The kidnappers set two deadlines, the most recent on Dec. 10, when they said they would kill the hostages unless British and U.S. forces release Iraqi prisoners.
Steinmeier said Osthoff's Iraqi driver will also be released.
Gunmen killed two relatives of a senior Kurdish official and 17 others died in a string of attacks overnight and on Sunday, piercing three days of relative calm that followed the country's first election for a full-term parliament.
The latest attacks, two of them suicide bombings, came after authorities eased stringent security measures put in place for the Oct. 15 parliamentary election and traffic returned to normal on the first full working day since the vote. A ban on vehicles was lifted and the country's borders reopened Saturday, although the frontier with Syria remained closed. Authorities said it would reopen in a few days, but did not give a reason for the delay.
In the northern city of Kirkuk, two relatives of an official of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, one of the two main Kurdish parties, were shot late Saturday as they walked near their house, police said. They were identified as Dhiab Hamad al-Hamdani and his son - the uncle and nephew of party official Khodr Hassan al-Hamdani. The PUK is led by President Jalal Talabani.
In Baghdad on Sunday, a roadside bomb killed three police officers and wounded two. A similar attack on Saturday night killed one policeman and wounded two in the northern town of Tuz, 68 miles south of Kirkuk, police said.
Unidentified gunmen killed a police Lt. Colonel and an Interior Ministry employee in separate attacks. Both were driving to work in western Baghdad when they were attacked. Four police officers were seriously injured when their squad car was sprayed with gunfire and a tea seller was shot and killed in the same area.
A police captain and his driver were shot and killed in south Baghdad while two people, including an Interior Ministry driver, were killed in Baghdad's Shiite Sadr City slum.
A suicide bomber killed a police officer and injured two when he blew up a bomb in a mini van at a checkpoint along the a highway in eastern Baghdad near the Interior Ministry.
A roadside bomb killed at least one woman and injured 11 in the northern Shiite neighborhood of Kazimiyah, police said.
Police also said one suicide bomber was killed in Amiriyah, about 25 miles west of Baghdad when his explosives-laden belt prematurely detonated a belt.
On Sunday, police found the body of a former Iraqi Army officer at a fuel station in the center of the capital. Abbas Abdullah Fadhl had been shot to death in his car, they said. Another unidentified man was found shot dead in east Baghdad.
Millions of Iraqis voted Thursday to choose a four-year parliament in an election that passed peacefully around the country. Although no official figures have been released, authorities estimate just under 70 percent of Iraq's 15 million registered voters cast ballots.
The big turnout - particularly among the disaffected Sunni Arab minority which boycotted the election of a temporary legislature last January - have boosted hopes that increasing political participation may undermine the insurgency and allow U.S. troops to begin pulling out next year.
Shiites account for about 60 percent of the country's 27 million people, compared to 20 percent for Sunni Arabs. Both Shiite and Sunni political leaders have said they will likely have to form a coalition government together and both sides have expressed a willingness to do so.
Shiite Arabs and Kurds, two groups that were oppressed under the Sunni Arab-dominated regime of Saddam Hussein, allied to form the interim government that has ruled since last spring.
In violence overnight, a roadside bomb killed one policeman and wounded two in the northern town of Tuz, 68 miles south of Kirkuk, police said.
Also on Saturday, gunmen broke into a barber shop in Baladruz, about 40 miles northeast of Baghdad, killing two policemen and a civilian and wounding the barber, police said.
TORONTO -- One week after they were threatened with death, there was no word Saturday on the fate of two Canadians being held hostage in Iraq.
A week ago, a group called the Swords of Righteousness Brigades threatened to kill James Loney and Harmeet Singh Sooden, along with a Briton and an American if U.S. and Iraqi authorities didn't release all Iraqi prisoners.
In Toronto on Saturday, members of the Christian Peacemaker Teams, waiting for news about their friends, tried to cope with the fact there's been no word on their fate.
"We are very concerned about our four colleagues and are working for their return," said Sheila Provencher, 33, a full-time Iraq Team member currently working out of Amman, Jordan.
In a news release Saturday night, the Christian Peacemaker Team in Iraq asked its supporters to contact President George W. Bush and ask him to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq.
It noted Bush will be making an address from the White House on Sunday at 9:00 p.m. EST to describe how he believes the U.S. war effort should proceed in Iraq.
"Christian Peacemaker Teams has asked its supporters to contact the president before his speech and inform him about the security crisis for Iraqis, aggravated by the continuing military occupation of Iraq."
"We have received wonderful support from all over the world for our missing colleagues," said CPT Iraq team member Maxine Nash in a phone interview.
"But we want to remind people that kidnapping has affected far more Iraqis than it has foreigners. We have neighbours and friends who have been kidnapped."
"This lack of security is directly related to the ongoing military occupation of Iraq."
Meanwhile, the CBC reported a foreign hostages unit has been put together in Iraq to investigate the case of the western hostages.
A spokesman for the Iraqi police major crimes unit said people are giving them information and they're checking it.
The spokesman, who would only identify himself as a police captain, said this is case No. 1 right now in the major crimes unit.
"The people are giving, producing information to us," the spokesman said.
"We are checking this information. We are doing our best."
"We cannot share this with the press because of the security of the hostages right now. All the information we have we are going to share directly with the Canadian Embassy," he added.
The first casualty in war is the truth. So it came as no surprise to find US President George W. Bush lying through his teeth on Monday when he said in response to a question after a speech on Iraq to the World Affairs Council of Philadelphia: "How many Iraqi citizens have died in this war? I would say 30,000, more or less, have died as a result of the initial incursion and the on-going violence against Iraqis."
First of all, to call the massive US invasion of Iraq an "incursion" is a bit like calling the sinking of the Titanic a boating accident. The US assault on Iraq that began in March 2003 was not an "incursion"; it was a full-scale invasion - an unprovoked war of aggression in violation of every canon of international law and in flagrant defiance of world public opinion.
Second of all, the number of Iraqis killed in the war by the US is four times higher than the figure of 30,000 mentioned by Bush. According to an independent analysis by public health experts published in October 2004, more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians may have died because of the US invasion. In the year since then, the number has gone up by at least 20,000 , raising the total to 120,000.
The analysis, which was reported in the October 29, 2004 issue of Lancet, a respected British medical journal, estimated that more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians had died in the conflict since the United States invaded Iraq in March 2003.
The estimate was based on a September 2004 door-to-door survey of nearly 1,000 Iraqi households - containing 7,868 people in 33 neighbourhoods - selected to provide a representative sampling. Two teams of experts from the United States and Iraq asked respondents how many people lived in the home and how many births and deaths there had been since January 2002.
They then compared the death rate among those households during the 14.6 months before the invasion and the 17.8 months after it, documenting the fatalities with death certificates in most cases. The researchers said that most of those who died were women and children.
When researchers examined the causes of the violent deaths collected in the study, 84 per cent were due to the action of US-led coalition forces. Of the Iraqi civilian deaths caused by military action, 95 per cent were due to air strikes by helicopter gunships, rockets or other types of aerial weaponry.
Of the violent deaths involving US-led coalition forces, 46 per cent were children younger than 15, and 7 per cent were women, the researchers reported.
The project was designed by Les Roberts and Gilbert M. Burnham of the Centre for International Emergency, Disaster and Refugee Studies at the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Richard Garfield of Columbia University in New York, and Riyadh Latfa and Jamal Kudhairi of Baghdad’s Al-Mustansiriya University College of Medicine.
Based on the number of Iraqi fatalities recorded by the survey teams, the researchers calculated that the death rate since the invasion had increased from 5 per cent annually to 7.9 per cent. That worked out to an excess of about 100,000 deaths since the war began.
The researchers called their estimate conservative because they excluded deaths in Fallujah, a city 50 miles west of Baghdad that has been the scene of particularly intense fighting. An estimated 10,000 Iraqi civilians were killed in the US assault on the city in November last year, two months after the survey was carried out.
"We are quite confident that there’s been somewhere in the neighbourhood of 100,000 deaths, but it could be much higher," Roberts said.
Researchers said the risk of death for Iraqi civilians was 2.5 times greater after the invasion. Even with a 1.5-times increase in deaths since the invasion, the number of deaths would be more than 98,000, although the estimate would be much greater if Fallujah data was included, the study showed.
While the major causes of deaths before the invasion were heart attack, stroke and chronic illness, the risk of dying from violence after the invasion was 58 times higher than in the period before the war.
Most people died from violence after the invasion, the survey said, with most of the households interviewed saying air strikes from coalition forces were to blame.
Lancet editor Richard Horton said that the study’s central observation - that more civilians had died following air strikes - was convincing.
From a purely public-health perspective, it is clear that whatever planning did take place was grievously in error," said Horton. "Democratic imperialism has led to more deaths not fewer. This political and military failure continues to cause scores of casualties among non-combatants. It is a failure that deserves to be a serious subject for research," he said.
The researchers said the findings raised questions for those responsible for launching "a pre-emptive war".
Actually, it wasn’t even a pre-emptive war, because there was nothing that Iraq was contemplating doing that the US invasion prevented.
Contrary to all the pre-war assertions by Bush and his officials that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and "posed an imminent threat to the national security of the United States," Iraq, in fact, had no WMD and posed no threat whatsoever to the mighty United States.
Now, 33 months into the US occupation of Iraq, we had Bush saying on Monday, two days before scheduled parliamentary elections in Iraq, that "30,000 Iraqis, more or less, have died as a result of the initial incursion and the on-going violence against Iraqis."
It is not clear from his statement whether this "on-going violence against Iraqis" includes the continuing killing of Iraqis by US forces. Or does Bush expect the world to believe that the killing of Iraqis by US troops does not count as "violence against Iraqis"? If he expects the world to believe that, he must think the world is as dumb as he is.
And what does he mean by this "30,000 Iraqis, more or less" business? Is that how he counts Iraqi lives? Will we next find him saying that these thousands of Iraqis are "more or less" dead?
The Bush administration has previously resisted giving estimates of the number of Iraqis killed since the start of the March 2003 invasion. During the Vietnam war, public pronouncements about the number of dead Vietnamese helped propel opposition in the United States and other countries to the war.
Bush’s Monday speech to the World Affairs Council of Philadelphia was the third of four planned speeches aimed at bolstering waning domestic support for the war in Iraq. A recent CBS/New York Times poll found that 59 per cent of respondents disapproved of the way Bush was handling Iraq.
Among questions that suggested a mixed response among audience members to Bush’s Iraq policy, one person asked why the administration continued to "invoke" 9/11 as justification for the war in Iraq in spite of lack of evidence that such a link existed. Without directly responding to the question, Bush stated: "9/11 changed my look on foreign policy," adding that the US could not afford to be complacent in the face of "potential terrorist attacks."
Raising the spectre of more terrorist attacks to frighten the American people into supporting his policies has been a Bush ploy for the last four years. This terrorist-attack bogey was also part of his re-election strategy in the 2004 presidential campaign, and it is now part of his strategy to halt the precipitous slide in his approval ratings as he completes the first year of his second term.
It’s going to take much more than such political ploys, however, to keep Bush from becoming an increasingly lame duck president with each passing month.
The US military, for its part, has consistently indicated that any attempt to tally Iraqi war dead, civilian or military, is of no interest to them. "We do not count Iraqi deaths," US military spokesmen have said on more than one occasion .
As an American commentator noted, some of this can be attributed to a primal urge to denigrate one’s defeated enemy; some to an urge not to publicise (in America at least - it can hardly be news in Iraq) the levels of death and injury the US’s so-called "precision" warfare methods actually inflict, directly or indirectly; and some to a desire to duck the essential nature of almost any colonial war between First and Third World countries anytime in the last few centuries. They are almost invariably slaughters in which, as in either of the US’s Iraq wars, thousands upon thousands die on one side, and comparatively few on the other.
In a recent article, "Who Is Lying About Iraq?" Norman Podhoretz takes the interesting position that George Bush has been completely upfront in his handling of the conflict, and that the conventional wisdom that he "lied us into war" is a complete fabrication by his political enemies.
I say the position is interesting because there certainly seems to be some skullduggery afoot. After all, Bush clearly said in his (now infamous) 2003 State of the Union address that we were giving Saddam one last chance to give up his stockpiles of WMD (that he currently had in his possession), or else we (i.e. Bush) would "lead a coalition to disarm him." Following the invasion, when the stockpiles failed to turn up day after day, people like Rumsfeld assured us it was just a matter of time. (Nobody ever said at that point, "Well, we’re still looking for the WMD, but keep in mind that it’s entirely possible our intelligence was dead wrong on this.") Then, after months and months had gone by, pundits (I’m not sure if the Bush higher-ups themselves ever tried this) said, "What are you wacky liberals talking about?? Bush never said Saddam had WMDs, just that he was developing the capacity to produce them!" Fortunately this lie (which it was) died out, and finally, at long last, even top people in the Bush Administration stopped speculating on how Saddam funneled all his WMDs through Syria on the eve of invasion, and admitted that they had been completely wrong in their statements about the stockpiles.
So given the above history of the WMD issue, it is interesting to find Podhoretz so confidently claiming that "the charge that George W. Bush misled us into an immoral and/or unnecessary war in Iraq by telling a series of lies" has been "refuted and discredited over and over again by evidence and argument alike." Further, I must confess that Podhoretz makes a very persuasive case; any Bush sympathizer would undoubtedly come away from the piece feeling reassured indeed. And yet, as I shall show below, Podhoretz largely relies on accurate, yet completely irrelevant, points. (At critical steps in the argument he also throws in a few falsehoods, but largely I agree with his statements.) Upon reflection (and some investigation), I cling to the conventional wisdom that George Bush lied us into war.
Democratic Critics
Podhoretz spends much of his article documenting the apparent hypocrisy of liberal Democrats such as Carl Levin, Tom Daschle, and John Kerry. Even if we stipulate all of this "evidence," it proves nothing except that US senators will lie in order to gain political points. Did it take Podhoretz to convince us of this? The point is obvious, but important, so let me say it plainly: Just because a particular critic of the Iraq War turns out to be a hypocritical liar, the war is not necessarily a good thing. If Bill Clinton should publicly speak out against marital infidelity, that would not exonerate philanderers.
However, even on this minor point I think Podhoretz oversteps. After claiming that all major intelligence agencies agreed with the CIA in the weeks before the invasion, Podhoretz writes: "But the consensus on which Bush relied was not born in his own administration. In fact, it was first fully formed in the Clinton administration. Here is Clinton himself, speaking in 1998…"
Now this is quite odd. Certainly the members of Congress (and coalition allies) who supported Bush were not doing so on the basis of 1998 intelligence reports. Bush, Rice, Rumsfeld, Cheney, etc. were not telling people, "As of five years ago, we are quite confident that Saddam has dangerous stockpiles of WMD."
More important, knowledgeable critics of the prewar intelligence were not claiming that Saddam had never had WMD in the history of his regime. No, they were claiming (as was Saddam himself) that he had fully complied with the UN demands to disarm. Now I don’t pretend to be an expert on these matters, and hence I can’t give a precise timeline, but it seems that one could consistently claim that in 1998 Saddam posed a growing threat, but that in response to international pressure he backed off his programs and was not a threat when Bush, Cheney, et al. claimed otherwise.
As a final remark in this section, let me draw attention to Podhoretz’s treatment of Kerry, who is one of the Democrats "who would later pretend to have been deceived by the Bush White House." As evidence of Kerry’s apparent dishonesty, Podhoretz offers the following quote from Kerry:
I will be voting to give the President of the United States the authority to use force—if necessary—to disarm Saddam Hussein because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a real and grave threat to our security.
Now to understand the context of this choice of Kerry quotes, you would need to read Podhoretz’s article (and of course I urge you to do this to accurately assess the fairness of my critique). Podhoretz is trying to demonstrate that Bush’s Democratic critics believed Saddam was dangerous even back when Clinton was in office, and so they must now be lying when they claim that Bush tricked them. Yet how does a quote from Kerry in 2002, in which he makes no allusion to his prior beliefs, bear on this point? If John Kerry is now saying that he was misled by Bush when he voted to give the president the option of invasion, how in the world is this disproven by quoting Kerry’s statement at the time of the vote? Yes, Mr. Podhoretz, John Kerry said in 2002 that "I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons" in the hands of Saddam posed a grave threat, but his current claim is that this very belief was engineered by Bush’s falsehoods. Again, I’m not trying to defend Kerry here, I’m just pointing out the irrelevance of this supposedly damning Kerry quotation.
Framing a Guilty Man
Beyond the alleged hypocrisy of liberal critics, Podhoretz’s main point is that Bush, although mistaken in his claims about Saddam’s WMD, was honestly mistaken:
[I]t defies all reason to think that Bush was lying when he asserted that [WMD existed in Iraq]. To lie means to say something one knows to be false. But it is as close to certainty as we can get that Bush believed in the truth of what he was saying about WMD in Iraq.
First, a minor linguistic point: Even if Bush didn’t lie us into war, he still misled us—by definition. He told the American people that it was up to Saddam to lay his banned weapons out for the world to see, and that if he didn’t do so, America would lead a coalition to disarm him. If that isn’t "misleading" then I don’t know what is.
Beyond that, though, Podhoretz is being quite naïve. Even if George Bush honestly believed Saddam had those stockpiles, why would this necessarily prevent Bush from using falsehoods to raise public support for the war? In explaining what happened with the O. J. Simpson trial, Alan Dershowitz said that the jury believed the police had framed a guilty man. In other words, the police were sure Simpson did it, but they were afraid he might walk if they didn’t "help out" with the evidence. Is it so inconceivable that a US president might feel the need to exaggerate certain things in order to convince the fickle and shortsighted public to support his bold mission?
Intelligence Consensus?
Let us now get to the gritty details. After the rather strong statement that "it is as close to certainty as we can get" that Bush didn’t lie concerning WMD, Podhoretz documents this fact by citing the endorsement of these claims by "all fifteen agencies involved in gathering intelligence in the Unites States," and Podhoretz also argues that the "intelligence agencies of Britain, Russia, China, Israel, and—yes—France all agreed with this judgment."
In fairness, let me concede that I conducted a (very brief) AP news search for the weeks prior to the invasion, and the headlines didn’t make it appear as if the French, Germans, etc. were saying, "We totally dispute the US-British claims about WMD, and that’s why we cannot endorse their proposed invasion." However, the situation is a bit more nuanced than a simple Agree: Yes / No. As the Bush apologists now remind us, intelligence operations are a tricky, uncertain matter. It would have been unnecessarily risky to say, "We are confident that Saddam has zero WMD." But in retrospect, whose use of the available intelligence was the more…well, intelligent? The position of the UN critics—based of course on their intelligence reports—was that war was not necessary, that inspections were working, and that Saddam did not pose an immediate danger to the world. Isn’t it a bit inaccurate, then, to say that every intelligence agency in the world agreed with the CIA about Saddam’s stockpiles?
In any event, we now come to one of the outright falsehoods in Podhoretz’s article. First, a caveat: Just as Podhoretz claims with Bush, it is here possible that Podhoretz is not lying; perhaps he honestly believes what he wrote. Nonetheless, it is demonstrably false. I refer to the claim concerning nuclear capability that I have put in bold below:
In short…"the consensus of the intelligence community," as [Powell chief of staff Lawrence] Wilkerson puts it, "was overwhelming" in the period leading up to the invasion of Iraq that Saddam definitely had an arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, and that he was also in all probability well on the way to rebuilding the nuclear capability that the Israelis had damaged by bombing the Osirak reactor in 1981.
Now this is simply not true. As Podhoretz himself admits, the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) never went along with the nuclear claims. Further, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General Mohamed ElBaradei’s March 7 presentation to the UN Security Council paints a quite different picture of the allegedly "overwhelming consensus" concerning Iraq’s efforts to revive its nuclear program:
Mr. President, my report to the council today is an update on the status of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s nuclear verification activities in Iraq…
The IAEA has now conducted a total of 218 nuclear inspections at 141 sites, including 21 that have not been inspected before. In addition, the agency experts have taken part in many joint UNMOVIC [U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission]-IAEA inspections.
…
Our vehicle-borne radiation survey team has covered some 2,000 kilometers over the past three weeks. Survey access has been gained to over 75 facilities, including military garrisons and camps, weapons factories, truck parks and manufacturing facilities and residential areas.
…
Mr. President, in the last few weeks, Iraq has provided a considerable volume of documentation relevant to the issues I reported earlier as being of particular concern, including Iraq’s efforts to procure aluminum tubes, its attempted procurement of magnets and magnets-production capabilities and its reported attempt to import uranium.
…
Mr. President, in conclusion, I am able to report today that in the area of nuclear weapons, the most lethal weapons of mass destruction, inspections in Iraq are moving forward. Since the resumption of inspection a little over three months ago, and particularly during the three weeks since my last ordered report to the council, the IAEA has made important progress in identifying what nuclear-related capabilities remain in Iraq and in its assessment of whether Iraq has made any effort to revive its past nuclear program during the intervening four years since inspections were brought to a halt. At this stage, the following can be stated:
One, there is no indication of resumed nuclear activities in those buildings that were identified through the use of satellite imagery as being reconstructed or newly erected since 1998, nor any indication of nuclear-related prohibited activities at any inspected sites.
Second, there is no indication that Iraq has attempted to import uranium since 1990.
[Third], there is no indication that Iraq has attempted to import aluminum tubes for use in centrifuge enrichment. Moreover, even had Iraq pursued such a plan, it would have encountered practical difficulties in manufacturing centrifuge out of the aluminum tubes in question.
Fourth, although we are still reviewing issues related to magnets and magnet-production, there is no indication to date that Iraq imported magnets for use in centrifuge enrichment program.
As I stated above, the IAEA will naturally continue further to scrutinize and investigate all of the above issues. After three months of intrusive inspections, we have to date found no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapon program in Iraq. We intend to continue our inspection activities, making use of all additional rights granted to us by Resolution 1441 and all additional tools that might be available to us, including reconnaissance platforms and all relevant technologies.
Now of course, just as we can’t take the public statements of Bush, Blair, Kerry, or Saddam for that matter at face value, neither should we conclude that ElBaradei believed in what he stated to the UN. In other words, just because he uttered the above on March 7, 2003, doesn’t necessarily prove that Podhoretz is wrong in asserting a consensus regarding Iraq; ElBaradei could’ve believed Saddam was reviving his nuclear program and lied about it (for some reason) to the UN. But judging from the quite specific details (which could have been easily contradicted), and their correspondence with what in hindsight is obviously the truth, I think the more reasonable conclusion is that Podhoretz is dead wrong on this point.
The Infamous Niger Documents
In his State of the Union, Bush notoriously said, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." The typical understanding (which Podhoretz takes pains to refute) is that forged documents were the basis for this claim, and hence Bush (and Blair) lied us into war.
First, an aside: Podhoretz spends most of his time here attacking Joseph Wilson. As with the liberal senators, I concede the point; as far as I can tell, Wilson has been caught fudging certain facts in order to make himself a sleuthing Cassandra. But again, that is completely irrelevant to whether Bush and his subordinates acted dishonestly with regard to the State of the Union claim.
In order to defend Bush’s statement, Podhoretz tries a Clintonesque parsing of language: "[E]very single one of the sixteen words was true. That is, British intelligence had assured the CIA that Saddam Hussein had tried to buy enriched uranium from the African country of Niger."
As I say, this move reminds me of Clinton hiding behind the definition of sexual relations. And, as with Clinton, not only does the legalistic defense miss the big picture, it’s not even correct. If you say that someone else has learned something, then you are endorsing its truth. (In contrast, if Bush had said that the British government believed or that the British government informed him of such-and-such then Podhoretz’s defense would be much stronger.)
This is a crucial point (for proving Bush’s dishonesty), so forgive me for the following analogy: If memory serves, the villain in a certain Columbo episode tried to establish an alibi by having someone purposely get caught on a traffic surveillance camera while holding up a cardboard replica of the killer. (The point was to make the police believe the murderer was on the road—going above the speed limit—during the time of the murder.) Now when Columbo interviewed this man, suppose he said, "Lieutenant, please! The officers who reviewed the traffic tapes learned that I was on the road at the time Jerry was killed." Would this statement be merely misleading, or would you consider it a downright lie? I for one would classify it as a lie, because the killer knows that the officers’ beliefs are false, and hence he knows that they haven’t really "learned" any such thing. In the same way—as I shall document in a moment—Bush had to have known that the documents on which the British claim was based were forgeries, and hence he was lying when he made his notorious statement.
Okay, why do I say that Bush had to have known? For the simple reason that the forgeries were ridiculously bad ones, and it is inconceivable that they would have long hoodwinked all of Bush’s top advisors. As I pointed out on July 19, 2003:
[L]et’s be sure we realize just how bad the forged documents were. It’s not as if it took painstaking analysis with an electron microscope to discover that they weren’t legit. No, the reason the documents have been referred to as "crude forgeries" is that, for example, experts say the signature of the President of Niger is obviously not his own. There’s also the problem that the President of Niger refers to powers under a constitution that did not exist at the time of alleged writing. Additionally, a letter dated October 10, 2000, describing the "protocol of understanding" for the uranium export to Iraq, is signed by a foreign minister of Niger who had been deposed a decade earlier. What is even more ludicrous, this particular letter was stamped with a date of receipt in September 2000. (In other words, this particular piece of evidence was somehow penned after it was mailed.)
Ah but wait, Podhoretz has an ingenious reply to my argument:
The documents did indeed turn out to be forgeries; but, according to the [British] Butler report, "[t]he forged documents were not available to the British government at the time its assessment was made, and so the fact of the forgery does not undermine [that assessment]."
If this were true, then Podhoretz’s indignation over the media treatment of this issue would be quite justified. However, it is simply not true that British and US intelligence did not have the documents in the weeks prior to Bush’s State of the Union. (I am relying on this ABC News timeline for the following, but I have cross-checked it with several places and they all agree on the general details of the Niger story.) On October 9, 2002, Elisabetta Burba, who worked for an Italian magazine, contacted the US embassy in Rome about the documents in her possession. On October 15 (over two months prior to Bush’s speech) the embassy faxed them to the US State Department’s Bureau of Nonproliferation, which in turn faxed them to INR. On January 13, 2003 (fifteen days before Bush’s speech) an INR analyst emailed his colleagues claiming the alleged purchase agreement "probably is a hoax." Because of this email, the CIA’s Iraq nuclear analyst asked for copies of the documents, which he was given on January 16 (twelve days before the speech). As for the British, they had mentioned the yellowcake claim publicly in the fall of 2002 (possibly not relying at all on the forged documents), and thus speechwriters for Bush decided to play it safe by "sourcing" his claim to the British.
Now at this point, Podhoretz could claim, "So what? We all know how inefficient government bureaucracies are. Just because the documents were in the hands of particular members of the British and US intelligence communities before the speech, doesn’t prove that they were the basis of the assessments."
That is certainly true, insofar as it goes. But in response to requests for verification of the Iraq-Niger connection, on February 4, 2003 the US sent copies of the documents to the IAEA. (As ElBaradei’s report [linked above] to the UN shows, the IAEA investigation centered on the documents [which the IAEA of course said were forgeries], so they apparently got the impression that the US/British case rested on the documents.) Thus, over three and a half months passed from the initial US receipt of the documents, and its turning them over to the IAEA as evidence in its claims regarding Iraq-Niger. As I’ve already pointed out, it is simply inconceivable that anyone at all competent in international affairs would have believed in the legitimacy of these documents after even the most cursory inspection. So is it more plausible to say that (a) this was just a quirky outcome of a bad system where complete honesty resulted in a major goof or (b) the Bush people knew full well that part of their "evidence" was bogus but thought they could use it and later claim to have been innocently misled?
Conclusion: Politicians Lie!
Wrapping up, let’s step back from the minutiae and remind ourselves of a few things. First, politicians are professional liars. That’s the very nature of their jobs. In his book Secrets, Daniel Ellsberg (of Pentagon Papers fame) tells of being asked by his boss (who I believe in turn worked for Robert McNamara), right before a press conference, to quickly brainstorm and come up with a list of possible lies to deal with a certain uncomfortable fact regarding Vietnam. That is simply the nature of politics; our rulers are placed in the position of having to lie to get anything done. (Go watch a few episodes of the fantastic series 24 and count how many times "the good guys" lie; they don’t even think twice about it.) Second, besides Vietnam, US presidents have clearly lied even when it comes to something as important as war. For example, even defenders of FDR now claim that he nobly lied prior to our entry into WWII, because of the foolish isolationism of the nation. Third, the Bush Administration has clearly lied regarding other matters of the so-called War on Terror. For example, the initial stories concerning Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman were complete propaganda.
In conclusion, I still maintain that George Bush and his subordinates knowingly lied us into war. Let me offer one last bit of armchair logic: If Bush really thought Saddam (a) had stockpiles of WMD and (b) was too crazy to respond rationally to threats of reprisal, then why would Bush send in American troops? Can you imagine the public outcry if, say, 850 US troops were killed in a single day by chemical weapons? Wouldn’t it make a lot more sense to invade Iraq if the president knew Saddam would love to acquire (but didn’t quite yet have) those nasty weapons?
Gordon Gentle was killed in a roadside explosion near Basra in June
The U.S.-led occupation authorities in IRAQ and America’s war allies have all failed to provide a comprehensive accounting of the human toll of the war from the invaders’ side, not to mention the larger toll on the IRAQI PEOPLE. They only report the strictly combat-related fatalities and injuries.
However, the U.S. and the British government maintain that action was necessary, repeating old rhetoric that Iraq has been defying UN resolutions and posed a real threat to the world stability, trying to give the devastating war an honorable image.
In a letter published previously by The Guardian, Rose Gentle, the mother of Gordon Gentle, a British soldier killed in Iraq few months ago, wrote: “Tony Blair says we are now fighting a "new war" in Iraq. That may suit him, to distract people from questions about the "old war" there. The one which killed my son Gordon at the age of 19. Sent to Iraq with just six months training at Catterick, with inadequate protection, he was killed by a bomb in Basra in June.
“Gordon wanted to be a soldier to defend his country. Not to die in a war of aggression. My family is one of nearly 70 grieving for a lost son because of this war. Many more of our soldiers are suffering from serious injuries.
“Some people say that soldiers have to expect to die or be injured when they sign up for the armed services. Maybe so. But they also have the right to expect that they will only be sent to fight for a proper cause, by a government which tells the truth.
“These poor boys are being sent to Iraq to die for this government's lies. Where are the chemical and nuclear weapons they were supposed to be looking for? And if the war was about upholding the UN, why has the UN Secretary General now said it is unlawful? Blair hasn't answered that either.
“He said our troops would be welcomed by the Iraqis. Instead, it is all endless bloodshed and chaos there. Yet he hasn't apologized. If my children had the same regard for honesty as the prime minister, I would be ashamed.
“It seems to me that Blair cares more about GEORGE BUSH than about British soldiers. He made secret promises to the president behind our backs, without a thought for people like Gordon, or like my daughter Maxine, deprived of her brother.
“If he cares, why doesn't he bring our troops back home before more are killed? After all, power is supposed to have been handed over to the Iraqi government. There are no more Weapons of Mass Destruction to look for. The Iraqis should be allowed to sort out their own problems now.
“Instead, I heard Geoff Hoon talking about sending more of our lads and lasses over to Iraq. That will mean more dead, more injured, to stop the government facing up to what it has done.
“I grieve also for all the Iraqis who have died in this war. It all seems to have been completely unnecessary.
“I want the government to be held to account. The prime minister says he wants a democracy for Iraq. If we had a proper democracy here, we would never have got into this war. “
A large majority of both the British and the American public now acknowledges that the liberation of Iraq was a “mistake”, with many sure that the U.S. and UK government are losing and that they need to pull out troops as soon as possible before more lives on both sides are lost.
Every day passes in Iraq, brings the death of more Iraqis, Brits and Americans. The situation is getting grimmer in many respects. But most disheartening indicator of all is simply the Americans and the British people’s loss of confidence in their governments and leaders.
Clandestine conduct of Italian troops in Iraq recorded- Video
"Today we find ourselves caught up in a war that the Italian parliament never agreed to," Piero Fassino, leader of the main Italian opposition party, the Democrats of the Left, was once quoted as saying.
Italian defense minister Antonio Martino have recently stated that the Italian government and the opposition which represents the central left are expected to reach an agreement over a scheduled withdrawal for the Italian troops from IRAQ. However he claimed that pulling out troops didn’t mean escaping from IRAQ.
A television group owned by Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian Prime Minister, plans to show an embarrassing documentary on the clandestine conduct of Italian troops in IRAQ, after it censored it for three days, the company officials stated earlier this week.
The footage, recorded by Italian troops deployed in Iraq in August 2004 in the southern Iraqi city of Nasiriyah shows a fierce firefight between Italian occupation forces and Shia fighters.
In the 10-minutes film, an Italian patrol appears returning fire after being attacked. Then it shows one soldier shouting: "See that one running, take him out," and another saying "Look at that bastard moving, get him."
Berlusconi has been facing mounting dissatisfaction and pressure at home from his nation to pull the Italian forces from Iraq since June 2003 when he despatched 3,000 troops to Nasiriyah.
Like the U.S. President GEROGE W. BUSH, Berlusconi has repetitively claimed that those forces were on a "humanitarian mission" aimed at easing the suffering inflicted upon the Iraqi nation.
The documentary was supposed to be aired during a popular programme, blending satire and reportage, last week on Italia 1 channel, owned by Berlusconi's Mediaset group. But it was retracted on the grounds that it "provides a representation of Italy's military presence in Iraq which is far from everyday reality."
"Mediaset, after viewing the report, have decided not to broadcast it," the company said.
On Sunday Mediaset changed decided to air the film during "journalistic depth" programme on another of its stations.
"This film should be put back in its context and made understandable through a journalistic interpretation," according to Mediaset official Mauro Crippa.
In fact the public broadcaster RAI has shown it several times since Thursday.
Last May, the Italian parliament defeated a motion tabled by the centre-left opposition, urging Berlusconi's government order the withdrawal of Italy's 3,000 troops from IRAQ.
At that time, Mr. Berlusconi was quoted as telling the MPs that an early withdrawal from Iraq would represent "an offence to the memory of the fallen and the wonderful and hard job of our soldiers".
"It is our duty and our honour to stay until the very end with those who are making sacrifices and taking risks to defend the principles of the UN charter," he said, echoing similar statements by the American President GEROGE W. BUSH.
"Those who proclaim peace but do nothing to support it, help the enemies of peace."
Bulgarian troops will hand over responsibility to an Iraqi unit
Bulgaria has ended military operations in Iraq and has begun withdrawing its troops, the defence ministry has said.
The pullout was first scheduled to take place earlier this year but was delayed until after Iraq\'s ballot on Thursday.
The full 400-strong contingent is due back in Bulgaria by 31 December, having lost 13 soldiers and six civilians.
Bulgaria\'s parliament voted in May to pull its troops out by the end of the year, amid strong public opposition to the country\'s involvement in the war.
The Bulgarian contingent, stationed in the southern city of Diwaniya, will hand over to an Iraqi unit it has trained, the defence ministry said.
Its statement added that \"with the elections conducted, Bulgaria has concluded successfully its mission in Iraq\".
Officials said last week that Bulgaria was likely to maintain a humanitarian presence in Iraq by sending 120 non-combat troops to guard the Ashraf refugee camp, 70km (44 miles) north of Baghdad.
The Bulgarian withdrawal coincides with the departure of the remaining Ukrainian forces in Iraq, due to be completed by the end of December.
Roadside bombs in Iraq became the most dangerous threat to U.S. soldiers
Four U.S. soldiers were killed in a roadside bomb attack northwest of Baghdad on Tuesday, hours after a leading Sunni Arab politician was killed in Ramadi, The Associated Press reported.
The four soldiers belonged to Task Force Baghdad, which is responsible for securing the Iraqi capital and the surrounding area.
The latest deaths bring to at least 2,149 the number of U.S. personnel to have died since the 2003 INVASION, according to an AP count.
Earlier Tuesday, unknown gunmen shot dead Iraqi Free Progressive Party leader Mizhar Dulaimi, who was running in the country’s election for the first full-term post-SADDAM parliament. Three of Dulaimi‘s bodyguards were injured, police said.
Dulaimi had appeared on television the previous night urging Iraqis to vote in the elections.
In other violence, a roadside bomb targeted the convoy of Sheik Jalal Eddin al-Sagheer, a Shia member of the National Assembly who was elected with the governing United Iraqi Alliance. The Iraqi military said the blast took place in Latifiyah, about 20 miles south of Baghdad.
Both attacks took place on the last day of campaigning for the general election.
Many Sunni Arabs are running in the election after their community largely boycotted the January 30 poll for a transitional assembly.
But Sunni candidates are among the groups most targeted in pre-election violence, correspondent say.
On Tuesday, more than 1,000 Sunni clerics issued a religious edict, or a fatwa, demanding Sunni Arabs to vote in the election.
Resistance fighters also have in recent days backed way from the threats they used to keep Sunni Arabs away from last year's elections. Some groups vowed not to attack polling stations to avoid killing civilians.
Ali al-Lami, executive director of the Iraqi Electoral Commission, hoped for a high turnout on Thursday, when about 15 million people will cast their ballots in more than 6,200 polling stations.
In another development, Iraqis living abroad started casting their votes. They have until Thursday to vote in polling stations in 15 countries.
According to BBC, there are an estimated 1.5m expatriates eligible to vote.
Iraqi soldiers, hospital patients and detainees cast their votes on Monday.
* Phased withdrawal by March 2006
The United States and Britain are planning to start a gradual military withdrawal from IRAQ by March 2006, a British newspaper reported on Tuesday.
British and American officials consider Thursday’s general election as the “green light” to begin a pull out, The Times said.
"It will happen progressively over the next year," the newspaper cited a senior unidentified Western diplomat as saying. "One of the first things we will talk about (with the new Iraqi government) is the phased transfer of security."
The United States has more than 160,000 soldiers in central and northern Iraq, while Britain has about 8,000 in four southern provinces.
The Times said “contingency plans” were in place for British units in Dhiqar and Muthana provinces to leave as early as spring 2006, followed by those in the most restive province of Misan.
The paper added that the U.S. is “planning to pull out 30,000 (troops) by the New Year” and cut its force to below 100,000 personnel “in the coming months.”
A British defense ministry spokesman said the Times report was in line with previous government statement, but he refused to confirm the March 2006 date.
"Our plan for the gradual withdrawal of troops from Iraq is based on conditions rather than specific dates," he said.
Despite PRESIDENT BUSH’s assertions that there will be no fixed timetable for withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq, the Pentagon said that on Monday Army Gen. George Casey, the U.S. commander in Iraq, will evaluate the situation quickly after the election and could make a recommendation as early as this month on whether and when to reduce U.S. forces.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who faces fierce opposition to his support for the IRAQ WAR, said last month that the UK could start withdrawing some of its soldiers in 2006 if Iraqi forces are capable of securing their country.
A top British army officer said in an interview yesterday that a pull out could begin within six months in some areas of Iraq.
"We wish to get out of this country as soon as possible when we have put in place the conditions that allow the Iraqis to continue to develop," Major General Jim Dutton, who commands a multinational force in southeast Iraq, told BBC television's "Newsnight" programme.
“Given what I know today and what I think is going to happen, six months is not an unrealistic timescale to start talking about withdraw of troops from some areas.”
Recent global public opinion polls show a growing opposition to the March 2003 INVASION of Iraq as the death toll of IRAQI CIVILIANS and occupation forces rises.
Complaints of dirty tricks tainted the campaigning process in IRAQ, and the Independent Electoral Commission, which monitors the poll, admitted that it lacks the funds to keep control and ensure a fair election.
Election posters filling the streets of Iraq indicate the seriousness with which the Iraqis take the political process ahead of Thursday‘s full-term post-SADDAM parliament.
The leading candidates are pictured in a mix of poses. Some smile like understanding fathers while others frown to show their anger at the terrible conditions of their war-torn country. Their slogans carry promises of an end to the bloodshed that now dominates the country.
However, the posters highlight the fact that the atmosphere of intimidation and fear the candidates are promising to combat has dominated the campaigning process.
According to Reuters, One of the posters of IYAD ALLAWI, the former Iraqi premier, have been replaced with a picture of SADDAM HUSSEIN in an apparent bid to discredit Allawi and remind voters that his old ties with the toppled Iraqi leader. Allawi was a Baathist early in his political career before falling foul of Saddam and opposing him from exile. "Our people stick our posters up in the evening and in the morning we find them torn down," Allawi told reporters recently.
One picture of Shia Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari had its eyes ripped out and a boot stuffed in its mouth, a deep insult in the Arab world. Another poster of veteran politician Ahmed Chalabi had been shot through the eyes.
One candidate, Hamid kifai, who stands as part of the Shia list, spent £30,000 to plaster more than 100,000 posters only to find them torn down, even those in front of his campaign headquarters.
* Violence
The campaign has sometimes turned deadly. On Tuesday, a leading Sunni Arab politician, Mizhar Dulaimi, the head of the Iraqi Free Progressive Party, was shot dead while campaigning in the western city of Ramadi. Another candidate, a Shia member of the National Assembly survived an assassination attempt near Baghdad.
Correspondents say Sunni candidates are among the groups most targeted in pre-election violence. Sunnis, who largely boycotted last year’s election, see the vote as their last hope of ending the killings and intimidation their leaders accuse the current Shia-led government of condoning.
Not only election candidates have been targeted. In the past two weeks, more than 18 campaign officials have been killed and ten wounded. Some were targeted simply for putting up posters.
One of the worst attacks took place in northern Iraq, when crowds raided the offices of a Kurdish Islamic party in more than six towns, killing more than four people and wounding ten others. The party blamed the attacks on supporters of the Kurdish bloc which forms part of the current government.
Allawi was mobbed by an angry crowd in Najaf and one of his aides was stabbed, while Tawfiq al-Yassiri, from the Sun of Iraq party, was snatched near his home in Baghdad and held for several days. He denied accusations from his opponents that he had planned the abduction to win voter’s sympathy.
And in Najaf, the Shabani Uprising party complained that another party told voters that it had withdrawn from the election race. Al-Furat satellite television channel, run by the powerful Shia party SCIRI, ran a screen ticker claiming that the Shabani Uprising had quit. The claim angered Shabani Uprising leader Ali Ghanim al-Jadui and his lawyer Ali Hadi al-Zamili, who complained to Iraq's electoral commission. “It misled voters who might have been expected to give their support to our list," Zamili said.
The importance of the election cannot be underestimated. The new government will distribute the country's oil reserves, select its police force and army and determine the role Islam will play in the state's laws.
Although the electoral commission said it is probing several alleged campaign irregularities, it insists most Iraqis are following the rules.
Western diplomats say that negative campaigning is part of the electoral process in many countries, but acknowledge that it poses a huge problem in Iraq. "As far as the level of campaign intimidation and violence is concerned, it is not worse than we saw in the Balkans in the 1990s and certainly not worse than we saw in Algeria but, yes, it is an issue," one diplomat told Reuters.
"There are going to be problems. The question is, will the problems reach the level of tainting the credibility of the elections? Right now, I'm optimistic."
A leading Sunni Arab politician has been shot dead in Iraq, two days before the country\'s general election.
Iraqi Free Progressive Party leader Mizhar Dulaimi was killed while campaigning in western Iraq.
Iraqis living abroad have already begun casting their votes. Expatriates have until Thursday to vote in polling stations in 15 countries.
Meanwhile, four US soldiers were killed by a roadside bomb in northwest Baghdad, the US military said.
Sunni candidate targeted
Mr Dulaimi was shot dead in his car in the restive city of Ramadi, in the western Anbar province. Three of his bodyguards were wounded.
He had appeared on television the previous night urging Iraqis to take part in the elections.
Ramadi map
Many Sunni Arabs are standing in the election after their community largely boycotted the 30 January vote for a transitional assembly.
But Sunni candidates have been among the groups most targeted in pre-election violence, correspondent say.
Al-Qaeda\'s branch in Iraq and several other extremist groups have warned people not to vote, describing the process as a \"devilish plot\".
Overseas votes
A spokesman for the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq, Farid Ayar, said the vote conducted outside Iraq was important.
There are an estimated 1.5m expatriates eligible to vote.
A five-day public holiday began in Iraq as security tightened ahead of Thursday\'s poll.
Iraqis will be able to vote in Australia, Austria, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Iran, Jordan, Lebanon, the Netherlands, Sweden, Syria, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, the UK and the US.
Election poster of for Iyad Allawi\'s National Iraqi List Iraqi election officials hopes turnout will be higher than in January \"We are making every effort to ensure the elections are honest, because any problem will have repercussions on the ballot in Iraq as well,\" he said.
The chairman of the Iraq Out-of-Country Voting Program hoped there would be a higher turnout than in January\'s election, when 265,148 expatriates voted.
\"We are expecting a greater number of voters because parties who boycotted the [January] elections are participating,\" Hamdiya al-Husseini said.
The BBC\'s correspondent in Tehran, Frances Harrison, says the people voting in Iran are mostly Kurds or Shias, who have lived there often for a quarter of a century, pushed out by Saddam Hussein.
Many of them say that they want to go back to Iraq and they hope that this election will bring the security they need for them to go back, our correspondent says.
On Monday, Iraqi soldiers, hospital patients and prisoners cast their votes.
President George W. Bush is facing mounting anger and dissatisfaction domestically and abroad over his policy and the way he’s handling Iraq war. The diminishing support wasn’t affected by his recent speech in which he outlined what he believes must be accomplished before withdrawing any forces from IRAQ. It was just another attempt to hide the continuous failures of the American Army in the war-torn country- another effort to justify staying longer and may be permanently in the country.
"Victory has a thousand fathers ..." John F. Kennedy once said. Last week, said a recent article by Richard Reeves, the current U.S. President used the word but here trying to explain how the American would win one day in IRAQ, avoiding the second half of the ex-President’s phrase; "Defeat is an orphan."
Reeves suggests that the Iraqi elections due to be held later this month, will help fix Bush’s tarnished image among his people, and help have his collapsing strategies in the country be viewed in a more positive way.
The "Plan for Victory," as the president called his speech at the U.S. Naval Academy, is a strategy to mask defeat.
He failed to answer his nation and the world’s questions regarding what’s happening in IRAQ, or satisfy critics who've called for setting a scheduled plan to pull out troops from the country; claiming “it would send the wrong message to ‘terrorists’ and certain conditions must be met first.”
"As Iraqi forces gain experience and the political process advances, we will be able to decrease our troop level in Iraq without losing our capability to defeat the terrorists," Bush said in his address before students at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland.
The new strategy the U.S. President motioned is basically borrowed from failure in Vietnam and 19th-century British colonialism. It can be called "Bases and Borders."
"We will increasingly move out of Iraqi cities, reduce the number of bases from which we operate and conduct fewer patrols and convoys," that’s how the President puts it.
America will begin redeploying its forces in protection areas, and later carry out on raids each once in a while with the aim of securing the country’s borders from what Bush called "regional meddling and infiltration," blocking any chance for Syria, Iran and Turkey to benefit from Iraq’s soil to have it all for itself.
And what the President called “trained Iraqi units” will be left to try to turn those Iraqi-protected areas into what were called "strategic hamlets" in Vietnam.
"The border strategy laid out by the President is an updated version of the Demilitarized Zone between South and North Vietnam, or British forts along barren boundaries between tribes in make-believe countries," the article further adds.
"To all who wear the uniform, I make you this pledge: America will not run in the face of car bombers and assassins so long as I am your commander-in-chief," Bush said.
How many LIVES will it take the American President to understand that he is losing IRAQ war?
Marines killed in Falluja were at promotion ceremony
BAGHDAD - Ten U.S. Marines killed near the Iraqi city of Falluja last week had been at a promotion ceremony and were not on foot patrol as initially reported, the U.S. military said on Tuesday.
The Marines were in a disused flour mill on the outskirts of the city to celebrate the promotion of three soldiers, a military statement said.
As the ceremony ended, the Marines dispersed and one of them is thought to have stepped on a buried pressure plate linked to explosives that caused the devastating blast.
The death toll was the largest suffered by U.S. soldiers in Iraq in a single incident since August.
Eleven Marines were wounded in the explosion, which the military initially blamed on "an improvised explosive device (IED) fashioned from several large artillery shells".
Which means that the Marines couldn't secure a place they thought was safe and the resistance had a very good idea of when and where a large group of Marines would be. They might not have known about the ceremony, per se, but they knew they could kill a group of Marines in that spot.
Saddam Hussein shouted that he would not return "to an unjust court" after spending the fourth day of his trial listening stony-faced to a woman describe horrific tortures inflicted on her by Iraqi interrogators.
She was known only as "Witness A," testifying from behind a blue curtain, her voice electronically distorted as she told of beatings and electric shocks.
Describing her treatment by Wadah al-Sheik, an Iraqi intelligence officer who died of cancer last month, the woman said: "I was forced to take off my clothes, and he raised my legs up and tied up my hands. He continued administering electric shocks and beating me."
Sometimes bursting into tears and moaning "God is great. Oh my Lord", the woman, who was 16 at the time, told the court in Baghdad what had happened to the women and children from the Shia town of Dujail detained after a failed attempt to assassinate Saddam Hussein in 1982.
"I begged them but they hit me with their pistols," she said. "They made me put my legs up. There were five or more and they treated me like a banquet."
She gave a graphic description of the cruelties inflicted on the prisoners during her four years imprisonment. "One of my relatives was mute and deaf. They would take him before the women and hold him by his penis and mock him, making the women and children cry." At first she was tortured in the intelligence centre. She implied but did not say that she was raped. "Is that what happens to the virtuous woman that Saddam speaks about?" she said. Asked whom she held responsible, Witness A identified Saddam: "When so many people are jailed and tortured, who takes such a decision?"
In the intelligence centre in Dujail she was kept in a small red room with no light. She used her shoes as a pillow. She was given two small loaves of bread a day to eat. "After all that torture do you think we could eat?" she asked. In other prisons, at Abu Ghraib and Samawah, the mistreatment continued. She said: "This woman was giving birth, and they wouldn't let another woman help her. The foetus was stuck." The baby suffocated.
Two other anonymous witnesses were also concealed behind a curtain. Witness C described how his 65-year-old father had died after being beaten over the head. He said: "My father died in prison and I was not able to see him."
This prompted an outburst from Saddam Hussein. He said the court was listening to the witnesses' complaints "but does anyone ask Saddam Hussein whether he was tortured? Whether he was hit?"
He suggested that the court inspect the conditions under which he was held. "I live in an iron cage covered by a tent under American democratic rule. You are supposed to come and see my cage," he said.
An Iraqi militant group holding four Western peace activists hostage has extended the deadline for their execution, al-Jazeera reports.
The original deadline set by the group for the US to release all Iraqi detainees was extended from Thursday to Saturday, the Arab TV station said.
The four men - two Canadians, a Briton and an American - were seized last month in Baghdad.
UK Foreign Secretary Jack Straw has renewed calls for the men's release.
"If the kidnappers want to get in touch we want to hear what they have to say," Mr Straw added.
Briton Norman Kember, 74, Canadians James Loney, 41, and Harmeet Singh Sooden, 32, and American Tom Fox, 54, work for Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT).
Their captors, calling themselves the Swords of Truth, have accused the men of being spies, a charge their employers deny.
Mercy
On Thursday radical cleric jailed in the UK made an appeal for the hostages' release.
In a video filmed in prison, radical cleric Abu Qatada urged the kidnappers to free them "in line with the principle of mercy of our religion".
The UK Foreign Office said Qatada volunteered to be filmed addressing the hostage-takers - who claim to belong to a group called the Swords of Truth.
Abu Qatada I urge my brothers in the Brigades of Swords of Right in Iraq to release them Abu Qatada
Profile: Abu Qatada
The terror suspect said on the video: "I am your brother Abu Qatada, Omar bin Mahmud Abu Omar, who is imprisoned in Full Sutton jail in Britain.
"I urge my brothers in the Brigades of Swords of Right in Iraq to release them in line with the principle of mercy of our religion, if there was no compelling religious duty against it."
Qatada, described by a Spanish judge as al-Qaeda's ambassador in Europe, was briefly released under a control order earlier this year before being re-arrested facing deportation to Jordan.
He had originally been detained in October 2002. The authorities had been trying to track him down since December the previous year.
He has been found guilty of terrorism offences in a Jordanian court in his absence.
A friend Mr Kember, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament vice-chairman Bruce Kent, said he was optimistic that Qatada's appeal could have an effect.
Former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has also appealed for the hostages to be released.
The American debate on the Iraq War has entered a dramatic new phase. For the first time, a prominent Democrat, Congressman John Murtha, has called for a withdrawal of American forces from the country.
Murtha’s words have had a major impact because he was a former supporter of the war, and has had a career distinguished by his consistently pro-military profile. His argument is based on the inability to complete the American military mission in Iraq, making inexcusable the continued killing and loss of life. He also refers to the adverse effects of the unpopular and flawed occupation of Iraq on the wider goals of opposing global terrorism and to the failure of American reconstruction efforts. Murtha’s critique is widely shared by a majority of Americans at this point, and helps explain the declining popularity of the Bush presidency.
But there is no sign that these developments, even in the face of a rising crescendo of violent incidents and high casualties, will bring a rapid end to the Iraq War. President Bush keeps reiterating his resolve ‘to stay the course,’ to do whatever is necessary to prevail in Iraq. A Republican-controlled Congress, although increasingly restive about the war, is not yet likely to break with the president, and withhold appropriations or mandate an exit strategy that calls for a definite end to the war. Unlike Vietnam, which looks more and more like a precursor to Iraq, the strategic stakes are high. The efforts to pretend that the outcome of Vietnam was strategically important because of ‘falling dominos’ in the region was never convincing, and the only strong argument for American forces remaining was the alleged prospect of a bloodbath in the aftermath of an American departure, a nightmare scenario that never materialized. But in Iraq there are major strategic stakes: oil, non-proliferation, the impact on Turkey and Iran, the containment of radical Islam, anti-terrorism, the security of Israel, regional security politics.
And so the puzzle posed is how to end the Iraq War without further and too seriously jeopardizing these strategic concerns. The solutions being proposed in the American political mainstream are not convincing: wait until the Iraq military can bring stability to the country, which seems like waiting for Godot; transfer the foreign security role to NATO in the manner of the Kosovo War, which reduces the American role by no more than a tiny percentage; reduce the American presence, but sustain the mission. These supposed solutions are disguised recipes for prolonging the futility of the war, and invitations for terminal disaster. It should be remembered that years after the American leadership realized that the Vietnam War was lost, the dying and killing continued, because the US Government insisted that it could find victory by political maneuver after acknowledging privately its inability to pacify the country by military occupation. As we know, when withdrawal finally came in 1975, it was humiliating, with a total exhibition of defeat, epitomized by helicopters lifting former Vietnamese collaborators with the occupation from the roof of the American Embassy. There is no way to transform the military defeat in the occupation phase of the Iraq War into a political victory. No way, and the sooner the illusion of magic rabbit is recognized for what it is the better the prospects for an effective end to the Iraq War before all room for diplomacy disappears.
Earlier in Iraq, the US Government had confused military victory with a political victory. Bush’s famous speech on the American aircraft carrier, USS Abraham Lincoln, of May 1, 2003, with the banner behind his podium reading ‘mission accomplished,’ was the extreme version of this miscalculation. Again as the Vietnam experience should have made clear, when confronting a nationalist adversary, battlefield victories are difficult, if not impossible to translate into favorable political outcomes. The bloody occupation of Iraq has confirmed this lesson, dramatizing the limits of military superiority in wars associated with foreign occupation, especially of a country previously colonized.
Understanding what has failed in the past and is unlikely to succeed in the present, is not enough. Without a positive alternative the blame game leads no where. In my view such an alternative does exist, although it contains big risks and like every proposed line of future policy in Iraq is enmeshed in uncertainty. We cannot know the risks of alternative lines of policy with any precision, but we can do what seems right under the circumstances, and appears to have the best prospect of stopping the bodies from piling up. In a key respect, Rumsfeld was right when a couple of years ago he wrote in an internal Pentagon memo that we lack ‘a metric’ for determining whether we are winning or losing the war against terror inside Iraq or in the world as a whole. Such an acknowledgement should suggest humility on all sides, but especially on those who in the face of such doubts, go on with a war that has had such disastrous human and political results. In law, morality, and politics we should all endorse a strong presumption against war as an instrument of policy.
I would propose several steps that together constitute a plan, or at least an approach, that moves toward hope for the future:
--a clear statement by the US Government that it intends to withdraw completely from Iraq and renounces all plans to build permanent military bases;
--a timetable for withdrawal of US forces that calls for the complete phasing out of the American (and coalition) presence within one year;
--a defensive military posture adopted immediately; American forces
in Iraq will only attack if attacked from now on;
--private and public encouragement of Iraqi forces to pursue a diplomacy of compromise and reconciliation as an alternative to prolonged civil war;
--diversify the effort at economic and social reconstruction to the extent possible, including seeking a new role for the United Nations acting with full independence of the American occupation;
--encourage regional initiatives that include Turkey, Iran, as well as Arab countries, that explore peacekeeping and political contributions to the post-occupation transition;
--affirm an American and British commitment to the unity of Iraq;
--exert greater pressure to end the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories, and move toward a solution of the conflict that recognizes the legal rights of the Palestinian people and the necessity of peace based on equality and mutual respect.
In the end, this approach has no chance of becoming operative without a major mobilization of anti-war opinion in the United States, reinforced by the expression of similar sentiments throughout the world, and on the part of regional leaders in the Middle East. Without a great heightening of anti-war activism, the war will drag on until a hasty terminal process is adopted in a spirit of desperation. What I am advocating is a comprehensive rethinking of American regional goals and behavior, with a fair chance that the results are likely to be more positive than can be realistically anticipated. My reason for guarded optimism is the sense that when the American protective shield is unmistakenably removed, Kurds and Shi’ia will find themselves under great pressure to reconcile with Sunni elements in Iraq, or face a continuing insurgency, possibly a full-scale civil war, that they would almost certainly lose. On the Sunni side, as well, the incentive of avoiding such prolonged civil strife would create important pressure to reconcile as Sunnis too would be confronted by dissident nationalisms that can no longer be squashed in the post-Saddam era. As long as the US occupation persists, the elements in Iraq that are benefited have no reason to compromise in a manner that is acceptable to the Sunnis. Of course, the ethnic composition of Iraq is more complex than this, and the faultliness of conflict are not only identified by reference to Kurds, Shi’ites, and Sunnis, but these divisions have a definite geographic foundation, and have been deepened by the faulty politics of the American occupation.
The situation in Iraq has deteriorated to a point that there is no assured exit strategy that is not beset by dangers, but at least these dangers raise hopes that a different path can be taken. By remaining on the Iraq War path, now so suddenly discredited, all we know is that the bodies will keep piling up!
The US President spokesman in 2002, Ari Fleischer, publicly defended the US invasion of Iraq, stating, “The only interest the United States has in the region is furthering the cause of peace and stability, not [Iraq’s] ability to generate oil,”
However, since the US-led invasion on Iraq, the world has not been short of articles, commentaries and analyses consistently demonstrating the fundamental motivation for the US insurgency and political colonization of Iraq is principally connected to strategic US political interests and economic interests, namely oil.
In reality, the US claim that this was a moral crusade to liberate the people of Iraq from the brutal regime of Saddam (a regime that was supported by the likes of the US and UK), or due to possession of Weapons of Mass Destruction has proven to be a theatrical staged show, which continues to go horribly wrong.
Even before the US colonial crusade, it was leaked in a report that in April 2001 (six months before 9/11), the US Administration had earmarked the need to access Iraqi oil; "President Bush's Cabinet agreed in April 2001 that, 'Iraq remains a destabilizing influence to the flow of oil to international markets from the Middle East' and because this is an unacceptable risk to the US 'military intervention' is necessary." ‘Official: US Oil at the heart of Iraq Crisis’ (Herald Sunday 06/10/02)
And so again it has been recently reported that, “Iraqis face the dire prospect of losing up to $200bn (£116bn) of the wealth of their country if an American-inspired plan to hand over development of its oil reserves to US and British multinationals comes into force next year.” This was based on a report produced by American and British pressure groups warning that Iraq will be caught in an "old colonial trap" by allowing foreign companies to take a share of its vast energy reserves.
Andrew Simms, policy director of the New Economics Foundation stated that "Over the last century, Britain and the US left a global trail of conflict, social upheaval and environmental damage as they sought to capture and control a disproportionate share of the world's oil reserves. Now it seems they are determined to increase their ecological debts at Iraq's expense. Instead of a new beginning, Iraq is caught in a very old colonial trap."
Louise Richards, chief executive of War on Want, said: "People have increasingly come to realise the Iraq war was about oil, profits and plunder. Despite claims from politicians that this is a conspiracy theory, our report gives detailed evidence to show Iraq's oil profits are well within the sights of the oil multinationals."
So as civilian casualties rise; regional instabilities increase; US use of illegal and inhumane chemical weapons surface, in addition to employing torture; the regional and international opposition to the US led invasion grows – the US administration, the oil barons and multinationals remain focused on their political and material objectives. This is nothing short of obscene and raping a population of its resources and economic future. It is unimaginable how a society is left poor and destitute though it possesses huge quantities of ‘black gold’ – oil is literally snatched ‘from under their feet’. But this is the reality of Nigeria, Venezuela, increasingly Saudi Arabia and most OPEC members. This is also the reality of third world countries. Corrupt and unscrupulous governments in the third world tend always to be connected to foreign capitalist interference and control.
In truth, if the US had not done this in Iraq and neither had the position of the sole superpower; then deliberate (both overt and covert) actions would have been initiated by other leading capitalist states for the same objective. This is a fact representing the true ugly face of capitalism and the dictates of western foreign policy, which their capitalists and politicians neither have shame nor remorse over.
In contrast, the world may take solace in knowing that the soon to be (Insh’Allah) Khilafah State foreign policy does not intend to displace a population, nor rape or pillage its resources whereby it is left reeling in poverty, misery and instability. Rather it is to ensure that the justice of Islam is applied and as a result of this the standards of living (social, economic, technological etc) are raised and natural resources will be public property administered to directly benefit the people.
The occupation authorities are trying to hide the truth about what's taking place in Iraq
It emerged last week that the U.S. Department of Defense has been selling the war to Iraqis by covertly planting fake news in their media; paying Iraqi newspapers to run favorable stories.
And as a top Pentagon official admit that "transgressions" may have occurred in a secret military program that pays Iraqi newspapers to publish information favorable to the U.S. mission in IRAQ, an article by David Miller on Bellaciao.com revealed a similar case in Britain. The article said that the BBC commissioned journalists from the Services Sound and Vision Corporation (SSVC) to provide them with news reports which, according to what is mentioned on their website make a “considerable contribution” of the armed forces.
According to Spinwatch investigation, the BBC is using the reports the SSVC provide as authentic news reports.
There is a similar deal happening through the British Forces Broadcasting Service (BFBS). The BFBS task is to “entertain and inform” the British armed forces. Journalists who supply the reports are getting paid by the British Ministry of Defense.
For instance, a report was broadcast where the journalist explained that she is standing in a street in Basra where residents depend on robbery and killing for their living, adding that there are tribal conflicts between the inhabitants. Then the reporter explained that all these problems had been solved by the troops stationed in area.
The report included interviews with British soldiers and not even one interview with Iraqis. It concluded by saying, “While the Scots Guards remain the ceasefire is likely to hold strong. There’s been little trouble in the area since the peace was brokered and the ceasefire has been extended to December 1st. But the Iraqi police and National Guard still lack confidence and credibility to keep the peace on their own and should the fighting resume, the governor of Basra has given the go ahead for the Scots Guards to use more force to make route 6 safe again.”
Although those reports use the term “occupying forces”, they still call them “peacekeeping forces.”
According to the editor of Good Morning Scotland, people comment on these reports –which are broadcasted on BBC- as “an audio press releases for the army”.
Many journalists decided lately to join the government. Also, BBC journalists are now more interested in working as propagandists.
A BBC editor tried to defend the agency position claiming that the BFBS “is not controlled by the MOD,” however it funds them the same way BBC is funded by the Foreign Office. He also mentioned that the journalists are hired by the SSVC which as he stated is a “charitable organization with editorial independence from the MOD,” according to Bellaciao website.
What had been said by the BBC editor is a complete contrast of what is stated on the SSVC website. On its site, the SSVC said:, “Our work makes a considerable contribution to the maintenance of the efficiency and morale of the three Services. Our activities are carried out directly for the Ministry of Defense. Any profits are donated towards Forces’ welfare.”
The BBC editor, on the other hand said that “the Foreign Office runs a network of fake news operations and has done for years. In recently times these have been contracted out to private production companies with the helpful effect that the government funding is further camouflaged. They have also been extended markedly to focus more centrally on the Middle East since 2001. One such is the London Press Service which is described as follows on the government I-uk site: ‘an agency offering the latest British headline news, news round-ups, features and pictures for use by journalists overseas.’”
As mentioned on the Bellaciao.com, what the BBC editor said is a detailed description to the propaganda journalism.
Bellaciao moreover referred to the British Satellite News (BSN), as “’a free television news and features service, which provides you with coverage of worldwide topical events and stories from a British perspective. Our dedicated team of experienced television journalists specializes in producing topical stories that inform and entertain a global audience.”
Transcript follows:
Good Morning Scotland, BBC Radio Scotland, 25 November 2004
Presenter 1: "Soldiers from the Black Watch regiment in IRAQ have carried out a major raid against suspected insurgents in villages on the banks of the Euphrates. The raid involving 500 troops was one of the largest British operations since the end of the IRAQ war last year."
Presenter 2: "Meanwhile the Scots Guards have successfully negotiated a ceasefire between two warring tribes just weeks into their tour of duty in IRAQ. The soldiers were called in after fighting flared along the main road north out of Basra. Operation Energise aimed to stop the violence which has been affecting transport and communications to and from Basra City." Martha Fairley from the British Forces Broadcasting Service has been embedded with the Scots Guards.
Martha Fairley: "Route 6 is the main road north out of Basra. It runs through the badlands of Iraq’s marsh Arabs they make a living from crime - carjackings, smuggling and murder are common place. It’s also the scene of an age old feud between two warring tribes. The Garamsha and Al Halaf kept a low profile during Saddam’s regime. But recently the fighting’s flared up again and the warriors and tanks of the Scots Guards and Royal Dragoon Guards were brought in as a show of force and as Sergeant Jason Manassi from the Scots Guard has discovered they are also a source of fascination for hoards of local people."
Jason Manassi: "There are a lot of people obviously trying to get involved but it’s not in a bad way -they are -I really think they don’t mean any harm at this stage. However we still need to be on our toes. We’re at the moment doing a re-supply. We are showing a bit of force at the moment sending troops up all the time. It is working but I think they are more inquisitive as opposed to hostile at this present moment - which is good, which is good.
We traveled with a convoy of Scots Guards bringing supplies and fuel to the troops stationed along route 6. The Iraqi police have set up vehicle checkpoints along the road to try and control the violence and while they’re stopping and checking the vehicles, the British forces are providing them with the support and credibility they need. But even after the arrival of the Scots Guards there’s been a murder on this stretch of road. The second checkpoint we stop at is Beruki camp. The Iraqi police service have a station here and the policemen proudly show off their uniforms and weapons as we arrive. But they fear for their safety. Three of their colleagues have been killed by a sniper here in recent months. Scots Guards master sniper Robert Milton set up an operation to find the gunman who’s thought to be holed up a mile away."
Robert Milton: There’s a sniper, enemy sniper within the buildings to our front, just behind and we’re here to take him on basically. And it gives them reassurance on the ground that we’re here to take out this person if we can find him.
MF: "We return to route 6 the following morning a ten day cease fire had just been negotiated by the Scots Guards and the two tribes had had their first nights sleep in several months. Commanding officer Colonel Harry Nicoson says persuading them to come to the negotiating table was relatively easy."
Harry Nicoson: "If you’ve got an armoured battle group and you plonk it in the middle of their village you tend to get their attention quite quickly and that is what happened. They immediately came up and spoke to us, we had two separate meetings brokered the cease fire with both sides and told them that if they didn’t stick to it then we would come and sort them out or words to that effect and that’s where we’ve got to at the moment. So we’re now waiting for them to take it forward, set up their own meetings, led by Iraqis to now try and find some sort of solution to this problem. "
MF: "Meanwhile some of the heavy armour has been rolled back as this tentative peace unfolds. For Lance Corporals Stewart Thorpe and Ian McGinty it’s been their first chance to get out on operation since they arrived in IRAQ last month. "
Stewart Thorpe: "Basically we’re just sat in a static location. The Iraqi police are doing their vehicle checkpoints and we’re just showing a presence on the ground. If anything does happen we’re there to respond to it. "
Ian McGinty: "What we’ve seen so far is the people are quite friendly they come and talk to us there’s no problems there but the threat’s always out there so we just have to wait and see and bide our time sort of thing and keep safe. You just have to keep your wits about you, make sure the guys are doing their job and make sure you’re doing your own job as well."
MF: "While the Scots Guards remain the ceasefire is likely to hold strong. There’s been little trouble in the area since the peace was brokered and the ceasefire has been extended to December the first. But the Iraqi police and national guard still lack confidence and credibility to keep the peace on their own and should the fighting resume, the governor of Basra has given the go ahead for the Scots Guards to use more force to make route 6 safe again." Martha Fairley reporting from Basra city. It’s 8.42
BAGHDAD, Iraq - A roadside bomb killed 10 Marines and wounded 11 while they were on a foot patrol near Fallujah, the Marine Corps said Friday, in the deadliest attack on American troops in nearly four months.
Thursday's bomb, which was made from several large artillery shells, struck members of Regimental Combat Team 8 of the 2nd Marine Division near the city about 30 miles west of Baghdad, the Marine Corps said.
In another statement, the Marines reported a U.S. Army soldier also assigned to the 2nd Marine Division died Thursday in a rocket attack near Ramadi. The U.S. command had earlier said four American service members were killed Wednesday, three of them from hostile action and the fourth in a traffic accident.
At least 2,121 members of the U.S. military have died since the beginning of the war in 2003, according to an Associated Press count.
On Aug. 3, 14 Marine Reserve troops from Ohio were killed when their amphibious assault vehicle was blown up by a roadside bomb near Haditha in western Iraq.
Of the 11 who were wounded, seven have returned to duty, the Marine Corps said. It added that Marines from the same unit continue to conduct counterinsurgency operations throughout Fallujah and surrounding areas.
Regimental Combat Team 8 is a part of the II Marine Expeditionary Force based at Camp Lejeune, N.C. The unit has been among the hardest hit in the war. In the nearly three years since the war began, 147 Marines from II MEF have died in combat, according to 2nd Marine Division spokesman Lt. Barry Edwards.
Regimental Combat Team 8 has been in Iraq since the beginning of February.
Fallujah had been a stronghold of the insurgents until U.S. forces, led by Marines, assaulted the city in November 2004. Since then, the U.S. military and the Iraqi government have been working to rebuild it and limit the return of insurgents.
The attack came after U.S. commanders reported a drop in suicide and car bombings as a result of increased U.S.-Iraqi operations.
However, Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, a coalition operations officer, warned that al-Qaida in Iraq, led by Jordanian terror mastermind Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, will likely step up attacks in the next two weeks to try to disrupt parliamentary elections Dec. 15.
Lynch said suicide bombings declined to 23 in November as U.S. and Iraqi forces were overrunning insurgent strongholds in the Euphrates River valley west of the capital.
Communities along the river are believed used by foreign fighters, who slip into the country from Syria and travel down the waterway to Baghdad and other cities.
``In the month of November: only 23 suicide attacks - the lowest we've seen in the last seven months, the direct result of the effectiveness of our operations,'' Lynch said.
Car bombings - parked along streets and highways and detonated remotely - have declined from 130 in February to 68 in November, Lynch said.
However, suicide attacks have not consistently decreased in the past year. After more than 70 such attacks in May, the number fell in August by nearly half and then climbed to more than 50 two months later.
And despite the decline in the past month, there has been no letup in the relentless toll of American deaths at a time of growing discontent in the United States over the war.
The fatality toll for November was at least 85, which was down from the 96 American deaths suffered in October - the fourth deadliest month since the war began. But it was well above the 49 deaths in September. U.S. monthly death tolls have hit 80 or above during 10 of the 33 months of the war.
There also has been no decline in the past six months in the Iraqi death toll from suicide attacks, according to an AP tally. In November, at least 290 Iraqis were killed in such attacks, more than double the figure from the previous month. The count shows the Iraqi toll ranging from at least 69 deaths in August to at least 356 in September.
In Ramadi, 70 miles west of Baghdad, the U.S. military launched a counterinsurgency operation code-named Operation Shank, a statement said.
``The purpose of the operation is to disrupt a terrorist group that utilizes an area of Ramadi as its base for attacks on local Ramadi citizens, Iraqi and U.S. military,'' the statement said. It is the fifth such operation in the area in recent weeks designed to calm the area before the elections.
On Thursday, insurgents allowed a local AP Television News cameraman to film gunmen as they toted automatic rifles and rocket launchers through the streets in central Ramadi. The insurgents appeared to be relaxed and not engaged in fighting. A gunman who did not given his name claimed the insurgents were ``controlling the city.''
Lynch denied reports that insurgents had staged major attacks on U.S. forces in Ramadi or had taken control of the town. He said there had been only one rocket-propelled grenade had been fired and there were no injuries.
As part of security measures for the elections, Iraq's Interior Ministry has banned all non-Iraqi Arabs from entering the country until further notice, officials said.
The decision was taken by Interior Minister Bayn Jabr, said two senior Interior Ministry officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to the media.
``This step is part of the security measures taken for the elections,'' said one of the senior Interior Ministry officials. ``It covers all border points whether airports, land border crossings and ports.''
In Baghdad, some Shiites joined hundreds of Sunni Muslims to denounce widespread arrests of suspected insurgents. They prayed together before a joint demonstration in a show of unity ahead of the potentially divisive elections.
Men waved Iraqi flags and women dressed in black robes carried posters of their missing sons. Some held portraits of Sunni clerics who have been killed since the U.S. invasion.
The joint prayer ceremony at Iraq's most famous Sunni shrine was called by Sunni politician Adnan al-Dulaimi, who has been trying to ease tensions between the rival Muslim communities.
Several prominent Shiite clerics who were invited did not show up, and Shiites made up only a small percentage of the several hundred people who turned out. Still, the ceremony was a significant sign that some mainstream religious leaders want to prevent tensions between the communities from erupting into a full-scale civil war.
Shiites make up the majority in Iraq, but were oppressed by former ruler Saddam Hussein, who is a Sunni. Since Saddam's overthrow, Shiites have controlled most of the political power in Iraq, while the anti-U.S. insurgency has been dominated by Sunnis.
